My breath is clouds of pale mist. I rub my watering eyes and Rosza is ahead of me, moving purposefully up the street. Her head turns slowly from side to side but only at certain points along the rise. She is looking but knowing where to look. Where the blackened stumps of burnt beams reach up from the crumbling bricks.
The bracelet light flickers. Maybe it is out of range here. I put it against my ear. No ticking, no whirring. The sound of death is silence, I think. I strain to hear; the wind turns over in my ears. I look at the bracelet. I am sure the green on the panel is darker.
I rub my finger on a shell of burnt stone; it comes away black, even after all these years. I wonder whether it would be cool inside the stone: in a fire would it be protected or would it become the hottest part, like the hottest part of the sun? What would it be like to crawl inside? To be a person encased in stone. I wonder if that is how Devlin feels. I have always imagined him looking up through layers of water – the remote world making unstable patterns. But now I realise that is me. Devlin would be the bluest heart of the hottest flame.
There is a broader gap between this shell and the next. In the centre are the burnt and splintered remains of a wooden shelter collapsed over a hole in the ground. An eye looking up to the sky. I move closer. A drowned eye: a well. Choppy black water with a hint of green lifts in small silver-tipped waves, as though someone has recently dragged a hand across the surface.
The street is empty. The only place Rosza could have gone is further up the mountain. Unless she has taken a side street and doubled back past me. My neck tenses. She could be anywhere behind me. She knows every corner, every alley.
I tell myself not to be ridiculous. There has been no sign that Rosza is hostile.
The building at the top of the street is actually two buildings: a low white-washed box with a crucifix nailed to the front mantel. Behind it is a tall thin tower.
I open the church door to find plain wooden pews before an unadorned font. The water had dried out long ago, leaving nothing but a milky tide line. At the far end, a wooden cross is nailed to the white wall. On it, a plaster Jesus: the painted head bent, tears trickling down the shiny pink cheeks, eyes closed, hands in supplication. His feet are bound in heavy chains: real chains, I see. Long rusted iron nails have been driven through his feet, the punctures surrounded by red. There is none of the ornate-ness of the Sicilian churches in my art books, where even the smallest church had an altar dipped in gold, a luminous Renaissance painting, priests’ robes with precious jewels sewn into the tunic. I wonder if the building was stripped on the Church’s orders or by looters.
The door opposite opens onto a narrow room with a hearth on one side, a wooden box bed on the other and a stone sink under the window. Two wooden benches are drawn up next to the fire. Two dusty wine glasses lie between the benches; a black robe – tattered and stiff – hangs on the wall.
I shiver. This room seems colder than the village outside.
The door at the base of the tower is ajar, so I stop and call Roza’s name. Inside, stone stairs wind up into the gloom. I can’t bring myself to step into the darkness until I see the light edging through the window slits. I put my hand on the cold cracked wall. My sleeve slides back, the panel on the bracelet glows. My wrist is the colour of seaweed in the gloom.
I climb, glimpsing the countryside through the slits. The tiger-striped light falls across the steps which are coated in black dirt but lighter in the middle as though someone has scraped their feet back and forth. There are cobwebs in the corners with old clumps of dust hanging like teardrops from the misshapen circles.
Rosza has moved more quickly than I would have imagined and the silence is oppressive. At least outside there had been the sound of the wind, the creak of wood, the far-off birds, a sense of living no matter how cold and remote. At least I could look back at the glass house. I just stop myself from thinking of it as home.
I round the next corner and come up the last steps and am, suddenly, there. A door opens onto a small room, bare except for a stripped bed and a wooden cabinet.
Rosza is standing at the window opposite. Without turning her head, she says, ‘Come to see the view.’
Below us the village descends to the plain in dark grey folds of hunched and brittle trees which flinch in the wind. Landscape as body of the twitching beast.
‘I keep expecting it to snow,’ I say.
‘The bastard weather is too changeable now,’ she says. ‘I often think it would be better to live in a hot climate. One knows where one is in an ofanculu jungle.’
