Landscape of Farewell Read online

  ‘Urgent?’ she queried me doubtfully. ‘And it’s Vita. Never mind the professor.’ She frowned at me, distrustful. ‘What is it then, a deadline?’

  ‘Well, yes, that is exactly what it is.’ It is strange how often our language inveigles us into pronouncing the literal truth when our intention is to deceive.

  ‘You’re not being very convincing. It’s your wife, isn’t it?’ With a sudden outburst of exasperation—and once again she seemed to interrogate not me but the world at large—she said, ‘Why has every man I ever meet got a wife waiting at home for him?’

  I said, ‘My wife is dead.’

  She closed her eyes. ‘Oh God!’ She opened her eyes and looked at me beseechingly. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m truly sorry. I’ve done it again. Please forgive me. I go charging in. I tell myself, Don’t do it, Vita! Then I do it. I’m always bullying people before I know half their story.’ She pressed my arm to her side and asked with gentle concern, ‘Will you please forgive me? Can I ask you how long it has been?’

  ‘A few months only.’

  ‘You poor man. You must miss her terribly.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ I thought I might weep.

  ‘Please tell me you forgive me, or I shall have to kill myself.’ She was at once playful again; the pretty child twisting her beloved daddy’s feelings around her little finger. I found it impossible to resist gazing into the inviting ocean of Vita McLelland’s generous dark eyes—deep pools of emotion, they were, in which thoughts and ideas and uncertainties flashed and darted about in excited shoals. Such abundance, so long absent from my own interior life, mesmerised me. I hoped she would not notice how distracted I was by her.

  ‘There is nothing for me to forgive,’ I said. ‘How could you have known?’

  The assured familiarity with which she held my arm throughout this exchange was a strangely compelling comfort to me, and I hoped she would not soon let me go. She might have laid claim to me. Although she was so much younger than I, there was something motherly and protective in the way she held me. I sensed an almost familial appeal in this direct, unabashed intimacy; a need to offer comfort where comfort was needed. Or perhaps she appealed for my understanding, for my protection, for my friendship? I was not sure. Was she lonely? Not without a circle of friends and intimates, I mean, but deeply lonely, a solitary who would cling to a stranger briefly, a sudden flare of recognition and companionship, then emptiness, nothing, the awful dragging void of melancholy. Could a visionary such as she—a leader, no doubt, among her people—ever be other than alone? Were not such fierce people always alone? Perhaps it was only what I wanted to believe of her.

  ‘Now you’ve said sorry to me and I’ve said sorry to you,’ she said. ‘Hey, Max! Come on!’ She let go of me and flung open her arms so that her clothes bloomed suddenly about her. ‘You and I have got to get past this stage of trying to out-apologise each other.’

  We both laughed.

  ‘There, we’re even now,’ she said and she tucked my arm against her side again—where she and I evidently felt it was most right for it to be. ‘I’ll buy you a drink. And don’t tell me you haven’t got time for just the one before your appointment. Be late for once.’ She stood still and examined me. ‘I’ve never struck one like you. You old blokes defend your work viciously to the last breath in your bodies. You never, never say sorry. Hey, folks, I got it wrong. I’m sorry. No. Never that. I’ve never heard it. You’re a rare bird, Max. What do people around here think of you? I’ll bet you’ve got a few of them puzzled. You’re not getting rid of me until we’ve had a tête-à-tête.’

  She adjusted my arm against her side and we set off down the street. She was more sedate now in her pace, more certain, I suppose, that she had secured a companion for the next hour or two. ‘So where’s the pub?’ she said. ‘Point me at it.’

  By the way, I am not making any of this up. It all happened to me only a little over a year ago, just as I am reporting it here. I loathe books that are made up, as if life is not enough.

