by Rachel Cusk
He looked immediately crestfallen. It was a translation of a book I had written: I said he could keep it if he wanted to. He raised his eyebrows and examined it back and front, turning it over in his hands. Then he nodded his head and tucked the book into the pocket of his overalls.
‘I thought maybe you could speak,’ he said sadly.
The translator was a woman of about my own age who lived in Warsaw. She had emailed me several times to ask questions about the text: I had watched her create her own version of what I had written. In the emails she had started to tell me about her life – she lived alone with her young son – and sometimes, talking about certain passages in the book, I would feel her creation begin to supersede mine, not in the sense that she violated what I had written but that it was now living through her, not me. In the process of translation the ownership of it – for good or ill – had passed from me to her. Like a house, I said.
Pavel was listening to what I said with his head cocked to one side and his eyes alert. In Poland I build my own house, he said presently. I make everything. I make the floors and the doors and the roof. My children, he said, sleep in the beds I make. He had learned his trade from his father, he went on, who was a builder. But the houses his father built were different from Pavel’s. Cheap, he said, wrinkling his small nose. The house was in a forest, beside a river. It was a beautiful place.
But my father don’t like, he said.
I asked him why not and he made a curious little humming sound, a small smile at his lips. My way and his way, he said, not the same. The house had enormous windows, he went on, that went from the ceiling to the floor. In every room – even the bathroom – the forest was so visible that you almost felt you were living in the open air. He had spent a long time thinking about the house and designing it. He had taken out books on modern architecture from the local library and studied them. I would like to be architect, he added, but – he shrugged resignedly. There was one house that had particularly caught his eye, a house in America. It was made almost entirely of glass. He had taken his inspiration from that house, although after that first time he had made sure not to look at the photographs again. He had developed his own idea and built it with his own hands. But then he had had to leave it and come to England to find work. He rented a bedsit near Wembley Stadium, in a building full of other bedsits occupied by people he didn’t know. In the first week, someone had broken in and stolen all his tools. He had had to buy new ones, as well as a better lock for the door, which he had installed himself. His wife and children were still in Poland, in the house in the forest. His wife was a teacher.
He resumed his folding of the dust sheets, shaking each one out with a snap and folding it into a tight, neat square. I said he must miss his family and he inclined his head melancholically. He went back as often as he could, he said, but these visits were so expensive and so upsetting he had started to wonder whether he was better off not going at all. The last time, when he was leaving, the children had clung to him and cried. He paused and laid his hands on his stomach and grimaced slightly.
‘In this country I make money,’ he said. ‘But maybe is not worth.’
He had always worked for his father, in the family firm, but after his father’s reaction to the house Pavel had decided not to do that any more.
‘All my life,’ he said, ‘he criticise. He criticise my work, my idea, he say he don’t like the way I talk – even he criticise my wife and my children. But when he criticise my house –’ Pavel pursed his lips in a smile – ‘then I think, okay, is enough.’
I asked what exactly his father hadn’t liked about the house.
Pavel made his humming sound again, clasping his hands in front of him and rocking back and forth slightly on his toes.
He hadn’t consulted his father at any point during the project, he said, but when it was nearly finished he had invited him to come out and look at it. They had stood outside and looked at it together, the transparent box. Pavel had designed it so that in certain places you could see all the way through it, out into the forest on the other side. His wife and children were in the kitchen: they could see them, his wife cooking dinner, the children sitting at the table playing a game. He and his father had stood there and looked and then his father had turned to him, striking his own forehead to signify Pavel’s stupidity.
‘He say, Pavel, you idiot, you forgot to build the walls – everyone can see you in there!’
He had heard afterwards that his father was freely talking about the house in town, telling people that if they went out to the forest, they could stand there and watch Pavel shitting.
