The White Hotel

by D. M. Thomas

  At last the beautiful opera star—the white of her sling contrasting almost elegantly with the plain black of her silk dress—allowed herself to be propelled across the room, smiling through the mělée of her friends and admirers; and she exchanged a word with Delorenzi. He began the serene, familiar introduction to Schubert’s An die Musik, and then the soprano took wing. They would not let her escape with just one short song, and so she gave them—Victor having produced a tattered piece of music for Delorenzi—a poignant Ukrainian ballad. The repetitive yet endlessly varied links in the chain of melody, every phrase struck clean, pure as a crystal glass, and full of yearning for the fertile homeland, cast a spell over the audience. One would have sworn that, when the last of many last phrases died into silence, her voice continued to sing, in the heart alone. Everyone was too deeply affected to applaud. The conductor rose from his stool, stretched up on his toes—he was a very small man—and kissed her on both cheeks.

  Lisa was suffering. She had found it hard to stay in the room while Vera sang, because she had been overcome by a really bad attack of breathlessness. She thought she was going to die. It had nothing to do with overhearing a member of the orchestra say to the person next to him, after the Schubert, “Now there’s a real voice.” She was not jealous; she knew she could not match that voice, which was as close to perfection as she ever hoped to hear, this side of paradise and perhaps even beyond. She not only revered Serebryakova, she liked her—had even perhaps fallen a little in love with her, in the space of a day.

  Partly, of course, it was the heat, smoke, noise, and press of bodies. But more than that, it had something to do with Vera’s announcement about expecting a baby; for she had started to become breathless during Vera’s rapturous unburdening of her secret. For some reason it disturbed her greatly. Now, as soon as Vera finished the folk-song, Lisa went over to her, and in a breathless voice thanked her for her wonderful singing, and for the party, but now she must go to bed, because the smoke was beginning to affect her voice. “Aren’t you going to wait for the newspapers?” asked Vera, disappointed.

  Safe in her own suite, a faint rumble of conversation underneath the carpet, Lisa threw open a window and gulped cool night air. She began to recover. Am I perhaps an embittered old maid, without knowing it? she wondered, starting to undress. She slept very badly again, tossing and turning. As dawn glimmered through the curtains she slept, and dreamed she was standing over a deep trench filled with many coffins. Directly beneath her she could see Vera, her straight naked body showing through a glass top. As she mourned for her, in a line of crying mourners, there was a rumble above her, and she knew a landslide was going to crash down and bury her. Before it could do so, she was woken by the telephone. It was Vera—who wanted to know if she was all right, because she sounded out of breath and upset. Lisa explained she had been woken in the midst of a bad dream, and was grateful.

  “Well, forget about your bad dream—we’ve just had the newspapers sent up. The reviews are excellent! Truly! No more than you deserve. We’re going down to breakfast soon—my train goes in an hour. Hurry up and join us. We’ll bring the newspapers down. Victor wants to say hello.” And after a pause Lisa heard Victor’s deep voice intone “Hello!” and then they hung up. Feeling much more cheerful, she jumped out of bed, ran to the bathroom and quickly dressed. She was down in the breakfast room almost before her friends. They presented her with the newspapers, opened at the review section. But before she could begin to read, Vera laid her hand on hers and said, “Just remember the critics here are cynics. Believe me, these are good reviews—better than I had—aren’t they, Victor?” Victor nodded, after a brief hesitation.

  They did not seem at all good to Lisa. “Sadly we have to report that even a one-armed Serebryakova is better than the two-armed Erdman,” wrote one of the critics. The other critic said her voice was “raw and provincial,” and that she sang with more emotionalism than feeling. There were admittedly some balancing descriptions: “competent,” “brave attempt,” “Tatiana’s Letter Scene movingly acted and sung,” “expressive potential.” “Believe me, this is high praise from the Milan critics,” Vera pleaded, taking Lisa’s hand again and squeezing it hard to prove her point; for they saw she was upset.

  It was not the reviews, however, which upset her. They were really not at all bad. She had been warned about the Milanese critics, and she knew there was an element of truth in Vera’s reassurances. No, she had simply had a shock, and it made her very angry with herself, at her stupidity. One of the critics had written: “The quite exceptional musical and dramatic understanding of the Berenstein–Serebryakova team assuredly owed much to their long association at the Kiev Opera, and also—it goes without saying—to their being husband and wife.” Lisa now recalled where she had seen Victor’s name most recently—in an article about Serebryakova. Serebryakova, of course, was only her stage name. It now seemed so obvious. Why had she jumped to the wrong conclusion? It was clearly written, she found later, in the programme given to her by Signor Fontini on arrival; but her eyes had somehow skipped over it.

  Vera, gulping her coffee, jumped up, and bent to give Lisa a hug and a kiss. As her husband wrapped a red cape round her, and buttoned it at the neck, she told Lisa she would expect to see her in Kiev next year. “Don’t come to see me off. Finish your breakfast. And good luck! We’ll keep in touch!”

