thunderstorm

1

It appears that every blade of grass could be counted if he wanted. They lie in a green rectangle. The boy feels the heat, the closeness press on him. The sun of the morning is giving way to stretches of grey. He puts his hand to his forehead and feels it sticky and wet.

His ears pick out sounds. Doves coo longingly into the gathering afternoon. Their song carries his eyes to the tall trees beyond the end of the garden. The still and dense shapes whisper to him of the coolness of shadows, of losing himself in a secret world.

He thinks of the stream in the tangle beyond the wall. He is running into the afternoon’s length, carelessly, feeling the scrape of dry earth on his knees. Until he is lying there his heart beating in his chest, his face pressed to the dry grass. Above him the sun is breaking the enveloping trees. The broken spaces, the endless blue are circumscribed only by the movement of clouds.

In the garden, half way down the lawn, his mother sits with the next-door neighbour. The light clink of china cups reaches him. On a low table is a plate with small cakes on it.

In the afternoon heat his mother’s flower-print dress stands out. The northern lilt of her accent drifts through the air. The next-door neighbour tilts her head to the side, her red hair falling from her freckled face. The flow of their laughter meanders up through the garden.

The boy walks toward his mother. He asks for a cake. Then reaches out to take one without waiting for a reply. He goes over to a football lying nearby. Swinging his foot, he kicks it against a bare patch of wall, moves to anticipate its return. He likes to watch its trajectory, the black and white diamonds spinning away from him, the thump as it strikes the pebble-dash. Its every movement, its every bounce, focuses his attention. And each shot is a dare, a challenge to his reflexes. With each shot he stretches possibilities, pushes himself, until a miss, something broken in his father’s flowerbed, a badly directed shot too close to a window, pulls his him back, pulls him back to his foot, to the relationship between eye and foot.

He aims a shot, strikes the ball and drives it with frustration. The heat delays his reaction. Diving, his fingers reach out, stretch, but miss. They grasp at empty air. With deceptive speed, the ball skids off the grass, spins away and rolls into the goal striking the picnic table and rattling the china cups. The roar of the crowd, the groan of disappointment, the commentator’s observations are all echoed in the sharpness of his mother’s voice. Asking him to be more careful.
The presence of the neighbour restrains her reprimand. ‘Has he nothing to do, nowhere else to play, no-one to play with?’ she asks.

Leaving the ball nestled in the corner of the goal, seeing himself as the goalkeeper, head hung after defeat in a close match, he walks toward the dressing room.



2

The kitchen is cool. He pours himself a glass of water. Drinking it quickly it runs over his chin and onto his green cotton t-shirt. His hands move across his mouth and he wipes it dry. Then he strolls into the living room.

The garden no longer has any interest for him. He feels restless and lethargic. Resting his head on the table he sighs. He gazes up at the rows of potted plants. They line the window-sill. Their shapes suggest to him giant trees in a make-believe world. His eyes wander over the various contours until they come to a large geranium. It has those delicate furry leaves and its flowers, a luminous red, are all the richer in the close afternoon.

He reaches his hand out and touches it. The movement releases its smell. That smell always evokes a conflict of sensations. It is neither sweet nor unpleasant. But it is a little too strong. It falls a little too heavy against the back of the throat.

Like all distinctive smells it evokes memory. Winter mornings on his way to school. The sun falling on the pavement as if weakened by its effort to penetrate the cold. He feels a hollowness in his stomach because he would rather remain at home. His father, coat buttoned, shoes polished, is waiting. calling out the car is started. They drive along the avenue, the exhaust hanging in the frosty air. And the boy is already anticipating the morning to come. He leans his leather school-bag against the back of the seat. In his head he tries to work out how many more days till the next holiday. His father talks brightly. But he, he is counting, watching each corner turned, each house passed.

Summer holidays are supposed to be fun. Today he does not know. The day is coming to him from a different level. There is a clarity, a sudden way in which objects strike him, as though he were seeing them for the first time. There is a sense of stepping over some line, a sense of time suddenly slowing into recognisable, graspable, units. The long summer holiday does not seem so long and perhaps the unendingly boring days of school in between also seem shorter. His fingers tap against the table. He moves them around in loose circles. Later a friend of his mother’s is coming to tea. He is curious. Who is it? Why is this man coming? His father will not be home till later. He is away on business.

He looks again to the sky. The clouds are growing in weight. They appear to be made from oily, torn pieces of paper. If only he could reach a little higher, he would touch them. He would dip his fingers into them, grab their heavy emptiness, drag them down to earth or push them back out into the unending sky.

The trees are motionless. He stares at the willow at the top of the garden. In the stillness, the occasional falling leaf, spins gently to the ground.

In the autumn these leaves turn bright yellow and litter the top of the garden. Like confetti at the sad marriage of summer and winter. He recalls with a shudder of excitement and fear that at the base of that tree each year, where the branches are bundled closely together, there is a concentration of wasps. He thinks of the jars that metamorphose into home made traps. Jam on the bottom, water on the top, a little more jam around the edges to lure the hovering bodies in and all hung conveniently with a piece of string from a nearby branch. Those small insects that fascinate and frighten. Their warning markings of yellow and black. The tail with a sting, the sudden way they fly at you, causing you, a creature so much more their size, to weave and run. Stories told in the playground at school. The friend on holiday who saw one three inches long. Another friend who in the mountains had to run from a swarm as big as a flock of birds. Wood-wasps that attack you in pairs. Killer wasps that live in the heart of the African jungle. Queen wasps that nest in the corner of your bedroom. Each storyteller topping the previous, secretly frightening each other, secretly knowing they only really felt easy with the layer of dead ones floating on the top of their jam-jars.

This afternoon there are no wasps. There is only the occasional bee in the buddleia tree. From a neighbour’s house comes the murmur of a radio. A door opens. Steps shuffle across a backyard.

A voice says something only half understandable. Then the afternoon is fleetingly full of the smell of baking bread.

The boy is back in his own world. The feeling returns. The feeling of something about to be uncovered. He sighs out loud, asks himself what it can be. Then he turns his head to the empty living room. The door to the hallway is open. He walks toward the open space.



3

Over the house the air becomes thicker. The avenue reaches back. It winds its way through rows of residential homes. There is a cluster of small shops and a railway station. Then there is the sea.

The house is situated on the outskirts of the city. It is linked by a two-laned tarmacadamed road. Wheels bite into this surface. The white lines, broken and unbroken, merge like the stroke of a brush in the corner of the eye.

The driver looks intently ahead. The curved road is reflected in the lens of his glasses. He grasps the steering wheel and wonders whether he should loosen his collar and tie. His jacket lies neatly on the back seat. There is a box of chocolates in paper wrapping.

Somewhere in an office someone is drawing lines across a map. Tightly bound circles, highs and lows, warm and cold fronts. The weather system is moving in off the ocean. It crosses the western seaboard, heading east. It moves over the relief of land, mountains and valleys, roads running like twisting, black lines into sudden endings, towns, cities. Two fronts about to collide. Cooler air meeting warm, static air. Friction; the release of energy; rain beating into the warm dry ground.

The driver presses on. He is nearly there. Soon he will see the sign indicating the turn left. He will find himself among the faces of tastefully painted brickwork and manicured lawns.

He glances at his watch. It is four-thirty. Leaning over to the wood panelled dashboard, he switches the radio on. A voice, almost sleepily, introduces another country-western song.



4

The light is diffused in the hallway. It comes through the six pebbled panes of glass. The boy sees the hall table. He leans against it. The fronds of a hanging plant tickle his ear. His gaze travels to the light at the door. There is the click of a car door closing. Footsteps sound on the driveway. A shadow looms, dark, undefined. A hand reaches for the bell.

Then it rings, cracking the silence open, splitting the afternoon. The boy takes off as if a starting gun had fired. He moves quickly past the glass of the door and onto the stairway. Taking the stairs lightly, two at a time, he reaches the top. Then he stops to catch his breath and listen.

He does not ask himself why he is doing this. Like a hare ready to spring he waits. The bell rings again, this time a little more insistently. His ears strain to hear the footsteps cross the living room and enter the hall. Then his name is being called out.

There is the swish of his mother’s dress as it passes the small table, the click of the catch being turned, the sound of the door opening and then a crescendo of greetings.

He peers carefully over the banister. His mother is being lightly kissed on the cheek by a man wearing tortoiseshell glasses. His hair is combed cleanly back off his forehead and his voice also has a northern lilt to it. He hands over the chocolates and mentions something about the children.

The boy waits until the steps recede down the hallway. Briefly he hears his mother mention his name but then the voices are swallowed by the living room. Again he moves. This time he springs onto the upstairs landing. He pushes the door of the guest room open. He steps toward the window and gently parts the slats of the Venetian blinds. Below is the front garden. His eyes run over the trimmed hedge to the front of the driveway.

It is grand. A family saloon, the same size as his father’s car. The wing design is flashier. It has more chrome along the side. In two shades of cream. There are wing mirrors near the front headlamps and a car radio aerial. Quickly running through all the names he knows, he settles on the appropriate one, turning it over and over in his mind.

