Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

  It is true what the psychologists say: Our ancestors are our first and only gods. It is from them we get our guilt, our duty, our sin—our destiny. A few claps of thunder had awed me, a few celestial firecrackers had given me a passing scare. I gripped the Watch. I did not go back to the infants’ school that afternoon, nor even, at first, to the house in Highgate. I went—all the way on foot, like a devout pilgram—to the street in Whitechapel where my great-grandfather, a flourishing clockmaker in his hundred and twelfth year had set up a home in the 1870s. In the 1870s there were fine houses as well as slums in Whitechapel. The street was still there. And so was the old home—its crumbling stucco, its cracked and boarded-up windows, its litter-strewn front steps a mockery of the former building which had once boasted two maids and a cook. I stared at it. By some prompting of fate, by some inevitable reflex on my part, I knocked on the door. The face of an Asian woman; timid, soulful. Someone had told me there was a room to let in this house. Yes, it was true—on the second floor.

  So I did not throw away the Watch: I found a shrine in which to place it. And I did not return—save to dispose of its meagre contents and arrange its sale—to the house in Highgate. I refashioned my world, on a hermit’s terms, out of an ancestral room in Whitechapel. Time, as even the ignorant will tell you and every clock-face will demonstrate, is circular. The longer you live, the more you long to go back, to go back. I closed my eyes on that old charlatan, the future. And Deborah remained for ever in her playground, whistling at her children, like someone vainly whistling for a runaway dog which already lies dead at the side of a road.

  Thus I came to be sitting, a week ago, in that same room in Whitechapel, clutching, as I had that day by the Thames, the Watch in my itching palm. And still they came, the cries, desolate and unappeasable, from the floor below.

  What was the meaning of these cries? I knew (I who had renounced such things to live in perpetual marriage with the Watch) they were the cries that come from the interminglings of men and women, the cries of heart-break and vain desire. I knew they were the cries of that same Asian woman who had opened the door for me that day of Grandfather’s cremation. A Mrs.—or Miss?—Matharu. The husband (lover?) had come and gone at varying times. A shift-worker of some sort. Sometimes I met him on the stairs. An exchange of nods; a word. But I did not seek more. I burrowed in my ancestral lair. And even when the shouting began—his ferocious, rapid, hers like some ruffled, clucking bird—I did not intervene. Thunder-storms pass. Clocks tick on. The shouts were followed by screams, blows, the noise of slamming doors—sobs. Still I sat tight. Then one day the door slammed with the unmistakable tone of finality (ah, Deborah); and the sobs that followed were not the sobs that still beg and plead, but solitary sobs, whimpering and dirge-like—the sobs of the lonely lingering out the empty hours.

  Did I go down the stairs. Did I give a gentle knock to the door and ask softly, “Can I help?” No. The world is full of snares.

  Time heals. Soon these whimperings would cease. And so they did. Or, rather, faded into almost-silence—only to build up again into new crescendos of anguish.

  I gripped my ticking talisman, as the sick and dying cling, in their hour of need, to pitiful trinkets. Do not imagine that these female cries merely assailed my peace and did not bring to me, as to their utterer, real suffering. I recognised that they emanated from a region ungoverned by time—and thus were as poisonous, as lethal to us Krepskis as fresh air to a fish.

  We were alone in the building, this wailing woman and I. The house—the whole street—lay under the ultimatum of a compulsory purchase. The notices had been issued. Already the other rooms were vacated. And already, beyond my windows, walls were tumbling, bulldozers were sending clouds of dust into the air. The house of Krepski must fall soon; as had fallen already the one-time houses of Jewish tailors, Dutch goldsmiths, Russian furriers—a whole neighborhood of immigrant tradesmen, stepping off the ships at London docks and bringing with them the strands of their far-flung pasts. How could it be that all this history had been reduced, before my eyes, to a few heaps of flattened rubble and a few grey demarcations of corrugated fencing?

  Another rending cry, like the tearing of flesh itself. I stood up: I clutched my forehead; sat down; stood up again. I descended the stairs. But I did not loosen my grip on the Watch.

  She lay—beneath a tangled heap of bedclothes, on a mattress in the large, draughty room which I imagined had once been my great-grandfather’s drawing-room, but which now served as living-room, kitchen and bedroom combined—in the obvious grip not so much of grief as of illness. Clearly, she had been unable to answer my knock at the door, which was unlocked, and perhaps had been for weeks. Sweat beaded her face. Her eyes burned. And even as I stood over her she drew a constricted gasp of pain and her body shuddered beneath the heaped bedclothes which I suspected had been pulled rapidly about her as I entered.

  Circumstances conspire. This woman, as I knew from the dozen words we had exchanged in little more than a year, spoke scarcely any English. She could not describe her plight; I could not inquire. No language was needed to tell me I should fetch a doctor, but as I bent over her, with the caution with which any Krepski bends over a woman, she suddenly gripped my arm, no less fiercely than my free hand gripped the Watch. When I signalled my intention, mouthing the word “doctor” several times, she gripped it tightly still, and an extra dimension of torment seemed to enter her face. It struck me that had I been a younger man (I was sixty-three, but little did she know that in Krepski terms I was still callow) her grip on my arm might have been less ready. Even so, fear as much as importunacy knotted her face. More than one layer of shame seemed present in her eyes as she let out another uncontrollable moan and her body strained beneath the bedclothes.

