by Deborah Levy
‘You are here.’ The photographer points to each of them on the Polaroid.
‘We know we are here,’ Zoya says.
He leans over and takes a toothpick from their table, tilts his head and works it into his golden teeth.
‘Sometimes it’s good to know where you are.’
The waiter lifts J.K.’s cup from the saucer.
‘Why are you laughing?’ she asks him.
‘What’s your name?’
‘J.K.’
‘I’ll tell you one thing, J.K.’
‘Okay.’
‘You must give yourself a name.’
071 and 081 for London. The Post Office Tower lights up and J.K. stares into her cup.
He walks in although she has no memory of leaving the door open. When she turns round to face him, he says, ‘You are wearing jeans and a silk halterneck.’
‘You have an airmail letter in your top pocket,’ she says.
It is a cold night and it is beginning to rain. J.K. is thinking, I have just left the 071 zone to come back here, to these rooms, the books on my shelves, to the fruit in my bowl, and to this man. Is that what a home is? A place to invite strangers to? He is staring at the snakeskin buckles on her shoes.
‘Y’know,’ she says, and he turns his body towards her. ‘My name is . . .’
His gaze shifts from her eyes to the radio behind her head. ‘I like it that you’re just called J.K.’ When he lets his eyes meet hers she sees they are frightened.
‘’Bye,’ she says.
He tangles his fingers with her fingers.
‘What are you still doing here?’
He says, ‘Start again. Why don’t you take off your shoes and tell me who you are.’
‘You like it that I’m just called J.K.’
‘Tell me who you are so I can love you properly.’
She considers these words. There are eleven walnuts in a bowl by her feet and there are eleven words for her to consider. Tell-me-who-you-are-so-I-can-love-you-properly.
‘You want me to be a stranger,’ he says and, for the first time ever, takes out a cigarette that smells of cloves, lights it and leans against the sofa.
‘You even wear shoes in bed so you can walk away from me.’
She stands up, switches on the radio, and looks at him sitting there, in her home, too close, a coil of smoke above his silver head, airmail letter shivering in his top pocket. At that moment, the radio announces that war has broken out, and tanks are sliding through the ripples of the desert.
4
Riding the Tiger
An English rose. The national emblem of England. The pink glow of the cheeks in health. Blooming Blushing Bright. But there are other roses. The rose of Jericho, of North Africa and Syria that curls into a ball in drought, the rose of Sharon that was probably a narcissus. The rose that covers the eyes of a corpse and the rosewater that scents lovers and sweetmeats.
Today Gregory told me on the telephone that he had Aids. We could both hear each other’s TV, 60 miles between us, words like ‘Saudi Arabia’ and ‘The Allied Forces’, and someone was knocking on Greg’s door. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘have a good holiday. Where are you going?’
J.K. walks through a ‘BeachPark’ built on volcanic rubble; swimming pool and pizza malls and discos by the pool and there’s nothing else but creaking palms planted alongside white holiday bunkers, curve of beach and desperate sunset. Somewhere else, charismatic missiles glide above skyscrapers. The dark incense of burning date palms and eucalyptus trees fills the desert. Young boys in the uniforms of North America and Europe sleepwalk through the bones of abandoned cattle, unsettling stars, scorpions and a sun that makes them shiver and burn at the same time. Sand in their eyes, they circle oil wells, delirious under that enormous sky, while men older than themselves, also in uniform, murmur strategies, statistics, geographies, parables into their sleepy heads, make jokes, hand out sachets of ketchup and arrange funerals.
‘It’s all complex on this island,’ says the supermarket senora as J.K., shipwrecked and solo, pays 340 pesetas for chorizo and bus timetables.
‘What kind of place do you want?’
The words make her sad and nervous. She walks back to the English boys eating pizza at the complex. They stare at her, call out to her, throw rings of pepperoni and black olives at her as she ties the red ribbons of her espadrilles, maps and timetables open on her lap, and she, thinking about what kind of place she wants to be in, puts on her spectacles and stares back. She stares into their pale blue eyes, growing blonder and blonder in the sun (Malcolm X called them devils) and what she sees is struggling mothers, absent fathers, broken park benches under sagging grey skies, poor food eaten in small rooms, places she doesn’t want to be in, places she has run away from in search of an imagined place, a place that is not this place, a place that is not that place, a place that is – a place that, like the words War and Peace, is perhaps just an idea. This is a very blue sky. Thin cats hiss into it. Cacti lament under it. Their golden spines shiver in the wind, and from the largest, most formidable of all, another scenario of struggle emerges.
