Night as It Falls

by Jakuta Alikavazovic

  The officer overseeing the hotel’s requisition greeted her with a deep bow, his back ramrod-straight, and her mother rolled her eyes. Nothing annoyed her more than the refined elegance of war’s beginnings, before everything came undone and one finally saw the world for what it was: a realm of recklessness and unremitting cruelty. He also thought (maybe rightly) that she was annoyed at the hubbub of those young bodies splashing in the water. I’m going to empty the pool tonight, he said. The sea isn’t far off, after all. No, the sea isn’t far off, she repeated, her mind on someone else. He must have left right after the deer, which was not the plan at all. She looked for him on the drive to the airport, she looked for him in the terminal, she never said his name but I could see quite clearly that all she now saw was his absence.

  At the airport, all the phones were busy or maybe already disconnected. Amelia and Nadia were the only people on the flight back to France, and Amelia didn’t dare to turn around and face all those unoccupied seats. Nadia never saw this man again. Amelia never saw the children again. I never talked to them, the whole time there had been a balcony between us, a window; she was sure she would never forgive her mother, yet before long she found herself burdened with yet more resentments, bitterer ones.

  Upon their return, her father was so beside himself that he marshalled an army of lawyers, some formidable experts in their field and others doing their best to bend family law to their will, as if families could be handled like the entities her father’s company sold abroad. He locked Amelia in a room and wouldn’t even allow her pathetic mother to say goodbye. She had already decided to leave again; he assumed that she wanted to take me with her, and was taken aback that she didn’t so much as suggest it. She didn’t want anything from him, anything at all. That autumn, her mother plunged back into the war and Amelia was sent to a boarding school in the mountains, in Switzerland or thereabouts, amongst other young girls – one of those places where they played tennis, where they all sold their souls to the devil, but she was too young for the devil, for him to be interested in her or her in him. Later on, she decided that the photos of her at eleven, in a leotard, were compromising – so she destroyed them, unaware that she was, in her own way, helping to erase her biographical materials. It had never occurred to her that these might be finite, and she had acted like any organism unwittingly working towards its own disappearance. No other photos of herself as a child would ever come to light. She had taken part in this extinction; it would soon become difficult to convince others of her existence.

  She had few memories of this boarding school; the ones she retained mostly blurred into scenes from a notorious horror flick, although one of the least frightening parts. Her father had decided to send her away, and she didn’t think it was because he needed to get her out of his hair, but she wasn’t any more convinced that it was out of any kind of love. She never saw her mother again, she only stayed with her father for short stretches. She came to feel, at moments, like she was nobody’s daughter, even though she never stopped being their child. The very idea of family lost its solidity; it flickered off then on again, and at some point she stopped thinking about it at all. In any case – in Switzerland or thereabouts, at boarding school in a small school-uniform jacket – I came to understand that my father just couldn’t resist the idea of trying to hide or camouflage me – and as always Paul found himself wondering about the money, how much there had been, where it had come from, and where it was now. As for the school, Amelia believed that she had entered it willingly – and left it willingly as well. She had been expelled for some reason no one quite understood, something about her having had unwarranted male visitors – but, for crying out loud, her father said, she’s just eleven years old! By which he meant, of course, that she was too young to be interested in such devious activities. There was no use arguing, however; she had to say goodbye to her friends in the crisp mountain air and go home. She could still remember the excitement, verging on hysteria, she felt upon finding herself amongst other children, young girls like her. Other children at long last, other children everywhere. She had been like aspirin in a glass of water: reacting and fizzing and dissolving.

  She had made up a friend; that was why she had been expelled. An imaginary friend, nothing unusual there, who embodied everything she was homesick for. We can call him Paul, if you want, she said. Later, he wondered how many times she’d told this story, in bed, under the shower, how many times she had changed the name of this non-existent man to suit her or someone else’s fancy. The other Paul (the first Paul, thought Paul, this is unreal) had appeared in the train station, a young man older than her. The moving trains and her rising anxiety had conjured into being, so she believed, exactly the kind of companion she needed as a little girl travelling alone. He was strong and considerate; with him, every danger turned into a game. She had invented him, she thought, out of nothing, an imaginary friend like so many others, but they had become so attached to each other that, even after she was settled in at the school, he stayed. She saw him once or twice a day, no more, and ended up telling her new friends about this brown-haired Paul. She told them about his doings, skiing, shooting, and how he’d saved a tiny animal. They clustered around her, clamoured for more stories of this mythical man, all these girls around her, awestruck, all dressed identically, with pleated skirts, white blouses, knee-high socks (if my father came, she thought, foolishly, he wouldn’t know me from the others, he wouldn’t know which one to take with him: I’m safe here, she thought). To meet their demands, and satisfy their ravenous appetites, she started telling her tales in the present tense, and the humdrum lives of these rootless little girls took on a new shine. Copy down this geometry problem, Paul’s solved it. He was always right around the corner – he was there not a second ago, you’ve just missed him – he was a nice way to kill time; and then, one night, something odd happened. Milena walked into the dormitory wearing an oversized T-shirt, a souvenir of the Olympic Games that had taken place several winters earlier in the land where her mother had gone as a peace activist, a T-shirt that nearly came down to Milena’s knees like a dress, and blithely said that Paul had given it to her.

