Once in Europa

by John Berger

  Everyone knows he was asphyxiated by fumes. That’s why he fell.

  We will see, Mademoiselle Blanc, when the investigation is finished. I wish I could tell you more.

  I have come to apply for a pension.

  How old are you?

  Seventeen.

  And the date of your marriage, Mademoiselle Blanc? He was obliged to look at me at that moment.

  We are not married.

  Then I don’t understand.

  I lived as Monsieur Pirogov’s concubine.

  May I ask where?

  I knew he knew where.

  In shed A, I told him.

  That’s company property.

  I want our bed too.

  You want a company pension and a bed! If we gave pensions to all our workers’ concubines, Mademoiselle Blanc, we’d be bankrupt!

  Are there so many killed in your factories, Monsieur Norat?

  I understand your distress but I’m afraid I can do nothing.

  I’m pregnant. In the name of his child which I’m carrying, I’m asking, Sir, for compensation.

  Monsieur Norat was surprised. He left his chair and came to stand behind me.

  Odile, if I may so call you, for you’re young enough to be my daughter, I believe you, but the Company can’t. From the Company’s point of view you’re not married, you had no fixed residence of concubinage, and you have no proof at all that Stepan Pirogov is the father of your child.

  You were born, Christian, on April 10th. You weighed 3.4 kilos, you had blue eyes, hair softer than the thistledown of a dandelion, hands smaller than Stepan’s thumbs and legs like holy bread, with a zizi between them.

  My mother hoped to keep you at home and put you on a bottle. I wanted to feed you myself. I had enough milk for twins. The boss at the Components Factory was obliging: so long as I did my quota, he wasn’t fussy about clocking in and out. I didn’t have to wait, like the others, till midday. When I felt my blouse wet on either side with milk, I left the machines thumping away and the metal shavings getting higher and higher on the shop floor. How you sucked! How you loved life! Then I had to get back early to sweep up the shavings and start again on tiny pieces for airplane hatches.

  You were nearly a year old. You were taking your first steps on the earth, and after the fourth you’d fall back onto your bottom. Funny to think of this in the sky.

  Emile was playing with you under the table. Régis had been out the night before and had drunk too much. It’s not the worst men who drink, the men who drink are the frightened ones, they don’t know of what, we’re all frightened, though at the age of eighteen I didn’t know any of this. Régis was arguing with Emile, who was under the table playing with you, about whether Corneille the cattle dealer’s Peugeot was dark blue or black. Emile was sure it was black. Régis was sure it was blue. They went on and on. Stop it! I cried out. You’re worse than children! Régis swung round so fast I thought he was going to hit me. You keep out of this! he said. You’ve got enough of your own business to mind, Odile! Better think what you’re going to do with your poor bastard of a kid! Shut your mouth! Emile seized Régis’s legs and he fell to the ground. At that moment Mother walked in and the three of us pretended nothing had happened. When Mother left, Régis, his head in his hands, a smear of blood under his nose, muttered: Blue, Corneille’s Peugeot is blue! I’m going for a walk, I said.

  I walked along the rail track towards the Heaps. The last one was smoking. Soon they’ll be as high as the factory, I thought. Soon they’ll have covered our orchard, I thought. At home there are only three cows left. There’s nothing more dead in the world than this dirt left over after burning at two thousand centigrade. Twenty-two months down in the dirt is the bastard’s father. I had the courage to say those words to myself.

  Every time I go over there to work, Giuliano the Sardinian told me after Stepan’s death, I’m not sure I’m going to come back.

  Each wall, each opening, each ladder was like the bone of a sheep’s skull found in the mountain—fleshless, emptied, extinct. The furnaces throbbed, the river flowed, the smoke, sometimes white, sometimes grey, sometimes yellow, thrust upwards into the sky, men worked night and day for generations, sweating, retching, pissing, coughing, the Factory had not stopped once for seven years, it produced thirty thousand tons of ferromanganese a year, it made money, it tested new alloys, it made experiments, it made profits, and it was inert, barren, derelict. I went through the melting shop where the furnace for manganese oxide is in the sky, and Peter and Tito for the ferromanganese are well below it, yet still so high that when the coasting cranes teem their metal into the ladles, you squint up at the ladles like suns setting, and I knew how the womb in my belly was the opposite of all I could see and touch. Here’s a woman, I whispered, and the fruit of her womb. I knelt on my knees. Nobody saw me.

