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My electric heater pinging woke me in the dark. The room was bitterly cold. It was morning and I had been dreaming about the skeleton. I did not know the time, only that the coils in the heater were waking slowly to life and that I had to get up and boil water, in case they turned the power off again soon. They turn the electricity off during the night to conserve power at the generating station. We only get electricity in the morning and at suppertime so that people can do their necessary cooking.
I stumbled around in the chill darkness, automatically. My large pot was full of water. It had frozen in the pot. I switched on the burner under it, and then crouched trembling in front of the heater to dress. I did not turn on my electric lamp. If there is too much draw upon the power, it goes off quicker. The orange coils of the humming heater gave enough light to get into my clothes.
The skeleton dances nightly in my dreams. It comes for me dancing, reaching out fleshless fingers to take my one hand and draw me into the dance. Gaunt white bones jangle absurdly. The face is all jaw and teeth, grinning in death's rictus. I've seen this skeleton in my dreams for years. I've seen this skeleton in the pages of books, in old woodcuts.
In Death and The Maiden, a girl looks up surprised from her garden. In Death and The Huswife, a woman is taken abruptly from her bake oven. In Death and The Miser, an old man is snatched from his counting house. The humans in the pictures are interrupted by the spectre and turn in astonishment as they are led away.
But I am not surprised. The stark face has eyes that are dark pits. I've dreamed of that face so often. I've been waiting for Death a long time. It has had a long journey. Each year and each night it is closer.
Last night I dreamed that the skeleton was just outside my door. My calendar on the wall was pageless. There are no more pages to turn. Today is the day that the skeleton will come for me.
It was also the morning of Christmas Eve, about six in the morning. Today, I thought, I am going to die. So I'm not going to see Christmas day. When I closed my eyes, I could see the image again, the paper white, gangling human form reaching out the skinny bone fingers, impossibly long. I dressed clumsily and hurriedly. I was afraid. It would be interesting to be dead. I had a question that I wanted answered and the only way to find out the answer to my question would be to be dead.
I am of no use to anyone. It would be no tragedy for the skeleton to come and take me. A one armed man is ugly and unfit for any really productive work. I have a job, of all things, as a typist. I type out municipal records, slowly, one handed.
The room warmed up a little. The heater laboured mightily. I took my great coat off of the bed and slid into it. My empty sleeve hung heavily, for I keep it pinned up as a pocket. With the coat, a couple of frayed sweaters and the shirts that I had slept in, I was much warmer. I forayed again from the heater and went to my window.
The frost on the inside of the panes was thick. I scratched it with my fingernails until I could see outside. White snowy shavings fell inside. I held my breath so that it would not fog the glass.
Outside, the city lay dim and jagged under the deep blue dawning sky. My room is in a five story building on the top floor. I could see no lights in the buildings below. Electricity is precious, saved for heating and for cooking. The dim glimmers of candles behind the shrouded windows did not touch the dark. It was as if black out conditions still existed. The war battered buildings had crumbled corners. They stood among the mounds of un-cleared rubble. Someday, now that the ceasefire had finally jelled and appeared permanent, the rubble would be bulldozed. If my dreams were premonitory, then I would never see the rubble cleared. I was still glad that I had seen the end of the war, even if I would not see the city come back to life again.
In the dark rooms and apartments around the city, people would be bending over their electric burners, lighting the guttering stubs of candles, preparing for the day to begin.
The electricity stayed on that morning for forty-five minutes, enough time to melt the ice in my pot and heat it to steaming but not enough time to boil it. Usually we get electricity for more than an hour, but the coil in my heater dulled, and the lovely heat faded.
I sat at the table in my dim room. I stirred the hot water into the oatmeal that I had for breakfast, a quarter cup of the frozen oatmeal from the sack in the corner farthest from the heater, into a cup of the hot water. It made gruel, thin but nourishing, my usual breakfast. I stirred it around and around.
