The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  She was sitting on the ruined side of his face but she could see his eye, staring out from its gnarled and webbed nest, taking it all in, remembering. His head ducked down as they passed the Basílica da Estrela to catch sight of the façade of his old apartment building on Rua de João de Deus still intact – in fact, untouched, just a little more cracked and crumbled. Only then did she realize the brilliance of her gift. These parts of Lisbon hadn’t changed at all in fifty years and some not since the 1755 earthquake.

  They turned off into Avenida Infante Santo and into Lapa. The cab threaded through the streets to Rua das Janelas Verdes and the York House. They walked up the same stone steps as the monks had done in the seventeenth century, when it had been the Convento dos Marianos. Voss stood in the old courtyard, beneath the huge spread of the palm tree and remembered all those characters in all those other pensões in Lisbon reading their newspapers, waiting for the day’s real information which was never in print in front of them.

  They rested and in the evening walked back up to the Jardim da Estrela. They touched the tiles of the old apartment building’s façade. Voss ran his hands up the iron swans’ necks supporting the roof of the now disused kiosk, where he used to buy his cigarettes and newspapers. They sat and had a beer in the café in the gardens. They stood on the spot where he’d given himself up and he raised his eyes to the window of the old apartment, now open to the cool of the evening.

  They walked the walk that they believed had been their undoing – down the Calçada da Estrela to São Bento and the National Assembly, into the edge of the Bairro Alto, around the church, along Rua Academia Ciências, up the Rua do Seculo and right into the grid of the Bairro Alto. Andrea ate a meal of rojões, cubed pork with cumin, in a Minhote restaurant. Voss watched and drank the best part of a bottle of Vinho Verde red from Ponte da Lima. In the lamp-lit darkness they strolled past bars, restaurants and dodgy-looking characters offering a night of fado, as if it was a porno movie. They reached the Rua de São Pedro de Alcântara and walked up between the silver rails of the tramlines as they crossed the street to the miradouro. They stood at the railings, looking out across the city to the Castelo São Jorge, just as they had stood forty-seven years before, but not touching.

  Voss still hadn’t spoken much since they’d arrived, but it wasn’t the hard, grim, obsessive silence of the month in Langfield. He seemed to be filling up, like a dry clay jug, darkening with moisture as it takes in water from a spring. She leaned with her back to the railings and pulled him to her by his lapels, looked into the good half of his face.

  ‘Is this completely normal?’ she asked.

  He struggled. His eyes shifted over her face.

  ‘I don’t…I don’t remember the words,’ he said.

  ‘You remember them,’ she said. ‘You told me them.’

  ‘They’ve slipped my mind.’

  ‘Is this completely normal?’ she repeated, shaking him by the lapels.

  ‘I don’t…I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve only been in love once.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘You…crazy.’

  He’d said it but it didn’t carry the same conviction as forty-seven years ago.

  ‘In that case,’ she said, relenting, ‘you’re allowed into my hotel room.’

  He joined her in bed that night and she slept with her back to him, their heads on the same pillow, hands joined over her stomach.

  In the morning she went off on her own and found the lawyer’s office in the Chiado. He gave her the wooden box, which she signed for. She bought some paper and wrapped it and went on to the bus station and booked two tickets to Estremoz for the next day.

  They took the train from Lisbon out to Estoril along the glinting, panel-beaten Tagus, the silver carriages of the train visible ahead as they turned on the bright and shining rails. The surf broke against the Búgio lighthouse in the middle of the estuary and the hump of the sandbank lurked behind like a surfacing whale.

  They were horrified by how tacky the casino had become – all naked girls and ostrich feathers. The passage up to the garden of the Quinta da Águia no longer existed. Houses had been built across it and up the hill behind. They had lunch on the promenade. He poked at his sardines. She showed him where she’d lived when she’d been married to Luís and they took the train back into the city in the late afternoon.

