Cliffs of Fall

by Shirley Hazzard

  “On the whole” indeed, the man thought angrily as they left the café and passed through a gap in the great wall into an open field of ruins. “I’m not quite sure what we’re talking about,” he told her, although nothing more had been said.

  “Simply that it wouldn’t work.” She stood still to gaze at a sheet of water, a long, shallow pond in which a few lilies were trailing. “We would make one another unhappy —we do already—and it’s as well that we found out in time. That’s all. It’s quite impossible.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said stubbornly.

  “And that,” she returned, “is precisely why.”

  I must have hurt her vanity, he decided, since she was not usually cruel. Opinionated, sulky sometimes—but even that she couldn’t sustain; she would give in at the first appeal. (Preferring consistency, he could not value such concessions.) If he were to say now, for example, whatever it might be she wanted him to say—that nothing mattered to him but their love for each other, something along those lines—she would come round. Though why she should need that, why she minded so, he couldn’t imagine. She herself, after all, had other things in her life, had, in fact, loved before this, more intensely; he didn’t know who it was—and had not the least desire to know, he told himself, his mind ranging hastily over the circle of their friends.

  “I don’t really think you care deeply about anything,” she was saying now, as though the observation might be of passing interest. “Except, of course, your work.”

  He reflected that she was probably the only person he knew who didn’t attach importance to his work. And it was important; something would be changed in the field, however imperceptibly, when his book came out. She, who knew nothing, nothing at all, and was always exalting her miserable intuitions into the sphere of knowledge—how dare she speak of his interest in his work as though it were something pedestrian, discreditable? She had no feeling for the elements, the composition of things. Once, for instance, in Rome, they had seen an ancient inscription on a wall, and he had begun to translate it aloud when she, brushing aside the syntax, rendered the sense of it in half a dozen words and turned away, having temporarily deprived him of his reason for living.

  “Perhaps it’s true that I care most about my work,” he said. “But then I do care—about other things. In any case, I can’t be what I’m not.”

  They were walking now on a path of small stones.

  She persisted, relentlessly: “You gave a different impression when we first knew each other.”

  He halted, opening his hands helplessly. “Well—that was human.”

  This, unexpectedly, seemed to be an acceptable answer, and they turned off the path into a vast shell of red Roman brick, and entered an inner courtyard. Water was seeping over the ruined paving and around the plinths of the broken columns that unevenly supported the sky. Releasing his arm, in which her own had remained, she made her way across the drier slabs of stone to a pillar and seated herself in its shadow.

  He followed her, reopening his guidebook. “This must be Hadrian’s retreat—the Maritime Theater,” he said. He sat down on the base of the column, and they held the book between them.

  We love to indulge in the generally entertained tradition, and fancy the Emperor Hadrian in his moments of spleen and misanthropy slipping off by himself and recover his spirits from the grievous weight of the care of the empire …

  She took off one of her sandals and inspected a blister on her foot. Pulling the strap back over her heel, she glanced at the young man, who was reading carefully. To him, she thought, life was a series of details—a mosaic rather than, say, a painting. He had to have reasons for everything, even if it meant contorting human nature to make it fit into them; so concerned with cause, he ignored consequence. And sometimes, no doubt, it was the right thing. It was the way men’s minds worked, she supposed; the process, in fact, by which the world was provided with machines and roads and bridges—and ruins. But they chose to forget that their whole system of logic could be overturned by the gesture of a woman or a child, or by a single line of poetry. This business of reasoning, she reflected, was all very well, within reason, but if one had nothing to be passionate about one might as well be dead.

  “ … from the grievous weight of the care of the empire,” she read again. They were, very slightly, leaning on each other.

  “Und hier, meine Damen und Herren, war die Zufluchtsstätte des Kaisers,” said a voice behind them.

  There were about a dozen in the group, all with reddened faces under their new straw hats, all with woolen socks under their new sandals, all, she noticed, with cameras and guidebooks. They assembled inside the arch, and made notes as the guide pointed and explained. “Man nennt es das Wassertheater. …”

  The two by the column sat in silence until the group withdrew. Then she clasped her hands around her knees, turning to him. “It’s just that you do seem to take yourself rather seriously,” she said.

