The Back of His Head

by Patrick Evans

  Duteous, unspontaneous laughter.

  Now, the Tour takes its first collective step—or steps: we need six trips to ferry them down to the garden room on the elevator, four at a time and five at the end. In his later years the Master, as many of us called him, made increasing use of this elevator each day to take himself and his wheelchair down here to write and then, as evening came on and his day’s work was finished, to take him back up to the Residence proper.

  Here, I point out Raymond’s fauteuil roulant, abandoned in the corner of the garden room: and it is at that moment that I notice another out in the garden, beyond the sliding doors of the garden room, a wheelchair locked into place on the lawn, about forty feet away. It has a high back turned to the house and from this distance anything of the figure inside is too small to see clearly: just a tiny, pale stick of an arm, visible for a moment.

  I return to the business at hand: now everyone is crowded into the garden room it’s time to give them the video of the Master in those golden years immediately after the award. Of this I never tire, of course. The video player is getting on in years: the tape, too, which catches and slurs at various moments. But it is always the same familiar, irretrievable world that it retrieves for us nevertheless, that most distant of all lost pasts, the recent past, the one we still know and remember and most nakedly mourn, the past that leaves behind every trace of itself to remind us of the finality of our death. It was full summer, I remember, by the time Bruno Prock and his crew arrived from Austria to make the art programme documentary from which this is excerpted, and one can still see on the screen the blowsiness of the trees and the shrubs, can still hear in the background the mad tinnitus of the crickets. It is a summer that never ends.

  At the stage caught by the tape Raymond remained plausible, his illness at its earlier stages: his performance for the Austrians varied from episodes of the usual nonsense (here, on the screen, eliciting the burst of laughter this moment always brings from visitors viewing the video, he has his dental plate in upside down, a stunt that was quite beyond the Austrian visitors’ collective comprehension) to longer episodes in which, persuaded by Bruno’s intensity and concentration, he gave more serious and detailed answers than I’d ever heard him give to anyone else before. Most of all, Bruno was interested in those disowned early novels.

  Because violence returns dignity to the violent, Raymond tells him towards the end of the documentary, in answer to the obvious question. It returns dignity to those whose own dignity has been taken from them. That part isn’t included in this introductory video, naturally, but I remember it because it was something he’d never addressed before, never spoken about directly. And, then: each successful work of art conceals a crime, an act of violence.

  Now, alas, comes the only moment in the video that I detest. A long shot of the Trust members on the lawn begins, and pauses—all of us younger, Marjorie surprisingly gamin and unsurprisingly skittish—pauses, and then pans left to take in the gardening ladies, hard at their work as they always were in those days, bent forward, their hoes moving almost in unison. Eric Butt, hoeing, too, and Daisy the dog, over-excited, her bobbing tail up in a curve—and, now, here he comes as he always does at this moment, his large, broad-shouldered frame visible for a few seconds, that ridiculous head, the loose-lipped, weak-mouthed grin, perpetual, democratic, unquestioning, invariably inane—

  Gradus again. For years I tried not to think of him, I tried to exclude him from my mind and concentrate on the story of the Master. He doesn’t belong in the life I’m talking about, he has no place in my story—he had no place in our lives back then, he didn’t fit in from the start. He wasn’t the beginning of anything and he wasn’t the end of anything, he didn’t explain anything or represent it. He simply was, he simply existed. I was horrified he’d been included in the first place, in this sequence that Julian selected from the Austrians’ documentary. It’s a historical record, Julian protested when I tried to get him to edit the buffoon out. But editing it was too difficult: so there he remains, my bête noir, providing the only moment in each viewing of this videotape at which I need to look away. In a second or two, I know, the camera itself will rub him out—I turn back, and there: he’s gone. He never was. Never existed. There—

  And, as Gradus leaves the screen, the old man comes back onto it, almost as fully present as in the flesh. The first glimpse of him always shocks me, however many times I’ve seen the video before: in white summer clothing and a broad-brimmed white hat he comes with a couple of the others through the shrubbery and towards the camera, holding his palms together in front of him like a monk. He is listening, now he is laughing, his head thrown back, and now he looks down at the camera with the smile held: he removes his hat and the lost wind plays with the lost hair. It always feels as if he is looking at me, just at me: as if there’s no one else in this garden room now and no one else behind him on the screen. Just Raymond, just me. Always it is that.

