Archive for category: Chapters

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.

What! What? Who? All right, yes then … Paul did it too, once. I saw. Don’t let him tell you he didn’t. Every morning for seven years, he’s poured one finger of rhum into his morning tea (then made two or three warm-up drawings of me) before he starts in the studio. Every studio is too chilly most mornings – those high ceilings, and who can afford to heat a room that size? Makart maybe, but no one wants to be him any more, and even Gus with an income like his works in a chill. Then every evening, I’ve gone to the studio and poured him three fingers of plum brandy, peasant stuff, into the wine chalice, Czech crystal in a steel base, and he’s shot it back to buff the edges of his evening’s fading vision. Except one morning he told himself, ‘I’ll drink the chalice before breakfast to see what happens in the studio.’ Like an experience, you know? He’s always open. Mistake, that one – direct to the hands. His words for it after he came back that evening with a look of aghast on his face – direct to the hands. He couldn’t work for three days (with Paul, bad things always happen in threes), which for him is as frightening as life gets. He did what he always does when he’s scared, which is get angry. I did what I always do when he’s angry, which is act scared. Then his pride wouldn’t let him calm down for a day. Now he only gets drunk on Saturday nights, the good stuff – Count Freddie’s Élite Tokay, whatever’s left in the case from the week, one bottle or three. Then on Sunday morning while he’s hung over or still drunk, he stumbles down the cottage hill to the Church of the Insane for Eucharist. It’s supposed to be just for inmates of the nerve asylum outside the village, but he enamelled a lot of the wall tiles five years ago when they were building it, as piecework, and the priest remembers that, so they let him in as long as he doesn’t agitate the inmates. I don’t know what he does in there, but for the rest of the Sunday, he acts pretty normal.
His creed, they almost all feel guilty about everything, but a few of them feel guilty about nothing, and he’s the second type. The way he explains it, they can do anything they want as long as they tell a priest later. That’s it. No wonder Catholics are evil. The guilty type are scared my kind want to rule the world. The other type won’t tell you they already do. It’s the lack of guilt that lets them and the certainty that comes with it. Don’t ever ask a rhetorical question around Paul, I warn you, unless you really want an answer (you don’t). Guilt, he acts like, is the mark of someone else’s conscience in you, and he never notices anything wrong with his own. Why do I love him so much? I bask in his certainty. He really doesn’t know that guilt is possible. What a life that
must be – daddy, buy me that.

My cordial wore off before dark today, and down there’s Johnny tangled in the bedsheets. The wetnurse we’ve brought from the nerve asylum (they make babies there, too) comes up twice morning and twice afternoon and sits on a stool (always where I can’t miss her) and nurses him while I ask myself, ‘Where does she put those when she’s done?’ I’m used to being around Flöge models, and I’m sure my next nightmare really is going to be about waking up with a shelf like that. She burps him and places him at the foot of the sheets for when I look that direction as a hint for me to pick him up or something. How do I even know he’s mine? I wasn’t there. Because Paul says? All right …

Johnny’s half-awake too, so I get out the little woollen ball and play catch with him. It’s his favourite thing. He hasn’t caught it yet. Paul says sixteen days is too early, but he’s trying to console me again. I toss him another. His eyes flicker at it, I think, and for a moment I don’t feel as if he’s trying to scare me back to death. Who are you, Johnny? One toss sails a little over his head and I reach for it without thinking and howl with pain. Well, not howl. Only inside. You’d better get the short course on Johnny’s revenge for being born. He tried to come out backwards through the wrong hole, basically, and no one could reason with him. Now we’re wearing diapers together, and he’ll be out of them before me. And he’ll be making his own babies before I ever try again, so declared. Is that why he’s trying to smile right now? I stare back, making a stone face at his beady little eyes and pointed nose and snickering laugh. You tried to kill me, Johnny, and what do I do about that?

I can get out of bed by myself. I learned yesterday – just pretend to be a dreadnaught leaving harbour. One leg creeps to the floor, then the other. Bum seesaws to the edge of the bed. Onto my elbows, then my palms, then bend the knees (try to) and push, and choke down a scream where I can’t help bending, and there’s mother’s backstairs maid on loan getting ready to catch me in a robe.

