It occurs to me that each moment in life, each thing we do, is a way of forgetting. I moved toward the group of artists to forget that my parents had abandoned me. To Tacita to forget that I was alone. To Lev to forget myself. To my work to forget Lev. He did it too. He came to me as a way of forgetting. Forgetting his past. Forgetting that he was being hunted. At first, in the south, he could hardly look at the linen curtains moving in the breeze, the stacks of books, the vase of wildflowers on the table, this peaceable domestic scene. He found it hard to know what to eat. I would suggest things, and he would murmur in my ear, Anything, hands lifting my dress. Only when he painted, or when he was with me, his need to constantly be inside me, could he forget.
I shake off all the images, but in truth, I don’t know how to forget him. He saw me more clearly than anyone else could. It makes me realize how remote I have become. I suddenly have a longing for that version of me, feverish, ardent. That person has long vanished, that is clear. I feel how I looted my own life to come to this point of view. I made listening into a shelter. I turn and see Skeet, his long limbs and thousand-yard stare. Our eyes meet for a moment but we say nothing. Something tacitly is exchanged between us. It is as though I am only, finally, seeing things truly in this moment. This house, these caves white and high, and it strikes me as odd, really, to be here. The caves are mythical but dirty. Their shining purpose scarcely visible. Sonorities. Skeet hands Lev’s painting to me. I feel my eyes well and blur, thinking of him. Remembering him so sharply as though he is standing here. His gait, the direct fullness of his response to everything, like no one I’ve ever known. Or will know. Where did it go? All of it. I am struck by all that is lost in life. By all the cruelties. The extremities of want. We were young and so sure of what could be discarded. With no idea how rare things actually are. All these memories, the weight of them suddenly displaced. Like space being made for space, as though someone has ripped off the sky. Why has all this come, at this completely inappropriate moment, I think, wiping my face. Blood banging into my ears, thinking of my grim resolve, the grave determination to remain afloat. The worked saved me. It got to the heart of things. Different heart. Different things. My hands trembling. I suddenly must set down the painting, like a live feather. I’ve held on to sorrow long enough. It ruptures the silence I have carefully walled around the past. In terms of history, silence is forgetting.
HORSE
Snorting, jerking its head, tilted hooves clicking on stones. Skin rippling, twitching off flies.
Its ears prick and pin back signalling something else, something alive.
EVERYTHING IS BRIGHT and then there is nothing, only darkness even with eyes wide open. It causes me to collapse and fall. This time onto the sidewalk, knee split open, blood on the pavement. I see a physician, not one I know but one a stranger has led me to. A cold stethoscope, the prick of a needle. He asks me a series of questions, including the date. I know enough to know that this is what they ask people who are undone.
I have been to Lev’s studio. Tacita took me straight there when I would not return to Mme. Tissaud’s. There must be clues. I will take anything. I will gather up his work, all that weight of paint, and bury it in a field until he is released. I will read every book on his shelf. I will learn Russian. I will lie down on the floor with the paint and dirt and papers that I will guard until his return. But when we get there, arranged through the landlord, money has been exchanged, its beautiful squalor has been wiped away. No drying racks. No art. No letters. With no trace at all of Lev in particular. The only thing that is left is the bed, his desk, and his empty easel in the corner.
I want to stay here. It is the only way I know how to be close to him. I remain for days without leaving the room. His easel watches me like a dog. It is airless and I find only tins of sardines and bottles of alcohol. I am continually sick. When I feel anything, I feel it in my stomach. My skin is chalky and damp and feels like the skin of someone else. I am paralyzed. My mind sloshes, eyes sliding around the room calculating the dimensions of my own captivity. But I cannot bear it. They have already erased Lev’s presence here, even for me. It is cleaner, tidier, their having gone through his things. It reminds me only of the absences. Of what cannot be changed. Eventually, out of hunger or despair I’m not sure which, I wander out into the bright, a night moth skittering toward light.
