Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  She thought of the silence of water above a sunken tree, of ripples widening through the reeds. Sometimes she wondered how she could do it, live in a world where water was so scarce. Her memories of Poland were all of rain, water running down black stone.

  She said, ‘My father was a man who thought history couldn’t touch him.’ The edges of the pellet were softening as her hand heated it. ‘I cursed him – did you know that? I cursed my father in the great hall in front of the family, the servants. I blamed him for driving Czeslaw away. And then I blamed him for whipping me. The whole hall was silent. Even the hounds stopped chewing their bones.

  ‘My father called me mad, but in the desert madness is an asset. Once your mind has split and peeled backwards, then you can cope with the ultimate nothingness of it all.’

  Her hand was cramping. ‘Despair pushes you deeper into yourself, deeper into the emptiness; deeper into the desert. My mind lay open to the powers of the night.’ She flexed her fingers and began to prise the foil wrapping off the pellet. ‘I spent all my life in Poland thinking like a prisoner.’

  Her thumbnail was catching on the foil. She had to take a breath, adjust her grip on the pellet. She said, ‘Your grandfather accepted Rosita. He could see that they thought the same.’

  ‘My mother told me it was blackmail.’ He lifted the glass, drained the brandy.

  ‘That too,’ said Agnieska. She remembered the dumpy Italian girl shouting up from the black hole for them all to go except for the old man. He waved them back, his skin purple and red, and she shouted one word. The word. And his mottled skin floated on a sea of white, and he told them to bring her to the surface. The servants said they found butterflies drawn on the walls where the Sicilian girl had been standing. Butterflies or figures of eight lying on their side.

  And then the girl was standing on the surface, blinking in the light: small, black-browed, relentless. She said something to the old man and he fell, foam in his mouth. And the girl put her hand over her stomach and Agnieska saw the gold band on her finger.

  The old man didn’t die. When the Sicilian girl gave birth to the baby with the platinum hair, he signed a new will giving Koloshnovar to the boy. Agnieska could remember her half-brothers – tall and thick-necked by then – kicking the oak panelled door of his bedroom. They wouldn’t go to his funeral.

  The pellet was crumbling in her hand. She used her fingernails to separate the small grains, felt the drug under her nails, she wondered if it would enter her bloodstream. She wondered if before the end Pietr would be honest about his father.

  She motioned to Pietr to give her his glass. He looked at it as though surprised that it was empty. She went across, slowly, to the drinks table. With her back to him, she took the pellet from her pocket. She watched the small dark clots of powder fall onto the shining mirror at the bottom of the glass. She picked up the decanter.

  She said, ‘In my entire life I had no physical contact with my father. Maybe he held me as a baby. He would shout, at Czeslaw who was such a good gentle boy, Du bist ein Puppenjunge. You are a little puppet boy. One of his Nazi phrases.’ The brandy was falling in streams of burnt gold. ‘He was a cold unresponsive man. He had never been taught to give or receive affection. There was something in his own past. Before he went to Africa, he went over to Russia voluntarily. No-one would go to Russia voluntarily.’

  The dark grains floated like ashes on the surface. Just as she was convinced they were too light, the alcohol filled the spaces within and they sank.

  She said, ‘Maybe my father was searching for something. The year before he was born, the Cossacks raided Koloshnovar. There were the usual stories.’

  She shook the glass in her hand. The liquid swirled.

  She said, ‘From Russia he went straight to Africa. And you know what happened there. He met the Frenchman, the poet who had survived being lost in the desert. The man who created art met the man who created death. ’

  She stared down into the glass. There was no reflection. She remembered she had said to the Sicilian girl, ‘Why did you come here?’ And the Sicilian had said, ‘We all go into worlds that have nothing to do with us. Worlds that are volcanoes to us. We suffer but it turns us into what we are.’ And she had said to her, this widow of her brother, ‘You did understand him after all.’ And Rosita had hooded her dark eyes and placed her hands on her belly and said, ‘First you dream, then your dreams die, then you die.’

  Pietr said, ‘My mother says you have an implacable will. She says you pretend to yourself it is fate. But it is your own will. You had a restless heart, she said, just like Czeslaw. There was nothing extraordinary about it.’

