Читать книгу Thirty Days - Annelies Verbeke - Страница 14

-

25

The first thing he sees is a boat-shaped cloud. It sails between him and the sun, then onward, allowing more and more sunbeams to warm the window and stretch out toward the quilt, toward his arms, hands, and face. He lies there until the sun is fully visible, astonished by the emotion its embrace evokes in him. He’s in the habit of sleeping with the curtains open because the light helps him to wake, and the endlessness of the sky is what he likes to see first. But this morning it shines at him more magnificently than usual, and at the same time more sweetly. As if this year the summer is refusing to yield.

He looks at Cat, who’s still sleeping. Soon she’ll be getting good news, he thinks. He carefully lowers the blinds; she sometimes complains about too much light too early. In the bathroom it’s the smells that take him by surprise, those of his bowel movement as well as the shower gel, every particle intensely present, almost tangible. ‘What’s happening to me?’ he wonders, but the smells are already fading into the background.

Dressed in his underpants and a T-shirt, he fills the kettle and rummages in the garage in search of a lighter pair of overalls. While lifting the straps onto his shoulders, he walks barefoot along the hall and picks up the newspaper from the floor.

It’s the photo of a dead Palestinian child on the front page that recalls his dream of the night just past, if only a few horrible details of it: heart-rending close-ups, no story. There was a man with his brains dripping down out of his long hair, a woman’s bleeding nipples, a child with ripped stumps for fingers, and none of them were dead, they screamed, stared at their wounds in panic, fully conscious, stumbling about aimlessly.

And then there was the sun and that cloud boat, warm light, a reaffirmation of the supreme happiness with which he woke. He wonders how he could possibly wake so happy after a dream like that. He searches his memory for similar experiences but finds none. Was it the realization of having been spared extreme suffering that struck him on waking? He used to take the assertion that things ‘could be worse’ as a threat, as if you were about to discover that your suffering could be far greater than it already was. Now it’s different, now he sees the extraordinary magnificence of every day on which no fateful turn of events befalls him.

He hears Cat coming downstairs and takes a second cup out of the cupboard.

‘I didn’t get much sleep,’ she says.

She’s wearing his bathrobe, which would leave anyone else guessing as to her figure. She’s far less pale than she has been.

When he puts the cup down for her she turns her face toward him and he kisses her on the lips. She pulls the paper closer by one corner, groans on seeing the burnt child and throws it down on a nearby chair.

‘I had a strange dream,’ he says. ‘It was horrific. I saw mutilated people, but when I woke there was only light and I felt happy.’

She looks up at him, suspicious.

‘Still do. Something strange is happening to me. Something’s changed.’

He wants to explain it to her but he can’t find the words, managing only to increase her mistrust. She uses a knife to break up a lump of sugar at the bottom of the cup in front of her; an industrious pixie, infuriated by a stone in the soil where it’s trying to plant something. The corners of her mouth point down.

Cat studies the man she lives with. Sometimes he seems like a caricature of vitality, a man for yoghurt adverts. She loves him with an intensity that she begrudges him on occasions because she can’t imagine it’s reciprocated to the same degree. That he’s chosen this morning to emphasize his zest for life is one illustration. He takes no account of her, really, and not because good news is coming. This morning she’s going to refuse to be dizzied by his confidence.

‘Let me go with you.’

It makes no difference that he’s correctly interpreted her disgruntlement. She resolutely shakes her head.

‘I can wait in the car.’

‘Let me do this alone,’ she says.

He wants her to call him as soon as she knows anything.

He’s set aside half a day to go with her, so the appointment with his next client isn’t until the afternoon. He reluctantly throws himself into his paperwork, putting his mobile phone where he can see it and checking the landline is working—it’s working.

The folder of invoices is a catalogue of domestic problems. Although his memory usually lets him down when it comes to names and faces, he recalls the houses and the conversations he’s had in them. Because those conversations are rerun repeatedly in his mind as he works, it often seems in retrospect as if he’s left them behind on the walls, covered with a thin but impenetrable coating to protect them against time.

