“We had all that long trip there,” the old man said, opening one eye, “and this long trip back, for nothing. When do we get to Venice?”
“If they had been the blue finch of Arabia,” the customs inspector said, “you would have been allowed to keep them. Ordinary birds can’t cross the border.”
“But they do all the time,” the old woman said, “in the sky.”
“I know,” the customs inspector said, “but not on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Hand me the cage, please.”
The old man looked at the old woman, who stood up stiffly, from having been in one position so long, and together they got off the train, missing their appointments in Venice, and spent the remaining years of their life in a country where they didn’t speak the language and there was no Commodities Exchange, rather than part with a pair of birds that they had grown attached to on a long train journey, because of their color, which was as blue as the beginning of night when there is deep snow on the ground, and their song, which was more delicate than gold wire, and their movements, which were like the reflections of water on a wall.
10. The sound of waves
ONCE upon a time there was a man who took his family to the seashore. They had a cottage on the ocean, and it was everything that a house by the ocean should be — sagging wicker furniture, faded detective stories, blue china, grass rugs, other people’s belongings to reflect upon, and other people’s pots and pans to cook with. The first evening, after the children were in bed, the man and his wife sat on the porch and watched the waves come in as if they had never seen this sight before. It was a remarkably beautiful evening, no wind, and a calm sea. Far out on the broad back of the ocean a hump would begin to gather slowly, moving toward the shore, and at a certain point the hump would rise in a dark wall and spill over. A sandpiper went skittering along the newly wetted, shining sand, the beach grass all leaned one way, the moon was riding high and white in the evening sky, and wave after wave broke just before it reached the shore. The woman said to the man, “What are you thinking about?”
“I was thinking about how many waves there are,” he said, which made her laugh.
“Thousands upon thousands,” he said solemnly. “Millions … Billions …”
He had been brought up far inland, where the only water was a pond or a creek winding its way through marshes and pastures, and though this was not his first time at the ocean, he could not get over it. No duck pond has ever yet gathered itself into a dark wall of water. Creeks gurgle and swirl between their muddy banks, but never succeed in producing anything like the ocean’s lisp and roar. There was nothing to compare it to except itself.
The next morning he went for a swim before breakfast. The waves were high, but he waited, and the moment came when he could run in and swim out into deep water. He swam until he was tired, and then rode in on a wave, and dried himself, and went back to the house with a huge appetite.
There was no newspaper to remind him that it was now Sunday the twentieth, and that tomorrow would be Monday the twenty-first. There was a clock in the kitchen, but he seldom looked at it, and his watch lay in his bureau drawer with the hands resting at one-fifteen. The only thing that kept him from feeling that time was standing still was the sound that came through the open windows: Sish … sish … sish … sish … a-wish … sish.…
As always when people are at the ocean, the years fell away. The crow’s-feet around the man’s eyes remained white longer than the rest of his face, and then all the wrinkles were smoothed away during the nights of deep sleep and the days of idleness. He and his wife were neither of them young, and nothing could bring back the look of really being young, but five, ten, fifteen years fell off them. When they made love their bodies tasted of the salt sea, and when the wave of lovemaking had spent itself, they lay in one another’s arms, and heard the sound of the waves. This year, and next year, and last year, and the year before that, and the year after next, and before they came, and after they had gone.…
The woman was afraid of the surf, and would not go past a certain point, though he coaxed her to join him. She stood timidly, this side of the breaking waves, and he left her after a while and went out past the sandy foam, to where he could stand and dive through the incoming wall of water. There was always the moment of decision, and this was what she dreaded, and why she remained on the shore — because the moment came when you had to decide and she couldn’t decide. Years ago she had been rolled, and the fright had never left her. So had he, of course. He remembered what it had been like, and knew that if he wasn’t careful diving through the waves he would be whipped around and lose control of what happened to him, and his face would be ground into the sharp gravel at the water’s edge, his bathing trunks would be filled with sand, and, floundering and frightened, he would barely be able to struggle to his feet in time to keep it from happening all over again. But he was careful. He kept his eyes always on the incoming wave, and, swimming hard for a few seconds, he suddenly found himself safe on the other side. As he came out of the water, his face was transformed with happiness. He took the towel his wife held out to him and, hopping on one leg, to shake the water out of his ears, he said, “This is the way I remember feeling when I was seventeen years old.”
