Garbo’s Faces
a Novel — Part 31: Death
She asked Ms. Graessli to call for a taxi, and it arrived astonishingly soon.
“Monstein, bitte,” said Harriet to the driver, who had actually stepped out of the car to close the door behind us. Not New York or London, this.
“If I were a girl again,” she said once we were underway, “I would not wish for stardom. Instead I would wish for a nice, young farmer in one of these villages, and I would spend my days mending his socks and milking our cows. But,” she added, “it’s too late for those wishes, or to un-wish my face.”
The village of Monstein was not much. A hundred cottages, at most, and a white church, with a tall, very sharp, heaven-pointing steeple, all clinging to the side of the mountain. The surroundings, however, were simply wonderful. You might as well have been on the moon, it felt so unearthly, so removed from London, or New York.
We stepped out and Harriet took a deep breath and belted herself on her chest a few times, a little like Tarzan, as if to make sure the air would go all the way down. Then she looked at me and smiled. “My spiritual home,” she said.
She told the taxi driver to wait for us and took my arm.
We walked in silence for a few minutes while I took in the scenery, and while she, apparently, returned in time. There was more to tell me. In retrospect I see that she really wanted me to understand.
But a that time, as we walked, I thought she had closed that chapter, at least for now, so it was out of nowhere that brought it up again.
“When I told Doctor Franzen about the horse, Athansor, and the snowstorm that Christmas morning, he didn’t say much, just nodded and took notes. I asked him if he thought I was crazy, but he just shook his head and smiled and asked me to go on.
“It was when I mentioned the trolls that he seemed to have had enough. ‘You have vivid dreams, Ms. Brown,’ he said to me. ‘Dreams,’ I said. ‘They’re not dreams.’ And then I remembered the necklace. ‘I can prove it,’ I said. ‘Really?’ he answered in that you-know voice that doctors seem to be blessed with. ‘Yes, really,’ I said. ‘The necklace they gave me, I can go get it right now.’ ‘No need to rush,’ he said. ‘Just bring it next time.’ Then he closed his notebook and said that the session was over.
“But it was gone. I nearly demolished my apartment looking for it. But there was no necklace. Can you understand, Nachiketa? We did that twice. Don’t you see?”
“Yes, I do see,” I said.
“It was so completely gone, gone with such vengeance, that it must have never existed. And you realize what that meant,” she said, looking at me over the rim of her sunglasses. “It meant I had in fact dreamed everything. And then, and you have to forgive me if I went a little crazy, all I could think about was where had the real world ended and the dream world started. Had I in fact been made with child in 1927, and had I given birth in 1928? Had I seen you aboard the Christina, or was that part of the dream too? Surely Phantom, the horse, and that thief, I forget his name now, and his theater were all dream, and that terrible snowstorm. And the trolls, the necklace, or the no necklace after all, proved it, didn’t it? A dream.
“But,” and at this she touched my arm, anxious that I hear and understand, “there was a voice, no, not even a voice, just a breathing, that said that the necklace did in fact still exist, it was only hiding. I had felt it around my neck, my neck told me, I had felt the stone upon my chest, my chest told me. It had left me, said the whisper, to teach me a lesson.”
We had stopped, and she still held on to my arm, as if to make sure that the extra contact provided a second channel for her words.
“And if I didn’t see the doctor for a week, and didn’t refill the prescription, then I could almost hear the necklace from somewhere far away, from wherever it had gone to. From wherever it was hiding.”
“It was with Madhuri,” I said.
“Why didn’t she tell me?” she asked. “Why didn’t she just tell me?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and that was the truth.
“But then I would see the doctor again, and of course, I could see it then, clearly, again: it had all been a dream.”
She let go of my arm and continued walking. Slowly. I caught up with her and she took my arm again.
“If I had been a farmer’s wife,” she said, looking out over the valley below, “things would make sense by now.”
“Perhaps,” I said.
“No, not perhaps,” she answered. “Definitely. If you live a whole life in clear air and in simple surroundings, working the land and milking the cows, and mending the socks, there is no room for problems. There are no movie contracts to fight over, or white horses, or dead organists.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Nachiketa,” she said. “I am an old woman. All I do is think. I think and I think and I talk to myself, and I think some more. I have imagined a simpler life, without all my stupid worries and complicated demands, and I have imagined it so deeply that I have lived it. In my room at the hotel, walking back and forth, or in my apartment in New York, or on the streets down to Greenwich Village: I have lived that life from beginning to end, simply, making butter and cheese, cooking vegetables for my husband, and having no children. Just him and me in our cottage and all that clear air. I have lived that life many times. I know it. It is simple. Don’t tell me I am not sure. Have you lived it?”
“No,” I said, and shook my head. “No children?” I asked then. “You wouldn’t want children?” That struck me as not quite part of the idyllic scene she painted me.
She looked up at me and patted my arm, even smiled, “Nothing personal,” she said. “I’d want a life free of all complications. As plain and simple as possible, and children are never plain nor simple.”
