To the Volcano

by Elleke Boehmer

  But then I got stuck. Something in me resisted going backwards. Yet telling the story the other way about, directed into the future, meant moving the narrative arc inexorably towards his death.

  I could not face his death, literally and in all other ways. I could not move our story in that direction. He had stepped off our beautiful path together without giving me so much as a warning and, even two years on, I could not face going onwards alone. I could not bear the thought of talking to him out loud or in my head and never getting a response. I did not want to be a widow—that sad, dragging word.

  Two years on, busy as I was, the dark days in our clammy house still congealed my blood and the nights killed me. It wasn’t just how everything still spoke of him—the trinkets he had collected on our travels, the pots and pans he used to cook his winter stews, how these things all clanged dully gone-gone-gone, like an off-key cymbal. It was the nights. The nights were still full of him—which is to say, full of the terrible dream of him that took me every night in its arms.

  Unless I took a sleeping pill, the dream each time caught me in a horrifying loop, a terrible rerun of his last night alive. It began with our usual embrace, tenderly, like all our nights together, but then moments later I was suddenly pinned down, suffocating in my own bed, our own bed. There I lay, covered in cold sweat, held down, grappling him, and he was prone on top of me, a cold dead hulk steadily stiffening, a cold dead skull with the jaw askew, my husband yet not my husband, the spirit departed, who knows how, by some sudden stroke, even as I slept.

  Could you not have warned me, Klaus, awakened me, before you left me with the shell of you in my arms?

  This terrible nightmare would not let me go. Whenever my guard was down the flashbacks came without warning—even now, at this moment, at our friend Jonathan’s housewarming party, here in his graceful new bungalow with the picture windows down the side of the lounge facing the bay.

  I stood on my own, holding the glass of sparkling wine Jonathan had just given me and admiring the view—the pale creamy sea, the thin nimbus clouds, the sky blueing towards evening. I was wearing a new white dress with tapering sleeves and a round neck, my hair in tight plaits, a Grecian look Klaus loved in me—fit for the Elgin Marbles, he always said. And then, without warning, even as I looked out, traced the soft wave pulses pushing into the bay, my body ran cold sweat and I felt the dead weight on top of me. It should have been a sign.

  At that same moment I saw the biographer. I saw the biographer before I recognised him, if I can put it that way, though his agent had already once brought him to the house. I found him looking at me across the room and nodding in greeting over the heads of the other guests, for we were both tall. I did not nod back, not yet, I was still trying to place him—that wide forehead, the wine-reddened lips—but even as I stood there, looking back, I was overcome with memories. I remembered the red-carpeted corridor on the way to the prize-giving in the great hall, the ceremony culminating in the lifetime achievement award that Klaus had sensed would be his last. I saw the welcome party waiting on the landing, the solicitous minister at its head, and then, yes, a man, this man, falling to his knee before Klaus’s wheelchair.

  Even as I stood caught in this rush of memories, the biographer set off across the room towards me. Like a tank he ploughed a straight path across the carpet, not once dropping his eyes. This was the moment to turn away—Jonathan was close by, still pouring wine, popping a cork—and yet, even as the writer bore down on me, something I cannot explain writhed through my innards and unsettled me.

  ‘Eve, how wonderful to see you,’ the biographer, I will call him Will, said. His hair, combed in a thick iron-grey wave, fell back from his face as he raised his chin to greet me. And yes, I remembered now, connecting that uplifted face and that low-timbred voice, how he had looked at Klaus with the same open expression, looked up at him with these same reverential words, and so wooed him.

  In the same minute, even as he said my name, and I said the usual things in return, I realised, too late, that I should not have dressed in this way, with the Grecian plaits spread across my bare shoulder-blades, as if he, my husband, were still there to admire me. Yet he was not there, would never be again, he had sidestepped our path together, while the biographer, Will, who even today, yesterday, last night, had been poring over Klaus’s lines, digging into them for as-yet-uncovered meaning, stood appraising me, following with his eyes the Grecian lines of my hair and gown.

