by Simon Mawer
The entrance hall is ill-lit and poorly ventilated. A smell of disinfectant pervades the stairwell, and beneath that something organic: the faint and putrefying scent of drains perhaps. In the first room there is a ledger to fill in with name and rank and time of entry, and then an escort to show the way upstairs. Little deference is shown to Herr Huber and his wife. They have left the world of embassy and diplomacy and tact and crossed the threshold into another realm where all is different: relationships are different, rank is different, manners are different, logic itself is different. This is a realm that stretches unbroken from border territories such as this, right across Europe to the heartland of the East where the names of Treblinka and Sobibor and Belzec are whispered. Outside the limits of Via Tasso it is a hot Roman day, pregnant with the past and with fear of the future; within the limits of this tawdry apartment block Herr Huber and his wife are in one of the antechambers of hell.
Frau Huber’s high heels clip briskly on the marble stairs behind her husband’s heavy tread. They pause on the landing outside a closed door while the escort knocks and whispers to the guard inside. The door opens. Beyond lies a hallway, a narrow, darkened domestic hallway with five doors giving on to it. The smell is stronger here – the pestilential smell of sepsis – and Frau Huber pulls a handkerchief from the pocket of her jacket and holds it to her face. Before they enter the apartment her husband bends towards her and says softly, ‘You will do nothing, you will say nothing.’ Above the lace edge of her handkerchief her eyes stare back like the terrified eyes of a rabbit. She nods her head. The pair of them step over the threshold.
The door on the left of the hallway is painted dark green. It is marked with nameless stains and inscribed with the plain number 5. In the centre of the door, at about five feet from the floor, there is a disk of thin metal. The guard flips this aside and uncovers a hole in the wood. He puts his eye to the hole for a moment and then stands aside and indicates to the visitors that everything is ready.
Huber is the only one who smiles. He cannot help smiling. It is smiling that has got him where he is; but this is a thin, nervous smile as he points his wife to the door. ‘Don’t breathe a word,’ he says in her ear as she presses her eye to the spy-hole.
She can see part of a tiled room, illuminated by a bare bulb set in the ceiling. The tiles are pale blue. There is a sink opposite the door and a zinc bucket beneath the sink. There is no other fitting in the room. Where there might once have been a window above the sink there is now a rectangle of bare brickwork. Her single eye allows no depth to the view, but the angles between floor and wall create perspective lines that converge into the vanishing point of the far corner. At this focus a man crouches, speared by the lines of perspective, crucified by the angles. The figure wears pyjama trousers and a collarless striped shirt. The front of his shirt is stained rust-brown. His feet are bare. The face – slick with sweat, grey with two days’ growth of beard – is a slack, lifeless caricature of the face of Francesco Volterra. He has his hands in the front of his trousers and he is massaging himself gently, like a child comforting himself with a favourite shawl.
Without raising his head, without moving anything but his eyes, without ceasing the rhythmic massage, Francesco looks up at the door.
Has he sensed their presence? What does he see? The blank back of the door. A single, blue, anonymous eye framed by the peep-hole, an eye as vacant and without expression as the lens of a camera. And then the eye has gone and there is the small and secret sound of the disk falling back into place. Nothing more. No sound. No hope.
On the landing outside, Gretchen is being violently sick into a corner. Her husband stands beside her, holding her narrow waist and turning his head away in disgust. A cleaner stumps up the stairs carrying a zinc bucket and a mop. But there isn’t much to clear up for she hasn’t eaten for days.
On their return to the car Herr Huber orders the driver to return to the Villa, but Gretchen shakes her head. She wants to go to the church, the Church of Santa Maria dell’ Anima. She wishes to go there to pray. Her husband accedes to her request, directing the driver through the centre of the old city, amongst the bicycles and the pedestrians, amidst the people scratching an existence from the relics of grandiose days – the days of Bernini and Borromini, of rebirth and counter-reformation when these people had a genius that Herr Huber really cannot understand. ‘Monkeys in the ruins,’ he says of the Italians as the car eases its way into Piazza Navona where the great fountain is dry and sandbagged. A policeman waves them on. The car noses its way through the square, like a barge nosing through the flotsam of a harbour. ‘Monkeys in the ruins,’ he repeats, acknowledging the policeman’s salute with a regal wave of the hand.
