In the Middle of the Wood

by Iain Crichton Smith

  One day the three of them were sitting in a park around noon watching another hotel being built. It rose quickly into the sky — even a day seemed to make a noticeable difference — the workmen ran about the skeleton framework, never stopping for refreshment as British workmen did. It seemed absurd to him that they should be building for foreigners, creating luxuries which they themselves would not be able to enjoy. In the middle of their own national world was this other secret world. (Ralph’s mother-in-law had the fixed idea in her head that the reason their passports had been examined and taken from them that first morning was that they were being spied on: and that the woman shaped like Krushchev was also a spy.)

  As they sat in the park they saw one of the waitresses from their hotel taking her child to a woman who presumably was its grandmother and after kissing and hugging it leaving it with her. So busy these waitresses were, so hard they worked! The granny sat down on a bench and took out a piece of knitting while the child, a girl, sat down beside her. In front of them was a swing on which another girl was composing huge arcs, pushing herself up towards the sky which was a perfect blue. Ralph watched her with a vague interest.

  She seemed a determined little girl, perhaps eleven years old or so. At first she didn’t want to let the other girl on to the swing at all till the granny went over and spoke to her. But then she did, and returned to her swinging. Her face was resolute and pale as she tried desperately to beat her own previous arc, to rise ever higher and higher, as if she wanted to fly into the very heavens which were so unfadingly blue. From a street across the way an old woman watched from a window in which a vase with roses was set, and in front of her the workmen scurried like birds among the iron branches of the half finished hotel. All around was activity, purposeful, thrusting, and yet, Ralph thought, essentially absurd. These birds were building nests for others on whose foreign alms they existed.

  And he could not communicate with any of them. Not the workmen, not the granny or the child on the swing or the other one shyer and more amenable to bullying. So little he really knew about this land, its inner logic, its inner purposes. In splendid arc after arc the girl swung towards the empty sky.

  He watched as a little boy came along and asked to use the swing but the girl didn’t seem to like him and soon they were throwing stones and twigs at each other while the other girl returned to her granny who was still patiently knitting. In a fury of words which Ralph couldn’t understand the boy and the determined girl chased each other round and round the swing which was now moving gently with its initial impetus. The girl pursued the boy and then went back to the swing where she rode the sky in solitary glory. Soon more and more children appeared and she joined them, the resolute leader. The children gathered in a ring around the pale boy and shouted what Ralph took to be a version of ‘Cowardy Cowardy Custard’ and the boy ran away past the bench on which the three of them were sitting wiping tears from his eyes. This day he would remember forever, the day of his defeat, unless he re-ordered it and made it into a fantasy in which he himself had been the victor. Ralph fantasized that some day he might become a cutting critic of, for instance, drama, of the community that he had been driven from. His wit would protect him instead of his fists, he would become the terror of the stage.

  Linda was more concerned with the child’s immediate welfare than Ralph was. She beckoned him over to give him a dinar or two but he shook his head and walked on steadfastly. The granny, who seemed to act as a one-woman nursery school, still sat knitting: she had seen worse disasters than this. The Yugoslavs, Ralph noticed, were very fond of their children, always kissing them and petting them: and the children on the whole were well dressed and neat.

  Sometimes he would say to Linda, “I don’t like this country.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I feel a hostility. I can’t explain it.”

  “Hostility?”

  “Yes. As if they resented us. As if they resented what they have to do in order to earn their living.”

  “I think you’re imagining things. It’s just that you don’t know the language.”

  “No, it’s more than the language. It’s as if they lived in a secret world and I can’t reach them.”

