Paradise and Elsewhere (9 page)

“Look!” she said, pointing upwards with her left hand, and with her right, firm from practice, she slit their throats.

 

I
t was crow who discovered
why Ax Blaney, seen several days in a row preparing the ground of her half acre for vegetables, had stopped growing thin and hadn't come to knock on his door. Impatient and troubled, he went to knock on hers. Ax invited him in, just as before. A fierce fire roared extravagantly in the grate, and arranged symmetrically on each side of the chimney—the largest pieces at the top, the smallest at the bottom—joints of meat hung smoking; enough to feed a family all year.

“Do they taste sweet to you, my sons?” said Ax softly. Blanching, Crow dropped his spoon on the table; the feeling of nausea kept him in his chair just long enough to reappraise the situation.

“The Moor'll be mine in any case,” he said slowly, “but I've still need of a wife. Sling's but thirteen and she's expecting. I'll need a grown woman's help and more room when the time comes.” He picked up his spoon and deliberately took another mouthful of soup. “So. We can say the twins were lost on the peak. They'd never have learned in any case.” Ax reached across the table and tipped the soup in his lap.

“Get out,” she spat, realizing for the first time that it would have been worth struggling to slit Crow's unsightly throat instead of those of her twins, so easy, as they gazed upwards at the sky. And only days later, when she watched the column of cavalry and the magistrate in his carriage, hidden then reappearing, seeming one minute nearer, the next farther, but nevertheless always coming closer, did she realize that the road which brought them to her could have taken both her and her sons away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Woodsmoke

 

 

 

 

T
he thin man had come
into the caf
é
, late, four days in a row. Each time he drank only a small coffee and a glass of water. But that day he ordered a lemon cake as well and ate it quickly without using the fork, leaning over the table and pressing his finger onto the plate to pick up crumbs. His skin seemed sallow against the white of his shirt, a foreigner, I thought, though I couldn't tell what kind, and not a tourist. From the way he spoke, in a careful, educated way, I knew that it must be a long time since he came from wherever it was he belonged to: a dry country, I guessed, mountainous, where people lived scattered thinly among their sheep and goats, were careful and burned fires all year long. Where the single city was full of the sound of bells; the streets lined with country people selling fruit and bolts of cloth. An old, quiet place, with cars only for the important people—not sunny, not bright with chrome and neon like here. I was very young then and I liked only new things.

The first time he had appeared I was angry. Summer was over; people went home early: often not a single customer pushed through the glass doors after eight o'clock, so that I could eat, sweep, and still have thirty minutes to sit on a stool with my shoes off and my books open. But as it turned out, the foreigner was never a nuisance: he did not put on the jukebox and he did not expect to talk to me the way most men did. He simply sat with his back to the mirrored wall and looked out of the window towards the sea, or read a newspaper. When I turned off the lights behind the bar, he would shift slightly in his chair. When I went to pick up the chairs and stack them upside down on the tables, he took his own cup to the counter, before wishing me goodnight and leaving me with five minutes still to sweep the floor. So I had grown used to him and that evening, when I looked up from my book and saw him sitting there still as one of the stones on the beach, I asked:

“Have you been here long?” His answer: “eight years” overlapped the question as if he had been waiting for me to speak. He rose quickly to his feet and brought his cup, plate and glass to the counter, although there were still fifteen minutes to nine.

“I am working at the hospital,” he continued, “just started. Paediatrics. It took me six years to re-qualify, although I was fully trained in my own country and head of a department, in fact.”

“I am studying too,” I told him as I put my books away. “Languages. But I can't do it full-time. It will probably take me sixty years to get my degree, so don't complain.”

“You're from the country,” he said.

“Maybe,” I told him, because I didn't like it that it showed still; I had felt, ever since I came to the city that I didn't belong back there, with the perpetual dust and the lame cattle and the bent old women, the men with no teeth, but in the places they taught us of in class. The foreign man smiled in a quick, shy way that I liked: so different from the slow grins of the local men. I surprised myself by saying:

“Would you like to come home with me?”

“Yes, please, I would,” the man said.

 

W
e walked quickly
through the streets and up the stairs to where my two rooms were: the small kitchen with its Calor stove and stone sink, the other with my books, table and folding bed. The shower was on the floor below. I poured some wine. We sat side by side on the cream lace spread that Grandmother had given me before I left. I unbuttoned his shirt. His skin was a pale, woody brown, not honey-coloured like mine nor rich chocolate like that of the man before him. I pressed my face into its warmth, breathed him in. He smelled like something burning, like woodsmoke, part bitter, part mystery. And his nipples, when I found them with my lips, were also bitter. But it was a kind of bitterness that was almost sweet in the way that it made me want to taste more of it: I leaned into him, slipped one hand around to his back, running my fingers down the side of his spine. I pushed against him, wanting him to lie down so that I could sit astride him and look down into his face. I was sure in my bones that this foreigner would be a good lover, sensual, considerate. But he resisted me and sat there quite straight on my bed.

