The Eyelid Read online

  The

  Eyelid

  The

  Eyelid

  S. D. Chrostowska

  COACH HOUSE BOOKS, TORONTO

  copyright © S. D. Chrostowska, 2020

  first edition

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Fund.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Title: The eyelid / S.D. Chrostowska.

  Names: Chrostowska, S. D. (Sylwia Dominika), author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200156608 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200156624 | ISBN 9781552454084 (softcover) | ISBN 9781770566293 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781770566385 (PDF)

  Classification: LCC PS8605.H77 E94 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  The Eyelid is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 629 3 (EPUB), isbn 978 1 77056 638 5 (PDF)

  Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email [email protected] with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free digital download offer at any time.)

  for Miguel Abensour, in memoriam

  ‘There is nothing like a dream to create the future.’

  – Victor Hugo

  Chapter One

  Come autumn, the eyes reap colour against the lengthening shadows and the night that seals them closed, as if nature, having already given spring to love and summer to leisure, made a season especially for dreamers, its days hazy and heavy-lidded, its evenings haloed and smudged by rain, the hours’ hypnotic passage sleeping all who, dazed and doubled in themselves, fall leaflike under its spell.

  Men we take to be awake seem not quite so. Presentable, bright-eyed, facing the day, possibly in the habit of retiring already groomed for their appointment with tomorrow, they come upon us in our fog of somnolence and, reminded of rest, let their head sink back into the sky’s great pillow, forgetting their progress. As for those with nowhere to go, or in no particular rush, they seem to have only just climbed out of bed, their clothes creased, as if yester-dusk’s circadian sign had them give up their undressing, and the crack of dawn took away the reason to go on. Drowsy, practically dozing on their feet, they let their lids droop low enough to screen their dreams, with half an eye still on the noir of reality. In autumn, such absences and bifocal vision come naturally, spreading like an insuppressible yawn.

  Chapter Two

  I no longer remember the day we met. Unemployed for going on a year, pondering a future set agape by idleness, I had slipped by degrees into a not unpleasant state of semi-consciousness, leaving time to erode in peace what little remained of my savings. As my thoughts hewed ever closer to my surroundings, cocooned in ambient noise and newsprint, I rustled through the daily papers and, nursing a tall glass, looked out at the street teeming behind the windowpane. Childless and sans disciple, I had a corner of tedium to myself, but no life, no occupation, and no prospects to speak of, save for a standing invitation from a retired bookbinder and a psychoanalyst, an elderly couple, to visit their country estate.

  I drew as much mileage as possible from this offer I could never in reality bring myself to accept. Imagining a house with its wings and empty guest rooms, a surrounding garden, and galleries stretching beneath all the way to Paris to join a mycelium of abandoned mines and catacombs, kept me going even when I myself was in no mood to budge. To languish in the capital as I did was simultaneously to while away the days until I could see myself boarding a southeasterly train sure to disembark where the air was clearer, crisper, where the grass was grizzled by frost, where the wine tasted of humus and my much-awaited hibernation could commence without further delay. My hosts, quite wrongly, presupposed in me a readiness to keep them company in their passing-house, in which time, reduced to whispers, ticked off, on a list as long as life, the varieties of pain. I had promised them nothing of the sort.

  It was on one of those wet afternoons, steps fugacious on decaying matter, that my constant reverie opened wider than usual. Intoxicated by dreams of romance in a primeval forest, I had settled down on a park bench and, for all I know, had been asleep for a good half-hour, when suddenly the boards shifted beneath me, as loose or rotted ones do if another sits upon them, leading my confused mind to conclude it was the superb creature I pursued barefoot through knee-deep underbrush who, having yielded at last, came to rest, light as swan down, right beside me. I was about to discover its face.

  Chapter Three

  That fall, I must have seemed unusually tired. I could have slept anywhere, even slung over a rope, as they used to for three sous on Rue des Trois-Bornes. The going was no harder, although humidity and worsening pollution made it more wearisome and disagreeable, than in years past. Smog clung to my hair as to my thoughts, and I do not rule out its effects on my biography.

  The day I was let go began like any other day, by the end of which nothing would be different except the headlines and the date on the calendar, were it not for that eventful loss of stability which papers over the routine of an orderly life. The post that had been mine until then suited me, and I could have sworn I had given it my all. The complaints against me cited negligence, sleeping on the clock, contagious yawning, and, by far the worst, lack of esprit de corps. What at one time required conscious effort had, I admit, become automatic, and I felt, not without reason, as if I could almost do it in my sleep. The air of inattention precipitating my dismissal was proof that I had learned to do my job too well. Having no more rules to follow with eyes closed drained me more. My bad habits, their expression capped by work, returned.

  The sacking itself did not roil me enough to contest it, nor did it rouse me to put on a saving act. It was more or less expected, and perhaps desired more than less. Badly in need of rest, I received the news tranquilly, relieved rather than crestfallen. After years of blinkers and checks, a rare grade of freedom stretched out within me, my mind unsaddled by a blind emancipating hand of what I had not the strength to throw off on my own.

