Dying in the First Person Read online

  Dying in the

  First Person

  Dying in the First Person

  Nike Sulway

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  First Published 2016

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  Copyright © 2016 NIke Sulway

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover image: ©Leszek Paradowski/Trevillion Images

  Cover and book design: Peter Lo

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  A cataloguing-in-publication entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia: http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  ISBN: 978-0-9943958-9-4 (e-book)

  For my fathers,

  Brian Sulway (1935–1973)

  Ken Keys (1929—)

  SAMUEL

  Winter

  A woman came across the field, carrying the body of my brother, who had drowned. She came to the edge of the river, up a muddied bank where sedges and grasses grew, the men flanking her like a shameful consort. Their dogs mooching at her heels. His long body was awkward in her arms and she must have stumbled, though when I think of her walking out of the water and up the bank of the river she is tall and shining and steady. When she reached the top of the bank she sank to her knees, Morgan’s body sprawling across her lap and into the grass. His great, loose body shockingly white and naked in her arms. A dead black leaf in the corner of his mouth. His face was turned in to the woman’s chest, as though he were listening for her heartbeat. One pale ear was rimmed with mud.

  To have to bear such news from the river to the bank would have made her move more slowly, attending to the form of things, bearing him with grace and some semblance of love. No wife or sister, no brother or son, was there to receive his body, to grieve for him. I was his closest living relative: a twin brother who lived on the other side of the earth and was not even aware, as Morgan drowned, that the world had changed. You read stories about people who feel the passing of those they are close to, twins particularly, as though they sense the dislodgement of their brother’s spirit from the body. The earth bobbing slightly, like an apple in a tub of water, as his spirit leaps away. But I felt nothing. And I cannot say with certainty that I felt any preternatural shift when our father died, either. The room had been quiet; I slept. In the morning, when I woke, my mother told me he was gone.

  I could not really have seen the woman bear Morgan from the river. The place where they pulled him from the water was shadowed by the buildings that surrounded it, and it was almost sunset. The men and their dogs were standing about, sipping coffee and trying not to talk about ordinary things. The woman who had found him was wrapped in a blanket and sat holding a cup in both hands near the opened rear doors of an ambulance. Her head rested on the end of the stretcher. The pale soles of my brother’s bare feet beside her. I remember – I can imagine I remember – her white face, her black hair. Her green eyes glowing wetly in the red and yellow light reflected from cars and torches and streetlights. My brother’s face – his familiar features like a faint echo of my own – finally serene.

  It wouldn’t have been like that. He would have been bloated and mottled. Softened and swelled like an over-ripe fruit, as though too heavy a touch would make his skin split and weep. He would have been changed, after so many hours in the river.

  Morgan had been living in a small apartment in Haarlem, not far from the city of Amsterdam, with this woman neither my mother nor I had ever heard of. Ana. It was not even an apartment, more like a bedsit: two rooms, separated by a curtained doorway, a kitchen and a bathroom out the back. A small bedroom. There was a bed and two bedside tables, a table and two chairs. A pea coat hung on a hook on the back of the door, and a bicycle leaned against the wall in the hallway. When the police searched the apartment containing his and Ana’s rude assortment of belongings, they assumed the two of them were travellers, and that elsewhere there were some other rooms – warmer, more densely occupied – in which they had truly lived. There were no such rooms. No home. No collection of acquired objects to lend substance to his body’s shadow. Morgan didn’t appear to have eaten many meals in his apartment, or to have cooked in the kitchen. Everything was clean and bare. The cupboards were almost empty. Sometimes, they discovered, Morgan had bought food at a nearby store. An odd assortment of things: a block of cheese, a packet of jelly crystals, a jar of cardamom seeds. There were no personal belongings to send home with his body; the coat and the bicycle, a CD player, some plates and cutlery and pots, white sheets, spare shoes, a small pile of books, were all given to Rataplan.

