In the Shape of a Boar

by Lawrence Norfolk

  ‘There's a rack of clothes through there,’ he said, indicating the opposite door, behind the girl. ‘There'll be something you can wear.’

  ‘What do you want to see me in?’ The girl smiled. ‘Help me choose.’

  ‘Play those games with Ruth,’ he told her, walking into the centre of the room. The mark by the window was still there. Evidence.

  ‘She told me what you said. Wrong tits, wrong ass. So what? I'm not so stupid.’ Lisa wrapped the jacket more tightly about her and walked quickly into the far room. ‘You don't know what she's doing to your work.’

  He paused, for a second or two, or longer perhaps. Her jacket was draped over the back of the chair he had sat in, waiting for Ruth. The towel lay on the floor beside it.

  ‘I've seen you before,’ he said.

  She put her finger to his lips.

  ‘Shush.’

  She dropped to her knees in front of him.

  ‘I saw you in a Métro carriage. You pulled up your skirt.’

  Her fingers were fumbling with the zip on his trousers. She was clumsy.

  ‘Imagine I'm her. You can do what you want. Like on a train.’

  ‘I remember your face,’ he said. But he did not remember.

  ‘Imagine me.’

  What did she mean? He felt numb. He did not want her. He reached down and touched her hair. ‘Who should I imagine? Who are you?’

  The girl made no reply.

  In the next instant the room was bright with electric light. Ruth stood in the doorway. She looked down at the girl. Lisa sat back on the floor, making no attempt to cover herself.

  ‘She's whoever you want, Sol. Me, if you like.’

  Ruth flicked off the light, plunging them both into darkness.

  ‘Enjoy her.’

  ***

  Letters and small packets received poste restante at the Hotel des Postes were held awaiting collection for one year. A ‘year’ in the poste restante office, however, was a variable quantity, running at least from 14 July, when the last current-year arrivals were received, to the first week following that date in the following twelve-month period. Only then were the previous year's arrivals audited and thus the minimum ‘year’ allotted to each letter and small packet was effectively defined as at least 368 days and sometimes as many as 376, depending upon which day of the week 14 July fell on in that particular year.

  A uniformed official explained these matters to Sol through the hatch in the wall. Sol glimpsed long rows of racks which stretched away behind the man. Ruth's letter would have lain there, somewhere. He directed his gaze back to the official, whose explanation had not finished.

  It followed that a letter or small packet arriving on 15 July 1952, for instance, would wait in the poste restante office of the Hotel des Postes until 14 July 1954, and, that date being effectively any day in the week following, the office's maximal ‘year’ could sometimes stretch to more than twenty-four months. Thus, continued the official, the Ministère des Postes et Télécommunications, which undertook to receive, store and disburse those letters and small packets entrusted to it poste restante during a period of one year from receipt, actually exceeded its legal obligation in all cases, sometimes by as much as a second additional year, free of charge.

  A note of apology had entered the man's voice.

  There were different rules for parcels, which could not be sent (or accepted) poste restante, mostly for reasons of space, although sometimes they were held for a certain period if the offending dimension (any one exceeding forty centimetres, or any two exceeding twenty-four) was either negligible or a result of deformation in transit. The official had returned empty-handed from the gloomy rows of shelves. Might it have been a parcel that Sol was expecting?

  Sol sensed the restive queue behind him. Letters came here to wait. Their recipients waited for the news which had waited for them. People had died and been born and moved house and separated and married: all these things were waiting to happen here. He had expected Ruth. But if Ruth's faraway life had ever come here in search of him, it was now gone. He told the official that he had not been expecting a parcel.

  ‘Then I am sorry, Monsieur, but there is nothing.’

  ‘What happens to letters after a year?’

  ‘They are returned to the sender, or sent to Neuilly. There is a form.’

  Sol took the form and tucked it inside his coat. The rush-hour traffic was in full spate when he walked back down the steps of the Hotel des Postes. A light drizzle fell, the buoyant droplets whirling in the cones of streetlight. The crowd flowed around him, then eddied behind him. He walked to Châtelet and took the Métro home.

