Into the Woods

Mette Jakobsen

EMPA 2010

Abstract

The novel, Skeleton Bird, takes place in a small island the winter of 1959. On the island lives twelve-year-old Minou and her father, a rational thinking man, who lives under the hopeful impression that he and his family are descendants from the philosopher,

Descartes. One morning Minou finds a dead boy washed up on the beach. Her father decides to lay him in the room that once belonged to her mother, and with his arrival the smell of oranges begins to spread on the island, reminding Minou of the orange cakes her mother used to bake.

A year earlier Minou’s mother left the house wearing her best shoes and carrying a large black umbrella. She never returned. One of her shoes was later found, saltstained and without heel, and she is assumed dead by everyone, except for Minou, who, instead of grieving, attempts to find the truth about her mother’s disappearance through philosophy.

The desire to portray the experience of loss became a decisive factor in writing

Skeleton Bird. The experience of loss is an existential part of human experience, but nevertheless ambiguous in nature and difficult to define. Ironically, storytelling about loss, and, in particular, loss in connection with death, is often modelled on an

Aristotelian narrative structure that traditionally negates the otherness of loss and posits it as a fact. Aristotle argues that the protagonist’s actions render him or her ‘happy or the reverse’. This suggests that particular actions are conventionally expected to lead to specific emotional outcomes. Some paths lead to loss, others to happiness. If the

Aristotelian protagonist experiences loss, then he or she is expected to reverse the situation by changing direction, physically or emotionally, by pointing his or her inner compass towards happiness. Loss in Aristotelian storytelling is, in other words, categorised and known, and can, with the focus, foresight and action of the protagonist, be reversed.

The dissertation examines possible ways in which to write about loss without reducing it to a category. Firstly, it outlines Aristotelian narrative structure and examines the notions of clichés and stereotypes that often accompany it. Then it proceeds to discuss otherness in relation to loss and death, using Emmanuel Levinas’ definition of other as a starting point. It examines the ways in which death and the experience of loss escape definition. It also looks at attempts to label death through adornments, rituals and storytelling. The dissertation moves on to discuss otherness in relation to writing. It looks at automatic writing, and at narrative expectation in the encounter with Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. It examines Gaston Bachelard’s notion of poetic space, and concludes by considering the use of humour as a way to depict loss as other, disrupting the firm categories of emotion within an Aristotelian storytelling structure.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank:

Dr. Anne Brewster for her supervision, and for her inspiration, patience and kindness. Dr. Shalamalee Palekar, for her supervision and support Dr. Andy Kissane, for his supervision and support. Narelle Jones for proofreading my material

Matilde Martin, Andrew Shine, Angela O’Keefe, Emily Sakardi, Digby Clarke, Ester Sarkadi Clarke, Deb Saffir and Chris Lambert, who read the novel at various stages and gave me valuable feedback.

The people who told me the stories I am using, or who feature in them: Kirsten Vest, Angela O’Keefe, Kresten Wänner, Freja Vest, Narelle Jones, Matilde Martin, Miriam Jones and Aksa Hagenberg

Table of Contents

Skeleton Bird, novel………………………………...... 1

Into the Woods, dissertation………………………………...... 145

Introduction………………………………...... 146

Chapter one: Aristotelian Storytelling…………………………154

Chapter two: Death and Other………………………………....177

Chapter three: Writing and Other……………………………...192

Chapter four: Aristotelian Storytelling and Other………….….211

Conclusion………………………………...... 235

Bibliography………………………………...... 238

Skeleton Bird

Mette Jakobsen

And the longer and more carefully I examine all these things, the more clearly and distinctly I know that they are true.

Rene Descartes

[1]

It was snowing the morning I found the dead boy. The island with its two houses and one church was covered in a thin layer of white.

Papa was pulling in the fishing nets, when I saw a hand between two rocks. It looked like a magic trick; almost as if a bunch of roses were about to appear−boom!

There you go, for you−and then applause. But everything was quiet and the hand didn’t move.

He was lying on his back, dusted with new snow in a cradle of rocks. He was a bit older than me, maybe fifteen or sixteen. His hair was dark, his eyes closed. His mouth was slightly open as if he were about to ask a question; something that is hard to ask, something that made him hesitate, and take great care in how he was asking.

‘Papa,’ I shouted, ‘Papa.’ He looked up from his nets. ‘Don’t be scared, Papa.’

At that he started running towards me, stumbling, running, stumbling, hands stretched in front of him, calling ‘Minou, Minou, I am coming.’

‘It’s not Mother,’ I called back, ‘don’t worry, Papa, it’s not Mother.’ He slowed down a bit, and I sat down on a flat rock next to the boy and waited for him to come.

It was 1959. It had been a year since Mother disappeared. A year since she had walked out into the cold morning rain with a large black umbrella. A year since she left and took Turtle with her.

The dead boy stayed with us for two days. Laid on a bed in the blue room, frozen and stiff until the delivery boat arrived. And out there in the ocean is the island, still there today, with its two houses and one church; an island so tiny that it doesn’t show on the sea-map. Only a cross tells the weary sailor about the possibility of salvation in

the middle of an endless sea.

Papa fished at dawn. His nets hung on the back wall of the kitchen, looking dark and full of promise.

Before Mother disappeared Papa would boil water on the stove while getting the nets ready. Mother liked her coffee as soon as she got up. She liked it with cream and sugar in a small cup with delicate peacocks painted on the rim and she would drink it slowly, with tousled hair and sleepy eyes.

I still got her cup out every morning and put it on the table. Papa would look sorrowfully at the fine porcelain, and every morning I would tell him, ‘She is not dead, Papa, she is coming back.’

Mother was beautiful in a way I can’t quite explain. But I can tell you that her eyes were grey, and even in the morning she wore dresses, blue, red or purple, and after her morning coffee she would put up her long red hair in a loose bun, in which she placed feathers or velvet roses.

I was twelve and black-haired, my body thin and long, and I was nothing like her.

I gathered the nets the morning I found the dead boy, while Papa finished his coffee, put on his boots and jacket and the yellow scarf I had knitted him the year before and that I could now see was less than perfect.

It was cold and dark outside, except for the lights that shone from the church in the distance. Tiny, prickly snowflakes hit me hard on the cheeks and I shielded my eyes. We stood in the doorway, Papa and I. We couldn’t see the ocean but we could hear it. The beach was two hundred and seventy-six steps from our front door, only

separated by a couple of gigantic wrought-iron gates, which stood high and proud, wishing, I imagined, for a fence that had never followed due to Theodora’s untimely death; Theodora who, more than two hundred years ago, had built both church and the two houses on the island.

‘Are you ready?’ said Papa.

‘I can’t find my gloves.’

‘Have mine.’

He handed me his large gloves with sheep’s wool on the inside, while the night rushed towards us, as if it had just one last chance to make itself felt.¨

Papa always opened the gates instead of walking around them. He would say:

‘A gentleman never ignores a gate.’ The gate closed behind us with a rusty shriek, and

Papa said, as he always did, ‘Name me three philosophers, Minou.’

And that morning, as on any other morning, I had three names ready for him. I replied, ‘Kant, Hegel, and Descartes, of course.’

‘Of course,’ he said and took my hand. I knew he was smiling, and together we stepped down the path, and then along the beach, like two blind explorers, through seaweed and dark rocks, through ice and sea moss, towards the fishing spot.

Papa said that to live on an island is to live in a closed fist. ‘Nothing suits a philosopher better,’ he said. ‘How can you philosophise if you constantly have to choose?’ On an island as small as ours there were choices to be made, but not that many. Most of the time could be spent in philosophical thought, which for Papa was the noblest of all pursuits.

I could walk around the island in half an hour. It had the shape of the chocolate cat-tongues we sometimes had for Christmas. They were creamy and milky with a shape more like a dog’s bone than a cat tongue.

Had the dead boy arrived on the island, a visitor, alive and well, we would have shown him around. We would have pointed to our house and said, ‘Just wait until you get inside,’ because the house from the outside told nothing of Mother’s colourful paintings covering every wall. And I would whisper to the boy that everyone on the island thought that she was dead. Priest had found her shoe after she disappeared, and

Papa didn’t like to be reminded of the day they buried the shoe, salt-stained and without heel, in an old shoebox.

We would have shown the boy the forest with its seventeen pines and the very old apple tree that one record summer bore three hundred and two apples, and we would have led him through the forest path and introduced him to Boxman.

Then we would have gone to visit Priest and in the grey morning light the church would look magnificent, with its lit windows, snow-covered roof and scores of ravens flying in and out of the bell tower.

‘Priest is scared of the dark,’ I would explain. ‘He sleeps in the bell tower and keeps the light on all night. When he is upset he even rings the bell sometimes.’ And the boy would probably be very impressed that we had a church complete with Priest, tower and ravens, on an island so small. And I am sure Papa would have shown the boy the old lighthouse tower on top of our house. It was no longer in use, but Papa was very proud of it and had spent many hours cleaning it up, so I could use it as my special place.

‘It has historical value, Minou,’ he said, as he scrubbed the floor in a special solution that would care for the aged floorboards.

In the centre of the tower was an old-fashioned lighthouse globe in a funny kind of bath. Once I tried to switch it on, but Papa got very angry.

‘There is mercury in that container,’ he said, ‘it’s very poisonous. That’s why so many lighthouse keepers have gone mad. They saw things coming out of the sea: strange creatures, pirate ships, goats, pigs, all sorts of scary things.’

‘And horses, Papa?’

‘Anything that shouldn’t come out of the water in the first place.’

I spent every night in the lighthouse tower. I had an old mattress and lots of blankets and in the corner of the tower was a small heater that kept me warm. But every night I would let Papa tuck me into bed downstairs. And most nights, before she disappeared, Mother would lean against the doorway and watch Papa make certain I was warm enough for a night in the tower. He would dress me in a warm jacket, thick socks, and one of the scarves that I had knitted myself. Then he would kiss me goodnight, make sure my boots were ready next to the bed and turn off the light.

Sometimes I stayed in bed for a while, listening to Papa in the study, to his absent humming and the sound of pages being turned, but most nights I would get up, tiptoe down the hallway, quietly open the front door and climb the outside steps.

The ceiling in the lighthouse was low and I could only just stand up in the middle. But most nights I sat, wrapped in blankets, knitting with cold fingers, looking out at the island; a dark shape of sand, snow and rocks, while searching my mind for something special and surprising that Papa could tell Mother when she came back.

When I was really young I asked Papa what philosophers think about.

‘They think about life,’ he said.

‘About dogs?’ I asked.

‘No, they don’t worry too much about dogs.’

‘About trees then?’

‘No, not about trees either, they don’t think in specifics, they think broadly.’

‘About the island?’

‘No,’ said Papa, ‘they think about much bigger things.’

‘The stars?’

‘No, not necessarily. Philosophers step right back and look at the big picture.’

‘Mother wouldn’t like that.’

‘No,’ Papa agreed, ‘no, she wouldn’t.’

‘She says it matters how the tiniest brush stroke looks.’

‘But sometimes, mein liebling, when you look in such detail, you lose the big picture.’

‘What is the big picture, Papa?’

‘Truth, Minou, telling us who we are and why we are here.’

‘But what if someone doesn’t want to see the big picture?’ I asked.

‘Well,’ Papa hesitated, ‘that would be a great misfortune, Minou.’ He glanced at Mother who was on her knees, paint on her cheek, putting the final touches on an apple tree. Her painting, Papa had said, was a great addition to the kitchen. The tree’s wilted branches stretched around the entrance door and right next to the shoe rack she had painted a rabbit with extra long ears and a pile of delicious looking apples.

Mother didn’t care much for Papa’s truth. She would say, ‘Use your imagination, Minou, don’t think so much.’

Once she took the leaf I kept carefully stored in Kant’s Critique of Pure

Reason and held it towards the light. It was dry and brittle and little squares of light shone brightly through it.

‘What does it look like, Minou?’ She held it higher for me to see.

I shook my head.

‘Can’t you see the city and the many houses?’ she pointed. ‘And there, a river and here, the square, where everyone gathers at night.’

‘Who?’ I asked perplexed.

‘All the people in the city, of course,’ she laughed, then looked at me searchingly. ‘Where is your imagination, Minou? Where has it gone?’

After Mother disappeared I asked Papa to order a notebook from the boatmen. It had

120 pages and in it I wrote down everything that happened after she had gone, such as:

There is still one apple left on the apple tree, but it’s very cold. Papa says that winter is coming early.

Papa fired up the woodstove in the kitchen this morning. My glass of water left on the kitchen sink had turned to ice.

It’s getting colder; Papa says that it’s going to be a cold winter; he can feel it in the autumn wind. Maybe even colder than in the war, he says. If you are on a boat I hope you keep warm.

Papa caught nineteen fish this morning. It is a record.

There is snow on your shoe-grave.

And I drew the strangely shaped rocks I had collected and that were placed in

a neat line on the lighthouse floor. I documented their shape and colour and each day I would add more raven bones to my collection, trying to arrange them into different patterns, hoping to see something special that Mother might like. But I felt silly, remembering Papa’s words: ‘A philosopher sees with his rational mind, Minou, he does not engage with the imagination. It takes us to places entirely unpredictable, it follows our wishes and wants, not what really is.’

I thought it might help if I knew more about Mother’s past, but Papa could tell me very little. All he knew was that she had arrived in a rowboat on a windy day.

Papa remembered the day clearly, every little bit of it, he said. It was autumn and the sky was grey. Ravens flew out towards sea the way they did when a boat approached, but were thrown back, one after the other, Mother said, like funny old hats, twirling, tumbling towards shore.

Papa knew that Mother had come a long way when he saw the autumn leaves in her hair. He took her hand, helped her with the boat, and invited her in for a cup of tea. And while Mother was drinking her tea, Papa got out an old bone-comb from an otherwise empty drawer. Then slowly and patiently, as though sorting through his fishing nets, he combed through Mother’s hair.

Mother had painted her arrival, filling an entire wall in the blue room. Her painting showed a boat amidst giant waves with a ruffle-feathered peacock as passenger. On the shore stood a kind-looking man, quite a bit like Papa, waving shyly, shielding his eyes from the sun.

‘I knew he was a good man as soon as he took my hand,’ Mother used to say.

Papa always said that the war was still inside him. Sometimes I thought I could feel it when I held his hand. And I asked Mother if she had felt the war in Papa’s hand when he had reached out and helped her safely to the shore.

‘Yes, little one,’ she said quietly and looked out towards the sea, ‘it runs in me as well.’

[2]

It was a slow walk from the beach to our house. The dead boy lay heavy in Papa’s arms, his hand reaching in front of them as if he were blind, not quite trusting Papa’s steps.

Priest was doing his Japanese morning exercises in the distance. I could see him in front of the church, stretching backwards, crying out as he always did, sounding, Papa said, like a wild deer in heat.

‘You have to pretend you are a warrior,’ Priest explained.

I thought he said ‘worrier’ and considered him to be doing an excellent job until Papa corrected me.

Just before the gates the boy lost his shoe. I picked it up. It was brown and cold and heavy with water. I ran ahead, shoe in hand, opening the gates for Papa, filled with a wild kind of excitement.

We never used the blue room. It was Mother’s and had been hers, said Papa, from the moment she arrived on the island. The room had a narrow cast-iron bed and a hook on the wall still with her black velvet coat and the green scarf I had knitted her.

On the floor, leaning against the wall, sat her suitcase, red and worn.

‘Open the window, Minou,’ Papa was breathing heavily, manoeuvring the boy onto the squeaking bed.

‘Won’t he be too cold?’ I asked, looking at his grey lips.

‘He is dead, mein liebling.’ Papa stood back from the bed. ‘This is how you can tell.’ He took a small mirror from the bedside table and held it in front of the dead boy’s mouth. ‘The mirror would cloud if he were breathing, see?’ And the mirror was clear. All I could see were my brown eyes and a bit of my nose.

But Papa didn’t have to tell me. I had known it straight away, even when it

had only been a hand between rocks in the distance. And I knew that this was it. This was the special thing I had been searching for. Papa would be able to tell Mother everything about the dead boy when she came back. And she would no longer mind that he liked philosophy or that the water pipes froze during winter and their squeaking and rumbling sounded, she said, like trains running through Germany.

When the pipes froze Papa would get his tools and lay them on the kitchen bench in an orderly fashion.

‘Don’t worry,’ he once assured Mother, ‘I know how to fix them. It all comes down to logic.’

But Mother replied, her voice tight and low, ‘It has nothing to do with logic.’

‘I can fix them,’ Papa repeated, sounding slightly worried. ‘It’s only ice.’

‘It’s more than ice,’ said Mother, her voice rising like a wave. ‘It’s this house, this island, don’t you see?’ And then she left the house without a coat on and was gone for hours. Mother always left the house when she was upset. If I went to the lighthouse I could spot her somewhere along the beach, picking up rocks and throwing them hard into the waves.

But the dead boy would change all that. When Mother came back she would only want to hear about him and not care about anything else.

‘How did he look?’ she would ask, and then, without waiting for an answer she would turn to Papa and say ‘And you carried him all that way!’

Papa would nod modestly and Mother would look very impressed. Then she would say again and again, ‘Oh, I wish I had been there. Tell me everything, absolutely everything.’

Snowflakes whirled tentatively through the window like uninvited guests. I still had

the dead boy’s shoe in my hand. I tried to put it back on his foot, but his legs were bent as if he were a dancer caught in an impossible jump and the foot was stiff and cold, and didn’t bend. I put the shoe on the floor instead, right next to the bed.

‘He smells of oranges, Papa.’

Papa nodded, ‘Almost like the orange cake your Mother used to bake. Did I ever tell you,’ he continued, not for the first time, ‘that I found twenty-seven leaves in your mother’s hair that day? In the most magnificent autumn colours. And I put them on the table, one next to the other according to size.’ Papa paused. ‘And your mother, she looked at me with a puzzled smile, drank her tea and said, as if it wasn’t a question at all, “I like it here, would you mind marrying me?” But I knew, even before she reached the shore, that she was for me. So you see, Minou, all I had to do was to say, “Yes.”’

Later, sitting at his desk in the study, Papa seemed strangely happy. He was writing with amazing speed, muttering words like ‘arrival,’ ‘dead,’ ‘coincidence,’ ‘oranges,’ as I picked out coloured pencils from a drawer, planning to draw the boy at first light.

I had written lots of notes in my notebook. I thought for example that his eyes might be brown like mine, but noted that I couldn’t be sure because they were closed, and that I would have to ask Papa if we could open them just for a moment to have a look. Then I drew the raven that had sat on a broken pine-branch next to the dead boy, snow resting like a white coat on its feathers. I drew Papa’s tin bucket, left on the beach full of fish, and described how their tail fins had made a sad song against the bucket as we walked up the hill with the dead boy. I added a note explaining that the dead boy couldn’t be buried next to Theodora, but needed to go to the mainland with the boatmen in order to be identified.

Papa abruptly stopped his writing, pen poised above paper. ‘This is what your

Grandfather used to talk about,’ he said, reading glasses perched on his nose.

‘What, Papa?’ I asked.

‘The great coincidences,’ he said and looked at me, ‘they wake you up,

Minou; they shake you like wind shakes the apple tree on a windy day. They point towards something you might have forgotten.

‘Your grandfather once came across a salmon when he was swimming in a river. It came right up close, almost as if it wanted to tell him something. And at that time your grandfather was working on a particularly difficult philosophical question and the salmon, Minou, reminded him of how fishing is often good in one spot, even though the current constantly changes everything.’ Papa paused, ‘I am still not sure what it means exactly, but I know that seeing that salmon changed everything for your grandfather. His philosophy was never the same again. He even painted a salmon above the entrance to his house.’ Papa looked at me. ‘Don’t say anything about the dead boy, Minou, promise me.’

‘To Boxman?’

‘And Priest.’

‘But why, Papa?’

‘The boy has something to do with the truth. I need time to find out what it is.’

I must have looked uncertain, because Papa added, ‘I will tell them before the delivery boat comes, I promise.’ Then he mused, ‘It’s such a long time since anyone has visited us, it’s nice to have company, don’t you think?’

I nodded. I liked it too. The house slowly filled with delicious wafts of oranges, and it was true, it felt as if Mother was baking again.

Before I went to the tower that night I opened the door to the blue room. In the windowsill sat a raven, silent and still, and on the bed lay the boy. I stood in the doorway feeling the cold and the darkness and whispered, ‘I will see you in the morning, dead boy.’

[3]

In the hallway of Papa’s childhood home stood a large brass clock. It ticked loudly, echoing through the house. To the left of the clock was the kitchen, stocked with plenty of cold milk. That was the hardest thing about being in the camp, Papa said.

‘I didn’t want to think of milk,’ he told me. ‘If you think too much about something you haven’t got, then it will break you. But I couldn’t help it. In here⎯’

Papa pointed to his forehead, ‘⎯in here I heard the brass clock, “tick, tick, tick” over the shouting and the moaning, reminding me of milk, always of milk.’

‘But you don’t like milk, Papa.’

‘I do. Very much. But I cannot stand losing it again. Remember this, Minou, everything can be taken away from you, everything can disappear. All you have is your mind and you have to use it well.’

‘But Papa, Boxman says it’s liberating to see things disappear,’ I said.

‘Magic, mein liebling, is an illusion,’ said Papa, shaking his head, ‘I have told you that before.’

Papa didn’t like magic as much as Mother did. It wasn’t that he disliked it.

Magic, he said, is entertainment and as such very enjoyable. And Papa was sure that

Kant too would have allowed for a bit of entertainment.

‘It can’t all be hard work,’ he said, and looked pleased with himself.

But Mother and I liked magic very much. Mother said that magic was one of just a few good reasons to live, and we would visit Boxman every day. Boxman used to work in a circus and knew all about magic. He made boxes for magicians. The kind in which women are sawn in half.

‘I believe in love,’ he said, ‘and there is nothing, absolutely nothing more beautiful than a woman just rescued from the box.’

The boxes too were beautiful, inlaid with satin, painted in bright colours with gold lettering.

From the tower I could see the forest with its apple tree and seventeen pines, and through the forest a small path, a grey winding rope leading to Boxman’s yard, where his dog No-name sat night after night; a dark shadow in moonlight, with spindly legs and floppy ears.

Boxman never asked if I could see into his yard, and I didn’t think he knew that I sometimes watched him.

One night he was teaching No-name how to jump through hoops of fire. The blue flames cast strange shadows on the barn, and I could smell the petrol.

No-name didn’t like it. He did it once, burned himself, then refused to do it again and began to howl. Boxman’s naked chest shone in the night and I saw, there on his chest, a birthmark, large and purple right where his heart was. He had a heart on the outside.

Another time, early in the morning when I could smell Papa’s coffee and was about to go downstairs, Boxman came out wearing his usual blue cape and a black top hat. He took off the hat in a smooth movement, paused theatrically, and then pulled out a rabbit, brilliantly white in the morning light. I could see its red eyes, its pale quivering nose, and I wondered how Boxman did it, and also, whether the smile he sent in my direction was intended for me.

After the burning hoops episode I began to knit a scarf for No-name to cover the burnt patches. I told myself to remind Boxman, who wasn’t always very practical, that No-name was, under no circumstances, allowed to jump through anything burning with a scarf on.

Boxman didn’t spend much of his time in the house. He liked the barn and

worked on his boxes sometimes late into the night. He had a cooker in the corner where he made tea, a foldout bed in case he got tired and always had his piano accordion close by.

On one wall hung photos and ‘thank you’ notes from magicians all over the world. Most of them were waving and smiling next to their newly acquired box, but one magician looked serious. He stood in what appeared like a snowstorm, next to a tiger in a cage, wearing a long brown coat, and an enormous black moustache that glinted and shone against all the white. The tiger looked at him with great interest, and, I thought, something that looked like a hungry smile.

The autograph read:

The Great Shine

Magician and Illusionist

Before you know it you are gone!

Out of the thirty-three photos on the wall, that one was Mother’s favourite. She often stood for a long time in front of The Great Shine.

‘What a life,’ she sighed. ‘What an incredible life.’ And then she would shake her head in wonderment, ‘He looks like a gentleman.’

‘He is,’ said Boxman. ‘A very courageous gentleman. He went from Moscow to Siberia on a rusty bike just to learn a new trick. He had to eat potatoes all the way, and lost his left foot to frost bite. Imagine the commitment.’ Boxman looked

admiringly at the photo. ‘He even found the tiger on the way and tamed it. An incredible man.’

I think Boxman’s admiration came from the potato thing; he hated potatoes.

But I didn’t like the sound of tigers running wild. You would have to bike very fast, just in case, and I didn’t think it would be much fun to lose your foot either, let alone biking so far.

You couldn’t see his feet on the photo. He was standing in snow knee-high.

But when Mother later painted The Great Shine and his tiger in real life size on our living room wall, she added a shiny metal boot to his left foot.

Mother said that magic reminded her that the war was over, and that she could breathe once again.

‘Those monstrous people,’ she said, ‘they don’t know about magic, they don’t know what it means to have imagination. Even if they stood on the highest mountaintop, they still wouldn’t be able to see it. Did you know, Minou, they had dogs with signs around their neck spelling dog in German; Hund?’

‘But why, Mother?’

‘Because, Minou, they had forgotten to use their minds properly.’

Another wall of Boxman’s barn was stacked with wooden boxes, ready to be painted.

The barn smelled of hay and sawdust and of the green jelly-like soap that he used to clean his hands with after painting.

‘What’s the hay for?’ I asked him one day when the wind was howling and the snow falling thick. Mother and I were sitting next to Boxman just inside the open door on the old apothecary desk with its one hundred and fifty-nine small drawers, each

labelled in delicate running writing.

Some of them read: Screws, Magic Rope, Problems, Sugar.

We were sitting close together, keeping warm, sharing a bowl of soup. Two rabbits were nibbling with furious speed on one of Boxman’s cabbages and we could see No-name through the open door, trying to catch snowflakes in the yard.

‘I might get a goat one day,’ he answered, chewing slowly, then added, ‘like

Theodora.’

Boxman was wearing heavy boots, his cape, and the dark blue scarf I had knitted him. He looked like a prince.

‘A goat would be fun, you could come and sing for it,’ he said, looking at

Mother, who nodded and smiled.

‘Do goats like music?’ I asked

‘I am sure that they do,’ he said. ‘You could sing too.’

‘I can’t sing.’

‘I think you can,’ said Boxman.

‘No,’ I said, looking at him firmly, ‘I can’t.’

‘You just have to pretend that you are the centre of the universe.’

Mother nodded and said, ‘Like a bird in a tree, with the most splendid view.’

‘Or like an elephant eating apples,’ added Boxman. ‘Elephants love apples so much,’ he explained, ‘that you could play Beethoven’s fifth on a bassoon next to them while they eat and they wouldn’t notice.’

I shook my head, feeling confused, ‘But how can I pretend to be the centre of the universe?’

The slim microscope Boxman then showed us was a gift from Cosmina, an actress from Paris who Boxman used to work with. She had curly hair, red like

Mother’s, and used to lie in the box, crying out for help with such conviction that his heart ached with urgency as he sawed through the box.

Cosmina, said Boxman, used to jump out of the box, clinging to his chest,

‘Oh,’ she would cry, ‘Oh, I thought I was going to die, I truly, truly thought I was going to die.’

Cosmina was Boxman’s great love, but one day she no longer wanted to be rescued. She had found herself, she told him, and wanted to study the stars from the foothills of the Himalayas. She had read about Galileo and wanted to walk in his footsteps.

‘Did Galileo go to the Himalayas?’ I asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Boxman, ‘but he probably dreamt about it. It would be just like Cosmina to carry on someone else’s dream, she was such a kind soul.’

The day before she left, Cosmina gave Boxman the microscope.

‘Observe,’ she told him. ‘What you see is the universe in a tiny drop. From this you will know yourself to be the centre from which everything unfolds, all colours, all movements, everything.’

Boxman unwrapped the microscope from layers of soft cloth and in the darkness of the barn I put my eye to the lens and saw tiny stars in a piece of hay, and the Milky Way in a scrap of newspaper, looking exactly the way it did on a particularly clear night. I was feeling dizzy from the sight.

‘Do you feel dizzy when you look at the stars?’ I asked Boxman.

‘No,’ said Boxman, ‘but I think No-name does.’

We could see No-name in the yard, standing on hind legs, mouth wide open, waving his front paws at the relentless snow. And it was true, on clear nights No- name would growl at the stars and at the same time look longingly towards them, in a

way that made him look a bit crazy, the same way he did right then in the yard.

I laughed at his frantic pirouettes around the snowflakes. ‘He doesn’t know if he is going to catch them in his mouth or in his paws.’

I thought, looking at him, that maybe he could see the universe in the snow, the same way it appeared under the microscope, and that perhaps it was all too much for him.

‘No-name knows exactly what he is doing,’ said Boxman. ‘His steps are measured, so that he can experience the delicious feeling⎯’

‘Of not making sense,’ finished Mother. And they looked at each other and laughed happily.

That didn’t sound right. I liked logic, and at that moment No-name looked more crazy with longing than if he were feeling something delicious. He looked as if he had forgotten which way home was.

Later I thought, that with a proper name No-name might have a better sense of direction and wouldn’t wear himself out so much when it was snowing, and it was clear to me that neither Boxman nor Mother knew about logic the way Papa and I did.

I read Descartes’ Meditations when I was ten, and tried to read Kant’s Critique of

Pure Reason, but couldn’t make it. Then I read Galileo and Freud. Freud, Papa explained, wasn’t really a philosopher, but still part of modern thought.

‘You have to know what’s out there,’ said Papa, ‘so you can say that you are indeed educated. Then your philosophical arguments count for something.’

Papa told me that Descartes’ first name was René and that he was born in

France on a cold day in March 1596.

Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ It is only through thinking, he argued,

that we can know something clearly and distinctly to be true.

I wasn’t sure I completely understood, and asked, ‘We can’t even know that the ocean exists when seeing it?’

‘That’s true Minou, we can’t, although ⎯’ he glanced through the window at the dark ever-changing sea, ‘it makes for such a convincing argument, I am almost tempted to make an exception.’

‘And me, Papa?’

‘You?’

‘Do I exist?’

‘You definitely exist, can’t you hear yourself think?’

‘Yes, but you can’t.’

Papa suddenly looked worried. ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ he said, then patted my head as if to make quite sure I was really there.

Papa’s study was full of philosophy books and he had worked very hard on finding the truth ever since the war. A philosopher, Papa explained, spends most of his time searching the dark room of his mind for the absolute truth; the one he has no reason whatsoever to doubt. Once he finds the absolute truth, everything else falls into place. Any time left over is spent reading.

When I struggled with Kant he said, ‘Leave it for a bit, Minou, these things are difficult. Even a philosopher by birth needs to mature.’

Kant lay next to my pile of blankets in the tower, and sometimes at night I tried to decipher a sentence by torchlight. But most of the time I strained so violently against the lines, that I ended up seeing only odd shapes in the hollow outlines between the words; birds, lions, and the curve of Mother’s rowboat lying upside down near the fishing spot where it had been since the day she arrived.

When Mother arrived, Papa said, she opened her red suitcase and unpacked five dresses, two paint brushes, eight jars of paint and a white enamel clock that didn’t work. She left the golden bowl in the garden, into which Peacock immediately settled, and warned Papa that Peacock was sensitive. He had seen things, she said, that no bird should see, and his heart was broken. Papa didn’t know much about birds, but he had been taught how to repair clocks in the camp, and asked if Mother wanted hers fixed.

But she said, no thank you; she liked time standing perfectly still.

Mother’s golden bowl was of great interest to the boatmen who came with our weekly deliveries.

We would all be on the beach, Papa and I, Boxman, Mother and Priest, when the ship arrived out past the reef. We would watch the boatmen lower a small boat into the chaotic sea and hear them swear in the distance. They didn’t like coming to the island. Our deliveries often consisted of packages in strange shapes and if they saw a box next to Boxman, packed and ready to go, then the swearing immediately grew louder.

With every delivery the boatmen got a new shopping list. Mother used to add a list to Papa’s weekly order and in her curly handwriting she would note:

Flowers, red (if not possible then yellow)

Ink, black

Three boxes of dark ginger chocolate

Three tubes of paint, oil: Cerulean Blue

A stuffed bird, white, to put in

hair, not too big

The boatmen had lined faces and thin mouths and their eyes were watery and blue.

They lived on the ship and the few times they had to step onto the beach, they looked uncomfortable and wobbly, as if the sea moved inside them.

Once the boat capsized as it was leaving the island with one of Boxman’s carefully wrapped boxes. Boxman shouted, the boatmen got wet and the box was lost.

The sea was very deep. A few metres out the sand abruptly gave way to a sea grave, six hundred and fifty metres deep. The box for Ludwig von Bundig, Master of Card and Magic Tricks, sank to the bottom. Hopefully, I thought, the lid had fallen off on the way down, making it an extravagant home for fish and the kind of one-eyed creatures that live in the darkest places of the sea.

But only a few weeks later, Boxman’s loss was made up in the unexpected form of No-name. The boatmen had no idea they had a dog on board. It was only when they lowered the smaller boat into the sea that No-name appeared, jumping in one daring leap to sit between them. As they reached the shore, and before any of us knew what was happening, No-name scrambled onto the sand and ran straight past us, up the path.

When Boxman arrived home, No-name was sitting in the lilac interior of a spare box. Boxman wasn’t happy; he had never wanted a dog and certainly not a dog in one of his boxes. But later I found them; No-name asleep in the box, little dream- feet moving against the satin, and next to him Boxman, looking down at him, tenderly.

Only one time, when Papa had spent all night having nightmares about the war and said the sky was too blue to go out, did the boatmen help us up the path with the

deliveries. When they saw the large golden bowl outside the house, they asked quite insistently to buy it. Peacock, who lay in it for hours a day, head resting lazily on the edge, opened her eyes and looked at the boatmen with great suspicion.

Mother wanted nothing of their proposals, not even when they offered her a very special blue paint from France, and she kept a firm eye on the bowl until they had left the island.

‘But Mother,’ I said, ‘you don’t really like that bowl.’

‘It’s there to remind me,’ she said.

‘Of what?’

‘How wrong things can be, little one.’

[4]

When Mother disappeared I told No-name that she had been swallowed by a great big whale that only that morning had looked for prey, one dark eye beyond the water’s edge.

