No Answers
Comments (0) The Next Village
Like the beanstalk, I had outgrown the village, and as the days passed I finally lost all confidence that it could contain me. I had outgrown the village: everyone said the same. True, they were too polite to verbalise it directly; instead, they forced me to read their conclusion through the sign language they carefully scattered among the various pots and pans and fruit baskets and wine presses and, in brief, any and all the objects that made up their lives. At first I read a kind of embarrassment in these signals, which, appearing both prolix and contrived, seemed to lack the immediate honesty of a conversation. But soon I realised that it was only my own understanding which was awkward, that their symbolism had both fluidity and grace, and that the first sign of my maturity was doubtless this newfound ability to read, albeit haltingly, the messages assigned for me at the agency of their hands. Indeed, perhaps they had been telling me to move on since the day I was born, but it was only now I had learned to read their signals that the request became a prescript. The girl was lying down, watching me with quiet, curious eyes, and behind her eyes were the eyes of the whole village, willing me either to leave them or to accept them unconditionally, to accept her, to accept myself, to put aside disbelief and return to the place where everything is acceptance and no understanding is required.
“You’ve made your decision. Now you’re just trying to justify it,” she said. “Even now, you’re thinking about the girls in the next village, and what might happen between them and you. I can see the thought, like a little coiled silver thing that’s trying to make itself invisible.” She stood up and walked toward the house. In the wake of her unassuming perfume I seemed to inhale the mild serenity of something always full and always complete. I had found a second-rate lover that would do my bidding, I reflected, even if secretly I had always coveted a first-rate virgin that would not. But the fact was, I did not really understand what I had, and neither did anyone else. All I knew was that her happiness did not depend on me, and, not looking to her for happiness myself, I could not place her purpose or justify her retention. Already, as she rightly said, I was dreaming about the next village, and wherever my dreams went, my heart was bound to follow. It was only an hour later, lying on my back in the shade, that I saw that what at first I had taken for a contemptuous arrow of defiance was in fact buckled and blunt, and realised that I had hurt her by failing to reply.
I set off at the height of spring, but, though the journey took less than a day, I felt almost immediately as if I were trawling through the depths of autumn, and I had left not only the village but even its season behind. If ever there had been a summer, it had long since slipped away between the cracks, although I fancied that, among the mist and damp leaves, I could still hear little seeds of it bursting on a bonfire somewhere. I do not know for sure if it was insight or merely superstition, but, either way I sensed that I had made a mistake right from the start, and maybe even before the start. Somehow, I was convinced, I had joined hands with an unsuitable travelling companion who would frustrate my efforts, and indeed, when I next looked up, it had grown dark.
I was tired, and there was a farmhouse before me with a little coil of smoke above it. I knew that the grey outbuildings, the peace and warmth and isolation of this place had begun to soak up the mysteries of the next village, even if it was only on its outskirts, and the most I could see of my destination were a few lighted windows and a silhouette on the other side of the valley. But it was still waiting for something to settle, all the same, and the stone and moss and ivy – the way they lay together, the way they drew apart – told me that perhaps I, or indeed anyone who looked at that farmhouse in this way, might be a part of that settling or unsettling, with the night dew dripping slowly from the eaves and the rutted path riddled with moons that overlapped the sodden leaves. It was no longer the village I had come from, nor yet the next one to which I was bound; but neither was it completely its own place either, and I realised its stasis must mirror my own until both of us acted decisively to reveal the lack within us.
On the first storey there were two wide windows in the shape of a heart, but it had been a mistake to wave at them: they blinked out at once, and I listened in vain for the sound of footsteps down an interior staircase I already knew was flagged with pots of geranium and had iron rails along which some kind of wild flowers had been trained. Instead it was from the stables that the lantern issued at last, carrying with it, a little unsteadily, the rhombus of a bearded face. I asked if I might stay the night, and the lantern moved without affirmation; the beard bowed and turned, and a back-of-neck replaced it; a moment later I was inside the farmhouse. I had come by bicycle, the man declared. Failing to understand the relevance of this, I nodded. Then he asked me the pedigree of my bicycle. Abashed, I told the man I did not know. Its worn chrome had always been at one, in my mind, with the worn hands of the farmer from whom I had bought it – a small piece of mechanical utility born upon the stage of a lacklustre time, and tricked out for little purpose beyond necessity. Seemingly satisfied with my answer, he said it was to be quartered in the barn. I myself, as custodian of the bicycle, might sleep at its feet, if I were so inclined. This much concluded, he sat down at a kind of bureau – perhaps it had been a dressing table, once – and began to write.
If it was a receipt or an instruction, it was a very lengthy receipt or instruction, and from the general poise of the room I soon realised that it was perfectly capable of reaching its destined conclusion without my standing on ceremony and awaiting it. I moved to the foot of the stairs, where the newly watered geraniums were dripping water and petals onto the stone floor, and, realising I could ascend it with my eyes alone, it was the work of a moment for my imagination to alight at the first landing and step softly along the corridor. At the first window it paused to try to decipher the outlines of the village, wreathed in night, beyond the reflection of the glass. But there was no village any longer, and throwing open the window only brought in the heavy mist of the fields and the distant laughter of geese on a lake somewhere.
“You are the man with the bicycle,” said a voice behind me. “I heard it squeaking, like a mouse. Well, not like a mouse …”
The moon had been joined by a pillar of lemon light, extending far above it. I turned back to the open doorway and the broad girl who was standing within it, her long raven locks separated by a rose.
“Not like a mouse?” I repeated.
“No. Not at all, as a matter of fact.”
