All That Man Is

by David Szalay

  Then she slaps him again.

  ‘Stop doing that!’ Murray yells, trying to stand up. She snatches his arm, while he is still off balance, and pulls him back down onto the sofa.

  ‘Sh, sh, sh,’ she says, as if to a small child, stroking his face.

  ‘Stop doing that,’ Murray says again.

  ‘Sh, sh.’

  ‘Zatvorite oči,’ Vletka says.

  ‘Please, shut your eyes,’ her daughter instructs him.

  ‘Is she going to hit me again?’

  ‘Please,’ the younger woman says softly, ‘shut your eyes.’

  Vletka is still stroking his face in a way Murray finds he quite likes. He shuts his eyes. She is all soft-voiced now, and holding his hand. Singing something, holding his hand, stroking it. The singing stops. He is aware of her weight moving, leaving the sofa. He opens his eyes to find her on her feet, extinguishing candles.

  ‘Are we done then?’ he asks.

  The daughter translates for him.

  Vletka shakes her head. She says something and indicates the table where her daughter is sitting.

  ‘Please, sit down here.’

  ‘What happens now?’ Murray says.

  Vletka just tells him to sit at the table again. So he does, sitting opposite her daughter. And then Vletka joins them too, having taken something out of a drawer. A pack of cards.

  She sits at the table, taking the seat facing the wall, the histrionic Jesus tapestry. On her left, her daughter’s oversized, smiling head. On the other side, Murray, asking if he can smoke.

  He can.

  He lights up while Vletka shuffles the cards.

  And in fact she is smoking too, letting a cheap cigarette hang whorishly from her lip – the mid-afternoon dressing gown is part of the effect as well – as she skilfully shuffles the old pack. The air in the room, already somehow grey and dim, is soon harsh and blue with smoke.

  She puts the pack face down on the tabletop. Then, with a single practised movement, spreads it into a perfectly symmetrical fan.

  The instruction arrives, as always, via the daughter: ‘Please, take one.’

  Murray looks furtively at Vletka. She is looking the other way, drawing tiredly on her fag, waiting for him to take his card. His hand ventures out into the middle of the table. It hovers for a moment over the fan and then his index finger lands on a card and tugs it free of the others. As if she is in a hurry, Vletka snatches it up and looks at it. ‘Prošlosti,’ she says, placing it face up on the table.

  ‘The past,’ the daughter tells him.

  The card shows a man, seated, facing out, hugging a large coin. He also has a coin on his head – as well as something that looks like a simple crown – and his feet seem to hold two further coins in place on the floor. His posture is hunched, tense, defensive. He is staring straight out of the card and his expression is grim. There is something about him that suggests exhaustion. Blood-saturated eyes, strangers to sleep. Behind him, some distance away, is a city.

  ‘Please,’ the daughter translates, smiling at Murray across the table, showing him her large yellow teeth, ‘take another one.’

  Murray does.

  When he has pulled it free of the fan, Vletka turns it over and says, ‘Prisutna.’

  ‘The present.’

  A tower against a black sky. A huge zigzag of lightning has just struck the top of the tower, violently dislodging the crown that was there. Flames leap out of the broken summit. Two figures tumble down through the dark air, as if the force of the explosion has thrown them out of their tower, which seemed so secure. Their faces are open with terror. One of them is wearing a crown.

  The daughter tells Murray to take another card.

  He presses his cigarette into the notch of the ashtray and does so.

  Vletka adds it to the other two and says, ‘Budućnost.’

  ‘The future.’

  Murray, having reclaimed his cigarette, is staring at the three cards.

  The guy hugging his coins.

  The shattered tower.

  The greybeard with his lamp.

  The final card shows an elongated figure in a monkish habit. Hooded. White-bearded. Holding in one hand a lit lamp, in the other a long staff. His head is bowed and his eyes might be closed, even though he is holding the lamp up as if to illuminate something. He seems to be standing in a frozen or snowy wasteland. There is, anyway, nothing there.

  Vletka studies the cards for a minute, finishing her cigarette. Then she stubs it out with a few gentle, thoughtful movements. She seems bored, actually. She says, indicating the first card, ‘Ovo je tvoja prošlost.’