While she was shopping for food he went into the post office and waited while a girl with sun-bleached hair sorted through a pile of envelopes. He came away with several, including a bank statement, which he looked at, out of habit — debits and credits, the brief but furious struggle between incoming salary and outgoing expenses — and then put in the same drawer with his watch.
ALL through sunny days, and cloudy days, and days when it rained, and days when the fog rolled in from the ocean and shut out the sight of the neighboring houses, the waves broke, and broke, and broke, always with the same drawn-out sound, and silently the days dropped from the calendar. The vacation was half over. Then there were only ten more days. Then it was the last Sunday, the last Monday.… Sitting up in bed, the man saw that there was a path of bright moonlight across the water, which the incoming waves passed through, and the moonlight made it seem as if you could actually see the earth’s curve.
During the final week there were two days in a row when the sky was racked with storm clouds, and it rained intermittently, and the red flag flew from the pole by the lifeguard’s stand, and only the young dared go in. Like dolphins sporting, the man thought as he stood on the beach, fully dressed, with a windbreaker on, and watched the teen-agers diving through the cliffs of water. The waves went crash! and then crash! and again crash! all night long.
This stormy period was followed by a day when the ocean was like a millpond, and the waves were so small they hardly got up enough hump to spill over, but spill over they did. Sish … sish … a-wish … Since the world began, he thought, stretched out on his beach towel. The I.B.M. machine had not been invented that could enumerate them. It would be like counting the grains of sand all up and down the miles and miles of beach. It would take forever. He could not stop thinking about it, and he decided that in a way it was worse than being rolled.
It was what reconciled him, in the end, to the packing and the last time for this and the last time for that, and getting dressed in city clothes, and the melancholy ritual of departure. It was too much. The whole idea was more than the mind could manage. Outside the human scale. Rather than think about the true number of the waves, he gave up his claim to the shore they broke upon, and the beach grass all leaning one way, and the moon’s path across the water, and the illusion that he could actually see the earth’s curve.
From the deck of the ferryboat that took them across the bay to the mainland, he watched the island grow smaller and smaller. And in two weeks’ time he had forgotten all about what it was like, this year … next year … last year … and before we came … and after we’ve gone …
11. The woman who never drew breath except to complain
IN a country near Finland dwelt a woman who never drew breath e
xcept to complain. There was in that country much to complain of — the long cold winters, the scarcity of food, and robber bands that descended on poor farmers at night and left their fields and barns blazing. But these things the woman had by an inequality of fate been spared. Her husband was young and strong and worked hard and was kind to her. And they had a child, a three-year-old boy, who was healthy and happy, obedient and good. The roof never leaked, there was always food in the larder and peat moss piled high outside the door for the fireplace she cooked by. But still the woman complained, morning, noon, and night.
One day when she was out feeding her hens, she heard a great beating of wings and looked up anxiously, thinking it was a hawk come to raid her hencoop, and saw a big white gander, which sailed once around the house and then settled at her feet and began to peck at the grain she had scattered for her hens. While she was wondering how she could catch the wild bird without the help of her husband, who was away in the fields, it flapped its great soft wings and said, “So far as I can see, you have less than any woman in this country to complain about.”
“That’s true enough,” the woman said.
“Then why do you do it?” asked the bird.
“Because there is so much injustice in the world,” the woman said. “In the village yesterday a woman in her sleep rolled over on her child and smothered it, and an old man starved to death last month, within three miles of here. Wherever I look, I see human misery, and here there is none, and I am afraid.”
“Of what?” asked the bird.
