Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (25 page)

Millions of people forgot their phones. It didn’t matter, since she knew where Mum was. In a funny way, as she pulled out the handle which slipped like expensive silk into position, as the pink case followed her like a pink poodle or like a pink nut-shell with a rattling kernel, both her parents were with her now – not that she needed them, of course.

Gerda had googled public transport from the airport. She knew in theory where to go, where the airport line met the New York subway, but she havered, briefly, when she got to
ARRIVALS, and TAXIS seemed to be written in sunlight, big yellow taxis bearing her away, and after all, it was her mother’s money.

Soon the yellow taxi was swooping her onward through the dazzling early afternoon. (Had she seen this – ordinary bit of it, with Dad? These roads didn’t look American enough.)

‘You did say Wordsmiths Hotel, Manhattan?’

‘Fifty-fourth Street,’ Gerda said, and felt better for the confidence of that, because streets had numbers, and she knew hers.

‘Fifty-fourth and Fifth,’ the man agreed.

Soon the towers were growing up all round them, and it was easily American enough. She saw a rabble of religious nutters with signs, bobbing. PRAISE, one said. HE IS RISEN. Briefly, it spoke to the cheerfulness in her heart. Gerda was excited; Gerda was afraid; Gerda refused to be afraid.

But what if Mum had gone out for lunch?

‘Are we nearly there yet?’ she asked the driver.

‘You’re nearly there.’ Gerda swallowed hard. What if Mum wasn’t pleased to see her?

54

In the stewards’ hutch on the Turkish Airlines plane, trapped between the two cabins, the staff are hyper: they are nearly there. They are nervously devouring three uneaten breakfasts and some chocolates discarded by VIPs. They have been flying for ten hours; in ten minutes they will begin preparation for landing. The party of Israelis had not been too bad, despite the commotion in the gangways: at least the children had been no trouble. ‘Better than British
çulsuzlar
,’ said the chief steward. ‘Imagine having thirty-two Brits. Whining children, shouting parents, having to lie that the bar has closed. If they fight a war again, they’ll lose.’ ‘Why say that?’ Süleyman objected. He had a cousin who lived in Enfield. One day he would go and stay with her, if he could get around the problem with the visa. ‘We will never fight another war with the British,’ and he helped himself to another croissant. It wasn’t very nice, but his blood sugar was dipping, and it was a pity to let things waste. ‘In any case,’ the chief steward said, ‘we beat them last time, thanks to the Father. In the War of Independence,’ he told the two young women stewards, who knew nothing about history, so were idiots at the mercy of Prime Minister Erdogan and his ‘modernising’ neo-Ottomans, who were actually sending Turkey back into the dark ages. ‘And I never want to see you in a veil,’ he told Amara. ‘Atatürk died to get you women freedoms.’ ‘Leave her alone,’ said her friend Maha. ‘You’re just another man trying to tell her what to do.’ ‘He’s exaggerating,’ said Süleyman. ‘Atatürk died of cancer, didn’t he?’ ‘He lost us our language,’
Amara said. She was vague about it, but someone had said so.

Now the chief steward became really angry. He allowed certain freedoms from the younger staff, but nobody should traduce the Father. ‘And this means?’ he asked her. ‘You haven’t a clue. You are just repeating what Erdogan’s mob say. It was the
written
language Atatürk changed, so Turkey could be part of the modern world. So other countries could understand us, and we weren’t just lonely peasants on a hillside.’ ‘We weren’t peasants,’ said Süleyman. ‘Who gave us the airport?’ the chief steward demanded. ‘Atatürk. Who gave us a constitution? Atatürk. Who gave us motorways? Atatürk. Without Atatürk, you’d have no job, you’d have been married at eleven, if anyone would have you. Now get back to the cabin and collect the trays.’

‘I’m sorry, Sir,’ she said, chastened. She loved the chief steward, who’d been kind to her, kinder, in fact, than her stepfather, who had tried to stop her training, but her grandmother had stuck up for her. ‘I did not mean to insult the Father. Of course I didn’t, we grew up loving him.’ Yet he had lived so long ago. It was hard for her to imagine the 1930s, when her grandmother had been a girl. She couldn’t grasp such a vast stretch of time. An eleven hour flight could feel like a lifetime.

