by Liz Byrski
The pain in my gut creases me in half, the pain in my chest threatens to rise up and choke me. I know you are dead. I have lost you again—I knew it would end this way.
‘But what could possibly have happened to me, in bed, in my own house?’ you ask, puzzled by my distress when you call to apologise for oversleeping by two hours and forgetting to take the phone to bed with you.
It’s a reasonable question, indeed any sane person might wonder how death could befall someone who was going to do something as simple as put the car away and go to bed. But for the neurotic lover there are any number of possibilities. You went out into the road and were mugged. You stepped out into the street, a car swept around the corner and hit you. The up-and-over garage door dropped on your head. Or in running up the steps from the garage to the house, you tripped and hit your head. If you do manage to survive putting the car away and make it to bed, a burglar breaks in and shoots you when you confront him in your study. The very least that can happen is that you go to bed and suffer a heart attack or a stroke.
‘Phew!’ you say, ‘I had no idea I lived such a dangerous life.’
The full extent of my neurosis is laid out before me and I am shocked.
‘Perhaps you really want to get rid of me,’ you joke. But I can’t laugh. ‘I don’t think this will be over for you until we actually do meet again,’ you say more softly.
And you are right. We must live the story beyond the point at which it ended the last time. Only then will the spell be broken, only then will the fear dissipate, the uncertainty become tolerable.
12
The first weeks of winter are fickle here. Brilliant sunshine is suddenly replaced by torrential rain and blustery winds. You can see the weather roll in from the ocean, stand on the beach in sunshine and watch as the storm rages at sea and the dark clouds race towards the land. Soon you will be drenched and will struggle to hold your balance against the ferocity of the wind. Behind the storm come more brilliant clear blue skies and the sun emerges once more.
My feelings mirror the elements. The joy of anticipation is interrupted by the piercing reminders of imminent change. A shaft of sunlight through the deep blue glass vase in the kitchen makes me catch my breath in recollection of so many precious times here in this house. Early evening on the deck with Jan before I left for Portugal; Sunday morning breakfast with Sue and John; a lunch with women friends which lasted all day. Long peaceful days of writing, early summer mornings when the sun is gentle, late nights when the air is still and the sky full of stars.
This country has been my home for eighteen years, there is much I love and a few things I detest. Australia has been good to me and I love it as my own country. I have been away before but this is different, I always expected to come back to the same things in the same place. This time I don’t know when I’ll be back or under what circumstances. Will I live here in this house or this country again? Will you and I live here together one day? Will we lie together at night and watch the clouds and the stars through that sloping window? Will we sit here on the deck and consider pruning the lavender or snipping the dead heads from the roses? Will the sound of your piano drift down the stairs and out into the garden?
Uncertainty.
Here in this town, in this state, I know and am known. I came here as a stranger, I worked hard and it paid off; I can thrive on the name I have made for myself. In some places I get special treatment, in some places my name can make things happen quicker. People stop me in the street and tell me they miss my column in the newspaper, my voice on the radio; sometimes people stop me to tell me they are delighted they no longer have to listen to me or put up with my views in their paper. Even the negative can be reassuring. This is my comfort zone and I am about to step right out of it and into a place I have never seen, a place where I am anonymous, and where now, in my fifties, I must once again start from scratch.
I have often seen that place in my dreams. I have seen a man walking down a steep hill with cable cars, where tall narrow houses border the sidewalk. In the background is the gleaming expanse of water and the Golden Gate Bridge. Thirty-seven years ago I dreamed that I called to him as he walked down the hill. He stopped and turned at the sound of my voice, just as he had stopped and turned when I called him on Brighton Beach.
In my dream he smiled and held out his hand. ‘Come with me, Sweetheart,’ he called and I ran to him and we walked together down the hill. But the dream changed and San Francisco became a place where he turned to the sound of a voice that was not mine, and that smiling, sparkling sunny city looked bleak and lonely for me.
Now I will see that city. The eyes that call me have lived in my memory across the decades, the price I am paying is the temporary separation from my life here. Everything has a price and this does not seem too high.
***
‘I’m off tomorrow Mum,’ I say.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Well have a nice time dear.’
For weeks she has worried about me going and how long I’ll be gone. Time and again she has asked me the same questions: Where is it Karl lives? How long will you be gone? How far away is it?
‘If you’re away more than a month I shall die,’ she has said constantly. ‘But you mustn’t worry about me. It’s your life. I want you to be happy.’
I know she means it but the conversations are agonising and we have had them several times a week for the last five months.
Now at the last moment she has lost interest. She is more interested in the new bedroom she has moved to in the nursing home, and in talking to Mark whom she saw a couple of months ago but thinks she hasn’t seen since he was twelve. I have been dreading a tearful, heartbreaking parting but it seems that I am to be allowed to walk away without the fires of my guilt being stoked again. As I hug her it feels as though she has already gone from me, has left me before I leave her—or is this just my imagination?
***
My friends help me to pack my books and make an inventory of the contents of the house. The boxes are moved out and slowly the rooms become bare, waiting to receive someone else’s possessions. I will spend the last few days at Jan’s house, where I will say my goodbyes. On a pouring wet evening at the end of June I put my suitcases in the car and take one final look around the house which was going to be my home into my old age, where I would write in precious solitude, have control of my life, certainty about the future. The house represents all that I have striven for, autonomy, independence, creativity, safety and peace. It represents my life as a single woman, a woman who chose celibacy and a single life and who celebrates that in her surroundings.
