by Jem Poster
The landscape has the luminous clarity of a Dutch painting. A cold blue sky without a cloud. Not a breath of wind stirring the trees or the brittle grasses. A covey of partridge huddled where the ground-cover thins at the wood’s edge. The roofs of the village below lightly dusted with snow, shining in the pale sunlight. A woman stands in a doorway, shading her eyes, looking up; but she does not move.
Suddenly the partridge rise, rocketing from the ground with a whirr of wings, skimming away across the sunlit hillside as the men enter the wood. The boy hangs back, holding the dog hard against his leg, his fingers twisted in the coarse hair at the back of its neck. Both are tense, the boy leaning forward, staring into the shadows, the dog quivering with suppressed energy.
They have found the girl. One of the men turns away, burying his face in his hands; but the others cluster around her, one leaning down to touch her cheek softly with his knuckles. There is no hurry. The sailcloth is unrolled and spread flat on the leaf-mould, and I see now that each corner is provided with a padded loop of rope. The body is stiff, but with something of the calm grace of a memorial effigy. They manoeuvre it awkwardly, with a kind of clumsy reverence, until it lies in the middle of the canvas. Her skirt has ridden up her calves to the knee; and now someone squats down and rearranges the rucked fabric, pulling it gently over her ankles.
I can feel the pressure of the loops on the palms of their hands as they carefully lift their burden; my own shoulders are taut with the strain. I know with what anxiety they hold her clear of the ground, avoiding the gnarled tree roots and the fallen branches, easing her towards the light. I understand their absurd solicitude for the insentient flesh and feel with them, for her, each jolt and bump of their slow descent through the frozen pasture.
Others have gathered by the gate at the foot of the hill, shivering, subdued, expectant, their breath clouding the still air. They gaze out and upward, tracking the progress of the returning party. The clouds are massing again on the horizon, the light beginning to fade from the sky. Someone lifts the bar and the gate swings wide.
There is more, I see that now. Almost impossible to make out at first, but the details sharpen as I examine them. It is night. The body is stretched naked on a deal table in the middle of a sparsely furnished room. Firelight; a candle burning in a chipped saucer at the girl’s right shoulder, a brown earthenware bowl at her left. The kettle on the hob begins to steam gently and a woman steps forward out of the shadows, carries it over to the table and fills the bowl. She has draped a sheet over the back of one of the chairs; and now she takes this in both hands and, with an abrupt, angry movement, tears off a strip of the coarse fabric. The sound rings out like a cry in the appalling stillness of the room.
The woman puts both hands to the nape of her neck and tightens the soiled blue ribbon which binds her thick hair. Then she sets to, plunging the strip of linen into the water, wringing it out and wiping the small white face from brow to chin. She does this for some time, gazing down as a woman might gaze at a newborn child; and as she works, her actions become increasingly delicate, increasingly tender, the cloth itself seeming to soften as she dabs it into the corners of the closed eyes, runs it down the sides of the nostrils and across the fine, downed contours of the upper lip. I see her wince as she presses it to the yellowish patch of bruising on the girl’s left cheek. It occurs to me that there may be other injuries, but the room darkens suddenly as I look, and for a while I can see nothing.
Her hair, then, what about her hair? Someone will have to see to that. And of course the woman does so, picking out the brown beech leaves and smoothing back the tangled curls as I smoothed them back that night in the moonlight. She makes no sound, but the tears begin to fall, lightly at first and then more steadily, wetting her lined cheeks and dropping on to the vacant, upturned face.
She has reached the neck. She draws the cloth with a long, slow movement down from the jawline to the collarbone and then round to the nape, damping the soft hair there, registering with a sharp spasm of bewildered love the knobbed contours of the skull behind the ear. And on down the body, painfully engrossed, swaying a little from side to side, caught up in the rhythm of the work until, quite unexpectedly, her legs buckle beneath her and she crumples and sags, flinging the cloth aside as she gropes for support. She steadies herself against the table and then, bending forward, lays her head on the girl’s cold belly, sobbing a little now, but quietly, her hands beginning to wander aimlessly, unhurriedly across the smooth surfaces.
