Black Dogs

by Ian Mcewan

  ‘At one point I left June standing with our luggage and wandered the length of the platform – you know how one does when time drags – right along to where it ended. The place was a mess. I think a barrel of tar or paint had been spilled. The paving stones had been dislodged and weeds had pushed up and dried out in the heat. At the back, away from the tracks, was a clump of arbutus which had managed somehow to flourish rather well. I was admiring it when I saw a movement on a leaf. I went closer and there it was, a dragonfly, a ruddy darter, Sympetrum sanguineum, a male, you know, brilliant red. They’re not exactly rare but it was unusually large, a beauty.

  ‘Amazingly, I trapped it in my cupped hands, then I ran back along the platform to where June was and got her to take it in her hands while I dug into my bag for my travelling kit. I opened it and took out the killing bottle and asked June to bring the creature over to me. She still had her hands cupped, like this, but she was looking at me with an odd expression, a kind of horror. She said, “What are you going to do?” And I said, “I want to take it home.” She didn’t come closer. She said, “You mean you’re going to kill it.” “Of course I am,” I said. “It’s a beauty.” She went cold and logical at this point. “It’s beautiful therefore you want to kill it.” Now June, as you know, grew up near the countryside and never showed much compunction about killing mice, rats, cockroaches, wasps – anything that got in her way really. It was jolly hot and this was not the moment to start an ethical discussion about the rights of insects. So I said, “June, do just bring it over here.” Perhaps I spoke too roughly. She took half a step away from me, and I could see she was on the point of setting it free. I said, “June, you know how much it means to me. If you let it go I’ll never forgive you.” She was struggling with herself. I repeated what I had said, and then she came towards me, extremely sullen, transferred the dragonfly to my hands, and watched me put it in the killing bottle and store it away. She was silent as I put my stuff back in the case, and then, perhaps because she was blaming herself for not setting it free, she flew into an almighty rage.’

  The drinks trolley was making a second run and Bernard faltered as he decided against ordering a second champagne.

  ‘Like the best of rows, it moved rapidly from the particular to the general. My attitude to this poor creature was typical of my attitude to most other things, including herself. I was cold, theoretical, arrogant. I never showed any emotion, and I prevented her from showing it. She felt watched, analysed, she felt she was part of my insect collection. All I was interested in was abstraction. I claimed to love “creation”, as she called it, but in fact I wanted to control it, choke the life out of it, label it, arrange it in rows. And my politics were another case in point. It wasn’t injustice that bothered me so much as untidiness. It wasn’t the brotherhood of man that appealed to me so much as the efficient organisation of man. What I wanted was a society as neat as a barracks, justified by scientific theories. We were standing there in this ferocious sunlight and she was shouting at me, “You don’t even like working-class people! You never speak to them. You don’t know what they’re like. You loathe them. You just want them arranged in neat rows like your bloody insects!”’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Not a great deal at first. You know how I hate scenes. I kept thinking, I’ve married this lovely girl and she hates me. What a terrible mistake! And then, because I had to say something, I mounted a defence of my hobby. Most people, I told her, instinctively disliked the insect world and entomologists were the ones to take notice of it, study its ways and life-cycles and generally care about it. Naming insects, classifying them into groups and sub-groups was an important part of all that. If you learned to name a part of the world, you learned to love it. Killing a few insects was irrelevant against this larger fact. Insect populations were enormous, even in a rare species. They were genetically clones of each other so it didn’t make sense to talk of individuals, still less of their rights. “There you go again,” she said, “You’re not talking to me at all. You’re giving a lecture.” That was when I began to get stirred up. As for my politics, I went on, yes, I liked ideas and what was the harm in that. It was for other people to agree or disagree and disprove them. And it was true, I felt awkward with working-class people, but that didn’t mean I loathed them. That was absurd. I’d quite understand it if they felt awkward with me. As for my feelings towards her, yes, I wasn’t awfully emotional, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have emotions. It was simply the way I was brought up and if she wanted to know, I loved her more than I’d ever be able to say and that was that, and if I didn’t tell her often enough, well I was sorry for that, but in future I jolly well would, every day if necessary.