A scarlet robe, a consolation from Gus the Painter day I left the hospital. A scarlet robe of quilted silk with golden cranes, green bamboo, tiny silver stitches. I asked to wear it for him once, when I saw it hanging in his wardrobe, the oak one in the hallway where his pose models used to wait, the closet a sunburst of kimonos, sarongs, Spanish lace. He smiled and said nothing, but someone like him, who talks with so much hesitation, you always know what his smile thinks: You don’t need it, Emma. So I stood in his studio under the skylight, just there, just so, and shrugged one shoulder at a time until the cotton smock pooled at my feet, arms and legs like this, starburst hair fluffed like this, back arched just a little. Hand under my chin, relax my belly, hold. And a few weeks later I’m the second water sprite from the top. And eight years later, he’s remembered. It came the day Johnny and I left the hospital, by a messenger blowing his little bugle from the bottom of the path. And an hour after that, a dogcartload of bringwiths from Paul’s sister Charlotte, who lives a twenty-minute gallop over the other hill, in a much darker valley than the one below our garden. From her, a crate of Count Freddie’s Élite Tokay smelling of the straw the bottles are cushioned in, a brace of pheasant shot out of season that no one knows how to cook, three freshly laundered horse blankets that even Paul struggles to lift all together, and a 100 gram tin of cocaine hydrochloride sealed and certified at the Duclos Laboratory of St-Cloud. Happy New Year to me. I hope Paul leaves me some. For me it’s got to be nothing but opiates, and a litre of something nice, until I get some strength back.

I look through the window, out at the world, down the hill through the frozen sunlight, the black pines. And there’s my grandfather, and his horse and cart, and Paul with him. Paul and horses – I knew about it when I married him, I was ready for it, I told myself I’d forgive no matter what, but on days like these new ones, with me feeling so horribly vulnerable, it isn’t easy. Watch Paul running his fingers through her golden mane, patting her strong, ivory flanks, staring deep into her mouth while she snorts, feeding her a carrot. I can’t deny this is happening or stop racking myself for ways to live with it. Her name’s Ostara, can you believe that? That’s the Aryan Goddess of Spring, you heard. Times like this, a city like ours, a world like the one we’ve got, she might as well have been named ‘Jew Basher,’ which would have been more on point.

‘Why don’t you change her name, grandfather?’

‘I suppose I could,’ he told me. This was two years ago, after he brought her home from the cabbage farmer in Krems who sold her. ‘But I’d rather not contribute to this world’s bitterness by taking sides that way. I’ll take good care of her, and she’ll take good care of me, and together we’ll come to understand what we add to each other’s world. Horses and people go back thousands of years, Emma, and neither has destroyed the other. Doesn’t that prove that the present days are the real aberration? Surely we can get along if our people’s desire for peace can express itself through open acts of goodwill.’ And I think, All right … Who would not want to believe it? So I try again.

Just then, a twisted, one-toothed face pops up to the window and shrieks at my face, then waits for the result with a giggle of expectation. Hi you again, my stare tells her, sorry but not today. My nerves are getting stronger – I don’t lean back or gasp this time at this one. Fourth since I woke, I count without trying to stop myself. They all know me and Paul; this was their hill long before ours. There’s a footpath alongside the cottage, from the asylum to the next village, and the good behavers, the ones who aren’t on lockdown or crazy watch, get to wander the hills between porridge and cocoa. The cacklers and droolers and handflappers, the Napoleons and Caesars, they wander the hills. That’s what crazy ones do to comfort themselves if you let them. They wander the hills, sigh. Mostly it’s the manic depressives who climb this high, who brave the rope path up and down. The hysterics would rather stay in their rooms and mope, and the dementics are too heavily dosed. You think they’d seep into Paul’s work up here, but no. He draws them sometimes as a technical thrill, but he doesn’t subject them to paint. I know why, after seven years with: these people are trapped in their own worlds, and he gravitates more towards the one we face together down below, the Dream City, the one full of people with choices and no excuses. With all the free will that frightens them so badly. Each of these ones is lost in a world too unique for others to join or rescue them, hears the world speak with a language no one else knows so that they have to think thoughts no one else can. It’s madness itself to think they fall outside the human – you don’t want to know how much like us they are in ways we don’t want to know. So, now you know how we got the cottage for so near to nothing – no one wants to live this close to the nerve asylum, especially the path to us almost a cliff. (How did he get me up here last week?) Truth, we’re usually only here summers now, but this winter we’ve found that with both stoves lit it’s warmer than our apartment on the canal quay, and that the silence, especially at night, is doing me good.

