The bird was imprinted on the pane. She could even see its head, turned to one side, eye half-closed.
Was there a puff of dust when it struck the glass?
Mireille finished the chicken left in the fridge from last night, wiped fingers on the balding towelling dressing gown. Peered, nose up to the glass, to where the sun caught minute burred cross-hatching, feather over feather.
She scraped the plate, filled the kettle. Shuffled in slippers to the back door and out; unpegged the skirt, underpants, pantyhose from the line. Came by the back porch into the bedroom. Folded the clothes into the small suitcase on the bed. From beside the bed she took the novel, tucked it into the case, took it out again and held it a moment, put it on the bed next to the case. To decide later.
In the kitchen, the kettle burbled, clicked off. She poured water over coffee and sugar, opened the fridge for milk. The greying avocado needed eating. Closed the fridge, remembered and opened it again for the milk. Brought cereal from the cupboard, slammed the stubborn door, twice, took down a bowl, poured cereal and milk.
Left the milk on the counter and went, stirring cereal, to the sagging armchair facing the picture window, straightened the embroidered throw and sat.
She thought: The book might take too much space. Anyway, would there be an opportunity to read? Would there be a better lamp, less awkward to turn off than last time?
Mireille had had to get up to turn off the light last time visiting Sue, hands blind in the dark. Expecting to strike furniture, bruise her toe or worse in that house she didn’t know.
She ate, nuts and seeds cracking, crunching, exploding inside her head. In her garden, twigs like lace on the limbs of European trees black against the pearl sky; the roll of dusty pale and dark eucalypts over and over to patchwork fields a long way away. A passing car flashed dirty yellow between her own trees and the next.
She would make a list. For the shop. Something for tomorrow night – she might be late back. Vegetables, a chop. Black rye bread.
She’d take the bread up to town with her. And twist up some muesli in a bag.
She’d take her own shampoo.
Her own soap. Toothpaste. Facecream.
She thought: The traffic.
It was too cool to sit for long like that. The dressing gown was lumpy and bunched underneath, the spoon sliding in the empty bowl. Outside, silent tops of trees shifted and bowed.
She should take a spare cardigan, and her coat. An umbrella.
If she left it too late, the traffic would be horrendous. Barging, pressing, pushing. Her hands gripping the wheel; the muscles aching for hours.
Her neck would seize; she wouldn’t enjoy the restaurant.
She put the bowl down on the kitchen bench, stretched, scuffed along the hallway to the bathroom, glanced up at the mirror.
How like her eyes were to her father’s. M le Directeur du bureau, whose eyes seemed always set in bruises, as if life were draining, drying, tiring. Deep lines connected the flat planes of his cheeks to the thin-ridged nose and the full drooping mouth. That pleated flesh. The face moulded in grey. She looked at her own face, and put on the light.
There was pink, suddenly, though the eyes were shadowed still.
Sometimes he would say: ‘I am a reserved man.’ To explain his silence.
Maman would chirp: ‘Mireille is so like her papa,’ and in silence the girl and her father would look away.
A small man, but that wasn’t what she remembered.
At the time she was so much smaller than he. Standing in low sling-backed heels. Often cross with boredom and pre-adolescent selfishness and because of those sudden cessations of conversation when she entered a room.
What she thought she remembered now was his head turning toward her, that last day. It had never made sense, what she thought she remembered. In profile, his head turning toward her. Half-seeing, his mind elsewhere, his eyes shadowed. In her mind, there was his head, again, in profile, turning toward her, shadowed against the white suit and against the sun flaring through the window. This repeating and repeating from that time to this. He might have laid his hand on her hair, but that was not what she remembered. It was this, over and over: his head turning, turning toward her. Perhaps he had been about to speak, but had not. Against the white, and the light, she could not see his face. She could not say: ‘When I saw his face that last time,’ because she had not, quite.
Then, she and Maman packed their bags, everything shoved, squeezed and pressed. Travelled in silence on a hot bus past chaos. They shuffled in a queue. Children clutched stuffed toys, while their whining rose into sirens. There were no white men, shuffling toward the airplane on the tarmac. Far away, at the edge of all that concrete, spiky-headed palms nodded under a bloated sky. She did not ask, ‘Where is Papa?’ Maman had her by the hand and she gripped back; the Congolese air puffed so sullen. In this suddenly snarling world, once safe. And though her father had made it seem safe, some said it was because of him, and those like him, that things were no longer so.
The women and children walked towards expulsion. Her father stayed. The angry Congo engulfed him. Forever, his head turned toward her in unfinished movement.
These eyes were what other children saw, batches of twenty-five high school children or so year by year, decades later when she sat, hands folded, teaching them French. ‘L’heure est crépusculaire. Crépusculaire,’ she repeated. ‘Much as in the English. Crepuscular,’ and twenty-five fifteen-year-olds worried for a moment that they’d never heard the word.