The car halts outside the church entrance, which lies in a narrow street, the ironically named Vicolo della Pace, behind the buildings of the great square. ‘I’ll wait here,’ Huber says. His wife passes through the entrance, through the tiny courtyard beyond where one of the Franciscan fathers is watering the plants, through into the shadows of the church where incense lies on the air like a promise of things ancient and ineffable.
There are a few figures kneeling in the stalls, young men in uniform mainly. There are heads blond and heads brown, uniforms black and grey, all bowed before the ornate baroque of the high altar, each one praying, no doubt, more or less the same thing: God, let me survive. But given the normal run of things, the pure, incontrovertible nature of statistics, some of them are bound to be disappointed.
Frau Huber edges into a pew right at the back. She kneels and, like the figure in front of her, she begins to pray – but unlike them she is praying for something that she will never grant herself for as long as she lives, even if her God does. She is praying for forgiveness.
17
People padded round, murmuring to each other like undertakers at a funeral. They prepared the body as for burial. They dressed it and anointed it with balm and wrapped it in shrouds. They inserted tubes and dripped in fluids. The scent of frankincense and myrrh filled the chamber.
He thirsted. He thought of Madeleine. He drifted to and fro on the shifting surface of consciousness and he thought of Madeleine. ‘Will I die?’ he wondered.
They drugged him. Morphine is the analgesic of choice. Morphine, from Morpheus, the god of dreams, who was the son of Sleep. And so he dreamt. Guilt, like a substance, pervaded his dreams. He dreamt of his mother talking to him, his mother incontinent and senile speaking to Leo, the living Leo and the dead Leo, the loathed and the loved. She spoke to Leo and she spoke about Leo, her mind meandering through the tortured landscape of senility, the distant landscape of her childhood in Buchlowitz. ‘We are all punished for what we do in our lives,’ she assured him. ‘I am punished, you are punished. We are all punished.’ And sometimes his mother and Madeleine were one, and he dreamt them naked, touched the cool and lucid skin of their belly with its rough scrub of hair. They enveloped him and they gave birth to him: the acts were the same.
‘You look terrible.’ Goldstaub bringing comfort. He was wearing a gown and a surgical mask, his beard showing ragged round the edges. ‘How do you feel?’
Leo peered through swollen lids and mumbled through swollen, blistered lips. ‘What happened?’
‘You tell me.’ Goldstaub gestured at his dressings. ‘Does it hurt?’
A grimace that may have been some kind of smile. ‘The superficial burns hurt, that’s what they tell me. The parts that don’t matter hurt. It’s the places where it doesn’t hurt that the real damage is done.’
‘Sounds like life.’
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘Don’t you remember?’
‘Nothing. I remember nothing. I remember breakfast. That’s it. And then fragments. Noise. Fear.’
‘Fire?’
‘Fear,’ he repeated, his lips fumbling with the sound. ‘Fear.’
They hustled the visitor away, with warnings about tiredness and shock, with assurances that he could come again later
. They left Leo to dream and he dreamt of flames and he dreamt of Madeleine. He plunged through the air and into the fire, and Madeleine was with him. ‘I’ll come to hate you, Leo,’ she told him as they fell. He plunged through the fire and into her flesh, so that she enveloped him with her burning. This, he understood, was purgatory, the purging of the soul in flame, the cleansing of the spirit, the ejaculation of guilt into the fire. They burned together, Madeleine and Leo, and they lived together in the burning, and she hated him.
Later there were David and Ellen, with stark, concerned faces. David talked while Ellen merely sat and folded her hands in her lap and watched him. Dimly Leo understood that she was praying, praying for his recovery, praying for his salvation. The idea brought a painful contortion to his lips and an agonising convulsion of his chest.
‘Are you in pain?’ David asked.
Leo shook his head. What must have looked like a grimace, like a fit of some kind, was laughter.