So vivid, the stark candlelit interior, so sharply delineated; but not that, surely? Stories, she said, all stories; and if I ask myself why that story rather than another, I find I have no ready answer. This, then? Scrubbed white walls, a marble mortuary slab, a faint smell of carbolic. The drip of water into a ceramic trough. The body lying unattended in the chilly half-dark, awaiting the indignities of forensic examination, the disclosure of injuries more terrible than I have yet dared to imagine.
Is that it? Perhaps so; but in that case whose are they, the hands still moving with such unspeakable tenderness over the white flesh, brushing the ribs below the breasts, minutely responsive to the nuances of the sunken flanks and the soft skin on the inner surface of the thighs? Whose is the wet face pillowed on the belly? – the face suddenly lifted in an attitude of anguish so immediate, so intensely and irrefutably real that I start up from my chair like a madman, my own mouth framing a silent cry of pain.
And it strikes me that, plagued by unnameable terrors and disorientated by lack of sleep, I may indeed have become a little crazed. Certainly anyone might be forgiven for thinking so, stumbling into the curtained gloom to find me slumped in my greatcoat beside the cold hearth or pacing the floor, stubbled and unwashed, lips working soundlessly, my valise unopened and my clothes unchanged since my return.
I have gone backward and forward over the whole business, and I am little the wiser. What am I to make of them all, the recollections, the impressions, the elaborate inventions to which I return incessantly like a singed moth to a candle flame? Even the smallest detail seems questionable. A glance, a phrase, the faint sigh breathed from a kissed mouth: how should I interpret any one of these?
Or this, glimpsed yesterday from the window of the train? An isolated farmstead – brick-built house, thatched barns of local stone; late-morning sunlight reflected off the buildings and the white waste of snow around them; and in the yard, three figures, their faces turned to watch us pass. The man and the woman standing side by side with an easy familiarity, her head tilted slightly towards his, exposing the pale skin of her neck above her brown fur collar. Her right arm reaching down, hand resting on the shoulder of the small boy at her skirts; the man, mirroring her gesture, resting his left hand on the child’s other shoulder.
Nothing remarkable, you might think, in any of that. But I was struck by the delicate interalignment of the three bodies and by some related notion of the way lives might fuse and flourish in worlds unshadowed by my own preoccupations. Yes, and just for the barest instant I was swept up and outward by the force of my own perception, knowing it all as though I were part of it – the texture of the glowing brickwork, shared warmth of flesh and breath, the eloquent geometry of love.
And as I stared, the train swung round on the curve and the sun blazed through the window, filling the whole carriage with light. The landscape beyond the glass shimmered and dissolved. I craned forward in my seat, knowing they must still be out there somewhere, those three interlinked figures, at the heart of all that glare and dazzle; but my eyes, unused to such intensity, began to smart and weep and I was obliged, not without reluctance, to reach out and pull down the blind.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM
THE OVERLOOK PRESS
Rifling Paradise
Jem Poster
978-1-59020-048-3
“Creepy and confronting…captures the atmosphere of the bush, the beauty of our birds, and the harshness of colonial life.”
—Independence Week
ly
“Immediately gripping…an epic tale whose figures in a landscape encapsulate a turning point in history.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“A narrative so vivid that you can almost smell the eucalyptus…full of intrigue, emotion, and individual realization.”
—Morning Star
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM
THE OVERLOOK PRESS
Beyond Sleep
Willem Frederik Hermans
978-1-58567-988-1
“The language is dry; the socks are wet; the compass is lost. A masterpiece.”
—RODDY DOYLE
“A novel of worldly disengagement trembling on the edge of tragedy, all the more comic for being related in Hermans’ best poker-faced manner.”
—J.M. COETZEE
“An unusual and intriguing book, and a welcome introduction to the work of a neglected 20th century master.”
—Kirkus
The Darkroom of Damocles
Willem Frederik Hermans
978-1-59020-062-9
“I read it in a single sitting…a thriller during which the suspense never flags…a great novel.”
—MILAN KUNDERA
“A Dutch classic to rival Camus…an edgy, uneasy novel about the human condition, effortessly disguised as a thriller.”
—The Telegraph
“Hermans’ dry, exact prose makes us look through an ordinary window at an extraordinary world. What starts as a thriller, ends up as a metaphysical shock that will bring you to tears.”
—The Scotsman