Archive for category: Chapters

I have to go farther each time to find a coffeehouse I don’t know. This morning I’ve crossed the river beyond the Great Wheel. There’s a basement on the wrong side of the Dream City’s river, rhum by night, coffee by morning, one more of those, but I’ve never been in this one, with a bar, no tables, and a bench along the wall under a vaulted window so that when I look behind me I see marching legs and when I look forward I hear them. This time of day in this quarter everyone is going to work, so I hear work boots, clunking muddy ones or whispering leather ones. Ragged cuffs, stained leather aprons, woollen skirts. There’s no snow on the pavements, but wait an hour, with that sky the wind will be carrying it, but not the clouds, to the city from the places these people were born. Everyone is moving, which tells me a lot, but it’s when they stop I take out a drawing tablet. I wait for people to stop and then pour their movement back into them.

After Emma sewed my head this morning, I hoisted the circus trunk onto my back and walked it into the studio – a flight of steps, an exposed catwalk across the roof, another flight to what was a glasshouse. I blinked at the light and counted the corners and stared through the four banks of windows. Day was breaking slowly from under a dense blue night, but I will always notice the light here, every moment, even when it’s only stars. Downstairs, I saw she’d arranged herself a display of competence. She’d pulled a soft chair from the parlour to the kitchen table and built two stacks of unanswered mail there and there, bills to one corner, draughts and letters to the other, a pen and a pot of ink at her right elbow that she would move over to the left when I was gone, and on the placemat in front of her a pair of little oval spectacles she would plant near the end of her nose once I left. Yes, mistress, three plus three is six. Her hair is almost under control, in a chignon with strands down the nape of her neck that I begin to stroke one by one. Johnny’s in a blanket-lined box on a chair beside her own, practising mouth sounds. Somehow she lifted him there without my help. He already says ooh and aah as if we really need to know, as if he’s summed up everything with every breath. She doesn’t look but I can tell she’s listening.

I don’t have to ask her what she’s telling herself, the same as she knows what I would tell her: it’s too late for me to start in the studio, though I’ll unpack and arrange my canvases and kit in the afternoon. I can make a drawing morning out there, but nothing worthwhile would happen if I started in the studio here. Unless I’m staring at a canvas with my morning tea, it’s a drawing day. And I haven’t seen the city for six weeks.

Now, in this basement hole, my head is in pain from the sharp echo of voices under the low ceiling, though I don’t feel the sutures she made. I’m drinking a brown one and watching everyone going to work, but I’m thinking about her, and about Johnny – whether they’re safe and what they’re doing together. I’m not used to wondering like that; I’m still learning how to talk to myself about my son. I’m meant to love and protect him, okay, but that’s easy – it’s overwhelming – and there must be thousands of things behind those two that I haven’t imagined yet. It’s going to be years before the little guy can take care of himself. On my own, I’ll always be okay, and Emma would manage in her own way, but when you take love out of the equation and think just about what he needs most, he’s someone I’m going to have to learn and wonder about every minute of the rest of my life. While I look at all the people around me, I wonder what they’ll want with him and what I’ll need to tell him about them. What way will this city want to have with him? It’s a question, and I’m no good at those.

I didn’t baptize him. The doctors told me after they pronounced Emma that if I was going to do it, better now. You don’t need a priest to make the sign for you. If the moment is necessary you can use any water as long as you say the right words, which are simple. But they took him away before I could, the first time I looked away. Then Emma opened her eyes again, and I wasn’t going to do it without telling her. So now, if I don’t want him to end in limbo, I’ve got work cut out.

I’m not going to have any secrets from him. He’s going to know everything I know. He’s going to know everything I’ve seen. I’ll sit him on my knee and just tell him everything any way he can understand, and then I’m going to let him go. Later, if he wants to argue with me, at least by then he’ll know what it means to believe something, and maybe how to trust what he tells himself when he sees something new.

I’m the only one sitting here. The rest are in a snaking line at the zinc counter, collecting salt rolls with cheese and having their coffee bottles filled. Little workshops line both sides of this street, but most of these people will be walking on to the factories. So tell me their expressions, which are tilted towards the threatening factory whistles and going more blank each minute. I know what poor folk are like. It’s a fallacy that rich people don’t notice the poor. When you grow up wealthy, the poor are all you see – there is no one else. Being what I once was, I cannot forget – this is a city full of districts full of strangers I recognize, a cloud of unstable earthbound desires. You sit in a room like this at a certain time of early morning, the moment before whatever these people must do next, and you have to remind yourself they’re all different from one another, and when you do you see that no one at that hour is connected to anyone else. They troop in and form their nervous line out the door, hopping in place, their faces closed, their stares tilted down and in, caught up in their yearning to vanish, and drop a copper coin on the counter and march out without looking at anyone else. You see them out the window, their legs in this weather like wisps of coal smoke in the wind. Cloth coats or loose jumpers, raw wool scarves tied at the throat the same way. Faces of one age. Some look right when they walk, some left, but it’s always down. Even this is a spiritual state, I tell you, but the people who inhabit it have forgotten they have spirits. This is the city that the people who live above it know nothing about – they theorize at best. This hour is what the world will look like one day when the future rules it completely. Right now the machines only grab most people some of the time. Ask me about machines and I can tell you a lot. I know machines – trust me on that. Trust me that I know machines and that I’ll never turn into one or perceive these people as wanting to be machines. It’s only that their human desires are being silenced by a more and more deafening world. They can no longer see for the noise the world makes. We want the world to make sense, to have a system. It doesn’t any more, though there must have been a time when a system was still conceivable or the crowd wouldn’t be going mad from its absence. We all used to be on the same way somewhere, and everyone sure there was something distant worth walking to, some common future if not here. Do you know how much that costs these days? Do you know the effort it takes to remember there’s a heaven? The knowledge it takes not be damned, and the power you have to invest today in preserving a memory like that? These people’s pockets have been picked empty by life, and they’re forgetting what they once hoped. No one knows now which direction is the right one. Heaven is either to the right or to the left, so they pick their chance and dash there, and it’s always their own direction, where no one else is going, towards the next clear field, an open space, a shadowed corner where they can breathe for a moment as themselves, before the whistles blow all at once and the world bumps them off their patch again. Their world is about to be stripped of all hope, their eternal future is invisible but breathing on them, and meanwhile, that steel winter sky is about to collapse. Look around, this hour. Progress has snapped the bonds that would have linked all these people. The old world is dying, and the sad part is there’s no new one to be born. Once the old one is wrecked, nothing better is going to take its place, but no one has imagined yet what the worse one will look like. The imagination for that has never been born in us. A community … remember what those used to be, then praise your luck if you can live authentically in the one we’ve been left with.

