In the Shape of a Boar

by Lawrence Norfolk

  ‘Madame Lackner has had to go on ahead,’ Slava said beside him. ‘Her people are already at the restaurant. She left her apologies.’

  Sol nodded, thinking it unlikely that such a thought would have crossed her mind. But that was the Ruth of thirty years ago, he reminded himself. He looked about the airy spaces of the foyer. People who knew the value of appearing busy were made to do nothing here, their discomfort policed by uniformed security guards and receptionists. As reward they were permitted to swim briefly in the watery globe of the Cyclops’ eye. As he had done.

  ‘There is a car waiting,’ said Slava. ‘The driver has the address.’

  The route began and ended in familiar thoroughfares. The riddle of Paris's backstreets connected them. After a grunted greeting, the driver made no attempt at conversation and Sol was left alone with his thoughts. Ruth's absence sharpened the realisation that he had wanted this short car-ride with her. He leaned back and watched the streetlights strobe over the rear window. One of her hands had clutched at him when they embraced; he had felt her nails through the cloth of his jacket and shirt. But then, when she stood back to look into his face, she had appeared perfectly composed. Over the years he had received news of her triumphs and occasional setbacks at irregular intervals: nominations for awards, a contractual quarrel with a studio, a divorce, acrimonious even by Californian norms, a period of silence, re-emergence as a director. Her first three films had not been released in France, but then she had made Nothing for Nothing with Paul Sandor and that had been shown everywhere. Sol had thought the star's performance self-obsessed, and the film had troubled him because he had found in it nothing of the Ruth he remembered. The Blue Dawn had followed, loathed by the critics and even more successful. Now Die Keilerjagd, or whatever she intended to call it.

  They were uncoordinated facts. He did not know the life that connected them – Ruth's life in America – any more than she could know of his. They had spoken twice in twenty-five years, both times by telephone. The latest of these conversations had taken place three weeks ago when the negotiations between Moderssohn and the film's producer had reached a deadlock which, it seemed, only a film director and a poet could resolve. They had talked inconsequentially. He had made a weak joke about her accent and Ruth had asked him what he meant. She had inquired about the weather ‘in Europe’ at that time of year.

  Of the earlier conversation, he remembered almost nothing. Even fifteen years later the few lost minutes in which his drunken self had babbled to a woman thousands of miles distant marked a fissure dividing the man who had waited in his apartment for a distant operator to place his call from the different man who had been woken hours later on the floor of the same apartment by the dropped receiver's angry buzz. The fissure recurred in his dreams. Sometimes he leaped over it, but more often he stumbled as he approached and a terrible clumsiness afflicted him. He seemed unable to save himself, or do anything but postpone his eventual tumble over the edge. He fell, but he never reached the bottom. He would wake in the instant before impact, sweating and shaking. He did not know what he had said to her.

  The car's suspension sagged and lurched, softly rocking him as the driver swung the heavy machine smoothly around the corners. Soon the name of the restaurant came into view in blue neon letters mounted high on the white façade of a hotel.

  Sol recalled Sandor's face from its appearance every six months or so on hoardings all over Paris. The star's exaggerated features rose out of costumes which came to seem increasingly absurd as his fame grew: cowboys, a boxer, soldiers. He remained Paul Sandor and his movies flowed about him, leaving him untouched. In return, he rendered them ridiculous in some way and as his stardom grew the films themselves began to accommodate Sandor's overbearing vitality at the expense of all else. The better his performance, the more shrunken the film. Then, within a single year, his public had deserted him.

  The anecdote from the shooting of Nothing for Nothing was that Ruth had taken Paul and a small crew to the Arizona desert to film the final scene. Paul's character has lost home, job, wife, children, friends. He runs into the desert, where the script, as Ruth related in syndicated interviews carried in the French press, had called only for his ‘final dissolution’.

  She had begun with a series of very long shots which shrank Paul to a speck of black in the vastness of the landscape. A second series, taken with a longer lens, had focussed on his face. Paul walks and walks but seems to get no closer. He does not sweat. He seems not to tire. ‘He is expressionless because he does not know who he is or what he should do,’ Ruth commented later, which her interviewer had understood as a reference to Paul's character rather than to Sandor himself. ‘He is undirected at this point, following an unwritten script.’

