by David Szalay
Yes. The one obvious proviso.
Last year, during the Hilary term, he had done the thing he had long wanted to, and had an affair with an undergraduate. It had been something he had had in view since his arrival in Oxford to finish his doctorate. It had taken years to achieve – and the affair itself, when it finally happened, was in many ways unsatisfactory. Just two weeks it had lasted. And yet the memories of it, of her youth …
He was sad in an abstracted way, for a day or two, when she ended it with that letter in her schoolgirl’s handwriting, that letter which so pathetically overestimated his own emotional engagement in the situation. And he understood that he had also overestimated her emotional engagement in it. As he had been intent on enacting his own longstanding fantasy, so she had been enacting a fantasy of her own, in no way less selfish. Except that she was nineteen or twenty, and still entitled to selfishness – not having learned yet, perhaps, how easily and lastingly people are hurt – and he was more than ten years older and ought to have understood that by now.
Only when he saw her, soon after, in the arms of someone her own age – some kid – did he experience anything like a moment’s actual pain, something Nabokovian and poisonous, seeing them there in the spring sunlight of the quad.
And by then he was already mixed up with Erica, the medieval Latin scholar from Oriel. That didn’t last long either.
The days he has just spent in London have exhausted him. Not only the meeting with Macintyre. He also had a meeting with his publisher. And a symposium on Old English sound changes at UCL, for which he was one of the speakers. Various social things. He had seen Emmanuele, the short, snobbish, scholarly Italian who had finished his DPhil a few summers ago and was now a lawyer in London. Emmanuele had asked after Waleria, what was happening there? It was at a party of Mani’s, last September, that he had met her. ‘I don’t know,’ he had said. ‘Something. Maybe. We’re seeing each other. I don’t know.’
*
Solitude, freedom. There is that feeling, still, on the ferry. This in spite of the other people; they are transient strangers, they do not fix him in place. They know nothing about him. He has no obligations to them. Sea wind disperses summer’s heat on the open deck, hung with lifeboats. The floor see-saws. Is sucked down, then pushes at his feet. England dwindles. The wind booms, pulls his hair. Inside, in the sealed warmth, people eat and shop. He wanders among them, nameless and invisible. Sits at a table on his own. His solitude, for the hour it takes to travel to France, is inviolable. He stands at a window, golden with salt in the sunlight. He watches the playful waves. He feels as free as the gulls hanging on the wind. Solitude, freedom.
*
As soon as he has driven off the ship he puts on the A/C and Vivaldi’s Gloria – pours into the French motorway system with that ecstatic music filling his ears.
Dum-dee
Dum-dum-dum-dee
Dum-dum-dum
The asphalt glitters. It is Sunday morning. Farms lie in the flat bright land on either side of the motorway.
And he knows this motorway well. It follows the so-called Côte d’Opale, towards Ostend. To the left as he drives are the windy dunes.
Welkom in West-Vlaanderen says the sign.
And now it is like he is driving through his own past, through a landscape full of living nerves, of names that are almost painfully evocative. Koksijde, where he went once with Delphine and her mother’s dog – the small dog digging in the sand among tufts of wind-flattened grass. Nieuwpoort – where they spent that summer, he and his parents. The smell of the sea finding its way inland, up little streets – and at the ends of the streets, when you walked down them to meet the sea with your plastic spade in your hand, a milky horizon. Roeselare, where they would visit his father’s parents – the suburban house, with hop fields at the end of the neat garden. Though the memories possess a jewel-like sharpness they seem surprisingly small and far away, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. It has been years since he was here, on this flat tract of land next to the ship-strewn sea, and that his own life has been going on long enough now for things like that windy day at Koksijde to lie more than ten, more than fifteen years in the past is somehow a shock to him. He was already an adult then, more or less, and yet he still thinks of his adulthood as something that is just getting under way.
Feeling a little shaken, he stops for petrol.
Holding the nozzle into the tank he stares at the motorway, the thin Sunday traffic.
