Through Streets Broad and Narrow

by Gabriel Fielding

And this led to John’s attempting to tell him of his immediate situation, the complex circumstances of his failure and indecision. Beginning with Dymphna, the growth of his love for her and its consequences, he made several attempts to recount them; then, finding it difficult to differentiate between internal and external events, he switched to an account of his relationship with Chamberlyn-Ffynch and the social adventures in which it had involved him. Collaterally, he explained how in reality the friendship with Palgrave had been a direct consequence of his love for Dymphna and tried to show how by means of it, as later by taking up boxing, he had hoped to impress her. And Greenbloom listened. He appeared to listen as he listened to the music, full-eyed, perfectly still, anticipating nothing; yet not, on the other hand, seeming to relish any aspect of it.

  John outlined the medical course and his progress through it up to the time of the paper, the subsequent débâcle culminating in his failure in Midwifery and Dymphna’s marriage to Cloate. Greenbloom made no comment and betrayed no surprise at the sudden introduction of Cloate’s name into the long and confused account John had given him. He sat there waiting, brooding, it seemed, his eyes occasionally studying John’s face, but most of the time focussed on the entrance to the smaller lounge through which the waiters came and went with trolleys and trays. He did not yawn, and asked no questions. When John had finished he waited for a few minutes then got up, signalled for John to follow him and limped out into the foyer of the hotel.

  He said, “We will have dinner in your Club; but first I must change. Would you prefer to wait for me here or in my rooms?”

  “In your rooms.”

  They went up in the lift together and John sat in the sitting-room while Greenbloom had a bath. He passed the time in looking at Greenbloom’s possessions. He had the usual press full of clothes; there must have been two dozen pairs of shoes and half this number of suits, all of them, judging by the quality of the cloth and the buttons, pre-war. At one side of the wardrobe there were two spare artificial legs, each with a sock and shoe already in place on the foot. The one in use was with Greenbloom in the bathroom. But apart from the clothes and a few books the only other things he appeared to have brought with him were three photographs and a large triptych open on the dressing-table.

  One of the photographs was of his mother; it was signed “Mother,” and there was a Hebrew inscription beneath the signature. Another, of a pale young man with the shadowy look of Greenbloom himself, was signed, “Your affectionate brother Eli” and dated August, 1939. It was also signed by the photographer, Felix Mesurier (Paris), who was evidently a personal friend for he had written, “Après nous le prelude.”

  John studied Eli’s face with closer attention. He decided that he looked dead in the way that photographs of second lieutenants of the First World War had looked dead when he had seen them on people’s pianos in his Northumberland childhood. Then he remembered that since most of them had been dead they might have looked so because he had known that they were dead; so he changed his mind and suggested to himself that Eli only looked doomed. At first glance he appeared to be wearing some kind of a uniform; but on closer inspection it was no recognizable uniform at all, only a black coat and the upper part of a black waistcoat showing between the lapels, and a dark-coloured shirt of some sort worn with a black tie. But the eyes were not dead, they were not liquid either, nor enigmatic, nor sombre; they were gloom circles on the mat surface of the photograph, well spaced by the grey nose and only just differentiated from the tarnished whites.

  The whole photograph was a trick of chemical paint on paper conveying a mood that was as much a deliberate falsity as the one it was intended to beget in the beholder; or so John decided. He also decided that Horab might as well have framed only the name and the message, “Your affectionate brother Eli, August, 1939.”

  He turned his attention to the triptych, glancing briefly at the first panel; very sharply painted, obviously good, perhaps modern; and then to the third, equally complex, equally Christian and confusing. But really, all the time he was looking at these two panels he was nursing an intense curiosity about the central panel which was concealed behind a small green velvet curtain. His impatience was so acute that he was quite unable to concentrate on the details of its companion pieces, noting only that they were labelled with tiny ivory plaques: La Débâcle and L’Ascension. He lifted the bottom of the curtain concealing the central piece and saw that it was entitled La Crucifixion.

