Authors: Jerzy Peterkiewicz
Patrick got up, his knees feeling bruised and swollen around the bone. He rubbed them until they looked very red. Then he flashed one of his charming smiles.
‘Do they hurt you, Patrick?’
‘What, the knees! Not at all.’
‘Now, run along, and be careful when crossing streets. Promise me, darling!’
‘Oh, yes!’
Patrick climbed over the wall between Dolly-mum’s back garden and that other big, posh garden. He was neither on speaking nor on barking terms with the poodle Nicky. A shorn mop of a coward, nothing more. The rheumatic lady hadn’t been on cooing terms with Patrick since that scene inside the closed Underground station. He was never asked to take Nicky for a walk. Just as well. Now no barking was expected from the other garden and no barking came.
Patrick slid down and sat on a kitchen stool which Dolly-mum kept outside in case the sun was warm enough for peeling potatoes in the back garden. The glass door had ugly pockmarks after a spluttering rain the previous night, Patrick’s ears were getting warm, then hot along the edges: nipped by words, cold, icy words, which the human draught had blown from inside the house.
‘I don’t see why a backward child should be treated like an adult. Psychiatry! it’s ridiculous to psycho-analyse children.’
The voice was high-pitched, foreign, but never groping for words. It had so many of them already, chilled inside the mouth, that they came out like ice-cubes on a tray.
Patrick could have repeated them all exactly as they reached him: each meaning defrosted his memory. He was afraid to peer in.
Then another foreign voice took over. It sounded thicker and chewed the sentences before bubbling them out:
‘I am afraid I don’t agree with you, Vera. Modern treatment can do wonders. In the States, for instance, retarded young people with I.Q.s below fifty can be trained to do a job useful to society. In my hospital, and it wasn’t the best I assure you, a little mongoloid made extraordinary progress after only three years of hospitalization.’
‘What is a mongoloid, Doctor Whitestones?’ Dolly-mum asked. But she was not allowed to hear an explanation. The first foreign voice, the one which had a quick supply of ice-cubes in the mouth, rushed in at once:
‘He’s nothing of the sort! My child a mongoloid? Impossible. It’s entirely your fault, Augustus, for giving him such an appalling education. Why didn’t you send Patrick to the Lycée Français as I advised and implored you to do? It was the only school possible for a boy of his cosmopolitan background.’
‘Cosmo-what?’ Patrick’s father bellowed from somewhere far in the house. ‘I didn’t want him to be brought up as a Bulgar. He was born an Englishman. In England, not in Macedonia. So there. I won’t say a word more.’
‘You will, when I take you to your English court,’ the foreign woman replied.
Patrick knew it was his mother, but Boris under his skin itched with jealousy, so he preferred to play it safe. It was perhaps more polite to call her a foreign lady than a woman. His father did that, when he decided to say one word, then ten, then twenty.
Patrick counted them on a silent adding machine inside his spellbound memory.
‘Shut up, woman! If there is any justice left in this country, they’ll deport you to Bulgaria. And your Bulgars will lock you up as a female phantom of the Opera.’
After Augustus the father had spoken, words came in piles on top of one another.
Both mummies were now talking; the first, however, had the last word. To which the doctor replied:
‘Vera, it couldn’t possibly have been P.K.U. Okay, I’ll spell out phenylketonuria, if you wish, but tell me why are you so aggressive about German measles? In the first months of pregnancy they could, I repeat they could, cause mental retardation. Vera, you mustn’t deny the validity of a medical term just because it has the word German in it.
What, Vera? Do I love them? You’re being aggressive again.’
A man with thick glasses loomed against the glass door. His eyes bulged out, his short grey hair stood up. This was beyond any doubt Doctor Patho himself. Patrick crouched behind the kitchen stool, though it was utterly useless. How could anyone hide from glasses like these?
Patrick trembled for Sindra. Doctor Patho was going to marry her. He had come all the way from America to lie in her bed under his powerful black-rimmed spectacles.
By day he would be occupying the sofa, a lavatory chain attached to his right leg. No room for Patrick, no room for anybody. Even Sandra, the beautiful Indian Sindra, would be squashed against the wall when behind her desk, and against the wall when in bed.
Suddenly, Dolly-mum trotted into the garden and cried out at the sight of Patrick:
‘Oh, it’s you! Blow your nose, dear, and come in to say hello to your mum. What a surprise, isn’t it!’ She herself looked sick with surprise.
