by John Metcalf
On top of the cliff that rose at the head of the lake stood another small castle. According to Christopher, it had been extensively altered in the eighteenth century, to turn it into something more comfortable, more domestic. The Nazis had used it as a recreation centre for army officers. Now it had been turned into a museum which housed an absolutely undistinguished collection of artifacts. Drinks and snacks were served on the ramparts.
It was possible to climb up the cliff on a wandering trail through the trees and then scramble the last fifty yards or so on scree, and skirt the parapet to come at a side gate.
Forde turned back and watched Karla scrambling up below him. As she reached the steepest pitch, he leaned down and extended his hand. She looked up at him, winded, a smudge of hair stuck to her forehead with sweat. She reached up and grasped his hand and he took the weight of her and pulled her up over the last of the scree onto the track below the wall.
The museum delighted him. It was exactly like one-room museums in provincial English towns, haphazard accumulations of local finds, curios brought home by colonial officers, the last resting place of the hobbies of deceased gentry.
They browsed over the glass cases of unidentified pottery shards, stone hand axes, arrowheads, bronze fibulae, plaster casts of Roman and Greek coins, powder flasks of polished horn, bullet moulds, bowls heaped with thirteenth-century coins of Béla IV of Hungary, fossils, Roman perfume bottles, stilettos, poniards, medieval tiles with slip decoration the colour of humbugs.
Forde stopped and exclaimed and bent over a display case.
“What is it?” said Karla.
“Look how pretty!” he said.
Forde stared at the leather object. He had never seen one before. The leather was rigid rather than pliable. It was a leather tube, which flared like a champagne cork at the open end. Three quarters of the way up, the tube bent over like a cowl and tapered slightly to a close. The stitching was precise and delicate, the leather dark with age, glossy, and chased with a wreathing convolvulus design. The whole thing was about the size of a shuttlecock.
“It has to be,” said Forde. “It’s a hood for a falcon.”
He was moved by the craftsmanship, by the thought of the hands that had gentled the hood over a hawk’s head, by the sudden opening into the past the hood afforded.
“I’d love to touch that,” he said. “I’d love to hold that in my hands.”
He tried the case but it was locked.
When they’d exhausted the possibilities of the museum, they wandered out into the garden and then climbed to the ramparts and sat under an umbrella, sipping lemonade through straws. The length of the lake lay silver before them, the hotel, the marina, ex-King Peter’s summer palace. A small yacht was tacking up towards them.
“You see, Karla,” he suddenly burst out, “that’s where art comes from. That leather hood. It arises from the realness of the world. Of course, art encompasses ideas but it’s not about ideas. It’s more concerned with feeling. And you capture the feeling through things, through particularity. There’s nothing intellectual about novels.”
Suddenly embarrassed, he busied himself with lemonade and straw.
Karla was reading his face.
They strolled back towards the hotel, following the road which led gently downhill all the way. Forde, still ravished by greenness, growth, the lemon-green of leaves, stopped to pick some wild flowers. He presented the bouquet to Karla. Daisies, white cow parsley, purple vetch, and campion both pink and white.
The venison was tough and fibrous. It was accompanied by a compote of red berries. Nobody knew what they were called but Professor Dorscht thought that in English they might possibly be called cloudberries. Though he could in no way guarantee that that was so.
Forde had been studying the programme earlier and said to Dorscht, “So tomorrow’s the day of your paper.”
Dorscht inclined his head.
“About Lucy Maud Montgomery, isn’t it?”
“Lucy who?” warbled Christopher.
“Specifically,” said Dorscht, “the Emily novels.”
“Emily?” repeated Forde.
“They are lesser-known works of her maturity.”
Works, thought Forde, who considered it something of a national embarrassment that Canadian scholars and universities studied the output of a hack writer of children’s books.
“This is another Canadian writer I do not know about it,” said Karla. “There is so much for a Canadianist to learn.”
“Oh, not really,” said Forde who was tempted to express the opinion that the best Canadian writing could be accommodated on a three-foot shelf.
Christopher was beginning to slur his words.
“Lucy who?” he said again investing the word ‘who’ with patent incredulity.
“What I term the ‘Emily’ novels,” said Dorscht, “is the trilogy of novels beginning in 1923 with Emily of New Moon and followed in 1925 by Emily Climbs and concluding in 1927 with Emily’s Quest. My paper will—I think the most appropriate word is ‘probe’—my paper will probe the trilogy’s mythic aspects.”
Mythic scrotums, thought Forde. Mythic bollocks.
Forde watched Dorscht peel his apple with a little silver penknife. His ability to digest was limited, he had explained, his health undermined by the tensions generated during the long years of study leading to his doctorate, years made unendurable by the psychological savagery visited upon him by his supervising professor.
“But what I mean is,” insisted Christopher, “who is she?”
“So, Robert Forde!” boomed a familiar voice.
He automatically started to get to his feet, but a heavy hand on his shoulder rammed him down again into his seat.
“May I introduce,” he said generally, “Drago Tomovic.”
