In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [46]
The wet heat focused the exhaustion and under the cold shower the last of the tension fell to his feet. For the last hour they lay on the green bunks, a radio on the windowsill transmitting the Saturday afternoon opera, with a sign above it in three languages insisting that no one change the station.
He lay there, not wanting translation, letting the emotion of the music fall onto him. Soon this arm would become the arm Alice kissed. They were all being released from the week’s work and began to allow themselves ease, the clarified world of passion. The music of La Bohème, the death of Mimi, hovering over their unprotected bodies, the keys hanging from the cords around their necks.
* * *
Then it was her hand in the doorway touching his heart, against his ribs, aware through her fingers of his weariness. In the small room where he could take three steps and touch the window. There was Patrick and Alice and Hana. If it was warm they would eat on the fire escape. Or if Alice was working he and Hana walked over to the Balkan Café where they sat on wire chairs and were served by long-aproned waiters. They ordered bop and manja, Hana telling him in her clear, exact voice what the names meant. Bop was beans. Manja was stew. As he watched Hana, her face drifted into Alice’s and back again as if two glass negatives merged, then moved apart. It was not so much the features as the mannerisms of Alice that he witnessed in her daughter.
He was at ease with the precise Hana and the way she seriously articulated herself among strangers. That voice knew what it wanted and knew what it was allowed. He wanted to pick Hana up and embrace her on the street but felt shy, though in games or in a crowded streetcar her arm lay across him as if needing his warmth and closeness. As he did hers.
But his relationship with Alice had a horizon. She refused to speak of the past. Even her stories about Hana’s father, though intricate, gave nothing away of herself. She was never self-centred in her mythologies. She would turn any compliment away. Her habit of sitting pale and naked at the breakfast table, cutting up whatever fruit they had into three portions, or sitting down with fried eggs made him once whisper to her that she was beautiful. “I’m terrific over eggs,” she shot back, her mouth full. She did not get dressed. She planned to go back to bed as soon as Patrick left for the tannery and Hana left for school. Alice worked in the evenings.
His relationship with Hana was clearer. There would always be something careful about her. As if she had been badly scalded and so would approach all water tentatively for fear it was boiling. With her there would be brief conflicts, a discussion, and then everything was settled. She would not be bossed and she was self-sufficient. She didn’t expect forgiveness.
They sat at the round tables at the Balkan Café eating a large meal and with ice creams strolled over at ten to the Parrot Theatre to pick up Alice. They had all the time in the world, Hana translating the information she received on the street, speaking to a butcher who walked beside them for a hundred yards carrying a pig’s head. Patrick watched the gestures towards him. They knew who he was now. A hat raised off a head in slow motion, a woman’s nod to his left shoulder.
He lived – in his job and during these evening walks – in a silence, with noise and conversation all around him. To be understood, his reactions had to exaggerate themselves. The family idiot. A stroke victim. “Paderick,” the shopkeepers would call him as he handed them money and a list of foods Hana had written out in Macedonian, accepting whatever they gave him. He felt himself expand into an innocent. Every true thing he learned about character he learned at this time in his life. Once, when they were at the Teck Cinema watching a Chaplin film he found himself laughing out loud, joining the others in their laughter. And he caught someone’s eye, the body bending forward to look at him, who had the same realization – that this mutual laughter was conversation.
He was always