When You Are Engulfed in Flames (13 page)
The latest Kate Bush CD includes a song called “Aerial,” and one spring afternoon Hugh sat down to listen to it. In the city, I’m forever nagging him about the volume. “The neighbors!” I say. But out in Normandy, I lose my excuse and have to admit that it’s me who’s being disturbed. The music I can usually live with. It’s the lyrics I find irritating, especially when I’m at my desk and am looking for a reason to feel distracted. If one line ends with, say, the word “stranger,” I’ll try to second-guess the corresponding rhyme.
Danger,
I’ll think. Then,
No, wait, this is a Christmas album. Manger. The word will be “manger.”
If I guess correctly, the songwriter will be cursed for his predictability. If I guess incorrectly, he’s being “willfully obtuse,” a phrase I learned from my publisher, who applied it to the title of my last book. It’s a no-win situation that’s made even worse when the lyrics are unintelligible, the voice a shriek embedded in noise. This makes me feel both cranky
and
old, the type of pill who says things like, “You and that rock!”
There are singers Hugh’s not allowed to listen to while I’m in the house, but Kate Bush isn’t one of them, or at least she wasn’t until recently. The song I mentioned, “Aerial,” opens with the trilling of birds. This might be startling if you lived in the city, but out in Normandy it’s all we ever hear: a constant din of chirps and whistles that may grow faint at certain times of year but never goes away. It’s like living in an aviary. Added to the calls of larks and swallows are the geese and chickens that live across the road. After they’ve all gone to bed, the owls come out and raise hell until dawn, when the whole thing starts over again.
The Kate Bush song had been playing for all of thirty seconds when we heard an odd noise and turned to see a bird rapping its beak against the windowpane. A moment later, its identical twin appeared at the adjacent window and began to do the same thing. Had they knocked once or twice, I’d have chalked it up to an accident, but these two were really going at it, like woodpeckers, almost. “What’s gotten into them?” I asked.
Hugh turned to the liner notes, hoping to find some sort of an explanation. “Maybe the recorded birds are saying something about free food,” he suggested, but to me the message seemed much darker: a call to anarchy, or possibly even murder. Some might think this was crazy, but I’d been keeping my ear to the ground and had learned that birds are not as carefree as they’re cracked up to be. Take the crows that descend each winter on the surrounding fields and pluck the eyes out of newborn lambs. Are they so hard up for a snack that they have to blind an international symbol of youth and innocence, or are they simply evil, a quality they possibly share with these two things at the window?
“What do you
want
from us?” I asked, and the birds stepped back into the flower box, getting a little traction before hurling themselves against the glass.
“They’ll wear themselves out sooner or later,” Hugh said. But they didn’t, not even after the clouds moved in and it began to rain. By late afternoon, they were still at it, soaking wet, but no less determined. I was lying on the daybed, working a crossword puzzle and listening to the distinct sound of feathers against glass. Every two minutes, I’d put aside my paper and walk across the room. “You think it’s so great in here?” I’d ask. “You think we’ve got something you can’t live without?” At my approach, the birds would fly away, returning the moment I’d settled back down. Then I’d say, “All right, if you really want to come in that much . . .”
But the two lost interest as soon as the windows were open. And so I’d close them up again and return to my puzzle, at which point the birds would reappear and continue their assault. Then I’d say, “All right, if you really want to come in that much . . .”
Einstein wrote that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result each time. That said, is it crazier to repeatedly throw yourself against a window, or to repeatedly
open
that window, believing the things that are throwing themselves against it might come into your house, take a look around, and leave with no hard feelings?
I considered this as I leafed through
Birds of the World,
an illustrated guidebook as thick as a dictionary. After learning about the Philippine eagle — a heartless predator whose diet consists mainly of monkeys — I identified the things at the window as chaffinches. The size was about right, six inches from head to tail, with longish legs, pink breasts, and crooked white bands running along the wings. The book explained that they eat fruit, seeds, and insects. It stated that some chaffinches prefer to winter in India or North Africa, but it did not explain why they were trying to get into my house.
“Could it be something they picked up in Africa?” I wondered. And Hugh, who had lived there until his late teens, said, “Why are you asking me?”
