Shroud (19 page)

That was the last time I was in the Vander apartment, the time I stole the pill-box. The theft was not the reason for my banishment; I am not sure it was ever detected, or, if it was, that I was held to be the culprit. In those days of invasion, defeat, occupation – all of which dizzying disasters came quickly to be referred to primly as
the events
– I was no longer as welcome among the Vanders as I had once been. Nothing was said, of course, but there was a constriction that occurred in the atmosphere now when I entered those spacious, overheated rooms that my heightened sensibilities could not but register. So I withdrew. The break was decorous, and went unremarked, on both sides. It is a curious thing, how even the most violently disrupted circumstances will quickly improvise and impose their own rules of mannerliness. In the early days, after it had sunk in that
les événements, de gebeurtenissen,
"were irreversible and would somehow or other have to be lived with, there was a certain small smile, wry, rueful, pained, accompanied by a flicker of the eyes heavenward, that people would exchange at unwontedly difficult moments, such as when some new and seemingly capricious edict had been announced, restricting the movement or meeting of persons, or imposing yet more levies on this or that section of society, most usually that section to which I belonged. At first these measures were merely an annoyance. We suffered them, having no choice, while at the same time we strove at least to maintain the appearance of disdaining them. However, as the months went on, life in those mean little streets on the wrong side of the square became increasingly attenuated, until we seemed truly to be living on air. We had a sense of floating above ourselves, buffeted now this way, now that, the frail tethering lines jerking and straining with each new ordinance that was issued against us. We grew lighter and lighter as all that we possessed was taken from us, article by article. One week we were forbidden to ride on trams, the next to ride on bicycles. One Monday morning it was ordered that every household must hand up so many men's suits, women's dresses, children's overcoats; at noon the order was rescinded, without explanation, only to be issued again the next day. We were told we could no longer keep household pets; it was the middle of winter, and, for days, long straggles of people wound their way on foot – no trams for us, remember – along snowbound roads to the designated pound on the outskirts of the city where our dogs and cats and budgerigars were to be put down. Yet in its usual uncaring way, life went on. There was the theatre, there were concerts to go to, and lectures and public meetings to attend, and when all that was put out of bounds to us there were the cafés where we could meet and talk, and then when even talk was proscribed there was the wireless, bringing news from elsewhere, all those elsewheres, crackling along the airwaves. Music broadcasts I treasured especially; they came from Stuttgart, Hilversum, Paris, sometimes London, even, if the atmospherics were right. The music was, well, the music, but how strangely affecting it was in the intervals to hear the stir and heave of the audience as it relaxed for a minute, all those people, so far away, and yet magically here, their presence so palpable I might be sitting in their midst. Even yet I cannot hear in the concert hall the sound of that murmurously expectant concourse without being transported immediately back across half a century to the little wallpapered living room with the tasselled tablecloth and the lampshade the colour of dried skin, and the big wooden wireless set with the Bakelite knobs and the canvas grille and the single, glowing green cat's-eye pulsing and contracting, and the blurred music pouring into the room and filling it like a luminous fog. I could not but hate them, too, of course, those audiences; they seemed to my ear so at ease, so lumpenly careless of all they had and I did not, here, where all around, stealthily, the world was closing in, armed with cudgels and flaming torches.

Axel and I continued to meet, not as often as before, away from his home, away from the Stoof, and away from the shtetl people, too, needless to say. We met on neutral ground, while there still remained ground that could be called neutral. His attitude toward me, at least in the early days of
de gebeurtenissen,
was one of affability tinged with impatience, restrained exasperation. He would tap me on the wrist, not unfondly, and accuse me of being overly alarmist in the face of my plight and that of my people. "Yes yes yes," he would say, with a frowning smile, waving a hand, "I am aware of all that, I read the papers too, you know." But surely, he would go on, surely I must agree that something had to be done, that matters could not go on as they had been doing? And even if people were to be sent away somewhere, would that be so bad? They might thrive, in a climate better suited to their temperament and racial characteristics. Anyway, it would only be the troublemakers who would go, them, and perhaps the sick, the very old, the mad, the syphilitic. They would be sent to Heligoland, to the Tatra Mountains; Hendriks had told him for a fact that only last week a thousand had been put on a ship at the Hook of Holland bound for South America. And in any case, Axel said, why was I worrying? I was safe, I was his friend. Had not our photographs appeared side by side in
De Vlaamsche Gazet?