Does Emma know I tell myself this? Probably. Women are better at keeping secrets, and then they know all about men because keeping their own secrets teaches them how to guess men’s. I’ve given up trying to guess what hers are. I used to until I learned to enjoy watching her without trying to know. That night before? Even that one I don’t yearn just then to try. I know, only, that she’ll be wounded in her pride that I’ve seen her past boil over like that, and that she has to know – she must know by now – that I’ll leave her be to gather herself before ever I ask about it.

 

[ chapter 15 on 14 March ]

I get out a pair of nail scissors and my sewing kit – both in the top kitchen drawer, a small mercy – and measure out a length of black silk thread, the closest match to his stiff-cut hair. He sits still and silent while I work, our backs to the awakening window and the canal below. The next minute is trying to make me stronger again, and he’ll be there when it succeeds. A crisis is an opening for unprecedented futures and unanticipated recoveries of the past. I’d almost, last night, fallen into the trap of repeating myself. If you’re going to be ashamed, let it be for actions, not thoughts. Unhappiness is the repetition of old patterns, and I’d been doing that last night. This can’t be happening, I was telling myself in the bedroom while it had the hold on me, this can’t be happening again. Twenty-two is a strange age, so I’ve been told. You’re not wise but you know wisdom is possible, that it’s inside you to hatch. But will you have enough to become yourself, let alone raise a child? The answer is as much about fate as experience. It’s about what you do with what the world does to you.

It knocked me sideways and down seeing … again. That guy, I tell you. It took hours to catch my own threads and start weaving them back together, all the while wondering if I remembered how. Since Paul, I’d never been tested like this. The first time I righted myself, years ago, it was like God rolling the knucklebones, thousands of them, one for every day of my life, until one day, like that, most of them came up sixes or fives. Most of me felt no hope at all, and I was telling myself to be ready to suffer until I died. Getting stronger happened without my volition. If you hold on long enough, the planets will align without you whether you still hope they do or not. Cast yourself into them, give up. You need to do that sometimes, and perhaps once can be enough, you hope, but there has to be once. That’s what I did – I threw away my will – and instead of being crushed, my will came drifting back to me. It turned out I was tethered to it. That’s how I explain it to myself. Now I’m telling myself I don’t have to go back there. I will not, now that I’ve been reminded what it was like. And I even have ways not to. I know because Paul gives me room to live like someone who remembers it. It’s a self-obligation to stay whole and authentic in a world that wants to tear the both of us asunder. It’s the chore of our being together, and any tool that helps do that is good.

The symptoms that came back last night: even when they first appeared twelve years ago, I knew they were just that. There was nothing wrong with me, it was the world that was wrong with me. But knowing something doesn’t help you solve it. You can’t change the world, and the symptoms were how I manipulated it. Women aren’t supposed to go out and conquer. A women’s only power is to manipulate the men in it: hide behind them, keep them all out, mess with their heads and revenge yourself at the same time. That’s what women do. The difference is, I have reasons not to feel helpless now, and it’s not as if I’m the only one in the world who’s angry at what the world does. I know what it’s like to have no will, the same as I know what it is to have a strong one. So it’s borrowed – you got a problem with that?

My conscience is cruel, demanding, and sadistic. It punishes me simply for wanting things, but it refuses to be clear about its own rules, and you end up placating it endlessly so that your life turns into an endless search for ways to assuage it. No wonder simplicity sounds so wonderful to those who are frightened of insight, who are afraid to think for themselves, who won’t even acknowledge a self to understand. When there are no clear rules, I ask myself what they would have to be if there were any, and then I commit to them and make my own way. That’s how I keep the demons in check, night after night – by telling myself what I’m sure the gods would tell me if they ever told us anything clearly. When I remember to commit myself that way, and how hard it was to learn how, I’m not going to let the void find me again. I’m safe from my worst self. I know where the edge in me is, where the chasm opens. I can see it in daylight, and feel it in the dark, and hear the wind’s voice like no one else, and tell the earth’s time without a clock, and dance on the edge as well as Paul can. I know all of that is in me. I guess wrong sometimes, but at least I know when I have and what questions to reset. I will not be murdered the way this world would murder me – that is, silently, without a voice to protest honestly. When I have to die it will be on the ground I’ve prepared, not like that Christ night in the asylum bed when the portal opened behind my back.

Sometime soon he’s going to ask me, ‘Who was that guy who scared you,’ and I’m going to tell him part of the truth: ‘Today, he’s nobody.’ I’d used to wonder what would happen, years later, if those eyes ever looked into me again; I’d used to frighten myself with the premonition of finding out. I’d never thought any good would come of it. Turns out it was neither good nor bad, it was only an inevitability, and those never need to be the last ones. You can step right through inevitabilities – It’s an old human folly to think they’re an end point, a wall. I repeated old mistakes for a night, then I stopped when I knew I was doing it, and Paul was there to help me catch myself. I’m ashamed of what I did to him, but I would have been more ashamed to stay where I had fallen. The next morning, while I’m sewing Paul’s head back together, I can look with cold vision at those eyes that stared again in Mister Rosemeyr’s shop and I can tell them back what they tried to tell me, at the worst possible moment so many years ago: ‘You mean nothing.’

 

[[ chapter 13 on 28 February ]]

Days later, she’ll remember to her grandfather she screamed when she collapsed. I’ll correct her as soon as she says it: she didn’t scream, no, I was there – she didn’t make a sound then. Which tells us both that she felt herself scream, but inwardly, until something snapped and every moment of her mind unravelled.

