I live in the cellar now. There are no windows and I have lost track of the days. The noises in the house give me only an intermittent idea of night and day.
They took away my clothes and everything else. There is only my bucket for my waste. With my hands manacled I can do nothing to amuse the hours of my life, except to play with my thoughts. They will turn on the light or turn it off as I request, when they leave me each time they visit. I have grown to know many of their familiar noises, their smells, their routines. and I wonder how they are getting on with their plan.
I do not think much now about my own predicament though it saddens me that the hours are all the same and my life flows without interruptions which would give it a meaning. Their plan is of immense world importance and the part I play in it had to be. I had not meant to intrude on them at that moment.
They are fond of me and in their hearts is a gratitude for my sacrifice. But, oh, I did love her so much in my own quiet way before he erupted into her life.
I hardly know now how I managed to buy this house ten years ago. It is in the middle of a row of houses not far from the river at Hammersmith. She was not the first lodger I had, but it must have been nine years or more since I first saw Irenia. My heart has always been one of quiet passions – so it was over many months that it grew and swelled out with love for her and for her freshness of being, a woman. My eyes are still capable of gentle dampness as I turn over these thoughts and phrases in my mind.
Without doubt, she was aware of how her presence stretched me out with warmth and substance. She gave me small tokens of her recognition – a button from her raincoat she left on the window-sill, half a ball of string. These were things I could just possibly have used. Nothing was ever spoken. I thought of taking her underwear drying on the line in the bathroom but that seemed to defile a sense of purity that seemed to be spreading inside me. Even the thought of stealing from I did not want to keep.
She was young then. She still is a woman of fine, fine beauty. She still knows of the swelling in my chest that keeps my hours warm for me. But now she has him.
At the time, I was a bus conductor for a while. That was when buses had conductors. But later I changed to selling papers in the street. I liked meeting the people who came and went. They formed a swirl of life around me. I am sure she had not ridden on my bus before the first time I saw her. I knew all the people and could recognise a new traveller immediately. She fell up the stairs on the bus, and her leg bled from the scratch where the garden fork she had just bought had caught between her ankles. I had helped her onto a seat, and she was distracted and slow in paying her fare. I helped her off at her stop. I did not suspect then that she had studied law and was then struggling with a few cases at the bar. Later when I used to chat briefly with her at my paper stall she had already moved into her journalistic career. It was not until much later that she actually appeared in many of the papers I would have been selling.
A few years ago, perhaps nine or ten, I cannot remember exactly though sometimes I ask them the date, she needed a place to live and asked me to keep an eye on the ads in the evenings. To cut a long story short, she moved into the upper floor of this house. She was not the first lodger I had, but she did pay me the best rent. And she was the quietest. She told me once, a journalist is best if she has most contacts, but in spite of that she had no friends. In all that time she was here, she had two visitors. Once a man called on her one Sunday afternoon. It was wet, wild and autumn. He left after an hour or so in a hurry. After that her arm was stiff and she kept it close to the side of her body for several weeks. He was a foreigner from the East. And once her father came in the evening and stayed for a long time. Afterwards her eyes were pink and then she started buying expensive jewellery and she went to Paris for the weekend, sometimes several weekends in a row. And then she must have given up her job altogether. I did not see her name in the papers any more and she spent a lot of time in her rooms and she told me her life was boring. It was a good long time, many years, during which she constantly bought herself expensive things, before she got out of that state. It was when he appeared, I suppose.
I try not to bemoan my fate. I know they are frightened of me. That was why just lately they took away the two folding chairs that had hung from the hooks on the wall. They had explained from the beginning that they would leave me nothing in my cellar. They feared I may escape - dig my way out through the bare earth floor. So they took everything I could dig with - anything that might conceal a hole – table, clothes, paper. I would never have done such a thing to them. But I never said so. Frightening them kept me close to them somehow. But I missed those chairs. There were two because sometimes she would take the second one down and sit opposite to me on mine. She would stay with me for an hour or so sometimes. We rarely spoke. But sometimes she talked. I would ask how the plan was getting on. Sometimes she said he did not like her talking to me. Secretly, I think that is why the chairs went.
