by Sam Leith
His eyes look at her, as if from far away. Isla feels creepily, sorrowfully, a sense of how broken his mind is. She knows, then, that she can’t stay. She shouldn’t have come.
‘Just here -’ He fishes, again, at his imaginary wall in the air. His lips are moving into a sad smile, and his eyes are wet. ‘So near. Imagine if you could pass through these walls. Imagine something that would make everything exist at once. Imagine if at every little point you weren’t seeing universes splitting off, but universes coming together. You will see the maze entire – it will be not a maze but a pattern, you see? Like on wallpaper. A decoration, not a prison.’
Isla’s cheeks feel stiff. She smiles at him, arranging her face somewhere between quizzical and accepting.
‘Everything that is lost is present,’ he says. ‘See? If you can just reach through, with your mind, through the wall, into the place where something never happens, or doesn’t happen yet… Everything that has gone is here. Anything can happen because everything will happen. Everything true, everything existing, everything here, now, always…’
He looks at her almost imploringly. ‘Nobody dies. Nobody goes away. Nothing is ever lost.’
The following day, Isla tells him that she has to leave. Banacharski looks momentarily stricken. Then he shrugs.
It is a bright morning, chillier than the previous one.
‘Walk with me,’ he says. They set off up the hill behind the house. At first Banacharski says nothing; then, to her surprise, he links arms with her. The slight tang of him on the air makes her not revolted, but a little sad.
‘I have enemies, Isla,’ he says. ‘You know, when you first came here, you wanted to know why I left the Sorbonne? That was one of the reasons I had to go. I had the real fear that they would kill me. No joke. They would kill me before my work was finished.’
‘But, Nicolas – why would anyone have wanted to kill you? Your work was abstract. You were a mathematician, an academic. You’re just being -’ she dared it; after a week, she dared it – ‘paranoid.’
‘No!’ he snaps. ‘That is how they try to discredit me. How they try to make me lower my guard. Paranoid! Tchoh! Even then, I knew my work would have – implications. I let something slip in a lecture, and one of their agents – Oh, believe me, Isla Holderness. They have agents everywhere. Everything is connected to everything else, and in this spiderweb there are good spiders and there are bad spiders.’
He has lost his thread.
‘You said something in a lecture.’
‘Yes, yes. Somebody wrote to me. Frederick Nieman, he called himself. Some kind of joke, I think: Niemand. “Fred Nobody.” That was how I was to know him. He said he was interested in my researches into causality. I was not working on causality, then. Not openly. I was still a geometer. But at the time I had started to think about these things: about geometries that were not strictly mathematical: geometries of desire and intention. Nieman had happened on my work by chance, he said. He understood some of the implications. He foresaw a great future for me, he said. And he would pay.’
Banacharski huffs, a little, as they reach the top of the hill. She feels him leaning more heavily on her arm.
‘They wanted what I was doing, for them and them alone, but they did not understand what I was doing. They thought I could make them a weapon: something that would change outcomes. Make magic bullets. If you sell weapons, you know, everything looks like a weapon.
‘I knew, of course – he did not even need to say it – that if I did not do what they wanted they would kill me. I was afraid. I told him that I would share my work with them. This was a company that had done great wrong. It worked, during the war, with the Nazi government. Many, many people were killed with their weapons. But I was scared.’ He looks ashamed, but at the same time a little defiant. ‘I told them I could build them a probability bomb. For that, I told them, they needed to pay, and I would need isolation.
‘So they paid me, helped me disappear. I disappeared – this was the big joke – after I resigned in protest at the discovery that their money was funding my chair at the Institute. They liked that. Double bluff.’
Something in Banacharski’s face changes, like when a shift in the angle of the light turns a transparent surface opaque. ‘I became my own ghost,’ he says.
‘The statement you gave, though,’ says Isla, ‘about the systematic corruption of science by the military?’
