by Kevin Barry
“I’d like to see it,” she said.
“The which?” he said.
“The cottage,” she said.
* * *
No doubt it was national stereotyping to think so but she seemed to know her way around a head of cabbage. From his spice rack’s broad selection she took some caraway seeds and softened them in hot, foaming butter and stir-fried shreds of the cabbage in the fat, and these were delicious with thick slices of bacon and the sourdough bread he had brought from the market. They ate in silence as the sun broke through to heat the last of the day and its warm light was lavish in the room. They kissed for a long while on the sofa and then went to bed and even that worked out well enough.
* * *
He felt himself falling. In the native way he was tormented now by his own happiness. He could not imagine a future day without Katherine. That would be hell. To be able to stand back from and recognise his obsession as exactly that did not lessen its extent nor remove its danger. He waited for her outside the café each day. He kept step with her across the bridge to the Cortober side and together they slowed to look out over the water. Tears welled up in his eyes and he had to make out it was the breeze off the river was the cause of them.
“What is it?” she said. “Really?”
“I didn’t realise I was so on my own,” he said. “If we’re going to be brutally fucken honest about things.”
Typically in the evenings they drove up to the cottage. Its solitude in summer was bliss. His future plans spewed as they sat over a few glasses of wine. There was pale light until eleven o’clock still, the summer at its high pitch. They could back away from the town and the world altogether, he said. They could be next to self-sufficient on the mountain. The madness of what he was saying to a woman he’d been seeing for three weeks was evident even to himself and even as he said it, but she did not seem in any way put out. In fact, she asked serious questions about the land and the cottage, the drainage, and she did so with an air of owlish inquiry. Sniffily together they watched films by the Dardenne brothers (Belgians were allowed) and Julia Ducournau. On a clear night in mid-July, he went outside very late—stepped softly so as not to wake her—to see the starlight fall on the mountain as she slept, and he made a ritual vow to remain true if not exactly to the reality of the small woman sleeping in his bed in the cottage then to the perfected version of her he had worked out in his scenarios, for he believed that this version could incorporate and sustain—that we must each of us dream our lovers into their existence.
And now the torment of his happiness was on his brow like bad fever.
And now the nights were not long enough.
* * *
But when they sat together on the sofa in the evenings he was inclined to reach across and drag the hem of her skirt back down over her knees. Prim, it must have seemed, and it became something like a nervous tic, something he had no control over. They were perfectly normal and functional knees, but somehow their slight thickness made them seem foreign to her otherwise slender legs. Protuberances, he came to think of them as. Those unfortunate protuberances. They started to play on Seamie Ferris’s mind a bit. When he should have been thinking about other parts of her, he was thinking about her thickset fucken knees.
* * *
In the sorrow and remorse that mingled madly with his animal passion he spent a long time in the bed kissing her knees. He could not keep away from them in the dark. He cupped and whispered to them. He licked and stroked them. He spent serious time with them.
“Please,” she said on a humid night in late July.
“What?” he said.
“Leave them,” she said. “My knees.”
“Why?”
“I fucking hate my knees,” she said.
“Oh, my darling,” he said.
“They’re hideous,” she said. “If I could cut the fucking things off me!”
“They’re exquisite,” Seamus Ferris said.
“You will get the scabs on your mouth for lies,” she said.
“I have a dreadful fucken jawline,” he said. “Weak, a weak jaw. Gives me an unreliable look. A chancer.”
“But I like this little beard you have going on,” she said.
* * *
She spoke hardly at all of home or family. Her name was really Katarzyna, she said, but since childhood she had preferred the English version—Poland was crawling with Katarzynas. The small extent of her belongings was sorrowful. They didn’t take up a quarter of the space in the back of his van. He thought the heart was going to explode in his chest as he watched her shyly fold away her underwear in the drawer he had cleared for her. He came in close behind and kissed her neck. She sighed at his kiss as though in sadness but turned and held him and told him that she loved him, and Seamie Ferris was sucked through a hole in the universe.
* * *
One night, soon after she had moved in, he lay beside her in the darkness and watched her sleeping. She turned towards him in her sleep and she began to speak in Polish—a slow, anxious muttering, with the same words repeated over and over again, a phrase, almost musical, and eerie, a kind of narcotic intonation. Was it some old love that she pined for? Was there something more than her nature behind the air of distraction? How much had she not told him of her past?
The next night she rolled and turned again and repeated again in her sleep the same words and this time he took his phone up from the floor and recorded them.
He spent the best part of the next day roaming the wind-swayed fields of Google, searching out voice-recognition apps with translation modes, and eventually he found what was needed, uploaded his recording, and he had her night words got, or at least he had them got in a loose rendition.
