Necropolis (24 page)

But happiness rarely lasts forever, as Gunard was to discover in the most brutal manner. In a fairly succinct e-mail, Renate informed him that little Ebenezer had died of meningitis. When she got home that evening, Cécile found him sitting in front of his Mac, as motionless as if a distant sniper had planted a bullet between his eyebrows. When she touched him she noted that he was freezing cold. In the emergency department of Beth Israel hospital, they said he had had a nervous shock, and when he recovered his first words were, my little Ebenezer is gone, I've been punished for leaving him alone.

They flew to Zurich and attended the funeral. Renate was cordial enough, although she looked at him with accusing eyes. She had been living for some time now with the Norwegian Edvard, which was only logical, and was devoting herself to non-figurative art and artistic happenings, in the style of Paul Hayse and Miriam Cunningham. She announced that she was planning to operate on herself, in order to create a work of sculpture out of her own body, as a way of expressing her grief over Ebenezer's death in a permanent form.

They talked about this over a beer in the café attached to the funeral parlor, minutes before the cortege set off for the cemetery. Outside, it was raining. Gunard was surprised that Renate could use the death of their child for artistic purposes, however noble the idea; he found it hard to believe that her grief was not as strong as his and that she could only think about herself. But he said nothing, only listened to her and then stood up, paid for the beer, and went back to the room where the coffin lay.

His father had come from Gothenburg for the occasion. They embarked, which gave Gunard back his strength. Then they went for a walk and his father said, the death of a child is the worst pain a human being can suffer, but you mustn't look for reasons and you mustn't try to assign blame, any more than you can deny that it's a terrible injustice and demonstrates that this world is not ruled by a superior being but by a murderous, drunk little tyrant who gloats over his creatures. Above all, don't try to understand, be strong and wait, the pain will pass, remember the Chinese proverb, we have to be like the bamboo, which bends when there's a storm and then rises again, let the storm pass, the noise of it will thunder in your head, but don't do anything. It's like the rain. You can't stop it falling, you can only wait until it's over.

He spent all night with his father and Cécile. The next day they buried Ebenezer in the Friedhof Fluntern in Zurich, in a grave on which Renate had had the following phrase carved:
The rest of my life is written on the stones that lie at the bottom of the Limmat
. Gunard made no objection, even though Renate's need to transform the child's death into something distinctive struck him as vain and ridiculous. The symbolism and metaphors concealed her imperious desire to play a leading role in the tragedy, to appropriate it for herself, thus demonstrating her extraordinary crassness and egotism. Gunard said nothing, and looked absent during the ceremony. Some of those present claimed they felt a great sense of cold when they gave him their condolences, as if something of that frozen North from which he came was in his eyes.

Ebenezer's death marked the final break with Renate, and that gave him a feeling of calm. On the flight back to Tel Aviv, he looked out the window at the glistening blue expanse of the sea and remembered the night with Renate in Capri. My God, he said to himself, what begins so romantically, between two human beings, has a tendency to become corrupted and end tragically, in contempt and insults and humiliation, is it always like that? The proof of the contrary was Cécile, but he also said to himself, it's too soon to draw conclusions. We'll have to wait a few more years.

Some time later, when Gunard was on the point of abandoning chess, he was called into the army. His new country was getting ready to launch a military action outside its borders and needed all its reserves. Gunard joined a tank company whose mission was to transport the wounded as well as supplies. Cécile enlisted in a mobile hospital unit.

The combat began and Gunard became accustomed to advancing amid dust and rubble, lifting bloodstained and mutilated bodies full of holes. He became accustomed to shrieks of pain and the sharp crack of ampoules of morphine opened with the teeth, and other things too: the smell of charred flesh and the smell of gangrene and the bulging eyes of young men who were dying and knew it and having to stop bleeding by plunging his hand into hot wounds, yes, Gunard's fingers, accustomed to moving delicate pieces of wood or ivory, were now exploring the insides of shattered bodies, suturing broken veins, and occasionally, only occasionally, finding bodies that emerged from the rubble and started to run, propelled by the force of life, an image that made him cry and forced him to hide his face, because the simplest actions had turned into something precious.

