by Jim Crace
Cargo Street was full as ever at that time of the evening on a weekday, but more tentative than usual. The fallen and impacted snow had made the sidewalks treacherous. So everyone was concentrating on their balance, their collars up, and either heading home where it was safe or making for a bar or restaurant where it was dry and welcoming and full of other weather refugees. Nobody was aware of Freda watching them, four stories up above their heads and hats.
This was a night of pregnancies, and not just Freda’s pregnancy The snow is sexier than sun. The cold encourages us to get to bed and hug the person we love. Our folklore says it’s so. As does demography. The snow is consummate. Fine weather brings the birth rate down. So this was only one of many rooms that benefited from fertility that night, and Fredalix was only one of many pairs. None of them as yet was counting on the cost, the cost of lovemaking, the cost that lasts for threescore years and ten. Nobody thought, when all the hugs and kisses had been finished with, to tell themselves, Things never end. They only stretch ahead from here. We have to thank our lucky stars for that.
3
A HIGH APARTMENT with a river view would be ideal, they’d thought. Three or four rooms facing east, with a small balcony in the City of Balconies where they could taste the air. The water and the sunset seemed important then. So did remaining close to the city’s ancient, motivating heart, near neighbors to the bustle and the stir, of course, but also close to graduated couples like themselves who’d once been untroubled students and were now more compromised. Couples, that is to say, who wanted permanence but were not prepared quite yet to celebrate that fact. They were still young, but not so immature as to imagine as they’d once done that marriages could prosper in cramped, cheap rooms. They required somewhere they could stay until they were ready not for children but for a single child. Five more years, perhaps. Somewhere big enough and bright enough for privacy and rows and lovemaking.
Alicja and Lix had not been made of money when they’d moved in together. His meager, irregular fees from the stage and, more frequently, from busing in the local restaurants, and her low wages as a consultant-volunteer on the night shift at the Citizen’s Commission were not enough to rent a river view.
Their income wasn’t quite enough, even, to pay the rent on the more modest, unbalconied apartment they’d finally settled for, their two ill-kept low-ceilinged attic rooms on Anchorage Street, a busy neighborhood—too much bustle, too much stir—nine blocks from the grander embankment residences they’d aspired to. It was hardly larger, though more expensive, than Lix’s old fourth-floor student room-‘n’-kitchen near the wharf. They fell in love with it as soon as they pushed back the sloping door in the bedroom alcove and found that they could step out on the roof. Still no river view. But somewhere to smoke and drink a beer, their urban version of the rural stoop. Somewhere to grow their herbs and vegetables in pots. Somewhere to be expansive and look out across the city, through the pylons and the tower blocks, the aerials and radio masts, beyond the leaf-fresh suburbs and the new commercial parks, across the plains toward the faint, uncivil hills.
This “private roof patio” was the landlord’s justification for the scarcely manageable rent. They’d had to borrow from the bank and made do at first with thinly furnished rooms. They had a bed, an electric stove, two bamboo chairs, a pair of bicycles, a fly larder, and little else to make the first months of their marriage comfortable, except their books, their gramophone, and what Paul Knessen has called “the conciliating rigors of the flesh.” Well, they had love, of course, the most essential furnishing of all, especially when poverty and hardship share the home. It was a calmer and less threatening love than Lix had had for Freda, but a thorough love, nevertheless, and one that would not soon be ripped apart by passion.
They could have had a river view quite easily and a fully furnished apartment on the embankment. The Lesniaks were made of money Alicja’s parents, despite their mistrust of Lix (‘Actors never pay—and actors never stay!”), would have cleared the rent and swallowed all the decorating bills rather than have their daughter share a staircase with waiters and shop assistants on a street unfashionably “mixed.” They had a friend who ran an import/export enterprise and who, if leaned on not too gently, could sort out some stylish furniture. (“And no bamboo!”) A new business colleague, eager to impress, might well be happy to provide a television and a fridge. “You want a telephone and no delays with the connection?” her father asked. “For me a working telephone is just a call away. I only have to whisper in a friendly ear. I only have to say our name.”