  “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

  You will doubtless think me foolish and colossally ignorant for not recognising before this point the symptoms of child-birth. For such they were. I, a Krepski who held in my hand the power to live so long and whose forefathers had lived so long before him, did not recognise the beginnings of life, and did not know what a woman in labour is like. But, once the knowledge dawned, I understood not only the fact but its implications and the reasons for this woman’s mingled terror and entreaty. The child was the child of a fugitive father. Daddy was far away, ignorant perhaps of this fruit of his dalliance, just as my father Stefan, far away on the North Sea, was ignorant of my mother stooping over my cot. Daddy, perhaps, was no Daddy by law; and who could say whether by law either Daddy or Mummy were rightful immigrants? That might explain the hand gripping me so tightly as I turned for professional help. Add to all this that I was an Englishman and I bent over this woman—whose mother had perhaps worn a veil in some village by the Ganges—as she suffered the most intimate female distress … You will see the position was vexed.

  And I had no choice but to be the witness—the midwife—to this hopeless issue.

  I understood that the moment was near. Her black-olive eyes fixed me from above the tangled sheets, in which, as if obeying some ancient instinct, she tried to hide her mouth. The point must soon come when she must abandon all modesty—and I all squeamishness—and I could see her weighing this terrible candour against the fact that I was her only help.

  But as we stared at each other a strange thing happened. In the little half-oval of face which she showed me I seemed to see, as if her eyes were equipped with some extraordinary ultra-optical lens, the huge hinterlands of her native Asia and the endless nut-brown faces of her ancestors. At the same time, marshalled within myself, assembling from the distant margins of Poland, were the ranks of my Krepski sires. What a strange thing that our lives should collide, here where neither had its origins. How strange that they should collide at all. What a strange and extraordinary thing that I should be born a Krepski, she a Matharu. What an impossible concatenation of chances goes to the making of any birth.

  I must have smiled at these thoughts—or at least lent to my f
ace some expression which infected hers. For her look suddenly softened—her black irises melted—then immediately hardened again. She screwed her eyes shut, let out a scream, and with a gesture of submission—as she might have submitted to that brute of a husband—pulled back the bedclothes from the lower part of her body, drew up her legs, and, clutching at the bed-head, with her hands, began to strain mightily.

  Her eyes were shut; I think they remained shut throughout the whole ensuing procedure. But mine opened, wider and wider, at what perhaps no Krepski had seen, or at least viewed with such privileged and terrified intentness. The mother—for this is what she was now indubitably becoming—arched her spine, heaved her monstrous belly, seemed to offer her whole body to be cleaved from between the legs upwards, and those expanding eyes of mine saw a glistening, wet, purple-mottled object, like some wrinkled marble pebble, appear where the split began. This pebble grew—and grew—growing impossibly large for the narrow opening in which it seemed intent on jamming itself. For a whole minute, indeed, it stuck there, as if this were its final resting place, while the mother screamed. And then suddenly it ceased to be a pebble. It was a lump of clenched, unformed flesh, suffused with blood, aware that its position was critical. The mother gasped; it became a head, a gnarled, battered, Punch-and-Judy head. The mother gasped again, this time with an audible relief and exultation; and it was no longer a head, but a whole creature, with arms and legs and little groping hands; and it was no longer caught in that awesome constriction but suddenly spilling out with slippery ease, like something poured from a pickle jar, a slithery brine accompanying it. But this was not all. As if it were not remarkable enough that so large a thing should emerge from so small a hole, there followed it, rapidly, an indescribable mass of multicoloured effluents, the texture and hue of liquid coral, gelatine, stewed blackberries …

  From what a ragout is a human life concocted.

  What was I doing throughout this spectacular performance? My eyes were popping, my knees were giving. I was clutching the Great Watch, fit to crush it, in my right hand. But now, with the little being writhing in slow motion on the gory sheets and the mother’s moans of relief beginning to mingle with a new anguish, I knew that I had my own unavoidable part to play in this drama. Once, on Grandfather’s television at Highgate, I had watched (disgusted but fascinated) a programme about child-delivery. I knew that much pertained to the fleshy tube which even now snaked and coiled between mother and baby. The mother understood it too; for with her last reserves of energy she was gesturing to a chest of drawers on the fair side of the room. In one of the drawers I found a pair of kitchen scissors …

  With the instant of birth begins the possibility of manslaughter. My untutored hands did what they could while my stomach fought down surging tides—not just of nausea but of strange, welling fear. Like the TV surgeon, I held up the slippery creature and, with an irresolute hand, slapped it. It grimaced feebly and made the sound—a sound of choking pain—which they say means life has taken hold. But it looked wretched and sick to me. I put it down on the mattress close to the mother’s side, as if some maternal fluence could do the trick I could not. We looked at each other, she and I, with the imploring looks of actual lovers, actual cogenitors who have pooled their flesh in a single hope.

  Deborah … with your playground whistle.

