Man Descending (20 page)

He took a pen out of his breast pocket and, directly beneath the slogan, wrote in his neat, schoolmasterish script Blake’s line: “Albion’s coast is sick, silent; the American meadows faint!”

The light in the stairwell clicked off and he was left in darkness. The penalty for tardiness and vandalism. But at last, hidden in the dusty, narrow tomb of the hallway, hidden in utter night, he found himself whispering it. I remember. I remember. Now I do.

She was a long time dying. Two years. But neither of them had admitted the possibility. That was foolish. In the early days after she had been diagnosed they would load the car and drive down to the ferry to fish for goldeye. They would drive their rods into the soft sand strewn with flood refuse and sit huddled together watching the bright floats riding the oily dark water. That might have been the time to say something. But the sun polished the heavy water, sluggish with silt, and the breeze tugged at their pant-legs and they were full of expectation, certain of a strike, eager to mark a plunging float. The magpies dragged their tail feathers along the beach and the earliest geese rode far out in the river along the flank of a sandbar. Nothing could touch them, and they pressed their shoulders together hard as they leaned into a sharp breeze that came off the face of the water.

At the end, of course, it was different. He spent every night in the armchair in her hospital room. Instead of watching a bright float, he stared at the intravenous bottle slowly drain, and when it emptied he called the little blonde nurse who wore too much make-up.

By then Marie was out of her head, wingy as hell. The things she said, accused him of. Poisoning her food, stealing her slippers, lying to her, sleeping with her friends now that she was sick – even of sleeping with her sister. The doctor explained it by saying that the cancer had spread to her brain. That was true. But why did she think of him in that way? Had she drawn on some silent, subterranean stream of ill will he had never sensed for those crazy notions? How had she really seen him all those years they had spent together? Had she read in his smoothly shaved face some malignancy?

And that of course was his difficulty. Who was he? Everything had changed since her death. His son didn’t recognize him. He hardly recognized himself. Had he been lost for thirty years, in expatriate wandering? Had all those hot classrooms been exile? Was he a harder man than anyone had imagined? And had his wife known that? Was he a breaker of jaws? A drunkard who kicked at strangers in the streets, a man who punished his son by giving him pictures of his dead mother?

Or was he the man who had dreamed of water, who had sat quietly on a stretch of ashy-grey sand and watched a gently tugging line, huddled with his wife?

He began to cry in that dark passage, his first tears. He felt his way down the walls with shaking hands. Why had the light been so brief? And why was the trick so hard, the trick every expatriate and every conquered people had to learn to survive.

Je me souviens, he said. Je me souviens.

Dancing Bear

T
HE OLD MAN
lay sleeping on the taut red rubber sheet as if he were some specimen mounted and pinned there to dry. His housekeeper, the widowed Mrs. Hax, paused in the doorway and then walked heavily to the bedside window, where she abruptly freed the blind and sent it up, whirring and clattering.

She studied the sky. Far away, to the east, and high above the bursting green of the elms that lined the street, greasy black clouds rolled languidly, their swollen underbellies lit by the occasional shudder of lightning that popped in the distance. After each flash she counted aloud to herself until she heard the faint, muttering accompaniment of thunder. Finally satisfied, she turned away from the window to find Dieter Bethge awake and watching her cautiously from his bed.

“It’s going to rain,” she said, moving about the room and grunting softly as she stooped to gather up his clothes and pile them on a chair.

“Oh?” he answered, feigning some kind of interest. He picked a flake of dried skin from his leg and lifted it tenderly to the light like a jeweller, intently examining its whorled grain and yellow translucence.

Sighing, Mrs. Hax smoothed the creases of his carelessly discarded trousers with a soft, fat palm and draped them over the back of a chair. The old bugger made more work than a whole tribe of kids.

She glanced over her shoulder and saw him fingering the bit of skin between thumb and forefinger. “Leave that be,” she said curtly. “It’s time we were up. Quit dawdling.”

