Sight

by Jessie Greengrass

  and later still, returned to my hotel room, curled up under Johannes’ coat like an abandoned pet, wanting the solidity of his presence, the way he stands about me like a wall, with a desire that is close to invocation, I will wonder if this is how it will always be, now, this longing to be elsewhere—the wish when I am with my daughter that I might step apart from her, and when I am apart this anxious echoing, the worry that the world might prove unsound, a counting down to her return; and I will be surprised that something so obvious has taken me so long to understand.

  I get closer to the river. The dome of the cathedral rises, drizzle dulling it to the colour of London brick; behind it, hills which ought like the church’s roof to awe and glorify are hidden by mist and when at last I cross the river it is nothing but water. My feet start to ache. I wonder what it says about me that I seem to feel love only in absence—that, present, I recognise only irritation, a list of inconveniences, the daily round of washing and child teas, the mundanity of looking after, and beyond this the recollection of what went before and how nice it was to be free; but I didn’t recognise my freedom then—or wasn’t free, since freedom only functions as an opposite to constraint. There were other things, then; and how can I say, now, that a different choice would have left me more content, and that I would not have felt the loss of this life as now I feel the loss of that one—

  In the Giardino di Boboli I sit down on a bench to rest but the rain begins to fall more heavily so instead I go onwards to La Specola, where in a stone-floored room wax anatomical models lie, their hands turned upwards to show finely crafted ligaments, bones, in glass cases lined with white silk like the insides of transparent coffins. This is what I have come to see: the uncanny beauty of these delicate faces above flayed bodies, the fine tracery of silk-thread veins, the layers of flesh removable one by one to leave an empty cavity.

  Aside from myself there is no one else in the room, and it is a relief to be unobserved. I stood beside the serene perfection of Clemente Susini’s Anatomical Venus, half-closed eyes in a face framed by human hair and below it the open casing of her thorax, her perfect lungs, her heart, and somewhere, invisible in the configuration of the museum’s display, a wax-cast human child, curved and tangled and unborn. Beside her it is hard not to feel that it is I who am the imitation, mere flesh in the face of an object made, not just to educate or to instruct, but because science was once a form of worship, this stripping back of layers a way to wonder at the fierce complexity of God’s work, the duty of created to creator. My own body, with its creaking joints and stretched skin, its aches and imperfections, feels by comparison to such still flesh a painful falling-short of what it ought to be. I imagine how I would look laid out like this, formed into layers, each one a shell, demountable, and at the centre of it all the indivisible nut my child makes; and how then all of it might be removed, stacked carefully up beside my open, undecaying carcass. So static I might be perfect, liable at last to a complete accounting, each piece examined, weighed and understood, disallowing surprise, mistake, decay; but amongst so much balance what would be left of me?

  I return to my hotel and climb into bed, Johannes’ coat on top of me, and I try to sleep so that, waking, it might be tomorrow and I might make my return to that encumbrance of minutiae, love, which anchors as much as it irks so that, tight inside its lacings, I know my shape, my place, and where my edges are.

