While the Gods Were Sleeping (2 page)

Undoubtedly she would raise a sceptical eyebrow if she could now hear me say that the substance of the gods has not yet completely seeped out of a child.

“What grotesque self-glorification, Helena,” she would sigh, and I’m not putting words in her mouth. I’ve heard her repeat it often enough, without looking up from the sewing with which we filled the long winter evenings during the war.

Meanwhile I am older than she was when she died. She now shares with the gods the situation of being outside time—and I still believe that I am right about the godliness of children and the childlike nature of the gods. The existence of each has the
character of a dreamlike game since they have no knowledge of death. Their cruelties are light-footed, their tendernesses brutal. Melt the infinity of the dead together with the uninhibitedness of the child and what you get is a gruesome godhead.

At this point—I have seen her do it more than once—she would abruptly lay aside her mending. With both hands she would pull apart the worn-out seam of a garment or accidentally prick herself on one of her pins. Then she would get up and move away from the pool of lamplight in which she always did her work, rinse off her bleeding finger and light the gas under the kettle to make tea. From somewhere near the draining board she would moan that I talk nonsense, but it seems to me most probable that she would not say anything. To some sophistries she found a piqued silence the best retort.

She had no patience with things that transcended the immediately tangible. For her I was a poetess because in her eyes poets floated in the air. “That’s true,” I said to her later. “But head downward.” I believe I meant it, though I may have dreamt it up on the spot so as to deny her the last word. I was gradually entering the school of rebelliousness.

Her sarcasm served a higher purpose. She wanted to thrust me into the everydayness of the word, squeeze my thoughts into sturdy winter clothes. Dreary but hard-wearing, and above all waterproof. For my mother trains of argument and items of clothing were one and the same: they must button up tight, while I liked nothing better than lazing about in the hanging gardens of Babylon in my open nightdress, proud of my blossoming curves, and climbing the ziggurats of books. I surrendered myself
to the cadence of silent speech that rose from their spines, the Styx of sentences, in which here and there, like driftwood or drowning people, words and images floated, which I more or less already understood, alongside much else that was not much more than shadowy stains in a dark flood.

I still believe that books, like gods and children, inhabit a limbo in existence, a dimension in which effects can lead to causes and yesterdays crawl forth from tomorrows. It is impossible to make final judgements there: who deserves heaven and who hell. Everything is yet to happen and everything is already over; that is the essence of paradise.

As a child I regarded books as a kind of dead people, and actually I still do. Anyone who writes is organizing his own spirit realm. Books were filled with the same stillness as the stiff limbs of relatives on their deathbeds. True, they had more to say for themselves, but seemed like the dead to be yearning for a living spirit to linger in.

I liked the anonymous, the posthumous quality that every book carries in it. I found their titles and prefatory headings an unforgivable genuflection to vanity, or a kind of extenuation of the energy with which a story can take possession of you. That the writer should put his name on it for the benefit of the reader seemed to me almost as absurd as being assaulted by someone who first politely hands you their visiting card. I should have preferred to scratch the names off the covers and tear the title page from the body of the book. I even wanted to go further and liberate all those books from their static array on the shelves of the home library by giving them a home elsewhere, in other rooms, in the garden, among the beams of
the shed, in the cellars, like Easter eggs or Christmas presents, nameless, indescribably vulnerable, their fate in the hands of whoever found them.

I have never been able to free myself from that fantasy, and have come to believe more and more firmly in it. Books should band together like feral dogs on street corners. They should have to sleep in piles in shop doorways under cardboard covers, beggars without much hope of alms. They should get soaked through with rain on park benches, or be scattered on the floor of the tram, in order to beguile or bore whoever picks them up, leave them indifferent or irritate them so much that they want to write a reply, which would then blow through the world just as namelessly. Somewhere that book will disturb an order, calm unrest, freeze happiness, commemorate the future or foretell the past, unidentified, announced at most by the rustling of the sheets—the only angels I more or less believe in.

