Fiction: A Eulogy for Eurydice

By Ayush Mukherjee

She was already loosened like long hair, poured out like fallen rain, shared like a limitless supply.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Later, I was not sure where we had first met. It was one of those events which become vaguer as they are pushed further and further into the dark abyss that is the past. In any case, there were so many interleaving moments that had thrust themselves in between then and now that perhaps if I were to tell a story, it would be so full that I could avoid talking about where it began. Let it be then that we met outside the paper-thin walls of a busy pizzeria, whose smokestacks escaped into the dusky street, silhouetting her lone figure against the buzzing lamp of its doorway. Let there be people, stumbling in and a out of the blue-paneled doorways, too many that for a while I could have been confused if I was not there for some other work, some other engagement that had pulled me to this corner of the city. Let there be some licensed fate in the mechanism of the world. I found her framed in wait, everything about her indulgent.

Later, much later, when we were less inhibited, when having left the world outside we had retreated to the covers that bound her body to mine, it was difficult to imagine that things could have been any other way. There was a strange comfort in our bodies, her frame pressed against me, limbs that had woven past each other, skin juxtaposed on skin, the rise of my chest bearing strongly against her. She laughed at this curious entanglement, a filling laughter that resonated in my ears, her mouth agape, head thrown back on the cushion that peeked through the sheet of her dark hair strewn about. I was young, excited, each inch of my body struggling to keep itself fixed to me, to not meld with her already, find myself dissolving slowly in the ecstasy that had bubbled in this proximity. And just as suddenly, she stopped laughing and looked at me intently.

With a warning palm on my chest, she asked, “Are you attracted to me?”

Before the answer, let there be some rain, with the attendant sound that leaves make as the water drizzles through them. Let there be the smell of fresh air that wafts through the stench of flesh, of sweat, of sex. Something, anything, that would bring me out of the play of bodies and toward the question. I was scared, then, for the first time that she was searching in me some depth of being, something that fit within her like the interlocking pieces of a puzzle. There was, in those words, the urgency of a pressing question that had to be settled before one traded in flesh, before we gave ourselves to each other.

“Yes,” I lied.

I noticed then her complexion darkening, noticed that within her blood was slowly rising, reddening where I pressed down on her. I noticed the widening of her eyes, the flickers of recognition coursing through her lashes. Even then, she smiled, ran her fingers through my hair, pulling me close with an edacity that had regained hold of her. She wanted to possess, even ephemerally, something that she had seen slipping away fast, as if the little of us that she had managed to salvage would be exhausted before the night faded. Before she woke up the next day and left a note that did not indicate, among other things, where we might meet next. Her hands were inflamed with the same urgency. They fumbled, slipped, found their way around by sheer force. Where they lingered, she scratched, marking on me the places that she had been. Here, and here, and here, she whispered, cutting, naming, traversing. When they held me, they did so with certainty, an already-after of an act, as if the pleasure she was seeking now had already been granted to her, as if she had already deserved what there was to have.

I too had not let go of her body; I was still breathing in the scent where my face had lodged into her. I was, now that I remember it, indescribably hard for her. Some cause had welled up to this moment, had spurred the flow of things, of moments that had brought us here.

“Stop,” she said.

Confused, I let go. She retreated into the bed, cutting a huge swath below me. Distance. I realised that she was trying to put some distance between us, as far as a polite leaning away might allow, more a tendency than motion, more a hint than admonition. Even then, she reached out, cupped my face in her palms and asked, “Are you ok?”

“Yes. Are you fine?”

She nodded, then looked away. The rain, still falling, had settled into a steady rhythm, like the sliding of drawers, like clockwork ticking. After a while, she looked at me again, pointed at herself and said, “Just on the outside.”

When I recounted the events of the night in the days after, I remembered her with a fondness that did not burgeon into ecstasy. Yes, I recalled, she was beautiful in an exciting sort of way, like when you are introduced to some place new and have to figure out the path back home. Such wonderful sights that a new city brings with itself, where mere buildings present their stature as edifices. I recalled the inflection of her words, her teeth, her tongue, her lips that fashioned syllable after syllable in utter promiscuity. And I recalled the alienness of her flesh, its sheer brownness invading the impression of a palm on breast, preventing it from turning into legible print, into words that I could not roll back. And my body remembered, in the thousand sites of their inflammation, the style of her touch, the many points of ingress that she had left upon me.

