I sleep badly, dreaming of enraged faces, poisoned fireworks, fragmented appearance at a roofless courthouse, lawyers duelling with rolls of blotting paper, umpired by a judge almost submerged by an immense cocked hat.
Near dawn we are both fully wakened by an explosion, terrifyingly close. Nadja is at once with me and, still naked, vulnerable, we see, in scrappy light, smoke and flame swirling from the Villa, monstrous, volcanic.
By late morning only a few blackened walls remain. No bodies found, debris revealing little. Alain reports rumours. The Latvians had mishandled their own bomb; had already left for Cuba; had been invaded by the Matelots under cover of the Fête. With nervy frivolity I blame Mr Kaplan but, in the garden, see a court, perfectly roofed, myself in the dock, the jury returning, the judge leaning forward.
October. Mistral, vines stripped, olives harvested, winter ploughing begun. ‘Another gate of the year,’ Jules thought, or quoted.
The garden had aged, darkened, the damp lawns having their last cut. I headed dead roses and dahlias, wandered in tarnished light, urn, bench, moon-daisies misty; then retired into a novel by the Estonian Jaan Kross, though more aware of Alex’s story, made plausible by minutely observed details of a civil servant metamorphosed into a shed by a chatty, courteous stranger. An actual incident, in keeping with the present, soon forced me to close the book.
In Canada I entrained to lecture at a distant Estonian settlement where no planes went and, though substantiated by the travel agency, was ignored on maps. I shared a compartment with a slate-faced man, mute, scarcely moving throughout and of indeterminate age. When the train halted at a small empty station surrounded by waste, he stood up, pulling his hat lower, stepped out. Another man flitted from a doorway in similar hat, and together they paced the platform. The utter stillness of the train unpleasantly suggested that I was now the only passenger, until three others, in silky Italian suits, joined me, complaining in foreign English of the delay, as if unaware of me but watching the couple outside. Finally, my original companion returned, gazed without surprise but with some disdain at the newcomers, then gave me a smile, small but attractive, reassuring. While the others remained oblivious to us, the compartment uncomfortably crowded, he addressed me in fluent German. ‘To talk about it would destroy it.’ Nothing more, but making me certain that he knew my name and errand, knew also the other three. They were staring at their shoes as if at exceptional phenomena. The silence was gangsters’ truce.
The train, after the unexpected delay, was now speeding. The German, or apparent German, left us, a parcel remaining on his seat, though by his light manner of placing it I was certain that it was empty. The spell broken, the three conversed indifferently, about a snowstorm, a car accident, a hijack. At the next station, another with no community attached, they departed, superintending the removal, further down, of a large packing case. Movie addict, I at once suspected that the parcel on the empty seat would not be retrieved. Safe, I was yet icy with sweat. My journey continued without incident save that, on arrival, I found that I was not expected.
In the ramifications of mind this whiff of improbability, of significance or nothing, somehow connected with the explosion. The unlikely, the coincidental, the inexplicable, had throughout been part of life. Chance, tyche, correspondence to the rhythms, if not of existence, at least to my experience. Neatly contrived novels, perfect solutions, were as unreal as signed treaties, elaborate pledges, medals strewn across a ruler who had never seen battle. Never ceasing, were these flickers from the Underworld: hidden controls, ambiguous strangers, arson, chaos? An Estonian prince once hurled a new spear into the sky, and it fell, dripping with blood. War Office’s assurance, political manifestoes were worthless, history as much confusion as design. Fêtes end in dissolution, terrorists roam at will.
Above us, charred bricks, smashed tiles, splinters of furniture remained a gash on the hillside, though no more bizarre or unlucky than everyday happenings elsewhere. Charting a new Central African route, a jet plane had scared a tribe into lynching an elder, beating up women, inventing several unwholesome words. Storming a mansion, Boston police discovered two reclusive old ladies, dead, one of cancer, the other of starvation, their rooms heavy with Titians, Louis XV adornments, a parakeet wilting in a platinum cage, $40,000 in gold, notes, bonds, the telephone cut off through bill unpaid. A European Cup fracas erupted from a Dutch spectator throwing a grenade at the Czech goalkeeper, pleading he had merely wanted to hear a bang. At the Athens Peace Congress, Mr Spender held a press conference to which nobody came. At the UN Assembly, a philosopher, having attacked the West for arming Iraq, selling nuclear assets to its enemies, enhanced his reputation by explaining that, if you look closely, murderers are the same as us.
Eventually, the Latvians would be etherealized into saints or martyrs, joining Sainte-Adèle des Pommes, guardian of a sacred well. We tacitly agreed to cease discussing them. Latvians came, Latvians went; live or dead – no human traces had been found – their fate was a tremor in an over-heated summer.
Though free to resume, we were nevertheless altered. Garden quietude had been jolted; we closeted ourselves more with books and music, laughter in abeyance. Even news of the Transport Minister flattening his nose on a door failed to transport us.
Again, I pondered my life as I might a police summons. Very little to declare. Pahlen would not have exalted me. That on a Committee of Public Safety I would have risked demanding acquittal for a friend was as improbable as Daisy poisoning a swan. Mr Spender had accomplished more, attempting to heal the world by his poetry. O young men, he had pleaded, O young comrades. I had merely flirted with life, my journeys and publications ephemeral as blossom.
Nadja was barely communicable, investigating classical media: oracles, sybils, sages, cryptographers, couriers, the ‘Antikythera Computer’, apparatus of learning, secrecy, clairvoyance, fakery. I could add some material about procedures at Uppsala, and she was dismayed, even annoyed, when I had to tell her that a tale she had thought from Herodotus was in fact invented by Hans Andersen.
Frowns melted into apology. ‘Erich, sometimes I see myself as parasite. Plagiarist. Grubbing into others’ labours.’ She looked up, as if at a favourite doctor. ‘So much is like those Brahms records I have never unpacked. Symphonies, concertos, songs. Never played. But I clasp myself, knowing that I can. And here, with you…’
Such uncertainty was familiar enough, from overwork or reaction from over-stimulus, and my anxiety, sincere, was not alarm, despite shadows having deepened under her eyes. We were autumn people with sadness well tempered, though outsiders might see us as sterile and luckless.
Laboriously, she shook herself free. ‘I am sorry. Much really sorry. You have given me so much.’
‘I’ve given you something. More than the ashen and despairing. But you give me riches. Making the very best of riches is, of course, no idle dilemma. I’ve banked it, at very fair interest.’
I spoke lightly, but words could not altogether suffice. We must await tyche, random opportunity, for some climactic embrace, exquisite harmony, the final screen removed, following destruction, perhaps death.
Spontaneously, slightly awkward, we moved into the garden, and she regained self-possession, natural authority, elegant in dark mannish coat, mauve scarf, pale trousers, against the formal, dark-green hedge. Woody smells drifted, a last dragonfly was now red, now blue, in electric rapidity. The cat condescended to inspect my ankle.