  Horse leather is the best leather for gloves, Dilenka, it resists the heat.

  I climbed up eight metal ladders, each one as high as hay in a barn, nobody stopped me, to the manganese-oxide furnace. This is where he fell. The fumes hurt my throat and I breathed deeply, yet nothing happened. I came down the eight ladders. I crossed the office space that had been the Ram’s Ballroom. I found the locker where he kept his horse-leather gloves and his blue shield. It had an Italian name on it now. I laughed. I surprised myself laughing. Our love was imperishable.

  Across the footbridge we lived IN EUROPA. The river was low, for the thaw had not begun. On many days it was minus ten and the mountains were still imprisoned. There was no time, I was thinking as I watched the water of the Giffre, to show Stepan where to take the trout, only time for Stepan and Odile to meet and for Christian to be conceived. Upstream, between the rocks, something attracted my attention. I waited. It seemed to me that it turned its head. A lorry clattered along the road and it flew up, long legs dangling, to perch in a pine tree. It was a heron. A water bird that nests in the top of a tree, said Stepan. I’ve seen three herons in my life so far. One with Father when I was small enough for him to carry me, one with Stepan on a June evening, and one that Sunday in March ’56.

  Stepan said the name of the heron was tzaplia, a creature from far away with a message. Waiting for its fish, it becomes as still as a stick. Which is why I wasn’t sure when I first spotted it. From the pine tree the heron surveyed the road, the factory grounds, the tall chimneys with their heads like the open beaks of gigantic fledgelings looking up for food, the manganese-oxide furnace, Peter, Tito, the turbine house, the cliff-face and that sky where I’m flying with my son. Of its message I was ignorant.

  She was in a good mood, Mother. She gave us a kilo of honey, she said your blue eyes were going to break girls’ hearts, she changed your nappies. For once I wasn’t in a hurry to leave and we missed the bus back to Cluses and had to hitchhike. You made hitchhiking easy. With you in my arms, the very first car stopped. The driver leant back and opened the rear door. As we were climbing in, he spoke my name. He was wearing a cap over his eyes and he had a black beard. Yet something in the way he said my name was familiar, was old. Our eyes met and suddenly I recognised him.

  Michel!

  He leant his head back awkwardly for me to kiss his cheek. I guessed he couldn’t turn round, couldn’t move his legs, so I kissed him like that.

  I was so sorry, Odile, when I heard about what happened, he said. I offer you my sympathy and all my condolences.

  His voice had changed. Changed more than his face on account of his beard. Before, he had spoken like most people do, his voice close-up to what he was saying. Now his voice was far away, like a priest’s voice at the altar.

  This is our son, Christian, I told him.

  He touched your woolen bonnet with his hand and it was then I noticed the scars on it: they were violet—the same colour as molybdenum bread goes when it’s cooling. Where they were violet, there was less flesh.

  You’re going where? he asked.

  Cluses.

  You live there?

  I
nodded. And you, Michel?

  Lyons’s finished with me. The surgeons say I’m a masterpiece. Do you know how many operations I had? Thirty-seven!

  He laughed and slapped his thigh so the sound should remind me it was made of metal. He was wearing well-pressed trousers, light-coloured socks, polished shoes.

  You started to cry.

  Developing his lungs! said Michel. He can’t run at his age, poor little mite, all he can do is to howl if he wants to fill his lungs. Here! Christian! Look!

  He dangled a key-ring before your eyes and you leant your head against my breast and stopped crying.

  And you, Michel?

  I’m going to take on the tobacconist’s and newspaper shop at Pouilly.

