Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

  After a while the churchyard was empty save for me and the Malakites. The Londoners and the few village people who had come to pay their respects were gone. The Malakites were waiting for me. I had not seen them since the news of her death, had only spoken with Sam on the telephone. I approached and then he did this thing. He opened his large moist badger coat wide—his hands were in its pockets—and enclosed me within it, next to his warm body, next to his heart. He was someone who’d barely touched me in all the time I had known him. He seldom inquired how I was doing, though I knew he was curious about what I might become, as if I were still green in judgement. I stayed the night at their house, the window of the spare bedroom looking down onto their walled garden. And the next day he drove me to White Paint. I had wanted to walk but he said he needed to speak with me. That was when he told me how she died.

  No one else in the village knew what had happened. He had not even told his wife. My mother had died in the early evening and Mr. Malakite found her about noon the next day. It was clear she had died instantly. He carried Rose Williams—he called her by her full name as if suddenly there was no intimacy between them anymore—into the living room. Then he dialled the telephone number that she once had given him, as he was supposed to do if and when anything, anything, happened to her. Even before he called me.

  The voice at the other end of the line asked for his name and to identify where he was. It asked him to confirm once more that she was dead. He was told to wait. There was then a pause. The voice returned and said he should do nothing. Just leave the premises. That he was to be silent about what had happened and also about what he had just done. Sam Malakite reached into his pocket and passed me the original note she had given him two years earlier, with the number he was to call. It was informal but carefully written, without emotion, though I felt I could read in its clarity and exactness an unvoiced sentiment, even fear. He dropped me off at the rise that looked down towards our house. “You can walk from here,” he said. Then I went towards my mother’s home.

  I entered her stillness. I put some food outside for the feral cat. And I banged a saucepan before entering the kitchen, as she used to, to ward off the infamous rat.

  Someone had been there, of course. There was not a mark on the sofa where Mr. Malakite had laid her down. Anything that might have provided a clue had been taken away. I guessed there would be a prompt and efficient investigation of her death, and that if there was any retaliation by the government it was sure to be invisible. I would not be notified. And there would be nothing in the house they did not want found. Unless she had left something casually, for me to pick up and place beside some conversational grain of sand she might have once mentioned. “Mr. Malakite reminds me of a friend of mine. Though Mr. Malakite is more innocent,” she had said. Only the word was not “innocent,” it was “benign.” Which was it? It was “benign,” I think. Somehow it matters. There’s a distinction.

  For a while I did nothing. I circled the garden, and almost as if it was coincidence I could hear the call of a cuckoo moving round the house formally singing. When we were small our mother used to say, A cuckoo from the east means comfort, from the west luck, from the north sadness, from the south death. I searched for it, following the sound for a while, then entered the greenhouse, where she was supposed to have died. Whatever greenhouse panes had been shattered were now fixed. I kept recalling how I was seldom allowed to be alone in the house. And how she would always be eyeing me to see what I picked up or was interested in. Now that I was released from her watchful gaze, the rooms felt more potent. It grew dark outside. I pulled a few German paperbacks from the shelf to see if she had written her name in them, but she always had a printless foot. There was a book about Casanova in his later years, by a writer named Schnitzler. I took it upstairs with me and got into bed.

  It must have been about eight in the evening when I did this, and I fell quickly into the strange compressed story of Casanova’s attempt to return to Venice in middle age, all of its action taking place over a period of a few days and fitting within the small canvas of a novella. I focused on the unexpected and convincing compassion towards Casanova. It was in German, and I was lost to time. As the story ended with Casanova’s sleep, I slept too, the bedside light on, the small book still in my hands.

  I awoke in the bed I always slept in, turned off the bedside light, and found myself in the darkness of three in the morning, wide awake. I felt I needed to walk through the house with a different mind-set, the more European gaze of Schnitzler. Besides, it was now the hour when my mother was always awake.

  I moved slowly through each room with the torch, opening cupboards, dresser drawers. I searched my bedroom first of all. It had been hers when a schoolgirl, though nothing of that time was evident on the walls. Then her parents’ bedroom, frozen in their own era, left as it was since their death in the car accident. Then the third midsized room, which belonged to her, with its narrow bed, like her coffin. There was a Regency walnut desk inherited from her mother, where she often sat in the middle of the night, erasing as opposed to recording her past. It was where the barely used telephone in the house was. Mr. Malakite would have needed to come into this room to ring the number she had given him—perhaps in London, perhaps somewhere else.

  In that walnut desk I did find, wrapped in one of my mother’s crumpled shirts, a framed picture of Rachel I had never seen before. As I studied it, it became clear it must have been taken during the period when my mother was away from us, supposedly unaware of our activities. I wondered who had taken it. The Moth? How conscious of us had our mother been when we were unconscious of her? The stranger aspect of the picture was that Rachel appeared to be dressed more like an adult, with an adult’s demeanour, than the teenager she was at the time. I had never seen her dressed like that.

