Shooting Star

by David Brierley

  ‘Ilona.’

  She’d gone. He felt that as a physical pain. He’d no idea that losing her a second time would hurt as much as the first. He remembered the way her fingers splayed out as she laid her hand on her chest and he supposed that was where the pain was, in his heart. Gone, vanished, run out of his life again. Yet she was still in the room, her presence, her perfume, the indentation of her body in a cushion, the chair she’d sat in pulled out, the window she’d looked through showing the Thames with a moonpath on the water.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he spoke out loud to that presence, ‘if I can’t sleep, I stand here and put my hand in front of my face and peer through my fingers at the river. Try it. You get an impression, just a little, of the Danube. Seen through bars, Ilona, seen through bloody bars.’

  He swung round on the empty room, searching wildly for something. Not her. She’d gone. He picked up the clock, the digital clock she’d noticed, and smashed it against the wall. The violence mounted in him, the urge to self-destruction.

  ‘God damn you.’

  Anger and humiliation welled up, the dark side of love.

  20 - London, now

  There was spectacular beauty in it. A nuclear blast, a pre-dawn artillery barrage, a drifting of mist or something else over the trenches, they display the same quality.

  Steven stood like Nero.

  A crowded life leaves no room for regrets. While one mistake all on its own stands out like a peak. This, he recalled it well, was according to the philosophy of an exiled and long dead Russian woman. His own life had been crowded with experiences, from Hump City (his dismissive phrase for crumbling Saigon) to the Desert of the Dying (wherever it was that year). If it hadn’t marked his face, then outwardly she was right.

  Do, act, court disaster, taste mad danger, crowd in life’s variety. It was some damn philosophy. But even Natalya Zelenaya would have hesitated before this.

  ‘You’ve got to get away. Move right back beyond the gate. The wall could come down any minute.’

  It was a fireman shouting at him, five metres away and he shouted because of the roar of the flames. Fire was hungry and ate noisily. Fire was sensuous, a dancer, with leaping grace and a veil of smoke. Fire had been terrifying, in the Budapest radio station, climbing the staircase where a man whimpered at the red mess on the stump of his wrist, and Ilona had stood staring through a window with flickering firelight on her cheeks and a shine in her eyes.

  Tonight he’d seen those eyes freeze over.

  Fire was hypnotic, fire was terrifying, fire was worshipped as objects of fear sometimes are. Fire now was destroying whatever it was he’d created of his life in the past twenty-five years. It was suicide, self-immolation. When full daylight came the studio would be ashes.

  The fireman was shouting again. There was a shine on his face, sweat, spray, drizzle. The shine on Ilona’s face, the very first time he had glimpsed her, had been excitement. There had even been a tremble to her — a frisson her argot would have it.

  The truth was this — and he told it to himself as if he was angry with someone, staring at the sparks that swirled into the sky, his thoughts spurred on by the urgency of the blaze. The plain truth was this: Ilona had gone again, and all his achievements were suddenly shown to be small and meaningless. Her disappearance reared up like a peak, a mistake that overshadowed everything and dwarfed all his experiences. He had found her, won her and lost her. It had been his own fault and nothing else was of consequence. The old Russian woman had been crazy. So let his past be wiped out in this furnace.

  A voice was repeating itself in Steven’s ear. A hand pressed on his shoulder until he turned. The policeman was young, with wide eyes and an edge to his voice.

  ‘Come on now, you’ve got to move away.’ The panic edged further into his tone. ‘Are you mad? You’ll get yourself bloody killed.’ He recovered himself with formal questions. ‘Are you by chance the tenant or owner, sir? Do you live here?’

  ‘No,’ said Steven. And again more forcefully, ‘No,’ imagining a swift transfer to the local police station, interrogation, statements, incarceration.

  There were no immediate neighbours and the fire had had a firm grip before a security guard checking warehouses across the river had noticed it. The darkroom chemicals and film stock burnt with intense yellow flames and thick acrid smoke. The timbers were dry with age and crackled fiercely. The fire engine was hampered in its approach by the narrow back alley. When the police arrived Steven had heard the fireman who hosed down a nearby derelict shed describe it as a ‘no-hoper, a containment job’.