Mister Rosemeyr jumps from his chair to help me catch her fall, and a man sitting there with a handlebar mustache and a greasy coat gives up his soft chair to her. Two clerks come running, and Mrs Rosemeyr is summoned quickly from the upstairs flat to pat her wrists. Johnny in train, we all carry her upstairs to their flat, except for the stranger, who has vanished.

She begins to collect herself after a few minutes and sits up on the couch. In a voice softer than a whisper, she asks whether Johnny’s safe, then looks without shifting herself while I hold him for her to see. By then a doctor has been summoned. She doesn’t want him there, but she gives in to his questions and lets him examine her and the lad. When he leaves she’s having a cup of tea with Mrs Rosemeyr. We’re all pretending everything’s fine again and that we’ll forget about this soon enough. That was an hour ago. Now?

In the carriage on the way to our flat, helpless. The woken horror, I tell you, to see her tumbling into herself like this, so exposed, so suddenly, to the powers that have reached for her again. I can’t see where she’s going but I tell from a look that she knows this pit is bottomless. At least at the start, part of her is in the moment with me and making grudging sense, but the rest … this force. It starts with a strange barking cough and a laugh I haven’t heard her make before. Her eyes go blank and stop looking out at me, or at Johnny in his travel basket, or at anything else. Some power inside her is pulling her stare inwards. There’s the calm Emma on the outside, too calm, eerily composed, and there’s the one whose inner claws are tearing her apart while I watch. By the time we’re upstairs in our flat, she’s been swallowed from within. She places Johnny on the kitchen table, slams our bedroom door, and begins screaming and laughing as if willing the combination to destroy her.

She was always an angry one, but I’ve never seen the machine that churns it out, as if her mind just now has been stripped of all its skin. The things I’ve forgotten I don’t know about her, that I always told myself I don’t have to know, are bursting out, and they’re audible in her loud, hollow laugh, her wailing tears, and this hacking cough. She hasn’t lost control – what I’m seeing now is in control, and it just swallowed the woman who used to control herself. Her laugh is the worst of it – this savage, murderous laugh at nothing.

We’ve always had our way worked out. She can get as angry as she likes – okay. We have a mutual no-hitting agreement, and we both know what we’d better not say no matter what. When she cries, I don’t try to stop her; I wait her out, and she can tell me why later, if she needs to. Things like that work when you know who the other is. Now? After she slams the bedroom door, I give her a few minutes and then knock. She screams, but it’s her tears that are screaming – they’re tears that yearn to kill. So I don’t come in, and when I step back a little, she senses it and I hear her crying and laughing at the same time.

The next time I knock, I do go in, and … silence. She half-sitting up in bed, with her black robe covering her completely and the hood pulled down over her brow. She’s curled her arms around herself as if the silence has crushed her. What point is her nature trying to make?

‘Emma,’ I say.

She coughs, and laughs, and coughs again. She’ll ruin her voice if she doesn’t stop that.

‘Emma, will you try to tell me what this is –’

She screams. I’ve heard her scream before, but I’ve never heard this one. I close the door again. She’s not out of control. Yes she is, no she isn’t – whatever has possessed her is in control.

An hour later, I’ve changed Johnny’s diaper – the first time, but he needed it, so I swallow my pride for her sake – and tuck him in. It’s all I can think of to do. Emma would have written a shopping list when she got home and rung for the candleman to handle it, so I try to do that, but all I can think of is milk. Nothing is going to fill the time until she lets it. She’s stopped screaming, but her wailing doesn’t stop unless she’s coughing. Twice I walk up to the door, and she howls out a laugh at the sound of my steps. Her laugh is the worst of it – braying, vacant, targetless. I stare at the door and feel her energy distort the air. I have the sense that if I say one word, take one more step, tap her on the shoulder, do anything, the world will implode on her and nothing will be the same for us again.

In the note I sent her grandfather that morning, I asked him to come for dinner. He knocks just after dark, and I start to tell him about it while he’s taking off his coat, but he’s already listening to her laughter and her cough with a questioning frown on his face, and after only a few words he shushes me: May I? He points to the door. He looks in the bedroom and sees her curled up, laughing and coughing. She’s still in her berber robe, buried under the trembling mountain of it. He hasn’t seen this before, but from his weary look, I know he’s seen something I haven’t. Sad and horrified – there ought to be one word for that.

He steps quickly into the bedroom and closes the door. Loving yourself and somebody else at the same time is the hardest thing anyone can do. After all the pride we’ve taken, it’s unbearable that we might be failing each other now. A few minutes later, he comes out. Nothing in there has changed. He searches his own mind for what to tell himself before he looks up and says –

‘Paul, say nothing for a minute. Clear your head, please, give me a moment, and then let me tell you what I know.’

His voice so soft it only reaches one ear. The other listens to her crying and coughing, each sound a stab. Each sob unspeakably sad, each cough like a cymbal clash. People talk about rage as if it’s something that towers, but it can be bottomless too, when it comes from the same place as pain. He points at the kitchen table and we sit side by side at the corner of it, staring together at the bedroom door.

‘I’m not a doctor,’ he tells me in a voice below a whisper. ‘I know this is what she used to see doctors for. Here, give me his dinner.’ I take Johnny’s bottle from the stove and pass it to him. He shakes a few drops from the nipple onto his wrist, winces, and waits for it to cool.

‘There’s no mystery to the heart,’ he tells me. ‘There are only good reasons we can never see. To her, I promise you, this is sensible. And it isn’t the devil, whatever you think she sounds like.’

He tests the bottle again, nods just so, cradles Johnny in his arm.

‘It’s not for me to know what she tells you or doesn’t,’ he says. ‘It has to be enough not to know everything about the one you love. But there were six months or so, after I met her but before she met you. She didn’t know I existed until I just went to her one day and introduced myself. You know that?’

‘That much, yes. There’s years of her life she won’t talk about much. That’s okay. I still try to guess.’