The car stands silently, commandingly; and the Cypress trees form a guard of honour from the far side of the avenue.

Deftly the boy grabs the cord and pulls the blinds up a couple of centimetres. He stares for a long time, his nose pressed to the window, his arms underneath his chin.

The avenue is quite. The distant mountains appear also to be pressed down in the closeness. Their curving, blue shapes, their dark and light patches quiver, caress the eye, compact the space and suggest that their texture, their shapes are just within reach.

His attention is caught by the creaking of a bicycle. A postman cycles past. In the lined face with its large nose, its sour mouth, the eyes are fixed resignedly ahead. The foot instinctively moves as a dog begins to bark in a neighbouring driveway.

Again he feels restless, unquiet, as if expecting something to happen. His stomach muscles tighten, his mouth falls open, and yet, nothing happens. The afternoon continues. The postman passes by, the mountains remain where they are.

He pulls back. He feels irritated, empty, lost in the entire afternoon. The shooting fall of sounds, the compressing of distance, the emptiness of the house all mount upon his ten year old frame. He looks down at his scuffed knees, sees the tear in the side of his gym shoes, the grass stain along the side of his khaki shorts and he feels constricted, feels constricted by all his clothes, held in by them, as if they were nothing to do with him any longer. Suddenly he wants to take them off, to throw them up into the coming storm, into the rain he knows must fall.

He does not. For a moment he looks about him as if arrested on the brink of jumping. Does he just imagine he feels the floor spinning away from under him? Is it just a trick of the heavy July heat that causes the afternoon to slip from him?

He sways and grabs the wooden end of the bed. The scuffed knee is still there, the torn gym shoe, the grass-stained shorts. Taking a deep breath, he straightens up, waits, coming back in on the blend of heat and light that makes up the afternoon.



5

The finishing touches have just been put to the table. He sits down. Across from him the visitor looks on politely. His mother asks if he has washed his hands. Answering no, he is told to do so. His brother is talking to the visitor. He is telling a story about what he has being doing all afternoon. About a dog belonging to a friend. About how big it was and about how he and his friend took it for a walk on the avenue and it tried to run away. The visitor listens, commenting affably now and then. Over his shirt sleeves are metallic arm-bands. Across his tie is a shiny, gold pin. The blue of his eyes is all the more noticeable behind the frame of his glasses. The boy listens. Then his mind begins to wander, to wander back upstairs.

Now it has become another world; a secret. After leaving the guest room, he crept into his parent’s bedroom. There was a moment of hesitation. He knew he was stepping into private space. Finally he pushed the door.

Through the window he could see the garden. He saw his mother and the visitor, the next-door neighbour making excuses to leave. From above the green was sprinkled in white; small flowers. Beyond were the grounds of an estate, a convent. There was a field of ripening corn, a small chapel. To his right was a line of heavy horse-chestnut trees.

Again that feeling came over him. A burst of fire, a current moving through him. There was constraint and energy. It struck him, unsettling, and yet exciting. It dizzied him as if he were somehow about to fly, about to step into a new world.

Turning from the window, he heard his mother laugh lightly from the garden and was aware of her holding a china-cup, of her crossing one leg over the other. Finding himself reflected in the full length mirror of his father’s wardrobe, he halted. His own face stared back. Its eyes blue, the nose freckled, the body lean, the ears sticking-out, the hair loose and fair. He reached out and turned the key and slowly. Then he stopped. For a moment his heart clasped. His reflection was transformed. It was replaced by his father’s dark, blue suit. It hung there; mute. He could see his father in it. He could see the tall, angular body, the balding head, the shadow around the mouth.

Across his vision swam the blue-grey eyes that seemed always to stare into some unmarked distance. The boy stared at the suit just as he had stared at the car earlier. Yet this was different. There was no chrome, no red upholstery and no flashy wing mirrors. Just a dark, blue woollen suit.

It was the suit his father wore on Sundays; the suit of the church pew with the frail sunlight and long hymns. This was the suit of deference and ambition; the suit that marked a man from the disappointment of his childhood. It was the suit that bore a man’s aspirations and achievements. It was the suit in which a father was seen by his son at Sunday lunch. Sunday lunch with the family dressed in their best. The aunts and the cousins. The smell of the pot-roast. The mother of the father sitting silently. An older world. And the son of the son watching her watching him.

The boy felt a sudden sadness sweep over him. It rose and mixed with the fire, the current, became part of the constraint and energy. It pushed against the constraint as if sadness were now the only energy; though it was also the sadness that tightened, constrained. He closed the wardrobe door. He stopped. Through the room drifted the murmur of the voices below. The air had become heavier. It clung now. It was permeated with the heavy scent of flowers and grass. And he felt alone. He could not put it in words. It was an aloneness that spoke to him of mystery. It spoke of a riddle he could not quite solve.

His eyes moved around the room. There was his mother’s dressing table with her make-up and jewellery box. Suddenly he let himself drop into the aloneness.

He faced the mirror again. He became taller. Imagining a similar suit, but lighter, he saw himself the proud owner of a family-car. He envisaged the woman beside him. She was slender. She wore a loose dress and her hair was long. He could see the laughter in her eyes.

It felt strange, unknown, as if trying on something new. He was stepping into another part of himself. Then it was familiar. He had always known it but forgotten. He had mislaid it or simply never quite noticed it before. Not only was it something he felt in his body but it was like an exhalation of breath within his mind. The closeness, the heaviness emptied out of him. The constraint and sadness mixed again but then loosened their hold on him.

Impulsively he wanted to run. He wanted to jump, to move with the fire, to follow the energy that now penetrated the stillness of the summer afternoon.

He descended the stairs, crossed the living room and garden without so much as a word. He heard his mother call out to him as he scaled the wall and plunged beyond. He ran underneath the labyrinth of leaves. He tore through the long grass. He brushed the bramble bushes and the hedges. Then crossed the stony stream in a single leap. It was the field he needed to reach. The field of the estate in which he had never yet set foot. It was out of bounds. Today that did not deter him. The fire, the opening out within him, the image of himself as having crossed something, drove him all the more, made him feel all the more pulled by the space.

He dived then, let himself fall into the strands of ripening corn. He looked up. His head span and he laughed out under the quenching sky.



6

The boy comes back to the table to hear his sister speaking. His mother asks the visitor if he would like some fruit juice. The boy is looking at his plate. He is hungry. The visitor speaks to him, asks him something. He goes to answer but then stops.
`There will probably be a thunderstorm tonight', he announces.



7

The storm comes. When it breaks he is already in bed with only a sheet covering him because of the heat. He is woken by the first rolls of thunder, the first breaks of lightning. Stepping sleepily over scattered toys he crosses the floor and pulls back the curtain. The trees are motionless, merged in shadow. On the grass, an amber glow spills from the room below. Waiting and watching his eyes are rewarded with a sting and the sky splits in two with a searing, white light.

Then the rain begins to fall. It comes down abruptly with an intensity as if the sky were trying to drown the earth and the earth in turn was reaching up to receive it. The garden rises in a rich, earthy aroma.

Hearing voices from below he creeps to the top of the stairs. In the doorway, his father and mother are standing. His father’s white shirt is soaking wet. The visitor is waiting and they talk together. He sees his father reach out and shake the visitor’s hand. The visitor is now wearing a light sports jacket.

The boy overhears snatches of the conversation. He listens and watches, concentrating as his father takes off his glasses to dry them. For a moment he sees the face of a younger man; for a moment the middle-aged eyes are lit by a brighter hue.

Lightly, the boys mother stretches forward and kisses the visitor on the cheek. He hears her say to drive carefully. The door is open and the rain is coming in. Across the porch the lightening flickers and the thunder rumbles. Stepping onto the foot-wipe, the visitor turns and waves. Then there is the sound of footsteps as he quickly runs to his car.



8

The storm begins to ease. The lightning becomes less frequent and the thunder is quieter. The rain taps gently against the window. Outside the air is clearer.

The boy squats on the top stair. He puts his arms around his legs, his chin on his knees. Again he is thinking about the trees and the field behind the house. He tip-toes back to the bedroom and climbs into bed.

He is thinking only of tomorrow. Running again. Remembering his secret, his new found sense of self. And the white clouds sailing across the endless blue sky. Running his hand over his scuffed knee, he feels sleep begin to overtake him. It run along his back, up through his neck, reaches quietly over into his eyes. He pulls up a blanket and settles the pillow to his face.



9

The slip road left, the main road north is now in view. As the rain eases and the car steers its way deftly out of the city the man in the sports jacket leans over and turns on the radio. Now and then a halfhearted flash of lightning illuminates the inside of the car. On the back seat are a bunch of red roses and the evening newspaper, July 21, 1968.

On the map, the lines have changed, the fronts have altered. The weather system spiralling its way across the country is moving east. Tomorrow’s forecast is light showers with periods of sun, temperatures, no more than fifteen to sixteen celsius, winds light, west to northwest.

