Light

by Timothy O'Grady

  The days began to pass easier than before. Finally then she walked back with him along the dark road to his house with her arm around his waist and in the morning he found himself climbing the stairs to deliver a boiled egg and tea to her in his bed. He stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at her. Her head was propped up with one hand and she was facing the window. He looked at the sunlight running through her hair, at her narrowing back, at how easy she looked there. Open, curious, lacking in malice. Quick to laugh. A deep appetite. The idea came to him that she knew that chaos and helplessness were never far away from anyone, that they just took you as a strong wind does a tree, and that their victims are to be commiserated with rather than scorned. That’s a feeling he had not come across in a while. It relaxed him. He felt well moving in beside her again with her breakfast, the way she turned towards him. Her breasts were against his chest, heat rose. ‘The tea can cool,’ she said, and he closed his eyes.

  Somewhere, Hanna was folding her clothes and placing them in her bag. She made her last calls. She looked in her mirror, adjusted her hat. She ran a finger over her eyelashes and painted her lips. She closed her bag then, drew in the shutters and stepped out into the street. It was dark, iron streetlamps throwing down pools of yellow-white light. I picture her walking as though with an acceptance of fate. M. of course knew nothing of this. He had by then returned to his job at the trade delegation in Barcelona. She was in his past, troubling him a little from there. By day he translated documents and by night he moved around hoping for deliverance to come to him from behind some as yet unopened door. It never did, but he maintained the expectancy nevertheless. He telephoned Eleanor at the weekends. A whale had appeared on the beach, she told him. She put roses in around the doorway to his house to make it look more lived in. She was to go back to the Andes before the summer. ‘Will I pay you a visit first?’ she asked. ‘I’d like that,’ he said. If she caught the helplessness in his voice she did not speak of it. What curse, he wondered, had been put upon him that he could not yet fully begin to live? Somehow Hanna was still in him like a virus. Had he heard her footsteps, hard leather heels on dark stone, had he turned and seen her moving from pool of light to pool of light, had he even been able to look into her bag and see the ticket she carried, still he would not presume it was him she was moving towards.

  This girl. I seem to get a glimpse of her at times, the way car lights catch something indistinct, a rock or an animal. I close my eyes and concentrate. I press the sides of my head. Nothing. Yet I have the feeling that if I wait long enough, I will see.

  Eleanor arrived in Barcelona with a bottle of whiskey, a bagful of music she wanted M. to hear and a framed map of the headland and bay where he grew up. The days were growing longer, brightening. The city filled with people walking slowly in the evenings in the late sun after the winter, stopping to talk, sitting out on the terraces. When the weekend came M. drove with her out into the mountains. This was a season he had not seen there before. Water tumbled down the rockfaces and surged through the crevices, wild flowers blooming, the red-orange earth wet and loose and with an aroma of ferment rising from it before the summer sun scorched it to dust.

  At night she cooked for him and they carried the food up on to the roof with candles and wine and a little machine for music. Afterwards he went back down for the bottle of whiskey and then leaned back against the tiles and they looked at the sky together, a clamour of car horns and laughter and the shouting of names rising from the street. She told jokes. She planned expeditions. She slid over to be nearer him. He looked at her there, her head on his chest, the light of the city glowing on her brow. Is it in any way possible, he wondered?

  One morning M. rose earlier than usual. In two days Eleanor was due to leave. I can see from here two lives moving towards each other from far away and soon to intersect. He knew nothing of this. He went out into the street for bread and fruit. He came back and laid the things out on a tray. While he waited for the water to boil he picked up a local newspaper lying folded over on the table. It was open at a page advertising jobs. He noticed that Eleanor had placed small marks next to two of them.

  That day he took her to lunch. She’d put a ribbon in her hair and was wearing a white dress. She smiled at him across the table. She held his hand. There would come a time, he knew, maybe here, maybe later, some time anyway before she left, when she would speak to him about the future. He wished he could halt it, for already as he looked at her there a little nervous and expectant he was wondering when and how and why it must end.

  After lunch they went back home and he got into bed with her. She was naked, pressed against his back. After a time he heard her rhythmical breathing, felt her thigh slip from his. Why, he thought, must he refuse this gift? This moved around in his mind until the leaking of consciousness transformed itself into a fleeting dream, and it evaporated then and finally he too was asleep.

  The telephone rang and he woke. Eleanor murmured and rolled over on to her side. He went to answer it.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  There was a pause. He felt a presence on the other end of the line, something he knew well in the drawing in of breath.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Is it you?’

  She laughed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m back,’ she said.

  He looked into the bedroom. Eleanor was turned away from him, her hair on the pillow, her shoulders reddened a little from the sun. Then he looked at the telephone. A force rose within him, there was a slipping away of something and out ahead of him a growing brightness. He lifted the telephone and began to speak.

  PART FOUR

  14

  Sand

  I COME NOW to the sands at Miedzyzdroje. Those were my days, the days of my life.

