Half-Blood Blues (37 page)

We both come to a stop. Across the room, seated in a cracked leather chair, his hair and beard completely white against his dark skin, was the man I’d reckoned dead all these years.

‘
Kto tam jest?
’ he said again, frowning. ‘Ewa?’

‘Hiya kid,’ said Chip, real soft.

That old man ain’t seemed like he understood. He turned his head directly at Chip, his eyes staring right through him. And then I seen his face open right up, just start to bloom.

‘Chip?’ he said. And then, in rusty German: ‘Is that you, Chip?’

My god. I seen his old milky eyes, the cast of his face toward us and then away, the sharp tilt as he listened for some reply, and I understood.

The kid was
blind
.

Chip walked up to the chair, crouched down before him. ‘It’s me, it’s Chip, brother.’ But then he just put one damn arm around the kid, and then the other, and then he was hauling the old kid out of his chair and they was both embracing.

‘Up you get.’ Chip was laughing, his voice thin. He stood back, staring at the changes in Hiero’s face: the even gaunter cheeks, the beard white as pure ash. Still got that frightened twist to his mouth. ‘You look
good
, brother,’ he said. He gave a little grunt. ‘
Damn
good. Like Sidney Poitier.’

‘You ain’t the only one hasn’t seen my face in years,’ said Hiero, smiling. Then he lifted his chin, tilted his face to the wall. ‘Who you brought with you?’

And all a sudden my mind gone white with panic.

Chip let him go and come over to me. ‘Come on, brother. Go on say hello.’

It was the strangest thing. I gone over to Hiero then, unable to say a word, and just put my old hand on his shoulder. He raised his sightless eyes almost right on mine and said, real soft, ‘Sid?’

His rough palm touched my face, the fingertips passing over my closed eyes, my nose, my chin. I was nodding like a fool.

‘You crying,’ he said.

‘I ain’t crying,’ I said.

And then he pulled me into a rough hug. All I could feel was his damn thin frame shaking.

‘Used to be the old Ironworks,’ Hiero was saying in his deep, cracked voice. ‘For years it produced all the steel round here. I trained as a blacksmith. When the cooperative finally shut down, they let me stay on, me and a few others. Used the space as a house. Well, one by one the others moved on, but here I am, still. I ain’t never going to leave.’

‘Those your sculptures outside?’ I glanced out the brilliant windows, tried not to meet his eyes.

Hiero smiled. ‘No.’

‘They ain’t done by you?’ Chip said, smiling. ‘Those old monsters out there?’

‘No,’ said Hiero. ‘They was here when I come.’

Well, son of a bitch. He was older, frailer, but the kid still couldn’t lie for nothing. It was clear as day he done them. I looked over at Chip and could see he known it, too.

‘Well,’ said Chip. ‘They really striking, whoever done them.’

Hiero looked pleased. ‘You like them?’

‘I ain’t likely to forget them,’ said Chip.

‘Sid?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It ain’t about liking them, is it.’

‘No,’ said Hiero, ‘it ain’t. Let me show you the rest.’

We trailed behind him. He walked through the house without hesitation, like he wasn’t blind at all, moving down hallways, opening doors for us.

‘You sure you blind, brother?’ said Chip.

‘I been living here for years, Chip,’ said Hiero. ‘But you just go moving the damn furniture on me and you’ll see it get ugly, quick.’ He led us outside, along one wall of the house, to huge cellar doors. He pulled them back, dragging them through the grass. The interior was dim, musty like wet clothes. ‘They had a hell of a time renovating all this,’ he continued. ‘They was in far too much of a hurry. I wanted the cellar converted into storage, but they said the only way I could get more space was by digging down into the old floor. Fifty centimetres down. It liked to have killed me, the news. Meant getting rid of the old concrete, casting a new base with under-floor heating cables beneath it. Was a hell of a job – for months the house was full of folks. But it’s done now.’

I watched his face as he spoke. Waiting for a flicker of something – bitterness, resignation. Anything that would tell me where we stood after all these years. But there was nothing. Just his pleasure, his joy. The poor man didn’t know a thing, ain’t got no inkling of what happened all those years ago.

We went in then. The bulb was out and he ain’t troubled to replace it, so the only light we had was what come in with us, through those big doors. In the shadows I could see dozens of strange shapes. And staring at those monolithic statues, the vast broken faces, their grotesque bodies, I got to thinking, maybe he
did
figure it out. Maybe he known right off, after his arrest, maybe he’d spent these long decades making peace with it.

