Gregorian Chant: Vidi Aquam

After digging a trench and diverting a drainpipe and then ripping up the sodden linoleum and then cleaning up after washing the towels and sealing the door against the floods and then doing the dishes with soapsuds up to his elbows and mopping the wet floors, he had to go to the office. He would rather spend the afternoons at home drinking wine and listening to jazz piano; not at the office, which is in the municipal library. At the library they were likely to call this truancy or dereliction or something equally fastidiously shaming. He had run out of excuses and sooner or later they would report him to the executive council. But the pure truth is that if he were at the office, he would simply be staring at the computer screen or out the window at the rain, watching bare trees fork and divide the hail, trying to justify why he wasn’t thinking so well in this process of weeding; the missed opportunities of each day when words used to get him through; books nobody borrowed destined for pulping; long afternoons of what could have been novels, stories, poems in which he imagined a Russian princess sitting reading by the window of the café sipping a tisane and thinking he was gallant, asking her not to take offence at his familiarity … something so old-fashioned it was new again, thanks to the movies … he was being a boy again … picking up her bookmark from the floor and placing it discreetly by her elbow. She would not have noticed, since she was, how would one say, both too distracted and unconsciously charming; it was an interesting combination. It did not cross his mind to want to sleep with her. It was not like that; at least, not in the beginning. Perhaps that was why the asking of her permission to call her by her diminutive Russian name ‘…’—he was not going to say it the way she pronounced it—though others were using it since time immemorial—created interest in her. How did he know? She didn’t know why either. It struck a chord. She had not met anyone so shy for a long time, as though he were out of a Dostoyevsky novel, a character ready to give up existence for an idea. It must be like rising from a dream or nightmare and being comforted by a secret—I am here; a possibility only. All his childhood he had thought about this conduit for his loneliness: that he didn’t really exist. But toughness is a beast with its own rewards. Now many years later and coming home later and later from the office and she, no longer a dream but a naked ambition, sitting in front of her computer asks him: ‘What would be the best literary journal in the world to which I could submit my story?’ He was weeding a list of books he wanted to rescue from the library’s extermination catalogue and didn’t answer but shrugged instead, seeing water foaming from the temple of God, not wanting to be saved anymore from this limbo of literature.