  By the end of my night search I had found nothing new, not even something forgotten on a top shelf of the cupboard in my bedroom. She had obviously scoured through it before suggesting I use it when I first came to stay during my holidays. All I had was the carefully framed and hidden picture of my sister, whom I realized I had not seen for over a year. It was about five in the morning now, and fully awake I decided to go downstairs. I walked down the stairs into a cold silence, and as I stepped on to the wooden floor at the foot of the stairs the nightingales began in the dark.

  The suddenly loud squeaks would have woken anyone, as they had my mother a year earlier when I had come downstairs in the middle of the night. I’d simply been hungry then for some cheese and milk, and as I turned back captured within that chaotic noise, there was her figure already at the top of the stairs with something, I am not sure what, in her hand. When she saw me, she put it behind her back. Wherever I kept stepping for the next few moments—with her watching me, relieved but slightly scornful—the sounds kept revealing where I was in the semi-darkness. There was only one narrow edge of the floor a person could walk along to have silence. But now I was alone and simply walked down the hallway within the noise, until I entered her small carpeted living room with its fireplace, and the nightingale alarm stopped.

  I sat down. My mind leapt strangely not to what my sister and I might have lost with Rose’s death, but to her earlier departure from us, when it felt we had lost so much more. I thought of her pleasure in re-naming us. It had been my father who insisted on my being called Nathaniel, but that was too long a word for my mother. So I had been “Stitch” to her. Just as Rachel became “Wren.” Where on earth is The Wren? Even with adult friends my mother enjoyed searching out better names than the ones they had been baptized with. She had plundered names from landscapes, called people by place-names of where they’d been born or even where she first met them. “There’s Chiswick,” she’d say about a woman she overheard on the radio, picking up a local accent. Such fragments of curiosity and information were always being shared with us when we were young. And she had taken all of that when she disappea
red, waving goodbye. I thought of that erasing of herself, just as now, alone for the first time at White Paint, I realized I’d lost her living voice. All the quick-witted intelligence she owned when young, all the secret life she’d stepped into and kept from us, now lost.

  She had reduced the house to a skeletal path. Her bedroom, the kitchen, the small living room that housed a fireplace, and the short passageway of books that led to the greenhouse. These were the locations of her life in the last years. A home once filled with country neighbours and grandchildren had been cut down to the bone, so during the two days I stayed after the funeral I saw more evidence of her parents than of her. I did come upon a few sheets of handwritten paper in a cupboard. One contained an odd meditation on her indoor rat as if it was a never-leaving guest she had in time become used to. There was a drawing to scale, probably by Mr. Malakite, of her garden. A constantly re-drawn map of the countries surrounding the Black Sea. But most of the cupboards were empty, as if someone had removed the essential evidence of her life.

  I stood in front of her bookcase, modest for a person who lived alone in the country and who barely listened to the radio unless Mr. Malakite mentioned a storm warning. She must have been tired by then of other voices, save those she discovered in novels where a plot might swerve wildly and then somehow turn easily for home during the last two or three chapters. There were no ticking clocks in this stripped-down silent house. The telephone in her bedroom never rang. The only evident and therefore surprising source of noise was the nightingale floor. It comforted her, she told me, gave her safety. Otherwise, silence. During my holidays I could hear her give out a sigh or close a book in the next room.

  How often did she return to the shelves of paperbacks, where she could be with Balzac’s Rastignac and Félicie Cardot and Vautrin. “Where is Vautrin now?” she once inquired of me drowsily, coming out of a sleep, perhaps unaware whom she was speaking to. Arthur Conan Doyle claimed he never read Balzac, not knowing where to begin, that it was too difficult to locate the sources or first appearance of any of the central characters. But my mother knew all of La Comédie Humaine, and I began wondering in which of the books she might have found a version of her own unrecorded life. Whose career did she trace, scattered within those novels, until she could understand herself more clearly? She would have known that Le Bal de Sceaux is the one book in La Comédie Humaine in which Rastignac does not appear, but also that within it he is being constantly referred to. On a whim I pulled a copy of it from the shelf, flipped through, and inside, tucked between pages 122 and 123, found a hand-drawn map of what looked to me like a chalk hill, on six-by-eight quarto-sized paper. With no place-names on it. A fragment that probably meant nothing.

  I went back upstairs again and opened that old brown envelope of photographs, still in my grandparents’ room. But there were fewer of them now. There weren’t the more playful, innocent ones she had shown me during an earlier summer. I saw again my mother’s serious young face under the lime bower that led from the kitchen—but later photographs, the ones I had loved best, were no longer there. So perhaps they had not been innocent. The ones of Rose with her parents and the tall man familiar from the other photographs—one, especially, of them all, in the foreign decor of the Casanova Revue Bar in Vienna, with my mother in her late teens sitting in a haze of cigarette smoke in the midst of this adult entourage, an ardent violinist bending towards her. And even a few other pictures, as if in time lapse, taken maybe an hour later, all of them in the back of a taxi, crushed together and laughing.

