by Simon Mawer
I’ve tried this before. Oh yes, I’m practised in this kind of thing, didn’t I tell you? That’s being disingenuous. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to frighten you away. This may be just another practice, in which case I’m writing it for no one but me. I want to apologise, of course. I want to ask forgiveness for imposing on you (who else can forgive but a priest?) and I want to say I’m sorry. You mustn’t blame yourself, that’s all. You mustn’t blame yourself. Just tell yourself it’s better like this. Good, clean break. Snap.
Maybe I won’t be brave enough. Maybe I’ll sneak round and retrieve this letter before you see it. I’ve done that before. There’s a lot you don’t know, I’m afraid.
M
He almost laughed when he read it. Through the mess of emotion he almost laughed. Certainly he smiled. But it really posed more questions than it answered, for still he could not find a reason within the words of her scrawl (written awkwardly in her car, he guessed, shortly before she bought a bunch of freesias and took them round to his flat). Why hadn’t she left the note in the flat for him to find? Another part of the joke? Did you joke when you were about to kill yourself? What did you feel? Leo Newman, ex-priest (let’s be honest about it now), ex-lover, ex-everything, felt no inclination to kill himself, so why did Madeleine Brewer, who had so much – husband, children, friends, even a lover should she have wished to continue that little diversion – why should she? And not he?
He, who had always been able to answer every question, argue every point, suddenly had no answers at all.
He delivered his evidence to the investigating magistrate by hand. He was forced to wait for almost an hour to see her because she was in court. ‘There’s this,’ he said when finally she received him and she took it from him and read it with difficulty, being unfamiliar with both the English handwriting and the language.
‘What is this word?’ she asked, pointing.
‘Disingenuous.’
She tried it in Italian – disingenuo – and seemed to find sense in it. She read on down as far as the final, ironical salutation. ‘And it is certain that this is from the Englishwoman? This is her handwriting?’
‘I can vouch for the fact that it is not mine. You’d better ask an expert to say whether it is hers.’
‘This must be deposited as evidence. It must be examined. We must obtain attested examples of her writing.’
‘It means that she killed herself,’ Leo said.
The magistrate smiled on him as though he was being naïve. ‘It means there is further evidence in the case. What the evidence means is another matter altogether.’
* * *
In the dead time of the afternoon he went out to the nearest newspaper stall. The English newspapers were just in. He tucked them under his arm and returned home, where he sat at the table in front of the photo of Madeleine and rifled through the pages until he found it, down at the bottom of an inner page, a different photograph of her looking quizzically out of the past, questioning him from beyond the grave, beneath a headline that said:
SCROLL SCHOLAR PRIEST AND DIPLOMAT IN LOVE TRIANGLE
It was like one of those children’s games, a tongue-twister. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper. Scroll scholar priest. The authorities were still making enquiries. There was no evidence to say whether it was an accident, or suicide, or worse. The article was carefully evasive. Body fluids were under forensic examination. And the article used that phrase beloved of English journalists but used nowhere else in the entire Byzantine edifice of the language: Foul play has not been ruled out, it said.
Later that day there were reporters camped outside the Palazzo Casadei, a small clutch of them with tape recorders and cameras. The next morning the story really broke, a synergy of stories, the sexual and the theological conspiring to make front-page news in the British papers: self-righteous outrage amongst the tabloids implying that they were guardians of the true faith no less than the Holy Father himself; a thoughtful leader in the Times that betrayed sophistry and priggishness in equal measure; sober, salacious details in the Daily Telegraph along with a photograph, snatched from some family album, of a smiling, faintly freckled face which had not the slightest hint of the wanton about it. SCROLL EXPERT COVETS HIS NEIGHBOUR’S WIFE, ran the headline. Below it came the photograph of Leo, captured as he stepped out of the gates of the ministry, appearing to glare suspiciously at the camera when in fact he had merely been surprised by the flash.
The Italian papers carried it in the sections devoted to cronache, the chronicles, the stories that are not the serious matter of politics but the prurient business of sex and violence and corruption. Cronache di Roma, one of them had: Chronicles of Rome. It might have been from the classical corpus, something written by Tacitus.
