whispered lineage

 

I.

 

The sea was stark, grey, scattered with light rain: the spring, in mid-April, still refused to come, though days of light sun in the previous week had seemed to promise its arrival. A few people, isolated, dwarfed by the steel sky above the Adriatic, hovered in the turreted fastness of the castle – the sign on the path had told him it was that day closed to the public, so they were perhaps privileged visitors, a last remaining royalty of old Europe returning to the ancestral home for a final, definitive farewell, before they went away, forever, to America, to Brazil, or the new expatriate colonies in the far southern lands.

     His arrival there was fortuitous: the booked-out buses and trains back up to the north delayed him in Italy a week or more, and the only immediately available accommodation he could find was in an otherwise deserted caravan-park by the sea. His caravan was unheated, and at nights he would keep warm with a burning gas-stove and quantities of the local wine, which he drank from a chipped ceramic cup.

     On the first day in the caravan-park toilets he had seen graffiti on the cubicle walls: racist slurs against Asians and Africans, ill-drawn swastikas, dull and rudimentary affirmations of a barely-conscious prejudice. They were in the majority – and then, in response, assuring the crabbed racists in their hope that the Leader might return to finish the job he had left undone, that he had indeed returned, there were strange, childlike words in a heavier handwriting. Their writer had trouble with the Lord, and had come in the guise of another man, but would nevertheless take care of those spiritual bastards, as well – the phrase seemed ill-chosen, tautological – that the Leader had engendered in the previous War: those sons of ideology after his own obsession for absolute purity. The writer had added (he assumed, in the male toilet, it was a he), that he would in fact wipe the slate clean of all the bastards, in their entirety. It was signed-off: A Black Man Was Here – the writing was slightly removed, it was unclear if the same man was the author of the biblical jeremiad of the graffiti, or someone else who wanted to append his own agreement to it, and so give it a racial identity it might not originally have had.

     He had squatted in the cubicle – it was an Indian-style ceramic basin set in the floor – and had studied the curious, but somehow telling, inconsistency of the text: if the Leader had symbolically sired a new generation of `spiritual´ heirs, what, for the writer, made them `spiritual´ at all? How could they, in their a-materialism, be guilty of the abhorrent, tedious, hackneyed and sheerly mindless sentiment of the graffiti? Could racism appeal to a sanction of spiritual value? Does the desire for purity hold a kind of elevated status above that of mere, commonplace tolerance?

     As in India, there was no toilet-paper in the cubicle – in any of the dozens of them – and he was forced, as he thought of these questions, to wipe himself with the fingers of his free hand. It was not a difficult thing to do, he had travelled in many of the poor, dirty countries, had learnt a new, simpler hygiene. There was even something apposite about the wet mess on his fingers, pure in its dirtiness, as he surveyed, again, critically, intriguingly, the moral ambiguity of the argument essayed on the cubicle-wall: that an evil force of the past could be responsible for a new generation of spiritual progeny, even claimed as such (or at least so it appeared) by one of those whose colour alone might have branded him in the earlier War one of its absolute victims. Did the anonymous Black Man have another, cruel understanding of the word? What did it mean to him to be – spiritual?

     He had flushed the cistern a couple of times and washed his soiled fingers under the brief burst of cold water – there was no soap in the dispenser, so that later as he walked across the empty camping-sites of the park he had smelt his fingers and caught the mild, woody, organic odour of them. It was a reasonable sensation, not offensive, it asserted a humble humanity. It was not spiritual, not in the clean, pure way that the Black Man had perhaps intended his use of the word to mean.

      There were a number of Italians drinking wine in a white, canvas tent-restaurant not far from the amenities building, though it was not long past mid-morning. They spoke in a dialect Italian with a hard rolled-r, borrowed it would seem from their Slavic neighbours to the east, across the border, only a few kilometres away. It was a strange, hybrid place, with the ugly graffiti, the empty rows of spaces for caravans, the old royalty in the turrets of the castle nearby, the nameless Black Man, and himself, wandering inside it – the most alien, perhaps, of all of them.

