Gael

by Mok, Judith;

  His friend had invited us to stay over for the night. I shook hands with a bearded person whom I couldn’t understand, though he seemed very friendly. I said thank you. I ate his food, and threw up afterwards. I asked if I could take a shower or a bath. Ah no, he said, that’s where he kept the beer. That night I felt like I was making love in a prison cell.

  I also felt I had come home.

  We took a train through the green countryside, passing flowers, rocks, cows, until we had to change at a place called Limerick Junction. I had been listening to his lengthy explanations of the places we saw from the window. He kept holding my hand so that it grew warm, and with it my entire body. But now we were standing on a platform in a bare nowhere. It started to snow.

  There was no shelter. It was here that I started my first battle with the winds.

  For an hour-and-a-half at least I tried to hide in his coat, behind his back, but whenever I moved my face met the elements. I had to talk to them, convince them that I was here for a reason. I peered at the grim backdrop to the station to seek distraction from my cold feet. My feelings were paralysed.

  A train pulled in to platform one. It reminded me of a train I had last seen twenty years ago in France. My father had pointed it out to me then as a curiosity. It had been the last of its kind. Here it lived on in a time of its own.

  Snow covered everything, so I couldn’t admire his ancestral land on the taxi-drive to our rented cottage.

  It was a low-ceilinged house with a living room and a bedroom. It was bitingly cold. We stood and waited for the landlord to arrive. My lover said he would make a fire. I was familiar with making fires for fun but not in a house. He asked me to deal with the landlord while he heated up the house. I paid the rent for a week to a man in a woolly hat.

  We had a fire and a snow-white view, but no food. The slide to the village took us half an hour. More men in caps, big chunks of meat on hooks in the butcher’s window, a shop that sold baked beans and white bread. And butter. A search for vegetables would have been like digging for gold in the mountains of Holland. My lover’s diet and demands seemed to have changed within a few days. We were going to feast for a week on sausages and baked beans. And worse: my warm underwear did not appeal to him. It was pink, with frills in the wrong places, and it was very hard to remove.

  After we had dined with our coats on and watched the flames die out, our only source of warmth was bed. So we went to bed early and I tried not to remember the other countries and my other life. He told me stories about his ancestors chasing people who were chasing sheep. He drew them for me on a small drawing pad. And as they started to live I started to laugh at their dark faces and their blunt weapons until I felt our bodies come alive again. Nothing was real apart from his skin and his hands that loved me. When I felt weightless with exhaustion I kissed his broken nose and fell asleep. Soon dreams moved in that took me back to reality.

  I woke up because somebody had stuck a mask on my face. It felt stiff and I could hardly breathe. The cold was so intense that it felt frozen; when I opened my mouth a big gust of steam came out. I hid under the thin blankets until the smell of coffee and fried eggs reached me. I felt my way around the bed to see if I could find a jumper and a pair of trousers and quickly got dressed.

  He was standing in the half-light of winter with his coat on. Later he would make a fire; we’d run out of turf. I liked the novelty of burning turf. A pleasant feeling came over me; this was not going to last. I was a tourist enjoying a preparatory trip for a survival camp on Nova Zembla. The name appealed to me, so maybe I was unconsciously planning to take a vacation over there. I rambled on to my darling, ignoring the faint voice in my head telling me to call my husband. We pushed our food through our chattering teeth and decided to go for a walk to thaw our feet.

  There was no telephone in the house. I couldn’t call.

  We held on to each other, children in a silenced landscape, writing a kind of truth with each footprint in the virginal snow. We reached the village, only to hear the news that there would be no traffic for the coming days, and a food shortage. I discovered a telephone and dialled my husband’s number.

  He sounded slightly amused that I should be snowed in. I didn’t need to bother to call him again in the coming days. He felt I was safe in a cottage built of snow. ‘Never knew you had primitive aspirations, darling.’ His laughter sounded loud under our high ceiling, the ceilings of my home.

