1998 - Armadillo

by William Boyd

  “He’s a big joint that, Milo. Is they pork?”

  “Yes, Mum.”

  His mother turned to her mother and they spoke quickly in their language. By now Grandmother had dried her eyes and shuffled forward for her kisses.

  “I say to her, ain’t you looking smart, Milo. Ain’t he smart, Mama.”

  “He’s a handsome. He’s a rich. Not like them milkcow out there.”

  “Go and see your papa,” his mother said. “He’ll be pleased to see you. In his parlour.”

  Lorimer had to ask Mercy to move so he could open the door, as she was kneeling in front of it playing a computer game. As she slowly shifted Drava took the opportunity to sidle up to him and ask in a petulant, graceless voice if she could borrow forty pounds. Lorimer gave her two twenties but she had seen the slim wad in his wallet.

  “Couldn’t make it sixty, could you, Milo?”

  “I need the money, Drava, it’s the weekend.”

  “It’s my weekend too. Go on.”

  He gave her another note and received a nod of acknowledgement, no word of thanks.

  “You handing out, Milo?” Komelia called. “We’d like a new telly, thanks.”

  “Tumble drier, please, while you’re at it,” Monika added. They both laughed shrilly, genuinely, as if, Lorimer thought, they could not take him seriously, that the person he had become was a subterfuge, one of Milo’s curious games.

  He had a short panic attack in the hall, practised his restorative breathing again. The television was also hollering from his father’s ‘parlour’ down the corridor. Six adults and a child lived in this house (“Six females in one house,” his older brother Slobodan had said, “it’s too much for a man. That’s why I had to get out, Milo, like you. My masculinity was suffocating”). He paused at the door—a sports programme, loud Australian voices on satellite (had he paid for that?) thundered beyond. He bowed his head, swearing to himself that he would not break down, and pushed the door open quietly.

  His father seemed to be watching the screen (on which the green-blazered experts loudly debated); certainly his armchair had been placed squarely in front of it. He sat there motionless, in shirt and tie, trousers sharply creased, palms flat on the chair-arms, his unchanging smile framed by his trimmed white beard, his specs slightly askew, his thick, springy grey hair damp and flattened on his scalp.

  Lorimer stepped forward and turned the volume low. “Hello, Dad,” he said. His father’s unreflecting, uncomprehending eyes stared at him, blinking once or twice. Lorimer reached forward and straightened the spectacles on his nose. He was always amazed at how dapper he looked; he had no idea how they did it, his mother and sisters; how they ministered to every need, bathed and shaved and pampered him, walked him about the house, parked him in his parlour, attended (with huge discretion) to his bodily functions. He did not know and he did not want to know, content to see this smiling homunculus the odd weekend in three or four, ostensibly happy and well cared for, distracted by daylong television, tucked up in bed at night and gently roused in the morning. Sometimes his father’s eyes would follow you as you moved, sometimes not. Lorimer stepped to one side and Bogdan Blocj’s head turned as if to contemplate his youngest son, tall and smart in his expensive blue suit.

  “I’ll put the volume back up, Dad,” he said. “It’s cricket, I think. You like cricket, don’t you, Dad.” His mother claimed he heard and understood everything, she could see it in his eyes, she said. But Bogdan Blocj hadn’t spoken a single word to anyone in over ten years.

  “I’ll let you get on then, Dad, take care.”

  Lorimer stepped out of the parlour to find his brother Slobodan standing there in the hall, swaying slightly, his gut tight against his stretched sweat shirt, a smell of beer off him, his long silvered hair lank, the loose switch of his ponytail lying on his shoulder like a flung tie.

  “Heyyyy, Milo.” He opened his arms and hugged him. “Little bro. City gent.”

  “Hi, Lobby,” he corrected himself. “Slobodan.”

  “How’s Dad?”

  “Seems fine, you know. You having lunch ?”

  “Nah, busy day. Match at Chelsea.” He put his surprisingly small hand on Milo’s shoulder. “Listen, Milo, you couldn’t lend me a hundred quid, could you ?”