What could I say to him, what reply? He could not know that sense I had now when I ventured beyond our side of the square of being crouched in hiding behind myself even as I walked down one of his streets, sat in one of his cafés, listening to him tell me, with an irritated rictus, that this was just the trouble with me, with all of my people, this hysteria, this cringing and complaining, this constant, kicked-dog whining Why had we not thought of the consequences before we infiltrated the banks and the judiciary and the government ministries until they were full to bursting with our secret, burrowing brood? It was all perfectly straightforward, perfectly obvious. Something had needed doing, as he had always insisted, and now it was being done. How could we not have seen what was coming, until it had arrived in our midst, clanking and smoking? Anyway, it would all soon be over and done with. That things were bad, and would get worse, he did not deny; most likely the last act would be bloody – "As it always," with a flash of small, square, white teeth, "is" – but when all the bodies had been dragged by the heels into the wings, how clean and free and filled with possibilities would be that emptied stage! While he was saying these things he looked me calmly in the face, shaking his head a little, with that smile, as if he were recounting to a child in simplified terms the plot of a tragedy the convolutions of which only grown-ups could properly disentangle. The possibility did not seem to occur to him that the directors and the stage managers of all this drama might end up by bringing the house down. I was embarrassed – yes, really, I was embarrassed, for myself, and for him. This, mark you, this was that same Axel Vander whose monograph on Heine which he wrote when he was seventeen had provoked more than one wise professor to mumble into his beard of the arrival in our midst of a new Hofmannsthal. What would I find to say if, one day, I were to be called upon to help him exonerate himself, when at last, slapping a hand to his forehead, he should come to his senses and see all this present foolishness and vile fantasy for what it was? He had put himself among fanatics and barbarians, the most reasonable-seeming of whom would in an instant turn a perfectly mild-mannered conversation into ranting, stamping theatrics. One quickly learned to spot in these people the signs of an incipient tirade: the reddening brow, the glazing eye, the bullish thrusting forward of the head. Women were some of the worst, adding to male fury their dash of hysteria and sexual revulsion. I was in bed one afternoon with an actress – porcelain face, bobbed hair, mouth like a scarlet insect, one of Axel's cast-offs – who halted in the middle of the act itself and lifted herself above me, her braced arms shaking from the strain and her little breasts trembling, and told me in tones of florid indignation how the previous night a
vuile jood
in a fur-collared coat had accosted her at the stage door and offered her money to come to his house and do with him what she would have realised, had she thought for a moment, was exactly the thing that she was doing now, here, in this bed, with one of the impudent fellow's pure-blooded brethren.

And yet, and yet… How often in my life have I said those words,
and yet?
Everything has to be qualified. The fact is, a part of me, too, was of Axel's camp. Oh, yes. Here it is, my deepest, dirtiest secret. In my heart, I too wanted to see the stage cleared, the boards swept clean, the audience cowed and aghast. It was all for love of the idea, you see, the one, dark, radiant idea. Aestheticise, aestheticise! Such was our cry. Had not our favourite philosopher decreed that human existence is only to be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon? We were sick of mere life, all that mess, confusion, weakness. All must be made over – made over or destroyed. We would have, I would have, sacrificed anything to that transfiguring fire. I whisper it:
and I still would.
The people who turned my people to ash, they were the ones I hoped would win; I regret it yet that they lost. Are you shocked? It was not those posturing brutes themselves I wanted to see victorious – for them, vulgarians to a man, if man is the word, I felt only revulsion – but the Idea that they insensately carried, like the wooden horse with its secret force of Argives. Do you see, my Cassandra? Something had been smuggled into the world, something terrible and true, which must be allowed to prevail, at whatever cost. True: yes. Never mind the necessary lies. In time they would have been dispensed with, along with the liars. Only let the Idea triumph, the great instauration begin!

