Shroud (13 page)

They went downstairs. The silence, a kind of miasma, was more oppressive than ever, weighted with the inaudible breathing of so many anonymous sleepers, and she picked her steps gingerly, as if someone might suddenly jump out and chastise her for disturbing the quiet of the place. Vander however clanged his stick deliberately against the brass handrail on the wall and at every other step brought down the heel of his shoe so hard on the edge of the marble stair she was surprised that sparks did not strike from the stone. In the lobby there was no sign of the old porter. The night, glossy and black, stood pressing itself against the glass door that at first would not open for them, but then abruptly did, shuddering, the big pane giving off a deep bell-tone:
barang!
The air outside was cool and soft and fresh, and the sky, starless, fully dark still, seemed to glisten, and she felt vertiginously as if she were looking up through a shell of crystal, invisible and immensely high. Her fingers brushed the polished leaves of the laurel bush in its pot on the pavement outside the door. Vander was already lurching away up the street. She lingered a moment, then followed. She sniffed her fingers, smelling faintly the sharp, fading leaf-stink. She caught him up and for a time they went on without speaking. The tall, unlighted buildings teetered close on either side. She tried to fit her pace to the syncopations of Vander's gait: step of good leg, stamp of bad, thump of stick. In his way he was almost graceful, stooping and swinging and throwing a shoulder back before leaning into the next long lope. She wondered what she might call him, how to address him.
Axel
was a metallic bark, and
Vander
sounded as if a final syllable had fallen off the end. A name is hard to speak. To name another is somehow to unname oneself. Is this true, she asked herself, is this really so? She pondered, feeling the cool night breathing on her face, the deep, wide stillness burring in her ears. So often the train of her thoughts carried her far beyond herself, or went off on its own way, without her. Did she think, or was she thought? She could get no steady hold on things. An idea would occur to her, some notion or theory, with all the ring of Tightness about it, then its opposite would come and that too would seem right, and how was she to judge between the two, not to speak of the myriad other contrary possibilities jostling for consideration?

And anyway, Axel Vander was not his real name. She put a hand to the pocket of her blouse and felt the fountain pen. Her little gun, with its loaded chamber.

They came out into a long, cobbled piazza. A bronze horseman strode motionless above them in the dark air, with a light from somewhere gleaming on his brow. She thought of the night porter and his black book, his silver tray; she thought of the glass of water with air bubbles like tiny beads of mercury clinging to the sides inside, below the water-line; she thought of herself lifting the glass and drinking deep. The rubber tip of Vander's stick squealed on the dew-damp cobblestones. They were walking beside the arcades, each archway an identical domed vault of blackness. A dog detached itself from the shapeless mound of rags that she supposed was its slumbering master and came forward and looked at them, wagging its tail in wan hopefulness. "Who was it that betrayed me?" Vander said to her. Betrayed. She asked him why he asked; what did it matter who, after all? This he greeted with a snort. "How did you know where to go?" he said, persisting. "Why Antwerp?Why those old newspapers?" She recalled, she could not think why, a line from the dust jacket of
After Words
that a critic had written in envious emulation of Vander's style –
"all the glints and flashes of a grand and faintly shivering chandelier"
– and she could not keep from uttering a low laugh. He stared at her. "I met," she said, "a man in a bar."

More accurately, she had been accosted by him, on what was to have been her last afternoon in Antwerp. Her father had paid for the trip; he was always happy to pay, she noticed, when it meant she would leave the country. She had come to look for Vander's past, following his trail along the shelves of public archives, libraries, university records; the farther she travelled the fainter the traces of him became, as if a broom had brushed away his tracks. There was an old man, a journalist of high reputation, and also, some said, a one-time collaborator, who she was told had known Axel Vander when they were both young, before the war. When she went to call on him, however, she learned that he had suffered a stroke and was in hospital and was not expected to live. Nevertheless she was taken to visit him. Everything was white, his hair, his long, sharp, suffering face, the robe he wore, the bed linen, the wall behind his trembling hawk's head. Nothing moved except his eyes, which fixed themselves upon her in what seemed a kind of anguished asking. It struck her that he was another ghost, his own. She sat with him for an hour, not speaking, and all the time he watched her, with angry impatience, so it seemed; far from having anything to tell her, he appeared to be waiting to hear from her something that he must know. Perhaps he was confusing her with someone else. When she saw Vander in the hotel lobby that first morning, she felt this other old man's presence behind him, saw it, almost, a shimmering shape there for an instant, a shadow made not of darkness but of cold, white light.