‘Sid,’ Chip called to me. ‘This one sort of look like you.’

My shoes scraped as I walked over.

It was big, thin, lean in the jaw. It was clutching a second figure to itself, as if to protect it. The second figure was big in the belly, like a woman heavy with child. Then it hit me: it wasn’t a woman, but a double bass.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said softly.

I looked over at Hiero’s face, and known then without any doubt he didn’t know what I’d done to him all those years ago. I stared at the figure.

‘So he blind and now you deaf?’ said Chip.

‘What you say?’ I said.

‘Hiero just asked if you could eat now.’

Hiero smiled, but tightly, his lips almost closed. ‘Please. It’s Thomas now.’

‘Thomas,’ said Chip, glancing at me. ‘Sorry.’

The kid’s sightless eyes seemed to meet mine. ‘Sid? You hungry?’

‘I could eat,’ I said.

Dinner was pickled herring and salad with store-bought sticky buns for dessert. We sat on stools pulled out from a closet, the table having only the one chair.

‘Apologies, gentlemen, for the spread,’ Hiero said with a precise flourish of his knife. ‘I’m down to the last of it. I have a girl who comes in, Ewa, she comes every three days with fresh groceries, changes the lights, cleans up. She be here tomorrow. I can do most things, but some things do get beyond you.’

Chip and I looked at each other, then looked guiltily away. You known we both wanted to ask about his eyes. Wanted to ask about his whole past, how he survived the camps and what had happened to him after, how he managed to make his way east and why he started going by Thomas – everything. But Hiero ain’t started in on none of that. He was witty, pleasant, full of good talk on just about every subject. But he ain’t gone
near
those years.

After dinner, he drawn out three glasses and a bottle of scotch.

‘I been saving this,’ he said. ‘A special occasion. Got to worrying I wasn’t going to have a chance to drink it.’

Chip chuckled. ‘Hell, brother, now we talking. Give me two knuckles.’

The day was failing but Hiero ain’t thought to turn on no lights. We said nothing, just sat in the gathering dark, drinking.

At last Chip cleared his throat. ‘I ain’t going to try to talk you into it. I mean, hell, brother, I
thought
about it. I did. Of coming up here, dragging you back, getting you some of what you deserve. It be a story for the ages. But I ain’t going to push.’

What a damn fool I am. A damn blind fool. Cause all a sudden I understood why Chip been so eager to come. I shook my head.

‘You pushing now,’ Hiero smiled gently. ‘But there ain’t no point, Chip. All that’s another life.’

Chip poured himself another glass. ‘You saying it ain’t still in you? You telling me that?’

‘Do it even matter?’ said Hiero. ‘You famous, Chip. You don’t need me.’

Chip looked sort of sad at that. After a while, he said, ‘Is that why you didn’t write all those years? You thought I’d try to get you to come back?’

Hiero shrugged.

‘And you don’t miss it? You don’t miss it for real?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t miss the kind of purpose it give you?’

‘A man’s purpose ain’t in what he do, Chip.’

‘Ain’t it?’

Hiero turned his face toward me. ‘Ask Sid. He give it up.’

I sort of shrugged. I ain’t said nothing in a long while.

‘Sid?’ said Hiero. ‘I know you still here. Sid?’

‘I’m here,’ I murmured. And then, since he seemed to be waiting for it, I said, ‘Aw, I ain’t no kind of talent. Not like you two. It’s different.’

‘You think that makes it easier to give it up?’

I blushed. ‘Not easier. Just different. After the war, after all that, I just sort of ain’t wanted to play it no more.’

‘Why not?’ Hiero pressed.

‘I don’t know.’ I opened my hands uselessly, glanced over at Chip in the falling darkness. He said nothing. ‘I don’t know,’ I said again. ‘It was supposed to be this joyful music. And I just couldn’t find none of that joy in it no more.’

‘I don’t understand that,’ Chip interrupted. ‘I don’t understand that at all.’ He sounded frustrated. ‘The music
is
the joy. That’s how you find it again. By playing.’

Hiero looked sort of sad at that. ‘There’s all sorts of ways to live, Chip. Some of them you give a lot. Some of them you take a lot. Art, jazz, it was a kind of taking. You take from the audience, you take from yourself.’

‘But what it gives, it gives in spades.’

