Red Heaven

by Nicolas Rothwell

  ‘It’s a noticeable shift!’

  Her expression and her manner changed. A waiter had come up. He placed a tall glass and a bottle of Évian on the bench beside her.

  ‘Here,’ she said: ‘Put it just here. Leave it. I’ll pour it. You can go.’

  She sighed, took the glass, tipped out the ice cubes and flung them imperiously into the pool.

  ‘I wanted no ice. They never learn. Come here.’

  She touched my chin momentarily with her cold fingertips.

  ‘What a shame it is. You’re so perfect now—so unspoiled. On the brink of knowing, on the threshold, but not there yet. You just drift through the world and time. I wonder if you can see what’s lying in wait for you—what’s all around us—the wild chase of life.’

  ‘Like upstairs?’

  ‘Everyone working everyone else. Everyone wanting something, every word disguising what they really want. That great châtelaine Serghiana being the prime example. I can’t bear it—it wears me out to even think about it.’

  She lay back on the daybed, and yawned, and stretched out languorously, and smiled. ‘You’re quiet again. Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘It’s you who sound like Great-Aunt Serghiana,’ I said: ‘Cold and hard, the way she used to be.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Josette, and she sat up. ‘Leave me alone now.’

  ‘Just like her!’

  ‘Enough—go back up to her if you want to—if you think your salvation lies with her—your cherished blood relation! Go!’

  *

  It was almost daybreak, and a hand was on my shoulder, shaking me. I looked through the half-light. There was Serghiana, her face close to me, her eyes staring into mine.

  ‘Wake up,’ she whispered.

  ‘What time is it? Is something wrong?’

  ‘It’s early—and nothing’s wrong.’

  ‘Have you been here a long time?’

  ‘It’s the only way truly to know someone—to watch them while they sleep. Are you well rested, my child? Any dreams?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘No? A good sign. Intelligent people don’t remember their dreams. The trapped and brainwashed dream to order—the order of Freud. Who could take such a man seriously? Let’s walk, just the two of us, the way we used to. It can be our field trip—our private exploration.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘You’ll see. It’ll be a surprise. Get ready. The hotel’s prepared a picnic lunch for us.’

  ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Their usual—bread, chocolate, strawberries, two splits of champagne.’

  ‘Champagne?’

  ‘Generally they think in terms of older guests.’

  ‘Are we celebrating?’

  ‘Always. Survival. Life itself. Hurry—I’ll be at the reception, waiting for you.’

  And there she was, a few minutes later when I went down.

  ‘Come,’ she said: ‘While the light’s still so pale—so beautifully ambiguous.’

  She was wearing a thick coat and headscarf; she looked me over and frowned. ‘You’ll be too cold,’ she said, and with slow, stately movements she undid her scarf, tied it round my neck and folded it carefully into place.

  ‘But what about you?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m used to these temperatures,’ she said: ‘Remember where I’m from. The wilds beyond the edge of Europe. This gentle cold is nothing to me, nothing at all.’

  We set off. The valley was still plunged in shadow; there was a scatter of frost on the grass.

  ‘This path we’re on—it’s the way down to the lake, isn’t it?’ I said after a little while: ‘Is that where we’re going? Are we going to walk all the way round?’

  ‘No, child—there, ahead of us, where the fir trees are—that’s where we’re going: the peninsula—it’s called Chastè.’

  ‘That’s a lovely name,’ I said.

  ‘It is—it’s Romansh. All the names here are magical. If the world spoke Romansh there wouldn’t be any sadness or wars.’

  ‘That would be wonderful,’ I said: ‘Wouldn’t it?’

  She looked sceptical, and made no reply. We went on: soon we had reached the lakeside: the track led up toward the banks and outcrops where the promontory began.

  ‘Of course, there’s no escaping from him,’ she said: ‘This is where Nietzsche used to walk, this way, every morning, when he spent his summers here. There’s even a memorial to him at the tip of the point: the kinds of people who come to Sils Maria for their holidays in this century have a fondness for memorials. But it can be our idyll, even so, can’t it? Never mind him.’

