Dying in the First Person

by Nike Sulway

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Robert. I don’t think you should come visiting so often. At all, to be honest. You were his friend, and he’s gone, and I know you feel obligated to help out, but the boys and I – we’re fine.’ She poured the boiling water into the pot, turned it three times on its stand. ‘Don’t think I’m not grateful for your small kindnesses. I like small kindnesses. In fact, I prefer them to the more substantial kind, but I’m done with them now.’

  ‘I understand, Solange.’

  ‘I know you do. And I’ll be sure to ask for your help if I do need anything. But I don’t. The boys and I, we need to get on with things.’

  She poured the tea, served him a slice of cake and sat with him for an hour making polite conversation about his boat and his catch, his wife and children, about the small town in which he had lived his whole life, and the dreams he had of a bigger boat, better weather. After an hour, he left. She stood behind the closed screen door and watched him go, her shoulders softening with relief.

  In the late mornings, we would sometimes find ourselves waiting for our father’s return. Each of us would be occupied with some task, but have one eye on the road up from the river, watching for him. We imagined him coming in, sprinkled with fish scales that gleamed like sequins. They would be on his shirt and his bare forearms, even his face, so that at first he would seem half-fish, half-man. A dark-haired creature of the mer, come up out of the sea to gather us in his nets.

  At the end of a day of fishing, when he had come through the kitchen door, it used to seem as though he was still sloughing off that other skin – thick and oiled and black as a seal’s – in which he lived his seaborne life. Did he have another wife, down there in the sea, other sons to whom he had returned while we spent the day in the dry, hot air? Is that where my stillborn sister lived? A pearl-pink angel sleeping among coral and weed. Did he spend his life hauling himself from one climate to another, passing from world to world like an antique god?

  By day he was all legs and flesh and teeth. But he was unsheathed by night, like a glittering, muscled trout.

  At night, our old dog slept on the end of my bed: something my mother had never allowed when my father was alive. When I woke at night – conscious of the sound of my mother moving around downstairs, or of Morgan coming in or going out of the window – he would raise his head and turn to look at me. His brown eyes would glisten in the soft light, urging me to lie back, to pull the sheets up over my shoulders and turn away.

  The first night Morgan stole away I was sleeping. I didn’t hear him wake, or slip out of his bed. I didn’t hear the floor creak, or the drawers sliding open when he dressed. I didn’t hear him open the window. And then he was gone.

  Sometimes, when I woke in the morning, he was just coming in again. Sometimes he didn’t return. Occasionally, I would wake to find him sleeping. He would be lying on top of the sheets, as though flung onto the bed by the wind that bore him through the night. He would sleep in his clothes, barefoot. The soles of his feet black, his hair tangled. He smelt of the sea and of fresh air. Of a terrible wildness. Sometimes, while I lay in the dark waiting for sleep to come, I would try to stay awake long enough to see him go. Or, better still, to stop him. I would stare at the ceiling and conjugate verbs, one hand under the blankets pinching my leg every time my eyes closed.

  I considered tying him to the bed, like a prisoner or a madman, strapping him down with thick white bands to protect him from the winds that came in the night and tore him from me. I concentrated on the lines of force that I believed connected us to each other. On holding him down, holding him close, but every night I fell asleep. And every night he went out into the dark and was lost.

  My father had told us many times about the night Odysseus slept. Ithaca – home – had been in sight when Odysseus, exhausted with war and journeying, lay down on the deck of his ship and slept.

  His crew, returning to their homes and families without gifts of plunder, thought that the sack Aeolus had given Odysseus contained gold, and opened the sack while he slept. The sack contained the winds: all of them, except the west wind. A gift indeed for a man of the sea. (At this my father threw back his head, opened wide his arms. The winds tangled his hair). The crew opened the mouth of the sack wide, and the great winds roared out, creating a storm. The twelve ships of Odysseus’s fleet were swept out to sea, away from the shore, away from the glow and the drifting smoke of the home fires.

