John Berger - Lilac and Flag

We’ll get another thermos.

A five-litre thermos, triple insulation, needs a lot of lettuce, and it’s hard to find a shanked one.

Then we’ll do something else, we’ll invent something, Flag.

She scratched harder into his scalp with her silver nails and he moaned with pleasure. This prompted her to soap his neck too, for she wanted to touch the spot she had made the sound come from. Then she rubbed his head more gently till her hands made him drop off.

He was driving along a one-way street. Zsuzsa was the city centre to which the road signs all pointed. But his street was going away from the centre. At the next round-about he read a sign which said: Zsuzsa 638 km.

At this moment she scooped up a basinful of water and threw it over him. The water had been warmed all day by the sun. Sucus scarcely stirred. He just opened his eyes and smiled.

He’s very wet, whispered little Julia to herself. She was watching every move through the lace curtains. Her sister got astride the man’s legs and sat facing him. He put his hands under her sister’s shirt. Her sister was putting her rings back on her fingers; she had taken them off to do the washing.

You could grow me a beard! Zsuzsa whispered to him.

She had found with her fingers the baby in this sturdy man who could carry sacks of cement across his shoulders and whose moustache was like a black aerosol signature saying HOMBRE. Now she wanted to change the baby back into a roused man.

You could grow me a beard, she repeated.

I know a woman with a beard, he replied.

Not for me! For you!

A black beard and the face of a man. And you know what? She has two breasts as large as melons.

So, you’ve never seen tiny melons?

She keeps an ironmonger’s shop. I went there to buy a gas ring for Mother. She dropped the old one on the floor and it broke.

And the lady with the beard shows her tits to every customer?

At first I couldn’t believe my eyes. She was feeding her baby. She had a beard and a baby! That’s how I saw them.

Zsuzsa rested her chin on Flag’s wet hair. What makes some hairs straight and others curly? she asked.

In the afternoon heat behind the lace curtains Julia fell asleep. The basin, full of beans she’d been podding, was still on her lap. The flies on the backs of her hands did not wake her.

All the noises on Rat Hill that hot afternoon were drowsy. It was as if no sound had the energy to continue. A chicken cackled and then stopped. A baby cried and went to sleep. Somebody hammered and then the nail was in. A gang of children were playing a game that involved hiding and never being seen or heard. Every dog had found its shade to sleep in. The only continuous noise came from the bottling factory on the Swansea side, a kind of metallic coughing and snoring.

What floor do you live on? Zsuzsa asked.

Fourteenth.

Top storey? Scratch me there again.

No, no, there are twenty-seven floors.

Over Zsuzsa’s shoulder Sucus could see the hill opposite, on which the shacks were built so close they almost touched each other. Higher up, the yellowing grass of the hill was criss-crossed by dozens of dust paths so that it looked like an animal losing its fur.

They’ve got electricity over there?

They got their electricity on Tortoise Hill before we did, she said. We had to wait five years. They built the first houses there the night of the New Year, eighteen months ago. They haven’t got water yet. A truck brings it round. Scratch me more there.

You don’t need pipes for electricity, Sucus said.

Anyway, they got it before we did.

And here you’ve got water!

They get less snow in the winter over there than we do here. That’s beautiful …

So you want to move out?

Depends on you. How many hundred bricks can you lay your hands on? She kissed his eyes.

Millions!

Millions?

Half a dozen.

Holy God! We could build a palace with them. All we need now is a sack of cement.

Use bird-lime!

Wood?

Cut down a tree or two.

Make planks, she said.

Make a bed, he said.

With his fingertips he was playing with the rough hair under her arm, where it was like a nest.

Do we need window frames?

One window to start with, he said.

Take it from a train.

I know where to find a truck chassis, clean, Zsuzsa, not rusty. Five minutes from here. Roof, doors, floor, the lot.

He pressed his elbow into his stomach so he could touch her breasts.

Once, in the presbytery where Monsieur le Curé Besson lived — he was a man of quiet dignity who drank himself to death — I saw a book, almost as large as the Bible, open at a picture of a young woman offering her breast to an old beggar. The old man had taken the nipple in his toothless mouth and his face was creased in happiness. When Monsieur le Curé came back into the room, he abruptly closed the book like a shutter on a window. I’ve never forgotten the picture. If I could find in my blouse the bosom which was once there, two full breasts and their nipples, dear God, for the time it takes to be sucked dry by a child!

Are we going to have a chimney? asked Sucus.

I want mosaics, Flag, like in Santa Barbara.

Blue stones and black jet.

Set in pearl.

She chewed on his wet hair with her teeth.

And ZSUZSA written in gold.

That’s right, so the postman knows where to deliver the letters, she said.

Who’s going to write?

You, when you go away, you’re going to write!

Why do I go away?

To find something else, something you can’t find here. You steal a car.

I don’t take you in the car?

I wait for you. I cook ful medames all night. And I stay awake praying.

Praying for me to come back.

I’m expecting you back and I’m angry.

I don’t come.

I can’t believe it.

I have to be rich to come back.

I leave and I start looking for you.

You find me on the day I make twenty million.

So you buy me a panther dress.

And a sapphire ring.

Then we take a ship, Zsuzsa said.

A white ship.

We have a cabin to ourselves.

In the cabin I tear off your dress.

I tear off your shirt.

We’re locked in the cabin.

I’ve thrown the key away, Flag.

I know why deers fight to the death in the mating season and why they bellow with such a suffering noise. To be male at such a moment is to have a sword thrust between the loins, with its point and half its length protruding. Nothing to do with dreams, not something coiled within. This comes from outside, it skewers the body and it leads him, helpless. It is worse in man than in any other animal because it goes on for longer and it can begin without provocation — as if suddenly a finger in the sky pointed. The sword is pointed too, and double-edged, and along its length it carries its wound. The blade is all the time cutting the wound, and the wound is nothing else but the flesh of the man’s little zizi now unrecognisable, because so large and straight. All three of them — man, blade, and zizi — know the same things: that relief cannot come until the sword is plunged into the river it is seeking. Only that river at that moment can heal their wounds, dissolve the sword and make the finger in the sky vanish. We women, rivers of pain and relief.

So Sucus and Zsuzsa embraced, and Julia slept, until Naisi came back up the hill. He was walking slowly and as he walked he kicked at the earth of the path with the toes of his famous calf-coloured boots. The soil was dry and dusty. When it rained on Rat Hill, the earth was transformed into slides of mud and little rivulets of yellow water that poured down the hillside, like beer down a drenched man’s throat. Wet or dry, frozen or baked, the earth on Rat Hill contained fragments and splinters of everything: of glass, brick, china, polystyrene, rubber, earthenware, nails, tin foil, slate, lead, hair, porcelain, zinc, plaster, iron, burnt wood, cardboard, wire, cloth, horn, bone.