Summer

by Ali Smith

  She tells her this with an air of blithe disconnect, same as you’d say, but it’s raining! or, what a lovely day! or, look at that funny-faced dog, it does make me laugh! or, you’re wearing such a pretty blouse today!

  Her husband, she tells Hannah in the same jolly manner while she punches a pillow into better shape, told her last night when they were listening to the radio that people caught listening to Les Français parlent aux Français can be fined up to 10,000 francs and also put in prison! For two years! Does this room please Madame Albert?

  Very much, Hannah says.

  Madame Etienne pulls open the bottom drawer of a chest of drawers. She pulls it out as far as it’ll come. She takes a blanket off the bed, goes down on her knees and folds the blanket into the drawer like a thick lining then tucks the pillow in at one end. She stands up leaving the drawer open and gestures to it like a ballerina might, but with no idea of the delicacy of her own gesture.

  For the child to sleep in, she says. Does Madame Albert think it’s good? Does she think it is too small?

  I think it will work very well, Hannah says.

  Madame Etienne kisses the baby one more time then flurries out and down the stairs.

  Hannah sits on the bed in the room.

  The baby kicks her legs.

  Claude, gone.

  Three others from the group, also vanished.

  They’re dead.

  He’s dead.

  She hopes for his sake he’s dead.

  She’s here to do his job, to meet a cousin at one of the big hotels tomorrow.

  She dandles the baby, sings the song about horses going to market and coming home again. The baby laughs.

  The baby is beginning to form words already and wants to test the strength of her legs, every chance she gets bracing herself against her mother.

  It is a happy baby, which is a lucky thing.

  Hannah spends the days between the child and despair. There’s a happiness in these days that’s unquantifiable up against the foulness.

  In the first days here she goes out with the baby in her arms along the Promenade des Anglais with its vegetable gardens in the lovely sun.

  Almost every day she does this she reminds herself that a child makes you too visible, that too many people will start to recognize you.

  She walks the baby back to their hotel room again.

  Even so, the days since the baby came pass so fast it’s as if they’re jealous of happinesses.

  She meets the go-between every fifth day of the week, always in a different place. The go-between, for now, is a fourteen year old schoolgirl who gives her name as Sylvie.

  Sylvie is as simple as a wooden door; she is plain and elegant, closed and solid, locked. Hannah gives her the bicycle, indicates without saying that it’s a gift. Sylvie understands, nods impassive thanks with all the articulacy of such a door.

  Don’t underestimate the articulacy of a wooden door. Everything has a voice. What Sylvie is made of has its own good seasoned voice, even in a girl still so young.

  Sylvie settles in to being the usual contact. It works well. They pass each other in the appointed street or square at the appointed times. As they do, Hannah slips the packet of papers into the basket of the bicycle under Sylvie’s folded raincoat or under the (very) occasional slab of meat wrapped in the brown paper, or the turnips or beets or chard she’s delivering to the big hotels.

  One day Sylvie takes Hannah’s wrist in her small hand as she manoeuvres the packet under the food.

  For you, Madame, she says.

  She hands Hannah a folded cone of paper. She puts a foot on one pedal, swings herself up on to the seat and she’s gone.

  Hannah opens the paper cone. It’s full of wild strawberries.

  That’s a locked wooden door for you.

  Then there are the hours of the day when Hannah does nothing but sit and watch the baby asleep in the drawer, like the baby’s afloat in a tiny boat.

  Hannah herself is a broken-oared boat on a sea so wild she already knows any minute she’ll be flotsam.

  So.

  What will I make of my broke broken self?

  She watches the child breathe and shift in her sleep. Rilke says that by having a child at all you’ve already served that child its own death, placed it in the mouth of the child like a little ball of greyed bread, the core of the loveliest apple.

  Her own parents, did they know this feeling? And theirs before them? And theirs before them, too? And yet, no anger.

  Instead, the last word of that poem is the word unbeschreiblich. The knowledge defies words.

  The baby breathes in.

  The baby breathes out.

  Her mouth is so small and so here.

  Wer den Dichter will versteh’n, muss in Dichters Lande geh’n. Translate it, for your brother.

  If you want to understand the poet, visit poet-land.

  I’m in poet-land now for sure. This is time on another plane.

  Weeks pass.

  (The baby gets too big for the drawer.)

  Hannah passes on the papers.

  (The child breathes in, out, in.)

  She sorts the tickets to Lyon, a little food, the instructions.

  (The child is beginning to form words into phrases.)

  There’s a silk map to pass on to a contact in Switzerland who’ll pass it on to London.

  More people to disappear.

  Hannah has to travel north.

  (Madame E minds the child on the days when Hannah’s away. The child throws her arms open when Hannah comes back.)

  This week there are two groups. One of seven kids. They’re to look like they’re on a hike. Sort the right clothes.

  (Soon Hannah is leaving the child at the hotel for days on end.)

