Untranslatable, page 6
They should never have even glimpsed one another.
Except that they did.
There was the time when a summer girl turned back as she was leaving, for a last look at the place she was leaving behind… and saw the winter cottage instead, accidentally, just a glimpse, and the winter boy standing before it.
Their eyes met, locked. And then the world rushed between again, and they vanished from each other’s sight.
Vivi was fifteen that summer. By the time she arrived home from her summer holiday, and stepped into the traces where she had left her ‘real’ life behind, picking up the normal everyday problems of school and boys and books and bickering parents and growing up, she had almost forgotten what she had seen at the lake cottage. Almost. But every now and then she’d catch herself drawing him, doodling him, the boy she had seen standing at the door of the cottage which her father had just locked as the family had left it, stuffing the key into his pocket, proprietorially, as though he owned the place… which he did.
Except that he did not. The eyes of the boy Vivi had seen told her otherwise. Her family was permitted access to the house during those few bright weeks of summer. The rest of the time… what happened there the rest of the time?
Who slept in Vivi’s narrow bed with its blue-and-white bedspread when she wasn’t there?
The question began to obsess her, as the months slid by into cold and Christmas. Everything she saw around her, everything she did, she found herself wondering if he saw and knew too. Who was he, that stranger? Was he even real? She had asked her mother about the cottage, at some point, looking up from a book she was barely concentrating on, curled up in an armchair before the electric fire.
“Who lives in the cottages when we aren’t there?” her mother had echoed, repeating the question back at her in a bewildered tone of voice. “Nobody does, Vivi. They’re summer cottages. We go there for the holidays, and while we aren’t there… nobody lives there, darling. It isn’t the sort of place you live in. Not permanently.”
“But I saw…”
“You saw what, Vivi?”
“Nothing,” Vivi said, turning back to her book. “Nobody.”
She wondered if he could speak. What his voice sounded like. She found herself listening for cadences of that imagined voice when the boys in her class at school spoke and clamored, trying to find a trace of him in there, the boy from the lake, but she couldn’t. At the same time she thought he would sound softer and gentler than the general screech and holler of the school corridors—or harsher, like a crow, perhaps, or the scream of the winter wind through branches empty of leaves.
She wondered what he would think of her voice. She found herself speaking differently, modulating the loudness of her voice or the roundness of her vowels for the ears of somebody who might literally never hear her utter a word. If her parents noticed the change, they said nothing about it. She gathered up the drawings she had made, the sketches that had somehow caught the curiosity and yearning in his eyes which might have been twin to what had been in her own, and hid them away. If anyone had seen them, and asked, she could not have given a coherent answer as to where they had come from. And she did not feel like explaining why she wanted to know about the sound of the boy’s voice.
He did not have a name yet. They didn’t gain names until they chose a task to do and proved they could do it, and then the name of that task was bestowed upon them. He was the second son of He Who Stops Pipes From Freezing and She Who Kept Paint From Peeling, the younger brother of He Who Watches The Windows. They were the Second House From The Shore Steps family. That was their cottage. Their responsibility. They were its winter people, its caretakers, its custodians. The doors that were locked to keep other summer people out were no barrier to the winter people who kept the house up in the winter months.
He had no specific task. Not yet. He drifted, helping out. It would come, whenever it came, some winter, when he set his hand to something that nobody else could or would do, and then he would have a name, and status, and responsibilities. But before that happened, he was still a ghost, something that almost existed but not quite. He wondered if she had her name yet, the golden girl from summer whose eyes he had so disconcertingly met as the family was leaving for the season, and if so what it was, what she was good at. What she did.
He knew which room was hers, he could see her eye, her hand, in a couple of pencil drawings that had been left stuck in the mirror frame. He could recognize the lake. But it was a different lake from the one that he knew, with leafed out trees, and with thick summer shadows he had never seen. He wondered what she would think of his own vision of that lake, if she would draw it like he could see it.
If she knew that it changed color, and texture, and context. If she was aware that it was colder, greyer, less splashed with bright splotches of swimming costumes, and summer hats, and watermelon devoured with summer greed (white teeth sinking into red juicy sweetness and tearing it from green rind on the shoreline…), and pistachio ice cream. If she could ever comprehend that other lake at all, or even believe in it.
He lay on her bed, every so often, trying to find her dreams. But they were cobwebs by then, flotsam of summer, impossible to reconstruct. He wondered if they would be able to understand one another. If they even spoke the same language.
He had been early, at the cottage, that year. Earlier than he had been supposed to be. The winter people were never meant to show while the summer people were still there. Not even as they were leaving. The time to arrive was well after the last car had left, leaving the cottages empty and completely abandoned in its wake. That was when the winter people were supposed to get about their work.
But he had broken the rules. He had been there as they had been in the process of departing.
