by Deborah Levy
Her brother sent her a book. The postwoman asked her to sign for it but she had forgotten her name and didn’t know how to tell her. And then she saw J.K. written by her brother’s hand on the parcel and copied it letter by letter as if she had just learnt her ABC, and the postwoman was gentle, helping her out, laughing in the right way, so she offered her coffee and for six weeks took sea walks with her, made pancakes with her, let her brush the knots out of her hair, just glad she was there, finding ways to keep her warm, stopping draughts that raged through doors and windows. A loner with intelligent fingers.
Loners are the opposition. Pensive, thoughtful and furious, marooned with stories that need to be spoken out loud and no one to listen, curries to be cooked and no one to taste, days and days of traffic signals to be manoeuvred and no one to congratulate, except other loners: they find each other because like all good maps there are familiar signs that lead the way. The loner who both observes and creates worlds necessarily speaks with many tongues. It is with these tongues that she explores the contours of the centre and the margins, the signs for somewhere and elsewhere and here and now.
J.K. stranded on a sand dune between a war, three bags and one pillowcase.
Rockahulla! Blind. Almost blind. My head is full of dizzy blond Muzak. The kind you get while waiting to be connected on telephones. Oh yes! No Bach chorale for me. My head is full of form. Donald Duck! Mickey Mouse! I’ve been invaded by an army of Disney pets when I should be at my most profound. Are these my inheritance? Fear of death comes and goes. It’s life’s the edgy thing. You always wanted a garden, J.K. That’s easy. Happy composting. Glorious growth. Glorious everything. What can you see?
J.K. sees the owner of the small sea shack on the cliff; table and chair outside, the table and chair she longs for, cacti and bush of herbs, boat on its side and tottering TV aerial on the tin and tile roof, palms rattling in the cold wind. A woman in a turmeric dress, bare legs and strong shoes waters her plants, looking out to sea while water spills on cacti. Someone comes out of the doorway carrying two bottles of beer, perhaps her mother, silver plait coiled around her brown head, pointing to a thirsty shrub. The turmeric woman is lost in some reverie of her own, ignoring commands to water this and water that, stopping now and again to sip beer or examine the broad leaf of a succulent. How did she come to be there? Who is she? J.K. sees her own mother as observed by herself at five years old, pins in her mouth, French pleating her hair – it must have been early 1960s – watching her dress in the mornings, catching the thrill of her presence in gardens or leaning against a car. When she was J.K.’s age she had three children, had been married twice and was now alone, struggling with debtors demanding money she hadn’t got. They would eat bread and apricot jam one two three days, and then on payday, steak, a new sack of oranges to suck in the shade. J.K. barefoot, lying on her stomach peeling oranges. Reading in the long grass. She is frightened and she is ashamed. Sometimes she cries and no one knows. Where is her father? She is nine years old and she knows that sometimes people are tortured. Are grown-ups cruel, then? She looks at them in a new sort of way and when they catch her eye she immediately smiles in case they know she knows they are capable of doing cruel things.
Who is going to love her enough to make her brave?
Her mother wore false eyelashes sometimes and lipstick and listened to classical music, but also blues, drank brandy, smoked cigarettes in a holder which she lost often and they had to search the house top to bottom while she went mad until, victory between their teeth, one of the children would find it and she would kiss them all over, laughing again. J.K. remembers thinking her mother was lovely and beautiful. She was allured to her, pulled to her, zipped the back of dresses for her, wanted her, tried on shoes at the bottom of her wardrobe clandestinely, especially in love with a purple patent pair with straps which seemed to promise a glamorous future, unknown worlds that J.K., five years old, glimpsed as she did up the buckles. Every kiss was a treat, Sundays a treat, tickling the soles of her mother’s feet while she read newspapers in the sun, coffee and slacks with zips at the side. Love is no maiden in silk. She is a monster who bellows, ugly and wounded. And her children are ugly and wounded too.
J.K. picks up her bags and resolves to find a place to stay.
In the chapel of the local monastery three monks gather around a painting of the Madonna, one perfect incandescent breast exposed to feed the child in her arms, nipple erect and moist. J.K. sits outside the chapel in the shade of an ancient tree, its trunk marked with three white circles of paint. She closes her eyes.
