All of this was familiar.
Then the first pain would be felt, which entered through the feet, rose and gathered itself in his ankles. His bones bowed and straightened. His footfalls jarred through his frame. The body and its memories. Mine, he thought, nearing wakefulness.
But the body also numbed from below, feet first again, for the same pain seemed to scour of sensation the flesh through which it passed. Feet, ankles, knees, hips, spine. Only the skull guarded its sentience, gauging the sudden blast of air which swept up the slope yet to be descended and the great stepping-stones of its crags and outcrops. But the body it topped was nerveless; a thing that moved according to one thought: the next climb.
The repetition had been the worst of it, he concluded vaguely. Up and down, and always the cold.
He had found the two packages where Ruth had told him they would be. Then his flight had begun.
And there was his journey to the dark tunnel which had proved its terminus, from birthplace to the extinction he had first glimpsed in the barrel of a rifle, thought Sol then, one crusted eyelash ungluing itself and the eye opening on the lowest shelf of the bookcase. His own editions were shelved there, arrayed in order of publication. Their spines rose and fell; an angular diagram of peaks and troughs, climbs and descents. His route in cross-section.
The morning roar of traffic rose from the boulevard below and vibrated feebly at the window. He had fallen asleep on the couch. He had woken to the sight of his own books. Edo, edere, edidi, editum. To breathe one's last. To undergo edition.
His first book had come out from Fleischer. The volume began the series: Memel· Die Keilerjagd, printed on a dark blue spine with the intertwined hands of Fleischer Verlag's device below it. Let that represent his first obstacle, thought Sol, the range of the Carpathians, after the first weeks of terror on the plain. He had slept in snatches during the days, moving only by night.
Sol's tongue dragged itself free of stale saliva and he swallowed. The whiskey bottle stood empty on the floor with the room bent around the swollen cylinder of its neck. A shoe lay beside it.
Surrer Verlag's edition had succeeded Fleischer's, after the purchase of Fleischer's publishing house. Surrer had then put out the fat white paperback which German high school teachers even now were drumming into the heads of their pupils. In Germany, one ‘did’ Memel from the age of fourteen. ‘It is the same all over the country,’ a young doctoral student had once told him excitedly. ‘A special day, when every head bends to the same text at the same time.’ Like the Roman Catholic Mass, thought Sol.
It was sixteen in France, but not compulsory. Solomon Memel
· La Chasse had been produced a few months after the German paperback, in a similar format. Together these first three extended a little plateau along the shelf, the place where he had become Solomon Memel the Poet.
This trio would stand for the long southward plunge to the Danube, he thought. If ever a God had watched over him, his hand had descended there. Even if the same hand had also raised the mountains which rose before him afterwards. The mountains which had seemed never to end. The black cover of the next volume rose sheer against the French and German editions, Solomon Memel· Den Vildsvin Jagt picked out in red, ‘for the blood, and the darkness of the body around it,’ as his Danish publisher had explained, in perfect German. A Caccia di Cinghiale marked the spine of a pocket edition which had been hastily bound in hard covers when his sudden celebrity had leaped the Alps. An illustrated version from France followed, then the first of the Spanish editions. The outlines of their spines rose and fell along the shelf.
No, the mountains never ended, thought Sol. On they went, rising and falling, on their way to meaningless exhaustion. Editions from Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia with no translators credited, a samizdat production from Russia, then the official one towering over it. A first, error-ridden Romanian translation produced by the only surviving member of the Fingerhut family, an aunt of Chaim's and Lia's, and dedicated to their memory, then the bound transcript of its near-faultless successor by a professor at the University of Cluj, which Sol had refused to authorise, and next to that, bunched together, the first Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic editions. His eye ran along a ridge of right-angles and perfect perpendiculars, peaks and precipitous ravines. He flexed a foot and cramp ran up his calf. He tried to raise his head.