  Odysseus woke to chaos. The winds of the south, the north and the east raged about him; his home was once more distant. His crew had betrayed him while he slept. He looked back towards Ithaca and despaired.

  But I

  awakened from sleep, considered in my excellent heart

  whether to drop from the deck and die right there in the sea

  or to endure, keep silent, go on being one of the living.

  One night my mother came into our room. It was late and dark and hot. The window was open but there was no breeze. She sat on Morgan’s bed and put her hand on his pillow.

  ‘He’ll be back soon,’ I said.

  She went to the window, looked out at the road, and the bushland on the other side, down towards the river and the sea. ‘I can’t sleep,’ she said. ‘I keep thinking he’s still alive; that he’s downstairs waiting for me, or out to sea. Lost in some terrible storm.’

  She turned towards me, her eyes a dark gleam in her pale face. ‘We always thought he’d die at sea, you know. We thought she would claim him. He talked about it sometimes, how it was the way he’d rather go. Standing foursquare on the deck with a storm roaring in his ears and the spray lashing him.’ She sat on my bed, and put her hand in Enki’s fur, kissed his ragged head, and smiled a little, leaned over me and kissed my forehead. ‘You love most what you fear most,’ she said.

  Our mother had always said this, an unconsoling mantra. When we were young, we had thought she was talking about our father. When he came in from a long or difficult day on the water, his muscles sore, his hair wild and salt-stiffened, she would run him a hot bath and settle him in it. Then she’d come down to the kitchen and pour him a glass of dark whisky. She’d stand at the window and look out at the thin slip of ocean she could see from the window and say it, like a prayer: you love most what you fear most. We had understood her because we felt it ourselves.

  That night, when she leant and kissed me on the forehead – her mouth hot – I realised she meant that our father had most loved and most feared the ocean. And that she had resented his passion for it; that she felt it as a betrayal of the love he should have given her. She was glad that he had not died in the ocean’s arms, after all, but here, on her land. In her home.

  She waited a decent amount of time before she sold off his boat, and most of the nets and other equipment. Those things she couldn’t sell she threw out or burned. She emptied out the shed of all the things she didn’t recognise or need, and hired a boy to help her load up the trailer and drive it out to the tip to get rid of it all. She kept his old boots by the back door, and a few other things that reminded us more of his absence than of who he’d been when he was alive. Without him they were merely objects, cumbersome and purposeless.

  His chair on the back deck, and the old fishing creel he kept his tools in, stayed where he had left them for several months after he died. Nobody sat there, and nobody used the tools. Eventually, my mother moved the creel into the shed. The dog chewed up one of the boots. The next day when I came home from school I found them sitting opposite each other on the top step up to the deck, with parsley and basil sprouting out of their chewed necks.

  Morgan came home later and less often. At the breakfast table my mother would set out his bowl and spoon alongside my own. When I came downstairs she’d glance up to see if he was following me. When she saw that he wasn’t there, she’d gather them up and put them away. The china bowl clinked into place. The cupboard door clicked closed with a quiet, heartbroken snick. She’d pour herself coffee and sit at the table with me, t
alking about nothing in particular, glancing up at the window every now and then to see if he was coming up the road.

  Sometimes Morgan left notes, in Nahum, saying he was going north, or south. I brought them down from the bedroom, or found my mother sitting with one lying on the table near her coffee. I would translate the notes for her, word by word, showing her how it was done.

  ‘It doesn’t mean he’s going a long way,’ I said. ‘In Nahum, you always use compass directions to talk about where you are going, or where things are. You don’t say to go left or right, or straight ahead, because it doesn’t matter where you are, and probably the person who reads your words won’t know where you are from, or where you were standing when you wrote the note, so you give directions relative to the main island: the first island of Nahum that was settled. To tell someone where the island with the lighthouse is, you would write: Go east of the main island, and then turn south. You don’t write that the crab pot is behind you; you write: It is on the most southerly chair in the room.

  My mother nodded, turned the note towards her and studied it. ‘Was this Morgan’s idea?’

  ‘Some of it,’ I said.