Once I was in love with a boy named Noel. He was eighteen and I was twenty-four and it was a lifetime ago. I remembered breakfast in bed with Noel, the blanket a heaving mound of warm quilts. Our knees tangled, kisses were flavoured with bacon. It was a late breakfast, midmorning, a sun dazzled room. We woke early, stayed in bed, bodies locked rocking and fused by the moistness of sweat. Saturdays completely wasted: Noel's tongue playing tickling in my chest and armpit hair, his flushed face coming up smiling from under the quilts. I had fed him by forkfuls from the fragrant mounds of food on the plate. Bacon, eggs, coffee with cream, sweet rolls, yellow butter, segments of oranges so juicy and sweet that they had burst in his mouth, and orange juice had trickled down the fingers of the hand that I no longer have. And like my fingers, Noel was gone also, like all the young men.
I could have eaten the gruel the way that it was. It would have been palatable, although it was raw. But the water had not boiled and all summer long there had been cholera in the city. There was always a chance that this water too, bought from off of the public water truck, was tainted. To get cholera was to die a slow death over days of diarrhoea.
I sat without eating in the dim cold room, stirring the porridge, until there came a knock on my door.
That roused me and surprised me. Who would knock, so lightly and so early? It was one of my neighbours, Mrs. Keitch, an old middle-aged woman who lived on the first floor. She stood in a black coat, holding a white candle, her crooked nervous smile yellow from the light of the flame.
"What's the matter?" I said. "Is there something you need?"
I'd never spoken to her before. I never spoke to any of my neighbours. They avoided me, perhaps having learned to fear all men of an age to be soldiers, during one of the two hideous times that the city had been sacked. Because of my dream I was expecting some trouble today and I did not expect anything but a very sudden trouble would bring her to my door.
But Mrs. Keitch said, "I'm selling candles. Mr. Anthoni, isn't it? Would you like to buy some candles?"
"Like those?"
The tall slim candle in her hand was for an advertisement as well as for light in the dark hall.
"I've been saving them." She smiled almost apologetically; perhaps afraid I would accuse her of hoarding. "But I've just heard that they are selling chickens in the market this morning. I want to buy a chicken. Would you buy a candle or two?"
I gave her six dollars and took two candles. They were tall hard white candles, brittle in the cold. She was knocking on the door of my neighbour across the hall, to see if she could sell more of her candles to the old couple who live there when I shut my door.
I put the candles aside. It would be good to have them. Perhaps tonight, if I was still here, and if I was not too tired to stay awake, and I could burn one of them and stay up reading old letters.
Noel wrote me hundreds of letters. His unit went East and he fought in the mud caked fields and barren wastelands that had once been productive farms. I got, I think, about a third of the letters that he wrote. Most were lost before they reached me. He wrote to me on any paper he could find, on pieces of newspaper and on requisition forms, over the printing when he couldn't find any blank sections to write on.
"I love you, love you, love you," he wrote. "You are NOT to find yourself a new boyfriend. When I come back I am going to dive into your pants, and if you have been fucking around with any of those fags from Tenshing, I will know it! I will be able to see the marks of their lips on your prick. You have been warned!!!!" I have dozens of his letters, which I had saved carefully. They stopped coming to me five years ago. Noel died.
It was time to leave, not to go to work yet, but to go to the market. The earlier I was there, the shorter the time that I would have to stand in line, perhaps. I would not have much money after buying the candles, but I could get a potato or two and those would make a good supper.
So I went out. The streets were still half dark and the paths in the snow were narrow, but well trodden. The market was filling early. That was the first thing I saw. There were more people than usual out, queued up in front of the boarded shop windows. I hurried.
"Mommy, look!" The sudden squeaking voice of a child startled everyone in the market street and made us turn. "Mommy! Look at that!" It was a small child, thin faced, pulled close by his mother's hand. His narrow arm was stretched out, and bright spots of excitement flushed his cheeks under his hood.
