To the Wedding

7

Blindness is like the cinema, because its eyes are not either side of a nose but wherever the story demands.

On a corner where the No. 11 stops, the woman driver of the first tram of the day smiles at the smell of newly baked bread which she breathes in because she has jammed the tram windscreen open with one of her shoes. Five floors up, Zdena smells the same bread. The window of her room is open. Long and narrow, so narrow that a single bed arranged lengthwise barely leaves enough space to walk between the bed and wall, the room is like a long corridor leading to the window which gives on to an acacia tree and looks down on the tramlines.

Ever since her daughter’s visit, Zdena has called this “corridor” Ninon’s room. From time to time she comes here to look for a book. Whilst looking for one, she picks up another. A book by a poet who was once her lover. Or the letters of Marina Tsvetayeva. Then she sits down in a chair to finish reading what she has begun. And when this happens, when she stays in the corridor room for an hour or so, it is as if she can see Ninon’s dressing gown still hanging from the hook on the door.

Zdena started sleeping on the narrow bed in this room a few days ago in the hope of feeling closer to her daughter.

I don’t know how he knew the song about my name: Quel Joli Nom de Ninon. But he did. He said he was a cook. I thought he was an army cook. I thought he had recently stopped being a soldier. His hair was still cropped and his ears came out sideways. I asked him whether he came from the north and he smiled with his blue eyes and didn’t answer. He certainly looked as if he did. He had a pale skin and a lot of hollows and clefts on his body — such as under his cheekbones or between the two muscles of his upper arm, or behind his knees. As though your hand might suddenly slip between two close rocks into a deep pool farther in. He was all knuckles.

I first saw him walking down the middle of a street by a quayside in Toulon. He was doing this so as to be seen. Like an actor or like drunks do. He was grinning. On the back of his cropped head was clapped a soft hat. He was carrying two boards, joined together by webbing shoulder straps, and the boards reached to his knees. On them, back and front, was written the menu of a fish restaurant. A cheap restaurant for most of the dishes cost less than 50. The word Moules was written at the top, under his chin. Below were listed different ways of cooking the mussels. Américaine, Marseillaise, Bonne Femme, A l’Indienne, Reine Mathilde, Lucifer … the list was funny. Tahitienne, Rochelaise, Douceur des Isles, Pêcheur, Hongroise … so the Hungarians have a Hungarian way of cooking mussels! The Czechs, like my poor mother, must have one too! Our national dish, she joked one day, is knives and forks! I loved it when she laughed. It was like discovering a tree was still alive, although it had no leaves because it was winter. I never understood her knife and fork joke. Poulette, Réunionnaise, Italienne, Grecque … I loved it when she laughed. Now I was laughing, too.

He saw me. He saw me laughing at his menu, and he bowed. He couldn’t bow very low because the bottom of the sandwich board hit his shins.

I was sitting on a bollard above the yachts and motor launches in the port. It was the mussel man who spoke:

We shut at four. You’ll still be here?

No, I said.

On holiday?

I work.

He took his hat off and put it farther back.

What’s your line?

Car-hire service. Hertz.

I didn’t tell him it was my first job. He nodded and readjusted his shoulder straps.

They bite into you, he said. I do this till I find something as a cook.

No joke.

Like a trip in the yacht there? He pointed at one called Laisse Dire.

How do the Hungarians cook mussels? I asked him.

Like a trip in the yacht there?

He was as stupid as the menu on his back.

I’m going to be late, I said, and walked off.

Zdena, lying on the narrow bed in the corridor room in Bratislava, lets out a breath — as after a sigh or a sob.

I came out of the Hertz office at 10 p.m. and the Mussel Man was standing beside the newsagents in the railway station.

How long have you been here? I couldn’t stop myself asking.

I told you, we shut at four.

And he stood there. He didn’t say anything more. He stood there smiling. I stood there. He had no hat and he was no longer carrying the boards. He wore a T-shirt with palm trees on it, and a studded leather belt. Slowly he lifted up a plastic bag and took out a thermal packing.

I bought you some moules, he said, cooked à la Hongroise.

I’ll eat them later.

What’s your name?

I told him and that’s when he hummed my song. Quel Joli Nom de Ninon.

We walked down the main boulevard towards the sea. He carried the plastic bag. The sidewalk was crowded and the lights were still on in the shop windows. For five minutes he said nothing.

You walk all day with your menu? I asked him.

They turn the lights off in the shops here at 3:30 a.m., he said.

We walked on. I stopped to look at a coat in a window.

Bullet-proof glass that, he said.

I dream about coats, dresses, shoes, handbags, tights, headscarves. Shoes are my favourite. But I never stop before a jewellery shop. I hate jewellers. He stopped in front of one. I didn’t wait for him.

