by Nike Sulway
Elizabeth hovered for a while, smiled tightly, glared at the sticky pastries and at an older man who asked me whether I was aware of Derrida’s work on friendship. A young woman offered to bring me a coffee, which I gratefully accepted, and we found some seats in a corner of the large, echoing hall. She brought a handful of other younger people back with her, who sat around me, gossiping and flirting and drinking coffee, including me in their discussions of which papers were worth going to, which were not. One of them asked me what I was doing in the evening, whether I was coming to drinks at Dr North’s house. A young girl – Jenna – leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘Don’t worry, Hank won’t make it. He’ll be too busy in his hotel room writing furious blog posts about all of today’s presentations.’
And then it was over. Thousands of miles. Thousands of words. A strange, hot, furious nothing and then I was released into the streets of Amsterdam. Tourists wandered past me in black and orange beanies. I bought frites from a street vendor and watched people have their photographs taken in front of the palace. And the whole time I felt he was there, but gone. My brother. The ghost in the streets. The one who was always walking away.
Autumn
Translating that last book of Morgan’s was the most difficult work I had ever done. I sat down at the desk each morning, spread out the copied pages of the original and my expanding glossary of notes, and leant into it the way a man leans into a storm. By mid-morning the page was awash with erasures and notes and hesitations. I was exhausted by the enormity of the task, by its seeming impossibility.
I had to remind myself that it always started this way; that there was a process involved, and that every time was like starting again, learning how to translate. Every book reminded me that I knew nothing about language.
I thought, for one heady moment, that I had grasped hold of the correct translation of a word or a sentence. Correct is not the right word, of course; there is no right answer, but an endless regression of imperfect forms. Still, I could fool myself into believing any sentence was perfect for a moment. I raced forward to the next sentence and the next. I reached the end of the paragraph: a sheer and terrifying place, like the edge of a cliff, and turned back only to realise that it was all nonsense. I tried to summarise the paragraph. Although the words made sense to me individually, the phrases, even the sentences, I found I couldn’t reduce their meaning into shorter forms. I dove into the paragraph again and again. It was always the same. In order to comprehend the meaning of the sentences, I had to stand inside them, not outside of them, not ahead of them – at the end of the paragraph or page – looking back. Each sentence was perfectly explicable, as was the whole, while you dwelt inside it. The difficulty – one of the difficulties – was that the work of bringing it over into English was so slow that the meaning slid out from under me while I was working. I thought I understood what I was reading and writing, but the feeling of understanding was fleeting, and the process of recording the understanding slow. The feeling – the meaning – escaped before it was captured.
I sat at my desk, staring out the window, chanting the sentences to the trees, and thinking of Jacob wrestling with his angel. Trying to grab hold of the angel’s hands and feet and wings. Meaning eluded me; each time I thought I had something true and right, it writhed in my grasp and twisted free. It ran from me, and I pursued it. The chase was long and hard.
I squinted up at my angel as it retreated before me: blurred, impossible. Sometimes I almost overtook it. I reached out my arm and stretched and dived, but he was a fleet, evasive creature. I remembered the feeling, as a young boy, of running, of being pursued, of hurling my body into the late summer heat, of running until my body was all air and blood and hurt.
I rose from the desk exhausted, exalted to have a single paragraph and a mess of annotations to work with tomorrow. I printed out the completed paragraph, amazed at how neat it looked. There was no sign of struggle. No broken lamp, no fallen chair. It seemed dishonest: the white page, the clean black print, the wide unmarked margins. As if I had lied, or got away with something, as we did that summer when we were fourteen: the last summer before everything changed.
*
I picked my mother up outside the hospital. She had decided not to allow me – or anyone else she had known before she became ill – to enter the hospital with her. She did not want anyone to see her as a patient, in her hospital robes.
