Quartet for the End of Time

by Johanna Skibsrud

  DRAGGING MY USELESS LEG, I headed in a singular direction—so singular, in a landscape replete with possibilities of directions I might equally have tried, that it was, on the contrary, no direction at all. I didn’t pause—to survey the land, to test the wind, to reason with whatever faculties I had begun to regain—I only plunged ahead, with a great shuddering panic of joy in my heart, which beat now only with the joy of its own beating, and with each beat there stirred again in me the impossible human faith with which all human hearts beat: that it would continue to beat. And it was by that faith, which had nothing to do with gods, or even with men, that I managed to make my way from the small camp, barely glancing back as I went.

  Almost at once I became aware of time in quite a different way than I had from within the cell. Of the way that it existed, deeply, within the earth—distinct and yet inseparable from the predictable comings and goings of the sun. It was according to these comings and goings (in order, that is, to survive first the brutality of the heat in midafternoon, then the crippling cold with which the landscape was seized by darkness) that I relearned time. That I regained, that is, or more particularly, a sense of continuum—of the manner in which time was not constituted merely by the tick, tock of two moments as they swung, alternately, back and forth, but proceeded according to a more encom-passing rhythm of which that alternation was only the most minute part. Without this sense—just as without water or food—I would surely have perished. But water and food were, of course, necessary, too, and both of which I was lucky enough to stumble upon on the third day of my travels when I came upon a recently abandoned village—torn through (I could not tell) days, maybe even hours before, and perhaps by Semenoff himself.

  The sight of that village as I approached it was to me like the sight of the kingdom of heaven—if, that is, there were such a kingdom, and I a man of faith. Being a man, instead, of an empty stomach, parched throat, and broken bones, it was equal or better to me than any glimpse of paradise. There was still water in the flasks that hung on the scorched and crumbling walls of the houses I entered—and I drank. There was flour and even a little dried meat to be found inside a leaning cupboard, whose door, fused shut by fire, I managed to pry open with the end of a spoon. I then mixed the flour with the water from a flask into a paste and placed it on my tongue. It is impossible to describe the sensation that spread through me in that moment. It was as if every cell of my body unfurled at once. I did not move for half a minute or more, or even swallow, but only sat and felt within me the thrill of contact between the food and my tongue. I felt it rush right out to the ends of my fingers—felt it reach every last follicle of hair on my body. Only then did I swallow.

  FOR FOUR DAYS I lived in that village alone, except for the rats and the unburied corpses of the dead—before I realized I was not alone. On the fifth day, toward evening, as I prepared my usual meal—stirring into my ration of flour six drops of the precious water from the flask (it gave me, I remember, such pleasure to count them, and even greater pleasure, after I had counted out six precisely, to allow one more—a mistake, a single, unaccounted-for drop, a pure gift!)—I caught sight out of the corner of my eye of an odd shape, darting quickly between the burned-out beams, fallen crossways, along the path. I turned and squinted into the oncoming darkness. At first I thought my eyes had simply tricked me. Perhaps it had been only a mirage I had seen—resulting from hunger, or the shifting light. Or perhaps, and just as likely, it was a passing ghost, finally rising from one of the bodies I had not had the strength to bury—whose stench and shame I lived among, as if it were my own. I was not then, as I am not now, unsusceptible to the idea that spirits linger sometimes, semi-embodied on the earth, and that it is even possible on occasion to encounter them. Whether in real and physical form, I don’t know, but at least, certainly, in the dream images—which do not ever just come from nowhere—of the mind. But at the same time as I accepted this possibility (as well as the inarguable fact that I was very hungry and very tired, and that my eyes were apt to make mistakes in the descending darkness), I did not believe that either explanation was true. I believed very strongly, and I could not be swayed from this belief, that I had indeed seen—moving between the beams that had been strung across the path—the shape of a man. I left my spoon and the flour and the water I had yet to allow myself the pleasure of releasing, drop by drop, from the flask, and made my way to the adjacent house. My leg had healed slightly, though it was stiff still, as if frozen beneath the knee, so I could not move quickly. Still, I moved quickly enough to catch a second glimpse of the moving figure as it disappeared behind a fallen tree. It was no wonder I had managed to track him—I saw now that he was a very old man, that he moved half doubled over, painstakingly slow. My impression that he had been a ghost had no doubt been influenced by the fact that he was dressed entirely in white.