The man loosens his tie and fixes his gaze on the road in front of him. He has passed the city speed restriction and already the headlights are picking up the road rushing forward. The two shades of cream, the red upholstery, the lines of chrome, move sleekly through the wet, hidden countryside.

It will be after midnight before he is home. He yawns lightly, sits back in the seat. The arm stretches out, instinctively, to turn up the radio. To the steady beat of a drum, the slide of steel guitar, and the announcer's reassuring voice, the visitor settles in for the long drive home.

Copyright (C) Peter Millington. Amsterdam. August 1994.

now

1

Now that it is nearly summer, I am glad. It has been a difficult winter. For weeks everything in sight was frozen. In front of my studio, the canal was covered in ice. When I slept there, I would wake early, would look down onto the opaque surface, over the lines, the cracks and fissures from the previous day, the patterns in which they had refrozen during the night. As the sky cleared, the pavement reappearing in the morning light, pale and frosty, the exposed branches of the trees were often covered in a crystal-like layer of white.

Now that I can see green, that the parks appear thicker, that I can sense the brush of pollen in my nose, hear the stir of leaves in the breeze, I feel different. The evenings have stretched out and the light does not die before I feel the day is finished. And when it rains, there is a softness, a quality to the air I find appealing. It brings a smile to my lips.

Not every winter is so difficult. Some winters it is simply wet and raw. It rains and rains and the city is enclosed in a clinging, cold fog that seeps into everything. There are some when it seems the intense cold threatens, but never arrives. And then there are those when the days are mild, when it is almost warm and I have to tell myself it is the middle of a December or a January, that the summer is as long behind as it is still in front.

This winter has reminded me. It has brought back my first winter here. The night I arrived; when I stepped out onto the square in front of the station, a stranger, the cold cutting straight into my body, the temperature minus fourteen. That night I had a sensation of transition. I had a sensation of crossing a point, arriving at a harbour from which I could examine the map, take provisions, step from one thing to another.

Now, when I think back, I realise how that time is already part of a distant past, a past that is purely personal. Here I have taken root. I have grown, have gradually flowered. I have come to a deeper understanding of myself.

I remember, for example, looking out a cafe window one morning at the yellow and black tug boats, the stripe of fluorescent orange across their top, the crunch of their reinforced bows as they attempted to cut a way through the packed ice of the harbours. Or the strange colour of the sky, a glassy, stinging blue, like a jar of mint sweets that once stood on a wooden shelf in a kitchen when I was a child. It is strange to contemplate the time that has already passed. It is peculiar to grasp the way in which weeks have slipped into months and months into years.

Now I cannot see myself as anywhere else but here. This is the city in which I have accrued an anatomy of experience. It is the city in which a life has grown around me like a second skin, has marked me as part of what I have become, who I am.



2

I look at the colours on the canvas. I wonder. Perhaps in the transition from winter to spring this year, I feel I have crossed something.

I stand back and turn the painting toward the light. I position it under the overhead window so I can better see its colours. I am still not sure about the particular quality of the red. The yellow, its position, the almost saffron tone it imparts is correct. It contrasts with the flecks of white, the fade to the green, sets them off. I am satisfied with the thin line of brown across the bottom. There is a hint of both sienna and ochre in it. It is the brown I sense in the earth after it has rained.

The colours are not strictly positioned, they blend and they bleed, they touch and they have space. Simple representation, is not what I am after. Feeling, vitality is what I want, the energy of the soil living, the sense of spring returning, an invisible intensity, something not only seen but felt.

It came upon the sensation while walking through the park. An April afternoon with the weather cool and showery. The sun shone brightly but then would be swallowed up by quick moving fields of dark, grey cloud, rain abruptly falling. A number of times I was caught and had to find shelter, running for a clump of trees, or one of the scattered cafes along the pathways.

Initially, I thought of conveying the sensation in shape, in form. Then I considered suggesting the drive of its energy by actually working the paint directly and quickly onto the canvas, mixing it straight in. Eventually I decided on a different approach, something simpler. Why not let the colour alone determine where I would start, where I would stop, let it randomly suggest the nature and method of work?

For some months, I have felt this change. All I need to say, all I want to say, lies in the colour itself.

Once I was walking along a street and I stopped to look in a shop window. There was a row of faceless mannequins. The display was incomplete. It was as if it had been stopped halfway through, had been left for some other time, postponed, an idea still waiting to be brought to life. One of the mannequins lay on its side. Part of it had been wrapped in plastic. Examining it, I noticed that an arm was missing, that one leg was twisted sideways. Under it was a roll of velvet material, a strange shade of red, a ruby or maroon. It had a mysterious quality. Something about it reminded me of blood, of a time I had once been in a hospital. There it was in a test tube held to the light. I saw this strange red, liquid, its viscosity, its evidence of the fragility of life.

The scene with the mannequins, despite its apparent innocence, seemed to contain some concealed element of violence. I stared until I realised it was the colour that was holding me, the colour that was working on my feelings, bringing up associations.

I remember autumn when I was young. Walking along a lane, the scattering of fallen leaves, the trees looking wounded in the tops of their branches. This is where I grew up. The streets, the houses, the wooden telegraph poles, their black wires stretched in the evening against the fall of the sun.

I hear the cry of the crows as they fly over the fields on silent afternoons, smell the mixing, the sweetness of the last bloom of flowers, the odour of decay, the summer dying as the autumn comes on. Faces come back to me. In particular one face. Back and back I go until I se her. She has crossed my mind before. My first awkward love.

We face each other in profile. Her ebony hair sweeps back off her face, the straight line of her nose, her dark eyes, a quiet smile on her mouth. All contrast me. The youthful hunger in the way my head leans from my body; the uncombed hair, the unsure, questioning line of my mouth.

Behind us, is a background hazy and diffuse. Around our heads, the colour lightens. There is almost a violet quality to where we meet. It is as though there were an energy between us that mitigated against the association of autumn, against how I remember the streets subdued at night, the provincial facades of the buildings, the resonance of footsteps as the city succumbed to darkness. Some of that energy is contained in the rattle through the city of the train that links us to the capital. The sound of its engine running away out over the still, sleeping land.

I put the canvas down. Perhaps I will choose another red. Lines of soft-drink bottles stand against the wall. Now I have nearly seventy of them. The labels have been steamed off and they have all been numbered. The combination, the mixture, of each colour, I have written on a list. Everywhere I go, I keep a photocopy of it stuffed in the inside pocket of my jacket. This is a form of definition. If ever anything happened to me I would have it with me. Without my colours my canvases would be nothing.

Days have colours. There are blue days or lemon days or mixtures and contrasts. Some days stimulate me, hold one colour as their line, their theme, the whole way through. Then there are the days that are grey, days when I feel alone. These are the days when I struggle, the days when I feel empty, when I find myself fighting just to keep working. On these days it is difficult to stand in front of the canvas, I must push myself to lift the brushes. It is on these days I understand what is meant by choice, what is meant by putting one foot in front of the other.

What is colour, really, but light? Everything around me is the result of this light. How would this change if I were to travel at the speed of light?
On one level, the world would cease to exist. The world my eyes create, would be no more. Because my knowledge of the world is so tied up with perception, seeing, would I not experience this as a form of death? Would it not seem that a part of me had died, that many things, I associated with life had disappeared?
Perhaps colours are more than light. Colours are energy. Energy that transmits feeling and sensation. And feeling is also energy. Is the energy of feeling as strong as the energy of light?
The energy of feeling is as tied up with my experience of the world, as the energy of light. Without the energy of feeling, much of the world around me would also cease to exist. Would I feel myself to be nothing more than a shadow then, an incomplete person in a world of other incomplete people?

One time as I sat in a cafe, I tried to imagine how it must look. This journey I have made.
It was a late winter evening and through the window people moved past. Bicycles rattled along the canal side. The fog that had lain above the city all day, began to lift.
The moon appeared, the moon that earlier was just a vague white disc. Rising slowly over the gables of the buildings, it framed itself in the tangle of branches leaning out over the water. In the sky were stars and it seemed as if suddenly there was a sky behind the sky, as if something had revealed itself after a long absence.
I imagined I could fly. I imagined I was far above in the air and I could see down, not only on the city, but on the land, on the countries, the continent. I imagined how it would appear. A map without frontiers, a map that showed only the topography, only the relief of mountains, of rivers, the flat lowland of deltas. Fronts of cloud, some thick, some thin, their edges, their definition changing, moved, drifted in off the sea. They wove their way in over or up from the heart of the continent.

Each colour is the outcome of its interaction with other colours. Each colour is the result of the weight of its motion with other colours. It is seasoned with other colours, continually in a state of flux. Always there is potentiality, always movement.
The purity of colours, the originality of colours, is an illusion. There is no one red that defines all reds. All reds are a form of light and all light is a form of energy.

