Michaels

Held: Anne Michaels

1: River Escaut, Cambrai, France, 1917

“We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?

Yes, she lifted her arms above her head to wave. Only her hat and gloves and the powdery yellow blur of the streetlamps were visible against the whiteness of sky and earth. He could barely feel his feet or his fingers, but the rest of him was warm, almost hot, from walking. He pulsed with the sight of her, the vestige of her. She was everything that mattered to him. He felt inviolable trust.

It was, to him, an encounter of sudden intimacy in this public place; the angle of her head, her posture, her hands. He watched as a man – soused and staggering, every careful step an acknowledgement of the spinning earth and its axial tilt – fell into the vacant chair opposite her, giving Helena a slow, marinated gaze until his head fell, weighty as a curling stone, and slid across the table. John and another onlooker jumped up to help at the same time and, between them, dragged the man to the back of the pub to sleep it off.

What we give cannot be taken from us.

He would understand, later, that there is a moment when your life must become your own; you must claim it from all the other stories you’ve been given, that have been handed down or thrust upon you, or that you’ve been left holding while someone else claimed theirs. He already knew that the life unchosen, left behind because of cowardice or shame, does not wither. But instead, without exception, grows rampant, choking the path ahead.

II: River Esk, North Yorkshire, 1920

“Lost, along with the privacies that form the real biography, never recorded or known; then countless inner adjustments we make to be in the world, to accommodate our loneliness, our ache for reunion.

Who can deny the reality of starlight? Yet the stars that give us their light do not exist. Who can say for certain that those who no longer exist, our dead, do not also reach us? And even those who do not believe, who live in a lead box of disbelief, must nonetheless accept – as the physicist Crookes proved in his experiment – that the electrical current we cannot see manifests itself on the plate in the lead-lined box, materialises in the dark of disbelief. From grief to belief.

III: River Westbourne, London, 1951

“What was the city to me? It was rain, narrow streets with lovers hiding in dark bedrooms opening their clothes to each other for the first time, the warmth, the shock, the gratitude. It was snow on the black roofs, the blush of light as it fades, lamps coming on across the square. The chairs carried out to the garden, the table too small for dinner, plates balanced on laps and left in the grass.

Of course Helena knew who he was, browsing the shelves in his fine merino overcoat and paint-smeared trousers. The shopkeepers in the neighbourhood took it as a point of honour not to notice him, to ignore his celebrity as he picked his apples from their baskets, his bread and tea from their shelves, finally reaching into his pocket and searching for loose change, when every-one knew his handwritten shopping list could have been sold to buy a house.

The only other customer, a young man standing in Fiction who had been watching from the corner of his eye (for of course the painter had been recognised), went back to browsing the shelves, while Helena stood, unable to move from behind the counter, looking at the door, knowing something had just occurred and not knowing what it meant; as if his future had somehow intercepted hers, jostling it out of place, just enough to swerve her off course, the single centimetre one way or another that saves one or sets one in the path of an oncoming car.

The dear minutes. Goodnight darling, goodnight Mama, goodnight, goodnight.

And then the long insomniac night, reading entire books borrowed from the shop and returned the next morning. The hateful sight of the clock – 3 a.m., 4 a.m. The scalding nightmare. Reading in bed is a precision art – knowing the right wattage, high enough to read by, low enough to fall asleep with the light still on, choosing books not for their content but for their size and weight, knowing the right position in bed so the book won’t slide off and hit the floor and wake you again.

There is a garden in a suburb of Paris I have never seen. A square wooden table and wrought-iron chairs weathered by decades, lilies bending in the rain. In our bed, you described this garden; for some reason, I wept. It was a place enravishingly familiar, as if I had known it long ago and had held it, always, close in memory. Then I thought it might be a future memory, something awaiting us. But I did not know then it was our last afternoon. The window was open and we could hear the trees.

Places described by a lover are like no other places on earth. To learn a city in this way – boulevards curving, canals, cornices overhead – in the naked embrace, the luxury of listening while your skin is listening. The city slips into your body. And then, if you are fortunate enough to arrive there for the first time with that same lover, or more fortunate still to arrive there after many years with the same lover – then you will enter the place as if in a dream.

When she arrived the day after, there was another woman in the studio. Very young. That was the first moment she understood her work might be good.

That night, she was glad Anna could not see her tears as she pressed the phone to her ear, aching to her daughter’s dear voice. She was calmed by Anna’s stories of her day and the thought of her making supper, even in her kitchen so far away.

IV: River Orwell, Suffolk, 1984

“At the back of the shop, Peter sat at a large table, the Anglepoise leaning over him, as if searching for errors in his work. He heard the front door open, with its bell on a hinge, and a voice call out:

‘On Amsterdam Island, it’s 4:01 p.m.; in Perth, it’s 11:01 p.m.; in Alert, it’s 10:01 a.m.!’

He looked up. Thank God. She was home.

She continued to read and he was almost asleep when Peter heard her say, ‘I missed her more than ever this time. Everywhere we were made me think of her, I almost thought I’d see her if I turned my head.’

He was fully awake now.

‘Sometimes I think I see her too,’ Peter said, ‘out of the corner of my eye. If you can see a feeling.’

‘Yes, I think you can.

He pushed the letter, irretrievable, his single chance, into the dark chasm of the post box. Irrevocable, he thought, as a grave. He did it quickly, as if he were throwing away all the hope left in the world.

Doctors turned to ice with emotion. The nurse who fell asleep in the middle of an operation. The infant put back together after hours of surgery, only to be killed by a bomb that fell on the hospital a moment later. The father who kept a scrap of cloth tied with a string around his neck, filled with teeth, proof his son had existed, though Mara knew he would never be sure they were his son’s. The same man who watched his shoes being stolen from his feet by someone who thought he was dead.

VI: River Orwell, Suffolk, 1984

“Above all, shared desire, with its unfathomable, inexpressible peace. The hope implicit in their days and nights together.

To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same.

The fight for necessities – water, food, shelter, schools, hospitals, a common good. As always, he would take his tipper lorry of language and empty the horror in plain view, so no one could claim they had not known. There was nothing more to say and, of course, he would go on saying that same nothing

The night was clear and still; the reflection of the stars began to settle into the water; it was as if we were floating in the sky.

Peter fell asleep at the table, his head in his arms. Sometime in the night, the power was restored. The Anglepoise leaned over him, like a surgeon, like a nurse, like a mother, and held him in a pool of light.

VIII: Estonia to Brest-Litovsk, 1980

“They had talked so long, so late, that when they kissed at last, they fell almost immediately to sleep, as if the kiss had knocked them out.

IX: Rue Gazan, Paris, 1908

“Our beautiful spring day. The glorious flower meadow, the armful you carried home for us, Eugène, filling the huge heavy glass vase so that the thirsty marsh marigold, mahonia and broom in all their shining yellows could drink and drink the

singingly clear cold water.

That evening, I could not comprehend that the wildflowers you’d picked for us had outlived you.

On your wrist, the second hand of your new watch was lurching forwards, though your pulse had stopped.

X: Highcliffe, Dorset, 1912

“Our machines govern our behaviour, thought Hertha, but they will never teach us meaning.

Science can never determine if there is something beyond flesh and bone because that inquiry is inadmissible.