Shroud Page 14

  TWO

  Come, my ghostly girl, plump up my pillows and sit by me here and I shall tell you a tale, a tale I had thought to think of no more until you brought it all back. It begins long, long ago, in the town of Antwerp, with a stroll along those little winding streets the name to which I gave, inevitably, was the Vander Way. The corner of the square with the plane trees was the crossing point from my world into his. When I think of that spot the weather in it is always grey, the luminous, quicksilver grey of an early northern spring, the colour for me of the past itself. On our side, the street leading up to the square was very narrow, and had to climb a slight incline, at a tilt, the left-hand pavement set higher than its counterpart on the right, giving me a giddy, toppling sensation as I walked up it, always, for some reason, on the lower level. Instead of a shifting church spire and the fragrance of hawthorn blossom I have as memory-points the three golden balls over Wassermann's pawnshop – how did they keep such a high shine, I always wondered, were they made of real gold? – and the warm, cloying aroma of vanilla from the pastry shop on the corner of the square. The big houses in the terrace on the far side, the Vander side, beyond the trees, were tall and brown and many-chimneyed; in the frost-smoke of winter mornings their upper reaches would crumble into dreamy insubstantiality, like the diaphanous edifices in the background to a Memling or a Tintoretto. They had shutters, and wrought-iron balconies, and here and there one of the tall windows would afford a glimpse of the opulent life within: a blazing chandelier, a bowl of roses on an antique table, a slender woman in silk standing with one arm folded and an elbow cupped in the palm of her hand, smoking a cigarette and looking down upon the world with an expression of lazy dissatisfaction. The Vander apartment itself was a numerous succession of high, cool rooms painted silvery white, or Greek blue, or deep, rich red. To my youthful, hungry eye the furnishings, all that brocade and ormolu and dark, gleaming wood, seemed the very epitome of taste and discreet luxury, although I suppose in reality it was just the usual high-bourgeois clutter. The Vanders did not seek to hide the fact of their wealth. Vander senior was a diamond merchant, an occupation that in a city other than ours would have seemed excitingly louche and exotic. He was very shrewd and careful behind a breezy manner. He travelled a great deal, to Amsterdam, Paris, London, and I suspect kept a mistress in more than one of those cities: he had a way of fingering his small moustache and smiling drowsily to himself that betokened a rich mental store of voluptuous images. His wife was a large, fretful woman, soft as a pigeon, big-bosomed and broad-beamed, with very round, starting eyes, of a washed-out blue that was almost colourless, and that gave her a permanent look of surprise and alarm. Everyone addressed her as Mama, even her husband. Axel treated his parents with indulgent disdain, affecting to be amused by their complacencies and pretensions. "Typical of their kind, of course," he would say, and heave a languid sigh. "I know I should hate them, but I can't." The apartment also housed a number of Vander relations, aunts and uncles, a brace of distant cousins, elderly, timid, curiously ill-defined persons, who kept out of sight as much as they could, as if fearing to risk expulsion by drawing attention to themselves. On Sunday evenings they would dispose themselves about the shadowy corners of the drawing room to listen with mournful earnestness as Mama Vander sang lieder to the piano accompaniment of her husband, or sometimes an unwilling Axel. She had a lachrymose mezzo voice that quavered perilously on the lower notes. She favoured the more saccharine songs of Schubert and Robert Schumann. These recitals would leave Axel shaking with mingled mirth and exasperation. He was a more than passable pianist. When we were at school together he had tried to teach me one or two easy pieces, without success. "Oh, you are hopeless,"he would say, and call me Hanswurst, and make a play of punching me in the chest. He was right. I could not keep the tunes in my head, and my outsized fingers – Hanswurst was right – wallowed over the keys like two huge handfuls of raw sausages.

  In those days – I am speaking now, my dear, of fifty years ago, and more – the Vander's were for me the very ideal of what a family should be: civilised, handsome, amused and amusing, at ease with themselves, knowing precisely their position in the world. I see myself moving amongst them, my face on fire with their reflected light, like a rough youth who has been invited up from the stew of groundlings to take part, in however small and passive a role, in the performance of a marvellous, sophisticated, glittering comedy of manners. If I had not exactly been spawned in an estaminet, as the poet so prettily puts it, our place – I would never have thought to call that low, dim warren an apartment – was the opposite of where the Vander's grandly resided. Our family shared no candlelit Saturday night dinners abuzz with lively dispute and multilingual jokes, enjoyed, or endured, no Sunday song recitals; shouts, shrieks and the sound of many siblings exchanging energetic blows were our weekend music. We lived an underground life; I have a sense of something torpid, brownish, exhausted; the smell is the smell of re-breathed air… But I do not intend to oppress you with reminiscences of my family. It is not that they are any longer an embarrassment to me – I have so many, more recent, things to be ashamed of – but because, because, well, I do not know. Father, mother, my older brothers and sisters, those botched prototypes along the way to producing me, and the many younger ones who were always under my feet, they have in my memory a quaint, outmoded, in some cases badly blurred, aspect, like that of the incidental figures standing about self-consciously in very old photographs, smiling worriedly and not knowing what to do with their hands. Among them I was too big, in all ways; I was the giant whose head threatened to knock a hole in their ceiling, whom they must feed and tend and humour, and encourage away from the windows lest the neighbours look in and be frightened.

