Martin Kovan

Burning Cities It is hard to tell, in the dim light, what the girl wants. She crouches not far from the station-entrance, beckoning him to come closer, or perhaps to show him something she is in the process of producing. As if she could be constructing a tiny house, or sewing a piece of baby's clothing, or shuffling through old family photos. Before moving anywhere he looks again and really can't tell. The girl is a mystery, and he has never seen her there before. For all he knows, she could be pissing in a bottle and wants him to view the results of her industry. He isn't sure, though, if she is mad, or perhaps only a little drunk. It has lately seemed to him that normal people often prove the more seriously disturbed, and the apparently deranged often cheerfully so, so that their aberrance proves to be a kind of balm to the typically harassed city-dweller: they are often very funny, cracking jokes to all and sundry, laughing their heads off, appearing to have a much more amusing time than their terminally serious counterparts, who can't help but feel either better about themselves, or momentarily diverted from the portentous issues of their lives. If madness acts as a benign benefit then at least some of it can be interpreted as a contribution to social cohesion, itself for most a mark of sanity. He has even lately been smiling at the mad ones, truly enjoying their obscure theatres of the absurd, even impressed at their sheer inventiveness, like children at play. In his smiling, though, they doubtless think he too is one of them, and it could be that, in someone else's superior judgment, he is. But that judgment could only ever come from someone whose own madness precludes ultimate authority, which means that in the final analysis only an Omnipotent Being could truly know where things stand. And God Himself, if such there be, and judging by His own Creation, could arguably be said to be possessed of a tenuous, perhaps cruelly ironic, temper of mind Himself, which brings the problem full circle. No-one can say for certain who is mad, and who is sane, in this particular world. He looks again and sees that the girl has prepared a bunch of flowers, a ragged posey, and is offering it to him. He wonders how many others before him have been privileged with the same attention. Is she in the act of soliciting him? Is she simply an innocent, with a too-large heart that no-one else can understand by reference to their own desiccated organs only truculently still pumping somewhere in the nether regions - somewhere it is better not to know too much about? He is half-inclined to move forward and accept her offering, but is simultaneously afraid, held in a spasm of disabling doubt at the thought of seeing something he is certain will be a terror; not even an especially horrific scene - a self-mutilation, a foetus-in-a-bottle - but a kind of inexplicably oblique and unclear allegory that nevertheless holds an immense power to shock his waking mind. Waiting on the station-platform he has lately seen a normal playing-card, a Queen of Spades, on which someone made the usual graffiti, giving the Dark Lady outrageous genitalia, a moustache and tail, a cleaver through the head. It should have been funny, and was, but for him it was also an epitome of violence, purely disturbing in its almost innocent idiocy. The kind of person who could do that for fun, he thought then, is the same person who could rob invalids, torture prisoners, or shoot a Jew, an Arab, a Muslim, for the thrill. In the same way he remembers a moment in his childhood when he had seen a boy at school angrily throw his sandwiches into the garbage, swearing and spitting after the unwanted food his mother had that day prepared. It was ham and cheese, the boy had said, and he hated ham and cheese. It was unlikely he would ever forgive his mother for her oversight. These are the gestures that still catch him up, like the vision of a burning city. The girl not far from him has perhaps another one to offer up - he can't tell but is clear that he doesn't want to discover it. So he moves a little closer to see - in a glimpse - if he should look closer or not. He expects to see a pet-mouse playing a harmonica, with a little beret left out for money, or a sea-horse in a drowned carousel, moving his wheel through water. He doesn't expect to see anything particularly real - in this city, in its onset of winter, the quaint theatres of the mad could be expected to proffer all kinds of exquisite miracle, but not anything belonging to the normal daylight world. And in looking closer he sees the girl is not holding a posey of dried flowers, but a doll's head with its hair pulled and stretched angrily in every direction, like an icon to the demented. It is enough to make him want to walk away immediately. He searches his pockets for some coins to leave the girl, so that at least the encounter might pass with some benefit to one of them. She is clearly poor and in need of care, and will probably spend