Light

by Timothy O'Grady

  ‘Do you know who she is?’ says Jacob.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘There is someone I have in mind when I think about her. Sometimes I have the feeling that I know all there is to know of that person – I mean about how she moves, the sound of her voice, her moods. But really I haven’t an idea. That’s just the person I make when I think about her. She could as easily be any other way. I never met her, as you know. But I think I know something about her that the man who loved her did not know.’

  ‘What’s that?’ says Jacob.

  ‘That she has not been living in Finland.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ he asks.

  ‘I have the idea that the time was going to come when she would leave him. Maybe that time was imminent. She made a telephone call the night before she left. She seemed a little agitated during the course of it. Perhaps she was under pressure from someone. But I think she was forced to leave when she did because he had arranged a dinner with a couple from Finland and she was afraid she would be exposed as not knowing the language. I think she broke the car window herself so that he would be occupied when she got away.’

  ‘That’s conjecture,’ says Jerzy.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I say. ‘But I also think I know where she is from.’

  ‘Where?’ says Jacob.

  ‘I think she’s a Pole.’

  ‘Why?’ says Jerzy. ‘I can see now that you say it that there is some evidence that points that way, but it’s not conclusive. That novel about the ballet dancer, for example, was probably available in other countries.’

  ‘I imagine so,’ I say.

  ‘And even the photograph,’ says Jacob. ‘We know it was taken here, but my father was also photographed in front of that statue. Maybe she was a visitor, like him.’

  ‘That could be.’

  ‘What, then?’ says Jerzy.

  ‘There are two things,’ I say.

  ‘And the first?’ he says.

  ‘What she did with a loaf of bread.’

  He looks at me suspiciously.

  ‘What would that be?’

  ‘She righted it when it was the wrong way up on a table. She was superstitious about it. “It’s bad luck to keep bread upside-down in the house,” she said to him.’

  ‘That means she’s a Pole?’ says Jacob.

  ‘It’s true that that’s done here,’ says Jerzy. ‘My wife does it. It used to irritate me but now I find I do it myself.

  ‘And the other?’ he says to me.

  ‘That’s something that only came to me yesterday. I was thinking about the days when they first met. They were alone one night together in the bar and she poured him a drink. She lifted her glass and said something to him. She said it was a toast. He didn’t understand it, but he was so fascinated by her that he took everything in. When we were in the bars that night in Krakow he toasted me in the same way, or tried to. It was just a sound. I didn’t pay attention to it. But it came back to me yesterday. I’d been doing all that work in the library, and all that thinking about him and about the past, and I’d got to the end of it. I felt the work was over. It was a strange feeling, like nothing I’d ever felt before. If I’d ever in my life finished a long piece of hard work I do not say that I had a feeling of triumph, no, that would be ridiculous. I never did any such thing that would merit a feeling of triumph. But maybe there was relief. And even satisfaction if it seemed to have been done well and I’d spent myself in the doing of it. Anyway, I’d long been looking forward to finishing this work. It’s not that anyone was making me do it, of course, or that there was anything much to it. It was only something for an old man who had nothing else to do. But it seemed a burden at times. I looked forward to the feeling of relief I might get at the end of it. And so then there came the time when I had read about the physicists and I had passed through once again as though in another life all those things that had happened to me and also to that young man and his girl. I knew it would arrive all at once, the end, and as I moved towards it I was already thinking about the sweetness of that relief. And maybe I’d get even more if I was lucky. But it wasn’t like that at all. I just felt it all running out of me. I felt an urge to hold it in, to keep it a while longer in case more could be made of it. But I knew that wasn’t right. I knew I had to let it go. And it went. I’d been carrying it a long while, from long before I met that man in Krakow. And now I no longer had it. I looked around the room. There were just walls, tables, chairs, things. They seemed naked there. I knew I wasn’t going to see and hear again all the things that existed between me and the things of the room, all those people and their voices and what they did. I had a feeling that already they had an existence somewhere outside of me, but I didn’t know where. And if all of them together as I had thought about them and pictured them had any feeling about me then and in time to come it would be the feeling of indifference. That was a kind of sadness, yes, but it also made me laugh. So I went into the kitchen and poured myself a drink. That picture of my young friend and Hanna together in the bar where she worked came to me and I said her toast out loud. There is something strange in that, I said to myself. So I wrote out the way it sounded on a piece of paper and said it again. Then I had it. “Lykniem bo odwykniem” – “Let’s drink or we will forget how to do it.” A Polish toast, as you no doubt know.’

