Dying in the First Person

by Nike Sulway

  I never really understood his fury, though eventually I came to terms with it. It rose up sometimes, at unexpected moments. In the early years I tried to stand in front of him and challenge it. I thought I could help him understand his anger, and let it go. I thought I could gentle him; I didn’t understand how strong and deep it ran.

  ‘Morgan,’ I said.

  He dropped the tin into the sink with a great clatter and turned, batter still cloaking his hands, and slapped me. He grabbed my upper arm and pressed his face close to my own. ‘I hate cake,’ he spat, the words hot on his breath, burning across the bruise I could feel forming on my cheek and mouth. ‘I hate baking; I hate the smell of it. I despise the waste of eggs and sugar and butter and time. Cake does not nurture the body; it poisons it. You will not bake cake in my home. If you want to cook, go to a soup kitchen. Bake bread for the starving, not cake for yourself, you fucking princess.’

  When I was a child, my father had baked a cake each year for my birthday: lumpen, hopeful things with icing that slid over their edges in pink and white rivers. Candles that tilted and dripped wax. He would carry it into the dining room on a plate, candles burning, singing ‘Er is er één jarig’ and smiling, proudly. The cake was often too heavy, or too light. He would forget the sugar or put too little flour or milk in the mix, but it was made with love and every year we ate it together, smiling and laughing, swallowing it bite by bite until one of us relented.

  ‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’ my father would say.

  ‘Yes,’ I would reply. ‘Dreadful.’

  My father would lift a sad spoonful of cake and icing onto his spoon, and flick it across the table at me. It would land in my hair or on my face, or on the crisp, white lace of my birthday collar. I would stick out my tongue, or scoop it off with my finger and eat it. ‘Terrible,’ I would say, very seriously, before loading my own spoon and sending a black-bottomed slice of cake soaring over the table towards him.

  Afterwards there would be a bath with bubbles, and then hot chocolate and a slice of (shop-bought) cake or biscuit by the fire.

  For Morgan, baking cake, eating it, was evidence of a moral failure to remember the world we lived in. People were dying, cities collapsing, children starving. Everywhere, there were wars we could not stop. Lives going on, endlessly on, without any hope or comfort. Every day, women were raped, children were forced into slavery, cultures were wiped out. How could I eat cake? he asked, his face a riot of confusion and hurt and anger. How could I sit and feel the sun on my face? How could I linger over my coffee, spend time dreaming, write poetry, sing love songs? Let alone make or buy gifts for him, which he did not need, and wrap them in tinsel and coloured paper.

  If he was given gifts at Christmas or on his birthday, he would give them away, unopened. Leaving them beneath the Christmas tree at the supermarket, or handing them to a homeless stranger on the tram or in a park. When you or Solange sent him gifts I kept them for myself. In the later years, it seemed to me that the gifts you sent were not really for him anyway, but for that other man – the Morgan I had created for you – the one who wrote long letters, and told stories, and lived forever in the archipelago the two of you had made.

  Morgan believed that I should be ashamed of the comforts life had afforded me. I should wear my First World luxuries like a hairshirt, feeling them prick and sting. I should use any and all of the privileges I had in the effort to improve the lives of those who would never know what it was to sit in a square opposite a beautiful church sipping coffee. I should work hard and long, stopping only to eat and sleep. I should shred my clothes for bandages. I should write letters and petitions until my fingers bled. I should chain myself to trees and buildings. I should make bombs. I should deny myself everything. Beauty. Friendship. Even love. Especially love.

  That spring – the spring Solange’s letter came – Morgan was working on a long essay on the history of violence, the desecrations and futility of war, and, of course, the need for action. The shapes it should take. It was based on a speech he had given in the Huis te Vraag: a local cemetery. Decades ago the Huis te Vraag had failed financially and been sold to the Church – the bodies of the dead, their graves and monuments included – by the family who had founded it. Still more decades passed; the graveyard became full and then fell into ruin. Finally, in the 1980s, an artist couple took up residence in the former funeral hall. These new caretakers lived in a closed and consecrated village of the dead that might sink, as so much of Holland seemed destined to do, back into the ocean. Developers and speculators had fought to have the land deconsecrated and turned into housing, or shops. They considered its graves prime real estate, the bodies so much landfill. But the cemetery remained hallowed ground, and would do so for seventy-five years after the last body was interred: the legal interpretation of eternity. Seventy-five years was the average span of a person’s life. Three generations. The time it takes for the body to return to dust. After the Second World War, with its waves upon waves of the dead crowding the cemeteries, the period of eternity was reduced, this time to thirty years. The developers waited – are still waiting – for eternity to pass, for the dead to give up their land to the living. There were unnamed thousands buried in the gardens of the Huis te Vraag. During the war, Jewish men, women and children had hidden there, and secretly buried their dead beneath the green paths.

  The cemetery was a comfort to Morgan, a reassurance. It wasn’t the presence of the dead that calmed him. Or the shade provided by the trees. It was the stillness. The mute evidence of death’s repose. That all this fighting, all this struggle, might someday cease and that, no matter what the capitalist scum desired, their rest – his rest – might finally go undisturbed.