  ‘This is your past,’ the daughter says to Murray, who has taken a position with his hands knitted on the table in front of him, his shoulders slumped. He feels tired. ‘Yeah?’ he says.

  Still indicating the first card, Vletka starts saying words. It sounds like a list. Her daughter translates, her words overlapping with her mother’s. ‘Materialism,’ she says, ‘acquiring material possessions, only interested in wealth, power, status, winning your share, and keeping what you have, ownership, jealousy, wanting to impose your will, denying weaknesses.’ She is smiling at Murray. She is always smiling, despite the fact that most of her hair has already fallen out, and her voice sounds slurred and stupid, and she needs help to walk even a few steps. She says, ‘This is your past.’

  ‘If you say so,’ Murray says, with some sarcasm. His mouth makes those strange munching movements. His eyes flit fearfully between the two women.

  With her finger on the lightning-struck tower, the shattered phallus spilling fire, the plummeting victims, Vletka is now telling Murray about his present.

  ‘This is your present,’ the daughter says. ‘Upheaval, turbulence, plans destroyed, disorder, pride humbled, humiliation, violence even …’

  His eyes narrowing, Murray unknits his fingers to find his cigarettes.

  The daughter says in her silly voice, ‘The destruction of a way of living. The impact of things over which you have no control. The final end of a … a part of your life. This is your present.’

  With the lighter that is there on the table – a souvenir lighter from a Macedonian health spa or place of pilgrimage or something – Murray lights his cigarette.

  Vletka’s finger moves to the final card.

  ‘This is your future,’ her daughter says.

  And Vletka says sternly, ‘Ne – to može biti vaša budućnost.’

  ‘This might be your future.’

  ‘Moguća budućnost.’

  ‘A possible future.’

  ‘Moguće,’ Vletka emphasises.

  ‘It is possible.’

  Vletka starts on the final list, and her daughter says, still with a stupid smile on her face, ‘Solitude, introspection, stillness, quiet, seclusion, withdrawing from the world, silence, submission, meditation …’

  Fuckin’ wonderful, Murray thinks.

  ‘That it then?’ he asks.

  ‘That’s it,’ the daughter says, still smiling at him.

  He is putting his jacket on. The daughter, leaning on Vletka and on a walking stick, has lurched out of the room in her old woman’s knitted shawl. It’s like one of her legs is six inches shorter than the other, Murray thinks, pretending not to notice, finishing his cigarette at the table on his own.

  The cards are still there.

  He ignores them.

  Still, the stuff she said about his present wasn’t so wrong.

  Fuck though, she knew he was in a bad way – people only show up here when they’re in a bad way.

  And his past?

  The smouldering end of the cigarette crackles, the cheap tobacco, as he inhales strongly.

  Ah, bollocks.

  That was everybody’s past, what she said. We all think we’re special – we’re all the fucking same.

  That’s how they operate, people like her.

  Five hundred kuna. Fuck’s sake.

  He is putting on his jacket, looki
ng forward to leaving, when the women are there again. The daughter is holding a plate of sticky-looking cakes.

  Murray is just shrugging his shoulders into his jacket – a sensible thing with a hood, elasticated wrists, lots of pockets.

  ‘You would like a cake?’ she says, smiling as always.

  He looks, for a moment, at the things on the plate – lumps, each with a layer of sugary frosting. They are misshapen, sad-looking.

  ‘A cake? Uh … Yeah, okay. Thanks.’

  He takes one. They are watching him as, after a pause, he lifts it to his mouth. In his other hand the cigarette is still going. He puts the cake into his mouth. The first thing is: it hurts his teeth. A lot. It’s shocking, how much it hurts. Sharp lines of pain lance down into his jaw, up into his skull. He forces himself not to wince, his miserable teeth working on the stuff. It has a weird texture – it seems to melt away in his mouth, melt into something sandy, muddy almost. It tastes of sugar, and something else, something foul. They are still watching him. The daughter still smiling, her upper lip downy, her lower lip glistening. He tries to smile back as he swallows, his Adam’s apple forcing the thing down. ‘Nice,’ he says. ‘Thank you.’

