The Origin of Waves

by Austin Clarke

  “The cold sure as hell brings life into your body! A strange thing! The cold make me feel sober. They say it makes you look younger. You look more younger than me. I be living in all that heat in Durm, and you living in all this goddamn cold, walking through all this shit!”

  We stand over a round hole in the white pavement, marked out clearly through the difference in temperature, and we feel warmer; our feet are two temperatures as if they are melting minute by minute. As we stand a policeman in a cruiser the same colour as the snow passes his eye over us, and continues on his way. John makes a slight jerk with his body, paying sudden attention. “The Man,” he says, softer than he needs to, for the window of the cruiser is closed against the cold. “The motherfucking Man, y’all!” and I feel and share the glee in his voice which shivers from the cold. We stand over the round iron hole and watch the steam rise; and we like this warmth, and we do not move immediately. And just like that, in the warm white night, our affection for each other comes to the top and we are hugging and slapping one another on the back and turning round and round and slapping as we turn; and shouting and laughing. The snow falling around us takes our voices, and magnifies our exhilaration, as we dance and turn. And then fall, still clutching each other, in the warm thick snow. It was just like this when the last wave, that last time at Paynes Bay, carried us, sitting in the inner tube, up onto the wet beach.

  “Try one of my cigars,” John says. We are still sitting up in the snow. “They’re good for you, but don’t tell the Surgeon General I say so!”

  The burning brown cylinder warms my hand, and the strong smell, the smell of success and of confidence, takes me on the swirling smoke to the dining room of Trinity College, where old men with paste in their complexion and thin strands of silver in their hair, eat. I imitate them, dressed in old tweed jackets with patches of leather or suede on their elbows, for economy and category, and follow their mannerisms as they lift their heavy brown pieces of rolled tobacco to their lips, ponderous and bulging, in the middle of their small round mouths. They look like babies feeding from a bottle. I move my cigar as they do, scotched at the sides of their mouths, showing the teeth, showing the accumulation of spittle, and speaking words covered in the richness of dark-brown sherry and port.

  “I will walk you to the hospital,” I tell him.

  “I have to face this alone. I am scared. But lemme try to face this alone.”

  “I wish I didn’t make, I didn’t allow my house to be turned into … to take on the ambience of a tomb … I’m not saying this too well.”

  “No problem,” John says. “I know.”

  “It is not a place to take anybody any more, not since I carried her body …”

  “I am sorry.”

  “I am sorry that …”

  “Who axed you to swim-out? Eh? Who was sitting on the goddamn wet sand on the beach with me that evening when the cobbler got-in my foot? Eh? Who?”

  “Me.”

  “Well?” he says. “Adios!”

  I am standing alone over the breathing manhole, looking at his cashmere winter coat as it becomes indistinguishable from the falling snow out of the skies I can never see in winter, as he is being swallowed up, devoured in the glistening night, which like a contradiction is dark; and in this puzzling light in which I have lived for more than fifty years, I watch that part of my life slip into the unmarked snow that a man not accustomed to walking in can disappear in. The snow is blowing in a wind, and the smokescreen buries him from my view, as if he was never here, never beside me. I feel angry at this snow, at this wind and this cold. It is like razors slicing my face and my legs. They say that the winter preserved the carton of milk for days and days, for longer than if it was left in the heat. The snow has buried him from my view, from my arms, and I am cold and angry at the murder it has just committed. My face is getting frozen. There are tears on my face. From the circle of land on which I am standing, and feeling the small warmth of the circle I am standing on, like the small island in which I was born. The longer I stand on this iron circle, the sooner I know I have to abandon it, get off and continue into this late night. I do not even know where I want to go. Which direction? And to what destination? The more I stand, the greater is the urge and the knowledge that I must step off from its temporary warmth and walk and walk, continuing in the direction I am taking, away from the house in which I live.

  After a while I am closer to the Lake, standing unsteadily at this street corner, Yonge and Queen, with the sidewalk slipping underneath my feet as if the street is melting, is the intersection that it takes courage to cross. And when crossed, it changes my life, and empties me into a cinema from the wrong end, the end that holds the screen and the moving figures, and gives an inverted version of things and faces and people. She was standing here, debating her own crossing, whether to walk with the green and wait for the other green, or wait longer and continue her walking on the same side. I was on the opposite side, with no reason to run the lights; and she changed her mind and waited; and we crossed this intersection together; and did not speak until we stepped off on the other side. She spoke and I answered her question; but I cannot remember her question now; and before she went on her job interview to be an interpreter of foreign languages, we sat in the small coffee shop in a vast basement shopping mall, and she drank her coffee and I watched mine grow cold and unappetizing. And like that she was a part of me. Love was born in that crowded, clattering place of numerous round tables and plastic cups and spoons.

