by Aashish Kaul
XIII
Maybe all this never happened. Maybe it’s part of a myth coming to me at birth. But why then have I held so close to my chest this slow roving sadness which knows not its own source and takes form unannounced, like clouds that build up in a clear sky from nowhere – this melancholy which has all but made me impervious to love or nostalgia?
I could write no more. Instead I took to walking each day for hours. In the woods that shone a deep green in the summer sun, I found new paths to the stream, and here I rested, dipping my legs in its plashing water. Emptiness gradually filled me and, for long periods, I’d gaze at my reflection in the water which the blue fish cut through with their sharp movements. They also cut through the dead skin of my soles, providing a free pedicure.
Finally two of my books had come. I thought of showing them to the old man. At our last meeting, he had gifted me a book by Carl Spitteler. Olympian Springs. An English translation from the time of the War. I decided to go the next day.
That night I had a curious dream. I saw myself running to the library, a miniature book in hand which was a torch too. It was intolerably heavy like a piece of a dying star, and soon my arm hurt from the burden. In its light I saw that I was moving on a giant chessboard. Above, the black arc was collecting blacker clouds. The wind had slowly turned into a gale, and the ghosts of trees performed a terrible dance in it. When I reached the clearing, the library had come apart from its base and was tilting over the abyss…
The swallow had flown in from the open window and was now perched on the desk. From there it watched me move, but soon jumped over to the window sill and flew off.
Late that morning, I went up to the library. The wind was heavy and it loudly whistled through the building’s cavities. My shirt’s collar fluttered madly in it. A light mist lingered on treetops and the sun glowed indifferently. But the building was there, solidly holding its ground. Inside, the old man was perched on a ladder, inspecting the spines in the topmost shelf of a cabinet. I shouted a hello. After this, what happened could have come from a movie, could have occurred in a dream. He started, lost his bearing, and came crashing to the ground. Shock numbed me. By the time I rushed to his side, he lay on the floor motionless, neck twisted to one side. A few drops of blood still trickled from his ear.
I was on the floor, transfixed, stupidly looking at him. The attendant came running from the kitchen. Then things happened very fast.
I remember being at the funeral that very evening. No elaborate rites were deemed necessary, for none knew of the man’s religious inclinations. Three men had dug a small grave at one end of the garden next to the church. Roses and lilacs decorated the body wrapped in country linen. Those about me had the look of men merely concerned about performing their duty fittingly. I tossed my books into the grave.
I decided to leave soon. Grief was beginning to break the walls again. I busied myself in my work. It became an exhaustion, an obsession. I worked for hours on end, neglected my food, nearly ceased my walks.
When I hadn’t spoken with anyone in over a week, I thought of going to the bar. The house-servant had returned to his village to attend a marriage in the family. Yet meals always appeared at the right time, though I never once saw another soul in the cottage.
The manager, too, was on leave and had gone down to the plains. I don’t know why but I felt defeated. Two men were drinking beer in a corner, talking of past times and laughing aloud. I had a couple of drinks and went my way. For the next few days, I avoided the club.
A slow rising mist had come to drown the hills. The sun shone intermittently, vaguely, uninterestingly. The wind carried with it a chill which one wouldn’t have called pleasant. I had progressed much during this time with the book, yet I didn’t know how to end it. I decided to leave it in the drawer for some days.
Then one day I thought of the library, of the tombal silence that must now cover its walls. I was curious to learn what had become of it. Had it been abandoned like the church to the corrosive forces of time and seclusion? No, it was too early.
As I climbed up to the library, a faint orangey smell reached me. Just before the clearing, a tree had sprouted bright red flowers that made it look lavish. I approached the building from the side. Pigeons had built a nest in its cupola and they fluttered impatiently round it. But the place had a stillness as if it was even now in mourning. Then the silhouette of a woman came into view. Sitting on the steps of the library, her arms cradling her legs, her chin resting on her knees, she was observing the ruined façade of the church. A traveller, I thought, as I moved towards her.
