Night as It Falls

by Jakuta Alikavazovic

  There was a language of gestures, of reflexes that she didn’t have, that didn’t flow from her heart to her brain, much less from her brain to her hands. When the baby cried it was Paul who got up, Paul who slept on the floor, beside the cradle, who set the small body on his, who deep within his sleep protected it. He tried, even so. He tried in every way possible to make her a mother; he left her with the baby one day, without any warning, to force her to care, to love. Came back a few hours later to find Amelia and the little one in an armchair, under a lamp, the baby half-asleep, bobbing, its head heavy with heavy thoughts, with wordless images or no images at all. Its eyes were shut, almost shut, a thin white crescent appeared between its lashes; the pupils tucked under the lids; and Paul knew that his daughter sometimes slept like this, her eyes not entirely closed, but he still felt a pang in his heart, a small shock, because she looked like she had fainted. Amelia, holding the child in her lap, studied her face, her head, as though it were an object. Her fingers, her delicate hands which Paul knew well and which knew Paul well, were, Paul suddenly thought, probing the tiny forehead, the tiny skull like a stone. He inched forward like an animal, the way one might draw close to a potentially dangerous rival, made more noise than he would have liked, and asked in a low voice if all was well.

  Amelia looked up at him – she seemed absent, or annoyed. Look, she said, in an equally low voice, so as not to wake up the child, or something else, or both; I think it’s all fine but come look anyway. Paul leaned over the small sleeping head, its bluish temples, the blood present underneath. He sometimes swore he could hear it as if it were his own blood, his own pulse. I’m sure it’s nothing, said Amelia, but she couldn’t disguise a tension or a worry in her throat, a purely physical phenomenon. Well, I don’t know, look – I thought, for a second, I thought she was a little – that she was red-haired.

  Paul gave up after that. He took care of his daughter, and otherwise lived a solitary life, contained within a few stolen minutes here and there. One day Amelia saw him on the street with a woman who she thought at first was her. But if I’m over there, in Paul’s arms, under Paul’s kisses – if I’m over there, then where am I? The question defeated her. She agreed to everything. She took medicines that made her face and her wrists swell up, that numbed her, dulled her hair. She went to the hospital. The electricity that illuminated the city, that warmed homes and the baby’s milk, fuelled the night light that bathed her bedroom in pastel tones of green, blue, pink – this same electricity ran through Amelia’s temples to instil the light and warmth she lacked. That was what she told herself, even though she knew, deep down, that it was torture. Nothing more. Nothing less. That the night in her head was the only place where she could still be safe, and that it was being cleared away by force. She ground her teeth. She didn’t mean to, but she did.

  She got better, and when that happened, Amelia sat Paul down and told him that he was right. That it wasn’t working. Some life had passed through her. She had done her best, it was the best she could do, and now she was going to leave, because she couldn’t be a cuckolded woman and the coldhearted mother that she was, a woman who watched the man she loved with other women, who watched the face of her only daughter like a river pebble that would only reveal something in its grain if she looked hard enough, searching for a vague resemblance to something she’d once known and loved. It’s better if I leave now – because I know what it’s like to have known and lost one’s mother.

  Paul looked at her. He’s looking at me like he’s going to kill me, Amelia thought. Like he’s going to pull a knife out of his pocket and kill me. A knife that wasn’t there until I said my piece, a blade that my words brought into being, resting against the heat of his body. Is that how his mother died? He’s never told me. I wonder if he even knows, Amelia thought. Did the evil she saw everywhere exist in the world, or only in her eyes? This question was at the heart of her insanity. Paul looked at her, and didn’t say anything. He’s going to grab my hair and drag me into that secret room he had built, Amelia thought, that soundproofed vault impervious to everything, maybe even the end of the world. Maybe even the end of us. He’s going to throw me in there and never open it again. Yes, it’s like I’m already in there, she thought. That’s where I’m going to spend the rest of my life. Banging. Screaming. And nobody will hear me. My daughter will grow up without knowing her mother is there, a few feet away. In the darkness. Forever.

  Paul just looked at her.

