I heard her footsteps on the stairs getting softer and softer; at the door, the dust balls disturbed by her knocking settled and gathered into a thick mass of fluff. I looked at my lover and said, ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to hear the story about the red coral bracelet?’
Lying on the bed my lover turned toward me with a tortured face. He stretched out his fish-grey hands and slowly spread his fingers, his fish-grey eyes protruding slightly from their sockets. The silence of the room quivered like the surface of a lake into which one has thrown a stone. I showed my lover my arm and the red coral beads on my wrist, and my lover said, ‘Those are members of the family Coralliidae. They form a little stem that can grow to be three feet tall, and they have a red, horny skeleton of calcium. Calcium.’
My lover spoke with a lisp, awkwardly and slurring his words as though he were drunk. ‘They grow off the coast of Sardinia and Sicily, Tripoli, Tunis, and Algeria. There, where die sea is as blue as turquoise, very deep, one can swim and dive, and the water is warm …’ He turned away from me again and sighed deeply; he kicked the wall twice then he lay still.
I said, ‘Listen, I want to tell you the stories! The St Petersburg stories, the old stories. I want to tell them so I can leave them all behind and move on.’
My lover said, ‘I don’t want to hear them.’
I said, ‘Then I’ll tell them to your therapist,’ and my lover sat up, taking a deep breath so that several fluffs of dust disappeared in a small stream into his gaping mouth, and said, ‘You’re not going to tell my therapist anything, you can go to anyone else, but not to my therapist.’ He coughed and thumped his naked grey chest, and I had to laugh because my lover had never before talked so much at one stretch. He said, ‘You’re not going to talk about me with someone to whom I talk about myself, that’s impossible,’ and I replied, ‘I don’t want to talk about you, I want to tell the story; and my story is your story too.’ We were really fighting with each other. My lover threatened to leave me; he grabbed me and pulled my hair, he bit my hand and scratched me, a wind blew through the room, the windows flew open, the death bells in the cemetery rang like crazy, and the dust balls drifted out like soap bubbles. I pushed my lover away and ripped the door open; I really felt thin and skinny. As I was leaving I could hear the dust balls sinking softly to the floor, my lover with his fish-grey eyes and his fish-grey skin standing silent next to his bed.
The therapist, whose fault it was that I lost my red coral bracelet and my lover, was sitting in a large room behind a desk. The room was really very large, almost empty except for this desk, the therapist behind it, and a little chair in front of it. A soft, sea blue, deep blue carpet covered the floor. As I entered the therapist looked at me solemnly, looked me straight in the eye. I walked towards him. I had the feeling of having to walk for a very long time before I finally reached the chair in front of his desk. I thought about the fact that my lover usually sat on this chair and spoke about himself – about what? – and felt a tiny sadness. I sat down. The therapist nodded at me. I nodded too and stared at him, waiting for it to begin, for the conversation to start, for his first question. The therapist stared back at me until I lowered my eyes, but he said nothing. He was silent. His silence reminded me of something. It was very quiet. Somewhere a clock I couldn’t see was ticking: the wind blew around the tall house. I looked at the sea blue, deep blue carpet beneath my feet and pulled nervously and diffidently at the silk thread of the red coral bracelet. The therapist sighed. I raised my head, and he tapped the gleaming desktop with the needle-sharp point of his pencil. I smiled in embarrassment, and he said, ‘What is it that’s worrying you?’
I took a breath, raised my hands, and let them drop again. I wanted to say that I wasn’t interested in myself, but I thought, That’s a lie, I’m interested only in myself, and is that it? That actually there is nothing? Only the weariness and the empty, silent days, a life like that of fish under water and laughter without reason? I wanted to say that I had too many stories inside me, they put a burden on my life; I thought, I could just as well have stayed with my lover; I took a breath, and the therapist opened his mouth and his eyes wide, and I tugged at the silken thread of the red coral bracelet and the silk thread broke and the six hundred and seventy-five red-as-rage little coral beads burst in glittering splendour from my thin, slender wrist.
Distraught, I stared at my wrist; it was white and naked. I stared at the therapist, who was leaning back in his chair, the pencil now in front of him, parallel to the edge of the desk, his hands folded in his lap. I covered my face with my hands. I slipped off the chair onto the sea blue, deep blue carpet; the six hundred and seventy-five coral beads were scattered all over the room. They gleamed, more rage-red than ever before, and I crawled around on the floor and gathered them up. They were lying under the desk, under the therapist’s toes, and he drew his foot back a tiny bit as I touched it. It was dark under the desk, but the red coral beads glowed.
