Dying in the First Person

by Nike Sulway

  I felt obliterated by the words, which rose up through me, taking what they needed and leaving the rest. The night died away; the light burned in, smearing itself against the washboard sky. The book became more substantial, more actual, hauled up onto the bank.

  The work of translating my brother’s last words had filled and extended my life, and now it was finished. And so was he. There was something terrible in the thought that he would never read my translation of There May Be Owls: a sense of incompleteness I could not overcome. When I had finished translating each of the earlier works, I had sent them to him. The translations would be returned with his handwriting scrawling up and down the margins, coursing over the pages, pulling them apart and reassembling them.

  How he said things was a crucial part of his struggle to think them, but my brother’s actions – his leaving life for the sake of life – intervened between me and this final work. I looked over the last pages he had given me, and which I had translated, with renewed horror, and renewed love. Aware of all the ways I had failed to realise his intention, to make apparent the way in which he worked to reflect that all these people he wrote about lived, that they had bodies, that they sang and danced and fucked and died, not only as language and ideas, but as human creatures.

  I had failed to bring over into the translation the deep sense of Morgan’s will to believe in exquisite happiness, accompanied, always, by his insight into the dark flood of suffering. He would have helped me; together, we might have found a way, but without him the work was a failure. A thing of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

  The last of the pages slid out of the printer. The heat rising above the page in a sheet of steam. I had fixed all the night birds, changing them into owls, and finished one more read-through making tiny, tiny corrections. It was done. I turned the pages over, neatened the edges, stacked them in the manuscript box and looped a thick, red rubber band around it all. Turned off the light, and the computer and the printer, and closed the door.

  I could not send the work to Morgan, but I could take it to Ana.

  The house I lived in hunkered down in a small valley, under the trees. As I made my way up the ridge, conscious of the weight of the manuscript in my backpack, the light seemed flat and breathy. Sunset warmed its hands against the horizon. I reached the top of the ridge and looked down into Ana’s valley. Little hammers of life beating in my head.

  She stood in the creek, bathing, bending to fill a container with water and standing to tip it over her head, again and again. Even from that distance, her movements had a steady particularity. Each time she bent, I imagined her lifting my brother’s bones out of the water – his white limbs, polished smooth as stones by the water – wiping a strap of wet, black weed from his face. The movement of her bending and rising was incantatory. She was always lifting him, her arms aching with effort. Always tired. She lifted him from the river in parts, each of the separate elements of his body complete and strange – his arms, his legs, his face – but he never rose to meet her. Some essential aspect spilled from her hands, between her fingers. His eyes never opened. He never saw her there, bending above him. She was so beautiful she made me afraid, both for and of her. Nothing that beautiful can survive very long.

  I moved away from the lookout, to the upper throat of the creek. The water was clear and cold. I took off my shoes, hung them from my backpack, and began to make my way down to her. When I reached the place where she had been, she had gone. Looking up towards the cabin, I could see smoke from the stove, drifting down through the trees like fog. The lights were on. I went around to the deck and stood at the top of the stairs. She was standing with her back to the window. My feet were caked with mud.

  ‘Have you got a towel?’ I said. ‘I need to wash my feet.’

  She dried her hands on a tea towel, came out onto the deck and smiled at my rolled-up cuffs and dirty feet. ‘Wait here,’ she said.

  I sat on the top step leading up to the deck, put my backpack on the step above. A few moments later she came out onto the deck with a round, shallow basin of water, a towel around her shoulders. She came down the stairs and put the basin on the ground, lifted my feet one at a time and lowered them into the basin. The water was warm. She put her hands into the water and found the round white soap. She washed my feet. First, cleaning off the mud, but then tipping out the dirty water, refilling the basin with hot, scented water, and washing them again. Using her hands and a soft cloth. Smoothing and cupping each one as she lifted it from the water, then pulling the towel from around her shoulders to dry them. As she leant forward, her hair unravelled and fell, heavy as breath, over my clean, bare skin.