  77. A Partial History of the Blocj Family. Imagine some ancient fragments of stone unearthed in the desert, eroded, windblasted, sun-bleached, upon which can be discerned some cryptic, runic lettering in a forgotten alphabet. Upon such tablets of stone might have been incised the history of my family, for the effort of deciphering them, of reconstructing meaning, has proved almost impossible to attain. Some years ago I embarked on months of dogged questioning of my mother and grandmother which allowed the story to advance a little further, but it was hard work, the oral history of my family was recalcitrant, barely comprehensible, as if uttered with huge reluctance in a language barely understood, with many gaps, solecisms and demotic errors.

  We should start, because I can go no further back, in World War II, in Romania, Adolf Hitler’s favourite ally. In 1941 the Romanian army annexes Bessarabia, on the northern shore of the Black Sea and renames the region Transnistria. It is used for the permanent resettlement of tens of thousands of Romania’s Gypsy population. Forced transportation begins almost immediately and amongst the fast to be dispatched is a young Gypsy girl in her late teens called Rebeka Petru, my grandmother. “Yes, I am in train, in truck,” my grandmother told me, “and I become Transnistrian. My papers say Transnistrian but in fact I am Gypsy, Tzigane, Rom.” I have never been able to glean any information at all about the pre-Transnistrian phase of her life, it is as if consciousness only evolved, her personal history began, the moment she jumped out of the cattle-truck that day on the banks of the river Bug. In 1942 she gave birth to a daughter, Pirvana, my mother. “Who was her father, Gran?” I ask and watch with alarm as the tears form in her eyes. “He’s a good man. He killed by soldiers.” The only other fact I could learn about him was his name—Constantin. So Rebeka Petm and little Pirvana live out the war in routine terror and discomfort along with tens of thousands of other Transnistrian Gypsies. In order to survive they formed alliances of mutual help and support with other Rom families, prominent amongst whom were two orphaned brothers named Blocj. The youngest of the two brothers was called Bogdan. Their parents had died of typhus in the first transportations from Bucharest to Transnistria.

  Then the war was finally over and the Gypsy diaspora was further dispersed in the massive, dispiriting migrations of populations in 1945 and ‘46 that occurred all over Europe. The Petrus and the Blocjs found themselves in Hungary, ending up in a small village south of Budapest, where the Blocj boys showed some elementary initiative as ‘merchants’, enabling the Rom in that corner of Hungary to survive, if not flourish. Ten years later, in 1956, Bogdan, now in his early twenties and an enthusiastic revolutionary, exploited the chaos of the Hungarian uprising to flee to the West with Rebeka and the fourteen-year-old Pirvana. “What about his brother?” I questioned once. “Oh, he stay. He happy to stay. In fact I think he go back to Transnistria,” my grandmother said. “What was his name?” I asked. “He was my uncle after all.” I remember my grandmother and my mother looked sharply at each other. “Nicolai,” said my grandmother. “Gheorgiu,” said my mother simultaneously, then added disingenuously, “Nicolai-Gheorgiu. He was a bit…funny, Milo. Your dad was the good brother.”

  In 1957 Rebeka, Pirvana and Bogdan arrived in Fulham via Austria as part of a quota of refugees from the Hungarian revolution given a home by the British government. Bogdan wasted no time in resuming his entrepreneurial activities, establishing a small import-export business with the communist states of Eastern Europe called EastEx, trading in whatever meagre toing-and-froing of goods that was permitted—cleaning fluids, aspirins and laxatives, kitchen utensils, tinned food, vegetable oil, tools—a clapped-out reconditioned lorry making the difficult run to Budapest, initially, and then expanding modestly o
ver the years to Bucharest, Belgrade, Sofia, Zagreb and Sarajevo.

  It was inevitable that Bogdan should marry Pirvana after what they had been through together. And it was Pirvana who stood by his side in the early days of EastEx, wrapping cardboard boxes in brown paper, stacking them on pallets, loading the truck, labelling the cartons, supplying the Thermos of clear soup to the driver, while above them in the tiny flat Rebeka cooked meat, stews and goulash, salted hams and made a spicy variation of blood sausage which she sold to other immigrant families in Fulham who yearned for an authentic taste of home.

  Slobodan arrived in 1960, duly and speedily followed by Monika, Komelia, Drava and, eventually, after a longish gap, little Milomre. EastEx gamely flourished in an unexceptional way and over the years Bogdan diversified, adding a small haulage division, a smaller van and truck hire company and a mini-cab firm to the EastEx’s roster. A larger apartment was required for the growing family and the kids were fervently encouraged to become English men and women. Bogdan decreed that no Hungarian or Romanian was to be spoken—although Pirvana and Rebeka would still chat covertly to each other in their special dialect which even Bogdan could not understand.

