Читать книгу Chaconne - Diana Blackwood - Страница 9
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Body and Soul
ON A WET SEPTEMBER evening in 1981, Eleanor’s sanctioned life in Europe was about to begin. She was not a gawping tourist but a resident, or would be as soon as she had her permit. A job of sorts awaited her, and tomorrow Julien would take her to the studio flat in Rue Dauphine. But tonight, as he had explained on leaving the Gare du Nord, they were going to celebrate their reunion in a little hotel in the Latin Quarter.
After so much yearning and imagining, sustained for two years across the earth’s vast distances, Eleanor and Julien were now a couple in a dark blue Peugeot, breathing the same polluted air and driving through the same rain towards a solidifying of expectation. On two occasions at red lights, and once between gear changes, he took her hand and kissed it. She felt tipsy with jet lag. Light and movement taunted her like the aura of a migraine: she had to close her eyes against the shop lights cast back by slick streets and the reckless manoeuvrings of pedestrians.
He dropped her at the hotel and went to search for somewhere to park, and in the time he was gone she checked into the room and fell into animal oblivion under the shower. On his return he announced that he was starving: how about Vietnamese? Lying on the bed, barelegged and partly clothed, she arched her back voluptuously and let her bent leg fall open. She needed him to lunge at her, to say all the things she had been longing to hear. He did lunge, more or less, but he said not quite enough to satisfy her, and for her there was only pale pleasure in their lovemaking.
Back in the hotel lobby after dinner, Julien handed her the key to the room and said he had to make a quick phone call. The telephone was under the curve of the staircase. Their room was on the second floor, but Eleanor climbed to just past the point where she was hidden from below. It was more out of old habit than suspicion or curiosity that she stopped and waited. As a child she had taken to eavesdropping in the hope of hearing something about her father from Mavis or her grandmother. She had heard many things – how babies born to heroin-addicted mothers screamed in withdrawal, how cruelly the ‘Japs’ had treated prisoners of war – but never what she sought.
Bonsoir, maman. Julien was telling his mother that he wouldn’t be home tonight because he’d decided to stay at Jean-Marc’s after all. They were working on a project together, remember? Eleanor did not wait for the deferential affection of his parting words.
Once, and only once, when Eleanor had wounded her with a glib deflection, had Ruth become angry with her. “You’re not cold, you’re not unaffectionate, you’re not ungiving … You just withhold too much. And don’t tell me it’s all to do with your mother. Of course I know that. But I’m your friend, not your mother, and you’re not a child any more, so just open up a bit, will you?”
Eleanor had apologised, meek with shame. Ah, but restraint, she thought now in the hotel room, restraint was the virtuous twin of withholding. Restraint was the child of discipline and diplomacy; restraint got all the praise. As if tasting bile, she held her tongue about the phone call.
Later Julien sank into sleep like a man with an uncurdled conscience. Beside him, as she waited to be sure he was truly sleeping, Eleanor remembered the first night she and Ruth had spent in Paris on the fourth floor of a one-star hotel. She had been drifting towards unconsciousness when Ruth said something. Eleanor had grumpily removed one earplug: now what?
“How would we get out of here if there was a fire? There’s no fire escape. We’d be trapped.”
“We could go down the stairs,” said Eleanor.
“But the fire might funnel up the stairs. They’re made of wood, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Then we’d jump out the window onto something.”
“But the fire brigade might not get here in time to hold out the something. Why are there no fire escapes? It’s criminal. Do you realise that in the Parisian region there are almost as many people as in the whole of Australia? Imagine them all burping, farting, ejaculating, excreting. Imagine the sheer quantities of shit in the sewers. Imagine for a moment what it takes in energy and resources to get food and water and electricity to all these people. It’s a nightmare. Paris is one enormous, vulnerable ghetto … You can put your earplugs back in now. Good night.”
She had not expected to miss Ruth quite so soon.
Julien was sleeping serenely beside her. He had refused to go to bed leaving the shutterless window open: j’ai horreur des courants d’air. But Eleanor could not fall asleep in a room that was sealed against the outside; would not stew in her own CO2, as Mavis might have put it. She slipped out of bed and tiptoed naked to the window. Glancing at Julien and nervously biting her lower lip, she drew the curtains as slowly and quietly as she could. The window had the usual tall halves that opened inwards. She twisted the knob and opened the two panes just enough for her to feel the damp night air on her breasts. She stayed there listening to the hiss of rain and the background noises of the city until she began to shiver; then she carefully arranged the window so that the left half snuggled securely into its mate, allowing the passage of air from above and below. She closed the curtains to conceal what she had done. Julien would be none the wiser, and she could sleep at last.
In his letters Julien had made much of the studio flat in Rue Dauphine. At first Eleanor had assumed they would both live in it, that being together at last meant his razor and her things would share space in the bathroom. But two months earlier, having flown like a disoriented swallow into another antipodean winter, he had explained that their moving in together would be a good way for Eleanor to get off on the wrong foot with his mother, who had never quite shaken off her Catholic upbringing. Between the births of his sister and himself, he had reminded Eleanor, his mother had suffered five miscarriages, although quite what should be inferred from that sad tally was not made clear. As for the father, agnostic and worldly though he might be, he would view cohabitation as nothing more than a foolish distraction and therefore a threat to Julien’s chances in the agrégation, the examination that guaranteed the elect a teaching position for life.
Eleanor had met neither parent, despite having spent the best part of a month – the January after she and Julien had fallen in love – in the family’s house near Versailles. Monsieur and Madame Foucher were in Mexico visiting the sister and her children, and from time to time they would phone to check on Julien. He would reassure them that he was eating well and working hard and keeping the place in some sort of order. He had instructed Eleanor not to answer the telephone; it was simpler that way. If he was out, she should not pick up unless it rang three times, and then four, and then rang again, which would be his signal. The cleaning woman had gone back to Portugal for a holiday, and no one seemed to know Eleanor was there except Jean-Marc, Jean-Louis, Jean-Christophe and Daniel, all members of the communist cell at that grand institution to which Julien had been admitted, the École Normale Supérieure at St-Cloud. When she had the house to herself, Eleanor would peer at the family photographs in their silver frames, studying with an anthropological attention to detail the cut of the sister’s wedding dress and the composition of her bouquet, the embroidery on a christening robe, Julien and his father on skis, grinning. So much normality made her feel like a gargoyle.
