The pain was swift and violent. There was no part of him it did not wish to destroy. He stood in the room holding her letter – the smooth, sloping words, the lines so perfectly even. The same hand that filled in forms, that made lists, that left him notes if she would not be at home when he arrived. How could that be? All passed in this instant from light to darkness. He already knew that it would break him. It had to. There was nothing to relieve it. He had cut himself off from everything because of her. How could he gather himself up? How could he remake himself? He couldn’t. He had nothing. He knew this.
He looked at the clock. It had taken him two and a half hours to find someone to repair the window of his car, to get the car there, to make himself understood. He looked out each of the windows of the room. He didn’t see her. It had begun to rain. He put his things in his bags and went down to pay the bill. He asked at the desk if they had seen her. No, they had not. Was there a train station there? No, they said. The nearest was forty kilometres to the north-east. Buses? Yes, of course. He ran out into the rain and through the streets. Bus? Bus? he asked. People pointed. He got to the station and looked at the board with the schedule on it but nothing made sense to him. How many buses have left here in the last two and a half hours? he asked the man selling tickets. He looked at M. through the glass. He did not understand him. M. tried the sentence four different ways, pointing at a clock and at a bus parked in the station yard. Nothing worked. The man continued to stare at him. M. tried again to understand the schedule on the board. Finally he was able to determine that according to what was written four buses had departed from this station since he went out to get the window repaired, two of them to the town where the railway station was located. That was the route he chose to follow. He wrote down the names of the towns the bus passed through on the way. He ran back out into the rain.
He found that the garage where he had left the car was closed. There was a shop next to it selling meat and M. asked there why there was no one in the garage. The man behind the counter shrugged his shoulders. M. did not know if the man had understood his question or if he could not answer it. He went around to all the eating places he could find in the vicinity but he did not find the man who was to put the glass in his window. He waited. The hopelessness of all this filled him like a congestion.
When after nearly an hour with the sky darkening further under the rainclouds the man returned to his shop, he refused to give M. his car. He pointed to the broken windscreen, he walked all around the car gesticulating, he waved papers in the air. M. had no idea what he was speaking about. Had he forgotten him? Did he think M. was a salesman, or someone who hadn’t paid their bill? M. pointed to the clock on the wall, he held up his hand and rotated it to indicate a key turning in a lock, he pointed to his car and then to himself, he took out his wallet and showed the man his credit cards. The man ignored him. He held papers up in M.’s face and shouted, pointing at different names and numbers on them, his jowls working, his voice rising in a thunderous outpouring that M. could not imagine the end of. He left the garage. The rain was heavier. He ran back through the streets looking for an agency that would rent him a car. He found nothing. He returned to the hotel. His clothes were drenched. His dripping hair fell down around his face.
At the hotel they hired M. a car. They regretted that they must give him one from the most expensive category because none of the others were available. He drove back to the garage. The man there allowed him with a dismissive wave of his hand to remove his bags and hers from the boot and transfer them to the car he had rented. He looked through her bag in a search he knew was hopeless for her passport. He cursed himself for never having done it before. Nothing. He looked at a map. He found the route. He headed out.
Pictures of her passed through his mind. His lungs constricted. Let this be a dream, he thought.
By the time he arrived at the station it was eleven o’clock at night and all the trains had gone. There was a woman with bandages around her ankles drinking beer on a bench. A man was sweeping. The ticket office was closed. What else, he thought, might he have expected to find? He took the photographs which I have here on the table beside my books and maps and he showed them to the man with the broom. The man lifted his eyes to look. It seemed to take a great effort. He shook his head. No, he had not seen her.
M. got back into the car. He had the feeling that he must continue to move, but for a time he could not. He slid down the seat and closed his eyes. The pain moved into him like a storm entering a valley, acute, vicious, enduring.
He turned the key in the ignition. He began to drive. He had no plan of where to go. He turned on the radio but the laughter and the speed and the loudness of the speech that came out of it oppressed him. He listened to the wheels moving over the wet road. He looked at the silhouettes of the trees. He passed through towns. Everything there looked malignant to him.
He saw a hotel set up on a hill above the main road. He pulled over. He opened the boot and reached for the bags, but then left them. He went up the hill and asked for a room.
He had a shower and got into bed. She would have liked this place, he thought. The beamed ceiling, the paintings and pencil sketches, the big wooden bed and linen sheets. The thought of where she was fluttered like a bat around the dark room.
His head ached when he woke. He went downstairs and took a little breakfast. He went to the desk to pay his bill. He put his hand in his pocket but did not find his wallet. He remembered then that he had put the wallet in one of his bags when he moved them to the other car.
‘I’ll be right back,’ he said to the clerk.
