The Red Door

by Iain Crichton Smith

  Sometimes under the booming roof he would hear a voice which said: ‘This train will stop at Belsen and at Auschwitz, at Friedsville and Pascaiville. Passengers will leave their luggage at the office where it says KRAUT in block letters.’

  Visions came to him of a garden in which he had once worked, in the grounds of a huge castle. Under the trees he would frolic with Marguerite, who had long since left, high-heeled, with a transistor that played incessantly in her left hand. Chewing gum, she swayed to the music. Where was she now? He imagined that she was a dancer somewhere or a striptease artist in some sleazy club. Anyway, she had left no address when she set out into the wide world with painted toe-nails, indomitable heart-shaped face and her transistor.

  And so many others had also left him – men and women and children. They had all gone into the world of light while in the darkness he waited for the train to stop so that he might be allowed to board it, and join those others on their recurrent journey from spring to fall.

  His footsteps echoed hollowly in the station as he walked up and down. The footsteps were of himself, they echoed himself back to himself. He could not emerge from the impatience of himself, except by entering the train and those illuminated possibilities that he saw each night.

  He stared ahead of him to the opposite platform where he could dimly make out advertisements exhorting him to eat more, drink more, buy a more comfortable bed, listen to a record or buy a newspaper. In the daylight there seemed to be a lot of advertisements about Goethe, at night they changed to Baudelaire. He waited because he felt incomplete, because he wanted not just the fruit but the core as well. He waited because he did not want to be excluded from the circus.

  Sometimes he would try to trick whoever was in charge of the train. He would appear in rags, dirty, dependent, a beggar. He would stand under a light which would show his unshaven face, a suffering stubbled Van Gogh. At other times he would howl into the night with a high-pitched scream as if by imitation he would make the train stop. But it did not stop as if it sensed the falsity of his cries.

  But tonight he was ready for it. Tonight he knew once and for all that there was no place for him but the train. He had given away all his possessions, even his photographs of the castle showing himself in the grounds tending a tree in the sunlight. He had simplified himself to what he was and wore. He was ready to offer himself to the howling train and the lighted compartments. The howl of his mind answered to the howl of the train.

  He prayed, ‘Why should I be different? Why should I not be permitted this terror? Why should I be omitted?’

  And as he prayed he heard the whistle of the train, the clear high manic note. Suddenly a voice above him spoke in a clipped inhuman tone, almost Japanese.

  ‘This train will stop at Miltonstown and Rimbaudville. When you board it you must leave all your luggage behind you. Tickets are non-returnable. Do not be alarmed by the appearance of the guards or police. Whatever happens happens to you. Your capacity for pain is the only entry fee required, but you must remember that this is as great as your capacity for joy. Do you accept these conditions? If you do have enough faith to, close your eyes.’

  For the first time in his many vigils he closed his eyes because he had tried everything else. The train thundered towards him. He felt it was going past and nearly opened his eyes but didn’t.

  ‘You may open your eyes now,’ said the voice. He opened them. The train had stopped and there was a door open. Without a case, empty of possessions, he entered it in the greenish light. There was a ghastly overwhelming smell which gradually became sweet and wholesome. The train was blazing with light from end to end. He moved down the corridor. In one compartment he saw a firing squad with invisible faces, in another a woman nursing a baby. In yet another a boy being beaten with a blunt instrument.

  He found a carriage and sat down in it, and as he did so his fatigue was changed to buoyancy. Opposite him there was a picture of a seaport, above him there was a painting of a youth in a flowery dress leaning against a tree. Music played incessantly, demonic, elegant and sweet.

  He heard someone singing, ‘I’ll be with you in apple blossom time.’ Someone else was singing, ‘I’m falling, falling, falling in love with you.’ He thought he recognised Marguerite’s voice but older, richer, more vibrant.

  He set off in search of her past the lovers, the murderers, the clerks. He thought he would find her eventually though it might take a long time. And each time on the recurrent journey she would be different. But as long as they were on the same train it did not matter particularly.

  In the Café

  The two of us – she wearing her yellow coat and I wearing my drab one – entered the café and sat down at the draughts-board table which was near the open door through which we could see the apple tree growing. The café owner nervous and bustling and vibrant swept towards us.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you are existentialists.’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ I said. But she said nothing.

  ‘Existentialism began in cafés,’ he said. ‘I’m very proud of that. Not here, of course. In France. What is your pleasure? A coffee?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘two coffees. One white and one black.’

  ‘True,’ he said, ‘two blacks do not make a white.’ He gave our order to a hovering waitress and sat down beside us.

  ‘I prefer Camus to Sartre,’ he said. ‘I feel that Sartre does not have a truly creative mind. But on the other hand I am sure they both wrote in cafés.’ He waved his hands dramatically like a Frenchman as he spoke. ‘Not that I’ve ever seen a writer writing in my café. Still, this is not a sunny clime.’

  He continued, ‘If for every chair there is no Ideal chair we are back with nothingness. Agreed?’

  She, who was just recovering from a cold, sniffled but said nothing. I nodded, regarding the marble-topped chair with the draughts-board pattern. There were so many kinds of chair, after all.