At that time Julien was writing a long essay with the piquant title of ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un sujet?’ Sometimes he would say, when he had tired of investigating what a subject was and was not, and she had returned from walking the dog or pottering about on her own in a museum, that he needed her, camarade mon amour, to de-intellectualise him, to bring him back to his body, to life, to love. At such moments she felt whole and radiant; everything, or almost everything, seemed to make sense. There were, admittedly, certain objects in the house that scandalised her, though in fairness to Julien, they did not belong to him: the entire shell of a large sea turtle, polished to a sheen; a zebra skin mounted on a wall; a white baby grand that inhabited the formal living room with its shrouded furniture. The white piano alone, she had told Ruth, might account for his rejection of the ideological intoxication of the dominant class and his consequent resolve to live in indignation and political engagement with the proletariat. Worst of all, the piano was badly, mockingly, out of tune.
Eleanor was disappointed that her building lacked a concierge, that anyone could buzz and enter without being noticed and assessed. Instead there was only a grubby alcove that housed the letterboxes.
An ill-lit corridor led to a small, irregular courtyard that smelled faintly of urine.
“Dog or human?” she enquired.
“What do you mean?” said Julien.
The wooden staircase wound with a dizzying tightness, and the skirting that ran alongside it was the colour of spleen. Someone was cooking onions. A radio murmured behind one door; a whiff of Gauloises hovered about another. A middle-aged African in a shabby grey suit coat and a beanie trudged downstairs past them. When Eleanor greeted him, he looked up in surprise and gave a shy smile. Bonjour, monsieur, madame.
Studio, it turned out, was just a real-estate word for one room. It was on the third floor. Wasn’t there a story about Handel trying to toss a mutinous prima donna out a third-floor window? The room had a single bed against the far wall and a solitary window overlooking the courtyard. Your fate would be uncertain if you had to leap in desperation from that window, though a suicidal Schumann had flung himself from his fourth-floor apartment and survived.
“I brought you sheets and a quilt,” said Julien, “and I put some plates and cutlery in the cupboard. So, do you like the room? It’s a great neighbourhood. The Pont Neuf is at the end of the street.”
It was no more than eight strides across the greenish-yellow linoleum from the door to the bed. She would go bonkers in here. No wonder there were so many people on the streets: no one could bear such confinement.
“Of course. Oh, two hotplates and a cute little fridge. Two chairs and a little table. And even a bookcase.” Her voice rang ridiculously false – couldn’t he hear it? And where would she hang her clothes?
The narrow door to what must be the bathroom wore decades of cheap white paint. She turned the half-sized elliptical brass handle, more suited to a linen cupboard, and entered the cramped, tiled room. For a moment she thought she must have missed something, but the more she looked, the more the shower, like Piglet, wasn’t there. Bidet, toilet, handbasin – all the same off-white – towel rail, mirror, cabinet … Dismay began to bubble in her chest. But he had gone to such trouble to find this place! In Paris tens of thousands of people probably lived without a shower, and many endured worse privations, huddled in maids’ rooms under the canopy of zinc rooftops. Anyway, there might be such a thing as a communal shower somewhere in the building.
Nelson Mandela, Nelson Mandela, she repeated. That was a mantra against triviality that she and Ruth had come up with one day when the landlord was bothering them about something. She looked at her anxious face in the mirror and conjured Mandela in his prison cell one more time, but that only made her feel stranded and helpless. Besides, he was probably allowed showers. Then she thought of the funny letter Ruth would write back to her about the ablutions cupboard. She told herself firmly that Paris was what she had wished for, and Paris was what she now had. The room was transitional but also cautionary, reminding her that for the time being she must be patient.
“So … do you suppose there’s a shower somewhere in the building for people who don’t have one in their rooms?”
“I’d be surprised. I’ve never heard of such a thing. It’s not the Cité Universitaire.”
“There’s no shower in the bathroom.”
“I know that. There’s a bidet.”
“So what do people do?”
“They wash.”
“Or not, as the case may be.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, you know, Ruth used to say …”
“You’re acting like a spoiled American. There’s one next door, incidentally.”
“How do you know that?”
“I had the misfortune of running into him one day.”
“No, I mean how do you know he’s spoiled?”
Julien flushed. “Listen, lots of people would be thrilled to have this studio. You have no idea how hard it is to find somewhere affordable to live in Paris. You’re an innocent from a materialistic country.” He sounded twitchy and condescending.
“I know, I know. I’m sorry. But it’s only human nature to …” The house where Julien lived had two and a half rather fancy bathrooms, after all.
“There is no human nature.”
“Oh yes, I forgot.” How easy it was to smother sarcasm in a language not your own. What she had in fact forgotten, in all the long months of separation, was his taste for dubious aphorisms.
“So when can I meet your parents?” she asked sweetly.
“When you’ve settled in and you know what your timetable is. Speaking of which, I must get going …”
“Pas de repos pour les braves.” Odd that it was ‘no rest for the wicked’ in English. She wanted to cling to him, to blot out everything but the two of them, to plead with him not to leave her alone in this room just yet. Instead she stretched her lips into a quick, false smile.
“You should rest. You look worn out.” He reached out with one hand and smoothed her hair distractedly, which made her want to back away like a recalcitrant child and to squirm like a puppy for more. “A bientôt.”
