Swimming Home (15 page)
Authors: Deborah Levy
Something was floating in the pool and that did not surprise her. At a second glance she saw that Kitty’s body was not so much floating as submerged vertically in the water. She was wrapped in a tartan dressing gown but the gown had slipped. The yellow lilo bounced against the edges of the pool and floated towards the body. She heard herself call out.
‘Kitty?’
The head was low in the water, tilted back with its mouth open. And then she saw the eyes. The eyes were glassy and open and they were not Kitty’s eyes.
‘Dad?’
Her father did not reply. She thought he was playing a joke on her. Any second he would rise from the water and roar at her.
‘Dad?’
His body was so big and silent. All the noise that was her father, all the words and spluttering and utterances inside him, had disappeared into the water. All she knew was that she was screaming and then suddenly doors were banging and her mother had dived into the pool. Mitchell jumped in too. Together they steered the body around the lilo and with difficulty were trying to lift it out of the pool. Nina heard her mother shout something to Laura. She watched Mitchell lay the body down on the paving stones and press his hands up and down on it. She could hear the sound of water splashing as her mother heaved the dressing gown out of the water. She did not understand why it was so heavy but then she saw her mother pull something out of the pockets. It was a pebble the size of her hand and it had a hole in the middle of it. Nina could see her struggling with three more of the pebbles she had collected on the beach with Kitty and she thought it must have got later and the sun was rising over the pool because the water had changed colour. She shivered and searched for the sun in the sky but she could not see it.
Mitchell stuck his fingers in her father’s mouth. And then he pinched his nose. Mitchell was panting and actually kissing her father over and over again.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’
Laura ran into the villa shouting something about the fact sheet. Where was Jurgen? Everyone was shouting for Jurgen. Nina felt someone touch her head. Kitty Finch was stroking her hair. And then Kitty pushed her through the French doors and told her to sit down on the sofa while she helped Laura look for the fact sheet. That’s all she heard for the next five minutes. Where was the fact sheet? Had anyone seen the fact sheet? Although Nina was still not sure whether it was her father or Kitty who was alive or dead she sat obediently on the sofa and stared at the Picasso prints on the wall. A fish bone. A blue vase. A lemon. It was only when she heard Laura shouting, ‘It’s yellow. The fact sheet is a yellow piece of paper,’ that she realised she was holding a yellow sheet of paper in her hand and waved it at Laura. Laura looked startled and then grabbed it from her and ran to the telephone. Nina watched her peer at the numbers.
‘I don’t know, Kitty. I don’t know which one to call.’
Kitty was saying something in a detached flat voice.
‘The hospital is in Grasse on the Chemin de Clavary.’
It began to rain. Nina heard herself sobbing. She was standing outside herself looking at herself as she stood by the glass doors.
The ambulance and the police were arriving. Madeleine Sheridan was there too. She was shouting at Mitchell.
‘Tilt his head upwards, hold his nose!’ and Nina could see her fingers press into her father’s neck as she felt for a pulse.
‘Do not put him in the recovery position, Mitchell. I think he has a spinal injury.’
And then she heard the old woman cry out, ‘There it is …’
Nina started to sob in the rain because she was still not sure what had happened. As she ran towards her mother she heard that she was a very loud crier. It sounded a bit like laughing but it wasn’t. Her teeth were showing and she could feel little jabs in her diaphragm. She was frowning and the more she cried the more she frowned. She could feel her mother holding her in her arms, stroking her neck. Her mother was wearing a nightdress and it was wet and cold and she smelt of expensive creams. As a child she had played a morbid game in which she dared herself to have to choose which one of her parents she would rather die. She had tormented herself with this game and now she buried her face in her mother’s stomach because she knew she had betrayed her.
Its softness against her cheek made her cry all the more and she thought her mother knew what she thinking because she heard her whisper in her ear, her words barely there, like an autumn leaf turning in the wind, ‘Never mind, never mind.’
