Peter Carey - Collected Stories

I have looked for the village in an atlas and cannot find it. It is a poor town, made from the same grey granite as the mountain it clings to. The cobbled streets are of the same grey stone, often wet with rain, occasionally covered with a heavy blanket of snow.

There are twenty-five houses in the village and the old man lived at the very last one on the high side, above the school. The house was as bleak and unremarkable as any other house in the village. But behind it was the most intricately wrought glasshouse, as delicate and weblike as the glasshouse in Kew Gardens in London.

In this house the old man grew roses. It is probable that the glasshouse was warmer than his own mean bedroom and his bleak kitchen. If the ashes in his stove were often white and cold, the furnace for the glasshouse never died through the winter. And in the very worst months he would move his mattress into the glasshouse and spend his nights there.

He spoke Spanish very badly and often irritated the storekeeper with his requests. The people in the village had never had a foreigner in their midst before and after twenty-five years he was seen as more of a pest than a novelty.

His mail was often needlessly delayed by the post office clerk, an idle and malicious game which gave less pleasure than teasing the old peasant woman who waited for letters from her son. The clerk tormented the old man quietly and determinedly, placing his parcels in full view on the shelf and insisting they were not for him.

The old man accepted this quietly, and called at the post office persistently, day after day, waiting patiently at the counter, rubbing his small dry hands together and breathing into them to make them warm. He never complained. He never explained that the books were about the production of hybrid roses, and it would have made no difference if he had.

When his books were finally made available he walked painfully back to his house, a small grey figure who looked fragile and pitiable in this village where everything seemed so cold and massive and unsympathetic.

Earlier he had donated a large clock for the small village school. The gift had been received with embarrassment. A year later the clock stopped. The opinion in the village was that the clock had been of inferior quality.

So its hands were still showing eighteen minutes past seven when two more foreigners arrived in the village fifteen years afterwards.

They asked questions at the post office and the clerk gladly told them everything he knew about the old man with the glasshouse. He even gave them two parcels he had been keeping for over a month.

That night the old man left the village with the other two foreigners, who were members of the Israeli security service.

Later the town was to learn that the small, quiet foreigner had been none other than the former commandant of Auschwitz.

The locals will now tell you that when they visited the old man’s glasshouse they discovered the most beautiful rose that anyone could ever dream of. It was twice the size of a man’s fist and was almost black in colour, with just the faintest hint of red in its velvety petals.

When I visited the town in the spring of 1974, the rose, or one of its descendants, was still there, carefully nurtured by the townspeople and shown with pride to visitors.

The locals insist that you can smell the mass graves of Auschwitz in the glasshouse, and that the heavy, sweet odour of death emanates from this one black rose.

They have named it “The Auschwitz Rose” and have printed a cheap colour postcard to celebrate their peculiar good fortune.

1.

He found her in the later summer when the river ran two inches deep across glistening gravel beds and lay resting in black pools in which big old trout lay quietly in the cool water away from the heat of the sun. Occasionally a young rainbow might break the surface in the middle of the day, but the old fish did no such thing, either being too well fed and sleepy or, as the fisherman would believe, too old and wise to venture out at such a time.

Silky oaks grew along the banks and blackberries, dense and tangled, their fruit long gone into Dermott’s pies, claimed by birds, or simply rotted into the soil, vigorously reclaimed the well-trodden path which wound beside fallen logs, large rocks, and through fecund gullies where tree ferns sent out tender new fronds as soft and vulnerable as the underbellies of exotic moths.

In one such gully a fallen tree had revealed a cave inside a rocky bank. It was by no means an ideal cave. A spring ran continually along its floor. Great fistfuls of red clay fell frequently and in the heat of the day mosquitoes sheltered there in their swarming thousands.

Three stalks of bracken outside its dirty mouth had been broken and the sign of this intrusion made him lower his hessian bag of hissing crayfish and quietly peer inside.

It was there he found her, wild and mud-caked, her hair tangled, her fair skin scratched and festered and spotted with infected insect bites. She was no more than twenty years old.

For a long time they regarded each other quietly. He squatted on his heels and slapped at the mosquitoes that settled on his long, wiry brown legs. She, her eyes swollen, fed them without complaint.

He rolled down the sleeves of his plaid shirt and adjusted his worn grey hat. He pulled up his odd grey socks and shifted his weight.

She tugged at her dress.

At last he held out his hand in the way that one holds out a hand to a shy child, a gentle invitation that may be accepted or rejected.

Only when the hand was lowered did she hold hers out. It was small and white, a city hand with the last vestiges of red nail polish still in evidence. He took the hand and pulled her gently to her feet, but before a moment had passed she had collapsed limply onto the muddy floor.

Dermott adjusted his hat.

“I’m going to have to pick you up,” he said. It was, in a way, a question, and he waited for a moment before doing as he’d said. Then, in one grunting movement, he put her on his shoulders. He picked up the bag of crayfish and set off down the river, wading carefully, choosing this way home to save his passenger from the blackberry thorns which guarded the path along the banks.

Neither spoke to the other, but occasionally the girl clenched his shoulder tightly when they came to a rapid or when a snake, sleeping lightly on a hot rock, slipped silkily into the water as they approached.

Dermott carried his burden with pleasure yet he did not dwell on the reason for her presence in the cave or attempt to invent theories for her being so many hundred miles from a town. For all of these things would be dealt with later and to speculate on them would have seemed to him a waste of time.

As he waded the river and skirted the shallow edges of the pools he enjoyed his familiarity with it, and remembered the time twenty years ago when it was as strange to him as it must be to his silent guest. Then, with the old inspector, he had done his apprenticeship as his mother had wished him to, read books, learned to identify two hundred different dragonflies, studied the life cycle of the trout, and most particularly the habits of the old black crayfish which were to be his alone to collect. It was an intensive education for such a simple job, and he often reflected in later years that it may not have been, in an official sense, compulsory, but rather a private whim of the old inspector who had loved this river with a fierce protectiveness.

The examination had been a casual affair, a day trek in late spring from where the old Chinese diggings lay in soft mossy neglect to the big falls five miles upriver, yet at the end of it he had successfully identified some two hundred trees, thirty insects, three snakes, and described to the old inspector’s satisfaction the ancient history of the rocks in the high cliffs that towered above them.