  It was like living in a land before the invention of books, arts. Its blunt barren surface repelled him, the remorseless glitter of its sun. It was as if here for the first time he had been brought face to face with an immutable almost unendurable reality, unprotected from its harsh glare. Above them was that perfect egg-shell azure, like armour. It bothered him far more than it did Linda, while his mother-in-law was more concerned with her ailing flesh. Even the beautiful women, stretched out on rocks, baking to a consistency of brown, did not trouble his flesh. They didn’t seem human at all: here the flesh was everything. He felt that his soul was departing from him, dying, white as an egg, in this tropical heat. The sun itself was an emperor of the day, a star actor in this unplotted drama. It seemed to have cracked most of the houses, driven people to shelter in the afternoons, heated the stones, till they were like cinders.

  “Actually,” said Linda, “I was talking to that courier and she said that though the houses don’t look at all attractive they are all beautifully furnished, and all have washing machines.”

  “It’s not that,” said Ralph. “What I am trying to get at is the quietness and the greyness. I would hate to live in a country like this. There’s some risk, adventure, missing.” And indeed in the end he preferred the violence, chanciness, extreme luxury and extreme poverty of the west — even if it included pornographic magazines, strip clubs, madness — to this prevailing drabness. It was like living in a perpetual Sunday. It was almost as if niceness itself could be dispiriting.

  “I want to be vulnerable,” he suddenly said to Linda. And the words came to him as a revelation. He wanted to swing towards the sky at the expense even of grief, sorrow and even death. He wanted to create fictions at the raw edges of things. And at that very moment he said to Linda as he was continually saying, “What have you done with our passports? Have you got them?”

  “You know I left them in the case. You’re always asking that.”

  “I don’t know why I keep doing that. I didn’t use to.”

  Linda didn’t reply. As he gazed at her profile he asked himself, “How well do I know you? Do I know you any better than I know this country Yugoslavia? Is your language as opaque to me as this language here?”

  There were times when he didn’t understand her womanly moods, the way that her eyes would suddenly brim with tears, and her lips tremble.

  She would say to him, “Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you really love me?” Of course he loved her: why should she need to be reassured? Sometimes in the middle of the night she would waken up and say, “I dreamt that vampires were drinking my blood.” Her dreams were substitutes for his own novels.

  “I was on this island,” she told him once, telling him one of her dreams. “And there was a record playing ‘Irene Good Night’, and I was with relatives. We were all sitting by a stream in the middle of the night and I realized that they were witches. They gave me a drink and I knew that it was drugged and that they were witches. Later I was standing in a garden and I threw the drink among the roses. They were looking at me oddly but I knew that they were my enemies.” The story went on and on and he listened to it with horror. Was he really drinking her blood? Was he concerned only with his own narratives, their purity, their authenticity? The characters in his books he could manage but her he could not understand. And often too he would listen to her mother who would say, “Stand up for your rights,” and in the next breath “You can’t afford to quarrel with your bosses. There’s nothing now but officers. In my day there were only sisters and matrons.”

  The contradictory nature of language and experience! How could be control it, how could he contrive one seamless garment of inner logic? But life wasn’t like that, it flooded all banks, it had no reason, no logic, it was simply itsel
f, a gift, that was all that could be said about it.

  (Actually two days later they were sitting in a restaurant in Porec and suddenly they heard, tinnily played in a foreign intonation, the record ‘Irene Good Night’, and Linda turned and looked at him, her face suddenly pale and overwrought: and he himself was startled as if the laws of reality had been broken.)

  “I think,” said Linda suddenly, “we should go to Venice tomorrow.”

  “Venice?”

  “Yes. Why not?”

  “But your mother. Does she want to go to Venice?”

  “Why shouldn’t she? She wants to go. Don’t you, mother?”

  “How do we go?” said her mother.

  “By boat, of course. We leave early in the morning. I was looking at a brochure.”

  Venice. Why, of course they would go to Venice. They couldn’t surely go home without having visited Venice.

  “And then there are the caves,” said Linda. “Another day we could go to the caves. There’s plenty we could do.” If her mother’s shoes were all right, if they fitted.