I thought of Nikolai Sergeyevich; I thought, if he hadn’t given my great-grandmother the red coral beads, if he hadn’t shot my great-grandfather in the heart. I thought of the hunchbacked, stooped Isaak Baruw; I thought, if he hadn’t left Russia, if my great-grandmother hadn’t stopped the train for him. I thought of my lover, the fish; I thought, if he hadn’t been silent all the time I wouldn’t now have to crawl around under a therapist’s desk. I saw the therapist’s trouser legs, his folded hands, I could smell him. I bumped my head on the desktop. Once I had collected all the red coral beads under the desk, I crawled back into the light and across the room, picking up the coral beads with my right hand and holding them in my left. I began to cry. I was kneeling on the soft, sea blue, deep blue carpet, looking at the therapist, the therapist looking at me from his chair with his hands folded. My left hand was full of coral beads, but there were more still glowing and blinking all around me. I thought it would take me all my life to pick up all these coral beads, I thought I would never get it done, not during a whole lifetime. I stood up. The therapist leaned forward, picked the pencil up off his desk, and said, ‘The session is over for today.’
I poured the red coral beads from my left hand into my right. They made a lovely, tender sound, almost like gentle laughter. I raised my right hand and flung the red coral beads at the therapist. The therapist ducked. The red coral beads rained down onto his desk, and with them all of St Petersburg, the Greater and the Lesser Neva, my great-grandmother, Isaak Baruw and Nikolai Sergeyevich, my grandmother in the willow basket and my lover the fish, the Volga, the Luga, the Narva, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and the Aegean Sea, the Gulf of Finland, the Atlantic Ocean.
The waters of the earth’s oceans surged in a huge green wave over the therapist’s desk and ripped him out of his chair. The water rose rapidly and lifted the desk up with it. Once more the therapist’s face emerged from the billows, and then it disappeared. The water roared, broke and sang, swelling and flushing away the stories, the silence and the coral beads, flushing them back into the seaweed forests, into the shell beds, to the bottom of the sea. I took a deep breath.
I went back one last time to see how my lover was doing. He was drifting – I knew he would be – on his watery bed, his pale belly turned to the ceiling. The light was as grey as the light at the bottom of a lake; dust balls were caught in his hair, trembling softly. I said, ‘You know that coral turns black when it lies too long at the bottom of the sea.’ I said, ‘Was that the story I wanted to tell?’ But my lover could no longer hear me.
Hurricane
(Something Farewell)
The game is called ‘Imagining a Life Like That’. You can play it evenings when you’re sitting at Brenton’s Place on the Island, smoking cigarettes and drinking rum and Coke. It helps to have a little sleeping island child whose hair smells of sand in your lap. The sky should be clear, preferably filled with stars, and it should be very hot, perhaps even humid. The game is called ‘Imagining a Life Like That’; it has no rules.
‘Just imagine it
,’ Nora says. ‘Just imagine.’
On the radio they’re broadcasting hurricane reports four times a day. Kaspar says it doesn’t get critical until the hurricane reports come every hour. Then the islanders would be asked to go to special safety zones. German citizens could ask their embassy to arrange for them to be flown to the United States. Kaspar is quite determined, saying, ‘I won’t leave the Island.’ He is going to stay, and he expects all of Stony Hill and Snow Hill will seek shelter at his place. The Island is in the low-pressure region of the tropical depression. Nora and Christine are sitting on the sun-dry wooden boards of the porch, raptly repeating to themselves, ‘Tropical depression, tropical …’
It is unbearably hot. Thick white clouds motionless above the Blue Mountains. The hurricane, named ‘Bertha’ by die meteorologists, is building up far away over the Caribbean; it isn’t moving but seems to be gathering strength for Cuba, Costa Rica, the Island.
Cat beats Lovey, Nora later writes to Christine, who is already back home in the city, Cat beats Lovey, and Lovey beats Cat, oh Christine my dear, it’s not really your fault. Kaspar talks too much: I like you, I like you; he carves wooden birds, and I only wish he’d leave me alone once in a while; dearest Christine, I miss you … Christine is reading this at the kitchen table, her legs drawn up to her chest. Sand trickles from the pages of the letter. She marvels at how things always have their effect, feels far removed from the Island, feels tired, too.
