User:One-eyed Jack/In Progress

Bertrand:

At Treviso last November you said you had an interest in Sarah's journals. It was rainy, and I do not like the rain. Between showers the canal at the Porta Piave reflected a sky like a gray washcloth. I had a cold. I was therefore not receptive.

I hope this letter finds you well. Ha, at your age you should have the health of an antelope.

Of course we do not know where Sarah is, or whether she is alive. Her will remains sealed. Technically her journals reside in legal purgatory, neither descending to the fires of the incinerator nor ascending to the heaven of the bookshelf. So to speak. Therefore your interest in them presents difficulties.

Here the weather has turned for the better. Outside the foyer the leaves of the silver birch (Betula pendula you recall) are opening. The popularity of this tree among landscapers baffles me. It sheds twigs and catkins, harbors aphids, and the bark is less attractive than our native Betula papyrifera. When I went as Sarah's guest to the "Literature as Life" conference at Maribor we saw a forest of silver birch broken by an ice storm. Fallen limbs lay everywhere. The walking-paths were impassable. It is not a trustworthy tree.

The journals are in boxes beside her old desk. I have her keys and I visit her apartment monthly if not weekly. Her African carpets should have a cleaning but there is as yet no legal finding of mortality and therefore no declaration of probate. I worry that a burglar will break in and take the A. Y. Jackson painting. It is the only thing of obvious value, although its clouds look like stones and its trees like stalagmites. However I can do nothing but lock up carefully when I leave.

You may not publish excerpts from the journals. Not a word, sir.

In June I plan to go to Bozeman to visit Jack for three weeks. He turned 83 last September, broke his hip, and walks with two canes. I do not look forward to the smell of his cigar, nor to the inevitable drive with him up the Gallatin River. The cab of a pickup is close quarters in which to accompany a 83-year-old cigar-smoker on a winding highway. I expect to vomit before we reach Swan Creek. He will ask after Sarah and I will tell him she is traveling. Their life together and the divorce are so distant to him now that he will nod and move on to the subject of trout, and forget what he asked. He is afraid of falling into the old man's vice, memories.

So. With disregard for legal niceties I have decided to send you the first ten notebooks, 1956-1970. I will wish a receipt from you so there is no future misunderstanding.

If Sarah is found you will hear of it as soon as I. Remember, Bertrand, you may not publish.

Yours, Joshua

-

In the two years since his divorce Bertie – Bertrand to his uncle Joshua – had tried to avoid falling into routine. He did not want to become, at twenty-four, a habit-bound bachelor. Therefore instead of going to the same lunch-spot every day he patronized three: Mondays and Thursdays a sandwich shop, Tuesdays and Fridays a small Thai restaurant, and on Wednesdays a pizza bar. The waitresses recognized him by his long legs, curly brown hair, and the bicycle helmet often dangling from his left hand. He had mild eyebrows and tipped well and so they liked him, within the bounds of their profession: he was a regular customer with quantifiable needs.

It was Wednesday, his pizza was finished, and the waitress came to ask if Bertie would like another beer. It was early to drink much -- rather, he assumed the girl would think so -- and so he said no more brusquely than he intended. The waitress had stayed up all night with her boyfriend's industrial rock band; she was tired. She scribbled his check and slapped it down. For a month Bertie had been considering asking her on a date, then reconsidering. So far he did not even know her name. Feeling rude and therefore guilty, he left a five-dollar tip on a seven-dollar lunch. The waitress was thinking of the rock band's drummer and hardly noticed.

Bertie lived in a apartment on the third floor of a middle-aged building with a sandstone facade and steam heat. He had to carry his bicycle up the stairs to keep it from theft, and the tires left black marks on the grimy walls of the stairwell. Balancing the bike on his shoulder he maneuvered around the landing and up the second flight.

There was a yellow slip on his door: a package was waiting for him at the Water Street post office. "That," Bertie thought, "would be the plates. Linda bought new china and has sent me the ones we got at the wedding."

His ex-wife had become a nagging source of leftovers and castoffs. "Marry young, divorce quickly, and keep nothing," Uncle Joshua once told him, gazing fish-eyed and unshaven across an expensive dinner for which he, Joshua, would pay. "You are too young for accumulation." Joshua had never married, but he had accumulated. He packed his condo with ceramic statuettes, Brazilwood music boxes, antique but worthless books, gilt-framed miniatures.

The package of plates would be a heavy box, Bertie thought, too heavy to carry on a bicycle. He would have to take the bus.