The Lesniaks would pay to have Lix’s cheek “spruced up” as well. A fashionable surgeon was in their debt. How could their son-in-law expect to succeed on the stage when he was branded like that? Besides, a birthmark such as Lix’s spelled trouble and adversity for anyone who came too close. A Polish prejudice, perhaps, but never wrong. It seemed a pity that their pretty daughter had ended up with such a curiosity. Every problem could be fixed, however. Mrs. Lesniak would make the phone calls; Mr. Lesniak would write the checks. Alicja only had to nod and she could have an apartment and a husband, neither of which would offer much offense to the eye. Polish parents are the best.
Alicja, despite her husband’s counsel of caution, turned every coin down. “I like things as they are,” she said. She meant she loved the man she’d married, would not want to change a cell of him. More than that, she wanted freedom from the Lesniaks, a chance to flourish as herself and be resolute on her own account. Finding a husband such as Lix would set her on her way. Her married name, Alicja Dern, provided instant anonymity Anonymity was exactly the base upon which she was determined to construct her successes and achievements—for this was something hidden from the world: buried underneath her sweetness, her patience, and her eagerness to please, Alicja was driven by a need to climb and conquer a different, higher summit than her father had.
Lix’s ambitions, however, were not concealed. How could they be concealed? To be an actor, even one who’s not in work, is to declare a public dream and purpose. But he had not yet got his call from Hollywood. He’d not recorded his first album. He’d not been cast as Don Juan or hosted any television shows. In his late twenties now, he’d ended up a table singer, as dependent on tips as any waiter, and—no more the Renegade—a minor, disappointed stalwart of touring theaters and the city’s lesser ones, famous only in his dressing room. So Mrs. Dern could still be judged mostly by her own achievements and campaigns and by the impact she’d make on platforms of her own. She took up causes in the neighborhood, chased complaints, investigated failures of the city government, but never made a nuisance of herself. His sweet, plump, tireless wife, Lix said unkindly to her face when they’d been stopped once too often in the street by troubled locals, was “a problem magnet.” She’d be upset to know his nickname for her was the Quandry Queen. Yet she was more respected and well liked than any Lesniak had ever been. That was more important than a sunset and a river view—and harder to acquire than foreign furniture.
Now, only three months later, finally, they had a river view without the help of Lesniaks.
On the same day they gained their river view, they conceived their son as well. Five years ahead of time. Much sooner than they’d planned or wanted. We can be sure it was Alicja’s first child. She was a virgin when she first met Lix, a lapsed but well-trained Polish Catholic, fearful of the wrath not so much of God as of her all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful mother. It was true that Alicja had “sacrificed herself” to Lix, “surrendered herself immodestly” while the family was “dining” (her mother’s later version of events), before they’d married. But only a month before. She was hardly dissolute or precocious. Despite her hidden appetite for change, she would not consider sleeping with anyone apart from the man she married, for three more years at least.
Lix was not a virgin, as we know. Already he’d had sex, penetrative sex, with Freda (even if the penetration had only been a short P.S. on all but one occasion).
Nineteen times, in their not-quite-a-month of passion, on and off the picket line. And twice with the nameless little clerk, who back then would have been about the age Lix was now, approaching thirty
This would not be his first child, or even his first son. It would be the timid actor’s third mistake. His first—his birthmarked daughter, Bel, the product of binoculars—was undiscovered still, undiscovered by Lix anyway, though very nearly nine years old already and full of life while Lix’s life, to tell the truth, was emptying. The vessel full of dreams and plans had sprung a leak—no wad of fame to plug it.