When I arrived, she was sitting on a bench outside the hospital looking, for all the world, like someone who had been there to visit one of the sick, rather than someone receiving treatment. It was a hot day, but she was wearing a suit jacket and a matching skirt. A nurse was standing nearby, chatting with her and smoking. Perhaps she didn’t look like a visitor, after all, but like one of the consulting doctors: she had that same air of exhaustion I had seen on them as they came off shift and emerged into the clean air.
I helped her into the car and we drove in silence until we crossed the bridge over the Pine River. My mother pointed out the men in their dinghies, the way the light spread heavy and gold over the water. ‘I love crossing this river,’ she said. She pulled a CD out of her bag and put it in the player: Bach’s Cello Concertos. ‘Did you get the partridges?’
I nodded. ‘Did you tell Dr Rowe about the back pain?’
My mother shook her head. ‘She said it’s nothing.’
I merged across two lanes, glanced at her pinched, pale face. ‘What did you tell her?’
‘Numbness. Tingling. She said I must have been stung by something.’
‘Did you tell her you’d been having trouble bending? Did you tell her about feeling paralysed?’
‘She said that what I described wasn’t a known symptom of the cancer, or the treatment. She suggested it was really a throbbing pain. She told the nurse it was probably psychosomatic but to give me some pain medication if I insisted.’
‘In front of you?’
‘I like that nurse,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t bother with all the bullshit happy-shiny rubbish like the others: she just does her job. She knows that when you’re dying you don’t need people to pretend you aren’t; you need not to be treated as if you’re already dead.’
‘You’re not dying; people survive cancer.’
‘I’m dying, Samuel.’
‘What makes you so sure? Did they say something? Did Dr Rowe say something?’
‘Don’t be so naïve. It’s insulting. And childish.’ She leaned over and turned up the music, then sat back and looked out the window, turning her body away from me. ‘I’m tired,’ she said, and closed her eyes.
The year after my father’s death, my mother began to pray, muttering incantations under her breath at home, in the car, at the supermarket. Hail Marys over the cress and the mushrooms; Our Fathers over the cabbages, fondling each like a baby’s head. I found three of them swaddled in baby’s blankets, quietly rotting in our old cradle in the spare room. I didn’t say anything to her, but emptied the cradle, washed the blankets. At night, in the house that felt empty without our father in it, I lay awake, listening to her turning in her bed. I prayed that in the morning she would be her old self again, and that Morgan would stop wandering and come home. I believed that these two things – two unlikely miracles – were connected.
I have this memory, perhaps from that time, perhaps earlier, of seeing a dead baby girl laid out in a basket in the lounge room. A pink rosebud mouth and flushed pink cheeks. A fist like a snail curled against her lightly furred cheek. She was all white, like a doll, or a baby made of marzipan. I imagined myself taking a small bite out of her, as if she were one of the meringue mice Morgan and I sometimes bought from the bakery. Perhaps taking a tiny toe into my mouth and rolling it beneath my tongue. So sweet and so small.
It is a dream I’ve had, or a dream Morgan related to me, so dull and terrible it must be true. I would like to call Morgan, or sit and talk with him. I want to say to my brother: was there another sister, when we were small? Is that what b
roke our father? Is that why he killed himself? I want to tell him I remember a marzipan baby swaddled in a white shawl and ask him what he saw, what he remembers, but Morgan is dead. My memories are only memories, as unreliable as dreams. Without Morgan as ballast, our childhood drifts away, fraying and loose, as the last clouds pulled apart by a pale blue sky.
I glance at my mother in the rear-view mirror, rehearsing the questions, trying to imagine her answers. Did you have any other children? Other pregnancies? ‘Do you ever wish you’d had a daughter?’ I say, finally, a coward sidling up to the thing I really want to ask.
She shrugs into a more comfortable position, pulls her jacket closed. As the road curves the light falls through the windshield and across her face. She looks pinched and old: the skin of her eyelids fragile as wet paper. ‘I’ve hired a nurse,’ she said. ‘For at home. She starts Monday. Rachel.’
‘You don’t need to do that. I can look after you.’