When the sun finally set, the birds went away, but they were at it again the following morning. Between their running starts and their pitiful back-assed tumbles, the flowers in the window box had been trashed, petals and bits of stem scattered everywhere. There were scratch marks on the windowpanes, along with what I’m guessing was saliva, the thick, bubbly kind that forms when you’re enraged.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
And Hugh told me to ignore them. “They just want attention.” This is his explanation for everything from rowdy children to low-flying planes. “Turn the other way and they’ll leave,” he told me. But how could I turn away?
The solution, it seemed, was to make some kind of a scarecrow, which is not a bad project if you’re in the proper mood. My first attempt involved an upside-down broom and a paper bag, which I placed over the bristles and drew an angry face on. For hair, I used a knot of steel wool. This made the figure look old and powerless, an overly tanned grandma mad because she had no arms. The birds thought it was funny, and after chuckling for a moment or two they took a step back and charged against the window.
Plan B was much easier, involving nothing more than a climb to the attic, which Hugh uses as his studio. A few years earlier, bored, and in the middle of several projects, he started copying head shots he’d clipped from the newspaper. The resulting portraits were done in different styles, but the ones that best suited my purposes looked Mesopotamian and pictured the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11. Mohammed Atta fit perfectly into the windowpane, and his effect was immediate. The birds flew up, saw a terrorist staring back at them, and took off screaming.
I was feeling very satisfied with myself when I heard a thud coming from behind a closed curtain next to the bookcase. Another trip upstairs, another hijacker, and so on, until all four living room windows were secured. It was then that the birds focused their attention on the bedroom, and I had no choice but to return to the attic.
Aside from CDs, which Hugh buys like candy, his record collection is also pretty big. Most are albums he bought in his youth and shipped to Normandy against my wishes:
Led Zeppelin II,
Pink Floyd’s
Dark Side of the Moon.
If it played nonstop in a skanky-smelling dorm room, he’s got it. I come home from my 5:00 walk, and here’s Toto or Bad Company blaring from the attic. “Turn that crap off,” I yell, but of course Hugh can’t hear me. So I go up, and there he is, positioned before his easel, one foot rigid on the floor and the other keeping time with some guy in a spandex jumpsuit.
“Do you mind?” I say.
I never thought I would appreciate his music collection, but the chaffinches changed all that. What I needed were record jackets featuring life-sized heads, so I started with the
A
’s and worked my way through the stack of boxes. The surprise was that some of Hugh’s albums weren’t so bad. “I didn’t know he had this,” I said to myself, and I raced downstairs to prop Roberta Flack in the bedroom window. This was the cover of
Chapter Two,
and while, to me, the singer looked welcoming, the birds thought differently, and moved on to a room that once functioned as a milking parlor. There I filled the windows with Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Armatrading, and Donna Summer, who has her minuses but can really put the fear of God into a chaffinch.
The pair then moved upstairs to my office, where Janis Joplin and I were waiting for them. Bonnie Raitt and Rodney Crowell were standing by in case there was trouble with the skylights, but, strangely, the birds had no interest in them. Horizontal surfaces were not their thing, and so they flew on to the bathroom.
By late afternoon, every window was filled. The storm clouds that had appeared the previous day finally blew off, and I was able to walk to the neighboring village. The route I normally take is circular and leads past a stucco house occupied by a frail elderly couple. For years they raised rabbits in their front yard, but last summer they either ate them, which is normal in this area, or turned them loose, which is unheard of. Then they got rid of the pen and built in its place a clumsy wooden shed. A few months later a cage appeared on its doorstep. It was the type you might keep a rodent in, but instead of a guinea pig they use it to hold a pair of full-grown magpies. They’re good-sized birds — almost as tall as crows — and their quarters are much too small for them. Unlike parakeets, which will eventually settle down, the magpies are constantly searching for a way out, and move as if they’re on fire, darting from one end of the cage to another and banging their heads against the wire ceiling.
Their desperation is contagious, and watching them causes my pulse to quicken. Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless — that’s what hell must be like. The magpies leave me feeling so depressed and anxious that I wonder how I can possibly make it the rest of the way home. I always do, though, and it’s always a welcome sight, especially lately. At around 7:00 the light settles on the western wall of our house, just catching two of the hijackers and a half-dozen singer-songwriters, who look out from the windows, some smiling, as if they are happy to see me, and others just staring into space, the way one might when listening to music, or waiting, halfheartedly, for something to happen.
