I praised Tauns, with an eye still for the strawberries, Nadja rhapsodized the coffee, while leaving it almost untasted, and, with renewed offers of assistance, hospitality, advice, we escaped.
For several days, Nadja avoided discussion of this petty escapade, during which I found some liking for Andrejs, his tired eyes, worn hands, reminding me of Greg, obdurate as weed under cities, dry-eyed in calamity.
Eventually, she announced that Margarita possessed jettura, evil eye, linking her with Alain’s account of Alfonso XIII emptying sophisticated salons by such a possession. Even suave croupiers and brutal footballers, she declared, extended figures in the cornu, repelling malign influences obvious to whoever could ‘verily see’.
We knew one remote village where strong or talented children were nicknamed Insignificant, Jug, You, to avert jealousy of saints. Occasionally, we passed the Ulmanis, gestured politely, but did not linger, feigning some urgent appointment. Without admitting it we maintained watch on the Villa. Once a limousine, smoke-glassed, presumably bulletproof, stopped outside it, no one leaving it or stepping from the house.
We wagered on who would first induce Andrejs to utter more than ten consecutive words.
More than ever, I was grateful to the garden, its constant changes within perfection. With trees and flowers, I was unperturbed by a report of Herr Doktor Gust, commandant of Buchenwald Camp, now a Stasi colonel, evading Israeli vengeance squads and, this week, cruising on the Black Sea. A wink from old times.
Drinking at Alain’s, I was more disturbed, not by balletic guns or suspicious-looking strangers but by Zimmer-frame crocks disputing at a beach kiosk below. Without warning a jet plane screamed over, cutting the sky with dead-white streak, unpleasant surgery.
‘Selfish buggers!’ Dick Haylock settled beside me, with empty glass. Knowing he preferred whisky I poured him wine.
‘Cheers, Erich! Or should I say prosit? Anyway, as I’ve been saying to everyone, there are things around I don’t care for. Incidentally,’ – a small awkwardness did not escape me – ‘we hear that you’ve been hobnobbing with the Letts. No offence. But, as poets say, they’re scarcely pukka. Mind,’ – he looked at the waves, dissatisfied by their performance – ‘I’ve not yet met them. Daisy thinks them club-footed. Bad luck, of course. But I’m sorry not to see your lady. A lily. But deep. Very deep.’
Too markedly glad of Nadja’s absence, he continued, ‘Aloofness can inspire. Like a cellist. So I wish her joy of the morning. Gates of Paradise. I should say, Portals.’
Was she, too, being called club-footed? He was looking serious, he should say, philosophical. ‘We don’t necessarily understand her, like so-called modern art. But some of us attempt to.’ The brown, weathered face twitched with doubt. ‘She has this effect on men, indeed on women. None of us would be surprised if one day she surprised us by doing something utterly unexpected!’
Surprised myself, I imagined horns, ribs, rotting carcasses as the wagons roll west, guarded by Wayne, Stewart, Fonda, though Dick’s greedy eyes had the leer, the bar-room joke, men, indeed women, imagining Nadja’s curves, dark crevices, the limitless majesty of nakedness.
He let me wave for another bottle. Alain responded at once, but the bar was crowded and he stayed only for one drink, time to inform us that Fred Astaire’s daughter told him that, at twelve, her closet friends were Clark Gable and David Niven. ‘They would not have been my choice, but …’
He darted away. Dick shook his head, showing wrinkled neck, dirty vest. ‘That fellow’s too French. He wouldn’t be passing the port in my mess. Always has to go one better. Tell him goats have chewed up the vines and he’ll know who bred the goats.’ His thin mouth sagged. ‘Thank God, the one thing that can’t be said of me is that I’m oily.’
He mistook my mutter for agreement, though ‘oily’ was the word with which Nadja frequently summarized him.
‘He can tell you where to find VAT 69 or that blasted Slivovitz.’ His thoughts rushed, a cistern refilling. ‘Or Mitterand’s private number. Both of them have war records steamy as Goering’s gumboots. But you’re waiting to hear my own choice of female.’ I was not but heard it. ‘I’ll stick to Daisy, with her blessed birds. For English roast chicken and bread sauce. But … your new friends. Up at the Villa, as somebody wrote. My opinion, my considered opinion, is that they’re on the run. That Iranian shindy. You’ll see.’