  Meanwhile my lover showed no concern; there was a car-racing competition going on in the village. Men in knitted caps – some pink – drove as fast as they could backwards through the main and only street of the village. The snow caused the tattered cars to slip and slide like toy cars at a fair. Grannies and children giggled along the road. I went in search of fuel and food.

  We spent the whole week talking about his work and his plans. How he wanted to avoid living his parents’ life. In their time they had assessed their needs, reduced them to the basics and struggled with stupefying work to pay for them. Church events were cheerful occasions: a good funeral meant a large amount of drink. And drink meant a warm mist of oblivion for a couple of hours. His bleak images made me feel even colder. I liked listening to him talk about his childhood. How he had a horse in front of his house in the middle of the city. A horse he could talk to and later show his first drawings to. The heavy silence of his parents whenever he showed them a drawing. They had a couple of images of The Lord on their walls. So he drew The Lord for them. His mother hoped there might be money for him in it. She prayed for it. She knitted and she prayed. A lot. She couldn’t really read or write. They watched the telly. That’s what you call it. The telly brought the world to them. But they switched the world off and only watched soaps.

  There was the ritual measuring of the willies with his friends, and how his was the biggest. Of course. He showed it to me again. And we made use of it. Again. He made a portrait of me. My drawing of him did not work out, so I kept tuning the cold strings of my violin. I played. I played along the lines of his thin stories and heard a clearer tone coming to me, and a different structure.

  I also learned to practise making loud farts in bed. His idea of fun. The beans certainly improved my abilities. We never went out much. Only once did we venture along a stretch of road to visit a pub. We were the only splash of colour in the uniform landscape.

  The pub was nearly empty, apart from a few middle-aged whiskey drinkers. For some reason I had brought along my violin. We drank and exchanged words until they asked me to play a tune. I produced a simple tune by Bach. Their loud clapping was pleasant; even here, having played for these people made me thaw out, thaw back to myself.

  A man who had introduced himself as the chief of police told me he knew a girl called Hadassah Roth back in Glasgow, where he’d worked for a while. She was a great fiddler, that girl. I mentioned that she must have been Jewish with a name like that, and I was just about to say that Jews tend to make good fiddlers when he interrupted me. ‘Jewish? Jaysus. You mean to say that the old guy Hitler didn’t manage to get rid of them all?’ It had started to snow again when we struggled back to our dwelling. He was holding my hand. All was white in the bleakest of worlds. White can be so cold once it has lost its innocence.

  He said he had reserved a room in a hotel on the River Liffey back in Dublin, but when we got there this didn’t seem to be the case. No matter, there was plenty of space, so I dug out a card and got us the room. I was going to meet his parents the following day.

  It was grey. Everything was grey: sky, trees, streets, houses, cars, the view, people, all grey. He left me in the Auld Dubliner, a large pub with carmine red sofas. It smelled of decades of smoke and stale beer. I tried to breathe through my mouth – and kept my gloves on while I sipped mineral water.

  He was going to come back in ten minutes. Just needed some time to warn his parents about my imminent arrival. Me – the girl in the photograph they had seen – his girl, he said –ah no, they said, that’s a lady. Me
– the lady on the stained couch. It took only an hour for me to disintegrate. It took him two hours to return, to order me to follow him.

  At the door she waved water at me. Holy water, for she had heard I was not a Christian. His mother, a small, fat woman took my coat. I noticed that her mouth went dry when she spoke to me. We talked about the snow, something she knew I was familiar with. I stood in the airless hallway that was filled with the smoke of fries, noticing the statues of her holy family. I kept my hat and gloves with me on our way to the kitchen where more holiness greeted me. A plastic heart beating in a plastic representation of the Son of G. I sat down and waited for my cup of tea. Meanwhile my lover discussed the neighbours and the deceased with his mummy. He called her Ma. I tried to imagine my mother’s facial expression if I had called her so. It cheered me up. The thought of my mother – that I could go and see her soon.

