Читать книгу Thirty Days - Annelies Verbeke - Страница 15

-

24

With the morning light, he strokes her back. He needs to talk to her, soon, to penetrate the unfamiliar shield she’s put up, but now she must sleep, for as long as she can.

Wash, dress, coffee and newspaper: acts you perform at fixed times fail to stimulate the memory sufficiently to be remembered, but on mornings like this, at the start of pleasant days, the rituals take a firmer lead.

He walks around as he eats his bread with chocolate spread, looking for his shoes. The sense of having forgotten something creeps over him. He walks to the van in the hope it’s nothing important and drives out of the street more slowly than usual.

For the past three seasons a boy with some kind of intellectual disability has stood in front of the last house. He addresses Alphonse as ‘scallywag’. He hasn’t been there for several days. Cancer again, no doubt. He tries to shake the word out of his head. ‘No. No,’ he mumbles. It’s a long time since he last talked to himself.

Then, just before the second road junction, he knows what it is he’s forgotten: Shaka Duran. He turns the van and drives back by the same route, this time at walking pace, behind a combine harvester. Once again he’ll get to his client later than intended. He squeezes the wheel, telling himself there’s no sense in getting upset.

It’s still quiet in the kitchen. When you visit your house unexpectedly it sometimes feels like someone else’s. He looks for the freezer box containing Shaka Duran and opens it carefully to check the sculpture is still intact—even the delicate spear is undamaged. With the box in a plastic bag between two freezer packs, he hurries out again.

‘Merci, merci!’ The owner of Pita Merci looks immensely tired. ‘Watch out, it’s slippery there.’ The floor is wet and clean, and in the corner there’s a bucket of water that smells of roses. Duran cautiously opens one corner of the lid. He nods his approval, closes the box again and carries it solemnly to the freezer.

‘What about your finger? When do the stitches come out?’ Alphonse asks his back.

‘In five days. But I’ll be in Japan then. They can do it anywhere, the doctor says.’

‘Ha!’ snorts a voice from behind the counter.

When Alphonse takes a step to one side and stretches his neck he sees a sullen sixty-something sitting on a low chair, head resting on an arm, the arm on a knee.

‘This is my father,’ says Duran.

‘A pleasure,’ says Alphonse.

The father gives a dour nod in response and tosses a few Turkish words in Duran’s direction. Duran gives a reticent answer, then adds something placatory.

‘My father doesn’t think it’s a good idea for me to go to Japan. We’ve been talking about it all night. He doesn’t see the point. I’m grateful he’s willing to keep the shop going while I’m away.’

The father stands up brusquely and shouts something at his son, gesturing toward Alphonse.

‘He says I’m not Argentinian. He thinks ice sculptures are for children and he’d like to know your opinion.’

‘I think they’re beautiful,’ says Alphonse. ‘Cleverly done.’

Duran translates triumphantly. The father raises his hands to the ceiling and shouts again.

‘“Another lunatic,” says my father.’

With his next statement the father stands up and puts one finger up close to his son’s nose.

‘He’s telling me to stop translating.’

‘I have to go, anyhow. Good luck in Japan. Good day to you, sir.’

‘Merci,’ say father and son in unison, both slightly thrown by their audience’s sudden departure.

Madeleine Claeys pretends to be lost in thought as the van comes up her drive, but behind the reflections in the window separating her from the front garden she keeps a careful watch on the driver. He’s a man who doesn’t like to arrive late. The fact that it’s nevertheless happened for the second time must have to do with some disturbance to the peace that usually surrounds him. You can tell that just by looking: he’s a person surrounded by peace. She wants to hear it from a person like this.

He’s startled by how quickly she opens the door.

‘Sorry,’ he begins, but she interrupts him.

‘Have you read them?’

Only then does he think back to the pile on the passenger seat. He can’t remember seeing it there this morning.

‘Only a few,’ he says. ‘These are strange days. Do you want me to read them?’

‘I want you to read everything, then tell me about them. Before you do any more work.’ Despite her slight stutter she says it with complete conviction.

He agrees and goes back to the van. The pile of letters is still there. He picks it up and arranges with Madeleine that he’ll read them all in the room and then come and find her.

They are variations on a single theme.

‘1993 when i sit next to him i draw little hearts on the ball of his thumb with my finger i casually say something about cowardly men and that the hands can go slowly but the years fast in the end and that i accept it can go even quicker but that i wont leave him alone i often say that i wont leave him alone i tell him about what ive seen that day or the night before its never much a swallows nest or once a procession a fanfare mostly i say nothing and wipe his mouth or look its no good really those eyes turn but real contact what is that i stroke him comb his hair usually with earplugs in because i feel i deserve routine and earplugs’

‘2001 in the end it comes down to limiting damage done to others which is why i agreed to it my brothers vocal cords were cut last month neighbours at the day centre have been complaining about the shouting and screaming for years and in the end even the social workers spoke to me about it i dont blame anyone he did shout most of the day never a whole day not year in year out and i know that for them it wasnt mainly about decibels but about how he shouted because anyone who heard it thought he was in unbearable pain now you only see that and you have to come close.’

When he’s read all of them he goes downstairs.

‘Gin and tonic?’ she asks. He nods and takes a cigarette from the pack she’s holding out. He smokes just a few a year. He waits on the poof that belongs with the sofa near the window until she comes to sit next to him. She puts his glass on the side table and her own to her lips.

