An eternally silent grandfather. An eternally silent father. The Poles, Matek concluded, had always fought for Europe’s freedom. Everyone who joined the struggle had grown up in silence and then fought until they passed away into silence.
His mother took him to see the priests, sought advocates, bought letters of recommendation, she put her faith in the protection that the Church could guarantee. In the end she placed him with the Brothers in Poznań, where he learned for himself the vulnerability of the human body: blood is a lubricant to help get inside the mortal coil, skin merely damp parchment, the mouth and throat a black hole that is stuffed until the last sound fades to nothing, after which silently it sucks up what life ought to bestow. And there too he encountered an entirely new concept of “underground”. When the pupils were assigned their apostolic names, they were led into the magnificent cathedral of Poznań, into the secret underground vaults and sepulchres, via stone steps that shimmered and glinted in the flames of the torches, down into the deepest underground, through a final roughcast tunnel and into a chamber that turned out to be a sunken chapel of death and eternal life. A barrel-vaulted room, hewn in the tenth century from stone one hundred feet below the blood-soaked earth of Poland. On the far side of this room was a monumental crucifix with a terrifyingly naturalistic Christ figure, behind it reliefs of angels protruding from the stone or seeming to pass into and through it, horrifyingly animated in the flicker of the flames. In front of the crucifix a Madonna, the like of which young Ryszard had never seen before, not in any church, nor in any picture in his books. She was completely covered up! The Madonna wore a cloak that she had arranged over her brow, nose and mouth in such a way that only her eyes were visible through a narrow slit, eye sockets so deep and so dead as they could only be after a thousand years of weeping. All of this, the altar too, had been sculpted and shaped from the stone and marl clay of the geological layer breached at this depth. Benches of cold stone on which sat eleven monks in black habits, their backs turned to Ryszard and the other pupils entering the room, and their bowed heads covered with cowls.
The pupils were led forward along the aisle between the praying monks to the Christ figure, where they crossed themselves and were then instructed to turn around. Looking back, Ryszard could now see that beneath the cowls glistened skulls, while the rosaries in the monks’ hands hung from bones – these monks were skeletons.
Beneath the earth one is closer to God than on the mountaintops.
Mateusz Oświecki tapped his forehead several times with the tips of his fingers. His own flesh felt heavy and rotten. And in his abdomen – beneath the navel and to the left – he sensed a burning. He realised that death was burning there. But rather than frighten him it took the fear away.
These skeletons in habits were the bones of the missionary bishop Jordan and the members of the founding college of the Archdiocese of Poznań. For almost one thousand years they had sat there in eternal silent prayer. In the presence of these eleven skeletons each pupil was assigned one of eleven apostle names. Eleven? No Judas? Yes, there was. But to give a pupil the name of Peter, God’s primary vicar on earth, would have been insolent. He who is chosen can, as John or Paul, become Peter too.
Mateusz Oświecki pressed his palms to his ears. So many voices inside his head. He closed his eyes. Too many images. This wasn’t memory, it wasn’t prehistory. This, here, was now, now as he was sitting before the crucified Christ. With the burning in his stomach. He wasn’t afraid, just felt that numbness you get before an important test or difficult task. The most difficult test is the one you can take only once. He opened his eyes, looked up and stared at the wound in the Redeemer’s side.
Mateusz Oświecki actually envied his victims. They had it all behind them.
He got up, stepped out of the stone of the church, cast a brief glance at the blue light dancing outside Hotel Atlas and walked, head bowed and hood pulled down, slowly through the rain towards Sainte-Catherine Metro station.
When Alois Erhart returned to Hotel Atlas he was initially barred from entering. Or at least he interpreted the policeman’s outstretched hand as an order to stay where he was. Unable to speak good French, he couldn’t understand what the policeman was saying.
