The cold eats into my spine. I shiver and put my hands over my eyes. Devlin’s grip on my arms tightens. I sense he wants to – what? push me away? pull me to him? There is that familiar smell – the Scotch and mouthwash.
He is a dark shape in front of me, boxing me in, unable to help. I feel dark ice growing around us. I say, ‘You can’t comfort me. You can’t even help someone in distress because you’re so damaged yourself.’
His face is a dark country of valleys and shadows. I visualise him putting the handcuffs on me. I want to hurt him. ‘You’re an indecent man. You could have helped.’
‘You?’ There is a note in his voice I read as contempt. I bunch my fist and hit him across the cheekbone. The blow knocks his head to one side. He doesn’t turn back immediately. His profile cuts into the lighter patches of snow on the trees.
I think, I never reached you. You compartmentalised me, like everything else.
I say, ‘I’m sorry.’ But when I see the snow in his eyes, I know that apologising isn’t enough this time. Why, in my deepest core, do I still think that I can control him? Nothing has ever hinted that I am right.
He says, ‘How do you want me to comfort you?’ He jerks me to him, rubbing my back ferociously. ‘Like this?’
‘Stop it.’ I wrench my arms free but he grabs my hands between his hands. ‘This?’ he says, unsteadily. He gathers me hard against him, rocking back and forth maniacally, so I feel the strain on my lower back.
I get my hand up, around his neck.
‘Dev.’ I put my forehead against his chest. Then – I can’t help myself – my whole body relaxes into him, I close my eyes.
His arms falls away but I don’t move and after a moment he puts one arm around my shoulders, the other around my head, shutting out the moonlight. I am held, in warm dark.
‘All I ever wanted was safe harbour,’ I say, ‘just for a few minutes.’
He bends his head. His lips are against my neck.
Now, he lets me put my arms around him. The coldness is going out of him – I can feel it. Warmth is seeping in. He feels it too; he tenses. He is wondering whether to pull away. But he doesn’t.
I lift my head. He doesn’t move. I am this close – I know it – I am this close – I put my mouth against his mouth. I kiss him and, for one moment, he leans in.
I feel his hands on my wrists. I am scalded, as I was once before. I open my mouth and hear the click. Like before.
He steps back into shadow. Only his hands are visible, glittering with cold steel in the moonlight.
I look at my wrists. The bracelet is gone.
‘How ironic,’ he says. ‘At the mountain – you looked at me with such gratitude. I felt I had made up to you, for before. Then I realised that nothing will.’
‘Dev – ’ I step forward but he withdraws even further, the bracelet a dark ring in his hands now.
‘I prefer to be alone,’ he says. ‘It’s a relief. Don’t you understand? This was impossible for me right from the start.’
‘I was impossible for you.’
‘This trip was meant to be punishment,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t meant to be – ’
I catch his arm. ‘No more punishing yourself. Please.’
He puts his hand over mine. ‘Don’t write everything in your diary. Even if you’re making it up. Don’t tell anyone. Not Mitch. Not Pietr. I’m not saying that because I’m jealous. Don’t trust anyone. Not even me. Well, I know you never trusted me.’
‘Dev – ’
He takes a book with a pale cover from his pocket, a blue booklet on top of it. I see the long red ribbon tied around the book. My diary, my passport.
‘I won’t take them,’ I say.
He opens his hand. The books make small square shadows on the ground. Little doorways.
I say, ‘When are you going?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘After all this,’ I say, ‘you’re just leaving me?’
‘Yes,’ he says, retreating into the shadows and he is gone.
MONDAY
The next morning I wake knowing that Devlin is leaving. I go to find Stefano. He is standing on the back terrace, arms folded, staring down into the forest. It is only when I am closer that I see he is watching Pietr, who is walking slowly down the back path.
I ask Stefano to take me into Trepani. I haven’t quite worked out my reason, I mutter something to do with supplies for the party. He looks at me as if he knows that I am going to see Devlin. It doesn’t seem to matter to him. When he looks again into the forest, I guess what is on his mind: anything that keeps me away from Pietr is fine by Stefano.