‘My daughter-in-law wouldn’t allow grandparents,’ he explains, as if the story needed repeating. ‘I found Emma on my own and, well, she decided to trust me, and she told me things. No, not about what’s inside her – she’s like most of us: she hasn’t much idea what makes her do things. But she told me a lot about what she’d seen. The six months before she met you is how much time she had to do that … Look, won’t she be happy?’

Johnny’s reached for his bottle’s nipple, fingers of his right hand curled around it and pointing it towards his mouth. He stuffs it in his mouth and bites down hard with his left hand burrowed under his knitted jumper.

‘She tells me what she must, for her own sake,’ I say. ‘It’s never had to be everything.’

In the next room, she knows we’re talking about her. We might as well be shouting in her ear. I watch him cringe while she wails, the same as me. Then he stiffens his mind again.

‘She’s getting worse while we’re both here, Paul. The coughing, the broken voice, the other things besides, like deep headaches and hemiplegia – that’s paralysis of one side.’

‘I know.’

‘That’s started tonight. She can’t move her right side when this happens. It’s an old symptom. She was being treated for hysteria till a few months before we met.’

‘I know, and that she used to go on cures.’

We wince in unison and cover our ears. She’s trying to deafen us even to our own whispers. We exhale in tandem.

‘It’s what they were for, Paul. Hysteria and this unshakeable sense of being worthless. The symptoms are mostly medical, so people who are diagnosed with it go to medical doctors. It’s almost always young women who suffer from it. She was rising out of it when I entered her life. All of it stopped after she met you.’

You want to think that goodness brings happiness and that he deserves better than this. That’s some of what I’m telling myself. The rest is that he knows portions of this that I don’t, which helps, even if he doesn’t understand it either.

‘She took treatments for years, Paul, with different specialists.’

‘Which is where she learned to hate doctors.’

‘I’m sure. Shock therapy, water treatment, something called a talking cure, one after another. It was a pastime of her mother’s. She would pick a spa for the season, someplace with good restaurants and the right kind of social connections and a new cure for Emma. Some of the treatments might have helped if she’d stayed with them, but she always refused to go on, or her mother withdrew her before a good effect could take. There was unhappiness in that house, and no one wanted to let go of it. Or no one wanted the others to let go of their own. Better for everyone to be miserable than for one person to be happy – that’s how it is in the Aaronson apartment.’

‘I know.’ Emma could never have said it so simply. You had to say it simply for her.

‘And with her height,’ he said, ‘and her looks, there was nowhere in that family for her to hide how little she wanted to be like them. After her mother found an excuse to move her out of their home, to that boarding school –’

‘– for troubled girls. She won’t walk on that street –’

‘– the symptoms began to vanish by themselves. That was around when we found each other. And then she found you, and I told myself, “Well, there – she can leave behind whatever brought her to this.” Even so, I’m always half-thinking about her earlier past when we’re together. I wonder where it went, since I didn’t really watch her escape it – not all of it. I’m sorry, Paul.’

‘I think we won’t tell her mommy and daddy.’

He looks horribly sad to agree with me so quickly.

‘She’s fleeing her life when she’s like this,’ he tells me. ‘That’s something to rejoice for perhaps thirty seconds, until the solution turns out more painful than the suffering that made her try it. She has the power to do this to herself, but the power to stop? Who knows where she’ll find that? I’m only sure she’ll want to.

‘After she and I met, she told me she had never been allowed an honestly free feeling in her entire life. At a moment she was capable of wanting that, I gave her a place to do it, and then you … That’s how she explained it to me once, just after she met you, when she was trying to explain what you meant to her.

‘Paul, she doesn’t want to be like this. It’s that she doesn’t know how to stop it yet now that she’s started. No one enjoys doing this to themselves, but what’s worse than pain? I ask you that. I’d say that helplessness is worse, because it prevents you from escaping the pain you feel.

‘She needs you and Johnny. She needs her life. If your parents want to deny you that, no one has the right to criticize you for escaping them. Sooner or later, you get older, and if you love them and they love you back, you feel lucky. But if your parents force a decision on you – “Choose between us and yourself” – you have to choose yourself and accept the consequences. Because the consequences open the way to all the other choices that wisdom demands you make. Sooner or later, parents have to let their children go. And that, you know, is something Mrs Aaronson still won’t do. The problem her mother has with you is that you know exactly how to protect Emma from her. And you actually have fun doing it – she hasn’t been able to punish either of you for that.’

‘I don’t gloat.’

‘Neither does Emma, anymore, but her mother knows that you two could rub it in whenever you wanted, which is a power in its own right. Tonight you’re wondering what to do now.’

We wait her out for another silence.

‘I don’t know,’ I tell him.

‘I don’t know, either. What made this start, Paul?’

I tell him what I saw that afternoon.

‘She needs a real doctor. You say she fell.’

‘The Rosemeyrs brought one while she was resting there. I don’t know if there are any good doctors. Emma doesn’t think so.’

‘That’s true enough, if you’re Emma. She’s had a terrible time with them. And then after almost dying five weeks ago … So who was the other man at the Rosemeyrs’? She saw him, and now this. That’s what you’re saying. So now you’re telling yourself to find out who he was.’

‘That’s right.’

‘If you think you have to do that …’ He suddenly looks tired. ‘But she returned to herself last time. You and I only gave her a safe place for that. It’s about happiness, Paul – when she wants to be that again, badly enough, she’ll know where it is now. If you and now Johnny help her want that … you know? Do whatever returns her to the love she has for you, even if it means doing nothing. Don’t try to guess what she can’t bear to tell you. Just let her be who she is.

‘But let me also tell you about the other Ninth Quarter girls she grew up near … I know, I know – Emma’s unique like everyone else, but the symptoms? They’re epidemic among women her age in the Ninth Quarter, they have been for years. The medical term is hysteria, but some doctors in this city nowadays are calling it “the Jewish neurosis.” They posit being Jewish as a cause of nervous disorders, as if it’s some sort of punishment the world metes out to our younger women for being born. Or it’s another way for Christians to label us as a race apart. And then for some other people the neurosis is a matter of in-breeding. And then there’s some who use it as proof that Jews will never belong in Europe. No, really, hear me out … Paul, if an illness called hysteria actually exists, it’s about the society she’s had to face every day in this city, no more than that.

