Lilac and Flag by John Berger

Author:John Berger [Berger, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79427-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

I’ve never been so tall, said Zsuzsa.

Can you feel it? Can you feel it swaying?

No one will ever make me as tall as this.

One day you’ll fly in a plane!

It’ll never go as high as we are now.

A Boeing 747 to Paris!

No, Flag, nobody in my life will bring me as high as you’ve done tonight.

Marriage

ON THE RIGHT of the stove in my kitchen, there’s a little lever to operate a damper which increases or reduces the draught of air being sucked up into the chimney pipe. The mechanism is simple enough for an old woman to understand. Pushing the lever up or down turns a bar which is attached to a circle of thin metal which has the same dimensions as the pipe. When it’s upright it shuts off, and when it’s horizontal it lets the air go up. Last year, the buff broke off the bar and the fire roared all the time, so I went to César, the blacksmith, and asked him if he could repair it. It was an insult to ask him this, like asking a cobbler to sew on a button. But he looked at me and said, as if we were both fifty years younger: Since it’s for you, I’ll mend it! Two days later I passed by and there was the damper, repaired and waiting for me. César wasn’t at home, so I took it and left for him on his workbench a pot of my honey. Several months later he died. Now every time I move the lever up or down, I think of César, the dead blacksmith, and I thank him as I hear the breath in the chimney becoming weaker or stronger. César, I whisper, you are in my fire!

It was getting dark in Troy. Sucus was sprawled on his bed reading about a marriage between a famous millionaire and an Australian film star. The millionaire was reported to have said: This is my fifth and last marriage, for I’m old enough today to know what I want. He was sixty-two, the bride twenty-three. Sucus dropped his newspaper onto the floor beside the bed.

Do you remember the last time you went to the village, Maman?

Wislawa put down her iron and looked through the fourteenth-storey window as if she could see—not the lead ingots of other Trojan buildings, but a mountain.

The last time I was in the village, Sucus, I was pregnant with you.

Was it snowing?

She laughed. No, it was summer, the time of the haymaking. They wouldn’t let me fork up the hay. They said it was too risky with you. I just raked.

Wislawa was still looking at the mountain. The water in her iron, upright on the table, gurgled. Through the party wall came the simmering noise of the neighbour’s TV, a noise like voices talking in a saucepan.

I’m going to be earning very soon, Sucus said.

I’ll believe that, son, when it happens.

I only need twenty-five thousand. Twenty-five. So I can buy a sphygmomanometer! With a sphygmomanometer I’m

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