by Ananda Devi
A part of Cub understood that this wound had been born out of solitude and abandonment.
But the man deep within him sneered in disdain, even as he watched this pathetic, trembling, suffering thing under her listless sheets. He understood that he was holding this fragile life in his hands. He could, if he wanted, hold a pillow down over her face and she would be powerless to defend herself. But he could give her a momentary respite, as if he were a deity overflowing with gifts and miracles. He wavered between these two impulses that he barely understood, and he decided to offer her life. He reached out and, overcoming a brief surge of disgust, caressed her unruly, thinning hair damp with fever. A sort of childish delight bathed Mary’s face. The suffering drained away from her eyes. In a second, Cub had erased her distress and her fear. He shivered at his power.
He wanted to return to the small room where he slept, but she gripped his hand. Her tears started flowing again, silent and abundant, down both sides of her face. She wanted to immerse herself utterly in the presence of this child’s strong, vibrant body. She drank in his vigor, inhaled the fiery energy he exuded. No matter why he was there. He had granted her a reprieve. She who was just a shadow, who had lived so little. She who was so, so cold. A sun, a flame, an incandescence, blazing out of the nothingness all around her. Having experienced this, she couldn’t let him go.
She squeezed his hand again and tugged him nearer. He let himself be pulled close. He lay beside her and let her draw his body against hers, right up against hers, so that the pain would pass.
Mary smiled in happiness, but there was no telling what Cub felt. Maybe even he himself didn’t know.
It was raining relentlessly. It never stopped raining. The humidity clung to the ceiling, dripped into the bowls she was forced to place in the middle of each room, eroding the walls from beneath. The house seemed about to collapse on her. But her body, too, worn down by old age, seemed about to collapse. Who was she? A core, a heart, a belly? What in her suggested that she might still be alive if not the beating of her heart, and the need to fill this belly, to evacuate it? Nothing more, nothing beyond these functions that barely distinguished her from an animal.
All around her the empty days were scattered and strewn. She stared at them, but to no avail: nothing differentiated them, except for Cub’s presence. Even if he didn’t seem to want to go, he wasn’t really there, he went out and came back at any hour he liked, she never knew where he was going. She didn’t have any hold on him. Nobody, clearly, had any hold on him. He was the most elusive of creatures even though she would do anything she could to keep him.
Ever since the night she had held on to his hand, he had slept in her bedroom, in her bed.
They hadn’t talked about it, they hadn’t said anything about it to each other. Cub accepted everything in a silence that did not brook any interruption. Mary could not figure out why he had a lost look when he woke up in the morning. He looked around, touched the sheets and his skin as if to make sure that he did exist. She, too, knew that she had willingly forgotten something about him, that she was repressing a truth in her mind and in her senses, and because of that they had become buoys for one another.
Their sleep was tormented, their bodies dozed in turmoil. They traveled through bitter dreams they didn’t dare put into words.
Whenever Cub left the house, Mary watched him through the bedroom window. She contemplated the harmony of his body, the tongues of light licking at his cheek and back, and the sort of transparency that set him apart from everything. She watched him leaving as if it were for the final time. She imagined that he would never come back. She knew she wouldn’t survive it. He couldn’t leave, she thought.
And it was just then, when she found herself all alone, that all the mockery of the city, her city, of everybody and everything that had abandoned her, came back. Oh, how much she had loved living there when she was young! She tasted a freedom that her mother had never experienced, joined in the wild dance of the city until she had internalized everything: the sellers and the buyers on Portobello Road, the regulars and the tourists, the curious and the obsessed, the connoisseurs and the dilettantes, she mingled with them all, she belonged to them all. She had believed that her hands’ work had given her feet the right to join in their dance. She had believed that she, too, was at the heart of things, but she hadn’t realized, amid so many relics, that she was growing older and older as wave after new wave of passersby swept past outside.
Mary only became afraid of her old age once it had fully arrived, settling on her body like the Old Man of the Sea on Sinbad’s shoulders. It grew heavier and heavier, but casting it off would mean dying.
Heat, it was heat she kept looking for. She’d always been so cold, so cold deep down, trapped in a polar, unvaryingly white world. Her nose was red, her extremities icy; she set her feet on the boiling radiators and felt nothing, nothing at all, she set her eyes on the world’s blazing things and felt nothing, nothing at all. She knew this cold was coming from somewhere else, it wasn’t the air that struck her face when she opened the door in the mornings, but rather the sigh the city was exhaling. It was possible to love this city and suffer from it at the same time. It was possible to look for streaks of sunlight crisscrossing windows, to walk down its streets with almond trees blooming in the spring, to disappear into the rose garden at Regent’s Park, but every adventure ended with the same realization: the city made itself beautiful, dressed itself up in its finery and opera and pealing bells and its preposterous coronet of sunshine, only for those who were swept up in its ascent. Everyone else, stuck in the mud and unable to move, saw nothing but dirt and disdain.
It was possible to love this city and die of it.
To love its hidden stars and its cemented sky.