  She folded the note in four and tucked it into her pocket. ‘You know, Morgan always had strange ideas. Do you remember Clarence, his imaginary friend? Once, when I told him he’d done a good job of something – some drawing he was working on – Morgan told me that I was lying. Apparently, Clarence didn’t like Morgan’s drawings at all. Clarence said he had no sense of form or colour.’ She looked out the window again, then drank the last of her coffee and started clearing away the breakfast things. ‘Clarence,’ she said, ‘was an arsehole.’

  *

  It was Monday. It had been raining all night. Ana had an ultrasound appointment, which she had clearly forgotten. The driveway down to the cabin was littered with blossoms knocked out of the canopy by the rain. The trees made a different sound in the rain, not rattling their song, but shirring, murmuring like wet silk. I knocked on the door and heard Ana call out from the studio.

  She was working almost naked. An old, stained T-shirt tied at the front, tucked up over her expanding belly. Boxer shorts scooped beneath it. Her hair knotted up on the back of her head and pinned with mismatched chopsticks. A mottled rag tucked into the waistband of the shorts. Her pale bare feet were as small as a dancer’s. A tin of beeswax polish lay open on the floor beside her. There was a smear of something on her cheek – something as dark and thick as old honey. She did not look up when I came in. Both hands were on the wood – no tools – she was rubbing the limbs smooth with her hands, every now and then dipping her fingertips into the jar of grease, rubbing them together to warm and soften the wax before she smoothed it over the wood. Just a little each time. All the windows were open. The wet smell of the forest moving through the room.

  I kissed the back of her neck, flattened my palm on her belly, the skin tight and warm as a beaten drum. I felt her smile through my closed eyes: the tightening of a cheek, the tilt of her chin. And through it all the firm, repetitive strokes of her hands, quickening the timber child she was stroking into life. ‘Nearly there,’ she said. ‘Nearly there.’

  A long strand of hair fell loose over her bare neck, so perfect, so black and clean and smooth it broke my heart.

  I have brushed her hand as she moved past me, and lain beside her in the dark, listening to the child forming in her body. While she lay in my arms I recited poems. I lay down words on her breasts, on her long, strong limbs, on her mouth. I whispered to her in the dark, chanting along the veins in her wrists, up into the bend of her elbow, over the blue rivers that beat against my lip, tracing her edges, laying down sentences in the soft cavities behind her knees. She has lifted me up and held my face in her hands and kissed me and looked at me. Looked at me for a long, long time. She has swallowed me with her dark eyes.

  Outside the window silence boomed its chorus, rising and breathing while she bloomed, while she lay with me, her skin soft and fragrant as rain-beaten flowers.

  *

  I was awake in the early hours of the morning, working on the translation of Motet. Those eighteen symbols had entered my dreams and when I woke that night – after midnight – I felt I knew, finally, what they were. I left Ana sleeping to go to the study, switched on the desk light and took that single page with its spine of symbols down from the corkboard. I had a sheet on which I had listed all the folio pages on which they appeared. I began with the first symbol and worked my way through the whole thing, noting the form of the definite articles.

  I had noticed that some of the articles were slightly different in this manuscript – the initial downward stroke slightly curved at the top, like a walking cane or a shepherd’s crook, with the dot that indicated the case at the top. At first, I had thought it was just a slight change in Morgan’s handwriting, but then yesterday, when I was sitting with my mother, she asked me to read to her from an old bilingual copy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. The German facing off against Snow’s English translation. My mother was not a reader of German – it was French she loved, and Latin – but she enjoyed bilingual editions and collected them when she could.

  … But listen to the wind’s breathing,

  that uninterrupted news that forms from silence.

  It’s rustling toward you now from all the youthful dead.

  … aber das Wehende höre,

  Die ununterbrochene Nachricht, die aus Stille sich bildet.

  Es raucht jetzt von jenen jungen Toten zu dir.

