The Listener

  The wind shifted constantly, and the boat lines had to be restretched and remoored. She woke up at night and lay in bed listening, worrying about the boat. She thought she heard it banging against the rock. Finally she pulled it up on land. But she woke anyway and lay in bed thinking about high water and storms. The boat needed to be pulled up higher, on trolleys. So one morning she went to the woodpile and picked out a couple of smooth old channel markers to use as rollers. She grabbed one of them and pulled. A log fell down on the far side of the pile and there was a quick, animal movement – something darted out and disappeared in headlong fear. She let go of the channel marker and stepped back. Of course it was here that it lived. It had made a nest for itself, and now the nest was destroyed. But I didn’t know, she defended herself. How could I know?

  She let the channel marker lie and ran back to the house for some wood shavings, ripped open the trapdoor to the cellar, remembered the torch only when she was down in the dark – she was always forgetting the torch. Jars, cartons, boxes, had she ever had wood shavings or maybe it was fibreglass she’d had, and that’s not good for a squirrel, glass fibres, supposing fibreglass was in fact made of glass … She groped around on the shelves and felt the old uncertainty, the one affecting everything that can occur in many different ways, stumbling over forgetfulness and knowledge, memory and imagination, rows and rows of boxes and you never knew which ones were empty … I have to get a grip on myself. It’s a box of cotton wadding, for the motor, a carton under the stairs. She found it and started pulling out cotton in long, reluctant tufts. The resistance and the darkness became an image of nighttime dreams, dreams about hurrying and nearly too late. She tore at the nasty, tough material and knew that she didn’t have time, and then it was no longer about the squirrel but about everything, everything that can be too late. Finally she took the whole carton in her arms and tried to take it with her up the cellar stairs. It was too big. It caught in the opening. She pressed on it with her shoulders and neck, the carton burst and the wadding flew all over the floor. Now it was a question of seconds. She ran across the granite, stumbled and ran, crept round the wood pile and pushed in wadding everywhere it would be easy to find and wouldn’t get wet. There you go. Build! Make yourself a nest!

  Then she was done, there was nothing more she could do. Her big body had never felt so heavy. Slowly, she settled herself into a sheltered crevice on one side of the rock, drew up her legs and completely forgot the squirrel. She was safe and private, completely indifferent in her sweaters, in her boots and raincoat, deep inside a warm space of damp wool and good conscience.

  Shortly after noon, it started to rain. She was awakened by an insight that had ripened while she slept. It was the winter wood, the wood that was needed every day through the whole winter. Her repeated antlike trips across the granite, sawing and chopping, deeper and deeper, would make her a stubborn and merciless enemy, coming steadily closer, opening new gaps for cold and light to reach a terrified and outraged squirrel in its nest of wadding.

  They’d have to divide the winter wood, that much was crystal-clear. One woodpile for the squirrel and one for herself, and it had to happen right away. Her body was stiff after her nap, but she was altogether calm because there was only one thing to be done. She went straight for the woodpile, which was as large and heavy as a house. She heaved down logs, then grabbed one end of one log and staggered with it down the rock face towards the cottage. The granite was slippery, the moss slid away beneath her boots, but she continued all the way down and tumbled the log against the wall of the cottage, then turned and walked back up the hill. They had to be carried, not rolled. A rolling log is a loose cannon, a weight crushing everything in its path. It had to be carried, carefully, all the way to wherever it was needed. The person carrying must also be a log, heavy and unwieldy but full of strength and potential. Everything must be put in its proper place, which is what the potential is for … I carry, steadier and steadier. I breathe a new way, my sweat is salty.

