John Berger - Lilac and Flag

You’ve been doing this long? she asked. He nodded without daring to speak out loud. He was listening intently to hear the beat of her heart, to hear the silence come to an end. He let out the air as gently as he could, and the mercury sedately descended. She was holding her breath, suddenly anxious. All day she had had pains in her head and she feared her blood pressure was up.

Like a triumph he heard her heart coming in, and his eyes instantly flicked up to the systolic reading. He was listening to a beat that had not stopped since she was an embryo. The heart begins to beat thirty days after conception, when it is only the size of a breadcrumb. The first beat, coming from nothing, is pure gift. The first beat makes another death, before or after many passions, inevitable.

He heard the old woman’s heart beating like a gong at the top of a mighty staircase in some palace. Then the gong went silent and the palace vanished. Her heart was still beating but the disk he held to her artery picked up no sound. The diastolic.

Eighteen-twelve, he said, it’s a little high.

Not for me it isn’t, she said, I often have twenty.

He was taking off the wrapping around her arm and she looked at him with her lustreless eyes, awaiting death, grateful for the good news, wanting a drink, wondering if he would smile.

There are medicines, he said.

Are there? She began to laugh, and her laugh turned into a cough that made her spit. You really believe there are medicines, my little love?

He helped her up from the chair and she put on her bolero.

How much do you want?

Fifteen hundred.

With the tips of the two middle fingers of her right hand she pulled the banknotes out of her bosom.

A woman of the same age but thin and with straight golden-dyed hair, wearing a trouser suit, stopped on the sidewalk beside Sucus’s chair.

Harley, the woman said, I was looking for you.

Sucus pocketed the money.

Eighteen-twelve, that’s what you said, isn’t it?

I’ll write it down for you.

No need.

That’s high, Harley, said the woman in the suit.

Not for me, Fleece.

I want you to come and see Lilac.

Lilac? asked his client.

The circus number I told you about.

My memory’s going, Fleece. Lilac?

Come and see for yourself.

The two women walked arm in arm down the street, stopping and turning slowly from side to side and glancing up at the sky, just as elderly ladies might do in a rose garden. Sucus immediately followed them.

Outside the Golden Fleece there were photos of girls making mouths and signs with their fingers. Sucus examined them intently. Not one of them could be Zsuzsa.

I want to rock Sucus to sleep now. I have a cradle-bed in the barn that would be almost large enough. It was made many years ago by the great-grandfather who left behind the stone sabot. I want to rock Sucus to sleep in the cradle-bed and sing him a song. A song Zsuzsa might have learnt from Rifat, the friend of her garbage man. A song that goes like this:

Sleepy night, happy day

Zero’s the plaything

And nowhere nothing

That isn’t in

That isn’t in

Your dear body …

To this, all men fall asleep.

In a moment Sucus would have woken up, smiled at the girls, taken his chair back to the corner of Third Street, and found another client. But whilst Sucus was listening to my song, three brawling men woke him up, and I could do nothing. They came down the street with their arms around each other’s shoulders so they shouldn’t fall. They were like a single animal with reactions as slow as a bull’s. They lurched into the entrance of the Golden Fleece. One of them roared: We want to see some beaver. They staggered to the box office. Another pulled out a wad of notes. Sucus watched them. When the man stuffed the change back into his hip pocket, a note fluttered like a leaf to the floor. Sucus took two strides and put his foot on the bill. It was a magenta ten thousand. He stooped, picked it up and bought a ticket.

From the beginning, men compared women with flowers, and women, enjoying it, encouraged them. They fastened blossoms in their hair, they wore perfumes, they twined leaves, and they displayed themselves. What the Bible says has never been true of the women I’ve known. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” The women I’ve known only imitated flowers after they’d killed rabbits or raked hay or mucked out stables or cooked mash for the hens or carried wood from the forest. Yet still the men were right to compare us with flowers. Not because we are pure, but because, like flowers, we were created to attract. Like flowers our beauty is delicate. Like flowers the colours we were born with draw the eye to our most secret parts.

Beyond the ticket office, on the other side of the velvet curtain, the Golden Fleece smelt of beer and talc, a fermentation and a sweetness. There was no daylight and the walls were roughcast as in an underground garage. An usherette in fishnet stockings led the bull down a corridor.

Would you like number I?

Nothing can separate us — not even a bimbo in the buff! roared one of the bull-men, we’re going in together!

Sucus pushed past them to get to the end of the corridor.

What’s that guy want an extra chair for?

You don’t know why he’s carrying his own chair?

Why should he have a chair?

Why shouldn’t he?

I’ll tell you why.

He’ll tell us why.

To rest his cock on!

The three bull-men had well-cut suits and waistcoats. Their striped ties, loosened many times, had fallen half-way down their shirts.

You’ll be a bit tight, said the usherette, the berths weren’t built for three.

Not even a bimbo in the buff’s going to separate us!

They bundled into a cubicle the size of Yannis’s crane cabin.

Ring if you want anything, said the usherette and closed the door.

Along one wall of the cubicle ran a low upholstered couch on which the three bull-men sat down, side by side. Facing them, near their knees, was a wide, inclined sheet of glass like the windscreen through which Yannis, the crane driver, looked down on the city of Troy. On the carpet by their feet was an imitation golden chalice and a neat stack of paper towels.

We’re going to jerk off together, aren’t we?

This is my old woman’s tale. There’s precious little dirt in the world I haven’t cleaned up. And there’s nothing — however piteous — that I haven’t heard with ears that grow larger every year. With age everything else shrinks and your ears grow larger.

The light in the cubicle went off. The space beyond the windscreen remained lit but, curiously, little of this light filtered through, for the glass on the far side was opaque. The screen was made of a one-way see-through glass, first invented for prisons. Screwsglass, as it’s known in the trade. Screwsglass.

We want beaver! Now!

Every light went out. The three bull-men sat in pitch darkness. Not a word was said. When the lights came up, she was there, very, very close to the windscreen. It looked as though there was scarcely space for her to stand up. She was crouching with a kimono over her shoulders, a black kimono decorated with roses. She let the garment fall slowly to the floor and then she arranged her legs differently so that she was kneeling with her shoulders and head thrown back. The soles and heels of her feet would have revealed, to any who wanted to notice, that she had often walked barefoot.

The windscreen glass had the effect of magnifying what the men in the cubicles were staring at. This brought the woman closer to their eyes. Her pores were visible like the pock marks on the skin of an orange. Each hair of her body could be counted, each one, under the probing light, as distinct as an eyelash. She raised her hands slowly. The lights exposed traces of dirt beneath her fingernails. With her large hands she started to caress her small breasts.