Light

by Timothy O'Grady

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’m going back.’

  ‘But you can’t,’ I said.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I can do it.’

  He rubbed his hands over his legs, and stood.

  ‘It was just that the legs were stiff.’ He walked in a circle to show me. ‘Where’s Angelina?’ he said.

  ‘There,’ I said, pointing, her figure a pale smear against the dark horizon.

  ‘I will say good-night,’ he said.

  We walked together towards the sea. When we reached Angelina he shook her hand and began to bow but she raised him up and kissed his cheek. We watched him walk in the direction of Miedzyzdroje along the beach near the edge of the water, arms still and at his sides, bow-legged and cautious, something military in his step. He knew we were watching him. He did not want us to trouble ourselves any more. We watched until he moved into the darkness.

  We went into the house and I stood in the room with the bed, waiting. Outside all was silent, even the sea, though I could feel its dense, heavy presence, the way it cooled currents of air, the smell of salt. I heard Angelina moving in the other room. She turned off the paraffin light. All this arrives very clear and heavy to my mind now, the way her eyes were slow and bright, the way her hands rose as she came into the room and moved over to me. ‘You have everything now,’ she would say later, and I would believe her. I cannot, will not, wish anything to be otherwise or regret the knowledge she gave me or the distance she carried me, though afterwards everything changed and all was lost. Yet why do I do it? Why do I call this forth? Because it is there, it insists. And I have no final defence against it. What matter the pain, at my age? It’s better to feel than not, no? I felt her hands on my back. She took everything slowly and I followed, for she was to lead me down her way into the heart of this moment over which a kind of doom seemed to hang. We moved to the bed. I saw her in the moonlight, a cool marble white over her brow, trails of hair across her eye. I felt her skin warm and animate now, her hand delicate as an alighting bird, a beauty too great to absorb. We flowed like water all around each other and I have to see these things, I have to take and hold the pictures knowing that I will return to them in this wheel of yearning and loss that will turn through the years, her fingers around the iron railings at the top of the bed, her silver rings, her arms slender and brown from the sun, the veins and the bones moving in her hands, her calls and whispers and I trying to bring her all that I was with logic and need and what force I carried. I knew that in all the world there was nothing singular in her or me or in what we felt or did, but I knew too that out of all the certainties I searched for with such steadfastness and devotion in texts and in churches and in heroes this now was my rite and she now was my creed.

  After, the room was like a boat drifting on a lake. I saw her dark eyes in the moonlight. ‘You have everything now,’ she said. She took her gold chain from around her neck and fixed it to mine. I felt her skin, her breath. I felt gratitude and a great wonder and then rising through it all like an acid the terror of losing her.

  15

  The Roads of Europe

  M. REPLACED THE receiver back on to the telephone. He stood still and thought, Where has she come from? What story will she tell? What will it mean? He walked back into the bedroom. Eleanor was rising from the pillow on to one elbow, her eyes still glassy from sleep. ‘I was dreaming,’ she said. ‘I was deep in the sea with hundreds of blue and silver fish.’ She flapped her hands like a bird beating its wings to show him how they moved through the water. She smiled. She sat up a little more, the sheets about to fall from around her breasts. He turned away, looking for a shirt. ‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘There’s a conference. They need me to translate a report. It’s an emergency.’ He found the clothes, made for the door. He heard her call to him from the bed. ‘I’ll buy you dinner,’ she said.

  On the street the evening light hit M. like a wave. He seemed to hear drumbeats as he ran. I don’t know that Spanish city where all those things happened to him, but I have here beside me a guidebook with photographs and a map and I picture him as if from a cloud moving among the cars and workers and promenaders with their dogs down along the avenues and into the entanglement of streets near to the sea. He bought roses from a woman with a wooden cart. He stepped slowly then as if on to ice into the plaza in front of the cathedral. He picked a spot and waited. He was a tiny figure there solitary and still among the crowd beneath the huge grey stones and vaulted entrance to the cathedral. Could it be true, he wondered? He looked at the door and offered a prayer a little self-consciously in the direction of the altar that she would arrive. He looked for a clock. He clutched his roses. He turned slowly around to check each of the entrances to the plaza. He didn’t know, I suppose, the peace that can come with simple words spoken to God. I didn’t either, though I know a little now.