He had spent the first winter in two freezing hideaways. Men with dogs had tramped through the woods around the first, hunting him perhaps. He would never know. He had fled higher, to the second, a long-abandoned shepherd's hut. The cold had reached into him, winding steely fingers around his bones. Here was its faint echo: a piercing rod of pain running through his brow to the back of the skull. His stomach heaved suddenly with no result. Sol breathed in, breathed out, then swung his legs and rolled upright.
He was a quarter of the way along the shelf, less than a quarter through the long march he wanted it to represent. Solomon Memel · The Boar Hunt was wrapped in a garish multicoloured dust-jacket. It had quickly been replaced, at Sol's insistence, with a more sober grey design. Together they formed a thick, half-shaded pillar. His eye ran over translations into Estonian, Catalan and Dutch. There had been an argument with the Dutch; he forgot the details. Hebrew, after numerous unexplained delays. Hardbacks and paperbacks, the lattermost printed in alphabets so foreign to him he could not distinguish the words of the title and it was impossible to draw the unmarked frontier where his second collection began, Von der Luft bis zur Erde. Not with certainty. The terrain had not changed; only its stumbling pilgrim, who shook from cold he could no longer feel and watched his bones suck the skin tight over his frame as the flesh within it wasted. These volumes stood for the weeks that followed as he had inched his way south. There were less of them: ‘An inevitable falling-off ‘ (Der Spiegel). He did not know how long he had walked. He recalled some of the days as lifetimes, while of others he could not recollect a single second. It was not until Reichmann had questioned him that he had traced a tentative southward line and realised that whole weeks had erased themselves from his memory, falling away behind him as though his passing had snapped the last cable of a swaying bridge and sent it tumbling into the abyss it once had spanned. His passage across had left no trace. There had come a point when he had risen each dawn as though from a deathbed, as unsurprised by his continuance as he would have been by cessation. He moved and existed to move. That he existed had been enough.
And I am, thought Sol. His head pounded steadily. He would have to stand soon. He smelled sour. Steinbrech mustered fewer volumes yet. By the time of his last volume, published three years and three months ago, his publishers numbered five: Surrer, still proclaiming his genius in quarter-page advertisements with every publication, the impeccably impoverished Editions Maroslav-Leger here in Paris, a university press in the United States, the unchanged and unchanging Danes, and a hand-bound volume produced single-handedly, it seemed, by the faithful professor from Cluj. His work, he was told, had grown obscure.
The last book on the shelf was different. Taller than the others, and bound in thin green cardboard, it resembled a school exercise book and leaned at an angle against the Romanian edition of Es gibt so eben. If he were ever to gather another volume of work, and if it were ever to be published, then this flimsy production would be shunted along the shelf again. It would always be the last of his books. But did it signal the end of one flight or the beginning of another? He had watched Ruth disappear up the hill. He had entered the shed.
The packages were there as promised. They had contained rye bread, onions, coarse sausage meat and a letter from Jakob, written in pencil on pages torn from an invoice book. He read with difficulty, Solomon, Your ‘Rilke’ won't help you now, or your ‘Goethe’, or your poems . . .
After that, Jakob's scrawl appeared to collapse. It was hard to distinguish underlinings from crossings-out and over the following three pages he could make out only odd words and phrases. Four times ‘The Tr
uth’ was spelt out in carefully formed letters but the words surrounding it were each time illegible. The last page was covered in scribbling which bore no resemblance to writing at all. The letter had been signed with a character which might have been a ‘J’, or an approving tick.
So his flight had begun. That first journey's end and his first exhaustion were then still almost a year away. Jakob would be waiting there. In the last days, deep in the Pindus, he had had the impression that the mountains were moving, but very slightly, bending in towards him as if taking strange bows. He remembered a dulled sense of alarm which had accompanied this perception. His movement no longer contained any thought of ‘towards’, nor had it ever, he supposed. There was an unforeseeable place where the interminable distance would give out. Click. There. And there was another where he would be unable to continue.
The last book described one of these. He still did not know which.
He remembered becoming aware that the landscape had grown dry, with slopes of rattling scree and grey mosses. He would scrape them out and chew them with handfuls of snow, unable to taste their bitterness. His nose bled and the blood dried, clogging his nostrils. His throat burned from the coldness of the air. He bound his shoes with strips of cloth torn from his shirt.