So it was that one afternoon, after a thunderous combat in a village, he saw a body emerge out of nowhere, and a man lifting his hands and saying, save me. Ferenck Oslovski.

They met at the moment of salvation.

Later, in the mobile hospital behind the lines, where they sewed Ferenck's wounds and announced a slow recovery, Gunard said: I know how to spend the sleepless nights, and he took out a chess set. After a few games, they realized that they knew each other. They had both taken part in a tournament in Austria two decades earlier and although they had never played against each other, they remembered each other's names.

When the war ended, they continued to meet.

Gunard would come to Tel Aviv and they would play on the beach until the orange sphere of the sun descended below the surface of the sea, seeming to sink in the water. The two men would talk and move the pieces rapidly. The lives of both men had drifted to that coast like a school of fish moving to warmer waters. Oslovski would say to Gunard: look at the sand, it's made of tiny stones and crystals. When one of these particles sinks it's covered by another, by ten more, a hundred or a thousand, and the same thing happens to us, don't you think? When we sink others will come, hundreds of thousands, and the Earth will always be populated by people who will feel alone, but a hundred years may pass before two men again play chess on this beach, do you think chess will still exist? Yes, said Gunard, chess is deeper and more mysterious than all of us put together; it'll exist until somebody manages to master it completely, and that'll never happen, Ferenck, it's impossible for that to happen. Oslovski looked at him in surprise, and said, at the end of the day it's a question of statistics: we'll keep getting better, more intelligent, more gifted, we'll keep going farther. Soon the great men of the 21st century will be born, or rather, they'll turn into adults, because many may already have been born, and then we'll know about them. The Freuds and Marxes and Einsteins and Nietzsches of the 21st century must be going to school right now, or still playing with toy cars, or watching the fall of a leaf in a park, who knows? And apart from them, there'll also be a young Kafka suffering then turning to literature as therapy, and there'll be an aristocratic Proust, who'll portray the decadent bourgeoisie of the early 21st century from within, and of course the new Rimbaud must already be walking the streets, a young man with his fists clenched with hate, struggling against the social forms, and the Bukowski of the 21st century receiving a thrashing from his father and discovering that alcohol dulls the pain, and of course some boy of seven or eight must be on the verge of checkmating an adult on a chessboard, because in humanity's infinite pack, the cards are equal only on one side; when we turn them over we find that there are many twos and threes and sixes of spades, but far fewer aces of diamonds, do you see what I mean?

Gunard listened to him, looked again at the chessboard, and said, you're right, not all of them are aces, but being an ace doesn't always ensure a happy life; the six of spades may end up much happier. Ah, great lives! Usually they're people who suffer, maladjusted creatures; some because their vocation was so overwhelming that it put an end to anything that didn't serve its purposes, others because their longings were never satisfied; others because they pursued the vanity of fame and success fruitlessly; others because sometimes talent is associated with terrible defects and vices, serious shortcomings . . .

Then the two men would fall silent and finish their game, and then spend a while analyzing the positions. When they could barely see their pieces, they would gather everything up and go off to a bar on the beach, near the walls of the port of Jaffa, and drink a few beers and continue talking about life and its curious variations, until at dinner hour they would walk to the Nightingale of Odessa where Gael would serve them pizzas with vodka and herrings in vinegar.

Sometimes Cécile came with Gunard and the four of them had dinner on the second floor of the restaurant, which was an uncomfortable space, a low-ceilinged mezzanine that filled with steam from the kitchen, but there they could sit down alone and chat: all this in spite of the fact that Gunard and Cécile were rich, rich in the best meaning of the word, that is, they did not have to work in order to live and enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle, but that did not mean that they closed the door to people of lower financial status, which was why they always preferred to meet in that cramped space and not in fashionable restaurants or hotels.