  ‘I hoped you’d be here,’ he was saying when next I concentrated. He seemed to be smiling. ‘I wanted to talk, catch up. As we’re working on related projects, if I can put it that way.’

  He knew about my book! Someone had told him, though the ink on the contract was barely dry. It felt suddenly as if we were stuck in the same small room together, the same library carrel, as if an invisible mischievous hand had shoved us in there, inescapably side by side like dolls in a doll’s house.

  He was too close. I made to step back, smile vacantly, deny everything, but then I saw again Klaus’s hand on this man’s shoulder, how he let it rest, gripped it tight. How grateful I had felt at the look of relief in Klaus’s face that night.

  All evening it had been tough to calm Klaus down, I remembered. He was a worrier by nature, but in the taxi on the way to the prize-giving his anxiety got the better even of me. His fidgeting kept dishevelling his black tie and our assistant kept straightening it, till finally even I, his unswerving wife, began to feel uncertain. I asked him to stop fretting.

  ‘Of course I’m fretting,’ he exploded, his lame leg restless. ‘Isn’t it a lifetime achievement award, the culmination of my life in letters? Haven’t I been waiting for it forever? But I don’t feel culminated. I’m not rounded out. Might they not pronounce me insufficiently achieved and at the last minute withdraw the award?’

  Life was cruel, he went on, it had reduced him to this wheelchair, and the last book had been so difficult to finish, the plot lines snarling, even towards the end, the minor characters staying flat, uninteresting, even now he doubted—

  And then, as I was pushing him along, because it helped him to feel my hands on the chair, this devotee had dropped down on his knee in front of him, and his brow had cleared.

  As soon as we got home that night, the glass trophy in my lap, Klaus had gone to his computer and looked up the biographer—the life writer, as he called himself. Klaus straight away pronounced him of his tribe, an impassioned realist. He called his agent first thing the next morning and arranged a meeting. Will’s ambitious study of the folk poet Reinhardt Kester had appeared only months before, a portrait that painted this small-town university professor with a side-line in verse as a provincial Rilke. The biography was, my husband said the reviews said, one in a thousand.

  After that he invited him home, just the once, but the visit lasted for hours. Klaus brought out his favourite Pinot Noir from the cool place under the south-facing verandah. He showed Will his study—the big desk purpose-built to fit the wheelchair behind it; the numbered archive boxes he had had specially made by the restorers at the state library; my photograph hanging opposite where he could always see it; the glass trophy; the other small contrivances to help his writing, like the piles of taped euro coins, saved from our honeymoon, that elevated his keyboard.

  ‘Don’t you think, Eve?’ the biographer was now saying, his voice raised. ‘Let’s compare notes. He’s a big enough subject for more than one study, I hardly need to tell you. As we’re here, shall we arrange something?’

  ‘Now?’ I found myself saying.

  In reply he took his phone out of his pocket, pressed the diary app. ‘It would be great to talk.’

  I felt for my purse, paper, a pencil. His eyes followed my hands patting my sides. He seemed to be leaning into me, bending over me even, though I am easily as tall. Again the worm in the base of my belly stirred.

  He went on talking, but hardly a word went in. There was something about the light from the sea, and coincide
ntal and fortuitous meetings, and about starting a new chapter centred on the remarkable short novel Klaus had completed not long before he met me, Yonville, a sequel to Emma Bovary, in which Emma did not die but found a third lover, a rich man to settle all her debts.

  ‘Don’t you agree, Eve, it was so surprisingly light for Klaus, so frothy and sexy, fantastic really for a writer of his seasoned maturity, his gravitas, how did he do it?’

  And he paused, his reddened lips puffy, waiting for me to say something. For the third time something in my guts turned.

  The following week we went out to dinner, an Italian place with a first-floor balcony, rough-hewn tables, black cladding on the walls. Though it was a warm night for winter the open balcony doors let in a draught. I was glad of my long-sleeved jersey dress, its high turtleneck collar.

