Shroud Read online

  There are moments, I know them well, when all goes lax and vacant suddenly, as if all the air had rushed out of things, and the people caught in the moment hesitate, feeling displaced, jostled somehow to one side of themselves. Kristina Kovacs put her purse on the table. Franco Bartoli made as if to rise from his chair but changed his mind, and for some reason looked faintly abashed. I leaned far back and peered upward, expecting something to be there, above me, but saw only the swarming air, and the edge of the awning and a tracery of leaves wreathed through with the smoke from my cigarette, and an invisible jet, very high, inscribing its gradual double chalk-mark across the zenith. That breeze again. The sun on the parked cars. The river, shining.

  Cass Cleave stepped out from the dimness of the restaurant, her head down, falteringly. She stopped a moment and looked about, holding up a shielding hand and squinnying her eyes against the glare, as if this – the empty tables, the trellis of vine, the three of us looking at her – as if this were not at all where she had expected to find herself. She came forward, negotiating her way between the chairs – they might have been so many crouching animals – and stopped beside me, bracing the steepled fingers of one hand on the table and leaning forward at a teetering angle. She began to speak but her voice would not work and she laughed instead, inanely, snuffling. There was a bad scrape on her elbow beaded with blood and her dress was stained. I reached out and seized the hand she was not leaning on and tried to use it as a lever to lift myself up but could not, and fell back on the chair, and closed my eyes.

  The last gift I ever gave to Magda, one of the very few things I bought for her – like most displaced persons I have a distrust of material possessions – was an ornate and absurdly expensive glass vase. I had, uncharacteristically, I suppose, remembered that this year marked the fortieth anniversary of our life together, and although her mind by now was almost gone I thought that I should mark the occasion. In the shop, a narrow box of plate-glass and angled steel on Euclid – am I alone in experiencing the peculiar and inexplicable soreness of heart that attends the purchase of a gift? – the vase had looked a fine and fetching thing, tall and slender, the pale-green glass shot through with fat coils of a clouded, sugar-coloured whiteness. However, when it had been installed in the living room for a week or two the green of the glass took on a snotlike hue, while the swirls of frozen white syrup made me feel slightly nauseous if I kept them in sight for long enough, and I came to regard it as somehow malignant, even menacing. I wanted to get rid of it, but I could see that Magda had become attached to it in all its horrid viridescence, which must, for her, have been a radiance piercing enough to strike even through the mists of her hopelessly distracted comprehension. She would sit and gaze at it for long hours, in placid quietude, and I did not have the heart to take it outside the back door and dash it to smithereens on the ground, as I was convinced I ought to do. The vase in its turn must have found me equally repulsive, or else must have felt my animosity to be unbearable, and decided to put us both out of our distress. Here is what happened; really, the oddest thing. On the day after Magda's death I was reclining on the sofa in the dimness of the lounge, awash in my new state of widowhood – the word still sounds wrong, applied to a man – with a bag of ice on my brow and a steadily diminishing bottle on the floor beside me, when a loud report, sharp and incontrovertible as a gunshot, brought me rearing up in fright, like the man-monster arching on his table when the big blue spark leaps between the conducting rods. I scrambled upright and swayed at a drunken list into the living room to investigate, thinking, in my befuddled state, of Officer Blank – remember him? – and that blunt blue pistol of his, stuffed full with live rounds. It took much fruitless peering and searching before at last I discovered what had occurred. The vase had shattered, not into fragments in the way that glass should, but into two almost equal halves, vertically, and remarkably cleanly, as if it had been sliced down the middle by an immensely swift diamond blade or a powerful, unearthly ultra-ray. As I may already have remarked, I am not of a superstitious nature – or was not, since this was before Magda's ghost had begun haunting me – and I knew that it was simply that there must have been a fault in the glass, a crack so fine as to be invisible, that had succumbed at last to an infinitesimal shift in air temperature or change of atmospheric pressure. I thought, with a pang almost of remorse, of the once-hated thing standing there, day after day, suffering my baleful glances and the hours of Magda's fond but perhaps no less assailing gaze, locked motionless in agonised struggle with the irresistible forces of the world working on it, straining to hold itself together for another hour, another minute, another few seconds, the last few, of wholeness and poise. I am thinking, of course, of Cass Cleave. For that is how it was with her, too, she was another tall, tense, fissile vessel waiting to be cloven in two.

