by Alex Preston
After her death, he still came over, usually to watch a ball game. He still brought me books to read, if he knew I was in town. He introduced me to ‘Gravy’ by Raymond Carver, about a guy who sobers up after the doctors give him six months, and lives eleven more years. Gravy means something extra, it’s what you get on top of everything else, another decade of conscious, loving, high-quality existence. But Bill meant her, his wife, whose medical sentence had been issued in this way, and whose late arrival on the scene of his life granted him those years. At half time, we still walked outside in the evening air to shoot hoops, across the sharp-leaved Texas lawn, under the pecan tree, even though he could barely make it to the court now. His breathing was like the description in ‘Kubla Khan’, intermitted, loud and thick, after a rare genetic condition or viral infection had gripped him in the lungs, in all the convoluted branch and root system of alveoli and capillaries, until the doctors cut him open and took out half. Let me make a shot before going in, he said, and stiff-armed the ball into the rim. Give me another, breathing heavy, jerking his shoulders back, shooting again and again until the ball rolled in. I can’t watch college hoops any more, he said. They’re just kids, they don’t know what they’re doing.
Later, years later, he had a triple-bypass operation at a hospital in Dallas that specialised in or pioneered the treatment. His American health insurance was very good, the benefits of teaching at a law school. But the pressure on his lungs, the continual failure of his oxygen supply – do you know what a moiety is? he said to me, taking pleasure in the word, a thing that can be divided into two parts, where the moiety is one of the parts, a moiety – had put a strain on his heart that no medicine could cure. A part or portion was the dictionary definition, especially a lesser share.
He called my father from the hospital bed. ‘I’ve joined the zipper club,’ he said.
When I came home at Christmas, he had another girlfriend. The beautiful Claire, my father had decided to call her, the way I used to call him Bill Anderson – as if that were his working title. An elegant southerner, in her seventies, she had been a diplomat’s wife and lived in Washington and Hong Kong. In Paris, also, she had memories and associations and places she liked to go, and she knew interesting and significant people, like the Pinskys. They lived separately but came to dinner together and wanted to talk art and books and movies and politics. I said to him, how are you doing, how do you feel, and he quoted at me a line he’d read in the New Yorker that week or heard at a concert in Portland, some kind of experimental electropop, I can’t remember – Feeling good about feeling good. At a certain age, he said, that’s enough, that’s all you can hope for.
A few years ago he came to tea at my house in London. Like I was a grown-up finally and not the kid who could disappear into his room. They didn’t stay to dinner because they had to catch a flight to Istanbul early the next morning. He wanted to see the Topkapi Palace, walk through the cicek pasaji (the flower passage, he said, translating) and visit the Museum of Innocence. ‘Have you read the novel?’ They arrived at Atatürk Airport on 27 June, a day before the terrorist attack, and afterwards spent two weeks in the country, travelling. He sent me an email with a photo of the pair of them, in front of a palace or temple. ‘The buildings are turtles,’ was all he wrote. Not bad for a kid from Maple Shade, New Jersey, was how I read the subtext, though maybe this is more the kind of thing my father would have said.
The last time I saw Bill was in Manhattan. He and Claire wanted to take in a little jazz, and came to dinner at my sister-in-law’s apartment (it’s a long story, with multiple connecting threads). We ate Cuban Chinese. They stayed for an hour; he tired easily and wanted to save his energy for the Village. His interest in these things was indefatigable.
After a lung transplant, they put him on immunosuppressants to keep his body from rejecting the organ. One of the side effects was that he had to be very careful around people with colds, and also in sunshine. His pale skin sprouted melanomas like moss in wet grass, which the doctors periodically removed. One of them metastasised. My parents usually spend the summer in London, and for several weeks my father called him daily in his hospital room. Sometimes he was with it, sometimes he wasn’t. I don’t know how intimate their conversations were. My father was checking up, dutifully, and I was often surprised by the limits he considered natural in his conversations with male friends. What happened next happened in a kind of rapid slow motion. Somehow you were complicit, because you could see it happening and there was nothing you could do. One day Bill was dead.