‘It refers to the point between day and evening.’ They looked at her. ‘The hour might be crepuscular; certain animals are crepuscular.’ She looked at them. ‘The animals come out in the evening.’
One often speaks one’s second language better than the natives do their own.
White now streaked her dark hair. Her reading classes hung by a chain. A little like an ageing comptesse in exile, she thought.
Mireille stood under the shower for four minutes She was blotched red and steaming by the time she towelled herself dry.
When she had lived in town there was her cat, Adrienne, who watched her showering from the top of the cubicle. Adrienne died of a galloping cancer hastened by old age.
Anyway, here was no place for cats, for hunters. It made nights very still, unbreathing and soundless, with no small furry body on the lap.
In the back of the wardrobe hung dresses she no longer wore. They were history. They no longer fitted. She was no longer young, dancing, drinking, pressing her mouth against some young man’s, kneading the flesh of his back through his thin shirt. Her students would never have believed she had been so loud and whirling, hips grinding. Those blank mornings afterwards, looking over to where someone barely remembered was just waking. Many, many, and hardly two the same.
There were, on the other hand, the two she had lived with, for four and three years apiece. They each fell, eventually, into long, unbroken silences, long and unbroken perhaps because she herself always met silence with silence. That moment for reconciliation passed, twice. The story of these relationships lay in the sum of their silences. There was Papa, in the wordless, bony faces. Well, of course. But they could not get it right; their silences were not self-contained, were undeniably threaded with hurt. With offense. There was no dignity to their distance. No reserve.
Each moved out quietly, avoiding her eyes.
Not many learned the language of silence well. Ah, those endless explanations of others. The young Mireille had always turned her head away from her mother’s cooing, her pleading. Maman, in search of shoulders on which to place all that anxious weight. That which weighed on the helpless dependent shooed from the colonies to stone-grey, urban France. Maman placed this in turn on the shoulders of Mireille’s uncles and her grandfather, the other one. Grandpapa. Once, a man brought flowers to Mireille’s mother and bowed, but he soon ceased to visit.
Maman used many words to say very little. Waved her little helpless hands in the air, her breath too personal on the cheek.
In the Congo, Mireille’s father had retreated into his study, or the office. Stood silent in the shifting dapples of the tropical garden.
Grandpère, her father’s father, had eyes like his son’s. He visited rarely, for he thought very little of her mother’s character.
Soon, there was not much to keep the girl in France. She asked no-one how one emigrates. It was not simple and she took all the steps herself: the forms, the doctors, answering questions. She had a degree in English by then, and a certificate of teaching. Her decision to emigrate surprised, to say the least, all the cousins and uncles and aunts. They seemed unsure whether to take offense; in any case, her aunts did so at length while it seemed the uncles did not.
In the past, Uncle Luc had searched out the old ivory chess set for games with her in the damp study with mottled plaster, far from the tight-wound querulous cooing that filled the rest of the house. Now he said merely: ‘She wants to leave.’ His brother looked up from his journal and shrugged.
Maman peered up at Mireille with tearing eyes. But she always had done that.
A niece, too young ever to have known Mireille in France, back in that heavy, chill house with the chestnuts looming dark in the grounds, had come by during an Australian visit. This was after years of diminishing contacts with the family. Contacts Mireille thought of as occasional reaching into mist across a river: who knows where or how distant is the other bank, or whether anyone is reaching back? As she grew older, this image sometimes interested her. Perhaps, one day, fingertips might touch.
Surprised at herself, she dithered over what to have for afternoon tea and whether the girl would stay longer. And, if she did, what to have for dinner. Would she stay the night and was the couch, though it pulled out into a bed, comfortable enough?
But, in the end, they spent a bare half hour of clattering awkwardness, little eaten. The habit of her French had disappeared; the girl’s own English was undernourished.
Uncle Luc had died five years before. Nobody had thought that Mireille did not know, or that she might want to.
The niece looked at the platter; Mireille regretted the choice of cake. The girl left and never wrote. Faded into the family that had forgotten Mireille and that she herself chose now to forget. It was a finality she had reached, she thought. The mist thickened to fog. Nobody, from either side, reached out.
Two of her ex-students once came by. They’d found her telephone number. So disconcerting to see them out of context. She tried to understand it as flattering, but instead saw it as an incursion. Was annoyed for a blaring moment that coincided with sudden music from next door. Not fair, she knew, but somehow connected. She fell into an unsmiling silence that saw them off all the more quickly.