  Ana and I made all of these arrangements. In the week after he died she called me every few days to talk about what needed to be done. She spoke slowly and carefully, waiting out the pauses while our voices travelled across the earth towards each other. Sometimes I was certain she had a list, and was writing down the answers I gave. She had a light, almost indiscernible accent and spoke English with the kind of old-fashioned British inflection I associated with ABC radio announcers.

  One evening when she called I was out on the back deck, working. The pages I was translating were spread out across the table, but I wasn’t concentrating. I had opened a bottle of wine and was listening to a recording of Yo Yo Ma and the London Symphony Orchestra playing Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor, Opus 85. When I had my tonsils out as a boy, my mother had come to the hospital and given me a recording of the concerto to listen to while I recovered. She put the cassette into the player and pressed play. During the opening movement – that elegant, dramatic recitative – she told me that Elgar wrote the first theme for the concerto after having his tonsils out, and that he had woken groggily from the anaesthetic and asked for pencil and paper. It was 1918, and he was in a hospital in London, but throughout the war years he had lived in a little cottage in Sussex where, night after night, the sound of artillery had crawled across the channel and into his dreams.

  ‘All of his earlier work,’ my mother said, ‘was different. Before the war there was hope, celebration, a great flourishing of art and politics, but afterwards …’ Here, she turned her head and closed her eyes; in that small, antiseptic room we listened to the viola hand off the theme to the orchestra and then to the cello. The sounds swelled mournfully in the heat.

  The phone was lying on the table and when I first answered it. I could barely hear Ana’s voice. It was only once I had found the remote for the stereo and turned Elgar down that I heard the distinctive echo of a long-distance call and remembered that Morgan was dead.

  ‘Samuel,’ she said, ‘it is Ana. Can you hear me?’

  ‘Good evening, Ana.’

  ‘You are listening to Elgar.’

  ‘I should have turned it down before I answered the phone.’

  ‘I like Elgar,’ she said. ‘It is nice to think of you listening to such things. Morgan, too, liked to listen to music at night.’

  ‘To Elgar?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘He thought Elgar was sentimental. He preferred Mussorgsky, Borodin, Shostakovich, even Prokofiev, though as a rule he didn’t have much time for the neo-classicists. He did have a soft spot for Saint-Saëns. He listened to Ave Verum in D most mornings.’

  There was a long, slow silence – a delay while her voice reached me. A pause before I realised that she had stopped speaking, and then our voices overlapped, awkwardly and suddenly.

  ‘When is your flight?’ / ‘Do you have a pen?’

  I flipped over
a page of the notepad and paused, waiting to make sure she had finished speaking. ‘What time do you arrive?’

  ‘We have a stopover in Kuala Lumpur, and will arrive in Brisbane at 7.55 pm on Sunday. Morgan will be on the same flight, but the funeral director at your end will not be able to clear him through quarantine until the next morning. I can stay in Brisbane until then; there is a hotel near the airport where I’ve booked a room. Can you meet me at the airport on Monday morning? I do not know how long it will take, but perhaps we can arrange to meet at 9.00 am?’

  ‘The funeral director explained the repatriation process to me earlier today. It shouldn’t take long at the airport. And then we can drive home together.’

  ‘I have not booked a return flight yet.’

  ‘You can stay as long as you like. I have a cabin nearby – it was supposed to be Morgan’s – you can use it while you are here.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I know about Morgan’s cabin. It will be good to stay there, I think. Are you sure it is okay?’

  ‘It’s fine. The cabin’s been empty for a month now, ever since Nicanor moved to Melbourne. He lived there for a long time. It will be good to have someone there. If it’s left empty too long, the bush starts to take over.’

  ‘Take over?’

  ‘My mother would like to see you, meet you, before the service. Perhaps I can take you to her on Monday afternoon.’

  ‘Solange?’

  ‘She has questions she wants to ask. Things she doesn’t understand. It’s been a long time. I don’t know what Morgan told you about us, about her …’

  ‘Do you have questions, Samuel?’

