She sat down on the floor, cross-legged with the child in her lap, and began to recite a story. It is not one I had heard or read before, but it was a good story, so I will repeat it to you, as nearly as I can in the way the mother told it.
* * *
There was once a man made entirely of rags. His head was a ball of dishcloths; his hair was strips of flannel, some of them black, some of them yellow. His clothes were like a waterfall of pieces of fabric in every color, every pattern, every size, every shape. His hands and feet were pieces of stiff canvas; his eyes were scraps of bright blue silk; his mouth was a crescent of scarlet velvet, upturned in a permanent smile. When the Rag Man first arrived in the town, the children who had not been properly brought up threw things at him, and the parents who thought nothing mattered as much as being clean and tidy locked their front gates so the Rag Man could not come in and sleep under the bushes in their gardens. Even the children who were properly brought up and the parents who thought nothing mattered as much as hugs and laughter did not quite like to go close to the Rag Man. He went to live in the park, where there was a big, round lake and plenty of trees, and no one much bothered with him.
Then one day people started talking about the Rag Man again. “Have you seen,” they said to each other, “what’s happening to him?” Each time they saw him, he had fewer rags. His locks of flannel hair had been reduced to just a few strands. His clothes were nothing but bits and pieces of dull white sheeting; even his face looked thinner, as if a layer or two of dishcloth had been peeled away.
“He’s even more scruffy and disgusting than he was,” said the badly brought-up children and the obsessively clean parents.
“He looks sad,” said the well-brought-up children and the loving parents.
When the people of the town were all gathered on the streets waiting for the celebrations for the National Day in that country to start, they talked about the Rag Man, and a woman whose husband had recently died said:
“I feel so guilty now. I should never have accepted the piece of cloth he gave me to dry my tears, but it reminded me of a shirt I once made for my husband and it made me think of happier days. It gave me such comfort.”
“I feel the same,” said a man standing near her, whose house had burnt down, leaving him with nowhere to live but an old shed in his garden. “I was in despair and the Rag Man gave me a square of dishcloth to wipe my face, and when I looked at it, I knew I should pull myself together. At least, I thought, I could keep my shed clean and that would give me back some self-respect. I felt better at once.”
So it went on—up and down the street, people confessing they had taken the rags the Rag Man offered them. It seemed that anyone in the town who was grieving or cast down would go to the park to walk round the lake and be alone with their misery and their regrets. After a while, the Rag Man would come out of the trees and pluck a piece of rag from his clothes, his hair, or his face and offer it to them as you might offer a handkerchief to someone you saw crying. In each case, the rag made them think positive thoughts, and from that moment, although they were still sad, they felt able to go back out of the park and carry on with life.
Soon everyone in the crowd was telling a story, or listening to a story, about the kindness of the Rag Man, and when the brass band had played and the children had danced and the miraculous pumpkin—which was the symbol of this proud country (because of the legend of brave men hiding in a giant pumpkin and leaping out to save the nation from invaders)—had been paraded past the crowds, the mayor stood up and made an announcement.
“The Rag Man is giving himself away, rag by rag, to help others,” he said. “It is up to us to give him back what he has lost.”
The people came from all over the town, even the ones who used to scorn the Rag Man—for they have tragedies, too, and want comfort—and left the cloth they no longer needed or could spare on the path beside the lake. After this, the Rag Man became as colorful, as plump, and as ragged as he had been before. Now the townspeople could recognize, in his costume, pieces of fabric they knew. Scraps of the old curtains from the theater, the remains of canvas kneelers from the church, the awning that used to hang over the butcher’s window. Now everyone loves the Rag Man, especially those who have been unhappy, and isn’t everyone unhappy sometimes?
* * *
Everybody in the room was still, smiling at the child and her mother telling the remains of an Iron Age man with his perfectly preserved face a story he could never have imagined. When it was finished, the little girl said, “Can we have an ice cream now?” and walked away with her mother.
I looked at the Tollund Man’s face and imagined the leathery skin was old cleaning cloth and his smile was stitched on. I wish we knew the circumstances of his death. Not the details of how he died, which we do know, but the hours and days before it happened. Did he come forward as a sacrifice for the good of others, as the Rag Man did, or was his death a punishment for a crime the people he lived among could not forgive? I think you were crying, in a way, when you first wrote, because you felt the Tollund Man should be able to wake up and tell you stories that would help. Instead, we are telling each other stories. I am happy that it is so.
Write soon. Think mountains.
Love,
Anders
Bury St. Edmunds
September 6
Dear Anders,
All is calm. You will see that this is a letter, in an envelope, and this is because I have something to send you. I will explain.