  While we had our tea she told me they’d had a Jewman in her village. He was a pork butcher. The joke was lost on her. I began to enjoy myself, except for the cold. Could I ask for my coat back? Let’s go and meet the Da, she said, before I had a chance to mention my coat.

  The father was sitting in a low-ceilinged room with his legs stretched out in front of him, a cigarette stuck to the corner of his mouth, a beer on the floor beside him. The television was on loud. Clearly he was not going to get up from his comfy chair. The room was decorated in a variety of flowery patterns strewn over the walls, the curtains and the sofa. There was just about room for all that. We sat on the sofa, the silent mother and son with his foreign lover and the relaxed father in his TV chair. We drank our tea. The father spoke. He liked Spain he said. Did I want to know why? I could barely understand him, but I nodded politely. Cheap drink. His smile was triumphant. Surely I did not expect such an answer? I did not. But now he wanted to know if I liked Spain and, if I did, the reason why. I mentioned the landscape, the language, the rich cultural heritage. I decided to be ambivalent in my praise. I was a snob. I was a snob because a line of a Spanish poem that I loved came to me and I did not care for cheap drink.

  Why not talk about their country? But we seemed to have visited a place they called ‘the bog’ and they did not want to talk about it. I thought it had a different name.

  The visit was a short one. When we were back on the asphalt he explained to me that people from Dublin always laughed about the countryside and called it ‘the bog’.

  I left. I left again. I tore myself away from his tales that kept me on my toes, his crudeness that peppered my sensualities, from the blatant knowledge that I had been stripped of a comfortable way of interpreting myself and my music. His mere presence hit me harder than ever before. At the core a feeling that I refused to recognise as love. So I went my way.

  The way of my tunes. Let me give you one.

  7

  My husband asked me, very politely, if I could tell my Irish friend not to ring at two in the morning every single night. He did not mind the bunches of flowers or stained envelopes that arrived on our doorstep. But his sleep was sacred. He did hope that the man was a decent painter. Think of the disgrace, my dear, if he turns out to be mediocre. But his problem was soon solved; a small portrait of me was sent to us. It was very blatantly dedicated to me. My husband praised the work as technically excellent, as well as interesting in shape and colour. I sat at the breakfast table hugging the painting. He suggested bringing ‘my friend’ over. It could turn out quite well, to have a talented ruffian around for dinner now and then. An artist with a story to tell; enough to last one course during dinner at least. I felt I was looking at my husband through a telescope. Since when had he managed to develop such a stable position in the universe? And at exactly what distance were we now existing from each other? He was going to inquire about an apartment for my painter friend. That silenced me for some time.

  I was thinning into the prescribed shape of a true Parisienne. To me it seemed that if I were lighter there would be less of me, less of his imprints in my flesh. I could feel them everywhere. I became neurotically addicted to water, to wash him out. Water down my lover’s touch to a flow I could integrate into my life

  Women at an old sports club, of which I had become a respected member, saw me swimming for hours in the pool and then steam up in the ancient Turkish baths and finally sprawl in an old armchair with a notepad trying to figure things out on paper.

  The afternoons were fanatical studying hours, my fingers shredded, the blotch in my neck from the violin turning to a purple bruise. Evenings were either the voices of guests or music at my concerts, or living with the presence of his absence.

  I slowed my backstroke one morning only to discover that there were Stars of David all around the ceiling of the pool. I had never regularly visited synagogues but I did recognize one if I happened to be in one. I climbed out of the water and, dripping, went to see the person in charge of the club. Not enough Jews around to keep the place going so the health club had bought the building, was her laconic answer to my question. The Chief Rabbi’s room was the Turkish bath. Naked women relaxed in the room where wise men had once tried to understand the world according to their doctrines.

  Painting nails and hairdos had taken over from the commentaries on the Kabbalah. I sat in an old armchair, speechless with surprise, and had a good look around. It suddenly seemed to me that all these white and very naked bodies were being oiled and perfumed for the ultimate sacrifice of their souls. As soon as they had painted a mouth on, they were only allowed to talk shop, such as hair, weight and designer outfits.

