by Неизвестный
It was a beautiful corner but no one would live here unless they had to. And thinking of those lovely level square metres of land by the river, where a family could spread itself in ease, and with the knowledge that whatever they planted would grow in the alluvium on which they lived, you might well feel that envy and hatred was inseparable from being stuck up here in the beauty of this hard and impoverished place.
We stood at the gate and a middle-aged woman came out of the house, short-sleeved shirt, strong arms, an unquestionable presence about her, and we began talking. She was Ioana Grad, Mărtinuc’s daughter, married to Ioan Vlad who was away this afternoon working on the railway. Her son-in-law was on the far side of the yard, clipping the wool from an old ewe, with his wife and baby daughter beside him. He saw us, stood up and slowly walked over, the pair of longbladed cutters in his hand, held out in front of him, the blade upright, his fist around the handle resting on his thigh, his eyes under a peaked forage cap intently fixed on us as we stood there outside the yard, talking to the woman across the gate, not crossing the all-important boundary. The last words of this family to Ileana Pașca were in my mind. There is no mistaking the big, swinging, self-establishing manner of a fighting man and we reacted as animals do in these circumstances, looking down and away, no meeting of those eyes, no encounter with the cloud of defensive, frightened aggression he was emitting, nor with the cutting blades held out in front of his thigh.
We talked about the EU, how no grants were available for farmers with less than fifty sheep, or farms as tiny as theirs; about the valley, their goats, the weather and the bears. ‘Is that why you are here?’ Ioana asked. ‘Because Ioan was bitten by the bear?’ ‘Ah yes,’ I said, ‘because of that.’ And with this talk the air of threat and distance started to shrink away. The son-in-law Stefan lowered his blade and Ioana asked us into the house. She had just baked an apple cake. Would we have coffee?
We sat beneath a small Day-Glo icon of the Holy Family at a table two feet square, covered in a plastic lace cloth. There were geraniums in pots growing in the window. They had tried to grow medicinal herbs here, but the plants had never thrived. They had made thirty carts of hay on the high meadows last summer and brought them down on sleds over the snow in the winter. They felt they had nowhere to go, nowhere to be. Unlike other, richer families from these valleys, they don’t have the resources to go west within the EU to earn the sort of wages that can buy cars, build new houses and change lives. ‘But you want to know about Ioan and the bear?’
It was 1991, the fourteenth of September, the Day of the Holy Cross. At ten in the morning, Ioan Vlad was looking after the cows only a few yards from the farm on the edge of the forest when a bear ran out between them. After Ioan hit it with a stick the bear put a thumb into Ioan’s mouth and grasped his face with his other claws. ‘With that one hand the bear broke all the bones in Ioan’s face. He did not pull his face out but he broke it all,’ his wife said.
Ioan, as they were fighting, with a presence of mind it is difficult to imagine, put two of his own fingers in the bear’s nostrils so that it couldn’t breathe. The bear dropped him and ran away. Ioan was screaming with pain and the neighbours came running from farther up and down the valley. His head was soon swollen to the size of a melon and they carried him down to the village, past the Pașcas’ house to a place beyond the river where there was a telephone and an ambulance that could take him to hospital. ‘All his body was torn because the bear had played with him. In Cluj, he had seventy-two operations on his face and still now he cannot eat easily because some of the bones in his head are still loose. And one of his eyes can no longer have any tears.’
Is that why they have so many dogs chained up around the edge of their place? ‘Well, for Gypsy thieves, for foxes, for wolves, for hawks. You never know. For bears. For strangers. For our enemies.’ Then looking out of the open door, to the lane and the stream and the steep far wall of the valley, filling the space of the doorway, no more than twenty yards away, ‘Do you know how much I like to talk like this?’
Ioan returned from work, one half of his face visibly slumped and broken. ‘Everything you see on my face was down,’ he said. ‘You could see the other side of this eye. And this is the eye from which tears will not come now.’