When from a distance he’d glimpsed the rotating blue lights his first thought had been suicide. As he approached the hotel, the feeling that had assailed him at lunchtime was back: as if the nothingness into which everyone plunges sooner or later were spreading – suddenly, like an announcement or even an invitation – through his chest and abdomen. It had left him numb and breathless, this miracle that a growing emptiness can unfurl within the finite mantle of the human body, infinitely. The soul as a black hole, sucking up all the experiences he’d had in a lifetime and making them disappear until all that was left was the nothingness, the absolute emptiness, utterly black, but without the mildness of a starless night.
Now he stood by the hotel steps, his bones aching and his muscles burning with tiredness, a few onlookers behind him, and explained in English that he was a guest at the hotel, he had a room here – which failed to elicit any laxity in the outstretched arm. He found the situation so surreal that he would not have been surprised if he were now arrested. But he wasn’t just the old man whose body was irrevocably beginning to let him down, he was also Professor Emeritus Dr Erhart, who had been an authority for half his life. A tourist, he said determinedly, he was a tourist. Here! In this hotel. And he wished to go to his room. The officer accompanied him into the lobby and led him over to a man in his mid-fifties, almost two metres tall and wearing a grey suit that was too tight, who asked him for his I.D.
Why was the professor standing with his head bowed? He saw the inflated, gassy belly of this gigantic man – and was seized by pity. There are some who, with their massive physical presence, appear eternally strong, always fit, never ailing until suddenly, as if struck by lightning, they’re lying there dead at an age where people say, That’s no age at all. Ever proud of their constitution, they’ve regarded themselves as immortal so long as they’ve been able to publicly hone their body, thrust it in the faces of others. These people have never been confronted with the question of what they’ll do when they’re old and chronically ill, an invalid in the foreseeable future. On the inside this man was rotten and brittle, his decline was imminent, only he didn’t know it.
Professor Erhart showed him his passport.
When had he arrived? Parlez-vous français? No? English? When had he left the hotel? Had he been at the hotel between 7.00 and 8.00 p.m.?
Why these questions?
Homicide squad. A man had been shot in one of the hotel bedrooms.
His right arm was painful. It crossed Professor Erhart’s mind that people might soon begin to notice that he kept stroking, pressing, kneading his arm.
He took his digital camera from the side pocket of his raincoat and switched it on. He could show them where he’d been. Each photograph was tagged with the time it was taken.
The man smiled and browsed the photos. An afternoon in the European Quarter, rond-point Schuman. The Berlaymont and Justus Lipsius buildings. A road sign that read “rue Joseph II”. Why that road sign?
I’m Austrian!
I see.
The “Dream of Europe” sculpture in rue de la Loi. The bronze figure of a blind (or sleepwalking?) man taking a step from the plinth into the void. The things tourists take pictures of! There. 19.15: Grande Place. Several photos there until 19.28. Then the last photograph: 20.04, Sainte-Catherine, the nave. The man pressed again and was back at the first picture. He pressed the back button. Christ, the altar, and before it a man sitting in a pew with “Guinness” on the back of his jacket.
He grinned and returned the camera to Erhart.
Up in his room, the professor went over to the window, looked out at the rain, ran his hand through his wet hair and listened to his inner voice. He couldn’t hear anything. On arrival that lunchtime he had immediately opened the window and l
eaned out a fair way to get a better view of the square; he’d leaned too far, almost losing his balance, his feet no longer on the ground, he saw the asphalt rushing towards him, it all happened so quickly, he pushed himself back, fell to the floor beside the window knocking his right forearm against the radiator, and found himself sitting in an absurdly contorted position. Erhart felt as if he were in the freefall he had avoided by a whisker, a feeling you might get in the moment before death. He had then pulled himself onto the bed and sat there panting, and a sudden wave of euphoria washed over him: he was free. Still. He could decide for himself. And he would make the decision. Not now, but at the right time. Suicide victim – what a silly term! An autonomous and free individual, rather! He knew he had to – and now he knew that he was able to. Now he realised that death was as banal, trifling and inevitable as the “A.O.B.” at the bottom of an agenda. The moment when there was nothing else. He had to leapfrog dying. Leap.