He looked up, his pale blue eyes surprised. “What?”

“Time to get up.”

“No,” he said. “Not yet.”

“It’s reveille. No malingering. Won’t have it,” she said, fixing an unconvincing smile on her broad face. “Come on now, up and at ’em. We’ve slept long enough.”

“That rubber thing kept me awake last night,” he said plaintively. “Every time I move it squeaks and pulls at my skin. There’s no give to it.”

“Complainers’ noses fall off,” Mrs. Hax said absent-mindedly as she held a shirt up to her own wrinkled nose. She sniffed. It wasn’t exactly fresh but she decided it would do, and tossed it back on the chair.

The old man felt his face burn with humiliation, as it did whenever he was thwarted or ignored. “I want that damn thing off my bed!” he yelled. “This is my bed! This is my house! Get it off!”

Mrs. Hax truculently folded her arms across her large, loose breasts and stared down at him. For a moment he met her gaze defiantly, but then he averted his eyes and his trembling jaw confirmed his confusion.

“I am not moved by childish tempers,” she announced. “You haven’t learned that yet?” Mrs. Hax paused. “It’s about time you did. One thing about Mrs. Hax,” she declared in a piping falsetto that betrayed her anger, “is that when someone pushes her, she pushes back twice as hard. I am ruthless.” She assumed a stance that she imagined to be an illustration of ruthlessness, her flaccid arms akimbo. A burlesque of violence. “So let me make this perfectly, crystal clear. That rubber sheet is staying on that bed until you forget your lazy, dirty habits and stop them accidents. A grown man,” she said disparagingly, shaking her head. “I just got sick and tired of hauling one mattress off the bed to dry and hauling another one on. Just remember I’m not getting any younger either. I’m not up to heavy work like that. So if you want that rubber thing off, you try and remember not to pee the bed.”

The old man turned on his side and hid his face.

“No sulking allowed,” she said sternly. “Breakfast is ready and I have plenty to do today. I can’t keep it waiting forever.”

Dieter turned on to his back and fixed his eyes on the ceiling. Mrs. Hax shook her head in exasperation. It was going to be one of those days. What went on in the old bastard’s head, if anything? What made him so peculiar, so difficult at times like these?

She walked over to the bed and took him firmly by the wrist. “Upsy-daisy!” she cried brightly, planting her feet solidly apart and jerking him upright. She skidded him to the edge of the bed, the rubber sheet whining a muffled complaint, and his hands, in startled protest and ineffectual rebellion, pawing at the front of her dress. Mrs. Hax propped him upright while his head wobbled feebly from side to side and his tongue flickered angrily, darting and questing like a snake’s.

“There,” she said, patting his hand, “that’s better. Now let’s let bygones be bygones. A fresh start. I’ll say, ‘Good morning, Mr. Bethge!’ and you answer, ‘Good morning, Mrs. Hax!’ ”

He gave no sign of agreement. Mrs. Hax hopefully cocked her head to one side and, like some huge, querulous bird, chirped, “Good morning, Mr. Bethge!” The old man stubbornly disregarded her, smiling sweetly and vacantly into space.

“Well,” she said, patting her dress down around her wide hips and heavy haunches, “it’s no skin off my teeth, mister.”

She stumped to the door, stopped, and looked back. The old man sat perched precariously on the edge of the bed, his white hair ruffled, tufted and crested like some angry heron. A pale shadow fell across the lower half of his face and threw his eyes into relief, so that they shone with the dull, glazed intensity of the most devout of worshippers.

Mrs. Hax often saw him like this, mute and still, lost in reverie; and she liked to suppose that, somehow, he was moved by a dim apprehension of mortality and loss. Perhaps he was even overcome with memories of his wife, and felt the same vast yearning she felt for her own dead Albert.

She mustered a smile and offered it. “Five minutes, dear,” she said, and then closed the door softly behind her.

