Edward Whittemore - Nile Shadows

I had no control over it, said Stern. It was a mood I couldn't overcome. Her loss was always in front of me in Smyrna, tearing at me and never letting up. All I wanted to do when I was there was hide. Sivi tried to help but he couldn't really. The days terrified me, especially the sunlight on bright days. . Homer's sunlight. The nights were easier in a way as they always are, less harsh and less brutal, but it was also at night when the most dangerous moments came. The truly black moments when nothing mattered and it began to seem perfectly reasonable to just end it all. . just end it. End everything. .

Stern fell silent. He touched the ragged sleeve of his cloak and leaned forward, staring intently into the shadowy mirror.

***

The end of December. One of the last nights of that dark year when Eleni had left him for the last time.

Stern had just arrived back in Smyrna to spend the holidays with Sivi, through Epiphany. Sivi was always careful to arrange some event for the evenings, so Stern wouldn't be left to sit alone in his room and brood. But that evening friends had invited Stern to dinner, so Sivi felt it safe to go off to the theater.

Stern was able to manage only a few hours at the house of his friends before his courage left him.

He gave them an excuse and returned early in the evening to Sivi's, to sit on the small balcony of his bedroom looking out at the harbor.

He was strangely calm that night and the decision came to him in a natural way as he sat there gazing at the lights on the water and listening to the sounds of the sea. There was nothing dramatic about it. On the contrary, it seemed reasonable and commonplace. A new year was coming and there was no point in facing it. No point at all.

So he went inside and emptied a bottle of pills into his hand and swallowed them one by one, without water, the way he always took pills. Then he poured himself some whiskey and sat down on the side of the bed to savor the drink, lighting a cigarette to go with it.

Suicide? A desperate act brought on by intolerable despair?

No, not at all. That wasn't the way he had felt about it then. He was calm and his feelings were commonplace, his mood reasonable. A drink and a cigarette before lying down to sleep was the same as hundreds of other nights. Exactly the same, only this time he wouldn't wake up.

He sat there on the side of the bed gazing out through the open French doors at the harbor, not particularly sad, relieved more than anything else. Soothed, at peace. The soft lights swayed on the water and the gentle night embraced him, a tranquil murmur of whispers rising from the cafés below in the darkness, anonymous and remote like the world itself.

It's so easy, he thought, as he sipped and smoked. Real decisions are always so easy, unlike the little things. And death is comforting and death is peace, only life is not. .

***

Stern remembered nothing after that until he awoke the following morning. Sivi had stopped by his room when he returned from the theater and had found Stern sitting on the side of the bed, dressed and unconscious. Sivi had immediately guessed what had happened and had made Stern vomit and called his housekeeper, and the two of them had pushed Stern into a cold shower and walked him up and down in his room for more than an hour, until the danger had passed, only then letting Stern lie down to sleep.

The housekeeper had told Stern about it the following day, when he questioned her. As for Sivi, he had never mentioned the incident and never alluded to it in any way. Instead he was his usual jovial self the next day, laughing and joking and trying to buoy Stern up as he always did, as if nothing at all had happened during the night.

But whenever Stern had returned to Smyrna and his bedroom in Sivi's villa, he had picked up the corner of the new rug beside the bed and looked at the stain on the floorboards, a permanent stain made by his vomit, by the life going out of him one night in order that he might live.

***

I used to close the door and sit there staring at it, said Stern, trying to find some design in that map of my life on the floorboards. But no matter how hard I looked it was still a shape without a shape, shadings that turned in upon themselves, a swirl of dark tones that was all suggestion, like clouds in the sky. So I tried to see something there but I never could. I could never read anything into it at all.

At first that stain was so ugly to me I hated to be in the room with it. It shamed me and frightened me and I was always aware it was there, under the rug, and always very careful to step around it. But after a while I forgot about it and I'd actually find myself standing on it, not thinking where I was. . In a way that made it better, but it also saddened me because it meant I'd learned to live with the stain. The psyche doing what it had to do in order for me to survive. Forgetting. What it always has to do when something horrible becomes an everyday companion in our lives. . But there was also another cause to the sadness. Whenever I found myself standing on that stain, I also found myself thinking of my childhood and how far I had come from a dusty little hillside in the Yemen. By a bed now in a room that wasn't my own, near some open doors overlooking a harbor. . But why this harbor and why this room?. . I used to ask myself that and a whole host of questions would follow. Where is this? Where are you? And the answers were devastating. . I was anywhere. I was standing on a map that was me, my life, and it had nothing to tell me. So I wasn't someplace, I was just anywhere. .

Stern drew back. He touched the neck of his ragged cloak and turned away from the mirror, pulling himself away from its peculiar fascination.

As for that attempt at suicide, he said, the first one, it caused me to think about many things. What I'd really done and what it meant, and what I'd learned about myself and the human condition, and maybe more than anything else, what I'd learned from Sivi.

There was so much wisdom in the old man I've often wondered whether he was actually aware of it.

Whether he did what he did out of some intuition, or whether he knew that the way he acted after that night was the only thing making it possible for me to go on. . Sivi acting as if. Acting as if nothing had happened. . How could he have known to do that unless he himself had once been where I was then?

But that's a whole other subject, said Stern, and it leads to the massacres and Sivi going mad during the massacres. Wisdom that profound is so tenuous it's often impossible for it to survive the brutality of life, the fears within us. And with Sivi it didn't and he went mad. .

Of course, that night on the balcony happened a long time ago, when I was just beginning to become a man. And looking back on it and what followed, I realized just how hard we try not to grow. How desperately we go on trying to clasp the certainties of childhood to our hearts, bravely trying to face the world with that pathetic armor. I know, we say, I may not be able to explain it but I know what I mean.

And yet if we can't explain it, said Stern, there is no understanding. Instead there are rigid dead dreams, the sand castles of our childhoods to which we add a turret or two in our youths, and a rampart or two later on before we die, passing on to our children the same outwardly dreamy shape with the same inwardly dense and incomprehensible structure.

Stern frowned. He stared down at the counter and his voice was tense, hushed.

Why is it we don't understand how destructive it is to cling to things? Why is it we don't understand that even revolutionaries do that, and that in fact there is often no one more reactionary than a revolutionary?