One Sunday Without Desire

My sister died today. Or was it yesterday? To paraphrase that most famous of beginnings…or endings. At least, the English translation. Someone said, time reveals all translation to be paraphrase. But, then, isn’t life itself a paraphrase? All we pitiful human beings can do is restate the text over and over and over again, casting it in various forms, trying to find a way to say it so we can at last understand the meaning, unwilling to believe that it’s meaningless.

Or at the very least, confusing, as were the events surrounding the last days of my sister. In Meursault’s case, he couldn’t be sure of the day because of the ambiguous wording of the telegram from the old people’s home. ‘That doesn’t mean anything’, he concludes. There it is, in black and white in the very first paragraph of Camus’ classic, the absurdity of the search for meaning.

In my case, or I should say ‘our’ case, for surely my sister was as much involved in her death as I, the unsureness of time was because we kept the shades pulled and after the clocks stopped, we didn’t bother rewinding them.

As luck would have it, we were journeying together when it happened. Which meant that, along with all the other problems, problems of a more profound nature, there was the immediate problem of what to do with a body in a foreign country where the laws are different than at home and you can’t speak the language. I suppose that’s a reason in favour of joining one of those tours with a definite beginning and end, one of those ‘if it’s Tuesday this must be Belgium’ types of things. Then you’d have people to tell you what to do, what arrangements to make. We had been travelling alone and by the end, we lost track of when we had started and where we were.

We started in Bath, that English city of past glory, that architectural accomplishment of order and control, where someone not only had a vision but also the persistence to bring that vision into being, as the tour guide said when we were deep in the underground passages like catacombs where springs lunge out of the earth to soothe aching joints, hip bone connected to thigh bone of past generations. There she is, my sister, standing with her broad straight back to the camera and her firm-fleshed arms showing beneath the short sleeves of her flowered print, and me, with my stripes and my sick arms as Donald once referred to them, meaning that they were too thin for his taste.

Looking out the hotel room window at our last stopping place, the bisque-baked street and the rows of low sharp-angled buildings, I was reminded of Bath, perhaps because of the contrast. Bath, orderly and majestic, rising against the green of an English countryside, and the place where we ended up, squat as a smashed toad, stark and dry as a chewed bone, without a sprig of green in sight. City of Gold, Bath is called, because of the golden limestone out of which it was constructed, while the last place we found ourselves was a dirty pinkish whitish clay which seemed to slink away between shimmering waves of heat. When we arrived, in the haze of a late afternoon, we felt the landscape surrounding us, suffocating us, bleaching us into invisibility, whereas when we arrived in Bath in the cool of a bright clear morning, we felt free, with the expectations of beginnings.

In Bath Vanya kept saying, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I’m finally here. After forty years. I had to wait forty years to see all these things I’ve only read about in books.”

I’ll never forget her face when the light dawned. I see it yet, superimposed on that grand architecture rising behind her straight brow, her perfectly shaped nose.

“There’s so much,” she said, holding her arms wide, “so much of life to see, so much to do. I feel like I’ve been let out of a box.”

She always had suffered from claustrophobia, which may have had its start in a frighteningly real situation. As a child, she’d had rheumatic fever and had to undergo tests in which her body was passed through a metal cylinder scanning device, which she later said was like slow suffocation. And I think she also suffered from a sort of claustrophobia of the spirit which might have been caused by a childhood of fear and oppression. Or it may have been part of her nature, for she was a gentle, rather timid, soul.

But to get back to Bath, there we were, giddy as schoolgirls. So what happened? That was what I kept asking myself in the last place. What went wrong? What killed Vanya? Oh, not how did she die. We could explain that. But how did she become infected with the will to die? How did she ‘catch death’ as it were?

How could it happen that I, who was travelling so closely with her at the time, sharing hotel rooms, even beds at times, didn’t become infected with her sickness?

But perhaps I did and didn’t know it.