The river is the river
Page 23
On her computer she has thousands of family photos. Here are the pictures from Prague: Lulu and Martin, with the Powder Tower behind them; herself and Martin, out of focus, at the Josefov cemetery; little Lulu in her powder-blue raincoat, wading in blossom by the castle; Lulu with an enormous ice cream. It was a wonderful holiday. One day a book would come of it, she had thought while they were there. She would use the station as a setting, somehow, and she would try to make use of a strange scene that they had witnessed. A smartly dressed man, fiftyish, had stood as still as a statue while a very pretty woman, about twenty years younger, standing less than arm’s length from him, spoke fiercely but quietly into his impassive face, until the man turned and walked away; whereupon she followed him, one step behind, neither of them hurrying, as the young woman continued to talk at the man’s back with barely a pause, as if reciting the catalogue of his offences against her.
Kate closes her eyes again, to return to the lake in Prague. What music would the band be playing? There must be flowerbeds, but what flowers would be growing there? She sees Jakub in the boat: he takes a cigarette case from the inside pocket of his jacket; the sunlight flashes off the silver. With a seducer’s smirk – an expression that looks completely wrong on Jakub’s face, thinks Dorota – he touches the wrist of his lady friend, and as he does this he glances in Dorota’s direction, as if he knows that she is observing them. He says something, and the young woman lowers the parasol to look at what Jakub has seen; she laughs, too extravagantly, like a bad actress; she is wearing a great deal of make-up; her lips look almost black.
But here the action is halted. Kate can see it all so clearly – the parasol; the actressy young woman; the young man, smoking, now wearing a boater hat – that suddenly she is seized by the suspicion that she is recalling the scene at the lake, not creating it. The suspicion quickly gathers force. Has she seen this couple, on the boating lake, in a film or on TV? She replays the sequence in her mind. The sense of its familiarity becomes stronger, but without bringing any information from which she might identify what it is that is being remembered. One moment it seems likely that she’s seeing characters from a film set in Paris, a film from the 1940s or 1950s, monochrome; the next moment she suspects that she is making this assumption on the basis of nothing more than the scene’s ambience of old-world elegance and illicit romance. Could it even be, she wonders, that the essence of the story – the mystery of the husband who may or may not have been killed in the war – is not in fact hers? Within a minute she is almost persuaded that she has read such a story somewhere, and is merely filling it in with borrowed costumes and backdrops.
30.
A fortnight after the delivery of the photograph, a postcard arrives, in an envelope that has been franked in Fort William. On one side is a picture of a golden eagle. On the reverse, Naomi has offered a report, of sorts: Life could not be better – no need to worry – whole days of saturated silence – Larder well stocked, so no imminent risk of death. Am at work, as I trust are you. Once in a while I will go into town – can get a signal there, so will text. No address is given; by ‘town’ she must mean Fort William, Kate assumes.
31.
At irregular intervals, text messages arrive. In November: Thrashingly windy days – ash trees sounding like surf with every gust – we have owls at night and buzzards during the day, and a fearless fox – a kiss for you & a kiss for Lulu & one for Martin too. Ten days later: Rain rain rain rain rain, a glorious noise, the infinite symphony of the sky – am in good shape – have muscles now, thanks to the axe work – enough wood to burn till Easter. Mum OK? You? And Kate replies, immediately: Mum much the same. I’d like to talk to you. There is no response; she tries calling, and of course is diverted to voicemail. At Christmas, Naomi sends a card with a clumsy drawing of two huts amid hills on one side, and on the other a message: Season’s Greetings from the charterhouse – all is exceedingly well – we now have a sauna, and some snow in which to roll – reading bee-books in preparation for spring & the arrival of the hive – picked up the flute yesterday & had some pleasure playing again – working on the translation & should have something for you soon – a Happy New Year to you all. In the New Year, two texts are received within a week. There is no mention of Bernát, nor of any intention to come south.
32.
