Dying in the First Person

by Nike Sulway

  ‘I can do that,’ I said, but she shook her head.

  ‘Have you got some music you could put on?’ she said. ‘And then you can clear the table so we’ve got room to eat.’

  When the meal was ready we sat at the table, facing each other across the newly cleaned expanse of old timber. I tried to remember the last time a woman had sat at this table with me, and could not. The memory of it, the fact of someone else’s body sitting across from me, someone else’s voice mixing with the sounds of the fire and the forest and the night, was like a stranger’s memory: a story I had been told, but did not believe. Neither of us spoke: the world stilled and slowed like old blood, drawing its great quiet over us. Later, when we had moved away from the table to sprawl out on the warmed floor in front of the fire, she asked me if I would let her read the new translation before it was sent to the publisher. ‘Have you read the others?’ I said.

  She nodded, the light of the fire reflected in the gloss of her eyes. ‘You could bring it down to me, when you’re ready. When you’ve turned all those birds into owls. And I’ll give you something in exchange.’

  *

  I raised my head when I heard a noise outside, my pen poised above the page, caught between the word and the world. There is a silence that precedes speech, and a silence that precludes it. There are silences between things – the silences that give the things they frame definition. Heft. There is the moment before I kissed her, and the moment after, but I will always remember the silence of the moment between these two. A breath, taken up into the body and held. A hand resting on the handle of a half-open door. A shoulder over which she looks towards me before turning. There are silences that speak of what is to come, though they are impossible to translate.

  I remember being a child, standing on the hot timber of the dock. My father had thrown me the bowline. It was my job to secure the line; he had shown me how to do this several times. Two symmetrical loops, dropped over the hawser and then drawn tight. It was raining, and we had been out in my father’s small sloop since before dawn. He had been showing me how to sail – an art form he considered should have been in my blood, but I had struggled all day, dropping ropes, tacking too soon, too late. I couldn’t read the wind, or the surface of the water. Several times, while coming about, I foundered in the dead eye of the wind and lost headway. Once, when the wind funnelled and momentarily shifted ninety degrees, I continued to cut across on the same angle, eager to finish my lesson, certain that the way to avoid another shameful moment of flapping sails and juddering hull was to maintain my direction and, with it, momentum. My sails luffed and the boat staggered to a standstill. I pushed the tiller towards the mainsail and tried to come about, but I had no momentum to carry the bow across. I jiggled the tiller, like a kid playing pinball. My father rested against the bow, watching me. The boat was boxed in by wind. The sails caught fragments of her breath, but never enough to belly into life and movement. The boat staggered like a drunk. The sails flapped and shivered. I fought the boat, the wind, my father’s refusal to help me, tears of fury lashing my wind-chilled face. Finally, my father moved. I closed my eyes and slumped. He barked orders at me as he trimmed the sheets. Within seconds we were going with the wind, scudding across the water.

  ‘I’ll tell you when it’s time to turn,’ my father said, looking not at me, but at the wind and the water spread out ahead of us. His voice was restrained and patient, as if he was dealing with a child. With a fragile, foolish kid. I let the boat run until my father called out, ‘Ready about.’ I trimmed the sail as closely as possible, let the mainsheet run out on the other side and ducked – watching my father’s head swiftly duck and lift – as the heavy wooden boom swept across the deck.

  Again and again, when I would have gone all the way around and tacked, my father forced me into the jibe. I wanted to go with the wind, but my father sailed us relentlessly downwind, wanting me to get a feel for the sloop’s weather helm, to learn its measure, to compensate for its turn into the wind, but only just enough. He set us up, the mainsail and jib spread like the wings of an impossible angel, so that when I took the tiller I could feel the surge of the wind, filling the sails and working, it seemed, to lift us in to the air. Again and again, I veered too far one way, and we foundered, or too far the other and the mainsail crashed across the deck.

