Cleaver
Page 5
Sitting on a low stone wall right outside the shop, unlacing and removing his boots, Cleaver decided that he must make a list of all those aspects of his personality that his son had known nothing about, all the things that made this slick presentation of himself as some sort of caricature tyrant absolutely implausible. Have I really left? he suddenly found himself asking. He spoke out loud. The good people of the South Tyrol walked by pretending not to notice this balding tourist, peeling off his socks to inspect two damp and delicate feet. You could be home in a matter of hours, Cleaver thought. Two or three phone calls and your diary would be full. You would be busy for the rest of the year, the rest of your life. The soft layers of skin above the heel presented four or five concentric holes, each slightly redder and moister than the one above. Harden up, he muttered.
This morning Cleaver walked a mile or so northwards before striking up one of the many ramblers’ paths. They were signed with a rectangular red-and-white flash on a rock or tree trunk beside the road, and inside the flash a combination of numbers and letters – 8A, or 13B & C, or 3, 5, 9B. No doubt these corresponded, Cleaver imagined, to the tiny numbers beside the twisting dotted red lines on his map, if only he could have read them. I should have asked in the pharmacy, he thought, if they had any of those off-the-shelf reading spectacles. He hadn’t seen any. A magnifying glass would do. Not that he had the slightest intention of opening a book or newspaper. The sky was dull today and a light breeze had begun to blow. The highest peaks were lost in cloud. Climb to the cloud, Cleaver ordered himself. Far too much of his life had been spent reading newspapers, thinking of things that didn’t directly concern him. Except there was also the question of whether or not he should buy a charger for his mobile. What is the point, Cleaver demanded rather sternly, striking up a broad path at random, of buying a charger for my mobile while searching for a remote property at high altitude that will quite probably have no electricity, be wrapped in cloud half the time and never receive even the ghost of a signal? More than a path, it was a broad track he had taken, an access road for logging vehicles perhaps. Though no doubt when he came down into the village for supplies he could always ask someone to charge the phone for him for a few hours and hence pick up any messages there might be while he was down in civilisation. Frau Schleiermacher perhaps. He sensed the beginnings of a mutual respect between himself and Frau Schleiermacher. She had served him swiftly and generously at breakfast. Curious, too, he reflected, the absence of a Herr Schleiermacher. Oh please! Cleaver muttered. What possible need do I have of a phone?
Striding up the timber track, swinging his walking poles vigorously, Cleaver tried to increase his pace. Piles of pine logs were stacked at regular intervals. He breathed deeply. Too fat, he muttered. Pull your weight is a strange expression. Then a chainsaw started up. A low moan rose and fell, biting into wood somewhere. At once Cleaver realised that until the noise stopped he couldn’t be happy. There was a roar as a branch fell and the motor revved. He couldn’t think even. He felt angry. How far do you have to walk to get out of range of a chainsaw, to find a remote place to live in? Was he walking towards it, or away? It seemed to be above him. Try to keep a brisk pace, he thought.
The path climbed steadily, monotonously, through tall trees, random undergrowth, small clearings with boulders and scrub. Ten minutes, half an hour. The noise seemed no nearer and no further, groaning, roaring, stopping and starting. The forest stretched away, austerely shapeless. There was no peace. How can I possibly find a place to live, Cleaver demanded, if I don’t know where I’m going? I’m so unfit. Only the slope gave direction. Up or down. Life isn’t a fairy tale, he muttered – he was panting now – where you stumble on your tailor-made Gothic castle, or suddenly find yourself the wilderness-wise master of a log cabin. I don’t even own a penknife, for heaven’s sake!
Suddenly tired, Cleaver sat down on a tree trunk and with unexpected perversity pulled out his phone and turned it on. Apparently, part of his mind had known he was going to do this, while another part was scandalised, disappointed. Only to check how much battery is left, he murmured. Three notches. Not bad. Now it was vibrating with arriving messages. So there is a signal! Impressive. I’m in touch. If necessary, he told himself, I could call California. Already the little envelope was winking. Memory full. He opened the message file. They were all from Amanda. Or rather, BOOTS. That was how he had her in his address list. Cleaver frowned, scrolling down the list.
