One day the hotel manager stopped her by the fountain in the lobby and spoke to her, smiling broadly without warmth, holding his hands before his breast, the fingers splayed, like a singer in an opera. He asked her if Vander required the doctor to come again. She said no. He said the hotel was concerned. She noticed that, like the doctor's, his hair too was dyed; it looked as if it had been smeared all over with ink. At the lift she turned and he was still standing by the desk, watching her.
She liked the evenings best of all, when the daylight began to go and she could draw the curtains. Then they might be alone together in the world, not another soul existing. She would order dinner to be brought up, always something simple, an omelette or soup for him, pasta for herself. He demanded wine, of course, but she pretended not to hear, and then he swore at her. The old waiter from the first night did not appear again. She wondered if she might have imagined him; she had imagined others, often, figures who stepped out of her dreams and walked up and down in the world, real as real people. When the food was finished and she had put the tray on the floor outside in the corridor she would run a bath and lie in it for a long time. She felt so weary. The tepid water soothed her. She looked along the pallid length of herself; her skin had the dullish gleam of tarnished silver, and when she stirred, quick flashes ran along her flanks, like phosphorescence. She always left the bathroom door ajar, worrying that he would creep out of bed and get dressed and make his escape. What would she do without him? He was her vocation now.
She did not sleep. That is, she slept, but so lightly it hardly counted as sleep. She would lie beside him under the sheet, her eyes lightly closed, holding his hand if he would let her, and her mind would drift over all sorts of things, memories, imaginings, notions of the future, a possible future, with him. Sometimes she would dream, too, strange, delicate dreams such as she had never experienced before, if it could be said of dreams that they are experienced. At dawn she was always wide awake. Even though the light could not penetrate the heavy curtains she would know the sun had risen. Each night the wind died and in the morning started up again. It had a name, he told her, it was called the Fôhn, pronounced Fenn, blowing out of season. Everyone complained of it, the waiters, the chambermaid, throwing their eyes to heaven and making a clicking noise at the back of their throats. The chambermaid she had trouble with at first. She wanted to maintain the room herself, clean the bathroom and change the bed linen and even vacuum the floors, but the maid obviously thought this a scandalous idea, not to be countenanced, and there was a tussle between them every morning over the clean towels and the clean sheets. Then Vander said something to the maid in Italian, making a threat, or offering some inducement, and there were no more arguments after that. The woman was from the south. She was short and bandy and ageless, with skin so dark it had a greenish tinge. She smelled of dishwater. Now when Vander spoke to her, after the first time, she laughed at the things he said, and probably blushed, too, only her blushes could not be seen because she was so swarthy, and made little crowing sounds of delight, waggling her head, and sometimes even threw her hands in the air and ran out of the room, squealing. Then, when she had gone and they were left alone again, he would turn a spiteful look on her before lying down on his back like a corpse and closing his eyes and pulling the sheet to his chin.
In time, out of boredom, she supposed, he began to talk to her again. It was not conversation, of course, he was not interested in anything she might say. He told her things, scraps of reminiscence, gossip about dead scholars, old jokes, fanciful tales, sitting up in bed in an old grey cardigan, red-eyed and unshaven. He spoke about his dead wife. "Magda," he said, " Magdalena," looking into the past and frowning as if in puzzlement, shaking his head. "She was a standing affront to all the things I held cheap." He chuckled, waggling his eyebrows at her, inviting her to admire his wit. He had her go out and buy packs of cards, and they played together for hours. He taught her intricate, arcane games she had never heard of. She told him she loved him and he laughed at her and said not to be a fool, but she noticed how he looked away from her quickly, showing, like a startled horse, the whites of his eyes, the yellows, rather. She said her heart was his. "Heart?" he said, throwing back his head and baring his teeth in that way that he did. "Heart? If it could think, the heart would stop beating. A great writer whom you have not read wrote that. Do not talk to me of heart." That was his way, to laugh, and pretend to be outraged, and cite quotations. Her names for him were Harlequin, and sometimes Svidrigailov. He called her Cassandra. She said if she was Cassandra then he was Agamemnon. Gagamemnon, more like, he said, and did not smile, but scowled. "Today," he told her, "todav you will learn how to play piquet."
