Napoleon's Roads (8 page)

The top of the tower/lean-to/house roof is now near the edge of the battlement. They can lean their arms in their usual place and study the grain of the wood. They can roll pebbles down its roof. They can scramble out on it with only the one sheet to hold them, and hammer on its sides. At last, surely, they should be able to see how it has been built, how it has climbed, at last they should be able to hear the builders. But nothing. Even when, not on watch, they stay up all night just to listen. The usual problems with the first morning light. The usual doubts about sleep, dreaming. At one point one of the soldiers thinks he hears a baby cry – the least plausible thing, and sure guarantee that he had been dreaming, that his mind wandered away. Another hears a faint knocking, as if someone were trying to get out, though it might have been a sound coming from much farther away.

Inch by inch, inexorably, ineluctably, inevitably, it passes the lip of the observation ledge, begins to fill in the space between two of the battlements, then – what, a month later? two? – clears the top. Not wood like the rest of it, but stone on this side, just like the stone of the Wall itself, as if this new wall were a kind of counter-Wall, if only for ten feet of it. Until something else appears, a lintel, and below it the beginnings of a thick shutter, or door. Door. Of wood that might be drilled through, though so thick, when they try, and so hard, that everything that they have breaks or falls short. How long is it now, three, four years? And a month more before the door itself, or rather doors, for they are double-opening, rise clear. Locked, it seems, from the inside; or barred, since there is no key-hole, no sign that they are intended to be opened from without. No hinges visible. But what else can they be but doors? And what else can doors that can only be opened from within be for but to let people out?

They hammer – at first relentlessly, then every time they think of it, walking past – but receive no answer. They try to employ a battering-ram, but can use only one of the benches from inside the guardhouse and by now, although the lean-to/tower/house seems to be growing no further, the doors are too high for easy reach and they have to erect a platform along which to run with the ram, so that, given the narrowness of the top of the Wall in the first place, the battering is no more use than pounding with the fist. For a time, trepidatiously, having done all this, they do nothing but wait, watch, and, when circumstances allow, sit or lean before the doors, by day or at night, listening. There is a tiny space between the bottom of the doors and the stone threshold, scarcely enough to pass a sheet of parchment, let alone shine a light through. By day, as far as can be told, there is only darkness within, although by night those who have spent a long time watching swear that a glimmer, a thin line of light can sometimes be seen, always as if at the edge of the eye, gone by the time they look back at it. Two of those who have seen it claim also, although with less confidence, that they have heard the shuffling of feet.

All of them feel a mounting nervousness. On a bleak winter day when the duty guard reports hearing a louder-than-usual sound from within, like the shifting of furniture or movement of a piece of timber, they determine, around the brazier, that they can no longer leave things as they have been, and that, if they cannot get into the house/lean-to/tower structure – ‘structure', yes, that is what they should call it – they should at least ensure as best they can that who- or whatever is within it cannot get out.

Outward-opening doors without handles are hard things to bar. Wheedling the staircase guards, claiming to be fixing a large shutter that has blown off its old hinges and onto the enemy side in a high wind, they are able to get several thick planks and the materials to fasten them across the doors, using the remaining planks and one of the heavy guardhouse benches, dismantled, to create a further reinforcement, which they anchor in the battlement itself by a judicious removal of stones. Should there be forces within the structure strong enough to break through such a barrier they will at least issue some kind of warning in their attempt to do so. Such, in any case, is the theory.

There has been no growth of the structure for several months, as if the intention all along has been to reach the level at which the door is exposed and to reach that level only. A further replacement is made, this time of the sergeant himself. In the short time they have in which to discuss the matter before he has to leave he advises them to say nothing to the man who replaces him. The structure, for all that any of them knows, has been there since the construction of the Wall itself, as has the barricade to its doors. If the new sergeant wants to remove it, the departing sergeant says, or to try to do anything about the doors themselves, let him do what he can. This, he says, is their chance to absolve themselves of any responsibility. They have only to act as if the lean-to/tower/house has always been a part of the landscape, and refer any question about it to Headquarters.

The new sergeant arrives, a slight, rather sullen man from one of the southernmost provinces. Since it is the only thing, other than the guardhouse itself, to break the long, clean line of the Wall, the construction is one of the first things he asks about. The soldiers answer as they have been instructed. He is most curious but, not being one to question authority or to take any initiative when there is no apparent need for it to be taken, and presuming nonetheless that the doors would not be barred without good reason, he writes to Headquarters – that is, he presumes, or is led to presume, that the staircase guards will forward the document to someone who will forward it to someone who will forward it to Headquarters – detailing the situation as he understands it and requesting instructions.