  We watch, the visitors and I, through selections of the interview with Bruno and to the final shot of the clip, as he walks down the drive and away, as if he’s leaving us forever. And now there comes another moment, here it is again, the moment of the viewing: he stops, turns, and faces the Austrians’ camera as it approaches. His image grows. For this final shot the cameraman, I remember, sank slowly to his knees like a supplicant, and as a consequence, Raymond seems to loom and fill the screen. Do not move, Ray!—Bruno, shouting throughout this sequence. Do not move!

  And there he is—here he is, looming, massive, like the Colossus of Rhodes: he looks down at us as the cameraman moves in. Raymond at last: eternal, magnificent, refulgent and supreme, my uncle as I will always remember him, the Master, forever in the superlative—before, now—turn away now, Ray, turn away slowly, please!—he turns from us and his back fills the screen as the camera follows. The cameraman stops: the Master begins to recede, he’s moving away, here is the moment when he ducks slightly under a branch, where he moves into flecks and smuts and flying wisps and the push-push-push of the wind in the shrubs and the trees, moves off and away and is gone.

  Dissolve to black.

  I squeeze the remote. Murmurs from the visitors as they come back to life.

  I look around.

  And that is the man whose house we’re going to look at together today—

  In the Blue Room I begin, of course, with a few words on Raymond’s theory of colour, how blue was thought in medieval times to be the colour of evil, the colour of the devil, and how the Master came to feel instead that blue—this blue, the blue before their very eyes, sky-blue at its deepest—was something else, the colour in which the abstract could become transformed into the material world. As always I mention Novalis, I mention Rilke, I mention Klein and all the rest.

  Then, as always and of course, I wind the touring party around the room and to the Medal and the Citation, starting with the enormous settee—always, gasps of wonderment at its size—and moving them to the fauteuil and the complex, fascinating story of its troubled reupholstering. Thence, through the amusing story of the Shoji screen, to an anecdote or two about the posters on the wall and the display of his books in the bookcases and the others he collected. Not too long on these, for here comes the moment when I draw their attention to the Holy Grail itself.

  I never need do more than fling my arm towards it: this, after all, is what they have come to see. There’s always a moment as they take it in: and then, always, they crowd forward. I always enjoy reciting the Citation aloud to them from memory as they gaze at it: I never get a word wrong. But when they look at the Medal, there is no need for me to say a thing. It speaks for itself, of course. The Nobel Prize for Literature.

  Today, the moment is as sacramental as ever. There are several seconds—twenty, thirty—before the spell is broken and they begin to murmur again, and turn away, and ask their questions. How much would the Medal be worth? Is the Citation a fake, too? Why not just put the real Medal there and tell everyone it’s a fa
ke? How much would the fake Medal be worth?

  Replica, I tell them. It’s a replica.

  The precipitating incident occurs a few minutes later, in Raymond’s bedroom, just after I’ve shown our visitors the desk under the window that looks north down the garden and out across the city. I’m turning towards the three-quarter bed on which the Master died when I notice a movement, to one side of my vision.

  A woman has just put something on the old man’s desk.

  I am in the midst of things, naturally, and keep on till the end. And now, the saddest part of this journey through the Master’s life, his last place of rest if not his last resting place. I look at them: nods from one or two: yes, yes, this is definitely where he died. Questions, as always, but, as always, I tell them I’m reluctant to discuss this part of his life and that I’m sure they will understand, given my closeness to him. Instead, we turn to the magnificent view that gave him both inspiration and consolation throughout his writing career—and, as we all turn to the window, here’s the woman I have just spotted, pressed up against it as she peers out and down to the lawn.

  Has she really just put something on the desk?

