He poured milk into the tea, said he loved traveling in that way, without a plan. She nodded and sipped from her cup; I only ever think about living there, she said. What she liked about this place, this trip, was the thought of living, having a life here, studying at the university with all the ivy crawling up its walls. A solid weight of ivy. She nodded toward the buildings. To wake up and go to sleep in this place, relieve the body of all its solemnity and expectation. No more expectation; the curse of it. Joylessness. He went inside again to get some salt. The sign tilted, the woman from the kiosk had disappeared into its octagonal structure and was now making coffee. Six, seven, eight measures of ground coffee. Is she beautiful, she wondered. The sign fell over; the woman didn’t notice, could hear nothing on account of the wind. One thing is what’s going on inside, the work taking place there; another is what happens outside.
THE BARK OF the apple tree is black; alone in the garden, black. It cuts into the winter like calligraphy. The winter paints white dogs yellow and makes the night luminous and in a way unreal, anesthetized sleep blowing through the streets, a flood of quiet, quiet.
The tree is a shadow of another, realer world. That’s what I think.
And the apples are still attached, too red, and certainly too late. Droplets suspended on black branches. They hang there today, they hang all night; not being able to see them in the dark doesn’t mean they don’t shine.
There is a small handful of images to which I keep returning. A hierarchy, belonging to the body and the mind, they are pictures of the emotions; they won’t let go. You go back to them, again and again. Wanting to get closer. Occasionally it happens, in spite of everything, in some way or another you manage to gain access. A moment: to reach them and show them, return them to the world. Then, perhaps, you’re able to recall. Everyone has these images; four, five or six of them. It’s all about coming closer; they are what you write toward, paint toward; they are what you want to say and to share with other eyes. Another’s gaze. You speak, and you point, though perhaps no one is there to see. Look, you say, perhaps. How then to hand the image on, to implant it within another, within you. That’s the issue. Whether you can even carry them alone. Whether I can; I need the eyes of another, another voice to share it with; it’s too much a burden, and I write with the expectation.
At the top of my hierarchy is the image of the apple tree with its bright apples.
There is an image of the bedroom window with light streaming in, a morning in summer, the panes in need of cleaning; cobwebs, and some leaves from the purple beech. There is an image of a pair of espadrille sandals on a bathing jetty; the sea that stretches out behind, a sleeping body; it is autumn, and no one in sight. An image of a stable after the animals have been put out to pasture for the summer.
The catastrophes you encounter in life may seem unreal, but they are: real. The alienation that makes you think that some people are more real than others is a construct; people are no more or less alien, no more or less real.
More people, as such.
And always impending: that slap in the face, for not having known; not realizing that particular unreality was just a matter of . . .
Of what. Of eventually swallowing one’s knowledge of the world—swallowing one’s own ideas about knowing anything at all.
We know so very little; so little that what we think to be knowledge is hardly worth reckoning with at all; instead we ought to settle for being pleasantly surprised if, on the edge of all things, against all expectations, our assumption should be disproved.
If it turns out we know just a fragment of the world.
Constant motion, collapsing buildings and meticulous work in stone. The unfamiliar as a wall we must forever scrabble to remove in order to find our humanity there and perhaps even love someone. Pass on one or two images, share them with someone else, a you. That kind of motion into the world. An escapism in reverse, a tower I build to be more able to see what is there.
You, for instance.
A desire to see you.
THE SNOW CAP creaks. the floors beneath me, too, feet remembering. You can trust the body. The body remembers like a hundred horses.
The apple tree is a kind of reconciliation.
I decide to go back home, but then I stay anyway. The days are like those that come after the death of a close friend. I was told the news, only then I forgot, and now I grieve, my grieving body, without any recollection of what caused the grief.
Who.
I stop and put down the wheelbarrow in front of me; who, who is it I miss. My nose is running, a dribble dissecting the oval of my face. Her father draws an oval in the air. That’s your face, he says, an oval.
But her face is streaked with mucus.
The light falls in stripes.
The panes are laced with snow, movements inside her parents’ house framed, embroidered. No one is dead. The wounded are legion.
THEY EAT TOGETHER, it is summer, and she has opened the windows of the apartment wide. She wants to eat in the park, but he doesn’t feel like it; it’s too much hassle, it’s only food, he says, and she says it’s only five minutes by bike. Extinguished in asphalt; the tossing heads of heifers exasperated by flies, shaking loose the brain.
There is not a breath of air inside the apartment, which smells like bottled summer; the sun vanishes behind the building opposite. The apartments are preserving jars, eyes; plums molder, voices, a partial vacuum, merely, keeping everything in place, home. They’ve had new balconies put in, the railings aren’t there yet, children can still fall out. She stands in the afternoon sunlight, imagining catastrophes again.
Soon, dinner is the only coming together. He goes to bed when she gets up. She snuggles up beside him and falls asleep, a couple of hours before he wakes; I miss you, he lies, I miss you, he confides.
I’VE BEEN HERE before, she says.
Impossible, he says.
SHE THINKS: THE summer is nearly gone. She thinks about what she was doing while it was there, she didn’t even see it, didn’t see it happen. He thinks about how hectic it is—has been. They stand there, feet scuffing at the gravel of the parking area in front of her parents’ house. Or: he has woken up and lies, watching her sleep. Her half-open eyes. He reaches out and extends his index and middle fingers. His arm is trembling. It is four o’clock, just before his fingertips reach her eyelids. Don’t wake, don’t wake, quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet.
She has the same effect as streams that ripple over stones, through landscapes with lakes. Fledgling birds. He draws her eyelids down with his fingers, wanting them to reach the moist edge, the horizon above the lash. He wants to shut her down for the night. Tally her up. That’s what death is: unsentimental.
But they aren’t children.
Have never been.
WHEN SHE’S IN that mood, she thinks of it as an insult, this sick urge to translate, in everything, bypassing art and writing. The need to understand. An insult, like asking Jesus to work as a circus hand, seeing him pass the paraphernalia to the magician when it’s time for his bravura piece: water to wine, with the aid of only deception and berries. A circus hand.
Ta-da.
The craft of it.
What’s the point. Gallows humor, greasepaint and flight: pretense, everything. And the hostages you take with you, cage in with your words, images and references, the world’s eternal guessing games and sick urge to translate.
Where