by John Berger
I noticed her on account of her face and its unusual expression. She reminded me, not of an animal, but of some picture of one. Perhaps of the lion who became the companion of Mark, the Evangelist. Sometimes this lion has an expression on his face which, at the same time, is smiling, wounded and a little mocking.
The bus moves off. She hears us talking in French and, after a while, she turns and asks:
Where are you from?
She is squat and short so she has to lean out over the aisle in order to see us round the back of her seat.
You weren’t born here, she goes on, you’re strangers.
Her eyes are unexpectedly light and they are blue.
So you’re going to Derry, she continues, and I’m going to Omagh. Are you on holiday?
We’re working in Derry with some actors.
I’m going to be in a play too! Why don’t you come and sit beside me?
She moves so that the seat beside her is free. I sit beside her and she tells me her name is Kathleen and I ask her what play she’s in.
A Christmas Carol. My first role, when I was very small, was the infant Jesus. Two years back it was the Lady Macbeth I played.
Very different, I say, very different. So you want to be an actress?
It was probably then that she calculated that I was a little stupid.
I’m going to be a hairdresser.
In Omagh?
No, I’m at school in Omagh. I’ve been home for the weekend. I’m sixteen. Were you taking me for being older?
A little.
It happens.
You have brothers and sisters?
We’re five but we have different fathers. Now Mum lives with Bill. He’s younger than she is and she’s pregnant.
Is the baby due soon?
In April. I get on with Bill, he’s easy. I’m pregnant as well.
I see.
Mine is for the month of May.
You’ll both have your babies in the same hospital?
Yes, we will. We like the nurses there. And who knows, they may have got the dates wrong, we could overlap.
Mum and you?
Yes.
And the father, the father of yours?
He didn’t want the baby. Get rid of it! he told me. I wouldn’t hear of it. I want our baby and I’m keeping it! So he left. Now he’s living with my oldest girlfriend.
Not very loyal, I say.
Ach! He’s only seventeen, poor kid. And I have the baby, I’m happy. I want to have lots of children. Shall I be showing you the birthday card I bought for my sister?
She finds an envelope in the carrier bag and hands it to me.
She’ll be furious I haven’t bought her a present, my sister. I wanted to get her a book. Maybe the latest by Roddy Doyle. But I didn’t have the money, so she’ll just have to smile at my card, won’t she? Go on, open it!
On the card is a picture of a white rose and underneath it the written words: To Deirdre with love from Kathleen.
She stays at home, my sister. She’s ten years older than me and she doesn’t go out at all. She’s written a book.
I offer Kathleen a peppermint.
She looks with her bright eyes from under her lowered eyelids. Would it be bothering you if I smoked?
I point towards her belly.
She lays her hand on my arm to reassure me. I know, she says, I’m going to stop at the end of the week. The heroine of my sister’s book is called Annie. She gets raped and becomes pregnant. The man, who is old enough to be her father, throws her downstairs hoping she’ll miscarry. She lies there and pretends to be dead and when he bends over her, she grasps him – you can guess where – and pulls and pulls until he’s howling. At this moment one of his mates comes in through the front door and the two of them decide –
Is this what happened to Deirdre? I ask.
What in the name of God makes you say that? No, no. Her father, he wasn’t my father as I told you, he interfered with her when she was little – but that’s all, nothing more. The tragedy for Deirdre is she’s deaf. She can’t hear a thing. She’s stone deaf.
She was born like that?
A car accident … I was in California at the time.
California?
We’re having a grand talk, aren’t we? she says.
You remember where you were in California?
A place called Lodi, fifty miles north of Oakland. You’ll be in Derry by one.
She holds up the birthday card of the rose for us both to look at again.
This afternoon I’ll be washing my hair, now do you think I might allow it to grow longer?
You could.
No, she says, and tucks the card into the net pocket of the seat in front, long hair is too hot in the summer. What’s your favourite colour for roses?
Rose, I think.
I want you to be at ease. I’ve taken you away from your friends and maybe they don’t like it. You don’t have to stay, Johnny.
She fingers the birthday card.
Well, at school I share a room with Sheila. She’s pregnant too. So we have an arrangement, one day I do everything for her and the next she does everything for me. Today it’s her turn to look after me. So I’ll wash my hair and then I’ll see what’s on the telly and then I’ll learn my lines. I’m playing the Spirit of Christmas Past.
At this moment she pats her tummy. Her hand is plump with bitten fingernails.
Next year I won’t be playing, I think. I’ll have my baby to look after. Would you like to hear my first lines?
Go on.
‘Bear but a touch of my hand there’ – she places her hand near my heart – ‘and you shall be upheld in more than this. Now your lip is trembling … and what is that upon your cheek?… these are but shadows of the things that have been …’
The bus stops at the gate of a cottage on a lonely road and an old couple get off, helping each other with their shopping. Behind the gate their dog is trying to jump over it.
For ten minutes neither Kathleen nor I speak.
I’m deaf too, she says eventually.
Come on, I say.
Not like Deirdre, I’m only deaf in one ear and you’re sitting on the good side. In fact, I have a hearing-aid and I don’t use it.
