Gael Read online

  Judith Mok

  GAEL

  TELEGRAM

  In memory of my parents,

  Maurits and Riemke Mok

  Her violin. On the first day she had it with her on Torca Point, a small cliff at the end of the park. She’d walked down with their son, his small, dry hand in hers, her violin on her back. They stared down at the deep sea, breathing in the unfamiliar smells of gorse and veronica, not speaking at all, listening to the wind and watching it play with the water against the rocks. The pull of it. Down, down. And then they came out of the water – the boy counted them – six dolphins swimming against the warm current. It was October, the month they always came up towards Dublin Bay, but neither of them knew that. They imagined, both of them sharing the same childish hope, that these dolphins were messengers. It was going to be good, their life over here. The child’s face was full of joy as they watched the kaleidoscopic swirls in the sea below. She took her violin from its case, telling the boy that she was going to make them dance for them, for him. I could see and hear them so clearly from my hiding place. They had no idea I was there, their phantom father and husband. I was witness to the miracle they were about to create. I could see the sky stretching over the blues and greens, shrouding the Sugarloaf Mountain, keeping very still above the spot where the dolphins would appear once again.

  She started to play the Brahms violin concerto. Out in the open it sounded like a folk tune. The boy clung to her coat, waiting anxiously for the dolphins’ reappearance. And two of them did return. They turned and bowed to each other in the air. They splashed the water high with their tails, silently singing to the tune. Mother and son saw the droplets sparkle in the bleak sunlight. She played for a good while – until the creatures swam up close to the rocks and then, just as suddenly, departed, leaving them staring into the empty water. Then she put her violin away and kissed Samuel. They were laughing and talking about Ireland. How wonderful this welcome was.

  I followed them back to their new home.

  1

  ‘So what’s it going to be? Murder or suicide?’

  Women like this were what he had hoped to find on his little trip back to Dublin where, in his earlier lecturing days, he’d enjoyed the splendid squalor of the Trinity College rooms. If he were to feed his nostalgie de la boue, a pub performance by this creature would be a good start.

  He ordered a drink.

  ‘If you listen to me, your head will be spinning for weeks.’

  She had kept her eyes lowered but now, as she repeated the same question, she flashed them at her public. Just long enough for him to recognize her.

  ‘What’s it going to be? Murder or suicide?’

  He suddenly realized that he had returned to Dublin not for a bit of local colour, but to find her. She, the one who was going to tell a tale of love and woe and play her fiddle on a makeshift stage.

  ‘My name is not Molly,’ she admitted.

  She was not Irish, but a Jew from a cold Nordic country.

  ‘Do you like sentimental stuff or the real thing?’

  Her voice was hoarse.

  He peered around in the shadows of the bar to see if anybody was paying attention but no one seemed interested. She loomed in the background, a frivolous piece of amusement. Though that’s not how it felt to him. To him it was story and revelation time.

  She stood very still, her arms glued to her thin body. A bad spotlight brought out the dye in her ragged hair.

  ‘You have to think of me as a ghost, but one that’s alive. An entertaining one, I hope?

  By ‘ghost’ I mean that my body and voice, and certainly the life I’m supposed to have now is mere fiction. I am a memory come alive.

  Okay, here’s how I met my Irishman. There was this thing he said to me when I first saw him. I had so many words, he said. Had I kissed the Blarney Stone, he asked. The what? A stone from his country. I thought they only kissed stones in Mecca, or the big black one I’d seen in Jerusalem.

  My coat was dripping with blood. Some stranger had bled on me during a fight in a café. The stone man followed me into the Mediterranean night.

  Inside he had already managed to tell me that I wasn’t beautiful but strangely attractive. As though I’d never heard that one before. Where is the beauty? In the touching or the looking – or the fact that his knees were getting weak and he wanted so obviously to be inside me. We wandered through the night, nameless. We sat eating fish at five in the morning, watching people go to work. I had a husband at home. Our home. In another city. In another country.

  And I had my violin.

  It was waiting for me in my cold apartment with the tiled floors and the solitary gas heater. It was snowing that night when I decided to leave my violin and accompany my friend Gertrud to the train station.

  My flatmate came with us, cursing the fucking climate, while my friend Gertrud quietly longed to be back home. She had booked a comfortable bed on a high-tech passenger train, with one of those pointy, shining engines that can nearly take you space travelling. But all we found was one desolate latrine car on the track. It was big, bulky and dark, with a huge spout sticking out ready to release its dirt. We teased Gertrud, saying that that was her train and she nearly believed us, but then she smelled the stale urine and realised her trip was off.

  A bunch of scruffy men followed us around the immense station as we searched for a telephone to call Gertrud’s partner to tell him she would not be home that night. But none of the phones worked. The men were yelling at us, and my Scottish friend shivered. We were frightened.

  We left the station and crossed broad boulevards trying to find a café or hotel that might have a phone that worked. It kept on snowing.