To love its children who laughed in Leicester Square and who experienced life so immediately that nothing of it remained in their memories. Each night, the same ritual that drove them to disappear into their tenth pint of beer, to sink into their incessant drunkenness, the girls with bare shoulders and midriffs even in the middle of winter because alcohol had lined their insides with false warmth, the boys with distressed jeans and brand-name trainers barely looking at them while they kissed.
To love the old folks dying in Stockwell, sitting on a bench, while the houses they’d bought and lived in for so long became luxury residences for the nouveau riche. No more space, no more space, except for the conquerors. The City rose up and up and up. The town stretched out and swallowed up those who couldn’t swim. It waged its own war, the young gods sitting astride it to collect their spoils, to take everything that could be taken, their mouths wide open to seize the air, the wind, the weather, life itself, groans of destruction, of construction, and meanwhile the invisible ones were crushed in the iron jaws.
Waiting for Cub to come back from whatever trip he’d taken into the city, Mary turned on the television to mask the silence of his absence. On the BBC, a woman was barking insults at the players on a quiz show. Her arrogance and her snideness were so brutal that Mary shivered for the contestants as she trained her small, spiteful eyes on them. She wondered why they were there. Did the excitement of being on TV negate the indignity of being so thoroughly humiliated? She held her breath on behalf of a young girl with a halting voice. She knew what was about to happen. Nothing warranted compassionate silence, not a worn face, or a balding scalp, or a hefty body, or a coarse voice. And the host bore a small, horrid grimace as she spat her venom: halfway between scowling and baring her teeth, she resembled nothing so much as a cruel ape. Mary was as hypnotized as a prey confronted by its predator. Then she remembered that she wasn’t the prey here: within her fingers, she held freedom. She pressed the remote-control button and let silence reestablish its domain. The pain of absence, at least, was properly hers.
The rain had stopped. Mary noticed the crystalline light now slipping into the leaden-gray living room. But, inside, she could still hear water dripping in a bowl.
S
he got up to see where it was coming from. Her joints were stiff and she had trouble straightening her back. The damp was so deeply rooted within her that she couldn’t even imagine a dry world where bodies wouldn’t instinctively rebel.
She turned on a dust-furred light bulb that barely had any effect on the shadows on the walls. She looked at the basin that, a bit earlier, had held three inches of rainwater. Now dozens of small worms were floating in the water. And others were falling in with that tiny splash she had heard from the living room.
She watched with morbid fascination as a worm twisted around a hole in the ceiling, crawled through and hung on by some unknown means—suction pads or microscopic claws—before finally falling.
Mary stepped back, one slow step at a time, so she wouldn’t make any noise and catch their attention.
She clapped her hand over her mouth. How would she sleep tonight?
She staggered through the doorway, unable to control her limbs, knowing how much she must look like a scarecrow in her padded, flowery night-robe.
In the hallway, she fell, almost literally, on Cub.
“Jeremiah,” she said. “Could you … Would you … I have a problem.”
He followed her into the bedroom. As he did every time, he gazed distantly into this old-fashioned, overly formal room, with its relics—there was no other word—of an England that no longer had any part to play in the present. The captive weight of a life once full of certainties that was now completely undone. Each time, as she watched Cub, it was Mary who felt like a stranger. Seeing everything through the boy’s eyes, she understood the place for what it really was: the expression of her emptiness, her uselessness. Through Cub’s eyes, she understood it all.
“Can you get rid of the bowl?” she asked, suddenly horrified at the thought that he might think she had done her business there in a bout of incontinence. But Cub was inattentive, his eyes glassy and heavy, almost dead, yes, that was the word, and he walked to the bowl without saying anything.
“There are some worms …” she whispered.
He scrutinized the water as if from a great distance. He dipped a finger in, touched the odd creatures swimming there, seemed to toy with them incuriously. Then he looked up to the ceiling.
“Maybe an animal died up there …” he whispered. “Or somebody …”
Mary slumped against the door. “Oh, dear lord, no, no …”
She thought she could see a corpse dripping tears of putrefaction, enveloping her with its stench. Soon it would engulf the entire house, the building, the street, Portobello Road and all its antiques, this past that was now useless—this past that she had wrongly presumed enduring.
Mary gagged again, stopped herself from screaming. She saw Cub staring at her oddly. His eyes were coated in a black film. He was unreadable while she became more and more transparent.
“Should I pour the water down the toilet?” he finally asked.
“No, please, not here …”
(And at night they would climb out by the dozens and the hundreds, up the smooth porcelain until they overflowed and fell onto the floor and kept making their way toward her …)
“Could you throw them out the back? Behind the rubbish bins? And then, Jeremiah, if you could be so good as to buy a very strong pesticide …”
“All right. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”
She couldn’t understand his calmness, his grown-up’s patience. He wasn’t a child. This little brown thing was a man in disguise. Did she have any idea who he was, what he really wanted? How could she have let him slip so quickly, so wholly, into her life? She pressed her back against the wall in fear.
“Mary …” he said.
His voice hadn’t deepened fully yet. She caught herself, chided herself: those were stupid fears.
She took two steps, avoiding the space under the hole, knelt down, pulled an old suitcase out from under the bed and removed a brown envelope. She extracted a wrinkled five-pound note, resisting the urge to check how much remained of her savings. How much longer would this last her? How much longer would she live?
