The Well-Read Man

We sit here on the same bench, every lunch time. I can’t recall who was here first, who joined who. Every day, the pigeons bob their heads and coo, a safe distance at first, just past where our legs would reach if we kicked a foot out (neither of us would), but once we sprinkle a few crusts around they seem to forget our threat. Until next time that is, when we are strangers once again, until the crust offering ritual settles them into their uneasy peace.

They pick up their broken crust in their beaks keenly enough yet seem at a bit of a loss as to how to deal with it. It’s too big to swallow, surely, but without hands, opposable thumbs, a serrated knife and two sizes of fork, what are they to do?

“I know what they’re thinking,” I say. “I can speak with them you know.”

“That’s not true,” she says. “That’s Dr Doolittle.”

“Ahh”, say I, unsure once more. But I had shared something with them hadn’t I? Understood their inner turmoil? Was it direct communication, or merely empathy?

Day after day we come here. I like watching the birds, of course, but it’s the lake that I love. It’s only a pond really, but there’s nothing quite like sitting here, watching the ducks wriggling their fat bottoms in the air as they stick their head under the glassy surface, or making a sudden dash forward as their feet brush a wayward eel, clearly embarrassed at the kerfuffle once they realised there was no need to jump out of their feathers. I like the way the ripples start off around their waist like a duck tuxedo cummerbund, but are soon travelling to the furthest reaches of the pond, concentric circles passing through the water away from the feathery epicentre of their creation, sending leaves bobbing, waving to us, and detaching reflections from their owners.

“You know I was out on a boat once,” I begin, the water pressing me on. “Fishing for marlin. Just me, and the sea. Well, wouldn’t you know it, but I hooked the big one. A terror he was! Dragged me well out. I knew I was in trouble, he was sounding and leaping with a life-force you just simply can’t imagine – once you’ve been on the other end of a line with a fish like this, you know life is far more slippery than we ever imagined. But more miraculous too – and far bigger than you and I, that’s for sure!”

“I see – and then what happened?”

“Well, for days this went on. Day after day I was dragged, into the rising sun, away from the setting, past one horizon after another. Out beyond where the trade currents could even find us.”

“And then?”

“Well, I... I’m not quite sure.” Why couldn’t I remember the rest? How I got home, how I got to be sitting here, on this bench, balling up a crumbling piece of stale white bread by rolling it between my thumb and forefinger and then trying to toss it to a particular pigeon I’ve spotted lurking beyond the usual suspects because he was missing out, but watching him stampeded by one of the more assertive and scared off it just as it was in his reach.

“No, I could never finish Hemingway either.”

“Pardon?”

“Hemingway – you’re thinking of the Old Man and the Sea.”

Week after week we come, day in day out. We rarely talk. It’s like we don’t really need to, like there’s a shared history linking us. But it can’t be so – I don’t even know her name. Even through summer not a day is missed, no matter how warm it gets. It’s a relief when the shadows finally start to lengthen, when the pigeons seem less frazzled and lethargic in their feathery coats, almost annoyed at having to move to collect their crusts.

“You know there’s something about this time of year that is remarkable. It’s just the most subtle of shifts, but the light in August truly grips me.”

“Is that so?”

“Indeed it is. A man can sit here, the weight of the world just kind of dropping off his sloped shoulders, shrugging maybe, at one moment those rounded corners of his uppermost corporeal existence lifted around his sinewy neck as though pistons have pneumatically though silently cranked them to their most austere reach, then dropped again, all while barely seeming to move to anyone who might be watching, but to him shifting more than his shirt, shifting the weight of his mind, his thoughts, all the preceding things that bumped up against him all that long day, or flying in from a day he may have momentarily thought back to – a memory cobbled of a fleeting instant that made no real impact at the time, but was coming back to him at this very juncture for who knows what reason, bearing what message – all this sitting there on those shoulders, each shoulder with its own story to tell, its own memories fashioning into a different knot; knots of hope, of dreams, of unanswerable puzzles, all their own distinct shape and all jostling for space with the devil and the angel, the dandruff and the pollen, ephemeral tokens taken for granted as always there yet never the same, while all the while he sits, looking (possibly for the first time in days) at something like these ducks – really looking, not just registering them in the primal part of his mind that processes all he needs to keep out of danger, no more no less, but really seeing them in their splendid sentience – and willing these knots to be gone, for the ducks or whatever he is focusing on, be it the cracked and crooked light, or the tepidly waning warmth on his cheekbones and brow, to take their place, to become the new knots; for he knows there will always be knots, but if we can at least choose what the knots are going to be, what form they take and how they will line up, then we can let that weight that doesn’t really belong to us anyway disappear for just that fleeting moment, allow that glimpse to be a conduit, a window into the soul of the world – a two-way window that puts the world into his soul.”

A long silence followed. I wondered if perhaps she hadn’t heard, and even had a slight panic that she had left – I began to wonder if perhaps I hadn’t even said anything; that my mind had drifted off on an internal tangent of tangled and confused words that I still see bouncing and buffeting around haphazardly on a layer of cool green felt. But then:

“You like Faulkner too then?”

