The Listener (6 page)

E
ARLY IN THE MORNING
, before it gets light, the snow ploughs circle the block. With a dull scraping noise they dig out broad paths along the pavements, and nothing gives a deeper sense of restfulness and warmth than
listening
to snow being cleared as, half awake, I turn over and go back to sleep. Sometimes I lie crossways in my big bed and sometimes diagonally. I like having plenty of space.

More and more snow cascades down in the darkness and is just as steadily scraped away. During the day, fog rolls in from the sea. We’ve had snow-fog for a very long time now and have walked around in twilight.

Last night there was thunder, probably thunder, a couple of powerful crashes, not a rumble, but more like tremors that went right down through the building. In the morning, the sky was completely clear, filled with a hard, exuberant light, and later that day the snow began to melt. There was a continuous shifting and changing outdoors, snow tumbling from the buildings in great white clutches, water clattering on metal roofs, meltwater streaming, and
the whole time that powerful, challenging light. I went out on the street. The sound of rushing water was almost violent, babbling and flooding across the pavement and the street amid the thudding of the falling snow.

In this naked light, all of winter’s traces are visible not least in a face. Everything becomes distinct and turns outwards, exposed, penetrated by the light. People come out of their holes. Perhaps they’ve survived the winter in flocks or maybe alone, willy-nilly, but now they appear and make their way to the harbour, the way they always do.

It was easier to walk past each other protected by cold and darkness. Now we stop and tell each other spring has come. I say, “Drop in sometime,” but I don’t mean it. And he says, “How are you doing?” without meaning anything special – I think. We are stuck with each other because we’re both on our way to the corner and there are no side streets.

So much water dripping and running, and how everything sparkles and dazzles! Now everything will start to grow again, all of it, all over again. Where does it get the energy? It’s just fantastic this business about always getting another chance, and I ask, “Are you with someone these days, or are you living alone?” “No,” he says matter-of-factly, “I’m not seeing anyone.” And I say that’s too bad, now it’s spring. So we exchange information that has a certain significance, if very little, and we part with our dignity intact. I walk on across the square, taking note of all the rushing and gushing. The water in the gutters is almost clean, and beyond the quay the sun is boring into the ice, which burns away in fine, needle-like formations.
I’ve heard that it’s thunderstorms that break up the ice, but I don’t know why. I could call him. He could have kept me company down to the harbour. Or maybe not. There are big pools of meltwater where the storm sewers empty into the harbour, full of trash and plastic and all the filth and refuse of the city, bubbling and glittering in the sunshine, bobbing cheerfully against the harbour wall, though maybe some of it will drift out by and by and float away and big waves will take it in hand, maybe.

I drift along the shore that encloses the city where I live until I come to the last point of land, and there they are, all of them, the black winter people on this blindingly bright spring day. One by one, each of them separately, they sit on the steps on the hillside and turn their faces upwards, as stiff and solemn as birds. Maybe he should have come with me after all. They stand out on the docks, just stand there quite still, each one alone. The ice is quite dark. It looks soft and yielding. The entire landscape rests on a threshold or perhaps a wave, ready to glide over the top and make a decision. This is roughly my train of thought, hasty and confused. Then I decide to call tomorrow, not today.

That night I hear the snowploughs. The morning is overcast and very cold. I don’t call. After all, what would I say? It starts snowing again, the room is filled with a pleasant twilight, the snowdrifts grow all around and smother all sounds except the scraping of the ploughs down on the street. I fall back to sleep. So goes the long spring, here, in our country.

A
FTERWARDS, THEY WENT UP TO THE FLAT
. The police had been there, but he himself was still in the hospital. He lived on the third floor, and his name plate was like his neighbours’, perfectly ordinary. He had a Christmas wreath on the door – green lingonberry sprigs in plastic. There was no post on the hall rug. They came into a large living room with southern sun and wall-to-wall carpet, modern wallpaper, but inherited furniture. It was all very tidy, the bathroom as well. He had a refrigerator and a washing machine in the kitchen, and the cupboards smelled clean.

“Can you figure it out?” she said. “I just can’t understand why he did it. And as old as he is! They almost never do it at that age.” She was large and level-headed and was wearing an attractive suit she had made herself. Her brother shrugged his shoulders and walked over to the window. The view was pleasant, a corner of the park and, further off, an open school playground. The room was very quiet. It has the same silence I have at home, he
thought. Untouched, somehow. He went to the cupboard and took out the dressing gown and put it into the valise they’d brought with them.

“Slippers,” his sister read from the list. “Toiletries and pyjamas. Oh yes, they’ve put him in a private room and they said he wanted his glasses …”

At the back of the cupboard was a large box. It was full of unopened cartons and rolls of leather and strange tools.