“I had to leave my own country,” he began suddenly. I could feel his voice vibrating in his chest. I wanted him to touch me now, not to talk. “I went in a hurry, because of the regime,” he continued, and I knew that I ought to ask him where it was, and what regime, and what they had against him; I knew that at the very least I ought to want to know what language it was that he spoke there. But it was a long time since I had brought a man back to my room. I eased his shirt away from his shoulders, breathing in the smoky smell of him.

“I had a wife,” he said, “who died.” Then, I had to stop. I straightened myself and looked into his face. He looked down.

“I am sorry,” I said and I told myself that this wife was in the past tense and had he not, after all, come home with me? “You do want to make love?” I asked, and there was a long pause. He looked over my shoulders into the corners of the room.

“After all, I don't think so,” he said. My body felt cheated, yet he relaxed and smiled, as if something good had happened. He reached behind him for his jacket and took out a photograph. “That's her,” he said “those—are the children.” I looked: a slender woman and the two children, one girl, one boy about three and four, were wearing ordinary western clothes and sat, smiling, in front of an intricate geometric pattern painted onto a plastered wall.

“I'm sorry,” I said again. But I did not ask him their names, nor where the children were, although I felt that this was what he wanted. He put the photograph back into a leather wallet tooled with patterns like those on the wall in the photograph and in silence we finished the wine. Then he put on his crisp white shirt and buttoned it up. I watched while he rinsed the glasses out under the tap.

“I'm sorry I haven't been more help,” I said at the bottom of the stairs.

“Really, it's nothing,” he said and suddenly he hugged me very tight so that I could smell the smokiness of him again, even through his clothes. Then he was off, walking rapidly down the narrow street which smelled of other people's evening meals. I went back upstairs to my books.

Much later that night, as I lay on the narrow bed looking at the street lamp opposite, it came to me that for certain I was the middle one of three. The stranger would have made love with the woman before me, sensually and with consideration, several times, and in the morning, over their hurried coffee on the way to work, he would have told her about leaving his country, but not about his wife and children. When he never returned, that first woman would have felt angry and far more cheated than I myself had, just a few hours ago.

The one after me, he might meet in one month's time or in ten years' time. They would not go home to his place or to hers, but sit in a calm room or a bench in the flower gardens in the city park, or even opposite each other at a quiet time in an ordinary, smartish caf
é
like the Oasis. He would tell her that he had left his country in a hurry, because of the regime. He had to pay four months' salary for papers. How he had crossed the mountains on foot in winter; two of the others had died. He had spent six months in a transit camp. He would explain how he had received one letter from his wife, bravely telling him not to worry and that it was for the best, she understood. But he did worry, of course, as the months passed with nothing more from her and each new arrival telling how much worse things were at home. Then someone came who had witnessed it: a sharp winter's day with dogs barking and the quiet street suddenly full of soldiers and noise. She told him the number of his house and the colour of his wife's hair. And what about the children? You asked, and so I must tell you, the witness said. Them too.

You could never know for sure what would have happened if he had stayed. He might have survived: if he had, in hiding perhaps, for how long would he have been able to save his family? Might not his presence have made things worse for them? Perhaps his wife would have suffered more if she had known he was in prison? Maybe he, a married man, should never have challenged the regime? Shouldn't he have thought of the consequences, bided his time?

It was impossible to judge. But also it was impossible to deny that he had left them behind; that they had met their deaths without him. With this third woman the stranger would weep, and she would too; perhaps they would make love, perhaps just once, but in any case they would be friends for the rest of their lives.

I remember lying there on my bed, with my hands behind my head, somehow knowing all this and thinking at the same time with another part of my brain how I would graduate, competent in Spanish, German and Russian, fluent in English, which is still what everyone wants. Then I would stop working at places like the Oasis Caf
é
and see the modern world with my own eyes. I aimed to eventually specialize in simultaneous translation for conferences and so on, so even after I had finished my degree there would be more to learn. I had already looked into it: one year in London, if they accepted me. Oh, I badly wanted to ride in aeroplanes and stay in hotels on expenses.

All of that has come true. I am sitting in a hotel bedroom now, with a fridge of drinks and twenty channels to choose from. It's the last evening and there have been no complaints about the interpretation, which amounts to praise. I sit here in my dressing gown, smelling of Chanel, and consider myself.

I have always sent money to my younger sister, who looked after Grandmother until she died (also, I send glossy postcards of each new country I visit) but in thirteen years I have never returned to see them in the village. I even missed the funeral. I was afraid that if I returned I would never escape again.

