Shroud Page 5

  Do not misunderstand me: I have no doubt that I possess genius, of a kind. It is just not the kind that it has pretended all those years to be. I sometimes think that I missed my calling, that I could have been a great artist, a master of compelling inventiveness, arch, allusive, magisterially splenetic, given to arcane reference, obscure aims, an alchemist of word and image. Indeed, my critics often grumble at the desolate lyricism of my mature style, seeing behind it the pale hand of the poet. I take their point. Mine is the kind of commentary in which frequently the comment will claim an equal rank with that which is supposedly its object; equal, and sometimes superior. In my study of Rilke, an early work, there are passages of ecstatic intensity that world-drunk lyricist himself might have envied, while those long, twinned essays on Kleist and on Kafka are as desperate and inconsolable as any of the plays or the parables of those two hierophants of dejection. Shall I bow before these great ones? Shall I bend the knee to their eminence? Damned if I will. I hold myself as high as any of them, in my own estimation. What troubles me only is the thought of all I might have done had I been simply – if such a thing may be said to be simple – myself.

  Magda was apparently as impressed by me as everyone else was, and took my poses and my brilliant pretences at their face value. If she knew I was a fraud, she did not seem to mind; seemed, indeed, to admire me, in her detached way, for my nerve and resourcefulness. There was a particular, small smile I would occasionally catch fleeting across her face when I was expounding to a spellbound company on some dense text she knew I had done no more than glance at. She had read Hegel and Marx, and much else beside. She could reel off quotations as by rote, for she had a remarkable memory, even if little of what the quoted passages might signify had stuck; she carried her knowledge of all those titanic thinkers like an atrophied limb, the intellectual equivalent of my useless leg. She had obediently studied the century's revolutionary texts at the bidding of the Pole, since he was not a great reader himself, but was determined they should be the perfect Party pair, he the hammer of activism, she the sickle of ideology. She shrugged, telling me this, and smiled, fondly, as at the recollection of some not entirely innocent childhood game of make-believe. Yes, she saw through us all, in her mute, intuitive fashion. Was that the reason I chose her above the others? Was that the reason she chose me? Was she my protectress, the guardian of my borrowed, my purloined, reputation? It comes to me with mournful force that these questions now will never be answered, or not by her, certainly.

  She regarded the past as a sort of huge, unavoidable mistake, a whole set of wrong beginnings that had now, at last, been put right. If she had any anger for all that had befallen her it was directed not at the devisers of the vast project of destruction in which she had been caught up and from which she had barely escaped with her life, but at the very victims of it, all those who had not escaped, even her bewildered parents, her sister who had been so vain of her dark beauty, her little brother, still clutching his toy bugle as he was marched away. It was not that she blamed them for not resisting, or for being hapless and confused and self-deluding – her mother before being hustled to the trucks had squeezed her hand and made her promise to write – but for the simple fact of their having existed, of their having been there in the first place to be taken away from her in the last. She had kept nothing of them, no photograph, no document, no lock of hair, only her memories, and these she would willingly have relinquished, had she been able. That she of all of them was the only one to have survived, because her name had somehow slipped from the lists, was only another cause for baffled, mute anger.

  We had been together for some months before she would tell me any of this. Late one raw November afternoon we had been to the cinema – or the movies, as I was learning to call them – and were sheltering from the cold in a coffeehouse on Bleecker Street when she began to weep, quietly, almost pensively. In the interval of the double bill a newsreel had been shown of scenes from the ruins of Europe, and the sight of those seemingly endless ranks of corpses had jogged something in her, and now she could not stop telling me what had happened to her. Sitting beside her as she talked, I held myself motionless, barely breathing; my fist, lying on the table by her hand, felt so heavy it seemed I would never be able to lift it again. Her recollections of flight and escape were fitful, lit in flashes: the sharp white stones on a mountain track; massed, dark trees moving past in the headlights of a lorry in which she lay hidden under sacking; a boy soldier at some dusty border post offering her an apple from his tunic pocket. It was as if she had made the perilous journey not in linear time, but in great leaps, from stopping place to stopping place, between each of which she had somehow been absolved from consciousness. When she had finished I had to tell her my story, of course, the etiquette of our predicament as survivors demanding it. Story is right. We had left the coffee shop by then and were walking down the street in the bitter cold and the gathering dusk, the traffic flowing along beside us through the slush like wreckage being carried on a river in sluggish spate. She leaned heavily on my arm, a dragging weight. She did not want to hear the things I was telling her, she was tired of them; she resented the burden of her tragic fate, and mine. In the light of her resistance my inventiveness burgeoned; never before or since did I spin my tale so well or so convincingly as I did that night, weaving through the lies a few, fine, shining threads of truth, as the wet white flakes fell fast around us and the huddled, faceless figures of passers-by loomed up at us suddenly out of the lamplight and as quickly vanished behind us into the dark. I could not but admire my own performance. What a fabulist I was; what an artist! And I never did tell her the real, the whole, the tawdry truth.