The music from her neighbours pushed, invaded, streamed through their open doors and windows and all of Mireille’s rooms. New songs repeated over and over until replaced by the next favourite, vibration insidious through wall and floorboards. The soundtrack to her mounting irritation. Anger. It was, she said and believed, why she left and came in the end to the quiet trees. Retreated to her quiet trees.
In those urban days there were two woman friends, teachers. One, with whom she visited galleries and saw movies. A weekly evening meal; slow walks along landscaped pathways by the sea; the same television programs. A creeping pattern, someone else’s idea of middle age. A trudging in step toward the banal; airless. Her father’s head turned toward her, silent in her mind’s eye. She read contempt in the twist of his mouth. Her friend took her by the arm. The irritation wavered about her and her plodding friend. In the end, an argument was manufactured between them, and that was that. Soon, she had pulled away altogether from town and landscaped pathways, in favour of the quiet trees.
The other woman friend was Sue, who had come dancing with her when they were younger. She kept wine and whisky, and was incurious, competent with her children and her busyness. It was at Sue’s suburban house she would stay tonight, because of the reunion at the restaurant she would attend, of French teachers to whose journal Mireille had years ago contributed.
She stood in the kitchen, not really seeing the ghosted bird’s image on the window. She had fetched the mail and the newspaper; she’d pulled at some weeds on the way back up the path to the house. She had washed her hands and was thinking: What should I be thinking?
The milk stood on the counter.
For God’s sake, look at that.
She put it away.
The traffic. Avoiding the city. She would park at Sue’s house and take a tram to the restaurant – but then she would have to take one back again when it was night. Sue would say there was no problem with that. Perhaps, perhaps. If she took the car through the city, directly to the restaurant, she might not be able to park at all. A taxi, possibly, but expensive there and back, and in any case sometimes they kept you waiting.
She took a breath. There had been a time when she would make a decision, without doubt, and it would be the right one.
When had this dithering begun?
She read the paper and did the crossword until lunch, and ate a little cheese and a salad of wilting lettuce leaves, a softening tomato and the greying avocado, to use them up.
Outside, the wind died down. The trees stood, on call. Then a thin veil of rain fell, stopped, began again. The pantomime of weather.
Vegetables. A chop. Black rye bread. I will take muesli twisted up in a plastic bag. Fold up the dressing gown and think about my shoes, not to forget the bathroom things. I will take a pillow; I slept badly on hers. God, the time; these things must be done and then I must go.
I will have to stop for petrol.
The petrol station at the bottom of the hill, next to the general store, had one bowser and a scratched counter. Where the teenager read magazines and ignored her. From there the road wound downhill. It joined wider, faster roads with traffic that would hiss past until all reached the bedlam of the suburbs. The inevitable SUV urging at her bumper bar while its driver mouthed obscenities.
She looked through the window, where the rain had stopped and the sun was weak behind clouds.
Energy leaked away; she could trace the draining from her veins.
Like wading through molasses.
In her bedroom she dragged out a drawer and took out two cardigans, one thick and one light, and folded them, laid them by the case, with the book. She went into the sitting room for the crossword puzzle and a pen, and laid them on the book. She took down her dressing gown and folded it, laid it on the cardigans. Toiletries. She fetched them in the washbag from the bathroom, laid it with the folded clothes.
What have I forgotten? Will they all fit? There is too much now. She looked at the folded things.
What have I forgotten?
Nothing. I have forgotten nothing.
Sue had said: ‘Of course you must come.’ Sue, who would come to visit and talk and talk and pace through the quiet house until she drove away always with that quick spit of gravel from the wheels.
Mireille would drive there in silence. Taking herself through the traffic in silence. In her own space, looking out to where chaos was on the verge. Always on the verge. Aggression barely held in check; rules so nearly broken.
Remember? Remember when beyond the silent bus window chaos broke its bonds, descended with a machete to hack at a man’s head and his blood sprayed unrestrained, red against black. His wife bent double, uncertain whether to cradle body or head. Remember when the thick breeze swayed the palms; remember her father turned his head to her. Forever turned his head to her. He who, they said, among many others was a cause of chaos was now swallowed by it. The silent man taken into silence. Forever in silence offering her his head.
How long had she stood there staring at the mound of clothes and toiletries, book and crossword? Her mind full of unfinished sentences, whispering. The traffic. The food. The clothes.
It will take so long. I have not gone to the shop.
In the end, she let out a breath so deep it meant she had not been breathing for some time. She went to phone Sue to say she would not be coming after all because of the traffic, the parking, the car. The night, the tram.
A small silence, and Sue said, ‘Again?’
Mireille sat watching the trees, her feet tucked under the embroidered throw. Watched the silent stirring until the spill of night, far away a few pinpricks of light. Perhaps some creatures out there. Crépusculaire, she thought. Behind her in the kitchen stood the imprint of the bird halted mid-flight on the pane. ©
