Shroud

by John Banville

  The corridor smelled of pencil lead, musty paper, and young bodies rich with humming hormones. A scrawny, ill-dressed person, vaguely male, a student, I presumed, leaning by an open window consuming a clandestine cigarette, gave me a defiant, surly stare. No call for truculence, pale ephebe – see, I am lighting up one myself. I heard the door of the lecture hall opening and rapid footsteps approaching behind me. It was Kristina Kovacs. She did not stop until she was almost under the lee of my chin – it was a thing I remembered about Kristina, how close she liked to stand to people, even strangers, even former casual lovers. She looked up at me with her knowing, sceptical smile, a fan of fine wrinkles opening at the outer corner of each eye. "Did you think I was next to speak?" she said, amused. "Is that why you left?" I really did wish she would not stand so near, her head tilted back and swaying infinitesimally from side to side in time to her sad, inner melody. I said that I could not have stayed another moment among that herd of earnest idiots. She laughed softly and clicked her tongue in soft reproach. She said she had enjoyed my contribution to the proceedings. "Very naughty of you, to read such a well-known piece," she said with an annoyingly merry twinkle. "Franco was furious, I am sure you saw." I scowled. Do you think, I thought of asking her, do you think the mere fact that we rolled and writhed naked in each other's arms for a few hours one afternoon long ago gives you the right to this insolent familiarity? But Kristina's gaze had turned inward. "Poor man," she said, and for a second I thought it was me that she meant, and was astonished to feel a warm something surge in response within me, with all the anxious eagerness of a dog leaping up at the sound of its master's key in the door. She put her fingers to my elbow as if in urgent supplication. "Poor creature," she said, "those letters he wrote when he was mad, speaking of the great emptiness around him." Firmly I freed my elbow from her touch; it was like being settled upon by a tremulous but insistent butterfly. I laughed. "He also informed one of his much put-upon correspondents, in what I believe is the very last of those letters, that he made his own tea, did his own shopping, and suffered from torn boots. Even Zarathustra must reckon with the dull requirements of the quotidian." She was not listening; her eyes were swimming again. "But writing to Wagner's wife," she said, "that woman, of all people, calling her Ariadne and declaring that he loved her, and then ordering that all anti-Semites should be shot…" She was, I saw impatiently, quite upset. In her agitation she looked suddenly old and drawn. I glanced about in desperation. The young smoker at the window was watching us with incredulous disgust, these two ancients standing together in scandalous intimacy, pawing and being pawed. Kristina linked her arm in mine and I had no choice but to turn and walk off along the corridor with her. I found faintly repelling the way she kept insisting on touching me, squeezing my arm against her side, for instance, making me feel the heat of her meagre flesh and the soft-seeming rib-cage beneath. I registered too the thinness of her arm inside its sleeve: it was as if there were no flesh there at all, just cloth and bone. At the end of the corridor, where a big window faced us, filled with a smoky white effulgence, the figure of Cass Cleave appeared and came forward, elongated and rippling in the blazing light. She faltered at the sight of the two of us advancing arm in arm. She was wearing a loose linen dress, inside which I clearly saw, as if the material had for an instant turned transparent, her lean, big-hipped, naked body. She came on, head down, looking at her feet. We met, and stopped all three. "Kristina," I said with a wave, "allow me to introduce Catherine Cleave." I watched them shake hands. There was something obscurely comical in the moment, and I had a strong urge to laugh. "Miss Cleave," I said, in a mode of lofty patronage, "is my biographer." At that I did laugh. Why had I not thought of it before? My biographer! Cass Cleave stared at me, then quickly looked away. Kristina was still holding her hand, looking her measuringly up and down, this tall, small-headed, affectingly ungainly girl. Magda, I found myself recalling, always hated shaking hands, would go to any lengths to avoid it; I wonder why? I am trying to remember her hands, to picture them; I know their shape, their feel, but I cannot see them. Is this how she will leave me at last, limb by limb, until there is nothing remaining, except my shame? "And have you seen the Shroud?" Kristina was asking of Cass Cleave. "Our famous Sindone." My memory snapped its fingers: sindone, not signore. Kristina set off walking again, and Cass Cleave and I turned and walked with her, me to the right and she to the left; Kristina was half a head shorter than Cass Cleave; I looked down at the little woman's lustreless hair, then up again at my girl, and grinned, and winked. My biographer. "Professor Vander has been reading to us," Kristina said, «till with her head down but addressing Cass. "'Effacement and Real Presence,' a chapter from his famous book. I was surprised," glancing up at me now, "that you did not mention the Shroud: effacement, you see." She laughed shortly. "They say it is the first self-portrait. I always think it was the Magdalene who held the cloth, not Veronica. But Magdalene was hair, is that not so?"