  III

  Twelve weeks and four days pregnant for the first time I lay on a high metal bed, my T-shirt pulled up above the curve of my ribs and my trousers, unbuttoned, folded down to lie along my pubic bone; between them, an expanse of empty skin like tundra, unremarkable and still unrisen, a kind of fleshy middle distance. The only light in the room came from the sonographer’s computer screen, its blue glow caught by her hands, the collar of her shirt, her carefully pulled-back hair. Earlier, sitting in the waiting room next to Johannes, drinking glass after glass of water and trying not to look at those who also occupied the space, the couples, the women alone, people whose lives I didn’t want to give myself the right to extrapolate, the ways that they might differ from us or be the same, I had turned my face to each uniformed passer-by and anticipated in each of them a kind of jocular camaraderie, a showman’s skill with patter; but the woman who had come at last to usher us through to this dim cell was so neatly professional that she seemed barely present at all, smoothed down to the perfect confines of her role. Staring at the ceiling, the exposed skin of my abdomen filling the silence like an unacknowledged solecism, I wondered if this leaching of character or compassion on her part was intentional—if it were done in case, needing either later, she might find that she had squandered them on the ordinary amongst us, we whose unborn children leaped and flipped about, indistinguishable from each other; or if it were itself an act of compassion, pre-emptive and organised: a way of sparing those for whom this day would be a shattering, insulating them from her sudden change of tone, a tightening of the skin about her mouth or eyes, the lurch from friendliness to intercession. To my left Johannes sat, bent into a plastic chair too small for him. We ought to be holding hands, I thought, but to reach him would have meant turning my arm uncomfortably backwards at the shoulder—and my reluctance to do so seemed a subtle marker of some already prevalent inadequacy in me, indelibly wrought, that I should put my own comfort first.

  At last the sonographer stood up. For a minute she fiddled with the large machine beside the bed, angling its articulated monitor, then saying

  —This will feel a little cold,

  squeezed gel onto my stomach, a great, chilly splurt which I would afterwards be left to wipe off with a paper towel, my furtive embarrassment at the task the first in a series of slight indignities which over the next six months would strip me, layer by layer, until at last I was nothing but flesh and would lie naked in another room and scream while strangers came and went about me. The sonographer passed the ultrasound’s transducer backwards and forwards, pressing down until I winced, staring across my shoulder at the monitor which Johannes and I were not yet permitted the sight of. I watched instead her face, the small frown of concentration that lay in the ridged skin between her eyes, and tried to force myself to some understanding of what we had to lose. The night before, Johannes and I had sat side by side on the sofa and, in half-made sentences like tendrils cautiously unfurling into dangerous territory, discussed what we might do, without either of us being able to quite articulate what it was we spoke about, and

  —I don’t know,

  I said

  —how I might feel. It would be dreadful—

  meaning all the time that I knew what our decision would be but that I didn’t know what degree of guilt or distress I might feel, all outcomes seeming to me so far entirely hypothetical, and I was worried I would feel nothing for this entity which was as yet more idea than child, which was in its own presumptive wellness experienced as the expectation of an unimaginably different future and as a combination of sickness and obligation, a requirement to regard my choices as circumscribed.

  At last, her face relaxing into something that was almost a smile, the sonographer turned the screen around so that we could see it, her practised litany of body parts (head, legs, bladder, heart) our reward for patience. I said the things I felt I ought to say, the exclamations of wonder or delight, and tried to make myself realise that the mass of grainy shadows on the screen was a child, and that it was ours, that it was there with us, not merely as a ghost or intimation but as something present in the room—as though the truth of it could be drummed into me by repetition.

  Later, after we had paid our three pounds fifty to take home a copy of the ultrasound image that we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to want and didn’t know what to do with, this picture at once too intimate and too impersonal for public display, we took the bus home, the print in its cardboard sleeve tucked inside my hospital notes. The Tuesday-morning city felt stran
ge, as when at school I would be allowed sometimes to leave at lunchtime to visit the dentist and, stepping out of the self-completeness of the classroom-bounded world, would find myself instead in one just out of whack, two degrees different from that which existed during the evenings and at weekends: a world slightly empty, industrious, quiet, its children elsewhere. Swings hung still in playgrounds. Newsagents were empty. Adults, their attention on themselves, ate sandwiches in the street. This was the same. Shadows were too sharp. There was a queue at the post office, a man sat on the steps of the library, a woman on her knees beside a crying child. The bus was half-empty but its progress was uneven, each stop a laborious rearrangement of shopping and pushchairs, and this would be my own world, soon—the buying of bananas in the afternoon, the manhandling of prams, the gratitude for open public spaces and the passing of time on benches—a world which went about its slow business while the rest of us were elsewhere.

