OUR VISIT LASTED ten days, but I can’t say I remember much of it. Most mornings I’d wriggle my way into a pair of Wellington boots and head for the dunes. There I’d sit, on the roof of a bunker that was half buried in the sand, gazing out at the gray sea. The sky was dead and dreary, like the sea, and the sand was wet and dark and it felt as if the whole world were sitting by roaring fires in warm, comfortable living rooms, waiting for the next storm. Sometimes my mother would come with me and then the two of us would sit there in silence, gazing out at the slow raging of the surf. One afternoon, when we were looking out at that pencil-sketched world from the roof of the bunker, she fished a pack of cigarettes from her jacket pocket and took out a Lucky. She had a hard time getting it lit. I watched her and waited for her to speak, but she said nothing. The smoke blew in her eyes. After a while, she dropped the cigarette in the damp sand and shook her head. I peered into the endlessly rolling waves. The wind tugged at my hood.
On one of those rare afternoons when the sky cleared up briefly, I went looking for my mother to ask her to come with me to the bunker, but I couldn’t find her. I did run into my grandmother though. She was standing in a hallway, muttering angrily at a portrait of a gentleman with a pince-nez and a high collar. As I passed her she nodded her head toward the dream room. I looked at her for a moment, dumbfounded, but she turned and shuffled away to the staircase.
My mother was sitting with her knees raised on the wide sill of the bay window. The light of the sun, which had already gone down behind the dunes, shimmered softly on her skin. The sea glistened in the distance and the wet sand, just beginning to dry, had an iridescent sheen. My mother’s head was raised slightly and she was staring out the window. She must have been cold, because she had her arms wrapped around her and was hugging them tightly.
By the time she noticed my presence, I was already standing next to her. She didn’t look at me when she said my name.
“I used to sit here and read.”
I looked out the curved window.
She turned her head toward me.
I frowned. Her eyes were large and dark. We looked at each other for a while and then suddenly she reached out her arm and pulled me toward her, my face in her waist. She smelled like grass.
“Would you like me to read to you?” Her voice sounded faint.
I shook my head.
“Do you think that you are too old for that kind of thing?”
I tried to shrug my shoulders. She let me go. I leaned against her hip and said, “I came to ask if you wanted to go to the bunker.”
Her gaze wandered, to the sea, the raw sky above it that, even now, was threatening a storm that would drive away this clarity. “Let’s wait. I want to walk in the rain. We’ll put on our windbreakers and boots and go outside.”
I laughed, a bit incredulously.
“What, you think I’m getting as funny as your grandmother?”
“She was standing in the hallway, talking to a photograph.”
My mother climbed out of the window seat and stretched her arms. Her back hollowed, her face was turned to the ceiling. “Why on earth do we ever come here?” she said. “This must be the most boring place in the world.”
She was acting strange this afternoon. She was saying things she didn’t normally say.
She ruffled my hair with her fingertips, which made it stick straight up, and then walked around the room, her hands clasped behind her back, with odd little ballerina steps. She peered up at the framed photographs on the walls. Each photo, each print—some had been cut out of magazines, others came from markets and bazaars—had a special meaning. Above the wide wooden bed hung a photograph of a path that disappeared into a dark, tangled forest. There were other pictures, hung at varying heights, showing elaborate picnics held long ago under shady trees, empty bottles here and there, baskets of strawberries and peaches. There were photographs of boat races with lots of flags and cheering spectators, and a reproduction of a page from a medieval book of hours, in which one group of travelers toiled up a winding mountain path while another group strolled down a wide dirt road from one jolly inn to the next.
WHEN MY FATHER was moved from the hospital to the village in the dunes, he had had a relapse. That afternoon he was running a fever and felt too weak to get out of bed. The doctor, who happened to be there anyway—he was just about to go off hunting with my grandfather—quickly examined the patient and said that it was “the exertion of the journey,” nothing to worry about. He advised rest, plenty of fresh fruit and fresh air. When he was gone, leaving behind the smell of boot wax and gun oil, the young nurse sat at her patient’s bedside, musing. She looked at the patient, lying there on his pillow in a troubled sleep. His forehead was beaded with droplets of sweat, his parched lips seemed to be searching for something. The exertion of the journey? Nothing to worry about? She wasn’t so sure.
She tried to imagine how he must feel, feverish, in unfamiliar surroundings, anxious, perhaps, about his future. A fallen angel. He had liked it when she read to him. “I hear your voice,” he had said, “and I close my eyes and see what you’re telling me. Sometimes the story goes left, but I go right.”
That afternoon she climbed the stairs to the attic, armed with a flashlight and the decisiveness of someone who didn’t plan to seek, but was certain she would find. She didn’t know when anyone had been up in the attic last. Her father never went up there, why should he? She wasn’t sure about her mother, but she couldn’t really imagine her moving around in this dark, dusty space in one of her voluminous black dresses.
