He spread honey — given to him by a beekeeping friend — on to a slice of toast, toasted in front of the gas fire, and he offered it to me on a hand-painted plate.
The plate was decorated by a friend of mine, he said. You recognise the plant?
Not yet, Sir.
The flower of the so-called Strawberry Tree.
Strawberries on a tree, Sir?
He didn’t bother to reply.
Tyler made drawings himself. Always with an HB pencil. Sketches of Tudor cottages, churches, driveways, willow trees, sheep, delphiniums. Some of his drawings he had printed on postcards.
Do you sell them, Sir?
I print them for my friends, like this I can offer them a little present.
Nobody can help him, I told myself, as I sat in the wicker chair before his gas fire, rubbing my chilblains and eating my toast and honey. He’s too old and he has too many hairs growing out of his body.
Pasiphae on her two sticks is crossing the reception. People make way for her, and, when she stops to regain her breath, they move around her as if she were a natural landmark. It is her effrontery which puts them at ease.
Did she die?
Who are you talking about? Tyler asked.
I nodded towards a photograph by his bed.
Never, never, talk, he said, about what you see on somebody’s bedside table. Study it if you want to — he picked up the framed photograph and put it in my hands — remember it if you like, but say nothing, for there’s nothing to be said. Nothing.
At last the TV star arrives. People have been standing in the street outside the hotel for almost an hour in the hope of catching a glimpse of her. She is tiny, even smaller than they thought, perfect, with tumbling black hair, wearing silver. Cameras flash on all sides. We all of us hope to find — in this impromptu unscreened moment — something beyond the fame, something which equalises. For example: the fact that she too farts like us. Meanwhile, we are also waiting for the opposite to happen: she has so much perfection, much more than any single person needs, so she could throw some to us!
Tyler takes a pad out of his pocket and begins to draw one of the palm trees in the hotel lounge.
It is at this moment, as he begins to draw, that I remember the weight of his solitude. Perhaps with me, given my age, he felt no need to mask or hide it. Anyway, his glasses magnified the solitude expressed in his eyes. The man who taught me to write was the first person to make me aware of irreparable loss.
Pasiphae is returning on her crutches from the Velásquez bar. Did she have a drink there? When she reaches her chair, she has the problem of lowering herself. Telegonus is at the ready, but it is safer to have a man on each side, so she glances at Tyler, who immediately comes and places one of his huge hands under her colossal elbow.
Are you an artist, Señor?
No, it’s a pastime, Señora.
The TV star, accompanied by a guitarist, has started to sing. The tune is both very young and very old. She sings simply, her eyes almost shut, her silver hips almost still, her lips almost touching the microphone.
On a tree trunk
a young girl jubilant
carved her name. .
you are she who cut into my bark. .
Tyler died in his fifties soon after the Second World War.
His death involved a story about a gas fire, or a house burning down, or an accident with a car left running in a garage with the doors shut. I have forgotten the details because they suggested that the methodical, tidy, gruffly shy man, who believed that quality mattered more than anything else in the world, died — or even put an end to his days — through indifference or carelessness. The details are better forgotten.
We’ll be leaving shortly, Circe whispers, standing at his elbow. It’s a big car and there’s plenty of room for your luggage.
I have very little, Señora.
So you will come and draw our horses? Pasiphae asks him.
When you shade a drawing, you do not scribble. Is that clear? You shade carefully, putting one line beside the next and the next and the next. Then you crosshatch and that way your lines weave the sketch together. The verb: to weave. Past participle?
Woven, Sir.
Juan comes up behind me, puts his hands over my eyes and demands: Who is it?
8 The Szum and the Ching
We’ve arrived — if you are with me. We’re going no further. We’ve reached the house with no doorstep in what they call Little Poland.
I often thought the road-signs were telling a fairy tale: Double Bend, Leaping Deer, Cross Roads, Level Crossing, Roundabout, Falling Stones, Steep Hill, Wandering Cattle, Dangerous Corner.
The warnings offered, when compared to the risks of life, seemed to be of a reassuring simplicity.
It’s hard to say what changes in the sky when driving eastwards after Berlin. You begin to notice whatever is vertical against the flatness of the plain in a different way: the wooden fences, a man standing in a field, the occasional horse, the trees in a forest. The distance you see in the sky is no longer saying the same things as before; here it is announcing that, after another few thousand kilometres, the plain is going to become the steppe — and on the steppe distance becomes as dangerous and challenging as altitude in the mountains.
On the steppe trees grow tougher and smaller, just as certain trees do on mountains — the Carpathians to the south for instance — so as to resist the winter. There are birches on the steppe no taller than a dog. On the mountains the ferocious cold is due to the altitude; on the steppe it is due to the distances, the horizontal extent of the continent.
After crossing the Oder this extent, this extension, is promised, even if not yet there. The sky is making a new proposition to the earth.
I am heading eastwards on my bike along the main road, which joins Warsaw and Moscow. The traffic in both directions is heavy. In a few years’ time this will be a motorway. The road skirts or crosses many forests. Northern ones, in which the summer light is green and the trunks of the spruces as they grow taller become more and more a feathery orange colour. What coral is to fishes, the tops of these red spruces may be to birds.
The number of lives that enter our own is incalculable.
Young women are standing on the shoulder of the road, dressed to kill, hips thrust to the side, beckoning to the drivers coming westwards. A man driving an old, battered 123 Mercedes has stopped. The Poles call this car a beczka, which means a barrel. The driver, who is Ukrainian, also looks like a barrel. Most of the girls are Romanian. The services are paid for in dollar bills.
OK, she says, holding out her hand for the money.
Afterwards, he says, refusing to pay now. What’s your name?
In her backless dress, she shrugs her shoulders.
He points to himself, stubbing his chest with his thumb. Mickhail, he says, I’m called Mickhail. You?
She shakes her head and examines her face in the driving mirror.
Your name?
She replies with the English phrase, used in all situations when she reckons it’s best to withdraw. I dunno, she says.
Fed up, he opens the door of the car and she has to get out. Whereupon he drives off fast, making the tyres slip and throw up dust.
Another young woman walks out from behind the trees. She is holding the hand of an elderly man who is wearing a felt hat with a feather in it. The two girls work this little stretch of forest together.