Laughter comes from the bar below and they are not so bad, these engineers, not really. I could go down if I chose, but I do not. Instead I sit here and think of the place I find myself calling home, and of my incredible luck: even if all of us smell of smoke, I think, only some can go back, and I am one of those. And the red dust path, winding like a lazy S, is still there, and the well, and the branch house under the tree, and in it my sister—though older, and still angry with me—splitting sticks for the fire. I sit here and think of the smell of the stranger. Of what he told me. How different I would be with him now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Like to Look

 

 

 

 

I
hadn't seen or heard
of her for fifteen years. No one had. We sat in the garden, spaced equally around the circular table: she to my right and Bill, the man who brought her, to the left; in the middle a jug of lemonade. Their big red car gleamed in the drive. I wouldn't let them inside the house.

“I've been all around the world, some of it in a very small boat and some of it I even swam,” said my sister Dee, folding her sunglasses away and examining the garden: walled, thick with shrubs and so much smaller than the world. “Listen. I've been in an army. I've lived with pygmies and Eskimos. I've—”

She was thinner than I remembered her, her skin darker and drier. Her ears had been pierced and she wore studs that looked like pearls and real gold, but it was her all right: her eyebrows still scattered across the bridge of her nose, her nails were still bitten close. I could see the right thumb, pointed from too much sucking as a child, the scar on her forefinger from the time she'd thrust it experimentally into a light socket. Me, Mother, Dee, and our brother: once we all lived here. Now Dee and I sat side by side in the garden of the yellow-stone house which she left, in which I still live. The windowpanes are wartime glass, faulted so that the whole world can seem drunken-strange; on stormy days seaspray lands on them, dulling my sight, like cataracts.

“I performed an appendectomy with a penknife,” she continued. “I can speak eight languages. I've made love to nine people simultaneously—the men were all tied up and gagged. But best to begin at the beginning: I started off picking avocados, then I was on one of those trawlers that freeze the fish then and there. Herring. Once we were caught in the ice—”

“You always said that travel was what you'd like to do,” I interrupted. “You always did like getting about.”

“You… ” She faltered, as if she couldn't quite remember me. “You didn't. You were odd. You used to sit and just stare into space.”

“You've not been there then?” I asked.

“Listen,” said Dee, drawing herself up straight, “I just thought I'd look you up. The rest of them can go to hell, but you, I thought you'd be interested.” The man called Bill leaned over suddenly and kissed my sister on the lips. The pores around his nose were large and open. He had purple flecks on his cheeks and even on the lids of his eyes. His hair had been artificially streaked. Their lips squirmed wetly. My sister closed her eyes. A cobweb of saliva stretched between them, then suddenly broke as they pulled apart.

“What are you looking at?” Bill asked me angrily, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. I thought it was obvious. I saw that one of his teeth was chipped, and a line was beginning to cross the bridge of his nose, the flesh plumping up to either side of it.

“You're still doing it!” he said.

“I like to look,” I replied. And then I thought: yes, that's what I do. Looking. I like to look. So I kept on looking at Bill, and saw how the ridge of his jaw was patchily shaved, the stiff hairs, just grey, growing through in clumps.

“For God's sake!” he said, turning his face away.

“Don't mind my sister,” said Dee. “Listen. Bill's a director and he's going to make a movie about me, the story of my life and my adventures. Aren't you? I dived for these pearls myself. There's so much to tell.

“I spent twenty-nine days alone in the Gobi Desert. I've got a pilot's licence. I tickled the soles of the feet of the Dalai Lama for nearly an hour and, believe me, he didn't move a muscle. I've been in three movies, but you won't have seen them: it was in Turkey. I lost half a million dollars at cards. Wasn't mine, but it would have been if I hadn't lost it. Easy come, easy go. Look at my arm, see? It was done in Hong Kong by a bearded lady. Took over forty hours. And look at the muscle too. I took cyanide in a hijack death-pact and came to just as they were about to bury me. I've got three passports. I didn't do much in the antipodes—too burnt out. Lived in a cave, had a baby, got it adopted, joined a theatre group. Then I met the sheikh—”

Bill refilled our glasses. The ice had melted into small slivers; it was old and made the drink taste faintly of metal. Dee paused to swallow.

“What about you, er—” Bill said, “do you share your sister's passion for adventure?”

“Yes,” I replied, “but—”

“She was always the quiet one,” Dee cut in. “It was the sheikh, you see, who gave me the half a million. He wanted to marry me, but I slipped out one morning and left for Canada. Now this might have got back: I killed someone in a bar in Montreal. Self-defence. I was tried, but I got off, of course. You didn't hear? After that, I went to the Soviet Union, as it was then, in the summer, mind you. I left, my jacket padded with manuscripts, just before they kicked me out.”