  ‘You are with me,’ he remarked. ‘I never suffer from jealousy,’ he went on. ‘If no one buys anything here I do not feel rejected. I know the owner of a newspaper shop who can’t bring himself to serve anyone who has a newspaper from another shop under his arm. That of course is a classic case of insecurity. I on the other hand feel and act like a café owner but with hauteur. Sartre and Camus have given me a status. In my café there happen all sorts of metaphysical events. My café is an image of the entire world like the Round Table. I act as a café owner should. If Man is not a thought of God, what is he? Eh?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What is he?’

  ‘He is a drinker of coffee and a muncher of cakes. That among other things. Out of all that detritus he has to make not only himself but all men. Have you noticed,’ he said, ‘that I wear a purple bow tie every day? That is because of the part I play. I am royalty now created by philosophy. Hegel I think is more suited to restaurants. I know exactly the type of restaurant. It is large and drab and not very well lighted. Do you understand what I mean? Have you seen these kinds of restaurants? They serve you with huge dark slabs of things.’

  ‘Yes, I know them,’ I said. ‘You are a very interesting café owner.’ She didn’t say anything but we were both very conscious of her fine face and yellow coat.

  ‘Ah, Man has to be made and remade again and again,’ said the café owner. ‘I could even become a tailor. That too would give my life meaning. That is the true image. Man to be rouged and powdered every day. For every day is a new day. And I always begin it with a cup of coffee. That is my ritual. Ah, here is yours.’ And the waitress in white set the coffees down in front of us.

  ‘Fine coffee,’ I said as I drank.

  ‘It is only with certain people that I can be a café owner,’ he said. ‘For instance I knew at once that you were both existentialists. One day I shall have to invent a motto and ribbon for us. I do not see long-distance lorry-drivers as existentialists though they often come here. They are Hegelians and always want pies which I don’t serve. Should Man be
created in the image of the long-distance lorry-driver?’

  ‘I think not,’ he said. And laughed. She didn’t laugh.

  ‘Good,’ he said, ‘you are a connoisseur of humour. But when I look around me and see the contingent chairs and tables my heart bleeds for them, they are exiles from Marx and Hegel and such large people. There is no room for them. They are like orphans, however beautifully they are painted. I yearn for the days when a chair had a life of its own. I think of the chairs sitting here during the night trying to add a cubit to their stature, trying to be more truly themselves.’

  ‘I can imagine that,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said earnestly, ‘I’m a very sensitive man. I would not like Man to be made in my image but perhaps in that of a peacock with a flavour of early morning coffee about it.’

  ‘It would not be inappropriate,’ I said. But she said nothing.

  At that moment a number of noisy rugger players came in and he sighed and left us. ‘They will need help in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘Anyway I don’t like rugger players. Their books are obscene.’

  After he had gone she said, ‘What an odd queer man.’

  ‘He seems very intelligent,’ I said.

  ‘He is very queer,’ she said sniffling. ‘And I don’t know or care what existentialism is.’

  ‘He is one,’ I said. ‘I like this café.’ In fact I was very reluctant to leave it. There hung about it the pungent smell of coffee.

  ‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘The coffee isn’t very good. And I’m sure it’s also very expensive.’

  ‘Well, he may have to charge for the conversation,’ I said.

  ‘We came here for coffee and not conversation,’ was her answer.

  ‘We could go and sit on the chairs beside the apple tree,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve got a cold anyway. I don’t know what you see in him. He talks a lot. I think he’s boring.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘if that’s what you think we can go.’

  ‘That’s what I think,’ she said.

  She was in one of her sullen moods but I thought that it would have been pleasant to sit by the apple tree in deckchairs on such a fine sunny day. But we didn’t and that was that. In any case the streets did look contingent and so did the rooks flying about the university tower. And so did the café itself, to a certain extent, seen from outside. And so . . . But that’s not true. She did not look contingent. But we needed each other and it would have been bad if the café owner with his theories of existentialism had come between us especially as he charged such a high price for coffee that I thought good but she didn’t. So I didn’t stay and we boarded a green contingent bus and she sniffled continuously from her cold and we went to her house and played scrabble most of the afternoon while her parents withdrew to some other contingent part of the building. Still, I thought, I could always go back there on my own and listen to the café owner’s theories because he seemed such a happy man who knew exactly what he was, a Café Owner.

  On the Road

  They were driving along the road – he and she – in the half dark when he hit the rabbit which was running across the road in front of him and converted it from a living, graceful, trembling being to a messy pulp. She shouted at him and he stopped the car and she was sick. As he tried to hold her head, she pouring a thin green bile out of her mouth, she pushed him away and as she did so he noticed without thinking of it the white moon rising ahead of him in the sky.

