‘You are the one who broke Abel,’ Luluwa said in her high, sing-song voice.
‘Yes,’ said Ghertrude.
Luluwa raised her polished head; her eyes swivelled between their brown surface scars, looking for the question that Ghertrude’s observation had not yet formulated.
‘I hear the child,’ Luluwa said. ‘I hear the squalling of the movement; the child sucks at your interior, and thrashes with its limbs.’
Ghertrude suddenly understood why she had not recoiled from Luluwa instantly, why she had not been immediately shocked to see her. Two eyes of cunning observation now adorned her face, surrounded by scars, as if the sockets and lids had been smeared with a hot knife. Her features had been altered with an amateur technology that had misunderstood the perfection of both the new and the original materiaclass="underline" it was a botched and graceless job at rendering her more human.
‘We will be your servants now,’ said Luluwa. ‘I and the remaining Kin will be teachers to the child.’
Ghertrude was running out of emotions, or at least the connective tissue that made sense of them.
‘I did not mean to kill him,’ she said.
Luluwa bobbed her head in understanding. ‘Life is not durable. There is no blame.’ She got to her feet, then looked again at Ghertrude. ‘You did not know that the camera tower is aligned over the well?’
To emphasise the point, she walked over to Ghertrude and placed one hand on her abdomen and the other above her head, where a halo might float. She made a small rotating movement; Ghertrude could smell the hum of Luluwa’s Bakelite. She realised that they were the same height. Luluwa had grown and stood looking at her, shoulder to shoulder and eye to eye.
EPILOGUE
The book was a present
Best to throw it away, to the bottom
Of the sea where ingenious fish may read it
Or not.
John Ashbery, A Snowball in Hell
Belgium, 1961
The streets are livid with bright cars; they seem to run at the same speed as their horns. The sunburnt boulevard is engorged with primary colours.
The American looks at his map once again. Brussels seems to be based on an irrational grid. Eventually, he locates the cul-de-sac, snatches up his briefcase and strides on, past clipped gardens that are manicured to retentive perfection.
As he walks on, the buildings become older and more dishevelled. He arrives at the entrance of the public nursing home, enters and is met by the universal smell of old age, an indelicate ambience of urine and sour cooking; here in central Europe, it is tinged with perfume and garlic. He talks to the staff in a remote French from his high school. Most of them are peasants, or foreigners with accents weirder than his. He claims good, proper French, taught to him and his classmates by a tutor from Montreal.
A Moroccan woman in a stained, threadbare uniform of blue and white takes him through the old house, which has been embalmed in magnolia and disinfectant. They climb two tasteless flights of stairs. The American is nervous and keeps pushing his spectacles back onto the bridge of his nose. He had imagined this meeting for months, but had only arranged it by letter in the last few weeks; now, it is becoming real. Suddenly, his guide stops in front of him, and he finds himself in a large room full of seated women.
‘Madame Dufrene, your visitor is here.’
All the old women look around. He panics: he has no idea what she looks like. Then a hand waves from a seat by the window.
The once grand room has crumbled into institutional decay. He carefully crosses it, avoiding the damp patches and dropped objects that redesign an exhausted carpet. She is frailer than he expected, double-wrapped in a heavy shawl as the sun floods the streets outside.
‘Madame Dufrene, good morning! Please allow me to introduce myself,’ he begins.
Charlotte listens and smiles kindly at the incorrect precision of his French. He pretends to make an effort to engage in polite conversation, but soon tires of the charade and pounces on his only interest. For the next hour, he asks endless questions about the Frenchman. Most of what he says is incomprehensible to her. She grows weary of the strain it takes to understand him, becoming more and more uncertain about what it is that he actually wants.
‘May we talk a little about the last days in Palermo?’
She is aware that he does not see her, does not look in her eyes. He is so appalled by her fall from grace that he cannot bear to acknowledge her tired gaze. He buries himself in the questions and pushes on relentlessly.
‘Is it true that he could not sleep in his bed, that he had a fear of falling from it? Is that why he was on the floor next to your door when they found him?’
She thinks of the genius of the man and knows it is not what this large, lumpy American wants. For her, his brilliance was not in his books or his words, but in the moments when he became a unique, infused, individual human being, doing what he loved most. She thought of him sitting at the piano, playing, improvising voices. He could mimic everything from the trams squealing outside to exotic animals, from opera divas to common street singers. It made them both laugh, in that time when he still could.
‘Do you have any pictures of your time together?’
She expected this and pulls a large, crumpled manila envelope out from under her shawl. She digs into it and, after a few moments, produces a dog-eared photograph. They are posed like a married couple: she seated, him standing behind her chair; her kindness radiates, even lending beauty to her startling hat, which resembles the neck of a dead, inverted swan. The American is mesmerised: this is the best image of his literary hero he has ever seen. It shows a taut, immaculate man of precise, if diminutive, proportions.
‘This is wonderful, truly wonderful!’
She sees the excitement light up something else in her guest, and there is a flicker of likeness; he has a taint of the same erratic, self-possessed dynamism. This stranger has been her only male visitor, and he bears a trace of the man he so admires. She warms towards him and relaxes. He listens as she begins to unwrap an explanation of what their relationship truly was. It has become quiet in the room; even the incessant coughing has stopped. The ladies subtly strain to catch the details.
As he is about to leave, he remembers the gift he has brought her and rummages about in his briefcase. He presents her with the chocolates and asks if they can meet again. She is delighted and says nothing would please her more.
They meet four times more; on the last occasion, he visits her in her own room in the elegant, private nursing home that houses her final days in a peaceful dignity.
He had worked hard ever since he had first left her in the crumbling decay. He had instigated the move, and surrealism had paid for it. He had contacted everybody who had dreamed in its crooked path or published and promoted its flamboyant imagery, and had collected enough wealth to change her last few years. Now she shone in her reflective surroundings. She beamed at him when he arrived and showed him around the room, pointing out her prized possessions, which had been locked away in storage for the last nine years. She wanted to tell him everything, but there was so little detail that he really wanted to know, and she had already forgotten so much. Only the joy and spite remained embedded over the years; the rest had fallen away. Nevertheless, they talked for hours. She enjoyed the company of the soft, shapeless man, and did not welcome his final departure; he started to rummage in the briefcase and she knew he had already left.