Vital Signs

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Vital Signs Page 33

by John Metcalf


  He began to send her reading lists; in the library he xeroxed what critical articles he could stomach; he sent clippings and reviews. When he went out walking around Ottawa’s used-book stores, he picked up inexpensive paperbacks and, from time to time, sent parcels.

  After a few months had gone by, he felt bold enough to start correcting her English.

  The more he moulded and shaped her, the larger the claims her letters made on him. She became increasingly confident of his attention. Her ardent engagement with his own writing slightly embarrassed him. It seemed a natural progression for his letters to move from Sincerely to With best wishes to With warm regards to Affectionately. He had hesitated before writing With love and had then delayed mailing the letter.

  During the two weeks he waited for her reply he found that the letter and her possible reactions to it came often into his mind.

  He asked no questions about her life but often, as he sat staring across the grain of the government-surplus desk made uglier by thick polyurethane, he found himself wandering, daydreaming.

  He had gleaned some few facts about her. He imagined that she must be between thirty-five and forty because she had a son aged ten. She had not mentioned a husband; when she used the word “we’ she always seemed to mean herself and the boy. She lived in an apartment in an old house. She used the spare bedroom as her study.

  When Sheila commented on the flow of letters from the German Democratic Republic, he had explained to her that such contacts were simply a normal part of the literary life, a necessary part of the shape of a career.

  After they had been corresponding for about a year, there arrived, in the week before Christmas, a padded airmail package fastened in European style with split brass pins. It contained between two sheets of cardboard a photograph of Karla and a Christmas card drawn by Viktor of the Three Magi and what was probably a camel.

  The photograph was a glossy close-up studio portrait in black and white and lighted in a stilted and old-fashioned style. Karla was in dramatic profile gazing up towards the upper left-hand comer. It reminded Forde of a Hollywood publicity photo from the forties of some such star as Joan Crawford or Myrna Loy.

  Embarrassed that Sheila should see it, he said, “What a strange thing to send someone!”

  “Fancies herself, doesn’t she?” said Sheila.

  “But going to a studio,” said Forde.

  Sheila tilted the photo.

  “Probably air-brushed,” she said, dropping it on the counter.

  Pointing at the camel, he said, “What do you think that is?”

  “I just wonder,” she said, “what you’ll get next.”

  What he got next was a request for three tubes of Revlon Color Stay lipstick: No. 41 ‘Blush,’ No. 04 ‘Nude,’ and No. 42 ‘Flesh.’ He had lurked along the cosmetics counters in Eaton’s in the Rideau Centre trying to avoid the eye of any of their attendant beauticians. He knew these supercilious women with their improbable sculpted make-up thought him a pervert, the Eaton’s equivalent of the schoolyard’s man-in-a-mac. He had felt uncomfortable and faintly guilty while buying the lipsticks, but later felt even guiltier about not telling Sheila.

  But he had done no wrong. He had to insist on that. It was not being disloyal to describe Sheila as in certain ways excitable. There was simply no point in upsetting her needlessly. Where lay the fault in buying small gifts for a friend—a colleague—who lived under a repressive totalitarian regime that did not allow her access to such simple commodities as lipstick? Or the Ysatis perfume by Givenchy she’d later requested?

  He opened his desk drawer and took out the calendar. He had put the photograph inside the calendar to keep it flat. He looked at the upturned face. He looked at the dark fall of hair. Her lips were slightly parted. Light glistened on the fullness of her bottom lip. It was as if seconds before the photographer had pressed the shutter-release button, she had run her tongue across her lip wetting it.

  He put the photograph back in the calendar.

  Tearing off the doodles page from his writing pad and the page beneath where the ink had gone through, he started to jot down all the words in German he could think of. He couldn’t think of many. He arranged them into alphabetical order and sat looking at the result.