  How will you manage to—

  Everything, Odile, everything. I can even climb a ladder! The trade union lawyers forced them to give me a pension. I don’t have to work too much.

  Stupidly, helplessly and for no good reason, I began to snivel. Michel turned round and started the engine. He could drive the car, for it had been adapted and fitted out with hand-controls. His two feet in their polished shoes just rested on the floor. Like flatirons.

  When there’s no choice, Michel said over his shoulder, it’s extraordinary what you can adapt to.

  I know.

  At first I was too drugged to realise, he said, then bit by bit the truth came home to me. When I woke up in the morning and remembered what I was, I wanted to scream. For a week I was in despair. Why me? I kept on asking. Why me?

  I know, I said. You’d gone to sleep. We were driving along by the river. He controlled the speed with his scarred right hand. His two feet lay on the floor like flatirons. I was still sniffling.

  The great thing in hospital is you aren’t alone. There are other people in the same state as you, he said, some are worse off than you. You’ve only got one life, they say, so better make the most of it. It’s not true, Odile.

  I know, I said between tears.

  We were all bad cases. Third-degree burns, with fifty, sixty, seventy percent disability. We’d have all been dead twenty years ago. There were people—we heard it—there were people who said we’d be better off dead. We had to learn to live a second life. The first one was over forever and ever. He’s sleeping now?

  He’s asleep, yes, I whispered.

  I had to learn how to live—and it wasn’t like learning for the second time, that’s what’s so strange, Odile, it was like learning for the first time. Now I’m beginning my second life.

  Do you have much pain? I asked.

  Not much.

  Never?

  Not much. Sometimes when it’s hot in the summer I’m uncomfortable. He touched the top of his thigh. Otherwise, no. For a long while I dreamt of pain in my legs. They weren’t amputated in my dreams. I’ll tell you something else, Odile. I’ve become a fire-cutter.

  I started to laugh. As with my tears, I didn’t know why.

  There was an old man in the hospital. He wasn’t a patient and he wasn’t a member of the staff… he was there every day. He went out to buy whatever we asked him—papers, fruit, tobacco, eau de cologne—and in return we gave him the change. He was eighty-two. When he was younger he’d been a railwayman. He was a fire-cutter. I saw him take the pain away once. A nurse scalded her hands with boiling water, and the old man put a stop to her suffering in two minutes. According to him he was getting too old, said the effort of cutting the fire took too much out of him. So, one day he announced he’d been watching us all very carefully and now he’d decided, now he’d chosen his successor. And it was to be me. He gave me his gift.

  How?

  Like that.

  What did he do?

  He just gave me his gift.

  We were in Cluses and Michel drove us to the front door. You were already asleep in my arms. Despite my protests he insisted on getting out of the car. He moved his legs with his arms. He pulled himself up with his arms. His neck and shoulders were much thicker than they had been. He extracted himself like a man climbing out of a trench he’s dug. There he stood on the pavement, swaying slightly from his hips.

  If you ever need me, you know where to find me now. I was so sorry, he repeated again, to hear what had happened.

  Do you remember Stepan? I asked him.

  I remember him. He was very tall, with blond hair. Didn’t he have blue eyes? We worked a couple of nights in the same gang, two or three nights I think—before I collected this packet. He slapped his hip.

  I don’t even have a picture of him, I said.

  You don’t need a photo, he said, fingering your woolen bonnet, you have his progeny.

  Strange word, progeny!

  You can’t have closer, he said. Good night.

  The long years began, the long years of your boyhood. Do you remember the flat we lived in? You did your homework on the kitchen table. You were always wanting me to make potato pancakes for supper. You kept a soccer ball in a net hung from the ceiling over your bed. Your room smelt of glue because of the models you made. The same smell as my nail varnish. You could change washers on a tap before you were ten. In my room there was the oak bed with the carved roses, when you were ill you slept in it with me and sometimes on Sundays too. Remember when we painted the living room and you fell off the ladder? You were all I had in the world and I thought you were dead.