Feet, thought Sol, pulling off a sock and looking down. A brusque American doctor in Venice had taken one look and told him that he would limp for the rest of his life. Later, here in Paris, he had been lectured by a stem-faced woman surgeon who had waved his X-rays at him and indicated badly-healed fractures, the floating fragments of cartilage, flicking her painted fingernails against the brittle plastic of the transparencies. ‘Your feet are your own, Monsieur. Now their aches are yours too.’ But there were no aches. The nerves were damaged; he barely felt his feet.
He had reached the brink of a cliff and looked down into a void. A vast crater opened before him, as though a giant hand had scooped a basin from solid rock. Far below, he had seen what he had thought was a track running across the basin's floor. But there seemed no way to reach it. The walls were almost sheer. He must, he thought later, have been close to the end. His limbs were numb with exhaustion or cold; he did not know which. He could no longer remember being able to imagine the life he had left behind. He would sleep now, he had thought, and had turned to find somewhere to lie down. Jakob was standing behind him.
‘Get up,’ Jakob said. (So had he, Sol, already been lying down? His recollection was otherwise clear but that had been omitted.)
‘We have to get down there,’ Jakob pointed and said a word that Sol did not understand. ‘There's a path and after that we'll climb.’
‘Yes.’
There was a path, as promised. There had to have been a path. Then they began the climb, although Sol soon lost sight of Jakob, whose voice drifted up, growing less and less comprehensible. He knew, of course, that Jakob had been taken away, along with all the others, in trains, while he, Solomon Memel, had fled, and so there was no ‘Jakob’, or ‘others’. No ‘Mother’, or ‘Father’. Nevertheless he could move in strange pursuit of this spectre, whose continued being could not be disproved, or not yet, not before reaching the floor which lay far below. A ‘Jakob’ could live in the depth of the descent, Sol's own slow progress. He slipped once, his shins scraping down the stone. That his hands and feet felt nothing helped him. He was surprised at the ease of it, second by second; only joining the moments together was hard. The last part would see the sheer sides grow ever more shallow until slopes of scree gave out onto level ground. The floor was littered with stones. There was an opening in the face ahead of him and to his left, a sliver of darkness shaped like the blade of a knife. A cave would give good shelter, he thought. There was a past above him that had been expunged; how else was he here, if not by falling down a well of space in which his guide had so briefly existed? There was no ‘Jakob’ now. Opposite the cave, far off to his right, an answering fissure split the sheer rock from top to bottom. He thought he had seen a track of some kind from the edge far above. There was no trace of it now.
He sat down, knowing as he did so that he lacked the strength to stand again. Fatigue rolled over him and he reached for the package that someone he had known had left in a shed. Long gone. But he was no longer cold. He would sleep now and never wake up.
So it should have ended.
The noise of the traffic outside grew in volume; a grey September sky. Sol pulled off his remaining shoe and sock and reached forward for the first and last volumes on the shelf, Leon Fleischer's volume bound in dark blue cloth, the other in green cardboard which sagged under its own weight: Die Keilerjagd von Solomon Memel: Eine Kommentierte Ausgabe.
Underneath this legend was printed the annotating editor's name: J. Feuerstein.
***
An unfamiliar voice crackled in the receiver.
‘Good news, bad news and news neither bad nor good. Which first, Herr Memel?’
After the war, he had travelled from a city untouched by the conflict and arrived in another. The war's sentence was written between them, a repetitious stutter of roofless buildings and cratered roads whose full stop jolted Sol awake as the train juddered over the points outside the Care de l'Est and slid within its protective shade. The sudden cool, the broad expanse of the platform and the echoing voices mingling beneath the wrought iron and grimy glass of the station's roof many metres above disoriented him for a moment. But in the next instant he felt his new surroundings cloak him and draw him forward into the crowd, which seemed to melt from him. He knew no one. He carried a suitcase of reinforced cardboard and, in the inside pocket of his jacket, twenty-seven pages torn from a notebook, each one covered in crabbed handwriting. His significance, if any, lay there. He was in abeyance. He had come to Paris, he understood later, to wait.
