Shroud (27 page)

He asked her what she was writing, tried to read over her shoulder. He sounded like her father, the way he spoke, teasing her, making fun of her. He imitated her accent, called her his colleen, his Cathleen Ni Houlihan, his wild Irish girl. She saw herself lying down under his hand, docile as… as something, she did not know what. She devised ways of making him attend her. She saw herself as a puppet, with lacquered cheeks and fixed mad grin, popping up in front of him, look at me, look at me! She told him about Otho and Adelaide. He only laughed. The weeks went on, the summer burgeoned. The voices spoke to her about him, always about him, now. His hands were beautiful, she was afraid of them, those long, fine fingers. Again and again he asked her what Max Schaudeine had told her, demanding to know. She lied to him, said she knew nothing more about him than that he had written those things for the newspaper. Then he would look at her, thinking, thinking, his jaw working. He was afraid of her, she could see it. But she would not harm him. No, she would not harm him. Harlequin.

Many years ago, in America, I found myself stalled for a couple of semesters on a high, snowy campus way out west. I was waiting to take up the first of what would prove to be a pleasingly ascending succession of posts at Arcady, and had been invited to fill the interval at Frozen Peaks, where what was to be required of me in the way of work would be happily small and the remuneration seductively large. Magda liked the place, its bleak Slavic prospects, its white birches and blue birds, and we might have stayed if I had let her have her way. We had been there a week, huddling against the cold in a rented, grey-painted wood-frame house with a swing on the porch and a big tree in the garden scrambled all over by beady-eyed squirrels, when we were invited by the President of the college to a party celebrating the end, or the beginning, of some part of the university year – for all the time I spent in the academic New World I never quite got the hang of its rituals. It was a not disagreeable occasion. The President lived in a fine old colonial house on a hill above the campus. There was an enormous log fire in the entrance hall that gave off cracks like gunshots, and we were greeted by a soft-spoken elderly negro in a white jacket and white gloves bearing silver mugs of steaming and, as I was quickly to discover, extremely strong punch. Magda and I knew no one, but it did not matter. People kept coming up and talking to us, in that breezy and yet intimate, indeed faintly suggestive, way peculiar to college people and their spouses in the more out-of-the way necks of the American wood. Polka-dotted bow ties were much in evidence, and the dresses the women were wearing diat year were tight in the bosom and full in the skirts, and after the third mug of punch and a week of breathing the thin mountain air, I was overcome by the blurred sense of having stumbled into die midst of a flock of brightly plumed, cacophonous birds, the females of which all seemed plumply, pinkly available.

President Frost – how he loved his title – was a big, rangy, robust Swede with a shock of flaxen hair and an open smile and a handshake diat could have cracked walnuts. He welcomed me with warm indifference and introduced me to his wife, a handsome, large-boned woman in shimmering scarlet who for some reason thought I was Russian, and remarked widi an apologetic laugh that she was sure the bitty old snowfalls in this part of the world could not compare with the boreal blizzards to which I must be accustomed. She immediately took charge of Magda, whom she somewhat resembled, while the President plucked me by the sleeve and led me off into a corner of the room where, as he said, we could be out of die way of all diis flapdoodle. He spoke of this and that in a practised, easy way, rocking relaxedly on his heels and looking out over the heads of his guests – we were of a height, the two of us – like a scout scanning the mountaintops, not waiting for a contribution from me, and probably not listening to himself, eidier. Then he paused and turned widi his woodsman's lopsided grin and looked me speculatively up and down. "Let me give you a piece of advice, son," he said. "You're a fine-looking young fella, despite your war-wounds, and I don't doubt half the female students here will fall for you. But go careful, and remember: never screw a nut." We were both silent for a moment – what could I possibly have said? – and he went on looking into my face with an admonitory twinkle, then gave a great plosive laugh and, having driven a punch playfully into my shoulder, linked his arm in mine and said we should go and join the ladies.