He didn’t want to die like his wife had. So helpless at the end, so reliant on him . . .
Erhart picked up the remote control and turned on the T.V. He took off his shirt and examined the bruise on his right arm. He pressed the remote: keep going! He took off his trousers, keep going! Socks, keep going! Pants, keep going! He ended up with the Arte channel, where a film was just beginning, a classic: “From Here to Eternity”. He hadn’t seen it for decades. He stretched out on the bed. “This film is presented by parship.de, the leading partner agency,” announced a voice.
It was no coincidence that Fenia Xenopoulou had been thinking about rescue at the very moment the ambulance turned into the square and the sirens wailed. For days she had been thinking of nothing else; it had become an obsession and that’s why she was thinking of it now: rescue! He’s got to rescue me!
She was having dinner at Menelas, opposite Hotel Atlas, with Kai-Uwe Frigge, who she had privately called Fridsch since a brief fling a couple of years before, although it was teasingly unclear whether she was bastardising his name to “Fritz” because he was German, or as a nod to “fridge”, because in his fondness for factual accuracy he came across as so cold. Frigge, a lanky, agile man in his mid-forties, originally from Hamburg and now in Brussels for ten years, had been lucky (or had perhaps not relied on his luck) in the trench warfare, intrigues and bartering that inherently precede the formation of a new European Commission private office, and made an impressive career leap. Now he was principal private secretary in the Directorate-General for Trade, and thus the influential section head for one of the most powerful commissioners within the Union.
It had not been Fenia Xenopoulou’s wish that the two of them should meet in a fairly mediocre Greek eatery in this city full of first-class restaurants. She wasn’t homesick and felt no longing for the aromas and flavours of her native cuisine. Kai-Uwe Frigge had suggested the place. He had wanted to give his Greek colleague a sign of solidarity now that, following Greece’s near bankruptcy and the fourth outrageously expensive E.U. bailout, “the Greeks” were very much out of favour amongst colleagues and the general public. He had felt sure he’d win Brownie points when he suggested via e-mail that they meet at “Menelas? On Vieux Marché aux Grains, Sainte-Catherine, supposed to be a very good Greek!” and she had replied, O.K. Fenia really couldn’t care less. She had been living and working too long in Brussels to be interested in patriotism. What she wanted was her own personal bailout.
Calling the fund intended to avert Greek bankruptcy a rescue umbrella was unintentionally funny, Frigge said. You know it’s the luck of the draw when it comes to metaphors in our business!
Fenia Xenopoulou didn’t find it in the least bit amusing and had no idea what he was trying to say, but she beamed at him. It was like a mask and she didn’t know whether or not people could tell it was affected. In the past she had always been able to rely on her masterful deployment of facial muscles, timing, blindingly white teeth and warm eyes to emit an irresistible genuineness. Even for the artificial you need a natural talent, but because of her career setback – at her age! She was turning forty! – Fenia was so distraught that she could no longer be sure of her natural talent for consciously appealing to people. In her mind, self-doubt had covered her face like psoriasis.
Kai-Uwe had ordered a farmer’s salad and Fenia’s first impulse was to say, I’ll have the same. But then she heard herself ordering giouvetsi! It was lukewarm and dripping with fat. Why was she no longer in control of herself? She was beginning to come apart at the seams. She had to watch out. The waiter poured wine. She peered at the glass and thought, another eighty calories. Taking a sip of water and pressing the glass to her bottom lips with both hands, she summoned all her strength and looked at Kai-Uwe, trying to assume an expression at once complicit and seductive. Inside she was cursing to herself. What was wrong with her?
Rettungsschirm – rescue umbrella! Kai-Uwe said. German lends itself to neologisms like that. It only has to appear three times in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for every educated person to consider it perfectly normal. After that there’s no escaping it. The boss utters this word into every camera. The translators have worked up a nice sweat. English and French have their equivalent of a Rettungsring – lifebelt, and Regenschirm – umbrella. But what, they asked us politely, is a Rettungschirm? The French began by translating it as “parachute”, but then there were objections from the Élysée Palace that a parachute only slows down a fall rather than stopping it altogether, this was sending out the wrong signal, so could the Germans please . . .