XIV
Dreams and reality are but different chapters of the same book. Wasn’t it Schopenhauer who said so? That book through which at times you drift serenely, while at other times you tramp with thoughts tied to your step like large, prehistoric stones closes one day. Then, as one chapter merges into the other, loses its distinctiveness, you begin to see the true, enduring wisdom of its words.
Astray I had wandered in these mists for long looking for a place to rest, to relieve my burden. But the mists did not depart. They collected around me and solidified like nebular dust. How much further? I cried despairingly. Whither do I belong?
I am barely a few steps away when the traveller turns towards me. Her face, tanned golden, is mysteriously elegant, smooth forehead, hair straight and lustrous that curls behind the ears. Her gaze pierces through me and I come to look into those clear brown eyes.
On her though, the effect is far serious. Her lips suddenly tighten and a stern look fills her face. A lone nerve is twitching on her forehead. She is about to weep. Now she is walking towards me. Uncontrollable tears roll down her cheeks. In a moment, she is in my arms, kissing and speaking at once. She is telling me it’s been seven years.
So suddenly has all of it happened that I don’t understand at first. Then a face grows over this one and I feel a stab in my heart. I pronounce the name slowly, with much difficulty.
She doesn’t respond, but her hold tightens and her lips press against mine ever more intensely. I feel blood drain from my legs. At last I have seen dream and life coincide. I am closer to the end than I ever was. I am surer of it.
The weakness passes. We walk back to the steps and sit beside one another. For a seemingly long time none speaks. The mist pleasantly lingers around us. Pigeons beat their wings urgently, making a dry perfunctory sound. Her smell has evoked in me that one image, drawn in precise detail like a Flemish painting. From a valley far away rise up the bell-chimes of a village temple. The distant rhythmic chimes bring to mind another forlorn sound that has traversed the treacherous distance of memory.
Something has caught my attention. Her navel is decorated by the arabesque of a strange tattoo – a kite-like formation of intertwined tails of numerous faceless serpents that from one end advances dangerously towards forbidden regions. Also, a fever is growing in her.
She begins to speak, but I say there will be time later. While we walk back to the cottage, her head is on my shoulder and our arms thread through each other. The wind rises and falls in the pines and only intermittently a word or a whole phrase reaches me. Stranded…Grey wastes…Pharaohs…A few words in Arabic…A name…Port of Alexandria…But I am far away from all of it, even from her. I have just seen the spot where I belong – have always belonged.
She refuses to eat, but she has taken a few sips from the cup I gave her. She says she wishes to lie down with me. Night is already entering the earth.
We are in the dark. She has fallen into a light sleep while I have been stroking her shoulders. Her breathing is heavy and comes in gasps. The warm air falls on my neck in lumps. But I am far away, on the sands that I will never see or touch. And later near the sea, near the vessel. She stands on the deck, and the moist cheerful air slips into her heart and drums its sundry rhythms on it. With one hand resting on the rails and the other at her hip how beautiful she looks.
Then she speaks slowly as if from inside a deep cave:
Suppose I die?
Then I’ll die too, I answer.
Why so?
Because one must share the fate of his loved one.
She has turned her back to me and I know she is looking out of the window. Her lean hips warm my groin. Past the branches of the deodar a yellow moon pours its shine into our hearts, a moon so low that the hills seem to cup it, overwhelmed all about by a thin darkness. Like a wolf or an owl the moon has bewitched me. An hour before dawn it turns golden and a procession of white clouds quietly passes over it.
At first glow I go over to my desk and pull out the pile of pages from the drawer. The house has grown hauntingly silent. Before I know the sun is high up in the sky and the swallow has alighted on the window sill to keep me company. Twice a light mist flows into the room. From time to time, the deodar becomes invisible. The world turns mute.