Another car accident?
No. It was a Friday night one year ago and I was pissed out of my mind and I got knocked down by a lorry. It broke my arm too.
She rolls up the sleeve of her cardigan and shows me a red weal by her shoulder.
If it’s a boy, I’ll call him Kevin and if she’s a girl, Sara.
They didn’t tell you, when they did the scan, whether it’s a boy or a girl?
I didn’t want to know, she says. I prefer mysteries. Do you like the names Kevin and Sara?
The bus stops twice in Omagh and at the second stop Kathleen gets to her feet, takes the birthday card of the rose from the net pocket of the seat and walks down the aisle without a word.
I watch her climbing a steep path towards a building which could be a school. She looks weighed down.
Sheila! she’ll tell her girlfriend, I met a stranger on the bus and I spun him the tallest stories ever!
Did he believe you?
And Kathleen will nod her smiling and wounded and slightly mocking head.
[4]
A Man Wearing a Lacoste Sweater
He was the last to enter the room. He was lean, tallish and in his mid-forties. He wore glasses and you immediately noticed his eyes. They were unusual because their look was both penetrating and sensitive. A man, you said to yourself, who calculated in millimetres. As he shook our hands, his smile of welcome revealed the same sense of precision concerning feelings. He knew the exact difference between acknowledgement and gratitude and between gratitude and delight. He smiled at us with a smile of acknowledgement. The circumstances of our meeting prevented him from adding: Please make yourselves at home.
We sat down, around the table. The room had no window. The other two prison
ers were younger than he, one from Reunion Island and the second from Marseille. We introduced ourselves and began reading out loud the story we’d chosen.
The aim of incarceration is to reduce all exchanges with the world to a minimum. And this has an effect on voices. Ours, as we read, were unlike prisoners’ voices. Our voices were volatile – like swallows in flight seen through a window. Maybe our voices were more interesting than the story we were reading.
Noises in a prison echo like sounds do in the hold of a ship. There’s nothing to absorb or clothe them. Like prisoners, noises there have no privacy. So most of the time you shut off your hearing – unless you choose to listen. If you so choose, then you listen sharply. The three men listened to our voices.
Over by the door of the room, the screw, who was leaning against the wall, read a comic. He had no need of voices. On the ring, chained to his belt, was a key to every door.
It was a love story we were reading. A story of passion, crime, interrogations, dream, death, forgiveness. Set in a faraway metropolis.
The boy from Reunion Island sat hunched up, frowning. The Marseillais leant back and looked as if he was alone, driving a car to the metropolis. On the sweater of the man with glasses, I suddenly noticed the Lacoste green crocodile trademark. A man of discernment. As we read, he nodded, as if acknowledgement was perhaps turning into gratitude.
In prison the imagination is caught by a form of genius which is seldom discussed or honoured outside. Every prisoner’s imagination allots to this genius its particular value and place, but all imaginations identify with it. This is the genius required for escape, the genius of those few who make it ‘over the hill’.
From the drawing-boards on which the penitentiary buildings were designed, for the most part a century ago, to the newly installed video cameras, from the metal landings outside the cell doors to the electronic alarm systems, from the obsessive suspicion of most of the screws to the Clausewitzian training of the Prison Directors, everything had been conceived and is run to make escape unthinkable. Day and night are systematically punctuated by routine or sadistic reminders of this unthinkability. Yet there are those who persist in thinking about it all the while. Of those, there are a few who try to translate thought into action. And of those few, a handful who – miraculously – succeed.
When a prisoner succeeds and makes it ‘Over the hill’, those who remain inside dream and talk about the exploit as they would talk about a masterpiece. And masterpiece it is. An achievement, which in its imagination, ingenuity, discipline, persistence, planning and concentration, can compare with the bronze doors of the Sacristy in Florence by Donatello or Thelonius Monk playing Epistrophy.
By the entrance to the prison main-block, before the cage and the metallurgical detector, there was an office with a dozen video screens, monitored by a Dickless Tracy. She could bring in camera after camera as she chose, and she watched all day. Men exercising, men sleeping, men working, men grabbing, men shitting, men smoking, men waiting, men telling stories. She glanced at them all. Next to her telephone there was an alarm bell. Every few minutes she checked what they were doing; what she couldn’t know was what was being said.
Like every story told in prison, ours also offered a means of momentary escape. Insofar as one listened, one flew over the hill …
In the story we were reading, there was not only plot, suspense, dialogue, there was also everything which was normal, which belonged to waking up in everyday life out there, and which did not exist here. In the room without a window the story was a reminder of mountains, of silence, of dancing, of choosing which street to walk down, of privacy and its special gift which is intimacy, of deciding for oneself what to eat and when, of opening a window without a thought, of taking a train or a bath, of doors which nobody could see through …
The next time we paused, the man with glasses, his hands in the air like birds in flight, said: Very neat. And beautifully imagined. Really neat.
We went on with the story and the story went on reminding the three men. Before we reached the end, the screw interrupted us and held up his wrist watch as if he thought we might not understand what prison time was. It was over.
