The Good Mayor: A Novel

by Andrew Nicoll

  “There’s enough here to feed an army,” said Agathe.

  “Were you expecting us?” Tibo asked. “Surely you weren’t planning on eating all this alone.”

  “It’s as I said, my dear Krovic, one must never disappoint one’s public. I planned to nibble on a dry biscuit but, by tonight, my legend would walk abroad on Cathedral Avenue. Blameless accountants and ministers of religion would swear they saw me eat an entire cow. Now, you must help me.” He turned to Agathe with a wheeze. “I think you’ll find a bottle of champagne in there, Mrs. Stopak. You and Mayor Krovic must help yourselves.”

  So they did. Tibo popped another cork and they drank champagne and ate cold chicken and ham and beef cooked pink and sliced thin and there was a big jar of preserved peaches and a pot of cream as thick as custard. They ate it all and laughed but, while they ate, Agathe would turn to Yemko from time to time with a look of gentle concern.

  She leaned close to Tibo. “Swap seats, would you? Let me sit beside him.”

  So, all through the second half of the concert, all the way up to “Radetsky March,” Tibo sat on the end of the row, by the aisle, picking marzipan fruits out of the picnic basket and feeding them to her because both her hands were occupied, one holding his hand and one laid gently over Yemko’s, patting it softly from time to time, reassuring him.

  Heaven alone knows what the tuba player made of it but, by the time the Fire Brigade Band got to the national anthem, Yemko had completely recovered from the strain of juggling his hat. Along with the rest of the crowd, he managed to drag himself to his feet but, unlike Tibo and Agathe, he didn’t bother with singing along.

  Tibo said, “Well, that’s that for another year. Time to get ready for winter again.”

  “It was a lovely picnic,” said Agathe. “Can we help with clearing it up?”

  But Yemko shook his great head. “The driver will do that. It’s been a pleasure.”

  “Then I’ll take Agathe to the tram.”

  “Yes,” said Yemko. That was all he said but he managed to put so much into it, the way that geese flying south from the Ampersand never say anything more than “honk” but manage to fill the whole sky with melancholy and longing just the same.

  Tibo recognised it and decided that now would be an excellent time to make his goodbyes and set off through the park with Agathe towards an afternoon of who knew what.

  But Agathe recognised it too and it very nearly broke her heart. From hating the lawyer Guillaume with a cold fury, she had gone, in the space of an hour, to loving him as only a mother can love. She looked at him and, for some reason that she could not explain, she wanted to help. So, when Good Mayor Krovic said, “I think we might catch a tram by the main gate, if we hurry,” she only said, “Yes. Why don’t you go ahead? I’ll catch up in a minute,” and turned back to Yemko.

  Tibo would never have admitted it, of course, but he was a little offended. “Yes,” he said, “of course. I’ll wait for you at the gate.” And he began to shuffle down the choked path, between the toppled rows of folding chairs, jostled through the crowd like a cork, looking back over his shoulder at where she stood, face to face with Yemko, a pace apart and holding his hand. As he went, Tibo noticed, far out to sea, the dark pencil-line of cloud along the horizon that always signified a coming storm. There was a sudden gust of wind that made the people burrow down into their collars and laugh about “winter coming.”

  Agathe was almost the last to leave Copernicus Park that day. The crowds cleared quickly once they were through the bottleneck of the park gate, some walking home, some heading for the tram stops arranged on either side of the road and serving routes that led to every corner of Dot with a more than municipal efficiency.

  Standing alone by the big stone pillar, Tibo noticed a sweet wrapper stuck to his shoe. He bent down to pick it off and dropped it in the bin that hung from the green iron lamp post nearby and, when he looked back, Agathe was there. She started beating him on the back and shoulders with a gloved hand. “You’ve been leaning on something,” she said.

  But he shooed her off. “You’ll be spitting on your hankie to give my face a wash next.”

  Agathe was standing there, just as she had been with Yemko, face to face but close to him, the buttons of her coat brushing his, her face turned up to him, chin raised, nose in the air, eyes closed, smiling faintly. She was happy, she was amused by his silly protests, she was confident, like a woman who knew she had the right to brush dust off a man’s shoulder.