  – Long thick brown tresses streaming like water weed in the yellow lamplight, the water sluicing from the white jug. She would kneel beside the bathtub, a votary before the sacred fount, broad shoulders bowed, her white neck bared. Feel of her big skull frail as an egg under my kneading fingers. Where? Newyorpennindi-anabraska. Always moving, moving westward, stepping over the chequerboard land in long, effortless strides. The cities and then the plains, then what they call the high country, with snow and pine, then the mountains, the great peaks, and then the desert, and then at last the Barbary Shore, on whose blue waters her ashes would one day briefly float, swaying -

  What?

  Someone asking me something.

  "What?"

  Cass Cleave was standing before me, peering anxiously into my face and enquiring worriedly in a voice that sounded impossibly far-off if I was all right. All right? I said of course I was. I squirmed my shoulder free of her touch. All these damned women, passing me from hand to hand! We were at the end of the corridor, by the big window. Outside, at eye level, there was the improbable ochre and burnt-siena pudding-dome of a church, the stark sun gleaming on its leads. Where was Kristina Kovacs? Somehow she had left us without my noticing. Had I dropped out of consciousness for a moment? If so, why had I not fallen down? Cass Cleave was saying something about an address, my address. I shook my head, like an old dog with water in its ears, struggling to understand. My address? My address where? "Your talk, I mean," she said, gesturing in the direction of the lecture hall, "your reading." I shook my head the more. "What are you saying?" I said. "You were there. I saw you come in." She frowned; she said no, she had arrived just now. "I saw you," I said. "You came in late. You sat at the side, by the door. I saw you." She tried to take my arm but I swung away from her. Stairs, and more stairs, and then a set of double emergency doors with a metal bar to open them that I could not work. Cass was beside me. She put her hand over my hand on the bar. I could feel the faint heat of her face close to mine. "I am all right," I said. "I am all right." The doors swung open like a bulkhead and a dazzling wash of sunlight broke over us.

