All Days Are Night (2 page)

When Gillian came around, her father was standing by her bedside, in quiet conversation with the doctor. Gillian didn’t listen. She closed her eyes and saw the hole in her face through which she had seen inside her head. She tried to raise her hands to hide, to protect herself. The covers were pressing down on her, she could hardly move her fingers. Suddenly breathing was a struggle too. She opened her eyes. The two men were still there. They weren’t talking now, and were looking down at her, into her. It was more than Gillian could do to stop their looking or deflect or respond to it. She closed her eyes and ran away as far as she could. A silly game, a dance, a children’s skipping
rhyme with endless verses. Then she heard her name, the doctor had said it. When she looked up at him, her eyes met her father’s. Her father turned away.

How are you feeling?

She didn’t say anything. She mustn’t give herself away. She was hiding, and if she didn’t move, they would never find her. She was capable of staying hidden for hours on end, in a wardrobe or behind the sofa, in the attic, before she realized that no one was looking for her. Then she would slowly start to creep back, show herself more and more blatantly, but it was as though her long period in hiding had rendered her invisible. Her parents seemed to see right through her. What a relief when she’d been standing for a quarter hour in the kitchen doorway, and her mother finally told her to set the table, as though nothing had happened. She heard the door and saw her father leave the room. The doctor followed him out.

Something was broken. Gillian remembered the feeling of despair when she held the pieces in her hand as though they could knit together and be whole again. She couldn’t remember how the crash had come about. Only the feeling of weightlessness. Suddenly she understood that time had a direction, that it was irreversible. Her first memory was that sense of not being able to do anything anymore, of having no force and no mass. It was as though consciousness had already deserted her body, which accelerated through space, collided with something, was thrown back, hit something else in a ridiculous to-and-fro.

Gillian had always known she was in danger, that she would sometime have to pay for everything. Now she had paid. When the doctor asked her what she could remember,
she had slowly moved her head from side to side. She wasn’t shaking her head, she was looking for her memories on the white walls. But the things she saw there had nothing to do with her. Her job, her parents, Matthias — they were all from another life.

Everything is still there, she said, only I am gone.

The careful movements of the nurses, their deliberate smiles.

Tell me if this hurts.

Pain was small events that took place just in front of her face, a fireworks of stabbings that Gillian couldn’t connect with herself. It was her body that reacted to it, flinching or convulsing. The nurse apologized, her voice sounded impatient. Gillian didn’t want to apologize for her body, which was nothing but an heirloom. She was someone else, she had only just moved in here. When people came along, she opened the door to admit them. She watched her visitors, tried to read in their expressions what they thought of the address. If they seemed impressed, she was happy. It is nice here, isn’t it. Bit of a work in progress, of course. She laughed. The nurse explained what she was doing, but Gillian wasn’t listening. She tried to bring the pain into harmony with her face, to make one single image, but she couldn’t do it. The picture was incomplete, the proportions didn’t work.

Almost done now, said the nurse. There, that wasn’t too bad, was it?

She left the room. The mirror lay on the bedside table. Gillian was thinking about the mirror, not her face. The
mirror was the face she could hold up in front of herself. She put out her hand, hesitated, waited a moment longer, then took it. She played with it, turned it around and looked at its shiny back, a dim reflection of her face, a sense of intactness. If someone had looked at her now, it would be his face in place of hers. Then she turned the mirror around again and looked at herself for a long time. Earlier, she had sometimes stood in front of the mirror at home and gazed deep into her eyes. But her eyes were glass, the pupils black holes, and at the bottom of their impenetrable darkness was her body.

She tried with all her might to recognize herself in that flesh. She saw eyes, eyebrows, mouth, but they formed no whole. When the doctor or a nurse entered the room, she quickly put the mirror down on the table and imagined her image was trapped in it, so that she could hide from the looks of the others. She tried to make out disgust or horror in the expression of the nurse. But all she saw was a friendly indifference.