  AutobahnKristallnacht

  Blitz Luftwaffe

  dankeschonPanzer

  ersatzRealpolitik

  FlakReich

  FuhrerStalag

  GauleiterUbermensch

  GestapoWaffen SS

  Kaiserauf Wiedersehen

  Sheila was pretending to be concentrating on driving. From Ottawa International Airport he was to fly to Toronto on the Air Canada Rapidair service. In Toronto he was to board a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. In Frankfurt he was to board a JAT flight for Slovenia’s capital, Ljubljana. He stared out of the window at the wastes of snow, the frozen trees, the roadside lines of piled crud left by the snowplough. From time to time Sheila sniffed.

  “All this stuff’s of your own imagining, you know.”

  She did not reply.

  “Sheila?”

  “I’ve said what I had to say, thank you.”

  “Yes, but it was untrue and unfair.”

  As the road curved round to the parking and departures area, Sheila said, “I’ll drop you off at the Air Canada counters and then I won’t have to bother with parking.”

  “And also,’ he said, “hurtful.”

  She pulled the car in to the curb and parked.

  “Well . . .” said Forde.

  “Have a good trip,” she said.

  “Aren’t you going to kiss me goodbye?”

  She inclined her head towards him and he found his lips brushing her cheek.

  He gathered his carry-on bag, umbrella, and briefcase and, opening the car door, said, “Really, Sheila, you’re being ridiculous.”

  She sat staring ahead.

  He got out and shut the door.

  Stood for a moment.

  Started across the sidewalk to the revolving door.

  Sheila leaned across the passenger seat and wound down the window. She called out to him.

  “Pardon?’

  “Az der putz shtait . . .”

  “What?”

  “Az der putz shtait ligt doss saichel in tuchus.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  She turned the key in the ignition.

  “What did that mean?”

  He reached for the door handle.

  She pushed down the button locking all the doors.

  He banged on the roof of the car with the flat of his hand.

  She rolled up the window.

  “I demand to know what that meant!”

  A small male child with a suitcase on wheels stopped to gape up at him.

  A Blue Line cab driver parked behind them had lowered his window and was staring.

  “What. Did. That. Mean?”

  He emphasized each word by accompanying it with a bash on the car’s hood with the malacca handle of his umbrella.

  The taxi driver started honking his horn.

  Sheila stretched across the passenger seat and opened the window two or three inches. Hoisting the strap of the carry-on bag higher on his shoulder and jamming the briefcase under his arm, Forde stooped to confront her through the narrow slot.

  “It’s an old Yiddish saying.”

  Forde glared.

  “Az der putz shtait . . . When the prick stands up,” she said, “. . . ligt doss saichel in tuchus . . . the brains sink into the ass.”

  * * *

  The ornate iron lamp posts along the lake’s margin speared light out on the water. Gravel crunched under their feet. Somewhere out beyond the reach of the lamps, a waterfowl beat a brief commotion in the water. After the heat and the blare and the smo
ke of the crowded bars in the dining room, the breeze from the lake smelled invigoratingly boggy.

  “Intrigue,” continued Christopher, “will be rampant.”

  He wiggled his fingers like fishes.

  “Aswirl with currents.”

  “But who’s listening? Does anyone really care what academics say?”

  “Everybody is listening, Robert. This isn’t Canada. Much of what’s going on here you won’t be able to understand. But the Party is listening, the factions of the separatists are listening, the Croatians are listening, the Serbs, the Macedonians, a positive stew of intelligence people. . . . And there are Slovenian writers here, too. They’re important political figures, spokespeople. You see, writing here is politics.”

  With Christopher Harris, Forde felt he had hit the mother lode. They had sat together on the bus, which had carried the party from the Ljubljana Holiday Inn to Splad and had quickly fallen into delighted conversation. Christopher was, Forde assumed, gay, about Forde’s age, his nose blooming with drink-burst veins, and his fingernails all bitten to the quick. He was a British expatriate who lived and taught in Lund, in Sweden—Provincial. Something of a backwater of a university, really. I’m suited—but who was an expert on all things Yugoslavian. His passion in life was the celebration of Slovenia and the Slovene language; he had translated most of the significant literature; he was working on a history.

