The Fall of Light

by Niall Williams

  “Cait!”

  Finbar called out her name as though he were summoning her from a far shore.

  “Cait!”

  He made the short name long and filled inside it the volume of his own longing and love for her and the gypsies remained quiet and lowered their heads and once more the lapping of the lake water could be heard.

  Then the whiskered woman drew aside the flap of the caravan.

  “She is all right,” she said. “She’s come back.”

  “How is my son?” Finbar called up to her.

  “Oh,” said the whiskered one, “your son has no penis.” She watched as all the fathers’ heads came up and their eyes opened and their mouths dropped and there was a kind of moan that passed among them like a wind.

  “No penis! But two heads!” she shouted, and brought her hands up to the sunken sides of her leathery face and leaned back and hooted a kind of hoo-hoo of owl-like laughter to the astonishment of all.

  Then from inside the caravan came the other two midwives, and wrapped in both of their arms were newborns. Their heads did not appear from within their swaddling.

  “You have daughters!” one of them said, and smiled. “You have two daughters! Twins!”

  “Hoo hoo, no penis!” hooted the whiskered one. And the breath of relief of all the gypsy men could be felt then as Finbar stood up and moved toward the infants. And as he was doing so, some of them came and shook him by the shoulders and he stopped as if just then grasping some urgent matter and told them quickly to return the fishes to the lake. They did. Finbar took his children in his arms and went inside to Cait.

  “Our sons are not born fishes, but daughters,” he told her, and smiled. And he laid down the two infants on her breasts and laid himself next to them, and he kissed the side of her face where her tears were slowly running and tasting like the sea.

  11

  They were both beautiful. They had their mother’s skin and their father’s eyes. They slept and suckled and seemed the children of such serenity that the turbulent passions of their futures could not even be imagined. Cait recovered from the ardour of her labour quickly but retained a kind of sensual fondness for her bed and lay there pillowed and luxuriant and told her husband she did not want to move. This mood was soon discovered general throughout the caravans. The mothers were abed. They did not want to travel on. The entire camp smelled then of warm breast milk and cotton and made the autumnal air by the lakeside heavy and drowsy. The gypsy men, suffering a deep nostalgia for their own infancy, were soon of a like mind and happy to stay the winter there. For in the aftermath of the momentous night of births all were ineluctably altered, and it was as though in the days following, minor roots had sprung from them and were twisting down into the ground. They watched with drooped lower lips of envy while their sons and daughters sucked away at these milky matrons that were their wives. Even the sexagenarian, whose breasts were bluish and flat, with nipples that were wide brown knobs like the plugs of copper baths, and who had to have her son carried by his aged father to the next caravan for a further sup, was strangely glowing. Her eyes shone with contentment and her silver hair was very fine.

  The mothers stayed in their beds for a month. Then they stayed for another one. The men and the older children cooked and burnt the food and bore it on tin plates into the caravans, where the mothers lay back listening to the songs of the canaries. That the bond between the women and their new children was overly strong, or that this might cause difficulty in time, did not yet occur to Finbar. He accepted the somnolent mood of the camp and watched as for the first time in many years the gypsy men came to understand what it was to stay still. The winter was slow in coming. The horses were left to graze the long grasses that feathered the lakeside and sometimes were taken and ridden bareback into the woods in grey dawn deer hunts. And it was a good time. They lived on there in the strange, desolate beauty of that place. And some of the men who had felled trees worked at these with long, jagged-tooth saws and cut out shafts of wood and placed these at angles off the sides of their caravans and bound the rough-hewn planks together with hay rope. There were three of these shelters made before Finbar realized it. He did not know whether to knock them down or offer his help and in the end did neither, retreating into himself and secretly studying the map of the world while all about him the gypsies built their winter houses. By the time the first snows came his was the only caravan without extension. He lay on the bed at night beside Cait and played his face like the moon coming and going before his daughters.

  “We’ll stay here now until the spring,” he said. It was more of a question than he pretended, for he was testing her wishes. “Then we’ll go north. Do you want to see on the map?”

  “I do not,” Cait said, and she held the child they had called Rose in the air above her. “I want to stay here, or I want to go home.”

  “Home?” He could not believe she had said it, and he furrowed his brow as if it were something beyond his comprehension.

  “Yes.”

  “Home?”

  “Your hearing is working, then.”

  “Where is home?”

  “You know where it is.”

  “I do not. This is home,” he said. “This caravan, this is all the home I have. All the home we have.… Cait.… Cait?”

  Cait did not answer him. She brought the child down to her and held her close and said no more.