  It is difficult for me now to say with what sort of caution I myself moved then, in the direction of the fallen tree behind which the old man had disappeared. What was I afraid of? What was left for me to lose in that ruined village over which, until just moments before, I had thought I’d had sole dominion? In truth, I had not thought past the last flask of water the already nearly empty cupboard contained. I had not thought past the immediate salvation that had presented itself to me in the form of a ruined village; of white flour, a severely limited supply of water, and a side of dried meat, which I had not yet had the stomach to touch. What would I do when the water was gone? When I had stirred the last of it— forgoing the final surplus drop—and there was nothing at all? Over what would I maintain dominion then except precisely that nothing? What, therefore, could I claim dominion over now? And thus with what caution did I move, except with the caution of a doomed man toward his own death—finally away from dominion over anything at all?

  But when I reached the collapsed tree—fallen crossways over the charred entryway to the adjacent house—and peered beyond it, it was not death that I saw, but only an old man. Bent nearly double—perched on a fallen beam just beyond the barrier the fallen tree imposed. He did not see me at first, but instead stared straight ahead—toward what, I didn’t know. Nor, indeed, given the blankness of his gaze, if he saw anything at all. I waited for a moment, my ears perked like a dog’s, listening for any indication that I was in the company of any more strangers whose presence I had just as equally failed to anticipate. But no, there was just the familiar sound of the empty air through the broken limbs of the tree and collapsed beams of the houses—which, exposed at various angles to the approaching wind, created a series of obstacles it overcame in a single breath. After some time passed like this, and I was certain the man was indeed alone and indeed a man, I approached, extending my open hand in an expression of—I knew not what. But then, as I continued my approach, as I continued to extend my empty hand at that particular angle toward the old man, suddenly—I knew. Peace, said my hand—and I knew in that moment, for the first time, the true meaning of that word, and also why it proves so difficult to say among living men. I had, and expected, nothing. And immediately as the old man turned, sensing my approach, he knew and accepted that. We were two men, with nothing to give, and nothing that could be taken away, and so we sat down next to one another, side by side, and were at peace.

  FOR SIX MORE DAYS and nights we remained like that, the old man and I. I wetted his flour with my water, and he wetted mine with his own. Together we now had six full flasks of water. I carried mine, along with my pot of flour and the side of meat, still untasted, to the old man’s home, which was still standing and looked, perhaps, much the same as it always had—except that the roof had been burned, exposing the little house’s single room to the open air. We placed our provisions together by the cookstove, which appeared as though it might also have functioned as it always had—except, of course, that its chimney had been made irrelevant by the gaping sky that it, and the rest of the house, now opened upon. Our joint provisions, gathered together there, gave the impression almost o
f plenty, and for several days—until my growing thirst and hunger interrupted the impression—I would find myself glancing over to the stove where the flasks remained, arranged together in a solemn row, simply to admire them there.

  THOUGH WE COULD NOT properly speak to one another, I understood before long that on the night of the raid, the old man had lain in the bed in which he still slept; that he had heard a noise, which had made him shake with fear. That he had turned to where another—a wife? a child? It was difficult to be certain—lay. That he had been surprised to see that they were not there, where he had expected them to be. That he had begun to call out. That for a long time he called and called, and no one came. That the noise became louder. That he smelled the smoke of the village as it burned. That he fell to his knees and prayed. That he prayed to God for the return of the woman or the child. For the flames to retreat. For the village to be saved. That, afterward, he lay down on the floor and covered his face with the cloth of his robe. That he crawled under the bed, wedged between the mattress and the floor, and closed his eyes. That he waited—perhaps for death. But that, after some time passed, he opened his eyes again and found he was alive. That he went to the door, which now gaped open, though the branches of a fallen tree obscured the street from view. That he had pushed his way through the branches and, because he was nearly blind and did not need to shield his eyes from what he knew lay before him, covered his heart. There were no words for what the old man had felt then, and those that he had up until that point used—words that, though I understood him well enough, had fallen uselessly on my ears—dropped away, and there were no words at all but only his hand, lifted from his heart, and extended—open and waiting—in the same way I had held my own when first I approached him.