No reply is ever received – at least, not while there is anyone still there to remember what the questions might have been in the first place. The personnel changes according to what is presumed to be the established pattern. Now and again, as if in obedience to a ritual nothing but Time itself could ever recognise, a new sergeant orders the barricade removed and the men, sweating, swearing, jarring their hands, prise it off with whatever implements they have or can find some excuse to borrow from the gatehouse. And then, finding the doors will not open outwards or in, look for a battering-ram, only to find that, the doors being too hard for easy reach, etc., given the narrowness of the top of the wall, etc. So that even Time, had it any consciousness at all, might find it hard to determine the ultimate point or fulcrum of the Event: the Wall, the Lean-to/Tower/House itself, the Barricade, the Doors, the Tapping that is sometimes heard from within, that might be human, yes, or ghostly, but is probably no more than a loose board somewhere, or shutter, far below, banging in the wind.

THE SEVENTH FLOOR

He hadn't been there the second time either, the poet. They'd come earlier, at nine-thirty, on their way back from dinner at the restaurant across the road. She'd felt like a cigarette outside – it was a non-smoking hotel – and he'd gone to check the bar, had walked through the cluster of low tables and armchairs, the poet clearly not there, then onto the terrace, and from there had looked across to where she stood by the main entrance, smoking and thinking and staring out onto the night – a moment of quiet grace and secret pleasure for him, to step away and see her from this slight distance. Within a few minutes she had turned, seen him watching, and smiled, and he had clambered through a gap in the railing, pushed through the shrubbery and walked over. No, the poet wasn't there, but he hadn't been sure, anyway – it had been so noisy at the reception – whether he'd said nine or ten, or in fact specified any time at all. Let's go back to the room, have a glass of wine on the balcony, and come back down in half an hour if we still feel like it. The poet is gregarious, he reminded her, you know him; he's probably got into some rambling conversation over dinner and forgotten the arrangement entirely.

So they had – gone up to the room, had a glass of wine on the balcony, come back down at ten, found nobody there, and gone back to the lift to go up to the room again. And beside the lift, having already pressed the button, waiting, was a woman, smiling at them warmly as they approached, holding the lift door open for them as they entered – smiling so warmly, indeed, that he wondered if she were someone who knew them, someone he should perhaps recognise, but no, he'd decided quickly, it was just friendliness. A pleasant woman, in her mid- or late-forties, ten years older than his wife, perhaps, and ten or so younger than him. Attractive, with a nice mouth, an aura of summer grass. And something had happened between the ground and the seventh floor. An intimate gesture, it must have been. Not that he had seen it, just known, somehow, that it had occurred. Not even voluntary, most likely, perhaps not even something one could be conscious of. And there had been no time to think, no time to stop what he'd found himself doing, to question the propriety of it, the sanity. A dilemma. He'd had no right to speak and no right not to. Sometimes a thought comes to mind and there is nothing else one can do but to act upon it.

‘Excuse me!' he'd said, as she'd left – leaning out of the lift, holding the door open himself now. ‘We've just decided to go back down, for a nightcap. Would you like to join us?' And, just as spontaneously – as if the gesture, if that is what it had been (but whose
had
it been?) had already made sense of things, even before the idea had arrived – she had accepted.

They had ordered a bottle, a famous, elegant white wine from the Cape – he was quietly celebrating, he'd explained, telling her of the award he was about to receive – and then, after just the one glass, he'd excused himself, said that he was feeling more tired than he thought and needed his rest, and, leaving them there, insisting that they stay, had gone up again to the eleventh floor.

It hadn't taken him long to go to sleep. The double-glazed windows opened in the European way, inward from the top, and there had been a breeze, cooling and soporific after the heat of the day, so that he'd not pulled the heavy drapes, but let instead the thinner, transparent curtains catch the soft light of the moon and the distant streetlamps. He had gone over the lines of an old song – he could never tell when it would come back to him – again and again, trying to get them right. Somewhere between the third and the fifth verses, at a point he'd stumbled upon, over and over, for so much of his life now, he fell asleep, and couldn't have said how much later it was – but there was no sound of traffic, and the room had a long-after-midnight cool – that he half-woke to see her undressing with the billowing curtain about her, then felt her climb in, naked, and put her arm around him.

