Summer

by Ali Smith

  She laughed and laughed when the people all over the ship who are acting so seasick hear the dinner bell get rung and rush to get to the dining room before anyone else.

  She laughed as they arrive in America and Chaplin kicks the behind of an officious customs man who cordons them all off with a rope.

  A title came up in English. Later – hungry and broke.

  (It was exciting to see the other language.)

  Is broke the same as broken? Hannah said.

  No, her brother said. It means you’ve no money left.

  Hannah memorized it. Broke. Broke.

  As she did, Chaplin with his sweet white face on Hannah’s bedroom wall (the little moustache Hitler has been canny enough to copy as if to suggest he’s benign and endear himself to the world’s millions, and to the kind of millions that Chaplin makes, too) finds a dollar on the American street. Then he finds Edna, the girl he fell in love with and was kind to on the ship. They eat a meal in a restaurant. But a funny plot happens round whether the money he found is real or not, which of course it isn’t, and they have no money and can’t afford to pay for the meal. The waiter, a monster of a man, has a habit of beating people to within an inch of their lives when they can’t pay.

  But an artist in the restaurant thinks their faces are remarkable and very meaningful, faces symbolic of the time he’s living in.

  He wants them to model for him.

  He pays them in advance.

  Happy ending in the pouring rain.

  Her brother knew she loved Chaplin.

  Where did you get your cinema from? she said.

  Camera shop. I had to carry it here, and I’ve to carry it back tomorrow. Chaplin’s not all that’s on today’s bill, he said. I’ve one more little thing of wonder here.

  He ran the Chaplin film back through the projector – it was funny backwards too, in a whole other way. When the end of the film flicked out and round and round itself even that was a bit thrilling.

  He switched off the projector, replaced the film with another, switched the square of inner sunlight / moonlight back on (this time it didn’t hurt her eyes at all) and threaded the film through the reel wheel.

  This time the film was covered in even more scratches and looked like it was from some other century. It was.

  A man in a room full of roman-looking statues, like a gallery or an artist’s studio, is chiselling at a statue that’s not even a statue, it’s just a drawing, of a fine lady or a goddess holding a jug and a cup.

  Then the drawing turns into a real person. It offers the artist a drink from its jug and its cup but he’s too shocked to accept, so it steps down off its pedestal and walks across the room to a pedestal on the other side, where it takes up a pose with a harp which it starts to play. The artist goes to throw his arms round it, but it vanishes to nothing and he falls over himself. The goddess appears behind him. He goes to grab it again and it turns into – a turban!

  The turban is the size of a small child. It walks about the room by itself.

  The artist catches the turban and picks it up, puts it on one of the pedestals. But the living statue appears again. The artist runs to hug it. It vanishes, jaunts across the room, mounts the first pedestal (the little walking turban has vanished too) and returns to being nothing but a drawing. The artist puts his hands to his head and collapses on the floor of his gallery.

  Hannah laughed. She clapped her hands.

  The artist’s envy of the muse, she said.

  The what? Daniel said.

  It’s a version of the story of Pygmalion, she says.

  Oh, Daniel said.

  In this case both the muse and the artwork out-artist the artist, Hannah said.

  But did you like it? Daniel said.

  Very much, she said.

  He ran the film backwards, unplugged the projector.

  Now he was lying at the foot of her bed in the dark telling her what Mr Wirtz at the camera shop had told him about the early filmmaker who made the vanishing statue film.

  He was filming one day in a street in Paris, Daniel said. And something in the camera stuck, the film stuck, the apparatus wasn’t working, so he opened the box and he sorted it and started filming again. And when he got home and watched the film he’d made, in front of his eyes a bus full of passengers suddenly turned into a hearse, and people on the street vanished, horses just vanished, and new people appeared there who hadn’t been there before, men turned into women, women turned into men, people turned into horses, horses into people. And the filmmaker thought, I have found a way not just to witness and record time but also to conjure with time.

  Something wakes Hannah.

  The woman sitting next to her on the train has jogged her elbow.

  (ALBERT Adrienne, seamstress)

  The train has arrived. Everybody off.

  Because it’s near the border the checks here are chaotic. Good.

  She says a silent goodbye to the back of the man who looked for a moment a little like her brother.

  She chooses a poorly dressed old woman carrying a pile of sacking and an empty wicker box, the kind that holds hens. She places herself directly behind the old woman.

  My mother’s ill. I don’t know. That woman you’ve just let through, she is taking me, she was sent by my aunt to fetch me from the station, I’ve come from Lyon and I don’t know this place and she may not wait for me, she’s deaf, look, she’s going without me and I won’t know where to go.

  She holds her arms out from herself. She gives the uniform the man’s wearing her most beautiful angry look. The man blushes red, hands her back her papers without looking at her and nods her through.

  She breathes fully in, then out.

  She quickens her pace as if to catch up with the old woman. She follows her at a distance through the busy streets to the less busy streets, past houses until there are no houses, nothing but gouged-up grass and dried mud where trucks have turned in the road, to the edge of the town then out beyond the town where the fields begin.

