The desire to be host deserted me as soon as I rode the car through the gate, if not before. I made a greeting to so many hundred things just on the way to the house that I couldn’t introduce to Jim. Not that they had any real significance. Just layers of impressions each as small as feather down that didn’t bear saying but swiftly added to each other and made a bird that carried me off to an unshared place. The borders of the walk packed by summer growth gave no clear view of the house. Vying shades of green all wound and mingling surged together—an unruly crowd. Fat birds, long used to our absence, went crashing into the trees. Among the faces that disentangled themselves—the colonnade of gnarly olives lining the walk at inspection and a half-bald Rosemary nestled against the rusted well into which I’d pushed loads of sand. The untamed laurel, rustling with creatures, still made the passage eerie connecting the little house to big house, and old gate-posts staked the claim of earlier inhabitants—an entrance through which donkeys came pulling carts of fishing nets, and women followed, dressed in black, widows of fishermen, pulling cold, sullen, toyless children behind—maybe Jim said something—nothing interrupted the thoughts of these things, except the smell of lavender by the house, for which I stopped to rub between my wrists. At the door, no welcome mat—a metal grate, resting on uneven stones, announced my entrance with a clang when I didn’t step over it.
I hardly remember our arriving. I ask myself for that memory but only one memory appears, which is not so much a memory as a ritual of arrival, of going to the kitchen, of taking bread and cheese to the terrace, of eating my sandwich and going to the garage for boots, of walking around the garden and then coming back to the house to set the Grandfather clock in motion. After that comes the making of fire, and a container of fish soup, and the drinking of the wine. Then there’s a walk on the beach as night falls and back at the house a hot shower—the ablutions you could say—and afterward comes the mortification by cold, damp sheets. Almost every guest is blotted out by this experience. Their first impression, maybe their strongest impression—the single thing I remember least.
I sat at his rusted kitchen table and looked out—as he’d said—through the back window of his Brooklyn tenement, into the green leaves of a single tree that managed to obscure the whole dinghy city, sitting with my elbows between dirty coffee cups and a jar of pens, and pads of letter paper with half-drafted notes—I had the feeling of the hours he’d spent like this, of his relief in the solitude of this unlikely place. It seemed magical to have found, in a far off neighborhood, in a dingy apartment, with a weird collection of things, the one thing I hadn’t been able to find myself—a resting place. And instead of finding it all very peculiar, the precariousness of the arrangement seemed just like the proof of how hard it was to make.
An island always seems like the place to keep the meaning of things. Old fishermen should tell you about the sea. There should be bakers, priests, shepherds, sail makers, gardeners into whose care you could go become those things, and in the end become yourself.
A storm last night after I got here, after dinner, rattling the doors in their locks. And nothing is better than a storm for portentousness, and to feel everything but the island wiped away. I was more than ready for bed, but went to the living room, built a fire, and sat for awhile halfway to a dream, seeing the room filled with fishing nets, circled by wooden chairs for mending, and a more comfortable chair I saw by the fire with an embroidered cushion that was always getting pushed aside to have the workspace for heating water, and burning things and drying dampened clothes. A table lived in one corner with a couple of chairs and a bookcase spare of books with maybe a bible and some stray tools, a knitting bag, a small accordion. Against the wall were empty bottles stacked in crates, and a dish on a worktable with crumbled pieces of biscuit. In another corner, in a nest made of retired nets and laid with woolen padding were two small boys asleep like chicks—twins—their scalps harshly cropped and scabby, buttoned up from knees to neck in black wool, their skin raw at the cuffs. On their legs woolen tights and the dull gleam of hammered nails shining from their clogs. They had such white faces. Such lightly formed features, as though they would fade away and become moons, or shells, or stones. And looking at a picture of them years later, not many, at their funeral, someone would say—even then they’d looked like skulls washed over by the sea. Their mother, who’d lost their father before them, had always felt old, and always felt her fate would be to live by the sea and lose everything. The sea came up to her doorstep, lapped at the walls, hocked foam at her door. It came in where it wanted—damp penetrating the walls. It blinded the windows with salt. They were the only ones who used the gate to enter, and huddled between the stone walls like stabled animals waiting for slaughter, she felt. She was practical. She would lose everything and die, and so might as well be old. She had given birth to old babies and they’d beaten her to the grave.
