It's Not Yet Dark

by Simon Fitzmaurice

  {

  I arrive early to the building. It’s dilapidated, covered with plastic and scaffolding. Next door is a primary school. Quiet, too early for children. I enter the plastic and climb the ravaged staircase to the top floor. The building has no roof. The floorboards are caked in ice and snow. Men stand in the shadows, smoking. It’s my first day on the building site. The crew are grizzled and unfriendly. We are waiting for the foreman. It’s freezing. Winter in Berlin.

  The foreman arrives, looks me over once and joins the other men, muttering in German and looking in my direction. No one here speaks English. I have pidgin German. The foreman calls me over and the crew disperses, forming a wide circle around the two of us. The foreman walks over to an iron girder on the floor and bends down, gripping it. He indicates that I do the same at my end. You’re joking, I think, looking around at the crew. They stare back at me. Apparently not. I lean down and grip the girder. I make eye contact with the foreman and we lift. It is an impossible weight, like nothing I’ve felt before. We don’t break eye contact as he guides us across the floor. The foreman’s face has turned red and a thick vein has risen on his forehead. I can’t take much more. We put it down. He comes over, pats me on the back. I’ve passed the test. The crew is around us, all smiles. I’m offered a cigarette. I don’t smoke. We smoke.

  My first job is to stand in front of a wall while a guy knocks it down from the other side. As the tip of the jackhammer appears through the wall, I gather the bricks it dislodges and put them in a wheelbarrow. That’s it. It’s nerve-racking, waiting for the hammer to appear and the rush to grab the bricks. When the barrow is full I have to wheel it across a wooden bridge that spans the footpath five storeys below and dump it into a tube that feeds into a giant wastage skip on the street.

  My first wheelbarrow is full of bricks. It weighs a ton as I push it towards the narrow bridge. The snow is compacted on the bridge and the result is sheet ice. The wheel starts to wobble as I cross. I slow to a snail’s pace. I’m sweating, even in this cold. I inch forward and the wheel slips, the wheelbarrow flips, falling to one side, the bricks tumbling out. I lunge forward, throw my body across the bricks, grabbing the sides, trying to right the falling wheelbarrow. Pain sears across my back. It’s too heavy. I manage to contain the bricks with my arms but a single solitary brick goes over the edge, disappears from view. Time slows. I don’t know if I shout out. I think I do. I scramble to the bar and look down. Five storeys below I see a little girl in a red coat, schoolbag on her back, standing stock still. She is staring at the brick embedded in the snow of the footpath two feet in front of her. I feel the blood leave my face. She looks up at me then, her small round face as pale as snow.

  {

  I walk into the flat I’m staying in, absolutely shattered from my first day’s work. My friends are there. I sit down. I almost killed a girl today, I say, and try to explain. They don’t seem to get it. I fall asleep on the couch.

  {

  I’m going out with a German girl from a city called Wuppertal. She is an artist and paints on large canvases in her room at the top of the house, where wide windows open out above the city. We go to the pub to meet her friends. Walking home afterwards, we pass a long thin building, its windows gaping black holes, some boarded up. I ask what it is. It’s the old train station, she says. Where the Jews were taken.

  {

  Drama

  I have been accepted into a master’s degree course in Anglo-Irish literature and drama at University College Dublin. I’m very excited. The course has attracted people from all over the world. China, Japan, a few people from America, Italy, Spain, me and two others from Ireland. Twelve in total. It’s ridiculously intimidating. To me, they all seem to know a hell of a lot already about the subject I am there to learn.

  Each week someone has to present an essay to the class. The first presentation is given by an American student. It solidifies the intimidation I feel. He stands, surrounded by piles of books and papers, and speaks slowly and calmly, totally at ease with his subject. He strokes his goatee as he talks, and uses the words ‘demonstrative’, ‘indicative’, Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysian’. I’m sweating. What am I doing here? I’m in over my head. He is speaking English but I don’t understand.

  I find out later in the library that they’re just adjectives, adjectives with lots of syllables.

