by Jeff Kamen
‘Water?’
‘No. Not water.’
‘Right, yeah, somewhere.’
‘I’ll get it if you tell me where.’
‘It’s here somewhere. Won’t it stop you sleepin?’
‘It’s okay. I’m not in the mood yet.’
‘I’ll join you.’
‘Wait. Don’t get up.’
‘Nah, I want to. Let’s get out, get some air.’
~O~
They went as near to the cliffs as it was safe to in the dark. Sitting in the rocks, they passed a flask between them, talking, listening to what was carried their way in the night, listening to the churning sea swell.
At one point she said to Radjík, ‘I think he’d have come between us in the end. I don’t think he’d have let us be friends.’
‘You reckon?’
‘I’m pretty sure.’
‘Might be right. He was touchy about things.’
Jaala swigged more of the vinegary wine and wiped her mouth. She thought a moment, then said, ‘He kept a lot to himself. Maybe that’s why he was like that. Always keeping things separate. Things he didn’t want connected. He was careful, too. Didn’t want people knowing things, finding them out by accident.’
‘Why d’you say that?’
Jaala shrugged.
I said I saw you talking with someone. Who was it?
My mother.
That was not your mother.
It was my mother.
I don’t believe you.
Believe what you want to believe. It’s what you normally do ...
As she shut away the images, she looked up. ‘You don’t agree?’
‘No ... just wondered why you said it like that. Like you knew somethin.’
‘Well. I suppose I know a few things.’
‘Come on. We said we’d talk, didn’t we? Why you keepin it to yourself?’
‘Well, it’s ... okay, I know he had other women, when he was with me. Or supposed to be.’
‘Like who?’
‘Down at the Maga camp.’
‘Eh? Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can’t believe that. He always said you were different, you know. That you shared somethin.’
‘He was right. We did. We shared a lot of things. Some good, some not so good.’
‘Like what?’
She looked out, past the rough grass bordering the cliff edge. Out to the night waters surging without limit through the darkness, to the turbulent gulfs swarming black and indigo beyond the rigid curves of land. Her voice sounded different to her as she said, ‘Well, there was something.’
‘What?’
‘Something I wanted to tell you before. Something he and I agreed not to talk about. But I ... I don’t think it really matters any more.’
‘What you talkin about?’
‘It ... just give me a moment.’
Radjík’s small brow creased as she watched her.
‘It was a few years ago. We …’ She stopped, taking a breath. The plangent voices were stirring again, spiralling layers of groans and whispers, of raw cries of despair. ‘We had a baby. Nearly, I mean. It died.’
Died.
‘What? You aint serious, are you?’
‘Well,’ she said, smiling tightly. ‘Serious enough. I wouldn’t joke about it.’
Thinking back to Ansthalt as she spoke. Green days, heady days. Feeling the tiny movements inside her and crying tears of joy so intense it felt like smoke instead of tears down her cheeks as she ran out to tell him. The chance of a family of their own, the chains of the repetitious past snapped effortlessly, snapped in joy ...
He then holding her so tightly, protecting her, not knowing what was on its way. He, her man, melting into her side at night, the two of them weeping as they made love. The most wonderful time of her life, all of it undreamt of. Her warm hands on her belly, feeling the future growing inside her and nothing else mattering: the world and its problems shut away behind a gate of flowers. As if they were free to exist within their own protected haven back then — then, before her womb cracked like a heated mirror and the fruit of their love came splashing out between the shards.
‘You ... you really had a baby?’ Radjík whispered, and Jaala nodded, picturing the thing which had slipped out from her, left her raging uterus. Clothed in a thin translucent suit of blood and damaged membranes and pink clotted waters. A thing so small and precious, like a little broken poppet. A thing so tiny, and with its wrappings of fine veiny tissue so like folded wings, it seemed it might fly away even then, had its twisted posture and the blank repose of its face not spoken so bleakly of death. A face like a melted button, a little smudge of clay. Her little baby. Unable to cling to the walls of her coldly burning womb. Unfinished, unmade, unable to survive.