In the morning, as they'd showered and dressed, they'd said nothing. There was no need. Halfway down on their way to a late breakfast, however, with no-one else in the lift, she'd suddenly turned and kissed him, that was all, lightly and gently on the lips, and he'd asked, at last, how it was. ‘Nice,' she'd said. ‘It was nice,' smiling softly. ‘She had a nice mouth.'

GRIEF

We are early – have to be, to greet the mourners – and sitting on a bench beside the open coffin. A strict ritual. Knowledge passed from funeral to funeral, by those who have been to so many. There has been discussion as to whether her face should be lightly veiled, as it was when we entered and the lid was first removed, or uncovered. Aldo wants it uncovered, and it's at last his say. His mother. For some reason the funeral directors have made no attempt to disguise the wounds on her face and I can see now how large they are. But they are on her right side and we are seated on her left. Aldo touches her cheek tenderly – brushes it, rather, with the edge of his hand – then leans over, kisses her on the forehead. It is the first time I have ever seen him kiss her.

~

I am still thinking about the cat. A lingering image on the mind's retina. A dying glow. You look into the light – at some lit object – and then close your eyes, and the light, the shape of the object is still there, blurred at the edges, its features lost; some force emanating from within. Except that in this case it was not light. Was, and was not. Is not. A tunnel vision. A vortex down which, since it happened, I am always falling yet never seeming nearer or farther away. A kind of vertigo. And the mountains today like great waves there on the horizon, about to engulf us.

~

The old lady died on the Tuesday. Sad, but no great surprise. I'd heard her from the rooms below, for six weeks or more, shouting, calling out names, lost in the corridors of herself. Long days of silence and then it would break out again. She would. I don't know what brought it on. The wind maybe. Or some weather inside her. Katia told me of her death almost matter-of-factly as I was talking with Igor on the balcony. There'd been a phone call in her study, and she came out. ‘Nona just died,' she said, ‘at the hospital a few minutes ago. That was my father. He's there.' And we went on with our day, tentatively, not knowing what else to do, waiting for something to arrive, to break.

~

A nausea, perhaps. The overwhelming weight of being. But also something more, surely. The heart was
wrenched
, as if something had prised it open. The opposite of nausea. Not closed in by things, but
offered
them, in their depth. Or drawn
by
them,
rushed into
them. As if one were being sucked out of oneself. A force. A kind of gravity. The cat at its centre, there in the boot-room.

~

At Alex's, while we talked at the table inside, our chairs angled towards the French doors so that we could see the view, the cats came, four, with a fifth somewhere off in the forest – dying, Jacqueline said. All of them were scrawny, under-nourished. Jacqueline fed them but they never fattened. Village cats. Worm-ridden probably. Katia always annoyed that Alex and Jacqueline didn't pay them more attention, offer more affection,
see
their condition. Katia rescued a white kitten two years ago, bonded with her instantly on the lawn, took her home. In twenty-four months she's become sleek, independent, strong. Bianca. At the window, late at night, while I read. Waiting for entrance. ‘That one's Bianca's mother,' Jacqueline says, pointing out a gaunt, long-haired tabby, oldest of the four. Looking as if she might be dying too. ‘No,' says Jacqueline, reading our minds, ‘She has always looked like that.' So many cats in these villages. You'd think
they
were the inhabitants, not humans.

~

This late afternoon – this late afternoon and on into the evening – I have watched a mass of clouds gather in the north-east and darken to a deep bruise-purple, and felt the pressure mounting within them, electrical, torrential. Couldn't it be like that? The Outside? And now, just moments ago, the first lightning. A crack. A fissure in the sky.

~

Igor left, in any case, not knowing what to do. I waited for Aldo to return from the hospital, anticipating his grief. But when he came back he put the car away, went into the downstairs kitchen for a while, then came out and went down to the fields. Perhaps he was sobbing down there. I don't know. And as to what Katia was feeling, there are times I can't tell that either, especially when it comes to family. Her grandmother hated cats. And Katia had claimed to hate her grandmother for hating them.

