by Lydia Davis
“What man?” Magin asked.
“Leader, cousin.” The man pointed to himself. “Gone to hunt.” He made the motion of shooting a rifle.
“How long?” Magin asked. He was lighting the butt of his cigar, though he did not know it. The people were all quiet, though they could not understand anything.
“Gone two day, two night. Then very cold, snow fall. Gone five week.” He held up his hand, fingers spread. He pointed to himself. “I leader, soon.” He smiled.
Magin started coughing and the old man left to get a drink. Magin could not catch his breath, and his eyes watered. Then he began to cry without control. He had drunk too much.
Later, the women put away their work and pulled on their coats and shawls by the light of a few stuttering candles. The men knocked the ashes from their pipes, smacked each other across the back, and walked to the door. The women followed. When they had all gone, Magin sat for a few minutes in the dark and smelly room, trying to collect his thoughts. It was not easy. He believed, for some time, that he was in the Smoking Room of the Engineers Club. He was waiting for Harry to come out of the cloakroom. His head swam. He remembered where he was and got up hastily, afraid of losing track again.
Outside he looked over the dim snow to the trees. He did not remember which direction to take. He searched for something familiar in the dark landscape. Hearing a faint noise, he turned and saw small shadows moving over the snow. The first to reach him was a thin white dog, who paused and stiffened, its nose pointed up at him. It was joined by a larger dog, who walked with difficulty and whose stomach was distended, stretching its worn black skin like a drum. One by one they came up, until a small pack had formed around him. He had nothing to offer them. He leaned down and smoothed the white dog’s head. The bones of the skull were round under his palm. The dog did not move. Fearing the sudden snarl and bite, Magin drew back his hand and walked cautiously away. His heart was jolting. He saw a twisted pine tree at the edge of the open space, and recognized it. Near it he found the path.
The dogs walked a few feet behind him, their footsteps muffled by the snow. He was uncomfortable. When the hut came in sight, a dog growled behind him. As he turned, the white dog caught his pants leg between its teeth. The dog growled again and shook its head from side to side. The cloth ripped and Magin began running. His old legs did not move very fast. The dogs dashed back and forth and snapped at his ankles. He reached the hut. As he struggled with the latch, they fell back. Once inside, he stopped to catch his breath, which was raking his throat. Out the window, he saw the dogs circle among themselves, sniff at his footprints, and settle on their haunches, watching the door. Magin went to his cot and lit a fresh cigar. He sat down without undressing and smoked, trying to remain calm. Stubbing his cigar on the dirt floor, he wrapped himself in a thin blanket and lay back. He fell asleep only after a long time.
Most of the night, the cold kept waking him. Toward morning, he slept deeply at last, then lightly again, dreaming of pains in his chest. The dreams became more and more vivid until his eyes were open on a window of pink light and he knew that the violence in his left lung was not a dream. He could not leave the bed. He wanted to smoke, but did not dare. Lying still, staring straight up, he struggled with the pain, resisting every attack, and relaxing when the pain died.
Curiously, what he had learned the night before seemed less final in the daylight. The village leader was gone, with his brother. The people were choosing a new village leader, supposing that the other was dead. They supposed that his brother was dead too. Yet there were other possibilities: his brother might be ill, or injured; someone might be caring for him in a place where there was no way of sending word. Yet the thought haunted Magin that he might have made a foolish decision in coming, and that he could not escape the consequences. He tried to draw a breath and the pain stopped him. Fighting the pain, he then saw that he had had no choice. He could not have stayed at home. There was nothing for him at home. Everything, now, was where his brother was. The pain slowly diminished. After half an hour, as the room grew more and more yellow with the rising sun, Magin was able to sit up.
His wrinkled and sticky clothes clung to him. He had not taken them off since leaving the river three days before. He reached under the bed for his bag and opened it. Inside was a pile of fresh linen. He shut the bag again. He found a safety pin in his pocket and pinned together the bottom of his pants leg. He breathed in his own musty smell. He ran his fingers through his hair and stood up. The pain had perceptibly weakened him and his knees trembled as he walked into the other room.