  ‘Yes, there was,’ said Agnieska, turning, the glass in her hand. ‘The fact that we didn’t accept it.

  ‘Impossible dreams,’ she said. She thought, There’s a madness in us all. We look at the Polish army riding out to face the tanks, the sun glinting off the soldiers’ silver helmets. We know they are doomed to failure. But there is something within us that if we were standing under the thin grey trees, our fingertips touching the yellow grass bending in the wind, we wouldn’t call them back.

  She came across the room and handed Pietr the glass. As he raised it, she found she couldn’t sit next to him. She stepped to the door, looked at the garden.

  ‘My father always liked his hiding places, his secrets,’ she said. ‘Something in his childhood, I think, some deprivation. That’s why he liked the desert. You only survive by knowing secrets in the desert. Where to water your camel train. Where to hide supplies, your car, your plane. The desert is crisscrossed with the trails of travellers, desperately burying their planes and food and guns for a return which never happens.’

  She looked at him, at his gold cufflinks, the immaculate shirt. A crease ran like a fissure across his cuff. She thought that, back home, he would not have worn a creased shirt.

  Pietr raised his glass. He was drinking. There would be a slight interlude before the drug took effect. A time of delusion, of dreaming. Of revealing secrets. Before she decided whether to use the knife.

  He was swallowing. She said, ‘Why are you in Casablanca?’

  ‘For the contacts,’ he said. ‘To promote the business.’

  ‘Import and export.’

  ‘Yes.’ He raised the glass again.

  ‘The shoe factory is no longer profitable.’

  ‘No.’ He was swallowing. His eyelids flickered. ‘Too much competition. From South America. And now, Asia.’

  ‘Contacts here. Pay-offs to the Americans?’

  He started to speak, cleared his throat. ‘Necessary expenses.’ His eyes flickered again.

  She sat next to him. ‘You know you can make a fresh start with your next breath.’

  He drew back. ‘I don’t want to make a fresh start.’ He lurched to his feet, still holding the glass. He looked at the peacock swaying in its small sea of colours along the pale marble.

  ‘I need the book,’ he said, without turning his head.

  ‘For a weapon?’

  ‘We need the map,’ he said. ‘The family needs the map. My grandfather was the only one who knew. We . . . owe people for being allowed to keep Koloshnovar.’ He raised the glass, looking at the liquid. From where she sat she couldn’t tell if his hand was unsteady.

  ‘The military,’ she said. ‘They need you to loot for them. They give you the information. You help them in the chaos of war.’

  ‘What is looting?’ he said. ‘If you look at history, it has mostly been accident, blind chance. Sometimes, it saved the art. Look at the Ankara frieze: the Turks were using it as target practice. Big-city pollution is already eating away at great buildings like the Acropolis, pollution reacting with the limestone in the rock, weakening the whole structure. We only take what is unattended. We ensure its survival. If a country can’t care for its art – ’

  ‘You pay good prices in wartime when people are desperate.’ She waited. He didn’t turn around. She wanted him to turn around. Why?
Maybe she wanted him to see the look on her face. She wanted to be caught. To be crucified.

  ‘You pay when the victims of war need money, food,’ she said.

  ‘It is always about money. The rest is conversation.’

  ‘You take their culture. You take them.’

  But still he didn’t turn.

  She said, ‘We can’t steal to fill the hole in ourselves.’

  He was immobile. She knew the words that would make him turn. ‘Your father would never have condoned this.’

  He leaned against the wall. ‘What did he know?’ he said loudly. ‘What about wardship of our own history? His duty? Anyway . . . ’ He pushed away from the wall, stood, swaying. His forehead glistened.

  ‘It won’t last forever,’ she said. ‘All these black trades will be harnessed. Maybe for religion. Beyond the clash of countries, the clash of ideas. You’ll become unnecessary to them.’

  Pietr was drinking, fast. He drained the glass, grimacing as he put it down on the table.

  ‘The dust even gets into the drinks,’ he said. ‘Miserable country.’

  He approached the couch, walking as though his legs were cramped. She helped him sit, wedged cushions behind his back to keep him upright. She took his hand. He seemed unaware of her touch. She said, ‘You don’t want the book the way I want the book.’