He walked down the hill and around the bend to where he had left the car. He saw it there ahead of him, pale sunlight coming down through the morning haze and gleaming on its broad silver bonnet. Behind it was a red open-backed truck piled high with boxes and mattresses and bicycles. A small dark man with a moustache reaching out past his ears was leaning against the truck, his brown arms folded across his chest. There was a woman with a child in her arms in the passenger seat. M. looked at them rather than his car as he walked. He wondered how far they had travelled and where they were going. The man saw him and pushed away from the truck. M. took the keys from his pocket and turned towards the car. The man approached. He began to shout and wave his arms and point to the red truck. M. saw something then which at first and for long afterwards he did not understand. The rear windows of his car were black, the boot rumpled and half open, the paintwork blistered and scorched, the tyres blown and ragged. Parts of them had melted. Through the windscreen he could see that all that remained of the seats in the back were the metal frame and exposed springs. There was the stench of burnt rubber and leather. Had he made a mistake? Was this truly his car? On the passenger seat he saw the list of towns he had written in the bus station. He walked around to the back of the car. He saw then that the grille and bonnet of the red truck were bent badly out of shape. Scorch marks ran up the bonnet towards the windscreen. Blackened pieces of metal that seemed to be from the engine of the truck were lying on the pavement. The small dark man shouted at him continuously. M. tried to open the boot but it was stuck. Finally he kicked it and it sprung open. Everything there – bags, credit cards, receipts, documents for banks, storage, car, his clothes and hers – had been destroyed by fire. He had no money or the means to get it. He could not reach anyone who could help him. No one there understood him. He saw one of her shoes, a belt, the arm of a pair of sunglasses, the sleeve of her white linen shirt, burned and blackened. Things familiar and now distant. He seemed to see all of this from a great height and far away, the hill, the bend in the road, the elderly man who was making his way past him with two walking sucks, the mangled vehicles, the owner of the truck pointing and shouting, his wife and child motionless and looking on, the trees, the playground where children were running, the sun pouring down and lighting the edges of the clouds white and gold and himself there small from this distance, bent over and looking into the man’
s brown and yellow eyes, understanding nothing.
For days when he woke M. did not at first know where he was. He saw the green Chinese pattern on the sofa he was lying on, the tiny pink flowers on the wallpaper. He rolled over. White sheets covered tables, chairs, mirrors, lamps. They were like ghosts about to walk. His aunt had put them there after he had last left this house after his father died and he had not removed them. This was his world. He lay on his back and it assembled around him.
He drank cold water from the tap and walked out on the road beside the beach to the thin neck of sand that led out to the graveyard at the end of the bay. It was summertime, caravans packed like fallen boulders into coves, the doors and windows of the houses wide open to let in the air, radios playing, people calling out, dogs and children running along the sand. M. didn’t know them. He walked among the gravestones and the flowers and then down to the ruins of the monastery at the foot of the graveyard and sat at a wall looking out over the bay. He hoped for something there, from the play of light on the water or the wild colours or the stones where the monks had prayed.
He went back to the house. He ate something. He spread documents in different languages out on a table in the kitchen. He made telephone calls to brokers and bankers and lawyers. He moved money from place to place. He counted what money remained. He tried to repair the damage he had done. He tried too as he walked the roads or sat in the house or drank in the bar to put a shape on his life, to find a direction in which to face, and he tried to hold his attention there until something was revealed, but he could not, for in his weakness it slid off, and each movement of his mind hurt him, as movement hurts the skin of a person damaged by fire, for everywhere he turned she was there.
When all this tired him M. walked the roads watching men bring in the hay or stood at the back of the church staring at the statues or lay down on the green sofa. He turned the pages of old magazines. He listened to the radio. At times he looked at a book he had found, its covers grey, its pages yellow and stained with blue ink, something from the schooldays of his father that told of galaxies and planets, the laws of heat and motion and the shapes and movements of atoms. He liked to see the way his father’s hand formed words then, the drawings and observations he made in the book’s margins. He liked too this picture of spinning spheres and orbits and everything in its place. Was that how the world truly was? If he started from the beginning, moving from the smallest thing up to the largest, could he make the world for himself again and find …? But his mind could not hold the thought.
When night came he walked to the bar. He sat in a corner behind a wall pretending to read. The passing of time made him find more things that he had lost. It shamed him that he could think of nothing else. He tried to keep his face out of view.
The day came then, a dank, warm day without wind and with heavy grey clouds spilling down the hillsides, when he drew the curtains, locked all the doors and took his father’s long yellow car out from the barn where he had stored it. He packed it with clothes, maps, sandwiches. His father’s book with its diagrams and formulas. Another by Werner Heisenberg with the tide Physics and Philosophy. Her photographs. He drove out along the road climbing the peninsula, the colours deep grey and green. ‘No one would know him in these places,’ he remembered saying to her. He was moving. The sound of the tyres on the road calmed him. ‘And no one would know where he was.’ Not all of the stories she told could be true. He knew this. That was not her nature. To expect them to be true would be to misunderstand her. But there were events, records, people. Everyone born leaves a trace. He pulled over. He wrote down a list of places – Isle of Wight, Barcelona, the town where he met her. That was just the beginning. Then Turku. Finally he would go to Turku. How easy it would be to find her mother with her ballet school or her man Ritso with his wild hair and strange clothes. He looked at a map of Europe, the entanglement of roads like a basketful of river eels. What matter to anyone if it was fruitless? If he could not be with her he must know why. Maybe he could save it, maybe not. But at least to know. He drove on into the failing light.