     In the quiet of the following days, he had waited for the others to come by to see him. He wasn’t sure who they were – he had been told they were locally important, dignitaries of the region who came to give notice of the latest developments. Hostages were being held in the city on the far side of the water, an international task-force had been sent to extricate them from the worst danger. That is all he knew, but it didn’t explain the possible reasons behind the crisis. He tuned into the national news-services – a TV had been conveniently left in his caravan – but every day there was little change, and his broken Italian pieced together bits which wouldn`t come together. On top of that everyone who was able to access it appeared to receive the news in different, garbled versions, so that dozens of stories – distinct yet curiously related like cousins bearing a suspect resemblance – came to circulate and build up a picture that agreed only in general outline but not in its particulars. He learnt the most from the scattered, spontaneous, usually brief conversations with the people he would meet in the white canvas tent in the afternoons, when he went to drink the local wine. There was a good-natured character there, who always handed him his change very slowly, as if counting each coin, from enormous white hands, while he spoke garrulously, warmly, but in barely-comprehensible language. They always parted in great solidarity, with laughter and large smiles, though it was clear neither were very sure at all of what the other had said.

     The other news he gathered in the park, after a few days alone there, was that a girl had been seen – from a distance, naked on the beach, hanging up her clothes in the boughs of the trees and playing like a child at the first, tame breaking of the waves on the shore of the small fishing-bay. Late one afternoon he saw her there too, dark and heavy-featured, retreating from the waves and running back to the gritty sand, that was mainly crushed shells, the heavy parts of her body bobbing in the open, cold air. Of the locals there were some who approached her directly, and asked her to respectfully leave, others who remained at a distance and contemplated coaxing her into art – they would like to paint her, catch her in the frame of Hi-8 video or their new digital camera-lens. One man, a sullen loner who lived a little removed from the main business of the seaside colony, would make a dogged ritual of laying newspaper on the sand, like a red carpet, to meet her in the broad, grey expanse of pebbled beach – the newspaper that described in abbreviated language the aftermath of the previous year´s, not-so-dramatic war, that had in its far-distant place died down now to a muffled murmur of discontent. No-one suspected that if the girl were to see the newsprint, and decipher its language, she might collapse dead, or at the least into a dire faint. The possibility wouldn´t have occurred to them.

      Though he watched the girl on the beach and her sullen suitor for some time, he left before she was reached in her seclusion and a proposal made. The presence of the girl was for him not something related to the arrival of the local dignitaries, but she appeared in his mind as an enchanted, even fictional, partner to them – like the unreal moon to the sun, the waves to the shore, the nightly dreams of the Italian and neighbouring visitors to their hard labour of drinking during the day. Because a life was trying to be built here, for him – an autonomous and free existence, independent of the obsolete, repeatedly strife-torn one of the immediately preceding period. When he had left her there, in the city, he had to be wholly, entirely alone: there could be no repetition of the year before, or the time before then. This time it was purely himself and the sea, and the castle solitude not far away, at the other end of the brittle stone path.

“You´re not worth the patience anway,“ she had said when he finally packed to leave.

     Though that is what he would have hoped she might say, and he already knew her goodness would not allow her that force of indifference: the same pallid submission to his will was what demanded his solitude now.

“You can go if that is what you´d like to do,“ she had said, in the event. “Just let me know when.“

     He had caught the local bus to the train-station, and travelled as far south as possible in a single day. He already knew he would not return to her, not so soon. There was still the castle, and the sea, the grappling with the thing still to be undertaken.

     There was nothing left of the old situation that he had brought to resurrect in the new, except the certainty of change. During the train-transfer he had even been robbed, cash and address-book pocketed out of his belongings, so that had he wanted to he wouldn’t be able to contact any of the old friends. The appearance of the dignitaries – proof of the novel place he had strayed into – would only be a kind of confirmation for him, a sanctioning of the rightness of his arrival there, his intention to set a new seal on the future. It was clear to him that what would happen there would be something to last for the duration. The miscarriages and failings of an older time were gone for good – what happened now had the taste of pure inevitability about it, as if it could be no different. He never considered the possibility that he could, simply, be wrong. That kismet had an entirely other story ready and waiting to enact there. Nothing could be further from his mind than the idea that the life he expected to have from thereon would be one that would never happen.

