In the Shape of a Boar

by Lawrence Norfolk

He must have passed out again. The blur of pain panicked him as consciousness returned. Answer, he told himself, answer quickly. But there were no questions. Eberhardt was speaking softly, as if to himself.

  ‘Geraxos is significant. A few hundred men, but the right men and in the right place. The old man knows how to fight this war. You encountered his grandson. Xanthos. The old man will not give him a thought. A good commander knows how to spill blood.’ Eberhardt nodded slowly to himself. ‘This war will be won in the mountains; the old man knows that. I have seen his handiwork.’ His face was inches from Sol's own. ‘And hers. Yes, you remember her, of course. Thyella. The Greeks fear her more than him, Herr Memel. Can you imagine? I will tell you why. I will show you. But all in good time.’ His hands moved around the cloth package, his fingertips tapping soundlessly on the wood.

  ‘Why would they take the trouble to save you, Herr Memel? You want this to be over. I understand that. It will be very soon, but you must pay attention.’

  Sol nodded slowly.

  ‘Good. You are found near death in the mountains of Greece, in a place the local people call Khaxani. It means the Cauldron. By shepherds, our blue-eyed informer has told us, after some prompting. But there are no “shepherds” in the Cauldron. There is no water. Nothing grows. There is nothing but a crater and the cliffs which surround it on all sides. The partisans found you and they took the trouble to carry you out. How, or why, I do not know. There is a gorge. I am told that a man who knows the route well might make the journey in a day and a night. And they carried you out.’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘Yes, you were dead to the world, unconscious. We have established that. And the gorge is not so mysterious after all. Inhospitable, certainly. Defensible too, at any number of points. But how did you come to be there, Herr Memel? Geraxos's men use the gorge. The village where they held you stands at its mouth. Their presence is unsurprising. Fortuitous perhaps, for you. But how was it that you were there to be found?’

  Eberhardt's voice had changed. There was no speculation in his question.

  ‘There are strategic aspects to this question. Tactical possibilities which, in certain circumstances, would transform Geraxos's little platoon into a force of great significance. Unlikely circumstances, but still . . .’

  The silence thickened and gathered in the room. Then Eberhardt turned to the Greek and said something in his own language. The man nodded, clearly surprised, then picked up his jacket and walked out of the room. The two of them listened to his footsteps recede down the corridor. The far door opened and closed.

  ‘He will not be necessary, you might be relieved to learn. Just the two of us for this part, Herr Memel. A way down may also be a way up. A way in may also signify a way out; and if there exists a way out of the Cauldron . . .’

  ‘I don't know.’

  He felt the cuts in his mouth reopen and begin to seep. Blood trickled over his tongue: a metallic taste.

  ‘You do not wish to betray your comrades. It is understandable. Even though they would have killed you rather than let you fall into my hands. They are fighting for their country. Even a Jew, who has no country . . . But of course you have not seen their handiwork. Times have changed since Homer, Herr Memel.’ Eberhardt smiled sadly. ‘You will answer my question now and you will live. You have my word, which will mean nothing to you, but you have it. I have good reason to keep you alive, Herr Memel. I only wish I could tell you it. Your decision would be so much easier.’

  There was an error in what the officer said. Thyella had had the chance to kill him last night and she had not. She had knocked away the barrel of the gun. What did that mean?

  The Colonel exhaled regretfully when Sol remained silent. His hands moved to the package which lay on the table between them. He began to unfold the sacking.

  ‘Perhaps you saw Kariskakis's men at work in the village. An ugly sight. They are old enemies, he and Geraxos. Kariskakis led an attack on him through the gorge almost a year ago. There was a failure of intelligence. A number of Kariskakis's men were captured, his sons among them. Kariskakis found their bodies hanging from trees outside his village. It was the manner of their hanging, however, for which he seeks revenge. And what had been done to them before their deaths, by Thyella.’

  Eberhardt unwrapped the instrument.

  Sol looked down. He knew now how the men in the village had been killed, and why the partisan had recoiled.