  In the lavatory she had suffered one of her seizures. She did not remember falling, only the familiar, faint smell, dry and sweet, and the voices in her head suddenly starting all together to say something. The stall was cramped and dirty and when she collapsed she grazed her arm on something, aldiough she did not feel the pain of it. Then the Ko vacs woman was tapping at the door and saying her name, and she got herself up somehow and wadded a handful of tissue and scrubbed at the hem of her dress where it was stained from the filth on the floor. It was one of her worst fears that one day she would pass out in some foul place like this and not come round until someone had found her, wedged between the stool and the door with her pants around her knees. When she came out into the sun she felt fluttery and light, and the air seemed to have turned into another medium, a kind of bright, viscous fluid that both sustained and hindered her. It was always like this after an attack, the sense of everything around her being different, as though she had stepped through a looking-glass into the other, gleaming world that it contained. When Vander wrenched himself around in his chair and grabbed her hand she felt an infirm tremor run down his arm, it might have been the last of his life draining out of him, and when his head fell forward on to the table with a frightening bang she thought that he was surely dead. Her father's mother had died in his arms after he had fallen asleep holding her and even that, his mother dying, had not woken him. To be gone like that, without a sound, like slipping out of a room and turning and quietly closing the door; in her mind she saw a hand, it was hers, slowly relinquish the polished knob and her miniature, curved reflection on it shrink to a dot of darkness and disappear. To be gone.

  At Vander's collapse Kristina Kovacs and Franco Bartoli sprang up at once and began to bustle about like mechanical figures, as if his fall had somehow switched on a motor and set their parts moving. Kristina Kovacs touched Bartoli on the wrist and he turned aside quickly to go, buttoning his jacket. She said nothing to him, and he nodded rapid acknowledgement of what she had not said. He muttered something in Italian: was it a prayer, perhaps, or was he cursing his bad luck in being here? He glanced at Vander where he lay slumped forward with his head on the table and his arms hanging down past his knees, and nodded again and said that, si, certo, he would go and fetch the car. And he went away, hurrying, with short, purposeful steps, a hand pressed flat against the side pocket of his jacket. Vander produced, as if in scornful comment, a loud, rolling belch that ended in a groan. Kristina Kovacs moved to his side, and, as Cass Cleave looked on, put her hands on his shoulders and with an effort drew him upright on his chair. He groaned again, more loudly, lolling. Kristina Kovacs spoke softly, as to a child, in a language Cass Cleave did not recognise, and then with a strange, sorrowing gesture she extended her arm all the way around his head in a sort of wrestler's hold, but tenderly, and drew him to her, until his forehead was resting against her midriff. His eyes were shut and his mouth was open, and there was a trickle of drool on his chin. Cass Cleave was sharply aware that there was something she wanted to say, or ask, but she could not think what it was, or whom she might address, and anyway here came Franco Bartoli in his little bright-red car, pulling up at the k
erb.

  Between the three of them they got Vander to his feet and heaved him across the pavement to the car, wheeling him forward lurchingly on his corners as if they were walking a wardrobe. Then there was the difficulty of getting him into the low front seat. He was a dead weight, yet in the midst of the struggle, as she leaned under him to support him, her neck wedged into his hot, damp armpit, Cass Cleave heard him chuckle to himself, or thought she did. Even when they had got him into the seat at last his stiff leg kept rolling out again, with comic obstinacy, until Bartoli braced it with the toe of his dainty shoe and at the last moment, like a penalty kicker in reverse, pulled his foot back smartly and slammed the door. They were about to drive away when the waiter came running with the bill they had forgotten to pay, and Bartoli, the wings of his nostrils turning white with fury, had to get out and wave the fellow's complaints aside and thrust a wad of money into his hands. At the hotel, when they were manoeuvring the drunk man up the steps, the automatic glass door kept opening wide with doltish promptness and immediately swinging shut again, as an outflung elbow or a splayed foot temporarily broke the beam of its electronic eye, while in the narrow street a line of backed-up vehicles bellowed and fumed behind Bartoli's abandoned, cowering little car. In the bedroom Franco Bartoli, with Vander's arm clamped on his neck, lost his footing and began to topple over, slowly, quakingly, and to keep themselves from falling they all three had to let go their hold on Vander, who stood swaying for a moment and then pitched forward and crashed face down on the bed with the force of a felled tree. Cass Cleave went and sat down quietly on a chair, and Bartoli stepped back, panting, and brushing his hands down the front of his jacket and hitching his lapels, like a chucker-out who has just succeeded in throwing a particularly truculent trouble-maker into the street. Kristina Kovacs had got Vander on to his back on the bed now and was taking off his shoes. Cass Cleave, trembling, stood up and went to the window and pulled the curtains closed against the daylight, not knowing why she did it, except that it seemed the necessary thing to do. Suddenly shadowed, the room took on a devotional aspect, and Vander's form supine on the bed and the two spectral people standing by him might have been, she thought, the figures at the centre of an altar-piece.

