The Angel's Cut

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘My grandfather got a grip on the cloth and pulled. He ignored the quarrel outside. He gathered two handfuls of material and shook the bundle till the cloth was free. Then he carried what he had in his hands to the hole and handed a wine-stained mess of disintegrating silk up to his uncle. He heard the winemaker say, “Is that all of it?” and answered that no, he’d only pulled the silk free from another mass. Then he shuffled back out of the light, through the encapsulated warmth of fermentation, and closer to that strange, powerful cold odour.

  ‘And what my grandfather said he touched then, and tried to lift, was a damp mass of feathers. He hauled the mass over to the light and that’s when he, and his uncle above him, saw the wing.

  ‘The wing was white—grandfather said—and there was wine on the feathers but not staining them. Small beads of wine sat on the feathers like crystals of water on the back of a duck.’

  De Valday paused and leaned back in his chair. ‘The family sent the winemaker away—dismissing him on the spot. Then they opened the other “Angel” and lowered my grandfather into it and had him remove the wine-ruined silk from the other wing. The wings were unwrapped, and left in the barrels. Then the barrels were sealed and haven’t been opened since.’

  De Valday looked at Flora with the look of someone who knows he’s told a good story and is more interested in its being appreciated than believed. Green caught Flora’s eye and made a gesture, less a nod than a spasm of enthusiasm. ‘What do you think?’ he said.

  For a moment she wasn’t able to think anything. Her mind only blazed, painlessly, as though she were freshly on fire. And then she remembered Xas’s figure, glimpsed through her kitchen window, out on the paper road in the rain, white skin whiter still in patches like mist floating below high, even cloud. She thought of the brief, taunting correspondence she’d had, and the startling unworldliness of the person who’d written the notes. She thought of an awning torn from a shop front and used as notepaper, of the stealth it would take to have spread that canvas at her door, for the crackling tarred tin on her veranda had given nothing away. She remembered Xas saying that the pearls had belonged to a relative of his. And she thought that, of course, that relative had wings—still had wings—and had dropped down out of the sky above her house to ask after Xas.

  Flora didn’t answer Green, she only put out her hand for the pearls. Henri de Valday poured them into her palm. She stretched the rope out taut and gave it several sharp, strenuous tugs, so that the pearls vibrated, singing. The string held; it had no give.

  ‘Careful,’ de Valday said. He retrieved the pearls from Flora, and shook an admonishing finger at her.

  Flora apologised. Then she said to Green, ‘I wanted to see for myself.’ But what she was thinking was: ‘Angels are indestructible.’

  Balboa Yacht Club

  March, 1931

  When Flora hailed Crow’s boat he appeared on deck and gave her his hand to steady her as she stepped aboard. Then she was pulled into a hug and, for a moment, her face was against his cotton sweater with its smell of soap and expensive whisky. She took a deep breath. He set her away from him and frowned. ‘You look hungover,’ he said, then, mischievously, ‘Would you like a drink?’ She declined, and he went down into the galley to make his own and talked to her as he did about her cut of Haywire, the film he had shot on the side of Helen Hope with his own money and some siphoned from the studio’s official project.

  Flora listened to his voice and the noises from the marina, water lapping against the hull, and the clack of hawsers against masts. She looked over the side at the deep green water in the lee of the boat. She tried to imagine Xas’s fall from Cole’s plane. She found she couldn’t visualise the fall itself so instead conjured an image of Xas surfacing from water like this, bubble-blistered seawater streaming off his upturned face. He would look for Cole’s plane, far off, dwindling in the sky. Flora imagined the expression on his face, a look she’d seen often but had never understood, an alert and deeply thoughtful look, that she now knew meant he was trying to fathom some human feeling he had never felt himself—Cole’s vengeful spite.

  Crow came up from below and gave Flora a cup of coffee. He had remembered how she liked it. He sat beside her. ‘Edna is out of hospital,’ he said, his voice now low and confiding.