A single road runs through our village in Normandy, and, depending on which direction you come from, either the first or the last thing you pass is a one-story house — a virtual Quonset hut — made of concrete blocks. The roof is covered with metal, and large sheets of corrugated plastic, some green and others milk-colored, have been joined together to form an awning that sags above the front door. It’s so ugly that the No Trespassing sign reads as an insult.
“As if,”
people say. “I mean,
really.
”
The hut was built by a man I’ll call Jackie, who used to live there with his wife and his wife’s adult daughter, Clothilde, who was retarded. On summer evenings after their dinner, the wife would dress her daughter in pajamas and a bathrobe and walk her either through the village or in the opposite direction, where the road steepens and winds in a series of blind curves. Depending upon the weather, Clothilde wore plaid bedroom slippers or a pair of rubber boots that came to above her knees and changed her walk to a kind of goose step. I’d heard from neighbors that she attended a special school, but I think it was more of a sheltered workshop, the type at which the students perform simple tasks — putting bolts into bags, say. Though I never heard her speak, she did make noises. It’s a contradiction in terms, but, if forced to describe what came out of her mouth, I’d call it an “upbeat moan,” not unpleasant but joyful. I can’t say that Clothilde was a friend, but it made me happy to know that she was around. The same was true of her mother and her stepfather: the whole family.
Jackie had some sort of problem with his leg and usually walked no farther than he had to. He drove a truck so small and quiet it seemed like a toy, and every so often, as I was walking into town, he’d pull over and offer me a ride. On one of these trips, he attempted to explain that he had a metal plate in his head. My French comprehension wasn’t very good at the time, and his pointing back and forth between his temple and the door of the glove compartment only confused me. “You invented glove compartments? Your glove compartment has ideas of its own? I’m sorry . . . I don’t . . . I don’t understand.”
I later learned that when he was a boy Jackie had found an unexploded grenade in one of the nearby fields. He pulled the pin and threw it, but not quite far enough; thus the metal plate and his messed-up leg. His hearing had been affected as well, and his eyes were deeply shadowed and encircled by spidery scars. Crew cut, dented brow, lower jaw jutting just slightly forward: had he been tall, his appearance might have startled you, but, as it was, he was pint-sized, five feet two, maybe five-four, tops. When the villagers spoke of Jackie, they used the words “slow” and “gentle,” and so it seemed outrageous when the police stormed the ugly cinder-block hut and took him off to jail. Someone or other spoke to the local councilor, and within an hour everyone knew that Jackie was suspected of sexually molesting his wife’s grandchildren, who were aged six and eight and occasionally visited from their home, an hour or so away. It was speculated that he also molested Clothilde, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. Hugh says I just don’t want to believe it, and I tell him he’s right — I don’t. She and her mother left our village shortly after Jackie was taken away, and I never saw either of them again.
With no one to maintain it, the house that was ugly became even uglier. Our neighbors across the road would often comment on what an eyesore it was, and, while agreeing, I’d lament the sorry state of my French. Oh, my comprehension had improved — I could understand just about everything that was said to me — but when it came to speaking I tended (and still do) to freeze up. It wouldn’t hurt me to be more social, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. The phone rings and I avoid it. Neighbors knock and I duck into the bedroom or crouch behind the daybed until they’ve left. How different things might be, I think, if, like Jackie, I had no more hiding places. Though harsh in other respects, prison would be an excellent place to learn a foreign language — total immersion, and you’d have the new slang before it even hit the streets. Unlike the French school that I actually attended, this one, when it came to verbs, would likely start with the imperative: “Bend over.” “Take it.” That kind of thing. Still, though, you’d have your little conversations. In the cafeteria, in the recreation room or crafts center, if they have them in a French prison, and I imagine they do. “Tell me, Jean-Claude, do you like the glaze I’ve applied to my shapely jug?”
Of the above, I can say, “Tell me, Jean-Claude, do you like the . . . jug?”
“Glaze” is one of those words that shouldn’t be too difficult to learn, and the same goes for “shapely.” I’m pretty good when it comes to retaining nouns and adjectives, but the bit about applying the glaze to the shapely jug — that’s where I tend to stumble. In English, it’s easy enough — “I put this on that” — but in French, such things have a way of biting you in the ass. I might have to say, “Do you like the glaze the shapely jug accepted from me?” or “Do you like the shapely jug in the glaze of which I earlier applied?”
For safety’s sake, perhaps I’d be better off breaking the one sentence into three:
“Look at the shapely jug.”