~

You carry such things around with you. I was sitting on the terrace of that strange hotel a hundred kilometres away, a fortnight later. Who ever heard of a hotel room without a table, a chair? And so I'd come downstairs. It was quiet on the terrace, and shaded by the building, out of the sun. A broad, calm view of slopes covered with trellised vines, mountains capped with snow even at this late stage of summer. And in the vineyard just below the terrace a dirt track, leading off along the edge of the vines, turning at the end into a small wooded area, disappearing from sight. What is it about a track that makes one walk along it in one's mind, wonder what one would see? Grasshoppers, I thought suddenly, or a butterfly, a large bee on some thick clover beneath a vine-stock. And silence. There would be silence. That as soon as you listened to it would be full of busyness, the constant whispering and shuffling of things, the breathing that becomes almost a hum, a soft shrillness answering from within. Would the track reach the mountains, if I followed it? This dream, of all tracks merging, everything connecting, drawing you …

~

As the priest delivered the eulogy I was looking at the stones. The cracks in them, the spaces between, the broken places. Filled with crumbled mortar. Here and there droppings that Danaja's broom didn't catch. Of mice, not rats. Too small for rats. Evicted temporarily but watching from somewhere. Rafters, cracks in the walls. To come out and re-occupy when all was finished. This chapel not much used. Another year, two, before the next disturbance. Light filtering through dust motes. Tiredness in the priest's voice, or just a studied calm, as he went through the formulae, holding something at bay. That hugeness inside us, outside us.

~

She had fallen. I had been working at my desk and there'd been a commotion below, muted: I couldn't hear any sign of panic. A dragging of furniture, metal frame on tile, that can only have been her bed. Without the language I can't help much, think I am only in the way. And others were there in any case. And then, ten minutes later, Aldo, asking for Katia though he knew she wasn't here. And explained, although I only half-understood. Except that he needed to tell. I understood that. That she had fallen. Hurt herself. And went away, with a kind of shrug. His shrug. As much to the world as to me.

A few minutes later an ambulance arrived. I watched from the upstairs window as they brought her out. She looked unconscious, head back as if in mid-gasp, a wound on her cheek, another above her eye. Not much blood. Why do I think it thickens, in the elderly, almost reluctant to leave?

~

He had been there, Aldo, in the hospital, at her bedside. She'd complained of feeling sick, wanting to vomit, and he'd called for a nurse. By the time someone came she'd passed out and her eyes had rolled back. They had taken her away, and left him there waiting. Soon they returned and told him she had died. He told this to Katia that night, late, after I had gone to bed. They would not use the church for the funeral, nor the priest, not this one. No surprises there. They'd use the small chapel in the cemetery instead, and arrange for someone else to come. They'd have to spend the next day cleaning. The chapel stank of mice – or rats, who knew? Katia thought rats – and there were droppings everywhere. I offered to help, but no, she'd do it with Danaja. It was all arranged.

~

I don't remember when it was I saw the moth. On the light-fitting over the sink. There are moths here day and night during the summer, as there are anywhere when you leave the doors and windows open to catch the night air. Souls, people say. Psyche. This one of a bright green I've never seen on a moth before. Uniform, unvariegated, the colour of a grass-blade in late-summer sun. An after-image of day. But why? So that I would see it? Carry it into my sleep? As if it needed a ride somewhere, and I were a psychopomp.

~

Katia is at loggerheads with the priest, a new appointee. Over an old transgression, on his part not hers. When they were at university together. A drunkard, and violent. She's had him banned from the house, by order of the bishop who's been inundated with calls to bring back the previous priest. His response to ban the previous priest from the parish entirely so that the new one can get on with it. But now Nona is dead, and Katia's parents have bitten the bullet, gone to the bishop's house, caught him and his minions at breakfast. He'd have looked petty to refuse. A special dispensation. The previous priest allowed back, just this once.

~

Heavy rain the night before the funeral. Air clear in the morning, all the haze washed out. The far mountains outlined clear against the sky, mist like a white skin on the plain, peaks floating above it unanchored, cut adrift. I'd been worried that the grave had already been dug and would now be filled with water, but no, they must watch the weather. Came early in the morning and dug it then. Three men, who by the time the funeral had commenced had changed into suits. In the same small plot as her husband, dead forty-five years now. How would they do it? Dig until they find a trace of him and then place her on top? His coffin rotted now, surely. Gone. These things you don't think about until you need to. So many bodies in that small cemetery. And how will they manage with me? Not so hard I suppose. I will be ashes in a jar. Katia will hold me.

