Shroud Page 16

  I never did discover the true circumstances of Axel's death. I thought of asking his family, and went more than once and stood under the trees in the square looking up at the windows of the Vander apartment, but each time my nerve failed me. Then they moved away, or so it seemed, for on the last occasion when I skulked under their windows there was no sign of life within, no lamp burning or vase of flowers on display, only a broken roller blind, hanging down crookedly. I made enquiries of people whom Axel and I had both known, but either they would not speak to me, or claimed not to know any more about what had befallen him than I did. Extravagant rumours began to fly about. Some were too ludicrous to listen to, for example that he had committed suicide when a love affair went wrong – imagine Axel hanging himself, and over a woman! Others were slightly more plausible, but I could not believe them, either. It was said for instance that he was not dead at all, but had been rounded up by mistake with a band of communists and interned at Breendonck, from where his father was seeking to buy his release. A journalist of my acquaintance, of my former acquaintance, whom I encountered in the street late one wet night, drunk and wild-eyed, his face running with rain or tears, it was hard to tell which, grasped me by the lapels and assured me in an urgent, sobbing whisper that Axel had been caught up in a dispute among the factions surrounding the military authorities, that the affair had ended in bloodshed, and that he had been shot and his body flung into an unmarked grave. At the time all sorts of stories like that were in the air, about all sorts of people. Most amazing of all the explanations I heard of Axel's disappearance, however, was the heroic farrago, recounted to me one ice-hung morning in a café on the Groenplaats, in tones of tragic wonderment, by one of his former girlfriends, that he had been betrayed, arrested, tortured, and summarily executed for the leading part he had played in the organisation of an underground Resistance cell. She looked so sorrowful and solemn, saucer-eyed Monique, and the pink-tinged air outside was so still, so coldly lovely, that I could only nod and say nothing, trying not to laugh. Many years later, however, in Arcady, one night at a gruesome academic dinner I found myself seated opposite a withered old fellow with ash on his waistcoat and soup on his tie, a visiting savant from old Europe, of Walloon origin, who on hearing my name became greatly excited and hailed me warmly as a former colleague in arms. Holding him off with what I knew must be a horrible, temporising grin, I studied that time-ruined visage – collapsed cheek and lolling Bourbon lip, moist rheumy eye, the pallid skull smooth and domed like the cap of a giant toadstool – and tried urgently to discern in it the features of one I might once have known or at least have met in Axel's company long ago. No blank-eyed bust stirred in the shadowed gallery of my memory. And what did he think, the old fool, if he really had known Axel and now believed that I was he – that forty years had added a foot or so to his height and turned his film star's profile into that of a superannuated carthorse? The more discouragingly diffident I became the more emotional he waxed, lapsing from laughable English into execrable, macaronic French, reaching infirmly across the table and trying to clasp my crabwise retreating hand, exclaiming the while about les beaux jours d'antan aux Pays-bas when, shoulder to shoulder with our amis ardents, we wrought havoc upon the military housekeeping of the invading sale Boche. He would have worried me more had he not been such a caricature; nevertheless, I extricated myself as quickly as I could from his humid attentions and left the building and walked across the campus in the balmy dark, under the eucalyptus trees draped with the strenuously abradant music of crickets, wondering if I should invite the old warrior to come for a hike with me up into the hills next day and kill him. However, when I arrived at Sprague Hall next morning to hear him speak, a notice on the door informed me that due to unforeseen circumstances Professor de Becker's lecture had been cancelled. It turned out that over a shaky breakfast in the college dining room the hung-over Professor had got into an altercation – on the validity of Durkheim's concept of the conscience collective, as I recall – with one of the faculty's many young Turks, and became so heated that he suffered an infarction and fell dead with his face on the table among the coffee cups and the bowls of muesli. I have always had the devil's luck.

