The Madness of Grief

by Panayotis Cacoyannis

  Leaning with my elbows on the counter, I held it right in front of my eyes, looking at the unopened envelope without really seeing it, as though it existed not in any physical form but only as a dilemma. My alertness was so acutely without focus that I felt my sudden wetness and the thumping in my chest only as the symptoms of a distant disturbance. Lost in thought, I was conscious only of not being able to think.

  It was my body that was first to kick back into action. I wouldn’t have known if Karl’s unopened letter had filled me with anger, or excitement, or uncertainty, or some other entirely new emotion that I couldn’t have described. Any sense of sequence was absent, until my hands had removed from the envelope the single sheet of paper and my focus had returned and the marks became letters that combined to form words that united into sentences that made up the letter I had just finished reading, and then had finished reading again.

  Containing neither an excuse nor an explanation, it was as if Karl’s real intention had not been a matter of choice, as if tomorrow at 3pm was also not a matter of choice…

  At 3pm every day of the week except Saturday, with all the windows open I sit at the piano to play, and I always start with “Jane”. It’s a piece I’ve composed as a favour not to you but to myself, and for a short time it brings back to life the Jane I will always remember...

  The letter asked for nothing, and by asking for nothing it succeeded inadvertently in asking for everything. I knew Karl well, and in spite of what had happened I knew that this effect could not have been the consequence of calculation. Karl was an innocent who wrote as he spoke, and in that artless, unstudied impulsiveness I might have found a reason to forgive him. The Karl who had tried to force himself on me was different from the Karl I remembered, but their difference somehow stemmed from their sameness, and this made it easier to consider his lapse as a single stray moment in “the madness of love”. Or perhaps all the madness was mine.

  14

  “Jane”

  I had hardly slept, and it made me feel selfish and ashamed that on the day before my father’s funeral not only had the cause of my sleeplessness been something else, it had also given me pleasure. And now that I had staggered out of bed, glad that the night was behind me and the day had begun, I felt my selfishness and shame dissolve like a dream, leaving behind, in some distant corner, just a dull pang of remorse. The pleasure, however, continued to be overwhelming.

  It had occurred to me often that all the world’s suffering stemmed from disagreement between men as to what was good or bad. Well, that might be true, but in my recent experience suffering was often self-inflicted, and stemmed from a similar dispute within one’s own conscience. I thought of how my father’s life had ended, how auntie Ada had only half-lived hers, how Mia-Mia’s had almost been perverted by her visits to her brother’s bed-and-breakfast in Torquay. I was more than just assuaging my guilt. I was asserting my right to override it.

  What I was feeling after reading Karl’s letter didn’t contradict or diminish how I felt about losing my father, or about anything else. But it had an urgency that I was powerless to resist. All my other feelings were passive; Karl’s letter was pressing. It required me first to make and then to act on a decision, and the uncertainty of that process was too overcrowding, leaving little room...

  ‘Penny for your thoughts.’

  Coming to with a jolt, I was in the kitchen, looking into the refrigerator as though the answers to all the questions in the world were to be found on its shelves. I hadn’t even noticed auntie Ada, who was standing with a mop in the corner of the room behind the table. I was barefoot, and when I looked at the square linoleum tiles of the floor they were wet, and I could trace the imprint of my footsteps backwards all the way to the door.

  ‘I’m sorry, auntie Ada, I didn’t see you.’

  ‘If you’re looking for the milk it’s on the table.’

  Milk, cornflakes, sugar, it was all on the table, along with bowls and cups and saucers.

  ‘Breakfast,’ said auntie Ada. ‘We have it every morning. I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?’

  ‘Breakfast, yes,’ I said. ‘Have you not had yours already?’

  ‘I thought I’d wait for you today, to make sure you’re okay. Are you okay? Sit yourself down, you still look a little bit off.’

  ‘Off?’

  ‘And you’re still acting odd.’

  ‘Acting odd?’

  ‘There you go again. Maybe you should get something down you and go back to bed, it’s the funeral tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean, auntie Ada.’

