He put on his sunglasses and retrieved a crumpled copy of Die Presse that had been pushed under the seat in front. He was becoming exasperated with himself, his relentless self-concern, his fantasies of collapse, of finding himself looking up from the floor at the faces of strangers, someone – there was always someone – shouting ‘Don’t move him!’. Did he wish for it? The failure that would excuse all others. Poor László! What could he do? A sick man! Helpless!
At Hegyeshalom, an hour out of Vienna, customs officers boarded the train. The Austrians, with their snappy berets and blue-grey tunics, were almost dapper; by contrast, the Hungarian trio, in caps and rumpled khaki, had the hapless look of young military conscripts, though for László, uniforms of any description could still provoke in him the old fear that those who wore them were spiders who moved along the web of the law, and whose interest could snare him in a tangle he would never escape from. He unwound the strap from his wrist and took off his sunglasses.
‘French?’ asked one of the Hungarians, in English, as László passed over the passport, which in 1971, after the success of Sisyphus Rex, the French government had at last seen fit to grant him.
‘From Budapest,’ said László, replying in Hungarian.
‘Budapest?’
‘Forty years ago.’ He wondered if the other understood. How much would he know about ’56? People would not remember it forever. Another generation and it would be a paragraph in a textbook memorized by schoolchildren for the sake of an examination question.
‘You’ve been about,’ said the young man, scrutinizing the stamps in László’s passport.
‘For my work,’ said László, and he prepared himself to deliver an acceptable explanation of what his work was. He knew from experience that customs officials were often nervous about writers, a tendency at its worst in those places with a long tradition of locking them up, and where the habit, the reflex of persecution, was hard for them to break. But he then realised that the young man was only envious of those enticing little stamps, and was, in fact, not particularly interested who came into Hungary, or who left. Hungary would be in the Community soon, another branch of the great European department store. The world had moved on; the grey-faced men, those who had worn coats lined with frost, were lost in the very history they had thought themselves the masters of. The country was open now, though László did not think he would ever quite get used to that. It had come too late for his generation.
They stopped again at Györ, then continued across the plain, where the heat rose in a silvery haze from grasslands and cornfields. Broad, low, farmhouses floated past; cars queued patiently at a level crossing; shadows indolent as moat water surrounded the blackened walls of an old Soviet-era industrial plant. László leaned his head against the window and fell asleep. Immediately, he began to dream, discovering himself in a street he did not quite recognize, one of those urban settings collaged by the unconscious from a dozen different cities; places lived in, or seen from the window of a taxi, or on a cinema screen. He was dressed in a baggy black suit like a type of circus clown, and dragged behind him an enormous overpacked suitcase tied shut with lengths of string. At the corner of the street, garbed in the outfit of a Mexican bandido, Emil Bexheti leaned against the wall with his arm around the shoulders of a beautiful woman, who laughed shrilly to see László stumbling up the dust of the street. And yet the mood of the dream was not oppressive. In spite of the sense that he could not possibly carry his burden much farther, he was content, almost cheerful, in the dogged fashion of a man who acts out his fate knowing that there can be no other. And after a while he ceased to hear the woman’s laughter. The city abruptly ended and he was out in the country, hauling the case – which now he dimly recognized as the one he had left Hungary with, his father’s case, a thing of solid burnished leather with the initials ‘A.L’ stencilled on the top – along a white road that undulated into the remote distance; a white ribbon threaded through a deserted arcadia, which would lead him, unerringly somehow, to his final destination…
He woke as they were pulling into Kelati station, the spell, the unexpected peacefulness of his dream, replaced by a great agitation of noise and movement. In a panic he reached forward, cursing himself and scrabbling under the pages of the newspaper that had fallen from his lap while he slept, and then, in his relief, laughing out loud as his fingers grazed the waxy sides of the bag.
He clambered with it down on to the platform, weaving through the gangs of accommodation touts, tough-looking women mostly, holding up cards with ‘Room to rent’ spelled out in English and German and Italian. Above their heads, pigeons flew in swift formations, their wings rippling the light that fell in a wash from the great fan window at the city end of the station. Émigré, playwright, international courier, László Lázár was back, and in his old language he silently greeted his old home.
11
On Sunday morning, Alice Valentine waited on the sofa in the living room at Brooklands. She was wearing a fawn winter coat, and round her neck a stole of mink fur, with a mink’s desiccated head on either end of it. The stole had belonged to her mother, and fifty years ago might have bestowed some glamour on a young woman with an evening dress and a powdered throat, but time and hordes of golden moths had done much damage to it. The creatures, with their glass eyes and ragged ears, seemed to be suffering from acute alopecia, and Alec thought of the old dog skin at the end of Lampedusa’s The Leopard, dropped from a window on to a dust heap. But Alice had wanted it, and after long searching he had found it coiled in a hatbox at the back of a wardrobe on the landing. None of them knew why she wanted it; perhaps in tribute to her mother on the visit to the old house. No one asked her for reasons any more.
It was a quarter to twelve by the time they left: Larry, Ella and Kirsty in the back of the car, Larry with his knees almost up to his chin; Alice in the front with her stick, her oxygen, her tissues, her supermarket carrier bag of pill bottles. They travelled on minor roads under the looped shadows of the trees, Alec leaning forward at the wheel like a card player, though there was almost no traffic. Ella, in a green frock and sandals, sat between her parents, poised and silent. Larry scratched the top of her head and she gazed up at him.
‘How you?’ he whispered. ‘How we?’
They had had their little talk about the return of the capsule (‘our secret’), though he had spoken to her more in gratitude than reproach. He was grateful to Alec too. Evidently his conversation with her had been more effective than they had realized. The thing was gone now; Alec had sent it the same way as the others (extraordinary what gets flushed down people’s toilets!), so that particular crisis was over. He had been unexpectedly reprieved, and the escape had invigorated him, so that for the first time in months he felt that better things might be possible. If he could rein back on the booze, the powder, the tablets, the mood swings, the lying, this time perhaps he would defy the lengthening odds and make the world right again. But the change would have to be convincing. It would have to show on his skin like a light, for there were only so many times a person could promise reform before the words ‘I’ll change’ began to sound like ‘I want to change but I can’t’. It might, of course, be too late; he was so cut off from Kirsty’s private thinking now, the tendency of her thinking. For all he knew she had already instructed someone in the States, some lawyer, and he’d go home to find the paperwork waiting for him. She’d had a week on her own over there, and that Khan bitch might have talked her into something. But it was his instinct that he still had one last chance, and he intended to reach for it.