She looked at the faces of the nurses, tried to make herself a nest in them. In her mind she copied their expressions, pursed her lips, blinked her eyes, furrowed her brow. She involved them in conversation just to be able to watch their faces, and to be able to rest in them.

Her father moved a chair up to the bed. When Gillian turned her head, she could see him sitting there staring at an exhibition poster on the wall, three red dots placed diagonally on a green background.

Do you like that picture?

Three dots. She had picked her head up off the pillow. He looked at her quickly and then looked away.

John Armleder, she said. The artist’s name suddenly sounded rather threatening.

They would pull off some skin, she didn’t quite understand it, but the doctor wanted to take some skin from her forehead, and without cutting the blood supply, fold it down, and use it on the new nose.

Matthias is dead, said her father.

Yes, said Gillian, of course.

She had known it, she had seen him. The tears were running down her temples before she realized she was crying. Her father took a Kleenex from a box on her bedside table and wiped them away, in an unusually gentle gesture.

I’m sorry.

I could have been dead. Gillian had said the sentence over and over to herself, but it didn’t have any meaning. The tears stopped as suddenly as they had begun. Her father dropped the Kleenex in the bin by the door and returned to the bed, settled down on the chair. He waited for a moment, then said he had a couple of practical things he needed to do.

Your mother was in your apartment and tidied up a bit.

Ever since she’d been in the hospital, Gillian had thought a lot about her childhood and the time after she’d left her parents’ house, of drama school, the years on small provincial stages. She had a vague memory of how the story continued, her getting married to Matthias, her job in TV. She had come up with an ending, too, a scene in a garden, a sunny afternoon in summer, she was older now,
but still attractive, there was a man, they were drinking white wine together and talking about old times.

Matthias is dead, said Gillian.

He had a blood alcohol level of 1.4, said her father. It sounded like a statistic, as though he had given Matthias’s height or weight.

I’m tired, she said.

At least you’re alive, said her father.

That’s what people say. I’m not really sure …

He gave her a short look and then turned away.

Your friend said you and Matthias had had a fight.

Maybe, said Gillian, maybe we did.

Matthias had found the roll of film and taken it to the photo shop to be developed. Just before they were due to drive to Dagmar’s to see in the New Year, he had slammed the prints down in front of her.

Who took these?

Gillian had taken the pictures without looking at them and slipped them back in the envelope.

That’s nothing to do with you.

Matthias gave a humorless laugh. Of course you think it’s perfectly acceptable to appear in photographs like these.

You can rest assured, she said, they’re not going to be published.

Oh, so you took them for fun?

Maybe they were going to be a present for you, she said.

For a moment Matthias didn’t say anything. What if
the guy in the photo lab kept a set of prints? he asked. But then you don’t seem to care who sees you like that.

It was you who took the film to be developed, said Gillian, I never asked you to.

Matthias walked out. An hour later he was standing in the doorway in his dark suit and asking if she was ready. It was at that moment that Gillian lost all respect for him.

Okay, she said, we’ll go. I’ll just get changed quickly.

She went to the bedroom and put on her shortest dress, black fishnet stockings, heels. She put on scarlet lipstick and applied a little scent behind her ears, a sultry perfume Matthias had given her that she hardly ever wore. Matthias stood impatiently in the corridor.

When she passed him on the way to the front door, he hissed after her, where do you think you’re going, a party with friends or a brothel?

Neither of them said a word in the car, and at the party he did his best to stay away from her. Gillian saw him in the distance with his gelled hair and shiny suit.

By two a.m. there was just a hard core of partiers left sitting around the big table, which was full of dirty plates and empty glasses. Matthias was the only man, he stood off, glass in hand, staring through the patio door into the dark garden. Dagmar, who had recently broken up with her boyfriend, was saying she was finding it increasingly difficult to see men as erotic objects. Even though the agreement had been that Gillian would drive them home, she had had a fair bit to drink. She agreed with Dagmar and said women simply had nicer bodies than men. Dagmar got up to go to the bathroom. She stopped behind Gillian, placed her hands on her shoulders, and kissed her on
the cheek. Matthias opened the patio door and stalked out into the garden.