  ‘About Morgan?’

  ‘Yes, about Morgan.’

  I took a deep breath, letting the crisp winter air enter my lungs. ‘Of course. Yes.’

  ‘What questions do you have?’

  The line buzzed and hissed. Inside the house I heard the stereo fall silent. Somewhere, on the other side of the house, the pump hummed into life. The water was getting low. Tomorrow I would have to pump up from the dam again. ‘Did he leave a note?’ I said. ‘Did he say anything before he left?’

  ‘He didn’t leave a note,’ she said. ‘But before he died, he gave away almost everything he owned. The morning he died, he was just like always. A little quiet, but he was always quiet. We had breakfast together, and I went out for a while. When I came back he was gone.’

  ‘Did you go looking for him?’

  ‘Not straight away. It’s hard to explain, Samuel, but our lives weren’t like that. He came and went, and so did I. We worked hard not to expect things of each other; not to be ordinary in that way. Sometimes he would go away, disappear for days, sometimes weeks, at a time. But that day, by the afternoon, I felt something was wrong. I went looking for him in all the usual places, but he was not in any of the usual places. I didn’t think I was worried, so I came home, but something … I could not sleep. I got up again, it was the middle of the night by then, and I went walking along the dyke, along the edge, up towards Pieter Kiesstraat. I didn’t have any shoes on. I wasn’t going to go very far. Anyway, that is when I found him. He was floating between two boats. He was still wearing his hat. I remember thinking it was strange that he had kept his hat on when he went into the water, and that his hat had not floated away.’

  *

  Morgan and I had fought one summer afternoon, more than thirty years ago, and I bruised his arm with my fist. He had been teasing our dog, Enki, until it turned to nip at his wrist: more warning than anger. I stepped between them, protecting him, and Enki’s teeth scraped across my bare knee, leaving a scar I still bear.

  I had not seen my brother in more than twenty years. And when I first heard he had died, I did not picture a man’s body hauled up onto the shore like a magnificent, fossil-headed fish, but a young boy’s. A boy’s body bruised by my fists.

  Later that same long-ago summer we built a cubby house out of old fence posts and sheets of corrugated tin, and rode our bicycles to the beach to lie in the hot sand of the dunes until we itched with sunburn, listening to the radio and the ocean – the static of one blurring into the crashing of the other. At school, we rarely spoke to each other. I had a wide and unstructured group of friends whose names, as Cervantes wrote, I do not care to remember. My mother knew them all, and could name them, as well as their brothers, sisters, fathers and aunts, and later their wives and children. Sometimes their faces come to me, the halfformed features drifting and tearing apart like clouds. Some of them still live nearby. I see them in the street, or in my mother’s bookshop. Strangers now, grown into men with wives and children and regrets, though I still imagine them in their grey shorts and white cotton shirts, their ties askew.

  Morgan, on the other hand, kept himself apart from the people in town, even as a small child. I had no real sense of who he spoke to, or where he went before or after school. When he was very young, he had an imaginary friend, Clarence, and for a while I presumed he spent his time in complex games with this ghostly creature, but Clarence was a distant, somewhat diffident friend, unable to find time for games. Instead, their friendship was conducted in messages left behind.

  ‘What did you do today?’ my mother would ask him. ‘Who did you play with?’ And Morgan would tell her he had left a note for Clarence in the mailbox, asking him to go fishing, but Clarence had written back to say he was too busy: he had an assignment to work on; he was translating a book of poems originally written in the language of the owls; he had been abducted by pirates but was hopeful he could convince them to meet up with his father’s fishing fleet when the wind changed.

  It occurs to me now that perhaps Morgan didn’t attend school much as a child. Perhaps some of those urgent, hushed talks he endured at the kitchen table with our parents – his head hung, his shoulders slunked as a dog’s – were to do with his truancy, his refusal, even then, to be present in the world. To participate in the structures that bruised him.

