Black Mirror
Page 18
The birds swoop and swerve as Anna once did. When she could fly. When she was a small flying child. The city air smells densely of petrol and rust, a fuming bus strains past, a bicycle, a taxi; but her heart is light and her spirits air-high. Just as she was taught by Uncle Ernie to apprehend visions, now, at the closing of an old woman’s life, as Victoria talks her way rather elaborately towards the admission of death, Anna looks for omens of redemption and patterns within flight. Sometimes she wishes she were Christian: it would be so much easier, this whole business of symbols.
A child walks towards her, dragged by his mother. His three- or four-year-old face is flaring with pleasure; he drags a simple wooden duck which bobs and clacks as it moves. Anna catches his eye.
Nice duck! she offers.
Charlie, the boy responds, with a kind of scholarly gravity. His name is Charlie.
Pleased to meet you, Charlie. Have a wet day.
The mother looks up and smiles directly, as if they share a sly secret, and Anna crosses the road, unmoored now from the search-for-deeper-meanings, content with the child, and the smile, and the absence of rain. Momentarily she can forget that Victoria is leaving her. Victoria, whose life she daily sifts and examines and tries to render intelligible, Victoria who finds coherence only in what is no longer there, Victoria whom she adores and now suspects might be her grandmother. Uncle Ernie went to the city and returned with a baby; it is not impossible to imagine that he had retrieved Victoria’s child. Anna clings to this hypothesis because it refuses sovereignty to loss. She is waiting for the right moment. The return of Odysseus. The birthmark. The truthful unveiling. In the diastolic and systolic spaces of Victoria’s life, all these openings and closings of detail and event, all this materialising and dematerialising of things moving, so unpredictably, in and out of being, she will halt the procession of images and say simply: I am here. She will lean her cheek against the old woman’s beautifully creased face and say: I am here, I am yours, I am evidence of the return of vanished things.
The sky has bright grey dimensions, like laterite. And crossing the street Anna is aware of unAustralian cold at her cheeks; she experiences stinging exhilaration; as if it were a kiss.
At Mrs Dooley’s boarding house the front door is ajar. A wedge of something wrong. Anna pushes gingerly at the door, and can hear from inside a voice elevated in anger and recrimination. Winston is there, in the kitchen, standing with his back to the fireplace and his hands joined behind him, and Mrs Dooley stands before him, red-faced and shouting. When Anna enters the kitchen Mrs Dooley turns, swinging in a semi-circle to face and accuse her.
So here she is then, Lady Muck herself, fuckin’ whore more like, call yourself white as driven snow and a book-learning lady, fuckin’ black men like there was no tomorrow; and me a widow and all alone, with no one but my nephew in Australia, who could be dead, for all I know, with his girl-crazy ways and his arty hands and his eyes as would melt any miser’s heart, and he was such a lovely kid, all gooey smiles and what-not, but he wouldn’t look, he’s a gentleman, wouldn’t look twice at a tart like you, a fancy lady who sleeps with black men, right under my nose, in a respectable house, what’s more, and comes and goes all lah-di-dah with her papers and her pencils and her fancy-arty reproductions.
Mrs Dooley pauses for a break, then begins to cry.
A crying woman. Another woman shattered by the bombshell of what is hidden inside.
She slumps into a kitchen chair and puts her rough elbows on the table.
Sorry, sorry, me love, that was a bit rough, wasn’t it? It’s just that I was saving you, like. For my nephew in Australia. You’d make such a lovely couple.
Winston appears ashamed. He looks down at his shoes.
I’ll make some tea, Anna suggests.
And in the spirit of tentative reconciliation, she bustles around the kitchen, opening the Persian-looking tea-caddy, washing the fine-china teapot, measuring equal-sized teaspoons, one by one, and hears herself saying, there, there, now; calm yourself, to the woman who has newly and flamboyantly abused her. Mrs Dooley is still sobbing, and it occurs to Anna that she too is distressed by mutability; she resents what her own history has taken away from her.