Now on this last day she was in one of those fake old-fashioned pubs near the cathedral, all wood and brass and pewter beer-mugs, while she waited for it to be time to take the train. It was a late afternoon in March, sombre and wet, more like midwinter than early spring. She was sitting at a table in a cramped corner by the window, huddled in her coat, watching the trees in the square outside that now and then shook themselves in a gust of wind, shedding big silver drops of rain that shone like money as they fell. It was out there that she saw him first, the red-headed man. She did not know why she should have noticed him particularly. He was standing under the money-trees. His clothes were shabby: cracked shoes, shapeless trousers too long in the leg, and an old coat fastened so tightly with a single button at his midriff that it seemed his skinny frame must be dependent solely on this support to stay upright. He wore no hat, and seemed not to notice the rain. She watched him for a while. His hands were in his pockets, and he held his elbows pressed close into his sides, as if to aid the coat in its task of general suspension. Was he looking in her direction? An ambulance went past, with its siren howling and its blue light spinning, and she turned away, for she did not like the sight of ambulances, or their sound, and when she looked again he was gone from under the trees. A moment later, though, here he was, in the bar. He appeared from behind her, and sat down at the table next to her. He took a plastic pouch of tobacco out of his coat pocket and rolled a cigarette. She noticed the faint tremor in his hand; it was not a sign of infirmity, but rather, so she thought, the result of long hours, years, of concentration on some tiny, intricate, antique task; he might be a watchmaker, or a scribe, even; she saw him bent over his work table with gimlet or quill.

He was feigning an elaborately vague, preoccupied air, brow distractedly wrinkled and eyes fixed on nothing, and she knew that he was going to speak to her. He patted himself rapidly at hips flanks breast, frowned more deeply, pursed his lips, then with a jerky movement turned about, pretending that he had just noticed her, and mimed entreatingly the striking of a match. She said she was sorry, she had no match. "Ah, you speak English!" he cried, as if hailing a rare accomplishment. "So do I." She wondered what age he might be. Fifty? Seventy? It was impossible to tell. His face was pale as whey and so sharp it seemed it must thin to a fine straight line were he to turn it full toward her. His hair was of an almost orange shade, obviously dyed; scintillas of rain were sprinkled through it, an incongruous jewelling. He put away the cigarette, unlit. She thought she should get up now and go; she looked out at the weeping sky, the street where the daylight lingered; her train was not due to leave for hours yet. He had been eyeing Vander's book where it lay on the table before her, and now with a contortionist's rubbery agility he leaned forward and twisted his head almost upside down to read the title. "Ah," he said. "Do you know him?" She shook her head. "I do," he said. "Or I should say, I did." With long, very white fingers, like the witch's fingers in a fairytale, he turned over the book and looked at Vander's photograph on the back cover and smiled. "But he was not Axel Vander, then." The waitress came, a brawny, blonde girl got up in a flounced blouse and a wide black skirt with a bodice, in what must be, Cass Cleave supposed, a parody of the national costume; she carried a gilt tray that she held lightly by one edge, like a weapon. The redheaded man spoke to the waitress in a language that must be Flemish, or Dutch, perhaps, and when she had nodded and gone he glanced shyly at Cass Cleave, licking a thin lower lip. She wondered unworriedly who he was or why he was speaking to her. She examined him closely, the narrow face, those white hands. He was smiling still, and nodding to himself, as at a rueful though treasured memory. Yes, he said, he had known Axel Vander. "Oh, a long time ago, a long time. In those days he was a writer for the newspapers, like" – he tapped a long, amber fingernail on the photograph – "his friend." He nodded, and his voice sank to a whisper. "Very strong opinions," he breathed, and gave a little soundless whistle. "Very extreme." She was frowning; she could not follow him. "His friend?" she said, looking at the photograph. "Is that not him?" He glanced at her sidelong and his smile became a grin of happy malice. She did not like the way he kept licking that bottom lip, the sharp, grey tip of his tongue flicking out and as quickly withdrawing. "What was his name, if he was not Axel Vander?" she asked, but he only grinned the harder, and lifted a finger and wagged it roguishly, closing his eyes and pressing his lips tight together. The bodiced Amazon reappeared, on her tray a tiny, tapered glass containing an inch of carnelian liquor, viscous, glinting. He paid from a little leather purse, counting out the coins with finical care. Cass Cleave watched him lift the glass, his bloodless lips already pursed to meet it, and drink with dainty relish. He sighed appreciatively and set down the glass and pulled his chair closer and began to tell her the story of AxelVander, who had died, and of this other one, who lived.