18
Three Clues
‘I’M SHRINKING,’ RENATA tells me on the telephone. ‘Wrists, I ankles, hips, cheeks. You could hold me up in the crook of your arm. The nurse’s assistant does it when she comes to wash me.’
When she hangs up I telephone Jacob.
‘Would you like to meet my sister?’ I ask him.
‘I would, of course,’ he says.
The next morning we set off by train, Jacob wrapped in his bright red coat, the two of us drinking tea from his flask as we roll southwards towards Krakow. Nothing much stirs on the land, just a few cars from time to time slithering in the icy lanes between the snow-covered fields. He hands me a sandwich from his pocket, the sun a pearl globe just above the treetops. Finally then the train slows as we pass behind the houses of Krakow.
‘I should be kinder to my sister,’ I say. ‘But something seems to stop me.’
We ring the bell of Renata’s home and stand in front of the door. It is answered by a small round-faced girl, a fringe of dark hair on her forehead which then falls and hooks around her pink cheeks like parentheses. She gives a little bow in a country style.
Jacob tells me he thinks it better that I go in first on my own, so I follow the girl into the bedroom. I find Renata there in a bed jacket and starched white nightdress propped up against a slope of satin pillows, her fingernails and lips painted red, her tiny hands sparkling with rings and bangles, her hair dyed the colour of rust and lacquered stiff as a bird’s nest around her face. I squeeze her hand and kiss her cool dry cheek and see that the cover of the pillow under her shoulder is worn away, the broken satin stretched across like the strings of a guitar. I stand by the bed and look at her. I don’t know how to begin. She is so tiny, so frail, like a figure in a catacomb.
‘You needn’t look so pitying,’ she says. ‘Or so smug. Maybe one day you’ll be held together with string and bandages. Maybe you’ll have to be carried to the bathroom.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ I say.
‘Here,’ she says. ‘Hand me over the bottle in that drawer there.’
I go to where she points and find a bottle of vodka. I pour her a glass.
‘That’s new,’ I say. ‘Isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘Drinking in the morning.’
‘Yes,’ she says. She drinks in rapid sips until the vodka is gone. ‘Since I’ve been stuck in the bed. I haven’t the concentration to read, the television is monstrous, no one visits. I lie here wondering what would happen if there was a fire and every now and then I take a glass of vodka. You think I should deny myself?’
‘No.’
‘Then give me another.’
She takes her glass from under her pillow and holds it out while I pour. Then she throws it down like a cowboy in a single gulp. Her whole face collapses, eyes and mouth both disappearing, as the drink scalds her throat. She looks for a moment like a walnut.
‘I look every day for the grace to bear this, but I don’t find it,’ she says. ‘I know a sour old person is one of the plagues of the earth. I don’t like to be sour. I pray to avoid it. But it’s a terrible struggle. I don’t find a single compensation for old age.’
‘Maybe we’re free to do what we want.’
‘We’re free to do what we’re no longer able for.’
‘There’s that,’ I say.
She looks around the room, her fingers picking at stray threads on the sleeve of her dressing-gown.
‘Nearly everyone I know is dead,’ she says. ‘There’s one old lady down on the first floor. We used to go out on Wednesdays to the cinema and then for a hot chocolate after. But that’s finished now because we’re both stuck in our beds. We speak by telephone. We talk about grandchildren and visits from doctors. We get the same magazines sent to us and talk about the dresses. Then at some point she’ll tell me about the cow that’s living with her in her bedroom. She would
n’t mind, she says, because when she was a little girl she liked cows. But this one is too big. There’s barely room for the bed now, she says.’
We both laugh then, and I feel better.
‘There’s more,’ she says. ‘At the age of eighty-seven she has a project to change her name to Zbigniew!’
‘I’d like to meet her,’ I say.
‘I’m sure you would. I’m told she’s still very well presented.’
I notice then on a dresser a small plastic Christmas tree with pink branches, its lights blinking on and off.
‘You’ve decided to mark the season,’ I say.
‘Bobby brought it to me. Or I should say Ryszard. That’s how he prefers to be known. He says, “We’ve no need to be ashamed of our Polish names,” very dignified. He gets ideas about what will cheer me up. He brought the Christmas tree last week and the month before it was a picture of a dove in flight. “Positive images”, he calls them.’
She tries to prop herself up but her arms won’t support her weight and she slips down into the bank of pillows, two of them at her shoulders pushed forward and up like a pair of folding wings before dropping down on her face. For a moment I can see only her hair.
‘That girl,’ she says from under the pillows, ‘doesn’t know how to fix a bed.’
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