  My turn. I stand, gripping a few pieces of paper, and read at the speed of thought. I’d be surprised if anyone understands me. The lecturer says, Any questions? And I look around with daggers at each person. No questions so.

  I get to know another American student, here on a Fulbright scholarship and hilarious. He walks up to me after class and asks me would I like to be assistant director in a play he is directing for the university’s drama society. That is why I’m here. Drama. Yes.

  I love it. All the details of back stage. Casting. Art design. Costume. Props. Everything. The director asks me to play a part. Not my plan but I do it.

  We’re in the library, by the photocopiers. My director friend asks me to write a sign announcing rehearsals. I start to write, and realise I don’t know how to spell ‘rehearsal’. I’m mortified. How did I come this far and not be able to spell? Clearly there are gaps in my education. I look over at him and he is busy doing something else. This is a library. I grab a nearby dictionary and get the spelling. He hasn’t noticed or is pretending he hasn’t to be polite. I vow never to be in that situation again.

  {

  We put on the play. It goes without a hitch and is received very well. I’m hooked. To behind the scenes, rather than out front.

  {

  I give my last presentation. I stand, surrounded by books and papers, and speak slowly and calmly, at ease with my subject.

  {

  It’s over. A friend is starting university in Edinburgh and I decide to go with him.

  {

  The biggest, thickest, heaviest dictionary

  I work as a dishwasher. In the canteen of a petroleum-jelly factory. It gives me time to read and write and think. I get the bus in the darkness before dawn and read as it takes me out of the city into the industrial zone. I read in the fifteen-minute morning break and the hour for lunch. No one disturbs me. I make notes in my little black book. As the heat from the bacon pan warms my loins, while it soaks and I scrub, I think about what I’ve read and know my pen, book and notebook sit just over there under the counter by the hatch for dirty dishes. I’m a good dishwasher. The ladies play cards on their break. Kafka. Beckett. Camus.

  {

  I get my first pay cheque and buy the biggest, thickest, heaviest dictionary I can carry. It is my prized possession. My father bought the complete hardbound works of Hemingway from his first pay packet working on the Underground in London. I have them now. I sit on the couch reading Beckett’s Murphy, the dictionary beside me. I look up a word, which leads to another. I am in love with the etymology of words. I read the dictionary half the time. I get lost in words, stories like an inner voice. I’m living lives I didn’t know existed. I walk the streets. My friend and I find a little video shop where the films are categorised by director and actor. I watch Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire for the first time.

  On a tiny TV in a damp flat in Edinburgh, I sit on the floor in front of the screen as my friend gives up on the film halfway through and leaves. I am riveted. Glued. I can’t speak afterwards. That way after the rarest of films. I have never seen anything like it. Wings of Desire is the Ulysses of film. The flow. The humanity of it. A moment on a bridge, with a man after coming off his motorbike, his last thoughts.

  When films reach the heights of Wings of Desire, Paris, Texas, Badlands, Punch Drunk Love, Blade Runner, Rushmore, they give me everything an art form can give. The things that keep us most alive.

  {

  I start my higher diploma in education to become a qualified secondary-school teacher. It is more for my family than out of any real desire. To get a real job. The head of the course
says, in his opening speech, This will be the hardest year of your life. He is right.

  I’m teaching English in a secondary school in the morning and going to college all afternoon. At night I have to prepare my classes. I quite often sleep in my clothes, falling onto bed.

  {

  I go to America in the summer, to Martha’s Vineyard. I love America. At the end of the summer of work, a few of us go travelling with the money we have made. All across America by train, the glass car looking out into the desert. San Francisco. San Diego. John Fante. Charles Bukowski. Bukowski reading Fante. Raymond Carver writing about Bukowski. Coffee. Breakfast. I love America.

  Mexico. Peru. Bolivia. I drink it in. I’m writing all the time.

  My father has worked in Russia for over ten years. The company he’s working for have just bought a cement plant in Ukraine and they need a teacher to teach the management English. I’m in.