    At the end of the first week during the Easter season, he had ventured into the town to participate in, to try to offer his own gesture to, the holy celebrations. He saw identifiable things, and strangers. A dull, high church, to his eye Masonic and full of misgivings and failed religious promises, late-comers who straggled in, couples broken from their clinch, old folk who now saw little difference between the market and the nave – what was being sold here, what could they expect from the endless transaction of souls under its high, leaden, vaulted arches? Eighty, ninety years – how many passed now, for them, between twilight and the dawn? They had come in twos and threes, hand-bag clutched, old black shoes on the flagstones, the grit of age in their eyes. The others, the ones in uniform, didn’t even look – walked right in and sat down wherever there was still space. Everyone there looked ahead to where the nun and her priest, both in full habit – habits of what? what kind of persistence of hope put them in stiff, starchy clothes, standing mannequin-like at the base of the marble steps that lead inevitably to the great drama on the cross? – made them speak in tandem, her voice quivering in an undeepened sing-song, an adolescent bloodless voice that had nevertheless stepped inside this echoing stone tent and listened to itself echo there, all the desire denied her though her voice pushed beyond itself and tried to speak to the high, vaulted dome that enclosed everyone in a collective, ice-cold embrace?

     There had been, he noticed, no coloured people – no Black Men – in the church; he had listened and the pious singing made him think only of the hard-rolled Slavic r`s in the white canvas tent, looking over the sea – the sound had the same quality of abandon. Afterwards he had left with the straggling company of the others, and gone out into the jumble of street-stalls littering the piazza, food-kiosks selling Austrian wursts and French cheeses – it was an international food-fair – and a coloured tent issuing thin swirls of incense, selling Indian handicrafts. Children ran around him soliciting interest in raffle-tickets. He had bought some fruit and bread, extremely over-priced, and walked out within the mass of the crowds along the piers, with the monumental, too-heavy Hapsburgian architecture silhouetted behind him. And there, in long dutiful lines of disarray, a kind of mercantile barracks of patience, he had seen them, the black men, tall, langorous and unimpeachably silent, not speaking to eachother, standing sentinel behind brightly-coloured, fluorescent Italian hand-bags. Few, if any, of the people walking there stopped to look at the pink, glowing-orange, green items on display, though the deep-black men smiled graciously, flourished heavy, dark hands over the merchandise, and finally, like a benediction, spoke a warm and woody Italian that flowed like sweet tar over the people on promenade, and out into the sunset-mellowed water of the sea.

 

 

 

 

II.

 

    Over the coming days the weather failed to improve, though the mornings would start out crisply blue and workmen went around confidently in the grounds. By midday there was usually a light cover of rain, and he would go down to the white tent to meet with the garrulous Giuseppe over a half-litre or more of the tangy Merlot they drank together. There was also the TV, but it had become insensible: every night he saw the same grainy images of impassive men holding passports to their chests while their hooded captors stood behind them with AK-47 machine-guns neatly held to their backs, as if these faceless aggressors had been born with their weapons neatly tucked behind them, like a snail its shell, always ready for use in any emergency. The picture would start to break up, the stone-faced men disappear, and a fast-talking correspondent replace them with a commentary that to him succeeded every time in providing very little by way of substantive explanation. The correspondent would be replaced by a newsreader whose essential task, it seemed to him, was to normalise the proceedings for the entire viewing public by virtue of a deeply sensible, paternal facial expression which remained unmoved, eternally reasonable and rationalising, no matter what context of terrible event it was called on to report. On top of that, the TV programs were boring, consisting largely of studio-forum discussions which invariably degenerated into screaming-matches  between people with bouffant hair who were often required to be escorted from the TV studio in a fraught disorder of tears, messed makeup and hurt feelings….The whole media-spectacle was too senseless and comic, in the wrong sense, for him to persevere with. He would turn off the machine and surrender instead to reveries in the silence and the dark, listening intently for any sign of life in the caravan-park; with each passing day more people arrived there, from Germany, or the Balkan countries, and he found himself paying as much attention to the varying music of their speech, as to the fact of the people themselves. The clues to their existence, the phenomena of them like their clothing, gestures, public behaviour and tones of voice, had become more interesting to him than the human fact of their being other people, like him, come there, like he had, to seek some surcease from the strife and sufferings of their homes.

