by Alex Miller
He wanted to keep the card. As long as he held it the connection was there with Lena, meandering impulsively in the dangerous airs and alleyways of Lorenzo de Medici’s cruelly exotic Florence, her excitement and fear, the danger of her situation, unguarded and alone, without the cover of language, seduced by the mysterious beauty of Mola’s masterful drawing. He knew Florence secondhand from the set texts for Renaissance studies, Ferdinand Schevill’s history of the city and Machiavelli’s Florentine History. He had no sense of Florence as a modern city. For Robert, Florence had held its breath since the sixteenth century. Her postcard was precious.
Birte was looking at it. She shrugged and said, ‘You can keep the card if you like.’
He could see she also wanted to keep it. He handed it to her and she took it from him.
‘She’ll write to me sometime,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you know when I hear from her.’ But he knew now that he was not going to hear from Lena. If he wanted to see her again he would have to go and look for her. He would have to demonstrate his commitment. To show his unassuageable desire to be with her. Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone. Suddenly her love of Rilke’s obscure phrases, which she’d translated for him, made sense to him. But did he have an unassuageable desire to be with her? He wasn’t sure. Perhaps that was how she wanted it to be. Their marriage merely part of the old regime of obedience to her mother. Their vows no longer binding, emptied of meaning by death. Perhaps she was embarked on a new dream. A dream without the dragging weight of family. A dream that had once been his own dream.
Birte and Robert stood in the hall under the light looking at each other. For once Birte didn’t say anything. There were tears in her eyes. She stepped forward and put her arms around him and held him firmly against her. Then she released him abruptly and turned and stumped off down the hall, forgetting to give him her brother’s lecture. He watched her lurching along. Despite her position of authority at Lena’s old school, where she was the deputy head and had great influence with ‘the girls’, she seemed to him to be a tragic figure from the past, a lonely survivor doing her best to give life its due of seriousness, keeping her curiosity hard at work, pursuing culture as fiercely as she knew how. He admired her courage and he loved her. That was her real heroism: her persistence. Impatient always with Martin’s despair. She had told them one evening that her mother had locked her in the henhouse in the back garden all night when she was a child. To cure her, she said, of a phobia of birds and feathers. He thought of her that night in the henhouse, a vulnerable little girl, intelligent and intensely sensitive, locked in terrifying solitude among the troubled fowls—like a sign of the coming nightmare that was going to engulf her and her family and her entire people, her beautiful Europe destroyed in a blizzard of hatred and murder. Birte was never going to give up. They had not beaten her. She was defiant. A bit crazy, definitely a bit crazy, but heroically defiant.
He watched her till she went in through the kitchen door at the far end of the hall. When he heard the door close behind her he turned around and went back into the sitting room. He was glad Lena had written to her. It would have hurt Birte deeply if she’d heard nothing from Lena. For him it was not hurt but puzzlement and something else. His life lay ahead of him. It was his own to do with as he chose. His love for Lena was real, but he didn’t know that it was necessary. For Birte, friendship was the essential, the remains of the sacred in a broken world that was never going to be fixed ever again. She would make the best of it.
Martin was lighting a fresh cigarette when Robert returned. Martin’s hand trembling, his features illuminated by the shivering flame of the lighter. He was a portrait study by his hero Käthe Kollwitz. He snapped shut the cap of the lighter, snuffing the flame, and sat back in his chair and drew on the cigarette, the smoke drifting around his head. Robert closed the door and sat down.
When Robert was leaving later, Martin went out with him to where he had parked Mrs Soren’s car in the street. Usually Martin said goodnight to him at the front door. The street was silent. They stood beside the car.
Martin said, ‘So will you go and look for her?’
‘I have a feeling she doesn’t want me to find her.’
‘But you want to find her,’ Martin said.
‘I don’t have an address.’
‘It’s not so easy to cover our tracks from someone who is determined to find us,’ Martin said. ‘Especially if we don’t want to be found, we always leave a trace.’
