by Anita Desai
Once again I pressed myself instinctively into the hedge. The last days that I had been through in the city had taught me to shrink, to make myself invisible, and so I did instead of springing out and standing there before them, in the middle of the road, and crying, ‘Look, I am here! I have returned!’ Neither the words nor the gestures came to me; it was as if they had been strangled inside me. How could I say them when they no longer rang true?
So the car passed by me, I crouched in the hedge, and none of those seated in the vehicle so much as turned their heads to glance at me. If only they had, surely those words, those gestures would have been wrung from me? Surely I would have cried out, at least to say, ‘Please! Oh, please?’
As it happened, they did not. Not one of them turned to look back at the house they were leaving after so many years of occupation. Did they not feel any pang on departing? Their faces were all fixed, staring ahead as if into the future. Was that what concerned them – the future? Were they, perhaps, looking forward to it, eager for it?
And when I saw that, when I saw that they had a future, one that they looked forward to, or at least moved towards with resolution, I admit that I also felt, mixed with the bitterness of disappointment, a certain relief. It was as though I had at last shed them. My wife, my children, my house, they were all gone from me, and curiously, I did not feel bereft so much as lightened of my load.
The car disappeared down the road. Someone in a watchman’s uniform came and locked the gate. The click of the latch reminded me the house was not mine, had in fact never been mine; it had belonged to the company for which I worked but no longer did. It was apparent they had asked my family to vacate it and move. And they had, to my wife’s parents’ home in another town. She belonged there, she was returning to it. She had been mine, my wife, for a stretch of time that now was over.
After a long time of sitting in a state of sorrow and exhaustion, I left my house and, not wanting to walk on the streets where I might meet neighbours or friends, I went by small back-streets that normally only servants and peddlers used, and came to the river that ran around the outskirts of the city. This was no wide, grand river as I had seen in the city where I died, but only a muddy, slimy trickle that ran through a wide sandy bed in which washermen spread out the clothes they washed, and alongside which stood a few straw-roofed shacks housing I had no idea whom. By then it was evening and I stayed on the bank and watched as the washermen folded up the washing, loaded it on the backs of small donkeys and led them away. Small fires were lit in the straw-roofed shacks which began to smoke in a dark, smothering drift. A child with a pot came down to the stones beside the river and filled it, then turned and wandered away.
By then it was growing dark and I felt it was safe for me to make my way down unobserved. I took off the shoes that somehow I had retained till now and left them in the grasses by the side of the road, then walked down and across the sand, which felt gritty to my feet, and came to the water. It looked more like a drain than a natural stream but I was in such need that I bent with cupped hands and scooped up some water to first wash my face, then splash some on my head and finally even to drink.
I could not have drowned myself in such a trickle if I had wanted to. That thought led me to wonder, as I stood up on the stones and stared into the murky opaqueness of the water, if that was what I wished: to drown this self that had remained, to drown the double of the self that had already died.
But that self, my other self, the self that had had a job and a wife and children and a home, that self was already gone. I wondered what it meant, that death of my mysterious double. It seemed to me that I had died with it; I was so convinced of this that I was not able to resume my life. But was that the only possible interpretation? Once again I felt my mind splinter into fragments that whirled wildly in some great vacuum, and one fragment that I seized upon as another possibility was this: could that death have meant that my double had died on my behalf, that his life was finished, freeing me, my new self, my second self, to go on with another life, a new life?
I searched in myself for an instinct, an urge that would provide the answer. Was it to be death, or life? I remembered how I had once stood on a river bank – in how different a condition, how different a state! – and considered leaping onto a boat and letting it carry me down the river and out to sea, but now I felt no impulse at all, not even one that needed to be confronted and stifled.
It seemed to me that by dying my double had not gifted me with possibility, only robbed me of all desire for one: by arriving at death, life had been closed to me. At his cremation, that was also reduced to ash.
Then I was filled with such despair that I sank onto my knees in the mud.
At daybreak the child with the pot returned to the river for water. What he saw made him stop and stare, first from the slope of the bank, then from closer up, the stones in the shallows. When he made out it was a man’s body that lay in that trickle, face down, he dropped the pot on the stones in fright. Its clattering rang out so loud and clear, a flock of crows settling on the sands in curiosity took off in noisy flight.
The Artist’s Life
When Polly returned from summer camp, there was still some time to go before school reopened. She took to slamming out of the house after breakfast and wandering barefoot into the backyard, disappearing behind the garage and the bean vines to where the old car tyre still hung on a rope from the maple tree. For years forgotten, its solaces were now to be rediscovered – the twirling herself round and round and then, when she had wound herself up to the point of strangulation, letting go and allowing herself to unwind in an accelerating spin; the dragging of a toe through the scrubby grass as she pushed herself moodily backwards and forwards; the contortions of her limbs into and around and about the reassuringly fissured and pulpy rubber to act out the contortions of the inarticulate mind. Then there was the great canopy of the maple drooping down over her and around her in its protective tent of green, and the sighings, stirrings and scamperings that went on softly and unobtrusively within it, and the shade, almost chill, it threw across the sticky yellow heat of the last August days. She hung, trailed, twirled and rocked within it, her eyes narrowed under a dusty fringe.