After that Pavel had tried to find other work and failed. He had come to England and worked for a few months building the new terminal at Heathrow, being routinely sacked on a Friday night and rehired on a Monday, because the building company never knew in advance how many labourers they’d need. Then he’d met Tony and got the job he had now. At the end of his time at Heathrow, the terminal had opened: he was working near the arrivals gate and all day long he would watch people streaming out through the doors. No matter how often he told himself to stop, he kept glancing up, thinking that his family were about to come through that opening, thinking he recognised faces he knew in the crowds, sometimes hearing Polish voices and fragments of Polish conversation. For hour after hour he watched the scenes of reunion as other people received their loved ones. It was addictive: when he got home his room was correspondingly colder, bleaker, more lonely. It was better to be here, in this house of books: he’d been meaning to ask whether I’d mind if occasionally he borrowed one, so that he could try to improve his English. It was difficult to talk to anyone, his language level being what it was: this conversation was the longest he had spoken to anyone in weeks. The problem was that his thoughts far outpaced his verbal ability. Yet he knew that when he spoke, he improved rapidly: he had once been stuck on a bus in a traffic jam, sitting next to a girl who had started to talk to him, and by the end of that conversation, which had lasted an hour, they had been able to exchange confidences and intimacies in a way he hadn’t done with anyone since his conversations with his wife on his last visit home. She had told him he was all bottled up.
‘Nothing come out,’ he said with a small, ashamed smile.
He had been meaning to tell me, he added, to lock my windows at night: he had arrived early one morning and seen the front window was open. Also, he wondered whether I would allow him to put a chain on the door, so that I would be safer here when I was alone. He advised me to accept; it would take him five minutes.
I could hear my phone ringing downstairs and I asked Pavel to excuse me so that I could go and answer it. It was my son, saying that he had lost the key to his father’s house and was locked out. He was standing on the doorstep, he said. It was cold and there was no one at home. He began to weep, harshly, inconsolably. I stood and listened to the sound as though paralysed by it. I remembered how I used to hold him while he cried. Now all there was was the sound. Then abruptly the crying stopped and I heard him call his brother’s name. It’s all right, he said down the phone to me. Don’t worry, it’s all right. He could see his brother coming along the road, he said. I heard scuffling and laughing sounds in the background as the two of them met. I tried to say something but he said he had to go. Bye, he said.
The front door shut and Tony reappeared and picked up his drill. He was reticent when I asked what the neighbours had said. He looked me up and down.
‘You go somewhere?’ he said.
I said I had to go and teach a class and I wouldn’t be back until late. He nodded his head.
‘Better you not here,’ he said.
I asked whether he had managed to get any agreement from them about the noise. He was silent. I watched while he levered away a new section of plaster, releasing it in a shower of rubble and dust.
‘Is okay,’ he said. ‘I tell them.’
I asked him what exactly he had told them.
He yanked at the wall a
nd a big broken piece of it came away with a crunching sound while a wide grin slowly appeared on his face.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘they treat me like son.’
He had acted, he assured me, on my behalf by telling the neighbours that they had his full sympathy, that I worked him and Pavel like a slave driver, that they were all of them my victims and that if they would only let him finish the job quickly he would be free.
‘Is best way,’ he said.
They had responded well, he added: he was given cups of tea and even a packet of sweets – the mixture of Dolly – to take home to his daughter. He wanted me to know that he had not of course meant the things he had said – it was a game, a strategy, using the force of their hatred to attain his own ends.
‘Like Albanian politician,’ he said, grinning.
There was something false in Tony’s manner that suggested he was not telling the truth, or at least that he was trying to impose his interpretation on a series of events he did not entirely understand. He avoided meeting my eye: his expression was evasive. I said that I could see he was trying to help. The problem, I said, with whipping up the neighbours’ hatred was that I had to continue living here with my sons after Tony had gone. I told him about an evening over the summer, when I had been sitting in the dark kitchen watching the international family next door in their garden, and had seen Paula come out of the flat below me and walk up the steps. She had talked to them over the fence: loudly, I had heard her telling them about me and about the terrible things I had done; I had watched their polite, embarrassed faces and knew that while they wouldn’t necessarily believe what she had said, they wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me either.