  The train comes into the station at Torun then and we collect our flask and blankets and make for the street. I say to them that I think we should walk everywhere here today, for this place is not so big and the day is so bright and alive. And that’s what we do. We pass through a tunnel and along the streets to where the road begins to rise to the river, the walls and the steeples of the city of Copernicus before us.

  ‘When he lost Hanna,’ I say to them as we walk, ‘my young friend began to read about physics. He was hurt. And he didn’t understand what had happened. The feeling became so strong that it began to spread to everything around him, so that the world outside too was drained of sense. He couldn’t find a way to change this. So he set out looking for her. And he began to read about physics. He wanted to feel connected to the world, to find the fundamental things. And he wanted it to make sense again.

  ‘He thought physics did that. He thought it classified and explained the biggest and the smallest things. I also. And for a very long time that is what the physicists did. They allowed us to look out at the world and see and understand where and what all the things in it were, how they worked and how they fit together. But then there was a change. I have a great many holes in my knowledge. In fact I have a knowledge that you could say is mostly holes. This change that happened in physics is one of these holes. And it was a very big change, and fundamental. For what the physicists began to discover when they looked into the world of the very small was that it bore no relation to the visible world, even though the visible world is supposed to be made from it. Up here planets and billiard balls and bicycles obeyed the laws laid out by Isaac Newton. But down in the world of the very small everything was different. You couldn’t make sense of it. You couldn’t get a picture of it in your mind. They found that instead of those very small things moving continuously, the way a ball rolls down a street, they jumped. They found that something could be two contradictory things at once – that light, for example, could be both a particle, or a substance, and a wave, or a pattern of energy. It was whatever you wanted it to become. If you set up an experiment to show that light was a particle, it would prove that light was a particle. If your experiment was designed to show that light was a wave, it would behave like a wave. They also found that there was something in the very nature of this sub-atomic world that made it impossible for it to be known fully. When I saw that young man in the square in Krakow he was reading a book by Werner Heisenberg. It was this German who discovered that if you want to know both the momentum and the position of a particle, you cannot do so, for the act of measuring one of these characteristics changes the behaviour of the other. The original information required cannot be got. Newto
n’s laws cannot be applied.

  ‘The more the scientists looked into this world, the more it disappeared. It seemed to be without things as we understand them. Einstein was the first to put forward this idea when he said that matter was energy. And when they looked at atoms, those tiny impenetrable things said to make up matter, they found that they were composed of almost nothing at all. If an atom were the size of the dome of St Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, then its nucleus would be the size of a grain of salt and its electrons all but invisible motes of dust. There was the idea we had as children in school that the atom was just like the solar system, with the electrons rotating around the nucleus as the planets do around the sun. Then Niels Bohr said that no, this was not correct, electrons jump in and out of orbits at varying distances from the nucleus according to how much energy they get. A French prince named Louis de Broglie then said that in this world particles and waves were interchangeable and Erwin Schrödinger refined this further by finding a mathematical formula that demonstrated that electrons are standing waves, like a clothesline between two poles set in motion. Finally Max Born destroyed the atom altogether by demonstrating mathematically that these waves are not real things at all but rather what he called probability waves, things of statistics rather than of reality. Atoms do not exist. They are numbers used to make sense of what is happening in experiments. All is number then, as Pythagoras once said.

  ‘Sometimes the physicists suffered when they discovered these things. It was not a picture of the world which pleased them. When Max Planck presented his paper contending that things in the sub-atomic world moved in jumps instead of smoothly and continuously, he hoped that someone would successfully contradict him. Einstein laboured for decades to prove the quantum physicists wrong and was called a fool for it. Heisenberg walked under trees through the night asking himself how nature could be so absurd.

  ‘My poor young friend. He looks for a Pole in Finland and for certainty in physics!’

  Along the bridge a little way we stop to look down at the river. Wind runs over the water, the light hitting it in explosions of silver and white. We watch a boat pass beneath us, two men sitting on crates holding fishing lines. The city is there before us. I see smoke rising from chimneys, a round white face in a window. Jacob begins to walk and I follow. Jerzy pulls away from the wall with what seems a kind of grief and falls into step beside me. He leans his head towards me but it is a while before he says anything.

  ‘You’ve been speaking a lot today,’ he says.

  ‘Yes I know,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll be silent now.’