  I am at my table, the light shining down on my head. The night is still, just the sound of snow receiving snow. My radio is here, the sound off, the aerial like a long arthritic finger. A newspaper folded over, a teacup and a bowl with a puddle of ice-cream in it. I can hear just now the sound of water coursing through pipes as the barber Stankowski drains his bath. I seem to be waiting for something. I feel well – calm, alert. I am not going anywhere tonight. I have no wish to be in any other place. I sit still in my chair, arms outstretched before me, eyes on the wall. I wait, I watch the hand sweep across the face of the clock. Then I go into the story, just at the point when Angelina said that we should go to the forest or the sea, this time of ripeness and loss. The sands at Miedzyzdroje. A picture of us walking together under the dunes rises like an object dredged from the sea. Well, let it come. There is no hiding from the fact that it can hurt me still, but just now I am thinking more about the words, about whether the words can catch this picture and the others around it. There are more words, I think, for longing than for rapture. Or at least they are more easily found. Can I find them, can I make my way to those glorious days? I take my eyes from the wall and look down. My hands are the colour of a ceiling stained by smokers, darker liver spots spread over them like splattered ink, the nails thick and yellow. A pale green shirt, a cardigan unravelling at the sleeve, a bathrobe for extra warmth. Two blue flannel slippers, a spot of dried gravy on the right one, two thin bald legs going down into them like dead stalks, skin white and smooth as marble. Some kind of blood running through the pale blue veins, some kind of comical version of life. But I don’t mind. Truly I don’t. I can even laugh, if I catch the words.

  These are the feet that walked through the sand. These are the hands that moved over her skin. But how can that be?

  The forest, the sea. That was where she said we should go. What was I to do? In our new world we had created a population of watchers. Each kept his watch and did little else, except to report what he had seen. How to become invisible in a place such as this?

  I went to Gottfried. He puffed on his pipe, the two heavy black eyebrows like caterpillars walking towards each other as he frow
ned. ‘Travel permits and a week’s holiday in Poland for you and your girl?’ he said. ‘Hmmm.’ Then he grabbed my shoulders each in one hand and tilted his head, his eyelashes fluttering like a coquette’s. ‘Why of course you shall have them. You deserve it.’ Our days in Miedzyzdroje were paid for by each shovelful Pawel dug in his gulag.

  On the morning we were to leave Berlin I watched Angelina move through the room and had the idea that we were just what I told Gottfried we were, a couple like any other, flowing along in a stream with all the other couples of the world, setting off for a holiday in my homeland. She put clothes and some drawing materials in a small suitcase. She put out an envelope with the rent. She opened the door to the room where her horses were, looked slowly from left to right, and then closed it. We will be back to see them again, I said to myself. She tied a pale blue scarf around her neck. I looked at the ballgown she wore the night of Pawel’s party spilling from the chest in the hall, at the bones in her ankle as we went down the stairs. If I had nothing else I had this being, I thought, this body, or at least pieces of them. I heard a radio play in the room where Pawel lived. A gymnastics instructor was living there now. Then we moved out past the big brass clock, the red bird sleeping on its perch, the bench where I watched her turn the corner of the stairs. The caretaker put her head out from her door, her hair in a net, then drew it in again, like a tortoise.

  Out in the sunlight Angelina took my hand, kissed me. Then she looked out ahead of her as we walked, as though she expected to see something she liked.

  ‘What about the horses?’ I asked her.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘What are you going to do about them?’

  ‘I’m not going to do anything. They’re finished.’

  ‘But what will happen to them?’

  She looked at me as if she hadn’t understood the question.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘And the drawings?’

  ‘They’re finished,’ she said, smiling. She said it as though I needed to be convinced. I stayed quiet for a time, embarrassed by being less than her. I watched her striding along out of the corner of my eye. How many homes, I wondered, had she left without looking back? Had I thought more then I would have seen in this a warning. But I couldn’t.

  We got on a train to Szczecin. I was against the window and Angelina was leaning against me, her head on my shoulder, her foot hooked around mine. I saw her eyes close, I took in the aroma of her hair. Where are they learned, these tiny, significant gestures, this arrangement of limbs? On whom had she practised? I turned away from this thought in time and looked out the window. The dense weight of the city broke up and we moved out into flat open land, back along the way I came so solitary and hesitant after saying goodbye to Jerzy and before any of this had happened. I saw the backs of the men in the fields rising and falling as though driven by pumps, the black trees with their new leaves like a child’s scrawl against the sky. The land was heavy with water, the light pale as though it had arrived through steamed glass. We rolled on in a steady rhythm, the carriage swaying easily, the clicks of the wheels on the track. We crossed the new border into Poland. Already those transplanted from the East at the end of the war had made it their own. Everything slowed, the gestures, the way people walked or rode bicycles. The air was more solid than on the other side of the border, the smoke rising from the chimneys black and nearly inert, the fields and buildings screaming their defiance against being understood. I knew that place, those gestures. It was the feeling of putting on an old coat again when the weather turned cold after the summer. My mind too slowed, moved down among the roots and the basements. I knew that place, it was familiar. What I had lost was the intimacy. I had only Angelina. The train rolled slowly eastwards. Across from us an elderly man sliced a gherkin. He offered us shots from his flask of vodka. We were going to Gdansk to elope, we told him.

