A Lark
At six-thirty on a Tuesday morning, the iron gate to the school ground was open. Mina walked in and reached the front side of the building where the Office of the Registrar sat. A painted metal door greeted her, bolted and padlocked at the center. Harrow Hall. Guarding it on both sides were tall pillars which looked to her like relics from another age. She paused in the shadowed path, reconsidering stepping up to the stairway and wait there. Like a beggar shut out. Anger rose up unbidden.
She was thinking of one she used to know. A kindred soul met at a time when most everyone she ran into in that path was kin, brother, friend. Would he recognize me? It was about a decade back. Not so long but somehow it seemed to belong to a strange time strange place inhabited by another race, another breed of people. Would he remember? Or, like the rest, he, too, would pretend it was all a nightmare.
Her steps took her back to the outer gate. She caught sight of the blue sea gleaming in patches behind the roof and arms of an old building, half-hidden by branches and leaves of trees. She turned to her right, the morning sun casting a dull glow on the dust-coated plastic pots and the cropped yellow perennials hedging the wire fence on the outside. But for well-groomed joggers on their way home from the sea side, most of the early risers were working people. The non-academic types, she told herself, which is what everyday people are. Her lips curled and she drew a breath, ridding herself of unwanted thoughts.
At the corner she made another turn, walking along the street that cordoned the school ground on another side. The sidewalk was old and broken in places, the chipped parts giving way for flowering grasses to grow unhelped. She liked wide sidewalks. A smile broke her face and her steps widened, long arms swinging in sync.
The rows of business establishments stopped a block away from the school ground and she stole glances at the roadside houses with railed verandas for living rooms. Concrete houses stood side by side with old structures, the latter unfenced and in varying degrees of decrepitude. A cab sped by, spewing clouds of exhausts in the air. Mina waved a hand under her nose, eyes darting imaginary missiles at the fleeing passerby.
By and by she was at the city park. The benches were damp with dew and standing in a corner were two bony boys who didn’t seem to know each other. Each looked her over but did not try to get near. The confusion in their faces at her appearance at the tail end of their own long night made her understand she was an anomaly in their universe. She took a corner seat. The bench felt cold and she wondered if she should walk around a bit or go to the fish market and take her breakfast now. She mentally counted her money. If she took an early meal, she would have to pay for lunch soon and another supper too. Unless she lucked into his place—if indeed he got a place here—. A nap should be a good idea, what with a sleepless night at the bus station aswarm with mosquitoes. But the sun in the east was shining so brightly. A policeman might chance upon her and fine her for vagrancy. She opened her knapsack, pulled out a paperback. A gift from another friend. That one always manages to catch her in her most compromising moments. Always generous, always forgiving.
Christa Wolf. Another cold name. Why did he give it to me? Doesn’t he love her enough for himself to keep? By the look of it—tattered edges, tear lines on the cover and back like crusted earth, the pages just holding on—the volume must be vintage GDR. A Berliner. She herself had never been to East Germany and the only thing she glimpsed of the East after the fall of the wall was the sight of a Berliner wiping the floor and the cosmetics glass panes of Frankfurt Airport at one o’clock in the morning. The two of them didn’t even exchange a word, just looked at each other like two night watches while all the other waiting passengers were sprawled asleep on the carpeted floor, she with her bath robe from a rummage store instead of a winter jacket or a three-piece suit and a misshapen hand bag tearing at the seams. I know who you are, they seemed to say to each other. I know where you come from, Brother.
A wave of tenderness sneaked up on her as she laid her hand on the book’s cover. How easy to fall in love with women. A secret. Many of her friends did not know that. And this one, one woman writing about another, both Berliners, one dead, the other still living, does so without jealousy, only admiration. She must love her indeed. The kind of love one would have for another who went in there first and came back up with a broken smile, maybe a broken nose.
She opened the bookmarked page. Anna Seghers. Something smashing simple in the name. Her eyes swept through the underlined blocks of letters. Journeying, rather than arriving. Getting angry and getting into a fight with a pacifist monk friend and refusing to feel guilty by it. Why not if the two of you came from thoroughly different traditions, Christa Wolf repeated, quoting Anna Seghers.