Through the open door Patrick saw a slim, well-dressed lady who had blue hair and a cat with blue eyes, perched like a parrot on her shoulder. A thin leash hung from the cat’s collar, as far as his mother’s ankle. For a moment which seemed to last very long, Patrick completely forgot about Doctor Patho.
Two days later was Saturday, sunny for autumn and almost warm, the right time to go to the Zoo, especially as it happened to be a sort of delayed birthday for Patrick, who was born on the thirtieth of September. Seven hours more and it would have been October, just think of that. And now it was October, simply because his first mummy couldn’t make the thirtieth. She had to sing in Toronto on the twenty-fifth, in Detroit my dear on the twenty-eighth, then Doctor Whitestones kindly arranged a visit to a world-famous oculist in Chicago at three-thirty on the twenty-ninth, and of course, my dear, the flight was postponed, I spent the night at New York Airport. Jets have become so unreliable recently. No, I really couldn’t get here in time for his birthday. Such a sweet darling.
Talking to Dolly-mum, she called him Patrick. As soon as she turned to him, Patrick became Boris, and Vera played with his name adding bits to it, which sounded funny. She had also a funny way of talking to Prince, the Siamese cat, but she wouldn’t take him to the Zoo. Prince was allergic to parrots, she said, and wherever you went to the Zoo, to any zoological garden, Vera pronounced it jarden, you always saw or heard parrots, and one was enough to make Prince sick. Maybe parrots, too, made Patrick’s father ill, because he said he couldn’t possibly face the Zoo. But he had given Dolly the money for a taxi one way, for the tickets and the seventy-four bus to come back. It was, in fact, a present from his dad; the second mummy provided tea in her blue pot on return.
Walking between his two mums from cage to cage, from the bears on the rocks to the crocodiles behind the glass, Patrick Boris felt that the tiring spell of good memory wouldn’t bind him for much longer. Moreover, he wasn’t in the least allergic to parrots, whether violet and yellow, or yellow and blue, which was very interesting, and he longed to hear that ‘very interesting’ straight from the upper lip of Sindra. He didn’t mind that she believed he was Patrick the spotty Ginger as well; it would be even more fun to have Sindra next to Vera or Dolly-mum, trotting with her crocodile bag just to say hello to a live crocodile.
The croc had his eyelids lowered and looked around without looking. Sly and sleepy, pretending he didn’t really care about those handbags.
‘The croc snoozes away, just like daddy,’ said Patrick, very pleased with his sudden observation.
‘Boris, caro mio! Che intelligente ragazzo!’ Vera covered his newly washed hair with violent kisses and said he smelt nice, which made him enormously proud of himself, of his first mum, of his private lady doctor and of the croc who had dad’s eyelids.
‘I like when you speak Bulgarian, mummy,’ he complimented her, brushing his hair back into position.
‘Call it Dalmatian, and we both will be happy,’ Vera laughed. She enjoyed herself and said so repeatedly to Dolly-mum, who said very little in return. She only squeezed Patrick’s hand from time to time, and he thought it was because of the big apes. They frightened Dolly, the orang-outang most of all: he had no cage manners and kept showing his armpits and his rude scarlet arse to the ladies outside.
‘He should hide himself in the trees,’ said Patrick and squeezed Dolly-mum’s hand, to which she replied with a scarlet blush. ‘Vera-mum,’ he turned on his heel smartly, ‘tell me which of these men in the crowd are descended from the apes?’ His good memory hadn’t as yet left him: he could almost risk spelling ‘descended’, if Vera the Bulgarian wanted to know. She knew only one man descended from a monkey, she said, and winked at Dolly. This time Patrick guessed the intended meaning at once.
‘Well, in this case I must be the son of a monkey too.’
Vera’s nose became narrow with surprise. ‘Retarded!’ she cried to Dolly. ‘What nonsense.’
The conversation over tea at Dolly-mum’s house didn’t go at all well. Both ladies seemed nervous and powdered their faces over cups of tea. Vera unpacked her American birthday present for Patrick which she had forgotten to bring in the morning. It was a space-gun, the latest model, emitting a dustless spray of atomic dust. Patrick adored the changing lights at either end, green to red, red to green, and violet at zero point for instantaneous death. While kisses of life were being exchanged over the weapon, Patrick managed to gasp out one question:
‘. . . would kill well!’
