Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

One man was not wearing a long overcoat. Hadja Bannerje was muffled in wool hat and scarf and a thick anorak. He stepped forward only when the others had gone.

“I know you very well,” he said. “I am so very very sorry, Stephen.” The snow fell across them. He held out a hand and Stephen took it, and in that moment Hadja Bannerje felt he understood something of the mystery of our connectedness, of how the old man's life had longed for some redemption, for the passing to his son of an immeasurable and secret grace, which now, at that moment, by the crazy mechanism of the world through which one person's life touches anothers, Hadja Bannerje himself was empowered to bestow.

“I must tell you how your father loved you,” he said simply.

The light snow flew about. Stephen looked down at the fresh earth and felt the loss grow huge inside him. The last time he had seen his father was when he left for the airport in the blue suit. “He wanted you to be happy,” said the Indian. “It is what all fathers want. You should not be sad.”

Stephen stood there. He looked up into the snow sky and felt the pieces of it fall into his eyes.

“I am sorry I did not come to see him,” he said quietly. “I did not even know.”

“Don't regret it. He saw you,” said Hadja. “He saw you in Venice, he told me so in the hospital. It was better you did not come. He died a happy man.”

Later, they returned to the house, and the Indian doctor sat in the room where the last chess game was still apparent. Stephen brought him tea as if Hadja were his father, and was astonished to find that since he had last played, his position in the game had been greatly improved.

“Your father played your moves,” said Hadja. “I am afraid I played his.”

Stephen sat in his usual chair, and while the clock ticked in the hallway, the tears fell down his face. They fell in the dead stillness of the early afternoon in that suburban house where a long, ordinary everyday tale of grief and longing and regret had finally ended, where the last shadow seemed to have fallen. The queen's knight's pawn, which had been unremarkable and forlorn, was now moved forward, until it arrived at the seventh rank of the board, threatening to transform defeat into victory.

“He kept on moving that white pawn,” said the doctor. “I was distracted from it. Now it is hopeless for Black.” He smiled and tapped the palms of his hands softly beneath his chin.

The afternoon died away, but Stephen Griffin did not turn on the light. The companionship of the other man touched him in a way he had not experienced in his adult life. The silence was soothing, like the deep blankets of a morning bed. And in the dying half-light of the snowy afternoon, gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, the figure of the other man across the chessboard became the figure of Philip Griffin, as it became, too, for Hadja Bannerje, the figure of his father, whom he had heard from his brother in Bombay was dying now from a slow disease in his bloodstream.

And in that time, that grey and easeful afternoon while the two men sat after the funeral in the old armchairs and said almost nothing, there was something like peace shared between them. The pawn at the seventh rank did not need to be moved forward. The board faded into the dimness and floated away, and the snow fell. It fell forever out of the Dublin nighttime, and was falling still when at last Hadja Bannerje stood up and shook Stephen's hand again and said goodbye and that they must see each other again. And Stephen agreed and said that he would like that very much, and then opened the door and watched the muffled doctor print his footsteps out the driveway and away, vanishing into the blown and falling flurries of the snow, and (although Hadja did not know it yet) out of Stephen Griffin's life forever, as, three days later, Hadja would leave Dublin to return to his father in India.

In the days that followed, Stephen lived in the house and journeyed through the places of regret and loss, until he became aware that he was gradually feeling more love than grief. The face of Gabriella appeared in his mind, and he knew now that the loving of her was centrally connected to the meaning of his world. The air lightened. He opened all the windows, and the house whistled with a steady music. The clarity of the notes was remarkable, and as the wind rose and fell in the giddy and capricious games of early spring, the spirits of the dead Griffins danced. All the memories of the house nudged Stephen as he came and went on the stairs and in the hallway, carrying boxes of books and papers. He paused a half dozen times on each journey, bewildered, until slowly he became accustomed to the presence of the reunited family, the strange harmonious sense of them all together there in the house. He remembered more than he remembered he had forgotten, then discovered for himself the truth that nothing of life vanishes completely but can be recovered whole from the past. It was like memories of kisses on the skin. So, in three bright, wind-polished days of early February, when light snow came and went on the air and the music of Puccini played without being switched on, Stephen was joined in the house by Mary his sister, Anne his mother, and Philip his father. The many persons of himself were there, too. He was himself at age four watching his father in the hallway on the evening his parents were going out to the Rathmines Opera. His father wore a black suit and a scent of sweet oil as he hummed an air to the hall mirror. His mother's shoes came down the stairs, slipping slightly on the carpet, they were so light and thin and silvery. He was himself at eight looking at his sister sleeping; he was ten and at the kitchen table while his mother served skinless white boiled potatoes and peas alongside slivers of roast beef that were islands in gravy; he was hearing the first cello notes from Mary's quarter-sized cello in the front room, where the wallpaper was the same still and where the family had smiled watching her, and he had passed jealousy and rivalry and felt simply the visit of a communal happiness. All of himself was there in the house, and all of the others, too. And the more they were present, the lighter was the burden of grief, until it lifted up and floated away altogether, disappearing down the road like a noxious yellow cloud, to be blown into another household, visiting it like a sour priest and smelling of bitter lemons.

Two days later Stephen left the house. He took his father's car. He put the Puccini in the boot and the folded-up, faded chessboard with the little box of pieces.

For a week the snow had dusted upon the windows of the house, but when Stephen came out and walked down the garden beneath the chestnut tree there was no whiteness on the ground. For a moment he thought it might be some weird meteorological condition and that the snow was falling only about their own house, but then realized that the snow was falling only, it was not alighting. It lived in the air and vanished into the ground, like a spirit.

Stephen drove away from Dublin a last time and headed west on the road where already he was thinking of Gabriella and where the air was too warm for snow. He drove the Galway road towards a bright sky, and in the early afternoon turned off at Loughrea to head down into Clare. Past noon the day had begun to leak a little of its brilliance, the colour thinning and the line between land and air blurred. Bits of sky had fallen on the fields. And by two o'clock on the road out of Loughrea there were low white spumes of mist scattered here and there inside the stone walls. In that sleeping landscape Stephen thought of Gabriella and in his mind played a passage he remembered of the Vivaldi “Summer.” By the time he passed the sign that welcomed visitors to County Clare, the interior of the car was deeply perfumed once more with the scent of lilies.