There was spruce tree set up, standing in a snow bank outside of the licensed rural produce dealer. On its dark green boughs a dozen yellow lights sparkled. An electric flex ran out of the dealer's store. The power had come back on again and made the tiny lights gleam in the tree's branches.
The power is back on, I thought and I felt my face widen in amazement, not that the erratic power was back on, but because of the tree.
"Mommy, what is it? Why are there lights in the tree?"
The mother, an exhausted looking woman with bare hands, red from the cold, bent close to her child. She was smiling. "It's a Christmas tree. Remember what I described to you? That tree is just to look pretty, because it's Christmas."
The child was entranced, round mouthed. Like the child, we adults stared. The gold lights gleamed like tiny stars and made the green of the tree more vivid. How long had it been since I had seen a Christmas tree? A few years, most likely. Now here was the proud, pretty symbol of celebration.
"The war's over," an old woman murmured.
No one muttered that the produce dealer was wasting precious power. We stood in a ring about the tree and gazed. Every person who came into the street halted. The little tree shone and the child laughed. A Christmas tree. Well, why not? It had been long enough. It would be a good thing to go back to celebrating Christmases.
The store was crowded and foggy with the shoppers' breath when I got in. There was a whole row of chickens, plucked and lying frozen waiting to be sold. I didn't have enough money for a chicken, but I bought potatoes and milk. That would make a good supper. Potatoes were not as dear as they had been a year ago. I bought three potatoes.
Chickens in the market, I thought, and Christmas trees! Like past holidays. One year Noel had wrapped my prick with red and green ribbons, spiralling them upward. There only had been one year with Noel, one Christmas. "This is what I want for Christmas!" he said, and he had seized my beribboned organ. "It's already wrapped…" he had said coaxingly. How silly he had been, like a kid ten years younger. And how trusting. He had fallen backwards into my arms, always confident that I would catch him, and I always had, and bent down to cover his upturned face with laughing kisses.
"Mine! Mine! Mine!" he had written in his letters. "You are mine! Tell your Colonel to send you to some nice safe place behind the lines so that you will be there waiting for me after this is all over. You must be waiting for me. I need you. I belong to you. I want you. Jesus, how I want you! Every time I think of you I get a hard-on or I come close to crying or both."
When the skeleton comes I will be ready for him. I have answers to Noel's letters and no other way to bring them to him. I have dreamed about the skeleton so many times that I'm not afraid of it. I'm only afraid of the pain that comes with dying. But the skeleton itself is not too terrible. Animated bones. They are as much absurd as horrible. My dreams don't feel terrible while I am dreaming them. I was never afraid of the skeleton and never afraid when I dreamed about my glove.
Why am I so sure that I am dreaming about my death? For years and years I had the same dreams. Sometimes I dreamed that one day a skeleton would come for me, and sometimes I dreamed that I was going to lose my glove. I had the dream about the glove until the winter before I lost my arm. And the night before I lost my arm, I dreamed that I would finally lose my glove that day.
There are two children that live in my building. I think that they are around nine and eleven, but it is hard to tell and I am not even sure if they are boy or girl, because the mismatched layers of clothes that they wear sometimes includes skirts and shawls and sometimes doesn't.
These two children have always been afraid of me. They go out and gather dung and wood and chips of coal, anything that burns. When they see me if we are going in and out of the building at the same time, they always run up the stairs with their buckets, and look back down at me with alarmed and wary faces.
They were standing outside of the building when I came back, steaming like small dragons, too absorbed in their conversation to notice me at first. They had arms full of pine boughs.
"If we just stick them up in the snow, they'll only look like we brought them home for the needles," the older one said.
"Well, we can't make them into a Christmas tree. And the tree in the market was stuck in the snow." The smaller one was clutching so many boughs that she appeared to be trying to look like a tree herself.
"They won't look like decorations. I want them to look like decorations."
Then they saw me behind them and stood looking at me.
"If you have string," I said, "you could tie them in an arch over the door. People decorate like that."