  We were sitting across from each other at a table in the recess of a window, the remains of our meal still on the table. I had never been inside the bar but had often passed it on my way to the railway station. Vita was talking, the long slender fingers of her left hand played with her glass—her wedding hand, she said, without a ring, holding it up, ‘See?’ And she smiled her vulnerable, sad smile, not the fierce smile of the warrior princess. Though her hand had once carried the precious ornament for a little while, she said. I watched her. She had lovely hands. She played with her glass, her head on one side, considering—what? Her voice was loud and penetrating at first, and the young man who had brought our meal had looked across at her and listened, and she had given him to understand that she knew he was listening to her and that she did not care. As the bar filled up with drinkers her voice drew back and became softer and more private.

  I noticed, suddenly, that my wineglass was empty again. The last time I had looked it had been full. I wondered, for an instant, who could have emptied it. Beyond the window, outside in the street, it was already dark. The bar was crowded now with young people and was noisy with their laughter and shouting. Beneath the clamour of their voices their tribal music maintained a steady beat. I had stopped trying to follow what Vita was saying some time ago and was attending to the throbbing of the music, which to my surprise I found calming and conducive to a kind of inner and solitary melancholy. I should have been dead by now, or at least drifting towards that state on the irresistible currents of an ever-deepening stupor.

  The steady throb of the music was precisely the sound of my uncle’s old single-cylinder tractor. An enormous green monster, it was—I wonder why my monsters are always green? It is a cliché of my generation, I suppose, to paint our fears green, whereas nowadays it is hope that greens the world. The monster was mounted on iron wheels. As a child I had more than half-believed it to be an ancient man who had been transformed into a giant machine by my uncle, who I knew to be in possession of unearthly powers. From the open window of my upstairs bedroom in the farmhouse, I listened to the tractor all day, spellbound by the drumbeat of its great heart, the tremorous thud of its powerful pump vibrating the fabric of the house, sounding in my own heart images of a distant enchanted reality. I could see it, that enchanted place: there were dark woods fringed by wide deserts, the faintly apprehended party of mounted figures in the distance, going I knew not whither, to what terrible destination beyond the far horizon no living man could know. Indeed the anguished heartbeat of the ancient man imprisoned within the iron machine inspired my first true daydream of another life. It was a life, this imaginary one, that I knew I would never quite reach or master, but it was ever thereafter the emblem of my inner yearning. Though outwardly I have changed quite beyond recognition from my boyhood self, inwardly little has changed. I still see that mysterious band of horsemen—if that is what they are—who ride together in silent company towards the end of time.

  I was filled with anxiety and excitement when my uncle started the tractor in the yard in the frosty morning, exploding with a confident blow of his hammer a shotgun cartridge in the small cylinder embedded within the blunt nose of the tractor—the casing of this cartridge was always a hopeful blue, instead of the blood red of the shells with which he shot the crows and foxes. That confident hammer blow convinced me he was a great demon in his own world. The violence of the explosion in the silence of the winter morning made me flinch and woke the ancient man from the cold night of his sleep, his deep throbbing groan shuddering in my own chest as he bent his iron frame to the labour of his enslavement. During the long winter months of that year, alone with my uncle on the farm and without the reassuring presence of my mother and father, I inhabited a place of beguiling strangeness. The cold metallic smell of the ploughed earth opened by the sleek plough was for me like the opened belly of a dead horse I had come upon one day when I was walking home, the massive innards scattered about the great carcass by the crows, as t
hough for modesty’s sake a passer-by had thrown over it a bright patchwork shawl.

  There had been scarcely a pause in Vita’s flow of words since we left the library—marching arm in arm beneath the chestnut trees along pompous Heilwigstrasse. She had been telling me her troubles, which were many and complex, involving either members of her family or colleagues at her university, or her repeated failure to attract the right man.

  I saw she was a little drunk. I was a little drunk myself. I did not mind at all.

  She reached across the table and punched me on the arm. ‘Hey, Max! I’ve forgotten what I was going to say!’

  I lifted my shoulders and smiled. ‘Then say something else.’

  She frowned, concentrating. ‘What was I talking about?’

  ‘You were telling me about your Uncle Dougald.’

  ‘You and Uncle Dougald would get on.’

