Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

I withdrew back into the window-frame. She took a hasty gulp from her glass and looked down at her lap. ‘I’m saying that this is what’s it’s like, when every man you kiss thinks he’s unearthed you, and everyone has a role for you to play, the brave little refugee, the obedient daughter, the foreign girl with loose morals…’ Her hand made a quick mechanical gesture. ‘You do what you can with that. You can’t stop life from happening, can you? You don’t get to choose what parts you get. So you take your opportunities. You use the means available to you. Your life becomes something that takes you further and further away from yourself. It sounds cynical, I know. It is cynical.’

She got up and went back over to the array of salvage, standing at it with her head bowed, touching its surface. ‘But what you have to remember is,’ she continued, keeping her back to me, her voice dipping and fragmenting as if unwilling to go on, ‘I’ve done all this before. I’ve had a whole life that no one here even knows. I had friends. I had someone I loved. How come no one ever asks me about that, Charles? How come if everybody’s so concerned about me they never ask about that? Because I loved him and he loved me, we took walks by the river and put daisies in our hair and all the things that people do when they’re in love, except that we were in a war, except that meanwhile everyone else was trying to kill each other for things that happened before any of them were even born… Still, what did any of that have to do with us? We didn’t want to kill anybody. We thought they’d leave us alone. We thought being in love made us different. We told each other how we’d run away from it and start everything again.’ The fingers of her left hand passed again one by one through those of her right.

‘How can a person, how can your person, just disappear, Charles? How can someone go for food one night and just never come back? It’s ridiculous. It doesn’t make any sense. But everyone had stopped caring about making sense. And then it was time to run away again, and when I tried to go back to look for him I found out about the mines — they put mines down in our street in case we tried to come back. Where is he now? A grave somewhere in Krajina? The same one as my father? Nobody knows. How can nobody know? I don’t understand it. But that’s what our love amounted to. That’s what my love could do for him.’ A faint wobble ran through her chin; the hobbyhorse head looked at me mournfully from the mausoleum darkness at the back of the room.

‘And so I come here, where no one knows or cares what happened over there, no one’s even sure what language I speak, and I forget. I forget my father, who went back to the village because his friends had left their dog in the basement. I forget that my mother came here hidden in trucks full of meat and computer parts. I forget the brothers I grew up with so it doesn’t hurt to see the boredom on their faces. I pretend I don’t see the news when it shows the same thing happening all over again. I forget, like everyone wants me to forget. I make myself think only of my new life — the plays, the boys, the opportunities. Every night when she says good night to me Mama asks when we will go back. She doesn’t understand that everything is gone now. All the people we knew are gone. Different people live in our houses, strangers. I explain it to her every night and then the next night she comes in again and looks the way she thinks is east and asks the same question. She doesn’t understand. But I understand. And I’m never going back, whatever I have to do.’

There was a long, subdued silence. I frowned at my glass, which needed a top-up. Mirela wrapped an arm around her waist and gently swayed her dark cowl of hair. ‘I don’t expect you to forgive me,’ she said more quietly. ‘I just don’t want you to think of me as a thief, who came in and stole your life away without even thinking. I didn’t want it to be like this. I would have made it different, if I could. I would have made us friends. You with your face and me with my leg. Maybe if they added us together we might make a whole person.’

She laughed: in the penitent atmosphere the sound was startling, like the report of a gun. Perhaps because I started, I laughed too. The tension dissipated somewhat and she turned away from the wall; and as she did I caught her perfume for the first time, and I was put in mind suddenly of home: the smells on Father’s hands when he came back from the lab, the fragrances the models trailed after them as they skipped down the staircase that would stay behind long after they had gone, haunting the house like warm sweet ghosts: slinking up to you unexpectedly in a corridor, or springing out Boo! from the corner of a hardly used room, then with a wink disappearing as if they had never been there at all…

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think I’d be making any more speeches tonight.’

‘That’s perfectly all right.’

She had come back towards the centre of the room, but under the lantern she stopped, and her smile receded into something more pensive; reaching up, she made a tink with her fingernail against the glass. ‘We had one of these in the Folly,’ she said.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘It was ours.’

‘It seems like so long ago,’ she said. The lantern canted away from her fingertips, sending light swirling in the hollows of her collarbone like the dregs of some opalescent drink. ‘You know I never told you…’

‘Told me what?’

‘Nothing.’ She lowered her head, coming back up to the table and leaning her hip on its edge. ‘Just something stupid I used to do.’

I moved out to the table and filled up our glasses. ‘Tell me,’ I said, glad to be on to a less morbid line of conversation.

‘Well… it was when we were hiding in the Folly, my brothers and me. Every day they used to go into the city, trying to register. But I wasn’t allowed outside. They said it was too dangerous, because of my leg. I can’t move very quickly on it, obviously. And anyway I was ashamed of it. When I got to Ireland, and I saw all these people who weren’t running away from anybody, who were living normal lives, I felt ashamed. I felt — what’s the word? — absurd. So every day and every night I stayed up there in that tiny little room. Eventually of course I started going crazy. I had to get out. I didn’t care who saw me. So at night when the boys were asleep I started sneaking out. Not going anywhere, just around the garden, just to taste the air.’ Absently she peeled off her gloves and laid them neatly on the back of the armchair. ‘Then one night I saw a light in the drawing-room window, and that night I must have been particularly bored and particularly lonely because I went up and peeped through the crack in the curtains. And it was you.’

‘Was it?’ I said cautiously, it having been my occasional habit to watch television in the drawing room without the encumbrance of trousers.

‘You were watching an old film, I could tell by the light on the walls. And it reminded me of when I was a little girl, and they would put on old films late at night, and Mama would let me stay up because I told her it was to help me learn English. But really I liked them because everything looked so beautiful in black and white.’ She smiled bashfully. ‘I even used to get angry when Dorothy went to Oz, because I didn’t like the world being coloured in, and I just wanted her to go home to Kansas.’

I said nothing to this, but inside my heart was clapping its hands, exclaiming, ‘Me too! Me too!’

‘Anyway, there I was in the flowerbed looking at you, and it was — it was like I could tell exactly what was happening just by looking at your face. Like when you frowned, I knew the murderer was comforting the widow, and when you put your hands over your face I knew the pistol had been kicked across the floor, and when you smiled I knew the hero had kissed the girl —’ She laughed again, and drew breath. ‘Or that’s what it looked like to me. After that I used to check through the TV guide and mark out all the movies you might watch, and at night when I would steal out of the Folly I would always go to the window, just for a few minutes, and imagine I was in there beside you, and it was my home, with the fire in the fireplace and a glass of red wine.’ She rocked herself still and pulled in a little closer to the table. ‘What do you think, Charles?’ she said softly. ‘Do you think that’s de trop ?’