"How could we do that?" The older asked boldly.
I gestured at the doorframe. "Tie it there and there and to each other. Bring them together in the middle." They were so interested in the problem that they had forgotten to be afraid of me. They stared up at the door.
"Then you decorate the boughs," I said. "You don't have lights? You make little decorations. I have some red cloth. Do you want me to show you?"
They nodded vigorously. I went upstairs. This would have amused Noel, I thought: Putting up Christmas decorations. I came down again with a piece of cloth that had one been a red shirt. It had worn through in the arms. The cloth was soft and rotten, too soft to be worn, but the colour was still red and vivid.
"Can you tear it? In a little square?"
"This big?" The elder child tore a square, two and a half inches on the sides.
"Now stuff it, with pine needles, with anything, make a ball and tie it with the threads hanging." They stood right under me. The small one tore the cloth with her face puckered seriously, looking at the elder's handwork while she tried to copy it. The elder did what I described and had a plump, small red ball with a ragged end and threads dangling to tie it to the boughs with.
Their faces turned up, bright. "Thanks, Mr. Anthoni!" They fell on the shirt, tearing it eagerly, but carefully.
"Not too small. Don't make the pieces too small!" the younger cried.
"Don't worry. Look, we can use the seams like strings to tie the boughs up with," the older answered her.
I had to go to work. I hurried. I was running late. I had delayed to watch the children make the decorations. The winter day was not frozen hard. Old men pulling carts of fuel were struggling, because the wheels got stuck in the slush. My balance isn't good. I can't throw both arms out to steady myself if the ground is slippery. I looked down, careful with my footing as hurried along the trench like paths in the snow.
It was winter, like this the very last time that I dreamed I was going to lose my glove. I'd slept in a billet with a coal fire stove. It seemed important when I woke up that I had finally dreamed that I would lose my glove, but what did it matter really? I felt like I had reached a great change in my life, like graduating or being born even. It was only a dream. We were fighting partisans in the towns along the coastal foothills. The day ahead of me with the danger of snipers, the tense work of going house to house, searching, the possibility of mines and booby-traps: That was a lot more important than if I lost a glove, winter or not.
I never felt it when it hit me. I was in the middle of a group going up a slanted street. Gunfire ripped out without sound or sensation. When it echoed, it had echoed in my deaf ears. I took the hit and fell, feeling nothing, down and dead before the sound began.
I was cold, waking: bitterly, bitterly cold. I was gummy, sticky with blood and burning with pain. I had lain unconscious, perhaps three hours, on the road between four dead soldiers and I was lying in a pool of blood.
I could see my arm on the road above me. The sleeve ended, fragments of flesh had no feeling. They had frozen in the cold. I tried to get up, to pull my weak body up onto my knees. I could not. My blood had frozen and I was stuck to the ground.
My chest heaved panting. The unyielding ground was hard as stone. It sucked the warmth from me slowly. It held me locked flat like teeth. I pulled on mangled, frosted flesh. I felt savage pain around my elbow and pulled with all my strength anyway. I was frozen to the ground as securely as if I was nailed.
The blood had run from my arm under me. My coat was frozen also, by the blood that had saturated it. There was no more fresh blood. When the torn muscle had frozen, that had sealed the wounds. I could kick. I could scrabble with my boot toes. I was shuddering with the cold, dying of the cold and I could not get up.
I lay between the humped up bodies of the dead men for the middle part of the day. I didn't stop struggling feebly. I could turn a bit and look up at the vivid blue of the sky. I tried to break the frozen blood every way I could think of. By rocking side to side, I got my gummy coat freed a little. The red crystals cracked and peeled off of the black pavement. My shoulder stayed down like it was part of the road itself. My cheek was freezing where it touched the road. My face was frost bitten. The numbness spread above my elbow. Now, even when I struggled, I could not feel pain there.