  Her body and Tibo’s were touching, belly and breast and thigh, as naked as a wedding night with nothing to separate them but the layers of warm wool cloth that wrapped them. Her hair moved in the wind. The scent of her filled him. She was waiting to be kissed.

  Tibo did not kiss her. He pulled away, stepped back by the length of a shoe and said, “What did Guillaume want?”

  Agathe’s shoulders slumped. She opened her eyes. It was as if a sigh of disappointment ran silently through her whole body and she said, “He wanted to offer me his friendship. He says that he is my friend. Tibo, are you my friend?”

  Good Mayor Krovic looked briefly at his feet, then back into the park and the empty bandstand and then at Agathe again. “I’ll take you to the tram,” he said.

  While they waited at the tram stop, they did not speak. When the No. 36 came round the corner with “Green Bridge” written in big white letters on its signboard, Agathe only said, “Bye, then.” And, when it stopped and she climbed on to the back platform, her coat tight over her hips, the curve of her calf taut, heel and ankle curved and carved like a statue, she did not look back and, when the tram slid away again, Mayor Krovic looked up and down the street and found himself completely alone. He began to walk. There was nothing else to do. Before long, it began to rain but he kept on walking. After about an hour, he was on Foundry Street and, from there, it was only another mile to the docks. It was quiet there. No work to do on a Sunday. Old newspapers lay flattened like starfish in the rain. The cobbles were black and greasy and coal dust choked the gaps between them. Cigarette stubs lay in piles by the warehouse doors, marking the spots where the dockers had gathered to slouch around and talk and spit. There were rainbow pools of petrol shining on the dark water. It puckered like orange peel where the rain hit it.

  Depressed seagulls with button-black eyes would glare at Tibo as he passed or rise up briefly, screeching like old machinery. They had already picked the fish boxes clean of scraps. They were bored. The rain grew heavier. Tibo walked on, through the docks and out the other side to where the cobbles vanished into a wild path that wandered among sand dunes for a bit and down to a long spit of gravel beach that led towards a tall grey lighthouse, appearing and disappearing through the squalls. Tibo found himself stumbling now as the pebbles crunched and shifted under his feet until, at the very end of the land, he reached the smooth stone wall at the foot of the lighthouse. He climbed up and walked round the flat parapet, standing with his back to the tower, looking out to where the islands were hidden by the weather and he yelled so the gulls rose off the water and cackled, “What the bloedig hell are you doing, Krovic? What are you doing? Is this what your life is? Is this the man you are—too frightened or too stupid to kiss a woman.” He put his face in his hands. “What are you doing?” he asked himself again.

  Far behind him in the town, where the lights of evening were beginning to sparkle from street to street, Agathe was standing at the sink, her coat and her handbag dumped on the kitchen table, her shoes kicked off and lying sideways on the floor as she washed the last of the dishes that Hektor and Stopak had abandoned. She had one of those little mops, the kind that’s held on to a stick with thick copper wire, and, every time she plunged it into the tired suds, she asked angrily, “What are you doing, Agathe? What are you doing? How can you make such a bloedig fool of yourself, woman? Is this what your life is?” She scrubbed her frying pan until it gleamed.

  And just round the corner, in The Three Crowns, where the wind w
as blowing straight off Green Bridge and battering rain off the window, two men sat at the corner table. One of them was asleep, holding a bottle barely propped upright on his enormous belly and the other sat squinting through the smoke of the cigarette he held between his lips, drawing, scoring out and drawing again in the sketchbook open on his knees and asking himself, “What the bloedig hell are you doing? Drawing her all day long. Drawing her every day. Imagining what she looks like naked when you could go there now and find out. What the hell are you doing? Is this what your life is?”

