Changing Heaven
Page 24
“On the seventh day Sindbad could weep no more. He had wept enough for ten men and could no longer keep his senses tuned to the orgy of reading and sobbing he’d been engaging in. Salty icicles composed of frozen tears hung from every inch of him. They made a sound like sleigh bells or wind chimes when he moved. And now he were moving – moving everything he owned off the island and far out onto the ice. The day was purple, the sun dark and only half visible on the horizon as he eliminated every trace of himself: balloon silk and wicker, tin cans and turds, empty champagne bottles and drag lines-far, far out onto ice so that when he stood on island for the last time he could see a small dark mountain of objects silhouetted against the mauve sky. He scattered the letters and journals about on the rocks so that they would not appear to have been disturbed. Then he walked away out onto the ice, which he must have known very well would melt once the few, brief weeks of summer arrived. He would think of all the strange objects that currents of sea brought to White Island when all the white nothingness around melted for a month and he would know that all these details would have to be brought from far, far away. And he would be content, covered in a shroud of frozen tears fabricated by himself alone, to wait for the thaw.”
Arianna watches the words wait for move on John’s lips and then she watches the word thaw emerge from Emily’s mouth. The ghosts look long into one another’s eyes. They clasp hands, embrace the energy of the completed story, touch reconciliation, become air, become wind, enter rock and ether, enter breeze and heather. Now they are shadows behind the glass, now they are clouds blown across the moon.
They are engaged in the great gasp of leave-taking, the long, relieved sigh of arrival. Open the window, Nelly, I’m freezing. On the other side of the window the ghosts are experiencing brilliance and fragmentation. Emily dissolves. Arianna evaporates.
When ghosts become landscape, weather alters, the wind shifts, and heaven changes. The shadows of great flocks of migrating birds tremble against the clouds, the seeds of wonderful storms are born and the winds are self-assured. A sixteenth-century painter holds lightning in his hands; a mill worker invents stories for the sky. Someone enters an ice-blink, someone enters air. She who loved weather becomes the weather, caressing the rock, the brown sturdy hills.
At the end of one dark village, someone illuminates an upstairs room.
Acknowledgements
Two books in particular have informed and inspired parts of this novel: Glyn Hughes’ Millstone Grit in which I learned about lip reading in clamorous mills, and writing in sizing dust, and other beautiful details too numerous to mention; and Peggy Hewitt’s These Lonely Mountains, from which I learned the facts about a certain lady balloonist whose tomb I had come across in a graveyard near Haworth. Thanks, also, to Peggy Hewitt for living in and writing about a certain old gentleman’s house in Oldfield, and for the hospitality she and her husband lavished upon me and my family, when we visited one evening in May. And, of course, deep gratitude goes to Eric and Kathleen Cole for their many kindnesses to me, my husband, and my daughter, and for the cottage in which I dreamt the greater part of this novel.
Thanks to the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for providing me with the time I needed to complete this novel.
I would also like to thank Diane Keating and Ann Pippin Burnett for their enthusiasm, their comments, and their encouragement; and, once again, special thanks to Ellen Seligman for her commitment and support.
Certain sections of this novel have appeared in Exile in a slightly different form. One chapter has been broadcast on CBC Radio’s “Speaking Volumes” and “Aircraft.”
Jane Urquhart
Wellesley, Ont.
November 1989
Jane Urquhart was born in Little Long Lac, Ontario, and grew up in Toronto. She is the author of five internationally acclaimed novels: The Whirlpool, which received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France; Changing Heaven; Away, winner of the Trillium Award and a finalist for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Underpainter, winner of the Governor General’s Award and a finalist for the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; and The Stone Carvers, which was a finalist for The Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, and longlisted for the Booker Prize. She is also the author of a collection of short fiction, Storm Glass, and three books of poetry, I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace, False Shuffles, and The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan (I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace and The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan were published together in 2000 in a one-volume collector’s edition entitled Some Other Garden). Her work has been translated into numerous foreign languages. Urquhart has received the Marian Engel Award, and is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Urquhart has received numerous honorary doctorates from Canadian universities and has been writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa and at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and, during the winter and spring of 1997, she held the Presidential Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the University of Toronto. She has also given readings and lectures in Canada, Britain, Europe, the U.S.A., and Australia.
Jane Urquhart lives in southwestern Ontario.
Her most recent novel is A Map of Glass (fall 2005).
Copyright © 1990 by Jane Urquhart
Cloth edition printed 1990
Mass-market edition printed 1991
B-format edition printed 1994
Trade paperback first printed 1996
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Urquhart, Jane, 1949-
Changing heaven
eISBN: 978-1-55199-424-6
I. Title.
PS8591.R68C43 2001 C813′.54 C2001-901850-9
PR9199.3.U77C43 2001
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
“Longing for Death Because of Feebleness,” by Stevie Smith (which appears here as an epigraph for Part Three), is from The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith (Penguin Modern Classics), and is reproduced by kind permission of James MacGibbon.
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