Known and Strange Things Read online

  I like the area and I like traveling in it, he said. There are many airfields around here, not just in Norfolk but also Suffolk and many other parts of the country. It’s just something I do. I have a spare bit of time, yeah, I go down to an airfield, see an air show, or just visit a disused field, go down there, remember what it was like. Places like Greenham Common, down in Berkshire. You know about that, yeah? I said I didn’t, but he could see now that I was making some notes, that he had captured my interest. He forged ahead.

  Greenham Common’s a major one. That’s where your CND camp was, yeah, the women’s peace camp, all that. Used to be cruise missiles and all sorts there through the eighties, until the nineties. I went down there, bit of runway left, but otherwise it’s all gone. And right around here, in Norfolk, with all the airfields and bases and what have you, this was called Little America during the war. Whole area was full of American air bases. During the war, the Second World War, mind you, bomb groups were based here and they used to go out on flying missions from here in the evenings. We are near the coast, and they’d take off from here to bomb the German cities, from here and from Suffolk, too.

  There is someone who would have loved to talk to you about this, I said, perhaps not loud enough for him to hear, and, as I said it, there was a sudden catch in my throat. Only then did the driver introduce himself, turning back for a moment with his hand on the wheel, his blue eyes a little bulbous, but the palest and most guileless of blues, tending almost toward gray. My name’s Jason, he said. And, with the same laconic urgency as before, he continued talking. Bentwaters was another big Cold War air base, he said. That closed down in 1993, thereabouts, but many of the men just stayed here, you see. They’d been here so long, they were part of the life here, these American airmen. They married local girls. There’s a museum down there in Bentwaters, that’s in Suffolk, they’ve got some of the old airmen giving talks. Tell you what, I think the place belongs to a family now, they bought the airfield, if I’ve got that right. The Kemble family, it’s theirs now. There’s just the one plane flying from there now, a Spitfire, and it’s flown by a lady called Carolyn Grace. She’s nearing sixty now, but she still takes the plane out. Only lady that flies a Spitfire in this country, to the best of my knowledge. Strange to say, her Spitfire was flown in a mission over Normandy on the morning of the D Day landings. And there was another base in Woodbridge, close to the coast, and that one had an emergency landing field, with an airstrip three times your normal airstrip length. That’s for your planes coming in from missions, maybe in distress or something.

  Jason talked, and we drove on, through small country roads that were like a postcard idea of rural England, winding, narrow, sedate roads, which, at sudden intervals, became larger roads, fierce, fast, and dangerous roads, which seemed to have barely enough space for the heavy traffic that plied them. On one of these larger roads, just as I noticed a sign for a village called Dunston, a large trailer rumbled past us at speed, and, whether from the shock of that overtaking vehicle, or because I had eaten nothing that morning, or perhaps due to some uneasiness brought about by Jason’s stories, I felt carsick for the first time in my life. And at that very moment, with a flickering photographic recall, as though someone had just switched on a slide projector, I remembered something W. G. Sebald had written. Looking it up now, I am surprised by how accurate my memory of it was, save for a few of the statistical details:

  His thoughts constantly revolved around the bombing raids then being launched on Germany from the sixty-seven airfields that were established in East Anglia after 1940. People nowadays hardly have any idea of the scale of the operation, said Hazel. In the course of one thousand and nine days, the eighth air fleet alone used a billion gallons of fuel, dropped seven hundred and thirty-two thousand tons of bombs, and lost almost nine thousand aircraft and fifty thousand men. Every evening I watched the bomber squadrons heading out over Somerleyton, and night after night, before I went to sleep, I pictured in my mind’s eye the German cities going up in flames, the firestorms setting the heavens alight and the survivors rooting about in the ruins.

  Are you all right? Jason said, glancing at the rearview mirror. I had rested my forehead on the window at the back and bunched myself up on the seat. I must have looked terrible. I feel ill, I said. I think I’d like to get something to eat, is there a small shop nearby where we could stop? Jason said there was a place right ahead, just past the Poringland Road, and within a few minutes we pulled in near a busy intersection. I went into the shop to buy a banana and a bottle of apple juice. It was about a mile away from where we were, in Framingham Pigot, in December 2001, that Sebald had had a heart attack while driving his Peugeot. The car had crashed and Sebald had died instantly. His daughter, in the passenger seat, had been badly injured. As I thought about how close in space these events were, even though by now removed in time, I noticed from the backseat of the taxi the headlines of the Eastern Daily News, pasted in front of the shop: MAN JAILED FOR MURDER OF NORFOLK PENSIONER. It was another set of lives, another set of fates rising to the surface for a moment before falling into history.

  Northwest of here is Swanton Morley, Jason said, when he saw that I had recovered somewhat, eager to resume his storytelling. I’ve been to that as well, there is another airfield there, they’ve got acrobatic displays. And just to tell you how a little bit of history opens things up, yeah, I noticed a small memorial when I was there, didn’t recognize the name. But just from the name of the airfield, I was able to go home and on the computer find out who that was, what happened to him, why there’s a memorial. With just a little bit of information your computer can tell you so much. Christopher Wilkins, that’s the name, he was flying in an air show, in 1998, when his engines stalled and he went down. And while Jason was telling me this, I remembered one of Sebald’s micropoems in Unrecounted:

  On 8 May 1927

  the pilots Nungesser & Coli

  took off from Le Bourget

  & after that

  were never

  seen again.