They looked at each other. Martin had been on the run from the Gestapo. He had crossed Poland and Russia and half of China to reach Shanghai and freedom. ‘Being careful to cover our tracks makes us stand out from the people around us who are going about their daily lives openly.’ He lit a cigarette. He looked younger when he smoked. He smiled at Robert, who saw that he was enjoying the situation. ‘It’s not so easy to go unnoticed by the waiter in the cafe or by the tobacconist or the paper seller when you are afraid someone might recognise you. They remember you. The nervous one. In a hurry to get away. A stranger they have never seen before. Even on the finest spring days you choose a table inside the cafe without a view of the street. You sit facing the rear, perhaps with a view in a mirror. And when you leave you do not respond to the banter of the waiter but get up and go quickly. Once in the street you hurry away. The waiter stands at the door to the cafe and watches you, and he knows. Waiters are the best sources of information for the police. They go straight to the waiters.
‘A young Australian woman of Lena’s description, recently arrived in Florence or Perugia, with not a word of Italian. Believe me, she will stand out. There will be people who will remember having seen her. And you have a photo, and you speak some Italian. Believe me, you can find Lena even if she doesn’t want you to find her. And she knows this, Robert.’
He gazed steadily into Robert’s eyes, and Robert was imagining himself to be one of the young men whom Martin had recruited to his resistance group. He said, ‘You are very persuasive.’
Martin smiled. ‘And you are not reluctant to be persuaded. I don’t believe for one moment Lena doesn’t want you to find her. That she doesn’t write to you is her challenge to you. You know her. You know the games she plays with all of us, and you most of all. After she first met you, she talked to us of nothing else but you. She recognised in you the same resolve and possibility Birte and I both see in you. She saw that you were one of us. We have known Lena since she was a young girl, since she first came to this house and began studying the piano with Leonard and he accepted her as a gifted student. And then, of course, Birte became her German teacher at school. Believe me, Lena has always been setting puzzles for her friends to solve. She is a puzzle to herself. She always has been. That is the real Lena we all know; the Lena who woke up one day at the centre of a puzzling game and who set about solving the puzzle and finding her way out to freedom.’
The two men embraced and said goodnight. Robert continued to stand by the car watching Martin walk back along the street and turn in at his gate. He watched until Martin reached his front door, which had remained open to the night, the light streaming across the garden. At the door Martin turned and lifted his hand, his inevitable cigarette between his fingers describing an arc, like a distant flashlight waving to attract attention. He called out, ‘Robert! Birte and I would like it very much if you find her.’ He went in and closed the door. Robert got into the car and started the motor.
He turned the car and drove to where their short street met Alma Road and he turned left and drove on towards the Bay. So Martin was telling him it was not just for himself that he should go and find Lena, but was for the friendship. For the four of them. Where else would he find such friends? You are one of us, Martin had said. They were the most precious words Robert had ever heard. As he drove along the familiar streets, Robert knew that Martin had set him a challenge.
His finals were three weeks off. He didn’t for a moment consider abandonin
g his degree. If he sat his exams, then he would at least be guaranteed a pass. And with any luck Lena and he would be back in Melbourne before March and the commencement of his fourth year. Martin had decided the question for him. He had reassured him that he was part of a circle of kindred spirits. He said aloud, ‘After my exams I’ll close up the house, give the key to Dr Eady and go and look for her.’
PART TWO
28
During a calm windless night, and without a sound, the great spread of the Albertine rose grappled to the ground the dead limbs of the apricot tree which had long been its reliable support, as if this had always been the Albertine’s purpose, and now at last its purpose had been achieved. When I walked into my study that morning, it was shocking and strangely exciting to see them lying there together in a final thorny embrace, like exhausted lovers, the great tangled rose and the old dead tree, its black limbs spread like the silent cry of the crucifix. I saw in it something beautiful. I saw tragedy in it. I was enthralled and stood gazing at the changed scene from my window for a long time. Gus, my old cat, was out there nervously inspecting the scene.
