Borderless Deceit

by Adrian de Hoog

  Not because I believe it can’t be done. I know you can. But for me balance is important. I can’t dedicate myself to physical endurance alone.

  Rachel, you know I’ll be driven to do these things as long as I can.

  I know. I understand.

  The bond between Rachel and Pekka is not complex and it loosens quickly. Over a coffee in the UN centre they agree the relationship should end.

  Rachel now sinks deeply into her work. UN committees exert strange powers: they lure and deceive; they may hypnotize participants into believing they are responding to a higher calling. But during the breaks Rachel looks into diplomatic eyes and notices many are strangely out of focus. She sees a hazy questioning in some, glimmers of suspicion in others. Are we out of control? is what they seem to be asking. Are we a herd which can move only in unison? Or are we addicts, hooked on negotiating all texts into utter pointlessness? Making a joke of it, Rachel asks others her age in the committees if they see this too and the replies are cheerful. Too cheerful. No one wants to face such facts. No one wants to admit that the dignified UN committees are often just an odd way to keep busy.

  One of her confidantes is Micheline from the French delegation. In the ladies’ room one day Rachel shakes her head and compares the delegates to a flock of sheep. What a morning! Such a lot of bleating! Micheline looks at Rachel in the mirror. Her take is the same. The UN, she says, is two-sided, like a coin. One side is absurdity, the other is meaning. The meaningful part is rare. It has to be taken on faith. While the absurdity is daily and real. As Micheline adjusts her bra she claims it’s on account of the pompous ones, the majority, the ones who proudly stir the pot of international debate day by day for the sole reason of listening to themselves. Take this morning’s speech by the Malaysian ambassador. What a master of self-congratulation! Such perfect logic…all chopped-up. Micheline does a fine imitation of the man, his sugary cadence, his arrogance, his raw claim to infallibility. Rachel doubles up with laugher. On the way back to the meeting Micheline asks if Rachel would like to come along the next evening to the opening of an exhibition of Matisse drawings organised by the French embassy. It’ll help us self-correct, she says, pouting charmingly.

  The opening of the Matisse show in the Kunstlerhaus across the square from the French embassy is a major event. The rooms are filled with people fuelled by wine. Micheline, nearly shouting to be heard above the racket, dismisses it in her precise way as a bland bunch of people trying to be electrifying. She supports her opinion by pointing at the overdone fashions and the outlandish jewellery. Rachel nods, observing that the ambient clamour is the antithesis of the tranquillity in Matisse’s drawings. The two young women make their way along the fringes of the mob to look at them, absorbing Matisse’s elegance and simplicity, remarking on how he used a few strokes of a pencil to create fully developed personalities.

  In a far corner Micheline glimpses Eugene, the owner of an art gallery. She takes Rachel’s hand and drags her over. Eugene immediately breaks off his conversation with a stocky, animated man sporting a tightly trimmed, greying beard. Both are delighted by the interruption. Eugene lifts Micheline’s hand to his lips – Rachel’s follows – introduces Iain Bruce, asks the women how they like the exhibition, does not wait for an answer, and launches into an account of how certain Viennese egomaniacs tried to kill the idea of showing Matisse in the Kunstlerhaus. The world of art, he sighs. The machinations and intrigues found in the management of the public galleries are unreal. Talent in commercial galleries…now that’s different. That’s where true art lovers reside, and take risks. It’s the commercial galleries that allow artists to live. That’s where they are promoted. Look at what art dealers did for Matisse.

  Iain Bruce, amused, wrinkly lines spreading from the corners of his eyes, seizes an opening for a polite interruption. As a Scot, he says, he admires Matisse’s economy of expression. What, he asks, are Micheline’s and Rachel’s opinions of Matisse’s women. Very French, claims Micheline. Rachel adds they were rendered by a master to show they loved living. Admirably put, decrees Eugene, and, speaking of living, he announces he’s got a new show almost ready – Spanish impressionist watercolours. Would they honour him with their presence at his gallery on Saturday for a pre-opening viewing? Micheline has plans to be in Paris, but Iain nods and Rachel says she’d be delighted.