“I see,” I said, and did.
“And since you haven’t lived that life,” she said. “You must not question it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No need,” she said. “Just believe me.” It was a command. But then she added, “Please.”
My left hand found hers where it rested on my arm, and squeezed it. “I believe you,” I said. For I did.
We walked on in silence for several minutes. Somewhere down in the valley they were cutting grass and piling it up on the drying racks. I could smell it from where we walked, a sweet, simple smell, and with the movement of those men far below us, I could taste Harriet’s simpler life, just her and all those childless, mended socks, and I believed her even more.
“I didn’t sleep last night,” she said.
She gave me a moment to reply, and when I didn’t, she amplified, “I sat on my bed all night, holding the necklace with both hands, willing it to stay, holding it, not taking my eyes off of it for a second. Keeping it.”
“I am sure it will not leave again,” I said.
“How can you know that?”
“I think it wanted to come back,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I think it’s here to teach me another lesson.”
That was something I had not considered. And she could be right for all I knew. I looked down to make sure she had not lost it again, already, and I saw it glitter now and then as the front of her coat shifted while we walked.
And as if to make sure herself, her hand went up to touch it as I watched. Then returned to her side, satisfied.
“Cecil never told anyone,” she said and for several moments I had no idea what she was talking about.
“About what?” I said.
“About you,” she said.
“About me?” I still didn’t quite get it.
“Well, Cecil Beaton. He knew about you, of course. I asked him to bring you to Greece.”
“Of course.”
“That was good of him,” she said, but added, “but he was still a weasel.”
“His books?” I said.
“He made money on them. On me.”
Which, apparently, was his biggest sin.
“But he never mentioned me,” I said.
“No.”
“So, perhaps not a very bad weasel,” I said.
“Not such a bad weasel, but a weasel nonetheless,” she insisted.
“He’s gone,” I said. “I read it somewhere.”
“He had a bad stroke in seventy-four,” she said. “I saw him a year later, I think it was November or December, and he was a broken old man in a wheelchair. I’m glad I didn’t marry him.”
“Was he glad to see you?” I asked.
“Yes,” she answered. “He cried. I should have thanked him for never bringing you up.”
“Yes,” I said. “I think that was gallant.”
“Well, he had promised,” she said.
“And he kept his word.”
“Yes,” she said, and suddenly there were tears on her cheeks, “he kept his word.”
“Was that the last time you saw him?”
“Yes. I never saw him after that. He died a few years later. A lonely man, and me a lonely woman. But had we married we would have driven each other absolutely crazy, I’m sure of it. Besides, I think that deep down he liked boys better than girls.”
She fell silent again as we walked farther away from the village. I thought briefly about the taxi driver, still waiting. Would he still be there when we got back? And then I realized, yes, of course, she was still Harriet after all: he would wait all day and all night and all day again, if it came to that.
Her hand felt comfortable on my arm, and every now and then she increased her grip to maintain her balance. Perhaps she was getting tired.
“Should we go back?” I asked.
She only shook her head, and we continued up the slight incline on the back of this large hill.
Someone had had the wonderful foresight to place a bench at the head of the knoll we were ascending, just before the path veered down and right, to soon begin to climb in earnest.
And I realized that this was the place she had been aiming for, for when we caught sight of it, her pace increased and she almost ran the last few steps to the bench and sat down.
She was not out of breath, but almost. I was, too, almost, what with the altitude and the sudden exercise.
“This is my lookout spot,” she said. “See, there’s the church.”
All I could see of it was the sharp white finger pointing skyward, with the cluster of cottages to keep it company.
“What a view,” I said.
“The best in the world,” she answered.
I looked over at her and she was taking it in with her entire face, with all of her body. Clutching it to herself, it seemed.
“I have a little collection of Oskar’s psalm,” she said.
The psalm. I had not listened to it for some time. “Here?” I asked.
“No, in New York. Quite a few organists have recorded it now,” she said. “It has become famous.”
“I did not know that.”
“Yes, I have fourteen different versions of it, some better than others. Some slower and longer, some faster and shorter.”
“So you have not forgotten him?”
“Well, he did exist, didn’t he? As a matter of public record,” she added, almost formally.
“Yes, of course.”
“Did we meet him, that is the question?” she said, and her hand again sought the necklace and touched it before returning.
“We did,” I said, feeling the weight of the tiger’s-eye in my pocket, where I always kept it.
“You’re so certain.”
“Yes.”
“You never doubted?”
“No.”
“Never once?” She looked at me, a little amazed.
“No.”
She shook her head slowly. “That’s hard to believe.”
“I have my stone,” I said.
“Oh, yes, the tiger’s-eye,” she said. “It never ran out on you, then?”
“No, it never did.”
“No lessons to be taught,” she said. Then added, “What is wrong with me that their gift did not want to stay?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
Again, her hand found the necklace to make sure.
“You’re lucky,” she said. “You’re not famous, and your troll gifts stay put.”
I had to laugh at that, and she smiled too, amused I think by her own cleverness. “Yes, I guess I am lucky,” I said.