His prescience depressed him. ‘But what’s our own place in the world? Back home, it’s not set fair. Teachers with rings through their noses. Not Shakespeare but Bengali folksongs. Brussels, the menagerie’s backbone. Only Anthony Eden got things right. As for America, too much smut.’
Nadja reckoned Dick too helpless to insult. ‘Helpless’ was approximate, the original, she said, too obscene to translate.
‘I spy with my little eye …’ Dick thought, mistakenly, he could not be overheard, ‘that fellow in the tie. He bought a Moroccan for ten thousand new francs. She’d been in prison, where they first met.’ Music from the promenade intervened. Under the tall, garish lamps, drums and bugles, some dozen were marching, in black shorts, black-and-white tunics, with thick sticks and white banners. ‘The Matelots. Merchants of Shit.’ Dick swallowed wine as if washing his teeth.
Les Matelots du Roi, neo-fascists, were more arsonists, thugs, sexual prowlers than pledged royalists. At movie festivals, political congresses, concerts, they demonstrated against townie effetism and immigrants. Now, ignored by tourists and automobiles, though not by jeering children, their swagger was pitiful, a march to nothing.
Dick appeared inclined to spit, desisting only at the last minute.
‘I don’t mind telling you this, Erich, now that the smell’s gone and the dust has settled. I couldn’t, at first, give my consent to Britain entering the war. For Poland, of all places.’ He coughed, resumed very hastily. ‘It would destroy the Empire, encourage Irish and wops. Now, this ruddy Custom’s almost due. I call it a case of history unable to shed its skin, as your Madam would say. I take it that you’ll keep carefully away.’
7
Dark as a volcano god, la Terre Gaste irregularly performed Custom, unpublicized in brochures, avoided both on hygienic grounds and for its inaccessibility, now that cars had replaced legs. Distinct from the annual Civic Fête, this year dedicated to European Unity, Custom was reputedly no parade of golden-hatted lovers and opulent models staged for tourists’ money. We would discover no shining sprites, mindlessly happy, tossing the ball of pleasure and for whom death itself was only a pose. Whatever the year, it always occurred on 13 August in the week not only of the Assumption of the Virgin but of the goddess Diana.
Nadja had found twelfth-century reference to it, ignoring Diana but mentioning a fire-spirit, akin, I judged, to the Northern Surt. She thought it might symbolize repulse of Phocaean invaders. We knew that the day, sacred throughout pre-Christian Europe, was when the dead, jealous, wistful, dejected, mingled with the living, lamenting lost times.
‘Erich, you should arm yourself with salt. It keeps them at bay.’
While thinking the Custom of very questionable interest, certainly squalid, probably tedious, she was now determined we should witness it. ‘It might confirm your belief in ghosts.’
I had no such belief and distrusted the usefulness of salt but always felt that small communities, uncouth survivals, stubborn beliefs were owed respect, struggling against bigness, conformism, the majority. Heresy is often honourable. Dwellers in la Terre Gaste, clutching survival on the margin of trained hygienic Europe, dismissed as brittle, interbred halfwits, existing on grubs and bark, still revering limping smiths as magicians, were too few for attentions from police, tax officials, the census. They had managed to skirt conscription, lycée, Occupation and Libération, spoke some dialect barely French. They, too, resisted.
Their hamlets were reachable only on steep, very rough tracks, so that we started early with full knapsacks, ready for hills. Swathes of mist soon surrendered to diffused but sharpenin
g light, the landscapes widening into tints sombre, elemental, littered as if with props; ruined mill, burnt-out shack, illegible signpost, all, Nadja observed with some appreciation, suitably discouraging. We wore shabbiest clothes, she without ornaments, myself unshaven ‘Viking guise’, she said, to avoid special notice. We had to risk choice between several tracks, none recently trodden, pocked by coneywarrens, periodically vanishing beneath scrub and myrtle. The most arduous climb began only after three hours’ trudging. Dull peaks gradually enclosed us, mist dripping on granite slabs and scarps, bare save for rare pine or fir. At a dry well, a flat boulder, we took wine, a roll. The air, breath of Africa, was fresher than the humidity below, the plain yellowy tinged with brown, blue thread of sea, patches of walnut. Few birds were evident in this high wilderness, though once a linnet’s red patch surprised us.