  ‘It’s just a book,’ he said impatiently. ‘Photocopy it if you want to look at it.’

  ‘I want to hold it,’ she said. He tried to shake his head but his chin rolled from side to side. She placed her fingers over his pulse. The beat was fast, then slow.

  ‘Scribblings,’ said Pietr. He rubbed at his face. His eyes were almost closed. ‘The words don’t matter. It’s the maps which are important. Maps are what save your life.

  ‘What the French poet drew as he staggered through the desert,’ he said, his voice slurred, the clipped edges lost. ‘A map of undiscovered oases and water channels between the Kabir Massif and Kufra.’ He rubbed his face again, pressing his knuckles in, leaving white marks. ‘Maybe the ancients knew it was there. Some desert tribe which died out, taking their secret with them. If we find that vast underground sea it makes the desert open to traffic from the east.’

  ‘There is no sea,’ said Agnieska, speaking slowly and clearly so he would hear her. ‘I was there – don’t you remember? It is another excuse to attack the land: oil in the Arctic, gold in the ocean.’

  He closed his eyes but she was sure that he was still awake. She said, ‘You need to hear about my time in the desert.’ She put her hand into her pocket, for the knife. ‘You need to know what I saw there.

  ‘You never asked me why I went into the desert. Maybe I didn’t know myself. This was long before I had any thoughts of retreating permanently from life. But even then I wanted to go into a time of quarantine. Rehabilitate myself. I was sick: my hands were hurting, time was hurtling past me, people were turning into streams of light. I was already drying up, becoming a husk, already unable to have children even though I didn’t know it. Maybe I suspected it.

  ‘Maybe the decision to follow the clues in the book was a deception. Maybe I went into the desert to kill myself. I was already feeling fragmented, a bow of torn silver arrows, loosed from a wild heart.

  ‘I followed the maps: yes, you are right. The book has maps but I don’t know if you can read them. You have to be de-centred, to be peeled apart. You have to let the desert enter you before the book truly makes sense.

  ‘There is water there, if you dig maybe there is enough to create a city. Maybe you can create another Las Vegas in the desert, a place where people shut out the light and go mad under neon. I don’t think the desert will allow you, though.

  ‘Isn’t it perverse that only money makes men strong enough to face remorseless nature? But you don’t want to know this. You want the story, the answers. The truth. Such as it is.

  ‘So, let me tell you: I followed the thin ribbon of water through the network of black caves. I found the empty drums, I smelled petrol in the rusted metal. They were too big to have been brought through the crevice I had slipped through. So there must be another way in.

  ‘I went on. The water was illuminated in the dark light, my fingers brushed against the wall. The darkness pulsed. I began to think that the whole head is a cave, the mind is a desert, a void waiting to be filled, a page waiting to be written on. I wondered if all this was a dream dreaming me.

  ‘The caves reminded me of the catacombs at home, the labyrinth my half-brothers had put Rosita in. I realised now that she must have gone mad there. One could only go mad in a tomb or find God. And she was always too angry to have found God.

  ‘There were odd marks on the walls: watermarks the colour of mottled bone, waves of forgotten seas, drowned reefs. The Sahara when it was covered by mile-thick ice; Africa where Antarctica is. Fire and ice. The desert is like the sea. Any borders are covered in sand or blown away. There are no countries, no nations, no different peoples in a sandstorm. You are either of the desert or you are not. But you don’t want to hear this. Your breathing is slowing. You are slipping away.

  ‘The first thing to tell me I had reached a place used by men were the iron rings hammered into the wall. I found what I thought were ribs buried in the dirt but which were the wooden planks of a cage.

  ‘I saw a child’s hair comb, the odd tip of an ivory tusk, a glint on metal that I thought at first was a sword. It was a machete, stained with darker patches along the blade. When I saw the eyeless skulls arranged in neat rows I knew it wasn’t rust on the blade. And I knew I hadn’t gone mad. I had been an accessory all my life to mass murder.’

  Pietr was shaking his head, trying to open his eyes. ‘There were no repercussions.’ He was hard to understand. ‘The police never turned up. There were no humiliations.’

