Shroud (20 page)

I went next to the
Gazet
offices, to try to speak to Hendriks. I do not know what I expected of him: I had not seen or heard from him for eighteen months or more. I was kept waiting in the front office for a long time. The familiar smells, of newsprint, ink, paper dust, provoked in me an inward sob of nostalgia, distant relation, it might be, to the grief for my dead friend I supposed I was too shocked to have begun to feel yet. The girl behind the counter who took in classified advertisements pretended not to know me; we used to flirt with each other, in the old days. I turned over the already dry and brittle pages of the previous week's editions, filed in their big wooden clasps. Newsboys ran in and out, whistling. A mad old woman came in from the street and shouted something and went out again. Wind-driven scuds of wet snow were flopping against the windows. I was remembering the walking holiday Axel and I had taken together in the Ardennes before the war, and the little inn we had stumbled on one rainy night, where we sat drinking plum brandy by the light of a log fire and he told me of his plans to write a study of Coleridge's aesthetics; how enthusiastic he was, his eyes shining in the firelight; how young he looked; how young he was, and I, too. He did not live to write that book, and when, years later, I tried to write it instead – to write it for him, as it were – I could not do it either.

Hendriks would not come down, and sent one of his deputies to fob me off. I remembered the fellow's face from those late nights at the Stoof, but could not recall his name. I saw that he remembered me, too; he had the decency not to meet my eye. He was fat, like his boss, and out of breath from the stairs, and leaned against the counter, exaggeratedly gasping, with a hand pressed flat against his chest. When I demanded to know if he knew the circumstances of Axel's death he only shrugged. Everything was confused, he said, no one was certain of what had happened. I pressed him, but he only shook his head, and said again what he had said already. His petulant, brusque tone told me that the
Gazet
had no intention of being associated with this death, one among so many, after all. The girl behind the counter gazed away, tapping a pencil against her teeth, pretending not to be listening. I left, and walked dully through the streets. The snow had stopped, but a big-bellied, mauvish sky hung low over the city, promising a heavy fall later. On a street by the train station an armoured car was stopped, with a trio of teenage soldiers in outsized greatcoats sitting side by side on the front of it, dangling their legs over the edge, like three school truants paddling in a pond. And further along, by the Stads-park, three dead girls in belted, lumpy overcoats with ragged bullet holes across the front, gruesome counterparts somehow to those idling boy soldiers, were tied to the railings with placards hung about their necks on which was daubed a message I did not care to read; I thought of the dead crows, their blue-black plumage rubied with dried blood, that my grandfather long ago would string up on the fences in his cornfields to discourage their ravening fellows.