Since we first came here to live I’ve waited each spring with innocent anticipation to enjoy from my study window the Albertine’s vivid display of fragrant blooms. So naturally I felt a sharp pang of guilt at the satisfaction it gave me to see that the rose’s massive root had been cleanly snapped at the base—the glistening stump looked as if a beheading axe had sliced it through at a single confident stroke. It was done for. There was no doubt about that. It was finished. There was a brutal finality to its end that excited in me a disconcerting elation and I let myself believe for a moment that a vandal with violent envy in his heart had sneaked into the garden during the night and destroyed my rosebush. I even felt a kind of kinship with this vicious stranger. Standing there looking out at that scene of destruction from my study window, it was as if I’d been waiting for it to happen and could now say to myself with relief, So there! You see? It is done! It was at this moment that I believe I understood something of Lena’s shocking anguished cry in response to her mother’s sudden death, ‘I’m fucking free!’
When Robert closed the front door of the Sorens’ Red Bluff house behind him that warm summer afternoon, it had the sound of finality in it for him and he knew, with an unchallengeable intuition, that he would never return to the house.
It was raining the morning he landed in Rome, the low sky dark and wintry in an old European way that made him think of his childhood in England. He caught the train north to Florence.
That afternoon the sky over Florence was a clear cold blue, the air chill and windless. He bought some postcards at the railway station and walked to the Piazza del Duomo. There it was, the great green and white front of the cathedral topped by Brunelleschi’s astonishing cupola, shining in the cold light, unchanged from the photograph in his copy of Ferdinand Schevill’s Medieval and Renaissance Florence. A familiar sight. He felt welcomed. He went into a cafe on the piazza, intending to question the waiter. He ordered spaghetti with meatballs and a coffee and sat in the window sipping his coffee and smoking a cigarette while he waited for his meal to be brought to him. He looked across the square to Giotto’s bell tower and watched the throng of people coming and going. Every young woman looked to him, for a heart-stopping moment, like Lena walking towards him, smiling, eager to tell him all about her adventures.
The waiter set his meal on the table in front of him. Robert thanked him and asked for red wine. His simple Italian seemed to be working perfectly. When he’d finished the meal he wrote a short message on one of the postcards he’d bought earlier at the railway station.
Dear Martin and Birte,
I am here in Florence. I have a feeling she is not far away. I will write again when I have found her. I hope you are both well. Don’t worry too much about her. Now that I am here I feel sure she is fine.
With my love to you both,
Robert
When the waiter came to take his plate Robert showed him the photo of Lena and asked him if he had seen her. The waiter took the photo in his hands and studied it for some time. ‘She is very beautiful,’ he said gravely. ‘If I had seen her I would remember her for the rest of my life.’
He handed the photo back to Robert. Robert asked him about a place to stay for a couple of nights. The waiter drew a map with his pen on a corner of the paper table cover, tore it off and handed it to him. ‘Signora Cafarella. She will take good care of you while you search Florence for your wife.’ He wished Robert luck. ‘If I see your wife, I will call Signora Cafarella and tell her.’
Robert ordered a second coffee and lit a second cigarette. He was feeling cheerful and optimistic. His view of the bell tower and the Duomo seemed to him the most promising sight he had ever seen. He knew their history. They were even more impressive than he’d imagined them to be. He was feeling generous and left a good tip for the waiter and thanked him for his kindness. The waiter went with him to the door and opened it for him and stood to one side. ‘Show your photograph to Signora Cafarella. She will know who to ask.’ The waiter didn’t smile. This was a serious matter.
Robert followed the waiter’s map. It led him up a gentle hill to a narrow street off Via San Gallo. A woman of around thirty-five greeted him at the door of the pensione. She was unsmiling and businesslike and clearly considered the job of receptionist beneath her dignity. The pensione was a warren of small rooms at the top of a dark stairway. Robert told her he would stay for two or three days and showed her the photo of Lena. She barely glanced at the photo and said in English, ‘I know nothing about such things. You must ask my mother.’