  Linda’s energy astonished Ralph. Her daring. So much he had read about Venice, so many paintings he had seen. The canals, the gondolas, the domes. Why of course Venice transcended the meagreness of reality, it represented the colourful brilliance of art, music. Such questions as his mother’s shoes, her varicose veins, would be overcome there, in the glory of the soul, rising towards the eternal blue of the sky.

  “Yes,” he said, “of course we’ll go to Venice.”

  And suddenly they had a future again. Their feet pointed in a fresh direction. They would feed like children at that great city which awaited them.

  In the morning they were at the pier early, and had to show their passports. Their guide told them that they were only allowed a certain amount of money, but that the ladies could shove some down their bras. When the great white ship left they all three sat on a seat on the deck. Their journey was quiet and uneventful and finally they were drawing alongside a pier. When they left the ship the heat hit them like a drawn sword and they kept together lest they should lose their guide, a young girl who held a red parasol aloft so that they could follow her more easily. They climbed steps and crossed bridges. The sunlight was a searing glitter. Ralph noticed that his mother-in-law was holding her handbag close against her side for she had heard of Italian thieves. Now and again they would glimpse canals to the right and left of them, and people reclining in gondolas. The water looked a dirty green.

  Venice. The word was like a spell but Ralph couldn’t fit what he saw into the previous picture he had had of it. The houses were less impressive than he had expected, and somehow lacking in solidity, unlike the huge buildings of, for example, London. The city appeared unreal. Now and again he would see the red flash of a flower on a broken balcony. His mother-in-law’s face was a confusion of reds and whites.

  After what seemed a long time, especially in the pitiless heat, they arrived in St Mark’s Square which was a blizzard of pigeons. Above him Ralph could see the famous clock tower with the metallic hammer about to strike. He noticed mangy effigies of lions. Everything seemed cheap and touristy as if the city were the backdrop of a decaying theatre.

  The guide pointed to a shop and told them that they could change their money there. Linda went in followed by Ralph and came out with twenty thousand lira. The guide said that the first stop on their itinerary was a glass factory but Linda said to Ralph, “Do you think we should follow her or make our way round Venice on our own?”

  “Whatever you like,” said Ralph.

  “I wish you would make up your mind for once,” she hissed at him, but he didn’t answer. The guide said that St Mark was supposed to be buried in the church in the square.

  “I never read that in the Bible,” said his mother-in-law, sitting down on some steps at the side of the church. A large woman sat near them eating a clay-coloured cone which melted in the heat. Pigeons’ droppings were broken stars on the stone.

  Their mother thought that the woman was Scottish but Linda knew that she was German. Ralph leafed through a guide book which he had bought on the boat. Mistakes were on every page:

  “Being built on the water, Venice owes to the lagoon not only its historic events but the very rhythm which rules its tides daily.”

  “As if a ship anchored in a quiet harbour it gave ospitality to clever men, famous artists and sensitive souls.”

  “If you come by plain you will reach the airport Marco Polo at Tessera.”

  “The traffic in the canals is very typical: it takes place mainly by gondola, a boat of very old origins.

  “We hope this wonderful city may appear to the visitor like a fantastic vision, and clear and hearty …”

  The very language seemed to reflect in its carelessness the untidiness that Ralph saw everywhere, the glitter, the cheap gold-coloured glitter.

  Finally Linda suggested they should have a look at the shops and they walked from one to another trying to remember their position in relation to the square. She, like Ralph, had expected some remote beauty, marbly and unapproachable, but not this glare, this tawdry rubbish, the gaudy paintings all outrageously expensive, the trashy silvery models of gondolas. Nor did she particularly like the Italians. When she picked up an English newspaper from a stand and having glanced at it replaced it again the newsagent had stared at her in a hostile manner as if she should have bought it.

  After a while they arrived at a restaurant in front of which were some seats. She chose a table under a large red canopy but when the waiter came over and said that an ice cream would cost the equivalent of a pound she rose to her feet and stalked indignantly away.

