Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘I wished he hadn’t written it. Not even thought it. A creeping poison pulsed in his veins from that day on. It changed him. Destroyed him. He didn’t want to show it to me. But he was so different afterwards. I took it out of his drawer and read it while he was asleep. It was the first and last time I did such a thing. For now the poison was also in me. The poison of offended respect, of destroyed trust. And things were never the same between us again.

  ‘If only he hadn’t been so mercilessly honest with himself! So possessed by the struggle against self-deception! Bearing the truth about himself can be demanded of man, he used to say. It was like a religious confession. A vow that bound him to Jorge. A credo that ultimately undermined even that sacred friendship, that damned sacred friendship. I don’t know the details of how it came about, but it had something to do with the fanatical ideal of self-knowledge that, even as students, the two priests of truth carried like the crusaders’ banner.’

  Adriana went to the wall next to the door and leaned her forehead against it, her hands clasped behind her as if someone had shackled them. Mutely, she quarrelled with Amadeu, with Jorge, and with herself. She braced herself against the irrevocable fact that the drama of Mendes’s rescue, which gave her those precious minutes of intimacy with her brother, soon set in motion something that changed everything. She leaned all the weight of her body against the wall so that the pressure on her forehead must have hurt. And then, quite suddenly, she raised her hands high and punched the wall with her fists, over and over, an old woman who wanted to turn back the wheel of time; it was a drumbeat of muted blows, an eruption of helpless fury, a desperate assault against the loss of a happy time.

  The blows grew weaker and slower, the excitement subsided. Exhausted, Adriana leaned on the wall for a while. Then she walked backwards into the room and sat down in a chair. Her forehead was covered with white plaster from the wall; now and then a flake came loose and rolled down her face. Her eyes went back to the wall. Gregorius followed her gaze and then he saw it: where she had stood just now, there was a big square lighter than the rest of the wall. The trace of a picture that must have hung there before.

  ‘For a long time I didn’t understand why he took away the map,’ said Adriana. ‘A map of the brain. It had hung there for eleven years, ever since we had set up the practice. Covered with Latin names. I didn’t dare ask why, he loses his temper when you ask him the wrong thing. I didn’t know anything about the aneurysm, he kept it from me. With a time bomb in your brain, you can’t bear the sight of such a map.’

  Gregorius was surprised by what he did now. He went to the washbasin, took the towel and approached Adriana to wipe her forehead. At first she sat there stiffly, defensively, but then she let her exhausted head drop gratefully to the towel.

  ‘Would you take what he wrote then?’ she asked when she sat up. ‘I don’t want to have it here in the house any more.’

  As she went to get the pages she blamed for so much, Gregorius stood at the window and looked out at the street where Mendes had collapsed. He imagined standing in the doorway, an incensed mob before him. A mob from which a woman broke loose, a woman spat at him, not once, but over and over again. A woman who had accused him of treason, he who had always demanded so much of himself.

  Adriana had put the pages in an envelope.

  ‘I often thought of burning them,’ she said and gave it to him.

  Silently she led him to the door, still in the white coat. And then, quite suddenly, when he was already halfway out, he heard the fearful voice of the little girl she also was: ‘Will you bring me back the pages? Please, they are his after all.’

  As Gregorius went down the street, he imagined her taking off the white coat some time and hanging it next to Amadeu’s. Then she would turn off the light and lock up. Clotilde would be waiting for her upstairs.

  21

  Breathlessly, Gregorius read what Prado had written. At first, he only skimmed it to know as soon as possible why Adriana had felt his thoughts as a curse on subsequent years. Then he looked up every word. Finally he wrote down the text to understand better what it had been for Prado to think it.

  Did I do it for him? When I wanted him to survive – was it for his sake? Can I honestly say that that was my wish? That’s how it is with my patients, even with those I don’t like. At least, I hope it is and I wouldn’t like the idea that, behind my back, my action is guided by quite different motives than those I think I know. But with him?

