In the Shape of a Boar

by Lawrence Norfolk

  Sol had peered at the newsprint reproduction. The woman was the right height. The face was strong, almost too strong to be conventionally beautiful. It might have been her, but the details which would have told him certainly were lost in the glare of sunlight which had flooded the photographer's lens. In lieu of any other image, it was reproduced over and over again. She was sometimes ‘the andartisse or woman partisan’, sometimes ‘the Greek resistance heroine’, but more often than either she was the ‘Thyella’ of his poem.

  In the New Year he began to search for new lodgings, a process long envisaged and long delayed. The books which had piled up in every corner of the room in the Hotel d’Orléans were packed into boxes. His clothes, he thought, would still fit into the cardboard suitcase which sat next to the typewriter on top of the wardrobe. Lying on the bed with his hands behind his head he looked up at both and realised that almost a year had passed and he had not written a word. Since the day he had encountered Reichmann, in fact. He climbed staircases to tiny mansard attics. His footsteps echoed on expanses of parquet. He looked up through light wells with the proportions of liftshafts at tiny squares of sky. A concrete pillar near Montparnasse had windows instead of walls. The view was invoked. The view of me, he thought, his nose all but touching the glass, which misted then cleared, revealing hundreds of other windows, or thousands, and hundreds of thousands.

  In February Leon Fleischer's voice regained the timbre Sol remembered from their first meeting.

  ‘I have “undergone a minor operation”, as moribund politicians like to say. In consequence I am dying at the standard rather than accelerated rate,’ he explained to Sol. ‘Speaking of death and politics, you were quoted in the Bundesrat last week. Misquoted, I should say. Did you see the report?’

  ‘Dying? Dying of what?’

  ‘You are beginning to repeat yourself, Solomon. Normally a trait of older poets. Now, the latest from Surrer. This is quite priceless . . .’

  The sale of Fleischer Verlag to Surrer Verlag seemed to have become an all-consuming passion for Leon Fleischer. His telephone calls became résumés of its progress, or lack thereof, for the feints and thrusts of the negotiation seemed to advance nothing, so far as Sol could tell, save the affair's ever-deepening complication. Fleischer's enthusiasm for the negotiation was unquenchable, but not infectious. He would laugh to himself in Vienna while Sol in Paris puzzled over the contractual point that could occasion such delight. He resumed his hunt for an apartment and finally found one, in the sixteenth, which seemed to have nothing to recommend it besides the fact that Sol did not dislike it as strongly as the others he had viewed. It was not available until May. In mid-April, he took the receiver from the shelf in the hallway of the Hotel d’Orléans and found himself speaking to a woman.

  ‘Am I speaking to Herr Memel?’

  ‘Yes, may I ask who is this?’

  ‘lngeborg Fleischer, Herr Memel. I am Leon Fleischer's wife.’

  ‘Wife? But I didn't know . . . Forgive me, Frau Fleischer, I didn't know that . . . Excuse me.’

  ‘I have never involved myself in my husband's business affairs, Herr Memel.’

  Out of the corner of his eye Sol saw someone enter the door to the hallway and hesitate in the gloom.

  ‘Until now,’ Fleischer's wife continued, ‘when I must. I am telephoning all of Fleischer Verlag's authors to tell them that the house has been sold to Surrer Verlag. Surrer Verlag has assumed responsibility for all contracts drawn up by my husband and will send a more formal notification. I wanted to telephone the authors first. I believe Leon would have wanted that.’

  Sol felt a cold wave ripple through him. ‘Please pardon me, Frau Fleischer, but do you mean Leon . . .’

  ‘My husband died the night before last, Herr Memel, of complications arising from cancer of the larynx.’

  ‘But he had an operation,’ Sol protested. ‘He told me he was recovered.’

  ‘The operation was not successful.’

  The figure hovering in the hallway was still there. A resident waiting to use the telephone, Sol thought. He turned his back on the man.

  ‘I am very sorry, Frau Fleischer. Without your late husband, I would never . . .’

  ‘I understand, Herr Memel. Many of the writers published by my husband have said as much, but I know that Leon would have been particularly pleased that you acknowledged his support.’

  ‘I am very sorry,’ Sol said again. There was an awkward silence.

