Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
Its softness against her cheek made her cry all the more and she thought her mother knew what she thinking because she heard her whisper in her ear, her words barely there, like an autumn leaf turning in the wind, ‘Never mind, never mind.’
Her father was being laid out on a stretcher. The police had started to drain the pool. Jurgen was there too. He had a broom in his hand and was energetically sweeping around the plant pots. He had even managed to put on navy overalls that made him look like a caretaker.
The News
Isabel walked towards the paramedics and took Jozef’s hand in her own. At first she thought a row of ants was crawling in a military line towards his knuckles. And then she saw the fading black inked vowels and consonants running into each other.
I
T
S
R
A
I
N
I
N
G
She could hear the drone of the bees nearby and she heard herself insisting that what her husband required was an air ambulance, but what she was mostly saying was his name.
Jozef. Please Jozef. Jozef. Jozef please.
Why did he hack into his hand like that? Where did he do it and how could he bear it and what did it mean? She squeezed his fingers and asked him to explain himself. She promised that in turn she would explain herself. She would do that right now. She told him she would have liked to feel his love fall upon her like rain. That was the kind of rain she most longed for in their long unconventional marriage. The paramedics told her to get out of the way but she did not move because she had always got out of his way. Loving him had been the greatest risk in her life. The thing, the threat was lurking there in all his words. She had known that from the beginning. She had always known that. He had buried unexploded shells and grenades across the roads and tracks of all his books, they were under every poem, but if he died now her daughter would walk through a world that was always damaged and she was as angry as it was possible to be.
Jozef. Please Jozef. Jozef. Jozef. Please.
She suddenly understood that someone was pushing her out of the way and that she could smell blood.
A large man with a shaven head and a revolver strapped to his belt was asking her questions. To every question he asked she did not have a straightforward answer. What was her husband’s name?
Jozef Nowogrodzki in his passport. Joe Harold Jacobs on all other ID. In fact she didn’t think his name was Nowogrodzki but that was the name his parents had written in his passport anyway. Nor did she tell him her husband had many other names: JHJ, Joe, Jozef, the famous poet, the British poet, the arsehole poet, the Jewish poet, the atheist poet, the modernist poet, the post-Holocaust poet, the philandering poet. So where was Monsieur Nowogrodzki’s place of birth? Poland. Łódź. 1937. Łódź in English is pronounced Wodge but she didn’t know how to say it in French. His parents’ names? She wasn’t sure how to spell them. Did he have brothers and sisters? Yes. No. He had a sister. Her name was Friga.
The inspector looked baffled. Isabel did what she did best.
She told him the news except it was a bit out of date. Her husband was five years old when he was smuggled into Britain in 1942, half starved and with forged documents. Three days after he arrived his mother and father were deported along with his two-year-old sister to the Chelmno death camp in western Poland. The inspector, who did not understand much English, put his hand up in front of his face as if he was stopping the traffic on a busy road. He told the wife of the Jewish poet that it was unfortunate the Germans occupied Poland in 1939 but he had to point out he was now engaged in a murder inquiry in the Alpes-Maritimes in 1994. Would she agree that Monsieur Nowogrodzki or was it Monsieur Jacobs had left his daughter a final note? Or was it a poem? Or was it evidence? Whatever it might be it was addressed to Nina Ekaterina. He slipped the yellow fact sheet into a plastic folder. On one side were instructions for how to work the dishwasher. On the other side were five lines written in black ink. These were apparently instructions for his daughter.
It was not yet six am but the whole village had already heard the news. When Claude arrived at the villa with a bag full of bread, Mitchell, who for once was not interested in a morsel, sent him away, his eyes still smarting from the chlorine in the cloudy water. The paramedics shouted instructions to each other and Isabel told Nina she would be in the ambulance too. They were going to put tubes up her father’s nose and pump his stomach on the way to the hospital. The ambulance began its journey down the mountain road. Nina felt herself being led by Claude to Madeleine Sheridan’s house, which was called Maison Rose even though it was painted blue. On the way she saw Jurgen with his arms around Kitty Finch and when she heard Mitchell shout, ‘Piss off and don’t come back,’ everyone heard what Kitty said next. She was whispering but she might as well have been screaming, because what she said was the thing everyone knew anyway.