From its prickly heart, to the soft waves not of the ocean, but of Muzak piped from the local boutique, Leon Trotsky emerges, shirt sleeves rolled up, tattered straw hat askew on his thinning hair. He says, ‘Yes, I was indeed architect of an alternative world. But I was banished before I could make it. On the run. Carrying it with me. Heavy luggage, my dear, for a man who had to be nimble on his feet.’ He considers the cactus next to him, prods it, takes out a small sharp blade and cuts a piece of its flesh. ‘I grew very fond of cacti when I was in exile in Mexico. However, I missed the inspiration of heavy overcoats and I have always thought better in a fur hat.’ He digs his hands into the black rubble. ‘No good for potatoes. Yes I am the same Leon Trotsky who once wrote impromptu speeches on napkins in Moscow restaurants. In exile I felt the loss of newspapers very badly. But cacti suit my choleric temperament and, like me, they survive in harsh climates.’ He smiles at a pale woman with straw-coloured hair and a T-shirt with ZAP POW MY WAY sprawled over her pastel breasts. She appears not to see him but her lips mouth the words CAR HIRE to some imaginary companion. ‘Her nose is too short,’ Trotsky observes. ‘I like women with large noses who nonchalantly cross their legs.’
He stares at J.K., whose fingers are tangled in the red ribbons of her shoes. She sits on her unpacked bags, passport in her back pocket, counting pesetas. Trotsky screws up his eyes. ‘Let us place you,’ he says. ‘You who are discontented, I can tell from the curl of your lips.’ He looks around him, up at the sky, and then at his blackened fingernails. ‘Why do you think you feel discontent more than those English boys eating Pizza Americano who will later get drunk and vomit in the swimming pool? Do you think they don’t know they are poor, miserable and needy? I was once an electrifier of weakening armies made up of just such boys.’ He stops. Wheezes. Kicks the cat under his old brown leather boots.
‘In the Middle Ages, these islands were visited only in the imagination. It took the map-maker Angelino Dulcert to record the actual sighting of the island and the humanist Boccaccio to describe his voyage of discovery in whatever ink and metaphor was available in 1341. Gold hunters and imperialists followed, and of course with all imperialists, slaves. ‘You see,’ says Trotsky, ‘the island proved to be the most significant of the Atlantic archipelagos because the wind system linked them to the new world.’
He gestures towards the BeachPark Development where young couples carry plastic bags full of lager to their bunkers. ‘I’d like a beer myself. A beer and my arms round my babe.’ After a long silence he continues. ‘We will jump six centuries or so . . . where were we, 1341, let us consider 1936. Let us make it summer. Dust winds blow from the Sahara. Hungry goats scavenge for food. There is a drought and the wells have dried. A paunchy little man called Franco, once commander-in-chief of the Spanish army, meets up in the woods of La Esperanza in Tenerife with a few discontented officers. They
promise to give him command of Spain’s best troops, tough lean Moroccan mercenaries. They walk to a hotel – the patron is a sympathetic English man – and by the time they have finished their omelette and sherry, they have given him the Foreign Legion as well. By 20 July the islands are in Franco’s hands and he thus begins to conduct his ideological orchestra with machine-guns. Within hours, in the terrible heat of that summer, trade unionists, teachers, left-wing politicians, writers and artists are imprisoned or murdered.’ He stops. ‘I’d like to shag that girl over there, blonde with muscles in her thighs.’ He watches an English boy stick his tongue into her ear. ‘Amorous vertigo in one of these BeachPark bunkers would really cheer me up.’ He scratches his balls. ‘I am undone. My hopes have beggared me.’ Head bowed, he examines a small hole in his cuff. ‘Just thought I’d give you some information,’ Trotsky wheezes, ‘it probably wasn’t in the brochure, and by the way, I recommend the local banana.’
The virus is making sorties into my body. Today I coughed up green mucus into a bucket on my lap. My masseur, an East End boy called Spud, says when he massages me he can see another body floating above me, and that’s the body he works on. He calls us Gregory One and Gregory Two.
