John Berger - Lilac and Flag

Her tits are getting a hard-on! moaned part of the bull.

Small and tight! I bite! muttered another part.

Let’s have the creamstick! hissed the third.

She leant forward in the lit box till her hair touched the floor. Women everywhere since the beginning of time, washing their hair, brushing, transforming to a glory, combing, platting, curling.

She twisted her hips and lay on her side, knees tucked up, a thin, thin arm between her thighs. Show us some beaver now!

Close up against the windscreen she parted her lips with two fingers. In the village we call that part of a woman’s anatomy her “nature.” With two fingers she parted the ruffled lips of her nature. When a rose is still folded in its case and has never been seen, the colours of its petals can resemble what she disclosed and offered to the screwsglass.

A splintering crash reverberated through the Golden Fleece. Before the bull’s six amazed and gaping eyes, a man with a folded chair smashed the lit box, felled the bimbo, broke their windscreen and struck their three heads.

Dogs were barking.

Sucus fled. In the street the prostitutes watched him run past them. It was still daylight, the light of a late afternoon in autumn, the moment of the year when everything in nature is held in suspension and nothing hurries, when time slows down, almost stops, until caught short by the night of the first ice. Through this light Sucus was running.

As he ran, he made a wail in his head to keep out every sound and word. The wail went up and down like the siren of the fire engine that had come too late to put out the fire in Cachan, up and down to the sound of Zsu-Zsa. The faster he ran, the louder the wail.

He ran along streets thronged with people who were going home after work and whose feet were already anticipating leisure, liquor, soft shoes, a sofa. They stepped off the sidewalk to watch him, for his run was frantic, like that of a hunted deer. They let him pass and immediately they looked in the opposite direction to discover who was pursuing him and why.

And there was nobody to be seen. Some peered across the street, sure of finding men running along the sidewalk. There were only bus queues, women window-shopping, several beggars. Others glanced down the side alleys, where vans were unloading and cars hooting. Nobody was running. One man cocked an eye up to the sky expecting a helicopter. The sky was empty.

And Sucus ran on. He must be late for something, a matter of life and death, the Trojans concluded, but in their heart of hearts they knew that no man runs like that because he’s late.

The sun was going down into the dust which turned it red.

He ran so as to never stand still again, for, should he have stood still, he would have faced Troy and its sea and the October sky and the galaxies and the fringe of the universe from whose unaccountable vastness no correction of the truth could ever now come.

He ran between trolley-buses and motorbikes. He ran past a Hilton hotel, a supermarket for pet food, car showrooms, travel agencies, a law court, sauna baths, bridal suites, a wool shop for babies, florists, foreign exchange kiosks, funeral parlours, coffee shops, the Trojan Horse — and not a single one of any of their promises of victory, defeat, pleasure, escape, peace, quiet, justice, soothing hands could ever be for him. So he ran faster and faster.

To the west, the lights were being switched on in the Paris Hospital, and its windows were like the portholes of a liner sailing inland. In the maternity ward, there, in the hospital on the cliff-face, Yannis’s wife, Sonia, had just given birth to a boy who was going to be called Alexander. Yannis was in his crane waiting for news. Sonia was exhausted, eyes ringed with sweat, blood smears on her legs the colour of the clouds in the sky, triumphant, with life before her. Give him to me, she said to the midwife who was holding Alexander upside down, give the darling to me.

His heart would soon burst, and Sucus was running to burst his heart. The blood in his throat and chest beat the time of running feet. But they were no longer his feet. She was running towards him. She was at the other end of Park Avenue and with every stride she was coming closer. Often his eyes were shut. People stepped aside for him, cleared a way, as happens for the mad. Traffic stopped and drivers smiled with a patience unimaginable for that hour in the city — as if for a few seconds they had become camel drivers in the desert. To see madness in another bestows a kind of calm. She was wearing her panther dress pulled up to the top of her thighs and she was running barefoot.

The wail did not stop, but as he ran he held out his arms towards her. He was passing Spallanzi metro station. She was running faster than ever towards him. He could see her two missing teeth and her large hands. He ran on. She was upon him and he could hear her gasping. She ran through him, clean through him.

A schoolgirl who had come up the steps from the station saw a man running towards her with his arms held out rigid in front of him. Quickly, she pressed herself against the wall. He ran past. Minutes later her pulse was still racing. She continued to tremble, not because she had narrowly escaped being run down by this man, but on account of what she had glimpsed as he passed, of his face. Its features had been so contorted that they were no longer two eyes, a nose, a mouth, ears. His face had turned into an armful of snakes and the snakes were devouring one another.

First I drive the anvil into the grass bank, then I arrange myself above it, sitting on the slope. My boots with their metal eyelets point up in the air. My woolen stockings are, as usual, a little rucked. The anvil is where it should be, between my skinny thighs, and the blade of the scythe, which I’ve detached from the helve, lies across my lap.

Tapping again? demands Hercule.

My eyesight’s going.

Give it to me a moment. I hand him up the blade and he clicks his fingernail against it. Zing! No resonance! You can’t find a good scythe these days. He flicks it again. You can hear it, can’t you. No note at all. Trash!

I remember a scythe, Hercule goes on, which when you struck it, sung like a lark.

He walks slowly and painfully towards his house, where Jeanne is turning the cows out into the field, and I stay sitting on the bank, pick up my hammer, hold the blade to the anvil, and tap. I tap from the corner to the point. Drops of sweat fall on to the lenses of my glasses and the curve of the black metal blurs, blurs before my eyes.

Night fell in Troy. Sucus found himself alone by the docks, near the Customs House. There were soldiers there with a searchlight. He climbed up to the waste lot, where he had waited for Zsuzsa on their first night. There was a lamp on in the Cadillac. Sucus didn’t approach. He lay on the grassy bank. Sleep, I whispered to him, sleep.

He woke to hear a voice in his ear and he turned round to see a head in the grass.

Sometimes I have good dreams, said the man who had lost both legs.

Sucus stared at him as if he, Sucus, had gone deaf and had to lip-read.

Last Tuesday, I dreamt of brandy, said the man.

The soldiers on the road below were playing with their searchlight. The man’s lips were grey.

I was going to drink the whole bottle, said the man who lived in the Cadillac, and then it occurred to me it would be cleverer to leave a mouthful for the next time. So far I’ve not been able to get back. You look in a bad way, friend. Suppose we move over to the car, and I’ll make some coffee.

Sucus said nothing.

The man with the sandals strapped to his elbows dragged himself up the hill. It took a long time. Sometimes he seemed to slip back like a fly climbing up a window pane. Yet compared to Sucus, he felt able-bodied and agile. This did not surprise him, for he knew that every hour in Troy invisible blows fell and destroyed limbs without a name.