While Stefan and his wife Maria returned to clipping the urine-coloured wool from the old sheep, Ioan took me to see his cow and as he talked he held her lip tenderly and sweetly between the fingers of his hand. ‘She is a lovely creature, isn’t she?’ he said.
Such gentleness and such intimacy in a world where violence seems as natural as the blossom on a springtime tree. If Homer made the Iliad from such a row, he also knew that there is no boundary between violence and love, that the two coexist in the same hand, the same face, the same slip of contested territory. It is not that these valleys are particularly violent places; only that in such a deeply corrupt society, with government ministers and officials siphoning off subsidies meant for farmers, dodgy bank deals, the abuse of power by local bigwigs, magistrates, the police and even the postmen, all living in a culture of mutual scavenging, taking whatever their power will allow them to take, violence is the resort of the dispossessed. That is true whether it is the bear threatened in his diminishing forest or the poor marginal farmers for whom flat and fertile land at the foot of the valley looks like a paradise of riches. Was it so inconceivable, in this place high up in the valley of Tătarului, that you might attack and kill another man you hated because he owned something which you thought was yours? Would you not feel justified in killing him because his ownership of that land itself felt like a kind of murder? It is a logic of claim and revenge that Achilles would have understood. It is what happens in a place where revenge is the only justice.
THE HAND’S BREADTH MURDERS
PHOTOGRAPHS FROM MARAMUREȘ
Gus Palmer
THE MIDDLE AGES: APPROACHING THE QUESTION OF A TERMINAL DATE
David Szalay
1
It is light when he leaves the hotel. Light. Primordial sunlight disclosing empty streets, disclosing form with shadow, the stucco facades. And silence. Here in the middle of London, silence. Not quite silence, of course. Never true silence here. The sublimated rumble of a plane. The burble of pigeons courting on a cornice. A taxi’s busy rattle along Sussex Gardens, past the terraced hotel fronts, from one of which he now emerges.
He feels that he is leaving London unseen, slipping out while everyone else is still asleep, as he walks, with his single small holdall, to the square where he left the car. The square is hotel-fringed, shabby. A few benches and plants in the middle. Sticky pavements. The car is still there, surrounded by empty parking spaces. It is not his. He is simply delivering it. Slinging his holdall onto the passenger seat, he takes his place at the wheel, on the plump leather.
He sits there, enjoying the feeling of inviolable solitude. Solitude, freedom. They seem like nearly the same thing as he sits there.
Then he starts the engine, which sounds loud in the silence of the square.
He is aware now that he does not know exactly which way to go. He looked yesterday and it all seemed simple enough, the way out of London, south-east, towards Dover. Now even finding his way to the river seems problematic. He tries to picture it, the streets he will need to take. When he has formed some sort of mental picture of where he is going, and only then, he pulls out.
He waits at a light on Park Lane, some posh hotel on one side, the park on the other, staring sleepily straight ahead.
When he gets to the river there might be a problem. He hopes there will be signs for Dover. The possibility of getting lost makes him mildly nervous, even though he would not be in any serious danger of missing the ferry. He has plenty of time. It is his habit, when travelling, always to allow more time than he needs.
He went to sleep very early last night. The previous night, Friday, he had been out late, with Macintyre, the Germanic philology specialist at UCL. And then he had had to g
et up early on Saturday to take the train to Nottingham and pick up the car from its previous ‘keeper’, a Pakistani doctor. (Dr N. Khan was the name on the documents.) He had done the whole thing on a hangover, which had made the day pass over him like a dream – made it seem even now like something he had dreamed, the time he spent in Dr Khan’s front room, looking through the service history, while the doctor’s cat watched him.
He swings around Hyde Park Corner, the sun pouring down Piccadilly like something out of Turner, the palaces opposite the park half dissolving in a flood of light.
He squints, tries to push it away with his hand.
Macintyre had not been very helpful. He was supposed to have looked at the manuscript, the section on Dutch and German analogues in particular. They had talked about it for a while, in The Lowlander. Macintyre, with a suggestion of subtle mockery that was entirely typical of him, always insisted on meeting there. The early modern shifts in German pronunciation, for instance. The way some dialects . . .