Bethge made no response. He was thinking – trying to pry those memories out of the soft beds into which they had so comfortably settled, sinking deeper and deeper under the weight of all the years, growing more somnolent and lazy, less easily stirred from sleep. He could no longer make his head crackle with the sudden, decisive leap of quick thought hurtling from synapse to synapse. Instead, memories had now to be pricked and prodded, and sometimes, if he was lucky, they came in revelatory flashes. Yet it was only old, old thoughts and things that came to him. Only they had any real clarity – and the sharpness to wound.

And now it was something about a bear. What?

Bethge, with a jerky, tremulous movement, swiped at the spittle on his chin with the back of his hand. In his agitation he crossed and recrossed his thin legs, the marbly, polished legs of a very old man.

Bear? He rubbed the bridge of his nose; somehow, it was important. He began to rock himself gently, his long, curving nose slicing like a scythe, back and forth, reaping the dim air of his stale little room. And as he swayed, it all began to come to him, and he began to run, swiftly, surely, silently back into time.

In the dark barn that smells of brittle straw, and sharply of horse dung, the knife is making little greedy, tearing noises. It is not sharp enough. Then he hears the hoarse, dragging whisper of steel on whetstone. Although he is afraid that the bear his father is skinning may suddenly rear to life, he climbs over the wall of the box stall and steps into the manger and crouches down. He is only five, so the manger is a nice, tight, comforting fit.

What a bear! A killer, a marauder who had left two sows tangled in their guts with single blows from his needle-sharp claws.

The smell of the bear makes him think of gun metal – oily, smoky. Each hair bristles like polished black wire, and when the sun catches the pelt it shines vividly, electrically blue.

The curved blade of the knife, now sharpened, slices through the bear’s fat like butter, relentlessly peeling back the coat and exposing long, flat, pink muscles. As his father’s busy, bloody hands work, Dieter feels a growing uneasiness. The strong hands tug and tear, wrestling with the heavy, inert body as if they are frantically searching for something. Like clay under a sculptor’s hand, the bear begins to change. Each stroke of the knife renders him less bear-like and more like something else. Dieter senses this and crouches lower in the manger in anticipation.

His father begins to raise the skin off the back, his forearms hidden as the knife molds upward toward the neck. At last he grunts and stands. Reaches for the axe. In two sharp, snapping blows the head is severed from the trunk and the grinning mask flung into a corner. He gathers up the skin and carries it out to salt it and peg it down in the yard. Dieter hears the chickens clamouring to pick it clean.

He stares down into the pit of the shadowy stall. This is no bear. Stripped of its rich, glossy fur, naked, it is no bear. Two arms, two legs, a raw pink skin. A man. Under all that lank, black hair a man was hiding, lurking in disguise.

He feels the spiralling terror of an unwilling accomplice to murder. He begins to cry and call for his father, who suddenly appears in the doorway covered in grease and blood, a murderer.

From far away, he heard someone call him. “Mr. Bethge! Mr. Bethge!” The last syllable of his name was drawn out and held like a note, so that it quivered in the air and urged him on with its stridency.

He realized he had been crying, that his eyes were filled with those unexpected tears that came so suddenly they constantly surprised and embarrassed him.

For a bear? But this wasn’t all of it. There had been another bear; he was sure of it. A bear who had lived in shame and impotence.

He edged himself off the bed and painfully on to his knobbed, arthritic feet. Breakfast.

At breakfast they quarrel in the dreary, passionless manner of master and charge. He wants what she has, bacon and eggs. He tells her he hates porridge.

“Look,” Mrs. Hax said, “I can’t give you bacon and eggs. Doctor’s orders.”

“What doctor?”

“The doctor we saw last month. You remember.”

“No.” It was true. He couldn’t remember any doctor.

“Yes you do. Come on now. We took a ride downtown in a cab. Remember now?”

“No.”

“And we stopped by Woolworth’s and bought a big bag of that sticky candy you like so much. Remember?”

