In the Shape of a Boar

by Lawrence Norfolk

  A young workman with untidy black hair got on at Bastille, took one disbelieving look and blushed. He stood rooted to the spot beside her, alternately examining the ceiling of the carriage, the scuffs on his boots and the two men in suits who occupied seats in the next section of the carriage. The head of the sleeping man now rested on the shoulder of his red-faced neighbour, where it rocked according to the motions of the train. The neighbour nudged him but this had no effect. Sol realised that the sleeping man must be drunk and he watched curiously to see how the situation would develop.

  As the train neared the end of the tunnel, the drunk made a chuckling sound in his sleep, surprisingly loud, as though mucus was bubbling in his throat. A smartly-dressed woman sitting across from him grimaced. But then Sol had been distracted. The train was approaching a point for which he waited with childish anticipation every time he travelled this line. He would not have let himself be distracted by prudish women or the drunks who offended them, even those wearing business suits.

  Shortly after Quai de la Rapée the train emerged from the darkness of the tunnel and seemed to launch itself into space. The carriage's dingy light was suddenly washed away in a flood of sunlight and Sol found himself in mid-air, high above the river, the train curving left then right like a roller-coaster. He twisted in his seat to peer down at the water ten or twenty metres below while the wheels clattered over the ironwork of the bridge.

  When he turned back he saw that the red-faced man had stopped fanning himself. Now his face was pale. But of course he had seen a hundred different details. The next stop was Austerlitz. People were shuffling towards the doors, as they always did, elbowing politely for position. They had local trains to catch to Dourdan and Saint Martin d'Etampes, mainline ones to Clermont-Ferrand or even Toulouse. It had been a Friday.

  The workman had tired of staring at his boots and, still anxious not to be seen staring at the girl's breasts (was it Sol's imagination which had her thrust them out towards the workman?), had chosen the drunk as the new focus of his attention. But the drunk included the red-faced man next to him. Observation of one necessarily involved the other. As the train shot over the river, Sol saw the young workman swivel around and bend his head as if transfixed by something on the floor. The young woman did not react, but Sol looked for whatever had prompted this odd manoeuvre.

  Something was wrong. The red-faced man was no longer red-faced, but pale. He seemed to be in the grip of a convulsion. He bent forward as though to rise to his feet, shrugging off the head of the drunk. But as Sol watched, he slumped back into his seat and the drunk's head fell back against his shoulder. He sat rigidly, enduring this unwanted contact while the remaining colour drained from his face. Now his face was ashen. The woman opposite him had noticed but seemed unwilling to offer assistance. An elderly couple exchanged glances and looked down at their laps. Some of those waiting to get off must have noticed the man's discomfort but now the train was pulling into the station. In a few moments they would be able to pull on the handles and the doors would spring open, releasing them from obligation. The girl was facing away from Sol; he could not see if she was aware of the man's distress or not. Suddenly he clutched his stomach and this time his face screwed up in pain. His drunk neighbour lolled in sympathy. Sol watched discreetly as the sightlines of those nearest wove a fabulous net. They peered out of windows, read advertisements, searched for things in their pockets. Escape from us, they urged the sick man. The drunk's head bounced against the other man's shoulder; the polite fiction that the drunk would wake, would prove to be an associate of the sick man, and thus responsible for him, was tacitly sustained. He would have to deteriorate further before anyone would help him. Sol felt a surge of curiosity. The woman seated opposite kept glancing up at the passengers crowding around the door. She was waiting for one of them to act. But the train was slowing, blurred faces resolving into passengers waiting on the platform. The elderly couple seemed engaged in private prayer. Perhaps they were waiting for the girl to intervene (Sol wished he could have seen her face), or the workman, or even himself. But no one moved. Sol's assumption was that the businessman was having a heart attack.

  Then the brakes squealed, the train halted and, as the passengers poured out, the sick man tried to stand.

  He heaved himself up by the rail nearest the door then half-swung, half-fell out onto the platform. Suddenly unsupported, the drunk toppled to the floor. Sol rose and hurried out onto the platform.

