From Aberystwyth with Love

by Malcolm Pryce

  ‘Why did they send you to the camps?’

  ‘Which time? I was sent two times. The last time for murdering my wife. And the first time, who knows? The question is meaningless; it implies there was a “why?”. There was no such thing. They threw the dice, your turn came, you went. In the early years, when the secret police came, a man might naturally ask for a reason. What have I done? But soon we learned not to ask because the question was stupid. It rested on the old-fashioned bourgeois belief that one must do something wrong to be arrested. You see? Of course, there is always a reason written down on your file, and through the endless interrogations you will eventually agree to it, whatever it is, even if it makes no sense. I was twenty, I had been working for a year as a junior card-typist in the Museum Of Our Forefathers’ Suffering. And then I was denounced for being a diversionary wrecker. I got ten years. Denouncing was a very useful method of getting rid of someone you didn’t like. Or who was perhaps a rival, not that I was a rival to anyone. Men were denounced by their adulterous wives in order to remove them from the scene. Neighbours were denounced so others could move into their apartment. One day someone did it to me and still to this day I do not know who, nor why. But it does not matter. I say this merely as a register of fact. I do not complain. No matter how bad one’s fate, there is always someone with a worse one. Throughout my time in the camps I was haunted by the fate of a woman whose story I heard. She had been suckling her baby one afternoon when she received a visit from the NKVD. They told her to get her coat and come down to the police station to answer a few questions. She asked what about the baby, and they told her to leave the child since she would only be gone ten minutes. She tried arguing but they were very insistent; they assured her the questions were a formality and would not even last ten minutes. They refused even to let her take the baby round to a neighbour. So she put the child in his cradle and went with the policemen. In the station she was charged as an enemy of the people and shipped off to Lubyanka for further questioning. From there she joined the long rail caravans to eastern Siberia. She left her baby that afternoon in an empty apartment in Hughesovka and never saw it again. Throughout my years of servitude I meditated upon this story, and wondered: is it the most tragic of all? As a cartographer of the human heart would she have been the greatest? But who is to say? In the monastery of Slovetsky they had a crooked cupboard inside which it was impossible for a man or woman to stand up or sit down, impossible to find any position of ease or comfort; whichever position you adopted you were forced by the crooked walls and low ceiling to adopt a pose that quickly became unbearable agony. They would lock a prisoner in this cupboard overnight. In the morning he would be completely insane. How can one measure the extent of his suffering during that night? An entire lifetime of agony condensed into the space of a single interminable night. Is it worse than the unending nightmare, spread out over many years, of the little girl of eight who was so demented by hunger that she ate a grain of rye from a cowpat? Stealing from the Collective, even its dung, is a terrible crime and grievously did she answer for it: ten years’ penal servitude. Is that night in the cupboard worse than those ten terror-filled years for the uncomprehending girl?’

  At the table across from us the actors stood up and left, leaving Rwpert alone, smoking a doleful cigarette. We joined him and poured some rum into his cold tea. He looked at us warily and tried to lose the camp affection that had hallmarked his previous demeanour.

  ‘If you’re worried we might be two toughs looking for some fun at your expense,’ I said, ‘you could be right. My friend here has spent many years in a Siberian labour camp and he was denounced by an actor. He doesn’t like actors.’

  Rwpert swallowed hard.

  ‘He especially doesn’t like ones called Rwpert.’

  ‘That was the name of the man who denounced me, I spit upon the bones of his mother,’ said Vanya.

  Rwpert decided not to ask how we knew his name but he saw clearly that it was not a good sign.

  ‘When we arrived,’ said Uncle Vanya, ‘there was no camp. Just a railway line that ended in a buffer in the middle of the snow and tundra. “Where is the camp?” we cried. “This is it,” they laughed. “If you don’t want to die you had better build some shelter.” So we did. We walked ten miles to find water and five to find wood.’

  ‘All because of a man called Rwpert,’ I said.

  ‘I curse the bones of his mother and her mother too.’