  All this I learned from the old man, but I was at a loss to tell him, or to have him comprehend, my own story, and after only one or two failed attempts I no longer tried. There was no vocabulary, not even of gesture or sound, by which I could convey to him the great distance I had traveled, or for what reason I had come.

  BUT ON THE THIRD DAY of our residency together a curious thing, which seemed close to miraculous at that time, occurred: we discovered, the old man and I, that we had between us a shared language, after all— however cursory and incomplete. It happened in this way: The old man, his toothless gums still gleaming with the paste of flour and water that we had, toward evening, shared, uttered three simple words: Oui, c’est bon, in appreciation of his meal. He spoke them quietly; he had not expected me to hear, let alone to understand. But the words resonated within me. They traveled the ill-used channels of my memory, and my own nearly forgotten childhood came flooding back. Though I was still a young man, the memories that returned to me then had not been stirred for many years. So far removed did I feel from them then, it might easily have been someone else’s childhood I recalled. Someone else’s language—which perhaps I had only read in a book, or heard recounted over a fire, in the same way I am recounting this story to you now. (Someday—who knows?—these words I am using may resurface within you in a similar way—as a dimly recalled version of your own life.) That was, in any case, how the memory of my mother—last seen by me at the age of six—and her language—last heard by me at that same age—came back to me. And so it was, that for the remaining four days we lived in the single room of his house—surrounded by an emptiness that could be neither gestured toward nor named—the old man and I spoke French together. It was a language the old man had learned as a child, dreaming he would one day visit the great cities of the world where he knew it to be spoken. A language that, perhaps at the same age the old man had undertaken to learn it, I had already begun to forget. It was my mother who had taught to me what little I knew—for she was a Frenchwoman, from Upper Canada. My father, a trapper and a gambler, had met her while traveling through that region in the early part of the century, and by the time I was six years old she had disappeared again—back to that mysterious part of the world from which she had come. The language she had spoken to me in those, my earliest years, had—I thought—also been lost, wrenched from me in the exact manner my mother had been. I could not, therefore, recall her language, when finally I did, without a certain amount of reflexive pain. It was as if each word I recalled, as the old man spoke, were pulled from an actual location in my heart where it had remained, without my knowing it, even after all those years.

  We did not speak in full sentences, the old man and I. Or try to convey our meaning, as we had before, with gestures and the accompanying words of our own languages. In part, this was because we did not have enough words between us in our shared language to really communicate anything—but mostly it was because that was not what we desired. For neither of us was there any longer a need, therefore an impulse, to attach the language we shared to any meaning at all. Instead, we took pleasure in listening to the sounds the words made when we spoke them—knowing they were sounds that connected us, at least by a tenuous thread, to one another, and therefore to the world. It was enough to know that when the old man pointed to the wall and spoke the word for it that I also not only saw the wall, and knew it was a wall, but also had within me a wall of my own—an almost forgotten wall, but a wall nonetheless, which corresponded perfectly to the sound of the word the old man spoke. Back and forth we went, naming the things that we saw, and that remained to be named in the half-demolished house. This went on until, on the sixth day of our shared residency, the old man uttered an unrecognized word and pointed to the empty space beside his bed where some days earlier he had indicated an absent wife or child. I did not understand the word at first, and it took some time for me to realize that it was not a word at all— but a proper name. This interruption of the simple rules of our game destroyed, at once and entirely, the initial joy we had taken in our shared language. It became, in that moment, a language like any other—which spoke of things that could neither be pointed to nor held in hand. To this day I cannot bear to hear a word of French spoken, and we did not speak it, the old man and I, again, to one another—not even to name the flour, or the water, or the spoon, with which we were nightly fed. And very shortly after that, indeed, we did not speak to or see one another again, nor sit in the perfect peace we had—after having for a second time given up language—regained. Because, on the seventh day, there arrived on the limit of our horizon a band of soldiers, moving swiftly in our direction.