  But the fact is, I was not all right. I said I must have something to eat. What I really wanted, of course, was another drink, many other drinks. At the first restaurant we came to I ordered that we should stop. It was on a big dusty square, Piazza Vittorio Somebody, that sloped down to the Po. We sat at a table outside, under a canvas awning, with a view across the river to wooded heights that were bluish and flat in the noonday glare. I ordered a glass of sparkling wine. As I sipped the sweetish, slightly metal-tasting fizz, clouds of tiny bubbles, cold and sharp, detonated pleasantly in my sinuses. Now and then a strong waft of warm wind would come up from the river and make the awning above us ripple and crack like the sail of a boat. Cass Cleave sat silent, looking down toward the river, a hand lifted to shade her eyes, a mauve armpit bared. "Perhaps," I said, "you really should write my biography. Put all that research to use, all that sniffing along the seams of my life that you have been so busily about." Still she said
nothing, still she held her face turned aside, expressionless as a profile on a coin. It was, I was coming to see, her favourite pose; how transparent you were, my dear, after all. "You could write it in the first person," I said, "pretend that you are me. I give you full permission. I grant you the rights to my life. What do you say, mein irisch Kind?" Suddenly I longed to be alone, just myself and my drink. The fact is, and I am aware, in the circumstances, of the grisliness of even mentioning it, the fact is that Cass Cleave was not, as they say, or used to say, my type. I never really favoured the tall, pale, pyriform kind, although they were the very ones who always seemed to seek me out. Given the choice – which I rarely was given, because of my great bulk, naturally – I would have preferred little fat women. There sits at the centre of the by now practically leafless maze of my sensual imagination a small, squat, Buddha-like figure, pink and naked, with heavy, raspberry-tipped breasts and nicely rounded shoulders and smooth, shiny, dimpled knees, and three charming, overlapping folds of fat above each hip-bone. She has no face, this fleshy idol, only a heart-shaped blank on which my venereal fancy, attaining a certain temperature, may hastily stamp a rudimentary set of features. I do see her hair, though, very black and lustrous, parted in the middle and drawn tightly back – the only attribute, incidentally, that Magda, and only in her youth, at that, shared with my secret ideal. Where did the image of this roly-poly little idol originate? Very far back, I suspect, very far back indeed, as far, perhaps, as the birthing bed itself. Unsettling thought.

  The pastel roofs of cars parked in the square were shining in the sun, gaudy and heraldic, like the banners and shields of a prostrated, ornate army. "Who is Magda?" Cass Cleave asked, frowning now, and seeming to concentrate all her attention on the traffic speeding along the embankment. "You whispered it in my ear," she said. "Magda." I saw again the room, the bed, the girl. I wondered what the experience had been like for her, poor thing. She must have felt as if she had come to a far-off country, bankrupt and pestilential, where she had been captured and set upon by an ancient beast indigenous to the place, last specimen of its species, rampant and ghastly, with its mouldering pelt and its corpse breath and its single, glaring eye. "Magda," I said, "was my wife. She died."

  Lunch was brought, although I could not recall having ordered it. The waiter stopped filling my glass while it was only yet half full – red wine now, I noticed – and I snarled at him and made him fill it to the brim. When I was lifting the glass to my mouth my hand shook violently, Parkinsonially, and the wine spilled over and splashed on the tablecloth. Cass Cleave attempted to mop it up with her napkin but I smacked her hand away and told her sharply to leave it. "Do not fuss," I snapped at her. "I hate for people to fuss." I began to talk then about Hitler at Berchtesgaden. It is a little dinner table turn that I do, for my own amusement if for no other reason. Deftly I sketched a picture of the magic mountain, with its band of trolls toiling to be the first in the Fuhrer's favour, the little smooth-haired fellows and their blonde women all calves and big, square, satin-clad buttocks, and he in the midst of them, the mountain king, dreamy and distant, exquisitely polite, calmly plotting the destruction of the world. She kept her eyes fixed on her plate. "You are wondering if I admired him?" I said. She looked at me. "I did, a little. Do. A little. My friends and I when we were young entertained the beautiful dream of a Europe cleansed and free." I took another deep draught from my glass and leaned back, smiling into her face. "I am an old leopard," I said, "my spots go all the way through."

