Shroud (8 page)

A touch on my arm made me turn. For a second I did not recognise Kristina Kovacs. It was not that she had aged very much, or changed greatly in appearance since I had seen her last, yet all the same something had happened to her. She looked not like herself but like a close relative, her own twin, perhaps, vaguer than the woman I had known, less sharply defined, faded, somehow, and somehow hollow-seeming. I could not think what to say to her, and instead leaned down quickly and kissed her on the cheek. Her skin was warm and dry, and seemed to vibrate tinily all over its surface, as if she were in the grip of a fever. She put a hand to the spot where I had kissed her and gave a familiar, dusky laugh – I am not the kissing kind – and leaned back from the shoulders to look up at me, holding her head to one side, her black eyes bright with fond malice and amusement. She exclaimed at how well I looked; she seemed genuinely surprised, as if she had come to a place in her life that allowed only of disimprovements. And yet she was no more than half my age. I wondered if she could recall with the same sweet, poignant clarity as I did that afternoon years before when she had come unannounced to my hotel room, in Budapest, or Bucharest, was it, or Belgrade? The place does not matter, only the moment. I remembered her salmon-coloured slip and the solemn way she lay down on her back before me on the bed, as if she had been felled by the awesome force of her own passion. I bit her lips until they bled, I licked the soles of her feet. Now she was asking me what I would speak on tomorrow at the conference, and Franco Bartoli popped up like a toy man at my elbow and, smoothing a hand on his fine, soft, gleaming beard, said with a roguish smirk that surely Professor Vander could have only one subject, here, in Turin…? I did not know what he was talking about. "I have prepared nothing," I said. I wanted him to be gone from my side. I was picturing the sprinkle of freckles in the hollow between Kristina Kovacs's pale, mismatched and somehow melancholy breasts. Behind her now the smoky city stretched away to the mountains in the distance with their furled rim of cloud. She was still gazing up at me with that wry, intimate smile. She has, or had, a habit of moving her head very slightly from side to side, as if she were swaying in time to the measures of a slow, inner melody. I felt unwell. The sour wine had parched the linings of my mouth. I leaned out to set my emptied glass on the table and took the opportunity to elbow Bartoli as if by accident in his little paunch, which made me feel better, then stamped away from him and Kristina Kovacs with pointed rudeness and planted myself before one of the glass walls with my back to the room, glaring bleakly out over the city. Behind me the buzz of conversation faltered briefly and caught itself up on a higher, more brittle note: Axel Vander being a boor, as usual. As I had at the hotel window that morning, I imagined again how I would seem to someone looking up from the streets below, an airborne figure, suspended on an angled stick and perhaps about to plummet, a decrepit, lost archangel. Once more I experienced a burning, bile-like rush of self-pity, pure and unfocused. Kristina Kovacs came and stood beside me, a breathing presence, the crown of her head level with my shoulder. I fancied I caught a whiff of her breath, warm, brownish and bad.Together we looked out at the distant mountain ranges. "I think I have been found out," I heard myself saying, in a tone of laboured, unconvincing lightness. "I had a letter. Someone has been looking into my past. She is coming here." I glanced sidelong at Kristina, and smiling she returned my glance. "She?" she murmured, shaking her head. "Oh, Axel, have you been foolish again?"

I was instantly abashed and angry at myself. I could not think why I had confided in her. She knew nothing about me or my past, the real or the invented one. What was she to me but an afternoon of mostly simulated passion in an overheated hotel room in a snowbound city I would never return to? I have always supposed it was those few hours in bed that had prompted the belated review she wrote of
After Words.
The review was a light piece, intended to be teasingly allusive; it had struck an incongruously frivolous note amid the weighty lucubrations of
Débat.
The letter of thanks I sent to her when the piece appeared had cost me much effort. I had sought to match her sly, arch tone, but the result was unsatisfactory in a way I could not quite make out. Her note in reply was all innocence and warm affection, with no mention of our tryst. Now I wondered uneasily if perhaps she did know more about me than she pretended, about my past, I mean, my interesting past. Well, what did it matter any more? That harpy even now on her way from Antwerp would likely be the end of me. I was, I realised, looking forward to the prospect of destruction. Yes, let it come, I thought, almost gaily, I shall welcome it! All at once, in place of the anger and self-pity of a minute ago, I had a sensation of incipient weightlessness, as if at any moment I might float upward, wingless and yet wonderfully volant, and drift away free, into air, and light, the empty, cold and brilliant blue.