* * *
A feeling occurred within Seamie Ferris sometimes as if a brim had been reached and now his own words must cascade and fountain. He confronted her in the kitchen. He was aware that he had a face on him like his father’s. Untrusting and cold.
“You’ve been talking in your sleep,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been saying things, and it seemed to me it was the same thing, over and over, and I couldn’t help but…”
“If only you could sleep,” she said.
“I couldn’t help but record it.”
“You…”
“With the phone. I know, yeah. And I had it translated.”
“By who?”
“By an app.”
“What have I been saying?”
“That you’ll die if ever I leave you.”
“Oh Jesus God.” She held her face in embarrassment.
“At least I think you’re talking about me,” he said.
“Who else would I be talking about?” she said.
* * *
Seamus Ferris could bear a lot. In fact, already in his life he had borne plenty. He could handle just about anything, he felt, shy of a happy outcome. As the summer aged he became unseated by her trust of him and by her apparent want for him. What kind of a maniac could fall for the likes of me, he wondered. The question was unanswerable and terrifying. When she lay in his arms after they had made love, his breath caught jaggedly in his throat and he felt as if he might choke. To experience a feeling as deep as this raised only the spectre of losing it. As she lay sleeping in the night his mind now began to work up new scenarios. These played out variations around a single narrative line—the way that it would all cave in, the way that it would end, the way that he would be crushed beneath the rubble of his broken heart. Katherine coughing blood in the sink one morning, and then the quick raging of her demise—an illness like a wild animal tearing through her—and the way she would die a bag of bones in his arms. Jesus Christ. Or…Katherine leaving without a word, absconding on the Dublin train from Carrick station, returning to Poland and the lumpen embrace of some previous, unnamed love, some s
teelworker fucker with a head on him like a thirty-kilo kettlebell. Or…Katherine stumbled upon in a dark corner of a late-autumn field, at evening, blowing a young farmer. Or…an old farmer. So rancid did his night scenarios become that Seamie Ferris stumbled from the bed to the bathroom and gargled with Listerine. In the morning, still sleepless, he watched her carefully over their yogurt and fruit.
“They say you can tell by the chin,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“You know full well, I’d say. The way a liar can be made out by the set of the chin.”
“Seamus?”
“Shay-moos,” he mimicked. “Who were you with before me?”
“This is ridiculous. Why are you so jealous?”
“Because you have me fucken destroyed,” he said. “I’m very sorry, Katherine. I just don’t know that I’m fit for you.”
“Ah, please,” she said.
“Or for anybody,” he said, and he stood up and walked out of the house.
* * *
The summer gave way without complaint. The light was thickening over the river now before eight. The long draw was well advanced. On Dromord Hill the colours of heartbreak came through. She had left him at the end of August. She moved back to the same apartment complex on the Cortober side. For almost the whole month of September Seamie Ferris slept like the dead. He would be up out of the bed for no more than an hour at a time, often much less. He had refused happiness when it was presented to him in the haughty form that he had always craved. What kind of a fucken fool was he? He drank milk from the carton by the light of the fridge in the middle of the night—never before in his life had he drunk from the lip of the carton. His skin itched and he had a whistling pain out the left lung. He believed that he might die. The two of them together could have made a small aloof republic on Dromord Hill—they could have written the rules for it. October. November. He hardly saw the town. He shopped at the Lidl on the Cortober side when he knew she’d be at work. On a dank winter morning he was trying to retrieve his coin from the trolley when a mullucker from the café came by, her face softening at the sorrowful sight of him.
“Did you hear at all?” she said, twisting the knife. “Did you hear Katherine went back?”
* * *
But now out of the winter-grey sky the soft magic again descended and he knew that the extent of his feeling was beyond the ordinary realm. He came to believe again that they were in telepathic contact with each other. Distance was no object to it. He sent mental messages down Dromord Hill and across the midland plain and across all the seas and the cities until at last the city of Stalowa Wola presented itself. The message he received back was that he must come to her and quickly.
He flew on a Ryanair to Wrocław and took a bus, a train, and then another bus until he found the place. It was a new-looking city with vast white fields opening everywhere in the distance. He walked the freezing afternoon away. He had no idea how to find her. He had to trust that he would be steered. There was a Tesco on the outskirts that made the place oddly familiar. He might well be mad, but what of it? He must find her.
An icy rain came across his face as he walked on. In an empty bar in what appeared to be the centre of the city, he drank a glass of red wine and tapped into his phone the wifi code. He went to the first place he always went—her Instagram account. It was fourteen minutes since she had at last posted a seventh image. It showed a detail of Dromord Hill—a whitethorn bank—in an evening sun flare. Her accompanying caption read, “Mam na mysli lato.”
Google Translate: “I am thinking of summer.”