  ‘And then an extraordinary thing happened. Actually, two things happened at once. As I was saying all this, our train pulled in with a great clatter and an awful lot of smoke and steam, and just as it came to a stop June burst into tears and threw her arms around me and broke the news that she was pregnant and that holding a little insect in her hands made her feel responsible not only for the life that was growing inside her, but for all life, and that letting me kill that beautiful dragonfly was an awful mistake and she was sure that nature would take its revenge and something terrible was going to happen to the baby. The train pulled out and we were still on the platform with our arms round each other. I had half a mind to dance up and down the platform with joy, but like an idiot, I was trying to explain Darwin to June and comfort her by saying that there simply was no place in the scheme of things for the kind of revenge she was talking about, and that nothing would happen to our baby ...’

  ‘Jenny.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Jenny.’

  Bernard pressed the call button above his head and told the steward that he had changed his mind and we would have the champagne after all. When it came we raised our glasses, it seemed, to the impending birth of my wife.

  ‘After this news we couldn’t bear to wait for another train so we walked into the town – hardly more than a large village really and I wish I could remember its name – and we found the only hotel, and took a huge creaky room on the first floor with a balcony overlooking a small square. Perfect place, and we always meant to go back. June knew the name of it, and I’ll never get it now. We stayed there two days, celebrated the baby, took stock of our lives, laid our plans like any young married couple. It was a wonderful reconciliation – and we barely stirred from the room.

  ‘But there was an evening when June had fallen asleep early and I was restless. I went for a stroll round the square, had a couple of drinks in a café. You know how it is when you’ve been with someone so intensely for hours on end, and then you’re on your own again. It’s as if you’ve been in a dream. You come to yourself. I sat outside this bar, watched them playing boules. It was an awfully hot evening, and for the first time I had the chance to think over some of the things June had said at the station. I tried hard to imagine what it would be like to believe, really to believe, that nature could take revenge on a foetus for the death of an insect. She’d been deadly serious about it, to the point of tears. And honestly I couldn’t. It was magical thinking, completely alien to me ...’

  ‘But Bernard, don’t you ever have that feeling, when you’re tempting fate? Don’t you ever touch wood?’

  ‘That’s just a game, a manner of speaking. We know it’s superstition. This belief that life really does have rewards and punishments, that underneath it all there’s a deeper pattern of meaning beyond what we give it ourselves – that’s all so much consoling magic. Only ...’

  ‘Biographers?’

  ‘I was going to say women. Perhaps all I’m saying is that sitting there with my drink in that hot little square I was beginning to understand something about women and men.’

  I wondered what my sensible, efficient wife Jenny would have made of this.

  Bernard had finished his champagne and was eyeing the untouched inch or two in my bottle. I gave it to him as he said,
‘Let’s face it, the physical differences are just the, just the ...’

  ‘Tip of the iceberg?’

  He smiled. ‘Thin end of a giant wedge. Anyway, I sat there and had another drink, or two. And then, I know it’s foolish to give too much weight to what people say to you in anger, but all the same, I brooded on what she had said about my politics, perhaps because there was an element of truth in it, for all of us, and she had said similar things before. I remember thinking, she won’t stick in the Party long. She’s got her own ideas and they’re strong and strange.

  ‘All this came back to me this afternoon when I ran away from that cabbie. If it had been June, the June of 1945, not the June who gave up on politics altogether, she would have spent a happy half-hour talking European politics with that fellow, putting him on to the right literature, getting his name for the mailing list, and, who knows, signing him up. She would have been prepared to miss her plane.’

  We lifted our bottles and glasses to make way for the lunch-trays.