"I am dying, Axel," Kristina Kovacs said.

She was looking at the floor with an almost girlish air of surprise and faint shame, as if it were some passionate secret she had blurted out. "Yes, I am dying," she said, more softly this time yet with more force, testing it, impressing on herself the incredible truth of it. I stared down at her. An aeroplane passed low above the building with a ripping rumble, and an instant later its vast shadow flashed across the glass walls. Kristina smiled, and shook her head ruefully, and said she was sorry, and that I must forget she had spoken. "Tell me about your girl," she said with awful, brave brightness. "The one who has found you out, I mean. You said it was a girl, didn't you? In the past it always was. What dreadful secret has she uncovered?" She laughed, not unkindly. I gripped the walking stick fiercely in my fist. How did she think she had the right to speak to me like this? I am Axel Vander. People do not say such things to me, with such impudence. She took a step nearer and put a hand on my arm, her grip at once urgent and infirm. I knew what was coming. I drew back from her touch. The air seemed suddenly thick, unbreathable. "Do you remember Prague?" she said. Prague, then, not Belgrade, not Budapest. I would say nothing. "So hot," Kristina murmured, her gaze blurring as she smiled into the past, "so hot, that hotel room…" This was intolerable. I looked about. Someone must rescue me. Where was that fool Bartoli, now that he was needed? "I'm sorry," I snarled, "forgive me," and wiping my mouth on my sleeve I turned from her abruptly and launched myself out across the sea-wide floor toward the door and escape. Franco Bartoli came hurrying after me, yelping. I brandished my stick, more in threat than farewell, and plunged on, a man pursued.

When she came out of the train station the street lamps were still palely burning in the dawn light and the air was the colour of dirty water. A map of the city showed her that it was not far to the hotel where he was staying. She decided to walk. A tram came lurching along its line. She liked trams, the ungainly, earnest look of them. She waited on the pavement as it passed, her bag in her hand, her raincoat over her arm. She felt like a figure from an earlier time, with that coat and bag, her plain dress and old-fashioned shoes, the eager, untried younger self of someone who in time would be famous, famously tragic, perhaps. Often she saw herself like this, in other guises, other possible lives, and so vividly it seemed she must have lived before. She shivered a little, and put on her raincoat; she had expected it would be warmer, this far south. Later the sun would come out. She had hardly slept on the train, huddled in a corner seat in a crowded compartment with her bag under her feet and her folded raincoat for a pillow. The train had kept stopping at deserted stations, and would stand for long minutes creaking and sighing in the night-deep, desolate silence, before setting off again with a series of loud clanks. Once she had pressed her face to the window and peered up and had seen that they were racing along beside a range of high, jagged mountains, whose sheer bases came to within a yard or two of the track. She had supposed they must be the Alps. She could glimpse their peaks, sparkling and unreal so high up there in the moonlight. She remembered being in the mountains once long ago with her father; he had pulled her up a slope on a sled, and afterwards had let her take a sip of his mulled wine. In the dark hour before dawn she dozed for a while; it was less like sleep than one of those fretful night fevers of childhood, and she woke repeatedly with a start, thinking one of the other passengers had touched her, or tried to interfere with her belongings. As they were arriving at last a fat man had stood up too soon and when the train stopped he had pitched forward and almost fallen on her, and to save himself had clapped a huge hand on her shoulder, hurting her. He had smelled faintly of vomit. Now, shaky and light-headed, she set off across the broad avenue. In the piazza before her the starlings were waking noisily in the trees, and a great flock of pigeons rose up, their thousand wings making a noise like derisive applause.

She did not know what she would do when she got to the hotel. It was still early, and she would have to wait at least an hour before she could think of announcing her arrival. She would not mind waiting in the lobby, but she was not sure the hotel people would even let her come inside at such an early hour. The voices in her head started up then, as she had known they would, as they always did when she was uncertain or nervous, seizing their chance. It was as if a motley and curious crowd had fallen into step behind her, hard on her heels, and were discussing her and her plight among themselves in excited, fast, unintelligible whispers. She stopped for a moment and leaned against a shuttered shop window with a hand over her eyes, but with the world blacked out the din of voices only intensified. She took a deep breath and went on.

Dozing in the train she had dreamed of Harlequin in his half-mask. Then she had roused herself and brought out her notebook, her fountain pen.
H. the headman, his mask and bat. Maistre on the executioner: "who is this inexplicable being…?" Rip the mask from his face to find
–
another mask. Father father father.

