The old lady lay on top of the kitchen table. Beneath her was the old rag rug that had been in front of the fireplace and she was wrapped in an eiderdown. She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling. She could hear the sounds made by water as it lapped gently against pieces of furniture. Some dull light from the setting sun illuminated the room and when she turned her head she could see the door leading to the garden moving slightly as the water beneath and around its lower sides pressed against the latch making the door rock on its well-worn hinges. Then the light from the sun reduced quite quickly and she could hear the sudden impact of more rain upon the window.
She was very cold in spite of her covering.
She allowed her mind to drift.
She was Bohemian. Not a Bohemian. Bohemian. That’s what she was and very proud of it too. How did that word come to be so inappropriately applied to people who were so completely different from her in every respect? Wild people. People who dressed extravagantly and danced all night. Students in Paris . That opera; enjoyable as it was it was not respectful of people like her, people like her Mother and Father and people like her Grandmother and Grandfather all of whom were born in Bohemia. Bohemians. They all lived quiet, industrious lives in their small town in the western part of Czechoslovakia. Until the war came and upset it all.
As a small child she saw a lot of her grandparents. Grandpa was a famous figure in their community, known throughout for his considerable carpentry and woodcarving skills that made his ornately decorated wooden fire-surrounds, cabinets, desks, sideboards, chairs and tables highly prized for miles around. Yes, there were other carpenters and furniture makers but only one Grandpa!
His speciality was making objects that were used as bridal presents and gifts to mark special occasions. Orders had to be placed months, even years ahead, but everyone knew it was worth the wait and there were few of the town’s wealthier families that did not have at least one of Grandpa’s creations. The house where she was born and brought up until the outcome of the war contained the most amazing furniture and objects that had been given by him to mark important events in the lives of her parents – particularly their wedding – anniversaries and birthdays. Grandpa might give her a little box with a hinged lid for her birthday. Or a picture carved in relief so cleverly executed that buildings seemed to stand right out of the frame and roads went off into the distance getting narrower and narrower until they disappeared over a hill.
She loved all her presents and it broke her heart when in the desperate rush to escape the invaders she and Mama were bundled into a train with only as much as they could easily carry. She was allowed to keep one small box in which she kept her little treasures. If she turned her head just a little she could see that box on a shelf to the right of the fireplace. It was all she had left of that happy time in her childhood.
Papa stayed behind and so did her grandparents. They watched the pillaging and destruction and experienced the harshness of a brutal occupation. Papa died. Her grandparents, now very old and worn down, survived into the first year of the peace and when Grandpa died Grandma, who had resisted all attempts to persuade her to join them here, wrote to them and told them of Papa’s brave death at the hands of the enemy. She wrote too of how Grandpa, overwhelmed with grief at the death of his son, worked non-stop for several days and nights to make Papa a coffin. The coffin was the finest piece of work the old man had ever produced.
The lid of the coffin was not flat, she had said. It was made in what he used to call ‘diamond style’ that he used for the gentry. The centre was higher than the sides and there were four triangular areas, rather like the facets of a diamond, where Grandpa had carved the story of Papas’s life and death. At the head of the lid, on a shallow isosceles triangle, there was Papa’s full name that included his five Christian names and the dates of his birth and death. The tall, thin triangle that came to meet it from the base of the lid showed a man, Papa, standing against the wall of the church in which he had been baptised and married facing a group of soldiers with rifles raised to their shoulders in the act of execution. The sides showed scenes from the town and nearby countryside with, on one side, Grandpa and Grandma and their son in various stages of his early life the other being devoted to his marriage to Mama and her own birth.
Soon after this letter she and Mama learned that Grandma had died. And then Mama, her constant companion in this land where they had taken refuge, also died and she was left alone in the small cottage.
The old lady sighed quietly and pulled the eiderdown closer. The light from the sun had gone completely and a rising moon began to illuminate the room. It revealed that the water level had become much higher as the rain had continued. She shivered.
There were strange noises at the door, a tentative scraping combined with a determined kind of pushing rather as a dog might show its wish to come in to its home. The door moved in response to the pressure and to the movement of the water itself. Small ripples could be seen on the water’s surface. The noises and movements of the door became stronger and, suddenly, it moved up and freed its catch so that it opened and the moonlight streamed through the open doorway.
The first she saw of the dark mass that loomed into her sight was the shape of an isosceles triangle that was wider than it was high, picked it out by the moonlight. The object stayed, framed by the doorway, gently moving with the water that supported it, the triangle of reflected light moving from side to side as though deciding where to go.
She felt an overwhelming sense of resolution and finality at the sight of what had entered the room and took up its place beside her. She knew the words and dates that would be carved into the top isosceles triangle. Her hand stretched out and her fingers read the pictures carved into the sides. There was, she knew, Papa and Mama pushing her up and up on the garden swing and her sitting in the local school classroom – and with her hair in plaits. Yes! That is how she wore her hair in those days! And on the far side there was without doubt a train and there within a carriage they sat, her and Mama, side by side on their way to a new and much sadder life. And Grandpa, Grandma and Papa waving them goodbye. Such a sad, sad scene.
She knew what the final picture would be. There was no need to reach out to feel for it. It amounted to an instruction.
The coffin lid slowly opened. Within it was lined with a shiny soft material and a padded headrest. With a sigh of satisfaction and sense of utter peace she rolled from the table into the welcoming interior. She relaxed her body and crossed her hands over her breast and closed her eyes. The lid slowly lowered itself.
Her lifeless body slipped from the table into the water and disappeared beneath the surface with hardly a ripple.
No comments:
Post a Comment