  Her mother however chose this moment to want to go to the toilet and as there were no public toilets Linda had to ask the restaurant owners if she could use theirs. They were distinctly unfriendly and it was only when Linda gave them a few of her lira that they agreed to her request. By this time Linda was furious and the old lady was quiet.

  It seemed to Ralph that there was something intrinsically comic and pathetic in their voyage through this city with an old lady in tow. Venice itself was old, with failing kidneys, clogged channels, a ghostly confection which was turning sour and gooey like one of its own ice creams. He was bitterly disappointed, as if his whole trip had been in vain. And now and again, too, he would feel dizzy. He had thought that his mind would fill like the tide with an abundance of fresh images but in fact all he saw around him was the imposed vision of the tourists: it was they who had written this play, this was their script and scenario, and Venice was responding to it. It was this cheap theatre that the people wanted, not his novels at all. They wanted these trashy silvery gondolas, lacking in style and substance. They wanted that gilt instead of gold.

  After a while they entered the church mainly to escape from the heat. But it was full of tourists with cameras, and now and again there would be a flash of light out of the cool dimness. There were candles everywhere, some red, some white: and images of the Virgin Mary and of Christ. Ralph peered at Latin inscriptions and tried to decipher them. The altar looked beautiful but theatrical. Altogether he didn’t like the church. It wasn’t austere enough: the atmosphere wasn’t at all holy. Though it was a huge building, in its colour and pageantry it was too gaudy, too altogether garish.

  The images in it didn’t seem to be all that different from those in the souvenir shop. Christianity itself was a set of souvenirs. The thought came to him that the walls needed a good coat of paint and he smiled. How could a saint be buried under these cheap stones?

  “I don’t believe it,” said his mother-in-law again.

  “Believe what?” said Linda.

  “That St Mark is buried here. I must read my Bible again.”

  “I don’t think it will tell you that in the Bible,” said Ralph.

  “Come on,” said Linda abruptly and they re-entered the fierce sunlight which hit them with harsh strokes. They sat down on the hot steps on which they
had sat recently. The large woman was gone. Linda took from her handbag the small vase which was the only thing that she had bought. A girl who had taken the place of the big woman smiled and gazed longingly at the vase. Their mother was prepared to speak to her but the girl made signs that she couldn’t understand English.

  To think that this was Venice, Ralph thought, gazing distastefully at the vase. Was everything then a deceit, cheap theatre, when you came right down to it? Venice appeared to him like a decayed music hall he had once seen in Wales. The actors had passed through it and had gone, leaving a legend behind them that was essentially false. He felt tremendous sorrow, grief, as he shifted his bottom on the hot stone. Was he himself as hollow as this city? An old finished prima donna.

  Impatiently Linda said, “I think we should make our way to the ship.” And so they retraced their footsteps, climbing and ascending steps, beaten upon by the pitiless sun. Nearer the ship they sat down on a bench and Linda took from her handbag the only postcard she had bought. It showed gold-encrusted gondolas sailing on green canals.

  She addressed it to Violet who was staying next door and wrote carefully. “We’re in Venice today. Very hot, very nice. You should have seen the church.” When she had finished she smiled ironically at Ralph.

  They sat and watched the white ship. It would be their cool saviour taking them away from the inferno of Venice.

  While they were in Porec they also visited other places. One was Pula, the town at whose airport they had landed on their arrival, and the other was Portojua with its big caves. Otherwise they rested a lot of the time, keeping themselves out of the devouring sun which fed on tourists like a large golden bristling animal. Ralph began to think of himself as a delicate white Greek, aloof and distant, while Linda grew more and more impatient with him. She herself was gregarious, impulsive, generous. He on the other hand was the eternal watcher, the reporter, the spectator on the edge of things. She had far more life than he had, far more energy. He compensated for his lack of life by creating worlds which were often hesitant and often cold.