Mina laughed. Then read on, page after page. Yes, indeed. She kept on nodding her head, muttering her agreement and throwing in her own thoughts, as though she was in the backroom with Wolf and Seghers, as though she was herself inside the book and not outside holding the book. But why praise an oddball among oddballs, a believer in revolutions and in life’s storms and stresses for offending a humble spiritual man? Something buzzed in her ear and she swatted it but missed. She looked up. The two boys were gone. Where are they? Did I scare them? She laughed again. A soft embarrassed laugh. Without her bidding so her hand went to her stomach. Air sacs. I need coffee. She rose, winced at the thought of another five pesos spilling out of her treasury. She stowed the book inside her knapsack and hurried out of the park.
The coffee shop must be the liveliest place in the morning, Mina thought, as she entered the awning full of men. She found a vacant seat at the stall closest to the way out, the two men on both sides of her just about to go, one cleaning his teeth with a toothpick, the other pushing away the emptied bowl of fish broth and a plastic plate wiped clean. Two women were in attendance, one washing cups and spoons at the sink, the other pouring coffee into plastic cups before waiting hands. She gestured for one to be handed over, placing on the counter the five peso coin she dug out of her side pocket. The coffee tasted good, and she wiped beads of sweat off her brows and neck as she took sip after sip, warmth spreading down to her chest and abdomen. To her left sat a row of men and young boys, porters and cab drivers and fish vendors. Early risers like her, she thought, but avoided returning a smile one or two directed at her. Half an hour later, she was walking toward the school gate again. The registrar’s office would be open in an hour yet and she settled for another walk around the school yard. If she were to go back to school she might as well start looking around for what she might find here.
There was a shabbiness to the old wooden building pointed out to her as the Hawthorne House where the English Department was. Her nose scrunched up. The street fronting the university gate is Scott, and the other cordoning it, which she just passed, Abbey Avenue. Excessively alliterative, aren’t they. It could mean the school’s founders, at their colonial best, had had their day. A relief, that. Where she came from, going etnik turned out a mess. She grinned, then frowned.
At the side faucet by the cobbled path, a squat man was rinsing a mop with a tall handle. Now and then, the big dumb plastic pail toppled under an avalanche of water. She paced on, past the man and the hissing pipes, past the row of untrimmed santans flowering every which way they bent. Her American friends in the solidarity network called them jungle geraniums. They were supposed to be shrub species native to Southern India. She wondered where they could be now. Had they forgiven her? One she rather liked but not enough to go to bed with, she heard, was now with the Naxalites.
Entering a shadowed cove, she slunk along flaky wooden boards. Dirt and unreciprocated propositions stain the concrete walls on both sides. Vandals, she read somewhere, was once a proper noun, referring to a Germanic tribe that sacked Rome. How wonderful that their tribe survived on campuses and street sides. Bohemians, too, were pioneer immigrants who settled in the American frontiers. And no, bourgeois decadence associated with current usage has little resemblance to that stock of gritty laborers who broke land and prospered in the Nebraskan prairie.
Or so. For real Bohemians, the ones who once came from a province of what became Czechoslovakia were long gone. Or not gone. They melded into, became other people. Happens all the time. Even Visayan captives who rowed for the Sulu aristocrats and fought their wars. That’s why Samas and Tausugs and Bisayas come in a merry mix of shape and color. Malay. Dutch. Indian. Chinese. Arab. A rather rich pool of impurities. Who proposed that? Warren? Is that what he meant? About one of the handful of books she managed to read from first to last when she was a librarian at an office that supported jihads and social justice work.
She entered a shadowy passageway and emerged in a narrow doorway that looked across a row of cottages and tree-shaded benches. Taking her knapsack off one shoulder, she chose a sunlit spot and laid the light pack at her side. The maze of concrete and wooden boards she just came out of was crumbly and dusty-looking, the faded red and beige of its walls and the cobwebbed windowpanes looked like post-WWII artifacts. She took her shoes off, pulled her socks, drew her knees up. It was a weekday and there were no other sitters in the row of shaded benches on both sides of her. At this hour of the morning, those with work should either be breakfasting or getting a shower and those who took up summer classes should still be in bed, making up for all the lost sleep. If nothing turned out today, she might have to spend another night at the bus station, perhaps on the boat and back to the last hovel she took refuge in. Her face darkened at the thought.