  This week five adults. Check the health, the stamina, sort the papers. More can go wrong with adults. Locals are more uneasy when they see adults crossing land. Kids they tend to care about much less. The guides have to look like the kind of young people who’ll lead other young people on a hike.

  (Madame Etienne and her husband, a man who looks thoughtful, says nothing and can mend anything that’s broken, welcome the cash.)

  The laws change. Now you have to be ten kilometres inside the Swiss border before the Swiss will let you stay. Check the stamina.

  North.

  Then back south.

  North.

  Then south.

  There are so many nights now when Hannah’s not with the child.

  On those nights, before she goes to sleep, wherever she is, she sits and imagines the child on her knee and herself singing the horse going to market song to the child.

  Whether she’s with the child or not she tells the child a story before sleep.

  Like the one about the summer day that argued with the gods about never wanting to be over.

  I will last for ever! the summer day said. Night will never fall! Winter will never come!

  Well, the gods all laughed like they’d heard the best joke, the funniest thing ever. Because as soon as someone or something says to the gods, this is the way things are, this is the way they’ll be, the gods and goddesses gather at the balcony and they look down over it at our nothing-much world, us running about on its surface like ants, and it’s worth noting, they’re sometimes cruel, the gods. They like a laugh, they laugh at us sometimes so much that they have to hold their sides so their sides won’t split with the laughing and all their godliness leak out of them. Best never to split a god. And here was a summer day, asking to be longer. As if a summer’s day wasn’t long enough.

  One of the gods stopped laughing and threw out a sudden lightning strike made of ice and the lovely blue sky of the summer day was gone. In its place was a great mass of clouds, black and grey. And from those clouds it isn’t rain
that fell, but snow. Big fluffy flakes of snow fell on the hottest day in July. They were so big that as they fell they stuck to each other and became a lot of little snowballs. And a summer’s day feels long, though it isn’t any longer than a winter’s day really, but that day, in the light that went on till late in the evening, so much snow fell that if you’d been standing on the doorstep the snow that fell would have reached as high as your nose.

  The child put her hand on her nose.

  It covered all the summer flowers. Their petals shivered and shrank.

  No! the child said.

  She covered her mouth with her hands.

  But the next day, Hannah said. What happened then?

  Sum, the child said.

  Yes. Summer sun. The sun melted all the snow away. Some poor flowers had been scorched by the cold, though, because cold can burn you just like heat can.

  Poor fowr, the child said.

  But most of them raised their heads to the sun, Hannah said, and what did they do?

  Hirsy, the child said.

  That’s right. They were thirsty. They drank all the melted snow. And after a while there were soon more flowers. And there were butterflies, and bees, who visited the flowers to make honey and to make the fruit grow on the trees, and make more flowers open.

  And the new summer day bowed its head and it said to the gods, I’m sorry I asked to live for longer than the length of the day I am. And the gods on the balcony bowed politely back to the summer day, and the townspeople of the city of flowers saw the flowers slowly lifting their heads after the sudden frost, and they were glad to have the flowers back, even for the short time a flower lasts. The townspeople knew that the flowers only last a summer, that a summer is soon over. So, they said – what did they say?

  What we ache, the child said.

  That’s right, she said. What will we make of this. So what did they make?

  Very big fume, the child said.

  A very big bottle of perfume. And when the summer was gone and the autumn and the winter came?

  Nos, the child said.

  That’s right, they opened the bottle and they put their nose to its opening and they sniffed, and enjoyed the lovely perfume. And what did they remember?

  Fowr, the child said.

  The flowers, Hannah said.

  Other nights she tells the child about the children who sleep all night under the stars under a canvas in the marketplace in town, so they’ll be first in the queue for the next morning’s vegetables.

  What are they? she says to the child.

  Cever, the child says.

  That’s right. They’re clever, she says.

  She tells the child the story of the mother who has to go away and leave her baby, and that it doesn’t mean the mother doesn’t love her baby, it means she loves her baby how much?

  Venor, the child says.

  That’s right, Hannah says. Even more.

  When the fields go dark, your eyes go bright, Hannah says one night. Soon a star starts to shine, and the insects sing the night. Every sound becomes a picture, everything you thought you knew, turns strange and dark in the pale sky, but the tops of the trees get brighter too. And you don’t notice as you pass, how the dark makes the light grow, till light frees itself from the darkness, and it holds you as you go.

  Old poem written by the son of a woodsman. When the light touches the tops of the poem’s trees the child flickers, closes her eyes.

  Hannah puts her own hands over her own eyes.

  The Italians are gone.

  The Nazis are all over town.

  She tucks the child into the bed, slips downstairs and asks Madame Etienne if she can have a word.

  Madame Etienne pours three glasses of something that looks and smells like actual brandy. She sets them on the table.

  It’s the real thing, Madame Albert, she says.

  She gestures in her graceful way for Hannah to sit down.

  Hannah, still standing, tells her that work has become very pressing.

  Yes, Madame Etienne says.

  Hannah asks her if she and her husband will let the child live with them permanently if she should happen to be away for a length of time.