  ‘No, no,’ he says. ‘Don’t. I find it interesting, and …’ – here he pauses and grimaces a little as though he is having problems with his digestion – ‘admirable.’ Giving praise, I know, embarrasses him. But so does receiving it.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘But that I speak of it does not mean that I understand it.’

  ‘Well no, perhaps not. You would need to know more about numbers. But I was thinking just then of what you said about the sadness of the physicists, and their distress. I think that … well, I believe, that the breaking of a belief long held by new evidence, a belief about which certainty has been felt – well, this is a process that can be painful.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  His jaws are working as though he is trying to chew something intractable.

  ‘This pain has its own laws and clock. It must follow its own course. Eventually it passes. And what I want to say is this – no one outside can do anything to affect it. It would be unreasonable to expect them to try. I believe this utterly.’

  I stop then and turn to face him, but he does not want this, he just nods once to say that the subject is now finished and leads me on until we reach Jacob, his step lighter, his face assuming again the contours I have known. In this world which the physicists say is all approximation, he has offered me at least a piece of what I have long wished for from him.

  We enter the city through a towering arched gate and walk along under the walls and through the cobbled alleys and lanes, the shadows of the ancient houses around us like diagrams laid out on a page. I step out ahead of them holding a guidebook open at a map and I lead them into a quiet street with trees and then through the door of a hotel. We take our seats in the dining room, Jerzy and Jacob on one side of the table and me on the other, a high beamed ceiling above us, waitresses in starched uniforms speaking in whispers. Beside us are two of our new men ingratiating themselves with each other, briefcases at their sides, nails polished, hair arranged like American senators’. Whenever they move, clouds of cologne billow towards us. I can see from the way Jerzy looks at them that the political beliefs which his mind long ago abandoned still remain in part within his viscera. But we will not let these men interfere with our lunch, this lunch which I tell myself marks the end of my labours, even if those labours may not yet be entirely over, for one act yet remains to be done. Afterwards we go out into the now truly dazzling afternoon light which sweeps across the square towards us like a herd of galloping horses. I lead them up into the high tower there and we look down on this city unknown to us all, yet where the air seems curiously concentrated for each of us, where there is a sense of something being prepared. We look all around and then at each other and Jacob begins to laugh. He laughs all the way down the stairs and across the square to the statue of Copernicus, the laughter fading as he stands there but a smile remaining while he looks from the robed figure of the astronomer to the spot where his father once waited to be photographed and Hanna smiled at someone we can never know. I lead them to the house where this great Polish hero of the heavens was born and I leave them at the door, for I have an errand, I say, an errand that could take perhaps an hour.