But he did not say how soon he would see her again. When the door – plain, brown, modern – closed behind him, Paris receded, drained of all splendour and possibility. Plumping herself down on the unmade bed, she acknowledged the punishing mood that was upon her, the familiar gradient that led to a deep pit of despondency. At the same time the daylight Eleanor, the person who managed to get by in the world and could even slip into insouciance when it was called for, noticed that the mattress appeared to be new and was therefore unworthy of her squeamishness. She folded her arms about herself and sank her torso into the pile of sheets and quilt. Why was there no pillow? And why had Julien not made the bed? She remembered how Ruth would be visited, now and then, by what she called The Utter Pointlessness of Everything. TUPE had made perfect sense to Eleanor, especially when she had essays to write, but she had never spoken of her own recurring affliction: a fuzzy sense of being shut out of her proper story, as if she had failed at youth, been found wanting by life itself. Once or twice she had considered trying to describe the elusive state for Ruth, but she was afraid her friend might think her self-indulgent – or was that Mavis’s word, or even Julien’s? – to probe her own hollowness when measurable suffering and injustice were never far away and even hedonism made more sense than introspection in a world that could be blown up next week.
From the direction of the courtyard came a baby’s cry that swelled to a wail of desolation. Eleanor sat up, her body stiffening. Pick her up, someone, please. Hold her, sing to her, make things right. The baby fell silent. Infant vocal passion had dragged Eleanor back to the gummy surface of the life that must be lived. What she had to do was to go out into the streets among all those people and find the nearest market and Monoprix; buy a pillow and a pillowcase, a radio, a saucepan, food. Create order and sustenance, the wherewithal of staying alive: that was what she must do now.
She was readying herself to go out when someone knocked at the door. Perhaps it was the spoiled American come to invite her in for coffee.
It was Julien, bearing a gift: the second volume of Soboul’s Histoire de la Révolution française. He had meant to give it to her last night but had left it under the front seat of his car. Also, to make life easier for her as there was no telephone in the studio, he had drawn up a list of times when he would be free to take her phone calls at his parents’ house. He had put the list with the book and forgotten about it. How lovely she was, he said, as if he had forgotten that too. He kissed her, told her that he was glad she was here, that seeing her at the Gare du Nord was like falling in love with her all over again.
All traces of disapproval had melted in the heat of his wanting her. He pushed her gently towards the bed, but the bare mattress looked slatternly and for some reason made her think of Flaubert, who made her think of Mademoiselle Vatnaz, who made her think of Ruth’s tears of bitter rage. Her desire for him subsided. She sensed, too, that if she let him inside her now, she would founder.
Pulling away from his embrace was a victory over herself, not him. “I need to go out,” she said, brisk and no-nonsense as her mother. “I’ve got a lot to do and so have you. Do you know where the nearest Monoprix is?”
He hadn’t the faintest idea.
Eleanor Weston was not someone who complained about rain, even when floods swept away topsoil and sheep and one might, without affront to drought-stricken farmers, mutter against the incontinent continent. Rain in childhood had brought respite from the clamouring world. Like music, it gave its blessing to inward wanderings. On wet days her grandmother would bake something special; good rain lifted her mother’s spirits too. It drew out the enemy, and Mavis would put on her gumboots and patrol the front garden, crying ha! with each squash of a gastropod.
Once, after a week of heavy downpours during which some hillside houses slipped from their foundations, Eleanor opened the front door and saw a tortoise trudging its way along the driveway. She had begged for a cat or a dog and been refused both: a cat for its murderous intent towards birds and lizards; a dog for its designs on the chooks, who by day roamed free in the back garden. Now this creature had come to her, and she felt chosen. She fed the tortoise scraps of raw meat and sang to it while it ate. It lived for years among the ferns by the pond until something called it away, by which time she was reading Thomas Hardy and was quite interested in the workings of fate.
That September in Paris was the wettest on record, and everywhere Eleanor went people were puckering their lips and complaining. Oh là là / dis donc / mais c’est pas vrai, il pleut encore! She would stand among flattened cigarette butts in neighbourhood cafés, leaning her elbow on the zinc bar and observing the deft movements of the barman while she listened to the flow of words and the hiss of the coffee machine. She would order un café, not because a few mouthfuls of bitter espresso were what she really wanted – that would have been un grand crème served at a table where she could linger as long as she liked – but because it was cheap and gave her the right to use the lavatory. When the barman slid the little white cup and saucer towards her, with the two wrapped rectangular prisms of sugar, she would smile and slide the sugar right back to him, watching for the spark in his eyes that told her she was worth looking at. She needed to be reassured not so much that she was attractive but that she was there, that she had not somehow gone missing in all her mapless meandering through the city. The café conversations, for the most part, were prosaic: the rain, snatches of impenetrable gossip and, depending on the neighbourhood, the odd declamation for or against Mitterrand and his nationalisation of the banks. Someone commented that there were fewer beggars around with the wet weather, and that had to be a good thing. It seemed that the scintillating verbal exchanges on which the French were said to pride themselves were taking place elsewhere – just out of reach in the next ruelle.
It rained on the day Eleanor went to the embassy to fetch her Australian information kit for her conversation classes. The embassy woman commented tartly that it was a shame not to have made the effort to attend the orientation and meet the other assistants. Eleanor nearly said that she had not come to Paris to spend time with Australians. It rained on the day she queued for her carte de séjour and on the day she caught the train to an outer southern suburb to meet the principal of the lycée to which the French Ministry of Education had assigned her. The English teachers, the three she met, were polite but incurious: another year, another assistante. Only one spoke to her in English, composing stiff sentences that bristled with British newsreader vowels. The vowels made Eleanor self-conscious; to her own ears she sounded like her cousins from Far North Queensland. (She had worked hard, growing up, to tame her diphthongs, for she had wanted to speak like the people who introduced classical music on ABC radio and not like her mother. It occurred to her that now she was in Europe, she might aim a little higher: BBC Radio 4 announcers, perhaps, her companions over breakfast.)
The principal invited her to his office and offered her, at eleven o’clock in the morning, a small glass of pineau des Charentes, which he declared to be a drink for jeunes filles. A girls’ drink! How should she respond to the man? Eleanor had university friends who seemed to operate out of some secret rule-book of feminism, but she lacked their brash conviction and willingness to offend. As she could not decide if he was slimy, or silly and harmless, or harmlessly slimy and silly, she replied mildly that she was well out of adolescence and if the drink was very sweet, no thank you all the same.