  2

  What was left of Amelia? Nothing, apparently. Nothing, or very little. Paul ground his teeth. He didn’t mean to, but he ground his teeth. He would have to talk about her to his daughter, he thought; what he would, or what he could say, he turned over and over in his mind – but what about the rest? What really mattered? His own art, his own crimes – his memories? What should I do, he wondered, with everything I don’t have the words to say? And so he kept silent. At the beginning, as if unintentionally. And he took what Amelia herself had warned him about many times – the lesson of the expunged Soviet astronauts, the lesson of the effaced traces of Sarajevan conflicts, and he applied it. He applied it to Amelia herself, to the woman he had loved and still did, whose daughter he was raising. That in death as in life thy body may be, and during sleepless nights he completed the line of poetry she had recited, the only one that wasn’t Nadia Dehr’s. That in death as in life thy body may be roses, be roses and streets and neighbourhoods, be the city I live in, that oppresses and poisons me. Be all the cities, all the poisons. Be all the nights. Try not to think about it, he said to himself. But the past wouldn’t let itself be forgotten, war wouldn’t let itself be forgotten. The two crept in – how is that possible? You shut your eyes for just a second, or so you think, and she’s already there. Her scent. Her pulse. There.

  He wouldn’t believe in ghosts. He had decided that from the beginning. They had decided together. They wouldn’t believe in ghosts. They would believe in love, in words, in numbness, and in silence, but in nothing else. In nothing that could whisper in their ears. In nothing that could walk through walls. He put everything that remained in a box and sealed it shut. This visible absence, with its clear-cut lines, its evident volume, was the shape he intended to give the future.

  Of course, you can’t shape the future.

  *

  He tried to be a good father and, the world being the way it was – in spite of what it was – he must have been one. Louise’s first encounter with death was that of her parakeet, a yellow and green thing that had hopped in place for several months, stoically, with an indifferent, glazed, perhaps afflicted eye, in a cage shaped like a Japanese pavilion; the bird saved from its decorative role by the unalloyed, childlike love Louise bore for it as a pet. A living being smaller than her, and yellow, and green – Louise loved it. She wasn’t afraid of anything, not its beak, not its claws, not even of the dark, nor of big dogs she clung to excitedly, with Paul, paralysed, shutting his eyes, sure of the worst. But nothing happened, Louise always ran back to him, he squeezed her small hand, swore to himself that he would never let it happen again. At first the cage seemed empty to her – she was too small to see what was inside, it seemed like a delightful mystery to her: shut cage – no bird. It had the promise of a riddle. But the small, lifeless body hadn’t escaped Paul’s notice, and he felt an urge to come up with something, a pretext, to explain away its disappearance, so that they would never have to talk about it. Louise wasn’t old enough for that, he thought, which was absurd: is a fish ever not old enough for the water it swims in? Is one ever not old enough for the reality one lives in? So he didn’t do anything; he let her approach it, stand on her tiptoes, look at the little bird lying there, What’s wrong with it, Daddy, and he waited for her to take it in her hand, to feel with her fingertips the lack of life in the feathers, the body that she could now squeeze in her hand, feeling the air leaving not the inside, the organs, but the space between each feather, discovering that in fact there was an animal there much s
maller and much more fragile than she could have thought – more nothing than anything. And yet, a life that no longer was.

  Louise had seemed somewhat sad, but only, oddly enough, because her father seemed to expect her to be. She had whispered into the dead bird, as if she were trying, with her own breath, to fill the feathers again.

  He had to ask, a bit insistently, very gently, for her to open her hands.

  *

  He tried to be a good father and suspected he wasn’t. He didn’t know what to do, he learned everything on the fly; he was overwhelmed, out of his depth, at his wits’ end. Like every other young parent. He went to great pains. Lived haunted by his own betrayals. He tried to buck his usual assumptions when he might perhaps have done better to buck all prevailing trends. But nothing doing. He couldn’t. Not him. Paul was, he thought, as he watched his daughter sleep, utterly compromised. He’d climbed up and up the social ladder; his ambition had driven him to reinvent himself again and again. He’d been unaware; he’d erased his identity; he’d erased his very origins. The one thing about himself he could feel certain of, now that he was as inconstant and changeable and fluid as water, was his love for Louise. He wanted to protect her, protect her from everything, from the world now ending and the one now beginning. But it wasn’t enough to protect her; he would have to prepare her. Prepare her – but for what?

