The Antarctica of Love, page 5
* * *
I told myself I had always been heading towards this moment, always travelling on this dark, muddy road leading out of the city, and when I turned and looked out of the window at the back, I saw the road cave in and disappear behind us. No road ahead of me and no road back. It was something I had thought so many times, without understanding how many roads still existed then. But now they were gone, irrevocably, and for a second I was struck by a sensation of freedom, a wave breaking over me, dazzling green and cold. It was Eskil’s wave, the cold, clear river water, and I realised that what happened to me no longer mattered to anybody on earth, and it didn’t matter to me either. I said, “Do with me what you will.”
* * *
A solitary bird seemed to fall out of the sky, swooping over the silver lake a little further away. And I supposed death was merely being outside time, being outside a human body in which time could be measured. That was the only way to comprehend it; death, and time. But now there was nothing else to comprehend, at least not for me.
All beasts of prey leave the entrails behind, and the hunter did too. My intestines were left on the little brown mudflat in the forest. They soon disappeared, dragged away by a vixen whose young were in a den nearby. It is the natural order of things; we are brought into being in order to be given up to death. Perhaps it is our only function? To become food for the animals. The birds came back later to eat what was left of me. My last remains taken by a flock of jackdaws, pieces of smooth pink flesh ascending with the jackdaws from the shore to the firmament.
* * *
It is very fortunate birds exist, and maggots, and decay. If we corpses didn’t lie in the earth and decompose, we would be piled to the sky, high-rise blocks and towers of the deceased. I often reflect on how many we are, those of us who have already taken our leave, so infinitely many more than you who are left. And yet we can’t do anything to you. You can do what you want with us, say what you want, throw black earth on top of us and tell whatever stories you like. No-one can check the facts with us, that is what is so nice about the dead. A perfect friend, someone who never argues, and we never change, we stay the same as we have always been, frozen in tableaux. A person is forgotten in two generations; that is the extent of human memory.
* * *
And what else did he say in the car, driving along the main road to an unknown forest? He said he was a hunter, that he had a job as a butcher, that he was an architect. Or did he say he was a judge? It doesn’t matter now; this was a world I didn’t want to live in anyway.
It was the summer I had disappeared. Raksha went into the bathroom, ran a bath and slid straight into the water. Why had she said, “Goodbye, my friend,” to Ivan? They had never been friends. They had loved like a pair of dogs, but they had never liked one another. Raksha had never had any friends at all, she had me and Eskil when we were little and that had been enough for her; and after us she had nothing whatsoever, that at least was true. Pills were her best friends, unimaginably wonderful friends, meek and docile, never troublesome. Sylvia in the apartment below was always trying to worm her way in. She would follow Raksha’s every response with another question, her prying eyes on everything, wandering the whole time, and she would spot anything left on show. Sometimes Raksha would drape a cloth over the books on the shelf, because she thought they revealed too much about her. Otherwise Sylvia would stand there, staring at the titles, as if it was a bloody library.
She looked down at her body lying in the bath, flabby and ugly, with skin sagging from her stomach in a way it hadn’t before, maybe because the only things she ate now were sleeping tablets. She had done everything she could to survive in this world. And for this? Now she felt as though she had known all along what was in store for her, seen the shadows gathering in her life, and that was why she had wanted to leave for good. She had seen a great sorrow ahead of us a long time ago, but it was like a cloud that was constantly moving, and she and Ivan were so happy tearing around, they ran straight into it. At heart, she had known from the beginning that both Eskil and I were too much of a miracle to be real, she had known she had only received us in order to lose us, in a gruesome game that entertained the gods after a night of roister. And now we had been transformed in her head into the impossible dreams we had actually always been, intangible, elusive soap-bubble versions. In her dreams we were in our winter cardigans, crying and looking at her, and when she tried to reach for us, we simply disappeared. That was what she learned from the dreams, that she mustn’t touch us, or we would instantly slide away and dissolve. So she didn’t touch us, she just gazed at us for as long as she could. That way she could prolong the dreams. And every time she woke, it was night-time in the world; and in the end she had got it right. She had instinctively wanted to shield herself from what was to come, and she hadn’t been able to. She had been made to stay in the world, as if governed by a dictator, and there was no-one to tell that she had been right all along.
She had always been afraid of falling stars, had never wished for anything more than those children we were. She had tried to keep her demons to herself, without success. In a way, Raksha had been dead for a long time. She had lain in the bottom of a coffin and looked up at the little assembled company, which was me, standing there weeping, hoping she would rise again like a second Jesus. She dipped under the hot water in the bath, and the world was soundless and filled with warmth, like the unfailingly soft light in the realm of her pills. She had called Ivan and now she would never need to ascend to the real world again. In the apartment beyond, the telephone rang, a sharp, exhorting sound, but under the warm water she didn’t hear it. It rang a few times and then it stopped.
