Shroud (34 page)

Authors: John Banville

BOOK: Shroud

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In an access of wonderment, the wonderment of a child who has found out one of the adult world's big secrets, I had to tell someone of these discoveries. Kristina Kovacs would not do; to her, so far advanced in dying, it would all have come as no more than a distant twittering, the mere gossip of the merely living. That I should blurt out such things to Franco Bartoli was unthinkable. I might have confided in his mother, certainly my secrets would have been safe with her, no sooner heard than forgotten. However, in the end it was Dr. Zoroaster that I turned to as confidant and confessor. It was on the day that he helped me to move Kristina Kovacs into the apartment here. Yes, I have brought her to live with me, or, more accurately, to die, as she herself remarked, with one of her wry smiles that are so rare now. There had been an ambulance from the hospital, and two blue-jawed helpers in white coats, who looked more like barbers than medical attendants but were gentle all the same, had manoeuvred her up the stairs in a wheelchair and got her into bed – I have given over my bedroom to her, and fixed up a crib for myself on the couch in the other room. The Doctor had given her a sedative, and she was barely conscious, muttering to herself in a language I could not identify, her poor head lolling. Bald and shrunken, still in her white hospital gown, she had the look of a wigless eighteenth-century savant at his levee. The Doctor and I were standing together at the foot of the bed, watching her, when I heard myself starting to tell him everything. Well, no, not everything; lifelong habits of dissembling die hard. I told him how Cass Cleave had known things about me, without saying what those things were, exactly, and how when I discovered what she knew I realised at once and for the first time that my wife had known them too. He listened with calm attention, standing there in his big coat and his scarf, not looking at me but keeping his gaze bent on the by now comatose woman. The city's first snow of the season had begun to fall, and a chill breath was seeping in at the low window beside the bed, and all around us was a muffled hush. As the waning year progressively turns paler the more pronounced becomes the Assyrian swarthiness of Dr. Zoroaster's face; he has the fierce dark eye and raptor's profile of a desert monarch. One of the most striking aspects of his curious presence, at once unsettling and reassuring, is the quality of stillness he maintains. He seems to function on a principle of intermittent entropy. He will rise out of immobility and silence into movement and speech and then subside into himself again and be as if he had not stirred or spoken. At times it will take so long for him to reply to a question or formulate a remark that it will seem he is not attending to the outer world at all, but is at rest in some remote, inner sphere of enervated contemplativeness, oblivious calm. It is, I suppose, the dwelling place of one who has survived. Now he allowed an extra lengthy silence to elapse, and, since already I regretted having spoken, I was entertaining the wistful hope that he might forgo any response at all. He was lighting a cigarette with that conjuror's gestural grace which is another of his characteristics, his hands making slow hoops through which wreaths of smoke drifted and drooped, and had I not been so mesmerised watching him perform I might have registered sooner the strangeness of what it was he had begun to say. He asked if I had noticed the surprise that he had shown when I had first told him my name. "You remember?"he said. "It was a pleasant occasion. We were having coffee, at the Bicerin." I remembered, but I did not remember him being surprised; what would constitute an expression of surprise, anyway, in that mummified, regal mask that is his face? He was surprised, he said, because he had heard the name Axel Vander before, a long time ago, in altogether different circumstances and surroundings. Here he paused, a hand holding the cigarette suspended before his mouth and his eyes narrowed against the smoke, remembering. He turned slowly and walked out of the bedroom into the study, where lamplight and snowlight were joined in feeble contest. He went to the window and gazed out through its grimy panes, watching the white flakes drifting down into the street. I could feel my heart beating, a tentatively apprehensive measure, getting ready for what shocks might come. "Snow," the Doctor murmured. "Yes, snow." He had encountered the Vanders, he said, in a place in a forest, a sort of way station, while they and he were awaiting transportation elsewhere. They were a middle-aged couple, healthy still but in a state of great emotional distress. They had exchanged for food the last of a small cache of diamonds they had managed to bring with them, concealed in the linings of their clothes, and their prospects, like the prospects of all those brought to that place, were bleak. Already they had lost a son, destroyed, so they told him, by the actions of a treacherous friend. "Destroyed?" I said faintly. Or perhaps I only thought of saying it. I sat down slowly at my desk and leaned an arm on it. There are certain exhalations that sound like one's last breath. Where were they bound, the Vanders, I asked, where were they being transported to? He shrugged, without turning from the window. "East," he said.

I am waiting for Franco Bartoli to come, as he comes every day, to visit Kristina Kovacs. He is growing his beard again, as if in an attempt to compensate for the loss of Kristina's hair. I think she does not always recognise him. I leave them alone together, although I suspect Franco wishes I would stay. When he has done his duty and paid his visit I invite him to sit with me for a while before he leaves; we drink a glass of wine, he sniffles a little, blows his nose and tries to talk about things, Kristina Kovacs, his work, happenings out in the great world; Cass Cleave he does not mention, no doubt to spare my feelings. I tell him again Dr. Zoroaster's curious story about the people he met in the camp in the forest, the people calling themselves Vander. I am really retelling it to myself. What am I to think? I recall Axel's father doing his Moses and Rahel routine, how persuasive a mimic he was. But if they…? If Axel…?What am I to think? Franco Bartoli finishes his wine and, sighing, departs. When I have heard his car drive away I put on my slouch hat, take up my stick, and, having looked in on Kristina, go out and stroll the winter streets, my daily promenade, my daily harlequinade. I think on what a gallimaufry we are, Franco and poor Kristina, the Doctor, me. The city is quiet at this time of year. The dead, though, have their voice. The air through which I move is murmurous with absences. I shall soon be one of them. Good. Why should I have life and she have none? She. She.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We set up a word…but not"truths,"p.
v, Nietzsche,
The Will to Power,
482, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (NewYork, 1968).

"A city child… a fantasy born of my longing to belong,"pages 46 – 47, is adapted from a passage in
The Future Lasts a Long Time,
by Louis Althusser, edited by Olivier Corpet and Yann Moulier Boutang, translated by Richard Veasey (London, 1993). Other themes in that book have been alluded to and employed elsewhere in the text, as have themes in the life and various works of Paul de Man.

"Of all the traditional characters…He has none, this Harlequin,"
pages 241 – 42, is a combined adaptation of passages from
The Italian Comedy,
by Pierre Louis Duchartre, translated by Randolph T. Weaver (NewYork, 1966), and
St. Petersburg Dialogues,
by Joseph de Maistre, translated by Richard A. Lebrun (Toronto, 1993).

The description in Part Two of the persecution of Jews in Belgium is not historically accurate, and is based on eyewitness accounts from Germany in
The Klemperer Diaries 1933 – 1945,
by Victor Klemperer (London, 2000), and from Romania in
Journal 1935-1944,
by Mihail Sebastian (Chicago, 2000).

Thanks to: LudoAbicht, Ortwin de Graef, Fergus Martin, Hedwig Schwall.

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