A few weeks later my parents returned to Austin and the city was emptier than it had been, my father said. The place where by chance they had made their lives was missing one of the people chance had thrown them in with. When you’re a kid, in school, everybody you know is in your class, and out of these materials you build a childhood, and the kids you know stand for all the human varieties, and that seems like enough; you never have such friendships again, because of the forced shared life, seven hours a day, watching the same teachers, doing the same things, practising your personality on these events. But then in adulthood the same thing happens. You move somewhere for practical reasons, because of a job, and instead of seven hours a day in the same place what you have is fifty years.
One of the first books Bill bought me (I was thirteen years old) still sits on my desk when I write. An anthology of American verse – the cover is a painting by Robert Rauschenberg. Bill came into the house, ringing the bell and opening the front door at the same time, walking through the hall towards the TV room, thumbing the book open at the page he wanted to show me. His lungs worked, his heart beat, his skin was clear – he was something like my age now. He wore a moustache then and read out to me, through the soft hairs, as I turned down the sound of the ball game:
Captain Carpenter rose up in his prime,
Put on his pistols and went riding out . . .
By John Crowe Ransom, where the valiant captain, chasing the Grail and continually defeated, forfeits at every turn a piece of his body, but rides on with whatever he has left until the bastards take his heart.
After his death, a local museum inherited his collection, and the executor went around Bill’s house to take stock. My parents were invited, too, and saw a picture my sister once painted of him, years ago, when she minored in painting at university and needed subjects. Can we have that? they asked. Really, it was supposed to go to the museum, but the executor said (a little snobbishly, they told me), ‘I don’t think anyone will miss it.’ So they took it home and gave it back to her. My sister edits an Austin literary magazine; Bill left them some money, too. At first she didn’t remember painting it and then suddenly she did. It hangs over her desk now; she looks at it every day and reminded me somewhat ruefully, by email when I sent her this piece, of a Larkin line that Bill liked to misquote: What will survive of us is art.
THE MINING DISASTER
Alex Preston
WHEN the earth began to wrench and roil, we grabbed at solid things: stalagmites, wooden pillars, the heavy trucks that began to buck and rear on the tracks. Some of us lay on the ground, huddled in tight curls as dust and rock showered from the roof. It was as if our ship had been whelmed in a rolling ocean, and everything we reached for betrayed us, revealing itself as shifting and insubstantial. A breathless explosion, a rush of noxious air. Silence. We sniffed, our lips puckering. Firedamp reaching its foul fingers through the darkness towards us. Then a more precipitous shift of the earth and, with a groan and a roar, the coalface began to crumble, the tunnel floor disappearing with it. The trucks clashed and chimed as they toppled, throwing up sparks that threatened to ignite the gassy air. Falling men were visible in the yawning void only by the beams of their headlamps, like hopeless ropes thrown to shore. So many, so many tossed in the dark flood. In that second silence, we looked around. Eighteen lamps, perched on the lip of the abyss. Before, there’d been fifty of us. Below, now, we could hear running water, the lazy settling
of the rocks, a single man calling out. Mama, oh help me, Mama. We clung to one another like children.
You don’t remember your parents’ faces. They are rounded up in the great Vel d’Hiv rafle of ’42. The concierge hides you in the nook of a fireplace, a wardrobe hefted in front of it. You sometimes wonder why you can still remember the grain of the wardrobe’s wood on your fingertips, the whirls and whorls that you trace in the darkness, and yet, when you look at the photograph of your parents that Madame Delphy gives you, slightly blurred, your mother in white organdie, your father in shirtsleeves, you can find no bridge that will allow them into your memory.
For the rest of the war the concierge keeps you concealed in her apartment. Madame Delphy has an ear for trouble and, whenever rumours circulate of a rafle or a razzia (the latter phrase adopted by Parisian police from the Foreign Legion’s colonial adventures), she ushers you into the dark burrow behind the wardrobe. For days you crouch there, afraid to stretch or sniffle, cups of water and crumbling tartines passed to you by the kindly, quiet concierge. Sometimes, when the light behind her seems blindingly bright after hours in the blackness, you think she’s your mother come back to save you.