  By the time we reached the docks, I was exhausted and ashamed. I was at the bow as we bumped gently up against the deck. I jumped onto the boards with the bowline in my hand, looped the rope and dropped the loops over the post, but I turned the top loop the wrong way, and – when the water and wind pulled our small boat away from the pier – the line slipped off the post.

  The hull of my father’s beautiful boat banged against a mooring post. I heard the crunch of the oyster shells scrape against her skin as she wallowed drunkenly against the posts. My father leaned over and hauled in the bowline, then leapt across beside me, pushing me out of the way as he deftly and quickly dropped two loops over the post. The wind caught the boat, broadside, and tugged her away from the dock, but the bowline pulled taut and held.

  When he turned to me, his face was fierce and still. I tried not to cower. I could feel the blow building in him, though he didn’t move. The force of his anger tugged at me, rippling and collapsing my sails. He didn’t touch me, didn’t shift a muscle, but I could feel the heavy grip of his hands on my body, the way they tore me apart like so much bread to be thrown to the birds. I tried not to shake, not to look away. I knew this was what was required: to face him as though I had no fear in that terrible moment between when the blow gathered in him, and when it fell. Finally, he turned away.

  I took a step towards the boat, reached out to grab the stern line. I was sulking, vengefully furious that he expected too much of me, that I had failed to meet his unrelenting standards of seamanship, but sure enough of what I had to do now: tie the boat securely, sluice the decks, roll the sails, lock her down for the night. There would be no lemonade for me while my father drank beer and bragged to his mates about his son’s first day at the tiller, no fish and chips in the garden at Mick Docker’s place, outside the shed where he was steaming planks in a long box and bending them, fixing them one by one to the ribs of his new boat. We would go straight to Mick’s, and I would be left on the hot lawn while he and my father disappeared inside. Perhaps on the walk home, after he’d told the story a few times and laughed about it, after he’d heard about Mick Docker’s son, who lost his rudder and put a hole in his father’s favourite spinnaker his first day out, his shoulders would soften. He might grunt and sigh and punch me, gently, on the arm and tell me I’d do better next time. If I worked hard, now, to show that I understood what was required, next time I might have a chance to prove myself.

  My father stopped what he was doing, turned, pinned me with his terrible gaze. ‘Go home, Mummy’s boy,’ he said.

  I opened my mouth to speak. His body stiffened and he put his hands on his knees, pushed himself up to standing. He hung his head for a moment, eyes closed, as if exhausted. ‘You don’t belong here,’ he said. ‘There’s no shame in it. Plenty of men have no seawater in their blood. Plenty of fine men. Now go home, boy, and tell your mother not to wait up for me.’

  *

  I had married friends – the Leans, the Tattons, the Dickersons – and often went to their homes, or joined them at restaurants for dinner. And there were a handful of single men, like Nicanor, with whom I drank or listened to music or fished. There was my mother, whom I visited once a week or so, for dinner, for lunch, to walk down to the bookshop and along the river, but mostly I was alone on the property. In the months after Morgan’s death I struggled to keep up with the work. There was the Gedenkschrift to work on, but after the first flurry of activity, choosing the contributors and writing to them, there was a long period of waiting to see what would come in. I worked desultorily on the final translation of There May Be Owls, but I was stuck for weeks after Ana showed me the owl, frozen into a kind of fea
rful stasis. What if there were other things I had missed? What if the whole thing – the whole translation – was a kind of fraudulence? In the mornings, I sat at the desk and stared at the pages, crossing from the originals to the copy to my translation over and over again, more like an accountant or an invigilator than a translator.

