In Another Country

by David Constantine

  At death, as is well known, the body lightens by a certain amount: twenty-one grams, in all cases. Aha, we say, that must be the weight of the human soul. The cadaver varies greatly. I saw a teenager the other day who must have weighed twenty stone. It was in the new mall at the old Pier 17. The food in there is on an upper floor and she stood at the foot of the escalator, wondering did she dare ascend or not. She wore a decoration in her hair, like antennae, such as elves and fairies are seen wearing in Victorian prints. On the other hand, one of those infants in, say, Ethiopia, can’t weigh more than a pound or two. But the loss at death, apparently, will be the same.

  But waking next morning Mr. Silverman did not feel lighter. On the contrary, he felt heavier. Imagine a blob of lead implanted in you overnight; or that some organ, roughly kidney-sized, has been converted to lead during your sleep. So it was. Hard to say where exactly: at the back of the head, in the region of the heart, in the pit of the belly? It seemed to shift. Wherever he pressed his hand, there it was not. Perhaps it could dissolve and occupy him thoroughly, like a heavy flu. He dozed and dreamed.

  Shaken awake again by his early-morning call—he had an aeroplane to catch to Singapore—Mr. Silverman sat on the bed and tried to weep. He shook, he strained, he sobbed, but the tears that came were not much more than the wetness of a few snowflakes on his cheeks. No relief. He took a shower, he wandered naked around the overheated room. Again and again, touching, he received little shocks, from doorhandles, switches, a metal frame—quite sharp little shocks. They startled him, in little jolts they frightened him through his fingers to his heart. He collected them, each time giving forth a small yelp, until the room was dead. Then he looked out of the window. He was high, in the nineties, the sun was visiting the upper reaches of the towers. Down below—Mr. Silverman looked down—all the silent hurry was deep in shade. Which was worse? The measurement of remoteness in no company but his own? Or proof of it when he clutched at Ed Raingold? Mr. Silverman foresaw an icy interest in the ways and means and relative degrees of horror.

  Car. Airport. Aeroplane. Singapore. Passing—so muffled, steady, multitudinous the tread—towards Baggage Reclaim, Mr. Silverman saw an extraordinary thing. There was carpet, glass, more and more glass, and falling from everywhere like vaporized warm piss, there was the usual music: but the extraordinary thing was a bird, a common sparrow by the look of it, high up against a ceiling, perhaps only an inner ceiling, of sunny glass, beating and fluttering. Natural that the creature should seek the light and whatever sustaining air was still available outside, but incredible that it should ever have got where it was now. Nothing living ever came in there, blind-dogs or bomb-dogs perhaps in the service of humans, but nothing else that lived, except the humans in transit. Perhaps not even microbes got in there, only the humans, marching in their gross forms, but never a bird, certainly never a common sparrow, but there it was, fluttering, beating its life out against the sunny glass. That was the last pure astonishment in Mr. Silverman’s remaining years. A sparrow against the glass ceiling on the way to Baggage Reclaim! It was also, he acknowledged later, the last occasion on which he might have wept. Yes, he said, had I stepped aside and gone down on my knees on that thick carpet and bowed my head into my hands, knowing the bird against the ceiling high above me, then, God be my witness, I could have wept, the tears would have burst through my fingers, I might have cupped my hands and raised them up like a bowl, brimful with an offering of my final tears. Mysterious, the afterlife, lingering a while between New York and Singapore, between landing and Baggage Reclaim, an afterlife in which he might have wept.

  But Mr. Silverman was met at Arrivals by a smiling driver holding up a card which read: Mr. Bob Silverman, Fidelity Investments; and soon, among smiling people, he was proceeding through his routine. Two days of meetings and presentations, all successful. He steered the company into wanting what he wanted. He had a clear mind, he set out the facts and figures clearly, he made shapely arguments, his conclusions were ungainsayable. No wonder he was so successful! He was a born persuader, persuading came as naturally to him as playing golf or the violin did to other mortals. And all the while it was like ventriloquy. He stood aside, listening to his own voice; he could even see it, his own embodied voice, and himself standing aside, observant.