The expedition was tonic after the anodyne, almost palm-court harmonies of our garden. Nadja rejoiced in the likely infrequency of Latvians. Not until late in the toilsome afternoon, ourselves moist, hard-breathing, did we hear voices, distinct in the thinned atmosphere, from somewhere above in the stony desiccation, now watched by untethered goats with sophisticated aloofness, clustered in committee at a dry stone hut, the slope providing its back wall. Our enjoyment was undiminished, an exorcism of theme park and casino, neon lights, skinhead violence, the culture of Mon Repos and Winter Palace. Rock, sky, cloud, unseen presences were pleasantly intoxicating: primitive grandeur with hint of danger. We were midgets surrounded by heights, stunted bushes, sour grass, a precipitous drop.
We were nearing a circular mount, man-made, Nadja was certain, for burials, housing the ghosts I was, apparently, so anxious to inspect.
Vision – a word usually accompanying rhetoric or pomposity – was momentarily viable in an instant prolonged only by mystics, poets, drunks, a gleam from isolation, distance, prehistory, though swiftly revoked by the sight of clothes hanging before scattered hill-caves, then by a cackle, not quite bird or animal, but disapproving, then by deepened silence. Expectation widened Nadja’s luminous eyes, and, exhilarated by the climb, we chattered about lost explorers, untraced disappearances, feeling younger, venturesome, daring.
Lower reaches still glistened, but we were in shadows cast by peaks vaguely magisterial, like Wotans at the start of the world, and given moods by short glints of sunlight. Imaginable as gypsum-white, with lidless calcified eyes.
The track rounded a jutting shoulder of cliff, meeting the sweet drift of pig-dung, then of stale vegetation and tobacco, coarse as sacking. The voices were close, from a lane of misshapen stone and wood shacks, turf-roofed, the far end filled with a crowd of some hundred, impoverished, shambling, like decayed boxers, many shoeless, with bare legs cross-gartered with blackish cord.
Our approach was watched incuriously, no sentinel dogs leaping at us with angry teeth. Glad of our shabbiness, I noticed several other outsiders, distinct only by polished heads, spectacles, cameras.
Nadja, at ease, raised a hand, diffident but appeasing, and unhurriedly we became part of the crowd, the smells, the strangeness. Sexes were largely indeterminate save for beards, men and women in ragged jeans and nautical-style kerseys, short yet heavy limbed, perhaps syphilitic, with genes of forgotten cast-offs. Many were lame or missing an eye, an arm, though as if connected not with military mutilés but with the Wotans. Faces prematurely aged, slightly scorched, necks goitrous, heads too large.
Shadows brought early twilight, shapes were unfinished as if in some fifth season, static, held in the gallows-grin of a clan undeniably withstanding the present. I was shocked by realizing that some, loutish, wizened, were children, listless, without promise of harlequin grace, without curiosity. No torrent of being would thrill these folk. Whatever the Custom would reveal, they would not pour themselves into the ecstasies of rock-youth, would bawl no New Europe, were ignorant of Aldous and Timothy, Chef and Red Danny, would breed laboriously, like badgers, be extinguished without publicity or protest. Meanwhile, their feebleness yet defied Paris, Brussels, Club Med.
Muttering, nudging, they eventually began lining both sides of the unlit, unpaved lane, beneath the dark, massive overhang from which thinner shadows stretched like claws. Air was thickened by smoke from low roofs and the proximity of more animals. Summer seemed to have recoiled.
Custom had apparently resumed, or perhaps begun, like an ill-managed rehearsal, haphazard, with tedious intervals, caterers on strike. A hoarse outburst greeted a hermaphroditic apparition, its breasts plainly artificial, draped in dirty green folds, mincing between the dim avenue of onlookers, waving an old toasting-fork before going rigid, motionless, staring inwards. Another figure was visible, in conic hat, mute, waiting, an axe at its feet, red even in this bad light. Others filtered from alleys and doorways in white Arabic surcoats, sashed, shabby. They stalked up and down, their gestures stylized but comprehensible only to the natives. One performer, in damaged, once-gilt crown, a knobbed truncheon protruding from his groin, adopted a limp, to a lugubrious chant that slowly petered out to a grumble while he was grabbed and held aloft by several others. We remembered later the Pope, the US flag, likewise forbidden to touch ground, at particular ceremonies.