  Crow’s wife had had another month-long stay in a private clinic. It was general knowledge that she suffered from bad nerves, and bouts of unhappiness when she would lapse into a silence and inactivity so profound that she eventually needed to be washed and fed, put to bed and got up, moved from garden to dayroom to her own room like a pale, poseable mannequin.

  ‘She’s much better,’ Crow reported. ‘She’s always better when she’s pregnant.’

  Despite herself Flora sighed. It was true that Edna was better when she was pregnant. But she had suffered her most serious breakdowns in the months following the delivery of each child. Besides, Flora had thought that Crow had finally decided to divorce his wife. Crow wasn’t so much tired of his marriage as worn out by all the alarms and discouragements of living with someone who couldn’t seem to find any durable happiness in herself. And then there was Carol, Crow’s secretary. Carol and Crow had been lovers for three years now and, as far as Flora knew, Crow had been faithful to Carol—excepting Edna, obviously, since Edna was pregnant again.

  ‘I suppose you think I’m hopeless,’ Crow said.

  ‘I did think that there was only Carol now. You and she are always together.’

  ‘Edna and I have twelve years of marriage and three children in common. We once knew all the same people. We’re connected, and all our connections would have to be cut.’

  Flora thought that Edna was like one of Crow’s heroines—was possibly their model—a fatefully sad, tired, and touching person. The heroines of his films loved consolation. They liked to fall asleep with their heads on the heroes’ shoulders. After nothing—a narrative nothing that wasn’t to do with censorship, and all the new entrenchments in the rules of decency for film. No—they would fall asleep after no lovemaking, after nothing more than an offer of understanding. Was it any wonder Crow was having trouble with the crusading Helen Hope?

  Flora opened her mouth to begin saying what she’d come to say, that she had solved Crow’s problem with that film, that she’d found a charitable occupation for Miss Hope, something that would film beautifully and add interest to the movie. She was about to speak when Crow said, ‘You should be careful yourself.’

  Flora looked at him and lifted an eyebrow.

  ‘I don’t have any objections to Pete per se, but you should be careful nevertheless.’

  ‘Pete sometimes sees me home. It’s meaningless, Connie.’

  ‘Pete couldn’t spend five minutes alone with an attractive woman without handling her.’

  ‘And he’s welcome,’ Flora said, defiantly. ‘There’s no harm in it. I’m surprised you even know about it, that anyone’s bothered to tell you.’

  Crow blushed. ‘Flora, I’m not worried about your reputation, I’m worried about your health.’

  Flora understood then that Crow knew more about her then he was entitled to. Drunk, she had confided in Gil, and Gil had passed on what she’d said to his brother. But Connie had no business knowing, and she didn’t want him looking at her and seeing someone neutered by an injury. She said, ‘I’m touched by your concern,’ cool. ‘But it’s none of your business.’

  Crow made a soothing motion, patting the air between them. They were quiet for some time after that. There was no sound but the lapping of the slightly oily water against the hull, the wooden bells of the hawsers, and a crackling of ice cubes in Crow’s whisky. ‘So, Flora,’ Crow said, finally, ‘to what do I owe the honour of this visit?’

  ‘I finally thought of something for Helen Hope to do, to be seen doing. Something that will play well.’

  ‘Good! I just had a spat with Stahr about bloody Helen Hope. He knows I’m dawdling, but not that I’ve made a whole other film.
Anyway, he told me I was just a technician, and I told him he was only a businessman. And fortunately that was the end of it—in our mutual understanding that we’re both too honest to imagine ourselves as visionaries and artists.’

  ‘My idea should work,’ Flora said. ‘Then perhaps the businessman will stop breathing down your neck.’

  Intermission

  Berlin

  August, 1931

  One day, after the shoot had wrapped but before the film was shown—Kameradschaft, the film on which he’d worked as a carpenter, then as a pyrotechnician—Xas received Flora’s message.