  There had been mechanical problems with the camera, because of the heat. Paul's face was dry because his sweat evaporated. Each time he neared the camera, Ruth had made them load the equipment into the truck and set up another half-mile away. They did this six times. On the seventh, Paul had broken into a run. They had filmed him running from the back of the truck. Then they continued as before.

  The critics had spoken of a new urgency in Paul's performance in Nothing for Nothing. With the distance between the camera and his character collapsed, a note of appeal had broken through the star's façade of flawless technique. It had always been there, some argued, but implicit and paralysing. It had taken a bolder director to find it and make it explicit: Paul Sandor's simultaneous need and distaste for what he did.

  So Ruth had made him run under a burning sun. The concluding images of Nothing for Nothing comprised a montage taken from the hours of footage shot that day: Paul's character trying to stand up; stumbling, then rolling down a shallow slope; raising an arm as if warding off a blow; crawling on hands and knees; attempting to haul himself to his feet. The crew had mutinied when Sandor collapsed, loading the semi-conscious actor into the back of the truck and driving him to a hospital in Flagstaff. This was later denied by Ruth and by Sandor himself.

  The car stopped.

  The brasserie standing opposite the dark edifice of Gare du Nord was well-known to Sol. It had never replaced its white linen tablecloths with paper ones, nor its green leather banquettes with more easily manoeuvrable chairs. Its L-shaped interior hooked an arm back into the depths of the building. Lamps copied from those mounted on the parapets of pont Alexandre III glowed yellow, their light thrown from wall to wall by bevelled mirrors. Similar mirrors cased the square pillars which punctuated the clangorous space. Sol watched himself approach as he entered the brasserie. Suddenly Ruth's face flashed in the periphery of his vision. A freak of the brasserie's decor had projected her forward in a flicker so fleeting that at first Sol could not decide whether he had merely thought of her or seen her. Sol stopped and turned, looking around the mirrored columns and walls for the chance configuration responsible. But the image had gone and he could not recapture it. Ruth, Sandor and whomever else might be dining with them were nowhere in sight.

  A bar ran down the side of the first dining-room. Diners waiting for tables and a large group of youngsters in the mufti of American teenagers coexisted there by ignoring each other and talking as loudly as possible. Sol edged his way through, murmuring apologies.

  ‘Monsieur Memel, this is an honour.’ The maître d'hôtel materialised before him. ‘Madame Lackner's party is already here.’ The man glided sideways to usher Sol through, casting a glance over the bar area and adjacent tables as he did so, frowning at the youngsters.

  The rearmost corner of the brasserie was raised on a low platform and partly screened from the eyes of the other diners by panels of frosted coloured glass. In this gaudy sanctum the party sat about a large round table, already crowded with half-empty bottles of wine. Ruth rose at his approach, edged around the backs of her neighbours’ chairs and kissed him briskly on the cheek. Two of the dozen or so men looked up at him incuriously then resumed their conversations. A third regarded him evenly across the table. That
was Sandor.

  ‘Rolf, Vittorio, Julian, Peter, François, Erno, Ethan . . . ‘ They looked up and offered quick salutes as Ruth reeled off their names. ‘Basically, the crew. And this,’ she raised her voice to call them to attention, ‘is Solomon Memel, as you all know.’

  Sol stood awkwardly in their collective regard. Those nearest him offered greetings which he strained to catch. The noise from the bar behind reached a new pitch. Suddenly a protesting voice rose out of the din at the front of the restaurant.

  ‘Shit,’ muttered Ruth. She squeezed past Sol and strode away through the dining-room towards the source of the commotion. Sol watched her go and when he turned back Sandor had risen from his seat and leaned across the table to offer his hand.

  ‘I'm Paul,’ he said. ‘I saw you come in. Look.’ He pointed to one of the mirrored columns in the dining-room, where the scene at the bar was just visible in miniature: the maître d'hôtel gesticulating, a girl pointing her finger at his chest. Ruth appeared beside her and rested a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Come and sit down. Drink some of this wine.’

