Outside, the new day was just beginning; there were voices and sounds and scents. The first light came red and beautiful through the streets, beams that crept and changed all the time.
And when I stopped crying at last I looked down on all of this and I thought: the snow and the light are bigger, they are bigger than all of us together. For there were men toiling in the snow, digging out cars and pushing them and swearing at one another and at their wives. Taxi drivers in their yellow cabs were shaking their fists and yelling. They were blinded by the red light that came low through the city; they tried to shield their eyes and they had to stop. All they could do was shout and swear, and I looked down on them from where I was four flights above, and they seemed so small and what they struggled against so huge.
I looked up and listened; I listened to the one room and I listened to myself. I felt utterly empty. I had cried myself dry; my eyes were empty caves. The dirty banknotes lay strewn over my lap and some were scattered over the floor at my feet. They were like leaves that had blown in the window – old, dead leaves.
My father and brother would be up soon; my father to sit in the living room and look at pictures and wait, just wait; and my brother to drag on his coat and go out into a city that did not want him.
Except that everything had changed now. I looked up and I listened and I realized I could hear nothing at all. The clock had stopped ticking.
The Song of a Robin
I remember the day I left. I was seventeen and I hadn’t told them. I remember the look on my mother’s face; she was cutting bread and turned round – a white oval of surprise. She cut herself and was crying, and I thought to myself: is she crying because of what I’ve told her or because she cut herself?
My father was stacking wood with my brother in the yard, and they looked round at me too. I don’t remember now if it was because I said something or because my mother called to them. I remember it as a kind of dream as I left the house; when I think of it I am swimming through the kind of soundlessness there is in dreams. And their faces, my father’s and my brother’s, are still following me as I walk away. They have blocks of wood in their hands and they are turning all the time to follow my leaving.
It is 1914. Why am I going? Why do I leave a sleepy village at the edge of a sleepy county to join something that means nothing to me whatsoever? Is it because I am tired of going out to fetch water at dawn on white mornings when there is nothing but the cold rawness of the wind and the stink of chickens on the breath of it? Is it because I want to believe in the talk around huddled beer tables, the lure of somewhere else and somewhere new? Perhaps I am no different from the seventeen-year-old boy in Athens who heard the stories of warships and swords, and whose heart raced at the sound of the words. Or is that only an excuse?
I am cold and I wish they would bring me a blanket! Where is anyone in this damned place? They should be here by five-thirty and it’s ten past six! There’s a robin there. Out on the window ledge. Wanting crumbs no doubt. Go and beg from someone else! You won’t get any from me.
There was one we fed that first winter, poor fools that we were. The following winter there was next to nothing for ourselves; we would have had precious little compassion for a bird. But that winter he used to flutter down at five past eight each morning, right into our trench. I can see the faces watching now, faces of men who were to die in the long months that followed. Their faces are a strange photograph inside the book of the memory, as they watch a robin eat crumbs from the palm of a man’s outstretched hand.
*
A man who is ready to take up a gun with a bayonet and rush across no-man’s-land to kill and maim all that stands against him. And the men he is preparing to gouge and rip and blow apart have done him no more harm than that simple robin. He has no reason to hate these men, and the chances are that he will never make it far enough to see their faces.
For this is what war is about, otherwise it would not work. After that first football match on Christmas Day in 1914, the officers had to pull rank; they had to order their men back into the trenches to begin again the task they had come to complete. In case peace had broken out like spring flowers all the way along the Western Front.
I realized all too soon my folly in running from home to this. Often enough I felt like the prodigal son, and yet had I gone on my hands and knees all the way to my father’s house, there was nothing he could have done to save me from my fate. I had grown up on a farm and I had known small horrors: I had seen pigs whirling about long after their throats were slit, I had seen animals caught in traps – traps I had set myself. But now there was horror all about me; there was no release from it by day or night. For the few hours one managed to sleep, dreams were horrified by the cries of men who still lay undead in no-man’s-land, hopelessly lost in a sea of mud and barbed wire and other men’s blown-apart bodies.
And dream I did. Perhaps in the end we dreamed the same dream, up and down the line and on both sides of the trenches. I had been crazy about a girl called Anna in the village since I was twelve or thirteen. She had wild gold hair and eyes the colour of soft blue, eyes that always were dancing. And I dreamed one night that she came to find me, to bring me home. I was the only one awake in my dream; everyone else lay asleep all along the line, and a kind of frost covered their faces and their hands. I heard Anna’s singing far away (for she was forever singing) and perhaps it was that magic that put everything else to sleep. Because goodness and beauty could not live in this place, it was impossible.
She stepped right down into the trench where I was and reached out her hand for mine, still singing. I stretched up into the sunlight of her face and felt the strands of her golden hair about my own. I closed my eyes for a second, knowing she had come to take me home, and when I opened them again my mouth was foul with mud, it was the middle of the night and the guns had started once more.