  We got out at Szczecin and walked along the riverbank past the bridges and cranes and masts of boats. There was wreckage everywhere, single walls still standing pocked with shell holes, all that had been of the buildings now heaps of rubble below. We stopped and looked downriver towards the docks. Angelina read the names of the boats, repeated a Scandinavian one in a whisper to herself, trying the alien sounds. Above us the castle lay flattened by bombs, a little like our pasts, I thought, memory seeping out through the cracks and from the broken masonry. This made me laugh loud enough for her to hear me. The sweetness of melancholy, the minor note – gifts from Angelina. She looked at me as if with a question. ‘The castle,’ I said. ‘It’s like us.’ She took this in, looked at me, smiled. We went back up then through the town to the station and the train which would take us north to the sea.

  In Miedzyzdroje we walked along the promenade to the bandstand and looked out at the sea, grey and rolling beneath the last pale yellow light coming from the west. Wind whipped the hair around Angelina’s face and she shivered. We turned then and walked into the hotel behind us. There was a man at the desk, slow of gesture, face a little brown from the spring sun or maybe the wind, hair long with strands of grey swept back over his ears and on to the collar of his shirt. He raised his hand, touched his ear, his brow slowly creasing. He was wearing cufflinks set with small red stones. I handed him the papers that were the gift of Gottfried and we stood before him. I saw in the mirror behind the desk the evening light fall on Angelina’s face. The man looked from us to the papers and back to us again. His eyes were blue and watery. He smiled in what seemed a kind of recognition. Of what, though? That we were doomed? That we were fools? That we were lovers?

  I was to learn that his name was Piotr.

  He led us up the stairs and along a corridor and opened the door to a room where we were to begin this new time, a time we could know nothing of. I can bring this room before me now. Photographs of men in uniform and of weddings. Rows of books with broken spines. A floor of wood, small rugs placed around it. A round table by the window covered with candles and broken clocks, another by the bed with a lamp and more clocks. The window was covered by two heavy velvet curtains, one green, strange to say, and the other black. A wardrobe with a mirror set into the door reflecting the bed. The bed was high and made of wood, heaps of white pillows rising up the headboard, a cover of lace. Did sea captains bring their mistresses here? The man parted the curtains and looked out for a moment at the sea. He bowed once then and left. Angelina untied her blue scarf, let it drop. We moved towards each other like wisps of fog.

  On the morning of our fourth day I went out and bought two gold earrings set with tiny pearls. The money I was carrying had become like gamblers’ money, something to keep in the game, nothing to do with the purchase of train tickets or shoes or food. Nothing to do with survival when our days ran out. It was Piotr who told me about the earrings. The old man who sold them to me took them out of a drawer wrapped in an old piece of newspaper. What desperate story lay behind them, I wondered? I pictured them in place above her long neck, strands of dark hair falling over them. I looked at my watch. Twenty-seven minutes since I left the room. That plus the forty-five minutes or so when Angelina went one way looking for apples and I another looking for wine – the whole of the time we had been apart since leaving Berlin.

  I went up the stairs two at a time and into the room. Angelina wasn’t there and I felt an ache. I took off my jacket, sat, looked at the earrings. I looked towards the window then and saw her foot resting on the railing of the balcony. I walked through the shadows and stood by the black curtain. She was in a chair leaning against the wall looking out towards the sea. She was wearing a shirt of mine, trousers of hers, no shoes. The buttons of the shirt had been put in the wrong holes. She didn’t see me, or if she did it was not my presence that was drawing her attention. She looked down, then out again at the sea, pushing her hair away from her face with her hand. I watched her eyes narrow as she looked at the horizon. I looked out too, but could see nothing other than water and sky. I followed her eyes down an
d saw a sheaf of papers on her lap. She had a pencil in her hand and on the top page was a drawing of a horse moving over the water from right to left, its head high, its mane flowing, its legs stretched to the limit as it ran. I saw the veins in its flank, the muscles of its neck, back and legs, the look in its eye of clarity and decision. This was another chapter in the biography of this horse. Where was it going with such strength and desire? I moved into the folds of the curtain and looked at Angelina’s face. Her breathing was short. Her lips were forming fragments of words, her hand went up in the air and then back to the page as though she was trying to take hold of something out of reach or out of sight. There was in her face no guile or restlessness, there was just the whole of her looking for a single necessary line somewhere out there in the clouds and milky light and rolling water. She would never, could never, love me like that, I thought, as her hand dropped to the page.