The ceaseless beating of the wind outside excited her. She felt suspended, weightless, airborne, almost. It was like being in a plane in those moments after the initial scramble into the sky when the machine is suddenly freed not only of the earth but of its own desperate effort of flight and for a minute or two pours in a sort of thrumming silence upwards smoothly through the air as if it were flying not of its own accord but had been thrown somehow. Once on a flight going somewhere she had sat beside a man, an engineer, who knew about these things, and when she said she could never understand how the engines stayed on the plane he said what was more remarkable was that the plane could hold on to the engines. She saw straight away what he meant. That was how it was with her, she was the plane and her mind was the jet engines trying to speed away from it. She was barely held together. The slightest jolt might make her fly apart into a million pieces. Everything was like that, the particles all fused together and trying to pull asunder. One instant of imbalance, one dip in the equilibrium, and it would all explode. Yes yes, the voices said eagerly, explode, all explode…
He did not die. At the end of a fortnight he was strong enough to get up and sit by the open window in the sun. Now he was ignoring her again. He grew restless, and paced the floor, his dead leg dragging. One day when she was out of the room for only a minute he managed to bribe the chambermaid to bring him a bottle of whisky. When she tried to take it from him he swung a fist at her, his soiled eyes glaring. But he did not drink the whisky, and he did not die.
As he got better she got worse. All the voices came back, joining all together, jostling to get at her. They said he was wicked, that he would harm her, kill her, even. At night now she fell into a kind of coma in which she could not move her limbs although her mind kept on, tumbling over and over like an electric motor gone out of control. The chambermaid told her that the Holy Shroud was to be put on public display, people from all over the world had come to the city for this rare and momentous occasion. By now Vander was well enough to go out, and she asked him if he would take her to see it. She told him how the Shroud was kept in a silver casket within an iron box inside a marble case in a black marble chapel. It had been taken to France by St. Veronica herself, who had fled the Holy Land after the Crucifixion along with Mary the Mother of God and sailed in a ship along the Mediterranean first to Cyprus and then to the coast of France and settled at last in the Languedoc. Cathars. The Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Freemasons. The Duc d'Orléans, heir in waiting to the French throne. She had studied it all, she had made discoveries, she knew secrets. He mocked her, and said the Shroud was a fake; he said he knew about fakes. Did she really think it was the image of the crucified Christ? But he got up and got dressed. He said he felt dizzy. He said that he would probably fall over in the street, and she would have to drag him by the heels back to the hotel. He described her going along with her head down, clutching his legs like the shafts of a cart, and him behind her on the ground, his arms thrown back in the shape of aV and his jacket and his shirt pulled up and his head bumping on the pavement. He laughed, and lit a cigarette, and coughed. When they came outside, that hot wind was blowing again, making their lips dry and coating their eyelids with a fine film of grit. The city looked unreal, sprawled in the turbulent heat under acid sunlight. They walked in a murk of underwater shadow along the polished marble pavements of the Via Roma, under the tall arcades. She linked her arm tightly in his and wondered if he could feel her trembling. Crowds of people were milling in the dusty piazzas, criss-crossing back and forth about them, blank of expression or frowning vaguely, as if in the aftermath of some tremendous but impalpable event. At first they all seemed to be wandering aimlessly, but then it came to her that there must be a pattern to so much movement, and she saw it as if from above, far above, the myriad lines of people merging and melting and forming again, the design at every point shifting and yet always remaining the same, the immense complex of individuals flowing into and through itself under the guidance of secret, immutable laws, and she at the centre of it all, its unwilling, moving focus. When they entered the Duomo, Vander sat down on a bench to rest, and his stick fell to the floor with an exaggerated clatter. A blue-jawed priest was hearing confessions, sitting in full view in his open box in an attitude of angry dejection, his head inclined to catch the urgent murmurings of an old woman kneeling at his right knee. The Chapel of the Holy Shroud was shut. Why was it shut? She could not understand it. Had the maid lied to her? She hurried agitatedly here and there, asking tourists with their cameras if they knew why the chapel was shut. She could feel Vander watching her, his grin. The tourists stared at her and moved on, uneasily ignoring her pleading questions. She confronted the confessor in his box. He frowned, and spoke a sentence brusquely in a hoarse, angry whisper. She went and crouched beside Vander and squeezed his hand in hers. "It is being shown somewhere else," she said, and gnawed on a thumbnail, looking up at him.