‘I don’t want you to feel obligated to do it, and I don’t want you to have to care for me like that. See me like that. I want to have someone whose job it is to look after dying bodies. Who knows how to do so without making me feel ashamed of what I’ve become. And no, I never wanted any more children. Your father would have liked a daughter. He wanted to try again, but I had my hands full with you two, and I wanted to go back to work.’ She opened her eyes. We were moving through the pine plantations. Uniform rows of pine trees, field upon field of trees the same height and age. Newly harvested fields dotted with mounds of unusable timber waiting to be burned, the earth around them torn into rough furrows. Fields filled with newly planted seedlings barely a foot tall. Bach’s Suite No. 2 in D minor was playing: the agitated Courante filling the small space of the car.
‘There were a couple of miscarriages. Most women have some.’
The children in the back seat of the car in front of us were kneeling up and looking back at us. One of them pulled a face, then the other. They were giggling and red-faced, ducking down into the seat and then popping up with faces contorted into pink grimaces. They were wearing paper party hats – an elephant and a giraffe – and had party whistles, which they blew into: the long paper tongues rolling out and back, out and back.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Do you remember, when you were five, you took one of your father’s maps off his desk and made a paper hat out of it? One of those triangle ones that look like paper boats? Your father was looking everywhere for that map, pounding around the house. And the whole time you were in the back yard: I was watching you through the kitchen window while I did the dishes, you were running around and around in circles, making yourself dizzy, while the whole Pacific Ocean sailed on your head.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘He looked everywhere,’ she said, ‘turned the place upside down trying to find it, roaring and roaring like a man gone mad, and the whole time you were right there.’
When we got to the house she was too tired to walk inside on her own. I took the groceries inside, turned on the lights, and came out to get her. I lifted her up in my arms like a child: one arm around her back and the other under her knees. Her arm around my shoulders, her head on my chest. I recalled, with a start that reverberated in my gut, all those nights, as a child, when she and my father had carried Morgan and I into the house. Lifted our sleeping bodies from the back seat and carried us effortlessly up the stairs into our room. It should be simple, to carry her, but it is almost impossible to do it well. The inversion is both comic and tragic. There is no way to make it seem as if I am okay with carrying my mother, who gave birth to me, and nursed me, and taught me how to ride a bike and tie a shoelace, who once kicked me out of home and who took me back without a word. We did the best we could. She asked me to take her into the kitchen. I pulled a chair out from the table with my foot and lowered her onto it. On the table were four pears, sitting upright on the flat silver dish she had bought in Morocco, along with a lemon and a silver bowl filled with juniper berries.
The early evening light beatified the pears, which my mother picked up one by one, bringing them close to smell them. I turned on the oven, boiled the kettle to make tea. My mother sent me out to the garden for some thyme. When I came in the kettle was boiling. I made her some raspberry tea; she plucked off the sprigs of thyme and added them to the mortar along with the butter and juniper berries. I stood at the sink and washed down the birds, checking them for feathers or splinters of bone. When she’d ground the butter into a paste she spread it over the birds and lay them in the baking tray while I sliced the pears, basted them with lemon juice and cooked them in a little of the butter. She ladled the pears out over the birds, sluicing them with some of the melted butter, and I put the pan into the oven.
‘How long?’ I asked.
‘Twenty minutes. Give or take.’
I set the timer and cleared the bench and the table. ‘More tea?’ I said. ‘A glass of wine?’
‘I’m quite tired,’ she said.
I carried my mother into the lounge, turned on the reading light and lit some candles. The room was warm. She picked up a book but didn’t open it. I opened a window to let in some cool air. A pair of fairy wrens flickered about in the bushes outside her window: the startling blue of the male, the soft, dull brown of the female. The male landed on the edge of the birdbath my father had built; his partner hesitated on a nearby branch, as though the bright male was foolish to venture out into the open. It was the same birdbath that had been there all my life, but it looked different, as if it had been abandoned. It was the same height, the same colour and shape as ever, but it looked the way things would look when my mother was gone, and the house was empty. It looked the way my life might look without her in it.