A peculiar sighing comes up through the trees, a rushing of expelled air. Blow, blow west wind, I say to myself. Blow your soul beyond the firmament of the dead.
From here, the glass house is easy to see. The light glints off the silver shell in veins of blue and green which snake into the air. The tower of Pietr’s bedroom is almost level with this tower; it rises straight, sheer and high above the rest of the house. It is out of proportion, I see that now. I am reminded of something but can’t think what.
‘We’re above the mist,’ says Rosza.
I say, ‘I prefer the water not the clouds.’
‘Clouds are water,’ says Rosza. ‘These mountains are known as the mountains of tears. They cry over the Triangle of Hunger but never long enough to make a difference.’ She slaps the window sill. ‘Everything is water in the end. Everything is tears.’
‘Do you come here to mourn?’
She lights a cigarillo. ‘So bastard unfashionable now, to smoke. Who would have thought that smoking would be taboo in Italy? When I was a girl . . . ’ She seems lost in thought. ‘The doctors in white coats said on the television, smoking was good for you. That was the first time I went out of Europe, to Poland. I had never seen anything like it. I was shocked.’ She exhales slowly. The smoke is snatched away by the wind. ‘Television,’ she says.
She leans out the window. I make an instinctive grab for her arm but she smiles and says, ‘I won’t fall.’
‘I used to come up here and burn the diary pages I had written,’ she says. ‘Pages that would have seen me called a witch. About the stupid girls who teased me.’
‘I burned my diary pages,’ I say. ‘I would eat the ashes.’
‘Yes.’ She is pleased. ‘It was a way of overcoming your weaknesses.’
She says, ‘Did you hide the car between the boulders at the bottom?’
I nod.
‘Pietr gave it to you?’
‘Yes.’
She smokes her thin black cigarette with her hand barely moving from her mouth. Her fingers are swollen around her rings. Fleshy folds at the little wrists. Round knuckles. An elderly pensioner living in a remote part of an ineffectual country.
‘I wasn’t following you,’ I say. ‘I just wanted to see what happens if I go high.’ I push back my sleeve. The metal rings my wrist like cold mist, the green panel shining. My arm feels dragged down by its own weather.
Rosza flicks the dried mud off with her nail. She runs her finger over the panel, pausing when she feels the hairline crack. She touches the burn marks, more gently than I would have thought.
‘Maybe there’s nothing inside,’ I say. ‘Just a battery for the light. It’s a psychological trick to keep me in one place.’
Rosza asks, ‘What did they say when they put it on you?’
I rub the bracelet, trying to warm it up. I remember how Devlin had rolled over in the bed when I unlatched the shutters. I had felt the splinters beneath my fingers, smelled the fumes of oil and fish rising off the inky water. The dawn light was pink and blue tinted. I remember how I could have looked over my shoulder at Devlin but I didn’t. I stood there and watched the sun come up, holding the coffee cup which felt cool in my hands, as cool as the inside of the early morning, feeling Devlin behind me. I remember how he had never touched me but I had relaxed against him and turned my head so that my lips were in that hollow where the shoulder muscle meets the chest, just below the collarbone,
the coolest place, the colour of blue vein and pearl.
I had just closed my eyes when I heard the click of metal around my wrist.
After that the heat from the coffee cup burned and burned and burned up my fingers, my neck, the back of my head, behind my ears. But where it burned the most was under my eyes. Since then I’ve never stopped burning. And I hate the heat.
‘It was just a technician,’ I say now, ‘who put the bracelet on me.’
She stares at me, unblinking. ‘It would be interesting to know how far they will let you go.’ She throws her cigarette out the window, watching the sparks break up in showers of tiny orange flares in the wind.
‘Your Mr Devlin has become a lone wolf,’ she says. ‘What do the Americans say? He has gone off the reservation.’
The wind swells, battering itself against the tower. The stones seem to shudder. Rosza looks at the bracelet and says, ‘We will go up.’
