Dark Lies the Island by Kevin Barry
‘You don’t look at it,’ she said. ‘You look through it.’
I have the photograph still and it is sacred to me. On the wooden bench between us, in the amber of a stein glass, she is reflected, with her camera raised. She is there, blurrily, and it’s just a shade, but it is all that I have left of her.
ix
The end came sharply. I woke one morning to find Silvija packing her stuff. That holdall of hers had seen plenty. I tried to sound casual but there was boy-fear in my tone.
‘So this is it?’ I croaked.
‘You knew it was coming,’ she said.
The studio had had its time, she said. She was going to stay with a girlfriend in Kreuzberg. It was time that I stood on my own two feet.
‘You need to go find your own life, Patrick,’ she said.
‘Yeah and you need to go to a fucking doctor!’
I was so angry to be cast aside and I was lost in the city without her. I became depressed. I stayed with some other people for a while, in Mitte – artists, of course – but they all by contrast with Silvija seemed to be acting parts, and I have forgotten all their names. I knew that the sweet days of the summer had passed and it was time to fly away. Reluctantly, she came to the station on the morning I was to leave for the airport. She hugged me on the platform but so awkwardly; she fled instantly from the hug. She said she would email and that I could phone but six years have passed and never once did she reply to an email, never once did she answer her phone, and after a few months, the line was dead.
Which signifies nothing, necessarily, because Silvija changed phones all the time. And anyway I must believe that she is out there, somewhere among the dreaming cities of Europe, maybe in Trieste, or in Zagreb, or in Belgrade again. I must believe that she is out there, still beautiful, foul-mouthed and inviolate.
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Copyright © Kevin Barry 2012
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Portions of this work have appeared in the following:
‘Fjord of Killary’ appeared in the New Yorker; ‘Beer Trip to Llandudno’ appeared in New Irish Short Stories (Faber & Faber); ‘Ernestine and Kit’ appeared in Columbia; ‘Doctor Sot’ appeared in Best European Fiction 2011 (Dalkey Archive Press); ‘The Girls and the Dogs’ appeared in Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails (Stinging Fly Press); ‘White Hitachi’ appeared in the John McGahen Yearbook, vol. 2 (National University of Ireland, Galway)
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
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ISBN 9780224090582
Kevin Barry, Dark Lies the Island