Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [92]
In Épernay that November, all that kept him warm were her shoulders. His mind reached forward and lit them like a gas fire. He’d been a secretive man for most of his life, and now was disconcerted by the secrets he had kept from himself.
Furlough
The furlough allowed him ten days. He returned home and it was midsummer and the August storms, or the threat of them, came every night. Sometimes there was lightning but no rain. His thoughts and emotions were loose in him, random, similar to the abrupt cuts of light in the sky. He would walk in the fields by the river long past midnight, unable to lose his wakefulness. In the house, his wife and daughters were asleep. He had been home three or four days and was still not used to the quiet, was not used to the chance of a suddenly lit room while he waited for the nightmare or the dream. The lack of the war was like a frozen river around him. There was security only in the past, with Marie-Neige always somewhere, in the symmetrical rows of her garden, or steering a wheelbarrow full of wet clothes back from the river.
What had touched him most on the day of his return was her greeting, the odour of the mud on her hands as she reached up to touch his new beard. He wanted to thank her, somehow, for saving him during the days and nights in Épernay. But he was cautious, fearing his strange obsession about her during the month of diphtheria was nakedly evident.
He sat at his desk organizing his reports, hiding everything he felt. Twice he walked to Marseillan and back. The town had been devastated, losing almost all of its men in the German war. It was a village of widows. Marie-Neige told him Roman had been released, but only into the war as a soldier. Lucien wondered what his old neighbour had been told he was fighting for.
At one or two a.m. he’d still be awake. He would dress and go outside and walk to the river. He’d leave the footpath as if splashing into long, coarse grass, and a wave of insects would lift around him so that anyone could be conscious of where he was by their sound.
Another night. In his bed he could hear thunder, the formal distance of it. He listened for rain but it did not come, and the frustration hovered alongside him till he fell asleep. Then thunder again, like a cynical, dry hand-clapping, and he was awake, with hope once more.
Another night.
He had his shirt off and stood among the noise of cicadas and grasshoppers. The ochre colour of a lamp came through the trees like a lit vessel being carried over the sea. When she reached him they both were still and quiet, as if intent on listening for some pronouncement or signal in that hesitation, and then the silence was lost, as the chirp and clatter of insects rose like dirt once again into the air around them. There would be no privacy even here, even now, after all this time in their adjacent lives. A wakeful nature surrounded them. A mockingbird at a height beyond their reach in the new branches (he would never see the bird) was consistent and woeful.
The lamp hung from her fingers beside her dress. But they said nothing. As if they knew that darkness was also a liquid, and just one uttered word thrown out would ripple back to the house. He held her hand and walked with her to the edge of the river. She dimmed the light, just enough so they could find this place again from the water, then moved away from the burn of the lamp and undressed and walked into the river. He could hear her wading movement. A few minutes later they faced each other. When his weaving hands touched her underwater, he pulled back in a courtesy or a shyness, she couldn’t tell which. Lucien could see no edge to the sky, not a star. He moved into the deeper darkness. He had not swum in a night river since he was a boy. He was with his sixteen-year-old