‘Hear me out, Paul. These things, maybe you can grasp them. Christians have always wanted us to hate ourselves, and a lot of us do, consciously or not. History is everyone’s lot, not just ours, and the ones who hate us are victims just as much as those they victimize. It used to be you could have yourself baptized and wash off the mark that Christians place on you. Not any more – Jew hating is in the air today, Paul. It’s in the culture, not just the churches, so how can some Jews not breathe it the way so many Christians do? Especially if you’re a Jew who cares too much about passing for a German, which describes my son and daughter-in-law. Some girl takes her first look into that world. That awareness of society’s loathing for your kind can be horrible when you first encounter it. Now what happens if her parents themselves have abandoned their faith? And what if as a barely fledged woman you’re supposed to be weak? Where in a world like that can you find the strength to become yourself? If you can’t find a safe place to do that, you just hold the self-hatred in, keep swallowing it back, till you poison your own soul and self-hatred becomes all you can ever know and your life becomes nothing but a failed escape from pain. Really, the only avenue open then is inner death, but what happens to those who can’t make themselves break that way? They break some other way that feels even worse.

‘Maybe that man who frightened her today is what happened to her. But what good is finding him going to do when she anticipates that man in every Christian she sees? You asked me once why I didn’t leave the Isle of Jews though I could. I’m happier seeing Jews all around me. I’m not terribly devout, but I’m proud of who I am. But I’ve had to earn my pride in a way, in this world, that Christians never have to.

‘You’re worried you’re the problem. You’re not, you know. Something like this would never be about you. She truly does love you, Paul. But how do you express your love at a time like this so that she knows how much? Maybe the solution is here at this table, with the three of you who are a family now. Let her be stubborn. You’re the one who showed her who she is – it wasn’t me. You’re the one who made her leap into the world, knowing she would be safe. That is how we discover the world, by testing it with our deeds. I could never have helped her do that, because I was always at some point going to be her father’s father. You came from outside and proved to her that the outside doesn’t have to be frightening, that fear doesn’t have to rule us. I’d like to sit with her for a few moments.’

‘You’ve done enough.’

‘I’ll never do that. Look at my son, Mr Aaronson to you. When I was raising him, when I had just arrived from Stryj, I was telling myself, “He’s going to succeed in the world,” and by the world, I meant “the Christian World.” Oh, I got him the best education, I found him the links, I force-fed him all the ambition I could. Except for his money, can you think of anyone who would want to be him now? He’s a hollow man, and I can’t think of anything worse. I believe sometimes that I destroyed him, the same way that family tried so long to destroy Emma.

‘It’s possible to doubt whether God exists and still lead a good life. Even a Jew can do that – Judaism is hardly a religion anymore. Christians have ended that by making that Jewish question a cultural one, even a racial one. Even Jews who try to embrace their God have trouble finding him in a city like this. They find him so easy to deny for their own material purposes, for a moment’s social comfort, however delusional that is. The world did this to Emma. Her family was the messenger, that’s all. And all you can do, or I can do, is show her that the safest thing she can do is show her love for you. I think I will sit with her for a few minutes.’

He leaves me with Johnny on my shoulder, dribbling milk down my back. I sit in the dark kitchen and hear him say, ‘Hello, Emma.’ And then nothing but her cough. I stand at the window and look over the canal, the blackest thing in the world I know, straight down. Lights all along the quay, but none of them reach this window.

After he says goodbye, I close the door softly. I hear her coughing, Johnny crying. I tuck Johnny into his kitchen crib and turn on the hall light. I stand at our bedroom door. She’s leaning against the headboard with pillows under her back, hugging her robe close, the hood pulled forward though I can see her eyes glittering from deep under it. As soon as she sees me she coughs without turning her head away. That look I see is asking, You think this is crazy? I wonder if this is what fear is: try telling yourself sometime, ‘I’m losing the woman I love.’ This thing that happened to her is a place I don’t know how to find. I can understand for a minute how the desire for death comes to us. When I imagine death, it starts with a black room like this. I’ve never felt so horribly sad in front of her. So I turn on the ceiling light and yank the blanket from her so that she almost tumbles to the floor with it.

‘This makes me sick,’ I shout at her. ‘Everything about us was a joke from the start. That’s all I see right now. We really played a trick on ourselves, didn’t we? Didn’t we? For all those years? Except the joke’s all yours, Emma. It’s you who fooled everyone about being tough. All we’ve been to each other, everything we’ve built together, it’s over, because if this is what you really are, if this is what you want to be, you’re worthless to everyone I care about, including yourself. That’s what you look like right now – worthless to everyone. You used to be nothing without a cock inside you and you can’t even do that anymore. And now? I don’t have a wife, Johnny doesn’t have a mother, you don’t have a husband. All you’ve get left is the people who did this to you in the first place. Do you know what I see? Nobody’s nothing, and you’re acting like you’d rather die than act like you’re worth something. We’re not going to join you in that. So choose what you want, then leave if you have to.’

I slam the door, think twice and shove it open again, and go sit in the kitchen. A moment goes by and slam she’s got up to shut it again. I hear her starting to wail again, louder than before, while I’m thinking: ‘In the kitchen there are three knives and a gas stove, and the drop from the window is eight storeys. The canal ice is six inches thick this week, I could chop a hole.’ Maybe it isn’t a black room over there. She told me last month that it isn’t. Then I hear a loud, harsh croak –

‘Paul? Paul, I’m so sorry. You’re right. Please forgive me.’

A string of coughs rips the air between us.

‘I said help yourself or fuck off and get out!’

‘Paul, it hurts …! I want to die. What have I done to myself?’

‘You help yourself, Emma.’

A string of coughs like a spray of bullets, that hollow laugh. Those kill like magic, just like words. Why haven’t I moved?

