by Jo Baker
He sets the axe down on its head, spits on his palms and rubs them together.
He lifts the axe and swings again. The bark opens a little wider.
He takes the coat off and lays it aside.
Later, he takes his jacket off and drops it on top of the coat.
Then he takes off his sweater and his shirt, and lobs them in the direction of the clothes pile. He works on in his singlet, the wind and winter sun creasing up his eyes.
His arms ache. His shoulders ache. His back aches.
It’s a different ache from usual. It’s not the stiff neck and tired eyes of before, not the tight cramp of study and neglect. And his head begins to clear; his thoughts are smoothed out and they begin to run. There are no knots. No tangles. No sudden snags. There’s just the swing of the axe, and the shift and twist of muscle, and the breath in and out of him, and the catch of it, of a deeper breath than usual, on his scar, like the tick forward of a second hand.
He works.
He is at Cooldrinagh, swaying high in a treetop, watching his mother cross the ground beneath him, her shins whacking against the sail of her skirt. He is huddled in his chair in the darkness of his college rooms, cold, deliberately alone. He is drifting in a morphine glow through billowing white curtains, and a line of pain that the blade made in him, waking now to the uneasy thrill of Shem’s face, and now to the new comfort of Suzanne’s, and now to his mother’s pinched visage. He is in that little café on the rue des Vignes watching Shem talk as though the world falling into ruins were some grand conspiracy against him. Two years he’s gone now, maybe even to the day—a sting to realize that things are slipping, blurring: he has lost track and doesn’t know the date. And if Shem had not died, and if he had fled south rather than to Switzerland, if he were here now, he’d have spread a handkerchief on the bank there and sat himself down on it, ankle on knee, dark glasses covering his eyes, hands folded on the head of his cane, hat tamped down, his good coat laid around his shoulders, watching him work. And he’d be griping. Small-town life, dear God, how does anybody stand it! The dogs following him around, and the food, and the state of his boots on these dreadful roads. C’mon now, c’mon for a glass of wine and a bite of dinner and a few songs, why don’t you? There must be somewhere in town where his name is still worth something, where a friend might stand him a drink, where he can caress a piano’s keys and sing a few old songs.
He glances down at his palms, at the puffs of unburst blisters, the seams of sweaty dirt, the puckered scar across his thumb where the knife had slipped. You wouldn’t catch Mr. James Joyce getting his hands roughened. Getting them dirty. At least, not this kind of dirt.
By nightfall, there’s a stump in the red earth. It twists its roots deep into the rocky soil.
He has started work on the second tree; he has taken a sappy, smashed bite out of its base. It shudders when he hits it.
—
He is splitting logs. There is rhythm to this work. His breath plumes and fades, plumes and fades.
The house is silent; Suzanne is out at Saint-Michel, playing the piano. The light lowers, the shadows lengthen, and there is, far off, the sound of an engine from the Apt road. The axe stilled, he listens. The rumbling grows; there is more than one engine. Diesel, heavy, getting closer. He whacks the axe into the chopping block, wipes his palms down his trousers. Gooseflesh prickles on his arms.
Because the roads are so quiet nowadays. Cars moulder in barns. Tractors serve as chicken roosts. Delivery trucks are solitary and infrequent. Bicycles are as cherished as firstborn sons, because there is no fuel now, not for ordinary people. There is only fuel for the government, the Army and the Geste.
He slips round the side of the house and peers out along the road. The rattle of the engines grows, and now there is the gritty peel of the tyres. And then, at the turn, light: the fence is illuminated in stark lines. The headlamps are sloped low and shaded for the blackout. There is no pause at the junction: the vehicles turn towards him with brutal self-assurance. They are passing now, shaking the ground beneath his feet, and he steps back deeper into the shadows, and the trucks thunder into town.
