Dying in the First Person

by Nike Sulway

  After Morgan’s death there was so much to do. I spent long days compiling and editing the Gedenkschrift, which, though small, had taken months to put together. Editing every essay was an exercise in grief; the perfection of each sentence a moral burden. At night, in bed, I felt as if I lay beneath the weight of his body, and my own, and the regret of each of those who had written about him. Ten copies came in the post in January, with a note from the publisher saying that the conference booksellers had ordered two hundred more.

  I took out the draft abstract Elizabeth had sent back, with some notes on suggested changes. The conference booklet was being sent to the printers in a week, and was to include a photograph of Morgan and me as children – one my mother had taken when we were ten years old. In it, we lay on our stomachs on a timber jetty overlooking the river. Our bare feet and chests were slim and brown, and below us, on the water, were a fleet of paper boats. The booklet was also to include a brief biography, and an abstract outlining the talk I was to give.

  As Morgan’s work, supplemented by my own, had spooled out into the world, sociolinguists, philosophers, poets, linguistic anthropologists and literary critics all had their say. The publication, volume by volume, of Morgan’s work had revealed his ongoing interest in the nature of existence, and of the relationships between thought, language and identity. But also his concern with the edge of selfhood – the fragility of any notion of individual identity – and with death.

  Just last year I received yet another work written in Nahum by a perfect stranger who had read all of my brother’s work, bought both my Encyclopaedia of Nahum and the more complex The Nahi Archipelago: A History of the Land and Language of the Men of Nahum and who, he assured me in his long and rather obsequious accompanying letter, was a member of the Society of Nahum, which hosted an online discussion group he urged me to join. His book was lusciously illustrated and presented. A slipcover with an image of an island silhouetted against cliffs of green ice protected the ice-green boards, and the endpapers with their pattern of fishbones and nets. The book had been published by the society, the colophon of which, printed in gold on the spine, was an island topped by a single tree. My map of Nahum – drawn from the original Morgan and I drew that summer – had been redrawn by a professional cartographer in two versions: a topographic map and a physical one, notated with the names of each of the islands. The large sheets were folded into a pocket in the back of the book. Spread out, they covered half the dining room table. Our work – our world – had escaped us. This stranger’s book was a sign of a new development; where once others were content to observe, comment, interpret and analyse, they had now entered into the society of Nahum, and claimed it as their own. They were altering the map, the language and the history of the culture we had created.

  I had considered giving a paper on this shift, but after fiddling with the idea for a while I realised there was very little, as yet, to say. Also, I noticed the author’s name on a list of presenters Elizabeth had sent to me; he was giving a paper on ‘Neo-Nahum Arts & Crafts’ and would be speaking alongside a musical anthropologist who had recently released an album of Nahum music. The album would be available from the conference bookseller; a sample track could be downloaded from the conference website.

  All of it irritated me. Who were these people? What made them presume to understand the work Morgan had done, that I had done, more than we did?

  I wanted to write to Elizabeth and withdraw – make some feeble excuse – but I couldn’t bring myself to mention Morgan’s passing in an email to a stranger, let alone use it as an excuse for not attending, and I felt a personal responsibility to her. She had written one of the longer and more moving essays for the Gedenkschrift and had sent her condolences in a handwritten note along with copies of all the letters he had written to her over the years. A small bundle, characteristically gruff on his part, but kind in their way. He had written her twelve letters over ten years, starting from the time when she was a graduate student and sent him a copy of a draft chapter of her thesis, in which she discussed the construction of identity in Nahum. If I am being overly presumptuous, she had written, please forgive me. I only want to avoid the greater error of publishing work that misrepresents your intentions.

  The correspondence ended with a short, sharp note in which he derided her latest publication mentioning his work, claiming she had misquoted an earlier letter (she had not) and indicating that any further correspondence from her would be burned. His letter was written in Nahum.

  I sighed and opened my computer, determined to complete the abstract and send it off before the end of the day. Elizabeth’s notes suggested only a few minor changes: switching from the future to the past tense so as to suggest the paper had already been written (even if it hadn’t); rewriting a couple of overly general, sweeping statements; including some citations of other, relevant work (she had included suggestions); and moving the material on mortality to the beginning of the abstract since it was the key point of the paper. The paper itself could wait. I had four weeks before I flew out and only had to speak for forty minutes. There would be plenty of questions, Elizabeth had assured me, to fill the rest of the hour, and if not we would simply finish a little early.

  Editing the abstract didn’t take long. We had decided that it would be best to keep the language as practical as possible – steering away from trying to sound as academic as some of the other presenters, but not so practical as to seem banal. I was conscious of not wishing to seem, as translators are often represented, like a mere cleric. I had decided to talk about the delicate, difficult process of translating Morgan’s final work. The particular challenges his late work presented.

  The abstract opened with a quote from Adorno, the opening of his essay ‘Late Style in Beethoven’: The maturity of the late works of significant artists does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation.