I have been looking into Mandelbaum's Syndrome. It was not easy to find information on, for Mr. Mandelbaum is choosy, and comes to call only on a select, misfortunate few. The malady will present itself in disparate forms, which makes it difficult to identify with certainty, but there are a number of telltale signs which are constant. The seizures, presaged by their aura, most commonly a phantom odour or perfume, are characteristic, and frequently they lead the physician mistakenly to diagnose epilepsy. Schizophrenia too is a common misdiagnosis, although there are some authorities who consider the syndrome to be no more – no more! – man a rarefied form of that deplorable affliction. In Doctor Vander's opinion, Mr. Mandelbaum occupies a redoubt three-quarters of the way toward the bad end of the scale between manic depression and full-blown dementia. The patient will suffer delusions, hear voices, manifest compulsive behaviour, and will be prey to bouts of paranoia, sometimes of an extreme nature. I am quoting here. There is no cure. Palliatives have been tried, Oread, for example, and the lithium carbonate – based Empusa, and even the various Lémures and Lamia, with discouragingly poor results. The prognosis for those inflicted with the syndrome is not a promising one, although long-term statistics are scarce, since sufferers rarely survive – rarely permit themselves to survive, that is – into old or even middle age.

I knew that Cass Cleave was mad. Well, not mad, exactly, but not sane either. The very first time I spoke to her face-to-face, in the hotel lobby that spring morning, I saw straight off mat she was unhinged. I did not mind. In fact, that was the very thing that drew me to her. There was her youth, of course, and her peculiar, skewed beauty – which, by the way, it took me a long time to discern – but it was the chaos and violence of her mind that fascinated me most. Hers was not a comfortable presence in which to be. By day there were the unstaunchable streams of disconnected talk punctuated with profound silences under which could be sensed the telegraph-wire fizzing of her over-stretched nerves, while in the night I would feel her lying sleepless there in that hotel bed beside me, her mind racing, mounted perilously on its waking, runaway nightmare. She was a battleground where uncon-tainable forces waged constant war. She was all compulsion, down to the way she gnawed her already well-gnawed nails until the quicks of them bled. I would catch her watching me from under her hair with a kind of savage surmise, like an animal watching from its covert the approach of the hunter. I knew when she was about to start hearing her voices, from the way she held her head at that peculiar tilt, still and alert and breathlessly expectant. At times I could tell the voices were so intense that I fancied I caught something of them myself, a sort of slithery din, like the noise of rain on a roof. Then the fugues began, I think I am employing the term correctly. She would fix on some tiny, concrete detail and elaborate upon it in fantastic flights of invention. In her version of the world everything was connected; she could trace the dissolution of empires to the bending of a blade of grass, with herself at the fulcrum of the process. All things attended her. The farthest-off events had a direct effect on her, or she had an effect on them. The force of her will, and all her considerable intellect, were fixed upon the necessity of keeping reality in order. This was her task, and hers alone.

She had recompense, of a sort. The affliction which darkened her mind also made it burn with a fierce, a frightening, intensity. If her brain had been right she might have been a real scholar; not a great one, probably, but a scholar all the same. There was a demented brilliancy to the way she could connect the seemingly unconnectable strands of the warp and weft of a subject and weave a shining something out of them, however quickly it might unravel in her hands. I was aware in myself of a professional disapproval, a distress, almost; had she been my student, so I fatuously told myself, I might have been able to show her how to turn her excess energies in a disciplined direction. She could not keep at a thing until it was done. Her enthusiasms were brief, her conclusions inconclusive. Worse, she had no detachment, could not divide herself from her subject – how should she, since she was the one, true subject? Thus in the thesis she had begun on Rousseau's children, and had never finished – she had brought it with her, a great wad of dog-eared foolscap, thinking to impress me – she drew a sly but unmissable comparison between the fate of those miserable babes, no sooner born than abandoned into the care of an orphanage by the philosopher and their mother, and what she saw as her own spiritually orphaned plight. And Kleist, whose last, fraught hours on earth she had attempted to chronicle in exhaustive detail, was, in her conception of him, as I quickly understood, nothing much more than a harbinger of her. She had been in and as quickly out of half a dozen academic institutions: her papa, according to her a once renowned but now broken-down actor, was financially indulgent. I wonder that she did not find her way to Arcady. However, what made her most difficult, most infuriating, to deal with, was that even in her maddest flights of fantasy there was always somewhere a hard grain of simple, sane, commonplace reality, for which she would demand, and get, acknowledgement, and then use that acknowledgement as a hook to draw one deeper into the whirlpool of her delusions. She was cunning. She could always judge – well, not always, not ultimately – how far to go, and when to stop. I can see her still, sitting cross-legged on the bed, her elbows on her knees and her head sunk between her shoulder blades and a hand thrust in her hair, talking, talking, talking, and then suddenly looking up sideways, sharply, measuring at a glance the scale of my scepticism, or exasperation, or boredom, and adjusting accordingly the intensity of her insistences.

