Nehalennia, by Daniel J. Cecil
My wife and I were sick in November. Historically a healthy pair, we’d unexpectedly fallen victim to the pandemic all over the news, an abstraction that we could now experience as reality from the comfort of our home.
While people were out there dying from the virus, we felt ill, but not deathly. We treated it like any other sickness. We called a few days off work and took care of ourselves the only way we knew how. We tried not to feel too guilty that this wasn’t a huge change for us.
As part of our convalescence, we fed the flu, but a bit too weak to cook for ourselves, we ordered takeout. Pizza and burgers. Bar food. Comfort food. At first, everything tasted all right, if not a bit muted. Typical when you’re sick. Then, we ordered spicy Lebanese food. Vegan Shoarma. Garlic mayonnaise and bread, dripping in oil. Spicy potato wedges. When we opened the containers, expecting rich spices, we felt a dull rush of hot air but no discernable smell. When we took a bite of the wrap, the fake meat tasted of humidity. It was food, but different, the alchemy lacking most of its best qualities.
***
My wife’s taste and smell returned within a few months. Mine, however, remained absent.
In spring the flowers bloomed and the ivy climbed green along the wall. I was sure there was fragrance in the air—specifically, the wisteria that clung to the brick of our apartment building whose perfume spread each April to fill the wake of cold winter’s flight. I watched my wife, nose deep in a flower hanging low, and I tried to summon the sweet smell she was enjoying. The broad smile on her face taunted me.
After months of observing my wife inhale the balm of lotions and soaps and spices, and feeling increasingly alienated from olfactory experience, which proved more distressing the longer it lingered, I attempted to force my senses into behaving as expected. I found an article online that claimed the nose and mouth could be trained to relearn the relationship between flavor and scent. My teammates and I had transitioned to working from home at that point, the law office no longer a safe environment from which to work, and though I avoided training my nose in front of Marie, I experimented throughout the day with coffee as I avoided work—I stuck my nose into fresh grounds, my video turned off, trying to detect the roasted chocolate, stone fruit, and tea notes highlighted on the package copy. All I could discern was an acrid buzz in the center of my brain.
The sense of expectation, the knowledge that a stimulus should produce a specific result but was refused, made the day feel dark and heavy.
But I continued. I peeled clementines during video conferences. I listened to the disembodied voices drifting from the computer speaker. Sometimes, the voice and the dull sensation of smell I knew the clementine offered but failed to detect became the same, bland note—a disembodied voice, divorced from origin, intending efficacy but utterly failing to deliver.
***
I was convinced in June that my senses would never return.
Still, I refused to give up cooking dinner each night, an activity that relaxed me, which made me feel a part of the world of smells and tastes. My wife complained, of course, that there often wasn’t enough salt or pepper or spices in my cooking, even when I made an extra effort to over season.
How would I know? I snapped. Salt it your own goddamn self.
So, she would take the grinder, and without looking in my direction, without reply, apply a storm of white over her food so that I could see what the hell she meant.
***
Derrida wrote in one of his books that language is the problem. I read this in grad school, I think, though the context is long forgotten. I don’t remember if the quote is actually his.
For my wife and me, language is one problem—she’s French, I’m American—but it isn’t exactly the problem. With each other, we often say something neutral that is given a negative charge between delivery and perception.
It’s the laws of attraction. A kind of distance in understanding each other because we’re trying so hard.
Marie’s nose plunged into the petals of a flower. Me trying to detect the notes of apricot in a paper filter full of fresh coffee grounds.
We’re not linguists.
In this sense, we’re surveyors, failing to distinguish where, exactly, the foundation is soft. Concrete, revealed to be a finely packed line of salt.
***
My wife, feeling under-salinated, suggested we go to the sea.
She packed our bags, as if this little trip had been agreed upon, and we drove to the village Domburg, in the province of Zeeland. We had no plan—the world was on lockdown—but Marie suggested we wander until we found something interesting. Anything interesting to snap me out of whatever funk it was that I was in.
It was July but rainy and bitter cold. This suited Marie fine, but I wondered why we couldn’t have felt depressed under the gray skies of home, rather than facing the bitter, scentless breeze on the cold, sandy beaches of the North Sea.
The town square of Domburg appeared to be bustling when we arrived. I drove the car down detours, the town center cordoned off for pedestrians. The excitement in the car was palpable. Had the world opened without our knowing? Marie detected the scent of fried dough in the air. Was there a fair? Or a concert? I imagined live music, people jammed together on a brightly lit stage, the taste of a swaying crowd’s sweat at the tip of my tongue, and I felt a glimmer of joy I hadn’t felt in months.
We dropped our luggage at the little holiday apartment we’d rented for the weekend and, after unpacking, rushed back to the blocked-off center of Domburg. When we arrived, instead of festivities we discovered a ghost town, the streets nearly empty. There were just a few people wandering aimlessly, peering into shop windows or standing in semi-circles, shrugging their shoulders, their masks at varying degrees of attention.