And from the shivering centre of another volcanic cactus, transplanted from some other place, perhaps a happier place, into sunshine and shadow, into the gentle Muzak of the BeachPark, someone else emerges. Vladimir Ilych Lenin. Ripped down from the bloodstained boulevards of Eastern Europe by his discontented children, Vladimir Ilych, great orator with gimlet eyes, now a little shaky, blinks. He is not used to sunlight. He prefers burying his hands in his wife’s mother’s fur muff. Wiping the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief he says, ‘The great sculptor Aronson was enraptured with my skull. He told me I resembled Socrates.’ He smiles, bends down and cradles a small striped cat to his breast. ‘Aronson told me, hands deep in the clay, that light emanated from my forehead, but my eyes glittering with irony and intelligence were not as protuberant as Socrates’ eyes.’ The cat purrs in his arms, its small paw catching his beard, and Vladimir, laughing, nudges it under the chin.
‘My political wife, Nadia, she loved my brain, but my lovers liked my lips. Thick lips that give me a Tartar look. While I listened to Beethoven’s Appassionata, played with kittens, read novels on couches, Turgenev my favourite but sometimes a little Hegel and Kant to keep me on my toes, nibbled cucumbers and made plans to hunt wild duck in autumn, I knew I could play my life in this way: admired for my lips, eat excellent goulash cooked by my faithful wife, enjoy lazy long games of chess, liaisons with admiring and full-breasted comrades, and write the odd book. I spent childhood summers in Kokushinkon reading Pushkin while my brother Sasha read Das Kapital – bought under the counter from a small second-hand book dealer. But I knew my destiny lay elsewhere! I would have to fight the seduction of Ludwig’s Appassionata and ride the Russian Tiger.’
The cat, entranced by Vladimir Ilych, falls into warm contented sleep.
‘The day I sat my examination papers on Pushkin, the tsar sent my brother to the gallows. My mother’s hair turned completely white and my sister Olga took to fainting at school . . . but I passed my exams brilliantly!’ He stops, eyes settling on her chorizo, and asks how much it cost. ‘And how many choices of sausage? Five? Yes, the people, they like to have a choice of sausage. The sum of my life’s work undone by sausage. Remove it immediately, it offends me. To be deposed by a pig is not good for the morale.’
Vladimir continues. ‘My brother, Sasha, argued that any philistine can theorize, but the revolutionary has to fight. The trouble with intellectuals is they are physically weak. They finish a debate, not because they have resolved something, but because they are tired. Stamina Stamina Stamina. Just raising his hand in a meeting is enough to make an intellectual die of exhaustion.’ Stamina Stamina Stamina, the black volcanic rocks echo. ‘Very big practical demands were made of the workers, but the intellectuals, they just want to screw each other and eat long lunches in cafés. It’s the same the world over.’ He stops again. ‘There is something a little frivolous about the way you do your hair,’ he says in a steely voice. ‘I think you are under the influence of red wine when you should be under the influence of the workers’ movement.’ His mouth suddenly crumples and his small black eyes go moist. ‘I HAD A DOG CALLED ZHENKA!’ he screams to the sky. Zhenka Zhenka Zhenka, the black rocks wail. ‘At twenty my brother Sasha pawned his gold medal to obtain nitric acid from Vilna, second-hand revolvers that did not fire, and explosives that were too weak. He died on the gallows because he engaged in political activity before he had clarified the principles on which it should be based. It is I who created the framework for well-elaborated principles. I had to put away my Pushkin and learn statistics. To cut the flesh and find the bone, lay in bare detail the economic connection between towns and villages, light and heavy industry, the working class and peasantry. What is that smell?’ His nose twitches. ‘Aaaah. It is your suntan oil.’ He writes something down in a little notebook: ‘What is the brand? Coconut with Vitamin F? Tested under Dermatological Control? Getest onder dermatologisch TOEZICHT!’ Zicht Zicht Zicht. Seagulls cry above his furious head. Vladimir wipes his brow again and stuffs the handkerchief back into his breast pocket. ‘I, Vladimir Ilych, wrote ‘The Development of Capitalism’ in prison . . . FACTOR FIFTEEN WATERPROOF . . .’ the words seem to send him into despair. This time he howls. Proof Proof Proof, the black rocks howl back, and someone dives into the swimming pool. ‘I wrote it for you . . . for them.’ His hands gesture towards the pool which is now full of vomit and lager cans. He sighs, tickles the kitten’s ears with his thumb, silent as he watches the English boys try to drown each other. He points his forefinger at J.K. ‘Take your bags and leave at once. Tolstoy said when one travels, the first part of the journey is spent thinking about what one has left behind. The second half is spent anticipating what lies ahead.’