  For a long while, Amelia kissed Paul, the real one (or maybe, Paul thought, the substitute one), and then she continued: So they all started seeing him when I wasn’t there, they started to meet up with him behind my back, this tall brown-haired boy was made into their idea, they all adapted him to their needs. Miranda, the precocious one (at twelve years old she already seemed to be fifteen), kissed him while going round and round in the huge revolving door. Carlotta (twelve years old but terrified of men and bras) reported all this to the headmistress, who started investigating the rumours, discovering with horror that a young man had insinuated himself amongst her little girls, coming and going quite freely in spite of all the locks and bars and other safety precautions. Nonsense, said her father, glaring at her, you do know he’s completely made-up. But the headmistress, who was wary of the devil’s wiles and unnerved by the sway this Paul had over her charges, would brook no argument. Don’t you see that only makes matters worse, she said. And so Amelia had to say goodbye to her friends and come back to Paris. All that remained of that time was a school notebook with a geometry problem in it that had been solved in a handwriting that wasn’t hers – although the distance of all those years had made it clear, abundantly clear, that of course it was her own, its telling details knit deep within the less-awkward cursive that would be her handwriting as a grown-up, set down with an insistence, a speed she hadn’t had then, and this final paragraph had been like a triangular self-portrait that, she felt, was worth just as much as a photograph.

  After the fiasco in Switzerland or thereabouts, her father had sent her to the United States. She never did understand this drive to send her far away. She was welcomed to upstate New York by Albers, who drove a ’70 Ford Thunderbird with no regard whatsoever for safety recommendations – Albers was the sort for whom grace was meaningless without risk �
�� and took her to see Niagara Falls half-hidden in the snow. She no longer dressed like a man but her artfulness was still evident in her cuffs and lapels – there was a certain je-ne-sais-quoi in every outfit she wore. On the plane over, Amelia lied to the woman beside her about her last name, her first name, where she was headed and why. She would never see her mother again, her father had decided she was inconvenient, but of course she didn’t touch on any of that. The woman spent a night in the air beside a complete fiction.

  She missed her mother, she talked to her every so often on the phone, across great distances, or distances made all the greater by bad reception. The line broke up often – she didn’t remember their conversations so much as the interruptions that made them lose each other, drove them apart – a metallic clinking sound would drown out their voices, reverberating in the earpiece, like Morse code. My mother would crack a joke – why, hello there, my dear eavesdroppers! – but her voice hollowed out more and more each week, as if she was being drained away. The noises were as harsh as cleavers; they came from our devices, from the network, they made what had been abstract all of a sudden concrete: distance, electricity, the fact that all progress carries its own dysfunction.

  She had never believed that they were being listened to, any more than she had ever believed that her mother might have dabbled in espionage, but she often thought back to those noises that impeded their conversations, the darkness and abstraction creeping into their relationship, poltergeists summoned both by practically nothing and by everything across the miles upon miles of submarine cables that had been laid down.

  It was while living with Albers in America that she learned English, that she became a teenager, although from then on she’d always feel much younger than she was, as if the bone-chilling winter of upstate New York, with its unrelenting snow and its unfamiliar language, had halted her growth. Far off, the war, no doubt, would end. Albers told me about the snow, the phone lines, meeting my mother in Paris, the tear-gas canisters. She talked to me about architecture: we were driving to Buffalo while dreaming about houses that grew like living organisms. Even though I didn’t say it I was thinking about a place that might come into my life the way my imaginary friend did. To console me, Albers gave me science, art, the world – or, at least, its dominant language at the time, which was neutral and soothed me; and then a capacity not to be bound solely to here, to now, to oneself. Secret passageways in the depths, miles upon miles of submarine cables, forming the greater part of global communications – how could these immense distances, the crushing weight of the ocean, not be felt in some of our conversations? The cables could be damaged by earthquakes, by shark bites, we forget so easily what a mad adventure it is to communicate between one continent and another. They emerge on the coast or directly within secured buildings, all the humdrum backwash of our conversations, all these overlapping voices, and I think that above all Albers conjured these ideas to try to create or recreate relationships that didn’t seem to exist, or at least not any more. I shut my eyes and, through these oceanic depths, I followed the cables to what had been my parents’ living room, in what had been my home.

