Notorious (52 page)

‘The cities are like the desert,’ she said. ‘An illusion to stop the eye. To stop any coveting. Flat walls like a veil. Behind the walls, you’ll find different worlds: gardens, hidden oases. Or maybe,’ she tried for a joke, ‘they don’t want foreigners to dawdle in front of their gates.’

‘I’m sure they hate us.’

‘We’ve spent a century subjugating them,’ she said.

‘It’s the way of the world,’ he said. ‘They lost.’

She tried to see if there was anything of Czeslaw’s earnestness, his inability to smile easily, his permanent expression of puzzlement as though life overwhelmed him. She saw nothing of Czeslaw in this man, with his monogrammed cufflinks, his changes of clothes. He was staring through the window, down to the market. He tilted his head, listening to the men’s shouts as they put up the night stalls. The way he stood now, the way he had held his hat, reminded her of Laforche.

He looked around, frowned. ‘Have you been robbed?’

‘No. Why?’

‘You have so little.’

‘There was little I wanted to bring from Poland.’

He shook his head, moved restlessly around the flat until he reached the old stove. He laid his hands on the black iron. A man who preferred to use his hands, to be on his feet, she thought. Not a talker. Not a writer. He ran his finger over the design stamped on the iron door.

‘The family coat of arms,’ he said. ‘It’s an odd place to find it.’ He cupped his hand, let it rest there, like a man feeling the belly of his pregnant wife. ‘Sturdy,’ he said approvingly. ‘You don’t see it so much anymore.’

She thought, A man made happy by things. Not a man afflicted with internal demons. She said, ‘You like fine things.’

‘I like craftsmanship.’

‘The true craft worker believes there is a sacred memory held in objects.’

He nodded. ‘I like the honour of a name.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of names.’

‘Tradition, then,’ he said. ‘I like the notion of generations living up to the standards of the previous one.’

‘There are no names in the desert,’ said Agnieska. ‘We lose our identities here.’

His fingers curled. ‘But we aren’t in the desert now.’

‘Aren’t we?’

He looked at the plain cups and plates on the shelf and shook his head. ‘And you brought nothing else from home?’

She pointed to the dried black rose in its glazed blue vase. ‘From Koloshnovar.’

He slowly approached the shelf. She saw the rose as he must see it: a sad thing, dried to the texture of black crepe, the petals cracked and disintegrating, dust eating away at the leaves, the bent stem become faded green scaffolding. Maybe he thought she kept it for sentimental reasons.

‘How old is this?’ he said. She wondered whether to tell him the truth but he continued, ‘How long since you left?’

‘Twenty-five years.’ His eyelashes flickered. He was calculating dates. ‘The year you were born.’ She wanted to say, ‘But I’ve been back since then.’ Instead she said, ‘I never saw roses as black anywhere else.’

‘Koloshnovar,’ he said, and in another man she would have sworn he shuddered.

She waited for him to continue but he was moving again, staring at the two prints propped up at the end of the shelf.

She pointed at the first. ‘
The Temptation of Saint Antony
by Brueghel.’

‘What a hellfire and damnation picture.’ She watched him absorbing the image: the blank sky, the broken landscape, the tiny human, the winged monsters hovering overhead.

‘Saint Antony confronting the fanciful monsters of his brain,’ she said. ‘They threaten to derange him with his own fears and lusts, obscuring the truth with their breath of fire, the way sandstorms obscure the desert.’

‘All these old myths,’ he said impatiently. ‘They have no place in the modern city.’

‘I’m sure the Church would agree with you.’ She pointed to the smaller pen and ink sketch further along. ‘But myths are part of history here. We back into truth through fables.’

He examined the image of the ruined town. The jagged silhouette was ringed by ghostly riders holding swords aloft. Their heads were covered against the harsh sun, so that only a gleam of light showed in their dark eyes.

‘Smara,’ she said, ‘where the first peoples from the south settled. Before the Berbers on horseback, before the Almoravids and the Bedouins. For a thousand years Smara was in ruins but, so the legend goes, it was guarded by ghostly horsemen. They protected it until it became the centre for Saharan tribes as they fought the Europeans at the end of the last century.’

As always to her, the picture shimmered in its lines of pen and ink. She said, ‘Michel Vieuchange, the Frenchman, disguised himself as a woman to cross the desert to see what he called mysterious Smara with its virginal ruins.’

