The Light of Evening

by Edna O'Brien

  * * *

  She carried her shoes upstairs and could hear and almost put a name to the various snores.

  Her husband was asleep. She lay in the twin bed next to him, bells rang repeatedly from the several churches, thrumming the air, bells metal-hard and vigorous, the stronger peals purposing to drown out the littler peals as from behind the wainscoting rats scurried in what seemed to be delirious glee, their patters light yet menacing, then a scraping sound and she imagined them gnawing their way through, spitting the wooden pulp and the bells even louder, even lustier, jabbering away to her- self, and realizing that the avalanche of the day, sights and sounds and heat, were threatening to engulf her, repeating the clichés of the lady guide, merely for something to hang on to:

  Chicory is a Belgian endive better cooked blanched since adolescence. Leopold the Second resolved to create a Belgian colony in Africa. The first diamond polisher originated near the central station. At the naval battle of Lepanto, the Ottoman Turks were defeated by the Christian League.

  All of a sudden she pictured little dwarf Klara in a niche above that museum, named for the orphans that had been left by their wayward mothers, their coats, caps, and wooden porridge bowls next to the halved playing cards that had been allotted to them, the other halves in the keeping of the mothers who never returned.

  She pictures her children, halved, quartered, torn between her husband and herself, her children asleep in her mother’s house at that moment, oblivious of the rupture that is to come, and powerless to stop this influx she gets out of bed and kneels and prays, “Oh God, let me not crack, oh please, God, let me not crack in this foreign city with the ghost of the slaughtering King Leopold.”

  Scene Twelve

  THEY CAME AWAY from the lowlands, from the silver flash of the rushing rivers, away from the harvested fields and the wandering drifts of poppies to more rugged terrain, the coach winding through a long narrow defile and gorges down below with rags and tatters of lodged yellowing snow. Mountain peak after mountain peak met them, snow-capped and luminous, while down the sheer slopes fir trees in thickets and elsewhere single ones like inky obelisks in silhouette, black-green monkish figures signaling the way.

  As a farewell gesture Gianni read from a guide book, read the height of the various mountain ranges, the characteristics of the plateau, the population of the villages tucked into the valleys, the wines of the various cantons, and an anecdote relating to Protestant peasants who slew a Capuchin monk at the time of the Counter Reformation. Wagner, he told them, had made the region historic because having heard the alphorn on his visit he was inspired to compose the herdsman’s air for Tristan.

  When the coach lumbered through a gateway that was barely wide enough to allow it to squeeze past, they clapped and cheered, craning with curiosity, the levity of the first morning restored to them, yet before many minutes expired, tempers had flared and indignation ranged all around.

  It was a huddle of low wooden buildings of various heights, narrow barred windows that looked onto a sweeping concrete forecourt and a parapet with a few wilting yellow marigolds scattered in a crescent of parched brown grass. At the entrance door a lady with close-cropped hair, who was dressed in a blue smock, kept beckoning and gesticulating to the driver to avoid the flowers and grasses, entreaties that were wasted on him.

  “It’s a dump.”

  “It’s a shed.”

  “It’s a rat hole.”

  “Where’s the sea, where’s the bloody blue sea, Geoffrey?”

  “Where’s the fucking alphorn?”

  “I tell you what … they won’t get away with this, Dudley.”

  “You can look out at the mountain, dearie … when in Rome,” Dudley answered, and his wife huffed and nettled, strode across in her serviceable leather sandals, resolving to have her money refunded, plus compensation.

  The woman in the blue smock called out each name or each pair of names, checking them on her notepad, then directed them to be registered, be given room keys and written instructions regarding meal times that, as she said, must be strictly observed.

  “Where’s the swimming pool?” she was asked.

  “Wie bitte?”

  “The swimming pool, ducky.”

  “Yoah yoah,” she replied.

  “Yoah yoah … there fucking isn’t one.”