  ‘Herr Memel,’ the woman spoke at last, ‘I am embarrassed to say that I never shared my husband's interests.’ Ingeborg Fleischer paused. ‘I rarely read the books he published. In fact almost never. Books do not interest me very much.’

  Sol could see her now. lngeborg Fleischer was plain, with a kind face, light brown hair which she had curled once a week. Her husband had baffled and fascinated her and now he had baffled her for the last time by disappearing. Sol could hear the shock in her voice.

  ‘But I read your book, Herr Memel.’

  Then lngeborg Fleischer hung up.

  Sol replaced the receiver and turned towards the door. The man who had been waiting to use the telephone advanced. Sol stood aside to let him pass. He would go out. Walk. Think. The man was carrying a large briefcase, which he swung out, almost striking Sol. It was Walter Reichmann.

  Sol's first thought was that the occasion of the critic's reappearance must be Leon Fleischer's death. His hesitation was that of the bearer of bad news. But his demeanour did not seem consolatory. Anxious, perhaps, as he greeted Sol. No, Sol decided, this had nothing to do with his publisher.

  ‘What brings you to Paris, Herr Reichmann?’ he asked.

  The critic mumbled something in reply, opened his briefcase and began to rummage, one-handed, within it. He shook his head in frustration as he fumbled after whatever it was he sought, and whatever it was that compelled his presence here. The man was more perturbed than Sol had first thought.

  ‘Herr Reichmann, I have just learned of the death of my publisher, Leon Fleischer. Now, forgive my directness, but why are you here?’

  ‘I am sorry to hear that, Herr Memel.’ Reichmann's round head rose from his briefcase. ‘I am sorry. I knew Leon Fleischer. A man of integrity, integrity, yes . . .’

  ‘Herr Reichmann, what is the matter?’

  ‘The matter?’

  The critic pulled his arm out of his briefcase and handed Sol a book bound in green cardboard.

  ‘This, Herr Memel, is the matter. Or integrity perhaps.’

  The thought seemed to be occurring to him for the first time. Sol waited for the critic to assemble his thoughts.

  ‘Integrity is earned over time, Herr Memel. Years. I too like to think I have integrity. A critic's integrity, of course. That my judgements are trusted and believed. That those whose work I endorse are also to be trusted. My integrity depends on them, do you see?’

  The critic delivered this little speech to the floor, looking up to face Sol only at its conclusion.

  ‘What is this about, Herr Reichmann?’

  ‘I must ask you something, Herr Memel. Something it pains me to ask; that should never be asked of an artist.’

  ‘Then ask.’

  But the critic frowned, pursed his lips, tapped his briefcase against the side of his leg, twisting this way and that in the hallway of the Hotel d’Orléans, in the grip of some internal argument. Or he is mad, thought Sol. But then Reichmann appeared to reach a decision.

  ‘There are no dolphins in the gulf of Corinth, Herr Memel.’

  ‘What?’

  Reichmann pointed to the book which rested, forgotten, in Sol's hands.

  ‘In there, Herr Memel,’ he said. ‘My questions are in there.’

  ***

  The wind had dropped as he descended. The sides of the crater rose around him. At the bottom the air was still.

  He looked across a vast floor broken only by stones. He remembered the light had dimmed and its colours seeped away leaving dry stone,
the far cliffs, pebbles shifting under his feet. Jakob had disappeared, had never existed here. The last seconds had seen the light's drainage accelerate, a flood of it west and away. A starless black gathered in the sky. He had lain down. No, he had tried to reach the cave and its shelter, but he had lacked the will. Only then had he lain down. The darkness was the closing of his eyes.

  There was no up or down in the slow tumble which followed, but there were openings in it, brief glimpses and disturbances, motions and sensations which he registered only as they passed beyond the reach of his senses. He remembered something like animal hair, coarse and fibrous, and a hot sun that made his head throb and dried his tongue. Soft waves of air had broken over him in a rhythm that nudged him gently one way then the other. A grinning man held four fingers in front of his face, said a word, then vanished. The ground was a reservoir of pain. He would reach down to touch it, then the pain would warn him off, but it grew harder and harder to remain weightless. When he opened his eyes he saw railway tracks suspended above him. The next time they were seams of coal. Finally they were smoke-blackened beams. He was lying on straw in a low-ceiling hut looking up into a tunnel of darkness. The tunnel swung aside, becoming the barrel of a rifle.