He had taken lodgings in rue des Ecoles. The rooms of the Hotel d'Orléans had been rented by the hour during the war. Now, in its aftermath, they were home to a floating population of sixty or more residents, who shared three bathrooms and one telephone between them. Its previous incarnation lingered in the pale pink, threadbare carpets which covered the floors, walls and even the ceilings, and the deep rust-striped sinks, one per room, their taps rimed with limescale.
The singular telephone was installed in the hallway. Whenever it rang, the ancient concierge would let it sound for a minute or more before emerging from her little room with its smoked-glass windows and shuffling down the hallway. She would interrogate the callers as to the urgency and relevance of their business. If the resident to whom the caller hoped to speak were out, she would mutter ‘Busy’ and replace the receiver without taking a message. If in, it was ‘Wait’, while she rested the receiver on a small shelf beside the handset which had been fitted for that purpose, then crept around her glass-walled office to the bottom of the stairwell. There she matched name to occupant, occupant to room, and calculated the necessary degree of volume. Sol's room was found on the fifth floor and so she screamed at the top of her voice.
‘Monsieur Mee-mel!’
Sol looked up from of the summer issue of Perspectives. A small stack of foolscap sheets lay on the right side of the desk, the product of the last six days’ labour. Tomorrow he would take down the typewriter from the top of the wardrobe and begin to type out the German text he had translated from the English. The occupant of the room to the right of his own would complain, as he always did, and there would be a terse exchange in the corridor. But that would be tomorrow. He rose, hurried down the flights of steps and took the receiver from the shelf.
‘Bad news? What bad news? Who is this?’
‘Leon Fleischer, your publisher. I am calling from Vienna.’
‘Pardon me, Herr Fleischer. Your voice sounded different.’
‘Of course it does, I'm dying. The bad news is that I'm selling the publishing house. You are to have a new publisher, Herr Memel.’
‘Dying?’
‘Perhaps Surrer Verlag. We are in negotiation.’
/> ‘What?’
Sol had sent out the typescript of Die Keilerjagd in the winter of 1950, running off purple copies smelling of acetone on the mimeograph machine in the Paris office of Perspectives. Surrer Verlag might have been one of the recipients; he could not remember. He had forgotten them all, except Fleischer.
After his arrival in Paris, he had found work translating journals, catalogues, academic textbooks and technical manuals. He pored over the texts he was sent, ate, drank, slept. He waited. Perhaps a different life would begin; he did not know and made no effort to initiate one. Or perhaps his previous life would recommence. At their parting in Venice, Ruth had promised to write to him poste restante in Paris when she had settled anywhere long enough to receive a reply. At first he had made the journey to the Hotel des Pastes in rue du Louvre conscientiously once a month. The office seemed always to contain the same half-dozen young men with carefully-combed hair and threadbare suits, the same thin-faced women in headscarves, the same old men with nicotine-stained beards, all in the grip of some private desperation. He would wait in line for his turn at the hatch and his precious few seconds of the official's time. His anticipation would mount, then the official would glance at his carte d'identité, disappear for a minute or so, and return shaking his head, already looking over Sol's shoulder for the next petitioner, shuffling forward with hands cupped about his offering of hope.
But hope of what? Sol asked himself. As the months went by the ritual scattering of his expectations seemed to lose its power. Sol would curtly thank the empty-handed official and turn on his heel, irritated that an hour of his time had been wasted in the airless room on the upper floor of the Hotel des Pastes. A reversal effected itself slowly in the man who stood in line (less frequently now, perhaps once every two or three months), for a letter which never came. His anticipation as he waited became something more akin to trepidation and, he realised slowly, when the official returned with nothing, Sol no longer felt disappointment, but relief. No letter had arrived for him, from Ruth or anyone else. He felt no lack. He had shrunk to the confines of his elected life. There was no room in him for need. He had not entered the building on rue du Louvre in more than a year.
In the Shape of a Boar Page 20
