I was content to allow her the lead. She had the energies of purpose, exploring half-worlds, provisional frontiers, disguised truths, the exciting lumber in the attic. Myths were ladders into the abyss, charts of the immemorial skull, passwords to history. She had foothold in academic journals. From her, I learnt of our predecessors here: Ligurians, Phocaeans, Greeks, Celts, Saracens. A Spanish coiffure glimpsed in Nice related to a Native American head-dress; a swastika adorned a Phocaean fragment. She researched secret societies, and I could inform her of the Westphalian Vehingerichte tribunals with their camouflaged names and mandatory death sentences; of runes that fascinated Himmler; of the white raven turning black at Ragnarok; of Margarita-Who-Grieves, Sky Child, the Bandit in the Fur Coat, figures transfiguring the Great Northern Night. I supplied notes of Estonian children, clad as animals, celebrating the driving of cattle from winter shelters to summer pasture. Then of Riv Blas, Estonian Robin Hood and of the Son of the Earth, the buffoon who, each Maytide, ridicules pastors, High Folk, Tsars, even God, himself born of an oak.
‘Erich, you, too, are a creature of trees and of midnight sun. Tough roots and unusual dreams.’
Without naming him, I added the Herr General’s account of medieval pastors rebuking isolated steadings for, on Thursdays, honouring Thor and transforming elderly Christians to pigs, especially those once redheaded and those ‘lame as a smith’.
Thus, my indolence was kept within limits, as together we repeopled the landscape. Each November, ageing cottagers trudged into the hills with gifts of bread, fruits, poor-quality wine. For whom? None would say. Fragments exhumed near Valice were linked by academics to a fertility hero annually dismembered by a Lord of the Cup. The Grail, itself sought by credulous SS commissioners, had been for centuries reputed buried on the coast. A dry well, beneath local Venusberg, had gained connection with Mary Magdalene whose body a Count of Provence had disinterred from beneath Saint-Saveur Cathedral, its face showing the white dot where Christ had kissed her. Libération, 1944, had hysterically acclaimed a golden-haired tart as the Magdalene, precursor of the Second Coming, though her hair was a wig and the Second Coming mostly a crop of babies from the American saviours.
Warm southern air and colour, scented, sometimes sickly, Revolutionary Terror, the victims of Sainte Guillotine, and of Maquis reprisals, easily coalesced into confused, banked-down beliefs in the Great Mother demanding blood of the faithless.
All this delighted Nadja, who held a Swedish doctorate for work on Mystery elements in Christianity, her thesis introduced by a text from an apocryphal gospel, Let the Living Arise and Live Anew.
We explored the round Saracenic citadel founded on blocks of a temple to Thracian Dionysus where orgiastic revellers had wrecked a town. Periodically, similar outbreaks, like cattle stampede, enflamed the coast, brief, motiveless. Centuries ago, a pretender had masqueraded as long-dead Nero, luring thousands by a name and dramatic bearing.
On a crag near us were remains of a circular tower, at sundown resembling smashed tanks. Legends persisted of Templar head worship, long surviving in badlands in the hills.
Nadja’s notebooks filled rapidly, completing her like a flower. She was consultant to the local musée, much at home with broken Ligurian vases, intricate arabesques, the spiralled snakes and leaves on Bronze Age cauldrons, fragments of Phoenicia, primitive yet futuristic, like the swastika.
She corresponded with Mr Robert Graves, distrusting him yet anxious for his approval. His replies were punctilious, terse with agreement or contradiction, always useful, lately about naked girls quarrelling over an apple, which he insisted denoted a sacred kingship ritual. She disagreed, but his respect was essential for her self-confidence. ‘I have,’ she told me, ‘the self-doubts of your far-North hanging gods.’
We had, several years back, agreed to investigate la Terre Gaste, where megalithic stones allegedly roamed between dusk and cock-crow, though we had yet to do so. The prospect hovered before us, sombre, not altogether inviting, Jules muttering that interference boded no good. There were whispers even in pimpish casinos and violet-air nightclubs, about the Wild Hunt, bearded muleteers with clubs and ancient rifles pillaging remote hamlets. In la Terre Gaste, dancers said to imitate birds and curse the dead were described in travel brochures by those who had not seen them, though, much photographed in the adjoining Department, as a gypsy-like clan who, like Irish peasants, refused to utter children’s names out of doors between dusk and dawn. Such folk, Nadja reflected, had sailors’ dislike of washing, which imperilled the fortune inherent in skin. A reminder of Estonian labourers retaining hair and nails of the dead, so that, deprived of vital spirit, they would be unable to prey on the living.
