Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (33 page)

Though I probably said it too often. I was tired of course, I was a young mother. And then, an author … maybe modern women are always tired.

‘I had brothers … difficult half-brothers. One couldn’t always say no to them. It’s a knack girls need to learn quite young.’

‘Do you think those are normal crows, Virginia? I mean, are they the same as British crows?’

‘Let’s go and have a look. I’m fond of crows. One saw them in Sussex.’

Crows were allies, somehow – one always felt that. But as we approached, they broke ranks, and we saw the dark-grey of their bodies (not quite British) as their wings part-unfolded and they hopped and skipped sideways, tumbling ungracefully, only half-bothered, cawing harshly. Then two little boys in matching blue jumpers took their lead from us and ran at the birds, with their mother, who was veiled, calling vainly after them, and soon all the crows, with a loud batting of wings, had flown far away over the walls of Topkapi.

73

‘It creeps me out, when he looks at me,’ Gerda told Lil, ‘the boy with the beard.’

‘Tell him to fuck off.’ Lil wasn’t bothered. ‘I tell him to fuck off all the time.’

They were walking in the sunlight with a huge grey deerhound that was there when Gerda woke the first morning. The golden-skinned girl claimed it was hers. ‘I call him Wolfy.’ Fortunately Gerda was OK with animals. She gave him the Three Musketeers chocolate bar she had half-eaten in the taxi from the airport, and the dog wolfed it, and licked her hand. She felt at home with him after that. Gerda got credit from Lil for courage as she walked along with her fingers plunged into the wiry curls at the base of his neck, which meant she had to hold her arm up. He was awesomely tall, with a noble head and oddly long, speedy hindquarters. ‘The others are scared of Wolfy. You’re not.’

It’s not really true, Gerda thought to herself. The others aren’t scared, or not very scared, and I am, slightly, but I’m hiding it. Lil made this up so she can think I’m special, so she has a good reason to feel what she feels.

The truth is, the feeling’s about her, not me. Lil is lonely among all those Divs. She just needs someone she can have fun with. It’s not really about me at all.

(But
I
like
her
. So is that about me?)

‘He’s not your boyfriend, is he?’ Gerda asked. Suddenly it mattered that he was not.

‘Boyfriend?
Him?
I haven’t got a boyfriend. Why would I
want a
boyfriend?
’ Lil said the word as if squeezing it in tweezers prior to disposing of it in toxic waste.

‘Well, on your rock there’s a lot of boys.’

‘On the rock it’s a different world.’ Lil reached out without warning and grabbed Gerda’s wrist, quite painfully tight, then let it go and interlaced their fingers. They walked along with the dog between them, a bridge of hands over giant Wolfy, arms too high to be relaxed, like a flying buttress on a church. Gerda felt awkward, glad and proud. Lil queened it over all of them, but she saw Gerda as an equal.

Somebody’s noticed I’m special, thought Gerda. Someone from the other side of the world. ‘Do you think life would be better if it was just girls?’ she asked cautiously.

‘Obviously,’ Lil Robber said. ‘But boys are useful to do things for us.’

Gerda suddenly remembered something. ‘I went to an allgirls’ school,’ Gerda said. ‘It wasn’t better, it was actually awful.’

‘That’s
school
,’ said Lil. ‘School’s awful. It’s prison, isn’t it.’

‘Still you have to learn things,’ Gerda said.

‘School is prison for innocent people.’ (Gerda thought: she’s said that before.) ‘I pity you for being locked up,’ Lil added, but her face said something more complex, more resentful.

‘One of the teachers was good,’ said Gerda. Lil was so sure of her opinions, and Gerda needed to hang on to her own.

‘That’s like saying “I had a nice prison guard”.’

‘It’s – all about your point of view,’ said Gerda. ‘It’s an Assertion, not a Fact.’ She could feel the mute force of Lil’s anger. The Robber Girl couldn’t answer her.

The dog was loping along by the lake, blue-grey-black against the blue-dark water. He had escaped their arch of hands, which had collapsed into a hanging garland that they swung, swung as they kept in step.

