Shroud (15 page)

But look! here is Kristina herself, and Franco Bartoli as well, sitting with us at the table in the shade of the awning, listening to the girl, who is talking to them, and laughing, in the strangest way. How did they come to be here without my noticing? I have no recollection of them arriving, joining us, ordering these glasses of wine they are toying with. I hear Cass Cleave telling them about someone called Mandelbaum, who comes to call on her. These are the words she uses:
"He comes to call on me."
The two sit facing her, upright on their chairs, fingers fidgeting on the stems of their wine glasses, blandly frowning with widened eyes and eyebrows lifted, polite and mystified. The girl leans forward at the table, her legs twined about each other and one foot hitched behind an ankle, and speaks very rapidly, stumbling over words, winding a lock of hair around a finger, tightly round and round, and giving that strange, snuffly laugh, as if what she is telling them were the drollest thing. Mr. Mandelbaum has a smell, she is saying, a smell of almonds, that goes ahead of him and warns her that he is on his way. Then he arrives and catches her in his arms and squeezes her, and squeezes, until all the breath is squeezed out of her and she falls down. Seeing that I am attending now, or trying to, out of an alcoholic haze, she gives me a bright, desperate smile, her eyes at once burning and blurred. To my distorted sight she looks like one of those hideous folded-in cubist portraits in which the face is presented simultaneously full-on and in profile, you know the kind of thing I mean. With perfect calm and no surprise I see that she is mad. "He smells of almonds," she said, "Mr Mandelbaum." Her smile stopped as if a light in her face had been switched off and she picked up her glass – or was it mine? – in both hands and drank deeply of the dark wine, watching me above the rim. The lunch things had been cleared, and I was holding a glass of… what is it? Grappa again, it must be. The sun was burning the back of my neck. How was it that no one seemed to have noticed that for some time I had not been here? Where was it I had been? In Prague, yes, with Kristina Kovacs, in her salmon-coloured slip. Cass Cleave, her head back and throat throbbing, finished the last of the wine in a great gulp and set down the glass with a bang and looked at me again. Her expression had gone lopsided, as if the profile half of the portrait now had slipped a fraction. She stood up unsteadily and turned and plunged off into the dim interior of the restaurant. The awning flapped, a car roof flashed. Kristina Kovacs cleared her throat and stirred. "You say she is writing your life?" she said, doubtfully. Franco Bartoli smirked at that. "She is your biographer?" he said to me. "Ah." He palmed another smirk. "Ah, I see." With his shiny bald brow and pouting mouth and scant, soft, downy, slightly reddish beard, he has the look, little Franco, of a rare and precious domestic animal, spoilt and ill-tempered from too much coddling. The rimless spectacles perching on the bridge of his neat nose were almost invisible. I wonder why it is that I despise him so. He began to speak now, in a tone of hushed and sibilant fury, of a fashionable French scholar who had agreed to come to the conference and give a paper and then had cancelled at the last minute. "Nearly alike," I said loudly, interrupting him. "Your Frenchman. Bator, Bartoli: nearly the same." I laughed, and held my grappa glass aloft and waggled it at the waiter leaning sullenly against a vine-clad trellis. "Bator the gnome," I said. "I met him once. Nasty, brutish, and short." The place had emptied, we were the last customers. I could hear myself breathe, a low, stertorous roaring, as if there were a bellows working inside my skull, always in me a sign of incipient drunkenness. There was a watery glare on the white tablecloth, and the objects on it, knife, fork, oil bottle, pepper grinder, stood each one at an identical angle to its own shadow, looking as if they had been set there just so, like chessmen, or runes for me to read. The waiter, scowling, brought the bottle of clear poison, poured; I drank. I tried to light a cigarette and fumbled the match and scorched my fingers and swore. Bartoli and Kristina Kovacs were looking at me in an odd, not to say alarming, somehow mechanical, fashion, sitting very still, very straight, like a pair of magistrates, their hands folded before them on the table, their eyes unblinking. "I know you killed your wife," Franco Bartoli said. I coughed, spluttering grappa. "What?" I croaked, gagging. "What?" Kristina Kovacs patted me solicitously on the back. "He says," she said, "you dropped your knife." Sure enough, there it was, the knife, on the ground; its blade, seen there between my knees, had an evil, knowing gleam. I leaned down to pick it up. Kristina Kovacs rose, purse in hand. I made to grab her; I demanded to know where she was going, afraid suddenly to be left alone with Franco Bartoli. She directed a small, dry smile at me. "I am going to see what has become of your biographer," she said. She made her way between the tables and went into the restaurant, where Cass Cleave had gone before her. Franco Bartoli with a fingertip rolled a bread crumb back and forth slowly on the tablecloth, pensive and tense. "You know she is dying," he said, and looked at me. "Kristina, I mean." His eyes were invisible behind the sunlight flashing on the lenses of his spectacles. And at once I understood that he and Kristina Kovacs were lovers. It came to me, just like that; excess of drink often has a clairvoyant effect on me. How long had the affair been going on, I wondered? Perhaps – and somehow this was funny – perhaps it had only just begun, perhaps as recently as last night. Franco must have seen the light of realisation in my face, for he lowered his eyes quickly and began rolling another pellet of dough, more agitatedly this time. I pictured them in bed after the act, Kristina unsleeping and disconcertingly tearful, and Franco with his pot belly and his little-boy's hands, his shoes with the lifts in them tucked discreetly under the bed, making a silent rictus as he stifled yet another yawn; then, out of the dark, Kristina's awful, blurted announcement of her illness, and Franco thinking at once of the dry feel of her flesh and the brown stench she had panted out of her already failing lungs while he was bouncing up and down on her, and he would want to leap up and flee back along the trail of his discarded clothes between bed and door, and run down the hotel corridor, the stairs, along the street, out of the city itself, away! but having instead to lie there, paralysed with dismay, not daring to stir a finger for fear of bringing everything, this woman, her distress, her life and impending death, all crashing down around his unwilling ears. Then the hours of talk, all her terrors tumbling out, her anguish, using up the air in the room until he could barely breathe. Would she have told him about that afternoon with me in Prague, the drapes drawn and she crying out and my dead leg between her thighs thumping its grotesque tattoo on the mattress? She would; oh, she would. "Have a drink," I said to him, smiling almost fondly into his face. "Have a drink with me, Franco, for the sake of old times." He would say nothing, and would not lift his eyes. "I know you killed her," he said in a whisper hoarse with hate. "I know you did." Kristina came back then, frowning. "The girl," she said, and looked at me. "I asked through the door, but she told me to go away. She sounded…"