I stand by the lines of bottles against the wall. I look around me. It is still early evening. Should I start working now or leave it till later? Experience has taught me that it is often better to wait.
For two years this studio has been my second home. Sunlight falls across its far end, rests in patterns on the walls, lighting the area where I sometimes sleep, where I eat.
The children to which I am father, two, a boy and a girl, cross my mind. I have watched them grow, watched them feel their way out into the world, been amazed at their will, their determination to assimilate, to learn. It is the simple things, the things adults take for granted that have impressed me most.
Learning a language, learning to communicate. When I compare their ease to my own clumsy attempts to master new words, to make sounds strange to my mouth, my own, I am amazed. Now they negotiate the world around them in two vocabularies, switching from one to the other with ease.

When I first came to this city, I was raw, new, felt vulnerable, in a way, like a child again. In my memory is the musty smell of my first apartment. I remember the almost paper-thin walls, the tight, shabby buildings in the south of the city. I remember the narrow street that ran at right angles to the river. Clearly I recall my first weeks, my first months, the struggle to get settled in, the struggle to find my bearings.
There are some things that seem to be forever etched in memory. Small things maybe. The taste of vanilla yoghurt. The view from the kitchen onto the small patio below. The first hesitant days of spring. The afternoon when from a tram, I saw a field of crocuses where the week before there were only tufts of tenacious winter grass.
I remember the blustery March weather, the wind and squalls of rain, that at night swung the streetlamps suspended from pavement to pavement, eerily.

At first I worked as a baggage handler in the airport. It was numbing work, repetitious. Sitting at a table in the canteen, I would try to understand what those around me were saying. I would examine their faces, looking for signs of interest or friendliness. They did not talk much, just sat silently rolling cigarettes, staring into space, reading newspapers.
Every lunch-break I lost myself in a book or scribbled on the pad of cheap paper I always carried with me. And each day I looked out the window, gazed at the clouds floating above me. I puzzled at the sense of exposure the landscape gave.
Each day I waited for three thirty. Then I would walk hurriedly to the station, wait for the train to take me back to the city, pull relieved on the sharpness of a cigarette.
Once as I came in through the periphery of the city, the track rising above other tracks, skirting a small park and lake, I saw the sun like a huge red ball in the turquoise air. I imagined I could see it move. I could its atoms, its electrons and neutrons, its hydrogen and helium turned energy driving inwards, driving down into the city-line. Then I wondered how long it would take me to become part of the city, how long it would take me to bring my energy down into it like that.

The experience of being outside this city is as much part of it as being in it. This is a city of interchangeable modes, of belonging and not belonging. For me, being a stranger, a person with a different past, a person encountering something new, has been replaced by something else. I am both familiar and strange in two worlds. In this world I am still marked by my difference. In the world I left behind I am marked by the sense of an acquired otherness.

What is left of the world I came from is only the constellation of private memory; the faces, the events, the personal experiences that formed me as I grew up.
Occasionally I see that world as a spot in the spread of the world, a spot over which I hold a magnifying glass.

I am standing on the platform of a rail station holding my mother’s hand one winter afternoon. The lights of the train in the tight air stand out. The old man we are waiting for, steps off. His thin, grey hair is combed across his forehead. In his old, wrinkled hand is a worn but polished suitcase. It exudes a presence of some past time. And I watch him greet my mother, wonder if he has done as I once did when going to the city with my father.

Did he go into the toilet and lock the door behind him. Then push his foot sharply down on the pedal that worked the flush, look through the open space, watch the tracks rushing past below him, see the swaying, silver lines of rail, the blur of the stones between the sleepers?

Did he feel the acceleration of the train through space. Did he feel its movement in the roll, in the sudden lurches from side to side? If he looked through the window, did he see the landscape move by, see the grey, cloudy sky press down over the fields, over the rise of hills, of forest, the scattering of towns, and wonder where this country ended and where it started?

I listen as my mother greets her father in German. I watch them as they embrace, as they look at each other for a moment, sadness swimming up into their eyes.

Later that night before I sleep I carefully place the crumpled stumps of the tickets my grandfather has given me under the pillow. In the pale, yellow light of the lamp splashing across the room, I read again and again the words. Leipzig - Praha.

Suddenly I understand the look of resignation in eyes, the sense of something withering at the roots, the sense of an energy pressed too far down on itself, an energy eating away at itself from within.

I place the canvas against the wall and stand back. Putting my hand to my unshaven chin, my fingers running over the stubble, I squint a little, lean to one side. I want to see the contrast of the colours in another light.

There is the accumulation of work, the roughs, the false starts, the unforeseen successes. Each picture is a mark on the long list of marks I have kept to record the passing of time here. There have been times when I have felt like a man crossing a wilderness. With every step, the need to continue has strengthened. Every canvas has brought me deeper to myself.

Slowly, I have learnt to recover the ground beneath my feet, to detect the life sustaining streams, the rivers, the places where there is shelter. I have determined the way the land lies. I have understood that destination, the other side, the yet to be attained side, is nothing but a variation of where I started from. As if departing and arriving were really one and the same thing.

What I experience as my first point of reference, is only so because of my lack of other points of reference. As my reference points increase, so what appears complex becomes simple. Choosing threads or strands of experience is not about choosing one thing over another. It is about various ways of looking at the same journey. Familiar and unfamiliar are contingent.

If the canvas defines me between these two points, then am I defined by the energy of my experience? Are my paintings, my memories, my loves, my losses, everything that falls between these two points, all that I am? And if so, what happens to this energy, this experience, after I am no longer living? Why do I feel compelled to explore. Why do I feel my experience of the world is something other than the arbitrary experience of me as a random part of this life, this universe?

In summer I like to open all the windows of my studio while I work. Often I paint late into the night.

It is good to listen to the city around me. Hearing the sound of the trams, the way they rattle over the streets, the way they sometimes grate against the rails as they round a corner I feel at home. I like to listen to footsteps on the pavement, voices, raised and laughing. Or music drifting in from other buildings. The sound of a radio. The sound of someone singing to themselves perhaps as they stand in a kitchen preparing to go out.

If it rains the drops patter on the leaves of the lines of linden trees. They fall and run across the roof above me.

There are times when the night around me mixes with the smell of my studio, or the smells of the street. Times when the smell of the acrylic, of the medium is the smell of the city. When it mingles with the perfume of plants and trees, or the beer from a cafe, its doors open because of the warmth.

Sometimes I bring the children around and let them run in the space, let them simply play, sit and watch.

The sticky feel of the paint beneath my fingers, the spring of the brush off the canvas, gives me pleasure. Mixing the colours I watch, enjoy. I see the slow blending, the one starting point becoming multiple.

It is in summer in front of the canvas I come closest to the echo, the energy that drove me out of where I was born, drove me like the train along the silver lines of the rails, drove me to let the blurred hard stones between the sleepers sink into memory.

On my map of colour and relief there are no borders. The lines of rail connections, the tangle of motorways, the winding course of rivers, are only channels of ever changing and ever moving variations of colour. The geography through which I travel is my canvas. This delta in which I find myself is the slow converging of land and sea. And the city in which I live, is the last outpost before land is consumed by sea. City and canvas are the points where the solidity of land subsumes the fluidity of sea.



3

I walk across the floor to the window and open it. I lean over the ledge and feel the breeze around my head. The sun is suspended, compressed into the evening sky. On the small gravel plein below me, the trees are obscured by movement; they bend and sway. The air is full of the blown remnants of blossom, blossom fragile and filament-like, its small petals falling in favour of the stronger leaves of summer. They drift and flutter, their oval, transparent shapes eddying through the air, forming and reforming in myriad patterns where they land in the flow of the canal.

Over the harbours, the water quivers and sparkles. A small ship cuts its way through the shining surface, the white surge of its bow moving ahead, catching the burn of the evening light. Down streets, shadows, still short, still sharp, run, or lie against the warm colour of the brickwork.

Now that it is nearly summer, I look back on the winter, think of transition, of the way in which I move on, move out. I re-encounter the energy contained in each spring. And now that it is nearly summer, I stain the canvas again and map my way, cross this delta, this confluence of expectation. I watch each painting emerge from the darkness, watch it become another mark on the journey I have started here.

Copyright (C) Peter Millington. June 1996.

beaufort street

The following are excerpts from a diary I found while walking down near the river embankment.

When I say it was a diary, I mean, it was a sort of journal. It was as if someone had been keeping notes for something, a novel, a paper, something they were planning to write.

It was a Sunday in late January. I had nothing much to do, and thinking I needed some exercise, decided to take a walk. On seeing it lying in the grass I first thought it nothing special. It looked to be nothing other than a bundle of three A4 writing pads held together with some elastic bands and covered in a piece of clear plastic. I was almost about to pass it by when something caught my attention.

Beside it lay one of those photocards. You know the type, rail or public transport, or some other such amenity. It was a picture of a young man, probably in his late twenties or early thirties. He had a somewhat familiar to his face. I immediately felt I had seen those eyes before. I felt, for a moment, that it was someone I knew.

The card was partially damaged, presumably by rain and sun, as it was bleached and faded. I lifted up the bundle of writing pads. They were relatively unscathed. Perhaps the plastic saved them. Apart from some mud and dirt on the cover, a little yellowing along the edges of pages, their contents appeared generally well preserved.