  The fire had invaded the Dead Room. The dawn was rocked by a series of explosions as quarter-century-old grenades went up. The young copper mouthed something and puffed out a lungful of air. He stood only a step away but the noises from the burning building covered his muttering. Looking round at Steven, he said: ‘Was that the gas supply?’

  But the grenades had given way to the crack of small arms ammunition.

  ‘It’s not the gas supply,’ the policeman said uncertainly. Then he seemed to gather strength as he grasped there might be possibilities for being a hero. ‘That’s explosives, isn’t it? Who lives there? Irish? Arabs?’

  ‘British,’ Steven said, and sounded too insistent even to his own ears. The innocent policeman’s forehead had the beginnings of a frown. ‘That’s what I heard,’ Steven expanded. ‘He was British.’

  ‘Was?’ The constable, in a vision of himself as the supersleuth, pounced on the word. The tuck of suspicion on his brow grew.

  ‘Was, is, how should I know?’

  The policeman’s eyes began a leisurely tour of Steven’s haggard face, dropped to the camera that hung on a strap round his neck and took in the shiny metal case in his left hand.

  ‘Are you Press?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Something still nagged at the policeman, possibly the slur of a slight accent. He hesitated and asked: ‘Why aren’t you taking pictures?’

  ‘I only came for bodies,’ Steven said. ‘The rag won’t print anything except bodies.’

  ‘Jesus,’ the policeman muttered, letting out a lungful of breath again. He gazed some more at Steven’s face, noting the pallor and dark bruises under his eyes, the evidence of his depraved trade, and moved away in distaste.

  21 - London, now

  One look at Ilona’s face, famished by lack of sleep, was enough. Judit said: ‘Ha, you’ve been fluttering on the nest all night. For a time you had me worried.’

  ‘Oh shut up.’

  ‘Pardon me.’ Judit peered more closely at the face now. It was a face of infinite variety, a mirror of moods, and now it had set like a death mask. It seemed to show a single emotion part way between anger and despair. And her clothes — the black sweater and black cords she had put on the previous day — they had the crumpled look of garments worn too long, or possibly ones that had been tossed aside on the floor. Judit’s appraising eyes didn’t overlook the dust on the elbows and all down her back.

  ‘People have been asking after you. Gyorgy especially,’ Judit said with heavy meaning. ‘Gyorgy has been like a repeating alarm clock. Antal has been worried. Worse, I have been interrogated by the Grim Hulk.’ It was their back-of-the-hand name for the wardrobe mistress who was formally called Comrade Revesz and who possibly had no first name. ‘The situation has been desperate. The whole world has been demanding where Ilona Kisfaludy has got to.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn about the whole world.’

  ‘Oh-oh-oh,’ Judit sighed. ‘So it is that, isn’t it? Eva, bless her little tongue, was moved to compose your epitaph: Ilona Kisfaludy, brave actress, missing, believed bed. Paris in the spring is a cliché, but London in the autumn...The Americans call it the fall, I believe.’

  Ilona walked across the bedroom and sagged on a bed, the one that hadn’t been slept in. Judit had brought up a bouquet of flowers from the opening night party several aeons ago and they lay in their cellophane, dead of thirst. Ther
e was nothing to hold Ilona’s interest in the room and she fixed on the flowers, trying to think about them as a change from thinking about other things. The cellophane was broken open and a carnation bloom snapped off. She could see the headless stem. Gyorgy, if she had to bet on it. He was rooster-vain as well as being big and possessing gregarious hands.

  ‘Do you need an aspirin?’ Judit tried again. But being solicitous had no effect on Ilona. ‘Perhaps a phone call from your husband?’ she suggested with a certain slyness. In her thirty-one years she had known several husbands, though none of her own, and they had displayed a sort of collective guilt towards the spouses they betrayed. Whereas wives, also in Judit’s observation, in similar circumstances felt an overwhelming need to confide.

  Ilona lifted up her eyes and set off at a brisk pace. ‘I have been bouleversée...’

  ‘You’ve been what?’

  ‘...and seduced by the past. Fed on dreams and memories, misled, possibly raped, tricked...’

  ‘Possibly, you said? Room for doubt? In my experience one knows...’