  My hand, it seems to have its own memory, and it seems to me that this memory is more trustworthy than every other source of self-examination. And this memory of the hand, which stuck the needle in Mendes’s heart, it says: it was the hand of a tyrant’s murderer who brought the already dead tyrant back to life in a paradoxical act.

  Here what experience always kept teaching me is confirmed, quite against the original temperament of my thought: that the body is less corrupt than the mind. The mind is a charming arena of self-deception, woven of beautiful, soothing words that give us the illusion that we have an unerring familiarity with ourselves, a closeness of discerning that shields us from being surprised by ourselves. How boring it would be to live in such effortless self-knowledge!

  So, in reality, did I do it for myself? To stand before myself as a good doctor and a brave person who has the strength to master his hatred? To celebrate a triumph of self-control and to revel in the frenzy of self-mastering? So, from moral vanity and even worse: from quite normal vanity? The experience in those seconds – it wasn’t the experience of appreciative vanity, I’m sure of that; on the contrary, it was the experience of acting against myself and not indulging in the obvious feelings of satisfaction and spite. But maybe that’s no proof. Maybe there is a vanity that isn’t felt and that hides behind opposing feelings?

  I am a doctor – that is what I argued to the furious mob. I could also have said: I have taken the Hippocratic Oath, it is a sacred oath, and I will never break it, never, no matter how things are. I feel: I like to say it, I love it, they are words that excite me, exhilarate me. Is that because they are like the words of a priestly vow? So was it really a religious act when I gave back to The Butcher the life he had already lost? The act of someone who secretly regrets that he can no longer trust in dogma and liturgy? Who still mourns the unearthly glow of the altar candles? So, not an enlightened act? Is there, in my soul, unnoticed by me, a brief, but violent, bitter struggle between the former pupil of the priest and the tyrant-murderer, who has never taken action? Thrusting the needle with the life-saving poison into his heart, was it an act in which priest and murderer were two of a kind? A movement, in which both got what they longed for?

  If I had been in the place of Inês Salomão, who spat at me: What could I have said to me?

  ‘It wasn’t a murder that we demanded of you,’ I could have said. ‘Not a crime, either legally or morally. If you had left him his death: no judge could have prosecuted you and nobody could have judged you by the Sixth Commandment: Thou shalt not murder. No, what we could expect was something plain and simple, obvious: that you wouldn’t keep a man alive with all your might, a man who has brought us misery, torture, and death, and whom compassionate nature finally wanted to get off our back, and that you wouldn’t make sure he could go on practising his bloody regime.’

  How could I have defended myself?

  ‘Everyone deserves help to remain alive, no matter what he’s done. He deserves it as a person, as a human being. We don’t have to judge over life and death.’

  ‘And if that means the death of others? Don’t we shoot somebody we see shooting somebody? Wouldn’t you prevent the obviously murdering Mendes from murdering, with a murder if necessary? And doesn’t that go much further than what you could have done: nothing?’

  How would it be for me now if I had let him die? If, instead of spitting at me, the others had acclaimed me for my fatal omission? If from the street, an exuberant sigh of relief had come at me instead of an enraged poisono
us disappointment? I am sure: it would have haunted my dreams. But why? Because I can’t be without something unconditional, absolute? Or simply because it would have meant an alienation from myself to let him die in cold blood? But what I am, I am by accident.

  I imagine: I go over to Inês, I ring the bell and say:

  ‘I couldn’t have done differently, this is how I am. It might have turned out differently, but in fact, it didn’t, and now I am how I am and so I couldn’t help doing what I did.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter how you are with yourself,’ she could say, ‘that’s completely irrelevant. Just imagine: Mendes is healthy, he puts on his uniform and gives his murderous orders. Imagine. Imagine it precisely. And now judge yourself.’

  What could I answer her? What? WHAT?

