The Book of Other People (14 page)

 

(for Ali Smith)

 

The monster didn’t know what it was - what kind of monster or even, now and again, whether a monster at all. It had lived for what felt like a long time without mirrors, which didn’t exist, or puddles, which it instinctively avoided. There were other monsters in creation, or the monster assumed they were other monsters (it did not philosophize on the nature of monstrosity - all could be monsters, without a norm from which to deviate), and, had it asked them, these other monsters would probably have described it to itself, using the few words and concepts available to them: monster, creation, sun, tree, fruit, merd, good, bad, up and down. But the monster was for some reason averse to this, just as it was averse to puddles, and had only learnt of the practice by overhearing one monster being described by another. The sentence it overheard was: ‘Monster up up good fruit, down down bad merd.’ And so the monster had always found out most about itself by touch. There were two soft floppy growths upon each side of its head, and its long curved back felt rough at the bottom, like the skin of a fruit. The monster couldn’t see its own feet because its belly, which was huge, got in the way. Every time the monster explored itself, though, its hands (it definitely had hands) seemed to encounter something different. With no written language, it was impossible for the monster to record these changes or the supposed status quo which had preceded them. For example, the monster had a vague sense that, sometime in the distant past, it had either been smaller or had walked upon four legs rather than two. It didn’t have a very good memory, but it was disturbed by the thought that once upon a time it had had to look up at things which now it looked down at, yes, and it had had to stretch on tiptoes to reach things which were now at eye level. Most of these things observed and grabbed were fruit, fruit on trees, and of course trees grew, too - as the monster rediscovered countless times. But not everything in creation grew at the same rate, as the monster had rediscovered more rarely. The monster tended to conclude that one of the best explanations for its sense of bigness was that it was growing faster than the rest of creation. Also, the memory of walking upon all fours could be deceptive: if the monster wanted to, it could still do this - just as, when tired, it would lower itself down until its back was flat on the ground. Because of the size of its belly, the monster could lie in no other position but this. Again because of the belly, the monster had only an intimation of what sex it was - and this it gained socially, from the kinds of monster which most commonly approached it with what seemed to be sexual intent, meaning an intent to sexually describe. ‘Up up good fruit down down good good sun creation fruit.’ Our monster, however, was not interested in pleasure or reproduction - it was put off the latter by its doubt as to its own nature, the former by its misery. At night, it slept - under the stars, there were many stars in creation, and its dreams were frequently of absolute certainty of being. I am this thing. This thing is me. Waking, the fact of waking and the quality of it, was invariably a disappointment. Despite its morning rage, the monster was almost always gentle with the world of creation. It had never killed anything, and if it had harmed anything, that harm had been done accidentally (except, that is, harm the monster had done to itself ). It knew of the quality of good and constantly aspired towards it. And it was this sense, rather than a visual image of beauty or handsomeness, that the monster thought of as its true parentage. Someone had taught the monster not to be unnecessarily cruel, and that was mother, someone had warned it never to be unwarrantedly proud, and that was father. Whatever kinds of creation they had been, the monster’s memory had finally failed any longer to remember them. Perhaps this was because the monster had lived so many days and nights. Among all the things it monstrously lacked, an accurate sense of time was the most disturbing. It knew there were days and, halfway through the days, it believed there were nights. Just after waking, it knew that the time of dreaming had passed in a different way to the time it was now in; just before sleeping, it felt joy: something was about to change and for the better. One definite experience was pain. When our monster hit its head against a tree, by accident or at full force, it knew for certain it had done it. The sharp stab at first and the dull ache afterwards helped it locate parts of its body in relation to one another. The monster wondered whether this behaviour, being cruel to itself and proud of its badness, was bad behaviour. For periods, the monster gave it up - but then it came to an indistinguished lump of time, usually during the middle of the day, and its desire for certain knowledge grew into an unbearable anguish. If the monster could have been content with the pain of anguish rather than the pain of pain, perhaps it could have been content in all areas of its life - though this thought was beyond it. The monster wandered around the areas of creation it knew best, aware that certain features were identities: trees were always different or the plural was a lie; in other words, there was only a single tree which was sometimes close to, sometimes far away from, where the monster had slept, or there were multiple trees but placed so far apart that they were not visible, one to the other, and by the time the monster had walked far enough away from one tree to find another, it had forgotten the memorized features of the first, and so was able to make a comparison. On the tree or trees were fruit, which were tastily colourful - the monster reached in the morning to touch their brightness, then found itself with half of one in its mouth. Eating had been reinvented, yet again - and the monster knew it was something that had happened before. It knew this because the action felt, like mother, both comfortable and comforting; the sensation of chewing seemed repetitive and, thus, repeated from before. This was probably, apart from the moments just after a headbash, when our monster came closest to happiness. Excretion, too, unexpectedly occurred. But, being a business of the unseen nether regions, beneath the belly, the monster wasn’t all that involved with it. Just as the fruits were bright, off the ground and attractive, so the merds were dull, underfoot and repellent. Whether by instinct or not, the monster only deposited them at some little distance from the tree or the nearest tree. And when the slight straining was done, which took care of itself, the monster would walk away - usually without looking. Again, because of the belly, if the monster did become curious about its merds, it couldn’t examine them from close up - not from above, anyway. The monster could have lain down and rolled towards the dull round smelly objects, but, before it ever did this, a feeling overcame it that nothing dull and smelly was worth the effort of rolling towards. Round objects, the monster had no objection to - and in the case of fruit was actively attracted towards. In hope, sometimes, the monster thought of its belly as a big round fruit. But just as often, in despair, the belly’s roundness was that of a merd. It, the belly, was where merds came from, after all - though the monster was capable of forgetting this. The trees were also possessed of leaves. If these taught the monster any lesson, it was one of uselessness - and use. By mistake, the monster sometimes ate some leaf along with the fruit. It wasn’t a bad taste, not proud or cruel like a monster could be, but it was useless. The monster spat them out, away from the tree, towards the merds. When the leaves became useful was when the sun overhead became too hot. This was when the cool beside the tree-trunk was the only good place. Several monsters would gather. ‘Down tree down sun good.’ The leaves were also useful when it rained and made puddles. Then, they stopped the monster becoming too cold. One day, the monster set off to - but no, there was to be no quest for true identity, no storing up of fruit for the long journey into the away-from-this-tree self. No. One day, one day of
that
sort, would never come. One day, instead, would continue to be one day - one day very like the day before and almost indistinguishable from the day after. The monster had no story, unless being a monster is story enough.