  “That was my father’s friend. He was our neighbour, his family were thatchers,” Rose had told me when she showed me the photographs that were no longer there. I had pointed to the extra man and asked who he was. “He was the boy who fell from the roof.”

  “What was his name?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  * * *

  —

  But now, of course, I knew who he was.

  He’d been the one at my mother’s funeral, with the shy, quiet voice, who stood beside her grave and attempted to speak to me. He was older, but I recognized him from those scattered photos, where he had the same height and presence. I had once or twice seen him in the hallways of our building, a legend in the office, waiting to take one of the restricted blue lifts to a high, unknown floor, up to a landscape only imagined by most of us working there.

  * * *

  —

  My last night at White Paint, two nights after the funeral, I went to my mother’s room, got into her narrow sheetless bed and lay there in the dark, the way she must have done, looking up at the ceiling. “Tell me about him,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “The person you lied to me about. The man whose name you said you couldn’t remember. The man who spoke to me at your funeral.”

  THE BOY ON THE ROOF

  He would look down from that sloped straw roof whenever one of Rose’s family emerged from the house to collect eggs or get into the car. The sixteen-year-old Marsh Felon had entered my mother’s childhood as a teenager because the roof of White Paint needed re-thatching. He and his father and his two brothers had roosted up there through the early summer, sometimes sunstroked, sometimes buffeted by great winds, the clan of them working with efficiency, always in conversation with never a doubt among them, myth-like in unison. Marsh was the youngest, a listener. During the winter he cut and stacked reeds, solitary in the nearby marshes, so they would be dry by spring when his brothers pierced and weaved them into the long-stem straw on the roof with pliant willow branches that they bent like hairpins.

  The sudden gale had lifted Marsh and flung him off the roof, and he fell grabbing at branches of the lime bower, attempting to slow his fall before he landed twenty feet down on the paving stones. The others came down out of the loud wind and carried him horizontally into the back kitchen. Rose’s mother made up the daybed. He needed to remain immobile and not be moved. So Marsh Felon would become a resident for a while in this back kitchen of strangers.

  The L-shaped room was lit only by natural light. There was a woodstove, a map of the region of The Saints depicting every footpath and river crossing. It would become his world for the weeks his brothers continued working on the roof. He heard them as they left at sunset and he woke to their loud persistent conversations as they climbed their ladders the next morning. After the first few minutes their talk was not quite audible, he heard only the laughter and yells of irritation. Two hours later he became aware of the family moving in the house, their conversations hushed. The world felt close yet distant to him. It was the way he felt even when working on the roof, sensing the great active world far away was passing him by.

  The eight-year-old girl brought him breakfast and left quickly. She was often his only visitor. She would just stand in the doorway. He could see the further reaches of the house behind her. Her name was Rose. His own family had been motherless and womanless for years. Once she brought him a book from the family library. He consumed it, and asked for another.

  “What’s this?” She had noticed a few sketches on the last, blank page of a book she had given him to read.

  “Oh, sorry….” Marsh felt mortified. He’d forgotten his sketch.

  “Don’t mind. What is it?”

  “A fly.”

  “Odd fly. Where’d you see it?”

  “No, I make them, flies for fishing. I can make you one.”

  “How? From what?”

  “Maybe a blue-winged olive nymph…I’ll need thread. Waterproof paint.”

  “I can get that.” She almost left.

  “No, there’s more….” He asked her for paper, something to write on. “I’ll make a small list.”

  She watched.

  “What’s this say? You got awful handwriting. Just tell me.”

  “All right. Small goose feathers. Red copper wire, not much thicker
than human hair. They use it on small transformers—”

  “Slow down.”

  “—or dynamos. Perhaps you could bring me a needle? Also some silver foil to let it shine.”

  The list continued. Cork, pieces of ash. Some of what he asked for he had never used before. Could she bring him a small notebook? He was only imagining possibilities, as if he were in an unvisited library. She asked for details of the thread, the size of the hooks. She noted even then that unlike his handwriting the sketches were meticulous. They seemed made by a different person. The youth felt this was his first conversation in years. The next day he heard the motorcar leaving the driveway, the girl with her mother.

  Most of the day he sat by the sunlit window, his fingers constructing the fly, echoing his drawing but for the colours. Or stood awkwardly in front of their map and searched it for what he already knew and what he had not known before—the clear line of oaks along the straight Roman road, the long curve of the river. At night he slid from the bed into the darkness and tried to move his ungainly body. It was important he couldn’t see himself. If the hip gave way, he fell against a wall or the bed. He moved as long as he could, then got back into the bed, covered in sweat. All this was unknown to his family or the girl’s family.