Red Heaven

by Nicolas Rothwell

  ‘I’m sure you could, madame.’

  ‘That’s right. We’re in agreement, headmaster?’

  The two of them shook hands, ceremoniously, like generals at a treaty signing. Ganzhorn retreated, with his retinue in tow.

  ‘My life,’ she said to me, and beckoned to me: ‘You look so pale and ill. Living in this barracks, I’m not surprised. And how do you find me?’

  ‘Just the same,’ I answered.

  ‘The same? The same! You’re supposed to say—Darling Ady, how wonderful you look, as lovely as a meadow in the spring, as dramatic as an alpine storm, as ever-changing as the waves of the sea. You’re supposed to charm and enrapture when you’re speaking to a woman like me. What do you actually remember of me, from last year, and the years before? What do you think of when you think of me?’

  I looked back at her.

  ‘My God, don’t say nothing. That’s the worst thing to do. Just say the first thing that comes into your head: how you picture me.’

  ‘I remember…’ I began, then hesitated.

  ‘What? Go on, don’t be like that, don’t keep it to yourself—say.’

  ‘I remember that you never wore the same dress twice all through the summer holiday; and they were always dresses in bright colours; and you smiled, and played cards with yourself; and your voice always made everything sound important, and from the way you spoke it seemed as if you knew a special secret, as if there were things you kept just beneath the surface and wouldn’t ever tell.’

  ‘Absolutely. Hapsburg irony. Happiness and sadness and appraisal and withholding all in the same breath.’

  ‘And you were always kind, and talked to me, even though we never went on walks together.’

  ‘And I bought you coffee Ischlers at the Konditorei every afternoon, don’t forget. You see, Muscatine. He’s a natural. I think we have the makings of a little Casanova here.’

  ‘What’s a Casanova?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s something that’ll be clearer later on. But you gave a good reply. I knew you would!’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘Aunt Adela.’

  ‘No!’ she took me by the shoulders, and grasped them: ‘You mustn’t call me that. Not aunt—that’s much too familial. I love you more than I would if my own blood were running in your veins. Never call me that. Never think of me that way. Call me by the name that those I care for use with me: Ady. Call me Ady. Say it.’

  ‘Ady,’ I said.

  ‘No. Like this. Ady—from the back of your throat. Ady—like the name of the poet.’

  ‘What poet?’ asked Muscatine.

  She rounded on him. ‘I thought you were a man of culture: Ady Endre—the lush romantic, Ady with the handsome face and long flowing hair, Ady who died in freezing January, in a dark room in a dark house in a dark street of a dark capital. That’s what we used to say of him. I think of him every time I hear my own name on someone’s lips, and it makes me happy to share that sound with an artist as pure as him. Now: time for us to make our getaway. Into the jump seat, Muscatine. I’ll take the wheel.’

  ‘But, madame,’ he protested.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said to him: ‘I’m a good driver, when I put my mind to it, especially with coupés like this. They suit me; I know the way to treat them—just as if they were living things.’

  ‘I’m not talking about your driving,’ said Muscatine, in a voice of outrage: ‘I’m talking about the jump seat. It’s too small. I can’t fit. He’s a child, and I’m a grown-up. Let him sit there.’

  ‘You’re being objectionable. Try. You’ll fit easily. Just fold up your legs. My happiness, get in, here, beside me. Let’s drive.’

  And she reversed, and swung the car around. We sped away.

  ‘Muscatine, my cigarettes!’

  ‘In the glovebox, madame, as always,’ came his voice from close behind me.

  ‘My life, find them for me, and light one up! Light me a Lucky! Isn’t this village charming? Unspoilt surrounds! Don’t you like being here, at least?’

  ‘Too many animals,’ I said.

  ‘No. Too many animals, Ady.’

  ‘Too many animals, Ady.’

  ‘I can’t see any. In fact, for a Swiss village, it’s astonishingly animal-free: as if they’d all caught some strange plague and dropped dead.’

  ‘Yes, there are,’ I said, and pointed to the gables on the house facades in the square. ‘Look. Up on the buildings, and even painted on the walls, and on the church front—storks, eagles, chamois.’