So when he comes out with it, I can scarcely breathe. The doctor’s proclamation a stunning broadcast without mercy. My chest is suddenly weighted under a pile of bricks. I remember nothing except the overwhelming instinct to flee. But there is nowhere to go when it is your own body that has betrayed you.
I used to tell women there were three options, his voice deep and authoritarian. But now there is really only one. He clears his throat and needlessly shuffles papers in front of him. There is an ashtray made from a large pink seashell containing cigarette butts beside his lamp.
As you may know, one has been made punishable by death, the other, another throat clear, difficult in these times.
I will later hear that the laundress who helps dozens of desperate women will be sent to the guillotine for her actions. La faiseuse d’anges, they call her. Angel maker.
A middle-aged man in shirtsleeves who decorates his weekends with dinner parties and tennis lawns, whose framed university degrees look down on me from behind his head, delivers these words like little blows. As though they do not gut.
I cannot listen a moment longer. I leave, forgetting one glove, a blight on his tidy desk with its glinting pens angled in their granite holder, like bones stripped of meat. I think of what the doctor said. Vous n’avez pas de chance. You don’t have luck.
I didn’t pay, I realize. The doctor. The francs still folded in my coat pocket. His cologne draconian, still, impossibly, on my coat, blocks away from his office.
In the streets women stand in doorways muttering. Like me, they might live on fifty centimes a day, though dinner parties can contain lavish things bought on the black market. Most of the food is shipped to Germany. They have started handing out ration cards, soon people will grow hungry. The city is meant to look normal. The women still knit, the click of their needles in the gardens of the Palais Royal. What compels them to knit? What are they thinking? No one wears anything handknit here. The cafés are full, though two-thirds of the city fled in a slow-moving wave of panic. Mme. Tissaud says it is impossible to get leather for her books anymore. It all goes to their army boots, she says. They have hung their flag at the Arc de Triomphe and have concerts of Wagner in the Tuileries and have imposed a curfew that starts at nine o’clock. At night the streets are eerily empty of cars and people. The electric lights are no longer reliable at night. I can hear Mme. Tissaud striking match after match. There is almost no birdsong since they began dumping gasoline in the Seine estuary, wiping out most of the birds. Still, there are black bicycles and young couples holding hands. The city smells of chestnuts warmed by sunshine. Se débrouiller.
Unconsciously I have walked, with no memory, to Lev’s street, Rue Jacob, like a homing pigeon. The wind is so strong, as if at sea. I have no idea where to go. Just seeing the hand-scrawled Sept-Bis sends the pain of missing Lev through me like a blade. I don’t know whose handwriting it is. I have never noticed it before. It looks like the school-taught cursive of every French child with its hooded letters, capitals with curving tails. Lev’s landlord’s maybe. A man who reluctantly accepts artwork for rent. He is a pale, almost tubercular man of little imagination. The sort of man who determines whether he should eat by looking at his watch.
The window above is still full of sun, mid-afternoon warm, the steep coil of stairs behind the thick wooden door that does not open. I have left it, so it is now locked to me. But still this building, even without him inhabiting it, continues to have authority over me. His studio. The vast space of it. All the tubes of paint squeezed onto palettes. All the pots of paint now grown over with skins.
A woman named Joséphine would be bent over i
n her dull labour, washing the small black and white hexagons of tile in the front hall. Though she is a hunchback, she has the look of someone who was once beautiful. At some point, Lev said, she had married a titled person but now she was reduced to cleaning houses. Reduced. The landlord’s word, not Lev’s. I once spoke to her and she said she found cleaning satisfying. She did not need to answer to anyone. Left alone as she scrubbed the grooves that gently dipped in the middle of the wooden risers. Dust, she had said to Lev, is people. It’s just everyone who once was here.
In the midst of fear there is still shape. She cleans. The landlord owns. The stores sell, though much less now.
The rip and crack of the laundry that hangs by a wooden stick from an upper window sounds like flags snapping. And I think, How violent flags are. Maybe it is the Russian woman who claims to be Polish. She says it is safer. The sound reminds me of Lev saying listen to nothing but the sound of your own heart beating when there is the nuptial flight of turtledoves high and circling, the whipcrack of their downward-flicked wings against the grey sky. These small miracles, he says. They make treachery bearable.