No-name looked as if he didn’t quite believe me, but I reminded him of the story of Jonah, and that Mother, with her long red hair and black umbrella would have caught any whale’s eye, and that she always, always walked too close to the sea, getting her shoes wet.

Rain came down in straight determined lines the morning she disappeared. The door on its three hinges opened towards the rain, the sea and the horizon.

Papa had stayed in bed and left the fish to their own devices, and Turtle, who was blind and lived under the doorstep, appeared in the kitchen next to the stove. He normally didn’t come inside and Mother almost stepped on him while making breakfast.

His shield was the colour of wet pine needles. He looked like a different turtle.

‘He is so shiny,’ I said.

I had to wear a dress every day and didn’t like it. I preferred wearing pants and a big green jumper with deep pockets, useful for things found on the beach. But every morning Mother would say with a firm voice, ‘You are a pretty young lady, and pretty young ladies wear dresses.’

The morning she disappeared she looked at me and said, ‘You should put your hair up, little one.’

I shook my head, ‘I am going to Boxman’s.’

She turned her back to me and wiped the kitchen bench.

‘It falls down when I run,’ I explained.

Turtle went towards the living room, almost hitting the door pane, and I felt sorry for him.

‘Will he be able to find his way out?’ I asked.

Mother didn’t answer. She opened the front door and took a deep breath of salty air, then straightened her shoes into a perfect line on the rack next to the door.

She picked out her purple shoes⎯her actress shoes I called them⎯with heels and a flower sewn on the side, and put them on.

Through the door I could see the ocean. Torn pine branches lulled on a quiet sea and among them a paint tin that must have belonged to Boxman. A terrible storm had rearranged the beach the night before, throwing rocks and sand here and there.

Lightning had lit up sky and sea and Priest had rung the church bells again and again until it was all over.

‘Poor Priest,’ I said.

It was what Mother normally said when we saw the church lit up like a ship on a stormy night, but Mother didn’t reply. Instead she picked up Turtle and walked out into the rain, the umbrella held high. I could see her walk down the path, stepping around the gates, then, swaying slightly in her heeled shoes, she reached the beach.

Rain had coloured part of the kitchen floor dark by the time Papa came into the kitchen. He stood in an old singlet, looking at the open door and then at Mother’s coffee cup on the table, still full.

‘Why is the door open, Minou?’

‘Mother has gone for a walk,’ I said.

I kept looking at her in the distance, mesmerised by her silhouette, partly hidden under the black umbrella, but later I couldn’t remember the last moment I saw

her or where she was on the beach. All I remembered was the swaying of her umbrella.

We searched all day. The rain turned to snow. And we were terribly wet and cold when we returned to the house. That night we waited up, all of us, sitting around the kitchen table. No-name slept next to the oven, while Boxman cried and told us that Mother was by far the best magician he had ever worked with, better even than

Cosmina. Papa didn’t say much. He made coffee over and over, while Priest, who was fond of origami, folded an enormous number of paper cranes.

‘Cranes are such graceful animals, don’t you think, Minou? They remind me of your mother,’ he said, hands working incessantly.

I woke on the floor at dawn, certain that a boat horn had droned somewhere far away. No-name was sleeping, warm against me. At some stage during the night

Papa must have covered us with a blanket. Boxman and Priest were asleep at the table and Papa was moving quietly around the kitchen, clearing the table and making a new batch of coffee. I lay listening with closed eyes, waiting for the horn to sound again, but it didn’t.

That day I kept waiting for Mother to come home, hoping that she would walk through the front door, laugh and say ‘I am home, sweet ones,’ but she didn’t. It was only later that morning that I realised that Turtle had disappeared as well.

Papa thought that a wave, unusually high, had swept like a rope around

Mother’s legs and dragged her out.

‘There are times,’ he said, ‘when the ocean rises, far and high, when it spits out glistening fish, and travels much faster than you and I can run. When that happens there is no avoiding it. There is nothing you can do but to spread your arms and let yourself be carried out.’

Boxman thought Mother had walked into the ocean in sadness with a dark nest of heavy stones in her pocket. She was excellent at magic, and he himself felt such sadness at times. Magicians saw more than anyone, he said, how magnificent, but transient, love is.

I soon realised that everyone was being very dramatic, and that I had been both silly and childish, to think that a whale could have swallowed Mother. I sat No- name down in Boxman’s barn, made sure he was listening and told him that whales on the whole are innocent creatures and that I didn’t know what had come over me. I told him that because I was the only one on the island thinking in a rational manner, it was up to me to prove that Mother was still alive and where she might be.

I already knew that Boxman wasn’t very logical, otherwise he would have remembered that Mother had left the house wearing a dress with no pockets. But I was disappointed in Papa. It was as if he had forgotten everything he had taught me about finding truth in the darkness of your mind. I could almost hear Descartes exclaim in a very French accent: ‘As if a shoe is prrrooooof of anything!’

When Uncle heard about Mother’s disappearance, he wrote and said that he was coming to stay for a week. Uncle was Papa’s brother and it was he who had traced us right back to Descartes. He was an academic and worked in the Department of Paranormal Sciences at a renowned University. He was the only one left in the department and worked from an office so small that he had to leave his briefcase outside the door. I was looking forward to meeting him. I had already planned that I would read my truths out loud to him, the way I had to No-name. Being an academic,

Uncle would realise straight away that Mother was alive and he would help me convince Papa that she was coming back. I would tell Uncle that:

1) Things that disappear on an island are always found.

I had written a list of examples:

Mother’s shopping list - found

Dog food - found

Tobacco - found

A blue enamel jug for milk - found, minus the milk

My yellow soft socks - found (very dirty)

Papa’s matches - found

No-name - found, hurt

I reminded No-name of the day he had disappeared. He looked at me as if he remembered clearly how the delivery ship had come and gone and how it had taken a long time to load one of Boxman’s boxes.

Papa had thought that No-name might have jumped into the boat and left the island the same way he had come. And Boxman looked at the ship, a tiny dot on the horizon, and for some reason I thought his hands looked very sad.

But Mother got that strange unseeing look in her eyes and said, ‘He is here, I can feel it.’

Later we found him on the beach, shivering under a large rock, a tiny piece of orange glass stuck in his paw.

My second truth was:

2) Things lost to the ocean always return.

Things lost to the ocean returned without fail, getting caught in the arms of rocks and whitened pine branches. Although strange things sometimes washed up on the beach, such as a bike with rusty bent wheels that Boxman unsuccessfully tried to fix for me, and later half a violin with two strings that Mother thought looked like an unusual boat, in which you could go unusual places, it didn’t change the fact that things leaving the island always came back.

Papa had told me it was to do with the reef. Once Mother put a letter in a bottle, sealed it and threw it out as far as she could. It returned two weeks later. It said: ‘Help me, I am trapped on an island in the middle of the sea, help.’

‘Poor woman,’ laughed Mother, when she opened the bottle and unfolded the paper.

It was clear to me that Mother was neither on the island, nor in the sea, and although

Descartes might not have liked it, I included Turtle in my list of evidence. If she had decided to walk into the ocean the way Boxman insisted she had, she would never have taken Turtle with her. Then there were her purple shoes, which she normally didn’t wear to the beach, but in that area Mother was a bit unpredictable.

The more I thought about it the more I knew it to be true. I wished that everyone would stop looking so sad when I mentioned Mother and realise that she was still alive. But one night, sitting in the tower, watching a storm, I thought I heard a sudden strange singing. First I thought it was the cries of whales, or maybe the huge silver-fin tuna I had seen at times, circling the island. The voice was mournful. As if it had been locked in a bottle for hundreds of years and suddenly escaped; a genie

calling out, mourning all that she didn’t get to do, all the beautiful things she didn’t get to see.

But the song had words, lines that were repeated again and again:

‘There is a song, there is a sea, goodbye to the man who waits for me.’

I sat very still. At every lightning bolt I searched the island and the sea for any sign of where the voice might be coming from. And there, in a particularly bright flash I saw Mother’s black umbrella, pulled and pushed by rain and wind along the beach and into the water.

Suddenly it was the loneliest night, and it was Mother’s voice, and it was the saddest song I had ever heard. It sounded as if she were singing from the depth of the frozen sea. I was breathing as if my breath was not my own. Everything felt wrong.

The island felt as if it was going to tip at anytime and rush us all into the sea.

Scared that Papa might hear it too, I got up from my blankets and ran downstairs, but Papa looked up from his book and smiled when I found him in the study, and everything was quiet. I didn’t tell Papa about the voice. Instead I sat down and started to draw as he read to me from Descartes’ Meditations.

‘You have to start,’ he read, ‘⎯with the simplest truth, the fundamental truths of which there can be no doubt, followed by the truths deduced from them, going from simpler to more complex.’

With Descartes’ words the island became solid again and I realised how easily logic gets lost in the night. I decided from then on not to philosophise at night but to knit instead, but during the daytime I reread my truths again and again and couldn’t find anything wrong with them and I didn’t think that Descartes would have either.

My next step was to work out where Mother might have gone. But that was much

harder. Mother liked things to do with the imagination, but Papa and I were philosophers, and Papa often said that it was difficult for a philosopher to know what

Mother liked and what she wanted.

When we saw her walk along the beach, singing loudly, her hair pulled by wind and sea salt, Papa would look at me and say, ‘When there is something you don’t understand, Minou, then you have to research, approach it with logic.’

[5]

I woke in the middle of the night, hearing Papa talk to the dead boy. His voice rose through the floorboards and I lay awake listening to him, while thick snow hit the lighthouse windows. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I thought he sounded happy.

‘What did you tell the dead boy?’ I asked the next morning, watching him getting his nets ready.

‘It’s strange,’ he answered, while getting the bucket out of the cupboard, ‘it feels as if the boy wants to hear everything I know about Descartes, and the truth and your grandfather’s research. There is so much I want to tell him, so much to say.’

It was not yet light when I watched Papa disappear down the path, nets over his shoulders, snowflakes dancing around him. He didn’t seem to mind that I wasn’t coming fishing. He didn’t even seem to notice when I put Mother’s cup on the table next to mine. Instead he told me, looking very pleased, that he hadn’t slept all night, and yet felt young and invigorated.

I waved one last time to Papa, closed the front door and went to see the dead boy. It was cold in the blue room. In the open window, against the dark morning, sat the raven, still and unblinking. Papa had placed an armchair beside the bed and next to it on the floor sat the wobbly lamp we normally used in the kitchen. He had put a blanket on the chair and next to the chair sat a glass of water with a frozen rim. I pulled the blanket over me and adjusted the notebook in my lap. The dead boy looked cold. His bare foot had the colour of aged raven bones and his jacket bulked around his chest; frozen and salt-stained. There was sand in his hair and on the bed, but I was sure that Mother wouldn’t mind a bit of sand. Sometimes she would lie on the bed

with closed eyes, her shoes pointing to the ceiling like little boats, but she never slept in it. She always slept in the bed next to Papa.

‘It’s important to daydream, Minou,’ she would say, her hair spilling over the pillow, ‘it’s important to let your mind travel, and not hold it tight like a dog on a leash.’

‘Like a German dog, Mother?’

‘Any kind of dog, Minou.’

I chose a pencil, looked at the dead boy and tried to think in surprising ways, the way Mother did. I drew the salt pattern on his jacket and wrote: “The salt looks like flowers.”

‘What kind of flowers?’ Mother would ask, sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for Papa to make her a coffee, ‘what did they look like, Minou?’ she would ask.

‘Sea lilies.’

‘Really?’ she would say, ‘What more?’

‘Oranges,’ I would add.

‘Oranges?’

And Papa would look up from the kitchen bench where he was pouring her a coffee and say matter of factly, ‘He smelled of oranges.’

‘How peculiar,’ Mother would reply. ‘A dead boy smelling of oranges.’

Papa would forget about philosophy and say in a very surprising way, ‘I talked to him all night, didn’t sleep a wink.’

And Mother would arrange her long hair in a loose bun, and look thoughtful, but happy.

I could see one of his ears through the matted hair. It was dark grey, almost blue. I

drew it carefully, taking my time. I drew his bare foot, his leather belt and then noticed that on his jacket, along a row of brown buttons sat one of gold. I tried to draw the button as well, but it was hard to copy the way it glinted and shone in the light of the lamp.

‘What was it like sitting next to the dead boy?’ Mother would ask and look at me intently.

‘As if he could hear me,’ I said, looking at his ear, realising that Papa was right.

‘Hear what?’

‘The pencils, my drawing. As if he were listening.’

‘Listening?’

‘Like Priest in the confession box.’

Mother didn’t like religion. ‘Remember, you are a child, and not a sinner,’ she would say when I got ready for church on Sundays. ‘They got it all wrong,’ she would shout as I ran out the door to pick up No-name before the bells rang out. But even though

Mother didn’t like religion, she still went to visit Priest. She liked the church paintings and sometimes she even enjoyed a story from the Bible. She planned to paint all the animals from Noah’s ark, starting from the back of the house running all along the walls until they reached the front door.

‘It’s going to look,’ she said, ‘as if they have just arrived at Mount Ararat, and are filing out, two by two, to look at the sun for the first time in forty days and forty nights.’

But Mother didn’t get to do it before she disappeared. Instead I drew Noah for her in my notebook, opening the window of his ark. I drew him the way Mother had

painted Papa on the wall in the blue room, smiling shyly, shielding his eyes from the sun. I was very pleased with it and planned to give it to her when she returned.

Papa didn’t mind that I was going to church. The bible he said is an historical document and useful to know.

‘Just remember, Minou,’ he said, ‘most people do not separate God from expectation.’ He peered at me over his reading glasses, ‘it’s important that you understand this. Expectation has no place in thought. People want something for their faith; they want something for their prayers. They are bargaining with God. But philosophy is a pursuit of truth, and that is,’ he emphasized, ‘truth without expectation.’

After Mother disappeared I started bringing my notebook to church. Priest was good at telling stories. Every Sunday he would speak with conviction and embrace, not just

No-name and me, but the whole church with all its empty pews. He talked excitedly about the creation of the world while folding origami; sending swans, cats, flowers, cranes and buffaloes, his specialty, over the side of the pulpit. Some of them, especially the ones with wings, would glide gracefully to the floor.

No-name liked the sermons and howled excitedly every time Priest paused for effect. I liked Genesis too, except for one bit. Every time he got to the part about darkness covering the surface of the deep I got scared. And ever since Mother disappeared I thought it was the scariest thing of all; the deep with only a layer of darkness to prevent anyone from falling in. It reminded me of ocean graves hiding ships of moaning wood, hiding things long forgotten, and against all logic, I kept seeing Mother’s red hair fanning out, pulling down, deeper and deeper.

At the back of the church was a dark-panelled confession box with plum-

coloured curtains dragging, tired and dusty on the floor. Once, when Priest had asked me if I wanted to do confession, I had curiously stepped inside and sat down with No- name on my lap. I could hear Priest behind the flower-carved partition.

‘What am I supposed to say?’ I asked.

‘Tell me whatever sins you have committed; entrust me with them,’ he answered. ‘It’s quite straightforward.’

I moved uncertainly on the velvet-covered bench. ‘I don’t really know what a sin is,’ I said, feeling that this was a serious flaw after all the philosophy I had been reading.

‘Things you might have done wrong, secrets you haven’t told another soul,’ said Priest.

And right then I almost told Priest what had happened after our circus performance. Boxman, Mother and I had rehearsed for weeks. Mother had put a big cross in the calendar for the performance day and Papa and Priest had received beautifully written invitations.

You are invited to attend an extraordinary circus performance

Time: 6 pm on Saturday the 2oth of December

Place: Boxman’s Barn

Dress: Wear nice clothes

Prepare to be surprised

The performance had been a great success and we talked about it for weeks, but I had never told anyone what happened after the performance.

I stopped myself from telling Priest what I had seen that night and instead told him that I very much wanted a horse. It wasn’t really a secret and I didn’t think it was a sin either, but Priest listened, while I stroked the velvet on the bench, wondering what a horse might feel like.

I told Priest that getting a horse to the island was not an easy endeavour. A horse would have to withstand the sea journey. It had to be lowered with leather straps from the delivery ship into the ocean and then swim behind the smaller boat until it reached the shore.

The boatmen wouldn’t be happy and the whole thing was enough to make any horse scared out of its wits, Papa said. So scared that it might not have any wits left by the time it reached the island.

‘Horses are sensitive creatures,’ nodded Priest.

I thought both Priest and Papa underestimated horses, and it was a small strong horse I wanted anyway, with a mind of its own.

I imagined bringing Mother to the tower on her first day home, saying, ‘Look

Mother, try and find something new.’ She would gaze, first in one direction, then in another and suddenly spot the horse, running, here and there, wherever it pleased.

‘Is there anything else you want to tell me?’ Priest asked in a kind voice.

Again I nearly told Priest about standing in Boxman’s icy yard after the performance and how everything had been so quiet. I nearly told him about the strange sound I had heard amidst the whispering of the swaying pines. My secret was like a leaf in autumn, about to fall from the apple tree, with nothing to stop it. But this time I pulled the curtain open and swung my legs over the side so I sat sideways. No- name jumped to the floor and Priest appeared next to me. For a moment the many coloured lights that fell from Theodora’s window blinded me. We sat side by side as

if in a little boat, feet dangling above water. Priest had been preaching in his chef’s outfit and the smell of pretzels spread through the church like a salty wave. He had just that morning received a hundred kilos of flour and ten new baking trays that shone and glinted like silver. It took three trips with the wheelbarrow to get it all delivered to his kitchen.

‘Who pays you for being a priest?’ I asked.

‘My family had lots of money,’ he said. ‘They died and left it all to me.’ He pulled out a piece of origami paper from his apron, started folding it and added, ‘They weren’t nice people; they didn’t believe in God.’

I thought of Papa who didn’t believe in God either, but was kind and had invited Mother for tea when she was just a stranger with tangled hair.

‘Maybe they believed in something else,’ I suggested, thinking they might have searched like Papa for truth without expectation.

‘Pigs,’ he said, ‘they believed in pigs. They had a barn with hundreds and hundreds of them.’

‘Pigs are lovely,’ I said politely, ‘they have soft ears.’

Priest didn’t look like he cared for soft ears. ‘They slept in the barn. Under a big tartan blanket.’

‘The pigs?’

‘No, my parents.’ Priest looked unhappy.

‘Where did you sleep?’

‘In the house, but Minou, this brings up bad memories. It was so quiet at night, not a sound, and it was dark, always dark. Pigs don’t like light, not even from across the yard.’ He looked at me. ‘Promise me, Minou, that you will never get a pig.’

‘I don’t think I will,’ I said, ‘I really want a horse.’

‘Horses are nice. Nice,’ he repeated with emphasis.

I picked up the dead boy’s shoe and wondered what had happened to him. The shoe was cold and greasy with salt. I looked at my own boots. Mother had bought them for me. They were getting too small, squeezing uncomfortably against my toes when I ran. Mother had ordered them from the boatmen, and because I kept growing she made me stand on a piece of paper so she could draw the size of my feet. Before handing it to the boatmen she decorated the drawing with palm trees, roses and a pelican, busy swallowing a very large, frightened-looking fish. ‘Your feet will take you many places, Minou,’ she said, as she added the final touches to the pelican. ‘No one is destined to stay on this island, no one.’

I couldn’t quite imagine my feet taking me anywhere else but the island, but I didn’t tell her that.

I turned the dead boy’s shoe around and looked inside. It said: Montgomery’s best since1460 in faded gold lettering. I copied it in my notebook and added, ‘His shoe smells of oranges too.’ Then I lifted the sole from the leather, I am not sure why. It came apart easily. Behind the sole was what looked like a letter wrapped in plastic.

[6]

No-name was good at tricks, so good that Boxman was sure that he had performed in a circus before coming to the island. Boxman had written a letter to his old circus in

Berlin, asking if they knew a dog with brown eyes and great circus skills.

‘It’s very far to Berlin,’ I said sceptically.

‘Crazier things have happened,’ said Boxman. ‘No-name is a really special dog.’

Boxman asked me to do a drawing of No-name to accompany his letter and I drew him, daringly and dangerously jumping through a burning hoop. I was very happy with the drawing. It was the best I had ever done, and I wrote my name in the corner with a note politely asking the circus to return it.

No-name would walk on hind legs and bark happily when I brought him back from church, as if he was telling Boxman about all the things that had happened; all the exciting things that Priest had talked about.

Sometimes I wrote things down during the sermon that I thought might interest him. Boxman liked everything about space. He had to keep up with all the new information, he said, in case Cosmina decided to come back from the Himalayas.

‘When you love someone,’ he said, ‘it’s important to be able to talk to her.’

One day, while Boxman prepared tea in the corner I read out some notes to him about space, ‘God made two good lights. The great light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.’

Boxman liked that, and wanted to know if Priest had said more about the stars.

I shook my head and asked instead why he never came to church. Boxman answered that Priest’s origami reminded him of Cosmina, and that sitting in church made him

sad. Cosmina too had nervous hands, he explained, and was always pulling apart pieces of paper.

‘Bits and pieces would whirl around the house,’ he said. ‘Like snow and hail and rain. Later we would find paper in our tea, in the paint, in the honey.’ Boxman sighed and looked longingly at my notebook.

The barn smelled deliciously of sawdust and paint and a newly painted box was sitting on the table. There was a naked woman with large breasts painted along the side. She had a whip in her mouth and smiled in a sort of uncomfortable way. ‘La

Luna’ was written in large curly letters just above her breasts.

‘Is that La Luna?’ I asked.

Boxman nodded, drawing his cape tighter against the cold.

‘She looks brave.’

‘She is not afraid of anything,’ he said. ‘You could take her to the darkest room at the end of the universe and she still wouldn’t be scared.’

Then Boxman asked me if I wanted to star in a trick. I nodded excitedly, but then felt nervous. I wasn’t brave like La Luna.

‘Take off your shoes,’ he said while opening the box. ‘And lie still,’ he warned as I climbed in, notebook in hand. ‘Sawing a woman in half is no funny business.’ He paused at the lid. ‘Do you really need the notebook?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘let’s get started.’ He exaggeratedly closed the lid, while calling out in his circus voice, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen! You are about to see a trick never before accomplished quite like this. Be prepared, be warned, watch every step, this is real, this is frightening, this is,’ he paused, ‘Minou, the fearless!’

Darkness took over. I could no longer hear Boxman and I thought of God creating the world and the thin layer covering the deep. I held my breath and tried to

act like Minou the Fearless, but felt instead I was sinking deeper and deeper into a dark ocean, Mother’s hair reaching for me; tentacles of red.

‘Boxman,’ I knocked on the lid, ‘let me out.’

When Boxman’s face and the dusty ceiling appeared above me, I searched my mind for something to tell him that didn’t involve La Luna.

‘Do you think,’ I asked, still lying down, notebook clutched to my chest, ‘that

No-name knows how far it is to the church, just by looking at the bell tower?’

I had thought about this for quite some time and had saved it for one of our conversations. Even though Boxman wasn’t a philosopher, he did know a lot about space.

Boxman lit a cigarette as I climbed out of the box. He had beautiful hands. His nails were shaped like little pink boats and he wore a gold ring on the right hand, set with a dark red stone.

I thought that he really shouldn’t be smoking in the barn with all that hay lying around and wondered if he was disappointed in my circus performance.

‘I don’t know what he sees,’ said Boxman, ‘but I know what he hears. When the church bell rings, even if it’s in the middle of the night, he waits for you at the door.’

It was true. No-name was always ready when I came to pick him up. He liked everything about church. Not just the sermons and Priest’s origami, but also the church paintings. He would stare enchanted towards the ceiling throughout the service.

Priest was very proud of the church paintings. One morning during his gymnastics he told Mother and I that they were called frescoes.

‘They tell stories,’ he said, swinging his arms around in big circles. ‘Stories about God.’

The largest, Mother’s favourite, was of John the Baptist, painted in faded blues and reds. John was knee deep in a river baptising a man amongst reeds and fish.

Priest stopped swinging his arms, pointed to the ceiling and said with conviction, ‘God is in that painting, Minou. He is right there asking me to give him everything I have.’

‘What do you mean, Priest,’ I asked, ‘what does he ask for?’

‘My life, Minou,’ Priest smiled. ‘My pretzels, my light bulbs, my origami, everything!’

‘But where is he?’ I asked, staring at the fresco.

‘He is nowhere,’ Mother said, quite loudly next to me. ‘That painting, little one, is made up of magenta red and cobalt blue, and a great deal of artistic ability.’

Priest abandoned his arm swinging and continued as if he hadn’t heard

Mother, ‘Look closely, Minou,’ he said and began to walk on the spot, lifting his knees very high. ‘God is there,’ he puffed. ‘He is in the river, in the fish, in the face of the man being baptised.’

I looked hard at the fresco, while listening to Priest, who exclaimed a loud

’Wahh Wahh Uhh’ on every knee lift. The baptised man, head above water, looked sort of surprised, almost as if he had seen the overweight octopus and the sunken city all at once. But no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t see God and I wondered if perhaps No-name, sitting next to me, head sideways, squinting at the fresco, might be seeing what I couldn’t.

Just above the entrance was a fresco of a large black dog, teeth glinting in a dangerous smile. He was dancing in a row of angels.

‘That’s the devil in disguise,’ said Priest.

I thought it was silly of the devil to dress up as a black dog. But the angels seemed too busy dancing in their long flowing dresses to notice that they were holding hands with a dog. But No-name, as if he knew perfectly well that the black dog wasn’t who he pretended to be, would whimper and growl at the fresco every time we left the church.

The stained glass window at the very end of the church showed Theodora and her beloved goat next to Paul the Apostle. Theodora had large hands. She held a brick in one and a paddle in the other, and looked big and strong next to Paul.

Priest often looked at her with admiration. ‘You wouldn’t want to mess with her,’ he said

‘Was she a real queen?’ I asked.

‘In a way she was,’ he said. ‘She wanted to be a queen so much that she bought the whole island and had her portrait painted.’ Priest went into a deep back- bend, folding his hands awkwardly behind him, and added with a laboured voice,

‘And she always wore a crown.’

Mother had found some of Priest’s origami paper in the pulpit and was enthusiastically folding away, while looking out over the many pews.

‘It’s like being behind the wheel of a great big ship, isn’t it?’ she shouted.

‘God’s boat?’ said Priest and added a ‘Wahh Wahh Uhh,’ before laughing loudly. ‘I like that. It provides steady sailing through a stormy sea.’

‘Did you learn that exercise when you were in Japan?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘From Hoshami. I met him at the International Pretzel

Competition in Tokyo. We shared second place. Hoshami could climb trees like a cat.

I myself tried the apple tree once, but I think I scared the rabbits.’

Theodora’s journal was kept in a box next to the altar and Priest knew everything there was to know about her.

‘There are many things to be learnt from Theodora’s managing skills,’ he said.

‘She lived here alone, yet she managed to build the church and the houses and she stayed warm in winter. She even wrote sermons and tried them out on her goat.’

I looked at the stained glass window, ‘Why is she holding a paddle?’

‘She canoed down the Thames in a hailstorm,’ said Priest. ‘She also climbed the highest mountain in Norway. She wasn’t scared of anything. “Do and do and do even more,” was her motto. She was a remarkable woman.’

‘There is more to life than doing,’ said Mother from the pulpit, sending a crane that didn’t seem to have any wings crashing to the floor.

Theodora and her goat were buried in the same grave. No one knew the exact circumstances of how they died, except that they had died together.

Boxman thought that Theodora had attempted a magic trick and that it had gone terribly wrong. Mother agreed.

‘But what kind of trick?’ I asked.

Boxman looked at me meaningfully, ‘Some tricks are so dangerous, Minou, they are best not talked about.’

Papa thought that it was impossible to know what had happened to Theodora and her goat and therefore silly to speculate.

But Priest told me in a matter of fact voice that Theodora’s goat had climbed the stairs to the unfinished church tower, leapt over the edge, and landed upon

Theodora, who was digging a well right next to the tower.

They were buried at the very spot where they had died when the delivery ship

arrived a week later, pulling deep with three punnets of butter and 436 bricks for the unfinished wall.

‘Did the goat think it could fly?’ I asked Priest.

‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘or maybe it just stumbled.’

Theodora had noticed a change in her goat and as she was not one to use big sentimental words it was noteworthy, said Priest, that she had described her goat as staring out towards sea with a ‘strange otherworldly longing.’

The boatmen wrote a note on the last page of her diary saying that Theodora still wore her crown when they found her and that they had taken payment for butter and bricks out of her money tin.

I imagined the goat looking at the world from the church tower; at the ocean, the horizon and maybe the sunrise. I imagined how it might have thought today is the day and confidently leapt, waving its little hooves around.

When Peacock had died of old age, head resting peacefully at the edge of the bowl,

Mother carried him to Priest, who dug a grave next to Theodora and her goat. That night I saw Mother crying in Papa’s arms.

‘Peacock was the only one who knew what horrible people, what horrible times,’ she said.

When Priest found Mother’s shoe, he said we should keep with tradition and bury it with Peacock. Getting ready for the shoe funeral the following day, he dug right down to Peacock’s skeleton. That evening I went to the church carrying my notebook and coloured pencils instead of going straight to the tower. Light streamed from the church windows, illuminating the hole in the ground, and I knelt at the slippery edge and drew Peacock deep down in the soil. I thought that when Mother

returned she would be very interested to see what Peacock looked like as a skeleton.

Later I asked Priest about the time he found Mother’s shoe and we had heard him shout from the beach in what sounded like another language. Papa had run out the door in socks and halfway down the path, he turned and called out to me, that I was under no circumstances to follow him.

‘What language did you speak?’ I asked Priest.

‘I can’t remember,’ said Priest. ‘It was as if the whole world was in my throat.

It could have been any language, Minou, any language at all.’

[7]

Snow kept coming through the window. Even the raven on the windowsill looked cold. I put the dead boy’s shoe back on the floor and slowly removed three handwritten pages from the plastic. My hands were as light as the cranes flying from

Priest’s pulpit.

‘What did they say, Minou?’ Mother would ask, ‘Hurry, hurry, tell me!’

I pulled the blanket tighter around me and began to read.

My father is a weaver of Persian carpets. I grew up in the shadow of his

lamp; a large factory lamp with a shade of metal, hanging right above his

loom.

The rest of the house was kept in darkness. The blinds were

pulled, the curtains drawn, and a doorstop lay along the front door

preventing light from creeping in.

Father was weaving day and night. Narrow pathways ran between

carpets stacked so high that you couldn’t see him or his loom from the

door. Occasionally he took a nap, head leaning on the pile of carpets

beside him. I don’t think he ever went to bed. I could smell him when I

placed a cup of tea next to his loom. He smelt dusty like the cupboards in

the kitchen, where jars and tins had sat for years with faded labels.

He once told me that it is the duty of a carpet maker to make just

one mistake while weaving a carpet. The mistake is made in honour of

God; the one and true perfection. But I searched for mistakes in his

carpets and never found one. They were flawless and light as a breeze.

My mother slept alone in the bedroom, taking up the entire bed. Most of the morning she stayed under the covers while I made tea and listened for the chime of the doorbell that announced father’s visitors.

Gusts of cold wind would sweep through the house whenever I opened the door and for a brief moment everything went bright. But darkness swiftly fell on the corridor as I closed the door again while the visitors felt their way towards father’s room, like moths towards a light. ¨

One of father’s carpets was said to have flown. Father neither denied nor confirmed the story, but no one seemed to mind. People; serious collectors, adventurers, sailors, and of course Lanikov the captain, kept travelling halfway around the world to see his carpets, hoping to find one amongst them that could fly.

When I finished serving tea for the visitors I would quietly retreat to the edge of the room where I sat on a hard chair, listening to their conversation. I was careful not to make a sound and I don’t think they noticed me in the darkness. They mostly talked about father‘s carpets, but I was only interested in the stories they told about the sea. We lived in a port, but I had never seen the sea. Instead I came to recognise its salty smell on the visitors.

Lanikov often came to visit and he always brought his monkey.

She would sit on his shoulder in a frilly skirt and when I opened the door for them she would stare at me with big eyes, and purse her lips. I wasn’t sure whether she was happy to see me or not.

Most of father’s visitors pushed past me in a hurry to see the carpets, but Lanikov always took time to greet me, his hand, strong and weather-worn, would rest on my shoulder for a moment and he would

look at me as if he knew something about me, that I didn’t myself know.

It didn’t bother me; it felt nice. Did he already know then that I was to

work on his ship? I haven’t asked him. Maybe some day I will.

PS. I don’t know the exact date, but Lanikov told me that when

you write a diary it’s enough to know the season and the year. So dear

diary, it’s autumn 1958, and Lanikov says that the winter ahead is going

to be the coldest we have ever had.

Autumn 1958 was when Mother disappeared. After that autumn, it was true, came the coldest winter we ever had. When Uncle arrived after the shoe funeral the ocean had already started to freeze. Thin ice covered it every night but during the day it constantly broke and rearranged itself. I thought the ocean looked beautiful like that and Boxman said it was almost like magic. After Uncle left the ocean froze solid and for three weeks we didn’t get deliveries. Boxman ran out of food and had to come for dinner at our place, even though the only thing we had left was potatoes.

‘How do they taste like?’ I asked, seeing Boxman’s pained look as he slowly chewed one potato after the other.

‘Like sucking on a coin,’ he answered.

I didn’t think that sounded very nice, and felt sorry for Boxman.

The lamp shone softly on the dead boy’s face. There was a bit of sand on his cheek and I leaned close to brush it off. His skin was hard, but soft and wet at the same time.

I tried to describe it in my notebook, but it was difficult. It almost felt like No-name’s nose on a particularly cold day. I leaned a little closer and tried carefully to lift one of his eyelids. ‘Don’t worry, dead boy,’ I said. ‘It’s for Mother. I just need to know what colour your eyes are.’ But his lids were frozen and it was impossible to move them

even the slightest.

Mother always said that each person has a favourite sense. I was sure that his was hearing. It wasn’t because his ears were blue from the cold, but something else. It felt as if he knew I had a secret and were waiting for me to tell him.

I shook my head, ‘No, dead boy, I can’t tell you.’

Autumn 1958

Dear Diary.

I am on night shift and I only have a moment. It’s dark and cold on the

deck. The rain keeps turning into sleet and then back to rain again. I wish

the moon would come out, just for a moment. My fingers are frozen into

clumsy sticks and it’s difficult to write.

