Vital Signs

by John Metcalf

  “Sort of idiot savant-ish,” said Christopher.

  “It sounds beautiful,” said Karla.

  “Well,” said Forde, getting up and brushing wisps of dry grass off his trousers, “sometimes I think it’s nothing but sound but then the old bastard gets off things like ‘darkness is awake upon the dark’ and you have to admit . . .”

  The path through the meadow joined a wider path that led down into the village. A large banner was strung across the path. On it were the words:

  WELCOME TO THE CULTURAL WORKERS.

  The straggling procession from the buses was beginning to pool now around the village hall, where rustic tables and benches were set out. The villagers were greeting each newcomer with trays of bread and salt and shot glasses of slivovitz. The men were in Alpine costume: long, tight white pants, thigh-high black leather boots, embroidered waistcoats. Cummerbund things. Or lederhosen. The women wore layered skirts and waistcoats and bonnets. Forde found it oddly unreal. Slightly embarrassing. He felt it was like being on the set of a Hollywood musical.

  Some of the men were carrying crates of beer and cases of wine from the village hall and setting up one of the tables as a bar.

  “The best beer,” said Christopher, “is this Gambrinus. And Union’s quite good, too. They brew that in Ljubljana. And for wine, I’d stick to Refošk or Kraški Teran.”

  “Who’s paying for all this?”

  “The Literary and Cultural Association of Slovenia and the local Party boss.”

  “And what about . . .”

  “The peasants?” said Christopher.

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that.”

  “Why?” said Christopher. “Peasants are a recognizable class. In France, Germany, Italy, Spain . . . everywhere. Peasants are peasants.”

  “Oh, very much in Austria and Bavaria,” said Karla.

  On the concrete slab in front of the village hall three young men were setting up amplifiers and speakers and going in and out of the hall trailing wire. Lying on and propped against the kitchen chairs were a bass, two guitars, and an amplified zither. Another man arrived and started messing about with a snare drum.

  A little girl of about four or five, dressed in skirts and bonnet, was wandering through the tables staring at the people. She clutched to her chest an enormous and uncomfortable-looking rabbit.

  The drummer’s peremptory rattings and tattings and paradiddles sounded through the roar of conversation. Two of the village women were spreading white linen tablecloths over three of the tables. As they flipped the cloths in the air, they flashed like white sails against the vast blueness, a sky so huge that it made him think of the word ‘empyrean.’ The warmth of the sun, the azure sky, the stillness of the mountains all around—a sigh of pleasure escaped him. Dishes, bowls, pans, and platters began coming out of the village hall. They strolled over to look. Fried pork. Sausages with sauerkraut. Pork crackling. Fried veal with mushrooms. Pork hocks. Beans and chunks of veal in tomato sauce. Pasta stuffed with cottage cheese. Hunks of bread in baskets.

  “That’s the only thing to avoid,” said Christopher, pointing. “It’s a sort of cheese pie called burek and it’s terminally greasy.”

  They filled paper plates and Christopher exchanged pleasantries with the man behind the bar and snagged a bottle of Refošk.

  The band started to play polkas and waltzes. An accordion came to join them. The music was just the thing for a picnic in the Alps, jolly and silly. Forde drank more wine and found himself tapping his foot in time to the rattletrap drummer.

  He noticed some of the village men raising their hats to a man who had just arrived. He was wearing a black suit and a black shirt with a priest’s white collar. But on his head was a bowler hat with pheasant feathers pinned to one side of it to form a tall, swaying cockade. He made his way through the villagers, shaking hands and slapping backs until he reached the bar where he was immediately handed, not a shot glass, but a tumbler of slivovitz. Forde had known some gargantuan drinkers in his day but he had never before seen a man purple with drink.

  “He is both notorious and widely loved,” said Christopher. “Later on—he always does—he’ll sing a selection of sentimental and dirty songs.”

  When they’d finished eating, Forde volunteered to fetch beer. The slow beer line-up brought him alongside a table of cultural workers who, seemingly oblivious to meadows or mountains, were locked in earnest discussion. As he stood there he heard a man say ‘univocal discourse.’ He looked with loathing upon these money-changers in the temple.