I assumed the card had some relation to the diary. Both were lying on the same patch of ground, one on top of the other. I searched around for any other items I could find. There were none. Only some rubbish. The kind one always finds in these places; papers, cigarette boxes, discarded tickets, plastic wrappings, dented soft-drink cans.

It would be a strange irony if the photocard had in fact nothing to do with the diary; a coincidence that they lay there together. What for instance would I have thought had the face been surly, heavy-set, the rough face of a labourer, or a beer drinking thug? Or what would I have thought had I seen a sallow face, dark hair slicked back with just a little too much oil, smooth skin, a pencil thin moustache, the look of a dubious intellectual?

Would I have been as interested?. Would I then have read the same meaning into the lines I later read so carefully? I cannot be sure.

Enough speculation. I began to leaf curiously through the pages. I glanced quickly over their contents. I was about to throw them back on the ground when something grasped my attention.

It was a description of an event, a happening, something that seemed to carry with it an uncanny resonance, an uneasy sense of knowing. I read it there and then, somewhat shaken, going back again and again over the words.

I confess then to taking everything, card and writing pads, home, and guiltily, compulsively, reading into the small hours of the morning. Yet who wrote them and where the author came from was never made clear. It is still not clear.

When I reluctantly reported my find to the local police, they had no record of such a missing object. Indeed they seemed rather annoyed I would attempt to take up their time with what they evidently considered a question of little importance. I did manage to convince them to try and trace back the numbers on the card, still just about readable, but they too turned up a blank file.

The effort of trying to make sense of the text, of trying to impose some sort of coherency on it, has not been too difficult. Yet though dated for day and month, the year of all entries has been omitted.

I have worked from extensive photo-copies that the police were kind enough to permit me to make before taking the documents into their custody.

I have presented it in its apparent order, that is how I have come to read it. I have preserved, where possible, the original names or place names.

The period most reproducible spans forty-one days, all of which take place from mid November to late December. Where necessary I have drawn upon my powers of interpretation. I hope it shall be read, bearing these factors in mind.


november 12. I awoke early this morning to the sound of lightly falling rain. It seemed before I was even conscious, I could feel it in every cell of my body. It was soft and fine, and penetrated the morning.
As I lay in the dark, I was aware of my aloneness. I could imagine how it looked outside. The paving stones dark-grey, the leaves piled up against the edge of the building, their colours of yellow, gold and brown enriched by the damp. Already there must have been people about. Yet the silence of the building was overpowering.

I got up and walked to the window. I pulled back the curtains and saw the black shape of the fire exit. I could see no-one, and hear no-one. Only the sound of the rain dripping from the metal steps. It was as if I had woken in another world. There was nothing except my memories from the previous day. There was nothing except my memories of other times looking out this window to reassure me it was in fact a living world. I pulled up a chair and sat.

The trees were nearly bare and the narrow path that wound its way around the back of the building was deserted. The shapes of other buildings, curtained windows, furniture no longer used left to age in back gardens, all stood silently in the morning's greyness.

I thought then of the size of the city. How it spread like a great tentacled organism, gradually acquiring all that stood in its path. Buildings upon buildings. Roads upon roads. Everywhere its accidental shapes and circles, all awaiting the animating touch of its inhabitants.

november 13. It has been bright and sunny all day. The sort of sun you get in November. It is as if the sun was somehow frailer, and this in turn contrasted with the pale blue of the sky.

I walked in the park at lunch time. The grass was very green and still damp after the light morning frost. The richness and the quantity of fallen leaves were almost unbelievable. I walked under the trees and felt as if I became somehow weightless by just being there.

Coming home this evening, along the street, I was intrigued by the pattern of lights, the density of bodies. Everywhere people were walking, hurrying, stepping in or out of buses. Yet nowhere could I distinctly hear the sound of footsteps. It was like a vast army of insects with only the traffic as a backdrop against which they all moved. I went to a phone-box to call Anna. There was no reply. She must still be away.

november 14. I do not like returning to the emptiness of my building. Sometimes after a difficult day, the aloneness that greets me when I open the door seems to laugh mockingly in my face.

I went to the station and bought a newspaper, thinking, I would sit in a bar and have something to drink while reading.

november 15. I took a half day from work. I felt I had enough. I came home early and made something to eat. Afterwards I sat listening to music. I feel asleep on the sofa and woke about two in the morning, stiff and cold.

november 18. Going down the stairs to the Underground this morning, stepping over papers, discarded tickets, following the crowd, all seemingly with the same edgy faces, I suddenly felt sick to the stomach. The station seemed so grimy and dirty. The tiles on the wall were old.

As I waited for the train to rush out of the tunnel I was aware of a heaviness in the air. The sound of so many commuters echoed eerily through the tunnels and up and down the escalators. I was still sleepy and wanted to smoke a cigarette. When the train appeared, the rush of its motor diminished everything else. Watching it I was aware of the sweat on my forehead. I was aware of my own discomfort.

november 19. No work today. Called in sick. It is cold and frosty this morning. I am writing over breakfast. In front of me is a half-drunk cup of coffee, two pieces of toast with marmalade, some fruit and a hard-boiled egg. I have not shaved, neither have I showered.

I am sitting with my feet against the table. The heating is on full so I am comfortable in just my shorts and a t-shirt.

Earlier I listened to the radio, to the morning news. There was nothing much to report. The usual things. Public-spending cutbacks, minor incidents, local occurrences, and a civil war that threatens the stability of the eastern part of Europe.

I wish I was more interested. I wish I could take it more seriously. Instead I follow it rather offhandedly from the comfort of my kitchen. Here I am sitting half-dressed listening to what for someone, somewhere, must be nothing short of disaster. What am I really thinking about?

I am wondering if Anna is back from the north. I want to see her. I need to see her. I have missed her.

november 20. About six this evening a friend phoned and asked me if I wanted to go for a drink. I had nothing planned so we arranged to meet at eight in a café in the city’s west-end. He was already there when I arrived. We decided to go a bar he knew behind the opera. It was much quieter there. We ordered two beers and sat down in a corner to talk. He seemed agitated.

november 21. Anna is back. She left a message on my answering machine.
This morning I walked along by the river. In a city this vast, one would expect to see more shipping traffic. It is not so. Now this long and famous river is a stage for the ever expanding tourist industry. Now it appears there are only tour companies, each one offering their unique own special view. I cannot say I am impressed.

To know this city one must live here. One must experience its myriad frustrations. One must walk its streets day in, day out. No visit, no guided tour can ever come close to revealing its core.

This is a city with two hearts. It is mean and generous, garrulous and withdrawn. It offers much and denies a lot. Its history is one of commercial expansion and political drive. Alongside its grandeur, its elegance, exists squalor and poverty. Its largeness belies its smallness. To walk its streets, to ride its Underground, one cannot but be aware of its past. No short visit can reveal that.

Only on the fringes, in the hidden areas, does one begin to approach the contradictory energy that has made it what it is today. To live here, to come home each evening in its rush hour, the collar of your shirt already grimy, your hands sweating, staring into the eyes of a stranger, is to understand it. It is neither splendid nor squalid. It exists and it breathes in its own crowded way.

It unexpectedly inspires and frustratingly disappoints.

This morning it was quiet. The river seemed timeless. It stretched out to either side of me, wide and lined with buildings old and new. Its achievements, the successes were there to see. Then the sun coming up, silhouetted the buildings, created an impression of great complexity. There was no running from it. It surrounded one on all sides.

Crossing a bridge, a train rattled noisily. It headed out to the suburbs. The city was already beginning to come alive. Under my feet leaves crunched. Here and there papers and bits of rubbish lay on the pavement. The benches on the embankment were empty. The cold was touchable.

I walked, thinking of the river flowing every day to sea. I thought of how many billions of lives have taken place along this river’s banks. I imagined my footsteps tracing a path, that though itself unique, was lost and obscured by the billions of other paths that could be traced along this embankment. If I could pick one of those lives out of time, what would I find?. What similarities would there be?. Would I find a life that paralleled mine in any way?.

Lives swallowed by history. Each city, each documentation of its past carried out at the expense of the individuality of its inhabitants. Would the telling of one life reveal anything other than that I already know?. Is it that when we get down to the details of individual lives, we find their particularity goes beyond that of cities? Is a city only what we make of it in our minds?

november 22. Talked to Anna on the phone this evening. I wanted to call her all day. Each time I went to the phone I was distracted by something at work.

When I left this evening I went straight to the nearest call-box. I kept bumping against a bag of books I had left on the floor. Our conversation was marked by long silences. There was no tension, just a frequency of spaces. I knew what I wanted to say. And she knew what I wanted to say. We both knew I should not say it. We skirted around this issue with a number of vague comments and questions.

I could imagine her mouth against the receiver, the unusual way she had of putting her tongue up against her corner teeth. I wondered if she was sitting the way she sometimes did, her hand playing with the lobe of her ear. What were her eyes doing?. What things were they also longing to say?.