This morning I saw my first whale. Lanikov pointed into the grey

water and there it was. It came gliding out of the ocean, and then

effortlessly went back under, only to reappear a few metres ahead.

‘Hurrah’ I yelled, ‘hurrah’ and the men around me stopped their work and

laughed at my excitement. Lanikov put an arm around my shoulder. He

smiled too and said, ‘I can’t remember when I was last excited about a

whale, it’s nice to see.’ The whale disappeared back into the water and I

stood at the railing, feeling happy, suddenly noticing that my hands

looked strong, and almost as weather-worn as Lanikov’s.

I am glad I left and even though I sometimes worry about

mother’s cream buns. Mother would call from the bedroom when I had

finished serving tea for the early visitors, and when she saw me she would

whisper that she was hungry, and that I had to hurry, be quick, and every

day, blinded by the light, I left the house to buy her a dozen cream buns.

Everything on the streets was loud compared to the house. I tried

to see as much as I could on the way to the baker shop and back.

Everything was bright and colourful. People were talking, going places,

some shouting, their faces bitten red with frost. Silver-winged seagulls

were pecking for crumbs in the snow outside the baker shop and the

butcher’s dog, across the road, always wore a green beanie on cold

days.

I collected things: a blue candy wrapper found in the gutter, a

yellow scrap of silk in the garbage bin outside the seamstress. To other

people the city might have looked dull and grey, but mine were hungry

eyes and I spotted colour everywhere.

One day I found the skeleton of a bird. It was only bones and

feathers, but I knew straight away that it was a seagull. Its wings were

spread as if it were flying, and the snow lit its empty ribcage. I carried it

home and put it on my bedside table. Every night before going to sleep I

shone my torch on it. As the light hit the ribcage I could almost hear its

piercing call. It was magnificent.

I had found many raven bones on the beach, but never a whole skeleton. I tried to imagine how it might look so I could draw it in my notebook, but when I very discretely tried to measure the raven in the windowsill, it shook off the snow that kept falling through the window and glared at me fiercely as if it knew exactly what I was doing. I wished the dead boy could have shown me his skeleton bird.

On my way to the bakery I passed the train station. There were always

people crowding the entrance. Some getting on the train, some having

just arrived. They were pushing and shouting, carrying suitcases and

boxes, and the dirt was trampled into mud in front of the entrance doors.

On the station wall hung a large map of enamel. Every time I

passed the map, I slowed down to look, trying not to walk into people.

The streets of the map were painted blue. They were running like inland

rivers towards the sea and I knew their shapes and patterns well.

Papa liked maps too. He said that if you lay a new map above an old one, you could see the land of losses and gains. It is useful, he said, to know that things perish and change. Then you can prepare yourself.

When Mother disappeared I asked Papa to help me look in the atlas, so we could work out where she had gone. But Papa said that Mother’s red suitcase was still in her room and if she had gone anywhere she would have taken it with her. I tried to convince Papa that maybe she had just wanted a new suitcase. But to Papa that wasn’t logical, when she already had one that was perfectly good and sturdy.

I thought of all the peculiar things I had read about, things that were strange and didn’t make sense. I told Papa of whole cities under water, streets filled with glittering fish and travelling seaweed, and I told him of the enormous overweight octopus they caught in the Pacific, that had jumped straight from the ship’s scales back to the water, just after registering 2300 kilos. When all that was possible then surely it was possible that had Mother left without her suitcase and would be coming back soon.

‘Wait, dead boy,’ I said, then ran to Papa’s study and found the atlas in the bottom drawer of his desk. When I returned to the blue room the raven had left the windowsill

and was perched on the bed head.

‘What do you want,’ I shouted, and shooed it back onto the windowsill. I didn’t like it when the ravens came inside. They were big and their beaks were strong and dangerous looking, and I had the feeling that the dead boy didn’t like it much either. Priest didn’t mind the ravens. Sometimes, he said, he would wake with one of them perched on his stomach. ‘They look at me so curiously,’ he said, ‘as if they want to hear all about creation. And they are such good listeners. I wish, Minou, that they would come to a sermon.’

I showed the dead boy the sea map and how there was a cross in the middle of the sea. Then I wondered if he knew about Descartes and that you could only trust your own mind. I was sure Papa had already told him, but I repeated it to him just in case.

Then, looking at the map, it occurred to me that the dead boy had been sailing in autumn and that maybe Mother and him had crossed paths. Perhaps he had even seen her, standing onboard a big ship, waving, laughing, her long red shifting and falling in the wind. ‘Oh Minou,’ she would say. ‘There I was, looking at the moonlight and then suddenly a ship came towards us. On the deck stood a young boy.

I could see him clearly because the moon was out. He was young, with dark hair, a bit older than you, and he waved to me, ‘Lovely night,’ he yelled, and I shouted back,

‘The mooooon is fuuuuuull of cooooooolours,’ you know, like I used to say. And just as his ship was almost out of sight I heard him call out, ‘I have a skeleton bird!’ Isn’t that extraordinary, Minou? I wonder what a Skeleton bird is.’ I smiled and continued reading.

A few days before I ran away from home I saw a strange-looking man on

my way to the bakery. He was standing outside the station with two large

suitcases next to him. He wasn’t from town, and people curiously

gathered in safe distance. His jacket was short at the waist with

pompoms on the shoulders and bright shiny gold buttons running from

neck to waist. His skin was dark, his eyes brown and his moustache was

black and sleek.

He didn’t seem to notice the crowd; instead he looked straight

past them, caught my eye, gave me a cheerful wave, and smiled as if we

were old friends. People turned to see whom he was greeting. I was

about to wave back, but dropped the money I held in my hand. When I

looked back at him after having scrambled around on the muddy street to

find my coins, he was looking the other way.

Later, while waiting in line in the bakery, I saw him pass the shop.

He was whistling merrily, carrying the suitcases as if they weighed nothing

at all. The baker girls stopped serving and looked at him. One

spontaneously pointed, then blushed and hid her hand in her apron

pocket.

When I left the baker shop carrying the cake box I saw him far

down the street, his pompoms blowing in the wind. He was moving

towards the harbour.

The next day and the day after everyone seemed to talk about the man

and his gold buttons. ‘Who was he?’ ‘Where was he going?’ ‘And had

anyone ever seen gold buttons that shiny before?’

I suddenly remembered something that Mother had said to Boxman and I. It was when we were preparing for our circus performance. We rehearsed almost every day.

At lunch we sat on bales of hay in the yard, drinking strong tea and eating some of

Mother’s homemade bread. Boxman had some old magazines and Mother had found an article about China with lots of pictures. She had pointed to the Sugar Top

Mountains and to the street in Shanghai where hundreds of birdcages hung like lanterns along every shop front. The cages were full of white and yellow birds.

Boxman told us that he had been once and that everything in China was filled with magic and imagination. Mother asked Boxman if there were any suitcases in China and he said that they were sold on just about any street corner. Mother had laughed and said, ‘It’s decided then, that’s where I am going.’

Another raven landed on the windowsill with a thud. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t remembered that day. I looked past the ravens into the forest where snow was collecting on the pine branches and thought hard. The longer I thought about it, the more clearly and distinctly I knew it to be true. Mother had gone to China. She had gone to the Sugar Top Mountains, and then to the street with hundreds of birdcages, and she was showing Turtle all the things we had seen in the magazine.

‘How wonderful it would be to stand on one of those mountains with wind in your hair,’ she had said, looking at the pictures, ‘or to walk down a street with hundreds of birds singing to you.

I think the girls in the baker shop felt sorry for me. Sometimes they gave

me a cake for free. It was always the same, the cheapest cake they had,

but it was still nice. It had a thick layer of icing on top that I would lick off,

before I ate the rest. The icing always made me feel strangely happy and

I wondered if that was how mother felt while she was eating her cakes.

When I returned with her cream buns the shades would be opened

just a little, and Mother ate her cakes slowly, one after the other, in the

grey woollen light. It was the only time of day she spoke, and when I was

younger she taught me to read between mouthfuls of cake. She would tell stories in an excited whisper and sometimes she would laugh out loud, her laughter echoing through our quiet house.

‘I married your father because he knew about knots,’ she said one day. ‘Knots were important where I grew up. A man that knew about knots was a man worth having. But even then something was not quite right about him. He only wanted to walk in the shade. We would criss-cross the streets to avoid the sun, but one day he got caught. It was a grey afternoon. Suddenly, without warning, the sun broke through the skies.

Your father stopped in the middle of the road. He stood terribly still, looking at his long shadow. Finally he turned to me and said, ‘That’s how

I am going to look when I die. There will be nothing left of me, nothing at all.’’

But as the cakes slowly disappeared, a deep melancholy descended upon the room. By the time the cake box was empty, everything was back to normal. The shades went down and darkness filled the bedroom again. I would leave her and go back downstairs, and soon after she would follow me and take over the tea making.

I remember being very little, sitting in my high chair while mother made tea. It was so dark that I couldn’t see my feet swinging beneath me. But I saw the gas flame next to mother‘s broad back. I remember how the light danced on the shiny surface of the kettle, the colours! But mother never noticed. She shuffled around the kitchen, preparing tea, day after day. Sometimes she would stop and sigh, her bare arms huge and floppy in a shapeless dress, and the words⎯flowing from her so effortlessly when she ate her cakes⎯had left her.

Mother was in China and would be coming home soon. There was so much in the dead boy’s diary that Papa and I could tell her. She would want to hear everything about the dead boy. She too liked cakes, at least while she was making them, and I liked sitting on the wooden bench, watching her while she was baking. She would turn on the radio and open the windows.

‘We need to breathe, Minou,’ she would say, and laugh happily.

She sang along to the tunes, even the ones she didn’t know, as she pulled out flour, baking powder, orange peel and eggs.

Papa would appear, reading glasses on, almost like a cloud of thought in the middle of all the light and air and singing, and send me a careful smile.

‘You are baking?’ he would ask her.

‘Indeed I am,’ she would laugh, scarf around her hair, flour on her lips.

Sometimes the smell of her orange cake would compete with Priest’s pretzel baking. Priest baked in an industrial oven at the back of the church. He baked pretzels the size of dinner plates and sometimes preached in his chef’s outfit, stopping the sermon frequently to No-name’s great displeasure, in order to check on his pretzels.

Smells stayed on the island. I could smell Mother’s orange cake under the apple tree three days after she had been baking, and then again in the corner of

Boxman’s barn. Priest baked on Sundays, and the smell of his pretzels lingered on the island throughout the week. Once I caught a whiff of pretzels at the most northern tip of the island near the tiny makeshift lighthouse that had stood unused since Priest’s arrival.

Sometimes Papa would say in a joking manner, ‘There is more baking done on this island than philosophical equations.’

Mother didn’t think that it was funny. She didn’t like pretzels.

‘German things,’ she said, ‘good for nothing.’

Every time I left for church she would say ‘Don’t bring home any pretzels,

Minou, I cannot bear to see any more in your father’s study.’

But when Priest shook my hand after the sermon, he would reach into his deep pockets and give me three warm pretzels.

‘One for each of you,’ he would say, sounding so pleased that I couldn’t say no.

I would tuck them under my jumper, where they lay warm against my belly, out of Mother’s sight, and Papa would hang them in his study, using the purple ribbons from Mother’s chocolate boxes. He would admire their flickering shadows at night on the hundreds of books stacked crookedly along the wall.

When the pretzels began to look a bit old Papa would open the window and throw them towards the forest. ‘The rabbits will eat them,’ he said. But the rabbits only liked Boxman’s cabbages and weren’t at all interested pretzels. I would bury them under the snow every time I found some scattered amongst the trees, worried that Priest would find them.

Autumn 1958

Dear Diary.

The sea was green and very clear this morning. Lanikov is worried that we

are going to get a bad storm. He stood for a long time looking into the

water with a serious expression, while the monkey clung to his neck. The

men on the deck were quiet. ‘It’s not uncommon to get storms at the end

of autumn,’ Lanikov explained when he saw my confusion. But I am not

worried. I think Lanikov can handle almost anything. He has been sailing

for most of his life.

The monkey came over to me one day while the visitors were waiting in the living room. I was sitting quietly in the dark, listening, with a tray of used tea glasses next to me. I tried to push her away, but she pulled at my clothes and pushed with her feet, and hoisted herself up until she sat in my lap. I got scared and was about to yell out, but then her breath smelled of liquorice, and her arms were soft. I let her stay. After that she came to sit with me every time she and Lanikov were visiting, and I began to look forward to her hand gripping my thumb, and her head resting sleepily on my shoulder. But when father woke and the visitors rushed towards his room, the monkey would lift her head, wide-awake and she too would jump quickly to the floor.

Father would tell stories about his early days as a carpet maker and the hidden meanings of his patterns. The visitors would crowd closer, but not too close. Those who knew him also knew that he disliked being crowded, and could, if offended, decide to show them all to the door with a cold smile they couldn’t see but felt.

They pretended to listen to his stories. But sooner or later they would turn their back on him, one after the other. They would edge along the pathways, holding the tiny lanterns father gave them. Now and again someone would stop with a gasp. A carpet would be pulled from a pile and everyone would wait in silence until the whispering was over and it was certain that the carpet wasn’t going to fly. You might think, dear diary, that whispering to carpets is a strange thing to do. But they all did it. They whispered words in other languages, they whispered strange mathematical abstractions, they whispered words, rhymes, and riddles, and all the while I waited in the corner with more tea, sweet and strong in

tiny glasses.

When Mother came home she could paint a flying carpet on the wall. Papa could tell her anything she needed to know about the carpets and about the dead boy’s father.

Mother always said that it helps knowing something about your subject when you are painting something, even though she didn’t like to talk while adding the brushstrokes to the wall.

‘I need to see the finished picture in my head when I paint,’ she told me, ‘the colours, the shapes, everything. That’s why I need to be quiet, little one, so I can see it all properly.’

But it was different when Mother was baking. Then she liked to talk. She would laugh and talk with me about magic tricks while her long red hair swayed over cracked eggshells and orange juice, often dipping into the dough.

We always found interesting things in her hair. Papa said that combing through her hair was like reading Kant; there was always something new and illuminating to be found. But Mother liked it more when Boxman said her hair was like Aladdin’s cave. Once Boxman pulled out a fishbone from her hair, followed by a green feather. ‘You make magic,’ he said to Mother, ‘without even trying.’

‘I could knit you a hairnet,’ I said one day when Mother was baking, but she only smiled and kept stirring.

‘It’s good to do something that makes you feel alive,’ she said. ‘Never forget that, Minou. This cake will come out right, I can feel it’.

No-name would come and sit outside. He forgot to bark at Peacock and just sat there sniffing the lovely smell, waiting with great patience as the kitchen became

increasingly scattered with orange peel, butter, greased paper and drips of dough.

Peacock would look guardedly at No-name from his golden bowl. He didn’t like anyone but Mother. Most days he would just stare out towards the sea, occasionally standing up, stretching his long legs as if ready to go, as if he didn’t quite believe that Mother and he were actually going to stay on the island.

‘He is a difficult bird,’ said Mother, and would look lovingly at Peacock, as if they shared some kind of secret.

But baking always made Mother sad in the end, even though she did everything right, from start to finish. She used twelve oranges the way the recipe said, she whisked the egg whites with sugar until her arm got sore, and still the baking went wrong. The cakes collapsed or didn’t taste right, and Mother would cry angrily, and say, ‘I just want it to be the way it used to be.’

I would sit very still, hoping she would say more about how things used to be, before the island and before she met Papa. But she never did. Instead she would throw large bits of cake to No-name and continue crying.

‘See,’ she would say accusingly, ‘it’s only fit for a dog!’

I would protest and say, ‘But No-name has got really good taste.’ I wanted to tell her that No-name never touched a dead raven and that Boxman said he had sophisticated eating habits. But Mother would leave the kitchen and cry behind the bedroom door.

Papa would lift me off the bench, then carefully break off a piece of cake and taste it with the look of someone who knew about cakes. Then he would give me a piece and together we would stand in silence, tasting the cake while No-name munched loudly outside.

‘It’s not bad,’ Papa would say, ‘not bad at all,’ and as if she could hear him,

Mother’s crying grew louder.

No-name wobbled back through the forest, drunk on cake, and for several days he wouldn’t want to play. He just lay there, staring into space as if he could see things we couldn’t. I thought that maybe he could see all the things I wanted to see; where

Mother grew up and all the magnificent cakes that her family used to bake. And I wished I could ask No-name what he saw. I wanted to know all that had happened before she came to the island; before Papa with patient hands had untangled her hair, just as he did the fishing nets.

It felt as if no time had gone when the front door banged and Papa’s bucket rang against the floor. The ravens jumped at the sound, and right then it felt as if the dead boy were telling me to quickly hide the diary. I swiftly hid both diary and atlas deep between mattress and metal springs, before hurrying out to greet Papa.

[8]

Papa and I cleaned the house the day before Uncle came to visit. Dirty plates and

glasses still sat on the table from the dinner after Mother’s shoe funeral.

Papa washed the plates while I swept the kitchen floor. I found five of Priest’s paper napkin buffaloes next to the stove where No-name had slept. They were all chewed wet and out of shape, and looked more like little balls than buffaloes.

During the funeral dinner Priest had told me about buffaloes; the hardiest, yet the most sensitive of all animals. Boxman had performed a magic trick, changing the date on a newspaper and later wouldn’t tell us how he had done it. No one had talked about Mother.

Papa and I swept and scrubbed for hours and we opened all the windows the way Mother used to do. Later that day Papa went to clear the snow off Mother’s shoe grave. He wanted Uncle to see the cross and the little plaque that Boxman had painted in red and gold, saying:

“Keep singing, red-haired girl.”

I had watched the funeral from the lighthouse, and seen them stand in front of the church, dark clothed and stiff from the icy cold. Boxman had wept, while placing the plaque on the grave, and Papa had hammered the wooden cross into the cold ground. The cross was a bit crooked, but Papa had insisted on doing it himself even though Boxman offered to do it for him. He had worked on the kitchen table for two days, and made a lot of noise. The first two attempts didn’t turn out so well and we were using them to separate the fishing nets when they hung to dry against the wall.

It was the first time Uncle was visiting the island, and it was important, said Papa that the house looked exactly the way it would have if Mother had still been alive. ‘We

need give your Uncle a good impression,’ said Papa, ‘of who your mother was.’

Personally I didn’t think Uncle would mind a bit of dust. He had been to every continent of the world, travelled along muddy tracks to places where houses didn’t have any roofs and had seen more, said Papa, than most people. He often sent us long letters about ghost hunting and paranormal phenomena, which, Papa explained, is when you see things that don’t make sense.

Papa read the letters out loud over dinner. Sometimes he would pause in the middle of an important sentence and say proudly, ‘More people should hear about it.’

Then he would look at me, ‘This is significant research, Minou.’

Mother would make tea while Papa read. One day, while handing Papa a steaming cup, she said ‘I thought you were a man of reason. How can you believe in ghosts?’

‘It’s a university study,’ said Papa. ‘They do research.’

Mother shook her head doubtingly.

‘And he is teaching,’ insisted Papa.

Every letter we received from Uncle started the same way, “Oh, mon Dieu, mon Dieu, it’s been too long!”

‘What language is that?’ I asked Mother.

‘French,’ she said curtly.

‘Is he French like Descartes?’

‘He likes to think he is,’ said Mother.

When Uncle discovered we were related to Descartes he wanted to change his surname. Papa thought it was a wonderful idea and for days he repeatedly exclaimed

‘Minou Descartes, Minou Descartes.’

‘It’s a good name, an excellent name,’ he said. ‘It will take you far beyond this island, mein liebling.’

But it never happened. Uncle couldn’t convince anyone of the legitimacy of our family tree. ‘The common man,’ he wrote to Papa, ‘avoids research as if it were some terrible disease!’

Sometimes Uncle sent me pictures of Descartes. I had 12 hanging in the lighthouse. It was the same portrait, but in different sizes and the colours, too, varied slightly. I thought Descartes looked serious and brooding and Papa said I resembled him quite a bit. Papa was proud of the fact that I read philosophy and that I too went on philosopher’s walks at dawn like Papa. .

‘All philosophers walk,’ Papa explained early on, ‘Kierkegaard, Descartes,

Kant, Nietzsche, all of them. They walk along empty beaches with cold hands and windblown faces and still remember truth.’

Truth, Papa said, never changes, never bends. It can be held like a shield against everything; snowstorms, bad weather and years without apples on the apple tree, and I tried to remember Papa’s words when my hands got cold. But sometimes I forgot to think philosophical thoughts and stopped to collect raven bones and shells amongst the rocks. The beach changed over night. Fish and seaweed, shells and pebbles washed up, shifting everything around.

Papa never waved if we met on the beach. He just stared seriously into the sand and dark rocks and I tried to do the same. But if I happened to meet Mother I would stop and talk to her. She liked finding things, and had found both the rusty bike and the broken violin. The day she found the bike she kissed me and laughed as she turned the bike in every direction.

‘Look, Minou,’ she said, ‘isn’t this brilliant?’

The next morning she took it to Boxman, who promised to try and fix it for me.

‘Nothing this precious should ever be thrown out,’ he said. ‘Even if it can’t be fixed.’

And Mother agreed.

Kant, Papa told me, took the same walk every day. He left his house at 3.30 every afternoon, timing his departure with such precision that neighbours, shopkeepers, the shoe polisher on the corner, and whoever else saw him, adjusted their watches as he passed them. He walked down the same streets, through the same park, passing the same shops, and just before turning the last corner into his street, he would admire the same large chestnut tree.

But one day the chestnut was gone. Instead there was only blue sky and a straight view to Madam Trapp’s laundry, and on the footpath were neat stacks of firewood. Kant went to bed with the heaviest of hearts and had no philosophical thoughts whatsoever for three weeks.

The worst thing about it all, said Papa, was that Kant suddenly began to sleep soundly at night.

‘But isn’t it good to sleep at night, Papa?’ I asked.

‘No, Minou, a philosopher should never sleep soundly.’

‘But why?’ I thought that sounded terrible. ‘Don’t you sleep, Papa?’

‘Mein liebling, that is my greatest sorrow, I drink coffee every night and yet I sleep like a bear in hibernation.’ Papa’s cheeks flushed, ‘As if there was nothing to work out, no problems at all.’

I thought of my nights awake in the tower and all the scarves I had knitted after Mother disappeared and I wondered if staying up at night, trying to work out

what Papa could tell Mother when she came home, had made me a better philosopher.

We helped each other scrub the floor and I asked Papa if Uncle too, even though he wasn’t a philosopher, believed in staying up at night.

‘Your Uncle,’ answered Papa, ‘is a man of reason. He is just like us, Minou.’

But still, Papa wasn’t entirely sure if Uncle liked staying up at night. ‘You have to remember,’ he said, ‘that I haven’t seen your Uncle since the end of the war. But his letters tell me that he has worked very hard in his field of expertise ever since. I am indeed looking forward to seeing him again.’

Papa too had worked hard since the war. But of course, he had searched for

Descartes’ absolute truth, the start of everything, the key, the explanation to it all, even though Grandfather said that he had already found the truth.

Papa had made a friend in the camp. He was called Gerhard. Gerhard was a poet, and as such not very logical, but he had taught Papa German and they had become good friends. Unfortunately he was killed just before the war ended.

The night before the camp was liberated Papa and Gerhard heard shooting close by. They knew what was coming and at first light they dragged themselves outside. But weak with hunger they couldn’t stand. Everything in the camp had ceased to function and they had gone for days without food. But Papa and Gerhard didn’t care. They knew, said Papa, that they were about to be liberated, and they managed to walk to the barrack wall, filled with early sunlight. “After you,” Gerhard had said and sort of smiled, as if, said Papa, the knowledge of liberation had brought with it old manners. Papa chose a spot in the sun and Gerhard eased himself down next to him.

Moments later Gerhard was shot. It was an accident. No one meant to shoot

him. It happened because there was fighting at the gates. But the worst thing, said

Papa, was that it was his fault. If he had chosen to sit somewhere else, then Gerhard would still be alive. Choices have consequences, he said.

Papa kept sitting next to Gerhard while the foreign soldiers entered the camp.

‘They looked like beings from another world; healthy,’ he told me, ‘with rosy cheeks, and most importantly, Minou, strong in thought. They walked two steps at a time through mud and corpses, thinking their righteousness held the world in place.

Oh, such a sight. I almost laughed. If I could have, I would have laughed.’ Papa looked at me, but it didn’t look as if he were about to laugh. Then he continued. ‘A soldier stopped right next to us. He lit a cigarette. And I tell you, Minou, I have never smoked, but I longed to start right there and then. And then, without looking at us, he threw us a piece of chocolate.’

Papa left a tiny piece of chocolate in Gerhard’s pocket. It was the biggest gift, he said, anyone could ever give.

Grandfather wanted Papa to find the truth on his own. He said that truth is not worth having and can never be fully understood, unless you find it yourself. But he did try to help Papa a little bit. The last few years before he was hit by lightning and died, he sent weekly clues to Papa, written on the back of postcards. All the postcards were the same. On the front was a picture of a mechanical horse. It was an invention by a seventeenth-century alchemist and Papa said that the horse was meant for warfare.

The horse looked mean, but Papa said it was a flight of the imagination, and that the invention had never worked. ‘That horse never trotted anywhere,’ he would say and laugh. I asked Papa if Grandfather liked horses, but Papa said that Grandfather didn’t like spending money on anything at all, and that it was more likely that he had got a

good deal. Papa would receive the postcard with the weekly delivery ship and Mother would turn each one around, and read it with a sigh.

A few of them read:

Particular existence

The organ of happiness

Twofold and then more

Finite and boundless consciousness

Sometimes Papa got a bit worried about the public display of Grandfather’s truth, but comforted himself with the thought that the boatmen weren’t philosophers and probably wouldn’t know what to do with the fragments of truth. I noticed that one of the boatmen shook his head every time he delivered a postcard and I didn’t think they cared much for philosophy in the first place.

“When you find the beginning,” Grandfather wrote to Papa, “it’s like finding a string. You pull and pull and pull some more. And then you have it.” Papa hadn’t found the beginning yet, and he often said that if only he had been as smart as

Grandfather he would have found it a long time ago with all those clues given to him.

I dreamt about a giant turtle pulling apart a knitted blanket; a string held in its hard-knotted mouth. It looked at me with lidded eyes and said with a sigh, ‘there is no truth here, no truth at all.’

I told Papa about the dream, but he didn’t want to listen. Instead he hung the postcards in his study, one next to the other until they filled the entire wall, and by the time Grandfather died there were two hundred and twelve cards all attached with thumbtacks. Sometimes Papa would shuffle them around and study them again.

The postcards seemed like small planets in an incomprehensible solar system.

‘When will you find the truth, Papa?’ I asked.

‘Mein liebling, I am not sure,’ he sighed.

When Grandfather was hit by lightning, his housekeeper wrote to us and said that the weather had been terrible, but that Grandfather, never one to miss his philosopher’s walk, nevertheless had strolled out into a storm so bad that lightning looked like stick figures suspended between sky and ground in a crazy dance. I thought Grandfather’s housekeeper sounded quite a bit like Mother. She even sent us a drawing of

Grandfather walking amongst lightning, one hitting a big tree next to him. She had drawn Grandfather sort of knocked sideways, his walking stick suspended in the air.

And Grandfather must have expected something terrible to happen, because before he left the house he took the one thousand and seventy-seven pages it had taken him thirty years to write and burnt them in the garden bin.

None of us went to the funeral, as it was too far to go. But Papa received a wooden box with a note taped to the top saying, ‘Your father’s life work.’ The box contained the burnt remains. Papa looked very sad when he poured ashes and bits of paper onto the kitchen table.

‘How am I going to find the truth now?’ he said, his voice sounding a bit like the rusty gates in the morning. Then he looked at me, ‘I promise you, Minou, that when I find the truth, I will share it with you.’

‘And with Mother,’ I said, looking at Mother who was cutting bread for lunch, her back looking as hard as Turtle’s shield.

‘And your mother of course,’ he said, looking timidly in her direction.

‘You should throw it out!’ she said.

‘Yes, I agree, there isn’t much here,’ Papa said sadly, starring at the ashes.

‘The postcards too, all of it!’ she said.

‘But Papa needs them,’ I said, ‘Grandfather knew about the truth.’

Mother gave a sound that sounded like half a laugh and half a snort.

‘He had two philosophical books published,’ Papa insisted weakly.

‘And who were they published by?’ asked Mother, knowing very well that

Grandfather had spent all his money publishing them himself.

‘Philosophy isn’t in fashion,’ said Papa.

‘I wonder why,’ said Mother, throwing the bread into a basket.

‘Papa is trying really hard,’ I insisted. ‘We should help him. He doesn’t think he is as smart as Grandfather was.’

‘I am not,’ said Papa, looking despondent.

‘That’s not true,’ I said, ‘you are Descartes’ descendant too.’

‘Little girl,’ Mother banged the butter jar on the table, ‘your father is a lot smarter than that hard-boned, small-minded man.’

‘But you never even met Descartes,’ I protested.

‘I am talking about your grandfather,’ she said. Then she added, looking firmly at Papa, ‘And your father should have told you a long time ago that Descartes never had any children.’

Then she put dinner plates on the table hard and fast, and added, ‘Now we will eat.’

We had dinner in silence. The ashes of Grandfather’s truth were still on the table, somehow making everything taste burnt. But when Papa tucked me into bed that night, I asked what had been on my mind all through dinner, ‘But Papa, how can I be Descartes’ descendant if he never had any children?’

‘We think he did, Minou, but it’s not official,’ said Papa. ‘You will have to ask Uncle for the specifics. The only thing I know is that it involves a very pretty woman, who ran an inn on the west coast of Denmark. She lived near the marshes and her name was Olga Svendsen. Descartes travelled past her inn on his way to Sweden.

It was called The Wild Boar Inn.’

‘But how do you know he went to this inn?’ I was feeling a bit suspicious about the whole thing.

Papa leant down and gave me a kiss on the forehead, ‘Your Uncle works for the university, you can trust him. If he says we are related to Descartes, then we are.’

When the floors were done, and the plates washed, we went to Papa’s study and dusted his books. I tried to count the ones on the lower shelves, but there were too many and Papa kept talking to me. He told me that Kant too liked to have a clean house, but that he had never had a girlfriend. I thought it was kind of sad for Kant that he had no one to share all that cleanliness with. Papa closed all the windows when we finished. The house smelled deliciously of soap and fresh air.

That night I sat down next to Papa in the study and wrote in my notebook:

Ask Uncle how he knows that we are Descartes’ descendants.

Make Uncle convince Papa that Mother is alive.

[9]

Papa went straight to the blue room and stayed there all day. He forgot about the

bucket full of fish on the kitchen floor. He forgot about chopping the wood, about lunch and dinner, and he forgot to tuck me in when it was time to go to bed. His voice had escaped the blue room, and during the day I had caught bits and pieces of what he was saying, such as: ‘that’s clear, my boy, very clear,’ ‘imminent,’ ‘a distinct possibility, yes.’

I brought five biscuits and a glass of milk with me to the lighthouse that night, and while still listening to Papa’s muffled voice I began to knit an orange scarf for the dead boy. I hadn’t been able to get his diary from underneath the bed, but I had been thinking about him all day. I was trying to decide whether to tell him my secret or not.

The dead boy had, after all, helped me work out where Mother was, and I knew a lot of things about him, things that were private. Halfway through the scarf I made up my mind. I stopped knitting, carefully tore a piece of paper from my notebook and wrote down my secret as precise and distinct as I could, the way a philosopher would.

All through the night I kept hearing Papa’s voice and the metallic sound of the coffee pot being put on the stove. Every time I woke I saw the note next to me, on top of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, folded with sharp precise corners, the way Priest had taught me.

Early next morning I found Papa downstairs, next to the stove. He was gazing into nothingness, wearing an ancient fur hat that I had never seen before. He almost looked the way No-name did when it snowed, and the coffee boiled over without him noticing.

‘The coffee, Papa.’ I said.

‘It’s extraordinary, Minou,’ he said, quickly removing the coffee from the stove, looking as if he had just woken up from a long sleep, ‘it’s almost as if your grandfather has written to me again.’

‘How Papa?’

‘I am close to finding the truth. Having the dead boy here is...,’ Papa paused,

‘an inspiration, Minou, he helps me. I am very close, mein liebling, very close.’ Then he added, ‘Ah, if only your Mother had been here.’

Father seemed to have forgotten that Mother believed in feeling and not in logic. He needed to change. When Mother came home she would want to hear about the dead boy, about the carpets, Lanikov and the monkey, and not about the truth. I needed to read the rest of the dead boy’s diary so I could tell Papa about it all. He needed to prepare himself for Mother coming home.

Once Mother closed her eyes and let her hand run through No-name’s fur. ‘Try,

Minou,’ she said, ‘tell me what he feels like.’

No-name looked slightly confused, scarf askew, but I closed my eyes too and felt his fur.

‘Like a pinecone?’ I said, the words rushing out, and then I blushed, feeling as if I had spoken without thinking.

‘A pinecone?’ said Mother surprised. ‘Yes, Minou,’ she nodded and then she smiled and looked at me as if I had just done something very special.

Mother said she could feel snow two days before it arrived. ‘There are snow crystals forming, little cold shapes in my body,’ she said.

Most times she was right. But Papa said that if you say something often enough, then you are sure to be right once in a while and it did snow a lot on the island, and Mother’s predictions did seem to change with the way she was feeling.

One day she said, ‘Did you know, Minou, that seafarers and explorers of all kinds have been to this island? I can see them. This is a special place. We are surrounded by

history.’

She looked knowingly into the horizon and I stared in the same direction, seeing nothing apart from the endless sea, not even the faintest outline of old ships and seafarers.

On another day Mother said, ‘This is a terrible, terrible place, Minou,’ and shook her head despondently. ‘Not even Theodora could stay here.’

‘But she did,’ I said.

‘She died.’

‘That was because of her goat,’ I protested.

‘Yes,’ Mother looked grim, ‘that’s what everyone wants us to think, little one.’

One morning before I was born, Mother came home with a black fish she had found on the beach, beating its tail fin in the shallow water. Sea salt glittered like small stars on its scaly body, the way, she later told me, something becomes bright and visible when death is near.

She wrapped her scarf around the fish and was going to cook it for dinner. But halfway home, just before the gates, the fish cried out. It was a terrible cry, she said.

