The Bell

The bell had been ringing for some time. I was tired of it. I had been tired of it for a long time before I knew it was a bell.

I sat up. The room was the room I knew it would be. The light through the shutters laid four pale bars across the floor and I watched them for what might have been a minute. The bell stopped and I did not notice the exact moment it stopped, only that the silence afterward seemed like another sound, and then like no sound, and then like the room.

On the bedside table there was a glass of water. I had put it there the night before, though I could not remember doing it. The glass was heavier than it should have been. I drank anyway and set it down and it made a small sound against the wood.

My wife was not in the bed. She had gotten up already, or she was in the kitchen, or she was in the garden, and the knowledge of which of these was true arrived without my needing to ask for it: the garden. The knowledge arrived the way the knowledge of the bell had arrived. I accepted it the same way. It was not a question I felt I had to examine.

I put my feet on the floor. The floor was cold in the way the floor was always cold in the mornings. I found my slippers without looking for them. I stood up and put on the grey robe that hung on the back of the door and I tied the belt and I went to the window.

Outside, the bell was still not ringing, and the garden was there, and my wife was there, bent over one of the rows, and I watched her for some time before she straightened and looked at the house and saw me at the window and waved. I waved back. I did not yet know her name, and by the time I went downstairs I did not remember that I had not known it. She was Anja. She had always been Anja. I had been married to her for eleven years.

The hallway was dim. I passed the mirror that hung opposite the door to the bathroom and I stopped at it without deciding to stop.

It was my face. I had always known this face. The face was also a stranger’s, and I was meeting it for the first time, and both of these things were true at once in a way that did not present itself as a contradiction. I had arrived in the body. I was also the person who had always been in the body. We were both there, looking at each other through the eyes.

I did not find this strange. I thought, later — much later — that this was the thing I should have found strange, and did not, and the fact of my not finding it strange was itself the thing I should have examined. But at the time it was only another thing the morning had given me, like the weight of the glass and the garden being the correct answer to where Anja was.

I watched the face watch me. It was patient. It was tired in a way I recognized without being able to say when I had become tired. Behind the face, the wallpaper was a pattern of small grey leaves on a paler grey ground, and I had the feeling I had looked at this pattern every morning of my life, and that I had never looked at it before.

I turned from the mirror and went down the stairs.

There was coffee. Anja came in from the garden with her hands dirty and washed them at the sink and did not look at me while she did. She said something about the beans. I said something about the bell. The bell was the church bell, she said, and I knew this as she said it, and I did not understand how I had forgotten it, or whether I had ever known it, or whether I was only remembering now because she had said so. These were not questions I examined. They were small weather in a sky I was not looking up at.

That was the first morning, and I do not know how to tell you the mornings that came after it. They came. I was in them. Anja was in them. The bell rang at the hours it was supposed to ring, and when it did not I felt something I would not have called missing it, because I did not think of the bell as a thing that could be present or absent. It was only something that either was or was not, the way the grey leaves on the wallpaper either were or were not, the way my face in the mirror either was or was not mine.

The years came and I do not know how to tell you the years either. There were children. Two of them. A boy and then, four years later, a girl. The boy was called Pavel and the girl was called Mira. I loved them in the flat way a man loves children whose faces he has been looking at every day for a decade. Anja grew thinner and then thicker and then thinner again in the way that a woman’s body moves through its decades, and I watched her and I did not think about the watching.

I will try to tell you one thing from the middle of those years, because it is the only thing that does not fit.