“And who,” said Drago, “is this most beauteous lady?”
He smiled a gold-toothed smile that was revoltingly roguish.
“Drago has translated my novel Winter Creatures into Serbian.”
Drago, with mock flourish, handed a package across the table. Forde tore open the paper.
It was in Cyrillic.
It had no cover art.
The paper was hairy.
Karla suggested they celebrate the translation in the bar off the lobby. The evening wore on. Drago’s flappy jacket was in huge checks, like the outrageous clothes worn by comedians in vaudeville or music hall. Christopher made it quite clear by grimace and the stiffness of his body that he found Drago appalling. Dorscht could not drink alcohol because of his ulcer. He also confided that he feared losing control. Drago flirted ponderously with Karla. Christopher started to read the translation, making loud tut and click noises.
Through the surf of conversation Forde kept overhearing snatches of astounding drivel from a bony woman behind him who was, apparently, uncovering a female language by decoding patriarchal deformation.
Christ!
“Winter,” boomed Drago, “is not just winter.” He tapped his forehead. “Think! It stands for the coldness between the characters. Always say to yourself what is the hidden meaning of this book. Andrew is not just a bureaucrat. He works for the government and so represents . . .”
“You mean,” said Karla, “that you read the book as . . .” She groped for the word. “. . . as an allegory?”
“Certainly,” said Drago.
Forde was horrified.
“I make everything,” said Drago, “crystal clear.”
Dorscht went into another coughing fit.
When he’d finished and done the tic-thing with his left eye, Forde pressed him for details of the psychological savagery visited upon him by his supervising professor. Dorscht revealed that he had been commanded to write papers which his professor then appropriated and delivered at conferences as his own work. That the professor would only dis
cuss his thesis in expensive restaurants, where Dorscht was always forced to pay the bill. That for years he had to take the professor’s clothes to the laundry and dry-cleaners and then deliver them to the man’s house.
Christopher interrupted Dorscht’s lamentations by slapping shut Winter Creatures and walking round the table to hand it to Forde, saying, “Oaf and boor.”
To Dorscht, Karla and Drago, he said, “I am now going to bed.”
His leaving broke the party up. Dorscht went off to take a Valium and a mild barbiturate, Drago was swept up in the lobby by a noisy group of fellow Serbians who were all wearing what Forde took to be the rosettes and coloured favours of a soccer team, and Karla was claimed just outside the doors of the bar by her two friends from Jena.
She turned to look back at him; she smiled and shrugged.
Forde made his way up past the deer with blood in its nostrils, climbed the stairs at the pellet-pocked rabbit and the hawk with the shattered wing. His room felt stuffy and hot. He flipped through the translation of Winter Creatures but the only thing he could read was his name. But even if Drago had reduced a sprightly comedy to a stodgy allegory of his own invention, a book was still a book and it had his name on it. And if one thought of the Cyrillic as a kind of abstract art, the pages were not unattractive.
He filled the sink in the bathroom and poured in one of Sheila’s Saran Wrap packages of Tide. He took off his clothes and immersed the shirt, pushing it down repeatedly to get the air pockets out. He was beginning to feel decidedly odd again. A band of constriction across his forehead. Difficulty swallowing. He wondered if there was something about the room itself. Outside it, he felt entirely normal. Perhaps he was allergic to something in the room. Though he’d never suffered from allergies before. And the first night he’d slept in the room had been uneventful.
His mouth kept filling with saliva, as if at any moment he might vomit. Perhaps they were using some devastating East European or Balkan chemical to clean the carpets or the bath.
He felt not only hot but distressed and confused by his discomfort. He wandered into the bedroom and sat in the armchair hoping that if he concentrated on reading he would be able to ignore or conquer the symptoms. He always travelled with a copy of Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press Oxford because it was small and inexhaustible. But the print swam and he kept putting the book down and staring at the furry wall, concentrating on not throwing up.
The venison?
But no one else had seemed affected.
And didn’t it take twelve hours or more to incubate, or whatever one called it?
He forced himself back into the bathroom and scrubbed the shirt’s collar and cuffs with the old toothbrush. He rinsed the shirt in the bathtub, leaving the soapy water in the basin to do his underpants and socks.
He sat on the toilet but nothing resulted. The fluorescent lights hummed. He thought suddenly of an eccentric landlady he’d once had when he was at university. She’d been having the house painted and had walked in on one of the painters who was on the toilet. In great embarrassment he’d said to her that he was having a pee.
“What kind of a man,” she’d demanded, “sits down to squeeze his lemons?”
Why had that swum into his mind?
He lay on the bed and tried to sleep but under the covers he was too hot, on top of them too cold. The nausea had settled into uneasiness in his stomach and at the back of his throat. Pictures churned about in his mind. Karla looking up at him from the steep scree. The falcon’s hood delicate and as light on the palm, he imagined, as a blown bird’s egg. In the gilt cabinet, the plaited silk jesses with silver varvels. The roadside flowers. Pink and white campion.