  In the years when the fate of the cemetery was undecided – before it was declared a conservation area – Morgan railed against the developers: those faceless, nameless men and women who would dig up the dead, overturn their rest, to build shopping centres and cheap apartments. He said that only in the Netherlands would people consider digging up the dead to build a marketplace. He despised those corporations that saw nothing in the cemetery but potential profit. He said they were typical of the scum who sought change for its own sake. Who had no respect for the past, or for the way things should remain.

  When the house and its gardens were reopened he was one of the first to visit, and he had returned over and over again since. He liked to go there at night, climbing the fences to wander in the closed, empty garden, or to sit with his back against a standing stone, watching the sodium lights of the tram depot bouncing off the snow in winter. Sometimes I would go with him, and he would ask me to tell him about my childhood, about my father and the small compass within which I had lived as a child. He particularly liked to hear the story about when I was seven or eight years old, and my father had told me I could wander wherever I liked so long as I wore a hat and a coat if it was cold, and so long as I never wandered so far that I could not see the tower of Sint Janskerk.

  ‘That far and no further?’ Morgan would say, repeating the words my father had said so long ago.

  I nodded.

  ‘And you never wandered further than he told you?’

  ‘I never needed to.’

  ‘Until he died.’

  ‘Until he died. Then I wandered a long way, as far away from home as I could go. To Africa and South America, to India and Nepal.’

  ‘But at night?’

  At night I dreamed of the stained-glass windows: of Judith with the head of Holofernes, of Crabeth’s the Last Supper, in which John lies across Christ’s lap as he speaks.’

  ‘Bishop von Egmond?’

  ‘The bishop in his great robes, with his dog curled up beside him, Solomon consecrating the temple, Philip the Second and Bloody Mary, the willow, cattails and reeds in the River Jordan where John stands, waiting to be baptised.’

  ‘And Jesus?’

  And Jesus bending before the adulterous woman – beautiful, eyes closed as though in pain �
� to write on the ground in fine Dutch script, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her”.’

  ‘Who else was in your dreams?’

  ‘My father,’ I said. ‘In my dreams, my father was always in the church, waiting for me. He would step down, out of the stained-glass panel where St Vincent normally stood, wearing the saint’s dark blue robe and carrying his shepherd’s crook. The raven perched on the end of the crook would flap and cry out in greeting and then a flock of them would come – all dark wings and bright eyes – and wrap themselves around me, like a dark, enfolding cloud.’ I turned on my side to face him. A plane thundered over us, heading towards Schiphol airport with all its lights flickering and blazing, like some strange modern angel.

  He was waiting for me to finish the story, though it didn’t have much of an ending. ‘And when you came home?’

  ‘When I came home and went to my father’s grave they were there – St Vincent’s ravens.’ I held out my hand so that Morgan could see the tiny, sickle-shaped scar in the webbing of my left hand. ‘When I knelt to put flowers on his grave they attacked me. One of them scratched at my clothes with its claws and another flew onto my head and pecked at my ear. I put up my arms to protect my face and another of them dived at me, pecked at my hands. It gave me this scar.’

  Morgan traced the ragged shape of the old scar with his finger. ‘Once your blood spilled they were satisfied.’

  I nodded, put my hand back in my pocket and lay down on the grass, stared up at the too-familiar stars, the sharp-faced moon. ‘Once my blood spilled on his grave, he knew I was truly home. Safe and sound.’

  8 Weeks: The Skeleton Begins to Form

  When I first met Morgan, he told me he had never believed in giving in to the false glamour of romantic love; he didn’t believe in the debt it raised between people. He believed in the necessity of sex for reproduction and release, but he considered attachment – love – a poison. He told me that romantic love was an illusion. He told me that it only ever led to betrayal, dishonesty and pain. He said love was a distraction from politics, from the real work of being human. He believed in dedicating yourself to the world; in loving the world and the strangers who were imprisoned within it. He had been vigilant against love his whole life.

  When I met him he was a runaway, a renegade, living hand-to-mouth on the streets. When I brought him to my home, he slept and ate and paced the rooms as though it were a cage, and I his half-loved, half-reviled keeper. He was thin and brown. The long bones of his hands, the knuckles and veins, were burnished by the heat of the places he had been, by the diseases that had run through him, burning away the fat and softness, by the sorrow he had swallowed like a bitter tonic. He had spent a lot of time in churches and galleries in the years before I found him: they were mostly open and free when everywhere else was closed against him. As well as the endless notebooks, he carried with him photographs of paintings, sure that they spoke to some essential character of the people he had met in those places. The paintings he photographed were of fishes and horses, churches and infants, and one of an inscription on the door of a house near a lake. Some days he would spend hours poring over these images, trying to piece together some understanding of the world that lay just beyond the limits of language.

