Note No. 5

For we are like the green earth that waits for snow
And like the snow that waits for the thaw
– PAUL ERNST, BRUNHILD

April 2020

It snowed in London last night. Quite out of season. Not this time the common sound of rain gurgling in gutters and drainpipes and whispering against windowpanes that enters sleep and insists on its presence. I was, nonetheless, awoken in the dark hours. A cold white silenced the room, seeping through the dank walls and the cracked window. I did not know what had woken me – I assumed last night’s pints of bitter in my bladder. I rose and padded on bare feet across the stained wooden floor to the door and down the passage to the communal bathroom. Coming back to the room I was struck by the absoluteness of the silence and some quality of light. I went to the window and parted the faded curtains.

All was whiteness outside. Kilburn was gone. London was gone. The streets, the cars, the pavements, the lampposts, the bicycles chained to lampposts, the rooftops, the eaves – all transformed. Through the dim rays of the street lights floated tiny feathers of snow.

I stayed at the window for a long time. The first feelings of something true in the early months of this, my second exile. I took the coat off the back of the door, shrugged it on over my tracksuit pyjamas and put on the black sneakers with the pink trim that Nadine had given me for my sixtieth birthday with the card that said, simply, ‘Forever Young’. I went out into the streets.

All was quiet. Empty. I stepped quickly, regretting the scars the footprints left behind me. I don’t know for how long I walked. I was reminded of walks in the snowed streets of East Berlin, the quietness, the clarity, the absence of commercial gaud.

I walked home, no, I walked to the bedsit, careful to place my feet in the footprints I had already left. It was still dark when I got back, slipped out of the coat and sneakers and climbed back into bed. I slept more deeply than I had in a long time, like I used to sleep after making love with Bongi, her head in the crook of my arm and her legs wrapped around mine.

In the morning I went back to the window. Cars and buses and motorcycles and pedestrians had violated the snow. It had turned brown. The garishness of Kilburn and London and the world had reasserted itself. I didn’t wash. I didn’t eat. I made a cup of instant coffee with two sugars. I opened this red notebook and began to tell this story. But this story will not begin here. It will begin at the beginning of the end.