by Sarah Moss
The old man barely saw his beloved grandson before the child’s arms became broad black wings, before his nose became a sharp yellow beak, and with the light of the world in his mouth the raven rushed through the smoke-hole in the roof and out into the sleeping sky. For the first time, rivers sparkled in the sunlight. For the first time, the sky was blue, the trees green, and all the creatures of the world began to stir themselves as the first morning began.
But the eagle, also, was astir in all the light of the world, and for the first time the raven’s darkness was plain under the bright sky and the eagle could see exactly what he wanted. Almost too late, the raven saw the eagle’s shadow scud across the earth below him. Almost too late, he heard the beating of great wings. In terror, he lurched, slipped on the wind, and half the light of the world fell to the ground and smashed like glass into thousands of bright shards, which bounced far into the sky and became our stars. The eagle chased the raven on the wings of the morning to the uttermost parts of the earth, until the raven flagged, weakened, and let the remaining light drift in a flaming ball to the eastern sky, where it became our sun.
And the raven? Oh, he reinvented himself, as he always does. He’s still here.
The real raven, or at least, the one on the beach in this story, made a tart remark and took off, landing on one of the immense sea-washed tree trunks lolling at the top of the sand where the spring gales had thrown them.
Really this is the wrong place, Robert said, for that story. It comes from much further north, and it was one of the first ones to be collected by Europeans so it might not have much at all in common with pre-contact versions. It’s probably just a mishmash of mistranslation and exoticism, hopelessly inauthentic. Did you know that there are whole groups of myths about which we know nothing except that they once existed and now don’t? Iliads and Odysseys and Aeneids gone into the darkness?
Yes, thought Eli. Yes, he knew that.
She was called Helena and at first he thought she was Jewish. Dark hair in a braid lay heavy between her shoulders and slithered as she moved, dark eyes in a pale face, one of those noses. She was slight, girlish; perhaps with age she would grow into the structure of her bones. He was put off, at first, by her British accent, couldn’t but hear superiority or at least snobbery in the way she pronounced ‘water’ and called the Pacific Ocean ‘the sea’. A girl from the Old World, his parents would have said, the world from which their kind had been all but exterminated. Except that here, under these trees and on this shore, in the woods where he still came sometimes on the last traces of First Nations villages, where sometimes a fallen tree turned out to be a fallen totem pole, it was absurd to divide the world like that. Totem poles may have been made only after contact with European sailors, in response perhaps to the figureheads on their ships. All the continents are made of bones and shame, if you see it that way. All of us carry violence and the triumph of the killers. The innocent bystanders died, and their genes and stories with them.
She wore bluejeans and sometimes long skirts with peasant blouses, and early one morning he met her coming up the sandy path from the beach wearing a wet swimsuit and sandals, water still running from the paintbrush tip of her braid down her tanned back and into the meeting of skin and swimsuit above the curve of her behind. She crossed her arms over her chest and he kept his eyes on hers, high, and asked if she swam every morning, if she had swum in England – not, he had imagined, a nation of athletes – if she worried about the sea-lions that they’d seen from time to time down on the rocks. Yes, she said, every morning, and yes, she had been lucky enough to go to a school that had its own pool and yes, a little, but you couldn’t swim in the sea at all if you thought about what might be with you and unseen. She didn’t ask him any questions back, but it was a start. It would take him weeks to learn that being lucky enough to attend a school with a pool meant that her parents were wealthy enough to pay the fees and progressive enough to educate their daughter as well as their sons, and also that she’d been sent to boarding school at the age of ten and didn’t now believe that her parents much cared where she was or what she was doing. It did not take him very long at all to see that she was brave and pragmatic, not just about invisible sea-lions but also about bee-stings on her face and a badly planned roof-repair that went on long into a rainy night. He already knew that she was beautiful to him, and so when summer ended, when the rains came and Bill and Judy moved back to the town for the winter because the track was too muddy for Annie to get to work and the huts too cold and damp for the baby, Helena said come with me, come back to England with me, we can get you away from this stupid war before it’s too late, we can start again, a new community, everything you’ve learnt put to a new purpose, come with me to the Old World and make it new, he said yes. Yes.
