Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [96]
He ripped up some old cardboard to use as kindling and opened the iron door of the stove. There was a slope of wood, cobwebbed, against the wall, and he lit the fire. Where was her husband? It felt to him that the house had been deserted for some time; the stones on the wall and the floor held an old cold. The cracking and banging of the burning wood woke her, and he heard her say, Roman? He came back and wiped her face dry with the blanket. ‘Lucien. It’s me. Let me change your bedding, it feels as wet as you.’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. In the cupboard he found a flannel sheet. It looked familiar. His mother must have at one time handed it down to her. He spread it over a chair in front of the fire.
He opened a can of soup, put it on the stove, then brought the warm sheet to her. When he pulled the coarse blanket down, her chest heaved as if freed of the weight, and her head came up coughing with each spasm. She was bent almost in two, a naked hairpin. When she lay back, the shadow of her ribs broke his heart, her thin whiteness reflecting the candlelight from the ceiling. He wrapped her in the warmed sheet and covered her with the blanket. Then he brought soup to the bed and began spooning it into her. She was drinking it eagerly.
Roman.
No. It’s Lucien.
It’s Lucien, she repeated slowly, as if confusedly shifting dance partners.
Yes, he confirmed. Where is Roman? But as he said that, he saw he’d lost her again, her mind elsewhere, in the shadows.
He must have fallen asleep in the chair. When he opened his eyes he couldn’t see her. He thought he’d just felt a hand on his shoulder. But the candle wavered then, and he saw her face on the pillow, looking at him. Her eyes signalling something. You, my friend. You have to take me out. Do you understand? She closed her eyes again, giving up, as if she’d been shouting at him through thick glass. He didn’t understand. But she kept turning to him for help, there was something else. Do you … Suddenly he understood. He was a fool. The blanket wrapped tight around her, he gathered her into his arms, crossed the room, pushed the door open, and carried her into the cold night. He didn’t have a light with him, but he knew where it was—the small shack that was the outhouse. ‘Thank you,’ she was saying. ‘Thank you, Roman.’
In the cubicle he lifted the blanket so she could sit down, and then sat next to her so he could hold her upright. After a minute she nudged his arm. All right? She nodded, with almost a smile. Again he gathered her like a frail branch and carried her to the farmhouse, and put her back into the bed. She was already asleep, and calm; he drew the curtain across so she would not be wakened by daylight.
He woke in the morning, his head on the kitchen table, his eye against the blue of it—the scratched and cut-into blue, a history of them all. So he knew where he was, coming out of the deepest sleep, in the instant of waking.
He sat up in the chair. Light from the east window revealed dust across the floor. He noticed the stove and went forward and touched it tentatively, but it was cold. There was a pan on it with the remnants of solidified food. He stood there not moving. The room, the air, was so still that he felt he could not be existing within it. He could hear nothing. He looked down at his feet, then at his hands held out in front of him, to make certain he was fully alive.
All he wanted to hear was a cough, or the movement of a bed-spring. He walked forward and looked at the bare faded landscape of trees and a river depicted on the curtain that cut the room in half. As though it was another spectrum of life he could now almost enter. He had not breathed for so long. He drew the curtain back and there was nothing there.
Say Your Good-byes
He walked into Marseillan and at the police station discovered that what he had warmed and