  I believe I would have thought better of my family, or at least more warmly, if we had been really poor, I mean ghetto poor. There was a touch of desert romance to the real shtetl people one met in the streets round about where we lived, a hint of the tent and the thorn fire and fiddle music and religious gaiety, mat we entirely lacked, or had long ago suppressed. We had our own pretensions: my father too was a merchant, although it was not jewels but second-hand clothes that he dealt in. I was, of course, accepted by the Vanders; they had assimilated me; I was Axel's friend, and therefore a special case, exempt from the general distaste – I would not put it more strongly than that – with which the Vanders regarded what in my presence were referred to delicately as your people. Over dinner at the apartment Axel's father liked to divert the table with a routine he had developed, involving an archetypal couple, Moses and Rahel, both of which parts he would play in turn, screwing up his eyes and bowing from the shoulders and crooning and rubbing his hands, until his wife, laughing tearfully, would flap her napkin at him and cry, "For shame, Leon, for shame, you will bring a judgment on us!" It did not occur to anyone around that table, not even to me, on the few, treasured occasions when I was invited to dine there, that I should feel insulted or humiliated by what was, after all, only a piece of good-humoured mimicry. Axel too was more than anything else amused to have for a friend a member of that very race whose pernicious influence on the body politic he claimed to reprehend. I say claimed to, because I do not believe that Axel cared in any serious way about these public matters, despite his frequent and bellicose pronouncements on them. Things that did not touch him directly could not be of true, deep, thoroughgoing consequence; it was as simple as that.

  He was beautiful, was Axel. Not handsome, you understand, but beautiful. He had the smooth, sculpted, slightly cruel, faintly feminine good looks of one of those French film actors of the day. He knew it, too. He was careful of his hair and his fingernails – I suspect he visited a manicurist – and dressed with the studied negligence of the true dandy. I can see him strolling by the lake in the Nachtegalenpark in Wilrijk on a Sunday morning, in old linen slacks and an open-collared white silk shirt, a cricket pullover – they were enthusiastic Anglophiles, the Vanders – thrown over his shoulders, the arms loosely
knotted on his slightly concave chest, and his sunglasses pushed up into that oiled quiff, the colour of polished wheat, the moulding of which must have taken a careful five minutes' work in front of the looking-glass. His girls… how I envied him his girls, a long line of them, beginning in early adolescence. The bright, earnest ones in particular fell for him, but he favoured shop girls, secretaries, actresses, and the like; he was always shrewd in choosing whom to allow to view him up close. Did I resent him? Of course I did. I wanted to be him, obviously.

  And yet, I despised him, too, a little. Underneath the sparkling talk, the charm, the lavish good looks, there was an entire area inside him that was vacant, vapid, entirely lacking in intellectual conviction and certainty. At moments a wary, almost a frightened, look would register in his eyes. It was the look of a limited being who knows that at any moment his limits might be reached and his narrowness revealed. He was, I am afraid, a dabbler, an opportunist of ideas, in short a dilettante, though no one, especially not I, would have dared to say so. Since I have started along this line I may as well continue: he did not have a first-rate mind, as he and so many others would claim. He was gifted; he was precocious; he could talk, in that allusive, lazy, uninterruptible way of his, but that is what it was, talk, and not much more than that. Nevertheless, great things were forecast for him, he was going to make a great noise in the world, I joined in proclaiming it myself, but I am sure that in my heart I knew better. He was a bright boy who could read fast and had a good memory; ideas, genuine thought, foundered in the shallows of his intellect. He was especially vulnerable to teasing, or anything that smacked of mockery, no matter how fond, and was constantly on the alert for slights of any kind. If in company he thought a joke that everyone was laughing at might have been made at his expense something would thicken in his face, his brow would darken, his gaze turn muddy, and he would fall upon the one who had offended him with the crushing weight and force of a school-yard bully whom a weakling has unwisely dared to cross. These flashes of vengefulness were dispiriting to witness, especially as one's urge to protest and protect sprang instinctively to the defence of Axel and not of his squirming victim. He was one of those people, the beautiful, the vivid ones, whose sense of themselves must be preserved above everything else, so that the rest of us shall not be undone, in ways we cannot quite specify. So his parents spoiled him, the poor relations flattered him, and the rest of us endured without complaint his bright disdain, content if only something of his luminence should reflect on us, and from us. I know, I know, it is not convincing, this patronising tone that I put on when speaking of him. I can still feel the envy and the bitterness, the peculiar, unassuageable, objectless yearning, the anxious and always vain scramble for self-justification, all there, boiling and muddily bubbling inside me, all still there, after so long.