  ‘You didn’t avenge your father’s death,’ she said. ‘That is what eats into you.’

  ‘It was an accident.’

  Agnieska said, ‘I talked to the ambulance driver – ’

  ‘I have a child now,’ said Pietr. ‘The past is no good to any of us.’

  ‘Czeslaw was dead before the car went into the water,’ said Agnieska. ‘The marriage was a sham.’

  ‘No,’ said Pietr.

  ‘The whole village was a part of it,’ said Agnieska. ‘The death of the old priest Dante was suspicious. What the villagers did during the war – ’

  He was shaking his head. ‘No.’

  Agnieska was exasperated. ‘You’re the last male. You could investigate.’

  ‘No – ’

  ‘You have money, Koloshnovar.’

  ‘Because she got everything,’ shouted Pietr.

  There was a silence as sharp as the pain in Agnieska’s hands.

  ‘He left everything to my mother, in trust for me until I am forty. If I don’t do what she says, I’ll be cut off without a penny.’

  ‘Would that be so bad?’

  He stared at her. ‘I have to live. I have to . . . ’ He struggled for the words. ‘I have to maintain.’

  ‘Maybe if you stripped away your possessions you wouldn’t be so haunted.’

  But his eyelids were dropping, his breathing was slowing.

  ‘I went to the morgue,’ said Agnieska. ‘All the records had been destroyed, the original admittance forms. Even before she became wealthy, somehow she was able to do it. Some help she had. Maybe Stefano, some Mafia connection. But the Sicilians still respect family. So the ambulance driver talked to me.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear,’ said Pietr. He raised one trembling hand.

  She said, ‘He told me that the villagers were there when the ambulance arrived: Rosita’s father and his friends carried the body up from the lake. But in the morgue the blanket slipped off the body and the driver saw – ’

  ‘It’s too long ago,’ said Pietr. His hand dropped, his eyes closed.

  She bent over him. His breathing was deep but rasping.

  She said, ‘Do you
know what I saw, in the cave, in the desert?’ She picked up his wrist. He had surprisingly broad wrists. She had expected Czeslaw’s wrists: delicate and bony with pale blue veins. She pushed back his cuff and saw the tan line. A few days in the country and yet his hands were already a dark brown. So unlike Czeslaw who had never tanned, who remained almost translucent.

  She gripped his wrist and shook it. She dug her fingernails in until she saw red half-moons in his skin. His eyelids twitched but he didn’t move. She took out the knife.

  She said, and she didn’t know if she was talking to Pietr or to Czeslaw, or even Betsoul, ‘Maybe I was in the cave for hours, days, weeks. I dreamed I stood on the riverbank and the wind swelled and the willows brushed my hair. I stared at the cages for so long they became clear to me in the light. The bones chewed by lions gleamed. The light intensified. The more I watched the more I could see. I saw all the way back – butterflies scratched on walls, ribbons of light, trees burning in the oasis, the sun glinting on the Polish cavalry – until the light grew so blinding that it consumed all colours. Everything turned to black. A light so pure it blinded me. A light that created pure darkness.

  ‘I emerged from the cave into a place of no time and place. My eyes turned to stars. Mythical beasts rose before me: winged creatures, huge lizards, scorpions with mouths of black, sand vipers with eyes of blood, crabs eating turtles with their shells ripped off, every beast that my inner mind could conceive, every rotting smell. My face was bathed in an orange glow. I was in a ruined place, surrounded by ghostly horsemen galloping out of the sand. The sand itself was rising, being swept to heaven, revealing the barren earth.

  ‘I was standing in a dead sea.

  ‘I was silent in the void, contemplative before the infinite and the sublime. I became de-centred. I became wholly the other. I became at one with the desert.

  ‘Je est un autre. I is an other.

  ‘I saw the wind lifting the sand in the vanishing point where the land became the horizon. The point of absolute nothing, the point of absolute poverty. I had nothing with me now but the book. I saw there was nothing that separates us from the void but the word. And then out of the heat on the sand and the rocks, I heard the roaring of lions. I looked across the dead sea and I saw Abu N’af, abandoned on the hill.