  But the sick man had fallen among the commuters crowding around the doors and, spurred so emphatically into action, they closed about him, calling for doctors and station-attendants and the police. Then, just as suddenly, they sprang back. The man had retched. He knelt on all fours with a filament of spittle dangling from his mouth. Someone offered a tissue. An official trotted up and began to coax the man to his feet, telling the onlookers to stand back, that the train was about to depart. The businessman was muttering apologies and explanations, now anxious only to be away.

  Of course he was, Sol would reflect later. Then, however, he saw only that the drunk still lay on the floor of the carriage. The official, who might have been expected to pull him off the train, had disappeared with the sick man. The passengers entering were left to step over the prone figure. A man in blue overalls reached down to shake him awake, but he was holding up the flow and those behind forced him inside. The doors slammed shut.

  Standing a little way up the platform, Sol watched the train begin to move off. Then he understood, as he should have done when the ‘drunk’ had fallen to the floor, or perhaps when he had seemed to chuckle to himself.

  But the sick and the drunk were among those whose public signals were to be ignored. They had committed the offence of obligation. The ‘sick’ man had understood this and had relied upon it. The ‘drunk’ had been beyond understanding. The train had imparted its own motion to the body whose head had rested on the sick man's shoulder. Of course, Sol realised then, the ‘sick’ man had known much earlier, perhaps all along. He had decided to choke down his nausea and continue his journey regardless. After all, he must have calculated, the ‘drunk’ whose presence he had endured, his body pressed against his own, had not looked like a corpse.

  Sol never knew what sign alerted the passengers remaining in the carriage. The signals of the dead, he thought later, were as liable to be ignored as the signals of the drunk. Almost as soon as the train began to move, the well-dressed woman looked down at where the man lay, invisible to Sol. Her expression changed quickly from distaste, to bewilderment, and then to recognition. She rose from her seat, her mouth opening and closing. The elderly man shielded his wife's eyes. Others stared. The windows rolled past like frames in a film, each one more frenetic than the last. Sol saw the young workman lunge; he was reaching for someone. The girl, he decided – it could only have been the girl. But she had moved down the carriage. How had he and the workman both failed to notice that? The train was gathering speed. Here she came, leaning casually against the opposite door. But she was paying no attention to the corpse at her feet. She was watching Sol.

  He knew now. He knew what the painting on the banner sought among his own particular abattoir of memories. The wind died down. The man standing on the scaffolding grasped the last guy-line and pulled taut the corner of the banner. Sol turned and resumed walking along the embankment. Soon pont Mirabeau came into view, his apartment block visible on the far side. No lights showed from its windows.

  For a week or so after the incident he had picked up discarded newspapers from park benches and bus seats, and had scanned the columns where men bit dogs and long-separated orphans found themselves trapped together in elevators. A man in Clichy had been charged with keeping pigs in his fifth-floor apartment; the son of a postman had discovered ‘some roomfuls’ of undelivered letters in the house of his late father, and the dwarf-troupe of an East German circus on a tour of its European twin-towns had defected in mid-performance at Braunschweig. But no drunken businessman
had died in his sleep on the Métro the previous Friday and no corpse had ridden halfway across Paris, unnoticed or ignored by his fellow passengers. What had happened to those passengers after the carriage had pulled out of Gare d’ Austerlitz, Sol wondered. They seemed to have disappeared, carried off down a single-track line to where nothing happened. Where did those tracks lead? The brakes had hissed as they were released and the couplings between the carriages had clattered down the length of the train. He had looked up as the carriage approached.

  Her hair had fallen over her face. The girl was now somewhat set apart from the other passengers, who must have shrunk back from the dead man. The corpse had divided the living, as the dead often do, he thought later. There were those who had ignored a man they believed to be dying, and those who had mistaken a dying man for a drunk, and those who had stepped over his corpse. One had tried to help but had yielded to the will of the others. In a moment or two another of them would call for order and calm. A doctor would be plausible, travelling down to place d'Italie for an appointment with his mistress. The others would rally to his call and absolve themselves in hushed concern while the doctor knelt and searched in vain for a pulse.