  Click.

  The safety-catch. The rifle was lowered. Sol looked up at a woman. She was a little older than himself with long dark hair pulled back from her face, dressed in army fatigues. The eyes which looked down at him were black and betrayed nothing as she fixed him in her gaze. Sol looked up at her. But a moment later she moved beyond his field of vision. The door slammed shut behind him before he could turn his head.

  Someone had wrapped his feet in ragged lengths of cloth. There was no sign of his boots. His left foot began to throb as he carefully unwound the improvised bandage. Then the right. Both were swollen and discoloured; the toenails on the right foot felt loose. He lifted his leg with both hands and rested the foot on the ground as gently as he was able. In the next instant something seemed to grasp his foot and crush it. He managed to raise the foot and waited for the pain to subside. He lay in the darkness in a daze while questions circled like kites, high above and unreachable: How far? Since when? For how long?

  He had understood that he was dying, alone and very far from home, but he had been wrong. His future still existed. Wrong, all wrong.

  The hut was windowless but the roof, supported by the heavy black rafters, seemed to be constructed of turf. Sunlight prickled above him and suddenly he was thirsty and light-headed. His feet were still unbandaged. From last night, he told himself. They had been bandaged an unknown number of nights before that. He had been brought here, wherever ‘here’ was. He had been found, and that must have been the evening he climbed down into the crater. He would have died that night if he had not been found. Another question. He slept again.

  He awoke to the smell of stale woodsmoke. Four men stood over him. Three were dressed in fatigues, as the woman had been; the two younger ones wore full beards. The third was heavily-built and red-faced. He regarded Sol placidly. All three carried short machine-guns.

  The fourth man hung back. He was older, but how much older Sol could not guess. He held an ancient rifle which reached almost to his shoulder. His steel-grey hair was cut close to the scalp and a sharp nose gave him a hawkish look, reinforced by eyes which seemed not to blink. He was shorter than the two younger men, who might have been his grandsons. When he moved forward Sol saw even in the hut's dim light that his eyes were a piercing blue. Sol tried to pull himself upright, then spread his arms helplessly. The old man watched his efforts and Sol was reminded of the woman the night before. Her gaze too had surrendered nothing of her thoughts. He uttered something in a language Sol did not understand, first to Sol, then in an undertone to the older of the others, who nodded and knelt beside Sol, wheezing theatrically. The man's eyes narrowed and his mouth worked silently. He formed his lips around three words.

  ‘I am America.’

  Sol stared at the round face which hovered before his own. It wore an expectant expression. To his surprise, Sol realised that he recognised the words. I am. America. He was being addressed in English. Before he could order his thoughts to respond to the outlandish sentence, the man spoke again.

  ‘You are America?’

  They began to attempt to communicate, watched by the two young guards and the old man. By ‘I am America’, Sol grasped, the man meant that he had been in America, or that he spoke ‘American’, and ‘You are America?’ asked if Sol did too. Then the man thumped himself on the chest and introduced himself. He was ‘Uncle America’. Uncle America grinned at this minor victory over their mutual incomprehension.

  The other three did not grin; nor did the young men trouble to conceal their impatience as they waited for these preliminaries to conclude. The old man stood back in the shadows, resting the butt of the long rifle on the ground. For all the inconsequentiality of the words which passed between Sol and Uncle America, the tension in the hut increased as their halting exchange looped them in half-understandings and led them into impasses from which they would slowly retreat to attempt their meanings from some other direction. When Sol nodded to signal that he had understood, Uncle America would grin broadly, quite oblivious to the mood of his companions, and when Sol spoke he would listen with his mouth open and his brow furrowed from the effort of concentration. Sol began to suspect that the man was a simpleton.

  From the rear of the room, the old man spoke, quietly but suddenly. Uncle America listened then turned back to Sol. ‘You are in . . .’ And there he broke off. After a pause he said, ‘place’, then cupped his hands and spoke a word which Sol knew, or remembered, but did not understand.