  Their bedroom turned out to be small and stifling, two bunk beds with two massive white quilts folded to suggest two bunched-up corpses. The wooden walls were burning, so that bright blisters of creosote bubbled out of them, reminding her of a fob of amber that she had seen in a shop and longed to buy, a nugget of wettish gold that she imagined would bring her good luck. Her husband had given her an allowance for the journey, enough to cover the cost of postcards and the occasional cup of coffee. It was a curiosity shop that sold braids, buttons, tassels, and thimbles, white china thimbles decorated with posies, which the women asked to be let try on. Slipping them onto their fingers, they played sparring matches with one another in retaliation for irkings along the way. Many of the men, meanwhile, had gone down the cobbled side street, only to be flabbergasted, or so they said, by saucy sights in a window, mannequins with whips in oilskin raincoats, posters of brazen fraus in garter belts and fishnet stockings, ogling for custom.

  * * *

  Flung at last upon each other in that cramped room without the cheer and safety of their children, each waited for the other to charge, yet instead they unpacked and placed their clothes on separate shelves of the built-in plywood wardrobe.

  “We’ll share them, we’ll share them,” she said. She was trembling as she stood there in her white slip, in a room too small to hold their despair, purple dark rims under his eyes from lack of sleep, but the eyes themselves on fire, as if he was looking right through her, right into her, and seeing only hollowness within.

  “You played fast and loose with me and my children for long enough … one more deception and you’ve lost them forever … forever,” and picking up a towel and a clean shirt he fled the room in search of some sanctuary.

  The postcards she had bought in the art gallery where they had stopped all seemed inappropriate to send to her mother—Bacchanalian scenes of Pieter Brueghel’s, dwarfs and huntsmen under whey-green skies, young debauchees stretched along the floor, broken delph, an eggshell slashed through with a knife, all evidence of a plundered feast. Even the one of the Virgin, sumptuously draped and with her stomach thrust forward to proclaim her pregnancy, seemed too brazen, too corporeal altogether.

  She wrote without thinking, because were she to express her plight, her mother would see the outcome:

  Dear Mother, we have arrived. I hope the children are behaving themselves and not tiring you too much. The hotel is high up, almost two thousand meters they say, one asthma sufferer has already complained of trouble with his breathing. Otherwise all is well. See you a week from Tuesday.

  * * *

  “He trained in Lausanne, you know.” It was a running joke concerning the one doddery waiter who shook as he wrote their drinks order in a minuscule notepad, shook as he moved the faded sheet of violet copying paper for the next order and the next and later almost dropped the laden tray as he sought to place each person’s order at the correct setting.

  They had resolved to make the best of things. The women had dressed as for a gala and the men were freshly shaven and wore clean shirts, mostly white shirts that made them look like a troup of itinerant musicians. Her husband, separate from them as he had been throughout, wore a black polo-neck sweater but she could see that he was animated and even drank a whiskey, animated as he told Mona and her husband about his house by the lake, the vegetables he grew, the marrows and tomatoes under cloches in a kitchen garden.

  June got a round of applause when she appeared in swathes of pink tulle and very high heels, tottering like a flamingo, as did the two Violets with their faded satin handbags and almost identical polka-dot dresses.

  Eleanora sat next to Jesse, who wore a
linen jacket that was both creased and several sizes too large for him. They had become friends since that day crossing a field to fetch water, when wild dogs had descended on them, came bounding out of nowhere, their tails low, their snarls ominous, sniffing them, sniffing her especially, smelling her menstrual blood, and Jesse saying, “Don’t run, don’t run” and she replying, “I have my period, I have my period” and he telling her to walk backward and she did, the stubble sharp and thorny, walking slowly backward like he said. She saw him fend them off in play, the one huge dog and the two littler ones who soon tired of it, then removing his red bandanna, his cherished red bandanna, he played with the big dog, bull and matador at play, under the scorching sun, the beautiful passes that intrigued the animal, until at last they approached the bus and it saw that it was being bamboozled, then bit into the flesh of Jesse’s hand and he hitting back, ugly determined swipes, until the driver came with a jackhammer and the animal had to let go, the thick tongue hanging out in rage and drops of blood on its front molars. Once inside the bus, Jesse fainted, fell flat on the floor and refused to be consoled and refused to have the hand looked at or dressed. He lay there, cradling it, silent, his eyes looking inward and upward, like a boy angel in a fresco. That evening in a restaurant in one of those shady squares, where the party had stopped for a drink, lanterns in the trees, dishes of olives on the several tables, he accepted the silk scarf she had bought for him, simply said, “No sweat, John, no sweat, John” and made himself a new bandanna.

