TIME SLIPPED BY like the shadow of a cloud over a corn field, there was light and darkness and light once more, the glasses were emptied and filled. Nina read and I dozed in the glow of the fire, got up, walked past the dark walls of books, took one down and put it back. Only after an hour, by which time Nina’s hand was moving automatically to the right to reach for her glass, even if it was empty, did I look for something I intended to read. I picked up one of the candelabras and scanned the titles. At least half of Uncle Herman’s library had been assembled by Zeno, the other half Herman and I had added. The result was a curious mixture of Kabbalah, philosophy, physics, and theology, a twentieth-century alchemist’s library. It took a while for me to find the right book, something that was completely out of place among all those stiff, scholarly tomes. It was the novel Herman had been reading the last time we were here together: Call It Sleep, by Henry Roth. I remember him sitting and enthusiastically making notes in the margins, a habit I couldn’t stand. When I said something about it, he had looked at me with gleaming eyes. ‘Stop whining, Nathan,’ he had said. ‘This is work.’ He had held up the book, asked me if I knew it. No. Roth, said Herman, was a forgotten writer. Sometime in the thirties he had made his debut with a novel that bore all the elements of modernism, a strikingly European novel. ‘Stream of consciousness, realism, surrealism, fantasy, dialogue, the whole lot. An amazing book. Pitch-black. Terrifyingly hopeless.’ And he had told me about Roth, the son of East European Jews who had gone to America and started at the bottom of the heap. He was a communist, who, because of his political convictions, came to a dead end as a writer. He became a ‘labourer,’ then a chicken farmer in the wilds of Maine, and had never published another book. ‘Roth’s novel,’ said Herman, ‘can be read as a kind of sociological case history.’ I had disputed this, without ever even having read it. ‘Every novel is a lie, Nuncle. Fiction is, by definition, unreliable, and therefore of no use.’ Herman had raised his eyebrows. ‘At the very most,’ I had said, ‘a novel can give you an idea of a particular way of looking at things. But even then, it’s all so personal and subject to demands that have nothing to do with society, politics, or reality, that any “application” of a novel is like trying to read the future in a dog’s entrails.’ Herman had shaken his head and immersed himself once again in his book, scribbling furiously. Now and then he seemed to remember what I had said and he pressed his lips together disapprovingly and shook his head.
This was the book I finally chose. I sat down next to Nina and, like her, was soon lost in the world behind the cover. I didn’t realize how long we had been sitting there until I began to feel cold. Putting the book aside, I got up to stoke the fire, which was by now nothing more than a thick layer of smouldering chunks. It was some time before the flames shot back into the wood and the hearth began giving off heat.
‘It’s not a biography, N,’ said Nina, when I had sat back down.
‘What?’ For a moment I thought that she, just as I had done at the time, was commenting on Roth’s book. She held up the portion of the manuscript that she had finished reading. ‘Ah. No. No, not a real biography.’
Nina unfolded. She placed her hands on either side of her in the chair and stretched her legs. For a moment she looked like a gymnast on the parallel bars. I had to resist the urge to give her a score.
‘Reisele.’ Nina leaned forward and bathed her face in the fireglow. ‘You never saw her again?’
I shook my head. ‘Schlomo Minsky had been an important man in the Bund. Many people in those circles knew him. But in America, that sort of thing didn’t mean much. They already had very powerful unions over there. The Minskys just melted away into history.’
Nina looked at me uncomprehendingly.
‘That’s the way it goes. Life is like watching falling stars on an August night. They appear out of nowhere, draw a trail of light through the darkness, and then disappear again. The stories we tell imply that we experience an event from beginning to end, but all we really see is that briefly glowing trail. What happened before that, and what happens afterwards, we don’t know.’
‘So you think the world is made up of unfinished stories.’
‘Yes, and what we do is extrapolate those stories. We try to give them a beginning and an end. We try, on the basis of those fragmented stories, to understand the world.’
The upper half of her body moved gently, in an approving kind of way.
‘Are you pleased?’ I asked.
‘With this? Yes. But it reads like fiction. This Uncle Magnus, for instance …’
‘Cousin. Cousin Magnus and Uncle Chaim.’