  {

  Cold from the fridge

  I can see the road through the floor of the car. A blur of snow, I try not to look. The Lada is tied together with string. There is a piece of string across the hole in the floor. This is post-Soviet poverty at seventy miles an hour. The driver’s shoulders reach the roof and he has to scrunch his head down just to fit. He looks like Luca Brasi. His name is Anatoli. My father is asleep in the passenger seat. Old-school traveller. Anatoli is hunched over the steering-wheel, squinting into the windscreen. I see why Dad is asleep. The windscreen wipers are going faster than the car but to no purpose. Outside is a total whiteout. I lean forward for a better look. Nothing. No road. No sky. Just headlights into white nothingness. It appears Anatoli is navigating by some inner sight. Or homing beacon. I close my eyes and pray.

  {

  My father is a ground-troops capitalist soldier. Or, put another way, a chartered accountant sent to strange places. He was one of the first people into Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, after the fall of the Soviet Union. Sent in by the World Bank to teach farmers who before had produced ten thousand chickens a day, all of which were bought by the government, to open a shop, to sell to the locals the produce of the small allotment they now owned. The embryo of capitalism. He came into a town with the idea of millions on his shoulders. He gave classes in purchasing and sales, debit and credit, profit and loss. He was the hero of capitalism, the vanguard of democracy. But it was all for nothing. The Mafia moved in and took over everything.

  Now, years after the fall, Dad has been put in charge of a cement plant in southern Ukraine, with the cornerstone of capitalism as his mission. Turn a profit.

  {

  Six hours south of Kiev. We make it alive. Anatoli drops us off at my new home. It’s a tower block, in a landscape of tower blocks. The company owns the bottom floor of this one, divided into two-bed apartments. Dad and I share one. Most of the workers live in the tower blocks. Two thousand staff and their families. As we walk from the car to the entrance I feel eyes from above.

  {

  I don’t care where we live, I’m just happy to be living with Dad. Gold dust. I put up movie posters on the walls and at night we watch films and drink Ukrainian beer cold from the fridge.

  {

  They have never had a teacher and they get the carpenters to build me a blackboard. It’s green. I teach the management team every morning and meet Dad for lunch in his office. Long, echoing corridors and the office doors are doors within doors so no one can listen, with lights above the doorway telling you whether or not you can enter. This is Kafka. Beside Dad’s office is a queue of people waiting to see the Ukrainian boss, now second in command. Some have been there for days. One is asleep. Some will never get in to see him. Dad leaves the door of his office permanently open. It infuriates the others.

  Sometimes after work we go into the old town and sit in darkened pubs and drink cold beer with paprika crisps. We like each other’s company.

  We are invited to a wedding. We are put sitting beside the bride and groom. I have an interpreter to my right. She whispers in my ear, translating all the speeches. She tells me who is sitting opposite us at the table. That is the local judge, she says, and beside him is the head of the Mafia. There used to be three Mafia heads, but one opened the front door of his house and was blown across the street, and the other drove his car off the road. I look at him. Shaved, gleaming, tanned head, he is young. Built like a house. He is a boxer, she tells me, owns a gym in town. In a jet-black silk shirt, he is the archetypal hood. He is looking at me and I stop thinking. I want to look away but I can’t, not this close. His eyes are like a shark’s. There is no other way to describe them. They are dead yet they are looking at me. And I realise I’ve never looked in eyes like this. I feel it deep inside. Fear. I look away.

  Dancing starts. He dances with his girlfriend, also in black, apart from a red flower on her dress and the bright red of her lipstick. They dance and they look like flamenco dancers. I look around. Every pair of eyes is on them.

  I talk to a girl taller than me. I’m six foot. She is a lithe Ukrainian. She says she has to go and I offer to walk her home and she says yes. We go outside and step down into the darkness of the trees by the road. Two large figures step out from the trees, blocking our path. Apparently I’m not supposed to leave the wedding. Dad has told me they’re all armed. I look over and see the giant Anatoli, standing with the other drivers by the cars. I smile and wave, indicating that I’m ok to go on. He looks at me and nods at the two and they step back. I walk her home and we talk. She has perfect English. We reach her block and she goes inside and I don’t get the kiss I was hoping for.