That night Signora Cafarella, a large woman in her middle sixties, dished up salt cod with pan-fried potatoes. The room in which they ate was without windows. The stale air reeked of wine and cooking and men’s sweaty socks and strong tobacco. There were four other boarders, all men. No one spoke a word of English. Their Italian was difficult for Robert to follow. He showed Signora Cafarella the photo of Lena. She said a great deal and passed the photo around among her other boarders, who also said a great deal. Robert understood none of it, but he got the impression they were sympathetic and would do their best to help him.
He was glad to get to bed. The rough red wine and his lack of sleep, together with the effort of speaking in Italian, had given him a fierce headache. He lay on his back on the small single bed and smoked a last cigarette for the day. His mind was too busy with thoughts for him to sleep. The last time he had eaten salt cod was when his mother had cooked it for him during the Blitz. He had never thought of salt cod as something anyone would choose to eat if they had a choice.
The next morning he walked down Via San Gallo to the Piazza del Duomo and took up his station at the table in the window of the cafe where he’d eaten the previous afternoon. It was a position that commanded a wide view of the piazza. It was a different waiter, an older man. Robert ordered a coffee and showed the waiter the photo. The waiter gave it a quick glance and handed it back without a word. Sooner or later, Robert was certain, he was going to see her. Surely every visitor to Florence crosses the Piazza del Duomo? But of course, if Lena was still in Florence, then she might have been there already for several months and would by now have settled into some kind of routine and wouldn’t be out looking at the tourist sights every day.
That evening he walked back along Via San Gallo and climbed the stairs to Signora Cafarella’s pensione and ate a dish of pasta. No one had any news for him. He went to bed and began reading for the second time Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon. He had snatched the book up at the last minute as he was leaving the house. It was the story of a man alone in his cell, a man who feels no enmity towards his gaoler but accepts his condition as part of some greater plan, over which neither he nor his gaoler has any influence. Reading Koestler, the cheerful optimism Robert felt on his first day in Florence soon evaporated. Quite often during the day he had no idea what people had said to hi
m in reply to his questions and he was feeling dismayed that his Italian was so weak after all. The air in his tiny room was heavy with the smell of stale humanity and he felt he could quite understand the fatalistic state of mind of the doomed prisoner in Koestler’s novel.
He was woken in the early hours by a nightmare. He didn’t witness the events directly himself but was told about them by someone else and had to form his own picture of them, which made them more believable and more horrible. Lena, his anonymous informant told him in a voice of great authority, had been hit by a train and her corpse buried under great slabs of granite that could not be moved. The granite slabs were covered in grey lichen, so Robert’s informant said, and had not been disturbed for hundreds of years. Robert lay awake in the dark for a long time, the horror of the dream clinging to his mind. A man was snoring heavily next door, great heaving shudders that vibrated the thin substance of the wall. It was the sound of a man being tormented. Robert knew he wasn’t going to find Lena in Florence.
In the morning he went to the station and caught the train to Perugia. He checked in to the first pensione he saw, then asked directions to the university for foreigners. The day was cold and it had been raining earlier, the cobbles still glistening. He was soon lost among a maze of narrow streets, each one of which looked just like all the others. He had been walking for half an hour when he emerged from a side street into an open square, a fountain spilling water at its centre.
She was sitting on the wide stone steps in front of a large building on the other side of the piazza. She was hugging her knees, her head resting on her arms, her hair tucked untidily into a knitted beanie. He couldn’t see her face but he knew it was Lena. He walked towards her across the square. His heart was beating quickly. He was nervous. A woman coming down the steps looked at Lena as she walked past her. The woman must have said something to Lena, as Lena lifted her head and looked at the woman. He saw that Lena’s feet were bare, her shoes lying on the step below her, as if she had kicked them off carelessly. They were scuffed and dirty. A plastic bag and a small case that was not familiar to him were on the step beside her. The grey overcoat she was wearing was obviously a man’s cast-off. She looked like a bag woman, someone who might live under a bridge, one of her patients from the hospital, a member of that lost community.