  She has: the paua shell ashtray is back.

  I stare at it, as the visitors begin to gaggle out of the room. Seventy-four years of age, I reply to someone’s question.

  She’s returned the missing ashtray—the woman at the window has returned the paua shell to the desk—

  His nephew and adopted son, I reply to someone else. And now his literary executor, yes.

  It’s obviously his: an ash-smeared paua shell, not new. I’ve forgotten how worn it was, how long he’d had it. Now I see the thing, the reality of what it has been returns to me, replacing memory: it becomes a thing once more, a part of the mere, uncreated world, still awaiting the lick of art.

  I stare at it. I gaze at the woman.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say to her as she turns. ‘May I speak to you before you go?’

  She stares up at me: dark-skinned, and a heart-shaped face: not at all unattractive: lived in, but not insensitively or unintelligently.

  ‘Sure,’ she says. ‘I just have to check my boy on the lawn.’

  I complete the tour quickly: the small bedroom—my own bedroom for a number of years, when I first came under my uncle’s wing—and then the kitchen and a quick reprise of the Master’s idiosyncratic views on time-travel and culinary spaces. Laughter: a few words about Nineteen-Forty-Eight—and we’re back in the Dining Room and with the opportunity for them to add a few comments besides their names in the Visitor Book before they go, and for me to take from them the admission fee we charge now, in this new season.

  A quick check at the window shows the woman down at the wheelchair, tilting it back towards herself and turning it as she speaks silently down to the small child it half-encloses. The wind bounces in her dark, springy hair. Sunshine, bleaching the sky, creating a democracy of little white clouds that puff across it.

  I come down to her from the house, behind the tourists returning to the tour bus, whose driver still slumps resignedly against his wheel. I watch them yack and scramble their way aboard. Down on the road, cars start up. I wave at the bus as the engine fires. Some wave back.

  The woman is pushing her child up the lawn towards me in his wheelchair, a large plastic cocoon that contains him in a web of straps. The boy crouches like a little spider in its web.

  ‘This is Anaru,’ his mother tells me.

  He stares up at my face, querulously, like a little old man.

  Now he holds up to me the thing he’s been moving through the air while left to himself down here. A model plane, a finger-span long, a jet fighter—

  ‘I brought him to meet you,’ his mother says. ‘I wanted you to see him.’

  ‘I’m going to be a fighter pilot,’ the boy tells me.

  I look at her. ‘You’re Jennifer.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been here two or three times. But it’s always been someone else taking the tour. I kept coming back till it was you.’

  ‘Why me?

  ‘You wrote the letter. You sent me the same letter twice.’ No rancour, just a simple observation. She has one hand on the chair, and looks out across the city, and the wind moves her hair. ‘I wanted to see how he lived. How a famous writer lived.’ Now she looks up at the house. ‘It’s not great but it seemed pretty good inside. All that furniture.’

  ‘It’s not all what it seems to be. We had a valuation recently and sold some.’

  ‘You can tell when people let things go. They don’t have to prove anything. Old money. I got angry when I saw it. The money.’

  ‘There’s not that much there, really.’

  She stares at me. ‘Yes, there is. You don’t understand. Of course there is. When I saw it the first time, I thought—I can’t say it in front of the boy. I thought, stuff you, and I took the ashtray. I didn’t want it to be something big so I took the ashtray. After I got the first letter. To get even.’

  Down below, the little boy is whizzing his plane through the air and providing the sound effects.

  ‘And then I thought, this is silly, it doesn’t mean anything, I’ll bring it back—anyway, I don’t want anything of his.’

  ‘We really don’t have money to give away, Jennifer. What we raise we spend on the Residence.’

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ she says. She’s unlocking the straps, she’s releasing the boy. ‘I want you to see him,’ she says.

  ‘Can he stand on his own?’

  ‘Sort of. He’s pretty good, actually. Aren’t you, boy?’

  The child comes out of his cradle.

  ‘I don’t care about the money.’ She bends down to him: he teeters between her palms. ‘But you need to see him.’