  That night was my first time in a real brothel. Our Scottish friend had re-discovered his courage and had to take us there: it was a place to use the phone, he joked, smiling mischievously. While Gertrud made a nervous call to her beloved I settled into a red velvet chair and observed the comings and goings of clients. The door opened and closed to let in the snowy air and silent men who made their way upstairs. I ordered a taxi, sent Gertrud back to my flat and decided to follow my flatmate to a downtown café, where I met the Irishman.

  It couldn’t have been a coincidence that I had just started reading Ulysses. It was a rare wartime German edition that my father had given me. Like Proust, Joyce was a must-read in my family. I hadn’t yet made the connection between Dublin and the island of Ireland, let alone with this nameless night wanderer who seemed drawn to me despite my deplorable lack of beauty.

  He was wildly beautiful. Strong legs. I liked his legs as much as his intelligent conversation. All through the night he talked colours and people. I talked about parts of my life, music. Nothing was real.

  We kissed like teenagers on my doorstep for about an hour, and then I went upstairs and hid in tired confusion in my bed. His lips had that taste. Hot, red blood. Throbbing. I touched my mouth in the darkness of my room, felt my lips against my fingers.

  Back then I was a soloist leading the orchestra. Playing with the locals, earning a reasonable penny, which I brought home to my husband every second week. I kept mostly to myself in that city by the warm sea. It was just that night that had been different. It was like a wave, a wild tune in me that I felt sometimes. I had to wander into other worlds, troubled ones preferably. And then I could play better and get solo work, and people would applaud my music and me.

  The orchestra was not for me. My husband was happy enough with the experience it gave me, but he saw me as a solo player. He didn’t care about the money. There was plenty of that where he came from.

  During my Mediterranean absences I never heard much from him. That must have been the reason. Why I kissed the Irishman, I mean.

  He dropped in a few weeks later. My mot
her had come over to stay with me. While I made tea and fussed with cups, they started a lively conversation about art, which was the thing my mother most liked to talk about. I kept getting up from my seat. I wanted to move my body right in front of him. He fixed his shiny amber eyes on me. I didn’t get an intelligent word in edgeways that night, just stared at his ragged clothes and tried to restrain myself from stroking his hair. He gave my mother a small catalogue of his paintings that he’d brought with him. Did he create a bond between them to seduce me? I doubt it. He told me he would contact me and show me the real life of the city. He was bragging about his wild acquaintances. His stories were lost on my mother and me. All she thought was that his paintings were impressive and, well, everybody can be young and a show-off.

  So let him roam the wilds of this city on his own.

  But I didn’t. The grind of the train wheels home and back affected me; repeated words turned me into a romantic, turned into wishing, turned into me picking up the phone and inviting him out.

  We were not lovers at that time, though it was spring with hot gushes of wind and the irresistible smell of flowering jasmine made us weak with craving ... We’d sit in cafés and restaurants by the sea, behind steamed-up windows if the day turned cold. He held my hand, told me about the mothers in Ireland who go out and steal meat for their family in the supermarkets. Only on Saturday. Only once a week did they have meat on the table. It was perfectly acceptable to steal if you had no money. He came from a neighbourhood where stealing was the norm. I weakly protested that I’d never been to such a place. But he was away with Marx, the underclasses and condoms you could only buy under the counter of a record shop.

  All the usual Marxist bullshit I’d heard before. As for condoms, as yet I didn’t understand that condoms and other methods of contraception were not available for everyone in Ireland. We kissed a lot, let our fingers explore the shapes of our bodies, and he came to listen to my ‘fiddle playing’, as he started to call it. Late at night we’d eat and talk. I never thought about the fact that I always paid the bill. He knew all the places with great views, great ceilings, or great food. And so I paid. I paid to hear him talk about Dublin, where he’d been taught by Jesuit priests. Where people ate grey food out of newspapers and got drunk on brown beer. Where you puked and discussed your hangover and its degree in vivid detail. Every time he told a story I was showered in ‘fucks’ and ‘fuckings’, while I sat in my designer French outfits dreaming up the other person in him – the one who’d tell me his mother could hardly write but knew how to milk cows and talk to them in the first harsh hours of the morning. His granny would sing soothing songs while waiting at the crossing for the train to pass, so that her animals wouldn’t get upset. He traced little drawings on the paper tablecloth of animals running towards us. But his father was a city man, accustomed to the monotonous rhythm of factory work. He came home to a bossy mother and eleven older brothers and sisters. There was always enough to eat. They kept pigs in the yard, where the toilets were. People chained to primal needs, with no words of comfort but those the parish priest had to give.

  Occasionally a quiet young man would join us and nod his appreciation of his friend’s accurate description of their homeland.

  I couldn’t stay sitting beside this friend for long because he smelled so bad. Neither of them had any regard for cleanliness. A full bath on Saturday, and one spin around, that did the trick. Clean enough.

  I’d had plenty of lovers. Everything was always clean in my well-organized young years. Especially sex. My father always claimed that sex was good if you were in love. While we did the dishes my mother would teach me about safe sex. So I developed a shining, erotic universe. Whenever I loved and lusted after a male I expected earth-shattering orgasms. This Irishman who talked his way into my affections and was worthy of great sex put the scrubbing brush between us. As I did my husband.

