A silhouette moved slightly among the furthest apple trees, as if hiding behind the fork of one of the trunks; the shape was warmer and more lithe than the trunks of the fruit trees. Isabel stopped. The grass was silent; the leaves on the apple trees said nothing. It stuck to the bark of the tree like a second skin. In the thick dusk it was impossible to tell - it could just have been a knot in the tree, an inanimate shape distorted by the night.
‘Ilya?’ Isabel shouted.
Only the wind ran through the leaves of the apple trees. The forked tree stood motionless, nobody moved from it, nor made a sound, nor answered. Isabel turned and flew quickly back into the veranda, listening to whether someone was following her. The darkness breathed down her neck loudly. Disconcerted, she slammed the door closed, as if she were never going to open it again. She checked, then, the other two doors, and shouted for Nut who was half asleep. Gingerly she approached the window – as if it were infected – and drew the blinds.
Before going to bed she put a bread knife next to her pillow.
In the morning she pulled herself together and called Liudas.
Over the four years they had seen each other occasionally.
‘We need to talk. If you’re in town shall we go for a coffee?’
Whenever Isabel agreed to have a coffee with Liudas she liked to go somewhere on the main street in town; somewhere so noisy they could barely hear each other speak. They could look around, watch people, drop a purse or a teaspoon under the table and then look for it for a long time - anything so that they didn’t have to look at each other. There had been a couple of times when Isabel had gone into town mainly for coffee with Liudas, having pretended she had business there. Each time Liudas would repeat the same offer – to take a last minute cheap holiday. He would try to convince her that as the ‘Liudvikas’ agency was thriving, Isabel could choose any country she wanted and Liudas would pay for it. He would, in fact, pay for something more expensive. If she was short of money. He promised her two tickets but never offered to accompany her. The other ticket was meant for somebody Isabel might want to go with. Her girlfriend or a man - Liudas’ eyes would narrow, attempting to read in Isabel’s face whether she had somebody for the other ticket. Isabel, though, would only shake her head stubbornly. She would come up with an excuse like she couldn’t leave the house empty, as if she could hear from a distance how dusty it would get. When she imagined climbing onto the plane – she hated planes – a terrible chill would freeze her heart, as though somebody was tightening an invisible umbilical cord that bound Isabel to her home. In other words, she spoke and behaved in the same way she had always done, the style which had attracted Liudas so much at first and then pushed him away. The style which made his fingers tremble now, when he bent to pick up Isabel’s tea spoon from the floor. Above the table, two glittering, damp eyes waited for him in the café where the noise made everything seem less intimate. I could have picked it up myself. Don’t do that next time, their owner reproached him. And the same dampness would appear suddenly in Liudas’ eyes as well.
And unconsciously she would also try to read – from his clothes, from his barely changed manners and his scent which at times was so familiar, but sometimes scared her with its newness - whether Liudas had somebody else for the other ticket. Or at least for a double bed. But even if there was a woman circling him – and he was that type of man that women circled - Liudas probably wouldn’t have taken her on a trip. Why was Isabel so certain about that? Maybe because there still flashed the old anchor of gentleness and care in his eyes. That, though, didn’t guarantee that Isabel was still the only woman Liudas looked at.
Like two animals they would meet to sniff each other, to make sure that they were still the same, that they could still read each other, that the old, redundant intimacy still smouldered in them. And then they parted, having checked each other out, or marked each other, though they didn’t think about it that way. They never invited each other to their homes. Isabel knew only that Liudas had moved again and lived now somewhere in the Old Town. He had three rooms with windows looking out onto Bekesh mountain. Liudas hadn’t been back to Puskai since Isabel had set the barn on fire.
So that morning, having woken up with the bread knife at her side, the sun playing on its blade, Isabel called Liudas, barely able to control her excitement.
For a long time he didn’t answer. Finally she heard a quiet Hello at the other end of the line.
‘I need to leave.’ The words sprang from her easily.
‘Isabel, is that you?’
‘To the mountains. Get me a trip to the mountains.’
THE IDEA of the trip washed through her in an uncontrollable, long-awaited, unstoppable wave. There was a burden deep in Isabel’s heart which for years had been hidden from the sunlight, growing beneath the dark, cool sheets, incubated like some kind of disastrous egg. Compared with that baggage, the travel bag into which she threw some underwear, some warm clothes, a toothbrush and a hair brush seemed incredibly light. The bag was only to distract inquisitive eyes; Isabel could travel without it in fact. She couldn’t find her mirror - the kind of round powder mirror women take on trips - anywhere. Perhaps she had broken it, or had thrown it away when everybody had left her so suddenly. For years it had been difficult for her to have a face, to push herself, day in, day out, like some kind of meaningless monument, to suffer the thoughts that ruthlessly tore at her mind leaving wounds that would not heal. Or worse, to pretend those thoughts didn’t bother her and that therefore she was happy. She had shattered her brain so that it no longer reflected the events that had happened long ago and so that the lost faces didn’t shout at her in the night, bending over her bed like over a well in the cemetery. She had smashed the mirrors and had forgotten everything, though she hadn’t forgiven anybody, and that deliberate annihilation of the past didn’t mean that it disappeared, it just grew sourer and the large, dark lump grew in her gut.