  As he put the three bottles of Gambrinus down on the table, Christopher was saying, “Well, the high point of the day for me is the absence of that hulking Serb.”

  “Drago is not my fault,” said Forde.

  “He certainly isn’t mine.”

  “Certainly!” said Forde. “Certainly!”

  The crowd around the food tables was thinning out. Some of the conference people had drifted away higher in the meadow and were lying down sunbathing. The band had returned after a break and was playing waltzes. Forde had had enough to drink for the day to feel dreamlike and desultory. Some couples were waltzing in the village street. Forde idly watched the swirl of skirts. The sun was getting hotter. He started to peel the label off his beer bottle.

  Karla got up and, pointing down the street, said, “Forde! Take me dancing.’

  He looked up at her.

  He hesitated.

  “Karla,” he said. “I have eaten sausage and sauerkraut. Fried potatoes. Fried mushrooms. And that sheep cheese. I must have drunk a bottle of wine. And beer. I might,” he said, “just might be able to manage a slow stroll in the meadows.”

  People started to crowd around the band.

  “Must be Father Baraga,” said Christopher.

  They walked over and joined the crowd. Father Baraga was sitting on a wooden kitchen chair, hands on his thighs, beaming and purple. The zither man was lowering and adjusting the microphone. The musicians conferred with Father Baraga and a song was agreed upon.

  It was obviously a kind of patter song, and the priest accompanied it with exaggerated facial expressions indicative of leering surprise, outrage, shock. Everyone who understood Slovene was laughing and grinning.

  “What’s it about?”

  “Oh, this is a mild one,” said Christopher. “It’s all innuendo and double entendre. Like old music-hall songs.” He thought for a second. “You know—

  ‘In the spring, my Auntie Nellie,

  Dusting down her Botticelli’

  —that sort of thing.”

  Watching the rubbery lips, the sweat running from the bags under his eyes, the spittle, the purple flesh bulging onto the white collar, the yellow stumps of his teeth, Forde felt again how dreamlike, even nightmarish, the world so often seemed.

  His novels were often criticized for containing what reviewers and critics described as ‘grotesques’ and ‘caricatures.’ What world, he wondered, did they live in? They carped and bellyached that some of his scenes were ‘improbable’ or ‘strained credulity,’ yet Forde knew that this was the way the world was. The world was bizarre. The word “normal’ was simply a notion.

  He shrugged as he thought about it.

  He was more than halfway up a very high mountain listening to a Fender bass being played by a man in thigh-length leather boots, to two guitars being played by men in lederhosen, to an amplified zither being played by another man in thigh-length leather boots, and to the singing of a drunken Roman Catholic priest wearing a bowler hat with feathers in it. And he was in the company of a woman Christopher had implied might well be a Stasi informer.

  Karla caught his eye and motioned with her head. He followed her, working his way out of the crowd. They strolled up through the meadow, past the sunbathers, past hay racks, until they were high enough on the narrow trail to look dow
n on the roof of the village hall. Karla was wearing her hair in a ponytail that bobbed as she walked. He thought of the photograph she’d sent. The photograph that was inside the calendar in his desk drawer. In that picture her hair had been short and helmet-shaped.

  They could see only three houses on the main street, with another set back from it by about fifty yards. Not that the street was really a street. It was just an unpaved, sandy path. The rest of the houses were dotted about the meadows. As they stood there, Forde was very aware of Karla’s toenails. She had painted them a silvery colour.

  The path they were walking along ran in front of three houses, grouped together. The house in the centre sported a frieze of stylized flowers painted just below the eaves. Outside the house stood the little girl in skirts and bonnet they’d seen earlier lugging her rabbit about.

  The rabbit was lying in the grass, unmoving except for one ear, which turned to monitor its world. Karla smiled at the child and bent down to pet the rabbit.

  “Das ist doch ein hübscher Kerl!”