  Perhaps it was a poor choice to build an argument on. The late works of Beethoven were written when Ludwig was in his fifties. Morgan would never reach that age. This last work was his late work only because he had died not long after he completed it. The span of his life was compacted. His early, middle and late periods each spanned less than a decade. And yet there was a marked shift in tone, in mood, and in lexical complexity in the final work. The sentences looped and soared, but the language was more charged and precise. The will to believe in a happy world had been overcome by the dark flood of insight into suffering, by a sense of the world as simultaneously exquisite and rank. There was a flintiness to his final work that no amount of beauty could occlude or soften. Metaphors emerged, became sustained, or were repeated in slightly different forms, as though evolving over the course of the work, in an attempt – it seemed – to make the latent actual, to puncture the reader’s lassitude.

  There were, of course, other things I could not say. In translating this final work, I could see that there was a sense in which I had held him responsible for what he had written in the earlier works, for the ways he had transformed the events of our childhood into the stuff of narrative. As though he had created, rather than recorded, the things he described. Of course, it was never so simple. His sense of what had occurred, and what it meant, was his own. I had no right to deface his work with my mealy-mouthed translations. With my parsimonious definitions of wind and rain and death, let alone those more complex, loose notions for which he created words without equivalent in any other tongue. I had been preoccupied with limits, with singularity, with the contraction of meaning into an essential expression of life as it is. I had seen Nahum as an attempt to create Eliot’s ‘deodorized and non resonant language’, a language with which to speak about things as they are, but for Morgan Nahum was expansive, evolving, an expression not just of the world, but of the future. Of all the possible futures he could and could not imagine. In the late work I had still
not completed translating, for all its spininess, for all its horror, he undertook a celebratory opening out of meaning.

  I had been the guardian of the fixed law; the grammarian, the compiler of dictionaries and maps. Morgan had created out of those fixed laws a complex, evolving language. Through poetry and metaphor, through new words and forms, he had been striving to articulate new ways of thinking. To find a form into which to pour the tangled insights of his experience.

  *

  My father took us out on his boat only occasionally. When we were small, we were too small, and when we grew older we forgot that he was our captain, our king. But during the in-between years he sometimes woke us early – before dawn – and bid us come down to the sea. We sat in the spare light of the kitchen while he made tea and toast. The tea in his battered silver teapot. There was nothing beautiful about it other than its simplicity, and its age. He sat at the head of the table and poured us each a cup. We drank our tea sweet and hot, like his. Then it was out the door into the darkness, and down the unlit street to the harbour where the black night pressed down on the even blacker sea.

  We went quietly through the channel into the open sea. It was only once we were out there – once the horizon had spread its arms out and the shore receded – that he began to talk.

  My mother had told us the story of Antaeus – the giant child of Gaea and Poseidon – whose strength was revived whenever his feet touched the earth. How he waited by the roadside and greeted journeymen and forced them to fight him, and never lost. Whenever he began to fail he would press his great bare feet on the earth and be renewed. My father was like Antaeus’s brother – his father’s son – tall and dark and browned by the sun, eternally replenished by the ocean’s slosh and roar. Inside, on land, he seemed diminished, but out on the water his body unfolded. With his feet on the deck he stood, steadier and stronger than any man who stood on the earth. He let out the nets, splaying his line like an artist concerned with the form of things, with the way the ocean’s salty breath, her heaving belly, swallowed and feathered the grid of his nets. On the boat, once the nets were set and the work was underway, our father began to talk. He answered all our questions carefully and at great length. He delighted in long, complex asides, gambolling out to the fringe of his subject and then circling back at the last moment, just when he might have lost us, when the thread of connection between our listening and his speaking was about to break.

  By late morning the cold was burned away. He lit the gas stove and boiled water for tea. When the tea was ready he opened his tin of shortbread. He spread out his nautical chart on the deck and drew maps of other countries, ancient countries, traced the lines of battles fought and won centuries ago. The Battle of Salamis was re-enacted, beginning with the Persians waiting in the Gulf of Corinth, sipping tea and waiting as their army captured Athens, seven miles away, watching the smoke rise and listening to the remote thud and suck and roar of war, like distant applause. More than one thousand Persian ships wallowed there, spread out on the waves, waiting for the Greeks to sail out and meet them, certain of victory over the Hellenes’ small fleet of triremes: a third of their own fleet’s size. The Persians were good sailors – good shipmen – they had perfected the diekplous, which required quick, clean sailing. Our father drew diagrams of the Greek triremes, the three rows of oars, the sails, rudders and masts, and the secret spine of the Athenian trireme – the hypozomata – rigged tight along the midline of the hull.

  He moved on to talk of bridges, sketching in the spans and towers, the trusses and counterweights of bascule bridges, the catenary arcs of suspension bridges. Combustion engines, electricity, atoms and ions, cell rooms. He described chlorine, talked about the smell of bertholite – how his own father had died after the Second Battle of Ypres near Mouse Trap Farm when the Germans released a cloud of the sweet, peppery gas. He had given his mask to a younger, wounded man. A boy, really, with photographs of his mother and his sisters – no wife, no child – in his pockets.

  My grandfather had put his mask over the boy’s face and gathered him up in his arms. The gas tickled into his lungs as he carried him – jogging – away from the low, green cloud. It was late evening, the light was going, but he moved quickly towards the dressing station.

