by Leon Rooke
Mr. Wriggley’s mind reeled. He was shocked. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her that would be the day. A cold day in hell before you’d find him doing woman’s work.
But Orillia was shaking her two fists. “Now!” she cried. “This minute! And I don’t mean maybe!”
He could not believe a skinny, naked, feckless little sparkplug could display such fire. Or be so bossy. Her inconsideration of a working man’s dignity utterly amazed him.
She yanked the pipe away. “Like this, Mr. Wriggley!” she shouted. And she shoved the nozzle back and forth over the befouled carpet. Then thrust the machine back into his hands.
It all happened so rapidly Mr. Wriggley could only stand in mute disbelief as she plopped down again on the sofa, squirming her body tidily against the cushions, pointing the soles of her tiny white feet out at him. “You exhaust me, sir,” she raggedly intoned. “You exercise me to my very timbers.”
Elsewhere in the house, a baby’s unmistakable shriek sounded. Mr. Wriggley’s expression mottled. His shoulders came up almost to cover his ears. The squall loudened. He might do a woman’s work. He might. But never to that inhuman squealing.
Orillia bolted up, smiling. “Little Petey wants his din-din,” she said. “Mother’s coming, darling!”
She darted away, a witch on a stick.
Mr. Wriggley clenched his eyes tight. He straightened his arms and legs, his spine, his toes and fingers – he went rigid all over. It was a trick he had for composing himself. His hope was that his brain would go altogether dead. It would resist cranking. It might spit and sputter, emit ghastly fumes, but he’d be unaware of this. Such was his hope. Ula had come across him in this posture once, and when speech had not been forthcoming she’s stuck an upholstery needle into his buttock. She’d struck a match and held it beneath his fingers. The same then against his very eyelids. He had felt nothing. All Mr. Wriggley knew at such times was that the uneasy world was a far, far space removed. He’d arrived in a land occupied, if at all, by sniffing rodents, swooping loose-jointed birds big as dinosaurs, and him. It was some kind of strange working man’s paradise, in that here there was no work at all. Everything had been done. He was as replete in that space as a minister on an old-fashioned Sunday.
He stood so now, anticipating a similar rapture. He’d come through galloping trees wide as rail cars and over hunchback snowcaps to this land’s end, to this gnomed grove ghostly, maddened Indians had named Ucluelet – come to the very rim of the Rim. He’d come, seeking improvement for his fortunes, to this island’s lonely, bemisted, strangely beautiful final edge, and mortal bones could carry him no farther.
Needles couldn’t touch him. Fire couldn’t. But a baby’s lusty squawl apparently could penetrate Mr. Wriggley’s potent armour. His left eye squinted open. Then the right. Both looked down, from oppressive height, with their owner’s accustomed vigour, to the pinkish infant cradled in Orillia’s swaying arms.
“Petey and I were worried, Mr. Wriggley,” she confided, as though with a touch of pride. “You made our gooseflesh rise. We were wondering did your fierce vacuuming have you hypnotized.”
True, Mr. Wriggley still gripped the whirring machine. True – and how oddly… how to explain it? – the carpet was now spotless! Not a footprint to be seen! He regarded with impolite suspicion his other hand: the lump of coal, carried all this while, lay in inert adherence to his palm, now a crumpled ash molded to that shape his fingers had pressed upon it.
“Goodness, Mr. Wriggley, you’ve crushed that coal. Petey, look at Mr. Wriggley. Isn’t he strong! Isn’t he utterely fantastic!” She shivered, eyes flashing, as though thrilled beyond endurance by Mr. Wriggley’s awesome powers.
The baby, with its wide innocent eyes, rolled away from his uncritical scan of Mr. Wriggley’s features, and buried himself chin, nose, and cheek into Orillia Peterson’s exposed bosom. It sucked and kicked its legs and made such rash, thirsting, rapacious noises that Mr. Wriggley, his consciousness newly emerging, smacked that same hand which had flattened the coal up to his brow and through his hair and again and again over his face. Nothing made him shudder more than the sight of nursing infants. In public or private, he was strictly opposed. He dimly remembered that such had been his wife Ula’s final undoing. This tit-sharing business indicated to him that God had forsaken all dealings with the female race. It indicated to him that females of every stripe should be kept penned up and only visited once or twice a month or as often as you had to carry slops and water to them. Ula had unleashed maniacal laughter when he said this to her. She’d then calmly, mysteriously, said, “How is it I have chanced to fall for such an unmitigated disaster? But you be on guard, Mr. Wriggley. As the Lord is my Shepherd, I’ll uproot you yet.”