“What are you doing?” she said. “What’s all that?”

“I think it’s bookbinding tools,” he said. Everything was new, the price tags were still on. He looked for the slippers under the sofa, but the only thing there were some flat boxes and a yellow wooden chest. Parts for model ships – a caravel, the
Cutty Sark
. He pulled out the chest.

“What are you doing?” she asked again. “Can’t you find the slippers?”

He undid the hasp. It was a complete set of carpenter’s tools. “They’re brand new,” he said. “He’s never used them.”

“So it seems,” she said. “But I ought to get some groceries before they close. And I don’t think we ought to search through his things any more than we have to.” She went to get the toiletries and found his glasses in the drawer of his night table. Everything was neat and orderly, linens and underwear in even, carefully folded piles. She went back to the living room. Her brother had opened the desk drawer. “And what are you searching for now?” she said.

“I’m not searching,” he said. “I’m just looking.” He wanted to say, I’m looking for him, I’m trying to understand. But they had never talked to each other that way.

Some envelopes. One of them said “Receipts”, another “Fire Insurance”. Forms. Directions for use.

“There’s not much to see in here,” she said quietly. She put the last items into the valise and closed it. “I think that’s everything. Now I need to get going and take care of dinner.”

“Off you go,” he said. “I can take the bag to the hospital. We’re not headed the same way, anyhow.”

She looked at him and he explained. “I’m a little tired. I think I’ll sit here for a while and look at a book.”

“You’re always tired,” his sister said. “You should see a doctor. You’re not exactly getting any younger. Goodbye then, and don’t forget to leave the keys with the caretaker.”

Now the room grew as quiet as before, a soft, quilted, absolute silence. Maybe it was due to all the rugs and draperies and overstuffed furniture, and of course the books. Why does someone ask for his glasses when he doesn’t ask for any books? But maybe it was his distance glasses. He read the spines. Book Circle books and gift books. Inherited books. Famous books. He took out one of them and saw that the pages hadn’t been cut. He took out several more; almost none had been cut. Behind them, against the wall, was another layer of books – of an entirely different sort. Orchid cultivation, how to lay a patio, how to build a ship in a bottle. Bookbinding, fine carpentry, graphology, outer space. They were hidden because no one had ever read them.

He replaced the books. The room was too hot. The sun shone directly in, and not a grain of dust moved in the shaft of light above the carpet. He felt very tired and
thought that after all it might not be such a bad idea to get himself looked at, just to be on the safe side. He sat down on the sofa. Another four years, maybe five or six. Orchid cultivation seemed far-fetched. But trees, he could plant trees. Of course, that meant owning land, acquiring some acreage, buying a plot – a craving for land. Grafting, that meant breeding fruit or flowers, experimenting, getting involved in the work. Do I crave land? he thought. I don’t know what I crave.

The room was far too hot. He tried to open the window but couldn’t figure out how it worked and gave up.

What if I got myself a book about trees in plenty of time and tried to work up some craving? Or something else, there’s so many possibilities. But maybe trees were best. And maybe he ought to know something about chemistry, as well, soil composition and the right time to plant. He was upset and he walked about the room the way a person walks about a room – over to the window, around the table, to the bedroom door, pause, back again, stopping in the middle where the sun lay on the carpet, then back to window. Finally he called a taxi. He took the valise, tossed the keys through the caretaker’s letterbox on his way out. In the car he thought, I want to see how he looks. There’s no need to feel sorry for him, I don’t feel sorry for him, and it will be difficult to talk. But I want to see him.

There was a big tree growing on the hospital grounds, either a maple or an ash or possibly an elm. Suddenly relieved, he realised that it didn’t matter in the least. If he cared about anything at all, then it was probably fruit trees.

S
HE WAS AWAKENED
by a banging ventilator and lay still and listened, noticing how the storm altered the light patterns on the ceiling. The shadow of the water pipes was an unchanging cross above the head of the bed, but again and again new reflections of swaying streetlights swept across the ceiling, and sometimes the lights of cars, though there weren’t many of those at this time of night. The skylight had been covered with snow for several weeks, and for several weeks he hadn’t called. That meant he would never call again. Now the door to the bathroom started to bang, and she got up to close it. Without turning on the light, she walked into the front room facing the street.

The wind came in gusts and swept snow across the windows in hard, hissing blows, but it wasn’t snowing. Above and beyond the storm she heard a heavy, hammering noise that she couldn’t figure out. Occasionally it stopped and then resumed. Maybe roof tiles, maybe something else. The night was restless and
strange, and so was the room where she listened and waited, all of it submerged in the dark, greenish radiance that surrounds a diver in the ocean. She watched as the wind-sculpted drifts on the rooftops swirled upwards like smoke. The snow and the sky above the city shared the same dark light. Something is going to happen, she thought, they’ve been talking about it on the radio all day. Let it come. I’m so sick and tired of being sick and tired and just waiting, and most of all I’m sick and tired of myself.