‘Paul, why don’t you come to me? Oh God, I’m about to die. What have I done?’

I stride down the hall and push the door open. She’s turned off the light again, and there’s her robe on the bed, the mountain of it. One step in and tha –

[[ chapter 11 on 14 February ]]

 

 

Nature is beautiful, when I look. I stand outside the studio door at dusk, at the base of the church path with my face to the Dream City – hidden by that tree, just –  down there and smoke my church bells pipe. I watch the winter lights twinkle, and when it’s truly silent, I can tell they’re smiling while they sing. Sometimes they’re stars, other times village lights, and up here, when the sky is clearest, you can’t tell one from the other. Colours move – they have as much life as lines do. Colours are liquids, they freeze and they boil. And words are half a centimetre high and a night’s walk long and only travel one way, for which thanks to God I’m not a writer, because I wouldn’t know how to live in two dimensions. I stand there wondering what I haven’t seen yet, and looking for it, because that’s what experience is – what you make yourself see. My paintings aren’t imagined in me – the imagination I use is out there. Then I take what the world has allowed me into the studio, and look for forms to emerge from what I sensed. All the things I wish this world was not, the world is still those, but I’m too empty-headed just then, in the dark beyond the studio door, to screen it with my memories, and it enters me unfiltered. And that’s a wonderful sensation, knowing that I worked hard enough all day to stand where I am, as empty as this, and open myself so entire to this world’s colours and lights.

This studio was once a greenhouse and potter’s shed. Emma says we came here first in 1908, but I don’t know why the year matters. She handles that kind of paperwork. It still smells like loam – is that the word? – here when you close the door and the walls start to breathe. I won’t have colours in here. I need everything black or white, mostly white, and wherever I work I spend the first week punching out walls, installing sheet glass to blast the space with light. If I could throw a chain over the sun and winch it closer, I would. Drawing is different – for that I need the hardest shadows I can make. Where the shadows are right I stop everything to draw.

Emma appears at the studio most nights now to remind me of supper and pour me my crystal, while I’m holding the little man, who I can already tell is going to be as big as me one day. When I kiss his forehead, he wakes up and belts me. Does he lead with his right? We still aren’t sure. She totters like a derrick around the studio, peering under the dropcloths with the tip of her nose, metering my progress like a Senior Inspector. She says nothing. Months later, when memory of effort has faded, she’ll tell me something sometimes. This muse thing – no, not her. We’d both laugh. It’s just that she has access to knowledge I never will, that comes from memories no one can share with her.

Whatever she’s told you, I haven’t left the cottage this winter any more than she has. I need every minute of light where we are, and when it’s dark, I want to be where Johnny is. What she told you about me and the Duclos tin, I don’t know why she said that. Neither of us has broken the seal yet. Direct to the hands. So, really, Emma.

Her mother’s backstairs maid is here to spy on us, though she can’t stop herself from hooking up with the lad, dandling him on her lap while Emma goes off on her laudanum flights (which have ended, mostly). I don’t mind if her mother knows everything, and really, there nothing to report except those tubes on the doors (which will cause a terrible stir of vapours). The maid sees me work through the daylight and beyond while Emma sleeps off her bottle. A mouthful of leftovers at ten and two, brought out to me. Emma wakes up and stands up and finds me. That’s it. If the maid stayed after dark, she’d see us brew tea together and have dinner with it, then I play with Johnny, followed by a few minutes’ soldiering from Emma, thanks, dear. She seems to think that as long as she keeps giving it out, somehow, I won’t go off to the station local after dinner. I don’t know what I’d do, actually – she’s ahead of me with those, the trooper she is. She’s got no reason to be jealous of the world out there – this is where I want to be, with my work, with Johnny, and with her. If you asked me in what order, I’d say, ‘It’s two o’clock.’

I know why she’s watching hawklike for me to be restless up here: when we’re down there, I can’t bear to be home the entire day. I have to get out for an hour or two: there are crowds to swim through, friends to argue with, patrons to meet. I work hard at all that. And then I come home and tell her what I’ve seen. And days I don’t do that, we’re out in the city together just, well, walking, to a coffeehouse or gallery or river park, somewhere where we’re as known as we want to be in that moment, and telling each other what each of us sees and me with my tablet at ready for the shadows. But up here? There she is, and there’s the lad. I know it’s a charmed life, this heaven we’ve built with our own resources. I know. We should never have been this lucky – there must be a law that hasn’t been promulgated yet. It’s meant disobeying the man-gods and forgetting, more often than we should, their version of what must happen some day.

When the maid brought Johnny to the studio the first time, she saw what I was doing and dashed back out, covering Johnny’s head. There are a hundred monographs around the Aaronsons’ apartment full of fleshier nudes than mine, and battle scenes full of pleading and gore. There’s a Goya aquatint in Mr Aaronson’s study – Los desastres, plate 39 – that disturbs even me. My work frightens her because she’s watching me make it, which means these are people she might meet one day (and she might be next). I don’t clean people up much. I might one day, but I keep deciding not to try.

When nobody visits in the evening, Johnny’s smirking and snoring in his crib by eight o’clock, and that’s leaves the two of us and the wind. There’s always a wind after dark, up here. We’ve moved the bed into the front room, where the light is better and it’s warmer. I don’t hang my own work at home, but there’s plenty on the walls, most of it crayon drawings that visitors make as party favours. We tack them up at random.

Moon on snow, pine trees. Working by coal oil the last hour, the shadows throbbing with the draft through the window cracks, black but soft at the edges. I like that burnished yellow light, anciently patinated bronze, I want to harness it somehow. It would take a thinner shellac than I’ve ever mixed, and I wonder how many coats. This winter I need go see the icons in the Imperial Attic, because the Orthodox monks used that effect all the time. [Gus the Painter could just tell him how, but no … – Emma.]

One day I was one thing, now I am this. I don’t know how that can interest anyone. I don’t understand why people want stories and I’m no good at them anyway. Stories are a torment – the sound of the world shouting in your ear. If the future did that, okay … knowing the future would be more useful than remembering your past. Sometimes I wish the world would hold still while I was walking on it, which is what I want more than anything else – to freeze it long enough that I can stare at it.