Beneath her profile on the post was the place from which it had been sent—Kafé Komputery. He showed this name to the barman, and was directed to it. It was two lefts and a right, a five-minute walk. It must have been the last internet café in Europe. Its dim lights were cinema against the falling dark. Katherine, paler, still lovely, was at a terminal—all the others were unoccupied.
She turned at once at the scraping of the door as he entered.
“Oh, thanks be to fuck,” she said.
DEER SEASON
She saw him often in the morning and often again around dusk as he walked out by the river. She called him the riverman. She had seen him only in the distance and had not properly distinguished his features. She was almost eighteen and determined to have a fuck before it, but she lived remotely and the summer was almost over. He was tall and thin and did not have a pronouncedly masculine walk—he could not be taken for a farmer. His step was carefully picked out and it had a hesitancy to it. He brought to her mind the heron. She needed to get closer to him quickly.
The morning was bright, with a breeze that moved the light’s sharp points on the lanes, and the hedges were opulent with berries and the high grasses raced in the late-summer fields. She set out for the banks of the river along the lit points of the lanes. She had taken a book for cover, after a long think about which book exactly to take. She pulled her cardigan tight against the morning chill that marked the season’s changing. Even before the river’s sour waft was in her nose, she had decided on the tree that she would sit beneath. She arranged the picture in her mind. She felt that she could see what was coming and that she could make events turn to her design. She felt a quick thrum of new sexual power. She fretted that the cardigan—a grey—might seem a little nunly, but if nunly, she reasoned, perhaps an intriguing counterpoint to the somewhat lurid cover of the Bolaño novel, which showed a Mexican death’s head. Often her thoughts went in these contrary directions at once. He might not be a reader at all. He might be curt and indifferent to her, but this was not what she made out from the hesitant, loping step. She would bet the farm on manners.
The country was beautiful now that August was almost over. The heavier growth was done with and the tall grasses that moved in the breeze had faded to a whitish gold, and the reed banks were a still paler gold, and the yellow flags of June had withered on the long stems but moved in their flayed tatters yet—she endured rather than enjoyed all this. She had declared herself a Romantic, and bare winter was her idyll. There was a chill from the river and fingers of mist crept from it and a dampness rose into her from the shaded ground she sat on beneath the tree.
She opened the book and set it on her thighs and tried to read about strangulated prostitutes in the desert, but the words swam madly. She was very nervous. He showed soon enough around the bend of the river and she drew him towards her along the line. She saw now as he came closer that he was in fact much older than her, maybe in his thirties, and she knew that he registered her.
“I’m ready,” she said, under her breath, and he stopped in his tracks and waved; he came still closer.
She saw at near range that he was good-looking enough, with a long and sharp-featured face that was pinched with kindness, and scruffy hair with some grey in its wires, and his eyelashes closed slowly now and opened again, a long exposure to inspect her.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hi.”
Their words were incongruous on the air. The moment of the riverbank here was seldom touched by human voices, but now it held clearly the riverman’s and the girl’s, and they both smiled at the fact of their intrusion on this place. There was only, as it got up again, the breeze among the grasses to distract them from each other, and they both looked out and across the moving grasses, as though casually, as though on the off chance of news. He turned back to her again with the knit bones of his smile. The smile was like something he had trapped, she thought.
“I think I’ve seen you before,” he said.
This was a revelation, and it needed to be answered inside the beat of a second. If he had seen her loitering in the fields, he might have seen the way that she watched him, too, and read her intention, and despite all that she had drilled into herself about not appearing eager she fixed her hair now with her fingertips, and even before th
e strand of hair was settled behind her ear she cursed silently the obviousness of the gesture. He got down on his haunches, laid a hand to his long, skinny knee, and smiled at her; she set the book to one side.
“I live over that way,” she said.
“Ah, yeah,” he said, and he twisted his face to read the name on the book’s cover.
“Roberto…”
“Bolaño,” she said.
“Any good?”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh. That’s gloomy.”
“No, it isn’t. I mean…the book isn’t.”
She had worried that the book might be a terrible idea, but here it was, doing its work, opening a pathway to conversation. She didn’t have any great desire for the man, but she liked his voice, and he wasn’t fat—he definitely didn’t sound as if he came from around here; he was English, but country English. He wanted the talk to continue—she could see that well enough.
“I had to burn half my books last year,” he said. “I had a very bad chest cold and I couldn’t get out and all my fuel was gone.”
Now she recognised the hesitancy of his walk for what it was, for poverty. He had the hunted look of rural poverty. His clothes were not good—army surplus, with ugly stout boots—but his limbs were long and lean and she was inclined to keep the conversation going; in just a week she would be eighteen.
“So cold you had to burn books?”
“Remember the cold snap, January? It was evil around here.”
“I’d have been away,” she said. “School.”
“School still?”