Thank you for the story, said the boy from Reunion.
The man with the glasses came over to me. He wanted more than ever to be a host. He spoke in a soft voice, as if he were somewhere else, by a garden gate, for example: I hope to see you again sometime … perhaps in another prison?
I nodded.
The warder took the three men down the corridor. The man with glasses and the Lacoste sweater turned round and made a vague sign with his hand.
[5]
An Old Woman with a Pram
Near Oxford Circus, London. In the nineties. Difficult to judge her age, probably around forty-five. Her belongings were in a shopping chariot, lifted from a supermarket. She wheeled it along the pavement, her face slightly inclined, as if it were a pram and she were looking at a baby. Her belongings in the chariot were in plastic bags. She wore a scarf round her head and a fur hat – what the Russians call a chapka. Much of its fur had fallen out. She also wore trousers, a padded jacket and an imitation-fur coat, the colour of dust. From a distance you might think she was clothed like an Eskimo. Except for her feet. She was wearing a pair of American-style sneakers. She found them in a dustbin on New Cavendish Street, which is near Hallam Street where my mother once lived when she was alive.
In the London underground stations a number of platform benches have recently been replaced by a new piece of public furniture. A kind of perch – which allows waiting passengers to take the weight off their feet and thus lean back a little. Its notable advantage is that no tramp can lie down on it to sleep. At night when the woman with the chapka lies down on a piece of cardboard which she places on the station asphalt, she doesn’t take off her white shoes but just loosens the laces so they don’t pinch her feet, which swell up at night like my mother’s did.
Now it is midday and she is walking towards a pedestrian precinct behind Oxford Circus where hundreds of pigeons gather. As soon as the pigeons perceive the woman with the chapka they waddle on their feet, or fly over the paving stones towards her. From her chariot she takes a black plastic bag of stale bread, thrown out by a restaurant in Mortimer Street, and breaking up the bread with her hands, she flings fistfuls of breadcrumbs into the air.
Several pigeons perch on her arms, a few hang, fluttering, in the air above her head, but most wait on the ground to peck up the crumbs as they fall. From time to time, absent-mindedly, the woman puts a scrap of bread into her own mouth.
During my childhood we had a stone birdbath in the back garden of our house and during one hard hard winter my mother – who must have been about the age of this woman at that time – strode every morning through the deep snow between the silver birch trees to put out toast on the frozen water. Like Maeterlinck, my mother believed birds carried messages from the dead. The tramp woman, holding a bird in her hands, is shooing the others away by tossing her head and prodding with her elbows into the air. The bird held against her breast has lost some of its feathers and its round head, a little smaller than a ping-pong ball, is half bald. It has refused the bread she offered. Still holding the pigeon against her coat, she searches in another one of her plastic bags and finds a baby’s bottle with a teat and a little milk in it. She expresses a few drops into the pigeon’s beak, which she manages to hold open.
Each day, before coming to Oxford Circus, she prepares the bald pigeon’s bottle and each day, after feeding the rest of the flock, she gives the bald one its milk.
A crowd of shoppers from Oxford Street now stop to watch the woman with the chapka.
They can’t see through the walls, can they? the homeless woman says to the bald bird. If they want to stare at the garden, let ’em!
Mummy!
[6]
A Young Woman with Hand to Her Chin
When she entered a room full of people she had an almost Byzantine arro
gance, like the Empress Theodora of Ravenna. She knew very well that, for such as her, self-defence began with the exclusion of any possibility of taking a liberty. And she made this exclusion unmistakably clear by both her expression and poise.
I say ‘such as her’ because she was a musician, she was an émigré, and the way a long, heavy skirt hung from her hips when she danced was biblical – it reminded you of generations of women without end.
She had been brought up by her grandmother, a country woman from the Ukraine. From her she had learnt how to kill chickens, feed geese and look after her own excited parents – her father was a concert cellist, her mother a pianist.
Under the tutelage of the grandmother she had acquired the confidence of an elder by the time she was twelve. Her first lover appeared when she was thirteen.
She could tell stories for a month. She had her own and her grandmother’s fund to draw from. Funny, true, untrue. The stories all revealed how the world is made up of people who, like birds during a harsh winter, need to be fed in some way or another. Some were crows. Some were finches. When she told them she hunched herself up like an old woman peeling potatoes to cook in the soup. Her laugh – and she only laughed when you did – was light and silvery.
Concentrated on Beethoven’s one-from-last piano sonata, she flushed as she played it and sweated like a farm girl. I will never again be able to separate the pathos of that sonata from the smell, like drying grass, of her sweat.
Once I started a drawing of her, just after she had been practising. The piano was still open and she was sitting nearby. I screwed up my eyes and I waited. The impulse of a drawing comes from the hand rather than the eyes. Perhaps from the right arm, as with a marksman. Sometimes I think everything is a question of aim. Even playing Opus 110.
Her left eye sometimes wanders, to become a fraction displaced. At that moment this slight asymmetry was the most precious thing I could see. If I could only touch it, place it, with my stub of charcoal without giving it a name …