  Slovenians, Christopher had explained, considered themselves strongly European, a civilized, energetic northern people distinct from the increasingly dubious rabble to be found to the south, a rabble that culminated in the barbarism and squalor of Islam. This did not mean, Christopher had insisted, that the Slovenians were any more racist than anyone else. Exactly the same sentiments were openly expressed in Germany, France, and Italy. Try cashing a cheque issued in Rome in a bank in Milan without having to listen to an earful about the duplicity of idle southern monkeys.

  Christopher had also explained that although the ostensible purpose of the conference was to discuss matters Canadian, much of the international presence was also intended by the organizers as a buffer and defence for separatist Slovenians who would slant their papers and statements in politically unacceptable directions.

  Secession was in the air.

  They turned back towards the hotel, Christopher sparkling off fact and anecdote—Saint Cyril, called in earlier life Constantine, the Glagolitic alphabet, the battles of Kosovo and Lepanto, the quirks of Selim the Terrible, the westernmost reaches of the Ottoman Empire, the karst cave system near Ljubljana, Chetniks, fourteenth-century church frescos—pausing only to sing sad stanzas from a Slovenian folk song about boys leaving their sweethearts to suffer their forced military service in the Austro-Hungarian army.

  “Alf a mo’, squire,’ he said in a sudden Cockney whine.

  He stood with his back to Forde and pissed loudly on a bush.

  Forde suddenly felt shivery cold and quite drunk.

  The verb ‘to stale’ came into his mind.

  He had had some powerful short brown drinks commended by Christopher and two bottles of nasty wine.

  Christopher’s feet on the gravel again.

  “That mansion set back there,” he said, pointing, “was one of ex-King Peter’s summer palaces. Do you know Cecil Parrott? Chap who translated The Good Soldier Svejk for Penguin? When he was a young man, he was tutor in that house to the two Crown Princes. Tiny, the literary world, isn’t it?”

  The bulk of the hotel was looming in the darkness. It was a strange building, its central block the remains of a massively built castle which, according to Christopher, dated from the fifteenth century. In the nineteen-thirties, an architect had joined onto the existing structure three huge concrete-and-glass wings. They rose up into the air like birds’ wings, rather like, Forde thought, three immense upside-down Stealth aircraft. The castle part was divided up into a reception area, kitchens, and a variety of bedrooms on different confusing levels and up and down small stone stairways. The three concrete-and-glass wings contained most of the bedrooms and an auditorium, conference rooms, and the vast dining room, which was cantilevered out over the lake’s edge.

  “So as the Nazis withdrew,” Christopher was saying, “the only organized force able to step in was the communists. But they’d been a military force, a partisan force, there was no civil organization. So inevitably there was great civil confusion. It was a sad period. The communist peasants went on the rampage. The churches, of course, took the brunt of it. Paintings, carvings, tapestries . . . so much of it smashed and put to the torch . . . so many beautiful things lost forever.”

  He sighed.

  “To them, of course,’ he said, “it was nothing but capitalist trumpery.”

  Forde stopped and put his hand on Christopher’s arm. He was overcome by a sudden warmth of feeling. With the earnestness and grave courtesy of the inebriated, Forde said, “That is the first time in my life, Christopher, that I have heard the word “trumpery” used in conversation.”

  “And you are the first person I have met,” said Christopher, “to whom I could have said it secure,” raising his forefinger for emphasis, “secure in the knowledge it would be understood.”

  They crunched on towards the hotel.

  Forde’s room was in the warren of rooms in the castle part of the hotel. He had been in and out of it three times now since arriving at Splad that afternoon but was still uncertain of his route. He knew that he had to make a first turn left at the painting of the dead deer.

  The corridors, staircases, and walled-in embrasures were hung with nature morte de chasse paintings. Early-to mid-nineteenth century, most of them, he thought, though a few might have been earlier. It was a genre he’d always avoided, disliking the lavishing of such formidable technique on the depiction of wounds. There was something unsettling about the best of the paintings. He sensed in them a sexual relishing of cruelty and death. He felt repelled in the same way by what he thought of as the Mayan element in Mexican cruifixes, Christ’s wounds shown to the white of the bone, shocking atavistic inlays of ivory.

