Sobran said, ‘Tell me next year how she is with God. You can do that.’ He looked into Xas’s eyes and felt the hands pull back in his hair as if the angel were angry. ‘That’s all,’ Sobran said, ‘no more than that. I beg you.’
Then Sobran was dumped on the bare earth. Xas stood above him. Sobran thought he heard Xas say, ‘All right,’ or, ‘I will’ – assent anyway. Or maybe Xas said nothing and Sobran simply knew he’d moved him. Then the great, creaturely wings came down, grit kicked up, Sobran’s eyes were full of it and he opened them blinking, teary, unable to look up – but he watched the angel’s long black shadow swell, dilute and slither away down the slope and across the house, as Xas swung around into the sun.
Sobran closed his eyes, coughed and hawked. He kept seeing, as he recovered and found his feet, as he opened his eyes and went down to his house, saw more clearly throughout that day and subsequent days – in a slow dawning, till months later when the vine leaves lay composting in oily drifts and the first snow came, he saw, day and night, only this – the angel’s form, wings frozen at the apex of their arc, still, but in memory the angel’s body was a vortex with his gaze at its centre. Sobran thought of Xas and saw him again – only this last picture, which wiped out every other so that all earlier memories melted into a warm voice talking in the darkness (when Sobran knew that, in fact, they had sometimes argued and that he’d had at least one other good look). Every day time stopped and Sobran saw Xas, the sun reflecting off his raised wings, white chest water-marked by tears dried in fine dust; bare skin and colourless nipples, as innocent as a child’s; the double signature, sea-green and vermilion, awake and vivid; a white-lipped white face and eyes, abysmal, inimical, like the sea seen through holes in an icefield.
It was like being in love, this remembering, because Sobran couldn’t put Xas out of his mind. And it was like shame. Because he grew so tired defending himself from the pain of this one recollection, Sobran forgot everything else he knew about the angel.
1820 Quoi-que-ce-soit (‘whatever this might be’ – a nineteenth-century apéritif)
The angel was there before him, sitting on the boundary stone, his wings crossed and furled, folds of white silk up around his chin. He sat so still that, despite his clear eyes and skin, he looked ill, careful of himself.
Sobran was in his Sunday best, his hair combed and oiled. He carried two crystal glasses and the finest wine he could find. He held a glass out to Xas, who hesitated, then took it. ‘Before long you’ll bring chairs,’ Xas observed.
Sobran blushed. ‘I like our informality.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Thirty.’ Sobran’s face was hotter yet. ‘The chairs won’t appear till I’m fifty.’
‘Plant a pepper tree. It should be big enough within twenty years to set a table under – all summer for your family, and for us, on our one night.’
Céleste, the cellar, a shade tree, thought Sobran – the changes my angel makes. He cut the lead seal, eased the cork with his thumbs, then inserted his first finger into the bottle neck to damp the foam. He filled the angel’s glass and his own, drilled the bottle’s base into the dirt till it stood, part buried and secure. Xas took a sip, swallowed, then spoke very quietly, ‘I saw Nicolette once, and only very recently. One reason I waited was so my news would be fresh.’ He paused. ‘Of course it means nothing to say that she is well and happy – she’s in Heaven. She hasn’t forgotten you; in Heaven even infants are collected. She’s all patience – can wait your lifetime to see you again – and Sabine’s lifetime for Sabine. She doesn’t miss you, because she has no room in her heart for pain.’
Xas spoke, measured, cool and sad. ‘I don’t really know how Nicolette feels – so can’t convey that to you – but Heaven was like this to me: When God made me and I became conscious I wasn’t conscious of myself, but of glory. I was in glory. Later I understood that this was my sensation, and I felt gratitude too. And in feeling gratitude towards God I differentiated God from my feelings – then felt consent and celebration. A human heart is formed differently. The child inside its mother learns slowly that it needs to move more, then it is born and feels loss – wants sustenance, warmth, the heartbeat it misses. It feels desire, then anticipation and curiosity. Nothing can make a human soul forget its first birth. It is made of its losses, even in Heaven, even in bliss.’