She unwrapped it quickly and there it was, looking straight at her, crying out like a cat, a baby, a siren, a rusty pipe, and all of it at once, mouth wide open, she said.

Mother wanted nothing to do with the fish after that, but Papa examined it closely and found nothing wrong with it. ‘It’s your imagination,’ he said, ‘it leads you astray. There is no evidence that there is something wrong with it. This is a fine healthy fish.’ He fried it for dinner, and for three days he was sick in bed, seeing all sorts of horrible things. The war, he said, was in his blood again, the sounds, the smells, everything.

But even though Mother was right about the fish, Papa still held that there was only one way to the truth and that was Descartes’ way.

Papa pulled the fur hat down further and began to sort his nets, getting them ready for that morning’s fishing. I noticed that he looked very tired.

It didn’t seem fair that philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Descartes and most of all

Papa, had to go through so much trouble looking for the truth. Poor Descartes was summoned by a Swedish Queen, who wanted to talk about truth at five in the morning in her very cold castle. Descartes, who wasn’t used to cold castles or to getting up early, had caught a cold and died.

I thought that I might have coped better with a cold castle if a queen ever invited me. I saw myself, an enormous feathered pen tucked behind my ear, talking to a fair blonde queen who was listening intently to my every word and if Papa hadn’t found the truth yet then I could always tell her stories about No-name.

Papa didn’t seem to mind that I, for the second day in a row, wasn’t coming fishing.

He emptied his cup, slung the nets over his shoulder and opened the door to another dark morning. I could see the gates down the path, lit hazily by the snow, as Papa walked down the path towards the fishing spot.

‘Hello, dead boy,’ I said, closing the door behind me.

A third raven sat on the windowsill. Snow had collected on the floor inside the window and the dead boy had overnight become covered with a thin layer of frost. I felt the sharp corners of the letter in my pocket and remembered how my fingers had slipped on the pencil as I wrote it. The note said:

‘a hand and Mother, he wore a ring’

[10]

We were on the beach waiting when Uncle came to visit. Papa had insisted that I wear

something that Mother would have liked and under my coat I was wearing a red dress with puffy sleeves. I wasn’t pleased. I didn’t care about dresses and wanted instead to show Uncle the deep pockets in my green jumper.

The boatmen were unloading our food into the smaller boat, as well as a large box of light bulbs for Priest. I was looking for Uncle, suddenly scared he wasn’t on board, while Priest nervously stepped from side to side, hands stretched in front of him as if to catch the box in case it dropped. We could see the distinct red letters in the distance, spelling: FRAGILE.

But then Uncle appeared, giving us a feeble wave before gingerly climbing over the railing into the smaller boat, wearing a bowler hat and black trench coat.

Arriving at the shore he stepped blindly out of the boat, one long leg plunging knee deep into the icy water. He walked a few steps, and then dropped into the arms of

Papa.

Papa and Boxman had to wheel him up the hill in the wheelbarrow that

Boxman normally used for carting deliveries, and I scrambled after them, carrying

Uncle’s old and very ample suitcase. Uncle’s head rested on the handle of the wheelbarrow, his body curled up the way Peacock used to lie in the golden bowl.

‘Oh mon Dieu, mon Dieu,’ he moaned, just like in his letters, while clutching a black machine tight against his chest, a machine that looked quite a bit like Mother’s old radio.

‘Papa, what is that on his chest?’ I called out, while waving at Priest, who was still at the beach with his deliveries, waiting for the wheelbarrow to be returned.

‘His ghost machine.’

‘Why is it on his stomach?’

‘It makes him feel safe,’ said Papa

I was eager to speak to Uncle about ghosts and our family tree, but most of all

I wanted to show him my notebook and talk to him about Mother. But Uncle slept from the moment we got home, still wearing his trench coat and bowler hat, and was only awake for a few minutes to request one of the chocolates from his bag.

‘They are for you,’ he said to me, as I looked for them in his big suitcase, ‘but

I dare not think what will happen if I don’t have one now.’

Then, chewing on the chocolate, he sank back into a deep sleep.

When I came down from the lighthouse the following morning, Uncle was eating breakfast, still in trench coat and bowler hat. His ghost machine was sitting in the middle of the table surrounded by toast and coffee.

‘Pleased to meet you, young lady,’ said Uncle, chewing on a piece of toast with generous helpings of orange marmalade.

‘I was wearing a dress yesterday,’ I said looking at him over the breakfast table.

‘You look delightful in that jumper, it goes well with your eyes,’ he said.

I looked triumphantly at Papa.

‘Are there any ghosts here?’ I asked, looking at the machine.

‘Let’s go for a walk before we check,’ he said, stretching his legs, ‘you can show me the island.’ Then he brushed his trench coat free of crumbs and got to his feet, marmalade still stuck to his chin, and with my notebook in hand I went ahead of him out the door. Uncle walked with a stick in one hand and his ghost machine in the other. He walked slowly and bent over, looking like an injured raven with very long legs. He was smoking a pipe, leaving a trail of smoke that smelled a bit like the fireplace in the kitchen.

‘How old are you?’ I asked.

He smiled, ‘A bit older than your Papa,’ he said. ‘The war did us both in.’

Just then, as we opened the gates, the wind took his bowler hat and I ran as fast as I could and caught it only moments before it reached the sea. Walking back to

Uncle, I tried to measure his neck for a scarf. His neck was pale, almost white and looked very cold and I thought that bright red might make him look more cheerful.

‘The war steals years from you,’ Uncle explained, when I came back with the bowler hat.

‘How?’ I asked.

‘I saw things nobody should ever see.’

‘But what?’

‘There is one thing, it is not the worst, not by any means or measures, but I keep thinking about it.’

‘What is it, Uncle?’

‘The war had finished, and I was coming home from the camp. Sitting on the train was difficult; I was very thin and tired.

Across from me sat a woman, wearing a dress with small violet flowers. She didn’t look at me. She was busy eating strawberries from a box folded out of newspaper. The strawberries were magnificently red, and somehow it felt as if I had never seen strawberries that red before. After she finished, she scrunched up the packet and threw it on the floor. There was still a strawberry left in the packet. I wanted to eat it very much, but I didn’t,’ Uncle paused, looking out towards sea, clutching his ghost machine a bit harder, ‘I remember everything from that train ride, the woman, the dress, the strawberries. It is the one thing that I can’t stop thinking about.’

‘It doesn’t sound so bad,’ I said.

‘No,’ Uncle shook his head, ‘it doesn’t. But still, it follows me wherever I go.’

‘The strawberry?’

‘Yes, Minou.’

‘Like a ghost?

‘Yes, sort of like a ghost, but worse.’

‘I don’t really know what ghosts are,’ I said.

‘They are complicated creatures just like us, Minou, some are good and some are bad.’

I thought it was strange that Uncle hadn’t become a philosopher like Papa. He was after all Descartes’ descendant and he too liked to walk. As we reached the northernmost tip of the island with its wobbly lighthouse, I asked Uncle why he wasn’t a philosopher like Papa and Grandfather.

‘I had my own calling, Minou,’ he said, ‘and your grandfather and I have had quite a few disagreements over the years. He was a man of reason, not of heart.’

I glanced at Uncle. He was walking slowly, all hunched over and serious. Papa was right. He looked both academic and trustworthy, although I couldn’t be entirely sure, as I had never seen an academic before.

‘How do you know that Descartes had a child with a Danish woman?’ I asked.

‘Rigorous research,’ he said. ‘Olga Svendsen is your great great great great great great grandmother. There is no doubt.’

‘But how can you be sure?’ I asked.

‘It is true that she had no husband, but she did have a drawing of Descartes hanging on her bedroom wall. It’s safely kept in the town museum today. And I have to say, Minou, Olga was not only a good cook, she was a good artist as well. With just

a few pencil strokes she captured his distinct good looks.’

‘She might have liked his philosophy,’ I suggested, thinking of the pictures I had of Descartes in the lighthouse, while trying to keep an open mind, the way Papa said a philosopher should.

‘And then there was her menu. She created a fruit of the forest dessert with whipped cream and named it, Descartes’ Passion.’ Uncle continued in a convincing tone, ‘There is plenty of evidence, dear Minou. It’s all written in the town hall archives.’

I was pleased to hear that Uncle was good at research. The more he told me about Olga and Descartes, the more certain I became that he would be more than interested in my reasoning about Mother’s disappearance.

Uncle continued, ‘As a matter of fact there was a wealth of information about all sorts of things in the archives. It was remarkable what they wrote down in those days. I even found a section on how to catch eels when you had a cold and needed to have one hand free for blowing your nose. It was most interesting.’

‘I stayed in the town for more than a week. At the end of my stay they held a big party for me with lots of Danish delicacies, herrings, rye bread, jam and cheese, and the ceiling was full of streamers. But I didn’t like the food much; I mostly have toast and marmalade. It makes it much easier to focus when you don’t have to choose, don’t you think, Minou?’

I quickly reasoned that if Descartes had died not long after arriving in Sweden, then Olga might not have had a chance to tell him she was pregnant. Or maybe

Descartes hadn’t given her the address of the castle. Either way meant that he, when lying on his deathbed, wouldn’t have thought about the possibility of having descendants. That was disappointing, although even if he had heard from Olga he

might have been too busy sneezing and coughing to think much about anything else.

But if he didn’t give Olga the address then maybe he was an awful person like Karl

Marx, who, even though he could think brilliant thoughts, Mother told me, wasn’t very nice to his wife. Or Rousseau who went out to serve the Enlightenment, leaving behind his wife and five children.

‘What does The Enlightenment mean?’ I had asked Papa.

‘It means that Rousseau wanted the best for the world,’ said Papa, ‘he wanted everyone to open their eyes and see the wonderful possibilities of a new world.’

I had imagined five dirty children standing on a cold floor, waiting for their father to come home and enlighten them as well. They looked cold and shivery and later I dreamed that they came to visit me, one after the other, shy, but insistent, and that I knitted and knitted, five long scarves, and when I woke in the lighthouse my hands were all knotted in wool.

Walking next to Uncle I wondered if I could trust Descartes’ way of finding the truth if he had been an awful man. But then I reminded myself that truth could be held up against bad weather and years without apples on the apple tree, and had nothing to do with either kindness or love.

As we got close to Boxman’s barn we could see him in the yard playing the piano accordion. Boxman once told me that musicians need to be careful not to get carried away.

‘There is only so far you can follow a tune before it starts to get dangerous,’ he said.

One night he had played a particularly sorrowful tune. It had built up, going faster and faster, wilder and wilder, like a horse galloping out of control. Until he, with a horrible screech, stretched the accordion so far that he dislocated his shoulder,

dropped his cigarette in fright and burned a hole in the accordion. And Papa, who had been sleeping, yelled out, dreaming as he so often did about the war, ‘They are coming, Gerhard, they are coming.’

‘Sometimes,’ explained Boxman, ‘sadness has a sweet, enchanting edge. It pulls at your heart and you can’t get enough.’

‘What were you sad about?’ I asked.

‘I kept seeing Cosmina in the Himalayas gazing at the stars, her hands all cold.

And I thought, what if she wants to find me and can’t find her way?’

When we got closer to Boxman’s barn we saw No-name dancing around the wheelbarrow on hind legs. The wheelbarrow was filled with the tins of dog food that

Boxman had ordered from the boatmen. The labels showed a black terrier drawn against a blue-sky background.

‘That dog,’ exclaimed Uncle, ‘looks like a frisky encounter with life itself.’

Boxman was wearing his blue cape as he greeted Uncle, and I felt proud to know him. His black hair and the snow that whirled around him made him look almost as mysterious as The Great Shine, and Uncle seemed very impressed when

Boxman told him about the magic box trick and showed him all the boxes that were waiting to be painted.

When Uncle later admired the apothecary desk, Boxman invited him to open any drawer he liked. Uncle, looking excited at the prospect, immediately started opening one after the other. In the first was a measuring tape. In the second a globe. In the third drawer a punnet of gooseberries, and in the forth an enormous snake that I had never seen before. Uncle jumped and clutched his heart, but the snake, although it looked very real, was made, Boxman told us, from nineteen melted bike tyres.

‘I had it made, Boxman said proudly. ‘It’s a copy of Solomon.’

Uncle and I must have looked puzzled, because Boxman continued, ‘Solomon was the greatest dancing snake in history. Some say he is still alive.’

‘Was he dangerous?’ I asked, looking at the dark glinting eyes of the snake.

‘Solomon,’ said Boxman, sending the snake an affectionate look, ‘killed 90 people. The last to die was the snake charmer himself.’

‘That’s very sad,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Boxman. ‘Especially because it is well known that the snake charmer was fond of Solomon. He had never before had a snake that could dance to any kind of music, be it tango, ragas or jazz. The last words he said before he died were “Keep dancing, Solomon!”’

After the snake charmer collapsed, the snake retreated back into the basket.

The market square was abandoned in seconds, even though it was the middle of the day and the busiest time for buying Gulab Jamun, sweet fried balls in rose syrup.

The basket, Boxman told us, sat in the empty square, first in sun, then in shade, and then night crept over the square. From his window, an old man who liked nights better than days, shadows better than people, saw someone walk across the square, humming a tune. The person, it was impossible to see whether it was a man or a woman, went to the middle of the square and, still humming, took the basket and walked away.

But the old man was not always on his best behaviour and therefore no one believed him. He stole from the stall holders at the market, sometimes socks, sometimes apples and once a watermelon hidden under his shirt, and every morning with impeccable timing, he flashed himself on the street corner, amusing the nuns who walked past at first light.

For years everyone thought that Solomon was still somewhere in the town.

They looked under their beds at night and if they had particularly big feet, which most did for some reason, they looked inside their shoes each morning.

Uncle looked faint during the story and kept a good distance from the snake, which swayed life-like in Boxman’s hands.

‘This is quite an adventure,’ he said breathlessly when Boxman finished, and then he laughed a strange laugh that ended in a swallow. ‘I don’t know why,’ he continued, ‘but that snake, Minou, reminds me of the woman with the strawberries.’

Then he sat down heavily on a bale of hay and drank his tea as if he were very thirsty.

I went over and sat next to him, ‘The snake isn’t real,’ I said, patting the hand that held the ghost machine. It was freezing cold. ‘You have to think logically when you get scared,’ I said. ‘Logic is all we have got, says Papa. It’s a shield against snowstorms and other scary things.’

Uncle nodded, still looking pale, and then told me that he used to be scared of ghosts.

‘Aren’t you scared anymore?’ I asked.

‘I looked straight at them,’ he said, ‘then they stopped coming so close.’

I thought about this, ‘Do you want me to get the snake, Uncle, so you can look straight at it?’

But Uncle shook his head.

‘Cosmina didn’t like the snake either,’ said Boxman. ‘She said it reminded her of Russia.’

‘Cosmina is Boxman’s great love,’ I explained to Uncle.

‘And where is the charming young lady?’ asked Uncle, propping himself up, looking around expectantly, seeming to forget all about the snake.

‘She is looking at stars in the Himalayas,’ said Boxman. ‘She doesn’t need to

be rescued anymore.’

‘She sounds like a wonderful young woman,’ replied Uncle. ‘Full of initiative.’

I think Uncle preferred the church and Priest was extremely excited to have visitors.

After greeting us at the door, he left us waiting on the doorstep for quite some time, while getting changed into the violet robe he only wore on special occasions or if he needed a bit of cheering up.

Priest told Uncle all about Theodora and the frescoes, and when Uncle saw the stained-glass window he exclaimed that Theodora looked distinctly like Descartes’ mother. She had the same large hands, he said, and had a tremendous love of animals.

It was even likely that goats were among her favourites.

‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if there is a connection. What a brilliant coincidence if that was to be true.’

I told him that No-name was scared of the black dog in the row of angels.

‘I am a bit scared too,’ said Uncle. ‘It’s quite some teeth he has got.’

Priest had a long conversation with Uncle about being scared of the dark while

No-name and I played hopscotch on the church floor. Priest always said I could draw anything I liked on the floor as long as I used chalk and God would find pleasure in my drawings. I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but reasoned that if it gave No- name pleasure then it might give God pleasure as well. And Priest didn’t seem to mind and would laugh boomingly when No-name tried to follow me, up and down the hopscotch.

‘You have to try and conquer what you are scared of,’ Priest said to Uncle in a serious tone. ‘I do that with the light.’

‘Right,’ said Uncle, ‘I see, interesting approach.’

Priest and Uncle talked for a long time and I started to get impatient. I had yet to tell Uncle about my notes on Mother’s disappearance, and was eager to discuss it all with him. But finally, after having eaten three large pretzels, Uncle shook Priest’s hand and asked me to show him Mother’s grave.

This was my chance to show Uncle that I, like Papa, could hold truth like a shield against snowstorms, against years without apples on the apple tree.

‘She is not there,’ I said, matter of factly. ‘It’s only her shoe. And Peacock of course,’ I added.

Then I told Uncle, step by step, as logically as I could, that Mother was still alive, and walking towards her shoe grave, I showed him my notebook. I read him the truth about how things lost on an island are always found, and I told him that there was no reason to pay attention to a shoe that Mother could have lost in any number of ways. I showed him my sketch of Peacock’s skeleton, and Uncle said that he had always wondered what a peacock skeleton looked like.

Encouraged, I told him about the sunken city and of the octopus that had jumped straight from the scales. And I told him about the man I had just read about, who was eaten by a boa constrictor and rescued by one long cut of a Swiss army knife, just when he could hold his breath no longer. There was a picture of him in a magazine throwing pancakes into the air like a professional chef. All he wanted after his ordeal, he said, was to cook his favourite foods. His cat was in the photo too, sitting on the kitchen bench, looking sceptically at a midair pancake. And I reminded him that Descartes would never have accepted a shoe as proof of truth. Instead I told

Uncle that Descartes would have closed his eyes and said, “Let me think about it.

Only my thoughts count, not a shoe.”

As I spoke it felt as if Mother could arrive home at any moment. I turned to the ocean and looked for her in every direction, but saw only the empty horizon.

Uncle looked at me in a kind but sad way. ‘But where would she have gone, Minou?’ he said, ‘Where?’ and when we reached the grave, he took off his bowler hat, bowed his head, and looked mournful.

It was clear that Uncle wasn’t going to help me convince Papa that Mother was coming home and that he had to start thinking in new and interesting ways.

I was disappointed in Uncle, in all of them.

How surprised everyone would be when Mother came home and wanted her shoe back. She would laugh and say ‘But I am not dead, how silly.’

[11]

I got the dead boy’s shoe from the floor. I lifted the sole, put my note inside the

plastic and covered it again. Then I put the shoe back on the floor.

Later someone might find my note, maybe even when they were burying him.

But no one would know what it meant. I looked at the dead boy and thought he looked pleased to get my note.

‘No-name wanted to come,’ I said, while reaching under the mattress for the diary. ‘But he is not allowed beyond the kitchen. It’s Papa’s rule.’ I unfolded the pages of the diary, ‘You will meet him tomorrow when the boatmen come, I think you will like him.’

Autumn 1958

Dear Diary.

Mother and father never saw my face, besides its shadowy outline when I

came close to father’s lamp. The only time mother saw me in full daylight

was when she gave birth to me. The midwife insisted on the shutters

being up and mother was in so much pain that she conceded. Later she

told me it was the most horrible moment of her life and that my body had

been bright red and my mouth a big gaping hole.

There was a mirror in the baker shop. It was hanging at an odd

angle, so that the baker girls could keep an eye on the shop from the

joining room. I realised that I was able to catch a glimpse of myself if I

stood right in the corner of the shop while waiting for the cream buns. But

the first time I saw my own face I can’t say that I thought myself to be

terribly good-looking either.

One of the girls caught me looking at myself in the mirror, even

though I tried to do it discreetly. She laughed, but in a nice way and

looked at me curiously when handing me the cake box. Her eyes were

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bright blue and very pretty and I wondered how I looked to her and whether she saw the same round-faced boy with slightly protruding ears that I saw reflected in the mirror.

It wasn’t until I got on board the ship and saw myself in the rusted old mirror below deck, that I realised that my face wasn’t round and fleshy like mother’s. Instead it was long, with sharp angles and a full mouth that looked as if it longed for conversation.

Autumn 1958

Dear Diary.

The monkey woke me at dawn. She jumped noisily from deck to cabin and went straight to my bunk where she fell asleep immediately, head nestled in my armpit. The sea was calm. Everyone was sleeping except for Lanikov and I. Lanikov stays up most nights. ‘Thinking,’ he says, ‘is easier at night when thoughts travel freely under the stars.’ When I asked him what kind of things he thought about, he warned me, ‘Labelling thoughts,’ he said, ‘makes them gather in clusters, they won’t be able to free themselves.’ He looked at me seriously, ‘The main objective of thinking is for thoughts is to go places they haven’t been before.’

I listened to the monkey’s breathing, to the sea and the quiet moan of the ship. Were my thoughts clustering? Perhaps they were. I always seemed to end up thinking about mother and father and about the day I left home.

One morning I simply continued walking when I reached the baker shop. I didn’t stop, not even when I saw the surprised look on the baker girl’s face through the shop window.

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I knew exactly where to go. I followed the blue lines of the map from the railway station. I walked through snow and sludge, up alleys, down side streets, hurrying past bed sheets waving like frozen flags, past shops I had never seen before. I didn’t pause to look at anything. I pushed forward, and the smell of the sea got stronger. I only stopped once when I saw a gold button lying in the snow. I picked it up, put it in my pocket, and rushed on.

When I finally saw the harbour I started running, towards the ships, towards the endless horizon. There was a hustle and bustle on the street and I was winding in and out between men pulling carts, one with fish, one with apples, and women selling vegetables on the footpath. I almost fell over a red-faced old woman with runny eyes. Her cabbages were laid out in front of her on an old blanket and I wished for a moment that I had bought the box of cream buns and could have given them to her, but the sea was so near and I had no time to spare. I kept running as fast as I could and then I ran straight into a man, so hard that I stumbled and would have fallen had he not caught me.

It was Lanikov with the monkey on his shoulder.

I greeted him politely, saying “How do you do?” and both Lanikov and the monkey looked at me for a long time. So long that I suddenly got scared that they were going to send me home. I looked out onto the harbour where ships sighed against the half-frozen sea and I knew that I never wanted to go back.

I think it was my pale eyes and ghostly skin that made them stare for so long, but I didn’t realise it then.

‘I believe we have met,’ Lanikov finally said.

‘I am not running away!’ I said it far too quickly, but still tried to

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look as if I had business in the harbour and had seen the ocean many times before.

Lanikov took his time. He fed the monkey a nut from his pocket with tobacco-stained fingers, looked out at the harbour and said, ‘I don’t particularly like your father.’

I nodded.

Then he added, ‘His house is too dark. I don’t trust people who live in dark houses.’ He scratched the monkey’s ear, ‘But I do like his carpets.’

‘None of them fly,’ I said defiantly.

‘I didn’t think so,’ he sighed regretfully. ‘But it is that which cannot be counted that gets our heart beating, isn’t it, son? Then he said the magical words, ‘Would you like to see my ship?’

Winter 58

Dear Diary.

I am sorry it’s been so long. It’s hard to believe that it is winter already.

The work on the ship is hard, every morning we scrub the deck and after breakfast there is an endless list of things that needs to be done, and most evenings I am too tired to write. I still got a lot to learn on the ship, but I am getting better. Lanikov says that I am becoming a sailor.

Sometimes I stand in front of the mirror below deck and study my face. It still looks strange to me. I wonder if mother would recognise me if she walked past me in one of the ports. I sometimes still worry about her, but I am don’t regret leaving. Somehow, maybe even the first time I smelled the sea on one of the visitors, something happened. I can’t remember when it started, only that I felt it many times after that. I felt it

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when I saw the gas flame on our stove. I felt it when I waved to the man

with the gold buttoned coat, and later when I stood on Lanikov’s ship. It

was like having a sea gull inside of me pushing against my chest ready to

fly, spreading its wings wide like the skeleton bird at home on my bedside

table.

Maybe Mother had felt the skeleton bird too, and that is why she had to go to China. I would ask her when she came home. Maybe she would say, ‘Yes, Minou, I too have a skeleton bird inside of me. Everyone does.’ And then she would tell me how a freight ship had picked her up the day she walked out the door with her large black umbrella.

‘Can you believe it?’ she would say and shake her head in a kind of musing. ‘They too were going to China.’ Then she would laugh again and describe the ship in great detail, from the enormous chimney billowing black smoke, to the load of colourful silk blankets stacked from floor to ceiling on the lowest deck where she shared a cabin with a snake charmer. She would tell me how she had to sleep with one eye closed and one intently watching the snake basket, and how the snake wanted to dance every time it heard the foghorn. And because, logically, the sounding of the foghorn depended on fog and was therefore not possible to predict, it was most important to stay alert.

If only Uncle had listened to me, then he could have helped Papa think in surprising and magical ways. When Mother came home and he found all sorts of interesting things in her hair, he would be able to present them with a flourish the way

Boxman did: a mouse…voila…a strange looking flower…an acorn…will you look at that…a cup…even a squirrel, a Chinese squirrel, which stretched its legs, sniffed around and, as surely as No-name had come to Boxman, would come and sit tamely on my shoulder.

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Mother would open her suitcase, new, blue, and shiny like Peacock’s tail feathers⎯‘It reminded me of him,’ she would say⎯ and show me how the satin lining matched the outside blue. I would show her the drawing of Peacock’s skeleton and she would get tears in her eyes, looking pleased, in a sort of sad way. Then we would walk to church and dig up her shoe. On the way she would ask me if Priest was still scared of the dark and in the same sentence, before I could answer, she would stretch her arms towards the sky and say, ‘Ah it’s good to be home, Minou. Your

Papa seems changed, like a different person, so full of imagination. The whole island feels changed, so different, so interesting!’

I didn’t hear Papa come back from fishing until he stood in the doorway.

‘Papa,’ I said surprised, quickly tucking the diary back under the mattress.

‘But what are you doing in here, Minou?’

‘I am telling him about Descartes, Papa.’

Papa paused in the doorway, looking pleased. ‘Which part of his philosophy,

Minou? I have covered quite a bit of it myself, but it never hurts to repeat the good bits. Although,’ Papa paused, ‘I think there is a distinct possibility that he already knows about Descartes. He looks wise, doesn’t he?’

‘I have been telling him about Uncle and how we are all related, and how Olga named a dessert after him.’

Papa nodded, ‘Yes, that’s sadly something that most people don’t know. There is nothing quite as melancholy as when historical facts are not recognised, don’t you think, Minou?’

‘You have to close the door, Papa.’

He quickly closed the door behind him, ‘You are right, Minou, you are right.

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We need to keep him cold.’ Papa walked closer to the bed and peered down at the dead boy. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘he is still nice and frozen; he is in excellent condition.’

Then Papa told me how he had reached the beach and had even set the nets before realising that he didn’t want to fish at all. Instead he wanted to come straight home and sit with the dead boy some more.

‘The delivery boat is coming tomorrow morning,’ Papa said, ‘I need more time, Minou. I am still not quite there, but almost, mein liebling, almost.’

[12]

We had been practising our circus tricks for weeks and it was finally performance night. I was sitting on the bed, watching Mother put up her hair. Her red suitcase was next to me, packed and ready, filled with costumes for the performance.

‘It’s as if we are going to the other side of the world,’ I said, tracing the locks

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on the suitcase, thinking their shape looked like No-name’s ears when he went flying through the burning hoop in the yard at night.

She smiled, ‘The other side of the world is far away.’

‘Boxman has a second heart,’ I said.

‘A second heart?’ Mother was putting a huge feather in her hair.

‘On his chest.’

‘Not an apple?’

‘No,’ I looked at her, a bit bewildered.

‘Not a pear?’ Mother was smiling

‘No, don’t be silly Mother.’

‘Not a suitcase?’ She fastened a strand of hair behind her ear.

I shook my head.

She looked at herself in the mirror, ‘To have a second heart would be a wonderful thing. You could receive visitors at any time, with no notice at all.’

‘You don’t have visitors in your heart,’ I said.

‘Oh but you do,’ she insisted, a hairpin between her teeth, ‘and if you had a second heart you could just invite them in and say, “hello, come in, my heart is nice and pure.”’

I didn’t think that she made much sense.

‘Like yours, little one, or mine, when I was younger…’ she stopped herself.

‘What was it like when you were younger, Mother?’ I asked quickly.

But Mother was already putting on her shoes and didn’t seem to hear my question. ‘Have you packed everything, Minou? We should leave. Boxman has been working in the barn all day, he needs our help.’

We walked along the dark forest track, dragging the red suitcase between us.

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The path was slippery and Mother laughed happily as we clung onto the suitcase and each other to keep our balance.

‘Little one,’ laughed Mother, ‘this is going to be a wonderful night, I can feel it.’ Her face was lit by the moonlight and her eyes shone, ‘Let’s make sure we never forget this moment.’

Just before we reached Boxman’s yard we saw lights, hundreds of them, running along the barn, reflecting tiny ice-skating stars onto the icy courtyard.

‘It all looks so magical,’ exclaimed Mother when we entered the barn.

The stage was outlined with pine branches and a great big mirror was leaning against the back wall for costume changes. Candles were lit everywhere, some alarmingly close to the hay bales. But Boxman had assured me beforehand that nothing would catch fire and that he would place a bucket of water in every corner just in case. There were six rows of chairs with different coloured cushions, and streamers stretching from one end of the barn to the other. Boxman was wearing a top hat and a slim pinstriped suit with green socks and very pointy shoes. He bowed gallantly, kissed Mother’s hand and then mine.

‘You are not wearing a cape today,’ I said.

‘No,’ he answered, ‘today is special.’

Mother sent me behind the curtain to get changed. I stood, shivering in my underwear, while Mother looked for my clown’s jacket in the suitcase. No-name, who was wearing his new green cardigan, came up to say hello. The cardigan was the first

I had ever made. It was a bit tight around his belly, stretching the buttonholes, but I thought I had done a good job and No-name looked pleased with it.

It was only when I had put on the clown’s jacket and Mother had painted my cheeks red that I realised I had left my clown shoes at home. But Boxman said not to

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worry. He went to the apothecary chest and pulled out a pair of huge white shoes, all scrunched up to fit the tiny drawer.

‘These were worn by Bukowski, the great Hungarian clown,’ he said. ‘He wore them at his infamous performance in Warsaw.’

‘Why was it infamous?’ I asked.

‘He had a newfound passion for tightrope walking and didn’t care for falling anymore. He cared for falling in love. That night he walked the tightrope wearing pink, matching his trapeze girlfriend, Frida the Quick. He didn’t fall once and the people of Warsaw never forgave him.’

I tied the shoelaces twice around my ankles to keep them on and was still about to walk out of them every time I took a step. I went up and down the row of chairs practising, while Mother did singing exercises in the corner and Boxman stood on a ladder trying to attach a bright stage light to a wooden beam. His pointy shoes on the ladder looked like a gigantic pair of scissors.

‘Why do we need so many chairs?’ I asked.

‘To get the feeling of a big audience,’ said Boxman from the ladder. ‘You should always expect more people. “Expect surprises,” my old circus director used to say, “it will keep you on your toes as a performer.”’

It was almost as if we were in a real circus and people were queuing up outside, and elephants were waiting to perform, snorting and rocking the way Boxman said they did just before going on stage.

Mother stopped her singing exercises. ‘I shouldn’t sing,’ she said to Boxman.

‘This is a circus. Who wants to hear me sing?’

‘I do,’ I said.

But Mother ignored me, ‘I should have just assisted you,’ she said to Boxman.

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‘Why did I want to do something on my own? What a stupid thing to do.’

But Boxman assured her, from the ladder, that her singing would make it a very special circus and that it was normal to be nervous. ‘Take some deep breaths,’ he said.

Mother was assisting Boxman in his box trick. She had also been supposed to help him with No-name’s fire jumping, but had changed her mind. She hadn’t wanted to let me help either, even though it was very difficult for Boxman to both yell and hold the hoop at the same time.

Mother used to hold No-name’s hoops while Boxman was yelling, but it all went wrong when Boxman added fire to the hoops. No-name didn’t like it much. And on a windy day, when Mother was holding the burning hoop, No-name ran away howling and hid in the barn.

‘This is cruel,’ said Mother in a shrill voice. She threw the hoop on the ground and it extinguished with a hiss in the snow, leaving dark petrol coloured marks.

Boxman stood very still. Only his cape moved in the wind. Then he waved his finger at Mother and said angrily, ‘You think you know about animals, but you don’t.

No-name will think he is a failure. He won’t be able to sleep at night because you allow him to stop now.’

But Mother didn’t listen. She walked up to Boxman, swiftly took his finger in her mouth and bit him hard. And Boxman said nothing, even though it must have hurt very much. He just turned and followed No-name into the barn, his footsteps dumb in the snow.

‘Come,’ said Mother, pulling me off the bale of hay, where I had been audience to No-name’s rehearsal. Then she walked briskly ahead, pulling me along down the forest path. Her dress, fluttering in the wind, took on a life of its own,

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brushing over Boxman’s cabbages, pale, and green, sticking out of the snow.

I didn’t understand Mother’s smile when we came home and she undressed in the kitchen, stripping right down to her silk underwear. Her white legs were luminous as she turned in front of the fire.

‘It’s cold,’ she said to Papa, when he came in and saw her standing there. Then she laughed. And both Papa and I, we couldn’t help it, we laughed too, although I don’t think either of us knew what we were laughing at.

‘I am still nervous,’ Mother said, after she had been breathing deeply for a little while.

‘Don’t be nervous, you are magnificent,’ said Boxman from the ladder.

‘Okay,’ she said, ‘okay. I won’t be nervous any longer.’ Then she took another deep breath, walked to the middle of the stage and with the voice of a circus director, she exclaimed, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, this is going to be an extraordinary circus performance!’

‘Yes!’ shouted Boxman, wobbling dangerously on the ladder.

‘People will talk about it for years to come. How the magnificent three…’

‘Four,’ I interrupted, pointing to No-name who was sniffing the pine branches, content in his cardigan.

‘Four,’ repeated Mother. ‘People will ask far into the future, “Where are they now? What are they doing?” And they will say, “Remember that little girl with the raven hair and the very big white shoes?” Everyone will…’

‘But, Mother,’ I interrupted again, ‘it’s only Papa and Priest.’

She nodded, ‘That’s true, but…’

‘And where is Papa going to sit?’ I asked.

