Could mere greed be sufficient diagnosis of a Hagen de nos jours? Another comfortable turncoat now staffing Third World charities and covertly supplying landmines to dictators, small arms to African children. Flamboyant skater on thin ice, whom Nadja ranked with Storm Princes quoting Rilke and Goethe, who fondled horses, while underling killers complained of headaches, moments of depression, overwork. He and the Reichsmarschall were night-ogres dodging sunrise that would destroy them.
Alone again, by the wide, murmuring sea, I held dubious communion with the man who had saved me not from sunrise or White Rose martyrdom but from the Eastern Front.
After this, I was certain that Nadja, too, was oppressed by the Latvians, without directly referring to them.
‘I suppose, Erich, that we, too, are suspect. Not needing others. Reading. Yet so much is worth it. Ask children to look at the night sky. They see only a mess, like a dustbin kicked over. Nonsensical names: Pleiades, Uranus, Orion’s Belt.’ Her hands traced constellations. ‘It would not matter, but they replace them with a screen thick with guns and blood. Ask even Dick the day, and he will say Thursday. But ask him about Thor or Saturn, and he will go on the blink. Well…’ she relented, was gay as a hostess. ‘How snobbish I am! I must invite retribution!’
To an imaginary seminar, in little more than a whisper, she said. ‘Does it matter? It does matter. When Brussels replaces language to digital signs, knobs, tubes, and makes watching football compulsory…’ An actress opening a scene, she was emphatic, commanding. ‘Some skeleton of real mind must be defended. Resisting order, regulations, directives.’
Responding, I managed to quote St Augustine, learnt from Wilfrid: ‘From the depths that we do not see comes all we do see.’
‘Yes. My thanks, truly. Augustine can be very wicked, but sometimes unbelievably wise. And even here, Erich, in our pleasure-domes and anchorages, Prometheus refuses submission to Zeus, at the risk of terrible beaks. Until Heracles brings light. Yet he, so brave, can be stupid as Siegfried. Dangerous.’
‘A most disputable analogy. Nevertheless…’
I did not continue; she already knew my direction. Analogy, however disputable, banal, misapplied, is yet Earth at its best, attempting to identify then name the truth.
That week we decided to call on the Latvians but did not do so.
‘We are patient, Erich, like books.’
‘Like eggs.’
We smiled, selected a bottle, drifted into the garden, at risk of aggrieving the cat. Afternoon heat was weakening, the owl was preoccupied, leaves hung very still. We were in sanctuary. Dick’s half-drunken apprehensions, my own qualms, were superstitious as fears of a tidal wave, plague, red frogs; improbable as a legacy from an unknown or free champagne from Alain. We had love, like genius unattainable by prayer, guile, labour, like a chance stumble into a glistening Otherworld.
Chance, mystery were vital to existence, were pungent as mackerel. I enjoyed plots and oddities being left unsatisfactorily explained. Earlier, sober folk vowed they had seen riders in golden helmets, crimson boots, riding from dusty hills, vanishing into more dust. Hallucination? Time warp? Movie actors? Fête rehearsal? No matter they were merely appropriate to the region and its past. One story, unbelievable from an American police chief, sounded almost convincing from Alex: a London editor, transformed to a camel by an astral hermeticist of vicious reputation, was exhibited for eighteen months in an Alexandrian zoo.
Nadja, professionally sceptical of oral tradition, had yet pondered over a Paraguayan herb, which, crushed and boiled, gave speech in purest Latin to a sick villager.
Enjoying wine, she shook her head. ‘My friend, these people will never wave a broomstick and compel us to dance. Life is too good.’
‘Let’s…’
Neither of us was as unconcerned as we outwardly showed. Our new neighbours might be refugees, but few who survived hatreds and oppression entirely escaped them. They were scarred into queer twists of character and motive.
Under continued silence from Villa Florentine, I could feel, as in childhood sickness, that patterns were shifting: ceiling cracks, wall bulges, familiar pictures suggesting strange secrets. Today, homely sounds – a gate opening, birds scattering, a car halting – seemed unnaturally loud, while the Villa’s balcony stayed empty, its shutters closed, the garden a morass of seeding sunflower and marigold.
Phelps’s assertion that he had seen a nondescript couple burning papers in the backyard suggested the discarding of incriminating archives, forged documents, counterfeit banknotes, and, Ray imagined, his smile hideously dividing his face, photographs of abstruse sexual practices. ‘Funderland, of a sort. Very foreign.’ A Peruvian doctor, flashing his rings, was convinced that the Latvians were artists. ‘Art, you should both understand, is apt to produce creatures of doubtful identity.’
Jungle messages, common in small communities, then agreed that the new arrivals were not from distant Latvia but only from Montpellier – Nostradamus’ birthplace, Nadja mused – possessed immaculate references, paid huge advance rent, could be trusted unreservedly.
Very unconvincing, we agreed, deprived of drama, fantasy jokes, until these revived at news that their telephone had been disconnected. ‘Ah!’ Nadja’s exclamation was almost a giggle. ‘Taking cover.’ But, alas, the news was false. The Latvians, Ray Phelps concluded, should not be shot but quietly drowned.
Nadja, however, was soon delighted by a letter from Robert Graves, detailing elicio, Roman technique for discovering the secret names of enemies’ gods, exploiting this to cajole or threaten them to desert or betray; I matched this with a tale of Louis XI bribing the patron saint of his rival, Charles the Rash, who soon died, atrociously, in battle. We laughed further when, on the hottest day of the year, Dick Haylock demanded curry, which he hated, to commemorate some victory in British India. He could not, we agreed, afford to bribe Krishna. Merriment resumed at a new rumour that a Brussels commission, lavishly funded, was debating whether ‘Black Comedy’ and ‘Cinéma Noir’ infringed race-relations regulations, and the ruler of the USSR had awarded himself the Lenin Prize for Literature.
Still exhilarated by Mr Graves, Nadja looked up from rereading his letter.
‘Let’s take a holiday. All day.’ Her impetuosity made it thrilling as bed. She hurried upstairs, swiftly reappearing in yellow beach shirt, black slacks, a hat vaguely cowboy. Eyes and voice were those of a student in love with the morning.
The blue was perfect, distant mountains clear, nothing was yet hardened by sun of Aztec ferocity. We wanted no crepuscular Terre Gaste, derelict Venusbergs, smitten heaths, only outdoor energy, happy fatigue, open vistas, spendthrift pasture.
Before moving inland we took the upper cliff walk, savouring fresh Mediterranean sparkle, blue and green whorls like magnified thumbprints, white frizzle barely knocking the pebbles. Nadja loved water, claiming visions of fata morgana, pale mirage of columns edged with turquoise, wreathed in sea-mist. Of this I kept silent; any doubt of her honesty, especially from Robert Graves, distressed or enraged her.
On our right, gently slanted fields were sparsely dotted with pink farms, oak coppices, stunted and pollarded from over-cutting. Dry light was smooth against rocky scarps, then a boulder high and grooved as an elephant. No one was about, the landscape tight as a drum, now sun-baked rinds of vineyard, now green, now reddish earth. Soon, the old sarcophagus, popularly identified, without evidence, with King Arthur’s Lancelot, in this region discredited as perjurious seducer. Raw, sweet smells of hay, nettle, dung, occasionally salty, were warming. Far below, continuous traffic, glinting, metallic, streamed through coloured roofs, promenades, neat plane trees, bleached squares.