  High in the air above me there came again that hollow booming sound I had heard on the avenue under the chestnut tree, and I woke with a shiver from my reveries. The day had cleared and the sun was hot in the piazza under a cloudless, hard, white sky. I recognized suddenly where I was: it was here that N., in the final months before his collapse, had lodged in a room in the Fino house on the corner looking out on the massive façade of the Palazzo Carignano – that was its name! – scribbling crazed letters and signing them Dionysus, The Crucified, Nietzsche Caesar … I closed my eyes and pressed a thumb and finger to them until tiny lights like distant rockets began to pop and flare in the darkness behind the fids. I am convinced my blind eye works when it is shut. I saw again, as clearly as I had seen it happen, the truck skidding and the girl spinning and the man with the grey hair throwing up his arm in that strange way and calling out as if to warn off some unwary intruder on this scene of violence and blood. I opened my eyes again and rose unsteadily to my feet, heaving myself up with both hands pressed on the crook of my stick. I was hot; I was thirsty; I was tired.

  When I woke the curtains were pulled against the light of day and I thought it was still dawn and that everything that had happened since my arrival had been a dream. I lay motionless on the bed, staring into the gauzy folds of shadow about me, gripped by an obscure panic. I could not understand why I was dressed in suit and tie; I even had my shoes on, although the laces at least were undone. My right arm had been asleep and tingled unpleasantly now as the blood began to move in it again; my injured elbow ached. Slowly memory began to gather up its fragments. I had drunk a bottle of wine with lunch in the hotel dining room and had stumbled up here to my room to rest and must have passed out, felled by alcohol and the last embers of travel fever. I got myself up cautiously and sat for a moment on the side of the bed with my head bowed. Why had I come to this city? I was too old and worn to travel so far for the sake of a whim. I could have made the writer of that letter come to me in Arcady, that would have tested her resolve. I rose with a groan and went into the windowless bathroom and stood wincing and blinking in humming white light. Dandruff, caries, Doctor Baloardo's big pockmarked nose. I washed out my mouth; the tap water tasted of tin. I stood and gazed dully in the mirror, hands braced on the basin and my shoulders hunched. I had the sensation then
, as so often, of shifting slightly aside from myself, as if I were going out of focus and separating into two. I wonder if other people feel as I do, seeming never to be wholly present wherever I happen to be, seeming not so much a person as a contingency, misplaced and adrift in time. My true source and destination are always elsewhere, although where exactly that elsewhere might be I do not know; perhaps it is in childhood, that age of authenticity the scenes of which I can summon up more and more vividly the farther away from them that I get. Banal possibility. Dull thoughts in a dulled mind. It was the wine, the weariness.

  The taxi was waiting for me at the door of the hotel. I was late already, but I did not care; let them wait. This time the city, in afternoon light, showed me another, softer side to the one I had seen that morning. Sun glanced, white-gold, on car roofs and the windows of caffès. We passed under the Mole, absurd in its pagoda lines. I noted without enthusiasm the thickening flotsam of strolling students in the streets, and presently the grey concrete headland of the university buildings hove into view. When I saw Franco Bartoli on the steps, standing on tiptoe with neck outstretched and casting about him anxiously, I had an urge to duck down and order the taxi driver to drive on. I asked myself bitterly again what had possessed me to come to Turin, what there could be here for me except confrontation, exposure, humiliation. I alighted from the taxi and turned back to pay the fare, and saw out of the corner of my eye Bartoli trotting toward me happily, already speaking although he was still well out of earshot. He is a delicate, balding, bearded, egg-shaped little man, voluble and nervous, and watchful as a weasel. He pressed one of my hands tightly in both of his and babbled breathless welcomes which made me grind my teeth. I pushed past and levered myself up the steps on my stick with Bartoli fairly dancing about me. So good of me to come! – such an honour! – everyone so eager to see me! I scowled. "Who is here?" I demanded. Bartoli ticked off names on his miniature fingers. "Old friends," he said, beaming, "all old friends!" I almost had to laugh.