  It was nearly dusk, and still raining. The trip up and down the granite slope became a quiet, automatic unreality. As she moved up and back down again, she entered a delirium of lifting and carrying and balancing, dropping the wood with a crash against the cottage wall and then walking back up. She grew strong and sure. All the words were flattened and turned off. Beams, boards, planks, logs. She tore off her sweaters and let them lie in the rain. I’m making something the way I pictured it. I’m moving what’s in the wrong place and putting it in the right place. My legs strain in their boots. I could carry stones. Overturn and roll them with a crowbar and a fulcrum, huge stones, and build a wall around me with every stone in its place. But maybe there’s no need to build a wall around an island.

  As evening came on, she began to tire. Her legs started to wobble. She let the logs lie and carried timber instead. Finally she carried only smaller driftwood to the back wall of the cottage, while small, anxious thoughts ran through her mind. She imagined that the squirrel didn’t live under the woodpile but right in the middle of it, where it wasn’t damp. She’d made a mistake. Every time she raised a plank, it was maybe that particular plank that formed the roof of the squirrel’s nest. Every piece of wood she lifted could disturb or destroy. Whoever dared touch this woodpile must calculate exactly how the logs lay and how they balanced one another, must think calmly and wisely and precisely, know when to heave on a log and when to tease it out with care and patience.

  She listened to the whispering silence over the island, to the rain and the night. It’s impossible, she thought. I won’t go up there again. She returned to the cottage and undressed and went to bed. She didn’t light the lamp this evening, which was a violation of ritual, but it would show the squirrel how little she cared about what happened on this island.

  The next morning, the squirrel did not come to eat. She waited for a long time, but it didn’t come. There was no reason for the squirrel to feel hurt or suspicious. Everything she had done was simple, unambiguous, and fair. She had divided the woodpile and withdrawn. More than fair. The squirrel’s woodpile was several times larger than her own. If the animal had the least personal trust in her, if it perceived her in any way as a friendly fellow creature, then it must see that from the very beginning she had tried to help.

  She sat down at the table. She sharpened her pencil and put a sheet of paper on the desk in front of her, perpendicular, parallel with the edge of the table. This always made the squirrel easier to understand.

  If now, in spite of everything, the squirrel saw her as movement, as an object, something unimportant and insignificant, then that also meant it did not see her as an enemy. She tried to concentrate. She made a serious effort to imagine how the squirrel perceived her and in what way its fright at the woodpile might have changed its attitude. It was possible that the squirrel had been nearly ready to begin liking her and was then seized by distrust at that decisive moment. On the other hand, if it regarded her as nothing special, as a part of the island, a part of everything that withered as autumn swept on towards winter, then it would not see the episode at the woodpile as a hostile gesture but rather as a kind of storm, the kind of change that …

  She was suddenly tired and started drawing squares and triangles on the paper. The squirrel seemed harder and harder to understand. She drew serpentine lines between the squares and the triangles and tiny little leaves growing out in every direction. The rain had stopped. The sea was swollen, shiny and tumid – such eternal chatter about the beauty of the sea! And then she saw the boat.

  It was a long way off, but it was coming, it was moving. It had an inorganic shape that was neither gull nor stone nor buoy. The boat was coming straight towards the island. There was nothing out here to head for except the island. Boats in profile are harmless. They pass along the marked channels, but this one was headed straight on, black as a flyspeck.

  She grabbed up her papers – several fluttered to the floor – and tried to push them into the drawer, but they bu
nched up and refused to go in. Anyway, it was wrong, quite wrong, they should lie out in plain sight, where they’d be discouraging and protective. She pulled them out again and smoothed them. Who was it who came, who dared to come? It was them, the others; now they’d found her. She ran around the room moving chairs and objects, then moving them back again because the room was unalterable. The black dot had come closer. She grabbed the edge of the table with both hands, stood still and listened for the sound of the motor. There was nothing she could do. They were coming. Coming straight at her.

  When the sound of the motor was very close, she threw open the window on the back side of the cottage, jumped out, and ran. It was too late to launch her own boat. She bent over, ran to the far side of the island and slipped down into a crack in the granite near the shore. From here, she could no longer hear the motor, only the slow motion of the waves on the rock. What if they came ashore? They see the boat. The cottage is empty. They start to wonder, they walk up onto the island, and they see me crouching here. It won’t do. I have to go back. She started to crawl, slowing down as she approached the top of the island. The motor had stopped. They’d gone ashore. She lay down full length in the wet grass, inched herself forwards a couple of metres and rose up on her elbows to have a look.