The dogs were gone. The tracks in front of the door startled the woman. Magin pointed to his torn pants and tried to tell her what had happened. She took an old twig broom and swept away the tracks. The snow against the trees was stained yellow.
At breakfast, Magin ate even less bread than he had the night before. He craved coffee, but sipped cold tea. He lit a cigar and kept it between his fingers without daring to smoke it. Then he walked outdoors, leaving his overcoat behind. Blinking in the glare of the sunlight, he shaded his eyes, which were pale and sensitive. From among the trees he heard men’s voices rise and break off. Birds twittered without pause, chipping away at the silence between the trees. He walked along the path, and the ground under his feet was smooth.
He reached the edge of the clearing in time to see two men struggling out of the underbrush on the opposite side, dragging behind them the corpse of a large deer that furrowed and reddened the snow. His throat tightened as he watched them slit the deer’s belly and disembowel it. Dogs crouched on their haunches at a small distance, ready to spring forward. Women carried up pans and buckets to catch the blood and innards. A few other men gathered around the animal, and fingered its antlers and hefted its limbs. Magin went up to them and they turned their heads and smiled at him. The brown body was stretched out on the snow, its neck arched and its belly caved in. It was a young buck. The smallest man grabbed Magin’s wrist with a soft, wet hand and pulled him over to feel the antlers. They were downy, and warm from the sun. Magin studied them and the pain began to grow again in his lung. The tall man with the hooked nose came up with a saw in his fist, and Magin moved back. The man kneeled to saw off the antlers. A thin stream of dust fell onto the snow. Magin grew dizzy as he watched them under the hot sun. His knees gave way and two men caught him and held him up. The man with the hooked nose let fall the deer’s head, round and bare, and stood up with the antlers in one hand and the saw in the other. Magin sat down on a large rock.
A few men had lit a fire on the ground and were roasting the innards over it. The flames were hardly visible in the noon sun. Near the woods, the dogs fought over the deer’s stomach and intestines. The old man came up to Magin’s rock with a charred stick in his hand. On the end of the stick was one of the deer’s kidneys. He sat down beside Magin, cut off a piece of kidney with a blunt knife, and held it out to Magin with his thumb clamped across it.
“Eat,” he said in Trsk.
Magin took the meat, unwillingly, and ate it, though it sickened him. He wiped his fingers on the snow and dried them on his pants. The other men swallowed their meat as quickly as the dogs, stood up sleepily, and began to cut the deer into pieces.
The pain continued to grow in Magin’s chest. When it gave him a moment of respite, he asked the old man beside him, “What do you think I should do?”
The old man chewed steadily, looking away. When he answered, the pain had attacked Magin again and he could not hear him. When it stopped, he put his hand on the old man’s arm. The old man pushed his meat into his cheek and said, “Wait, wait. Later will be news.” He shifted the bolus of meat around with his tongue. “One month, two months.”
Magin sat still in disappointment. The old man beside him swallowed his meat and fell into a doze. Magin then lit the stub of cigar that had gone out as he held it. With his first lungful of smoke, the pain became severe and he started coughing. The mucus in his handkerchief was pink.
He became aware that he was quite sick. It did not occur to him that he might not leave with his brother, or that he might not leave at all. He had always been able to leave a place, and his brother had always been alive and in a place known to Magin. Only Magin’s wife was gone when he expected her to remain.
When, later, the sound of a shotgun from deep in the woods roused him from his thoughts, there was a wide plate of shadow across the clearing. He had not noticed the old man leave. He was cold, but did not know it until he saw that his hands were as blue as the shadows on the snow. The air was sharp in his throat and he had very little strength left in his legs as he went up the path. He stopped now and then to rest. When he was nearly to the hut, he heard a thrashing in the brush nearby. Looking through the trees, he saw a doe on the ground. Her body was steaming in the air. In the snow under her heaving side, a large hole was opening where the blood from her wound melted it. Her eyes were moist. Curious, Magin left the path and pushed through the snow and branches to where she lay.
