Robin Sommers  

 

 

HAIL

 

          Hailstones are falling on the roof, Andrea muttered, turning over on the rumpled sheets that should have been laundered days ago.  Pret put his hand on her head like a cap.

          You're musing again.  You've left me and gone off again.

          They weren't consciously listening to the occasional rattle of gunfire in the distance, not even when it was in the lane beneath their window, far up on the topmost fifth floor.  The shutters had been closed for so long the inside of their flat was permanently evening.  They slept when there was no more light and later they could feel the sweat running between them when they came together.  Passion was saved for the light -- the last light or the first, although sometimes they forgot which it was and were surprised when night didn't ensue for the perfect sleep after pleasure.  Their cigarettes had run out and they remarked on the damage it had done to their lovemaking, but, after awhile, even that didn't matter.  Pret would sit in the rocking chair by the shuttered window and pretend to smoke, his hand languidly passing from his mouth to a semi-outstretched, debonair bent arm.  The verses would come out of his mouth on the warm smoke of his imagination and hover in the air over the bed, beguiling Andrea who felt the words fall lightly on her naked breasts, stimulating them like light kisses, so the nipples drew erect.  She envied his effortless production of marvels -- she knew his poems were better than hers and it galled her.  She wanted to make the same splendid leaps -- the startling comparisons -- the alliterated swoops that actually meant something fine and genuine in spite of the poetic conventions.   Her envy created desire in the depths of her womb and she would gasp when the poem was finished and rise and straddle him on the rocking chair.  

         

          She swiveled her head and kissed his hand, letting each finger lie between her lips for a moment, and then pushing it gently aside for the next one. 

          I don't think those are hailstones, Pret said.  I think they're bullets or shrapnel or something.

          He began to sing just as the hail began falling again.  It was a meaningless song that seemed to be in a real language -- perhaps Portuguese -- but was not.  It was in a language that would no longer exist when the shutters had been opened, and then they would no longer be there.  They knew this, indeed, but it didn't matter, at least not as much as what they might find tonight in words of poems they would surely compose.

 

          Andrea rose and went to the sink in the corner and cut up an apple, one of the many they had brought with them.  When the apples  were gone, there were tins and tins of food left by her parents when they had fled town.  She could hardly remember her parents.  She wondered if she could sketch their faces if she tried, but she thought not.  They were a part of the past and it, and the future, simply did not exist.  It was strange how exhilarating this thought was -- perfect freedom.  Maybe that's the kind of freedom a quick death gives people, she thought.  She did not want to say this to Pret, though -- it was something she thought outside the room.

          She began to sing, a kind of lament, a kind of fada, inspired by the faux-Portuguese.  It took her over and she even forgot Pret for awhile.  He had been her audience -- a perfect one -- but now that didn't seem important.  The song absorbed her and it was absorbed into her and shaped a moment of personality that astonished her.  This is what we live in hope of, she thought.  This sort of instant. 

          When she turned with the apple in her hand he raised his arm in a kind of salute.  He had known, of course, that an achievement had been reached.  She sat down on the bed next to where he lay and fed him the apple, piece by piece, as though each one were a perfect gift.

         

          She wondered that they had not quarrelled.  Perhaps it was the fear that there was nobody else but them and a quarrel could become the world.  A larger quarrel had become the world already and that was what they had escaped by climbing to her parents' flat and pulling the shutters. They had met at the cafe where students met and talked about philosophy.  Pret was passionate about philosophy, but it was poetry that seduced him and enticed him away even from philosophy.  They had begun talking to each other in a kind of poetic shorthand, partly made up of allusions to poems everyone they knew was reading.  Then they began going further afield, to Baudelaire particularly, and it was then they had left and gone into the darkened park and made love on the ground beneath a large elm tree.  The roots hurt her back but she was even more worried about policemen who patrolled the park at night and knew all the places to look for couples.

          Their friends talked more and more about politics and terrorism but she and Pret would break away and walk by the river that charmed them even though its banks were concrete.  The lights of the city never went out completely and they would sit close to the water and bend over and look at themselves. 

          I was Narcissus, for awhile, Pret had said.  But it was lonely.

          Yes, so was I, but the sex isn't very good.

          Is it better now?

          She had laughed and bitten his ear, but not very hard.  His wavy hair hung down around his ears and over the back of his collar.  He always wore an Oxford-cloth shirt with a button-down collar, open at the neck.  His face was usually rough since he shaved only every other day.  But now he hadn't shaved in a week -- there was no soap and the water in the shower had dwindled to a slow drip.  

          Do you think anymore about philosophy?  Andrea asked when he had finished the apple.

          Always -- it's inside my poems.  Rather it's around them -- it holds them together.

          She wondered if that's what hers were lacking.  She wished she could only love his poetry and not also envy him for it.  Perhaps love and envy are not at odds, she hoped, but she felt a pang of self-deception.