  In the supermarket, buying bread and ham for lunch, we hovered in the dairy aisle and I asked

  —Do we need milk?

  and felt as though I were reading from a script. Johannes and I stood apart from one another, not touching, and although I wanted very much to be able to offer reassurance or be reassured I found that I could do neither. In the sonographer’s room, both of us watching the screen, it had been as though what we looked at existed not inside my body, blood-warm, internal, but in the space between us: that what was previously a private thing, its border coextensive with myself, had been transmuted by the act of sight from subject to object. It seemed that I had, in conceiving this child, and without anticipating it, given Johannes a stake in my body; and although the extent of this was still to be negotiated, although it was a kind of temporary, partial license, like the provisional rerouting of a right of way across a private garden, still I felt this retraction of self, the shrinking back of borders to leave what had been within the perimeter now beyond the selvage. Diminished, I moved carefully, as though to protect against further incursion; but there was an obverse to it, my concession the price of purchase for my advantage. For all that it seemed to me that I had surrendered territory, still I retained the rights of ownership. The way my body interposed itself between Johannes and his child gave me an unacknowledged right to disregard him if I chose, and it gave me privilege of access, touch, an assurance of my necessary place that Johannes lacked. It was there in the way he trailed after me through hospital corridors, his presence an afterthought, and in the subtle, unarticulated presumption made by others that he would feel love less than I, or loss; but his life too had been made strange and would be altered—and so it was hard in the end to say which of us had been put more in the other’s keeping. Standing in the supermarket queue behind a man buying twenty-five bottles of bathroom cleaner I saw for the first time the unintended consequences of our actions: that in choosing to have a child we had become that we had thought ourselves to be already: inextricably involved with one another, knotted up, as though a part of our child’s chimerical genetics had transferred itself to us and now we were each partially the other; and so, waiting in the checkout line, we held ourselves very carefully, just apart, to save both ourselves and each other from accidental injury.

  * * *

  —

  After we had eaten our sandwiches at the kitchen table, after we had returned to our separate parts of the house to work, trying to wrest from the day some semblance of the ordinary so that we might cease to feel that we were waiting, I sat at my desk. All morning, caught up in the business of appointments, I had forgotten to feel sick, but now it returned, the constant queasy ostinato over which rose exhaustion’s disharmonious cadence, a progression paused before the point of resolution, aching forwards. I had no heart to work. Instead, searching for some act of petty symbolism to cast myself off from the morning, I took from a drawer of jumbled scraps a picture that I had clipped from a newspaper some months before and had not then known what to do with: the surface of Titan, the largest of Saturn’s many moons, a sphere of ice and rock 5,000 kilometres in diameter swathed in a cloud of nitrogen. This image was taken by the Huygens probe, named after the Dutch astronomer who in the March of 1655, using a telescope that he had designed himself, observed Titan for the first time; 350 years later, after a journey which itself took six and a half years, the slow progress outwards into darkness of ticking metal in so much chilly silence, the probe landed with little more than thirty minutes expected battery life, this tiny span the culminating blink of so many years and such a journey. Lying on solid ground in the outer solar system, the Huygens probe then performed that minute central act it had been built for, its last process, sending back across so many slowly traversed miles this image of its resting place, an expanse of grainy ground, flattish to the horizon, with rocks or boulders strewn across it, smooth globules that might without context be taken for bubbles or for the cellular structure of a plant—and then at the picture’s highest edge the sandy-coloured smoothness of the sky. I pinned the clipped-out piece of newsprint to the corkboard above my desk and next to it I put the photograph we had bought from the hospital, the ultrasound image of what would be my daughter. Looking at both of them, side by side or separately, I felt the same: a kind of plunging incomprehension, an absolute inability to make sense. These two things—a view of the ground in the outer solar system and a picture of the inside of my own body, of the entity that had taken root there to build itself cell by cell towards an articulated experience of grass in sunshine or the smell of violets—existed beyond the boundaries of my constructed world, the navigable realm of named things, and into that shadowy distance which was still unmade, which had neither colour nor warmth but only spectrum and could not be spoken of except through simile (to say “it is like this other thing” and feel the point has not been made) and I could not incorporate them: they would be neither magnified nor reduced and nor could they be imagined beyond these representations of them which were themselves little more than metaphor. Much later I saw a picture of the surface of Mars, a high-resolution image in colour, reddish-brown earth and the sharp rocks throwing shadows, and I have seen too those three-dimensional images of babies in utero in which each detail of their not-quite-finished faces can be picked out, their skin too smooth across the landscape of their features, their bodies foreshortened; but these did not have the same power. They were too like the images of things that are familiar: a stretch of January field, unploughed; a doll. Their strangeness has been made unrecognisable by the sharpness of their edges and although what they depict is as far from the familiar as before, they have been brought by the exactitude of these analogies within the confines of the real: I can dismiss them easily, and turn the page that they are printed on. Those two grainy pictures, though, Titan and my daughter, their figures made as if from dust or static, the ill-formed communications of ghosts, were in their strangeness absolute: they were like nothing else and so they were irresolvable and faced with them, while the child I could not imagine turned its aquatic loops in a space which I contained but couldn’t reach, I could do nothing but sit, silent, and try to measure against them the implausibility of things: myself, Johannes; the particular set of events that have occurred weighed against all those that might have done, but didn’t, so that our lives together seemed at times nothing but an impossibly narrow pathway rising through shadows.