  Ah. To see him. My stomach knots up. I swallow hard. ‘Right.’

  She holds him with one hand and pulls at his T-shirt with the other. ‘No, Mum,’ he says.

  ‘Mr Lawrence is going to be a friend of ours, boy.’

  ‘Please, Mum.’

  ‘Just for a second.’ She lifts up the back of his little shirt. ‘There—’

  ‘Ah.’ And I peer down at him, at last. ‘Yes. Yes—’

  It takes a few seconds, and then she begins to put him together again. When she’s done, she leans forward and presses her face into the top of his head and holds him close. Soon his hand brings the plane up again.

  ‘Good boy,’ she says. ‘Good boy.’

  I watch as she holds him up, across the lawn: his tiny, strutting body, his strange, man-in-the-moon profile. It occurs to me that he may be eight or nine years old, possibly more.

  She walks him, and he flies the plane. I watch.

  After a minute I suggest we take him for a ride on the old elevator. She puts him back in his chair, and we bring him into the garden room.

  Now the chair is on the platform, with the two of us on either side. I flick the switch and the elevator begins to rise, with its familiar, low, urgent hum.

  The boy holds the plane up, to rise into the air with the elevator.

  I turn to the woman, across and above the boy’s head and the weaving, ducking fighter. As we rise into the Residence, I feel as if I’m beginning to understand what’s happening.

  The boy looks up at me. ‘I’m going to be a fighter pilot,’ he tells me.

  I think I’m beginning to understand.

  Far out on the plain, in a slight depression in the ground, Hamilton found ruined walls and a crumbling mausoleum that had a narrow, high dome. Bou Saada. He could see an old Ottoman bordj farther up behind it on a stony mound of earth. Its split walls were patched with ancient, furred whitewash. Nearby, figtrees, stunted, around a fountain whose sanguine water trickled into a canal lined with red and white piles of saltpetre and salt.

  In the bordj he was given a small room that had a reed mat, a chest of drawers and a skin of water hanging from a nail. There were Fez cushions in embroidered leather and the walls were painted white. Lying on th
e mat he sensed the old building hulked around him in silence, though sometimes a fettered horse whinnied outside, or there was the passing thud of hooves and, regularly, the squeaking of a bucket being let down into a well and pulled out again. Less frequently and from farther away, the low, savage growl of the camels when they arrived to kneel at the gate. All this as evening set in.

  That was when he remembered the tangerine in his pocket and took it out and peeled it, and pushed the sweet pulp of it hard against his teeth and palate till it broke and dissolved into juice. He began to think of the boy again.

  Back at the military camp he’d been told he came from here, from Bou Saada, though everyone knew the coastal Arabs despised the Amazigh youths and that the boys stayed away from the encampments because of that. This one had come into the military camp all the same and Hamilton had let him into his billet. His first mistake. Before he took the wallet the little prick stole Capitanes from Gost and one of the other Frenchmen, and the week before that something else went as well, guns or ammunition, the soldiers thought, because there’d been such an uproar around the place. Hamilton was sure that was the Kabyle boy, too. A small dried monkey head belonging to one of the Frenchmen, it turned out to be, that such a fuss was made of.

  When he went out to it the next morning the little settlement of Bou Saada seemed to have changed overnight around the bordj. Now he could see a service station and a café under the eucalyptus trees, and, further on, what turned out to be a dry-goods store. Houses beyond that, shacks, and, behind them, little more than a cemetery with its bluish domes and white gravestones.

  He moved through the streets, aware of children staring at him and of the dark-robed women looking down and stepping away as they passed him by, this Nazarene. But the men stared as he walked by them, stared hard at him, the desert-faced men squatting against buildings and gazing up at him as he walked past. He tried to look back, but found he could not. Berbers, some of them, their smooth faces heavy with dark blood and, when their rust-coloured buzzard eyes were not turned upon you like this, their sense of complete preoccupation. He would walk to the edge of the cemetery and back, and then he would try again to confront them.