  In Singapore the rooms were, if anything, rather cool and the air outside (the little of it he had felt in passing to and from the car), if anything, rather warm. But the rooms were very high, in the hundreds, and the towers all around, very densely rising, looked—to Mr. Silverman—liable to crumple at any moment. The men coming up to congratulate him and to wish him a safe onward journey were less tall than he was, they were slighter, but they were dressed like him and from behind their glasses they beamed on him with an almost ferocious admiration. When their numbers dwindled, again he clutched at a sleeve, stood at a window, speaking the words and the body language of an old condescension. But he felt the leaden implant somewhere in his body, and suffered little starts of indignation that it mattered nothing to these successful gentlemen whether he stood and moved and had his being among them with a soul or without. Alone then, he had the distressing thought that perhaps it had never mattered; and a shadow fell like lead over all his past, all the life before his loss withered and died when he entertained the certainty that it had never mattered, he would have done just as well, he would have got just as high, even without a living soul in him. It had never been required of him that he have one.

  He was met at Heathrow by his wife, Mrs. Silverman. He looked her in the eyes, to see would she notice. She seemed not to. He kissed her with some force on the lips. Was it palpable there on the lips, as a shock of cold perhaps? Apparently not. She had brought the two children with her. It was easier than finding someone to look after them. She asked him had he had a successful trip. Yes, he said, very; watching, would she notice? Then he asked after her life in the interim. Busy, she said, and detailed the difficulties. Then husband and wife were silent, driving in dense traffic, and the children on the back seat were silent too. He sensed his wife returning to her own preoccupations and he saw beyond any doubt that what had happened to him would never happen to her. She was fretted to the limits of her strength, she had days, weeks, being almost overwhelmed; but below or beyond all that there was something continuing in her for which it was indeed required that she have a soul. Bleak, the few insights in Mr. Silverman’s remaining years. Before a man struggles to retain his living soul he must first be persuaded that he needs one.

  Mr. Silverman began to notice other men and women to whom the loss had happened. Angels wandering the world in human disguise are said always to recognize one another. Likewise the clan to which Mr. Silverman now belonged. In one gathering or another, to his mild surprise, he knew and was known by his desolate kind. They were from all walks of life. At least, he met them in the few walks of life that he and Mrs. Silverman had any knowledge of. Successful people. For example, at a Christmas party somewhere just outside the M25 he was introduced to a successful academic. They saw, each in the other, the fact of it. What to say? Nothing really. There was no warmth between them. They stood side by side, their backs to the company, looking down a garden at the fairy lights in a dead tree. The academic, a Dr. Blench, said: Most of what we know about the ninth circle comes from Dante, of course. And he had an axe to grind. But the ice must be true, wouldn’t you say? Mr. Silverman hadn’t read Dante, didn’t know about the ice, but at once acknowledged, after a few more words from Dr. Blench, that what Dante reported on the ice must indeed be true. The thing I haven’t quite worked out, Dr. Blench continued, is why he says it is traitors that it happens to. I mean, are you a traitor? I don’t think I am. So perhaps he got that wrong, even if the ice is right.

  Driving home round the M25 Mr. Silverman thought about treachery. Was he a traitor? Was he even a liar? Whom had he betrayed? Whom had he ever lied to? He glanced at his wife. She was concentrating on her driving amon
g all the lights in a good deal of rain and spray. But he thought again: it will never happen to her. When she can relax a little she will revert to her own concerns, and for those a soul is necessary. Still he did not think that his worst enemy or the Recording Angel could assert with any truth that he had betrayed his wife. Two or three times on his business trips he had been with a prostitute. In Tokyo they sent one up to his room on the 141st floor, without his asking, as a courtesy. But always he told Mrs. Silverman when he came home, said how sorry he was, how joyless it had been. He could not honestly say that she had forgiven him. He would have to say she had made him feel there was nothing to forgive. She appraised him, shrugged. She lingered over it briefly, as though it were a strange but characteristic thing. She seemed to be gauging whether it touched her or not, and to be deciding, with a shrug, that it did not. For a while he had even sustained a sort of affair, with a woman in Frankfurt, a secretary at several of his presentations. She told him he was a very persuasive man. They had sex together for a while whenever he flew in. But he confessed that also to Mrs. Silverman, said it was nothing very much, and she contemplated him and the fact of it briefly and seemed to concur: it was nothing much. So he was not a traitor, he was not a liar, not to her at least, his wife, his closest companion on the upper earth. To whom else then?

