In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [42]
– I don’t know, she whispered, near him.
He reached to where she was and she put her hand against him. The sky looked mapped, gridded by the fire escape. Above and below them a few neighbours came out onto the frail structures, laughing with relief at the cooler air. They would wave now and then, formally, to Alice and her companion. He was suddenly aware that he had a role.
A bottle of fruit whiskey on the end of a long piece of twine swung from side to side in front of them. Alice caught it and pulled it in. “To impatience,” she said. She drank, offered him some, and then holding the rope let the bottle down to another level. In this way it moved among the others.
To the south they could see the lights of the Victory Flour Mills. The Macedonians, who disliked the raindrops on their hair, asked their wives to pass them their hats through the window, and felt more secure. They saw Alice’s man who worked in the tunnels. They sat among their families, looking towards the lake. The vista was Upper America, a New World. Landscape changed nothing but it brought rest, altered character as gradually as water on a stone. Patrick lay back again beside Alice and the girl Hana.
– You should sit up, she said after a while. You will see something beautiful.
A rectangle of light went on below them. Then another. The night-shift workers were starting to get up. They could be seen in grey trousers and undershirts, washing at their kitchen sinks. The neighbourhood was soon speckled with light while the rest of the city lay in sleep. Soon they could hear doors closing on the street below them. Figures filed out, Macedonians and Greeks, heading for the killing floors and railway yards and bakeries.
– They don’t want your revolution, Patrick said to Alice.
– No. They won’t be involved. Just you. You’re a mongrel, like me. Not like my daughter here. But like me.
– So what do you want?
– Nothing but thunder.
* * *
Alice and Hana were still on the fire escape, curled up together, when he left. He closed the door on them quiet as a thief.
He would have to go back to his room, take his clothes out into the alley and beat the hardened mud out of them, then walk to work. It was about five A.M., his head and body buzzing, overloaded with false energy. Later, he knew, he would be unable to lift his arms above his head, would stagger under the weight of a pickaxe. But for now the dawn in him, the sun, wakened his blood.
He remembered Clara in the Paris hotel talking about how Alice had been after the child’s father had died. “Hana wasn’t born yet. But Cato died and I think she went into madness, into something very alone. He was killed up north when she was pregnant.”
In the Thompson Grill, the counter radio was already playing songs about the heart, songs about women who let their men go as casually as a river through their fingers. The waitress with the tattoo gave him his coffee. The music this morning threw him across eras. He was eighteen again and he fell into a girl’s arms, drunk and full of awe during his first formal dance, painted moonlight on the ceiling, the floating lights through the scrims that bathed the couples translating them. He had stepped up cocky and drunk onto the sprung floor and was suddenly close enough to see the girl’s lost eyes, undisguised by the colours, and he too was lost. A chameleon among the minds of women.
– What did you think of my friend?
– I liked her.
– She’s a great actress.
– Better than you, is she?
– By a hundred miles, Patrick.
– Yes, I liked her.
His mind skates across old conversations. The past drifts into the air like an oasis and he watches himself within it. The girl’s eyes that night when he was eighteen were like tunnels into kindness and lust and determination which he loved as much as her white stomach and her ochre face. He saw something there he would never fully reach – the way Clara dissolved and suddenly disappeared from him, or the way Alice came to him it seemed in a series of masks or painted faces, both of these women