And then I heard the crunch of footsteps, slow and careful in the snow. It was a partisan, a big man with a black beard who moved warily around the group of fallen men. I gave a frantic kick and his eyes gleamed at me. I could not use a weapon, even if I had been able to reach one.
He stooped at the other soldiers, sliding his mittened fingers into their pockets, searching them. He took their rifles and hung them on his back, and all the while his grinning gaze turned to me, while I kicked again and again.
He came to search me also. He poked hard in my numb ribs and pulled. Steam came from around his teeth. He didn't point a gun at me. Why should he? Bullets are expensive and I was helpless. The cold would kill me cheaply if I laid out there for a couple of hours more. When he had pulled all the weapons and any ammunition that he could find away from the men who littered the road, the partisan had gone away.
He had come back again with a weapon that needed no ammunition. He stood above me looking down. He was enormously tall, dark against the sky, a giant with an axe. His eyes measured, centred on me as he brought the tool up high. His eyes bulged as it was aimed. They fixed on me, glaring, holding me. I kicked but didn't scream. It came down unstoppable, a dead weight, hissing in the frigid sky.
It landed clean. It took him one blow. He took off my arm. I screamed blood then. The pain was numb lightening. His hands wrestled with my stump and tore me free. The frozen blood ripped as it released me, with an obscene sound like that of tape being peeled back. I was limp and screaming as the man clutched cloth against the end of my arm. The big man seemed to shimmer in and out of a black oblivion. I wavered, conscious and unconscious by turns as he wrestled with me roughly, tying up my stump and kneeling on my stomach to hold my convulsing body still.
I don't remember much of how he dragged me out of the road, nor of the hospital. I know the partisan cut off my arm just below the elbow. He was a kind enemy, because if he had been able to save my elbow, I would have had that much more use of my arm afterwards. But in the field hospital, one of our own surgeons took the arm off again, much higher, only a little below my armpit, because the rot got into the elbow.
I shivered for a month in a canvas cot, vomiting from the pain, the smell of pus disgusting as it seeped yellow beneath the bandage. I survived. I don't regret surviving. But I never again dreamed my recurring dream about the lost glove.
That is why I believe my dreams are prophetic, and why I am not very much afraid of dying. Whatever sends me my dreams, to me that means that there is something more than the world I see. Something good sent me my dreams as a warning. If there is a power for good that reaches beyond me in dreams and singled me out this way for its kindness, then I believe it will bring me back to Noel again.
When I reached the scarred concrete building, which used to be a warehouse, and is now city hall, where I work, there were trucks parked outside. I passed inside. The building smelt of heating fires where garbage had been burned, but the rooms were cold.
"We got paid!" The only one in the office was my boss, the regional census and manpower manager. Martha is a lawyer, a sixty-four-year-old woman, too arthritic to type. She was beaming from her desk, bundled in a couple of shawls. "You'd better hurry," she said. "You have to go out to the airport."
On my desk was my pay. We usually get paid every two weeks. We are supposed to be paid in advance, and if possible in scrip instead of in kind. I stared at my desk. There were a few creased pieces of scrip, clipped together. But what I saw on my desk was something I had never expected to see again. There was a bag of oranges.
I took up the bag and turned to look at her with an incredulous smile. She beamed back again. "Can you believe it? But now that the planes are coming in safely, they must have been flown in from Morocco, or even from the States! Oranges! I'm going to give one to my sister, and one to the man who brings me my firewood and one to my nephew…"
The bag held eight oranges. Not just one orange but eight. They were bright, round and vermilion. Oranges. I could almost smell, like a hallucination, the sharp sweet acidity of their scent when the peel is broken. I wanted to tear one open right away and to eat it, but I couldn't do that. To peel an orange would take time. It takes two hands to tear the bright rind back easily. I didn't have the time.
"Why am I going to the airport?" I asked her.
"There are planes expected this morning. New manpower. New people to feed. You will have to get the lists. I can't go because I am meeting with the rationing manager," she explained.