In the Shape of a Boar

by Lawrence Norfolk

  He had thought that she would walk with him and found himself surprised at their parting, although it was he who raised her fingers to his lips and turned away. Why had he thought their meeting again would settle him when their pasts lay parcelled up between them, taped, stamped, containing bulky unwanted gifts. Ruth had never called back after his drunken telephone call. It had not been mentioned when they had next spoken, fifteen years later. Three weeks ago. How did that seem so distant?

  He turned left into boulevard de Denain, which led to place de Valencien, a grandly-named crossroad. Traffic penned and released by the lights further up roared past him and continued down rue La Fayette.

  The pitch of the traffic noise changed. A convoy of identical trucks was approaching, the old-fashioned kind with high cabs and oversized wheel-arches. Sol watched them draw near. Their headlights smeared the wet asphalt with yellow. He might have been twenty again, standing by the side of the road while his future rolled past him. But he had not recognised it. None of them had, even when the events of the following days had prefigured what was to come with such exemplary candour. Even then they had not understood. They should have taken to their heels, every man, woman and child, all the thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds and millions, all of them scattering over the fields.

  The trucks of the convoy passed him and continued on their way, the wet road reflecting and multiplying their tail-lights. The red glows drifted in the darkness as the vehicles retreated. Sol watched until the last had disappeared.

  ***

  Seven dull thuds shuddered through the town. A thick column of mud-coloured dust rose slowly from behind the railway station, leaned as the breeze caught it, then toppled into the river. The retreating Russians had blown the bridge.

  War had been declared the previous autumn but nothing had happened until the following spring, when the Russians had demanded the return of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. The retreat of the Romanian units from their forward positions to the north and east of the town had prompted the abrupt departure of the town's police force, most of the university faculty and a significant proportion of the civilian population. Within a single week, the early-morning roar of the markets at the far ends of Herrenstrasse and Siebenbürgerstrasse fell to a polite hum, the crush in Ringplatz to an orderly toing and froing, and Gustl Ritter's father found himself presiding over a near-empty trolley-car. A meagre human traffic interrupted the heat-haze of the streets, squares and parks, a subdued remainder who recast themselves as survivors of some enigmatic catastrophe, moving slowly, jostled only by their memories of those who had left.

  This strange calm had been broken by the appearance, on the plain of the Prut, of a Soviet armoured battalion. A tank had been deployed in Ringplatz for the first week of the occupation. The armoured unit had been succeeded by a garrison of red-cheeked Ukrainian peasants costumed in brown uniforms and commanded by thin-faced commissars.

  Now, more than a year after the arrival of the Russians, Sol, Ruth and Jakob sat outside the Schwarze Adler, neither eating cakes, for there were none, nor drinking coffee, although the liquid in the cups before them still went under that name. Sol watched the surface of the steaming concoction Auguste Weisz served from the elaborate chrome contraption behind his counter. The liquid shivered as the seven explosions went off, the first triggering an answering volley of pigeons from the building opposite, which had been the Rathaus, then the garrison commander's headquarters, and now appeared deserted.

  ‘The railway station?’ he wondered aloud.

  ‘The synagogue,’ said Ruth.

  ‘The bridge,’ said Jakob. ‘Retreating armies destroy bridges. Force of habit.’ He tilted his cup to confirm that it was empty.

  In the third week of the occupation, the university's fleeing professors had been replaced by a mixture of Ukrainians and schoolteachers from the surrounding villagers, whose ignorance Sol had taken pleasure in exposing with abstruse questions. Three times a week, he and his remaining fellow students were herded into the university's largest lecture hall to listen to a catalogue of Tsarist injustices and the reforms achieved under Soviet communism. The course was called ‘History’ and was compulsory.

