Mythic Journeys

by Paula Guran

  Why do they always have to change us into something else? I wondered, and sat back to watch the movie.

  Berlin was a shock. We are by nature solitary and obsessive, which has its own dangers—like Narcissus, we can drown in silence, gazing at a reflection in a still pool.

  But in a city, we can become disoriented and exhausted. We can sicken and die. We are long-lived, but not immortal.

  So Arethusa had chosen my flat carefully. It was in Schöneberg, a quiet, residential part of the city. There were no high-rises. Chestnut trees littered the sidewalks with armored fruit. There were broad streets where vendors sold sunflowers and baskets of hazelnuts; old bookstores, a little shop that stocked only socks, several high-end art galleries; green spaces and much open sky.

  “Poets lived there,” Arethusa told me, her voice breaking up over my cell phone. “Before the last big war.”

  My flat was in a street of century-old apartment buildings. The foyer was high and dim and smelled of pipe tobacco and pastry dough. The flat itself had been carved from a much larger suite of rooms. There was a pocket-sized kitchenette, two small rooms facing each other across a wide hallway, a tiny, ultramodern bath.

  But the rooms all had high ceilings and polished wooden floors glossy as bronze. And the room facing a courtyard had wonderful northern light.

  I set this up as my studio. I purchased paints and sketchpads, a small easel. I set up my laptop, put a bowl of apples on the windowsill where the cool fall air moved in and out. Then I went to work.

  I couldn’t paint.

  Philip said that would happen. He used to joke about it—you’re nothing without me, you only use me, what will you do if ever I’m gone, hmmmm?

  Now he was gone, and it was true. I couldn’t work. Hours passed, days; a week.

  Nothing.

  I flung open the casement windows, stared down at the enclosed courtyard and across to the rows of windows in other flats just like mine. There were chestnut trees in the yard below, neat rows of bicycles lined up beneath them. Clouds moved across the sky as storms moved in from the far lands to the north. The wind tore the last yellow leaves from the trees and sent them whirling up toward where I stood, shivering in my moth-eaten sweater.

  The wind brought with it a smell: the scent of pine trees and the sea, of rock and raw wool. It was the smell of the north, the scent of my island—my true island, the place that had been my home, once. It filled me not with nostalgia or longing but with something strange and terrible; the realization that I had no longer had a home. I had only what I made on the page or canvas. I had bound myself to a vision.

  Byblis fell hopelessly in love and became a fountain. Echo wasted into a sound in the night. Hamadryads die when their trees die.

  What would become of me?

  I decided to go for a walk.

  It is a green city. Philip had never told me that. He spoke of the wars, the Nazis, the bombs, the Wall. I wandered along the Ebersstrasse to the S-Bahn station; then traveled to the eastern part of the city, to the university, and sat at a cafe beneath an elevated railway, where I ate roasted anchovies and soft white cheese while trains racketed overhead. The wall behind me was riddled with bullet holes. If this building had been in the western part of the city, it would have been repaired or torn down. In the east there was never enough money for such things. When I placed my hand upon the bullet holes they felt hot, and gave off a faint smell of blood and scorched leather. I finished my lunch and picked up a bit of stone that had fallen from the wall, put it in my pocket with some chestnuts I had gathered, and walked on.

  The sun came out after a bit. Or no, that may have been another day—almost certainly it was. The leaves were gone from the linden trees, but it was still lovely. The people were quiet, speaking in low voices.

  But they were seemingly as happy as people ever are. I began to take my sketchbooks with me when I walked, and I would sit in a cafe or a park and draw. I found that I could draw Philip from memory. I began to draw other things, too—the lindens, the ugly modern buildings elbowing aside the older terraces that had not been destroyed by the bombings. There were empty fountains everywhere; and again, here in the eastern part of the city there had been no money to restore them or to keep the water flowing. Bronze Nereids and Neptunes rose from them, whitened with bird droppings. Lovers still sat beside the empty pools, gazing at drifts of dead leaves and old newspapers while pigeons pecked around their feet. I found this beautiful and strange, and also oddly heartening.

  A few weeks after my arrival, Philip called. I hadn’t replied to his e-mails, but when my cell phone rang, I answered.