     Leaving the amenities-block one morning, he saw, for the first time, an aging couple walking arm in arm: their distinction that they were black, as dark as the extra-strong coffee he drank in the mornings, as the eyes of the Italian and Rumanian workers he saw pushing wheelbarrows and carrying equipment across the empty spaces of the park. When he had passed the black couple, smiling and lightly tilting his head, he heard them speaking a faultless German, though as they saw his approach they had offered him a sincere buon giorno in an Italian that also sounded native to them. He imagined they might be academics, with a large family, perhaps a bevy of grandchildren, settled in Berne or Lugano, awaiting their return home. It was a curious coincidence, as he had paid a visit to the toilet-block immediately beforehand, where the ugly graffiti of a fortnite before had in the interim seen industrial-strength cleaner and a scrubbing-brush, though the spidery, inept marks of the swastikas still hadn`t been entirely erased. The vindication of the Black Man, however, as if it had been the most offensive gesture against popular sensibilities, was gone, wholly vanished, amid the other scrawls – as if its threat of vengeance had never existed at all.

      The same afternoon he had wandered down to the bay, and its patchy shell beach, only vaguely supposing the large, naked girl – maybe she was really a full-grown woman – might still be dancing in her lonely world of dark, brittle sand. But she was gone, and there was a sign instead, in her place, that read !VIETATO BALLARE SULLA SPIAGGIA! So she had been finally reproached, and driven away from the place, though the matrimonial newspaper still lay scattered around the area. That afternoon in the white-tent he asked his friend on whose initiative the sign had been erected.

“That, my friend,“ Giuseppe had told him, “is due to the genius of the dignitaries. They always come up with the wisest solutions to our problems.“

“But Giuseppe,“ he had replied, “there are no real problems here. Life here is almost a paradise.“

      Giuseppe had smiled, lynx-like with his liquid Italian eyes swimming in the wine, in his own profound satisfaction with himself. “Ah, ah, no, friend. There are worse things here than anywhere, there is problem everywhere. True – here we are free, we are not held hostage like those over the water. We can come and go as we like. But, you know, in freedom there is often as much difficulty as in strife. It is impossible to escape. But still –“ here he had raised his glass – “we can still drink, no?“

      They had smiled and clinked their glasses, and though he considered Giuseppe’s words for a moment, he still thought of the romantic pair on the beach. “And her, the girl,“ he had asked. “What has happened to her?“

     Again Giuseppe smiled. “She stays with the caretaker, the, you know – “ here he dropped the corners of his mouth in a frown – “il penseroso, you know, the old philosopher here. They are shameless. It is not so long and they must leave, for good. Never return. It won’t be tolerated, after all. The dignitaries will see to it.“

“Why, Giuseppe, what has happened?“

     Giuseppe had smiled, again, sensuously, with a deep strain of mockery in his eyes. “We saw them, you know, out in the open. Like rabbits, or dogs. In their pathetic newspaper house on the beach. Riff-raff, really, enjoying eachother in the open like animals. Personally, I don’t care. Me? No. But, after all, it won’t be tolerated.“

