Shroud (21 page)

No, I did not attend Axel's funeral. I knew that I would not be welcome, that my presence would be an embarrassment, possibly a danger, to the Vanders. I do not know when it took place, or where, even. I think now I should have been there to see him into the ground. It is said that those close to a person who goes missing will not find peace and an end to their grieving until they know the fate of their loved one, and, especially, the place where he, or she, is interred. I would not wish to appear fanciful, but when I look back over the years of my life, and those moments in it of great stress and suicidal urgings, I wonder if all along I may have been in a state of suspended mourning for my friend. Does this make me seem too good, too faithful? It does. But certainly there is something buried deep down in me that I do not understand and the nature of which I can only intuit. It will seem too obvious if I say that it is another self – am I not, like everyone, like you, like you especially, my protean dear, thrown together from a legion of selves? – but all the same that is the only way I can think of to describe the sensation. This separate, hidden I is prey to affects and emotions that do not touch me at all, except insofar as I am the channel through which its responses must necessarily be manifest. It will prick up its ears at the tritest, most trivial plangency; it is a sucker for the sentimental. Sunsets, the thought of a lost dog, the slushy slow movement of a symphony, any old hackneyed thing can set the funereal organ churning. I will be passing by in the street and hear a snatch of some cheap melody coming from the open window of an adolescent's bedroom and there will suddenly swell within me a huge, hot bubble of something that is as good as grief, and I will have to hurry on, head down, swallowing hard against that choking bolus of woe. A beggar will approach me, toothless and foul-smelling, and I will have an urge to open wide my arms and gather him to me and crush him against my breast in a burning, brotherly embrace, instead of which, of course, I will dodge past him, swivelling my eyes away from the spectacle of his misery and keeping my tight fists firmly plunged in my pockets. Can these splurges of unbidden and surely spurious emotion really have their source in a bereavement nearly half a century old? Did I care for Axel that much? Perhaps it is not for him alone that I am grieving, but for all my dead, congregated in a twittering underworld within me, clamouring weakly for the warm blood of life. But why should I think myself special – which amongst us has not his private Hades thronged with shades?

Yes, I should have gone to Axel's funeral, and seen him into the ground, if only to have an end of him. Even when in my heart I came at last to accept that he must truly have died, in some ancillary ventricle there still lodged a stubborn clot of doubt. I recalled the empty windows of what had been the Vander home; was there a connection between his disappearance and the family's abrupt decampment? Why had Hendriks's deputy been so evasive when I questioned him that morning at the
Gazet?
What did he know that he was not prepared to tell me? To this day I find myself wondering, with a mingled sense of unease and peculiar excitement, if after all Axel might not be dead, but living somewhere still, in hiding, for whatever reason, and going, like me, under another name, mine, perhaps, that would be a joke. Maybe back then he committed a crime none of us knew about that was so shameful that he cannot bring himself even now to step out of the shadows and confess to it. If so, it would have to have been something far more serious than that handful of
Gazet
articles, for even in senility Axel would be able to charm the world into excusing him for that peccadillo. Or is it my usurpation of his identity that has somehow prevented him, all this time, out of who knows what scruple or fear of looking a fool, from laying claim to the name, to the life, even, that is rightfully his? The possibility affords me, I admit, a certain base satisfaction. It is not entirely ungratifying to think of Axel, with all his wit, his quickness, his assurance, his good looks, languishing in obscurity these fifty years, gnawed by frustration and failure, while I strutted the world's stage, making, in all senses of the saying, a name for myself.

Oh, but I know, it is impossible. I would have heard from him, sooner or later; Axel would not have worked a vanishing act like that without coming forward to boast about it, if only to me. All the same, on occasion down the years I have experienced an eerie, crawling sensation across the back of my neck, as if I were being spied on, and quietly laughed at; as if I were being toyed with. Certainly someone did look after me that day of the deportations, although I do not insist it was Axel. It may have been Max Schaudeine, for instance, manipulating the strings from up in the flies. I am thinking of the message that came to me that snowy morning only a month or so after the announcement of Axel's death, scrawled on a scrap of paper and pushed under our front door. My mother brought it to me. We stood in the bluish snow-light by the window in my room, I in my ragged old night-shirt and she with a shawl pulled over her shoulders. Her long hair was unpinned, and I remember thinking distractedly how grey she had become without my noticing. She waited, in that silent, apprehensive way that she did everything nowadays, while I unfolded the sheet of cheap, ruled paper, torn from a school copybook, and read the terse instructions written there. The handwriting I did not recognise; it might have been that of a schoolchild, the big, square capitals pencilled hard into the paper, the grains of graphite glinting in the furrows. I was to take
the
noon train to Brussels tiiat day, sitting in a certain compartment, in a certain carriage, and board the very next return train, and take the same numbered seat as on the outward journey. There was no signature. I could not think who might have sent it, nor could I say what it might portend, but, the times being so, I knew straight away that I would comply with its command. My mother was searching my face more anxiously than ever, looking for a response; I did not doubt that she had read the note before bringing it to me. It was all right, I said casually, it was from a friend, I had been expecting it. I still wonder why I lied to her. She nodded, sadly, knowing it was a lie, and shuffled off into the shadows.