***
I was in a foul mood as we walked by a hotel that overlooks the beach leading to the North Sea. The hotel appeared built from the bones of a former grand estate house, and I imagined the people who’d once lived there, sitting in grand Victorian costumes, fanning their roly-poly faces with bills of sale. Money for flesh. For spices. Gluttony. Sucking on the Earth’s bounty until they hit marrow. Maybe, I thought ruefully, they’d tasted something in death they’d only hoped to have caught wind of in life, and that became the blowing breeze of their personal hell.
***
Along the boardwalk we discovered placards that highlighted Domburg’s history. I accidentally began in the middle of these placards, instead of their start, and worked my way to the end. I’d somehow missed some in-between. At first I was confused, thinking for a moment that I’d somehow misread the Dutch, that there were sections of history I’d lost in translation. Then, I discovered the placards I’d skipped. Instead of going back, I gave up on making sense of Domburg chronologically. Instead, I let the sea breaking speak. From there, a story emerged, a beginning created by a release of historical tension, the pretense that this follows that, gracefully eroded away.
***
Years ago, my wife and I drove over the Afsluitdijk, a 32-meter engineering project built in 1932 to close off the Zuiderzee inlet and create a freshwater lake called the Ijsselmeer. Engineers created this barrier to protect the rapidly growing Dutch population from flood waters, and to create land for agriculture. Shallow fishing waters would be lost, but prosperity would take its place.
Marie and I parked at a rest stop on the Afsluitdijk (it’s 20 miles across) to use the bathroom. While waiting for Marie to finish in the toilet, I found placards similar to those in Domburg. Historical facts about the dam’s construction. I read that slender gateways were included in the dam’s design so that fish accustomed to saltwater could swim away into the North Sea as the new lake lost its salinity. I learned that the Dutch call freshwater sweet.
An odd fact: some fish become accustomed to both sweet and salt, preferring neither the taste of one over the other. They have adapted to be happy in any environment.
***
On the Domburg boardwalk a certain placard caught my attention. A series of altars, it read, unseen under millions of pounds of sand, were discovered in the 1600s when a wild storm blew in and eroded the dunes, exposing the bones of a temple. The altars were devoted to a goddess named Nehalennia, whose origin goes back to before the birth of Christ. The name doesn’t appear to be Latinate. Maybe Welsh, or Celtic. It could be Germanic, but it isn’t exactly German as we know it. When matched with other altars found elsewhere, there are multiple spellings of Nehalennia’s name. Latinizations. What is known, regardless of nomenclature, is that in the pre-Christian age, people throughout central Europe worshiped her. Yet, there are no words to describe what she meant to these people. Just an image of a woman holding apples, a dog at her side. Nothing written onto an altar of stone to tell the tale. Her name, stripped of its context. Her image, void of any meaning.
While I was reading this placard a battering-ram wind blew, and my wife, a leaf against it, was nearly blown away. She took my hand and squeezed until I acknowledged its placement.
Help, she said, and I did my best to hold her fast.
***
In the evening we tried to get comfortable in the strange apartment we’d rented over the internet. It felt put together for the express purpose of transience. The walls were bland white. Nothing caught the eye except the art on the wall—still lifes of fruit and wild game, reproductions of one of the old masters. They were certainly beautiful, in a way, but I wondered what it meant to the people who owned this apartment to have hung it. They had taste, but it felt it had been applied without any heart behind it. Our surroundings felt lifeless.
That evening, my wife and I watched a movie that neither of us were very much interested in. My attention drifted to the light cast from the action on the television to where it landed on my wife’s face. I watched as the colors shifted the features of her mouth, her eyes and nose, so that her whole face appeared flat, then round and stretched. Though she shapeshifted, a base remained and I—drunk on wine that I was surprised to detect the notes of: lemon grass, herbs, citrus—drifted into a trance, spelling her name in different ways to see if this act of language would cause that base to lose its fidelity.
She drifted to sleep. I turned off the television, kissed her forehead, and was surprised to detect the unmistakable taste of salt lingering on my lips. Though somewhat pleased to have the smell of wine and the taste of salt that evening, a return to some kind of normalcy, I thought how grand it might been to have stayed stricken, without senses, forced to seek beyond limitations to find some new way of living, to swim through inlets to the soul of the sea, to drink in salt and sweet without hesitation … to discover deeper solace in a goddess that needs no name, whose only request is an undeterred practice of devotion.
Daniel J. Cecil is a writer based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Heavy Feather Review, The LA Review of Books, Miracle Monocle, and The Stranger, among others. Daniel was recently long-listed for the Dzanc Fiction Prize and has received the support of several residencies. Learn more at: www.writerdanieljcecil.com.