Several times the girl had been within a hundred meters of her father. This city isn’t all that large. You meet and pass and meet again. They’d shared a crowd, a streetcar, a shopping street, a flu virus, they’d strolled the same catalpa avenue in Navigation Park one Sunday afternoon, bought nutcake from the same vendor. And recently, when she’d been in the Play Zone by the zoo, her mother had seen Lix walking past, beyond the roses. Unmistakable. Not a face she could forget. If it hadn’t been for the roundfaced woman on his arm, she would have found the courage to go up—for Bel, for her daughter’s sake. A blemished child has a right to meet the author of her blemishes—and introduce the pair of them, acquaint their family nevuses.
His second grand mistake—Freda’s six-year-old son, George—was still an awkward and rancid secret that Lix had kept from Alicja. What was the point in telling her? He never saw the child himself, had not even been identified as its father by anyone other than its mother. Alicja had hated Freda, anyway, and Freda despised her, “Lix’s dreary compromise.” A little clear-skinned boy, especially if he had his mother’s neck and hair, would not appeal to his wife, nor would it delight any of the Lesniaks. So Lix was happy to keep his past secret and resigned to being not so much an absentee parent as an evicted one. It had been Freda actually, when she was six months pregnant and her relationship with Lix was long dead, who’d commanded him to stay away: “The child is mine, not yours. My pregnancy My body. My responsibility My private life. My kid!” she’d said, rapping out her arguments on the palm of her hand with knuckles that had once shown love for him. “You understand?”
“Five very eloquent mys,” he’d said as mordantly as he dared. Her throat and earrings tortured him. This had been the dream once—to be with Freda and his son, a sort of neofamily. “Consider me as good as dead.”
And that had been it—at least for the time being, anyway. Fredalix split in two. Then three. They went their separate ways. She had—and raised—his unacknowledged son.
COULD LIX HAVE any idea yet that there was a curse on him, a more insistent version of the happy curse that falls on almost everyone, that if they persevere with sex, then chances are—not quite as sure as eggs is eggs, but close—a pregnancy will follow? Certainly that one mistake he knew about had freighted all his fantasies and practices of sex with Cargo Consequence. Had he become afraid of making love because of Freda and her son? Before Alicja, he’d not had intercourse with anyone since he and Freda split up in 1981. That was seven years. Key years for young men in their twenties. His month with her had been a costly farce and a disaster from which he’d not recovered yet. How pleased Freda would be if she discovered how she’d blighted him and all the women in her wake, even—especially—Alicja.
Certainly, Lix had been slow on the night a month before they’d married to respond to Alicja’s un-Lesniak initiatives. She’d never been that intimate before or so daring. She’d seemed excited that her parents were downstairs with dinner guests and hired staff, immediately below, separated only by a rug, the ceiling joists, and plaster. The wine they’d smuggled into her room had helped. As had the cannabis. She locked her bedroom door and put on music as a sound track and to disguise the noise they might make. The actors always made a lot of noise in films.
He’d not encouraged her. Because he understood the dangers better than she did? Because he feared the consequences? Because she was not Freda? Because there wasn’t a single condom in the house? No, actually, because he had not yet succeeded with an erection. Nervousness was playing havoc with his potency Fear dispatches its adrenaline to the lungs, the muscles, and the heart, and undermines the blood flow to the genitals.
Alicja, however, had thought his reluctance considerate and endearing but had surprised herself by pressing forward with inflamed resolve and—always the ones you remember—inexperienced but persuasive hands. Finally, Alicja was “graduated,” as they say. She and Lix had made the light shade swing above her parents’ table. She liked to think she’d peppered everybody’s soup with ceiling plaster. But Lix’s imagination had almost let him down that night, and let her down as well. His fear of those five mys was not an aphrodisiac.
THIS WAS the season of his third mistake.
Although their marriage was already three months old, he and Alicja still had no table, or any reason to join the city’s morning rush hour. Lix had no rehearsals at that time, and it would be another year before his fortunes changed so magically, and so disruptively. So neither of them needed to leave the apartment until the afternoon.
