Winter

by Ali Smith

  What will it have been like, the glass thing in front of the dog closing and the dog not knowing what was happening to it and the capsule hitting the sky then going beyond gravity and the dog still not knowing?

  Gravity’s what we have so that we don’t fly off the surface of the earth.

  Gravity, graveness.

  It is like there is now a dome over Sophia’s head and brain and consciousness and in it life is being flung about unknowing in what’s called space.

  Why aren’t you eating? mother said tonight at supper.

  I cannot eat, she said, for thinking about the graveness of the life of the small dog.

  What small dog? mother said.

  The little Russian dog that died, she said. The one they sent into space.

  But that was years ago, father said.

  Then a minute later he said:

  look, she’s crying now. Come on, girl. It was only a dog.

  She is very sensitive, mother said shaking her head because sensitivity is not a good thing.

  Leave her sensitivity alone, Iris said. It takes serious talent, to be as sensitive as Soph is.

  Iris is asleep in the other bed.

  Iris is supposed to be going to secretarial school to learn to have a useful career for the years before she gets married. But letters have been coming from the secretarial school saying she’s been consistently absent and has not been attending. Tautology, Iris said when the one saying those things came. Another came today. When father waved it over the dinner table at Iris, Iris took it, read it, pointed out first a mistake in spelling and then an inconsistency in marginal spacing, both of which proved, she said, that she knew more than they knew at secretarial college and therefore no longer needed attend.

  The little Russian dog had had a clever face in the photos from when it was still alive. Laika. But Sophia has to be less sensitive. She has to pull herself together. She pulls the sheet up over her eyes. The planets are there thousands of miles above her head whether she hides her eyes or not and floating between them and the earth in a vehicle as thin as a tin can there’s life itself and what’s written all over its face is pure blind trust.

  Sophia turns over.

  She turns over again.

  She can see with the light from the street lamp under the curtain that the alarm clock reads 4am.

  She can see Iris two foot away from her bed in her own bed and a thousand miles away in sleep.

  Sophia gets out of her ruined bed. She kneels down next to Iris’s head.

  What? Iris says.

  She says it blurredly.

  Can you what? Sure you can.

  She holds open the covers. Sophia climbs in, into the warm. She puts her head on Iris’s shoulder touching Iris’s head. She lies in the smell of Iris which is a mix of biscuit and perfume.

  Safe, Iris says.

  Then it’s years later, it’s more than three decades later. The world has turned and turned and turned. The moon has had people walking on it. The earth is surrounded with floating space debris, space junk and satellites, and something has woken Sophia in the middle of the night.

  She puts on the light. It’s Arthur. He is seven years old. He’s home for Christmas. He’s in tears.

  I have tried to be grown up about it, he says. But I couldn’t make it not be frightening and I am definitely frightened. Which is why I came.

  What could possibly be so frightening? Sophia says. Nothing’s as frightening as all that. Come here.

  Arthur has had a nightmare. He sits on the bed. He was running through a field of corn. It was a beautiful sunny day. Then halfway across the field he realized that he and all the other children running through the field had been poisoned just by breathing in and out and getting on their skin the chemicals that the farmers have used to spray the corn, and that though it was still a sunny day and the corn was still a lovely yellow colour they were all going to die, of illness.

  I woke up and I couldn’t breathe, Arthur says.

  Christ almighty. An Iris nightmare.

  Sophia gets up. She picks Arthur up. She tucks him into her bed. She sits on the side of the bed next to him.

  Now, she says. Listen. You’ve got to stop believing all the lies about the world being poisoned. And the bombs. And the chemicals. Because none of it is true.

  Isn’t it? Arthur says.

  No, Sophia says. Because why would the people who do things in the world want anything but the best for the world?

  But they do spray it with stuff, Arthur said. They do spray. I’ve seen them.

  Yes, but, Sophia says. But. That spraying is, it’s what we do to make it safe, to eat it, what’s growing in the fields. The things they spray the corn with gets rid of the insects and bugs and bacteria that would ruin it otherwise, and makes the weeds that would choke it die down to let the farmers harvest it without wasting any.

  Do the insects die? Arthur says.

  Yes. But that’s a good thing, Sophia says.

  Could they not just lift them off and take them to a different field where they don’t mind what they eat? Arthur says.

  They’re just insects, Sophia says.

  Some insects are beautiful, Arthur says. Some are important.

  Yes, but you don’t want insects in your cornflakes, Sophia says.

  Yes, but do they have to die? Arthur says.

  You don’t want insects in your bread, Sophia says. You don’t want germs in your wheatgerm.

  Arthur laughs.

  Wheatgerm germs, he says.

  I’ll tell you what you do want, she says.

  What? he says.

  You want a hot chocolate. Don’t you?

  Yes, Arthur says. I do want that, thank you.

  And then I’ll tell you a story, she says. Yes?

  What kind of a story? Arthur says.

  A true story, Sophia says. A Christmas story.

  Arthur frowns.

  Then we’ll play a guessing game, she says. Where you try and guess what it is you’re going to get for Christmas.

  Arthur nods.

  Okay then, Sophia says. I’ll be back in a minute. Will you be okay by yourself for just a minute?