“Do you like the glaze?”
“I did that.”
If I spent as much time speaking to my neighbors as I do practicing imaginary conversations in the prison crafts center, I’d be fluent by now and could quit making excuses for myself. As it is, whenever someone asks how long I’ve been in France I wonder if it’s possible to literally die of shame. “I’m away a lot,” I always say. “Two and a half months a year in America, and at least two in England, sometimes more.”
“Yes, but how long ago did you come to France?”
“What?”
“I asked, ‘How. Long. Have. You. Been. In. France?’”
Then I might say, “I love chicken,” or “Big bees can be dangerous,” anything to change the subject.
What I needed was an acquaintance, and what I wound up with was Jackie. This was after his release, obviously. He’d been gone for close to three years when I walked past the hut one day and noticed a pair of little black socks hanging on the clothesline.
“Who do you suppose those belong to?” I asked the woman across the road, and she pulled an unusually sour face, and said, “Who do you think?”
I’d imagined that, like his wife and stepdaughter, Jackie would move away and start over, but it seemed he had no place to go and no money to go there with. After hanging out his socks, he picked up his rake and hoe and started getting his lawn in shape. It was strange. Were an American sex offender to return home, there’d be a big to-do. Here, though, it was all very quiet. No meeting was held that I was aware of, but somehow or other it was agreed that no one would look at or speak to this man. He would be treated as if he were invisible, and, with luck, the isolation would drive him away.
He’d been back in his hut for a week or so when I walked by and saw him inside his front gate, worrying something with the tip of his cane. Jackie had always been kind to me, so when he looked up and said hello I employed one of the formalities I’d learned years earlier in French class. “I am content to see you again,” I said. Then I shook his hand.
“What did you do that for?” Hugh asked later, and I said, “Well, what
could
I do? Someone says hello and sticks his hand out, and you’re just supposed to walk away?”
“If he’s a child molester, yes,” he said. But I’d like to see what he would have done in the same situation.
A few years later, after Jackie died of cancer, and the garden he so carefully tended had turned to weeds, I gave the baccalaureate address at a certain American university. When the speech was finished, I joined a procession of deans and distinguished fellows back to the president’s house, and it was there that a well-known politician approached and extended his hand, saying, “I just want you to know how much I enjoyed that.” Now, this politician — it’s not that I simply disagree with him. I despise him. I loathe him. My friends and I, the way we throw his name around, you’d think we were talking about the Devil himself. Spittle forms in the corners of our mouth as we denounce him, his party, and the people we refer to as his henchmen and cronies.
I hadn’t known that this politician was going to be in the procession that day; rather, I turned around and there he was, the two of us dressed in flowing robes, like wizards.
“I just want you to know how much I enjoyed that.” So did I place a pox upon him? Did I spit in his face, or even turn my back?
Of course not. With everyone watching, I looked up, and said, “Oh. Thank you.” And because he had held out his hand I took it, just as I had taken Jackie’s after his release from prison.
I said to Hugh after the graduation, “But I wasn’t enthusiastic about it. Sure, I said, ‘Oh’ and ‘Thank you,’ but anyone who knows me would know that I was faking it, that I didn’t really mean the ‘thank you’ part.”
“Well,” Hugh said, “I guess you showed him.”
Had the politician been my neighbor, I might have moved. That’s how disgusted I would have felt, but Jackie, because of the metal plate in his head, because you could put a magnet to his temple and it would stay there, aroused pity rather than anger, or at least he did in me. I didn’t go out of my way to pass his hut, but neither did I go out of my way to avoid passing it. If he was in the yard, he’d say hello and I would say hello back, or “Yes, it certainly is warm,” or whatever answer seemed called for. And in this way — a word here, a wave there — little by little the summer advanced, and Jackie came to see the two of us as friends. One afternoon he invited me inside his front gate to show me the tomatoes he’d planted.
“Well,” and I looked to see if any of our neighbors were watching. No one was, so I opened the latch, saying, “OK, sure.”
During the years that he had been away, Jackie’s hair had gone from brown to gray. His eyes were flat and more heavily shadowed, and what had once been a pronounced limp had grown more subtle. It seemed that while in prison he had had a hip replaced, and the way he walked now was miles better than it had been before the operation. “Hey,” he said, and he gestured behind him in the direction of his open front door. “Do you . . . want to come in and look at my X-rays?”