‘Yes,’ says Banacharski. ‘They let me attack them because they thought it would help. I was telling the truth. Triple bluff. There is no bomb. There never was. I am engineering reality – not assembling some toy out of nuts and bolts.’
They walk on a bit. Isla watches a small brown bird prick and preen in the grass, the beak and head moving sharply.
‘But Nieman,’ he says, as if more to himself than Isla, ‘I think Nieman is coming back.’
‘Back? He’s been here?’ Isla asks.
‘No,’ says Banacharski. ‘We haven’t met. Only letters. He writes to me on yellow paper. Always yellow paper. Like the paper I use. I am afraid about meeting him. But I think he is coming for me anyway.’
‘What did you do with their money?’ Banacharski looks at her sharply. She worries, for an instant, she went too far. She sees something of cunning in his expression – a decision to say something almost taken, then a decision not to.
‘You must concentrate, Isla. I stalled them. My work is nearly finished. But they may come for me. They have been losing patience. You know, you need to take care for yourself…’
He is now looking down at his wrecked flip-flops.
‘There is something I would like you to have of mine, Isla. A gift. You have been someone who has shown me kindness.’
Banacharski reaches into the pocket of his filthy trousers and produces something. Isla sees it glint, and then she startles at the pressure as he presses it into her palm. As he does so he looks furtively about him, into the distant trees, the empty ground between.
He withdraws his hand and she looks into her own. It is a ring, right where her lifelines cross – a simple silver thing, with a figure-of-eight design sweeping over the top of it.
‘It was my mother’s,’ says Banacharski. ‘I have nobody. Now I give it to you.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I have nobody. You take it. That ring will be – how should I say it? – a lucky charm for you.’
He gives her a strong, fond look. ‘Borrow it, then. Think of it as a loan. Come back at the end of the summer. Bring it back to me. God keep you safe.’
Isla sets off for home the following day, walking down into the local town, from where she arranges a taxi – it takes her half a day – to get back to Toulouse. That is the last time she sees Banacharski alive.
As Hands described to Red Queen, they continued to exchange letters. But Banacharski’s letters had become wilder. Isla, back in Cambridge, felt uneasy – as if there was someone shadowing her. When she went out every morning to get the newspapers, she found herself casting suspicious glances down the aisles at the Co-op. There’d always be someone holding up a pot of yogurt or a tin of sweetcorn, fondling it abstractly, reading the label with studious distraction.
She thought for a time that she might be going mad – that Nicolas’s paranoia was rubbing off on her. The magazine continued to forward his letters. Sometimes, the way they were folded in the envelope, a certain looseness about the glue, made her feel like they might have been tampered with. She took to hiding them.
At the same time, other letters started to come – more personal ones, addressed directly to her. The handwriting on the envelopes of these was different – more restrained – though the writing inside was the same.
In the last of these, he wrote: ‘Don’t worry. You have my love. I am nearing the centre of the artichoke. Do not trust. Destroy.’
Something, she thought, had started to confuse him. The letters were in the same handwriting, but they seemed to be from two different people. The le
tters that came through the magazine raved about this ‘machine’, which he said was ‘nearly built’. She puzzled over that.
In these letters, he promised her that ‘when the time was right’, he would share his discoveries with her: she was, he said – and here it was triple underlined – ‘the custodian of his legacy’. But he said the time was not yet right. He said he was ‘storing some parts of the machine’ in a place known only to him.
The other letters, the ones that she told nobody about, were love letters, of a sort. That is, they did not profess love directly. But they were personal. They were trying to make a connection. And they talked at length – great length – about his childhood, and what he remembered about the war. Much was about his mother, Ana, the presumed owner of the ring he had entrusted to her. She had lived through the war but cancer got her while Banacharski was in his teens. He talked about his first memory of her, rocking in a chair with him, sitting in her lap wrapped in a woollen blanket. That was at his grandparents’ house in Allenstein, what is now Olsztyn in northern Poland. He said he remembered how the blanket had tasted: of dust and pine.