~

A thought crosses the mind. Or is it a vision, a glimpse? This of the moth –
as if I were with it
– in the garden somewhere, feather-light in the corners of darkness. Dreaming me, moving on.

~

A week after. The eighth-night Mass. Has she been waiting, for this final permission? Aldo is anxious that he not have to go alone, but the church is being painted; the first floor of the gallery next door is to be used instead. And Lucia, Katia's mother, is still on crutches after her operation, can't handle the stairs. He comes to ask Katia to go with him, knowing full well her fury with the church, and she too at first refuses – he has left it too late, the dinner is already on the table – but then unexpectedly relents. Leaves the meal half-eaten. She will be half an hour, no more.

I sit and watch the sunset. Half an hour, forty-five minutes, an hour. People are walking back from the Mass in first darkness. More people than I would have thought, but then Nona has been here a very long time. And then suddenly, from the courtyard, Katia's voice calling, urgent. I go to the landing. She is holding something to her chest. A cat, she says, and it's dying, might be dead already, she can't tell. Bring water. Bring food. By the time I get down she has laid it on its right side on the floor of the boot-room. She rushes into the house to get a syringe, so that she can feed it water drop by drop.

I watch it in the pool of yellow light, can see no movement. Long, thick hair, matted, gaunt, either very old or very ill. Both. It must weigh almost nothing but already the gravity has flattened it against the tiles. It. Him. Her. Such sad stillness. And then suddenly the right forepaw stretches, lunges almost, a spasm, and goes limp again. Within seconds Katia is back and tries to coax it to drink from the syringe, but the water simply runs out onto the floor. We place rags in the alcove at the side and she moves it there. There is no resistance in its body. It droops in her hands like something already far off. As we finish our dinner she tells me the story. That she'd seen the cat in the grass by the road as she was walking to the Mass, sick, obviously dying, and straight afterward had run back there, to find that it had moved to the other side. Robbie had called from his porch to say that it had been there for three days already, and the woman next door to him had been feeding it. She had checked next door; no-one was there; so she had gathered it up and brought it home. When I express consternation that people have been walking past it for days and that no-one has taken it to a vet, she tells me that I still don't know these people. For them it's just a cat.
It
, not
he
, not
she
.

~

It was later, just after ten, I think. I had been reading some dry philosophy, bored, skimming, looking for something. I suppose you could say my mind wandered, without in any way signalling that it was doing so. And there was a sudden tunnel, a
vision.
I was looking at the cat – although it was impossible, although I was at my desk and it was downstairs and across the courtyard, in the boot-room – as if through a portal, or port-
hole
, surrounded by darkness, in a pool of hot, rancid light. And had just realised what I was seeing – that it
was
the cat, so deep and so burdened with its dying – when the wave struck and whelmed over me and I was submerged in it, fighting for breath. Of anguish, a sadness beyond measure. And I was standing there, before Katia, there was nowhere else to go, the sobs breaking from me, despite all I could do to hold them.

When I slept at last it was to dream of a body discovered, a century after a shipwreck, frozen in Antarctic ice, and then of a bubble rising with unbearable slowness through a tar-like substance – a bubble that had been rising for millennia – at last reaching the surface, releasing its ancient, rotten air.

~

The mourners are filing by, grasping our hands as they pass. Condolences. With twenty minutes still to go before the priest arrives most of them are seated, in silence, thinking, waiting. A very pious man in a back row – Katia has pointed him out as the bishop's informer – takes out his beads and begins to say the rosary, and suddenly, as if a wave has swept over the room, the whole congregation of elderly women, elderly men, has joined him. Breaking from dry throats, scarcely more than a rasping at first, wind through dry grass, the prayer builds, pushing its way through voices almost too tired to stand, finding its passages, a bass drone slowly filling the space as water fills a jug. Groaning up through the stones, an ancient poetry underneath, within, of grief and bewilderment, incomprehension, overlaid by the old rituals and recipes of containment, this chanting of the rosary, people burying their own dead again, any funeral a reawakening, reburying, re-grieving, mothers, fathers, daughters, brothers, friends, wives, husbands, again, in slow showers of earth, insubstantial, heavy as this shadow, out of the afternoon sunlight, her death mask almost beautiful in its rest, after the torment, waxen, pearl-grey, the fright and confusion become dignity, music moving through us in a kind of praise, making us instruments, wind, clay vessels, a kind of brooding bird, almost dove.