When she got upstairs she saw that she was right. The last additions to the attic were standing, any which way, around the stairwell. Someone, her mother or perhaps the maid, had lugged everything up the stairs and dumped it on the first available bit of floor space, then fled. She shone her flashlight over the dusty boxes and piles. Right next to the stairwell stood a crate that had once contained wine and now turned out to be full of commemorative plates, flags and pennons, and hideous tin beakers. She held a plate up to her flashlight and read the words around the rim. The pseudo-medieval handwriting was hard to decipher, but it wasn’t long before she figured out that it was a souvenir of the mayor’s visit to a Belgian city. The rest was more of the same: a shield commemorating the fifth anniversary of a friendly alliance between her father’s village and that of a French mayor, whom she suddenly remembered as the “Uncle Gaston” who had had the annoying habit of grabbing her hands and rubbing them along his badly shaven cheeks; an embroidered standard made by the local chapter of the Christian Housewives’ Association on the occasion of the Queen’s silver wedding anniversary; the dusty, moth-eaten head of a wild boar that, according to the inscription on a small metal plaque, had been shot on October 3, 1929, in the Black Forest. She pushed the crate out of the way and shone her flashlight over the dark walls. The attic extended over the length and breadth of the house and was divided into a large central area, where the stairs emerged, and four tiny rooms, on the left and right, that had once been the servants’ quarters. As a child she had always wanted to play up here, but her mother, probably because she herself didn’t dare go upstairs, wouldn’t allow it.
When she returned downstairs that afternoon she was carrying a burlap bag over her shoulder that was so heavy she had to stop and rest halfway down the stairs. Back in the room of her patient, who had fallen into a deep sleep and whose face had an unpleasantly waxen serenity about it, she began distributing her loot over the walls. The two items still hanging there—a funereal painting of the moors and a calendar that had last been torn off in February 1937, with a faded illustration of a small Romanesque chapel in the north of the country—she laid on the top shelf of a closet. Even though she had to hammer in a nail here and there, the sick man didn’t wake up.
At the end of the day, when my father finally opened his eyes, the sun was shining so low that he seemed to float in soft orange light. His eyes fell on a group of men in straw hats with striped b
ands, clutching an enormous oar. In the background the shady water of a tree-lined rowing course sparkled, little flags hung from the trees and boats lay keel-side-down in the grass. He had seen a boating race once, in England, and now his thoughts turned back to that afternoon. The scent of freshly mown grass rose in his nostrils, he could smell the dark water. Ice tinkled in glasses and a woman’s high laughter drifted up to the treetops. Then he dropped off to sleep again.
As it turned out, it wasn’t the journey that had caused my father’s relapse, nor any other type of exertion, but an infection in an old wound. A course of penicillin, for which my mother jabbed a sturdy needle in his buttock twice a day, soon had him back on his feet, although my mother, with the same obstinacy with which she had once christened him Boris, would always insist that it was the paintings and photographs that had cured him.
The same painting that still hung in the sunny room that she now referred to as the dream room. I turned around and looked out at the sea, the light above the water, which cast a dirty green haze over the waves.
“It’s going to start pouring any minute,” I said.
My mother came and stood next to me. “Maybe it’ll be raining too hard to go outside.”
My face clouded over.
“But who cares! Quick, get your windbreaker. Put on your boots. We’re off!”
We ran out of the room, grabbed our jackets from the coat rack, and shot out the door before anyone could say anything sensible. We ran down the brick path to the gap in the dunes that opened onto the beach and felt the rising breeze. When we reached the foot of the dunes the wind came rushing toward us like an old friend. We backed away, grabbing each other by the sleeve. The tide was still going out. The wet strip of sand along the water was a cluttered trail of driftwood, seaweed, and dead fish. The sky was dark gray with a sickly purplish hue. We walked about a quarter of an hour along the tidemark, kicking at the flotsam and jetsam with the toes of our boots, and then turned back. As we reached the bunker, the clouds burst and the rain came down in such thick drops that we had to stop walking, because we suddenly couldn’t see a thing. Then we ran into the dune, slipped through the hole in the bunker, and sat there, crouched, our backs against the damp concrete.
The rain fell the way it had been falling for weeks: as if melting glass was streaming from the heavens. My mother rummaged around in the pocket of her jacket and took out her cigarettes. The narrow entrance to the bunker began to smell spicily of Luckies. I followed a shred of smoke as it drifted outside and disappeared in the pouring rain. In the distance, barely visible in the roaring flood of rain, someone was walking. He came down the brick path, half stooped, shoulders hunched. He was wearing a long coat that he held closed at the neck with his right hand. Not far from the bunker, he came to a halt. Shielding his eyes with his hand, he looked first left, then right. The entrance to the bunker was dark and the rain made it even harder to see. His eyes skimmed over the dunes, the bunker, the gap between the dunes, the sea. Then he pulled his collar tighter around him and walked onto the beach.
Next to me, my mother threw the rest of her cigarette in the sand and slowly got to her feet. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s give it a try.” As we were getting up, we suddenly heard a plaintive sound, like a baby crying. My mother raised her head. She took a step in the direction of where she thought the sound was coming from, turned back again—and then stood there like a watchful animal, head raised and tilted, listening. After a while she went farther into the bunker. Leaning forward, still halfway in the dark entrance, she lit a match.