  He missed Amelia.

  *

  He taught her how to swim. How to run. She had the same taste for effort that he did, the same seemingly indefatigable heart. They were good friends. They explored Paris through its swimming pools. On Sunday nights the father and his little girl slept in hotels. Never the same one. Louise loved the velvet benches, the strange lamps, the paintings or murals, the stairways they got lost in, the elevators that stopped at various floors, the room-service menus with which she learned how to read. On Mondays he dropped her off at school, her head still filled with their adventures. He was charmed by his daughter and his daughter was charmed by him. I’m not bringing her up to be my wife, he thought one day, and the strangeness, the obscenity of that line made him ashamed – where did it come from, this idea he’d immediately pushed away. It’s not enough to entertain her, though, he thought. No. It’s necessary to prepare her. But for what? He could have confided in Amelia, but not in anyone else. He would have liked for his daughter, his only daughter, who was growing taller and getting older, his daughter with a strong heart and a stubborn spirit – he would have liked, deep down, for his daughter to be able to kill a man with her bare hands. Only then would he feel like he’d come up to scratch, not before. When she no longer needed him. For now, she was four, eight, ten years old. Long lashes, dark curls. She resembled him. He was proud of it, and worried, because he thought first and foremost about Louise’s safety and would have been more reassured if she looked nothing like him. He increasingly came to understand his own father, his determination to erase everything. His name, his language, his very self. He’d chosen to call his son Paul, chosen to live so that he could go unnoticed. All that, to feel safe. To blend into the background. Camouflage, really, Paul thought. Which meant committing unimaginable, private violence against himself.

  Like his left hand was breaking his right.

  *

  In his later years, the grandfather turned to birds. He set a birdcage up by a small window and it was the prettiest and saddest thing to see, those darlings in captivity. Yellow ones, green ones. Blue ones. We’ll set them free one day, won’t we, Louise, said the grandfather, and Louise in her little dress nodded, wisely and patiently. Her feet in her little slippers didn’t reach the floor but swung in agreement. We’ll set them free when they’re ready, Louise said, looking lovingly at those sweeties, those treasures with distraught hearts that fit in her hand, and Paul knew that the birdcage was meant to console the child about something she had perhaps forgotten, that she didn’t talk about any more, the First Death. And also, simply, to lure the wealthy son and the beloved granddaughter here, to this small apartment, the smallest and tidiest and saddest apartment that ever was, that the grandfather, who she called Gramps, refused to leave. Insisted that he never wanted to leave. Dad, that’s stupid, you spend days on end at our place, leave this apartment, Paul said. But his father pretended not to understand, not to hear, a comical look of confusion on his face. Louise laughed. There was nothing more delightful or fleeting than Louise’s laugh. Paul said it again, Come on, Dad, it’s stupid, come live with us, there’s all the space you could need – us being Paul and Louise, and, he soon learned, the neighbours’ cat, whose real name they didn’t know and whom they called, because of its beautiful feathery tail, Plume-Cat. Whenever the neighbours opened their window to let Plume-Cat out – to wander and live its secret, nocturnal, feline life on the roofs and terraces and gardens out of sight and reach – the cat simply went next door, to Louise, who cuddled it until her eyes were red and puffy. The catnapping was re-enacted each night, and the allergic child, whose Plume-loving lungs wheezed, couldn’t handle her passion any more, and more than once Paul was struck by the thin red veins on the oh-so-white white of her eye before setting the animal outside as ashamedly as if he had been caught in flagrante. Louise cried, begging for Plume-Cat in between sneezes, and Paul, trying to console her about the reality of things, about cats and the night, lay on the floor beside the small bed, and both father and daughter shut their eyes as he told her about how the animal roamed over the roofs and terraces and gardens out of sight and reach, and how the cat’s paws padded almost inaudibly on the zinc roofs; shadows – shadows that flowed where nobody imagined they could fit; the city that was immense and asleep or the city that Louise imagined was sprawled and stretched out in sleep, like a cat itself.