* * *
Every time she took a bath, she stayed in the tub long after she had let the water out. The little eddy that swirled round the plughole as the last of the water poured out was her life, a tiny spiral of her life’s light draining rapidly away, to no purpose. When the telephone rang again, she heard it, jumped out of the bath and answered it, naked. It was Ivan.
“You’re back.”
“Yes.”
“I was in the bath.”
“Ah.”
He was silent. And so was she. She twisted the telephone cord round her finger so hard it hurt. She thought she must have been the one who had rung him, and he was annoyed.
“Did you have something on your mind, Ivan?”
“I wouldn’t have rung if I hadn’t.”
He sounded angry again.
“I can talk for a bit if you like. I just need to put something on. Will you wait a second?”
“Yes.”
She hurried out into the hall and pulled on a coat at random, a winter coat, and then she sat down, perspiring, the receiver in her hand, hair dripping, the ornate belt pulled tight round her waist, waiting for him to say something. And that was how it went on. He rang again that evening and early the following morning and soon she started to wait for his calls, and when he didn’t ring, her stomach began to ache, but then the shrill noise suddenly filled the apartment again. And there they would sit, saying nothing. She grew accustomed to his silence; indeed she knew it well from before. They had often been at home together, in silence; they could go months without saying anything.
* * *
In the course of those telephone calls she sometimes heard birds chirping in the background, he must have opened the window, and she remembered the sky, how low it always was by the river, how it had been everywhere; whilst in the city there were just brief glimpses here and there, and she had always missed it. Sometimes she heard the television in the background and she switched hers on to see what he was watching, and they sat there, watching together. When he was with her she wasn’t scared of the television, and anyway he only watched football matches. Ivan’s breathing was right beside her in the receiver, and just as it had once filled her life, it was filling it again; she couldn’t understand how this could happen so fast, when she had coped without it for so many years. Whenever there was a goal, he cheered. It made her happy; inside she was cheering too. And when the match was over, they quickly switched off, before the news started. Then they sat in silence once more, and nights came and went; she had stopped waiting for him to say anything, it would feel almost absurd if he suddenly began to speak. In the evenings she fell asleep with the receiver in her hand and when she woke the room was light and the sound of birdsong flowed through the receiver, such a loud sound, so close, as if the birds were singing inside her. She didn’t dare think about the cost of these telephone calls.
Raksha no longer tore the pages out of her calendar; she hadn’t done this since the day the police called. She was living outside time, perhaps she had been for a while, but now she didn’t know if it was day or night, summer or winter, war or peace, if she was young and still waiting for life to begin, or if she was already lying under the earth; and it was comforting not to know. She had heard someone say on the radio, during a programme about death, that if time and space no longer existed, there could be no pain. Evil needed time and space to operate.
* * *
It was early morning and she had slept with the receiver in her hand as she had every night for the last week, and now she woke to a single tone beeping in her ear. She immediately replaced it in the cradle and waited for him to ring back. And when he did, a few minutes later, she said:
“Do you want to come and see me, Ivan?”
“No,” came the quick reply, in his rasping, gravelly voice.
Then she had hung up and heard nothing more, but the next morning he was at her door with his suitcase. She had just woken up and opened the door wearing a T-shirt, bare-legged. She had slept all night because he hadn’t rung, and before she fell asleep she had wept at her own stupidity, and now she thought he was Sylvia, wanting to borrow something for some stupid baking.
* * *
Ivan had taken the night train, he mumbled, standing outside Raksha’s door, looking down at the fossil-streaked stone floor, to find out more and do what he could. He didn’t trust the police and he couldn’t afford to stay in a hotel. What he might want or could afford made no difference to her, she could see he was furious with himself for coming and furious with her. There were no words for love and none for death. So she walked into his arms and held him and listened to his old, angry heart beating inside him. After a while he shoved her away, of course he did, he brushed her aside like a clinging cat and stared at her with the ice-blue eyes that had always made her feel so unclean and loathsome. But now they had no effect on her. She had seen what she needed to see, found out what she needed to find out. They drank coffee together, maintaining their silence; he took a shower and had something to eat, and then they put the television on, the afternoon repeats. He could do what he wanted as far as she was concerned, as long as he didn’t leave now. And when all the programmes were over, he came to her. They went into the bedroom together. She lowered herself cautiously onto him and they sank into the blackness together.
* * *
He couldn’t do what he did before, but it didn’t matter. This was something different, as if they were two very elderly people. He was shaking, and she wished she could help him be still. In the dark room it was as though they had just come into being; when she looked down at her skin it was shimmering, her clothes had slipped off her body unnoticed, the flabbiness had disappeared and the broken rawness that was usually there was also gone. Gently he stroked the scar under the elastic in her pants, and perhaps he was thinking of us, of Eskil and me. It was still red after all those years, a botched stitching job, and sometimes it still hurt, a tight, burning sensation. Raksha gasped with fear when he touched her, her breathing quick as a bird’s and halting, afraid he would suddenly get up and leave and take the night train back and never be in contact again. But he stayed where he was, and she found no malice in his eyes. When he bent and kissed her on the scar, I looked away. This was not for me. This was their hour on earth.
