Kevin Barry: Dark Lies the Island

‘When you are worried, that is when you are working. When you are doing nothing, that is when the work is happening. It does not happen in the front section of the brain, Patrick. It happens in back section. Here is the subconscious level. This is the place the story come from. You just have to let it happen. Liberate yourself! If it is going to come, it will come. You just make yourself available and open to it. If it comes good, some day, it comes good. Champagne! But you have no power over it. It is all involving luck. When it feels like nothing is happening, that is when it is all happening. And remember that when you are worried, you are working.’

Still I search for a more succinct explanation of how it all occurs, but I know I will not find one.

vii

It was in odd scraps and rags that Silvija’s own story came through to me. Mostly in the small hours, when deep in her cups and whuzzled from the hashpipe, when in that borderland between wakefulness and sleeping, with her eyes half closed, wrapped in blankets against the night chill, this is when she would tell me of the viking-level horrors she had witnessed and been a part of: the rape, the pillage, the evil marauding. War-lands I could not imagine. And Silvija as a scared child among it all — Silvija scared was even harder to imagine. Such a story I had in my selfish way yearned for — maybe I could steal it, and recast it, and it would lend my work the gravitas it lacked; writers are such maggots , especially the young ones — but as she fed it to me in these night-time crumbs, I could not even begin to process the detail. I have made myself forget most of it. I know that she had as a kid dispensed blow jobs for soup money. She had been tied up in a facility once and brutalised with a broom handle. She had escaped but only to long broken years trailing madly through the squats of Barcelona (held captive once by a Sudanese in El Born, she had been made to eat catfood) and then there was a period of homelessness in Genoa (she cracked up and became obsessed with reading the words of the streetname signs backwards — Via Garibaldi … Idlabirag) and it was Berlin before she recovered, it was Berlin where she found her talents and the balance of her humours and the makings of a hard shell.

Nights at the studio she would go to the bathroom and spit blood in the sink. She would wash it away but I would find on the porcelain smeared traces in the mornings.

viii

The summer deepened, and our days became toned with sadness, and other, unnameable things. I sat up in bed one morning, smoking. I tapped the ash into an empty pils bottle. Silvija squatted on her heels on the couch, in her underwear, battering the laptop — she had a wide circle of acquaintance, 80 per cent of which she was feuding with at any given time. The light poured in from the climbing sun, and caught her bare, brown muscles. The windfall from the Americans and the passports was long since consumed and we were again in the depths of poverty, but we looked pretty good poor. The Wedding scene was slow, due to the season and the usual inclemence of luck that afflicted the fashion people: the arrests, the random plagues, the near-death experiences. This particular morning, there was something like shyness between us. Briefly, in the night, Silvija’s strict no-penetration dictat had been lifted. I knew even at the moment it was a mistake, despite the luxuriousness of the sensation. I could feel the scaredness in her. I knew that it would never happen again. And I knew in my heart that I just wasn’t working out as a lesbian. I was too clumsy and knuckly.

Not that she didn’t walk with me the hot summer streets of noon, and not that she didn’t teach me, and not that she didn’t give me something, just a tiny sustaining something, of her great aura.

I believe it was that same day, in the beer garden on Kastanienallee, that she turned the camera on me, there beneath the chestnut trees in full leaf, and I was shy of the lens and awkward but she told me what to do.

‘You don’t look at it,’ she said. ‘You look through it.’

I have the photograph still and it is sacred to me. On the wooden bench between us, in the amber of a stein glass, she is reflected, with her camera raised. She is there, blurrily, and it’s just a shade, but it is all that I have left of her.

ix

The end came sharply. I woke one morning to find Silvija packing her stuff. That holdall of hers had seen plenty. I tried to sound casual but there was boy-fear in my tone.

‘So this is it?’ I croaked.

‘You knew it was coming,’ she said.

The studio had had its time, she said. She was going to stay with a girlfriend in Kreuzberg. It was time that I stood on my own two feet.

‘You need to go find your own life, Patrick,’ she said.

‘Yeah and you need to go to a fucking doctor!’

I was so angry to be cast aside and I was lost in the city without her. I became depressed. I stayed with some other people for a while, in Mitte — artists, of course — but they all by contrast with Silvija seemed to be acting parts, and I have forgotten all their names. I knew that the sweet days of the summer had passed and it was time to fly away. Reluctantly, she came to the station on the morning I was to leave for the airport. She hugged me on the platform but so awkwardly; she fled instantly from the hug. She said she would email and that I could phone but six years have passed and never once did she reply to an email, never once did she answer her phone, and after a few months, the line was dead.

Which signifies nothing, necessarily, because Silvija changed phones all the time. And anyway I must believe that she is out there, somewhere among the dreaming cities of Europe, maybe in Trieste, or in Zagreb, or in Belgrade again. I must believe that she is out there, still beautiful, foul-mouthed and inviolate.