BOOTS
BOOTS
BOOTS
BOOTS
BOOTS
BOOTS
BOOTS
BOOTS
BOOTS
BOOTS
He shook his head. One of the things that had made him suspect a certain amount of collaboration between his elder son and Amanda in the writing of the famous fictional autobiography, was the detail the first-time author had been able to give of how his father and mother had so fatefully met when, three years older than himself, Amanda was Cleaver’s boss on The Times Saturday Review. So he called her Boots, for short, his elder son had written. The Pretender, was how Mother referred to him. My father always claimed he should have sued for sexual assault in the work place. Talk about being bossed about, he would quip. In any event the two had just broken up and my father had left the paper (was this the first attempt to write the masterpiece?) when Mother realised she was pregnant. With twins.
Cleaver turned off the phone without opening the messages. The chainsaw had stopped and he thought he heard other noises now through the trees from the slope above. The cloud was sinking lower. A horse neighing perhaps. Is that possible? Perhaps voices. Amanda had put the book in his hands exactly thirty-six hours before the most important moment in his career, his interview with the President of the United States. That in itself was an act of terrorism. Hot off the press, she told him, and already on the shortlist for the Booker. Our boy.
It was breakfast time and, opening the stiff new pages beside his cereal bowl, Cleaver was at once concerned to find his elder son holding forth about the origin of his parents’ relationship. Why did I know nothing about this? he asked. On the Booker list? Despite all their vaunted modernity, his elder son had written, their habit, that is, of presenting themselves to the world as bright, rebellious young things, my father and mother caved in at once to received morality and, even before Angela and I were born, stayed together for the children, something they would then make us pay for throughout our childhood, which means, of course, for the rest of our lives, since each of them, having bowed to the parental yoke, then had to do absolutely everything to establish that they had independent lives apart from the family, apart from each other, apart from us. How many times would a guest at lunch or dinner – because we always had guests both at lunch and dinner; in fact, if there were no guests, more often than not there was no lunch or dinner – how many times, Cleaver’s elder son had written, would a guest say Your wife, or Your husband, and immediately my father and mother would chime in, Actually, we’re not married you know. Actually, we never tied the knot. Probably it was the only time they spoke in unison. How irritating, Cleaver thought, was his son’s silly habit of using italics. Not knotted, you know, he had written, quoting his witty father. I should get royalties for all the jokes in that book. And how utterly reductive this was, Cleaver felt sure, as an account of the tension there had been between himself and Amanda in those feverish and beautiful days, the decision they had taken: that twins were a gift, a sign. You can’t abort twins. Though of course Cleaver never did believe in signs. Certainly we loved each other. Or something. It was so long ago. And Amanda was the most atheist woman in the world. Still, it did seem, Cleaver was now convinced, that the all-too-accurate details in his son’s book of how he, Cleaver, had given up what would have been, at that point, a rather precocious masterpiece, to make his breakthrough move to the Beeb, was a story his elder son could only have had directly from his mother. Hot off the press the book might be, but Amanda seemed all to
o familiar with the contents.
A horse snorted quite near by. At once the chainsaw started up again. But quite definitely there had been a jingle of harness, the snort of an animal. If there is one sound that more than any other sums up the horror of invasive noise, Cleaver decided, as the motor started up again, it is the moan of the chainsaw, its insistent, straining aggression, the way, even when it abruptly stops and the world shrinks into wounded silence, nevertheless the mind remains tense, on guard, waiting for it to start again, to start demolishing things again, above all, demolishing your thoughts, your peace of mind. With this pregnancy, his elder son had written, and the consequent decision to get back together and have not one baby but two, my father was obliged to acknowledge that this literary ambition of his was impractical and so …
Look, doesn’t the Booker, Cleaver had shouted to his wife at breakfast that morning – he seemed to remember she was grinding coffee beans – have to be a novel, fiction? I mean, should I turn to the last page and find out what happens, or what? The coffee grinder fell silent and Amanda was laughing. Better not, she said. They hardly ever looked each other in the eye. The bloke casting the long shadow gets killed, hoist with his own petard.