It is a clear day as we drive along the coast. The white crests are being eaten by seagulls, the buoy rides the rolling waves.
‘If you were on the south Spanish coast, you would see Morocco,’ says Stefano. ‘Africa.’
I look at the long line of cloud lying on the horizon. The buoy tips and the bell jangles. I wonder, again, about the darkness of Stefano’s skin. Where does he feel at home?
We drive past a clearing which looks like where I stopped with Devlin. I touch my hair before I remember that it is gone. There is only dark stubble.
I say, ‘My life would have been easier if I was a blonde.’
Stefano says, ‘My sister Sophia’s life wasn’t easy.’
‘Pietr’s life seems – ’ I stop.
Stefano shakes his head. ‘Not easy.’
I look over the cliff to the water below. ‘I’ll need a wig for the Christmas party. Or they’ll think I’m a – ’
‘Collaborator.’
Stefano doesn’t hover, he doesn’t crowd, but there is something dark and hunched about him. He looks the archetypal old stocky Sicilian: gap-toothed smile, brown face, but there is something dead in his eyes. He’s never there, completely. I don’t feel he means me any harm but he’s watching for something. Maybe he is just sizing me up. My father’s business connection doesn’t make me untrustworthy. Or trustworthy. The only thing I don’t doubt is that he is totally loyal to Rosza and Pietr. How far he will go is another thing entirely.
Devlin thinks I should be on my guard against everyone in the house. I think that I should worry outside the house. But I don’t want to leave. This is the first place in years where I feel at home. Am I deceiving myself?
We are passing in and out of tunnels: one, two, three. When we come out of the next, I see a huge ripple running across the waves, trailing shadows. The buoy bows and rolls. The bell sounds, louder.
The car slows. ‘See the darker water?’ says Stefano. ‘Trepani’s Teeth, a line of rocks which the fishermen believe moves with the weather. They are never in the same place.’
Trepani. I think of Devlin in his room, with his black marks. And his alcohol. I can’t bear the pain he is going through. I can’t bear it.
Spits of rain hit the windscreen. ‘A ferry used to run past here from Palermo to Calafu,’ say Stefano. ‘It went down one night in heavy winds. Only men survived – that should tell you something about this part of the coast.’
‘There were only men on board?’
‘Survival of the fittest,’ says Stefano. He half closes his eyes so they are slits of black across his weathered face. I can’t tell whether he is grieving – or remembering.
I am confused. ‘So there were women on board?’
‘And children. The women stayed with their children or were dragged down by their skirts. It was every man for himself. Only the strong survive in Sicily. It wasn’t so long ago that they stopped putting weak babies out on the hillside.’
We are right on the coast. The sea shudders under its white crests, a school of darker objects – fish – move like birds through the blue water. Matted clumps of seaweed drift like crowds of people through the dark blue air of this other world. I see reflections of the clouds where the water flattens between the waves and think, The world is doubled.
‘You didn’t ever want to move away?’ I say curiously.
The car is definitely slowing. ‘Nobody likes strangers, especially Sicilians.’ He stretches his mouth into a silent laugh. ‘Even in Sicily.’
‘But there are other places – America . . . ’
‘It’s hard if you don’t trust anyone.’
‘You have Rosza here,’ I say, looking to the horizon. ‘You’ve known her a long time.’
‘Since we were children,’ he says. The car turns down a narrow gravel road. ‘I cuccioli più piccoli e deboli di una figliata. The runts of the litter stick together. We knew what it was like to fight for attention. Everyone followed my sister Sophia; they all thought Rosza was the quiet one. But she showed them.’
‘She seems very far-sighted,’ I say cautiously.
Stefano says, ‘She heard voices on the wind. She knew the calamity, he was coming.’
‘And was she right?’
‘They all died,’ says Stefano. ‘The well was poisoned and they all drank from it.’
‘But Rosza survived?’
‘She wasn’t there,’ says Stefano. ‘She had gone to Poland. I put her on the ferry myself.’
