41. Tiger
The house stood in a flat field of pale gold grass with reddish tips. Around the house, rows of tall stone tubs of olives and cypress trees prevented the eye from wandering towards the horizon. She watched the wind blow the grass into lines and waves until the whole field rippled and flickered, sighed and unfolded. She drew the front edges of her jacket together and wrapped her arms around her body. The dark green points of the cypresses were vibrating against the pale wall of the house. Someone inside had lit a fire. She could see smoke stains and specks of burnt paper twirling in little eddies of wind.
The first heavy drops of rain fell, hitting her shoulders with a thud. Virginie, she thought. You waited all that time for the drought to break, and now you’re not here to see it. Behind her, a black trail had formed where her feet had flattened the grass. Rain pooled in the depression in each brick of the patio.
– Terrace, Virginie always said firmly. It’s a terrace.
A dark figure moved behind the glass, someone tall, a blurred face. Must be a figment of my imagination, she thought. She was expecting no one.
– Ah, Paula.
Completely unsurprised, a deep, calm voice. Loading logs onto the fire she had lit that morning and allowed to die down. The room smelled of ashes. The man squatted on the hearth, poking at coals, his coat trailing in a smear of soot on the white tiles. He fished about in his pocket, uncoiled himself to hand something to Paula. A letter from Virginie.
This is Felix. He is a painter. I told him he could stay in the bungalow for a week or so. He is to pay you fifty dollars for electricity and water. He will cook for himself and do his own washing.
– Felix, Paula murmured.
– Felix Lehmann.
– Are you my sister’s friend?
The man smiled. It was like watching his face separate into two parts. His eyes didn’t change.
– You could say that.
– My sister doesn’t say… Paula’s voice trailed away. She was not experienced with strangers. Virginie usually met people and dealt with bills, rentals, all the business to do with holding onto the property. But sending a stranger here, for her to deal with alone? She looked at the window, as if Virginie would appear out of the storm at any minute. She almost saw her black hair tossing.
– We live together in the city, the tall man, Felix, said.
– Mr Lehmann, my sister does not mention that anywhere in her letter.
– Felix. Call me Felix. She said she would ring you tonight and explain.
– This is a bit sudden.
It was unexpected. Did Virginie lead, then, a secret life away from here? She watched as Felix brushed ash off his trousers, then looked around vaguely for something to wipe his hands on. His task of warming the room accomplished, he seemed not to know what to do next. He found an old rag on a nail near the fireplace, wiped his hands, then wiped the soot off the tiles with an exasperating thoroughness. Paula did not offer any assistance. She was not sure what came next. Perhaps tea.
– I’ll make a pot of tea, she said.
– Will you show me the bungalow? After tea, I mean.
It was still raining; she could hear it on the roof. They drank their tea standing next to each other at the window, as if watching the rain falling on the path was a substitute for conversation. The man did not say the obvious things, like ‘nice place you’ve got here’, or ‘wonderful view’. Paula wondered why he’d come. There was nothing to do unless you liked walking or maybe bird watching. A sudden thought filled her with horror – perhaps Virginie wanted them to get to know each other. Felix stood, shoulders slightly hunched, his weight on one leg, his face very still except for his eyes, which seemed to examine every raindrop. When he looked at Paula, it was as if those eyes took in every pore of skin, every line and hair. Paula was not used to such intense looking, such microscopic probing. If that was how painters looked at the world, how merciless they must be.
To Paula, the world was a threshing floor, the sky full of dark shuddering wings. Her life was a negotiation between the troughs and crests of waves – waves that divided things from each other, overlapped beneath her feet and crashed apart. She tried not to see the things around her, only what lay directly ahead. This tunnelling of her vision protected her from surprises; occasionally she felt alongside her for another swimmer in the dark, but encountered only her own limbs. There was nothing she wanted from the world except that it turn a blind eye and overlook her. Her house was a box of opaque glass. There were no mountains, just space pressing in on all sides.
The painter had very little luggage. The path was wet, and Paula’s shoes sank unevenly into mud that she knew would leave a stain. Felix was so close behind her that she could feel his breath on her neck. She moved aside for him when she opened the door. He ducked his head under the low doorframe and stepped into a room that was a diving bell – encased on all sides by glass, and with the rain pressing in, appearing to sway as if moored in currents of fast-flowing water. He moved quickly to the other side of the room, polished a windowpane with the edge of his jacket, and peered out, as if to see whether a miraculous snow-covered mountain, a pool, or a forest full of exotic tropical flowers lay there unexpectedly instead of more rain-sodden grass.
