The journey was enlivened when the train came to a bridge over a ravine. The driver stopped before it, uncertain whether it was possible to get his loaded train across. Frank looked along the track. Workmen on the upper banks of the ravine stood aside, waiting for the train to make up its mind.
‘We’ll be here all day,’ he said to Myra. ‘You should see that bridge.’ Planks formed a parapet only along part of its length, while tree-poles buttressed and reinforced its shaky girders. Frank thought he saw it sway, but knew that this was imagination, mirage, fatigue. The train inched forward, lurched, a hundred heads poking out to gauge its progress. Frank felt scared. The train stood full on the bridge, not a word spoken, only a grinding of wheels, a creak of structure.
They were over. ‘I hope there aren’t any more like that.’
Myra laughed. ‘I knew it would be all right.’ She had had this feeling, that all things would be all right, ever since leaving George, but as the afternoon spun itself slowly out it seemed that the magic weave was falling away, that the train was taking her to a stage beyond both George and Frank, not out of Frank’s love so much as into her own self where life would be lonelier and yet more solid, frightening, exhilarating and independent. The baby lulled her, and the journey went on and on.
Plains on either side seemed without limit, as if they were going into the hinterland of a newly born and endless continent. Sunlight spread yellow wings through sparse cloud, turning the arid countryside into a blood-irrigated desert. Mile after mile without house or horse. They cat-napped through the dusk, Frank wondering whether he hadn’t, at last, encountered those vast and endless spaces dreamed about with such love and longing. He’d given up everything to find this, to find Myra, to find a new brain and absence of mind by drifting anchorless or, rather, attached to the built-in anchor of himself. But these weren’t the spaces, nor these the feelings. Wherever he was going, he was some way from it yet.
When he opened his eyes and looked through the window the sun was sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, but always lower down towards the horizon, until nothing could be seen and the world was confined to a train whose wheels were spinning towards Granada.
21
They walked the streets of Granada under a clear, cold, sun-blue sky, spiritually unable to leave. ‘I feel I’ve been here before,’ she said. ‘But I never have. Not in this life, anyway. George didn’t approve of the régime to let us come this far south. These smells of oranges and flowers, and snow in the air. It’s strange.’
He didn’t know what she meant; it was new to him, but rich in its newness. ‘The Jews and Moors lived here at one time.’
‘Maybe it was that,’ she said. ‘It’s such a strong feeling. It exists right inside me.’
‘It could be that,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t believe in that.’ Such new impressions overwhelmed him still, but he was strengthened by them, no longer disorientated. Having no time to think of himself, resolution grew firmer because decisions that moved him from one place to another were less hard to make. They walked in the garden of the Generalife, between the shadows of gigantic cypresses. ‘I was with George so long,’ she said, talking through the sound of spraying water, ‘that I forgot I was Jewish. But it’s been coming back to me since I met you, for some reason. And this place has given it to me strongest of all.’
‘Where did your grandparents come from, then?’
‘From Bessarabia. I think that’s in Russia now.’
‘Arabia,’ he smiled, ‘it doesn’t seem much different, does it? We’re in a bit of Arabia now. When the Jews left here they went to North Africa and Turkey. Maybe some ended up in Bessarabia.’
‘Why not?’ she said.
‘Myra of Bessarabia,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘I never thought we’d be in Granada.’
Her eyes filled with tears. ‘What is it, love? Tell me what it is?’ A group of Germans armed with guidebooks, plans, cameras and measuring tapes trod gutterally past, pinkfaced and coatless, stepping over hosepipes with exaggerated care. ‘I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know why.’
He embraced her by a tall tailored hedge: ‘I’m full of love for you. Everything will be all right. The baby will come, and we’ll be happy with it.’
‘It’s not even that,’ she said. ‘It’s not that at all. It’s more than that.’
‘You’ll be all right. Don’t cry.’
But Myra felt a desolation of the soul, was a young girl again thinking of beautiful things, locked in an ancient world passed on to her from an exclusive state that only women can inhabit, and that men catch (if ever) in rare moments when they are happy. It was a sensation carried from one woman to another by some dying goddess who never quite died. To Myra it became a self-induced ivy-dream of queens and princesses in whom the beauty of physical mating was admitted to become the finality and further beginning of childbirth. It was a world they kept unjealously because of a divine right that seemed to flower in the alleyways and upper streets of the Albaicin. A parapet had guided her eyes directly across at the blood-coloured towers of the Alhambra buttressed by great snowbanks of the Sierra Nevada — where it also flowered. This desolation went through a procession of images towards something it could never quite reach, a dream containing all the animal realities of the earth. She saw in other women her perfect counterparts infused with the orgiastic motions of which childbirth was the last great cry and connected to the delicate inborn tendernesses in herself. She felt the force of living and was glad to be alive, a positive sensation for the first time which had nothing to do with Frank. The time was close when she could live in as complete a way as she would ever know, for this was the end of her life so far, the phosphorescent deadness that would give place to a new and unique person. It pointed the rebirth towards a life that would be hers only.
He looked out at the white midnight roofs of Granada, steam-breath clouding the glass which he rubbed clear. The city was sleeping at last, and smelled of snow. Noise still came from the hotel kitchen, Andaluz voices subdued and rapid, the clash of plates, a door banging as he got in bed and tried to sleep. He wanted to show her eyes beautiful landscapes, feed her heart with more tenderness and pity than it already possessed, fill her body with more sensations than it had ever known. But this was turning against himself. It was impossible because the end had been reached, not the end of love, but the beginning of something else in which the sort of love he had always known about and felt as fully as anyone was to be discarded as a fraud and a trick, the stone tied around a corpse to make it sink. To cut it loose would enable a man and woman to live in equality, with regard and respect for each other’s purpose in the world. Mutual destruction had to cease.
Copulating cats roared like lions in the night. Myra was sleeping, curled in her nightdress. At dawn an inquisitorial roll of bells came loud and dissonant over luminous rooftops. In the street a ripped poster waved like a frantic hand. Leaves fell thick as copper snow over an autumn square. He had lived through a hundred seasons in one year. Hump-backed clouds looked like disappointed pilgrims returning from some mountain shrine, glad to be back over streets and houses. If you like a city, he thought, it protects you; if you don’t like it, it drives you away. I like this one, but still I’m going. He did not know what he would be doing a week from now. He did not remember what he dreamed last night. If he did not want to wake up, the dream had been good; if he had been glad to wake up, it had been a nightmare. He was uncertain about it.