  Jason said, as though he were commenting directly on my own silent thoughts: These people are worth remembering. It’s nice to think that people will want to remember the past, because it shapes who we are, at the end of the day. I try to remember, you know. I’ve even been to some airfields in Germany. Well—his tone changed, and he stopped the car, bringing me out of my reverie—here we are. St. Andrew’s Church. I’ll just wait out here for you.

  It was a quiet, shaded lane. The fog had lifted, but the day was not bright. There was not a soul around. I raised the slim iron latch of the wooden gate, which was overgrown with creepers, and went around the old Norman church with its characteristic East Anglian round tower. Round-tower churches are rare in England now, except in Norfolk and Suffolk. St. Andrew’s is built of honey-colored stone, its churchyard full of old stones, old graves, well kept but arranged somewhat haphazardly. Flowers were in bloom all over, and there was in particular a profusion of foxgloves.

  I searched. Finally, coming around the chancel, I saw Sebald’s gravestone: a slab of dark marble, a slender marker shaded by a large green bush. There he is, I thought. The teacher I never knew, the friend I met only posthumously. Some water had trickled down the face of the slab, making the “S” of his name temporarily invisible, as well as the second “4” in “1944” and the “1” in “2001.” The erasures put him into a peculiar timelessness. Along the top of the gravestone was a row of smooth small stones in different shades of brown and gray. There was a little space on the left. I picked up a stone from the ground and added it to the row. Then I knelt down.

  How long was I there?

  When I returned to the car, I asked Jason to drive me back to Norwich, to the Church of St. Peter Mancroft in the city center. Jason said: Just to satisfy my curiosity, this grave you came to see, he’s a writer, yeah? What’s his name, maybe I can find out more about him. I told him the name. He’d never heard it. He was a sort of local historian, I s
aid, like you. Like you, he didn’t want the past to be forgotten, especially the small and neglected stories. He lived in this area a long time, taught literature up at the university. Jason turned around, and from under his glasses I could see both a merriment and a melancholy. He was originally from Germany, I said. Germany? he said. Well, that’s what you’d call ironic. And he wrote down the name.

  At St. Peter Mancroft was the memorial to Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century physician and antiquarian whose weird and digressive texts Urn Burial and Religio Medici had meant much to me as a young would-be physician. I did not read Sebald until later, after I abandoned my medical studies. Only later still did I find out that he had been strongly influenced by Browne. That connection with Browne, and with others, like Nabokov and certain obscure historians of Northern Renaissance art, helped me to understand something of the uncanny feeling I had when I first read Sebald, and the feeling that I still have each time I read him: a feeling of return rather than of arrival.

  That afternoon, thinking of Jason’s eyes and the slight mischief in his serious mien, I was faintly aware of others traveling the same circuits, pulled by an unidentifiable gravitational force into certain habits of mind and psyche. In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald had written:

  Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one’s own precursor?

  I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the University of East Anglia, where he had taught for more than thirty years. A large magpie followed me around, disappearing for occasional spells, but always returning, a solitary bird, sharp black and white, bigger than I expected, and as starkly devoid of color as a woodcut. I am not superstitious, and thought nothing of it. But the bird was persistent. These things, as Sebald said in one of his last interviews, once you have seen them, have a habit of returning, and they want attention. He said this with regard to the interred past, but I think he possibly meant more.

  Later, in the unending late afternoon of the longest day of the year, Sam, one of the conference organizers whom I had gotten to know that week, and who had come to Norwich just a few weeks before Sebald died, said—with no prompting from me—that it had been noticed at the university that Sebald always wore two watches, one on each wrist. Was it something to do with the mystical properties of different metals? Was it some strange sense of time that demanded simultaneous witness? Or was it simply Sebald’s dry sense of humor? And were the watches even set to the same time zone, or was one testifying to past time, the way his writing did? Sam didn’t know, but I found myself thinking again of the magpie, its talent for collecting this and that, and its eye for the sudden shards of brightness that enliven the ordinary. I said good night to Sam and, returning to my hotel in the last light, well past nine, saw the bird again, going from bush to bush in the uphill path ahead of me, little more than a shadow now.

  A Better Quality of Agony

  “SQUID MARINATED IN lemongrass and lime and chili flakes. Slices of salty haloumi cheese and lamb chops and sausages from Nicos, our local Greek Cypriot butcher….We’d marinate a leg of lamb for two days in a mix of yogurt, almonds, pistachios, lots of spices, mint, and green chilies….We’d buy greengages in August. Often they were perfect, not too yielding, but not unripe.”