He had nearly decided not to come; it was only the thought of all that silence and of sleep, of deep endless sleep, that persuaded him in the end.
Virginie did not look like the kind of person who came out of the plains. She seemed city-born to him, dressed in a sober but witty style that came with the territory, his territory, of galleries, cafes, bars and cinemas. She moved with a light and insolent step, with an ease that he could not match. He could not reconcile that walk, those clothes, with this place, the place to which she apparently returned every other weekend. He had resisted knowing much about her for so long, as if by knowing he would disturb the delicacy that lay between them. Even lying next to her in the morning, watching her naked face, her rounded arm, a breast uncovered and trembling with the beat of her heart, he would imagine himself unconnected, free, untouched by her. He remained essentially the same, changed none of his habits and imagined that he changed none of hers. Occasionally he would glimpse a woman who reminded him of Virginie, and he would catch his breath until the vision faded. Gradually, he saw her in all women, or saw all women in her. He had no ideas about romance or marriage. He knew every centimetre of her face, every shade and contour of her body. He could pick her voice out of a crowd.
She had shown him a photograph of her sister. They were so like each other that he began to doubt the particularity of his feelings. If the sister looked the same, how could he explain to himself what was unique about Virginie? It was like asking himself what he felt about all women: what was unique about this woman? What was it that other women did not have? He did not allow that question to take him where it could have led, into an inquiry about the particularity of any human being.
She, Virginie, was perfect yet mutable. He admired pale women with dark hair, not seeing a stereotype. He preferred black and white photography and silent movies. His own paintings were more about edges, lines and shadows than colour or form; they had no narrative content. His life had no direction. He had no expectations. He felt himself sliding towards middle age but was only mildly curious about what it would be like to be forty. Along with all this vagueness and passivity, he felt mainly tired. He worked at his painting, his skills were hard-won, and his vision was not superficial. He had an eye, critics said; he could see to the core of things. The world had become hard and crystalline, and vision like his was sorely needed, they said, unaware that they were repeating themselves. He was weary. He would go to the country to rest. He would go to look at Virginie’s sister and try to discover what it was about Virginie that made her singular.
Paula watched Felix stride out in the morning, a tall figure in silver grey, leaving neat prints in the wet grass. He carried something under one arm, and she noticed a slight unevenness in his walk. Her conversation with Virginie had not been satisfactory. Her sister, in a hurry as usual, told her only two things: one, that Felix wanted to be alone; and two, that she, Virginie, hoped he enjoyed it.
– But what am I supposed to do with him?
– Nothing. I told him to expect nothing. He’ll probably leave in a week when he’s bored.
And then she had to go, mumbling about an appointment, another job, never having enough time.
– See you in two weeks, she said in a rush just before her coins ran out. She was ringing from a train station and said her mobile had been stolen. Her car was being repaired.
Felix came back after sunset. The lights in the cabin snapped on. It was like watching a spaceship appear out of the darkness. Paula crept up to the window, across sodden grass that muffled her footsteps, telling herself she just wanted to make sure he was all right. He was taking things out of a satchel placed in the centre of the table – leaves, stones, seeds, feathers, a sketchbook. He left the things there while he made himself a cup of tea. He placed the teacup on the cupboard beside the bed, undressed, and climbed into it. She saw everything: the little whorls of dark hair on his chest, the lean legs with ropey veins, pale buttocks, pouches of soft purply flesh under the penis. She fled to the house, terrified that she had made a sound, and went to bed with the image of him disturbingly vivid in her mind.
She was woken by a tapping sound, soft but insistent, and peered at her bedside clock which showed the amazingly late time of 10 a.m. There was a dark shape at the centre of her window, surrounded by such an intense blueness that her eyes were momentarily dazzled. When she could see again, the shape had disappeared and a voice called from the direction of her front door. She scrambled into her old towelling dressing gown, wishing for the first time in her life that she had something more presentable to wear.
– Sorry. I woke you.
It was a statement, not a question or apology. His eyes flicked across her tangled hair and dressing gown and dismissed them. She started to murmur a reply, but he was edgy, impatient.