  Finally then he saw her. She had come around the corner out of a narrow street and was walking towards the centre of the plaza. Her pace was steady and serene, her arms were folded in front of her. In this large arena mendicants were holding out their hands, traders were making offers, tourists were consulting brochures. There were roller skaters, mobile phone users, guitarists, mothers with children, worshippers moving with small steps towards the cathedral. Some, thought M., were preoccupied, some confused, some bored. None were at all like her as she moved forward at her unvarying pace, looking at nothing, it seemed, except what was within her, her long legs like scythes cutting grass. He walked towards her. She saw him, slowed, and then stopped. She was very close to him as they stood there in the centre of the plaza. She studied his face, then looked into his eyes.

  He handed her the roses.

  ‘I had some for you before,’ he said. ‘But I couldn’t find you.’

  She took them, smiled, her eyes still on his.

  ‘I thought I lost you,’ he said.

  ‘Well you didn’t,’ she said.

  Blue morning light came in through the window and moved like smoke along the floor. He heard the rattle of a motorbike, the lifting of a shutter from a shopfront. They were the sounds of those who must rise before others. He was in Hanna’s bed lying next to her among scattered pillows, his limbs still and heavy as though the blood moving through them had thickened. He thought of the story of the night – of how she looped her arm through his as they stepped away from the cathedral, of their long walk through the narrow streets, of the bar with caves underground, the white-faced mimes on the steps of the restaurant, the waiter who referred to her as his wife. He bought a cold bottle of wine and they brought it with them up into this room where she put the roses into a glass and her hands on either side of his face and kissed him. He could see now in the morning light the bottle still nearly full and the spent candles with pools of wax running off the plate. He rose a little and looked along the bed. He saw her thigh, the curve of her hip, hair fallen across her eyes. The room turned from blue to rose, and brightened. Everything was new. It was being made as he looked at it. Golden light ran over him and her.

  When M. returned home he found Eleanor sitting on the floor, her legs splayed beneath her, her nails digging into the rug. Around her were telephone books and balled, wet tissues. ‘I was calling the hospitals,’ she said. ‘And the police.’ She looked up at him, her eyes red and wet, her breathing staggered, her hair in knots. He saw her suitcase by the door, the bed in the room beyond neatly made. ‘You don’t deserve this,’ she said.

  He stood in the doorway, one shoelace untied, his hair like a trampled field. Bright yellow light filled the room and the sound of traffic rose as if from a single engine. He felt her pain there too but it seemed far away. He watched her get to her feet. He wished that she didn’t feel that way. He wished he could reach her, bring her comfort. But he knew that could not be. He stayed in his place by the door, the room before him brightening to white and then vanishing. Then in front of him he had only the picture of Hanna above him in her bed, balanced on her fingertips, the red and gol
d of the candlelight moving over her skin, her head thrown back, a long, meandering note, full of breath and a little helpless, rising slowly from her throat. This was all that he could see.

  M. watched her. It was enough for him. He watched the way her head turned at a certain sound, her fingers slid along her lip as she listened, the way she went up on her toes to reach something. He watched her lean in close to the mirror to draw a line on her eyelid, the way she cut the flesh of a peach, the arrangement of her rings, the shifting of her weight while she watched something cook, leg to leg, the hip pivoting, the way her foot rolled to music, her slow wink, the dimpling of her cheek, the way she reached behind her to fasten her dress. He loved these things. He tried to embed them in his memory. He watched the slow rise of her eyes to meet his, her stillness in sleep, the way the shadows fell on her flesh, the opening of her arms to draw him to her.

  He was making a new world, particle by particle. It grew larger, more real, than the world he had known. When he left this world to enter the other it was like the rending of a membrane.

