In this number of the magazine (it was this that seemed to me like a face at a window) there was a story about the guru that I had not heard before. Two girls who were his acolytes had been caught smuggling drugs in Europe; they had been on their way to his commune, or ashram, in India. When their case had come up in court they had said – or rather the lawyers hired by their families had said – that the girls had been doing their smuggling on behalf of the guru who had brainwashed them, so they could not be held morally or legally responsible. The magistrates had had sympathy with this argument, and the girls had been given a suspended sentence. When the Die Flamme reporter had questioned God about this he had said that if it would be any help to any of his acolytes in trouble with the authorities to say that he was responsible, then of course he would be delighted to do so. The reporter had said – Yes, but in fact was he or wasn’t he responsible? Whereupon the guru had been so overcome with laughter again that he had had to leave the room. This had so incensed the Die Flamme people that they had published comments about him that were indeed uncharacteristically humourless – the charges about drugs against the guru might not be able to be proved, but what about his encouragement of sex! and so on. So it did seem that a lack of sense of humour was being visited back on the Die Flamme people as some sort of retribution.
I read this story in the waiting-room of the hospital. There was a photograph of the guru who had a bright nut-brown face rather like that of the Professor. I thought I might wave and say – Coo-ee!
After a time a doctor came into the waiting-room and said that they had done all they could for Oliver but that they still would not know for some time whether he would recover. The doctor looked at me with hot, distrustful eyes. I thought – There are these connections, like those of the shadows of a cage, between drugs and death and sex. He told me I could go and sit with Oliver. I thought – But if these people have envy, is it not satisfied by the chance of death?
Have you ever been in the intensive-care unit of a hospital? Figures in white coats stand facing switches and dials. The switches and dials are on the faces on machines that are connected by wires and tubes to bodies. It is as if the bodies are feeding the machines; and the people in white coats are there to see that the supply of food does not run out.
Oliver was on a bed like a trolley. There was a large tube going down his throat, a smaller one in at the side of his neck, and one coming out from the sheets at the bottom of the bed. There were two pads on his chest from which wires went to a machine with a screen on it like a clock; the numbers became sometimes greater and sometimes less; this was to do with his heartbeat. There was another machine which drew zig-zag lines on a roll of paper and it was as if these were to do with the weather in other bits of Oliver. The pipe down his throat was like some terrible sexual violation.
I sat beside Oliver and I sometimes held my hand on his arm and I watched the numbers on the screen above his head grow greater and sometimes less. I thought – If you can measure a person’s life, can you not also alter it? This was, I think, what I had been trying to say to the Professor. I wanted to alter Oliver’s life because I felt that he had asked me to; he must have been someone who had come near enough to rock bottom.
I stayed with Oliver through most of that day; I had nowhere else, after all, to go. I thought – People’s lives might bounce up from just such moments, mightn’t they? when nothing much else seems to be happening.
One of the nurses told me that I need not wait: that Oliver would not regain consciousness, if he did, until late that evening. I thought – But is it also myself who might change? now that there is nothing much, or everything, happening?
I went down to the canteen where people sat as if in limbo, waiting for their tickets to heaven or to hell.
Late that evening Oliver’s hands began to move; they fluttered; they seemed to be trying to pull out the terrible pipe down his throat. It was like someone trying to pull himself up by his gut-strings. I could not bear this; Oliver’s fingers scrabbled like fish-bait in the tin. I asked a nurse if she could take the pipe out; she said the right time for the pipe to come out was when he was strong enough to pull it out himself. I thought – But who ever gets out of the tin on their own? I sometimes held Oliver’s hand to stop him scratching: he had beautiful fine-boned hands with long fingers. After a time I could no longer bear it and I helped him to pull the pipe out from his throat; it came out with a dreadful noise like a horse’s penis.
I asked Oliver if he could hear what I was saying, and if he could, would he press my hand. He pressed. I asked him if he knew who I was, and did he want me to stay with him, I mean did he want me to come back and be with him in the morning. There was a pause while he seemed to be trying to open his eyes; they were like dried-out seaweed waiting for water; then he squeezed my hand over and over. So I said I would stay with him until he fell asleep, and I would come back. I thought – You feel you know just where you are, do you, when someone has been on the point of dying?
I went back to Oliver’s flat. I wanted to see if there was anything more I should clean up. Also, I had not had a home of my own for some time.
I put the chain on the door behind me. I thought – This is some cave: I am hiding from pursuers: I am one of those primitive humans who have just learned the secret of fire.
There did not seem to have been anyone living in the flat; nothing was unpacked; there were none of Oliver’s paintings; there was no sign of anything belonging to a woman.
I thought – It is as if he had arranged for me to move in here?