It was getting light.
Emma rolled off me and propped herself up on her elbow, which called into being a cleavage she doesn’t usually have.
‘You do want to go,’ she said. ‘You want to go to America. Land of your fathers.’
My arm tingled as the blood returned. I thought about it, about our summer lying sunlit and empty a few weeks in the future. We have been to New York, eaten bagels in Central Park and Hershey bars on the Staten Island ferry, taken the girls to MOMA and up the Empire State Building, and also out to Brooklyn to walk down the street where my father grew up, my pilgrimage the negative of those of Americans who appear in the poorer and more picturesque bits of Britain looking for what their ancestors fled. We are all in flight, all trying to raise our forefathers’ ghosts. If I want to go to America, it’s to the coastline I had just conjured in our dim and landlocked bedroom. I have never seen the Pacific Ocean.
‘I don’t think so. It’s just a story, my dad’s America. And we can’t afford it. I think I want to go to Austria. Land of my fathers.’
They are all stories. My fathers whose hearts beat true and required intervention, the intervention of the camp guards, to stop. My fathers who needed a reason to die, whose blood knew to keep moving, but who also carried their own destruction – the story of their own destruction – in their Jewish blood.
She frowned. ‘When we went to Vienna you said you could hear the echo of jackboots goose-stepping up the streets when you went to sleep.’
I rolled my shoulders. ‘I was younger and sillier then. I can hear the echo of Roman legions on the A429 and Tudor monks singing plainchant in the Coventry bus station. Lucky me. Let’s go to the Alps. We can show Rose The Sound of Music first, she’ll love it.’
Emma picked up her phone to check the time. ‘I should be getting up. OK. I’ll check where there are good hospitals in Alpine towns. Is Switzerland in the EU?’
She stood up, naked and beautiful, her hair wild where she’d rolled her head against the headboard as I held her down.
‘No,’ I said. ‘But they might have reciprocal healthcare arrangements. I’ll check.’
She looked at herself in the mirror, gathered up her hair and frowned at herself. ‘Another thing, Adam, I’ve been thinking, when we get back we probably should get a cat. One of those posh breeds that doesn’t go out so it can’t get run over.’
I knew who would be cleaning its litter tray and taking it to the vet. ‘What about that illness?’ I said. ‘The cat poo one? What about worms and fleas? Doesn’t cat hair cause asthma?’
‘Toxoplasmosis isn’t usually bad unless you’re pregnant. They tested Mim, remember, and she doesn’t react to cats. It won’t get parasites if it doesn’t have them on arrival and doesn’t go outside.’
‘It can still get ill and die,’ I said. ‘The girls would still have to deal with that sooner or later.’
She met my eyes in the mirror and shrugged. ‘We all do. You can’t go round not loving things because they’ll die. I mean, I can come up with some more reasons if you want them, I know you like reasons, but really I just want to make Rose happy. And I think Mim will probably like it when it gets here even if she says it’s a sign of fa
lse consciousness to buy cat food while there are people starving under austerity.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to argue against happiness. I’ll look up posh cat breeders. There’s probably a new whole world of fun and games out there.’