On a day that opened like an autumn poem, with wisps of cloud in an azure sky, a day when she would have liked to catch a bus to Neuilly and stroll in the English garden at Bagatelle, she forced herself to attend to her conscience. To bolster her chances of being selected for an English language assistantship, she had written on her application form that she planned to study comparative literature at the University of Paris III. It sounded plausible and European, and she had thought how pleasant it would be to have mint tea at the mosque or coffee in Rue Mouffetard between classes. She had also declared on the form that she would return to Australia to teach. While that was not an outright lie, it was also unlikely to be the truth, and it troubled her just enough to make her enquire about enrolment. Also, there was Julien to consider. Despite his enthusiasm for the proletariat, he preferred the company of people who were flexing their intellects. (Not that he considered the study of literature to be true intellectual labour: la littérature peut être comprise mais n’aide pas à comprendre.) Teaching twelve hours a week of English conversation was simply not enough to fill a respectable life. Indeed, the hours were theoretically designed to enable foreigners to pursue their studies, provided they could sort out the timetable clashes between teaching and learning. One way or another, therefore, she felt propelled towards comparative literature.
Trying to inhale as little as possible of the unclean air, she walked down Boulevard St-Michel, with its tourists and bookshops and takeaway crêpes, and then turned left into Rue Soufflot. The Panthéon, too zealous and overbearing a building to interest her, reminded her of Julien. She had visited its interior with him on one of the rare occasions that he had accompanied her anywhere in Paris. With his crooked half-smile he had announced that he hoped to be interred in the edifice along with Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo and the other grands hommes of a grateful nation. So Marie Curie was an honorary great man? He supposed she must be. Now, passing the Lycée Henri IV – what with the illustrious dead next door, the very air was heavy with masculine authority – Eleanor imagined the Oxbridge or Harvard male who would be appointed as an English language assistant to that solid old institution. It was a relief to reach Place de la Contrescarpe, intimate and unruffled as a village square. Here there was almost no traffic, and she could resume normal breathing.
As she dawdled down Rue Mouffetard she wondered, not for the first time, why there were so many Greek restaurants in one section and why some of the upper stories of the medieval buildings tilted so far back from the street. Were they built that way, and if not, why hadn’t they collapsed? In the street market she listened to the patois of the locals and the playful cries of the vendors; breathed in the earthy smells and admired the colour and texture in the vegetable displays. Because the morning had a hopeful tint to it, she drank un grand crème at a café table and then ate a golden brioche from Les Panetons.
She was carrying the type of slim shopping basket favoured by French women, and she planned to fill it. The pineapples in the African market just off Mouffetard tempted her briefly, but a pineapple was too much like home, and she was in search of France. At a fromagerie she bought cheese from the Jura and the Pyrenées as well as a goat’s milk cheese from the south in the form of a decapitated pyramid. (She could afford such quality, she assured herself, because she didn’t eat meat.) Behind a card table heaped with wild mushrooms, a squat woman in an old cardigan explained how to prepare a simple fricassée de champignons sauvages. Mademoiselle would also need shallots and parsley and a lemon.
She stepped into the churchyard of St Médard to gain a better view of the ornate mural on the façade of a building opposite. The sun shone like a benediction on the animals and birds in their stylised forest of rich browns; it warmed the arthritic joints of the humans who were taking the air on the churchyard benches. Paris suddenly felt embraceable, beneficent, idiosyncratically hers. After wishing the nearest elderly threesome a good day, she left St Médard, sauntered to the end of Mouffetard, turned right, tittupped down some steps and entered La Vie Claire, whose symbol was the dove of peace. The bell gave a friendly tinkle. Paris was not bursting with vegetarians, let alone the vegans to whom this pungent little shop catered, and the bouncy woman who ran La Vie Claire greeted her cheerily. The unsprayed apples had just come in. Would mademoiselle like to try some vegetable pâté? Eleanor added lentil patties, apples, and a rustic loaf to her basket. Normally she welcomed the woman’s chattiness, but today the shopkeeper mentioned in passing that Paris was surrounded by nuclear reactors. ‘Nuclear’ was a word that in certain couplings – war, fallout, proliferation, energy, family – could drain the joy out of anything. It brought her back to comparative literature and the tiresome task she had been deferring.
If ‘Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III’ had not been up in majuscules above the row of glass doors, Eleanor would have taken the university for a shoddy block of offices. Most of the windows had their blinds down, which gave the place a dull, inward look. Across the road was an undistinguished modern apartment building, whose proximity to Mouffetard offended her. A single tree and a square of grass on either side of the entrance way to the university warned students from the Anglo-Saxon countries not to expect a campus. She entered reluctantly, aware as she moved among the groupuscules of students, a few of whom looked thirtyish and interesting, that she was carrying a basket of groceries like a French housewife. And now, a day or two earlier than expected, came the dragging sensation in her womb, which would be followed soon enough by blood and cramping pain. She had to find the lavatories.
All the privacy of a concentration camp, Ruth had once quipped about something Eleanor had now forgotten. At the time she had been taken aback, but now she just wished Ruth were here to shock her again. The lavatories were unisex, no Dames and Messieurs, which she supposed was something she could get used to. But she did not see how she could ever adjust to the absence of doors to the cubicles. It was the same on the floor above, and the one above that. No doors, nowhere to hide. The damaged doors were stacked in corners, and the rooms seemed to vibrate with the echoes of recent violence. It would take strength to tear those barriers off their hinges, so young men must have done it. Why? To impose their contempt for bourgeois notions of privacy on everyone else? For the wanton pleasure of destroying state property? Or just so they could perve on a young woman as she inserted a tampon? She hated them, whoever they were.