When Mrs Dooley drinks, it is in the manner of Uncle Ernie: she pours tea into the saucer, blows on it gently, and sips. The saucer tilts to her face. She bends her grey head. It is over five years now since Uncle Ernie’s death, but Anna is still susceptible to the pangs this homely gesture elicits: Ernie’s face, like a mirage, behind vertical ripples of steam.
And pardon my French, Mrs Dooley adds.
She takes a large handkerchief and blows her nose loudly, then resumes her tired invertebrate slump.
I got myself carried away a bit there.
Winston leaves to pack his things, and Anna longs to follow. But instead she sits with her arm around poor Mrs Dooley, a middle-aged woman fizzing and spluttering at the tail-end of her fury, a woman seized by something unnameable that has left her stranded in anger. In this over-heated kitchen, with the mineral sky gone, and the boy with his duck, and the air of reaching a surface in resolution, there is only frayed discomposure and bleary forms of grief. Anna suppresses weeping: she is not a woman-who-cries. In fact she never cries. Yet this seems to her entirely sad — that the joy of ascending into light is so swiftly eclipsed.
There, there, she repeats. Calm yourself, now.
And she thinks of Winston’s expression, wondering what Mrs Dooley said to him before she arrived.
She had gone to surprise him at the library and found him not reading, after all, not caught in that virtuous librarian quiet, composed of soft low murmurings and flipping pages, but gazing at a photograph and talking to himself. In one of those gestures of lover’s licence she approached him quietly from behind and cupped her white hands over his distracted black eyes, asking him, since this was the game, to guess who? Guess who?
When he dropped the photograph, startled, she quickly retrieved it.
It was a picture of a Jamaican woman and a small happy boy. They had brilliant smiles and faced the camera with an aspect of jubilation, as though offering up to the photographer their hearts and souls. Behind their heads was a hibiscus, massed with huge yellow blooms: trumpeting love.
My wife and my son. Back in Kingston. Jamaica.
You will return to them? she asked.
But of course, no question.
(Stay, she says silently. Stay. Stay.)
They had talked together for only fifteen minutes, each reaching across the rent distance that had opened between them, and then she left. She was a woman in love with a man whose image she bore away, reversed into false whiteness, held in frail promise, as the imperishable negative of some photograph not yet developed.
She had wanted to say stay — her mouth close to his ear, breathing amorously, confidentially, into the warm spaces of his body — but simply could not. He had already left her.
So will he return to them? asked Victoria.
Yes, said Anna. At the end of this year.
You didn’t guess?
I didn’t guess about the child; I only discovered that recently. But from the beginning he had told me he was a married man.
And is she beautiful, this bride?
Yes, she is beautiful. She has — they both have — the most remarkable smiles. Their smiles make me feel pinched, mean and small. My great uncle, back home, used to say that there was something called a death-defying smile. That’s what they both have. Death-defying smiles.
Victoria refilled the brandy and offered more chocolate.
I had a black man once. Played the trombone.
And did he, Anna asked, have a death-defying smile?
He was from Detroit and had wonderful fingers. I liked the shape of his head, his cheeks puffing out as he blew. It didn’t last very long.
They smile at each other.
I’m sorry, said Victoria. I was sweet on him myself. Don’t go crazy, she adds.
I won’t, she responds.
Once they had come in from a wet Sunday and wanted only to go to bed. They undressed with inelegant haste, flinging their clothes on the floor and wiping their naked skins on the candlewick coverlet. As they leapt beneath the blankets Winston and Anna shivered and laughed. Their hands and their feet were so cold each was obliged to perform on the other a comical ceremony of rubbing and vigorous embrace.
There, said Winston, as he placed her cold fingers between his thighs. Warm parts. The equator.
After they made love Anna realised that her face was burning. She laid her hot cheek against his pulsing neck. She wanted again to whisper stay, but the word fell somewhere silent, smothered in the soft intermittences of his breathing.