‘Just ships passing in the night.’
The green glassy eyes of the Englishman settle on her breasts. He moves nearer, immaculately manicured fingernails flickering across his trousers. J.K. thinks, yes, I am sitting under a tree marked for death. I must ask the monks something. What is it? Oh yes, when they think about women what do they feel?
‘I’m a mega-star,’ the Englishman says, puts two fingers to his forehead, shouts ‘bang bang’ and collapses at her feet.
Today Gregory died. Slipped out of this century. A few days earlier he said, here’s a picture of us, J.K.: we’re talking about places we feel happy in and people we feel happy with, about our ordinary everyday lives and the planning of things to look forward to. God is dead. Long live lager!
‘Bang bang.’ The Englishman falls on to the crackling leaves by the bench. Every time he makes the sound ‘bang bang’ in his throat, he dies again, in slow motion, mouth open, miming some terrible agony of his own.
J.K. is looking for a piece of string to tie up her suitcase which has split. Gulls cry above the glittering ocean. Grief is an inflammation. She spits it up bloodily, unhealthily, stupidly. She wants it to go away, but it won’t let go. She can taste it and see it and she has to spit it out. Here, the fishermen’s nails are crammed with fishguts, tourists translate menus, and dogs sleep under cars. There, a friend has died, it is a cold winter and trains have stopped running.
Somewhere else, strewn across the desert, corpses, charred limbs, the odd shaving brush, a microwave, a mirror and one broken bottle of rose-scented cologne soaking into ripples of sand.
In Washington the currency is dollars, the bread yeasted, breakfast waffles and maple syrup, coffee filtered and decaffeinated, golf is being played on slopes of green grass and yellow ribbons hung on taxis. In Baghdad, the currency is dinars, the bread unleavened, breakfast goat’s cheese, coffee flavoured with cardamom, foreheads scented. Mustansiriya College in the centre is the oldest university in the world, crops are rice, vegetables, maize, millet, sugarcane, pulses and dates.
Do we exist?
What proof do we have?
When did we become a people?
When did we stop becoming a people?
What kind of language will (re)create us?
It is possible that classic rules of form and structure do not fit this experience of existing and not existing at the same time.
J.K. watches a storm rage into the crimson afternoon. The sky is electric. Rain whips her bare arms and legs. Dustbins are hauled into the air, caught on the wind’s curve. Bags and pillowcase unpacked for a while, toothbrush, perfume, books, a little pile of yellow feathers, J.K. knows she too is caught in the wind. She is Europe’s eerie child, and she is part of the storm.
5
Book of the Open Mouth
Rain lashes against car windows. Her favourite dress lies in a heap on the floor covered in candlewax. The white wax against black velvet looks like a fierce livid scar. The scar above her eyebrow makes the shape of a K which is the second letter of her name. J.K. shuts her eyes.
H arrives. They have met once before, briefly, in a train where she felt the brooding and bemused attention of someone staring at the wet black fur of her Russian hat (it had been raining), which she placed on her lap, lightly caressing its fur as the train rattled through the smoke of belching industrial chimneys. When at last he spoke, it was to conjure a picture for her. �
�Your hat makes me think of the time I thought I was going to die. I was standing on a jetty. There was a raging wind and a huge wave of white froth seemed to curve above my head. I thought I was drowning. At that moment I looked down and saw a black kitten sleeping on the wooden boards.’ He waited for her to say something or ask him something and when she did not he said, ‘The white smoke from the chimney reminded me.’ J.K. guessed from his voice that he was German, and another image of smoke raging from chimneys presented itself to her.
Now, as he walks through her front door, gift in his hand, he comments on the pleat in the sleeve of her black velvet dress, the books on her shelves and the thick ivory candles flickering in two heavy Ukrainian candleholders. J.K. pours rum into two long- stemmed glasses. She is ill. Flu is streaming through her, a virus, it is the decade of virus, and H, who offers her his handkerchief, is in a maverick mood.