She ran down the central stairway thinking she would leave, but when she reached the first floor she decided to give the university another chance, if only for Julien’s sake. She turned right into the corridor and followed it to the end, having noticed someone else do the same. Off to the left, in an abbreviated hallway, a guard in a dark blue uniform was sitting on a metal chair with a newspaper on his lap. He looked her up and down and gestured towards the opposite wall: Toilettes. Perhaps he was guarding them against the return of the barbarians. He watched her brazenly as she went in. Yes, the cubicles had doors. She splashed her face with cold water and found herself again in the mirror. Then, trembling a little from the pain in her belly, she locked herself in the furthest cubicle. She was alone, save for the guard outside who would know exactly how long she spent in here; who would always be there, watching her go in and come out, smirking to himself and thinking whatever it was that such men thought when they were bored.
She could not face the administrative staff of the university today – such people always seemed to be grumpy in France – and quite possibly not on any day. Everywhere people were sucking on cigarettes, and on the way out of the building she asked a young man if smoking was allowed in the lecture rooms. He looked surprised. But of course! How uncivilised, she replied. Oh, you Americans, he said, not unkindly. She knew that by walking away from the university she was forfeiting the camaraderie of French students, of people other than Julien and his circle, but nothing these unhallowed halls might contribute to comparative literature could be more important to her than her lungs.
She scarcely noticed her surroundings as she set off along Rue Monge in the direction of the Seine, turning into a back street at the first opportunity. Comfort was at hand, however, in the form of a fantasy more enthralling than any romantic or erotic reverie: the Desert Island Discs interview. She told the imaginary interviewer, with a twinkle in her voice, how she had chosen her lungs over comparative literature. Might he say, on behalf of her legions of fans, that it was a jolly good thing that she did! In the Desert Island Discs daydream she is a famous mezzosoprano, in demand all over Europe for her interpretations of early music. Despite her fame, however, she has never stopped performing with her original Baroque group, the Instruments of Joy. Prague, Budapest, East Berlin: they adore her behind the Iron Curtain. She has even given a recital of Handel and Purcell arias to Soviet submariners in Vladivostok. The BBC interviewer describes her as an emissary for the unifying power of music. She lives somewhere in the French countryside – today she made it Burgundy – with Julien, who writes books and runs the local communist cell (just to keep his hand in with praxis and to annoy the mayor) and lectures occasionally to the locals on the joys of philosophical enquiry. One of the spare rooms, with a view across the vineyards to the wooded hills, is kept ready for Ruth. Eleanor didn’t know if Julien had ever given much thought to artisanat – he seemed mostly interested in factories – but as a local grande dame she does her bit to keep the village’s traditional skills alive. Her well-paid gardener grows vegetable offerings in a medieval jardin potager; her vines produce superb wine. Children, however, have not yet entered this valley of delight. Ruth had once confessed that she didn’t care what some feminists thought: if she had a baby, she would never want to leave it. What mammal would? Eleanor had sheepishly agreed.
The best part of Desert Island Discs was not the country house, which sometimes gave rise to a queasiness such as had come over her a few days earlier when she had looked too long in shop windows at beautiful clothes that she could never hope to buy. The best part, always, was roaming the musical centuries, sifting and selecting songs, movements, performances, according to her mood. What an embarrassment of riches was the European art music tradition, she would remind her radio audience. The tonal system alone was surely one of the great monuments of Western civilisation, an edifice of collective cultural genius! The embodied Eleanor, the young woman who was feeling the city percussively through her feet, negotiating bollards and dog turds, wearing jeans and carrying a basket of groceries, knew that she had much music yet to discover. As she evolved, so would her musical preferences. Like music itself, the Desert Island Discs fantasy was a companion for life.
“It’s chastening to remember, in the context of cultural and intellectual fashion,” she told the interviewer as her body carried her past the Collège de France, “that Beethoven did not know of the unpublished St Matthew Passion or the Mass in B Minor. One can only imagine how such works might have enriched him. It was, of course, a composer of Jewish origin who resurrected the St Matthew, on the 11th of March, 1829 …” By the time she arrived at the dark-green front door of her building, she had almost decided that she would choose an aria from the St Matthew instead of a great choral passage from the Mass. Ah, but which one?
From behind the spoiled American’s door came the strains of Indian classical music. Perhaps Julien had mistaken oddity for self-indulgence. What did he know of individual Americans, anyway? His disdain was the standard left-wing prejudice, nothing more. Unless Eleanor’s neighbour was a CIA agent in Paris to keep an eye on people such as Julien – and the man would hardly blow his cover by announcing it – or he worked for the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund – and he would not be living in the shabbiest building in Rue Dauphine if that were so – she was not going to hold all the trespasses of the United States against him. He was far more likely to be the apologetic kind of American, in awe of European culture. If she felt better after lunch, she might even pay him a visit.
She turned on the radio in her room – the program was Woman’s Hour, with its simpering signature tune – and unpacked her groceries. She longed to sink into a hot bath but had to settle for standing in a washing-up basin while she grappled with the plastic hand-held shower attachment. It had seemed like such a smart idea, but the object was hostile, intent on thwarting her. Time and again the cup that fitted over the hot tap would bulge and then burst off, whereupon she would curse it and quickly turn off the other tap before she was doused with cold water. In the end she resorted to the saucepan, which at least was not temperamental. As much water fell outside the basin as in, and she spent several naked minutes mopping it up.
She dressed in a skirt and a lambswool cardigan so as not to feel like a student, and then made herself a lunch of bread and goat’s cheese and salad. When she dropped the woody ends and outer leaves of the endives into the garbage bin – when they didn’t land in the scrap bucket for Ruth’s compost heap or Mavis’s chooks, to be returned, one way or another, to the earth – she felt a pang, as if she had wilfully severed a connection. The cramps had eased now and made way for fretful thought: even as a gap in the future, comparative literature was a problem. She would not mention to Julien that she had abandoned it unless he asked, and even then she wouldn’t tell him about the guard outside the lavatories and the special claims of her lungs but would simply say … She would think of something when the time came. It was Thursday. On Saturday Julien was taking her to Normandy for the weekend. In the hotel at Honfleur she would have his warm body next to hers. She just had to live with herself until then.