  Later then we stand together on a low rise in the land, Jerzy, Jacob and I. Below us brown grass and grey flats and the blinking sign of a video shop. Just next to it a pharmacist’s. The light is fading from the sky, a pale blue. Each of us is silent as we look out. We are waiting. I hope the wait will not be long. I feel the air growing colder now. I think of M., and wonder how he is. Packing his bags, maybe, in a Finnish hotel. Is there anywhere left for him now? She told stories to beguile him and please herself and keep the truth at bay. I have told these for the company and now they are passing and soon I will be alone. But no matter. I feel well and strong this night. I feel a power moving around me and wish I could pass some of it to M. I think of a physicist from his country I would like to tell him about were he here. He could help him, maybe. His name was John Stewart Bell, and he was from Belfast. When studying the separateness of things Bell found against all sense that things were not separate, that if you took two paired particles and set them far apart from one another, even at opposite ends of the universe, they still had the means to communicate with one another within the same moment, so that if you changed the condition of one the other would react instantaneously, in that very instant of time, not through some signal sent at the speed of light, and that therefore all is somehow of the same fabric, all is one. This makes me laugh, though I didn’t laugh when I first read it. I watch the print of my breath vanish from the air. I look above the rooftops and the line of black naked trees to the sky and the slender pale moon like a trail of powder, the first faint starlight beyond it. I think of all those men of numbers down through the ages breaking their brains in a search for something they would never quite reach, the whole of the universe written down in equations on the page, all that was and all that will be, all together in a perfect, harmonious unity. This is M. and me, and Jerzy and Jacob, for have we not all been tried and convicted as we made our way along this same futile road? We have sought what cannot be granted, the inner life never finding its match outside, mysteries never revealed, love transported here and there in search of completion but ever denied. We stand together side by side on this little hill, our shattered beliefs lying like heaps of dust at our feet. This too makes me laugh. I feel Jerzy stir beside me when he hears this, but
then he settles back in to his watch. How rich seems the air this night, how alive and full of movement! Einstein said that the physicists’ efforts to understand the world resemble a man guessing at the workings of a watch he cannot open, but just here and now in the twilight in this city of Copernicus I feel it all churning and boiling and dancing around me, all the many billions of tiny particles, creation, then annihilation and then creation again, this world which just now I meet and feel again where nothing is lost and everything is changed. There are no things, there are only forces, processes, movement. I know this, and I get some taste of the loveliness of it. You cannot hold a single thing to you for it must break and fall away. That is its nature. And I understand now too the idea of the physicist Dirac who found that for all matter there is antimatter, for each particle an antiparticle, where the play of energy and matter is carried out, where creation is destruction and destruction creation, for I see what is high must fall and what is broken must find form, for each thing holds its opposite, and that already in exaltation is despair and in despair exaltation. I feel something stir and rise within me, a cleansing and an opening and the flow of raw power such as I felt long ago in the hotel room in Erfurt, that whirring of a hundred dials, that laying waste to what I have known followed by another birth, but all of it a little slower and sweeter and sadder maybe, for I am old now and even the blood too is hobbled a little. All is one, even in this decrepitude. It is just a moment, this little miracle, a moment for which I am grateful, and before it passes I seem to hear at the very limits of what can be heard a voice saying, ‘Goodbye … goodbye … Say goodbye, goodbye …’ trailing off as in the last notes of a song. And then I feel Jacob reach his hand around the back of Jerzy and tap me on the shoulder. He turns his face from the street to me and on it is a look of wonder. It was not difficult work nor long in the doing to move around the city of Torun with some questions and photographs while he and Jerzy were looking at the gyroscopes and sextants of Copernicus. The questions were few and they were simple, for I could see then that in the story of Ritso a real person began where Copernicus ended, a person known to Hanna, linked to her by bonds and by fete. So I asked the people moving around in the streets of this little city if they knew of a man, maybe a little fat, lame after a fall from a rooftop, an almost bald man with a badly trimmed beard who wears mismatched clothes. Perhaps he has an interest in the theatre. Perhaps he knows about remedies. Had they ever seen this beautiful girl here in the photographs? I was not long in getting an answer, and nor are we long waiting on this hillside before we see the light go out in the pharmacist’s below us and the upraised front of a wheelchair appear in the door. In it is a large smiling man with a red face, a green scarf and basketball shoes. He holds the hand of a little girl who walks beside him, laughing as he whispers something into her ear. I see a woman’s hands on the back of the wheelchair then as she manoeuvres the wheels over the ledge of the door. These are the hands of the man’s wife. They move towards us, father, daughter, mother the three points of this triangle. The pale light of a streetlamp falls on this face I now know better than Angelina’s, the bones wide around the eyes, the neck long and slender. This is the face that M. never wanted to lose sight of. She walks as he said she walked, as though on small skis, pushing the wheelchair and looking at nothing or maybe at something else beyond what can be seen in these forsaken streets known only to those who live among them. When will come her next time of release from them? Whom will she beguile with her knowledge and beauty and stories? And do they cost her, these acts of mind and passion played out in places far from her home? How I would love to see what is behind those green eyes and how well I know that I cannot. The man who is loved by this woman is blessed, thought M. She loves this man, I think, this man in colourful clothes who drinks wine and smiles and each time she ventures out welcomes her home with a glass of vodka and a ceremonial cake with a strawberry on top and who asks no questions. And I think she loves M. But out of pity or hopelessness she will spare him the blessing of this love the next time she gets away, but of course he does not wish to be spared it, even though he might know that it is written that he will lose her again and suffer again. If I take a few steps down this little rise in the land I could touch her as she passes. Think not badly of her, M. Her skill is great as you know, and a skill unexpressed is an anguish. It is freedom that she lacks. So think not of the harm she brought you, for that is past, and think no more of certainty, for certainty is for fools and zealots and provincials. The world is bigger and harder and more wondrous than our attempts to ensnare it. All is one, theories and tracts and stories, a girl in a banana grove in Africa, another in a house in the sand and this one here moving away from me with her long strides. Say goodbye. All is one and all is change. And you too M. must say goodbye, for you will not walk with her now. Say goodbye to that wheel of yearning and sorrow. Say goodbye, all of us, for all is passing and all is being made.