How quickly the unthinkable becomes normal. The people of this city have been so hungry they once did something so egregious, now commonplace—they ate their own horses. Something they keep up, even when the plenty comes back. They then dined on zoo animals, including a beloved pair of elephants. Though the line was drawn at monkeys. No matter the level of desperation, this makes even the creationists uneasy.
I have a moment of calm. Like a cool wind, it blows through me. Lev saying when he was born his father caught him in his own hands in the middle of the night. His mother had to wait until his father had delivered the horse and two cows first. He had to use an axe on the iced-over door to empty the contents of the enamel bowl into the splintering cold. The only time his mother was truly warm in that high house full of cracks was when she was giving birth.
There are uniformed men who surface here and there, like extras in a play. They drink coffee, watch ballets, wind their watches. Paris looks much the same despite the darkness rippling underneath. I see them posing in front of the Tour Eiffel. Perhaps they occupy it in this manner because, like everybody else, they just want to enjoy Paris.
I wear my hair the same way, plaited, though messily. I consider where to walk. Playing this role, the one where is everything is fine.
Tacita says, Be careful. If you practise hard enough, you can forget who you are.
Before I know what I’m doing I’ve thrown a rock through the window of the woman’s apartment with the laundry. The one who pretends to be Polish. I need to hear something break. A delicate web in the glass. There is shouting. I must get out of here. For a moment I’ve lost my French. This pain is stunningly clear. Like the cold that only people from the north know. It isn’t about being numb, it is about being knocked awake. Stinging skin, a trickle from the skull, down the spine. The kind of cold that means you have to keep moving or you die.
CRUSTACEAN
Dirty green. Noisy. Sounds produced by tapping, scraping, bending, clicking, or rasping parts of their exoskeleton.
TIME DOESN’T BLUNT ALL MEMORIES. Some grow edges sharp as knives. I thought I was past everything, out of everything. But I find I have only sealed things off. A pain ripens anytime these things come in uninvited, as they do, in the form of a simple question, or rain falling at a certain angle, or the smell of a solvent. Lev’s painting alters the order of things. Realization flickers through. Not the great sweeping kind, but the miracle of this one small thing. The great revelation never comes, because how could there ever be just one? It is all the things that strike, unanticipated, defiantly outside of reason or emotion.
I now see why old people live in the past, I say to Skeet. It saves you from surprises because it tricks you into counting on what comes next.
But all the wisdom of age—
I see his brown hands, pale eyes. He is also someone who shook off one life to find another, left mostly alone. I am certain he doesn’t subscribe to some cliché of a wise old woman, just as he wouldn’t to an old rattled one, gathering frustration. There is a part of me that wishes none of this had ever surfaced. That he didn’t know. It took so much effort to keep it away. I never wanted to be one of those women who cling to their past. To the sad, hard facts of war. You talk about work, they talk of hunger. You mention joy and they tell of hardship. They deny their lives by staying in the past. Their suffering asks for witness. And now they are almost all gone. I have avoided witness. It is almost funny. Someone who has spent life observing, to understand only now that a life, any life, needs witness. I remember how, in painting, you can only know what you’ve made once it has been contemplated by someone else. And now Lev’s painting, here, sending the anguish through me all over again. It is too late, too messy, too fractured to be put back together, in this rented house, in the middle of these scorched fields.
Frame, he says, eyes down. I wait. Do you miss him?
There is no need to ask who he means. I wonder what Skeet must feel. He would never tell. Looking at him reminds me of the losses I must negotiate. Of fieldwork that I will never conduct again, Skeet and I staring quietly as the sun dropped, pink light washing over us. Packing up recorders, microphones, and walking back to the truck, senses quickened, ears pricked to every sound, for days after. Of all the work that will not be carried on. Skeet moves as though there is no clear truth or falseness in anything. He prefers questions over answers and always takes himself out of the equation, which, I see, is exactly what I do. Have always done.