The next day Leo had a brief, acerbic conversation with the rector of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, a conversation in which self-righteousness trampled on the heels of outrage. ‘You will have to go before the Congregation for the Clergy,’ the rector said. ‘You face excommunication and disgrace. You will have to make peace with your conscience.’ But Leo Newman had other matters with which to make peace: his loneliness, for one. The void within him. The sensation of dispersion, that he was mere scattered atoms amongst the awful chaos of the city and the world. That evening he stood on the terrace and watched the sun set behind the dome of Saint Peter’s. It no longer shone right through the lantern. The earth had shifted and the sun now went down fractionally to the right.
And Madeleine was dead.
A Funeral
A funeral. A quiet, private affair tucked away in the narrow streets behind Piazza Navona. Weeping openly is for the Italians. The protagonists here weep silently. They sit in the pews before the draped catafalque as if in a courtroom, waiting for the words of the priest with all the composure of people waiting for sentence to be pronounced. They will not contest the sentence. They will not appeal to any higher court. They are under authority and they understand these matters.
During the service Frau Huber faints. The heat, the oppressive presence of the mourners, the clouds of incense like the smoke from a funeral pyre have all contributed. Fainting is, perhaps, a forgivable lapse although, again perhaps, it is also a sign betraying her imperfect breeding, the alien genes that lie behind her apparently perfect Aryan features. She faints and falls against her husband, who does not let her down but holds her upright for the chant of miserere mei, Deus, his left arm holding the missal, his right arm round her shoulder and his hand hitched under her damp armpit to prevent her slumping on to the pew:
Have mercy on me, O God,
According to Thy great mercy.
And according to the multitude of Thy tender mercies,
Blot out mine iniquity
He will not let her sit. She must stand. It is a kind of expiation.
Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea, chant the choir: Wash me yet more from mine iniquity; And cleanse me from my sin.
And the Hubers, husband and wife, stand there in the face of the psalm like a couple facing a blizzard, the one with his face clenched tight against the storm, the other pale and staring, as though battered by the gale and almost beyond caring. She looks dramatic in black, a mourner for all times and all seasons, her hair like gilt decoration on the canopy of a hearse.
After the funeral there is the interment, across the city in the great cemetery of Campo Verano beyond the railway sidings, beside the Basilica of San Lorenzo, outside the Walls where all Rome’s dead lie among the umbrella pines and cypresses. It is a place of marble and travertine, a place of dried flowers and dying flowers, a place of memory and regret, of guilt and remorse. It is a place that has been much in use of late: as the cortège draws up outside the front of the portico of the basilica there are already two funeral processions there, impoverished ones with horse-drawn hearses and wailing women. The shining motor cars pause in the heat of the square and wait for the way to be cleared, and then it is their turn at the gates of
heaven or hell, their turn to drive in through the portals and process at walking pace down the main street of the city of the dead to where, amidst marble and porphyry, a grave lies open. Bearers – soldiers from a pioneer unit drafted in for the occasion – shuffle the coffin out of the rear doors. Leo’s cap, the cap of the Jungvolk, is arranged carefully on the top of the coffin. The soldiers lift the coffin on to their shoulders and carry it towards the open grave.
The burial ceremony is a brief, almost cursory affair. Clouds of incense drift around the grave like smoke from a bomb crater. There is a sprinkling of holy water and a scattering of earth, a dull drumbeat on the wooden coffin; and then the deed is done, the child has been consigned to eternity, with hopes of fellowship with the choirs of angels.
The mourners walk away from the scene uncertainly, as though unsure whether it is all over: first the Hubers, then the von Klenzes in anxious attendance, and then Jutte and Josef and some others from the Villa. Francesco Volterra hovers nervously at the back. As the funeral party breaks up he goes up to the parents and solemnly, with a small, brisk bow, shakes hands with Herr Huber; then he raises Frau Huber’s gloved hand to within a half inch of his lips, inclines his head for a moment and clicks his heels.
‘Sono desolato,’ he says.
The Hubers’ expressions are impassive in the face of his distress.