  ‘Don’t you want to hear? Why do you keep interrupting?’

  ‘Half a minute ago I was interrupting silence. Are you sure you want to confess?’

  It was not a question of wanting. Ilona was compelled. ‘I went to meet Steven Curtis. I knew him in my long-lost youth as Istvan Ketesc.’

  ‘So,’ and Judit drew a breath, ‘let me see that I have the story straight so far. This Istvan/Steven comes out of the dark ages and tramples all over you. His footprints, not to mention fingerprints, are obvious enough.’

  ‘Fingerprints?’ Ilona glanced over the black sweater as if the long night had left its marks there. She gazed at Judit again. ‘Are you listening carefully now? I tried to kill him.’

  ‘You’re serious?’

  ‘With a gun.’

  ‘Brava, Ilona.’

  ‘I pulled the trigger. It wasn’t loaded.’

  ‘Shame.’

  ‘Do shut up. I was desperate at that moment, trying to stuff a bullet in the damn thing. I wanted to kill him, hear me? Then the next moment we were all over the floor making love. You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘I do,’ Judit said at once, for solidarity. And more softly, ‘I think I do.’

  ‘I never wanted any of it to happen,’ Ilona went on in a rush. ‘It was just to be a reunion with a friend from a long time ago. You must believe me. We’d parted and now we were to meet again. En effet, it had never been a proper parting, no farewell. It had been a mistake, a muddle, a confusion. It had been 1956 after all. Anyhow that was the past, safely buried. Or so I thought. We’ve grown up. We have our different lives to lead. I haven’t seen him. He’s long fallen out of my thoughts. I make a career. I make a marriage. I make a mistake.’

  The sentences had dwindled, and now Ilona seemed to have run out of words. That was what the mention of marriage did to her. It was as though she had to remind herself of it from time to time, though seldom with enthusiasm. Her husband Erno was a stage designer, their courtship had been spirited and highly visible, and subsequent wedded life had proved nothing like so interesting. In the louche world of Budapest theatre, they said that Ilona looked on marriage rather like smoking; a habit you gave up two or three times a year because too much was bad for you.

  ‘Do you believe God brings two people together?’ Ilona asked suddenly.

  ‘Well, the Devil sometimes.’

  Ilona stared and stared as if Judit had genuine knowledge of such things. She nodded. ‘I suppose God has his hands full enough. Idiotic fate throws me in the path of Istvan again. Or Steven. I don’t know how to think of him. But there he was in the park, and there he was in his disgracefully rich car, and there he was in his studio. He’s a photographer, a war photographer. What kind of man chooses to do that?’

  Judit had the wit not to answer. Ilona was talking freely now and just needed the pauses to catch her breath and sort out the confusion.

  ‘Of course he doesn’t see himself as a war photographer but as a recorder of people in extreme distress. They’re dying and he gives their end a kind of dignity. Or immortality, possibly. Like a priest?’ she finished uncertainly.

  ‘He lives at his studio?’

  ‘Yes. He has the best of everything, the best furniture, the best food, the best drink. I understand that. It’s not greed, not primarily. It’s a distraction so he doesn’t feel the emptiness. You know?’ She laid her actress’s hand on her chest. ‘In here.’

  Judit nodded quickly. She knew that emptiness.

  ‘Well, that’s the story really.’

  Judit felt cheated. ‘But there has to be more. You tried to kill him.’

  ‘True. He was driving me insane. I mean literally. His hateful museum of the Uprising, the way he forced me to live through the fighting again, never giving me peace. We’ve been twenty-five years apart, lived different lives by different ideals. But he made our boy-and-girl days come flooding back. We were together again.’

  ‘And you’ve come back in ruins. Poor Ilona.’

  ‘What does one do after an earthquake?’

  ‘You’ve already done it,’ Judit pointed out in the gentlest way she could. ‘You’ve pulled on your socks and run, haven’t you?’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He doesn’t love you, I take it?’

  ‘Love!’ It was a disastrous little word. Ilona pushed herself off the bed to inspect her face in the dressing table mirror, bending in close as if terrible things showed. ‘How would I know if he loved me?’

  ‘But you love him?’

  Ilona’s despairing eyes shifted in the mirror so they rested on Judit.