Light had left the hills when I went out. Outside the moon coloured the cottages a crimson white. The clubhouse with its blue dome looked like the retreat of a pasha. Soon I was descending into the valley. I crossed the bazaar where most shops had closed down for the day, while a few were tending to last-minute customers.
Before long I was walking (or drifting?) on a narrow mountain road that at some distance joined the main highway. It was pleasantly deserted. I must have walked a mile when my sight fell on a white chrysanthemum that lay at the edge of the road over a bed of wild mountain grass. It appeared unusually big and I was tempted to touch it. Now the moon was troubling me, glowing like the sun. I raised the chrysanthemum like a parasol and a cool shadow fell on my face.
All of a sudden, a slanting drizzle burst from the sky. I was drenched in no time, but the flower was completely dry. The rain had a curious effect on me – it roused forgotten thoughts and distant and enchanting sounds. In my mind’s eye I saw Asya gazing pensively afar, while the clear water of the lake, the sky, and the mustard fields sang for her. This vision lasted only a moment. After this, I heard a motley collection of sounds, a few gaining prominence, one after the other, before falling back into silence. First came the cries of a baby from the cold desert of Mongolia. This was followed by a deafening laughter of a pod of whales from deep in the Pacific. Then rose up the bell chimes of a temple in the south. And finally I thought I detected the crisp, dry sound of two atoms colliding on a star seven worlds away. Yet all I heard were the melancholy notes of a lute.
The rain fell leisurely, lightly. In a few moments (for a few moments) I had jumped past time and space. Everything in the world, I whispered to the black vault, exists to end up not in a book like the Poet had believed but in man’s heart.
But in my flight neither did I notice that I was walking in the middle of the road nor did I hear the rattling sound of the old tractor that had come dangerously close, its faint beam barely illuminating the road ahead. It hit me from behind with great force instantly breaking my spine. Blood filled my mouth, and I vomited it eagerly. The flower still in my hand, I nearly flew under the impact tracing a red arc on the ground, fell on the wet grass, and rapidly rolled down into the valley. My fall was interrupted by a pine with a split trunk where rest at last descended on the tired, broken body. Then a heavy darkness fell over me.
Having reached the end of the page, she quickly turns it over to read further. But there is nothing. A blank page glares at her. She halts for a moment, and then returns to the last page and reads it again, slowly, almost meditatively. When she looks away, dawn is breaking. Her eyes are moist with fatigue. She is tempted to close them. From the music player in a corner, rise up the strains of Vivaldi’s Cello Concerto in C Minor drowning the stillness settling over her heart.
Two Travellers
He who is about to sing the fourth song is either a man or a stone or a tree.
Lautréamont
That is why he came here. For the silence that opens the door, that destroys this crumbling rampart hopelessly thrusting its lot in space – letting, for once, the watcher watch himself. Cold, of which he is unaware, is already closing him into the night. Mist lingers over the woods, and a half-burnt moon draws out streaks of light from the white ground. His sight is in the throes of leave-taking and he cannot be certain of the lone star that shines aeons away past the low drifting clouds, suddenly opening up to him the vastness of the universe. O you fiery, flaming orb! O you last frozen tear of the retreating deity! But never before has he felt his breath move with the earth. At last there is the rhythm he has sought in vain all along, in paint, in music, in words. At last he breathes for the wolf that prowls in the trees, for the lark that will sing on the morrow.
Hands which are nearly claws, stiffening and curling in, make him more and more into the fierce bird he loves, whose movements he has watched countless times for long spells, spellbound – those long pernings, the quivering poise, the wings lifted for the plummet drop, the wild reascent, fascinated by such extremes of need, of pride, of patience, of solitude – his twin, if he can believe the look of himself in the mirror or in the eyes of those he meets in the street. Due to the contracture in the tendons of his fingers, he holds the pen with difficulty. Not that much is left in him to work with. In truth, he only writes a little for distraction, for in the present state the piano is beyond him. And yet he can hear the quiverings of a song, what he sees coming into being each day on the page. A slow piece, with ever-widening silences, as in Beethoven’s Seventh, so that there is nothing but a bridge of sounds suspended from dizzy heights, linking one upon another deep oceans of calm. Or is it merely the sap behind language, behind the words he has drilled big holes into, which has begun to flow? Nothing to express, but a need to express.