  And perhaps there had been no letter from Ruth, he reflected in the quiet of his apartment. It was almost ten years since they had parted in Venice. Perhaps they both preferred to remember the people they had been rather than encounter those they had become.

  The form was printed on stiff brown paper, divided into boxes, gummed along one edge and scored so that it could be folded in three. A pre-printed address ensured delivery to the office at Neuilly, which would ‘remit any letters or small packets’. He printed his name. He wrote ‘6, avenue Emile Zola, Paris 15e’ and ran his tongue along the sour gum. Five weeks later a slim bundle secured by a perished rubber band was delivered to the apartment above pont Mirabeau.

  ‘That is correct, Madame. Eight-two-eight. Nine-two. Seven-eight. Yes, I understand. Thank you. Yes, I will be here.’

  Sol replaced the handset and sat back. The overseas lines were busy and he would have to wait. The operator would call as soon as a connection could be made. He drummed his fingers on the desk and thought of the bottle sitting behind the dusty glasses in the cabinet in the kitchen. The telephone would ring and the operator would tell him that the connection had been made to the number written on the back of the envelope in which Ruth's letter had arrived. Then he would tell Ruth.

  The first letter in the bundle from Neuilly had contained a review of Die Keilerjagd clipped from a German newspaper and a note hoping that ‘as the author’ he might find it of interest; it was signed ‘An Admirer’. The second and third letters were both from a female relative of Chaim and Lia Fingerhut, who wrote to inform him that ‘someone found your book in Bucharest. We are very proud, and I have translated some of it into Romanian (difficult!)’

  The fourth letter bore an American stamp. It was from Ruth.

  An hour passed. Sol fetched the bottle from the kitchen and set it on the desk in front of him. It was almost nine o'clock. The city's lights tinged the sky with dull yellow. He stared at his reflected self, unmoving, suspended outside the window. His image picked up the whiskey bottle and poured itself a measure of liquor. His mouth opened and swallowed. A floating telephone did not ring.

  Ruth's letter had crossed the Atlantic three times, for, returned to sender after its incalculable sojourn in the Hotel des Pastes, it had been marked ‘Not known at this address’ and sent back. A telephone number scribbled on the back of the envelope had connected him to an unknown woman who had paused for so long after his initial question that he had thought the connection broken.

  ‘No one by that name lives here,’ she replied eventually.

  ‘I am calling from Paris. Can you tell me where she does live?’

  There was another long pause.

  ‘I don't know where she lives. I don't want to know where she lives, either.’

  ‘I knew her before the war,’ said Sol. ‘I apologise for troubling you.’

  The woman sighed theatrically, then said, ‘I heard she was working out of Hartwood's office. Number's in the book.’

  Then she had hung up.

  Sol drank steadily. At some point he carefully disentangled the telephone cable from the snarl of wires behind the desk and placed the instrument on the floor. At full stretch, the cable almost reached the couch, where he had taken up his new position. It would be better if the telephone was on the low table in front of the couch, he thought. Easier to
reach when it rang.

  But the telephone remained on the floor and did not ring. Sol lay on the couch and drank until the words he would say to Ruth dissolved. It was too late. The titles in the bookcase swam in his vision, composing and recomposing themselves. The characters spun and whirled, leaping up and down the spines like acrobats, vaulting the peaks and bounding out of the troughs. They would not stop now he had set them in motion. Their clangor rang in his skull. Get up! Get up! A short silence, then, Get up! Get up!

  He rolled off the couch and felt the bottle topple. The last of the whiskey spread a tongue of liquid over the floor. The telephone was ringing. He lunged for the receiver.

  ‘Ruth,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Your call has been placed, Monsieur. Shall I put you through now?’

  ‘Ruth.’

  ‘Sol? Are you there? Is that you?’

  ‘Ruth, I can . . . I can't hear you. I can't hear . . .’