  The child laughed and swooped on the rabbit, hauling it up to her chest, its hind legs dangling. Just as Karla reached out to stroke it, the rabbit squirmed and raked the inside of her forearm with its back legs. She cried out in surprise. The little girl dropped the rabbit and squatted beside it and seemed to be scolding it. As Forde watched, blood welled into the two scratches, rose into large beads, ran.

  “Animal things are always bad news,” said Forde. “Dog bites, that sort of thing. They’re always dirty. You probably ought to get a tetanus shot, but for now . . .”

  He took her arm. He held her with his left hand just above her elbow. With his right hand he held her hand. He bent over the inside of her forearm. On her wrist he could smell the fragrance of Ysatis. He sucked the length of the two scratches, filling his mouth with blood and spitting it out onto the grass. Suck and spit. Suck and spit.

  Karla laced her fingers with his.

  His mouth tasted vile and he could hardly get his eyes open. He’d obviously slept for far longer than the nap he’d intended. His watch had stopped. He went into the bathroom and looked at his puffy face in the mad fluorescence. He’d caught the sun.

  He went down to the dining room. The lobby was deserted. He heaved open the door to the dining room. The vast room was empty and silent. The chandeliers blazed light on the emptiness. By the trestle tables used as a service station, two of the waiters were silently folding a tablecloth. Arms raised above their heads, the corners of the cloth held between thumb and forefingers, they advanced upon each other. The corners met. The fat waiter stooped and picked up the bottom edge. He retreated until the cloth was taut, then advanced again to meet and make a second fold. They looked as if they were performing an elephantine parody of a courtly dance.

  The door thunked shut behind him.

  He went into the bar off the lobby. There were three people there. He supposed some of the conference people had already left. He discovered that it was nearly nine thirty. The buses had arrived back at Splad at about six thirty, so he’d been asleep for nearly three hours. He wound his watch and reset it.

  He wondered if he ought to call Karla or Christopher.

  He stood in the silent lobby in indecision.

  Then he turned and started up the stairs, left at the deer, up the stone steps at the rabbit and hawk, hardly noticing them now they were familiar. He felt quite groggy from the unexpectedly deep sleep. He sat in the armchair in the bedroom and immediately started to feel even worse. His mouth was filling with saliva. He was feeling waves of nausea. He mastered the surge of vomit long enough to get into the bathroom, where he vomited copiously and uncontrollably. He braced himself with both hands against the wall and stood, head hanging over the toilet bowl, breathing through open mouth, drooling, strings of saliva and mucus glistening from his lower lip. His stomach seized again and again and he vomited until he was vomiting nothing but bile and his throat was raw. He was in a cold sweat and his legs were trembling. He could feel the sweat cold on his ribs.

  When the nausea faded, he brushed his teeth and cleaned the rim of the toilet and the underside of the spattered toilet seat. As he was doing so, he realized that something was happening to his vision. Bright white sparks seemed to be drifting across things, the sensation intensifying until there was a gauze obscuring things like the snow of interference on a TV screen. He felt quite frightened, and went back into the bedroom, feeling his way along the walls. He got himself onto the bed and lay there wondering what was happening to him, what he ought to do.

  He opened his eyes again, but the silent crackle of white dots still veiled the bedside lamp, the occasional table, the bed itself. He closed his eyes and tried to think calmly about his situation. Were the vomiting and the white dots related? Could they have the same cause? Why might he have vomited? Wine? Extremely unlikely. Might he be suffering from sunstroke? Might the white dots be a migraine headache? Though he’d never had one before and his head wasn’t aching.

  He lay on the bed and tried to relax. He breathed as slowly as he could, trying to slow the rate of his heartbeat. Despite his anxiety and the churning question and formulations in his mind, his head turned into the pillow and he drifted some of the way towards sleep.