He tells her the story she knows, about her younger brother who was born normal but after a fall or an infection would have been better off dead. He tells her she never doubted it was her fault, that her mother convinced her of that, blaming her not just for her brother’s condition but for her father’s disappearance as well. She’s never dared allow herself to see that there are a lot of things that guilt has nothing to do with, that a child can be inattentive and inattentiveness fatal. That events don’t even require inattention in order to be fatal. She was the only one to go and visit him every day, out of love and to punish herself. Sometimes a partner threatened to come between them, but never for long. Anyone who didn’t disappear of their own accord she chased away with double-glazed loneliness, her world of bedsores, severed vocal cords, and malicious fate, a sorrow so great and incontrovertible that everyone walked away from it. And that her brother then finally found peace and she went on living, he tells her that too. Now she must set the fire. He’ll paint the room and she must fill the decades that remain to her with what she enjoys, everything she can still love.

He waits for the sobs to subside before wiping back the grey lock hanging over her face.

‘Dropped, that’s what,’ she says.

‘Come on.’

She nods.

Outside, in the long narrow garden at the back of the house, they gather wood. He lights it with thin twigs and one of the letters. It burns quickly in the dry air. Without any hesitation Madeleine throws the other letters on, one by one so as not to smother the fire, until she’s finished and takes his hand. He doesn’t let go until the last blackened fragments have turned to white ash.

The rest of the day he wets the wallpaper in the room. It seems to have been waiting for his paint scraper and it makes way without complaint for walls flayed smooth. He brushes flakes of paint from the ceiling, sands and repaints the parquet and the skirting boards. At the end of the day he finds himself inside a cube that’s waiting, naked and buoyant, for a new coat.

He doesn’t see Madeleine until he’s clearing up. She called out to him earlier that she was going shopping. He leaves the house promising to be back the next day, while she puts a considerable quantity of pasta away in a cupboard and ice-cream cakes in an empty freezer.

‘Hungry,’ she says.

At home he finds Cat, also looking into an empty freezer compartment, but peering and groping. Her face is tear-stained. The packs of spinach, the bag of croquettes, and the leftovers of soup she’s pulled out stand near her feet weeping too.

He wants to take her in his arms but the scene dissuades him, first because he finds it disturbing, then because of a suspicion that he can explain all this, although he doesn’t yet know how.

‘I’m going crazy,’ she says.

‘No you’re not,’ he says.

‘I no longer know what I dreamed and what’s real. Yesterday I went to get something out of the freezer and I saw a box at the back that seemed to have been hidden there.’

With secret pleasure he decides to let her tell the whole story.

‘When I open it up there’s a little guy made of ice inside, about as big as my forefinger, dressed in a loincloth and a pair of those straw legwarmers, with a shield and a spear. Beautifully made, I’ve never seen anything like it. All ice. No idea if it was supposed to be an African. Its face made it look white. I put it back in the box and thought: I’ll have to ask Alphonse—the fact that I forgot isn’t normal either!’

He sees her dismay—greater, crazier than he’s used to in her—and wants to interrupt, but she rattles on.

‘And now it isn’t there, because of course it never was, I’m imagining things and that I imagine things is my own fault!’ She ignores the placatory arms he holds out to her, his lips pouting to say something. ‘Because I’m not sick, or only in my head. I’m not sick any longer, I lied.’

What is she saying?

He looks at the rising water in her eyes, watches it pour over the rims.

‘The tests?’ he begins.

‘I’m cured.’

‘But that’s great, isn’t it?’ He doesn’t know what he’s feeling, doesn’t know who this woman is or why she’s allowed him to live in hell for the past two days. Before her sobbing intensifies, her expression mimics his own: a mouth that slips from smile to horror and back again.

‘That’s what you wanted more than anything, isn’t it? To be healthy? It’s what I wanted more than anything!’ The tighter his embrace, the smaller and more angular her body becomes, until he lets go because he no longer recognizes it. ‘Why?’ He needs to know. After all the youth it cost her to defeat the enemy, why does she want to collaborate with it? Is this a version of the Stockholm syndrome? ‘Why did you lie?’

‘Before I got ill it always seemed as if I was going to lose you.’

He can’t believe she’s saying this.

‘No. Don’t go away now.’ Sure enough, he’s at the door, in the hall, covering the last metre to his van. ‘It’s better to talk about it straight away,’ he hears her call through the half-darkness before the car door cuts off her voice. He thinks so too, in theory, but it seems his foot wants to press the accelerator and he has to flee any delay that could bring him to a halt.

He wonders how come the radio is tuned to a classical channel. ‘Liszt,’ says a voice by way of a starting shot. He knows little about classical music. Is it pure chance that even the music is suddenly different from anything he knows? He’s no idea where he’s driving to, but he does know that he has to drive and that a shaft of beauty is filling the car. The piano sounds so lovely at first, so orderly, to the point of pampering. Night falls over the endless rows of trees—what kind of trees? are they ash?—on both sides of the road, trees whose leaves are changing and then letting go because they’ve been sucked dry by the trees, which made them to store food, to eat from when winter comes, because trees know how to survive. He wants them to embrace what the music says, to pamper him, to make him turn round. But a small rodent has crept up to the highest piano keys and it’s now multiplying and mice are hurrying in dense throngs up the neat stalks, out of the ground into the sky, and when they throw themselves from the branches they become descending bells, then bell-ringing that catches the sky unawares. The twilight dissolves into night.

He turns off the music and leaves the engine running. Was it true what she said, that she might have lost him at any moment before she got sick? It was true. He remembers the turmoil of times past, the thirst, recalls a firework competition he took part in with friends, coincidence really, not even their style, a random detail that strikes him as symbolic of those days: a firework competition. There were loud nights with lots of movement, with stages and audiences, for him, with crowds dancing on the spot, ogling at women, smiling, full of disbelief about how he met his girlfriend.