He has to focus, as he flows through them, on the layout of the streets around Victoria Station.
The way some dialects were still impervious to those shifts, after more than five hundred years.
The traffic system pulls him one way, then another, past empty office towers. He looks for the lane that will throw him left eventually, onto Vauxhall Bridge Road.
There.
No, Macintyre had not been as helpful as he might have been. Obviously, he was holding back. Professional jealousies were evident. He did not want to give too much away about what he was working on. That was why he had wanted to talk about other things. Kept steering the talk away from shop. Wanted to know, when he had had a few Duvels, about his ‘sex life’. ‘How’s your sex life, then?’ he had said.
Well, he had mentioned Waleria. Said something about her. Something non-committal.
The lights halfway down Vauxhall Bridge Road start to turn as he approaches them and after a moment’s hesitation he stops.
Macintyre was married, wasn’t he? Kids.
The lights go green. Unhurriedly he moves off. A minute later – the Thames. That exhilarating momentary sense of space. The water, sun-white.
Then streets again.
In south London he feels even freer. These are streets he does not know, that may be why. Strange to him, these sleeping estates. These hulks, slowly mouldering. He has a vague idea that he needs to find the Old Kent Road. Old Kent Road. That insane game of Monopoly that happened in the SCR once. He thinks of that for a moment, and imagines the Old Kent Road to be liveried in a drab brown.
Signs for Dover draw him deeper into the maze of south-east London. The maze marvellously unpeopled – the low high streets with their tattered shops. The sun shines on their grubby brick faces. Dirty windows hung with curtains. Only at the petrol stations are there signs of life. Someone filling up.
Someone walking away.
He has so much time, he thinks he might make the earlier ferry. His own ‘sails’, as they still say, just after eight. So yes, he may well make the previous one – it is not yet five thirty and already he is in the vicinity of Blackheath, already he is merging onto an empty motorway, its surface shining like water. Speed. There is a tangle of motorways here. He must keep an eye out for signs.
Yes, Macintyre has several kids. No wonder he seemed so threadbare and fed up. So tetchy. Some little house somewhere in Outer London, full of stuff. Full of noise. He and his wife at each other’s throats. Too worn out to fuck. Who wants it?
CANTERBURY says the sign.
And he thinks, with a little frisson of excitement, This is the way Chaucer’s pilgrims went. Trotting horses. Stories. Muddy lanes. And when it started to rain – a hood. Wet hands.
His dry hands hold the leather-trimmed wheel. Through sunglasses he eyes the wide oncoming lanes. He has the motorway to himself.
Wonderful to imagine it though. The whole appeal of medieval studies – the languages, the literature, the history, the art and architecture – to immerse oneself in that world. That other world. Safely other. Other in almost every way, except that it was here. Look at those fields on either side of the motorway. Those low hills. It was here. They were here, as we are here now. And this too shall pass. We don’t actually believe that though, do we? We are unable to believe that our own world will pass. So it will go on forever? No. It will turn into something else. Slowly – too slowly to be perceived by the people living in it. Which is already happening, is always happening. We just can’t see it. Like sound changes, spoken language.
‘Some Remarks on the Representation of Spoken Dialect in “The Reeve’s Tale”.’
The kick-ass title of his first published work. Published in Medium Ævum LXXIV. Originally written for Hamer’s Festschrift – Hamer who had supervised his doctoral work when he first turned up at Oxford. A tall, bald man with spacious, elegant rooms in Christ Church. Would literally offer you a sherry when you arrived – that old school, that English.
The author of works such as: Old English Sound Changes for Beginners (1967). Professor Hamer lived, it had seemed, in a fortress of abstrusity. Asleep at night, he must have dreamed, so his young foreign pupil had thought, sipping his sherry, of palatal diphthongisation, of loss of h and compensatory lengthening.
And he had envied him those harmless dreams. Something so profoundly peaceful about them.
Something so profoundly peaceful about them.
