‘There's only us,’ Ruth had said, behind him. ‘She was a pretend aunt, remember?’
Sol fumbled for the plug. When he emerged from the bathroom, Ruth was opening the windows. He stood before her, newly-washed, dressed in a clean soft cotton shirt and dark grey slacks.
‘John's clothes?’
‘Whose else? You can't wear the rags you came in.’
‘I'll wash them.’
‘I've thrown them out. They had lice. I took your bits and pieces out of the pockets.’ Ruth moved briskly around the room then stopped and looked him over. ‘Sol, what happened to your feet?’
The bundle she had earlier pushed around the bathroom door included a pair of soft leather shoes, which had proved too small. Sol looked down at his bare feet. Clean, they appeared more misshapen than he remembered.
‘Walking,’ he said. They looked at each other across the room. ‘How did you come to be here, Ruth?’
She shook her head and began to make up a bed on the couch.
‘Stay here as long as you need to. John can fix it.’ She unfolded blankets.
‘Ruth. . . . ‘
She stopped, her back turned to him.
‘None of them came back, Sol. Your parents, mine, the Fingerhuts, Gustl, his father. They took Ehrlich only a month before the end.’
‘And Jakob?’
‘He was arrested the night before you left.’
His sleep was a slow fall into welcome darkness, down and down. He did not know how far. At some point in the night Ruth came to him. He awoke with the palm of her warm hand in the small of his back. She touched her lips to the back of his neck. He turned his head.
She knelt by the side of the couch, a dark shape against the outer dark of the window. He reached back and she took his hand in her own. Then, in a single quick movement, she slipped beneath the blanket and fitted herself against him, her breasts pressed against his back, her legs bent to his. She freed her fingers and stroked his stomach, then his ribs, slowly, as though she were counting them.
‘Do you remember?’ she whispered. ‘That night in Flurgasse, walking back from the theatre?’
‘Your play,’ he murmured, still drowsy and willing to let happen whatever might take place.
‘I wanted you. You remember how it was? You're so thin now. I'm going to feed you up.’ She stroked his stomach again.
‘You're going to America.’
‘Hush.’
Ruth reached for him then, and for some time there was silence. She kissed his shoulder, then rested her lips against the base of his neck.
‘I'm sorry,’ he said eventually.
‘I'm happy,’ she whispered. ‘I'm happy that you're alive.’
She was crying.
***
Sol heard Paul Sandor's voice issue from the loudspeaker in the side of the tape recorder:
‘What marks our passing? A cracked window-pane, a mark on a wall, the ring in the bath-tub, and a smear of lipstick? Everything we have spilled, or spoiled, or let fall. The dust settling in our footprints. The marks we leave behind us fade, or are blown away. Is this how we survive?’
The spools turned slowly at one end of the room. At the other, an awkward procession was underway. Vittorio crept across the floor, his camera held waist-high and the viewfinder angled up. He hunched to peer into it, glancing up every few seconds. The lens glided over the surface of the wall, almost touching. Behind him, one of the young men Sol remembered from the week before mimicked his movements. He seemed to have no function until Vittorio muttered something when the camera moved closer yet. Then the young man reached over and twisted something on the lens. The last person in the procession was Ruth, who directed the movements of both.
‘Go in closer, Vito. Enough, now up in a curve. That's it. Pull back a little.’
They inched their way along the wall.
This time no one had been waiting at the top of the stairs to check Sol's name off a list. The orange plastic crates had gone and the actors had disappeared. Ruth had turned from the window as he walked in.
‘I can't offer you anything to sit on, I'm afraid.’ She had spread her hands in apology. The three chairs had been removed, along with everything else, even the chalk crosses which had marked their positions. Ruth walked across to embrace him, as if nothing had happened. ‘We shouldn't even be here,’ she said.
There had been a terse telephone call three evenings ago.
‘I overreacted, Solomon.’
‘Nothing happened, Ruth. And nothing was going to happen.’
‘It wouldn't matter if it had. It's none of my business.’
