by Ali Smith
But wait. Now his eyes have wakened too.
He is in his neighbour’s house, in his neighbour’s daughter’s room.
What time of day is it?
He has had breakfast. He has had a sandwich. He has had soup. It is afternoon. It is still light.
What month is it?
Low sun.
Winter-spring.
There are people outside the house. He can hear them. He can see a car in the driveway through the French windows. People getting out of it are talking and laughing outside the house.
Well, it’s a fine sunny afternoon for the wintertime, and a fine thing to hear people happy out in the air.
They shut the doors of the car and stand talking for a bit longer, young people and older people, a family.
They sound like happy birds.
He thinks of the birds above the scarecrow in the picture. They were moments in ink, and he saw them come to life, and there they still were all the years later in the book he saw, when he saw that book.
One of the young people from the family of visitors comes and looks in through the French windows, stands right up against one of the doors looking in through the reflection.
What Daniel sees then is his sister.
Is it?
Hannah?
It’s Hannah herself standing there looking in.
It is.
It’s her.
It’s her young self.
It’s the copy of her young self.
She opens the window’s door and it’s Hannah, God help him, there in the room, aged twelve, in the shape of a boy.
Oh hello, Daniel says.
Hi, Hannah says.
Where’ve you been all this time? he says.
The traffic was busier than they thought it’d be, Hannah says.
But so very long, Daniel says. I thought time had quite undone us.
On the contrary, time and space are what lace us all up together, Hannah says. What makes us part of the larger picture. Universally speaking. The problem is, we tend to think we’re separate. But it’s a delusion.
Ah, Daniel says.
Of course I’m quoting Einstein, Hannah says. Well, paraphrasing. He said the only real religion humans can have is the matter of freeing ourselves from the delusion first that we’re separate from each other and second that we’re separate from the universe, and the only peace of mind we’ll ever get, he says, is when we try and overcome this delusion. He said this in a letter to a man whose son, who was eleven, had just died of polio. In exactitude you know if today was February the 12th it would be the seventieth anniversary to the day of Einstein sending this letter to the man. But the actual anniversary will happen on Wednesday this week. In exactitude.
Ah, Daniel says.
Yes, Hannah says. He was actually a man, the man Einstein wrote back to, who had done a lot to help save a lot of children’s lives at the end of the Second World War. But he felt bad because he couldn’t do anything to save his own child from dying from a disease. So he wrote to Einstein and asked him to explain, what was the point, or if there was a point, in being innocent, and gifted, and dying and becoming nothing but dust.
There is no doubt, Daniel says. You really are you.
Yes, Hannah says. I really am me. And you really are you. But if we follow Einstein’s thinking and add together you plus me plus time plus space.
What does that all make?
Then she waits, like she always did, for Daniel finally to catch her up.
What? What does it all make? Daniel says.
It makes you and I more than just you or I, Hannah says. It makes us us.
Here’s a tale to drive away the time trimly. Once upon etc there was a king or a lord or a duke that had a fair daughter, the fairest that ever was, with hair and skin as white and as red and as gold and as black as etc and once upon etc his daughter was stolen away etc.
Today Hannah Gluck has been trawling the graveyards of the smaller places out of town, cycling between them with flowers in the bicycle’s basket, wheeling the bike past the graves, checking the dates, memorizing the names of the ones who died young.
This is a good source. It’s not completely safe but birth and death certification are usually held in different lists, often in different drawers or cabinets, sometimes even in different buildings if you’re lucky. If you’re lucky, if you’re moving fast, nobody thinks to check both sources, that’s if they check at all.
This’ll change. Change is the nature of luck.
But it’s still working well at the moment.
She has started going out of whichever town or city she’s in, out to the surrounding villages especially. People can be more suspicious though. Or they tend to be, in the smaller places.
No, it’s more that when people see her in the graveyards going from stone to stone they can be either foul or kind. It’s always interesting. You can never tell which way they’ll go.
Who the hell are you?
Can I help?
Hannah Gluck is ready for both.
In this readiness, Hannah Gluck is more than Hannah Gluck. At the moment she is Adrienne Albert, seamstress. Adrienne Albert died at eighteen months old, in Nancy, in 1920, of Spanish influenza. She’s buried there in the same grave as a grandmother who died of the same thing at much the same time. But here she is, regardless, living and breathing and as warm as any living flesh and blood, though just a touch younger than it says on her papers, and today she’s trawling a graveyard and looking to resurrect other lives like her own.
You see the name and the dates on a stone.
You ask a silent permission of the person gone.
You bow your head to their memory.
Then you pass on the gifts, the names and the dates, to the person who needs the new self.