Then an army of crows landed in the shallows, splashing,
pecking at the brightness, chattering. Suddenly the dog leaped into the lake.

Lil rounded on Gerda, eyes blazing topaz, hands on hips, cheeks heavy and red.

‘Now you got to get him back. Fact.’

74

I was watching our shadows as we walked towards the gates. Did they look frail and elderly? Were both of us slightly bent forward, from writing? I pulled my shoulders back and looked at her. We had pitied the women of the Harem, but I suddenly knew they wouldn’t want to be us. No, they would have pitied Woolf’s childlessness.

‘What are you staring at?’

‘Nothing. I was wondering what the women of the Harem would have thought of you, Virginia.’

‘I would have been beyond their comprehension. And what would they have thought of you?’

(They would have asked her if she had a husband, and when she said ‘Yes’, they would have asked ‘Where is he? And how old is your child? She isn’t with you?’ They might have thought she had missed the point.)

‘Have I tired you out, Virginia?’

‘Certainly not!’ She struck out towards the arch more energetically than before.

We walked over the gate’s massive threshold, a great metal sill, burnished in the middle to dazzling smoothness by the endless passage of the little people, their shoes humbly passing and polishing. Thousands of shadows of the living and the dead. We are cotton-fluff: dandelion; we blow on the wind.

Aya Sophia glowed into view, its central dome like an enormous gold-tipped breast on a cream and pink, sprawled, stucco body.

New York is a man, I thought to myself, cool, straight, confident.

And Istanbul’s a middle-aged woman. Watery. Supple. All tides and inlets.

‘Of course the wives plotted against each other. It was politics, and that’s what male politicians do – oh look at the queue for Aya Sophia.’

The queue stretched out in restless motion towards the flowerbeds and fountains of Sultanahmet Park, which rose and fell, rose and fell, bowing and aspiring to the Blue Mosque in the distance. A shifting succession of people crossed the bright expanse of paving-stones in front of the water, flickering and fading like the fountains.

So many people. Ants, midges. Why should I mind so much about Edward? Surely I would find another man.

‘It wasn’t a story of sisterhood, was it?’

‘Sisters do feel rivalry.’

Now we were in the queue behind a young Chinese man who was doing a full Kung Fu routine to pass the time. He kept doing lunges, and shouting ‘Ha’, which was wearing.

‘I never had a sister. I imagined I would love her. Were you really jealous of your sister? Did you ever, for a moment, hate her?’

‘I didn’t dare to hate her, you see. After Mother died, Vanessa mothered me. Even before, I ran to her for kisses. For me, Nessa always meant kisses. But we were both artists. Of course, I was jealous. Artists are always jealous of each other.’

‘I hope you don’t think I am jealous of you. I’m not, I promise. I admire you, Virginia. You’re like my mother, honestly. All modern writers look to you. That’s what you are, our foremother.’

I felt so hurt when she hooted with laughter. The sweating Chinese man paused mid-kick and looked at her sharply, but she was oblivious.

‘It sounds like an ape, a foremother! No, it’s ridiculous, I wasn’t a mother, I had no talent for looking after. You can’t foist motherhood on me.

(
More gently
) ‘I never learned to look after children.’

‘Do you object to followers? (
Cheering up
.) If you won’t let us be your daughters, we’ll just traipse after you, unacknowledged.’

(
She follows Virginia to the ticket office, which they have reached at last. They pick up guide-books. Virginia reads hers
.)

‘I know quite a lot about it already.’

We entered the body of Aya Sophia through tremendous doors, twelve feet high. It was huge, and cool, full of light and people. It went on forever. It was a city.

‘Who was Saint Sophia, by the way? I’m sure she must have been hideously tortured to deserve this kind of edifice.’

‘Aya Sophia wasn’t a person. It means “Sacred wisdom”, Virginia.’

‘
Sapientia
in Latin … Yes. Wisdom is female. I was never wise.’