We arrived in Berlin by train. The apartment we rented filled with orange gold light. A room, a brown tile coal-burning heater in the corner, wide floor boards, two windows, bare walls flecked with lilac paint and wisps of wallpaper. A small red-framed mirror, a canvas closet striped in blue and white like an old beachside changing stall, and placed directly in the middle of the floor, two small mattresses, each with pillow and folded comforter, looking significant, and, with the gap of a foot between them, modestly restrained. The city very green, big trees, grass growing between the stones of the sidewalk, a shaggy laid-back look. Our building—facing a little square park with handsome couples making barbecues and children playing naked. Our key kept beneath a foot-mat at the door. People in sunglasses and sandals riding bicycles, sitting everywhere at cafes, eating ice cream, drinking beer. A market nearby with enormous loaves of bread cut and weighed like wheels of cheese, multicolored eggs, kilos of blueberries, cherry juice. After New York, the Berlin summer, like country-life masquerading as a city.
To think just one thing, the same thing, everyday, at the same time, even just five minutes—would be like running your hand along a smooth surface and suddenly hitting a doorknob. Once a day you touch it, it grows more real, but somehow never joins the rest of your walk. Gradually you discover more handles, and then realize that one of them must turn, just because you’d always called them doorknobs without thinking what you’d meant by it.
One afternoon the sun woke me from a nap. I didn’t remember climbing into bed. On the other side of the nightstand my sister wasn’t in her own. An uncapped pen on the table, a cardigan over the back of a chair, moving in the breeze, had the look to me of things left behind in a hurry. I threw my cover off and rushed to the window to make sure the deux-cheveaux was parked where it should have been, but that too wasn’t where I expected it. I turned and ran from the room. I shouted for my mother. Ran down the hall to her bedroom. From the door I saw nothing but a mess of covers and ran out again frantic. Why had I fallen asleep? I went to the banister and yelled into the stairwell. I yelled in the kitchen as well as the living room, though the two shared a doorway. I heard only the Grandfather-clock in response. Everything was still. And then the house revealed its indifference, revealed that its rooms weren’t there to delight or shelter or comfort me, and swiftly the indifference spread from the rooms to the garden, to the ocean, to the sun.
It is like haunting myself on these pages—like that part of me that would come back as a ghost and go around taking letters from their envelopes, and knock the paintings at an angle, or send smells of cooking from the kitchen at inexplicable times, and open the window at night—the slight disruptiveness of a presence who belongs to a universe all its own and can’t imagine leaving a trace in these motions—who rights the angles of the paintings she disrupts, and usually returns the letters to their envelopes so that it seems obvious she’s not even aware of her haunting, that she hasn’t done it out of mischief or a desire to make her presence felt. A life moving according to its own rhythms, with an utterly different time, the worlds intersecting, barely, like two hairs on a pillow. As I would tell the story of my life it’s not a story emerging, but strange remainders of me that live beyond my past selves.
At night the garden grows in size because it joins the sky. During the day if the sky is cloudy it puts a roof on everything. Even when the day is sunny the distance in the blue is only something vague, immeasurable, but on a moonless night the garden shares the light of the universe, and the stars are everywhere between the trees, they come down to the horizon at the end of the long perspective, the suns of other galaxies, and the Milky Way—there in the middle like the tail of a gesture made by a hand holding a candle. In the dark I can hear trailing voices, kids going home from a party on bicycle. Sometimes the wind carries over the sound of someone whistling, a dog singing. Without the moon on guard everything seems less dark. With the moon the night is eerie in a way it isn’t in the company of stars. The stars and the human sound seem close.
I cut mine like a boy’s at age fifteen, but I still felt like I had long hair, except that it worried me. I felt it waiting beneath my scalp to push up again and fall down my back in waves. It grew thicker and darker after I cut it. There seemed no way to mask it, nothing that it wouldn’t overgrow, that didn’t require constant vigilance. I felt it doing things behind my back, unpredictable, unruly gestures while I tried to be nice or charming. Even as a girl my mother tucked it in my coat before I went to school with the warning that it attracted men. It makes me think of strange old postcards of women standing with trains of hair trailing the ground, a foot of it lying on the ground even when draped over a chair. And they are always naked, except that you hardly noticed the bodies, as if they were just roots of a plant. There is just hair and then the whiteness of skin interrupted again by that other hair, holy of holies.
When I was in very low moods I used to think of letting it grow longer, then cutting it all off and taking it to a wig maker—wearing a wig of my own hair. I knew it was a vicious idea, akin to a zoo really.