More than ever, he now understands Bram’s gouache, no longer in the cottage, but securely fastened on a wall in his mind, so long and hard has he stared at it: the wave rising from none knows where into the heart, into the mind, leaving the hand which moves the brush, flooding all the filthy logic, now mingling, now divulging, here swishing through vast empty spaces like a comet, there abstracted from time and serene like a peak.
For most part of the day he lies in his cot curled in the usual way, holding his knees tight to the chest, entering the darkness, so he thinks, from whence he came, and drawing on the inside of his eyelids a mosaic of faces and images. Towards the evening he takes long walks in open cold, and upon returning to the cottage, prepares a meal, rice and a vegetable stew mostly, and smokes and drinks himself into oblivion. White Beaujolais at dinner, then later his favourite whiskey and slim black cigars. He has no use for his old car, which he will soon be giving away to the farmer’s son who helped him paint the two rooms last winter. At this time of the year, the country roads are broken and slippery, and his vision is too poor to permit the adventure of fast driving.
Days go by without meeting or speaking to anyone. Earlier he would not have been able to stand this quiet, now he lusts for it. Aside from checking up on his wife each day, he stays clear of the phone. It has beeped just once in the whole week; his publisher, the one other person who knows he is in Ussy, called to tell him that they were yet again planning to put up the accursed play in Berlin. Will he travel to Germany to direct it? He is sick up to his throat with the nonsense of those tramps to pass time and the debris it kicks up in papers with each rerun at a theatre. All this when he wrote it simply to travel into a memory of a painting seen in Germany before the war. That and the vaudevilles of his youth. And the waiting, yes, the waiting in unending queues to collect his ration from German soldiers. No, he replies, he is too old and too bored with it. What do they expect from him at seventy-eight? Last man left in the banquet.
Night falls quickly. For this he can only be glad. Mercifully, time slumbers in the depths, and he finds himself rocking back and forth in the cradle of his past: Look, look there, at the fir tree of his childhood which turned green a week before others in the yard. How he climbed up to its top and jumped without a thought, the low branches breaking his fall, and yet failing to think of the fall itself o
r his cracked skull against the cold hard earth. Same for the dive into the sea from Forty-Foot at Sandycove. Such perverse yearning for vertigo, such brave curiosity of the precipice.
He never did think far into the future; only the past ever held his interest. And maybe this is why he never thought too hard about leaving the easy certainty of a teaching post and running away to Germany, to the art galleries that would put air back in his lungs. Already it had become impossible for him to teach Ronsard and Racine to rich and thick students, hungry only for the crumbs he threw at them, nudging past one another to a bright academic career. How could he explain this to the professor who had arranged, in the first place, his move to Paris as a lector? And his father? He trembles at the very thought of that distant evening, of his father’s pride on entering the private lawns of Trinity, which he had laid open with a key allowed only to the elect. The deepening hollow in his mother’s eyes he has somewhat forgotten, but the bays and mountains of his youth are etched clear on his heart. And what of the time when the covert operation he worked in during the war was compromised by that infamous double-crosser who on the very night of betrayal had taken along his concubine to squander his reward in the brothels of Pigalle, the brown, nubile whores joining her and working him up in an orgy, unaware of his beautiful priest crucifix lying rolled up in a cheap underwear? Did he not once think of the spectacular horrors awaiting him on the other side of the night as he made his escape from Paris by the very skin of his teeth (the shivers came later, and so, inevitably, did the tears!), while the Führer’s grey-uniformed phantoms got ready to make the arrest?