by Jesse Ball
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The truth is, I said to the interlocutor, she was perfectly right. When she mentioned the possibility of bats, I did not entirely believe her. I thought she might be speaking metaphorically, or just exaggerating a childhood memory that would never need to bear any proof. However, when we lay there on our backs, looking straight up into the night sky, bats flew past. They flew past. A fabric of stars such as you have never seen, impossibly far, and yet spread before you so clearly, all from right to left and up and down. You felt it had been placed there, so particularly were all these distant objects put into relation to one another. And then—bats, just inches away, tearing past. She said that it would happen, and it did. The bats flew past—not one or two, but dozens and dozens. It went on for at least an hour, just at sunset. I can’t believe it, she said to me, clutching at my arm and pushing against me. She pulled herself up until she was on top of me, and her nose pushed into my cheek. She said, all these years and it is just the same, the bats pass overhead. I imagine they come out of the same caves, they live in the same colonies. I imagine these bats are descended from the bats that I knew, the bats that passed just inches above my face on summer nights fifteen years ago. Once, she said, my brother and I set out one morning to go and find those caves. We told my father. We put on our coats and packed a rucksack, and set out, and there on the porch, where he was sitting, reading, we told him we were off to find the caves. He bid us goodbye and told us that if we found them, there would be a choice then. It is the choice that people have when they find the thing for which they are looking. Will you come back. Then, my father said, you should decide in our favor, in what I would call our favor, in favor of the continued life of our family, and come back. You should not stay there with the bats. I will definitely stay with the bats, my brother said, if we find them. In that case, said my father, I take back my blessing. I hope you wander lost for some hours, and then stumble back here in time for supper. Of course, Rana continued, that is what happened. We had an idea of waiting until dark and using a flashlight to judge the direction of the bats’ flight, but we grew afraid as the night started to fall. When supper came, we were both to be found at the table. I assume, then, my father said, that you did not find the bats, as I hope that you are now, and will always be, a man of your word. This he told my brother, regarding my brother’s proposed domiciling with the bats. You have to understand, Rana said, that all of this is very funny. To my family, it is very funny. It is also something we never would laugh about, or talk about, or even mention. I only tell it to you now so that you can get to know me better. I want you to know me. She threw herself onto me, biting and scrambling with a feigned indignation.
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In the morning we woke early, as everyone does who sleeps outside, and she said that she felt strong. This was a thing that sometimes came, whether she felt strong or weak, and we would change our plans accordingly. In the city, I had seen her every day, but not all day, and I imagined, standing there beside her at the hunting lodge, that I had not had the whole picture. She had, in the city, as a way of course, saved her strength so that she was always feeling strong when she saw me. The other things that she said she had been doing in the day, perhaps she had not been doing all of them, or at the very least not with her whole strength, and with breaks. Now, though, in the morning, we stood there in the morning light looking off down the mountain, she had her strength, so she said, and we were to walk in the town. This I told the interlocutor. Where the town was, it was positioned nearby the hunting lodge. Her father, being a boy at the time, had romantically been drawn to places not in the town. His parents had both died in the town. He preferred, then, living with his aunt and guardian, to move to a place beyond the town. Yet, he wanted to be able to observe the town. He had lived there all his life. The town was what he knew. He wanted to be near it, and yet to be apart from it. He took up residence in the hunting lodge, and modified it, with his own plans and the help of architects. He built the porch out into the trees. He raised a platform on the roof. He extended the back to reach out over a stream, so that there is a room actually in the house through which a stream flows. Rana told me all this as we walked into the town, I explained. She loved her father dearly, I could tell. How did it happen, I asked, that his parents died. My grandparents, she said. Yes, your grandparents. Sitting there, speaking of grandparents with a man who looked like my own grandfather, I felt an odd resonance. Perhaps once, I would have said it out loud, actually confronted this person to whom I was speaking, explained it to him, but I was weary and I felt very old. That, I did say out loud. I said to the interlocutor, I feel old. It’s the thing that is most often said to me, he replied. But it isn’t you that is old. You aren’t the thing that needs to change. It’s that you are overcome by your situation, by the way the world has descended on you. There is much in you that is young and new—and not just in you. In any person, even the oldest conceivable person. That’s what it means to be living—to engage with the cacophony of objects. The interlocutor handed me a cloth to wipe my face. Can you repeat, he said, the last portion. You were speaking very quietly and I couldn’t hear you very well.