‘Ten times over, Boris. It’s the overkill type, you see.’
‘Do the Bulgars have such weapons, mummy!’
‘I hope not. But a true Bulgarian gentleman, Boris, carries arms to defend his lady’s honour.’
After this and another returnable kiss, Patrick played with the space-gun in the back garden. He wanted to spray Nicky to see what would happen to his crinkles and the mop, but the poodle was probably on his last walk before the Overkill. Then he heard loud voices coming through the glass door. How peculiar, he thought, that his first mum should sound through the glass so very foreign and full of ice-cubes in the mouth.
Perhaps Doctor Patho was back in the house, raping them both, with a cup of tea in his wicked hand.
He felt brave when he pushed the door in. A sly, croc-like, sideways glance. No Patho. The blue tea-pot stood undisturbed on the table. Only Vera looked different. Her slender nose was red, her blue hair bluer. She was holding a handkerchief under her left eye. As for the second mummy, she burnt with terrible colours on top and under her powder. And how she screamed: Patrick never imagined Dolly-mum had that much noise inside her.
He went to bed late and couldn’t sleep. Crying was no use. Besides, he wanted to hold the tears in. Just like not going to the loo when one ought to.
His wrist-watch showed three. He went to Dolly’s bedroom, made sure that she was asleep, and then, very quickly, sprayed her with the dustless death-dust. Dolly-mum jumped up and sneezed. It sounded at first like an overkill sneeze, atomic and final. After that, however, she spoke:
‘Patrick, really! This isn’t funny in the least!’
Patrick didn’t apologize, but sneaked out to look for the potato knife.
Sky
1
I was hanging from a tree, and below, at either side, two men stood: my seventh son and my husband. Amo had strapped me with binds of twisted hair to the bough of an oak-tree, and dug out, according to my wish, a hollow under the tree. And the hollow he had softened with green and yellow moss, so that the fall would be soft, from my womb into the soil.
‘Curse me, husband! Why are you afraid to curse me?’ I cried from above, while the muscles of my arms laboured with the muscles of my suspended belly. ‘I am giving birth to his child, not yours. Why are you here, Adam?’ I weighed two lives, and the earth under the oak was opened to receive one of them: this readiness meant more to me than his presence and his law in the likeness of the law.
‘Eve, Eve, don’t speak. It swells your pain.’ Only this voice had fingers that could touch, and cool the skin, and wipe off the oozing of shame. My second husband, my seventh son, born ten children ago, he now stood waiting for this birth, the first of a new breed.
‘Why are you frightened to curse Amo?’ But Adam kept silent. My first husband guarded his strength with silences.
He had arrived in the night, unannounced by animals, and before the treeman’s parrot had come with a message and a warning.
What could any of them do to me? What could the sky do, when the earth was prepared and my arms were tied to the arm of a strong tree? After this birth we should be in another beginning, free at last from the weakness of our original innocence. Surely the skies between them had no greater strength than the double bond between mother and son?
‘Our father who are in the sky . . . Our father in. . . .’ My first husband was mumbling under the oak-tree, his hands clasped, his knees ready to pull his body down into the dust. Didn’t he know that the law obeyed its own law, that the womb closed in conception had to open in birth? didn’t he know that sons could become fathers, that the mother of the first generation could be the mother of the second?
Suddenly, the pain inside me unlocked a deeper pain which wasn’t mine, but the child’s, crying out its own dread of the beginning. The whole weight of my body was cut in two, the suspended fruit detached itself from the stalk and dropped into the soil. The moss, the green and yellow moss, must have welcomed Eve’s fruit with the softness of a womb, for there was no echo thudding in the hollow, and then the crying stopped, as if swaddled by the hands of the earth.
Both Adam and Amo bent over the hollow. I waited, each muscle along my arms tightening again on a suspended expectation. No, it couldn’t be. I had never given birth to a dead life. Death was only to visit me once. This the law had been made into a law, and the laws obeyed themselves always.
‘It’s not a son, Eve,’ my first husband said.
‘Is the girl breathing? I can’t hear any crying.’
‘She’s speaking with eyes, Eve. They will grow as big as your eyes.’ This was Amo’s voice, happy and sad in turn, the voice of a son in the likeness of the father.