Light

by Timothy O'Grady

  Still, the day was to be honoured. There are certain days when my absence cannot pass without explanation – her birthday and saints’ day, Christmas, this day on which Wladyslaw went sailing like a diving penguin from the window of their apartment in Chicago. I did not even think to lift the telephone. ‘Why didn’t you come?’ she says to me when she calls. ‘You know how nervous I get.’

  I have nothing to offer in the way of an answer. It’s just that I couldn’t help it. On that day and the days before and since I have been overcome by a feeling of laziness as irresistible as a tide. I get up and then lie back down on the bed when I have finished my breakfast. I read a book and the words fall like pieces of melting snow from the page. I play cards with myself. By the third day I try to set a limit of just eight hands before lunch, but then I cannot stop myself and I go on until I win or until it gives me a headache. I get a bright idea to polish shoes. I think of going for a walk, put on coat, scarf, hat, gloves, then take them off and sit down again. From the chair I watch the light fede. When I feel the time must have arrived for concentration, I heat soup. I can’t get a picture of M. It’s as if I’m trying to look at him through smoke. I can’t even bring back before me the pictures I have already made, or find the wish to make more.

  Why do I feel that I am about to enter into a darkness? Why do I feel that all effort is just dust thrown in the wind?

  I think more than usual about praying and there are times when I actually do it. Mostly I advance and turn about like a fish in an aquarium in a vacant, colourless state that seems primarily an absence of everything else – sadness, happiness, curiosity, hunger. I know nothing at all then but after a time I find I can concentrate for a moment. Then I feel bad about Renata or about M., or about the books in the library which have not been consulted, or about the condition of my mind which in these days has resembled an unmade bed. There are moments when I look nervously to the future for what may already be drained from it, or when shame races like a lizard up the length of my spine. I had not known such things before, being pushed here and there into parts of myself I never visited. It began with M. in Krakow. But why all this commotion? It’s only thinking and remembering. And making pictures. It is a companion of a kind, yes, I will say that, but an unruly, quarrelsome one that never seems to go out of the door. Or if it does I mourn it and sit in my chair like now waiting for its return. I am too old for this, no?

  Here in the room just now the shutters are closed. I can’t know if the morning has arrived, or if it’s still the night. M. is in the room like currents of air. I feel them moving around me, all his different possible selves. Which is the true one? The physicist Erwin Schrödinger said that a thing unobserved will propagate endless possibilities about what will become of it, but once this collection of possibilities is observed – say by a measuring device in an experiment – all the possibilities except one disappear and only that one thing remains.

  I see now how the process works. I think of M. and in their time the words themselves make a single selection. Maybe the words do not concur with the true nature of a thing that has happened, or is felt – if there can be a true nature of something that has happened or is felt – but if they have the right arrangement they carry a truth of their own, or a semblance of one. They give me a way to understand, and to move on.

  I walk out. I have the intention of buying bread and paying the bill for my consumption of electricity, but I pass Mrs Slowacki’s shop without entering and when I arrive at the turning for the post office I go the other way. I feel the cold tauten the skin on my face. There are fine points of blue reflected light sparkling like stars in the snow. I have brought the photographs of Hanna with me for I fear thieves. It wasn’t so long ago that we didn’t have thieves. I stop at the entrance to an arcade to look at them and then move on again. It is the hour of school and of work. I am among a sparse crowd of salesmen and the old and infants with their mothers, all of us labouring along the cold pavements behind the white columns of steam which rise from our mouths. As I walk I have in my mind the photograph of her with her dishevelled hair and skewed look. I have looked at this picture every day since bringing it back with me from Krakow, yet it looked odd to me there just a moment ago, unfamiliar, as though I knew nothing about her. Who is this woman anyway, not as M. saw her, or I, but in herself? What matter any of it, for it is just words thrown out like cards in a hand of solitaire, for M. cannot hear them fall, he or anyone else. But why does it seem as if she has stepped wholly made out of a bank of cloud? Why do her stories have the feeling of something composed rather than lived? Why is she without a man, or even a story of one from the past? What is the cause of her opaqueness? She is not part of our great community of the wounded and stumbling and myopic. But of what community is she? What of that ring she said she borrowed from the woman upstairs from the bar? Those papers in Barcelona? And of course the man in the wheelchair? They suggest something tangible, yet out of the range of M.’s knowledge. And mine. Something is moving there.