She was still. Only her eyelids moved. But when Magin came near her, she thrashed again, digging her hind legs into the brush and lunging forward with her head. The blood spurted from her side. Then she lay still again, panting, and Magin leaned over her, pitying her. Without warning, her hind leg drew back, trembling, and shot out, striking him in the ribs.
Magin fell backward into the snow, and was only half conscious of what had happened to him. The snow seeped through his hair.
After a long time, dim forms drew near him, circling around him. Hot breath washed over his ear and cheek, and the harsh stink of malnourished animals filled his nostrils. Then there were voices of men, and snarling and yelping. Someone moved him and the pain sharpened until he lost consciousness.
He woke late at night in his bed, remembering nothing. His body, sheathed in blankets, struggled against fever. Pain sat like a rock in his chest. The pillow was hard under his head and his bones ached. When he shivered in the heat, his skin prickled and stung under his damp clothes. His swollen eyes were dry in their sockets, and his chest labored for air. He fought against this weariness, afraid that if he slept, he would stop breathing. But his weariness overcame him little by little. The fever spread. His limbs shook until the bedframe itself trembled, and sweat ran from him until the mattress under him was damp.
A white snowfield blinded him. A cold north wind crossed it, opening small holes in the ground and leaving banks of steam in its wake. Out of the holes crawled many deer, no larger than mice. Blinking feebly in the light, they tapped the snow with their hooves. As one of them drew its body up out of a hole, a dog leaped on it and devoured it with a convulsive jerking motion. Magin ran at the dog to beat it off, and caught his foot in a hole. He fell forward, his sight clouded by the steam. The cold crept into his bones, and he shivered uncontrollably. In the gloaming that filled the room he groped for some covering. The blanket burned under his hand. He barely had the strength to grasp it and draw it up over his body.
His eyes rested on the pale window. A late-rising moon shone over the sill, casting a gray light on the floor. The rotten floorboards softened and began to cave in. As the wood crumbled, Magin saw, down in the darkness under the house, the face of a light-haired man. Magin saw that his skin was steely gray and mottled, as though he had been there a long time. Magin watched, and the dead man moved restlessly, then opened his eyes.
Magin woke, his heart thumping. He saw the large circle of the sun outside his window. Turning his face, looking for darkness, he saw, without recognizing her, the woman standing in the doorway. She backed away from him. Shadows moved in the hut. He smelled fear.
“Don’t go,” he said. From beyond the wall, whispered echoes of his words came back to confuse him.
“I’m here,” he said.
The echoes died. White faces with hollow eyes passed his doorway, curious. Slender hands pointed to the pit in the floor and the stiff, ivory face of the man. The sun grew hotter, singing the wool of the blankets and suffocating him. Trying to free himself of the tangled blankets, he ripped his clothes and meshed his fingers in the tattered cloth. Groaning, he scratched at his own skin, trying to find a way out of his fevered body. The sun dimmed, leaving him exhausted. He slept deeply without dreaming.
When he opened his eyes, the room was again black. He heard the sound of the woman snoring. He was thirsty. “Wake up,” he said. His voice was too feeble. He drew a shallow breath and as the pain increased, spoke again. He coughed and choked on his mucus. The woman only shifted in her bed. He lay back to wait for dawn to draw her from her sleep. Slowly he worked the blankets off his burning legs. A cool breeze blew over his skin.
In the morning, the pain had climbed into his throat, so that he could not swallow without tears coming to his eyes. As though mocking his own darkness, the sun shone over the bed where his limbs gleamed through the rents in his clothes. He looked at his body and saw that it was wasted: the veins stood out over his arms where the flesh had shrunk, and his skin was like parchment. His lungs drew little air into his body; his chest rose and fell almost imperceptibly.