There are times when the gravity of what cannot be spoken between lovers necessitates wandering and evasive digressions. They looked into each other’s faces in the wavering and water-marked light and what they spoke of was rain:
Where I come from, said Anna, we have under ten inches a year. Desert country. Dust. In the early days miners were so desperate for water they forced Aborigines to eat salt and then lead them to waterholes. One set up dynamite traps at waterholes just to kill off Aborigines.
Jesus, said Winston.
When I was twelve years old, Anna went on, there was a map in my classroom which showed Australia colour-coded according to rainfall. There were bands of rich dark green in the southern corners, bands of light green and a wider, more pronounced band of yellow, and in the interior a huge pool of orangey-red. We lived inside the space of orangey-red. Somehow I believed that this was what Australia looked like, banded like that, a kind of stripey pattern. I was pleased to live inside the largest and most vivid space. At the sealed and cogent centre, not stretching in a narrow band. I remember once the teacher pointed at the red pool with the tip of her ruler: the Heart, she announced. The Dead Heart of Australia.
It was an alarming notion.
Winston smiled.
Dead Heart, he repeated. Are all Australians so melodramatic?
Yes, Anna said, hoping to provoke him. We are all melodramatic. Victoria and me: we are typical.
Where I come from, Winston added, it was a dark green centre. A green heart, you might say. The rain was dense and substantial — not this vapid English drizzle — and after downpours everything was glossy and scented. There were small lakes across the ground and channels between the cane rows, and there were fallen battered blossoms and sodden leaves. We children would shake the trees so that we could make our own showers and then rats came out and together we chased them. It was a kind of celebration — not this miserable drizzle. My mother would catch rainwater in her hands and then wash her face with it. I’m not sure why. A habit, I suppose, or some kind of custom. But rain meant that: her shining face.
You’re a poet, said Anna.
I’m Jamaican, said Winston.
Jamaican Shakespearian.
No, Shakespearian Jamaican.
They paused, each reflective. Their lovemaking was often like this: confession, intermission.
Once, when I was seven, Anna continued, I saw a black cat spun in the air, way up high, flying anti-clockwise. Just outside the window of my school. There it was, magically spinning.
You’re making that up.
No, not at all. Cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die.
Winston rolled over Anna and kissed her above the heart.
Anti-clockwise, he said gently, hovering above her.
Later that night Winston leant close to Anna’s face.
Me can’ sleep, he said softly, in his boyhood speech. Me keep thinkin bout all them po thirsty Aborigines …
It is 2 a.m. She can hear the distant forlorn sound of a revving-up vehicle.
Anna thinks of Winston’s hands. Of his forehead. His mouth. She is laced into the space of wherever he is and knows that when she sleeps it is the nightfall of his absence she slides into. Now, insomniac, and agonised by yearning, she wonders how she will live with this excess of desire. She is lying on her back, considering the ceiling over which streetlight flickers and plays. Discs, shafts, the swinging beam of headlights: this spectrum of effects appears somehow like a transparent body, or indeed like the memory of such a body, evoked in fits and starts and lit in clustered flashes that signify everything vague and uncertain. She remembers the occasion of her lover carrying a cyclamen through the streets of London, all comic benignity and Shakespearian joy; he cradled it in his hands; it was mysterious, like an offering; and then she remembers the little boy with the string-along duck, the bright particular boy, so touchingly formal, so charmingly stern, and she sees this boy now, floating on the ceiling, his round face shimmering and efflorescent, and wonders for the first time in her life if she will ever have a child.
2
Jules is shadowy, said Anna. I don’t see him at all.
Yes, shadowy.
He had fallen asleep, Victoria said, on the velvet chaise longue.
He was on his back, with his hands knitted together at the centre of his body — as though he were older, somehow, since this is the sleeping posture of a man with a belly, a man holding himself against death, a man preparing to rest forever in the mean confinements of a coffin. Yet he was in lovely repose; his face was young and placid.