  The snows were thin until Christmas. They fell into the lake and lingered only on the margins of the road. The gypsies lit fires and traded with those who passed that way. They told fortunes to some that came out of the snowy roads with thick capes and horses thin. The gypsies played them music on wooden pipes and sang the songs they knew. The strangers told them sorrowful tidings of the greater world, and it seemed to the gypsies it was always so. They built high their fires and kept warm their children. An air of contentment had settled over the gypsies then and they did not hanker after open roads. Even their features softened. When the snows grew worse, Finbar expected they would come to him and look to move on. But this did not happen. Instead they barricaded more thoroughly their caravans and cut wood for fires.

  Gradually, very gradually, the line of caravans grew to resemble a street.

  Storms of wind and hail and sleet came and went and still the gypsies did not look to move on. Finbar talked no more with Cait of bringing the gypsies to Bohemia, and he did not unfurl Benardi’s map except when she was sleeping. She loved him for that then and some nights lifted Rose and Roisin to the other side of the blankets, and rolled her bed-warm and sensual amplitude to him and let his face be lost in the roundness of her breasts. Then, when the spring arrived, she, like almost all of the gypsy women, announced that she was pregnant once more.

  So they stayed on again there. Finbar came out to the campfire and gathered all of them around him and announced what he knew they were already wishing. Finbar’s broad arms were crossed on his chest, his long hank of fair hair hung down his back, and he stood before them like a god.

  “It will be good,” he said, “for another year. Then our children will be strong.”

  “Yes,” the men mumbled. They nodded and shrugged their shoulders in acquiescence and raised the palms of their hands slightly outward as if showing stigmata. “Our children. Yes. For our children we must.”

  Finbar left them and went away down the lake and felt ashamed and dishonest.

  Rains fell. One night, when all were sleeping, a gypsy by the name of Nimez hitched his caravan and dismantled its extension and moved down to the beginning of the line of caravans and made camp on the opposite side. When the others woke up he was already established in a superior trading position and had set out a stall of tin pots, ladles, bent spoons, two-pronged meat forks, prongs from meat forks, keys without locks, spikes, hooks, tin Vs of no particular usage, and other such oddments. He had put on a purple shirt and was standing before his caravan, looking down the road. Some of the gypsies were disgruntled but could not sa
y so, for it would reduce them to no more than petty merchants. But the following night, several of the caravans were hitched and moved about in a dark ballet until the dawn arrived and found them settled in two lines either side of the muddied road. No one said a thing.

  “Have you seen what has happened?” Finbar said to Cait as the girls rolled in her lap. “They have made a street.”

  “What is so bad about that?” she asked him. “Don’t be afraid of the new thing. It might be wonderful.”

  And he did not believe her, but neither did he know how or if he could stop it.

  The place changed before his eyes. As the warm days of May came with hordes of flies, the pregnant women grew irritated under the canvas. They told their husbands they were useless. They heard that the wife of Nimez had cool silken sheets and Moroccan perfume. When their husbands lurched over in the bed to kiss them, the women shooed them away and said how could there be love in a place that smelled like horse manure. They asked why was it that their men were so slow to see the future. Did they want it to bite them in the ass? The women said the future had arrived. For, since the gypsies were no longer going to sell and barter and tell fortunes and stories and beg their living travelling miles along the roads, they must now make it from all that passed there along the road between the caravans. It was that simple.

  In the morning the gypsies moved the horses farther toward the woods. By that afternoon any traveller coming down the road took two hours to pass the various booths and stalls and pitches and hagglers that were in his way. Some did not pass at all. So it was that there was soon a dealer in mirrors, a brewer of medicines, a maker of elaborate mechanical contraptions, a scarred man who offered body piercing, a trader in boar hide, a sharpener of knives, a woman who needled tattoos, and others various and sundry of that kind.

  From these and others who were delayed along the way, the gypsies heard tales of the greater world. The travellers and traders spoke in all languages, and their meanings were not always clear. Nonetheless soon the gypsies understood that there was calamity everywhere, and they were better off staying there by the lake. The summer drew on. The street lengthened and the flies buzzed over it. Without anyone noticing it, the caravans themselves began to lose their origins. Nimez worked in the dark to build a kind of foundation beneath his and was one day able to sell the wheels to a passing Macedonian, who bore them off tied either side of two oxen. Other wheels were soon removed, too. Then, when a bearded Magyar stopped around the fireside one night and told them that in the empire of the Ottoman’s gypsies could still be bought and sold as slaves, the following day the horses were sold and the gypsies cut short their hair.

  In all this trading, Finbar Foley took no part, and although still their leader he was soon the poorest among them. He kept his horse and did not remove the wheels from the caravan. In the mornings when he woke he caught in his nostrils the bitter smells of the street that were the smells of envy and avarice, and he was disgusted at what he had allowed to happen. He rose and took his daughters in his arms and took them off away around the lake, then to where the birds flocked and plashed in the waters and where things were simpler. He caught fish for their dinner, and they ate it every day, though Cait wondered why he did not barter some of it for the vegetables of Kaleth the grower.