  “You’re in Berlin?” He sounded amused but not surprised. “Well, I wanted to let you know I’m going to be gone again, a long trip this time. Damascus. I’ll come see you for a few days before I go.”

  He told me his flight time, then hung up.

  What did I feel then? Exhilaration, desire, joy: but also fear. I had just begun to paint again; I was just starting to believe that I could, in fact, work without him.

  But if he were here?

  I went into the bedroom. On the bed, neatly folded, was another thing I had brought with me: Philip’s sweater. It was an old, tweed-patterned wool sweater, in shades of umber and yellow and russet, with holes where the mice had nested in it back in the cottage. He had wanted to throw it out, years ago, but I kept it. It still smelled of him, and I slept wearing it, here in the flat in Schöneberg, the wool prickling against my bare skin. I picked it up and buried my face in it, smelling him, his hair, his skin, sweat.

  Then I sat down on the bed. I adjusted the lamp so that the light fell upon the sweater in my lap; and began, slowly and painstakingly, to unravel it.

  It took a while, maybe an hour. I was careful not to fray the worn yarn, careful to tie the broken ends together. When I was finished, I had several balls of wool; enough to make a new sweater. It was late by then, and the shops were closed. But first thing next morning I went to the little store that sold only socks and asked in my halting German where I might find a knitting shop. I had brought a ball of wool to show the woman behind the counter. She laughed and pointed outside, then wrote down the address. It wasn’t far, just a few streets over. I thanked her, bought several pairs of thick argyle wool socks, and left.

  I found the shop without any trouble. I know how to knit, though I haven’t done so for a long time. I found a pattern I liked in a book of Icelandic designs. I bought the book, bought the special circular needles you use for sweaters, bought an extra skein of wool in a color I liked because it reminded me of woad, not quite as deep a blue as indigo. I would work this yarn into the background. Then I returned home.

  I had nearly a week before Philip arrived. I was too wound up to paint. But I continued to walk each day, finding my way around the hidden parts of the city. Small forgotten parks scarcely larger than a backyard, where European foxes big as dogs peered from beneath patches of brambles; a Persian restaurant near my flat, where the smells of coriander and roasting garlic made me think of my island long ago. A narrow canal like a secret outlet of the Spree, where I watched a kingfisher dive from an overhanging willow. I carried my leather satchel with me, the one that held my sketchbooks and charcoal pencils and watercolors. I wanted to try using watercolors.

  But now the satchel held my knitting, too, the balls of wool and the pattern book and the half-knit sweater. When I found I couldn’t paint or draw, I’d take the sweater out and work on it. It was repetitive work, dreamlike, soothing. And one night, back in the flat, I dug around in the bureau drawer until I found something else I’d brought with me, an envelope I’d stuck into one of my notebooks.

  Inside the envelope was a curl of hair I’d cut from Philip’s head one night while he slept. I set the envelope in a safe place and, one by one, carefully teased out the hairs. Over the next few days I wove them into the sweater. Now and then I would pluck one of my own hairs, much longer, finer, ash gold, and knit that into the pattern as
well.

  They were utterly concealed, of course, his dark curls, my fair, straight hair: all invisible. I finished the sweater the morning Philip arrived.

  It was wonderful seeing him. He took a taxi from the airport. I had coffee waiting. We fell into bed. Afterward I gave him the sweater.

  “Here,” I said. “I made you something.”

  He sat naked on the bed and stared at it, puzzled. “Is this mine?”

  “Try it on. I want to see if it fits.”

  He shrugged, then pulled it on over his bare chest.

  “Does it fit?” I asked. “I had to guess the measurements.”

  “It seems to.” He smoothed the thick wool, October gold and russet flecked with woad; then tugged at a loose bit of yarn on the hem.

  “Oops,” I said, frowning. “Don’t worry, I’ll fix that.”

  “It’s beautiful. Thank you. I didn’t know you knew how to knit.”

  I adjusted it, tugging to see if it hung properly over his broad shoulders.

  “It does,” I said, and laughed in relief. “It fits! Does it feel right?”

  “Yeah. It’s great.” He pulled it off then got dressed again, white T-shirt, blue flannel shirt, the sweater last of all. “Didn’t I used to have a sweater like this, once?”