‘Cousin and Uncle. You have them popping in and out as if they still exist.’
I gave her a long, hard look.
‘I like that,’ she said, ‘but it’s not what you’d expect in a biography.’
‘But perhaps they do still exist.’
‘In your mind? Okay. But that makes it more and more fiction and less and less biography.’ She drank the last few drops of wine from her glass and tipped back her head. She yawned. ‘But you certainly tell a good story, N.’
‘Time for bed,’ I said. ‘We’ll make up the four-poster in the hunting room, you can sleep in there. I’ll stay here in the chair.’
Nina looked at her watch. ‘Twelve-thirty. God, yes, I’m tired. But N, we’ll never last the next few days if one of us has to sleep in a chair. Even the bed’ll be cold. The only warm spot is right in front of the fire.’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘We share the bed. We make a small fire in the hunting room, to take the chill off, then crawl into bed and go to sleep.’
‘I’ve already made a fire in there. The chill is off. But the two of us in one bed? Weren’t you the woman who thought, only this afternoon, that I was going to rape her?’
She raised her eyebrows.
I took the poker out of the stand next to the hearth and raked the fire. ‘All right, let’s go. I’m dead tired.’
Nina blew out the candles, picked up the sleeping bag, and a candelabra. I picked up a glass, got my hip flask of Jameson’s and a box of Alka Seltzer out of my bag, grabbed my book and followed her into the hunting room. In the cold, cavernous hall the voice on the tape was still scraping through the darkness. We said nothing as we crossed the marble floor and opened the door on the other side.
Although the fire had been burning for some time now, the room was still freezing.
‘What’s that?’
I had put the hip flask on the table on my side of the bed, next to the book, the glass, the candelabra, a box of matches, and the box of Alka Seltzer. ‘My nightly ritual. Irish whiskey. In case I wake up and can’t fall back to sleep.’
‘Don’t you sleep well?’
‘Old people never sleep well. It’s like having a limited amount of time in which to do something and you keep putting it off until the end. Just before your time runs out you realize that you should have been better prepared, that you could have made more out of it if only you’d started sooner and now it’s too late. That’s how night-time feels, when you’re old.’
She looked at me blankly.
‘Would you like a hot-water bottle?’
‘Hot-water bottle?’
‘Hot-water bottle.’
‘Have we got any here?’
‘I’ll make one.’
I took my glass and race-walked through the dark hall to the kitchen. In the kettle on the kitchen stove was enough warm water to fill one of the empty wine bottles. When I had done that, I pushed open the back door and pulled the kettle through the snow. There was a sizeable bank behind the house. If it kept on snowing all night, they would have to dig us out in the morning. I put the kettle on the back of the stove, where it started hissing fiercely, stuck a cork in the bottle, filled my glass with hot water, and went back to the hunting room. Nina lay shivering under the covers. She had spread the sleeping bag out over the bedspread. Only the top of her head was visible. I took a thick woollen sock out of Uncle Herman’s cupboard, slid it over the bottle, and slipped the makeshift hot-water bottle under the covers on Nina’s side of the bed.
‘God, you’re clever …’ Her teeth were chattering so loudly, I could hardly understand her.
‘I know.’
‘And arrogant.’
‘I know.’
I pulled off my shoes and jacket, put down the steaming glass, and crawled in beside her. It was like sliding under an ice floe. ‘Tomorrow, let’s try to remember to put a couple of these bottles in bed an hour beforehand.’
Nina didn’t answer. There was only the quiet rustling of her breathing.
I stared at the brocade canopy, which was faintly lit by the glow from the hearth, and waited. It must have been nearly one in the morning. Darkness everywhere. A night as thick as treacle covered the land, no sound but the rustling of the snow, the endless stream of flakes that would keep falling, falling, falling, until things were no longer what they used to be.
An endless white plain of frozen snow, black patches of ice, stiff white grass.
‘Nathan …’
A dot on the emptiness.
Above that: the veiled sky.
A thin black stripe that crosses the burnished ice, walks effortlessly through the frozen stalks of grass, grows biggerandbiggerandbigger.