Hey, he said, there could be something you like here!

So?

You just need to tell me.

I hate jewellers, I said.

So do I, he said.

His face, between his cup-handle ears, broke into a smile, not quite sure of itself, and we walked down towards the sea. I ate the moules on a beach beside a stack of deck chairs. The moules were called Hungarian because of the paprika.

Whilst I ate, he undid the laces of his trainers. He did everything deliberately, as though he couldn’t think of more than one thing at a time. The left shoe. Then the right shoe.

I’m going to swim, he said, you don’t want to swim?

I’ve just come from work. I haven’t got anything with me.

No one’ll see us here, he said, and he pulled off his T-shirt with the palm trees. His skin was so pale I could see the shadow of every rib.

I got to my feet, took off my shoes and, leaving him, walked barefoot down to the water’s edge where the small waves were breaking on the sand and shingle. It was dark enough to see the stars, and light enough to see how he was now undressed. He somersaulted down the beach towards the sea. I was surprised and then I laughed, for I had guessed something: he was somersaulting out of modesty. It was a way of coming down the beach without showing his cock. I don’t know how I knew that, and I didn’t ask him. But the idea came to me.

Whilst I was laughing, he ran into the dark sea. I should have left then. He swam a long way out. I couldn’t spot him any more.

Have you ever tried leaving a man in the sea in the dark? It’s not so simple.

I went back to where we had been sitting. His clothes were in a pile on the sand, folded. Not like recruits in the army have to fold them. They were arranged like things you would be able to find in the dark if need be. They were arranged so that if you came back in a hurry you could gather them up quickly. One cotton T-shirt. One pair of jeans. A pair of trainers, with a hole in the sole of the left shoe, large feet, 44. A slip. And a belt with an engraved hand on the buckle. I sat and looked out to sea.

Twenty minutes must have passed. The sound of waves is like what you hear on the radio when the public claps. But it’s steadier and nobody shouts Johnny! He came up behind me, dripping wet. He stood there dripping and holding two deck chairs under one bony arm and a parasol in the other. I laughed.

So we went on, the cook and I. There was a solidity to his dumbness; it would never change.

After we’d fucked, I asked: Can you hear the waves?

He didn’t reply. He just went: Shooo shooo shooo.

Zdena sits up on the bed, lowers her feet to the floor and walks barefoot to the open window. Her nightdress has a lace neckline which covers her small collarbones. She looks down on to the tramlines. There is still the smell of new bread. A few men in the street are going to work.

I strolled down to the port where the pleasure boats were moored and I happened to think of the cook. I didn’t want anything, I just wondered what he would do if I appeared. Then I saw his menu-boards, so I pushed my way through the crowd but it wasn’t him. It was an old man in his fifties with grey hair. I asked the old man whether he knew the cook, but he shook his head and pointed to his mouth as if to say he couldn’t speak. This made me decide to find the restaurant.

The proprietor was a man with a light blueish suit and the face of a fat boy, a frozen face. I asked him about the cook.

Who are you? he said, without looking up from his calculating machine.

I’m a friend, I have something to give him.

Can you post it?

He’s gone?

He looked up for the first time. They took him away. You want his address?

I nodded.

Correctional Penitentiary, Nantes … You take a coffee?

Everything he said was shouted. He had to shout to somehow get through the freeze of his face. He put the coffees on one of the empty tables and sat down opposite me.

They were looking for your cook for three years, he said. Seven of them broke jail. He was the only one who made it. The others were grabbed. But he got careless, he went downhill, your cook.

I saw there was something which amused him, not in his face but in the way he spoke.

They caught up with him by sheer chance. A prison officer from Nantes was on holiday here. Came into the restaurant with his wife to eat mussels. On his way out, he spotted his old acquaintance. Yesterday, a dozen of them were waiting round the back when he came off the quayside.

What’s so funny?

I was going to give him a job in the kitchen the next week! If he’d been in the kitchen, the flic wouldn’t have seen him, would he?

And that’s funny?

It’s good news! Your cook was biding his time. One Saturday night he’d have robbed the till. No question about it. Instead they clapped the handcuffs on him. You don’t ever smile at good news?

Frozen pig, I told him.

A thrush has begun to sing in the acacia tree. More than anything else, birdsongs remind me of what things once looked like. Thrushes look as if they’ve just taken a dust bath, don’t they? And blackbirds, with their glossy black feathers, look as if they’ve just stepped out of a pond, but when they open their beaks, it’s the opposite. The blackbird’s song is dry. And the thrush sings like a survivor — like a swimmer who swam for it through the water and made it to the safe side of the night and flew into the tree to shake the drops from his back and announce: I’m here!