The river is the river

by Buckley, Jonathan;

  For someone of Bernát’s calibre, it is implied, writing a book is simply a matter of making the decision to write it. ‘Walden revisited, I assume,’ says Kate.

  It was an autobiography, of sorts, Bernát said, and he was going to write it in Hungarian. ‘His mother’s tongue, but not his mother tongue,’ says Naomi.

  It is obvious that the phrase has been rehearsed; the wordplay might be an instance of the wit of Bernát. ‘Just for the hell of it?’ Kate asks.

  ‘To make it true,’ answers her sister. Engulfed by the babble of English every day, he had become infected with its banalities and clichés. Hungarian, on the other hand, was a language that he had maintained through study and effort. With Hungarian, he would be in control. He would use the language, instead of the language using him. Distance would ensure exactitude, Naomi explains. He would be working with surgical instruments rather than the battered old tools from the shed.

  And Hungarian is the most wonderful language, Naomi tells her sister, as if recommending a city known only to the cognoscenti. It’s the most harmonious and flexible of languages, she says, with its endless suffixes and compound words, and its supple syntax. Every evening in Scotland, for an hour or two, Bernát had helped her with the grammar and vocabulary; studying Hungarian is the most rewarding thing she has done since she started to learn music, she says, and the most difficult; she seems to have an aptitude for it, she allows herself to say.

  They have stopped at a stile; the sun will soon have gone; the river is very low, between wide banks of putty-coloured silt. Surveying the river, Naomi smiles at the prospect, and murmurs: ‘In summer, towards the end of the day, the chestnut trees caught the sun in such a way that the leaves were turned to tangerine, and the grass beneath them was covered in shadows of various blues and greys, like the plumage of a pigeon.’ She looks at her sister, as if the lines were quoted from a book that they had shared when they were younger; but the words are Bernát’s, translated by herself, with his assistance of course, she reveals.

  Kate pictures the master and his acolyte, at work together in the humble homestead: a simple table, a single lamp, fingers sliding over verb tables, touching; outside, the sun is setting beautifully on the heather; the wind makes natural music with the trees.

  When she goes back to Scotland she is going to translate what Bernát has written, says Naomi. ‘I’ll send you a copy when it’s done, if you like,’ she says; the offer is made ingenuously, in the hope of giving pleasure.

  ‘Of course,’ says Kate.

  ‘And don’t worry – it’s not really a book,’ says Naomi.

  ‘Why would I worry?’

  ‘I think you’ll like it,’ says Naomi, ignoring the question. ‘It’s heartfelt. And short.’ It’s short because, having written just a portion of what he had envisaged when he began, and some pages of fragments, Bernát had put his book aside.

  Only for a few seconds is Kate permitted to think that Bernát had realised, as do so many aspiring writers, that he did not after all have a book in him. No, Naomi clarifies, Bernát did not fail: he had decided to leave the book behind, as one might leave a path. Writing, for Bernát, had been part of ‘a process of restoration’, says Naomi. The chief reason for withdrawing to that place was to ‘relinquish all artifice’, she tells her sister, and by this Bernát had meant not merely the artifices of city life but the artifice of himself. Living in society, we learn ways to behave, ways to speak, ways to think. ‘We become encrusted, year by year,’ says Naomi. ‘Layer builds upon layer, and the thing that is formed is what we come to think we are,’ she instructs her sister. We are given masks, she says, and the masks turn into flesh, and then another mask is needed, and so it goes.

  With effort, Kate refrains from comment.

  Next, inevitably, Naomi tells her that Bernát was determined to strip away the masks. He wanted to cleanse his perception of the world, to rediscover what he called the ‘gleam’, says Naomi, as if the noun were a word of Bernát’s invention.

  ‘But the masks are what caught your attention,’ Kate points out.

  ‘Perhaps I could see through them,’ Naomi answers quickly; it’s like a proselytiser’s programmed response to a cynic. Anticipating another objection, she hurries on: ‘The simplicity of the retreat, the writing, the hours of walking, it was all to the same end,’ she says. Then adds, as if this were a detail of no great consequence: ‘As was the fasting.’

  ‘And when you say “fasting”, what do you mean? Skipping breakfast, an apple for lunch, or what?’