There are moments, I know them well, when all goes lax and vacant suddenly, as if all the air had rushed out of things, and the people caught in the moment hesitate, feeling displaced, jostled somehow to one side of themselves. Kristina Kovacs put her purse on the table. Franco Bartoli made as if to rise from his chair but changed his mind, and for some reason looked faintly abashed. I leaned far back and peered upward, expecting something to be there, above me, but saw only the swarming air, and the edge of the awning and a tracery of leaves wreathed through with the smoke from my cigarette, and an invisible jet, very high, inscribing its gradual double chalk-mark across the zenith. That breeze again. The sun on the parked cars. The river, shining.

Cass Cleave stepped out from the dimness of the restaurant, her head down, falteringly. She stopped a moment and looked about, holding up a shielding hand and squinnying her eyes against the glare, as if this – the empty tables, the trellis of vine, the three of us looking at her – as if this were not at all where she had expected to find herself. She came forward, negotiating her way between the chairs – they might have been so many crouching animals – and stopped beside me, bracing the steepled fingers of one hand on the table and leaning forward at a teetering angle. She began to speak but her voice would not work and she laughed instead, inanely, snuffling. There was a bad scrape on her elbow beaded with blood and her dress was stained. I reached out and seized the hand she was not leaning on and tried to use it as a lever to lift myself up but could not, and fell back on the chair, and closed my eyes.