Today, however, the invoices and the reminders they bring fail to distract him. Cat’s appointment was at 8.30. It can sometimes be busy in hospitals. He mustn’t bother her, mustn’t ring.

At ten o’clock he can’t bear to wait any longer. She shuts off his call. She’s face to face with the doctor, he tells himself. She’s sitting there looking at the doctor. Last time the results were as good as they could be at that point; today she has to be declared completely cured. She seemed to assume the results would be given to her immediately.

For another half-hour he paces the floors and stairs of their house, faster and faster, then he calls again. And again when she fails to answer.

‘Yes?’ she says, her voice powerless.

Seagulls, he thinks. Is that the sea? ‘Why didn’t you ring?’

‘I’m on the beach.’ De Panne, perhaps, where her parents live. Did she want them to be the first to comfort her? He can’t imagine so.

‘What did the doctor say? Not good?’

‘No.’

An ice-cold fish is tossed into his stomach cavity, where it thrashes for life.

He can guess which part of the beach she’s walking on: the broadest, between the campsite, the dunes, and the sea. ‘Stay there,’ he says, deaf to her protests.

He curses this region of winding lanes now; if a ring road ran north from their house he’d be with her in fifteen minutes. It takes twice that long.

After he’s parked the van, though, he finds her almost immediately. She’s sitting cross-legged on the dry part of the beach. This is where they usually come for a breath of fresh air after visiting her parents.

The way she stands up—reserved, ill at ease—prompts a sympathy that softens him. He won’t leave her side. Their raincoats fly up in a wild dance as they embrace.

‘What exactly did the doctor say?’

With a dismissive gesture, she turns away from him and starts walking.

‘The last test was fine, wasn’t it? Is it back now? At the same place? How’s that possible?’

She shrugs. He presses her to him again. You generally only believe there’s a pit called tough luck after you fall into it. The unfairness that makes such a fall possible. His anger turns against him. He’s forty—how can he still let himself be misled by a few months of joy and inner harmony? He’d secretly started to believe in an autobiographical success story. A light that shone inside him. Fundamental well-being. Were he to cling to a more clearly defined faith, he’d be convinced he was being punished now for managing to enjoy personal happiness in recent months. It’s certainly a bitter warning.

Cat doesn’t want to talk about it. Not now. Nor does she want to visit her parents, calling them the worst option after bad news, a view he can only endorse.

He doesn’t understand why she wants to keep him out of this, so he asks her to explain. They’ve shared plenty of misery in the past. But she insists: no need to cancel his appointment with his new client, she’d like to stay here alone for a while in the wind and sea air. ‘There’s no way I’m going to do myself any harm,’ she says finally, irritated.

Everything has a heaviness about it when he reaches the van. It doesn’t feel right to drive off and leave her at this point. Being unwanted gnaws at him. THE LAST STRAWBERRIES! he reads—a message chalked on a sign beside the road, a metaphor, the title of a song about this day on which things turned their back on him after all, completely unexpectedly. He mustn’t have such melodramatic thoughts. He stops at the side of the road, close to a muddy ditch, to allow a monstrous agricultural vehicle to thunder past. Everyone is eager to share their distress with him except the woman he loves. It seems a reprehensible thought, but he’s unable to shake it off.

The woman is transplanting a hydrangea in her front garden, between a small model windmill and a low holly hedge. She’s about sixty and her head is down. The pinafore she’s wearing makes her as timeless as this district, on the boundary between fairy tale and destitution. He loves the old houses, especially the small ones, slightly lopsided, with their postage-stamp gardens filled with kitsch and the glories of nature, every sundial so polished, every calyx so diligently propped that even the most cynical guardian of good taste couldn’t help but be moved by it. The care this woman devotes to her little garden certainly moves Alphonse. Perhaps he’s more receptive to it now that his mood has sunk so low.