Tony put his hands out, palms up, his head to one side.
‘Is bad situation,’ he said.
I felt him looking at me furtively while I put on my coat. He asked me what I taught, and whether the children were well behaved – a lot of the children at his daughter’s school behaved like animals. They had no discipline, that was the problem. Life was too easy for them here. I told him that I taught adults rather than children and he laughed incredulously.
‘What you teach them?’ he said. ‘How to wipe their behind?’
The class was a fiction-writing class: I taught it each week. There were twelve students who sat around tables arranged in a square. The classroom was on the fifth floor: at the start of term it had still been light at that hour, but now it was dark outside, and the windows showed us our own reflections etched in glare against an eerie backdrop of overblown, dirty yellow clouds. The students were mostly women. I found it hard to attend to what they were saying. I sat in my coat, my eye continually drawn to the window and to the strange cloudscape that appeared to belong neither to night nor to day but to something intermediary and motionless, a place of stasis where there was no movement or progression, no sequence of events that could be studied for its meaning. Its yellowed formless components suggested not nothingness but something worse. I heard the students speaking and wondered how they could believe in human reality sufficiently to construct fantasies about it. I felt them glance at me often as though from a great distance. Increasingly they were speaking, I realised, not to me but to one another, building among themselves the familiar structure that I had accustomed them to, in the way that children, when they are afraid, will retreat to the rules and regulations of what they have learned to regard as normality. One of the students, I noticed, had taken the role of leader: she was asking each of the others in turn for their contribution. She was acting my part, yet there was something wrong with her execution of it: she interfered unnecessarily; instead of proceeding by instinct the students were becoming self-conscious and halting. One of the two men in the room was trying to talk about his dog. What was it about this dog, my understudy asked, that he thought was so interesting? The man looked uncertain. It’s beautiful, he said. My understudy made a gesture of frustration. You can’t just tell me it’s beautiful, she said. You have to show me that it is. The man looked quizzical. He was somewhere in his forties, with a small, slightly elfin appearance: his large head with its domed, wrinkled brow on his neat, diminutive body gave him the appearance of a strange elderly child. My understudy urged him to describe the dog so that she might be able to see its beauty for herself. She was a loud-spoken woman arrayed in a resplendent series of coloured wraps and shawls, who wore a great quantity of jewellery that clanked and rattled when she gesticulated with her arms. Well, the man said doubtfully, she’s quite big. But she’s not heavy, he added. He paused and then shook his head. I can’t describe it, he said. She’s just beautiful.
I asked him what breed the dog was and he said it was a Saluki. They were Arabian hunting dogs, he added, greatly prized and honoured in Arab culture, to the extent that traditionally they weren’t regarded as animals at all but as something midway between the animal and the human. They were the only non-human creatures, for example, that were permitted to enter an Arab tent. A special hole would be dug for them inside, in the sand, to lie in as a bed. They were beautiful things, he repeated.
I asked him where he had got this dog and he said that he had bought it from a German woman in the south of France. She lived in a house in the mountains behind Nice, where she bred only Saluki puppies. He had driven down there overnight, all the way from his house in Kent. When he arrived, stiff and exhausted from the journey, she had opened the door and a shoal of Salukis had run down the hall in her wake. They were big dogs already, even at only a few weeks old, but they were fleet and light and pale as phantoms. They had engulfed him, there on the doorstep, pressing their narrow faces against him and feeling him with their paws – he had expected to be knocked over but instead it had felt as though he was being stroked by feathers. She had trained them – there were nine – with an extraordinary scrupulousness: in the sitting room various snacks had been laid out for him on a low table and the nine beasts – unlike any other dog he had encountered – arranged themselves dignifiedly around it, making no attempt to snatch the food; at feeding time their nine bowls were placed in a row and filled, and they would wait for the signal to eat before beginning. Whenever their trainer passed, the nine long, elegant noses would lift in perfect synchronicity and follow her movements like nine compasses.