“Faulkner?”

“Never mind.”

Sometimes there will be others. A mother showing the ducks to her child, encouraging her young progeny to replicate the noise a duck might make; an old grey man in a too large coat, young lovebirds early in their courtship with brows blissfully unfurrowed.

There seemed to be an almost unseemly amount of the latter this autumn, crowding the pond’s edge and sharing cheese and bread on stolen lunch trysts or walking arm in arm as the sun dipped behind the church that stretched skyward over on the far side of the pond, its dying golden rays no doubt mistaken by many as lending an unearthly religiosity to the rough-hewn stones and faith-charged steeple.

“Oh to be that young and carefree again,” I sighed.

“Mmmm,” she returned, the loose skin across the knuckles entwined in her lap rippling a little as she stretched them.

“Did I ever tell you about my first true love? We were very young, the two of us. Our families were embroiled in a most terrible feud, but by a stroke of fate we were brought together. How I fell for her! Her family would not have it, of course, she was desitined for higher stations, greater things, but though I was banished from her side, we met again the very next day and were furtively married. Well, things took a dramatic turn for the worse I tell you... much scandal and mayhem was to follow - great tragedy in fact - but I think that I may have already said too much. Tomorrow – tomorrow I shall tell you more.”

She smiled.

Soon the clouds returned; blindingly white and bilious. I knew what this meant and, sure enough, small flecks of desiccated snow soon danced across the streams of air, jigging to and fro as haphazardly as a sea of butterflies migrating to only they know where. Each was a facsimile of the other, each wildly unique. At first they would fall and we would watch them disappear, leaving only a darkness, a tiny moist spot as black as the flake was white. But, at one point – you could never say quite when – they stayed as they were, welcoming the next flake and the next, linking outstretched hands until they were not flakes at all, but an undifferentiated blanket; soft, hard, delicate, crunchy, welcoming, treacherous. Of the sky, the air, yet of water too. Land, also, a new earth to replace the old, a layer or crust upon which a new layer of life would wander, seeking out its own stories. And fire – cold enough to burn.

“This snow,” I say.

“Mm-hm?” she allows.

“It is qanik – big, almost weightless crystals falling in stacks and covering the ground with a layer of pulverised white frost.”

“Is that so?”

“Oh yes. That’s what we get here, of course, with these snow flurries. There’s not much likelihood of sikussaqi, or hiku – certainly no chance of hikuaq or ivuniq. But we’re still a chance of some apuhiniq if that wind keeps up and compresses it.”

“Hmmmm.”

“If you’re wondering how I know all this, my father was a scientist and my mother a Greenlander.”

“How wonderful! That means I have the pleasure, then, of sitting with Miss Smilla?”

“Excuse me?”

“You must be Smilla Jaspersen – fearless avenger of the death of six-year-olds, with a rather advanced feeling for snow.”

“Well, no, that’s not my name.”

“No, I imagine not, but it is the name of the person you’re thinking of – Peter Høeg’s best-known character in his worst-endinged book.”

“Is endinged even a word?”

“How would you say it?”

“Worst ended. Worst finished. Book with his worst ending. I don’t know, that’s not really the point – you’re saying that it’s not me?”

“Who knows? It might very well be. You’ve not ever told me your name, where you live, what you do when you’re not sitting here, so perhaps you are all the above and more. Tell me – do you rent a small room and a write a manifesto that a young boy will one day read and discover you to be the Steppenwolf? Did you wake up one morning to find you were on trial for a most serious crime but could not find out what it was supposed to be? Is everything you do and every conversation you have under surveillance by an omnipotent controller? Have you ever lived in squalor and tried justifying to yourself the murder of an old person? Were you ever washed up on a deserted island after a shipwreck? Did you, perhaps, spend year after year riding the countryside on a donkey, tilting at windmills, in the hope of winning the heart of a beautiful damsel? Or maybe you were born near midnight on the day your country was also born and you have magical powers that enable to you to telepathise with all the other children born that day?”

I was confused. All this felt so familiar. But how did she know so much about me, my past?

“Well, yes, I think so.”

For the first time in all the time we had been coming here, she turned to look at me – really look at me.

“I thought so too. Then surely you remember me? It’s me, Juliet.”


***


I smile sadly, slowly shaking my head.

“That’s not how it ends,” I say.

She fixes me with a steady gaze, blue eyes dancing with the last of the day’s reflected light.

“But why on earth not?”

“That’s too neat. Too tidy. Too soon. Worse – it’s cliché.”

“But this isn’t a book, a fiction, a made-up story. This is life.”

“In life as in books. Many things are forgivable – the most heinous of crimes against humanity, or love, or indeed both, can be carefully constructed, retold, refashioned, so as to explain them away. But cliché – unforgivable. A fate worse than death.”

I stand, brushing the crumbs that had collected on my jumper onto the ground, folding the paper bag now empty of bread into quarters and carefully placing it into my pocket. I walk away.