It has been nine months since I lost my sight. Nine months. A woman could have a baby in that time. Perhaps this is like falling unexpectedly pregnant. The surprise, the adjustment, the learning to cope. Perhaps nine months represents the beginning of a new life.
What a silly idea. There's not really any difference between yesterday and today. I haven't started on a new life. I must be careful not to be too poetic. I'm no Masefield.
Napoleon has been on seventeen missions out of the country since I went blind. He's come back with broken bones once, gunshot wounds twice, and with suspected concussion two times. He should have a partner, but he won't choose a new partner. He says he prefers working alone.
Right now he's – Where is he right now? I think he's in Cuba. He calls when he can but I can't rely on him calling. He isn't obliged to keep calling home. He feels a duty to, like any husband. Even though we're both men, and I in no way take the part of a wife, Napoleon likes to be a husband. He feels guilty about leaving me behind, even though he knows I can look after myself perfectly well.
It's very strange, this relationship we've fallen into. I never imagined it happening. I never imagined any serious relationship, much less one with Napoleon. If I imagined it I imagined a doll-like wife, two children, something of which mama and tato would approve. They wouldn't approve of this. I've flitted back and forth between women all my life and never found anything worth staying for. I've looked at men and wondered and then been disgusted at myself. But then this happened. Fate, I suppose. Life happens, with its ups and downs. Going blind. Finding Napoleon. These things aren't black and white. Sometimes Napoleon irritates the hell out of me. He always has. Sometimes being blind feels like a blessing. I'm not supposed to say that, but it does. Sometimes it feels as though it's a blessing that lets me concentrate on the important things. Sight is such a distraction. There's so much that you don't need to see.
Like now. Here I am sitting in the window with my brailler and a sheet of paper wound in, practising, because the more I practice the better I will get. When I look back over the accounts I've written in the last few months I can see how much better I'm getting at typing, and I can see how much better I'm getting in my adjustment to this life. I have put Bach on the record player, and the summer sun is so warm on my face I feel like I'm melting. I know what I might see out there. I know I'd see people walking in the street, and the cars I can hear purring by. I know I'd look up and watch the clouds drifting by, and I'd be looking at that one cloud in the sky, waiting for it to cover the sun. Instead of writing I'd be doing that. I know when a cloud goes in front of the sun because the heat suddenly fades a little and sometimes the light dims. But I don't wait for it and anticipate it and get annoyed at all the little clouds waiting in the wings. They just come, and they go, and it's warm again. So I carry on typing, practising my braille, writing this – I suppose it's a diary. Just writing down the thoughts that come into my head so that my finger strikes become smoother and faster, and remembering the grade b contractions becomes easier, and – ha – remembering to put in the damn capital signs and number signs so I write Grade 2 not grade b. Stupid.
But it's all right. One is not supposed to decide that blindness is all right. One is supposed to rail against it, to rend cloth and gnash teeth. People keep telling me how hard it must be, how awful I must find it, how I must be desperate for a way to fix my eyes. I'm tired of trying to find a way to fix my eyes. Three doctors have told me there's no chance of that. I'm tired of rending cloth and gnashing teeth. It doesn't get me anywhere. Blindness is all right. I can get just about anywhere I want to go on buses or in cabs. I can use the subway if I really have to. I can walk pretty much anywhere. The grid system is a blessing, and if I lose my bearings someone will set me straight. I'm independent and capable, and a side benefit of all the hours at the school is that I can cook better than I ever could in the past.
I do miss things. Of course I do. I miss driving. I wish I could drive still. I miss shooting a gun on the firing range. I wish people didn't treat me so strangely. I wish the girls at headquarters didn't speak to me in those over-gentle voices. I wish I could read my own post when I get it, and read books without having to hope they have them in the Braille library in ten volumes, and read journals so I can keep up with physics. I miss seeing sharp colours and not having to plan everything like a military expedition. I wish mama didn't cry every time I speak to her on the phone. I miss going on missions. Napoleon is in Cuba. He's been in Hong Kong, England, France, Brazil, Spitzbergen, Czechoslovakia, and I wish I could have been in those places too.