There was bread and cheese and apples in the kitchen; a bottle of whisky. I sat on the floor of the sitting-room amongst the packing-cases. I thought – I am like someone cut off by a fall of rock; with luck, no one will find me till the end of winter.
Once or twice the telephone rang. I did not answer it. I thought it might be that policeman.
I began to count the bundle of twenty-pound notes but it was so large that my mind went blank, and I put it back in my pocket.
I thought I would go through some of the packing-cases in the sitting-room: one of them contained papers. There was nothing to tell me much about Oliver’s present life: one letter was from a lawyer about his wife’s money in America; there were some catalogues of exhibitions in Europe. But then there were hundreds of letters from Oliver’s old girlfriends: these were done up carefully in bundles with bits of string.
As I went through them – cross-legged on the floor like Goldilocks researching the natural history of bears – there was a pattern that seemed to emerge. Hundreds of letters were from girls who, it appeared, had been in love with Oliver more than he had been in love with them: these letters complained, cajoled, pleaded, argued: the words went on and on like flies trapped between window-panes. From the tone of the letters it seemed that Oliver had hardly answered them; he had just tied them up like dead people’s mouths with string. Then there were a few short letters that were cool and factual and which seemed to be from a woman whom Oliver had been more in love with than she had been in love with him: the pile of these compared to the others was tiny, like the Sphinx beside the Pyramids. And somewhere in this woman’s house I imagined there would be a heap of Oliver’s letters complaining, cajoling, pleading, arguing; huge tombs looming above the smile of the Sphinx.
I thought – One should write no letters! or just one great letter that would carry one past all such images like the eternal waters of the Nile.
When I went back to the hospital the next day they had moved Oliver out of the intensive-care unit and he was in a ward with three other beds. There was a contraption like a scaffold beside him with a drip going into his arm. He had his head propped up on pillows as if he had arranged himself to be watching the door.
I said ‘Hullo.’
‘Hullo.’
I thought I might say – I wondered if you remembered me?
I said ‘How do you feel?’
‘All right.’
‘I’ve got myself down as your next of kin.’
‘That’s very good of you.’
He was watching me, half-smiling. I thought – He thinks I am someone else? He imagines we are meeting in some other incarnation?
I said ‘You didn’t want me to get in touch with anyone?’
He said ‘No.’
I said ‘I’ve tidied the flat.’
He said ‘Thanks.’
Then he said ‘What I wanted them to find was just a little pile of clothes on the beach.’
I thought – He is establishing some complicity between us? well there is complicity between us: he wants us to be joined as if in the cover-up of some crime?
He said ‘Did you find the money?’
I said ‘Yes.’
He said ‘I knew you’d be efficient.’
All the time there was the impression that we were talking about something of which he assumed I knew more than I did. I thought – This has always been one of his weapons?
Then – This is what those people in America must have felt when it seemed the Professor was talking in code.
He said ‘Did you find lots of letters?’
I said ‘Yes.’
Then – ‘Do you mind?’
I thought I should be saying – But the police came and they could have found the dope! How did you know I would fix things? If you were not dead, you could be in jail!
There was a grinning somewhere inside his skull that was upside-down like bats.
He said ‘Do you know, there really are green fields and angels, when you nearly get there? and a man in a white robe who comes to tell you it is all right!’
He spoke with his odd not-quite-foreign accent. I thought – You mean, you will make out it has been worth while to have nearly died?
He said ‘When the Emperor Nero and the Empress Poppaea got fed up with their boring exciting life they decided to die, so they could come alive again and live quietly somewhere in the Peloponnese. They heard about this witch-doctor who had been doing it in Jerusalem.’
I thought – But what a risk! you genuinely did not mind if you died?
His strange enamel-green eyes were like the eyes of that bronze Greek charioteer that have been taken out, so that when you look at them you look inside.
He said ‘What can you do with someone who has saved your life?’
I thought – Love them, honour them: hate them for ever? He said ‘Do you think you can ever forgive them?’ I thought – I don’t know, do you?
Then – Did not Desmond say Oliver could do anything he liked with animals?
I said ‘Is there anything you want?’
He said ‘Promise you won’t leave me.’
I thought – He says his lines like Holofernes did that night when the play effectively ended: looking down on himself, playing with words; is it his words that are like horses?
I said ‘Can I buy some cooking things?’
He said ‘Buy what you want. It’s your flat. It’s your money.’
I thought – You are doing some experiment? you are playing Russian follow-my-leader?
Then – You know, do you, that I will keep up?
I went to pick up my things from the hostel: I chose a time when I imagined that Krishna would be involved in the basement with his friends. I went up the stairs holding my shoes in my hand. I thought – People become involved in conspiracies because they like the excitement; the impression of bodies being moved at night; of what has been dead coming alive.
In my room in the hostel I found an IOU typed out for the money that Krishna had taken. I thought for a moment – I might be making some terrible mistake?