  ‘Well, something a bit more purposeful than that. Obviously,’ says Naomi, directing Kate’s attention downward, to her over-reduced body.

  ‘And you decided it was a good idea to follow suit?’ says Kate.

  ‘I didn’t follow suit,’ Naomi bridles. ‘But I ate less than I’ve become accustomed to. Yes.’

  ‘A lot less.’

  ‘Yes. But more than Bernát.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why more than Bernát?’

  ‘No – why do it at all?’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been telling you,’ says Naomi, perplexed that her sister should be so obtuse. ‘It’s a way of focusing. Of rejecting everything that’s inessential. We live in a culture of surfeit,’ she says.

  ‘Food is not an inessential item.’

  ‘Many people have done the same thing, for centuries. In every culture. Religious people, thinkers.’

  Fanatics and the unwell, are the words that Kate hears in her head. To her sister she says: ‘I can’t see that this has anything to do with religion.’

  ‘I didn’t say it did. I’m just saying that it’s not an unusual thing to do.’

  ‘Did you think about the consequences?’

  ‘The consequences were why we did it.’

  ‘I mean in the long term. You might have wrecked your health.’

  ‘Let’s not be melodramatic, Katie. Actors have lost more weight than I have, in a shorter time, and they’ve not suffered in the long term.’

  ‘And you know this for a fact?’

  Another stile is imminent; the dusk is deepening. ‘Shall we turn back?’ Naomi proposes, so cheerfully it’s as if the preceding minutes have already been forgotten.

  They walk for twenty yards without speaking, then Kate says: ‘You think it was a worthwhile experiment?’

  ‘That’s not the word I would use,’ Naomi answers.

  ‘What would you prefer?’

  ‘Exercise.’

  ‘OK. Do you think it was a worthwhile exercise?’

  ‘Very much so.’

  ‘Because—?’

  ‘It made me see more clearly. Not literally,’ she says, and she emits a shriek of a laugh, as if at someone she finds ridiculous. ‘Things got a bit fuzzy at the end, to tell you the truth. But in the bigger sense, in the way that matters, I saw more clearly. In the sense of understanding. Accepting.’

  ‘Accepting what?’

  Naomi encompasses the river and the trees in a grandiloquent sweep of an arm, and says: ‘Everything.’

  ‘So you had problems with your eyes.’

  ‘For a day or two. And a hum in the ears. Like a tuning fork. That’s when I pulled back.’

  ‘You were in pain?’

  ‘Uncomfortable. But not in pain. Well, briefly. Which is when I reached my limit. I’m not as strong as Bernát.’

  ‘Or you’re more sensible.’

  ‘No, not as strong,’ Naomi states. Pain, for her, was a barrier through which she could not pass; for Bernát, it wasn’t. ‘On the contrary,’ she says.

  The comment is an invitation, which Kate pretends not to hear.

  ‘Now I’m going to tell you something,’ says Naomi, undeterred. ‘You’ll be appalled, I suspect. But I’m not going to keep anything from you. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ says Kate, in a faint nausea of dread.

  She and Bernát had agreed a sort of ‘pact of friendship’, says Naomi: they would be ‘absolutely honest
and open’, at all times. To this end, daily, they ‘confessed’ to each other, she tells her sister.

  In the hiatus, the dread becomes heavier; Kate awaits Naomi’s confession of what she had confessed to Bernát. It will be something, it seems certain, of which Kate would have preferred to remain unaware.

  Naomi tells her that she had told Bernát about the various difficulties – psychological difficulties – that she has experienced over the years. None of it was a great surprise to him, she says, and none of it changed anything. And here Naomi wants there to be no misunderstanding about what she means by ‘confession’. The sacramental sense of the word is to be disregarded, she insists. So when Bernát told her what he told her, he was not admitting to anything to which guilt or shame might be attached. In confessing, she says, he was not explaining or justifying; he was describing ‘how it is with him’. She, likewise, was describing how it is with her.

  Thinking it advisable to wait for the fog to clear, Kate responds minimally. ‘I see,’ she says, as if in thought.

  The subject of pain is one to which she had never given much thought until Bernát talked to her about it, says Naomi. ‘But it’s an interesting question,’ she says. ‘What exactly is pain?’

  ‘I think I know what pain is,’ Kate answers, as required.