  And here they were, waiting for me indeed, fifteen or twenty of them, in a wide, low-ceilinged top-floor room the four walls of which were made of sheets of smoked plate-glass bolted between rust-red girders, in the brutal modern way. They were huddled together in the middle of the large empty space where a bar had been set up on linen-covered trestle tables, all with their faces turned toward me expectantly as I stood eyeing them from the doorway. It was true, I did know most of them, the faces if not their names; I am not good at remembering names, even when I try, which is not often. I sighed, and with Bartoli bouncing ahead of me I set off across the floor, fixing my stony smile in place and bringing my stick down on the squeaky rubber tiles with deliberate force. Bartoli dived into the crowd, swirling and swooping among them like a choreographer assembling his troupe. He has the mannered and slightly mechanical movements of a professional performer. I was greeted on all sides with wary warmth. Bartoli drew me to the table where the drinks were, and when the waiter, a dark young bruiser with a peasant's hands, did not move smartly enough he seized a bottle and two glasses and poured the wine himself. "A son of the south," he said to me out of a corner of his mouth. "They live on our taxes and send us oxen in tribute." Franco is very vain of his accentless English. The waiter was watching him sullenly. He handed a glass to me and tipped his own in salute. "Hard to believe that we have lured you here at last," he said, with a sharp little twinkle. "We have invited you every year for the past seven years – I checked our records, yes – but always in vain." He was like a boxer, outclassed and outweighed, dodging and feinting, looking for an opening through which to jab an insult at me. I hardly attended him. I was remembering, with sudden, hallucinatory intensity, the summers of my boyhood at my grandfather's farm. A city child, I always registered first and most acutely the smells of the place, of flowers, fruits, and plants, and of their decay, the hot smell of horse dung, the smell of earth and excrement in the little wooden privy in the garden under the heavily scented elder tree, the exquisite perfume of the wild strawberries I hunted for in the hedgerows, the smell of mushrooms, the smell of hens and of their blood, the smell of the cat and the dogs, the smell of chaff, of oil, of spurts of boiling water, of animal and human sweat, of my grandfather's tobacco, the pungent smell of wine, and worn cloth, the smell of sawdust, the smell of my own sweat. I liked best the time of harvest, when the wheat and oats and rye were brought in from the fields to the threshing shed. It was, or seemed to me to be, a vast building, big as a church, big as a cathedral, with a lofty, arched ceiling and high-set windows through which thick beams of sunlight streamed down. The air was dense with swirling chaff, and the workmen coughed and spat and swore, shouting to make themselves heard above the constant din. The threshing machine was an enormous, complicated wooden structure, like a giant insect, the moving parts of which kept up a deafening clickety-clacking. It was driven by a steam engine attached to it by a long leather belt that terrified me as it shuddered and slapped like a thing in agony. In the shed it was always a luminous dusk, and the men moved about like ghosts, with cloths tied over their mouths. Low down at one end of the machine the golden grain flowed through an open funnel into the sacks, while, high above, the stripped and broken straw was shucked out in ceaseless, wild and somehow comic eruptions. I stood beside my grandfather, who above the noise attempted to explain to me how the parts of the machine worked. What a sense of splendour and communion I felt, before this scene of labour and its rewards! And then at midday all work stopped and an extraordinary, ringing silence descended, and we all marched off together to the cavernous stone kitchen of the farm where my grandmother served up a meal of beer and bread and eggs and thick-sliced sausage. At rest as at work the men treated each other as if they were a band of brothers, slapping each other on the back, shouting at each other across the length of the room, laughing, swearing, calling out ribald insults. I wandered freely among these men who were exhausted yet elated, too. No one paid me any particular attention; it was as if I were one of them. Then, with the help of the beer, the first artless murmurings of a song would be heard, halting at first, seeming to go wrong and lose its way, only to break out at last in an exultant cacophony that caught me up in its sweep and made my chest constrict and my throat swell with emotion. In a pause in the singing I was made to take a drink of beer, and although I hated the sour taste, which reminded me of the pigsty, I smiled and smacked my lips and held out my cup for more, and was applauded, and then the singing welled up again, and from the far end of the long table my grandfather smiled at me… All this I remembered, even though it had never happened. Certainly, there was a threshing machine, but I only ever glimpsed it at work, from outside the shed, which I was forbidden to enter because of my supposed weak constitution; I was kept away from the workmen, too, for fear I might see and hear things unsuitable to a child of my tender years. It was all a dream I had worked up out of my desire to be there, in the threshing shed and the kitchen, in the midst of men, a fantasy born of my longing to belong. Now through time-dimmed eyes I peered from this high place out at the city, all burned-looking beyond the smoked glass of the walls, and it was as if I had come round from a swoon to find myself among a band of survivors huddled here above the site of a vast and ruinous conflagration.

