Listen to the Voice
Page 38
Chagall’s Return
WHEN I CAME HOME the cat was smiling and the walls of the house were shaking. The door opened and there was my mother in front of me.
‘Who are you, my child?’ she asked, and her eyes were unfocused and mad. There were other old women in black with her and they nodded to me over and over. I went to see a neighbour who was ploughing, and afterwards I took buckets to the well and brought in water. But my mother was still gazing at me with unfocused eyes and she asked me again and again who I was. I told her about the skyscrapers and the man with the violin, but she could understand nothing.
She kept saying, ‘In the old days there were cows, and we were children. We would take them to the grass and there they would make milk.’
‘I have brought you money,’ I said. ‘See, it is all green paper.’
But she looked at the paper unseeingly. I didn’t like the look in her eyes. In the afternoon I took a walk round the graveyard near the house, and the tombstones were pink and engraved with names like conversation sweets.
There is nothing in the world worse than madness. All other diseases are trivial compared to it, for the light of reason is what illuminates the world. All that day I shouted to her, ‘Come back to me’, but she wouldn’t. She wanted to stay in her cave of silence.
In this place I walk like a giant. My legs straddle the ward robe, and the midgets around me speak with little mouths. My hands are too big for the table and my back for the chairs. I look into the water which I brought home from the well and it is still and motionless. But my mother’s eyes are slant and the old women whisper to her. I nearly chase them out of the house but my mother needs them, I think, for they tell old stories to each other. I think they are talking about the days when things were better than they are now.
The cat’s mouth is wide open and he smiles all the time as if his mouth were fixed like that.
‘Who are you?’ says my mother, over and over. She doesn’t remember the day she stood at the door watching me leave, a bag over my shoulder, her eyes shining with tears. I used to see her in the walls of skyscrapers, a transparency on stone. My young days were happy, I think, before she went crazy. Now and again she says things that I don’t understand. She speaks the words, ‘Who is the man with the black wings?’ over and over. But when I ask her what she means she refuses to answer me.
Night falls, and there is a star like a silver coin in the sky. I hear the music of violins, and the black women have left. But my mother’s eyes remain distant and hard, and she stares at me as if I were a stone. A dog with a plasticine body is barking from somewhere and in an attic a man is washing himself with soap over and over.
One day in New York I saw that the sun had a pair of moustaches like a soldier home from the wars, and he began to tell me a story.
‘I went to the war,’ he said, ‘and I was eighteen years old. For no reason that I could think of, people began to fire at me trying to kill me. I stood by a tree that had red berries and prayed. I stayed there for a long time till the sun had gone down, counting the berries. After that I went home and I was hidden by my sister behind a large canvas for the rest of the war. When the war was over there were no trees to be seen.’
Still my mother stares at me with her unfocused eyes. I see the whites of them like the white of an egg. She has terrible dreams. In her dreams she is being chased by a vampire, and just at the moment when he is about to clutch her she wakens up.
‘Where are you, my son?’ she cries. I rush in, but she doesn’t recognize me. The greatest gift in my life would be if she recognized me, if the light of reason would come back to her eyes.
I wonder now if it will ever happen.
‘I shall put tap-water in the house for you,’ I say to her. But she doesn’t answer. She only picks at her embroidery.
‘And heating,’ I say. ‘And an electric samovar.’
‘My father,’ she says, ‘was a kind man who had a beard. He was often drunk but he would give you his last penny.’
I remember him. He wasn’t kind at all. He was drunk and violent, and he had red eyes, and he played the violin all night. Sometimes I see him flying through the sky and his beard is a white cloud streaming behind him. But he was violent, gigantic and unpredictable.
Where the sky is greenest I can see him. I go to the cemetery with the pink tombstones, and his name isn’t on any of them.
What am I to do with my mother, for she shouts at the policemen in the streets. ‘Get out of here,’ she screams at them, ‘this was a road for cows in the old days.’ The policemen smile and nod, and their tolerance is immense for she cannot harm them.
The bitterest tears I shed was when she told them that when her son came home he would show them that she wasn’t to be treated like a tramp. The old, black women come back and are always whispering stories about her, but if I go near them they stop talking.
‘Is your seed not growing yet?’ I ask my next door neighbour.
‘No,’ he says, ‘it is going to be a hard year. How is your mother?’
‘Not well,’ I say, ‘she lives in a world of her own.’
He smiles, but says nothing. He was ten years old when I left this place with my bag on my shoulder. That day the birds were singing from the hedges and they each had one green eye and one blue.