“Eat, little darling,” he heard Orillia Peterson say.
The baby’s head flopped over and fixed its moist, doleful eyes on Mr. Wriggley – it seemed to him they did – then the head flopped back and resumed its gross suckling.
I shouldn’t have come here, Mr. Wriggley thought. Ucluelet was the wrong place. The very edge of the edge was not far enough.
He wondered where otherwise he might have journeyed. Wondered whether there was any place left on earth, with its ramshackle tidings, where an honest labourer might stake out new roots, plant his boots, lay claim to decent fortune.
Nowhere, he thought. Nowhere. For a man of my burdens, less I have benefit of divine interference. Less I have a hamperful of proper instruction.
Ula hadn’t had milk. She’d moped and moped. Wailed and wailed. “Dry, dry, dry! It’s how you look at me that dries me up like a desert bug!” She’d twisted and spun and jumped about like a snake in a fire. “Where went my mother’s milk?”
He’d liked Ula dry; she had some modicum of decency, as he saw it, so long as she remained dry. But she wouldn’t let it alone. She’d messaged her breasties, poked and prodded them, coaxed and pinched and punched. She herself had swallowed milk by the bucketful; she’d swallowed pills and seaweed tea and gone to doctors and stood on her head. She swaddled her great breasties in towels steaming-hot to the touch. She said, “You suck, Mr. Wriggley. I’d have milk to waste, if only I could get these jugs primed!” And he might have, even then, even irked as he was, if she’d said, “Do it like this, my good man.” If she’d told him exactly how she wanted it done: how long and precisely with what force and what he was to do once he’d wrested the first mouthful. For he took no stand against Ula’s breasties as such, nor against fitting his working man’s lips over her rosy, enormous nipples. It was the labourer’s role in this madcap world – to serve. To broaden the knowledge, advance the method, refine the technique. To say nay to no task. It might be dirty, reprehensible work, but he’d never shunned that.
So he wasn’t unwilling. No, it was the baby’s part in the job that unhinged him. He hardly saw how Ula had come by having that baby in the first place. She was at a stove he recognized, in a room that was their own; she had a pan on that stove, with steam rising from it. She turned – inside Mr. Wriggley’s head she turned – and stood a moment in cautious, unoptimistic study of him, her expression fixed, and faintly hostile. She had a blue bruise on her left cheek. He saw her shake drops of milk onto her wrist, and next saw her tongue come out and lick away the drops.
It was kind of peaceful… even pretty… nourishing… the way he was seeing it.
Then Ula was sliding away into darkness.
“You ought to know how I come by this child,” he heard her say. “You put it there.”
But he hadn’t. He could almost swear to that.
***
Orillia Peterson was sleeping. The room was too hot; it made one drowsy. Mr. Wriggley was seated in a rocking chair, nearly asleep himself. Do whatever she wants done, Mr. Peterson had told him. Well, he was doing it. He’d never held a baby. He’d hoped he’d never have to.
Had it crawled across the carpet and climbed his legs to nestle in his lap? Well, why not? For the working man,
shorn of instruction, the whole of life was a mystery.
The baby weighed nothing.
It smelled of soap and water and powder.
Its perfumed body was warm as a heater.
Its five fingers were up in Mr. Wriggley’s mouth; one foot was hooked into his pocket.
Why was it smiling?
Mr. Wriggley was in the dark.
Ula would faint.
The working man is to his reward – was Mr. Wriggley’s uncertain thought – as the mule is to his plough.
AT HEIDEGGER’S GRAVE
The finding of the proper
in the encounter with the alien
is the path of homecoming.