I never did discover the true circumstances of Axel's death. I thought of asking his family, and went more than once and stood under the trees in the square looking up at the windows of the Vander apartment, but each time my nerve failed me. Then they moved away, or so it seemed, for on the last occasion when I skulked under their windows there was no sign of life within, no lamp burning or vase of flowers on display, only a broken roller blind, hanging down crookedly. I made enquiries of people whom Axel and I had both known, but either they would not speak to me, or claimed not to know any more about what had befallen him than I did. Extravagant rumours began to fly about. Some were too ludicrous to listen to, for example that he had committed suicide when a love affair went wrong – imagine Axel hanging himself, and over a woman! Others were slightly more plausible, but I could not believe them, either. It was said for instance that he was not dead at all, but had been rounded up by mistake with a band of communists and interned at Breendonck, from where his father was seeking to buy his release. A journalist of my acquaintance, of my former acquaintance, whom I encountered in the street late one wet night, drunk and wild-eyed, his face running with rain or tears, it was hard to tell which, grasped me by the lapels and assured me in an urgent, sobbing whisper that Axel had been caught up in a dispute among the factions surrounding the military authorities, that the affair had ended in bloodshed, and that he had been shot and his body flung into an unmarked grave. At the time all sorts of stories like that were in the air, about all sorts of people. Most amazing of all the explanations I heard of Axel's disappearance, however, was the heroic farrago, recounted to me one ice-hung morning in a café on the Groenplaats, in tones of tragic wonderment, by one of his former girlfriends, that he had been betrayed, arrested, tortured, and summarily executed for the leading part he had played in the organisation of an underground Resistance cell. She looked so sorrowful and solemn, saucer-eyed Monique, and the pink-tinged air outside was so still, so coldly lovely, that I could only nod and say nothing, trying not to laugh. Many years later, however, in Arcady, one night at a gruesome academic dinner I found myself seated opposite a withered old fellow with ash on his waistcoat and soup on his tie, a visiting savant from old Europe, of Walloon origin, who on hearing my name became greatly excited and hailed me warmly as a former colleague in arms. Holding him off with what I knew must be a horrible, temporising grin, I studied that time-ruined visage – collapsed cheek and lolling Bourbon lip, moist rheumy eye, the pallid skull smooth and domed like the cap of a giant toadstool – and tried urgently to discern in it the features of one I might once have known or at least have met in Axel's company long ago. No blank-eyed bust stirred in the shadowed gallery of my memory. And what did he think, the old fool, if he really had known Axel and now believed that I was he – that forty years had added a foot or so to his height and turned his film star's profile into that of a superannuated carthorse? The more discouragingly diffident I became the more emotional he waxed, lapsing from laughable English into execrable, macaronic French, reaching infirmly across the table and trying to clasp my crabwise retreating hand, exclaiming the while about
les beaux jours d'antan aux Pays-bas
when, shoulder to shoulder with our
amis ardents,
we wrought havoc upon the military housekeeping of the invading
sale Boche.
He would have worried me more had he not been such a caricature; nevertheless, I extricated myself as quickly as I could from his humid attentions and left the building and walked across the campus in the balmy dark, under the eucalyptus trees draped with the strenuously abradant music of crickets, wondering if I should invite the old warrior to come for a hike with me up into the hills next day and kill him. However, when I arrived at Sprague Hall next morning to hear him speak, a notice on the door informed me that due to unforeseen circumstances Professor de Becker's lecture had been cancelled. It turned out that over a shaky breakfast in the college dining room the hung-over Professor had got into an altercation – on the validity of Durkheim's concept of the
conscience collective,
as I recall – with one of the faculty's many young Turks, and became so heated that he suffered an infarction and fell dead with his face on the table among the coffee cups and the bowls of muesli. I have always had the devil's luck.

For a long time I found it hard to accustom myself to the thought of Axel gone; indeed, I am not entirely accustomed to it yet. At the time it should not have been so difficult; in those perilous years the state of being alive often seemed an altogether less plausible proposition than that of being peacefully dead. In Axel's case, however, death seemed somehow… inappropriate. Anyone can die, of course, at any moment. The beloved child, the circus strongman, the Cranach maiden, all are sustained by the merest thread. Afterwards, though, when the first shock has worn off, we seem to discern in even the unlikeliest extinction an inevitability that had been there all along, hidden from us, the embryo of death growing steadily toward its moment of fatal parturition. This is where ghosts come from, I suppose, this phenomenon of lives unfinished before they ended. The role of revenant fitted Axel ill. He had been meant to live. Deadi, an early death, was something too serious, too weighty, to have befallen him. So I found myself returning again and again, with increasing speculative uncertainty, to those outlandish rumours as to what had happened to him. In particular I could not get out of my head Monique's theatrically tearful account of his involvement with the Resistance – a Resistance, by the way, of which at the time I could see little sign. Could it be true? Could what she told me be a garbled and melodramatised version of something that had really been the case, and of which the story of his having been mistakenly interned was another mangled variant? Might Axel really have been involved in some mad exploit that had turned deadly, and for which he had been picked up and had an unceremonious bullet put in the back of his head? Was it possible that I had utterly mistaken him, that in all the years I had known him he had hidden his true convictions from me? This is the trouble with the dead, that they take their secrets with them to the grave. When I tried to picture Axel huddled amid a band of bandoliered partisans in some smoke-filled cellar, poring over maps by the light of a guttering candle – "We intercept the convoy
here
" – the thing seemed preposterous, and yet I had to admit it was the kind of venture that would have fed an image he probably nursed of himself as a Byron, or a Pimpernel. I do not miss the irony for me in all of this. If, despite the comical implausibility of it, he really was an unsung hero, how piquant has been my predicament all along! I would be like the protagonist of one of those third-rate, so-called philosophical novels that were so popular in the haunted postwar years, the man who takes on the identity of a sinner all unaware that the one he is impersonating was a saint all along.