  But before he could examine it further he was suddenly aware of being watched, realized that he knew this to be so because the sounds from the bathroom had ceased and that a moment or two earlier he had heard the door swing open to admit the scent of Greenbloom’s bath salts to the bedroom.

  He turned round to see him standing there in a pitch-black bathrobe with only one leg showing beneath its hem, one hand on the doorknob, his head wet and bedraggled, some silvery feathers of hair hanging down on either side of his temples. Greenbloom stood there like a black flamingo. At that instant he was smiling. He said, “Well?” and swung himself into the room, hopping like the flamingo, putting out the wings of his sleeves to steady himself from one piece of furniture to another in his progress to the bed.

  He sat down on it and, in his old way, ordered, “Leg!”

  John went towards the bathroom to get it but was stopped and directed to the press. “A spare. That one with the black sock. I’m dressing for dinner.”

  When he had carried it across to him, Greenbloom said, “Turn your back.”

  “Can’t I help?”

  “Since I value your friendship, no! Instead, you might care to finish your inspection of ‘La Crucifixion.’”

  “I hope you didn’t mind.”

  “Kindly look at it.”

  John drew the curtain across and was confronted by a black panel. There was nothing whatsoever painted on the smooth wooden surface. Instead there was a visiting card pinned to the empty space:

  M. ELI GREENBLOOM

  78a rue Jacob

  Le Chateau Noir

  Paris 6me.

  Bordeaux.

  and scribbled across this in a flat, even, hand: “Horab. La Crucifixion c’est aujourd’hui aussi … J’espère.”

  Greenbloom had his leg on and his pants and trousers. The harness of the leg crossed his naked chest to the opposite shoulder and was very clean. He said, “It was never completed. One must conceal what is incomplete.”

  “Who painted them?”

  “My brother Eli. You saw his message?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is interesting, I think?”

  “It’s cryptic,” John said. “What does he mean, ‘The crucifixion also is today, I hope.’”

  “They are separate sentences; or so I hope. It is when they become one that I cease to hope. But we shall discuss this later, briefly; so soon as you have made a second and more successful attempt to outline for me your own problems.”

  He dressed rapidly but more tidily than in the old days, not scattering things everywhere, and they drove down to the Ranelagh Club in a hired Daimler.

  Before they went in, he instructed, “Should you introduce me to anyone my name is August Graeme. I am an American metallurgist here on business from New York. This is important.”

  “But your appointment was in all the newspapers.”

  “For that reason the Minister took particular care to see that my arrival was not. Mr. Graeme, on the other hand, landed at Shannon two days ago.”

  “Is that why you’re living in the Shelbourne instead of at the Consulate or somewhere?”

  “I need about a week,” Greenbloom said. “After that I shall take up my appointment officially.”

  Giving up any further attempt to diminish Greenbloom, John asked, “Why does your arrival have to be so hush hush? You’re not engaged in espionage, are you? I mean, an agent on behalf of the British government or something?”

  “I hope to carry out a small personal mission in the week at my dis
posal, that is all. That is why I expect something of you from this evening onwards. You may suggest that I am an old friend of your family’s, a benefactor of your brother Michael’s, his employer, in fact. We met at Oxford. The more truth one can incorporate in a lie the better.”

  “I’m to act as camouflage, you mean?”

  “Socially, yes.”

  “But I told you; I shall be up to my eyes in exams in a few days’ time.”

  “We’ll discuss that in a moment. You must take me to a room where we’re not likely to be overheard. There we shall attempt the almost impossible task of communicating.”

  In the club library John ordered drinks and when Bartlett had gone, said, “I keep thinking about your pictures—”

  “As I told you, they are the work of my brother Eli. Each of the panels took him six months to complete: they were not experimental.”

  “Why did he never complete the third one?”

  “He is completing it now.”

  Greenbloom waited so obviously, which is to say, by not moving at all, by a certain intonation of the last word, that John also waited for him to finish what he had patently not finished. The time passed, yet he added nothing; and John, borrowing Greenbloom’s own word, said, “Well? Where? In France?”

