John Berger - Lilac and Flag

Naisi passed the window where his little sister was asleep with the bowl of beans in her lap, he passed the door through which he could see his mother sprawled on the mattress on the floor, and he observed the lovers outside who were kissing with their tongues in each other’s mouths.

He stood there alone, and with a voice like the starter of a car that won’t catch, hoarse and tired, he said: There’s nothing happening today, nothing, nothing, not a fucking thing.

AT THE MOMENT Zsuzsa’s brother Naisi said nothing is happening, not a fucking thing, Clement, Sucus’s father, seated on the bed in the two-room flat on the fourteenth floor of the apartment block in Cachan, pressed the ON switch of his television set, which exploded into blue flames. The satin bedspread went up in flames. Clement hurled himself into the kitchen to fetch water, unaware of his burnt face and hands. Only when he picked up an enamel basin in the sink and dropped it as if it were red hot, did he realise he was hurt. His hands felt on fire. He heard Wislawa, his wife, screaming: Jesus! Branch, what have you done to yourself? Branch, what have you done?

White smoke was pouring from the bedroom window. Down below in the street nobody noticed until the first fire engine, hooting like a terrified water bird, rushed through the traffic lights; then people began to look around and eventually to point up at the fourteenth floor. By the time the firemen got their hoses out and extended their ladder, Clement and Wislawa had doused the fire with a bucket and a zinc bath. But Clement had to be taken to hospital in an ambulance. The firemen feared for his eyes.

As a boy he used to sing in the village choir. I loved Clement’s voice. When he sang in public he shut his eyes because he did not like being stared at. He stood there, arms at his side, stiff but full of expression. Like a figure carved out of wood. The same force-fulness, the same strength, and the same suffering. Clement left for Troy when he was seventeen. I remember it as if it were yesterday. His older brother, Albert, who was already working as a porter in one of the city’s auction rooms, had found him a job. Unfortunately, it did not last long. One day, a few minutes before a large sale was about to start, an auctioneer found Clement asleep on an eighteenth-century four-poster bed which, it was hoped, would realise fifteen million. Naturally, he was sacked on the spot. A few months later he got a job opening oysters and this is what he did for the rest of his life. During the winter he opened oysters and during the summer he loaded fish into refrigerated trucks and railway cars. Sometimes he sang whilst working.

My sheep were grazing

The green mountainside

Tra la la, la la la, la la.

So as not to be sad

To myself I sang

And the echo replied:

Eh oh! eh! oh!

When he was over thirty — and his parents had despaired of him ever getting married — he fell in love with a tally-clerk in a fish warehouse. Her name was Wislawa. She was plump, rosy-complexioned, and she wore thick glasses behind which her eyes were kind and sleepy. Clement was a good dancer. He danced her off her feet. He waltzed like somebody from another century. He also cooked fish for her. He had a way of cooking red garnards which made them taste like lobster. She watched him with his enormous red hands — always swollen because of the salt water, and painfully cracked because of the ice — preparing the fish on their bed of vegetables and she thought of a mother putting a child to bed, his gestures were so gentle. For her part, she changed his life with a book: a dictionary that explained the origins of words. Clement read it for the next thirty years, and never forgot a thing he learnt. It became a passion. He opened words, as he opened oysters, to find, within, their real meaning. Through words he listened to the past and to what he believed to be the truth. To migrate, from the Latin migrare, to change one’s abode.

Wislawa’s father, a primary-school teacher, was outraged when Wislawa told him who she wanted to marry. The fishmonger-son-of-a-peasant! he screamed. Do that, do just that, go on, do it, and ruin my life! And my life! she said very quietly and with great determination, for Wislawa, because of her poor health, knew exactly what she wanted. Clement, large, quiet, wooden, was to be the tree of her life: in him she would perch. And perch she did.

Clement brought Wislawa to the village for the wedding. I was there. During the next few years they sometimes came back on visits — particularly in July so they could help Clement’s parents, Casimir and Angeline, bring in the hay. Casimir was the brother of Marcel, the Marcel who went to prison for kidnapping the two government inspectors. Each time Clement and Wislawa arrived, Casimir made a point of tentatively placing his hand on her belly even before embracing his son. Yet the years passed and his daughter-in law was never pregnant.

Then one July he put his hand on her stomach and was as usual shaking his head, when she nodded. No? he said, incredulous. Yes! she said and laughed. Let me get my thingamebob, lie down on the table and close your eyes. Casimir came back with a tiny chain attached to a wedding ring. Holding the end of the chain between his finger and thumb, he let the ring hang suspended over her magnificent belly. Wislawa couldn’t stop laughing. Angeline held her hand to calm her. The ring started to move and then to swing out in ever-widening circles. It’s a boy! cried Casimir, a grandson!

The child was conceived at Easter, said Wislawa, at least I think so.

You mean in this house on your last visit! shouted Casimir triumphantly.

I think so.

We gave them our bed, Angeline, you remember?

So we did.

He was conceived in this house, cried Casimir, and in our bed! He belongs here! He’s our man … And he embraced his son and then his daughter-in-law.

Let us drink to HIM and his mother! In the cellar I have a bottle that I have kept for half a century, just for this occasion! Ah, my dear Clement, what a happiness a son is …

The thingamebob was right. Wislawa was carrying a boy. Sucus was born the following January, under the sign of Aquarius, the Water-Carrier.

From Troy they were always promising to come back to the village to show Casimir and Angeline their grandson, but, after the birth, Wislawa’s health got worse and Clement’s earnings became feebler and feebler as prices in Troy increased a hundredfold. So they put off coming and both grandparents died without ever having seen their grandson. The years passed and Clement taught Sucus all that he knew about the truth of words.

So you’ve come, my son, said Clement from the hospital bed.

Yes, Papa.

Come to see me for the last time, eh?

Why do you say last?

Do you know how long I’ve been here now? Eight days! You look better.

The lift’s too small to take coffins, they tell me. They’ll have to carry mine down the stairs. How’s your mother?

All right.

Stop staring at me.

You’ll get better, Papa.

They won’t let me see myself in a mirror. The man-over-there’s wife came to visit him, so I asked her if she had one in her handbag. When she held out the mirror to me, her hand was trembling.

Maybe it always trembles. Maybe it’s a disease that makes her hand tremble.

Shh! He may hear you. He’s not deaf.

Maybe there’s no cure for her trembling. Who knows?

You know everything, don’t you!

He wasn’t burnt like you? asked Sucus.

He’s badly concussed. Concussion.

Something fell on him?

Worse, son, it was an icon. He’s Russian and thinks it was a punishment sent by God. Retribution. From the Latin retribuere , to pay back, from tribuere , to pay, originally to share out among the tribes . You see what that means? In retribution there’s still the tribe, the clan, where we came from.