  The question seems inane, Naomi agrees. We all know what pain is: it’s a sensation that accompanies illness and injury; it is nasty, often intensely so, and any normal person would prefer not to be subjected to it. But pain is an experience, not a thing, says Naomi. It happens in the brain, not in the limb. A simple proof: people lose limbs and yet feel no immediate pain. Connor had witnessed this phenomenon, more than once. Conversely, having been maimed, they will feel pain in a limb that no longer exists. ‘Pain is not an entity,’ Naomi pronounces. ‘Our brains create it, and our brains can use it.’ She pauses, to allow this idea to settle. ‘Now,’ she goes on, coming to the crux, ‘everybody accepts that our emotional states are often ambiguous. Horror can be cathartic; love is often not simply love.’

  ‘Wouldn’t argue with that,’ Kate contributes.

  ‘But the ambiguities of sensation are less acceptable,’ she goes on. ‘Sensation is regarded as a phenomenon of the flesh, and people become illogical when the flesh is the subject. Sensations are nothing but excitations of the body, and the body must be regulated, because the body is the arena of sin,’ she proclaims, lowering the eyebrows to assume the glower of a joy-denying preacher. ‘But the distinction is absurd,’ Naomi declares. ‘Emotion and sensation are indivisible. Both are events of the brain, and the brain is an organ of the body. Our emotions are irregular, volatile, paradoxical, et cetera; so are our senses. Yet our senses are policed and subjected to judgement,’ she tells her sister.

  ‘Is this you talking, or Bernát?’ asks Kate.

  ‘Both,’ says Naomi. Then she repeats, in two or three sentences, what Bernát had told her about the relationship between himself and the woman he referred to as Una.

  The bluntness of the disclosure is intended to enhance the impact, it seems; but Kate receives the information as if there were nothing remarkable about it. It had been foreseen, by half a minute. And the absurdity of the woman’s name introduces an element of comedy.

  Naomi gives her sister a mind-reader’s squint and tells her that she can tell what she is picturing: a suburban dungeon; black walls; faux-medieval contraptions of restraint; a middle-aged man, spreadeagled flabbily to receive the attentions of a corseted Miss Whiplash; a tawdry scene.

  This supposition is correct. ‘I’m listening, not imagining,’ Kate answers.

  In certain respects, the situation was indeed tawdry, even risible, Bernát had conceded, Naomi concedes. He had made himself ridiculous, he knew. But self-respect was an irrelevance in this situation, because its purpose was to eradicate the self. And the unoriginality of the scenario was significant too. The equipment and techniques were not novel, because novelty would be inappropriate, says Naomi. The costume of the officiant, like a priest’s attire, must be conventional, a costume specific to the ceremony: in this instance, a cladding that was both a vestment and an armour. It was more than that, says Naomi, as if what is being discussed is something of a more than private importance: covered in this perfect and artificial skin, the body was transformed into an ideal form.

  ‘If you say so,’ says Kate, envisioning the unideal form of her sister, compressed into an ensemble of latex.

  Naomi wants to know why, if we revere the ideal bodies created by the sculptors of Greece and Rome, we should disdain someone who transforms her own body in this way. ‘Imagination is at work here,’ she says. ‘You should approve.’

  ‘It’s not a question of disapproving,’ says Kate.

  ‘It obviously is.’

  ‘No, I don’t disapprove,’ says Kate. ‘Each to his own. It’s just sex. And S&M is rather old hat, isn’t it? Everyone’s at it nowadays. Or pretending to be.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as S&M,’ Naomi snaps, refusing to lighten the tone. In a relationship of the sort that existed between Bernát and Una, each partner plays a role. It’s a contract – a contract of equals. In the majority of ‘supposedly healthy relationships’, on the other hand, there is an ‘imbalance of power’, Naomi ordains. Behind the charade of equality, there is always a dominant partner, and that dominant partner is the male, more often than not, she says; she seems to think that the point has some local applicability.

  But Kate offers no visible reaction; this episode will pass more quickly if no objections are made to the teachings of Bernát.

  Honesty and clarity were what defined the relationship of Bernát and Una, says Naomi. It was play-acting, yes, but serious play-acting. One partner consented to play the part that the other requested her to play, and he, her subject, consented to abnegate himself in the rituals that their contract governed.

  ‘Mutual submission,’ says Kate.