They were not supposed to be able to perceive one another. Those were the rules. There was the tiny, tiny exception—the Equinox exception—that was supposed to be the only time when they did, when they could, cross each other’s path, touch each other. But it had not been the Equinox when he arrived, when she left. It had been in the last gasp of August, just before September brought the Equinox in. The days were still long—summer days, their days. He had been uncalled for, unwanted, unexpected. Perhaps it was just that unexpectedness that tore the veil, just a little. Because for a moment—just for a moment—they had both been there.
And he knew that she knew it too. That she had seen him.
His family hadn’t known that he had done this. He was never going to tell them if he could help it. It was a transgression—a big enough one that perhaps meant that he would never get a name at all. There had been winter people before who had simply… disappeared. Nobody knew where, or asked. But for the first time he thought he might have an understanding of how, of why, of where. That perhaps he had not been the only one of the winter people to have looked into the eyes of a summer girl, or a summer boy. And found there something that they could not bear to forget or to leave behind.
The lake was gray and silent that year. He spent a lot of time lingering at the water’s edge, staring out across the lake towards a distant shore often obscured by sleeves of fog in the winter mornings, watching the resident ducks quack and flutter and seek shelter against the cold winds. He couldn’t seem to find it in himself to take up any job in the winter upkeep that year, let alone a specific one to which he would devote his days. He would not get his name that season.
He had an awful feeling that his name was lost, adrift, floating somewhere in the shredded summer dreams of a summer girl’s mind.
Vivi looked for him when they returned to the cottage the summer she turned sixteen. She looked for him as they arrived, scouring the shore, the woods, peering around the corners of her family’s cottage, of other cottages. But he was nowhere.
The summer was as summer always was. They swam in the lake. They played summer games, and played summer music and danced on the shingle shore, they lit bonfires and sang while someone played the guitar. Vivi got kissed, but didn’t like it much and tried to avoid the boy who had stolen that kiss while they were all there sitting around the fire. That was hard to do in that small clutch of cottages by the water. When she did the summer stuff they all did, the boy who had kissed her was somehow always underfoot with his annoying puppy-dog eyes and eager smile, as though that stolen kiss entitled him to a whole lot more. Vivi found herself instinctively wiping her lips with the back of her hand when she thought of him, and that wasn’t a good sign. She also found herself touching her lips lightly with her fingertips when her thoughts strayed to the other boy, the one whom she had thought she had seen the year before.
She thought she had seen. She had almost convinced herself that she had dreamed the whole thing. And she might have done, had it not been for the extreme vividness of the memory. She found herself sketching him again, the expression in his eyes, the shock of hair above his narrow pale face. She felt as though his ghost was in her room at night, whispering to her in that voice she could not quite bring herself to fully bring to life. Whispering about the lake and the naked trees and the wind, the fog and the ducks, and curlews on the dark water. Of winter stars.
Lying there in her summer bedroom, with the summer nights beating their wings like moths against her windows, she could imagine this place in a different season. It didn’t quite occur to her to specifically connect this curious sensation with her lack of enthusiasm for what had been her first kiss—something that, if she were to believe the common wisdom of her culture, she was supposed to carry the memory of always, warming herself at it during her old age when it brought back the way she had been when she had been young. But hers—her own first kiss in the summer she turned sixteen—she had already half-forgotten. She only remembered that she had not wanted it or asked for it. It was a memory of annoyance and impatience and resentment rather than something pleasant and treasured.
She drew a girl kissing the winter boy. She did not intend the girl to be herself, but she drew in her own hair, her own thin arms.
She did not think about it too much.
She dreamed about him, the last night of their summer, the last night at the cottage—and, on impulse, she left that last drawing behind when she finished cleaning out her room in preparation for departure, hidden underneath the bedspread of her bed. And, as though he had been summoned by that dream, when she looked back as their car was pulling away, she saw him again, standing where he had been standing the year before.
This time, when their eyes met and locked, he raised a hand. As though in greeting. Or a farewell. She found herself thinking about that, as they drove away, back in her own proper bed in the real home where their real lives unspooled. It was a moment where time stopped, like something preserved in amber. It was as though, in the moment of its ending, that particular summer would never quite go away.
The winter people had withdrawn in good time and in good order that year, and he was in their ranks—still nameless, but belonging to his kindred, and dutifully following when the spring Equinox arrived and they left the cottages for the summer people, according to the ancient contract. He Who Stops Pipes From Freezing and She Who Kept Paint From Peeling had finished their work for the season, He Who Watches The Windows had done his own work—only a couple of seasons old—in a manner that did his name proud. The younger brother had reached the end of their season still a drifter, still nameless. Herded away from the cottages by his mother and his brother while his father led the way. Their time was over. He turned and looked back, often—but she was not yet there, the summer girl. He wondered if he would ever see her again.
