Coming Up for Air

by Sarah Leipciger

  Panic, at first, sparked in the pit of her throat. It travelled through her body outwards, from her sternum to the tips of her fingers. No direction or control over her limbs. Her head went under, and when she resurfaced her face was angled towards the sky, mouth gaping. She went under again, into the murk, bubbles rushing and tight fists pale and was she actually drowning?

  She came up again and here was her body, racked with its interminable, wet cough. This was familiar. This she could do. The cough killed the panic because the cough took everything, and, as the panic drained from her, she was able to take control of her exhausted limbs and clumsily propel herself towards land.

  Eventually her hand hit rock and she pulled herself up out of the water like some kind of newt, dripping and spent. She scraped her knee on a rock and pink, watery blood ran down her leg. She sat in the grass, hunched forward to ease the tightness in her chest cavity. Aftershocks of cough. Something felt wrong in her ribcage, as if she’d cracked a bone. A woman stopped and asked her if she was okay and Anouk told her she was fine. The woman asked where her parents were and Anouk waved towards the beach. ‘Over there,’ she said.

  No one would have noticed Anouk’s drowning. She knew this. Had seen it on television. Contrary to what most people believed, a drowning person didn’t make much of a splash. A drowning person was there one moment, and then she was not. Drowning was private. Unremarkable. Drowning was quiet.

  33

  L’Inconnue

  Paris, 1899

  Madame debord was frantic when I returned home from my antics under the bridge, several hours late. My hair had come loose and somewhere along the way I’d discarded my hat. She was hungry and she was afraid, and she made me sit down on the sofa in the salon with a blanket over my knees. I wasn’t able to explain to her where I had been and she was too anxious to investigate.

  ‘Carrying a child can do peculiar things to a woman,’ she said, flapping like a caged bird about the room. She knocked a pile of newspapers and they fanned out across the floor. I started to gather myself from the sofa to pick them up, but she snapped at me to stay seated and so I watched, helpless, as she tried to reorganize a bunch of old newspapers that refused to be piled, and so they slipped and slipped and slipped a hundred times to the floor. Eventually she gave up and, on to some other mystery, began going through the drawers of a sideboard with alarming aggression, flinging things that had been stowed for years to the floor: a pair of scissors, pencil stubs, a man’s leather glove, a lone cufflink and a snuff box. This was the most evidence I’d yet seen of her deceased husband. It occurred to me to ask her what she was doing, but I simply didn’t care.

  ‘I was sure I had a pair of beeswax candles somewhere,’ she said. ‘They smell lovely, and their effect is soothing. But, I—’

  ‘They’re in the third drawer, in the kitchen. Wrapped in brown paper.’

  ‘Ah.’ She disappeared down the hallway and there was the dry shuck of stiff wooden drawers being opened, and she soon returned with the candles, whispering to herself and picking at the paper in which they were tightly wrapped. After an age, the candles were twisted into a pair of brass holders and lit and placed on the mantelpiece, and Madame was sitting in the armchair opposite me.

  ‘Each time I was with child,’ she began, ‘I used to cry. Often and without obvious cause. My husband thought I was suffering from hysteria.’ She leaned closer to me and tucked the blanket more neatly around my stomach. ‘I can feel it,’ she said, and placed her palm on my body. ‘We need to make arrangements before you become incapacitated.’ She kept her hand on my stomach, and she was so close I could smell the powder on her skin. ‘We travelled to Nice once, not long after we were married. The sea was a shade of blue I don’t even have the words for, so much prettier than how it is at home. La Manche is the colour of storm. And the rain in Wissant. So much, worse even than Paris. But Nice is very different. We walked on the promenade, every evening we walked, eating some delicacy freshly plucked from a tree, almonds or apricots, and one minute you would catch that briny smell off the sea and the next turn it would be some wild, lemony herb. I could hardly believe we were in France. And,’ she moved her hand from my stomach to my knee, ‘the children are healthier there. I’m certain of it. More sun. Finer air.’

  I couldn’t speak. My tongue was curling, again, with the oddest desire to consume grit, dirt, coal. All reason was abandoning me.

  ‘I probably was hysterical,’ she said, and smiled, kindly. I could scarcely follow what she was saying. ‘But now,’ her eyes flitted to my stomach. ‘We have another chance.’

  I licked my dry lips and there was the shiver of candlelight on the walls. A snag of thoughts. Packing and transport, finding new lodgings. A disgraced lady’s maid and her invalid mistress and a bogus story.

  Madame was smiling but her skirt quivered with the obsessive jerking of her knee. ‘We will overcome this,’ she said.

  In that moment. The future was a black gash forced open by rancid breath, a tongue licking my ear. ‘Pennyroyal,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you know about it?’

  Her smile set, like wax. She took her hand from my knee and smoothed her skirt over her lap with exaggerated gestures, as if she were a child playing at being an adult.

  ‘Have you heard of it? Do you know if it works?’ I asked.

  She stood and went to the window and ran her fingers up and down a pleat in the drape. ‘I saw, today, how carefully you tended the geraniums,’ she said.