  I started reading local history and philosophy during the day, going for long walks up along the range, carrying a journal out of habit more than design. I started working, idly, in the way I sometimes had between projects, on a translation of Homer’s Odyssey. I worked on it every morning after breakfast, sitting at my desk or out on the deck with a cup of coffee. I worked on it without any design or grace. Including notes about other translations I had read, music I had heard that seemed to catch the same spirit as Homer’s words, sketches of the characters I knew so well, now, after so many years. I worked slowly, and with no expectation that the translation would ever be complete, or necessary. A sentence or two at a time. An image, a line. I took pleasure in choosing the right word, in focusing on the verbs and nouns in particular, trying to use the cleanest, most precise language I could. Language that reflected the muscularity of Homer’s prose, and the way his words were picked out, like musical notes, from a silent and austere page. I liked to concentrate on capturing the exactitude of his writing about the weather, and the landscape. I documented cloudscapes and the way the light moved over the hills, through the trees, and wondered how to translate my understanding of the real, contemporary world with Homer’s antique land. I was concerned with colour, and shadow, and form, as a painter might be, but also with the temperature of the light, and the feel of the air on my skin. Wondering how to refract these concrete experiences through Homer’s work; how to render the dramatic passages about war and journeying with the immediacy that the classic and popular translations I knew seemed to lack.

  One morning when I woke I went out to the kitchen and opened the cupboard before I realised that the day before – when I had gone into town to see my mother, and walked along the river with her – I had meant to buy coffee and bread on the way home, but had forgotten.

  It was raining, and the kitchen window was open. Rain came in onto the cedar windowsill, but I didn’t close it. There was something about the smell of rain on cedar that I wanted to capture, thinking that there was something in that sensory experience that might help me better understand Homer’s writing about storms, and the longing for home. I got dressed, thinking the whole time about the right words to use, the right passage to translate and annotate.

  I drove all the way to the river with the radio turned off and the window down. Rain came in the windows, onto my arm and shoulder. Occasionally, a car would come towards me on the other side of the road, its headlights glowing and diffuse. The sodium arc lights near the bridge illuminated silver needles of rain, bouncing on their upturned faces. I parked beside the grey river. I could smell the sea.

  The café was almost deserted, but I sat at one of the tables outside, facing the water. The waitress came and I ordered coffee and poached eggs. I sat and watched the rain on the surface of the river, thinking that since I’d come into town I should maybe drop in on my mother on the way home. There weren’t many people on the river, or out walking. There was a bus stop a few hundred metres away. A young woman in a black skirt and jacket waiting and reading. I could see someone walking along the river in a grey raincoat with a hood. The coat was baggy and lightweight.

  She stopped at one point, not far from the café, and took off her shoes. She went down onto the sand and stood ankle-deep in the water. She slid the hood of the raincoat back off her head and tipped her head back to let the rain fall on her face. She stood there for a long time. The waitress brought my eggs and coffee. The rain grew heavier, louder. When the woman turned back to the shore I recognised Ana, and waved.

  She smiled and crossed the road. Suddenly, I felt self-conscious, eating breakfast in a café, alone in the rain. She wiped the rain out of her hair, took off her raincoat and bundled it into a crumpled mass under her chair.

  ‘Coffee?’ I said, and when she nodded I looked over her shoulder and caught the waitress’s eye.

  ‘Have you been at your mother’s?’ Ana asked.

  ‘Ran out of coffee.’ I shrugged. ‘You?’

  ‘I like the river in the morning, especially in the rain.’ She nodded towards my notebook. ‘Have you been working?’

  I flipped the notebook closed. ‘Not really,’ I said.

  ‘Writing?’

  ‘Morgan was the writer. I’m just a translator.’

  The waitress brought her coffee and asked her if she wanted anything to eat. She shook her head and emptied two sachets of sugar into her coffee, wrapping her white, cold hands around the cup without lifting it from the table, putting her face over the steam rising from it. ‘Morgan was a writer, you mean.’ She bent her head and sipped from the edge of the cup. ‘Can I see?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Notes about what I’ve been reading, and about the weather.’

  She nodded and held my eyes. I opened the notebook, found a page that had a few small fragments on it and handed it to her. She took her time. The rain was easing, and the light had started to push its way through the clouds. A car drove past with one broken windscreen wiper.

  She put the notebook down, sipped at her coffee, watching me. ‘It’s Homer,’ she said. ‘A new translation. It’s good. Original.’

  I shook my head and took the notebook off the table, placing it under my thigh on the seat. ‘You think it’s original because it’s misspelled,’ I said, smiling.