  The boat had anchored over a bank not far from the island. They were fishing. Three square-shaped men sat beside their rods, drinking coffee from a Thermos. Possibly they were talking a bit. Occasionally they reeled in their lines. Maybe they had caught some fish. Her neck got tired and she let her head sink onto her arms. She didn’t care about squirrels, not about the men fishing, nor about anyone; she just slid down into a great disappointment and admitted to herself that she was disappointed. She thought, How can this be? Why am I beside myself because they’re coming and then terrifically disappointed when they don’t come ashore?

  The next day, she decided not to get up at all. It was a melancholy and defiant decision. She thought no further than this: I will never again get up. It was a day with rain, a quiet, steady rain that might continue for days. That’s good, I like rain. Curtains and draperies of rain, endless infinities of rain going on and on, pattering – rustling and pattering – across the roof. Not like sunshine, which hour by hour moves through the room like a challenge, crossing the windowsill, the rug, marking the afternoon on the rocking chair, then disappearing on the stove hood in red, like an accusation. Today is honourably and simply grey, an anonymous, timeless day that doesn’t count.

  She made a warm cavity for her heavy body and drew the covers over her head. Through a little air hole for her nose she could see two pink wallpaper roses. Nothing could get at her. Slowly she drifted back to sleep. She had learned to sleep more and more. She loved sleep.

  The rain darkened towards evening, when she woke up hungry. It was very cold in the room. She wrapped herself in her blanket and went down to the cellar to get a tin of food. She forgot the torch and took a tin at random in the dark. And stopped, listening, stock-still with the tin in her hand. The squirrel was somewhere in the cellar. There was a tiny scurrying sound and then silence. But she knew it was there. It was going to live all winter in her cellar, and its nest could be anywhere. She’d have to leave the vent open and make sure it didn’t get covered with snow. And she’d have to move all the tinned food and everything else she needed up into the cottage. And, nevertheless, she’d never know for sure if the squirrel was living in the cellar or the woodpile.

  She went up and closed the trapdoor. The tin she’d brought with her was boiled mutton with dill sauce, which she didn’t like. A belt of clear sky had opened up at the horizon, a narrow, glowing band of sunset. The islands lay like coal-black streaks and lumps in the burning sea. The fire burned all the way to the shore, where the waves swallowed it and then slid around the point in the same curve over and over again as they broke over the slimy November granite. She ate slowly and saw how the red deepened across the sky and the water, a violent, unthinkable crimson. And then suddenly the red winked out, everything went violet, lapsed slowly to grey and then into early night.

  She was wide awake. She dressed and lit the lamp and all the candles she could find, got a fire going in the stove. She turned on her torch and put it in the window. Finally she hung a paper lantern outside the door, where it shone clearly and steadily in the quiet night. Now she took out the last of the Madeira and put it on the table beside her glass. She walked out onto the rock and left the door open. The glowing cottage was beautiful and mysterious, like a lighted porthole in a foreign ship. She walked all the way to the end of the point and began walking around the island, very slowly, right at the water’s edge, and the whole time she turned her face towards the wide-open darkness of the sea. Only when she’d walked around the entire island and had come back to the point would she turn and consider her illuminated cottage. Then she’d walk straight into its warmth, close the door, and be home.

  When she came into the cottage, the squirrel was sitting on the table. The animal dashed away, the bottle fell and started to roll, she leaped forward too late, and the bottle shattered on the floor. She got shards of glass between her fingers, and the rug soaked up a dark Madeira stain.