  About our conversation I remember hardly a thing, just the very ordinary pasta arrabiata, and something he said about biography, the question of whether biography was the new fiction. I remember also the raw, stupid, indiscriminate desire again plucking at my guts.

  Then the decaf espressos arrived and he came at last to his point. He wanted to ask me a few things, he said, not interview me per se, but rather confirm stories heard elsewhere. Speaking of coincidences, as we did, you know, last time—did we? I asked myself—he wondered about the things that had drawn Klaus and I together at first, you know, after the festival where we met, when we got talking. He had heard that we both loved birds and bird-watching, that we shared wide-ranging tastes in music, Handel, Bach, but also the Grateful Dead, Little Feat—

  But how did he know these things? I asked myself. I had typed up some of these details, of course, but I was the wife, the widow. I let him bridge his own pause. I looked at his hands clasping his coffee cup, his rosy, supple hands with their big-knuckled fingers. I had to clasp my own hands together in my lap, the urge to grip those fingers was so strong.

  Holding me tight in bed at night, Klaus had always said there will be others. I would not want you to be alone. Sunk in the dank cavern of my grief, I had many times remembered this. His words sanctioned me now. I did so want to be touched, to be held. I wanted the side of Will’s hand there to slide up hard and warm between my thighs.

  ‘In a way, the timing couldn’t be more perfect,’ he was saying. ‘I don’t mean we join forces necessarily, but at least set up a regular conversation, exchange tips. It makes sense, writing in tandem about the same subject, excited about the same life, but from different perspectives, obviously.’

  I managed to repeat back to him, ‘A regular conversation, yes. From different perspectives.’

  ‘You’ll excuse me for saying this,’ he went on, ‘but some of the research I do might be useful to you. Much of his life must have felt like past history from where you stood.’

  His book would ingest mine, I then saw. It would suck it in. My memoir, my memories, the few notes I had got down so far, would be his material, his substance, his meat. He was telling the story that was mine to tell, he wanted to tell it back to me. I saw it coming and yet I did nothing. My innards craved him like food.

  Two nights later we again met for dinner. It was at the same restaurant, perhaps it was the same pasta arrabiata. I wore the same turtleneck, with my hair in Grecian plaits. By midnight, we were in his flat, in his huge bed with its crisp white sheets, and I was held tight, as I had wanted. In fact I was held too tight. His powerful arms engulfed me. His hands scalded my skin.

  ‘Hold on, Will,’ I had to ask at one point, ‘Take a break, let me breathe.’

  But when he pushed back, withheld himself, things were worse. Now I could not avoid his eyes, that gimlet stare fixed on me, even when he came.

  Still, that was the first sedative-free night since Klaus’s death that the nightmare did not visit me.

  After that night we spent every Sunday together. We visited art exhibitions and craft fairs, and took drives through the small dry towns scattered along the peninsula. Afterwards we always ended up back at his place, on his crisply laundered sheets. Each time I brought along a fresh change of clothes and showered and changed before dawn, arriving back on my own doorstep, Klaus and my doorstep, as the new day broke, ready for a new week’s work. And I was at last working. Writing came from my pen in fits and starts, a memory here, an image there, and the draft of my first chapter slowly grew in length.

  Yet all this time Will avoided returning to the topic of our conjoined projects, the things we might exchange. He took down no notes and his bedroom was free of recording devices—I did check. Generally it was I who introduced the subject of Klaus, if I was reminded of him, and he responded in a warm, kindly way, without probing. He left his mobile phone on his hallway table every time he came in.

  In fact we talked very little, even on our long afternoon drives. I spent the greater part of these excursions thinking about the sex we would later have. After that first night, our coupling was always scissored, distracted, our torsos as far apart as a ninety-degree angle makes possible. But it was good to be held, at least for that early period we spent together. True, at night, if I ever awoke, I often caught his open eyes on me, shining in the light coming in from the street. It was the price I had to pay for being held. Every time, I quickly shut my eyes again, tried to fall back to sleep. The memory of his watching only ever came to back to me much later, long after I was home.