  I think so, Arthur says. If it’s no longer than a single minute.

  Well, you’d better be, Sophia says. Because I can’t make a hot chocolate unless I’m down in the kitchen for the time it takes to make it, can I?

  No, Arthur says. I suppose not.

  And that might be a little longer than a single minute, but I’ll be back as soon as it’s made, she says. Okay?

  Arthur nods.

  Sophia goes downstairs.

  Christ almighty. Ten past four in the morning.

  She stands in the kitchen and shakes her head.

  The child. So sensitive that he literally radiates sensitivity. She herself feels physically terrible, bombarded by transference aches, every time she is anywhere near him and his sensitivity. And Christ. The Iris nightmares. She hasn’t had the Iris nightmares herself for years, the ones with the tower of cloud in the distance, the flash of light, the waiting in the nondescript building with your heart going mad in your chest for the impact then the blindness that means your eyes have melted and are running down your face.

  She takes a deep breath in.

  She breathes it out as a sigh.

  She mixes drinking-chocolate paste with milk then fills the mug with boiling water like they used to do when she was a kid, when she and Iris were kids and you weren’t to use up all the milk.

  Then?

  It’s almost a decade after that.

  It’s not long before her father dies.

  Sophia is on the phone to him; he has called her at the office number. It is quite rare for him to do such a thing so it must surely be important. But no, it isn’t important and her father has had her hauled out of the worldwide strategy video conference-call that’s been set up for weeks.

  The dog, he says. The Russian dog.

  Yes, there was a dog, wasn’
t there? Sophia says. But I’m unable to talk right now. Can we speak later?

  He’s phoned, he says, because he thought she’d like to hear that the truth’s just finally come out, that the poor dog that died up there more than forty years ago didn’t have to circle the earth in that tin can for a whole week before it died. No. Lucky for that dog, it died only a few hours after they blasted it into space. Seven hours at the most is all it suffered for.

  Right, Sophia says. And do you need anything? If you do, just tell Jeanette, I’ll put you through to Jeanette and you can tell her if there’s anything.

  Her father is saying he has never forgotten how much it mattered to her and that he’s phoned her because he thought she’d like to know what he’s just read, today, in today’s paper –

  she can hear him shaking the paper about down the phone to get to the right page –

  that the Russian scientists who’d taken that little stray dog off the streets, pretty little thing, friendly, intelligent, you can see it in the photos, bright little thing, and put her in the capsule for the experiment – which became a rush job in any case because the old bald Khrushchev was being vain and had wanted the firing of the dog into space to be a publicity stunt to celebrate something or other on a certain date, though the scientists doing the experiments with the dog weren’t ready – anyway these scientists, the very men who did it, had finally revealed the truth that’s been being lied about for all these years, that the little dog had died in the severe heat levels only a few hours after being fired up there, that the dog had never been expected to survive in any case, in fact they’d known it would die, they’d made the decision that it would die, before they sent it up there, and they’d just publicly said for the first time they were sorry.

  Thought you’d like to know. Thought you’d appreciate knowing, this above all. That they wished now they’d never done it, never done it at all, to the dog, her father says. And, that’s, well, as your mother’d say, life –

  Lovely story, Sophia says. Got to go. Call you later this eve.

  – time for you,

  she can hear his far voice smaller and further away as she stretches over, pushes the PA button, replaces the receiver.

  —

  Burnt butter smell all through the house, middle of the night.

  Sophia got up without waking her sister who was the same deep sleep snorer she’d always been.

  Hi, Charlotte said.

  Sophia sat down at the kitchen table.

  We have to stop meeting like this, she said.

  I like it. Why do we have to stop? Charlotte said.

  No, I don’t mean it literally. It’s not literal. It’s a joke. An English cliché, Sophia said. But what I don’t understand, myself, Charlotte, is how you know about Shakespeare but aren’t familiar with such a common cliché.

  Which common cliché? Charlotte said.

  What I just said. We have to stop meeting like this, Sophia said.

  But I like our meeting like this, Charlotte said.

  Oh very funny, Sophia said.

  And don’t call me Charlotte, call me Lux, she said.

  I’ve only just got used to not calling you your full name inside my head, Sophia said. I can’t call you a name that isn’t yours.

  You’ve been calling me a name that isn’t mine since I met you, Charlotte said. We have to stop meeting like that.

  Why do we? Sophia said. Since whoever you are to yourself, you are Charlotte to me. That’s my view.