Although Gael and Cécile only knew each other through their husbands and were not obliged to become friends, they, too, developed a friendship that grew and put down roots. After a time, Gunard and Cécile decided to rent an apartment in Tel Aviv that would allow them to spend the weekends with their friends, a beautiful penthouse on Rothschild Boulevard, not far from the Allenby district.

The lives of these four friends went on like this, placidly, for six years until, once again, the fates got angry, or else grew bored and turned their gaze to them, and something very sad happened, which was that Cécile found a lump in her breast, a little ball just under her right nipple, and the subsequent tests determined that the cancer had spread to sensitive areas like the pancreas and the liver and that a swelling of the tissue of the lung was in fact emphysema. Radiation treatment began immediately and Cécile foundered, in spite of the efforts of Gunard, Gael, and Ferenck, who constantly invented new and extravagant ways to distract her, to make her feel happy and lucky.

Every human being has his limits, and seven months later Cécile lay dying. She weighed eighty-five pounds, her skin was the color of linen, and Gunard prayed for a quick, painless death. The gods heard him and a few hours later Cécile's heart stopped. Oslovski and Gael were at the hospital and they were the first people to receive the news from the doctors. Gunard was so absent, it was as if he was under the effects of a drug. Of the following seventy-two hours, he retained only chaotic, disjointed memories. A sumptuous funeral, with Cécile's family present, meetings with rabbis and lawyers to settle the inheritance, and then it was all over and Gunard decided to settle in Tel Aviv, near the only friends he had in the world.

Oslovski and Gael looked after Gunard as if he were their son. They took turns being with him, making him lunch and dinner, or going out for walks with him. Ferenck's company was more beneficial, because with him he could descend into that deep cave that was chess, which took him away from the surface, where all the pain and absurdity was, where the memory of Cécile waited for him with its daggers and its hot irons, and so the two friends grew closer than ever, to the point where Ferenck would spend the weekend in Gunard's apartment, and Gael would come there to sleep and be with both of them. On one of these weekends, Ferenck and Gael told Gunard that it was time to throw out Cécile's things, and that they had found a charitable association that took used clothes and sent them to less fortunate countries. Gunard liked the sound of the association, but refused to allow Cécile's things out of the apartment. They were his and he wanted to keep them. Ferenck and Gael shrugged, and that same night, after dinner, Gunard appeared in a striped dress, green nylon stocking, high-heeled shoes, and jewelry. Don't worry, he said to them, I do it to find a bit of peace, I've always done it; Ferenck, who had already drunk a few vodkas, said, if you have to confess to us that you're a fucking queer, do it now, nothing will happen, but he said, it isn't that, Ferenck, this calms me down, not many people understand, but Cécile did.

Gael intervened to say, that's enough, don't say anything more, just let me tell you, that color really doesn't suit you, you look like a madwoman in a beauty parlor; Ferenck, overcoming his initial rejection, finally said, it's O.K., forget it happened. That settled the matter, and every night, after dinner, Gunard performed his ritual with Cécile's clothes and chatted with them for a while, before going to the window of his room to look out at the night, which from there was mostly lights on roofs and buildings rising in the darkness, and ask it his many questions, his sad, disconsolate questions.

His participation in local tournaments, although increasingly sporadic, led a chess correspondent from the United States to take an interest in the case of these two players who had decided to live in anonymity. He researched who they were, and what struck him most was that neither of them had striven to reach the heights. They had both been content to break off careers that could have led farther. The journalist wrote for the
Chicago Tribune
and his name was Earl Coltodino. One afternoon, after a couple of fruitless calls, Coltodino went to the beach to look for them and found them near a terrace. They had a roll-up chessboard held down by stones and were analyzing a position, with bottles of Diet Coke that they kept cold in a bag filled with ice, plus chicken sandwiches that Gael had made for them that morning. In another bag was a thermos of hot coffee and a bar of chocolate. They were well prepared. At the bottom, ready for the end of the afternoon, was a quart of Smirnoff vodka.