‘It didn't.’
‘I know.’
They had listened to one another's breathing over the telephone line which connected them across Paris. Ruth had talked about the English painter, whose lover had killed himself in a hotel bathroom. There had been pictures. A remote electrical wind blew in their ears.
‘We're out of time.’ Ruth's voice crackled through the disturbance.
‘I have time,’ said Sol. The interference reached a peak and abruptly disappeared.
‘Not us. The crew. The set. Paul starts shooting in Mexico in ten days. He tells me he hasn't even read the script. We're out of money. The production office can't write cheques.’ She chuckled to herself. ‘Sets are supposed to be struck, Sol, but they never are. They fall apart of their own accord.’
‘I'm sorry.’
‘It's always like this.’
He said, ‘I still have time.’
There was a long pause.
‘I've tried to be honest, Sol.’
He said nothing, waiting for her to speak again.
‘We'll be shooting until late tomorrow night. I'm on an early flight back to the States on Saturday. You know where to find me.’
She had ended the call abruptly.
Now she, Vittorio and the assistant moved down the wall, keeping to the side of the window where Sandor had stood. Vittorio clicked the viewfinder back as he angled the camera down, taking the lens to within a hand's-breadth of the floor.
‘Very slowly now Vito, at a diagonal to the floorboards. Then curve around. Make the gaps between the boards look solid. Solid as railway sleepers. Cut straight across them.’
‘There's not enough light,’ said Vittorio. ‘No contrast.’
‘Doesn't matter. Keep going.’
Sandor's voice continued: ‘What of the gaps in our account? The edges of our “Ands” and “Thens” or “Otherwises"? Who'll read our signs, or see us in what we leave? There are no truthful silences. Look back now, look at our trails and their scattered possibilities. We took so few of them.’
‘The light's going,’ said Vittorio.
Only the machine responded: ‘Step into darkness. Nothing betrays us there. Walk into silence. Leave nothing. Be among the lost.’
‘Light's going,’ Vittorio repeated.
‘Let it go,’ said Ruth.
The lens moved back and forth over the floor, recording nothing. There was no stain on the wall and no crack in the window-pane. The light fell and fell.
Sandor's voice ceased. The turning spools drew blank tape through the machine. Sol thought of the moment in the screening room when Ruth had prompted him for his memories. Three flickering children playing in a grainy river and their resonant ghosts: himself, the woman beside him and Jakob. A train whistle sounded its thin note from further up the valley. He pulled himself out of the chilly water and the sun shone out of a cloudless sky, stinging his wet skin. Had he been hot or cold?
But they were not children. They had never been three children playing in a river. Ruth was right, he thought, as the shadows lengthened, forming two figures on the rough ground where he had once lain. It was honesty, of a sort.
The last of the tape unwound.
‘That's it,’ said Ruth. ‘We're done.’
The two men straightened slowly.
There was a muted leave-taking. Vittorio and his assistant pac
ked their equipment, slung the padded cases over their shoulders and edged their way out of the door. Ruth and Sol listened to their footsteps as the two men walked away down the corridor.
‘Here is the time,’ he said.
‘What?’ Ruth looked distracted.
‘There's no crack in the glass, Ruth.’ He pointed. ‘There's no mark on the wall either. I didn't understand before.’
‘Because they've gone. The lovers and the tracks they left. They've disappeared, like your Greeks.’
‘That's not what you say. You say they never existed. That none of it happened.’
‘Do I? Did they? Thirty years ago, or three thousand?’ Ruth was silent for a moment. ‘But you're right, Sol. I've deceived you.’
‘Take my name off your film. Let me disappear too.’
Ruth smiled to herself. ‘Not the film. The footage I showed you from Greece. I took it, with Jakob. You guessed, didn't you?’
Sol stared at the woman who stood by the window.
‘Why have you done this, Ruth? Why did Jakob. . . . What does he want from me?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Then why . . .’
Ruth shook her head.