Mother stopped being a circus director and said in her normal voice, ‘There is

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plenty of space, Minou; three rows of chairs.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but he doesn’t like to choose.’

Mother was behind the red curtain getting changed in front of the large mirror, when

Papa arrived for the performance. He looked very handsome, wearing suit and bowtie, and he smiled and waved, but stopped when he saw the many rows of chairs.

I ran towards him as fast as I could in Bukowski’s shoes, while quickly searching the seats for one that might suit Papa. I saw one that looked nice, right in the middle of the second row with a gold pillow on it. I took his hand.

‘This one is for you, Papa,’ I said, pointing to the chair.

‘Thank you, my girl,’ he said, as I led him to the chair. ‘Thank you,’ he said again, accidentally stepping on my big shoes.

Then Priest arrived, wearing his violet robe, carrying a plate of pretzels, a bouquet of flowers and an enormous lantern. He glided onto a chair next to Papa and I could hear him tell Papa how he had seen all the lights from Boxman’s yard through the trees.

‘Just like the star over Jerusalem,’ he exclaimed excitedly. ‘A guiding light.

Such a welcome, such a welcome.’

A silence fell over the barn. Boxman folded up the ladder, put on his top hat and went to the centre of the stage. He started out in a quiet voice: ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ then he got louder, ‘you are about to see,’ he paused, then bellowed, ‘an extraordinary singer.’ He pronounced ‘extraordinary’ as if the word tasted sweet.

Priest whispered to Papa, ‘A singer? How unexpected. Who could it be?’

Boxman bowed, doing a round wave with his hand, almost as if he were making the shape of a cloud. Papa and Priest clapped and Boxman nodded for me to

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pull the curtain string. And there was Mother, standing with an old microphone between her hands.

She looked beautiful, like a seahorse, like the ones we saw coming close to shore, standing upright, but floating at the same time.

Boxman put the accordion to his chest. And Mother sang as if she were somewhere else, as if Boxman’s barn was full of things none of us had seen before.

She sang in French. Her voice seeped sorrowfully through the barn, the hay bales, the night outside, like Boxman’s sharp-edged saw, like the ocean on a windy night and she made Boxman cry. He tapped his feet to the rhythm, while tears fell into the accordion. Papa and Priest seemed mesmerised and No-name followed Mother’s movements intently and didn’t himself move from his spot near the stage.

‘I didn’t know your Mother could speak French,’ said Papa in the short break that followed. And he looked over at Mother who was her old self again, laughing at something Priest was telling her, as if he didn’t know her, almost shyly as if they hadn’t met before.

No-name had to get out of his cardigan before he could perform in the burning hoop trick. The barn smelled of petrol and Boxman yelled in an angry voice, ‘Come, come, come, jump…yes…Hoopla!’ And No-name didn’t look nervous at all. He jumped through the hoop twice, and seemed to like the applause. Even Mother clapped.

Then it was my turn.

‘Clowns fall,’ Boxman had explained during the practice.

‘But won’t everyone feel sad when I fall?’ I asked.

‘Yes, but if you do it well, then they will also laugh,’ he answered. ‘You will make them feel torn, that’s the art of being a clown. But it’s important that you

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remember to pause between your falls. Otherwise the audience will get worn out by all that laughing and feeling like crying.’

I remembered once asking Papa where the rabbits on the island had come from.

‘We can’t be sure,’ he said.

‘Were they here before Boxman?’ I asked, not really able to imagine the island without Boxman and No-name.

‘Long before Boxman,’ said Papa.

‘How was it living here before Boxman?’

‘It was good,’ said Papa. ‘Your mother was pregnant with you. She was happy. I remember a peculiar thing that happened during that time, Minou. Your

Mother started talking in her sleep. She quoted long passages from The Jungle Book and I used to lie awake and listen to her. She spoke with perfect pauses, it was a joy to listen to her, and you know I have always been fond of Mowgli. But when she woke she would insist that she didn’t like The Jungle Book. “The sentences are too long,” she said.’ Papa looked at me. ‘My point is, if you know how to pause, you can captivate any audience, even in the middle of the night.’

During my act, I remembered to pause. I fell over everything imaginary, paused, then fell again, while Boxman played a dramatic tune on the accordion.

‘Imagine that there is something in front of you,’ Boxman had said during practice, ‘Elephants, hats, bottles with thick green bubbling liquid, a cloud, another clown, an old key, imagine it all and fall.’

At my first fall Priest gave a frightful cry. Papa tried to assure him that I was fine. ‘She is a clown,’ he said, ‘she is supposed to fall. She is doing a wonderful job.’

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But at my next fall Priest cried out again, ‘Watch out, Minou, watch out.’ And his cry startled Boxman, who for a moment stopped playing. When I took my finishing bow I saw that Priest was still clutching Papa’s hand, making it hard for him to clap.

It didn’t get better when Mother performed in the box trick. Mother was a good actress. She trembled with pretend fright as she crawled into the box and Priest clung to Papa during the entire trick.

I had seen Mother and Boxman rehearse the trick many times, but I too didn’t like to watch when Boxman raised the saw and Mother started to moan, ‘Oh no, no, no! Don’t saw me in half. Please monsieur, please. Spare me. There are many other women out there, why me, I like my legs.’ Boxman acted as if he didn’t hear her and the saw grated through the wood.

At the end we all held hands and bowed. Papa and Priest cheered and clapped, and Papa stamped his feet into the ground, making a lot of noise. Afterwards he told me that it is tradition to stamp your feet if you enjoy a performance. Priest was flushed and said, ‘What a miracle, what an extraordinary thing to have been sawn in half and still,’ he threw out his arms in exclamation, ‘be so beautiful.’

Then he belatedly remembered the flowers and threw them at Mother, hitting her on the arm.

‘But where did you get these, dear Priest?’ She laughed and wasn’t mad at all.

‘They are beautiful. And in the middle of winter!’

Priest beamed and looked pleased with himself, ‘Oh I have my ways, I have my ways,’ he said.

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[13]

Mother used to cook for all of us the night before the delivery boat came. One joy should never come alone, she said, as she sent me off down the forest path, delivering bowls of steaming food. Mother liked to experiment, and Boxman used to say that her

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cooking marked the most interesting day of the week. But he didn’t always like the food and a few times I found Mother’s chocolate fish fillets untouched in No-name’s bowl.

After Mother disappeared Papa continued the tradition and cooked with great enthusiasm for both Priest and Boxman the night before the deliveries. He often spent the whole day preparing, but could only make two dishes. And even though we all liked fried fish and pancakes, it wasn’t as exciting as it used to be.

But the day before the dead boy was leaving the island Papa stayed in the blue room and forgot all about cooking. I decided to visit Boxman, instead of waiting for

Papa to come out. The path through the forest was squeaky and deep with snow. I was thinking about what Lanikov had said about clustering thoughts and how it was similar to what Mother used to say about daydreaming. There were lots of things about the dead boy that she would like very much.

Boxman was in his barn, busy painting a dark blue box and asked if I wanted to help him. I liked the way paint swished when it was painted in straight soft strokes the way Boxman had taught me. I took off my gloves and chose a long red paintbrush.

Boxman had started writing where the paint was already dry. His hand moved slowly and steadily along the box, while frequently dipping the tiny brush in a jar of gold paint. After a while he stretched, and went to make some honey sandwiches, while I waited on a bale of hay with No-name. I scratched his ears the way he liked it and told him everything about the dead boy and the note I had written him. And No-name looked at me as if he approved.

Boxman returned with the sandwiches and watched me eat hungrily.

‘Where is your Papa today, Minou, I didn’t see him out walking this morning?’

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‘He is busy,’ I said. ‘He is looking for the truth.’

‘Ah, the truth,’ said Boxman and looked pensively at the ceiling. ‘I wonder where it is?’

I stared at the ceiling with him. ‘He says he is very close to finding it.’ I paused, ‘but I don’t think Mother wants to hear about the truth when she comes home.’

Boxman nodded. ‘Your Mother liked a lot of things, but philosophy wasn’t one of them. This box, Minou, it reminds me of her, she liked the dark blue ones.’

I looked at Boxman eating his sandwiches, and wondered why it was that

Boxman always knew what Mother liked.

One night during Uncle’s visit I overheard him and Papa talk about Mother. I was drawing in the study and their voices travelled clearly through the house. I could hear glasses being put on the table, and a match being lit and I could smell Uncle’s pipe tobacco.

I heard Papa clear his throat, ‘One morning she liked toast, the next she wanted eggs. And if there were no eggs, she got sad. It was the same with everything,’

Papa paused. ‘Maybe I should get a chicken. Should I get a chicken?’

‘Chickens are useful,’ said Uncle.

‘I never understood what she wanted and why she had to change.’

‘Some things are hard to explain,’ said Uncle, ‘I see that every day in my work.’

‘She would say something like: “We could build a boat, you and I, and sail to the moon and back,” and then she would look at me, waiting for me to say something.

But what she was saying wasn’t real. We couldn’t build a boat, I couldn’t.’

But I knew straight away what Mother had wanted Papa to say. She wanted

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him to say what Boxman used to say with ease: ‘Let’s go then,’ offering her his arm.

‘What will we do on the moon, lovely lady?’

‘We will sing,’ she would say and smile.

‘Well then, let me escort you to the boat. It’s here, are you ready?’

And Mother would laugh and say, ‘No one knows me better than you.’

There wasn’t smoke in our chimney when I left Boxman’s barn that afternoon, but I noticed that a row of ravens had settled on our rooftop, undeterred by the falling snow. There were many of them. I counted thirty-three. Normally they spent their days flying in and out of the church tower, and I had never seen them on our roof before.

It was as cold in the kitchen as I arrived home, almost as cold as outside, and there was no sign of Papa. I tiptoed close to the blue room and listened at the door.

‘Dear boy,’ I heard Papa say, sounding very sad, ‘I can’t work it out. What does it mean? If only you could tell me.’

I got the last biscuit out of the jar, but couldn’t build a fire. Papa had strictly forbidden me to split wood. I tried to think of what Mother might have done to make everything feel better, and remembered the French song that she had sung at our performance. I went to the middle of the room and began to sing. I didn’t really understand the words, but I thought I got them right. By the third verse the house felt a little nicer. I could almost hear Mother saying, ‘See, Minou, bring a little joy into life and everything feels different. It’s like magic.’ And it was true, the more I sang the better everything felt, even the wall paintings looked more colourful and bright.

Papa appeared from the blue room, moving stiffly, looking white and cold under the fur hat.

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‘But what are you doing, Minou? Why are you singing?’

‘To make it nicer, Papa. It’s working.’

Suddenly it was as if Papa noticed it all at once, the ashes in the fireplace, the darkening sky and that he hadn’t cooked.

‘I am sorry, mein liebling, time just seems to slip away in the dead boy’s company. You must be hungry.’

I nodded, and Papa went straight to the stove, pulling out flour, eggs, butter and milk. Then he went out into the yard, leaving the door open, and soon after I heard the chopping of wood. Snow had built up along the doorstep, and Papa almost slid when he came back from the yard with arms full of firewood. I helped him carry the wood, then he kneeled in front of the fireplace and with stiff hands placed, firstly kindling, then bigger pieces in a neat pattern, and soon warmth spread throughout the house.

Papa got to his feet and brushed his pants. He took off his fur hat and rubbed his eyes, then stared into the beginning fire, ‘But I can’t work it out, Minou. The dead boy is giving me a clue, he is telling me something, and here I am, hopeless, not worthy of being a philosopher.’

‘But, Papa,’ I started, but Papa wasn’t listening.

‘Your mother was disappointed, so terribly disappointed in me. To think that I was so close and…,’ his voice trailed off.

‘Mother wouldn’t like the truth anyway,’ I said as firmly as I could.

Papa looked surprised, ‘But she wanted to know about the truth, Minou.’

‘No, Papa,’ I said, but I wasn’t ready to tell him about the diary. The only thing I could think about saying was, ‘When are you going to make pancakes, Papa?’

‘Pancakes?’ Papa looked at me distractedly.

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‘For us, for Priest and Boxman?’

‘That’s right, I almost forgot,’ said Papa. ‘Get dressed, Minou. Wear your thick coat,’ he said, not noticing that I was already wearing it. ‘And a scarf,’ he added and glanced out the window, ‘the snow is very deep, you will have to walk carefully, mein liebling.’ Then he went to the kitchen and began to whisk batter for pancakes.

Papa gave me the first one. It was a bit broken, but it tasted good. My fingers got sticky from the honey and I licked them one after the other.

‘When will you tell Priest and Boxman about the dead boy, Papa?’

‘Tomorrow, Minou, they will come here as usual for morning coffee before the boat arrives. Then I will tell them.’

The pancakes were warm on the plate and the sky was darkening as I walked towards the church. The snow was very deep and I took one careful step at a time. Priest opened the church door wearing his violet robe and two of the scarves I had knitted him. He looked feverishly pale, but greeted me cheerfully, ‘So lovely of you to come,’ he said and sniffled. ‘And you have brought pancakes, I see. Come in, come in.’

Two picnic blankets were spread next to the altar with cheeses, wine and a pile of origami paper.

‘Sit down, dear Minou,’ he said, gesturing towards the blanket.

‘Are you sick, Priest?’ I asked as I sat, putting down the pancakes.

‘I am a bit under the weather, but,’ he looked affectionately at the cross, ‘we were just having fun, God and I. There is never a dull moment, Minou, when you are with God.’ He blew his nose loudly in a large handkerchief and cut a big piece of cheese.

‘What happens if you spill on your robe?’ I asked.

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‘God will make sure that doesn’t happen,’ he said confidently. But when he a few moments later he spilled wine, he exclaimed contentedly, ‘Minou, this is God’s reminder of an exquisite spread.’

Priest pointed at the cheeses and told me their names. There were Camembert,

Brie, Blue-vein, Goat’s cheese and then one that smelled very bad.

‘It is called Old Holger,’ said Priest. ‘It is so old it has started crying. Look,’ he said, and held it close to me, showing me the small tears covering it. ‘Theodora liked cheeses too,’ Priest blew his nose again. ‘But the boat trip was too long and the cheeses went off before they arrived. It’s better now that most boats have a fridge.’

‘It’s strange,’ said Priest continued, ‘I have started to smell oranges everywhere. It’s like your Mother is baking again.’ Priest sniffled and reached for his origami paper. ‘She loved my oven. She always asked for my pretzel recipe. I kept saying no, but I am sorry now of course.’

‘She is coming back,’ I said. ‘But you can give the recipe to me if you want.’

I thought making pretzels might be useful. No-name could wear them around his neck and if I got really good I could make them into hoops.

Priest looked uncertain, ‘I will think about it, dear Minou, I will think about it.’ Then he swiftly changed the subject. ‘Did you know, Minou, that priests write to me from all over the world? They want this church post because of my oven.’ Priest beamed, ‘I didn’t realise how many men of God who like baking. One day I will show you the photos.’

‘Of them?’ I asked.

‘No no, Minou, of their cakes, of course,’ said Priest, reaching for his handkerchief.

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One day I told Priest that No-name was once again eating the leftovers of Mother’s orange cake. Priest left the church without a word, and briskly walked ahead of me until he stood in front of the closed bedroom door. Mother was crying and wouldn’t let him in, but Priest didn’t seem to mind. He shouted happily through the door ‘Come and see me at church on Sunday. Bring your recipe book. Under God’s roof and with my industrial oven, nothing can go wrong.’ Then he added, ‘You have seen my pretzels!’

Mother kept crying, but Priest wasn’t deterred, ‘I am preparing a special sermon this week. Join us if you please; the more the merrier.’

Priest had been repeating Genesis for a very long time. Some parts had even turned into song. It was nice to know the words, and No-name and I would sing along.

But I thought it would be exciting if Priest talked about something different.

But the following Sunday the sermon was pretty much the same and Mother arrived just as No-name and I were saying goodbye to Priest. Mother was wearing a bright pink apron under her coat and carried her black recipe book. She embraced

Priest with vigour and laughed.

‘So this is where my rescuer lives,’ she said and laughed again.

Priest blushed. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘God is the true rescuer, with a little help from my industrial oven of course.’

I wasn’t allowed to stay.

‘I have to concentrate, Minou,’ said Mother, ‘I feel it might happen today.’

By late afternoon Papa started pacing the floor looking anxious. No-name was sitting on the doorstep looking hopeful and Papa kept saying ‘Don’t worry, Minou, mein liebling, it’s going to be different this time.’

I was just about to boil water for coffee, when Mother arrived home. She was

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singing with great gusto, walking without her coat on, carrying the cake in front of her.

‘Shoo,’ she said to No-name. ‘Shoo, you silly dog.’

‘What’s the candle for?’ I asked.

‘Just for celebration,’ she laughed. ‘I think it’s the oven, Priest thinks it’s God and his industrial oven, but this one really did come out right.’

Papa later told her how magnificent she had looked, singing with the cake steaming around her. ‘You looked like a queen,’ he said excitedly, ‘like Theodora!’

But Mother didn’t like that. ‘I look nothing like Theodora.’

Papa faltered, ‘You looked stately, that’s what I meant.’

‘I was happy, that’s all,’ she said.

‘You looked very, very happy, and beautiful too,’ he said.

And Mother nodded, and kissed him on the cheek.

I couldn’t tell if the cake was any different from her earlier ones, but I ate slowly and tried to imagine what Mother might have felt, eating the same cake before the island, before she found Papa. And I wondered if her family had had an industrial oven just like Priest’s.

Priest sneezed again. The church was getting colder and darker, and his nose was running.

‘Are you sure you don’t want a piece of cheese?’ he asked.

I shook my head. Old Holger smelled terribly bad. ‘How come you wanted to be a priest and not a baker?’ I asked.

‘I was longing.’

‘What for?’

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‘God, Minou. God the unknowable,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘We are all longing for God, even though we might think we long for something else.

‘Like what?’

‘Oh, pretzels, or a horse,’ he said and looked at me pointedly.

Logically I didn’t think that worked. But it was hard to think philosophical thoughts while Priest’s nose kept running.

I shivered, ‘But how can we long for God if we don’t know who he is?’ I asked.

‘Ah,’ said Priest, looking immensely pleased, ‘that’s the key question!’ He looked at me with pride, then sniffled heavily. ‘You are my best student, Minou, my best one.’

‘How do you keep warm at night?’ I asked, thinking of his room upstairs next to the cold church bell, and his bed beneath the open window.

‘With Theodora’s bearskins of course, but Minou, you mustn’t change the subject. How can we know God when he is the unknowable?’

I shook my head.

‘We know God through our longing.’

And somehow, even though I didn’t understand it, I thought that even Papa would be impressed by Priest’s logic.

Priest blew his nose, and reached for an origami sheet. ‘But it was better when the earth was flat,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, no longer so sure about Priest’s philosophising.

‘When it was flat you could long for God in one direction,’ Priest continued.

‘Now people don’t know where to look. They look up and all they see is Galileo’s stars, nothing else. And when they look at the stars they don’t see God. They get

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confused,’ he finished, with a loud sniffle that echoed through the darkening church.

The talk of stars must have reminded Priest that he still hadn’t turned on his lights for the night and he jumped to his feet with amazing speed and began to turn on the lights, one after the other.

‘Minou,’ he said, getting out of breath as he ran towards the kitchen, ‘could you climb upstairs and turn the lights on? And ring the bell. Just once, I think I need to hear it.’

The tower was lit by the moon. I carefully edged around the bell to Priest’s bed. Above the bed was a framed photo. It showed Priest on a podium next to a short man with strong looking arms, who I guessed might be Hoshami. They were both smiling happily at the camera. Next to the photo was a picture of Mother Mary, blue eyed and pretty.

I looked out through the open window. The moonlight illuminated the island and I could see our house with its snow-covered roof and the many ravens, black and still, perched along the rooftop. There was light in the blue room and I thought of my note and how I needed to tell Papa about the dead boy’s diary. Then I stretched over the windowsill and looked into Boxman’s yard. I could see Boxman outside the barn, shovelling the snow away from the entrance, wearing his silver cape.

And then I saw Mother.

Her long red hair, her pale face. For a moment it seemed as if she looked my way, as if she knew I was in the tower, but then she turned and walked into the barn. I looked at the barn door for several minutes, straining, trying not to blink. But Mother didn’t come back out.

I edged back around the bell, climbed down as quickly as I could, and started running, past Priest, past the picnic blankets towards the entrance.

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‘I have to go, Priest,’ I called out, pulling at the large church door.

‘But wait, Minou!’ Priest joined me at the door, looking fearfully into the dark. ‘Will you be alright walking home alone?’ But then he saw No-name, who had appeared in front of us, ball in his mouth, and said ‘Oh, you’ve got No-name waiting for you, that’s wonderful. Goodnight then, dear ones,’ and closed the church door behind us.

I started to run. I ran down towards Boxman’s barn and No-name tried to follow, but struggled in the snow and started to howl, and I had to turn around and pick him up.

I ran faster than the afternoon Papa had timed me, standing in the lighthouse with his big stopwatch waving every time we could see each other. It had taken me just under 20 minutes to run the whole island, and my hair was pulled deliciously by wind and sea-salt.

But this time Papa wasn’t watching me. No-name was whimpering in my arms, and my stomach felt hot and my hair strangely itchy.

It wasn’t the way I had planned it. My jumper hadn’t been washed for quite some time and I wished I had brushed my hair and was wearing a dress. But Papa didn’t care much for clean clothes and neither did I. My drawings were incomplete, my notes unfinished, I still hadn’t read all of the dead boy’s diary. Maybe Mother had already seen the dead boy, maybe she had even found the diary, she was good at finding things. And then Papa wouldn’t have anything interesting to tell her.

‘Shh,’ I said to No-name, trying not to slide in the snow. ‘Shh, we are almost there.’

I heard Boxman’s juggling before we reached the yard. No-name jumped out of my arms and staggered through the snow towards the sound.

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‘Oh there he is,’ called Boxman as we got closer. ‘I was about to go out looking, the snow is too deep for him.’

I could hear Boxman saying something else, but I was already inside the barn.

The blue box was still sitting on his worktable. On a bale of hay stood a cup of tea on a saucer, and two of the apothecary drawers were open. But the barn was quiet, and

Mother wasn’t there. I lifted the lid of the finished box. It was dark and empty inside and I suddenly felt very tired.

‘It’s almost finished,’ Boxman came up behind me. ‘Thank you for helping me with it.’

‘Did she leave?’ I asked, but even as I did, I knew she had never been.

Boxman was quiet for a while. ‘Did you see your mother?’

I didn’t answer.

Boxman put an arm around me, ‘It’s because you miss her.’

We all helped clean up at the end of the performance. The barn smelled deliciously of hay and candle-wax. Boxman asked me to snuff the candles, while Priest collected pillows and Papa stacked the chairs.

‘The pretzels are lovely, aren’t they?’ said Priest, crunching away delightedly, and didn’t seem to notice that no one had touched them. ‘I am very pleased with this batch.’

No-name was deeply asleep, with his cardigan back on. And neither Priest’s unsuccessful attempts to feed him a pretzel, nor the two grey rabbits that lazily jumped back and forth between us managed to wake him.

Boxman removed the spotlight from the ceiling, while Mother changed clothes behind the red curtain. I was still wearing Bukowski’s shoes and was getting very

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good at walking in them.

After Papa finished stacking the chairs neatly along the wall, he asked Priest, who was pacing near the door looking anxious, if he would like some company on the walk home. Priest looked gratefully at Papa, then thanked Boxman profusely for a delightful, wonderful evening.

Papa kissed Mother and said, ‘Come home soon, I will make coffee for us,’ and then they both waved and we all shouted ‘Goodbye, goodbye,’ as they were walking out the door.

‘No,’ I heard Papa say on the way out, ‘I don’t think she hurt herself, she has been practising. Yes. For many weeks.’ And then from across the yard, ‘The church does indeed look beautiful. Easy to find with all that light,’ he laughed kindly.

I finished snuffing the candles and Boxman climbed down from the ladder, took off his top hat, stretched, then jumped onto the apothecary drawers and began to juggle the leftover pretzels.

‘Have I ever told you,’ he said to Mother as one pretzel flew higher than the next, ‘that few women act as well as you do in the box trick?’

Mother, who had been pushing hard on the suitcase in an attempt to lock it, smiled and leaned against the drawers, ‘I knew that already,’ she said, and caught one of Boxman’s pretzels midair. Boxman juggled faster. Mother tried to catch another, laughing hard, and Boxman moved one way, then another and pretzels flew higher and more daringly each time. But then all of a sudden Mother began to cry. She leant into Boxman, who let the pretzels fall to the floor and hugged her.

‘Are you sad?’ he asked.

She nodded.

‘You are a great performer,’ said Boxman. ‘One of the best.’

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I was standing very quietly, waiting for Mother to say something that would explain why she was suddenly sad. But Mother quickly wiped her eyes, laughed once again and said, ‘We shall talk no more of that silly stuff.’ She turned to me.

‘Are you alright to walk home alone, Minou?’

‘Yes,’ I nodded.

‘I will be home soon. Then we will have some coffee. But first I need to help

Boxman finish up.’

I was putting on my jacket when Boxman jumped from the apothecary drawers and ceremoniously placed his top hat on my head. ‘You were a great clown,

Minou,’ he said. ‘This is for you. You deserve it.’

I went to the big mirror and looked at myself. The hat was large and fell heavily onto my forehead. It had a big black velvet band and I thought it made me look mysterious. Like a real magician.

‘Your Papa is waiting,’ Mother prompted. ‘Help him get the coffee ready.’

And I nodded again, blew them a kiss the way Papa had done and walked out into the yard.

The yard was dark. All the lights had been turned off. Mother’s laughter stopped and the whole island grew quiet. I could see the lights from the church in the distance and through the trees I could see smoke from our chimney, wafting like a fishbone ladder towards the sky.

The top hat was lovely and warm. I lifted my arms the way Boxman had done when he introduced Mother and did a circle in the air, the shape of a cloud. I tried it again and whispered, ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ then paused dramatically, and continued a bit louder. ‘You are about to see…an extraordinary…’ I tried to say it the way Boxman did, as if the word tasted sweet in his mouth; like one of the last apples

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in autumn. I repeated, ‘an extraordinary,’ trying to get it to sound right as I walked across the yard towards the forest path.

I was almost on the path when I heard a sound. It was a strange sound, a whimper almost. I stopped and listened. Then I heard it again. It sounded almost the way No-name did when he howled, just more quiet. I went back across the yard again, unsure. The barn door was ajar. Then I heard another whimper and quietly I leaned forward and looked through the crack. I couldn’t really see anything but the empty stage. The curtain hung heavily, drawn to the side. The mirror was leaning against the wall, and smoke from the snuffed candles was still hanging in the air. But then I saw a reflection in the mirror. At first I wasn’t sure what it was. I reminded myself that

Boxman could conjure up doves, rabbits, roses and coins and that nothing was unusual in his barn. But Mother’s lips, her closed eyes, and Boxman’s hand, his red stone ring bright against her breast, looked real and not a trick.

Then I ran, my heart beating and fluttering like a leaf on the apple tree on a very windy day.

‘Your Mother isn’t here, Minou,’ said Boxman, closing the lid of the blue box. ‘She is dead,’ he looked at me as if he were feeling sorry for me. ‘But I see her as well. When

I least expect it. I miss her too.

‘I think you should give No-name a name,’ I said, my voice sounding loud and sharp in the quiet barn. ‘It’s important to have a real name.’

Boxman nodded seriously, ‘Then we need to think of a name, Minou.’ He paused, ‘Your Mother saw things too. Did you know that? She once saw a zebra standing where you are now. I knew straight away that it was Franz from my old circus. He was bad at tricks and the circus wanted to send him to a slaughterhouse. I

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had to come up with something he might be good at.’

Boxman’s voice started to sound like wind far away over the ocean. ‘She could see beyond this world, your mother. She was an extraordinary woman.’

I nodded, feeling my head go heavy, as Boxman guided me out of the barn.

‘Come, Minou, let’s get you home. Isn’t it strange,’ he said. ‘I can smell your

Mother’s orange cake? It makes me quite melancholy.’

Boxman kept talking about Franz as he guided me through the forest path. The stars were out, the moon climbed the trees and the snow squeaked beneath our feet.

‘Every time I played the accordion Franz would neigh as if he were in pain. In a strange way it sounded as if he were singing. But the moment I finished playing, he would stop too. He was relieved, I imagine. We performed together until he died one summer morning, head resting on a tuft of grass in the paddock. He looked happy. It was a good way to die, I think.’

My eyes kept closing as we walked. For some reason I thought of Uncle and his investigation of the lighthouse, and how I had tried to draw him while he was looking for ghosts. He had been too tall for the tower and had to stand bent over. I had given him a cushion to sit on and after admiring the lead bath, he folded his legs under him with slow, laboured movements, while I selected a red scarf out of my pile.

‘What a view,’ said Uncle, as he wrapped the scarf around his neck with great delight. ‘Water everywhere, it feels like we are at the edge of the world.’

I nodded, and looked at his ghost machine. Lights flashed and needles danced and Uncle held a microphone in different directions while turning one of the knobs, up, then down.

Uncle had told me on our walk that ghost hunting is a difficult enterprise and that you have to be patient. I was being very still for a long time while trying to draw

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him. I couldn’t get my drawing quite right and after a while I got out my knitting instead. But Uncle soon looked sternly at the knitting needles and shook his head.

As Boxman steered me through the forest I thought of how relieved Uncle had looked when he had turned off the machine and said, ‘There is nothing to worry about, Minou. This is a good place, a safe one. There are no ghosts. The coast is clear…so to speak.’

‘But lots of people went mad up here,’ I protested, ‘all the lighthouse keepers, because of the mercury.’

Uncle nodded solemnly, ‘That’s very unfortunate, but they are not here any longer. Most probably because of the ocean. Ghosts don’t like water much.’

It seemed as if Boxman and I walked forever. I drifted in and out of sleep and

I dreamed that I was walking in a howling snowstorm. Everything around me was white, and I shouted to No-name, who was wearing strangely knitted gloves, ‘Ahoy, ahoy, where is the edge of the world?’

No-name pointed knowingly into the distance and there was Franz, singing, not knowing how close he was to the surface of the deep, not knowing how close he was to falling in. I went to the edge and looked down, and saw Mother’s hair, fanning out, pulling down, deeper and deeper.

[14]

I woke in my bed downstairs, thinking about Franz. I was still wearing boots, scarf and my green jumper. It was night. The ocean was grey with moonlight, and I could

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hear Boxman across the forest playing the accordion. I couldn’t remember arriving home, or even saying goodbye to him. And I couldn’t remember getting into bed.

I went to the kitchen to look for Papa, but he wasn’t there. In the darkness I could see the table set with plates and glasses. It didn’t look as if Papa had eaten. I drank a glass of cold water, standing at the sink and then went to the blue room. The moon shone through the window. The three ravens turned to look at me, but Papa wasn’t there and the dead boy looked as if he were sleeping beneath the frost. I reached under the mattress, got the diary out and put it in my pocket.

‘I will read this later, dead boy,’ I whispered.

I found Papa in the study, and saw at once that all Grandfather’s postcards were no longer on the wall.

‘Mein liebling,’ he said and turned towards me.

He looked tired and his eyes looked very sad. They looked like the ocean before a big storm.

Papa followed my gaze, ‘I can’t find the truth.’

‘No.’ I said, and looked at the floor.

‘Why did I think the dead boy could help me?’

‘He looks kind.’ I said.

‘Yes,’ Papa nodded, staring at the floor with me. ‘Yes, he does.’ Then he added, ‘Have some pancakes before you go to bed, Minou. They are still on the table.

I am going to sit with the dead boy for a little while. To say goodbye. He is leaving us tomorrow.’

I didn’t go to the lighthouse that night. Instead I went back to bed. I lit a candle and sat facing the ocean with the blankets pulled over me. Boxman was still playing the

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accordion, and I could hear Papa in the blue room, adjusting the chair.

I got the diary out of my pocket. It was bent and crumpled, but I unfolded it carefully. There was one page left.

‘Dead boy,’ I whispered to myself, ‘I am going to read the rest of your diary.’

Autumn 58

Dear Diary.

It happened just as Lanikov predicted. Last night we had a storm. For

hours we watched it, dark on the horizon. There was an eerie quietness

on the deck as we quickly tied everything down. Then it came closer,

slowly, zigzagging towards us, and with it came a sound; a strange

muted whining. Lanikov pulled and pushed the wheel, and gave orders

while staring ahead.

The monkey, who had been sitting halfway up the mast, climbed

down and swiftly hid in the box where we kept our fishing equipment. She

had only just closed the lid, when the storm was suddenly right in front of

us. The air started to taste of metal, almost like the skinned goats that

used to hang outside the butcher at home.

Then it was over us. The sea disappeared and then almost

instantly rose like walls around us. Everything went black; there was no

light, no horizon. Lanikov kept shouting orders and in between he would

yell, ‘We have seen worse than this, men, far worse.’ But when he

stopped yelling we all knew that even Lanikov hadn’t seen storms worse

than this. The wood was shuddering, the ropes stretching and grinding

and throughout the night the ship became both our enemy and our

saviour. We clung to whatever we could; sliding, banging, pushing,

bruising and hurting, while trying to hear Lanikov’s orders through the

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howling. Soon I had no idea of what was up and what was down.

It seemed to go on forever. I was wondering for an instant, right in the middle of it, whether stars dotted the sky outside the storm, or whether a soft glow of early morning light was filling the horizon. But inside the storm it was dark and howling and I kept tasting metal.

A strange thing happened; we heard church bells. Lanikov shouted ‘Ignore the bells, ignore them.’ But the men looked terrified, and later they told me that the sea map showed no island close by. They were sure that it was the bells from a ghost ship; a terrible omen.

Then, with no warning, the blackness eased. It withdrew like a big sigh, the sea flattened and the horizon was painted in two bold strokes, colouring both sea and sky with dawn. We clapped and cheered and I started to cry in relief, but tried to hide it by helping the monkey out from the box. Just as we were about to go below deck, exhausted and cheerful, we realised that despite the sea map, there must have been an island close by. A tin of paint and broken pine branches bobbed along the ship and it was then, when I stood leaning over the railing with a long hook, trying to fish out the paint tin, that she came floating by.