We took our time. We let our phone conversation meander slowly through forty units. We arranged to meet in a café tomorrow. We did not know how to say goodbye. It somehow seemed so formal. In the end we agreed just to put the phone down and wait till three pm tomorrow.

november 23. At first it was raining. Cloudy and misty. It seemed to hang about the city. Looking out the window, I did not feel it was a day for going out. About eleven thirty it began to clear a bit.

I had a couple of things to do. I went to the supermarket and bought some groceries. I cleaned up the flat and generally got things into some kind of order. Living alone one tends to get lazy, thinking no-one else will see the mess. I did not know whether I would spend the night here or at Anna's.

I walked slowly to where I was to meet her. I was thinking about us, of how long we had known each other, of the days we had spent in this city.

There are many places we consider ours, that for us have a personal meaning. Yet we probably share them with many others.

She was sitting looking a little lost. Her hair was falling across her face and she was wearing that funny raincoat she sometimes wears.

She did not see me coming in, so I stood for a minute or two watching her. The fairness of her face, the sort of nervous way she has of moving, graceful and yet a little awkward, seemed so familiar then, so normal as if she had always been standing beside me.

There is always this space, this slight distance when we have not seen each other for some time. It seems she grows apart, or she becomes vague, something that threatens the ease with which I feel I can be myself with her. Perhaps this is one of the things I love most about her. This feeling of not having to assume an attitude or role.

Then she saw me. She smiled suddenly and spontaneously, but with a trace of shyness. I kissed her cheek. I smelt her perfume. I felt the reassuring softness of her skin and the warmth of her body.

She asked how I was, and I asked her how her work had been. She answered it had been alright, a little tiring, and that the language had been a problem, but she had done what she went to do.

We held hands across the table. I told her I had not been doing much, just reading the newspapers, going to work, sleeping and waiting and that everything was about the same. She laughed and said she had only been away for a week.

We talked a bit longer and decided to take the bus to the north of the city where there is a large heath, where one can almost pretend one is in the country. Getting up, I watched her walk on ahead of me. I thought of how her movement, how when she had smiled at me, it destroyed any of the doubts I had begun to feel. I felt reassured and suddenly happy.

As we walked out onto the pavement I took her arm and pulled her close to me.

november 24. We woke late this morning. The sun was streaming in the window. I lay for a while and then got up and went out to pick up the Sunday papers. Anna made some breakfast, and we stayed in bed till noon reading.


november 26. The radio is on. I am listening carefully. It is an old song I remember from when I was younger. I am catapulted out of the present and into the past. I am standing and listening to how I once was. I am standing again in the living room of my parent's house. I can see the leaves of the willow tree in the garden in the morning sun. I can see the shadow of the buddleia on the grass, its orange blossoms bright against the green, its branches swaying beside the pebble-dashed wall. I can hear the chatter of birds from the bushes that line the garden wall. There is a feeling of nostalgia. The song finishes. I wait a couple of seconds. I instinctively expect to hear the next song that was on the recording I owned. I am back there, back in the living room of my parent’s house.

Then I realise there is no other song coming. The voice of the radio announcer brings me back to where I am; in the kitchen of Anna's flat in some non-descript section of this large city.

The juice squeezer is squeezing the oranges. The toast has popped from the toaster. The frost is thawing on the windows; and I am standing grappling with a sudden feeling of loss.

november 27. Quite day at work. Itching all day to get home.

november 28. Week nearly at an end.

november 30. Yesterday evening, Friday, we went to the cinema and later to eat. We drank a lot of wine and took a taxi home.

Driving through the city at two in the morning it looked like a great half-empty ship. Its roads, ring-roads, were the decks, and the centre with its complex of old streets and squares, the bridge.

Everywhere people stood cold and pale, huddled into their winter clothing under the night sky. Old newspapers mingled with the bodies and blew in scurries down the streets. One could understand, looking at this, the electronic scream which permeates the airwaves.

At night this city floats on a great sea; the collective sea of a planet. Its energy, its drives are tangible. The merest change of weather, the merest change of posture, is enough to communicate a shift, a sensitivity to a new direction in its unending voyage.

This sea chatters endlessly in bleeps and scratches, in pulses and non-pulses. It babbles into the black vacuum of space. Air waves that once carried only birds, prevailing winds, the pollination of pastures, cackle with voice and counter voice, with snatches of music, advertisements, rumour, gossip. They build like a great electro-magnetic wall over which it is sometimes difficult to hear.
Strange to sit in a taxi and watch this slip by like a clip out of someone else's movie. Two in the morning, and a little drunk. Anna lying asleep against me on the back seat.

december 1. We went walking in the park this morning. A windy and raw day.

december 2. Sat on the Underground this morning, squashed in against the window. It was a typical Monday morning, neutral and grey, with that air of sullen acceptance. In front of me the headlines of a newspaper. Continuing violence on streets that as a child I knew. Streets where I spent happy carefree summers, now stained with blood and hatred. Patrolled by Armoured Personal Vehicles; scanned by radar and high-tech listening devices. Electronic ears in place of human ears. The voices drowned by sound bite. By politicking. Words wrenched from their context.

It was about five hundred to six hundred kilometres from where I sat hurtling underground at that moment, but, it felt a lot closer. Distance somehow diminished by personal memory.


december 3. A busy day. Christmas approaching. The lights are now going up on the streets. I do not like it. There is always something lacking. I feel it is somehow out of touch with reality.

We would like to go away for a couple of days in the new year. It depends on Anna's papers. She does not know how she stands with her visa.

december 4. I came south and she came west. We met here on an April evening when we both got into a lift taking us from the Underground to the street. She dropped her passport and I ran after her. When she turned around she looked so beautiful, so sad. I stood looking at her and rather stupidly said, I had never met anyone from there before.

december 5. If I talk to her about home and how she feels about it, she becomes rather wistful. She does not say much, but I sense there is still a deep attachment.

She describes it in terms of heavy, foggy days in winter, made heavier by industrial pollution, and yet the beauty and freshness of arriving spring. If I try to imagine her there, I see her as if still in a dream.

She paces the cobblestone square in front of the famous clock-tower. Or she sits in her cramped office looking longingly through an ochre tinted window. She is already wearing that funny raincoat that sits so oddly against her lightly sun-burned neck. She is moving in the dream as if the dream itself was moving somewhere. I feel I am looking at her through a glass sphere or a stretch in the fabric of space. I can see the blue-green ovals of her eyes set so delicately in her face.

december 6. If she talks to me about where I was born, I can only describe it as a presence. I do not think of it much yet it is there. On days when I feel the impersonality of the city wear me down,

I find myself walking in places I knew when I was young. It seems I have become a stranger again, right within the centre of all that has become familiar, all that has become home.

I tell her about the mountains and the sudden shifts of light. I tell her about the tiny back streets and the rain sweeping in off the sea. I tell her about the cranes and the shipyards. I tell her about a city torn apart on its own bitterness; a city that is no longer my city yet refuses to lie down and go away.

december 7. If she asks why I left, what can I say?. As a boy I watched the boats leaving port to cross the short, difficult sea. Somehow I always felt the necessity. Felt I was born to leave. It seemed the only step. I would walk along the coast and gaze expectantly into the horizon. What did I imagine, what did I expect to see?. What voice told me I would not find myself till I left?

december 8. If I ask her why she left she answers with passion. All her life there was a frontier across her mind. She felt she lived in a lost city. She always dreamed one day the barriers would fall. With her camera, she crossed three countries on a night train.

december 9. Anna sitting by the window in the morning sun. Her face is not made up. Her eyes are bright and soft in the cold winter light. Her hair is uncombed and she is curled up, her feet underneath her, reading a magazine. She looks at me and says she is glad to be here.

december 10. Anna sitting in the park on a winter’s day. The bright green of the grass and the bare trees are the only backdrop; there is the red of her lips, her light, brown hair.

Her hands are gloved and hold the book she has nearly finished reading. A leather shoulder bag, a bag that looks as though it has grown here with her is on her knee. I see her leather shoes, now wrinkled, and a loose floppy hat is pulled down over her eyes.

On her coat is a piece of jewellery inset with an amethyst; subtle and elusive, clear and direct. Her legs are crossed. She is sitting at the far end of a park bench lost in the words she is reading.

She does not hear my footsteps on the smooth stone path. She is not aware of the ducks in the nearby pond.

When I sit beside her on the bench, she looks up a little surprised. She smiles and kisses me on the mouth.

december 11. Anna close up. The elasticity of her lips. The spray of light freckles across her nose. Her teeth, white and close together. The slightly round end of her nose.

december 12. Anna at three in the morning sleeping quietly, her breathing deep, her hair loose, the sheets only half covering her. Lying beside me with her arms around me, her mouth slightly open. On the streets nothing but quietness.


december 13. I went to the train station this morning to check on tickets. It was raining heavily. Anna called me at work. We met later and had lunch.

december 16. It is raining again today. I sit and look out the window of my office to the street below. There is the usual stream of traffic. An old woman is looking through a rubbish bin on the side of the pavement. The taxi drivers blow their horns at the slightest provocation. The old red buses trundle by more or less regularly. Umbrellas scurry here and there. People disappear in and out of doors. The rain falls continually. It runs down the windows, across the pavement and into the gutters at the side of the street.

december 17. Staying in my own flat. Anna will come over tomorrow evening.
Slept badly during the night. Strange dreams. At one point I seemed to be drifting down a river on a small boat.