  The book in which this passage appears contains other passages that speak of times in the garden, trips taken with family, children learning from their parents and vice versa, and moments of laughter and joy. In most books, these evocations of summertime ease and sweet familial conviviality would be a pleasure. In Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir, Wave, they are among the most difficult things I’ve ever read. The reason: Wave is about Deraniyagala’s husband, her parents, and her two sons, aged seven and five, all of whom died in a single morning in December 2004, when a tsunami hit the resort where they were holidaying in Sri Lanka. Deraniyagala herself was found spinning around in circles and almost deranged in a swirl of mud after the water receded. Wave is her account of that day, and of the years that followed.

  Wave is really two stories in one. The second story is about remembering the life of a family when they were happy. The first is about the stunned horror of a woman who lost, in one moment, her past, present, and future. Deraniyagala was raised in Sri Lanka, and trained as an economist at Cambridge and Oxford. She married her college sweetheart, the economist Stephen Lissenburgh, and together they had two preternaturally intelligent and happy boys. Her friend Orlantha, who was with them at Yala National Park in Sri Lanka, said to her that morning, “What you guys have is a dream.” But the next thing Orlantha said was “Oh my God, the sea’s coming in.” The dream had become a nightmare so unspeakable, so incommensurate with typical human experience, that Deraniyagala would later wonder what she had done to doom herself to such a fate. Steve was dead, Ma and Da were dead, as were Vik and Malli. Orlantha, too: dead. “Why else have I become this shocking story, this wild statistical outlier?” Deraniyagala thinks to herself. “I speculated that I must have been a mass murderer in a previous life, I was paying for that now.”

  Sorrow flattens her. Then sorrow gives way to the amplitude of anger and to a suicidal fury. It takes a dedicated group of relatives and friends to lock away the knives and hide the pills and keep her from self-harm. There’s a period of alcoholism, and for a while she harasses, with demonic inventiveness, a Dutch couple who have rented her parents’ home. Grief is a frightening condition, and at its extreme is like the sun: impossible to look at directly. That Deraniyagala wrote down what happened is understandable. But why would some unconcerned individual, someone who has not been similarly shattered, wish to read this book? Yet read it we must, for it contains solemn and essential truths. I am reminded of what Anne Carson wrote in the introduction to Grief Lessons, her translation of four plays by Euripides:

  Grief and rage—you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you.

  Carson is writing specifically about Greek tragedy, works of tragic fiction, and of course a book like Wave is only too real. There’s nothing put on about Deraniyagala’s suffering. But part of what Carson says applies. In witnessing something far-fetched, something brought out before us from the distant perimeter of human experience, we are in some way fortified for our own inevitable, if lesser, struggles.

  Years pass. Deraniyagala revisits her old London home (she avoided it after the disaster) and begins to allow herself to recollect the lives of her boys, her husband, and her parents. The book gradually reveals itself to be about that greater thing on the other side of loss: love. She had avoided touching their things—the books, the clothes, the cricket equipment—she had avoided thinking about their little ways, their hobbies, their obsession with the natural world, their shared love of birds in particular. It was too hard to think about these things, and her grief was too raw. But then she found her way into it, and there’s a lift when those pages arrive. They are difficult to read, but behind them is the generosity of the writer: to her family, to herself, and to her readers. Very few of us will ever experience loss on this scale, but, somehow, her having written about hers is a kind of preemptive consolation for us, too:

  Was that a dead pheasant on the side of the road? They are not here, they would have noticed it if they were. They would have said something. Yuk. Cool. When do you think it got killed, Dad? They are not here. But I do not want to emerge out of them. I want to hover inside our metallic blue Renault Mégane Scénic. Why am I allowing this? I will have to crawl back to reality soon, and that will be agony….

  They are sitting quietly at the back, not kicking each
other’s shins for a change, no burping contests. Vik sees a gush of starlings wing the air, his eyes trail the whirr of gray filling the sky. But what he really wants to see is a sparrow hawk. Or, better still, a sparrow hawk sparring with a crow. Malli’s nodding off, he always does this in the car, but it’s too late to nap now. “Vik, talk to Malli and keep him awake, sweetheart. He won’t sleep tonight if he dozes off now.”

  Readers who are looking for a neat story of loss and redemption, a simple narrative arc, catharsis on the cheap, will find no such thing here: the particularity of Deraniyagala’s suffering, and the intensity with which she feels it, is immense. But something does shift in the course of the narrative. As Deraniyagala said in a recent interview, she found that “writing is a much better quality of agony than trying to forget.” In accurately describing her family’s life—and I’m drawn here to the root word “cura,” care, from which we get “accurate”—she rescues her family from uncaring, careless fate. Losing them plunged her into darkness. Writing about what happened brings them back into the light, a little.

  Derek Walcott

  “WRITING POETRY IS an unnatural act,” Elizabeth Bishop once wrote. “It takes skill to make it seem natural.” The thought is kin to the one John Keats expressed in an 1818 letter to his friend John Taylor: “If Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” Bishop and Keats both evoked a double sense of “natural”: that which is concerned with nature, with landscape, flora and fauna, and that which is unforced and fluent. In both senses, Derek Walcott is a natural poet.