‘My carte de séjour needs renewal.’ This he forced out, barely moving his lips, which, thick, cracked, seemed designed to spit rather than release words. ‘The French authorities…’ the emphasis did suggest spit, ‘demand I supply a certificate of good living.’
The formula, like his French, must be inexact, ‘Signed by citizens of repute and substance…’ Crashing speech, and I feared a giggle from behind the door. ‘This I will require from you both. Your professional service. It will assist our voyage to America. The USA.’ His manner denoted no wholesale admiration for the USA. With the same intonation, matching his pale, wary eyes, he explained that two respectable signatures would suffice. A privilege undesirable but which, in conscience, could not be refused.
He laid several stamped, embossed documents on the enamelled table between us, jabbing a stubby thumb at particular paragraphs, expecting instantaneous compliance, perhaps my forging of Nadja’s signature.
Handling them cautiously, befogged by the prose style of officialdom, I made a gesture intended as conciliatory but which he understood as need for a pen. This, as additional favour, he supplied, then smiled, not in gratitude but like a fellow conspirator completing a deal. But, as one large man confronting another, I ignored the pen, fearing being outmanoeuvred like a footballer, enthusiastic but untrained. Instead, attempting the manner of repute and substance, I assured him of the honour he was doing us, yet regretting the signatures must be delayed, explaining, untruthfully, that we had no legalized status, possessed only Nansen passports, outdated, not universally recognized and viewed with barely credible suspicion by those same French authorities, unquestionably scoundrels, three of them criminals. A letter must be written, a permission obtained. Sadly, but unavoidably, he must wait.
It sounded clumsily false, inciting a blue glare as he squared as if for assault, but at this, commendably prompt, Nadja returned, amiable, hospitable, offering coffee. Stalled, he rose, giving her a cursory grunt. At the door, ‘I will allow you the time required. Now I leave. I will come back.’
‘How very kind!’ Nadja’s softness was dangerous, her expression subtly mischievous. Beast routed by Beauty, he scowled at the Juan Gris, then the door closed like a gunshot.
The garden was bright with well-seasoned flowers, August leaves tinged with brown.
‘Darling Nadja, I suppose we must sign. It will hasten their packing and delight God the Father America. Two points for us.’
Almost never predictable, she was indignant, colour touching her ovalled pallor, her eyes charred.
‘Erich, I will not sign; you should not. Even though you may be right. But you are not right. What do we know of them? How can we send them to others like a secret missile? He has the face of… anything you can imagine. A strike-leader of menace. Not a good man. She is worse. They are mixed with the strange and brutal.’
She had prosecutor’s severity.
‘Nadja, if they launder money, forge visas, sell stolen LPs, manufacture weapons and further poison Alain’s champagne… they can do it somewhere else, with more likelihood of being caught. Surely.’
But she went miserable. ‘To guarantee them risks all this.’ She motioned at green depths, lucid vistas, a bird on a statue inquisitive or waiting for crumbs. Warm ochred walls. I had nothing to say, she sighed, in relief, and, nearing Stendhal, we changed key. Head on side, she gave her throaty laugh.
‘There was a Hungarian Barbe Bleu. Of him, I can only say that in appearance he was splendidly splendid but with six hanged wives amongst his credits. A seventh arrived on schedule, but she peeped into a closet just in time…’
Intimacy could always leave sentences, moods, embraces unfinished. We sat comfortably, sunlight sliding through leaves, the air cooling, gnats on the make.
‘You are not, my darling girl, setting the best example of genial toleration.’
‘Yah!’
She did not put out her tongue, but her face rippled with pleasure, our laughter alarmed the bird and nudged us into a kiss.
Self-reproach for the Ulmanis persisted, notwithstanding, together with the awkwardness of downright refusal, an onus from which Nadja easily, too easily, absolved herself.
She was always cautious of signatures. They could trap like false witnesses, though this was an excuse likely to be considered invalid at the Villa. A bout of Rising Tide threatened, another glimpse of Claire, pleading for her brother in his need. The atmosphere of those German silent movies descended: dark streets, steeply slanted houses, haunted, distorted cemeteries, drab hotels sheltering the child-murderer and the pianist with artificial hands, personalities splitting like pines, mountains luring climbers to fatal embrace, trembling waxworks, the pale horse lying at distance from its head, the juicy young, stalked by hooded vampires moving like the deaf, all in cracked, faded blacks and whites, feeding my unassuagable hankering for ruins, damned tribes, the lost; for antique tapestries of doomed courtiers, the white, equivocal tower solitary above dark trees, for names and titles once sonorous, now mute in auctioneers’ catalogues, for renowned towns now submerged by the colossal and featureless. The Red Town, so eagerly reread in the Turret. Then the weird breath of la Terre Gaste and its invitation to love the unlovable. Once again, Danton, amid invective, blood, gristle, brooding over fields and rivers.
Oppressive meanderings, lying between me and Andrejs’s reproachful papers.
These remained unmentionable but inescapable, making days chancy. Nadja retreated to study, to write or to her piano, Haydn drifting towards me, reassuring, civilized, in a manner truthful, my misgivings finally liquefying to rhythms, then shapes, outside words.
One night I found her naked in my bed, at once was fierce then frantic with desire for her and for secrets skin-deep yet still closed. But, unusually, I failed, through very excess, quickening only after she departed, not wholly understanding but friendly, forbearing. Mischance was not catastrophe.
The Ulmanis’ documents would not wither away, but reprieve came. A note was delivered; the Latvians would be away for some days on a most serious matter. The wording conveyed a hint that the matter was due to our procrastination. ‘On our return, after signing, you will be posting, by hand only, the missives in sealed packet through our door.’
Nadja shrugged, retired to work. I strolled down to the Old Port, where Kanachen had been scrawled on the jetty, synonym for German resentment against Turkish immigrants. No Turks and fewer Germans remained here long. The word nagged, irritating me further.
August sky frayed, gloomed with spasmodic rain. Nights were chilly. Nadja was disturbed by a cracked mirror, more so than she admitted. In primitive belief, a shiny surface could kidnap the soul and, if broken entail worse.
Alarm followed. She was at the musée, and to retrieve a book I entered her room and, searching, touched something cold behind a row of Balzac. A small, delicate pocket gun. Though unloaded it startled me, like the bulge in the Herr General’s pocket.
Replacing it, I decided to say nothing. It added a facet to a personality liable to veer between extremes, the riddle of others. Those who, imagining themselves unseen, gravely bow to the moon, order their shoes to dance, attempt to drink their reflection in a pool.
With two wet days we prayed to Sainte-Andrée of Sudden Tears at least to spare us a tidal wave. Rain ceased, sunlight returned. We felt smug, though Nadja was first to resume normality. ‘I will…’ she announced, her good humour untrustworthy, ‘submit. I will sign those noxious papers. I have thought. Occasionally we require not reason but nonsense. At times, danger. Even Latvians, like rich Spaniards, need beggars. One beggar informed a hidalgo that he was so mean that he did not deserve beggars. I once heard a bus driver tell a man that he was ungenerous enough not even to spare a coin to see Paul of Tarsus piss on a duck. But, my dear,’ – she came close, fingered my hair – ‘we must keep watch. Whoever has suffered is never harmless. Today’s Latvians are Greeks who bear gifts.’