  Sitting in the quiet of my mother’s house, with all the windows closed and the air conditioning humming and my mother lying on the lounge, her eyes closed, I had noticed again how powerful the gender of the grammar was in Rilke’s work, and how much of the poeticism of the work was lost when it was brought over into English. The old conundrums come into play: how to communicate in an ungendered tongue the subtle ways in which gender shapes your sense of a noun’s denotative meaning? The neuter wind, the feminine silence, the masculine death became in English just wind and silence and death. In my mother’s beloved French, their genders would shift: the masculine wind, the masculine silence, the feminine death. And if I had tried to render Rilke in Nahum?

  There are three classes of noun in Nahum, each indicated by the form of the definite article. The masculine, which is used for the men of the island, and for the tools they create – for nets and tables and chairs – is a thin downward stroke, like a plain lower case l, with a dot at the top right. Then there is the atollic class, which indicates things of the islands, or the earth. It includes trees and land animals, grass, earth and seeds, and is indicated by a downward stroke with a dot at centre right. And finally, there is the aquatic class – for seaweed and fish, shells and tides – indicated by the downward stroke followed by a dot at the base. And then, finally, I realised that Morgan had created a fourth class: neither masculine, nor earthbound, nor aquatic. The dot – the true indicator of case – was at the top, perhaps suggesting that the new case was closest to the masculine case.

  I opened the manuscript to a page on which the new symbols first appeared. A handful of them littered the page, and I recognised, finally, what they were. Not words to describe a fish or a bear or a whale – or some fabulous mer-creature he had invented – but a woman. Morgan had brought a woman, and a feminine class of nouns, to the islands of men. I crowded my notebook with annotations, scanned the subsequent pages for the new definite article, and the strange compacted nouns it introduced, wondering how I had managed to overlook its distinct difference, seeing for the first time that when the woman – the woman! – speaks, she gives the moon and the spear the feminine gender – her own gender.

  I opened my tattered Nahum dictionary, and began making notations there, too. In this new form of Nahum – in the woman’s tongue – the wind is feminine, silence is masculine, and death? Death shifts: taking on the gender of the thing that dies.

  The phone rang in another room and I heard Ana’s sl
eep-drowned voice speaking, though I couldn’t hear what she said. There were two long silences. Outside, the light was beginning to spill into the world; it was too early for it to be anyone other than Rachel, who would have just arrived at the house for her long day with my mother. Usually she slept at the house. Sometimes, when she was away, Ana or I stayed with my mother until she went up to bed. Often, after leaving the house, I would drive around the block and pull up outside again, watching the light in her bedroom, waiting for her to turn it off so that I could go home.

  I looked at my watch and started tidying my desk, still excited about the breakthrough I had made, but conscious that Rachel didn’t usually call so early. I felt a mild twinge of irritation that, whatever it was that she was calling about, it was likely to mean that the rest of my day would be consumed by caring for my mother. She had fallen, or weakened, or had another infection; her white blood cell count was too low, or her platelet count plummeting. Some piece of equipment was broken, or in need of servicing. I would be drawn away from my study for at least a day, possibly longer, taking my mother to the hospital, chauffeuring her from one specialist’s office to another, filling prescriptions, calling suppliers or tradesman. I started rehearsing the conversations my mother and I could have – the topics that might keep her occupied while we waited in an endless series of waiting rooms. I imagined telling her about the breakthrough I had made. I was taking it all too lightly; all too seriously. We can’t take ourselves seriously without getting things wrong.

  I went out to the kitchen, filled the kettle, lit the gas. I heard Ana hang up the phone and come into the kitchen. ‘What did she say?’ I asked.

  Ana came up behind me, and put her hand on the back of my shoulder. There was a pale, scratched light bleeding in across the vitrified sky. When I turned towards her she touched my face. I heard a bird outside, singing, and closed my eyes and did not think of my father, or my brother, or of being alone. A week earlier, driving home from the hospital, my mother had pointed out a kingfisher perched on the powerlines outside her house. ‘Birds sing in their own language,’ she had said, ‘and they sing the same thing whether they are in a park or a forest or a cage. They have their phrases, their small repertoire, and spend a lifetime perfecting them. They do not sing to please anyone; they know their notes, and they sing them.’