There was a postcard, from somewhere north of Denmark, where the land touched its frontiers with the sea. In it, behind a picture of a solitary swing set apart from a bustling diner, looking at a calm sea that extended skyward, she had written to me about literature, about words that we had discussed long ago in another diner in another city.

“Rilke writes,” her handwriting said, “about Woman in the starkest of language, a poet who is perhaps gazing into the abyss that is Woman with just his flashlight. A woman that is to him already dead, lost to all action because she is lost to the world. Reminds me of you, Ayush. It is perhaps an imagination both of inspiration and sex that makes you unmake the woman so much in words.”

Underneath, in neatly scrawled handwriting, she had penned her name and that of Eurydice. One must imagine that she had felt in the moment of her arrival at the swings, framed against the panorama of the Atlantic, a moment of truce with the figure she had become. To become Eurydice was to lose herself to Rilke, yet to gain some semblance of a gaze that made her into something for the world. To become Eurydice was to always be in a game with Orpheus, a game of desire and relinquishment; to enter into a truce with her was to be in a game with everyone in the world, of advancing and retreating with the people she met, the ones she could and could not love, the ones who could and could not love her.

I wandered for a while in the city before returning to the postcard. A small delay, inserted into the rhythm of correspondence that made its way across continents. The rains had given way to a winter slightly cold, and the trees were old and worn out. I felt that I knew them personally, each branch of each tree that lined the streets that were now empty because people had retreated into their homes. Fresh air, that allowed me to think of space and distance and the distinction between sea and snow, fluidity and settlement, here and there. Yet, something of the frantic night returned to me in those moments, a stirring deep within me, as if my body were rising to the realisation of this pause I was poised within. Perhaps only now I felt the weight of the lie that I had let slip, and in the remembrance, it appeared true. It was true that I was attracted to her; now that she was not here, her words seemed to beckon me toward where she was; a challenge, as if issued by the world itself. And if there was some residual doubt about it, let it be that I had pulled the attraction of this moment as far as it would stretch into the past, perhaps till even before we met. Was that not how we choose to tell our stories?

So I wrote back to her, hastily, on a postcard that I had grabbed from the shelves of a corner stationers’, which showed a street so familiar you could not pin down where it was. In barely legible longhand, I scribbled to her what I felt was a defence of poets everywhere and for every time.

“Rilke writes not about Woman, but about Woman dead. He writes from a place without life, from the underworld itself. How alive must the world be for it to be marginally alive for somebody dead?”

And I posted it at the office of the Postmaster, across the street from a café, indistinct from every office of every Postmaster, indistinct from every café out there in the city. It is strange to lose a city with a person, stranger still when life that has thrummed through you so far in this corner of the world seems to appear suddenly transported millions of miles away, across the space of deserts and oceans, sharded by the gates that we make and the words that we speak. It was as if Bangalore had hollowed itself out to make space within itself for Copenhagen, as if I was being beckoned toward a place I had no business being.

 

#

 

She had escaped the humdrum of all cities, she told me, with a handheld camera. A view of the world, she said, that allowed her to frame what others merely existed within, create a background art of sorts. In the long gallery where her work was displayed, housed in thin folios that boasted bleeding images of the war, she walked confidently, thrusting me from exhibit to exhibit, talking to me about the finer points of how one assays a conflict when the land you stand on is given to detonating percussions. “The biggest problem, Ayush,” she said, “is holding your camera steady. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise.”

The photographs were desaturated, their colour presenting a past-ness that the dates on them betrayed. Who knew if the eyes I gazed into were at that moment dead, covered under so much rubble that the natural order of the world had been re-established? Death by burial: do we not all bleed downward into our graves?

She interrupted me, her fingers plucking off the piece mid-air, as if suddenly animated by a dim memory. Her eyes, now upon me, now forced to follow the trajectory of her own hand, registered some recognition among those images. “Farah,” she said, as if to remember a name was to offer a story. “Twenty-three.”

The register at the gallery held the names and ages of each of these subjects. Farah, twenty three. Zainab, twenty four. Aziza, twenty five. And on and on, like a roll call in the underworld. “Leave them behind,” she said, watching my intent gaze upon the faces of people I barely knew and had had no occasion to study.  “Perhaps some privacy from being always so watched?”

Let there be a passing glance, the thickness of that moment set against the sirens of distantly passing automobiles, the fluttering of a million pigeons, the beckoning of a city that houses two bodies not its own. She tore me away from the display, past the meandering corridors of the museum and later, stolen away from the world, she would sneak me into her room. It was difficult then to imagine that we were not once here already, that this was not a reprise of what had happened once already. I struggled to remember the warmth of her skin, the colour at the drop of her shoulders, the razor edge of her nails on my waist. A familiar dissolution suggested itself to me, amid a scent that I knew, amid the many struggles with touch that I was privy to.