  She reached over and speared a piece of my egg with the fork, carried it to her mouth and ate. Her hand was shaking. A coin of eggwhite dropped onto the table.

  ‘Are you cold?’ I said, and offered her my jumper.

  ‘In Suffolk they say that if a robin dies in your hand, that hand will shake forever.’

  ‘Is that what happened to you?’

  She took another bite of my egg, and I pushed the plate across to her. Her hair had started to dry. Long, light threads of it fell forward as she leaned over the plate. I wanted to reach out and brush them out of her face. Touch her cheek. I remembered the feel of her body clenched around mine at the airport. How she had cleaved herself to me.

  ‘When we were boys,’ I said, ‘we had a picture book with Babes in the Woods in it, and the bird that covered up the children with leaves was a robin. I remember the brightness of the robin’s breast in the illustration. Very red, very small. Like a drop of blood.’

  ‘Do you like birds?’ she said. ‘Do you have a favourite bird?’

  I smiled. ‘Owls, I think. I like hearing them hunt at night.’

  ‘I had a pet crow, when I was a little girl. I used to lie in bed listening for the milkman, because if I didn’t get up early enough and bring the milk in, she used to puncture the silver milk-bottle caps to get at it. When I lay on the bed to read she would land on my chest and pick at my teeth with her beak.’

  ‘Is that why your hair is so black?’

  ‘Have you got your car?’ she said.

  The wings of the black crow spread and cracked beneath my chest, pausing to glide. I nodded, and pointed across the road. She stood, wiping her finger around the edge of the plate and licking the last of the yolk from her finger. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  I stood and picked up my jumper and notebook. While I went inside to pay she crossed the road to lean against the car door, watching the river. I crossed the road, unlocked the car. The rain moved in soft sheets over the brick of the path. She stood and waited for me to open the door for her. While I drove she was quiet, watching the sheen of rain on the black streets, the thick green of the trees once we passed out of town. When we turned onto our road and began climbing the range, she pointed out a kingfisher perched on the powerline. I wanted to ask her about Morgan, what he had meant to her, what he had told her about us. She rolled down her window and let the rain co
me in, pushed her face out into it and then turned towards me, smiling, with drops of it on her eyelashes and nose and lips.

  We parked at the top of the drive, which needed grading, took off our shoes and headed barefoot down to her cabin. Halfway down she began running, took off her shirt and dropped it in the mud. Water ran down the drive in noisy, ochre rivers. She pulled off her bra, too, and hung it on a branch.

  I could have said that it was foolish. That I had no capacity for love. I had tried, a few times, but in the end I could never find that element of grace within myself. I had had lovers. One, in particular, I had almost married. When it had ended I was appalled by the crush of finitude, by the despair that was as rough and palpable as rock.

  But then she turned and stood, letting the rain wash over her in long, silver swathes. This, too, I wanted to write about. But not with words, which seemed inadequate. I kept walking towards her. When I reached her, I put out my hand. I shuddered when I touched her, almost wept.

  Later, lying in bed, she absentmindedly pulled a strand of her hair forward, plucked it from her head, then another and another until she had a dozen strands. She went out of the room and came back with a small black feather, which she plaited into the strands of her hair. ‘Hold out your hand,’ she said, and tied the fine bracelet around my wrist, turning my hand over to kiss the palm.

  *

  Finally, in the early hours of the morning, the perfect translation of the last pages of Owls came to me. All at once: so quickly I could barely keep up with the words that spilled from my brother’s pages into my own. I raced after them, my head heavy with the smell of salt and ink and paper and tears. The writing breathed. I was open like a window, like a vein, and the words rolled loosely through me, bruising me as they passed. The words were like small stones, clacking together in the bottom of a stream. The sound was a pleasing one: robust and minimal, marking out the weight of each word as I pressed it onto the page. I was a sower of stones, seeding them in the pale ground, planting out this last crop from which I could only reap a final, sovereign silence.