They all fell silent, and just for a second, as the plane banked steeply into the sun and a diamond of white light cut into the cabin, the old leader seemed to be in the room with them, his great kindly head and refulgent eyes, reassuring them about the future: they need not fear the imams, nor Syria, nor America.

‘Süleyman, you’ll get fat,’ said Amara. She was never down for long. ‘Come and help. The Americans have spilled food on the floor.’

They did the gangway run together, a left and a right,
keeping pace with each other. Amara liked working with Süleyman. He told her things she needed to know, and she was not in awe of him. She wondered if he might not be normal, but at least he did not fancy her. He was a graduate; he knew things.

As they put away the containers of rubbish, she asked him, quietly, so the others wouldn’t hear, ‘Do you think it’s true what some people say, that life was better for us before Erdogan? Is it true there are lots of people in prison?’

He motioned, delicately, for her to be quiet, but smiled in a way that meant ‘Don’t worry.’ ‘Maybe things were better then than now,’ he said. ‘But life is for living. Things are good.’

She clicked the clasps of the containers shut and smiled at him. ‘Life is simple.’

55

The will to live, that animal will. It carries one on, past so much despair. When my father died, it seemed impossible, the disappearance of the giant father, always behind me, sheltering, looming, for he loved my writing and believed in me. The keeper of the library, who opened it to me. I was desolate. Then the wound healed over. Second by second, minute by minute, day by day, loss became – less. His shadow shrank. I saw beyond him.

Could it have been the same for Leonard?

If my father had lived, I could never have written. His weight would have extinguished me.

‘Virginia, have you got any rubbish? They are trying to collect our rubbish.’

Of course she didn’t care about them. She was lost in thought, she barely looked up.

‘I see you haven’t solved the servant problem.’

‘Virginia, please don’t talk like that. The cabin staff are not our servants.’

‘Of course they are. It’s obvious. You sit in comfort, they are servants.’

‘Virginia, please! Servants is not a word we use.’

‘That changes nothing. They are the servants, we are the masters – ’

‘Shhhushh.’

‘Oh, is it like the Jews? Are we not allowed to call them that?’

‘We are not going to talk about it.’

‘I start to think we were more free than you are … We talked about everything in Gordon Square. Never mind your scruples about “servants” and “Jews”. We were always talking about buggers and semen.’

(
The young Hasidic woman beside her looks astonished, but then laughs
.)

‘It’s not clever, Virginia, honestly. You did ask me to take you with me to Turkey. You can’t go on like this in Istanbul. You don’t understand. It’s a Muslim country.’

Her cheeks were getting very red again. Perhaps it was the change of life? It was clear she had no idea about Turkey, which seemed to us peculiarly free. Men urinated in the street; there were books devoted to copulation. We shopped for silver in the markets and I found a little charm, beautifully carved, of a man and woman in the act of congress. You could touch them, gently, and they performed. I still imagined, then, it would be my lot. I gave the silversmith fifteen lira.

Just when does the course of one’s life become set? I might have been a milch-cow like Vanessa …

‘Virginia, put your seat belt on. The air hostess is talking to you – flight attendant, sorry.’

(Yes, they were obsessed with the names of things.)

Somewhere I lost it, that little silver charm. I looked out of the window, and there it was –

‘Look! Quick, there’s another plane – ’

Like a brilliant silver needle, tiny – like a messenger, or the flash of a thought – a jet plane, was it, slender as a thread, fast as a minnow, sprinting below us – through blue, then cloud –

And then it was gone. And my life was changed. It was taken away, what I could have been. Those years of breakdown, after I married. Leonard was afraid, and left me alone, but part of me always regretted it. I could have been more of a wife, a mother. The window opened, and then it closed.

The beak flashed, and the fish were eaten. Before I knew it, I had grown old.