I’m teaching myself little things, like how to walk without falling like a tree, how to fill the kettle without bending at the waist, how to step into shoes with no hands. I’m walking on my sixteenth day, so take that, Johnny. The night wind in the chimney sounds like a flute. Lying there, with Paul breathing beside me and Johnny snoring in his cage at the foot of the bed, I’m warm enough. Baby makes three – three is the number we’ll always be. It’s the first thing the doctors told Paul, and then he told me. And then they cut me again to make sure of it. Neat little stitches this time, dozens of them, not the kind they use to sew corpses. They even left me my sailor. I’d expected them to cut it out to take my mind off it.

Johnny smells like walrus milk (you’d have to see her) and feels like a raw dumpling when I pick him up. Yes, it hurts. But after you live through ten years of cycles and five of heroic medicine, what’s a little of that? What’s a lot of that? It hurts but so what? I’ve tried to be tough as Paul, and practising that is helping me get through this. We look at each other these nights when he comes in from out there, and it’s as if we’re telling each other that our life together had better not dare start hurting.

I get to sleep all I want up here and to avoid people I don’t want to see. The visitors we want, the ones with something to say to us, always come in the evening. Paul has so much work to finish, with his show at the SilverDome in May and eleven canvases to prepare by then. He needs every minute of daylight this winter.

Live. To live? What a word. I thought it was a word. I really didn’t yearn to come back from the dead, not the first new sensation of it, not while I was sort of up there watching myself on the night of Johnny’s Big Day. Different, you know? I saw the clock on the clinic wall, and it had stopped. Paul was moving around, but the clock? Did you ever imagine that? When every clock has stopped, time is telling you something. And the wind through the window that Paul cracked open, I knew it was cold but I didn’t feel the cold, it gripped me but I didn’t feel it grip. I was in pain but the pain, like I said, was down there, in that corporeal place that was no longer me. After you die, there’s no more experience, not in heaven. No, heaven, the corner I listened to from the cloudy gates, sounds a little like a party with lots of bland party food and tinkly music and people you’re supposed to like because they’re dead too, and they’re all laughing to themselves at the same small joke you arrived just too late to hear. And that’s it – everything. I could have tolerated heaven, but I don’t know how long. I would have got bored soon, which was always a bad idea for me. If there’s anything I’ve craved all my life, it’s experience, for change to have its chance at me, for me to let those chances their try. If I have to die to see those clouds again, I’m still too young to crave it.

But that’s now, that’s what I see behind me from sixteen days. Then, while I was waiting for what happened next, this … well, breath sort of floated me back this way and suddenly, snap, my body and I were one thing again and my body was letting me know it. Up there’s powers and authorities had made a choice before I had any say, and for once, with Paul to hold me, I rode with them.

Johnny’s world … where has it started? I don’t know where they took him, only that they all left with him before I could hold him. I open the window a crack to let her soul out, then search the walls for mirrors. I see one screwed to the wall, I cover it with my coat. I thought the two of us were immortal together, that to the point we knew how to love each other, we couldn’t die. Emma would tell me, a lot, that love would kill her in the end, and I’d say, ‘You’re not from Budapest, no …’ And she’d laugh and laugh, don’t ask me why. It was a private joke of hers that I stumbled against years ago, and she’d laugh and laugh. Where’s the humour in Budapest? Okay, plenty, but I was never clear what was funny about Budapest to her. Someone that angry about most things at all times, and mostly at herself, all you could do was make her laugh, somehow, and I never questioned what worked. There’s no sense being sad when you can be angry, we always knew that together. And if you can laugh when you’re angry, even better. From the window, I look down into the hospital’s carriage yard. Our child is riding onto this earth on an enraged wind. The trees buckle, glass clouds slice the sky. Will part of her soul stay attached to him in all of that? It’s Christmas Eve, three nights after the darkest one. Across the city down there, coloured lights will be sparking as they soar, the air so cold you have to sip. While up here in the asylum woods, a wind is pouring from the eastern plain, a fist in the city’s gut, a street-clearing wind turning the stonework into galloping horses, the snow into virgin stone. I swallow tears to stop their burning. I shiver at the keening window. Imagine Death hovering in that.