Then she looks up at him and he’s startled by his own sorrow, which he sees magnified and stretched like a reflection in a fairground mirror. She smiles, the woman, but inside her deep eye sockets lie heaps and heaps of something else.

He introduces himself, reminds her of the room he’s agreed to take in hand. It’s just one room and she’s called Madeleine Claeys—it all comes back to him now.

‘Yes, thank you,’ she says, or rather sighs, in a hoarse monotone; she must be deeply tired. ‘I’ll show you the room.’

He walks inside behind her and up a narrow flight of stairs. Unlike the front garden, the house is badly neglected. The wallpaper in the stairwell cries out for replacement—it might well be older than he is—but he never makes suggestions.

Oh, so it’s one of those stories, he thinks as she pushes the door open for him. The silenced child’s room from another era, radiant with weekly cleansed disuse, the smooth patchwork quilt over the narrow mattress, washed every year, the ancient teddy bear and scary clown on the pillow gazing at the stains on the wallpaper, the only interruption to which is a black-and-white photo of a sweet little boy of about two years old. A beautiful child, it goes without saying. An old one, though, thinks Alphonse.

‘My brother. He’s dead.’ The woman’s rasping voice sounds decisive.

He nods, doesn’t wait for any further information, not after this morning. ‘Do you want it to look the way it does now or to be unrecognizable?’

‘The latter,’ she says. ‘The walls, ceiling, floor, skirting board, door, and door frame. All of it. The furniture can go into the next room for now. If you see anything you can use, just take it with you.’ She stiffly descends the stairs.

After he’s emptied the room he calls Cat, who to his exasperation and sickening concern doesn’t answer. Thirst plagues him. After the day’s emotional start he forgot to bring a bottle of water. Since leaving him in the dead child’s room, the woman has not shown her face.

His large feet diagonal on the narrow stairs, he cautiously goes down. He knocks on the door and opens it on receiving her feeble permission. She’s sitting at a window looking out on the front garden, in a rattan chair with a tall back to it, smoking a cigarette. She glances round at him and waves at the cupboard above the sink when he asks for a glass of water. His thank-you doesn’t seem to get through to her. She’s staring at a blackbird on the window ledge, then she looks at her fingers, holding the burning stub of the cigarette, which she puts out amid the pile in the ashtray.

Still no one who feels like talking to me, he thinks. Perhaps it was something I used to have that’s gone. The blackbird flaps wildly against the glass.

In the room he looks again at the portrait of the little brother.

Insufficient daylight comes into the room and the chandelier is feeble. His hands are clumsier than normal and the results messy. When he tries to check whether a skirting board is firmly fixed to the wall it breaks in two without the slightest resistance, emitting a rotten burp.

He looks at the piece still attached to the wall by clusters of bent nails and curses the generations of DIY enthusiasts who make his work more difficult, and not just in this house. They hide the pipes of a defective floor-heating system but forget to release the pressure. They concrete over television cables, saw through supporting beams, brick up drains. Here the floor isn’t level, an imperfection that the unequal skirting boards are intended to resolve by means of an optical illusion but in fact only emphasize. And what have the weekend dabblers stuffed into the gap between wall and floor? Paper?

They’re letters, or at least full envelopes. He pulls them out of the groove one by one, all the way from the corner where two walls and the floor come together to a point where the skirting board is still clinging on. Perhaps there are more; he could wrench all the skirting loose. First he wants to see what’s inside. If it’s money, this may be a means of testing him, to see whether he’ll pocket it. Something like that happened to him once, at a previous job.

When he opens a letter, the graph paper tears in half. There’s a number at the top—‘1972’—the year perhaps. Then writing, in an irregular hand, switching from blue to black ballpoint halfway. People who manage to overcome dyslexia develop their brains more thoroughly than people who don’t suffer from the disorder, a teacher once impressed upon him. In his case the letters continue to jump over one another like playful lambs. Handwriting demands more effort than print, and Madeleine doesn’t seem to care about punctuation. It’s only when he reads the sentences for the fourth time that their meaning starts to come through.