Scanning the TV pages in the Sunday paper, Kate sees a familiar name: Daffyd Paskin. Part one of The Never-Ending Conquest, his new documentary, is being broadcast the following Wednesday. It will ‘reveal the appalling human cost of our exploitation of the Amazon wilderness’, the previewer writes.
On dark and glassy water, a narrow boat slides between high trees; sitting in the stern, Daffyd Paskin surveys the welter of vegetation that obscures the banks of the river; he is humbled by the magnitude and fecundity of it, we can see. Addressing the camera face-on, he tells us that we think of the Amazon as the ‘ultimate jungle’. A bird of ultrabright plumage is spotted; an unseen creature disturbs the water underneath an impenetrable canopy of leaves. ‘This is one of the richest ecosystems on the planet, and people have been part of this ecosystem for many many centuries,’ he states. ‘The Amazon is not just about natural history. It has a human history – a terrible history,’ he tells us, as if bringing news. His face is slightly fuller than in his gypsy days, and the stubble is a little more lush; a blazingly white shirt offsets the bristles nicely. The vocal style is more portentous too.
We have come to a bend in the river; looking ahead, into the gloom of the undergrowth, we distinguish a group of grass-roofed dwellings. The jungle village is located somewhere on a tributary of the Rio Negro, Daffyd tells us. In the sixteenth century the Europeans arrived here, he goes on; this was the start of a ‘perpetual disaster’ for the peoples of the Amazon. At the time of the invasion, the rainforest supported a great number of settled societies of great complexity; within a hundred years, these societies had lost ninety per cent of their people. When the Spanish first ventured into the forest, more than one thousand languages were spoken in the area that is now Brazil; today the number is lower than two hundred, Daffyd informs us, as sombre as a doctor bringing a gloomy bulletin from intensive care.
The entire population of the village is gathered into the frame of the lens. ‘You are looking at half of all the people in the world who speak this language,’ says Daffyd. An elder of the village has placed three stones on a log; the stones vary in size, but all can be held easily in the hand; to us, says Daffyd, the three stones are all just ‘stones’, or ‘pebbles’, but these people have a different word for each. Since coming into contact with the modern world, the villagers have become prone to illnesses to which they had previously never been exposed. The population is in steep decline; it seems inevitable that their language will expire sooner rather than later, and it will have left no traces, other than in the notebooks of a few ethnologists. Daffyd has such an ethnologist to hand, a man called Walter Doniphan. Why should it matter, Daffyd wonders, if this fragile and small language becomes extinct? Change, after all, is the essence of life; extinction is inseparable from survival. It matters, Walter Doniphan believes, because language is the greatest natural resource of the human ecosystem, and the human ecosystem, like any ecosystem, thrives on diversity. The loss of any language is a loss of information, of vision. Every language is charged with knowledge: the language spoken in this village is the embodiment of a unique way of seeing the world. These people, says Walter, have more words for cloud types than any Western meteorologist. We return to the image of the three stones on the log, before being shown some women talking energetically; from the rhythm of their exchanges, it appears that they are taking turns to add details to a lengthy reminiscence; they laugh loudly. Walter explains that they are talking about their mother. We observe the incomprehensible sisters; one of them is dabbing her eyes as she laughs. Another thought from Daffyd Paskin: Homo sapiens is the only species that can recover its past, and language, more than images, is what makes this recov
ery possible. He asks us to imagine a world in which everyone speaks the same language – a linguistic prairie, a world in which billions have been exiled forever from the culture of their forebears.
Suddenly, Daffyd Paskin has been transplanted to a traffic intersection, before a backdrop of office towers. He might be somewhere in the USA, but in fact we have moved some unspecified distance downstream from the endangered village. We are in Manaus, the city that grew twentyfold in the space of just three decades, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when Brazil monopolised the world’s production of rubber, and Manaus grew rich on the proceeds. So wealthy did the elite of Manaus become, Daffyd Paskin tells us, that more diamonds were bought here, per capita, than in any European city. Clothes were sent all the way back to Europe to be laundered; an opera house was built here, almost a thousand miles from the ocean; thousands of prostitutes were brought to the jungle city from Paris, Budapest, Moscow and Tangiers; ‘they bathed in champagne, literally’, Daffyd Paskin marvels, half-appalled. ‘And this is what paid for the decadence,’ he pronounces, and the screen is filled with a picture of dark-skinned men in chains. ‘This is what paid for the diamonds,’ he says, before reading an eye-witness account of the rape and mutilation of slaves on the rubber plantations, of workers being thrown onto fires alive, of slaves being used for target practice. He quotes the words of a plantation supervisor: ‘Kill the fathers first, then enjoy the virgins.’