In such environment, I could trace my life as quest for a pot of marvels, endangered by periodic breaking of taboo.
Less so inclined, Nadja was more concerned with calculating the age of a cromlech, climbing to inspect a pentacle carved on a corbel always in shadow, discovering an alchemical sign on a font, also Sinatra, in Gothic capitals, on a choir stall.
She often preferred exploring alone, sometimes disappearing for several days, ‘foraging’, usually informing me of failure to find a manuscript, tomb, tradition. Half-joking, she said that failure was a precaution against the evil eye of the universe, jealousy of heaven.
Nevertheless, we shared many pleasures, seeing an old man crossing himself at sight of a cart, reading a court case in which a lawyer, M. Lessore, confessed his conviction that the poisoning of children was caused by their mother offending a hunchback, a Mother Stick. In local lore, Christ had changed a baker’s daughter to an owl for his selling short weight. Hearing this, we were more respectful of our own garden owl, though we had always been mindful that the bird presaged death, and, should we convert to Judaism, blindness. For Celts – her laugh was deep, almost mannish – the owl was the sinister Night Hag.
Serious about her work, Nadja was often humorous, amusing me with revelations of the goddess Ishtar, male in the morning, female in the afternoon. At night? The jury was still out. Not so regarding the tiresome owl, for, later that morning, not boastful but pleased as if over a present, she discovered that the bird was harbinger of crime, evil and disloyal children. ‘So we’re safe! Rightly so!’
For us, no child had come, and, while we would have greeted it as a new friend, we did not lament its absence. Whether we would have been conscientious parents was disputable, occasionally disputed. We might too closely resemble our neighbour Ray Phelps, who, when his son was born, enquired if he would be staying long.
Over coffee or kumquats she could be dreamy, jokey, almost childlike, then revert to stern inspection of file, card index, tome. She often seemed the elder, in the extremes affected by Ishtar, though we were much of an age. She did not affect youthfulness, relying on clear skin, firm bones, long walks, rock climbing, at the mirror shrugging, as if at a caustic witticism deployed too often. Without her customary slight make-up, her face had emphatic lines in chin, cheeks, bone, with a subtle hint of Asia around mouth and in strong black eyes guarded by heavy lids, often less open than they appeared and divided by a proud, somewhat predatory nose. They contemplated, appraised, rejected or darted into the humour that had first attracted me. Not overpowering but insidious.
There was no hurry to know her more precisely than it was to finish an exacting, very enjoyable book. Indeed, she was a book, rare but not antique, elaborately bound, written in language I imperfectly understood, often to be put down, for query, rereading, repetition of delight. A book without message or moral but inexhaustible.
Language could be inadequate, my sensations at times analogous to birds that, in medieval belief, could fly into heaven but were powerless to report what they had seen.
An old château stands outside Quebec, with five courtyards and numerous rooms. Likewise, Nadja possessed selves, some free to sky and light, others locked, desolate, forbidden. A ripple of laughter or indignation could abruptly end in silence, never sullen, but me
ditative, cautious, perhaps painful, a reticence that enhanced the mystery that sustains love. Direct questions were best avoided. Those most important in my life had been conspicuously incomplete.
Often she seemed one move ahead in an intricate game. In Sweden, after a supposed rebuff, I resolved to ignore her telephone calls. None came. To disregard her letters. None were delivered. Eventually, I had to seek her out.
She spoke of poems she would like to write, though they remained only titles: ‘The Garden’s Retort’, ‘The Barn’, ‘Hangers-On’.
‘Erich, there are always hangers-on. At ceremonies, in offices, at bars. The credits are longer than the story. We do not know who they are, what they do, the producers who produce the producers. Gossiping, intriguing or just looking. Bad smells of the day. Toads in lace and shirtfronts. Like selfish kings.’
She pondered Like; magic key transforming clouds to souls, a drum to a chief, as a pencil alters a sun to a skull, to a swastika, forest to brothel, dome to a virgin, a flat, empty terrace to Death.