  On her first rest day, she went to mass at the Cathedral, but the great building oppressed her, and she resolved not to go again. It was too institutional. She much preferred being in a minority, on the outskirts: it was much easier to believe. Even in Vienna there were too many Catholics; but even so, the Church was not so relentlessly present as it was here. She could not believe in anything so universally acceptable and so infallibly certain. Even Leonardo’s Last Supper, which she went to see in a near-by convent, struck a chill in her. It was too symmetrical. People did not eat meals like that.

  Perhaps the closer you came to God, the harder it was to believe in Him. That was why Judas had betrayed Him—and the cock crew for Peter too. Walking back from the Last Supper, Lisa had to pass one of those smelly tin boxes, by the side of the street, where men urinated. Though she walked hurriedly by, and with averted face, she caught a glimpse of two weatherbeaten, olive-skinned faces, overtopping the urinal, deep in conversation. Before she could stop the blasphemous thought, she saw the two men as Jesus and Judas, their robes hoisted, standing in subdued conversation side by side after the Last Supper. It must have been difficult for Judas, being so close, to see Him as the Son of God. And probably even harder for Mary, next to Him in heaven. Which meant it must be impossible for Him too. Sitting up there like Boris Godunov, He must be tormented by the holy sham of it all.

  The blasphemous moment passed, but left her feeling terribly oppressed. Before writing a postcard to her aunt, she looked closely at the picture on it. It was a blurred reproduction of the mysterious Holy Shroud, kept at Turin. It was not the first time she had seen reproductions of it, and wondered if it really was the Shroud of Christ; but it meant more here because the Shroud was close. She thought it might help her to feel more spiritual again if she went to see it. So, on another rest day, she took the train to Turin.

  She went with Lucia—her understudy. This was the girl, a member of the chorus, whose catastrophic failure had been responsible for the urgent telegram to Lisa. A raven-haired Lombard, with full red lips and lustrous dark eyes under long lashes, she had been chosen more for her looks than her voice. No one had expected Serebryakova, who was notoriously as strong as a horse, to miss any performances. But Lucia had had her big chance, and failed. Her proud parents and six brothers and sisters had been present on the night she was hooted off the stage. Lisa knew what a terrible blow the young woman had suffered, and made it her business to become acquainted with her and try to undo some of the damage to her morale. Fearing to appear condescending, she had at first taken a brisk, professional line, saying she would like to run through some o
f the arias with her. Understandably the girl had been reserved and a little resentful; but she was passionately fond of music, and found the afternoons in Lisa’s suite, studying the score and practising together, so interesting and instructive that she had shed her unfriendliness. Lisa, for her part, found she enjoyed helping the girl to sort out some of the flaws in her technique; she really had quite a promising voice, and made progress under Lisa’s tuition. If she had to take over again, she could probably now cope reasonably well.

  This was important to Lisa, for her attack of breathlessness that first night—fortunately short-lived—confronted her with the possibility that one night she might not be able to go on. So quite apart from the motive of compassion, there were solid professional grounds for trying to help her understudy.

  By now they were firm friends: friendship mixed with a good deal of adoration on Lucia’s side, and perhaps of maternal affection on Lisa’s—for Lucia was hardly twenty. Devoutly religious herself, and knowing Turin well, she was delighted to accept when Lisa asked her if she would accompany her on her “pilgrimage.”

  Now here they were, gazing, not at the Shroud itself—which, trapped in iron, had stayed hidden from their eyes when they had knelt in Turin Cathedral—but at a full-length replica of it hanging on the wall in the museum, seeing the nail marks, the scourge marks, the very features of Christ. Those marks and features had appeared, not in Secondo Pia’s photograph of the Shroud, but in the negative. A nun was gazing at the image, tears streaming down her cheeks, making the sign of the cross over and over again, and murmuring, “Terrible! Terrible! Terrible! The wicked men! The wicked, wicked men!” Lisa too felt profoundly moved. That gaunt, tortured, yet dignified face and body—the hands placed becomingly over the genitals. Gazing up at the photographer’s image, she became convinced that this was indeed Jesus.

  In the confessional, back at the Cathedral, Lisa told the priest that, having seen a replica of the photograph of the Holy Shroud, she no longer believed in Christ’s resurrection. The priest, after a moment’s thought, said she ought not to judge anything so momentous by a doubtful relic. “We do not claim that it is the Holy Shroud,” he said. “Only that it may be. If you believe it is false, that is no reason for doubting the resurrection.”

  “But that is just it, Father,” she said. “I am quite sure the shroud is genuine.”

  The priest’s voice was puzzled. “Then why do you say you have lost your faith?”

  “Because the man I’ve been looking at is dead. It reminds me of pressed flowers.”

  The priest advised her to go home and pray in the quietness of her own room.

  Lisa confessed a second time, to Lucia, when they sat on a seat beside the river, taking in the warmth of the sun behind a light veil of cloud, and eating bread and cheese. This time it was a secular confession. She told the girl about some of the disasters in her life: the lack of contact with her father and (of less importance) her brother; her failure in her first choice of career, the ballet, due partly to bad health but mainly to a lack of talent; her annulled marriage—and yet she still had the feeling one was married for life. She envied Lucia’s large and loving family circle; she envied her youth, with all its prospects of family happiness. And, because of the late start and a long illness, Lisa would never be more than a good singer—whereas Lucia could at least hope to be great, one day.