  Openings and closures had been haphazardly decreed. Thus the medical department, whose faculty had not been replaced, had closed, while the Yiddish Theatre, closed seventeen years before, had reopened. As direct consequences, Jakob had spent the previous year studying Ancient Greek and Botany and Ruth had taken small parts in the dramatised folk tales and Soviet playlets which the Yiddish Theatre's director, Pessach Ehrlich, had been encouraged to stage. Most of her fellow-actors were cutters and seamstresses from the leather-goods factory at Weinberg, which had closed for want of leather. Ehrlich himself had been a dentist's assistant, until the dentist had fled. A Ukrainian company from Lemberg, or Lvov as its citizens insisted, had been installed at the grander establishment in Theaterplatz, where they put on productions of Shakespeare, Racine and Kulish. Ruth and Sol had spent an amusing evening at the Kaisercafé miming to a performance of Bérénice, clearly audible from the adjacent theatre. The troupe from Lvov tended to bellow. The town's new overlords had dispatched four thousand of the town's inhabitants to a new life in Siberia and forbidden the remainder to venture outside the town's boundaries. The timber market had closed and Sol's father had found employment in the office of the Municipal Engineer, where his final task before the Russian withdrawal had been to survey the town's bridges.

  But the glove-stitchers and saddle-makers of the Weinberg works could not believe in themselves as actors any more than a dentist's assistant could credibly direct them, or an acolyte of Rilke eulogise tractors, thought Sol. Doctors treated people, not plants, and timber-brokers had no business with drafting tables unless it were in supplying the wood to manufacture them. For the past year, those who had remained in the town had worn the vestments of those who had departed. They did not fit and now the seven explosions, one for each of the seven piers of the bridge painstakingly drawn by Sol's father, announced that these awkward garments were to be discarded. What form would their replacements take? An army of empty clothes was marching towards them, wanting only bodies. Six days earlier, Germany had turned on her ally and declared war on the Soviet Union.

  ‘Shall we investigate?’ asked Sol. The trolley-car's bell sounded as it proceeded up Siebenbürgerstrasse.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Jakob, glancing at the clock tower, which held his attention for longer than seemed necessary. The other two looked up. A bare spike protruded from the top of the tower where the two-headed eagle had been mounted.

  ‘Lotte told me that Erich left,’ said Ruth. ‘Have you seen him?’

  ‘Erich? Impossible!’ Sol scoffed.

  ‘The last time I saw him was two weeks ago. He was terrified,’ offered Jakob.

  It had been obvious for a month that the Russians were preparing to leave. The train had shuttled between the station at the foot of the hill and its invisible counterpart at Lemberg, taking first the possessions of the Soviet officials, then their families and eventually themselves. When the last train had left, the original inhabitants were told by the commander of the remaining garrison that they should prepare for evacuation to safety and a new life in the Ukraine. Then he and his men had left too.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Ruth.

  Sol shook his head. A community of artisans whose grand-parents had emigrated from Ukraine and who worshipped at the cathedral on Herrenstrasse had supplied a few hundred refugees, the town's known communists rather fewer, but Erich was neither a Ukrainian nor a communist. They had known him since the first day of term at the Meisler Institute, when they were six years old. It was inconceivable that he should have fled with the Russians. Sol said as much.

  ‘Inconceivable, but true,’ retorted Jakob. ‘Like so many things.’

  Sol frowned. The thought that Erich might have taken flight unsettled him in a way that the more obvious signs of the town's abandonment had not. Eric
h had been quiet, prone to embarassment, a passable violinist.

  ‘How could he leave without a word to anyone?’ Ruth appealed to Jakob.

  ‘If he really has gone,’ added Sol. ‘Remember when he ran away and hid in the lifeguard's hut? He stayed away three nights.’

  ‘Erich isn't twelve anymore,’ Jakob said flatly, ‘and he's not hiding in a hut by the swimming pool. He's gone and we don't know why, and that's that.’

  Ruth looked down at her lap. Sol felt his temper rise. He and Jakob had argued more frequently over the past year. Now there were grudges between them, trivial disagreements which had been left too long and were beyond resolution. Through his irritation, Sol wondered if this spat were destined to become another. There was no middle ground between what was known and what was not, according to the Book of Jakob. There was no room for doubt. Erich was simply ‘gone’. And that's that.

  And Jakob was wrong, he thought. Erich existed. He was out there, somewhere. Erich's life continued, whether known to them or not, a flickering in the periphery of their vision, a reference to a lost source.