  I sat at the table, and after putting the kettle on auntie Ada joined me.

  ‘Why, why did you have to go upsetting yourself, two days before your father’s funeral?’ She passed me a spoon and filled our bowls with cornflakes. ‘I mean you’ve never liked the shop.’

  ‘Things are different now,’ I said. ‘And I’ve already told you, I was checking the post. In case there was something urgent.’ While auntie Ada made the tea, I sprinkled one, two, three tablespoons of sugar on my cornflakes and drowned them in milk.

  ‘And was there?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I shrugged. ‘I just put it to one side, I didn’t go through it.’

  ‘And how’s that “checking the post”, may I ask? You went in there for nothing and came back in a right state, wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t eat, and so flushed that I thought you must be running a fever.’

  ‘I’m feeling much better now.’ And to prove it, I took a large mouthful of my soggy cornflakes, but they were far too sweet, even for me. I forced myself to have another mouthful, but if I had any more I’d be sick. If I were auntie Ada, I’d be worried too. After coming back from the shop, where I had stayed for many hours, everything had seemed like a monumental effort, and under some pretext I couldn’t remember I had managed to escape to my room.

  ‘Did you sleep well at least?’ Auntie Ada poured the tea.

  ‘Like a baby,’ I said. ‘I’m still a bit groggy, that’s all.’

  ‘Go on, get that down you, it’s no good just stirring it about with your spoon. And I’ll make us some toast. Are you sure you’re okay?’

  ‘I’m fine, auntie Ada, really. You’re right, I shouldn’t have gone to the shop, but I’ve been cooped up in here for so long that I felt like a change.’

  ‘And you got yourself upset.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  When the toast arrived, to make up for abandoning the cornflakes I asked for three slices, munching them down quickly, to prove to auntie Ada that my appetite had been restored.

  ‘I thought I might pop out later on, to get some fresh air and try and clear my head of all the cobwebs.’

  ‘I’ve a thousand calls I still need to make,’ sighed auntie Ada.

  ‘Then you’ll be glad to have me out of the way.’

  ‘I daresay, if you’re sure you’re okay.’

  ‘I’m feeling fine, auntie Ada, I promise. By the way, when I was going into the shop I saw you talking to that awful sergeant…’

  ‘What awful sergeant?’

  ‘Sergeant Morris; the Inspector warned us he’d be fishing for dirt.’

  ‘Oh, yes, the sergeant, he completely slipped my mind.’

  Auntie Ada looked embarrassed, as flushed as her description of how flushed I had looked the previous evening.

  ‘Was he rude to you, auntie Ada? If he was we should call the Inspector.’

  ‘No, no, he was perfectly civil, we just happened to bump into each other on my way back from the shops, and he was asking me about the funeral, that’s all.’

  ‘I hope he’s not thinking of being there.’

  ‘He never mentioned.’ Auntie Ada hesitated, as though trying to remember. ‘But no, I shouldn’t think so.’

  I had again paid attention to what I was wearing: a stiff white blouse, a pair of blue jeans and my sandals. I was in Cross Street at 3 minutes to 3, and at 3pm exactly came the proof that I had ma
de the right decision. Any traces of doubt that I may have harboured still were washed away by the furious first minutes of the music that gushed through the open windows. That initial violence struck me not as any tribute to myself, as Karl had claimed in his letter, but as a visceral and abject self-denunciation, until it literally broke into a drifting in the wind of a thousand elegiac lamentations. And then, just as abruptly, it shuddered as it struck out far, far ahead of itself, as though in a cajoling exhortation to the future: in the language of despair, it spoke to me only of hope.

  I had always thought of music simply as the stirring of emotions with sound. I had never understood it in any other way, and could judge it only by the strength of the emotions it had stirred. I saw no difference between Beethoven and Bowie, and whenever Karl had asked me I had never been able to put into words why I might have found Rachmaninoff’s Etude Tableaux more stirring than Liszt’s Feux Follets. ‘What does that even mean, you found it more “stirring”?’ Karl would ask. ‘Can’t you give me something more concrete?’ And I would always answer that I couldn’t, because wasn’t that precisely the thing about music, that it wasn’t something concrete?