  ‘Exactly,’ Naomi answers, as if encouraging someone who is finally beginning to comprehend. ‘Whereas the sadist, by definition, does not submit to anyone.’

  ‘Therefore sado-masochism cannot exist,’ says compliant Kate.

  ‘Exactly,’ Naomi repeats. Still, though, she has not finished. One has to think of it in spiritual terms, she says. When the pain commenced, all thought was abolished in the ‘overwhelming consciousness of the flesh’. These were Bernát’s very words. Everything was reduced, concentrated, to this: the body in pain. Each refreshment of the pain took the body further from itself. A transformation occurred – the pain became an experience that had no body. This seems to be a paradox, Naomi acknowledges, but paradoxes are entirely a creation of language. The flesh was ‘etherealised’; the pain became itself alone, with no object and no subject. And then the apotheosis, as ‘pain ceases to be pain’. One attained a ‘blissful void’, Bernát told Naomi, as she tells her sister, as if relating the passion of a saint. But Naomi is dissatisfied. It is impossible, she says, to translate into language the experience of which Bernát was speaking.

  ‘Of course,’ says Kate. ‘Pain can’t be shared. This we know.’

  ‘Yes. But do you understand what I’ve been talking about?’ Naomi demands, with some stridency.

  ‘I think so,’ says Kate. ‘But I do have a question.’

  ‘Ask anything,’ says Naomi.

  ‘Are you trying to tell me that you and Bernát—’

  Naomi’s laugh is a single loud expulsion of air that makes her head jolt back. ‘No, Katie,’ she says. ‘Can you imagine? Me? My God.’ With a downward sweep of each hand, she presents her body for inspection, as if it self-evidently disqualified her for such a role. She explains: Una was not providing Bernát with a service. What she did for him was an act of love, and the love that Una had for Bernát, and vice versa, was of its own order. Their separation did not create a job vacancy. Bernát was not a ‘type’, and neither was Una, Naomi asserts, countering what she takes to be her sister’s tacit judg
ement. Neither, of course, should either of them be regarded as being in any way deviant. Deviancy was a lazy concept, a creation of the unimaginative, of ‘taxonomists’, says Naomi.

  Deep into the fast, after the book had been abandoned, she and Bernát had walked together to the loch – or rather, towards the loch, because Bernát was now somewhat weakened. It was a memorable day, says Naomi. He had made himself a walking stick, and as they descended the valley he pointed with it to right and left, naming the plants and trees and birds that they saw. He knew the names of everything, but his tone was one of parody. ‘Calluna vulgaris; Fraxinus excelsior; Buteo buteo,’ Naomi intones, waving a hand from side to side, as though playing the part of a mad monarch, bestowing honours and titles upon vegetable matter and birds. ‘Calluna vulgaris; Fraxinus excelsior; Buteo buteo; Calluna vulgaris; Fraxinus excelsior; Buteo buteo; Calluna vulgaris; Fraxinus excelsior; Buteo buteo,’ she repeats, making her voice a drumbeat of nonsense. ‘But we are not essential to the order of nature,’ Naomi proclaims, in lieu of Bernát. He was trying, he said, to rinse all names from his mind, to see the things of the world as they are in themselves, instead of projecting himself and his words upon them. It was difficult, he said, to use one’s eyes as receptors rather than instruments of order. That was what he was attempting. He quoted a line about learning about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about grass from grass, Naomi reports. It’s a pity, said Bernát, that we cannot do without words and simply sing to each other like birds.

  Kate’s tolerance for the wisdom of Bernát the investor-hermit-botanist-masochist-philosopher has almost expired. Could this character be any more preposterous? she manages not to say. Instead, restraining her disdain, she comments: ‘Words are arbitrary things, Naomi. This is not an original idea.’

  Her sister winces, as if this response had offended her taste buds. ‘I never said it was an original idea,’ she says. ‘Obviously it’s not an original idea. If it were original it wouldn’t be true.’ This too has the ring of a Bernát apophthegm. They are returning by a path parallel to the one they walked out along. In the vicinity of a straggling blackberry bush they move into air that stinks of rotted meat. Stooping at the edge of the bush, Naomi discovers the source – the remnants of a rabbit, eyeless and half-emptied of its innards. She crouches to peer at the carcass, and smiles, as if the thing were a gift.