I see a horse pulling a cart stopped in the yard, and two attendants in hooded blanket coats carrying out a corpse in a winding sheet, snow streaming up from their boot tops. So two are lost tonight. A Franciscan told me as a lad once that no one dies alone, that every soul waits another soul’s company for the journey. Every star is a word, and the space between is thoughts, but I can’t hear the language in this. The light in the room blasts away all shadows. I look for the switch and can’t find it. It’s best to paint without shadows, but to draw? I’d brought all my kit, the twelve-pound sheets, the graphites and chalks, charcoals and dry sponge. That was my plan for the birth, to draw everything I saw. And I’d started to, before the day went bad, and the night went worse.

I lift away her sheet without touching her. Her breasts have sagged to either side, swollen and tiny both, the nipples gone chalky as her skin. Her hair feels stiff, I don’t touch it again. She used to talk with her hair, actually. Toy with it, toss it, tie it differently eight times a day, always free-flowing and never the same except for that shocking colour, burnt strawberry – a colour that existed only in her nature. Now some of it has covered her left cheek, a strand or two tangled between her lips, and there I leave it. She was always beautiful, but the kind that’s about expressed motion. Her face elastic, her eyes quick, her feelings shifting every surface, her mood’s body a reed in the wind or an oak in the clearing. I sit on the high deep windowsill, tablet tucked into right elbow. I’ve drawn the dead before, but this woman … I loved her, do you know? We loved each other. We were both so sure that we never said it much, or we said it in ways no one else would have heard, with touches no one else could have felt. Those stitches … those cannibals … arched over her belly, one bootlace bow to each end of the last wound the world could make in her, the thread thick as package twine. Her belly swollen and flat at once and unsettled from the long tug they pulled to get Johnny out. Her limbs fragile as sticks, all weight no light. She’s lost the pins that once held her together, she looks disorganized. I’m bored, she’s saying, but I don’t care that I’m bored. Death – so what? Look, Paul. Do what you do. Life’s been hard before, so say goodbye your own way. Love her memory. There must be a way to do that as much.

Her stitches are leaking – that shouldn’t be. Those butchers could have shown more care. I take out the purple chalk. Purple, her favourite colour. She used to wear it because she knew she shouldn’t, with tones like hers. She’d wear black to birthday parties, yellow to funerals, checks and plaids to the theatre, vertical stripes to bring out her leaning tower of skin and bones, that was her. She knew how to dress – she was a clothes modeller when we met, at the Flöge sisters – but she only dressed to please or stun some people, when she cared enough – about me, or her grandfather. (How will I tell him? What will he tell me?) I put down the purple and pick up the green. Now the blood is dripping. Focken doctors – I would have done a better job myself. I’m going to berate them later, for her memory’s sake, so that I’ll be able to remember for us both that I did. But before I start practising the words for that, she blinks.

I blink back, who would not. The body is a pagan temple whose mysteries I no longer worship. But when I look again, her eyelids have fluttered half-open, her lips are parted, and the next breath is hers, not mine. To a choking sigh, one finger shifts towards her wound.

‘Paul?’

‘Yes, dear?’ What else can you say?

Hair stirs, chin dips, eyes two sparks in slow time, one to each corner. Mouth twists in horror and contempt. How do you imagine that? Horror and contempt …

‘What did you do to me, Paul?’

‘Nothing, Emma.’

‘Yes you did. I thought I was having a baby. Where is it?’

‘I’ll get a doctor.’

‘Oh no, not one of them again …’

Too late – then I’m out the door. The next one she sees, she’s going to win that fight, and neither of us will want to miss it, whatever happens next.