I love Emma’s grandfather, I do. I thought I was only capable of loving women sometimes, but around him I’ve noticed other kinds, like his for us, and Emma’s for him, so I’m learning I’m capable, though not what I’m supposed to do with it. It’s too much responsibility for me. But at least I know now how Emma learned what love is – from him. In her life, from him. He’s the reason she’s capable of wanting to love, of trying to love back, and so terrified of failing. Love, you only have to feel it once. Once, and after that it would destroy you inside to lose that power.

I’m haunted by the absence of dreams. I’ve never remembered one. The same way that she’s haunted by their waking presence. The things used to swallow her like shark chum, she says – rip, gulp, rip, gulp. They still do sometimes, and she wakes up bloody and torn. I don’t know what pain is – no one has ever hurt me, and I’m no good at inflicting it on myself. Pain – what is it? The best defence against pain is a good attack. If you want to find your real enemies, look inside yourself. Look for what’s in you that’s letting people hurt you. This, okay, is what Emma tells me, and that’s the reason I know. I’m saying that the people who suffer needlessly are a whole other tribe, and it’s Emma who married outside that village.

It was almost too easy for a little while today. Something’s unsettling when it’s too easy. A few minutes of doing something well is all I need, and an hour or so of knowing I’ve made progress; then I can forget how hard it was to make those minutes, that hour. Days they don’t happen for me, I retreat from the day feeling terribly sad. Sooner or later, you can’t get away from it – you have to be alone. You have to speak honestly to yourself. You have to seek out your own doubts and then ways to assail them.

She doesn’t come to me this evening, so when I carry Johnny back to the cottage, it’s later than usual. Soon, Johnny is laughing at us from his crib. The maid has left me half a rosemary chicken on the edge of the stove, with noodles simmering. When I look up next Emma’s still in bed, waiting for me to stare back at her, with the leaking stovelight glittering her eyes. She’s taken off her silk cap and I notice the resemblance, again and always, to the Danae in the bedroom where the dresser mirror would otherwise be – the similarity is uncanny, thank Gus. I watch her staring and hear my own voice telling me: ‘This is new again.’

She’s half-sitting in bed, her comfort position, propped by nine cushions, cloth-of-gold camisole winking at me in the yellow light, her scarlet robe untied at the waist. Her hair has billowed into two clouds, her green eyes smouldering. She opens her mouth as if getting used to the motion again and slurs hello.

‘Feeling the good stuff, little one?’

Not that she’s little. Slim, yes, but not little. Her feet were all she ever used to be embarrassed about – long and skinny – until I cured her this way I got her to try. Tonight she just shrugs with her mouth – you silly man.

‘I drank the last bottle of Freddie’s Tokay,’ she says.

‘There were two bottles,’ I tell her.

She considers.

‘I thought I was seeing double. What do I care? What does anything mean? Tell me that.’

It’s when she’s drinking that I can’t predict her. Not that I feel a deep need to do that. Alcohol lets her demons out, too many of them to count, or possibly they’re the same ones with different faces each time. I’m never sure. She drinks to remember them: hello lust, hello greed, hello gluttony. Show me what you’ve got tonight.

‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ she tells me. ‘Bad, bad, bad, Emma.’

‘Rotten to the core, actually.’

She raises a Reisler’s phial to the light, shows me the unbroken seal. ‘See? None of this today. So don’t say I took any, all right? I want to feel my body tonight. What does it feel like, Paul? Are you scared to touch? Johnny couldn’t kill me, so what makes you think you could? Don’t you want me to die, just a little? Come on, say you miss it.’

Lock an eagle in a cage and poke it with a stick and you’d start to see this same stirring hunger for flesh. Mint-green eyes glowing fire, face flushed just there, mouth askew and fluttering. The best drunk in the world is Count Freddie’s Élite Tokay. Her hand slides under her robe, pointing down.

‘I’ve been out sailing,’ she says. ‘Now I’ll go mad if I stop. Come on, Paul, captain’s orders. All hands tonight. Find what they left, please.’

With one hand she pushes a knee to one side so that I hear the creak, and lets the robe follow, and pushes down her pants just enough for me to see. The scars carve a cruel road across her belly, one broad angry rut, a thin path below it with the stitches still in. Her eyes are glistening like a tide in meadow grass. She trails a finger across one scar, the other.

‘They didn’t cut my sailor out. Will it kill me if you touch? Come on, Paul, see if it does, and then you’ll get yours after me.’

‘How do you want to try?’ I say. ‘Let’s figure it out.’

‘I have. Lie down, then I’ll lie back between your legs.’

I don’t remember the last day we tried. She could tell me exactly, with her head for dates. I only remember that Johnny was already kicking, and it was one of those on our sides from behind nights and I was scared of hurting the little one and she kept saying okay, okay, that condescending way women have of telling you things they know men can’t know.

I help her stand up, lie back down, lean against me. She arranges my hands on her tummy and sighs with momentary relief. I still feel the narrow lump where the broader scar runs through and feel her exhale.

‘All okay?,’ I ask.

‘Can you kiss me from there?’ And she turns her head and I crane mine till I find her lips. The first kiss is a chaste one. Lightning doesn’t strike us. Her fingers, under my own, are already busy.

She’s tilted her bedside mirror towards us. I see when we both look how frightened she is of what she misses so much. She would want me to crush her in my arms near the end, she never wanted a hair’s breadth from me when her storm breaks, but not tonight – squeeze? I just won’t – though her eyes are soon begging the night for release the way they once always did. I just won’t while she’s shivering like this, while she’s gasping for breath in a way we’ve never heard before. She pulls her robe tighter, her hands under it, wanting me to forget what the past month has changed of her. Just … now … When she begins to keen her song, I cup her breasts slowly together and up and feel her lungs fighting my hands. Her knees try to rise, she rocks onto her back, her legs clamp shut on her hand while her face loses its moorings, all its surfaces dissolving as she bursts into silent tears. I’ve missed you, Emma, let me show it. You have to leave her alone after – she’ll come back through the door in a moment. Never the real way, never again, we’ve been told a dozen times to not ever try again (they drew us diagrams, heavensake, to get the point through), but let’s find ways to forget that when we can. When she rises for a long breath, she rubs her hair against my chest – which always burns, the crinkles so stiff – and I give her a minute for the tears to dry and the tremors to stop working through her.