  I mean as a paying guest, of course, she says. Because your good care for us both means I know she’ll be safe here. But the likelihood is that I’ll be away for a long time.

  Frown lines appear in Madame Etienne’s pretty forehead.

  We won’t take any money, Madame Albert, she says. We don’t ever need money for this.

  I insist, Hannah says.

  She puts a roll of notes in the pocket of Madame Etienne’s apron.

  You’ll teach her to read, she says.

  Madame Etienne nods.

  Thank you, Hannah says.

  Madame Etienne calls her husband. He comes through from the kitchen drying his hands and stands with them both round the table.

  His wife tells him, shows him the money.

  I’ll come as often as I can, Hannah says. If it looks like something’s likely to change, I’ll come back straight away and collect her.

  Paul, my love, Madame Etienne says.

  Hannah hasn’t even known his name till now.

  She can’t know his name.

  She can’t have his name in her head.

  She blanks it.

  She can’t have her own child’s name in her head. Of course she knows it, it’s written all through her. But she is disciplined. She is ready. She vanishes it all the time.

  To do this she imagines a gravestone, a headstone, but with nothing written on it.

  That’s her child.

  What shall we drink to? the wife asks the husband.

  Brotherhood, he says.

  They clink the glasses.

  —

  My dear old (decrepit) (ha ha) summer brother (I will always be younger than you and there’s nothing you can do about it)

  Here’s something of a self portrait. It’s of me walking towards you.

  Recognize me?

  Shows how long it’s been since I did any drawing. I’m very out of practice. But it’s me. Dear Dani. It’s been a long time. I’m cancelling out that long time by writing something of the time down, on paper which, you will be interested to know, I’ve very neatly torn, without hurting the book, out of the back of a copy of Gide’s Prometheus.

  Dani, when I think of you it’s of us sitting saying our something and our nothing in the sunlight, and I’ve always got one of my arms slung round your shoulders, at least in my imagination if not in actuality because I know how hard you’d punch my arm if I did it in real life.

  I often think of the care you always take with me. Your kindness in putting up with my bluntness and my snobberies, your taking such real pains, and it was, I’m sure, very much a pain! to have to listen and try to understand me, but you always did, you always do try, with such good grace putting up with even my most impenetrable and argumentative and obtuse demands on you.

  We said we’d write and we’d burn what we wrote. You remember?

  The heat that will come off this note when I burn it will alter the balance of heat and cold in the world in its own way.

  That energy I send your way.

  Look at me. Hopeless. It’s like I can’t help but be grandiose in English.

  So I will say it plainly.

  I think of you.

  I think of father.

  I hope he’s not too ill and his spirit not too low, and not making your own spirit go low.

  I will see you after this is all over.

  I’m looking forward to that.

  Here’s my news.

  I have a child now.

  !

  She looks like her father, who was a good friend to me.

 
She also looks, in certain light, quite like you.

  For me this is a good sign! The days when I see my brother in her make me wildly happy.

  I don’t know that I believe in gods enough to ask of them. But if they exist and I might be so bold as to say, excuse me, if you’re there can you please make that sunlit summer day longer and these dark days shorter – remember the story mother used to tell us? well she definitely told me at least, about the summer day and the gods, and she used to list the gods? I realize now that what she was doing was teaching me gods, since nothing was ever not a bit prussian and instructive one way or another with our fine mother. Well.

  The good gods, I ask them all in all their guises, the whole panoply of Pans, and Zeuses, and Dianas, and Floras and Poseidons and Persephones, and Brighids and Maeves, and Apollos and Athenas and Minervas and Marses and Odins and Thors, and Mercurys and Hermeses and Baldurs and Plutos and Demeters and Neptunes and Venuses, and Bacchuses and Bentens and Kores and Kalis, and Gamas, and Artemises, the Gods and the Allahs and Buddhas, all the other ancients, the ones whose names I don’t have in my head right now, hope they’ll forgive me, there are so many – most of all the Jupiters,

  above all I ask the Jupiters

  that my girl will grow up

  and that time will be kind to her.

  Those bloody gods are laughing already. I can hear them.

  God-laughter sounds like, well, right now, bullets hitting stone.

  But they’d better not cross me on this.

  You know she reminds me of us both.

  She is so small and new but already she is quick, sensitive, argumentative (me), slow to anger (you), she sleeps like she’s a bearcub in hibernation (you), she doesn’t like the taste of turnip (us both, if I remember rightly, and a small daily disappointment given that there’s not much else to eat most days), she loves to be told a story (me), she is keen, from some inner stillness I have never had, to do right by people (you) and be good mannered and polite (definitely you), she is loyal (us both), she is soulful (you), also a laugher at everything, she finds unfunny things very funny (me, I think).

  The other day she slid her foot under a pillow on the bed and then called me over to her as if to tell me something of great import to all the world’s nations. She flourished her arm in the air over her leg (with its foot under the pillow) and said like a little circus magician, Foot gone! Then she pulled her foot out from under the pillow and said, with the same flourish, Look! Foot!