  ‘Madame. Please.’

  ‘They look so much healthier without all those dead leaves.’

  34

  Pieter

  Stavanger, 1956

  Somehow, bear, a year passed after we lost you. It passed in the way one might cut through metal sheeting with blunt scissors.

  Consider how it would be to move through the world but not be a part of the world. This is what grief is. A wasteland, dusty and infertile. The wind is gritty, the food tastes of nothing and there is no music, and in the distance some dark, unknowable thing is waiting. This is what grief is. Hollow as a tin can.

  Food stuck in my throat and so did words. Sleep was like, it was like: trying to solve a puzzle without the comprehension that half the pieces were missing. Three, four, five in the morning, I would wake up with rage beating a hole in my wasted heart.

  Your mother was given tablets to calm her nerves but they turned her to stone. I should have taken them too, but in those days men didn’t suffer from nerves.

  The passing of the year didn’t end the grief but, as I’ve said, a man can get used to anything. You can learn to live on a few mouthfuls of bread and little sleep. You can interact with the world and yet still be separate from it. And we had your sister to consider. We had her, too.

  Chemistry. This, at least, I could consume. The summer you died, your mother and sister left Stavanger to stay with your mother’s parents, and I was left alone to experiment with soft plastics in the kitchen oven. I baked glycerol and gelatin and corn starch, polyvinyl chloride and phthalate esters. I burned every pot and pan in the house, set the oven on fire and produced gallons of useless glue before I came up with anything useful. And the smell. It lived in my hair, on my clothes. It lived in the food. I could taste plastic when I brushed my teeth, and when I battled with sleep, my skin sweated plastic on to the bed sheets. Sometimes it addled my brain and I found it hard to concentrate, my thoughts coming apart atom by atom. I lost the cat. We had a cat and I lost him. I called your mother most days and I don’t remember what we spoke about, or if we said much at all. I may have only spoken to your sister.

  The difficulty with making soft plastic was in the pouring of the liquid resin into the moulds, for which I was using metal ice trays, without creating air bubbles. And consistency was a problem. It didn’t seem to matter how vigorously I recorded measurements and procedure, I coul
dn’t replicate one batch to the next. I wanted to create a soft plastic with a smooth, impermeable finish. Easy to clean, durable plastic that would hold its shape with just the right amount of plushness to give the impression of life.

  * * *

  During this time, I swam every evening. This was an attempt to clear my head and rinse the smell of burnt plastic from my hair and skin. It’s dangerous to swim a long distance in the North Sea alone, or without someone on the beach waiting for you to return, so I kept close to the shore, never more than a hundred or so metres from land. The water temperature that summer never reached higher than sixteen or seventeen degrees and, because I wasn’t eating very much, I was thinner and less able to deal with the low temperatures. I swam for short bursts, lacking the energy to do more.

  But one day, a bad day, I kept my head down. I breathed seaward and didn’t pay attention to the course I was swimming, to where the beach was. The water was calm but cloudy. I don’t remember feeling particularly one way or another. Or caring much about anything. One way or another.

  Drowning, the possibility that I could drown, had never been a consideration for me. The sea was as much a part of me as grief had become, and drowning would have been an act of defiance. I thought about it though, that day. The struggle between wanting to die and wanting to live. Press the muzzle of a gun to your temple and pull the trigger and it’s pretty simple. But being a strong swimmer, I didn’t think it was possible to drown, even if I’d wanted to.

  This was torture, Bear, foolhardy, a type of self-mutilation. I was leading myself to you. Deep in the cold water, already shivering after ten minutes out, I told myself a story. It was about you. About how, one summer morning, you woke up as soon as the sun hit your face; your eyelids, your cheeks, your lips warm and rich and full with sleep. You nudged your mother’s neck until she turned away from you. Then you remembered, we were supposed to go fishing. You stepped with bare feet out of the bed, expecting to find me at the table, to find breakfast at the table. Fruit and bread and a cup of warm milk. I wasn’t there though, and you were mad that I had forgotten you.

  So. You found your leather sandals just next to the door and sat on the front step to buckle them over your feet, your pink tongue poking out of your mouth and your hair sticking up and your pyjamas still on. You knew the way to the lake, down the path to the boathouse. You got there and called out for me, and looked through the boathouse door expecting to find me there, waiting for you. I wasn’t. And then you made a discovery. On the flat rock, just outside the boathouse door, you found five baby mice. You didn’t know what they were. Five pink and hairless creatures, blind and curled like cashew nuts. You went back into the boathouse and got your toy boat, and you scooped the mice up and put them into the boat. You probably spoke to them, named them, told them they were going on a trip. There was no question that this boat would be launched – live passengers! Very carefully, in both hands you carried the boat to the end of the dock, your eyes on the mice and nothing else. You launched the boat into the water and watched it float, and as it started to bob away, you crouched down and tried to reach for it, further, further out, until your equilibrium crossed an invisible line and you fell in. Your splash was silent and insignificant in that vast lake. You turned for the dock but there was nothing for your small hands to grab, only a flat surface of wood that was bright green and slippery with algae. And anyway you were too small to figure out this problem; you called out for me and water filled your mouth.