I pause; I falter. My mother I rarely think of, or my father, in waking hours. It seems absurd for a man of my age even to have had parents; I am so very much older now than they were when I lost them that it might be not my parents at all that I am remembering, but my children, rather, grown to sad adulthood – the children, I hasten to say, that I never had, so far as I know. However, if mother and father are largely absent from my daytime thoughts, they do make frequent, unwilling appearances in my dreams, or at any rate at the periphery of them. There they hover, pressing close together, hesitant, uncertain, afraid, it seems, like the Vander cousins, of being seized upon and ejected, amid ridicule and general, spiteful hilarity. They are dressed in black, and my father the rag merchant wears a flowing black neck-tie, an improbably bohemian flourish. I notice they are holding hands, and my father's expression is sheepish. They are like a pair of humble guests who have turned up without costumes at a riotous and strenuously orgiastic fancy-dress party, in the steaming midst of which my sleeping self is trapped, a comatose Tiberius, unable to welcome them, invite them in, offer them hospitality, unable even to see that they are allowed to leave discreetly and 'with dignity. My mother has that notch in the clear space between her eyebrows that always signified her deepest, inexpressible woes. She is shy of me, and will not look at me, and keeps her eyes downcast, which makes her demeanour seem all the more desperately beseeching. My father wears his usual expression of wary amusement. He was a humorous, even a witty, man, but he made his sallies so tentatively, with such diffidence, that people rarely appreciated them, or appreciated them too late, so that in my memories of him he is always turning away with a wistful, disappointed half-smile. My parents. Did I know them at all? When they were there I think I hardly noticed them, except when they got in my light, restricting my view of the radiant future. I used piously to hope they would not have suffered, at the end, them, and the others, but since then I have learned about hope.

I took the train to Brussels, as instructed. The compartment had only one other occupant, a skinny, furtive-eyed, clerkly-looking young man in a double-breasted pin-striped suit a size or more too big for him. In looks he was unremarkable save for his nose, huge, pale, high-bridged, and pitted all over, like the stone head of a ceremonial axe. From it, the rest of his features receded, despairing of the contest. He held on his knees a small scuffed cardboard suitcase, such as conjurors keep their effects in, the lid of which he would now and then lift a little way and peer inside.

Papers? An urgent dispatch? Bars of gold bullion? Assassin's pistol? We exchanged the barest of politenesses and settled down to watch in the window the snowbound countryside opening endlessly around us its broad, slow fan. Our glances would float toward each other like amoebas, meet, and immediately flick away again. When we entered the gloom of a station and his ghostly reflection appeared in the window beside him, it would seem from the direction of his gaze that he was fixed on me intently, as if he were worried I would leap at him if he were to let fall his guard for an instant. I wondered if he might be connected with the warning note, even if perhaps he might be the one who had written it. Should I address him in some way, ask him some question, challenge him? On we rolled, through the frozen countryside, the wheels beneath us weaving their maddeningly irregular cross-rhythms, and we shifted our haunches on the dusty plush, and cleared our throats and sighed, and said nothing. Once, in the middle of nowhere, the train ground to a slow stop and stood breathing for a tormentingly long time. We peered out bleakly at the deserted snowscape. Two soldiers came to the door of the compartment and looked in at us and moved on. The Nose ran a finger around the inside of his shirt collar and gave a little puff of relief, and looked at me and ventured a queasy smile. Still I did not speak: he could be the most enthusiastic collaborationist and yet be wary of the attentions of the military. Outside, someone shouted, and with a series of clangs and wrenchings we were off again.