  ‘It’s done then?’ she said, looking up and past me, at the backpack.

  For a moment, I had forgotten why I had come. I nodded and reached for my pack, slid the manuscript out and held it towards her. She smoothed her hand over the cover. ‘You changed the title – did you like my suggestion?’

  ‘I had a lot of trouble with the title before you pointed out the owl to me.’

  ‘It’s good,’ she said. ‘It’s fine.’ She stood up and tipped the cold water over the herbs growing near the base of the stairs, collected the towel and the soap. ‘Bring it inside.’

  Inside the house it was warm. My feet seemed exaggeratedly naked on the polished timber floors. I followed her into the room that Nicanor had used as a study, and into which he had occasionally invited me to come, to sit, to drink whisky and listen to jazz. The room had been full, then, of chairs and books and filing cabinets and photographs. But now there was a long, low shelf running around the perimeter of the room, and in the middle of the room was a high table, on which chisels, sanding blocks and sanding papers were laid out around a half-carved block of timber. On the floor were shavings, not yet darkened, curling around the table legs and each other. The room smelled of freshly cut timber.

  A range of pieces – some completed, some still swimming up out of the wood – sat on the low shelf. She watched me go over to one, kneel to look at it.

  The figure was curled up into itself. The beads of its spine exposed, the fine ribs outlined beneath its timber skin. It was hunched up. There was something terrible about the posture: a stiffness underscored by fragility. As though the child’s spine was malformed, its head too heavy, its bones too light, so that any gesture of affection or reproof would wound. As though any movement would result in fractures, splits, terrible harm. I wanted to place a comforting hand against that slender neck, draw a blanket over the hunched shoulders, soothe its body into some more comfortable position.

  I moved from one to another of the works, examining what I could see of their avian faces: always half turned away, some with a terrible look moving across their features, as though they were about to cry, or stop breathing. Their clenched fists dented their plump cheeks. Each was a child in the process of becoming a bird, or a bird in the process of becoming a child. Caught halfway between the two, their bodies seemed like expressions of some other form of beauty. On the far side of the room, between two unfinished works, was a pile of paper. I glanced at the top sheet and was stopped.

  A single word in my brother’s all-too-familiar hand. The letters of Nahum, curving in towards the centre of the word, like ornate parentheses that never quite connect or close upon each other, and in their centre a caesura: a breath within the word. The word was unfamiliar, but already I was searching my memory for its antecedents and cousins, for the root and branch from which it had fallen, the soil into which it had set its seed.

  ‘That’s for you,’ Ana said. ‘In exchange for the one you’ve finished.’

  *

  I rolled gently onto my side, looked at her bare shoulder and the dark, curved river of her hair, watched her steady breathing. Ana. The memory of saying her name, the weight of it in my mouth, satisfied me. Light fell over her through the gap in the curtains: a mixture of carmine duskiness, watered down with turpentine, thickening now, darkening into night, accented by the risin
g light of the moon. The light glossed all her surfaces. Blood-black hair, the filaments of her eyelashes tinged with dark gold, her skin bold and luminous as the ghost gums outside the window. I felt the tug in my groin, the thickening. Overwhelmed by tenderness, I would have liked to kiss the bared paleness at the back of her neck; I would have liked to slip inside her, quietly, like a bird settling inside its nest, feeling her shift and open to me.

  Sculptors make the best lovers, she had told me. They understand the shape of things, the natural forms to which all bodies long to return. They know how to wait, and how to push and mould without force, how to allow a body to find its natural posture.

  The truth is, I was never very good at love. I had tried, as a younger man, but had always felt remote from the passion I saw in others. I thought then that perhaps it was only her beauty that accounted for my pleasure: the deep softness of her skin, the calluses of her palms. The way her body was a map of contradictions: hard, soft, smooth, shirred, naïve and knowing.