I awoke about four and could not get back to sleep. I lay there, trying to get a hold of how I felt about things, trying to get a hold on that sense I sometimes have of the ground moving from beneath my feet. Something about my life here is a point of reference for that, is the core of where I am actually going. I stayed in bed for about another hour and then got up and had an early breakfast.

Snatches of the dream remained with me for the rest of the day. A strange echo of relevance, meaning.

december 18. It snowed yesterday evening. The city is sombre and bitterly cold this morning.

december 19. I am home early from work today. It is now late afternoon. Already the streets are changing into shadow, into pin-points of light, made and unmade. The sky to the east has cleared.

It is dark blue and flecked with violet clouds. Yesterday’s snow is still on the streets.

Sometimes I am struck by a strange sense of living backwards. I feel I am somehow stepping outside the world and yet immersing myself in it all the more intensely. It is as if I have experienced this scene, somewhere else, at some other time, in some other way. My footsteps echo like they were echoing across another time.

If I open the window and look into the street below, the murmur of the distant traffic assumes an expression of its own. It seems to be talking with a sadness, as if each car were a voice, and each voice were saying something, speaking to me. Yet when I listen I cannot catch what is being said. Instead I am aware of a sense of aloneness, of estrangement.

In the kitchen the darkness descends. The light bulb burns harshly from its place in the wall. I stand in the middle of the room, my arms stretched out, my hands reaching into the air.

All around I am surrounded by people and yet the spaces between us seem as vast as lifetimes. Now and then I hear a radio, a step on the stairs, an opening or shutting door, the voice of a child. Yet everything seems to come from afar. I feel I am wrapped in a cocoon of silence.

On the floor is a pair of Anna’s shoes. Her book and perfume are on the table. In the bedroom the bed is unmade, and a suitcase lies half open beside the wardrobe. Newspapers lie here and there, after-shave, a magazine, socks, a couple of scribbled lines on some foreign notepaper, little things that in a way define me, but are also the common currency of many others. The feeling of threads of life interweaving and intertwining across many lives is one I cannot easily shake off.

Each life is a history and each history is the accumulation of the events, illusions, fallacies, and facts of all lives. I carry within me my own history. Am I at each moment of the day, at each turn of the corner, creating new possibilities for myself? Each time I kiss Anna, each time I pull her close to me, am I returning to a thread, a vein to which I have returned many times before?

Are those decisive moments in my life, the dropping of a passport on the street, the running after a complete stranger, only infused with the sense of meaning I choose to give them? Do I write my own history from some deep inner sense of what I feel it should be. Or do I construct it in retrospect, demanding it fit the pattern that most vindicates my present position?.

december 20. I have been living in this flat for two years now and still I live out of a suitcase. To see me walk on the street, my shirt, my tie, my raincoat, my leather shoes, one would probably place me in another world. I live a double life.

Each morning I walk past the porter of my office building to the fourth floor. Each morning as I enter the lift, I alter a part of my personality. I mask myself and assume the face of my colleagues.


december 21. This city that I can almost taste, this city in which I have spent years, is it only a part of a journey? I envy the permanence of others. Their lives are solid, their blindness something to be rewarded. I live in a continual state of flux and influx.

If I grasp too hard, that which I want slips away. If I chase, that which I pursue becomes invisible.

When I look at Anna I ask myself what it is we have in common. What is it, other then those personal things, that holds us together? We both belong to a time when the roots of much have been pulled clean from the ground.

When she tells of her journey here, she tells me how she looked out of the window as the train raced through the night. Then she saw the lights of towns and cities, towns and cities that for her were once only dreams. All the time she was struck by the sense of unreality. The dream was coming true, yet, somehow it had always been true.

When she stepped off the train that April morning she was suddenly struck by a feeling of intense hunger. The space she had once been sensed was now real, was about to fill itself up with a life that previously could only have been guessed at.

She tells me how she sat on a bench, her baggage at her feet, and looked about her. She saw the light filtering through the glass ceiling of the station, the pigeons, flying, trapped, nesting in the great steel girders above her. She saw the dirt on the ground, the electric trolleys picking up the mail. She heard the whistle of porters as they went to and fro between the platforms. She saw commuters, oblivious to the presence of tourists or travellers. She slowly began to feel she really was somewhere else.

Then, she says, she felt sad as she realised that a step once taken is always taken; even if gone back on, it has been taken.

Coming out of the station she saw a city busy and moving. She tells how she found a hotel room. She describes the smell of coffee and toast in the reception as she set her bags down; the desk a little worn, the furniture having seen better times.

In her room she opened the window and lay on the bed. She listened to the sounds coming from the street. For a moment she wondered if it was all true, the unfamiliarity, the strangeness.

She realised she was on the crest of a wave. This city she had chosen was a vortex of influence. She tried to imagine herself living in it day to day, tried to see herself finding a way through its linguistic and social maze.
Her life, she says, suddenly seemed short. She was suddenly aware, that like many of the city’s other inhabitants she would become a mutation, a product of her interaction with it. What she would find, was not a new life, but a new aspect of her particular life. The barrier had fallen, the frontier was crossed.

december 22. A friend of Anna’s called and asked if we would like go and eat with her and her partner next weekend. Sometimes I enjoy this, sometimes not. It is outside the city, an hour's journey. I like the travel, the train swinging out through the spreading suburbs. I am always refreshed by the smell and touch of the countryside, its contrast with the streets of the city. I always look for the flight, for the poised movement of birds over the fields.

december 23. It was raining again this morning but cleared up later. This evening as I walked up the path behind the flats, I noticed how completely bare all the trees had become. They were hard and jagged in the ghostly glow of the street-lamps. Their tips disappeared into the clear night air. Overhead an airplane was crossing. Its lights appeared like a short line of white beads moving though the sky.

I looked toward the window and saw a light on in the flat. It was the only one burning on our floor. I figured Anna must be already there. It seemed all the warmer for the coldness outside.
I stood for a moment listening. The city was turning over. It was still busy. It was still involved in its endless permutations.
Then I saw Anna come to the window. I stopped for a moment and watched her. She put her hand up to drop the blinds. I could just make out the details of her face in the light from the room. Then she shook her hair back from her face. Then I wanted nothing more than to be upstairs and with her.


The entry for December 24 is unclear. It starts with a statement about a poem the author appears to be attempting to write. However the text here is quite damaged and just how it pieces together is uncertain. There are some sparse entries for December, but, it is not till January the author again appears to have much interest in writing. The entry concerns the beginning of a journey. He appears to be alone. There is no reference to any of the previous entries. I have not included it above.
As already stated the identity of the author is still a mystery and will probably remain so. I have resigned myself to this fact, though it must be said I still entertain the occasional hope of further discoveries.
Anyone with information concerning the above or with anything they feel may help in this strange matter, should contact me at the address given below. Or, if they prefer, refer the matter to the police at Battersea Bridge station.

Andrew Dubrovsky.
Beaufort Street,
London.
June 1992.

Copyright ( C ) Peter Millington. Amsterdam. May 1993.

Hradcanska

1

I remember walking down the Chotkova that morning. How it wound, descended, the leaves in splendid piles over the footpath, the sun gently lighting the colours of the buildings, the soft reds and creams.

The previous evening, we arrived late. We did not eat much on the train. When I showed the address to the taxi driver outside the station, his face looked puzzled for a moment, its wrinkled and melancholy features moving over the written words. Then in broken German he asked if we were paying in Marks.

The following morning, I went to the window and pulled back the heavy curtains. I saw for the first time the street that the night before had been hidden in darkness. Steam was rising and in front of the building, stood a small square full of bare trees. Parked outside the window, was a battered, light blue Skoda. After getting up and showering, she applied a thin covering of lipstick to her lips, quickly brushed her hair. Then I put on a heavy overcoat and pulled a woollen hat down around my ears.

On the street, she took the map from her pocket and handed it to me. First we crossed a small railway with the rails disappearing into early morning mist. We heard a bell and saw the front of something that looked like a tram appear, saw it tilt as it rounded a bend and slowly headed for the crossing. Then we went along a wide street, passing a football stadium before turning to our right and beginning to feel the pavement under our feet slipping downwards, realised we were descending.

We left the Chotkova and found themselves on a series of narrow, side streets. We came to a green area with a metro station and thought the river should be nearby. She stopped and asked to see the map, but I assured her I knew where we were going. Checking street names every now and then, we arrived at a small bridge set in an intersection of streets. On the bridge there were two girls looking down into the water, down at the surface sprinkled with leaves and on which two white swans swam. A little way in front of us, running to the left was the northern end of the Karlûv Most. We did not go along it. Instead, we turned right, walked up a short hill until we arrived at a square with an old, gold-brown building, and a church. It was a square formed by buildings with shadowy pavements under archways, and a square cut in two by a tram line. On the corner was a cafe and I remember its name because it was in English not Czech and was called the White Eagle.