now I am about to stop writing
So let us say there is a cat in the future, after the ending. A ridiculous posh cat with a pointed nose and elegant grey colouring. Let us say that Emma will continue to come home in time for dinner, perhaps even, with the passage of time, to take an occasional turn at the stove. Let us say that I will continue to let my daughters be, to let them go; that Miriam will take a gap year and travel the world with her epipen in her back pocket, that Rose will turn out to be an enthusiast of wild swimming. But for now I have caught up, more or less, and I am sitting on a balcony above a city that was, seventy years ago, a lifetime ago, the dark heart of a dark continent. Emma and the girls are asleep in the apartment behind me. I have a grey wool blanket from the old mahogany armoire in the hall wrapped over my pyjamas, tickling my neck, because although dawn was over an hour ago the sun has only just come over the tops of the mountains and its yellow light is still edging down the church towers and the apartment blocks towards the shops and houses below. Two days ago, we sat on the rocks up there and ate our lunch on top of the peak whose shadow lies over the park. You can see, from there, over into the next valley and the next, see Europe beginning to fold towards the Mediterranean. There is a little snow in north-facing hollows on the tops, even now, enough for Rose to stop to make a snowball and demand a photo. Today, I hope, if the weather holds and everyone’s feeling strong, we will climb the tall mountain on whose summit the sun now rests, join the retired locals and the serious young backpackers on the tram out to the village where we’ll buy bread and salami to eat on the summit, and then we’ll walk up the forestry track, keeping an eye out for black squirrels in the trees and blueberries underfoot, and then on up the narrower mountain path to a rocky scramble to the top.
And now I am here, and Emma is here, and Miriam is here, and Rose is here. Now I am about to stop writing, to leave my laptop on the wobbly formica kitchen table, return the blanket to the cupboard for the next visitor to keep a dawn watch over the city. I will pull on yesterday’s clothes, not waking Emma, try to be quiet as I open and close the heavy front door with its overstated locks. I’ll join the old ladies with their high heels, stately hair and shopping trolleys making for the market to get the best produce while the young people and tourists are still in their beds. I’ll buy an excess of plums and greengages, Pflaumen and I think Renekloden, picked yesterday from the orchard surrounding a farm on an Alpine plateau, a farm sheltered by rustling pine trees from the storms of autumn and spring and warmed in winter by a blue-and-white tiled stove the size of a small room. I’ll stop at a bakery on the way back for one of the many kinds of bread you can’t buy in England and probably a couple of pastries for the girls as well, because the pastries are good and no-one’s going to start diabetes in a fortnight’s holiday. I will come back, up the stairs with my arms full of paper bags because I’ll have forgotten to take a cotton one, and make coffee with the exotic coffee machine before I wake Emma so I can leave a cup at her bedside, its scent adrift, its steam rising in the sunlight that will spill across the bed when I open the shutters. I’ll take a shower in the pink bathroom and then rouse the girls, good morning, time to wake up, and I’ll set out the bread with salty farm butter and blueberry jam on the iron table on the balcony, where we’ll still want to warm our hands on our mugs as we open negotiations about the day’s activities, tell Rose to come and sit down, tell Mim that one cup of coffee is more than either of us was allowed at her age.
Stories have endings; that’s why we tell them, for reassurance that there is meaning in our lives. But like a diagnosis, a story can become a prison, a straight road mapped out by the people who went before. Stories are not the truth.
Begin with brokenness. Begin again. We are not all, not only, the characters written by our ancestors. I have told my stories now, and we are still here, and the day is hardly begun.
Acknowledgements
The story of the eagle and the raven has been stolen and broken up for parts many times over many years. I took it from Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst, art historians and anthropologists, in The Raven Steals the Light (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1988).
The book Adam reads on the train is Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (London: Picador, 1999).
I thank Sharon Dixon and Sinead Mooney for reading full drafts and making important suggestions. Max Porter for intelligence, sensitivity and being right, everyone at Granta for their patience and care. Anna Webber at United Agents for kindness and support far beyond the call of duty.
At Warwick: Ian Sansom, Maureen Freely, Tina Lupton, AL Kennedy, David Morley, Will Eaves, Tess Grant, Chantal Wright. The students of the Warwick Writing Programme, who ask the right questions.
Dr Lawrence Youlten kindly shared his expertise in anaphylaxis. All errors of fact or probability remain, as ever, my own.
Also by Sarah Moss from Granta Books
FICTION
Cold Earth
Night Waking
Bodies of Light
Signs for Lost Children
NON-FICTION
Names for the Sea
Copyright
Granta Publications, 12 Addison Avenue, London W11 4QR
First published in Great Britain by Granta Books 2016
Copyright © Sarah Moss 2016
The moral right of Sarah Moss to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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