The horrors continue: Daffyd Paskin peers into the pit of an illicit gold mine, where scores of desperate men, slathered in mud, are panning for gold in slurry that has already been panned; he wades through slicks of oil in ruined waterways; he encounters the displaced, the crippled, the ailing, the destitute. In case we do not understand how calamitous this all is, Daffyd Paskin’s sorrowing face is repeatedly displayed. In a preview of next week’s programme, a small plane bears the presenter over a soybean plantation that extends almost to the horizon, to the shore of the disappearing jungle. Only then does Kate remember why there is something familiar about Walter Doniphan’s name.
33.
Though concern for her sister and for their mother – and, sometimes, some resentment of Naomi’s refusal of communication – combine to make concentration difficult, Kate carries on with the story of Dorota.
After again sighting Jakub with his former workmate, Dorota sees a man she knows to be dead rather than missing – he was killed in Galicia and buried there. He is definitely dead; he has a tombstone. Yet he is seen near the station, like Jakub, and like Jakub he eludes her in the crowd. Perhaps she then sees another man, also certainly dead, also in the vicinity of the station, walking away from her quickly. At home, she suffers headaches and nightmares; she walks in her sleep. One morning Julius wakes up to find that every drawer in their flat is open; for a moment he thinks they have been burgled while they slept. Three or four times Dorota is not at home when she should have been. Julius’s suspicions are becoming intolerable. Sunday afternoon, writes Kate, D tells J she has to visit her sister/cousin/parents – J follows – walk along the river – weather & architecture – D’s point of view: she sees the ex-workmate (another J? or is this too much?) & catches up with him – introduces herself – he claims not to remember Jakub – seems v ill at ease in her presence – some talk about the war & then D mentions his wife – man says that he has never been married – D’s consternation – man leaves her, hurriedly – & switch to J’s POV – his wife accosting a man in the street & the man’s wariness & D’s bewildered reaction to something he says. This scene might be powerful, she thinks, but the thought lacks strength. Man that Julius sees does not resemble in any way the former workmate, as described from D’s POV earlier, she writes. Her novel proceeds no further.
34.
She contemplates a new story, set in Germany, in the 1830s, amid lakes, mountains and forests; the central character would be some sort of false messiah, and there would be a schism among his disciples, leading to a murder perhaps. This idea soon expires. A portion of a chapter of Afonso’s life in London is written; he works in a hospital laundry, with people who have no idea how remarkable he is; something horrible happens – foetus in a drying machine? – hand reaches in & touches something like warm vinyl – and Afonso is dismissed, though blameless. Nothing comes of the story of Afonso. Kate reads several books for a novel set in the rubber plantations of Brazil; she fills pages with notes about Walter Hardenburg, Roger Casement and the unspeakable Rafael Calderón. She writes a ten-page sketch of a big set-piece: a party at the home of Waldemar Ernst Scholtz, Austria’s honorary consul in Manaus, at which guests drink champagne from a bath occupied by a beautiful naked woman – Scholtz’s mistress, Sarah Lubousk. Nothing comes of it; nothing comes of any of these ideas.
35.
At the end of April, the postman brings a package, franked in Fort William. It contains two batches of text. The first consists of twenty photocopied pages, in Bernát’s extravagant hand, in Hungarian; a cover sheet bears a single word: Gyermekjelenetek. The second batch is another photocopied manuscript, in English, written by Naomi with evident care; there are no revisions, no smudges. A card is attached: The translation, at last – apologies for the delay – to repeat: Bernát is happy for you to do what you want with this material – he asserts no claim to it, and neither do I – use it as a quarry, or whatever – treat the words as if they are anonymous – bees installed & thriving – I thrive too – ‘Therefore, happiness does not consist in the activity of prudence.’ N xx.