  It seemed as though the telephone was still ringing, but it was impossible. He was speaking into the mouthpiece. Ruth's voice.

  ‘ . . . you've heard? How did you find. . . . It was last . . . alone? How can you talk to me about this?’

  Talk to me. You have to find. Say something. I shot him.

  ‘He was dying anyway.’

  Had she hung up?

  ‘Ruth.’

  The room sagged and the woman's voice came in waves, breaking over his head. He held the telephone in his lap. The receiver felt hot and slippery with sweat from his fingers. He could not speak, or listen to the woman who spoke to him from thousands of miles away. Wake up, he told himself. Wake up. What was she telling him?

  But when he did wake up, the telephone lay on its side on the floor. He was in a room smelling of liquor, in soiled clothes, one foot bare and his shoe resting next to the empty bottle. He lay on the couch across from the long row of his editions. What had he said? He remembered pronouncing her name, but then? He reached for Ruth's letter. He had written her number on the back of the envelope. How can you talk to me about this? What had he told her? He could not remember what he had said.

  He took out her letter:

  Dear Solomon,

  All post-office workers hate Jews. They claim you do not collect these letters then send them back to me, whose life is hard enough. I am still married, but not for much longer. I am going to get a divorce from John (the ex-Major) and take all his money. I told you I would. It's the American way. I have a swimming pool, a huge motor car, and a smile as wide and perfect as Ann Sheridan's, who is my co-star in my latest film, Just Across the Street. I say co-star, actually she's onscreen for about ninety-four minutes and I'm the twenty-eighth one on the left in a cinema queue, but who cares? It's a sugary mess. I make poor John get me these parts and then he makes me do them. We really are quite unhappy with each other.

  Otherwise life is easy here and I am becoming American, which I like. Do you understand? I hope so. I cannot think about the war any more but I need to talk to you to stop thinking about it. As I said, life here is easy and I would like to live like that now. How are you living? Please find the place for the Tellable as soon as possible, if you get this. This is the third letter I have written, my dear Solomon. The others came back. I don't think I'll write again.

  I send you my love,

  Ruth

  PS. Even if you get the chance, please don't see Just Across the Street. I actually have a small speaking part, which makes it even more dreadful than it is anyway.

  ***

  Dear Ruth,

  I am sending this letter to your ‘aunt’ in Venice, to Ehrlich, and to Auguste Weisz at the Schwarze Adler. I hope one of these places is where you are. And the same letter to Jakob.

  I am in a Displaced Persons camp a little way north of Messolonghi. No one seems to know whether or not the war has ended; I have decided to believe that it has. I hope that you are safe. The stories I hear are very bad.

  I have been very ill but have now recovered well enough to do what I have done through most of this war: digging. I do not know how long I will be here. The choices are repatriation (to Soviet ‘Chernovtsy'), or Palestine. Please write to me and tell me that you and Jakob are alive. There are two addresses: Solomon Memel, Int. 0551, Agrinion Camp (DP-Transit), c/o British Military Mission (Greece), Messolonghi, Greece, and, as above, c/o International Red Cross, Mainland Greece Mission, Messolonghi, Greece. The post arrives here from Athens once or twice a month.

  I think of you every day.

  Solomon

  When he was strong enough to stand, Sol had wrapped himself in blankets against the January cold and taken his first unsteady steps from his palette-bed to the window. As the frost melted under his breath he had looked out on a reed-fringed lake and a distant town. He pressed his face to the cold pane. A different flag hung from the flagpole and the communications hut was a pile of blackened timbers, but the camp was otherwise unchanged. The plastered walls of the cell-block in which he had been held were streaked with soot.

  Now they housed the administrative offices of Agrinion Camp (DP-Transit) and the personnel who hurried in and out of its doors wore Red Cross armbands or Greek Army uniforms. The soldiers provided food, or at least transported it, arriving weekly in a battered German military truck and offloading sacks of rye flour, which came from Canada. Greek gendarmes from Agrinion came now and then and were shouted at by a stocky woman with short blonde hair, the camp's director, who was Swiss. There were fewer than five hundred men in the Agrinion Camp when Sol became aware again of his surroundings, perhaps a hundred more by the time he could walk unaided. When he was strong enough, or bored enough, to present himself for work, the number must have reached a thousand. But thereafter, the numbers fell.