  I heard the train come up the valley. The soft, ghostly mourning cry and then the reply of an owl, close by. I slipped out of bed and went to the window, conscious that I was naked, touching the floorboards with my newborn’s milk-white feet. I parted the curtains a little as the owl sounded again. Nearer still. And then it dropped and scudded across the clearing. Its body heavy and slow, its wings dropping and rising like oars that must work to push aside the air. God is a bird, I thought, ploughing the air of the forest. God is an owl: dark-eyed and violent, with pale feathers riffling on his breast as he hunts. I remembered the carvings she had shown me in the afternoon. The smell of freshly shaven wood. The curls of it, like pencil shavings, swept into a pile. The impossibly soft heads of the sculptures – so delicate I almost believed I could see their fontanelles pulsing beneath their wood-feathered crowns – the almost-breathing bodies of feathers and claws.

  The train sounded its horn, heading towards the station, or around the sharp corner near the overhead bridge, like a banshee beckoning the dead from their rest. Wake up, it called. Tip the lovers from their beds, wrest the children and the old women from their hard-won sleep, the invalids tossing in pain, the workers with aching shoulders and backs and thighs, tapping at the windows of dreams. Their muscles lowing to them in the dark. Wake up, wake up, the train called, as the light slipped and slid away, revealing the tenebrous dark. This is the real world, this darkness, this allconsuming night. All good things come into the dark, eventually, exhausted by the light, they curl in the earth and close their eyes and rot and rest.

  ‘Samuel?’ Ana was propped up on her elbow in the bed. She reached out a hand and I let the curtain fall closed. ‘Open it,’ she said.

  I pulled back the curtains to reveal the forest. A few pinpoints of light, the shadows of the trees, their tall trunks dark silhouettes against a mottled sky. I wanted to say something beautiful and tender, but only obvious things came to me, childish things. Bess the black-eyed daughter, plaiting a dark-red love knot in her long black hair. Crows and shapeshifters and Shakespeare’s dark lady. Death’s maiden in the forest, bare feet pressing down on the fallen leaves, a shadow passing in and out between pale tree trunks. Her black hair loose down her back, the whispering of her black gown as she moves, silk and cotton rustling together like night-blown autumn leaves. Things I couldn’t say; things she wouldn’t understand.

  As a translator, I work with silence. Sometimes the silences are gaps in the text. Paper can be torn or burned, crumpled, crushed or folded. Parts of the page that once existed rot or fade. Things that were written are erased by one hand or another. This morning, for example, I tore a page from the notebook in my pack to write a note for Ana before I left her sleeping and brought my brother’s manuscript back to the house. To leave her this note, I obliterated another record.

  Sometimes manuscripts are lost. Hemingway’s wife lost a sheaf of his unpublished works at the Gare de Lyon in Paris. Shakespeare is said to have written a play called The History of Cardenio. There is no evidence but rumour, secondary references.

  When I had completed – or nearly completed – There May Be Owls, I had a sense there was another work waiting in the exhalation after its end. There was something incomplete about the work – something half-voiced. Silence hung in the air of its sentences, like the blue light that hovers between clouds. I had reconciled myself to believing that the silence was deliberate, or at least that it would never be resolved. Morgan had closed his mouth, his eyes. He had gone into the river. His last action was an eloquent refusal of speech, of others, of the future, of any acts of completion. Towards the end of the work, I dreamed he had written another story, in invisible ink, between the lines of black ink. That secret words – in milk, in acid, in strange, dry marks – were embedded in the page but I could not read them. My brother’s silence was complete. But now there are more words. A ream of paper, thickened and buckled by his hand.

  I empty the bin, sharpen a suite of pencils, place the manuscript Ana gave me in the centre of my cleared desk. Motet is the work’s title. My brother’s Latin scrawled in sloping black ink on the top sheet. I open the notebook, make some preliminary notes. I turn over the first sheet, folio it in pencil – lightly – on the reverse, slip it into a protective plastic sleeve and move on to the next page. The text appears in a small block in the centre of the page. My first translation notes, raw and stumbling, read: It is important not to be fooled by false love [agape/consuming love – a reduced form of the word for love used in earlier texts, perhaps to indicate a more universal, less personal affection]. If you mistake false love for love, or a translation for the [truth/true story], you will spend your days in terrible hunger, no matter how many pages you [eat/consume].