That desire for everything to just stay the same. That day at Koksijde, stretched out over a whole lifetime. Why is the idea of that so appealing? Or today, this very moment, the hum of the flowing petrol, its heady sickening smell. The motorway, the thin Sunday traffic. Here and now. The pallid heaven of these hours. Solitude and freedom. Stretched out over a whole lifetime. That desire for everything to just stay the same.
The tank is full.
Walking back from the till – where it felt strange, somehow, to speak his own language with the woman there – he finds himself enjoying the sight of the luxury SUV in which he is travelling. He feels pleased and proud to take his place in it, to start the engine with the touch of a button. Stańko is trusting him to hand it over, to sign the papers that will transfer the ownership. And though he does not know him very well – has only met him once, in fact – Stańko has every reason to think that he will hand it over.
Stańko is, after all, a policeman. The senior policeman of Skawina, a town in southern Poland, nowadays a suburb of Kraków – tractors farting in fields of potatoes next to a multiplex showing the latest films.
You don’t fuck with Stańko. Not in Skawina or the neighbouring townships, in Libertów or Wołowice.
It is easy to picture him in this car, moving through the banal landscape of his beat, his wallet abulge.
How that brooding ogre and his ugly little wife produced something as lovely as Waleria …
Well, maybe she wouldn’t age well. It was worth thinking about, though he feels no inclination to long-term thoughts. He still doesn’t see things that way. It still feels new, this situation, even somehow provisional. There was a sense, for some time, that they had no obligation to each other, that they were free to see other people. He didn’t. (Unless you include Erica the Latinist, who was still, last September, just about extant.) Whether Waleria did or not he doesn’t know.
He has turned inland, passed Bruges.
Later, Ghent, where he did his undergraduate degree. English and German. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Parzifal.
After Christmas last year he spent a few days in her parents’ dayglo orange house. A scalloped balcony over the white front door. Snow disfiguring all the garden ornaments. Waleria met him at Kraków airport, and drove him to the house, which was near a petrol station on the edge of Skawina.
Every day while he was there, they went skiing at Zakopane. (‘Do you ski?’ she had asked him, making small talk, when they first met, at Mani’s party. ‘Do I ski? I’m Belgian,’ he had deadpanned. It made her smile.) She was an excellent skier. Warily, he had followed her down the stiffest slopes Zakopane had to offer.
As he approaches Brussels, clouds close over him in the sky. Wind moves the trees at the side of the motorway. There will be rain. Shafts of hard light pick out the distant prominences of the city as he passes. He knows the way without having to think about it – the leaky underpasses, the glimpse of Uccle (those tree-lined avenues, where he was once a bookish schoolboy who lived in a big flat), and then out on the E40 towards Liège, as the rain starts to fall. He feels for the lever that sets the wipers swinging.
Since then, since Christmas, they have seen each other every few weeks. A sense evolved that they were in some way together, a sense of mutual obligation. He wouldn’t put it more strongly than that. Sometimes she visits him in Oxford, or they spend a weekend in London, or somewhere else. They meet, for the most part, in the neutral spaces of hotels. There was Florence in February. There was, at Easte
r, a week in the Dodecanese, island-hopping, the windy deck of the hydrofoil in its world of vivid blues.
Slowly, they are finding each other out. ‘You,’ she said, ‘are a typical only child.’
‘Which means?’
‘Selfish,’ she told him. ‘Spoilt. It never occurs to you,’ she said, ‘that you might not be the centre of the universe. Which is what gives you this personal magnetism you have …’
‘Now you’re flattering me …’
‘It’s nerdy,’ she said. ‘Still, it’s there.’
She was shuffling her cards, her tarot pack. That was a surprise. It seemed she had this New Agey side to her – it wasn’t, he told himself, fundamental to who she was.
‘Okay. You’re going to take three cards,’ she said. ‘Past, present, future.’