  From a nearby table a raffish-looking old fellow in a straw boater was attending us with interest, who when I caught his eye gave me the faintest little smirking nod of envy. Strange, but people never took us, Cass Cleave and me, for anything other than what we were; there must have been an aura about us, a sulphurous something that we generated, or that I generated, at least, that told them she was no daughter and I no dad. I am not sure why, but old Aschenbach's longing look had set me thinking again of Prague and Kristina Kovacs. When she came to the door of my hotel room that day I had been in bed, nursing yet another after-lunch hangover, most likely. She stood before me in something like a penitent's pose, it had a lewd effect, hands clasped at her breast and head inclined, looking up at me sideways and smiling, not bothering to say a word nor needing one from me. In those days she was famously handsome, in a smouldering, slightly bruised sort of way, and practically every man and not a few of the women at the conference we were both attending – on Molière, Kleist and Amphitryon, as I recall – had been trying to get her into bed, but it was to mine that she came. Why? Afterwards she said it was because she admired my mind, which made me laugh; one unhindered glimpse into that foul chamber would have sent her backing speechless out of the door, with hands uplifted, shaking her head in horror. At the time she still had a husband, in Bucharest, I believe it was, a folly of her student days. She told me about him, Istvan, or Ivan, or Igor, some such name, in that thrilling, chocolatey alto of hers, lying on her back with a hand behind her head, gazing soulfully up at the ceiling through cigarette smoke and absently touching a finger to her swollen lip where my fierce teeth had hurt it. I listened, half dozing. Such dramas! The night their apartment was searched. The day her typewriter was confiscated. The frights they had, the fights. The time when Igorstvan came home after a weekend of interrogation by the secret police, red-eyed and grey-faced, and punched her in the belly because he was angry and afraid, and after that she could not have the baby the lack of which, she said, was the tragedy of her life. "That filthy country," she hissed, her dragon-mouth smoking. "Those filthy people."