  We don’t know what we hunger for any longer.

  When I translated the first of my brother’s works the better part of twenty years ago, I approached it by thinking about new languages, invented languages. Why might new languages arise? What gaps did they seek to close? What anxieties did they arouse? What pleasures did they promise? What new mental freedoms gave them their allure? The threat and possibility of saying previously inexpressible things through the invention of a new language was merely a gesture in his early work. In Owls, and now in Motets, it had become his whole purpose. Or perhaps it was just that I had only now come to realise that the intellectual and emotional excitement in his work was due to his struggle to find a language in which to think.

  I saw my earlier translations now as violent reductions, scything through delicate webs of thought, reducing complex ideas to bare tropes. In his writing – in its original, pure form – hesitation, reach, inhibition and empathy declare themselves in the syntax as well as the semantics of his sentences. Once, I saw this circumlocution of the thing said as a frailty in his expression: an inability to get to the point. To tell the story. To speak the truth. I laboured over his neologisms, over his prevarications, wondering whether I knew enough of the language he had made his own. The problem is no longer whether I know enough Nahum, but whether I know enough English to do justice to the work.

  It was morning. It was night. The manuscript lay face-up on the table, each of its pages numbered and slipped into a protective sleeve. This was the simple thing: the preparatory work in which I came to terms with the breadth, but not the depth, of the text. I saw the bricks of text, the columns, the experiments with form, but not the sentences. Occasionally, a word released itself from the page, or a series of words repeated. Finally, I went back to the first page, with its ragged-edge block of text, and then on to the next; here the narrative begins.

  A man is on his island. The wind is his own son, [blowing/breathing] in and through his body once again. The wind strokes the man’s hair and, at the shore, the waves warm the man’s toes …

  The text was difficult, obscure. It slid in and out of my vision like a fish deep in a night-dark ocean. My mind wandered, struggling to grasp the always elusive meaning of a text that was right before me, an
d yet so distant. So remote. My mind struggled – I struggled – to grasp the fish that flickered in the deep. The hinting, the soft gold mottled with weed.

  It, It, I kept circling the words I did not know. An infinity of its without a single referent, without a source. A hum in another room: the refrigerator, the pump dredging up the last of the water in the tank, the powerlines on the other side of the property.

  I am no poet. The stories I wrote and rewrote were never my own. The greatest work I’ve produced was a dumb show of sorts. A speaking in place of. I was the ferryman of narratives, bringing them over from one language to another.

  There were silences of form, of context and intertext. The poor handwriting of a long-dead author. The meaning inherent in a mode of speaking, written down for posterity, though the musicality of that speech – the pauses, the gestures – were now lost. The text of Beowulf was written down by two anonymous scribes in the Nowell Codex. It was bound together with a life of Saint Christopher, a translation of a letter from Alexander to Aristotle, and a mirabilia – Wonders of the East, a text that detailed, species by species, the weird creatures of the undiscovered world. The Panotti and Donestre and Homodubii: the doubtful people. The Donestre, a tragic, monstrous translator, had always been my favourite. The Donestre had the head of a lion, including a long, gold mane, and the body of a young man. He was a tall, strong, beautiful creature. Masculine and powerful, something akin to the Minotaur. The Donestre knew all the languages of the human race, and spent his days on his island, greeting lone and shipwrecked travellers in their own tongues: calling out their names, quoting the great writers of their civilisation’s history – poets and historians – and crooning to them half-familiar plainsongs and hymns. He told them stories, offering homesick travellers the comforts of home. All lies and deception, of course; the Donestre was a great raconteur but he was no fellow journeyman. The travellers, reassured, perhaps even thrilled to discover this glorious, intelligent creature – this man with the head of a lion – came ashore, sat at the great beast’s table, took up the cup he offered.