the night by the station-entrance. He searches his pockets, feels inside his coat, but can't find any coins, only a high-denomination bill. The girl immediately understands his dilemma and starts smiling, like an intelligent child, nodding her head up and down. "Yes," she says in a surprisingly sweet, gentle voice. "Give to me. Give me that." It is too much money for him to give away just like that, and the truth is he also needs it for himself. Everyone, everyone, needs money, and he is no exception. "Can I - here, something else?" He stammers, feeling his pockets again. An apple? A pen? Does she need a spare train-ticket? But he knows he doesn't have even these. "Money," the girl says again, and licks her lips, distinctly lewd, though otherwise restrained. He thinks again that she could be offering herself to him, but that is absurd, she is too young, barely into her teens. It is hard to tell, with street-people, just how old they are, and this incarnation could be a weathered child with a precocious mind, or an ageless adult with a juvenile one. Again he looks and can't tell, and the more he stays there the more he realises the whole experience, already disturbing, is moving outside his imagining. When the music starts, a liquid, slow accordion music that he also imagines he has heard before, he is quite sure he could be certain of nothing on this night and at this place. He hears the music coming from behind him, though he has seen already that there is no-one there. It is doubly tormenting because the music sounds distinctly cliched - everything about the scene, when he thinks of it, also is - and at this turn in history it would seem childish to be tormented by the banal perpetuation of a few cliches. So he turns and sees in fact that no-one is playing an accordion though there is sound emanating from that place. It is perhaps coming through the wall, where a late-night busker might be trying out his luck on the other side. But that, too, seems unlikely - it is too late to attract much of an audience. One mystery lies on top of another, like an obscure, blind coupling in a night-time ditch. He realises that the only thing keeping him there is still the question of whether he ought to leave the money with the girl or not. It would mean his having to go a day without food, though the girl might have a roof over her head for the night. He at least knows, without mystery, that a light rain has started to fall, and that he will soon need to seek shelter. He looks for what he hopes might be the last time at the girl, and sees that as the queasy accordion music plays - he almost want to laugh - she is moving in her sitting position to the languid curves of sound and stretching out her hand to move with him. It is another vision, another burning city. It does not hold him up, as if suddenly under arrest, his head bounding into his throat with a shock of recognition, because it is distasteful to him. It leaves him near to paralysed where he stands because he realises that he wants more than anything to take the girl's hand, and dance with her there under the murky, buzzing electric light, in the shadows of the station-entrance. He sees them turning in a graceful circle, making a quaint and courtly waltz among the cigarette-butts and littered tickets, politely bowing to each other before making a neat exit into another world. He also sees how extremely beautiful the girl is, with long slender hands and forget-me-not eyes looking to him with an expression of the most guileless honesty and warmth he can remember. There is no ordinary person, even someone out of his past, who has in his memory ever looked at him that way. On that reasoning, it can't possibly be real. He decides it is simply a minor hallucination; a poor person sitting there, probably half-asleep, that in his confused state of mind, he is turning into a saint. In any case, the accordion music seems to be fading, and the girl has gently taken back her invitation to the dance, and is cradling something in her arms, that she rocks back and forth. He wants to dispel the illusion, once and for all, and recover his senses enough to know that certain things exist and certain others don't. He looks forward and in the bleak light sees what she holds in her arms: it is a rat, quite large, and probably dead. He is not disgusted, but he feels suddenly very clear and sober-minded. All the cliches, thankfully, have left the bare room of life clear again. He feels the rain on his face, coming down with greater force now, knocking on the windows of that bare life he now makes an effort to move into again. It is only some minutes later, on his way home, that he becomes aware he has failed to leave the money with the girl: it has simply slipped his mind. Even so, he can't forget the vision, not of the rat, but of that other thing. Something in him prays - it is a desperation barely under his skin, under his breath - that the rain will be enough to drown the flames that threaten to take the city.

Home