Into the ‘Enter text’ box of an online translator, Kate types the title: Gyermekjelenetek. The result: children scenes. She types the first four sentences, and they are converted into this:
Waking up, I remember waking up in my room at home, in the bedroom of a half-century ago, in the winter, and I see the curtains in the room: the colour of the white light glowed so weak blackcurrant cordial. Feathers was ice on the inside of the window, and the wide range of satin duvet was cold to the face. It was the satin scarlet border. The bedspread, candlewick-patterned, was burgundy. I see the headboard of the bed, painted to resemble mahogany, three deep scratches, close to each other, as the traces of a claw.
Kate sends a message – I would like to talk about what you sent me. Intrigued. Please call. I really need to talk to you. Eight days later, she gets this: Nothing to say about G’tek – it is what it is. But glad you got something out of it. All is well. Nxx. And so it goes on, week after week: All is well; Am very well; Everything is wonderful. The condition of their mother deteriorates as autumn arrives, and Kate informs her sister; the bulletin is acknowledged, without comment. Two weeks later, at The Willowes, Kate learns that her sister has been there. ‘How did she look?’ she enquires. A bit thinner, Kornelia tells her. Naomi had been wearing a kind of smock, grey, ankle-length, shapeless; and a headscarf, which stayed in place throughout the visit. She was with a man, the same man as before. He sat in the car for the entire hour, looking at the scenery, it seems. Kate talks to her mother. Her mother has no memory of a visit from Naomi, but she might remember being visited by a nurse who wore a headscarf. ‘Last week, I think,’ she says, then she returns to silence, then to sleep.
36.
Katie, Naomi writes, on a postcard showing a view of Loch Linnhe:
I have decided to stay here for the foreseeable future. I mean that I shall not be leaving the retreat and its immediate environs. The town is now Bernát’s domain. So the phone is henceforth of no use. Our plot is productive and the bees are earning their keep. I am healthy, I promise you. Should anything untoward happen, Bernát will let you know. And vice versa. But nothing is going to happen. This is where I have to be. Sorry I am not equipped for family life. Please try to accept this. Be happy that I am happy, and be happy with Martin & Lulu & your work. And I won’t be here for ever.
More than a year has passed since Naomi left.
VII
Gyermekjelenetek
[Scenes from Childhood]
Awaking, I remember waking up in my bedroom at home, the bedroom of half a century ago, in winter, and I see the curtains of that room: in the pallid light they glowed with the colour of weak blackcurrant cordial. Feathers of ice were on the inside of the window, and the wide border of satin on the eiderdown was cold to the face. The satin border was scarlet; the bedspread, candlewick-patterned, was burgundy. I see the headboard of the bed, stained to resemble mahogany, with three deep scratches, close together, like the marks of a small claw. On the chest of drawers stood the old radio; it was as wide as the kitchen sink and could not be lifted easily. On the black and gold glass pane of the radio were marked, in echelon formations, the names of many mysterious stations; when the cursor was moved across the names, incomprehensible voices would rise and fall against a wail of interference, like messages in wartime; in the top right-hand corner of the radio, a tiny deep-set window, like a miniature radar screen, had a fan of green light in it, which would become narrower and brighter when a station came into focus. And I can see the wallpaper, on which was depicted, on a white background, children at play under trees, with hoops and balls, on rope swings, in a tree house. There were half a dozen scenes, repeated over and over again, but the repetitions were imperfect: here was a tree with leaves that were smudged in one place; here a child’s hair was like a cap made of brass; this yellow ball, misshapen, resembled a lemon; here, above the dog’s muzzle, were two tiny dots that might have been flies; in half a dozen places the girls’ skipping rope was a string of dots and dashes, like Morse code, and no two pieces of code were the same.