Hobbyhorses swarm in imitation cloth-of-gold caps, then a hunchback Scaramouche with tricoloured horns, a lascivious Punchinello, Pierrot jiving with Columbine. Anthology of popular culture, language of distilled memories. Fleeting celebrities – female Olympic equestrian, tennis champion, rawhide footballers showered with petals from windows. I see through the magic spectacles of near-intoxication, which stretch faces like elastic, transform colours to the incredible. Deranged planets re-form into ‘Crédit Lyonnais’. Time for St André to discharge a hosedown of sudden tears. Cooling. Instead, relentless heat matched by trumpet salvoes, vivacious, archaic hunting-calls, panoplies of holiday sound in this phantasmagoria of Europe’s Spirit World; the wolf, red-fanged, white-gloved, wringing falsetto bleats from a popinjay saxophone, a mulatto witch bestowing blessings on whorish mermaids, and prancing demons, preceding a Société Joyeuse platoon, brocaded surcoats, peaked caps askew, diamond hues, grotesquely lengthened noses. They caper to shrill pipes, swipe each other with bladders and, strung with tiny bells, jeer and sourpuss the crowds. Claire and Sinclair could earn bit parts, mincing alongside a platform of phallic confectionary driven by a darkly cowled Doctor with swollen yellow beak and briefcase twinkling ‘L’Imposture’.
A man, naked save for mistletoe sprigs – to propitiate oncoming winter, Nadja explains – wears bull-mask and displays corn-cob genitals, hugely popular, target for marigolds. Within the Garde Républicaine band ambles the mayor, Légionnaire d’Honneur, sashed, medalled, bobbing, one hand stilling imagined applause while he ignores a chorus of ‘Stolen Funds’. First mistaking him for ‘blasted Musso’, Dick, rather unsteady, worries Daisy by calling ‘Blasted Eurocrat. Superstate Barmy!’ then looking about him as if this was uttered by somebody else.
By now fatigued, bored, hungry, about to urge Nadja homewards, I am unexpectedly stalled. I know something of Arthurian legend, from Breton and Welsh traditions, some researches of Lars Ivar Ringborn and Nadja’s more cabbalistic works of Emma Jung and Marie Louise von Franz. I see that, for the first time, she is really interested, opening her notebook.
The cacophony has fallen apart, the gap filled with a single vicious groan, some ritual curse, trained on a tinpot knight bareheaded, elevated in a workaday cart pulled by two mules. He is downcast, disgraced, now flinching from a scurry of dead blossom, cabbage stalks, condoms, broken shoes, to repeated shouts of ‘Elaine’ and farmyard neighs and crows. French political feuds? Some desperado of boudoir scandal or casino morals? Certainly not. Elaine, a word from Nadja, my own diehard memory, reminds me of a Breton tale of a southern lake goddess, confused with Mary Magdalene, simultaneously mother and wife of Arthur’s blood-brother Lancelot du Lac, adulterous paragon who betrayed him. Historically negligible but with a thin patina of psychic truth. Unhorsed in combat, this Lancelot had been forced to return to the royal cuckold in a peasant’s barrow, customary for a condemned felon, the populace discharging stones, dung and, particularly, cast-off shoes.
No more. I expect, vainly, an electrically lit Grail safeguarded by mini-skirted initiates with star-tipped wands advertising Cointreau. The dazzle dwindles to a trickle: a posse of police cadets, quartet of oarsmen in broad, hillbilly hats, uniformed pupils, their party squeakers shooting orange tongues back at gate-crashing scrapings of dosshouse, souk, estaminet, barfly derelicts, a collection of clumping boots and tattered shawls. Vigilantes, I suggest, seeking Latvians, but Nadja does not smile.
We all depart to Hôtel Montmorency. I escort Daisy, herself silent, drunk or redrafting her will in favour of buntings. Dick and Ray argue about the Fête, its expense, absurdity, Frenchness. Certainly, it would not have been envied by such as Malraux and Jacques-Louis David, whose political tableaux have sunk into history. Children are over-tired, anxious for home. Nadja, unusually sociable, perhaps exhilarated by the Knight in the Cart, holds court. Dick, after glancing at Daisy, heaped beside me, inert, asleep or dead, approves not of her but Nadja. ‘She’s sparkling, like a house on fire. Where would we be without her? But, my God, what we’ve endured! Worse than opera. The educated man, my dear fellow … Shakespeare, Galsworthy … Miss Sayers … laws unto themselves. I’m sometimes sorry that fate never cast me upon the shores of our national showcase, Eton. But what did Hamlet say? “I could a tale unfold”?’