  ‘All the time he was in that camp, during those odd hours when he was not mining the gold beneath the frozen wastes, he was thinking of how he would revenge himself upon all the people in the world called Rwpert.’

  ‘I spell my name with a “w”; it’s a very rare form of it.’

  ‘We know,’ I said. ‘The man who denounced him spelled it the same way. He was from Hughesovka which was founded by Welsh people and has the highest incidence of Rwperts who spell their name with a “w” of anywhere in the world.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Rwpert.

  ‘In Siberia, during the long bitter years incarcerated with the dregs of Soviet criminal society, he learned so many ways of killing a man, so many ways of inflicting torment, that sometimes it takes him all day to decide which to use.’

  ‘Please don’t kill me,’ Rwpert said softly. ‘I have a sickly child. We love her very much but the expense of looking after her is difficult to meet. With me gone, I’m not sure how my wife could manage. Please, beat me if you must, but do not kill me. And if you must beat me, please not on my face. I know it’s not much to look at these days, what with these accursed cigarettes, the cheap make-up and the late hours, but for all that it is my meal ticket; if you bruise my face I will not be able to work. I am sorry about the evil done to you by this other Rwpert, but please think of my child.’

  I looked across to Uncle Vanya who was weeping. ‘You poor man, you poor brother in suffering, I bless the sacred bones of your dear mother,’ he said.

  I took out the photograph of Gethsemane in the school nativity play and showed it to Rwpert. ‘If you tell me about this picture we will not hurt you.’

  Rwpert looked at Uncle Vanya.

  ‘Don’t be fooled,’ I added hurriedly. ‘He is a very mercurial man. One minute up, the next down. Soon this perception that you are united by a common bond of suffering will pass, as swiftly as a cloud passes in front of the sun, and then he will want to kill you again.’

  Rwpert took the photo and brought it up to his face and peered. The look of fear and hostility on his face slowly melted, replaced by surprise and wonder. ‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘That’s me, Joseph, father of baby Jesus. I look so . . .’ He stopped. He looked so . . . what was it? A look of concentration formed, the expression of a man struggling to call to mind a vital truth. He tried again. ‘You know, I was . . . I wanted . . .’ He stopped again. ‘I always thought that one day, I . . . I . . .’ He bunched his fingers into a fist and pressed it to his forehead. ‘Fuck,’ he said. He began to whimper. His heart had burst, ambushed by a tumult of anguish. What was he remembering? The little boy contemplating all the great things he would one day be? Or just a gate he played on as a kid? That can do it. I would have told him, if it had not been for the tears that now glistened on his cheeks and smudged the kohl-rimmed eyes, that sometimes we cannot find the words because they are not there. Words are such wonderful things that they deceive us, we fail to see how even the simplest things so often lie beyond their reach; we can describe spaceships and translucent sea creatures that live on the floor of the ocean trench, but we have no way to describe the subtly differing currents that sweep through the channels of our own hearts. Words are brass coal tongs with which we seek to caress butterflies. When the veils of memory are torn asunder, and the raw experience is released like scent in the mind, the coal tongs snap on empty air.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ he snivelled.

  ‘You remember this scene?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘This is you?’


  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The kid in the cardboard beak is Gethsemane Walters, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She disappeared.’

  ‘We know, but where did she go?’

  ‘I was only fifteen.’

  ‘So you’ve had a long time to think about it, what do you think happened?’

  Rwpert considered and said, ‘I saw in the paper that she’s back. Someone saw her down by the lake.’

  ‘That’s right, and someone handed in her hat.’

  ‘Was it really her?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. What do you think?’

  ‘I think she’s dead, buried in the concrete of the dam.’

  ‘Who killed her? Goldilocks?’

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘What do you say?’

  He pressed his wet face into his hands. ‘I don’t know, I don’t.’

  I addressed Uncle Vanya. ‘Has your melancholy subsided?’

  ‘I’m recovering.’

  ‘Better hurry up, Rwpert. See how he flinches when I mention your name?’