We ordered bread with ham and eggs, toast and jam, two glasses of orange juice and four cups of coffee.

Finishing before her, I smoked a cigarette, watched and looked about me. Tapping my fingers on the table, I turned the map over, saw the pictures, the tours offered, what there was to do, and for a moment felt a sense of familiarity, felt a recognition, as if it were really no different from home. This surprised me and I wondered what else I had expected and then wondered what she would like to do. Next to us a couple spoke rapidly in German but no-one took much notice. Standing, I paid. Then we returned from where we had come, this time crossing the bridge.

The sun had disappeared behind the cloud and the river stretched away to both sides. In places it rushed over what looked like weirs. It was only there I could see the speed with which it moved, see the power it held, not in any way apparent from the slow surface beneath the bridge. I stood and looked and felt cold and then heard music coming from my left. She had already moved a little way away from me and I looked and saw a group of middle-aged men playing dixie jazz, and a crowd gathered in front of them, and among the street sellers, near where she stood, a French woman turned to her companion declaring it was, `vraiment amusante.’.

We walked on and the sun reappeared. I did not want to stop so we crossed streets and alleys, coasted along the river until coming to a bridge that was cordoned off, that we gathered was being repaired. Then we paused while she consulted our guide book, while she looked at the building we were in front of, its ornamented pillars, its baroque elegance. She explained it was a famous concert hall and that in August 1968 a philosophy student set himself on fire in front of it in protest at the Soviet occupation. In the reflection of its doors I could see the letters from a neon sign the other side of the street, see the Czech words that I did not understand and were in any case reversed. Beside me someone was bending down and taking a photograph, and I imagined how it should look, thought the glass should be black and the letters should swim in it with a whiteness and the stone should come out grey and grainy.

She said she wanted to rest and could sit for a bit so we found somewhere to have a coffee and I loosened my coat and watched her drink. I watched the reassuring sight of her head bend over the cup, the ring on the fingers that grasped the white porcelain handle and I smiled at her and she smiled back, looking a little puzzled.

She finished and we crossed the river again, climbed until we came to the palace. On the stepped street upwards I looked back over the city and marvelled at the weave of roofs, at the sloping park, the trees planted in lines on rolling grass. The river twisted and turned below, curled between the rise of spires, the air seemingly thicker in places. A young woman sat on a corner with an open case in front of her and a cap, manipulating some brightly painted puppets, making them dance and move in quick jerky actions. We stood and watched and she dropped some money in the cap, turned to me, her face flushed with the cold and climbing, and I thought again how good she looked.

Further up we passed a small stone house covered in burgundy ivy, its walls almost completely hidden. We looked over into its garden, saw a patio area tangled in apple trees, their branches no longer full. Here and there some pulpy looking fruit remained lying on the ground.

On the road back we swung to the right, finding ourselves on the Malá Strana. Its pathways wound up and down, its trees with their shed leaves caught the light of the afternoon, obscured the city below us. Finding a bench, we sat, enjoying the colours, the sense of the city, its sounds carrying on the cold air. I liked the way it lay nestled between the hills around, felt I was discovering it, yet it had always been there, and I had always known it was there, and that it conformed to some sense of a city I carried within me. I put my arm around her and she moved close to me, began to talk about home, about the new apartment we were going to buy, but I put my finger over her mouth and said to her it could wait. We walked a little more, hand in hand, the air getting colder, then took the metro back to the rooms we had rented for the couple of days and slept for a while.


2

When I woke, she was already up, sitting in front of the small mirror, her hands resting across her knees. Through the window the mist had gathered again. I went over and stood behind her and for a moment saw her face and my face, and saw her find me in the reflection, her eyes meet my eyes, saw her lift her hand and lightly touch my fingers on her shoulder, as if in the mirror we were in another world and looking at ourselves in this world, as if we were only real in that world and that was the way it had always been.

We left the room and I paused in the hallway before locking the door. I was aware of the old, high roof, the wide, wooden stairway rising to my left. I felt for a moment I was waiting for something, that it was as though I expected something I knew was going to happen to happen. But nothing happened.

In front of a shaky looking table, a young man was peering at a pile of post. The key suspended in my hand, I watched him put his bag to the floor, carefully go through all the letters and suddenly there was the smell of boiled vegetables on the clinging, dusty air, the smell of simple cooking and I felt an almost crushing sense of melancholy.

On the street we retraced our steps. We crossed the Karlûv Most, the river now lost in fog, the lights along its banks strangely diffused in irregular patches. We came to the Staromestské Námestí, crossed the old town square again, took a right until we were on the Národni.

Finding a restaurant, we were shown to a table beside a high, curtained window. Despite the dim lights I noticed the decor was faded, how the atmosphere was almost of another world, another time. My eyes fell to her hands, I heard the rattle of her bracelet, heard her say she was feeling cold, that maybe we had walked too much on our first day. And at the same time was aware of a curious sensation of it being spring, thought of lilac trees blooming, of hedges wild along pathways, of the light lingering longer each evening over country roads, over mountains. Though through the window, it was autumn, late autumn and the shapes on the street were shadows, emerging only in detail beneath street lamps; a face under a hat, a woman on the arm of a man, a stranger in a long coat with an umbrella stepping by quickly.

Then suddenly I felt disoriented. I answered her sharply as she again brought up the subject of the new apartment. I turned to her to see her looking at me, her forehead creased in frustration. I apologised, attempted a smile but felt I did not manage it convincingly. For a moment I wondered if I myself was convinced and the thought of the apartment annoyed me even more and I said to her I was getting up to find the bathroom.

When I came back she was quietly staring out the window. The waiter came and we ordered soup and bread. She chose chicken, but I asked for fish, because it was shark from the Baltic and I felt curious and wanted to try something I had never had before. As the waiter walked away, I called him back and asked if I could have a glass of a beer.

We waited and I was unsure what to say. I asked her what she wanted to do when we were finished eating but she did not know. At the table next to us two men were eating. From their language, their accent, from the neatly ironed work shirts, the freshly laundered jeans, I guessed they were North Americans. They were talking business loudly, were talking about the city as if it were in some state of stasis, talking about the city as if it were something awaiting their magical touch. I imagined these men on the metro, imagined them sitting among the silent faces, the stoical faces and the small metal sign above the door through to the each carriage carrying the letters CCCP, the symbols of what once had been to them an enemy state. I wondered if they would have seen that, wondered if they would have noticed that small detail as I had. Small details, I thought, are sometimes all the more important because they are small details, because one does not always notice them at first. Sometimes small details reveal the hidden world behind the world one thought one knew. Then I wanted to turn to her and tell her what I was thinking, tell her there is no magic touch, the magic is always there, change was in how you look at things and that we do not always look hard enough. She was lifting a glass of water to her mouth, her eyes somewhere else so I said nothing.


When the day is over I will take the lift, return to our new apartment. I will open the door onto its quietness and will think of the evening to come and how my father is coming over. She has asked me to do something about that. She does not like when we sit and watch the football together. And beneath my father's grey, thinning brows his eyes will get angry and he will complain that the footballers of today get paid too much and are more interested in the advertising on their shirts, are more interested in creating an impression than playing. Then he will take a drink from one of the cans of beer he always brings with him and want to talk politics.

There will be the lights of the city burning through the window and the night falling and below beneath the glow of the street lamps, rows of neatly parked cars alongside the footpath that leads to the park. My stomach will tighten, will tense as I think how later I will walk my father to the door, will watch from the balcony as he strolls stiffly the short distance to the tram halt, something he always insists on doing himself; the same tram he always takes home alone.

Turning back in the doorway, there will be a moment when I think of my work, my life, my relationship. I will think of myself in the city as though swimming through it below sea, underwater, as if sometimes looking for ways of surfacing for air.

Then it will be the morning again and maybe the sun will shine over the buildings, the sky will be blue and in the winter a white blue and I will feel for an instant there is a fire within me and step onto the pavement and hear the traffic in the morning stillness, already the cars in lines along the junction. I will put the key into the door and throw my briefcase onto the backseat and then turn on the radio. I will push on the accelerator, will edge out onto the motorway, will pull the phone from my pocket, hear it peep as I punch in numbers, wait for the voice and leave a message wondering if my colleague will get it.

Over the edge of the motorway the city will come into view and the flatness and the trains crisscrossing the flatness and the offices rising with their clean, sharp edges will seem to cut right into the sky.

I will do this every day and each day, will pass every week until it is weekend and we go to the supermarket and stock up with groceries. I will spend some time picking out a good wine and will eventually agree to do something about my father's visits. Then we will drive home and I will be seized by a sudden impulse to go into the bathroom and look at my face in the mirror, will look at the hair beginning to grey on my temples, at the wrinkles beginning to spread from the corners of my eyes. I will wonder if she was right when once she said I lacked direction, decisiveness. Until I reach up and pull the cord extinguishing the thin fluorescent strip of light. Until I hesitantly close the door behind me. Wondering what it is I am closing a door on.

Copyright © Peter Millington 1997