Kaspar knows that Christine kissed Cat – on her last evening on the Island. They had driven down to Stony Hill in the Jeep. ‘Let’s drive to Brenton’s Place, okay?’ Christine had begged, wide-eyed. Kaspar let himself be persuaded. He liked Christine’s phrase ‘Brenton’s Place’ to designate Brenton’s store, a wooden shack in the village, in the shade of a breadfruit tree; you could drink dark rum there and buy Craven ‘A’ cigarettes by the piece while old men play dominoes with grim concentration, and a long drawn-out high-pitched whistle comes out of Brenton’s radio. They had driven down to Stony Hill in the Jeep, and the clouds had parted to permit a view of the high, star-spangled sky.
Brenton had a new refrigerator. Christine duly admired it, but she was restless and kept staring hard into the darkness towards Cat’s bench at the edge of the clearing – ‘Is he sitting there or isn’t he?’
Kaspar knew very well that Cat was sitting there. Cat always sat there; all the same Kaspar said, ‘No idea,’ gloating over Christine’s anxious indecision. Christine, nervous, quickly drank her dark rum, tugged at Nora’s dress, then ran out and was swallowed up by the darkness. After some time her white legs were seen dangling down from the bamboo bench.
‘Because he was clicking his cigarette lighter,’ she said later, proud of her powers of deduction, and Kaspar remembers the pale shadow of her face, turning towards something and merging with it. Later, when he and Nora wanted to drive home, he called her name. At first she didn’t answer, then some minutes later she said, ‘Yes?’ in a very sleepy and soft voice before jumping up off the bench and silently getting into the Jeep. Kaspar knows that she kissed Cat and made him God-knows-what promises; he does not approve.
But it’s Nora and Christine’s first time on the Island. Kaspar doesn’t miss the chance to repeat this every day: he sings it to himself. After a week of this Nora says firmly, ‘Kaspar, enough now.’
‘You’re always so amazed by every little thing,’ Kaspar says. ‘“Look at those guavas,” and “Look at that sunset sky,” that’s ridiculous too.’
In the hammock Christine yawns sleepily and says, ‘Kaspar, you’ve simply been here too long, you live here, that’s what makes the difference.’ Kaspar, triumphantly, says, ‘That’s why I have to keep saying it – it’s Nora and Christine’s first time on the Island.’
Kaspar is no longer amazed. Guavas, mangoes, papayas, lemons big as a child’s head. Coconuts, lianas, azaleas. Spiders hopping through the room like frogs, the tiniest salamanders and poisonous millipedes. The fruit of the akee that looks like an apple and when fried tastes like an egg. Mangoes are cut open and then spooned out. ‘Are you thirsty?’ Kaspar asks graciously, getting a coconut from the garden, cracking it open and pouring the white, milky liquid into glasses. ‘Good,’ says Nora. She makes a face as if to say there’s a first time for everything, then says, ‘Kaspar, stop watching me.’
Christine collects everything. Coconut shells, black seashells, akee pits, palm fronds, matches, butterfly wings. ‘What are you going to do with that stuff?’ Kaspar asks. Christine says, ‘Well, it’s to show them. Back home.’ Kaspar replies, ‘They won’t be interested.’
Since Nora and Christine arrived Cat has been coming to see Kaspar almost every day. But this isn’t really anything new. Cat comes around often; he is a friend of Kaspar’s and he helps on the farm. But Kaspar is surprised by the persistence with which Cat – mangoes, papayas, and lemons in his backpack – now takes the steep and rocky road to Kaspar’s house every morning in the blazing sun, silently puts the fruit on the kitchen table, then goes to sit down on the porch, only to lapse into immobility. Kaspar watches Cat, who leans back in the blue porch chair, his eyes, as always, half closed, smoking a lot of hashish, clicking his lighter open and shut with his thumb and watching Nora and Christine. They remain unresponsive, noticing nothing; besides it’s hot, and they’re much too close to each other to be aware of a stranger’s attentions. In the morning they drink unsweetened black coffee, smoke five Craven ‘A’ cigarettes in a row, cadge some coconuts from Kaspar, restless to do something, then run down the meadow and disappear. Kaspar feels shut out and is angry. He would have liked to have more of Nora to himself; after all, that was the reason for her visit. He says ‘Back then’. He says ‘Remember’, he says ‘We’ and ‘We in the city back then’, such funny words. Christine raises her eyebrows mockingly and Nora looks away.