They were lying on his bed. Oxford. It was Saturday morning. Last month.
‘So.’ She offered him the pack, fanning it out. ‘Take one.’
Humouring her, he prised out a card.
‘Ace of Wands,’ she said. ‘Past. Take another.’
‘The Tower.’ She made a face of mock alarm. ‘Fuck. Present. Last one,’ she instructed him. And said, when he had taken it and turned it over, ‘The Emperor. Future.’
‘That sounds good,’ he suggested, looking pleased with himself.
She was studying the three cards, now lined up crookedly on the sheet. ‘Okay,’ she said, provisionally. ‘I think I understand.’
‘Tell me.’
‘It’s time to grow up. That’s the headline.’
He laughed. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Well, look at this.’ She was pointing to the Ace of Wands. She said, ‘It’s obviously, you know … it’s a phallic symbol.’
It did seem to be. The picture was of a hand holding a long wand, which thickened towards the top into a fleshy knob, a divided hemisphere.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘So it seems.’
‘Well, that’s the past.’
‘What – so I might as well kill myself now?’
‘Don’t be silly.’ It was difficult to say how seriously she took this. She looked quite solemn. ‘The present,’ she said. ‘The Tower. Some kind of unexpected crisis. Everything turned upside down.’
‘I’m not aware of anything like that.’
‘That’s the point. You won’t be, until it hits you.’
‘Unless it’s you.’
She ignored that. ‘Now let’s look at the future. The Emperor – worldly power …’
And he made some silly remark about how that sounded like him and started to fondle her nipple, to tease it into life. They were naked.
She said, ‘I think these cards are suggesting that you should maybe stop thinking about your … thing all the time.’
He laughed. ‘My thing?’
‘This.’
She put her finger on it.
‘What it means,’ she said, looking him in the eye, ‘is that your skirt-chasing days are over.’
‘But I don’t chase skirt. I’m not that type.’
‘Oh, yes, you are.’
‘I promise you,’ he told her, ‘I’m not.’
*
It is ideal, he thinks, the set-up they have. He is unable to imagine anything more perfect. He is unable to imagine living more happily in the present.
The huge sheds of the Stella Artois plant at Leuven, its steaming stacks, are half-obscured by the drenching weather.
How well he knows this stretch of motorway, its different surfaces, the sound of the tyres shifting suddenly, dropping in pitch, as you pass from Flanders to Wallonia. How often, in the years he was studying in Ghent, did he drive it, and how insignificant a distance it seems now, as part of his longer journey – he is already halfway to Liège and it feels as though he has only just left Brussels.
And now here it is, Liège – the place where the road plunges down into the valley.
Pines start to appear in the woods as he mounts the heights on the other side, overtaking trucks in the slow lane.
Suddenly fresh, everything.
He needs to finish the piece for the Journal of English and Germanic Philology; he was hoping to have it done by now. The question of whether, in the pre-West Saxon period, æ sometimes reverted to a – or whether in fact the initial change from a to æ, postulated for the West Germanic period, that is to say prior to the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, never in fact took place at all. The principle evidence for the former hypothesis was always the form ‘slē-an’ – if that form could be shown to be anomalous, then the whole venerable thesis would start to look very questionable. Hence the importance of his proposed paper, already accepted in principle by the journal, ‘Anomalous Factors in the Form “Slēan” – Some Suggestions’.
He had used some of the material, teasingly, in his talk to the UCL symposium last week. Quite a stir. (The look on Macintyre’s face!) Yes, this might be it – the thing he has been looking for, the thing that makes him, in the world of Germanic philology, a household name. Something everyone in the field simply has to have read. Worldly power. So he must take time over it – seclude himself with it for the rest of the summer. Stop thinking about his thing all the time.
He is eating a chorizo sandwich, drinking Spa water.
Sitting in a huge Shell services with a Formula 1 theme. Francorchamps is nearby, somewhere in these forests.