  That would be in a moment or two. For now they played victims and their acting was poor to Sol's eyes. How happily they would have fled their carriage, spilling out of the doors, affecting the stumbling gait of panicked animals or imbeciles.

  But who was there to bellow the orders, or bang a truncheon against the side of the carriage? Of the participants in this drama, only he stood outside on the platform. The old couple, pious in their absorption, the bourgeois woman, the young workman rearing out of a fantasy in which he clasped the girl protectively to his chest, or fondled her breasts. Here she came now.

  He walked across pont Mirabeau to his apartment block. The outer door resisted, then swung open suddenly when he leaned against it. The antiquated elevator was waiting. The building's other occupants were careful always to close both sets of doors and press the red Bakelite button which sent it back down to the ground floor. Its brass grille clattered shut. Somewhere high above him a cable twitched and the car shivered in response. He rose through the silent building.

  If he were honest, he would admit that he had lied. If only to himself.

  Once inside, he moved from room to room, switching on every light in the apartment. From the kitchen he took a glass and the bottle of American whiskey, then moved through to the small dining-room, where he settled at a table pushed up against the only window. By day it overlooked the river, the Radio France building and the jumbled roofs of Muette. Now the glass reflected and framed the image of a low-ceilinged room. Next to the door, a row of overcrowded bookcases was partly obscured by a couch and the two straight-backed wooden chairs which faced it across a small coffee-table. The foreground was dominated by the face of a man in his late forties or early fifties with black or brown receding hair. His face. He closed his eyes and the screen went dark. He opened them.

  ‘Good evening.’

  Her gesture to the middle-aged man standing alone on the platform had been neither aggressive nor salacious. Himself. Even confined with the other passengers, she was apart from them, as she had been all along. It occured to Sol that if he were to travel this line daily, at this time, for a single week, then he would probably re-encounter everyone in the carriage. But not her. And not the corpse. That was where her allegiance lay, finally. Those two were on a different train. As the carriage had drawn level with him she had shifted her stance and spread her legs a little wider. They had watched each other blankly. Then, in a single casual gesture, she had reached down and pulled up her skirt.

  ‘My name is Solomon Memel,’ he said to his reflection. ‘For reasons that are obvious, given that I am a Jew and the year was 1943, I left the town in which I had grown up and fled to an area of Greece called Agrapha. It means the Unwritten Places. There I witnessed events experienced by many at that time. In consequence, after the war, I became famous as the poet of Die Keilerjagd, of which you may have heard. You may be among the three million or so who own a copy. You may even have read it.’

  In the unwatchable black behind the glare of his reflection, the banner masking the façade of the Grand Palais rippled in the wind. The floodlights illuminating the image printed upon it would have been switched off by now, he supposed. Its cracks would be darker, its creases deeper, the ragged tissues smoothed at first, then stretched and split by one of memory's miraculous wounds. Underneath her skirt, the girl on the train had worn nothing. He had stared at her oddly childish body, naked from her waist to the tops of her boots and forked at the gaping split of her sex.

  But he had lied to himself, he realised, in recalling that particular moment as though that were the memory prompted by the Englishman's painting. What had he seen when he had looked up at the banner stretched across the Grand Palais's façade? A sexualised gash of some sort, some clottish aping of L'Origine du Monde. And what had he remembered? A bizarre moment in an otherwise ordinary Friday afternoon at the Gare d'Austerlitz. That memory was a lie. ‘Her sex’ had not ‘gaped’. He had not seen its ‘split’. An untidy nest of thick black hair covered her crotch. He had stared. A second later she would let her skirt fall again. The silly, shrieking passengers noticed nothing. Liars. All of us, he thought. The memory elicited by the English painter's daub lay as far behind the girl's outrageous salute as forgetting would permit. What he had remembered in the dark recession at the painting's centre was a substitute, an effacement. The girl's sex was what he could bear to recall and thus not what he could not.