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I don’t want to talk about them, she said, bitterly. Holding the cloth that he had given me, I told the interlocutor this, the bitter thing she had said. Standing there on the wooded slope fast by the hunting lodge, I told her, I can wait. But, a moment passed and she said very cleanly, as if she had cleaned off the sentence with a brush and then handed it to me, my grandfather went first, and she followed him after a week. We went on, she held my hand, but didn’t speak. We walked slowly, and it was mostly down one hill or another. In the town, Rana was recognized at every place we went. First, at the grocery store, by the clerk, a young man of about our age; he said, Rana. He said it in a very unadorned fashion. Rana. Outside the grocery store, she commented on it. Do you hear the local accent? I said, I think I do. You can tell, she remarked, that someone is from here, if it sounds like they are narrowed in on what they are saying—as if they are saying it after having thought about it for a long while. It isn’t so much an accent, I started to say, as…a mannerism, she said. A collective mannerism, that’s right. I used to play with that boy. I think he was in love with me. We went on into the next place where she was to be recognized. That was a store that sold sweaters and other things of wool. She bought a long wool sweater for me, worked all about the shoulders with patterning. Everyone who comes here, she said, must buy a sweater. The girl there, who was extremely pretty, told Rana that she shouldn’t pay. Rana brought the sweater to the counter and tried to pay, and the girl would not accept her money. It became clear that they knew one another. Take it, this girl said. I thought to myself, she must be the most beautiful girl in the village, even as she said to Rana, Rana, I haven’t seen you in so long. Then, they talked for a little while, and I went outside. I could see them giving me furtive glances, these two utterly elegant people. They must have been speaking about me. In my heart, then, a sort of hollow but steely pride that Rana would want to be seen with me. She came out and we continued on. There was a small store that sold wine and had some chairs and a few tables inside and outside. Here we are, said Rana. This is where my father would sit, when we came here in the summer, she said. He’d sit here and play backgammon all through the summer with other old men. There were no old men there at that moment, so I told the interlocutor, relating the situation in the village. The place was largely unoccupied. Let’s sit, she said. So, we sat there, and the proprietor came out and brought us two glasses and a carafe of wine. It is very good, she said, without pouring or tasting it. This town has a reputation for wine through the whole world. If you like wine, you will enjoy it very much. You seem happy, I said. You are doing all right. I feel good, she said. I haven’t been here in such a long time. It is a good place to come to. It is nice that some things can’t be tak
en away, as long as…She poured the wine into the glasses and we sat there. The proprietor came back over. I am sure of it, he said, I am sure you are Rana Nousen, Andro Nousen’s daughter. I remember you. She accepted this, and she said his name to him, and he was very pleased. He explained that they don’t come to his place to play backgammon anymore, the ones that did, because they were mostly dead. The younger people aren’t interested, but we do all right. We get enough custom in the evenings, he said to us, so I told the interlocutor. We sat at a table on the side of the main street of the little mountain town and heard this man’s estimation of his business, so I said. But, your father, the man asked. He is still living? He is, said Rana. Hers is, he said to me, a very delicate family. All the aristocracy from these parts are. He gave her a familiar nudge with his elbow. It is something you are quite used to, I know. We have all become used to it. Your brother’s death, though, was too early. Much too early, he said. He was here often. He would come with your father, nearly every day, carrying that monocular, what was it—that shooting glass that your father had given him. He was always staring off through it. Much too early, much too early. He coughed a short, harsh cough. Much too early.
