Metro Winds

  When he woke he was in hospital, having been found lying unconscious on the cobbled pavement, unable to be roused. Two police came and heard his story. They told him he had been the victim of a scam. He had given the gypsies all the information they needed to dupe him. They did not say he had been a fool, but it was in their faces. That he had drunk wine that was drugged, that his wallet had been taken, that it was his own fault. There was no dead woman they assured him when he insisted. No body. No permit had been issued for a small gypsy circus anywhere in the city.

  When they released him, Daniel went back to the square where the tent had been. There was no sign of it, of course, only a drift of white feathers in a gutter that might have belonged to any of the hundreds of roosting pigeons in the eaves of buildings around the square.

  He sat down on the edge of a fountain. It was very hot. His temples pulsed with the heat as two boys on rollerblades sped by. A woman passed, dragging a screaming, red-faced child; an ambulance clanged past, then another. Or maybe they were fire trucks. Daniel tried to picture his parents and found their faces with difficulty. It seemed to him that they were drawing rapidly away from him, as if they had boarded a train and were leaving him standing on the platform.

  He thought about the man who had died in the accident, and wondered if he had truly been a Nazi soldier who had interrogated and tortured a child to the point where a sort of madness had fused their lives so that they had made some strange impossible pact to die together, or if, somewhere in this city, a woman was mourning the failure of her lover or friend to meet her after a long parting. Perhaps both endings could be encompassed. Or neither.

  In the antiseptic hospital night he had dreamed of the woman; dreamed that she had embraced him in her dove dress. He had not been able to tell where her flesh ended and the frantic dove trembling began. He had felt her touch as a cool hand, as claws, as a knife.

  Had she cut her throat? Had he dreamed it? Had it been a trick? He would never know the truth.

  An elegant old man in a pale suit with a cane came tapping across the square, holding the hand of a boy in a little blue sunsuit. The old man sat carefully on the edge of the fountain, watched by the boy. He sighed and took a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket and unwrapped a crust. He spoke to the boy as he crumbled the crust and threw the crumbs in a pale arc. Pigeons began to land on the cobbles and peck at the crumbs and the boy and the old man watched them gather and squabble. Suddenly the boy darted into the midst of the birds, routing them. They fled, fluttering and shrieking into the air. The old man swayed with laughter and the boy ran at the few birds that had waddled hastily to the sidelines, sending them scrambling into the air too. He glanced at the empty cobbles with satisfaction, and then strutted back to his grandfather, who had turned to rinse knotted fingers in the water.

  The boy noticed Daniel watching and gave him a long, solemn, assessing stare. Then he smiled conspiratorially.

  Daniel smiled back and felt all at once that the shadows that had come to roost in him had been routed, too. He felt sunlight and a clean soft breeze flowing through him.

  THE GIRL WHO COULD SEE THE WIND

  for Rosie

  1.

  Papa died when I was eight.

  The death of a parent pulls away one half of the sky so that a weird light is cast upon all ordinary things. My father’s death opened up a vast chasm, setting me apart from all others, but when I said as much to Mama, she answered that I had always been different.

  It was true that she had always seemed to think so. Willow, she named me, and as if it were also my name, she always added, The Girl Who Can See the Wind. I had earned the title when I was still in my perambulator, watching a swirl of leaves and grit in the elbow of a building. ‘Look,’ Mama had cried out to Papa in delight, ‘Willow sees the wind!’

  He laughed at her but she insisted it was so.

  I had heard both my parents tell this tale but I did not think of myself as special. Mama had said, half angry, half laughing, ‘Do you imagine a daughter of mine can be like other children?’