  A touch on my arm made me turn. For a second I did not recognise Kristina Kovacs. It was not that she had aged very much, or changed greatly in appearance since I had seen her last, yet all the same something had happened to her. She looked not like herself but like a close relative, her own twin, perhaps, vaguer than the woman I had known, less sharply defined, faded, somehow, and somehow hollow-seeming. I could not think what to say to her, and instead leaned down quickly and kissed her on the cheek. Her skin was warm and dry, and seemed to vibrate tinily all over its surface, as if she were in the grip of a fever. She put a hand to the spot where I had kissed her and gave a familiar, dusky laugh – I am not the kissing kind – and leaned back from the shoulders to look up at me, holding her head to one si
de, her black eyes bright with fond malice and amusement. She exclaimed at how well I looked; she seemed genuinely surprised, as if she had come to a place in her life that allowed only of disimprovements. And yet she was no more than half my age. I wondered if she could recall with the same sweet, poignant clarity as I did that afternoon years before when she had come unannounced to my hotel room, in Budapest, or Bucharest, was it, or Belgrade? The place does not matter, only the moment. I remembered her salmon-coloured slip and the solemn way she lay down on her back before me on the bed, as if she had been felled by the awesome force of her own passion. I bit her lips until they bled, I licked the soles of her feet. Now she was asking me what I would speak on tomorrow at the conference, and Franco Bartoli popped up like a toy man at my elbow and, smoothing a hand on his fine, soft, gleaming beard, said with a roguish smirk that surely Professor Vander could have only one subject, here, in Turin…? I did not know what he was talking about. "I have prepared nothing," I said. I wanted him to be gone from my side. I was picturing the sprinkle of freckles in the hollow between Kristina Kovacs's pale, mismatched and somehow melancholy breasts. Behind her now the smoky city stretched away to the mountains in the distance with their furled rim of cloud. She was still gazing up at me with that wry, intimate smile. She has, or had, a habit of moving her head very slightly from side to side, as if she were swaying in time to the measures of a slow, inner melody. I felt unwell. The sour wine had parched the linings of my mouth. I leaned out to set my emptied glass on the table and took the opportunity to elbow Bartoli as if by accident in his little paunch, which made me feel better, then stamped away from him and Kristina Kovacs with pointed rudeness and planted myself before one of the glass walls with my back to the room, glaring bleakly out over the city. Behind me the buzz of conversation faltered briefly and caught itself up on a higher, more brittle note: Axel Vander being a boor, as usual. As I had at the hotel window that morning, I imagined again how I would seem to someone looking up from the streets below, an airborne figure, suspended on an angled stick and perhaps about to plummet, a decrepit, lost archangel. Once more I experienced a burning, bile-like rush of self-pity, pure and unfocused. Kristina Kovacs came and stood beside me, a breathing presence, the crown of her head level with my shoulder. I fancied I caught a whiff of her breath, warm, brownish and bad.Together we looked out at the distant mountain ranges. "I think I have been found out," I heard myself saying, in a tone of laboured, unconvincing lightness. "I had a letter. Someone has been looking into my past. She is coming here." I glanced sidelong at Kristina, and smiling she returned my glance. "She?" she murmured, shaking her head. "Oh, Axel, have you been foolish again?"