The Day of the Nightingales:
Who am I to hear such a Wonder?
That day, when it drew to a close, became the Day of the Nightingales. It gave rise one day many years later to a poem, and then later still to a short story.
At the time, it was the early 1970s, I was teaching a few hours at the university in Paris and for the rest of the time commuting to a smallholding in Brinon-sur-Beuvron in the Nievre where my then wife lived in retreat from the city.
Here they are, first the poem:
Nightingales in the Nievre
I used to take the train from Paris
To the little town of Clamecy where
My bike had spent the week locked
To the station railings.
I’d arrive quite late.
In the dark I pedalled by the river Beuvron
Twelve miles or more, my way
Lit by a dynamo light that stopped
The moment I did, stranding me in darkness.
There is one night, one journey, out of many
That lives still.
It was cold and very dark.
Clear of the little town, I paused,
Maybe to fix the pannier - do up my coat -
But as I did, suddenly engulfed,
Through the stillness came the nightingales.
From the wooded crests of the river valley
On either side the thrilling came cascading
Over me. Their song in the cold air
Amplified a rich antiphony. I didn’t know
There could be so many or their song
So vast in such an ordinary night
Unlit by stars so far away, or that I
Could find myself alone among those tiny throats
Channelling more ecstasy and joy
Than either they or I might know beyond
That momentary happenstance.
I rode on, and the nightingales sang on.
I stopped from time to time to listen.
When at last I reached my destination,
Paused beneath acacias beside our iron gate,
The twelve-mile valley sounding with their song
Lost behind me, and I about to turn the lock and enter,
A single bird unseen close to my head sang out,
Full throat. Its spasm an electric shock.
Unmanned I shook, until I caught my breath.
Then minutes long I stood recovering myself
In the showering of song poured out.
I’ve learned since then the hen-bird is quite dumb.
Only the male has song. Philomena had her tongue
Cut out: she the nightingale once her form was changed.
But all her fierce cry against the dark,
The evil done her by Tereus, gives her mate
A salving strength, commutes her sorrow
Into a harsh joy, fierce tenderness
And such involuntary sobs as rose in me
Quite silently that night of nights.
Then the short story:
The Nightingales
Now I am living two lives in two places. In Paris, I am a teacher and would-be scholar. At Brinon I’m not quite sure what I am. And then there are the hours I spend in a sort of limbo, sitting in the train going there and coming back. Though the there I am going to is always the other place: sometimes Paris, sometimes Brinon. As neither is always home, neither is ever quite home. And nor is Scotland or England, since I have no home in either any longer.
The train is floating fast and the track sound is a smooth whisper. No clackety-clack. I have a carotte rape and potato salad, egg mayonnaise and bread which I’ve bought at the restaurant car on the little table in front of me, as well as a small bottle of red wine. While I’m between my two lives I feel very relaxed. I don’t really want to arrive, whichever direction I’m travelling. I will find a different kind of loneliness in each place. But also a different kind of happiness. But here on the train, I float in the reassuring solidity of the carriage. My direction is decided for me, and I feel sure I will be safely delivered at my destination.
Now I am travelling south east towards Brinon in the Nievre. Elena will be there, and by the time I cycle the last twenty kilometres to the village from the station, it will be dark. Elena may have gone to bed, and I will get into the warmth beside her, and perhaps we will make love. The thought arouses me. But then my arousal recalls the American student I have arranged to meet when I get back to Paris.
I do not want to be unfaithful to Elena. I’m sure my instinct, my true nature is to be monogamous. But while I’m pretty sure Elena is faithful, she does not give herself fully to me. It leaves a sort of vacuum in me which I find I want to fill with other women. I resent her for that. And it’s so corny to blame your wife for your infidelity. I find myself grinning at the sheer banality of it all. The grin is on my face while the pain of it is deep inside. I cannot bear that my relationship, my marriage to Elena should have sunk to this. I don’t like what it is doing to me. What I’m doing to myself. What I’m doing.
For now I will enjoy this good French railway food, the swaying modern carriage and this whispering, whooshing limbo.
The American student will be there in Paris when I get back. She didn’t say much, and I suspected it was because she didn’t trust herself to say much to me. Someone had told her that I taught at the University, well, actually they said the Sorbonne, which is technically true but creates a grander impression than my post as lecteur really merits. And also that I wrote poetry, which I do, but, again, the impression she had of me was I’m sure inflated. I didn’t go out of my way to disabuse her, and I was flattered by her attentions.
She wore funny clothes. I suppose in an attempt to seem way-out or hip or something here in sophisticated Paris. She was from a college out west and quite rural, and wouldn’t say much about it, probably feeling very provincial. Not that I know that much about the States. Though I do recognise a New Yorker or San Franciscan when I meet one, as I often do in Paris. Still, I sensed she was trying not to give herself away to me. Me, whom she thought of as a catch. How was she to know I was pretty much playing the same game as her.
