Bird
BIRD
Sophie Cunningham has worked variously as an editor, publisher and journalist since 1989. Her first novel, Geography, was published in 2004. She is currently the editor of Meanjin and working on a novel This Devastating Fever, about Leonard Woolf’s time as a colonial administrator in Ceylon, and the first years of his marriage to Virginia.
Sophie Cunningham
TEXT PUBLISHING MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA
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The Text Publishing Company
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Copyright © Sophie Cunningham 2008
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published in 2008 by The Text Publishing Company
Typeset in Granjon by J&M Typesetting
Printed in Australia by Griffin Press
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Cunningham, Sophie, 1963-
Bird / author, Sophie Cunningham.
Melbourne : The Text Publishing Company, 2008.
ISBN: 9781921351525 (pbk.)
A823.4
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government, through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
For Sari
Author’s note
This novel was originally inspired by the lives of Zina Rachevsky, Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Lama Yeshe, and the monastery they founded just out of Bodanath in the early 1970s, Kopan Monastery.
However while the lives of my characters, Lama Gyatsho and Lama Dorje Rinpoche, have echoes of the extraordinary lives of Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, and their teachings—either read, or attended—inspired the voice of these characters; my fictional characters are just that: fictional. Similarly, while Anna Davidoff’s final years have moments that are similar to some of those in the final years of Zina Rachevsky, she is a fictional and invented character. All other characters in this novel are entirely fictional.
Contents
Az
Eleanor
Az
Lama Dorje Rinpoche
Eleanor
Lama Dorje Rinpoche
Az
Eleanor
Lama Dorje Rinpoche
Az
Eleanor
Anna
Lama Dorje Rinpoche
Az
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Az
And who is the author, and who is the hero—
It was August 14, 2003. Eleanor rang first thing, ‘just to say hello. Is it hot in New York today?’ and yes, it was. The temperature was heading for the mid-nineties. That doesn’t sound so bad, but with brick and stone and asphalt all around, the city turned into a pizza oven.
By nine a.m. I was midtown sitting in my office, ruler in hand, when Marilyn called. She also wanted to talk about the weather—in Los Angeles, apparently, it was milder and less humid. I appreciated their calls, but I didn’t need them. There is not a great difference between one’s mother having been dead for 10,956 days and 10,957.
I put the phone down and picked up my ruler, the same wide and wooden one I’d used for twenty years. I held it firmly, flat on the page, and dragged it down, sentence by sentence. It moved so slowly you would think words were heavy things and my ruler a net: that I was a rescue worker dredging a mud-thickened dam. Ignoring the lotuses that grew around me, their beauty a distraction from my task, I waited instead for the catch and pull of a body. Looking at words as if they were a series of shapes; stopping only if the shape looked wrong. If, for example, I saw ‘hungre’ rather than ‘hunger’.
It is harder to spot these errors if you read for meaning, though I don’t mean to suggest that meaning isn’t important. It is just that by the time I proofed something, the moment for picking up errors, inadequate characterisation or ridiculous plot twists, had come and gone. At that stage, the last stage, it is only the shape of things that matters.
I worked for one of the largest publishing houses in the world and counted myself lucky. It was a fine company and a good job. My office had a window with a view of Times Square. Where I’m from that is a big deal, believe me. I was senior enough for my work to be interesting, but not so senior that I dealt only with administration. Certainly I’d been there long enough that my colleagues thought it mad that I still proofread. When my assistant, Mike, came in each morning carrying my coffee and gearing himself up for a sycophantic flirt, he always commented if he saw I was holding my ruler, ‘What’s a princess like you doing the dirty work for?’
By eleven a.m. Steve was on the phone. ‘Az,’ a morphing of my name, Ana-Sofia, ‘how are you coping?’
‘I’m fine,’ I reassured him. Steve had been the boyfriend of Ian, my kind-of-stepfather, and he was a miracle. Despite having contracted HIV at the same time as Ian, he’d been asymptomatic for twenty years. His theory was that he was descended from survivors of Black Death. I wasn’t sure I bought the theory but I was pleased to have him in my life.
‘Let’s have lunch,’ Steve persisted. ‘In case you feel less fine later.’
But I had a meeting, so we arranged to have an evening drink instead, down in the East Village near where we both lived. That’s why it was that I was on the L later that day when the lights in the train began to flicker, then went out altogether. There were murmurs. ‘What’s up man?’ ‘What’s happening?’ Someone further along in the carriage screamed. A few people tried to use their cell phones. A voice close to me came out of the darkness: ‘The network’s down.’ No one said, though we were all thinking, ‘Has it happened? Is it happening again?’ I imagined the moment when we reached the surface, to find—what? Dust fluttering down like snow. One building and five thousand dead; or half the city, and millions.
How much longer would we be able to breathe?
Breathe.
I made myself take slow breaths, to counteract the contractions of my chest. Anger, anxiety, fear: it’s all about contraction. The world becomes smaller. We are reduced. I tried to remember how Joan Didion once described fear. A protein. She called it a protein.