“Smoking has its advantages,” she said.
Against the back wall, where it stank of filthy toilets and wet sand, lay a cat. My mother threw away the match, handed me the box, and asked me to light another one.
“I thought it was a child,” I said, as we looked at the cat in the restless light of the flame.
My mother squatted down next to the animal and examined it with the skill of a nurse. “Cats can sound frighteningly human,” she said. She felt its flanks with her right hand, while stroking the head with her left. I threw the match on the ground and lit another.
“We’ll stay here a while and wait. It won’t take long.”
“What won’t?”
“She’s having kittens.”
I recoiled. “I’ll wait outside.”
She looked at me over her shoulder and raised one eyebrow. “No you won’t. I’ll need you to light another match for me soon. And I want you to see this.”
“But I don’t want to see it!” I flung the match to the ground and shuffled my feet.
“You can’t avoid everything. We’re staying here.”
The cat had stopped howling. We, too, fell silent, in the muffled hush of the bunker. It was very dark and it was a long time before we were able to see something.
Nearly an hour passed before we left the bunker. In the meantime, the cat had four kittens, blind little worms that burrowed their noses into their mother’s belly. When we came outside, it had stopped raining. Tattered gray clouds scudded over the water, toward the shore, and except for one lonely figure at the tidemark, the beach was deserted. My mother was just turning around, toward the house, when I caught sight of the figure. I peered into the wind, my eyes watering, and didn’t hear my mother calling until she had come back to get me.
“Didn’t you hear? I…”
I didn’t look at her, but saw her hand go to her mouth.
“But that’s…”
There at the tidemark, massive and tall, his coattails flapping, staring at the raging sea, stood Humbert Coe.
THAT EVENING WE ATE in the parlor, by the light of a candelabra I had seen gathering dust on a sideboard for as long as I could remember. The candle flames swayed gently in the twilight and cast a feverish glow on the faces of my mother and Humbert Coe. A bottle had been brought up from the cellar that made Coe nod with approval. He had poured it with his large hands into a crystal decanter that was new to me.
It was a while before I realized that I hadn’t seen my grandparents for quite a while. When I asked about them, I was told that they had eaten upstairs.
I hadn’t exactly been looking forward to an interminable meal with my gun-and-rabbit-crazy grandfather and my vacantly staring grandmother, but the fact that they weren’t there, in their own house, seemed odd to me. I didn’t get the chance to pursue the matter. My mother firmly evaded my glances and launched into deep conversation with Coe.
The room was at the front of the house, where the large bay window provided a clear view of the rolling dunes and the great void of sea and sky. Now, in the darkness, you could see only the faint, distant light of the moon through shreds of cloud and the reflection of the flickering candles on the windowpane. A few hours earlier Coe had sat here, a towel draped across his shoulders, his hair still somewhat wet and wild. He drank from a cup that looked so small in those big hands that I would have found it perfectly normal if he had grabbed the whole teapot and drunk straight from the spout. There were still raindrops leaking from his hair and every now and then he gave a thunderous sneeze and shivered from head to toe.
It was soon decided that Coe would spend the night at my grandparents’ house. There weren’t many trains running at night, and besides, he was chilled to the bone. Even though he himself mumbled “taxi,” and that he’d be fine, really, my mother had brushed aside his objections with her usual briskness and asked the housekeeper to make up a bed in the dream room. I had thrown her a bemused look that she chose to ignore. Instead she sent me into the kitchen to see what we could serve for dinner that night. The cellar and pantry were well stocked, and there was a hare hanging in the scullery that the doctor had brought over two days before. When my mother came in an hour later to see where I was, the potatoes had already been peeled and the hare lay browning in a roasting tin. I was sitting on a kitchen chair, in the hot, heady scent of dried prunes simmering in wine, and stared at the drops of condensation rolling down the kitchen
window.
“What are you making?”
I told her. She looked at me with a mixture of surprise and uneasiness. “I thought you weren’t allowed to shoot hare in the summertime,” she said. I grinned. She smiled wearily. “Did you skin that beast yourself?” I nodded. A barely perceptible shiver went through her. Once, when she was still very young, Grandfather had taught her how to skin a hare and pluck a pheasant. It was not a success. For several years afterward, she had been a vegetarian.
She disappeared into the cellar and after a while came back with two bottles. She put them on the table and looked at me expectantly. I nodded, she sat down across from me at the table and let her eyes drift around the room. “Do you think we should come and live here some day?” I shrugged. “I don’t think Boris would like it much,” I said. She shook her head. I had the vague feeling that she wanted to tell me something or wanted me to say something to her, but I had no idea what. “Well,” she said, “I’ll bring the wine into the other room.”
She was already at the door to the hallway when I called her name. She looked back over her shoulder, bottles in her arms, wisps of hair around her face. She looked much younger than she really was. Her cheeks were flushed and the light from the lamp glittered in her eyes.
“How did he end up here, do you think?”
She looked at me for a while. “Coe?” she said. She shrugged her shoulders, pushed open the door with her foot, and walked on.
The Dream Room Page 6