  I look up now and find that I am walking along a road without pavements and no one around me, the last of the town’s buildings behind me and ahead of me huge silent fields stretching away to a distant forest, all of them covered with unbroken snow.

  * * *

  After my days of behaving like a mote of dust in the air I hear a rap on the door, very light. The sound is so strange and surprising that I let out a call like a dog whose tail has been stepped on. I get up from the sofa and go to the door. I put my eye to the little hole and see that it is Jacob. He looks very grave. I begin to laugh. I try to bring this laughter to an end, but I cannot. So I let him in then just as I am, stubble sprouting like weeds on my chin and the hair standing up on my head, a little embarrassed about being barefoot and in my pyjamas at 7 p.m. but still laughing. I am very happy to see him. He seems too big for the door. He narrows his shoulders, ducks his head. He looks at me and says in a whisper, ‘Are you all right?’

  I tell him I am fine and bring him into the room. He can’t see very well because his glasses are fogged from the cold. He rubs them clean and then takes from inside his coat a bottle of whiskey and hands it to me. I take away the plates and cups which have been spreading like a mould around the room. I shave and pass a comb through my hair. I put on clean clothes and then come out and sit across from him, a glass for each of us. I feel as though I’ve awoken wholly remade after a long coma, that I am part of a vast army experiencing this same thing.

  He tells me he’s had a day off.

  ‘I needed it,’ he says. ‘I’ve been reading too much. Nothing more would go into my head.’

  Like me! I think. Then I say to him, ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I made an excursion,’ he says. He rose very early, took a train to Krakow and then went by bus to the salt mine at Wieliczka. He’d been wanting to see it ever since his father first described it to him in his village in Africa.

  ‘Do you know it?’ he asks me.

  I tell him that I do not.

  ‘You would love it,’ he says. ‘Copernicus went there and one of the chambers is named after him. The salt in it is pure green!’

  Green salt! I have to turn away and walk over to the table and think of something else, for laughter threatens to overtake me again. What is happening to me?

  I suggest that we watch a football match on the television in the hope that it will calm me. I go into the kitchen and collect two large bottles of beer. That is the correct drink for football, I tell myself. We’ll have the whiskey later. I find a game being broadcast from Germany between a team from Frankfurt and another from Thessaloniki. The game is tied at one all with only minutes remaining. The Germans look so disdainful that Jacob and I immediately align ourselves with the Greeks, and in particular with one very short Greek player with long hair arranged into a ponytail on the top of his head as though his brains are bubbling up in a black fountain and who is racing frantically around the pitch like an insect trapped in a box. The minut
es tick on and the Greeks seem unable to hold on to the ball. I look over at Jacob. His fists are clenched on his knees. I feel as if a trigger has been pressed inside me and that laughter or tears or even some wild expression of love will come flying out of me like bullets.

  As the game enters the final two minutes both teams accelerate the pace. The Germans press forward like a thunderstorm and the Greeks move among them with a rhythmical grace we had not seen before. The tackling is vigorous. No one can hold the ball for a sustained period. Then with seconds to go on the clock the Germans move in very fast on the Greek goal, there is a great chaos of leaping and flailing bodies, a German foot connects with the ball and sends it crashing into the post, from which it returns directly on to the same player’s forehead, rebounding powerfully towards the corner of the net and it seems all over as; the goalie stretches desperately and Jacob lets out a long bird-like cry, but then a red-headed German with a long moustache and a melancholy look running across the mouth of the goal and not having seen what has happened receives the ball flush on the side of his face, leaving it to dribble quietly over the touchline while he collapses face-down on the pitch.

  Now we are in injury time. Jacob is gripping his bottle of beer so tightly that I wonder will it splinter in his hand. The ball seems for minutes to be moving back and forth within just a few metres of the midfield line with occasional long kicks by the goalies. Jacob and I are speaking only in grunts and sighs. The Germans make a break for the goal, which results in a corner, but nothing comes of it. The referee has by now looked twice at his watch.