  The lettuce was indeed limp, but who cared, and the antipasto of sausage, cut in thick chunks and dyed an unfortunate overrealistic red, was rubbery, but who cared. They swigged their drink and toasted each other—“It’s good, it’s great, it’s the Continent”—all the while laughing at how exceedingly the waiter shook.

  The conversation fell to recollection of unforgettable holidays and excursions, June saying there was no place like gay Paree, the Tuileries, the Folies Bergère, Pigalle with its naughty lingerie, Violet One remembering her apprenticeship as a young girl in service, the braces of pheasants that had to be plucked after the shoots in August, sitting by the back kitchen door, she and another girl plucking, plucking, the bustle in the kitchen, while Mavis, who had been a pastry cook in another stately home, recalled how her boss had reserved his own little dining room at Ascot, whole rows of dining rooms, some far larger than his, rented by the hoi polloi, who clustered onto the balcony between courses to watch the race and guess what, a Royal, a first cousin of the Queen, was on a balcony two down from them.

  The main course of pork and sauerkraut met with some disdain, but as Dudley pointed out, “When in Rome…” and asked the waiter for second helpings of chips and boiled potatoes.

  Dishes of sorbet, spiked with sparklers, were put down and the overhead lights lowered to signal the entertainment.

  A dwarf impeccably dressed in black suit with white tuxedo carried a piano accordion onto the stage, placed it on a stool, and bowed. Then, clad in lamé, the singer followed, picking up the accordion, with dapples of mountain daisies painted on the black lacquered panels, opening it slowly, the red pleating coming apart, prefiguring the thrills that were to follow.

  “You’re the business … you can have my knickers to twist any old time,” June said, blowing him a series of affected kisses and her husband remarked on the bad breed in her coming out after a few gins.

  The first song was clearly about love, he the swain, distraught, pleading with a girl who was not there, crushed by the fact of her rebuffing him, pacing, almost weeping, his sentiments wasted upon an empty world. Love love love. Liebe liebe liebe. Then came a selection of Gypsy songs and the singer with his soft and velvety eyes drinking them in, the old waiter placing down the coffee cups and big snifters of brandy, tears in his eyes, either from exhaustion or because the Gypsy songs revived stray memories in him.

  For the finale he had chosen a song that he reckoned they would all know and charmingly suggested that they would join in:

  Ae fond kiss and then we sever …

  Had we never loved so kindly

  Had we never loved so blindly

  Never met or never parted

  We had ne’er been broken-hearted.

  Afterward he moved among them so amiably, agreed to pose for a photograph with several of the ladies, flirtatious to one or another, young or old it did not matter, June begging to know the words of his first song and he writing it carefully on the dinner menu: “Mit 17 da hut noch traum. At seventeen you have sweet dreams.” How lovely. How tender. How true. And what was his name. “Konrad.” Konrad! they exclaimed, touching the accordion, squeezing and tweaking the keys as if they were tweaking and squeezing him. “It’s good, it’s great, it’s the Continent, it’s Konrad,” Dudley said, scoffing at them.

  After he had done with the courtesies the singer withdrew to a corner of the room where he and the dwarf sat having their supper, deep in mirthful conversation, the old waiter plying them with dishes and pitchers of wine.