Round the back of the house again he snatches up the coat and drags it on. Suzanne, fingertips shifting their gentle pressure from key to key—no way to get word to her. And in town, the newcomers vanishing as the trucks appear; people slipping down alleyways and up flights of stairs and in through garden gates. If the trucks pull up outside the hotel, if soldiers descend and slam open doors and demand papers. So many people are so vulnerable there.
And if the troops are sent back out this way, to find the Irishman. It would only take a word.
He flits on into the woods, the ground rising, so that he is scrambling up, on hands and feet, through rocks and fallen pine needles. The stream of headlights continues off to his left. The trees baffle the sound and distort it, seeming close, then distant, then right up by him once again. He pulls himself up over roots and shivering dry scree until he reaches the top of the outcrop. His breath hurts; it catches on his scar. He squats down, his back against a tree, and stares out towards the town. He lights a cigarette and shakes out the match and squeezes the black tip till it is cool. He holds the match cupped in his palm: the woods are dry as tinder, even at this time of year. He watches the lights, the flick and smudge of them through the town, and smokes, his hand shaking. Then the lights slither off, along the road that curves away and descends steeply to the valley, and away, and they fade off into the distance. He taps ash into his hand and rubs his palms together. Cigarette clamped between his lips, he gets to his feet and begins the ungainly slither back downhill.
—
Heron-like, he hunches over his manuscript. He holds his pen in calloused fingertips.
The blankets are thrown back on the bed, the pillows are still dented with the press of their heads; the few clothes he is not actually wearing are slung over a chair. Suzanne is outdoors in the cold, digging over the ground, preparing it for the first seeds.
He has the old coat on, the collar drawn up, the mitts that Suzanne knitted on his paws, his muffler up over his nose. This room is right above the wood-burning stove and is the warmest part of the upper floor, but when the wind blows it whips the warmth away and even here it’s cold. He only notices afterwards.
Because the words now come. With a curve and loop and dip and stroke. The words keep happening, and he will not think too much about their coming but just let them come. At the foot of the page, he blows upon the wet coils, then turns the leaf and folds it flat, and on the verso the words go on, loop and dip and twist, as they have gone on now for weeks together. A stalagmite of heavy notebooks grows on the desk beside him.
From time to time there’s the cry of circling crows, or the noise of a horse and cart slowing for the turn at the crossroads. An occasional motor vehicle. People pass from time to time, exchange a few words, but it’s there-and-gone and does not intrude on his own words.
And so he thinks of none of it: not the presences nor the absences, neither the wide expanse of sky beyond his window nor the close grain of the wood under his hand, though all of it was necessary for this quiet alchemy to happen.
—
Writing lets him step aside, and time flows on without him. He sips his just-made cup of corn coffee and it’s ice-cold; he looks up from the morning and the light has gone. His shoulders ache. There’s a snag in his neck. Then headlamps blur the dark—and he gets to his feet, but he’s too slow to see the truck pass and so doesn’t know whether it was a patrol, or if it is one of the few remaining delivery vans, rigged up to run on gas, or wood chips, or old cooking oil.
You keep on going, don’t you, after all? The horrors build. You keep on doing what you do, out of spite.
He turns away from the window and his desk; he wraps his arms around himself and shivers and clumps downstairs. Suzanne isn’t there. He opens the back door and blinks out at her, standing in the chill spring evening, surveying her dug-over p
atch. Her hands are red with earth.
“Is that you?” she says. She looks round and her face is streaked with red.
“It is,” he says. “I was writing.”
“We’re almost out of firewood,” she says.
—
Newcomers still turn up in the town. They stumble off buses and hole up in the hotel. He makes friends there, in ones and twos, not by the half-dozen. Henri Hayden becomes a companion over chess; he’s an artist, and a blessing. In the evenings, they gather at Miss Beamish’s, Henri and his wife, Josette, he and Suzanne, Miss Beamish and her companion, also called Suzanne. They listen to the radio.
This is just another bubble. The bubble’s shrinking.