She was a foot beneath the water and she was beautiful; like a princess of the sea. Her arms were spread, her palms facing up and she was wearing a blue dress. Her skin was very white and her long red hair was moving like silent reeds. Alongside her were fish, lots of fish, and she wore just one shoe. It looked as if the movements of the fish were carrying her forward and I was wondering where they might take her.

Lanikov and everyone else, including the monkey, came to the railing and we stood there looking at her until the boat overtook her and Lanikov yelled, ‘Let the boat horn drone three times in respect of a beautiful

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woman.’

What he wrote made me sad. Terribly sad. My eyes started to hurt, and my breath felt strange; it was as if I couldn’t breathe properly. But I kept reading.

Winter 59

Dear Diary.

It’s a year since I last wrote. I apologise, what a friend I am! By a strange

stroke of fate we are back on the same course as last time I wrote. I have

just reread my pages and everything that happened. Leaving home, and

running into Lanikov at the harbour seems a long time ago. But I

remember it all, every part of it, but most clearly I remember the storm

and the woman in the sea. Sometimes I look into the dark of the ocean,

expecting to see her again. In a strange way it is as if she is still moving

alongside the ship.

She was all I wanted to write about after that, but I could never

find the right words. I would like to know her name. She has become part

of what I love, and I wonder where she might be now and in what part of

the seabed her hair is flowing with the current.

I am a good sailor now. The job is hard, but there isn’t anything more

beautiful than being on the ocean. Everything is movement, everything is

light. There are hundreds of colours on the surface of the waves and it’s

the same colours as in the gas flame in my old kitchen.

I want to tell you this, dear diary, although it might not make any

sense, that it is in the heart and not in the words⎯not even in the most

beautiful ones, not in the formulas and mathematical abstractions⎯but in

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the heart, in the skeleton bird pushing against your chest, wanting to fly,

that we know for certain what we love. It is all we have, and all there is.

We are moving east now, and Lanikov has told us that another

storm is brewing. It seems fitting that we once again face a storm at

these co-ordinates. But right now there is not a cloud in the sky. Right

now there is just beauty and light, so much light.

That was the end of the diary. Papa was still talking to the dead boy in the blue room, his voice rising and falling, brushing against Boxman’s accordion music, against the slow dance of dark pines, against the sound of broken waves.

And my lips started moving and I spoke too, hands tucked beneath the blanket, face turned towards the sea.

‘You should not have left, Mother, you should have stayed. You should not have taken Turtle, and you should have come home that night after the performance.

You should have had coffee with Papa and I. We waited for you. For a very long time.

Papa wanted to tell you how good you were at singing.’

And they were my words, they came and they went and they travelled with

Papa’s, over the ocean, reaching the silver fin tuna, reaching the box at the bottom of the grave, reaching Galileo’s stars and the end of the world. Then the words became sound and I heard Papa was crying too.

And across the forest No-name started howling, the accordion playing grew louder and it felt as if the whole island, the house, the tower, the ceiling was weeping.

Then the church bell started, furiously, dong, dong, dong, dong, again and again.

In my belly was the froth of the sea; it came to my eyes, and I couldn’t stop it from coming. I choked and spat, and cried. Yet it ended with a long lingering whine.

After a while No-Name stopped howling, the church went quiet, Boxman stopped

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playing and Papa turned silent.

Then I heard Mother’s voice. ‘You have grown, little one.’

I turned and looked out towards the sea and saw her sitting in a bathtub in the middle of the ocean. Her long hair was washed silver in the moonlight. She gave me a wave and as I watched the bathtub move steadily through the ocean, I imagined the cleaving of golden lion feet through the sea.

I waved back, and then she was gone.

I woke the next morning to the drone of the delivery boat somewhere far in the distance. It was the first time in a long while that I had slept in my bed.

I went to the blue room in bare feet. Papa was asleep in the armchair with the blanket wrapped around him. The ravens slept, heads tucked under wings and Papa was breathing slowly and peacefully, his ears red and warm, despite the cold. I looked carefully at the dead boy. More frost had covered his face, his foot and his bulked up jacket with its shiny gold button. It almost looked as if he were smiling beneath the frost. Maybe he too had heard the drone of the delivery boat and was happy that he was about to go on a ship again.

‘Papa,’ I said, but Papa was sleeping deeply and didn’t stir. ‘Papa,’ I went across the room and shook his shoulder, the floor cold under my feet.

Papa opened his eyes, shuddered and stretched.

‘Is it morning?’

‘Yes, Papa.’

‘Is the boat on its way?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Then you better put some coffee on, mein liebling. Boxman and Priest will be

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here soon.’ Papa rubbed his eyes and looked at the dead boy. ‘It’s been nice having him here, hasn’t it, Minou?’

I nodded, and went to the kitchen. I picked up my boots near the door and held on to Mother’s shoe rack as I pulled them on. I looked at her shoes on the rack, still sitting in neat rows. I pulled one out and smelled it. It smelled fresh of leather and the sea. Then I noticed that the kitchen smelt good, almost like the time we had scrubbed the floors before Uncle was coming. The orange smell had gone.

Priest arrived as the water boiled. He carried a small cardboard box and seemed cheerful.

‘Have you seen the ravens on your rooftop, Minou?’ He said, and continued without waiting for an answer. ‘It’s most peculiar. I didn’t know where they had gone, the church tower is empty.’ Priest continued while carefully placing the box on the table, ‘I wonder if God is trying to tell us something. Sometimes he does, Minou, sometimes he gives us a sign.’

‘What’s in the box?’ I asked.

‘Wait and see,’ said Priest and winked at me. ‘Make me a coffee, and I will show you.’

‘You don’t have a cold anymore,’ I said, scooping coffee into the pot.

Priest wandered into the living room, ‘I had the most extraordinary dream last night,’ he called out to me, ‘I dreamed your Mother was in a boat right in the middle of the ocean, such a funny boat, almost like a bathtub. She waved to me and I felt so much better when I woke up.’

I could see Priest through the doorway, studying Mother’s painting of the

Great Shine and his tiger on the living room wall.

‘Isn’t that silly, Minou?’ he said, but he sounded happy.

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I got sugar out of the cupboard, knowing that Priest liked four teaspoons in his coffee.

‘I should have asked your mother,’ he continued, ‘to decorate the church while she was still with us. She could have painted the rabbits and No-name and all the things on the island. Theodora would have enjoyed that.’

‘Mother would have liked that too,’ I said.

Priest nodded. ‘Where was it that she painted Peacock and the boat? Was it in your mother’s room?’

But before Priest reached the door to the blue room I called urgently, ‘The box, Priest, it’s moving!’

And it was true. The box had moved to the edge of the table and was about to fall as Priest rushed back and grabbed it. Just then we heard No-name’s excited bark and the clunk of Boxman’s wheelbarrow against the house. When Boxman came through the door, shivering in his silver cape, he noticed the box straight away.

‘Are you doing a magic trick?’ he asked Priest.

‘No, no,’ said Priest. ‘It’s for Minou. It’s a gift.’

‘Cardboard boxes are good for magic, I can teach you some tricks,’ he offered

Priest.

But Priest kindly refused. ‘I only use boxes for gifts, dear Boxman,’ he answered. ‘Magic scares me a little.’

‘That reminds me,’ Boxman swung his cape open and revealed a pineapple in his inner lining pocket. ‘This is for you, Minou. It will cheer you up. Pineapples are funny. You looked so small and tired yesterday.’

The coffee started boiling and Papa appeared from the blue room. He looked the way he did once when dancing with Mother in the kitchen, slowly, round and

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round, hands resting on her back. He looked as if he knew every step they were meant to take. And Mother had been quiet. She didn’t laugh or talk or get angry; she just looked at him with eyes like a quiet sea.

‘You can open the box now, Minou,’ said Priest, ‘I was waiting for your

Papa.’

Everyone gathered around the table as I lifted the lid. And there, beneath five layers of silk paper, sat Turtle, glasses and plates from the table reflected in his blind eyes.

‘Cheers to Turtle,’ shouted Priest, startling us all. Then he laughed boisterously. ‘He is alive, Minou, he is alive! I didn’t understand where all my pretzels were going. But look, he has grown fat. He was behind the cross all this time,

I think he might have found God. He looks a lot happier.’

And Turtle definitely looked both happy and chubby as he stared blindly and contentedly at all of us.

‘Maybe he should live inside from now on,’ said Papa, who was pouring coffee for everyone. ‘It might be too cold for him to go under the steps again, especially if he has been near an oven all this time.’

‘Not just any oven,’ added Priest. ‘An industrial one.’

I looked at Turtle and remembered the sound of rain and Mother’s shoes across the floor, and the moment when she paused to open the black umbrella and pick up Turtle. The boat horn droned again, this time closer and Papa resolutely asked everyone to follow him to the blue room.

Priest cried out when he saw the dead boy, but Boxman immediately asked,

‘Who is he? How did he die?’ Priest moved closer, peering behind Boxman, and said,

‘He looks kind, as if you could confess all your sorrows to him.’

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Papa explained everything; starting from the moment I had found him at the beach, dusted with new snow in a cradle of rocks. Then he said, looking kindly at the dead boy, ‘We will be sad to see him leave, he has been a breath of fresh air to us, an inspiration, really.’

The box had J.G. Magician written on the side.

‘It’s a spare,’ Boxman explained with laboured breath, as he and Papa tried to lift the dead boy from the bed into the box. ‘J.G died before it was finished and his wife didn’t want it. She didn’t want to pay for it either.’ Both Papa and Boxman groaned during their second attempt, but still didn’t get him off the bed. ‘She sent me a letter saying: ‘I despise magic and do not require the box.’’

‘You are going back on a ship,’ I said encouragingly to the dead boy, because suddenly it looked as if he didn’t want to go; as if he were trying his hardest to stay on the bed.

‘Imagine, a dead boy on this island,’ said Priest, standing aside for Papa who tried to move around the boy and grip him under the shoulders.

‘He is too heavy,’ said Papa. ‘You have to take the feet, Minou.’

I took hold of his feet as well as I could, ‘He is very cold, Papa.’

‘Yes, mein liebling,’ Papa was puffing. ‘Yes he is, let’s lift on three.’

‘If only I had time to prepare a sermon for him,’ said Priest, and shook his head sadly.

The dead boy didn’t quite fit the box and his bent leg sat stiffly above its edge.

‘Do you want to draw him before we close the lid,’ asked Papa and looked at me.

I shook my head. Then I put his shoe in the box next to his feet and thought of

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Mother. Before Boxman and Papa put on the lid Priest said a prayer. He cleared his throat, ‘May the sun shine upon you. May you feel God in the salt and the sea, and may you see Jesus’ feet, bare, as they were, beneath his robe, and remember that he too was a traveller just like you.’

And I thought of how the dead boy had seen Mother, floating in the sea like a sea princess.

Then I ran to the tower to fetch his scarf while Papa and Boxman tried to work out how to attach the lid. They ended up using strings to keep it secure, but even though it was tied down well, it was still possible to look into the box through the crack and see the dead boy, nice and snug with the orange scarf around his neck.

We placed the box on the wheelbarrow and wheeled it down the path. Priest ran alongside, holding up his robe, shouting, ‘Careful, careful,’ while the wheelbarrow bumped and jumped over rocks and ice, and No-name ran back and forth, barking excitedly.

Papa opened the gates for them to go through, just as the boatmen lowered their smaller boat into the sea. And then, in one go, the ravens left the roof, spreading like a black cloud, to the forest, to Boxman’s barn, to the church tower and a few flew boldly out beyond the reef to meet the boatmen.

‘I have missed them in the tower,’ said Priest. ‘They make such comforting noises in the night.’

And as we were waiting at the beach, hearing the boatmen swearing out beyond the reef, Papa bent to pat No-name. Priest started telling Boxman that

Theodora had made plans to build a theatre on the island just before she died, with curtains and a wooden stage, varnished so no one would get hurt if they had bare feet.

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Then I felt it. I felt the skeleton bird in my chest, pushing its wings against my ribs, wild and hard, as if it were about to fly, as if it were about to take off, and I knew with absolute certainty, clearly and distinctly, that I loved them all. I turned and looked at the snow-covered island. One day I was going to pack Mother’s red suitcase full of things and take Turtle. One day I was going with the boatmen to see the mainland, maybe even to China. When I was ready, but not yet.

I faced the sea again. The boatmen were coming closer. A raven swooped out of the sky and dived at crazy speed towards the waves, then swooped back up again.

‘Here they come,’ said Papa.

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Into the Woods

Mette Jakobsen

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Introduction

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When writing the novella ‘Skeleton Bird’, I sought to tell a story about the experience of loss. I wanted to use an Aristotelian story structure with a beginning, middle and a cathartic end. I did not, however, want my story structure to be mirrored on an Aristotelian model. Any action taken by the protagonist in a traditional

Aristotelian story structure, will make her either ‘happy or the reverse’.1 It is plot and not human complexity that determines emotional outcomes. Loss in Aristotelian storytelling is consequently reduced to a category. It is known and defined like a parcel going through customs; checked, stamped, weighed, and all its contents known.

The experience of loss, however, escapes definition. It is apart from that which is already labelled and understood; it seeps through any attempt we make to know it.

Throughout the dissertation I will use the term ‘other’ to express that which escapes definition in the experience of loss. The dissertation is ficto-critical. It is a fusion of theory, memoir and poetry. Using ficto-critical strategies allowed me to engage diversely with the thoughts and questions about narrative structure and loss that arose in the process of writing Skeleton Bird.

The unusual characters of Skeleton Bird, and their interactions within a strange setting, as well as my desire to portray the experience of loss as something indefinable, made me initially consider two genres: the fantastic and magic realism.

Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic as a narrative style that evokes uncertainty about the world presented. Something about the way the characters relate to and interact with their world, points to the instability or fragility of the boundaries of that world, casting doubt about whether that world is real or not. Todorov writes:

1 Aristotle 2008, 12

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The fantastic narrative…is not characterized by the simple presence of

supernatural phenomena or beings, but by the hesitation, which is established

in the reader’s perception of the events represented. Throughout the tale, the

reader wonders… if the facts reported are to be explained by a natural or a

supernatural cause, if they are illusions or realities. This hesitation derives

from the fact that the extraordinary (hence potentially supernatural) event

occurs not in a marvellous world but in an everyday context, the one most

familiar to us.2

In this discussion Todorov refers to Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, but a more recent narrative that displays the characteristics of the fantastic is Don DeLillo’s The

Body Artist. The story focuses on Lauren, whose husband Rey has committed suicide.

Lauren is grieving, living alone in the house they once shared. One morning she hears a noise from the third floor. She has heard it once before while Rey was still alive.3

She searches the many rooms in the house and finds a boy, of indistinct age:

She found him the next day in a small bedroom off the large empty room at

the far end of the hall on the third floor. He was smallish and fine-bodied and

at first she thought he was a kid, sandy-haired and roused from deep sleep, or

medicated maybe. He sat on the edge of the bed in his underwear.4

Lauren’s house is large. Through a dialogue between Lauren and the owner of

2 Todorov 1971, 155-156 3 DeLillo 2001, 40 4 Ibid., 41

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the house, the reader is given a sense of a house without bounds. The owner enquires whether Lauren has been satisfied staying in the house:

‘Mostly , I think, yes.’

‘Because if there’s anything?’

‘No, it’s fine, I think. Rooms.’

‘Yes.’

‘Rooms and rooms.’5

The boy is unable to tell Lauren who he is. His strange and sudden appearance, sitting on the edge of a bed in his underwear, in a room among an endless series of rooms, makes the reader hesitate. Is the boy real or not? Is the house real? However, it is

Lauren’s response to the boy that, more than anything else, creates doubt in the reader about whether he exists or not. Lauren only half-heartedly attempts to find out where he might have come from. She also begins to tape his strange repetitions of her questions and later she initiates a sexual relationship with him. The sum of her actions suggests to the reader that the boy might be a product of her imagination, possibly brought on by her grieving.

The fantastic is often put in the same category as magic realism. The literary theorist Wendy Faris describes the fantastic narrative and its connection to magic realism as one wherein:

The reader may hesitate (at one point or another) between two contradictory

understandings of events - and hence experience some unsettling doubts.

5 DeLillo 2001, 118

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Much of magical realism is thus encompassed by Tzvetan Todorov’s well-

known formulation of the fantastic...6

To place the fantastic and magical realism in the same category, however, robs each of them of their distinctive traits. The fantastic narrative creates an uncertainty in the reader in regards to whether the events presented are real or not. Magic realism, on the other hand, introduces magic elements in such a way that the reader has no doubt that they are dealing with a marvellous world.

Jeannette Winterson presents a magic-realist world in Sexing the Cherry. She describes Jordan, a young man who falls in love with a woman while feasting above a crocodile pit. Winterson writes:

The family who lived in the house were dedicated to a strange custom. Not

one of them would allow their feet to touch the floor. Open the doors off the

hall and you will see, not floors, but bottomless pits. The furniture of the

house is suspended on racks from the ceiling; the dining table supported by

great chains, each link six inches thick. To dine here is a great curiosity, for

the visitor must sit in a gilded chair and allow himself to be winched up to

join his place setting. He comes last, the householders already seated and

making merry, swinging their feet over the abyss where crocodiles live.

Everyone who dines has a multiplicity of glasses and cutlery lest some

should be dropped accidentally. Whatever food is left over at the end of the

meal is scraped into the pit, from whence a fearful crunching can be heard.7

6 Faris 1995, 171 7 Winterson 1990, 20

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Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry presents, similarly to DeLillo’s The Body Artist, a narrative about loss, featuring a house that, with its missing floorboards, seems boundless. Jordan falls in love during dinner, suspended over the crocodile pit, but later loses the woman of his affection before getting a chance to speak to her. He consequently spends the rest of the narrative trying to find her again. Winterson writes:

I did not speak to her, though I spoke to all the rest, and at midnight she put

on flat pumps and balanced the yards of rope without faltering. She was a

dancer. I spent the night in my suspended bed and slept badly. At dawn I was

leaning out of the window, a rope round my waist. The moon was still

visible: it seemed to me that I was closer to the moon than to the ground. A

cold wind numbed my ears. Then I saw her. She was climbing down from her

window on a thin rope which she cut and re-knotted a number of times

during the descent. I strained my eyes to follow her, but she was gone.8

The appearance of crocodile pits, suspended tables and dancers who descend from windows on thin ropes, causes delight and surprise in the reader, but does not, as in

DeLillo’s The Body Artist, create hesitation. Instead, in Winterson’s magic realism, the reader is propelled forward, accepting all the marvellous elements of the story in much the same way as he or she would accept and delight in the appearance of a dragon in a classic fairytale. Marvellous elements, whether a house without floors or a dragon spewing fire, are, in the magic-realist narrative, as real as a vase or a door knob. The genre dictates what is known and real. If Minou, the protagonist of

8 Ibid., 21

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Skeleton Bird, met a dragon on her walk around the island or, if she lived in a house without floors, then her loss and her use of Descartes’ philosophy in face of that loss, would not appear as other. Instead her loss would be known and defined as being just another aspect of a magic realist world.

Todorov’s fantastic presented another possible narrative model for Skeleton

Bird. The events in DeLillo’s fantastic novel, The Body Artist, are presented in a way that creates hesitation about whether they are natural or supernatural. However, if the reader begins to question whether Lauren’s experience is real or not, then it is not just the portrayal of loss, but the narrative itself that appears as other. The same would be the case for Skeleton Bird. Minou’s experience of loss would, in a fantastic narrative, escape attempts to know and define it, but so would the narrative itself. Ultimately neither genre worked in showing the experience of loss as other. Before I considered my next step I decided to firstly examine the Aristotelian storytelling structure and secondly look at the relation between otherness and the experience of loss.

The dissertation explores this process in four chapters. Chapter One,

‘Aristotelian Storytelling’, outlines the Aristotelian storytelling structure. I look at how plot in this storytelling structure determines reactions and emotional outcomes and consequently reduces emotions to categories. In view of this I examine the notions of stereotypes, expectation and a shared world. In Chapter Two, ‘Death and

Other’, I discuss the relation between loss and otherness. This discussion involves looking at death and the experience of loss as something that cannot be defined despite innumerable attempts by writers and theorists to do so. The chapter examines the otherness of trauma, and asks whether it is possible for an experience of loss to appear simultaneously intimate and other. This leads the discussion into Chapter

Three, ‘Writing and Other’, wherein I consider the relation between writing and

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otherness and investigate the difficulty of writing outside stereotypes. I look at automatic writing as well as poetry and poetic narrative. I refer to Gaston Bachelard’s notion of poetic space and his idea of ‘immensity’.9 In Chapter Four, ‘Aristotelian

Storytelling and Other’, I reintroduce the Aristotelian narrative. In this concluding chapter I examine incongruity as well as the structure of a joke. I look at a joke’s ability to disrupt concepts and I consequently consider humour as a way to depict the experience of loss as other within an Aristotelian storytelling structure.

9 Bachelard 1994, 185

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Aristotelian Storytelling, Chapter one

expectation

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Storytelling is important in many different cultures. Fijian tribal people perform stories. They sing, they move, they dance. One of their narratives are told in parts. Every section is indicated by a short break and a refrain which goes: ‘Listen here, lads, to the story that is building up again’10 Stay with it, pay attention, ‘listen here’11

A story: an orgasmic, rhythmic expectation: for something to come, something to follow, steps of action⎯first this, then this, and then, ah yes, that. ‘Listen here’12

the prince

The literary theorist, Ari Hiltunen, outlines the elements of a traditional

Aristotelian narrative by giving the example of a folktale: A prince sets out to rescue a princess held hostage by a dragon. He frees the princess having completed a journey full of trials and obstacles. While the princess makes her way home, the prince stays to finish a dramatic battle with the dragon. Back in the kingdom, however, someone else lays claim to the rescue and demands both the princess and half the kingdom. A wedding is arranged with amazing speed, and the prince returns only at the last minute. A final test is arranged by the king, during which the prince proves that he is the rightful hero. Justice is restored, and the prince is rewarded for his heroic conquest and gets to marry the princess and live happily ever after.13

Pity and fear are the two major ingredients in Aristotelian storytelling, and a

10 Fitzgerald 1976, 44 11 Ibid., 44 12 Ibid., 44 13 Hiltunen 2002, 30

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good plot needs to produce both. The reader of the fairytale needs to fear that the protagonist might not make it home in time to prevent what seems like an inevitable catastrophe. With every trial and obstacle the reader’s pity is increased. Hiltunen writes that ‘…the audience must feel such intense compassion for the fictional character that they feel as if the threat were directed at them personally.’14 A shared sense of what is fair and unfair is needed in order for the reader to engage with the protagonist’s journey. The Aristotelian protagonist needs to be a good person in the eyes of the reader, a person who clearly doesn’t deserve the misfortunes he or she is encountering.15 Hiltunen writes:

The audience experiences emotion through a character but at the same

time⎯because of their superior position and the suspense structure⎯they

are concerned for that character.16

The greater the moral injustice demonstrated towards the protagonist, the more pleasurable it is for the reader or the audience when things, at the end, are solved in the protagonist’s favour and order has been restored.17 Aristotelian storytelling is familiar. Its structure has been visited many times before. There is pleasure to be found in the way it follows the storytelling recipe, step by step.

recipe

14 Ibid., 13 15 Ibid., 10 16 Hiltunen 2002, 10 17 Ibid., 8

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My grandmother made the perfect chocolate cake. She made it whenever we came to visit, even when she was getting very ill. She knew how to follow a recipe, step by step; she had done it for so many years. It had chocolate icing and coconut sprinkled on top. It always tasted the same. We would walk into her kitchen and be met with a lovely smell of filter coffee and the cake.18 My grandmother’s cake, and a visit to her kitchen, felt good. My expectation was always fulfilled; the visit was pleasurable and reassuring.

this is that

Piero Bointani, literary theorist, reflects on the pleasure of recognising a familiar image or scenario in a play. Bointani writes:

…when we see ‘images’ imitated from reality (eikonas), we feel pleasure,

because we learn something and discuss what each image represents, and

then, in a wonderful shock of recognition, we conclude: ‘this is that’.19

What we see when we recognise an image and exclaim ‘this is that’ is a thread of the fabric that makes up our shared world.

18 Jakobsen 2004, 88 19 Bointani 2002, 59

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a stone face

When I am travelling in Latvia I see a stone face of a man. It is sculptured into the wall next to a blue door. His mouth is wide open; his eyes pressed together; empty wedges. From his helmet sprout wings. He looks like he is wailing in agony. Is he forgotten, howling to the universe, to the dark night, to the street, and the passers-by?

I am taken with his mouth. I am not sure, but it feels as if I know, as if I have felt the exact shape of that mouth, of the tension in the lips. I acknowledge the stone- cold face: I salute him.

Months later on a calm and peaceful afternoon, I am writing at my friend’s place. I hear her in the kitchen, cooking; small familiar noises and the smell of onion.

Suddenly I hear someone crying from the flat above. The crying is deep and broken. It is the kind of crying that feels as if there is nothing left, nothing at all. I hear my friend pause in the kitchen; she is listening too. I walk out to her. She looks at me and says, ‘I have cried like that’. I nod. So have I. familiar steps

Recognising a familiar scenario makes our lives seem meaningful. Jean Paul

Sartre claims that a traditional story structure, such as the Aristotelian structure, has an ‘extraordinary power’.20 The reader feels pleasure not only at the end of the novel, but at the very beginning, when he or she identifies with the protagonist. Sartre argues that

20 Sartre 1965, 62

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we know that the man is in fact the subject of an adventure that is about to

befall him. How do we know this? Because he is there at the start of the

novel and he would not be there if nothing were going to happen to him.21

The protagonist stands at the brink of an adventure when the narrative begins. It is inevitable that something is going to befall him or her. Even though he or she will ultimately walk familiar narrative steps, it will still feel to the reader as if they, like the protagonist, are on a journey, free to act and to choose which path to take, in ways that seem meaningful.22

happy or the reverse

Action, argues Aristotle, determines whether the protagonist is ‘happy or the reverse’.23 Plot is the main aspect of Aristotelian storytelling, and it is the unity of plot, not the unity of the protagonist, that is the ‘chief thing of all’.24 It is in the steps of the plot that the emotional life of the protagonist is outlined. This, however, does not mean that Aristotle is blind to the emotional complexities and inconsistencies of a human being. Aristotle writes:

21 Ibid., 62 22 Sartre 1965, 62 23 Aristotle 1995, 12 24 Ibid., 12

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Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero.

For infinitely various are the incidents in one man’s life which cannot be

reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which

we cannot make one action.25

Emotion is invariably linked to action in Aristotelian storytelling. Some paths lead to happiness, others to sadness. If the Aristotelian protagonist experiences loss, then he or she is expected to reverse the situation by changing direction, physically or emotionally, by pointing his or her inner compass towards happiness. Loss in

Aristotelian storytelling is, in other words, something that can be reversed with the focus, foresight and action of the protagonist.

password

The notion that one action might lead to happiness, while another leads to loss, makes choosing unbearable. It makes my heart rate go up when the right word, in real life or in a movie, is set to make the difference between life and death, between love and loneliness. It makes my anxiety reach an excruciating level, when a password is needed and might not be found. I have been known to hide in the kitchen during particular movie scenes, hovering nervously next to dishwashing, turmeric and chopped tomatoes.

Me, whispering through the door opening: ‘Is it over?’ But no one has time to

25 Aristotle 1995, 16

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give me a satisfying answer; they are all too busy watching the movie.

Oh, the power of words. To be able to reverse the course of events. To save lives, reunite loves, but instead ..Oh dread…without the right word it might be destination death or a loveless life.

At school I dreaded the occasional arm or leg that would suddenly bar an entrance⎯‘Password, please!’ I felt more than knew, that with infinite possibilities it would be almost impossible to get it right. I would have made a terribly bad

Scheherazade.

In my early twenties I was in love with a man. He was undecided about me though, but still invited me to his flat. After dinner he made me gaze at his knees, yes, both of them.

‘What do you think they look like’, he asked.

A test! I knew it was a test.

Elephants! It was the first thing that came into my mind, but I was full of fear of getting it wrong and no words escaped my mouth. What if I gave the wrong answer and lost him? Instead I answered hesitantly, ‘I am not sure,’ and saw immediate disappointment on his face.

I didn’t pass the test. He pointed patiently, but already distant, to the part of his knee that looked distinctly like the trunk of an elephant and said, ‘Can’t you see?’

The longing to fit, to fit perfectly.

It haunted me for years. The password was indeed elephants. Had I said it right, I might have won his heart.

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pitchforks and narrative direction

For a while I believed that my inability to utter the word ‘elephants’ had cost me the love of my life. Had I been an Aristotelian protagonist this would certainly have plunged me from happiness to sadness. Everything in Aristotelian storytelling has consequences. Jacques, the protagonist of Denis Diderot’s novel, Jacques le

Fantaliste, recalls the experience of a group of men carrying pitchforks coming towards his master and him. No novelist, argues Jacques during the account of the event, would fail to utilise such a scene. He exclaims:

You will suppose this little army is about to fall upon Jacques and his master,

that a bloody action will ensue, with blows exchanged, shots fired, and if it

were left to me alone, such indeed would be the case, but then farewell to the

truth of the story, farewell to the tale of Jacques and his loves…It is evident I

am not writing a novel, since I overlook just what no novelist would fail to

utilize.’26

Diderot is having fun with his readers. If it is true that a novelist wouldn’t fail to utilise a scene such as above, then, Diderot, as a novelist, is an exception to his own rule. Because when his protagonist runs into the group of men with pitchforks the meeting does not result in a fight. This, argues Diderot cheekily, is not supposed to happen in Aristotelian storytelling. Everything in traditional storytelling, including strange questions about knees, should respond to and evolve around the trajectory of the protagonist.

26 Todorov 1983, 83

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where is she?

When K’s daughter was two, she sat on a blue pillow in front of the television and watched an old Danish favourite, a cartoon featuring a little girl in polka dotted dress called Cirkeline. One episode showed Cirkeline venturing off looking for a cat.

She disappeared from the frame, while the other characters in the cartoon started a game. K’s daughter became very distressed and shouted: ‘Where is she? Where is she?’ She already knew the importance of the protagonist, but she hadn’t yet learned about plot. She hadn’t yet learned to follow the steps of a narrative, and that the hero always returns.

forewarning

Aristotle argues that each part of a plot carries an important part of the story. If any part were to be removed, he argues, then ‘the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. A part whose presence or absence makes no visible difference to the story, is not an organic part of the whole.’27 Milan Kundera writes that

the need to maintain suspense requires an extreme density of action, and

27 Aristotle 2008, 16

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hence the paradox: the novelist wants to hold on to all the plausibility of

life’s prose, but the scene becomes so thick with event, so overflowing with

coincidence, that it loses both its prosaic nature and its plausibility.28

Kundera presents a paradox. Authors want to portray their characters as infinitely varied. However, in order to achieve plausibility the author needs to produce a narrative that has, what Kundera calls, ‘density of action’. In other words, it cannot contain anything superfluous to the narrative.

Plato outlines the meaning of verisimilitude by giving the example of a trial.

Two men fight about who is to pay compensation for property damaged in a fight.

The judge, not being able to verify what has taken place, listens to both sides of the story. By the time the case is tried, argues Plato, the task of the litigants is no longer to establish the ‘truth’ of what happened, but instead to produce an impression of the incident. This impression, he claims, ‘will be stronger in direct proportion to the skill of the narrative’ and the level of persuasion depends on verisimilitude.29 The impression of what happened becomes an ‘autonomous entity governed by its own laws and susceptible of being judged for itself.’30 This means that both the structure and the internal logic of the account need to supersede the actual event.31

The Aristotelian narrative consists of a familiar mapping, a step-by-step journey taken by the protagonist. It does not entail anything unnecessary to its structure. If in fact the hero is ‘suddenly and unexpectedly saved (as in melodrama), the audience may feel cheated!’32 The reader expects that a story will comply with

28 Kundera 2006, 18 29 Todorov 1983, 80 30 Ibid., 80 31 Ibid., 80 32 Hiltunen 2002, 11

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what is being set up at the very beginning and, furthermore, that nothing will appear in the narrative that is not important to the story.33 This gives the writer an opportunity to use the literary technique of forewarning. Forewarning indicates what is going to happen further on in the narrative. One out of many possible examples is Ian

McEwan’s novel Enduring Love. McEwan uses forewarning in the novel to signify that something significant is just about to happen and that whatever it is, it will be life-changing for the protagonist. The forewarning not only marks a turning point in the story, it also builds suspense and makes the reader pay special attention to what is happening. McEwan writes in the first chapter:

The Keats’ conversation faded as we unpacked our lunch. Clarissa pulled the

bottle from the bag and held it by its base as she offered it to me. As I have

said, the neck touched my palm as we heard the shout. It was a baritone, on a

rising note of fear. It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that

moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my life closed’.34

This forewarning informs us that the life of the protagonist is going to change dramatically, and it is implied that the lovely picnic, the warm day and the good relationship between the protagonist and his wife is under threat. The forewarning increases the suspense and confirms, at the same time, a storytelling structure that moves along familiar and predictable steps.

33 Aristotle 1995, 57 34 McEwan 1997, 8

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pointers

I worked on a suite of poems. It was a difficult undertaking. The poems needed to connect and form a storyline while at the same time being able to stand alone. I temporarily gave each poem a heading and thought that I had solved the problem. It all seemed more orderly somehow. The headings, it appeared, made it easier for the reader to navigate the narrative; to bridge one poem with the next.

Headings are pointers, they point in specific directions.

To create a narrative just

point ahead

predict a curve

Headings are like traffic lights. They give way; they say no go. Language is held captive. Without headings words go off to wherever they please. They seek the company of strangers; they eat pancakes at pancake houses along deserted highways, where Texan police and kangaroos exist, side by side, quite happily. And the wind always blows.

discovery

The Aristotelian trajectory is predictable. Every step is expected to serve the

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plot much the same way as we expect that meeting a group of men carrying pitchforks will result in a fight. However, when every aspect of a story serves the internal logic of a plot, there is nothing new to be discovered.