  But Jakob would have no truck with any of that. The three friends had collided that summer, rebounded, then collided again. And there was a new element in their relations, a gritty particle which had worked its way between them leaving telltale scratches. Jakob had not deciphered those marks.

  ‘How would you know?’ Sol burst out in response. He would have said more but Ruth had risen, the legs of her chair scraping over the stones and the sound echoing off the wall of the Rathaus, breaking the near-silence in Ringplatz. Startled, Sol and Jakob looked up but she was already striding away, almost running with her skirt swishing angrily from side to side. She rounded the corner and was gone before either of them could summon the presence of mind to call out.

  ‘Damn,’ said Jakob softly to himself. Then, with obscure authority as Sol half-rose to go after her, ‘No, leave her be.’

  Sol relapsed into his chair, pondering whether he did so in deference to Jakob, or to Ruth's mood, or to the strange lassitude which the hot afternoons brought to the town, when humid air collected in the streets and pressed against the walls of the buildings. Later he would remember Jakob's furious departure from Schillerpark. That was now almost two years in the past: the year of Soviet occupation and the year of waiting which had preceded it. Then, Ruth had stayed his pursuit with the same phrase. Now he stared at his feet and wished he had not spoken. It would have been simple to hold his tongue. He had no doubt that Ruth's anger was directed at himself. An uncomfortable silence descended on the two of them.

  ‘What are we going to do, Sol?’ Jakob asked after a minute or more. His voice was level and his eyes unblinking as they sought Sol's own. ‘What are we all going to do?’

  He was jealous, thought Sol. The suspicion scuttled into his head and clung there. Jakob held his gaze for a second longer than seemed natural. Jakob was jealous because he knew.

  ‘I . . . ‘Sol began to say, then thought better of it.

  ‘What?’ Jakob prompted, more quietly than before. ‘What do you want to tell me?’

  It had happened three months earlier. Ruth had been appearing in her third production at the Yiddish theatre. Ehrlich had adapted a number of folk-tales and linked them to suggest a progress from rural poverty to collectivised and mechanised emancipation. The production grew implausible as dibbuks and trolls strove to recast themselves as landowners and other counter-revolutionary elements. Ruth played an array of erring daughters, and two ill-defined ‘hags’ for Ehrlich's adaptation necessitated a certain amount of doubling-up among the members of his inexpert troupe. The costume changes had produced chaos backstage, where the hissing of the audience had almost been drowned out by the dresser's cursing of the actors, who would mislay hats, lose boots, or tear buttons off their costumes in an attempt to solve the arithmetical conundrum of seven actors divided between eighteen parts.

  Ruth had banned both Sol and Jakob from attending, offering in recompense detailed accounts of the production's nightly disasters. More often than not, one or the other or both of them would meet her afterwards at the stage door from where they would walk with her the short distance to her home while she related that night's catalogue of disasters, extending the route as necessary to accommodate explanation of their absurdity in full. But it had been Sol alone who had been waiting for her three months ago. The two of them had found themselves in the alley running behind Flurgasse, both of them laughing so hard that they had had to stop walking and prop their hands on their knees to recover their breath. They had risen slowly and fallen silent, their faces flushed.

  ‘I. . . . ‘

  But he thought afterward that he had not even managed that single syllable. He had wanted to speak. Everything was clear for an instant as their months of cautious circling spiralled in to the inevitability of what followed. Ruth's urgency had startled and silenced him. She had pushed him up against the fence, parted his lips with her fingers and kissed him without inhibition.

  ‘What is it?’ Jakob asked again. He appeared puzzled.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Sol. ‘Ruth's nervous. We shouldn't forget that.’ The sentence sounded ridiculous in his ears.

  ‘And you, Sol?’ Jakob asked without a hint of challenge, the solicitude on his face catching Sol by surprise and disarming him so that all he could muster in reply was a forced smile as he said, ‘Now is not the time.’

  He pushed his chair back and stretched. He was rising to his feet when Jakob spoke again.

  ‘Forgive me.’