A Paris song, ‘Knock on the Barn Door’, had agitated her, beneath her composure; she said nothing but, in Sweden, more to herself than to me, murmured about smoke and a barred door. Also she disliked fire; in a grate, in a spirit lamp. Though she was not herself Jewish, she might remember Germans, or Polish endeks, burning Jews in a barn.
Laughing at her absurdity, she flinched at moonlight through glass, while gaily pleading Novalis’s epigram, compact as a bud, that the only truth is that which in time and place never occurs.
I could see her hunting naked in a midnight wood or, spear aloft, atop a temple, gazing seawards. But her smile was almost a grin. ‘Your sexual fantasies, monsieur, cannot always be obeyed.’
Bad dreams were one reason for her sleeping alone. She refused to touch dead birds, disliked crossroads but could laugh at her obsessions, publishing a spoof comparison of Hollywood stars to Mystery candidates: studio initiation, ritual rebirth by cosmetics, surgery, new name, before acquiring illumination or, failing the final test, sinking to the Underworld.
‘Only once, Erich, have I been really frightened. A peddler came, offering nylons. Nylons! What paradise! It was illegal, so we had to meet him secretly, amongst high corn. Then, horror, a soldier rose up, red-capped, red-starred, enormous. My blood really did freeze. One could be shot for speculation, as they called it. I was actually holding the nylons, but he only asked how much I wanted. I could have kissed him. But,’ her hand became a fist, ‘not liking infection, I did not.’
My volume of Estonian lament verse, given me in Canada by Arved Viirlaid, she found valuable:
O, my coal-black heart,
Alas, my red cheeks!’
Once she mentioned ‘my father’s wife’, adding, though reluctantly, ‘Father was an architect. Handsome, like his buildings. He probably loved me but never said so. Never at all.’
Alexei Karenin. Much she never divulged to me. Especially to me.
In lovemaking, we both relished some pain but, after vigorous grippings, scratchings, bitings, thrustings, we easily resumed banter. The promiscuity, safeguarded by the Pill, not yet smirched by new disease, lightly practised on plage and meadow, we had no need to join. We learnt from each other. ‘That’s what you like,’ she murmured, offering it. No Snow Queen, she would artfully rearrange her bedroom, like a movie director stimulating desires by subtle disposition of light, mirror, colour. Lust could waylay me at a party, as she gleamed in low green gown, amusing yet reserved, lifting her dark head, smiling a reply to what had bored her.
Unpredictable, after a serious dissention about very little, she had hurriedly withdrawn, returning with an envelope. I feared my dismissal but found a drawing of herself, naked, in demure fun parodying the classical pose by shielding her crotch with an invitation card.
Her laughter, itself frequent, like her tears, could disconcert, as at news of Alex, killed crossing the road to avoid cutting an old friend who had treated him badly. I had always failed to convey him as anything but a ramshackle Englishman, covering a mean heart with swagger and chatter. ‘Your Mr Alex …’ It sounded disreputable. She could not distinguish the coughing, obdurate fellow queuing in frozen London, in Hour of the Wolf, for a last pilgrimage for Sir Winston. Writing an obituary in parts harsh, he had ended with the old warrior’s plea, never to flinch, weary or despair.
‘Might not Mr Alex have had one face too many?’
Despite slang dated as a circus, his voice remained vibrant, assertive, a complicity against dullness, as he recalled the boy Ziegfeld selling tickets to fellow pupils for an exhibition of invisible goldfish. Dying, he mumbled that, on the whole, he had treated life rather well.
Nadja knew my fear of borrowing too much light from others, the pathology of the semi-finalist scared of winning. For Wilfrid, she had respect, though grudging, suspecting my gullibility while relishing his favourite Chinese saying: Heaven is high, and the Emperor is far away.
Once, abruptly, throatily, she said, ‘I would not be surprised if Chekhov was not his favourite.’