  ‘You are in place.’ Uncle America cupped his hands again. ‘You come to place by road.’ He was red in the face now and he no longer smiled. ‘But there is not a road to . . .’ He cupped his hands and said the word again.

  It was the word Jakob had used. Khax-Arn-Nee. The non-existent Jakob, who had guided him down an impossible descent to the place in which he was to have perished. He had been saved, however. He understood the words being spoken but not their import. Yes, he thought, I was in place. He began to tell what he remembered. There had been a path around the rim which dropped down, then a climb, how he had fallen once or twice. Uncle America relayed his words in short bursts. But as Sol relived the descent for his silent audience gaps began to open in the story, as though his stride had widened or he had made impossible leaps down the sheer face. He did not know how he had arrived safely at the floor of the crater. He could not remember. He stumbled and faltered. Finally he stopped. The room was quiet.

  Its silence was broken by one of the younger men. He muttered something then gestured impatiently at Sol. His thumb flicked the catch on his gun.

  But the old man spoke, quickly and quietly as before. Sol saw reluctance in the face of the young man, who stepped aside to let the old man approach. He squatted in front of Sol, holding the antiquated rifle as before, and peered into Sol's face. Once again Sol was reminded of the woman the first time he had awakened. Then, the old man extended his free arm, palm open, as though to slap Sol in the face. It stopped short, however, and rested against Sol's cheek, almost a caress. The old man spoke.

  ‘Say the truth,’ Uncle America translated. ‘About the place.’ The same word again. Axani? Khaxane? The old man's eyes held him, searching his face.

  ‘I am telling the truth,’ he said. ‘As much as I know it.’

  The old man watched him for a few seconds more, then removed his hand and rose to his feet. He said something else, which was not translated, and by the anger which flashed across the young men's faces Sol knew that he had been believed. It was anger, certainly, and behind it was apprehension. But they could not fear him, only what he represented in that question, which he had not been able to answer. He had reached the floor of a basin of stone scraped out of the surrounding mountains. What was there to fear in that?

  Over the days
that followed the face he saw most frequently belonged to Uncle America, full-cheeked and snub-nosed, his mouth slightly agape as though mildly surprised at anything and everything around him. He would amble in with a gait that rolled from side to side, settle a bowl of cold thin soup on the ground then lower himself with a sigh onto the packed earth and rest his gun on his lap. Then he held a finger up, ‘One,’ a second finger, ‘Two,’ a third, ‘Three.’ After this ritual he would pass the bowl to Sol and while the other ate he would begin to talk.

  ‘Hellas!’ Uncle America thumped his chest to indicate himself. ‘Greek!’

  Sol's first question had elicited an immediate and straight-forward answer. His subsequent queries, when he managed to speak over Uncle America's rambling monologue and frame them in such a way that the man might understand, were rarely so fortunate. He had not, Sol finally understood, been to America. He had intended to go, to follow his cousin, or second cousin, who had been brought up in the nearest town and could write. Uncle America had had the cousin's letters read, reread, explained and re-explained many times over to him by the cousin's elderly parents, who were now dead. So the tenuous link with his second cousin, or third cousin, had been severed and the problem of getting to America remained. The war had complicated the issue. Uncle America's English seemed not to extend to any clear explanation of how he came to speak it.

  The Germans were a distant presence as Uncle America eked out his store of words and reached after the long vista of his project. But the old man's other enemies were close, he explained. An arm was waved and brought down with a chop. A valley away? The other side of a river? They had joined the Germans because Geraxos was with the andartes. That was the old man's nom de guerre.

  On the days that Uncle America did not appear, young bearded men armed with short machine-guns would bring the bowl of cold soup. They regarded him neutrally, nodded, retreated. He was left alone again in the near-darkness, which was all the darker after these dazzling interludes. As his eyes readjusted, the earthen underside of the roof reappeared, then the blackened beams which supported it. There was no scent of smoke now, though, only a dry animal smell. No one had lit a fire here for many years. A verse drifted in his thoughts, something about the ‘black in the smoke being heavy with fat’ or ‘thick with fat'; it was not quite right. He spent the hours chasing it, and other fragments, until the door opened again. The words and their author eluded him. He wondered if the woman would return.