Everything so settled, you see. It all happened a thousand years ago. And the medievalist sits in his study, in a shaft of sunlight, lost in a reverie of life on the far side of that immense lapse of time. The whole exercise is, in its way, a memento mori. A meditation on the effacing nature of time.
He likes the little world of the university. Some people, he knows, hate it. They long for London.
He likes it. The fairy-tale topography of the town. A make-believe world of walled gardens. The quietness of summer. The stone-floored lodge and the deferential porter. Yes, a make-believe world, like something imagined by a shy child.
Somewhere to hide.
Dreaming spires.
Sun sparkles on wide motorway.
It is just after six and he will be at Dover, he estimates, in an hour.
Yes, he likes the little world of the university. He likes its claustral narrowness. Sometimes he wishes it were narrower still. That the world of the present was even more absent. He would have quite enjoyed, he thinks, the way of life of a medieval monastery – as a scholarly brother, largely exempt from manual labour. He would have enjoyed that.
With, naturally, the one obvious proviso.
Without noticing, he has pushed the car well into the nineties. It manages the speed without effort. He eases off the accelerator and the needle immediately starts to sink and for the first time this morning he feels sleepy – a mesmeric sleepiness induced by the level hum of the engine and the monotonous, empty perspective in front of him. It seems, for long moments, like something on a screen, something spewing from a CPU. Just graphics. Without consequences. He shakes his head, moves his hands on the wheel.
Yes. The one obvious proviso.
Last year, during the Hilary term, he had done the thing he had long wanted to, and had an affair with an undergraduate. It had been something he had had in view since his arrival in Oxford to finish his doctorate. It had taken years to achieve – and the affair itself, when it finally happened, was in many ways unsatisfactory. Just two weeks it had lasted. And yet the memories of it, of her youth . . .
He was sad in an abstracted way, for a day or two, when she ended it with that letter in her schoolgirl’s handwriting, that letter which so pathetically overestimated his own emotional engagement in the situation. And he understood that he had also overestimated her emotional engagement in it. As he had been intent on enacting his own long-standing fantasy, so she had been enacting a fantasy of her own, in no way less selfish. Except that she was nineteen or twenty, and still entitled to selfishness –
not having learned yet, perhaps, how easily and lastingly people are hurt – and he was more than ten years older and ought to have understood that by now.
Only when he saw her, soon after, in the arms of someone her own age – some kid – did he experience anything like a moment’s actual pain, something Nabokovian and poisonous, seeing them there in the spring sunlight of the quad.
And by then he was already mixed up with Erica, the medieval Latin scholar from Oriel. That didn’t last long either. It lasted one summer.
The days he has just spent in London have exhausted him. Not only the meeting with Macintyre. He also had a meeting with his publisher. And a symposium on Old English sound changes at UCL, for which he was one of the speakers. Various social things. He had seen Emmanuele, the short, snobbish, scholarly Italian who had finished his DPhil a few years before and was now a lawyer in London. Emmanuele had asked after Waleria, what was happening there? It was at a party at Mani’s, last September, that he had met her. ‘I don’t know,’ he had said. ‘Something. Maybe. We’re seeing each other. I don’t know.’
Solitude, freedom. There is that feeling, still, on the ferry. This in spite of the other people; they are transient strangers, they do not fix him in place. They know nothing about him. He has no obligations to them. Sea wind disperses summer’s heat on the open deck, hung with lifeboats. The floor see-saws. Is sucked down, then pushes at his feet. England dwindles. The wind booms, pulls his hair. Inside, in the sealed warmth, people eat and shop. He wanders among them, nameless and invisible. Sits at a table on his own. His solitude, for the hour it takes to travel to France, is inviolable. He stands at a window, golden with salt in the sunlight. He watches the playful waves. He feels as free as the gulls hanging on the wind. Solitude, freedom.
As soon as he has driven off the ship he puts on the A/C and Vivaldi’s ‘Gloria’ – pours into the French motorway system with that ecstatic music filling his ears.