  But look! here is Kristina herself, and Franco Bartoli as well, sitting with us at the table in the shade of the awning, listening to the girl, who is talking to them, and laughing, in the strangest way. How did they come to be here without my noticing? I have no recollection of them arriving, joining us, ordering these glasses of wine they are toying with. I hear Cass Cleave telling them about someone called Mandelbaum, who comes to call on her. These are the words she uses: "He comes to call on me." The two sit facing her, upright on their chairs, fingers fidgeting on the stems of their wine glasses, blandly frowning with widened eyes and eyebrows lifted, polite and mystified. The girl leans forward at the table, her legs twined about each other and one foot hitched behind an ankle, and speaks very rapidly, stumbling over words, winding a lock of hair around a finger, tightly round and round, and giving that strange, snuffly laugh, as if what she is telling them were the drollest thing. Mr. Mandelbaum has a smell, she is saying, a smell of almonds, that goes ahead of him and warns her that he is on his way. Then he arrives and catches her in his arms and squeezes her, and squeezes, until all the breath is squeezed out of her and she falls down. Seeing that I am attending now, or trying to, out of an alcoholic haze, she gives me a bright, desperate smile, her eyes at once burning and blurred. To my distorted sight she looks like one of those hideous folded-in cubist portraits in which the face is presented simultaneously full-on and in profile, you know the kind of thing I mean. With perfect calm and no surprise I see that she is mad. "He smells of almonds," she said, "Mr Mandelbaum." Her smile stopped as if a light in her face had been switched off and she picked up her glass – or was it mine? – in both hands and drank deeply of the dark wine, watching me above the rim. The lunch things had been cleared, and I was holding a glass of… what is it? Grappa again, it must be. The sun was burning the back of my neck. How was it that no one seemed to have noticed that for some time I had not been here? Where was it I had been? In Prague, yes, with Kristina Kovacs, in her salmon-coloured slip. Cass Cleave, her head back and throat throbbing, finished the last of the wine in a great gulp and set down the glass with a bang and looked at me again. Her expression had gone lopsided, as if the profile half of the portrait now had slipped a fraction. She stood up unsteadily and turned and plunged off into the dim interior of the restaurant. The awning flapped, a car roof flashed. Kristina Kovacs cleared her throat and stirred. "You say she is w
riting your life?" she said, doubtfully. Franco Bartoli smirked at that. "She is your biographer?" he said to me. "Ah." He palmed another smirk. "Ah, I see." With his shiny bald brow and pouting mouth and scant, soft, downy, slightly reddish beard, he has the look, little Franco, of a rare and precious domestic animal, spoilt and ill-tempered from too much coddling. The rimless spectacles perching on the bridge of his neat nose were almost invisible. I wonder why it is that I despise him so. He began to speak now, in a tone of hushed and sibilant fury, of a fashionable French scholar who had agreed to come to the conference and give a paper and then had cancelled at the last minute. "Nearly alike," I said loudly, interrupting him. "Your Frenchman. Bator, Bartoli: nearly the same." I laughed, and held my grappa glass aloft and waggled it at the waiter leaning sullenly against a vine-clad trellis. "Bator the gnome," I said. "I met him once. Nasty, brutish, and short." The place had emptied, we were the last customers. I could hear myself breathe, a low, stertorous roaring, as if there were a bellows working inside my skull, always in me a sign of incipient drunkenness. There was a watery glare on the white tablecloth, and the objects on it, knife, fork, oil bottle, pepper grinder, stood each one at an identical angle to its own shadow, looking as if they had been set there just so, like chessmen, or runes for me to read. The waiter, scowling, brought the bottle of clear poison, poured; I drank. I tried to light a cigarette and fumbled the match and scorched my fingers and swore. Bartoli and Kristina Kovacs were looking at me in an odd, not to say alarming, somehow mechanical, fashion, sitting very still, very straight, like a pair of magistrates, their hands folded before them on the table, their eyes unblinking. "I know you killed your wife," Franco Bartoli said. I coughed, spluttering grappa. "What?" I croaked, gagging. "What?" Kristina Kovacs patted me solicitously on the back. "He says," she said, "you dropped your knife." Sure enough, there it was, the knife, on the ground; its blade, seen there between my knees, had an evil, knowing gleam. I leaned down to pick it up. Kristina Kovacs rose, purse in hand. I made to grab her; I demanded to know where she was going, afraid suddenly to be left alone with Franco Bartoli. She directed a small, dry smile at me. "I am going to see what has become of your biographer," she said. She made her way between the tables and went into the restaurant, where Cass Cleave had gone before her. Franco Bartoli with a fingertip rolled a bread crumb back and forth slowly on the tablecloth, pensive and tense. "You know she is dying," he said, and looked at me. "Kristina, I mean." His eyes were invisible behind the sunlight flashing on the lenses of his spectacles. And at once I understood that he and Kristina Kovacs were lovers. It came to me, just like that; excess of drink often has a clairvoyant effect on me. How long had the affair been going on, I wondered? Perhaps – and somehow this was funny – perhaps it had only just begun, perhaps as recently as last night. Franco must have seen the light of realisation in my face, for he lowered his eyes quickly and began rolling another pellet of dough, more agitatedly this time. I pictured them in bed after the act, Kristina unsleeping and disconcertingly tearful, and Franco with his pot belly and his little-boy's hands, his shoes with the lifts in them tucked discreetly under the bed, making a silent rictus as he stifled yet another yawn; then, out of the dark, Kristina's awful, blurted announcement of her illness, and Franco thinking at once of the dry feel of her flesh and the brown stench she had panted out of her already failing lungs while he was bouncing up and down on her, and he would want to leap up and flee back along the trail of his discarded clothes between bed and door, and run down the hotel corridor, the stairs, along the street, out of the city itself, away! but having instead to lie there, paralysed with dismay, not daring to stir a finger for fear of bringing everything, this woman, her distress, her life and impending death, all crashing down around his unwilling ears. Then the hours of talk, all her terrors tumbling out, her anguish, using up the air in the room until he could barely breathe. Would she have told him about that afternoon with me in Prague, the drapes drawn and she crying out and my dead leg between her thighs thumping its grotesque tattoo on the mattress? She would; oh, she would. "Have a drink," I said to him, smiling almost fondly into his face. "Have a drink with me, Franco, for the sake of old times." He would say nothing, and would not lift his eyes. "I know you killed her," he said in a whisper hoarse with hate. "I know you did." Kristina came back then, frowning. "The girl," she said, and looked at me. "I asked through the door, but she told me to go away. She sounded…"