– I’m going into town to get some things. Do you need anything?
– Well…
She could see that he had only asked out of politeness, and there was nothing that she needed really.
– Milk. You can get me some milk.
He didn’t have to know that her fridge was full of the stuff. She had an obscure notion that it was important to ask him to bring her something, as if he might not return if she didn’t. He must be bored already if he was going into town. Perhaps she was supposed to entertain him, but Virginie had issued no such instructions, knowing that she would be hopeless at it. He was halfway to his vehicle when he turned and called to her.
– Do you have a car?
She gestured vaguely at the garage, signalling yes. In fact, there had not been a car parked in it for well over a year. She made do with the bus or the occasional taxi. There was a bicycle and the tractor and a very old motorbike which nothing would induce her to ride after watching her mother stand in the road helplessly, legs astride, while the bike took off on its own. She smiled to herself as the image surfaced, but there was something about machines in general that she couldn’t get the hang of.
He was finally going. To her astonishment, he waved at her.
The Tundra.
Beyond the limits of tree growth, we come to the climate of the tundras, wastes of mosses and low-growing plants, which are frozen for many months of the year, but which in their brief cool summer are carpeted with brilliant Arctic flowers. The rainfall is generally small, but the country is mostly flat, and when the winter’s accumulation of snow has melted, it is impassable swamp. Winter is the season of travel, and the universal vehicle is the sleigh. Over much of the tundra, especially in Siberia, the soil is permanently frozen below a certain depth. This description sounds unpromising, but the tundra is not without its economic value, being the chief home of fur-bearing animals.
As we go north the summer gets shorter, colder, and more dismal, and the shores of the Arctic Ocean are nearly the most desolate places on earth. There is one further stage of desolation, the climate of eternal frost, which is found over most of Greenland and the Antarctic Continent.
Felix was imagining, not for the first time, that his car was travelling over the tundra. Perhaps there was a hint of snow in the air. He felt strangely soothed by the thought of the Siberian landscape. Of course, it would be preferable to be travelling in a sleigh drawn by a couple of sturdy ponies, with someone called Alyosha or Sasha jiggling the reins. It wasn’t just the little book he had found with the unprepossessing title of The Weather that had induced these fantasies. He often dreamed of a black and white world, a world that one slid or flew over, a largely silent world. The flat country around Virginie’s, Paula’s, house had filled him with an inexplicable intoxication when he strode across it. It was the wrong colour, gold instead of white, but it was empty and quiet, and its surface presented no obstacles to impede his progress. He felt that he could walk forever. ‘The climate of eternal frost’, he repeated to himself as if it was a mantra. There would be thick frost on these paddocks in a month or so. Perhaps he could come back then; if Paula didn’t mind. He recalled her eyes in the morning – sliding away from his gaze, they had the look of a wild animal; all whites, no iris.
He wanted to phone Virginie. There was no telephone in his bungalow, and since he had forgotten his mobile, he would have to find a public one. The only phone at the house was in Paula’s bedroom. She was an odd girl, and although he had no intention of prying, he wondered what she did for fun living alone and out of town. ‘Fun’ was the wrong word he suspected. There was something old-fashioned, even mysterious about her. She must be, what, about twenty-five? But she had a gravity and self-possession that he had only encountered in much older people. He tried to recall what Virginie had said about her sister. Something about not being interested in people. Well, that he could understand. If you took people as a whole, in general, most of them were not worth any attention at all. But her face… now, that was worth some attention. Its stillness remained with you like an echo – it resounded. She only superficially resembled Virginie: they were both small and fine-boned, with pale skin and heavy dark hair. Paula was less pretty, her straight hair cut to the level of her chin, her body, what you could see of it, less animated. But the eyes were set at such an angle in that face, and the lips were so perfectly proportioned, and the shadows cast by nose and cheekbones of such delicacy, that he was momentarily unable to see Virginie’s face at all.
When they spoke at last on the telephone, after he tried her several times at home and then at work, he found that he was visualising Paula’s eyes, which were a kind of layered blue. He remembered Virginie telling him, almost defensively, how much she loved her sister. They had been alone together for most of their lives, adolescent and adult, she said, after a car accident had killed their parents. The property had been left to them together with a little money, and they had never considered selling. Paula had an affinity with animals and plants, while Virginie was skilled at management.
