Asystole

SCENE ONE-3

Then, warmed by the sun and lulled by boredom, he fell asleep again next to the mound, hoping to hear what the fish was doing at the bottom of the deep hole. He listened very carefully, and thought the fish was listening too. The silence was broken by his grandfather, who caught another bream while the boy was sleeping.

Walking back home along the same route, only in reverse and now weighed down with sleepiness, seemed unfair. Considering he had done all the boy could wish for, his grandfather decided not to waste money on the motor boat. In any case, he liked the wide road paved with concrete slabs which ran the full width of the island to the bridge. He was evidently enjoying the walk, or had decided to pace something out, and made the way home even longer. Crossing the bridge with all the people on it was a further torment. Feeling its springiness and how it shook beneath him, the boy thought it might collapse if a lot of people crossed it at the same time. His grandfather only laughed, but if the boy glanced down, it took his breath away. He imagined he was falling from a great height down into the river. He dreamed about it, and woke in a sweat because the feeling was so realistic.

He found the idea of eternity terrifying, if it meant there would be no end to falling. It haunts you, the way your own reflection in a mirror haunts you, because you might be looking at another life. This is myself, appearing and disappearing because I have so many lives. And yet, when daylight prises your eyes open in the morning it seems only an instant has passed.

Coming back to consciousness, you always feel you have been rescued, reborn. Taking your first breath. Coming back, you remember the sense of height beneath you, and of flight in which you dissolved with every cell in your body. You feel that at night you are carried up into the sky, and in the morning safely delivered back down to earth. In dreams everything depends on you. You are born but do not die. You have no fear. Only if you are fearless can you soar in the air of your dream. If you are overcome by fear you become incapable of anything and, holding your arms out in front of you, fall headlong into an abyss that rapidly narrows to a funnel, swallowing everything around it. You are told children are growing when they dream this dream, but it is the fear, the falling, that makes its way into your soul. Your soul remembers that, and tries desperately to fly.

Sounds, smells, colours: everything seems to be born in front of your eyes and never to die. There is a blessed sense of eternity, when even sounds are filled with light, the laughter of the sun. Everything delightful and pure has just been born. It is morning. Your mother’s smile. Bluebells ringing, each individual cap. Everything is such fun, although everything about adults tells you that what they are doing is terribly important. When their faces are so serious, it makes you think your mother and father are casting spells and that is why the tea suddenly tastes so sweet. There is nothing frightening about that. All that is disturbing is the sense of being among these people. He knew they were his family and that this place was his home, but for some reason felt he was only visiting. He accepted what they gave him, not daring to refuse food and drink even if he did not like it. He allowed them to feed him, and solemnly swallowed the same food as everyone else because he knew it was his new flesh and blood and he was eating and drinking it to grow bigger. Was that not brave? The little god had his first experience of suffering, a fear he might not grow bigger, because day after day he had no sense of actually getting any bigger.

This was worrying. Each year lasted an eternity, but the only visible trace it left was on the door frame. Once a year, the moment he opened his eyes, he remembered this was the day he was born. To make up for somebody’s fault that he had not, on the day he was actually born, been able to see the light and be happy, each year he was given that day back again. Nobody except him knew that yet, so he ran to his parents’ room, shouting to wake these grown-up people, and watching in delight as undifferentiated, lifeless masks turned into the faces of people who loved him and lit up with smiles. He imagined he had brought them just what they had been waiting for, the joyous tiding of himself.

Everybody knew this was an indispensable part of the programme, and then the celebration of the birth of a son became his party. The happy assertiveness lighting up his face, perhaps a little arrogant after his performance at the tea table, was flushed and tinged with recklessness, perhaps even silliness. The toasts and stories came to an end. Admiring, anticipating, the slightly drunk guests collectively provided the audience, as if about to witness a conjuring trick, although everybody knew what was to happen. Only the boy stood stock still awaiting the miraculous revelation. Now one year older, readied for a new sacrifice, he drew himself bolt upright, trembling, his back motionless against the door post. He dared not stir as his father performed an action above his head he could not see. He would call him back to life, as if the edge of his hand was cutting off the past, everything that was dead, and laughing out loud, admiring not his son but the height he had measured. A moment ago everything hung in the balance, but now the bar of life had indisputably been raised higher! This ladder of straight lines, marked in a conspicuous place by his father’s hand, was a proud reminder of his father himself, left, passed down to a son who had already ensured his immortality. He was immortal! He chortled with delight. Another year would pass, and it would all be repeated. This seemed to be the only way, an endless ascent, but suddenly it stopped, broken off. The boy, unaware on the day he was orphaned that he had lost his father, went to sleep that night still not knowing, not yet having taken life’s suffering over from him. Everything that came back to him later came out of nowhere: dim, silent and, like in the movies, fleeting. It was a kind of seeing from which the sound had been cut, the colour removed, the life drained, an image as if reduced by the screen, to appear before his eyes, be seen, and then abruptly disappear again. All that remained was the photographs, the faces brought back to life in their capsules which time could not penetrate, in which faces no longer aged and so remained recognizable.