  When they arrived in Estremoz the next day it was already brutally hot. They took a cab up to the pousada within the castle walls and flaked out for an hour. They went back down into the town for lunch and found a dark, cool tasca whose walls were lined with terracotta wine jars, each tall as a man. The place was packed with Portuguese, workers and tourists, all sitting on wooden benches and eating vast portions of food.

  ‘Do you see these people?’ asked Andrea.

  ‘Yes, I see them,’ said Voss, wary.

  ‘What do you think about them?’

  ‘That they might become very fat,’ he said, the thin smug man.

  ‘I think they don’t give a damn about anything, except the food on their plates, the good wine in their glasses and the people around them. It’s not such a bad way to be.’

  He nodded and ate a quarter of his grilled fish and a leaf of lettuce.

  They took a cab out to the small chapel and graveyard amongst the marble quarries on the outskirts of town. They walked the lanes of the graves and tombs until they reached the Almeida family mausoleum. Voss lagged behind, looking at the photographs of the dead, which were very formal, no better than mug shots, some of them. He fingered the flowers, some of which were plastic and others made out of material. He came alongside her, not knowing what they were doing in this place. She tapped Julião’s photograph, faded in the years of draining sunshine. Voss took a closer look, peering at the outline of the face.

  ‘You haven’t asked me anything about him,’ she said. ‘So I thought I’d start at the end. In his end is your beginning…something like that.’

  Voss clung on to the wrought-iron bars of the gate to the mausoleum and took in the coffins, more coffins now, and the two urns of Julião and Luís on the same shelf. Andrea took out the old photograph and put in a new one. She handed the old one to Voss. They left the graveyard, Voss’s head bowed over the bleached picture, and found a cab to take them back up to the pousada.

  Outside the hotel she took his arm and walked him past the church and the statue of Rainha Santa Isabel and sat on the ramparts. She gave him the present, which he opened. He admired the African box and thanked her with an awkward kiss.

  ‘Look inside,’ she said. ‘The present’s inside.’

  On top was the Voss family photograph. His hand shook as he took it out. His emaciated body shuddered as he looked from face to face, each one with its own sense of triumph at being someone in the family group, in front of a photographer. He took out his father’s letters, leafed through them to the one asking him to get Julius out of Stalingrad. He read it, and then his own to Julius and finally the letter from one of Julius’s men. He wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist.

  ‘I took them from your room before I escaped on to the roof back in ‘44. I thought it might be the only thing I’d ever have of you so I kept them. They’re yours,’ she said. ‘You probably don’t have anything left yourself.’

  He shook his head, chin resting on his chest.

  ‘I lost you, Karl,’ she said, standing up, looking down on his bowed head. ‘This last time, you’ve turned up in my life but you’re not here. You’ve been consumed by something else and I want you back. I hope this reminds you of the man you were, because you’re still the only one who has meant anything and everything to me.’

  They went up to the hotel room. Karl, exhausted, slept on his back with the box on his chest, its contents seeping into him like a new drug. In the evening they returned to the same tasca where they’d had lunch. This time he ordered beer and wine. He ate the cheese and olives. He ordered roasted pig’s cheeks and ate it all, right down to
the crackling skin. He had a pudding – cake with sugar plums – and coffee and he drank a bagaço, because he wanted to remember that harsh liquor, his demand for it when he’d been in Lisbon during the war. He still didn’t say very much but he looked at her throughout, taking her in as if he’d noticed her for the first time. His eyes were still sunk in his head but they’d lost the haunted look, the tortured, pleading look.

  Slightly drunk, they held on to each other and found a small café near some gardens by the barracks and ordered aguardente velho, less harsh, more refined, more suitable for pensioners. He toasted her:

  ‘For what you’ve returned to me,’ he said. ‘And for reminding me what’s important.’

  ‘And?’ she asked, severe, but eyes smiling with the booze.

  He paused, smacked his lips.

  ‘For being the most beautiful creature on earth that I’ve never stopped loving.’