Later there was a man from the police department, speaking a kind of transatlantic English and frowning as he wrote things down. ‘Was there anything unusual that morning?’ he asked. ‘Did you notice anything out of the ordinary, any strangers around, anything at all?’
‘Why were you there so early?’
‘Do you possess a clock?’
‘Can you describe your movements in the previous twenty-four hours?’
‘Have you ever met anyone from outside the Bible Center, anyone at all?’
‘Did anyone give you anything to carry? Anything at all? A package, a gift maybe?’
‘Have you visited anyone’s house during your time here?’
‘Tell me.’
‘Tell me.’
Later there was a priest. They warned Leo of the priest’s presence as though the man might do some kind of harm. ‘Only if you wish to see him,’ they assured him.
‘Of course. Let him come.’
The priest entered the chamber with the solemn, processional step of a funeral mute: the Frenchman Guy Hautcombe, his hands clasped before him as though ready for some kind of self-defence, the defence of prayer. He sat by Leo’s bed and rested a benevolent and benedictory hand on his shoulder, then withdrew it sharply when Leo winced. ‘Do you feel pain?’ he asked, as though there was a possibility that Leo didn’t.
Goldstaub returned with copies of a newspaper. There were photographs showing the blackened, toothless gums of the windows of the manuscript rooms. There were charred lumps, and glistening puddles. ‘They put the damage at a couple of hundred thousand,’ he said.
‘What do they say?’
He held up the page for Leo to see. Person or persons unknown, was the phrase. ‘Why were you there so early?’ he asked. ‘What were you doing so early?’
Leo didn’t know. He knew only the noise and the light, the light of the sun, the light of the fingers of flame reaching out to touch him, Madeleine’s fingers touching his frigid flesh, fingers that scalded.
‘They say there was gasoline,’ said Goldstaub. ‘That’s what the forensic guys are suggesting. Gasoline and mineral oil. And maybe some kind of timing device.’ He folded the newspaper differently and held up another picture: a close-up of the cogs and wheels of a clock, blackened and charred. Carpe diem. The alarm clock shrilled in Leo’s ear and he awoke and Goldstaub was gone and there was his mother beside him, his mother’s arms around him, his mother’s flesh enveloping him, his mother’s flesh that became Madeleine’s, her slick suave flesh engulfing his, engulfing him so that he drowned in it, struggled for life in it, swam out of the flames and lay there on the shore beside her.
Someone else from the police department, a woman this time, a woman with black hair and dark eyes and the sympathetic smile of a nurse. But the same questions, exactly the same questions. ‘Did you meet anyone from outside the Bible Center?’
‘Why were you there so early?’
‘What was the normal time that you began work?’
‘Was there anything unusual?’
‘Tell me. Take your time. Tell me.’
Later doctors talked to him in low tones of graft and granulation, of eschar and necrosis, of antisepsis and debridement. He liked the word debridement. He enjoyed its bitter and astringent irony. They injected him with anaesthetic and masked figures bent over his wounds and cut away dead tissue, and he saw Madeleine plunging into a lake of flame, Madeleine who became his mother: not his mother as he remembered her but his mother as a young woman, as naked as a blade.
People came and went: nurses, doctors, one of Hautcombe’s minions, someone languid and thoughtful from the British embassy who reminded him of Jack, who knew Jack, of course, knew Madeleine, knew the whole damned story. ‘Terrible business,’ he said. And Calder. Calder wandered round the room, gazed out of the window and talked to the blue sky and the clouds. ‘What happened?’ he asked.
Leo didn’t answer him.
‘They tell me you can’t remember.’
‘No.’
‘They think it might have been those protesters. The Children of God or whatever they’re called. They might have planted some kind of device. They’ve gone, of course, disappeared.’
‘You think that? You think it was them?’