  The watercolours that Saturday are striking. But Eugene is surrounded by workmen and is panicking. No time to show them around. Instead, Iain takes Rachel through the rooms, pointing at interesting subtleties in technique and the use of colour. He uses certain motifs to tell witty stories about his Spanish travels. He turns the art into an exciting intellectual pleasure. When he and Rachel leave the gallery, he asks if she’d like to do this again – another gallery – in a week’s time. I would, Rachel says.

  This is how a Saturday routine sets in. A different art show every weekend. And after looking at pictures, Iain leads Rachel to a Viennese café for coffee, cake and a brandy. They talk easily, no hesitations, no pauses, no searching for next subjects. Composition, use of light, the aesthetics of the scenes they’ve just seen, the moods, the metaphors, pictures that deepen insight – each work leads to a new discovery. Occasionally Rachel and Iain talk about themselves. He learns she’s from Oak Lake, Manitoba, and asks what places like that are like. He tells her about his work as the legal advisor to the UN, slipping in that he’s divorced (two children in a private school in Scotland).

  After some months a Saturday arrives – Iain is working on a slice of chocolate cake – when he innocently asks if she would join him on a trip to Florence. Rachel studies him, thinks, nods slowly and accepts. The garrulous Scot is stunned by the simplicity of the yes and falls silent. He had expected an ambivalent reply: Can I think about this and let you know, maybe next week? He drops his head and ponders. Usually it’s mere seconds before Iain’s thoughts spill forth, but now minutes pass. Patrons at nearby tables wonder how a man can concentrate that long on the remnants of a piece of chocolate cake. Iain’s reflection deepens into something else, a kind of inner turmoil, because sweat forms on his brow and the fork in his hand acquires a tremor. Rachel waits, and waits, and finally breaks in. As casual as Iain was before, as if reading off the menu, she remarks there’s no need to go to Italy right away and it’s not that far, so there’s no point getting nervous about travelling just yet.

  He looks up, takes a deep breath and regroups, though his Scottish brogue is deeper.

  Sorry, Rachel. My thoughts wandered off. Not polite.

  Did they get lost somewhere?

  I’m all right now.

  That’s good.

  I was thinking, would you have a drink with me in my apartment?

  Are there paintings on the walls?

  Oh dear me, yes. Don’t know what to do with them all.

  I’d like to see them. Promise to talk?

  In the apartment, out comes a bottle of Scotch. Rachel wants one finger, Iain pours himself four. On the walls she sees landscapes, still lifes, portraits. There are aquarelles, mixed media, large paintings in oil, some modern constructionist works. Two paintings are of the same, somewhat bulky, nude woman. In one she reclines on a sofa, in the other she lies on a bed, her legs to the front, staring frankly at the viewer. Iain sees Rachel studying the poses.

  My wife.

  Did you paint her?

  Oh no. A friend. Afterwards she went to live with him.

  I’m sorry. When was that?

  Five years ago.

  Why do you hang the paintings?

  I suppose because I think they’re well done.

  Aesthetics trumping emotion?

  I’m over it. No bitterness, if that’s what you mean.

  How did you get over it?

  I kept busy at work and in my free time I studied art history. I couldn’t do that before. In some ways the marriage was a distraction.

  And now you live here like a monk?

  There’s something to be
said for dedicating oneself to the pursuit of understanding beauty. I have to ask you something, Rachel. A practical question. When we go to Italy…we didn’t clarify…should we have separate rooms…or share? When I say you can trust me, I mean it.

  Oh, I trust you. We can share.

  Four more fingers of single malt for Iain, none for Rachel. Once more he falls silent. Again his head droops and more sweat comes to his forehead. He looks anguished, pitiful, like someone wracked by struggle – the ideals of the spirit pitted against the urgent, spiked demands of the flesh. When the Highland Scot finally speaks, his brogue is at its thickest.

  I…I don’t know how far I can go.

  I’m not heading for the door.

  I have strange phantasies at night now.

  Phantasies? Spiritual pursuits?

  Rachel, please.

  I’m sorry, Iain. I don’t mean to mock.

  I don’t know…how can I say it?

  Relax. Take a deep breath.

