A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

The gush and suck of froth, of the black wash

  over hacked rocks to a sea wall: This could

  be St Kilda, you or I smiled, cold, sick,

  glancing out to sea. All day lay ahead,

  and then a late-night ferry back. Coffins

  had never frozen me with dread before.

  Why? I was two months gone; and knew we had

  too lightly borne this child I bore across

  there to the black-robed shore of Zakynthos.

  I ordered a fig tree at the garden shop in the hope that one will bear fruit here, even in this dry sand.

  From A Book for the Hours of Prayer (Das Stundenbuch):

  Feigenbaum, der auch im marmorharten

  Grunde hundert Früchte trägt:

  Duft geht aus aus deinen runden Zweigen.

  Und du fragst nicht, ob ich wachsam sei;

  furchtlos, aufgelöst in Säften, steigen

  deine Tiefe still an mir vorbei.

  figtree rooted in ground hard

  as marble, yet carrying a hundred figs:

  odor pours out from your heavy boughs,

  and you never ask if I am keeping watch or not;

  confident, dissolved by the juices, your depths

  keep climbing past me silently.

  Rainer Maria Rilke (Robert Ely’s translation)

  Dogen instructed:

  Students cannot gain enlightenment simply because they retain their preconceptions. Without knowing who taught them these things, they consider the mind to be thought and perceptions and do not believe it when they are told that the mind is plants and trees.

  Dogen: Shobogenzo Zuimonki

  Fog has been falling night after night this week. The horn starts before nightfall, two double blasts twenty seconds apart, and is still blasting half-through the morning into the sun haze. I walked to the lighthouse tonight to hear it up close. The avenue of tea-trees was black, dripping, in a luminous white mist so dense that I was on the steps to the lighthouse before I could see the great white rocket of it, the lantern revolving. I stood beside the shed containing the horn. Steam gushed out and a blast so loud that my eardrums, my whole body shuddered, filled with it – so loud it was no longer sound, only pain.

  The tide was a long way out. I was walking along the pier when a great answering groan came out of the invisible water at the end of the pier – then a ship’s faint lights appeared, moved on and out of sight, but its horn sounded again. The lighthouse, the ship, and echoes from the rocks all around…I came back damp and salty at midnight, still resonating with the roar of it.

  A story beginning: A banner of script, large characters on thin gold silk that wavers whenever the wind moves the trees at the window and slides along and down the wall on to the floor by midday. Script printed over the picture of the Buddha. As the morning passes the characters change in size, and also in shape, and so – it must be so – in meaning.

  TRUE STORIES OF OUR VILLAGE

  The man who was killed by a handful of walnuts

  Let his name be Barba-Yanni. A patriarch, Barba-Yanni was too old to work and his heart was playing up, but he had sons who came with their families in summer and worked the fields. One day a scuffle broke out among the grandchildren in the avli, the courtyard where everyone was sitting in the cool of the evening threading the last of the day’s tobacco leaves one by one, ready to be hung in garlands in the sun next morning. One of the children had come home with a handful of ripe walnuts from Barba-Yanni’s magnificent tree, and the others all wanted some. An aunt shrieked at the boy: ‘Who told you you could help yourself to walnuts?’

  ‘Grandfather,’ whispered the boy.

  ‘Did you?’ She swung round to the old man, who had gone red.

  ‘What did you just say?’ he said.

  ‘Since they’re our walnuts…’ she yelled.

  ‘My walnuts, daughter-in-law.’

  ‘All right! They’re ours, yours and ours, we live here after all!’

  ‘They’re my walnuts. And my grandchildren will have any of my walnuts they want, while I live,’ roared Barba-Yanni.

  She too was enraged. She was not backing down now. ‘That field’s going to be ours, with everything in it! With the walnut tree! Not theirs. You’ve willed it to us!’

  ‘I’m not dead yet!’ Barba-Yanni uttered, and he fell dead at her feet.

  The boy whose mother came back

  Let his name be Maki. Maki, who was three, lived with his widowed grandmother, Theodora; his father, whose marriage had broken up soon after Maki’s birth, boarded in Thessaloniki where he worked, and only came to the village for the harvest months. They were a poor family, whose land was not enough to support them. Maki was growing up a wild child, a loner. He threw stones if other children spoke to him, children who had mothers.