  “How have you managed—?” The girl dropped her head, blushing at her boldness.

  “You mean, without love? Oh, I try not to think of it any more. It’s not been easy. I’m not without—passions, I can assure you. But you can stifle a lot by getting involved in your work.”

  “I could never get that involved,” said the girl, with a sigh. She glanced slyly at her engagement ring.

  “You’re very wise, my dear,” said Lisa.

  They fell silent. Lisa was disturbed by the foolish thought that if Christ’s hands had not been placed so tactfully, yet suggestively, the Church would not have been able to display His image.

  “It’s a good thing Rome is too far,” she said to Victor. “If I went there I’d become an atheist like you!” He denied being an atheist. You couldn’t be brought up in the Caucasus, and look up at the thousands of pure bright stars at night, without having a glimmer of religious feeling.

  His remark made Lisa yearn for the tranquillity of mountains. She could get to Como and back within a day. She asked Victor if he would like to go with her. His eyes lit up, flashed for a moment, through his horn-rimmed glasses, with the snowy peaks of his native Georgia.

  On a cloudless June day they drank tea on a hotel terrace, overlooking the sparkling lake and with a backdrop of transparent mountains. She felt light enough to float off the terrace and drift over the lake. The cool refreshing breeze would carry her. Victor felt happy too, because of the mountains and that morning’s letter from Vera. She was in marvellous spirits, except for missing him. By the same post, Lisa had received a gift from her. It was a print of the Chersonese by Leonid Pasternak. She had mentioned to Vera the Chersonese, as a part of the Black Sea coast dear to her memory. It was a thoughtful, touching gift.

  As they sipped their tea, Victor reread his letter, chuckling over the bits he read out to Lisa. “I’ve bought a maternity corset, darling. I’ll be as fat as a sow when you come home.” How overjoyed he was, he said, at having a child, so unexpectedly in the autumn, as it were. How much he missed Vera; and how unbearable it would be without Lisa’s company. His first wife and their ten-year-old son had been killed in the Civil War. A stray shell had fallen on their house. He still couldn’t talk about it. Until he had found Vera he had not expected any more happiness in life.

  They went for a ride, up a funicular railway. Still he rattled on, about his wife and coming child, with occasional pauses to point out a fine view. She had never known him so talkative. In fact, without Vera’s presence as mediator, she had not found it easy to communicate with him. He spoke very little except when he was drunk; and his wife had given him strict orders about that. But today, in the mountains, he opened out, even if on a line of thoughts as narrow as the railway. Lisa herself did not feel talkative, and was content to smile and nod, while drinking in the scenery.

  It was late afternoon when they came down to the town, and neither of them felt like rushing back to the station. He suggested they try to get rooms at the splendid hotel where they had had tea. “We’re not needed till tomorrow night,” he urged. “Fontini doesn’t own us—though he thinks he does! And Delorenzi too, the arrogant little runt! I see what you mean about Milan. Awful place! Well, the Devil take them, let’s stay the night!”

  Lisa was “game,” after the initial surprise. “Splendid!” he said; and dashed into the hotel. He came out beaming success.

  “But I haven’t any things!” she suddenly remembered.

  “What do you need?”

  She considered. “Well, only a toothbrush and toothpaste, I suppose!”

  “You wait here.” In three minutes he was back, with two paper bags. “We’ve got our luggage.” He laughed. “I needed rather more—some shaving gear, too!”

  Rising in the lift, they shared their amusement at the suspicious looks the receptionist and the porter had given them. After settling into their rooms, they had a pleasant, leisurely dinner. The dining room was crowded, but so large and high that it invited people to eat in silence, or to converse in low tones. Victor had recovered from his talkative spell; but the silence was companionable, not awkward. They gazed out through the french windows at the still lake, beginning to ripple towards dusk. Afterwards they had a stroll along the shore. The night fell quickly between the mountains, until the peaks could only be “seen” by the absence of stars there, for the open sky was full of stars. Lisa felt the Holy Shroud fall away from her, and faith spring alive again. Trite though it might seem, Victor was right—you could not look up at such stars without believing there was something.

  Outside her door he surprised her by planti
ng a firm kiss on her lips. “I’ve been wanting to do that for weeks!” He chuckled. “They’re so—full and deliciously curved! Vera will forgive me! I hope you didn’t mind? See you in the morning.”

  He had never expressed curiosity about her past; but a remark she threw out at breakfast, about her being “probably half Jewish,” did arouse his interest. She found herself, in the quiet train journey back to Milan, telling him things that she had never told anyone. Not being a good talker, he was a good listener; and it relieved her to be able to talk to someone—someone who was sympathetic and yet not too close. Altogether, the trip to Como was a restorative, refreshing her so that she could cope calmly with the two weeks of the season that remained.

  A week before the end, she pretended to have a migraine attack before a matinée. Lucia took her place and successfully surmounted the ordeal. So Lisa let her migraine continue into the evening. Again Lucia sang. Victor—and Signor Fontini, and Delorenzi—were astonished by the understudy’s secret improvement.