  I did not argue with her, but I secretly believed that all children saw the things I did, only they kept their seeing secret, while Mama wheedled mine out of me. I might have resented that wheedling when I was older, if Papa had not died and cast Mama into bitterest despair. She tore her hair and raked her face with her nails, shrieking so wildly and incoherently that she might have been speaking another language. Anguish crushed Mama and sapped her spirit, though her beauty was indestructible. Her grief was so monumental and fantastic that my own seemed inconsequential beside it, a peeping chicken beside a screaming eagle. I had loved Papa and I mourned him sincerely, but for me, grief was less a wild thing unleashed within me than a profound misplacement of normality. It was only as I grew older that I understood this distortion was as much the result of Mama’s grief as of Papa’s death.

  It was in one of the rare quiet moments in those grotesque, dreadful first days after Papa’s death, that Mama told me how she had watched and fallen in love with him long before he noticed her. I found it hard to believe that any man could be near Mama and remain unaware of her, for aside from her beauty she had great and potent presence. Papa had openly adored her. Indeed, he told me often enough that he had fallen in love with her the moment he set eyes on her. Yet here was Mama telling me she had loved him first.

  She said, eyes streaming tears, ‘I gave up everything to be with him.’ She said this so bleakly I could not doubt it, although I did not know what she could have meant, for Papa had been handsome, wealthy and well-born. But I had learned that it was better to let Mama’s talk run on unremarked, until the cataracts of grief ran dry, for each question elicited a new flood of pain. I speculated to myself that Mama must have been even more wealthy, or so nobly born that her family had regarded wedding Papa as a wicked betrayal and had cast her out and forbidden her to mention them. Certainly Mama did not ever speak of her past nor of her own parents or siblings, if she had any. When asked, she always said that her life had begun when she met Papa. I developed the sense, as children do, that this was an area that had been fenced off and forbidden long before I was born.

  Only after Papa died did I come to wonder if he had been curious about Mama’s past. Had he adored her so much he accepted her silence on the matter as simply part of the bargain? I could almost believe it, for his eyes had rarely shifted from her face and form whenever she was close, and he could not long abide being away from her. Or perhaps she told it all to him in the early days of their loving, and had then sworn him to silence.

  One way and another, all that was said and unsaid about love by my parents gave me to understand it was marvellous and intoxicating; but the more wondrous it was, the greater the cost. It was not until after Papa died that it occurred to me he had never spoken of giving up anything or of being forced to pay for his love. Even dying first had meant it was Mama and not he who must bear the cost in pain of that mortal parting. Yet for all her anguish, Mama never wished she had not loved Papa.

  For me, the most difficult facet of her grief, aside from the loss of any sense of normality, was the almost morbid fear she developed for my welfare. She hated me to be away from her and would insist she loved me with an intensity that embarrassed and even alarmed me a little, though I tried not to show it, for I did not wish to hurt her further. I told myself such fierce protectiveness was the natural consequence of what had happened, for if a husband could die, then so might a daughter.

  But I want to tell you of my stepfather.

  A year passed and the dreadful corrupting grief that had assailed Mama since the death of Papa ebbed to a bleakness in the eyes and a twist of pain about the lips. Mama entered a new phase of sorrow, where she began to have nightmares, waking night after night with screams. I knew the nightmares were about me, because the first thing she would do upon waking from them would be to fly to my bedroom to hold me and whisper reassurances to herself that I was safe. Sometimes she would beg
my forgiveness, though what I must forgive her for I could neither imagine nor discern from her gabbling hysteria. I wondered if she was asking me to forgive her for having given birth to me, since, being born, I must suffer. Someone honed by grief might have such a conceit.

  Papa visited her nightmares too, for sometimes when her cries woke me, I would hear her begging him to forgive her. I wondered what she imagined she had done to harm him. After all, he had not died because of any action or inaction of hers. Even the fever that killed him was from a recurring sickness he had picked up in the tropics years before they had met.