  She raised her head and looked at the squirrel. It hung on the wall among the books, legs outspread, heraldic, immobile. She stood up and took one step towards the squirrel; one more step; it didn’t move, and she stretched out her hand towards the animal, closer and closer, very slowly – and the squirrel bit her, quick as lightning, sharp as scissors. She screamed and went on screaming with rage in the empty room. She stumbled across the broken bottle and outdoors, where she stood and bellowed at the squirrel. Never ever had anyone forfeited a confidence, misused a covenant the way this squirrel had done. She didn’t know if she had reached out her hand to the animal in order to caress or strangle it. It didn’t matter; she had reached out her hand. She went in and swept up the broken glass, blew out all the candles and put more wood in the stove. Then she burned everything she had written about the squirrel.

  In the time that followed, none of their rituals changed. She put out food on the rock slope and the squirrel came and ate. She didn’t know where it lived and didn’t care. She no longer went into the cellar or up to the woodpile on the hill. It showed her contempt, an indifference that didn’t stoop to revenge. But she moved about the island differently, impulsively. She could rush out of the cottage and slam the door behind her. She rattled the pans and stomped on the floor. Finally she started running. She would stand still for a long time, motionless, and then set off across the granite, running and panting back and forth across the island, flapping her arms and screaming. She didn’t care in the least whether the squirrel saw her or not.

  One morning it had snowed, a thin covering of snow that didn’t melt. Now the cold was coming. She must get the motor running, go to town, buy things. She went and looked at the motor, picked it up for a moment and then put it back against the wall of the cottage. Maybe in a few days. The wind was blowing. Instead, she started looking for the squirrel’s paw prints in the snow. The ground was white and untouched around the cellar airhole and the woodpile. She walked the shoreline, walked the whole island systematically, but the only prints she found were her own. Clear and black, they cut the island into rectangles and triangles and long curves.

  Later that day, she grew suspicious and looked under the furniture in the cottage, opened drawers and the cupboard. Finally she climbed up on the roof and looked down the chimney. You little bastard, you’re making me ridiculous, she said to the squirrel. Then she went to the point and counted the pieces of timber, the squirrel boats she’d set out for a following wind to the mainland in order to show the squirrel how little she cared for it. They were still there, all six. For a moment she was uncertain. Had there been six, or maybe seven? She should have written it down. Not writing it down was indefensible. She went back to the cottage, shook out the rug and swept the floor. Nowadays everything got out of order. Some
times she brushed her teeth in the evening and didn’t bother to light the lamp. The lack of order was because she no longer had the Madeira to divide the day into proper periods and make them clear and easy.

  She washed every window and rearranged the bookcase, not by author this time but in alphabetical order by title. When she’d finished, she happened to think of a better and more personal system and decided to arrange the books according to herself – the ones she liked most on the top shelf; the ones she liked least on the bottom. She discovered to her amazement that there wasn’t a single book she liked. So she let them stay the way they were and sat down by the window to wait for more snow. There was a bank of clouds to the south. They might bring snow.

  That evening she felt a sudden wish for company and went to the top of the island with her walkie-talkie. She pulled up the aerial, turned it on, and listened. There was a distant scratching and swishing. A couple of times she’d picked up conversations between two boats. It might happen again. She waited for a long time. The night was coal-black and very quiet. She closed her eyes and waited patiently. She heard something very far away, no words but two voices talking to each other. They were slow and calm. They came closer, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. She heard that they were winding up their conversation, their tone of voice changed and their sentences got shorter. They were saying goodbye, and it was too late – and she started screaming, Hello, it’s me, can you hear me, although she knew they couldn’t, and then there was only the distant swishing noise and she turned it off. Stupid, she said to herself. It occurred to her that the walkie-talkie batteries might work in the radio and she went back to have a try. They were the wrong size. She needed to go into town. Madeira, batteries. Under ‘batteries’ she wrote ‘nuts’ and then crossed it out. It was gone. There must have been seven pieces of wood after all, and not six, all at precisely the same distance from the water, sixty-five centimetres.