  He bent to peer at the small brass plate at the bottom of the frame but all it said was: 1831.

  The deer was lying head down across a rustic bench. Two tensely seated hounds with mad eyes yearned up at it. In its nostrils, blood.

  As he walked on down the silent corridor, he found himself groping for the name of Queen Victoria’s favourite painter. The man whose animal paintings had got nastier and nastier, the cruelty coming closer to the surface, until his mind gave way entirely and he’d died years later barking mad. The man who did the lions at the foot of Nelson’s monument in Trafalgar Square, the Stag at Bay man.

  It was on the tip of his tongue

  Began with ‘L.’

  Lutyens?

  Battues of grouse and pheasants. A gralloched deer. Hecatombs of rabbits, grouse, partridges, snipe, and ducks. In some of the paintings, for no obvious reason, greaves, helms, gorgets, a polished-steel cuirass inlaid with brass, a drum bright with regimental crest and colours amid the piled, limp bodies.

  He had to go up a short flight of stone steps just after a painting of a dead hawk and rabbit hanging upside down from a fence. Highlights glinted on the rabbit’s eye and on the hawk’s curved talons. The rabbit’s grey fur was wind-ruffled to show the soft, blue underfur pocked where pellets had struck, each swollen puncture dark with gore.

  At the top of the steps he turned the wrong way. The short curving corridor terminated in a dead end. He stood in the stone embrasure staring at the ice-making machine.

  It rumbled and hummed.

  “Landseer!” he exclaimed. “Sir Edwin Landseer.”

  He followed the corridor in the opposite direction and, recognizing the red brocade curtains partially drawn across the entrance to the recess, finally gained his room.

  He felt relieved to lock
his door. It had been a long day and he felt tired and crammed with undigested new experience. The bedroom had an antique look, the furniture old and heavy, the walls covered in some kind of grey material, slightly furry to the touch, velvet perhaps. Off the bedroom to the left was a bathroom and to the right a separate little room intended, perhaps, as a dressing room. It contained a chest of drawers and a long mirror in a gilt frame. He had been pleased to discover, in what had seemed to be a cupboard, a TV set and a mini-bar.

  The thing Forde loathed most about travelling was carrying things. He hated lugging heavy cases about. He hated luggage itself. Luggage, he had often proposed to Sheila as she sat on her case to get it to close, reduced people to being its ill-tempered guardians. Who would wish to stand with the anxious herd watching tons of luggage tumbling onto carousels? Who would wish to share in that mesmerized silence as luggage trundled round and round?

  Forde travelled only with a carry-on bag. He never carried more than two shirts, two pairs of underpants, and two pairs of socks. Sheila made up for him little Saran Wrap packages of Tide, each secured with a garbage bag tie and each sufficient to do one wash. Every night he washed his clothes in the washbasin, scrubbing clean the collars and cuffs of the shirts with an old toothbrush, and then hung everything over the bath to dry.

  He lay in the dark, letting his mind run back over the last two days to his landing in Ljubljana. Thought of his surprise at seeing booths at the airport for Avis and Hertz. At the taxi, which accepted Visa and on whose tape deck the Stones were singing ‘Midnight Rambler.’ At the opulence of the Ljubljana Holiday Inn. Hardly the grim face of Godless Communism he’d been looking forward to.

  It had all been much like anywhere else.

  He’d wandered the streets of the old city, the buildings distinguished but shabby, the river running through the centre of it all, graceful bridges, churches, and nuns everywhere, the castle at the top of the hill boarded up because of the danger of falling masonry, no money, Christopher told him later, for renovation or repair.

  But there was certainly money in the new part of the city. Most shop doors carried Visa and American Express stickers. Familiar names in windows—Black & Decker, Cuisinart, Braun. Parked along the streets, Audi, BMW, Volkswagen. In a bookstore window he’d seen translations of Jack Higgins, Wilbur Smith, Sidney Sheldon, Dick Francis and, to his mortification, an omnibus edition of three Jalna novels by Mazo de la Roche.

 

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