  “Jane” was different. It had stirred my emotions, but it had stirred them very specifically, in a way that had communicated meaning to me. ‘There’s nothing in the world that’s more concrete than music,’ Karl had told me, but only now had I understood what he meant. And when “Jane” came to an end I remained where I stood, alone in a street that was rarely so deserted; it was as if it had reserved itself exclusively for me. Then Karl came to the window, as he must have every other day since delivering his letter by hand, and when his gaze fell on mine I held on to it tensely; when he lifted the open palm of his hand I did the same; when his face dared to break into a smile so did mine, at exactly the same moment. And when he disappeared from the window, I knew that very shortly he would be at the door, and already I had stepped into the road and was crossing the street.

  With the door still ajar just behind us, we put our arms around each other, and when I rested the side of my head on his shoulder I could feel the warmth of his breath in my hair. Then I broke away a little, to lean back and look at him directly in the eyes. But as my lids became heavy, I felt the distance between us dissolve, and our mouths came together in a kiss that had the softness but also the passion that all our other kisses had lacked.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Karl, and when I told him to shush while our noses and our foreheads still touched, he shook his head lightly and he said it again. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘What I did…’

  Tilting backwards again, I put the flat of my hand against his mouth. ‘Let’s just forget it.’

  ‘I don’t want to forget it. I want it always there, to remind me what I don’t want to be.’

  ‘But you’re not. And if I thought that you needed reminding I wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘It wasn’t me who called the police.’

  ‘I guessed that,’ I said.

  ‘I left the note in the shop in case it was too soon to get in touch. I’m really sorry about your dad.’

  ‘At least we managed to talk.’

  ‘You made peace, Frau Angela told me.’

  ‘Yes, she came to see me.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that too.’

  ‘She’s your mother, what choice did she have?’

  ‘The choice to let me pay for my mistakes,’ said Karl. ‘But everybody wanted to protect me, even you.’

  ‘You got a broken nose for your mistakes, let me see?’ I held his face in place to examine it closely, and could see the fading bruises under his eyes, but the nose seemed as straight as it had always been. ‘Just a bloody nose and a pair of black eyes,’ I corrected myself.

  ‘When he came to see us the second time, I think the Inspector knew, but he wouldn’t let me tell him. He said I should write you a letter instead, if there was any explanation to be made it was you it should be made to. But there wasn’t, so I wrote you a letter without one.’

  Only then did I notice as though in the haze of a daydream that Karl and I were practically dressed in identical clothes. His white shirt had bigger collars and was better ironed, and his jeans were a slightly lighter shade… I was too close to him to see what he was wearing on his feet, but I imagined him wearing his flip-flops. It was a stupid detail, but it did make my feeling more intense: without Karl I would never feel complete. It was a feeling that brought with it a new anxiety - what if I was wrong?

  ‘I’m glad you did,’ I said, refusing to even countenance a thought that perhaps only a lifetime together could settle. ‘And I’m even more glad that I found it when I did.’

  ‘I would’ve waited,’ said Karl.

  ‘But I’m not ready for sex yet.’

  ‘I’m obviously not either,’ Karl answered without looking at me, and after I had used all my fingers to ruffle his hair, ‘Can I play “Jane” one more time for you? Or don’t you want to come in?’

  ‘Only if you have ice cream,’ I said, and when Karl nodded I pushed the door shut.

  ‘It’s been too hot,’ he said, as we made our way through to the kitchen.

  ‘Let’s not talk about the weather, it reminds me too much of auntie Ada.’ I leaned against the bright Formica worktop and watched Karl scoop some ice cream into bowls. It was mixed vanilla and chocolate with pieces of crushed meringue.

  ‘How is she, your aunt?’

  I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. ‘I wouldn’t have a clue where to begin.’ And when Karl’s curiosity had united his eyebrows, ‘Come to the funeral,’ I said, ‘it’ll be fun.’