  Rachel…I think about you…in the dead of night I see you. You’re so near. As if…when I reach out…I could touch you…I’m sorry, this is not acceptable. I have no right to talk like this.

  In your phantasies, have you touched me?

  Oh yes…yes…

  And then? What happens then?

  Don’t ask. I have no right to say it.

  Maybe I have a right to hear it. Tell me.

  When I touch you…you take your clothes off.

  Slowly? Quickly?

  I don’t know…Too slow. Too quick. Both.

  Touch me.

  This can’t be true. Oh God, I am so truly sorry. Forgive me.

  Iain. Touch me. Then sit back.

  Florence, then Venice, Paris, Munich, London – everywhere they visit the great museums and, time permitting, make impromptu detours into commercial galleries. In London, Rachel decides to own art too. She takes a long time to decide. Iain counsels her on some pictures she says she likes. He continues talking about them patiently over lunch, then over dinner. The next morning, still no clear decision. After more weighing of options, Rachel finally buys two eighteenth-century miniatures, one of a sailing ship under duress in a great storm, another of violent clouds over a moor. Not a steal, but excellent value, proclaims Iain, adding he hadn’t realized she likes extreme weather.

  Whenever they travel, on trains and ferries, in airports and taxis, Iain does the talking. Like a happy educator he comes up with one anecdote after another – of great forgers and forgeries, of good artists destroyed by wealth, of great artists who died penniless. The tales are endless. He also tells her what it means to be a Scot born and raised in the Highlands. Occasionally he philosophises, claiming he is fascinated by aging because it allows the exploration of the human condition to deepen. The relationship between the two is asymptotic, he claims. Rachel occasionally takes a turn at this way of talking. She tries to explain prairie vastness. In her view the prairies expand people’s horizons, except for some. There are those who feel boxed-in by all that space, unable to cope with an absence of limits. Iain nods solemnly. Paradoxes, he asserts. Without them life would be too bland. It’s the paradoxes that add spice.

  This is true. Because everywhere Rachel and Iain go, strangers pause to watch theirs. He is short, middle-aged, with a deeply lined face and dark, inky pouches beneath his eyes. She is the opposite. Alone, he would be just another slightly pudgy, somewhat untidy, unremarkable traveller. Alone, he would scarcely interest anyone. But with Rachel at his side he is lifted. With her he looks as if he must be rich, possibly corrupt, irresistible as a lover, a typical aging ram that can still strut. Rachel, for her part, is fresh. Her lean body is graceful. She moves with dignity and radiates breeding. People think she must be at least a duchess, one with centuries of pedigree. Eyes are snared by her beauty; minds are fascinated by the harmony of her bearing. From Rachel to Iain, and back to Rachel – the darting glances from strangers are filled with envy. They see the contrasts as signposts to dark and extravagant pleasures. But what strangers do not see, beyond Iain’s self-assured portliness and Rachel’s defiant lankiness, is a deeper asymmetry.

  For during all the time they spend together Iain, with his outpourings, is putting his soul on display, whereas Rachel keeps hers to herself. Rachel is not accessible. She might as well be existing inside a hard and highly polished marble shell. This creeps up on Iain and he reacts by searching for weak spots. He looks for anxieties, character inconsistencies, tiny dependencies, inhibitions – any small flaw or defect, any thin crack by which to worm his way inside the shell. But if Rachel has vulnerabilities, Iain eventually concludes, no mortal could ever hope to find them. Not even at the height of making love, or afterwards, does he sense he’s nearing her. Being shut-out becomes a spectre and it stalks him. Week by week it strengthens until it dominates his days. In the end it haunts him so much that he becomes his own prisoner. His dedication to the spirituality of art goes up in smoke and his humour erodes. Off balance, Iain makes a desperate last attempt to save himself. In his apartment, surrounded by earthly treasures that mean nothing to him now, he asks Rachel to marry him. He knows the stakes are high and even tries to turn the question into a little joke.

  She searches his eyes for a flicker of understanding. Doesn’t he know that legal niceties can’t bond two souls? But all she sees is moistness, and gently she says no.

  Give Iain credit. This time he isn’t short of words: Sorry for the melodrama, Rachel. It’s the Highlander’s heart. Difficult to tame. Peculiar, how it rides roughshod over reason.