She lowered her knees again, grateful for the lungful of clean air and the sweet hard press of grass and ground against the soles of her feet. Tiny yellow and ochre orange leaves and needle pins nestled in between her toes. If she made it here, if by some miracle she caught up with him here and got help, then maybe she could take up… take up what?! Writing? Does that need taking up? Her brows knitted and she reached inside her backpack, took out the stowed book. Life, she thought. That’s what she’ll take up here. Life dropped somewhere as done and over with. She flipped through the pages.
The book was sent over all the way from Cologne. The author’s name was not even familiar to her before then. Her novel awaiting translation, the giver had said, resuscitated after the wall fell. They Divided the Sky. I should read it, he had insisted. How the hell was she supposed to know about GDR authors, their women writers least of all. The only German writers she knew were Marx and Engels and she had not even gone over their voluminous tracts. One got to read Goethe and Hesse and Remarque only because Literature students and writer-critics mentioned those. She turned the book left and right, loving the torn-worn condition, the yellow-brown paper going brittle and threatening to fall off the spine. Rare book, this. Thank you Christa for finding me. Thank you, Daniel, for the far relay. But why in hell did you pass it on to me when you could take it up yourself? Because the author is relatively unimportant beside your Rilke? Because you’re not casting your lot with this Wolf and this Seghers and our sorry tribe? Hmp. As though I didn’t know that it’s my professed love for French radicalism he was attacking by a long shot. The Germans have a deeper and more durable intellectual tradition than the French, he so insists. His last postcard where he said he had not been keeping correspondence with friends lately and missed the romance of letter writing was a bit caustic. Paris is no more. I went there. There’s not much below the tower. As it is, Muslim immigrants are its number one problem right now.
She did not tell him she had been to Paris, and that when a real radfem took her there, she was able to sleep in a women-only commune and went with a hooded gang of garbage pickers rummaging for canned goods a couple of icepick-totting grocery shoppers from the same commune had earlier pierced. And that those canned goods went to the Muslim immigrants’ table. She did not want to pick a quarrel with him now. He had it bad, a Chinese-looking Filipino Asian among the racist French. Divorcing a German feminist should be trying enough.
Thankfully, she loved the book. About half-forgotten lives and half-forgotten wars. About young geniuses who gave their all to their country and did not know how to live in post-war GDR, some ending up in insane asylums or committed suicide. Did he find it in a roadside auction in Berlin? Perhaps in a stack of discards at a warehouse with an owner wishing to make a clearing sale out of a situation? He said he stayed home during the whole time that everyone was picking brick as memento. His wife—the ex-wife—didn’t want to go. She loved the East so much to want to be part of the mob sacking the wall.
She ticked caterpillars off her shirt and knees. Enrollment time would be a week away and she hadn’t figured out as yet where to get enrollment money. That is, if something good had to come out of this trip. Things have changed, so must people. No matter how you were once together. She put her socks and shoes back on. Shoved the book inside her backpack, walked back to the big gate at Scott Street, crossed Abbey Avenue, then the rows of small stores and cafes. Old houses dotted the main streets—holdovers from the days before the sugar plantations in nearby provinces took a deep dive. She looked for Wanted signs. Salesgirls, storekeepers, dishwashers, typists—surely there’s something for her—. She kept circling the blocks of buildings right across the school vicinity that she felt a little lost after half an hour of mindless walking. You Crazy. As though the school would fly and disappear into the ether if you didn’t keep it within sight. She paced up, retraced her steps again and ambled to the other side of the university gate where she found the school cafeteria.
Eight-thirty. Another half-hour or less to wait. Perhaps, everyone was inside by now, including the office clerk who kept employees’ and students’ addresses. There were not many people in the cafeteria except an early crowd that looked to her like the type who don’t keep a kitchen but forage around from meal to meal. One of the guys had paint on his knee; the rest wore slippers and long hair. The school, everyone not from the island said to her, is an artists’ colony, and she watched the disheveled crew with unabashed interest as they took their seats at a nearby table. They were having coffee and a pack of cigarette was going from lap to lap. Might they be able to help her? Might they know him? Shit. How will she introduce herself, that she’s an artist too and a poet besides and was here to heed her Muses? That like them, she too, had only coffee for breakfast? Fuck. When they themselves were every inch a bunch of starved sharks. She stood up and slung her backpack, not giving the boys another look.