  ‘Kariskakis removed one of these from each of his sons and vowed to return them in like manner. You see, once driven through, the body's own weight . . . But you understand. Death can be very slow. How did you come to be in the Cauldron, Herr Memel?’

  One of Sol's eyes had closed. The flesh of his face and neck throbbed and seemed either to stiffen or swell with each pulse of blood. The room was humid from the water which had pooled at his feet and steamed from his soaking clothes. He saw Thyella's arm pushing down the barrel of the gun, her finger being raised to her lips, for silence. Eberhardt's fingers traced the length of the shank. His thumb pressed lightly against one pointed end.

  ‘There are those among my colleagues who cannot think beyond bridges and railways, roads, lines of communication and supply. They see the barbarism, but they do not understand it. It has always been here, in the mountains. Even before Homer. That is where it comes from; it will be defeated only there.’

  Eberhardt was a tall man whose long face seemed to elongate his body further. A high forehead disappeared finally in wisps of black hair slicked down and back over the high dome of his skull. This unexceptional countenance came alive now, as he spoke of a war against all that could not be civilised or tamed. But it was a monologue and Eberhardt was its true audience too, Sol realised. It was growing harder and harder to remain upright. Soon he would have to answer the question put to him, or refuse to do so. He thought back to the few minutes he had spent in the Cauldron before he had sunk to the ground in exhaustion.

  ‘Now, Herr Memel, for the last time. There will be no time to recant once the animals outside are loosed upon you. They wanted Geraxos's grandson, but I have my own plans for him. They wanted Thyella and could not hold her. Only you are left. How did you reach the floor of the Cauldron?’

  The officer's eyes fixed on his face. Sol swallowed with difficulty.

  ‘There is a cave,’ he began.

  He dropped his gaze to the table, where Eberhardt's hands gripped and released the instrument, never once looking up after those first words, for he had seen in the officer's face that his words had been anticipated and believed.

  ***

  The lights dimmed and for a moment the auditorium was in absolute darkness. The projector whirred; a rectangle of luminous black flecked with fleeting splinters of light appeared before them. It vanished and was replaced by washes of colour cut horizontally across the screen. At the top, a distant mountainous interior stood out against the dark blue of a dawn or evening sky, the farthest peaks snow-capped and pinked with light. The bottom half was water, which rippled and shivered a few metres beyond the prow of the boat, growing smoother with distance. The boat rail was a blurred white bar wavering over a shoreline lost in haze and diluted colours, sandy browns and liquid greys. The boat was changing course, the whole scene slowly sliding to the right and bringing the lights of a small town into view. Beyond it was a wide stretch of water and a headland, but very distant, if it existed at all. A small grinning boy leaped up, waved and fell from sight. There was no sound.

  ‘Antirio,’ said Ruth. ‘The ferry docks there. Messolonghi is further around the headland.’

  ‘That rise further inland must be Aracynthus,’ Sol replied. ‘The lower slope.’

  ‘It's called Mount Zygos now,’ said Ruth.

  They were sitting in plush upholstered seats in the basement of the building. The screen glared and darkened and glared again, washing their faces in light. Sol settled in the soft embrace of the chair.

  His taxi had crawled the last kilometre, trapped
behind a truck carrying steel sections of an enormous yellow crane. A new business district was rising to the north-west of the city. He had arrived anxious and late at the address on the edge of the seventeenth arrondissement. Ruth had been waiting in reception with Vittorio.

  ‘You made it. I'm happy. We had trouble finding a projector to run this stock. It's an old format.’

  Ruth looked tired and distracted. They had been shooting for three weeks. There had been a row on set the day before. Ruth had called a break and telephoned Sol. Now Vittorio reached across to shake hands.

  ‘Let's go. They're ready downstairs,’ Ruth said to the two men.

  Some brief scenes followed the approach to the coast: a wooden jetty with a large hut beside it; a narrow curving street and children running past the camera; a girl turning back to stare, bewilderment on her face; a crossroad with no traffic in sight but a bench under a tree and three old men sitting on it, all smoking, one either waving or warding off the camera. The film was overexposed and the colours weak.

  ‘Who shot this?’ asked Vittorio.