There are not many people about. Even though it is high summer – the second week of July – the weather is foul, and there is little to do up here in the woods when the rain is just steadily falling, seeming to hang whitely against the dark slopes of pines.
With cold hands, he puts more petrol in the car. He has an idea that it is cheaper here than in Germany. He isn’t sure. Stańko is paying for the petrol anyway. He tucks the receipt into his wallet with the others as he walks out again into the rain.
This is where he leaves the road he knows – the motorway running east towards Cologne. He looks, sitting in the car while the rain falls, at the printed Google map. An indistinct line drops diagonally down from where he is into Germany, just missing Luxembourg. The E42. It ought to be easy. He folds the map and sits there, in the rain-pelted car, finishing his coffee. Luxembourg. Never been there. Like Surrey was a country. Silly. Anomalous. Like ‘slē-an’. A household name. He just needs to devote himself to his work. Stop thinking about his thing. Time to grow up. That’s the headline. He had liked the way she said that.
The windscreen is a mass of trickles. Summer. Still, there is something romantic about the rain. There are not many people about. It was her idea to meet at Frankfurt airport. Not the Frankfurt airport – Frankfurt-Hahn, a no-frills-type place deep in the countryside, and nowhere near Frankfurt; Frankfurt doesn’t even appear on his Google map, even though the little pin indicating the airport is almost in the middle of it. They are used to airports like that, these lovers. Sleepy places next to a village with twenty flights a day at most. They have been in and out of them a dozen times so far this year. In and out. In and out. It was her idea to meet there, and finish the journey to Skawina together, taking their time, spending a night or two on the road.
2
The airport is harder to find than he thought it would be. There is more driving, when he leaves the straightforwardness of the E42, on narrow twisting lanes, more following tractors. A hilly landscape. The day is grey and humid. There is insufficient signage. He passes through a village, starting to worry that he might be late after all, and then quite suddenly it is there. Soon he is moving among parked vehicles, looking for a space, in a hurry now.
He finds a space.
And then it happens.
There is a loud ugly metallic noise that for a moment he does not understand.
Then he does and his heart stops.
When it starts again he is sweating heavily.
She looks up from her magazine, smiles.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ he says.
‘You’re not
late. The plane was early.’
‘Everything was okay?’
She is putting her magazine in her bag. ‘Yes. Fine. You must be tired,’ she says, looking up at him. He appears pale and shaken. ‘You’ve had a long drive.’
‘I’m okay, actually,’ he says. ‘Probably it will hit me later.’
‘Do you want something to eat?’
‘Uh.’ He thinks about it. He was hungry, half an hour ago. He has had nothing to eat all day except a pain au chocolat on the ferry and that chorizo sandwich, up in the rainy Ardennes. Now, however, he isn’t hungry. In fact, he feels slightly sick on account of what has happened to Stańko’s luxury SUV. ‘Maybe I should,’ he says. ‘Have you eaten?’
‘I had something.’
‘Maybe I should,’ he says again.
‘Okay. Are you okay?’ she asks, suddenly sounding worried.
‘Yes. Yes,’ he says. ‘Fine.’
They speak English to each other. His English is more or less native-speaker standard. Hers is only slightly less perfect.
He queues at some sort of food place, one of only a few in the airport. The airport is shabby and unexciting. Modest improvement works are taking place behind plastic sheets and warning signs. He orders, in flawless German, a ham sandwich, a double latte.
‘Look,’ he says, sitting down next to her. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
To his surprise, her face instantly tightens. She looks frightened. ‘Yes?’ she says.
‘I had an accident,’ he says, taking the plastic lid off his latte. ‘With the car. In the car park. Here. There’s some damage. To the paintwork.’
She doesn’t say anything.
‘I hope your father won’t be too pissed off.’
‘I don’t know,’ she says.
‘Do you want any of this?’ he asks, offering her the sandwich. ‘I’m not really hungry.’ When she shakes her head, he says, ‘How was the flight? Okay?’