Oliver came out of hospital on the third or fourth day: I took him home to the flat in a taxi and sat him up in the bed, which was an elegant four-poster. I had unpacked linen and china and put flowers in vases. Oliver watched me with his mad, rather childish smile. It was as if he needed to locate himself by watching me as I moved around the room.
When he was in his pyjamas and propped up in bed I realised how old he was. I suppose at that time he was in his early fifties. I thought – He is like a grandmother pretending to be a wolf: but would not Little Red Riding Hood have always hoped that her grandmother was a wolf?
There was indeed something womanish about Oliver: or perhaps it was to do with what people think of as being womanish. He had white, rather tight skin like something upholstered. I suppose women are in fact often like Oliver’s paintings of them – bony, with bits and pieces coming out.
He would sit up in bed with his hands flat upon the bedspread: he was like a statue waiting for rain.
While he watched me as I moved I thought – His eyes are like some tether: the rope you tie to goats.
He said ‘Does anyone know you’re here?’
I said ‘No.’
He said ‘Do you think they’ll think I’ve murdered you?’
I did not know quite what to say to Oliver. I thought – It is by making you feel inadequate that he tethers you. But then, had I not always imagined that in silence I would feel at home?
He would say ‘Come here.’
I would stand by the edge of his bed.
He would say ‘How am I going to forgive you? What do you think it would be to forgive you?’
I thought – You mean, you are only pretending that it is you who are in my power?
Do you know the story of Achilles and Penthesilea? It is in a play by Kleist.
Achilles, King of the Myrmidones, is at war with Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons: this is a particular but also a universal war, the one between men and women. Achilles comes face to face with Penthesilea on the battlefield; they fall in love; but what are they to do? They are dedicated to enmity; they have no style for anything different. Then in the course of the fighting Penthesilea is taken prisoner by Achilles; she happens at this moment to be knocked unconscious so she does not know what has occurred. Achilles explains to her handmaidens who have been captured with her that he loves her, that he will treat her with all the respect and adoration she might require. But the wisest of the handmaidens says – What will it matter to her that you respect and adore her? she will never forgive you if she learns you have taken her prisoner. So Achilles and the handmaidens fashion a plot: when Penthesilea wakes they will pretend that it is not she who has been taken prisoner by Achilles but that it is he who has been taken prisoner by her: then everyone will be happy: Penthesilea will think that she has taken Achilles prisoner, and Achilles will know that this is not true. So when Penthesilea awakes everyone is committed to this piece of acting. And so for a time she and Achilles are in empyrean bliss. But then in another turn of the battle those of Penthesilea’s forces who have not been taken prisoner rescue their Queen, and Penthesilea learns what has been happening. She vows revenge. Achilles, meanwhile, has been so overwhelmed by his time of bliss that he says – Never mind: I will simply now surrender to Penthesilea genuinely! what can be more worth while than such bliss? But when he approaches her, without weapons and with open arms, she will of course have nothing to do with what she feels is now his condescension to her; and she hacks him to pieces. And then, for some reason or other, apparently she tries to eat him.
Well, with Oliver and myself, I thought – Who is Penthesilea and who is Achilles?
And what on earth does it mean that she eats him?
Oliver would say ‘Come here.’
I said ‘How did you know I would come that morning?’
He said ‘I had to take the risk.’
I said ‘Why?’
He said ‘How else would I have got you?’
I thought – It takes more than conjuring tricks to be so clever? You have to be in touch with what the Professor called something beyond?
When Oliver painted his portraits of women’s bodies, it was as if he were turning them inside out with his fingers.
I said ‘Do you know the story of Achilles and Penthesilea?’
He said ‘Ye
s.’ Then – ‘You know, Kleist killed himself together with his girlfriend.’
I said ‘Yes.’
He said ‘Aren’t you frightened?’
I lay on the cover of the bed next to him. His close-cropped hair was like something that has been burned: that has been propped up in the dark corner of a temple. His fingers were like something probing beyond a membrane, a wall; to another dimension.
I hired a television set and placed it at the end of the bed: we sat side by side with his arm around me. We watched, as if through some peephole, the things people were doing in the world outside: the running, the fighting, the shouting; the climbing up on each other’s heads and shoulders. I thought – We are like one of those couples on the top of Etruscan tombs: we will be dug up, serene and smiling, in a thousand years.
Or – I am like one of those bits of material that a child takes to bed when it sucks its thumb instead of its mother?
I wish I could explain about Oliver. He created this vacuum into which you were sucked: like a black hole, it was not easy to get out of.
I went out to shop each day; I cooked; I cleaned the flat. I thought – It is some sort of nothingness that most people come to be tethered to after all: they like just to tick over; to lie; to be at peace.
Judith Page 6