Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

Finbar called out her name as though he were summoning her from a far shore.

“Cait!”

He made the short name long and filled inside it the volume of his own longing and love for her and the gypsies remained quiet and lowered their heads and once more the lapping of the lake water could be heard.

Then the whiskered woman drew aside the flap of the caravan.

“She is all right,” she said. “She’s come back.”

“How is my son?” Finbar called up to her.

“Oh,” said the whiskered one, “your son has no penis.” She watched as all the fathers’ heads came up and their eyes opened and their mouths dropped and there was a kind of moan that passed among them like a wind.

“No penis! But two heads!” she shouted, and brought her hands up to the sunken sides of her leathery face and leaned back and hooted a kind of hoo-hoo of owl-like laughter to the astonishment of all.

Then from inside the caravan came the other two midwives, and wrapped in both of their arms were newborns. Their heads did not appear from within their swaddling.

“You have daughters!” one of them said, and smiled. “You have two daughters! Twins!”

“Hoo hoo, no penis!” hooted the whiskered one. And the breath of relief of all the gypsy men could be felt then as Finbar stood up and moved toward the infants. And as he was doing so, some of them came and shook him by the shoulders and he stopped as if just then grasping some urgent matter and told them quickly to return the fishes to the lake. They did. Finbar took his children in his arms and went inside to Cait.

“Our sons are not born fishes, but daughters,” he told her, and smiled. And he laid down the two infants on her breasts and laid himself next to them, and he kissed the side of her face where her tears were slowly running and tasting like the sea.

They were both beautiful. They had their mother’s skin and their father’s eyes. They slept and suckled and seemed the children of such serenity that the turbulent passions of their futures could not even be imagined. Cait recovered from the ardour of her labour quickly but retained a kind of sensual fondness for her bed and lay there pillowed and luxuriant and told her husband she did not want to move. This mood was soon discovered general throughout the caravans. The mothers were abed. They did not want to travel on. The entire camp smelled then of warm breast milk and cotton and made the autumnal air by the lakeside heavy and drowsy. The gypsy men, suffering a deep nostalgia for their own infancy, were soon of a like mind and happy to stay the winter there. For in the aftermath of the momentous night of births all were ineluctably altered, and it was as though in the days following, minor roots had sprung from them and were twisting down into the ground. They watched with drooped lower lips of envy while their sons and daughters sucked away at these milky matrons that were their wives. Even the sexagenarian, whose breasts were bluish and flat, with nipples that were wide brown knobs like the plugs of copper baths, and who had to have her son carried by his aged father to the next caravan for a further sup, was strangely glowing. Her eyes shone with contentment and her silver hair was very fine.

The mothers stayed in their beds for a month. Then they stayed for another one. The men and the older children cooked and burnt the food and bore it on tin plates into the caravans, where the mothers lay back listening to the songs of the canaries. That the bond between the women and their new children was overly strong, or that this might cause difficulty in time, did not yet occur to Finbar. He accepted the somnolent mood of the camp and watched as for the first time in many years the gypsy men came to understand what it was to stay still. The winter was slow in coming. The horses were left to graze the long grasses that feathered the lakeside and sometimes were taken and ridden bareback into the woods in grey dawn deer hunts. And it was a good time. They lived on there in the strange, desolate beauty of that place. And some of the men who had felled trees worked at these with long, jagged-tooth saws and cut out shafts of wood and placed these at angles off the sides of their caravans and bound the rough-hewn planks together with hay rope. There were three of these shelters made before Finbar realized it. He did not know whether to knock them down or offer his help and in the end did neither, retreating into himself and secretly studying the map of the world while all about him the gypsies built their winter houses. By the time the first snows came his was the only caravan without extension. He lay on the bed at night beside Cait and played his face like the moon coming and going before his daughters.

“We’ll stay here now until the spring,” he said. It was more of a question than he pretended, for he was testing her wishes. “Then we’ll go north. Do you want to see on the map?”

“I do not,” Cait said, and she held the child they had called Rose in the air above her. “I want to stay here, or I want to go home.”

“Home?” He could not believe she had said it, and he furrowed his brow as if it were something beyond his comprehension.

“Yes.”

“Home?”

“Your hearing is working, then.”

“Where is home?”

“You know where it is.”

“I do not. This is home,” he said. “This caravan, this is all the home I have. All the home we have.… Cait.… Cait?”

Cait did not answer him. She brought the child down to her and held her close and said no more.

The snows were thin until Christmas. They fell into the lake and lingered only on the margins of the road. The gypsies lit fires and traded with those who passed that way. They told fortunes to some that came out of the snowy roads with thick capes and horses thin. The gypsies played them music on wooden pipes and sang the songs they knew. The strangers told them sorrowful tidings of the greater world, and it seemed to the gypsies it was always so. They built high their fires and kept warm their children. An air of contentment had settled over the gypsies then and they did not hanker after open roads. Even their features softened. When the snows grew worse, Finbar expected they would come to him and look to move on. But this did not happen. Instead they barricaded more thoroughly their caravans and cut wood for fires.

Gradually, very gradually, the line of caravans grew to resemble a street.

Storms of wind and hail and sleet came and went and still the gypsies did not look to move on. Finbar talked no more with Cait of bringing the gypsies to Bohemia, and he did not unfurl Benardi’s map except when she was sleeping. She loved him for that then and some nights lifted Rose and Roisin to the other side of the blankets, and rolled her bed-warm and sensual amplitude to him and let his face be lost in the roundness of her breasts. Then, when the spring arrived, she, like almost all of the gypsy women, announced that she was pregnant once more.

So they stayed on again there. Finbar came out to the campfire and gathered all of them around him and announced what he knew they were already wishing. Finbar’s broad arms were crossed on his chest, his long hank of fair hair hung down his back, and he stood before them like a god.

“It will be good,” he said, “for another year. Then our children will be strong.”

“Yes,” the men mumbled. They nodded and shrugged their shoulders in acquiescence and raised the palms of their hands slightly outward as if showing stigmata. “Our children. Yes. For our children we must.”

Finbar left them and went away down the lake and felt ashamed and dishonest.