All the way from China

Suzanne takes you down to her place

Near the river, though whether there had always been a river or whether the river itself was only the name we gave to that dark persistence that remains after houses have fallen and families have gone away and the graves have sunk beneath the weeds and even the names upon the graves have become so worn by rain that the dead, if they were permitted to return and stand before their own stones, might have to ask who it was that had been buried there, no one could say, and this was why she stood beside it, because she had understood before any of us that a river does not belong to the land through which it passes any more than a life belongs to the body which carries it, that both are merely passing through, carrying with them leaves, bones, branches, the drowned remnants of houses, the small forgotten objects which once seemed so important to someone, and that perhaps the whole of creation is nothing more than this carrying away, this perpetual movement from what has been named toward what has not yet received a name.

You can hear the boats go by

You can spend the night beside her. She had been there when you found her, though afterward you could never remember whether you had discovered her beside the river or whether she had been waiting for you there since before you were born, and when you tried to remember her face the memory would alter itself, first making her young, then old, then neither, until at last the face became the face of every woman who had ever watched someone leave, every mother standing in a doorway at dusk, every widow listening for footsteps which had ceased years before, every girl who had once believed that love meant being chosen and had lived long enough to discover that sometimes love meant only remembering the one who had not chosen you.

She’s wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters

Garments assembled from the discarded clothing of strangers, plumes and faded cloth and pieces of fabric which still carried, if you pressed them close enough, the almost imperceptible odour of houses where people had lived and died without ever knowing that their lives would one day become nothing but an odour in the hand of a woman wearing dead ladies’ pearls beside a river, and she looked at you not as though she recognized you but as though she had been expecting you, which was worse, because recognition belongs to the present while expectation belongs to a time before the present, and you understood then, though only later would you understand that you had understood, that she was not saying Come because she needed your company but because you had already come. You have always been in her lover.

And you know that she’s half-crazy

But that’s why you want to be there. And so you followed her down toward the water, though there are certain forms of following which are not acts of obedience but acts of exhaustion, the kind in which a man follows because he has reached the end of all the roads by which he believed he could escape himself, and because the ruined house behind him is no longer a house and the road before him is no longer a road but merely another direction in which he might become lost, and because there comes to every life, whether in youth or old age or in that nameless hour between the two when the soul seems temporarily to have been misplaced, a moment when one discovers that every brook, rivulet and rill has been leading toward the same stream.

And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers

And there the sun lay upon the river with such impossible gentleness that you thought, for one instant, that this must be what heaven had looked like before heaven acquired gates and angels and judgment, before men divided eternity into rewards and punishments, before they taught children to fear the dark, and then you saw what the sun was shining upon: bottles half-buried in the mud, rusted metal, the rib cage of an animal whitening among the reeds, a child’s broken toy, an old sneaker, flowers growing from the places where treadbare rubber tires had been thrown sometime in the Forties, and you understood, or believed you understood, that perhaps heaven had never been the absence of these things but their inclusion, that perhaps the divine was not concealed from the ruined world but revealed precisely in the fact that something could bloom from what everyone else had judged worthless.

There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning

She pointed toward the reeds, and whether she said Look or whether the word came from somewhere beneath the river you could never afterward determine, because there are words which enter us without passing through the ear, words which seem to have been waiting inside us for the occasion of their discovery, and when you looked you saw what might have been faces among the reeds, or stones shaped by water into the resemblance of faces, and children standing in the mist, or birds whose pale bodies seemed for an instant almost human, or a forsaken saviour beneath the surface with his hair moving slowly in the current, relentlessly sinking beneath your wisdom like a stone.

Only drowning men could see him

And women upon the opposite bank standing with their hands folded as at Golgotha, Suzanne and the others, waiting for someone who had promised to return, and you wanted to ask her who they were, because the mind insists upon names even when confronted with mystery, as though naming a thing could protect us from it, but before you could ask you knew, and the knowing was not comforting, because they were everyone, they were no one, they were the dead whom the living carry without knowing, the unborn whom the dead perhaps carry in turn, the forgotten whom memory preserves only by changing them, the remembered whom memory has altered so completely that to remember them is almost another form of forgetting when we’ve touched their perfect bodies with our minds.