– I can manage anything, she had laughed, when he asked what kind of management.
This, in the early days of their affair, was an invitation of a quite specific kind, given that they had been lying naked on the bed together, her hand moving languidly along his outstretched thigh. He had spent the next few years trying to avoid being managed by someone so entirely clever, someone who was also very nearly the most beautiful woman he had been with in a life dedicated to beauty.
He drove back to the house slowly after a not very satisfactory telephone conversation and an even less satisfactory coffee at the town’s only cafe. The road was perfectly flat, dividing like a whiplash paddocks of plush grains fringed with feathery trees. He liked the way every house sat at the end of a sandy driveway lined with rows of clipped silver bushes. It was so symmetrical, this landscape, that the mind searched for imperfection and found none.
Paula, her body enveloped by one of her shapeless working garments, was doing something to a pile of what looked like black muck. It was in fact a carefully nurtured heap of sweet-smelling compost, and she was turning it over before shovelling it into a wheelbarrow. Her feet, in dark green gumboots, were partially buried in the pile. Felix parked under a peppercorn tree, slammed the door, and walked over to the girl. He was about to open his mouth and apologise, having forgotten to buy milk, but she spoke first.
– You shouldn’t park there.
– Why on earth not?
– You should never park under peppercorn trees. They make a mess; they drop berries and leaves and sticky stuff. Also bird shit.
She said the word delicately. Her face was shiny with perspiration, her black hair, sticking to her forehead and neck, looked like strands of watergrass or seaweed. She smelled salty and earthy.
– Do you want any help?
Paula shook her head and went on with the shovelling, watching out of the corner of her eye as he shifted the car and went off to the bungalow, walking with that long uneven stride she had noticed before. He favoured his right leg, putting as little weight as possible on the other one, but moving so quickly that it was barely noticeable. That came from long practice, she knew, having perfected the art of concealment herself. It was interesting, that walk. There was a story there. She would have to ask Virginie. For the first time she wondered about the two of them together – Virginie and Felix. Virginie had never brought or sent her boyfriends or lovers to the house before. Did that mean that he was different in some way, that she loved him more, or less, than the others? Paula knew very little about men; she avoided them as she avoided all people. But it was hard to ignore one if he arrived on your doorstep like this. There was now a feeling inside her, gnawing at her, that impelled her towards his lighted window again that evening.
He was sitting at the table with an open sketchbook, pencil in hand, deeply involved in what he was doing. She watched him for some time, settled against the window ledge, watched him quietly drawing for what seemed like hours, until she was so tired that she had to creep away to bed. He was so still that she had been able to examine every part of his face, his bare arm and hand, every part of him not sunk in shadow.
Every day, this ritual of avoidance and then the furtive watching at his window. She did not try to justify or even explain it to herself. It was a simple need. Twice more she saw his naked body, once as he emerged from the shower, and one evening as he opened the door and stepped outside. She flattened herself against the wall, and this time she could see in the light pouring from the room the scar along his hipbone. He walked a little way off from the house. His back was facing her, but she could see the stream of urine as it hit the grass. She was already retreating as he turned to go inside. By now her body was sending her frustrated messages. She had experienced these feelings before but never in connection with another human being. Usually it was pictures.
Virginie on the telephone that morning, strangely terse, had been in one of her managing moods.
– Just be careful how you behave around her. She’s led a very sheltered life; she’s so innocent about most things. I’ve talked to her about men, and women, about sex, and of course she’s read books, but she knows nothing, nothing, about how people behave. She hides away. She’s different, so don’t try and flirt with her as you usually would.
The conversation had angered him. He had replied that if she couldn’t trust him with her own sister, who could she trust him with? Slamming the phone down was a satisfying response, but hardly helpful. That word, trust, had never been negotiated before now, and here it was, an accusation, an implication, something he had failed.
Each day, he strode across the plain, dislodging small insects and flattening the grass, each day walking in a slightly different direction from his central point, a massive Stringybark that towered above the other trees. Could one smell water? There was a feathery line along the horizon, waving grasses and tall reeds, a row of bowing willows, the brown surface of a river. He sat on a flat white rock with his sketchpad open. He never drew directly from nature; the pages of his book were covered with patterns and shapes that were an attempt to show parallels and differences. There were spaces between things and lines connecting them, a kind of force that he perceived as a web. Insects flew into his eyes and stayed there to explore this new stickiness, or lodged in the cave of his ears. He threw off his clothes and walked warily into the water, which was yellowish and warm. He closed his eyes and floated on his back. Time stopped. It was as if his body had dissolved into the liquid, a sensation utterly unlike any other experience of floating. The sea always felt separate, vast, salty, alien, and he disliked swimming pools.
