I may seem to understand what I say, but, believe me, I do not. From the beginning, when I found him behind the garage in his cardboard house, sleeping, waiting, I have understood nothing. I am feeling my way along a, passage that grows darker all the time. I am feeling my way toward you; with each word I feel my way.
Days ago I caught a cold, which has now settled on my chest and turned, into a dry, hammering cough that goes on for minutes at a stretch and leaves me panting, exhausted.
As long as the burden is a burden of pain alone I bear it by holding it at a distance. It is not I who am in pain, I say to myself: the one in pain is someone else, some body else who shares this bed with, me. So, by a trick, I hold it off, keep it elsewhere. And when the trick will not work, when the pain insists on owning me, I bear it anyhow.
(As the waves rise I have no doubt my tricks will be swept away like the dikes of Zeeland.)
But now, during these spasms of coughing, I cannot keep any distance from myself. There is no mind, there is no body, there is just I, a creature thrashing about, struggling for air, drowning. Terror, and the ignominy of terror! Another vale to be passed through on the way to death. How can this be happening to me? I think at the height of the coughing: Is it fair? The ignominy of naivete. Even a dog with a broken back breathing its last at the roadside would not think, But is this fair?
Living, said Marcus Aurelius, calls for the art of the wrestler, not the dancer. 'Staying on your feet is all; there is no need for pretty steps.
Yesterday, with, the pantry bare, I had to go shopping. Trudging home with my bags, I had a bad spell. Three passing schoolboys stopped to stare at the old woman leaning against a lamp-post with her groceries spilled around her feet. In between the coughing I tried to wave them away. What I looked like I cannot imagine. A woman in a car slowed down. 'Are you all right?' she called. 'I have been shopping,' I panted. 'What?' she said, frowning, straining to hear. 'Nothing!' I gasped. She drove off.
How ugly we are growing, from being unable to think well of ourselves! Even the beauty queens look irritable. Ugliness: what is it but the soul showing through the flesh?
Then last night the worst happened. Into the confusion of my drugged, unsavoury slumber penetrated the sound of barking. On and on it went, steady, relentless, mechanical. Why did Vercueil not put a stop to it?
I did not trust myself on the stairs. In bathrobe and slippers I went out on to the balcony. It was cold, a light rain was falling. 'Mr Vercueil!' I croaked – 'What is the dog barking about? Mr Vercueil!'
The barking stopped, then started again. Vercueil did not appear.
I went back to bed and lay there unable to sleep, the barking like hammering in my ears.
This is how old women fall and break their hips, I warned myself: this is how the trap is laid, and this is how they are caught.
Holding to the banister with both hands I crept downstairs.
There was someone in the kitchen and it was not: Vercueil. Whoever it was did not try to hide. My God, I thought: Bheki! A chill ran through me.
In the eerie light cast by the open refrigerator he confronted me, his forehead with the bullet wound covered by a white bandage.
'What do you want?' I whispered. 'Do you want food?'
He spoke: 'Where is Bheki?'
The voice was lower, thicker than Bheki's. Who could it be then? Befuddled, I searched for a name.
He closed the refrigerator door. Now we were in darkness. 'Mr Vercueil!' I croaked. The dog barked without let-up. 'The neighbours will come,' I whispered.
As he passed me his shoulder brushed mine. Flinching, I smelled him and knew who he was.
He reached the door. The barking grew frantic.
' Florence isn't here any more,' I said. I turned on the light.
He was not wearing his own clothes. Or perhaps it is a fashion. The jacket seemed to belong to a full-grown man and the trousers were too long. One arm of the jacket was empty.
'How is your arm?' I asked.
'I must not move the arm,' he said.
'Come away from the door,' I said.
I opened the door a crack. The dog leapt excitedly. I tapped it on the nose. 'Stop it at once!.' I commanded. It whined softly. 'Where is your master?' It cocked, its ears. I closed the door.
'What do you want here?' I asked the boy.
'Where is Bheki?'