She wore a bowler hat, sort of Clockwork Orangey I guessed, and denim overalls. She had a nice figure and a pleasant face. In fact she looked very wholesome and fresh and young and altogether a nice, if not specially interesting, young woman who had a lot of growing up to do. The thing is, I did not find her specially attractive. Ah, but her attention: the way she only half subtly offered herself to me, the fact that she wanted to seduce me as, in her mind, a prize: that was enough for me to want to have her. That was what attracted me.
We went to her room and we went to bed. She was very accommodating, as if she wanted to show she was ready to do anything I wanted. Which threw me a bit, since when it came to it, I didn’t feel there was much I wanted to do except have my climax and go. Which is pretty much what happened.
I was rather thrown off my stride by the fact that her peachy, clear skin was unexpectedly not very smooth. In fact rather the opposite. And also by the fact that she seemed to be not just remote, but absent. She indicated her pleasure in the usual ways, but that was just it. It was in the usual ways. Almost like the responses described in an old-fashioned manual for newly-weds, such as I had once discovered and read from cover to cover in my parents’ bedroom as a young adolescent.
Now brooding in my train seat, with the remains of my meal in front of me, I was considering how the date I had arranged with her would this time lead to my enjoying all the pleasures my fantasy imagined with this co-operative sex-partner.
At the same time, I felt the dull weight in myself of desire divorced from love, and the cindery feeling of encounters which are founded on half-truths and false appearances.
It comes to me as I sit here, rocking and swaying in the train, that somewhen, somehow my soul left me. If someone were to come and sit down in the empty seat opposite me in this all but empty carriage and look into my eyes with the look I once had in an audience with a Sikh Master, I don’t think I would be able to be present to them as I once could have been, indeed as I once was able to be, in such an encounter.
I have become something like a husk. Perhaps no more than many have. But Elena has her soul still, and I do know who of my friends still have theirs. I feel I had to stray into destructive ways in search of what I lost when my Christian faith left me and I could not follow the teachings and practices of the Sikh Master who as much as told me, they were not for me. Which indeed, all along, I knew.
It was Elena’s twin brother Peter who took me to meet the Master. I have still to call him that. I have forgotten his name if indeed I ever knew it. Peter had become an initiate of Sant Mat, which teaches meditation, vegetarianism, self discipline and promises blissful insight and self realisation. Easy to be sceptical and to mock. Don’t the Beatles hob nob with a Guru, and isn’t the sitar all the rage?
Peter has followed the hippy trail to India, taken hallucinogens, enjoyed all the pleasures of the flesh. Strikingly handsome and warm and intelligent, he is a gifted artist and musician and a good friend. I love him. And when he had drunk the cup to the very dregs, and sated himself, he had turned to Sant Mat to find a meaning and a discipline that he needed to save himself from dissipation.
It was when I was living in Scotland and working with the cattle on a farm that his vegetarianism appealed to me. The proximity to those beautiful creatures warm and sweet-smelling in the fresh straw of their byre on cold, dark
mornings in Fife made it increasingly distasteful to me to consider eating their meat. Feeding on corpses, as Peter put it. The same charge of life that ran through me, ran through them. Their consciousness was as inaccessible to me as mine was to them. The whole angel-edifice and afterlife theology that I had been brought up with, and whose poetry stirred me; the cadences of the Authorised Prayer Book; the ancient cantillated psalm service that had inebriated me on Founder’s Day in the old College Chapel in Dulwich, and the incense and Latin Mass I flirted with in my teens in France no longer moved me. Instead the sense of sharing a fragment of some eternal life force which inhabited me and would one day return to its source or find itself in some other incarnation, leaving my conscious self a dead husk as dead as my lifeless body, and my soul free to create or become a fresh consciousness: those thoughts occupied the empty categories left by my departed faith. Those thoughts survived my retreat from any attempt to be initiated into Sant Mat, too, so my world still felt rooted in some transcendent meaning which I had intimations of. But it was a rather immense and impersonal universe calling on the self to abdicate its sovereignty.
That was when I began to come adrift. Being vegetarian in rural Fife set us apart from the farming people who were our neighbours. Less so from the University people and the circle of friends Elena had built up among the teachers and even the minister and his wife, but no-one else was vegetarian and so shared meals were made complicated.
In Paris, I now sometimes slip into a cheap restaurant for steak and frites and camembert, usually feeling unhappy with myself at the end of the meal, having betrayed something I cannot quite identify, probably myself. Or that self of just a couple of years ago when I stood among the cattle.
How everything has become a difficulty. Pleasure, food, sex, company, literature: all vitiated, the brightness gone. I can see the world is as fine as ever it was. I am possibly fitter and stronger, freer of migraines and head colds. I no longer need my spectacles for close work, and my muscles are as strong as they were when I was playing sport at school. But I am adrift. I have the sad heart of Ruth standing in tears amid the alien corn but unlike her I don’t know what the home is I am sick for.
At least here in this cocoon of an air-conditioned TGV I can think these things without quite feeling them. Just for now I don’t have to be or do anything. That this is the state I am in is, temporarily, of no consequence. But at each end of this journey, whichever way I am travelling, there are consequences, and I will feel them, I know. At Brinon with Elena, or in Paris with whoever it is I next break my solitude with.