     It was for him a pity, as there had seemed something touching in the older, morose man’s courtship of the woman, and love anywhere is always a testimony to beauty. Walking up on the stone-path to the castle, alone and lost in his own memories he recalled his own past failures of love, though they had been adventures of the finest intentions, embarked on from the purest part of his innocence. It seemed many years, perhaps a decade, earlier, that he’d been engaged to be married – in another, foreign country, a place he had never expected to end up in. But it was only a year, or less, earlier – when the general prognosis seemed far more positive, for his own life, for his friends, and travellers met on the way, even, improbably, for the world. He stopped on the path and looked out over the steel sea, to the castle – rustic, mediaeval, in the purest European taste – not far to his right. The reek of the caravan-park toilets – from his own body – was still on his fingers, and it smelt, again, of India, where he had loved as he never did before, and was unlikely to ever again. There, too, the people, the upper-classes, the priests and the dignitaries, the politicians and the magnates‘ beautiful wives, all used their fingers, as a simple tool of life, for living and eating and making beautiful gestures in intelligent, even spiritual, conversation. There was a dignity to all things, in the breath of their existence, in that faraway place, and he looked over, and deeply, into the sea and saw again the shimmering, exquisite expanse of rice-paddies under the sun of late-winter, before the heat had really set in, saw the labourers tilling the fields with ox-ploughs and village-women carrying water-urns on their heads, the children in the school yards running in circles and chasing the slow-moving cows, who received every human prank without the faintest snort of complaint. He saw the green of the paddies, swimming up close to his vision, dirt paths where snakes might lie basking in the first heat of the day, the paths made for bare feet and bicycles threaded between adobe dwellings of the villages where old men or women slept in peace until the sunset seeped into their dreams, and they woke to candlelight and the subdued chatter of drums and singing, in the twilight, in the uncanny space between the brightness of the day and the imperturbable sleep of night. In the place of war, he wondered, across the water, not so far away, would they still find sleep, at the hands of the faceless captors? Would they use their fingers, to live, eat, and laugh, in the dignity of being men – captured ones, but still men, nevertheless? Were they impure, the prisoners, is that why they were being held, under the neat, precise gaze of the AK-47s and the exotic hoods? Were they obstacles to some programme of cleanliness, so that their fingers and humour and smell of sweat or hunger would encroach on a beautiful, more spiritual world they would never understand? Did their impassive, tired gazes, the two weeks of stubble on their faces, disqualify them from some higher spiritual cause? The men in the hoods, after all, were unseen, perhaps absent, perhaps immaterial, but above all purely invisible behind the inscrutable curtain of their being. They could be vacant, they could be free, keep pure the beautiful certainty of the emptiness of their faces – if in truth, behind the material curtain, they still had human faces at all.

     He turned from the ocean, broad and stainless before him, turned back to the path, and before he had turned the next corner of the path, saw them, held together like another crucifixion against the stone, beyond the path-railing. He recognised her first, the naked girl of the beach, and here too she was naked, though it was a full revelation of nudity so stunning it was almost another clothing, a curtain of shock, in itself. He was a little blinded by them, above him, high as monuments, a human offering to the sea, proud, and philosophical, il penseroso…but the other one – he saw but chose not to see, it was unthinking, something automatic in him registering a vision, that to someone else, to Giuseppe perhaps, unthinkable, not to be tolerated, after all…He didn’t know even if he himself had been seen, caught there, as in flagrante, in the hopeless innocence of his gaze, as the others, or if they were so deeply held in that strange embrace of discomfort as to make him invisible, a nonentity, empty and unrealised in his solitary place on the path, and so faceless, another captive caught, the watcher who sees everything, blinded by his omniscience…It was too late, now, to keep on the way to the castle. He turned back, casually, as if nothing had occurred, and walked back the way he had come, and though he wanted to, not once, unlike Orpheus, did he turn around to see if that statuary was still there, entwined in itself, still real, or only something he had dreamt there, to make real, shock into substance the sleep of his own body.

 

 

 

III.