I begin to draw my mother to see if her reason will come back to her. I see her as a path that has been overgrown with weeds. Her apron is a red phantom which one can hardly see and the chickens to which she threw meal have big ferocious beaks. Nevertheless, she does take an interest in what I am doing, though she cannot stay still, and her eyes are beginning to focus.
One day—the happiest of my life—she speaks to me again and recognizes me. ‘You are my son,’ she says, ‘and you left me. Why did you leave me?’ I try to tell her, but I cannot. The necessity for it is beyond her understanding, and this is the worst of all to bear.
That night before she goes to bed she says, ‘Good night, my son,’ and in the middle of the night she tucks the blanket about me to keep me warm. I feel that she is watching over me and I sleep better than I have done for many years. In the morning I am happy and wake up as the light pours through the windows. She is sitting by my bed with a shawl wrapped round her.
‘Mother,’ I cry, ‘I am here. I have come back.’ The windows change their shape as I say it. But she doesn’t answer me. She is dead. She is a statue. She is solid and changeless. All that day I kneel in front of her, staring into her unchanging face.
In the evening one of her eyes becomes green and the other blue. I take my bag in my hand and leave the house. The birds are singing in the hedges and a man is walking through a ploughed field. I do not turn back and wave. The houses are turning into cardboard and the violins are stuck to their walls. I feel sticky stuff on my clothes, my hands and my face. I carry the village with me, stamped all over my body, and take it with me, roof, door, bird, branch, pails of water. I cross the Atlantic with it.
‘Welcome,’ they say, ‘but what have you got there?’
‘It is a nest,’ I say, ‘and a coffin.’
‘Or, to put it another way, a coffin and a nest.’
About the Author
LISTEN TO THE VOICE
Selected Stories
Iain Crichton Smith (1928–98) was born in Glasgow and raised by his widowed mother on the Isle of Lewis before going to Aberdeen to attend university. As a sensitive and complex poet in both English and his native Gaelic, he has published over twenty-five books of verse, from The Long River in 1955 to the Collected Poems of 1992. In his 1986 collection A Life, the poet looked back over his time in Lewis and Aberdeen, recalling a spell of National Service in the fifties, and then his years as an English teacher, working first in Clydebank and Dumbarton and then at the High School in Oban, where he taught until his retirement in 1977. Crichton Smith was the recipient of many literary prizes, with Saltire Society and Scottish Arts Council Awards and fellowships, the Queen’s Jubilee
Medal and, in 1980, an OBE.
As well as a number of plays and stories in Gaelic, Iain Crichton Smith has produced ten collections of stories, the best known of which are Survival without Error (1970), The Black and the Red (1973), The Hermit and Other Stories (1977), Murdo and Other Stories (1981), Mr Trill in Hades (1984), Selected Stories (1990), and Thoughts of Murdo (1993). His novels are Consider the Lilies from 1968 (also in Canongate Classics), The Last Summer (1969), My Last Duchess (1971), Goodbye, Mr Dixon (1974), An t-Aonaran (1976), An End to Autumn (1978), On the Island (1979), A Field Full of Folk (1982), The Search (1983), and The Tenement (1985), In the Middle of the Wood (1987), and An Honourable Death (1992).
Copyright
First published as a Canongate Classic in 1993
and reprinted in 2001
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2009
by Canongate Books Ltd
Copyright © Iain Crichton Smith
Introduction copyright © Douglas Gifford, 1993
All rights reserved
‘Survival Without Error’, ‘Adoration of the Mini’ and ‘On the Island’ were first collected in Survival Without Error (1979)
‘The Dying’, ‘An American Sky’, ‘The Wedding’, ‘The Black and the Red’ and ‘The Professor and the Comics’ were first collected in The Black and the Red (1973)
‘The Hermit’ and ‘Listen to the Voice’ were first collected in The Hermit and Other Stories (1977)
‘At the Fair’ and ‘Murdo’ were first collected in Murdo and Other Stories (1981)
‘What to Do About Ralph?’ and ‘The Play’ were first collected in Mr Trill in Hades (1984)
‘Napoleon and I’, ‘The Old Woman, the Baby and Terry’, ‘By Their Fruits’ and ‘Chagall’s Return’ were first collected in Selected Stories (1990)
The publishers gratefully acknowledge general subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards the Canongate Classics series and a specific grant towards the publication of this title
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN: 978 1 84767 564 4
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