Time started again when he began to hear tiny sounds around him, then a loud splashing from further up the river as if an animal was shaking itself dry. He opened his eyes and turned over in time to see the slight figure of someone wrapped in a white towel disappearing into the shade of the willows. Paula. Black streaming hair flattened on her elegant skull. He swam off in the opposite direction. She had been running from him.
Felix had found Mr Brook’s and Mr Storm’s little book about weather fascinating and somehow restful. He had learned that on the leeward side of the mountain range, the air descends again to lower levels and is dry.
Here the rainfall and cloudiness are small and the temperatures more extreme, so that the presence of the mountains makes the climate to leeward more continental. This is the rain-shadow of the mountain.
He had heard those words before, ‘rain-shadow’, in a song, but never connected them to mountains and certainly never to a person. Now when he imagined Paula’s face, he said ‘rain-shadow’ to himself, as if it was her secret name. It conjured up the colours which he thought of in connection to her – grey, violet, black, silver. He tried to draw her face from memory, and this was safe, because it was art.
Five days from his arrival, days that felt like years, he woke to a still, hot morning. The idea came to him as he padded around the warm floor. He knocked gently on her door. Her eyes were dark blue this morning, enormous in her pale face. Her hair was tangled around her head like a soft nest. She must be a rough sleeper to get it all snarled up like that, he thought. He wanted to brush it out for her.
– I wondered if you would like to come swimming? We could take a picnic to the river.
– I don’t swim, she said.
He watched her face close up against him and said nothing. The girl was pathologically shy.
Later, he decided to go to the river by himself. He washed the dust and sweat off him, settled inside a willow house with his towel and book, and was almost asleep when he heard a sound. He raised himself up slowly, the book sliding softly to the ground. Paula had come silently along a different path. She looked around and seeing no one, went straight to a large, flat rock near the water, where she put down her towel and sat for a few moments, her bare feet dangling in the river. She splashed her face with the cool brown water, and he was just about to call out to her, when in one swift movement she stood up and pulled her jeans down. He groaned softly. He was trapped now. If he called out, she would think he had deliberately hidden himself.
She took her shirt off and stood with her narrow back to him. He couldn’t stop looking now. At first, he could not believe his eyes. He was looking at a girl, but she was covered from the base of her neck to her coccyx with fine, striped fur, golden-orange and black, like a cat or tiger. She jumped into the water and started swimming to the other side. He gathered his things and began moving backwards up the riverbank, but she was already swimming back, her strong arms pushing her through the water and her slim legs kicking, obviously an experienced swimmer. She pulled herself onto the rock and lay down on the white towel. He was looking at her from above now, through the willows. Her eyes were closed. Perhaps if they had been open, he would not have looked. He was not sure. But he did look, first at her small, beautifully striped breasts, then at her firm fur-covered stomach, her long muscular legs, the triangle of hair-free pubis. His mind was working slowly; it was difficult to assimilate this information with what he knew about Paula. Her hand moved, and the combination of the sun’s warmth, the movement of her fingers, and whatever she may have been thinking, caused her to sigh and move her other hand to her breasts.
He couldn’t look any longer. It was unbearable. It was impossible. It was dangerously exciting. He stayed completely still, a cramp in his legs, until she had stopped sighing and lay there, apparently asleep, all soft now, and from this angle with her legs bent and her body curled up, wholly feminine. He continued moving up the riverbank, slowly, trying not to make a sound. His confused thoughts churned to no real conclusion. She was now girl/animal. How could he think of her?
The body on the rock unfurled itself, and Paula opened her eyes. She gazed directly at him before he had time to look away. She moved slightly, confirming in that shift of limbs everything that he had seen, not allowing him to go until he spoke to her. And he knew he would tell her how completely he understood her perfect nature, her symmetrical, geometric duality.
Jennifer Coralie's published work includes short fiction, creative-nonfiction, essays, articles, book chapters and artist biographies. She is currently working on a piece about Japan. She really wants to be a poet.