—MARTIN HEIDEGGER
Upon a time once in Poland, a thousand or so years ago, a boy named Tadeusz Benunito climbed a tree, chasing what he thought was a chicken. The cooking pot in the family clearing was cooking, though without a chicken and with what the boy considered to be little else. The boy went higher in the tree. So too did the bird the boy thought was a chicken. The supposed chicken took to the highest branch, regarding the ascending boy with what the boy himself considered to be a dolelful, somewhat sympathetic expression. It seemed to the boy that the chicken he was chasing was one scarred by the ravages of a hard life and the onslaught of old age. He meant still to have the chicken for his family pot. The white feathers could be put to good use; a few might go as a necklace around his neck or as adornment for his hair. A syrupy stain the colour of blood leaked from the bird’s scarred beak but the eyes were fierce and bold; the bird seemed as unconcerned with this unsightly discharge as he was aroused by his imminent death. Perhaps – the boy thought – the bird had just eaten, although it assuredly lacked that plump fullness one associated with a steady diet. It was as poor and unsightly as he was himself. The boy had never seen a chicken with such a long bent beak, long almost as his head. But there was meat enough on the chicken’s bones and the very thought of the bird bubbling in the family pot brought sweet juices to the boy’s mouth.
Prepare to die, the boy said. The bird said nothing, tossing back its snowy, unkempt head in a scoffing manner that made the boy all the more determined. The boy reached to grab one of the chicken’s scaly legs. The bird merely lifted that leg and the boy’s hand closed on nothing. It was in that closing, in that moment when the boy’s hand closed on nothing, that the boy fell. He fell, not dying from his long fall through the nothingness of air – only, in the end, as it turned out, breaking a leg.
He would be spoken of, in the days to come, as The Boy Who Does Not Walk Easily. Or as The Boy Who Stumbles. Sometimes, merely, as The Boy Who Fell. As for the immediate event – the boy’s pursuance of what he saw as a chicken and his subsequent tumbling – the wiser speculation among those in attendance was that all the boy’s bones would be broken. If the gods were merciful he would be dead before he hit the ground.
Lo, their wonder when indeed the boy survived with merely a broken leg. The boy was young. The leg would mend. Tadeusz Benunito – of a nomadic folk some attested had got here by way of Asia (no one else carried their cooking pots on their backs from place to place; certainly not from Asia) – would not always be known as The Boy Who Stumbles, or The Boy Who Does Not Walk Easily. For years afterwards, many claimed – some of whom had been nowhere near the vicinity – that the bird itself cushioned the boy’s fall. The bird swooped down – down, down, down. Time did not exactly stop, although for some seconds those assembled around the pot in anticipation of that moment when the bird would be tossed into it saw the boy riding the bird’s wings. Riding those wide wings virtually to the ground, until, perhaps out of impatience and a sense of humiliation, the boy on his own volition surrendered his grip around the huge bird’s neck and tumbled head over heels to earth.
Which is how the foolish Tadeusz Benunito, never known for his brains but a whirlwind when it came to bravado, broke his leg. Much swearing, chest thumping, religiosity, developed in surround of this incident – with particular attention given the act of the strange bird. By those on hand, as well as by those from miles around, who would later, and for many years, affirm they had witnessed the miracle with their very own eyes.
The bird the boy held to be a chicken was, by any standard, not a chicken. It was a Polish eagle, white as the driven snow in his original conceiving (so many ages ago), come down from the skies because of its bonds with the oppressed people of that time and place. This benevolent trait the eagle himself considered close to useless, a travesty, the result of some inglorious wrangling between two-headed gods, since he could no more fill the people’s pots with chicken than he could sprinkle those pots with spices; he could only offer inspiration and hope – diversion, spectacle, aesthetic charm – and often precious little of that. Time’s encomium, dolorous song, a bird’s-eye view of ragged historicity. Winged Aquila’s simple accounting.
The eagle-that-was-chicken was eternal Poland’s symbolic bird and Keeper of the Grail. Its emblem. He had been so, the popular myth went, long before Poland existed as a nation, and in fact, in the intervals since, seemed most in evidence during those periods when the armies of other nations were doing their utmost to eradicate Poland’s land-mass and people from all memory. That is, every few years over the past one thousand.