  ‘More,’ she said, ‘I think I deserve more of that stuff. Tell me how much you love me. Go on, Karl Voss, physicist from Heidelberg University. How much? Quantify it. I need measures.’

  ‘I love you…’ he said, and thought about it for thirty seconds.

  ‘I’m glad this is taking so long to compute.’

  ‘I love you more than there are water molecules in the oceans of the world.’

  ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘That is quite a lot. You may kiss me now.’

  ‘This work,’ he said, as they recklessly asked the waiter to leave the bottle of aguardente velho on the table, ‘this book I’ve been working on, that I thought, until this afternoon, was so important, is called…I’ve named it The Gospel of Lies. It was to be a personal account of what it has been like to spend my whole life as a spy, always working against the states which have employed me. I thought that this would be the way to make sense of it all. But it wasn’t just going to be that. I was also going to make an astounding revelation…that for the entire post-war period, until it became unimportant, the Russians had somebody installed at the very highest level of British Intelligence.

  ‘In 1977 I was retired, but I asked to continue working in the Stasi archives. I had already stolen lots of documents, which I kept buried in the garden of a villa Elena and I had the use of on the outskirts of Berlin. From 1977 to 1982 I worked exclusively on stealing documents which would give me irrefutable proof that there was a traitor permanently in the top five executives of the British SIS. In 1986, when Elena fell ill, I took her back to Moscow and there I managed to fit in the last piece of the puzzle. The final and verbal confirmation of all my documentary proof. I spoke to Kim Philby on three occasions before he died in 1988.

  ‘It was difficult to work on the book in Moscow and later, as Elena got sicker, I became ill myself. I have cancer, which at my age is a slow-moving affair, but I’ve been told that it can suddenly get worse. So I’ve believed myself to be on this important mission, to tell the world everything I know, but without knowing how long I had to do it.

  ‘I felt compelled to do this work because the man, this traitor, has been honoured by his country for his services and I didn’t think it right that such a person should be so highly regarded for sending his own countrymen to their deaths.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘And now, in the last forty-eight hours I’ve come to realize something. That what I thought was the most important thing, the work that would have left my stamp on this world, is as valuable as all the intelligence ever gathered and presented to those leaders who demanded it in order to make their brilliant decisions. It is worthless. It is dust. And now that I know that, or rather had you to help me remember it, and with all that you’ve shown me, with all that you’ve given me…I am, at last, happy.’

  Andrea sipped her aguardente, kissed him on the mouth so that he felt the sting of the alcohol on his lips.

  ‘But who is it?’ she asked. ‘You’ve still got to tell who he is.’

  They laughed.

  ‘It is so worthless, such dust,’ he said, ‘that I don’t think there’s any point in telling.’

  ‘You’ll be sleeping on your own if you don’t.’

  ‘I wanted to tell you when we were on that walk yesterday. Our walk through the Bairro Alto. The one where we were seen by the bufo who reported it to General Wolters. That, for me, was the most amazing thing that Philby revealed. It was during my last meeting with him. I hadn’t told him I’d been in Lisbon during the war. To begin with I thought that would be too risky, but Philby was completely finished by then. A very sad case. I think even the Russians were wary of him by the end. So I told him who I was. I even remembered my codename, because it was such an odd one. I told him I was “Childe Harold”. He started laughing, laughing so hard I was worried about him. He grabbed my hand and breathed into my face, “And now we’re on the same side.” So I started laughing with him, willing him to tell me but not wanting to ask, because asking someone like that is different to them telling. He told me he had given the order that my name should be handed over to Wolters as a double agent and traitor…but that it must be done with subtlety. Nothing traceable.’

  ‘Why did Philby want to get rid of you?’

  ‘Because I was stuffing his British agents full of information which could possibly have given us, the Germans, a chance at a separate peace with the Americans and the British. He didn’t want there to be any possibility that the Russians would be excluded. So, he ordered one of his men to give me up. It was this man who told the bufo to report it to Wolters and led to my arrest.’