  ‘Idyll?’

  ‘Like a dream.’

  ‘But you said intelligent people don’t dream.’

  ‘Consistency’s an over-praised virtue.’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘Do you remember how we used to walk together, years ago—in the mountains, and down in the valley, through the forests: how happy you were when the songbirds were singing from the treetops; how frightened you were when you saw the poisonous red mushrooms growing in the shade.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ I said: ‘I can still see it all. I see it in my mind all the time when I’m at that school.’

  ‘And do you remember the trip we made up to the peak at Cassons Grat, on the funicular—how perfect that time was, up in that clear air, in the bright morning, high above the world; and it was a precious thing for me to go up with you, that day of all days—it helped me see into the future: I thought of you living on after me.’

  I looked across at her as we walked, but she went on speaking, with barely a flicker of a pause in her words.

  ‘And that’s why I wanted you to come here. Not so you can hear about Nietzsche: there’ll be time for that later on—ample time, when you’re condemned to studying him somewhere. I wanted you to be here with me; I wanted you to see the lake and Chastè together with me. I wanted to see it together with you.’

  She took my hand. ‘Do you understand how important that is to me?’

  ‘Because it’s an important place?’

  ‘It’s important, yes, in a way it is. Writers tend to come here, if they can: it makes them feel exalted. Musicians, though, above all, it’s like a rite of passage for them. You should see the hotel’s guestbook: it reads like the performing schedule for Salzburg or the Vienna Philharmonic. But it’s not because of that. I came here for the first time years ago, years into the past, when I was a very young woman, and those were days that meant a great deal to me—that’s the real reason I brought you here.’

  She smiled at me, and stopped speaking, and stood still. There was a strange expression on her face: it combined happiness and distress.

  ‘Are you sad, Great-Aunt Serghiana?’ I said.

  She let go of my hand and, for a moment, covered her eyes. ‘Always, inside,’ she answered: ‘Ask me something else.’

  ‘Was it very different here, then?’

  ‘It looked like heaven, because everywhere else was in ruins.’

  ‘You can remember everything?’

  ‘Perfectly. You know how to aim your memory, don’t you? No? I think you do know; you know by instinct, and very well. You make your mind into a cinema: you place the characters inside it, as if they were standing on a stage-set; you place them in their positions, their exact positions, one by one; you build the scene that way before your eyes. You picture everything, every detail—but you leave yourself out of the picture.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if you’re in it, vanity and pride come with you, and distort everything. Remove yourself: then what you’ve seen and heard comes back to you. All the words, all the looks and gestures. It’s all still there in the record chambers of the mind. I wish it wasn’t that way. I wish things could be erased. Ask me something more.’

  I asked a question; and another. Suddenly it seemed essential to fill the air with words, with questions and with her respo
nses, to be speaking constantly, to protect her and envelop her, to prevent her from having to stand in silence even for the briefest instant. There was a sense of crisis in those moments, it mounted, it was strong, then abruptly that strength subsided, it became weaker and weaker: the scene lost its menace, it became amusing; it passed. The distraught look had left her face. We walked further.

  ‘We’ll talk about those days another time, my child,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Because they haven’t gone?’

  ‘They can’t disappear. It’s all still real, everything that’s happened to us. Those experiences haven’t gone anywhere, or faded away somehow into time. Time’s not real. It’s nothing—it’s a measure. We invented it.’

  ‘And you’re still caught in those days you can’t talk about?’

  Serghiana ignored this, and went ahead of me. The path narrowed. There was a steep headland: we rounded it together. Ahead we could see the curves of the peninsula and the early sunshine gleaming on the lake.

  ‘How blissful,’ she said softly: ‘Nature’s what gives us peace, not man. But look—above the pass—those clouds. There’ll be a storm: this morning, soon—it’s coming fast.’