  One of the crew, Rolf perhaps, was to Sandor's left, waiting impatiently to resume his conversation. Sandor ignored him smoothly.

  ‘Quite a woman, Ruth. You knew each other before the war.’ Sol nodded, reaching for a cigarette. Sandor lit it and declined one for himself. Huge hands, thought Sol. But delicate movements, how they handled the lighter. ‘We grew up together,’ he said. ‘Then we grew apart.’

  The two men began to talk while the table bunched and knotted and unravelled itself into different configurations. People came and went. When their numbers were swelled by the late arrival of four Americans (whose connection to the film Sol was unable to fathom) a second table was pressed into service just outside their glass-walled enclave. Men hopped between the two, leaning forward to rest their palms on the white linen, or crouching down between two chairs, heads turning back and forth like spectators at a tennis match. Apparently whatever had drawn Ruth away was continuing. She had yet to return.

  Sandor brushed away some breadcrumbs and settled his forearms on the table, addressing himself to the patch of table-cloth between them. He would speak, then glance sideways to Sol, who made a comment or gave a slow nod of agreement. The cocoon of intimacy between them was Sandor's creation, part of his act. Nevertheless Sol's attention wavered and veered from the actor, who perhaps sensed his distraction for it was he who broke off their carefully-shaped exchange.

  ‘Where's Ruth got to anyway?’ he asked abruptly, and at that both men stood up to peer over the glass screen.

  Ruth was still talking to the maître d'hôtel. She rested a hand on his forearm. The man smiled unhappily. The girl from the bar stood behind them, arms folded, a sulky expression on her face.

  ‘What do you think?’ Sandor asked Sol.

  Heads had turned to look at the actor from all over the dining-room, a fact which he seemed not to notice. His directness caught Sol by surprise.

  ‘I don't follow you,’ he said.

  ‘The girl. You know who she is don't you?’

  ‘No, I . . . ‘

  ‘She's your Atalanta, or Thyella. Lisa Angludet.’

  The girl was dressed in faded blue jeans, suede boots and a loose white blouse. She swung a heavy leather coat from one hand as she waited gracelessly for Ruth to take her leave of the mollified maître d'hôtel.

  ‘Not mine,’ said Sol. The girl looked over at him for a moment, her thick black hair falling to her collar and framing a full mouth and large dark eyes. No bra, he thought. And too young. What did Ruth think she was doing? The real face flashed unbidden before his mind's eye: stronger, less obviously beautiful. The mask of the woman he had known as Thyella, and Atalanta. In twenty-seven languages. Something sank in his memory, too quick to be caught. He knew her from somewhere, had seen her somewhere. Lisa Angludet was all wrong.

  ‘Monsieur?’

  She was standing in front of him, one limp hand outstretched. From a magazine article, he thought without conviction. Her lower lip stuck out a little; perhaps the sulky expression was natural.

  Ruth said, ‘Lisa, this is Monsieur Memel.’

  ‘I know.’ She smiled at him, then turned to Ruth and said, ‘I have to go. My friends are waiting.’ Ruth nodded and kissed the girl on the cheek. The three of them watched her twirl about and weave a path between the tables, dragging the leather coat along the floor behind her.

  ‘She's a real piece of work,’ said Sandor, watching her departure.

  ‘She's perfect,’ retorted Ruth. ‘Sit down. We should talk.’

  The film would be shot over seven weeks in an apartment in the Chaillot district overlooking the Seine. Ruth laid out photographs on the tablecloth. From the windows one could see the Eiffel Tower across the river to the left, then directly below and to the right the long artificial island of alhée des Cygnes. A barge was moored there. The bridge would be pont de Bir-Hakeim. The apartment was only a few hundred metres upstream from his own, which overlooked the river from the other side. The scenes would be set up to suggest that the apartment was endless, its rooms always leading to other rooms. One of the men who had been introduced earlier now drifted over and explained to Sol how the lighting would lower the ceilings and stretch the apartment horizontally; Paul and Lisa would appear taller and more distant from one another. ‘It is a cave of a kind. Like the one in your poem,’ he said. ‘But it's not possible to film real darkness.’ He shrugged apologetically.

