Guy Vanderhaeghe - Man Descending

And that of course was his difficulty. Who was he? Everything had changed since her death. His son didn’t recognize him. He hardly recognized himself. Had he been lost for thirty years, in expatriate wandering? Had all those hot classrooms been exile? Was he a harder man than anyone had imagined? And had his wife known that? Was he a breaker of jaws? A drunkard who kicked at strangers in the streets, a man who punished his son by giving him pictures of his dead mother?

Or was he the man who had dreamed of water, who had sat quietly on a stretch of ashy-grey sand and watched a gently tugging line, huddled with his wife?

He began to cry in that dark passage, his first tears. He felt his way down the walls with shaking hands. Why had the light been so brief? And why was the trick so hard, the trick every expatriate and every conquered people had to learn to survive.

Je me souviens, he said. Je me souviens.

THE OLD MAN lay sleeping on the taut red rubber sheet as if he were some specimen mounted and pinned there to dry. His housekeeper, the widowed Mrs. Hax, paused in the doorway and then walked heavily to the bedside window, where she abruptly freed the blind and sent it up, whirring and clattering.

She studied the sky. Far away, to the east, and high above the bursting green of the elms that lined the street, greasy black clouds rolled languidly, their swollen underbellies lit by the occasional shudder of lightning that popped in the distance. After each flash she counted aloud to herself until she heard the faint, muttering accompaniment of thunder. Finally satisfied, she turned away from the window to find Dieter Bethge awake and watching her cautiously from his bed.

“It’s going to rain,” she said, moving about the room and grunting softly as she stooped to gather up his clothes and pile them on a chair.

“Oh?” he answered, feigning some kind of interest. He picked a flake of dried skin from his leg and lifted it tenderly to the light like a jeweller, intently examining its whorled grain and yellow translucence.

Sighing, Mrs. Hax smoothed the creases of his carelessly discarded trousers with a soft, fat palm and draped them over the back of a chair. The old bugger made more work than a whole tribe of kids.

She glanced over her shoulder and saw him fingering the bit of skin between thumb and forefinger. “Leave that be,” she said curtly. “It’s time we were up. Quit dawdling.”

He looked up, his pale blue eyes surprised. “What?”

“Time to get up.”

“No,” he said. “Not yet.”

“It’s reveille. No malingering. Won’t have it,” she said, fixing an unconvincing smile on her broad face. “Come on now, up and at ’em. We’ve slept long enough.”

“That rubber thing kept me awake last night,” he said plaintively. “Every time I move it squeaks and pulls at my skin. There’s no give to it.”

“Complainers’ noses fall off,” Mrs. Hax said absent-mindedly as she held a shirt up to her own wrinkled nose. She sniffed. It wasn’t exactly fresh but she decided it would do, and tossed it back on the chair.

The old man felt his face burn with humiliation, as it did whenever he was thwarted or ignored. “I want that damn thing off my bed!” he yelled. “This is my bed! This is my house! Get it off!”

Mrs. Hax truculently folded her arms across her large, loose breasts and stared down at him. For a moment he met her gaze defiantly, but then he averted his eyes and his trembling jaw confirmed his confusion.

“I am not moved by childish tempers,” she announced. “You haven’t learned that yet?” Mrs. Hax paused. “It’s about time you did. One thing about Mrs. Hax,” she declared in a piping falsetto that betrayed her anger, “is that when someone pushes her, she pushes back twice as hard. I am ruthless.” She assumed a stance that she imagined to be an illustration of ruthlessness, her flaccid arms akimbo. A burlesque of violence. “So let me make this perfectly, crystal clear. That rubber sheet is staying on that bed until you forget your lazy, dirty habits and stop them accidents. A grown man,” she said disparagingly, shaking her head. “I just got sick and tired of hauling one mattress off the bed to dry and hauling another one on. Just remember I’m not getting any younger either. I’m not up to heavy work like that. So if you want that rubber thing off, you try and remember not to pee the bed.”

The old man turned on his side and hid his face.

“No sulking allowed,” she said sternly. “Breakfast is ready and I have plenty to do today. I can’t keep it waiting forever.”

Dieter turned on to his back and fixed his eyes on the ceiling. Mrs. Hax shook her head in exasperation. It was going to be one of those days. What went on in the old bastard’s head, if anything? What made him so peculiar, so difficult at times like these?

She walked over to the bed and took him firmly by the wrist. “Upsy-daisy!” she cried brightly, planting her feet solidly apart and jerking him upright. She skidded him to the edge of the bed, the rubber sheet whining a muffled complaint, and his hands, in startled protest and ineffectual rebellion, pawing at the front of her dress. Mrs. Hax propped him upright while his head wobbled feebly from side to side and his tongue flickered angrily, darting and questing like a snake’s.

“There,” she said, patting his hand, “that’s better. Now let’s let bygones be bygones. A fresh start. I’ll say, ‘Good morning, Mr. Bethge!’ and you answer, ‘Good morning, Mrs. Hax!’ ”

He gave no sign of agreement. Mrs. Hax hopefully cocked her head to one side and, like some huge, querulous bird, chirped, “Good morning, Mr. Bethge!” The old man stubbornly disregarded her, smiling sweetly and vacantly into space.

“Well,” she said, patting her dress down around her wide hips and heavy haunches, “it’s no skin off my teeth, mister.”

She stumped to the door, stopped, and looked back. The old man sat perched precariously on the edge of the bed, his white hair ruffled, tufted and crested like some angry heron. A pale shadow fell across the lower half of his face and threw his eyes into relief, so that they shone with the dull, glazed intensity of the most devout of worshippers.

Mrs. Hax often saw him like this, mute and still, lost in reverie; and she liked to suppose that, somehow, he was moved by a dim apprehension of mortality and loss. Perhaps he was even overcome with memories of his wife, and felt the same vast yearning she felt for her own dead Albert.

She mustered a smile and offered it. “Five minutes, dear,” she said, and then closed the door softly behind her.

Bethge made no response. He was thinking – trying to pry those memories out of the soft beds into which they had so comfortably settled, sinking deeper and deeper under the weight of all the years, growing more somnolent and lazy, less easily stirred from sleep. He could no longer make his head crackle with the sudden, decisive leap of quick thought hurtling from synapse to synapse. Instead, memories had now to be pricked and prodded, and sometimes, if he was lucky, they came in revelatory flashes. Yet it was only old, old thoughts and things that came to him. Only they had any real clarity – and the sharpness to wound.

And now it was something about a bear. What?

Bethge, with a jerky, tremulous movement, swiped at the spittle on his chin with the back of his hand. In his agitation he crossed and recrossed his thin legs, the marbly, polished legs of a very old man.

Bear? He rubbed the bridge of his nose; somehow, it was important. He began to rock himself gently, his long, curving nose slicing like a scythe, back and forth, reaping the dim air of his stale little room. And as he swayed, it all began to come to him, and he began to run, swiftly, surely, silently back into time.