‘But Nicolette was happy,’ Sobran said, uncertain.
‘I said that.’
‘Yet she can never be as happy as an angel is,’ Sobran said – trying to clarify what he was being told.
‘I didn’t mention happiness in connection with angels.’
Sobran said something in apology – but wasn’t sure why. It was as if the angel had told him his pain was vulgar. He felt ashamed. He thanked the angel.
Xas nodded, said, ‘She’ll be much the same in fifty years – so don’t ask me to go to her again.’
‘I won’t. Thank you for your trouble.’
‘It’s more your trouble, Sobran. If you start looking for news of the dead –’ Xas shrugged. ‘You might want next to know about your father, or Baptiste.’
‘I wouldn’t know where to direct you for Baptiste. He could be in purgatory.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Xas said – not as though he knew but as though the possibility had slipped his mind. He drained his glass and then reached out – it seemed to Sobran – carefully, stiffly, for the bottle. As he filled his glass he made his usual request for a report on the fortunes of Sobran’s family.
Sobran dutifully filled the angel in, called his attention to the grapes. It looked, God willing, to be a very good year.
Xas scarcely spoke, but to ask questions, or for elaborations on things Sobran said. Sobran missed Xas’s conversation, his confidences. He felt that something had happened to divide them. He thought: ‘He’s angry with me still because I begged him to visit Nicolette.’ And, a thought that forked: ‘Where is his pity?’ and ‘I’ll never impose on him again.’ Then, because he was not a generous man, Sobran began to wonder whether Xas’s awkwardness was to do with the fact he was hiding something from Sobran, something about the visit and Nicolette in Heaven. Surely the angel wouldn’t say he’d seen her if he hadn’t – then give such a plausible report.
Sobran stopped speaking. He tilted his glass so that the champagne spilled, in a long twisted ribbon, on to the soil where it foamed then vanished. He said, ‘How did she look, my Nicolette?’
Xas sighed. ‘She looked like a little fair-haired girl.’
Sobran snorted.
‘You disappoint me, Sobran,’ Xas said, coldly. Then he went on: ‘She was with some other children. They were picking up stones, preparatory to standing under the river. Where I found her there is a narrow river, one that comes and goes and flows over grass – the preposterous valley grass of Heaven, green with a blue cast, no blade with a corroded edge, for in Heaven the insects are never hungry, no one is hungry or eats. The children were walking among some trees above the river. The ground was bare and dry and the soles of Nicolette’s feet were dirty. There were a few adults, talking, reading, playing at sleep. And, if you need to know, there was the river and, a little distance away, its a course of an earlier time, a path of flowers of the flimsy sort, in red, yellow, orange and white: then drier grass and more forest, beeches with roosting birds and sparkling leaves; some friendly buildings, sandstone, a kind of town minus commerce – except conversation and music, someone was playing a violin, not very well. Then there were distances, a veritable stockpile of hills, and snowy mountains. One lake, very far away, blue-black, fringed with rushes and lilies. The other way, through the little copse, were downs, plains, a great forest where every tree is the same height, the coast, mangroves, the sea, so forth – in short, the landscapes of Paradise.
‘I called Nicolette over to me. She was shy; she hadn’t spoken to an angel. She was surprised to learn that her father had known one all her life – well, maybe not so surprised since she thinks
very highly of you. She had one stone, and I helped her find another. The drowned pasture was very soft, she said. It felt nice to lie down in it – but you needed stones in order to stay under. Sometimes there were fish – always in a tearing hurry – since the river came and went, she supposed. We dug out a stone and off she ran. She was very happy.’
Sobran had his face in his hands.
‘So, did you need to hear that? Did you really need to know more?’ Xas asked.
‘Yes. It’s always better to know more.’
‘God help you,’ Xas said, with feeling.
They sat for a long time without speaking. Then Xas thanked Sobran for the champagne and suggested Sobran go to bed.
‘Goodnight,’ Xas said.