Then I say, ‘You’re still here.’

‘So I do still have a life. I was terrified, Paul.’

‘He’s doing it again.’

She nods, I know, I don’t have to look. But in a moment she rolls half-over and gazes with me through the slats of his crib. He’s already a funny little man. I can watch him for an hour straight, then another, and he’ll be sleeping with little baby breaths in some baby world we’ll never visit again. Then turn away for a moment or less and he’ll have done this – rolled onto his back turned head to toe, with his legs together and his arms spread like wings, one of them clutching a slat of his rocking crib and the other reaching for the other, with his back arched like a diver in mid-flight and his mouth gaping round like a fallen angel’s song.

There are no bottles left in the house, and her tears have gone cool though they don’t stop falling.

‘I held him today when you weren’t here,’ she says.

‘You didn’t drop him, then.’

‘I don’t know how not. More, please …’ I hold her till she stops shivering. ‘I’m a mother, then. Just keep holding me. No, this way.’

[ chapter 9 on 31 january ]

Through a frost blossom in this kitchen window, across the snowbanked yard and its wind devils, through Paul’s studio window, I see their forms moving. I lean forward, or try to. Everything is murky over there, for all the light that always floods his studio, but I can tell where they’re standing and what they’re doing. There aren’t many times like that, when I can watch either of them, or both of them, without them knowing it, without my presence being part of their equations. I used to seek moments like that, for the chance to see them in a world that just briefly does not include me, when I can stand alone just like them.

All right, yes, grandfather has lifted away a dropcloth. The third one down – oh yes, I know it. Paul’s working within squares this year, tacking each canvas to an oversized board without stretching it. When we returned here just after the new year from the asylum clinic down the hill where I almost died, this was his next one. The three of us are sitting on a calico blanket, another one cast over Paul’s shoulders. It’s the only painting I ever saw him make that he’s included himself – he’s never made a self-portrait, not even with a graphite. Even when he’s drawing in a mirror, he’ll include what’s behind him but not himself. I’d watched him work preliminaries for this before Johnny was born though Johnny’s in it too now. Paul is squatting with knees apart, and I’m cross-legged between them (cross-legged – what was that like?), leaning back against his chest, with Johnny in my lap head on my hip. Paul tells me sometimes that colours move if you shape them this way, if you anchor them just so. You can train them to fight the stillness the square tries to demand. No fool me, I’ve got a mind for the self-knowledge he can’t for himself articulate – when something he’s done strikes me the way I know he hopes it will others, I ask myself, ‘Where’s the diagonal?’ There always is one under the surface – not hidden, just silent – and whether you notice them or not, you can’t help following their vectors to where his instinct intended you. He hasn’t touched colour yet, but the anchors all are there, sticed into the delicate graphite work, in the touches of charcoal like secret writing waiting to be fixed by tinted glazes that will be the next step, and the anchors to this are the faces, their own pyramid running against the ones our bodies make and the folds of the blankets. There’s something aggressive about triangles, something that aims at the world beyond the square that contains them. Squares hold you still; triangles make you want to kick out; it’s circles that relax your eye, but he rarely uses them when he’s building a composition. After seven years with him, I know he never works with a pilot and that everything he succeeds with might as well have been for the first time. He tries something, and then he tries something else, and when something starts to work for him, to keen for release, he’ll seek out ways to harness what he hears. He doesn’t set out to say or mean anything. He only wants to stop the world for a moment that mattered to him when he experienced it, to bring that energy he sensed to a halt so you can see it concentrated in one place: ‘What must that look like?’ Nothing ever moves in his paintings, but things are always an instant before movement or an instant after they’ve stopped. Look at us now – three on a raft of their lives so far’s own assembly, steadying one another on a universal sea, tensing themselves against one another, huddled inviolate to the world around. The little one too young to name things, his existence still a cloud of wonder and sensations, pure expression without object. Me holding him tucked and looking where he is looking but remembering what he cannot yet, and clutching the father’s arm steady. Me, fear? You can tell I used to feel it, but not here and not now. Fear has been chained deep in me in a place where I can’t sense its weight, my pride too strong and now too old for it to cross back to others’ awareness against my will. And the father the most still, arms draped over my shoulders, hand on breast, hand on tummy, chin on shoulder, looking the same as me direct at the lens – I’ll steal that word for Paul, who would shudder if he heard me use it on him. But there’s always a lens – something in his paintings that is looking back and pulling you in. Once you notice it, that’s what won’t let you go. You can turn away, walk away, but never completely, and that is what you’ll remember – how what you saw looked back at you with an intent that will haunt you. The father holding all three still and safe from you – lost in the depths like his wife and child, and knowing what’s there – you – out beyond the square, and protecting them from it as if his silence was a rock to hurl. More than that, what could this one’s love do? How much farther could he send it? He works on the edge of what he can understand, and looks down from there into places where words fail all of us. That’s where he tries to walk, on the outer edge of what he can experience, to where his intuition can climb no higher and begins collapsing back into the colours and lights that birthed it. When he comes back from that place in the evening, while I’m pouring him his three-fingered shooter, if I tried to get him to tell me what he did all day, I’ll tell you what he would say if he could: no idea – this is no more than what he does, but it’s also all of what he does. It’s something he lives when no one else is there, a walk, and then another, toward a place he can’t stop hoping to see, a life it would end him to escape, a need he has to make sense of experiences it would destroy him to deny. But those are my words. The moment he starts to understand too much, he isn’t working hard enough, and he berates himself (I can tell), and I berate him (with a look), because by now I always know too: when he’s sure for too long just what he’s doing, he hasn’t been close enough to look back from the disintegrating edge of this world.