  She can see the military grey and the signage, the roadblocks skirting the border.

  They walk a lower road through a scatter of farmland.

  When the woman turns away from the hills rather than towards them, Hannah stops and stands under a tree, takes off her shoe and looks inside it as if to find a stone. She lets the woman disappear towards a cluster of houses.

  She sets off herself in the opposite direction along the side of a meadow.

  It is a completely beautiful evening. Heavy summer light. She walks until she comes to the place a signpost has been removed from a village. She walks past its houses like she knows where she’s going. The people working see her and leave her alone. She walks between fields for over an hour on a dirt road in the birdsong, the evening’s grassy air.

  Then there’s a house by itself with a yard full of geese settling themselves for the night, the mountains rising behind it.

  She opens its gate.

  A dog barks.

  A woman comes to the door and opens it, holds the dog by the scruff of its neck.

  What do you want? the woman says.

  A man is standing behind the woman and the dog in a doorway that leads through to the rest of the house.

  I was wondering if I might trouble you for a glass of water, Hannah says.

  A glass of water, the woman says.

  I have a little money, if you’d take recompense for the kindness, Hannah says.

  She smiles her smile.

  The woman turns to look at the man.

  Yes, a warm evening, and you’ve been walking, the man says.

  I’ve quite a way to go, Hannah says. But there’s still light in the sky.

  We’ll gladly give you something to eat, too, if you can pay us something small towards it as you suggest, the man says.<
br />
  It’s kind of you, Hannah says.

  She sits at the table. The man says something to the dog. It stops agitating. The woman puts a spoon on the table in front of Hannah.

  Thank you, Hannah says.

  They put bread down, and a glass of water filled from a jug, then a bowl of some kind of stew. It tastes good. She tells them. The woman straightens herself with pride.

  Hannah tells them her name is Adrienne and says the name of the place she bought the train ticket to.

  That’s more than an hour on foot from here, the woman says. And the curfew. We can give you blankets, you’re welcome to sleep in the barn if you’d like to wait till the morning.

  It is a real kindness, she says. It’s my very good luck that I knocked on your door.

  She puts two banknotes on the table.

  I’ll set off as soon as it’s light, she says. I won’t trouble you more.

  You’re no trouble to us, the woman says.

  Hannah goes out to the barn with the man, who carries a roll of blankets. The dog walks peaceably beside them both.

  The mountains, she says. It doesn’t matter what time of the day or evening it is. Such beauty.

  Yes, the man says. We’ve always thought of them as our own.

  He smiles at her.

  Where does France end and Switzerland begin? she asks.

  The man takes her beyond the barn and points to a small muddy yard full of goats at the back of the house in the dusk. He takes her to the edge of the yard. He slides one foot through the wire in the fence.

  I am now in two countries, he says. My goats, when they put their heads through this fence, benefit from the good grass of more than one country. They always have. We get excellent milk.

  He pulls his leg back through. He stands in his yard and looks at her with utter candour.

  How lucky you are, she says.

  He crinkles his well-sunned face.

  If I were to bring family, just every so often, especially the little ones, there are many children in my family, just now and then, to visit you to enjoy your beautiful view, she says. Or perhaps send a cousin with some family of mine. Perhaps you would be as kind to them as you’ve been to me. Of course, for a little recompense for such kindness.

  We’ll always be happy to receive visits from your family, the man says. And there,

  (he points beyond the fence across a grassy expanse which ends in a forest)

  that’s where a path through the woods begins. Just one high fence, and my goats get under it easily if they try. Beautiful wildlife, those woods. It’s a very nice hike. I also know a man in town. He’s the mayor. He is himself a great lover of family life. I will leave you a note addressed to him telling him you and I are old friends, I’ll leave it on the doorstep for the morning, you can take it with you.

  When the man has gone back into the house and the sun is down, she folds the blankets on top of each other in the corner of the barn where there’s a tall bank of hay. She sits back against the haywall on the blankets, flicks a tiny fly away from her nose. She checks for her cash. She checks for her papers. She settles her hands in her pockets and closes her eyes.

  Good people.

  Lucky break.

  Claude will make it work.

  Claude got her the papers, good ones, real artistry. When the park was overrun with flowers and the city first overrun with thugs, she’d sat in the park with a book in her hand, Rimbaud, Illuminations. He came and sat beside her. He was good-looking, he was serious but smiling, he spoke with a lightness. O saisons, he said, o chateaux. What soul has no faults? I’ve done an enchanted study of it, happiness, it won’t pass us by, long may it live, with de Gaulle to wake us.

  When she’d turned to him and smiled, he’d said the word: yes?

  Yes, she said.

  They watched people strolling about the park, women on the arms of the Luftwaffe like everything wasn’t happening. They sat among the flowers, flowers falling over themselves, and he told her with the same light demeanour three things he’d seen.

  He’d seen a casino in Nice that was no longer a casino, had become a mattress store, you couldn’t move for the high piles of them that local people had donated to give to refugees to sleep on.

  He’d seen people shot by the planes dead on the sides of the road out of the city.