It’s not subterfuge. It’s much more complex. Something real happens, something as metamorphic as caterpillar and butterfly. The gone person is as here and as real and as much a part of the act of balancing against the odds as a girl at a circus Hannah saw years ago, on one toe on one foot on one leg on the back of another girl on the back of two other girls, all on the back of a huge horse going at a lumbering canter you’d have thought it impossible to balance on top of even if there were only one of you on its back, thundering round the ring to a circus band playing Did You Ever See A Dream Walking.
How did they do it?
They did it against the odds.
And, like it or not, we all get ground down to a name and a date and what looks like nothing much in the end.
But when the words that once meant a person meet a living breathing shape, it’s like when a lone bird sings in a tree like that one above her just did, and then a bird many gardens away sings the same song back to it. Particle sings to particle, crumb of grime to crumb of grime, fragment-hank to fragment. Something connects. A smatter of dust meets the thought of water, and then the thought of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, calcium, phosphorus, mercury, potassium, magnesium, ion, so on, molecular alphabet.
Something heats up round the words that once, even so briefly, meant a person.
You don’t know anything, the first thing, about that person. Still, something family happens.
It starts to happen the moment she memorizes the name and the date.
Then she telephones a number, a different one every time, and passes on to someone she doesn’t know and will never meet the things she’s memorized. That person, a kind of cousin, passes these on to the artists, and the artists make the papers that give that name the new life. Something shifts seismically. The dead name takes the new person on, and a live person takes the dead name on. Life happens for someone whose life will otherwise end. Life happens to a life that didn’t happen. Life enters, graciously, with respect, the unlived life. With luck, with one eye on survi
ving the cold and the other on thanking the heat, thank you, summer fires, bless our crops and sheep and cattle, may the gods give us a good year, the reborn person will withstand a few more seasons.
So the thing to do, then, she says to herself as she walks the paths watching for the too-soon dead, the pebbled paths of the bigger cemeteries, the cat-paths and no-paths and grassy plots where the little towns and villages bury their families – the thing to do, when life asks for acrobatics, is behave like that circus girl on the top of the pyramid of girls on the back of that giant farm horse, remember, how she leapt down off the top of the others, somersaulted, landed in the sawdust on her toes, skipped to the place where the ringmaster’d sprayed the paper hoops on the stands with something flammable and set a match to them all, and threw herself through the burning hoops.
Then even the clown, remember. He looked like he’d be useless, clumsy, falling over himself, stupid wig sticking out and wrong size clothes flapping like petrol rags near a furnace. But what an athlete he turned out to be, he dived like a seabird, a champion, Olympian, through the rings of fire not once but twice, then again, and again.
—
One late summer’s morning in 1940 in Lyon a man who looks very like her brother walks past Hannah in the street.
Of course it’s not her brother. That’s obvious almost immediately.
But there’s been a fragment of a second when her brother was there in front of her even though he wasn’t, isn’t, and the man has such a look of him that it makes her turn her head then turn right round on her heel on the street.
It is so nice to see him!
Even though it’s not him.
Even the shape of his back. Even though it’s not his back.
So she follows an inclination, let’s see where it takes us. She follows the man. He goes to the station. She follows him through the station. She joins the ticket queue, stands behind him. She doesn’t hear where he’s buying his ticket for but when she gets to the ticket desk she casts a glance at the man’s back like he’s her husband and they’re having a quarrel and says, Same as him, please.
The ticket woman looks at the going man who’s paid this lady no attention, turns back and gives Hannah the eyebrow. Hannah shrugs her own eyebrows, gives a little shake of the head, keeps her face long-suffering.
The woman charges her half of what it says on the ticket is the price.
Hannah gives the woman her warmest smile.
She sets off after the man who’s not her brother, stays five or six paces behind him.
She sits in the same carriage.
Actually he is nothing at all like her brother. A very slight physical resemblance. Still. Even slight is lovely. She can imagine it’s him and that they’re just sitting in a railway carriage ignoring each other, which is something they quite often did.
The carriage fills with people and luggage. People sit between Hannah and the man who’s not her brother.
From here she can still see the side of his head.
The city flashes past, grey on blue. A woman in a torn poster paddles along a coast on a boat made of the word MENTON, some torn-open mountains in the background, the ripped words Sai d’ té above her head. BUGAT. Avec Energol démarrage foudroyant en hiv. The hoardings are bright rags placed over the dark. The surface of things is a lie, and everybody who sees the hoardings for what they are knows it.
(Why are you travelling?
My mother is very sick, they think she will die.
Where is your mother?
With her sister, near St Julien.)
Countryside flashes past, sunlight, green on blue, quite migrainous. The summer when she was thirteen, remember, was a summer of migraines. The migraines were partly enjoyable, like a private light-show on the inside of her eyes, the triangles pulsing like cartoon characters, their colours piercing, splendid. Black lines held colour-shape after colour-shape like the shapes were walking a road together, geometry of a travelling band.