  He considered this. “Well … in the end, I suppose, one must.”

  “Exactly. So why begin that way?” But this she said almost as an entreaty, adding: “Anyway, you know, you’re so much better than I.”

  “In what way, for God’s sake?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Accurate, reliable—”

  “It sounds,” he remarked, “like an advertisement for a watch.”

  “Et ici nous voyons le refuge de l‘Empereur,” a new voice announced from the entrance “On l’appelle le Théâtre Maritime.”

  “Shall we go?” he asked.

  Outside, the heat was rising in waves from the plain. The withered countryside enclosing them again, the man and woman crossed a miniature railway that had been laid to carry masonry to and from the works of excavation and restoration. A workman with a paper cone on his head was crushing stones for a new path, using a roller improvised from the broken shaft of a column. They passed from the Large Baths into the Small Baths, and walked along the side of another pool, disturbing the sleep of two or three dusty swans. They found their way into a small museum, where she admired a Venus. (“Her sandals are the same as yours,” he said.) Behind the museum, a grooved track took them, through a farm, onto a wooded incline.

  It was cooler on the slope. Wild flowers were growing beneath the trees and across the path. Walking in silence, they could hear the birds. The sounds of the plain came to them more remotely, for they were approaching the foot of the mountain; as they reached the first ridge, the white houses and shops of Tivoli could be distinguished, grouped high above the lines of olive trees.

  Pausing on the ridge, they kissed—for some unknown reason, as she told herself, still clasped in his arms. She could see over his shoulder the next slope rising, and the next, the black pines lost in thicker vegetation or swept away in areas of cultivation. Her interest in the scene at that moment struck her as ludicrous, and she wondered if he, in his turn, might be studying the countryside behind her head. She drew back, but he kept her hand tightly in his, although the path was too narrow for them both. They were standing quite still, side by side. They might almost, she thought, have been defending one another from two different people.

  “We must go back,” he said.

  There was a washroom near the café, and she combed her hair in front of a scrap of mirror and attended to the sunburn on her face while he selected a table in the garden. An elderly woman in a floral apron brought her a can of cold water, and she washed her feet, sitting on a white wooden chair borrowed from the restaurant. When she took off her sandals, the woman carried them out and brushed them in the garden, and stood watching her while she put them on again.

  “Your husband?” the woman asked, smiling and nodding toward the restaurant.

  “Yes,” she said, because it seemed simpler.

  They had a table in the shade. The waitress, moving slowly across the garden, arrived at last beside them and set down their drinks on the cloth. There was a different boy in the bar.

  “When I orde
red,” the man said, “she asked me if we were married.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  He looked surprised. “Why—that we weren’t, naturally.”

  Even under the trees, the heat was intense. She lifted her hands from the table and closed them around the cold glass.

  “There’s a bus in half an hour,” he said. “We should just do it. We may even see it coming down from Tivoli.” He thought she seemed tired, but then they had been walking all afternoon. And they hadn’t decided anything—although at one point, he remembered, she had told him that it was impossible. She was looking at him, and for a moment he thought he would be able to tell her that nothing else mattered (or whatever it was). But they had walked too far; his head ached slightly from the sun. And now she had turned aside.

  CLIFFS OF FALL

  “IF you have to be unhappy,” Cyril said, “you must admit that there couldn’t be a better place for it.”

  He was speaking to Elizabeth Tchirikoff, who sat on his right at the breakfast table. His wife, Greta, was at his left. They were seated this way, in a row, because the table was on the terrace and commanded across the lake a fine view of the Alps. At their back, past the side of the house, the garden merged into fields and vineyards on the flat green plateau and appeared to stretch, with the interruption of scarcely a single house, to the range of the Jura. On the Jura, this magnificent September, there was no snow whatever. Even on the Alps the snow line was exceptionally high, revealing great jagged precipices of black rock that had seldom seen the sun. Along the lake, the bathing places were still crowded in the afternoons, the weekend traffic was still lethal on the Route Suisse, the tourists still sat outside in the cafés of Geneva. It was weather more majestic, less distracted than summer, and untouched by decay—the improbably fine weather, without evocation or presentiment, that is sometimes arrested in a colored photograph.

