1001 Nights Cast

I don’t know how these things are connected, you say into the dark, turning to exhale your smoke away from the long table covered with dishes of food and bottles of wine and water, but, you know, sometimes you feel that they are. It is late summer, hot and dark. The moon has not yet risen.

It was the first year that we were living in Paris, you say. I hardly spoke French then. I didn’t know it would become my home.

The children are gathered at the end of the table, drawing intensely, their heads bowed. The adults lean back in their chairs in conversational groups of twos and threes. Food is passed up and down—tiny fried fish and stuffed vegetables, dates and small sweet cakes. Our host brings plates of grapes from the garden. We drink cold wine and tell stories. Some are shared, some are inconsequential and some are not stories at all—and this is the point you are making, how things connect or whether they connect. You tell me a story about a man and a child and a block of flats in Paris, in the first year of your life there, twenty years go. A man you noticed as if you knew him, though you never spoke. There is a dog in your story, a dog that appears twice in a day, and an exhibition, connected to your work, which is about archaeology. I am not sure I understand all the words. At times I am not sure what language we are speaking. Perhaps I have had too much to drink.

The dog, I say. What kind of dog?

The children have made sticky paper badges that say our names in crooked writing. One by one they pass them up the table. Mine is edged in purple, my name in green. I stick it onto my blue silk dress.

The moon appears as a bright sliver of light above the dark edge of the mountain opposite. Then it rises, pulled on invisible strings. At first it is just a slice, now a disc, round and shining.

A black dog, you say, I don’t know what kind. The tip of your cigarette gleams red. You stub it out in your plate.

Our long crowded table settles into a murmur. Children climb onto adults’ laps, small arms wrapped around parents’ necks, listening. Brandy appears.

Once, I say, once.

The sky is full of stars.

It is as if the earth has been spread with fine silver sand, the moonlight is so bright tonight, and all our clothes (and the plates of food, and the children’s hair), gleam, as if we have been dusted with something shiny, or as if we have been spirited into a parallel world.

The point is, you say, that I met him again at my parents’ house in Cork fifteen years later, and it turned out that he was Irish and even that his parents knew mine, and that we could have met, all that time ago, and we didn’t even speak. When I was so alone, so far from home.

And how did you know it was him?

The eyes.

Once, I begin (and I don’t know why), I was in London. It was summer, must have been, say, June, because the chestnut flowers had faded. I had gone to see an exhibition at the Serpentine. I was wearing a thin summer dress and as I came out of the gallery I noticed that the sky had gone dark. A storm broke, lightening flashed and it started to pour. I ran towards a tree to shelter, and, as I stood there, a woman walking towards me put up an umbrella and beckoned. I smiled and came out from under the chestnut tree and took her arm and we walked, close together, like sisters, until we reached the underground, and then we parted. She gave me her card. I kept it for years. Her name was Edith. She was Hungarian. I never saw her again.

The moon glistens. I reach for my shawl. One of the lamps blows over.

They say it’s from Africa, this wind. That it brings dust from the Sahara.

Once, someone says. Once, not so long ago, there was a huge storm. The sky darkened as if it was about to rain but what came down was dust, dry grey dust that covered everything in a kind of strange light silt.

It is hot tonight, someone says.

Once, someone else says, on a night like this—late summer, this dry heat—we were eating at a small restaurant by the sea. We were so hot that we carried the table and chairs into the sea and ate with our feet in the water.

You were wearing your red dress, someone else says. Remember?

I have swum on nights like this. I have watched the dark glistening water pool in eddies around my body, white in the moonlight. I have stepped, dripping, onto warm sand and lain there watching the moon. Watching the world turn.

My small daughter stands behind my chair, looping her arm round my neck. Let’s go. I pick her up. Too heavy to carry, I say. She leans against me and we start to walk out through the garden and into the street of the small town, towards our house. A black dog runs past us in the dark. The moon has a halo around its face. Time, says the moon, is all. E = mc2 says the dog to the moon. Time is curved. Time is fluid. You can see the earth turn in an instant. Everything is connected. There is no here nor there. There is no home, just the moment where you are, feeling the dog brush past, with your child on your hip, her weight shifting and her head drooping against your shoulder. This is a moment and this and this and this is where you live.