‘He was very good about it, when it happened. We were out together, climbing. I know it seems stupid, because we both knew I was pregnant ... but it wasn’t much of a climb. I felt okay, I really did. Then ... something let go. Just like that. We were a long way from the settlement and I thought we should try to go back, but ...’ She paused, feeling the pressure mount, her eyes misting. ‘Then I started bleeding. It hurt, but I thought I’d be okay once I got home, or lay down or something. Then it ... it came out of me.’
‘Oh, hell ...’ Radjík said, and Jaala shrugged helplessly.
‘Like I said, he was very good. He helped me get up, even carried me for a while, until we found somewhere I could lie down. While ... while he went to get water and things. He came straight back, he was running … but it was too late. I’d already lost it. Lost him. It was a little boy.’
She spoke the words tenderly, feeling her love again, and all the jagged pain of love, seeing the tiny child as if it was still there before her, the miniature features immobile within their frail transparent coverings. ‘So there it is,’ she said. ‘Now you know. You nearly had a younger brother.’
Radjík looked aghast. ‘But ... but what happened to you? Didn’t you get any help?’
‘I … we were both in shock, really. It hurt so much I couldn’t really think … and he, well, all he could do was look after me. He didn’t want to move me, and he was afraid if he left ...’ She shrugged again, letting the tears fall. ‘I was lucky in a way. The bleeding stopped quite quickly. I don’t know why, but I knew I was going to be all right. We just sat there like we are now. We had to decide what to do with ... with him. And that was all we could do.’
‘Shit,’ Radjík sighed. ‘What did you do then?’
‘We … we buried him.’
She looked down, seeing the dark open earth in sight of the old cave. Gouged out by sticks. The blood-spattered grass nearby. And her little mauve baby, soon to be buried in the caul of the ground without a name. While above them, above the gathering clouds, a striped balloon had just set out on its crossing.
‘Why didn’t you say about it before?’
‘It’s not that easy. Like what you told me about him going to the lake. It’s not something you want to think of, is it?’
Radjík took the flask from her and took a long swig.
‘Anyway, it … at the time it was just for us to know about. That’s what we agreed. I didn’t even tell Annie. No one. And if we weren’t here, now, like this ... maybe I wouldn’t be telling you.’
Radjík took another swig and sat with the flask between her knees, staring blankly.
They fell silent, listening to the deep relentless crashing of waves. After a while, Jaala added, ‘Maybe I would, I don’t know. In a way, the most important thing is ... we were a family for a while. All of us. Even if it was just a few months.’
‘Didn’t you try to have another one?’ Radjík said emptily. ‘Another kid?’
‘No, I ... some of the parts in me came out damaged. Broken. So I can’t have babies any more.’
‘Sorry. I’m so sorry.’
Jaala tried to smile. ‘Well ... don’t be. I’m alive. We’re here, we ha
ve each other. When you think about the rest of it, that’s not bad, is it?’
Radjík was staring at the ground. She offered back the flask, but Jaala declined, and even when they were back at the cart, Radjík soon dropping to a heavy sleep in the back, she left the flask to sit untouched.
Wanting to stay clear in her thoughts, not lost, as she’d promised Nina. Wanting not to be overwhelmed, stricken by guilt at having promised never to speak about it, not to anyone. Sitting on the rear footplate, the mule resting nearby, she decided that she’d been right to talk: it felt better to have it out.
And yet even so, she knew that certain things would need to remain unsaid.
It was for the best. Radjík didn’t need to be told that her father considered her and Lajos to be the progeny of a useless woman, someone he referred to as a whore, a nothing, a fuck. There would have to be things that only she would know; she alone.
