The Complete Stories (58 page)

“If you don't mind,” he was saying, "I'll call up tomorrow and see how you are. It's no trouble.”

She shook her head and made deprecating motions with her lips. What was it—kindness?—was he
kind?
More of his filial piety?

Fortunately the taxi had arrived. The driver gave her a look—some old girl who'd had too much to drink, and while Nicholas was giving him the address, she heard, as often before, the sound of a note being passed.

“Thank you,” she murmured, eager for nothing now except to be moving on in the dark.

“You all right, ol’ lady?” the driver asked over his shoulder. There was mockery in his voice.

“Get stuffed,” she told the fellow. That fixed him.

Eleanor's late-night telephone voice was full of concern. “No, no, I'm okay, no trouble—I was tired, that's all. How was the Schoenberg?” Then, because she was tired of making mysteries, and because sooner or later it would have to be said, she let a voice that was not quite her own announce flatly: "Karel died this morning—a heart attack. In the street …” Poor Eleanor! "No, no, I'm okay—I promise. Yes, I'll call you in the morning.”

She replaced the receiver and stood for a moment looking down at the Bay. She must have been doing that for the last hour. There were no searchlights tonight; and no angel was clamped like an aerial frogman to the wall out there, with his animal eyes upon her and his angelic, unshaven cheek pressed close to the bricks. Only below, in the dark of the Moreton Bay figs—those exiles of her own northern shore—the flying foxes, gorging on fruit.

She turned the lights out and went into her bedroom. Brightness and squalor of a small star's dressing room—den of a sorceress whose spells were expert and false according to the times, and whose powers had
been worked up always out of improvident energies. Well, that spring was dry. All that was left were the half-empty bottles of the witch's fak-ery: cut-glass in what the boys these days called Deco, plastic jars full of liquors, creams, milks, balms, emulsions—unmagic potions. Unzipping the good black dress, she hung it like an empty skin in the closet—one of the rules—then sat and rolled off her stockings, leaving them anyhow on the floor; underclothes the same—she had always been messy. “You're impossible,” people told her, "you're such a perfectionist." "No,” she had sometimes answered, bitter at being misunderstood, "I'm a slob.” The nuns had known. “Clay McHugh,” she heard an old nun, Sister Ignatia complain, "if your mind in any way resembles your closet you're in for a hard time. We shall say nothing of your soul.” They had none of them said anything of her soul.

So she was naked.

She groaned aloud now, since there was no one to hear, and drew back the sheet. She laid her body out: the slack flesh of her arms and thighs, her wrinkled belly, her skull and her feet and her hands that were covered with blotches, patches of darkness that would spread.

I am lying with the goose, she told herself, that's how they'll find me. Only nobody dies of grief—grief doesn't kill us. We're too damned selfish and strong—and what we love in the end is the goose.

She unsnapped the chain. It was too heavy to sleep with. It dragged you down into dreams. With a solid clunk it hit the night table, all her stories, her insoluble mysteries: a dead sound,
clunk,
just like that—the last sound before silence.

H
e has already been pointed out to me: a flabby, thickset man of fifty-five or sixty, very black, working alongside the others and in no way different from them—or so it seems. When they work he swings his pick with the same rhythm. When they pause he squats and rolls a cigarette, running his tongue along the edge of the paper while his eyes, under the stained hat, observe the straight line of the horizon; then he sets it between his lips, cups flame, draws in, and blows out smoke like all the rest.

Wears moleskins looped low under his belly and a flannel vest. Sits at smoko on one heel and sips tea from an enamel mug. Spits, and his spit hisses on stone. Then rises, spits in his palm, takes up the crowbar. They are digging holes for fencing-posts at the edge of the plain. When called he answers immediately, "Here, boss,” and then, when he has approached, "Yes, boss, you wanna see me?” I am presented and he seems amused, as if I were some queer northern bird he had heard about but never till now believed in, a sort of crane perhaps, with my grey frock coat and legs too spindly in their yellow trousers; an odd, angular fellow with yellow-grey side-whiskers, half spectacles, and a cold-sore on his lip. So we stand face to face.