When he went out again the sky had cleared; the upper windows of the buldings flashed with afternoon sun. On the bus he sat beside a thin old woman with a cantaloupe on her lap. Etiquette suggests silence on city buses but she did not mind. "This time of year," she said as a gambit, "melons probably come from Mexico. Don't you think?"

"Yes, I suppose it's too early. It must be imported." He imagined that her loneliness required his cooperation, although in fact she was not at all a lonely woman.

"I'll bet it came from Ciudad Victoria," she said. "We drove through there on the way to Veracruz after my husband retired. We bought a trailer and traveled all through Mexico. He said, 'Why not Canada? They speak English!' But I wanted to go where it was sunny."

"We went to Florida for our honeymoon," Bertie said.

"How nice for you. Will you go back for an anniversary? It's good," she said enthusiastically, "good to revisit places where you have been happy! My husband died ten years ago and I go to Mexico every summer. But now I fly."

Unable to dissemble, Bertie said "Actually, my wife and I are divorced."

"Well. That happens sometimes. I suppose it must be for the best." She saw him through the prisms of her age: a man younger than her sons, unsmiling as so many were now, a young person flecked with shards of rainbow and darkness. "They grow cotton around Ciudad Victoria, too," she said thoughtfully. "And pineapples. Is this fifty-second?"

"Yes."

"I get off at fifty-first." The air-brakes hissed; he stood to let her out. She turned back, leaned close, and whispered, "Don't kill yourself, young man. The afterlife isn't worth it. That's what my husband tells me." Bertie would have answered but she was gone too quickly.

The problem, Bertie thought, was not suicide but uselessness. The future seemed implausible. Linda had not been the answer and had, in fact, been a distraction from the question. Now he wondered if the real world consisted only of a horizon he would never reach. A horizon which was, in any case, featureless and flat.

When Bertie had the package in his hands he realized it was not heavy enough to be plates. He opened it sitting on the floor of his bedroom. It held three-ring binders, each containing a collection of spiral notebooks -- colored and plain, some with French labels, some undersized with clumsily-punched holes for the binder rings.

He remembered then talking with Uncle Joshua about Sarah, and that he had agreed that her journals might be interesting. Here they were. He would have to read at least a bit. He went into the kitchenette and made toast.

22nd April, 1956. Near the British Railways station a gust of rain blows a woman's umbrella inside-out. She stands with an armload of shopping and does not swear. Crows fly fast downwind or keep to the trees. Keith says the Romans bathed here and I ask to see the bathtub ring. Surely Claudius' soldiers did not tidy up? I press the joke and he sighs. Keith's forced patience with me makes him cranky. Why does he bother? A puzzle. The sidewalks go up steep hills past hydrangeas and box hedges. The rain soaks through our coats. Keith pants uphill but my thighs and calves are hungry for the stretching climb and I go ahead, out in front.

Crocus, bluebells, narcissus, dandelions, an early violet under the concrete step. Up those steps to meet friends that Keith says will put us up for a week. University friends, him now a junior professor, she nervously ripening toward child. Funny old things, waiting in the row-house for the rest of their lives to begin. Answering the door and seeing visitors they did not expect they cover well, welcome us in -- "oh look you are soaking" -- and then give surprisingly generous food and cabernet and coffee with whiskey in it.

Thank you.

We get a narrow bed where the child will sleep someday but for now it is a guest room with ivory-painted walls and a yellow lamp, the bulb dim like a candle. A parsimony of wattage. Keith rolls over to sleep but I'm at him until he can't. The bed bangs a bit, don't they all. After, holding to each other in the calm, we hear the rain outside. And then their bed in the next room bangs a bit. It's like seeing someone else yawn. All over England beds are banging, one and then the next. Pass it along.

3rd May, 1956. Brick row-houses seen from the train. Under low gray clouds a thin ginger man leaning on a garden wall smokes and watches the train pass. In a moment he will turn and go inside where his mother calls from her chaise-lounge. She wheezes with emphysema, dying. His sister will brush cigarette ash from his shirtfront and say "There, then, Dickie, but it's hard am't it." Keith breaks the thread by taking my hand, saying "So thoughtful! Homesick are you, Sarah?"

I tell him, "It was just here that they captured the German spy Heiklermann. He had gone mad and carried a dead Jewish baby in a briefcase. It's a famous story. Have you never seen the pictures? It happened just here." Keith purses his lips, baffled. I abuse his credulity. But he wants to write, he should grasp the rudiments, he should! And he should not interrupt.