'Bheki is dead. He was killed last week while you were in hospital. He was shot. He died at once. The day after that affair with the bicycle.'
He licked, his lips. There was a cornered, uncertain look about him.
'Do you want something to eat?'
He shook his head. 'Money. I have no money,' he said. 'For the bus.'
'I will give you money. But where do you intend to go?'
'I must go home.'
'Don't do that, I urge you. I know what I am talking about, I have seen what is happening on the Flats. Stay away till things have gone back to normal.'
'Things will never be normal -'
'Please! I know the argument, I haven't the time or interest to go through it again. Stay here till things are quieter. Stay till you are better. Why did you leave the hospital? Are you discharged?'
'Yes. I am discharged.'
'Whose clothes are you wearing?' 'They are mine.'
'They are not your clothes. Where did you get them?'
'They are mine. A friend brought them to me.'
He was lying. He lied no better than any other fifteen-year-old.
'Sit down. I will give you something to eat, then, you can get some sleep. Wait till morning before you make up your mind what to do next.'
I made tea. He sat down, paying me no attention at all. It did not embarrass him that I did not believe his story. What I believed was of no account. What did he think of me? Did he give me any thought? Was he a thinking person? No: compared with. Bheki he was unthinking, inarticulate, unimaginative. But he was alive and Bheki was dead. The lively about everything, I am written out, bled dry, and still I go on. This letter has become a maze, and I a dog in the maze, scurrying up and down the branches and tunnels, scratching and whining at the same old places, tiring, tired. Why do I not call for help, call to God? Because God cannot help me. God is looking for me but he cannot reach me. God is another dog in another maze. I smell God and God smells me. I am the bitch in her time, God the male. God smells me, he can think of nothing else but finding me and taking me. Up and down the branches he bounds, scratching at the mesh. But he is lost as I am lost.
I dream, but I doubt that it is God I dream of. When. I fall asleep there commences a restless movement of shapes behind my eyelids, shapes without body or form, covered in a haze, grey or brown, sulphurous. Borodino is the word that comes to me in my sleep: a hot summer afternoon on the Russian plain, smoke everywhere, the grass dry and burning, two hosts that have lost all cohesion plodding about, parched, in terror of their lives. Hundreds of thousands of men, faceless, voiceless, dry as bones, trapped on a field of slaughter, repeating night after 'night their back-and-forth march across that scorched plain in the stench of sulphur and blood: a hell into which I plummet when I close my eyes.
I am more than half convinced it is the red pills, Diconal, that call up these armies inside me. But without the red pills I can no longer sleep.
Borodino, Diconal: I stare at the words. Are they anagrams? They look like anagrams. But for what, and in what language?
When I wake out of the Borodino sleep I am calling or crying or coughing with sounds that come from deep in my chest. Then I quieten down, and lie staring about me. My room, my house, my life: too close a rendering to be an imitation: the real thing: I am back: again and again I am back, from the belly of the whale disgorged. A miracle each time, unacknowledged, uncelebrated, unwelcome. Morning after morning I am disgorged, cast up on the shore, given another chance. And what do I do with it? Lie without motion on the sands waiting for the night tide to return, to encircle me, to bear me back into the belly
of darkness. Not properly born: a liminal creature, unable to breathe in water, that lacks the courage to leave the sea behind and become a dweller on land.
At the airport, the day you left, you gripped me and stared into my eyes. 'Do not: call me back, Mother,' you said, 'because I will not come.' Then you shook the dust of this country from your feet. You, were right. Nevertheless, there is part of me that is always on the alert, always turned to the north-west, longing to welcome you, embrace you, should you relent and, in whatever form, come visiting. There is something as terrible as it is admirable in that will of yours, in the letters you write in which – let me be candid – there is not enough love, or at least not enough of the loving-yielding that brings love to life. Affectionate, kind, confiding even, full of concern for me, they are nonetheless the letters of someone grown strange, estranged.