  Nothing much more to say about the remaining years—many years, interminable, as it sometimes seemed—of Mr. Silverman’s living death. Heeding the sort of information that must inevitably come, by accident or by grace and favour, to a man in his position, Mr. Silverman shifted some money very advantageously, for the benefit of Mrs. Silverman and her growing children. He told her so, with some wan satisfaction, quite without personal pride, and she appraised him as she had done when he told her about the prostitutes and about the secretary he had for a while had sex with in Frankfurt: thanked him, nodded, as though it were both very strange and very characteristic. And he watched her vanishing behind her eyes, to where she really belonged.

  Mr. Silverman thought a good deal about the ice. He connected it with his inability to weep—and rightly so. One evening in the lift, ascending very rapidly to the 151st floor in Manhattan or Tokyo or Frankfurt or Singapore, he found himself the sole companion of another of his kind, a bigger man than himself, in a suit of excellent cloth, wearing a confident loud tie and a very big signet ring on his left little finger. The man—Sam’s my name, he said—told him at once about a particularly bad ending (if it was an ending) that had just come to his knowledge. The doors opened, Sam and Mr. Silverman stood together on the hushed corridor. Sam continued. The man in question—he must surely be one of us—had taken an ice axe to his own face, raised it in desperation against himself, in the firm belief, so the story went, that his face, indeed his entire head, was enclosed in a bulky helmet of ice, in the desperate illusion raising the ice pick against himself, to make a way through to his eyes, to give exit to the tears that were, so he believed, welling up in there, hot melting tears welling up and not allowed to flow.

  An Island

  20 October

  There weren’t many on the boat—mostly birders coming over to observe the departures and for sightings of any rare vagrants. I eavesdropped a bit, on deck and in the bar they talked about nothing else. Before we left, one of them got texted that a red-eyed vireo had just been seen on Halangy dump and when he told the others they were taken up in a sort of rapture, big grown men with their beards, bad-weather wear and all the equipment. They made sounds that were scarcely words any more, little shouts and squeals, a hilarity, in the enchantment of their passion. I loitered on the fringes.

  After a while, when we were clear of the harbour and coasting quietly along and had passed the first lighthouse, I went downstairs, right down to the lower saloon, below the waterline, and lay on a bunk under a blanket. There was nobody else down there. I felt okay on my own in the big throbbing of the engines, I felt them to be in my chest, like a heart, but I was okay, I kept seeing the faces of the birders when they received the news about the red-eyed vireo, I heard their voices, the transformation wrought in them by their enthusiasm, and it seemed to me that I knew what it was like to be in a company of friends in a common passion that would do no harm. Then I must have slept, but not deeply, near the surface, in the rapids of sleep, not restful, and in the whitewater hurry of the images the clearest, flitting not abiding but as clear as the blade of the moon when it cuts through the clouds, was you. And I believed you wouldn’t mind if I wrote to you now and then. Everyone needs a fellow-mortal to address. You won’t mind?

  When I went up on deck the islands were coming into view. I watched them materialize in their own domain of light. It seemed to me a quite peculiar blessing that a place so manifestly different, far away, out on the borders, could be approached by me.

  At Halangy I went down the gangway among the birders in single file and soon found the boat to Enys.

  So here I am, camped snugly in the angle of two walls for shelter against the expected weather, the site to myself, the season ending and the small birds resting up here in the tamarisk hedges before they launch themselves across the ocean.