  They skip their gallery visit the next day, going for a brisk walk instead. At the end, before parting, they have a last embrace.

  Two and a half years passed between the day Rachel walked into Eduardo de Castro Santiago’s apartment and the weekend Iain Bruce lost his gamble. In Herridge Cabin, in the bitter cold, staring fiercely at nothing, I beheld the apparition’s final round. Eduardo de Castro Santiago, haughty and beautiful, regarded me with disdain. Pekka Svedlund, tough and sinewy, mocked my poor, crumpled-up heap of a body. Then Iain Bruce came along. He was different. His sad-moist eyes glowed as an oracle’s and, though showering me with sympathy for my dismal state, prophesied that times worse than he had endured lay in store for me. As they faded, I imagined hearing Rachel’s voice, its composed, seductive timbre. She was saying she had liked these men and, yes, she had desired them. But why, she asked, were they such spoilers? Why the insistence that she fulfill this or that abstract notion they held of her? Why couldn’t they accept that she was who she was, and didn’t wish to be someone else?

  I could stand it no longer. Afraid that other men on her life’s list, the Geneva ones, might also penetrate that god-forsaken cabin, I jumped up. With a cry of despair I bolted out. The barbaric air outside dispelled Vienna’s nauseous proximity and my thoughts began to clear. Why, I remonstrated with myself, why could I not obliterate my urge to behold the normal unfolding of experience of one young woman? Partial knowledge and dismal imagination – was there no way to exorcise their corrosive interplay from my brain?

  With two savage kicks I liberated my skis from the accumulated snow, clicked into the bindings, grabbed the poles and rushed back onto the trail. The wind was at the back now and skiing was like sailing. Within a dozen minutes heat began spreading from a thermal centre in my body, setting extremities aglow. Sudden comfort. Balm. My anger at the sordidness of knowing what I shouldn’t dwindled. I was soaring now. The trail, the valleys and the hills, the outcropping rocks and the frozen lake, the dimming forest light, the falling snow pushed forward past me by the wind – I was as one with all of it.

  Odd, such transitions from moral collapse to a state of near exaltation.

  Of course, I continued to think about Rachel as I poled along, and I grasped then why in Vienna she moved so easily from man to man. She was exploring desire, including her desire to know herself. And who can claim that in this pursuit it was not her right to leave no stone unturn
ed?

  When conflict ends in reconciliation it leaves humility and peace. The afternoon’s events – my conflict with myself – had that effect and for the remainder of that day, and throughout the next, I reflected calmly on many things.

  One was the origin of Irving Heywood’s plague. I considered numerous possibilities, rejecting them one by one until a last hypothesis was left. I resolved to test it first thing during the new working week, using the powerful slim laptop from Hugh-S.

  7 CHAPTER SEVEN

  Irrespective of the season, the Monday morning atmosphere in the Service complex is relentlessly frigid. The workers, hunched and brooding, make their way to their assigned places. In joyless silence they steel themselves for a new week of struggle with bureaucracy’s chilling forces acting against them. The never-ending press backwards – it sucks the ardour out of living.

  But on this wintry Monday I was an exception to all this. Hugh-S’s laptop, light in my briefcase, elevated my mood and I felt eager to attack the day. An expectation was tingling in my brain; my fingertips were itching to get on with things.

  Once through the sliding doors, in the quiet of the watchers’ sanctuary, I stamped the last snow off my boots and unfurled my scarf. Arthur Beausejour, in early as always, stood in the common area whistling a tune. With lips puckered up, rocking on his feet to his own notes, he waited for a kettle to come to the boil.

  “Got my files back,” he said when he saw me, smiling like a winner and sending me three loud clicks of triumph with his tongue. “No time being wasted now. The Mounties are picking up the Dutchman’s flower ring as we speak. And…yeah, you guessed it, Carson…simultaneous arrests of the pseudo-Mennonites in Hamburg. Not sure what’s happening in Uruguay. Tough to get them to play ball. Worked on it all weekend.”

  “Why the rush?” I said without much interest, unzipping my parka. “Why didn’t you take another couple of days to get Montevideo on side?”