The temple stretched above us, airy, colossal, essentially unchanged from a century ago, though the wheels of lights which hung from the roof were now electric, not candles. But far above the lights, reappeared like phoenixes, two golden mosaics flickered like flames – Mary the Mother gazed down at us, child on her lap, calm patient face, and I recognised her with joy and sorrow, the eternal absence I could never fill, the mother I always had to find again. When we came before, there was only blank plaster; the Christian murals had been painted out by Mohammedans who thought images were sinful. Atatürk, ‘friend of history’, had restored them, according
to my guide-book. People were gazing up, but thoughtfully. These were aesthetes, not religious enthusiasts. Watching them, one thought ‘those wars are over’.

According to Angela, alas, they were not.

An American guide gave a loud commentary somewhere at the back of the church. ‘This is the Omphalos. What we call the umbilicus. The spot where the child was joined to his mother at the beginning of the world. The Romans crowned their emperors in this circle. They believed that everything started here …’

Yes, the mother. But I had to escape her. All through my life, ‘my mother’, ‘my father’ …

I wanted to go up to the gallery where I had gone with Vanessa, when Aya Sophia was still a working mosque, so the women had to watch the men from above. ‘Angela,’ I said, ‘come upstairs with me.’

‘Where are the stairs?’

‘There weren’t any last time I came, just a sloping stone ramp that spiralled up sixty feet or so. Empress Theodocia used to drive up it in her chariot. Such a shameless display of power, to drive one’s chariot right through a temple! I’m sure they’ve installed a lift by now.’

What followed was something I will never forget.

‘RAMPA’, it said on the notice. But when I looked right, I saw a sloping tunnel. As a girl, I could never use the underground. I asked a guide if there was any other way up, but she shook her head. This was it.

It was pinkish-grey, low-ceilinged, cobbled. It must have been there since Theodocia’s time. Waiting for me for two thousand years.

As I stepped over the threshold, my courage failed. ‘Does it go on like this? No windows?’

‘It will be fine, you’ll see. I just remember being young, walking up, with Nessa, arm in arm, and in a hurry. Not wanting to miss anything.’

‘Virginia, I can’t do it. You go ahead. I’ll sit and wait.’

‘What’s the matter?’

She was trembling, and breathing fast.

‘Nothing. I’m going to try.’

I didn’t want her to see my fear. I took a deep breath, made for the first turn, and rounded it, but it went on ahead of me, narrowing slightly, and no more windows, and would go on forever, no hope, I thought, and no Edward in the background to help me, and if I go on, I will never get out. As I turned and fled, I bumped into Virginia, and her body was surprisingly warm and solid. ‘I can’t,’ I told her. ‘I’m claustrophobic.’

And then we were together, back at the beginning. Virginia looked into me, into my fear, with those piercing orbs, without flinching.

‘Perhaps I am afraid of being born,’ I said. I tried to laugh, but my heart was beating, and a light breeze told me my skin was wet. ‘My mother told me I was born too fast.’

And so I took Angela’s hand. I helped her to be born, though I had never had a baby. I saw how she suffered, but for me it was easy. ‘Step by step,’ I said. ‘Step by step, and we’ll get to the top.’

Her hand was shaking, but she did what I said. We reached the first turn, and the last window. ‘Don’t look back,’ I said. ‘Trust me. If we just go on walking, we will get there.’

Step by step, she led me on.

I could feel the tension in her arm. She started to pull away and go back. I talked to her quietly, as if she was a child. Some nonsense, ‘It’s all right, good, you’re doing well …’ I no longer remember what I said. There was just my will-power carrying us, some womanly force that would make things happen, Theodocia’s chariot, Nessa and I, driving us up towards the light.

I will remember her voice for ever. It was soft and low, a sweet murmur. It kept me going, like a golden thread, and the gentle pressure of her hand on mine. But another voice tried to drag me down. ‘You’ve gone too far, you can never go back, you will burrow on through the dark forever.’

I could hardly bear her mute dependence, but I took the burden, I found a smile, my legs were strong, we went on walking. Suddenly there was a hole in the wall, I suppose an air-shaft, not really a window, and through it we heard the voices of children, sweet and clear and echoing. She stopped
for a moment – I thought she’d given up – but then I saw she was breathing, smiling.

‘I’m all right.’