  No one was allowed to mention the smelly old men who had conferred here, in this same space, to talk about the miracles of life and death. The pool might have been a ritual bath, a mikvah. That idea appealed to me. So I cleansed myself of the stains of an adulterous love.

  I sat in my chair, stark naked, until the pattern of the cover was indented in my skin, until I started laughing at it all.

  We had agreed to meet for lunch at Fouquet’s. The restaurant where James Joyce used to go with his entire family and hand over enormous tips to the headwaiter. I had to be thinking of the Irish connection, of course. I kept humming cheerful tunes, walking all the way up the Avenue Foch, all the way down the Champs-Elysées. Looking at the trees, smelling the spring in the breeze, waving at a man in a car: forget about sex, forget about it and don’t turn it into that emotion that you do not want to hear about, just forget about the sex.

  I had paraded a second lace skin in front of my husband the night before. He had sat behind his desk, his legs slightly apart, flawless fold in his casual trousers gazing at my underwear, my high heels. A tinge of sadness in his eyes. I took advantage of that and cajoled him into my consoling him. We had a short struggle with sex, as short as the word itself. He sighed into the pillows and admitted to admiring my outfit. It just did not turn him on. My body, after all, was an empty orbit.

  Walk. Forget that he is naked behind you, and worse, his long fingers in you, on you. His hands stroking your skin. That magnetic field is drawing them closer to a firm grip. Male. I had that long, dull poem to be recited along every walk I took.

  He told me over oysters and lobster, his manicured hand resting peacefully on the damask tablecloth, that he had found a flat for my protégé.

  His answer to my raised eyebrows was that he had checked my credit card accounts; the young artist did not come cheap. The gesture was cold. My answer was a photograph of the Irishman kissing me passionately, which I put down beside his plate.

  In that case, he thought, I should take another trip over there, just to say goodbye and put an end to the whole business.

  He took my arm and we strolled to a travel agency.

  I spoke to him on the phone. No need to collect me. He was just about to forget all about me, about the time I came to see him. So he said.

  If things were like that I might as well throw my ticket away. But no, I was what he wanted and I was just going over there to show him he was not, ever, ever goi
ng to get me. That time he picked me up and took me straight to his bed in a filthy cold room.

  His canvasses stood around doing most of the talking for him. I explained the facts. We were not to meet again. He laughed and said it was fine, fine with him.

  We had two days of loving to do. Could we sleep somewhere else, I wondered, after I struggled for a while to find my clothes amidst the ruins of his belongings. Ah sure, we could go out and phone a friend who lived in his grandfather’s house. A beautiful big redbrick. I was marched along a gloomy street. Drizzle hung around us. I didn’t notice the dull facades well enough until we reached our roof for the night. We entered the sombre hall. It was late. The friend showed us to his grandfather’s bedroom. The old man was in the country, so we could use his bed. I undressed my freezing body and pulled back the bedclothes. On the sheet was a long, dry shredded piece of skin. I suggested the old man must have been a reptile. And I could not rest in a reptile’s nest. We went downstairs and called our host. Not a muscle in his face moved when he heard our complaint. Granddad was not a great one for changing the sheets, but there should be some clean ones in the bottom drawer. They were his Granddad’s wedding present. We found them and enjoyed the fifty-year-old dust in our dreams.

  For breakfast we met a girl who did not introduce herself. To avoid the sausages I listened to her talk. She was all praise for the house, she was from the countryside and they had a toilet outside in the yard. I couldn’t believe my ears. The girl kept on talking. She was away with the animals on the farm and the fire they had to keep going. There was a sickening smell of hot, dead fat.

  I fled outside. A group of born-again Christians were singing in the garden next door.

  It was tuneless and messy; their singing pulled at my fragile nerves. Back in the kitchen the girl was now wiping the remains of her breakfast from her face with the back of her hand. At least she had stopped talking.