Yes, I thought, I like to look. In trains, buses, gardens, at films, even those in languages I don't understand, on pavements and curbstones, in mirrors and water there's much to see and I look. I look at faces, the folds around eyes, the sculpture of flesh that grows with time to reflect habits of thought and feeling, the many textures and colours of skin. I look at litter, wet paper, September leaves. I look at the sea: sometimes the sky is darker than the water, a negative. Sometimes the beach is smooth and damp, and as the sun sets the sand blazes brazen-gold. On the rocks, mussels build themselves into tight black bouquets. I like to look at the fossils, exposed in shale that softens, blurring in a matter of hours the sharp record of past millennia, dissolving them within a day. I like to look at the shadows of twigs mingled with clots of leaves, just stirring in the wind. At sand blown around grasses and debris, at frost on windows, at gulls landing like a scattering of crumbs on the sea. I like to look at the wind seen through glass, at the flow of traffic, its motorway lights tailing into the distance, red retreat, oncoming white.

“Miles away,” Dee said to Bill, meaning me. “We're twins, you know.”

“You're not at all alike!” Bill said to Dee, conspiratorially.

No, we're not. She left, I stayed put. She has a story to tell; I sit and stare, look and see. While she was away I saw some sights. I saw our mother shrink. Her skin grew yellow, a damp envelope. I saw the snowdrops each spring. I saw a last breath, and the skin growing luminously pale. I pulled back the sheet and looked upon our mother's bones, seemingly wrapped in bleached and shrunken cloth. I saw our brother, taller than any of us and fitter too, trying to catch sparrows in his useless hands. I looked at rainbows in soapsuds stretching and bursting, at a tangle of earthworms, wet, glistening; saw the scars where their ends had grown back. I saw the yellow stone of our house obscured by ivy, how the small dry roots pushed themselves into its pores and cracks. I looked at myself in the mirror and felt that it would break; I looked longer and the feeling went away.

Dee leaned closer towards me over the table.

“I spent three months in the Pacific Basin, stuck because of storms. I got married to an island chieftain, not that it counts now I'm back. Free as a bird—” She threw her head back and laughed. Dee, I thought, if I had been around the world, I would have seen a great deal more than you. That's but one of my bitternesses.

“I've dined with kings,” she continued, “with shamans, beggars, gods incarnate, lunatics and transvestites. I've had more diseases than I can remember, unnamed fevers, various malarias, malnutrition, amoebic dysentery; in Nepal my liver grew so huge that it threatened to squash my lungs. My skin turned orange. I thought I would lose a leg… ”

Looking. It isn't only a passive pleasure, a drinking in. Looking can be hard. Looking can vanquish time. Looking can change water to wine. It can wipe fear clean away: I have looked at entrails on the road until my gorge no longer rose and choked me, and now I can distinguish them and their circumstances. Looking can turn another's eyes away. Looking can strip skins, drain blood. Looking can abolish the other. There's a power in looking. I've discovered it over the years, and that day in the garden was the first day when I realized what I had, and the only time I dared its use.

Dee's glass was empty. She sighed, and smiled at us both. White flecks had collected at the corners of her mouth. Bill was sweating, the top of his collar grey and damp.

“Why did you come back here?” I said.

“To see you, of course,” she lied, “and the house.”

“Yes,” said Bill, pushing back his chair, “I'd like to see the house.”

“You can't film this house. It's mine until our brother dies.” I spoke without turning to look at him. “Perhaps you'd like to see him? Seeing as the garden is so secluded, I let him go naked in the summer. He can't speak. His face is slack, his body going the same way. His appetite is enormous.”

“Will you stop staring at me,” snapped Dee, glancing down at the bracelet of pearls which she had dived for herself through a world of impossible colour, blue and yellow fish, purple corals shimmering with refracted light. She was growing very pale. I looked, I looked hard for a very long time.

“I used to think you were beautiful,” I said softly. She was about to continue her account of places been, not seen. And then she would have made her request again, more forcefully. Her eyes were glancing offside, to check that Bill was listening; her grainy tongue-tip poked through parted lips, moist with bitter lemonade. I looked.

“Dee?” Bill leaned forward, touched her arm, grasped her wrist. His fingers left no mark. Then he ran from the garden, and the red car sped off down the coast road, clashing with the sea and sky.

Those lips are dry now, Dee. Leaves whirl around your legs. Dirt collects in the crook of your arm. Rain runs clean tracks over your face. Salt spray ages you, scouring at the sharpness of your features. Sometimes our brother pisses on you when I've locked him out; at other times he picks flowers and lays them at your feet. He at least, I think, can do what he wants. Dee, I am all eyes, and you are still and home at last, forever in the garden: not flesh, nor bone, but stone.