  It was less the levitate freedom of spirit than the gravitate one to fall off the map, to let everything go, imprimis myself. Unsupported, no longer holding on, I took to sliding and falling, and the more I slid and fell, the heavier and wearier – objectively heavier and wearier – I became as I sank deeper into blessed sleep.

  With so much latitude, my imagination, until then confined, grew bold, vivid, and complicated. In a matter of weeks, the dreamlife where I would soon pass night and day so dilated that, with the first snow, it found the last of the channels by which I still traded with reality. As white silence fell around me in flakes, taken now for poplar pollen or cotton, now for the petals of cherry blossoms, I blundered seemingly without purpose or end, as one enchanted, while underneath my lids crystallized parallel landscapes and hours lengthened to years. In this somnambulic languor, my spirits, after brief repose, became preternaturally active, as though poised on the cusp of a life-altering discovery which, I still had the sense to tell, was no more than a trick of the mind.

  Chapter Four

  It was by its weight, not warmth, that I first sensed the presence beside me, on a bench of wood so damp and tender as to sag toward the soil on which it stood. I raised myself and opened my eyes to a view of the pond with its two swans, a black one and a white, whose to and fro had the puissance of a pendulum to send me into a trancelike state, deepened by the water’s glimmering.

  Again I felt the boards move beneath my ischium, thinking myself on the scales of justice, or else on a kind of seesaw, matched against a stranger whom some unknown force, amusing itself at my
expense, had placed across for counter-weight to make slapstick of my efforts to touch the ground; stranded in mid-air, a sitting butt, feather-light and risible; none of it visible except, perhaps, to the two swans, which, in their ceaseless slow motion, might have registered with one eye at a time what went on ashore – so slight was my actual displacement. For a short while I struggled, fancying I could hold my own before this mute ocular quartet as it floated by. When finally I turned my head, I saw a small, unimposing man gazing out at the water.

  Chapter Five

  We were coated in fresh snow. Nearly awake now, I kept the silence, which seemed to envelop us, isolating me from my earlier pursuit and the drollery I had just imagined. Looking ahead at the darkening lake, I contemplated the stranger’s appearance. He had the features of a child, and grey hair tousled like that of a schoolboy on recess.

  My eyes, exposed to the waning daylight, adjusted to the crystals floating all around us as particles do in the liquid air of a snow globe. They wandered the length of the water’s placid surface, where the swans, bowing gently toward each other, now sat motionless, the one with black feathers powdered white, the white one a dusky cast. Dubious birds of passage, these. Watching them, I was seized by a violent chill and glanced down at my overcoat to see if it was buttoned. The stranger, who stayed still the entire time and must have noticed this sudden concern with my physical condition, was more warmly dressed and, unlike me, stiff as a twig, had brushed the snow from his sleeves before it melted.

  We sat together without exchanging a word, neither of us having anything to feed the swans, which drifted shore-ward in our direction. To break the silence that had about it something glacial, a speechlessness that had begun to congeal into ice, I inquired, immobile, lingering in the stillness of our surroundings, for the correct time. The answer came, simple and, for one whom I took for an emissary of reality in all its permanence, sobriety, and good sense, surprisingly imprecise. And, though its tone was doleful, the stranger who shared the bench with me infused this ‘Too late’ of his with a radiating warmth.

  Chapter Six

  He introduced himself as ‘Chevauchet, diplomat.’ The card he handed me, folded in half as if in confidence, gave his position as ‘Ambassador of the Free Republic of Onirica,’ a state, he promptly offered, virtually unknown because lacking international recognition.

  In my peripheral vision, grown sharper, I thought I saw a silhouette on standby in the rushes. In the old days, in another era, a passeur ferried children to the rocky island over the water.

  ‘As you well know,’ said the Ambassador, interrupting my nascent reverie, ‘there are many sovereign entities to whom status has historically been refused. Our republic is the last of them. It is the most foreign and the most unrecognized.’

  The idea of such a scorned, outlying place resonated with me. Although I had grown up being told that I lived in the world’s very centre, I always suspected its true navel to be elsewhere.

  ‘You might not have any official and diplomatic relations with it now. But records show that most people still visit Onirica regularly and compulsively, if increasingly on the sly, keeping quiet about your travels, which, fortunately for you, require neither visas nor passports.

  ‘You might think this would be bad for business. But for Onirica, a little outside trade with the so-called real world goes a long way. And its economy does not rely on foreign tourism. Better yet, what you leave behind and what treasures or memorabilia you bring back from your trip are yours alone. Somehow this always feels like smuggling, doesn’t it? When there is really nothing to declare!

  ‘My mission is twofold,’ he resumed after a brief pause. ‘To have our special statehood recognized at the highest level and as soon as possible. Then, having achieved this, and in the longer term, to work with all nations, all peoples, toward the final dissolution of the state form.’