With those narrowed eyes she was gazing back into the remarkable fortnight of the summer camp. It made her push out her lower lip, clench her teeth as she remembered the bliss, so unexpected, so unlooked for, that came her way as if in search of her, Polly, its chosen recipient.
That summer, in the tedious summer camp beside the dully glittering, reed-edged lake in the north, Polly had been chosen the hand-maiden of Art. A red-haired young woman who wore long, tie-dyed cotton shifts, and smiled cat-like through green eyes and moist lips, had chosen her.
Of course Polly had been introduced to Art as an infant. Of course the local school provided her – indiscriminately, as it did all children – with paint and clay and crayons, and she had made, as all children make, representations of her home and family – triangular-shaped father and mother holding hands, box-shaped brother in outsized shorts standing apart – as well as of daisies in a vase, and even a lopsided teacup or two, each of them intensely satisfying for a day or two, then desperately unsatisfying thereafter.
But what Miss Abigail at the camp introduced her to was Real Art: in her whispery, bubbly, disquieting voice she had urged them to ‘paint your dreams – show me what you dreamt last night’. She had spaced the words, leaving great gaps for them to fill, and then sighed a replete sigh, as one might when overcome by swirls of incense or opium, when Polly presented a particularly lurid or mysterious painting – headless, shrouded figures in shades of purple appearing on the surface of a lake with large, many-pointed stars shining down on them out of a streaky sky, or purple pigeons swooping down out of a pink sky to light upon lilac roofs (Polly was very attached to the colour purple, and perhaps it was only a coincidence but that was the colour that dominated Miss Abigail’s tie-dyed shifts too). For the sake of that na
rrowing of green cat’s eyes, that slow exhalation of breath that spoke such volumes, and simply for the sake of staying close to that enchantingly incense-scented young woman with her flowing red hair and flowing purple dresses, Polly dedicated the summer to paint, letting others canoe, shoot arrows, roast marshmallows or run around working up a sweat like the damned and the demented.
She came home reluctantly, dazed into an uncharacteristic silence, with her paintings rolled up into an impressively long roll – Miss Abigail had insisted she always use large sheets of thick paper for her art. The family had been faintly surprised by what she spread out on the dining table for them; they turned to her with quizzical looks and remarks like ‘Very nice, dear,’ and ‘Now what is that supposed to be?’ making her roll them up again in offended exasperation, and carry them up to the attic where she spread them out along with all her painting equipment. She was determined to find herself a tie-dyed skirt, wear her hair loose, not in tight painful pigtails any more, and spend the rest of the summer drawing long strokes of purple and lilac paint across sheets of paper, humming the melancholy tunes Miss Abigail had hummed at the camp. ‘And then my lover,’ she moaned under her breath, ‘left me a-lone …’
Unfortunately it was very, very hot under the attic roof, and in that thrumming heat of late August she would find her head spinning after a while. So much so that she was compelled to stretch out on a sheet of canvas and fall into a kind of stupor, struggling to keep her eyes open. Spiders descended from the rafters and spun their wavering webs, or dangled like aerial acrobats over her head. Seeing one unroll its lifeline and drop, cautiously and investigatively, closer and closer to the nest of her hair, she swatted at it, and upset a mug of water over a painting of a volcano spewing blood-red and orange paint. The water and paint seeped through several layers of paper, staining not only one but several other paintings as well.
That was when she descended the stairs, arms crossed over her chest, chin sunk, looking down at her bare feet, oppressed by the burden of being an artist. ‘What’s the matter, Polly?’ her mother asked, ‘Got a headache?’ and her brother jumped out from behind a door, with a ‘Yah-boo!’ that made her drop her arms, jerk up her head, then stick out her tongue and scream ‘You – pig!’ or was it, her mother wondered, aghast, ‘You – pigs?’
It was then that the maple’s drooping August skirts and the rotting rubber tyre hanging from its branch became the only option for her during the remaining days of summer. It was then that she discovered she could sail through the green leaves and the yellow air and be the artist without having to go through the sticky manoeuvres required by actual painting. Truth be told, she had no distinct memory of any of Miss Abigail’s paintings, only of her loose hair, the long skirts, the whispering voice. She became convinced that art was not so much a matter of painting as of being an artist. Her eyes blurred, seeing not the dusty leaves or the scolding squirrels, the grass with its sandy or weedy patches giving it an undesirable patchwork effect, or her brother’s face with its ginger freckles leering at her through the bean vines that sagged off the garage roof, but great watery sunsets, wild frenzies of blossoming plants, suns colliding with stars, wisps of carelessly cavorting hair, and ‘Paint what-e-ever you drream,’ she sang to herself, stubbing one toe into the dirt and making the tyre swing upwards.