  M. entered his home with a loaf of bread. It was during the afternoon, three o’clock. From the bathroom he heard the radio, the sound of falling water. He saw her jeans on the bed, one leg crooked at the knee. Her shoes were on the floor, one of them tipped on to its side. This too became a picture. He placed the bread on the table, and sat. He heard the water from the shower stop falling and then listened as she moved around the bathroom. The door opened and a cloud of steam smelling of soap billowed out. She walked towards him. She was wearing a T-shirt and her legs and feet were bare. She left footprints made of mist on the floor. She smiled, kissed him. He reached up to draw her to him but she stopped him.

  ‘A second,’ she said, and turned.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just this.’

  She upended the loaf of bread.

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘It’s bad luck to keep bread upside-down in the house.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said M.

  ‘Well you wouldn’t,’ she said.

  She sat astride him on his lap, the T-shirt rising up her leg. Her skin was still cool from the water. She looked down at him through lank strands of dripping hair, her arms around his neck. She moved down to kiss him. His hand moved over the slope of her hip and on to her back, her skin warmer there, smoother. He felt her ribs contract with her quickening breath. He saw the muscles flex in her leg, her hips slowly circling. There was the vapour of soap and skin cut by the rising heat. She slipped the buttons on his trousers, reached for him. He heard the notes of a violin on a radio. She rose a little from the chair and then descended driven by muscles of leg and back and hips and he was inside her, charges running up his spine and detonating deep within his head.

  He watched her. I could have told him that this alone would be enough to plague him. But he wanted all of what he could see then, and for the times to come.

  It was a hot night. M. and Hanna were on the rooftop of his home under a half-moon. There were pale stars, clouds gliding past like swans. Far below were the night sounds of the street. They were lying on their backs side by side, looking up.

  ‘… I was driving to my aunt’s house the day after his funeral,’ M. was saying. ‘I was in his car. It’s much bigger and smoother than mine. It was more like being in a house than a car. It seemed a waste to only go as far as my aunt’s. I thought, Maybe I could just keep going. Across Ireland, over the water, on into places I didn’t know. I could go on for months. It wouldn’t matter where I went or what I saw, it was just the idea of moving through a world I didn’t know and nobody knowing me. I pictured a burnt landscape without trees, the big yellow car rolling along, the tyres hissing. I’d drive for as long as I felt like it and then stop. That was the idea, anyway.’

  ‘But you didn’t do it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It passed – though there were times when I thought of it again.’

  She rolled over onto her side to face him.

  ‘Why don’t you do it now?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get into your car and drive.’

  ‘Do you mean it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d miss you,’ he said.

  She touched his face.

  ‘I’d be with you,’ she said. ‘If you’d invite me.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes. I like that picture. To see those places without trees, to be where nobody knows us.’

  He looked into her eyes. He pictured the sunlit road, her beside him.

  ‘Will we do it?’ she said.

  ‘All right,’ said M..

  * * *

  I take down the map of Europe from the wall and stretch it out on the table. I bring from the library picture books from the countries M. and Hanna are to travel through. I see him carrying a small pile of boxes full of paintings and books along a narrow street, her taking her things from the drawers in their bedroom and arranging them in a suitcase. Her movements are slow and light. It seems she is thinking of nothing other than this task. Miedzyzdroje and the sting it carries drift away from me as I watch. I see M. run to a machine and take money from it, folded notes thick as a fist. She arranges the sweep of her hair in the mirror, paints her lips a pale pink. M. comes in and watches her through a gap in the door.