There was a light in the same two windows at the hospital, the ones always lit at four in the morning. The Christmas trees at the filling station were lit, but they were shaking their branches in the storm as if terrified and trying to tear themselves free. She stared at them for a long time, and when they finally blew down, at almost the same moment, and were swept across the street, their lights winking out, she cried out in relief. It was cold in the room, which faced the full force of the storm. It no longer came in gusts. Now the wind pressed in on the city from the sea in a single continuous roar, a rising and implacable mass of sound. Power, she thought, how I love power! The onslaught was so violent that she stepped back from the window. What a storm! What a night!

What is night? Sleeping till the next day; trying to sleep away your tiredness so you can face what you don’t want to face; hiding yourself in a cautious little death for which you’re not to blame – for hours that seem like seconds when you wake up. She walked back and forth between the windows and thought, Call! Call me
and ask me if I’m frightened. She watched the storm tear the snowdrifts on the street into spirals and press the snow against the façades of the buildings like great outstretched hands. The greenish light had grown darker. And dreams, what are they? They dig up your fear and display it, enlarged by cruelty. There is no rest, there is no comfort!

A large object flew past her window and struck the side of the building with a crunch, then flew on – wherever, whatever. The wind was like a great groaning, a scream. Neon lights burned here and there across the city like coloured inscriptions in stone, worn almost away, and the snow rose up from the ground everywhere and from all the streets like an enormous curtain. She could no longer see any lights at all, and there was nothing she could do but listen and wait. So it goes, she thought. Thus it will be one day when everything cracks and falls and there is nothing more to remember and hold fast to, and we will have to rethink everything from top to bottom, if we have time. It won’t matter if we’re strong or weak, and nothing will make an impression on anyone. Everything will be erased and extinguished.

The city was empty; no people and no cars. The temperature had fallen. Her window was a whirling greenish wall of snow, and she stepped back slowly into the room. The storm had gone beyond reason and imagination, merely a powerful, uninterrupted shuddering. This shuddering was universal – in the windowpanes and the walls that protected her, in the air around her and in her teeth and her gut. She moved further back, against the wall. Right
now, she thought, right now I can see that everything is utterly simple. I know what I want. Everyone is standing like this in their rooms tonight. They’ve woken, all of them, and don’t dare go near their windows and don’t dare go back to bed. They realise that it’s not merely a question of living and enduring but rather of something else entirely, but they don’t know what.

How can a storm of tropical strength find its way to a land of snow, a dreary, dependable land where we light Christmas trees to appease the darkness? Windowpanes shattered in well-built stone houses over the few short hours of the visitation, and sheet-metal roofs were carried away in several areas near the harbour. The storm flew into her violently opened room in an explosion of ice-cold air that was thicker than flesh. It pressed her against the wall and pressed against her eyes and eardrums and into her mouth, while all around her the room fell to pieces like the wings on a dragonfly. No truths applied and nothing had a name that could be used and recognised.

She crept towards her bedroom on hands and knees. The only thing that mattered was getting to her bed – her bed by the wall below the water pipes – and hiding in it. She felt the doorjamb with her hands. The floor was covered with snow and shards of glass, and when the storm let go of her she fell headlong and felt as if she’d broken. She crept on, reached the bed and crept in under the covers and drew them around her, tight against the wall with her knees drawn up to her chest. Now she heard the storm again and noticed she was cold and realised that something important had happened to
her, something that had seemed significant and simple. But she couldn’t remember what it was.

The telephone rang for a long time before she realised what it was and lifted the receiver in the dark.

“It’s me,” she said. “No, I wasn’t asleep.” She listened attentively, staring at the ceiling, which was no longer a ceiling. The window frames had become a black and arbitrary geometry. She lay beneath a grillwork of broken beams, and above them was a firmament of dark light that rose higher and higher in unbroken eddies of snow. “Don’t explain,” she said. “Don’t say the same thing over and over again, it doesn’t matter.” She straightened her body in the bed. Slowly, disdainfully, she stretched out her legs and thought, It’s not a bit hard to be strong. “It doesn’t matter,” she said again. “If you’ve had an insight and then lost it, don’t worry about it. You’ll remember it in the morning.” She put her arm under her head and turned on her side. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course I’m frightened. Do that. Call me in the morning.” They said good night. She hung up the phone and fell asleep.

About seven o’clock the wind died and the snow drifted down over the city, onto streets and roofs and down over her bedroom, which was completely white and very beautiful when she awoke.