“Ah, an Anglophone! Come in, come in. Would you like some coffee? I was just having breakfast. I keep unusual hours, you see – bed at four or five a.m., up at lunchtime. Oh, and would you mind taking your shoes off? It’s just that I spend a lot of time on the floor meditating.”
The name of Eleanor’s American neighbour was Roland, and he was from Columbus, Ohio. He said ‘Columbus, Ohio’ as if it were some kind of cosmic joke, like Wollongong. Roland was pale and slightly stooped in the way of tall men who are not sturdily built. He was dressed all in black, but the black of his shirt was of a less intense order of blackness than his trousers. The effect was ascetic: he looked as if he had never played mud pies. His fair hair was long and combed off his face like Liszt’s, but his hands were unremarkable.
Eleanor was prickling with Parisian envy, which masked any uneasiness she might have felt at being in the home of a man she did not know. Roland had a proper flat with a parquet floor and a Tibetan rug, a kitchen alcove, a separate bedroom, a WC with brass letters on the door and another room that had to be a bathroom. She knew – she just knew – that in that bathroom was an actual bath. The main room was large enough to contain not just a sofa and table and chairs but a desk, which, despite the dictionaries and Olivetti electric typewriter, had about it a tidy lack of urgency. She caught a whiff of family money along with the incense. The walls were lined with books, in English and French, on religion and esotericism. He had translated some of the French titles himself, for he made his living as a freelance translator. But his true work, his vocation – Eleanor had never heard anyone talk so earnestly about vocation – was the study of the connections among the mystical traditions, which called for experiments in quietism and occasional retreats to an ashram or monastery.
The most American thing about Roland was his coffee machine, which he called a dripolator. He tipped the remnants of the coffee into the sink, filled the water cavity, replaced the old paper filter and put fresh grounds into the new one. She watched him padding to and fro in his leather slippers and noticed that he had flat feet. At Dartmoor Street Ruth had made tea for her countless times, and she for Ruth; life would have been unthinkable without the rituals of tea and conversation. Perhaps solitude had opened Eleanor’s eyes, for this ordinary act of making coffee for another human being felt like a sacred gesture across separateness. Supposing the African who lived upstairs had no one in his life to make coffee for him? She turned quickly from so forlorn a thought. Under the table she wiggled her toes and flexed and pointed her green-stockinged feet. She had stopped resenting Roland for having such a nice flat, and now she wanted to give him something in return for his kindness. Leaving out any reference to her period and her lungs, she told him, with just enough self-mockery to avoid appearing precious, how she had fled the university.
“Oh my, that’s a change from the commonplace horrors of the malodorous toilettes turques. But the fascist swine, the dictatorial soixante-huitards! I don’t blame you for not going back. I never could abide herd behaviour myself. When the Vietnam War demonstrations were on, I stayed in the library. I’d just discovered esoteric religion, you see, which was a whole lot nuttier and more fascinating than French literature …”
All fine and dandy, she could hear Ruth say, when you know your flat feet will keep you out of the jungle.
“You could try Paris VII,” he concluded. “They might have comparative literature and toilet doors.”
Eleanor did not want to talk about comparative literature, but neither was she in any hurry to return to her cheerless room. She looked to the bookshelves for help. Of course it would be prurient to ask Roland if he had any religious beliefs himself, so she enquired about Sufism, which by happy chance turned out to be one of his favourites. The account he gave was encyclopaedic, spreading over the afternoon as she drowsed beneath it. Once or twice she thought she came close to achieving the obliteration of the self, but perhaps she had just nodded off.
Roland had gone from gnosis and blessedness and the perfect man to saying something about the time being ripe for a new religion.
“We could bring back human sacrifice,” said Eleanor, “starting with Margaret Thatcher.”
“Tempting in her case, though not quite what I had in mind.”
“A friend of mine says Thatcher has missile envy. But Roland, how could you compete with the Christians? They have all the best tunes.”
“True. By the way, do you know about the music listening room at the Pompidou Centre?”
Salvation in the here and now!
That evening Eleanor went on her own to an orchestral concert at the Maison de Radio-France. The orchestra’s rendering of Mozart stood like a tourist bus between her and any glimpse of the transcendent. Having heard a radio talk about performance practice in the classical period, she concluded they were making dull work of the symphony because they were coming at it, out of arrogance or ignorance or both, from an anachronistic standpoint, smothering classical articulation with nineteenth-century legato phrasing and twentieth-century vibrato. At any rate she was unmoved, but since she had nowhere better to go, and the orchestra might have more success with Berlioz, she stayed in her seat and let her mind wander where it would. It revisited Roland and his well-thumbed religions before taking off along overgrown paths of its own.
Since adolescence Eleanor had given little thought to religious belief. Faith was simply out of the question: she had come along too late in history for such binding comforts, and modernity had cosmologies of its own. But neither did she share Julien’s contempt for religious expression – masturbatory, he called it – or even her mother’s milder disdain. For the duration of the St Matthew Passion she was a believer – almost – but that glorious submission ended with the dissolution of the final chord. When she was younger she had chafed at the irony of it: you could worship Bach’s sacred music but be denied the Resurrection by the workings of your own mind, the same mind that caused you to love the music in the first place. What mattered to her these days, however, was that the St Matthew existed at all in this unholy world, and that you didn’t need a Christian faith to receive it. Bach was there for anyone who would truly listen. If the thousands of religions that had come and gone upon the earth were just an inventive human response to a troublesome itch – with creation myths and hierarchical struggles and ethical precepts thrown in for good measure – then surely it was better to satisfy that itch with Bach. For no one, so far as she knew, had used the great man’s sublime powers to oppress or persecute anybody, although a bad performance could annoy the hell out of you.