‘Please, Miss, put your seat belt on.’

‘Ten minutes to landing in Turkey, Virginia. Are you excited? It will be so different from … when were you there, 1906? And the second visit was – 1910?’

My Hasidic neighbour was looking at me strangely. But Virginia was less of an anomaly than he was. Both of them were relics from another time.

‘The second time in Turkey was so different.’

The unthinkable loss after the first visit. My elder brother, my conspirator. I envied Thoby, but adored him, of course. He came with us to Greece on the way to Turkey, we rode and walked through the blue aromatic mountains, naming the gods and their transformations; he read us Greek, we drank that rough wine and I had too much and got a headache, but we plotted futures of fantastic greatness as the moon rose and fell and the crickets sang and the white vines of stars slowly faded into morning. That night I knew we would always be happy.

But I was the one who had the future. The gods demanded a sacrifice. Thoby’s muscular back as he walked ahead. The illness must have already been inside him, breeding secretly, beckoning. The Furies saw the illness stirring, it signalled to them, and their nostrils flared; they reached out and touched him with their scaly fingers. Two spots of red appeared in his cheeks. The doctors could do nothing to save him, those grave old mummers with their hopeless nostrums.

The bravest, most beautiful of us was dead. They called him the Goth, but his death was not noble. He was incoherent, incontinent, he had wagered all on his intellect, but it wasted his flesh, his big, healthy, helpless body. Days after he died, Vanessa agreed to marry Clive, his dearest friend, I lost my sister as well as my brother, and she began another life as a mother.

(She went everywhere first: sex, childbirth. When I tried with Leonard, her probing questions forced their way into my intimate places and made me feel inferior. She placed her finger on her lips – no, Ginia, too much for you: I agree with Leonard, you can never be a mother.)

In the long view, was she such a good sister?

She is not here to answer me. She was dear to me. I must not grow bitter.

Oh, Vanessa
oh, my Nessa

‘Virginia? Did you say something?’

‘It doesn’t feel as if we’re going down.’

‘The pilot said we’re in a holding pattern. Which means there’s a queue of planes wanting to land. He also said there would be turbulence … we might have a bit of a bumpy ride.’

We were suddenly banking, horribly – one wing was making a bee-line for the ground.

‘All I can see is sea.’

‘The other side, there’s a mass of black cloud.’

Then we straightened up. We were climbing again.

The flight attendants were checking that the overhead baggage containers were closed, and walking up and down looking purposeful, removing bags from the emergency exit rows. We must have been circling for twenty minutes; I was willing the plane to start to swoop down, but at the end of each curve, it climbed once more.

I realised my companion was nervous. Yet she was the frequent flyer, not me. I wondered: dare I reassure her?

Sometimes Nessa laughed when I tried to help her. She was never so dear as when she needed me.

Distraction, that was what I needed. ‘Virginia, could you give me back
The Times
? I might do the crossword while we’re landing … “Domestic beast starts a phrase of poem in classical denouement” … Eleven letters, begins with ‘c’. Damn this pen. You’re right, they’re hopeless.’ Was it the air pressure? I gouged the paper. Then I tried gentleness: twizzled it, shook it.

‘Crosswords, to us, were an American craze.’ (The answer to the clue was obvious, though …)

1910. Over a century ago. The message came, and I had to go. Vanessa was miscarrying in Bursa, a boat trip away from Constantinople.

It was me she asked for. Roger wrote to me. And then I showed them what I was made of. I travelled alone, I travelled hard, I refused to fear heat, or snakes, or strangers, I went by
boat and bus and horseback and crossed Europe in less than four days. I found her lying in a darkened room. I became a man, off to save a woman – I was brave Gerda in my childhood book, my beautiful gold-and-green
Hans Andersen’s Fairy Stories
that my father bought for me when I was eleven, Gerda, my favourite, who saved little Kay, a brave girl who saved a boy – Angela had named her daughter well.

Later I used that trip in
Orlando
. I was
Orlando
. A man-woman.

The pilot said ‘Cabin crew, ten minutes to landing.’