Sobran got up, reluctant – then held out his hand to the angel. Xas took the hand and Sobran stooped to kiss the angel’s cheeks. He saw Xas’s lips part and his eyes wince. He paused, his face a foot from the angel’s, and asked, ‘Are you hurt?’ The knowledge coalesced out of several earlier moments of suspicion.
‘Yes.’
Sobran knelt and, without thinking, pushed his hands into the shielding wings and parted them like curtains. His hands touched the layered silk and he felt the resilient flesh that he realised was familiar to him, then a pulpy patch – a horrible wound, mortal if in mortal flesh.
Xas drew his wings together, so that Sobran’s hands were forced away.
Sobran felt faint, horrified. ‘I made you break a law,’ he said. ‘Who punished you?’
‘It wasn’t punishment. An angel hurt me – what else could?’
‘But you are allowed to go freely.’
‘The angel thought that shouldn’t include carrying private messages to and from Heaven. Besides, you mustn’t imagine that angels are always obedient.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘All right, enough contrition. But I’ll never do it again, Sobran. I’m in fear.’
‘Will you heal?’ Sobran pointed through the concealing wings.
‘Yes.’
‘What can I do for you?’
‘Go to bed.’
They stared at one another. Then Sobran obeyed, went down the slope between the vines and into his house.
He sat at the window of his bedchamber and watched. Xas didn’t move, all night. At dawn a breeze lifted and the angel got up. He used his wings to stand, then beat them and flung out into the air, falling a little in the shelter of the hill – so that Sobran heard the wings crack like a sail as Xas crossed the house.
From the bed, Céleste called, ‘What was that?’
Sobran got out of his chair and pretended to fasten one shutter back against the wall. ‘Only the wind. Good morning, dear.’
A week later, Sobran, drinking brandy with his cronies outside the little tavern in Aluze, heard some talk. Apparently old Anne Wateau had been gathering firewood at the edge of the forest above Vully, and saw an angel asleep under a thorn bush. She said she thought at first it was a church statue someone had stolen and hidden there, and she touched it with the end of her walking stick, then discovered it was alive and looking at her. Of course she hurried away in terror, and when she came back with her two great-nephews, they found the kindling she had dropped tied in a neat bundle with a plait of willow, and the angel gone.
The men Sobran sat with listened to this with interest, but when Christophe Lizet chimed in with the story that, a year ago, his cousin Jules claimed to have seen two angels in an embrace on the southern hillside of Jodeau, they all laughed. Sobran’s brother-in-law, Antoine, said, ‘So that’s why the harvest looks so good this year, Sobran – your luck!’ Someone else said, ‘Crazy old Jules.’
Sobran, alarmed for Jules Lizet’s reputation, protested that every man should be entitled to one or two strange fancies in his life. ‘So maybe not “crazy”.’
All the men looked down at their drinks and nodded, not wanting to argue with Sobran’s softening of someone’s craziness. It was only to be expected, considering Céleste Jodeau’s recent oddities.
1821 Vin d’une nuit (the wine of one night)
No, Xas said, true, he hadn’t been fit to fly home for some time. He’d gone to ground like a hurt creature. When Dame Wateau discovered him he flew further, across the mountain to northern Spain, and slept in a forest. After a week he went to stay with a friend. Yes, Xas knew this was news to Sobran. That he had another friend whom he saw more than one night a year. But Apharah had no family – and no industry, as such. A rich widow in Damascus, Apharah was middle-aged, learned, cultivated. ‘That Turkish wine, the yapincak, came from her to you. She knows a little about you – and why not? – she’s your senior and, as you must imagine, sometimes I don’t understand you and I ask her advice.’
The notion of a dark-skinned foreign human woman advising his angel was so preposterous Sobran refused to believe it. He felt slighted and envious. ‘She nursed you, did she?’
‘She sheltered me. Her house is very quiet – it has a place she never lets her servants go, the library and an adjacent roof garden, a lovely garden, with a fig, a tiled fountain, jasmine and potted peonies. Apharah and I have an untroubled friendship. Now. We have since she gave up Islam, fifteen years ago.’
Sobran looked away from Xas. He put out his hand to crush a cricket – only to hear, once its voice was silenced, how many there were, singing among his vines. ‘I hadn’t imagined that you were so incautious or full of talk.’