“I am afraid lest they look down from the sky and see how blessed I am, compared to my neighbors, and decide to even things up a bit. This way, if they do look down, they will also hear me complaining, and think, ‘That poor woman has lots to contend with,’ and go on about their business.”
“Very clever of you,” the bird said, cleaning the underside of its wing with its beak. “But in the sky anything but the truth has a hollow ring. One more word of complaint out of you and all the misfortunes of all your neighbors will be visited on you and on your husband and child.” The bird flapped its wings slowly, rose above her, sailed once around the chimney, and then, flying higher and higher, was lost in the clouds. While the woman stood peering after it, the bread that she had left in the oven burned to a cinder.
THE bread was the beginning of many small misfortunes, which occurred more and more frequently as time went on. The horse went lame, the hens stopped laying, and after too long a season of rain the hay all rotted in the fields. The cow went dry but produced no calf. The roof began to leak, and when the woman’s husband went up to fix it, he fell and broke his leg and was laid up for months, with winter coming on. And while the woman was outside, trying to do his work for him, the child pulled a kettle of boiling water off the stove and was badly scalded.
And still no word of complaint crossed the woman’s lips. In her heart she knew that worse things could happen, and in time worse things did. A day came when there was nothing to eat in the larder and the woman had to go the rounds of her neighbors and beg for food, and those she had never turned hungry from her door refused her, on the ground that anyone so continually visited by misfortune must at some time have had sexual intercourse with the Devil. The man’s leg did not heal, and the child grew sickly and pale. The woman searched for edible roots and berries, and set snares for rabbits and small birds, and so kept her family from starving, until one day, when she was far away in the marshes, some drunken soldiers happened by and wantonly set fire to the barns, and went on their way, reeling and tittering. The heat of the burning barns made a downdraft, and a shower of sparks landed on the thatched roof of the farmhouse, and that, too, caught on fire. In a very few minutes, while the neighbors stood around in a big circle, not daring to come nearer because of the heat of the flames, the house burned to the ground, and the man and the child both perished. When the woman came running across the fields, crying and wringing her hands, people who had known her all their lives and were moved at last by her misfortunes tried to intercept her and lead her away, but she would have none of them. At nightfall they left her there, and she did not even see them go. She sat with her head on her knees and listened for the sound of wings.
At midnight the great bird sailed once around the blackened chimney and settled on the ground before her, its feathers rosy with the glow from the embers. The bird seemed to be waiting for her to speak, and when she said nothing it stretched its neck and arched its back and finally said, in a voice much kinder than the last time, “This is a great pity. All the misfortunes of all your neighbors have been visited on you, without a word of complaint from you to bring them on. But the gods can’t be everywhere at once, you know, and sometimes they get the cart before the horse. If you’d like to complain now, you may.” The wind blew a shower of sparks upward and the bird fanned them away with its wings. The woman did not speak. “This much I can do for you,” the bird said, “and I wish it was more.”
When the woman raised her head, she saw a young man whose face, even in the dying firelight, she recognized. There before her stood her child, her little son, but grown now, in the pride of manhood. All power of speech left her. She put out her arms and in that instant, brought on by such a violent beating of wings as few men have ever dreamed of, the air turned white. What the woman at first took to be tiny feathers proved to be snow. It melted against her cheek, and turned her hair white, and soon put the fire out.
The snow came down all night, and all the next day, and for many days thereafter, and was so deep that it lasted all winter, and in the spring grass grew up in what had once been the rooms of the farmhouse, but of the woman there was no trace whatever.