The headaches and the vomiting? Much less enjoyable. Worst of all she couldn’t read. Whenever she looked at a page she saw the insides of her own eyes on it, same as on the insides of her eyelids when she shut her eyes. A blank circle formed, round which the geometries pulsed, in the middle of any words she’d try to read, a blur surrounded by words her eye could make out but couldn’t focus on, because trying to focus on them eclipsed them in turn.
So she was spending a fair amount of time in a darkened bedroom.
She lay on the bed. On one side of her head beyond the shut door there was the summer noise of family (her brother and father were back). On the other there was the summer noise of the city through the window shutters, traffic. Happy-sounding people in the daytime. Thug-songs through the night.
What do you make of it all? Daniel said.
He’d come in and was sitting on the side of her bed.
Make of what? she said.
Everything, he said.
He meant what was happening.
Then he pretended he didn’t mean that at all.
What’s it like? he said. In there.
He knocked with his fist, but gently, on her forehead.
She always tried to speak to him in English; she was proud of her English. She read a lot of books in English, all the ones she could find, precisely so that when the summer came round she’d surprise her English brother by speaking exceptionally well to him in the language he spoke every day. Was it rivalry? Yes. Was it love? Yes.
In here? It’s like. Hm. Imagine hand-painted animation at the cinema. Imagine a team of assiduous (she was pleased to have found a use for the word assiduous, her first time, she hoped she’d said it correctly, so she said it again just for the pleasure) assiduous girl painters sitting at a tinting table in a film factory. And they spend their day colouring by hand, dipping their brushes into pots of paints filled with the colours of blooming English roses, pinks and yellows shining like after a rainshower, then colouring each of the little triangles that’s about to do a dance across my eyes. And each time the frame changes, these colours, and the line of blackness that holds them together, like a road they’re all walking along, vibrate as if electricity is going through not just them but the road they’re on.
Well, he said. Sounds like quite a show.
Truly I rather like it, she said. I’m quite well entertained.
Is it doing it now? he said.
No, she said. Kino Hanno is closed for now.
How does it feel now, then? he said.
Now then, she said. An interesting verbal construct.
A what what? he said.
The past and the present together, she said. Now. Then.
A bewildered silence came off him.
He went to sit on the window seat across the darkened room.
She’d gone too fast for him again. She forgot. He is not flippant like she is. He is not quicksilver. His energy is steady, something like a tree root.
Now? I’m all right, she said. Then? It’s like something wild, which is eating me whole, decides it doesn’t want me after all and so it regurgitates me. That’s my now and my then. Most of all I regret that I’m missing some good summer days.
He looked through the little gap in the shutter where the slice of light came in.
You aren’t missing so much, he said.
He thinks I’ve shut myself in here because things are changed out there, she thought. He thinks I’m frightened. He didn’t see it coming, hasn’t seen it happen, not like we have. He doesn’t know the everyday nature of it. He must be frightened.
I’m not frightened, she said.
I didn’t say you were, he said. I’d never assume such a thing, not of you.
Good, she said.
Though it may be the case that your head is acting scared without telling you, he said.
I d
o not give it permission to do that, she said. Neither should you. So. If I may, I’ll ask of you the same question you asked of me.
What question? he said.
What you’re making of it all, she said.
Ah, he said. I’m not much of a maker of anything, me. You know that.
He jumped up. He went to the door.
(He was agitated.
She was right.)
I’ll leave you to get the rest you need, he said.
I’ll alter the question a little, she said. What will you make of it all?
He shut the door.
He heard her. He can’t not have.
(Also, she was particularly proud of her use, there, of the future tense.)
The next afternoon her brother opened the door of the bedroom and carried in something dark and heavy, bulky, something under a blanket.
You have the shape of a pregnant woman, she said from the bed.
But she’d embarrassed him by the word pregnant. She could hear it in his awkwardness.
Anyway he put the bulky thing on the chair and unwrapped it from its cover. He stood holding the cover as if unsure whether to fold it or not. He did, very neatly. He unwound from the machine a wire and a plug.
The whole room began to whirr. A circle of light, like a square moon, a square of sun, appeared on the bedroom wall.
She put her hand over her eyes.
Too bright for you? he said.
No, she said. What is it?
Kino Danno, he said. You don’t need a ticket. Today you’re our guest.
She peeked through her fingers and watched as he adjusted the focus.
Chaplin. Der Einwanderer.
A ship, a lot of people lying seasick on the deck and on each other, groaning in silence.
A shot of someone bent over the side of the ship, convulsing, being what looks like sick over the side. But no – it’s Chaplin, and he isn’t being sick, he’s catching and landing a live fish, which he turns to show them both with a brilliant smile.
Hannah laughed.
She took her hands away from her eyes.