  UT AT THE LIGHTHOUSE, AT THE VERY FARTHEST bit of ground that could still call itself “Dot,” Tibo turned his back on the storm and began to walk for home, crunching his way over the beach and back through the dunes, into the docks where the whores had come out for their night’s work. They yelled “Hello!” at him as he passed and asked him if he was lonely. Tibo almost laughed at that. He tramped on, saying nothing, sticking to the middle of the road, not looking at the men in the shadows. They did not look at him. Along Canal Street and, finally, back on to the avenue along the Ampersand, the elms dripped on him as he passed. Already most of their leaves had fallen and the rain had knocked almost the last of them off. They lay in a greasy carpet on the path.

  Tibo reached City Square. He dug in his pocket for his keys and opened the side door that led to the back stair. When it closed behind him the whole Town Hall seemed to shake. Tibo put his hand out in the dark and found the bottom of the banister. He slid his foot forward over the tiled floor until it collided with the first step and he began to count, “One, two, three. Landing. Turn.” Then he counted fifteen more steps, then another landing and fifteen more, all the way to the corridor that led to his office. Tibo shuffled and stumbled his way through the dark, fingering his way past Agathe’s desk and into his own office where he groped across the table hunting for his lamp. He felt better with some light in the room—less like a burglar, more at home.

  He took off his dripping coat, shook it, hung it on the stand in the corner of the room and sat down at his desk. It was the first time Tibo had looked inside that drawer for some time. It slid open easily. There at the back, at fingertip reach, he found a paper bag printed with “Municipal Galleries, Dot” and, inside, just as he had left them, two picture postcards. He took the one printed with the Venus of Velázquez, the rich, creamy, pink and scarlet woman lying on her couch, gazing in the mirror with a look of longing and welcome, the one he had bought because—he could admit it now—it reminded him of Agathe. The other, whatever it was, he stuck back in the drawer without even looking at it.

  Tibo glanced up at the town arms that hung opposite his desk and huffed a long sigh which he hoped I might recognise as a cry for help. He flicked his wet hair back over his head to ensure that it did not drip on the postcard, rubbed his hand on his trouser leg to dry it off and picked up his pen. He wrote, “Mrs. Agathe Stopak, Office of the Mayor, Town Hall, City Square, Dot” in rows on the side marked “This side for address” and sighed again. Such a tiny square of white cardboard—half the size of an envelope—that was all there was left to write on, all the space there was to tell her. Tell her what? Another sigh. Another glance up at me in my place on the shield and he began to write again. “You are more beautiful than this. More precious. More to be desired. More to be worshipped than any goddess. Yes, I AM your friend.” The card was full. He jammed “K” into the bottom corner and went to look for a stamp in the light that spilled from his room on to Agathe’s desk and, when he found one, he dropped a coin into petty cash.

  It would take too long to explain how Tibo put his coat on again and crashed about in the dark back down the stairs to City Square. Just hurry through that part and imagine him there, standing at the double-fronted postbox on the corner of White Bridge, with its enamel signs marked “City” on one side and “Country or Foreign” on the other. Tibo pushed the card into the “City” slot and held it there until the very last moment. There was still time to pull it out and think about this again. It was just a postcard. But even so. It was evidence. It was something in writing. Dammit, what did that matter? Evidence of what? But was it even the right words? Was it enough? The card slipped from his fingers and nestled deep in the locked iron box and Tibo turned away for the tram, breathless, his heart racing. “You’ve done it now,” he said, all the way up Castle Street. “You’ve done it now.”

  The enamel sign on the posting box promised, “A final collection will be made from this box at midnight” and the postal authorities were true to their word. The postman came at midnight. Not at five minutes to midnight, when he was at the top of Castle Street, not at ten past midnight when he was outside the Opera House. Midnight. The midnight postman was not an art lover. He did not notice Tibo’s card and, anyway, although he had the ordinary human curiosity about other people’s business, postmen do not have the time to snoop at every card or speculate about every scented envelope or every bill printed in red. They have sacks to fill, they have mail to dump down the big brass hoppers outside the main Post Office with its statues over the door, really quite beautiful statues that reminded some people of angels—one holding out a bronze letter and the other holding a lightning flash. “That’s for telegrams,” the postmaster explained to every new recruit.

