Shroud

by John Banville

  Here was a door of frosted glass. I rapped on the pane with the handle of my stick. No response. I cleared my throat, Cass Cleave cleared hers. I pointed to the name painted on the glass of the door in gold lettering. "Fino," I said, nodding. "You see? That is the family who rented him a room." We waited. I knocked again, and at last the door was opened by a diminutive, homuncular voung woman wearing a drab dress like Cass Cleave's and old-fashioned spectacles with heavy black frames. She sidled forward and quickly drew the door to behind her, closing off whatever might have been glimpsed of the room, although a faint smell of something cooking did escape. She greeted us diffidently and stood looking sidelong down at our feet, incurious and still. She held her hands joined before her, moving them about each other in a slow, caressing, washing motion. I asked if we might be allowed inside to see the room where the philosopher had lived. She frowned, and her hands stopped moving. "Nietzsche," I said, loudly. "Friedrich Nietzsche!" The name sounded absurd, like a sneeze; it was swallowed in the stairwell and rang back an echo that seemed to snigger. The young woman pondered, still with her eyes on the floor. There was a small, furry mole beside her left nostril toward which my eye kept straying. She shook her head slowly. No one of that name lived here, she said. She had a strange, low, sibilant way of speaking, pausing for a second on a word and making it buzz deep in her throat, a sound like that which a cat makes when it is being stroked. "I don't mean now," I said, fairly bellowing. "A long time ago! He lived here. Il grande filosofo!" I pointed again to the name on the door, I mentioned the plaque on the wall outside. She would only keep on shaking her head, remote, unapologetic, immovable. Once she raised her eyes sideways for a second and with a flicker of interest took in Cass Cleave's naked throat and the twin pale folds of freckled flesh where the sleeveless dress pinched her at each bare armpit. The landing was a narrow, hot space, and we had to stand close together, we two tall ones and the tiny woman, swamped in each other's heat and the cooking smell that was coming more strongly now from behind the closed door. I cast about for something more to say but could think of nothing, and instead swivelled on my heel and set off in mute fury and frustration down the stairs. At the first landing I stopped and turned and saw Cass Cleave and the dwarf woman still standing up there where I had left them, neither looking at the other, both with their eyes cast down, saying nothing, simply standing, motionless as a pair of manikins.

  I was in the hall, waiting inside the door, when she came down at last, stepping from stair to stair with careful deliberation, watching herself as she did so, as if descending like this were a skilled manoeuvre she had only lately learned to execute. I thought, jarringly, of Magda. Slowly the girl came to meet me, avoiding my eye, or no, not avoiding, but looking through me as though I were not there. Yet I knew she knew what I would do. I seemed to be no longer drunk; on the contrary, I felt violently sober. She stood in the circle of my arms quite still and stiff; I might have been a cascade of water falling about her but not wetting her. Her lower lip stood a little prominent of the upper, so that she seemed in permanent expectation of receiving a drop of some sacred distillate from above, yet now when I leaned my head forward I had trouble finding her mouth; when I did, I took that soft, protruding bud of flesh between my teeth. As I kissed her she did not close her eyes, and neither did I, and so we stood and stared into each other, surprised, almost aghast. I caught again from her skin that faint, flat, medicinal smell. It reminded me of something: violets, was it? Her shoulder blades flexed under my hands like hard, stiff wings, flexed, and were still. Clear as if it were being projected before my wide-open eyes I saw myself in the house on Cedar Street sitting opposite Magda at the table in the breakfast nook, feeding her the tablets, picking them up one by one from my cupped palm and dropping them into her offered mouth. It was at midnight, I could faintly hear a clock chime in the next-door house; a moth was bumping against the black and shining window. All around was silence, not a sound save of that baffled, winged thing blundering against the glass. Magda's hands rested flat before her on the table; her fingernails were chipped and there was grime under them. How calm she was, how docile, watching me steadily, with keen interest, it might be, as I poured out the glass of water and put it into her hands. Here; drink. I had told her the tablets were a special kind of candy. They were violet-coloured. I released Cass Cleave from my embrace. Still she did not stir, but stood and looked at me, calmly attending me and the possibility of what I might do next, with Magda's very gaze.