  Kristina Kovacs was looking about her with interest, frowning, as if she had just realised that this was the place where she had lost something once, and were wondering if it might be here still. Franco Bartoli, anxious to be gone, plucked at her sleeve, trying to draw her toward the door. He told Cass Cleave that he would telephone later, and she nodded; she wanted them to go away now, quickly. But at the doorway Kristina Kovacs lingered, still with that distracted frown. "He should not drink," she said, as if to herself, shaking her head. "He really should not drink." Bartoli took her arm then in both his hands and pulled her after him into the hall. However, they must have stopped at the front desk on their way out, for presently, as Cass sat quietly by the bed in the room's sanctified stillness, there came a sharp tap at the door, and a very thin, elegant, elderly man in a pale, shining suit stepped inside. He was, he said, the doctor, making it sound as if there were only one doctor in all the city. He had an Eastern look. His face was swarthy, thin and fleshless, his eyes were dark but not unkind; his sparse hair was dyed black and heavily oiled, and had a fragrant smell, of sandalwood, she thought, although she was not sure she knew the smell of sandalwood. He was carrying a real doctor's bag that snapped open like the thick-lipped mouth of a fish, releasing an ancient and familiar odour. She looked as closely as she dared at the strangely radiant, pearly cloth of which his suit was made; it was less like cloth than a kind of metal, marvellously fine and soft, shining at all angles in the light of the bedside lamp. He waited while at his direction she unknotted Vander's tie and opened his shirtfront, then sat down on the side of the bed with one foot raised and resting on its toe, and listened to Vander's heart, and lifted his eyelids and shone a light into his eyes, and looked into his ears with the light, and prised open his mouth and looked in there, too. Then he took out of the depths of his bag an old-fashioned metal syringe with a glass barrel, and a small glass phial of clear liquid and held the phial upside down and inserted the needle through the rubber seal that was, she noted with interest, exactly the same colour as the inner tube of a bicycle wheel; perhaps, she thought, it was made from the same kind of rubber, and she marvelled again at how despite their seeming disparity so many things are secretly the same. The doctor was working Vander's arm up and down at the elbow like the handle of a water pump. Then there was the business with the swab of cotton that always made her shiver. She watched as the needle first made a dent in the flaccid skin and then broke through and sank smoothly at an angle into the vein. When he had put away the needle and the empty phial the doctor sat for a long moment motionless, as if it were to him and not to Vander that the calmative had been administered. Then he looked at her. "And you," he said, "you have hurt yourself?" He pointed to the scrape on her elbow. "I fell," she said. He nodded, and took her hand in his; his long, slender fingers were dry and smooth, like jointed lengths of smooth, dry wood; with his other hand he made a peculiar gesture, moving it sideways, up and back, imparting a sort of blessing, it might be. His breath smelled of tobacco and something warm and sweet. In the quiet of the room the only sound was Vander's soft and steady breathing. The doctor peered closely at the graze on her arm but then seemed to lose interest and released her hand and looked away again, thinking. She imagined where he might live. In her mind she pictured it, the big, silent, gloomy apartment, smelling like him of tobacco smoke and sandalwood and that sweetish something, with big, dark, vague furniture, and photographs in tarnished silver frames showing pale, solemn-faced children, his brothers and sisters, dead or scattered now, and stern-eyed elders, his father, thin like him, in a high collar, his mother as a girl, wistful and wan. How could there be so many people in the world, she wondered, so many lives? Not to mention the countless dead.

  "He will sleep," the doctor said, looking askance at Vander, and then at her again, and smiled, as if it were a magic trick that he had worked. "He will sleep, and then, in the morning, he will wake."

  He went away. She sat again on the chair by the bed with her hands in her lap and listened to the sounds of the day subsiding around her, a long, languishing, myriad-voiced sigh. The crack in the curtains turned from molten white to amber to a rich, arabian blue. The last time she had watched over Vander sleeping he had seemed to elude her, drifting out of himself in that strange way, but now, unconscious rather than asleep, he was more vividly present than if he had been awake; lying like that on his back, with his eyes closed, frowning, as if he were concentrating on some puzzle or problem, he somehow populated the room, making it seem there were others here besides him and her, a silent, unseen gathering. But perhaps it was not Vander who was making this effect, perhaps these were not his phantoms, but hers. She went to the window and looked out and up, and saw the moon's scurfy silver face gloating over the city.