In the wardrobe mirror, she saw herself, as wobbly as a clumsy child. Behind her was a small brown thing that was solid, vibrant, extraordinarily graceful. She was on her knees. He watched over her like a lord.
There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone’s prayer to Death its God….
—T. S. ELIOT, Four Quartets: The Dry Salvages
She was alone alone too too too much solitude in this city it’s unbearable it wears you out it chews you up it runs you down and you never stop looking out at the horizon a friendly gaze but there isn’t one or rather they’re flowing like strings like ropes like knots have to get up on a chair to grab the knot of solitude and slip it right there and wait for something to knock you down, but what, maybe the last bit of work your hands petrified by cold and pain made, maybe the door shut every time Cub leaves with the fear that he might not come back and the echoes of his footsteps for a long long while even when he’s gone, or maybe the mornings when he watches over you and as you wake up the sole glimmer of day slips through but there’s no point thinking about it because Cub
Cub
Cub
Mary was on her knees and her hoarse sobbing was nothing like laughing or crying. The floorboard was sloping. She would slip, that was for sure. And her hands frozen in grotesque positions could not clutch anything. Her hands frozen over nothingness. Her hands which had assured her survival and which no longer could.
She walked down Portobello Road and the noise was not a noise but a yowling in her cloistered mind. It was market day and the stalls were bustling, the sellers smiling as if life didn’t cost a thing. They all flowed together in a motley, blurry crowd beneath her gaze, copper pots blackened by burning wood, objects so oddly gray that there was no question time alone could have formed this patina, sphinxes or four-legged birds with ornate ringlets from a tomb broken open out of sheer curiosity, wooden furniture in all shades battered by the centuries, wooden frames around cracked or wholly missing mirrors that now circumscribed reflections of nothing, faded cloths, heavy brocades that had once whispered their melodies around female forms, a long litany of voices, dreams, refrains, and then paintings, there were so many, so many, the smaller and darker they were, tortured by these immense frames that seemed to entrap gazes, the greater the chance that they were truly old, but who could possibly want these tiny things, these narrowed nighttime visions of clouds over ponds, meadows beneath horses, Brocéliande forests, impossible mountains, or perhaps austere, melancholy portraits of people with ridiculously high foreheads? Not she who would rather make these timeless figurines, even when they were imperfect, than surround herself with these faces that always sneered at you from the hereafter, reminding you that you were just a little thing taking up some air and some space; not she who had poured her love into her statuettes for so long and who now had to accept this prohibition of her sole consolation: all Portobello Road could offer her now was a breath of life, and even that was growing increasingly vengeful and unforgiving.
Even so, the street’s spell still had a hold on her, because here the past was always alive, always present in the thousands of objects stolen out of time, the yellowed doilies, the dented forks, the porcelain dolls, how many hands, how many hearts, how many bodies had been touched by them, and their dust remained through the centuries, nothing could be wiped away, maybe that was the true consolation—nothing could be wiped away? And so, as she disappeared, her shadow lingered on the sidewalk, in the heavy gaze of the sellers who watched the world changing every day and in the air ruined by so many smells, and maybe even in her figurines which she could still half see sometimes, as if nearly lost in the immensities of time despite being more present, doubtless more
permanent than she ever would be.
For some time now, despite their outward friendliness, people had been regarding the city with warier eyes. She remembered the turmoil of the war and the difficulties after the war clearly enough to consider the era that had followed as a blessed time, even if she herself had stayed on the sidelines. It hardly mattered, since she had lived, she had seen things change, she had seen flowers bloom out of concrete and steel on a ravaged landscape—but, after all those years, the world had collapsed again in a fell swoop.
A huge hole had opened up in the center of the capital. At first rumors had swirled of a far-off war, and she couldn’t understand how it might affect her country. What was over there, in those deserted and mythical lands that hadn’t been there all along? These weren’t wars of ideas or even of territories. These were wars of unclear motives, hidden calculations, like a torrent flowing so deep underground that nobody aboveground could tell which direction the current was. Aboveground, all that mattered was that they believed. Those of the new century were conditioned to believe what they were told.
Two towers had fallen and forced them to believe in the enemy. And especially to believe that this invisible enemy could be overcome in a single place.
The worst thing, in Mary’s eyes, was watching the men leave for war. She had watched them, their heads shaven, their eyes serious but barely hiding glimmers of excitement, of hunger, their powerful, gnarled hands, mechanics’ hands perhaps, their smart uniforms, their faith above all in something, no matter what name it took, some country or creed, they needed to believe in it because they were being told they were fighting for a cause, and she had seen them go off, those handsome young men, those stupid young men, those dead young men, and it was as if sixty years hadn’t gone by between these two wars. And the girls, too, clung to a desperate love, pressing their pliable bodies against the starched uniforms so they would retain the imprint of those fabrics fated to come back as nothing more than shreds. For a minute, in front of the television, Mary really did believe that time had stood still. That she had remained frozen while Howard had gone to get himself killed over there. Her moment of innocence had only lasted a little over half a century.