I remember one man saying to me: we will never be able to see colour again. We will never be able to see colour again. When I looked into his eyes I saw that there was nothing there, nothing left, and I felt afraid – I feared that I would be the same, that if I were to look into a mirror I would see the same blindness. But then I thought the fact that I was afraid of exactly that was proof something had survived after all! There was at least a candle flutter left that had not been extinguished.
There came a time we were on the move day and night. Of course we knew nothing, but I reckon things were bad: it must have been the winter of 1917. I was twenty years old and I felt seventy; it was as though birthday after birthday had been spent in this hell, that the years before were nothing but a dream. We were without sleep for four or five days. Once we had to take refuge in the shell of a house, knee-deep in mire, for a whole day. The ground around us shook and rumbled with explosions; the worst of it was you knew you were nothing more than a number in the most terrible game of roulette there ever had been. One man beside me went mad; he broke and fell and flailed about, sobbing uncontrollably, babbling gibberish. And the CO shot him, shot him in the head as though he was a dog. And he sank slowly; I remember watching him disappear into the darkness, his eyes still open, still full of unimaginable horror. And later, when we were still there, waiting for a lull in the shelling before we began crawling out over the bare ridge once more, yard by aching yard, I thought of the madness of it. That man had survived innumerable attacks, endless nights of bombardment by the enemy, to end up shot by one of his own. And I remember wanting to laugh; I can vividly remember standing in the stench of that foul mud and water, wanting to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all. Yet I knew that if I broke out laughing I would be shot, because once I began it would be impossible for me to stop.
But the irony is that I survived; the dice did not roll for me. I think that for a time I believed I had made it, that I was going to be all right. I had passed the great shadow and now I was into the clear. It’s the way children think when they’re playing some
game of hide and seek; it’s no different from that. There’s some core of us deep inside that remains the same despite all the adult armour we wear to disguise it. I would think of it when I first woke in the half-darkness and even smile to myself: the worst is over, it is just a question of marking time.
Where is everyone this morning? I don’t understand what on earth is going on. Someone is usually here for me long before now; I only wish I could hear what was going on anywhere else in this place! It’s still strange ringing a bell, pushing a button in the wall that’s soundless to me, knowing someone else will hear and come. Perhaps that’s what faith is.
I suppose it was three weeks later I was sent out with the night patrol. We were going to be moving again the following day, I’m pretty sure of that. It was so cold, so still. There was a glitter of stars but no moon. Even the muddied edge of the trench had frozen solid. We had to move so slowly, inch after inch drag ourselves over the ground in case snipers spotted us, picked us off one by one.
*
We were crossing the ridge when I was thrown backwards, my head exploding with the shell blast that ripped into the hillside. A hail of broken earth and broken men landed all around me. I landed on the bottom of the shell hole on my back, intact, except that I could hear nothing.
I was lucky they found me (at least that’s what they said) and brought me back to the field hospital. They looked at me and saw a man unscathed: his fingers and toes, his limbs and his organs, his mind in one piece, almost. Was that not luck? Was that not amazing? To say you had lost your hearing sounded like a shrug of the shoulders, little more than losing a coin in the grass. I was lucky, and I was useless to them now.
So I went home and the war went on. But all the way back on trains and in stations filled with men heading the other way, streaming towards the last fading hope of breakthrough, I was locked into the silence of my own inner world. They wanted me to feel grateful because they could not see the thing I had lost, and the loss of that pearl of great price meant everything else became pale and strange and suddenly worthless. I even watched two men talking in sign language on the last train, their hands moving like rabbits in a moonlit field. I watched them until they saw me and stopped, staring at me, but I wanted to tell them, to shriek at them, that I was deaf and could not hear what they were saying.
At the end of the day it is the little things that always matter. I went back to my village; I walked down the same track I had left by all those years before, and they welcomed me – in silence. I could not hear my mother laughing as the new lamb came for its feed in the morning; I could not hear my father’s axe as it thudded the wood for the stove. I could not hear the thatch of the dawn chorus, that net of song in the trees before the greyness lifted and morning began in earnest. And I could not hear Anna singing as she passed the house, the wild gold splayed about her shoulders, around the oval of her face and those blue, blue eyes.
So I left a second time. I ran away because I could not bear to hear that silence any longer, and because I could not bear to see the way Anna’s eyes passed over me to the men who came home whole. At least she saw me as I was, disabled and different, bleeding inside from a wound that would never be healed again. I left one night because I could not bear to endure another morning unable to hear the singing of the birds.
Now I am old; I have everything and I have nothing. They look at me and they think: what a miracle it was he survived those years of madness! But they know nothing. I lie here alone in this Munich home, looking out south towards the first line of the German Alps, and I cannot hear the song of a robin as it comes in winter in hope of crumbs on a window ledge.
The Listener
It was in the Helsinki summer he realized he had to leave. They were working on the road at the back of the house. He understood for the first time in his life how men working at mending roads can only shout at one another. They laughed and shouted as the asphalt broke beneath their drills. He knew he had to go and listen. He felt as he had done many times before: a tugging urgency to be gone, to leave for somewhere he needed. Sometimes he was sure he had felt that way as a boy, but the truth was he didn’t know. He wanted to believe it.