  At the hotel, when I followed her into her room she was already drawing the curtains against the glare of afternoon sunlight. Now, of course, came the last-minute faltering, and I did not want to be there. I was tired of myself and my hungers, my infantile need to clasp and squeeze and suck that the accretion of years seems only to intensify. "You realise," I said, "that I am old enough to be your great-grandfather?" I laughed. She did not answer, only unbuttoned the neck of her dress at the back and pulled it over her head, becoming for a second a hooded black beetle with clawing antenna arms. The sound of her falling under things rustled along my nerves. "Do you know that Cranach Venus in the Beaux Arts in Brussels?" I said brightly, leaning on my stick at an angled pose. "The one in the big dark hat and rather interesting black choker?" It had struck me how like the painted woman this living one looked, the same sinuous type, with the same heavy hips and tapering limbs and somewhat costive pallor. "Cupid," I said, "hardly as high as her knee, is an angry toddler crawled all over by bees, although they always look to me, I must say, more like bluebottles. Do you know the one I mean?" She bent to turn the bed covers back, one breast, a silvered bulb, glimmering under the arc of her armpit. "Cranach," I said, "younger or elder, I cannot remember which, was a friend of Martin Luther, of all people. One wonders what the great reformer thought of those lewd ladies his chum so liked to paint." She was sitting on the bed now with her legs drawn up to her chest and her pale arms clasped about her shins. She was not looking at me, but gazed before her with a faint frown, as if she were trying to recall some elusive word or image. I leant my stick against the headboard of the bed and turned and swung myself into the windowless bathroom and locked the door.

  Micturition, I find, is one of the lesser annoyances of old age; sometimes, indeed, the copious passing of water can be an almost sensual experience. My urine on this occasion smelt distinctly of grappa. I turned on the cold tap and half filled the handbasin and doused my hands, liking the water's steely coolness, its joggle and sway. Then I spent some time picking idly among her things, her salves and pastes and powders; their mingled fragrance was faintly, pleasurably repulsive. I unscrewed a cartridge of lipstick and applied the scarlet nub to the underside of my wrist, drawing a smeary mouth there, open as in a startlement of desire, and pressed my lips upon it, tasting the sticky, waxen sweetness. In the land of women I am always a traveller lately arrived. I studied myself in the mirror, the flecks of scarlet the lipstick had left on my mouth, then took a tissue and wiped them off, not without difficulty. Still I loitered. Even from within this tombal chamber I could sense the afternoon's hot pulsings all around outside. I put my ear to the door; not a sound. She would be under the covers by now, waiting for me, her leman, with her lemur eyes, waiting for me to come and devour her. I recalled the policeman standing in the kitchen the morning after Magda died. He was a short, muscular young tough fairly bursting out of his uniform, his hair shaved to within a millimetre of his bullet head, his scalp a shade of baby blue and pink. His name, improbable, and yet gruesomely appropriate, was Officer Blank. He had shaken my hand with the courteous solemnity of an opponent before the commencement of a duel, and stood now audibly breathing through his nose, his square jaw rotating around a wad of chewing gum. I had never been afforded the opportunity to study a policeman at such close quarters before, and in my hungover, tear-sodden state I was fascinated by the quantity and range of impedimenta that he carried about him, the bulky gun, clenched in its holster like a steel fist, the long black club,
the handcuffs, the complicated, brick-shaped telephone, also in a sort of holster, hanging from his belt. What was most impressive, however, was his stillness, the way he just stood mere, in fathomless silence, hands set on angled hips and only that jaw moving, moving. There did not seem to be anything to be said, by either of us. When I offered to make him a cup of coffee he blinked and looked askance, as if I had advanced a faintly improper suggestion. We could hear the others moving about heavy-footed upstairs. I found it peculiarly embarrassing to have to stand and listen to them like this; it was like hearing someone using the lavatory, or eavesdropping on a couple making love. Officer Blank, perhaps also feeling the indelicate awkwardness of the moment, cleared his throat and shifted the gum from one side of his mouth to the other. "My Pa went the same way," he said, nodding. "Pills." I nodded too, and frowned in sympathy, and then there was silence again, except for those noises off. I could not think how last night I had got Magda up the stairs and into bed. I remembered the leaden weight of her arm across my shoulders, and the eerily contented-sounding, burbling little sighs she kept releasing into my ear, as if she were a drunken lover trying to whisper lewd endearments. Now here she was being brought down again, this time strapped to a stretcher, with the sheet pulled over her face so tightly that I could see not only the outlines of her nose and mouth but even the protuberances of her eyes. Officer Blank said something and with surprising nimbleness stepped quickly sideways past me and went out, and a moment later, clattering over the doorstep, they were all gone, so abruptly and so thoroughly it might have been not Magda's mortal remains they were removing, but a living felon who must be hustled off without delay to secure captivity. Through the window I watched them drive away, the ambulance, and the following police car. Around me the transformed house vibrated, as if I were standing inside the dome of a great bell that a moment ago had sounded its final peal.