‘Another madman.’ His tone incredulous.

She pictured vast skies above the great settlements of Nitria and Scetis. ‘Everyone has their dreams of resurrection,’ she said. ‘And the desert is especially seductive. The blossoming of the desert is a sign of God’s love for His people. Then we become true citizens of heaven.’

He frowned at the mention of heaven and said, ‘Was Smara resurrected?’

‘Until it was retaken by the French in ’34. They had destroyed it in 1913. You can understand the bitterness. Why Vieuchange had to disguise himself to go there.’

‘Everyone blames the heat I suppose,’ said Pietr. ‘The way the Poles blame their vodka or the rain or the Soviets.’

Agnieska said, ‘It is the same the world over. One group has the power, the other the silence.’

‘Poland is becoming a nation of sleepwalkers,’ said Pietr. ‘The old ways are going. We have moved our business to Sicily. If the Communists stay, well,’ he shrugged, ‘maybe it will not change so much. We will pay them. We’ll keep the land. Eventually they will go.’

‘You want to keep Koloshnovar,’ she said. ‘You love it.’

‘I deserve it.’

He stared into the corner that was her bedroom, at the empty space on the stone table.

‘I gave my Confirmation Bible away,’ she said. ‘I kept it mostly to remind myself of my childhood.’ She said deliberately, ‘With my brother.’

After a beat, he said, ‘Maybe you are not as religious as you think.’

‘I think I was hiding from God,’ she said. ‘The rituals of religion are like veils, they obscure the truth.’

He stepped away from her. ‘Friends of mine, the ones I ski with at Gstaad, would say you need a weekend with EST or a good Jungian therapist. They would say you want to recreate your past.’

‘If I wanted to recreate my past I wouldn’t have come to the desert,’ she said. Then she thought of the book, hidden beneath him. She said, ‘Maybe I want to rewrite the past.’

‘Maybe you want your childhood back.’

‘My childhood was a disappointment,’ she said. ‘As my father kept telling me. But he was already aged and he wanted a dutiful daughter.’

She remembered as a girl – how old had she been? – she had gone around the house and taken the hands off the clocks and left a note next to each saying,
It is later than you think.
It had taken her all day. It was only when her father threatened to whip the servants that she confessed. How old was she? Twelve, thirteen. It was a few months after her first period. Old enough to know better, said her father, as he whipped her.

She said to Pietr, ‘I was an angry child. And then I decided – what was that Viennese expression – the one they use for everything from a bad gas bill to Hitler taking over?
Das geht bei uns nicht
. “That does not go well with us.” My anger did not go well with me. So I became a party girl instead. You mightn’t know but it is a full-time job.’

‘I know,’ said Pietr.

She went to offer Stefano more tea. He had pulled his hair free and it hung, black and shiny to his shoulders. He looked her up and down. At first she thought he was trying, like so many others, to see under the black robes, imagine her inside her shadow. But his gaze lingered on her pocket. Before she could stop herself, she had slipped her hand in. She grasped the knife.

‘Pietr and me, we do tour of city,’ he said, and it took a moment to realise he was speaking in her own language. ‘The guide, he said the women here carry weapons in clothes.’

She stared at him. ‘You speak Polish?’

He lit a cigarette, cupping one hand around the flame as though he was used to wild weather. She saw the long black lashes, the blue shadow on his chin, the muscles in his arm rolling and flexing like waves under the inked purples and reds. A man of the sea, she thought. A man of water.

‘Back home the padres carry Bible in one hand and knife in one hand.’ He looked straight at her. ‘I learned myself, to talk to Pietr. When he came back from Kolosh – ’ He stopped and spat into the water. He crossed himself and took out the small gold crucifix on the chain around his neck and kissed it.

She stared at the bubbles of saliva broken by the falling water.

‘You never went there?’

He raised his hand, his thumb pointing at her, the cigarette curled between his forefingers so the glowing tip was pointing inwards. He must feel the heat on his palm, she thought. It must be burning him.

Her fingers tightened on the knife. He set the nail of his thumb against his front teeth and flicked it out at her. ‘I know your family.’ This close she could see his pupils withdrawn: black points in the dark brown eyes. She looked at his inner arms: no noticeable track marks. A casual user then. A part-time drug addict.