  The crew began to gather about Ruth, drifting up to the table in ones and twos. Sol felt the conversation slide away from him. And what is ‘real darkness’, he wondered.

  ‘Lisa will be nervous to begin with. After that, I don't know. I want you to catch that, Vito. I want her at a loss, uncertain.’

  ‘Her face is hard to light,’ said the man who had been speaking to Sol. ‘Her eyes don't do anything. Paul's face looks best when the light is coming in low and from the side, but then her cheekbones disappear.’

  ‘Most of the early scenes we're sitting or lying down,’ said Sandor. He looked at the photos of the apartment. ‘Looks like we'll be lit from above, pretty much.’

  ‘I can balance it out, but I can't turn up into down,’ said the lighting director. ‘I still think we should use lamps.’

  ‘No,’ said Ruth. ‘It's not possible. When it's overcast, or there's a thick haze, the light here in Paris is close to the mountain light in Greece. There's a lot of very high thin cloud so the light is chalky, very flat. It's a good light for what we want.’

  ‘Greece?’ Sol had spoken before he realised. ‘When were you . . . I mean, you never told me.’ He did not know how to continue.

  ‘Told you?’ Ruth turned and regarded him evenly. There was a new note in her voice and, in that moment, Sol felt that she was distant from him, peering down while he fell away. He did not know her at all. Then her expression changed again and she spoke warmly. ‘But there's nothing to tell, Sol. The production office sent a couple of cameramen down there to get footage of the locations. What's the matter?’

  He shrugged. Their exchange had drawn the attention of everyone at the table.

  ‘The landscape there is incredible,’ said Vittorio. ‘Especially in the mountains. How the hell did you survive out there?’

  ‘Luck,’ said Sol. ‘Boots.’

  Vittorio smiled.

  ‘We're going to use it as punctuation,’ Ruth continued. ‘It'll represent their memories, their previous lives. So there'll be sudden openings in the darkness, an expanse of sky or a lake, the mountains. As if the closed world of the cave, the apartment, is broken open and there's the world they've escaped, where they've lived the lives they can't live anymore.’

  ‘It is a most expressive landscape,’ added Vittorio.

  Ruth laughed, ‘OK, OK. There's about two hours of footage. You should watch it, Sol.’ She looked up. ‘Do we have a screening room yet?’ They began discussing the relative merits of d
ifferent screening rooms and why none of them were suitable, or had not been secured, but Sol could think only about the flatness of Greek light. There was something wrong in what Ruth had said. He tried to think back the twenty-five years to the last time that light had fallen upon him. Something in what she had said troubled him. Something had slipped by him. He looked up quickly and caught Sandor watching him with undisguised curiosity. A smile spread slowly across the actor's face.

  ‘Boots,’ he said. ‘Luck. There's no such thing as good light. How in hell did you survive?’

  ‘You're drunk, Paul,’ said Ruth sharply before Sol could think to reply.

  Sol held the actor's gaze for a second or two, then looked away. ‘I have to go,’ he said.

  Ruth caught up with him outside.

  ‘Pay no attention to him,’ she said.

  ‘He wasn't drunk. He hardly drank all night.’

  ‘I know. Just forget it. It's meaningless. I'm sorry about tonight. We should have met somewhere away from the others. There's too much to say.’

  The light from the restaurant silhouetted her and reflected off the wet pavement on which she stood. It must have rained. He could not make out her expression.

  ‘Now is the time for the Tellable,’ Sol intoned.

  ‘Then tell me.’

  Her face was unreadable. He hesitated before her.

  ‘There's so much . . . Almost thirty years, Ruth.’

  ‘I wrote to you. Different addresses.’

  ‘I never received anything.’

  Ruth shrugged. ‘Tell me what you think of Lisa.’

  ‘Young,’ he said quickly. ‘Too pretty.’

  ‘You should see her naked,’ replied Ruth. ‘It's worse than you can imagine. But she's good with Paul. They'll work well together, when we put them in their cave.’

  Sol nodded. She was soothing him. The two of them stood there, thinking of the third who did not. Ruth was right. Tonight was the time to say nothing.