On a bus at the volcanic crossroads, away from the BeachPark, the bored driver plays with the buttons of his starched blue shirt. He says, you must go to Morro J, lays out his hand to conjure something beautiful for her there, and J.K. gives him her tortoiseshell fountain pen which he turns over in his hand, writes slowly in elaborate italics two words, Pensione Omray, and starts the empty bus. They’re driving through desert dune to Puerto Rio for her bus connection, one hour to wait, three bags, two of books, one of clothes, Smith Corona 1936 typewriter in a pillowcase. He drops her at a small industrial port at the bottom of the hill, the sea whirling gases, a church, a cigarette kiosk, a local newspaper which has oil-drenched Gulf birds on its cover: Catastrofe ecologica en El Golfo, contaminada por el crudo bombeado al mar; and somewhere a ship’s hooter shrieks while men gamble on the pavement. What is it, this blood that leaks from her mouth every day? Dark and morbid in the basin? Two red stars burn in J.K.’s cheeks. At the café by the bus station, small yellow butterflies knock against her bare arms.
‘Spit it out.’
J.K. looks up into the eyes of a young black woman who takes out a tissue and says again, ‘Spit it out.’ The woman’s daughter kicks her chair with her sandals and stares curiously at her. ‘It’s all right,’ her mother says. ‘It’s all right to spit.’ She calls out for some beers and an ice-cream for her daughter. A parrot cracking seeds on a perch nearby lifts its head and makes the sound ‘Hooo Hoooo’. The daughter, shy, whispers ‘Hoo’ back and then looks away. ‘Hoo,’ the parrot calls to her, and despite herself, a little louder this time, her lips return, ‘Hooo,’ and then she hides her face in her arms.
‘It’s all right,’ the woman says again.
‘What’s all right?’ J.K. also hides her eyes.
‘Nothing’s all right,’ the woman says, and they all watch the parrot.
‘Last year I woke up feeling weird. I could hear birds singing, my body was warm, my fingers tingling and I was in the Promised Land! So I took a chair outside, outside my estate that is, and fell into the garbage. Yes, you might laugh
now, but I could taste milk and honey in my mouth! The allotment was rustling with sugar cane! I reached out towards the cane and cut my hands on glass, my head was spinning and I walked the streets until I came to this synagogue and I ran inside it. There’s a service going on and I shout UNITE! Everything stops and I shout again UNITE UNITE, so they called the police. Bloody Jews. I didn’t say Fuck you, I said Unite.’ She gives J.K. a tissue. ‘That’s better,’ she says. ‘Spit some more.’
‘Hooo.’
‘Hoooo,’ her daughter begins, and then stops herself.
She sticks her tongue into the ice-cream and looks up at her mother.
‘So the police put me in a cell, and in the cell are a lot of blue blankets and blue was the colour of peace to me. So I thought, if I put these blankets up on the wall and over the door it’s all going to be OK. But then they open the door and say they’re taking me to the hospital. So I say, ‘You’ll have to drag me there. I’m not finished with these blankets yet.’ And I sit on the blue blanket like it’s a magic carpet and the police are pulling it, two on each end and me in the middle shouting UNITE UNITE, and they lash my arms behind my back and I end up in the hospital.’
‘Hooo.’
‘So nothing’s all right is it?’ Her finger prods J.K.’s hot arm.
A fat man sleeping on his guitar wakes up. He orders a plate of potatoes and chilli sauce, twisting the heavy ring on his fat finger round and round. He smiles at the child, teeth small brown stumps, and points to the parrot. ‘Lauro,’ he says and throws her one of his potatoes.
‘A doctor in a white coat comes up to me and I knew I’d met him before somewhere. In a concentration camp, or he sold me as a slave, or he massacred my mother or deported my father or lynched my brother. I knew that man. I knew he was evil and could hurt me. So I screamed. That scream frightened me more than it frightened the doctor . . . I didn’t know I had so much fear in me . . . and then I saw this woman, this black woman wheeling a trolley of tea, and she says, ‘You’re frettin’ darling.’ So I threw myself on her and stuck there like a leech and wouldn’t let go and she walked around giving patients tea with me stuck to her, telling the doctors it was ALL RIGHT I was stuck to her.’