THAT VAIN WORD NO

BRENDA WALKER

He said, repeating the opinion of Socrates in the Phaedrus, that a tree, so beautiful to look at, never spoke a word and that conversation was possible only in the city, between men.

-SAUL BELLOW, Ravelstein

William is an old man, a surgeon, standing barefoot on a paved driveway at dawn. He holds a hot-water bottle in his arms. He’s looking at his trees. Conifers trucked in from some place of immediate forests. They’re lined up along the driveway now, deep in the earth, evenly spaced, shocked. These trees don’t show their misery yet, the foliage is firm and grey, but William notices an unhealthy pliancy that wasn’t there when they were unloaded from the delivery truck. They will recover; they will grow. In the meantime he breathes in the scent of Christmas trees that reminds him of the smell of disinfectant in a dirty urban train.

He was six years old, sitting by his mother, watching her take a square of chocolate from a man across the aisle, watching as she slid into a light diabetic coma that the other passengers mistook for sleep. The man folded the silver foil back over the remaining chocolate; his hands were white and small. William said no, please no, quietly, she heard him and she refused to listen and he lost her. As he sat alone beside her body he relaxed. If she could slip away then so would he. He noticed the disinfectant: pine-scented chemicals rising from something, vomit, blood, half wiped up by a railway cleaner days before, and closed his eyes. His mother began to stir at Central Station. So long ago, almost sixty years ago, and the smell of pine is waiting in his memory.

Birds sing, the sky turns white, then rose, then blue, the hot-water bottle cools against his chest. He hears the tearing sound of a blind spinning upward in Dan’s kitchen, the empty voice of a politician from the radio inside the house where his coffee waits.

Dan helped him to plant the trees. They’ve been neighbours for a long time. William knows the details of Dan’s illness, the name of the woman in Geneva who sometimes phones him in the night. Dan is vegan, thinner than William, lining up ten vegetables and five fruits on his kitchen bench each morning. It’s kept him alive, kept the markers down in his blood. Dan says that if he doesn’t die of cancer he’ll die of starvation. He’s a good cook, in spite of the restrictions. He often cooks for William. The trees were his idea; it’s William’s driveway but Dan organised the sudden view of the pine trees through his kitchen window.

The old men hacked at the roots with axes, freeing the young trees from their clenched and pot-bound state. Dan dug pits slowly and filled them with water and William steadied each tree in the earth. Then they ate together: black ragged mushrooms with chopped garlic for Dan, steak for William.

Late at night, back in his own house, William climbed the spiral staircase to his bedroom. At every step he had a new view of the room below: the cane rocking chair, the sisal mat. Photographs of his daughter, Nina. Alone, long after a long-exhausted marriage, he circled the few things he owned like a great bird moving upwards in the air, thanks to this staircase. And it carried him like a mother to his sleep.

*

William is driving by the river, later in the morning. Boats with firm white sails slip beside his car and veer away into greener ruffled water. The traffic has to slow so that cars can file past a cyclist on a fold-out bike. A tourist. A man who doesn’t know his cycle paths, who has checked his folding bicycle through with the rest of his luggage in some truly distant city. Osaka. Dusseldorf. The cars slow, slice into the edge of the adjoining lane, ease past. The cyclist could slip and be destroyed in spite of all this irritated care. It’s William’s turn to pass. He guesses at the space the man will need, then looks in the rearview mirror and sees that the rider has a joyful hands-free smile. Each driver puts aside the light callousness of the morning rush, slows, then speeds away.

William gives the day’s first patient his opinion of her illness. She sits with her husband beside her and William watches as the man’s hands began to tremble. He smells fire, an electrical fire, just a faint smell, then he realises that the smell comes from the husband, from his skin and breath. It’s fear. She listens calmly; almost everybody lapses into shock. That’s why William draws diagrams; he writes instructions down. The patient tells him, quickly, that she has children. As if this will reverse his diagnosis. As if he’ll change his mind. She’s in jeans and running shoes. Some of his patients dress formally in black, they make a funerary occasion of their appointments. I have a rendezvous with Death. William tries to think of the cyclist, smiling on the lethal metal highway. After she speaks she gathers her things. In the waiting room William sees a child scramble to his feet, a boy about the same age as he was when he rode in the train to Central Station beside his own unconscious mother. This boy must belong to his patient. Her secret shield. Surely a mother cannot be taken from her child. Surely even Death plays by this rule: that a mother cannot be parted from her child. The husband leaves first, then the woman with her son’s hand in her own. Quite often at the door he feels misgivings; he senses the vast appeal of simple denial; the refusal of his surgery.

*

Once William’s mother took him to a strange house in the city. He remembers the narrow street, the shush of trains. His mother left him alone with instructions not to follow her upstairs. He was afraid to leave the room in case she disappeared. He pissed in thimblefuls, thirsty but too frightened to look for a kitchen, soaking the brocade and wadding of a chair, soaking his own dark shorts. He was damp when she appeared at the foot of the stairs. By nightfall the cloth barely rasped his skin. There was no smell. His mother was at her sweetest, her most warm and sad. He knew that she hadn’t pulled it off, the new lipstick and the astrakhan coat had been good for an afternoon upstairs but nothing more. They were going to be alone, William and his mother, or William would be alone in a wet chair guarding a strange door.

He sees patient after patient with good news and bad, the day slides into shadow, he takes a message on his mobile from Dan. Dinner again, yes.

*

Dan’s house smells of butter and polenta, of cornfields in summer. Or is it paper? Something good. William leaves his drink untouched; his hands are occupied with a metal lobster from Japan. Dan owns this kind of thing. Probably old. Yes, it’s old, Dan tells him that it was made by a family in Kyoto who died, one after the other, leaving no descendants. Brown flanges clack into place as William curls the tail. It’s a miracle. The legs are loose and jointed like early attempts at prosthetic hands.

Dan’s phone rings. He takes the call in another room but William can still hear his voice, he’s speaking a name over and over again, a single syllable, half-sung into the receiver to soothe or amuse the woman in Geneva on the other end of the line. Like a parent calling softly in the darkness. Dan at sixty-seven, dying, and in love. William suddenly realises that it’s the voice Dan uses when he says his own name, which he does at times, dramatising a conversation, putting himself in the sentence. Dan loves this distant woman as he loves himself.

William remembers crowding into a lift in the city with his mother. He was too short to see her face. He reached for her hand and held it until the doors opened and she stepped out ahead of him and he found that he had been holding onto a pale man, who smiled but did not speak. Tonight there is nothing but his mother in his memory. Even his daughter Nina fades. Perhaps he should speak to Dan about all this.

Through the window, beneath the blind that he had heard Dan raise that morning, William sees his row of conifers and feels the relief of darkness for the foliage newly positioned in unsheltered sun, the relief of the slow restorative lift of dampness from the unfamiliar earth. He closes his eyes and listens to Dan’s love, failing as his life will slowly fail but still musical with the confident failing music of all human love.