They kept to themselves as they always did, and waited for the moment of their return. The September Equinox, when the balance of the days changed again, when the longer nights allowed them to walk in the world, when the shorter days became colder, greyer, theirs. But he escaped, once again, and returned early—in August, as the summer people were leaving. It was not permitted, it was against the rules and against their law, and he did it in secret, clandestinely, with nothing except hope to balance the evil that would happen if he had been caught at it. But for the second time he was lucky—or perhaps it was just destiny—and he was there to watch them leave again. And he sought her family, and he lingered as the last boxes were loaded, and he saw her turn and look, again, as she had done the first time. And this time, he lifted his hand, and he waved.
It might be all they ever had. But it was something. It was a connection.
The winter was a hard one, long, brittle, cold. The wind blew constantly. The birds grew hungry. The trees shivered in their slumber. The ground was solid underfoot, and ice clung to the edges of the lake where it met the frozen shingle. And his family went dutifully about their work, caring for the summer cottages in the off season, making sure all was well.
It was a while before he drifted into her bedroom. A while before he lay down on her bed. A while before he discovered the thing she had left behind under the bedspread.
She had signed it. He had a name for her now, and he tucked it away into the deepest part of him, the part which he shared with nobody.
Vivi.
They had names, the summer people—names, which belonged to themselves, names that did not describe what they were and what they did, names which were their own and stood untrammeled by any other context. She had a name. A name. He stared at the drawing and sounded it out, shaping it with his mouth, never saying it out loud. Vivi. Vivi. Vivi. If they walked the same stretch of lakeside shingle and they met halfway, he would know what to call her.
She would not.
For the first time in his life he felt the lack of a name as something real, something solid, as though he lacked an eye, or a hand. He could not be her equal, not if she could tell him her name and he could not reciprocate. But in his world the only way he could own a name would be to dive deeper into that world, to become more wholly, more completely, one of the winter people. And that would distance him from her, not bring him closer. If he owned a name it would be harder to slip away, as he had done. He might never see Vivi again.
And if he did not do this thing, if he stayed nameless… well, winter people had known that before. Some of them had not gained a name by a certain turning point in their lives and after that… they were gone. Not spoken of. Not remembered. How could they be, when they had no names? They were just not there anymore. As though they had never been.
He wondered if that happened with the summer people, if one of them could simply be erased from existence by the simple erasure of a name.
And whether the fact that he now knew hers meant that she could never vanish, because he was part of the anchor holding her here. And if he failed to gain a name and disappeared through it… if she would also vanish. Go with him, wherever it was that winter people went when they went away. And if they would both have names there, something they could call each other…
The winter was a hard one, long, brittle, cold, empty of joy and full of difficult choices. He tried to forget about things every so often by thinking about other things, doing other things. He found himself sweeping snow off the cottage, when it came—off the railings, off the stairs, off the roof. Compulsively, as though it offended him by being there.
And by the end of the season, as they prepared to depart again, his mother gave him a name.
He Who Sweeps Snow.
He was trapped now. Theirs.
He had once wanted a name, badly. Now that he owned one, he wept.
He wrote the name down, with a stub of pencil he found in the drawer of her desk, on the drawing she had left for him, and left it in the same place that she had done. It was a greeting. Or perhaps a farewell.
And he wrote one more thing, which was neither. It was, perhaps, an invitation.
The year she turned seventeen, Vivi had her last lakeside summer.
She found the drawing, when her family returned to the cottage. She found the strange thing written down underneath where she had signed her own name. She knew who had written it. For some reason the knowledge frightened her. Badly.
And the word below that—written in ungainly letters, as though the writer had never written anything down before—the single word which made no sense at all and yet which meant everything.
Equinox.
She pressed some of the wildflowers which grew in the dappled sunlight of the woods, stuck them in between the pages of one of her father’s old law books (why it was in the summer cottage at all Vivi didn’t even know because nobody had ever looked at it there, it was covered in a layer of dust when she first took it down) until they were dry and flat and fragile, and then slipped them between two sheets of paper and left them as she had done the drawing the year before, underneath the bedspread, as they left for the season. It was a summer gift, it spoke of sunshine and long warm days and cool lemonade and bare feet on cool shingles washed by the lake waters. It was a gift of identity. She signed it again, although this time it had not been her making, her drawing—but it was her gift, and a part of her, and she signed her name to it.
And—on impulse—wrote Equinox underneath that.
As though it was a password to a secret country.
She watched the cottage, when they left that summer, her head turned back, for as long as she could see it. But he was not there.
He Who Sweeps Snow found the flowers when the winter people came for the season. He hugged the paper on which the pressed flowers were lightly taped down, and smiled. He saw the word, his word, written down in her hand, and he thought he understood.
He lingered at the cottage long after his family had gone, that year. Right until the night of the Equinox, until the moment that he—by the rules, by the Law—had to leave. He waited, patiently, alone, on the steps which led to the cottage door, on the shore of the lake.