‘i still see him every day after school i have to mum not any better dad no news and hes older than i was then no one can ever get used to it my Moustaki record broken in two dix-sept ans et vivre à chaque instant ses caprices d’enfant ses désirs exigeants but i am seventeen that doesnt matter itll stay the way it is tough luck’

He opens a second envelope, also unmarked. On the paper, ruled this time, is a neat ‘1987’ and the message: ‘everything the same without that shouting it would be different try to enjoy nature’.

It must be her abbreviated diary. In 1990 she writes: ‘he would have a deficiency something remarkable but it wouldnt show colour blindness for example i would always be the only one who could calm him the parents of his last girlfriend would have a riding school and after the relationship was over because she cheated on him i would say that i always thought she stank of the stables i would also inspect his clothes tennis hed have a talent for that but not enough ambition because he also benefitted from his youth and his trainer would have a hard time with that we would always like looking a lot at certain television programmes he and i but he less and less so we would slowly discuss less and less about them but talk a lot about the garden and sometimes about cooking and we wouldnt mind that’

His telephone fishes him out from among the letters. Cat. What is he reading, sitting here? He has to regain control, or at least hold chaos at bay. He puts the phone to his ear before he’s had a chance to read the name of the caller.

It’s not Cat, it’s Duran. He knows straight away that he’s talking to the young man of the finger but doesn’t immediately understand what he wants.

‘I got your number from the Yellow Pages,’ Duran begins. ‘It’s only because I have a chance to go to Sapporo. With a group from Argentina.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I’m going to Japan. It’s much bigger out there.’

‘What is?’

‘Ice sculpture. Sapporo, haven’t you heard about it? They found me via internet, the Argentines. They were selected months ago. They rang me on an old number and mailed me. I saw it just in time. So I can still go.’

‘Fantastic. I didn’t know your sculptures were on the internet. I thought no one was allowed to see them.’

‘I like to keep this separate from the shop,’ he says seriously. ‘Anyhow, I’m in the Argentine group. They’re very good. They want Durans from all over the world. And Shaka Duran is one of them.’

‘I can bring him round.’

‘I don’t like to ask. It was a present. I tried to make a new Shaka Duran but I can’t with my bandaged hand. Otherwise I’d make them there, like the other participants, but in the circumstances I’ll have to take them with me, see?’

‘When do you need him?’

‘As soon as possible. The moment I’m back from Japan he’ll be yours again. Thanks.’

‘I’ll be round tomorrow morning early, all right?’

‘That’s really very good of you.’

He has to go to Cat, even though he’s done far less work than he intended. It’s a long time since he felt a sense of embarrassment steal over him. It permeates the general unease of the day. Not only has he done little work, he’s breached this woman’s confidentiality, although that didn’t occur to him as he was reading. He decides it would be pathetic to stuff the envelopes back into the crack so he piles them up on the floor.

‘I’ve found some letters,’ he says as he walks into her living room.

She’s still sitting in the same position, but now with a flowery shawl over her shoulders.

‘Just take them with you,’ she says, her expression shrouded in cigarette smoke.

‘Ça va,’ he says, in no fit state to think of a better answer.

He doesn’t want to take the letters into the house so he leaves them on the passenger seat.

Cat has cooked. She talks about her parents, how she’ll go and see them this week after all, and about the translations she’s working on: a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic and a folder for a timber company. She thinks it’s absurd that she finds herself financially obliged to take on the latter sort of jobs. As he’s aware.

He wants to ask her if she’s scared, but despite her communicative mood, which makes him think of Madeleine’s notes, she continues to avoid eye contact. In bed she falls asleep immediately. Several hours later he wakes aroused and confused with her lips around his member. She licks and glides, climbs him and rides him; he can’t keep up with her, wants to slow down, to turn on the light to see her, but she’s a whirlwind, a beast with a hundred tongues that gives him no chance and then suddenly escapes him again. He throws an arm around her warm stillness and hopes for a night without dreams.