 

          The poem she wrote then was about how loving him made her feel she was perfect but then her envy stared her in the face and she knew it was far from true -- in fact, love had made her more imperfect.  She didn't read this poem to him.  She wanted him to think she loved him perfectly although she doubted he loved her perfectly. 

          She began another, honest poem about how love had made her more imperfect.

          You're more poetic than I will ever be,"  he had said in the early hours that morning.

          Of course, I'm a woman.

          That's exactly what I meant," he had said very soberly, as though it were a significant truth he had finally grasped.   And then he held her very hard against his chest -- too hard, but she didn't complain because she felt vulnerable.

He said he wondered that they had not become bored, but he stopped wondering and wrote a splendid poem about peaches and punting on a river.  It was lazy and flowed  evenly like a quiet stream, she said. 
          You're right and I do feel lazy,  he agreed.  I never felt lazy until I met you, he added and threw her shirt at her.  She hadn't worn anything for days -- she seemed to have forgotten that she ever had.  She had learnt to take care not to spill hot tea on herself.  There wasn't any left now.  They were suspended in time as people are who are waiting for something -- something to happen that will set life in motion again.  When bombing could be heard at night they did not open the heavy shades and sometimes it drew them together in desire, in transforming themselves into dawn they hadn't seen for weeks -- or was it months now?  It couldn't be -- there was still food, although it was becoming hard to prepare a proper meal. Pret prided himself on devising a new and original dish each day when it was his turn to cook.  She had fallen back to omelets alternating with pancakes.  And something had to be done to find water.

The hail came again the night  they spoke about love poems.

There is no other kind -- all poems are about love, he pronounced a bit contentiously.

What about war? --  and death?  -- and nature?"

They're about love of war and death -- and nature --

Nobody loves war, she objected forcefully.

Everybody loves war --

Nobody loves death --

We are all in love with death -- poets more than anyone else --

Poets love life.

And death.

That's just because thinking of death makes one love life more.

That's a trick -- it depends on a verbal ploy to prove the opposite of anything.  And then there is the 'little death' --

That I am in love with --

So am I --

There was a rumbling above them on the lead roof, and they froze for a moment.

What could it be?

Pigeons.

It's too loud for pigeons.

Storks.

Yes, storks.

But it wasn't storks.  Gunfire was now far away when they could hear it at all -- as though it were in the mountains to the east.

When the heavy bombardments began Pret was sitting crosslegged in the corner on a cushion, dressed only in satin tights. He shut his eyes when the bombs hit.  They shook the building and made them feel the building would shoot up like a rocket into the sky.  When she  started to go to the window and peek out, he had shouted No!  It startled her -- she'd never heard him shout  and his voice had a coarse barbarity.

 

Why would anyone wear satin tights?   They make you look like a rajah.

I am a rajah.

She began to giggle and that made him laugh -- a low self-conscious chuckle without real humor.

There was an explosion so strong she sat down against the wall and braced her back against it.  She tipped her head off the wall and squeezed her eyes shut, alarmed by possible vibrations conveyed to them.  But it was the sound vibrations against her ears that caused her to yelp and cover them with her fists, pushing hard down against them. The pain in her ears frightened her.  What if her hearing should be damaged?

Across the room Pret looked detached -- smiling at a private joke perhaps.  He seemed to be part of the pain in her ears.  When the pain was gone, which surely it must be soon, everything would be the same again.As Pret went out the door that led to the toilet in the hall, he didn't flinch at a crash on the roof.  How odd, she thought.  How unfair.

The storks have flown away again -- had you noticed?  Pret asked as he came back.  The bombing had just stopped.

 

She put on her jeans and sweater and sat in the old chair by the shuttered window and wrote down a title: "Storks."

Do storks' knees bend backwards?

I don't think so -- I don't think I know.

Never mind.

It was the best she had written -- she could imagine storks swirling above the building, unable to settle on their nest because it had been destroyed by hailstones -- they were disoriented by the hail and the gunfire in the distance -- had their eggs been destroyed? -- finally one of them lit next to the chimney to make sure -- everything was gone -- all the potential they had worked for.

She took the poem over by the window to read it again in the dim light -- was it early morning or late afternoon? -- the sound of the storks' wings reached her from far away -- from their flight to Egypt which had begun early.  She added these lines and then drew a line through them -- ending with the empty potential of reproducing themselves.

She didn't show it to him although he walked over to the window to join her. .He was curious; it had taken a short, intense period to write it and he had scrupulously avoided interrupting her work -- an unspoken courtesy they accorded one another . She loved it -- whenever she re-read it, it shone like the forgotten sun -- but she didn't share it with him.  That made her uncomfortable so she said, It's not quite finished yet.  I want to finish it before I read it to you.

But she knew it was finished and that she would never read it to him.  She saw in his eyes that he did not believe her.  The silken cords between them had begun to stretch.

That night the hail began again.  They lay next to each other without touching.