The heat built steadily. The stink of us took only fifteen minutes to fill the carriage. Young men pulled their shirts off in the flickering of gas lighters. I saw the slick glow of their bodies, beautiful. I turned away. Even though I was past the age when it would cross most young men’s minds that I desired them, it seemed impolite to look.
Two enormous women, one black, one white, sat opposite me. I could smell their distress. The black woman, like me, was sitting very, very still. The white woman rocked and began to chant, ‘Oh God, we’re all going to die.’
One of the beautiful young men snarled, ‘Shut the fuck up.’ The woman began to cry. A young girl, a teenager, got up from her seat and felt her way towards the weeping woman. She knelt before her, patting her large knees. ‘It’s all right, ma’am. Don’t cry.’ The cross around the young girl’s neck glinted in a sudden flame and I flinched, then reminded myself that Christians aren’t always fundamentalists. All my petty prejudices rose in my throat.
Every few minutes someone tried the doors. The man across the aisle from me took off his suit jacket, loosened his tie and tried to prise the doors apart with a metal ruler he’d pulled out of his briefcase
. To no avail.
‘It’s a safety precaution,’ the black woman said. ‘This city will kill us with its precautions.’ I laughed with her and the man wearing the tie seemed to enjoy the irony as well. We caught each other’s eye.
I sat. Images came to me: of people, Jews like my mother—which I suppose means Jews like me, though I was not brought up as one—being forced into train carriages; jammed in together so tight that when they died standing they remained so. I tried not to think of the Tokyo subway, eight years ago, commuters gulping gas into their lungs: the nausea, the running eyes, the blurring vision, the pounding hearts. My mother’s name was Anna. She died of a heart attack, have I told you that? There are other versions of her death—she was poisoned; she died of cholera while I held her head in my nine-year-old hands, my tears falling onto her face; she died in perfect meditation posture and became a realised being—but that was the version I believed to be true. A heart, starved, wears out sooner.
I began to think about a story she once told me. One late summer day, when my mother was living in Paris, she decided to explore the catacombs. She’d only visited them once before and that first time she’d been with her friend, Gabriel. This time she was alone and she felt uncertain how to get down there. She walked through the park to a large pile of boulders and looked among them for a crack she could disappear into. As she gathered her fur coat to her and went to slip into a fissure a gypsy girl came towards her; a girl with dark hair and dirty rose cheeks. She held a candle and matches out to Anna: ‘Here,’ she said.
Anna gave the child some coins and tried to kiss her on the forehead but she ran away, flinging the candle and matches onto the ground. Anna picked them up, then slipped between the rocks. Once she was inside she groped around until she found the iron ladder she’d been told to look for. She clambered down it then lit the candle, which sputtered unsteadily. For twenty minutes or so there was nothing to be seen in the uncertain light. Nothing to be heard but the drip, drip, of weeping rock. Then suddenly skulls and femurs flickered into view. They were golden brown with age; made beautiful through arrangement: hearts, skull and crossbones. Anna saw that not all the bones were neatly arranged. Many of them had been tossed in random piles after being dug out of cemeteries more than a hundred years ago: a thigh in one direction, a skull in another, ribs scattered heaven knew where. The Nazis had been down there during the war, and the Resistance. They’d all crawled around in the dirt, never knowing the others were there.
Down in the darkness there was a scuffling, faint as the scurrying of mice. Stifled giggles became louder and two teenagers descended upon her then exploded into shocked laughter as they dashed past, shrieking at an even higher pitch. Anna felt her way up the path in the direction they’d come from. The passage became so low she had to stoop over and trail her hand over the perspiring walls to orientate herself. Suddenly the wall fell away and she followed its slopes into a small room filled with a pile of femurs. At the top of the pile there was a dip where people had lain pressing the bones down into the shape of a bowl. Anna patted at the bones and felt that they were still warm—the teenagers must have been there—and suddenly all she wanted to do was rest. She curled up in the nest of bone, covered herself in velvet darkness and slept.
After some indefinable period of time she was woken by the sound of more shouts. They seemed a long way away. In her fright, she told me, she called out for her mother, then fell asleep again. When she woke for a second time she felt hungry and cold and needed to piss. She clambered out of the room to the tunnel, but instead of turning right the way she had come, turned left and walked until her stooping became a crawl under collapsing walls.
My mother crawled back through the layers of Paris, past the time when the boulevards were built, past the time her Jewish forebears were evicted from the city—once, twice, many times—back through the years and centuries of plague and war to the time when the city was nothing more than a few Roman soldiers on a river island, digging houses out of the mud. People died down there—of course they did, they died everywhere—and Anna discovered that the thought of death pleased her. She lay for a while, covered in dirt, trying not to wet herself; and that is when I began to kick. ‘It was the first time,’ she said to me, ‘that I ever felt you.’