  Judit went on: ‘On one side you have a husband, an apartment, a Balaton cottage, friends, a respected career, a whole way of life, a part in creating a new society. On the other side you have him.’

  Damn her for making it sound like scales, Ilona thought, with all the weight piled in one pan. There was nothing on Steven’s side apparently but a youthful infatuation, a quarter century of separation, a night of tumult and desperation.

  ‘So do you love him?’ Judit pressed again.

  Ilona covered her face with both hands.

  Yes, she loved him.

  No, she couldn’t bring herself to confess it out loud.

  Also, she couldn’t imagine why she loved him.

  Except that he wanted her, as if twenty-five years hadn’t come between. The manner of his wanting — ruthless, fierce, angry — was a measure of his passion. Perhaps love never entered into it. It was starkly different from the mating with Erno, played out in the incestuous world of the theatre, which lost its fire so quickly when they were married and there was no longer an audience. The wedding had been all wine and waltzes in the summer. By Christmas Erno had found some pretty blonde madarka in the theatre and was whispered to be fluttering on the nest, as Judit put it.

  ‘Well, what significance is there in it?’ Erno had responded, so cool and casual, the first time Ilona knew for certain he hadn’t been kept busy at the theatre all night. ‘My God, Ilo, we’re artistes, we’re creative, we’re different beings. We offer ourselves up nightly to the world and the world is composed of nothing but critics. Silence or a harsh word destroys us. That’s why we have a deep need to touch and reassure each other.’

  ‘Reassure? Is that the new word for it?’

  ‘Don’t be cheap, dear heart.’

  ‘And don’t I need reassurance?’ she had pleaded but earnestly and without drama so that Erno had taken it for compliance.

  He took himself off to make coffee. ‘We have this apartment,’ his voice came from the poky kitchen. ‘We’re buying the place by the lake, our careers go well, our friends are amusing, we’re really very comfortable.’

  ‘Is that it? Comfortable? Is that all?’

  But Erno, if he heard her, had had his bit of theatrical business ready: he dropped a cup and finished the conversation on his hands and knees muttering soft curses in th
e kitchen.

  And his smug words, they were almost echoed by Judit when she put Ilona’s life in the scales.

  Feeling a touch on her shoulder, Ilona took away her hands and looked up. Judit was peering at her with compassion.

  ‘Poor Ilona. I know.’

  Judit bent down to kiss her cheek.

  It was the rush hour for dogs.

  They came in all sizes, intent on their business, while the owners stood off holding their leads. Most of the men stared into the middle distance while they waited, their faces lifted in contemplation of things spiritual. One gaunt woman glared down at a squatting poodle, her own face taut with effort. Dogshit was everywhere, among the shrubs, on Steven’s shoes.

  It was a small square that he stood in, imprisoned by iron railings. There was a gate and normally you needed a passkey to get in and stroll among the straggly lilacs and dismal aucubas. With such a traffic of dogs, the gate had stood open. Across the road was the Bayswater Terrace hotel, where Ilona was staying. She would be inside, must be. She’d run out on him and would have come straight back to bury her face in a pillow.

  Steven had a sense of some looming disaster: her all-night absence had been noted, her association with him discovered, her unreliability confirmed. Never mind the talk of the new relaxed atmosphere in Hungary; his memories were of the granite days of the Fifties. A coach was parked in front of the hotel with a board in a side window proclaiming: On hire to Sights and Sites Tours. The driver sat smoking at the wheel, studying a newspaper. He was reading the racing page, Steven surmised, because from time to time he took a pencil from behind his ear to mark his fancy.

  ‘You notice the itty-bitty things, don’t you?’ some features editor had once rasped through cigarette smoke. ‘Always tell your actual twenty-two carat Curtis photo ‘cause of the significant detail. Could have been a copper, right? Or a spy. You’re not by any chance a spy, old son? No, don’t tell me.’

  It was just before nine o’clock when the car pulled up beyond the coach. It was a Mercedes, as black as a hearse, and watching it Steven felt a decision had been made for him. Even before he saw the CD plates he knew it came from the embassy: there was something confident about the way it parked on the double yellow lines. Two men got out and climbed up the steps to the porticoed entrance.