  Then a long clearance by a Greek defender finds one of his own players well into German territory by the right touchline. The whole of both teams charge downfield. The player with the ball on the wing is moving down into the corner and looks as if he will be trapped until he feints right with such violent force that the German defender falls to the turf. The Greek steps forward and now with a clear view and plenty of time sends the ball into the centre, where it is taken on the chest of the Greek with the ponytail sprouting on the top of his head. He drops the ball lightly on to the toe of his right foot. The camera moves in on his face. He is smiling and his wide brown eyes have a dreamy look as if he’s just finished lunch. Around him the German players are diving and lungeing and kicking, their faces grimacing like souls in hell. The Greek is tapping the ball up and down on his foot as though he is alone on the field. When a player moves in on him he directs the ball through their legs or over their shoulders and picks it up on the other side. His own players look incredulous, their hands on their hips. Tap-tap he goes on. It’s as if the others are swimming in mud while he laughs at this hypnotic spectacle of the ball going up and down on his foot. Then with his back to the goal he sends the ball high up into the air, waits for its descent, and then flips backwards, his arms and feet extended and his body spinning like a pinwheel until his right foot connects with tremendous force with the ball at the apex of his leap. Jacob and I are seeing this from behind the movement of the action, towards the German goal. We see the surging entanglement of defenders rising to meet the ball. We see the German fans all in orange looking as if they are watching an impending train crash. Some are covering their eyes. In the second row, just behind the goal, two Greeks in tall blue hats are raising their arms and screaming. The ball thuds into the bottom of the net. Two German players scramble for the ball to put it back into play while the goalie stays locked in his crouch in front of the goal as if this has not yet happened to him. The whistle blows. The Germans fall down on to the pitch and don’t move. The Greek with the ponytail looks at them with what seems like concern before trotting off to the tunnel leading to the dressing rooms.

  I am more giddy than ever and Jacob seems to have ascended into this part of the atmosphere with me. Everything makes us laugh – the song the barber Stankowski is singing in the flat next door, the solemn faces of the Polish footballers with their moustaches and long hair looking down from the poster on the wall, the drained bottles of beer. We get straight back to the whiskey. We declare our wish to drink lakes of it and then run up the side of a mountain. We drink toasts to the Greeks. We drink toasts to our respective nations and to extraordinary feats of athleticism we have witnessed in our time. We hail the Germans and wish them better fortune in their next match. We get through the bottle of whiskey and head out into the night in search of more. Jacob pays no attention to the cold. I ask him the day and he tells me ‘Thursday’. I cannot immediately understand the meaning of this word. I walk on, trying to find the way back into my own skin. We pass a policeman looking at a gold chandelier in the window of a shop, a group of boys sliding around the ice on their bicycles. There is not a thing that does not make me laugh. I take a few steps and then I have to stop. Tears are running down my face. Jacob is laughing too. We are holding on to each other in case we might fall. I look around and recognise some windows and corners but cannot place myself very well. I seem a bit dizzy. I wonder is it the lack of food. A white light flashes before me. I reel back. I don’t know whether the light is in my head or outside. I see then that we are standing before an underground bar, fast electronic music surging up to us with clouds of hot air smelling of sweat and perfume. This seems just the thing for us, and we head down the stairs. The lights flash brighter. Young people are waving their arms. On a big television screen above the dancefloor is a black man dressed in leather coat and hat with his fingers full of rings bobbing and pointing and crossing his arms in time to the music. I follow Jacob through the people, my fingers in the grip of a drowning man on the sleeve of his coat. We get to the bar and I order whiskey. I look down at my tapping foot and then move to the edge of the dancefloor. I look around for a while, bobbing up and down on my knees. I can’t seem to get that to stop. I set down the drink and slide like an ice skater into the rhythm of the music. I get a spot and stick there. My hands flick out like I’m trying to rid them of water, my whole torso jerks forward and back. Where did I get that? I throw my coat and hat on to a chair and move deeper among the dancers. They look at me as if I’m a pigeon that’s just landed in their soup. But I can see from the eyes of a few of the girls that they like to see me there. I don’t miss anything of the music. Its secret pulse courses along my nerves and into my muscles. I look up at the black man and follow his gyrations and spins and strange coded language of the hands. They clear a space around me. I am getting the warm open looks such as I never got at dances when I was their age. I go down on to the floor and kick my legs up supported by one hand. Soon they all stop dancing and make a ring with me in the centre. They begin to clap to the music. I take my jacket off, then my shirt, and I am down to my vest. It’s a little grey and sorrowful-looking so I take that off too. I stand still among them for a moment, feet together, straight-backed, bare-torsoed. I do not give myself a moment to think or to form a picture of myself in my mind. I crouch low and stalk the edge of the ring and then begin to spin. I see Jacob clapping with the rest of them. I wonder will I fall. But I am held together in a kind of infallibility of the body. I move out through the crowd, pick up a chair and bring it back into the ring. I have the delirious idea of standing on my head on it and then do so, my quivering body held up by my forearms pressed against the chair’s back. I flip back down to the floor, pick up the chair with my teeth and prowl the perimeter of the ring, my hands clapping in front of me like a seal’s.