In Brussels I sat in the steamy station buffet and drank three glasses of schnapps in quick succession and my hands stopped trembling. When I went back out to the platform the return train was already moving, and I had to run and leap on, barking my shin badly. I limped along swaying corridors until I found the right compartment, and there he was, with his agitated eyes and his suitcase on his knees and his big nose empurpled from fear and the cold. I produced the note and he produced another just like it. I laughed. He laughed. We both laughed. It sounded as if we were gasping for breath. He knew no more than I did, he said. Someone unknown must have gone about the city in the night from door to singled-out door, delivering these forewarnings. We speculated if there might be others like us on the train, a scattered band of baffled fugitives. There must be something happening, at home, he said, and it sounded so strange, that word, home, and he gave a soundless gulp and looked away. Presently he opened his conjuror's case. He had in it sandwiches, an apple, a flask of aquavit, all of which he shared with me. We drank from the flask in turns; our comradeship could not have been sealed more solemnly had we cut our wrists and mingled our blood. By the end of the journey I was tipsy and heedlessly euphoric. On the platform we exchanged addresses, shouting above the din of trains and tannoyed announcements, shook hands fervently, vowed to meet, then turned and with a relieved straightening of shoulders went our separate ways, hurriedly, knowing we would never see each other again, unless perhaps the Angel of the Lord should pay another warning visit to our doors.

I walked home through the hushed city, hearing the snow squeal under my boots. The effect of the aquavit quickly wore off. My shin still throbbed where I had barked it that afternoon running for the train. When I got to our street it was darker than dark, not a single window lit, and all in silence, and then I knew. Three sentries with rifles were standing around a burning brazier, stamping their feet in the cold. I did not dare approach them, and crept past in the shadows, catching the sharp, hot stink of the burning coals, a consternating waft straight out of childhood. I recall the scene in expressionist terms, the brutish forms of the soldiers there, the terrible intensity of the brazier, and the street sliced clean in two by a glaring moon. Frost glittered everywhere on the pavements amid the snow, but when I trod on it I found it was not frost but broken glass. The shop windows were all shattered, their doors boarded over with fresh-cut planks; the piney fragrance of the wood was another incongruous whiff, this time of forest and mountain flank. The building where I lived, or at least where I had lived until now, was as dark and empty as all the others. The broken front door hung by a single hinge. Behind it, the hall was a square black hole giving on to another universe.

I went to a cinema. The film, as I recall,
was Jew Suss,
unless my memory, with its lamentable hunger for congruence, has substituted that title for something less apt. The audience seemed as subdued as I was, sitting back at a tilt, row after row of them, staring motionlessly, as if frozen in astonishment or fear, their faces lifted in the flickering gloom and the tips of their cigarettes glowing and fading like a swarm of fireflies, the billows of smoke in slow motion swirling up into the projector's spasmic cone of mingled light and muddied shadow. When the film was over I was the last to leave. In the street I stopped at a late-night stall and bought a paper twist of roasted chestnuts and distributed them in the pockets of my trousers, first for warmth and then for sustenance. Without thinking where I was going I made my way back to the central station, and there I spent the night on a bench in the echoing nave, like a fugitive in the sanctuary of a cathedral. I would doze off only to wake again almost immediately with a start of what was first fright and then a sort of slow, disbelieving amazement at all this that was happening. In the middle of the night the cold grew intense and I went into the lavatory and wrapped the sheets of a discarded newspaper – the
Gazet,
not inappropriately – around my legs under my trousers. Where had I learned all this vagabond lore? Sometime before dawn a fellow outcast tried to pick my pockets. It was an amateurish effort, and I woke at once and made a tremendous kick at him that missed. He was an old fellow with a beard. I remember his mouth, a pink, round hole sunk in tangled hair. He backed away from me cautiously, in an attitude of reproach, as if I were the aggressor, his brown-palmed hands lifted, that mouth opening and closing wordlessly. I did not sleep again, but waited for morning, when I rose stiffly and went to a workman's café and spent the last of my money on a plate of bread and sausage; I can still taste that meal. I walked the streets again. The day was clear and hard and bright, and everything rang and chimed as if the city were enclosed under a bell-jar. Frost stood in the air, a crystalline fog. Inside my stiffened boots my toes were numb. Also my barked shin was still sore, which angered me greatly. That same, hardly accountable anger was to recur often in the coming months; for the fugitive, it is the persistence of trivial afflictions that pains the most. At last, I went home. There was nowhere else to go.