  {

  I’m going mad in the apartment so I phone the interpreter and ask if she would mind taking me into town. There is a population of over a hundred thousand and the large square at the centre of the old town is buzzing. It’s strange to be out with you, she says, as we walk across it. Why? I ask. Because everyone knows who you are.

  I laugh at the idea. I realise she is not joking. I look around. Here, there, all around the square, everyone is looking.

  {

  Gecko

  I leave Ukraine after a year. My students give me a painting of the old town. It’s strange to be leaving.

  I fly to France to meet some friends for a holiday before I return to Ireland. Five of us go kayaking in the Dordogne for five days. I’ve decided to take a break from love.

  I kiss a girl in one of the campsites. She is a tour guide from England and has a tattoo of a gecko on her ankle. The next day my friends and I are on a train to San Sebastián and I spend the journey drawing a gecko on my stomach with a blue biro. I show everyone.

  We have to change trains. Waiting in a dusty rural station, we are all sitting in the shade when a bright green gecko runs across the space in front of us and right up to me, stopping between my legs. Everyone laughs and one of the lads tries to grab it. It darts away.

  We go out in San Sebastián and I kiss a girl from America who tells me about her granny. She turns around to order a drink. On her back is a tattoo of a gecko.

  {

  I go home. I am taking a break from love.

  {

  Then I meet a tall, slender girl named Ruth on a bridge.

  {

  I spent my whole life looking for Ruth.

  {

  I stay over in her house in Harold’s Cross for the first time. In her bedroom, on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, I pick up a small wooden carving on a necklace and hold it up to Ruth. I hand-carved that in Thailand, Ruth says. It took me ages. It’s a gecko.

  {

  I’m still man

  I do not eat or drink or walk or talk the way you do. I don’t breathe without a machine helping me day and night. I cannot move my arms or legs. And yet. I’m still man.

  I’ve lost so much. And yet. I’m still here.

  I feel everything. The slightest feather touch anywhere on my body. And my heart is alive. To meaning. To value. To love. Which is all it’s ever been about.

 
{

  I realise I have a choice. I can let this life crush me. Bearing down on me until I am dead. Or I can bear the weight. And live. There is no surviving. There is living and dying. There are no gates to this suffering. No liberator will come. I must decide.

  To live or die.

  {

  No pain without love. No love without pain. We are not built for death. It does not sit well with us. It is not in us. We cannot grasp it. I cannot. The end of me. It is beyond fear. Beyond reason. Beyond us. Yet the universal question: Are you afraid of dying? And the ever-evolving answer we formulate throughout our lives, secretly hoping we will truly believe it. Death is not in us, despite what the scientists say. Yet death is as real as our reflection. As present. A presence that we must ponder, must endure. Until we die. And become that which we are not.

  This life is the harshest of opposites: Death and Love. Anyone who says different has not met death.

  This life is ours, and whether we want to keep it or let it go, there is no love without pain, no death without love.

  {

  I’m a good man. I see it now. I’ve been selfish and spoilt but I’ve also been the best this life has to offer. The people I’ve touched, everything I’ve ever tried to do or say. Love. This existence is good. The sun on the fence. The people I’ve touched. I’m worthy of my sons’ love now. These are an old man’s thoughts. My body is afraid of death and so am I. To leave this place. But I have lived.

  {

  I stand before the vast stillness of the sea. I get that feeling, like in front of the Grand Canyon. When nature becomes a presence. And it’s Me and The World. There is a noise above the waves, a rhythmic chopping sound. A man in the water, swimming alone, his arms cutting the surface, one at a time. His wake only a dark stain behind him. Humans don’t leave much of a wake. I close my eyes. I am living. I am alive.