From her jump-seat by the emergency exit door, one of the air hostesses, her face stiff with cosmetics and fatigue, was watching him without much sympathy, and seemed on the verge of putting some procedure into operation, but now they were descending sharply, the plane suddenly on a level with the roofs of the airport buildings, and there was no longer time to do anything but mutter the garbled end of a prayer (Christ, don’t let us crash and die here…).
The businessmen sat very straight, braced, their fingers on the switches of their phones, ready to power up. Something fell in the galley; someone laughed, grimly. As they touched down, the child had her face in the bag again.
5
Above certain words and in the margins, Alec made notes with the fine point of his pencil. Slowly, under the light of the storm lantern (this least stormy of nights), he was learning the music of the new piece, and how to sing, in a head quieted at last of all other thoughts, the approximate, imitative song of the translation.
He had never met László Lázár, and knew what he looked like only from a photograph he had cut out of the Sunday Telegraph magazine which showed a delicately built man with cropped grey hair and large eyes, the pupils unusually prominent and dark. It was winter, and Lázár had been posed beside the boating pond in the Jardin du Luxembourg, a place Alec had often visited on solitary walks during his year abroad at the Cité Universitaire. But what gave the picture its particular character was the package Lázár was carrying, hugged against his grey overcoat. A book perhaps, or something from a local patisserie, a cake for Sunday, but it lent him a vaguely conspiratorial air, like a nineteenth-century anarchist on his way to plant a bomb in the foyer of a reactionary newspaper office. That, together with the somewhat silly caption ‘As a young man Lázár knew how to handle a tommy-gun’, had helped confirm in Alec’s mind the idea of the playwright as a romantic figure with a mysterious and violent past, owner of the kind of history he himself would never have.
Millions had died to produce the world Alec had grown up in. This he had been told at school on every Remembrance Sunday before the bugle sounded and silence fell over the ranks of schoolboys who would not be asked to play their part because others had done it for them, had laid down their lives like so many garments of tissue and silk, so that in England at least, cars did not arrive in the middle of the night to take dissidents to basement torture chambers, and democracy, ‘the dear old dog’, could go on slumbering in its long after-dinner sleep. And this was a great success, of course, a triumph, because everyone knew, or had been told, that war was hell. He had watched the World at War series twice – once on television, once on video – Laurence Olivier reciting the horrors of the Russian front, Hiroshima, the Camps. And there was no shortage of more contemporary evidence. Iran and Iraq. Afghanistan. Chechnya. Endless wars in East and Central Africa. Wars like ‘Desert Storm’, carried out with textbook brutality, with press briefings and generals from Central Casting. Wars full of astonishing neighbourly murderousness, such as those that had ended uneasily in Croatia and Bosnia. Fighting was still a consuming occupation for large parts of the planet. But Alec was in England, and had only ever witnessed, from a safe distance, the kind of flailing, closing-time violence that all British cities vomited up at the weekend. For this he knew he should be grateful. Road kills upset him. The sight of a fishmonger ‘cleaning’ a fish made him queasy. He was delicate, prone to colds. His own front line had been four years teaching French at a South London state school, at the end of which (one pitiless Tuesday lunch-time after the Christmas break), he had simply run away. But still, he could not quite free himself from certain naive and powerful daydreams in which he fought at the barricades with a man like Lázár, or ran under a fiery sky with Grandpa Wilcox to haul some bleeding comrade to safety. It was comically depressing, the realization that there would never be a picture of him standing gravely on Tooting Common with the legend, ‘As a young man Valentine knew how to handle a tommy-gun’. That wasn’t his kind of life.
Since his appointment as Lázár’s translator, there had been a to and fro of e-mails between Paris and Alec’s flat in London, queries arising from the text, and replies – precise and businesslike – signed not by Lázár but by a certain ‘K. Engelbrecht’, presumably Lázár’s PA (Katrina? Katya?). Alec was scheduled to meet Lázár at a reception in London in September, together with the director from the Royal Court, and various actors, designers, technicians and management, who would be part of the production. Barring the unforeseen, there would be a first night at the end of January.
For Alec, this was, without question, the most important piece of work he had ever undertaken. Marcie Stoltz, the Court’s literary manager, had seen his new translation of Le Médecin malgré lui at the Rathaus in Hackney when she was looking for a replacement for Chris Eliard, Lázár’s regular translator, who had disappeared from his yacht in mysterious circumstances while sailing single-handed across the Golfo di Genova. Stoltz had called Alec and invited him to lunch at Orso’s in Covent Garden, a class of restaurant he had never been into in his life, and after plates of asparagus, and lobster ravioli, she offered him the contract, explaining that the new play was something of a departure for Lázár, not exactly upbeat, but not gloomy. ‘Certain actions innately graced, etc.’, she said, fork in one hand, a Marlboro Light in the other, studying Alec with an amused and soulful gaze. There was, as usual, very little money in it – ‘would love to offer you tons more’ – but enough, with careful budgeting, to mean he could give up the detested ‘technical’ work (the latest was a document on braking systems for SNCF). After two large glasses of house white and saying goodbye to Stoltz, almost bowing to her as she squeezed into a taxi on Wellington Street, he had spent the remainder of the afternoon walking around Regent’s Park, smiling at dog-walkers and tourists, even at the police, who nodded back warily, suspicious of being liked. At last he was a man of prospects! And though he had long since given up competing with his brother – the futility of which had been apparent to him since primary school – he would not now, with Lázár at his side, be utterly overshadowed. He called Alice from a pay-phone somewhere in Marylebone, stumbling over his words, embarrassed at how much he wanted her approval, how relieved he was to hear her full-blooded ‘Well done, Alec!’ But as he made his way home, his feet starting to ache, his head thickening from the drink, a new restlessness and dissatisfaction had replaced the euphoria, as though someone had twitched back the curtain and let light into a room that had been tolerable only in the dark.
The play was called Oxygène: sixty-seven pages of card-bound typescript that told, in a clipped, elliptic language, the story of a mining disaster in eastern Europe. It was to be shown on a revolving stage, with two sets, ‘above ground’ and ‘below ground’, alternately on view. The action commences with the explosion that traps the miners at the end of a narrow shaft. Above ground, a rescue team and a chorus of relatives attempt to force a way through to them. Hope endures to the end of the first act, but by the beginning of the next it is apparent to everyone that the rescue can only have a single outcome. Underground, the miners struggle to come to terms with their fate. For one, it is nothing but the crude majesty of facts – too much rock, too little force. Another finds peace in a religious quietism, wedding himself to the will of his Creator. A third rages at the mine-owners who have forced them to go on drilling despite warnings about the safety of the tunnel. In the middle of the act a fight breaks out between two men so starved of air they can do no more than slow-dance like drunken lovers. Despair seeps in like a gas. Even those above ground succumb to it, gasping as if they too were under threat of asphyxiation. But at the moment when all further effort seems futile, one of the trapped men, György, a veteran of the mines, rouses himself, rallies the last of his strength, and renews his assault on the rock, while on the surface a young woman, unhinged by grief perhaps, takes one of the abandoned picks and clumsily wields it at the earth. As the house lights are dimmed and the audience sits on in the dark, the air rings with the steady percussion of the tools, a noise that the text insists should be ‘a triumphant sound but also a mocking one’.