  Greta looked up warningly at Cyril, but Elizabeth had smiled—as he meant her to—and even made an uncompleted gesture of touching his hand with hers. As if he had set off some small mechanism in her, she made a few more motions with her hands—brushing a wasp away from the strawberry jam and placing the melting butter in the shadow of a loaf of bread—before settling back again in the white wooden chair and closing her eyes against the sun. She had been staying with the Stricklands for three weeks and was very brown, browner than she had ever been in her life. The brown of her breast and back and shoulders fitted exactly to the cut of the blue-and-white striped sun dress she wore almost every day. Her feet were patterned with the lines of sandal straps, and the outline of sunglasses was palely imprinted over her cheekbones. “I feel quite well,” she told herself as the sun made circles of yellow and mauve through her eyelids. “If I feel anything, it is that: quite well.”

  “But then I really don’t feel anything,” she had told Greta on the day of her arrival, driving back from the Geneva airport. “At the beginning there was the shock, but now I don’t feel anything.” And when Greta explained in a lowered voice to visitors—the women who came for tea in little pale-blue or gray cars, and the couples who came for dinner—that she was still suffering from the shock (“They had only just been married. He was killed in an accident”), Elizabeth had a sensation of receiving their concern under false pretenses—and of spoiling their visits, since no one could decently enjoy themselves in her presence. For I don’t feel anything at all, she told herself. Before leaving New York, she had been given prescriptions for pills that would stimulate her, or calm her, or help her to sleep. In plastic containers, the pills (green and triangular, white and circular, red and cylindrical) lay in a pocket of her suitcase, along with tablets for airsickness and a bottle of cold-water soap. She had not needed any of them.

  She opened her eyes a little and looked at the sky, which was now violet, cloudless. A hawk had risen from the pines bordering the road that ran toward the lake; it plunged and soared over the house, dispersing smaller birds, its flight sustained on still, spread wings. It looked, Elizabeth thought, like a child’s kite on a string. Will I ever feel anything again, she wondered. Unfeeling, she felt strangely imperiled, as though she might now perpetrate any crime, commit any indiscriminate act, say any unspeakable thing, unless she consciously applied a restraint that had formerly been instinctive—as people who have lost the sense of heat and cold will touch fire and burn themselves, uninhibited by pain.

  “There’s the postman,” said Greta, rising from her chair and wrapping her dressing gown of much-washed turquoise chenille about her. The postman was coming up the road —a young boy in a dark uniform and cap tenaciously weaving his bicycle over the slight incline. Elizabeth sat up and leaned her elbows on the table, watching him. She did not herself understand her interest in the mail, which was delivered twice a day. Nor did she understand why her interest should make the Stricklands so uneasy; after all, she thought, they can hardly imagine that I expect a letter from him. The letters addressed to her still expressed sympathy, enumerated the virtues of the dead, emphasized the importance of his brief life. Vaguely, she felt a resentment at being left to answer them all—just as, previously, she had been obliged to acknowledge the letters of good wishes and congratulation, and the receipt of wedding presents. Trying to find something different to say for every one of her short replies, she wondered that the event did not fully strike her now that it was commemorated in other people’s words and her own. But she wrote, each time: “Your sympathy has meant so much to me,” or, “I was very touched by your kind letter,” not easily but without real pain. Once, she turned her writing pad over and wrote on the back: “He is dead,” and watched the letters turn fuzzy on the gray cardboard, hoping to comprehend them. But she remained as numb as before, and after a moment stroked the words out heavily with her pen so that they were indistinguishable. If Greta saw it, she told herself, she would think I had gone out of my mind.

  At times, she wondered whether it was simply too soon for her to miss him. He had been dead little more than a month. Six weeks ago, they had eaten their meals together, made love, driven about in a car. It was no time at all. During his lifetime, they had quite often been parted for several weeks because of his work, and once for almost three months when he had gone on business to the Far East. But she had missed him, then. Missed him unbearably, wept at the airport when he set out and again when he came home—thin and exhausted, having been ill and overworked in the Hôtel des Indes or the Raffles or whatever it happened to be. And how, she asked herself, could I have missed him then and not now? Testing herself a little at a time, she found that she could think with equanimity about any aspect of their life together, although she expected continually as she pursued these thoughts that at some point her stillness would be shattered, and grief and anguish would begin.