  “You did,” I said. “Come on, I’m hungry.”

  We walked arm in arm to the Persian restaurant, where we ate chicken simmered in pomegranates and crushed walnuts, and drank wine the color of oxblood. Later, on the way back to the flat, we ambled past closed shops, pausing to look at a display of icons, a gallery showing the work of a young German artist I had read about.

  “Are you thinking of showing here?” Philip asked. “I don’t mean this gallery, but here, in Berlin?”

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about it much.” In truth I hadn’t thought about it at all, until that very moment. “But yes, I guess I might. If Anna could arrange it.”

  Anna owned the gallery back in Cambridge. Philip said nothing more, and we turned and walked home.

  But back in the flat, he started looking around. He went into my studio and glanced at the canvas on the easel, already primed, with a few blocked-in shapes—a barren tree, scaffolding; an abandoned fountain.

  “These are different,” he said. He glanced around the rest of the studio and I could tell, he was relieved not to see anything else. The other paintings, the ones I’d done of him, hadn’t arrived yet. He didn’t ask after them, and I didn’t tell him I’d had them shipped from the island.

  We went back to bed. Afterward, he slept heavily. I switched on the small bedside lamp, turning it so it wouldn’t awaken him, and watched him sleep. I didn’t sketch him. I watched the slow rise of his chest, the beard coming in where he hadn’t shaved, grayer now than it had been; the thick black lashes that skirted his closed eyes. His mouth. I knew he was going to leave me. This time, he wouldn’t come back.

  If he had wakened then and seen me, would anything have changed? If he had ever seen me watching him like this . . . would he have changed? Would I?

  I watched him for a long time, thinking. At last I curled up beside him and fell asleep.

  Next morning, we had breakfast, then wandered around the city like tourists. Philip hadn’t been back in some years, and it all amazed him. The bleak emptiness of the Alexanderplatz, where a dozen teenagers sat around the empty fountain, each with a neon-shaded Mohawk and a ratty mongrel at the end of a leash; the construction cranes everywhere, the crowds of Japanese and Americans at the Brandenburg Gate; the disconcertingly elegant graffiti on bridges spanning the Spree, as though the city, half-awake, had scrawled its dreams upon the brickwork.

  “You seem happy here,” he said. He reached to stroke my hair, and smiled.

  “I am happy here,” I said. “It’s not ideal, but . . .”

  “It’s a good place for you, maybe. I’ll come back.” He was quiet for a minute. “I’m going to be gone for a while. Damascus—I’ll be there for two months. Then Deborah’s going to meet me, and we’re going to travel for a while. She found a place for us to stay, a villa in Montevarchi. It’s something we’ve talked about for a while.”

  We were scuffing through the leaves along a path near the Grunewald, the vast and ancient forest to the city’s west. I went there often, alone. There were wild animals, boar and foxes; there were lakes, and hollow caves beneath the earth that no one was aware of. So many of Berlin’s old trees had been destroyed in the bombings, and more died when the Wall fell and waves of new construction and congestion followed.

  Yet new trees had grown, and some old ones flourished. These woods seemed an irruption of a deep, rampant disorder: the trees were black, the fallen leaves deep, the tangled thorns and hedges often impenetrable. I had found half-devoured carcasses here, cats or small dogs, those pretty red squirrels with tufted ears; as well as empty beer bottles and the ashy remnants of campfires in stone circles. You could hear traffic, and the drone of construction cranes; but only walk a little further into the trees and these sounds disappeared. It was a place I wanted to paint, but I hadn’t yet figured out where, or how.

  “I’m tired.” Philip yawned. Sun filtered through the leafless branches. It was cool, but not cold. He wore the sweater I’d knitted, beneath a tweed jacket. “Jet lag. Can we stop a minute?”

  There were no benches, not even any large rocks; just the leaf-covered ground, a few larches, many old beeches. I dropped the satchel holding my watercolors and sketchpad and looked around. A declivity spread beneath one very large old beech, a hollow large enough for us to lie in, side by side. Leaves had drifted to fill the space like water in a cupped hand; tender yellow leaves, soft as tissue and thin enough that when I held one to the sun I could see shapes behind the fretwork of veins. Trees. Philip’s face.