This seemed to be the eagle’s fated mission. Après moi, le deluge, the bird would think, during more arrogant, fanciful moments. He could have been saddled with a worse fate. He could have been yoked with the never-ending miseries of the Poles themselves. An indomitable people, certainly, these Poles, though not without their flaws. Not least of which was the anti-Semitic legacy so many of their numbers embraced. Untermensch, subhuman, was a good German word that slipped easily over the Polish tongue.
The bird was very old indeed, so old that not infrequently, of dark nights when his head lifted in stark anger at the cold heavens, he conceived of – and into the hours convinced himself – that he remembered that time long ago when his body had opened and out of himself had come himself. Fully blown and already a thousand years old. That had to be, because at no time could the old bird recall having been a youth. But then he would shake his head free of this wizardry and acknowledge that this self-birthing was an idea born in antiquity and renewed with some regularity since; in, for instance, that pre-Christian era when the Agnostics in Persia, in Egyptland, over the whole of Asia Minor, out to find release from the void through which they drifted, concocted their creators and gods and saviours and serpents, more than one of whom had seeded his own womb and given birth to himself. Such insight made the bird miserable. He prided himself on being an Original Thinker, tending towards the hylozoic view, but in this concept of his own birthing he was no better than a common plagiarist.
Whence did I come? The question roiled up in the bird from time to time, and when it did he would tear at his nest, pull at his feathers, squawk at the daft Wawel custodians, spit blood at the workers trudging about with their barrows of heavy mortar, until his siege of insignificance, of meaninglessness, passed. Despair. Forgetfulness of being. Another of the great burdens placed upon his scrawny shoulders, arousing convulsions in his balding cranium.
A city bird, he thought, made moody and insecure by a cross word, a bad day, bad weather. He would berate himself while cruising the skies, reminding himself that he must keep a tighter rein on his emotions. He was childish, gross, a loony; these temper tantrums served no purpose.
Grow up, he would say. Act your age. Stay cool.
After all, fate could have ordained you a chicken.
Knowing itself to be an eagle, as far from a chicken as an eagle could get, the bird nested each night when at home in a corner tower in Kraków’s ancient castle, known since the fourteenth century as the Wawel. The eagle had had its nest or aerie here for over five hundred years, in a south tower that boasted a numinous view of the snow-heaped Carpathian Mountains and the high Tatras within that chain – Tatry Wysókie – not to mention the fine vista afforded him
of the Romanesque and Gothic rooftops, steeples, towers of the ancient capital itself. The forests of Ojcow and Niepolomice, from which the many small bands of resistant fighters had made their raids, were under his purview. He could see horses at graze in Bednarskiego Park, swans on Lublin Pond where the SS commandant had enjoyed his summer swims. The peoples’ river, Poland’s soul, the great Vistula, originating in the West Beskid range of the Carpathians, flowed through the heart of Kraków, directly beneath the Wawel’s decaying walls on its long journey north through Warszawa, Warsaw, where it angled northwest to Torun and Bydgoszcz, there veering due north again to pass the towns and cities once the domain of the Teutonic Order: Chelmno (1223), Grudziadz (1230), Tczew (1260), until at last emptying into the Gulf Of Gdansk – Gdanska, Danzig – on the Baltic Sea.
Although the natural-born Polack might raise a fist in disgust at the notion that the old eagle was the spiritual symbol for the Polack, the Gypsy, and Polish Jew – Jews in 1939 constituted one-eleventh of the nation’s population – the bird took his calling seriously: he was a Zionist-bird on September 1 of that year when the Nazi’s invasion of Poland launched World War II and five days later the armoured divisions of Oberstgruppenführer List rebuffed the small-arms fire of the Polish People’s Army, thundered over Kraków’s Podgórze and Kosciuscko Bridges on the one flank while roaring down Iontelupich and Deluga and Mickiewicza Streets on the other. Installing in the very Wawel where the old eagle nested, the National Socialist Party’s Governor General of occupied Poland, Hans Frank. Within four weeks of Kraków’s fall, a forced labour edict applying to each of the city’s fifteen thousand Jews would be in place; before November’s end each of these fifteen thousand would be registered, their food allowance be at half-ration (half that allowed the Poles), the yellow star affixed to each breast, with the ghetto of Kazimierz, just by the Old City, soon to come.