He felt small cramps of pain in his stomach. He flung back the covers again and went to sit on the toilet. He strained briefly but nothing happened. He got up and realized immediately that something had happened. The toilet bowl was speckled with a fine mist of blood. Through the toilet paper his incredulous fingertips felt a lump, a lump with three—his fingertips explored that heat and hugeness—a vast lump with three. . . . What was this? A Pile? Piles? What were piles? Exactly? Such a thing had never happened to him before. His fingertips traced the dimensions and configurations of the horror. A lump with three . . . lobes.
The very word filled his mouth with clear saliva.
His hand smelled and was sticky with watery blood.
He twisted round trying to look at his behind in the mirror.
He put one foot on the toilet seat and bent forward, separating his cheeks, but this position revealed nothing but redness.
A woman had once told him that, after giving birth, she’d had piles “like a bunch of grapes.”
He waddled across the bedroom into the dressing room with its full-length mirror and contorted himself variously and ingeniously but could see nothing. He imagined it to be blue or purple. He didn’t want to get too yogic in his postures in case the horror burst.
He began to feel panicky. He could not endure the embarrassment of requesting treatment. But he did not wish to leak to death in a Slovenian hotel. He made a pad of a dozen or so Kleenex and wedged it between his cheeks and over the thing. He eased on clean underpants to keep the pad in place. Then he put on a clean shirt and his trousers and, taking his key and the plastic ice-bucket, set off down the corridor, with tiny steps, towards the ice machine.
Back in the bathroom he leaned his weary head on his arm on the vanity and, with his right hand, held ice cube after ice cube against the hot, swollen lumps his body had extruded, ice water trickling down his legs into his toes, his scrotum frozen, fingers numb even through the flannel; weary, weary for his bed.
Forde was sitting with Karla. Christopher was sitting in the seat behind. The bus, one of four, was taking the conference people on this final day for a picnic in a village high up near Mt. Triglav in the Julian Alps.
Forde was feeling cheerful and restored. His piles had retreated entirely. His reading and lecture the day before had been well attended. Even Forde had been surprised by how rude he had been to an earnest man at the lecture who had put a question to him that had involved the name ‘Bakhtin’ and the words ‘dialogic,’ ‘foregrounded,’ and ‘problematized.’ Though he felt absolutely no contrition. That night he had again felt ill and feverish but suffered nothing worse than a rash over his torso and thighs, hot, white welts that itched and throbbed and bled when scratched. He had tried to soothe the itching by repeatedly applying a flannel soaked in ice-water.
He was sure he was suffering from an allergy either to something in the room or to food.
He had read from his last novel, Tincture of Opium. He’d done a restaurant scene involving the two lovers and a Chinese waiter who understood little English and whose every utterance sounded like a barked command. It was a set-piece, but it performed well, modulating from near-farce to a delicate affirmation of love. He particularly liked the way he’d cut the sweetness of the sentiment with comic intrusions.
At dinner that night Karla had arranged with the Oliver Hardy waiter for a bottle of champagne to be brought to their table. She had proposed a toast to Forde’s wonderful reading, to his glittering novels, to his eminence in Canadian letters, to his generosity with his time to beginning Canadianists, to, well, Forde!
She had been flushed, her eyes shining.
“Bottoms up!” cried Christopher.
“Sincere felicitations,” said Professor Dorscht.
“To Forde!” said Karla again.
“Certainly to Forde!” boomed Drago.
Now he could feel her thigh swayed warm against his as the bus made turn after turn climbing the narrow road terraced into the mountain. The buses parked outside the boundary of the Triglav National Park, and people set out to walk the mile or so through woods and meadows to the village. The sun was pleasantly warm, the surrounding mountains serenel
y beautiful. The mountains enclosed them, cupped them. It was, thought Forde, rather like being on the stage of a vast amphitheatre. In places, the path they were walking along ran over outcroppings of rock. They stopped to help an elderly couple whose leather-soled shoes were slipping on the smoothed stone.
“What are those wooden things?” asked Forde.
“They’re racks for drying hay on,” said Christopher. “Unique to Slovenia. They’re called kozolci.”
“And look!” said Forde. “Cowslips and primroses. I haven’t seen those for years.”
“And here,” said Christopher, “are some of our famous gentians.”
Forde stopped. He stared down at the intensity of the blue.
“Oh, yes,” said Karla. “In German we say Enzian.”
“This is a very special day for me,” said Forde. He got down on his knees and brushed the grass aside. “I’ve never seen a gentian before. I read about them when I was in my teens. I used to learn poems off by heart that I liked the sound of and there was one called “Bavari:an Gentians” by D. H. Lawrence. Well, perhaps it’s not such a good poem. Perhaps you’re extra forgiving to things you liked when you were young.”
He looked up at Karla.
He frowned slightly in concentration.
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is
darkened on
blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding
darkness on
the lost bride and her groom.
“Stone the crows!” said Christopher. “Do you do that often?”
“No,” said Forde. “It’s weird. Only with things I learned when I was about sixteen.”