  ‘Anyway, there it is, for what it’s worth, another item for the life and times. She was a better communist than me. But in that outburst of hers at the station you could see a long way ahead. You could see her disaffection with the Party coming, and you could see the beginnings of the hocus-pocus that filled her life from then on. It certainly wasn’t a sudden matter of one morning down the Gorge de Vis, whatever she liked to say.’

  It hurt to hear my own scepticism thrown back at me. As I buttered my frozen roll I felt drawn to make mischief on June’s behalf. ‘But Bernard, what about the insect’s revenge?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Jenny’s sixth finger!’

  ‘Dear boy, what are we going to drink with our lunch?’

  We went first to Günter’s apartment in Kreuzberg. I left Bernard waiting in a taxi while I carried our bags across the courtyard and took them up to the fourth-floor landing of the Hinterhaus. The neighbour across the way who was keeping the key for me spoke a little English and knew we were here for the Wall.

  ‘No good,’ she insisted. ‘Too many people here. In the shop, no milk, no bread, no fruit. In the U-Bahn also. Too many!’

  Bernard told the driver to take us to the Brandenburg Gate, but this turned out to be a mistake and I began to see what Günter’s neighbour meant. There were too many people, too much traffic. The usually busy roads were carrying an extra burden of fuming Wartburgs and Trabants out on their first night of sight-seeing. The pavements were crammed. Everyone, East and West Berliners as well as outsiders, was a tourist now. Bands of West Berlin teenagers with beer-cans and bottles of sekt passed our trapped car chanting football songs. In the darkness of the rear seat I began to feel a vague regret that I was not already in the bergerie, high above St Privat, preparing the house for winter. Even at this time of year you might still hear the cicadas on a mild evening. Then, remembering Bernard’s story on the plane, I deflected my regret with the resolve to get from him what I could while we were here and revive the memoir.

  We gave up on the taxi and walked in. It was twenty minutes to the Victory Monument, and from there, stretching ahead of us, was the broad June 17 approach to the Gate. Someone had tied a piece of cardboard over the street sign and painted ‘November 9th’. Hundreds of people were moving in the same direction. A quarter of a mile away the Brandenburg Gate stood illuminated, looking rather too small, too squat for its global importance. At its base, the darkness appeared to intensify in a wide band. Only when we reached it would we discover that mis was the gathering crowd. Bernard seemed to be hanging back. He held his hands behind his back and leaned forwards into an imaginary wind. Everyone was overtaking us.

  ‘When were you last here Bernard?’

  ‘Do you know I’ve never actually walked along here. Berlin? There was a conference on the Wall on its fifth anniversary in sixty-six. Before that, my God! Nineteen fifty-three. We were an unofficial delegation of British communists who came to protest – no, that’s too strong – express express reverent concern to the East German party about the way they put down the Uprising. There was hell to pay from some of the comrades when we got home.’

  Two girls in black leather jackets, skin-tight jeans and silver-studded cowboy-boots brushed by us. They had linked arms and were not defiant of the glances they were attracting so much as oblivious to them. Their hair was dyed black. The identical pony-tails that swung behind them completed a passing reference to the fifties. But not, I imagined, Bernard’s fifties. He was watching them go, frowning slightly. He stooped to murmur confidentially into my ear. It was hardly necessary for there was no one near us, and all around were the sounds of voices and footsteps.

  ‘Ever since she died, I’ve found myself looking at young girls. Of course, it’s pathetic at my age. But it’s not their bodies I stare at so much as their faces. I’m looking for a trace of her. It’s become a habit. I’m always searching for a gesture, an expression, something about the eyes or the hair, anything that will keep her alive for me. It’s not the June you knew that I’m looking for, otherwise I’d be scaring the wits out of old ladies. It’s the girl I married ...’

  June in the framed photograph. Bernard rested his hand on my arm.

  ‘There’s something else. In the first six months, I couldn’t put the idea out of my mind that she would try to communicate with me. Apparently it’s a very common thing. Grief breeds superstition.’

