Necessary Lies(27)
He came here one more time, as a visitor that year, for a retreat. We have a few rooms in the monastery where people come for peace. Perhaps it calmed him to be in a place where we accept the limitations of reason. I said to him then that in the depth of doubt there were always two roads, one of despair and one of hope, and that I always chose hope.
I pray to God that peace and hope comes to you, dear Frau Herzmann. You and your late husband will always be in my prayers. Father Albrecht
Once, at a party in Montreal to which William took her, Anna met a Filipino woman who said she could remember everything that ever happened to her. “Exactly the way it happened,” she said firmly, “As if I were watching the same film over again.”
Anna remembers feeling incredulous at first, then irritated with the certainty in the woman’s voice and then, guilty that her own memories came maimed, malleable, prone to manipulation. “I can close my eyes,” she can still hear the woman’s slow voice, “and I can see what I saw twenty years ago. Feel the shape of the rope with which we had to tie the house down before the hurricane. Smell the wax on the bamboo floor.”
“All of it, right here,” she knocked at the side of her head, a soft knock muted by a layer of black, shining hair, “forever.” But Anna no longer knows how much of what has happened is already lost.
How she regrets now the wastefulness of the first weeks after William’s death. Knits her brows at the recklessness of picking up the small silver scissors with which he trimmed his beard and then putting them back, in their place on the glass shelf in the bathroom. Of breathing in the air trapped in the fibres of William’s shirts, opening the book he left unfinished, a book mark pointing to a traveller’s account of the journey through the Russian steppes: The spring is chilly in the steppes. The wind has no barrier, here, no reason to stop.
How much smarter she is now. She knows that without her efforts William’s presence will evaporate from the rooms. Keeping it demands ministrations that rarely repay her with the vividness she craves. In the street she might see a man his size, turning his head in a gesture that is unmistakably William. Then she has to stop herself from running after him, grateful for this momentary sharpness of feeling, which is all she has left.
She has devised some temporary measures. “Stay away,” she tells herself. “Save it,” she murmurs. “Don’t look.” She stays away from the black case of his violin, hides William’s favourite mug, his navy-blue dressing gown still smelling of sandalwood soap, with some threads pulled out already, breaking the thickness of the terry cloth. These she guards, saves them for the empty time when memories have to be coaxed out, enticed.
She flings the door to his study open and walks in. She brushes her fingers over the surface of the mahogany desk, over the pile of papers, over the drawers with their round brass locks. She opens them, one by one, slides her hand inside, smoothing the things that retain the layer, however faint, of his touch.
“My haven,” he called it when he brought her here, for the first time, and she looked at the piles of books and papers lying on the floor, seeing in them a maze of paths that would take her years to unravel. His ex-wife and her inexplicable outbursts of hatred. Julia’s angry silence. William was standing right behind her, his arm around her waist, his mouth nuzzling her hair aside and touching her neck. She leaned back and pressed her head to his chest. When she was little she would ask her father to let them walk like that, together, her feet on his. He pretended to wobble as they walked and she laughed at these big steps she was making, the sweeping swings to the left and to the right, the sudden twists broken by a peal of laughter.
I am that which is.
I am everything that is, that was, and that will be. No mortal man has lifted my veil.
He is of himself alone, and it is to his aloneness that all things owe their being.
They frightened her then, these words, so beautifully penned on white parchment paper, in their wooden frame.
“These?” he repeated her question. “These are ancient oracles. Beethoven had them mounted under glass on his working table,” he had told her. “You don’t think I’m arrogant to do the same?”
“No,” she laughed, “I don’t.”
How relieved she felt then, how light! Borrowed, words somehow became less ominous, easier to tame.
“I’m worried about you,” Marie says as she so often does. The touch of her friend’s hand is firm and not unpleasant, but Anna withdraws her own hand swiftly. At Stach’s, a Polish restaurant in Old Montreal where Marie has taken her for a bowl of goulash and a thick slice of rye bread, Anna separates strands of soft meat with the tip of her spoon. She puts her spoon down, and sips water from a thick, green glass.
“It is this absent look,” Marie says, “I can’t stand it.”
No one, Anna thinks, has told her about the apathy of grief. Of the loathing of the slightest effort, the slightest gesture. Of the long, empty hours spent in bed, curled up, her head covered, hoping that the world has stopped as it should. Of the times, increasingly alarming to her, when she finds herself doing something she does not remember starting, as if, in these blank, missing moments, her mind floated somewhere above and could not be accounted for.
“Can you sleep?” Marie asks.
Anna shakes her head. That has changed, too. At first she could. Right after William’s death sleep was an escape, a relief; she could have slept night and day. Now she has to rely on Halcyon, her mind emptying itself in a heavy, dreamless slumber. The pill doesn’t help her fall asleep; she takes it for the dawn when, without it, she would have woken up, no matter how dark she has made the bedroom. At five in the morning her mind refuses all consolation.