  She stopped, sank down on a low, weathered wooden bench beside the path, and made a sign to me to sit beside her.

  ‘Great-Aunt Serghiana,’ I began, then hesitated.

  ‘What, child? Such calm: I don’t know whether to fall into the quiet forever or run from it. Another question?’

  ‘These seats and benches with names carved into them—the ones along the path: what are they? Who put them here?’

  She laughed. ‘Remember yesterday, when you asked me what a bourgeois was? Now I can show you. Show you to perfection! These are bourgeois seats. They’re the memory seats; that’s what they’re called. People who come here in the summer each year claim them, they buy them up, and stamp them with their names, and have them put in places with a view. It’s become a fashion. Children dedicate them to their parents, and parents to their children—and married couples as well, you see benches commemorating them and their long-lasting unions, too.’

  ‘Because they love each other?’

  ‘Because they love themselves, and they want their names to live on! That’s what the bourgeois want. To be remembered after death. To be missed. Soon the whole Chastè peninsula’s going to be covered by these benches, there’ll be one every few metres, they’ll form a perfect record of a class and its longing for permanence.’

  ‘But won’t the benches all rot away and collapse—the way old trees do?’

  ‘Yes—they’ll be ruins in the end, or earth art, and decay to nothing.’

  ‘Would you like me to put one there for you?’

  ‘The wrong thought! I’d rather be remembered in your mind than on a block of wood along a footpath. Anyway, I don’t think I fall into the category—I may be many things, but I’m not a bourgeoise!’

  ‘No,’ I said then, triumphantly: ‘You’re the Red Princess!’

  ‘Wherever did you hear that expression? Who have you been listening to?’

  ‘It was Egon the cartoonist who called you that.’

  ‘Is that so—the poor deluded man!’

  ‘I don’t think he meant it in a bad way. But princesses can’t be bourgeois—can they?’

  ‘Nor can communists.’

  ‘What about Ady? Is she one?’

  ‘Now there’s a question that opens up the depths! Everything about her’s made up—even her name. I suppose that’s forgivable.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Everyone in this part of the world has an origin story, and they’re all false.’

  ‘Even yours?’

  ‘Of course not! Do you want to know the true story of Palafay and where she came from? I’m sure you’ve heard the cover version.’

  ‘I know she likes to keep the names of all her husbands.’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it. Her father was from the Bukovina, from some marshy shtetl. There were pogroms: he fled them; he made his way to the city: he failed in business in Vienna; he tried again in Budapest, and opened up a shop there with borrowed money, selling toys, and trinkets, and ladies’ clothes. That went well, he expanded, he did the right people favours—he became a big capitalist; and his daughter was a little student by then, at a private school high on Gellert Hill: she was pretty, very pretty, in the usual lighthearted Hungarian way: she survived the war somehow—who knows how, and who knows where. I remember her in party circles, afterwards, in those years when the war was over and everything was being remade; I know I saw her once, at a meeting in Romania of the Cominform—then suddenly she was in the West: she had a singing voice; it gave her a screen career she doesn’t like to be reminded of—and that’s when her real days of performance began: she went out and found her husbands, each richer than the one before: there was a count, and after him a diplomat, and now a maestro of the music world. The class terms don’t exist to describe someone who’s lived their life like that: she’s what bourgeois women dream of being, rather than being one herself. I’ve seen her mansion on the Vienna Parkring: the interiors make the Hofburg look modest. Quite a tale, isn’t it? From the proletariat to the plutocracy in two generations. Does that fit with anything she’s told you?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  ‘Well—why should it? Her life’s just the raw material for her self-reinvention. No one would begrudge her that. What matters more is how she treats you. Do you actually like her? Has she been kind to you? Does she ever come to see you? I know she hands you on to those Upper East Side intellectuals for your holidays.’

  ‘You know everything!’