Perhaps my mother’s lack of understanding of my questions issued from a dislike of what she considered unforgivably provisional. She was more Catholic than she felt herself to be. However agnostic she might be, the divine was set in her thinking like a plug in a bathtub. God was the dam that people had thrown up in order to prevent the fatal encounter with their own bottomless longing. Pull out the plug or breach the dam, and everything runs out. It’s far too late to ask her for clarification, but I know that she didn’t like giving up. “We can’t hang about hanging about,” was her favourite pronouncement. “We must get to work. If the chicken doesn’t lay, in the pot with it!” She liked exclamation marks and pronounced them audibly. They stood at the end of her sentences like gatekeepers with flaming swords: thus far and no farther.

I heed her battle cry, albeit reluctantly. A person will never be more than a rough version of themselves, a crude sketch on a sheet of paper that can be screwed up at any minute. Why should I get worked up about full stops at the end of a line, the place of a comma or exclamation marks—and why demarcate spaces, rooms, dwellings, bullet holes, craters? Sooner or later I pick gold coins out of the cold mouths of the dead, the mineral of time without time, and their voices burst out endlessly as if they are still alive.

“Time is the great soul of all things,” I wrote, aged about fourteen—the word adolescent didn’t really exist yet. “It fills its lungs without ever exhaling.” I don’t know if I find the formulation as bombastic as my mother definitely would have done if she had been able to read my most intimate writings, but now, almost a century later, I can hear time’s constant inhalation more clearly than before, and I am already half dissolved in the air, screaming through its bronchioles, the light-years-long blast of breath that forces its way through caverns of calcium and bone. Perhaps it will be possible, just before I disappear completely, to gain an overview of existence itself as if I have been peeled away from it.

I imagine that I would be able to see life, not just mine and yours, but life as such, down in the depths beneath my feet: churning, meandering. A hundred thousand Grand Canyons intertwined, an expansive tissue of rapids, pools, salt pans and waterfalls, shimmering in an endless night.

Perhaps I would be able to read the patterns unfolding in the fanning torrent, the motifs that develop in it and dissolve in it again, the completeness that it carries with it and the futility
of human time that sinks into it. I would then feel as if, just before I vanish into oblivion, it is granted to me for a moment to see things through God’s eyes. I would be able to appropriate some of the fatalism through which a rodent fighting against the strangling grip of a snake embodies just as cosmic a tragedy as the fall of Troy—or conversely: the same banality.

A human being should not really think in these dimensions, I know. Life is not a play or painting, to be viewed from outside, but if I am honest I would never have written a word if I actually believed that, and don’t you kid yourself that you read for any other reason.

My mother would have lost all patience by now, reading this. “Pathetic,” she would giggle with a shake of the head. She would pour her tea in the kitchen and drink it by herself without realizing what a triumph I am granting her.

It doesn’t matter.

She’s dead.

As she gets up from her chair, her outlines fade in the
lamplight
and, with her outlines, the room.

“Life is simple,” she once said to me. “I don’t need any posh words for it. It’s doing the washing-up. A person makes plates dirty, washes them clean, wipes them dry, puts them away, takes them out of the cupboard again, makes them dirty, washes them clean, wipes them dry, puts them away, takes them out of the cupboard again, and one fine day the whole pile falls out of your hands.”

She fell silent, looked down and drank a mouthful of tea.

I had no answer, at the time.

She was a born poetess.

I
T STRIKES ME
that Rachida likes scouring or mopping downstairs while I am working upstairs, and a definite sisterly relationship is created between us as she clenches the brush in her fists. I should like to be able to send the pen in my fingers as easily across the paper as she sends her mop across the tiles—the gentle dragging calms me and smoothes my senses.

Except that she washes dirt away and wipes out traces. While I stain the paper with the staggering gait of a drunkard, my ecstasy of ink, she leaves things in their nakedness. She brings the blissful mongoloid smile of the world to the surface, the grinning, gleaming-wet Zen of dumb objects, the names of which she blows off like chaff. And I think: I shall never be able to reduce everything there is to such unrestrained silence in the word, the great night is better than 10,000 months.

