black sun

I dreamed I was back in that apartment. First I stood on the street and looked up at the front of the building. It was how it was before, though I knew by now it must have changed. Now when I came over the river, followed the tramline around off the Ruycshstraat, there were new apartments. Everywhere there were new apartments. Sometimes it seemed the city was always changing, that there was a restlessness beneath its surface and so a building was torn down a new one started. Yet nothing ever really changed because change, that shifting of impressions and sensations was so much part of this city that it was expected and if it did not occur then there was a sudden lurch, and people found yourself wondering why things were as they were.

Perhaps I dreamed of it because I had just been there. I had just walked there and crossed the bridge coming up from the Oosterpark and on my way south. Some things were as they used to be. The building on the corner with its fine architecture, its small spires, inlaid suns and curved windows. And the river, that though it is a small river is still a river, flowed under the bridge and up into the city. That was an autumn day, the leaves turning on the trees and trembling, the sun streaming down thickly over everything.

I dreamed about that apartment. I dreamed of the first time I saw it. You were there and it was a January evening with the canals thawing and the temperature rising again after a period of freezing fog and rain that fell like hail or struck like splinters of glass. We came from the other side of the river and it was dark. In the corner of the bridge was a barge. It rocked against the quay and the lights from the buildings glowed in the brown night and mist that covered everything. Something inside of me felt I was crossing not only a bridge but also a line and when we found the apartment something new would be starting. Like the river that fed the sea there was something moving. The tide was taking me somewhere. Not that I put it in those words, only it was there and as we bumped against each other I knew this was for us and no one else.

We came along the river that night and in your pocket was the piece of paper with the directions and we did not know our way so had to keep looking at the map we had bought in a small newsagents near the rail station. Behind us was the hotel, along the quay, out past the rail tracks. The small room we were staying in, its blankets strewn untidily over the floor and our half packed cases and cassette tapes and books. I think we stopped for something to drink on our way, a coffee and roll with cheese. One of those rolls dusted with flour that comes off on your fingers and gets over your clothes so you spend half your time brushing it away and trying not to get it anywhere else, though never succeed. At that time those rolls with cheese or pickle or liver sausage tasted good. It was a while before they began to taste like more of the same and we would go looking for somewhere that offered some interesting variation. Perhaps you know you live somewhere, you know you are no longer visiting or passing through when the food tastes like it has always been there, when it has the reassurance of the simple and the commonplace. I mean you understand it when you are somewhere else and suddenly long to be sitting in the corner of a certain café where you once sat and have a coffee that only tastes like it tastes there, a sandwich or pastry the way only there it can be. Maybe look out the window and see a tram come up over a junction, sway on the tracks and the hiss or blue flash where it crosses cables, where they meet or swing off somewhere else. The ring of the tram bell as a cyclist cuts over its path and the face of a stranger who does not look strange because of a look that is unique to where you are and the way only the light can fall in that place. Over the gables and spires, off the windows or sift through the trees in long lines.

That night we crossed the bridge and went along the riverside and turned right onto the street we were looking for. It was a narrow street with a peculiar raised path to one side and lamps hanging across on wires. It was dark and a little lost and I smelt the river in it. As if the river were there in its foundations, had somehow seeped up after so many years into the stones and cement, the rafters and beams that framed the buildings so there was dampness that even on a summer’s day would be there. A dampness that was brown and green and never going anywhere.

Dreaming is strange. Its ability suddenly to penetrate your life, like a voice from outside, is curious. Though I believe dreams are from within you. They are part of you and that everything you need to live is there inside you. I do not mean in some mysterious way, though perhaps that is how it is, but that, like animals, we have our instincts, we have our needs and so know what to look for. We need a place to live and food to eat and it is that simple. Yet unlike animals we need to love and be loved and that adds a complication. Not only that, somehow we have to know why we love and understand love. And sometimes though love is what validates us, what brings us to our reality, we turn away; we prefer the shadows and say love cannot exist because there is no ground for believing. Even when life gets so controlled that it is flat and we are fading away, we say it has little to do with loving or not loving. We say we are beyond needing and that everything can be understood, and maybe it can. Yet then we spend all our time focusing on a small moment ahead of us and forget there was ever anything else. Dreams come from within us and tell us what our strategy is, what it is as living organisms, as consciousness we need to grow; what is outside us is really what is within us.

I dreamed I was standing in front of the door. It was still crooked, still set back off the street and cramped. When I opened it, the cord was still there. The cord that enabled tenants to open the door from above without having to come below. It wound up into the dark like a line into the nothingness of the stairway. The only way of knowing for certain there was something else there. It called you up, its rough texture and the way it hung from the loops that held it. It was a risk you always took. You often wondered what possibilities that climb held.