I don’t want the train to arrive, naturally, but it does and I step down with my few things onto the platform. The carriages quickly begin moving on and in no time the train is away and a quiet falls over the station. It seems quite deserted.
Outside I find my rather dilapidated old bicycle where I had chained it to the railings. I look it over in the failing light. It seems not to have been interfered with. The plump tyres are inflated enough. I squeeze my soft bag into the old canvas pannier and attach my briefcase to the rack, and set off just as the street lights are coming on along the quiet broad road from the station past the farmers’ co-operative sheds and the tractor workshops and shuttered up hardware merchants.
Until my muscles warm up, the pedalling is hard going, and the kilometres ahead feel daunting. By the time I am out on the little road along the Beuvron valley, which I will follow all the way to the grille in front of our place, the light has almost gone, and I stop to get the dynamo working against my front tyre. That is something else to push against, but I know under the trees at the bottom of the valley, even when the stars are bright in the night sky, the road itself is pitch black.
I am soon cycling in darkness, following the dim dancing light which, attached to the front forks, amplifies every small movement I make with the handlebars. I don’t need to see far ahead. The road is deserted and the surface good, and there is only one fork in the road coming up which it might be easy to miss. If I have to stop to check the turning, the lamp will go out, which reminds me, I always mean to carry a torch, but always forget to.
After the warmth of the train, and now the sun is down, and also because I am feeling quite tired, I my hands become chilled. I pull my cuffs down over them as best I can, wobbling as I do so. The rest of me is warm with the effort of pedalling this heavy, old, fat-tyred push bike.
And then I hear the first nightingale. The sound is first distant, from across the valley. Then it swells and comes very close. After a brief silence, I hear it again. Another bird joins the first, this time from the trees in the wood above me on my side of the narrow wooded valley. It could be an echo, but it isn’t. It’s a response. I cycle on, and over the squeaks, rattle and road noise of the bike, more voices are singing, birds calling over the valley. I stop the bike. Darkness and stillness drop down like a shutter.
In a few moments the voices of the nightingales multiply. I cannot tell how many they are, echoing over the valley, replying, following on from each other and sometimes overlaying each other. I wonder I had not heard them before now on this regular ride. This must be their time, their moment. I do not remember hearing a nightingale before, other than on a recording. Sometimes I have heard blackbirds singing their long, varied, nuanced songs, and wondered if they were nightingales. But now there was no question. This sound is of such a power, such a passionate cadence, such richness, it is hard to believe it is made in the little throat of a small bird.
I stand stock still. I can’t call it beautiful. It is other than that. It is holding me in a physical grip. It is a spell cast over me. I stand gripping the handlebars in the middle of the invisible road, and everything before me and ahead of me is suspended too. It seems as though I alone am hearing this. There is no sign of anyone. No lit window. All just the woods climbing up each side of the Beuvron hidden below in the shadows, the bright stars and the air as if electrified, trembling, with the sound.
More are singing further along the valley. Perhaps it is the echoing in the chill air, but there seem to be so many singing that it is as if this is where all nightingales come without anyone knowing. This is why they seem so rare, why they are no longer heard in city squares and the woods of the home counties: they are here, all together.
Fanciful idea, but I feel something like laughter rising up inside. I feel as if I have been chosen to be here alone like this to hear a wild, natural music, to be elated by it, and it is like a test. I am being put to a test. Something will depend on whether I rise to this moment or else, what? let it dissipate, let it sink back into a remembered anecdote?
I ask myself, standing stock still with my old bike in the middle of the road, I ask myself, who am I to hear such a wonder?
The ecstatic sound enters me as if searching in me for an answering call. There is something deep in me which wants to return the call, but it is locked away, it cannot break free and, in that, I recognise the answer to my question: who am I to hear such a wonder: I am that husk of a soul I admitted to myself as being just now while sitting in the train.
Because there should be in me, but there isn’t, the capacity for such rich song - a human song, - one that arises out of my being as the nightingale’s song rises up out of its being.
So it is this thrilling moment, unexpected and precious, even as I hear the birds sing on, makes me sad, recalls me to my all too familiar self, my all too familiar preoccupations, and feeling all of a sudden tired and anxious not to lose my momentum, I set off again along the valley. It is a long ride and somewhere along the way I notice there’s no longer the birdsong over me. At last, the odd small lights of the village as I pass through and out to my house under the acacia trees.
As I stand under one of the acacias to lean my bike against the grille and unfasten the lock, it is as though I had been struck a blow. Just over my head a single nightingale sings out so close it frightens me: all ecstatic cadences and broken, repeated phrases, so loud the hairs on my back stand up and I feel the shock run along my spine. I freeze and listen for a moment, then push back the gate on its big, rusty hinges. The bird is silenced. I hear the goats snuffling and shaking their straw as I put away my bike.
At the door stands Elena, the light coming round her, her face dark against it. She holds out her arms, and we give each other a little hug.
Inside she says, Are you alright?
A bit cold and tired, I say.
Then she says, Is that all?
No, I say, no, it’s not all. There are a lot of things…we can talk tomorrow.
Tomorrow I will tell her about the nightingales, unless the moment has passed.