We take the last set of stone steps to the ruins of the Roman battlements. Past the crumbling parapets and the faint road is the graveyard. At first I think there is no order to the graves but then I see the stones lying in uneven rows around the peak’s bony hillocks. Most of the headstones are plain but here and there is a magnificently carved angel or engraved crucifix. Set well back is a small flat-roofed stone building with a new brass padlock on its wrought-iron gate.
‘You wanted to know why I come here,’ says Rosza, pointing. ‘My husband’s vault.’
I peer through the gate past the high stone table to the five shadowed alcoves.
Rosza looks at the ledge over the gate. ‘There should be a key there.’
I am barely taller than she but I stand on tiptoe.
‘A little more,’ says Rosza.
The green light on the bracelet turns red. A shrill sound cracks the grey air. I can’t understand what it is at first. A city sound. An alarm. The note breaks into regular beeps. I jiggle the bracelet. The beeping goes on.
Rosza holds my wrist, examines the bracelet with care. She lights a cigarillo and exhales, staring down the mountain. ‘Now we see how important you are,’ she says.
The wind comes up the hill: a wind with the smell of decayed moss in it, a wind carrying the colour of death in it. I look at the sombre greys of the stones around me, imagine women with dead hair walking slowly up the path, looking down on the living. On those that killed them.
The beeping hammers through my head. I am finding it hard to think.
‘You young people have no conception of what it is like to be poor,’ says Rosza. ‘To not be able to afford a doctor, not to avoid pain.’ She scratches her stick across a mossy stone, leaving a pale wet trail in the glowing green. ‘Pietr never comes to the vault.’
I think of Pietr by the lake. ‘Maybe he cares too much.’ I stare at the stone table. ‘How did you meet Czeslaw?’
She studies the broken village falling down the mountainside. ‘He was passing through.’ Nothing stirs but the wind. Rozsa’s breath is heavy in the cold air. ‘All these women that criticise me,’ she says. ‘Fat Rosza, insignificant Rosza. I outlasted them all.’ She beats her stick on the ground, in time with the shrill beeping. ‘I would hear them whispering,’ she says, ‘huddled behind the long line of sheets in the drying yard. They thought the wind blew their words away. But it blew them straight to me. I wrote them in my diary then I burned the pages and I ate them.’
The beeping goes on and on. ‘Eating the book of words,’ I say. ‘Yes.’
She grasps my wrist and swings it against the wall. I feel the shock in my arm as the panel meets hard stone. The beeping goes on. Rosza swears.
‘Of course we made enquiries,’ she says loudly. ‘Did you think we would not? Your Mr Devlin is a drunk. He is a man collapsing into failure, of no good to anyone, embarrassment after embarrassment from Sydney to Borneo.’
At that past moment in the moonlight, Devlin opens his eyes and smiles at me. I press my knuckles against the cold vault wall.
‘Then why is he here?’ I say. ‘If he is a drunk.’
Rosza slashes at a strand of wet moss with her stick. ‘I suppose it is their idea of fairness. He has been on the case the longest.’
The beeping noise burrows into my spine, along my jaw line. Go to the dead and love them. Where were those words from? I saw them carved in stone by women with pale dead hair. Go to the dead and love them.
‘Longest?’ I say.
‘I was sure he would have told you. Mr Devlin is the one who arrested your father.’
The beeping stops. The silence fills the cold air.
I look at the panel. It is still red.
In Venice, I didn’t talk to him the whole time he bandaged the burns and cuts on my arms and hustled me out to the boat and down the blue green canal to the airport. He walked me in a careful arc away from the gleaming passenger planes to the sandbagged concrete sheds beyond the last runway. I wondered whether any tourists saw me, what they thought, whether they could see the handcuffs. Maybe they were briefly disturbed, the way that I had been as a child when we crossed into Morocco, driving past the wire cages and turnstiles and dogs twisting on leashes and the Africans sitting on the ground – their own ground – while surly police tossed their clothing into the dust. Inside the air-conditioned limousine, my father’s business associates passed around the figs they had brought across from Spain.