The road drops sharply. The smell of the sea oozes through the closed windows.
I say, ‘Rosza showed me Czeslaw’s grave in Santa Margherita. She still seems in love with him.’
Stefano says, ‘It’s not love.’ The car slows to a walking pace. ‘The Pole is nothing to do with us now.’
‘Pietr has his hair.’
‘That colour, it is not so unusual in Sicily. Sophia’s was almost silver.’
‘Still, like father like son . . . ’ I say.
‘He died before Pietr was born. He was never meant to be a father.’
‘But Rosza must have cared once?’
‘Maybe,’ says Stefano. ‘Yes, probably. She couldn’t bear the lake being there. Every year she drained it. But it seeped back. Then they spilled poisons outside Piscia and it showed in the lake water. That was how her story was believed. She had spent years being blamed by the Polish family. They thought after what happened at Castelmontrano – the poisoning in the village – she was connected, but now . . . ’
‘The water proved her innocence.’
The road flattens, the pitted shadow of a small grey beach comes into view, capped by a restless sea. I think, Water absorbs all the suffering in the world. But it can never erase the blood. Blood clouds the surface of the clearest water; it makes running water slow down, become heavy.
The road finishes at a pile of rocks in front of the cliff face. Stefano turns off the engine.
‘You should know what she suffered,’ says Stefano. ‘Before you judge. When she went to the Polish place the old Count, Pietr’s grandfather, he wouldn’t see her. The sons from the first marriage took her down to the catacombs and left her there. They wanted to frighten her away. But we have catacombs all through Sicily: when a country is poor, even the dead must do without coffins. Since medieval times, the bodies are buried upright in the walls.
‘Still, they left her there in caves stretching into infinity – a labyrinth, she said. She wandered for hours in the dark until she felt cold air on her cheek and then she shouted words that the old Count – Pietr’s grandfather – couldn’t bear to hear. So they brought her up to the surface.’
I say, ‘She told them she was pregnant.’
‘Maybe.’ He flexes his thick fingers.
‘She inherited Koloshnovar. Did you ever go there?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘I never saw Pietr until he was ten years old.’
We get out of the car. The beach is grey and damp and pebbly. This water is not silent like the lake with its brooding meditation on death. This sea is constantly diving within itself, like divers excavating shipwrecks.
‘She outlasted them all at Koloshnovar,’ says Stefano. ‘Later, when the Americans wanted to use the place, they thought they could browbeat her: the little Sicilian peasant. They learned.’
‘How did she get on with my father?’
‘He respected her,’ says Stefano. ‘They were the same.’ He picks up a pebble, skims it across the water, between the waves. ‘Mutual exploitation, she called it. That only goes so well when one side doesn’t feel more exploited than the other. It is difficult to keep these things in balance.’
This is the closest I have been to the sea in Sicily and the water is quite unlike the thick syrup of the Castelmontrano lake or the oily greenness of the Venetian canals. The dark grey sea slides back and forth across the pebbled beach, trailed by tainted foam as dank as wet blonde hair. It has depth to it even on the shore and it carries fish hooks and plastic bottles, rotted carpets and broken shells. Stefano picks up a small square piece of wood, probes it with his thumb. He takes out his knife and begins to carve. The wood turns this way and that in his hands; the serrated blade with its wicked hook flashes light. Shavings fall between his fingers onto the dark beach.
He says, ‘I used to make toys for Pietr when he was a boy. I sent them to him in Poland. He liked animals.’
‘I would have thought he liked cars.’
‘He only liked cars when he found out his father liked them.’ He blows on the wood. ‘Before that, it was hawks and dogs and wolves.’ Dust motes spin in the salty air.
Gulls hover overhead, a tanker edges along the thin horizon. The waves break sluggishly on the rocks nearby. I pick up a small sea-shell. It is greyish pink, cracked along the spine. It feels powdery and old. I throw it away. I yearn for the sun on my face, wattle on the breeze. Home.
Stefano says, ‘You should tell the Australian he doesn’t belong here.’