True. He had relished exceptions, oddities of circumstance, endings that could be beginnings. Like Paris, our own district provided a live mosaic of incongruities. As if in a theatre, we saw a stately Austrian slowly, creakily, lower himself on to his silk hat, a prim American idealist opening her umbrella, unaware that it concealed a half-eaten melon, the Spanish waiter at Antibes with a perpetual response, ‘No Problem, No Waiting’, applied to the loss of a spaniel, a sunset, the deathbed of a Pope, a platoon of ducks, marshalled like delinquents on parade, before one comfortably at rest. One favourite exception was Luisa, hunched, withered, solitary, with legs wrapped in newspaper. She claimed to have been personal maid to the last Queen of Portugal, a status we had no means of disproving. Nadja would listen to her reminiscences, oblivious to the squalor of her cabin, but interested in the cracked photographs of King Manuel, Wilhelm II, Franz-Josef, Edward VII, inscribed with such endearments as ‘To darling Luisa’. All in identical handwriting. In previous existence she claimed to have been a hare. Alain was censorious. ‘No asset. A creature of many limitations.’
Socially adept, Nadja was seldom sociable, preferring to sit quietly in the garden. ‘Stillness creates soul,’ Father said.
We were too autonomous to be much liked in a colony mostly of British expatriates, ageing so rapidly that Alain named the place Departure Lounge. German tourists were numerous, noisy, in ugly shorts, though French estate agents adroitly frustrated their attempts at land purchase. Of Americans, Dick Haylock was sniffy. ‘Verbal gadgetry. Wisecrack culture.’
Of immediate neighbours, the men were mostly retired, the women, several ex-dames de carrière, were not, in Nadja’s phrase, cuntworthy. We shamelessly preferred vintage wine in cut glass to airport coffee in cardboard, eating at home to fast-food joints, books to television, despite my addiction to old movies. Worse, we saw our acquaintances as sleepy fruits in a moribund orchard: at Terror, they would jump, at Love, lower their eyes, going early to bed while, in jazzy, hedonistic towns, the young saw green suns, crystal explosions, violet harvests sprouting through the cosmos.
Nadja was envied, not for her charm, often inoperative, or her beauty, frequently chilled, or her wit, too caustic, but for what she once called her invisible limp, potent by being indefinable.
‘You’re both such old friends …’ Dick Haylock could begin. ‘Could you possibly …’ Their bungalow was noted for its odour, that of furniture polish laced with beef stew. Dick’s assiduity in lending money was attributed to his pleasure in showing cheques drawn on Coutts Bank, with royal connections. I tolerated them more easily than Nadja, always suspecting the English were more devious, Machiavellian, cabbalistic, than they usually were. Actually, the Haylocks were simple to a degree of near lunacy. Daisy was saddened by the ingratitude of birds, taking bacon rind as if by right. Her most vivid occasion was evidently not marriage but when in childhood she saw, or thought she saw, a gold-crested bunting
.
Thick-set, in too youthful polka-dot, last week she had shyly taken my hand. ‘I once believed I deserved the very best. But where is that girl now?’ The very best might not have included Dick. I gave my most bucolic smile, assuring her that I knew what she meant. Her worn face under the fair, dyed hair strengthened indignantly. ‘My dear Erich, you certainly do not.’
The French were mostly polite but inaccessible. Many farmers and black-marketers had resented Libération for depriving them of high prices extorted from the Germans and were still rumoured to pay protection money to Red Maquis veterans, expert blackmailers.
Occasionally, very occasionally, over-lulled by the garden, music, esoteric books, in paradisiacal stasis, I wished for a gust from the North, freshening what Wilfrid called the airless complexities of the simple life. The South could etherialize into an Otherworld of dreams without sleep, people neither naked nor clothed, flowers growing from the waves; a sheen of simultaneous dance and stillness.
2
Days were unhurried, often starting – once again – with Let’s: ‘Let’s drive’, ‘Let’s swim’, ‘Let’s walk’. We ate, explored, slept, made love impulsively, feared life only a little. In her absence I would watch the broken pharos on the cape, the white house above the bay, so distinct from our windows but, when we trudged towards it, it receded like a mirage. I agreed with Nadja that it must store the raspberry-flavoured condoms sold in Antibes.
Today, she was gazing into massed, golden mimosa. In white, sleeveless shirt, black trousers, she was not Ishtar, but at her most feminine, most slender, her face never staling in summer, its pallor startling amongst so many tanned and withered under the meddle-some sun of Africa.
She seated herself beside me, appreciative of the butterflies, leaves flat on the light, the bird song, glanced at my book, Maigret and Monsieur Charles, her cat, after a look of hatred at me, arranging itself at her feet.
Secret Protocols Page 27