He is, they tell me, the one surviving speaker of his tongue. Half a century back, when he was a boy, the last of his people were massacred. The language, one of hundreds (why make a fuss?) died with them. Only not quite. For all his lifetime this man has spoken it, if only to himself. The words, the great system of sound and silence (for all languages, even the simplest, are a great and complex system) are locked up now in his heavy skull, behind the folds of the black brow (hence my
scholarly interest), in the mouth with its stained teeth and fat, rather pink tongue. It is alive still in the man's silence, a whole alternative universe, since the world as we know it is in the last resort the words through which we imagine and name it; and when he narrows his eyes, and grins and says, "Yes, boss, you wanna see me?,” it is not breathed out.

I am (you may know my name) a lexicographer. I come to these shores from far off, out of curiosity, a mere tourist, but in my own land I too am the keeper of something: of the great book of words of my tongue. No, not mine, my people's, which they have made over centuries, up there in our part of the world, and in which, if you have an ear for these things and a nose for the particular fragrance of a landscape, you may glimpse forests, lakes, great snow peaks that hang over our land like the wings of birds. It is all there in our mouths. In the odd names of our villages, in the pet-names we give to pigs or cows, and to our children too when they are young, Little Bean, Pretty Cowslip; in the nonsense rhymes in which so much simple wisdom is contained (not by accident, the language itself discovers these truths), or in the way, when two consonants catch up a repeated sound, a new thought goes flashing from one side to another of your head.

All this is mystery. It is a mystery of the deep past, but also of now. We recapture on our tongue, when we first grasp the sound and make it, the same word in the mouths of our long dead fathers, whose blood we move in and whose blood still moves in us. Language
is
that blood. It is the sun taken up where it shares out heat and light to the surface of each thing and made whole, hot, round again.
Solen,
we say, and the sun stamps once on the plain and pushes up in its great hot body, trailing streams of breath.

O holiest of all holy things!—it is a stooped blond crane that tells you this, with yellow side-whiskers and the grey frock coat and trousers of his century—since we touch here on beginnings, go deep down under Now to the remotest dark, far back in each ordinary moment of our speaking, even in gossip and the rigmarole of love words and children's games, into the lives of our fathers, to share with them the single instant of all our seeing and making, all our long history of doing and being. When I think of my tongue being no longer alive in the mouths of men a chill goes over me that is deeper than my own death, since it is the gathered death of all my kind. It is black night descending once and
for ever on all that world of forests, lakes, snow peaks, great birds’ wings; on little fishing sloops, on foxes nosing their way into a coop, on the piles of logs that make bonfires, and the heels of the young girls leaping over them, on sewing-needles, milk pails, axes, on gingerbread moulds made out of good birchwood, on fiddles, school slates, spinning-tops—my breath catches, my heart jumps. O the holy dread of it! Of having under your tongue the first and last words of all those generations down there in your blood, down there in the earth, for whom these syllables were the magic once for calling the whole of creation to come striding, swaying, singing towards them. I look at this old fellow and my heart stops, I do not know what to say to him.

I am curious, of course—what else does it mean to be a scholar but to be curious and to have a passion for the preserving of things? I would like to have him speak a word or two in his own tongue. But the desire is frivolous, I am ashamed to ask. And in what language would I do it? This foreign one? Which I speak out of politeness because I am a visitor here, and speak well because I have learned it, and he because it is the only one he can share now with his contemporaries, with those who fill the days with him—the language (he appears to know only a handful of words) of those who feed, clothe, employ him, and whose great energy, and a certain gift for changing and doing things, has set all this land under another tongue. For the land too is in another language now. All its capes and valleys have new names; so do its creatures—even the insects that make their own skirling, racketing sound under stones. The first landscape here is dead. It dies in this man's eyes as his tongue licks the edge of the horizon, before it has quite dried up in his mouth. There is a new one now that others are making.