10th May, 1956. In London some dirty-boys stand outside our hotel. Keith is inside, napping. The boys wear tight dungarees and no socks. I ask where's the Tube and they mutter "Goin' down on it chippie" and one points up the street. I ask their names and they laugh. I ask if they know a druggist's, my boyfriend needs condoms. They burst out then. "Aw yer filfy filfy ya awr." "Send 'im owt 'er ta us, we'll show 'em 'ow." "'E won't be wantin' none of yer after, neever." What does a professional catamite realize that women can't suspect? They look at me and their eyes go flat. They turn away. They chafe each other. Thin chests inside half-buttoned shirts.

When Keith wakes we go to an Indian restaurant. Jaskaran Bhagat has three daughters and one son. Keith and I eat a vindaloo with haricots and chickpeas and chicken. Jaskaran came from India in 1948, he says. His son's name is Abhyudaya, which he tells me means "lucky". He will be a mathematician, Jaskaran thinks. Jaskaran does not ingratiate himself. He has no need: he has succeeded, he is a self-made immigrant. He smiles, his face round, brown, intelligent. There is some prejudice, he says when I ask him. But not too much. Not so bad.

Keith strides back to the hotel. His shoe-heels crack hard on the pavement. "I thought we were having dinner together," he shouts. "I thought you would talk to me. I had some idea that I interested you, somehow." Of course I know what he means: a relationship. Well there it is, I can't help myself.

Bertie knew of Sarah before he knew her in person. She had partly raised his father and Uncle Joshua. She took them in when an unexplained family crises made their parent's home untenable, and then sent them off to college a few years later. "Pushed out the nestlings," Uncle Joshua said. "Released us into the wild," said Bertie's father. When Bertie was born Sarah was in South Africa. Then she was in Israel and later Greece. At six he knew her as the great author, the success, the legend. His father called her She Who Knows Not Failure. Bertie imagined she looked like Hera in the illustrated book of Roman myths.

Then in 1990 she came to visit and she didn't look like Hera at all. She was short, broad-shouldered, and her face was sun-browned; she wore jeans and a print blouse. She knelt, hugged him, and looked at him. Then she stood up and looked at his father in the same way. Bertie, occupying a physical plane below that of the adults, saw big flat toes in her sandals; they were brown too, and one toenail was split.

"I brought potatoes and purple onions," Sarah said, and Bertie saw that by the door was a cloth bag with vegetables in it. Bertie's mother squeezed her hands together and smiled thinly: "We have plenty of food, Sarah." To Bertie she acted like Sarah had not brought something into the house but was threatening to take something away.

Sarah picked up the bag of vegetables and went into the kitchen, and his mother followed. Bertie heard them talking, and food-making noises beginning, and then his mother's surprised laughter. His father took him and went to get Sarah's things from the car -- there was one suitcase and one knapsack. "Traveling light," his father said. "Professional."

For supper they had potato salad and ham. "Sarah's salad," Bertie's mother said, "it's very good." His father said "Naturally".

That was how Bertie remembered it years later, anyway. His memory may have been unreliable; after his father's unexpected death Sarah came back to help his mother and perhaps that second coming retroactively colored his mental image of her. At fourteen he knew enough to see that it was Sarah who allowed his mother to rebuild, to undertake that terrible process of stacking broken stones into a new foundation. Sarah became an additional parent to Bertie and his mother, just as she had been to his father.

Sarah's journals were another matter altogether. Reading them he was aware that they were written when Sarah was nearly his age – younger, really, only twenty. He expected a narrative, or notes for her future novels, but there were only fragments. She had written nothing for days or weeks at a time. It was confusing.

---

23rd June, 1956. In a long avenue where early sunlight slants between plane trees a shopkeeper shouts at a one-armed young man: "Brulez dans l'enfer, maquisard! Casse-toi!" The old shopkeeper's face contorts and reddens and he seems ready to weep. He shakes his fists. The young man puts his arm up against the attack. He is Algerian I suppose, or at any rate from North Africa. The old man curses and the young one cringes away. The people nearby appear not to notice. A moment of madness. A private matter.

Keith and Julie and Alain want to swim. But Marseilles has no good beach and we have no money for transport so we go a cafe instead. There we have coffee and brioche or croissants on Alain's credit. Alain eats methodically, Julie smokes and watches the sparrows at the curb, and Keith frets about the cost. Café, pain, lait, brioche, croissant, chocolat, beurre, sucre. A half-grown sparrow pecks a cigarette end.

Every morning Keith goes to the bank on the Boulevard Francois Duparc, expecting money from his father. Nothing has come. While he waits in line I go to the Musee des Beaux Arts and eavesdrop on conversations but my French is not equal to the speed and the idiom being spoken. Practice.