  The rest of the time I looked for girls my age who would become my friends, my confidantes in this new country. But in this area along the Canadian border, that winter – perennially harsh and interminable – girls disappeared, teenagers sublimated. One night they had been asleep in bed; the next morning, they were gone. Sometimes there was an open window. Snow fell into pink-and-white bedrooms, soaking the carpets – that was the first thing their mothers noticed – this fatal yet beautiful blurring between inside and outside. It was as if the girls themselves had turned into snow. Snow covered everything. Curfews were instituted, with little effect on my life with Albers, while in Rochester, in Buffalo, in all of upstate New York, girls were disappearing – an epidemic of kidnappings – but more likely they were runaways. Rarely were their personal belongings missing. They left with nothing but their coats.

  These were suburbs with borders lost in the snow, with streets that abruptly ended in a vast white expanse. No horizon, no depth; visibility stopped after thirty feet. Winter was a geographical region. The most ordinary landscapes sank into abstraction, entire towns ran the risk of being forgotten. The snow came up to their knees, then their thighs. Amelia wore legwarmers, fur boots; she’d never been so cold or friendless, but she’d never felt so safe as during those long, hazy months spent with Albers. The suburb’s other houses were shaken by a rumour that weakened their foundations and fissured their walls: talk that a man or several men were watching the girls sleeping. But Amelia was protected from that gossip by her loneliness and Albers’s common sense, even when she found herself thinking, My friend is here and he’s looking for me. In the schools, it was all anyone talked about, frantically, to the point of near-hysteria. The blonde girls down the street mentioned it, yes, a man, sometimes outside, sometimes inside – how he gets in, nobody knows – he’s there, he doesn’t do anything, he just watches you sleeping until, if we’re to believe it, you disappear.

  She waited, and waited, but the few times someone did come, it turned out to be a dream.

  They were found in the spring, all these girls who had fled. Often they turned up in Portland or Denver; those most afraid of the cold in California – teenagers now perfectly accustomed to perpetual sunshine, to living easy, to specific drugs. Others, however, hadn’t gone far, they’d walked at night in the snow to the end of their street then the edge of the suburb, and into this strange expanse where they had ended up falling down or falling asleep. They were found in the spring as well, small blonde creatures curled up in balls, as if an inner force had driven them there, as if there had been an imperative to forget themselves, to cast themselves out. The human race seemed so cruel in its demands, in insisting that an entire category erase itself: that year, several young American girls, perhaps too quiet but seemingly of sound mind and body, were forced out of themselves, out of this world by all this white. Everyone knew that these wintry lands could drive people mad, that nature abhors a vacuum and that this vacuum where vision became blindness was sometimes full of unspoken, dangerous ideas. Or maybe, Amelia thought, she had been the one to trigger this instinct to flee. Maybe, because she had finally stopped moving, some act of transference had made her the cause of their own flight. Or maybe they, too, were victims of some distant war in a land they might never have heard of. As vast as the world is, there’s still no escaping it.

  4

  Time passed. They loved each other. Paul wanted all of Amelia: her mind, her spirit, her body, its radiant warmth which he could feel inches away, and which, if he fixated on it, felt like immediate contact. Alone and together, apart and embracing became false binaries. She was always with him. He wanted to see what she saw, to know what she knew. At his insistence they went to museums, to those venues of a culture foreign to him and deeply familiar to her. As a guide, she was both wonderful and terrible; she knew the artworks on the walls like the back of her hand but she had no patience; she raced through the rooms without pausing to look, talking as she charged ahead. As they hurtled past so many masterpieces, Paul wondered what made them masterpieces – it wasn’t obvious, he wasn’t sure he saw or understood what gave them that particular quality – while Amelia was obsessed with talking about paintings that weren’t there, missing images. He wanted to understand, to learn how to look at Cézanne’s paintings, for example, and she talked to him about the Mont Sainte-Victoire done by an American who had decided to reproduce the master’s paintings freehand, in charcoal, from memory, in thirty seconds, with his eyes shut tight. An act of regression, of sorts, a return to blindness, a way of showing how art could be inscribed in one’s memory – always imperfectly, a child’s fumbling, a barbarian’s muddling. So that Paul, in front of this:

  was supposed to see this:

  She walked with him, rolling her eyes – she was unconvinced and made a show of it. Why are you wasting your time with the
se relics? You’re worth so much more than this, she told him, you’ve got a positively feral intelligence, you’re the only panther I know – and I’m lucky enough to have you in my bed, she whispered right into his mouth, biting his lips gently, I’d give everything in the world to be like you, I’d give it all to be you. Paul, on the other hand, knew that unlearning something was nothing like never having been aware of it in the first place. His own ignorance bewildered him. Deep down, he was experiencing his first love as keen suffering; he mourned everything he had never known about, everything he could not have known was missing from his life – a nostalgia that Amelia would never comprehend. She kept going, the two of them still wholly unaware at twenty years old that the derailments defining her life were not merely a series of ruptures but, in fact, her fate; or rather that these fracturings themselves traced an inexorable, straight line that would be her ruin, her downfall; they would drive her, much later, to meet the ground five storeys beneath her.