  And on the threshold of sleep, he sees himself walking along a hospital corridor. As he passes each open doorway, the sudden warm smells of sickness, of food and faeces. He is standing near a bank of elevators looking out of the window onto the flat, gravelled roof. The roof is mobbed with pigeons and seagulls screeching and squawking and fighting for the scraps thrown out of windows by patients and orderlies. The roof is seething with the bodies of birds. They tread upon each other. Pigeons are pecking cigarette butts and a dead pigeon. The gulls are threatening each other, pumping up raucous challenges. One rises to a piercing crescendo only for another to start over again. The screeching of the gulls heard through the glass merges with geriatric wailing further up the corridor, a cacophony of aggression, fear and despair.

  He goes into the room. It has two beds in it but only one is occupied. The nurse is bent over the person in the bed. The sheets and blankets are pulled back off the bed and trail on the floor. The nurse plaps a sanitary napkin onto the polished linoleum. It is bloody. She withdraws a syringe and caps it, and puts it on a stainless-steel tray on the bedside table.

  He goes around the bed and looks down at Sheila. Her eyes are closed. He puts his hand on her arm. It is cold and clammy. Karla is wearing a stethoscope. She looks up at him across the bed.

  She shakes her head.

  The room is silent. The only sound other than Sheila’s rapid, shallow breathing is the screeching of birds.

  The bus that had been laid on for Ljubljana pulled out of the hotel car park onto the road that led to the highway. There were a dozen or so passengers from the conference, none that he’d spoken to before. He was returning to the Holiday Inn.

  He’d woken only half an hour earlier and, in a panic to catch the bus, he’d forgone a shower, stuffed his possessions into his bag, paid the mini-bar bill at reception, and, standing in the bar off the lobby, had gulped down a tepid, black coffee.

  The bus had been his only chance of getting into Ljubljana in time. He had agreed to give a lecture that afternoon at the University of Ljubljana; yet another honorarium had been mentioned.

  A few introductory . . . the professor had said . . . and such and so.

  He gazed out of the window. His stomach was empty and rumbling and he still felt flustered from rushing about, but at least he could see. The screen of white dots had disappeared entirely. He had Christopher’s address in Sweden and he would write to him—and to Karla—to explain his disappearance the night before, and his unceremonious departure.

  The journey took just over an hour. The room that had been reserved for him was actually vacant and ready for occupation. He poured a package of Tide i
nto the washbasin and washed the shirt he’d been too ill to deal with the night before. His flight the next day to Frankfurt left at eight in the morning. The trip to the airport took some twenty minutes to half an hour. He liked to be early so he would need a taxi at six thirty. The hotel could doubtless supply one, but he had accepted a business card from the driver who had driven him in from the airport and had promised to phone him. He suspected the man was desperate for the business. The switchboard got him the number and eventually he made himself understood and completed the arrangements.

  He went downstairs and ate breakfast in the Holiday Inn restaurant in solitary state. Four unenthusiastic waiters stood about. He worked his way through a mushroom omelette and three rolls with butter and plum jam and felt soothed and restored after the purging his stomach had suffered in the night. The morning fog was dispersing, the sun burning through. He decided that he would go for a walk along the Ljubljanica River and then devote the rest of the morning to finding presents for Sheila, Chris, and Tony. As he strolled out into the plaza in front of the hotel, he was feeling a lightness of spirit, almost a jauntiness.

  Presents for Chris and Tony would prove far more difficult than finding a present for Sheila. They seemed to be interested only in rock bands, basketball, and strange fantasy magazines involving dragons, mazes, dungeons, and monsters. Pleasant-enough boys, but he found them rather blank. Sheila said they’d turn out just fine, that all boys were like this. What he was seeing was just adolescent conformity. Beneath were two sturdy individuals. Forde trusted Sheila’s understanding of people and did not doubt that she was right. What troubled him was what they didn’t know. Things like History and Geography. Sheila had told him he was becoming cranky.

  Two years previously he’d taken the pair of them to England to visit their grandparents. He had shown them Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, the British Museum, Westminster Abbey, all the delights of London. He had taken them to Warwick Castle. To Stratford to see Shakespeare’s birthplace. To Oxford. Through the Cotswold villages. Chris had been—he thought for a moment—eleven, and Tony thirteen.