She took it all with her, everything that had been growing inside her, everything that had been accumulating in her for years, as much as she was able to carry. She took the light of the sunset in the doorway of the barn, the twilight in the ferns, the wound in the stomach that had opened again on the way to the city. All those endless days when she had stood slowly dying before the shirt of her son, in front of his pencils left in the shape of a cross, the ball of modelling clay, trying to explain and to justify to herself the injustice, to put everything back together again. All those nights when she had listened to the other-worldly sounds, when she was afraid and hated, when she had killed in her mind and then resurrected from the dead.
She had never been to the mountains but longed for them as if knowing that their hostile nature would be cleansing; she longed for their pure, welcoming emptiness in which the most hardened knots in her heart could be unravelled and melt away.
She sped along the road – that road which headed into town as straight and cold as the blade of a knife. Isabel felt a new lightness as she drove, as if it were the last time she would pass along that road, and it was true, she didn’t know if she ever would again. I am getting lighter, she thought. And then, almost losing control on a sharp bend, she laughed – I am light!
The plane was due to leave early the next morning. Isabel had arranged to stay overnight at her friend’s house and leave her car there.
It was getting dark; in the city the street lights were on. Turning at the train station Isabel thought: I will never do the same thing twice again. She was not quite sure what this might mean, but these thoughts that came to her raised her spirits.
She left her car in the car park and went to exchange some money for the next day’s journey. The queue was long but moved fast.
It felt quite natural to be among people, but she was a little distant, as if in a dream. She didn’t feel anxious or have a desperate need to leave immediately. The bank clerk looked tired but pleasant; Isabel felt the warmth of her fingers on the banknotes.
In the street som
ething annoyed her. It was dark and the street light shone in a melancholy manner above the trolleybus stop. Next to her Mercedes there was a dark shadow – when she looked more carefully she saw that it was a man, a young man wearing a black cap and carrying a bucket in his hand. It was easy to see, even from a distance, that he was begging.
‘Missus, give me some money, I washed your car,’ the boy said motioning with his hand.
She didn’t recognise his voice, she couldn’t have recognised it; it had been so long ago.
But suddenly something rippled through Isabel, scorched her like electricity – they were both startled, their eyes locking onto each other.
Only his eyes were still the same – the rest was distorted, stretched out, as if re-made. Those features that had been closed up blossomed now, acquiring a vicious brightness and a terrible, ghastly beauty.
They leapt away from each, repulsed like two magnets. Isabel slid inside her car and slammed the door. She sat there for a moment with her eyes lowered and felt a shiver run through her body, sensing, still, through the glass that child.
He stood there, a dark smudge with a slightly lighter face. Only the glass separated them. There had always been something to separate them.
He stood there like stranger. He wasn’t afraid, he didn’t run away. He only needed a coin from Isabel.
Isabel fished some money from the pocket of her jacket and reached out to him. From the darkness a greedy hand grasped at the coins; Isabel jumped as her fingers brushed against his clammy palm. In her mind’s eye the blade of a knife flashed with lightning speed. Only the coins flashed now, flashed and fell from her hand, disappearing into Ilya’s dark shadow. He didn’t thank her, as if he was afraid to let her hear his adolescent voice. Taking his plastic bucket and soapy water into the hostile darkness of the station car park, as if he was afraid of anything that might reveal himself to her, he hurried to his accomplices, a nocturnal hunting pack, who lurked further away among the cars with their buckets.
Ilya exchanged a couple of words with the group and then broke away from them. He walked toward the kiosks. He didn’t turn once to see if she had left. Isabel watched his cap as it moved among the crowd, straining to see as he moved away.
Suddenly she was flooded with a feeling of gentleness, a gentleness that had no explanation or reason; a wave that liberated and set right her feelings. Something which came from the earth; from the light; from the ferns; from the depth of the womb; something which was always right and never fully exposed. The lope of the boy as he walked away struck her loins as if, fifteen years before, his head had pushed out into the world from between her thighs.
It reminded her of that feeling of newness she had felt driving along the road.
A groan rose from deep inside Isabel, from the very core of her being, as if she were pulling out the mouldy, moth-eaten sheets of her heart. Her heart moved, contracted, as if resisting, squirming before ripping – but she knew that she would be able to do it.
A clean, empty space was opening up behind the glass, a space cut open by the sun.
The mountains were right there.
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Breathing Into Marble Page 14
