hadn’t allowed himself to grieve in the wake of Maja’s departure. With one unnerving exception, in which he had briefly cried like a baby, he had redirected his energies to professional achievement. Which had yielded different, if ultimately less satisfying, rewards.
Two major books, an array of conference papers and an associate professorship had provided comfort of a kind. Thinking meant he didn’t have to feel.
There had been other women after Maja. But these affairs had been strictly utilitarian. In his newly parlous state, he even experiences a pang of remorse about that. Wonders whether, and hopes not, he inflicted any casual wounds from which others might be suffering.
As he is suffering now.
But what he had experienced with Maja wasn’t casual. Why is he even now trying to pretend otherwise?
His academic ambition had been as voracious in her aftermath as his desire had been for her. Whatever his distaste for psychoanalysis, he can’t fail to appreciate the extent of his sublimation.
But why are images of her and their time together returning now? And with such crystalline purity? Like perfect, indelible hand prints under the many layers of consciousness. Their long inaccessibility imparts a sharper edge to their capacity to hurt.
One avalanche has precipitated another. He is submerged by a psychic landslide to which it is becoming increasingly difficult not to succumb.
Maja. The very name (so long since he has spoken it!) diffuses an ache. The belated intensity of which stuns him.
He had fought hard against her memory. As he had initially resisted her. Not that she had been the one to come on strongly. Quite the reverse in fact.
But his pursuit of her – determined, even relentless in some respects – had masked his psychological guardedness. It had been months before his emotional barriers, jealously guarded, had crumbled along with his physical defences (those had collapsed immediately).
The first few weeks of their relationship he had experienced a mind/body split so vast as to threaten the loss of equilibrium he seems to be facing now. Later she told him she had never met a man as insulated as he. Perhaps his remoteness had comprised part of his attraction for her. Maybe she had set it as a personal goal to crack his resolve; to see how long it would take. By the time she succeeded she was in love with him, if she hadn’t been before. And he with her.
At least, she had said she was in love with him. But he intercepts himself with this impulse to question and potentially destroy. A long dormant inner voice - barely audible in its rustiness from disuse - speaks up. And resists this attempt at ex-post facto denigration of what they had shared.
Why this perverse temptation to eradicate something precious? To deny the richness of their relationship? They had loved strongly and mutually. Realisation of this had been slow to him. But the more potent for the delay of its registering. To he who was so distrustful – who, part from training, part from temperament, distrusted and doubted everything – it had meant he was alive.
Sarajevo 1984. Fire and ice.
Neither of them particularly sports-minded, they had nevertheless attended many of the events. How could one fail to be impressed? These athletes were the best in the world.
The cult of perfection had always fascinated him. In this context physical prowess was honed to a fine edge. And discernible in the gleaming blades of skates which described graceful arcs before their eyes.
The silhouette of a lone skier on a mountain. The exquisite poise before the executed leap. These people defied gravity. Married technical expertise to sheer poetry.
And then physical activity of a different kind afterwards. Poetry of another type. After a light meal in one of the cafes, surging with the life they scarcely contained, he and Maja would go back to his flat.
For a brief moment he sees again the rumpled bedclothes. A pair of shoes she had often worn; the late afternoon light illuminating the red and bronze pattern in their leather. Maja.
It was the aftermath he had relished most. The time when the passion had ebbed from him – been wrung from him – like water from a sponge. When they made coffee and chatted of nothing in particular (were those the only occasions on which he could do that without experiencing a sense of wasted time?) And later still. When, also stimulated intellectually by her presence, he had sat at his desk to write.
Less frenziedly in those days, less compulsively. She’d had a way of wrapping herself around him from behind, of laying her cheek against his back. As if connected to a low pulse current, he was both relaxed and re-energised by her proximity.
And re-experiences, for a fraction of a second, the exhilarating languor it had induced.
Can’t he at least slow the images that are now rushing back?
And in that way regulate, if not minimise, their capacity to hurt?
Until recently that had been possible. But as if in mocking inversion of his former conscious control, he is powerless to do so now.
He wonders where she is after these several years. Whether, in the hell they are now obliged to inhabit, she is alive at all. The circumstances of their parting had been brutal – the accidental death of her seven-year-old son. The loss of her loved only child had been devastating to her. And even precipitated a brief reconciliation with her former husband, who was as shattered as she. For a while he had been sure she would come back to him. As perhaps she herself had been.
But the wellsprings of grief were merciless. Though she soon re-left her former husband, she did not re-join her lover. Perhaps – given the love he knew she felt for him – she saw renunciation of their relationship as some form of restitution. Because while she never intimated as much, Dominic knew she blamed herself for Nikolai’s death. And was obscurely convinced that had she been home the day it happened - instead of with her lover - it would not have occurred. In the strange and sad bargains we strike with ourselves, perhaps ending their relationship was her way of paying the piper.
Beyond some brief telephone conversations, and one desolate meeting in which the frozen wastes surrounding them had mirrored the devastation of their emotional landscapes, he had never seen her again. In desperation, he had phoned her former husband in search of her whereabouts. But the man had known nothing; had himself been enveloped in a cloud of pain and withdrawal so dense it seemed a cruel imposition to try to penetrate it. Instead and extraordinarily, they had drunk schnapps together. And had a stilted conversation.
Maja! His suppressed grief is now ignited. It courses through his body as if lit by a fuse. He needs to find some way to arrest and contain it. To delay confrontation with it until he is strong enough.
Not now! He tells himself. I can’t cope with it now!
The difference this time is that he knows he can’t rout memory by deferral.
That he has reached the limits of evasion. Such intensity of feeling demands only engagement with it. And thus the risk of capitulation.
Had he known the consequences of denial he would never have attempted it.
But assimilating deep grief, assuming this to be possible, cannot be concurrent with the psychic desolation he now faces on account of the war. In a kind of Faustian pact, he tells