  I had heard the expression “life hangs in the balance.” I knew that it applied to tense moments in operating theatres and in condemned cells when a reprieve may still come, but I never knew—used to life as an ambling affair that might span centuries—what it meant. And only now do I know what enormous concentrations of time, what huge counter-forces of piled-up years, decades, centuries, go into those moments when the balance might swing, one way or the other.

  We looked at the pitiful child. Its blind face was creased; its fingers worked. Its breaths were clearly numbered. The mother began to blubber, adding yet more drops to her other, nameless outpourings; and I felt my ticking, clockmaker’s heart swell inside me. A silent, involuntary prayer escaped me.

  And suddenly they were there again. Stanislaw and Feliks and Stefan; winging towards me by some uncanny process, bringing with them the mysterious essence of the elements that had received them and decomposed them. Great-grandfather from his Highgate grave, Grandfather from his urn, Father (was he the first to arrive?) from the grey depths where the fishes had nibbled him and the currents long since corroded and dispersed him. Earth, fire, water. They flocked out of the bowels of Nature. And with them came Stanislaw senior, Kasimierz, Tadeusz; and all the others whose names I forget; and even the mythical Krepfs of Nuremberg and Prague.

  My hand was on the magic, genie-summoning Watch. In that moment I knew that Time is not something that exists, like territory to be annexed, outside us. What are we all but the distillation of all time? What is each one of us but the sum of all the time before him?

  The little baby chest was trembling feebly; the hands still groped; the wrinkled face was turning blue. I held out the Great Watch of Stanislaw. I let it swing gently on its gold chain over the miniscule fingers of this new-born child. They say the first instinct a baby has is to grasp. It touched the ticking masterpiece fashioned in Lublin in the days of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. A tiny forefinger and thumb clasped with the force of feathers the delicately chased gold casing and the thick, yellowed glass. A second—an eternity passed. And then—the almost motionless chest began to heave vigorously. The face knotted itself up to emit a harsh, stuttering wail, in the timbre of which there seemed the rudiments of a chuckle. The mother’s tearful eyes brightened. At the same time I felt inside me a renewed flutter of fear. No, not of fear exactly: a draining away of something; a stripping away of some imposture, as if I had no right to be where I was.

  The diminutive fingers still gripped the Watch. Through the gold chain I felt the faintest hint of a baby tug. And a miraculous thing—as miraculous as this infant’s resurgence of life—happened. I set it down now as a fact worthy to be engraved in record. At six-thirty P.M. on a July day scarcely a week ago, the hand of a baby (what titanic power must have been in those fingers, what pent-up equivalent of years and years of accumulated time?) stopped my great-grandfather’s Watch, which had ticked, without requiring the hand of man to wind it, since September, 1809.

  The fear—the sensation of being assailed from within—clutched me more intently. This room, in the house of my great-grandfather—in which my ancestors themselves had invisibly mustered (had they fled already, exorcised ghosts?)—was no longer my sanctuary but the centre of a desert. Weighing upon me with a force to equal that which had kept this child alive, was the desolation of my future, growing older and older, but never old enough, and growing every day, more puny, more shrivelled, more insectile.

  I released my grip on the chain. I pressed the Great Watch into the hands of an infant. I got up from my position squatting by the mattress. I looked at the mother. How could I have explained, even if I had her language? The baby was breathing; it would live. The mother would pull through. I knew this better than any doctor. I turned to the door and made my exit. Things grew indistinct around me. I stumbled down the flight of stairs to the street door.

  Outside, I found a phone-box and, giving the barest particulars, called an ambulance to the mother and child. Then I blundered on. No, not if you are thinking this, in the direction of Deborah. Nor in the direction of the Thames, to hurl, not the Watch, but myself into the murky stream and join my sea-changed father.

  Not in any direction. No direction was necessary. For in the historic streets of Whitechapel, minutes later, I was struck, not by an omnibus, not by an arrow of lighting, nor by a shell from one of the Kaiser’s iron-clads, but by an internal blow, mysterious and devasting, a blow by which not physical trees but family trees are toppled and torn up by their roots.

  Another ambulance wailed down Stepney Way, not for a mother and child, but for me.

  And now I lie beneath fevered bedclothes. And now I
can tell—from the disinterested if baffled faces of doctors (who no doubt have a different way of gauging time from clockmakers), from the looks of buxom nurses (ah—Deborah) who bend over my bed, lift my limp wrist and eye their regulation-issue watches—that my own breaths are numbered.

  ALSO BY GRAHAM SWIFT

  Making an Elephant

  Tomorrow

  The Light of Day

  Last Orders

  Ever After

  Out of This World

  Waterland

  Learning to Swim

  Shuttlecock

  The Sweet-Shop Owner

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  GRAHAM SWIFT was born in 1949 in London, where he still lives and works. He is the author of eight previous novels: The Sweet-Shop Owner; Shuttlecock, which received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Waterland, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour; Out of This World; Ever After, which won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; Last Orders, which was awarded the Booker Prize; The Light of Day; and, most recently, Tomorrow. He is also the author of Learning to Swim, a collection of short stories, and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry, and reflections on his life in writing. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.