As the days went on more postcards came, from Rapallo, from Santa Margherita, from the five towns of the Cinque Terre, places I had never been to and had to imagine. I followed her progress along the Ligurian coast in a big old atlas that Franco Bartoli took down for me from a high shelf in that book-lined hallway of his. By now I had left the hotel and moved in with him and his Marna. It was a temporary arrangement, while I looked for somewhere permanent in which to set up my missing person bureau. Every afternoon Franco and I went together in his little car to the hospital on the city's industrial outskirts where Kristina Kovacs was undergoing a final, futile round of treatments. Most days we found her in a state of prostration and sleepy shock, like a survivor who has been pulled out of the rubble a week after an earthquake. Franco Bartoli was awkward in her presence, or perhaps it was only because I was there; he would sit on the metal hospital chair with his palms pressed between his knees, clearing his throat and stretching his neck up out of his too tight shirt-collar, or falling into protracted bouts of vacant staring from which he would emerge with a guilty start, casting a furtive glance at Kristina Kovacs and at me. He brought her flowers, they were a form of attempted propitiation, elaborate sprays of orchids and lilies and tuberoses that imparted an odour of the mortuary to the already faintly fetid air of the sick-room. Kristina had become touchingly dependent on him, asking him in a voice as thin as paper to do little services for her, to change the water in the vase on the window sill, to retrieve a dropped book, to ring for the nurse. The chemicals they were plying her with made her thirsty, and he would fill her water glass repeatedly and perch beside her on the bed and put an arm around her shoulders and help her to drink, and I would have to turn away and walk to the window and look out at the view of factories and shopping complexes smoking in the relentless summer heat. I brought Cass Cleave's postcards as they arrived, and Kristina had the nurses pin them on the wall beside her bed. Some days she would pass an entire visit lying motionless on her side, facing away from Franco and me, with a hand under her cheek, gazing steadily at these gaudy scenes of nude blue skies and silky seas. After we had left her Franco and I would go to a bar at the other side of an unrelievedly busy intersection, which we had to cross in zigzag fashion, perilously hurrying from one whimsical set of traffic lights to another. The bar was a nondescript place frequented by long-distance lorry drivers, solitary and haunted-eyed, and swarthy young thugs of uncertain provenance who passed the time playing the pinball machine in relentless, seething silence. As we sat there at the smeared metal counter, Franco with his coffee and me with my grappa, I would sense him trying to frame all the things that he wished to say, all the things that he felt he should be able to say, and failing every time; he was like the espresso machine behind the bar, a gleaming, big-bellied monster with countless knobs and gauges, that was forever building up a head of steam and never getting anywhere.
By the way, I do not know if it is a portent, or, if it is, what it might portend, but I have found Mama Vander's pill-box! It had slipped through a hole in the pocket of a jacket that I seldom wear and lodged in the lining. I am childishly delighted to have it back, and have been feeding it, at the rate of a tablet per visit, from Kristina Kovacs's store of pain-killers, against the day when I may need to kill my own pain, for good. Kristina will not go short: Dr. Zoroaster keeps her generously, not to say criminally, well supplied. It is he who tends her, now that she has left the hospital; they spend much time alone together, I hear them quietly talking, hour on hour, I do not know of what.
In my time at Bartoli's apartment his mother kept carefully out of my way. I felt a certain sympathy for her. It must have been distressing to be confronted anew each morning by this startling stranger, for I am certain that overnight, every night, monotonously as in a fairy-tale, the fact of my lodging there slipped through her hopelessly porous memory. Maria, the ancient cook, on the other hand, took a great shine to me, her colosso, and plied me coquettishly with all sorts of delicacies and sweetmeats, plates of pasta smothered in fresh truffles, and slices of panforte that threatened to pull out by the roots my few remaining molars, and tiny glasses of a metal-bright, thick, sweet liqueur with floating coffee beans and a wisp of ghostly blue flame trembling on the brim. She and Franco Bartoli between them had rigged up a makeshift study for me in a room at the back of the apartment looking on to the gloomy garden; here, as Franco indicated, in a tone of hushed reverence, I would be free to do my work without fear of interruption. That room became for him a hallowed place, a sanctum of intellectual sacrifice, a tabernacle of the real presence – he was, I discovered with some surprise, devoutly religious – consecrated here at the heart of his little domestic establishment. I would hear him creaking past the door on tiptoe, could almost feel him smiling in excited happiness and pride at his good fortune in having Vander the Great for a house guest. I had not known he held me in such high, such heroic, regard. No detractor ever ruffled the placid surface of my self-esteem, but an eager admirer can make me cringe for shame. I did not have the heart to tell poor Franco that my work, such as it was, had all been done, and there would be no more. Instead, I went each morning dutifully into that room, with the look of a man whose gaze is fixed unswervingly on immortality, and shut the door firmly behind me, and felt all outside it go still, waiting for the soundless roar of my mighty intellect starting up its engine. All a sham. For hours I would sit there, slumped in an uncomfortable antique chair, an elbow on the card table that served as a desk, my chin on my fist, gazing out at the place by the garden wall where Cass Cleave mat last day had stood up from her chair and taken my arm and walked me off across the parched and crackling grass and told me, so calmly, smiling, with eyes cast down, as though it were the simple answer to an unanswerably complicated question, that she was going to have a child, and that it would be mine.
How is it that men are always astonished by the phenomenon of conception? It might have been understandable in primitive times, when we believed it was the wind that got women with child, but what excuse is there for us in this jadedly over-informed age?True, in the course of a long life I had slept with many women without once, so far as I was informed, impregnating a single womb. What prankster god of fertility had decreed that at the very end I should be allowed to shoot one of his potent arrows straight to its secret and palpitant home? Who would have thought that my dry old seed could still sprout? What an embarrassment! How foolish I felt! And yet, how grateful, too. I saw at once, you see, the implications, the possibilities, what I shall call the saving grace, of this absurdly wonderful happening. Let me be clear; it was not I who would be saved. For once, perhaps really for the first time, it was others I was thinking of. Growing already inside this girl was the enfolded bud of what would be a world reclaimed. Out of the unimaginably complex coils in the hollow heart of the blastula I had set swelling in her belly there had already sprung the new beginnings of my people, my lost people. It was as simple as that. My gentle mother, my melancholy father, my siblings put to summary death before they had lived, all would find their tiny share in this new life. Oh, fond old man! How could I have thought this world would allow for such redemption?
The final postcard bore a brightly tinted picture of a church on a rock in the middle of an improbably berylline bay. She sent it in a package, along with her fountain pen, of all things. Dearest Svidrigailov - Iam going to America - Your Cassandra. She had posted it in the town of Chiavari three days previously. She must have calculated that it would take just that time, no more, no less, to reach me. I marvel at her faith in the reliability of this country's postal system, although it proved remarkably well founded, for it was a mere ten minutes later, as I was standing helplessly by the window in the garden room with the postcard in one hand and her pen in the other, trying to think what to do, that Franco Bartoli tapped at the door and put in his head warily and whispered that there was a person – una persona – on the telephone who wished to speak to me.