Madame Delphy is a collector, her rooms on the ground floor act as a glory-hole into which flow the abandoned goods of the higher apartments. When someone dies, or, like your parents, disappears, the choicest pieces find themselves squirrelled down to rest in the care of the concierge. There, in the dim and dusty half-light, you ride on a child’s tricycle – too small for you – squeaking between collections of quartzes and precious stones, Meissen figurines and antique dolls. Stopping to inspect the military paraphernalia, you fix a plumed shako bobbing on your head; then you wheel into the room of clocks, whose syncopated tickings accompany your first dance steps. You spend hours with the astrolabe, the barometer with hydrographic chart, the maps of the Ptolemeic constellations.
Most often, though, you sit at your father’s roll-top desk, looking into the light well, waiting for the few minutes each day, fewer in winter, when the sun floods the building’s shaft with brightness, and all the glittering things in Madame Delphy’s collection come alive. Mirrors pass beams of light between them, the quartzes quiver and gleam, the nacreous inlays of pocket watches, jewellery boxes, cigarette cases, commence a glowing dance.
Now when you’re asked by a journalist, or during the introductory forays of a conference, before you begin to expostulate on horsts and grabens, magmatism and alkali basalts, what was it that brought you to geology, you speak of those few minutes of brightness, of the sun arrowing down into the light well, the shaft filling with light. The regularity of those moments, the expectation and fulfilment, they have given a shape to your mind, a shading – height and depth, light and darkness – which you now find in the rifts and runnels of the earth.
We edged along the narrow ridge – all that was left of the tunnel – imagining ourselves on a mountainside above a roaring cataract, each urging the next not to look down into the blackness where, still, the dying voice of a man, his head-lamp swinging from side to side in his agony. We reached the foot of the shaft where the tunnel opened out, allowing us to stand straight, to take stock of the devastation. Timbering and brattice all piled in sulking heaps. Shining our lights upward, we could see that the walls of the shaft had pressed together like two hands in prayer. One of us began to cry, and that was all right, because it drowned out the distant screams of the dying man, the rush of the water which had grown to a galloping torrent in the chasm below. Still the foetid fog in the air, the dust raining from the roof, which caught in our beards, silted up our noses and mouths, crusted in the corners of our eyes. We stood there, looking hopelessly upwards, as if suddenly aware of how lost, how alone, how abandoned we were. Down there in the darkness, we could feel the movement of the hurtling earth, the lonely spin of our dying planet. In the silent blackness of the mine we could imagine how it will be when everything is ended, when the sun expires, and where once there were stars there is only an aching and eternal void.
You start school in the spring of 1946, Mme Delphy packing you off with your sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper, a cap skew-whiff on your fuzzy brush of hair. In the evenings, she greets you with a kiss and a goûter of hot chocolate and langues de chat. You sit at the kitchen table in close, happy silence. In 1949, she dies of a subarachnoid haemorrhage, and you win a bursary to the Collège Stanislas. Five lonely years in the scholars’ dormitory overlooking the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. The wind picks up speed over the Luxembourg Gardens, meets little resistance in the draughty shuttered windows of the dormitory, and gusts across the beds of the twelve boys. You shiver yourself to sleep. Then it is Jussieu, Paris-Diderot, further research at the Sorbonne. You specialise in optical mineralogy and crystal structure, write a well-received paper on isomorphism in clay. You leave the Sorbonne before finishing your doctorate and take up a position at the Société Peñarroya, swiftly rising to become Chief Mineralogist.
I can see you now, in a suit of grey worsted, your hair’s unruly squiggles tamped by a felt fedora. On your face, a certain melancholy distance which means that your colleagues don’t ask you to join them for coffee at eleven, wine at five. You return through dusky streets to the apartment you now lease on the third floor of the same block in which you grew up. You put music on the gramophone, lay your crystals on your father’s roll-top desk (recovered from an antique dealer on the Avenue Kléber), and turn them under the light of a green-shaded lawyer’s lamp: uvarovite druzes, dolomite geodes, pink pyrite vugs in which you place now one finger, now two, running your nails over the reticulated inner surfaces. You sit until the small hours of the morning, looking out into the shadowy light well, and the music plays on.