When I play with my thoughts, putting them in order like this, there is one that I wonder what to do with, where to place it. It concerns her and those times she used to spend sitting with me in my cellar. They were privileged times. Before he came, and so before the cellar, I would only glimpse her passing on the stairs, see her through the front window coming in at the garden gate at some time of the day or evening. I would smell the rich scent she used in her bath hanging in the warm wet air afterwards. My mind's eye would imagine her long body wet and soaping – preparing herself for some glamorous occasion I imagined. Yet, she often only spent the rest of her evening in her rooms. She was very pure. I would never interrupt her there. But my thoughts quite often played with her body when I was in a good mood.
I have not been an active man, so she probably never thought of my body. Yet, in this one memory of her, she did notice. It too was very pure in her own way. We sat silently. As was frequent, my hands were manacled to the back of my chair. I let them do that whenever they wanted. On this occasion, she put out her hand to take my penis gently. She let it lie there, and we looked at it, perhaps for half an hour. In that time, it grew very hard and then gradually softer again. She let it drop from her hand and she never held me again. I treasure that, and my sojourn is worth it just for that moment it lay in her hand.
My health must be poor now. For the years of inactivity have made me tired; and my manacled arms are thin. The half-damp soil on which I sleep at night and the atmosphere of mould instil a smell of disease. But I am not a dog in a kennel. I am not a mere animal. I have a mind, which is alive and plays with my thoughts. My mind can still see and stroke and enjoy in a thousand ways. Those things are still mine because I can still think them. My mind still has its great love. I think it may be an obsession to form my mind around her shape every day. I feel her in imagination and sense the smell and draft of her hair. I tend the sadness I used to see in her face. It is easier with my light off. Sometimes I wait days before I ask for it to be switched on. And then when I see her there it is no less than my mind imagined. She pauses often as if she knows I have a way of drinking from her. She is a flower that pauses in the breeze knowing in satisfaction she has built the hive for honey, she has turned the garden into a radiance of colour. I gaze at her without movement. My thin arms sag sometimes. Afterwards I look at the patch of earth where she stood. It is especially purified. I cannot move to touch it.
She wears simple clothes, they line her curves in graceful arcs. Her clothes are free. Years ago what haunted me were her clothes. Then she wore clothes that wrapped her carefully. They stretched across the nakedness that must lie inside. She made her clothes radiate. They were gold-leaf. She was living marble.
Now her wealth is so vast she could buy clothes of gold and jewels. But now, she makes the clothes she wears look awkward, anxious to be off her. They are loose, so free from her that the air in between shines with a vivacity as if they had already left her.
My mind strokes obsessionally. That is the furniture of my cellar. I want nothing more. After they overpowered me and put me down here, I have never been violent again. I never lost my temper in my life, but I was angry when they took my house away from me; because they took me as well. I was frightened they would take my life, but they could not do that, not then. I know now. They are good people in their own way. And they have to do what they are planning. And they have left me my mind, which plays and strokes her. I am closer to her now than I would ever have been otherwise.
Irenia's eyes never blinked. I could not gaze back at them for long without flicking my gaze to the side or downwards. The stillness at that moment fired a flood inside me. She once told me of games she and friends played. The game where who could resist blinking was the winner, when your opponent made to punch you on the nose. She always won. She told me. I remembered, even in that moment of stillness when they came. Before they did it. I remembered her stillness. She had never flinched, she had told me, when her mother beat her on the palm of the hands. No – my mind is rearranging its toys too much. They had come. Together. I did not flinch. I tried to stare into her face as she watched me.
My hands will not be sore again where the manacles were. When they first put me in manacles, the skin of my hands and wrists rubbed and became sore. After months it gradually healed over. But now little sores had appeared again... But let me finish this as it finished. I think my health is leaving me. Sometimes when I have lain on my hand, it is not there in the morning. Instead, I am waving a live thing, a joyful banner that describes life, a semaphore that has escaped defeat and darkness. But they had come finally. They knew it was the moment before death. It was the sadness I objected to, not the pain, the sadness that she caused me. She invited him to do it. She merely gazed in still attention as he slid the thin blade beneath my ribs. If only it had been her, if only she had made a steely search into my interior, then it would have been her that I would have given my life to. If only she had found my heart with her knife, then I would have gone on dreaming.
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