 

     The sea was far too calm – he wouldn’t return there. Small, child-size boulders got in the way, on the way to – ? That place, that place that promised release. But where was it? The sea was too calm – why, on that day, was it asleep in a soporific, opiated immobility that belied his own radical awakening? It was a perfect mask, the sea, and he wondered what unearthly worlds it hid from him. He would have to return, to the caravan-park, the dull little town, just to find some distance from the perverse vision by the stone path. He already knew, as well, that he couldn’t recall precisely how long he had stayed, rooted to the spot or moving, it was all unclear, nor how long it had lasted. He stumbled a few times, along the path, and the only person he came across was a jogger, on his way to the castle, in bright, fluorescent colours like those of the handbags the black men had been selling on the thoroughfares down by the city piers. He was not, it turned out, the first to have seen them. And presumably the electric-pink jogger, too, would soon come across them, strung-up and ecstatic in their windy place of love.

     Down in the camp-ground, they were aleady making enquiries – a kind of local tribunal, in the white-tent restaurant, where plenty of wine was spread around, and where Giuseppe still held his charismatic court. When he saw him, he rose from a littered table and opened both his arms up wide, as if to embrace a long-lost brother. “But, friend, where have you been? You look shocked,“ he declared. “You know more than any of us, I’m sure – am I wrong?“

“Know – what do I know?“ he said, his own voice obtrusive to him, disturbed at being without any warning at the centre of so much attention. All the others, and their hard-rolled r’s, strangely reminiscent of animals of prey, turning towards him in a sexual, ravenous curiosity, glittering with the wine in their bloodstreams – froze him where he was, so that he looked at them, wounded and crestfallen, like a little boy wholly out of his depth.

“But, you know, surely,“ Giuseppe repeated, though the amused cast of his face didn’t cohere with the urgency of the matter in hand. “You have seen it as well? Surely, my friend!“

“Yes – I saw, I’ve seen something, though I’m not sure – “

“Yes, bene, very good. You will be able to make a report to the dignitaries. They are coming here, very soon, it will be a matter of formality only. Your view on things will be the most valuable one, I’m sure.“

     But he had already gone back to the refuge of his caravan. He washed dishes, shaved, put cups and saucers in order, arranged his pens and paper, washed his hands, sat down, and sat up again, moving through the cramped space of his little house like a caged animal. What could they want with me? What do I tell them, now? I don’t know these people, they don’t know me – I really can’t tell who they are, after all, they could be anyone. It’s none of my business, anyway.

     But surely and swiftly the dignitaries came – a modest knocking on the fly-screen door of his caravan: a middle-aged, portly couple, a man and a woman dressed in the synthetic fashion of an older generation, with superb and vulgar gold jewellery standing out like magic seals of kingly authority on their thickening, mottled hands. He noticed especially that the woman, heavier and taller than the man, had a very large and imposing chest, her decolletage far down low, sprinkled with talcum powder under the tangle of gold chains hanging over the loose, wrinkled skin. Her companion, the smaller, almost natty man with a neat and trimmed moustache, smiled and grinned at him as if to impress on him how significant he must be to be accompanied by such a beautiful and impressive, such an undeniably desirable, woman. They were friendly enough, and asked him simply to tell them what he had seen. He was trembling visibly, his hand when he wrote a short statement on their clipboard cold and clammy under their beneficent, perfumed gaze. But when it came to putting words to the other party, to the companion of the girl, they asked him pointedly and with an alacrity that had been missing from all their other remarks, whether the man she had been with was in fact the black man, the older professor, he might have seen residing in the caravan-park during the preceding days.

“Well, no – “ he answered, uncertain of which posture to take –  “no, I don’t think so, that is – it was a strange light. The sea was giving off a kind of mercury – like a sulfurous gaze, so my eyes were distracted. I was maybe a little confused –  “

“So you didn’t see a black man?“ they repeated, charming in their flashing, yellow smiles, the front teeth capped with minor fortresses – like miniature, royal castles – of gold, glinting in the fading light of the afternoon. “Good sir, we can trust your discretion. Feel free to tell us anything you choose. It will be kept in all confidentiality,“ – and he felt actually numbed and rested in their presence, not stupefied but sleepy, like a little boy who knows that now he has found safety and can rest. He could see the vast hill of her breast rising under the jewellery, that shifted a little as the skin beneath it slid like silk against itself, her body adjusting itself in all its imperturbable Italian glamour. “So you’re not sure if you saw the black man? Answer us please, in your own time.“