  I was wise enough not to reason with fear, any more than I had tried to reason with grief, and eventually the period of nightmares gave way to a sudden spate of journeying abroad. Despite her concern for my welfare, or perhaps because of it, Mama left me behind. Of course I had tutors and chaperones and a house full of servants who clucked around me like mother hens, but they were on the other side of the chasm that Papa’s death had opened up, and I was lonely and afraid when Mama was absent, half convinced she meant to disappear, or even, in darker moments, to cast herself from a cliff or the prow of a ship. My imagination was fuelled, you see, by the romantic, ghoulish novels that boredom made me steal from the bedrooms of the chambermaids. But each time, Mama returned safe to smother me with kisses and tell me again and again that I was precious and wondrous and rare, worth the price of pain I cost her. I took this to be an oblique reference to the birth pain she had endured in bearing me, the mention of which I found a little shocking.

  Then a day came when Mama returned with flushed cheeks and vivid eyes to announce that we would be moving to the end of the earth. Her face glowed with such delight that I did not dare ask her why and risk causing her to fall back into grieving for my father. I told myself in the flurry of preparations that there was not the time to ask, but when we were on the ship, and there was a sea of time, I floundered and could not think how to ask. Her moodiness and unpredictability, and my habit of being careful and watchful with her, had stifled my ability to converse lightly and easily. Indeed, she told me more than once not to be such a dullard, and seemed, as that journey progressed, to grow ever more gay the further we went from all we had known.

  I was ten when I first saw the country that was now to be our home. The ship had sailed into a sparkling blue harbour surrounded by dark, densely forested, grey-green hills, and I could at first see nothing of the town that was our destination. The only thing I could see, I took to be some sort of industry, half veiled in red smoke. The ship brought us here and we came ashore to crooked streets of red-brown earth and houses made of wood and to a bustle of horses and carriages and people whose movements raised the perpetual rust-red blear – a strange, rough factory of life. I breathed in the bloody dust, appalled and stumbling because my feet could not immediately adjust to the lack of cobbles underfoot, but when I said as much, a crewman told me gently that it was only that I had not yet got my land legs back. A carriage awaited us and it carried us away from the dusty town and up into the forested hills I had seen from the deck of the ship. I ought to have been pleased to be in the midst of what was certainly untouched wilderness, but the colours were all wrong, both too drab and too garish, as if exaggerated by the exaggerated sun. It beat down with such relentless fury that I cowered in the shade of the awning, unable to imagine baring my skin to it.

  I wondered if it was the sun that made the men and women who inhabited this place so heavy and vague in their movements. Their eyes and expressions seemed to me both exhausted and bewildered. Mama had said many of them came from across the sea, like us, but it was impossible to imagine either of us being so reduced.

  I soon took to calling them the clay people, for their skin seemed as rough and muddy as their voices and minds.

  All of our furniture and most of the servants had been sent in advance, and were waiting to greet us in a house so similar in dimension and ambiance to the one we had left behind that I had to assume Mama had chosen it for that reason. Yet why had we come here, if nothing was to change?

  But of course everything was changed and much that we had brought with us did not fit our new lives. In particular, all of our lovely winter coats and muffs and boots were put into storage, for it never snowed here. That Mama had allowed them to be brought, gave me a nugget of hope that she did not mean us to stay here forever, and in those first days I analysed her words and tried desperately to find in them a confirmation of my hope. I was desperately unhappy. If I had felt estranged before, here I found myself a pale-skinned, over-delicate freak full of irrelevant complexities of manner. I did not like the heat nor the clothes one must wear to endure it. I did not like the light, which stabbed into my eyes like little blades and exposed everything so mercilessly, or the way the heat dried all that was green to brown. I did not like the untidy look of the trees, or the ever-present, ominous hum of insects that rose from the bleached grass. But I did not make any tantrum or protest. Aside from the fact that it was not in my nature, the heat drained me and made me feel exhausted almost the moment I left my bed. I could not imagine undertaking the long journey back home.

  Winter, when it came, was only a little better, for all seasons were but variations of summer in this land. But at least there were cool breezes and occasionally dew beaded the morning grass. I took to rising very early, just before sunrise, in that hour when the air would smell clean and fresh and damp and there might be a few veils of violet cloud in the peach-gold sky. All the birds sang at that hour, though later in the day only a few cried out, sounding harsh and exhausted.