Is this an accusation? No, but it is a reproach, a heartfelt reproach. And this long letter – I say it now – is a call into the night, into the north-west, for you to come back to me. Come and bury your head in my lap as a child does, as you used to, your nose burrowing like a mole's for the place you came from. Come, says this letter: do not cut yourself off' from me. My third word.
If you would say you came from me, I would not have to say I came from the belly of the whale.
I cannot live without a child. I cannot die without a child.
What I bear, in your absence, is pain. I produce pain. You are my pain.
Is this an accusation? Yes. J'accuse. I accuse you of abandoning me. I fling this accusation at you, into the north-west, into the teeth of the wind. I fling my pain at you.
Borodino: an anagram for Come back in some language or other. Diconal: I call.
Words vomited up from the belly of the whale, misshapen, mysterious. Daughter.
In the middle of the night I telephoned Lifeline. 'Home deliveries?' said the woman – 'I don't know of anyone who does home deliveries any more except Stuttafords. Would you like to try Meals on Wheels?'
'It is not a question of cooking,' I said. 'I can do my own cooking. I just want the groceries delivered. I am having difficulty carrying things.'
'Give me your number and I'll get a social worker to phone you in the morning,' she said.
I put down the receiver.
The end comes galloping. I had not reckoned that as one goes downhill one goes faster and faster. I thought the whole road could be taken at an amble. Wrong, quite wrong.
There is something degrading about the way it all ends – degrading not only to us but to the idea we have of ourselves, of humankind. People lying in dark bedrooms, in their own mess, helpless. People lying in hedges in the rain. You will not understand this, yet. Vercueil will.
Vercueil has disappeared again, leaving the dog behind. A pity about Vercueil. No Odysseus, no Hermes, perhaps not even a messenger. A circler-around. A ditherer, despite the weatherworn front.
And I? If Vercueil has failed his test, what was mine? Was my test whether I had the courage to incinerate myself in front of the House of Lies? I have gone over that moment a thousand times in my mind, the moment of striking the match when my ears are softly buffeted and I sit astonished and even pleased in the midst of the flames, untouched, my clothes burning without singeing, the flames a cool blue. How
easy to give meaning to one's life, I think with surprise, thinking very fast in the last instant before the eyelashes catch, and the eyebrows, and one no longer sees. Then after that no thought any more, only pain (for nothing comes without its price).
Would the pain be worse than toothache? Than childbirth? Than this hip? Than, childbirth multiplied by two? How many Diconal to mute it? Would it be playing the game to swallow all the Diconal before turning the car down Government Avenue, edging past the chain? Must one die in full knowledge, fully oneself? Must one give birth to one's death without anaesthetic?
The truth is, there was always something false about that impulse, deeply false, no matter to what rage or despair it answered. If dying in bed over weeks and months, in a purgatory of pain and shame, will not save my soul, why should I be saved by dying in two minutes in a pillar of flames? Will the lies stop because a sick old woman kills herself? Whose life will be changed, and how? I go back to Florence, as so often. If Florence were passing by, with Hope at her side and Beauty on her back, would she be impressed by the spectacle? Would she even spare it a glance? A juggler, a clown, an entertainer, Florence would think: not a serious person. And stride on.
What would count in Florence 's eyes as a serious death? What would win her approval? Answer: a death that crowns a life of honourable labour; or else that comes of itself, irresistible, unannounced, like a clap of thunder, like a bullet between the eyes.
Florence is the judge. Behind the glasses her eyes are still, measuring all. A stillness she has already passed on to her daughters. The court belongs to Florence; it is I who pass under review. If the life I live is an examined life, it is because for ten years I have been under examination in the court of Florence.
'Have you got Dettol?'
His voice startled me as I sat in the kitchen writing. His, the boy's.
'Go upstairs. Look in the bathroom, the door on the right. Look in the cupboard under the basin.'
There were splashing noises, then he came down again. The bandage was off; with surprise I noticed that the stitches were still in.
'Didn't they take out the stitches?'
He shook his head.
'But when did you leave the hospital?'
