Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  Bradway went away while I swept further afield, and I looked out with a haughty but weary look at the people walking by: I was the maintenance man, standing in the water; they were just pedestrians in a mall. ‘Are you going to keep all that money?’ a man said to me. I said no, it was going to charity. ‘I’m a good charity, man,’ he said. The trickiest area to sweep was along the row of mushroom fountains (which were just stalks when the water was turned off), but even there it wasn’t too hard, and when I got the strays out into the open tilework and scooted the change along in a cloud of pale, sluggish dirt, I felt like a seasoned cowboy, bringing the herd home.

  Bradway came back and together we pulled the black bucket out, letting the water pour from the holes. It was extremely heavy. We set it on a two-wheeled dolly. ‘Feel that slime?’ said Bradway. I nodded. ‘The bank won’t take the money this way.’ We went down the freight elevator to the basement and he showed me a room with an old yellow washing machine in it. Together we dumped the money in and Bradway turned the dial to regular wash; the coins went through a slushy-sounding cycle. After lunch, I scooped out the clean money and wheeled it to the bank. As told, I asked to see Diane. Diane led me back to the vault, and I slid the black bucket off the dolly next to some dirty sacks of quarters.

  Every week that summer I cleaned the fountain. Every week there was new money there to sweep up. I flipped more coins in myself; one nickel I deliberately left in place for a few weeks while I maneuvered away all the pennies around it, so that my wish-money would have more time to gather momentum. The next time, though, I swept it along with the rest, trying, however, to follow its progress as a crowd of coins lined up like piglets on the sow of the rubber blade. There were momentary collisions and overturnings, and the wavelets of the water added a confusion. My coin slid over another coin and fell to the right, and then, as I pushed them all into the corner pile, a mass of money avalanched over it and it was lost to view.

  Once I came across a penny that had lain in the water under the stairs, unswept, for a very long time – perhaps years. Black it was and full of power. I pushed it into the heap with the others, dumped it into the washing machine, and delivered it to Diane at the bank.

  (2001)

  ★

  The Student

  by Anton Chekhov

  At first the weather was fine and still. The thrushes were calling, and in the swamps close by something alive droned pitifully with a sound like blowing into an empty bottle. A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air. But when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence. Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and lonely in the forest. There was a whiff of winter.

  Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a sacristan, and a student of the clerical academy, returning home from shooting, walked all the time by the path in the water-side meadow. His fingers were numb and his face was burning with the wind. It seemed to him that the cold that had suddenly come on had destroyed the order and harmony of things, that nature itself felt ill at ease, and that was why the evening darkness was falling more rapidly than usual. All around it was deserted and peculiarly gloomy. The only light was one gleaming in the widows’ gardens near the river; the village, over three miles away, and everything in the distance all round was plunged in the cold evening mist. The student remembered that, as he went out from the house, his mother was sitting barefoot on the floor in the entry, cleaning the samovar, while his father lay on the stove coughing; as it was Good Friday nothing had been cooked, and the student was terribly hungry. And now, shrinking from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown in the days of Rurik and in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression – all these had existed, did exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make life no better. And he did not want to go home.

  The gardens were called the widows’ because they were kept by two widows, mother and daughter. A camp fire was burning brightly with a crackling sound, throwing out light far around on the ploughed earth. The widow Vasilisa, a tall, fat old woman in a man’s coat, was standing by and looking thoughtfully into the fire; her daughter Lukerya, a little pock-marked woman with a stupid-looking face, was sitting on the ground, washing a caldron and spoons. Apparently they had just had supper. There was a sound of men’s voices; it was the labourers watering their horses at the river.

  ‘Here you have winter back again,’ said the student, going up to the camp fire. ‘Good evening.’

  Vasilisa started, but at once recognized him and smiled cordially.

  ‘I did not know you; God bless you,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll be rich.’

  They talked. Vasilisa, a woman of experience, who had been in service with the gentry, first as a wet-nurse, afterwards as a children’s nurse, expressed herself with refinement, and a soft, sedate smile never left her face; her daughter Lukerya, a village peasant woman, who had been beaten by her husband, simply screwed up her eyes at the student and said nothing, and she had a strange expression like that of a deaf mute.

  ‘At just such a fire the Apostle Peter warmed himself,’ said the student, stretching out his hands to the fire, ‘so it must have been cold then, too. Ah, what a terrible night it must have been, granny! An utterly dismal long night!’

  He looked round at the darkness, shook his head abruptly and asked:

  ‘No doubt you have been at the reading of the Twelve Gospels?’

  ‘Yes, I have,’ answered Vasilisa.