  I see the people who had been facing me suddenly turn and look behind them. The crowd parts to form an aisle. Advancing towards me then is a solidly built woman in early middle age. She wears a woollen dress cut to the knee, a thick cardigan and a heap of blonde and silver hair piled up on her head. Her glasses sweep up to points at the corners. I haven’t seen any like them in a long while. They are like the tailfins of an American car from the 1960s. She looks very grave. I remember seeing her when we first came in, sitting with a woman of a similar age, the two of them maybe teachers at a vocational college in a nearby town. She begins to dance. Sh
e is moving along the ring of people, her grey, opaque eyes never off me. I move with her at the far end, the two of us endpoints of the circle’s diameter. The disc jockey turns the music higher, there is a great shout from the crowd and I break into a flurry of finger pointing and head rolling, my feet planted like a weightlifter’s. She pays no attention. She takes off her glasses. She takes the pins from her hair and it falls like a cascade of water down around her shoulders. The cardigan drops to the floor. She kicks the chair out of the way as she walks across the centre of the ring towards me. I take a few steps in her direction and stop. We move around in a tighter circle now like two wrestlers about to grapple, eye to eye, me moving my arms in big loops and hopping about as though the floor is in flames. She rolls her eyes and wags her finger as if to say, ‘Is that all you’ve got, boy?’ She bobs down and shakes her shoulders, her huge breasts heaving from one side to the other. Then she leans way back and throws her hips forward, her dress sliding up her thighs to the tops of her stockings. When she’s up again she looks me in the eye and strides towards me. I back away and try to find a lateral move. But she cuts me off. My angle of escape gets narrower as I am backed in against the crowd. She presses on. She is as implacable as a tractor. A lane opens in the crowd behind me and she continues on, bobbing from foot to foot. I try to save myself with leaps and pirouettes and furious movements of the hands. But soon my back is to the wall. She presses in against me. I feel the air go out of my lungs. She leans over. Then she whispers in my ear in what sounds like an accent from the Ukraine, ‘Now let’s see how you can move.’ Around us the whole of our audience are standing on tables and chairs whistling and clapping and cheering these two people they are astonished to find here in this underground bar instead of at home in their beds with hot water bottles and rheumatism tablets. She turns away from me and slides slowly with her hips and back down my front all the way to the floor, swaying back and forth. What will she do now? Will the music stop? She turns to face me again and climbs slowly upwards along my body, led by her hands and followed by her breasts and thighs. Little gusts of warm air from her skin waft around me. When she reaches her full height she rests her brow on my shoulder. Before it seemed she had the weight of a loading dock but just now she feels very light. I have to say that I do not find this unpleasant. But what am I to do? I cannot get away. I look around at the crowd and fan my face with my hand as though I am beside a furnace. But she pays no attention. She is not in the mood for jokes, at least not jokes which involve laughter. She places her hands against the wall just above my shoulders and gyrates up and down, her whole body pressed against me. The air is getting scarcer. I am like a little rowboat facing the whole of a fleet. I look around for Jacob but I can’t see him. I feel her skin and sweat and breasts and the bones of her pelvis. Everything is flesh and movement and whirling lights. For one sweet moment that extends like the howl of a dog into this night I let myself go with her, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, the two of us like a single body as we clutch each other and the music builds to its final frenzy before crashing in a furious pounding of drums to silence. I hear the crowd roar as if from far away. Sweat has drenched the waist of my trousers. I can barely breathe. I reach then into my pocket, take from it my handkerchief and wave it at the woman in surrender.