Matthias was arts editor of a magazine that was not noted for its coverage of the arts. When they first met, Gillian was still working for the local TV station. She had been impressed by the way he seemed to know everyone in the cultural scene. Their paths kept crossing, Matthias introduced her to people and talked her into going to openings and premieres. One very cold winter day they met at the premiere for a musical in a small theater in the city. After the show they sat together with some of the cast. Gillian talked to the composer for most of the evening. He had asked her what her name was, and she explained her mother was English. She had a sense the composer knew something about her that she herself was unaware of. When they all left the theater a little after midnight, the streets were full of snow, and an icy wind was blowing. Matthias said he had something he wanted to tell her. While the others walked to the funicular, he took her across the street to a small belvedere. The lights of the city glittered in the cold; even the stars seemed unusually close. Matthias showed her a memorial stone under a big linden tree and told her this was where Büchner was buried. He put his arm around her shoulder and told her the story of the poor child in
Woyzeck
, which Gillian dimly remembered from school. And the moon was a piece of rotten wood, the stars were little golden midges and the earth an upside down harbor. And then they kissed.

That was as far as things progressed that evening. They had parted at a tram stop and gone home their separate ways. It wasn’t until the spring that they first spent a night
together. Gillian had a couple of difficult relationships behind her and was glad that Matthias was straightforward and seemed to like her. He was very tender, but over time they slept together less and less often. They were both so busy that Gillian kept putting off the conversation she meant to have with him about it.

When he dropped to his knees and asked for her hand in marriage, she laughed and tousled his hair. It was in an expensive restaurant where they knew her and greeted her by name. First, the situation felt embarrassing, then she enjoyed it. Over the course of the following years, there had been a good many carefully orchestrated candlelight dinners and champagne breakfasts, and a surprise party for her thirty-fifth birthday with the guests in masks, weekend outings to spa hotels, overnight trips to specially decorated rooms for romantic couples.

Then she got the job as host, and suddenly she was making as much as Matthias. What really seemed to get to him, though, was the fact that when they were both reporting on the same events, she was the one who seemed to matter. Only now did Gillian understand that he might know everyone by name, but no one really took him seriously. When she did interviews, she sometimes out of the corner of her eye saw him standing around nearby. No sooner was the camera switched off than he would turn up and jump into the conversation. He would demonstratively throw his arm around her, or kiss her.

Is he really offended? asked Dagmar when she came back.

We had a fight this afternoon, said Gillian. She got up and went out into the garden. Matthias was on the terrace,
smoking. What’s the matter? Her voice sounded harsher than she had intended. Come back in, it’s freezing out here.

He claimed she had been flirting with Dagmar. Was it her who took the pictures? he asked.

That’s enough, said Gillian.

We’re going, said Matthias, as though he hadn’t heard her.

I’m not good to drive, said Gillian, and she traced a one-fingered spiral in the air. We can always stay with Dagmar.

You’d like that, wouldn’t you, he said.

She left him and went back into the house. Someone spoke to her, but she didn’t reply, and poured herself a glass of grappa, knocked it back, and then another. Are you planning on staying the night here? asked Dagmar. Perhaps we’d better, she said with a laugh.

Yes, said Gillian, we had a fight. But that doesn’t matter now.

Her father stood up. Take some of the flowers, why don’t you, she said. I’ve no idea who sent them all. Do you want me to read the cards? he asked. She shook her head. I feel like I’m a corpse in a mortuary.

That afternoon her mother called to thank her for the flowers. She asked when she could visit Gillian.

Ideally never.

Every intact face reminded Gillian of the destruction of her own. And she had the feeling she had to bear the horror of the other person, and comfort them with her own bravery. The only thing she could endure was the presence of the doctors and nurses.