“So what does a mouse sound like, then?” I asked, wondering why she had chosen the comparison, if it seemed so inopportune. It was not the question I had meant to ask; there was at least one other question that should have preceded it, but somehow we and our conversation were already here – wherever here was – in despite of those missing preliminaries. I had been caught unawares, my back to her, and now I stumbled blindly after her lead.
“I haven’t the faintest idea. I’ve never seen one,” she said carelessly, as if, once again, she intended the incongruity, and hoped I would make light of it.
“You live on a farm and you’ve never seen a mouse?” I asked involuntarily.
“Who said I live here?”
And she gave out, somewhat deliberately, as if she hoped to take later profit from it, that her name was Sisé. Suddenly I had something concrete, and involuntarily my mind grasped the name and held it the more strongly because of the evasion, the lack of focus that had preceded it. A moment later I realised that this had been her intention from the start, that she had deliberately surrounded her name with half-shapes so that I might distinguish it among them the more clearly, and accordingly credit it with greater substance than perhaps it truly warranted.
“It means safe haven,” she said with a smile, and the smile itself seemed to say: You have fallen, but I shall catch you, because I am Sisé and safe harbour, and I mean exactly what I say.
I told her it was a nice name, and – “Well, it’s my name,” she replied carelessly. But something caught her attention. “My name, ” she repeated more thoughtfully, as if it were part of a prayer. The carelessness, now feigned, escaped her, and circled her like a bloom of lost youth; knowing she could not regain it, she pretended not to notice that it was there.
“It’s my name,” she said a third time, and as if to underline the point and lay her authority firmly upon it, tore it off, like something at the bottom of a pad of paper. I let out a cry, but – “What I should be called now isn’t the point,” she said. “It’s that you are here, at the beginning, with me. For the first time in our lives, we are at the beginning; we didn’t run to catch up; we didn’t slip sideways, over the hills; there’s nothing we missed through an opera glass.”
I could not believe the ease with which she had given up her old name, and I felt humbled by it, since I had done nothing to deserve being here with her as she did so. But then I saw that it was because of me that it had happened in the first place. She had been waiting for me – perhaps for me, maybe for anyone; – but she had been waiting, patiently, for someone to come along all the same, and she would have given her name away regardless, even if they would not accept her in return. Something was moving in the room; her lips brushed my own. Already I was dabbing at the frosted glass, rainswept and green with mould, against which the diluted, anonymous and somehow comforting yellow light of an unknown interior had framed itself.
“I’m not very good at kissing,” she said apologetically. “I’m better at doing the things people do when they’ve finished kissing …” But when I raised my head I found myself staring into the confused eyes of a child, and a legion of things passing upon the backstreets and thoroughfares of her mind without either clear shape or general comprehension. Maybe the errant, dream-governed thoughts had some agenda, but they put me in mind of the village I had just left, which could not even begin to mean until it had been unconditionally accepted. Not knowing what to say, I kissed her on the forehead, and turned back toward the flight of steps at the head of the landing, taking the piece of paper the farmer was still writing from my pocket.
“The lights will be extinguished at midnight,” he had written so far. “It is the responsibility of all tenants to ensure they take their belongings with them when they leave …” But the finger – Sisé would not be left so easily, and was beside me once more – was pointing to the next sentence: “Any items found missing or damaged will be charged at the cost of repair or replacement, as appropriate.” I started, not knowing the cost of a name or a heart in this place, or who could make a new one.
“I was only holding the paper,” she said, “because you were trembling. It’s like that in the beginning, but when you stretch out your feet and find there’s nothing you can touch, then it’s like being on a beach. What are you worried about a new one for? What’s done is done.”
“But I didn’t mean to do it,”
“But you did it all the same. Both of us. You are the tenant, and I tore off my name. If you had it in you to get to the next village, then you would be there by now.” And she pointed out the window where, sure enough, I seemed to be still walking with my bicycle in the leaden early morning mist, an ever brighter skyline shining pink and blue between the black trees.
I was the tenant, and minded to take care of my possessions. Was Sisé my possession now? She followed me as if to constitute a claim, though she did nothing specific to hold me back. I knew in time I would tire of the cold, grey dawn in which nothing could be achieved, would tire of it before it gave way to the more bearable day which would succeed it, and in which perhaps I might be able to see Sisé herself in a different light. The argument of convenience was to remain on this sheltered landing, at the top of this flight of steps, where it was warm and safe harbour, and this beginning could be our distraction. But perhaps the farmer had not been talking about Sisé. Perhaps, instead, he was talking about the possessions I had had before. Only after breaking with the first village could I embrace the secrets of the next village, but I suspected that the secret of the next village was simply everything the first village had always been, only revealed by its rejection, and that this was the reason I stumbled about in the gloom, unable to recognise my own hand before my face.
“And the lights will be extinguished at midnight,” I repeated, with a sudden sensation of colour – fields, sky, sea, battlements, ships, Sisé and her eternal descendants, all a burnished, shining, shadowy, glittering green. I saw that at every moment events run up and clap their hands, and the time for good intentions and leave-takings is already past. Slowly, but quicker than we know it, a small frown settles upon the brows of our tomorrows, down the slopes of which a man with a sickle hastens on a sled. Knee-deep in snow, the journey upward exhausts us, and we take advantage of his charity upon the way.
“Midnight is time enough for everything to be done,” Sisé said indifferently. “It’s the same rule for everyone, and however much you want to do, one day you’ll feel sleepy, all the same.”
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No Answers writes a blog, and maintains Mazeopolis, where many more short stories can be found.