Banacharski enclosed, in these letters, pages from a manuscript he said was ‘my mother’s testament’. It seemed to be a memoir of some sort, but it was told in the third person, annotated in pencil by Nicolas, and quoted from in his letters. Between the two narratives – and what of the history of his life remained on the public record – Isla was able to piece together the sequence of events.
One fragment described Ana Banacharski’s courtship with Nicolas’s father, Sergei Mitrov, in Berlin in the late 1920s. Mitrov was a Russian anarchist who had fetched up there after fleeing the Bolsheviks. She had moved to the city as a student, and they met after she attended a meeting in the radical bookshop where he was staying. She had fallen pregnant, and they moved through Europe together living, unmarried, as a family.
Then came the Spanish Civil War. Mitrov joined the International Brigades, and Ana moved back to her parents’ in East Prussia. Nicolas would then have been seven. Three years later, when Germany annexed Poland, and the persecution of Allenstein’s Polish-speaking minority began, Ana fled with Nicolas to France. Ana’s story described the old man, her father, waving from the door of the town house – his moustache, his mild smile and the turn-ups on his trousers. It was the last time she saw him.
Mother and son spent the war years in a series of refugee camps. ‘Her Nicolas, her little Buddha, her watchful child,’ her narrator wrote. ‘Ana knew she would have to leave him.’
Nicolas’s own narrative picked up here. He talked about his memories, the watchful child reporting. At some point they had been reunited with Mitrov. He remembered his mother, terribly distressed, in the camp outside Paris. He had worked out afterwards, only from his mother’s memoir, that he had had a sister who was stillborn at about that time.
But in 1942 Mitrov was separated from Ana and his son by what Banacharski called ‘a malign chance’. His letters stopped coming. He did not survive the war. Nicolas wrote, curiously, that he had no memories of his father at all.
These communications resembled love letters not in anything explicit, so much as in their intimacy of address, their notes of tenderness, the parallels they drew between past and present. There had been a girl he had known in the refugee community at Chambon-sur-Lignon, he said, called Kara. Isla reminded him of her. She had resembled Isla, he said, though he did not say in what way. He sketched out a chaste friendship between the fourteen-year-old Nicolas and sixteen-year-old Kara, complicated by longing. Her father was Danish – a wealthy man in the antiques business. He had not encouraged their friendship. They’d been separated, though he’d had letters from her after the war. She hadn’t died. But she had disappeared. In his early twenties Nicolas had tried to find her without success.
‘Gone,’ he wrote. ‘Another gone. Another lost to time.’
His letters seemed confiding, tender, anxious that what had happened to him would be known, and his connection with her maintained.
‘Chance – or the illusion of chance – is what divides us one from the other. It is chance that carries us apart. Chance that kills us. But what if chance could make us live? What if chance brought us together again? It is just a matter of seeing it right. Of turning it around.’
Isla wrote back, in one letter: ‘Nicolas, you say it is chance that divides us. But is also chance that makes us live. You lost people by accident. But you also found them by accident. You found me by accident. Every human being on the face of the earth is here – you said it yourself – by chance.’
‘You misunderstand. Deliberately?’ he wrote back. ‘For everyone who is born hundreds of millions of people – real people – are never born. Who speaks for them? They are nobody. Who will rescue them? What if you could imagine a world in which those people live and are not alone and do not grow old and die? And what if by imagining you could make it so?’
In early autumn, via EtUdes/RecOltes, came another letter, sharper in tone than any of the previous. It wondered, with crude sarcasm, whether she was in the employ of ‘the other side’. It asked her to come and visit him. It said he had something to give her. But before, it said, she needed to answer him one simple question: ‘Nobody has been reading my letters. I have proof positive. I need to know that you are who you are. So answer me this: what is a metre? Reply quickly.’
Isla called her colleague Mike about this. She was worried, she said. She sat in the kitchen of her house in Cambridge and showed him the last letter from Banacharski. What could he mean? Mike shook his head. ‘Buggered if I know,’ he said. ‘Your boyfriend is, let’s not forget, mad as a badger.’
