Shroud (31 page)

When in the morning I went back to Franco Bartoli's apartment he was not there, or at least did not appear, and instead Kristina received me, still in her black dinner dress, more ashen and red-rimmed than ever. She said she had not slept, but had spent the night at Cass Cleave's bedside. This seemed perfectly natural to my ears, as natural as the fact that I had, without any intention that I can now discern, packed Cass Cleave's bag and brought it with me from the hotel. I do believe that at these times our thinking is thought for us. Kristina when I handed her the bag made no comment. She led me into the dining room where we had eaten dinner the night before and bade me sit down at the table. In the spiked sunlight of morning the place had a slightly sweaty, panting atmosphere, as if the night's revels in the streets had broken in here and had only lately been quelled. Cass Cleave was right, it is the different air, the different smells, that mark a place as foreign. This room, fusty and watchful, was meant to be lived in only after dark, and the sunlight coming in at the window was scandalously bright and brash. Odd to think that for others, for Franco and his mother, for the old cook, this place was as familiar as the palms of their own hands. I have never belonged anywhere… I cleared my throat and enquired after Cass Cleave, diffident as a hospital visitor. Kristina was pouring coffee for me and did not lift her eyes from the cup. I could see my face reflected in the polish of the dining table, foreshortened, indistinct, the upper part of it seeming sinisterly masked. I was trying, inconse-quently but with some irritation, to recall the exact distinction between the terms
gemutskrank
and
geisteskrank.
"She wishes to be alone," Kristina Kovacs said. "For a while. She has things to consider." I nodded, not seeing how else to respond. There seemed a nice point of etiquette in play here, an etiquette to which I was not party. I felt distantly a dull, dragging sense of sundering and release, as the ship must feel in the first moment of heaving away from the dockside; it was, I realise now, an initial, premonitory twinge of the coming pains of loss. "I love her, you know," I heard myself say, almost peevishly, and would have gone red all over if my ancient hide were less leathery. Now it was Kristina's turn to nod, pursing her lips. I could hear the old cook scratching about in the kitchen. "Nevertheless," I said, overly loud, sounding to my own ears like a Victorian paterfamilias reluctantly acceding to a fortune hunter's request for his homely daughter's hand, "nevertheless, I shall let her go, if that is what she wants." Kristina, still looking down, pondered my words for a moment, and then looked up at me and smiled. "Oh, Axel," she said softly, "only someone incapable of love could love so selflessly."

Later, when I saw Cass Cleave, she was in Bartoli's garden, a cramped, sunless box of stubby grass and wilting foliage wedged between two high, stuccoed walls and the blank-windowed rear of another, looming apartment house. She was sitting on a wrought-iron chair in a corner beside a blue-blossoming bush, very straight, her slender neck extended and her hands calmly folded in her lap. Her hair, I noticed, had grown appreciably longer in the months that she had been with me, and was gathered now and tied behind
her head in what I believe is called a chignon. She was barefoot, and was wearing an old-fashioned white linen night-gown, lent to her by Bartoli's mother, no doubt. Placed there, all pale and russet, in front of the stained white wall, she might have been posing for a photograph, or awaiting, indeed, the arrival of the firing squad. As I approached, she looked up, her gaze not quite focused, and smiled vaguely, as if she were not sure whether I was real or only a comfortably familiar hallucination. I stood before her in the still and lifeless air, jabbing at the coarse grass with my stick. She waited, incurious, directing her blurred smile here and there. I said that I had heard that she wished to be left alone, and was unable to suppress the unexpected note of pique in my tone. I said she should know that Kristina Kovacs was ill, that she was, in fact, dying. I said that I had slept with her once, long ago, in Prague. "Yes," Cass Cleave said, "she told me." So. "And what," I asked, "did you tell her, in return?" She did not answer. I sighed. I had my little speech prepared. A livid cloud was creeping stealthily toward the sun. "You must understand," I said, "I shall have to go back to my life, and so must you go back to yours." I lightly laughed. "I have spent so much money here," I said, "my agent in Arcady, who handles my financial affairs, believes I am being blackmailed – which," with an archly frowning smile, "I am, in a way." I paced a step to right, to left, pivoting on my stick. I said that of course I loved her, but love is only an urge to isolate and be in total possession of another human being. "By loving you," I said, "I took you from the world, and now, I am giving you back. Do you see?" She listened to all this in silence, her head judiciously inclined, and now she nodded. I sighed again, impatiently. "Are you going to betray me?" I said. "Those newspaper things – will you reveal them, and betray me?" She sat quite still for a moment, then looked up with a little shiver, smiling, as if she were waking from a brief, refreshing sleep, and glanced about, in pleased surprise, it seemed, at the blue bush, and the white wall, and at me, standing before her, leaning on my stick. "We never saw the Shroud," she said. She rose from the iron chair and linked her arm in mine, and together we started back across the garden, toward the open garden window, where Kristina Kovacs stood, waiting for us, with her arms tightly folded under her bosom. "I have," Cass Cleave said softly, "something to tell you."