  You sank without fanfare. Your silky hair flowed about your head. Your pyjamas billowed from your scrabbling limbs.

  I know what it means to drown. I’ve read about it. You would have struggled at first as you sank, holding your breath, growing exhausted. When your respiratory system reached a certain saturation of carbon dioxide, your muscles would have involuntarily aspirated. You would have inhaled a great deal of lake water and you would have convulsed, continuing to swallow and inhale more water. You may have vomited. You would have, mercifully, lost consciousness, and succumbed to pulmonary oedema, which is an accumulation of fluid in the air pockets of your lungs, and ultimately, you died of suffocation, which means you asphyxiated, which means there was a lack of oxygen in your blood, which stopped the beating of your beautiful, beautiful heart. All of this – the breakdown of your perfect body, the final shudder of your young heart – would have taken less than three minutes.

  I didn’t know about this stuff then, that day I swam in the sea not paying attention to where I was going, telling myself this story about you. I hadn’t done my research yet. That day, my story ended with the image of you sinking in your pyjamas. At that point, saltwater filled my mouth and burned the canals at the back of my nose. This was the result of surprise wash from a large leisure boat. I stopped swimming to cough and spit and emptied my nose of saltwater, stinging and hot. I turned to shore to see where I was, and saw that the closest point of land was hundreds of metres away, perhaps half a kilometre. I picked a point of reference on land, a church spire, so that I would swim in a straight line. I put my head back down and began to kick. I was very cold. You were there in the water with me, too deep for me to reach. I tried to think of other things: the melting point of glycerol, the whereabouts of the cat.

  Raising my head every few strokes to sight the church spire, I settled into an awkward rhythm. My teeth chattered, my fingers had curled into bloodless claws, and my feet were like blocks of wood. No energy, I hadn’t eaten much for days. With each breath, I grunted, trying to create heat. Here is a man who could drown, I thought. See how close a man can get.

  I touched land at a rocky spit where a couple sat on a bench and watched me crawl pathetically from the water, a creature drenched through. It was a long walk back to my car, to my towel and warm clothes and jug of coffee. My numb feet bled on sharp stones that I didn’t bother to avoid. If it were possible, I would have walked deep into the ground that day, just dug in with my heels and burrowed under the dirt.

  * * *

  But then I figured out the plastic and, within a year, I had refitted the factory and we started producing a new line of toys.

  Anne was the first doll I designed. She was for Tilda. She was named after the little girl who featured in the stories your mother used to tell you, the girl who lived on an island that was shaped like a boat. Anne who silently climbed trees, who was the master of wasps, and who could transform herself into a fish.

  The doll Anne had a stubby nose and fat chin, a mouth open for the bottle. Her cheeks were blushed and her curly hair was painted on, fawn brown, and she had small, pudgy arms that stuck out as if she were asking to be picked up. When a bottle was put into her mouth, it could be moved up and down so that it looked as if the lips were sucking. You could press her cheeks inwards and they would pop back out. The impression of life. She was popular not just in Norway but all across Europe.

  We also made toy cars, Volkswagen pick-ups and Mercedes-Benz. American Chryslers with oversized hoods. Tractors and buses, Beetles and racing cars. All cast in thick, durable rubber, solid primary colours. We kept it very simple. Convertibles with passengers sitting front and back. Indestructible, and easy on walls and furniture legs.

  There is nothing original or admirable in how I conducted the next few years of my life. I avoided home, your mother and sister, moulded plastic into toys, and repeated to myself the story of your drowning and how it never would have happened if only I.

  I was an automaton. Instead of a beating heart and flowing blood, I was a vessel spinning with sharp-toothed cogs and springs. If you lifted my shirt you would have seen a hole in my back where the key was meant to turn. I don’t know why your mother didn’t leave me, but, and this was something we only talked about in her final days (and she was happy again, by the end of her life, I want you to know that, because despair – because loss – can turn into a thing that is precious and beautiful; it can grow into something you cherish, a part of t
he stronger person you have become), she wasn’t thinking about me either, nor did she care that I was never present. In those years after we lost you, while I did whatever it was I was doing, she was slowly finding her own path out of the black. I wasn’t important enough to be left.

  I could have carried on like this until death. I would have, Bear. I would have let life fester until this body dropped and the black swallowed me and there was nothing but black. I would have missed so many things: your mother finally attaining her university degree when she turned fifty-five, or the birth of Tilda’s children, or standing in the silver shadows of a solar eclipse on a hillside in America one summer while that country was sending its youth to fight in another war. The man who’d taken me to see the eclipse? He had just bundled his son away, Bear, hidden him under the back seat of a car bound for Canada to save the boy from being killed in a war that made no sense to anybody. I would have missed it all had I not received something unexpected in the autumn of 1959. Only a small thing, Bear, a letter. But. It was a letter that changed everything.

  35

  L’Inconnue