  For a long time I found it hard to accustom myself to the thought of Axel gone; indeed, I am not entirely accustomed to it yet. At the time it should not have been so difficult; in those perilous years the state of being alive often seemed an altogether less plausible proposition than that of being peacefully dead. In Axel's case, however, death seemed somehow… inappropriate. Anyone can die, of course, at any moment. The beloved child, the circus strongman, the Cranach maiden, all are sustained by the merest thread. Afterwards, though, when the first shock has worn off, we seem to discern in even the unlikeliest extinction an inevitability that had been there all along, hidden from us, the embryo of death growing steadily toward its moment of fatal parturition. This is where ghosts come from, I suppose, this phenomenon of lives unfinished before they ended. The role of revenant fitted Axel ill. He had been meant to live. Deadi, an early death, was something too serious, too weighty, to have befallen him. So I found myself returning again and again, with increasing speculative uncertainty, to those outlandish rumours as to what had happened to him. In particular I could not get out of my head Monique's theatrically tearful account of his involvement with the Resistance – a Resistance, by the way, of which at the time I could see little sign. Could it be true? Could what she told me be a garbled and melodramatised version of something that had really been the case, and of which the story of his having been mistakenly interned was another mangled variant? Might Axel really have been involved in some mad exploit that had turned deadly, and for which he had been picked up and had an unceremonious bullet put in the back of his head? Was it possible that I had utterly mistaken him, that in all the years I had known him he had hidden his true convictions from me? This is the trouble with the dead, that they take their secrets with them to the grave. When I tried to picture Axel huddled amid a band of bandoliered partisans in some smoke-filled cellar, poring over maps by the light of a guttering candle – "We intercept the convoy here" – the thing seemed preposterous, and yet I had to admit it was the kind of venture that would have fed an image he probably nursed of himself as a Byron, or a Pimpernel. I do not miss the irony for me in all of this. If, despite the comical implausibility of it, he really was an unsung hero, how piquant has been my predicament all along! I would be like the protagonist of one of those third-rate, so-called philosophical novels that were so popular in the haunted postwar years, the man who takes on the identity of a sinner all unaware that the one he is impersonating was a saint all along.

  Given that possibility – I mean, that he might have been a martyr of the Resistance – given that, if nothing else, why, you will wonder, was I always so afraid of one day being unmasked? I suspect I understand it hardly any better than you do. What was it I did, after all, except adopt a dead man's name in a time of danger and mortal need? I took, or borrowed, rather, nothing except his identity, and death had already as good as deprived him of that. What has it profited me to have maintained this deception for half a century? Axel Vander's reputation in the world is of my making. It was I who clawed my way to this high place. I wrote the books, seized the prizes, flattered those who had to be flattered, struck down my rivals. What did he achieve, what legacy did he leave behind? A couple of monographs, a few not unperceptive reviews in little magazines, a handful of ill-judged poems. He was precocious, I grant him that, but you could drop the middle syllable from that word and it would better apply. And then there are those Gazet pieces, what about them? Although it was he who wrote them, the tarnished golden boy, they are my responsibility now. It was for his sake, in part, at least, that I hid them from the world for so long, until you, my curious cat, chanced upon them. You will not believe me, I suppose, when I say that when eventually it dawned upon my sometimes sluggish understanding that in taking on his identity I had also automatically take
n on responsibility for his deeds, I made a pact with myself that in the event of being shown up as an impostor I would claim – wait for it – I would claim that it was I, and not he, who had written those damning articles, and that I had persuaded him to put his name to them because that was the only way that Hendriks would publish them in the Gazet! Laugh all you like, in the Elysian fields where you wander, but I have my own, peculiar code of honour. If you had exposed me to the world I would have been reviled for abandoning my people, betraying my race. It would have been said of me that in order to shed an identity of which I was ashamed, I had willingly stepped into the place left vacant by a minor monster whose poisonous opinions might one day be uncovered and attributed to me. Perhaps this is true. Yet if it was all no more, no less, than a cowardly attempt to throw off a past, and a people, of which I was ashamed, then the attempt failed. The past, my own past, the past of all the others, is still there, a secret chamber inside me, like one of those sealed rooms, behind a false wall, where a whole family might live in hiding for years. In the silence, in solitude, I close my eyes and hear them in there, the mouse-scuffles of the little ones, the grown-ups' murmurings, their sighs. How quiet they go when danger draws near. Shush! Something creaks. A child's wail is promptly stifled. Someone puts an ear to the wall, a cautioning finger lifted, while the others stand motionless, unbreathing, big-eyed. Knives of light come in through cracks in the plaster. Down in the courtyard engines are running, and boot-heels stamp on the cold cobbles. There are cries in the distance, shouts and cries. My eyelids lift. A breath. All gone, all of them; gone.