High above their heads a tinny bell banged, once, twice, three times, then a quavering fourth, startling her. The gunmetal sky was turning ash-blue all up one side. She was cold now, in her thin blouse. Vander had been silent for so long she had almost forgotten he was there. She watched him stop to poke at an object on the ground with his stick. It was a white plastic bag with something soft in it, and tied at the neck with string. "A man in a bar," he said. "I see. And you happened to be reading my book. What a coincidence." He was not looking at her. "Tell me," he said, "what was the name of this mysterious man?" Max somebody, she said. "Scheindiene, Schaundeine, something like that, I cannot remember." He said he had never known anyone of that name. He was still poking at the bag, turning it this way and that. It was plump and vaguely heart-shaped, and wobbled and flopped under his proddings; the string at the neck had been knotted in a neat bow, with awful thoroughness. "He must have been speaking of someone else," he said. "He must have been mistaken." She had not told him all that the man had told her; she had kept back the most important part. Vander was frowning intently, as if the thing in the plastic bag, whatever it was, were taking all his attention. "But he knew you," she said. "He knew the dates the articles appeared. Five weeks, five issues." At last he looked at her, holding his head at a tilt, thinking, calculating. He had got the bag partly open; something dark was oozing out, a thick, dark liquid. She felt her stomach heave and settle again. "Come," he said, folding a hard hand on the tender underside of her arm above the elbow and turning her about, in the direction of the hotel, "let us go back, you are shivering." Dawn was strengthening rapidly. High cloudlets, tinged with pink. The starlings.

There was a general hesitation, and when the applause did come it was markedly restrained. I lingered for a moment longer than the clapping lasted, smiling menacingly up at the audience ranged before me in the tiered semi-circular rows of benches, my hands clamped so fiercely on the lectern edges it must have seemed to those sitting in the front rows that I was about to pick the thing up and heave it at their heads. They were offended that I had not prepared a paper especially for the occasion, but had chosen instead to read, and in a tone of tired irony at that, a chapter from
After Words,
the one, justly famous, if I may say so, on poor Nietzsche's last, calamitous days here in Turin, which the majority of them would already have read, of course. What did they expect? They should count themselves fortunate that I had agreed to address them at all. I was about to step down from the podium when Franco Bartoli shot up a hand and asked with false and nauseating sweetness if I would perhaps agree to take a question or two? I heaved a loud and pointed sigh. There was the usual interval of awkward, foot-shuffling silence, and Bartoli rose part-way in his seat and swivelled his head to cast an encouraging glance at this one or that of his tongue-tied students skulking among the audience, which was made up for the most part of middle-aged academics, instantly recognisable by the peculiar drabness of their attire. At last a young man up at the back cleared his throat and asked in an earnest mumble what was, please, Professor Vander's view on the current state of cultural criticism? I lifted my head high and back and smiled. "My view?" I said. "Very fine, from this elevation, thank you." I made a curt bow and stepped away from the lectern and went none too steadily toward my seat – I had taken more than a generous go of grappa with my morning coffee, and was feeling the effects. On all sides there were head-shakings and sarcastic laughter and even some slow handclapping. I glanced to where I expected Cass Cleave to be sitting – five minutes into my reading I had glimpsed her from the corner of my eye as she came in quickly and slipped into a seat near the door – but she was not there. The place where she should have been was occupied by a brawny Brunhilde from Gottingen with massive knees, a Nietzsche scholar, as it happened, who was glaring down on me in pop-eyed indignation at my admittedly skittish treatment of her subject's final transfiguration and collapse on the Piazza Carlo Alberto a century before to the year. Franco Bartoli, one of the slow-handclappers, was smiling at me with angry brightness. I sat down. The room had no window and the woolly air was barely breathable. I was tired, dispirited, irritated. Bartoli, rising and going forward to introduce the next speaker, paused as he passed me by and leaned down and spoke into my ear. "Very witty, Professor," he murmured with honeyed bitterness, "but not entirely original, I think." Kristina Kovacs, at the other side of the room, was squaring a sheaf of papers on her knee and looking toward Bartoli expectantly. No, no, I thought, I could not bear to listen to Kristina tease out another of her elegantly humorous conceits on the phenomenology of comic strips or the soccer star as existential hero – I do wonder sometimes why I chose to spend what I am compelled to call my professional life in that little sphere of preciosities and trivial arcana. I stood up hastily and made my way to the door like a man escaping a fire.