Yes, only she would ever know how he’d helped her to grope her way into the cave where Grethà had almost burnt to death ... and how the horror in her as she was pulling away her bloodied clothing was so extreme and suffocating she’d gone blind for a while as she started to scream. Only she would know how the viscera had run hot and icy down her legs as she shrieked in agony, and how she knew that she was losing everything inside her. And how it had felt to do nothing but suffer, to suffer and clutch at herself; and how in that sticky abhorrent tide had been the vital coils and tubing of her womanhood. A mess of gobs and delicate silky tissues in which had lain such a monstrous thing, arriving in the nadir of her life like a bomb, a gross thing lounging like an evil fruit next to the frozen toylike child.
The child so unknowingly connected to it. Linked by strings of female tissue as diaphanous as his suit of wings.
How cruel it had felt: looking down at that lumpy manmade object, knowing exactly which kind of people were responsible, but not understanding why — why they had done such a thing. Planting inside her a bundle of cells she had no use for; that jelly of tiny identical faces that were all her own face, wedged together in clustered layers. All with their eyes closed and all like a nightmare and all of them dead.
Jaala-like faces that would never live, terminating the course of what had gone before. Rendering her existence as futureless and pointless as it had been painful, leaving only questions and anger; so much anger. Small dark faces like petals and thumbnails, curled in sleepy slices. Faces like dream residue smeared over a compound eye.
Oh, how it had felt.
Watching the detritus of her insides being sloshed away in buckets of chill water. Shivering, weeping as she’d tried to clean the blood from herself and get dry again. He only able to stare at her and mumble, almost paralysed, it seemed, as she’d forced herself to pick up their broken creation, then limped outside. He still useless, pathetically so, doing nothing but weep and grimace as she’d carried the bundled faces and the tiny body away and dug a hole for them.
Yes, only she would know how he’d looked at her as she buried them, covered them over. Layering the earth until a low mound had formed. And only she knew that neither had known what to do or say.
The man she’d loved so very deeply. But since then, life had changed.
She rested her chin on her knees. Staring.
No more would she have to swear never to tell another soul about it; no more remembering how they’d agreed to visit the mound each year on the anniversary. To use it as a means of keeping strong, keeping together, keeping their love alive.
And no more regretting that he might have been a decent father, a loving man, had the baby lived. No more: the same man had left her.
No more worrying about the way the child’s death had obsessed him, even crazed him; the way he’d told her repeatedly how essential, how important it was. And how he would have done anything for it to have survived.
Again and again and again. Sun and storm, good days and bad. And she’d believed him.
That he would have done anything for that little boy. To have brought him back to life again.
That he would have done anything.
Anything.
Chapter 72 — Travels And Strangers
The old man let him go the following day. He hadn’t heard him coming along the trail, nor felt himself taken from the grave, nor carried to the shack in the man’s thin arms. In the heat of the afternoon he stood in the clearing, blinking at the sun.
‘A headache you say? Heh. Well. If you say so.’
‘I ... I’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘I must have done it when I fell.’ He touched his forehead, feeling where the scab was drying on his wound. ‘See? It’s not so bad.’
‘I see it.’ The man came down the porch steps, shielding his eyes in the glare. ‘This heat won’t do you much good, mister. Maybe you’ve got a fever. You were saying some strange things, if you don’t mind me saying. Heh. Wait till evening. Wait till it’s cooler.’
Moth licked his lips. His tongue felt dry. And he could feel a pounding in his head that was like the waves against the rocks as he hung moaning in the tree, a relentless pounding which would not go away. He began to stare. The tree, the storm, the lightning. The creak of a wooden lid. All peculiar and disembodied memories, all harrowing, all disturbed; like a stick thrashing in water. He wanted to ask the man why he was standing there, what their connection was, but he could not quite frame the matter clearly in his mind’s eye. Everything was out of position, fragmented, unfamiliar. Instead, he thanked him for his breakfast and limped away. The old man watched him go, rubbing the back of his hand, then turned regretfully back inside.