  By the way, I had a dream, last night, or this morning, some time recently, at any rate. It has just come back to me. Shall I tell it to you? It was not properly a dream, or what I recall of it is not; it may be only a fragment of a night-long saga the rest of which I have forgotten. As is so often the case with dreams, it impresses me as highly significant even though I cannot say what it might signify. I was standing in darkness, on a high promontory; I knew it was high because of the air that wafted against my face, deep and chill, not at all pestilential. I had the sense of a precipice before me, and of a great plain below, stretching a great way off. Lightning fitfully illuminated a far horizon. Nothing happened. I was simply standing there on the brink of that dark immensity, like Dante awaiting the arrival of Virgil. Then from out of the darkness – I note the increasingly ecclesiastical sonorousness of these formulations – a great voice spoke, the voice of Yahweh himself, it might be. Here, it said, here are interred all the Abrahams and Isaacs; here is their tomb. That is all I remember: the darkness, the high place, the dim horizon, and that voice. And a great feeling of sorrow, too, not the sorrow of mourning or loss, but of being present at some grand and terrible, unpreventable tragedy.

  No, I did not attend Axel's funeral. I knew that I would not be welcome, that my presence would be an embarrassment, possibly a danger, to the Vanders. I do not know when it took place, or where, even. I think now I should have been there to see him into the ground. It is said that those close to a person who goes missing will not find peace and an end to their grieving until they know the fate of their loved one, and, especially, the place where he, or she, is interred. I would not wish to appear fanciful, but when I look back over the years of my life, and those moments in it of great stress and suicidal urgings, I wonder if all along I may have been in a state of suspended mourning for my friend. Does this make me seem too good, too faithful? It does. But certainly there is something buried deep down in me that I do not understand and the nature of which I can only intuit. It will seem too obvious if I say that it is another self – am I not, like everyone, like you, like you especially, my protean dear, thrown together from a legion of selves? – but all the same that is the only way I can think of to describe the sensation. This separate, hidden I is prey to affects and emotions that do not touch me at all, except insofar as I am the channel through which its responses must necessarily be manifest. It will prick up its ears at the tritest, most trivial plangency; it is a sucker for the sentimental. Sunsets, the thought of a lost dog, the slushy slow movement of a symphony, any old hackneyed thing can set the funereal organ churning. I will be passing by in the street and hear a snatch of some cheap melody coming from the open window of an adolescent's bedroom and there will suddenly swell within me a huge, hot bubble of something that is as good as grief, and I will have to hurry on, head down, swallowing hard against that choking bolus of woe. A beggar will approach me, toothless and foul-smelling, and I will have an urge to open wide my arms and gather him to me and crush him against my breast in a burning, brotherly embrace, instead of which, of course, I will dodge past him, swivelling my eyes away from the spectacle of his misery and keeping my tight fists firmly plunged in my pockets. Can these splurges of unbidden and surely spurious emotion really have their source in a bereavement nearly half a century old? Did I care for Axel that much? Perhaps it is not for him alone that I am grieving, but for all my dead, congregated in a twittering underworld within me, clamouring weakly for the warm blood of life. But why should I think myself special – which amongst us has not his private Hades thronged with shades?

  Yes, I should have gone to Axel's funeral, and seen him into the ground, if only to have an end of him. Even when in my heart I came at last to accept that he must truly have died, in some ancillary ventricle there still lodged a stubborn clot of doubt. I recalled the empty windows of what had been the Vander home; was there a connection between his disappearance and the family's abrupt decampment? Why had Hendriks's deputy been so evasive when I questioned him that morning at the Gazet? What did he know that he was not prepared to tell me? To this day I find myself wondering, with a mingled sense of unease and peculiar excitement, if after all Axel might not be dead, but living somewhere still, in hiding, for whatever reason, and going, like me, under another name, mine, perhaps, that would be a joke. Maybe back then he committed a crime none of us knew about that was so shameful that he cannot bring himself even now to step out of the shadows and confess to it. If so, it would have to have been something far more serious than that handful of Gazet articles, for even in senility Axel would be able to charm the world into excusing him for that peccadillo. Or is it my usurpation of his identity that has somehow prevented him, all this time, out of who knows what scruple or fear of looking a fool, from laying claim to the name, to the life, even, that is rightfully his? The possibility affords me, I admit, a certain base satisfaction. It is not entirely ungratifying to think of Axel, with all his wit, his quickness, his assurance, his good looks, languishing in obscurity these fifty years, gnawed by frustration and failure, while I strutted the world's stage, making, in all senses of the saying, a name for myself.