  His overture intrigued me not a little. Not only had I personally never travelled to the country he spoke of; I could not recall ever having heard of the place. And when I admitted my ignorance as to which part of the world Onirica was in, his reply was as enigmatic as the one he gave to my first question.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Too close,’ he again said with emphasis, more to himself this time. And, taking his hand out of his coat pocket, he cast into the lake something dark whose nature or even shape I could not make out but which, judging by the sound it had made, was a small stone or a large pebble. I made nothing of this inexplicable act, content rather in having provoked something in my bench-fellow. As starlings in flight, my thoughts swerved from him to the metaphors I knew for disappearance, remembering the expression to vanish into thin air having, in another language, its equivalent in a stone being lost in water, and how water closes around a sinking object like an eyelid. So Onirica lay a stone’s throw away, did it? Not even across the pond? ‘Then let it stay there,’ I murmured spitefully to myself. ‘Let it rot at the bottom of a lake.’

  Casting about for something to say in return, I soon appreciated the eloquence of his wordless gesture. Though I had neither the courage nor the interest to launch into more questions, the idea of responding in kind suddenly seemed appealing. I waited for an appropriate rejoinder to come to me, wallowing as I did so in another thought, this one about the ephemeral and somewhat unreal character of conversations. The few words I had exchanged with Ambassador Chevauchet were already fading from my memory. All that kept me from pronouncing them imaginary, besides his stubborn presence next to me and the cloud of his breath, was their warmth. They seemed significant upon being spoken but carried less weight than the stone providing punctuation and brought less clarity than the snow, which fell only to be swept away by his hand. Next to this, my confirmed inertia transformed me, in my own mind, into a fossil, so that I started when his tongue again took up the thread I had wrongly supposed broken.

  ‘Onirica is a beautiful place, and you seem right at home in it.’

  Chapter Eight

  Not understanding or knowing how else to reply, I decided to play along. ‘Maybe if you tell me more about Onirica I will recognize it.’ I shivered as I uttered these words, feeling upon me the breath of approaching night, in whose cavernous mouth I caught sight of the uvular pendant of a waterfall.

  ‘It is impossible to give a general description,’ I heard him answer through the crashing water. ‘As with any country, everything depends on your location and place in it. Take Greater America. What it looks like to you has little in common with what it is to a Chinese factory-villager, or a prisoner in Oaxaca, or a Parisian schoolchild, or a New York banker, or an imam in Africa, or an aborigine in Arnhem Land. Yet you all occupy one and the same world-state. Onirica, too, is heterogeneous, contingent on where one is coming from.

  ‘That said, in Onirica, social inequalities and the pressures of individual circumstances back home are mostly non-existent. Once inside, your mindset is not decisive for what happens to you. Of course, in one crucial sense, Onirica depends on your mental state: you cannot recognize it awake!

  ‘But perhaps we can do something about that…’ he said, turning to face me. ‘What do you think of to fall asleep? Do you shuffle cards, count sheep…?’

  ‘Neither,’ I answered without conviction. ‘I always picture two swans, a black and a white one, just like those in front of us, gliding toward each other and then, very slowly, entwining together their long necks. I never reach the point when they strangle themselves, or each other. I seem to drop off just in time to avoid seeing it. Imagining this scene has never once failed to anaesthetize me.’ The idea, invented on the spot, pleased me, and I made a mental note to give it a try.

  ‘What about your other habits?’ he persevered. ‘Do you sleep well, on the whole?’

  In fact, I was embarrassed about my lassitude of late. I slept not only well but in excess. He must have noted my unease at the question.

  ‘I can, of course, guess some things outright. For instance, you seem a b
it tired. But you would be remarkably fresh for someone who did not get enough sleep. Do I gather from this that you regularly have a good night’s rest and that last night was an exception? Not at all. It seems to me, rather, that you habitually sleep more than you need, over and above what is strictly necessary, and even that, for some time now, you may have been caught in a spiral of sleep. Am I wrong?’

  I nodded, unable to stifle the yawn breaking across my face.

  ‘In your case, then,’ he went on, ‘Onirica is a vast land of abundance, wonder, and adventure. A country of open borders, across which you travel freely and frequently. A place where, in every port, a table and a bed await you. Whose inhabitants fascinate you. Where everyone, including you, enjoys unheard-of freedom of expression. Where boredom is unknown. Where your wishes, even the most inadmissible, come true.’

  I smiled at his fable and saw floating in the distance, like an Italian landscape, what he had just sketched in a few deft strokes. All at once, I felt the bench sink slightly on my end – a spur to get up as well. As I rose to my feet, I discovered I was no longer in a park overlooking a pond but facing the door of a house. I found the bell and rang it instinctively.

  ‘Welcome to Onirica,’ Chevauchet greeted me as he appeared on the other side of the threshold. ‘It is a pleasure to host someone of your oneiric talents. We can continue our conversation here.’ He motioned for me to come in.

  But for the floor creaking, the house was quiet. I sat down at the table he had set for us and helped myself to the lavish spread – and to the wine, that truthful soporific. Chevauchet’s voice grew muffled, like a radio played downstairs or underwater, or damped with felt. The napkin with which I still managed to wipe my lips was so fine it must have been made of eyelashes. Overcome by a wave of fatigue, forgetting my manners, I rested my head on it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a grey dog wander in from an adjacent room and curl up beside the fireplace, and, before I knew it, I was sound asleep.