She had told him, over the course of his visit, the story of how she had learned to breed these extraordinary animals. She was married to a businessman, a German whose work often took him to the Middle East. At a certain point they had moved there on a permanent basis: they lived in Oman, where he pursued his career and where she, having no children and not being permitted to work, had nothing particularly to do. She was not, it seemed, interested in pursuing the activities of an expatriate wife: instead she spent her time lying on the beach and reading novels. The aimlessness of this existence, and yet its inferences of freedom and pleasure, was something she had not consciously troubled herself to analyse; but lying there one day reading, a series of strange shadows, almost like the shadows of birds, had flown before her eyes across the page and she had been compelled to look up. There, running along the sand beside the frill of surf, was a pack of dogs. Their silence and lightness and speed was such that they appeared almost to be some kind of hallucination; but then she saw, walking slowly in the distance behind them, a man, an Arab in traditional dress. While she watched, he made some barely audible sound and the pack of dogs instantly looped back in a graceful curve and returned. They sat at his feet on their haunches, their heads lifted, listening while he spoke to them. That vision, of a near-silent feat of control, and of an almost mystical empathy that nevertheless had its basis in absolute discipline, had struck her at her core: she had gone to talk to the Arab, there in the heat and glare of the beach, and had begun to learn the science of the Saluki.
They were hunting dogs, the student continued, who ran in packs behind a falcon or hawk, the bird guiding them towards their prey. In each pack there were two principal dogs whose role it was to watch
the hawk as they ran. The complexity and speed of this process, he said, could not be overestimated: the pack flowed silently over the landscape, light and inexorable as death itself, encroaching unseen and unheard on its target. To follow the subtlety of the hawk’s signals overhead while running at speed was a demanding and exhausting feat: the two principal dogs worked in concert, the one taking over while the other rested its concentration and then back again. This idea, of the two dogs sharing the work of reading the hawk, was one he found very appealing. It suggested that the ultimate fulfilment of a conscious being lay not in solitude but in a shared state so intricate and cooperative it might almost be said to represent the entwining of two selves. This notion, of the unitary self being broken down, of consciousness not as an imprisonment in one’s own perceptions but rather as something more intimate and less divided, a universality that could come from shared experience at the highest level – well, like the German trainer before him, he was both seduced by the idea and willing to do the hard work involved in executing it.
I asked whether he had succeeded in sustaining that vision with his own dog and he was silent for a while, the furrows on his prominent brow deepening. He had returned, he said, to Kent with the dog he had chosen, which he and his wife had named Sheba. The German woman had trained Sheba impeccably – she never gave them any trouble at all – and they stuck rigorously to the two hours of walking they had been instructed to give her each day. On these walks, Sheba could be let off her leash: she came when you called her and never – or not often, in any case – lost her head in pursuit of the rabbits and squirrels that populated the local landscape. She was the object of much notice and attention when they took her out, but at home she was languid almost to the point of stupefaction; she was forever lying on their laps or across their bed, draping her large, silky body over them and resting her narrow face against theirs with what was either neediness or sheer ennui – she was, as he had said, almost human. To be perfectly honest, he knew that Sheba’s potential, her magnificence as a creature, could never be realised in suburban Sevenoaks, where they lived. It was almost as if they had captured her, this rare and exotic item, captured her not entirely through their own efforts but through the long story of possession that was her destiny and that had taken her in successive steps away from who she really was. The German woman, he went on, had described to him the sight of two Salukis bringing down a gazelle between them, with such stealth and harmony it was like music made visible. There weren’t any gazelles in Sevenoaks, obviously; but he and his wife loved Sheba, and would care for her to the best of their abilities.