Strangest of all the manifestations of her condition, eerier even than the seizures she was subject to, were those states of utter absence into which she would suddenly fall, without warning, and from which she was not to be roused or recalled until whatever other place it was she had been in was ready to release her. For it was absence. Although she may have seemed in those intervals like a catatonic, she would retain a quality of such vividness, such – what shall I say? – such immanence, that it was plain she was fully conscious, but, as it were, conscious somewhere else. I confess I found these lapses extremely unnerving. She would falter, and stop still as a breathing statue, and I would feel her leaving herself, as the ancients believed they could feel the soul abandoning the body of one who was dying. I too would halt, transfixed, as if I had felt the passing of a ghost, and wait for her to come back. We never spoke of any of this. I never asked where she had been, or even if she was aware of having been gone. In fact, I never mentioned any of the signs of her condition, and certainly not the condition itself, held in check as I was by a reserve that was as arbitrary and as rigid as any primitive taboo. Just as she was preserving the world, so I must preserve something in her, some last and vital shred of decorum, privacy, equilibrium. However, lest I present an image of myself bent low in hieratic submission at the feet of a capricious moon goddess – although they were lovely, in their way, those large, long, slender, pale feet of hers – I should say that my treatment of her in general was not pretty, no, not pretty at all. She was demented, and hardly more than a child, a lost poor damaged soul who trusted me, and I betrayed that trust. In defence of myself, although I do not deserve defending, I shall adduce only two articles of evidence, the first of which is a product of the second. I was embarrassed. Now, there is embarrassment, and there is embarrassment. That under which I sweated was of a kind usually experienced only in those dreams in which one finds oneself caught trouserless in a public place. Do not mistake me. My shame was not that I had taken advantage of a creature who was a fraction of my age and of unsound mind. I did not care how the hotel waiters might smirk, or Franco Bartoli frown, or Kristina Kovacs offer me her sadly smiling, patronising sympathy; where lust and its easements are concerned I am and always was beyond good and evil, or at least beyond delicacy and bad taste. No. The trouble lay elsewhere. This is the second line of evidence for my defence, and the source of my embarrassment: the fact, simply, that I loved her.

I have allowed I hope a decent interval for the laughter, the jeers and the catcalls to subside. Now I must qualify this startling declaration. It was a great surprise to me, a great shock, at this late, last stage of my life, to find myself host to such a sudden and unfamiliar, if not forgotten, emotion. Inside every old man, or inside this one, anyway, there lives on an unageing youth who never had enough of love, of the Keats and moonlight variety, and who at the least encouragement and in the most unsuitable circumstances will leap out, posy in paw and glans athrob, ready to scale the ivy to the rose-hung balcony and his beloved's bedchamber. He is of a serious, a solemn, bent, this flushed and swooning Romeo; he is after more than mere gratification of the flesh. Despite the pococurantish pose to which in the matter of love I am given like all my kind – men, I mean, old or young – I approach the female body on the knees of my soul. Never, since that April evening in my earliest springtime when bad little Lili Erstenheim lifted her skirts for me in the shadows under the staircase of our apartment building and laughing seized my rigid virginity and slipped it effortlessly, like a lollipop, into the hot hollow between her skinny thighs, never, I say, have I been able to breach that holy of holies, wherever I have encountered it, without a numinous shiver. To thrust a limb of one's living flesh into the living flesh of another, how can that be other than a sacred or a sacrilegious act?