‘You think I confine myself to collecting roses and one friend a century – the sad disciplines of a domesticated immortal?’
‘I imagined you spent the balance of your time with other immortals.’
Xas made a soft noise of affirmation, then said, ‘I’m at my leisure. With my time, what would you do?’
‘I’d do good,’ Sobran said.
The angel was silent for a moment then asked, ‘Haven’t I done you good?’
The blood rushing to Sobran’s head seemed to close a valve in the top of his skull; it shut out a coldness. He moved closer to the angel and, without looking into Xas’s face, put a hand on his bare forearm. ‘Forgive me. I’m only jealous.’
‘I know.’
Sobran moved his grip and took Xas’s hand, lifted it to his lips and kissed. ‘You’re my beloved friend,’ he said.
This abrupt submission appeared to trouble the angel. He removed his hand from Sobran’s and thanked him – then, putting things back on a firmer footing, asked, as usual, for the news.
Wondering what Xas saw, Sobran studied himself in the mirror – his brown, scarred, handsome face. His hair was thick, with a few grey strands, sparks in its brown. It was a month after midsummer, and his face wore a look of exultant exhaustion.
Sobran had taken his troubled heart to church, had tried to pray – but his desire had sprung up, a curtain of fire, between himself and the Virgin who seemed to dream behind her bank of mild candles. Years before, Sobran had taken to talking directly to God, because there was so much he couldn’t say to a priest. After midsummer, when he got on his knees, he had meant to ask for God’s pity and help. His desire was an imperfection. But instead of praying, Sobran remembered. The memory was a torment, of their embrace on the night of vigil, when he had been so sick with grief it was as if he’d had his skin stripped off and all the angel’s touch had done was to bandage, or oil him in balm. Now Sobran relived the embrace and, while still remembering grief, he kept turning against the body he knew – knew how it felt – and using his hands as he hadn’t to touch the skin under his own tears, touch the more-anomalous-than-a-human-male’s nipples and warm fingerstall of paradoxical navel. In the dream that hatched in its incubation, a memory of warm flesh he’d touched and knew, Sobran was able to kiss the mouth that always said such interesting things.
Sobran found that he couldn’t say, in prayer, ‘God help me.’ He didn’t feel shame or fear. His desire was a triumph – Xas was so fine that of course Sobran should love him. God had made Xas beautiful, had made his
clever tongue. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ Sobran asked God, laughing, and waving his desire up like the smoke of a sacrifice. ‘This is what you get, Lord, for your great work.’
1822 Vin trouble (hazy, cloudy wine)
Sobran dressed for his friend, in linen fresh and pressed, but open at the neck. The shirt was untucked, as if he’d just come from hard work, his flesh bared to the cool air, but washed. He went unshod, his clean defenceless feet somehow beseeching.
Xas brought a bottle of St-Saphorin. Sobran had two of the second vintages of Jodeau-Kalmann.
‘Angels don’t get intoxicated,’ Xas said, looking at the bounty. ‘But I’ve told you that.’
‘Then watch me get drunk and be happy.’ Sobran, radiant with confidence, opened one bottle and lay back against the boundary marker. ‘I have some business with you, Xas.’
‘I like the way you can always think what to do with me.’ Xas was smiling.
Sobran took a swig and stared, felt all the available light pouring in at his eyes as his pupils opened and opened – a sensation pleasurable in itself. The angel was so beautiful. Sobran felt no agitation – it was like basking against a stone wall in the morning light.
‘We are back to drinking from bottles, I see,’ Xas teased.
Sobran put the bottle neck to his mouth again, swallowed then nodded. A moment later he got up, put the bottle on the boundary stone and went to where Xas sat. Sobran crouched and, without hesitation, put his hands around Xas’s wrists, to hold his arms down, and kissed the angel on the mouth. Xas’s mouth opened in surprise, then against the kiss. Then Xas turned his head, so that Sobran was left with his mouth beside the angel’s ear, breathing the frosty scent of his hair. Xas shook his head.