In those days, their marriage was an embarrassment of time and poverty and self. In other words, if it was free or very cheap, then they could do it all day long. So they would take their breakfasts and their books out onto the roof during that late spring and sunbathe with their backs against the slates in their nightclothes, the matching pair of long fake-granddad shirts she’d bought from Parafanalia and which he hated. These were beloved times, in fact, despite the shirts. They had the whole apartment building to themselves. By the time they’d settled on the roof, all their neighbors were already sitting at their desks or standing at their tills or setting tables for lunch, “earning corns.”
Alicja had planted up some heavy gray pots—to match the roof tiles—with mints, marjorams, and balms and four or five fessandra shrubs. They flourished there, with the help of coffee dregs, abandoned cereal, and bowls of used soapy water, and—once in a while, when Lix was on his own and too idle to go indoors—urine. Otherwise they had the sweetest-smelling roof in town. The foliage provided a civilizing fringe of green along the roof parapet, muffling much of the traffic thrum from the Circular but still allowing Lix with his binoculars—the householder at last, the lord of everything in sight—to study the hats and shoulders of passersby, the roofs of streetcars and automobiles, the shadows and the silhouettes in adjacent attic rooms, the ornamented summit of Marin’s finger, and anything that moved between the city and the hills.
Except he could not see the hills in early May.
Rain had fallen on the prosperous and slanting plains that embraced the city in a semicircle of shale-on-clay-on-sand and the grand estates of manacs, vines, and tournesols which kept the owners rich and their tenants busy. Rain had fallen in the far-flung hills and stripped the valleys of their oaten topsoil and their undergrowth. The fields were silver and the rivers bronze. Nine days of it. Rain had fallen everywhere, it seemed, except on us. We had blue skies. The whole of May was mocking blue for us, disdainful of the countryside. The city’s blessed, we told ourselves, in shirtsleeves, eating out in sidewalk cafes, getting tanned, getting overconfident. We have the nation’s summer to ourselves.
So the hills were virtually invisible to Lix and to Alicja from their high and costly patio. A heavy mass of slaty clouds had gathered discreetly in the first few days of the month like a sieging army, patient and bullying, softening the countryside with rain, but still just far enough away from the outer suburbs not to appear too menacing. No wind. The clouds just seemed to darken, breed amongst themselves, and fatten on the washed-loose produce of the plains, reluctant to depart, unwilling to invade the determined patch of urban blue that kept our weather fine and caused the Dern rooftop to snap and crack unseasonably with heat. Their true horizon had been smudged away by clouds, and so even in the rain-free city, untouched it seemed at first, the days were shorter than they should have been. The dawns were late and dus
k was early. A sweating wintertime in May. The rising and the setting sun, to use the finest phrase of a newspaper columnist, was “smothered by a black-brown shawl and swathed in widow’s cloth.” Wet wool!
These were dramatic days for Lix and for Alicja. The weather made them feel grandiloquently loving. The fitful romance and the ecstasy of early married life can only benefit from breakfasting amongst the rooftop pots under such sensual, operatic skies. By chance, they’d rented happiness. Their midmorning light was startling that May, low and sharp enough to give the clouds—especially in the photographs they took—their own ravines and cols and peaks and scarps that seemed as permanent and sculpted as the granite ones which they’d obscured. These were clouds you could trek in, ski down, climb. You’d think that you could mine in them for tin and silver, sink great shafts through fissures, plates, and strata to haul up spoils of solid oxygen and fossil rain.
The clouds were full of riches and rewards.
Lix and Alicja watched an aircraft fly too close to that great granite cliff of wet suspended atmosphere. They watched it disappear, illogically intact. They watched through his binoculars the flocks of geese and plovers, displaced by rain, the jazz quintets of buzzards extemporizing on the thermals against the backdrop, blackdrop of the clouds, the laboring of herons, and, closer, with the naked eye, they watched the resigned and stoic flight of crows, forced into town for once. They were puffed up themselves like clouds, puffed up with massive confidence, with everything-is-possible, with an affection that Lix at least had never felt before. The weather was a prelude, so they thought with all the arrogance of newlyweds, to something grand and memorable for them.