He unfolds nothing, scrutinizes me from beneath sandy, ragged eyebrows, sighs, mumbles ‘Bread of Heaven’, nods at the barman.
Returning, we listen to Wagner, his pomp overwhelming the streets below: shouts, rockets, tom-tom beat. Towards Cannes, darkness is pierced by fires, apparently uncontrolled, reddened clouds drifting seawards. Local radio announces a riot from an unnamed port, presumably one of the sporadic outbreaks of vandalism and vendetta to which we are accustomed.
I sleep badly, dreaming of enraged faces, poisoned fireworks, fragmented appearance at a roofless courthouse, lawyers duelling with rolls of blotting paper, umpired by a judge almost submerged by an immense cocked hat.
Near dawn we are both fully wakened by an explosion, terrifyingly close. Nadja is at once with me and, still naked, vulnerable, we see, in scrappy light, smoke and flame swirling from the Villa, monstrous, volcanic.
By late morning only a few blackened walls remain. No bodies found, debris revealing little. Alain reports rumours. The Latvians had mishandled their own bomb; had already left for Cuba; had been invaded by the Matelots under cover of the Fête. With nervy frivolity I blame Mr Kaplan but, in the garden, see a court, perfectly roofed, myself in the dock, the jury returning, the judge leaning forward.
10
October. Mistral, vines stripped, olives harvested, winter ploughing begun. ‘Another gate of the year,’ Jules thought, or quoted.
The garden had aged, darkened, the damp lawns having their last cut. I headed dead roses and dahlias, wandered in tarnished light, urn, bench, moon-daisies misty; then retired into a novel by the Estonian Jaan Kross, though more aware of Alex’s story, made plausible by minutely observed details of a civil servant metamorphosed into a shed by a chatty, courteous stranger. An actual incident, in keeping with the present, soon forced me to close the book.
In Canada I entrained to lecture at a distant Estonian settlement where no planes went and, though substantiated by the travel agency, was ignored on maps. I shared a compartment with a slate-faced man, mute, scarcely moving throughout and of indeterminate age. When the train halted at a small empty station surrounded by waste, he stood up, pulling his hat lower, stepped out. Another man flitted from a doorway in similar hat, and together they paced the platform. The utter stillness of the train unpleasantly suggested that I was now the only passenger, until three others, in silky Italian suits, joined me, complaining in foreign English of the delay, as if unaware of me but watching the couple outside. Finally, my original companion returned, gazed without surprise but with some disdain at the newcomers, then gave me a smile, small but attractive, reassuring. While the others remained oblivious to us, the compartment uncomfortably crowded, he addressed me in fluent German. ‘To talk about it would destroy it.’ Nothing more, but making me certain that he knew my name and errand, knew also the other three. They were staring at their shoes as if at exceptional phenomena. The silence was gangsters’ truce.
The train, after the unexpected delay, was now speeding. The German, or apparent German, left us, a parcel remaining on his seat, though by his light manner of placing it I was certain that it was empty. The spell broken, the three conversed indifferently, about a snowstorm, a car accident, a hijack. At the next station, another with no community attached, they departed, superintending the removal, further down, of a large packing case. Movie addict, I at once suspected that the parcel on the empty seat would not be retrieved. Safe, I was yet icy with sweat. My journey continued without incident save that, on arrival, I found that I was not expected.
In the ramifications of mind this whiff of improbability, of significance or nothing, somehow connected with the explosion. The unlikely, the coinciden
tal, the inexplicable, had throughout been part of life. Chance, tyche, correspondence to the rhythms, if not of existence, at least to my experience. Neatly contrived novels, perfect solutions, were as unreal as signed treaties, elaborate pledges, medals strewn across a ruler who had never seen battle. Never ceasing, were these flickers from the Underworld: hidden controls, ambiguous strangers, arson, chaos? An Estonian prince once hurled a new spear into the sky, and it fell, dripping with blood. War Office’s assurance, political manifestoes were worthless, history as much confusion as design. Fêtes end in dissolution, terrorists roam at will.