* * *
Thank you for the story. When I had read it I went to the chest where I keep all the old pieces of fabric and clothes I know I will never use or wear again but which I cannot bear to throw out. My brother’s bedroom curtains are in there. They have a gray background and a pattern of black sailing boats with blue or red sails, made simple in the way an Impressionist painter might make them simple, not like a cartoonist would. My sister and I had pink curtains with flowers, and as a child I was frustrated that I was not allowed to have curtains like my brother’s, which you could look at again and again and each time the boats would be different. Sometimes they looked ready to sail away and sometimes they looked fixed and sullen. Sometimes they did not look like boats at all but like lines and shapes that could be anything you wanted them to be. When my mother redecorated the room, I asked for the curtains and meant to hang them in this attic bedroom where I have my sewing machine and my desk, where I write these letters, but they did not fit the windows, and I prefer not to have curtains up here, but to be able to see the sky, without impediment. So I put them away in the chest.
The dress I told you about, the one that I wore to the opera with Bella, is also in the chest. There is a scarf Bella bought once, when we were together, that is cerise silk with a pattern of small sequins sewn on to it. She decided almost at once that it did not suit her and tied it round my neck instead. I wore it all that day, but never again. I love it for how vibrant it is, how exuberant, and I can imagine it might suit me, if I had the other clothes to wear with it that would make it look like a carnation in a bowl of mixed garden flowers. If I wore it with the clothes I own, it would look like a carnation in a bowl of dried leaves.
Perhaps I should stop thinking “dress,” “scarf,” “curtain” when I look at these things, and think “rag,” then turn them into patchwork. Having thought this, I have snipped off a bit of the curtains to send you, as I cannot paint a good enough picture with words.
* * *
What I wanted to say about music is not about music at all, but about poetry. It is a part of my life as music is a part of yours. This is something else I feel I owe to the Tollund Man. I might never have started to read poetry if Seamus Heaney had not written a poem about him. Bella found it in a library book and copied it out for me. It is on my wall today, this handwritten sheet; the description of his “peat-brown head” alongside the picture of it. Since then, poetry has become my music. I read randomly, but the poets I love tell me somethin
g about how they experience, for example, grief, or loneliness, or a moment of joy. My choice of what to read is random because I buy all my books of poetry from an Oxfam charity shop in town that sells only secondhand books. A woman whose name, I am ashamed to admit, I don’t know, who loves poetry, volunteers there on a Thursday. Whenever I am in town on a Thursday, I go in and she shows me all the poetry books that have been donated since last I visited and recommends the ones she thinks I will like. She is usually right. I have a collection now, mainly modern, by poets not all of whom are well known. Some of them, for all I know, not even very good in the judgment of those who are more literate than I am. So what I wanted to say was that I understand what you mean about having to know a piece to be able to snatch pleasure from it in passing, as it were. Then it can hum away in the background, ready to be pulled up to the surface for half a minute or half an hour or however long is available or necessary. A poem will seize a thought or an idea that can keep me occupied for ten times the time it took to read. I have something to think about while my arms and legs are employed doing the things I do every day. The poems I know well, and love best, I do not need to read. I can catch a couple of lines off a page or from memory, and the pleasure of the whole poem is there. When I read poems new to me, I have to read them slowly and carefully and, if it is a poem I particularly like, several times. Then at last it may become one of those I know so well, I only have to let the book fall open at the page as I walk past, between washing line and ironing board, and in the length of time it takes to switch the basket of washing from one hip to the other, I will have taken in the sense and beauty of a line or two and it will sustain me.
Do you read poetry?
* * *
When I had my children, we were not given prints of the scans showing them as fetuses in the womb. But my daughter-in-law had prints of my grandchildren from her scans, and I have them pinned on the board here in my attic workroom. Even now that they have been born and have turned into people I know and love, I still keep those first pictures of them, though I cannot say I look at them or even notice them, much of the time. I lined them up on my desk, when I’d read your letter, and I can see exactly what you mean. It is not just the essential appearance of something human yet not quite of this world. The pictures also hold a promise of someone almost but not completely knowable.
* * *
Mary and Vassily are almost ready to leave. They have packed the few things they want to take and have organized a farewell party. I had expected them to slide off with no good-byes. I could picture them opening the door of their cottage before dawn and putting their few belongings in the back of Vassily’s van. I imagined waking just as it grew light, at the sound of the engine, and watching the van moving slowly away from me through the gate. In fact, I realize, I am forever interpreting their disdain for social chitchat as a reluctance to engage, a positive avoidance of others. In truth, they do not avoid others. They have friends. They make choices about whom to meet, whom to talk to, on the basis of whom they want to meet and talk to. What they avoid is idle conversation with people they have no interest in talking to. So there will be a party. I am cooking food for it. I have consulted with Vassily, who has described the food his mother and grandmother cooked for celebrations in his home in Lithuania, and I have downloaded recipes from the internet. The food is heavy on root vegetables and will probably suit my family’s tastes, which tend to favor bulk over subtlety, but just in case, I will also cook pizza and sausage rolls. Otherwise, I am worried there will be nothing they will want to eat, and I am compelled to provide them with food they will eat. It is a self-propelled compulsion. I could say: “This is what I have cooked and there is no other food, so you must eat it.” But I am not able to do this.