  ‘Hardly in your scientific scheme.’ I regretted the harsh levity of this remark, but Bernard nodded.

  ‘Exactly so, and as soon as I felt stronger I came to my senses. But for a while I couldn’t stop thinking that if the world by some impossible chance really was as she made it out to be, then she was bound to try and get in touch to tell me that I was wrong and she was right – that there was a God, eternal life, a place where consciousness went. All that guff. And that she would do it somehow through a girl who looked like her. And one day one of these girls would come to me with a message.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now it’s a habit. I look at a girl and judge her by how much June there is in her. Those girls who passed us just now ...’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The one on the left. Didn’t you see? She’s got June’s mouth and something of her cheekbones.’

  ‘I didn’t see her face.’

  Bernard tightened his grip on my arm. ‘I have to ask you this because it’s on my mind. I’ve been wanting to ask for a long time. Did she talk in a very personal way – about me and her?’

  The awkward memory of the ‘size’ Bernard ‘took’ made me fumble. ‘Of course. You were very much on her mind.’

  ‘But what kind of thing?’

  By withholding one set of embarrassing details I felt I owed another. ‘Well, er, she told me about the first time you ... about your first time.’

  ‘Ah.’ Bernard withdrew his hand and put it in his pocket. We walked in silence while he considered this. Ahead we could see that parked in a ragged file down the middle of June 17 was an array of media vehicles, mobile control rooms, satellite dishes, hoisting cranes, and generator trucks. Under the trees of the Tiergarten, German workmen were unloading a matching set of dark green portable lavatories. Little muscles flinched along the line of Bernard’s enormous jaw. His voice was distant. He was about to become angry.

  ‘And this is the sort of thing you’re going to be writing about?’

  ‘Well I haven’t even begun to ...’

  ‘Does it occur to you to consider my feelings in this?’

  ‘I was always going to show you whatever I wrote. You know that.’

  ‘For God’s sake! What was she thinking of, telling you that sort of thing?’

  We had drawn level with the first of the satellite dishes. From out of the darkness empty styrofoam coffee cups rolled towards us, propelled by a breeze. Bernard crunched one underfoot. From the crowd gathered before the Gate, still over a hundred yards ahead, there came a round of clapping. It was
of the foolish, well-meaning kind you might hear from a concert audience when the grand piano is lifted on to the stage.

  ‘Listen Bernard, what she told me was no more intimate than your story of your row at the station. If you want to know, its main feature was what a bold step it was for a young girl in those days, proving just how attracted to you she was. And in fact, you come out of it rather well. It seemed you were, well, extremely good at that sort of thing – genius was the word she used. She told me how you leaped across the room and opened a window during a storm and made tarzan noises and thousands of leaves blew in ...’

  Bernard had to shout above the roar of a diesel generator. ‘Good Lord! That wasn’t then! That was two years later. That was in Italy, when we were living above old man Massimo and his scraggy wife. They wouldn’t have any noise in the house. We used to do it outside, in the fields, anywhere we could find. Then one night there’s this tremendous storm blowing up, forced us indoors, so noisy they didn’t hear us anyway.’

  ‘Well,’ I started to say. Bernard’s anger had removed itself to June.

  ‘What was she doing, making that up? Cooking the books, that’s what! Our first time was a disaster, a complete bloody disaster. She’s rewritten it for the official version. It’s the airbrush all over again.’

  ‘If you want to put the record straight ...’

  Bernard gave me a quick look of focused contempt and moved further away as he said,

  ‘It isn’t my idea of a memoir, writing up someone’s sex life as if it were a damned spectator event. Is this what you think life comes down to in the end? Banging away? Sexual triumphs and failures? All good for a laugh?’

  We were passing a television truck. I had a glimpse inside of a dozen or so monitors each showing the same image of a reporter frowning at the notes in one hand, while in the other an absently held microphone dangled over its loop of cable. From the crowd came a loud sigh, a long surging moan of disapproval which began to gather in volume to a roar.