For the last time I turn off the lights and lock the door. I get into the car and with a final glance up to the sharp peak of the roof, I reverse out of the gate. One part of my life is ending.
13
E-mail: 27 June 1999 11.30pm WA
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Last message from Australia
My Darling Karl Heinz
This is my last message to you from Australia. My last night here for who knows how long? All 1 know is that ahead of me lies a dream which has been with me all my life.
I have felt so sad saying goodbye to my family and friends. But I am driven by my desire to be with you as I should have been for the last 37 years. I feel so confident now that this is how it is meant to be for us after all this time. Thank you for your love and support during these last months of this lifetime of separation.
I hope you will continue to believe that it was worth searching for me, and that reality lives up to your dreams. I know that the reality of having you in my life is more wonderful than I ever dreamed. I hold you to me with all the love I have kept for you all my life and that which has grown from it since I once again heard your voice on 27 December.
Let us keep the dream alive always. Meet me in Frankfurt on Wednesday morning—I’ll be waiting for you—always.
Liz
E-ma
il: 27 June 1999 7.30pm San Francisco
From: [email protected]
To dbyr [email protected]
My Dearest Darling Liz,
Tears and more tears for you and your sadness at leaving your home and friends. I am making you a promise, we will fly to Australia together soon, depending on my work or retirement situation here, but fly we will, unless we can find a steamer to take us on a slow boat to China via Perth!
You have given me more than you will ever be able to fathom Darling. I cannot be as expressive in my messages to you as you are in this loveliest of all the messages I have received. I feel so awkward sometimes I freeze in front of the screen. I am so infinitely grateful that you had always kept our love alive.
Please take good care of yourself on this awful long flight.
I have the greatest admiration for you, for what you did with your life, for your wonderful sons, for what you achieved. It will be a constant source of my admiration for you.
May your flight be gentle and safe—good heavens I catch myself praying! I love you with a passion that draws its strength from the spiritual. You are always my same Smugglers Cottage Liz, and I am yours always.
Karl Heinz.
Part Six
Meditation
14
London, August Nineteen Ninety-nine
The house is gone now, but this is where it stood. This where I stood by the window in the first floor lounge on that damp Saturday afternoon and turned around at the sound of the opening door. You stood in the doorway and everything else disappeared. This is where it all began.
The house is gone now, but the park is still here. The street still sweeps down in a sloping curve bordering this avenue of trees where we walked one evening as darkness fell. That night the trees were bare but this evening they are in full leaf and their branches arch above the pathway. There are no street lights—the August evenings are long and light. That night there were tears in your eyes. We leaned against this tree and shared our dreams, our hopes and fears; now we share them once again with the extraordinary blessing of this second chance—the chance to go back again to the start of love, to the romance of youth with the wisdom of age and hindsight.
For a few brief months our paths merged, we thought we were taking the first steps towards a life together, now we reflect on the years we lost, the foolish decisions we made, and the painful irony of lives lived on opposite sides of the world. Would love have lasted through togetherness as it has through separation? Would we still be together? What sort of people would we have become? Was it always meant to be this way?
In dreaming of how it might have been I recognise the blessings of what was and is; my wonderful sons who have brought the greatest love, satisfaction and meaning to my life; dear friends old and new; the getting of wisdom and awareness; the acceptance of and by a new country and my struggles to become a writer. And now there is you. The years we lost are the years that have made us who we are today, they have been rich in their blessings; they have brought us back here to the place where it all began.
For so many years Karl, I wanted to tell you my story. I wanted to hear your story, to know how it was for you and to understand. You came back into my life at the time when I least expected to find love again—in autumn you brought back the spring. Now our two stories are one—it is a story that can only be told because you had the courage to follow your heart.
Acknowledgements
This book tells a story which has affected my life in ways and at times not covered in the narrative. Inevitably the events of the last two years have caused me to reflect on the’ missing years and in those reflections it is always to my two sons, Mark and Neil, that I return. I want to take this opportunity to thank them for their constant support and unconditional love, which has so enriched my life.
Thanks too to Neil for his careful reading of and thoughtful responses to the confused and rambling early drafts of this book.
Many people contributed to the events recorded in this story. My sincere thanks are due to all of them, but to some I want to give special thanks.
Sincere thanks to Jess Phillips who invited a complete stranger into her home and was so moved by his story that she took on the role of private detective. The detective became fairy godmother and both Karl and I will always be grateful to Jess for the effort she made to find me.
Thanks also to Irene Carter for her generous friendship, wisdom and humour during the extraordinary events of December 1998 and January 1999.
I want especially to thank J an O’Meara for her loyal and unconditional friendship, for constantly bringing me back to earth, making me laugh and knowing when to speak and when to say nothing. And Carolyn Polizzotto for her precious friendship, and for the conversations that contributed so much to the process of deciding how to write this story.
Thanks too to Susan James and John Noonan and the many other friends who let me know what my happiness meant to them and whose encouragement has meant so much to me.
To my editors Ray Coffey and Janet Blagg for their faith in the story and sensitive, thoughtful and insightful editing of a manuscript which was so precious to me.
And finally, of course, to Karl, without whom there would have been no story to write.
Liz Byrski
May 2000