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You must be used to what, I asked. What brother, I asked. I didn’t know you really had a brother. What was he talking about? The proprietor had gone away, and we sat there in that village, at a table in the street, and Rana was looking at me with her bright, lovely face, and her hair was falling all over, and her posture in the chair was graceful, so graceful, I almost couldn’t bear it. I could see that she was tired again, I could see she didn’t want to speak, but she was bearing up, and part of it was in her raising up of her chin and her shoulders, and it stretched her dress against her body and she was breathing in and out with difficulty. If I had ever loved anybody, I thought to myself, and I kept saying, tell me. What did he mean? She shook her head. I wasn’t hiding anything from you. I just didn’t mention it yet. My brother, he died when he was a boy. I told you about him—with the bats, the bats. He died of the same thing as my grandparents. It goes that way in my family. Most of them die of the same thing. That’s why he asked about my father. He is not very old, though, my father. He is not going to die. What is it, I asked. Now we were walking again. I was carrying a canvas bag with all the groceries, and a flask of the wine over my shoulder, and we were walking back up the hill to the lodge. We would stop occasionally so she could rest, and then we would continue. The exertion and the mountain air made her eyes bright and fierce, and she would look at me and it was as if the sudden sight of me pleased her. That was a thing that was different with her than with everyone else I had ever known. With everyone else, they would come into a room and I would be standing there, and they would see me and recognize that I was there, and then something would happen, an action or a conversation. It would proceed directly from their recognition of knowing me, or their recognition of not knowing me. Something about me would activate in their head, everyone I had ever known, and in the space of a moment, some action would occur and I would be enmeshed in it, or I would be separate, I would push myself away from it, and be distanced. That was the usual thing. But, with Rana, whenever it happened that she didn’t know I was somewhere, or whenever she was away in her mind thinking, and forgot that I was there, then it would happen, so I told the interlocutor, her eye would come upon me, and an absolute leaping delight would rise in it. I would see that her whole being was gladdened. She had seen me—I was near! For me, this was hardly to be believed. I didn’t know what it was at first, until I knew, and then it was a thing that I could only be grateful for—a thing I could never deserve. In the mountain air, she was sitting on a rock and she was looking at me, and her eyes flashed with that same light. It is a sickness, she said, that makes your body unable to defend itself. Slowly you die of something else. And because there is always something else, always something else. Stopping any one particular something-else doesn’t call a halt to it. My grandfather died, and my grandmother, who was related to him—in my family cousins often married—must already have been battling it, and when he died, she gave in. My brother gave in when I was fifteen. Everyone gives in. That’s how we talk about it, she said, my father to me, and my mother, my brother even, my cousins, my aunts. He gave in. She gave in. After a time, it was too much, and he gave in. Then she had no choice but to give in also. How do you know if it has begun? I asked. Have you ever had any sign of it yourself? She blinked and smiled. She actually laughed, so I told the interlocutor. Me, no. No, not me. I’ve always been just fine. Why would you think that? I said that she had been weak of late. She said, it is just the altitude. Haven’t you felt weak as well? This was, she said, in any case, a good climate for the illness. That’s why my grandparents had been here in the first place. The family had settled part of their estates here, hundreds of years back, because it was a good place for convalescence. Of course, she continued, all that land is long gone. Just the hunting lodge remains. You are fine, I asked. Are you? Stop it, she said, hitting me lightly on the arm. I’ll beat you up the hill. Then, she went ahead of me up the slope, I told the interlocutor, and I could only hurry after her, burdened with all our purchases. When we reached the house, she was exhausted. Her face was sunken, and she could only lie in the downstairs daybed, breathing softly. I helped remove her clothing, and looked at her body there on the bed beneath me. I undressed and lay beside her. We are as far away, she said, as anyone can be from anything, here. Do you like that feeling? I asked her. I like it, she said. I have longed for it. I entered a state, so I told the interlocutor, wherein I was with her and I was watching us both from a point beyond. Somehow, I could see that we were in the house, going about the house, making meals, eating meals, playing cards or chess, sitting out late drinking wine and talking of nothing at all, or sitting close together on a bench with our heads inches apart, talking with great direction of particular and very important things, these things I could see as from a great distance, and from up close. I could see as though out of my own eyes, and out of the eyes of another. I feel it was some circumspection that had grown around me. She said suddenly, after we had been there four days, I want to make all of our plans. What plans, I asked. All of them, she said, I want to make all of the plans that we will make for our future, I want to make every one. I want to make the plans for what we will do now, while we are young. I want to make plans for what we will do partway through our careers, when we are in our primes, and the world has received our gifts with great gladness and even approbation. I want to make plans for our old age, for what we will do when we are old and the world opens again—to the separate wishes we have then, when for us everything will have changed, everything but that we will still want—that I will still want you with me. This she said to me, I told the interlocutor. This person who was so far above me, not just in terms of wealth or birth, but in actual human evaluation. I am sure of it, as sure of it as I could be of anything, that if a group of the finest people that had ever lived were to see to her and look her over, speak to her and know her, they would set her high, high above me, so high that I would never have met her or known her. I said, I can scarcely believe that it did happen, that we did meet, but we did, and for some reason she recognized me as something like herself, although in this I think that she was wrong. Where she was courageous and strong, willful, passionate, clever, I was cowardly, weak, forever bowing beneath the weight of things I did not understand and could not. Perhaps I will be a doctor in a small town, she said. We will find a small town where so little is known of medicine that we can smatter together some portion of knowledge and I could be a doctor and you could be my helper. We would do what we could for people, and not just for people. Perhaps it would be a place so basic that the same person deals with animals and people. Not a human hospital, not a veterinary hospital, just a hospital. She said this, laughing at herself in a way, laughing at her plans and her planning, but delighting in it. She had no in
tention of being a doctor. By this she was teaching me how to enjoy her planning, and her work of ideas. We shall take pleasure in everything, she was saying—in things, and in the hope of things.
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