  ‘Local crew,’ said Ruth.

  ‘You should have got people from Athens. Angelopoulos. Or Makis Barouch.’

  Ruth pursed her lips. ‘No budget. Anyway, the later stuff is better.’

  Vittorio snorted. Ruth was sitting between the two men and at this she turned from her cameraman to Sol and made a face. Sol smiled back, thinking that he saw the girl he had known surface momentarily in Ruth's features. She turned away.

  The next sequence had been shot from the window of a vehicle. The jerky footage showed stunted bushes of indeterminate colour punctuating a parched reddish-brown landscape. The land rose and the road twisted so that the camera swept to left and right in wide pans. Little stalls with wooden tables and roofs of corrugated iron flashed past, all deserted.

  The scene changed. The vehicle had been a bus or a coach; its light-blue form crept slowly out of shot. The screen filled with a massive shape which rose in spurs and ever-steepening slopes, reaching higher and higher until its dark vegetation thinned and disappeared. The sky above was intense blue and when Sol turned to Ruth he saw her face tinged with the same colour.

  ‘I know where we are,’ he told her. She turned to him but said nothing, most of her face in shadow.

  The camera moved slowly back down the mountainside. Sol said, ‘That's Aracynthus again, or Zygos. From the south. This was shot from the bridge. The work camp was on the far side and a little way up the valley to the right. Below the ruins.’

  Ruth still made no response.

  ‘What ruins?’ asked Vittorio after an awkward silence.

  ‘Kalydon,’ said Sol. ‘There's a stone platform, perhaps forty metres by twenty. It would have been a temple. And the remains of a road; it's just a ridge now. It led up to the city. Parts of the outer wall are still there. They were waist-high twenty-five years ago; the rest was just foundations. We dug up some smashed pottery, a few charred bones. There were coins too, but Roman. Much later.’

  ‘The list in the poem,’ said Vittorio.

  Ruth's face was turned to him. He gave her a quizzical look and she seemed to pull herself from some private train of thought, then turned back to the screen.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sol, turning back himself.

  The base of the mountain passed slowly across the screen from left to right until it disappeared and was replaced by the glare of sunlight off the waters of the gulf. The broad mouth of a river indented the distant shoreline and the camera followed its meanders upstream to arrive finally, as Sol predicted, at the bridge on which the cameraman was standing. Then he trained his lens up the valley.

  ‘It's gone,’ said Sol.

  ‘What?’ Ruth's voice.

  ‘The camp.’

  Above the bridge the river unravelled itself into five or six streams which criss-crossed a broad shallow channel. Bushes had taken root where little islands and ridges rose between the streams. Their bright greens seemed too vivid, even artificial, against the dull rusts and browns of the valley and the grey of the stones which lined the river-bed. The image went out of focus, then sharpened again on something further up the valley. A long low rise wavered about the screen.

  ‘Wrong lens,’ muttered Vittorio.

  ‘That was the city,’ said Sol. ‘That flat area in front of it and to the left, that was the platform where the temple would have stood. The huts we lived in were below it. They must have demolished them. The river is just out of shot. On the right.’

  He leaned over as though this might bring the river into view. The film ran on for a few more seconds and in the last frames it was as if the camera's attention had been drawn by some anomaly in the barren landscape, for it veered suddenly to the left. But then the screen went dark.

  ‘That's the first reel,’ announced Ruth as the lights went up. She stretched her arms and turned to Sol. ‘This must be strange for you. To see these places again. Is it as you remember?’

  Before Sol could answer she rose and signalled to the projectionist, then looked to Vittorio.

  ‘Well?’

  The cameraman thought for a moment. ‘The shot of the sky when he pans up the mountain. We could use that. Otherwise nothing.’

  ‘Paul kept looking up the day before yesterday, do you remember? Looking for something in the ceiling. Lisa wants him to say what he's thinking and instead of turning away he turns his head up. I wasn't sure it worked, but perhaps he could be looking up like that and . . .’

  ‘That blue is what he's looking for,’ Vittorio interrupted. ‘And we balance it with the black. He's falling away from the light, do you see?’