Raksha and Ivan came flying in from nowhere and became a family, a sudden constellation which was as arbitrary and haphazard as a newborn cloud in the sky, as transient and momentary as a flock of birds rising up as one, doomed to scatter in the wind.
* * *
The years by the river when Raksha and Ivan stayed up all night and Raksha woke me with her hearty laugh, I would lie in my bed listening to their voices drifting through the apartment in gentle loops. Suddenly Eskil was there next to my bed, with his bright little halo of hair.
“May I come in with you, Inni?”
I used to carry him back to his bed after he had fallen asleep, there wasn’t much room in mine, but after a while he would be back. I never understood how he could know where I was when he was asleep, but he did, and in the end I let him stay. He lay curled up in the crook of my arm, while the winter storms roared outside the window. Sometimes I would get up and follow the low voices in the room next door. A tune was playing on the gramophone in the sitting room, a violet trail.
* * *
They were often up all night, Raksha and Ivan. Then they slept for half the day. It wasn’t possible for anyone else to reach inside their world; they had sealed themselves off in something that was made of the two of them alone. In this first light of day they look so young, like they did before, and when I look at them now I see how short their lives have been, how little they know. Although deep furrows are already drawn across their faces. I look at my parents, Raksha and Ivan, gently dancing in the dawn, cheek to cheek.
“Mamma?”
She turns, pulling slightly out of his embrace. She has been crying, black streaks under her eyes making her look like a raccoon. And she has been drinking; how would she survive otherwise? Then she turns away and they carry on dancing, locked into the paradise and the hell they constitute for one another. They are alone in the world, those two, no relatives, no family, at any rate none that came home to us. When I watch them now, I don’t know whether it is before or after what happened by the river. But when I go back into our room, Eskil’s bed is no longer over by the window, so it must already have happened. The wardrobe has been emptied of his clothes.
* * *
They knew no other way of living, Raksha and Ivan, and without alcohol they were lost. It was as if the sun rose inside them every time they brought out their bottles. A sun that turned black in the end, after a few days or weeks of drinking, but even so, they would never have coped without that black light. It was a hunger I inherited from them.
You could say we lost Eskil because of Raksha and Ivan’s drinking, that they were bewitched by each other and the light they found in alcohol. But it could also be said that higher powers were out for Eskil, and they would keep on trying until they succeeded. He was always hurting himself, stumbling over stones and doorsteps from an early age and hurting himself, falling out of trees and off rocks. As though a large hand in the heavens was making a grab for him. We had warnings, premonitions, but we didn’t listen.
NIGHT
I would like to have my head back, I miss it. They always dispose of the head first, to eliminate the horror of looking a dead person in the eye. It is the gaze they want to get rid of; that is why they kill, to extinguish the light in the eyes, the stranger staring out from a foreign land. The head often ends up in a rubbish chute or a skip. Not mine; mine disappears into the slurry pit with the pink surface, sinking slowly to the bottom; and as it descends, my hair opens out like a little parachute over my head. No-one ever comes to find it. The thick, frothy liquid dissolves my face first, and then the rest. I would rather have been a skeleton in a secondary school somewhere, sitting there empty-eyed, an earthly representative of the dead.
We had reached the lake now, where the road came to an end at the edge of the forest. It felt as though we had been driving forever along the muddy road that receded behind us. When the engine stopped we sat in silence, surveying the lake’s silvery sheen; a solitary black bird, soaring and dipping over the inky surface, the world’s last bird. As if we were both waiting for something to happen, for the sound of icy wing beats from an ageing angel who would eventually come to my aid. But I was tired of angels, tired of hoping for rescue and deliverance; no-one could help me now. This was the place for my death, this was my great window to eternity, my trapdoor out of this world. I longed for the sound of the coffin lid closing above me, for everything finally silenced. No birds, no sky, no light, no escape.
* * *
“May I smoke in here?” I asked; after all, we were only sitting and waiting. I wondered what we were waiting for; perhaps for the courage to take my life, the courage I didn’t possess myself. I imagined he might be afraid too, as I was. What was I doing in this terrible forest by this awful lake?
“Of course, smoke if you need to,” he said, opening a small ashtray on the dashboard.
“Would you like one?”
I wasn’t in the habit of offering; I was usually asking for cigarettes, even when I already had some, to avoid ever being without.
“No,” he said. “I detest cigarettes and alcohol. They’re disgusting.”
He was funny, he had forgotten he was talking to a junkie.
“OK,” I said, and lit what would be my last cigarette. And for one last time the little flame flared in front of me, the innermost cone of blue, the smell of sulphur stinging in my nose, the smoke spreading quickly in the small car.