  AT FIRST IT WAS impossible to tell from what army, or for what cause, they came. Perhaps it was their own. There were plenty of those, too—self-governing bands of soldiers, fashioned after the mode of the great Admiral Kolchak or General Semenoff. Those who could see no reason for the spoils of war to be directed into the hands of only two or three men—or why, if it did occur that way (as it was always wont to do), they themselves should not be among the chosen. It was rumored that some of the American “deserters” had joined wandering bands such as these, and it was impossible for me, I realized, as I watched the approaching soldiers waver at the limit of the empty landscape, not to get the idea of these fearful wandering tribes of deserters and outlaws mixed up in my mind with the idea of the dead.

  Once the soldiers had advanced far enough that it became clear there was no other possible course for them to take except directly to our door, the old man and I returned to the half-demolished house. Obeying the old man’s hurried gestures, I followed him to the bed, which on one other occasion had saved him. Cautiously, he slid his slight frame between the sinking mattress and the dirt of the floor, and, when he was settled there, turned and directed me to follow. Though I was smaller in frame than I am now, there was no way I

  could have fit myself beneath that narrow bed. I shook my head and indicated my breadth and height, exaggerating it by at least three times my actual size. Indeed, I felt that overlarge as I looked around for another location in which to hide. I felt each moment as it passed thicken like an object in my throat. Everything was open and gaping, blasted or shot through or collapsed or in s
ome other way exposed to the air and every approaching eye or blade or gun that might arrive in the hand of any man, living or dead. I knelt again to the floor and peered in at the old man. He lay perfectly still, his thin chin pointed straight ahead, but I saw that his lips moved in what I took to be a half-whispered prayer. I listened carefully, and found that if I stilled my heart and pressed my ear as far into the emptiness that stretched between us as I could, I could hear the sound his words made against that emptiness. I could hear, that is, not the sound itself, which rang in my head without meaning, but instead the space of encounter between the words and the air. Between his utterance of those words and the air’s receipt of them, which was as dumb and uncomprehending as my own. And at that moment, though I had not prayed for many years, it occurred to me to hunt in the depths of my memory for a prayer of my own. I located one or two words, but when I said them out loud they sounded embarrassingly hollow and insincere—especially next to the reverent, though unintelligible, murmur that continued to emanate from the old man. For a moment, comforted by that sound, I thought I might just stay beside him like that, until the end came—whether at the hands of marauding bandit soldiers or the hands of time. I would stay, pressed as nearly as I could into the emptiness of the old man’s voice as it made its negative impression on my heart and my ear. But then I realized that, if I stayed, I gave away not only myself but also the old man, and that brought me to my senses again. But as I made to go, the old man—sensing my retreat—interrupted his prayer with a muffled shout, and once more I turned and pressed my face into that dimness and saw his face was now turned toward mine. He reached his hand toward me as I knelt again by the bed. It was more like an empty claw of a bird than the hand of a man—a crippled claw, which had grasped nothing for a very long time. I took that claw in my own hand, and saw then that there were tears in the old man’s eyes. In the dimness they stood motionless, like a thick cataract, but somehow it was not sadness but a sort of joy that I sensed in him then. I could not explain it at that time, nor fully now, so counter to the fear and the trepidation in my own heart did that joy run. We are always so quick, aren’t we, to translate what we see—the pure material of the world—into our own image. We refuse to let it rest, even for the brief moment in which it is given to us to do so, as it first arrives. To feel it, that is, even for that brief time, for what it is, or might have been, before converting it through the machinery of our hearts and minds—which can be such dark and merciless implements sometimes—to what we already know. And just so, I took the old man’s joy and I turned it into sadness and fear inside my own heart. Though there was something of that joy that lingered in it still—something I am only now beginning to crack into and understand. But it is a slow thing, and I do not think that I have understood yet, or will for a long time, what it was on that day that I was given. Not until, perhaps, I myself am an old man—if God or whatever powers-that-be grant me that—and I have wedged myself into the very last space available for me on the good earth to hide.