  Oh, but I know, it is impossible. I would have heard from him, sooner or later; Axel would not have worked a vanishing act like that without coming forward to boast about it, if only to me. All the same, on occasion down the years I have experienced an eerie, crawling sensation across the back of my neck, as if I were being spied on, and quietly laughed at; as if I were being toyed with. Certainly someone did look after me that day of the deportations, although I do not insist it was Axel. It may have been Max Schaudeine, for instance, manipulating the strings from up in the flies. I am thinking of the message that came to me that snowy morning only a month or so after the announcement of Axel's death, scrawled on a scrap of paper and pushed under our front door. My mother brought it to me. We stood in the bluish snow-light by the window in my room, I in my ragged old night-shirt and she with a shawl pulled over her shoulders. Her long hair was unpinned, and I remember thinking distractedly how grey she had become without my noticing. She waited, in that silent, apprehensive way that she did everything nowadays, while I unfolded the sheet of cheap, ruled paper, torn from a school copybook, and read the terse instructions written there. The handwriting I did not recognise; it might have been that of a schoolchild, the big, square capitals pencilled hard into the paper, the grains o
f graphite glinting in the furrows. I was to take the noon train to Brussels tiiat day, sitting in a certain compartment, in a certain carriage, and board the very next return train, and take the same numbered seat as on the outward journey. There was no signature. I could not think who might have sent it, nor could I say what it might portend, but, the times being so, I knew straight away that I would comply with its command. My mother was searching my face more anxiously than ever, looking for a response; I did not doubt that she had read the note before bringing it to me. It was all right, I said casually, it was from a friend, I had been expecting it. I still wonder why I lied to her. She nodded, sadly, knowing it was a lie, and shuffled off into the shadows.

  I pause; I falter. My mother I rarely think of, or my father, in waking hours. It seems absurd for a man of my age even to have had parents; I am so very much older now than they were when I lost them that it might be not my parents at all that I am remembering, but my children, rather, grown to sad adulthood – the children, I hasten to say, that I never had, so far as I know. However, if mother and father are largely absent from my daytime thoughts, they do make frequent, unwilling appearances in my dreams, or at any rate at the periphery of them. There they hover, pressing close together, hesitant, uncertain, afraid, it seems, like the Vander cousins, of being seized upon and ejected, amid ridicule and general, spiteful hilarity. They are dressed in black, and my father the rag merchant wears a flowing black neck-tie, an improbably bohemian flourish. I notice they are holding hands, and my father's expression is sheepish. They are like a pair of humble guests who have turned up without costumes at a riotous and strenuously orgiastic fancy-dress party, in the steaming midst of which my sleeping self is trapped, a comatose Tiberius, unable to welcome them, invite them in, offer them hospitality, unable even to see that they are allowed to leave discreetly and 'with dignity. My mother has that notch in the clear space between her eyebrows that always signified her deepest, inexpressible woes. She is shy of me, and will not look at me, and keeps her eyes downcast, which makes her demeanour seem all the more desperately beseeching. My father wears his usual expression of wary amusement. He was a humorous, even a witty, man, but he made his sallies so tentatively, with such diffidence, that people rarely appreciated them, or appreciated them too late, so that in my memories of him he is always turning away with a wistful, disappointed half-smile. My parents. Did I know them at all? When they were there I think I hardly noticed them, except when they got in my light, restricting my view of the radiant future. I used piously to hope they would not have suffered, at the end, them, and the others, but since then I have learned about hope.