Jim Crace - Genesis

And that had been it — at least for the time being, anyway. Fredalix split in two. Then three. They went their separate ways. She had — and raised — his unacknowledged son.

COULD LIX HAVE any idea yet that there was a curse on him, a more insistent version of the happy curse that falls on almost everyone, that if they persevere with sex, then chances are — not quite as sure as eggs is eggs, but close — a pregnancy will follow? Certainly that one mistake he knew about had freighted all his fantasies and practices of sex with Cargo Consequence. Had he become afraid of making love because of Freda and her son? Before Alicja, he’d not had intercourse with anyone since he and Freda split up in 1981. That was seven years. Key years for young men in their twenties. His month with her had been a costly farce and a disaster from which he’d not recovered yet. How pleased Freda would be if she discovered how she’d blighted him and all the women in her wake, even — especially — Alicja.

Certainly, Lix had been slow on the night a month before they’d married to respond to Alicja’s un-Lesniak initiatives. She’d never been that intimate before or so daring. She’d seemed excited that her parents were downstairs with dinner guests and hired staff, immediately below, separated only by a rug, the ceiling joists, and plaster. The wine they’d smuggled into her room had helped. As had the cannabis. She locked her bedroom door and put on music as a sound track and to disguise the noise they might make. The actors always made a lot of noise in films.

He’d not encouraged her. Because he understood the dangers better than she did? Because he feared the consequences? Because she was not Freda? Because there wasn’t a single condom in the house? No, actually, because he had not yet succeeded with an erection. Nervousness was playing havoc with his potency Fear dispatches its adrenaline to the lungs, the muscles, and the heart, and undermines the blood flow to the genitals.

Alicja, however, had thought his reluctance considerate and endearing but had surprised herself by pressing forward with inflamed resolve and — always the ones you remember — inexperienced but persuasive hands. Finally, Alicja was “graduated,” as they say. She and Lix had made the light shade swing above her parents’ table. She liked to think she’d peppered everybody’s soup with ceiling plaster. But Lix’s imagination had almost let him down that night, and let her down as well. His fear of those five mys was not an aphrodisiac.

THIS WAS the season of his third mistake.

Although their marriage was already three months old, he and Alicja still had no table, or any reason to join the city’s morning rush hour. Lix had no rehearsals at that time, and it would be another year before his fortunes changed so magically, and so disruptively. So neither of them needed to leave the apartment until the afternoon.

In those days, their marriage was an embarrassment of time and poverty and self. In other words, if it was free or very cheap, then they could do it all day long. So they would take their breakfasts and their books out onto the roof during that late spring and sunbathe with their backs against the slates in their nightclothes, the matching pair of long fake-granddad shirts she’d bought from Parafanalia and which he hated. These were beloved times, in fact, despite the shirts. They had the whole apartment building to themselves. By the time they’d settled on the roof, all their neighbors were already sitting at their desks or standing at their tills or setting tables for lunch, “earning corns.”

Alicja had planted up some heavy gray pots — to match the roof tiles — with mints, marjorams, and balms and four or five fessandra shrubs. They flourished there, with the help of coffee dregs, abandoned cereal, and bowls of used soapy water, and — once in a while, when Lix was on his own and too idle to go indoors — urine. Otherwise they had the sweetest-smelling roof in town. The foliage provided a civilizing fringe of green along the roof parapet, muffling much of the traffic thrum from the Circular but still allowing Lix with his binoculars — the householder at last, the lord of everything in sight — to study the hats and shoulders of passersby, the roofs of streetcars and automobiles, the shadows and the silhouettes in adjacent attic rooms, the ornamented summit of Marin’s finger, and anything that moved between the city and the hills.

Except he could not see the hills in early May.

Rain had fallen on the prosperous and slanting plains that embraced the city in a semicircle of shale-on-clay-on-sand and the grand estates of manacs, vines, and tournesols which kept the owners rich and their tenants busy. Rain had fallen in the far-flung hills and stripped the valleys of their oaten topsoil and their undergrowth. The fields were silver and the rivers bronze. Nine days of it. Rain had fallen everywhere, it seemed, except on us. We had blue skies. The whole of May was mocking blue for us, disdainful of the countryside. The city’s blessed, we told ourselves, in shirtsleeves, eating out in sidewalk cafes, getting tanned, getting overconfident. We have the nation’s summer to ourselves.

So the hills were virtually invisible to Lix and to Alicja from their high and costly patio. A heavy mass of slaty clouds had gathered discreetly in the first few days of the month like a sieging army, patient and bullying, softening the countryside with rain, but still just far enough away from the outer suburbs not to appear too menacing. No wind. The clouds just seemed to darken, breed amongst themselves, and fatten on the washed-loose produce of the plains, reluctant to depart, unwilling to invade the determined patch of urban blue that kept our weather fine and caused the Dern rooftop to snap and crack unseasonably with heat. Their true horizon had been smudged away by clouds, and so even in the rain-free city, untouched it seemed at first, the days were shorter than they should have been. The dawns were late and dusk was early. A sweating wintertime in May. The rising and the setting sun, to use the finest phrase of a newspaper columnist, was “smothered by a black-brown shawl and swathed in widow’s cloth.” Wet wool!

These were dramatic days for Lix and for Alicja. The weather made them feel grandiloquently loving. The fitful romance and the ecstasy of early married life can only benefit from breakfasting amongst the rooftop pots under such sensual, operatic skies. By chance, they’d rented happiness. Their midmorning light was startling that May, low and sharp enough to give the clouds — especially in the photographs they took — their own ravines and cols and peaks and scarps that seemed as permanent and sculpted as the granite ones which they’d obscured. These were clouds you could trek in, ski down, climb. You’d think that you could mine in them for tin and silver, sink great shafts through fissures, plates, and strata to haul up spoils of solid oxygen and fossil rain.

The clouds were full of riches and rewards.

Lix and Alicja watched an aircraft fly too close to that great granite cliff of wet suspended atmosphere. They watched it disappear, illogically intact. They watched through his binoculars the flocks of geese and plovers, displaced by rain, the jazz quintets of buzzards extemporizing on the thermals against the backdrop, blackdrop of the clouds, the laboring of herons, and, closer, with the naked eye, they watched the resigned and stoic flight of crows, forced into town for once. They were puffed up themselves like clouds, puffed up with massive confidence, with everything-is-possible, with an affection that Lix at least had never felt before. The weather was a prelude, so they thought with all the arrogance of newlyweds, to something grand and memorable for them.