  Best of all I liked the thunderstorms, which were elemental and thrilling, knives of light slashing through the blackness, with great cracks of sound. Then rain would begin to fall. I loved the intoxicating scent given off by the parched earth when the first drops fell, but, like everything in this new land, there was no gentleness in the rain. It did not fall, save for the first spattering, but hammered the earth so hard that, setting off in it, one felt it might be possible to drown standing up. There was a dry streambed that ran by the house and after rain it would suddenly and for a short time become a churning torrent. Once I saw a horse floating in it the morning after a storm, bloated monstrously by death. That violent rain fell only briefly, and then, as if to punish me for the pleasure I took in storms, the heat would always draw a haze of sweaty steam from the earth to sheen the skin and clog the air.

  Mama was no more enamoured of the heat than I, and she would often express disgust over how things were done or, more often than not, left undone in it. From time to time I saw her staring at the clay people with incredulity. She became ferociously determined that nothing in our household or our behaviour would be permitted to deviate from what was proper.

  But even as I struggled to be formal in a country that lacked any idea of formality or any reason for it, I could not help wondering why Mama had brought us here. Lying on my bed under a canopy of netting to keep out the insects, it came to me one day that, before deciding upon our removal, Mama had been on a quest. Yet what had she sought, that she had found it here? Unless she had truly sought the end of the earth. If that were true, she did not show any particular love for the end of the earth nor its inhabitants. But she smiled often and serenely here, though at her thoughts I fancied more than anything in our surroundings. Even so, her smiles gladdened me after the sombre years of mourning. Perhaps she had brought us here simply to force herself to give away all our dark, smotheringly hot mourning attire, and might therefore cease to grieve. We had come from a place where there were clothes for every eventuality and behaviours to match each garment so that one could not exist without the other. But here, the heat slashed away the connection between fashion and form, though the clay people had tried to cobble together a fashion that allowed for the heat. Descended as many of them were from the middle and servant class of our own land, their notions of good taste were intolerable to Mama.

  A few weeks after settling ourselves a
nd our possessions in the new place, Mama said that we must shop for a wardrobe. This was not an indulgence but an absolute necessary, for even the lightest of the clothes we had brought with us were too heavy and ornate for the heat and for the rough simplicity of the society about us.

  I enjoyed the shopping expeditions simply because it seemed as if our lives were curving back to some approximation of normality. But the clothing offered to us, even the finest of it, was appalling and the cloth available was unsuitable for anything but the plainest house gowns. My mother ended up sending abroad for a dressmaker and a seamstress as well as a cobbler, who brought with them at her command silk and lace, pearl buttons and other rare and costly fabrics. But she made a point of buying cottons and linens and wool locally, for she said it would not do to alienate the town entirely. It surprised me to hear her speak of local traders as if their feelings mattered, but then I remembered that she had always had the best of everything at home because she had wooed the underlings as much as their masters, knowing who did the true work.

  Before Papa died, we had shopped often for gowns and hats and new shoes for this or that occasion, but having spent the last years in black and grey and purple, it was a heady experience to be permitted to think of colour again. Even Mama seemed nearly elated as she chose blues in all shades to complement her lavender eyes and flaxen hair, while I was directed to pale primrose, cream and delicate light greens. I was permitted one moss-green gown, which I adored because it seemed a dramatic adult colour. The endless fittings, which could have been a trial in the sullen heat, were pleasurable because Mama laughed and talked with the designers and cutters in a gay, charming, effortless manner she had not exhibited since Papa’s death. Only very occasionally did she fall silent in that preoccupied way that told me she was thinking of Papa. But to my relief, her mouth drooped only for a short time before she began to speak of some new bonnet she had seen, or the settee she was having designed for the large formal parlour.