  I want to do something, Prado had said to João Eça, you understand: do. Tell me what I can do. What exactly was it that he wanted to make up for? You haven’t committed a crime, Eça had said to him, you’re a doctor. He himself had so argued to the accusing mob and had also said it to himself, certainly hundreds of times. It hadn’t done anything to soothe him. It had seemed too simple to him, too glib. Prado was a man of deep distrust of everything glib and superficial, a man contemptuous and hostile to stock sentences like: I am a doctor. He had walked on the beach and wished for icy winds to sweep away everything that sounded like mere linguistic habit, a malicious kind of habit that prevented thinking by producing the illusion that it had already taken place and found its conclusion in the hollow words.

  When Mendes lay before him, he had seen him as this particular, individual person whose life was at stake. Only as this individual person. He couldn’t have seen this life as something that had to be calculated in terms of others, as a factor in a bigger calculation. And it was precisely this that the woman accused him of in her monologue: that he hadn’t thought of the consequences also affecting individual lives, many individual lives. That he hadn’t been ready to sacrifice one individual for many individuals.

  When he had joined the Resistance, thought Gregorius, it had also been to learn such thinking. He had failed. One life for many lives. You can’t calculate like that. Or could you? he had asked Father Bartolomeu years later. He had gone to his former mentor to have his feelings confirmed. But he couldn’t have done anything different anyway. And then he had taken Estefânia Espinhosa over the border, out of reach of those who thought they had to sacrifice her to prevent something worse happening.

  The internal gravity that made him who he was had not permitted any other action. But a doubt had remained because the suspicion of moral indulgence was not to be dispelled, a suspicion that weighed heavily on a man who hated vanity like the plague.

  It was this doubt that Adriana cursed. She had wanted her brother all to herself and had realized that you can never have for yourself someone who isn’t on good terms with himself.

  22

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ said Natalie Rubin on the phone. ‘I simply don’t believe it! Where are you?’

  He was in Lisbon, said Gregorius and he needed books, German books.

  ‘Books,’ she laughed. ‘What else!’

  He listed: the biggest German–Portuguese dictionary there was; a detailed Portuguese grammar, dry as a Latin textbook, without any junk to make it easy to learn; a history of Portugal.

  ‘And then something that may not exist: a history of the Portuguese Resistance movement under Salazar.’

  ‘Sounds like an adventure,’ said Natalie.

  ‘It is,’ said Gregorius. ‘Somehow.’

  ‘Faço o que posso,’ said she. I’ll do what I can.

  At first Gregorius didn’t understand, then realization dawned. One of his students knew Portuguese – that mustn’t be allowed. It diminished the distance between Bern and Lisbon. It destroyed the magic, the whole crazy magic of his trip. He cursed the phone call.

  ‘Are you still there? My mother is Portuguese, in case you’re wondering.’

  He also needed a grammar of modern Persian, said Gregorius, and he named the book that had once cost thirteen francs thirty, forty years before. In case the book was still available, or else another. He said it like a defiant boy who doesn’t want to give up his dream.

  Then he took her address and gave her the name of his hotel. He’d put the money in the post, he said. If anything was left over – well, maybe he’d need something else later.

  ‘You’re opening an account with me, so to speak? I like that.’

  Gregorius liked the way she said that. If only she didn’t know any Portuguese.

  ‘You caused one hell of a turmoil here,’ she said, when he remained silent on the line.

  Gregorius didn’t want to hear anything about that. He needed a wall of ignorance between Bern and Lisbon.

  So what happened? he asked.

  ‘He’s not coming back,’ Lucien von Graffenried had said into the amazed silence when Gregorius had closed the classroom door behind him.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ others had said. ‘Mundus doesn’t just run away, not Mundus, never in his life.’

  ‘You just can’t read faces,’ von Graffenried had replied.

  Gregorius wouldn’t have thought von Graffenried was capable of that.

  ‘We went to your house and rang the bell,’ said Natalie. ‘I could have sworn you were there.’

  His letter to Kägi had not arrived until Wednesday. All day Tuesday, Kägi had been calling the police about accident reports. The Latin and Greek classes were cancelled, while the students sat perplexed outside on the steps. Everything was off kilter.