He listened to the early air, searching for some sound to root him in the world. Birdsong circled away through the woods and back again. A dog barked once. A man called out and another, nearby, answered. A footstep brushed the dirt close to Magin, and looking up he saw the woman’s face in the doorway.
“Ning,” she said, smiling.
Magin tried to raise himself from the bed, but had no strength in his arms.
“Oh no. No, no, no,” the woman cried in English with a look of horror on her face, throwing back her head.
“Listen to me,” said Magin.
The woman took a breath and rushed on.
“No: tk. Uurk, uursh.”
Magin turned away from her. His pain deafened him.
The woman hobbled quickly to the door and called out: “Ruckuck. Tk! No, no!” Magin heard the sound of people coming: a soft rustling and then the ground shaking outside his door.
The people crowded into the hut, filling it with the smell of burning wood and tobacco.
“Tk. Pshsht uuril,” said one man, softly.
Magin shrank from the crowd above him.
“Ning,” said the woman.
“No, tk, no pshtu tori,” said another man, bending over Magin and breathing on his face.
As each minute passed, Magin felt the need for silence more desperately, and his fear grew. He wanted to be alone, to think of Mary, to breathe, and to sleep.
There was almost no air left in the room. Magin’s eyesight grew dim. With difficulty, he searched the faces above him for the white-haired old man and did not find him. The woman was smiling in a friendly way. He tried to lift his arm. It was too heavy. Fixing her with his eyes, he said in Trsk, “Bring me water.”
She did not understand, and stopped smiling.
A black-bearded man, standing near the bed, puffed on his pipe in quiet contemplation of Magin. Magin hardly breathed. His throat was dry and he could not swallow.
“Water,” he said again, hoarsely.
“Water,” answered several voices.
Then the black-bearded man said a few guttural words and the people began talking vigorously. “Uurk,” said a small man. “No, tsatet ruck!” shouted another. The dogs, who had come to the hut at the heels of the men, became excited and barked sharply, one after another, outside the door. Magin fainted.
When he regained consciousness the room was empty. He tried to think clearly, but his thoughts faded and slipped from his grasp. The pain had wrapped around him tightly. His throat burned. He looked across at the inner wall and followed the grain of the wood. It was dark and water-stained. He looked at the floor. Clumps of snow lay over the pocked dirt. His eyes turned up toward the ceiling, and found only deepening darkness over the beam. His eyes moved down over the outer wall, from stone to stone, until they fixed on the window. There, beyond the pane, was a crowd of faces, staring intently at him.
/> Startled, he turned away. He heard fingers moving over the sill. Snow rustled below the window. He tried to close his hands around the mattress, testing his strength, and waited for the voices to rise again.
Away from Home
It has been so long since she used a metaphor!
Company
I like the students. I like their company. I like them here—if only they would remain in the indefinite future. They must be somewhere in my future or they will not be here for me, for company, where I can talk to them sometimes all day long. But that future must never come. Because it is so hard to meet them in the class itself. The problem is that in order to have the company of them here, in my imagination, I must pay the price of that future arriving, as it does, with all the difficulty of that encounter.
Then there is another sort of company in the letters I have not answered. If I answer the letters, those patient or impatient people waiting for answers are no longer present to me. If I answer the letters, I suppose I may be in some cases present to them, then. But, though not telling myself this is the reason, I don’t answer these letters. And yet this is selfish, and of course impolite. I answer some, in fact. But most go unanswered for weeks, months, more than a year, several years, or forever. Several times, I have waited so long to answer a letter that the person has moved away. Once, I waited so long to answer a postcard that my friend died.
But maybe these people are no longer waiting for answers by now anyway; maybe their attention is no longer on me, and this company is only an illusion: the friendly or neutral words are still there on various sheets of paper in different envelopes, but in the minds of these people who wrote the unanswered letters the words for what they are thinking about me, if they think of me at all, are no longer friendly or neutral but unfriendly, dismissive, even disgusted. I believe I have this company, but I do not have it, unless believing this is enough, and I do in some form have this company, whatever they may be thinking.