Faith belonged to childhood, at least in her experience. Most people she knew seemed to have outgrown it, although in some it took on other forms, as if there were a vacant space that needed to be filled, or neural pathways to be kept open and humming. Lapsed Catholics embraced Marxism; Protestants with a fondness for the material found comfortable accommodation in Tibetan Buddhism. Not long ago she had been asked twice at a party if she was an old soul. Lately some people appeared to have effected a nifty substitution: the Universe for the One. The textless, lowbrow Universe offered hints – a coincidence was never just a coincidence – but demanded nothing in return. As a higher power it lacked moral authority, and Eleanor was suspicious of its adherents. Such people were not above asking the Universe to cough up for a trip to Nepal when they would have thought twice about pestering the Lord.
She had not quite forgotten the pantheism of her own childhood. Moonrise over the ocean, the roar of the surf that on still nights she could hear from her bedroom, a magnifying drop of water on a nasturtium leaf: God was in anything that took her fancy, though not, of course, in bull ants or maggots or mosquitoes. Her grief when a muddy creek near the house was forced into concrete drains and buried under fill involved more than just the loss of somewhere to catch tadpoles. It was God against the bland suburban spread, and she was on the side of God, as in this instance was Mavis – for once both righteous and godly, though she didn’t know it. At around that time, when Eleanor was eight or nine, she confided to her grandmother that she had been asking God to send her father back. The grandmother was plaiting Eleanor’s hair, and she did not answer straight away. She undid the bottom half of a plait, the one that had been yanked so viciously the day before by the red-haired girl up the road, and replaited it more securely. Then the woman spoke in a voice that shocked the child. It was the same gilded tone that grownups used when they talked about Father Christmas.
“God is taking care of him. Sometimes we just have to bear certain things, even though we may not understand why things are the way they are.”
God didn’t bring her son back from the war. She doesn’t believe God helps people, even good people like her. Maybe she doesn’t believe in God at all.
Some thoughts cannot be unthought, and so Eleanor stopped her hopeful prayers. In some ways nothing changed. She still came top of the class, as before. (Sometimes she had asked God for that, although it wasn’t strictly speaking necessary.) The redhead pulled her hair at every opportunity. Eleanor continued to say grace with her grandmother because she knew – she was reminded often enough by Mavis – that all over the world there were children who didn’t have enough food to fill their stomachs. It was only polite to give thanks for what she had, even if no one was listening and it didn’t help those unfortunate children. But she entertained no more expectations of the Almighty, and gradually His presence faded from the world around her. The ocean became just the ocean, though she loved it as before, and the breath of God was no longer in the wind.
Some of the neighbours who wanted to be rid of the tadpole creek – the redhead’s family, for instance – as well as some of those who wanted to keep it, attended church of one hue or another. (How could some churchgoers be so out of touch with God?) But church or no church, creek or no creek, neighbours mattered, according to her grandmother. They mattered because one day you might need their help, or they yours, in which case you wouldn’t give a hoot about their religion or their politics. Her grandmother was at pains to say such things, though in the abstract she was a bit funny about Catholics, whose loyalties, she believed, were to Rome. Someone had convinced her that they had secret plans to take over the public service, scattering their haitches like pebbles as signals to those coming after them. Mavis doubted the public service story – not that she would want them running the hospitals, mind, because they’d put a foetus’s life ahead of a mother’s when a choice had to be made. She had a low opinion of religion in general – name one that wasn’t dreamed up by men! – and gripes against the pope in particular. The Roman Catholic Church, thanks to the men in the Vatican, caused more suffering in the world than it alleviated. The Church should mind its own business, allow divorce and contraception, and not keep women enslaved and in poverty by tricking them into having too many children. But what got her goat more than anything was that the Catholic vote was keeping the real Labor Party out of office. It was the rock choppers’ fault that the country had to endure Menzies the Magisterial, because their breakaway party gave his mob their preferences. The Drongo Labor Party! The Delinquent / Demented / Demonic / Anything-but-democratic Labor Party! And they let the sin-shifters tell them how to vote instead of thinking for themselves! That Santamaria deserved to rot in hell.
“Mavis,” the grandmother said once, “for heaven’s sake, calm down. You’ll frighten the horses.” (What horses? Had they found out about the imaginary pair of ponies that Eleanor fed and watered in the back yard?) “We don’t know for certain that the priests tell their flock how to vote. Besides, Catholics don’t all vote DLP. And there is no hell, remember?”
Fear of Catholic hegemony did not prevent mother or grandmother from sending Eleanor next door with neighbourly gifts of vegetables and eggs, even though the old widow had indeed voted DLP. Mrs Moynihan had a photograph of the pope on her mantelpiece and a watercolour of an insipid Virgin on a wall. She always ate fish on Fridays and seemed to Eleanor to totter off to Mass more often than was sensible for someone her age. Eleanor’s grandmother, by contrast, hardly ever set foot in church. Sometimes, though, she would take a plate of scones next door for afternoon tea, and the two women would discuss the latest goings-on in Blue Hills as if the characters were people who lived in their street. When Mrs M. died, Mavis said she wasn’t a bad old stick, just a bit brainwashed by all that mumbo jumbo. Mother and grandmother attended the funeral. And if there were haitches flying about among the popery that day, Eleanor did not hear a word about it from either of them.
October 6th, 1981
Dearest Eleanor,
Quel bore about the ablutions cupboard. I would send you a bush shower, but you’d have to put a hook in the ceiling, and what would the landlord say about that, indeed? Anyway, the hose thing for washing your head – didn’t Mr Salteena encounter one of those at Bernard’s house? – and the washing-up basin are an excellent solution. Happy mopping.
Now, I have something Of Great Moment to tell you – and only you. God I wish you had a phone in that hole in the wall. Vati said to tell you to phone reverse charges from the post office whenever you feel like it, but chances are Mutti would be hanging around listening. She’s gone all peevish on me; you’ll see why. (I adore the semicolon; I’m so glad you taught me how to use it.) She wasn’t, it goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway, peevish when I was away for a year in Israel, because it’s full of robust Jewish boys, unlike the federal capital, home of the scruffy-bearded boffin. But I’m jumping ahead.