Her father was being laid out on a stretcher. The police had started to drain the pool. Jurgen was there too. He had a broom in his hand and was energetically sweeping around the plant pots. He had even managed to put on navy overalls that made him look like a caretaker.
Isabel walked towards the paramedics and took Jozef’s hand in her own. At first she thought a row of ants was crawling in a military line towards his knuckles. And then she saw the fading black inked vowels and consonants running into each other.
I
T
S
R
A
I
N
I
N
G
She could hear the drone of the bees nearby and she heard herself insisting that what her husband required was an air ambulance, but what she was mostly saying was his name.
Jozef. Please Jozef. Jozef. Jozef please.
Why did he hack into his hand like that? Where did he do it and how could he bear it and what did it mean? She squeezed his fingers and asked him to explain himself. She promised that in turn she would explain herself. She would do that right now. She told him she would have liked to feel his love fall upon her like rain. That was the kind of rain she most longed for in their long unconventional marriage. The paramedics told her to get out of the way but she did not move because she had always got out of his way. Loving him had been the greatest risk in her life. The thing, the threat was lurking there in all his words. She had known that from the beginning. She had always known that. He had buried unexploded shells and grenades across the roads and tracks of all his books, they were under every poem, but if he died now her daughter would walk through a world that was always damaged and she was as angry as it was possible to be.
Jozef. Please Jozef. Jozef. Jozef. Please.
She suddenly understood that someone was pushing her out of the way and that she could smell blood.
A large man with a shaven head and a revolver strapped to his belt was asking her questions. To every question he asked she did not have a straightforward answer. What was her husband’s name?
Jozef Nowogrodzki in his passport. Joe Harold Jacobs on all other ID. In fact she didn’t think his name was Nowogrodzki but that was the name his parents had written in his passport anyway. Nor did she tell him her husband had many other names: JHJ, Joe, Jozef, the famous poet, the British poet, the arsehole poet, the Jewish poet, the atheist poet, the modernist poet, the post-Holocaust poet, the philandering poet. So where was Monsieur Nowogrodzki’s place of birth? Poland. Łódź. 1937. Łódź in English is pronounced Wodge but she didn’t know how to say it in French. His parents’ names? She wasn’t sure how to spell them. Did he have brothers and sisters? Yes. No. He had a sister. Her name was Friga.
The inspector looked baffled. Isabel did what she did best.
She told him the news except it was a bit out of date. Her husband was five years old when he was smuggled into Britain in 1942, half starved and with forged documents. Three days after he arrived his mother and father were deported along with his two-year-old sister to the Chelmno death camp in western Poland. The inspector, who did not understand much English, put his hand up in front of his face as if he was stopping the traffic on a busy road. He told the wife of the Jewish poet that it was unfortunate the Germans occupied Poland in 1939 but he had to point out he was now engaged in a murder inquiry in the Alpes-Maritimes in 1994. Would she agree that Monsieur Nowogrodzki or was it Monsieur Jacobs had left his daughter a final note? Or was it a poem? Or was it evidence? Whatever it might be it was addressed to Nina Ekaterina. He slipped the yellow fact sheet into a plastic folder. On one side were instructions for how to work the dishwasher. On the other side were five lines written in black ink. These were apparently instructions for his daughter.
It was not yet six am but the whole village had already heard the news. When Claude arrived at the villa with a bag full of bread, Mitchell, who for once was not interested in a morsel, sent him away, his eyes still smarting from the chlorine in the cloudy water. The paramedics shouted instructions to each other and Isabel told Nina she would be in the ambulance too. They were going to put tubes up her father’s nose and pump his stomach on the way to the hospital. The ambulance began its journey down the mountain road. Nina felt herself being led by Claude to Madeleine Sheridan’s house, which was called Maison Rose even though it was painted blue. On the way she saw Jurgen with his arms around Kitty Finch and when she heard Mitchell shout, ‘Piss off and don’t come back,’ everyone heard what Kitty said next. She was whispering but she might as well have been screaming, because what she said was the thing everyone knew anyway.