There, cupping my neck, she looked at me and asked, “Are you attracted to me?”

A journey of a thousand miles had reached its natural end. I was like Orpheus on the lyre, and this here was the underworld, though there was no haste, right at this moment, to be anywhere but here.

The underworld; why think of the underworld at a time like this? I noticed her eyes widening, filling their orbits fully, as if she was struggling to see clearly. Her breath came in short spurts, huffing her away into the space of the room. And her lips were quivering as they reached up to mine.

“Yes,” I lied.

In that moment, I realised that I was wrong, that there was really no distinction between this Eurydice dead and Eurydice alive for all the world, or Eurydice right here in front of me. Her body had decomposed itself into tiny bits, the odds and ends that she had been leaving in places, in cities far and wide, and forgetting about them. She had dropped herself between the photographs, a toe here, a limb there, such that her touching me was no more than pawing at bare flesh where one could find it, as when somebody tries to anchor themselves to something human. Hers was the clawing of dismembered flesh, an arm disjointed at the shoulders, torso rent from hips, thighs from feet, nose cleaved from face like in that other old legend.

She came at me in a thousand different pieces, and I returned to the gallery again, where flipping through a thousand photos, you could mutter: Asma, thirty-three, whizzing bomb. Fiza, thirty-four, bouncing bullet to the skull, Reya, thirty-five, raped and maimed by soldiers. She was a passionate woman, one who had passively made the deaths of others as her own, allowed them to stir her deeply.

When I remembered our encounter later, the streets of the foreign city seemed a little more like my own. I knew of the routes that proliferated around my small apartment, and the buses that would whisk me away from it, from her. She complained to me once, after that second night when we had lived as friends brought back from the brink of desire, that I was always trying to break apart from her. To run off, she said, and laughed because the choices were either the sea on one end or white men with big guns on the other. And both of these options were certain death.

“What was it that the old poet wrote?” her handwriting asked me. “Is there balm in Gilead? Tell me, will Gaza ever find its Gilead?”

I could not understand her singular occupation with war that was not our own, whose men and women and children were not being buried in our backyard. Despite the map, perhaps, there was a certain proximity that I had developed with Copenhagen, the city that slept in silence, where blood flowed only in pictures. These were not issues that we must die for.

So I wrote back to her, deliberately, on a postcard that I hoped would make it past what I thought the frontlines of the warzone were: past smoke through which silhouettes moved with laser pointer guns, and barbed fences that poked through the desert sand, and half-eaten buildings tipping over one another, images that came floating my way. Strangely, though she was what seemed like a million miles away, something of the old attraction, something in the savagery of the attraction between our bodies, returned to me. And it returned to me in a flash what she had said many months ago: the unmaking of a woman.

I dreamed that I would shoot the postcard through empty space, and that it would arc in the skies like a bullet does, shattering her into a thousand pieces. Amidst the stench of rotting bodies, bones jutting from splintered wrists, skin chafed away from muscles, I would find the parts of her that I would be forced to put together. That I would be forced, against my will, to make her whole again.

“It was Poe, I suppose,” was all I could manage to write.

Later, much later, when news of her passing reached me before her last postcard could, I would think back on this occasion and wonder if I should have written something more. It seemed appropriate, did it not, that there was to her message only this much response, only these many words. In his passage to the world, Orpheus must be silent, lest he should fail to hear the sure footsteps behind him, but perhaps, this too is his fault. Perhaps if he were to keep talking, there would be some semblance of companionship, some comfort in the winding paths. I wonder when he turned around, could he at least glimpse her before she was gone?

 

#

 

1.

The day she died, I forgot how to tell the past apart. It was as if the urgency of living with proximate conditions was suspended, something like drowning face-down where gravity urges along the suffocation. I woke up often with a feeling that I could not tell my fingers apart, that the simple act of making the bed would see me stumbling over objects: two pillows, a fraying duvet, a phone turned off, a lazy book whose seventeenth page was thumbed down by the repetition of the days, a bedspread whose edges disappeared into the thin lines that divided weeks, and the sheer weight of her absence. Outside, it was June, and it remained June for as long as I could remember.

2.