  ‘If carvings and images and statues count, of course it’s a menagerie. And that’s a good sign. Love for animals is a proof of humanity. Never trust a man who doesn’t care for them. Never stay in a home without them.’

  ‘No chance of that in any of your houses, madame,’ said Muscatine.

  ‘My husband adores dogs—Salukis and Afghan wolfhounds. He prefers them to human beings. He spends his time with them so he doesn’t have to talk to visitors. Isn’t that true, Muscatine? But Muscatine doesn’t care for them. They’re almost the same size as him, and they pester and intimidate him all the time.’

  ‘Madame, that’s not fair. I don’t like them because they’re always shedding their coats and their hair gets onto everything. Clothes, carpets, furniture. It’s as if we were working in a kennel, not a home. They sleep on the piano stool, they howl all through rehearsals, they jump up and paw the sheet music: they’re impossible.’

  We were on the main road through the valley now. Ady sped up. The wind blew past us, the sun was strong. I reached into the glovebox and found only a slim pack of cigarettes with a stylised white flower on the front.

  ‘They’re not Lucky Strike,’ I said.

  ‘It’s just an expression,’ said Ady: ‘From the movies. Those are Edelweiss. Very alpine! Light one for me. You know how?’

  ‘We’re not really allowed to smoke.’

  ‘Today’s a day for firsts, and breaking rules. Give me one—it’s like this!’

  She demonstrated.

  ‘Try. You see. It’s easy: you didn’t even cough. And do you know where we’re going? No idea? You can’t guess? We’ll be there soon. Somewhere that might mean something to you. See the peaks above us, leading back towards the Tyrol, and all in snow, so bright you can’t look at them for more than a split second? That’s the way to our true home. Yours and mine. They can be like a sign for us, reminding us of where we’re from—and what we’ve lost.’

  ‘We’re from the same place?’

  ‘All the East’s the same. It’s all Mitteleuropa, it’s the opposite of everything that’s here around us. But there’s something else that’s special about it. You understand that, don’t you? You have to! It’s no longer really there. We come from somewhere that’s disappeared. They still mark those countries on the maps, but we can’t travel to them. They only exist for us now in our minds. They’re gone, all gone, they’re in the shadows of our memory. Isn’t that so, Muscatine?’

  She turned round to him even as she swung out to overtake the car ahead.

  ‘Madame, please, the road.’

  ‘There’s no danger,’ she said: ‘Not with him here. My talisman. Look down the valley now, to where I’m pointing. What can you see? Shield your eyes. Look now, before the turn comes, look beyond the peaks. It’s not just distance that you see there, and the light greying and fading, is it? No, it’s as if you can see right through to another time. Sometimes I think that horizon’s speaking to us, telling us what lies ahead, whispering its secret to us, telling us we’ll never reach our home again. Broken life for you, it’s saying. Broken life, memories and dreams that escape from you and have no end.’

  ‘How bleak you are with him, madame,’ said Muscatine into my ear. ‘Such dark thoughts for a mountain drive.’

  ‘Bleak! Is there only sadness in what I’m saying? Or is there a secret happiness as well? The happiness of having nothing. Nothing that ties you, nothing that binds you, nothing that stops you from remaking yo
urself. Wait. Slowly now, it’s coming up. Here’s our destination, just ahead.’

  She turned abruptly off the valley road onto a side track, braked hard and came to a stop. There was a straight, stepped pathway ahead of us. It led up to an old church and belltower.

  ‘Let’s walk,’ she said: ‘Come with me. Muscatine, you stay here.’

  ‘What, madame? A sudden religious inspiration?’

  ‘It’s a bad idea to make fun of me too often, Muscatine!’

  She stretched out her hand to me. ‘Take it. Follow.’

  We climbed the steps in silence. Inside, the light was dim. There were painted patterns on the roof beams above us; there were frescoes on the far wall behind the altar, almost too worn and faint to see.

  ‘Sit with me now,’ said Ady.

  Her manner had changed. Her voice was serious. She was speaking softly.