  She lifts the plate up towards him, offering him another.

  ‘No. Thank you,’ he says. ‘No.’

  Ushered through the dark, narrow hall – past hanging coats and hats, and a mirror that tells him nothing – he finds himself in the stairwell again.

  The door of the flat closes and he starts down the stairs, spurning the besmirched lift. The cement stairs are darkly shiny, polished by decades of footfall so that they look wet even though they aren’t. At each landing there is an island of light from the window, and a line of communal pot plants – rubbery leaves, dead leaves, crusty soil. At the bottom, metal postboxes with little nameplates. A metal thing set in the floor for scraping the mud off your shoes. Some notices on the wall, a slew of junk mail. The heavy door with its two panes of safety glass, the lower one spider-webbed with damage.

  He stops there.

  For some time he stands there, in the dim daylight.

  A strand of cobweb waves in the air over a radiator. He is looking at it, waving in the rising heat of the radiator. Everything is perfectly still, except for that strand of cobweb, waving.

  He stands there, watching it.

  He is still standing there, watching the cobweb, weirdly absorbed in the way it moves.

  Then he shoves through the heavy front door, makes it screech on its hinges.

  He shoves through it, out into the world again.

  7

  Two and a half hours it takes, to drive to the sea. First the flat land, then the limestone hills, then mountains. Sparse vegetation. The motorway, which starts at Zagreb, is empty. It is a Wednesday morning in early November, that might be why. And now Hans-Pieter has switched on the windscreen wipers – a slow, intermittent setting. They sweep, and stop. They sweep, and stop. Each time with a little squeak. Drizzle obscures the distances of flat farmland in the early part of the drive. The wipers sweep, and stop. Deserted villages, strung out along the road. Dark fields of stubble or ploughed soil. The landscape undulates slightly, is the most that can be said for it.

  Next to Hans-Pieter in the front is Maria.

  From where he is sitting, Murray can see her chewing at her gum, staring without interest at the dull landscape.

  He is actively pleased, at this point, that she is Hans-Pieter’s lookout, not his own. She isn’t his problem. He turns the other way. They are just passing through one of those villages, fucking awful place. One-storey houses line the road, in little fenced plots of land. There is some sort of pub, he sees – a sign with a Pan logo, a sign saying Pizza. That’s it. That’s the village. That’s the life you have here. Murray watches it taper to nothing. More dead fields.

  There’s this point when you think, Why pretend? What’s the point? Who’re you trying to fool?

  Who are you trying to fool? Yourself?

  So what is the point?

  There is no point.

  What difference does it make anyway?

  We’re all headed to the same place.

  They are talking in the front, Hans-Pieter and Maria. Talking in low voices so that he can’t hear, over the noise of the engine and the wheels and the wind, what they are saying exactly. It surprised him, this invitation. Last night, he was in Džoker, talking to Matteus about football, when Hans-Pieter turned up in his duffel coat, ordered a white wine. He put in his two cents about the football – a stupid opinion, Murray thought. Then Hans-Pieter said, ‘We’re thinking of taking a trip to the seaside tomorrow. You want to come?’

  They were perched up on tall stools, facing the shelves of spirits, and the postcards that people had sent over the years, and that Matteus had pinned up. Not that many of them, less than ten.

  Murray said, ‘Isn’t the weather a bit shite for that?’

  Hans-Pieter had a quick, timid sip of wine. ‘Should be okay tomorrow,’ he said. ‘They say.’

  Murray shrugged. ‘Okay then. If Maria doesn’t mind.’

  ‘It was her idea,’ Hans-Pieter told him.

  It was her idea.

  What was that about?

  Part of Murray allowed himself to think that this meant it was him she fancied, and had done all along.

  That just wasn’t true, though, was it?

  What this was actually about was that she felt sorry for him. That she and Hans-Pieter, when they talked about him at all, talked about how fucking pitiable he was.