  ‘You didn’t answer me. You told me once you enjoyed her company; you said you loved her. I think you know—that cut me like a knife. But now I wonder: now you’re under her wing, is it still the same: a year, no, two years later? Do you like the treatment you get from her? Do you still care for the life that’s been sketched out for you by Palafay?’

  She turned, and gave me an inquisitorial look. I stayed silent for a moment.

  ‘See!’ she said then: ‘See what you’ve become. I ask you a simple question: and you stop, you think. Your face doesn’t move, it’s like a mask, but inside you’re considering what to say. You’re no longer a child at all: in fact you’re quite grown up in your behaviour. You’ve become calculating. What things you’ve learned from Palafay!’

  ‘But I hardly ever see her,’ I said.

  ‘I know it’s not your doing,’ she said then, in a gentler voice: ‘But you understand, don’t you? You had a place in my life. And she has you now. Does she mother you, does she fly in to see you, and spoil you with her gifts?’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘So she’s claimed you—with a glance, and a smile, and some Hungarian patisseries?’

  ‘You’re not being fair.’

  ‘Fairness isn’t in my repertoire. Truth, principle, loyalty and faithfulness until death—those are qualities I recognise. The world doesn’t know fairness or justice; it knows their absence. It knows danger and destruction. Look up. See there—the storm’s almost on top of us. That’s the way the world is—random bursts of violence—look, there—you can see the lightning flashes deep inside the clouds. Don’t flinch! Have you become afraid of storms now? Should we go back—or are you still actually the same inside—brave and fearless, the way you were when I was shaping you?’

  ‘I love storms,’ I said: ‘Of course. Let’s stay, and watch it coming in.’

  ‘Well—why not? We’ll stand right at the water’s edge. Let’s see its fury. See the true face of the nature we try so hard to love. There’s the rain, there—pelting down, on the far side of the lake—like a column pouring from the clouds. It looks just like Dürer’s dream.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘An artist—from long ago. He had a famous dream—I know—another dream. But this one counts. He made a watercolour sketch of it, so we know what he saw—or
what he imagined he saw. And he wrote about it too.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘There’s a long description: it’s in the collection in Vienna. I’ve seen it, I’ve held that page from his workbook in my hands. It’s a striking image—the storm looks like an atomic bomb cloud, just after the detonation—but he made it hundreds of years before anyone ever thought of atoms and nuclear tests. He often used to see imaginary paintings and artworks in his sleep, and as soon as he woke up they’d vanish from him and leave no trace—but this was a different kind of image: clear, precise enough to draw: a wide column of water falling from the sky, and spreading out before it hits the ground, with smaller jets of water falling all around it, close by and far away, just like the rain veils in the tropics. Beneath the image there are several lines in his handwriting, very neat and elegant, and his signature as well. He says in his dream there was a furious noise, and a wild wind, and the force of the flooding drowned the whole landscape in front of him—he woke trembling, he had no idea where he was, he had to struggle to get control of himself.’

  The rain had drawn closer as she was speaking, the clouds were rearing upwards, they formed white towers, rising and shifting, with voids between them through which shafts of blurry sunlight came pouring down; there were plumes of vapour hanging low like ragged curtains stretched across the lake. Blots of cloud raced in; their shadows pressed down on us. The wind had strengthened—it whipped up wave crests, the surface of the water turned to foam. Serghiana dropped down to one knee beside me, she clasped her arm around me and held me by the shoulder, tight. Her face was touching mine; her breath as she spoke blew on my cheek.

  ‘It’s near,’ she said: ‘How wonderful! Almost like the storms of years ago.’

  ‘Were they different from the ones today?’

  ‘Very. They were dramas, they were violent, they had a progression to them—like a piece of music. First a thunderclap—the statement of the theme—then variations, and a quiet interlude, then, suddenly, out of nothing, the finale, fierce, profound: you’d see lightning bolts come down on both sides of the valley, the thunder would roll across the sky and jump between the mountaintops, and there would always be a double rainbow at the end.’