When she first told me that story it seemed to me she was trying to tell me that I had saved her. That the thought of me had given her the energy to haul herself back along the tunnel and up to the surface. Now it occurs to me: was it the thought of me that sent her down there in the first place?
I visited the catacombs myself once, when I was on a trip to Paris. Perhaps that was why I could feel so intensely, now, the sense I had of being down in the catacombs with my mother more than forty years ago. There was the dark of the subway. There was the fact I really had been down there with her, albeit in utero.
But the scene came to me more vividly than these truths would allow for. The sobs and mutterings of the train carriage faded away, the air itself seemed to cool: imagining myself in a tunnel with my mother made me feel safe. Which is strange, when you consider she didn’t make me feel safe at all when she was alive.
After an hour we heard workers approaching. We saw the bob and bounce of their torches and a few moments later a guard was opening the doors. He smiled in at us all, his face lit up from below by the torch hanging around his neck. His gothic entrance added to the sense of melodrama.
‘Just a power blackout’s all this is folks,’ he drawled. ‘No cause for alarm. Happening all over the East-ern sea-board.’ He drew out the last two words. To reassure us. ‘But here’s the bad news. We’re jammed in here between Sixth and Union Square. We can walk you out, but it’ll be a few blocks.’
The guard led hundreds of us along the track. We stumbled. The smell of ammonia in the tunnels was strong. I could hear voices chattering in the distance and wondered, for a moment, if they were the voices of the people who lived down there, driven into the warm dark by poverty or shame, or both. Torch lights flitted ahead of us like fireflies. In the quiet that had descended on our group we heard the scuttle of rats. A large one brushed a woman’s foot and she shrieked, then fell heavily to the ground. I leaned over her. ‘It’s okay,’ I reassured her. ‘This will be over soon. We’ll help you.’
The man who’d tried to force the doors open, the one who’d caught my eye, moved towards me, insubstantial as a shadow. He touched me on the elbow.
‘Here, let me help.’ Then we all walked together towards the pinprick of light we could see in the distance.
Four hours later I made it home to find Steve waiting for me outside my building. I lived just near Charlie Parker’s house on Avenue B, not far from Tompkins Square Park. We gave each other a sweaty, smelly hug. ‘Don’t be too impressed by my loyalty,’ Steve gestured towards the square. ‘We Are Family’ was pumping out of a ghetto blaster and young men and women, half-dressed, were holding hands and dancing around in a circle. ‘We’ve been having fun. It’s all very fall of the Roman Empire around here.’
I pulled out the business card the man in the tunnel had given me—Robert Rodriguez—and presented it to Steve with a flourish. ‘In the midst of disaster,’ I said, ‘I got myself a date.’
Steve was seriously impressed. ‘You are good, girlfriend.’
He walked me up to the first floor because the stairwell was dark as a tomb. (In fact later that night it would become one: the old man from the fourth floor would slip, strike his head and die trying to find his way down.) When I stepped into the apartment Minx raced towards me, howling her distress. The place was hot as hell. Normally when the temperature got to a certain point the air conditioner came on automatically. I kidded myself that this was to keep the place cool for me, but really it was Minx I worried about. In theory she could get in and out—her collar had a chip which triggered the cat flaps in my front door, and the service entrance of the apartment. (I can’t tell you how many months of arguments I had with the condo association to ge
t that through. It cost me thousands of dollars, and would cost thousands again if I ever moved and had to return everything to the way it was before.) But the days were too bright and noisy for her; it was just before dawn that she let herself out, and for an hour or so, claimed some of the city as her own.
‘I should check on my own place,’ Steve was apologetic. ‘As long as you think you’ve got things under control here.’
‘Of course,’ I kissed him. ‘It’s all fine now.’
After Steve left; after opening all my windows and letting more hot air into the place; after Minx had settled herself on the windowsill, a neat silhouette against the darkening sky; after finding candles in the drawer and lighting them, I sat in their dull glow. I thought about the time Ian took me to my first classical music concert: Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, ‘Leningrad’, played by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. After that extraordinary, hypnotic, dissonant performance, as the tears were still running down my face, Ian turned to me and said, ‘That music, it is about your mother. It’s about what she went through—she and her city. She was a survivor.’ I felt annoyed at him for bringing me back down like that. I wanted music that took me away from reality, not deeper into the heart of it. But as I got older I found that Symphony No. 7 was something I played on nights I couldn’t sleep. I would lie wide awake during the first section, and even if I dozed during the piccolo and violin duet I would be jolted by what sounded like the rhythm of marching as the music swelled to bring the entire orchestra in. I’d be lulled again by the diminishing pulse of the fourth section, that point where the music seemed in danger of dying away altogether. By the end, the exaltation of the final bars, I’d be asleep. I found I wanted to play the Leningrad now, but there was no power. Instead I sat, wondering. How many nights did you sit here like this, Anna, in the dark, wondering if the world was about to end?