‘He’s leaving. He never found what he wanted.’
‘He made a nuisance of himself. Asking questions, searching houses.’
I stare at his bent head. He is a collection of heavy cheekbones, big fingers, broad wrists, blackness in the tan. There is no sense of light to him.
I say, ‘I didn’t think Devlin was doing anything.’
Stefano blows on the wood again. He seems to be carving two spheres, one higher and smooth, the other lower and warped. He says, without looking up, ‘The only reason he didn’t end up off the cliffs – ’ he hooks a thumb at the rocky wall above us – ‘was Rosza said it was a family matter.’
‘About her family?’
‘Your family. Your brother.’
He blows the last wisps from the carved wood and puts it in my hand.
The carving is a seated woman bent over a baby. She has the calm face of a Madonna but the baby is misshapen, twisted, in her lap.
The first thing I see when Stefano drops me off in the town square at Trepani is a broom against the cobbled wall. But not a broom with horsehair and a wooden handle. This handle is a bobbled branch with dried twigs bound at the bottom by rusted wire hammered into the wood.
In summer, this would be a pretty square, with its small church at one end. A fountain spills out of the wall, with the inevitable wolf’s head. Beyond are six brass tethering rings for mules and livestock and a row of shops with metal frames for the summer awnings bolted into the pavement.
But in December, there is only one awning up, only one old man sitting on the bench outside the church, watching me with uncurious eyes.
The fountain is not running; a pool of brackish water broods under the dry-mouthed wolf. The church door is closed. There are no shadows on the ground; the flat, pastel-grey sky is streaked with yellow. The row of shops hides the view of the sea but the smell of salt is strong on the wind that blows across the square. A dried leaf, etched with black veins, skitters past me.
Café Flora is sewn above the scalloped edge of the lone awning. Chairs are stacked along the front wall under the broad windows but the door is open. I step down into a low-roofed room with booths on the right. A woman with grey-blonde hair and a lived-in face is polishing the long wooden bar.
I ask her if she knows an Australian staying in the village.
She stares. I am wondering if she understands English when she jer
ks her thumb upwards.
I turn to the front windows. Maybe he is staying in some kind of farmhouse in the woods running up to the ridge.
But she points to the corner. ‘Up,’ she says. I peer and see steep, curved wooden steps.
I look at the row of bottles behind the bar, the glasses gleaming in the low light. Of course Devlin would live here.
I go up the stairs, every board creaking. His room is at the end of a long narrow corridor. The door is unlocked. I don’t knock, I don’t hesitate. I go in.
The room is bare: a single bed, a washbasin with a shelf and plain mirror, wooden floor, a small desk in front of a tiny window which looks over a back alley. Grey sky and hills are smeared beyond the roof tiles and the lines of washing strung from the balcony railings.
I don’t want to look at the sleeping figure on the bed so I go to the desk. His laptop is there, his files in a neat pile. There are three pens: two black and one red, all exactly parallel. The red pen lies inside the other two.
His breathing fills the room. He is out cold. The screen glows as I lift the laptop lid. I type in the password I got from him that night in Venice. Files come up. I see my name, Pietr’s name. I find my brother’s name. Enter. I read the blunt subheadings, the brutal sentences typed into the official boxes.
There are photos, three years old – I hadn’t expected that. But I know these photos. I recognise the lattice light, the wet sheen on the stone floor, the marks of despair gouged into the walls.
I stare at one particular photo for a long time. When I saw these cells at Koloshnovar they were bare, deserted. But this photo – I can see the figures slicked with liquid pressed up against the wall, merging with the damp. Flinching in the darkness.
I close the laptop and turn. He is lying, face down, one arm thrown over the side. There is something falling from his fingers. It looks like blood. It looks like he has cut his wrist.
I can’t believe it. I stand, stone inside my spine, then I step stiff-legged to kneel by the bed. I cup my hands beneath his fingers to catch the blood, the ribbon of red. Then I see it really is a ribbon. Silky and narrow. Not long: fringed at one end, cut sharply across at the other.
Notorious Page 25