  He’d seen a mother and child who’d been executed, shot into the same grave. The mother’d been made to take her clothes off, the child the thugs had buried clothed, tossed it in on top of the mother.

  Now you don’t need to tell me anything else, she said.

  But he told her his name, the name he’s now inhabiting. Hannah told him her French name. She told him she didn’t have papers.

  He told her how he’d picked up an actual Bentley on the road. What? She didn’t know what a Bentley was? He laughed. A Bentley was an English car, a very fine one, and it had been abandoned, door hanging open, engine still running, by English people rushing to get the last ship that’d take them back to England. He’d also picked up on the same road a bicycle left the same way, he’d tied the lid of the boot down on it and driven as far as he could get. When the car ran out of petrol he got on the bike and cycled the rest of the way to Toulon. He’d met the gardeners there. They pass as gardeners. They’re pretty good gardeners, too. They garden all across the Midi.

  Ever been? he said. You’ll like it.

  He sorted it. He got her papers. He got her across the zone line. It won’t be non-occupied for long. The Italians want it. The Germans will let them have it till they decide to take it for themselves.

  He never asked her about anything.

  She told him about her mother, said that what she was telling him had happened to someone else’s mother. This other person’s mother’d been ill and medicines were forbidden and dying and nurses were forbidden. Meanwhile the thugs took the flat and everything in it.

  Now there’s no need to tell me anything else, he said.

  He gave her the bicycle.

  He told her laughter was the best way to conceive, so whatever she did, best not to laugh. Then he made her really laugh. It was impossible not to; he was an excellent mimic. He mimicked the concierge. He mimicked the Nazis. He mimicked the Maréchal watering his red white and blue flowers in his Azur garden. He mimicked any film star she could name, could do Colbert and Gable. He mimicked the grim woman at the baker’s. He made her laugh at all of it and then he held her body in a way that completely understood her, he was good at doing her too, then, a whole other kind of mimicry.

  She’d woken, she’d thought he’d be gone. He was still there next to her, smoking a cigarette. The light was coming up outside.

  New day, he said.

  There was a caterpillar in my dream, she said. It was walking the length of a rifle. It’s a sign, what do you think?

  In which direction was the caterpillar heading? he asked.

  Away from the handle towards the shooting end, she said.

  Away from the trigger, he said.

  Yes, she said.

  Good, he said. If you’re going to get shot, don’t get shot by a caterpillar. Tell it you’ll wait to be shot by the butterfly.

  That’s when she told him the first real thing about herself, by mistake.

  (It was dangerous. You had to blank your brain. You had to think way beyond yourself. Life depended on it, and not just your own. Her father, her brother. Her mother was safe in heaven dead, thank God.

  You had to not know, to know as little as you could. You had to find new ways of thinking and saying and not saying everything and anything.)

  She’d spoken thoughtlessly openly about her father and how he liked to catch butterflies, and to kill them, pin them behind glass. She regretted it as soon as she did. Her stomach dropped inside her. She felt sick. She thought she migh
t well be sick any moment.

  But Claude shrugged, flicked the done cigarette into last night’s dirty water in the washing bowl.

  You can’t put a pin through a summer, he said.

  They’d kissed, got up, got ready for the day.

  What she knew about Claude was that he was a man who could make damp newspaper catch light and burn.

  Because of him she’d be warm enough through a cold winter.

  —

  Mad dogs and Englishmen. We’re out in the Midi sun.

  Hannah puts her face against the shawl that’s round the child when she says it, so close that the shawl is partly in her mouth making her words not actual words, so nobody can possibly have heard her say anything, or anything meaningful.

  The city of flowers – the bright coast under the bright blue sky next to the bright blue sea, with its flower fields on the hills above it in a riot of bloom for the perfume industry – is ragged with refugees.

  Some of the big hotels are making a fortune because some of the refugees still have money. Most of the smaller hotels are going under.

  After Claude goes, she has to move. She chooses this city. She chooses the hotel she’ll stay in by the delight on the face of the woman who comes to the door when she sees the baby.

  When the woman tells her a name Hannah replaces it instantly. The name the woman said is gone. Her name in Hannah’s head is now Madame Etienne.

  It’s Madame Etienne, young and sweet, so keen that she runs up the stairs ahead of Hannah and the baby and waits on each landing for them to catch her up, who opens a door in the slope of the roof and shows her a room.

  It’s worn, I know, Madame Etienne says now toeing a rip in the carpet. But if Madame Albert will look. It has the sea.

  Madame Etienne is quite lovely to the baby. She also promises with all her heart that some days there’ll be more than just turnip for supper. She does this with a wink in case she can’t fulfil her promise. She tells Hannah, whom she refers to respectfully and repeatedly as Madame Albert, as if Hannah is twenty years older than she is, which she isn’t, they’re clearly about the same age, that last night at one of the cinemas in the town the authorities had come in and made the staff turn the houselights up! So they could pick out whoever was shouting or throwing things at the screen whenever the Maréchal or Hitler or Mussolini came on!