She left the city that day. Kristina Kovacs came to the hotel to inform me of her departure – her flight – bringing Franco Bartoli with her. When I saw them in the lobby, sitting side by side on the white couch by the indoor fountain where I had caught my first, unrecognising glimpse of the girl, they looked like a pair of errant children miserably awaiting their due of punishment. A thunderstorm that had been threatening for days had broken at last and was striding about the sky in lavish fury, banging its fists together and flinging down bolt upon jovian bolt with scarce a pause. A group of guests and one or two staff were crowded in the open front doorway, watching the palls of rain sweep along the street and sending up a collective sigh of appreciation and awe at each lightning flash. "But you said you would let her go," Kristina Kovacs said, looking up at me and blinking. "I thought – " The noise of the rain from outside was louder than the splashing water in the fountain. I struck the marble floor a blow with my stick. There are times when anger is a kind of pain, whining in one's head, high-pitched and hot, like a toothache. "You thought?" I cried. "You thought?
You did not think!"
Kristina went on blinking helplessly. No, she did not know where Cass Cleave had gone to; she had given her money, a considerable sum, enough for her to travel on for weeks, for months, perhaps. I made her promise, I made her swear, to tell me at once if she should hear from her. "You do not understand," I said, shaking my head from side to side, old wounded brute. "You do not understand!" I could have broken down and wept for rage. I had walked them to the door. A crackle of lightning lit the street, the crowd said
Ahh!
Kristina Kovacs went to the reception desk to borrow an umbrella, and Franco Bartoli laid a hand solicitously on my arm. "We thought you wanted to be rid of her," he said. "We thought you would be glad." I nodded wearily and said that yes, yes, glad, I was glad, of course. For a week I heard nothing. I seem to have done little else but pace, up and down my room, along the hotel corridors, from street to street, muttering, talking to myself and to Cass Cleave, railing at her and calling down curses on her head. In my overheated memory, the background to that interminable interval is all rolling, rumbling noise and thunder flashes, as if the storm that broke over the city on the day of her departure had continued on, without abating, day after day, night after empty night, in sympathy somehow with the turmoil in my heart. Then at last, banal as can be, came a postcard, from Genoa, with an antique photograph on the front showing, of course, a panoramic view of the Stagione cemetery.
There is to be an eclipse of the sun,
she wrote,
do you think the world will end?
Although she had given no address I had myself taxied at once to the station and was in Genoa by noon. I swung myself off the train and walked out into the sun and set off blindly up the first street facing me. The day was foully hot and the harbour stank. Crowds, cobbles, tottering palazzi.The street, a winding gorge, narrowed and then narrowed again, and then grew narrower still, and soon I was elbowing my way through a sort of souk where enormous, blue-black men in white djellabas lounged at stalls displaying slices of fried food and spilling bags of grain and unskinned kid goats with slashed windpipes hanging up by their little black hoofs. I sat down in a café and drank a glass of anis. The fat Arab proprietor leaned comfortably on the counter picking his teeth and talked to me in demotic French about his wives and his good-for-nothing sons. It was siesta time, the shutters were coming down. A circling fan in the ceiling stirred the drooping twists of flypaper. And at that moment, in that cheerfully alien place, I knew at last that she was lost to me for good. For good: how the language mocks us. I trailed back to the station, where I had to wait a peculiarly agonising hour for the next northbound train. It was late afternoon when I returned to the hotel, exhausted and feeling obscurely ashamed. I pulled the curtains in the room and climbed into the bed that still smelled faintly, or so I fancied, of her.