  ‘If you remember at the Last Supper Peter said to Jesus, “I am ready to go with Thee into darkness and unto death.” And our Lord answered him thus: “I say unto thee, Peter, before the cock croweth thou wilt have denied Me thrice.” After the supper Jesus went through the agony of death in the garden and prayed, and poor Peter was weary in spirit and faint, his eyelids were heavy and he could not struggle against sleep. He fell asleep. Then you heard how Judas the same night kissed Jesus and betrayed Him to His tormentors. They took Him bound to the high priest and beat Him, while Peter, exhausted, worn out with misery and alarm, hardly awake, you know, feeling that something awful was just going to happen on earth, followed behind . . . He loved Jesus passionately, intensely, and now he saw from far off how He was beaten . . .’

  Lukerya left the spoons and fixed an immovable stare upon the student.

  ‘They came to the high priest’s,’ he went on; ‘they began to question Jesus, and meantime the labourers made a fire in the yard as it was cold, and warmed themselves. Peter, too, stood with them near the fire and warmed himself as I am doing. A woman, seeing him, said: “He was with Jesus, too” – that is as much as to say that he, too, should be taken to be questioned. And all the labourers that were standing near the fire must have looked sourly and suspiciously at him, because he was confused and said: “I don’t know Him.” A little while after again someone recognized him as one of Jesus’ disciples and said: “Thou, too, art one of them,” but again he denied it. And for the third time someone turned to him: “Why, did I not see thee with Him in the garden to-day?” For the third time he denied it. And immediately after that time the cock crowed, and Peter, looking from afar off at Jesus, remembered the words He had said to him in the evening . . . He remembered, he came to himself, went out of the yard and wept bitterly – bitterly. In the Gospel it is written: “He went out and wept bitterly.” I imagine it: the still, still, dark, dark garden, and in the stillness, faintly audible, smothered sobbing . . .’

  The student sighed and sank into thought. Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly gave a gulp, big tears flowed freely down her cheeks, and she screened her face from the fire with her sleeve as though ashamed of her tears, and Lukerya, staring
immovably at the student, flushed crimson, and her expression became strained and heavy like that of someone enduring intense pain.

  The labourers came back from the river, and one of them riding a horse was quite near, and the light from the fire quivered upon him. The student said good-night to the widows and went on. And again the darkness was about him and his fingers began to be numb. A cruel wind was blowing, winter really had come back and it did not feel as though Easter would be the day after to-morrow.

  Now the student was thinking about Vasilisa: since she had shed tears all that had happened to Peter the night before the Crucifixion must have some relation to her . . .

  He looked round. The solitary light was still gleaming in the darkness and no figures could be seen near it now. The student thought again that if Vasilisa had shed tears, and her daughter had been troubled, it was evident that what he had just been telling them about, which had happened nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present – to both women, to the desolate village, to himself, to all people. The old woman had wept, not because he could tell the story touchingly, but because Peter was near to her, because her whole being was interested in what was passing in Peter’s soul.

  And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to take breath. ‘The past,’ he thought, ‘is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.’ And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.

  When he crossed the river by the ferry boat and afterwards, mounting the hill, looked at his village and towards the west where the cold crimson sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he thought that truth and beauty which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the high priest had continued without interruption to this day, and had evidently always been the chief thing in human life and in all earthly life, indeed; and the feeling of youth, health, vigour – he was only twenty-two – and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of unknown mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting, marvellous, and full of lofty meaning.

  (1894)

  Translated by Constance Garnett

  ★

  Nuptial Sleep

  by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

  At length their long kiss severed, with sweet smart:

  And as the last slow sudden drops are shed

  From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,

  So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.

  Their bosoms sundered, with the opening start

  Of married flowers to either side outspread

  From the knit stem; yet still their mouths, burnt red,

  Fawned on each other where they lay apart.

  Sleep sank them lower than the tide of dreams,

  And their dreams watched them sink, and slid away.

  Slowly their souls swam up again, through gleams

  Of watered light and dull drowned waifs of day;

  Till from some wonder of new woods and streams

  He woke, and wondered more: for there she lay.

  (1870)

  ★

  One night, back when I was falling in love with my future wife, I couldn’t get to sleep. She was still half-awake. To lull me to sleep, Salome started to tell me about her childhood in Africa. Mundane details – where she and her family lived, their daily routine – but I savoured every word. There was a simplicity to the tale. It sang, like a lullaby. My mind was taken off whatever things it had got stuck on. I slept well.

  This extract from Joseph O’Neill’s novel Netherland has a similar effect. It beguiles. The passage serves as a song of childhood, a dreamy remembrance, and a romantic bedtime story all at once.