  Sunday 25 October

  The island is barely half a mile wide at its widest. There’s a channel of the sea on the east and open sea on the west and my home (for now) is midway between, just under the winds that mostly come from the west. My first evening there was a pause, a complete silence. My second, and all through the night, the weather came over me like nothing I have ever been out in or lain under before, so thorough in its strength, loud in its howling, the wind, the rain, the waves after hundreds of leagues without impediment making their landfall here. Weather knows itself at last when it finds some terra firma to hit against, and best, most thoroughly, knows itself when there are some habitations too and creatures in them who can feel what it is like. Soon after daybreak the rain ceased and I went out in the wind, crouching and gasping for my own small breath in it. The scraps of abandoned fields were strewn with stones, wreck, seaweed, dead things that had lived in salt water. The waves slid up the sheer face of the northern headland and spilled back milk-white off the crown. Nowhere are we higher than a hundred feet above the sea. I crawled along the chine in a blizzard of spindrift through the tumuli home to this tiny lair with every stitch of dress and pore of exposed flesh sticky and proofed with salt. My little stove was a wonder to me, its hoarse flame, the can of drinkable water, the inhalation of the steam of coffee.

  Since then, though the wind has dropped, I can always hear the sea, like a vast engine working just over the hill. It’s as though I’ve been taught something, had my ears and my heart opened to a fact of sound I was ignorant of and now I shall always be able to hear it, even in the city where you live, there on the pavement in the din of traffic if I paused and bowed my head I would hear this sea.

  Tomorrow night I’ll be closer still, but more secure. The woman who runs the campsite has offered me accommodation in a shed. I can fit it out as I like, she says, there’s a table and chair and a camp bed in it already and she’ll lend me a bigger stove. In return, I’ll paint the wash house here, do a few repairs, clear up, make myself useful. If she thinks me odd, she didn’t say so. Generally someone blows in, she said, about this time and quite often over the years they’ve been about your age. You’ll pick up more work if you want it, she said. If you’re handy, if you want to stay. And it suddenly seemed to me that I am quite handy, that I do want to stay, that I’ll be glad to be an odd-job man for a while and possess my own soul in patience in a shed within a stone’s throw of the sea.

  It’s dark an hour earlier from today. I know you don’t like that day of the year.

  If you did want to write, c/o the campsite would find me. In fact, c/o Enys would, enough people have seen me by now on my walks or at the post office.

  26 October

  I went in the church today. It’s down by the quay. Every now and then I re
member—I mean, feel again—why I was ever with the monks. Four solid walls containing stillness, the light through the windows. Really it’s only that, the possibility of being quiet and of receiving some illumination. I don’t think that’s too much to ask once in a while. Afterwards I mooched among the graves. There aren’t many different names, half a dozen families seem to own the place. Newcomers get cremated and are remembered on tablets by the gate. The sea is so close, who wouldn’t want to be buried or at least remembered here?

  I like my shed. It smells of the sea. It’s roomier than I expected and with electricity too because there’s a workshop on the same plot, not used now but still connected. Mary lent me a heater as well as a stove, I trundled them down in a wheelbarrow with the rest of my gear and now I’m nicely at home. I cleaned the place out, mended the roof where the felt had blown off, shaved the window so it closes tight … Things like that. A few other jobs want doing and there are all manner of tools lying idle in the workshop. Help yourself, Mary said. Tomorrow I’ll start on the wash house. That’s the deal.

  I’ve put my notebook, my writing paper and my couple of books on planks from the sea laid over two packing cases. That’s what Mary meant by a table. It’s to write on, read at, eat off—under the window that faces out towards the sea. The chair’s a real one, decently made. It came in off a wreck many years ago. The bed I shall call a truckle bed because I like that word. I took your photo out and did think of standing it on the planks to glance at while I write to you—but I shan’t. I keep my eyes on the page, the nib, the black ink, the making of the letters and the words. If I stare out of the window towards the dune that hides the sea, if I let the vagueness come over, if I don’t keep my eyes by force on the here and now, I see you at once, it’s my gift and my affliction.