  ‘I brought you here because I want to tell you something. A story about my younger self, a simple story. Would you like to hear it?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said: ‘But why here?’

  ‘Because it happened here. In this church; in San Gian, a long time ago.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘More than a decade ago. Before you were born. Let me set the scene for you, even if when I think of that time now I feel as though I’m watching some old, flickering film in black and white. It was an episode, it led me to the life I lead today, but when I picture it, I see a stranger, someone I hardly know. I was working as a translator then. Have I ever told you about that time? No? I was a diplomatic translator. At the mission in Geneva, at the UN. It was after the great uprising in Budapest. Everything was already over; the reprisals were underway. Our days were tense, and there was a drama in that tension, it felt like being on stage, or in one of those dreams where the menace is never clear and never goes away. Each morning I waited to be summoned by the staff attaché and hear I’d been dismissed and called back home. I was full of fear, and also full of hope, and those two feelings fed each other—because I’d fallen in love.’

  She paused, and looked across at me, and smiled.

  ‘With one of your husbands?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course not. Women only get married to the kinds of men I choose after all their ideas of being truly loved in this world have gone. No. I was caught up in a wild romance, it was under the star of impossibility, that was the entire point of it, I knew it would end in disaster before it even began, I just didn’t know what form that disaster was going to take. Does that sound peculiar to you? Grown-ups give in to temptations like that all the time. You don’t believe me? Don’t be shocked by what I’m saying! He was Russian, posted to Geneva, and full of charm. Handsome, a wondrous depth of culture, a perfect proletarian background. I look back now and I realise: he was working for the state security.’

  ‘He was spying on you?’

  ‘He wasn’t what he seemed to be, and I’m sure I knew that then, in some part of me, but it made no difference. My head was full of books and stories. My life until then had been just an emptiness. Wartime, all the horror. And post-war, a drab parade of interludes that never seemed to end. I wanted life. I thought I’d been denied it. I’d survived, and been given nothing more. I’d forgotten survival’s the greatest gift—and has its own responsibilities. I was only beginning to know him, and have a sense of him. We used to meet by the lakeside, at the Rousseau statue, every afternoon. I thought that was exciting and clandestine, like affairs in the movies. We’d walk together hand in hand along the embankments, past the Beau Rivage and the Angleterre, I’d look up to the villas at Cologny, and beyond, to the Mont Blanc massif in the clouds, and I wanted nothing in that picture to change.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘The picture didn’t last for long! He vanished. I went to the Rousseau Island late one afternoon, and waited by the statue. He didn’t come, that afternoon or any other. I never heard from him or of him again. I don’t know if he disappeared into some camp in Siberia or Kazakhstan, or if he took a new identity, or even who he really was. At first I was afraid he might have been punished because of me: because I was from a fraternal country turned unreliable. I was frantic, I don’t know what thoughts took hold of me. I waited—a week, two weeks, then I summoned up my courage. I went to the Soviet permanent mission. I asked for him. “And this was an individual you felt you knew closely?” they said to me. “We no longer have that name here; we no longer know it.” I walked back to the lakeside, along the embankments, past the jetties and the monuments, across the footbridge to the island. It was as if I was seeing it for the first time. A standard nineteenth-century statue, a little park with trees, and pigeons, and passers-by, rain in the air, traffic blaring on the streets. That was the end of my diplomatic life: the very next day they called me in.’

  She gave another little smile, and shook her head.

  ‘It’s a sad story,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not the story, my treasure. It’s just what happened first, before the story starts, and I was listening to my voice as I was telling you all this. How trite it sounded. A little Cold War drama, nothing else. At least there’s more adventure in what happened after that. I knew very well there’d be no hope for me if I went back to Budapest. They thought I was a meek young woman, and I’d just follow whatever orders I was given. They booked me on a train back home through Switzerland and Austria. Can you imagine! A minder went with me. I knew him a little. He was old, and kind. He liked me. I’m sure he knew I wasn’t going to finish the journey with him. We had to change trains at Zürich main station. I lost him there. I left my suitcase. I ran.’