  * * *

  —

  On a cold winter morning in 1750 three men stood in a Covent Garden basement. In front of them, spread across a table, illuminated by that grey, early light in which facts appear immutable, lay the body of a heavily pregnant woman. Her corpse, unearthed that night from one of London’s mass graveyards, had just been delivered, brought round to the back door of William Hunter’s recently founded anatomy school; beyond this her history was unknown—her name and place of birth, where she had lived and how or who might mourn her, what it was that had killed her and her child so close to term that the baby’s hea
d, as they would shortly find, had already settled into her pelvis, engaging itself ready for birth. Aside from William—aspiring obstetrician and social climber, lecturer in the anatomy school which was still both novelty and controversy, with the majority of medical professionals regarding a knowledge of the body’s geography as tangential to their craft—and the dead woman, whose body had become possession and exemplar, an object of interest only in its generality, in the ways that it was like all others beneath its particularising skin, those present were John Hunter, William’s younger brother, and the artist Jan van Rymsdyk, who had been called quickly out of bed at the news of the woman’s arrival. The body’s decay, though slowed by the cold weather, necessitated haste. John had been in London barely two years and was as yet in his brother’s shadow, his character and ambition not quite set, his restless curiosity still mistakable for adolescent zeal, but he had already shown himself to be a remarkable anatomist, certainly more adept than William, and so it is likely that it was he who performed the delicate operation of this unnamed woman’s unpeeling: the careful parting of skin and muscle like the drawing back of heavy curtains to give sight of the horizon beyond; the injection of blood vessels with a mixture of wax and dye so that their pathways might be visible, a new-drawn map of territory claimed; and then at last the long incision in her uterus and the uncovering of that which none of them had seen before and few others had thought to look for: an unborn baby, full term, curled tightly on the pillow of its placenta. While John worked, a leather apron tied over his ordinary clothes, Jan van Rymsdyk made a series of drawings which would eventually, reproduced as engravings, form the foundation of William’s greatest work, The Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus Exhibited in Figures, an atlas of the female body at each stage of pregnancy—and both John Hunter and Jan van Rymsdyk had cause to wonder, later, what fraction of the labour involved was William’s that he should put his name so obviously to it. The idea, perhaps. The raising of subscriptions, later, and the hiring of engravers, true, but neither the skill of the enterprise nor its art.