  I came back from men to now and remembered Cass Cleave. Cautiously I pressed the door handle and opened the door and stepped out into the bedroom's tense and waiting twilight. Ah, child, woman, forgive me.

  She could not sleep. The room in the half dark was phantasmally still, like the so many sick-rooms of her childhood. It was late, long past midnight. The air in the room was heavy and hot. In the light of the single lamp beside the telephone Axel Vander lay sprawled across the disordered bed, naked and asleep, breathing through his mouth, an arm thrown up awkwardly as if he had fallen backwards trying in vain to ward off a blow that had knocked him senseless. She moved away from him and rose cautiously and stood at the foot of the bed, looking down at him. The hair on his chest was grey. She could see the sinews in his shrunken arms, the shin-bones inside the stretched, paper-white skin of his legs. His face was ashen, and there was a perfectly round spot of hectic colour printed high on each cheekbone, neat as a dyer's stamp. He was breathing so softly she wondered if he might be only feigning sleep. She saw him in her mind rearing up and catching her by the wrist, could almost feel the grip of those ancient talons on her flesh. She drew up the sheet and laid it over him and he stirred and tensed and then went slack again. She was still leaking from him, she could feel the hot stickiness between her legs. The first time, when he had come out of the bathroom at last and heaved himself on top of her, she had thought of one of those huge statues of dictators that were being pulled down all over Eastern Europe. Crash. It was quickly over. They had lain together in the shadows then, lain there all afternoon long, until the day died, and the night came on. They were like survivors, she thought, washed up on this foreign but not unfriendly shore. Between bouts of dozing he had cradled her in the crook of his old arm and told her stories about himself when he was young; she listened idly, knowing it must be all lies, or nearly all. He did not know that she knew who he really was. Would she tell him? Not yet; not yet. Flakes of ash from his cigarette fell on her breast, tiny, warm, weightless kisses. She tried to picture him at the age he had been when the newspaper photograph was taken, restless, violent, insatiable, stretching out with both hands, straining to grasp at a future that now was long ago in the past. Then he had thrown himself on her again, and this time it was different, he was all chest and churning elbows and quaking thighs, straining and heaving, until she thought she might split in two clean down the middle. He seemed so angry. Then there was the smell of almonds, and then… When he was done he had pushed her aside without a word and gone to sleep, but she could not follow him, for all that she was exhausted. Now she had been awake for hours. Everything was so strange, all pulled out of shape and littered with torn-up things, like a stretch of shoreline after a storm. This old, old man. All at once, as she stood there gazing down at him, he was not he, or he was he and also not. She frowned, trying to unravel it. Perhaps it was simply that he was asleep and hence not present to her even in his presence. No, that was not it, sleep was not the agent, sleep only served to hold him still, the sudden stranger, so she might concentrate on what it was of him that was not there. She heard his harsh laughter in her head and imagined his eyes snapping open, the good one fixing her, the blinded one staring wildly past her into the nothing that it saw.

  She could not now remember when she had first heard of him. There had been books of his on her father's shelves, unread. As so often with the people and the things that caught her questing attention, he was first a configuration, a sort of template fitting itself to a need in her she had not known was there. The parts of the pattern assembled themselves almost casually. He had written a famous essay on a play in which her father had achieved his greatest success. She had read him on Rousseau, of whom he disapproved. There was his book on the Italian comedy. Then she saw his photograph in a newspaper, receiving an award, in Jerusalem, and had been surprised that he was still living, since she had thought he must be among the illustrious dead. Now she bought all of his books, and sat in her room above the garden in her father's house and read and read. It was winter, and the garden was a pool of dank green light where a lone bird disconsolately piped. Vander was with her in the room, a living presence, stilling the voices in her head. There was something in everything he wrote, something darkly playful, that spoke straight to her. She knew that she would find him, and now she had.