  ‘Look,’ said Rwpert. ‘Why not ask her mum, Ffanci Llangollen? She’s back in town, I saw her the other day at the public shelter with a Tesco’s trolley. She heard about the town reappearing and came back. This is her.’ He pointed to the schoolteacher in the picture.

  ‘OK, Rwpert,’ I said trying to be tough. ‘Forget about Ffanci Llangollen, tell us about Goldilocks.’

  ‘I don’t know. I think they were trying to nail it on him because they didn’t like him, but it takes more than that, doesn’t it? Even a bad guy like him is entitled to the protection of the law. That’s only fair. That’s what the law is for, isn’t it? To protect us against spite and vindictiveness and lies and stuff. To shield us from the malice of those who would denounce us for selfish reasons of their own.’

  He looked up at Uncle Vanya whose entire life had been a testament to the simple Christian truth uttered by Rwpert. They embraced as brothers.

  Uncle Vanya and I stood up to leave and, on impulse, I took out a ten pound note and stuffed it into the balled fist of Rwpert. ‘Hope things work out with the kid,’ I said. As I walked away he called me back.

  ‘There was something,’ he said. ‘The same day that Gethsemane went missing they found Gomer Barnaby, the heir to the Barnaby & Merlin rock fortune, wandering around in a daze in the streets of Abercuawg. His hair was standing on end like he had seen something terrifying, and all his teeth were broken.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘No one knows. But he never recovered his wits. His father has nursed him ever since. Some people said he’d seen a troll, others said the Slaughterhouse Mob had done something to him. No one knows what. I don’t know if it helps.’

  We walked out of the station and hovered for a while at the wrought-iron gates of Elm Tree Avenue. The night had darkened and the breeze brought scents of summer: woodsmoke, new-mown grass, creosote. But the street lights were flickering on and the orchestra of wailing police sirens was building. It was time to measure the capacity of a Russian heart against the eternal encephalograph machine of Aberystwyth Prom.

  Chapter 8

  A donkey brayed maniacally. His eye sockets had been filled with glowing coals. The donkey stood in the bell tower of Notre Dame silhouetted against the blood-red sunset and febrile stormy sky, braying with malignant pleasure as the bell clanged and clanged and clanged . . . Each brazen clang was a demented hammer blow against the inside of my skull, like the nauseous pounding of blood in the ears of a man raving with fever. The clapper was fashioned from bone and carved into a form that filled me with an eerie and sickening sense of déjà vu. I had seen this bony clapper somewhere before, long ago, in a different life, perhaps on a different world. It clanged and clanged, the donkey laughed and then the realisation broke upon me in a deluge of sweat; suddenly I knew with the withering intensity of divine revelation where I had seen the bell-clapper before: it was my head. Gingerly I undid the stitches with which my eyelids had been sewn shut and gasped in pain at the searing incandescent blade of light that slipped through the curtains. The donkey’s laughter resolved into the squeaking milk sign outside the caravan site shop. A memory rose up of prisoners of war having pieces of dowel hammered into their ears; it was the ticking of my alarm clock, but louder and more exquisitely painful. The clanging of the bell was replaced by the rapping of knuckles on the tin side of my home.

  I stood up and, fighting back waves of nausea, lurched as if across the pitching deck of a ship in a storm towards the place where I dimly remembered having left the door the night before. It was still there. I opened the door and saw Llunos. Despite the profusion of old wives’ tales about raw egg or oysters, nothing really works against severe hangovers apart from death. And maybe even death would not take away the pain of a man who had been so presumptuous the night before as to attempt to take a sounding of that bottomless cistern, the Russian heart. But of all the things that don’t work against hangovers, the one that doesn’t work the most is a visit from the cops. They always have conversation on the mind and seldom of a kind likely to knit up the ravelled sleeve of care.

  I sat at the table holding my head in my hands. Llunos made tea: a symphony of discordant percussion and shrill violin notes that reminded me of the atonal music they sometimes had up at the Arts Centre.