Above us, charred bricks, smashed tiles, splinters of furniture remained a gash on the hillside, though no more bizarre or unlucky than everyday happenings elsewhere. Charting a new Central African route, a jet plane had scared a tribe into lynching an elder, beating up women, inventing several unwholesome words. Storming a mansion, Boston police discovered two reclusive old ladies, dead, one of cancer, the other of starvation, their rooms heavy with Titians, Louis XV adornments, a parakeet wilting in a platinum cage, $40,000 in gold, notes, bonds, the telephone cut off through bill unpaid. A European Cup fracas erupted from a Dutch spectator throwing a grenade at the Czech goalkeeper, pleading he had merely wanted to hear a bang. At the Athens Peace Congress, Mr Spender held a press conference to which nobody came. At the UN Assembly, a philosopher, having attacked the West for arming Iraq, selling nuclear assets to its enemies, enhanced his reputation by explaining that, if you look closely, murderers are the same as us.
Eventually, the Latvians would be etherealized into saints or martyrs, joining Sainte-Adèle des Pommes, guardian of a sacred well. We tacitly agreed to cease discussing them. Latvians came, Latvians went; live or dead – no human traces had been found – their fate was a tremor in an over-heated summer.
Though free to resume, we were nevertheless altered. Garden quietude had been jolted; we closeted ourselves more with books and music, laughter in abeyance. Even news of the Transport Minister flattening his nose on a door failed to transport us.
Again, I pondered my life as I might a police summons. Very little to declare. Pahlen would not have exalted me. That on a Committee of Public Safety I would have risked demanding acquittal for a friend was as improbable as Daisy poisoning a swan. Mr Spender had accomplished more, attempting to heal the world by his poetry. O young men, he had pleaded, O young comrades. I had merely flirted with life, my journeys and publications ephemeral as blossom.
Nadja was barely communicable, investigating classical media: oracles, sybils, sages, cryptographers, couriers, the ‘Antikythera Computer’, apparatus of learning, secrecy, clairvoyance, fakery. I could add some material about procedures at Uppsala, and she was dismayed, even annoyed, when I had to tell her that a tale she had thought from Herodotus was in fact invented by Hans Andersen.
Frowns melted into apology. ‘Erich, sometimes I see myself as parasite. Plagiarist. Grubbing into others’ labours.’ She looked up, as if at a favourite doctor. ‘So much is like those Brahms records I have never unpacked. Symphonies, concertos, songs. Never played. But I clasp myself, knowing that I can. And here, with you …’
Such uncertainty was familiar enough, from overwork or reaction from over-stimulus, and my anxiety, sincere, was not alarm, despite shadows having deepened under her eyes. We were autumn people with sadness well tempered, though outsiders might see us as sterile and luckless.
Laboriously, she shook herself free. ‘I am sorry. Much really sorry. You have given me so much.’
‘I’ve given you something. More than the ashen and despairing. But you give me riches. Making the very best of riches is, of course, no idle dilemma. I’ve banked it, at very fair interest.’
I spoke lightly, but words could not altogether suffice. We must await tyche, random opportunity, for some climactic embrace, exquisite harmony, the final screen removed, following destruction, perhaps death.
Spontaneously, slightly awkward, we moved into the garden, and she regained self-possession, natural authority, elegant in dark mannish coat, mauve scarf, pale trousers, against the formal, dark-green hedge. Woody smells drifted, a last dragonfly was now red, now blue, in electric rapidity. The cat condescended to inspect my ankle.
Much seemed repaired. We discussed the distinction between Anne, demure as milk, and Anna, vivacious, bold. ‘Both’, she tossed her head like an Anna, ‘odious.’We almost managed gaiety at more radio news. A Department of Employment had rendered most of its clerks unemployed; a Finnish urban council had found Donald Duck’s common-law marriage morally loose; an American DA was prosecuting a journalist for writing ‘Junkie’ instead of ‘Disadvantaged’.
Interrupting, in some accusation and as if expecting denial, she stated, ‘You are thinking of someone else.’
True. The self I had not achieved.
