He mistook my mutter for agreement, though ‘oily’ was the word with which Nadja frequently summarized him.
‘He can tell you where to find VAT 69 or that blasted Slivovitz.’ His thoughts rushed, a cistern refilling. ‘Or Mitterand’s private number. Both of them have war records steamy as Goering’s gumboots. But you’re waiting to hear my own choice of female.’ I was not but heard it. ‘I’ll stick to Daisy, with her blessed birds. For English roast chicken and bread sauce. But… your new friends. Up at the Villa, as somebody wrote. My opinion, my considered opinion, is that they’re on the run. That Iranian shindy. You’ll see.’
His prescience depressed him. ‘But what’s our own place in the world? Back home, it’s not set fair. Teachers with rings through their noses. Not Shakespeare but Bengali folksongs. Brussels, the menagerie’s backbone. Only Anthony Eden got things right. As for America, too much smut.’
Nadja reckoned Dick too helpless to insult. ‘Helpless’ was approximate, the original, she said, too obscene to translate.
‘I spy with my little eye…’ Dick thought, mistakenly, he could not be overheard, ‘that fellow in the tie. He bought a Moroccan for ten thousand new francs. She’d been in prison, where they first met.’ Music from the promenade intervened. Under the tall, garish lamps, drums and bugles, some dozen were marching, in black shorts, black-and-white tunics, with thick sticks and white banners. ‘The Matelots. Merchants of Shit.’ Dick swallowed wine as if washing his teeth.
Les Matelots du Roi, neo-fascists, were more arsonists, thugs, sexual prowlers than pledged royalists. At movie festivals, political congresses, concerts, they demonstrated against townie effetism and immigrants. Now, ignored by tourists and automobiles, though not by jeering children, their swagger was pitiful, a march to nothing.
Dick appeared inclined to spit, desisting only at the last minute.
‘I don’t mind telling you this, Erich, now that the smell’s gone and the dust has settled. I couldn’t, at first, give my consent to Britain entering the war. For Poland, of all places.’ He coughed, resumed very hastily. ‘It would destroy the Empire, encourage Irish and wops. Now, this ruddy Custom’s almost due. I call it a case of history unable to shed its skin, as your Madam would say. I take it that you’ll keep carefully away.’
Dark as a volcano god, la Terre Gaste irregularly performed Custom, unpublicized in brochures, avoided both on hygienic grounds and for its inaccessibility, now that cars had replaced legs. Distinct from the annual Civic Fête, this year dedicated to European Unity, Custom was reputedly no parade of golden-hatted lovers and opulent models staged for tourists’ money. We would discover no shining sprites, mindlessly happy, tossing the ball of pleasure and for whom death itself was only a pose. Whatever the year, it always occurred on 13 August in the week not only of the Assumption of the Virgin but of the goddess Diana.
Nadja had found twelfth-century reference to it, ignoring Diana but mentioning a fire-spirit, akin, I judged, to the Northern Surt. She thought it might symbolize repulse of Phocaean invaders. We knew that the day, sacred throughout pre-Christian Europe, was when the dead, jealous, wistful, dejected, mingled with the living, lamenting lost times.
‘Erich, you should arm yourself with salt. It keeps them at bay.’
While thinking the Custom of very questionable interest, certainly squalid, probably tedious, she was now determined we should witness it. ‘It might confirm your belief in ghosts.’
I had no such belief and distrusted the usefulness of salt but always felt that small communities, uncouth survivals, stubborn beliefs were owed respect, struggling against bigness, conformism, the majority. Heresy is often honourable. Dwellers in la Terre Gaste, clutching survival on the margin of trained hygienic Europe, dismissed as brittle, interbred halfwits, existing on grubs and bark, still revering limping smiths as magicians, were too few for attentions from police, tax officials, the census. They had managed to skirt conscription, lycée, Occupation and Libération, spoke some dialect barely French. They, too, resisted.
Their hamlets were reachable only on steep, very rough tracks, so that we started early with full knapsacks, ready for hills. Swathes of mist soon surrendered to diffused but sharpening light, the landscapes widening into tints sombre, elemental, littered as if with props; ruined mill, burnt-out shack, illegible signpost, all, Nadja observed with some appreciation, suitably discouraging. We wore shabbiest clothes, she without ornaments, myself unshaven ‘Viking guise’, she said, to avoid special notice. We had to risk choice between several tracks, none recently trodden, pocked by coneywarrens, periodically vanishing beneath scrub and myrtle. The most arduous climb began only after three hours’ trudging. Dull peaks gradually enclosed us, mist dripping on granite slabs and scarps, bare save for rare pine or fir. At a dry well, a flat boulder, we took wine, a roll. The air, breath of Africa, was fresher than the humidity below, the plain yellowy tinged with brown, blue thread of sea, patches of walnut. Few birds were evident in this high wilderness, though once a linnet’s red patch surprised us.
The expedition was tonic after the anodyne, almost palm-court harmonies of our garden. Nadja rejoiced in the likely infrequency of Latvians. Not until late in the toilsome afternoon, ourselves moist, hard-breathing, did we hear voices, distinct in the thinned atmosphere, from somewhere above in the stony desiccation, now watched by untethered goats with sophisticated aloofness, clustered in committee at a dry stone hut, the slope providing its back wall. Our enjoyment was undiminished, an exorcism of theme park and casino, neon lights, skinhead violence, the culture of Mon Repos and Winter Palace. Rock, sky, cloud, unseen presences were pleasantly intoxicating: primitive grandeur with hint of danger. We were midgets surrounded by heights, stunted bushes, sour grass, a precipitous drop.
We were nearing a circular mount, man-made, Nadja was certain, for burials, housing the ghosts I was, apparently, so anxious to inspect.
Vision – a word usually accompanying rhetoric or pomposity – was momentarily viable in an instant prolonged only by mystics, poets, drunks, a gleam from isolation, distance, prehistory, though swiftly revoked by the sight of clothes hanging before scattered hill-caves, then by a cackle, not quite bird or animal, but disapproving, then by deepened silence. Expectation widened Nadja’s luminous eyes, and, exhilarated by the climb, we chattered about lost explorers, untraced disappearances, feeling younger, venturesome, daring.
Lower reaches still glistened, but we were in shadows cast by peaks vaguely magisterial, like Wotans at the start of the world, and given moods by short glints of sunlight. Imaginable as gypsum-white, with lidless calcified eyes.
The track rounded a jutting shoulder of cliff, meeting the sweet drift of pig-dung, then of stale vegetation and tobacco, coarse as sacking. The voices were close, from a lane of misshapen stone and wood shacks, turf-roofed, the far end filled with a crowd of some hundred, impoverished, shambling, like decayed boxers, many shoeless, with bare legs cross-gartered with blackish cord.
Our approach was watched incuriously, no sentinel dogs leaping at us with angry teeth. Glad of our shabbiness, I noticed several other outsiders, distinct only by polished heads, spectacles, cameras.
Nadja, at ease, raised a hand, diffident but appeasing, and unhurriedly we became part of the crowd, the smells, the strangeness. Sexes were largely indeterminate save for beards, men and women in ragged jeans and nautical-style kerseys, short yet heavy limbed, perhaps syphilitic, with genes of forgotten cast-offs. Many were lame or missing an eye, an arm, though as if connected not with military mutilés but with the Wotans. Faces prematurely aged, slightly scorched, necks goitrous, heads too large.