  One spring day Theodora, greatly excited, announced to Maki that his mother, who had gone to work in Germany with her sister, was coming to get her household things, her proika. ‘You’ll see your mother, Maki! She’s coming here!’ He knew what his mother looked like from the wedding photo which they had kept hanging in the saloni.

  The car stopped in a swirl of dust short of the house. Maki was waiting with Theodora beside the geranium tins in front, dressed in his best, his church clothes. A man in a suit stepped out and introduced himself to the open-mouthed Theodora as her daughter-in-law’s solicitor. The woman beside him was staring straight through the windscreen. He was here to supervise the loading of the proika, he said. ‘Yes, yes. Tell her,’ Theodora said, and wrung her hands… ‘Say that Maki – Ach Maria!’ she wailed. ‘This is Maki! Speak to the boy, evlogimeni!’ (Which means ‘blessed one’, and is a curse.)

  A clod of mud and gravel exploded on the windscreen. Theodora was spattered. Maki was far away.

  Daisies in a glass curled like dead yellow spiders.

  Rocks raise their brown backs, scaled or furry, and go under. Weeds wallow in the channels.

  A narrow strip of sand in the sun. The tide washes in and the shadow of the cliff flows down to meet it.

  A twig cup in the fork of the bare prunus tree. The only shells in it are snail shells.

  More hail this morning.

  A stooped cow nuzzles a calf

  that doesn’t wake up.

  Idea for a dialogue:

  Woman’s Voice: For him all I’ve been is a few notes, on a flute, say, in the long symphony of him-and-her…

  Wife’s Voice: Oh? Have there been flute notes?

  Woman’s Voice:…and for me those few notes have been the whole music. Now I’ve gone off symphonies, heard or unheard. Now I prefer my music made of a note here, a note there; flute-breath and koto-pluck out of the depths of a silence.

  The lighthouse horn hooted all morning on two notes, while I dreamed of a wrecked ship sunk into a pit so deep no light could wake it. Now the fog has lifted. The air is creaking with crows.

  Vase with Red Fishes

  AT THE BEGINNING OF SUMMER she invites him down to stay at the Point in the house in the tea-trees in the lee of the dunes which she is minding for a friend. ‘No strings,’ she says. ‘Come and paint,’ and he accepts. He arrives late one night bringing wine and a framed print as a present.

  ‘Oh, thank you!’ She props it up. ‘Oh, I love this.’

  ‘I thought you would.’

  ‘“Henri Matisse. Vase with Red Fishes (1914). Centre G. Pompidou” – I wonder where he painted it.’

  They lie in bed together sipping the wine. ‘They’re moving,’ she says. ‘Look. The fish.’

  ‘Fish-es.’

  ‘They’re negative of us. White inside, red out.’

  ‘Mmm.’ He wants to sleep now, not talk.

  ‘If we immersed it in water they could swim off.’

  ‘You dare!’

  ‘Fresh water, of course. Salt water’d be fatal. They’d float away with their bellies up. Over the balcony and off into the flooded square where gulls would swoop and snatch them away.’


  On a stand with long grey wooden legs is a jar of thick glass more than half-full of water in which are circling two goldfish, poissons rouges, red-gold fishes nosing at the fragmenting shrunken and swollen shadows they inhabit. They are in the window of a dark blue room, seen by someone inside leaning back to take in the wooden chair-back, the divan with square cushions, the pot or jug of pale green water in the foreground. A pillar stands behind the vase. Black iron is curled round the blue of the balcony. The sun strikes one side of the tall building across the square, its tower hooded with black tiles, slate tiles like the scales of a giant fish; its other side, four storeys of wall with narrow windows, is in shade. Next to it is a sunny façade with black loops for windows. The sky is thick blue. Carts crawl over the square. A terracotta flowerpot by the vase holds two long black stems out over the balcony, which has a top rail of darker red. There is an archway below. Serrations, a staircase. The perspective is fractured, refracted.