As to complete another sentence begun silently, and, more amiably, she said, ‘I would throw sticks into the river to help it go faster. I never wondered where it was going, but it seemed scared.’
I fancied she was attempting to say more than she found possible, but she relapsed into the pose always worth a connoisseur’s glance, one bare arm resting on a ledge, one hand stroking away hair, head tilted, eyes in another world.
Without speaking, we agreed that music would best suit a mood still difficult. Not Wagner but a grave, plangent Corelli sonata. We were not truly musical: my appreciation was too literary, finding not formal design but unruly stories, preventing concentration; hers was sensuous, seeking motifs for dance. Nevertheless, we sat contented, her face ruminative, puckered; now the child striving to succour the river, now anxious to please Corelli, while I unmethodically pondered the origins of music. Hunters’ cries, trappers’ animal imitations, warriors’ shouts, girls mooning over babies.
Afterwards, she was apologetic, to Corelli. ‘I was imagining …’
As though on cue the telephone rang. Often we ignored it, but at once she jumped up, as if for Mr Graves, lifted the receiver, looked back at me with what I thought some unease, murmured a dismissive ‘Yes’ and unhurriedly moved to the garden, pausing under an arch, glimmering between dishevelled roses, vanished into massed shadows.
For the rest of the day I did not see her and, always respecting the need to be alone, I removed to Alain’s. At breakfast she did not appear, and by evening it was apparent that she had gone with the cat on another professional trip.
Her room seemed as usual, tidy, the girlish straw hat lying on the gold-and-cream quilt, like a joke.
Unpossessive, I would miss the drama of an unexpected kiss, the movement towards my bed, the sudden playful suggestion. No more. By the end of the week, however, I had worry, still faint as shuffled silks but near a foreboding that I was no longer protected and that love remained a trap.
HOME
1
The crowd is vivid, many in nationalist peasant costumes, 1918 uniforms, jeans, with banners of Baltic heroes, all ages united in power of action, yet with outbursts of ribald song. Pre-war posters of Päts, Laidener, Poska, Pisp hang on tents, alongside demands for an anti-Soviet Popular Front, National Sovereignty, the restoration of Estonian in schools and verses celebrating the Baltic Way. More banners are woven with Independence, Freedom, We Too Are Europeans. Also, Perestroika, Glasnost. National badges, religious emblems, factional ribbons are flaunted, leaflets swapped, dates announced for festivals of native dance, music, poetry and democratic rallies. Gypsies in red kerchiefs argue in their own tongue or, passions quickened, link arms with strangers. No official, Russian or Estonian, is seen.
Following the muted anniversary of the Nazi–Communist Pact, two million Balts are massed in the Human Chain, unbroken for four hundred kilometres across the three republics, prepared to face Red Army invasion. The dedicated, courageous, reckless, obstinate. Initiates wresting freedom from Fate; coppersmiths beating out pure lines.
We watch the lilac horizon for a swirl of dust, blur of tank or bomber. A shout rises, loud
ening along the front,’ Hakka Astuma … Russians Out … Keep Standing …’ At intervals bells clang, slowly, solemnly, kneading the warm air. They still, then resume, faster, merry, almost syncopated.
Other names flutter. Heldur, Armo, Pille, Leenia, mostly forgotten, mere growls to the numerous children brandishing toy pistols, flags, darting for buns and lemonade. All are part of the revolt, daily expanding, enflaming Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, after the spontaneous, exultant heave that toppled the Berlin Wall. The jokes, slang repartee, sharing of pastries, chocolate, vodka, kvass, the hymns and patriotic choruses climax a week rhetorical, resounding, purposeful. From this heath of brown sedge, sallow scrub, Ivask’s verse rebounds:
A giant lake warns off eastern endlessness –
An eye that, keeping watch,
Stays open towards sunrise.
2
The days succeeding loss of Nadja were a flurry of instincts, disconnected images, a tearing mish-mash sustained by Alain’s supply of valium. Fenris swallowed the sun, Meinnenberg children savagely fought to devour a magazine illustration of cake, an egg dissolved into a sneer, red petals to Katyn Woods, John Wayne folded into rubber. Daytime was dream, nights sleepless. I lived in metaphor: empty highway, polluted waters, abortionist’s table.
Secret Protocols Page 35