  ‘Fun?’

  ‘We thought we’d celebrate his life with a magic show. It’s what we think dad would’ve wanted.’ Karl gave a tentative nod. ‘Mm, the ice cream’s divine,’ I said. ‘Oh, and he’s being cut into two for the finale, I nearly forgot.’

  ‘Your father?’ Now Karl’s incredulity had made his eyebrows part and twist upwards into spirals.

  ‘You pull such faces,’ I laughed. ‘Don’t worry; he’s not really being cut into two. And someone’s going to be there I’d like you to meet.’

  ‘Can I ask you a personal question?’ Karl was nervously stirring the last of his ice cream. And when I answered with my eyes that he could, ‘Why would your father want to kill himself? Especially after you talked. And what about this girl he was seeing, you said they were happy.’

  ‘Come to the funeral,’ I said. ‘It’ll make it easier to explain.’ I thought about that word, “explain”, and immediately I wanted to change it. ‘Not explain, exactly. I mean it was a shock, the last thing I expected, but then so many unexpected things have happened… I think I lost my dad when we all lost mum. I’m trying to accept it without feeling angry or loving him less. In fact I’ve never loved him more. Does any of that make sense?’

  ‘My dad ran off to Australia with a leaning tower of Pisa from Sweden, do I actually want things to make sense?’ Karl’s smile moved closer to mine.

  ‘Someone’s stolen auntie Ada’s Giacometti,’ I managed in a heavy breath, just before my cold lips met Karl’s.

  Watching Karl play it made “Jane” even more categorical. I stood in my usual place by the piano, taking in Karl - the abrupt and brittle movements of his head, the tension on his face and neck, the deftness of his long slender fingers - while being stirred in my entirety by the first piece of music that was speaking to me personally.

  When he stopped and placed his spread-out fingers on his legs, his eyes briefly shut, exhaling as though to let out any remnant of the music before getting up, already I was moving behind him, to reach over his shoulders and tighten his chest with my overlapping forearms, the side of my head lightly nestled in the nape of his neck.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  While he was locked in that contorted position, his hands found mine and briefly brushed against them. ‘It’s me who should be thanking you. “Jane”
would never have happened without you.’

  ‘It did happen without me,’ I said, standing back as Karl swivelled round to face me.

  And as I offered him my hands, which this time he held onto, ‘There hasn’t been a moment without you,’ he said.

  ‘But it wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t fallen out, is that what you meant?’

  ‘If the slightest thing had been different.’

  Perhaps it should have made me uncomfortable, this theory of his that everything had happened for a reason: if anything, the last few days had been governed by unreason, and I had clung to that unreason to make sense of them, or rather to be able to endure them. But now the unreason of being here with Karl, by transporting me over impassable borders had made life unendurably delicious. And Karl wasn’t trying to defend himself. He was simply conceding that the intensity of everything was interrelated, that perhaps he had needed the burden of so much regret…

  ‘What’s a “Giacometti”?’ I heard him ask.

  ‘Similar to an Otto Dix, but not really; he’s a famous modern artist, but a sculptor, not a painter.’

  ‘He died you know.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Otto Dix.’ Karl got up from his stool, and led me by the hand to the sofa.

  ‘When?’ I asked, when we had snuggled up together in a corner.

  ‘July 25, just a few days after… But no, that’s not a nice way to remember.’

  ‘Just a few days after Nixon’s propaganda?’

  ‘Don’t take any notice of Frau Angela’s nonsense,’ said Karl, almost indignantly waving it out of the way with the back of his hand. ‘I doubt she believes it herself. She’s just angry that Germany’s caught in the middle, but whose fault is that? Caught in the middle and cut into two like your father tomorrow, except that it’s not an illusion, I hope unlike your father tomorrow.’

  ‘I hope so too,’ I said, ‘not that it would make any difference.’

  ‘And Giacometti?’

  ‘As dead as Otto Dix, I think.’