“No – no, I’m not sure. I’m really not sure. I’m sorry. I might have seen someone like that – perhaps I did. It is possible.“

“Yes, anything is possible,“ they smiled again. “Anything is possible. And tell us, if you could, of any other interesting observation you might have made, any distinguishing feature, anything at all.“

“Well…no, nothing really stood out for me, in the, ah, composition – I – “

“Yes? – anything, any little tiny, insignificant thing? Anything at all.“

“I – well, I did notice that – I saw them, you see, using their fingers. It was just a small thing, but it was something – unusual – it had a certain quality – “

“Yes? Please tell us – what quality was that?“

“It had something, well, hard to define, but something spiritual, about it. Something essentially human.“

“Ah. It was spiritual. And could you tell us, please, what is the gist of this, experience, that you are calling spiritual- ?“

     He paused, and for the first time smiled at them, again like a small child. “Well, it’s a feeling, really. They were – they were like gods. A god and a goddess. As if they had risen above.“

     At this the two dignitaries smiled broadly – they seemed unduly impressed with the idea. “Ah, divinities, yes, we understand that – don’t we“ – they each conspiratorially smiled at the other, as if sharing a private acknowledgement not intended for him. “And could you please be more specific about these – gods: were they like the great classical gods, the Greeks, the Romans, Zeus, Rhea – or any of their company?“

“No – no. They were not from that family of gods.“

“Oh – not of that family. We see. A small disappointment. So which family did they belong to? Feel free, please.“

     He answered promptly, but almost in a whisper. “They were Indian. From another civilisation.“

“Really! Indian!? That’s quite far! Quite exotic! And please let us know which gods, of what nature, they might have been?“

“Well – they were gods of love. Gods of divine love.“

     After that they thanked him, simply and formally, and quickly left. He didn’t really know what to make of their visit, nor of what they had said, nor especially of what he might have said to them. It was all mainly a blur – everything he had heard and felt since seeing the vision of them on the path. He drank some of the wine, which tasted stale and watery to him, not wine at all. He tried watching the TV, but it took some time before the picture tuned into focus, and the saga of the hostages had seemed not to change, not even slightly, in the interim: it was the same, clearly depressed men, holding their passports, watched over by the immaculate hooded captors, and the correspondent with a microphone seemed to be making much the same, garbled and inconsequential commentary, that dragged on for hours, so that he eventually fell asleep, in his clothes. Asleep, he didn’t notice the ceramic cup he held in his hand, already chipped, fall and break on the floor under the table, in many pieces, like ancient crockery from another, classical time.

 

 

 

IV.

 

    The next day it was as if the entire caravan-park had been irredeemably transformed overnight – the previously quiet, almost elegiac, tranquillity of the place was overrun now with people and activity: hundreds of new arrivals, children and tourists, as well as a new platoon of workers, and incongruously among them, a force of police-inspectors strutting around in dull, brown uniforms – unmistakeably faeces-coloured, he thought – swarmed the grounds and strode up and down the path to the castle, kicking stones around, leaving plastic litter lying in the austere sage-brush. Loud, obnoxious children were constantly doing their toilet in the bushes and behind walls. It was suddenly a menagerie, and as soon as he stepped outside he felt his flesh crawl, the hair on the back of his neck receive strange warnings from the electricity of the air.

     He considered wandering up to the tent-restaurant, as he usually did, to order some lunch, drink some more wine and enquire of Giuseppe what was responsible for the vast revolution that had taken place under cover of the previous night. But he didn’t have far to go before he saw Giuseppe striding quickly, in an agitated bandy-legged gait, towards him, and before his friend had taken his arm and pushed him forcefully against the rendered rough wall of the amenities-block.