  The ground was dry. We lay side by side. After a few minutes he turned and pulled me to him. I could smell the sweet mast beneath us, beechnuts buried in the leaves. I pulled his jacket off and slid my hands beneath his sweater, kissed him as he pulled my jeans down; then tugged the sweater free from his arms, until it hung loose like a cowl around his neck. The air was chill despite the sun, there were leaves in his hair. A fallen branch raked my bare back, hard enough to make me gasp. His eyes were closed, but mine were open; there was grit on his cheek and a fleck of green moss, a tiny greenfly with gold-faceted eyes that lit upon his eyelid then rubbed its front legs together then spun into the sunlight. All the things men never see. When he came he was all but silent, gasping against my chest. I laid my hand upon his face, before he turned aside and fell asleep.

  For a moment I sat, silent, and looked for the greenfly. Then I pulled my jeans back up and zipped them, shook the leaves from my hair and plucked a beechnut husk from my shirt. I picked up Philip’s jacket and tossed it into the underbrush, then knelt beside him. His flannel shirt had ridden up, exposing his stomach; I bent my head and kissed the soft skin beneath his navel. He was warm and tasted of semen and salt, bracken. For a moment I lingered, then sat up.

  A faint buzzing sounded, but otherwise the woods were still. The sweater hung limp round his neck. I ran my fingers along the hem until I found the stray bit of yarn there. I tugged it free, the loose knot easily coming undone; then slowly and with great care, bit by bit by bit while he slept, I unraveled it. Only at the very end did Philip stir, when just a ring of blue and brown and gold hung about his neck, but I whispered his name and, though his eyelids trembled, they did not open.

  I got to my feet, holding the loose armful of warm wool, drew it to my face and inhaled deeply.

  It smelled more of him than his own body did. I teased out one end of the skein and stood above him, then let the yarn drop until it touched his chest. Little by little, I played the yarn out, like a fisherman with his line, until it covered him. More greenflies came and buzzed about my face.

  Finally I was done. A gust sent yellow leaves blowing across the heap of wool and hair as I turned to retrieve my
satchel. The green-flies followed me. I waved my hand impatiently and they darted off, to hover above the shallow pool that now spread beneath the beech tree. I had not consciously thought of water, but water is what came to me; perhaps the memory of the sea outside the window where I had painted Philip all those nights, perhaps just the memory of green water and blue sky and gray rock, an island long ago.

  The small, still pool behind me wasn’t green but dark brown, with a few spare strokes of white and gray where it caught the sky, and a few yellow leaves. I got my bag and removed my pencils and watercolors and sketchpad, then folded Philip’s jacket and put it at the bottom of the satchel, along with the rest of his clothes. Then I filled my metal painting cup with water from the pool. I settled myself against a tree and began to paint.

  It wasn’t like my other work. A broad wash of gold and brown, the pencil lines black beneath the brushstrokes, spattered crimson at the edge of the thick paper. The leaves floating on the surface of the pool moved slightly in the wind, which was hard for me to capture—I was just learning to use watercolors. Only once was I worried, when a couple walking a dog came through the trees up from the canal bank.

  “Guten Tag,” the woman said, smiling. I nodded and smiled politely but kept my gaze fixed on my painting. I wasn’t worried about the man or the woman; they wouldn’t notice Philip. No one would. They walked toward the pool, pausing as their dog, a black dachshund, wriggled eagerly and sniffed at the water’s edge, then began nosing through the leaves.

  “Strubbel!” the man scolded.

  Without looking back at him, the dog waded into the pool and began lapping at the water. The man tugged at the leash and started walking on; the dog ran after him, shaking droplets from his muzzle.

  I finished my painting. It wasn’t great—I was still figuring it out, the way water mingles with the pigments and flows across the page—but it was very good. There was a disquieting quality to the picture; you couldn’t quite tell if there was a face there beneath the water, a mouth, grasping hands; or if it was a trick of the light, the way the thin yellow leaves lay upon the surface. There were long shadows across the pool when at last I gathered my things and replaced them in my satchel, heavier now because of Philip’s clothes.