“No.”

“That’s fine,” she said irritably. “You don’t want to remember, there’s nothing I can do. It doesn’t matter, because you’re not getting bacon and eggs.”

“I don’t want porridge,” he said tiredly.

“Eat it.”

“Give me some corn flakes.”

“Look at my plate,” she said, pointing with her knife. “I’m getting cold grease scum all over everything. Fight. fight. When do I get a moment’s peace to eat?”

“I want corn flakes,” he said with a little self-satisfied tuck to the corners of his mouth.

“You can’t have corn flakes,” she said. “Corn flakes bung you up. That’s why you eat hot cereal – to keep you regular. Just like stewed prunes. Now, which do you want,” she asked slyly, “Sunny Boy or stewed prunes?”

“I want corn flakes.” He smiled up happily at the ceiling.

“Like a stuck record.” She folded her hands on the table and leaned conspiratorially toward him. “You don’t even care if you eat or not, do you? You’re just trying to get under my skin, aren’t you?”

“I want corn flakes,” he said definitely and happily.

“I could kill that man,” she told her plate. “Just kill him.” Then, abruptly, she asked, “Where’s your glasses? No, not there, in the other pocket. Okay, put them on. Now take a good long look at that porridge.”

The old man peered down intently into his bowl.

“That’s fine. Take it easy, it’s not a goddamn wishing-well. You see them little brown specks?”

He nodded.

“That’s what this whole fight’s about? Something as tiny as that? You know what this is. It’s flax. And flax keeps you regular. So eat it.”

“I’m not eating it. What do I want with flax?” he asked quizzically.

“Sure you’re crazy,” she said. “Crazy like a fox.”

“I want some coffee.”

Mrs. Hax slammed down her fork and knife, snatched up his cup, and marched to the kitchen counter. While she poured the coffee, Bethge’s hand crept across the table and stole several strips of bacon from her plate. He crammed these clumsily into his mouth, leaving a grease shine on his chin.

Mrs. Hax set his cup down in front of him. “Be careful,” she said. “Don’t spill.”

Bethge giggled. In a glance, Mrs. Hax took in his grease-daubed chin and her plate. “Well, well, look at the cat who swallowed the canary. Grinning from ear-lobe to ear-lobe with a pound of feathers bristling from his trap.”

“So?” he said defiantly.

“You think I enjoy the idea of you pawing through my food?” Mrs. Hax carried her plate to the garbage and scraped it with a flourish. “Given all your dirty little habits, who’s to know where your hands have been?” she asked, smiling wickedly. “But go ahead and laugh. Because he who laughs last, laughs best. Chew this around for a bit and see how she tastes. You’re not getting one single, solitary cigarette today, my friend.”

Startled, he demanded his cigarettes.

“We’re singing a different tune now, aren’t we?” She paused, “N-O spells no. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

“You give them. They’re mine.”

“Not since you set the chesterfield on fire. Not since then. Your son told me I was to give them out one at a time so’s I could watch you and avoid ‘regrettable accidents.’ Thank God, there’s some sense in the family. How he came by it I’m sure I don’t know.”

The old man hoisted himself out of his chair. “Don’t you dare talk to me like that, I want my cigarettes – and I want them now.”

Mrs. Hax crossed her arms and set her jaw. “No.”

“You’re fired!” he shouted, “Get out!” He flapped his arms awkwardly in an attempt to startle her into motion.

“Oho!” she said, rubbing her large red hands together in delight, “fired am I? On whose say-so? Them that hires is them that fires. He who pays the piper calls the tune. And you don’t do neither. Not a bit. Your son hired me, and your son pays me. I don’t budge a step unless I get the word straight from the horse’s mouth.”

“Get out!”

“Save your breath.”

He is beaten and he knows it. This large, stubborn woman cannot, will not, be moved.

“I want to talk to my son.”

“If you got information you feel your son should have, write him a letter.”