We fell silent for a while. Just breathing the clear, cool air, and looking out over the valleys and mountains.
“I am afraid of death,” she said.
I had yet to reach the age where death was a thing that had to be faced, or even considered; at least not with any real degree of gravity. Of course, death is always there, waiting. That last exhaling. Someone once said that all breaths come in pairs, except the first, and the last. Every second that passes is in fact one second closer to your own Death, axiomatically. Sure, I knew that, analytically, conceptually. But I don’t think you actually embrace death as Death, as an ever-intensifying and now approaching reality, until you reach her age, or unless you fall critically ill and given a timeline.
And I thought: how old is she? I calculated that she must be, gosh, nearly eighty. Eighty years old later that year. Only a couple of months short. Yes, I saw, then, that death would have grown into Death for her, that she could see him, not too far off. No too many corners away. Waiting. That last exhale.
I didn’t answer her, for I had no idea what to say. Anything I could think of simply fell short, so for some while I watched her watching the valley below. Until she said, finally looking at me, as if my thoughts were in plain view. “I guess you’re too young to worry much about that.”
“I don’t think about it,” I agreed.
“I do,” she said. “All the time.”
Then, mercifully, I did think of something to say. Attra came to me, either for real or through memory, I could not tell which, but he told me what to say, and it was right: “Snakes have a good word for it,” I said, and she looked at me, her eyes still and wide: whatever did I mean?
“Attra once told me. They have a good word for death: ‘Sensi.’ It translates to ‘the bigger sloughing,’ and that, I think, is as close to truth as words can take us.”
“Sloughing?” she asked.
“It’s what snakes do when they shed their skin for a new one.”
“Sloughing,” she said again. This time to herself. “Sloughing. The bigger sloughing.” Then she smiled. “He should know,” she said.
She seemed relieved.
“In India, we learn from the moment we’re old enough to listen, that there is really no such thing as death,” I said.
“Maya,” she said.
“Yes, Maya,” I answered. “God of Illusion.”
“But an illusion that hurts,” she added.
“I know,” I said.
“And you know, Nachiketa, if it is an illusion that hurts, or if it is life — a real life — that hurts, who cares? It doesn’t matter. The pain is pain either way. The pain is real.”
“But you don’t vanish. You don’t cease to exist,” I said. “That is at the heart of, and the lesson of, the illusion. Everyone here in the West believes that they cease to be when they die, that they cease to exist, as if they are the flesh and bone and gristle of a body and not a spirit which occupies one. The Western religions always talk of you and your soul, as if your soul is something different from, quite aside from you, and a thing over which you don’t have much control. I think what I have learned, and what I have come to believe — no, believe is not a strong enough word, what I have come know — is that I am a spirit, I don’t have one. And I — the spirit — goes on, cannot die, only thinks it dies, or will die. That is Maya.”
“It is comforting to hear you say that with such certainty,” she said.
“Well, it’s true.”
“Is it?”
“I think you know it is,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I don’t know that.”
She uttered this with such sad finality that her necklace dissolved and in the same moment reappeared as a heavy impossibility in my left trouser pocket. I think we noticed the disappearance at the same time: her hand flew up to her neck for confirmation, and the next moment, she shrieked in such pained lament that I felt the hair rise on my arms.
“It’s gone,” she said.
I brought it out, or tried to. It resisted me, made itself very heavy as I fumbled with it. Insisted on staying put. Insisted on shelter. But then acquiesced, tentatively. Was I returning it to that woman? Yes. I don’t like her neck, too turbulent. Please. All right. And it let me bring it out. I showed it to Harriet, who shrieked again, but not so loudly this time.
“At least it didn’t go very far,” I said.
“What is so wrong with me?” she said. “Why am I so awful?”
“You are not awful,” I asserted.
“I told you it was here to teach me a lesson,” she said. “You had better keep it.”
“She gave it to you,” I said, and held it out for her to take.
“I don’t want it,” she said.
“It’s yours,” I said.
She shook her head. “I don’t want it.”
“Are you serious?” And I stressed serious to make sure she knew my question.
“No,” she said finally. “I am not serious.”
She took a deep breath which was part sigh and part gasp. “I want it more than anything. But it does not want to stay. You saw what happened.”
“Take it,” I said. And she did. I helped her clasp it around her neck again — the necklace did not fight me, but neither would it cooperate and clasp itself — and she patted it to make sure it was still there. It glittered, if a bit reluctantly, I thought.
“Do you think it’s afraid of me?” she said suddenly.
“Perhaps,” I said.
“What does it see in me that scares it?” she wondered.
“I don’t know. I have no way of knowing.” Then I added, “I don’t think it is scared of you. I don’t think it is scared of anything.”
Then neither of us said anything for some time. Her hand found the necklace several times, patted it softly just to make sure, then returned to her lap. She looked out at the valley below, or into the sky beyond, still as a statue, but for her necklace-visiting hand, until, at length, “We had better get back.”
© Wolfstuff