The stairs were still steep and dusty so I climbed them and found myself at the door of our apartment. I had the feeling it was night, a night when we lived there. One of those nights when it rains, when it drizzles and the streets are wet and shine. A night when there are not many people about and if you are in somewhere you watch the drops run down the window pane, making their way until they are gone and others come and the streets get wetter. Perhaps someone hurries by, holding a newspaper up over their head and a taxi pulls in while the lights of the traffic fragment and disperse and everything goes by in split patterns. The rain is coming up from the south and sometimes it seems you can smell that too. Fields and forest and where the land begins to come up again, where hills rise and take you above the sea, up into the air. And even further south where the food is strong and the wine sweet. Where the sun falls and flashes off the sea, animating all it touches.

I opened the door and it was light inside. The room was empty. I stepped over the floor and noticed it was bare and yet the beams were polished. Where there had been a carpet there was nothing but burnished wood. It shone and creaked when I walked and I had the feeling of something very old but also new and freshened. At the far end of the room, the window was open. Outside the light was close and shimmered.

I stood and looked around. There were no chairs or tables. There was only a cupboard and wardrobe. Pulling the drawers out and opening the door I could find nothing. Nowhere was there any clue to the fact we had once lived there. Everything was empty.

Behind me was the bedroom. The light switch was still on the wall with the wiring cased in that ugly sort of way, like a pipe running up from the floor and around to where the switch waited to be triggered. Carefully I went in.

The bed was gone though I remembered the times we spent there. How on spring nights we would lie with the window open and the noise of the city coming in and somewhere over that the sound of the river. I remember you made a shade for the lamp, a large sun stretched over a frame in orange and red and yellow with rays coming out at different lengths and direction. In the corner of the room, the small palm tree I worked to make grow but still collected dust and looked lost. Over the windows were those bamboo shades that in summer sometimes worked and let in air while keeping out the mosquitoes.

I turned back to the living room. I stood and looked about me. The light from outside flowed in, seemed to be engulfing the room with a luminescence. It fired off the walls and hung in the air. Formed rays like there was dust. Only there was no dust because everything had a feeling of being clean, being fresh, as if some invisible air stream had just come down and blown it all clear.
Standing there, I thought of the times we had spent in this room. I remembered the table and the tattered armchair. I used to sit at that table writing, my navy turtleneck on or maybe only a t-shirt and unshaven. You would read, curled up in the armchair and sometimes look impatiently toward me and then talk. One Sunday afternoon you read a story you had picked from a book of children’s stories about a stainless steel spoon that thought it was silver and though the other spoons told it otherwise, it refused to believe. Even when it had been discarded and was lying with the rubbish or had fallen between the gratings of a drain and was being rained on and was down with the dead leaves and dirt, it maintained it was silver. Listening, I was not sure if that was maybe like us. Maybe the odds were stacked against us even then. Too many things hung on a thread. Or maybe the spoon felt silver and so was silver. Yet that was more difficult because it brought up questions about what you felt and what you were. If you felt you were something and maintained that to the bitter end even though everything around you was falling apart, then were you that or were you just foolish? And who could tell in the final say what you were and what you were not? At what point did you judge yourself, confirm yourself by the values imposed on you by others or those experienced by you yourself? I mean, where does the freedom to be what you want to be, become an un-ease, an illusion? Yet you keep believing it because to admit you are only stainless steel would be to admit you are wrong. Deceiving yourself is worse than being deceived by others. Self deception means you have gone to war with yourself, with your reality.

Still those winter Sundays were often sad and grey. Often times we sat in the apartment and lounged around and I would think of how I had spent Sundays as a child. The shirt and tie and the gospel hall with its rows of plastic and steel seats. In the pulpit some round-faced car salesman and the bibles being dusted down for another week. And the man who told us he could see angels, though his wife, I think, saw different. She kept her eye on all the girls to make sure none were dressed prettier than her and that none went near the boys.

It was from that living room we would decide to cycle out along the canals when summer came. Sitting on a green wooden bench sometimes for hours, just watching the sun go down. Or the time we went to the beach and nearly got stranded. The waves pounding the sand. The dunes with their long reed-like grass and deserted pathways. We watched the sea run up the beach in foamy fingers and the sun burst through a bank of cloud in long rays and touch the surface far out from the tidemark. Then came back in on the train, sleepy, with the city appearing like a picture burnt in light and electricity, alone and naked on the horizon.

That night the moon was full and hung over the river and the gables in a close dreaminess. Through the open windows and across the warm roof the moths flew in and around the light bulb. Later I woke to find there was a storm. The lamps hanging across the street, swayed and swung. Their light moved over the wall, creating shadows and strange shapes and the wind and thunder rattled in the window, blowing rubbish and things down the street. So next morning when I got up and walked through the park things were still wet and sharp and there were branches strewn across the pavements.

Sometimes you would sit before the mirror in that room and make up your face. Your perfume always stood on the mantelpiece. I could never quite figure out why you did it but you would. As if you were masking yourself, putting on a different face and so could, for a short time at least, be someone else. Not that I felt you should be someone else or needed to be someone else.