  On weekends and during holidays I would go to the kitchen for breakfast and see his slim, self-contained figure standing on the deck. Our backpacks leaning together at the bottom of the stairs, while he waited for me to join him.

  We had been given our first fishing rods for Christmas when we were four. During our early fishing trips, we pressed chunks of bread torn from our sandwiches around the hooks and lowered them into the warm shallows. When the line floated in close to shore, tiny fish nudged the moons of bread as they broke up, releasing white stars into the river. When cast further out, the twitches and jerks of the line were an unreadable mystery. We had to learn to read the language of floats.

  Sometimes, we would sling our rods over our shoulders and walk along the shore, imagining ourselves twinned Huck Finns, striking up conversations with the older fishermen along the bank. Some of the men resented our intrusion, but others were quick to show us their stained white buckets with fish writhing and glistening, the stiff mouths clicking open and closed, or to show us the proper way to kill, gut and scale our catch, or to teach us about knots and floats and flies.

  We would carry our kayak down to the river and set out. Morgan always knew where we were headed. If we travelled downstream we might go as far as the river mouth, pull our kayak up onto the beach and have lunch on the sand. We might play a game, making a ball from the crumpled, greasy paper that had been wrapped around our sandwiches, or racing each other up and down the shore, laughing and wrestling. In the hot afternoons we would find some shade and read, or play games, or work on our imaginary civilisation and its language, Nahum, while we fished. As very small boys we had devised codes with which to communicate with each other. At first, we used codes we learned from books. Pig Latin and Morse code to begin with, and then the scholar’s Latin our mother taught us, and our father’s beloved Greek. Later, we devised our own languages: pictographs, with eyes for the words ‘look’ and ‘see’, and sticks with six arms for trees. Eventually, we invented our own dead language, Nahum, which we perfected ove
r the long summers of our boyhood, writing dictionaries and books of grammar, histories of its people, and geographies of the archipelago where the civilisation of Nahum had arisen.

  We wanted our language to be both secret and mysterious, a language capable of saying the terrible, heroic things we felt but could not express. It should be a language without nostalgia, without a grammar of regret. A language of men. Nahum was for us, but it was also a gift for the archaeologists and translators of the future, whose faces we would never know, but who would one day find these works – these ancient manuscripts – and wonder at the people who had written them. At their courage and fierce intelligence. One day, when we were long dead, they would discover who we had been.

  My brother was seven minutes older than me; seven minutes after he died, I passed into the future he had refused. Nobody in the world could speak with me now. Nobody knew those languages, those histories, like we did. I waited for someone to tell me what I should say, what I should do with what was left of my life now that he was gone. Nobody could tell me how to carry on. I had spent my whole life as his brother, and as his translator. And now I was neither a brother nor a translator, but only some voiceless, broken creature. Half a man, with only half a life.

  Morgan’s death undeniably happened. It was only a hard illusion that it was someone else’s body Ana had pulled out of the river and brought here, delivered to my mother and me along with his final manuscript. But I have held onto it for a long time. Periodically, I could make myself believe in his death, just as I could make myself believe in the certainty that my own death will one day come. But it is a willed suspension of disbelief. I can sometimes believe in his death in the way I believed in Narnia as a child: it had happened, but it did not occur, it does not occur.

  It will not occur.

  The tense is difficult. How should I speak of my brother, and of his death? What is the grammar of death, since death is an event, a process and a state of being? Is his death what has occurred, what occurs, what will occur, what is always occurring? Is he still, now, in the interval of death? Should I speak of him in the present tense? It seems impossible to translate this event into language. There are words, they are simple and plain enough, but the grammar of dying is difficult. Does death belong to him – to his bones, heart, lungs, cells and sinew – or does he now belong to death? Should I write that this is the story of Morgan’s death, or is he now death’s Morgan? Does he still bear his own name, or is death his name now? Perhaps the only certainty is that, in death, he has become more irreducibly a creature of language. A fantastic monster made up of the words he wrote and which I translated: he has become bodiless, mythical.