  Wladyslaw taught me how to drive in Chicago, but I never had a car. I never had enough money to think about being without work for more than a month, maybe two, nor a girl and an open road ahead of me that wasn’t shrouded somewhere along its way in darkness. I look at pictures of the Spanish coast in the books I have brought and see M. and Hanna climb towards the mountains, the coves and the villages, the heaving rock. They cross over into France and keep to the shore. I see the white-masted boats, the girls on the beach, a little hotel on a hillside at the edge of a village, painted pink, bougainvillaea pouring from its veranda. Maybe they passed some nights there behind a window I like the look of on the second floor. I never saw such places and won’t ever, I suppose. I don’t want a ride on a boat. I don’t need to see bougainvillaea, though I never saw it nor heard of it before. I don’t even want that girl who would stop your breath walking alone at the edge of the water – well, maybe for a little while, if she was kind, and interested, and didn’t laugh. It’s just these pictures I begin to long for before I wake, this idea of freedom, M. and Hanna in the car, the rippling heat and the cooling breeze, this journey that I, like M., can believe for a moment has no limits and no end. Freedom. A word that changes at borders of place and time. Jerzy looked for freedom and I looked over his shoulder, but the more we struggled to find it, the tighter grew the ligature.

  They drove on through heat I’ve never felt, aromas I’ve never known, across borders I would never have been given permission to cross, through vineyards and sunflower fields, around hillsides terraced with citrus and olive trees, Hanna lying across the seat beside M., her head resting at the edge of the window, her bare feet tucked under his leg, sea breezes and the aromas of salt and pine circling around as the wheels rolled and the music played and she told him stories about this woman whose life had been a single long journey towards him. The roads of Europe were their roads, the lights over the doors to restaurants and hotels were shining for them. All along the way M. went to machines and took money from them, the scientists and poets and potentates of the different countries they passed through looking up at him from the bills. He put them in his pocket. He paid no attention to them. Her soft voice and the feel of her near him and the way she placed him at the centre of her world obliterated prudence and duty and commerce and all that was not of this everlasting now the way the sunlight blanched the land. I see M. there at the wheel of his car, radiant, self-absorbed as lovers are at times such as this, her eyes on him as he drives, her feet moving under his leg to the rhythm of the music. Never had the air borne such colours or wine tasted like that or shapes been assembled so be
autifully. No one could touch him. Those were his days, the music passing through his mind playing perfect notes at the perfect pitch, each one a surprise when it was struck yet inevitable as it faded. Each day, each hour, he cut away the tissue that connected him to his past and he fed himself to her as she fed herself to him. It became too late to find a way back from this feast. He knew this. But he didn’t care. He spent himself as he spent the money. There could be no measuring in this, no equivocation, for this was real, this was the truth, this was the new world, and his discovery of it was as it had been for Galileo in his tower, Kepler at his blackboard and Newton finding the numbers for gravity – all that was came into its light and all that had been was now pale and far away. He drove on over burnt red lands rising from blue water, the sun caught on his skin and hair and eyes, the smells rising from him those of the earth. Then they turned to the north. She was beside him at every moment of this journey and at no time did he wish for the soft sounds of her voice to stall or the charge in the air around him to diminish. He could not grow accustomed to her. ‘The man who is loved by this woman is blessed,’ he remembered thinking. How, he wondered, had it come to pass that it was him? He was like a gambler whose every throw of the dice brought him victory. They took rooms for a night or a few days and did not leave them sometimes until the shadows began to fall as he moved around her trying to know all that she was. Then again when they left they got into his car and looked at maps as I now am looking at mine and he drove, she close to him, her head on his shoulder, speaking softly, almost whispering. His desire grew and he let it, he played it out as she did according to the rhythm of the day and the silent language they made between them that at times like that could be without flaw, they drove on or walked among trees or sat in chairs outside a little bar, their fingers moving over each other’s skin in the delicate night air until the time came but even then a little further they went making wagers with this yearning of body and soul that seemed without limit, another glass of wine maybe or a little more walking through the trees taking in their aroma before climbing the stairs with a slight ache and a liquefying mouth and currents flickering around them as they entered the room and the white rectangle that was the bed where the gates that they had held closed could open and they found each other again in this act which never seemed to carry the pattern of any other, and yet this was as it was in every room and every bed of this journey, for this was how they were, they were free in this, they had found that the act of love was not an event that repeated but was instead a single story made up of speech and gesture and light and dark, the varying notes of peace and hunger and urgency, folding and unfolding through their days without ever finding an end.