  Extract from Netherland

  by Joseph O’Neill

  I pressed the flashlight’s rubber button. I was looking upward. Everything blacked out except stars and a memory of stars.

  I was twelve. I was on a summer holiday with my mother and old friends of hers – Floris and Denise Wassenaar, a married couple. We travelled along the south coast of Italy. We drove from place to place, stayed in cheap hotels and took in sights, an itinerary banged together, from my youthful perspective, with a heavy hammer of boredom. Then, over dinner one night, Floris announced that he’d organized a spear-fishing expedition. ‘Just for the men,’ he said, ganging up with me. ‘The women will stay on land, where it’s safe.’

  We went out on a wooden motorboat – Floris and I and a local man with dense white body hair. The two men were armed with full-sized spearguns. I was given a smaller speargun requiring only boyish strength to pull back the rubber catapult that fired the spear. For hours the boat bumbled parallel to the shore. We passed two or three headlands and came to a stretch of the coast that was mountainous and truly wild, with no roads for many miles inland. We moored in the beryl of a small bay. There was a beach with white pebbles. A pine forest grew right down to the beach. This was where we would fish and spend the night.

  I had never snorkelled before. It was astounding to discover how a simple glass mask made clear and magnified a blue-green water amid its frightening inhabitants: when a ray glided towards me, I scrambled ashore, flippers and all. Snorkelling was hard. Gianni, the Italian, and pale and enormous Floris seemed to be able to hold their breath forever – you needed to, to find the big fish; the big fish lurked in shadows beneath rocks and had to be staked out – but with my small lungs I could only dive for a short while, and shallowly. It hurt my ears to go down deep. As the day wore on, however, a predatory boldness overtook me. A whippersnapper Neptune, I lorded it over the grassy, glistening inlet sending my matte iron thunderbolt through startled groups of small silver and brown fishes. I grew fierce and began to hunt with intent. Stalking one particular fish, I followed the rocks out of the little bay. The fish twisted into a crevice, and I dived after it. Then I became aware that the water had become cold and dark.

  I was swimming at the foot of a mountain. From thousands of feet in the air the mountain plunged directly into water and sank into an endless dimness beneath me.

  Like a chump in a horror movie, I slowly turned around. Confronting me was the vast green gloom of the open sea.

  In a panic I bolted back to the cove.

  ‘Catch anything?’ Floris asked. I shook my head shamefully. ‘No problem, jongen,’ Floris said. ‘Gianni and I got lucky.’

  The killed fish was cooked over a campfire and seasoned with thyme growing wild in the pine forest. Afterwards it was time to sleep. The men lay down under the pines. The most comfortable sleeping berth, in the boat, was reserved for me.

  What happened next, on the little wooden boat, was what came back to me on the synagogue roof – and what I once told Rachel about, with the result that she fell in love with me.

  She revealed this in the week after Jake was born. We were up in the middle of the night. Jake was having trouble falling asleep. I held him in my arms.

  ‘Do you want to know exactly when I fell in love with you?’ Rachel said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I wanted to know about the moment my wife fell in love with me.

  ‘In that hotel in Cornwall. The Something Inn.’

  ‘The Shipwrecker’s Arms,’ I said. I could not forget that name and what it called before the imagination: treacherous lights on the land, the salvage of goods at the expense of the drowned.

  My wife, on the point of sleep, murmured, ‘Remember when you told me about being in that boat at night, when you were little? That’s when I fell in love with you. When you told me that story. At that exact moment.’

  A small anchor fixed the boat to the bed of the cove. I lay on my side and closed my eyes. The rocking of the boat by the waves was soothing but unknown. The men on the shore were asleep. Not the twelve-year-old though. He shifted and lay on his back and decided to look up at the sky. What he saw took him by surprise. He was basically a city kid. He had never really see
n the night sky for what it is. As he stared up at millions of stars, he was filled with a dread he had never known before.

  I was just a boy, I said to my wife in a hotel room in Cornwall. I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.

  (2008)

  ★

  Happiest Moment

  by Lydia Davis

  If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English-language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life were her trip, and the eating of the duck.

  (2001)

  ★

  DANIEL HAHN

  From its title, you might expect ‘She Frequented Cemeteries’ by Dorthe Nors (brilliantly translated by Martin Aitken) to be ghoulish, but it is not. It has its darknesses, but is, in fact, a story about love; about being alone and not being alone. It’s delicate and quiet but also filled with insight and wisdom and detail, and in its few pages manages quite magically to reach an extraordinary stillness, a feeling of rightness, of reassurance, of calm. It is also, in its own curious way, immensely alive.