“Good friend, I was coming to tell you,“ he breathed aggressively into his ear, the foul breath almost stinging his skin. “It is not safe for you to be here. They, you know, after yesterday – they suspect you.“

“They suspect me? Of what?“

“When you refused to identify the man, who had – who was there with her – they thought you must be hiding something. That you know.“

“That I know? What do I know?“

     Giuseppe grimaced impatiently. “That you know, but are unwilling to tell.“

“I don’t know anything!“

     Quickly Giuseppe smiled his fluent, charismatic Italian smile. “But, friend,“ he drawled the words indulgently. “But of course you do. Come now. There is no need for you to lie to me. We have all noticed it – it is written on your face, after all. And, anyway, you know I know everything.“ Giuseppe had again become the liquid seer of the white tent, broadly smiling, secure in his superiority to the situation, knowing everything, like a master of ceremonies who actually has everything in his domain under the sure direction of his benevolent gaze.

     He was dumb-founded, a little smothered, and didn’t know what to say. “Come now,“ Giuseppe continued. “It is clear, no? You must come now, immediately.“

“Now? But I – “

“Don’t worry about your things. There is nothing very valuable among them anyway, no? You can leave everything in the caravan and come with me and it will be alright. They will return – they plan to arrest you, you know – and you will not be there. By then you will be far away.“

“But where will we go?“

“That, friend, is up to you. I have a private car, it can take you anywhere you desire to go.“

     But he couldn’t think of anywhere to go. All the phone-numbers of his friends had been lost in his address-book, stolen from him at the station. He racked his brains, while Giuseppe left him, of all places, hiding in the toilet-block. To feel secure, to feel safe, he went into the same cubicle he had visited the first day – both out of the solace of familiarity, but vaguely also to check on the progress of the graffiti on the cubicle wall. Before he even looked, he admitted to himself that he expected the wall to be covered with new racial slurs, that amongst the new arrivals, there must be many who held the same insidious and tediously obtuse ideas of persecution that the earlier graffitists had. But what he saw surprised him: the entire door, and both walls to either side, were covered from top to bottom in a dense, heavy wall of black paint, like an underground nightclub, a cavern, like the underworld of the dead Orpheus had once visited and only narrowly escaped from. Was it the work of the new work-gangs, striding self-importantly around the disturbed hive of the camp-ground? Was it a directive of the charming dignitaries, keen to make changes, to start afresh, with the visible facade of the new, populous, season? It was an uncanny, timeless beat of time before he saw, almost unnoticeable on the floor under his feet, the same signature of the first time, that filled him with an unreadable sensation of extreme fear and the deepest, almost necrophiliac, feeling of complete assurance, and read: A Black Man Was Here.

     He couldn’t think where to go. It was only at the last moment, when Giuseppe was already coming back to take him away, that her phone-number, that for so long had been encoded in his memory, came back to him, and later he was able to call her from the phone Giuseppe, like a movie gangster, had installed in his long, gleaming private car. He had waited for minutes, for what seemed like hours, while the phone rang, and rang again. He was beginning to sweat and shiver from fear and panic, wondering finally if there would be anywhere he could go, that would take him in, where he would be safe, when he heard the familiar, downward-inflected, soft tones of her voice, the voice he had never expected to hear again, not so soon.

“It’s you,” the voice said. “Where are you? I was waiting to hear from you. I’ll be waiting for you here, if you want that.”

     He took the train to the city in the north, after Giuseppe dropped him off in his extraordinary car. While he watched it noiselessly slide away, and an enormous, white hand wave briefly out the car’s window, he really couldn’t be sure if it was real. He stood there without any of his belongings – his only possession was the ticket in his hand that had been given  him by one of Giuseppe’s minions. The afternoon was already growing quite dark, and a warm, mild breeze blew newspapers and dust across the platform of the station, where he waited, vacant , expectant: spring seemed ready to make an entrance, at last.

     There was a TV in the corner near the station-entrance, always turned-on, immaculate in its tirelessness, and while he waited for the train that would take him away, quite far, to the well-known city in the north, he watched the screen, and it stared back at him. The men were still there, with their passports held to their chests, their elegant escorts still standing behind them: captive and captors both suspended it seemed in a pure eternity, both awaiting the new developments.

 

*

(Duino-Vienna, IV.2004)