‘Jakob doesn't want anything from anyone. Not anymore. He shot himself in a cellar in Tel Aviv in 1955,’ she said. She held herself erect and expressionless. But then her face crumpled.
He took a step forward, as if to hold her. She raised her hand.
‘No.’
‘I wrote to him,’ Sol said. ‘The letters came back.’
‘It would have made no difference. He had to see things as they were. He only wanted the truth. Don't you remember how he was? He thought you would be the one to tell it, Sol. Oh God, you don't understand a word of what I'm saying, do you?’
Sol shook his head. He tried to summon the Jakob of thirty years ago; Jakob and his unlivable truth. When Ruth spoke again her voice was calm.
‘When you telephoned, I thought you had heard. Nothing you said made sense. Jakob wrote to me, insane letters. That's how they traced me. They were all about you, Sol.’
‘But you believed him.’
‘He didn't even believe himself. I think he hoped to find you there. But you were gone and there were only the places you had been. The camp. The village. The mountains.’ She looked across at him. ‘Of course you were there, Sol. I've known that all along. It was never you I doubted.’
He waited while Ruth locked the outer door of the apartment. They walked down the stairs and into the street. He offered her his arm but she refused. Cars sped past. On the other side of the road, the river was a silent cut in the city's noise and motion.
Ruth began to speak about the time in Greece. Her memories broke off and resumed abruptly. From time to time she would address a comment to him but before Sol could reply she would be led down some other train of thought or would chase after some other recollected fragment. Sol walked beside her, awkward in his indecision. They crossed pont Mirabeau.
He pushed open the door to the apartment block and pressed the button in the elevator. They rode up in silence. When they entered the apartment, he saw her brow furrow as though she had formed a thought and were debating whether or not to express it. She did the same again when he returned from the kitchen with the whiskey bottle and two glasses. She nodded for him to pour.
‘But when the night-hunter loses the trail,’ Ruth said deliberately, as if in conclusion to an argument that they had conducted between them many times, ‘what then?’
Sol stared at her in bewilderment.
‘There had to be a boar. And hunters to hunt him,’ she said. ‘But when the light fails and the tracks give out.’
‘What are you trying to say?’
Ruth looked up, surprised. But at what? To find him sitting there? He did not know the woman who sat opposite him.
‘Of course you were there, Sol. And there was a woman, called Thyella, or Anastasia Kosta, or Atalanta. And you were her night-hunter. It's not so different: a film is only a trace, a scattering of shades and colours. A succession of moments. I understood what you did.’
‘And what did I do that you understand?’ Sol broke in. ‘How do you film the dark, Ruth? How do you catch what is not there?’
‘Then the truth is just silence. Or darkness.’
‘And what is lost is lost? Those who disappear may as well never have existed. Or do you think the boar remembers his victims? The boar only remembers his victors, Ruth.’
‘Like Atalanta? Like your Thyella?’
‘Yes.’
‘But the closer you got, the less there was of her. Her tracks grew fainter and fainter. And at the very end, she disappeared. There was no “Boar”, no “Atalanta”, no “Eberhardt”, no “Thyella” . . .’
‘You're as insane as Jakob. I saw with my own . . .’
‘Stop! Stop it, Sol!’ Ruth burst out. ‘Don't ask me to believe what you saw with your own eyes. Eberhardt was killed outside Messolonghi. He was escorting a group of prisoners to a camp further north. He was an Abwehr intelligence officer, an ineffective one, according to his records.’
He stared at her across the table.
‘Jakob,’ she said in explanation. ‘He knew all of it. There was no record of “Thyella”. People remembered her in Messolonghi. They described her much as you do and told the same stories you tell. But when we travelled into the mountains she faded. The villagers knew less and less, or would not talk. Until we reached the gorge and the village there.’
‘It was her village. Eberhardt razed it. He gave the order. I saw them do it.’
She nodded, not looking at him. ‘It was burnt down during the war. They told us that.’
Ruth picked up her tumbler and raised it to her lips. He saw her mouth distort through the glass as she sipped.