  He took me to his studio a few days before my orchestral contract finished. I saw that he was talented, really talented. I had learned from my father, who was a great painter, to look at art. As children, we’d been forced to visit countless museums and galleries, to read books on the subject. I’d even modestly attempted to draw. I thought I had no virginal response to art, but his work made my response virginal again. Tough, harsh colours, furious lines. To me it was obvious that nobody could ignore it. At the time he had sold a couple of paintings to a New York gallery, but had to earn his living with drawing lessons. Lessons to women named Carmen and Carmel, to the fiery Dolores del Fuego and other dark-haired beauties who would drive him off to their homes on the back of their scooters.

  Often in the early afternoon, after we had sated our sexual frustration with a variety of tortillas, I would be left standing alone on the pavement waving at a yellow scooter with my as yet platonic lover perched on the back, hands held firmly around some other woman’s waist.

  2

  Gael the painter has met Maria. Gael should have been a priest. He is devoted to Maria who speaks a foreign language and he has lost all beliefs along the long road from Bethlehem to here. Here they are, beside the hot mirror of the Mediterranean sea reflecting her naked, muscular body. There was a hard sun in the sky to shine on her, to catch the colour of her hair for him. So he could go with the taste of her lips on his and find some red clay and wet earth, and rub it on the painting. For blue he took the generous sky without even asking, and dressed her in it. His icon had lips and eyes to talk to and a body in a shrine. A priest in the Roman Catholic Church with his mother Maria minding him. Already he followed the sound of her boots and ate their shadow, keeping their imprint for holiness. Maria came from Botticelli and Rosetti, to show him how she really looked. Gael the painter used rough sand on his brushes. ‘Believe in Maria’ had been pounded painfully on the palm of Gael the schoolboy’s hand ... But he had washed it off with the grey of rain and the white of wind, and at home had watered her further down with his mummy’s bleach over their very own print of Maria. Once she had lost her face he started looking for her, the real one. The Jewish girl that would leave herself for him, for he was the only priest in her church. The priest that could recreate her a thousand times and love them all. Maria came from Cranach and Holbein, she came from the North, her skin ever so cool against the hot air that lost them. A stern face against a sensual background, a burning horizon. No animals could breathe yet. He still held all of them contained in him. But he would show them to her when she minded him, her priest. Roman Catholic still because he is chaste in her church and only loves her in his painting. Because he can show his life in her image. What he saw as a five-year-old altar boy nearly crumbling under the weight of her statue. He was carrying her around the church outside, slippery stones under his shiny, polished shoes, black shoes, black stones wet, and black trousers on the priest in front of him, but when he looked up in the dark of the evening he could not see her under her saintly skirt, for she had folded her legs and the darkness in between them in stone. He painted the wet statue and tasted the salt of her secret in his mouth. He was ten years old when he first received her cold kisses and now he marbles her lips and her skin, so thin the veins, yet so visible they could bleed when you look at them.

  Maria stands at a street corner, her cheeks touched by the weather, alive with a hidden smile, cloaked in a woollen cape that hides her teenage body, holding the case of a fiddle in her arms, singing to it as if it were him she wanted to tell that she already knew him then, in the concrete Bethlehem where her parents were pork butchers and he was the little Catholic boy who had just lost his faith to her, a little Jewish girl. He never talked to her and now he paints the corner of that street, the lack of light and contour, the damaged paint on the woodwork, the rain dripping off the rust on to the street where her footsteps stand.

  As long as he believes in Maria they will come to him, Rubens and Raphael, and offer him the full fruit, the basket of shades, and hand out colours early in the morning. She stands beside him while he works on her and t
alks about his slaves. He tells her they are her slaves; Carmen and Lulu, his scooter girls, have to draw her, only her, until their fingers hurt.

  Here is the city. It has its buildings for humans, for music and dance, food in the streets, knives with real bloodstains on the floor in bars, and the soft, wounded skin of the coat that belongs to Maria when the city meets her and he is in it.

  Maria who talks his language with a silver tone while he starts his painting of her walking with the stars rigid in the night sky above her. Never will he mention these. He will unscrew them and turn them into demons that will tease Maria into love, tease her into duty, the duty to mind him, the priest in her church populated with demons. They are silent and watchful, in awe of her talking, in fear of her bow and her fiddle, and the unpaintable thing called music.

  3

  I went back home, back to my husband, only to dream of Gael. Between concert halls and rewarding melodies, foreign countries, holiday beaches and books, food and friends, talking and writing, visions, sex and stupor, he remained. So when the offer of a new two-month contract with the orchestra came up, I went back to the warm city by the sea.

  He did not know I was coming back. We had kept our feelings to ourselves, and only a letter and a postcard in casual handwriting made it to my home during half a year’s absence. Much and nothing was said in those messages. I picked up the phone once to call him, but when I spoke to him all I could do was listen to the background noises of partying and Mediterranean fun. So I cut our conversation short. And I never wrote to him, not even to tell him I was coming back.

  I made the journey with a middle-aged antique dealer who had let me his apartment in the warm city. He needed to go there as well, to visit his mother, he said, and he might as well give me a lift.