There were the times we took the bicycle and went to the Leidseplein. Seeking out its noise and alleys with different types of restaurants or bars. Occasionally we came home after having a beer or two too many, a little drunk and the bicycle wobbled and I would steer and have to be careful not to catch the wheels in the tram tracks. The streets and the canals might be empty, just the odd person walking along or lurching from one side of the pavement to the other. You could be wearing your suede jacket and those silk pants you made, the ones that were a sort of copper colour and finely woven with an intricate Oriental pattern. Climbing those stairs was always strange then. Late at night they seemed dustier and darker and I would wonder too what secrets they held. Who had lived there before us and how long ago. What acts of kindness had they seen or sorrow or maybe even violence. They were the type of stairs in the type of apartment that seemed like it had secrets, that there were layers of many lives already woven into its dust and wood and walls. They had seen a lot. And then the river would seem to rise up and run through me. It would run free and I would feel its story, its endlessness and that it had been there longer than any building, than all the lives put together on the street. Like all rivers it went on and on adjusting to the land around it, being built along, being bridged but always bringing those who sought it out, back, back to the simplest of things; water, land, human survival.

It was in that living room I took a photograph of you. In it you look like Vermeer’s ‘Girl Reading a Letter’, though you are turned the other way and not reading a letter but looking out the window with your hair tied back behind you. The light is coming in and covering your face, making it pale and catching the highlights of your hair and falling over that forest green sweater you are wearing. Beside you is a plant, its leaves leaning toward you and the rest of the room falls away into darkness. That was in March and I remember the tulips were just beginning to bloom near the Museumplein, coming out in great red bunches, covering the grass and under the Linden trees. When I saw them from the tram I thought of how when I was a boy I would wait for them to open in the garden at home because then it was spring and summer was nearer. They would first appear in the bed ringing the front lawn and their colour, their reds or yellows would be bright against the laurel bushes, against the grey heavy clouds on damp spring days. I would stand on the front porch and look at them and then at the cypress trees across the avenue and the mountains, blue and vaporous in the distance. Some mornings I would come out on my way to school and hope to see them, would hold my breath and wish they would be there and then get into my father’s car and drive away. Not that I liked flowers particularly just that tulips were special nice and I liked their strong colours and simple shapes and it was also a time near my birthday.

These thoughts were going through my mind as I stood there, as I looked around me. A certain period of my life had occurred here. Something in the run of my life ran here, in these rooms, in this apartment. I had walked the line from the door, past the bedroom, through to the living room and then to the kitchen many times.

At the far end of the kitchen was the space where the shower had been. That shower never worked well and the plaster around it was crumbled and the paintwork peeled. To its side should have been the postcard pinned to the wall, the one that reminded me of you, Modigliani’s ‘Seated Nude’. On the counter should have been the white enamel pot with the red stripe, the new knife and the green of parsley on the wooden cutting board. Loose potatoes, fresh oregano, garlic and an assortment of vegetables for a soup. There should also have been an open bottle of wine. I knew if it was real and I walked to the window and looked to the patio below, the two women would be there. The two women we used to wonder about, with their dyed hair and how on summer afternoons they sat and drank white beer from tall glasses while cats padded between the legs of the plastic chairs. If this was real their laughter would suddenly break the afternoon open and some of the cats would run at each other and I would smell the oil heating from the pan and the first of the potatoes and oregano going in, releasing their aromas.

I stood there and looked about me. Going to the window, I leaned on the sill and looked out. The air was concentrated and humid but there were no cats running below and the postcard that once hung on the wall was gone. No smell of cooking hung in the air and the counter was empty. Not even an empty bottle.

So I wondered why I was there, what I was doing back in these rooms, why I was walking through this dream? Was there some reason? The sun was hidden by broken cloud though its rays were curling around and falling onto my hands. Then I understood.

Time has passed and though we are no longer together things do not just finish with a signature on a piece of paper, a document passed before a court clerk. A relationship leaves marks on you, leaves after effects that can be detected the way trace minerals can be found in a spring or a well. No relationship just ends in a moment. Like a leaf fallen or a bird shot down it takes time to die. And we get hurt when disappointed, hurt when our dreams do not materialise, when they go awry. That hurt gets twisted around and moves down into the bones of life, gets deep rooted and holds onto you until it seems to be holding you where you are, stopping you from moving on. Then one day you are angry. You are not angry at anything in particular but just angry at how things are, angry at your inability to move.

Now the anger that was a dark shadow over the sun, a penumbra of blackness, was gone. That was what I had come to discover. I dreamed to be released. I was no longer bitter.
The apartment was empty and while in its emptiness, the empty drawers, the empty kitchen, the empty bedroom, it held nothing more than memories, memories still strong, it also shone. It shone like everything was clean again. So I kept looking from the window, thought of the river over behind the roofs, to my left and under the trees, its presence, its fusing with the street itself so much part of everything.

Then I stepped out of the dream and crossed back over the bridge.

Copyright © Peter Millington. London. September 1999.