by Simon Mawer
It was raining outside. He crossed the little artificial piazza outside the cathedral and he felt a terrifying sense of freedom. A taxi waded past through the rain. He hailed it and to his surprise it stopped. The driver set the meter going with a flick of his hand. ‘Where to, guv? Father, is it? Where to, Father? Quick round trip to heaven?’
‘Farm Street,’ Leo said. ‘The Jesuit house.’
‘Jesuits, eh? Near enough.’
A Picnic
A picnic. Eine Landpartie is what Herr Huber calls it, but Gretchen insists on the English word. A picnic, with friends, the fortuitous friends created by the exigencies of war or diplomacy, men and women thrown together by chance. A picnic at the amphitheatre of Sutri, in the countryside north of Rome, a beautiful place hedged about with holm oak and approached along an avenue of umbrella pines, the Roman campagna at its most secretive and seductive, heavy with the echoes of its Etruscan past. It is her picnic, her small reminder of days long gone by when they used to go on picnics in the forests near Buchlov Castle, her small treat and Leo’s too, with Jutte and Josef invited, and the amusing von Klenzes, and of course, Checco, so that she can feel his eyes on her. As she sits on the rug that the servants have spread out in the amphitheatre she even lifts her knees for him to see beneath her skirt. Just a glimpse of hidden, secret silk; no more. Just sufficient to make him uncomfortable as he sits in front of her, managing plate and knife and fork and the bulge in the front of his trousers with a certain lack of competence. ‘Are you quite all right, signor Francesco?’ she asks mockingly. He looks hot and awkward, but answers that he has never been better.
‘Because you look most uncomfortable.’
‘I am perfectly comfortable, Frau Huber.’
There is some banter about the wine. They eat prosciutto crudo and figs and Herr Huber decides that this particular variety of ham is not as good as Viennese Schinken.
‘I prefer Prague ham,’ someone says. It is Josef, who was in Bohemia in 1938 where he met Jutte, in fact, in those distant days when the State of Czechoslovakia still existed and he was with the embassy in Prague. He does tend to go on about the city rather, its beer and its food, but his reflections on the matter of Prague ham, which the Führer himself ate on that momentous day when he visited the city in 1939, are interrupted by a sound, a sudden and intrusive sound like the fabric of the blue sky being torn apart. The picnickers pause, forks frozen halfway to mouths. They glance upwards.
‘What the devil?’
Something dark and silver, something awkward, cruciform, loud, flashes overhead from behind the fringe of holm oak and roars away over the road and above the umbrella pines, tearing at the sky as though doing it a great hurt.
‘Amerikaner!’ Leo cries in excitement, getting to his feet and running to the entrance to the theatre as though he might catch the great, dark machine.
‘Nonsense,’ says Josef. ‘Luftwaffe! A Messerschmidt.’
‘Leo!’ shouts Gretchen. She gets to her feet and runs after the child. The noise is background now, a distant roar against the spring day. ‘American,’ agrees one of the men, and Herr Huber begins a lecture, directed mainly towards signor Francesco, a lecture about how the great tragedy of the war is that it has given the Americans an excuse to get into Europe, and things will never be the same again, whatever happens. And whatever happens is this: the sound of the cruciform creature grows louder in the sky once more and the people of the picnic stand transfixed in or about the entrance to the amphitheatre, with Gretchen calling ‘Leo! Leo!’ and Herr Huber impatient to develop his argument.
And there is the machine once again, sudden over the umbrella pines, not cruciform now but a swollen face with outstretched arms, raging in fury at the soft spring day and the picnic party on the turf below. There is a racket and the anguished whine of metal and an explosion of rock dust from the tiers around the theatre, and the sour stench of sulphur in the air. Then the thing has gone and all is quiet.
The disposition of the picnic party is this: Herr Huber is picking himself up from the grass (his hat has been dislodged and lies some distance away; his crown is fine and arched and devoid of hair) and brushing himself down as though he has just been splashed by a passing car. Jutte is crying softly and Josef curses softly, as though that way he might comfort her. And Gretchen is running through the entrance towards the cars, calling ‘Leo? Leo?’ with a faint upwards intonation, as though she is taking part in a game of hide-and-seek and is getting rather tired of it and wants to hand victory to the boy.
‘They’ve hit the damned Mercedes,’ cries von Klenze, going to investigate. He reaches Gretchen just as she gets to the entrance, where she halts for a moment as though waiting for her whole world to collapse just as the Mercedes has collapsed on to its suspension and two flat tyres, just as Leo has collapsed in an awkward heap, his face in the dirt, one arm twisted beneath him, his legs lying anyhow just as though they have been dislocated, and a dark puddle spreading into the rough grass round him.
He is still moving when his mother gets to him. That only makes it more distressing. It’s the hope that is so distressing. A fait accompli, a certainty, the inexorable and contingent hand of fate, that’s easier to deal with. Hope is the destroyer of things.