  There is a bus stop at this corner. But neither she nor I was waiting for its transportation. So, here I am now, at this intersection, seeing her as she was dressed in the loose-fitting white dress with the band not tied, hanging from her back; here as if I expect she will rise up from the white carpet that covers her grave; here I am remembering the Saturday afternoon we went on the long journey by streetcar and two buses to reach the suburbs, so that she might look at the flowers of the gardens of the Guildwood Inn, and sit on a rock beside the water which has no sand, and toss smaller rocks into the unmoving water. The street is empty now, and I can hear the squeaking of the snow under my shoes, slow for safety and balance and leading me to the point in this walk where I go every day, every year since she died, but never at this hour. And I pass things and places which I paid no attention to on previous walks, but now, I can feel the warmth from the round iron grate, and my body once more has the life of summer. The street is empty. I can hear voices of men and women, and hear their footsteps and see their smiles as they carry bags and boxes and parcels of T-shirts, and posters rolled up like white shiny spying-glasses, and there is music from the man playing a set of drums, a tune I do not recognize, but full of pounding; he is the only man, the only person who can see and hear the invisible musicians accompanying him; and this music takes me all the way to where I can see the bridge, the underpass, although no one walks above my head. And the palm of the street which fans out and leads you either out of the city or else to the edge of the land, to the edge of the water. In summer, this street is filled with different colours of dress and of skin. And the screaming children rush and push their parents out of the way to board the ferry which takes them to an island small as a dot in the short distance from the mainland in the Lake. This island is not my island. I can only stand beside the end of the land and watch them, screaming for the lesser pleasure, the lesser beauty of this island dropped between the city and the Lake … this island is ugly compared to mine. For when I walked this distance yesterday, when it was also cold, the island was a mere trace in the mist that falls at the end of the land, at the beginning of the water.

  John must have reached the hospital by now. I imagine him sitting on a metal chair, sitting with his shoulders hunched, and his cigar tapping the metal ashtray, waiting for the final tying of the invisible strings that sew up the wound; and he is sitting in his expensive winter coat, with his hat still on, and his tie loosened as men who work in offices loosen their ties to give the impress
ion of work and mental concentration; and his woman, the child’s mother, is pounding the corridor farther along the freshly waxed slippery dangerous tiles; or as a braver parent, she is on another floor over him, listening to her son’s breathing, holding her son’s hand. I imagine her counting each step, counting with each step the risks in the slicing of her son’s body, to find the cancer perhaps … to find the germ, to find the growth that will continue to grow until it devours the entire small body of this child, Rashid, made from love, if the knife does not cut it out. And I see her, up and down in a continual march, soft and almost silent, and with a cup of coffee in her hand, to stay awake, to see this child pass through the worst. But John is probably stuck to his seat in the strange, large, brightly lit room, waiting beside the ashtrays. This kind of wait is not meant to put a man at ease, or to sleep, even though the silent nurses ignore his anxiety which they are trained to face and detect. How many cigars has he taken out, placed to his lips, sucked on, and then refused to light? How much longer will he have to sit in the untalking Recovery room?

  The water here is still green and dirty, and cold. There is no reflection in it now. There are no lights burning, neither from the restaurants nearby nor from the windows of the hotel and the apartments which rise on both my sides like lighthouses in the daytime. There is a speck of light moving across the water. It is like the fishing boat with the red sail, in a slice across the blue waves. And then it is not seen, as I wipe the rheum from the cold wind out of my eyes. I suddenly feel the urge to like this darkened scenery, this dimness, this cold water. I can get to love it, can embrace it like the water in summer or the waves on a beach, coming up to my feet over the sprawling pink sand. I can learn to feel there is no difference between the water, this Lake and that warm water of the blue sea.

  Nothing is moving now. There are no cars. There are no trucks. No ambulances cry out. The machine that cleans the snow is not operating. The security guard who is to watch this unoccupied building cold and strong as granite, and as secure, is sleeping off his waking hours in which he caught no intruders. And the wooden seats are now like slabs of marble in the cemetery where she lies comfortable and asleep with her sprig of flower in her lap, just as she held her left hand in the crux of her thighs. They say it is warmer the farther down you go, even in this cold time; they say there is no difference that the dead can discern between themselves and those who are alive. The lives we live, passing our time in the warmer graves on the face of the land they say are just like death; they say you start to die the moment you reach forty; but I do not know if this is true for I do not any longer know anyone who is only forty. For when she passed away she was thirty and that was not a fair death, not a natural dying. It was a mistake and a tragedy. I have since quarrelled with God about His justice. And I have become mean-spirited over it.