A farmer is shot dead. One bullet, neatly through the brain. The blood dries in the red soil. It’s known who killed him; it’s never spoken of. There’s a cloud around the man who did it, a haze of flies. Because this was a neighbour; this was somebody known to them all, over long years, the family over generations. The farmer had found a crate of cigarettes where there should not have been a crate of cigarettes. He reported it. He allowed the information to flow along the proper channels, rather than damming it or forcing it back upon itself, making it flow uphill.
When he sits alone and writes, it is to push against the closing walls of the bubble. The sides flex outward, just a little; he feels that he can breathe. When he blinks, his eyes feel sore against the lids. He’s always tired.
The prose creeps. Notebooks fill. A soft evening in Ireland, a redbrick villa, and the elderly and lame and syphilitic. An unseen man upstairs, dishing out pabulum, approval and opprobrium, entirely arbitrarily.
His handwriting shrinks too and becomes more careful. Everything is reduced, condensed. He commits just the essence of the thing to paper. Anything more than that would be a waste.
And when he surfaces to a cramped hand, a crick in the neck, the sunlight shifted across the floor, a sore blink, he knows that even to have written this little is an excess, it is an overflowing, an excretion. Too many words. There are just too many words. Nobody wants them, nobody needs them. And still they keep on, keep on, keep on coming.
At night, when they gather—he and his Suzanne, Miss Beamish and hers, sometimes the Haydens—to listen to the radio at Miss Beamish’s house, he notices that the gnomic messages on Radio Londres are increasing. They take up more and more of the broadcast time. The gathered company strain their ears through the noise and clutter of the attempts to block the signal, to catch hold of the surrealist fragments and Dadaesque cut-ups that mean something to somebody somewhere. The elephant broke a barricade. I repeat, the elephant broke a barricade…The blue horse walks on the horizon…Giraffes don’t wear false collars…Aunt Amélie cycled in shorts. Sometimes, in Miss Beamish’s sitting room, a head is shaken at the strangeness; sometimes an eye catches another eye and there’s a smile. The poetry of these utterances is intriguing. There are secret parcels and packets of meaning attached to them; they go unseen by all but the intended recipient.
—
The sun shines, and the leaves unfurl, and the shade deepens blue again beneath the trees, and the grapes swell, and in the streams the fish become fat and sluggish, and the birds hop through the inner storeys of bushes like they do every year; flights of them skim above the houses and through the town, and the boys take potshots at them, sharp-eyed and practised, and the women pluck the moth-light bodies and cook them so that the flesh falls from their greenstick bones.
He has become a creature of wire and rope: muscle twists over bone; tendon shifts under skin; skin becomes as brown as tea. He moves freely, lost in the mechanics of labour, less conscious of his physical self than he has been since he was a child. The stone sits in a cheek, is turned over, sent to rest in the other cheek. In solitude and silent work, his thoughts shift and slide across each other. There are patterns forming; they can be glimpsed in the corner of the eye. It doesn’t do to look directly: the pieces drift away like ice. But later, to sit down at his desk, to fill his pen, to trace this across a notebook’s whiteness, is to conjure the patterns back. To write is to drift along with the floe; it is to let the floe drift through him.
He walks out with Henri, and they drink a bottle of wine on a café terrace.
At night, he sleeps his black sleep, and it washes him quite clean.
When the day is bright and calm, and the mistral doesn’t blow, and there’s a warmth to the sunshine, and the air is sweet, and when in the evenings there is light and time and space to write in, it is all too easy to forget that their good luck is just the luck of the crow in the woods, the luck of the merely overlooked.
Fie on’t! O fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
Henri Hayden can be heard well before he’s seen; he declaims the lines as he’s coming down the road. Irish and French sounds bulge out of the English verse, along with his native Polish.
He gets up from his seat and peers out of the window. His friend has a Collected Shakespeare clamped under his arm and is striding along with the ungainly confidence of the half-cut, having been to Miss Beamish’s for an English lesson. Miss Beamish is not a methodical teacher, but she is liberal with her rewards. He raises a hand and Henri pauses in the street, swaying slightly. They talk over the balustrade.