More characters were pacing around the axe in perfunctory circles, unsteadily, like inexpert comedians feigning intoxication, reminiscent of the Meinnenberg wedding. Torches of tar and broom suddenly flared, during which the axe vanished, leaving the caste mournful, bereft, until, miming despair, beginning another shuffle. Various props were upheld: a halter, dented fireman’s helmet, a twig painted with red blobs, perhaps berries, precaution against witches or spirits. The dance, if dance it were, was oddly furtive, without music, weighted by the ponderous heads and legs, though clearly satisfying the threadbare villagers. One actor, slouching alone, was strapped to a leather hump that the others would surreptitiously touch, then bow to the still statuesque figure with toasting-fork, mock trident. One face was unearthly: sunken, barely detectable eyes, parched skin, so loose that it seemed carelessly hung on the skull.
Like Greg, they were close to the earth, detached from our world. Torchlight cancels time. Had mighty vessels collided off Cuba, nuclear-fission smashing civilization, these sorry wraiths could have become aristocrats, teaching brute survival to those, like anonymous Meinnenberg refugees, frantically plunging for cabbage stalks, potato skins, crouching from rumours of approaching hordes or flame. No passion sprang from the faces stiff as masks. If a Magian star had once lured outsize tribes across Europe, they had shrunk, with coinage and language, were wedged, almost inert, like climbers stricken on the cliff face, like the satyrs, demons, wild men that strayed into the edges of medieval manuscripts. Or circus folk proscribed by Animal Rights. Or possibly our Latvians.
Despite some revulsion, I yet, in a manner, bonded with them, though to Nadja they must be anthropological examples of minor significance.
To encouraging growls, a couple, their eyes thickly ringed by charcoal, had loped forward, dangling a third, like a half-filled sack, one onlooker stooping to kiss him. Voices immediately livened, mouths widened into grins, many toothless, fires flared from darkness above, hovels and street filling with a grinding, wailing chant.
Nadja was to admit that she had actually been fascinated, as if by a screen murderer, a Peter Lorre, whose simplest action – selecting a razor, handling cord, emptying a jug – is hideously fateful. The unmelodious chant she interpreted as ‘To the Oak, to the Hill, the Cleansing’ interminably repeated.
By now, I was bored, sickened by monotony and stench, longing for a fountain, dragon-fly glitter, even Blue Grass tunes, above all, for drink, strong, very expensive. My flickering sympathies evaporated into morose anticipations of the difficult trek home. The other visitors had already left. Nadja remained, rapt, seeking clues in these graveyard tableaux to Dancing the God, which must require lunatic guesswork as much as insight.
No garlanded hackabout followed, no antique melody traceable to Transylvania. A pock
ed, thin-haired creature, possibly female, handed us balls of dirty cloth to throw at a wooden hunk, headless, trussed in a ragged blue sash, which was then swung over a fire to another monotonous dirge. And then. My prayer was partially answered. The full moon slid over the summits, complementing the fires, and, on cue, an outburst of Scott Joplin-like jazz from a tinny transistor, the glum celebrants regaining vigour like Underworld spectres refreshed by sacrificial blood. Slow, twitching gyrations transformed to hopping, like children avoiding pavement cracks. Almost all joined in, Nadja alarming me by showing inclination to seize my hand and drag me amongst them.
Relenting, she confided, with unreliable seriousness, that the dead had certainly been present; several still were, surly and unappeased. Counting dim figures, we would never reach the same number. The fumes, wavering lights, the moon, ‘Bright Moon of the Nameless’, did indeed create intimations of tricky rivals.
‘At least,’ Nadja finally permitted departure, ‘we were not made to watch sizzling cats!’
Far, too far off, urban lights were almost unreachable as grails. Disturbed, a crow flew past, low, wing-beat irregular. ‘That’s Cledon.’ Nadja’s assurance was unassailable. ‘A prophetic sign. Not very good.’
8
‘I don’t like it, Erich. I feel …’
‘But I could scarcely refuse.’
I had learnt from my cowardly, devious refusal of Claire’s appeal, but Nadja’s fine eyes darted impatiently. ‘With your face and arms you can do absolutely but absolutely anything. You are Thor, but asleep. Raise hammer.’
Since our excursion she had been admitting headaches, keeping her own bed, not complaining but subdued, leaving me to late-night movies, mostly sci-fi fantasies of outer space convulsions, domestic pets mutating to double-headed monsters, seas to salt-pans, outweighing Custom and the ill-balanced crow.
Secret Protocols Page 33