I had a message that Iain wanted to see me. I was wondering where he’d been because he’d cancelled one appointment. I was only five minutes late, but he seemed agitated. What’s more he was wearing long trousers, as if he’d been doing something official. Ah Ruth, he said gravely, and then something to the effect that perhaps I’d like to sit down because he had some important and rather difficult things to tell me. Have you noticed, or is it just me, that when something really matters you don’t take in the exact words and later you can’t remember them even though you want to, perhaps because at the time you’re focused on non-verbal signs or your own reactions or whether you really do want to sit down to hear it, which I didn’t. So this is the gist of it, brutally to the point. His wife has advanced ovarian cancer, misdiagnosed by at least two doctors. I’m afraid it’s in the peritoneum, diaphragm, liver, bowel and god knows where else. She didn’t have much in the way of symptoms – some abdominal bloating, occasional bleeding, which she ignored. She put her exhaustion down to motherhood. No one is prepared to say how long she has left – I said it was brutal – but no oncologist is saying she has even a slim chance. The little girl is only three.
I couldn’t say anything except “I’m so sorry” about ten times. In case you’re wondering – and I know you’d never ask in a million years – if I thought “he’ll be free at last” (ugh, that was hard to write) or something along those selfish lines, the answer is no, I don’t believe so. If you’d seen the grief in his face, you would understand. There just wasn’t room for me and my fantasies. Witnessing real suffering is somehow so shocking that you move beyond your ego. So in a way it was almost a relief to hear the rest of it. Annette wants to go home to Canada to die, and he’s worked something out with the dean (sabbatical plus leave without pay). He’ll be gone from the end of this month and for the whole of next year, which means I need a new supervisor.
The best prospect is in Canberra, with someone called Peter Ashbury. Iain sang his praises, said he’d spoken to him at length about me. Peter is keen to take me on and enthusiastic about my rare interest in grassland ecology. Then, conscientious to the last, Iain handed me an envelope with all the information I needed. He apologised for the disruption to my life. He said I was the best student he’d ever had, that he expected great things from me in the future, and so did the natural environment. I said I owed everything to him. You get the drift …
I didn’t know what to do then, so I stuck out my hand. He grasped it with both of his, and the next thing I knew – I always forget he’s an inch shorter than I am – his arms were around me and he was sobbing into my neck, and so of course my arms had to go around him. (Where else could they go?) I just wanted to take all his pain away but at the same time to burrow into him and never, ever, have to remove myself. My body, my traitorous body, was electrified, but my mind was terrified I’d do something I’d regret. So when his sobs had died down I said, “You have to be brave.” Assault by the bleeding obvious, but it worked. He released me and apologised. “You have nothing to apologise for,” I said, “but I really should go.” He probably thought I was embarrassed by his emotional display; maybe he doesn’t know many Jews. I don’t imagine he had a clue about my turmoil. When I reached the door he said, “Ruth … have a happy life”, which struck me as odd. He’s not conventional. “I don’t know about happy,” I said, “but I’ll make it a good, useful life.” (God, oh god, how insufferably pompous!) Then the old, droll Iain smiled briefly out at me from the new, sorrowful one and said, “Spoken like a true Methodist”. And that, as they say, was that.
On the bus trip home I was a sodden heap of misery. People must have noticed because no one sat beside me. Base over apex, I thought; everything’s gone base over apex. I’ve never heard anyone but Mavis say that. Mutti was out, Gott sei dank, so I had the house to myself. I put on some Bach (the suites for solo cello, in case you’re wondering) and wept and wept, for Iain and the child and poor Annette, who will have to endure so much. And for myself too, fool that I am.
Sometime in the middle of the night I began to see that life was handing me the kind of freedom that you, Ms Weston, take for granted. I’m outta here, I thought: no more nice Jewish girl staying close to her family and the community. I feel Jewish to the core – whatever that means – but I’m not tribal. Israel taught me that. And more to the point, it’s my good fortune to be the grand-daughter of people who had the wits and the wherewithal to get out of Germany in ’33, and then out of Europe. I’m not the child of Holocaust survivors (although we lost our share of relatives, as you know). If I were that child, I wouldn’t be going anywhere. I’d be studying medicine just as Mutti wanted, as if that could keep us safe. I’d be dutiful and neurotic and deeply resentful, because I didn’t want to do medicine any more than you did. Of course I don’t have to leave Sydney, but it’s time I did. I want a little house with a garden and chooks and Eastern grey kangaroos over the back fence. Frosty mornings, a woodfire, a bicycle … Oh yes, and lovers. Lovers to go with the woodfire, a succession of them. I’m being determinedly realistic, not greedy. No man will ever come close to Iain for me. I WILL bury the hopeless longing, but I can’t forget him. Does that sound adolescent, a bit overwrought and Herz / Schmerz? Did we listen to too many Lieder when everyone else was listening to Sid Pernicious? But you of all people should understand. You’ve seen how quickly I become disenchanted with young men, how nothing ever seems to get off the ground.
I’ll feel closer to landscape in Canberra, and the university is excellent for my sort of science. The truth is that I should probably have gone there in the first place to do my PhD. I considered it, but not very rationally. You see, I’m not as smart as you think I am. Anyway, my quadrats won’t change, and it will be an easier drive to my patch, as Mavis calls it. When I took that research assistant job last year instead of going straight into postgrad work, I wanted to be sure that being in the lab all the time wasn’t my thing. It isn’t. I’m an ecologist: I love field work, and I love my grassy places. Canberra is a grassy place. Therefore it follows that it will be a good place for me.
My hand aches – so many words and no graphs or diagrams. I miss you terribly, my dear friend. By now you should be settling in. Have some tarte Tatin for me. Yes, I know I shouldn’t. Actually I’ve had no appetite for a few days. Shall we agree to write once a fortnight, even if it’s just a scribbled aerogram? Mutti has kept every personal letter she ever received, can you imagine? For history, she says. Or herstory, rather.
All my love,
Ruth