So. It is because I am a famous visitor, a scholarly freak from another continent, that we have been brought together. We have nothing to say to one another. I come to the fire where he sits with the rest of the men and accept a mug of their sweet scalding tea. I squat with difficulty in my yellow trousers. We nod to one another. He regards me with curiosity, with a kind of shy amusement, and sees what? Not fir forests, surely, for which he can have neither picture nor word, or lakes, snow peaks, a white bird's wing. The sun perhaps, our northern one, making a long path back into the dark, and the print of our feet, black tracks upon it.

Nothing is said. The men are constrained by the presence of a stranger, but also perhaps by the presence of the boss. They make only
the most rudimentary attempts at talk: slow monosyllabic remarks, half-swallowed with the tea. The thread of community here is strung with a few shy words and expletives—grunts, caws, soft bursts of laughter that go back before syntax; the man no more talkative than the rest, but a presence just the same.

I feel his silence. He sits here, solid, black, sipping his tea and flicking away with his left hand at a fly that returns again and again to a spot beside his mouth; looks up so level, so much on the horizontal, under the brim of his hat.

Things centre themselves upon him—that is what I feel, it is eerie— as on the one and only repository of a name they will lose if he is no longer there to keep it in mind. He holds thus, on a loose thread, the whole circle of shabby-looking trees, the bushes with their hidden life, the infinitesimal coming and going among grass roots or on ant-trails between stones, the minds of small native creatures that come creeping to the edge of the scene and look in at us from their other lives. He gives no sign of being special. When their smoking time is up, he rises with the rest, stretches a little, spits in the palm of his hand, and goes silently to his work.

“Yes, boss, you wanna see me"—neither a statement nor a question, the only words I have heard him speak …

I must confess it. He has given me a fright. Perhaps it is only that I am cut off here from the use of my own tongue (though I have never felt such a thing on previous travels, in France, Greece, Egypt), but I find it necessary, in the privacy of my little room with its marble-topped washbasin and commodious jug and basin, and the engraving of Naomi bidding farewell to Ruth—I find it necessary, as I pace up and down on the scrubbed boards in the heat of a long December night, to go over certain words as if it were only my voice naming them in the dark that kept the loved objects solid and touchable in the light up there, on the top side of the world. (Goodness knows what sort of spells my hostess thinks I am making, or the children, who see me already as a spook, a half-comic, half-sinister wizard of the north.)

So I say softly as I curl up with the sheet over my head, or walk up and down, or stand at the window a moment before this plain that burns even at midnight:
rogn, vainoti, spiseskje, hakke, vinglass, lysestake, krabbe, kjegle …

T
he boy stood in the doorway and was not yet visible. The others were at breakfast. He stood leaning against the refrigerator, which was taller than he was, a great white giant that made ice, endlessly made ice, and whose shelves (the brightest place in the house) were packed with bowls of asparagus tips, beetroot, egg-custard, roll-mops, tubs of Neapolitan gelati, cheesecake, pizzas, T-bone steaks. No one bothered to look up.

He would step out soon—but as what? A stranger from the streets, filthy from sleeping on building-sites or at the end of alleys among the rubbish-tins and piss; demanding that they take him in and feed him, or find a place for him in their beds. As a courier of the air, one of those agents of apocalypse that are for ever in course about the planet, bearing news of earthquake, epidemic, famine, and the coming now of the last invaders. As an exterminating angel swinging a two-edged sword and bringing them back to the first things of all, to blood and breath. As anything but the fourteen-year-old he was, descending only from a night among the hot sheets and a room whose Cat Stevens poster (which belonged to the time when he was a Cat Stevens fan), and his dictionaries, calculator, tape-recorder, and head-set—and the silhouettes of all the ships of cruiser class in the Japanese navy of forty years ago—might define the whole of his interests and what he was.

He stepped out of the lee of the white giant, in T-shirt and jeans, his hair combed wet from the shower. The two-edged sword went swinging.

“You're late,” his mother complained, without even looking to see who it was.

“It's all right,” he said. “I don't want anything. Just tea.”

His mother poured it with her back to him, where she was preparing salads for their picnic, and he came and took it from the bench.