Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups Page 3

  I am not about to propose a new social morality; I do not wish to break convention or tear away restrictions. I am merely expressing my real feelings. Are all the feelings that arise in one’s mind reasonable? I could not drive from my mind the conviction that the Surabala who reigned behind Ramlochan’s portals was more mine than his. I admit this feeling was highly illogical and improper, but it was not unnatural.

  I was now unable to concentrate on my work. At midday, as pupils burbled over their books, and everything outside shimmered, and a soft breeze brought the scent of the flowers of the nim trees, I yearned – what I yearned for I don’t know – but this much I can say: I did not want to spend the rest of my life correcting the grammar of India’s future hopefuls. I hated sitting alone in my large room after school hours, yet I couldn’t bear anyone coming to see me. At dusk I listened to the meaningless rustle of the betel-nut and coconut trees by the pond, and reflected on life. What a baffling tangle! No one thinks of doing the right thing at the right time; instead, wrong and unsettling desires come at the wrong time. You, worthless though you are, could have been Surabala’s husband and lived out your days in contentment. You wanted to be Garibaldi, but look what you became – an assistant master in a village school! And the lawyer Ramlochan Rey, why did he need to be Surabala’s husband? She was nothing to him, right up to the wedding: he married her without giving her a thought, became a government lawyer and was earning nicely, thank you! He ticked her off if the milk smelled of smoke, and when he was in a good mood he ordered some jewellery for her. He was plump, wore a long coat, was perfectly pleased with life, never spent his evenings sitting by the pond staring at the stars and regretting the past.

  Ramlochan had to go away for a few days on a big court-case. Surabala must have been as lonely in her house as I was in mine.

  It was Monday, I remember. The sky had been cloudy since dawn. At ten, rain began to patter down gently. Seeing the look of the sky, the headmaster closed the school early. Large chunks of black clouds rolled across the sky all day, as if grandly preparing from something. The next day torrential rain started in the afternoon, and a storm blew up. It rained harder and harder through the night and the wind blew more and more fiercely. At first it had blown from the east, but it gradually swung round to the north and north-east.

  It was pointless trying to sleep that night. I remembered that Surabala was alone in her house. The schoolhouse was much sturdier than hers. I several times thought of fetching her over to the school – I could spend the night on the raised bank of the pond. But I could not bring myself to do this.

  At about one or one-thirty in the morning the roar of floodwaters became audible – a tidal wave was approaching from the sea. I left my room and went outside. I made my way to Surabala’s house. The bank of the pond was on my way – I managed to wade as far as that, up to my knees in water. I scrambled up on to the bank, but a second wave dashed against it. Part of the bank was about six or seven feet high. As I climbed up on to it, someone else was climbing from the other side. I knew with every fibre of my being who that person was; and I had no doubt that she knew who I was.

  We stood alone on an island nine feet long, everything around us submerged in water. It was like the end of the world – no stars in the sky, all earthly lamps extinguished. There would have been no harm in saying something, but no word was spoken. I didn’t even ask if she was all right, nor did she ask me. We just stood, staring into the darkness. At our feet, deep, black, deadly waters roared and surged.

  Surabala had abandoned the world to be with me now. She had no one but me. The Surabala of my childhood had floated into my life from some previous existence, from some ancient mysterious darkness; she had entered the sunlight and moonlight of this crowded world to join me at my side. Now, years later, she had left the light and the crowds to be with me alone in this terrifying, deserted, apocalyptic darkness. As a young budding flower, she had been thrown near me on to the stream of life; now, as a full-bloomed flower, she had again been thrown near me, on the stream of death. If but one more wave had come, we would have been shed from our slender, separate stems of existence and become one. But better that the wave did not come. Better that Surabala should live in happiness with her husband, home and children. Enough that I stood for a single night on the shore of the apocalypse, and tasted eternal joy.

  The night was nearly over. The wind died down; the waters receded. Surabala, without saying a word, returned home, and I also went silently to my room. I reflected: I did not become a Collector’s chief clerk; I did not become Court Clerk; I did not become Garibaldi; I became an assistant master in a run-down school. In my entire life, only once – for a brief single night – did I touch Eternity. Only on that one night, out of all my days and nights, was my trivial existence fulfilled.

  (1892)

  Translated by William Radice

  ★

  After Apple Picking

  by Robert Frost

  My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree

  Toward heaven still,

  And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill

  Beside it, and there may be two or three

  Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.

  But I am done with apple-picking now.

  Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

  The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

  I cannot shake the shimmer from my sight

  I got from looking through a pane of glass

  I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough,

  And held against the world of hoary grass.

  It melted, and I let it fall and break.

  But I was well

  Upon my way to sleep before it fell,

  And I could tell

  What form my dreaming was about to take.

  Magnified apples appear and reappear,

  Stem end and blossom end,

  And every fleck of russet showing clear.

  My instep arch not only keeps the ache,

  It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.

  And I keep hearing from the cellar bin

  That rumbling sound

  Of load on load of apples coming in.