‘Nathan …’
The wind: a sheet of steel scraping across the countryside.
He sits at the foot of my bed.
Here.
There. At my feet, on my bed.
‘Nathan … It’s a cold, cold land.’
The darkness nestles in the corners of the room. Shadows huddle together under the four-poster bed. I peer through the slits of my eyelids at the foot of the bed and push myself up, against the wall, my head half-buried in the folds of the midnight blue canopy, in the musty smell of old velvet and mothballs and … I arrange the blankets and sheets, the quilted bedspread, the sleeping bag.
‘Zeno.’ Puffs of vapour escape my mouth. ‘This isn’t you. This is a dream.’
‘You talk to dreams, N?’
‘A trick of the light,’ I said.
‘And what am I? The light or the trick?’
Razor sharp. Uncle Herman was right: A Kopf. (But has he got a heart?)
Not light. Not light as in alightbulbgives. But still. All is clear.
He at my feet, at the foot of my bed. Me against the wall, in my cloak of deep dark blue velvet, under my baldachin of brocade, in a bed like a room, a room like a house.
He looks around.
I breathe out clouds of steam, reach sideways, unscrew the flask, and drink. As the fire starts burning inside me and my stomach tackles the whiskey, as the chill in my mouth gives way to the prickle of alcohol, he looks at me. His white face the dark eyes with the moss-green flecks the coppery hair. (Not that I can see him well enough to make out these details. It’s how well I know him. Like my heart. Like my stomach. Like the depths of the depths of myself.)
Every night. Sometimes not until morning. He has the time. He can wait. Every night: ‘Zeno, this isn’t you.’ All that time: It’s a cold, cold land.’
My shivering brother.
‘You’ve been exercising, Zeno. You’re less transparent. You’ve even got a bit of colour in your cheeks.’
He looks. The Zeno-knows-something-you-don’t-know look.
‘Come on, Zeno,’ I say. ‘Rattle your chains. Let me go back to sleep.’
Motionless. Silent.
But then.
He raises his head. He tips back his head. He opens the mouth in his head. He closes his eyes.
He breathes out.
And I hear. Oh Lord of the Universe, how I hear him. From across the fields, the snow-covered roads, the sleeping cities, the oceans that glitter like mica in the blue moonlight. I hear him.
A soft, gentle exhalation like a … a lament from afar … from far across fields and villages and houses and forests and fields and …
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
BookGlassCandelabraAlkaSeltzerFlask.
Matches.
Fire shoots up, crackling and sputtering, shadows flee timidly into their corners, orange-yellow flecks dance across the bed, the velvet canopy swells, the floorboards leap. The flame licks curiously at a candlewick and jumps over.
In a small sphere of light in the darkness of the universe, a universe surrounded by endless, snow-covered plains. The clouds from my mouth, fluorescent in the trembling light. Someone out of Dante’s Inferno, exiled to the frozen ice fields of Hell, doomed for all eternity to float through space in a clammy bed, surrounded by darkness cloaked in darkness and around that, a ring of frost. Alone all my life, even when there were people around me, but never lonelier than I feel right now … The last living soul.
Nina’s face appeared like a smudge on the darkness.
‘Nathan? Nathan. What’s wrong?’
‘Cold. It’s cold.’
She carefully sat up. ‘I thought you were talking to somebody.’
I shook my head.
Her face was right next to mine. ‘Has the fire gone out?’
‘In the hearth? I think so.’ I rubbed my forehead and sighed. ‘I’m sorry. I must have been dreaming.’
She nodded. I could hear her teeth chattering. I climbed out of bed. A tiny red eye was still glowing in the mouth of the hearth. I blew on it and laid the smallest piece of wood I could find on top. When it caught, I covered it with the rest of the chair legs and pieces of piano.
Nina was already asleep by the time I crawled back under the cold sheets on my side of the bed. Firelight rippled over the walls and ceiling. Now and then the wood snapped. There was a whispering sound, very soft, almost as gentle as Zeno’s sighs. When I blew out the candle, the room went dark. Moments later the glow of the fire loomed once more.