  ‘And that’s what made you take my side,’ I said: ‘About running away to Zürich.’

  ‘I was on your side all the time. I was just pretending to the headmaster. Surely you can see by now you have to pretend a great deal in the world of adults? People are always pretending. Those who don’t are usually the worst.’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘Do you? Let me tell you what came next. I had no aim in view. I was amazed at what I’d done. My life had just been transformed. How instantly! How easily! By getting off a train. I walked and walked. I went all the way down the Bahnhofstrasse. At last I reached the PostAuto terminal, and I saw the different buses lined up, and their destination boards. My father had owned a villa in the Graubünden once, on the lake at Arosa, before the war. I’d never been there: I knew nothing about the place. I don’t think I even knew where Arosa was. There was a Graubünden PostAuto just leaving, for Chur and Zernez. I jumped on board. It headed off. You know that journey, don’t you, how it has a rhythm? Zürich, the view across the water, the peaks advancing towards you and retreating, the mountains, their walls of rock, the little towns along the lake, the clouds, the peaks in snow. I stared out at them. I had no idea where we were going. Soon it was mid-afternoon. We were high up. Whenever there was a stop, I found myself listening for the three notes—the PostAuto horn.’

  ‘I do that, too,’ I said.

  ‘It was a happy sound for me that day. It still is. We crossed the Julier Pass. I could see the valley of the Engadine spread out below: Silvaplana, St. Moritz. I thought it would be a bad idea to get off somewhere so well known. The next village was Celerina: here—where we are. Dusk was already falling. I could see this church tower, standing on its own, surrounded by green pastures, lit up by the last sun. I walked up this pathway, up the same steps we climbed. I pushed open the church door, and came in.’

  ‘And this is what you saw?’

  ‘It was less well-kept then. The murals were fainter, everything was in half-darkness. I remember it—a strange, suggestive shade. I went up to one of the front pews, before the altar. I was going to sit. It seemed best to kneel. All through that day I’d been insulated from my feelings. Suddenly I was overwhelmed. I was happy at what I’d done—I regretted it. I imagined the new life ahead of me—I missed everything I was leaving behind. I was excited—I was afraid. I leaned forward;
I rested my head on the wood of the bench in front of me. I could feel myself crying, but almost silently, I was sobbing, my whole body was trembling. Then a hand touched my shoulder, and I heard a voice, a woman’s voice. “Don’t cry,” it said. “Don’t cry. Let your feelings leave you. Let them go.” And it was such a soft, sweet voice that I did stop crying. I straightened up, and looked round. There in the murk I could just make out the profile of a young woman, standing in a shaft of light. She sat down, moving very gently, like a bird alighting on a perch, and she took my hand in hers and held it. “There,” she said to me: “Be still.” And I was, for the first time in many days. I was still and calm inside. It was as if she was some kind of modern angel, coming to me in my time of grief and need. We began to talk. I told her what had happened to me.’

  ‘And who was she?’ I said.

  ‘Can’t you guess? We sat side by side, the two of us, close to where we’re sitting now. “I’m no one,” she said to me: “Or no one at all unusual. I was here when you came in. I was at the back of the church, I was in the shadows, and I heard you, and watched. I thought you might not want to be alone. I thought you might need to feel someone’s presence close to you.” I could see she had a particular air about her, I noticed that at once. A distant air, as if some part of her mind and being was always somewhere else.’

  ‘And she became a friend of yours?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Ady, softly. She was whispering now. ‘A special friend. I know her still. I’ve known her ever since, through everything—but—but it’s been some time since I’ve seen her now. Some time—and I don’t know if I’ll see her again.’

  She stopped speaking, and put her head in her hands.

  ‘Was it who I think?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course it was,’ she said after a few moments: ‘That’s why I brought you here. The scene’s very vivid for me. Clear, as if I were living through it again—or maybe you make it stronger. What was she doing there, at nightfall, in a village chapel, I wondered. I wanted to know. “I’m asking for a blessing,” she said: “A blessing for my unborn child.” How well I remember that. It moved me very much.’