  I’m not Charlotte, I’m Lux, Charlotte said. Who I am to myself is what in the language of English cliché is called a clever clogs egghead smartypants brainiac nerd, who started a university course here three years ago but ran out of money and now can’t afford to complete it. I’m from Croatia. By which I mean I was born there. My family moved to Canada, I was quite small. It was far, but not far enough. There is a problem. The problem is, my family is war-wounded however far away we go. Nobody in our close family died in the war, nobody was physically wounded in it, I wasn’t even born till after it. But we were wounded, I was wounded, all the same. And I love my family, I love them, but when I’m with them, my wounds reopen. So I can’t live with them. I can’t be with them. So I came here. But my family haven’t much money, and I ran out of money. And now I can’t get a good job because nobody knows if I’ll still be able to be here this time next year or when they’ll decide we have to go. So I’m keeping myself below the radar, which is how by chance I happened to meet your son, and the truth is, your son happens to be paying me a good amount, cash in hand, to accompany him here so he won’t feel bad about not being able to come here with his girlfriend, Charlotte, who he’s had a fight with. With whom he’s had a fight. Less informal, but more grammatically correct. You see, my English is excellent. Though it’s true, I’m not up on all the clichés. And it’s my view, Mrs Cleves, since we get to live by our views in your kitchen this evening, that I dislike our meetings happening, yours and mine I mean, when I’m the only person eating something. So I’d like to rectify this. Is there anything I can make you, to eat, right now? Anything you’d like?

  To tell you the truth, Sophia said. I am actually feeling a little like eating something right now.

  An excellent truth. What do you feel like eating? the Croatian woman (no, more of a girl really, Sophia decided) said.

  I don’t precisely know what I want, Sophia said.

  The girl went to the fridge. She took out a cantaloupe, cut it open and spooned out its seeds.

  Would you like me to cut it into small chunks or would you like to eat it like this? she said holding up one of the cut halves. Which is one of the reasons I like this kind of melon. It is a fruit that comes complete with its own bowl, already in the bowl of itself.

  You remind me of someone, Sophia said.

  Is her name Charlotte? the girl said.

  Ha, Sophia said.

  She picked up the spoon.

  Half a small melon later she put down the spoon and said:

  I’d like to tell you a little about my son’s father.

  I’d like that, the girl said.

  She sat down at the table and put her head on her hands to listen.

  The love of my life, Sophia said. There really is such a thing. Though I spent almost no time with him, just one night in the dead of winter, then some years later half a week in the dead of summer.

  Why did you spend so little time? the girl said.

  It’s just how it was, Sophia said.

  Ah, the girl said. How it was. I know about that.

  It was Christmas Day night, Sophia said. I was staying in this same house we’re in right now, with my sister and some of her colleagues. They were living here then, a great gang of them. I was in my early thirties, my mother had died not long before. I went for a walk, down the path, the same path, to where the main gate is now; there wasn’t a gate there then, it was just an opening off the roadside with a sign on it saying the name of the house, and I went off for a walk in the dark, I didn’t like the people my sister was living with, I was thinking, I’ll get murdered, I’ll get attacked, I’ll get lost and it’ll serve her, serve them all, right.

  And I was walking along with my head down thinking these ridiculous thoughts and I literally walked into a man, in the dark.

  He was staying with some people who lived close by. He’d come out for a walk, he said, because he was sad.

  There’d been a sea storm, a Danish ship that went down, and I thought he might live locally and be worried about that, or about local people out in the rescue boats. He said he didn’t know about the drowned people or the lifeboats. He was sad because he’d heard on the news that Chaplin had just died.

  Who? the girl said.

  Charlie Chaplin. He was a very famous film star in the silent days, Sophia said.

  Oh, I know. With the big feet, the girl said. The big shoes. The funny one. There’s a statue in my home city.

  So we were both sad about something, Sophi
a said. We went for a walk, we walked to the village. He went up the steps of a house and took the Christmas wreath off the front door and he held it up and he said, I am going to use this as my picture frame for tonight, and he looked back at me through it, and he said, oh yes. Yes, that’s right. So I took the wreath, it was made of holly. And I looked through it and I saw him. I mean I saw him.

  We took it with us to sit under this tree and we looked at everything through it all night.

  Then after we said good night, good morning, we swapped addresses, and this was well before email, Charlotte, or finding people on Google, and in those days people lost touch a lot more. Which wasn’t as bad a thing as you might think. Not that I wanted to lose touch with this man, I liked him, he interested me. But not long after that night I lost my purse, I left it in a taxi, and his address was folded inside it. And he was never in touch with me. So we didn’t see each other again, not for years. Eight years.

  Then I was walking along a London street one day, I was a different person really by then. But the man who’d never written to me, I saw him, we caught each other’s eye when we walked past each other on the street. And we were so happy to see each other again that we made a plan, we planned to go to Paris for a week. And we did go to Paris.

  But it wasn’t right, not for me. I knew for sure there in Paris. And I was too busy for mistakes and far too busy for an improvised life by then.

  It was Paris we went to because he wanted to see pictures, we went to the famous museums and galleries. In fact, he’d been here that Christmas at all because he was interested in an artist, a sculptor who lived quite near here. I mean, she was dead, she’d died some time before, but he’d come because he liked what she made so much and he’d wanted to see where she’d lived. He had a piece of her sculpture at his house, I saw it. Really it was just two round stones. But they were strikingly beautiful stones. The sculpture was in two pieces, I mean. They were meant to fit together.

  But we didn’t fit, he and I.

  He thought it was because he was too old. He was older, and compared to the age I was I did think he was ancient. He was in his sixties then. Well, now I know that your sixties feel the same as all the other ages, and your seventies. You never stop being yourself on the inside, whatever age people think you are by looking at you from the outside.