  Word was out about Blago, what had happened with that. Blago did indeed seem to have gone to Germany. Murray’s money seemed to have gone with him. The man and the money had vanished, anyway. Hans-Pieter’s advice was to tell the police, tell them everything. Murray was too embarrassed to do that. And anyway the police already knew him, from that time after the Irish pub. He just didn’t want to see them again, simple as that.

  The rain is intensifying.

  Hans-Pieter ups the tempo of the wipers.

  So much for the weather forecast.

  Maria turns to Hans-Pieter to make a similar point. She has a fat whitehead near her mouth. A stud in her nose. He’s welcome to her, Murray thinks.

  Once they hit the motorway it takes an hour and a half. Murray nods off. Wakes to stark limestone hills. Then the sea, greyly glittering. They park in a municipal lot – plenty of space, today – and find a place for lunch. A mixed grill for Murray, with that sweetish red-pepper sauce they do here. A glass of the local plonk. A squall passing outside. Maria is being friendly. She does most of the talking. Hans-Pieter hardly says anything. He picks at his grilled fish, prising flesh from bone, and rarely lifts his eyes from it. The lazy silence of a man in settled circumstances, letting his other half entertain the guest. Intervenes to correct her sometimes, that’s all. She has rings on most of her fingers. Blue eyeshadow. She’s encouraging Murray to go to the police – they’re still talking about that. It’s what they’ve been talking about for a week. He hasn’t even told them the true amount Blago took from him. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He wants to forget all that. She’s just trying to be nice, though. Shouldn’t be impatient with her.

  ‘What’s the point?’ he says. ‘They’ll not find him.’

  She is adamant. ‘How do you know?’

  She just likes the drama of it, he thinks. At least it’s something – something has happened at least.

  ‘You can’t let him get away with it!’ she insists.

  ‘I shouldn’t have trusted him,’ Murray tells her, feeling the wine a bit. ‘I was an idiot. End of.’

  It’s raining outside again.

  Murray and Maria have flaming sambucas.

  I was an idiot. End of. Put that on my fucking tombstone, Murray thinks as they leave and head for the sea – down some steps, through some drizzly streets. He has dropped back now. Hans-Pieter and Maria are hand in hand, up ahead of him. Jack Sprat would eat no fat … That�
�s what they look like, those two – Jack Sprat and the wife.

  No, he’s okay, Hans-Pieter, the shy Dutchman in his duffel coat.

  She’s okay as well, waddling along next to him.

  They’re my only friends, anyway.

  I was an idiot. End of.

  There aren’t really beaches here. There are walkways along the shore, winding paved paths, overleaned by spry old pines. Dry patches of paving stones under the pines. On one side as they walk, former villas of Austro-Hungarian notables, now hotels. On the other side, steep steps or even ladders down to strips of shingle, or empty terraces, or little marinas. The sloshing sea. Slapping at green-matted walls. At squeaking jetties.

  He is kissing her. Hans-Pieter is kissing Maria, leaning down to her, snogging in the shelter of his upturned collar.

  They are about twenty yards ahead of him. They seem to have forgotten he is there. Murray stops, to save himself embarrassment, and turns to the sea.

  Hooded, he takes up a position of heroic reflection, hands resting on the top bar of the metal railing that follows the edge of the walkway, eyes seeping water and fixed on the distant island, far out over the windy inlet, no more than a dark horizontal smudge.

  And, nearer, in the middle distance, some sort of yacht. More of a fucking ship, actually. How many decks does that thing have? Four, five? Must be a hundred yards long, at least. It moves on the waves, you can see, if you keep your eyes on it.

  And look at that! Look at the way the sunlight falls down between the clouds! White the sea underneath it. Sudden islands of blinding white. The yacht turns black, waves blink around it. Sudden islands of blinding white. And in Murray, watching, an unfamiliar euphoria. Sudden islands of blinding white. Then melt away. Dull sea.

  Damp wind in his face.

  He turns his head in the hood of his jacket, sees the lovers still necking further up the walkway, in the shelter of a wind-mangled pine.

  Fuck it.

  His eyes find the superyacht again.

  And fuck that as well.

  Aye, fuck the lot of it.

  8