‘He shot himself with one of your guns, Mitchell.’
Mitchell’s big body was bent over double. Something was happening to his eyes, nostrils, mouth. Tears and snot and saliva were pouring out of the holes in his face. Without a shot being fired his face had five holes in it. Holes for breathing, looking, eating. Everyone was gazing in his direction but what he saw was a blur. They were a mob full of holes just like him. How was he going to protect himself from the mob when they pointed the finger? He would tell the police the truth. When the ebony Persian weapon disappeared, he thought the mental girl had stolen it to punish him for hunting animals. The telephone was ringing and then it stopped ringing and he could hear Laura wailing. His muscles ached from dragging the body out of the water. It was so heavy. It was as heavy as a bear.
NINA JACOBS
London, 2011
Whenever I dream my twentieth-century dream about my father, I wake up and immediately forget my passwords for EasyJet and Amazon. It is as if they have disappeared from my head into his head and somewhere in the twenty-first century he is sitting with me on a bus crossing London Bridge watching the rain fall on the chimney of Tate Modern. The conversations I have with him do not belong to this century at all, but all the same I ask him why he never really told me about his childhood? He replies that he hopes my own childhood wasn’t too bad and do I remember the kittens?
Our family kittens (Agnieska and Alicja) always smelt a bit feral and my childhood pleasure was to groom them with my father’s hairbrush. They lay on my lap and I combed out their fur while they purred and patted my hand with their soft paws. When I got near their bottoms the fur was stuck together and tangled because they were still too young to lick themselves clean. Sometimes I left the fur balls on the sofa and my father pretended to swallow them. He’d open his mouth very wide and make out he’d gulped one down and that it was stuck in his throat and he was choking. My father spent his life trying to work out why people had frogs in their throat, butterflies in their stomach, pins and needles in their legs, a thorn in their side, a chip on their shoulder and indeed if they had coughed up fur balls he would have studied them too.
No, he says. I would not have studied the fur balls.
We agree that he and I learned to muddle along together. He washed my vests and tights and T-shirts, sewed buttons on my cardigans, searched for missing socks and insisted I should never be afraid of people talking to themselves on buses.
Yes, my father says. That’s what you are doing now.
No, I reply, that’s not what I am doing now. I am not saying what I’m thinking out loud. That would be mad. No one on this bus can hear me talking to you.
Yes, he says, but it wouldn’t matter anyway because everybody’s talking out loud on their phones.
I still have the beach towel he bought me in a souvenir shop in Nice. The words Côte d’Azur Nice Baie des Anges fly across a big blue sky in a sunny yellow font. Tourists on the beach are rendered in black dots and just behind it is a road lined with palm trees. On the right is the pink dome of the Hotel N
The next time I’m sitting on a bus crossing London Bridge and the rain is falling on the chimney of Tate Modern I must tell my father that when I read biographies of famous people, I only get interested when they escape from their family and spend the rest of their life getting over them. That is why when I kiss my daughter goodnight and wish her sweet dreams, she understands my wish for her is kind, but she knows, as all children do, that it’s impossible to be told by our parents what our dreams are supposed to be like. They know they have to dream themselves out of life and back into it, because life must always win us back. All the same, I always say it.
I say it every night, especially when it rains.
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Our first four titles, published in autumn 2011:
Iosi Havilio, Open Door
translated from the Spanish by Beth Fowler
Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
Clemens Meyer, All the Lights
translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire
Juan Pablo Villalobos, Down the Rabbit Hole
translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey
Title: Swimming Home
Author: Deborah Levy
Editor: Sophie Lewis
Proofreader: Lesley Levene
Typesetter: Charles Boyle
Series and Cover Design: Joseph Harries
Format: 210 x 140 mm
Paper: Munken Premium White 80gsm FSC
Printer: T. J. International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
The first 300 copies are individually numbered.
Copyright
First published in 2011 by
And Other Stories, 91 Tadros Court, High Wycombe, Bucks, HP13 7GF
www.andotherstories.org
Copyright © Deborah Levy 2011
The right of Deborah Levy to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher
E-book ISBN No. 978–1–908276–06–3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Deborah Levy, Swimming Home