These were the names of the men who would have slept with Nigora (thought Nigora), if only she had encouraged them:

Then there were the names of men whom Nigora had successfully pursued, but who would not sleep with her again, for various reasons (loyalty to their wives; loyalty to her husband):

Next there was the list of men whom Nigora had successfully pursued and who, she thought, would still sleep with her if she wanted to: this list, therefore, could be further and more precisely divided into those whom Nigora would also sleep with, for various reasons (pride; vanity; love) -

- and those whom Nigora would not sleep with, for various other reasons (boredom; fidelity; love) -

And yet this list was complicated by the fact that all these men were absent. They were all in another city, in another country, to which Nigora would never return.

In a cake-shop - in this city which was not her city, this city in the west - Nigora was compiling imaginary lists of her life, while watching the sullen assistant stroke sky-blue ribbon into curlicues with the back of a pair of scissors.

And finally (thought Nigora) there were the men with whom Nigora, in this city, had a chance:

This was the list which mattered to Nigora. Or no. To be more precise: Nigora’s imagination dwelt on those she had not pursued, and those she could still pursue - whether conquered already or not. She only left alone the list of those whom she had conquered and to whom she would no longer return. She was haunted by the spectre of non-fulfilment.

But one name was more present than the rest.

Yaha
.

 

It would also be possible to describe Nigora’s life in a list of all the films which she had seen with her father, on
Kultura
or the more commercial Russian channels, from the age of six to sixteen. Each Saturday afternoon, they would settle down in the living room, thus avoiding the tantrums and depression of her mother, his wife.

On their satellite television, they watched varieties of romantic comedy, both ancient and modern:

They watched teen movies:

They watched weepies (
An Affair to Remember
) and screwball comedies (
Bringing Up Baby
). They admired the
œuvre
of Preston Sturges - the
unacknowledged genius
of the American 1940s. They watched the Russian mini-series of Sherlock Holmes, with the great Vasily Livanov (Holmes) and Vitaly Solomin (Watson). They made forays into the artistic and silver world of Max Ophuls
and the artistic and silver world of Jean Renoir

They treasured André Hunebelle’s films of Fantômas, the sadistic master criminal of Paris - who owned a Citroën DS with retractable wings. Nigora’s favourite, disputed by her father, was
Fantômas contre Scotland Yard
. Her father preferred the simplicity of
Fantômas
. They watched Truffaut (
Le Dernier métro
) and Godard
(Le Mépris
). But most of all they watched the American 1970s:

Like the list of Nigora’s love affairs, perhaps this list is also overly comprehensive. For what predominated, from the weekends of her childhood, was not the films. The films were exorbitant; what remained was a sense of sadness and of loss.

Her mother would stop talking to her and her father for two weeks. She would refuse to address her daughter in front of the mothers at her school. She worked two jobs - one as a lecturer in the university, in classical archaeology, the other as a reader for a specialist ancient history publisher. And these jobs, she would remind her daughter, made her tired. They exhausted her, she said.

Nigora, as a girl, always identified with the minor characters. She always sympathised with the rejected, the marginalised, the small.

In the cake-shop, balancing a cake-box on the tripod of her fingers - like a waiter - Nigora made lists of her life. She remembered the sledge on nails above the front door; the dovecote of slippers beside it. She remembered doing piano practice on a Saturday morning, a metronome becoming hysterical beside her.

Simultaneously, Nigora’s husband - Laziz - arranged his elbow in a scalene triangle, pleasantly uncomfortable, on the rim of the perpetually open driver’s window. His car was imported from the Communist past of Eastern Europe: it was yellow and outdated. Its window-frames contained no glass whatsoever.

Its meter was printed in Cyrillic, with TAKC
.