Breathing deeply, fighting the insistence of the chainsaw, Cleaver decided he was unwell. There are times when he feels he has stepped into an oneiric space of pure, motiveless anxiety. His palms sweat. His head feels hollow, his flesh is impossibly heavy. He can trace these experiences right back to university days: this difficulty breathing, a fear of emptiness that is actually a physical tension in the mind. On your feet, Cleaver ordered himself. You old ox. He thrust his poles into the dirt. Neck in the yoke now. And as he stood up, the horse appeared. It was a small stout Haflinger, brown and gold, round as a barrel, pulling a cart. Cleaver knew the names of horses from the times he had taken Angela riding. Then he wanted to burst out laughing. Directly behind the animal’s fat butt, flapping the reins, sat the flamboyant Hermann, he of the big horse for a big arse. There was the same comedian’s grin about his thin lips, though he had substituted his leather cowboy hat of two evenings before for something old-fashioned and black, a black trilby with a green band. Somehow this allowed Cleaver to notice his moustache properly, a generous blond brush in the shrewd red intensity of his narrow face. An exhibitionist’s moustache. Cleaver was about to wave when he noticed the passengers sitting in the cart behind. Everyone was strangely well dressed: a man of fortyish sitting slightly bowed, a green sash across his short jacket, his black hat forced onto thick tawny hair; beside him, a creature who seemed no more than a dark bundle crumpled against the cart’s backboard. The face was hidden in a loose hood. Two women sat opposite, swaying together with the uneven progress of the cart, both wearing black headscarves, one elderly, one young.
As the cart approached, Hermann met Cleaver’s eyes and quickly touched the brim of his hat, but as if to indicate that he couldn’t speak. Cleaver smiled, standing back against a tree. The horse stumbled, pushed hard by the weight of the cart trundling down the steep track. Up above, the chainsaw must be biting deep into some old tough wood. It whined and groaned. Hermann was staring straight ahead now. As the cart passed, Cleaver saw that the younger woman was still an adolescent, seriously overweight, her hair cut boyishly short, the sunken eyes blank, mouth wide open. The man had a hunched alertness about him, his hands gripped tight on his knees. Only the elderly lady picked up Cleaver’s gaze and held it a moment, despite a sudden lurch of the cart. Her cheekbones were high and flat. Her hard eyes locked into his and glittered. Cleaver was arrested. Turning to watch as they rattled away, he saw that between the passengers’ feet a black cloth had been draped over a low platform or box. They were sitting with their knees tucked under their benches so as not to touch it. Even so, it was only when the chainsaw roared out and fell silent, leaving the valley bare to the distant clanging of a bell, that Cleaver realised this must be a funeral.
Without thinking, he turned. He could still hear the Haflinger’s hoofs and the faint clatter of the wheels. But the cart had disappeared now. The air seemed limp, drained of tension. It had come on to drizzle. This isn’t a day for getting above the treeline, Cleaver decided. Strangely relieved, as if released from some difficult assignment, he pulled his waterproof cape from his backpack and started striding back to the village as swiftly as possible. Why the hurry? Because the clouds were coming down. Yet he couldn’t explain a vague sense of excitement as his legs led him briskly after the cart. Just before the track met the main road, a jeep drove past. No doubt the chainsaw man.
The church stood in a large cemetery surrounded by a low wall. A small crowd was milling under umbrellas outside the gate, but as Cleaver approached, a band struck up and they began to move in. He tagged behind. A procession was forming along the wall of the church. At its head was the priest, and beside him a man in black carrying a huge, almost life-size wooden crucifix. Death-size. Then came the coffin, borne by six men, including Hermann and the other fellow on the cart. All wore sprigs of flowers in their lapels. The chief mourners it seemed were the three women who had been sitting with him, the oldest supported by the other two. Beneath the black hood, Cleaver glimpsed a face whose skull seemed to have risen right through the sunken skin.