  “In Dachau,” Greenbloom said, “in person. We will drink to him, a toast without words.”

  They emptied their glasses and Greenbloom said, “In all you have told me about your particular Dublin, I suspect that you have omitted one vital factor, the one which pains you most.”

  “That would be Groarke,” John said, “my closest friend.”

  “One of those friends whom one dislikes immoderately?”

  “Not at present; that wasn’t the reason for missing him out. It was only because I thought it would complicate things more. Even without Groarke there was so much to explain; and if I’ve no clear idea exactly what he means myself, how can I expect to make him relevant to you?”

  “The facts?”

  “He’s had a breakdown, he’s in a mental hospital. He was in love with Dymphna too.”

  “An ambitious man,” Greenbloom said. “Is he certified or is his attempt to escape a voluntary one?”

  “He’s not certified but I should have said it was an involuntary one. He can do nothing. He wants to qualify, he’s nearer to it than I am myself, yet he’s shut up in a private ward in Grangegorman wasting the most vital time of all. He won’t even write to me. I’ve only managed to visit him once and that was by accident; then, when I spoke to him, he seemed to be genuinely amused. He made a joke.”

  “We will drink to him.”

  Greenbloom pressed the bell and ignoring Bartlett’s arrival began to talk quite at random about Eli’s pictures. Perhaps to pass the time or else simply because he had been thinking about them for some minutes he limped round the loo table like an absorbed lecturer or a man rehearsing a speech.

  “‘La Débâcle’ is the artist’s interpretation of the Eden myth. The man and woman are being driven not out of, but further into the primal garden. The streaming seraph in the upper part of the picture holds open for them the transparent doors of temporal vision. These are covered with anatomical shapes which might also be flowers and fruit; they suggest eating.” He emphasized the last word as though it disgusted him, and Bartlett, who was waiting to take John’s order, looked at him with surprise. John asked for two glasses of dark Marsala and as soon as Bartlett had gone, Greenbloom went on.

  “An idea probably derived from a triptych of Hieronymus Bosch who used these symbols in the portrayal of the sensual passions. Bosch was also an ugly man.”

  “Is your brother Eli ugly?”

  “By now I should imagine he is even uglier than I remember him.”

  “He didn’t look ugly in the photograph.”

  “In portrait photography never trust a three-quarter profile. This particular study would have been most expensive had not the photographer, one of the best in Paris, been an intimate friend of Eli’s.” Greenbloom paused. “They were arrested simultaneously in their flat in the Rue Jacob.”

  “Are they both in Dachau?”

  “Not now.”

  There seemed to be nothing more to say. Bartlett came in and left the drinks on the table. When he had gone Greenbloom said suddenly, “They were once homosexuals. The Nazis do not like homosexuality outside the Party, it disgusts them. Since they were also Jews and later, converts to Rome, I am surprised, that is to say I was surprised to learn from an unimpeachable source eight weeks ago that my brother was still alive.”

  “In Dachau?” John asked. “I don’t know quite where it is.”

  “It is a romantic village about ten miles north of Munich. Incidentally, one of the most Catholic areas of Bavaria.”

  “How horrible.”

  “Romanticism is a terrible thing,” Greenbloom said. “It is intolerable in art, unrealistic in politics and anathema in religion. Belloc once said that to go to Rome by way of Germany was equivalent to pouring beer on top of good wine.”

  This meant little to John and to cover his lack of interest he asked, “What’s the meaning of the other picture?”

  “According to the notes he sent me, ‘L’Ascension’ marks Eli’s acceptance of the Christian creed. The transparency of the ascending Christ extends the motif of the doors in the first panel, limiting nothing but taking into itself the whole body of the natural to give it final reality in the supernatural. Only the face and brow of this figure are at rest within themselves; the remainder of the body and its vestments fluctuate between what is beautiful and what is not. The whole background of the picture leads the eye into the confines of this enormous, perpetually rising body. Had you studied it you would have seen that it too was composed of the physical forms of men and women, those in the shadows taking what shape they have from the reflected light of the remainder. This symbolizes my brother’s conviction that the Hell-form exists only by virtue of the Heavenly, that consequently the excruciation of the damned is, in this sense, Heaven-sent.”

