In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [50]
He is always surprised at Alice’s body. She seems physically frail, as if a jostle will break her, but she is agile, a dancer as much as an actress moving fluidly through rooms. She thinks the twentieth century’s greatest invention is the jitterbug. She can almost forgive capitalism for that. She is in love with Fats Waller. Patrick has seen her sit at the piano in the Balkan Café and sing
“Needed no star
Wanted no moon
Always thought it too dumb …
Then all at once
Up jumped you
With love.”
Clara, she would say later, was the classical one, she could play the piano like a queen stepping across mud. I play the way I think. And heartbreaking romance is all I want in music.
But Alice’s tenderest speech to him, as she sat on his belly looking down, concerned her missing of Clara. “I love Clara,” she said to him, the lover of Clara. “I miss her. She made me sane for all those years. That was important for what I am now.”
She could move like … she could sing as low as.… Why is it that I am now trying to uncover every facet of Alice’s nature for myself?
He wants everything of Alice to be with him here in this room as if she is not dead. As if he can be given that gift, to relive those days when Alice was with him and Hana, which in literature is the real gift. He turns the page backwards. Once more there is the image of them struggling and tickling Alice until she releases her grip on her shirt and it comes off with a flourish, and Hana jumps up, waving it like a rebel’s flag in the small green-painted room. All these fragments of memory … so we can retreat from the grand story and stumble accidently upon a luxury, one of those underground pools where we can sit still. Those moments, those few pages in a book we go back and forth over.
* * *
Nicholas Temelcoff’s fingers sink into a ball of dough and pull it apart, then they reassemble it and fling it down onto the table. He looks up and sees Patrick enter the Geranium Bakery, awkwardly look around, and then approach him. Patrick pulls out the photograph and places it in front of Temelcoff.
Behind them the pulleys and rollers move hundreds of loaves into the ovens, pause, then continue out. Temelcoff in his grey clothes talks with Patrick about the bridge and the nun – reminded of the exact date which his memory had lost – and pleasure and wonder fill him. He stands in the centre of the bakery thinking, throwing a small ball of dough up and catching it, unaware of this gesture for so long that Patrick, a yard from him, cannot reach him. Temelcoff is somewhere else, the eyes magnified behind the spectacles, the ball of dough falling surely back into the hand, the arm that caught her in the air and pulled her back into life. “Talk, you must talk,” and so mockingly she took a parrot’s name. Alicia.
Nicholas Temelcoff never looks back. He will drive the bakery van over the bridge with his wife and children and only casually mention his work there. He is a citizen here, in the present, successful with his own bakery. His bread and rolls and cakes and pastries reach the multitudes in the city. He is a man who is comfortable among ovens, the smell of things rising, the metamorphosis of food. But he pauses now, reminded about the details of the incident on the bridge.
He stands exactly where Patrick left him, thinking, as those would who believe that to continue a good dream you must lie down the next night in exactly the same position you awakened in, where the body parted from its images. Nicholas is aware of himself standing there within the pleasure of recall. It is something new to him. This is what history means. He came to this country like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light. Energy poured through him. That was all he had time for in those years. Language, customs, family, salaries.