It was as Devlin was leading me up the ramp into the rear of the cargo plane that I quoted the Rimbaud. I didn’t even know if he could hear me: the propellers had just started turning and the wind was rushing in my ears. Wild bad tortured Rimbaud, giving up poetry, the thing he loved most, because he couldn’t achieve the perfection he wanted. Poetry couldn’t make him immortal. I descended black impassive rivers. I sensed haulers were no longer guiding me. Screaming Redskins had taken them for their targets. When I had finished, I spat on the floor – spat the devil out of my mouth – and said to the man who had handcuffed me, ‘I’ll never forgive you.’
Rosza was looking along the horizon. ‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘Maybe you are right. Maybe you don’t mean enough to them. It is all a trick.’
‘You can’t take that risk.’
She waves a hand. ‘A few fotutto bureaucrats. Imagine a whole village against you.’ She drags her stick across the moss. ‘If you tell them you see nothing maybe they will leave us alone.’
I see the jewels winking in their velvet gullies. ‘It’s just trade?’
‘That’s all it’s ever been. Trade and territories. Just maps. Nobody killed. Nobody disappearing like your brother.’
The wind swells again on the far side of the mountain. We hear a distant hammer striking wood, an approaching beat. A black shape rises above the summit; light flares off the metal body, the dark rounded windows, the turning metal blades. It hovers like a bird on the wind before falling sideways and disappearing from view. The beat fades down the mountain. For the first time Rosza looks as though she isn’t sure what to do. The beat grows louder. The helicopter is coming back up, over the village.
She looks at the bracelet. ‘It might switch off if you go lower.’
As I turn into the brittle wind, she raises her hand with an air of finality. Then she flicks her fingers, dismissing me.
I walk down through the silent village, hearing nothing but the creak of the dead wood and the old leaves raking their fine-veined husks along the cold cobblestones. I try not to think of shadows slipping between houses, black wraiths climbing out of the silver-tipped water in the well. The hunched trees close over me all the way down the mountain. No coward soul is mine. I find the mosaic path and look across to the glass house turning dull silver in the late afternoon. There is nothing in the grey sky – nothing on the plain. The panel is a steady red. I put the bracelet to my ear. Nothing.
I continue downhill, slipping in the mud. Trying to see the car from where I am. The noise of my boots against the falling stones almost obscures the approaching beat. The black shape moves over
me. The branches vibrate, dried mud lifts from the ground, wet stones and smaller rocks fly upwards. The earth is joining the kingdom of water in the sky. Chips of stone hit my neck. I put up my hands to block out the sound, the wild air, and it is then that I see the red light on the bracelet has gone out. I lose my balance and land on my back, sliding and sliding until I crash into a bush.
I lie on the trembling ground, looking up through the branches which whip back and forth against the flat sky as the black body swings restlessly overhead. The metal runners reach forward like grasping metal hands, glints of light slice off the dark windscreen, the wind booms between the blades.
The helicopter tilts. I see a man peer out: black shirt, black sunglasses. Not Devlin.
I crawl further under the bush and watch as the helicopter finishes its arc and beats its way up the mountain.
I count to fifty then slide, using my hands to push me faster down the muddy slope. Too slow. I force myself to my feet and run.
The branches catch my jeans, I am constantly slipping on the mud and wetted mosaics. I see shadows waiting behind the bushes and when I reach the stonier ground, see more shadows between the boulders. A rock falls somewhere, stone chipping on stone, like a drop of liquid chrome. The helicopter is a faint thudding in the distance, a speck disappearing over the summit, falling upwards into the crown of mist.
I reach flatter ground, see the car between the boulders, am running towards it when a black wraith moves at the corner of my eye. I swing around and am grabbed by both arms.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?’ shouts Devlin.
‘Devlin.’ I am so relieved to see him I try to lean against him. But his immediate tensing reminds me and I push myself away.
‘I wanted to see,’ I jangle the bracelet, ‘how far I could go.’
The light seems brighter here, the scars on my wrist more noticeable. A shadow passes over his face. I smell Scotch and mouthwash, more Scotch than mouthwash.
‘It’s broken anyway,’ I say. ‘It went red then it went out.’
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