Out on the road he stood aimlessly, his bag hanging from a shoulder, the wrapped glider clutched beneath his arm. He saw that he was alone, but also more than that: he had no place to go. It was scorching. Few people were out that day. Wretches dwelling in local hillcaves had put up bleached cloths to ward off the sun. Shortly a tradesman came his way with a clutch of dusty black umbrellas. He looked through the man insensate. Turning one way and then another, confused. Then he set down the glider and took out the thing he’d discovered in the dry crust of a bag he’d pulled free, and upon opening it out, began to survey its contents. It was a map, faint and yellow, delineating the countries and main settlements around the sea’s roving coastline. A series of dots was marked on it. Its islands and mountains were shaded in neat pen strokes. He stood swaying, holding the brittle paper before his eyes. The map was pocked with holes and much of it stained beyond legibility. He squinted. The dots led from Istra to the place where he’d flown into the storm. No further. His own journey repeated there and nothing else to glean from it but the possibility that if he followed the dots in a line ...
It meant his father was …
Whereas if he went the opposite way, it meant ...
‘Parasols!’ the tradesman cried, ‘keep the sun off your face! Keep it nice and cool! Parasols ...’
The road turned to a fuming haze.
Think what I say. Think. Please ...
He turned, whispering. Then he turned back again, and on gathering up the glider he went lurching into a run. Something was directing him with frightening power. Something he could not fight. Clutching the glider tightly he ran into the hot day with the tradesman looking after him in bemusement.
He was continuing south; it meant his father was still alive.
~O~
For a while he fell in with some merchants carrying ingots and raw scrap metal in covered wagons. He quizzed the drivers and passengers alike, asking if they were carrying soil, or knew of any others who were, or had done so in the past.
They indulged him at first, then he began to pester them, repeating himself and tripping over, getting in the way of the animals. A woman called her husband over, and the man took a broomstick and brandished it in his face. But instead of running, he sang at them, croaking out his song:
‘Vrijeme!
Dvije metle se sudaraju,
Brišući naprijed,
Sudbi
na, sudbina ...’
Staring at the broom, he whispered, ‘Metle.’
He no longer flew: the glider was too badly damaged, and for reasons he could not quite establish in his mind, he could not face repairing it. Something felt wrong about it, wired as it was to so many jagged memories. And besides, he thought, staring out, his father was the expert. He could help him, make sure he did it right.
He trekked on, persistent in his questioning, yet never with success. The common language was still widely spoken here, but the conversations he had were few and awkward. He resorted to gestures alone, making digging movements, the shovelling of soil. The motions of a man flying and landing; a man consulting a map.
Lost in those hot and alien streets he talked to himself to stoke momentum. Closer, he told himself. He imagined them bumping into one another in a quiet street or market. Just like that. He imagined their surprise, their shock and laughter, all the things they had to say. He saw his father leading him to the home he shared with his new wife, some pleasant older beauty with a friendly smile. Perhaps he would meet his father’s new children, shake hands with them politely whilst he was shown around the house. Forever welcome, the son they’d all heard so much about; that he’d been forced to leave behind.
‘Father!’ he bellowed down the streets. ‘I’m here! It’s okay! Just come out! I’m here!’
Temperatures grew to scorching, the shards of ruins flaring white from afar. He called at markets of rotting fruit and blackening meat where the dogs skulked slyly or fought among themselves in whimpers, and where the owners lay drowsing in a stupor, heavy lidded and disinterested in his tales. Nothing of use was to be found at all.
Finally, in the blank hum and metal blaze of day, he entered deep southern Illyria, a halt and whispering figure among the dwindling daytime populace. He loped on, reduced to a friendless wretch clouted away from the doors he called at with his rambling speeches; a man jeered at and derided, pelted with rubbish, doused with dishwater. Still he continued south, his shoes as foul and ragged as his clothing, gradually flapping apart. On into the sun.