Siri Hustvedt, novelist and art theorist, studied six paintings when writing The

Mysteries of the Rectangle, a book on visual art. She discovered a face in a painting of

Goya that no one, neither scholars nor museum guests, had noticed before. Hustvedt writes: ‘Because few people anticipate that they will find anything new in a very old or very famous painting, they don’t. Expectation prevents discovery’.35

Stand in a hilly landscape. Pick a spot. Look around you, what do you perceive? Does your perception reach further than the outline of the hills? James

Gibson argues that depth ‘is implicit in the edges that separate the surfaces’.36 In other words, whatever we might think is behind or over the hill is something we deduct based on previous experience.

catharsis

We know the trajectory of an Aristotelian narrative. Even though we might fear that the protagonist won’t be able to find the right ‘password’, we still trust that there will be a reversal from bad to good, and that the story is going to end with a pleasurable catharsis. The Aristotelian story structure builds to the final catharsis through well-known stages, each important and essential to the narrative. The steps build an emotional suspense, necessary for a pleasurable catharsis after which justice

35 Hustvedt 2005, xix 36 Cataldi 1993, 32

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is restored and everything is solved in the hero’s favour.37 Hiltunen writes:

We could say that if witnessing moral injustice produces pity and fear,

witnessing the re-establishment of moral justice produces pleasure. The more

intense the injustice, the greater the pleasure when moral justice occurs at the

end of the drama. Catharsis is therefore an emotionally pleasurable

experience that is also morally satisfying.38

In order to achieve, what Aristotle names, ‘proper pleasure’ the writer needs to produce the pity and fear necessary for a catharsis.39 Catharsis is described by

Aristotle as a ‘purgation’ of emotions; a letting go or getting rid off.40 However, despite the outpouring of emotion, it can sometimes be difficult to remember the storyline that produced it, once you have walked out of the theatre or put down the book. Paradoxically, the only thing left after a cathartic outpouring of emotion might just be an echo of something visited many times before.

Bogart argues that when the movie Lassie brings tears to her eyes, it is not because the movie is sad, but because she has been manipulated into a particular response. Nothing is easier, claims Bogart, than ‘to lock down meaning’ and make whole audiences feel the same thing. But, she continues, it is far more difficult to create something that reflects ‘the ambiguities and the incongruity of human experience’.41 In other words, it is easy to manipulate an audience, because most people respond habitually to a particular kind of storytelling. The reader or the

37 Hiltunen 2002, 27 38 Hiltunen 2002, 13 39 Ibid., 12 40 Aristotle 2008, 10 41 Bogart 2003, 106

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audience has seen or heard the trajectory of stories similar to Lassie before; its curve is familiar, and invariably sentimental.

continuity

Leon Wieseltier writes in his biography, Kaddish, about a year of saying

Kaddish after his father’s death. Wieseltier describes how the daily visits to the synagogue affect him emotionally even though he is not religious. He writes:

Then it comes time for them to say amen, and they sing it out again and

again; and with every little chorus I melt. It is almost impossible to think

unsentimentally about continuity. 42

Wieseltier, like Bogart, is affected by the repetitive enforcement of a particular structure. Although Wielseltier might not have felt manipulated like Bogart, the repetition of ‘Amen’ nevertheless provokes sentimentality.

stereotypes

When particular actions in storytelling repeatedly lead to specific emotional outcomes, then we end up with stereotypes. Stereotypical characterisations are containers, argues Bogart, for history and memory. Stereotypes embody ‘codes and

42 Wieseltier 2000, 28

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patterns of behaviour’.43 They are part of our cultural inheritance.44 Bogart writes:

A stereotype was a plate cast from a printing surface. The French verb

stereotype means to reprint from stereotyped plates. The word cliché came

from the sound of metal jumping when the ink dye is struck during the

printing process.’45

There is pleasure in spotting and identifying particular characterisations. Author Alain de Botton, however, argues that ‘the problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. They insulate us from expressing our real emotions’.46 Bogart describes watching E.T. late one night:

As I watched the film I dutifully cried at the moments I was supposed to cry

and walked out of the theatre at the end of the movie feeling small and

insignificant and used.47

After the movie Bogart leaves the cinema complex with hundreds of other movie goers and gets into her car:

Suddenly, watching this spectacle through the battling of the windshield

wipers, I had the appalling sensation that each one of us, isolated in our

43 Bogart 2003, 102 44 Bogart 2003, 102 45 Ibid., 94 46 De Botton 1998, 97 47 Bogart 2003, 107

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separate cars and just having seen a Spielberg film, were feeling the same

thing⎯not in a glorious communal sense that raises our hearts and spirits but

rather, I felt, the film had made us smaller. We had been treated as mass

consumers. We had been manipulated.48

A cohesive image of the world and a firm idea of how storytelling should proceed are essential aspects in making everyone feel the same thing when reading or watching a narrative. Yet, the expression we recognise and respond to as being a familiar world is, argues Marcel Proust, ‘a form of expression which differs so much from and which we nevertheless after a little time take to be reality itself’.49

an Aristotelian story about loss

Once there was a woman who had a good life. She had a good husband, a good, loving daughter and she had a job that made her feel alive and inspired. She was happy⎯yes⎯quite happy, but she rarely took time to see the flowers bloom in her abundant garden, and she no longer seemed to notice the affectionate look in her husband’s eyes when he came home at night and took her in his arms. Instead she grew interested in the gardener, who worked on the rose beds twice a week, always sweaty, always needing big glasses of cold water. ‘Life is so boring,’ she would say to her friends when explaining her interest in the gardener, and then she would laugh, sometimes quite harshly and continue: ‘Everyone needs a little spice.’

48 Bogart 2003, 107 49 Proust cited in Bogart 2003, 91

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Then, out of the blue she started to get tired, terribly tired, and the tiredness was followed by dizzy spells. She laughed it away and said, ‘I never get sick, I am probably just low on iron.’ But when she passed out one evening just before cooking dinner, she did what her husband had wanted her to do all along; she went to the doctor to have some tests done. The next day she went a bit further with the gardener, telling herself that it was all just a bit of fun. Innocent really. She followed him into the workshop at the back of the garden, carrying a cool glass of water, and then she kissed him. Later that afternoon she went back to the doctor for her test results, and the unthinkable happened. She had cancer. ‘I never get sick,’ she told the doctor, who in turn looked embarrassed. On the way home in the car she was shell-shocked. Other people got cancer, but not her.

The months that followed were horrendous, with chemotherapy, pain and vomiting. Her beautiful long blond hair fell out, fistful by fistful, and her skin turned ashen and dirty looking. She couldn’t stand to look at herself, and although she prided herself on good manners, she even threw her food on the floor after catching her image in the steel tray. She looked horrific; old and pathetic, she thought. But her husband sat next to her, patiently, day after day, holding her hand. Sometimes she would wake in the middle of the night and there he was, always awake, always there for her. His love seemed endless. ‘Is there anything that you want, my love?’ he would ask, leaning towards her, reaching for her hand. And in the morning her daughter would come, fingers clamped hard around the small bouquets of flowers that she with great care had picked in the garden and now proudly arranged on the bedcovers. Instead of reprimanding her daughter for the dirty fingers and for putting flowers on the bed, she saw, as though for the first time, the eagerness and love in her daughter’s eyes when she proclaimed, ‘You are still the prettiest mummy in the whole

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world.’

There are two possible endings to this story. In the first ending, the female protagonist recovers. In the process of recovering she learns a lesson that ultimately makes her life both richer and deeper. In the second ending the female protagonist dies. It is, however, a peaceful death, a death of acceptance, without struggle. In this ending the protagonist learns a lesson similar to that of the first ending. She learns that despite death she has the love of her husband and daughter and that she will live on in their lives after her death.

1) And then, against all odds, she began to feel better. The chemotherapy worked. By the time she recovered she had learned, in the most profound way, that she had everything a woman could want. She had the love of her family, and nothing, not even death, could take that away from her.

As soon as she got better she started pouring her love back into her family, and in her spare time she volunteered at the local hospital. She especially liked reading to and talking with sick children. She also rang up the gardener and even though he was eager to speak, she politely and gently told him that she had made a mistake and was ringing to apologise.

2) She got worse. The cancer was eating away at her body. Every day and every hour was a struggle. But the pain of losing the battle against the disease was eased by the incredible commitment of her husband and daughter. They were so brave, so full of love. It was as if she had never properly seen them before and she realised that she had never fully known how lucky she was. It was with sadness she

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squeezed their hands one last time, but she still died with a smile on her lips. The last thing she said before dying was ‘I have had everything a woman could want. I have everything, because you love me. Make sure,’ she said to her husband, ‘to love someone else.’

He stayed in their family home with their daughter. It was a beautiful home, full of light and warmth. He hung a large photo of her, his beautiful wife, on the wall in the living room, and he would smile at her when he walked past. He loved the way she looked, sitting in the hospital bed, scarf askew, smiling at him. To his daughter’s amusement he taught himself to cook. He shopped frequently for fresh herbs and vegetables, and although exotic groceries were a rarity in the local supermarket he bought anything he could get his hands on. It was there that he began to notice her, the woman behind the counter. She looked lovely and warm. She had short brown hair and a beautiful smile. She was sweet and clumsy, often dropping the money he placed in her hand with increasing care. It took him six months, but one night standing in line, he knew that it was time. It was time for new beginning.

everything I write sounds like a soap

A student asked in class: ‘I want to write about a woman dying. But everything I write sounds like a soap. How can I avoid that? How can I write about dying in a way that sounds real?’ The answer I gave focussed on the technique of showing loss, rather than telling the reader about loss. This, I explained, can be done by letting particular things become metaphors for loss, such as showing the husband’s

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shirt as having been done up wrongly, or describing how the hard winter light might illuminate some dirt on the window sill that perhaps looks, to their five-year-old daughter, like the cold ashes in the fireplace at home. Showing loss through an image,

I told her, is a way of avoiding clichéd phrases such as: ‘she thought her world had come to an end’, ‘she was inconsolable’ , ‘he was grief stricken’, ‘her sobbing tore his heart apart’. The answer I gave suggested a way around the repeated and worn-out phrases that often accompany stereotypical writing. This way opens up to an otherness within the narrative.

I was concerned with showing rather than telling when writing Skeleton Bird.

In the following chapter, ‘Death and Other’, I discuss the relation between loss and otherness. This discussion involves looking at death and the experience of loss as something that cannot be defined despite innumerable attempts by writers and theorists to do so. The chapter examines the otherness of trauma, and asks whether it is possible for an experience of loss to appear simultaneously intimate and other.

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Death and Other, Chapter two

otherness

Descartes argues in The Meditations for the existence of God. Human beings are finite, he claims, and the only way that they can contemplate infinity is because the idea of infinity has been given to them by something infinite, ie. God.50 Descartes’

50 Descartes 1968, 123-4

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argument demonstrates the possibility of having an idea of something, without reducing it to interiority, to something known. Descartes demonstrates, in his argument, the possibility of having ‘a relation with a being that maintains its total exteriority with respect to the person who thinks it’.51 It is Descartes’ idea of the infinite that constitutes the relation with the infinite. Emmanuel Levinas uses the structure of Descartes’ argument to demonstrate the possibility of having a relation with something that is other, something that cannot be defined.

Levinas argues that otherness cannot be conceptualised, and transcends any attempts to define or know it. A relation with otherness is consequently a relation with something that is beyond history and social constructs.52 It is a relation with something that transcends the ways in which we define our world and our place in it.

One is arrested, argues Levinas, in an encounter with other. In the arrest a temporary fragmentation of self happens.53 This is not a tiny event, or a mere obstacle to a sense of self. It is a major disruption. One’s ‘subjectivity’ has for a moment been suspended and the firmness under one’s feet has gone. Levinas for example describes the relation to the face. We cannot place the face in context, argues Levinas, unless we read and interpret the face in terms of a shared world. Without social signification the face appears nude and detached; it visits us in its nudity from that which is beyond our comprehension.54

51 Levinas 1969, 50 52 Ibid., 22 53 Ibid., 83 54 Levinas 1985, 86-7

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death

Epicurus claims that there can never be co-existence between death and a human being. When death occurs, he argues, there is no longer an ‘I’ to experience it.55 Epicurus presents death in a similar way to Levinas’ notion of other, that is, as something beyond knowledge. Alphonso Lingis writes on death:

Death comes, of itself; its approach is not locatable across the succession of

moments each of which presents the possibility of the next one. When, in

prostration, one feels it close at hand, one cannot take hold of what is there.

Darkness, the unknown: it is not even apprehendable as the impossible, as

nothingness.56

Hustvedt continues in this vein as she comments on a photo taken by photographer,

Gerhard Richter. The photo is of a dead member of the Bader Meinhof group.

Hustvedt writes: ‘The corpse, after all, is human erasure. It means becoming nobody’.57 Zygmunt Bauman adds to the discussion by arguing that people, despite the impossibility of doing so, continually attempt to define and label death. Bauman writes:

It transpires that it is ultimately impossible to define death, though attempts

to define it⎯to master it (albeit intellectually), to assign it its proper place

55 Wyschogrod 1973, vii 56 Lingis 1994, 233 57 Hustvedt 2005,160-165

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and keep it there - will never stop.58

George Bataille claims that we attempt to master death through the notion of the hero.

The hero fights remarkable and sometimes dangerous battles. If the hero loses a battle and dies, the memory of his or her heroic actions lives on. He or she is beyond death even in death. The hero does not have to be the hero of a battlefield or an ER. The hero can be a quiet hero, who ‘took care of his family despite hardship’ or who

‘spread so much love to her children and to the community and never once mentioned her own illness’. Bataille argues that ‘one must be a god in order to die’.59 We adorn the dead with the status of being a hero, even the ones who are not even close. With the status of being a hero one lives on. One’s story doesn’t stop at death, it continues.

Death is mastered, having been assigned only a small part in the ongoing story of the hero.

adorning the dead

The dead are adorned. They are embalmed, dressed up, given coiffed hair and have make-up applied. It almost appears as if the corpse were going to a family birthday and not to their own funeral. Funeral rituals themselves are full of adornments. Elizabeth Kubler Ross discusses a man who describes the grass-like carpet laid around the edges of his father’s grave, for the funeral service. Not only did

58 Bauman 1992, 2 59 Bataille 1988, 71

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the carpet cover the edges, it also spilled into the grave completely covering the dirt walls. The man exclaims:

What an offence against nature, against history, against Papa, against us,

against God. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry out to the whole world:

‘Something is going on here, something great, something significantly

human. Look! Everybody, look! Here is my father’s death. It is going on

here!60

Adornments serve as a reminder of life, not of death. The artificial grass hides not only the walls of the grave but, also, the fact that someone is dead. Someone is going into the soil; someone is going to decompose and become part of that soil. However, despite the attempts to make the otherness of death into a celebration of the living, death still remains other. Under the green carpet are soil, worms, bones, flesh and decay, and death pushes its way through the fabric of constructed meanings.

Imagination takes over and claims a different reality. From under the green carpet, the makeup, the flowers, the casket, comes the beloved to haunt us.

brushing teeth with ghosts

Freud argues that with loss comes a demand to withdraw the libido from its attachments to what is lost. This is not done easily. Freud claims that the resistance to

60 Kubler Ross 1973, 21-22

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withdrawing the libido is often so strong that it results in an ‘hallucinatory wishful psychosis.’61

When he died,

his face was still in the mirror,

just behind me, eagerly, as if waiting

for his turn at the sink, morning,

brushing teeth.

And in the living room

his clothes still draped over the couch, a blue

and green tie, worn, a ripped tag

and his smell, mysteriously coming

from within the couch.

When he died,

he was there and not there, a clock ticking on the kitchen wall,

a sorrow so deep, it was hard to swallow.

michigan avenue

‘In the morning I walked on Michigan Avenue and saw nothing but my

61 Freud 1985, 253

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father who never set foot there’.62

gold watch

Sometimes unfamiliar responses can arise in the face of death. Ultimately, I will argue, these responses are ways of assigning death a ‘proper place’, similar to flower arrangements and to placing artificial grass around a grave.63

When my friend K was a young girl, 17 or 18 perhaps, she came across a dead man as she cycled through the forest on her way to work. He was on the ground, face up. His car was parked beside him. It was only when she leant over him that she realised that he was dead.

Her first impulse was to take his heavy gold watch. Never before or after has

K felt the need to take anything from anyone. Now, almost thirty years later, her impulse still puzzles her:

to want

to take

to possess.

I know what a gold watch is.

If K hadn’t noticed the watch then she might have responded with a different action or

62 Wieseltier 2000, 21 63 Bauman 1992, 2

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with words. She might have tried to revive the man. Or she might have tried to talk to him, despite the fact that she knew immediately, when leaning over him, that he was dead.

Bessel Van der Kolk, neurobiologist, tells the story of Irene, a woman in her

30s, who nursed her mother during a long period of illness. When her mother died late one night, Irene continued to talk to and care for the corpse. Van der Kolk writes:

Irene was unable to grasp the reality of this event; all through the night she

tried to revive the corpse, trying to force it to speak, continuing to give it

medications and cleaning its mouth. While this was going in, the corpse fell

from the bed. Calling her father for help was of no use: he was completely

drunk. She finally succeeded in putting the body straight and continued to

talk to it.64

Irene kept speaking to her dead mother. Her language kept her mother ‘alive’; her words were all that held their relation together.

the intimacy of death

Death, and our responses to it, transcends our understanding and are impossible to pin down. Language, according to Dastur, therefore has a double function. It works to conquer death by attributing meaning to it. Ironically, however,

64 Van der Kolk 1995, 428

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language simultaneously reveals death as other.65 Dastur writes:

It is in existing that we are witnesses of death⎯even and especially when we

take up a stand against it, and ‘work’ to conquer it, employing all the means

at our disposal to overcome it. Language, the primary and most powerful of

these means, is also the one that most radically reveals our finitude.66

Alain Resnais portrays, in his film, Hiroshima Mon Amour, a protagonist who loses her lover in the war. No one knows about her trauma until she, years later, tells a new partner about it. The telling of her secret, however, does not result in relief. Instead she feels that she has betrayed her dead lover in a way that goes beyond erotic unfaithfulness. Cathy Caruth argues that the betrayal felt by the protagonist lies in the

‘act of telling, in the very transmission of an understanding that erases the specificity of a death.’67

I will argue that in this context specificity means something specific to the woman’s memory and to her body. It is a specificity that cannot be translated into language, intellectualised or defined without at the same time being violated. The words spoken by the woman, the transmittal of her loss into words, erases the specificity and the intimacy of death and of her loss. It makes her experience of loss into something that is defined and categorised.

65 Dastur 1996, 81 66 Ibid., 81 67 Caruth 1996, 27

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words in the hospital

I am in the hospital. I can’t remember how I got there⎯train I think. The bed linen smells of chlorine and in the bed is my mother, dying. She is falling in and out of consciousness. I suspect the moments are carefully selected. She is moaning. Her belly is swollen with cancer.

We are there: her latest husband, my brother and I. My eight-month-old daughter is outside on her father’s lap. I want to hold her. My mother dies; it’s early afternoon. We have expected it to happen and have all travelled from different parts of the world to be there in time to say goodbye. But when it happens we are still surprised. My mother turns over, throws up, and dies at that exact moment. A dirty death, a smelly death, and she forgot to say her goodbyes.

The hospital serves lunch in a private room. I can’t work out whether it is out of consideration for our need for privacy or if they are trying to keep us apart from other visitors, in case that we might act inappropriately.

We sit around the table, around meatloaf, potatoes and gravy. We are pillars, apart, together: we exist, we exist.

And words are suddenly clumsy and square between us; they break and overflow with possibility. Ordinary sentences suddenly flitter in the air like poetic fragments, stark and beautiful, a sudden gift, a betrayal. There are silences, breaths, heartbeats, the sound of forks hitting the plate. Every sound and every word is loaded with living:

‘Look, the sun is out.’

‘Should we catch a taxi home?’

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‘Could you pass me the salt?’

‘Are we staying at your place tonight?’

trauma

The experience of grief and trauma cannot be pinned down. It belongs neither to time, nor to space. It overflows when we try to grasp it, know it or make sense of it.

Pompeii was, without warning, buried in lava when Mount Vesuvius erupted.

In our century, many years later, archaeologists uncovered Pompeii layer by layer to find a city remarkably intact. People, preserved by the lava, were found in positions of rest and work. The colours on the walls emerged from under the layers of lava, deep and radiant. Although the city belongs to the past, it is also vibrantly present, evident in its deep red, violet and golden walls. It is as though the city has merged outside of time as a story neither belonging to the past, nor to the present. It is existent and nonexistent at the same time.

In witness accounts, the words of a traumatic event reappear naked, stripped of before and after layers. They reappear outside time. They reappear as vividly and isolated as the layers of colours carefully painted on the walls of Pompeii.

shoah

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Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah presents testimonies of victims, perpetrators and German bystanders of the Holocaust.68 The testimonies are not presented in chronological order; the documentary resists a linear temporality.

Lanzmann purposely resists telling a story from beginning to end and the witness accounts are consequently presented in non-chronological order. The documentary jumps from one concentration camp to the other⎯without a sense of time⎯

Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor. The documentary furthermore jumps from one witness account to the other; from perpetrators, bystanders and survivors. The witness accounts too are broken up, and the documentary returns to each account again and again, not telling the rest of the story, but moving on to another fragment. Lanzmann often uses a translator, and the process of translation is slow. These sequences have not been edited and cut. Consequently, there are long moments, gaps, pauses, breaths, in which the camera stays with the translator, or on Lanzmann, while the witnesses talk. The viewer might even get a glimpse of the landscape in the background. This creates uneasiness in the viewer who is familiar with fast, forward-moving and predictable Aristotelian plots.

The film, argues Caruth, does not attempt to provide psychological insight.

Instead, it rejects, with its non-linear presentation of testimonies, the possibility of a framework from which we might come to understand and reason about the Holocaust.

Caruth argues that Shoah works in a way that is similar to psychoanalysis. It works

‘through gaps in understanding and at the limit of understanding’.69 Lanzmann says that he presented the testimonies in this particular way because he believes that some events and actions need to stand apart from psychology, and should not be explained, understood, or reasoned with. Lanzmann purposely wants to dismiss the desire to

68 Lanzmann 1985 69 Caruth 1992, 203

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normalise, and to cast ‘characters into typologies’ that are easily understood.70

There are no signposts in Shoah. There is no beginning, and no end.

Lanzmann is not interested in the lives of the witnesses before or after the war. What he portrays is the experience of war and the trauma of war. The witness accounts are not contained by a before or an after. There is no commentator who leads the viewer through the narrative, signposting how the viewer should feel about what he or she sees and hears. The viewer is consequently not assured of their own innocence; they are not absolved or removed from what happened. Shoah does not facilitate understanding, but instead opens up to an overflowing, an otherness. A survivor of

Treblinka says:

I didn’t care about anything. I thought, if I survive, I just want one thing.

Five loaves of bread. To eat. That’s all. That’s something, I thought. But I

dreamed, too. That if I survived, I’d be the only one left in the world, not

another soul. Just me. One. Only me left in the world, if I get out of here.71

These words open up to an interior world. They tell us something, but what they tell is hard to define. There are silences and ellipses in these lines. They do not say anything about this man’s childhood; they do not say why he was sent to the camp; they do not tell us anything about his life as it is now, 30 something years later.

Instead they tell us about a specific world, an intimate world. There are only these few lines, stark, unforgettable, haunting, yet escaping.

70 Lanzmann 1992, 217 71 Lanzman 1985

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intimacy and otherness

The experience of death overflows our attempts to define it. It remains elusive in the midst of adornments, familiar narratives or storytelling about the hero.

This is conveyed through the words of the Treblinka survivor, and through the protagonist in Hiroshima mon Amour, who experiences loss as something intimate; specific to memory and body.

In the following chapter, Writing and Other, I consider the relation between writing and otherness. I look at how the otherness of loss can be portrayed in writing.

I examine automatic writing as well as poetry and poetic narrative. I refer to Gaston

Bachelard’s notion of poetic space and his idea of ‘immensity’.72

72 Bachelard 1994, 185

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Writing and Other, Chapter three

Freud’s couch

A horizontal body was sure to daydream, to fragment one’s sense of self and, more dangerously, was prone to cultivate erotic thoughts. Lying down = letting your thoughts get away with you

Freud thought this to be perfect. His couch was a simple thing; wrapped in an

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oriental rug, upholstered with springs and horsehair stuffing. Fragments, nonsense, unruly words were spoken from that couch, words that did not, of their own accord, create a narrative.

studio

It’s late afternoon. I have been working all day in my studio, writing has come easily. I lay down on the couch to read, but fall asleep, only to wake twenty minutes later, disoriented. My world is in pieces.

The first thing I see is the curtain, transparent and white. A shadow: curly metal from the window bars falling and shifting as the curtains move. Someone is playing guitar in the flat upstairs, and I hear the familiar sounds of my daughter and her little brother somewhere outside, no words, just tone. The world is for a moment digested through my body, deep and heavy, fragmented but full of sense, sense that I am not awake enough to appreciate, verbalise, intellectualise; sense that I am not awake enough to orient myself in. Or to direct.

If I had spoken the moment I woke, I could have said anything and nothing.

Maybe unexpected words would have expressed my deepest fears, or love, or maybe

I would have said ‘star, puzzle, reach, and never come back...just like that.

Kafka’s overflowing

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Aristotelian storytelling structure relies on unity of plot, one predictable step followed by another. It does not yield any surprises. It does not overflow with startling words, fragmented sentences or straying ideas. Helene Cixous describes the last words that Kafka wrote, on a serviette at the garden table when he was no longer able to speak: ‘Limonade es war alles so grezenlos’; Lemonade everything was so infinite. The words, in their non-association, disrupt language and make room for what Cixous describes as an overflowing, words all new in meaning. For Cixous,

Kafka’s sentence sums up ‘the beginning and the end, the whole of life, enjoyment, nostalgia, desire, hope.’73

My mother may have wanted to write. I am not sure. She had many volumes of poetry, and she loved to read. Once she wrote on a serviette. She had heard about automatic writing, and at a dinner party she and her friends wrote whatever came to mind while counting backwards from one hundred to one. They wrote on serviettes, snippets of paper, and receipts hauled from woolly pockets.

Later she stood in the lounge room holding a red serviette. She stood in the middle of the room, reading it to herself. Was it with an infatuated look on her face or a look of surprise? I am not sure. But I do know that she looked as if the writing didn’t belong to her, as if she were a stranger to it. It could have been something beautiful or simply a line she could not have imagined herself ever writing. A line setting her apart from herself. Perhaps she was lying on Freud’s couch without knowing it. Perhaps the words no longer wrapped themselves around her like a comfortable old coat, but were in flight, escaping her grasp.

73 Cixous 1991, 116

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misreading

The word ‘pear’ came into my head when reading ‘linear perspective’. Maybe

I am a bit dyslexic, maybe a writer needs to be. I went from linear perspective to thinking about pear trees:

Pear trees at night, lots of them,

an orchard maybe, a sloping hill,

and all the pears lit, like

fireflies in

blue

blanket darkness.

automatic writing

The Breton movement claimed that automatic writing produced original writing: weird, wonderful, uncorrupted. Poetry in the raw.74 I used automatic writing when writing ‘Skeleton Bird’ in order to loosen my mind and avoid writing cliches.

However, most of what arrived was everyday phrases: remnants and waste, body, breath, thoughts, recipes, shopping lists, phone conversations with friends,

74 Taylor 2007, 48

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arguments, and how much money I had left in my bank account. Sometimes, however, the most tender word combinations, or beautiful visions arrived as surprises. Their meanings escaped, because their origin was uncertain. These images and word combinations were not constructed or known. Yet they were felt, they were specific and intimate.

weighty words

Novelist Anne Dillard writes about the difference between a vision and the writing originating from that vision. The vision, argues Dillard, cannot be fully known. It escapes the writer’s grasp. Dillard writes:

It is a glowing thing, a blurred thing of beauty. Its structure is at once

luminous and translucent; you can see the world through it.75

The process of writing does not consist of filling in the vision. Dillard argues that

‘you cannot fill in the vision, you cannot even bring the vision to light’.76 A writer might exclaim: ‘I have it! I have an idea so wonderful that it will give meaning to my life, in fact to the whole world!’ It is likely, however, that when the writer is asked what the idea entails, he or she will only be able to give vague sense impressions, fragmented and incoherent, small almost undetectable currents in a large sea.

The writer feels the vision in its translucent splendour. But when the work

75 Dillard 1990, 56 76 Ibid., 56-57

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begins the writing follows its own laws. It has its own weight, claims Dillard, and the translucent beauty of the vision is replaced with something solid. Dillard writes:

The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the

page always wins. The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by

the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling,

this bastard, this opaque lightness, chunky ruinous work.77

The vision is, according to Dillard, replaced by a ‘changeling’, a ‘bastard’.78 For a beginning writer, indeed for any artist, this can be a devastating experience.

cardboard box

I had a box made of cardboard. It could fit a tiny cake. I was eight.

I wanted to create a world inside it; the same magical world I sensed between the trees in the morning, in the wet moss, in the glistening trunks of birch trees. And in the mist. My body stretched with longing, to show, to sense it all again, exactly the same, in one little box.

I furiously collected leaves, moss, branches, pebbles. I didn’t know it was impossible to re-create, to make something exactly the way I had experienced it, to bottle that sense, pure, undiluted. And I didn’t know it was going to be a disappointment so deep that my stomach still turns when I remember the box: leaves pathetically arranged, bits and pieces, ugly and easy to discard. How could the garden

77 Ibid., 57 78 Ibid., 57

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I sensed be evoked? Was it even possible?

sea monster

Leonardo da Vinci had a vision of an antediluvian sea monster while he was examining marine fossils. In an attempt to capture the vision, he sat down and tried to write about it. Three of his attempts are recorded. Maybe he wrote more. Maybe he sat up a whole night trying to get the words right, or maybe he sat up for a week struggling to replicate his vision:

O how many times were you seen among the waves of the great swollen

ocean, with your black and bristly back, looming like a mountain, and with

grave and stately bearing!79

And many times were you seen among the waves of the great swollen ocean,

and with stately and grave bearing go swirling in the sea waters. And with

your black and bristly back, looming like a mountain, defeating and

overwhelming them!80

O how many times were you seen among the waves of the great swollen

ocean, looming like a mountain, defeating and overwhelming them, and with

your black and bristly back furrowing the sea waters, and with stately and

79 da Vinci cited in Calvino 1996, 79 80 Ibid., 80

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grave bearing!81

Da Vinci, like any other writer, adds a line here and takes one out there. He changes the words, and he moves them around in an effort to get closer to his vision of the sea monster. Did the words eventually satisfy him or did he abandon the attempts? Was the page tyrannical like Dillard’s and the words inadequate? Did they fail to describe the mightiness of his sea monster vision? Or was he happy with the last attempt, getting up from the table, finally able to sleep?

world qualities

Italo Calvino describes the distance between one’s vision and the writing generated from the vision. He writes:

Soon I became aware that between the facts of life that should have been my

raw materials and the quick light touch I wanted for my writing, there was a

gulf that cost me increasing effort to cross. Maybe I was only then becoming

aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world-qualities that stick

to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.82

Calvino does not, like Dillard, insist on the impossibility of realising one’s vision.

Instead he points out the difficulty of doing so. I suggest that Calvino’s notion of

81 Ibid., 80 82 Calvino 1996, 4

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‘word-qualities’ points to the way writers feel pulled towards imitating stories heard before; stories with stereotypical characterisation within an Aristotelian storytelling structure. The pen travels automatically towards the familiar.

the man of the late hour

My curtains are open onto the street. It’s evening and it’s raining. I can see dark shadows moving past my window; cars driving past, people coming home from work. Ahead of me, slightly to the left, lie the railway tracks where rattling, whispering trains pass every so often. I don’t notice them much.

I have been writing since early morning. Things take time. Sometimes I work on a sentence or a paragraph endlessly. Then, just as I decide to do another half an hour, I am suddenly aware of him. He is standing next to me, not of this world, not of another. At first he seems patient and kind. He explains with quiet authority that he is there to tell me that I am wasting my time; that no one will like my novel, nor will they find it even the slightest bit amusing. People, he says, and nods importantly, need something that makes them feel good. They do not want strange curious narratives.

It’s hard to ignore him. ‘I am going to finish the novel and see what happens,’

I say firmly. ‘Perhaps someone out there will like it.’ But I am already starting to doubt.

‘Do you want to fail?’ he asks me gently, in a way that sounds as if he has the utmost concern for my well being. ‘Why not write what people like? It would be so much easier. You are wasting your precious time and you haven’t got any money.’

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Then he says the most important thing of all, the one thing that makes my heart take notice. He says, ‘You will be liked⎯loved even.’

I feel it in my gut. I feel how good it would be to belong, how much I miss it, and ideas for popular novels flit across my mind. Maybe I should write a popular novel, I think, remembering the abandoned crime novel collecting dust at the back of my drawer. I remember it having potential. But just then, outside on my dark lit window flitters a large grey moth. There is something so strange and gracious about the way it tries to get past the glass towards the light that I stop my conversation. The man disappears, for a moment. what Calvino does

Calvino attempts to evade ‘world-qualities’; he tries to bypass the worn out phrases associated with Aristotelian storytelling that have grown stale through fixed usage. He does so by introducing the reader to multiple narrative beginnings in his novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. In the first chapter a man arrives at a small town by train. The reader is given a few vague details about the town, and is told that there is going to be some kind of suitcase switchover between the man arriving and someone already in the town. Calvino writes:

For a couple of pages now you have been reading on, and this would be the

time to tell you clearly whether this station where I have got off is a station of

the past or a station of today; instead the sentences continue to move in

vagueness, greyness, in a kind of no man’s land of experience reduced to the

lowest denomination. Watch out: it is surely a method of involving you

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gradually, capturing you in the story before you realize it-a trap.83

A narrative trap for Calvino is, I suggest, developing an expectation of how the narrative is going to progress. The narrative beginnings in Calvino’s, If on a Winter’s night a Traveller consequently do not give the reader enough narrative information for an expectation to take place. What is normally revealed at the beginning of a narrative⎯place, characters, and hints of what obstacles there are ahead⎯is hidden behind a veil of steam. Calvino writes: ‘The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph.’84 In the second chapter, Calvino begins a potential love story, unrelated to the train narrative, and in the third chapter he starts anew in Poland with a story about a young boy who is about to leave home. The novel touches upon a mosaic of conventional narrative beginnings, but catapults the reader ahead just before he or she develops an expectation of how the story should progress and ultimately be resolved. Calvino writes:

Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient

times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero

and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all

stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.85

As the narrative beginnings in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller do not point to any possible endings, the novel cannot refer to either the ‘continuity of life’ or to the

83 Calvino 1998, 12 84 Calvino 1998, 10 85 Ibid., 258

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‘inevitability of death’. Instead the novel, in its refusal to carry out an Aristotelian narrative structure, achieves a particular kind of otherness. It is an otherness that arises from the absence of what we vaguely imagine should be there, a blurry structure, faintly echoed again and again.

mountains

On a holiday to Norway we arrived late in a small village. We got a room in the only guesthouse open in the winter, and went to bed, exhausted.