  For I have had too much

  Of apple-picking; I am overtired

  Of the great harvest I myself desired.

  There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,

  Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

  For all

  That struck the earth,

  No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,

  Went surely to the cider-apple heap

  As of no worth.

  One can see what will trouble

  This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

  Were he not gone,

  The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his

  Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,

  Or just some human sleep.

  (1915)

  ★

  On the Beach at Night

  by Walt Whitman

  On the beach, at night,

  Stands a child, with her father,

  Watching the east, the autumn sky.

  Up through the darkness,

  While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,

  Lower, sullen and fast, athwart and down the sky,

  Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,

  Ascends, large and calm, the lord-star Jupiter;

  And nigh at hand, only a very little above,

  Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.

  From the beach, the child, holding the hand of her father,

  Those burial-clouds that lower, victorious, soon to devour all,

  Watching, silently weeps.

  Weep not, child,

  Weep not, my darling,

  With these kisses let me remove your tears;

  The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,

  They sh
all not long possess the sky – shall devour the stars only in apparition:

  Jupiter shall emerge – be patient – watch again another night – the Pleiades shall emerge,

  They are immortal – all those stars, both silvery and golden, shall shine out again,

  The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again – they endure;

  The vast immortal suns, and the long-enduring pensive moons, shall again shine.

  Then, dearest child, mournest thou only for Jupiter?

  Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

  Something there is,

  (With my lips soothing thee, adding, I whisper,

  I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)

  Something there is more immortal even than the stars,

  (Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)

  Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter,

  Longer than sun, or any revolving satellite,

  Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.

  (1871)

  ★

  The latency of evening – its hovering and lingering – is dispelled by an infantile utterance in this next poem: and, in that instant, the wonder of our earliest reaching-out towards language is captured – in moonlight – for ever (apparently ‘moon’ was one of the first words uttered by Frieda Hughes, daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath).

  The moon itself serves as a mirror, an awed orb, reflecting the child like her poetic father, as the evening is cowed . . . by a new imagination springing to life.

  Full Moon and Little Frieda

  by Ted Hughes

  A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket—

  And you listening.

  A spider’s web, tense for the dew’s touch.

  A pail lifted, still and brimming – mirror

  To tempt a first star to a tremor.

  Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their

  warm wreaths of breath—

  A dark river of blood, many boulders,

  Balancing unspilled milk.

  ‘Moon!’ you cry suddenly, ‘Moon! Moon!’

  The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work

  That points at him amazed.

  (1967)

  ★

  When John Dickens, a clerk who had fallen on hard times, was arrested for debt in 1824, he was sent to the Marshalsea Prison with his family . . . that is, with all but young son Charles, aged twelve, who was instead dispatched to work in a factory at London’s Hungerford Market, making pots of blacking for boots. Little Charles (he was small for his age) would work long hours in the half-ruined Thames-side factory, above a basement of rats and alongside an orphan called Bob Fagin. At the end of the working day, Charles would walk in his child’s pale suit a full four miles by night to his dirt-cheap Camden lodgings. If he ever had any time to himself, he would wander the city, waiting for London Bridge’s gates to open, making up stories about the wharfs and the Tower of London. On Sundays, he would visit his family in the prison.

  These hardships infused Dickens’ subsequent fiction, of course, notably the early chapters of David Copperfield and the character of Little Dorrit. Indeed, the grown-up Dickens frequently revisited the blacking factory in his mind, its shadow forever inked over his inner life. ‘I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man,’ he wrote, ‘and wander desolately back to that time of my life.’ It should be no surprise then that this adult Dickens, when struck down by a bout of his chronic insomnia, would take to the streets of London, striding for hours by gaslamp.

  From Night Walks

  by Charles Dickens

  I chose next to wander by Bethlehem Hospital; partly, because it lay on my road round to Westminster; partly, because I had a night fancy in my head which could be best pursued within sight of its walls and dome. And the fancy was this: Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie adreaming? Are not all of us outside this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our lives? Are we not highly persuaded, as they daily are, that we associate preposterously with kings and queens, emperors and empresses, and notabilities of all sorts? Do we not nightly jumble events and personages and times and places, as these do daily? Are we not sometimes troubled by our own sleeping inconsistencies, and do we not vexedly try to account for them or excuse them, just as these do sometimes in respect of their waking delusions? Said an afflicted man to me, when I was last in a hospital like this, ‘Sir, I can frequently fly.’ I was half ashamed to reflect that so could I – by night. Said a woman to me on the same occasion, ‘Queen Victoria frequently comes to dine with me, and her Majesty and I dine off peaches and macaroni in our nightgowns, and his Royal Highness the Prince Consort does us the honour to make a third on horseback in a Field Marshal’s uniform.’ Could I refrain from reddening with consciousness when I remembered the amazing royal parties I myself had given (at night), the unaccountable viands I had put on the table, and my extraordinary manner of conducting myself on those distinguished occasions? I wonder that the great master who knew everything, when he called Sleep the death of each day’s life, did not call Dreams the insanity of each day’s sanity.