The phantoms behind her fell back.

And now already here was the hotel, with a laurel bush in a pot at the foot of the steps. The glass door swung open automatically before her, and she wondered if instead of approaching it at the measured pace that was demanded she had run at it full tilt would it have still managed to open in time or would she have been too quick for the mechanism. She saw herself sprawled there on the marble step, amid big lances of shattered glass, the blood pumping from her throat and wrists. It struck her how like hospitals hotels are. A young man in a smart black suit behind the reception desk smiled at her non-committally. She walked past him with her gaze fixed straight ahead and her back arched, trying to look as if she had a perfect right to be there. She had never understood exactly how hotels work, or what the rules of hotel living are. For instance, how would paying guests be distinguished from the other people who would drift in and out here during the day, casual visitors, people coming for lunch, or for assignations in the bar, suchlike? Would that young man at the reception desk know she was not staying here? She had not asked him for a key, but she might have one, all the same, might have got it earlier from one of his colleagues, before he came on duty, and taken it with her when she went out. There was her bag, of course, but it was not very big, and might be a shopping bag, for all he knew. But why would she have gone out with a shopping bag at dawn, when no shops were open, and how could she be coming back now with it full?

The lobby was all gleaming marble surfaces, with hidden lighting and a low ceiling. There was a sort of pond in the middle where water splashed among ferns, soothingly. She took off her coat and sat down at one end of an uncomfortable leather couch that she knew the backs of her legs would stick to even through her dress. A large, indifferent silence hung about her. She wondered if the ferns in the pond were real or made of plastic; they looked suspiciously genuine. She was trying not to think of the voices; often, just thinking of them was enough to set them going. The young man from the reception desk came and asked, in English, with cool politeness, if she wished for anything, some coffee, perhaps, or tea? She shook her head; she did not know what the procedure for paying would be; she imagined herself offering him money only to be met with an offended stare. He was handsome, like a film actor, dark and smooth and poised. He smiled again, this time with a shadow of irony, she thought. As he was turning away he glanced at her bag and lifted an eyebrow, in a way that told her he knew she was not a guest. She wondered enviously how he had decided. Perhaps everyone checking in was photographed in secret, and the pictures were kept in a file under the desk, and he had gone through it and not found hers. More likely he had known just by the look of her, the way she was sitting, so straight, with her knees together and her hands folded in her lap; that, and the fact that she had not gone up in the lift, to her room, the room that she did not have. She looked at her watch and sighed. A single, gloating voice began whispering in her head.

Here I am, asleep again, and dreaming. In the dream I am in an aeroplane, or on it, rather, for the cabin is open to the sky, with a metal floor and a rounded metal canopy above supported on thin steel struts. There are other passengers on board but I cannot see them, the headrests of the seats are set too high. The air is gushing against my face, wonderfully cool and mild. Far below, through breaks in the cloud, I can see fields and rivers, little puffs of green that must be trees, and houses, and highways, a whole toy world laid out and stretching off to the curved horizon on all sides. As I fly along, feather-light and free, I am myself and also someone else, and this is all right, and natural. A stewardess comes and leans over me, telling me something, but when I look up at her I see that she has a bearded, pained face, the face of a man, gentle but not effeminate, the eyes lightly closed as in death, the lids stretched like paper or silk over the bulging orbs beneath. She is handing me something, a folded sheet of paper, a letter, perhaps, which I try not to accept, but she insists, still with that gentle, kindly, suffering expression.
Signore,
she is saying, with soft urgency, pointing to her bearded face,
signore, signore.
I push at her to make her stand aside, the paper crackling in my hand, and try to rise from my seat, but cannot, my leg will not let me. I know that the plane is going to crash, I can feel it dipping out of its headlong course, can feel the metal floor shivering with the strain. The world was rushing up to meet me, the objects in it growing bigger in sudden, ratcheted expansions, like a series of photographic enlargements being laid rapidly one over the other. At last I got myself upright, my leg severing itself painlessly at the hip and releasing me, and as I hopped bleeding down the aisle I saw that it was not an aeroplane I was travelling in but the open back of a lorry that bucked and swayed as it hurtled driverless through the smoke and blare of the midday traffic. There was a cry, and someone shouted something, and I woke, cold with sweat and clutching the edge of the mattress, my teeth clenched and my legs tangled in the sheets.