A bride and groom, porcelain figurines of dignity and tenderness, their eyes, probably for the first time, so intently focused on each other. The waltz of the newly wed, so graceful, the couple not even holding hands but fingers. Champagne! The kiss! In domestic settings she is always alone and he, the only witness, delighting in her, fits her into the frame as if for love. A young woman posing, feeling herself an actress, smooth, free, the coldness of silence on her lips. Almost all photographs of her were taken by his father, a keen photographer. He had a certain vanity, like a painter, and a way of taking the photographs with perspectives sweeping upwards or falling, as if on the wing. Somehow, though, they were all the same, reflections of reflections which could have been made into a short film. An upside-down baby suspended in the air in crumpled nappies, ensnared by a spider for looking so tearful. His father took many photos to get this one. For some reason he liked photographing his baby crying, or so angry that he was in tears. He thought that was just splendid. Dressed up when visiting his grandfather. Growing up, spending every summer without exception with his grandparents, but without his own parents. In a prim pose in a photographer’s studio, clad in a lambskin coat, gleaming boots, a reindeer fur hat, and wearing a gold embroidered general’s belt. A little general in the glare of highly theatrical stage lighting.

His school years, their class, year after year, with a graveyard landscape of children’s faces apparently anxiously contemplating their own deaths. Looking out of portholes, the stalwart crew of Gagarin rockets flying to the stars. They seem to be peeping like little cuckoos, each out of its own lonely little hollow, growing older and less confident. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Within a few years he will learn you do not have to agree with every verdict passed on you. He will learn to think about his own actions, and know exactly what each one is called. The little stars of the Octoberlets’ uniforms will be replaced by the neckerchiefs of Young Pioneers. Cuckoo! And next they are sprouting Young Communist League badges like teenage pimples. In 1987 it is all over. Somewhere in that same cosmos, underdeveloped, unfocused messages to himself from photographic societies at Pioneer camps dissolve. The figures of identical small beings, seemingly from other planets, are frozen in poses sweeping upwards or falling downwards on sports fields and in solemn line-ups. His father’s orphaned camera was lost at this time, with no regrets. He had not been taught to value things, and this was just something he got bored with one day, like a toy. It did not even seem to belong to anyone.

His eye falls on something else, his father’s most enduring fancy. It appeared, like all the other things with which his imagination sparkled, in the guise of something exceedingly serious. No doubt he believed he had invented a double, which would enable a pregnant woman expecting his child and awaiting the return of her absent husband from his scientific expeditions, when she looked at it, to feel his love. Mysterious and proud, he lost no time in placing himself above the baby’s cot. When he became a schoolboy and they gave him a desk at home, the portrait hung above, and his father looked down from there on his son. He just positioned the camera in front of himself, set the shutter, held his breath for a few moments, the timer made contact, the bulb flashed. Then, silence. A look of anticipation, and therefore a lonely look. Patience in those understanding eyes. He seems at that moment to have felt himself a real father. He has understood something very important. That, at least, was how he hoped he looked. He hung it on the wall of his study, darkened like an icon. An identical copy was to look from his headstone: noble, stern, cut off before his time.

Everything retreated, draining away into that ceramic medallion in the cemetery, redolent only of loss. The photos were somewhere in their home, although no one was preserving them. Rather, both of them, the mother and the son, were separately hiding from them. They were brought closer by shared fears, not least the fear pulling them down back into the past.

She has no time for her reflections, although she seems to be putting that on, and with equally feigned indifference consents to recognize her former self, as if with the passage of time something unbecoming is evident in the faded photographs. For him, it is all just stuff that no longer exists, except that there is also something about it he wants to leave firmly alone. The family he was born into, all there is to show for its time on earth, what he might some day pass down to his own children. He cannot stand to hear his mother talking about what her son was like when she was bringing him up, before he could walk, or talk, and got sat on the pot when she, not he, decided. That seemed to be all she remembered. She liked him as a helpless cripple. That was what seemed to have suited her, and he detected something crippling in her mother love. His love for the woman who had given him life was all about offence caused and waiting to be forgiven. Was that why he himself had never learned to forgive? It was only his heart that grew bigger and heavier, like an apple juicy with blood, the fruit of all he had experienced. He felt time was crippling him, making the past drag on. There was something mechanical and soulless about that, and it was the reason he was so soulless himself.