‘That was then, Kaspar,’ she says, kissing him on the cheek. She wants, perhaps, a new kind of friendship, perhaps nothing at all any more.
‘Why did you come anyway?’ Kaspar asks. Nora answers casually, ‘Because you invited us,’ or, ‘Because I felt like seeing you. How you live here, and if you’ve changed.’
‘Have I changed?’ Kaspar asks himself. ‘Did I come here to change?’ He has no answer and feels hurt, deserted.
Every day Nora and Christine take the Jeep down to the harbour and then one of the beaches. ‘Kaspar, want to come along?’ Kaspar stays behind, as does Cat, not even asked, immobile in the blue chair. ‘All right then, see you later.’ Not the slightest note of disappointment in Nora’s voice; she guides the Jeep in a serpentine line down the meadow to the little sandy road, Christine waving exaggeratedly. For two or three minutes you can hear the car’s engine, then there’s silence.
Kaspar lies down in the hammock and looks at Cat through the mesh. Cat draws in his left leg, extends the right one, scratches his head, sits still again. He’ll stay till evening, till Nora and Christine come back. He’ll stay till after supper, and presumably he’ll sleep here too, that’s what he did yesterday, on the old sofa in the kitchen. Cat’s sleeping in Kaspar’s house is something new. It doesn’t bother Kaspar. The islanders come, stay uninvited for a day or two, disappear again. It’s the custom. Kaspar could go to Brenton’s house, lie down in his bed, stay there four days, and then go home again; Brenton wouldn’t ask any questions. And Kaspar doesn’t ask Cat any questions either. But he wants to know whether Cat is thinking about Christine, or about Nora. Christine?
Christine and Nora watch Cat while he eats. Cat eats everything with the same expression on his face, a stoic fork-to-mouth motion with his head slightly bent toward the plate, his left hand lying flat on the table while he holds the fork in his right.
He eats everything without betraying the least emotion, and never says this is good or that tastes funny. ‘He eats because he’s hungry,’ Christine thinks, ‘because you eat to satisfy hunger, and that’s all.’ She watches him, and sometimes he looks at her with half-close
d eyes until she lowers her gaze. She puts rice on his plate, akee and salt fish. She likes putting food on Cat’s plate.
The evenings are long, and Christine becomes restless. Nora lies in the hammock, plays the didgeridoo, blowing long, hollow, vibrating tones out into the night. She does this for hours, and won’t allow herself to be distracted even by Christine, who walks back and forth on the porch, arms crossed over her chest, nervous and bored. ‘Kaspar, why do you live here?’
Kaspar is on the lawn, watering the azaleas. Christine, an intent expression on her face, leans against one of the porch columns six feet away from him. Kaspar doesn’t like these questions. He doesn’t like Christine’s restlessness, but still he says, ‘I guess because I’m happy here. Happier than elsewhere, I mean.’
‘How come?’ says Christine, trying to listen to him, though she’s already bored again.
‘Look around you,’ Kaspar says, straightening up and pointing toward the jungle, toward the ocean, the fiery glow in the mountains, down in the inlet the misty, orange-coloured lights of the harbour. Christine follows his glance. Kaspar remembers how, on the first night after her arrival, she sat on the porch, her knees drawn to her chest, and stared into the darkness for a really long time, very quiet.
‘All right,’ she now says defiantly. ‘All right, I know. But still, you must miss something. Autumn, for all I know, snow and the changing seasons; you’re not a native. I mean, you must miss the city, your friends, your old apartment, all that – don’t you miss all that?’
‘No, I don’t,’ Kaspar says, sounding annoyed.
Christine slowly slides off the porch and walks along behind him.
‘What do they talk about here anyway, Kaspar. I wouldn’t want to spend my life talking about papayas and breadfruit. About mangoes. Sex, children.’
‘You don’t have to,’ Kaspar says. Christine replies, ‘One has to make up one’s mind,’ then turns and runs down across the meadow.
The Summer House, Later Page 2