I closed the shutters, then gathered our four or five candles. I lit and arranged them so that the light cast Jules’ silhouette in profile upon the wall, and with my box of artist’s chalks traced the outline of his face and the top of his body. Thereafter the wall bore the memory of my lover — a stain was at his forehead and a tiny crack at the cheek, but I was quietly surprised at the likeness there, its uncanny quality. I was surprised at the specificity of his face, captured like that, and surprised too by my own inclination to superstition; I felt I’d trapped him, that he was mine. When I dream of Jules he sometimes appears as a shadow. A chalky shadow with a crack on one cheek …
He had fallen asleep after a tachycardia attack. It had shocked me, his vulnerability. We had been shopping at the market on Rue Mouffetard when suddenly his whole body began swaying and jolting, his face became livid and he was gleaming with sweat. At that stage I knew nothing about Jules’ heart condition, and I was alarmed to see such utter change. His knees buckled under him and our shopping spilled — clementines went bouncing down the cobbled street — and Jules gagged on what he was unable to express. Startled shoppers scrambled around us to gather our shopping, exultant at the terrible and exciting situation. A man dying, convulsively, in front of their eyes. An event-to-talk-about. Un spectacle.
Think of it, Anna: a seizure of the body controlled by the racing heart, a kind of perilous extravagance, an over-supply of vivacity.
When the attack was over Jules found he had wet himself.
How humiliating, he whispered in English.
He was panting against my neck; and although his body shivered, he was hot as a flame. With my silk scarf I dabbed at the sweat that flowed from him.
I remember that Jules insisted on carrying the shopping home. It was clearly a labour; he could barely make it up the stairs. When I closed the door he had dropped our basket and was already lying down, with his eyes closed and his hands resting clasped on his belly.
I’ll just rest for a minute, Jules called out softly.
His fatigue was so great, his body so persecuted, that he was instantly asleep. I drew the outline then. I drew his face and body in its almost incredible stillness, settling into the immunity and suppliance of sleep. Jules called it Cartoon of a young man’s brush with Death, and threatened to erase it, but the image remained on the wall, long after he was gone. Even now it may be there, upstairs, faintly recalling him. In Rue Gît Le Coeur.
What happened to Jules?
(Anna can barely bring herself to ask the question.)
Jules
was lost: buried treasure … To be honest, I don’t know.
The first large round-up of Jews in Paris was in July, 1942. Thousands were herded into the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the Vél d’Hiv, we called it, and then deported to camps. Jules, I believe, was not among them. He had disappeared before that; he had not worn the yellow star with Juif written on it. He had not carried the sign of his own fatality.
According to Hélène — who seemed so sure — he’d last been seen at Drancy, sometime late in 1943. Drancy was a prison camp just to the north of Paris: it was a holding point before inmates were sent to Auschwitz.
Nobody knows, Hélène said bleakly, looking into the engulfing distance, looking into uncertainty, where he went after that. In her deafness and bereavement she heard only the tremendous ringing echo of his absence.
A photographer we knew in Paris told me that he heard that Jules had been working for the Resistance. Taking secret photographs, he said. Aiding the Gaullistes and the Allies with his fluency in English. But was not sure exactly where. Or when it was. Or the unit to which he had been attached. Not sure, he said.
Someone else, an old school friend, who knew of his condition, speculated that Jules had died of a heart attack.
In these dreadful times, a natural death, he said, trying hard to comfort and console me. We both knew it was a lie. But I nodded, and said yes, of course that is possible, and he touched the back of my hand in a sympathetic gesture, as though I was a widow standing in a parlour, over a walnut and brass coffin, legitimately grieving.
One of our neighbours told me that she heard Jules had escaped to the United States, through Spain and Gibraltar.
Probably a rich man in California, photographing film stars. Probably in Beverly Hills. Probably famous.
Another fake consolation. Another net to catch nothing in, thrown over tearful darkness …
Something grim obsesses me: O Anna, let me tell you.