He said, and she could barely hear him over the creak of the water wheel, ‘If anything happens to Pietr, I will hunt you down like a wolf.’

Inside, Pietr was holding the tea but not drinking it, rocking the cup slightly.

‘Stefano seems . . . angry.’ She stared at the rose on the shelf.

Pietr laughed. ‘He is still offended the tour guide told him not to lean against a wall. Some wall less than a thousand years old. Yesterday, to a Sicilian.’ He laughed again, admiring Stefano the man of action. Of threat.

Pietr said, ‘And he tried to drink the water.’ He looked down at the black liquid in his hand. ‘We are in the desert and the water tastes of salt.’

‘Once this was all a giant sea.’ She touched the cross at her neck and said, ‘I thought you came here to talk about – ’

‘No.’ He wouldn’t look at her.

She said gently, ‘Didn’t you ever wonder?’

‘Wonder what?’ He put his tea down and drifted around the room, touching the wall now and again.

‘No belongings,’ he said, turning the signet ring. He looked around again, carefully; his knees bent as though he was about to get down and look under the rugs.

‘No books,’ he said at last.

‘About Czeslaw – ’ she said.

‘No,’ he said loudly. A shadow fell sideways across the tiles in the doorway. She had an image of Stefano: eternally waiting, his skin black against white walls, his head turned. What was he waiting for? Why did he wait?

Pietr said, ‘It’s the future that counts, the children.’

‘Aren’t children products of their past?’

He shook his head.

She remembered. ‘You have a daughter.’

‘Anna.’ For the first time, the hard planes of his face relaxed.

He took out his wallet, passed across a photo of two little girls, both dark-haired, alike enough to be sisters. She pointed to the one in front who was looking directly at the camera: a pointed face, lively expression, laughing. A familiar girl; where had she seen her? Another girl – smaller, more serious – was behind her.

‘This?’ She pointed at the lively girl.

‘That’s her best friend. This is Anna.’ He pointed to the serious girl.

She remembered sitting in the kitchen, the second to last time she had secretly visited Koloshnovar, her old nurse holding her hand. She was needed again, the nurse said. A new baby; Pietr a father at eighteen, his wife even younger. A good Polish girl. They had barely said two words to each other, said the nurse, rocking on her stool, wiping her nose on her apron. The Count and the Sicilian mother, they arranged it.

Pietr said, ‘The marriage didn’t last. I’m not proud of . . . ’ He paused as though he found the word hard to say. ‘My failure. But at least we parted as friends.’ He held the photo carefully by its corners, on the white border.

‘Since then you have searched,’ said Agnieska.
Depuis ce moment
tu fouilles
.

But he misheard heard her, thought the word was wandered.
Tu
flânes
.

He said, ‘The old ways which suited us so well won’t look good to the new reformists. That is why we are moving the business to Sicily.’

‘Sicily,’ said Agnieska. She remembered the young priest watching her over his clasped hands, waiting for her to ask the question. She had smelt sulfur on the breeze. She thought of Stefano, waiting outside. She wondered whether he had taken out his knife.

Pietr said, ‘You want your house back.’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘I would.’

‘Koloshnovar.’ She closed her eyes. It was a palace of rock in her mind’s eye. ‘I think I was the only one who ever loved it. Czeslaw couldn’t wait to leave, my half-brothers despised it as a backwater, thought the shoe business was for peasants. My mother was constantly sick. She said the tannery smell poisoned her. But to me it was a magical place. A small kingdom. I never left it as a child. So when I discovered what was going on there, I couldn’t bear it.’

‘You ran away.’

‘I ran away to find out what had happened to my brother.’

He didn’t want to ask, she could see that. He said, fast, ‘And did you?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

He was moving around the room again. She waited for him to ask her the question he must have come to ask. But again, he didn’t.

‘I’d like to build a house,’ he said. ‘A house on a hill. Anna has never been strong. She likes being up high. Her friend has a house on the water in Sydney with fresh sea breezes.’

She sensed a displacement of air and light by the doorway.

‘Anything that tears away the walls,’ said Agnieska, ‘is a good thing.’

He said, ‘That is why I want the book.’

Finally. ‘What book?’

‘The Frenchman’s book. The book my grandfather couldn’t bring himself to destroy. The book my father took with him when he left.