  Chlorine gas, my father told us, is not a particularly effective weapon. If his father had kept the mask for himself, he would have lived. If he had stood above the parapet, letting the dense cloud hover at his knees, the chlorine may not have reached so deeply into the tissue of his lungs. He might have lived if he had held a damp cloth over his mouth and nose to dissolve the water-soluble gas. But he needed both arms to carry the boy. My father described the chemical reactions in his father’s body – the chlorine slowly dissolving into the fluid of his father’s lungs to form hydrochloric acid, burning away his father’s pneuma until he drowned, breathless, in the winter air.

  He discussed economics, astronomy, natural philosophy, etiology, chance – and listened intently to our attempts to understand. Making us rehearse, over and again, the concepts he tried to teach us. ‘Read Doctor Seuss,’ he said, ‘he understands everything. Anapestic tetrameter. Turtles all the way down.’

  The trouble was, he terrified us. We wanted to go out to sea, we wanted to understand him, but as soon as we got out there the world disappeared. There was no steady earth beneath our feet. Our father boiled up pots of milky tea and threw out his nets and invited us to walk the plank. Our father, our captain, who knew the world so well, who had circumnavigated the globe when he was seventeen, and perhaps the heavens, too. Our father, who recited Homer while he pissed over the side of the boat, who sang Norse hunting songs while he hauled in the nets, who called Ahab a pussy and a coward and Darwin a hero though he had set sail once, and never again. Our father, who seemed consecrated by the morning light, sometimes got things wrong. Not much; not enough that it should have mattered, but it did. The first time was like a cold blade entering our worshipful hearts. In the kitchen, my father holding forth, and my mother sitting at the table, quiet, severe, attending to the reality of things while he opened his arms and brought in the light. ‘Plato said two friends are a single soul dwelling in two bodies.’

  My mother tilted her head to the side and considered the hem she was taking up. She snapped the cloth twice and then pressed it flat on the table. ‘Aristotle, actually,’ she said. ‘According to Laërtius.’ She stood and folded up the pants, put her pins and thread away in her mending box and left the room.

  ‘Woman,’ my father said, ‘what have I to do with thee?’

  My mother, her voice as regular and patient as it would be if she were discussing buying shoes, clearly smiling as she came back in and started making tea: ‘John. Chapter two, verse four.’ She reached past him to the cupboard and pulled out two cups. ‘I cannot live without you, it would be life, and life is over there, Behind the shelf.’ She cupped his cheek with her hand. And he smiled, after all, and pulled her to him.

  ‘Emily Dickinson,’ he said.

  *

  I flew out in the early afternoon. Ana came to the airport to see me off. We ordered champagne. There was nothing to celebrate except the fact that we were together, and would be together again when I returned. Our first few months had been very nearly perfect. The long, cold nights in which we lit the fire, poured wine, read old books and listened to the rain. The days when the sun was warm but kind, spooling green light through the forests we crossed to meet each other.

  The day before my flight I went to visit my mother. When I was leaving, I turned back and saw her, raised up on her pillows: exalted, satisfied, exhausted. The summer rain was torrential, incontinent. Everything seemed exaggerated and overwrought. I wanted to tell the waitress, the air hostesses, the long queues of people smiling and jostling and patting their pockets: I am in love and my mother is dying.

  When they called my flight I kissed Ana goodbye and we stood near the boarding gate with our foreheads pressed together, our eyes closed.
We were not young, and I was not handsome. For a moment, I was aware of how foolish we must have seemed. I must have seemed. But only for a moment. I could smell champagne on her breath, and feel her lashes strike my own as she opened her eyes.

  The final boarding call was announced, the queue had dwindled to nothing; the stewardess smiled and beckoned me to enter.

  ‘I have something to tell you,’ Ana said. ‘I’m pregnant.’

  I drew back a little so that I could see her face. There was a faint red circle where my forehead had pressed against her own. I had a momentary vision of my mother and my child passing each other, going in opposite directions. They were in the deep vent between life and death – a warm place, dark and indistinct, that smelt of the sea.

  ‘What is it like?’ my child said, looking up towards the end of the passage.

  My mother shook her head. Turned away.

  The final boarding call came, and I had said nothing. Done nothing. I boarded, took my seat, clipped on my belt and watched the stewardesses perform the strange ballet of the safety demonstration as we taxied out onto the runway, all in a mute daze.

  From the window of the plane, I saw the shadows of clouds scud across the ocean. They seemed like the shadows of enormous, shapeless creatures – the ghosts of Darwin’s monstrous aquatic bears – floating across the sea’s gilded surface. Mute forms that turned their faceless gazes towards the sky, watching me leave. We passed through a layer of clouds burnished gold and pink by the sinking sun. This is the age of ordinary miracles. A cloud pressed close against my window. If the window were open, I could have reached out and dipped my hand into them, scooped them up like cream, spread them on my lap. Eaten them. The plane punched through, rising higher still, and we could see the earth mantled in clouds, like an old queen drawing her furs up around her shoulders.