‘Thyella's name meant nothing to them. You see, I understood why you needed her, and what you needed her to be. You think we should have fought like her,’ Ruth said. ‘In our Bukovina, and your Agrapha, and everywhere between. Better to have left our mark like that.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Such romantic dreams. You wanted us too, to march through Ring-platz with our bows and arrows and spears. We could never be the heroes you needed. Nobody could. Not Thyella. Not me. I'm sorry, Sol.’
‘Please stop, Ruth.’
Ruth picked up her tumbler and raised it to her lips. He saw her mouth distort through the glass as she sipped.
‘You liked my hair short, Sol. In Venice, do you remember? You should have seen me when it was cut. It was the officer you found me with the day you left. They did it after the Germans had gone. They pulled me out and shaved my head in the street.’
‘Enough, Ruth.’
‘I'm not ashamed.’
‘You had no choice.’
‘We choose the people we become. I chose to survive. What did you choose, Sol?’
‘Thyella killed him.’
‘The truth is now, Solomon. Not then. Here is the time for the Tellable. Your Thyella never existed. Your “boar” was an insignificant desk officer. The boar didn't die at all, Sol. The boar won.’
She fell silent. He watched her waiting for him to answer.
***
A lake of stone had drained away. This void remained to mark its passing. The floor of the Cauldron was a plain of stones enclosed by rising cliffs. There was no scale. Their first footsteps over the loose rocks and smooth grey pebbles sounded at once too loud and too puny. The six men walked out of the gorge and stopped.
Sol let himself sink slowly to his knees, hearing small stones crunch and grind beneath him as he settled. The air was cold and very dry, and burned his lungs when he drew it in, each breath an effort now. The shivering had stopped and started throughout the previous night. They had risen at first light and continued their progress, Sol's limbs floating out from him then drifting back. He wondered if he might drift upright again. Uncle America said something to the men in front and they turned to look down at him, the old man, the three a
ndartes. Uncle America's hand descended and hooked itself under one arm. He was lifted to his feet.
His head fell back. The sky hummed and thickened, luminous one moment, opaque the next, a curving vault of blue. He closed his eyes and felt his skull's weight roll forward. Open them. There was the cave. It seemed too narrow: a black blade hundreds of metres away. He might have mistaken it for a shadow. The grey cliffs rose above it and pressed down but its darkness was dense and resistant. There was no colour here. The old man's eyes did not belong. The wrong eyes, he muttered, as one of the younger men turned away again. A dark plant was blooming in his face. The wrong colour.
No, he thought. The wrong time. That had come later.
They advanced, the two younger men out to the left and the other to the right, the old man between them. He and Uncle America walked behind. Their footfalls clattered over the stones. Red belonged here no more than blue. What did the old man see?
And then. That was the moment.
One of the andartes spun around, as though something had caught his eye, some movement. Dark red petals were flowering in his face, shooting roots and sprays through his head and into the air behind him. Sol felt something strike the backs of his knees. He fell, as a hard crack rolled around the surrounding cliffs. The echoes died slowly. There was a moment's silence, then Uncle America began firing. The two remaining younger men opened up too. The old man held his fire, his rifle flat to the ground, motionless. The noise went on and on, returning off the unyielding stone in tumbling volleys that merged and roared in his ears.
How long? Counted in heartbeats, or gauged against the slow fading of the light. A minute?
Little explosions of dust curved towards him, their arc seeming no more fearsome than the splashes of a waterfowl beating its way into the air. Uncle America grunted and shifted position. His gun chattered again. The two younger men had moved forward. One turned his head, looking back for Uncle America but finding only Sol. He shouted something, a strange grin stretched over his face. Uncle America shouted back. He too had moved forward. But the old man remained where he was, still kneeling, his long rifle held down, watching the cave. The gunfire came in regular bursts now, swapped back and forth between the three men, from the left, from the right. Sol raised his head.
In the Shape of a Boar Page 33