Dawn came, and from my bed I saw the mountains, invisible when we arrived, now shapes, pushed, by the sunrise, into rapidly changing forms. I watched breathlessly, feeling as if I was catapulted into one new scenario after the other, until I almost lost sight of my self. Memories I hadn’t visited for years, floated, loosened themselves from deep muddy grounds; like water lilies letting go of riverbeds, drifting aimlessly.

into the woods

Gaston Bachelard writes of a presence in poetry that cannot be pinned down; a

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presence that arrests.86 An encounter with this presence is similar, argues Bachelard, to being immersed in the deep woods. It is a feeling, not only of being in unknown territory, but also of not knowing where one is going. Bachelard writes:

We do not have to be long in the woods to experience the always rather

anxious impression of ‘going deeper and deeper’ into a limitless world. Soon,

if we do not know where we are going, we no longer know where we are.87

Poetic space, claims Bachelard, is a phenomenology of expansion, an experience of space that goes from ‘deep intimacy to infinite extent’.88 Bachelard names this boundless quality ‘inner immensity’.89 Inner immensity stands ‘apart from objective expression’; it escapes our attempts to know it and to pin it down. The only way we can make ‘sense’ of it, is to reach back into a childhood way of dreaming. Bachelard writes: When he would dream in his solitude, the child knew an existence without bounds. His reverie was not simply a reverie of escape. It was a reverie of flight.90

Reaching back to childhood in the encounter with poetry, does not mean, according to Bachelard, that we recall childhood ‘as it was’. Rather, we make more of our memories of childhood in order to make sense of the ‘immensity’. We reach back while at the same time transcending what was. Bachelard’s notion of otherness is different to Levinas’ definition of other. The encounter with ‘immensity’ results in an arrest that is felt like a loss of direction, like no longer knowing where one is going. It is a temporary lack of narrative projection whereas Levinas’ encounter with other

86 Bachelard 1994, 186 87 Bachelard 1969, 185 88 Bachelard 1994, 202 89 Bachelard 1969, 185 90 Ibid., 100

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results in not a lack of direction, but a loss of self.

In the activity of engaging with poetry we experience, argues Bachelard, going from ‘deep intimacy to infinite extent’.91 We reach back to childhood memories, while at the same time transcending what was. An example of Bachelard’s poetic space can be found in the poet Jan Zwicky’s fifth poem of the series, ‘Six Variations on

Silence’. The poem reads:

The jade river in its skin of wind

below. Sudden coolness

of cloud shadow, even at mid-day.92

Even though we may never have experienced a river, it is still possible to access the poetic space of river, by reaching back and with child-like imagination make more of whatever sense impressions and memories we have. The experience of poetry thereby becomes something intimate. It is anchored in previous experiences, while simultaneously taking flight, escaping our grasp.

book shop

It’s a rainy morning. I walk through Berkelouw bookshop in Newtown to get to the café upstairs. Before reaching the stairs I notice new arrivals on the front table.

The books look radiant in the grey light. They lie next to each other in neat rows

91 Bachelard 1994, 202 92 Zwicky 2005, 71

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showing off their colourful covers. The shop smells of paper and ink. I pick up a poetry collection and read the first poem. It is about snow.

Then it happens. I feel it straight away, my body tenses in a mixture of sexual desire, excitement, fear and something else that I can’t quite name, I am propelled forward, into a feeling of almost…taking off, almost...falling over. I know snow. I can feel it on my skin, on my arms like wings.

I have only limited, fragmented memories of my childhood; a string of pearls, apart, like teeth on an old man. But a winter morning springs from my body into mind: red jacket, flushed cheeks, breathing in, breathing out. The sun is hanging low and still on a white horizon. Snow-covered fields stretch endlessly.

I respond to the poem. My encounter with the words arrests me. I am transcending in flight, a flight without a destination. I touch childhood; memory becomes red, becomes orange, becomes white, childhood fields, a house of straw, and the smell when frost hits last night’s ashes from the fireplace.

Later I showed the poem to a friend. I was certain that she too would see its beauty and its strangeness, and be moved the same way I was. But she was neither arrested, nor the slightest bit moved. My encounter with the poem was intimate, yet escaping. It was similar to Bachelard’s arrest, a relation with something in flight, yet at the same time with the colours and tastes of memory and body.

poetic storytelling

Gaston Bachelard writes of a presence in poetry that is intangible. That

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presence escapes our attempts to define it. The impossibility of pinning it down produces a feeling of being in unknown territory and of not knowing where one is going.93

In the novel Fugitive Pieces by poet, Anne Michael, a young boy loses his entire family during the Second World War. German soldiers enter their house while the boy is in hiding behind a fake wall. Later, emerging from his hiding place, he finds his sister gone and his parents dead. The use of short sentences and the poetic fragmentation shows death and loss in a way that stands apart from conventional ways of expressing loss:

The burst door. Wood ripped from hinges, cracking like ice under the shouts.

Noises never heard before, torn from my father’s mouth. Then silence. My

mother had been sewing a button on my shirt. She kept her buttons in a

chipped saucer. I heard the rim of the saucer in circles on the floor. I heard

the spray of buttons, little white teeth.94

The soul leaves the body instantly, as if it can hardly wait to be free: my

mother’s face was not her own. My father was twisted with falling. Two

shapes in the flesh-heap, his hands.95

The narrative does not convey grief and trauma as something that can be discussed and known and consequently overcome. The use of poetic fragmentation⎯hard and fast like quicksilver, there, yet impossible to grasp⎯conveys instead the sensations of

93 Bachelard 1994, 185 94 Michaels 1997, 7 95 Ibid., 7

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loss, intangible, yet still seeping into everything and anything: into the mud, the bed linen, the curtains, the cupboards, into the past, the present and the future.

desire

My copy of Fugitive Pieces is worn and bent; I keep returning to it. Initially I desired to write a similar novel, a poetic narrative that would reveal an elusive abyss of loss through the fragmentation of poetry. I tried. My writing, however, kept seeking the humorous. In the following chapter I will consider the use of humour as a way to depict loss as other, by disrupting the firm categories within the Aristotelian storytelling structure.

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Aristotelian Storytelling and Other, Chapter four

heat

It is tempting to seek new and original ways of writing, such as Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, when wanting to show the experience of loss as other.

Bogart, however, suggests that an artist should not do away with convention. She draws on T.S Eliot, who, in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, argues that ‘an artist’s work should be judged not by its novelty or newness, but rather by

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how the artist handles the tradition he or she inherits’.96

Once, argues Eliot, originality meant transformation through an interaction with tradition, but since then the art world has instead become ‘obsessed with innovation’.97 Bogart follows Eliot’s lead and suggests that instead of cultivating originality, it is more interesting to figure out how to use the stereotypes present in traditional storytelling. Bogart writes:

In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and

memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human

questions. This is our function; this is our task. In the light of that purpose, I

want to think more positively about the usefulness of stereotypes and

challenge my assumptions about originality. If we embrace rather than avoid

stereotype, if we enter the container and push against its limits, we are testing

our humanity and our wakefulness.98

Bogart argues that if we work with characterisations that have ultimately grown stale through fixed usage, then we need to be aware of the way we approach them. She gives a real-life example of a transvestite and an elderly lady sitting next to each other on a bus. The bus lurches and the transvestite’s flashy ring gets caught in the elderly lady’s hairnet. Bogart claims that there is heat in that moment. By heat she means that an unusual connection has materialised between two characters that otherwise could have been characterised in a stereotypical manner, such as: the elderly woman might have lost her canary and is lonely, whereas the transvestite could have lost a friend to

96 Bogart 2003, 94 97 Ibid., 94 98 Ibid., 111

210

AIDS or have just then spotted her sister on the opposite pavement; a sister who swore never to have contact with her again after learning she was a transvestite. These preconceived notions of what it is to be an elderly lady and what it is to be a transvestite are challenged when these characters encounter each other in an unusual way.

I am exploring the surprising encounter in Skeleton Bird. The narrative might have an Aristotelian storytelling structure, with a beginning, an obstacle and a cathartic end, but the action that unfolds, due to the surprising encounters, is no longer linked to a predictable emotion. It becomes impossible to predict from a narrative beginning what is going to happen next.

train ride

Hustvedt tells a story about two stereotypical characters who during their encounter behave in unpredictable ways:

A number of years ago, my husband witnessed a memorable exchange on

a subway car he was riding on to Penn Station. A very tall black man

entered the car with a woman dressed in short shorts and high vinyl boots.

Both appeared to be under the influence of some powerful pharmaceutical

substance. The woman found a place to sit and immediately nodded off.

The man, who was weaving on his feet, took out a cigarette and lit up.

Within seconds of that infraction, a little white guy with blond hair, a

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person probably in his late twenties, wearing a beige trench coat buttoned

all the way to his neck, politely demurred. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said, in a

voice that was obviously formed somewhere in the Midwest, ‘for

bothering you, but I want to point out that it’s against the law to smoke on

the subway.’ The tall man looked down on his interlocutor, sized him up,

paused, and then in deep mellifluous tones, uttered the sentence: ‘Do you

wanna die?’ Most New York stories would have ended there, but not this

one. No, the short fellow admitted, he did not want to die, but neither had

he finished what he had to say. He persisted, calmly defending the law and

its demonstrable rightness. The big man continued puffing on his cigarette

as he eyed his opponent with growing amusement. The train stopped. It

was time for the smoker to leave, but before he made his exit, he turned to

the indefatigable little Midwesterner, nodded, and said, ‘Have a good Dale

Carnegie’.99

Moments of heat depend, according to Bogart, on unusual connections made within a familiar context. The heat produced in the above text arises out of a surprising interaction between two individuals, who, initially, are presented in a stereotypical manner. The reader can’t help to expect trouble when introduced to the ‘tall black man’ and the woman, much the same way as Jacques, in Jacques le Fantaliste by

Diderot, claims that trouble is inevitable when encountering a group of men carrying pitchforks. The reader is hardwired to think that certain actions have certain reactions and emotional consequences.

Dale Carnegie published in 1936 a book called How to win Friends and

99 Hustvedt 2006, 115-16

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Influence People.100 The core idea of the book is that you can change other people’s behaviour by altering your own reaction to them. The ‘very tall black man’ reveals both wit and intelligence after his first ‘Do you wanna die?’ Exiting the train with

‘Have a good Dale Carnegie’ he demonstrates that despite his threatening manner, he is intelligent and has a sense of humour. The ‘little white guy’s’ reply to the initial threat is similarly unexpected. When he answers that, ‘No, he doesn’t want to die’, and then calmly continues to defend ‘the law and its demonstrable rightness’, he too is different to the way he initially appears. The predictability of the narrative is reversed and suddenly creates both surprise and a humorous response.

humour

Arthur Koestler claims that humour results from ‘universes of discourses colliding, frames getting entangled, or contexts getting confused’ and that the pattern underlying all varieties of humour is essentially ‘bisociative’, two incompatible frames of thought brought creatively together and reversed.101 Freud argues, in the same vein, that the premise of humour is incongruity, produced by bringing two

‘dissimilar things’ together.102 Literary theorist, Paul Lewis, claims, however, that incongruity does not always achieve a humorous response.103 Sometimes incongruity

100 Carnegie 2010 101 Fishburn 2005, 154 102 Ibid., 155 103 Lewis 1989, 9

213

can be frightening or ‘too confusing to be funny’.104

It is the resolution of incongruity that distinguishes most jokes. Lewis argues that adults generally expect a joke to be resolved, whereas children might find humour in incongruity alone.105 Lewis gives the following example of a joke that moves from incongruity to resolution: One tonsil says to another, ‘Let’s get dressed up, the doctor is taking us out tonight’. If the tonsil said: ‘Let’s get dressed, the doctor will remove us tomorrow’, then the joke, argues Lewis, will be lost. The incongruity of a tonsil getting dressed cannot be ‘resolved’ or be made sense of, without adding ‘the doctor is taking us out tonight’.106 Lewis argues that in order for a joke to be ‘resolved’, it needs to move from what is briefly ‘puzzling’ to a ‘resolution’, wherefrom a

‘humorous response’, a ‘joyful click’, is issued.107

The following joke was attached to a personal email:

Why is the dove the symbol of peace? Why not the pillow? It has more

feathers, and it hasn’t got that scary beak.

A joke is only funny if it is not too bewildering.108 There needs to be a possible cross- over between the incongruous bits. Neil Schaeffer, literary theorist, writes: ‘Our mental task is to find this slender element of congruity amid the predominating elements of incongruity.’109 This is illustrated in the above joke. Both the dove and the pillow have feathers, and each has either the presence or the absence of a beak. There

104 Ibid., 11 105 Ibid., 9 106 Ibid., 10 107 Ibid., 11

108 Schaeffer cited in Lewis 1989, 11 109 Ibid., 9

214

is a cross-over between the two seemingly incongruous parts of the joke. The humorous aspect is that the dove obviously didn’t become the symbol of peace based on its number of feathers or whether it has a beak or not. Competing to become the symbol of peace based on beak brings both humour, but also a momentary loosening of the dove’s identification as the symbol of peace.

When hearing a joke we experience first of all something that appears strange.

We then wonder whether it fits the criteria of what is normal. We ask ourselves,

‘could it happen?’110 However, when ‘getting the joke’, we realise that what is said is not as strange as we first thought.111 The initial strangeness moves closer to familiar cultural parameters.

Lewis claims that there is no such thing as ‘an objective joke’, one that will make everyone laugh. A joke is subject to both individual and cultural interpretation.

It relies on ‘the state of the perceiver’s knowledge, expectations, values and norms’.112

Umberto Eco notes that we ‘understand the drama of the protagonist of Rashomon, but we don’t understand when and why the Japanese laugh’.113 The linguist, Victor

Raskin, argues similarly that because catergories of codes of conduct, etiquette and morality ‘underpin a given person’s or group’s world view, we can fall into the habit of regarding them as objective…’ However, when we consider concepts such as the

‘nature of insanity’ or the ‘effectiveness of voodoo’ it reminds us that what we perceive as reality is subject to individual and cultural definition.114

110 Ibid., 12 111 Ibid., 12 112 Lewis 1989, 12 113 Eco 1986, 269 114 Lewis 1989, 12

215

Gorbachev

Humour is subject to both individual and cultural interpretation. It relies on morals, customs and expectations.115

We were playing charades in a flat with blue floorboards in the part of

Copenhagen where the Danish Turks still have fruit shops on every corner and where you can buy the sweetest and softest dates. It was the time of the cold war, and we were all much younger.

My brother is not good at charades. When he moved hesitantly towards the centre of the floor I felt slightly guilty for having suggested the game. But at the same time I felt laughter forming deep down in my belly.

The note said ‘Gorbachev’, my hero at the time, who, with a big red birthmark across his forehead, had turned his face to the West in what seemed to be a friendly manner. Russia was opening up to the West and it even seemed that Gorbachev had managed to stop the flow of Russian submarines that for years had crept through the

Danish waters, often crashing against the treacherous coastlines after which they had to be rescued.

Playing charades is not easy with just a few people. I had written the note, my brother was acting it out and my Australian boyfriend, visiting at the time, was the only one guessing. But I hadn’t taken into consideration my boyfriend’s lack of engagement with the politics of Scandinavian waters. I had forgotten about his all- consuming interest in the surf at Maroubra, and that he simply had not been in

Denmark long enough to know what dominated our world. When we went for walks

115 Ibid., 12

216

in Copenhagen he was still busy breaking ice puddles, darting here and there on the footpaths to crack the paper-thin ice. His fascination wasn’t directed towards cold war politics.

When my brother began, nervously and feebly, to hit himself on the forehead, my boyfriend, who was leaning forward with a serious expression, looked genuinely bewildered by the spectacle. I knew right then that no matter how long my brother would continue to hit himself, my boyfriend would never utter the word: Gorbachev.

My brother, however, not wanting to give up, but unable to come up with any other clues to a big birthmark than a frenetic forehead slapping, kept going until I couldn’t bear it any longer.

church

When the predictability of an event is reversed, it suddenly creates both surprise and a humorous response.

I go to a run-down church that attracts a huge variety of people, students, street people, families, the mentally ill, punks, hippies and elderly Greek ladies. There is freedom in mixing in unexpected groups. There is also unpredictability. The church prides itself on the kind of openness that allows everyone to speak before or after the sermon if they want to.

At one service a man requested the mike. The service was running late as it often does, but the man assured the pastor that he only wanted to say a few words, and that he was all prepared. He carefully placed a bulky white plastic bag on the wooden table behind him, while the pastor hovered next to him with a stressed look on his

217

face. The bag looked mysterious, and while the man spoke of the need to plant seeds in fertile ground as he fervently waved a small packet of pea seeds in front of us, my eyes kept straying to the white bag behind him. It had a funny shape, but pea bushes do, don’t they? They sort of curl out of the earth and climb towards heaven. I was certain that the bag held a pea bush.

After numerous repetitions on the same subject the man dramatically shook the packet of peas one final time and exclaimed, ‘If you plant these seeds in fertile ground, you get…’ he paused dramatically and reached behind him in an awkward movement for the white plastic bag, ‘this!’, and out of the bag he pulled a large beautifully shaped lettuce.

When later that night I told the story to my partner I started laughing so hard that my laugher turned to shrieks. The look on the pastor’s face⎯I told him⎯was indescribable, and when⎯I howled⎯he finally got the mike back, he had such a hard time not laughing. All his stress was replaced by the struggle not to laugh. Oh delicious bliss, to see his face, all torn, scrunched up and funny. For days I felt it, a bubbling from my stomach to my chest, a rising wave of laughter.

humorous sadness

When a joke is ‘resolved’, it moves from what is briefly ‘puzzling’ to a

‘resolution’, from which a ‘humorous response’, a ‘joyful click’, is issued.116 It alters

116 Lewis 1989, 11

218

the sensation of being lost in Bachelard’s woods,117 to suddenly remembering a safe way out. Having a humorous response is delicious. However, when a joke structure is incorporated into a narrative it has a continual cathartic effect. A ‘puzzling’ incongruity will temporarily disrupt a narrative, only to be resolved when ‘getting’ the joke. To write about loss in a humorous way similarly requires a ‘joyful click’.

However, instead of resolving the incongruity and ‘getting’ the joke, a narrative about loss needs to bridge the gap between the familiar and the un-familiar, in a way that allows for a multitude of interpretations.

Jacques, the melancholic traveller in William Shakespeare’s play, As You Like

It, describes a humorous melancholy. This melancholy, he argues, is

compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the

sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in

a most humorous sadness. It is therefore not a dense, opaque melancholy, but

a veil of minute particles of humours and sensations, a fine dust of atoms,

like everything else that goes to make up the ultimate substance of the

multiplicity of things.118

Jacques’ ‘humorous sadness’ exists within the ‘multiplicity of things’. It has lightness, appearing as ‘a veil of minute particles’ and as ‘a fine dust of atoms’.119 However, sadness imbued with lightness does not mean that loss has been reversed from bad to

117 Bachelard 1994, 185 118 Shakespeare 2000, 161 119 Ibid., 161

219

good. Rather it means that loss is not weighed down by its own definition. The experience of loss is not static, nor is it categorised, yet it is contained within the narrative of Jacques’ travels.

norwegian mist

A delightful multiplicity of stories, sensations and feelings spring forth when the otherness of experience is contained within a familiar narrative structure.

I am standing on a ferry with a friend and our two daughters. Mist dances around us. It’s cold. The coastline is shrouded in mist. Occasionally it breaks through the mist revealing a stark dark brown landscape; a few red houses, rounded cliff faces, a single pine tree. The ferry follows a route, I am sure of it. The fact that we glimpse the coastline now and then makes us feel safe. We are not confused; we are not scared. Instead we make up stories of strange towns and mysterious destinations, while rubbing each other on the back to stay warm.

my grandfather’s trip to Spain

220

Stories, strange towns and mysterious destinations spring forth when we bridge the gap between the familiar and the un-familiar in an imaginative way.

I inherited my grandfather’s photo album. It is green with delicate pages, thin and crisp, fragile like dried parsley. My grandfather was an avid photographer with a dark room in the cellar. I recognise my grandmother as a young girl, posing next to my grandfather, equally young with raven black hair, and then, one after the other, pictures of their children, my mother and her sisters, growing up. I turn the pages, slowly: women with coiffed hair and pencil skirts, farmers lined up proudly in front of a wagon of stacked hay, sleeves folded above their elbows, self-conscious and solemn faces. They are all dead now. There is no one left to tell the stories.

There is a photo of my grandfather in uniform. I recall a fragment overheard as a child⎯I don’t remember from whom or when⎯that he went to Spain on his pushbike to fight in ‘the war’. I had almost forgotten about it, but there he is, as I turn the pages, black-haired and clad in uniform. I study him closely and cringe when I think about which side he might have fought on. My grandfather was intensely religious, and I can imagine too well how the anarchists’ destruction of churches would have spurred him onto his bike.

I began to write a story, sparked from the photo and the fragment overheard as a child. There are 2000 kilometres from Kildebrønde, where he lived, to Madrid. How far did he get? Did he stop along the way? Did he eat at the roadside, and whom did he talk to on the way? Did my grandmother pack his bag full of the delicious cakes that she made so well? Did she bake the chocolate cake? Did he wear his uniform all the way, and did he tell people where he was going? At what point did he return? Did he kill anyone? Did his pants get out of shape, worn at the knees from all that biking?

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Did his very short legs get sore from all that biking?

Even though I don’t know what had happened to my grandfather, I still access his travels. I reach back, like Bachelard, and, with child-like imagination, make more of whatever sense impressions and memories I have.120 They overflow my history and my attempts to grasp it.

squirrels and grief

Originality, argues Bogart, comes from interacting with the traditions we have inherited, rather than dismissing familiar story structures and stereotypical characterisation.121 Lorrie Moore’s short story, ‘Realestate’, follows a classic

Aristotelian storytelling structure with a beginning, an obstacle and a cathartic ending.

The story portrays Ruth, a woman in her forties. Ruth has cancer, her husband is emotionally absent, and her adult daughter has visited only once in three years.

Despite her illness, Ruth and her husband decide to buy an old run down house. From the moment they move in, pests begin to invade the house, one after the other. First racoons, then crows. After that it is ants, squirrels, bats and geese, one after the other.

Ruth begins taking shooting lessons in order to kill the oversized crows that have claimed her garden. Moore writes, ‘In their new backyard, crows the size of suitcases cawed and bounced in the branches of the pear tree’.122 Noel, a young guy from a lawn company ‘advised her to forget about the crows, and worry about the squirrels’.123

Ruth, weaker by the day from her illness, places cages in the garden in an attempt to

120 Bachelard 1969, 100 121 Bogart 2003, 94 122 Moore 1998, 192 123 Ibid., 193

222

catch the squirrels, who keep gnawing ‘the hyacinth bulbs, giving their smooth surfaces runs like stockings…’.124

The incongruous story line reaches absurd and comical levels when the footsteps coming from the attic⎯deemed, jokingly by her husband, to be coming from a house ghost⎯turn out to belong to a teenage boy. One afternoon teenagers begin to arrive at the house, insisting that they have been invited to a party in Ruth’s house. Ruth claims that there is no party, but the teenagers keep coming. Moore writes:

More teenagers gathered in front of the house. They collected on the lawn

like fruit flies on fruit. Some sat on the front steps. Some roared up on

mopeds, some hopped out of station wagons crowded with more kids just

like themselves. One carload of kids poured out of the car, marched right up

the front steps, and, without ringing the bell, opened the unlocked door and

walked in.125

When Ruth gets angry and tells them to leave, she suddenly hears someone behind her. Moore writes:

Ruth turned and saw standing in the middle of her living room a fifteen-year-

old boy dressed entirely in black, his head shaved spottily, his ears, nose,

lips, and eyebrows pierced with multiple gold and copper rings. The rim of

his left ear held three bronze clips.

124 Ibid., 195

125 Moore 1998, 203-4

223

‘Who are you?’ Ruth asked. Her heart flapped and fluttered, like something

hit sloppily by a car.

‘I am Tod.’

‘Tod?’

‘People call me Ed.’

‘Ed?’

‘I live here.’

‘No, you don’t. You don’t! What do you mean, you live here?’

‘I have been living in your attic.’126

Tod’s arrival is both strange and comical. It does not make sense that a teenager is able to live in someone else’s attic without anyone knowing. However, even though

Tod’s arrival is incongruous, it, unlike DeLillo’s The Body Artist, does not create hesitation in the reader as to whether he is real or not. Ruth responds to him as if he were real and the hordes of teenagers who arrive on Ruth’s front lawn confirm his presence. Moore continues to create strange and comical instances throughout the narrative. Humour is present even in the cathartic moment after Ruth shoots a burglar.

A ‘puzzling’ incongruity as described above temporarily disrupts the narrative, only to be resolved when ‘getting’ the joke. But instead of resolving the incongruity and

‘getting’ the joke, the narrative bridges the gap between the familiar and the un- familiar, in a way that allows for a multitude of interpretations.

When Ruth runs across the lawn without direction or aim, she has nothing left to face, no more pests, no more burglars, only her own illness. Moore writes:

126 Moore 1998, 204

224

She went down the stairs and ran from the room. Her crying now came in a

stifled and parched way, and her hair fell into her mouth. Her chest ached and

all her bones filled with a sharp pulsing. She was ill. She knew. Running

barefoot across the lawn, she could feel some chaos in her gut⎯her intestines

no longer curled neat and orderly as a French horn, but heaped carelessly

upon one another like a box of vacuum-cleaner parts. The cancer,

dismantling as it came, had begun its way back. She felt its poison, its

tentacular reach and clutch, as a puppet feels a hand.127

Even when the full extent of Ruth’s grief is revealed and the reader is in no doubt that she is in utmost despair, her cancer-ridden intestines are still being described incongruously as vacuum-cleaner parts. Ruth wants to die, but her body, writes

Moore, has its own wishes, pains and nostalgias. The body hangs on, and won’t let go.

Moore writes:

Though she would have preferred long ago to have died, fled, gotten it

all over with, the body⎯Jesus, how the body!⎯took its time. It possessed its

own wishes and nostalgias. You could not just turn neatly into light and slip

out the window. You couldn’t go like that. Within one’s own departing but

stubborn flesh, there was only the long, sentimental, piecemeal farewell. Sir?

A towel. Is there a towel? The body, hauling sadnesses, pursued the soul,

hobbled after. The body was like a sweet, dim dog, trotting lamely toward the

gate as you tried lowly to drive off, out the long driveway. Take me, take me

too, barked the dog. Don’t go, don’t go, it said, running along the fence,

127 Moore 1998, 110-111

225

almost keeping pace but not quite, its reflection a shrinking charm in the car

mirrors as you trundled past the ciborium, past the pine grove, past the

property line, past every last patch of land, straight down the swallowing

road, disappearing and disappearing. Until at last it was true: you had

disappeared.128

Ruth’s dying happens in the midst of numerous pest invasions, unresolved family relationships, and in the act of killing a burglar. Her life doesn’t stop for her to die peacefully. Neither is there anyone, it seems, who is going to ensure that she will be remembered as a hero. Rather, it seems more likely that she will be quickly forgotten.

Ruth’s experience of loss is not a result of wrong action. Consequently, she cannot reverse the situation. She cannot become well, and the memory of her won’t live on.

Since Ruth’s experience of loss is not defined, but instead revealed through the use of humour, it comes instead to exist within the ‘multitude of things’. It is not weighed down by its own definition; it is not static, nor is it categorised. Ruth’s experience of loss cannot be pinned down.

skeleton bird

The narrative of my novel, ‘Skeleton Bird is’, similarly to Moore’s

‘Realestate’, told within an Aristotelian storytelling structure with a beginning, obstacle and a cathartic end. Two mysteries are announced at the beginning of the

128 Moore 1998, 111

226

narrative: the mother’s disappearance and the arrival of the dead boy. These two mysteries are the obstacles faced by the main protagonist, Minou, and are ultimately solved through the discovery of the dead boy’s diary. The discovery of the diary results in a cathartic conclusion through which the protagonist, Minou, emerges as wiser and more mature, with a deeper understanding of human nature.

Minou’s mother arrives on the island in a rowboat with 17 leaves stuck in her hair, and a peacock at her side. Her arrival is incongruous. The island is situated in the

‘middle of an endless sea’, frequented only by a weekly delivery ship. The isolation of the island does not match the arrival of a woman in a rowboat. However, Minou’s mother arrives in a rowboat and not on a magical sea bike. She has tangled hair and a peacock at her side, and not green hair and a lawnmower stashed at the bottom of the boat. The gap between the two incongruous parts⎯an isolated island and the arrival of a woman in rowboat⎯is possible to bridge. A ‘joyful click’ is issued, not as in

‘getting the joke’, but instead in bridging the gap between the familiar and the un- familiar, while still being contained in the narrative structure.

Another incongruous aspect of the story is Priest, who is scared of the dark and who loves his industrial oven, pretzels and origami. The stereotypical character traits of a priest do not include the joys of pretzel baking. Instead priests are often portrayed as being without earthly passions or fears. Again, the gap between the expectation of how a priest should act and the way Priest appears in Skeleton Bird, is not too wide for the reader to bridge. If Priest wanted to jump from his church tower in order to get closer to God, then it might be difficult for the reader to bridge the incongruous parts. As a result the incongruous parts might create confusion rather than produce the humorous response needed to disrupt the predictable plot structure of

Aristotelian storytelling.

227

Another incongruous aspect of the storytelling is Minou’s search for truth.

Having been taught by her father, Minou believes that human complexity can be understood through the use of reason. Minou approaches her mother’s disappearance with logic, and in the beginning her logical reasoning seems to be going smoothly:

The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced she had gone to

China. She had gone to the sugar top mountains, and then to the street in

Shanghai with the thousand bird cages and she was showing Turtle all the

things we had been reading about in the magazine. How surprised everyone

would be when she came home and wanted her shoe back.

‘But I am not dead’, she would laugh, ‘how silly.’129

Descartes’ framework of logic, however, cannot contain the complexity of what has happened to Minou. Yet, with the revelation of her mother’s death through the dead boy’s diary, Minou is finally, in a cathartic ending, able to grieve. Minou is changed through the encounter with the dead boy, and in the final chapter Minou emerges from the drama with a deeper more mature awareness of human complexity and love:

Minou’s actions do not have predetermined emotional consequences. The use of humour disrupts the firm categories of happiness and sadness that are normally evident in Aristotelian storytelling. The reader is therefore not able to predict the trajectory of ‘Skeleton Bird’, despite the familiar narrative structure of a beginning, middle and cathartic end. Instead ‘Skeleton Bird’ paints the experience of loss as something that escapes our grasp and our desire to know. The narrative aim is for its reader to take a walk in Bachelard’s woods; at once being familiar with the

129 Jakobsen 2010, 61

228

surrounding outline of trees, but not knowing where he or she is going.130

130 Bachelard 1994, 185

229

Conclusion

I wanted to write a story about the experience of loss using the Aristotelian storytelling structure. However, the conventional path of the Aristotelian protagonist is full of forkings. When the protagonist asks, ‘Will I go this way or that?’, the reader, familiar with Aristotelian story structure, is aware that any action taken by the protagonist will make her either ‘happy or the reverse’.131 It is plot and not human complexity that determines emotional outcomes. Loss in Aristotelian storytelling is

131 Aristotle 2008, 12

230

therefore traditionally categorised and known, and can, with the focus, foresight and action of the protagonist, be reversed. Even if the protagonist dies, unable to reverse the unhappy circumstances, then he or she is still beyond death even in death.132 This is demonstrated in the ‘Aristotelian story about loss’ in chapter one. In the alternative ending of the story, the protagonist dies of cancer. She moves with clarity and ease from life to death. She says goodbye to her family with sadness, yet with a smile on her lips. She does not struggle in the process of dying. She does not cling to life. She is given the status of a hero and thereby defies death even in death. She continues to be present in the minds of her daughter and husband. The ease with which the protagonist dies is far from the experience of Ruth, the protagonist in Moore’s

‘Realestate’. Ruth’s body will not let go. It takes time to die, writes Moore. You do not just ‘turn neatly into light and slip out the window’.133 The body is stubborn and dying is, for most, a long and drawn-out process.134 Ruth’s dying is neither happy nor the reverse. Her experience of loss is not defined or categorised. Instead it escapes in ways similar to the real life examples, such as the daughter who, throughout one long night, talks to her mother’s corpse, or the young woman who impulsively reaches for a dead man’s watch on a lonely forest road.

It is tempting to seek new and original ways of writing, such as Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, when wanting to show the experience of loss as other.

However, instead of doing away with stereotypes and conventional story structure, it is more interesting, argues Bogart, to utilise these culturally inherited ‘containers, codes and patterns of behaviour’ in new ways.135 A way of retaining the Aristotelian structure of a beginning, middle and cathartic end, while telling a story about the

132 Bataille 1988, 71 133 Moore 1998, 111 134 Ibid., 111 135 Bogart 2003, 102

231

experience of loss, is to use humour. This is done successfully in Moore’s

‘Realestate’, wherein two seemingly incompatible frames have been merged: the subject of death, and the humorous battle against pests. The incongruity between these two subject matters, set within an Aristotelian narrative structure, brings forth surprising and unexpected connections. Humour disrupts the predictability of the narrative. Instead of being cast as a typology, the character of Ruth, similarly to

Minou in Skeleton Bird, comes to possess complexity. Their experiences of loss cannot be categorised and known the way a parcel is checked, stamped and weighed.

The categories and definitions that accompany loss in most Aristotelian storytelling are instead momentarily loosened. They briefly evade being labelled, just like the dove that momentarily escapes being the symbol of peace in the before mentioned joke. Humour disrupts categories and makes the experience of loss appear similar to

Shakespeare’s melancholy, as a part of the ‘multiplicity of things’: there, yet intangible.136

136 Shakespeare 2000, 161

232

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