  Why do I have the same name as you, Maman, why am I called Christian Blanc?

  Because your father died before you were born.

  What was he like?

  Strong.

  What did he look like?

  Big.

  Was he like me?

  Yes.

  Was he interested in aircraft?

  Not particularly, I think.

  You don’t know much about him, do you?

  As much as anyone ever knows.

  Guess what I really want to do, Maman. I want to build a glider. One that will fly. I saw a picture in a book at school. It’ll have to be big, as big as a car.

  Big enough to fly us round the world?

  Yes … I’ll need lots of glue.

  The long years began. Where could we go to be at home? Régis got married to Marie-Jeanne. Her condition for marrying him was that he give up drinking, and for a while he did. Mother sold the last cow, keeping only the goats and chickens. The trees of the forest, up by the path to Le Mont, began to die. The hillside above the river became the grey rusty colour of dead wood. Emile got a job loading drums in a paint factory near the frontier and Mother lavished all her attention upon him. Every evening he came home to a hero’s welcome. His weaknesses inspired her determination to live to be a hundred. As she aged, Emile became the love of her life. She changed the hay of his mattress every week.

  I bought an atlas to study how to go to Stockholm. I found the Ukraine and the river Pripiat. Yet what could we have done there? We’d have been further from home than ever.

  Why are we going up so fast now?

  The boss at the Components Factory pursued us for a while. You remember he bought you a Sputnik with a dog inside, and you lost the dog? I went to his house for supper several times. He took us to the lake and we ate a fish like a trout but stronger tasting. You said fish find their way in the ocean through their sense of smell. His wife had left him years before. He was nearly forty, you were nine.

  Do you want to marry Gaston, Maman?

  We are still climbing into the sky.

  No, I don’t want to marry him.

  I think he wants to marry you.

  I don’t know.

  He told me he’s going to buy a Citroën DS.

  That’s what interests you, isn’t it?

  If you didn’t have to work for him, Maman, I think I’d like him more.

  Gaston is very kind. He and I don’t know the same things, that’s all. What he knows doesn’t interest me a lot and what I know would frighten him.

  You couldn’t frighten me, Maman.

  When we turn, Christian, it’
s strange, for there I am looking not up but down at the blue sky.

  Michel’s shop in Pouilly was unlike any other in the district. The newspapers were arranged in a special way, the left-wing ones always in front. When a customer asked for Le Figaro, Michel bent down and brought one up from under the counter with a look of disgust, as if the paper the man had demanded were wrapped round a rotten fish. He sold bottles of gnôle with a pear the size of my fist inside the bottle.

  How did the pear get inside? you asked.

  It grew from a pip! Michel said and you didn’t know whether to believe him or not.

  He also sold toboggans and radios. He was mad about radios and could repair anything. On the back wall of the shop he pinned a large map of the world and on each country he stuck little labels like the ones they sell for jam pots, indicating the city, the wavelength, the hours of broadcasting. There were those who said that Michel with his politics and his radios could only be a spy for the Russians! His reputation as a fire-cutter spread. People from other valleys came to him to have the pain of their burns taken away. He categorically refused any payment. It’s a gift! he repeated.

  Do you remember when I took you to him? You’d burnt the palm of your hand with a firecracker. It wasn’t serious but you were howling your head off. Michel came out from behind the counter with his stiff, swaying movement—like a skittle. Let’s go into the back room, he said. I made as if to accompany you but he shook his head and the two of you disappeared. He closed the door and within seconds you stopped howling. Not gradually but suddenly in mid-cry. There wasn’t a sound in the shop. Total silence. After what seemed an eternity I couldn’t bear it anymore and shouted your name. You came bounding through the door laughing. Michel lumbered after you. There were already grey hairs in his black head.

  You don’t have to burn yourself in order to come and see me, he said when I thanked him and kissed him good-bye.

  Later I asked you: What happened?

  Nothing.

  What did Michel do?

  He showed me one of his burns.

  Where?

  Here—you pointed at your tummy.

  And your hand stopped hurting?