  It is hot, a hot summer evening in the south of France. Out of sight beyond the frame two people are sitting in the dark interior, which, like the painting, is touched here and there with red and gold – the bright edge of a cushion, the strip of rosy light at the floor of the balcony. A man, a woman. They are translucent. They have just woken up from the siesta. Colours flow from and over them listening to watery piano pieces: Debussy, Reflets dans l’eau, Poissons d’or, La cathédrale engloutie. Or the record has stopped and sound – a bird, a shouted exchange of words, a cat’s yowl – floats in on a silence.

  He has been painting what he sees out the window. She sits watching the fishes. They are two ripples of blood that dissolve and twine, red whips in the light of the water. In the glass with them are fragments of the hot blue and wheat-brown square with its turret and loophole windows sunk in a slab of shade. Their eyes, hollow black, look out at her. As if in a concave mirror they see hollow towering walls and encased in them a red bubble, which is the woman. She has put on a long red robe today and the folds and shadows of its silk lap her whiteness, trailing loose from her arms and on the floor at her feet. The silk feels like cool water.

  They have been lent this room by a friend. They will feed the goldfish and water the overgrown potplant; walk about on the green floor of the square under the stone walls in the cool of the evening. She knows a beach that disappears and reappears with the tides. The tide will be low, she says, at sunset, if he wants a swim. There is a long metal staircase down from the clifftop. When you walk on it in wooden-soled shoes each step chimes; when you run, the small sounds shimmer together like gamelan music. The whole staircase thrums. At its foot lie two flat round rocks with a fan of flutings on their backs like giant scallops. Black straps of kelp twist on the sand and in pools. The waves in the shallows turn cloudy gold as they rise, full of sand they have scooped up. He can watch the moon rise, she says, the lighthouses flicker under their green helmets, ships edge by into the open sea. And the other bay at low tide is all sweeps of pale water and sand, she says, tangles of kelp and red weed, and birds gathering, rowing boats tilted to one side half a mile out, lying on broken mirrors.

  ‘Low tide. I love low tide,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, it’s best at low tide,’ she says, ‘here at least.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘When the title’s in, the water comes right up to the foot of the cliff and the sea wall. But there’s sand at low tide.’

  ‘“As I Ebbed with the Ocean of Life.”’

  ‘Yes. Fancy you remembering that. Well, I ebb and flow. I still love Walt Whitman. Remember you said we all do at one stage and then we grow out of him? “Your summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me…” I’m less depressive than I once was.’

  ‘Good.’ And he squeezes her arm. ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Why do you love low tide?’

  ‘Seeing what’s hidden at other times. I think that must be why. Revelations. It’s like love, don’t you think? Like revisiting a past love. Each time the sheets are pulled down and then up again. The water sheets.’

  He goes out on the dunes to paint. Sandstone is honeycomb in the late summer sun, pitted with swallows’ nests. All this beach is the same colour – sand, rock and rock pool. The small mouse-shrieks of swallows skim and soar. The wave-shaped, whale-shaped headland is dark in the spray of the western sky and into the eastern sky a ship surges from behind the lighthouse. Its surfaces flash. A point like a star pierces the masthead. Its smoke is a rope pulling it away. His footprints flatten the crisp arrowheads left by gulls. At the high tide mark, along the hairline of the marram grass, he sees a soaked spaniel head, but it’s a drowned penguin, its dense wings folded under and hanging out like earlobes. Here and there are splashes of jellyfish. Long pink and white eggs are cuttlefish bones, in nests of seaweed.

  He sees her down on the beach lying in a dark gold rock pool and paints the small sandy prongs of her stretched out, weedy head back, hands open on the edge out of the water. He shows her that night. ‘Want to have a look at this, Narcissus?’ he says.

  ‘Me, Narcissus? Oh, this is lovely! Monochrome, is it? Yes, it’s tawny all over. Were you up on the cliff this afternoon? Why didn’t you come in for a swim?’

  Later, looking at the painting again, she says: ‘You were looking in the pool, I was what you saw. That makes you Narcissus.’

  ‘And you, now that you’re looking in the pool.’

  She smiles. ‘Okay. But Narcissus can only be a man. Only a man can be Narcissus.’