  Sol, excluded from this conversation, looked around at the rows of empty seats. Concealed loudspeakers hissed very faintly. Ruth reached down and, to his surprise, he felt her hand squeeze his arm. She smiled at him.

  ‘I'm sorry, Sol. Don't feel you have to sit through all this. You must find these memories disturbing. I wasn't thinking.’

  ‘No, not at all,’ he protested. He had forgotten how dark Ruth's eyes appeared, set in her pale face. Where had her freckles gone? She seemed armoured somehow, standing over him in her dark jacket and slacks, waiting for the projectionist to thread the next reel. The disappearance of the camp troubled him, as if not the place but the time he had spent within it had been excised. His poem had been written there, and then, if it had been written anywhere. But it might never have come into existence, for all the mark it had left on the place of its gestation. Even the purposeless trenches they had dug appeared to have been filled in.

  Ruth sat down. The next reel was ready.

  ‘What happened on the set?’ he asked.

  She had twisted about and was signalling for the lights to be cut. ‘I'll tell you later,’ she said. ‘Or see for yourself. We have to go through the rushes after this. You might find it interesting.’

  Vittorio laughed. ‘The same thing a dozen times over. Fascinating.’

  ‘Or two dozen if necessary,’ Ruth replied. ‘As many as it takes.’

  The room darkened and the second reel began.

  This footage seemed more expertly shot. Its scenes changed more frequently than those on the first reel, the images coming crisply into focus and filling the screen with solid blocks of colour: dark green drifts of oak scrub against the harsh white of limestone outcrops rising behind them, or the brushed bronze hummocks of the little islands which studded the green lagoon to the west. Reference points linked the scenes more or less successfully: a crescent-shaped olive grove, a cracked spur of rock with a wind-twisted tree leaning out into space, a blackened slope punctuated by charred stumps.

  ‘Those burnt areas were brushwood,’ said Sol. ‘There was a kind of thorn tree. They had us try to cut it down, but nothing could get through it. They had to burn it off and then it grew back thicker. Around the next ridge we'll see the lagoon again.’

  The screen filled with green. Thick stems swayed like tree trunks in a high wind, but t
heir surfaces were too smooth to be trees.

  ‘This is good,’ said Vittorio. ‘Now go up.’

  The camera rose obediently until the screen was cut in half, a piercing blue sky resting on the green of a reed-bed. The camera glided over the tops of the stems, which shivered when a gust of wind rolled off the lake, bent and sprang back. Then it turned inland, away from the lagoon.

  ‘That I can use,’ said Vittorio. ‘And this. Is this where the flood happens?’

  ‘The Kleisura,’ confirmed Sol. ‘It cuts through the mountain for two kilometres or so. No one knows how it was formed.’

  The new image was blinding white, broken only by a thin wedge of blue. The scene darkened, lightened, then slowly darkened again as the camera struggled with the glare. The sides of the canyon grew more definite, rising sheer to left and right. Sol blinked and looked away. Ruth's face was hard and angular, her complexion bleached, her eyes and lipsticked mouth glossy in the reflected light. The camera moved into the canyon and sought out the broken texture of the stone, sweeping over surfaces which appeared jagged and cracked from a distance but whose sharp details smoothed with the camera's approach. This sequence went on for some minutes and the three of them sat in silence, allowing themselves to be lulled by the repetitious images until a flash of red passed across the screen, breaking the spell. The camera followed. An antiquated truck trundled away down a road which had been kept out of shot. A man leaned out of the passenger-side window, looking back suspiciously. The camera waited until the truck was a dot of shimmering colour in the heat haze and then, just before it disappeared, the walls seemed to rise even higher, their scale blotting out the insignificant speck.

  ‘The sequence after this is the old army camp, at the eastern end of the lake,’ Ruth said. ‘Agrinion. Where you were interrogated.’

  Sol nodded, his attention on the new vista projected before him.

  ‘This is the other end of the Kleisura, on the northern side of Aracynthus. Look how much greener it is. And that's the plain. You can see the lake in the distance on the left.’