  I do not know, or cannot remember, or have suppressed, who it was that approached him to write those newspaper articles. It is scarcely possible that I was the go-between; although at the time I had a foot in the door of a number of papers and periodicals, the Vlaamsche Gazet was unlikely to have been amongst them. The paper's editorial attitude was one of noisy and confident anticipation of what it called the Day of Unity, when all the country's unnamed enemies would finally be dealt with. This Day of Unity was never defined, and a date was never put on it, but everyone knew what it would be when it came, and knew who those enemies were, too. The editor, Hendriks – I have forgotten his first name – large, overweight, glistening, with a wheezing laugh and furtive eyes, had, in the early years of that dirty decade that was now coming to a calamitous end, decided in which direction the future was headed, despite the fact that, in private, he expressed nothing but contempt for our immediate and increasingly menacing neighbour to the east. In the early hours, when work was over for the night and the presses were rolling, he would hold court for his writing staff, knuckle-duster nationalists to a man, in the Stoof, next door to the Gazet offices on the Nationalestraat, a fine old tavern, still going strong, I am told, although the air must surely be polluted even yet by the lingering vapours of Hendriks and his gang. There he would squat, in his special corner, banging his special pewter stein, sharing gossip and telling jokes and spitting when he laughed, his womanly bosom wobbling. It was Axel who brought me there. I suppose he was curious to see how I would fare, how I would defend myself, among that feral gathering. For the most part I was kept firmly off at the outer edge of things, where I circled, hungry as a hyena, always on the watch for an opening through which I might dart and get my head, too, into the smoking innards of the times. I would catch Axel glancing at me now and then, with that charmingly crooked half-smile of his, amused at my avidity, my glittering eagerness. My presence did nothing to tone down the rabid talk or curb Hendriks's yid jokes; it was all in fun, we were all hearty fellows here, thick of skin and merciless of purpose, and besides, to pay special consideration to those of us whose origins were… different, would have been really to offer insult, surely? As Hendriks was fond of repeating, his eyes skittering sideways, the issue was not Race, but Culture, our Great European Heritage. Now, isn't that so? yes? yes? the pewter stein banging, those fat bubs bobbing. And Axel would nod along with the others, and look at me sidelong again from under his pale lashes, and smile, and faintly shrug.

  When those articles of his began to be published I was jealous, I will not deny it. Why had Hendriks not invited me to write for his paper, instead of Axel? I would have been far fiercer on the threat to our – their! – culture that my people were supposed to represent, if it had been asked of me. Yes, I would! I was tougher than Axel, more relentless, more daring, more vicious. I would have sold my soul, I would have sold my people, for one sustained moment of the public's attention, even if it was only in a rag like the Gazet. Why did they turn to him, to Ariel, when in me they had a more than willing Caliban? Those half-dozen articles he wrote were much too elaborated and opaque for what was required of them. But that was how it was: people like Hendriks, even brutes like him, were mesmerised by that mixture of self-esteem and false diffidence that Axel displayed, by that remote, amused, knowing air that enveloped him and into which he would retreat, like Zarathustra into his cloud, leaving only a soft laugh behind him. To me the last piece of the six that he wrote was the sharpest refinement of the insult, the blob of poison smeared on the sharp end of the series. It was cast in the form of an interview with me – with me! – as a typical specimen of dissatisfied intellectual youth. He wrote not only the questions but most of the answers, and freely modified the few opinions that he did allow me to express. Why did I let him do it, why did I let him put words into my mouth? Abject, abject, abject; how they rankle, these old self-betrayals. When the so-called interview appeared, and I saw our photographs accompanying it, printed side by side, I was shamefully, chokingly, unconfessably, proud, although at the same time childishly gratified that Axel's picture was a bad one – he could look quite peaky and anxious in certain lights – and his name underneath it misprinted.

  For all my protests, though, I am compelled, in bitter spite of myself, to admit that he did a more successful job as a polemicist than I would have done. It was his very restraint, his scrupulousness, what one might call his insistent tact, that gave those feuilletons their force. I would have ranted, mocked, hurled abuse, amid shrill peals of forced Mephistophelean laughter. The poise and studied distance of Axel's style, with its high patrician burnish and flashes of covert wit – it could take two or more readings to get one of Axel's jokes – the attitude of aristocratic weariness, the sense that he was writing only because world-historical duty had dragged him to his desk and thrust the pen into his hand, these were the things that made him so effective, or would have, had he been addressing a serious audience and not the rabblement who read the Gazet, moving their lips as they did so. What can they have made,'for instance, of his call for the aestheticisation of national life, or his suggestion to them that they might escape the plight of the self by sublimation
in the totalitarian ethic? Music to their thick ears, though, simple and rousing as a marching tune, must have been his suggestion – one could hear one of Axel's studiedly otiose sighs rustling amid the words like a breeze in the grass – that nothing of consequence would be lost to the cultural and intellectual life of Europe, really, nothing at all, if certain supposedly assimilated, oriental elements were to be removed and settled somewhere far away, in the steppes of Central Asia, perhaps, or on one of Africa's more clement coasts.