  ‘Whether you have read my poem or not,’ he continued, ‘you will know that I wrote of a Greek partisan as both herself and Atalanta. And I speak German as my mother tongue.’

  He paused to consider what he should say next and drained his first glass of whiskey.

  ‘The exit wounds inflicted by certain firearms can resemble a woman's sex when aroused: one of war's more tasteless visual puns. But true, as I can testify from experience. Confusion between the two can result in episodes of impotence and delusional behaviour. To which I can also testify.’ He refilled his glass.

  Ruth had looked as he imagined she would. The years had added definition to her features. He had expected her to be surprised at his own appearance after almost three decades. Presumably photographs of him appeared in America from time to time. Poetry journals requested them. He finished the second glass and poured a third. How odd the people who arrived, emerging out of the features of others. And always uninvited. Sandor's face told him nothing, so many people had passed through it. He wondered if it had been the youthful Ruth that he had recognised in Lisa Angludet, or, just perhaps, the altogether harsher angles of the one whom Ruth hoped to draw out of those soft, over-full cheeks and lips. Her eyes had been right; the rest all wrong. The eyes never change, he thought. Not even in death.

  He sought his own eyes in the reflection in the window. His own sought those of a girl on a train. Had he seen her face before that moment? He had no image of it at all. He had thought her ‘beautiful’ and ‘sulky’. But she had stood sideways on to him, her head angled away. A mass of dark hair, the hinge of her jaw and a single high cheekbone; nothing more came to mind. The carriage slid across the field of his vision. She flicked the hair away from her face to reveal a high forehead and prominent brow and cheekbones, a strong face that was barely softened by a full mouth. The dead looking through the living.

  But all of this had come to him afterwards. Remembrance, however insistent and unwelcome, could not have come before recognition. Only when she had dropped her skirt had he lifted his gaze from her crotch and looked up. There was no doubt. Framed in the carriage window, her black eyes had followed him as the train pulled her away. She wore Thyella's face.

  The young workman had been pressed against the window. Struggling with the catch to let in some air, his cheeks sucked in with the effort. There it went.

  ‘Solomon!’ he hissed fr
om too far up the platform to be heard, too deep within the life he had buried. It was Jakob.

  ‘Sol! Did you find my letter?’ He grinned. ‘Don't forget the truth, eh?’

  Then both of them were gone.

  ***

  It was still early. The curfew would not lift for another half an hour at least. Sol glanced at his wrist, forgetting that he no longer owned a watch. He waited behind the row of cottages which formed the southern boundary of Schillerpark.

  Ahead of him, the familiar shallow slope of the park led his eye past the poplar trees to the crest of the gentle ridge above which showed the tops of the chestnuts where Jakob, Ruth and himself had been used to sit. But that was in a previous life. In this one the parks were forbidden; he had not set foot in any of them in eighteen months. It had seemed a trivial restriction among all the others, but this Monday morning it was the snare into which he had had no choice but to tread. Regulations interdicted the streets between six in the evening and eight in the morning. They interdicted the parks at any time. They forbade absence from the roll-call, which took place at the assigned workplace at eight sharp.

  To be here, or there, or not, at this time or that time: all were offences under the regulations, which had multiplied until it had become impossible to remember them all. The railway station was interdicted, unless one were taken: then it was forbidden to leave. There had been a rumour during the first wave of deportations that a man named Fischl had talked the guards at the station into taking his parents off the train. But Fischl, if he existed, was an anomalous creature; the snares set by the town's current masters were ingenious devices and did not release their captives so easily. Their dogs were tireless and could not be distracted or thrown off the scent. There were new inevitabilities. The thought sank into Sol as a lassitude which rooted him there, suddenly uncaring as to what might happen. To do nothing, to wait passively, merely to exist. What else had his parents done? That, too, was an offence under the regulations.