  John is standing now, with his arms outstretched and extended, creaking the fatigue out of his body. The colour of the skies is changing from the heavy weight of black to a more bearable dark blue, and I can feel my body getting cold and stiff. I think of John. I find myself imagining he cannot leave. That something has gone wrong. This fills me with hope. I see him sitting there, killing the boredom of waiting and the fear of the results of the knife the surgeon passes over the diagnosed parts of his son’s body. I have been standing here longer than the time it takes my uncle to pass the knife sharpened on stone across the fat belly of the dolphin where the skin is whiter and less pink than on the flat sides. John is standing again, following the red seconds of the long hand of the electric clock that is moving in endless circles, moving through time. I pray that something will go wrong to keep him always here. I pray, and do not feel the pinch of guiltiness. Death has done this … I can see the shape of trees now, bursting through the greyish skies, across the Lake on the island. I hear the sounds of the breaking dawn, and can remember how they summon life, when once I was in hospital on another island: enamel hitting the iron posts, and screams … A truck stops behind me, and a man walking in the snow with a ballast of fresh bread in a green plastic milk case places it in confidence on the cold front step of the nearby restaurant. He leaves with greater confidence. No one in this city steals this kind of delivery. The light is silver-grey, and the water is still green and oily and not moving. I have been standing here now, with the metal railing guarding me from jumping in. The cold metal has no effect upon my comfort. With the Lake at my feet, at my beck and call, with the face of Lang in my mind, I am still here more hours than I have ever stood in one place.

  The light is still not light enough to see too far, and the night is still; and noises – rats returning from the basement of the restaurant, the pounding of an early jogger foolish at this time, to brave this kind of weather, lands heavy on his heels and his passing resounds and vibrates along the metal rail, and I follow his pilgrim’s progress until his exercise is succeeded by the opening of a garage door.

  I hear the footsteps increasing in sound behind me, and I do not move or look to make sure I am safe. It may only be the guard roused by the coming of light. And because it is always so still, so peaceful, and so comfortable by the Lake, I have no need to save myself, or crave trials to find the reason. I can stand at this cold metal bar and watch the Lake, and see described in the dirty water her face that turns the water crystal. An object bobs on the surface, and I see that it is a flower …

  Footsteps are behind me, pausing for certainty of courage and for clarity of direction, perhaps for caution, to be sure that the steps are approaching the right victim. I can almost hear the footsteps causing heavy breathing, as a man breathes before he is about to deliver a deadly blow. My body does not echo the anxiety in the approaching steps.

  In the middle of the Lake is an inner tube drifting slowly upon the oil-spilled surface, in my direction; and I lean over like a man about to toss crumbs into the water to attract fish and ducks or the ugly birds which squeak and eat anything that is thrown to them.

  The footsteps stop. And I can see the vapour from the person behind me come curling to reach the side of my face, and then come in front of me; and after this warning of attack or of approach, after this warning of arrival, I feel a touch upon my winter coat, as if someone is asking for my attention, or is asking for direction. John is dead in my wish of personal cruelty and selfishness. A light touch. A touch so certain and at the same time so much like a kiss, like Lang’s kiss, that I can wait and relish its ecstasy. I do not have to wish for miracles any more, I have only to wait for the placing of the right hand on my right thigh, in our position of falling asleep without love-making. And then instead of her fragrance, I can smell the heavy, strong smell of cigar smoke, like the rising of smoke from the morning breakfast. The room is warm, and the bed is strewn with flowers, white flowers in the pattern of the cotton sheets; and the corridor is quiet, for the heavy woman is no longer walking outside the room in which a child lies breathing without tubes, for there was accuracy in the surgeon’s knife; and six floors beneath her, as if in the deepness of an unfilled grave, the man who had been sitting beside the pile of smoked and unsmoked cigars can now stretch his limbs in a different manner, for it is success. It has been success, success at the heavy catch which fills the fishing boat, leaving only two inches from its brim before overflowing, and from giving back to the sea the hard-earned bountiful rewards of the sea; and there are voices of women scrambling along the beach, their anxiousness deeper than the marks of crabs which scamper from such pleasure and laughter; and the old black, patched inner tube, shining in the coming light, swirls and comes in, comes in in a rounding movement; and the hand is on my shoulder for a second time. This time it has more weight.

  “He’s alive,” I say.

  “Goddamn!”

  This is all the voice says.

  Austin Clarke was born in Barbados, and came to Canada to attend university in 1955. He has had a varied and distinguished career as a broadcaster, civil-rights leader, diplomat, and professor. He has published ten
novels, including the Toronto Trilogy (The Meeting Point, Storm of Fortune, and The Bigger Light), The Origin of Waves, winner of The Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, The Question, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, and, most recently, The Polished Hoe, winner of The Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book. He is also the author of six short-story collections, including When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks, When Women Rule, There Are No Elders, and Choosing His Coffin: The Best Stories of Austin Clarke; and three memoirs, Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack, winner of the 1980 Casa de las Americas Literary Prize of Cuba, A Passage Back Home, and Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit: Rituals of Slave Food. Austin Clarke: A Biography by Stella Algoo-Baksh was published in 1994 and The Austin Clarke Reader, selected writings, in 1996. He is the recipient of numerous honours, including the 1999 W.O. Mitchell Literary Prize, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award, and the Order of Canada.