  Sol thought that he must have misheard. He stood there, at a loss how to respond. At that moment Auguste Weisz emerged from the café but, perhaps sensing the oddity of the exchange, paused in the doorway and did not approach. Jakob seemed wholly absorbed in the stained rim of his coffee cup.

  ‘There's nothing to forgive,’ blurted Sol.

  Jakob nodded without looking up.

  Quickly, he had thought in the alley. Ruth had pressed her body against him. He had nuzzled her neck, one of his hands reaching for her under her skirt. She had pushed harder, at once denying him and clamping him in place. Everything was suddenly a flurry of hot breath, the awkwardness of their clothes and the scent of one another mixed together. He had felt her shudder. Then she had softened in his arms and hung there for a second or two, one hand hooked over his shoulder, the other clutching him below his ribs. He would find the marks of her nails there later when he undressed. Then she had exhaled, or sighed, and her own breath had seemed to blow her away from him.

  ‘Never tell him.’

  Those had been her first words. She had meant Jakob, of course. He had nodded stupidly, wanting her and thinking that perhaps his agreement would be the price of her continuing.

  ‘Promise me,’ she said. ‘It would kill him if he knew.’

  He had reached for her, grinning at her melodrama. But she had jumped back.

  ‘Promise!’

  ‘I promise.’ He smiled more broadly. ‘But we make such a good pair of rivals. Especially over you.’

  He had thought she would smile, or at least acknowledge the compliment. Instead she had stared at him in amazement.

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  Her hand flew to her mouth. She had turned on her heel and fled. Her reaction baffled him so completely that he stood rooted to the spot for some seconds before shouting after her, ‘Wait!

  Ruth! Of course I promise.’

  What else should he have thought?

  They had not spoken of it afterward, he reflected as he left Jakob sitting outside the café and walked through Getreideplatz. And the episode had never been repeated. He was left with a memory which now hung between the three of them, albeit unbeknown to one. Perhaps it had in part prompted the trio's drift into the ambit of their fellow students, the turbulent frothing of whose passions flowed over all three and masked the rifts widening between them. It was easier not to be alone. But they felt this as a renewed interest in
their peers rather than as a disenchantment with each other, so that, arriving at the bridge two days later to confirm for themselves what the whole town already knew and finding a group of their friends bathing there, all three experienced and concealed a faint sense of relief. Today at least they would be excused the performance of the intricate dance which they performed only for one another's benefit. When they reached the river-bank, Ruth pulled her skirt up above her knees and waded into the water. Sol and Jakob followed. Her abrupt departure two days before had not been mentioned by any of them.

  The water rushed in a glittering sheet interrupted by sandbars and little reefs of pebbles where a few sparse tufts of long grass had taken root. A channel near the far bank flowed slower and was deep enough to swim in. As they approached, Sol picked out the heads of Lotte, Rachel, then Chaim Fingerhut and his sister Lia. Four or five others were lying on the bank, seemingly asleep.

  The water flowed around their legs then whorled away downstream towards the stumps of the bridge's piers. A solitary arch had survived the dynamiting and stood midstream to commemorate the triumph of its continued existence. The rest lay in the water, the debris forming an irregular weir.

  ‘The troika approaches! All hands on deck!’ shouted Axel Federmann, and the heads of the swimmers turned. Ruth waved. Lotte waved back and sank. The three walked a little way further upstream, trying and failing to keep to the shallows. They were soaked almost to the waist when they clambered ashore, Sol offering his hand to Ruth, who had decided, midstream, to adopt the gait of a decrepit old woman in obscure allusion to one of Ehrlich's productions.

  ‘Oy, how heavy is my back! And how my firewood aches.’

  ‘She's trying to amuse us,’ said Jakob to Sol from behind her.

  Sol considered releasing her hand to let her fall, with an amazed expression, backward into the water.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, when he did not. She looked back for Jakob, who made the bank in a single stride.

  The swimmers were drying themselves when they reached the little group. They had brought blankets and bottles of water. Lia was cutting slices from a loaf of white bread, watched by her brother and Axel.