‘What do it give, Chip?’ I said. ‘You a great artist, but you a miserable man.’

Chip was quiet, turning his drink in front of him.

Hiero said nothing.

At last Chip said, ‘I tell you what I know. The world’s damn beautiful. But it’s an accidental beauty. What we do, it’s
deliberate
. It’s the one damn consolation you can offer not just you own life, but other lives you ain’t even met.’ He gave Hiero a long, thoughtful look. ‘You don’t owe the world nothing, Thomas. I know it. And you a good man. But it sure as hell breaks my heart, missing your music. There been this one brutal emptiness I been hauling around my whole life, and it’s that damn beautiful music of yours. I ain’t never stopped being lonely for it.’

Hiero, with that unnerving precision of the blind, reached across and grasped Chip’s big hand in the darkness.

‘It’s an old life,’ he said. ‘It’s an old life.’

I felt desolate, sitting there. I cleared my throat, stood unsteadily. ‘I reckon I got to turn in. Ain’t getting no younger.’

‘You welcome to,’ said Hiero. ‘But you know we just going to spend the night talking about you.’

I glanced sharply at him. He was smiling though, just making an innocent joke.

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘It like to put you both to sleep fast enough.’

Hiero got up from his chair, rapped the table with his knuckles. ‘Pour me another, Chip. I won’t be a minute.’

He led me down a dark hall smelling of sweet breads, into a narrow, simple bedroom. I could see the dark sky of the fields through the window, the billion stabs of the stars.

‘Bed has fresh sheets,’ said Hiero, his hand on the brass doorknob. He shrugged, as if to say, What more could you ask of life.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you, Thomas.’

He was still looking where I was standing just a minute ago. ‘I’m glad you came, Sid. I thought… well. I’m glad.’

This awful weight come into my throat then, I almost couldn’t breathe. I swallowed it down. ‘What a thing, finding you like this.’

‘Like what?’

I shrugged, then seen he couldn’t see it. ‘Alive.’

He gave a sad smile, nodding. ‘Well. You get some rest. Any luck, we’ll both still be that way in the morning.’

He shut the door behind him. And then I known, sitting on the edge of the bed in that dark room, sure as anything in my life, that I had to tell him about the visas. That that was why I come. Not to find a friend, but to finally, and forever, lose one.

I slept. But it wasn’t a dream, what I seen. There was this gap in time, an absence, and then I was thick into it again. I could see Hiero being forced to line up in a row of rusted iron statues. I seen him called out of that lineup, the SS men so astonished by his colour they rubbed his skin, like to see if the black come off. They pegged him for an athlete, like Jesse Owens, like Joe Louis, threatened to keep an even sharper eye on him, in case he used that fitness to run away. I seen an SS man follow him to the effects room, tell him to strip down – everything: coat, hat, pants. Stuffed all of it in a sack with his new number on it.

It wasn’t a dream. I seen them feed him saltpetre until his limbs begun to swell. To keep that raging African libido in check. Day after day until his face between his hands felt like a slab of water-logged bread.

And I seen the kid shaved, every last part of him, him standing in a cold room, raw as caught game, his thin legs shaking. Except it wasn’t the kid he been, but the old man he’d become, so that it was his shining white beard on that dirt floor, his milky eyes troubled as he got handed a striped uniform, a tramp’s cap. And I heard him say to them, ‘It’s an old life. It’s an old life.’

I seen him unable to sleep. Hell. I seen him staring at his bunkmates, their limbs like twisted forks, their eyes like everything been burned right out of them. Even empty like this, they give him surprised looks, amazed at his black skin. And I seen Hiero hardly notice. These men are like smoke, you could move right through them. He even feared them a little, as if just being near might leech the muscle from his bones, carve the light from his eyes.

And I seen his days creeping by. I seen him forced into an orchestra. There’s no shortage of instruments folks have brought with them, maybe reckoning they’d play when they got to where they was going. I heard Hiero playing Wagner’s
Lohengrin
as new trains pulled up. I heard him playing
The Threepenny Opera
’s Cannon Song as bodies was rolled by on lorries and folks was marched off to be hanged. I seen him playing in a brothel of female prisoners, their screams tearing the air as he stood there, lips working, his notes brassy and bright.

It wasn’t a dream. And then I slept.

The sun rose, and that overwhelming light returned. I got up in the same rumpled clothes I gone to bed in, went outside, sat on the lip of Hiero’s porch with my legs dangling over the edge.