  I imagined a tall, broad-shouldered, square-jawed Scot, McLelland of McLelland, weather-beaten and fierce, a true colonial pioneer, axe at rest on the stump of the great gum tree he has just felled, frowning belligerently at the intrusion of the camera, behind him his half-built shack, a scene located somewhere in the timbered wilds of Australia, a woman and a child looking on, helpless if this man’s arm should falter. It was an image not from my own mind this, but drawn from my old storybooks of the New World.

  Behind Vita, beyond the window, the rain glistened on the iron railings and the headlights of cars passed along the street. ‘You’re young to be a professor,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll be forty-one at Christmas.’

  I was surprised. ‘I thought you were about twenty-seven.’

  ‘I’m immature, I know. Tell me about it!’

  I began at once to see her differently.

  ‘Don’t stare,’ she said. ‘It’s rude.’

  I apologised. She laughed and punched my arm again, a little harder this time. Perhaps she wished to wake me from old age. I had not sat in a bar with a companion for many years. Not since I was a student. Winifred and I had never sat in a bar together. I believed, however, that Winifred would not have objected had she been able to see me drinking with Vita in this bar next to the Kellinghusenstrasse railway station, whose arcades are, at night, a favourite beat for the sad-eyed young women who dedicate their tender lives to prostitution. The thought of the young girls, the sight of their sad-eyed countenances, always made me think of our little Katya. Those tragic young women. Lost to life. Where were their mothers and fathers? Why did they not come and take their little girls home? I could not remember if I had told Vita about our daughter.

  ‘Have I told you about Katya?’ I said. My glass, I noticed, was full again. I reached for it and drank the dark red wine—it had the taste of aluminium.

  At my question, she looked around the bar with sudden interest. ‘This place is jumping,’ she said. She looked at me. ‘Katya? She’s your daughter? What a beautiful name for a little girl.’ She said this as if she referred to a girl known only to herself, an imaginary girl who lived somewhere far away.

  ‘Yes. She has changed her name to Katriona and has become English.’

  She waved a hand at me. ‘So don’t tell me, I already know, she’s happily married. To a brain surgeon.’

  ‘She is married to a teacher. They have two children.’

  ‘So let’s go and see your grandchildren.’

  ‘Katya lives in London.’

  ‘Is she happy?’ she asked in a bored voice.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You should call her Katriona. That’s who she wants to be. Me? I’m ready and waiting for the first big black Murri prince who comes along and tries his luck.’ She examined me, a look of faint irritation in her eyes suddenly. ‘You haven’t said a word about yourself all night. You don’t know if your own daughter is happy or not. That’s all I know about you. You should go over there and spend time with your grandchildren. They won’t know their grandad and one day soon they’ll want to know why. Family is family, Max.’

  ‘I think it’s quite late,’ I said. I consulted my watch.

  She looked startled. ‘Hey, don’t you go abandoning me. Jesus, Max! Don’t you even think of it!’

  I was shocked by her fear of being abandoned by me late at night on the streets of Hamburg. ‘Of course I shan’t abandon you. How could you think such a thing? I shall see you to your hotel. This is my city, Vita.’

  She pouted, like a child who has been chastised. Then she brightened, a mischievous look coming into her enormous dark eyes. ‘You’re pissed, Max.’ She laughed. ‘And, hey!’ She pointed a finger at me as if she had achieved an important advantage. ‘I made you miss your appointment! I bet they gave you up for dead hours ago.’

  ‘I had no appointment,’ I said.

  ‘You lied? You bastard!’ She cursed me mildly and with amused surprise, as if she were delighted to discover me capable of such paltry deceit. She sniggered, ‘You didn’t want to be seen walking down the street with a black lady on your arm.’

  ‘That is not true, Vita,’ I said seriously. I was acutely sensitive to the offence of her suggestion, even though she made the charge playfully.

  But she was not listening to me. She cast about her as if she had mislaid something, fidgeting and nervous suddenly, reaching for her coat, searching in her bag then snapping it closed, gathering the loose folds of her elaborate clothing about her; readying herself for flight. She looked up at me, her gaze distracted. ‘So what are we going to do? They’re closing this place.’