  This is how I should talk to her about her mother, Paul thought, but the moment he thought that, they were both asleep, she deeply, he half so.

  The birds are just a ruse, Paul thought. My father is well aware that she’s a little rich girl, a little girl who’s nothing like him. But he was wrong. About his father and about his daughter. The two stubbornly refused to be who he thought they were or who he wanted them to be. In this mystery was their identity. In this resistance.

  *

  He wondered what to say, and how to do so, and time passed. He didn’t imagine, couldn’t imagine, that what he kept silent about had a life of its own. He didn’t imagine, and by not doing so gave rise to something unintended nonetheless. Amelia had told him, though: you can be contaminated by what you know, but also by what you don’t know. Silence is an organism. It’s alive and it seeps in. But Paul didn’t appreciate it, not yet, he would have to step back in order to see it fully; and he, with his own story, his own ignorance, was unnerved first and foremost by language.

  One day he heard an incomprehensible babble coming from his daughter’s bedroom. He barely paid attention to it – she was only five, and at the age of making up imaginary words and imaginary friends. He did as he usually did – a single father and a business owner – and opened a bottle of beer and the mail, and noticed, smiling, that Louise seemed to be chattering endlessly in her secret language, when she normally expressed herself with less volubility, weighing up her words with some degree of hesitancy, as one might count foreign coins. He kept on doing as he was doing, lulled by his daughter’s chirping, until the moment when his paternal, animalistic brain, the one that only thought about danger, the one that was buried within his skull like a strongroom in a wall, heard an answer. An answer just as incomprehensible and long, but an answer in a deep, low voice that he didn’t recognise and that made his hair stand on end. He rushed into Louise’s bedroom, his heart pounding – and found the little girl in conversation with his father, his own father, in a very clean, frayed, impeccably ironed shirt, in very clean, frayed, impeccably ironed trousers, and they broke off and looked at him, with round eyes, polite, innocent eyes, waiting patiently for him to explain his sudden interruption. What are you doing? Paul asked, and Louise
shrugged and said, in the humorously learned tone she sometimes took, Daddy, we’re talking, as if he didn’t understand a single thing, as if he were the child and she, at five years old, the adult. And they smiled at him, but they didn’t say anything further, and he backed out apologetically. Soon he heard them again. This time they were whispering.

  The language of birds, he thought idiotically, they’re talking in the language of birds. But that wasn’t it. They were talking in the father’s language, from the land the father had left and spoken of so rarely to Paul, whom he had given that name and who had grown up feeling as if he had been set there, in an urban disaster, in an urban jungle, as unsteady as though he were on water.

  Does it bother you, the father had cautiously asked him later, once Louise was asleep, her mouth open, her sights set inward, towards a world that belonged to her alone, the same way the roofs belonged to Plume-Cat, and the nights to Amelia.

  Not at all, said Paul, not at all.

  A pause.

  But you never spoke to me. Never taught me anything.

  The father finished emptying the dishwasher. He was pensive, measured, and the dishes clinking against each other barely made any noise.

  It’s different, now. Louise is safe, he said, with an unthinking gesture (but did his father gesture unthinkingly? Paul didn’t think so) towards the walls, the floorboards, the high ceilings, the view of the sky and the Seine, the unsuspected strongroom between the walls, and maybe all the strongrooms of the city, unsuspected between walls.

  *

  Paul, on the other hand, felt that danger was everywhere. Everywhere. He talked about it sometimes with his mistresses, even met with them to talk about it, and once he’d run through all his worries or once they were turned on enough, they stopped talking and got into bed. If not for his father and Albers, he wouldn’t have made it, he said. He had found an apartment for Albers not far away, a carbon copy of his own, not out of generosity or an overfull heart but because it assuaged something dark and fearful within him to be able to imagine Louise in the same exact setting on the nights when she wasn’t with him. He knew, down to the nearest second, the time she had dinner, the time she took her apple-scented bubble bath; and being able to envision her so precisely freed him and allowed him to go about his business, whatever it might be, as a bachelor and as a predator of sorts.