In a moment of silence the old man’s eyes follow Adrian’s, and both watch the agonies of the kite.
‘Does the kite mean something to you?’ asks Adrian.
*
It reminds me of my brother. You were asking me about my family. We once built kites just like that, though in those days we made the wings from paper.
Once I was given a real kite; my father bought it for me with his clerk’s salary the week I passed my school certificate. I ran out to test it on the bank behind our house. But the season was wrong, there was not so much as a whisper of wind. Running to and fro, I became frustrated, finally I threw it down and burst into tears. My crying angered my father. He told me to bring the kite to him and in front of him he made me hand it to my brother.
Within two days an unseasonable wind blew up. Who knows from where? I watched my brother playing with the kite. He called me to join him, but I refused. I would die rather than admit how much I wanted to play with that kite.
My brother was strong-limbed and solid, hard as a rubber ball, so when he first fell ill you couldn’t notice it. I left him sleeping in the bed we shared. Afterwards he went about his chores, never complaining, only his usual boisterousness was tempered by the sickness. In a family of men doubtless nobody would have noticed. My mother had enough to do in a day, as she often said. She made all our clothes and some embroidery as well, to sell. But she had a fondness for him. Late in the morning she found him curled up in a corner of the room, complaining of the cold while outside the sun burned in the sky.
I was moved out of the bed soon afterwards, to sleep in the sitting room with an older cousin. I loved my brother, but still there were those times I would go into his room with the sole purpose of taunting him. If he asked for water, I would walk in and hold on to the mug and refuse to let him have it. There was a point in his sickness when his voice failed, and so there was nothing he could do but whimper little words and make stuttering sounds. Then I would imitate him and when I had had enough I would place the tin mug just beyond his reach and leave the room. Another time I pulled the bedclothes down and delivered bruising little pinches across his body, knowing he hadn’t the strength to fight me. None of it made any difference. Whenever I entered his room he looked at me without fear or hate, rather with something like expectation. As if waiting to see what I might do next. And there were days I sensed he felt something like pity for me, though it was he who lay there with limbs as useless as a straw doll’s.
In time he recovered though his walk maintained an uneven keel. My mother had made me fetch and carry for him during his sickness, and so it continued. Look after your brother, you’re the eldest! All the responsibility came to me, though I never asked for it. And there were times his happiness seemed designed to goad me, and I confess, occasions when left alone I vented my frustration on him.
Don’t ask me why I did it. A little childish jealousy. As an invalid he drew more of my mother’s attention. The good thing is that my brother forgave me. Even after he no longer depended on me, when I left home to pursue my studies and left him behind.
And if you asked me did I love my brother, I would have said yes. I would say yes. I had spent more nights lying in the warmth from his body than in that from any lover’s. Only during the time when he was sick did I ever sleep anywhere else.
At any rate, I digress.
A change in the season. Surreptitious at first. At night the rain tapped on the windowpanes, scores of hesitant fingers. Dawn brought bright skies, washed of the desert dust, and the hard, coppery smell of earth. For the first time in months you had a clear view of the hills from the city. As the weeks passed, the rain became emboldened, abandoned the sanctuary of the night and came by day, blindingly, accompanied by dark clouds. The blue skies that arrived with the morning by the afternoon had vanished.
One such a day, trapped indoors by the rain, I sat at my desk, trying to concentrate on the outline of a paper for the faculty journal. ‘Reflections on Changing Political Dynamics’. I was looking for an arena in which to make my name, to put recent political events into perspective. The drumming of the rain, the tapping of the typewriter keys combined to unsettle my thoughts and I struggled to maintain the logic of my argument. The light was grainy and grey; I went into a neighbouring office to fetch a small lamp and when I returned I paused for a moment to gaze out of the window. People were scurrying across the courtyard, running from one doorway to the next as though there was a sniper on the roof. I saw Julius. He was walking along the diagonal path, bareheaded and without an umbrella. With him was another person, who I took to be one of his students; they were both deeply absorbed in conversation. Julius was gesticulating with both hands. It was a habit of his, he drew sketches in the air and even traced out mathematical problems of some complexity on an invisible blackboard. At one juncture they paused, heedless of the rain, better to conduct the conversation face to face. I stayed and watched from the window. They shook hands vigorously, as though they had arrived at some agreement. Julius left his companion at the door and walked on, ambling. I saw him shake the raindrops from his head, like a dog, and watched until he disappeared into the doorway beneath me. I went back to sit at my desk. Sure enough his face, glistening wet and grinning, popped around my door moments later.
‘Borrow me twenty-five cents, Cole. I need a soft drink.’
I brought my change purse from my pocket and counted out the money. Julius had got into the habit of dropping by my office. Sometimes it was to borrow small amounts of money. At first I kept a running total of how much he owed me, until I realised he had no intention of paying it back, no intention even of expending the effort required to remember the debt. Once I came back to find three brand-new packs of cigarettes on my desk. From Julius, or at least so I assumed. Recompense for all the twenty-five-cent loans.
He had an appetite for history and frequently borrowed books. One or two he returned with phrases underscored and comments pencilled into the margin. Not for my benefit, or the benefit of any future reader, but as a record of his own thoughts.
There were other days when he sat in the spare chair, or rested his backside on the windowsill, and began to expand whatever was on his mind, something he had read in the papers, a thought, or a theory — seeing what I made of it. On days when he had use of the car he would invite me for a drive and he would continue to expound his ideas from behind the wheel. In front of my eyes he pulled down the city and rebuilt it. Drainage systems. Buildings. Bridges. Highways. Driving along, humming and singing off key.
The peninsula bridge. He told me how, when he was fifteen or so, he had watched its construction every day for months. The columns of the support towers being raised one by one. The superstructure, then the deck, one section at a time, transported and hoisted upwards on a crane and swung into place. The men who did the work knew him by name. Kru mostly, a hundred years ago they worked the ships going and coming from here, were used to the proximity of water, of heights and ropes. They seemed to understand, elementally, the nature of the construction, though none could so much as read or write. Once, at the close of the day’s work, Julius told me he crept to the edge of the new section, crawling on his belly, and peered over, exhilarated by the drop down to the water, the possibility of being blown away. The day before the official opening they lowered him, dangerously, over the side on a trapeze and he wrote all the workers’ names in the wet concrete, adding his own initials at the end. J.K.
For my part, I listened, which was my role. And anyway, Julius was a talker and I am not so prone to it. I am circumspect by nature. Julius was not. He was a man possessed of great ardour. The whiff of naivety, of wonderment was all about him. He had a way of seeing the world, full of glory, that served only to obscure the reality of it.