Three days earlier, as she shut her front door, unlit cigarette in one hand, box of matches in the other, and started to walk down the stairs, a short man in his thirties walked up the stairs. They collided and he quickly shoved his hand inside her skirt. In the fight that followed with this stranger on the stone stairway, he somehow manoeuvred her on to his shoulders so that she, still with the matches in her hand, was on top of him, looking down at the frizzy blond curls of his hair. He was struggling with her weight and at the same time running his hand up her thighs. Suddenly she knew what to do. She lit a match and set fire to his hair.
After they have eaten, H turns his chair towards her and says, ‘You look like a matador. You would fight small bulls, though. The sort you see running wild in the Camargue.’ She lights his cigarette and asks him what his accent is. ‘German,’ he says. ‘I like cold winters.’ They drink more rum and she unwraps the gift he has brought her. It is a small packet of wild rice.
‘Wars were fought over that rice.’ H strokes the grey suede of her shoe. ‘In fact it is not rice at all. It is a black seed that grows into aquatic grass in certain parts of North America.’ As they dance across the curved room, tasting the rum on each other’s lips, her hand pressed into the back of his neck, his hand pressed over her heart, which is beating fast, something salty mingles with the taste of rum. It is her tears, streaming again, and he moves his hand from her heart to her cheek. After a while she says, ‘What kind of places would the trains journey through in a united Germany?’ His fingers, now wet from her tears, draw a map across her cheek: ‘Erfurt–Leipzig–Potsdam–Berlin.’
She lit a match and set fire to his hair. The blond stranger on the stone stairway began to burn, his frizzy hair in flames, the palms of his hands slapping upwards, anywhere, her calves, her knees, still holding on to her, until he got desperate and began to dig his sharp nails into her stomach and finally into her forehead, making the shape of a letter K.
‘What shall we do about your flu?’ H whispers as they dance into the flickering light of the candles. ‘Tell me about Erfurt,’ she says. His pale eyes settle on a painting behind her. Two vultures hover over a cream satin slipper, a languid red rose on its buckle. Next to it, a thin bamboo stick pokes out of a pot filled with soil, thin strips of shiny paper, gold, purple, green, glued to it so that if whirled it creates an arc of light and colour. ‘In this room you have made yourself a world that pleases you,’ he says. ‘In Erfurt there is a cathedral. The houses are covered in soot and the air smells of coal smoke. There is also a theatre and . . .’ he smiles . . . ‘good ice-cream.’ She follows his gaze as they dance, reading book titles as if they were new to her, and when they kiss under a small book called Undocumented Lives: Britain’s Unauthorized Migrant Workers she says, ‘Well, I think we should go to bed and drink more rum.’ He smiles, sticks his finger into her mouth and says, ‘Um . . . you see . . . you are quite lovely, but the thing is I have another involvement and I don’t want to lie to her.’ They dance in silence, this time his hands in her hair, and she says, ‘So tell me about Berlin.’
‘Berlin,’ he begins, and then stops. ‘Berlin is where I was born. Erfurt is where my . . . my . . . companion was born. She comes to Berlin to buy lipstick.’
‘And to see you,’ J.K. interrupts.
‘Yes.’ The vultures and satin slipper seem to fascinate his eye. He dances her closer to the image and studies it.
‘The bird has a snake in its mouth,’ he says.
‘Were you standing with her on the jetty when you thought you were drowning?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why did you say I and not We?’ she asks as they dance on and she untangles his hands from her hair, holding on to his hand though, both warm from the rum and he pressing against her velvet hips, ambivalent and desiring, his pale eyes somewhere else.
‘Because it was my thought,’ he says. ‘The white smoke and your black fur hat. The white wave and the black kitten.’ He takes his finger out of her mouth and presses it against the scar on her forehead. ‘K,’ he murmurs. At that moment his elbow nudges the Ukrainian candleholder.
She lit a match and set fire to his hair. At last she managed to jump off his shoulders, calves and forehead bleeding, and ran down the stairs leaving him folded over himself, slapping at his blond head with blistered hands. And then, he spoke.
‘And because,’ he looks away, ‘I want to beam love into you.’