If I could choose the place of our meeting, it would be a museum corridor, faced with as many photographs as there are days in a year. She was someone who insisted upon gazing at the world, in the hopes that someday you might spot something quaint enough to call your own. Somewhere along Bedford Avenue, she confided, she had found a silver-crested, one-legged pigeon. “There,” she had said, “that is my bird.” Her claim to ownership was simple: if you found something in the world that only you could truly describe, then it is yours. Let that be the case then.

3.

In autumn, I was asked to speak how I remembered her, about how she wanted to be remembered. “You write well, so maybe make something out of it,” said her sister over a hasty phone call, caught within the business of arranging for a place and the many people who would make up her funeral, the ins and outs of a ritual where we collectively discuss death to be able to live. And I wondered if I could describe her uniquely, if by virtue of me talking about her, something of hers would remain to call my own.

Her last postcard had specified that I should speak about her. It was not posted, but salvaged by those whose work it is to assuage the families of the deceased. They could not find her entirely, so they found me one day, sitting at the desk oblivious of the emptiness that had caught me by surprise.

4.

A thin branch of philosophy sees death as not nothingness, rather as an introduction to an order that differs from what we are caught within. Bergson said that the chief problem with metaphysics is that we privilege existing over nothingness and inquire after it, that we privilege order over disorder and seek meaning within it. Levinas says that death is an initiation into what is yet mysterious: like falling in love, like coming face to face with somebody who is not you. It is supposed to be a happy philosophy; it is actually depressing. It promises something without recourse to completion: to bury something, to forget someone is convenient.

5.

Of all the ways to die instantly, perhaps the bullet is the most symbolic. It registers its metallic touch faster than its sound; it explodes in ways that are lateral to its own trajectory, the ripples in air affecting lives far beyond its own location. A bullet is small, precise, incisive, a nick in time like a thin beat of a powerful, cosmic heart. In my dreams, I see it slowly trace its arc, across seven hundred metres of dry air, and then she explodes with a bang, over and over. Perhaps the next time it rains over the city, she will trickle down from the skies.

6.

If we are to talk about death or loss, we should perhaps defer to the poets. “I thought that love would last forever; I was wrong,” That is Auden. “What else need we know before death? Have we not heard the cries of birds fall upon the dying sun? And watched the crows fly across the darkening mists?” That is Jibananda Das.

In the corner bookstores, they also sell paperbacks that teach you how to deal with grief and loss, one day at a time. Nobody teaches you how to deal with the loss of your own life, the many ways in which we come unstuck from the flow of time. And nobody tells you how to write a eulogy. There are, in the process, so many false starts.

7.

Orpheus was charged with escorting Eurydice out of the underworld, with the sole condition that he would not turn around to ensure that she was there, following right behind him. To drive toward a destination without knowing if both of you would reach the place, if you have indeed been able to carry someone out of hell, if you were not at the centre of a vast cosmic joke that the gods of the universe were pulling on you.

I think the Greeks let Orpheus off easy. Imagine then the man escorting the ghostly woman through the sinuous paths of the underworld, walking backwards. He holds Eurydice’s face in his gaze, compelled to find his way out with nobody else but a person who is less than alive. Would Orpheus stumble? Would we call him blind? Would he still doubt? The tragedy is not absence, but the constant pressure of selecting of what we allow to be absent, of which absence we allow to enter our lives.

8.

She was a friend. We had not met in a museum, no. We had met over a planned date at a diner, and like the curious person she was, she had asked me if I would write her eulogy after her passing. This is not fiction; and her face had not betrayed the earnestness with which she was testing the waters.

I remember asking her how she would want to be talked about. If the many achievements, which I would discover in attentive moments that spanned years, would suffice to tell people the kind of person she was, or if she would like to be referred by the sequence of her effects on people.

“No,” she said, “begin with the details of my death. Make it medical.”

This is perhaps the only guilt I carry now. I have realised that we were both wrong then, that if I am speaking here, I am speaking not only about her but about me. But I agree with her. Perhaps, the medical details of her death are important.

9.

She died covering a war. She was blasted at close range by someone --- by whom, it is not known. Or they won’t tell. It makes no difference. In the final tally, they could not spot one of her arms or part of her face. They say the could not spot her at first, so close was her complexion to that of the ground, that until the blood had caked over, it was all uniformly coloured.

She died, from what we know, on November 8. Her camera could not be recovered. Those are the details.

Ayush Mukherjee is a Bangalore-based writer and educator, previously published in Tasavvur and The Threepenny Review.