Guilt. Grief and guilt. A powerful combination. Guilt like a liquid, a thin liquor, seeping everywhere, informing everything, saturating the whole – corrosive, like sea water, scented with the rich stench of ordure and corruption, and carrying with it hard, abrasive shards of grief.
‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’ She makes a full confession, baroque in its fullness: a minute description, a count of the times, an explication of the things done, the actions performed, the minor brutalities, the major betrayals.
‘I cannot pretend that what you tell me is not very grave,’ says the shadow beyond the grille.
‘Yes, Father.’
‘It will take time to atone, time and discipline. You must never see this man again. You understand that?’
‘Of course, Father.’
She meets him on neutral ground, one of the cafés on the Via Veneto that has remained open despite everything, a place that attempts a poor imitation of a Parisian café with tables out on the pavement underneath a glazed shelter like a conservatory. She watches his approach warily, as though expecting him to snatch her handbag or make a pass at her, but when he is finally standing in front of her and raising his hat – a rather absurd straw boater – she barely looks at him, merely makes the shape of a smile, crosses her legs carefully away from him, and gestures to him to sit.
The waiter comes with a cappuccino made of ersatz coffee and powdered milk. When the man has gone Francesco asks, ‘How are you feeling?’
She looks up the slope of the street towards the red brick of the wall that forms a barrier across it at the top of the hill, a stretch of the Aurelian wall that once encircled the whole of the classical city. How is she feeling? How ought one to feel? She feels dispersed, scattered. ‘I am going away,’ she says, almost as though talking to someone else. ‘There is nothing for me here any longer. I am going back home.’
He laughs. ‘Home,’ he repeats. ‘The Russians will be there before long. And then you’ll see.’
‘Do you suppose I care about that?’
‘Come away with me. Your country is finished, my country is finished, and your marriage is dead. We can go to Switzerland. I know someone who can get us both a visa. Someone at the Swiss embassy.’
She shakes her head. ‘I cannot go with you, Francesco,’ she says quietly. ‘I cannot be with you. It would be wrong.’
‘Wrong?’ He raises his voice. She hushes him, glancing round to see if people are listening. But there are just some army officers two tables away, four officers with a couple of Italian girls. The girls are laughing at something that has been suggested to them. Elsewhere a woman in a wide, feathered hat, the principessa Casadei, delivers a lecture to a wizened man who is her father, the Prince, a Knight of the Order of Saint John, a member of the papal noble guard. ‘Wrong?’ Francesco repeats. ‘We did nothing wrong. We were in love, are in love—’
‘Shh!’
The Princess Casadei looks across to them and inclines her head towards Gretchen. Her expression is one of polite enquiry. How is Frau Huber after her great personal tragedy?
‘We are in love and so we did nothing wrong.’
‘For God’s sake keep your voice down. And if it is so, that we did nothing wrong, then why did Leo die?’
It’s a good question under any circumstances: why did Leo die? The German officers are laughing loudly; the principessa Casadei is talking in subdued tones to her father; an army staff car is cruising slowly down the street with men inside looking for women – even at ten-thirty in the morning they are looking for women – and Gretchen is asking why Leo died. It is a question that never ceased to exercise her mind, but which never received a satisfactory answer. ‘Because of an act of war,’ is Francesco’s reply. ‘That is all. Unless you pretend that God works through the hands of an American pilot, then it was no more than that – chance, fate, whatever you want to call it.’
‘It is a punishment.’
‘A fairly odd way of punishing one person, to kill someone else. What kind of God is that? Hardly the God of loving kindness.’
‘You are a Jew. What can you know of God?’
‘I thought we invented him.’
She chooses her words deliberately, as one chooses a weapon that will do the most damage: ‘You may have invented God,’ she says, ‘but you also murdered him.’
There is silence. There is a sensation of the irrevocable about those words. She cannot unsay them. Just a moment’s vibration in the air, but that is enough. They have been said.
Francesco gets slowly to his feet. Surprisingly there is an air of dignity about him. He gets to his feet and leans forward and places something on the table. The object, a key, gleams in the sunlight like a piece of bright, tawdry costume jewellery. It has a small tag attached to it. ‘The key to the apartment in Geneva, lent to me by the friend you do not believe in. That is where we would have gone.’ He straightens up and stands over her, for a moment proud and rather impressive. ‘Maybe we will meet there one day, who knows?’