The last gift I ever gave to Magda, one of the very few things I bought for her – like most displaced persons I have a distrust of material possessions – was an ornate and absurdly expensive glass vase. I had, uncharacteristically, I suppose, remembered that this year marked the fortieth anniversary of our life together, and although her mind by now was almost gone I thought that I should mark the occasion. In the shop, a narrow box of plate-glass and angled steel on Euclid – am I alone in experiencing the peculiar and inexplicable soreness of heart that attends the purchase of a gift? – the vase had looked a fine and fetching thing, tall and slender, the pale-green glass shot through with fat coils of a clouded, sugar-coloured whiteness. However, when it had been installed in the living room for a week or two the green of the glass took on a snotlike hue, while the swirls of frozen white syrup made me feel slightly nauseous if I kept them in sight for long enough, and I came to regard it as somehow malignant, even menacing. I wanted to get rid of it, but I could see that Magda had become attached to it in all its horrid viridescence, which must, for her, have been a radiance piercing enough to strike even through the mists of her hopelessly distracted comprehension. She would sit and gaze at it for long hours, in placid quietude, and I did not have the heart to take it outside the back door and dash it to smithereens on the ground, as I was convinced I ought to do. The vase in its turn must have found me equally repulsive, or else must have felt my animosity to be unbearable, and decided to put us both out of our distress. Here is what happened; really, the oddest thing. On the day after Magda's death I was reclining on the sofa in the dimness of the lounge, awash in my new state of widowhood – the word still sounds wrong, applied to a man – with a bag of ice on my brow and a steadily diminishing bottle on the floor beside me, when a loud report, sharp and incontrovertible as a gunshot, brought me rearing up in fright, like the man-monster arching on his table when the big blue spark leaps between the conducting rods. I scrambled upright and swayed at a drunken list into the living room to investigate, thinking, in my befuddled state, of Officer Blank – remember him? – and that blunt blue pistol of his, stuffed full with live rounds. It took much fruitless peering and searching before at last I discovered what had occurred. The vase had shattered, not into fragments in the way that glass should, but into two almost equal halves, vertically, and remarkably cleanly, as if it had been sliced down the middle by an immensely swift diamond blade or a powerful, unearthly ultra-ray. As I may already have remarked, I am not of a superstitious nature – or was not, since this was before Magda's ghost had begun haunting me – and I knew that it was simply that there must have been a fault in the glass, a crack so fine as to be invisible, that had succumbed at last to an infinitesimal shift in air temperature or change of atmospheric pressure. I thought, with a pang almost of remorse, of the once-hated thing standing there, day after day, suffering my baleful glances and the hours of Magda's fond but perhaps no less assailing gaze, locked motionless in agonised struggle with the irresistible forces of the world working on it, straining to hold itself together for another hour, another minute, another few seconds, the last few, of wholeness and poise. I am thinking, of course, of Cass Cleave. For that is how it was with her, too, she was another tall, tense, fissile vessel waiting to be cloven in two.

In the lavatory she had suffered one of her seizures. She did not remember falling, only the familiar, faint smell, dry and sweet, and the voices in her head suddenly starting all together to say something. The stall was cramped and dirty and when she collapsed she grazed her arm on something, aldiough she did not feel the pain of it. Then the Ko vacs woman was tapping at the door and saying her name, and she got herself up somehow and wadded a handful of tissue and scrubbed at the hem of her dress where it was stained from the filth on the floor. It was one of her worst fears that one day she would pass out in some foul place like this and not come round until someone had found her, wedged between the stool and the door with her pants around her knees. When she came out into the sun she felt fluttery and light, and the air seemed to have turned into another medium, a kind of bright, viscous fluid that both sustained and hindered her. It was always like this after an attack, the sense of everything around her being different, as though she had stepped through a looking-glass into the other, gleaming world that it contained. When Vander wrenched himself around in his chair and grabbed her hand she felt an infirm tremor run down his arm, it might have been the last of his life draining out of him, and when his head fell forward on to the table with a frightening bang she thought that he was surely dead. Her father's mother had died in his arms after he had fallen asleep holding her and even that, his mother dying, had not woken him. To be gone like that, without a sound, like slipping out of a room and turning and quietly closing the door; in her mind she saw a hand, it was hers, slowly relinquish the polished knob and her miniature, curved reflection on it shrink to a dot of darkness and disappear. To be gone.

At Vander's collapse Kristina Kovacs and Franco Bartoli sprang up at once and began to bustle about like mechanical figures, as if his fall had somehow switched on a motor and set their parts moving. Kristina Kovacs touched Bartoli on the wrist and he turned aside quickly to go, buttoning his jacket. She said nothing to him, and he nodded rapid acknowledgement of what she had not said. He muttered something in Italian: was it a prayer, perhaps, or was he cursing his bad luck in being here? He glanced at Vander where he lay slumped forward with his head on the table and his arms hanging down past his knees, and nodded again and said that,
si, certo,
he would go and fetch the car. And he went away, hurrying, with short, purposeful steps, a hand pressed flat against the side pocket of his jacket. Vander produced, as if in scornful comment, a loud, rolling belch that ended in a groan. Kristina Kovacs moved to his side, and, as Cass Cleave looked on, put her hands on his shoulders and with an effort drew him upright on his chair. He groaned again, more loudly, lolling. Kristina Kovacs spoke softly, as to a child, in a language Cass Cleave did not recognise, and then with a strange, sorrowing gesture she extended her arm all the way around his head in a sort of wrestler's hold, but tenderly, and drew him to her, until his forehead was resting against her midriff. His eyes were shut and his mouth was open, and there was a trickle of drool on his chin. Cass Cleave was sharply aware that there was something she wanted to say, or ask, but she could not think what it was, or whom she might address, and anyway here came Franco Bartoli in his little bright-red car, pulling up at the kerb.