  (1860)

  Dickens’ likening of dreams to madness can, of course, now partly be explained away by science. J. Allan Hobson, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, has done just that, stating that during REM sleep and dream states we experience ‘frequent visual hallucinations (in the perceptual domain), instability of orientation and recent memory loss (in the cognitive domain) . . . the mental state that dreaming simulates best is delirium.’

  ★

  Old Bud

  by James Wright

  Old Bud Romick weighed three hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce, and he weighed an ounce. He used to sit on his front porch swing, enraged and helpless, while his two tiny grandchildren, hilarious and hellish little boys, scampered just out of his reach and yelled hideously, ‘Hell on you, Grandpa.’ His unbelievable Adam’s apple purpled and shone like the burl of the root of a white oka, and he sang his God Damns in despair.

  Old Bud Romick has fallen asleep as the twilight comes down Pearl Street in Martins Ferry, Ohio. The window shutters close here and there, and the flowing streetcars glow past into silence, their wicker seats empty, for the factory whistles have all blown down, and the widows all gone home. Empty, too, are the cinder alleys, smelling of warm summer asphalt. The streetlight columns, faintly golden, fill with the cracked mirrors of June bugs’ wings. Old Bud Romick sags still on the porch swing. The rusty chains do their best for his body in the dark.

  The dark turns around him, a stain like the bruise on a plum somebody somehow missed and left under a leaf. His two hellions have long since giggled their way upstairs. Old Bud Romick is talking lightly in his sleep, and an evening shower brings him a sticky new sycamore leaf in his sleep.

  Whether or not he is aware of leave, I don’t know. I don’t know whether or not he is aware of anything touching his face. Whether or not he dreams of how slender sycamores are, how slender young women are when they walk beneath the trees without caring how green they are, how lucky a plum might be if it dies without being eaten, I don’t know.

  (1982)

  ★

  They Sit Together on the Porch

  by Wendell Berry

  They sit together on the porch, the dark

  Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.

  Their supper done with, they have washed and dried

  The dishes – only two plates now, two glasses,

  Two knives, two forks, two spoons – small work for two.

  She sits with her hands folded in her lap,

  At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak,

  And when they speak at last it is to say

  What each one knows the oth
er knows. They have

  One mind between them, now, that finally

  For all its knowing will not exactly know

  Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding

  Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.

  (1998)

  ★

  ANNE ALVAREZ

  I wouldn’t mind rereading the following excerpt about nightfall in the Italian countryside, even if it wasn’t written by my husband and therefore very familiar to me. I am still astounded by the way he lives with, breathes in and somehow inhabits the slowness and gradualness of the night’s arrival. I myself always got the beauty of it in patches and snatches, but he is totally with it, helping us to savour every second’s change. He is, after all, a poet, and, by the way, a gourmet. The great art critic Robert Hughes called this kind of art and sensibility ‘Slow Art’.

  It is not only children who need to be read to, or later, to read to themselves at bedtime, it is also we adults. Our reads don’t necessarily have to have positive content but nor should they be too disturbing. What they do have to do, I suspect, is have meaning. In my experience, it is the undigested shards of the day, the worries, the disappointments, guilts and fears which are as yet not fully thought about and through and therefore remain unprocessed, that become those sharper shards that cut into our peace of mind at night. Psychoanalysis teaches that the undigested or semi-digested stuff gets into our dreams or even produces nightmares. The most those dreams may do is allow us to remain asleep, but it is now known that they can also do real processing work for us, and even produce highly creative solutions to problems.

  Note, however, that although Alvarez ends the passage with the predatory cries of the screech owl who haunts his mountain retreat and of his relief at never having seen its face – or that of the death that he reminds us awaits us all – the underlying rhythm of the piece and the dying fall of that closing passage is beautiful, brave, and strangely right.

  Extract from Night

  by A. Alvarez

  Once I had grown out of my childhood fear of the dark, night not only lost its power over me, it lost its separateness, its distinction, and I forgot all about it. At most, it was a minor inconvenience, but only irregularly. I rediscovered it, however, twenty years ago, in an old farmhouse in Italy. The house is in Tuscany, though not in Chiantishire, the expensive rolling countryside south of Florence, with its vineyards and cypresses and swimming pools. It is up in the mountains, on the edge of the wild Garfagnana, Tuscany’s northernmost boundary, on a steep hillside covered with chestnut trees beside a stone mule-track that was once a Roman road. The Apennines rise up behind it, slowly at first and thickly wooded, then bare rock and turf. In front is the valley of the River Serchio, with Barga, a little Renaissance town crowned by a diminutive Romanesque cathedral, poised on its hill just beyond the flank of the next mountain. Across the valley are the Apuan Alps – the Marble Mountains above Carrara, where the stone was quarried for Michelangelo’s statues – fold upon fold of them, rising to the bleak cone of the Pania delle Croce. It is a place full of history, yet history has left it behind because it is too rough and remote to smooth down and assimilate.