12. The masks
ONCE upon a time there was a country where everyone wore masks. They were born wearing them. About twelve months they lasted, and were shed the way a snake sheds its skin, and for the same reason, and under the old mask there was a new one, at times all but undistinguishable from the old one, at times startlingly different. The first warning was a loosening of the skin next to the hairline, and as soon as he noticed it the person would retire for two days, and food would be left on a tray outside his door, and when he emerged with an entirely new mask his friends and family were careful not to stare openly at him until he had got used to it. The masks were not what we think of masks as being — for purposes of disguise, say, at a fancy-dress ball, or for purposes of concealment. In that fortunate country people had no need to conceal their feelings, and the masks let anger come through, as an ordinary face does, and joy, and sadness, and triumph. That is to say, the mask was their true face but they could not keep it for more than twelve months, and if you had said what a pity, they would have said, “Yes, but so is it a pity that my little granddaughter cannot always stay five years old. Never to change one’s mask is not in the nature of things.” When that same little granddaughter, who had been wearing the mask of a strong and healthy child, emerged from her room with the mask of a child who is wan, tires easily, and is sickly, it struck terror to the old woman’s heart, for the masks were sometimes prophetic.
People were fond of their masks and did not discard them when they were no longer of any use. Parents saved the masks of their children until they were old enough to take care of them themselves and realize their value. In the privacy of his own room, the person would go to the closet where the masks were kept and take out the mask of the period when he had been most happy, or sometimes the opposite of it, and try it on in front of the mirror, remembering old emotions. Sometimes they even went so far as to wear them in public, fastened on over their current mask, with an elastic under the chin, and the hair down to conceal the Une where it had peeled from the face. And their friends would affectionately smile, remembering how they were at that period, and understanding why they chose to return to it for a brief moment. Ministers of the Gospel, professors, politicians and statesmen, official heroes of all kinds were obliged to wear the same mask year after year, no matt
er what new mask had formed under the old one, or how ragged the original mask had become with constant wear. When a great artist died, or a king, or a President, or a general who had changed the course of history, his masks, all of them, were hung in a museum that had been built for that purpose, and the idea was that they would hang there in perpetuity, for the edification of posterity. No doubt they would have if there had been such a thing as posterity. Or perpetuity. Instead, the masks of the great and famous were forever being shifted around — from the most conspicuous place in the main hall to some obscure alcove, and vice versa. Or even to a storeroom in the basement, where they were to be seen only on written request. When an ordinary person died, his masks were gathered up, usually by someone whose own mask was bathed in tears, and put away in a pine box. From time to time the box would be opened and the masks looked at longingly or with new understanding. They did not deteriorate, or suffer the slightest change. As year after year passed, the box would be opened less frequently, and sometimes when it was opened it would be by a person who had never actually seen any of the masks before, though he had of course heard of the person they belonged to. Or it might be someone who had the name and even the facts wrong, and, studying the masks, would arrive at all sorts of interesting conclusions that were occasionally taken seriously, and so muddied the stream of history.
The living masks of saints grew less distinct in outline the closer they came to the knowledge of God. Lovers, especially at the beginning of their rapturous exploration of one another’s natures and bodies, would sometimes childishly exchange masks — as if it made the slightest difference to a heart overflowing with feeling. The masks of husbands and wives long married and deeply connected by subterranean knowledge of one kind and another grew to look more and more alike, so that if they had changed masks with each other it would hardly have been noticed. The discarded masks took up more and more room, inevitably, and people with imagination sometimes felt that it was hardly worth their while to grow a new mask every twelve months when there were so many of them in pine boxes in storeroom after storeroom stretching back and back into the distant past. They didn’t expect anyone to take their carping seriously, but on the other hand change would never come about if people did not, for one reason or another, accept it as a possibility. In the case of the fortunate kingdom where everyone wore masks, it began with the young. Whereas people in their forties and fifties and upward continued to retire into their bedrooms at the appointed time and to emerge with a new face, it was said that fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds were passing the time when this should happen, and rejoiced in the thought that in failing to produce a new mask they were defying their parents. When several years passed and they still had not changed their masks, they knew they were part of a New Movement. “It’s a fad,” people said. “And like every other fad it will pass.” But they saw nervously that the younger children had taken the idea up too, and finally it spread to children too young to know what it meant not to change one’s mask ever. And, not wanting to appear peculiar, the older people did not retire when the twelve-month period was up, and, instead, kept their old mask, and so it became clear at last that Nature, not Fashion, was at work.
All the Days and Nights Page 43