How, you will ask, did I square with the terrors of everyday life these murky longings for an apocatastasis? For certainly among my people everyone was afraid, myself no less than the others. Fear is mostly a transient thing, it flashes out in the dark at the thought of death, or on the empty road at night, or in the imminence of fire or flood; the human animal is not equipped to live constantly in fear, the system cannot sustain it. Yet for the best part, the worst part, of two years, we were frightened almost all of the time. Fear burned in us unquenchably. There were periods when it was no more than a smouldering coal lodged at the base of the breast bone, then suddenly it would leap up in jagged sheets of flame, leaving behind a hot fall of cinders. These were the poles of existence for us: consuming, irresistible terror, or a sort of gluey apathy, with intervals of futile rage in between. Frenzied hope would expire into exhaustion, indifference; days that began with us crowded in hopeful excitement around a newspaper headline would see us at nightfall lolling in blank-eyed stupor like the addicts in an opium den. Headaches, stomach cramps, a constant churning in the gut, these were the body's protests at the insupportable strain of living always in fear. One suffered from an incontinence of the emotions. The slightest kindness, the slightest nod of seeming sympathy, could bring one to one's knees in grovelling appreciation. There was that gasp of gratitude we could not restrain when someone of the ones in authority over us chose to relent in the prosecution of some trivial order of the day. I heard myself doing it, that gasp, even with Axel, on those occasions, rare enough, when he would express indignation at a particularly egregious piece of petty-minded cruelty that had been ordered to be inflicted on our side of the square. His quizzical glance and silent turning away from my breathless earnests of gratefulness, however, were as jarring a rebuff as would have been an unceremonious push in the chest from someone else.

Despite all that I have said so far, I do not think harshly of him. When he died I believe I would have wept, for shock, if nothing else, were I the type to weep.

I learned of his death from the newspaper, a couple of paragraphs on an inside page of the
Staandard.
Perhaps it was the way I chanced upon the item that prevented me from absorbing its contents straight away. I had been sitting on a park bench, in coat and muffler, and was about to get up and leave, the late-autumn day having turned bitterly cold, and had snapped wide the pages of the paper in outspread arms prior to folding it, when all at once the thing turned into a winged messenger and thrust Axel's name at me, alone out of all those columns of print. My first reactions were the usual ones – it must be some error, a case of mistaken identity, maybe even a practical joke – accompanied by an odd, lifting sensation in the chest, a sort of dreadful exhilaration. Giddily I read that pair of paragraphs again. They were frustratingly, scandalously and, I thought, deliberately vague. It seemed to be that he had died violently, but whether by accident or at the hands of some person or persons was not made clear. The anonymous reporter had chosen his phrases with care – tragic demise of, friends shocked at, great loss to – as if he had been advised to go cautiously in the matter, and were covertly passing on the same advice to his readers. I jumped up from the bench, rolling the paper into a wad and stuffing it guiltily into my pocket, and walked swiftly out of the park, pulling the upturned collar of my overcoat tight around my chin and resisting the urge to take to my heels and run. It was as if I were personally implicated in Axel's death, without knowing how. Before me an enormous, grape-blue cloud was nudging its way up out of the low west, like a slow, sullen thickening of nameless possibilities.

I threw away the
Staandard
and went in search of the
Gazet.
It was late afternoon, and the first newsstand I came to, on the corner of Maria-Theresialei, was the one kept by the old fellow with the goitre – good God, suddenly I see him, plain as day, in his fin-gerless gloves and the woollen cap with the earflaps that he always wore – who made a great fuss of retrieving for me from under a pile of grubby magazines what he claimed was the very last copy of the late edition, grumbling under his breath. I took the paper from him and skulked off like a rat with a stolen tidbit. Rounding the corner, I stopped and scanned the pages, once, twice, a third time. There was no mention of Axel. I was surprised not to be surprised.