  “Does he mean the Ascension, too, is going on all the time?”

  “I have wondered.” Greenbloom picked up his glass and raised it to his mouth. “To the man who jokes—in the asylum.”

  “To Groarke!”

  When they had drunk John asked, almost as an afterthought, and half wishing he had thought more carefully before he put the questions, “When you said Eli was completing the Crucifixion in Dachau I suppose you didn’t mean he was actually painting it—?”

  Greenbloom only said, “We will dine and you will perhaps tell me more about your friend Groarke.”

  During dinner John asked him why he was so interested in Michael Groarke.

  “Because he, like Eli, is a prisoner. One of my objects in taking this post was to make personal but incognito contact with the Nazis here and secure the release of my brother from Dachau.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “It is not as probable as the liberation of your friend, but if I find the right German and pay the right amount I have some hope that Eli will be sent through Italy to Yugoslavia, or one of the other escape routes.”

  “Then surely you don’t want to waste time on Groarke.”

  “There are unities,” Greenbloom said angrily. “As a Jew I recognize them. I came here to obtain freedom for my brother and the first person I meet is similarly concerned to release a friend from the imprisonment of his ambition. Do you imagine that all will go well with my cause if I neglect yours? We will see the superintendent of the asylum tomorrow. I will offer safeguard for your friend and take full responsibility. I shall also listen to him myself and we shall understand one another since I too have succeeded magnificently in all my failures.”

  John did not argue with him. He was not at this time very interested in Groarke. The faculty he had developed of forgetting all about people when he believed that they could no longer help him in any way had extended so far that it seemed to operate almos
t before he had need of it.

  When they went to drink coffee in the hall, he asked instead for more information about Greenbloom’s plans for Eli.

  “Which particular Dublin Nazi are you going to approach?”

  “My opposite number, before he knows the nature of my own appointment.”

  “But how extraordinary.”

  “Yes?” Greenbloom asked.

  “Because that will be Christian Luthmann, the German press attaché. He’s a friend of Groarke’s. They know each other well.”

  “Precisely,” Greenbloom put down his cup. “Unities are only to be discovered by recognizing them before they present themselves. There is no point in discussing these matters further tonight. Thank you for a good meal. Meet me at the Shelbourne tomorrow afternoon at three o’clock.”

  But the next day there was a letter in his box. Recognizing Dymphna’s handwriting, knowing again as so often in the past the sickening pace of his heart, the vertiginous tilt of the floor, he put it in his pocket and with clumsy hands cooked his breakfast on the gas ring. He managed to eat most of it and then, to get some air, he walked to the Rotunda clinic instead of taking the tram.

  He thought that it would be a magnificent thing to throw the letter unopened from O’Connell Bridge into the Liffey. There is so much information one cannot avoid, but a letter is always a choice, and this letter, so contagious in its physical effects, might have come direct from a plague house.

  When he reached the bridge he looked at the envelope again, studying it most minutely. The postmark showed that it had been posted on the evening of the day before in Dublin and not at her home in the country; the turn of the handwriting, less defined than usual, conveyed haste and some clumsiness. It was a thin envelope and there was no bulk inside it, therefore it was a short letter. What did it say? It said, perhaps, “Cloate is dead—killed in action.” Or it said, “I’m really very lonely and miss my friends. With Fergus away it would be lovely to have someone to talk to. Couldn’t you bring yourself to have coffee with me just occasionally? Fergus begged me to see you if only you’d consent—” Perhaps it said, “I’m desperately ill; I must see you, I want to explain,” or, “Dear John, How are you after all these months? I’ve just heard from Mike Groarke; he says—”