  He’d spent the day in a beer hall. The beer halls were inviting, he thought, a novelty anyway. It seemed to him that Germans had lately turned into Russians—all of a sudden they were extravagantly sentimental, in public at least, and liable to jump up to make speeches and sing songs. All the zealotry and sentimentality at his table was about the job they’d done. Everyone was making promises. He was promised more work. There had to be more work for, they said, a man with such a feeling for fire.

  Xas spent all afternoon drinking his share of beer till his innards were sloshing, and listening, puzzled and muzzy, to the speeches. He joined in the singing, and forgot to moderate his voice so that everyone in his vicinity eventually stopped singing themselves to stare at him in astonishment. He was quiet after that, and only listened—making a conscious attempt to assimilate the changes in the city he had supposed he knew. Finally, when the sentimentality began to seem a little sinister, he got up and went out into the day, using the banister to haul himself up the stairs—so drunk that his balance was impaired.

  Outside there were more inebriated people sprawled on benches built around the trunks of old linden trees. But beyond the plaza Xas found a quiet street, where families strolled in the evening air, and bathers lounged on the banks of the river while boats glided by, rowed with vigorous but silent synchronicity. The angel found a urinal and pissed not urine but beer, with only a little of its alcohol and sugar subtracted from its mix, then went on his way feeling lighter but still light-headed.

  He was passing a cinema when a poster in its box office caught his eye: ‘Monroe Stahr presents Helen Hope, a film by Conrad Crow.’ There was a picture of Franchot Tone and some actress with eyebrows like two fairytale bridges.

  Xas bought a ticket. He sat through half of another feature film, and a selection of shorts—a strike by sailors in the Royal Navy, Scotland; bank riots in Düsseldorf—and then the film started, and Xas took note of Flora’s name on the credits.

  The heroine, Helen Hope, after a run of man and money trouble, found shape and direction in her flighty life by teaching painting at a school for deaf children. Whole minutes of the film were without dialogue, and seemed silent, made for the eye only, despite the music and the sounds of hands clapping, or rubber balls bouncing on pavement. The film ended with an embrace on the front steps of the school. Helen Hope and her man were holding hands—or, still not quite in accord, still resisting one another—their hands came together as if to say, ‘Stay, and argue with me.’ As they came together the school doors opened and the pupils spilled out for recess. One boy, Helen’s tough-guy favourite, noticed the vestigial embrace. He grabbed at his friends, then began to flap his arms to get their attention. Then his flapping turned into the universal gesture for ‘come back’. ‘Come back’ he signalled to the other children, and then looked up at the couple. His face grew brilliant with delight. He had caught them kissing. The camera didn’t show the kiss, only the boy’s delight, and his signalling hand growing still and going up to touch his own mouth.

  Xas, sitting in the dark, thought, ‘How like Crow not to show the kiss. Not to satisfy us in any ordinary way.’ He was entranced, he was admiring—but these were cold reactions. After all, he had taken in the other thing, that Flora McLeod had got her friend Crow to film what he, Xas, had told her he’d like to see filmed, and had used that deaf child’s vivid face and graceful hands to call him back to her.

  He had new clothes, a silk shirt and flannel trousers, a pale grey jacket and hat—a fedora, at a time when many other men had adopted Tyrolean hats with little feather cockades. Then again, young men were also wearing lederhosen. Xas didn’t know quite what to think of this adoption of peasant costume by clerks, students, and city folk. It wasn’t yet a wholesale adoption, but there was something in it more fervent than faddish. It puzzled him. He didn’t like it, and he wasn’t going to do it.

  The angel arrived at the Hintersee country house looking respectable in his new clothes, if a little rumpled from the train and cab ride. Frau Hintersee took him off the maid who’d opened the door to him, and conducted him through the house and out onto the long lawn that sloped down to a canal, where her husband, August, had his narrow boat.

  She explained, ‘August likes to keep out of the way of the young people. They were all here this summer, our nieces and nephews as well as our own children. It can be very noisy. August says he needs quiet because he’s writing a book, but I see no sign of it. He reads. I think that’s all he does.’