In the eighties, Mina sternly thought as she walked toward the school gate, everyone was a brother, a comrade. There was no bystanding then. After that, the dispersal. The things one had to go through. For those who survived anyway. For many didn’t.
Seghers. The lady in the book. University students in post-war Germany no longer believing in the idea of a utopia. Her being of the world, of the earth—what’s that word she used?—terrestrial—I am very terrestrial, Seghers said— was what made her believe in the beauty of revolution, in the idea of a utopia, a coming down of things from the higher realms. She liked Seghers, alright. For speaking against the malaise swallowing German youth in the universities she visited. It is never alright for men in their 40s or 50s to be cynical and corrupt, but for boys and girls in their late teens and early twenties to lose the ability to believe that the world will ever come to a better place? Something terribly going wrong with universities was what Anna Seghers what Christa Wolf thought what Mina thought.
It felt very real then. What belonged to one belonged to all. And sometimes, it was like what conversation was taking place in one corner was the same conversation taking place everywhere else where one of them was seated. There was a communion that breached physical distance between and among them all. Then suddenly, the ground shifted. A gang of disbanded combatants, for refusing to surrender but did not know how to use an Armalite when not fighting a revolution, ended up messing a bank holdup and got themselves fired at by the lone guard with but a handgun as none of them had the courage to shoot him. Last she heard, the one who saved himself finished a business course and taught.
It was his address the school registrar gave her when she returned to Harrow Hall that morning.
The guy at the doorway was on the thin side. He was strumming the guitar, hardly turning a head at her approach. Mina realized that if he be an angel, the gatekeeper, her entry was out of time. The young man—he looked in his early twenties—was struggling with the chords, a note, a minute second behind the beat of a breaking heart. Hello John Keats, she uttered under her breath. She never liked being made to wait. Not even by a younger poet-artist. But it could be that the boy was just having hunger pangs. He looked it. Behind him someone was holding forth with a bottle of beer which to her mind was odd for it was early midday. She stepped inside as the young man finally motioned for her to get in and be seated. Beside the old man was a hoarse embittered voice emanating from a cassette being played.
Ah, there is no comfort in the covens of the witch Some very clever doctor went and sterilized the bitch And the only man of energy, yes, the revolution's pride...
The young guy, Mina would know, was a fellow in the just-concluded writers’ workshop that summer and was at the moment waiting for when the English Department would offer him a teaching fellowship that would allow him to finish an MA. The ex-combatant, when he saw Mina, was genuinely surprised, though Mina herself almost failed to recognize him. How fat he has become, how flabby. He would not even meet her eyes. And when she shook his hand, she also noticed how slack and how lacking of feeling the handshake was. How uncomradely, she thought.
Are you happy? he had interrupted at one moment a little after dinner as more cups of coffee and more beer were being passed around. She was intently listening to the old man retelling his tale in a drunken roundabout way, sitting with his back on the telephone, which the hungry-looking gray-haired guy kept on dialing. As more friends got in, Mina saw how it was like there. The place was a hangout for kindred spirits: poets suffering one thing or another; aspiring young fools faltering some more; apprentices wanting to put forth a case. She gave the unwarranted query a blink and a half-smile, and turned a grim face to the blabbering old man who she gathered was a pastor and a Theology professor. The wife was in HK, the children with his in-laws, and he was somewhere between himself and the world. He was with the CNL, too, the erstwhile comrade-combatant had whispered above her head as he poured her another glass of beer.
Early the morning after, while everyone was still in bed, Mina opened and closed the door to the apartment she happened by. As she turned around, she pulled her knapsack’s straps tighter up her back. How light it was, her burden, her pains, she told herself. As she trudged along the path that would take her to the highway and to the docks , she kept on humming the refrain of the song the old man kept on playing all night.
And there are no letters in the mailbox
And there are no grapes upon the vine
And there are no chocolates in the boxes anymore
And there are no diamonds in the mine