  ‘I knew it,’ said Andrea. ‘I knew it would be him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Richard Rose.’

  ‘This is very sad, Andrea, because I know how much this man means to you but…’

  ‘Richard Rose means nothing to me…even less than nothing now. I invited him to my dinners because he’s one of the gang. He’s entertaining. But I’ve spent most of my life not liking him at all.’

  ‘It wasn’t Richard Rose. I always thought it would be, because he was so hard in the negotiations I had with him and Sutherland in the Monserrate Gardens.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I couldn’t believe it either…that he was already in position at such an early stage.’

  ‘Philby was a liar, too.’

  ‘I’ve got the documentary proof of his later work, Andrea. All those files I dug out of the Stasi archives. They’re all at home.’

  ‘If it’s him, I want to hear it from his lips.’ ’I’m not sure how wise that is, Andrea,’ said Voss. ‘Philby and Blake were both ruthless men. They sent hundreds of agents to their deaths, but I can assure you that Meredith Cardew was worse than the two of them put together.’

  They slept heavily that night because of the drink. They woke late in the morning and made love for the first time, with the maids singing in the corridors outside.

  By afternoon Voss was not feeling well and was in pain. They took a cab all the way to the airport and flew back to London. By eleven in the evening he was in the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. By a quarter past he’d been transferred, in agony, to the Pain Relief Unit in the specialist cancer hospital, the Churchill, where they brought his condition under control. By morning he was stable.

  The consultant told Andrea that it could be a matter of days, at the most a fortnight. Voss insisted on staying with her at home. Andrea paid for a private nurse who would come in twice a day. Voss was installed in her bed with a morphine drip, whose doses he could control by a handheld self-administering device that computed the amount taken so that he couldn’t overdose himself.

  Andrea didn’t go up into the attic. She didn’t turn on Voss’s computer. She never knew that all his data had been corrupted by a virus and that someone had taken a sample of the documents from the trunk. She stayed in the bedroom with Voss and read to him, because it was comforting to both of them.

  At night she made a light supper and before she went up to bed at eleven o’clock, she let Ashley out into the garden. She
stood at the back door under the light, the dog lost in the darkness. It was a balmy night but she wore a cardigan and held it tight around her chest though she realized the cold was coming from the inside out. She had tried not to think it, but she knew she was going to have to do it again. She was going to have to go through that whole painful process once more – coming to terms with the word ‘never’. Not in a million years. From here to eternity. An infinity of absence.

  She remembered coming out of the Basílica da Estrela back in 1944 having cried herself empty and the feeling of that breeze blowing straight through her. Had that been bad? Not entirely. There’d been a freeing up, a loosening of the moorings, her ship still linked to the landmass of her grief but the instinct already there to move on. That was her generation. Don’t make a fuss. Get on with it. And now? After a life led with love hanging by a thread. And old age, and the only possible end of old age.

  In the afternoon she’d walked through the graveyard of the church looking at the headstones of married couples, wondering if this was a grim thing to be doing. She noticed that if the woman died first, the man always followed within a year. If the man died, the woman did not go gently into her husband’s night. The women hung on in their decrepit bodies, hearts thumping through the years.

  She was going to finish life how she’d started it. Alone. Except that this time there were connections and an image came to her of roped climbers up a sheer wall and the looks of encouragement between them.

  She shouted for Ashley.

  No response.

  ‘Bloody dog,’ she said, and set off down the path.

  She found him by stumbling over his supine body. The dog was warm but completely inert and she could tell by the light coming up the garden from the back door that if there was any life in his visible eye it was the tiniest crack. She picked him up. Quite a weight for a dachshund. She went back to the light, inspected him briefly under it and took him inside and laid him on the refectory table at one end. She looked at him intently for some sign of what it was that had struck him down. The warm night air blew against her back. She prised open his jaws and saw vestiges of red meat in his teeth and, in the instant that it came to her that he’d been poisoned, a white silk scarf floated down in front of her eyes and snapped tight round her neck.