“Better keep it down, my friend,” he says to Henri in French. “You never know.”
Henri wafts the concern away. “But I must practise my English, so that when the Americans come I can welcome them properly in their own language. It’s only right.”
He is not sure that Shakespeare’s English, via Connemara, is likely to make much sense to a GI. He drops his voice further still. “Would it not be wiser to learn German?”
“Oh, they’re last week’s news, the Germans. They’re done for.”
“Henri. Be careful.”
“It’s the paperwork, you see. Each new country they go blundering into, wagonloads of new paperwork, all those forms and dockets.” He grins. “They’ve bitten off more than they can chew in Russia, now, you mark my words. All that bureaucracy will bring the Nazis to their knees.”
“Maybe they like paperwork,” he says. “Maybe they relish it.”
“Buggers.” Henri’s face falls, but he speaks in perfect English idiom. “I bet they bloody do.”
—
In the circumstances, to find oneself still continuing on with all the business of life, to keep on putting one foot in front of the other, taking one breath after the other, while so many others have just stopped, is uncomfortable. It’s not as though he thinks he’s worth the effort.
He pushes into the post office, making the bell ring, inhaling the universal post-office smell of manila, ink and gum. He catches a glimpse of the postmistress in the back room, her startled face turned towards the sound of the bell. There’s a man there too; he’s tucking a sheaf of letters into an inner pocket. A brisk, muttered exchange. She bustles out with a smile and the fellow slides out past the counter and gives him a nod, passing with a cloud of country smell of sweat and wine and livestock. The bell dings and the fellow is gone.
He exchanges courtesies with the postmistress. She checks the pigeonholes. He leaves with a letter from his mother.
He reads as he walks, past the end of the schoolyard where the children run and shout, past two little girls, who, pausing in their game with marbles and chalk, stare huge-eyed and watch the spindly giant pass, and then snort with laughter when he’s gone. He folds the cheque into a pocket.
News of the dogs, and Lily the maid, and Cooldrinagh now sold, and the new place half built—she is even going to call it New Place, which makes him smile—and Frank and Janet, of card parties and coffee mornings and church. Mollie who had walked the strand with him at Greystones, hair blowing, catching in her mouth. Sheila now settled comfortably in Wales with the girls and sending postcards, everybody well. But worried about him
.
He turns it over, reads on to her signing-off, then folds it up and stuffs it away. It is warm and it is kind and it is concerned. It seems that they can only be close when they are at such a distance, when the whole of Europe stands at war between them. He should not be putting her through this, all this, all this worry. She is old, she is not well; she is his mother. That queasy umbilical tug. Still, he pulls against it.
He goes past the front of the house. He continues on past Miss Beamish’s, through the woods, following the road that winds downhill, underneath the cypresses. He walks as the red road fades to pink, out on to the limestone territory, as the road becomes a white line tracing through the vineyards. The far hills are white with bare stone like a fall of snow. His boots scuff white mud on to themselves.
He takes off his coat, slings it over an arm. Keeps on walking.
He could have stayed in Ireland. To save her this. Getting old and alone and worrying about him.
He is halfway up the slope of the ancient bridge before he notices where he is. Beyond the balustrade there’s a twenty-foot drop and white water churns over rocks below. He peers down: it’s barely a stream; it must have shrunk considerably over time, to have once merited a bridge like this.
When she is dead, he thinks, will the tug then not be to home, but down into the grave?
His friend just stepped out into the empty air.
The water tumbles, churns, it wears pits into the white rock. Beneath his hard palms, the stone is crumbly as lump sugar.
It had seemed brisk and simple, that step out of the window. But every moment leading up to that moment must itself have been a decision made.
He pushes away from the balustrade. He takes the slow way down, striding along the bridge, climbing the stile and then scrambling down to the water’s edge. A wading bird picks its way across the mud, and dips her beak down into it, and sifts the silt for food.