  By and by the time came for him to come to our house and it was then that things changed. Of course I had prepared everything carefully. I aired the spare room and refreshed the sheets. I locked the cabinets and cupboards that held Klaus’s papers and sent the completed box files of his early work to the national library for safekeeping. Our cute his and hers kitchen stuff that we had so enjoyed using, the mugs, plates and aprons, I hid in the pantry. I wedged our bedroom door shut and fitted a padlock to the inside of Klaus’s study door. Then I locked up the study and let myself out through the sash window and jammed that shut too.

  The first night I made a fire and we drank a bottle of Klaus’s Pinot Noir. Will said we didn’t have to have sex, we could just talk. I led him to the spare bed anyway, but then my body locked shut, I could not let him in. The night was wakeful for us both. Several times I glanced across and saw his eyes shining up at the ceiling. Later I must have fallen asleep because when I woke suddenly around dawn, I was alone in the clammy cold bed, and there were stirrings all through the house, creakings, rattlings, tappings.

  ‘Talk to me,’ Will said the second night, this time at table. ‘Tell me how this feels to you, my being here, holding you in this space, loving you?’

  I turned my face away. He should have not said loving. It was a mistake. After coffee I asked him to leave.

  He did not return to the house and yet my work began to suffer. Some days I wrote a paragraph where before I had written pages; some days I wrote nothing at all. I could no longer find my way through to the Z-to-A story-line. Will was in the road. Whenever I wrote about Klaus, even the best times—the evenings we spent by the fire reading from his new work, the walks we took before his leg got bad—it was Will with his eyes gleaming in the darkness I saw in his stead. With every word, Klaus retreated from me.

  Will and I agreed to a daytime meeting in a neutral place, the café beside the art gallery. I asked him not to touch me, yet I could not avoid his eyes.

  ‘I’m in very deep, Eve,’ he said, or words to that effect. ‘Klaus once talked about love fiercer than death, about never letting it go. I don’t want to say this, but I must say it, I feel this love for you. I love you and desire you more than anyone I’ve ever loved before.’

  It was then I saw that Will didn’t only want me for material. He didn’t only want the woman Klaus had loved, the mere mortal coil of this woman. He wanted things that went beyond that, far beyond. He wanted to feel the desire that Klaus had quickened in me. He wanted somehow to fill the place that Klaus had occupied in me. He wanted to reach in, probe, dig around, and then take that place.
Watching me at night, he was considering his chances, how to effect the grab. He had me wanting him and he wanted my spirit in exchange.

  So I broke things off. On the phone I asked him to stop everything, the calls, the texts, the deliveries of flowers. He came to remonstrate on the verandah, his arm propped across the door frame. I managed to shut the door on him. Then he stood for hours in the street, rocking back and forth, shouting my name. He returned the following night, and the night after that. On the first two nights I begged him by SMS to stop. On the third night I called the police.

  The following morning I called my agent. Will’s biography of Klaus was no longer authorised, I said. I wished to withdraw authorisation. I was Klaus’s literary executor, I could do this. My agent asked for reasons. One very good reason, I said—his methods are unsound.

  It is another year on now. I am still on my own. Perhaps I will always be. At night the dream of Klaus still comes to me. I am held, yes, but by a ghost, the dream of a ghost.

  At parties I occasionally meet someone—mostly men, on occasion a woman. When we spend the night together it is usually at a hotel, more rarely at their place, but never at mine, at ours. Sometimes they ask about Klaus. If they do, generally after we first have sex, I cut the affair short.

  Klaus and I were one, I’d say if I were minded to explain. I lived for him and his work lived because of me. My love blazed in his work. In my heart I live for him still.

  Will’s unauthorised biography will soon be out. His publisher has taken out half-page ads in the literary review pages. The cover shows Klaus’s face in profile. The outline of his face is a grey-brown collage of stone shapes and birds.