‘A metre,’ she said. ‘It’s a measurement. He’s preoccupied by measurements. And he’s trying to build a machine. He says he’s finished it.’
‘Clear as flaming mud, love. I’d leave it. Write back and tell him it’s something to do with Napoleon. He probably thinks he’s something to do with Napoleon.’ Mike seemed moderately pleased with the witticism. He fetched himself another of Isla’s biscuits and moved on to some faculty gossip.
‘What is a metre?’ he said as he left. ‘A hundred centimetres, eh?’
Isla did not show Mike the letters she had got privately. And she did not tell him about Ana’s ring. She was still turning it over in her mind two days later. She was leaving for her 10 a.m. seminar, running late and with her hair still slightly wet against her neck, when she picked up the post from the tiled hallway. There were two letters, forwarded from Nice. Both were bulging, as if there was more paper in them than their envelopes were strictly designed to bear.
She tucked them under the arm of her duffel coat as she stepped out into the street. She slipped open the first one with a thumbnail, her bag on her lap, as she settled on the top deck of the bus on the way in to the faculty. She felt her cheeks grow cold as she read.
The yellow legal paper was in some places torn with the force of the handwriting. Block capitals alternated with lower case, no one letter joined up with another, and words of German and French mashed into English sentences. The ruled lines on the paper were only ever a loose guide when Banacharski was excitable – but here the lines of his script were flapping off them like an untethered mainsheet in a gale.
It was a wad of incoherent fury, calling her a ‘thief’, a ‘liar’ and a ‘Judas’. It accused her of working with ‘the enemy, the murderers, the Moloch’. The second letter was shorter, and barely in prose at all. On the first page, her name was written in block capitals, dead centre, and a series of numbers scribbled underneath – separated by dashes and subject to a whole succession of transformations that brought them out to new numbers. She leafed through. He was using the letters of her name – it would be Kabbalah, she guessed; he had spoken to her about using Kabbalistic practice for, he said, exploring ‘the relationship between speech and number’.
On the following pages the letters of her name had been anagrammed, and further manipul
ated into numbers; or, the letters of her name were written out as a matrix, and multiplied by another matrix constructed from the same letters. Her eyes started to swim. He couldn’t have slept. Nobody could physically have achieved the rate and ferocity of work in these letters – would not physically have been able to write them down – in the time between them.
They were both dated the same day, though they bore different postmarks and had clearly been held up a few days between Paris and London. Isla, scouring her memory, couldn’t swear to it that they hadn’t been written on the same day as the original letter posing the riddle. The final page of this second letter ended: ‘Nothing comes of nothing. Nobody’s here. We are divided by nothing. Forgive me.’ His signature at the bottom was also bristling with numbers, all of them cancelled to zero.
She missed her stop. She was twenty-five minutes late for her seminar by the time she got there and she noticed her hands trembling as she wrote on the whiteboard. She felt very afraid. She cancelled drinks with Mike and Jude. She spent the afternoon talking to the faculty and the college about a temporary, emergency leave of absence. The first flight she could get to Toulouse was the following lunchtime. It would cost her. She didn’t think about that.
The following morning, a third letter arrived. On the envelope it said: ‘To the Supposed Isla Holderness.’ She read it on the way to the airport.
‘You are not who you say you are. I am not who I was. Nobody is here,’ it began. Almost every other sentence contained a sarcastic intimacy – ‘my dearest “Isla” ’; ‘my trusted “Miss Holderness” ’ – as if parodying the man who had written her those private letters about his life over the past couple of months. The brusque kindness she remembered from the shack was gone. She found it unbearable.
It ended with a signature: not ‘Nicolas’ or even ‘NB’ this time, but ‘Fred Nieman’.
And so, fast-forward to Isla, walking round the final curve of the approach to Banacharski’s shack, feeling that she knows what she is going to find.