As I later said to Hugh, “Do you tell a person, ‘No. I
don’t
want to see pictures of your insides’? Of course not. How can you?”
The hut was a lot cozier than I’d imagined it. In the kitchen were the same sorts of things you’d find in the homes of any of our neighbors: a postal calendar picturing a kitten, a hanging copper saucepan turned into a clock, souvenir salt and pepper shakers in the shapes of castles and peasants and wooden shoes. The room was tight and clean and smelled of watermelon-scented dish detergent. From the kitchen, I could see the bedroom, and rows of medications neatly arranged on the dresser. Little radio. Little TV. Little easy chair. It was like a troll’s house.
Jackie’s X-rays were as large as bath mats, and he washed and dried his hands before removing them from their separate envelopes and presenting them to me. When handed a photograph of someone’s wife or children, I know how to form the appropriate compliment. “How pretty!” I can say. Or “How like you.” “What nice eyes.” “What a pleasant smile.” Hip replacement presented more of a challenge, and I alternated between “I like the pin” and, simply, “Ouch.” On or about the fifth X-ray, I looked through a clear patch of plastic, past the front yard, and into the hills on the opposite side of the road, where another of our neighbors grazes his sheep. The flock had been shorn earlier that day, and those in view seemed oddly aware of how dumpy and vulnerable they looked.
“I have to go,” I said, and in the way of good neighbors the world over, Jackie said, “Stay, why don’t you? I was just going to make some coffee.”
A few weeks after that, he invited me in to look at his government-issued ID card.
“Oh, I don’t want to put you out.”
“Not at all,” he said, and two minutes later I found myself back at his kitchen table. The ID was in a bright plastic folder, the sort of thing that a young girl might carry. On the cover was a cartoon pony having his mane braided by a troop of friendly ladybugs.
I think I said, “All right, then.” Jackie opened the folder and withdrew his identity card, a small color photograph attached by grommets to a stiff piece of paper. As when looking at the X-rays, I didn’t know quite what to say. His birth date, his height, the color of his eyes. He was obviously proud of something, but I couldn’t tell what it was.
“See,” he said. “Right here. Look.” He pointed to the corner, and I saw that the government had classified him as a “grand mutilated” person. The “grand” business was new to me, but the other part was familiar from riding the Paris buses. “These seats are reserved for the elderly and for those who have been mutilated in the war,” the signs used to read. It’s a much stronger word than “wounded” or “handicapped,” and I imagine that, if we used it in the United States, enlistment in the volunteer army would fall by at least half.
As a grand mutilated person, Jackie was entitled to a discount on all train travel. “With the metal plate, I got fifty percent off, but now, with the hip replacement, it’s gone up to seventy-five,” he told me. “Both for me
and
the person I’m traveling with. Seventy-five percent off!”
I handed him back his ID card. “Those are some real savings.”
“You know,” he said, “we should maybe take a trip together. Over to Brittany, down to Marseilles — wherever we wanted.”
It took a moment for his “we” to register, and another moment to come up with a fitting response. “That would be . . . something,” I finally said, thinking later that at least I didn’t lie. “Where’s David?” the neighbors might ask. And Hugh could say, “Oh, he and Jackie are off on vacation. You know how those two are, give them seventy-five percent off on their tickets, and the sky’s the limit.”
It was only after I left the house that I started feeling insulted. What made Jackie think that I’d want to travel with him? Could he possibly have believed I’d be swayed by the discount, or did he think, the way certain people might, that the two of us belonged together, the homosexual and the child molester being cousins of sorts, like ostriches and emus. I’m usually not paranoid about this kind of thing, but in a small village, you sometimes have to wonder. Why had the neighbors to our immediate left, a truck driver and his family, never said anything more than hello to us — this after years of living next door. Then there was the man two houses down, who stopped me one afternoon and asked where I slept. “I’ve been in that place of yours, and there’s only one bedroom,” he said. This is the same man who chained a goat to a tree in his backyard and let it starve to death, so in his case it was probably the craziness talking. Just as with Jackie it was the loneliness. I usually passed his hut every other day, but after the incident with his ID card I cut it back to twice a week, and then to once a week. Late that August, I traveled to Scotland, and on my return an irritated Hugh collected me at the train station. “What’s eating you?” I asked, and he gunned the engine, saying, “Ask your little friend.”