And then he turns and walks away. Gretchen waits for a moment. She picks up the key and looks at it, as though wondering how it came to be there. Rue des Granges, it says on the tag. And a number. She slips the key into her handbag, gets up from the table and crosses to the table of the Casadei father and daughter. The prince rises and kisses Gretchen’s hand. ‘My dear,’ the principessa says comfortingly, ‘how good to see you in public so soon. I can never abide these long periods of mourning which we Italians indulge in.’
‘Hansi,’ she whispers.
He says nothing. There is light coming in through the shutters, the faint monochrome of the moon. He lies on his back in the shadows, a large still figure whose grief has no expiation.
‘Hansi?’
There is no answer, but nevertheless she speaks: ‘Francesco Volterra is a Jew,’ she says.
He speaks upwards towards the ceiling, his silhouette unmoving. ‘Now how can you possibly know that?’ He laughs faintly and without humour. ‘No, don’t bother to answer. You will only lie.’
‘I won’t lie to you, Hansi,’ she whispers. ‘Ever again.’
‘Perhaps even that is a lie.’
‘No lie,’ she says. She reaches beneath the sheet and takes his hand, and moves it to her belly, to the rough hairs, to the warm folds.
‘Then you must do one thing more,’ he says. ‘To purge your lies.’
‘One thing?’ She moves herself against his fingers. ‘What thing?’
‘You must take me to him.’
The two black cars gleam like a pair of patent leather shoes, court shoes with silver buckles. They pace slowly dow
n the narrow street and come to a halt outside one of the anonymous apartment blocks. Five men and one woman get out. The woman leads the way, in through the entrance archway as far as the portiere’s glassed-in booth.
She turns away from the lift and instead she takes the steep steps that wind upwards, turning at each floor where there is a landing and a small window like a porthole, up towards the roof of the building. The men follow her, pausing uncertainly when she reaches the topmost landing. It is hot, almost stifling up here under the rafters. There are dust motes in the air. One of the men – his face glistens with sweat – slips past her and stands against the wall beyond the door. The others wait down the stairs, just below the level of the floor.
She knocks, a piece of practised syncopation: four raps on the wood, three in rapid succession and the last after a breathless pause.
After a while the door opens a fraction, like legs reluctantly yielding to an insistent pressure. ‘Gretchen,’ he says quietly. He is there in the doorway, standing on the threshold, his face moving swiftly through a whole complex of expressions, from surprise to delight to something like dismay as she steps towards him and says the name ‘Checco’ and reaches up to kiss him on the cheek.
‘Gretchen,’ he repeats. His hands are poised in mid-air perhaps to grasp her shoulders, perhaps to keep her at bay. But just as quickly as she stepped forward she has stepped back, stumbled back, turned for the stairs while men push past her.
Behind her there is a cry, slammed shut by the door. She walks carefully back down the stairs to the ground floor. Her face is set in marble, not beautiful, not classical. Her husband is waiting for her on the pavement.
Gretchen at the spinning-wheel, spinning the web of fate. Gretchen at the keyboard, playing soft and sullen, the plangent chords of the Beethoven C minor piano sonata opus 111, which has no name but might be called the Innominate, expressing as it does nameless things – the anguish of mere existence. Gretchen weeps. She weeps for Leo and she weeps for Francesco, the one dead, the other damned, and the music wanders between the solemn and the reflective and the angry – a meandering, pensive threnody, a celebration of life and an elegy of death. She doesn’t play accurately. Sometimes she loses her way in the serpentine complexities of the adagio with its absurd tempo marking molto semplice e cantabile, very simple and singable; but the mistakes do no more than bring a faint smile to her lips as she pauses and returns and gathers up the fragile pieces and fits them together like someone repairing a piece of fractured porcelain. The notes swell out of the great Bechstein, out through the long windows and across the Italian garden, at times like a dirge, at times like a cry of something approaching joy, but at the end nothing more than a fading into silence.