When he ate an olive and put the stone on his plate it seemed to Fenia as if he were ingesting only the taste of the olive, and sending the calories back to the kitchen.
Then the sirens began to wail, followed by the blue light, blue blue blue blue . . .
Fridsch?
Yes?
You’ve got to – she was about say it – rescue me. But that was impossible. She corrected herself: help me! No, she had to appear competent, not needy.
Yes? He peered at Hotel Atlas through the window of the restaurant. He saw a stretcher being carried out of the ambulance and men hurrying with it into the hotel. Though Menelas was very close to Atlas, the distance was still too great for death to cross his mind. For him it was mere choreography, people moving to light and sound.
She’d already said, You’ve got to, now she wanted to unsay those words, but that was no longer possible. You’ve got to . . . understand . . . but I know you do! I know you understand that I . . .
Yes? He looked at her.
The police sirens.
Fenia Xenopoulou had started off in the Directorate-General for Competition. The commissioner, a Spaniard, had been clueless. But each commissioner is as good as their office and she had stood out as an outstanding element of a perfectly functioning office. She got divorced. She had neither the time nor inclination to have a man sitting in her Brussels apartment every second – or later every third or fourth – weekend, or to visit him in Athens and listen to him gossip about the intimacies of Athenian society and puff on cigarettes like a caricature of a nouveau riche. She had married a star lawyer and ended up throwing a provincial solicitor out of her apartment! Then she climbed a rung higher and entered the private office of the commissioner for Trade. In Trade you earn merit by trampling down trade barriers. She no longer had a private life, nor shackles, there was only free trade. She really believed that the career she saw as her future would be the reward for her contribution to making the world a better place. To her mind, “fair trade” was a tautology. Surely trade was the prerequisite for global fairness. The commissioner, a Dutchman, had scruples; he was so unbelievably punctilious. Fenia worked hard to calculate how many guilders his scruples cost. The man still crunched numbers in guilders! The credit he got each time Fenia had persuaded him of something was worth its weight in gold! Now it was time for the next rung on the ladder. She expected it to happen after the European elections, when the Commission was reconstituted. And she was, in fact, promoted.
She was given a department. What was the problem? In Fenia’s eyes, this promotion was a demotion, a career slump, a rejection. She became head of Directorate C (“Communication”) in the Directorate-General for Culture!
Culture!
She had studied Economics at L.S.E., done her postgrad at Stanford University, passed the E.U. concours and now she was stuck in the D.-G. for culture! It was about as pointless as sitting around playing Monopoly! Culture was a meaningless ministry without a budget or any weight in the Commission, without influence or power. Colleagues called Culture an alibi ministry – if only it were that! Alibis are important; every crime requires an alibi! But Culture wasn’t even window-dressing, because nobody bothered to look at what was being dressed up. If the commissioner for Trade or Energy – even the commissioner for Catching Fish – needed the loo during a Commission meeting, the discussion was paused and they waited until he or she came back. But when the Culture commissioner had to pop out, they went on talking unperturbed; in fact nobody really noticed whether she was sitting at the negotiating table or on the loo.
Fenia Xenopoulou felt as though she was in lift that had gone up, but had got stuck, unnoticed, between two floors.
I need to get out! she said. When she came back from the toilet she saw that he was on his mobile. He hadn’t waited.
Fridsch and Fenia gazed through the large window at the hotel, silent like an elderly couple delighted to have something to talk about at last.
What’s going on over there?
No idea! Perhaps one of the hotel guests had a heart attack, Fridsch said.
But the police don’t turn up if someone’s had a heart attack!
You’re right, he said. And after a brief pause he almost said, Talking of heart, how’s your love life? But he bit his lip.
Something’s weighing on your mind, isn’t it? he said.
The Capital Page 2