  I had discovered Morgan in Sint Janskerk, wrapped in an old, stinking coat, huddled against the walls of the choir facing St Vincent. I had gone to Gouda to visit the church because it was my father’s birthday and I could no longer remember what he had looked like when he was alive. His features and those of St Vincent had merged in my memory: my father’s warm, round features cooling and flattening into the sepia and light of Vincent’s. I went there to remember what it felt like to be within the circle of my father’s domain.

  Morgan was muttering to himself, and writing in his notebook. There were a few other people in the church – tourists, stepping sheepishly on the tombstone floor – but they avoided him. St Vincent’s glass overlooks the curving corridor of the ambulatory, and the choir and is quite close to what is now the visitors’ entrance. Opposite St Vincent is the apostle Andreas, who looks away, towards the long open nave of the church, holding lightly to the posts of the crucifix on which he will be hung. I squatted beside Morgan without looking at him. He was dressed like a homeless man, in scuffed, holey shoes and dirty clothes, but I noticed his hands, which were clean and fine, and the notebook in which he wrote: heavy, expensive paper with a soft leather cover. A slim, expensive-looking fountain pen. I settled my bag on my lap and took out my father’s birthday cake. A small, square cake with pink icing and a lopsided candle. Morgan glanced at the cake, and then at the doorway to the visitors’ entrance. At the time I thought he was nervous on my behalf – worried that I would be discovered and my tiny candle snuffed out; later I realised that the cake and candle distressed him. That he had sought refuge in churches because they were consecrated to loss and sacrifice – things he understood and valued – havens from the indulgent excesses of the outside world.

  I lit the candle and cupped my hand around it. The tiny flame shivered in the cool, open cave of the church. ‘Happy birthday, Dad,’ I said. I waited until the candle had nearly melted away before I blew it out. The cake was lopsided, the icing lumpy and unevenly coloured. It had become a challenge to make such appalling gifts. Too often, it seemed to me, they had the appearance of cartoon failures – neat and clear asymmetries instead of the hopeful catastrophes my father had made. I offered Morgan a piece of cake, breaking it off and handing it to him on a paper napkin.

  ‘My father would have been sixty-five today,’ I said.

  Morgan took the proferred cake and held it in his hand without eating it.

  ‘He loved this church. He lived in Gouda his whole life. He told me he could remember when the glass was taken down during the war, stored safely in lightless rooms. When the war was over, he came and watched them take the boards down, watched the great sheets of glass being put up again. He stood inside the church the next day and felt the light fall down into what had been for so long a dark, sad place. He knew then, he said, that the war was really over. Years later – when he was a young man – he worked on the restoration of the church. He used to make stained glass. He had started out making lampshades – reproductions of art nouveau pieces – and then windows for the rich. He said it was one of the happiest times of his life, when they gave him a job restoring the glass here. He took the windows down one by one – sometimes in sections – and cleaned and polished the glass, replaced the pieces that had cracked or broken, replaced the lead caming – he even repainted some of the damaged pieces: hands and feet, the wings of angels. The face of von Egmond’s dog.’

  I pointed up at St Vincent. At his round chin and hooded eyes, his tonsured head. ‘St Vincent’s face, too. My father told me that it was so faded it was almost impossible to see what his features had been like, so he based the recreation on his own father’s face. A kind of blending of what was there and Opa’s face. I never met Opa – he died in the war. To me St Vincent always looks like my own father.’

  ‘My father is dead too,’ Morgan said. ‘He died when I was a boy.’

  ‘Do you remember what he looked like?’ I said.

  Morgan stared up at the portrait of St Vincent. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I remember what he looked like when he died. I wish I could forget, but I can’t.’

  I took Morgan back to my apartment in Haarlem and made him bathe. I lit the fire and gave him clothes to wear and made him eat. He showed me his notebooks, filled with page after page written in a language only you and he understood. He told me about you – about his brother – about how much he loved you, and how connected he had felt to you as a boy. He told me how strange it felt to know that somewhere in the world some other part of himself wandered, separate and apart. He told me that when he was born, he was holding onto your foot, that he had followed you out into the world unwillingly and that, while you greeted the air and light with eyes wide
open, he had kept his eyes closed and his hands balled into fists. He told me that, as a boy, he had often dreamed that you were born Siamese twins and had to be cut away from each other, and that when he woke he would check for the thick black stitches he was sure he would find on his body and yours.

  He said he was writing about the Hidden Truths of the world. He was recording the last words of dying people. He spoke with great regret of a language he had heard that was now dead.

  He showed me the notations he had made regarding a women’s language whose last speaker had no daughter to teach it to, who had leant across to him while her blood pooled in his hands and whispered a handful of words. And he had heard them, felt them, each word like a bone piercing his skin. He showed them to me, scrawled on a dirt-stained page in one of his endless notebooks. I could see that saying the words again made his heart break.

  Though I did not love him, I was his lover for a while. He was like an act of extreme weather. A cyclone or a volcano into whose path I had placed myself. I faced him foursquare. He was a force I wanted to get close to, to be penetrated and torn apart by. Annihilated.