  ‘You are a very unlucky man,’ said Llunos as he placed the teapot down. He had already observed from the way I flinched each time the clock stunned the day with its vicious ‘tock’ that normal sounds were amplified for me this morning; or maybe he had intuited it from the alcohol fumes in the room, which, he said, made his eyes water and his head a bit dizzy. Out of kindness he lowered the teapot on to the table with the gentle controlled descent of the lunar module approaching the surface of the moon; the cups like Harrier jump jets landing vertically on to the deck of an aircraft carrier.

  ‘One terribly unlucky man. Everyone you meet winds up dead. I need extra life insurance just to talk to you.’

  I groaned.

  ‘You’re like that woman, Typhoid Mary. You should be in quarantine.’

  I groaned again. He stuck a shovel into a pile of white rocks and threw them into the cauldron of tea. The god Thor lent him a spare hammer and he slammed it against the porcelain anvil.

  ‘Oh yes, you are a voodoo man. For ten or fifteen or I forget exactly how many years you and I have been working this town, every so often I find a dead man who is somehow connected to you. Don’t you find that strange?’

  I groaned.

  ‘Oh yes, Louie Knight, the undertaker’s friend. It’s one of your best features. But the one I really like is the way you lie; particularly to that body of people whom good citizens are required to tell the truth to, the police. You remember the police?’

  I groaned.

  ‘Course you do. Those suckers you can always ask if you want to know the time.’

  He pulled out a quarter bottle of rum from his jacket pocket. My hand flew to my mouth as the urge to retch flooded over me. He laughed again and brought over two tumblers from the draining board. He filled them to the brim and slid one across to me. ‘Cheers!’ I looked at him in despair. ‘Drink it,’ he said. I picked up the glass, my hand trembling so violently the rum spilled over the rim. He took a drink, I took a drink. He took a drink, I took a drink. He took one more, I took one more. I felt better. Much better. I smiled at Llunos. He was my friend who had come to make me feel well. ‘Drink,’ he said. ‘It will wake you up; today is an important day; we are going to see some dead men.’

  I sat up straight in my chair and said . . . my face hit the table and I passed out.

  I regained consciousness briefly in Llunos’s car somewhere near Rhydypennau, and then once again as we drove down Penglais Hill. There was a bacon sandwich on my lap and a Styrofoam cup of tea wedged between the seat and the handbrake. It was the kindest thing Llunos had eve
r done for me. Probably the kindest thing anyone had ever done since I was a child. We drove along the Prom, and turned left after the castle to enter the bed & breakfast ghetto – a warren of crooked narrow streets where every second house was a Shangri-la. An ambulance and a cop car were parked outside one of the houses, with a few cops keeping the gawkers back. The cop on the door stood aside to let us through and the gawkers looked on enviously. Inside the front door it was the usual cheap seaside guest house arrangement: an occasional table with a phone and an assortment of framed photos; a vase of bulrushes stained lurid colours; framed views of Norman castles lining the corridor leading to the kitchen. Stairs led up to a landing, sheathed in russet, apricot and umber floral-pattern carpet.

  At the top of the stairs, men in white paper suits were photographing and putting invisible things with tweezers into sandwich bags. A young man was sitting in a straight-backed chair next to the window, with a look of great surprise on his face, an expression enhanced by his hair which was standing up in comic-book fashion. The surprise on his face looked terminal.

  ‘Know this kid?’ asked Llunos.

  ‘I think it’s one of the students we saw painting watercolours the day we found Gethsemane.’

  ‘Funny, you didn’t tell me about the students.’

  ‘Didn’t I?’

  ‘Must have slipped your mind.’

  ‘Maybe I didn’t think it was important.’

  He made a grunt that said he would be the judge of what was important. ‘His mate is in the next room looking pretty much the same. The third hasn’t returned home.’

  ‘He doesn’t look very alive.’

  ‘Died last night around midnight; the door downstairs at the back was forced. No one heard anything.’

  ‘What did he die of?’

  ‘Fright. Or something like it. That’s what the doctor thinks. His teeth are all broken.’

  A woman in a housecoat, a head scarf, spectacles with blue translucent plastic frames, and a permanent expression of martyrdom appeared on the landing. A landlady straight from central casting.