  ‘He was human, ultimately. Both male and female.’

  ‘No, women don’t see themselves in him. He doesn’t reflect – echo! – anything in women.’

  ‘Echo! He’s the Self, it seems to me, in search of the Other, brought up against the impossibility of finding an Other. The boundary of the Self as a mirror. It’s not a matter of male or female.’

  ‘Men made Narcissus. In their own image, or so it seems to me. He’s a male myth.’

  ‘All right. But one that transcends gender.’

  ‘I think it’s an illusion,’ she says, ‘that human beings can transcend gender.’

  He sighs.

  A wooden table stands against one wall, with a second chair. In the next room is an iron bed under a window with shutters; the window faces the back and fills up with hot strips of light every day. So they lie back against the blue wall in the front room, sipping wine or tea and watching the coolly spiralling fiery fishes.

  ‘The heart of the painting,’ she says one day, ‘is the red fishes.’

  ‘And the vase. You could take out the fishes and still the vase would be the heart.’

  ‘Not if the fishes weren’t there it wouldn’t.’

  ‘You’re wrong. The vase is enough. By itself.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think that sunlit building would dominate. I wonder what it is? A town hall? A convent? Of course, we’re used to it as it is. If we’d seen it first without the fishes or the vase…’

  One afternoon she comes in from the water, drives over to the fish-shop boat moored at the pier and buys two red fish for dinner. While he is still out sketching she uses his paints, on the glass not on the print, to hide the fishes; she fills the vase with the colours of the water. He sees as soon as he walks back in that they are missing and his face smiles, dark with annoyance at the mutilation of his gift.

  ‘A glass of wine?’

  ‘Thanks. And thanks for proving my point. I suppose next thing you’ll go off and paint the vase out.’

  ‘Your point or mine? Look at that bright building. Anyway I have other things to do just now. Such as dinner. What if I bake the fishes?’

  ‘Oh, right? Bake the fishes, eh?’

  ‘They’d taste quite good baked. With herbs in their bellies, stuffed inside the slit, and a little garlic. Lemon juice. Or I could slash and oil them and grill them whole, if you like.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Grill them whole. Great idea.’

  ‘You don’t believe me.’


  ‘Have you got loaves as well?’

  ‘See.’ And she opens out the wet newspaper.

  ‘Red fishes!’

  They are not red-skinned; they have silvery white skin tightly covered in a mesh, a red net with a sheen, densest at the peak of the back. They have a rack of spines and their long-lipped jaws sag. Blood has leaked in and tarnished their ringed eyes; through the pupils you can see into the dim caves in their skulls. At the base of the great wound behind the head and in the skin along the edges of the slit belly is a bluish pearly gleam. Their fins are braided bright vermilion.

  Grilled, they are toast-brown with black bubbles and their eyes are as white as the flakes of flesh and the skeleton.

  Early next morning she has wiped her paint off the glass and the fishes are back. ‘Look,’ he says, ignoring that, pointing at his mug of tea. ‘Poissons bleus.’ The white mugs have a blue fish painted on the outside.

  ‘That room, that window, must be in France. The Côte d’Azur.’

  ‘Poissons d’azur.’ He turns the print over. ‘We could probably find out. Let’s see: 1914.’

  ‘Fancy you remembering my birthday.’

  ‘1914?’

  ‘No! The Matisse. Wasn’t it for my birthday?’

  ‘Was it your birthday?’ He raises his glass. ‘I didn’t remember. I just thought I’d give it to you. Happy birthday, eh? What does that make you?’

  ‘Older.’

  ‘Indeed. I meant your star sign.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Don’t go in for star signs myself.’

  ‘Pisces!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘You knew.’

  ‘It was pure coincidence.’

  ‘It was fate. Or maybe you were remembering my ring.’

  Her ring has a stone, a clear bright bubble of amber with dark flecks, some close to the surface, some resting on the silver bottom. In the silver on each side of the stone a fish is embossed. The two full-lipped identical fishes face opposite ways, so that their movement is a clockwise circling of the stone. She slips her finger in.

  ‘Poissons d’argent. Remember it now?’

  ‘Never set eyes on it. Never seen you in a ring.’