Unfortunately, the old heavy circle of ridged rubber could not be made to swoop upwards. At best, it dangled in its incurably pedestrian way, refusing to lift her into the higher realms where she wished to go. Those unpredictable roseate dreams were cruelly limited, encroached upon by the undeniable reality of the house, yard, suburb – enemies, all, of Art.
Although the suburb was as neat and trim as a picture (a childish picture, not the kind Polly had embarked on with Miss Abigail to inspire her) – white frame houses with black or green trim, standing in meticulously mowed lawns, neatly raked driveways, garages that housed two cars and had roll-up metal doors – there were those necessary but unsightly bits and pieces, too, that owners had managed to conceal with varying degrees of success: garbage cans with lids weighed down with rocks to prevent raccoons from tipping them over and spilling the rotting contents, washing lines hung not only with pretty skirts and coloured shirts but also with more unsightly items of apparel, and stacks of wood that had not been touched for many seasons and were slowly rotting where they stood. There was even an occasional sick tree begging for a visit from a tree doctor by dramatically holding up one blighted arm or exposing a wounded flank.
One of the most unsightly bits of the neighbourhood stood, shamefully, in their own yard, in the corner where the driveway curved away from the house and disappeared behind the lilac bushes that no one ever trimmed, so that it really was not visible to anyone else but to them, and then only if they happened to go past the garage and around the lilacs to the end of the drive. Normally it was only their father who went there, in winter when he was obliged by contract to clear the driveway of snow, because at the end of the drive stood a two-roomed wooden cabin with a condemned porch and a sagging roof that had been let out to their tenant, Miss Mabel Dodd.
Of course the tenant herself was visible, when she drove off to work in the gauzy grey steam of early morning, in her beaten-up old maroon Dodge with the grey paint showing through and flaking off as it creaked past the lilacs, fell into and lifted itself out of the deep ruts outside their kitchen window, scraped by the low-hanging branches of a thicket of lugubrious larch and spruce trees, and then cautiously edged onto Route 2, pointing towards Amherst. It was usually already dark when she made her way back at the end of the day, the headlights of the Dodge dragging through the leaves and grasses, leaving behind shadows. The cabin itself could not be seen from the house. The tenant spoke to none of them unless absolutely necessary and greetings were not: the mother had discovered that when she tried to greet her on their occasional, inevitable meetings in the driveway and there would be no reply. The father claimed he had actually had some conversations with Miss Dodd regarding particularly heavy snowfalls and problems with heating, but the children had not witnessed them and suspected him of imagining a relationship that did not exist, even so minimally. He would do that, pretend to be sociable when he was not.
When she first took up occupancy, the children fantasized about her, made up stories about her secret life as a witch. The first Hallowe’en, they had even gone around wrapped in bedsheets and with baskets on their heads, to chant ‘Trick-or-treat?’ under her windows. She had simply not answered the door. The children persisted: the car stood outside, after all. They pressed their ears to the front door, listening for a sound – and heard creaks, cracks. They peered through the grimy windows to see if they could spy a shadow or a light, and Polly, peering through a slit in the sheet of grey plastic that hung over the window, thought she did see something pale, wedged into a tall-backed chair in the corner; it was certainly not a light. It had the substance of flesh, but without any variation, entirely pallid from top to toe – or at least as much of it as Polly could see. And a faint swirl of smoke wound around it, slowly floating in the dark. When the other children began to push at Polly and ask, ‘Can you see? Can you see anything?’ she turned and elbowed past them, then leapt off the porch, swearing, ‘It’s a ghost!’ All of them echoed, ‘It’s – a – ghost!’ and Polly could not explain that the ghost had not been light and afloat as it should have been, but solid and fleshy and dull.
It was easy to forget that Miss Dodd lived there at all. For long stretches, they did forget. They built themselves a tree house one summer and sat on its uneven planks, dangling their legs and looking out over the sagging, crumbling roof of shingles that seemed a natural outgrowth of the earth. It was a long time since the walls had been painted and it was impossible to tell what colour they had been. Now they were the colour of dried blood, a boring brown. There was nothing that could be called a garden or a yard around it; in fact, it was a wilderness of ivy and scrub and some peculiarly vigorous ferns.
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br /> Polly was still humming ‘Pa-aint just what you-u dre-eam—’ when she slipped out of the rubber tyre and slouched across the grass to where the jungle spread in order to examine those ferns; her painter’s eye saw some promise in their furled and unfurled shapes and tightly wound, or else exuberantly unwound, clusters. There was something serpentine about them, something you might come across in a dream. She was barefoot, and cautious, as if she expected them to hiss and sway, and when she heard sounds behind her, she snapped her head around to look. But it was only Tom following, lifting up his knees and plonking down his feet like an intrepid explorer, a switch held in his fist in readiness.