* * *
Meanwhile, the replacements for Vassily and Mary have been selected and are even now, as I look out the window, being towed back and forth across the yard by Edward and Tam, being taught the business of the farm. This is not truly necessary in either case. Instead of Vassily we will have Gregor, who is also Lithuanian and a friend of Vassily’s, a cousin even, I think. He has turned up whenever a job Vassily was doing needed two people; was best man at the wedding; is exactly like Vassily in being dark and quiet but smiles more and sings, quietly, as he works. Though I will miss Vassily, I am pleased to think I will be seeing Gregor more regularly as he walks around with a toolbox and a ladder.
I cannot say the same of the woman who will do the job Mary used to do. Her name is Daphne Trigg; she is nearer to me than to Mary in age and utterly unlike both of us. She is the sensible choice because she has been doing some basic bookkeeping for us since March, when Mary became busy with the preparations for her wedding, so she does not need guidance from the start. Mary did not want to choose Daphne, on the basis of competence. Daphne, Mary says, is not very good at bookkeeping; will make mistakes; will leave work for the accountant who audits the books to do, at additional expense. I did not want to choose her, either, as, unlike Mary, Vassily, and Gregor, Daphne does not wait until she has something worth saying before she opens her mouth. She is also physically incongruous in the purposeful setting of a working farm, where everything is arranged around getting the job done and everywhere is only as clean as it needs to be, where everyone moves briskly, wearing clothes and shoes suitable for somewhere only as clean as it needs to be. Daphne is a fleshy woman, slightly pink. She doesn’t always wear pink, and her hair is dyed bronze, but she creates a pink impression on me. She does not appear to own a pair of Wellington boots or even a pair of shoes with laces and with soles that grip in the mud. However, all this is of no relevance in this decision (and much of what I have just said is too prejudiced and petty to be allowed to count). We have gone ahead with appointing Daphne despite Mary’s reservations, because she is available. Also, Edward says it is the right thing to do because Daphne’s husband, a golfing partner of Edward’s, died last year and poor Daphne needs the money and the occupation in her newly widowed state. I suspect the decision also feels right to him because, like Gregor, she is cheap (on the face of it).
* * *
I am comforted by the thought of mountains. Write soon.
Love,
Tina
Silkeborg
September 18
Dear Tina,
I read your description of the fabric without unfolding the tissue paper round the sample. It was as the words you used led me to expect it to be. I took it out of my briefcase at work and left it on my desk when I was called away. When I returned, a colleague was waiting for me, and she pointed at the piece of cloth and asked what I meant to do with it. What was it for? I said I was going to do nothing with it. It was not for anything. It was a piece of cloth and that was enough. She said she did not like the pattern, which did not surprise me. Her house, I expect, and my house would be so different from yours. If I understand correctly the things you have said. Let me describe my house.
It was built within the last forty years and is a simple design. The rooms are large and there are few of them. On the ground floor, just the kitchen and a living space and a dining space. Upstairs, bedrooms and bathrooms. All the walls are white. I have no curtains, only blinds. In the living space there is a large, soft sofa facing a stove, and also some firmer chairs shaped like eggs. This is a standard Danish design. The lights are dramatic. The main light is also a standard Danish design. Many of the houses I go into have the same one, like an inverted flower opening its petals. There are floor lamps that make me think of willow trees, bending over to let light fall in a pool around them. (I read back what I have just written and I have used nature to describe what is in fact completely unnatural.) The floor is wooden and there are rugs. In the dining space is a black wood table, black wood chairs. On a stretch of wall under the staircase I have my desk facing the wall, where I am writing this. There is a bookcase, a low table, and another piece of furniture where things are kept out of sight. I don’t know what you would call it. All this i
s pleasant and restful and could be any of my neighbors’ houses as well as my own. On the surfaces, on the bookcase and the windowsills and other pieces of furniture, are one or two photographs, which is also usual, I think. Otherwise, there is what Birgitt chose to keep, out of the things she picked up, and bring into the house and display. Everything else I have described was chosen by me. At the time we first moved here we maintained a pretense that we were making decisions together, but in fact she agreed with all of my suggestions. My suggestions were based on what I saw in the houses of friends and in the rooms laid out as examples at the furniture store.
Here is what Birgitt added:
A piece of broken pottery with a cream background and what might be a peacock’s tail, folded up, painted across it from top to bottom.
A collection of pebbles in different sizes, shapes, and colors. Birgitt moved these every week, when she cleaned, rearranging them as a group or separating them into several groups. They have stayed in the arrangement they were in when we left for our anniversary trip. I know the pattern they make by heart, so I can move them, to clean, and put them back as they were.
A dented brass padlock, with its key in the lock. It is open.
A bowl made out of the hoof of some large animal. I don’t know what. It is very ugly.
A piece of wood shaped by the sea to form a perforated, twisted arch. It is very beautiful.
A slice from the trunk of a tree that has been felled, very thin but wide, showing the circles of the tree’s growth becoming smaller and smaller toward the center.
A box made from playing cards. Every suit and every card is represented, but not every card in every suit. It is quite old and rather dirty.
A fan so torn that only the skirt of a gown and the curls of a wig show it was once decorated with scenes from the eighteenth century.
Meet Me at the Museum Page 10