  Natalie hesitated. ‘The woman … I mean … we found that thrilling, somehow. Excuse me,’ she added when he was silent.

  And on Wednesday?

  ‘At break, we found a notice on the blackboard. Until further notice, you would no longer be teaching, it said. Kägi himself would take over the classes. A delegation went to Kägi and asked about it. He was sitting behind his desk with your letter in front of him. He was quite different from his usual self, much more modest, gentler, not like a Rector. “I don’t know if I should do that,” he said, but then he read the passage from Marcus Aurelius you had quoted. Did he think you were ill? we asked. He was silent a long time and looked out of the window. “I can’t know that,” he said at last, “but I really don’t think so. I think he suddenly felt something, something new. Something subtle and yet revolutionary. It must have been like a silent explosion that changed everything.” We told him about … about the woman. “Yes,” said Kägi. “Yeees.” I had the feeling he was somehow envious. “Kägi is cool,” Lucien said afterwards, “I wouldn’t have expected that of him.” Right. But the class is so boring. We … we wish you were back.’

  Gregorius felt a burning in his eyes and took off the glasses. He swallowed. ‘I … I can’t say anything about that now,’ he said.

  ‘But you’re … you’re not ill? I mean …’

  No, he said, he wasn’t ill. ‘A little crazy, but not ill.’

  She laughed as he had never heard her laugh, altogether without the sound of the courtly maiden. It was a contagious laugh and he laughed too, surprised by his outrageous, unfamiliar, carefree laugh. For a while, they laughed in harmony, he reinforced her and she him; they kept on laughing, for a long time; the reason was no longer important, only the laughing. It was like train rides, like the feeling that the banging sound on the rails, a sound of safety and the future, might never stop.

  ‘Today is Saturday,’ said Natalie quickly, when it was over. ‘So the bookshops are only open until four. I’m off.’

  ‘Natalie? I’d like to keep this conversation to ourselves. As if it had never taken place.’

  She laughed. ‘What conversation? Até logo.’

  Gregorius looked at the sweet wrapper he had put back in his coat pocket that night in the Liceu and had touched this morning when he groped in the pocket. He had picked up the receiver and asked for Inquiries. The operator had given him three numbers
for the name Rubin. The second had been the right one. He had felt as if he were jumping off a cliff into emptiness when he dialled. You couldn’t say that he had done it rashly or out of blind impulse. Several times he had had the receiver in his hand, had hung up again, and had gone to the window. Monday was March the first, and the light was different this morning. For the first time it was the light he had imagined when the train left Bern railway station in the snowstorm.

  Nothing was in favour of calling the girl. A sweet wrapper in a coat pocket was no reason to call a student out of the blue with whom you had never exchanged a personal word. Especially not if you had run away and a call might lead to a drama. Was that what had decided the matter: that nothing was in favour of it and everything was against it?

  And now they had laughed together, for some minutes. It had been like a touch. A light, hovering touch without resistance, something that made every physical touch seem like a clumsy, ridiculous manoeuvre. He had once read an article in the paper about a policeman who had let a convicted thief escape. We laughed together, the policeman had said as an excuse; so I could no longer lock him up. It simply didn’t work.

  Gregorius then called Mariana Eça and Mélodie. No answer. He set out for the Baixa, for Rua dos Sapateiros, where Jorge O’Kelly, as Father Bartolomeu had told him, still stood behind the counter of his pharmacy. It was the first time since he had arrived that he could wear his coat open. He felt the mild air on his face and noticed how glad he was that he hadn’t reached the two women on the phone. He had no idea what he had wanted to say to them.

  In the hotel, they had asked him how long he was planning to stay. ‘Não faço ideia,’ No idea, he had said, and then he had paid his bill so far. The woman at reception had watched him to the door, he had seen it in the mirror on the pillar. Now he walked slowly to Praça do Rossio. He pictured Natalie Rubin going to the Stauffacher bookshop. Did she know you had to try Haupt on Falkenplatz for the Persian grammar?