And then I got only half what they promised. And there isn’t much left after five years, five years next month. I’ve done some sort of work, now and then, so no-one would be wondering where I got the money to pay the rent for my room and so on. Worked at the race course, and once or twice in night clubs. Places where they don’t register you with any labour office. What was I thinking I was going to do with the money if I had got it all, as they promised? Get away, somewhere else? When I think of going to some other country, like they did, taking out at the frontier the papers and the name of nobody they gave me, showing my face—
I don’t talk.
I don’t take up with anybody. Not even a woman. Those places I worked, I would get offers to do things, move stolen goods, handle drugs: people seemed to smell out somehow I’d made myself available. But I am not! I am not here, in this city. This city has never seen my face, only the back of a man leaping up the steps that led to the alley near the subway station. It’s said, I know, that you return to the scene of what you did. I never go near, I never walk past that subway station. I’ve never been back to those steps. When she screamed after me as I disappeared, I disappeared for ever.
I couldn’t believe it when I read that they were not going to bury him in a cemetery. They put him in the bit of public garden in front of the church that’s near the subway station. It’s an ordinary-looking place with a few old trees dripping in the rain on gravel paths, right on a main street. There’s an engraved stone and a low railing, that’s all. And people come in their lunch-hour, people come while they’re out shopping, people come up out of that subway, out of that cinema, and they tramp over the gravel to go and stand there, where he is. They put flowers down.
I’ve been there. I’ve seen. I don’t keep away. It’s a place like any other place, to me. Every time I go there, following the others over the crunch of feet on the path, I see even young people weeping, they put down their flowers and sometimes sheets of paper with what looks like lines of poems written there (I can’t read this language well), and I see that the inquiry goes on, it will not end until they find the face, until the back of nobody turns about. And that will never happen. Now I do what the others do. It’s the way to be safe, perfectly safe. Today I bought a cheap bunch of red roses held by an elastic band wound tight between their crushed leaves and wet thorns, and laid it there, before the engraved stone, behind the low railing, where my name is buried with him.
AN EMISSARY
‘ … how few Westerners grasp malaria’s devastation. That said, its global toll remains staggering. In the last 20 years, it has killed nearly twice as many people as AIDS …. Malarial mosquitoes can even stow away on international flights — just ask recent unsuspecting victims near airports in Germany, Paris and São Paulo’.
All impurity hazing away, middleage evanescing, you can’t really make out their jowls and eye-pouches in the steam, and your own face if you could see it would be smudged, all that you’ve done to it, the wriggles of red veins down the nose, wafted from view. Underneath is you as you were.
This place calls itself Fredo’s Sauna and Health Club. But when you’re lying here you’re a senator among senators and nobles in a Roman bath. It’s winter now — no need to worry, no dangerous ultraviolet striking you, nothing noxious survives. Winter now but there’s no shivering here! Never any winter. In the humidity summer lives on; and there’s some tiny thing floating out off the misty heat — can’t be — no, must be a shred of someone’s towel — but it lands on a plump wet pectoral, just above the hair-forest there, it’s alive — and now dead, smack! A deformed punctuation mark of black, a scrap of wing, sliding on sweat.
REBIRTH
Winter outside but there’s water and privacy for breeding, eggs to lie low where no-one could imagine it, a place in which to emerge as you were, sloping back, transparent wings and special proboscis feature, in Fredo’s Sauna and Health Club.
The musical conversation of the orchestra, tuning up rather like athletes running-on-the-spot and shadow-punching, before performance; it even includes the pitch of anticipation in the low interchange of human voices. A diminuendo from this audience, as the musicians come from the wings, and a rallentando when the guest conductor, a famous young Czech or whatever, appears to bow, turn his back, mount the podium and settle his shoulders in readiness to enter the symphony with raised baton.
HEAVENLY CHORUS OF THE SPHERES
It’s winter, but nobody coughs. The sonority of wind, strings and keyboard calms all, the following tempest of brass sweeps away all reactions but the aural. The cello and viola file into the temple of each ear with the intoning of monks, there’s the query of the flute, the double-stopping grunt of the bass, the berating of drums and an answering ping of a triangle. All these creatures produce the beauty of the invisible life of sound. They dive, they soar, they ripple and glide almost beyond the reach of reception, and swell to return; some overwhelm others and then in turn are subsumed, but all are there somewhere in the layers of empyrean they ravishingly invade and transmute. They weave in and out of it, steal through it, flow into eight hundred sets of ears — it’s a full house when this conductor comes out on tour from one of those dangerous benighted Balkan countries that are always seceding and fighting and changing their names.
The auditorium is kept welcomingly heated by artificial means and by the pleasant warmth of human breath. A minute manifestation of being flies with the music, contributing a high, long-drawn fiddle-note. Nobody hears this Ariel materialise round their heads.
On the other hemisphere — Southern — it is summer, not simulation that makes all the year a summer.
WINGED CHARIOT
They are not here officially, driving on a rutted muddy road between baobab trees, if officially means that your whereabouts are known to close collaterals — wives, husbands, and professional partners. An irresistible mutual impulse — like the original unlikely one that brought them together — to take to themselves something more than two hours once a week under an assumed name in an obscure hotel, had discovered in each the ability to devise unbelievably believable absences, the call of professional commitments. They took a plane, carefully not travelling even in the same class (how clever passion makes even those who have been honest and open all their lives). They chose an unlikely destination — they hoped; in their circles people travel a lot and quite adventurously, so long as the camps are luxury ones with open-air bars and helicopter service.
The baobabs are mythical animals turned to stone.
Whenever before would he have found himself beside a woman who would come out with such delightful fantasies! She’s a writer, and sees everywhere what he has never seen; he’s an economist, privy to so much about the workings of the world she always has felt herself ignorant of, and here he is, listening with admiration to her trivial knack of imagery.
This adventure of theirs can only last a few days — the credibility of the alibis won’t allow longer — and it has come late and totally unexpected, to both of them. Husband, wife, half-grown children, reputation — now a last chance: of what? Something missed, now to be urgently claimed. He loves her to speak poetry to him as he drives. It’s her poetry, appropriated by her to accompany her life, the poets knowing always better than she does what is happening to her; now, to them. What they have done is crazy, the final destination a bad end; the realisation comes silently to each with a bump in the rutted road. Then she’s saying for them both, as the medium possessed by a dead poet, the lines don’t all reach her in the right sequence — at my back I always hear, Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near … let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up … and tear our pleasures with rough strife through the iron gates of life … the grave’s a fine and private place but none I think do there embrace …