  She raised her head at last and they went back into the car. He protested over and over that there was nothing he could have done about it, that he couldn’t have pulled up in time. She didn’t say anything, it looked as if she was in one of her moods again. It was true that sometimes she went into deep dark moods which lasted for a long time but eventually gave place to sunshine. He waited for this mood to pass. The thin moon seemed to be directly ahead of him as he travelled on, this time more slowly, hoping that he wouldn’t hit anything else, for instance a small owl wafting across the windscreen of the car. She was still silent curled up inside herself and he didn’t know what to say to her. If it hadn’t been for her he would have forgotten about the rabbit a long time ago. But when he looked at her he thought of the messy redness of the rabbit with its guts spewed out on the road.

  ‘That is how it is,’ she said at last.

  ‘What?’ he asked, glad that she had spoken.

  ‘With us,’ she said, ‘with everybody. We make a bloody mess of each other.’ She spoke as if she had been granted a revelation.

  He waited for her to go on, but she didn’t for a while and then she said, ‘Only we don’t see it. We don’t see it out there like that.’

  What she said puzzled him because he didn’t understand it. He had never felt like a rabbit. Anyway a rabbit didn’t feel things like a human being and it must have been killed instantly in any case.

  ‘If we could see what we do to each other,’ she said. ‘We would look like the rabbit. Do you see that?’

  He drove very carefully in case there were some small animals about that he couldn’t see.

  ‘Don’t you see that?’ she said so suddenly and with such violence that he nearly swerved off the road.

  ‘I couldn’t help what happened,’ he said, feeling stubbornness settling within him like a stone. ‘I didn’t want to kill it. I couldn’t stop, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s part of everything else,’ she said persistently. ‘It’s part of what we do. Like the day you . . . ’

  ‘The day I what?’

  ‘The day you gave me the present. It was a necklace.’

  ‘What about the day?’ He remembered the necklace but he couldn’t remember the day he had given it to her.

  ‘You said we should celebrate by going to bed together.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ he asked. ‘I can’t see anything wrong with that.’ That pale white moon was beautiful. Quite lovely. Like a pearl necklace against the background of darkish blue.

  ‘You didn’t think how I felt, did you? You didn’t think at all. Like with the rabbit. You could have turned away but you didn’t. Or at least you’re glad in a way.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he said. ‘I told you I didn’t want to kill it. I’ve got nothing against rabbits. It was just bad luck.’

  ‘It was like a bribe,’ she said.

  ‘What was like a bribe?’

  ‘The necklace. I remember it quite clearly. You associated the two, the bed and the necklace. And I didn’t think of it like that.’

  ‘I was just joking,’ he said. ‘For God’s sake it was just a joke.’

  ‘Rabbits can’t understand jokes,’ she said.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said rabbits don’t understand jokes.’

  ‘I know that, but what has the rabbit got to do with necklaces?’

  ‘A lot. It’s got a lot to do with them.’

  He couldn’t understand how her mind worked at all. For two years now he had tried to understand her but couldn’t. His own mind he felt was clear and logical but hers was devious and odd. It jumped from one thing to another like . . . He could feel no more small animals hitting the car. The moon rose more clearly ahead of him as the air darkened. It was really a lovely moon like the one they had used to see when they were courting and they could hear the sound of the leaves and the small animals and the water in the ditches.

  ‘For you,’ she said, ‘the necklace was to be used for getting something else. Don’t you see it was a trap, a rabbit trap? For the little rabbit.’

  Her pale throat glowed out of the darkness, he could imagine her small white teeth between the lips. No, he couldn’t cause an accident to her. For God’s sake, she was inside the car. What was all this nonsense about rabbits anyway? There were hundreds of rabbits. By the laws of average, some rabbits were bound to be killed. After all, he hadn’t set out to kill it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said feeling the stone in his body. ‘
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to kill it.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t,’ she said in a small voice. ‘Naturally.’

  The moon was now a full pale blaze ahead of him. Its majestic aloof beauty awed him. It was so huge and confident rising out of the darkness, more impressive than the sun, a big white stone. It seemed to swim through the sky.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again but this time there was a change in his voice. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t understand.’

  ‘What we do to each other,’ she said again. ‘If we could see it, the torn flesh I mean.’ He thought she was going to be sick again. And this time he did see it. He saw it quite clearly. He saw the rabbit with its guts hanging out and his wife spewing a thin green bile. He saw it all absolutely clearly by the light of the moon that floated over the undergrowth that was so fresh and new.

  He stopped the car. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I really am. I see it.’ She looked into his face to see if he had really seen. Her small teeth shone white and her face seemed to quiver. Good God, he thought, the rabbit. The rabbit in my car sitting beside me. What then did I leave back there? But the moon shone fully and clearly and provided no answer. He stopped the car and put his arms around her, very gently, without kissing her. He simply held her against him, while she quivered. That damned necklace, he thought, I wish I had never bought it or I wish I had never said anything. And yet all the same he had wished to surprise her. He had really been happy buying it. He noticed that she wasn’t wearing it, in fact now that he thought of it he couldn’t remember her wearing it. The moon, white as a pearl, looked in on them through the windscreen with a huge peering power, a complete presence. It was frightening. Why the hell, he almost shouted, weren’t you shining before, why didn’t you show me the rabbit earlier?

  Publication Acknowledgements