All in dark uniform, the band began to play some slow dirge. It was soft and solemn. The drummer had muffled his drumsticks. The rain muted the brass. Who are they burying? Cleaver wondered. It seemed a very public occasion. And he recognised Armin. The boy was blowing a trumpet. He wore a black cap like the others, but he hadn’t removed the earring with the sign of the Beast. It can’t be a child, he told himself. There wasn’t that anguish you saw when there was a child to bury. To this day, his elder son had written, I shall remember my father’s face as … No. Cleaver shook his head.
The music surged forward. Leading the procession, the swaying crucifix turned the corner behind the church. Cleaver watched from among the graves. Frau Schleiermacher was there, almost at the back, stepping slowly, face handsomely intent. She has a fine chin, steady eyes. Not even forty-eight hours here, Cleaver thought, and already you recognise people. They were singing a hymn. The voices swelled, but softly, tunelessly. The sound was strangely solid. He didn’t understand the words. The rain came harder. How concentrated everyone is, Cleaver noticed, how intent and sure of what they are doing. His eye moved across the graves. They formed a grid of small ironwork crosses, arranged in rigid symmetry, a low black rail around each grey tombstone. There must be firm rules here, he thought, or no desire to be different.
Then just as he was going to tag on at the back of the crowd as it wound round behind the church, he heard a voice intoning a prayer and, turning his head, saw the priest now reappearing from the other end of the building, the tall crucifix swaying beside him. The priest half sang, half spoke in a flat, guttural voice and the crowd were murmuring a collective response. They had done no more than march right round the building.
Cleaver stopped on the path beside the church wall to watch, to listen. The man beneath the crucifix was finding it hard going. Indifferent to the rain, the bleeding Christ gazed away amongst the graves. Hermann shuffled slowly beneath the coffin, his thin lips and bright moustache moving to the responses. No doubt I look ridiculous, Cleaver thought, in my red waterproof with my tourist’s backpack. But Hermann gave no sign of having seen him. Tourists should not come to funerals. A car door slammed and a woman came hurrying into the cemetery. She wobbled on heels along the wet gravel path, belting a raincoat as she ran. Seffa! Seffa! The elderly lady half raised her head, but turned away.
The procession was heading straight towards Cleaver now. To get out of its way, he stepped aside and stood with his back pressed to the church wall between two buttresses. The coffin passed very close in little lurches, resting on the bearers’ shoulders. I can reach out and touch it, Cleaver thought. There was a small wreath of flowers on top. Very small. Carnations. The man who had been riding on the cart was hunched
under his burden, coarse features tense. The rain drummed on the dark wood. No one seems to notice me, Cleaver thought. The new arrival, a petite, blonde town-dressed woman, fortyish perhaps, had grasped the big girl’s arm. Both were staring at the coffin. How fixed everybody’s face is! How promptly they muttered their responses to the priest. A collective voice speaks through them, Cleaver thought. He couldn’t have said even to himself why he was so taken by this. Armin must have seen I am here, but he pays no attention. The rain doesn’t touch them, he noticed. They let it run down their cheeks and onto their black jackets without concern.
Once again Cleaver was on the point of joining the back of the procession when once again the priest and the crucifix bearer reappeared behind. They had circled the church a second time. A second time he stood pressed to the wall to let them pass. The murmured responses dissolved in the damp air. Water ran swiftly in a gutter. The tall, straight woman with the glittering eyes is the chief mourner, Cleaver realised. She was austere, expressionless. There is something quite remote about her. The flat cheeks and pale pressed lips passed only a couple of feet away. Even if I jumped out in front of her, Cleaver thought, she wouldn’t notice, her eyes would pass right through me. Then he understood that the woman was burying her husband.