  He had had rheumatic fever and pneumonia in both lungs, the nurse in the hospital wing told him. She spoke a slow, stilted Greek he could understand. She was from Trieste. He said nothing then. He was lucky to be here, she added. They had not thought he would recover. The nurse smiled and walked away.

  The numbers fell because the camp's inmates left, in groups of a dozen or more in the same supply truck which wove its way over the cratered road skirting the southern shore of the lake. Once its sacks and crates were unloaded, it returned by the same route with a different cargo. Some of the men it carried away hung out of the back, waving caps and shouting to their friends; others climbed aboard in silence and departed without a backward glance. But none returned, and those arriving at the camp, in battered ambulances, under escort, on foot, by mule, injured, diseased, speechless, numbered fewer and fewer. Sol did not know how he came to be there, nor where he might go when he left.

  Fields stretched away behind the camp. He worked with the other able-bodied men, and they were paid, though in thick piles of drachmas, which were worthless. Sol lifted tussocks of grass, knocked dark red soil out of their rootballs and muttered to his shovel.

  The departures gathered pace through late spring. There was a rumour that under a lottery scheme free passage could be had to America, and from there one could send for one's family. Some men spent whole days sitting in the cold outside the administration building. As Sol understood it, one presented oneself there and waited for a long time, perhaps as long as a day. Then, for a much longer period (certainly weeks, perhaps months), nothing happened. But papers of some sort arrived, in time, and then one walked into one's hut, clutching or waving them, packed one's belongings, or simply stuffed them into one's pockets, and climbed into the back of the truck, never to be seen again.

  ‘Who is your sponsor?’ asked the Red Cross officer from behind a desk stacked with neat sheaves of papers. He made notes in pencil. There was a box of pencils beside him, another of notebooks. Wooden crates filled with papers crowded the floor to either side of the desk.

  ‘Visas are almost impossible, even to return to your own country, let alone travel permits. And there are no trains running north of Arte at the moment. Let me look at your file.’

  So
l's file contained only two sheets of paper.

  ‘You've already been interviewed, but there's no clearance marked here.’ The man looked up, puzzled. ‘"Failed to respond” it says here.’

  ‘I was ill.’ He tried to distinguish the faces that had floated before him during those weeks. ‘What is a clearance?’

  The official was nodding. ‘Ill. Yes, I see. Clearance from the Greek authorities. It can take months. Better to try the British.’ He looked again at the papers and frowned. ‘They're going to talk to you anyway.’

  ‘I've written letters,’ said Sol. The man looked at him blankly. ‘I want to send these letters.’ He passed them over the desk and the man shuffled through them, then rubbed his eyes.

  ‘Forget these,’ he said, offering back all but one. ‘Anywhere east of Vienna's impossible. They'll sit in Athens for the next ten years.’ But when Sol did not move to take them, the official sighed and put the letters in a sack behind him. He considered Sol again.

  ‘This room was used for interrogations,’ said Sol. ‘There was a mark on the wall behind me, different colours where coats of paint had peeled away. I can't remember the colours. Green was one. On the floor there were other marks.’ He stopped. The official was looking at him strangely. ‘I was interrogated in this room.’

  He twisted about to point out the patch on the wall.

  But the wall was white. There were no marks, or stains.

  ‘It was repainted,’ the official said after a pause. ‘We know what happened here.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘We will do what we can.’

  ‘Can you give me a notebook?’ Sol pointed to the box on the desk.

  The official hesitated, then handed one across the desk.

  Two months later Sol was summoned back to the administration building, where a different official led him down the same corridor but this time stopped short of the room at the end. The former cell was shelved along one wall and the shelves filled with filing boxes. There were two chairs, but no desk. The official shut the door.