  And this is how I remember it: the big, crowded, triangular flat, the ever-present smell of cooking meat, the frowsty, chilly reek of the EastEx warehouse, school in Fulham, promise of a role in one of the family’s always somewhat struggling businesses, the constant incantation of, “Now you are English boy, Milo. This is your country, this is your home.” But what of the enigmas that remained? My grandmother’s early youth, grandfather Constantin, my shady uncle, Nicolai-Gheorgiu? I read a rare history of the Transnistrian Gypsies and came to understand a little of the horrors and the hardships they must have endured. I read also of the gendarmerie commanders in Transnistria, cruel, petty tyrants who dominated and exploited their transplanted populations, and who ‘lived in debauchery with beautiful Gypsy women’. I looked at my wily old grandmother and thought of the beautiful teenager who must have stumbled from the cattle-trucks by the banks of the river Bug wondering what had happened to her life and what fate lay in store for her…Perhaps to be confronted by a handsome young gendarmerie officer named Constantin…I will never know, I will never know more than this. All my questions were met with shrugs or silences or sly deflections. My grandmother would say to me as I pestered her for more information: “Milo, we have saying in Transnistria: when you eat the honey do you ask bee to show you the flower?”

  —The Book of Transfiguration

  Ivan Algomir’s shop was on the north side of Camden Passage, behind the arcade, to the left. Its two windows contained one spot-lit object each a studded painted chest in one, and a small brass cannon in the other. The shop was called VERTU and emanated such a daunting aura of the exquisite and pretentious that Lorimer wondered how anyone dared to cross its threshold. He remembered his first visit well, how he had dithered, hummed and hawed, visited the Design Centre, circled back, searched for excuses to go elsewhere, but had finally surrendered to the irresistible lure of the dented Norman basinet (£1,999) which stood on its high pedestal, starkly lit in the sepulchral gloom of the vitrine (which he had sold last year, finally and reluctantly, but for a considerable profit).

  He had not planned to come up to Islington; it had been a long and tedious ride from Fulham, landing him with a £23.50 taxi fare, impeded and harassed by Saturday shoppers, football fans, and those strange souls who chose to take their cars out only on weekends. Up Finborough Road to Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, on to the A40, past Madame Tussauds, Euston, King’s Cross, along Pentonville Road to the Angel. Halfway through the journey, as the cab driver gamely tried and abandoned a route north of Euston, he had wondered why he was bothering, but he sorely needed cheering up after his lunch at home (a meal that had cost him, in various loans and donations, some £275, he had calculated) and, furthermore, Stella didn’t want him to come over until after nine. Turning north and then south, accepting the taxi-driver’s baffled apologies for the traffic (“Nightmare, mate, nightmare”), he realized that, increasingly, his life was composed of these meandering trajectories across this enormous city, these curious peregrinations. Pimlico-Fulham, now Fulham—Islington, and two more awaited him before the journeying could stop: Islington-Pimlico, then Pimlico-Stockwell. Up North of the Park and then South of the River these were boundaries, frontiers he was crossing, not merely itineraries, names on the map; he was visiting city-states with their different ambiences, different mentalities. This was how a city routinely appeared to its denizens, he considered, rather than to its visitors, its transients and tourists. If you lived in the place it existed for you as a great matrix, an evermore-complex web of potential routes. This was how you grappled with its size, how you attempted to make it submit to your control. Come to dinner in…There’s a meeting at…Pick me up from…See you outside…It’s not far from…And so on. Each day threw up its set of route conundrums: how to get from A to B, or F, or H, or S, or Q- a sophisticated formula that factored-in local knowledge, public or private transport, traffic conditions, roadworks, time of day or night,% priorities of speed or calm, brutal expediency or more relaxed sagacity. We are all navigators, he thought, quite pleased with the romantic associations of the metaphor, millions of us, all finding our individual ways through the labyrinth. And tomorrow? Stockwell-Pimlico, and then perhaps he should stay put, though he knew that he should really go further east, to Silvertown, and start thinking about the decor and furnishing for the new flat.

  Ivan had spotted him and stuck his death’s head out of his smoked glass door.