One night he spoke to Lars and told him he needed the cabin. His voice north of the Arctic Circle. In the window the sun breaking like an orange; the city rippling with heat. The traffic sighed in the streets: sleepless, restless, searching.
He stayed up packing until he heard only the house. He held his breath and listened and heard only the house’s hum, and in the night’s heat he slept.
*
The train was packed. They were leaving Helsinki for the weekend. Like a fool he’d chosen a Friday. Two women opposite chattered about everything necessary for a party, down to napkin rings and the colour of tablecloths. Children ran up and down, playing hide and seek. He tried to read and gave up; he tried to escape into the landscape that flickered past the windows, and he was drawn back and back to tables and chairs and placemats. And so he slept.
When he woke he realized he was alone. The train curling around a lake and sunlight playing in strings through the windows. They had slowed and as the train curled its wheels shrieked. They were in the north; they were heading north and all at once it surged through him. Northern-ness. His need of north had been there from the beginning, from the time of the first stories, the first forests. Harp strings of light played through the compartment, edged with orange so he knew it must be four or five o’clock. By nightfall he’d be there. A joy that might have been a child’s surged through him and he found himself at the window opposite, peering into the light above the lake. A single wooden cabin in a clearing, its windows gold. This was where he was going, for as long as he needed, as long as it would take.
*
The seaplane nodded on the river. The blackfly were bad here by the water; a thick fur. But he knew. It was said you could always tell a stranger because they’d fight them off with their arms. The man walked six feet away from him: small, dark, quiet. There was no need to say anything but he wanted to say something nonetheless. They shared the same country yet inhabited different worlds. He was from Helsinki, even though the north was there on both sides of his family. This man was a Sámi, a Lapp. He’d made the journey with him to the cabin a dozen times and they’d never spoken; nothing beyond Put your bag here, or This drum’s the one to use, or That’s the path over there.
Once they’d left the ground it would have been impossible to talk anyway. Yet in the end the aircraft’s song became something you grew used to, became another kind of silence. He’d thought the sun had set but he was wrong; it was there on the sky’s edge – an orange ball lighting the lakes, just above the sea’s rim. They must be a hundred miles beyond the Arctic Circle and this was still a world of bears and wolves. Something in the deepest core of him rejoiced, leapt. After their wars, after Auschwitz, after Chernobyl – a world that remained and lived.
They curled down to the lake, the engine suddenly all but gone. The silence held them. They curled like a white kite down and down to the water, skidding across the fierce blue. This was the beginning.
*
Before he did anything he cut wood. There was no need; Lars had stacked a month’s worth of birch logs in the lee of the east wall. But he had to cut wood. The thud of the axe the only sound there was; it might have been carried all the way to Helsinki. He cut wood until he shone, until he was breathless, and then he stopped. Pieces of pale yellow-white wood lay splintered all around his feet. There was a whisper of wind – no, not even so much as that. A ghost of wind; that was how he thought of it. You had to be exact with description; an approximation was not enough. That was true of words as much as of sounds. It was about listening and hearing exactness.
*
The second thing he did was to take out the paper he’d brought from Helsinki. He laid it under the window in the main room of the cabin. It caught the last light in the sky; became
like sky itself – like pieces of sky.
The third thing he did was to look all around the cabin. It was turning dark now; everything falling under shadow. He stood at the door, opposite the window. The wood-burning stove to his right; the bunk beds to his left. A little further back the sink and what counted as a kitchen. The wooden floor. The lamp hanging from a hook in the middle of the ceiling. It was time to light the lamp. It was time.
*
He’d been christened on a day of thunderstorm when one of the city churches was struck by lightning. He’d never learned to drive a car. He’d been married twice: once he’d run away, the second time it was she who’d run from him. His father was still alive in an old people’s home in Helsinki, transformed from a kind and forgiving man to an angry and incoherent one who threw things at nurses and recognized no one. His fame came and went in waves; he hadn’t written anything proper for ten years. He’d been silent for almost ten years, but that did not mean he had been listening. He’d just been silent; hunched into himself and restlessly searching, moving through attics on the hunt for something that might not have been there to begin with.
It didn’t grow dark that night. It shrank from yellow-blue to deep blue, the colour of a bruise. The stars that shone on the cloth of the sky were pale things, seed pearls weak as faint cries. You could have walked as far as morning carrying no light.
*
He found the lake by accident. He’d wandered from the cabin by a path that did not know where it was going until it opened into a clearing. The lake was black, almost perfectly round with dead trunks of trees sliding into it, like a mouth consuming wood – a strange reptile.
He went forward on soft feet and saw that he was wrong. The water wasn’t black; it changed and shifted colour. A fish flickered the surface. At one end lilies whose white eyes were fading after their June lives. Sunlight danced in soft pools of brightness, even though the sun itself was hidden behind wreaths of cloud.
Winter Tales Page 4