Roland concentrated solely on the management of his own performance; following closely the guidelines he recovered from Edith’s frantic and inelegant script. The hints Roland dropped suggested that Edith had not written anything in the form of a play. There were, for example, no speeches or stage instructions. No, what she had done was to ensure that anyone who read her notes with attention would be led to ‘re-enact’ the sequential prophetic curve that any play has to be. The script was a series of physical proposals for a séance that would deliver the event Edith was imagining. Wisely, Roland allowed the ritual site to look after itself. His only ‘theatrical’ contribution was to drape the expressionist backcloth from his Oscar Wilde drawing room over the raised bimah; making a tent from which we assumed he would, in his own time, emerge.
I don’t know how long we waited. Light died in the sloped glass roof over our heads: it grew strong again, illuminating the cracks, the broken webs of long neglect. I’m sure that neither of us slept, or lost consciousness for more than a few seconds. Very slowly, the shaking and the rolling of past worshippers faded: the silver bells, the pomegranates; the stiffened yolks of eggs, unpeeled from dead faces; the steam from the bath house melted away. And we heard the low whining of a solitary dog. It seemed to come, not from the floor of the synagogue, but from beneath it: a melancholy and inhuman kaddish of loss. The hair rose on our necks. We heard the claws of the dog scratching on tile: turning, circling; faster, faster, from end to end of the cellar that enclosed him. Our sense of the animal developed: a lion-headed, tail-thrashing, back-arched revenger, bumping against the floor that could no longer contain it. The beast was growing. It would burst through the feeble bricks.
Our veins closed, stopping the surge of blood to spasms of pain. The room was filled with suspended heat. We flinched from the rails on which we were leaning. We dug our nails into the palms of our hands.
Now there was a cooler sound, metallic; a length of chain dropping into a dry well. A small gridiron in the floor of the main chamber was lifting itself, falling back into place; lifting again. A stutter of untraceable images flooded in behind the sound. A cloaked sleeper, living or dead. A peasant-priest stalking the circumference, barefoot; drawing his own breath from a glass-flute, in which locusts are imprisoned. Horizontal confessions. Crimes of passion. The supplicant lies, face down, upon the synagogue floor, and whispers his (her) guilt through the grille to an unseen confessor; or into a pool of accumulated evil. The priest is standing on a chair in the inundated cellar, neck twisted, lifting his mouth to catch her (his) spit. The penance involves cleaning with the tongue these loops of cold iron. And it is shared between priest and victim.
With a wild rush of yellow, of thorn and sand, the lion-thing was at the door: it thundered, its breath was rage. We did not want to see it, but we could not move.
Roland Bowman was naked, red, on all fours; crawling like some obsolete chess piece, across the worn boards towards a restored pool of decorated tiles. His movements were precise, but they did not appear to be premeditated. He was the inherited dog, burnt of its fur; birth-shivering, as it aligned itself to enter once more the geography of its ordained narrative. Scalded, raw, vulnerable; Roland pushed himself pitifully along the floor, until we felt the waves of displaced pain enter our own knees and wrists. His muscular control was astonishing.
I gave no credence to what I was seeing. I was the right eye, Fredrik was the left eye: we had both to concentrate to bring this vision into focus. I could not judge its distance from my own amorphous fears and desires. I could not guess what part of this scene Fredrik was censoring with his intelligence. But what I saw shocked me. The dog’s swollen pizzle, emerging like a piston of peeled, pink flesh from its holster of fur. Nothing of Roland was left. He was overwhelmed by this assertion of the animal’s unthinking maleness. I did not believe Roland would ever break free from the creature whose spirit he had so convincingly summoned.
The dog salt-licked the blue pigment from the dutch tiles. He put his shoulder, in turn, to each of the six pillars. He acknowledged the amud, and bent his head before the Ark. Now the vigour drained from him. He was beaten. He dragged on broken legs. His spine was twisted, his head lolled. The crushed beast slunk from our sight under the painted cloth of the tent — and re-emerged, on the instant, by some conjuring effect; erect, strutting, arms thrown wide, parading the cloak of maps. The dog was Edith Cadiz. Or a switch had been made. Roland had volunteered to vanish in her place from this story. He was robed once more in the cardboard streets that surrounded his house. He was dressed in the tale he had told us at his kitchen table, the woman’s life.
Roland’s body — hairless, pale, disciplined — had the miraculous capability of allowing any other life to be ‘projected’ over his own. He was neutral; the dream actor. A man, a woman, an animaclass="underline" he could be a cardinal or a horse, a prostitute or a surgeon. The watchers would witness whatever transformations they dared to conceive.
For this role Roland’s make-up was predatory and exulting. He laughed, and he licked his white teeth. He ran a finger teasingly over his lips. He shook out the red-gold hair that flowed down his back. Edith was producing a wicked pastiche of the Roland who laid claim to her identity, by making himself the sole curator of her legend. There is no salvation in dumb reverence. Loving admiration metamorphoses to soul-theft. The glamour of the risks that Edith provoked had been peeled like a mask from the bone of Roland’s skull. Neither party could break from this terrible contract: the telling and the showing, the being and the dying. The mirror had frozen hard about them.
There was only the sound of bare feet sliding on the boards. Roland spun to face the Four Quarters of the World: he stretched out his arms. He was passing down a track already flattened in the wet grass, under the arch, and out of Meath Gardens: rain in his face, he brushed against the drooping purple heads of buddleia. Eyes shut, following the wind; he crossed Roman Road towards the corroded green effigy of a blind man tethered to a stone dog. He could go no further. He was enclosed by a crescent of water; which he drew, at once, into the unsuspecting air. Faith kept the shining column in balance on his hand, a liquid wand.
Fredrik, coughing fiercely, stood up, a handkerchief clutched to his lips: he loomed alarmingly over the balcony rail. Shadows from the swinging lamp aged him; grew a dark judicial beard. He challenged the woman who stood beneath us on the floor of the synagogue. He spoke, but the voice was not his own: it was chalky and base. He rose to defuse the gathering tension of the moment: only to discover that he was now the dominant part of the act. He was implicated: the necessary articulator of a written voice.
‘Who is he who gives you this authority?’ Fredrik choked out the words he was hearing for the first time. He fingers closed on his throat, so that he could feel them, and assess their truth.
Edith countered his assault with movement, the steps of a dance: she glissaded, turned, showed her back. She ripped the sleeve from her cloak, and let it float into the unlit margin of the stage.
‘What business do you have with Hebrew ceremonies, the taint of idolatry, and the like?’ Fredrik continued his cabalistic interrogation.