  But the identical days broke, hung suspended, and were absorbed into the green plateau between the Alps and the Jura. Every weekday, and sometimes on Saturday, Cyril walked half a mile to a tiny station overgrown with roses and took the train to Geneva. He worked for an international organization and had a solid-looking office in the Palais des Nations with a view of the gardens. Greta would begin the day with some housework and, at eleven, tea in the kitchen with Elizabeth and the maid, Charlotte. The house had just been built; there were interminable difficulties with newly installed electrical appliances, and a procession of mechanics came to the back door in the mornings on their bicycles—young men with perfect manners and unbelievably high, clear coloring, who lay on the kitchen floor with their heads in the oven, or under the dishwasher, or otherwise obscured according to their particular competence, and were made the object of untimely demonstrations of affection by Aurélien, the Stricklands’ spaniel.

  Greta and Elizabeth usually lunched on the terrace and sat there in the sun, watching the mechanics and the electricians depart. There was scarcely any traffic on the narrow road, which led only to this house. Occasionally, a farm laborer with that same high coloring, and wearing deep-blu
e overalls and cap, crossed the fields beyond the garden. Some plowing was going on, discreetly, at a distance. The newly laid lawn that sloped down from the outer edge of the terrace ended in a series of raw garden beds. After lunch, Greta and Elizabeth worked in the garden, bringing fresh black earth from boxes in the garage to cover the exposed clay. Greta worked bareheaded, her coarse black hair pinned up, but Elizabeth wore a straw hat she had found in the closet in her room. Even so, the sun burned through, and when she took the hat off, her brow always showed a red crease and small painful imprints from the rough straw.

  At four o’clock, they stopped work and went inside to bathe and dress. Unless visitors were expected to tea, Greta got the car out and they drove to Geneva. In the town they did a little shopping and had café crème and pastel-colored cakes outside the Hôtel des Bergues. Tall, delicate women in pretty dresses came and went at the hotel, or walked their small dogs in and out of shops. The avenue along the lake was full of traffic on those beautiful afternoons. Foreign cars drew up at the hotel; elderly men rode slowly past on bicycles, holding limp brief cases over the handlebars. It could be seen from the way in which people drove, or rode, or walked, that everyone was conscious of the weather. Weather was the chief topic of conversation in the café—it was incredible, it wouldn’t last, it was warm, it was too warm; the Mont Blanc had been visible every day for a week. No one could recall such a September.

  When it was time to pick up Cyril, Greta and Elizabeth took their packages to the car and drove to the Palais. In the stream of people issuing from the main building, Cyril would be the only man without a brief case, the only person without sunglasses. He was not tall; he had blue eyes and receding yellow hair, and a curious rolling walk. ( “You are the only human being I know who limps with both legs,” Greta had once told him.) His greeting was always the same. “Move over,” he would say, as he squashed them into the remainder of the front seat and kissed Greta abruptly on the side of the head. They would sit there, squeezed in the hot car, deciding how to spend the evening. Sometimes they crossed the lake and had dinner in the Old City. Occasionally, they crossed the border into France and dined at the inn of some village in the hills. More often, they had dinner at home, where they sat at the kitchen table, by the windows, and watched the sun dying in the fields and the Jura flickering with high and lonely lights. They talked all the time. Cyril entertained them with outrageous impressions of bureaucracy, his office having apparently been designed to provide him with a daily supply of absurdities; or he read aloud from the evening paper accounts of the local crimes passionnels—a remarkable number of which were apparently committed at the foot of Calvin’s statue. Elizabeth got used to the sound of her own laugh, which she had at first found faintly improper. She discovered that she could speak about her life in New York without any awkwardness. If the occasion demanded it, she said “we” or “us” with no hesitation, and in a voice that sounded to her completely natural.