  “I will not,” he told her, “and I don’t want you to ask me again.”

  “This time maybe your son will be born a fish!” she shouted back at him.

  When the time for birth came it was not like the year before. This time there were many along the street who were able as midwives, and they visited in and out of the wheelless caravans without betraying excitement or tension, either deeply weary of this action of life or fearing displays of emotion would soil the decorum of that neighbourhood. Nor did the gypsy fathers come out and gather, but there was a muted and melancholic dullness to the street, and the births took place one by one without announcement or celebration. For his part, Fin-bar again went out to the great lake in the darkness and wished that his son would be born well. He dove into the waters and made a net of his shirt and swam there until he had a trout thrashing in the raised bag of it. He came up to the caravan, where Cait had finished her labour.

  “Is he born a fish?” he asked.

  And the whiskered midwife again came out and said: “He is not. But he has no penis.” She smiled the whiskered smile. “He has two heads.”

  The second pair of twins was identical to the first. When he saw them for the first time, Finbar threw back his head and exploded with laughter. He laughed and Cait laughed and the first twins, Rose and Roisin, made a noise like laughter, too. He laughed until the tears ran from his eyes and he looked down at the two newborns and saw their red and tiny faces and said:

  “Two more roses.”

  And he kissed his two forefingers and flew them down unto the infants’ heads.

  “Roseleen and Rosario.”

  “Is there nothing else that springs from your penis but roses?” Cait asked him, and she smiled and his heart grew large inside him and might have taken the form of white birds with wide wings, for he felt then so light and full of hope.

  The days thereafter were soft and warm. The street became a small village. But, without the constant journeying of the past, the gypsies grew restless easily in the mild late-summer nights and took to sudden knife fights for little reason. They visited the giant-bosomed whore, Cassandra, in the small hut she had erected at the end of the street, whose loose planks creaked and sometimes fell outward as her customers’ heads banged against them. Not to be offput, in midcoitus she called out to those who were queued outside to repair the damage unless they wanted their wives to see. While some ecstatic customer bobbed up and down on her chest, she made above his head the gestures of hammering to the gaping others and told them to hurry up in case she caught a cold and closed. After such loving then, the gypsies came out into the night with an empty dissatisfaction they could not explain and took to flashing their knives without provocation and spilling the innards of each other in the street. They did not fight to the death, but slashed at chests and midriffs and took a kind of perverse glee in how the blood slowly emerged like dye on the fine white shirts their opponents wore to visit Cassandra. To arrive in that street in the summer nights of that year, it might have seemed the gypsies were rivals for the love of a fabulous beauty and were engaged in a fight for her honour. But it was in fact not hers but their own honour that they sought to recapture. They knifed each other to be men, and whether you were the gypsy wounded or wounding did not really matter. In the daylight the scars were bandaged and masked and the little village seemed as normal. The bloodstains in the street vanished under the traffic and trade.

  Now all of this Finbar Foley knew yet could do nothing to stop. He grew more and more isolated from those he was supposed to lead, and when the gypsies saw him in the street it seemed to him they lowered their eyes and busied themselves with merchandise. He said nothing to any of them now. In the evenings he did not unfurl the map of Benardi or mention again the notion of Bohemia. Secretly he allowed the first seeds of returning to his home country to settle in his mind, but he did not tell this to Cait, for he could not face the idea of such defeat. Then, one morning in the month of October, there arrived in the village a ghost whose name was Malone. He was a figure ancient and thin unto transparency, with baleful blue eyes and the bones of his cheeks like stumps polished and poking outward through the flimsiness of his flesh. His head was bruised and scabbed. As he walked down the street he blinked incessantly, and when the gypsy traders called to him of their wares he babbled words they did not understand and stepped on in his shoeless way. They cursed after him then and disregarded him further, though he stopped in the middle of the street and said something back to them which was again indecipherable and easily mistaken for ravings. Then he drifted on slow and ghostlike and without baggage and in the dim brown light of that season seemed little different from the dead.

 
Then Finbar saw him. And in a moment recognized some trait of physiognomy or bearing and knew he was from that old country where he himself had been born. The ghost-man stopped and looked at him and said:

  “Ta an domhain ag dul ar siar.”

  And although Finbar had not heard that language spoken in a long time, he recognized what it was and knew that the man had told him the world was nearly over.

  Finbar brought him inside then and sat him by the low oak table in their caravan. He brought the man cold smoked fish and water, and he and Cait sat there and watched while this same fellow took the food and drink in slow, small mouthfuls as if these were painful to him. The man’s jaws moved in a crosswise, crooked motion. He was without teeth and crushed the food on his palate with his tongue. He was bent over and rocked softly all the time. Then Finbar asked him in Irish where he was from and the ghost-man stopped and turned his ruined face to them and said his name was Malone and he was from the place that was the County Galway.