But he soon stopped moving. She was soaked in his blood by then, calm and detached, trying to hold his right shoulder together, and soaked in her child’s blood. Later the dress will have to be thrown away, along with so much else.
Magda
‘Your family?’ Magda asks me just as Madeleine had once asked.
‘My family was like yours, less than yours. There was just me and my mother.’
‘No father?’
‘No father.’
‘My father was a big man, always drinking. Maybe you were better with no father.’
‘Maybe.’ I watch her working at her pictures, watch that narrowing of her wide features, that puckering of the black mouth that accompanies the brush-strokes as though it is her lips rather than her hand that marks the lines on the canvas. She works with acrylics and oils. Sometimes there are other things there as well, sand, for example, mixed into the paint to give a harsh and abrasive texture.
‘And there was my brother.’
‘Your brother? You said there was just you and your mother.’
I shake my head. ‘There was always my brother.’
Today with Magda I visited the city of the dead. The city of the dead lies behind the Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls. In that place outside the walls, beyond the pale, in the place where the Romans laid their dead, one sultry August day in the year 258, they buried the scorched and scoured body of Saint Lawrence. I feel for Lawrence, the martyr who had a taste of hell before he ascended into heaven. The authorities didn’t throw him to the lions or anything like that. They didn’t stick him with spears or crucify him or any of those things. They tied him to a gridiron and roasted him over a fire. The night sky weeps meteors on the day of his death – le lacrime di San Lorenzo, the tears of Saint Lawrence, they call them – but I just feel the flames.
The city of the dead has a street map and by-laws. Cars cruise solemnly along its tree-lined avenues. Taxis pause at the kerb, waiting for their fares with their meters ticking over. Pedestrians walk the streets like ghosts, flitting beneath the cypresses and the umbrella pines with armfuls of flowers – chrysanthemums, which are the flowers of the dead.
The city of the dead has quarters, districts, zones named for the inhabitants – an Evangelical quarter, a district for the Muslims and a ghetto for the Jews. There is a military area with barracks and parade ground and monuments. There is a zone where the rich reside, there are spacious villas for the bourgeoisie and apartment blocks for the poor with steps leading up to glass entrance doors and lifts to take the inhabitants up to the top floors. The city of the dead has running water and electricity and its lights burn all night lest the inhabitants awake and cannot see for the dark.
‘Why are we here?’ Magda asked, but she needed no real reason. She wore funereal black, of course – black jeans, black jacket, clumsy black shoes like army boots. She crossed herself at the gates of the city and she wore the composed face of a mourner as she walked with me along the paths. She is an artist and she understands such places. The place will live again under her pen and ink and brushes and paint: the dead will awaken and their fingers will grab the marble slabs that lie on top of them and slide them aside. They will lever themselves out of ditch and sarcophagus, and stand finally before the judgement of history or God, whoever happens to be around at the time.
There is no saying whom you might meet in such a place as the city of the dead. I half expected to find my own mother there amongst the marble and the travertine, to bump into her on the pavement much as you might bump into someone on the street. ‘Good God! Fancy seeing you here!’
How would she be? Aged, as she is whenever I recall her; or a youthful shadow of that young woman who first conceived me? How are the dead when they arise at the last trump? Which version of them survives for all time: the first bloom of youth, or the victim of age and Alzheimer’s? That’s the problem with bodily resurrection, isn’t it? Is it the child or the adult, the youthful sinner or the aged repentant, who gets to emerge from the tomb?
But of course there was no real risk of meeting my mother. She lies safely buried in the cemetery of Saint Mary’s, Kensal Green, where I helped inter her amidst the comforts of Holy Mother Church. I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, although he be dead shall live: and every one that liveth, and believeth in me, shall not die forever. She wanted the rite in Latin; of course she did. It was there in a codicil to her will, along with the details of the bank account in Geneva and the deed to the apartment: ‘I wish to be buried using the Latin form of the mass.’
Ego sum resurrectio et vita …
Or we would encounter Madeleine, walking in that quick, determined manner that she had, as though she always had somewhere to go and was just fractionally late for the appointment. She would halt in surprise at the two figures coming towards her, her surprise transforming into an ironical smile: ‘What, you here? And who on earth is this?’ Looking at Magda with a knowing expression, as though she understood how things stand.
‘This is Magda. She shares your name.’
‘Does she, indeed? I wonder what else she shares with me.’
There are jokes, you see, even in the city of the dead. Let me give you another one, an inscription on a tomb:
Angelica Tomassini, Vedova Contenta.
Can you manage it? Why should I explain it? I don’t explain my miseries, so why should I explain my jokes? And when explained, does it remain a joke? I had to explain it to Magda, though. ‘Roughly,’ I told her, ‘it means: Angelica Tomassini, the Happy Widow.’
A frown, the frown Magda makes when confronting linguistic difficulties. ‘Roughly?’
It was a lesson again, a lesson amongst the lessons that the dead themselves teach. ‘Approximately. That’s approximately what the inscription means: the Happy Widow.’