  The canal was a vivid green, and black where the willows dabbled their long fronds into their shadows. The water was still, disturbed only by tiny spasms of insects touching-down or taking-off or stepping across the water on their hair-like legs.

  As Frau Hintersee and Xas neared the gangplank she waved to her husband, who was sitting in a deckchair in the shade behind the wheelhouse. August had his shoes off and an open book resting on the slope of his belly. He looked up at them—and didn’t wave, or move. Frau Hintersee stayed on the riverbank, and watched her guest step across the gangplank. Then she turned away and trudged back up the slope.

  Xas leaned on the rail at the back of the barge. There was about ten feet separating him and the man in the deck chair. He took off his hat and brushed his hair back—he was wearing it long on top now, and it fell forward unless he oiled it, and he often didn’t oil it because it was so thick it took too much oil. ‘I feel I should be standing, hat in hand,’ he said.

  Hintersee only stared.

  ‘I want to say that I regret the way I acted when we met last,’ Xas said, ‘and that I’ve now learned that the policies I made for myself about how to treat people don’t work. That if I act in a certain way at the outset—if I smile, share a beer, show affection, mend a roof—I can’t then just say “no”.’

  ‘You threatened me,’ Hintersee said at last.

  ‘Not with anything,’ Xas protested. Then he gave Hintersee his name and spelled it. He did this as though it was a great concession. ‘What happened in 1917 haunted you,’ Xas said. ‘And it was reasonable for you to want to understand it. But I didn’t want to discuss it any more than I wanted to hear then—in 1917—what the malalak had to say to me.’ He used the Hebrew word for messenger. He said, ‘Sooner or later one of Them is going to try to explain Himself to me. God—or Lucifer. But though there may be a reason why my wings were cut off, a reason for doing it, and for letting it be done, the reason is nothing compared to the act. The world of the act is a different one from the world of the reason.’

  ‘After you jumped from the observer’s car,’ Hintersee said, ‘and after what I overheard, nothing we were doing made the sense it had. I lost my stomach for the fight. I lost interest in my men. I felt I had a new duty to—to the mystery of what had happened. It seemed to me we were all wasting years staring through gun sights instead of looking into—’ He trailed off.

  The hinges and canvas of Hintersee’s chair creaked as he dismounted from it. His book dropped onto the deck. He put one foot out of the wheelhouse shade then lifted it again immediately, its sole striped with soft tar from the deck’s caulking. ‘What do you think God wants from us?’ he asked Xas.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you think He wants us to better ourselves?’

  ‘God thinks you are all automatically improved by dying after a blameless life.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we wa
nt better for ourselves? For instance, a society free of poverty and degeneracy?’

  Xas shrugged.

  ‘You mustn’t just shrug!’ his captain said, chiding.

  ‘Sorry,’ Xas said. ‘I’m sure God approves of improvements. But should people be wondering what God wants of them?’

  Hintersee looked surprised, but not scandalised. Then he looked thoughtful. ‘The world could be more like Heaven,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose it could,’ Xas agreed, mildly. He got up and joined the man in the shade, stood beside him for a moment, then leaned on him, as a dog leans on its master’s leg.

  Hintersee put an arm around Xas, as much to maintain his balance as to show affection. Then Hintersee was conquered by the smell of the angel’s body. Xas smelled of the air up high; air without any obstacles. The man breathed deeply. They were standing hip to hip, and Hintersee tilted his head so that his temple touched Xas’s. He heard Xas’s voice, both in the air and through the bones of their skulls. Xas sounded gentle, ingenuous, submissive. He said, ‘I hear Lake Werner is crossing the Atlantic again next month.’

  Los Angeles, and a spa in the Sierras

  October, 1931

  Flora was very busy cutting films for the studio. In May Stahr had called her into his office to say how much he admired her cut of Helen Hope. He told her that he was aware she had more than an editor’s hand in the film. The studio had some top-end films in production and he wanted Flora to edit them. ‘You can be a kind of backstop for our directors. Not all of them need one, but I’m going to be a lot more confident knowing you’re on the job.’