*
All through the final years of high school, I worked in the bookshop, stacking shelves, making coffee, serving customers. I walked from school, or rode my bicycle, and changed out of my school uniform in the small apartment upstairs, where my mother always hung a clean shirt and a pair of jeans. There was a tiny bathroom, with a shower and a toilet. The first time I shaved it was in that small room. The shop was quiet, and I crossed the street to the chemist to buy a razor and shaving cream. My mother stood out in the hall of the apartment while I shaved, one eye on the shop downstairs, watching me tilt my head and ease the razor over my few thin hairs, slopping the stubbled cream into the sink. She had made me remove my shirt, convinced that I would cut myself, but I didn’t.
At first, the people who came to the store were mostly locals who wanted to peer at the widow and her son. To see how my mother was holding up, and what she’d done behind those newspapered windows while the shop was closed for renovations. Soon, people came from the next town over, crossing the bridge to admire the long shelves of books and to ask my mother about special orders, to tell her about how relieved they were not to have to go down to the city just to get something decent to read.
The first summer after we opened, the tourists discovered the shop; it was written up in a local glossy magazine, and then in a tiny piece in the travel section of the national paper. A small rural delight, they called it. They photographed my mother on a bench beneath the cotton tree, her hands folded on her lap, her newly grey hair swept back from her face, a book open in her lap and a pile of books stacked up beside her. On top of the pile of books sat a cake stand with a glass dome, beneath which were an array of lychee and rose-petal jam cupcakes, each topped with rosewater icing and a tiny rosebud.
This was her secret contribution to the shop’s success. When people asked her who made the cupcakes she smiled and shook her head. ‘A secret,’ she said. Each night while we waited for Morgan to come home, she baked. The house would be dark and quiet. Sometimes she would look in at our bedroom door, come in and close the window or pull the sheet up over my shoulder, before going downstairs. Perhaps she imagined that the smell of chocolate and sugar would draw Morgan home. That he would turn up at the back door just as
she finished beating the cake batter, asking to lick the beaters clean.
She had her favourites: pistachio cardamom with Turkish coffee ganache, wild fig with ginger cream, or amaretto cream cheese topped with almonds and cinnamon. Their scents filled the house, making the walls seem softer, the night warmer. While she worked she would play music, turned down very low. The sounds of cellos and violins blended with the smells of cinnamon and star anise, lemongrass and toasted coconut. Sometimes I snuck out of bed and sat on the bottom step, listening to her hum and bake. One night she put a batch of cakes into the oven and clapped it shut. Set the timer and said – quietly, as if she was continuing an ongoing conversation – ‘You might as well put the kettle on.’
At midnight, while the next batch was still baking, we drank tea and taste-tested the first batch of cupcakes while we iced the ones that had already cooled. The night was cold and dark, but the kitchen was warm. She talked about the shop: the books she had ordered, the people who came in, what they read, what they bought for each other as gifts. She said that she believed she had learned patience and the art of letting someone go if they needed to, at least and at last, and that Morgan would come home one day. Perhaps. She told me that she did not believe in holding on to things that did not want to be held.
‘I never believed in baby talk. In treating you like fools because you were small. If you could talk, you should talk sense. If you could walk, you should walk. Your grandmother didn’t approve of such things. She bought us strollers and baby books, told your father I lacked a true maternal instinct.’ She grimaced at me. ‘I donated most of her gifts to Lifeline.’
She asked me what books I thought we should order for the children’s section, and brought out catalogues from the publishers, spreading them out on the table between the mixing bowls and the paper sacks of flour and icing sugar. We bent over the booklets together, marking things that appealed to us, that we thought we could sell. We discussed the need to balance our sense of what people should read with what they would read. She asked me what the kids at school were reading, and told me that she had started paying closer attention to the books she saw people reading at the bus stop. That she had caught the bus into town and back several times now, just to see what people were carrying with them.