  * * *

  Two nights later Eleanora was sitting on a bench in the forecourt, next to the few marigolds that had livened somewhat in the night dew, when he appeared. Moments before there had been consternation on the mountain, the sheep bells, erstwhile so light and intermittent in that crystalline silence, suddenly began to clang and clatter, a united bout of warning rings, as obviously danger stalked up there and the herd ran in confusion.

  Konrad came from the side of the building, his attire not nearly so theatrical as on that first night. There had been no sign of him since, as for the two subsequent evenings a lady sang German lieder while the dwarf turned the pages of the sheet music, the applause not nearly so robust as it had been for him.

  He seemed surprised to see her, then remembered, ah yes, was she not the lady with the green necklace and the shawl.

  “I can’t sleep,” she said, as if sitting there was a crime.

  “It can happen in the mountains … the fuhn upsets visitors … they feel betruben,” he said, smiling.

  “Betruben—what is it?”

  “I tell you … if you come tomorrow to have tea with me in my loge … up in the tower.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Du bist so nice,” he said snapping off one of the marigolds to give to her and thence from a tangled stack of bicycles he pulled one out and cycled off with a nonchalance.

  She sat and studiously plucked the petals, the yes, the no, enquiring if she should or should not go to his loge on the morrow.

  * * *

  The shutters were drawn and he had been lying down as she saw, since the white cotton coverlet was obviously flung back as he jumped up to answer the door.

  “Since two hour I am dreaming of this,” he said and drew her in, at the same time turning the key in the door.

  “I can’t stay long,” she said, breathless. There had been four flights of stairs—she had not dared take the lift in case of being seen—and then a rickety spiral stairs that led to the tower. In the dusk of that room she met the rush of his kisses, the sweet blast of his muffled words, his hand on the breast that housed her wildly beating heart, and as she was hoisted up she heard one court shoe then a second fall with a tell-tale thud on the wooden floor.

  “I love the womans … I love the womans,” he kept saying, the words lewd and lovely as spoken from his lips.

  As he removed her cardigan the shivering got the better of her and he kissed her passionately along the nape of her neck, thinking it would calm her down, except that it didn’t. He liked the fact that she was so nervous. Then he crossed to the bed and, like a puppet master, drew a white muslin curtain all around it for them to be enfolded in a bower of secrecy.

  She wanted nothing more than to follow him there, yet something stopped her. Without her cardigan she felt naked and asked if they could talk. If they could talk.

  He sat her on the wicker chair, he, crouched at her feet, looking at her, musing again and again what color her eyes we
re, her ever-changing eyes, as he bit on the smooth round disks of her green glass necklace and asked why the word daydream.

  “Because it’s in the day,” she whispered back.

  “So I daydream and I nightdream of you,” he answered and she knew, or rather she guessed, that he would have said it before and yet there was in him such a sincerity and she hesitated at what she would have to tell him. They could be lovers, but not there and not then, up the mountain perhaps in one of the shepherd’s huts, or in some other city or resort where he would be singing and where she would arrange to meet him. He shook his head, uncomprehendingly, frowned, puckered, asking why not then, why not there, why not now? She remonstrated with him and saw that his eyes, which she had thought to be brown, were a dark gentian, like the gentian flower.

  “I love the womans … I love the womans,” he kept saying.

  “Konrad”—and she blurted it out—“Konrad, could I come away with you … can I live with you?”

  He looked stunned, looked as if he had not heard correctly, then covered it up with a beautiful smile as he crossed to fetch a packet of cigarettes from the dressing table and lit one for her, without asking if she smoked.

  He did not answer at first, he did not know how, but gradually he found himself able to tell her his brief history, his voice soft and considerate and strangely sad. Home was north of Vienna, a small industrial town that was foggy in wintertime. His wife and daughter lived there and yes, they would much prefer to be traveling with him, but it was something hotel managers did not encourage. His wife resented his traveling, resented the fact that he sang for other ladies, and his daughter, Lena, his little Lena, sulked when he returned home after a long absence, went to the window box where his wife had made a small garden and threw pieces of clay and small stones at him, in punishment.