I sit, thoughtful, for a moment. Every morning I wake, I smoke, I work. The sounds connect me to the world. And when I am in a state of pure discovery, when I am completely unaware of everything else, that’s when I am most alive. I am not unlike the birds I’ve observed, who have their own private world. Their own sense of light, and comfort and purpose.
Yes, I finally say, I do.
Frame?
Skeet, I don’t know how to tell. Essential things are too far inside to have an obvious language. I’m older, everyone gets older, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you gain anything from it. Everything becomes more daily. More urgent. But at some point you have to be able to find the truth of the time you’ve taken up. All the living—the value of it.
What about the knowledge from the dictionary, from all this work. I mean, why do it? Why the compulsion to organize the unorganizable?
I place my cigarette, glowing, in the shiny ceramic ashtray. God. I never thought of it that way. As a compulsion to organize. Like Mother. I always think of it as documenting the present for the future. This is what art does. It allows for a continuous present. It encapsulates what cannot be known until something is lived. When Lev painted, I saw how he truly existed out of time. He was articulating what was beyond his own ability to know.
I want to show you something, I say to Skeet, getting up from the table, slowly, with difficulty.
—
Skeet picks up his bag and ducks his head under it, the leather strap across his chest like a newspaper boy, and takes my arm. We walk through the front door, the gravel making small rips underfoot, brush past the lavender down the stone steps and out through the archway. The cave walls gleam white. I see that one of my taped notes has fallen down. Nine thousand years of protecting ourselves from nature, now we must protect nature from ourselves. For the longest time I had a William Blake quotation above my desk. There is no difference between the whole thing and one thing, was what it said. It both made sense to me and confounded me intermittently. But seemed as sturdy a philosophy as any to live by. My pages weighted under stones. There is little breeze down here, and it is surprisingly arid. I wrap my shawl around me. The sight of all the work a small thrill that grazes me still.
Skeet’s hands touch the pages, his eyes move around the space. I didn’t picture it like this, he says, looking up. Eyeglints in the absence of light.
What did you pictur
e?
I don’t really know.
He looks at all the work, piles of papers, my drawings of parabolas translated into shapes, then mapped as expanding webs of glissandos. Writing pinned to the walls, digital recorders, a box of batteries, a stained teacup, pencils, huge stacks of vertical files, stiff large paper covered in symbols, crates of hard drives full of data, tapes, fieldbooks, several headphones, fieldnotes scrawled on slips of graph paper, broken-down recording equipment from various eras, empty packages of cigarettes, photographs, yellowed notes, spectrographs.
This— He stops. I forget how much you’ve seen, he says in a solemn voice that requires space around it.
First, I lost myself, I say to Skeet, and then I saw it clearly and began the conscious work of construction. And after all these years I see now that it comes from a devotion to life.
But where, he wants to know, does that devotion come from? Is it outside of you or inside of you?
It is bigger than me.
—
That night in the south of France, there were no more stars, the sky was black. There was a low rumble when the sun still shone. When I was out walking by the river. First there was a short rain. And after I went back to the house, after I saw that Lev was gone, the true rain began to fall. The earth calling for it. I stayed inside and listened to the sudden violet storm, counting the seconds between lightning flashes. I sat outside on the slippery stone steps. Lightning moving closer. Strike me.
There is no edge between the sorrow and the rain. I run out into the storm and feel its sullen chaos. Rain pricks my skull. Already this rain between us, erasing everything. Your dry footsteps. Sun glimmering through the spaces between every leaf, a cache of ancient gold. High larks filling the silverblue dawn. Ditches red like the first poppy you ever saw, dark-hearted and delicate. Your paintings so heavy I can’t even hold them in one hand. It’s all paint, you say, squinting in the sun. Paint upon paint, no money for new canvases. And they completely change. In the morning I wake up and everything that was dark is now white. Everything that was white is now black. You say that over time black on black becomes white on white. The edges are an archaeology of colour. The whip of white paint trailing along the foreground, the brush flicks from your hand like another perfect finger.
The Dictionary of Animal Languages Page 22