Given that possibility – I mean, that he might have been a martyr of the Resistance – given that, if nothing else, why, you will wonder, was I always so afraid of one day being unmasked? I suspect I understand it hardly any better than you do. What was it I did, after all, except adopt a dead man's name in a time of danger and mortal need? I took, or borrowed, rather, nothing except his identity, and death had already as good as deprived him of that. What has it profited me to have maintained this deception for half a century? Axel Vander's reputation in the world is of my making. It was I who clawed my way to this high place. I wrote the books, seized the prizes, flattered those who had to be flattered, struck down my rivals. What did he achieve, what legacy did he leave behind? A couple of monographs, a few not unperceptive reviews in little magazines, a handful of ill-judged poems. He was precocious, I grant him that, but you could drop the middle syllable from that word and it would better apply. And then there are those
Gazet
pieces, what about them? Although it was he who wrote them, the tarnished golden boy, they are my responsibility now. It was for his sake, in part, at least, that I hid them from the world for so long, until you, my curious cat, chanced upon them. You will not believe me, I suppose, when I say that when eventually it dawned upon my sometimes sluggish understanding that in taking on his identity I had also automatically taken on responsibility for his deeds, I made a pact with myself that in the event of being shown up as an impostor I would claim – wait for it – I would claim that it was I, and not he, who had written those damning articles, and that I had persuaded him to put his name to them because that was the only way that Hendriks would publish them in the
Gazet!
Laugh all you like, in the Elysian fields where you wander, but I have my own, peculiar code of honour. If you had exposed me to the world I would have been reviled for abandoning my people, betraying my race. It would have been said of me that in order to shed an identity of which I was ashamed, I had willingly stepped into the place left vacant by a minor monster whose poisonous opinions might one day be uncovered and attributed to me. Perhaps this is true. Yet if it was all no more, no less, than a cowardly attempt to throw off a past, and a people, of which I was ashamed, then the attempt failed. The past, my own past, the past of all the others, is still there, a secret chamber inside me, like one of those sealed rooms, behind a false wall, where a whole family might live in hiding for years. In the silence, in solitude, I close my eyes and hear them in there, the mouse-scuffles of the little ones, the grown-ups' murmurings, their sighs. How quiet they go when danger draws near.
Shush!
Something creaks. A child's wail is promptly stifled. Someone puts an ear to the wall, a cautioning finger lifted, while the others stand motionless, unbreathing, big-eyed. Knives of light come in through cracks in the plaster. Down in the courtyard engines are running, and boot-heels stamp on the cold cobbles. There are cries in the distance, shouts and cries. My eyelids lift. A breath. All gone, all of them; gone.

By the way, I had a dream, last night, or this morning, some time recently, at any rate. It has just come back to me. Shall I tell it to you? It was not properly a dream, or what I recall of it is not; it may be only a fragment of a night-long saga the rest of which I have forgotten. As is so often the case with dreams, it impresses me as highly significant even though I cannot say what it might signify. I was standing in darkness, on a high promontory; I knew it was high because of the air that wafted against my face, deep and chill, not at all pestilential. I had the sense of a precipice before me, and of a great plain below, stretching a great way off. Lightning fitfully illuminated a far horizon. Nothing happened. I was simply standing there on the brink of that dark immensity, like Dante awaiting the arrival of Virgil. Then from out of the darkness – I note the increasingly ecclesiastical sonorousness of these formulations – a great voice spoke, the voice of Yahweh himself, it might be.
Here,
it said,
here are interred all the Abrahams and Isaacs; here is their tomb.
That is all I remember: the darkness, the high place, the dim horizon, and that voice. And a great feeling of sorrow, too, not the sorrow of mourning or loss, but of being present at some grand and terrible, unpreventable tragedy.