  She took a cotton dress out of her bag and put it on, and despite the lightness of the material she immediately began to sweat. She wondered if she might go outside. The streets round about were quiet, she could not hear a sound except now and then when a lone car went past, its tyres making a watery hiss on the dry street. She thought of the coolness and the dark under the stone arcades. What would he think if he woke up and found her gone? Perhaps he would not care. Perhaps he thought this was all she had wanted of him, that she had written that letter and brought him to Europe just for this one day, this one night, in this hotel room that she could not afford to pay for, so that afterwards she would be able to say that she had slept with the great and notorious Axel Vander. It was not true. Yet why had she written to him, why had she brought him here? What was that thing that spoke to her out of the things he wrote? She cared nothing for Shelley's defacement, or Coleridge's dreams, or Wordsworth's suborning of nature. No; what she heard was a voice calling to her, and her alone. Cautiously, on stork's legs, she backed to the door and reached behind her and opened it, still with her eye on the sleeping figure on the bed, and went out. In the corridor she stood and listened, fancying she could still hear Axel Vander breathing. Behind her the metal-grille doors of the lift cranked themselves open, making her jump. The lift was empty. It stood there, a harshly lighted box, waiting, impassive and patient, as if it had come especially for her. She hurried away from it, looking for the stairs. It was the light in the lift that she was fleeing, it followed her, bluish-white and thin, like watered milk, and still the metal doors had not closed.

  Downstairs she stood in the marble lobby with its mirrors and gilt chairs and felt suddenly helpless. How could she go out? It was late, she was naked under her dress, she was not even wearing shoes. The n
ight porter at his station gave her a politely vacant smile and went back to checking off something in a tall, black-bound ledger open before him on the desk. He was old and bald as a baby, and moved his lips as he read down the columns of names or figures or whatever they were. She went and sat on the leather couch where she had sat that morning, yesterday morning now. The water in the fountain among the ferns had been switched off. She wondered again if the ferns were real, and thought of touching them to find out, but to do that she would have had to stand up and go forward and get down on her knees at the side of the pond. Stand, advance, kneel. It seemed, as she pictured it, as intricate and effortful as a gymnast's exercise or a complicated pass in ballet. She did not stir. Soon the silence became oppressive and made her begin to feel dizzy. She felt as if she were holding herself upright in her own hands, a frail, over-full vessel that had been given forcibly into her unwilling care. She made herself rise and walk to the porter's desk, and asked the old man for a glass of water. He nodded, or perhaps it was a little bow that he made, briefly letting his eyelids fall as he did so, and murmured something, and padded off into the shadows. He was gone for what seemed to her a long time. When he returned he was carrying the glass on a little silver tray in one hand, while over the knuckles of the other a folded white napkin was draped. He stood calmly before her, watching as she drank, swallow by long swallow. How thirsty she was! She found the old man's nearness comforting, and somehow appropriate, as if he were the necessary witness to this ritual, this raising of glass and drinking of liquid, that she was required to perform. His soft brown eyes played over her with placid interest, taking in her bare arms, her bare feet, the thinness of her dress, through which, she supposed, he would be able to see the shadow of her nipples, darkened and swollen as they were from Vander's avid lips. She drank a last, long draught of water; really, she had not known she was so thirsty. The porter, still smiling his kindly, melancholy smile, lifted the back of his hand toward her, ceremoniously offering the napkin. Draped there before her on his hand it shone with an uncanny glow, stark as neon against the surrounding velvety dark, making her think with a shiver of the light in the lift. His black uniform was greasy from age. "You do not sleep?" he said. The question had a curious intimacy, like the question a doctor might ask, or a priest, and she hardly knew how to answer. She touched the napkin to her lips, liking the roughness of the linen, its starchy, laundered smell. "The room is hot," she said, pointing to the ceiling to show him she meant the room upstairs, the bedroom, her room, where, if only the old man knew, another old man was sprawled asleep across her bed with lolling flesh and mouth agape. The porter nodded again, frowning in sympathy, in the manner of one seeking to soothe an anxious child. "Si, si, is hot," he said softly, with a soft little sigh, still smiling. She proffered the empty glass and the napkin and he advanced the tray to receive them. She thanked him, and he made another small bow of the head, and a dull gold lozenge of light from somewhere slid over the shiny, pitted dome of his skull. He withdrew, walking backwards, the tray with glass and napkin held before him, then turned and was gone into the darkness, making not a sound. She went back to the couch and sat down once more.