‘He shot himself with one of your guns, Mitchell.’
Mitchell’s big body was bent over double. Something was happening to his eyes, nostrils, mouth. Tears and snot and saliva were pouring out of the holes in his face. Without a shot being fired his face had five holes in it. Holes for breathing, looking, eating. Everyone was gazing in his direction but what he saw was a blur. They were a mob full of holes just like him. How was he going to protect himself from the mob when they pointed the finger? He would tell the police the truth. When the ebony Persian weapon disappeared, he thought the mental girl had stolen it to punish him for hunting animals. The telephone was ringing and then it stopped ringing and he could hear Laura wailing. His muscles ached from dragging the body out of the water. It was so heavy. It was as heavy as a bear.
London, 2011
Whenever I dream my twentieth-century dream about my father, I wake up and immediately forget my passwords for EasyJet and Amazon. It is as if they have disappeared from my head into his head and somewhere in the twenty-first century he is sitting with me on a bus crossing London Bridge watching the rain fall on the chimney of Tate Modern. The conversations I have with him do not belong to this century at all, but all the same I ask him why he never really told me about his childhood? He replies that he hopes my own childhood wasn’t too bad and do I remember the kittens?
Our family kittens (Agnieska and Alicja) always smelt a bit feral and my childhood pleasure was to groom them with my father’s hairbrush. They lay on my lap and I combed out their fur while they purred and patted my hand with their soft paws. When I got near their bottoms the fur was stuck together and tangled because they were still too young to lick themselves clean. Sometimes I left the fur balls on the sofa and my father pretended to swallow them. He’d open his mouth very wide and make out he’d gulped one down and that it was stuck in his throat and he was choking. My father spent his life trying to work out why people had frogs in their throat, butterflies in their stomach, pins and needles in their legs, a thorn in their side, a chip on their shoulder and indeed if they had coughed up fur balls he would have studied them too.
No, he says. I would not have studied the fur balls.
We agree that he and I learned to muddle along together. He washed my vests and tights and T-shirts, sewed buttons on my cardigans, searched for missing socks and insisted I should never be afraid of people talking to themselves on buses.
Yes, my father says. That’s what you are doing now.
No, I reply, that’s not what I am doing now. I am not saying what I’m thinking out loud. That would be mad. No one on this bus can hear me talking to you.
Yes, he says, but it wouldn’t matter anyway because everybody’s talking out loud on their phones.
I still have the beach towel he bought me in a souvenir shop in Nice. The words
Côte d’Azur Nice Baie des Anges
fly across a big blue sky in a sunny yellow font. Tourists on the beach are rendered in black dots and just behind it is a road lined with palm trees. On the right is the pink dome of the Hotel Negresco with a French flag flying into the towelly blue sky. What it’s missing is Kitty Finch with her copper hair rippling down her waist waiting for my father to read her poem. If she was named after a bird it’s possible she was making a strange call, perhaps an emergency call to my father, but I cannot think about her, or the pebbles we collected together, without wanting to fall through their holes out of the world. So I will replace her with my father walking through France’s fifth biggest city on his way past its monuments and statues to buy a wedge of honeycomb for my mother. The year is 1994 but my father (who has an ice cream in his hand and not a phone) is having a conversation with himself and it’s probably something sad and serious to do with the past. I have never got a grip on when the past begins or where it ends, but if cities map the past with statues made from bronze forever frozen in one dignified position, as much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.
The next time I’m sitting on a bus crossing London Bridge and the rain is falling on the chimney of Tate Modern I must tell my father that when I read biographies of famous people, I only get interested when they escape from their family and spend the rest of their life getting over them. That is why when I kiss my daughter goodnight and wish her sweet dreams, she understands my wish for her is kind, but she knows, as all children do, that it’s impossible to be told by our parents what our dreams are supposed to be like. They know they have to dream themselves out of life and back into it, because life must always win us back. All the same, I always say it.
I say it every night, especially when it rains.