“Did you say something, Mrs Helena? Did you call, do you need anything?”

She doesn’t whistle in the hall, like the other one, that standing stone, after she has plumped me down on the toilet like a bag of bones in the hope that it will make my bladder empty faster.

Rachida makes tea and fills the thermos. She checks whether my pens need ink and whether the side tables are close enough to the chair. She will soon leave me there until she returns in the afternoon to heat the food.

“We have angels too,” she says as she combs my hair and seems to be looking more at my hair than at me. She brushes my sparse locks up without her eye catching the mug with its
mummy’s grin that laughs at me every morning in the bathroom mirror with my own yellowed teeth. That carcass that, ridiculously, still houses the lust of a girl and, at the sight of the window-cleaners in their cradle at the windows, still sneaks a look at their crotches like a teenager looks at a lolly.

“The same angels as you. Gabriel,” she says. “He’s your angel too, isn’t he?”

She does my nails, looks in the drawer of the dressing table to see what earrings match my blouse. She doesn’t find it too much to ask to hang a few carats of innocent dignity around my scraggy neck every day—unlike “her colleague”. That bloated cow would probably most like to smother me between her tits.

“Christine,” she laughs. “Her name is Christine.”

“She’s not an angel,” I say. “You are. But without wings.”

“The boss won’t let me. Too many feathers. I hang them up in my cupboard when I have to work, Mrs Helena.”

I’m glad that she’s laughing, that she takes me from my bed to my chair as if she is leading me onto the dance floor, that I can place my fingers in hers and put my feet in the spot where she has put hers.

She lowers me carefully into my chair.

She asks whether it is close enough to the window.

She lays my feet on the pouf.

She wraps my feet in an extra blanket.

Am I sitting comfortably?

Don’t I need an extra cushion behind my hips?

“I’ve poured the tea in the thermos, Mrs Helena. Would you like the paper first?”

When I shake my head she lays the board on my lap and says that there is enough ink in the pens.

Although she asks whether I’m feeling cold, as she asks she has already knelt down beside me. She rubs my fingers warm until they tingle. I’m glad she understands, understands so much, that she doesn’t overwhelm me with favours for which I first have to beg and that her gestures and grimaces do not spell out to me the thousands of connotations of the word parasite. As you get older you automatically calculate in nanograms and micrometres. You weigh friendship like gold dust on tiny scales and the merest grain of sand embodies the grossest humiliation.

She gets up. Looks down at me with satisfaction.

“They and the Spirit ascend to Him, on a Day whose length is 50,000 years.’

“What was that, Mrs Helena?”

“Nothing, child. Something about your angels…”

She always makes sure there is an extra notebook to hand, so that I have to get up as little as possible from my chair before noon. She never sighs when I ask: “Can you fetch me the red exercise book, and put the green one back on the shelf, if you would?” She will never chuckle sarcastically like the other one, that half gorilla, who in the evening grabs the exercise book out of my numb hands with a vicious grimace, flicks the pages through her fingers and shakes her head with a snigger. Then I brace myself for the umpteenth question, the umpteenth sneer—do I really have so many secrets that I have to write them all down before I kick the bucket, and can’t she put the ones on the top shelf into boxes? They’re gathering dust and you never reread them anyway.

I say to Rachida alone: “When I’m dead, take them with you and distribute them. Make sure the other one doesn’t get her
hands on them, she’ll only take them to the dump, the rodent. When you distribute them: read them or don’t read them, and if you don’t read them, pass them on. Don’t say who I was, that isn’t of the slightest importance. I swear by my pen and what the angels dictate to me.”

She always seems pleased, childishly pleased, whenever I manage to fill one of the notebooks and she can put it in the cupboard. When I ask her to fetch a few of the old exercise books for me—“Take some from the top shelf, at the back, with the split bindings,” I say—she first goes over them with a dry cloth, places them in two measured piles on my board and opens the top one for me.