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Chapter 5: The Sound of a Bird Woke Me.
It was late afternoon. The birds' voices rang shrill and clear over the silence. A gentle breeze swept through the apartment. Jennie was still sleeping. The air was fresh, smelling of the sea.
As quietly as I could, I made my way to the kitchen. I had a craving for tea. I put the kettle on and sat by the table in the living room enjoying the sunshine that came through the partly drawn curtains. The atmosphere created a warm, peaceful feeling that underlined the stillness of the hour. The mellow sunshine shimmered in the palm leaves near the balcony, where a lizard made its way up the brickwork of the building. It moved effortlessly. It halted once, looked into the room through the window and continued straight up the wall. Moments later it disappeared. I went onto the balcony to see where it had gone. I couldn't find it as if it had vanished off the face of the Earth.
In the distance, a sailboat negotiated a turnabout in its play with the wind. On the grounds below us children were playing, diving into a circular swimming pool, and splashing each other.
I leaned over the railing to watch them. As I did, I remembered Harry's kids. Seeing the children at play jolted me. I felt a sudden emptiness. Fiona came to mind. Could I have seen her at the airport behind the wall of plate-glass if I had known that they were there? They must have been all there. They must have seen my plane approach. Fiona might have been told that this was daddy's plane. But they saw me pass them by without stopping at the most dangerous hour in their life, a mere ten feet over the runway, hardly a thousand feet from where they stood. We had come so close to meet, but too distant to touch and too far for a cry to penetrate.
I was glad when the kettle began to simmer. It woke Jennie. When I noticed her, she stood drowsily in the balcony doorway. She yawned, then joined me at the railing. She brushed her hair back, looked into the sunshine, squinted, then smiled at me.
"How fortunate she is, to be partly asleep," I thought. She didn't seem tortured by the thoughts I had just encountered. Hearing the kettle boil I went into the kitchen to make tea. The kitchen counter was open to the living and dining room area of the apartment. I could see Jennie perfectly from the kitchen as she stood in the light of the setting sun. She stepped back after a while, put her hands over her head and leaned against the frame of the balcony door, still looking out towards the beach. She said she was glad to see the sunshine.
Seeing her in the thin nightgown that I had bought her aroused a deep, profound feeling in me that became almost painful. Her silhouette was like a scene from a dream world in the light of sun touching her. Although she probably wasn't the beauty queen of the world, to me she was more than that. What I saw was angel, excitingly female, beautiful to look at. Only once before had I felt anything nearly as powerful as this, when I first met Melanie. Now this feeling resurfaced again in a new dimension. It pervaded my being. It fed me with life. It separated the moment from the logical, the familiar, and the things I had control over. It was insanity in the conventional sense, but it was totally sane in our new unfolding reality and Jennie was at the center of it.
This response, a response to a greater sanity, seemed to be built into the design of the human being that thereby becomes transposed into the surreal world where the conventional is replaced with the wonderful and the inexplicable. A door had been opened between us by the recognition of a truth that had been stored away in consciousness to be triggered into life by a greater openness towards reality. With so little certainty left now in the world, our being together became more profound in its reality. She was tangibly real. Our being together was real.
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Stories
about
Healing
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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