What I do now is a good job. It pays less than my agent's salary, but I have a monthly disability payment on top of that. I still get to read the details of all the missions, I get to plan infiltrations, assign agents, compile dossiers on enemy agents. It's interesting and it occupies me and I get on with Sarah, thank god. But I do miss international flights and infiltrations and explosions. I get jealous of Napoleon when he leaves on yet another mission. I do get jealous. But there isn't anything I can do about it.
And it's all right. I don't get injured any more. I don't get captured any more. I haven't escaped death by a hair's breadth since I was in Stockholm, and I really don't miss almost dying. I might live past forty this way. I don't miss the indignities and the exhaustion and the feeling sometimes that we're fighting a rising tide. I have friends from the school who don't treat me strangely, because we're all blind, and they're good, interesting people with interesting lives. The people who matter at Uncle are so much more normal with me now. I get more chances to go to the jazz clubs and play music there than I ever used to, and I'm exploring new avenues of life that weren't possible when I was always on another plane, going to another place.
So it's all right. I miss sight, but I live with blindness. Sometimes it's an inconvenience, but those of us without wings don't notice the inconvenience of not being able to fly. Most of the things I miss are things I don't need. It used to be that every time I realised that sight doesn't matter I'd fight and struggle against that feeling, but then I discovered that if I let go I don't fall to my death. I just carry on. How do I explain that? I discovered that letting go of sight is all right. It's better. It's not like jumping off a cliff. It's more like letting go of the shore and finally discovering you can swim in the sea. I don't drown. I swim.
I'm not a saint and I'm not an angel, no matter how much people want to apply those labels to me. Blind people aren't holy martyrs. We're just people. People who don't see so well. It would be silly to pretend I never get down, that I'm never frustrated, that I don't have bad days. Very silly to pretend that here, in these notes that only I will ever read. I do get down. I get terrible with poor Napoleon sometimes. He puts up with so much. I scream at him and I rage at him and sometimes he takes it and sometimes he rages back, but it always ends in closeness and comfort. And I get over it. I remember that I can't change anything, and that it's all right, being blind. I remember that almost all of my problems are because the world isn't adjusted for me, or that someone's being stupid, refusing to accommodate someone whose eyes don't work, or underestimating me, or patronising me. I remember that on my own I'm capable. I'm okay.
Illya rolled the last sheet out of the brailler and put it on top of the others, shuffled them into neatness against the palms of his hands, and put them carefully into the locked box where he kept this record. He turned the key, but he didn't take it out of the lock. He trusted Napoleon to not open the box, and even if he did he thought he would give up quite quickly at trying to read the braille sheets. He put the box back in its place under his desk and put the cover over the brailler. The last track on the record he was listening to trailed off and turned to hiss and static, and he went to flip the disc to the other side. He remembered briefly that glossy, fluctuating sight of light on black record grooves, and smiled. Then he set the record player going again and sighed as the rich sounds of Bach's Third Cello Suite began to fill the air. He put his fingertips on the speaker to let the vibrations move up through his arms and encompass him. There was something so intensely beautiful about the pure and penetrating resonance of those string sounds filling the air. Sometimes it was hard to move about the room because he became so lost in the sounds that he forgot to take notice of his surroundings. He just stood, transfixed, and forgot where he was.
Perhaps he would try to replicate something of that on his English horn later. Or perhaps he would listen to some jazz and play along with that on the beautiful piano that sat on the other side of the room. It had been so good of Napoleon to buy him that piano. He really wished he had the time to learn musical braille...
He could hardly wait for Napoleon's return from Cuba, because they both had two weeks leave that Waverly had promised wouldn't be interrupted with that inevitable beep of the communicator. Illya had booked almost all of that time at a cottage on the beach with its own pool. It would be his first time away from the apartment since Stockholm. He hadn't been swimming since Stockholm either, and he was looking forward to trying that in a small, private pool. He was looking forward to the drive up there in a soft-top car in the summer sun. He was looking forward to discovering what restaurants there were in the little town a few miles from the house, to exploring the beach and forest walks that were to be had in the area, to trying out the cane tips he had bought for rough terrain. He was looking forward to so many things, and to Napoleon coming home so that they could share them together.