  It was true. The young man who had been serving us was collecting glasses and wishing his customers goodnight. Vita watched me. She was no longer the haughty black princess of the barbarous new order, but was just another lonely woman in a bar with a stranger at closing time.

  I heard myself say, ‘I have a bottle of whisky at home.’

  3

  Tête-à-tête

  I closed the door to the apartment softly behind us and switched on the hall light. What would the publisher’s unhappy wife, the poet Lydia Erkenbrecht, lying awake in her lonely bed, make of this tête-à-tête that is taking place in the apartment above her head? So he is going to behave just as he pleases now, and she only a month or two in her grave. The mother of the little birds, into whose defenceless ears she murmurs her bitter discontents.

  I followed Vita along the hall and into the sitting room. She walked across the rug and stood admiring Winifred’s Biedermeier cabinet. It was our only antique piece and had belonged to Winifred’s grandmother. I stood by the hall door watching Vita trail her fingers over the polished surface of the cabinet. The intricate marquetry and honey-coloured wood of the old piece had been the symbolic spiritual reliquary of Winifred’s ancestral home.

  Vita turned and looked back at me. ‘How beautiful this is,’ she said, not sharing her wonder with me, but thinking of something remote and private. She turned back to the cabinet and touched it again. ‘It’s from another world.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, responding to the fiction that it was me she had addressed. ‘You are right. It is all that is left of the elaborate furnishings of a once-grand Viennese household.’ The household, indeed, of which Winifred had secretly dreamed herself the exemplary big-bosomed, broad-hipped chatelaine, a place she had never visited but had heard about from her own mother. It was her legendary house of the ancestors, and had been destroyed during the war, like so much else ancestral—but for the miraculous survival of this cabinet, which had come down to her unscratched, as if it were a sign to her direct from her grandmother’s Vienna. The precious piece had been Winifred’s link to all that mattered to her in her past, all that she had believed to have once been good and decent—her nostalgia for an innocent ancestral past that had never really existed. I said, ‘Your admiration would have pleased Winifred. That cabinet meant a lot to my wife.’

  She let her hand fall to her side and murmured something, losing interest. She turned and walked the few paces to the couch under the window and
dropped heavily onto it. She arranged herself where I had been sitting reading on the evening Winifred was struck down. A tremor passed through me to see her seated there.

  She considered me, frowning. ‘What?’ she asked irritably.

  She was pouting, and looked incredibly young suddenly, a discontented teenager. She is achingly tired, I thought, and is wishing she had not agreed to come here but had got into a taxi outside the bar and said her farewells and gone straight back to her hotel. Her stream of words and goodwill had failed her. I thought of offering to call her a taxi, but hesitated to do so. If she accepted my offer, the moment I waved her goodbye I would be alone with my bottle of whisky and my pills, and I would have to decide whether to go through with my planned suicide. I did not want to be alone in the apartment confronting that question. The thought of it frightened me. I wondered how I might convince Vita to stay the night. I said, ‘Would you like to see the rest of the apartment? My study is rather fine.’

  She closed her eyes and shook her head slowly from side to side, as if the idea of it made her feel ill.

  ‘I’ll get the whisky then,’ I said. I knew, suddenly, that I was not going to kill myself. It was not even an issue. I felt relief and disappointment in almost equal measure at this realisation. I was confronting once again the man I might have been and the man I really was. There was to be no heroic order of absolution. I should have known it. Winifred would have understood my suicide, and might even have admired me for it. But this retreat with a young woman she would not admire.

  When I came out of the bedroom with the bottle of whisky Vita still had her eyes closed and was even more deeply scrunched into the corner of the couch, her legs folded under her. She was hugging a cushion to her breasts, as if she was in need of warmth, or was shielding herself. She might have been waiting for someone for hours and they had not turned up and she had given up hope of seeing them ever again but could not rouse herself sufficiently to get up and leave. I touched her shoulder and she opened her eyes and glared at me. She released the cushion with one hand and took the glass of whisky from me. She sipped the neat liquor, making a face and watching me narrowly, clutching the glass close to her chin.