  “Lorimer, my dear fellow, you’ll freeze.”

  Ivan was wearing a biscuity tweed suit and a floppy, oyster-grey bow-tie (“You have to dress the part for this job,” he had said slyly, “and I think you know exactly what I mean, don’t you, Lorimer?”). The shop was dark, walls covered with chocolate-brown hessian or else darkly varnished exposed brick. It contained very few, hilariously expensive objects—a globe, a samovar, an astrolabe, a mace, a lacquered armoire, a two-handed sword, some icons.

  “Sit down, laddie, sit down.” Ivan lit one of his small cigars and shouted upstairs, “Portobello? Coffee, please. Don’t use the Costa Rica.” He smiled at Lorimer, showing his awful teeth and said, “Definitely the time of day for Brazil, I would say.”

  Ivan was, to Lorimer, the living, breathing representation of the skull beneath the skin, his head a gaunt assemblage of angles, planes and declivities somehow supporting a pendulous nose, large, bloodshot eyes and a thin-lipped mouth with a partial set of skewed brown teeth that seemed designed for a larger jaw altogether, an ass’s or a mule’s, perhaps. He smoked between twenty and thirty small, malodorous cigarlettes each day, never seemed to eat and drank anything on a whim—whisky at 10 a.m., Dubonnet or gin after lunch, port as an aperitif (“Tresjranqais, Lorimer”) and had a rare, distressing, body-racking cough that seemed to rise from his ankles and made its appearance at roughly two-hourly intervals, after which he often went and sat quietly alone in a corner for some minutes. But those rheumy, bulging eyes were alive with malice and intelligence and somehow his feeble frame endured.

  Ivan began to enthuse about’ almost an entire garniture’ he was assembling. “It’ll go straight to the Met or the Getty. Amazing the stuff coming out of Eastern Europe—Poland, Hungary. Turning out the attics. Might have a couple of things for you, old chum. Lovely closed helm, Seusenhofer, with beavor.”

  “I’m not so keen on the closed.”

  “Wait till you see this. I wouldn’t wear a white shirt with that tie, my dear old china, you look like an undertaker.”

  “I was having lunch with my ma. Only a white shirt will convince her you’re in gainful employ.”

  Ivan laughed until he coughed. Coughed until he stopped, swalloed phlegm, patted his chest and drew heavily on his cheroot. “God love me,” he said. “Know exactly what you mean. Let’s have a look at our little treasure, shall we ?”

&nbs
p; The helmet was of average size and the bronze had tarnished and aged to a dirty jade, encrusted and flaky, as if it were covered by a vibrantly coloured form of lichen. The curved cheek plates were almost flush with the nose guard and the eye holes were almond-shaped. It was more like a mask than a helmet, a metal domino, and Lorimer supposed that was another reason why he instantly coveted it, why he desired it so. The face beneath would be almost invisible, just a gleam from the eyes and the lines of the lips and chin. He stood staring at it, some ten feet away from where it had been placed on a thin plinth. A small two-inch spike rose from the centre of the cranium.

  “Why’s it so expensive?” he asked.

  “It’s nearly three thousand years old, my dear friend. And, and it’s got some of its plume left.”

  “Nonsense.” Lorimer approached. Some strands of horsehair trailed from the spike. “Come off it.”

  “I could sell it to three museums tomorrow. No, four. All right, twenty-five. Can’t say fairer. I’m making almost nothing.”

  “Unfortunately, I’ve just bought a house.”

  “Man of property. Where?”

  “Ah…Docklands,” Lorimer lied.

  “I don’t know a soul who lives in Docklands. I mean, isn’t it just a teensy bit vulgaire?”

  “It’s an investment.” He picked the helmet up. It was surprisingly light, one cut sheet of bronze, beaten thin, then shaped to fit a man’s head, to cover everything from the nape of the neck and the jawbone up. He knew infallibly whenever he wanted to buy a helmet—the urge to put it on was overpowering.

  “Funerary, of course,” Ivan said, breathing smoke at him. “You could chop through this with a bread knife—no protection at all.”

  “But the illusion of protection. The almost perfect illusion.”

  “Fat lot of good that’d do you.”

  “It’s all we’ve got in the end, isn’t it? The illusion.”

  “Far too profound for me, dear Lorimer. It is a lovely thing, though.”