As hot white wax trickles down her black velvet breasts, J.K. sees the packet of wild rice lying on the table, a delicacy, a frivolous gift, and pulls in the following memory:
A woman holds up a queue of impatient (West) Berlin office workers one lunchtime in a supermarket while her groceries are cashed up at the till. At the other end of the supermarket (East) Germans queue for shopping trolleys because a sign tells them to. The shop is crowded with people pushing empty trolleys, a can of beer in one, a box of washing powder in another, two bananas and a can of Pepsi in another. No one can move. There are skid-marks on the lino from the wheels. An old man reads the label of a small carton of cream, broken shoes tapping against the beat of Muzak spilling through the speakers. He puts the cream very carefully into his trolley, walks to the cashpoint, stops, bends down to pick it up and read it again. Eventually the woman turns round to face the office workers who are having to dodge the trolleys squeaking past them. They do not have trolleys. They carry their groceries in their hands and have currency ready to pay and leave.
‘I queued for food for twenty years, you can queue for twenty minutes. Look! My mouth is open.’
They shout back at her, call her a White Turk, and she becomes quiet as she takes them in, their perfumes, shoes, briefcases, watches, cufflinks, haircuts, jewellery. ‘Are you the new world I’ve been promised?’
J.K. stares into H’s pale eyes.
‘It’s not a good idea to stick your finger into the mouth of a hungry woman.’
‘Who is more predatory . . . the satin slipper with rosebuds on its buckle . . . or the bird above it?’ he says pointing to the painting.
And then:
‘Tell me how you hurt your forehead?’
His hair was on fire and then his mouth opened and words poured out. ‘I gotta plate inside my head. Some cocksucker cracked my head. Only wanted an aspirin. Looking for an aspirin. Need an aspirin. I buried the dead in Bucharest, miss. Threw apples on the graves, six foot under the snow. A HAPPY NEW YEAR IN LIBERTY! If you’ve not got an aspirin, can you spare a piece of cheese?
‘My companion and I are together because we are frightened to be alone.’ His fingers search for the zip of her black velvet dress. ‘But we are alone. I live half my life pretending I am full up.’ Outside, bins topple as drenched city cats search for food.
‘I am touched,’ J.K. says to her mother, Lillian Strauss. ‘I am touched by H in every way.’
‘Give some more form to the object of your affection,’ Lillian Strauss says softly, trying not to smile.
‘How do you mean?’
‘What’s his name?’
‘I’ll tell you when you’re sober.’
>
Lillian Strauss’s hands tighten around her glass of scotch. ‘You self-righteous pious little shit.’ Her eyes go dim. ‘Why do you have to ruin everything?’ They sit in silence. Lillian Strauss takes a small sip from her glass and purses her lips. J.K. looks out of the window.
‘I enjoyed Gregory’s funeral.’ Her mother takes another sip.
‘Thank you for inviting me. I liked his mother. She said if she’d called him Klaus and not Gregory he might not have got Aids. She’s a bit weird isn’t she? We’re having supper together on Tuesday.’ She looks at her daughter, whose eyes are glued to the window.
‘If I’d known I was going to blubber, I would have taken a tissue.’ Lillian Strauss stands up. Walks to the sink and pours her drink into it.
‘Bloody good stuff to waste,’ she says, slamming down the empty glass.
‘Mom,’ J.K. says.
‘Don’t call me Mom. And don’t ever have children. They’ll just end up hating you. That’s what happens to parents. Their children hate them.’
‘Let’s have a baby,’ H says to J.K. His hand rests on her belly. It is summer. A small aeroplane hums above them. Her camellia has flowered again, another pink bud opening in the petrol winds of the city. She looks around her room; a little saucer full of yellow canary feathers, pebbles, postcards, a bag full of coins, an address book, a white bowl on a stand, a photograph of Gregory, a cashew nut in its shell – not unlike a foetus – a poster of a man with a dragonfly taped to his forehead, a green ribbon, the letters XYZ scrawled on the back of an envelope in felt pen, a picture of an orange hand with six fingers, ALIEN written underneath it, and a 1936 Smith Corona typewriter. J.K. feels panic rise in her chest. The same panic she always feels when arriving at a new place. She is in a new place. She is in H’s arms and the aeroplane nearly drowned out his words, but she heard them and he is waiting for her reply.