‘So she was happy that her husband die?’
‘That’s what it says, but not quite what was intended. Her husband’s name was Contenta. Her married name was Contenta. She was the widow Contenta.’
Magda pondered the matter; and then laughed, too late. Madeleine would have been the first to see the joke, of course. She would have pointed it out to me and made the most of it: ‘I’ll bet she was,’ she would have said. ‘The wicked old thing.’
But there aren’t many other jokes in the city of the dead: a lift for the exclusive use of coffins is worth a chuckle, I guess. Tomb doors of anodised aluminium like the doors and windows of a vulgar modern house evoke a wry smile. But
Quello che siete fummo
Quello che siamo sarete.
is not a joke. We found it inscribed on one of the memorials and it’s perfectly true: that which you are, we were; that which we are, you will be.
Or Mors Ultima Ratio carved above the portals of a vault built like a modernist house in the style of Le Corbusier: Death is the final reckoning. It is curious how little overt religiosity there is in the city of the dead. The dead know, I suppose. They know the truth, they see through the lies.
Remember Man that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.
The fragment of the ritual that always struck me as being the most plainly honest was the administering of the ashes during Ash Wednesday. I remember it so well when I worked in a school for a few years after my ordination: the progress round the classes with the small bowl of grey ashes. The bowed brows, the smear of ash, like a smear of pigment, the rough brush-stroke of an artist: thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return. Perhaps that is when the priest is most near to his true purpose: when he enacts the ritual task of an artist.
There are cross-connections in the city of the dead, associations known only to the inhabitants. There are secret mistresses entombed whole streets away from their clandestine lovers. There are bastards buried distant from their parents. Chains, links, bonds, concatenations. There are murderers and their victims, rapists and their prey, libertines and their catamites. There are enemies buried in pious proximity and friends buried far apart. There are only secrets in the city of the dead.
Magda the artist standing in an open space amongst the monuments and memorials. Before her an area of grass, an urban square, the kind of place you might find the children playing, dogs with balls, mothers with prams. A car drifted past along the road behind us, heading towards the tower blocks of the newly dead. There were pedestrians on the pavement, their arms laden with shock-headed chrysanthemums.
‘We’re here,’ I told her. She followed me along a gravel path between the gravestones and stopped where I knew to stop, before the slab that said Leo.
‘We’re here,’ I repeated.
Leo Alois Huber. 1932–1943. Geliebt.
And a small spray of fresh flowers, their shaggy yellow heads like a mop of curls, with a printed message: dal Ambasciata tedesca.
Magda’s forehead puckered in a frown. ‘Who is he?’ she asked. ‘Eleven years. Who is the boy with your name?’
Who indeed?
‘Who is this Leo?’ Magda insisted.
They have taken my Lord and I know not where they have laid him.
But I knew.
‘Who is he?’ she repeated. ‘Who is the boy called Leo?’ She seemed confused, bewildered, perhaps frightened by this city of the dead and the forgotten. She rarely took much notice of me, painting me with the indifference of a surgeon stitching. She rarely showed any glimmer of emotion. But now her voice rose amongst the silence of the tombs like someone crying for the dead, crying to waken the dead. ‘Who is the boy called Leo?’ she cried.
Magda paints. She works in acrylics and oils, deftly, with cunning, smoking as she works, her eyes half closed against the smoke and her head held tangential to the line of vision so that the thin wreaths of grey will not annoy her. There are things embedded in the paint: sand, bits of plants, bits of twig, spines of cactus culled from the rooftop terrace, toothpicks like shards of bone. She even works with chicken wire rolled and moulded into shapes like limbs, heads, creatures that come out of the paint as though perhaps they might fly. But nothing flies. Flight is beyond it all. Everything is trapped in the intricate web of her creation.
She sits, hunkered down and leaning against the low wall on the terrace, observing the paint dry (acrylics dry fast, she tells me) and rolling stuff into a loose cigarette, and smoking calmly as she looks. She keeps her things in a leather wallet hung round her neck and pushed down the front of her T-shirt, hanging between her narrow breasts. ‘You want a smoke?’ She smiles, not caring one way or the other. She doesn’t care, one way or another, about anything.
She paints Leo amongst the tombstones, Leo amongst the memorials, Leo on fire in the anteroom to hell.
11
It w
as raining in Rome, the basalt paving slick with water and glistening with lights. He paid off the taxi. The porter’s cubicle was closed, like a market stall that has been shut up for the night. He took the lift up to the top and climbed the remaining stairs to his flat. The smell of freesias greeted him, the vivid smell almost overpowering in the closeted air. There was a bunch of the flowers in a vase on the table in the living room. They must have been put there by Madeleine. She must have come to the flat during his absence, let herself in and left the flowers for him to find on his return. He could hear her saying it: ‘You need some colour in here. You need a woman’s touch.’
Women were colour; men were grey – clerical grey.
He smiled at the mute message of the flowers. A plea? A question? A statement. Say it with flowers. But what exactly was she saying?