Calder shook his head of silver hair. A vision against the window, a person with an aureole of light around his body. ‘I don’t know.’ He turned away from the window and looked at Leo. He didn’t like the look of the patient, you could see that by his expression. Leo understood. He knew what he was like because he had asked one of the nurses to bring a mirror. She hadn’t wanted to and he had demanded that she do what he say, and she had said that it was orders, and then she had disobeyed the orders and brought the mirror for him to look. He was like a leper, with running sores. He was like one of the creatures whom Christ had cured. His flesh was swollen black and mauve and crimson. His hair was a charred stubble, growing in patches like weeds in a parched field, the Potter’s Field perhaps.
‘What do you think?’ Calder asked as he watched Leo, and his eyes were narrowed, as though by that means he might descry the truth.
‘I don’t know what I think.’
Calder shook his head. ‘The sprinklers didn’t work. Can you believe that? The alarms went off but the sprinklers didn’t work.’
‘I remember the alarms. The noise. I dream the noise.’ Leo smiled painfully at him, turning his head slightly to see Calder better, willing him to believe. Calder was watching expectantly, as though waiting for Leo to discover more down there in the depths of his subconscious. But he wouldn’t discover anything, he knew that. ‘I dream a lot, you know: souls in purgatory.’
Calder’s tone was impatient. ‘A Catholic fiction. I thought you agreed with that.’
‘Didn’t anything survive?’
‘You survived. Just. And a copy of most of your transcription, did you know that? Not the last part. I’d copied it on to my own laptop, you see. And there are some photos. Not many, but they’re not bad. We can publish, of course. We will publish it. But what will it mean without the material evidence …?’
He left after a while. He gave the impression of having left things unsaid, accusations unuttered, suspicions unvoiced.
Resurrection is not an instant thing. It takes time and pain. It proceeds by small steps and it is measured in millimetres, the millimetres of epithelium and epidermis and dermis. And when pain dies away it is replaced by itching, the ant-crawl of pruritus, the exquisite torture of formication, the sensation of invisible fingers touching, stroking, caressing, perhaps as Madeleine had once touched him, touched the surface of him and through the surface, the very quick of him. Dreams awoke the itch of his love for her. She stood beside the tomb that he had left empty.
Later, days later, they flayed him alive and lifted layers of his skin like parchment from his thigh and laid them on his chest and neck like the priest spreading the corporal on the altar. Later still they buried him beneath anaesthetic, and surgeons worked away with minute instru
ments to reconstruct the tendons of his hands, to give the claws something to move them. Percentages were noised abroad, the percentages of burn, the percentages of probability, the percentages of success. There was more flaying, more grafting. It was like a snake sloughing off its skin, shuffling its way out of its old integument, shouldering its way out into a new life where it would no longer have to crawl on its belly and be bruised, but could walk up and down a sterile corridor or sit in a chair and look out of the window at meagre pine trees and a distant view of hills. A life delimited by meals and books, peopled by hushed doctors and nurses and rare visitors, punctuated by the agonies of compression gloves and the small and intimate flexure of the fingers with a physiotherapist watching and advising. The physiotherapist reminded him of Madeleine. Something about the way she smiled, the way she inclined her head. Sometimes he fancied that Madeleine herself might suddenly step forward out of the physiotherapist’s body, slough off her superficial physiotherapist’s skin and stand there before him with that faint and ironical smile.
But the metamorphosis never happened, the transfiguration never took place, the physiotherapist remained immutably herself.
He was summoned to the official inquiry. The doctors didn’t want him to be moved. ‘Grafts need time to take,’ they said. But eventually they assented. It was like a day release from prison, the shuffled walk out to a waiting car, the drive through a world that seemed bright and surprising and strangely unfamiliar. Outside the court a clutch of photographers waited. In the courtroom they sat him in a black leather chair and they asked him the same questions that the police officials had asked. More or less he gave the same answers.
The story made the headlines in the local press and merited a few inches of column space in the international newspapers: BURN VICTIM TALKS OF SCROLL FIRE, a headline said. Back in the clinic a psychologist came to talk to him, an expert in post-trauma therapy or some such. He wore bright and hopeful colours and talked of grieving, grieving for parts of your own body just as you might grieve for the dead. ‘What do you dream?’ he asked, crossing his legs and leaning forward to examine the patient, steepling his fingers, fingering his notebook, wishing he could finger the patient’s mind.