  Tibo was long ago in his bed, washed warm again in a hot bath, suit hanging from the kitchen ceiling and drying in the warm air rising from the stove, when his card arrived under their care. It slid down the wooden chute that led from the brass hopper and spilled on to a broad table in the middle of the hall where Antonin Gamillio, who was not really a postman at all but a writer who worked nights at the Central Post Office to keep himself in paper and ink until his novel of working life in the main post office of a medium-sized provincial town was finally accepted by a publisher, glanced at the address and flicked it deftly towards a sack marked “Central” which hung open against the wall. Antonin was rightly confident of his flicking skills. So confident, in fact, that he had already begun to read the address on the next letter he picked up before Tibo’s card had even landed in the sack. It was a matter of pride to the mail sorters in the Central Post Office that they did not have to watch the mail as it glided towards its sack, which is a pity because, seven years before, a letter addressed to Mr. A. Gamillio from one of the biggest publishing houses in the capital had missed the sack marked “Parkside,” hit the wall behind and slid to the floor to stand upright against a table leg, where it remained to that very night, clouded in grey dust.

  Fortunately, although such tricks of fate are popular in novels as a means of provoking misunderstandings and unhappiness between lovers, nothing of the kind happened to Tibo’s card. After a while, the bag marked “Central” was taken from its place on the wall and carried to a bank of wooden pigeon holes, each row labelled with a street name, each individual box labelled with a number, except for the very end of the very bottom row where four boxes had been knocked into one and marked “Town Hall.” Shortly before 3 a.m., Tibo’s card landed in that box, tied with a red rubber band between a letter complaining about a broken pavement on the corner of Commerz Plaz and another in a brown envelope with a cheque inside for the Licensing Department. Imagine it—a naked goddess sandwiched between stuff like that! But that was how she travelled—not wafted on wave tops or carried by cupids but bound in rubber bands and dropped in a sack and swung through the door of the Town Hall post room by half past eight in the morning. And, when Agathe arrived for work forty minutes later—she was late mostly because she could think of no good reason to hurry to work—the card was waiting on her desk.

  Look at her now. Look at her, slicing her way through the morning’s post and then she finds the card. “That’s odd,” she thinks, “that’s odd, that’s strange, that’s unusual.” She picks it up. She turns it over. She reads, “more beautiful than this, more precious, more to be desired, more to be worshipped” and she reads “K.” Who is “K”? But it says, “I am your friend.” No. No. It s
ays, “AM your friend.” It says, “I AM your friend.” See that? It’s the answer to a question and “K” is for Krovic. “K” is Tibo.

  Do you know the word for this? It’s “glee.”

  Look at her. Look at that smile. A bit of cardboard and a few words, that’s all it took. So little. And look at her now, turning the card over, looking at the naked goddess lying there and thinking, “More beautiful than this? Am I more beautiful than this? More desirable?”

  Of course! Of course, because the woman in the painting is just blobs of colour on a bit of card but Agathe Stopak is warm pink flesh—the real thing. The woman in the painting was shovelled into a whore’s grave in Madrid centuries ago but Agathe Stopak is here now, blood in her veins and breath in her lungs. Look at her. Look at her now, hurrying into Tibo’s empty office, to stand in front of the town shield and hold up the card as if to say, “Look what I did at school today!” And she’s bobbing that pretty curtsey of hers and saying, “Thank you!” with a smile because she’s a good girl and polite.

  And now she’s hunting in her drawer for a tack and she’s pinning the card to the wall above her desk and she’s sitting there, just looking at it and that’s exactly what she was still doing when Mayor Krovic came into the office looking like a man who thinks he’s in a lot of trouble.

  But Agathe smiled at him with a twinkle and, with the tip of a shaped and polished fingernail she tapped the bottom corner of the postcard, not so much to straighten it as to draw attention to it.

  “Good morning,” Tibo said. There was a quaver in his voice. “Lunch? I mean later. Would you like to go for lunch? Later? With me?”

  “That would be lovely, Mr. Mayor.”

  “Good,” said Tibo. “Good. Look, I have to go out now so would it be all right if I saw you there—at The Golden Angel—about one?”