We knelt and prayed, extending our arms towards the crumbling roof, and soon we were covered in fine dust, like plaster icons. One of the men, Karel, wondered aloud if they would be heard, our prayers, from such a distance, through the strata of compacted rock. We ignored him and raised our voices above the roar of the water. Later, we crawled to the edge of the ravine and stared downwards, stretched out on our stomachs like young tykes spying on sunbathing girls. The black water reflected our torches, we saw occasional islands of coal and rock, soon swallowed by the rising flood. We were all struck by the abysmal horror of it – the depths, the darkness, the water. The river gushed up from the rocks to the western end of the ravine; we could dimly make out the point, off to the east, where it disappeared again under the earth, entering the mouth of a tunnel. The water had swept away the screaming man. There was no sound from above, no drilling or distant voices, only the sense of a whole forgetful world pressing down upon us. We are lost, Karel cried out, and no one would comfort him. I, the oldest among us, lifted my hands and began to pray again, sucking the afterdamp into my lungs and pouring out De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine: Domine, exaudi vocem meam.
It is in 1976, during a visit to one of the Societé’s open-cast copper mines in Wallis and Futuna, that you feel the first jostlings of the obsession that will come to shape your life. Six miners have been trapped in a cut-and-cover trench, the wood of the support beams worm-rotted and friable. There, cupped in the palm of the mine, in the boiling heat, with the screams of the trapped men in your ears, you are hit with a vision that seems to come into your mind fully formed and thoughtless. You perceive how the surrounding geological stress of the rock might be used to support the tunnel, to free the men. You set a team working with rock bolts and mesh. You feel buoyed up, invincible. As the last stones are lifted away, you step like a god into the mouth of the cave and lead the men out, blinking, newborn into the brightness.
If this were a film, I would show you first back in Paris, at a workbench, your pen a grey blur as you sketch cross-sections and geomechanical diagrammes, early setbacks prompting greater leaps forward. Now, on a turning globe, Air France jetliners ferry you to disasters in Abidjan and Yaoundé, in Linares and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, to Dumas and Pla
inview. You are there, in khaki, a cowboy hat on the frizzy hair that is now zagged through with silver. The stones are rolled away – employing your patented method – and you step in, smiling, and lead the survivors out. You like to sit with them afterwards as they weep and hug their wives, press their damp cheeks to those of their bright-eyed children, lie with their heads in their mothers’ laps. You remember a vision you had of your own mother, come to rescue you from behind the wardrobe as a child, and you want to be here for these moments, when all that was feared lost is recovered, and you can cry with them, press yourself into the soft heat of their love.
Some scenes from Tartarus: three days had passed. We’d finished our drinking water, the hardtack that one of us had kept in a pocket. Then the thirst came, and we looked down into the rising waters of that underground river and almost willed them upwards, even while knowing what would happen when the water crested the lips of the ravine. We all, at the same moment, imagined pressing our mouths into the last few inches of air at the top of the cave, the murky sight of each other underwater, our limbs drifting like weeds in the ghostly green. One of the men went mad. He ran at the mound of rocks and debris at the foot of the shaft, scrabbling at it with his hands, mewling like a cat. We had to tie him up. I drew my knife and cut lengths of rope, bound his feet and hands fast. His name was Branislav. A big, burly boy. When he continued to scream, rolling on the ground like an imbecile, I, as the eldest, took charge. Grabbing him by his bound feet, I dragged him to the edge of the rock face and pitched him off. His screaming didn’t change one bit, not until he was under the water and gone. I turned to look at the other men. One of them shrugged. Pray, I said. Branislav didn’t pray hard enough. All seventeen of us, on our knees again, offering up our alleluias and Hail Marys and Anima Christis. I felt, inside me then, a knot of certainty growing. That this was what my life had been leading towards, that this flooding mine was to be the scene of my glory.