'Yesterday. The day before yesterday.'
Why the need to lie?
'Why didn't you stay and let them take care of you?'
No response.
'You must keep that cut covered, otherwise it will get infected and leave you with a scar.' With a mark Eke a whiplash across his forehead for the rest of his life. A memento.
Who is he to me that I should nag him? Yet I held closed his open flesh, staunched the flow of his blood. How persistent the impulse to mother! As a hen that loses its chicks will take in a duckling, oblivious of the yellow fur, the flat beak, and teach it to take sand-baths, peck at worms.
I shook out the red tablecloth and began to cut it. 'I don't have any bandage in the house,' I said, 'but this is quite clean, if you don't mind red.' Around his head I wound a strip twice and knotted it behind. 'You must go to a doctor soon, or a clinic, to have the stitches taken out. You can't leave them in.'
His neck stiff as a poker. A smell coming from him, the smell that must have set the dog off: nervousness, fear.
'My head is not sore,' he said, clearing his throat, 'but my arm' – he moved, his shoulder gingerly – 'I must rest my arm.'
'Tell me, are you running away from someone?'
He was silent.
'I want to speak to you seriously,' I said. 'You are too young for this kind of thing. I told Bheki so and I tell you again. You must listen to me. I am an old person, I know what I am talking about. You are still children. You are throwing away your lives before you know what life can be. What are you – fifteen years old? Fifteen is too young to die. Eighteen is too young. Twenty-one is too young. '
He got up, brushing the red band with his fingertips. A favour. In the age of chivalry men hacked other men to death with women's favours fluttering on their helmets. A waste of breath to preach prudence to this boy. The instinct for battle too strong in him, driving him on. Battle: nature's way ' of liquidating the weak and providing mates for the strong. Return covered in glory and you shall have your desire. Gore and glory, death and sex. And I, an old woman, crone of death, tying a favour around his head!
'Where is Bheki?' he said.
I searched his face. Had he not understood what I told him? Had he forgotten? 'Sit down,' I said.
He sat.
I leaned across the table. 'Bheki is in the ground,' 1 said. 'He is in a box in a hole with earth heaped on top of him. He is never going to leave that hole. Never, never, never. Understand: this is
not a game like football, where after you fall down you get up and go on playing. The men you are playing against don't say to each other, 'That one is just a child, let us shoot a child's bullet at him, a play bullet.' They don't think of you as a child at all. They think of you as the enemy and they hate you quite as much as you hate them. They will have no qualms about shooting you: on the contrary, they will smile with pleasure when you fall and make another notch on their gunstocks.'
He stared back at me as if I were striking him in the face, blow after blow. But, jaw set, lips clenched, he refused to wince. Over his eyes that smoky film.
'You think their discipline is poor,' I said. 'You are wrong. Their discipline is very good. What holds them back from exterminating every male child, every last one of you, is not compassion or fellow-feeling. It is discipline, nothing else: orders from above, that can change any day. Compassion is flown out of the window. This is war. Listen to what I am saying! I know what I am talking about. You think I am trying to lure you out of the struggle. Well, that is true. That is what I am doing. I say: Wait, you are too young.'
He shifted restlessly. Talk, talk! Talk had weighed down the generation of his grandparents and the generation of his parents. Lies, promises, blandishments, threats: they had walked stooped under the weight of all the talk. Not he. He threw off talk. Death to talk!
'You say it is time to fight,' I said. 'You say it is time to win or lose. Let me tell you something about that win or lose. Let me tell you something about that or. Listen to me.
'You know I am sick. Do you know what is wrong with me? I have cancer. I have cancer from the accumulation of shame I have endured in my life. That is how cancer comes about: from self-loathing the body turns malignant and begins to eat away at itself.
'You say, 'What is the point of consuming yourself in shame and loathing? I don't want to listen to the story of how you feel, it is just another story, why don't you do something?' And when you say that, I say, 'Yes.' I say, 'Yes.' I say, 'Yes.'
Age of Iron Page 12