As the days went on more postcards came, from Rapallo, from Santa Margherita, from the five towns of the Cinque Terre, places I had never been to and had to imagine. I followed her progress along the Ligurian coast in a big old atlas that Franco Bartoli took down for me from a high shelf in that book-lined hallway of his. By now I had left the hotel and moved in with him and his Marna. It was a temporary arrangement, while I looked for somewhere permanent in which to set up my missing person bureau. Every afternoon Franco and I went together in his little car to the hospital on the city's industrial outskirts where Kristina Kovacs was undergoing a final, futile round of treatments. Most days we found her in a state of prostration and sleepy shock, like a survivor who has been pulled out of the rubble a week after an earthquake. Franco Bartoli was awkward in her presence, or perhaps it was only because I was there; he would sit on the metal hospital chair with his palms pressed between his knees, clearing his throat and stretching his neck up out of his too tight shirt-collar, or falling into protracted bouts of vacant staring from which he would emerge with a guilty start, casting a furtive glance at Kristina Kovacs and at me. He brought her flowers, they were a form of attempted propitiation, elaborate sprays of orchids and lilies and tuberoses that imparted an odour of the mortuary to the already faintly fetid air of the sick-room. Kristina had become touchingly dependent on him, asking him in a voice as thin as paper to do little services for her, to change the water in the vase on the window sill, to retrieve a dropped book, to ring for the nurse. The chemicals they were plying her with made her thirsty, and he would fill her water glass repeatedly and perch beside her on the bed and put an arm around her shoulders and help her to drink, and I would have to turn away and walk to the window and look out at the view of factories and shopping complexes smoking in the relentless summer heat. I brought Cass Cleave's postcards as they arrived, and Kristina had the nurses pin them on the wall beside her bed. Some days she would pass an entire visit lying motionless on her side, facing away from Franco and me, with a hand under her cheek, gazing steadily at these gaudy scenes of nude blue skies and silky seas. After we had left her Franco and I would go to a bar at the other side of an unrelievedly busy intersection, which we had to cross in zigzag fashion, perilously hurrying from one whimsical set of traffic lights to another. The bar was a nondescript place frequented by long-distance lorry drivers, solitary and haunted-eyed, and swarthy young thugs of uncertain provenance who passed the time playing the pinball machine in relentless, seething silence. As we sat there at the smeared metal counter, Franco with his coffee and me with my grappa, I would sense him trying to frame all the things that he wished to say, all the things that he felt he should be able to say, and failing every time; he was like the espresso machine behind the bar, a gleaming, big-bellied monster with countless knobs and gauges, that was forever building up a head of steam and never getting anywhere.

By the way, I do not know if it is a portent, or, if it is, what it might portend, but I have found Mama Vander's pill-box! It had slipped through a hole in the pocket of a jacket that I seldom wear and lodged in the lining. I am childishly delighted to have it back, and have been feeding it, at the rate of a tablet per visit, from Kristina Kovacs's store of pain-killers, against the day when I may need to kill my own pain, for good. Kristina will not go short: Dr. Zoroaster keeps her generously, not to say criminally, well supplied. It is he who tends her, now that she has left the hospital; they spend much time alone together, I hear them quietly talking, hour on hour, I do not know of what.

In my time at Bartoli's apartment his mother kept carefully out of my way. I felt a certain sympathy for her. It must have been distressing to be confronted anew each morning by this startling stranger, for I am certain that overnight, every night, monotonously as in a fairy-tale, the fact of my lodging there slipped through her hopelessly porous memory. Maria, the ancient cook, on the other hand, took a great shine to me, her
colosso,
and plied me coquettishly with all sorts of delicacies and sweetmeats, plates of pasta smothered in fresh truffles, and slices of
panforte
that threatened to pull out by the roots my few remaining molars, and tiny glasses of a metal-bright, thick, sweet liqueur with floating coffee beans and a wisp of ghostly blue flame trembling on the brim. She and Franco Bartoli between them had rigged up a makeshift study for me in a room at the back of the apartment looking on to the gloomy garden; here, as Franco indicated, in a tone of hushed reverence, I would be free to do my work without fear of interruption. That room became for him a hallowed place, a sanctum of intellectual sacrifice, a tabernacle of the real presence – he was, I discovered with some surprise, devoutly religious – consecrated here at the heart of his little domestic establishment. I would hear him creaking past the door on tiptoe, could almost feel him smiling in excited happiness and pride at his good fortune in having Vander the Great for a house guest. I had not known he held me in such high, such heroic, regard. No detractor ever ruffled the placid surface of my self-esteem, but an eager admirer can make me cringe for shame. I did not have the heart to tell poor Franco that my work, such as it was, had all been done, and there would be no more. Instead, I went each morning dutifully into that room, with the look of a man whose gaze is fixed unswervingly on immortality, and shut the door firmly behind me, and felt all outside it go still, waiting for the soundless roar of my mighty intellect starting up its engine. All a sham. For hours I would sit there, slumped in an uncomfortable antique chair, an elbow on the card table that served as a desk, my chin on my fist, gazing out at the place by the garden wall where Cass Cleave mat last day had stood up from her chair and taken my arm and walked me off across the parched and crackling grass and told me, so calmly, smiling, with eyes cast down, as though it were the simple answer to an unanswerably complicated question, that she was going to have a child, and that it would be mine.