G133: What Have We Done (19 page)

It was too late – he had to say it.

‘Childbirth.’

He wished then more than ever that they had not driven out there, in the heat of the day. He didn’t like baroque, or whatever this was. And he had a feeling that something was coming unstuck.

The next saint, he told her, was St Vitus, invoked against epilepsy.

‘St Vitus’s dance. And so on,’ he said. Her eyes, he was sure, were still on St Margaret of Antioch. ‘Here, I won’t read them all.’ He handed her the paper and, after standing there for a few seconds, started off at a leisurely pace across the brown marble floor, past pinkish columns, their markings swirling like the clouds of Jupiter.

She was still at the altar.

The place was as full as a station at rush hour.

Full of murmurous voices like the wind in a forest.

He found himself standing in front of the font – another extraordinary accretion of kitsch – staring at its pinks, its golds, its powder blues.

A stone bishop holding in his hands his own gold-hatted head.

As weird, he thought, as anything in any Inca or Hindu house of worship.

A stone bishop holding in his hands his own gold-hatted head.

A martyr. Presumably. And he wondered, with the habit of
wanting to know, who this man was. This man, who had invited oblivion on himself, or taken it peaceably – the stone face on the severed head was nothing if not peaceful – when it took him.

Oblivion.

He looked up, looked for her where she had been, at the altar.

Not there.

His eyes found her nearer the entrance, where the devotional candles were. And she had put a euro in the box and was taking a candle and lighting it from one of the ones already there.

He wondered, again, whether she was in any sense devout. Her personal mores – as far as he had been able to make them out – suggested not. Or at least had not in any way led him to think that she might be. The first time he had set eyes on her, more or less, she had been snorting cocaine, at Mani’s party.

Everyone else in that space was moving, it seemed, and she was standing still. She was standing still and watching the little flame she had lit.

Which meant what?

He wanted to ask her. He did not dare. He was frightened about what she might say.

‘I preferred the cathedral in Bamberg,’ he said, as they walked down the hill, hoping that she would agree – as if
that
would mean anything. As if it would dispel the worries that had started, since they arrived at this place, to interfere with his tranquillity.

She said she would have expected him to prefer the cathedral. ‘You’re not interested in anything post about 1500,’ she said, ‘are you?’

‘1500,’ he said, pleased that she was at least being flippant, ‘at the very latest.’

‘Why is that, do you think?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You must have some idea. You must have thought about it.’

‘It’s just an aesthetic preference.’

‘Is it?’ She was sceptical.

‘I think so. I just feel no love,’ he said, ‘for a place like that.’ He
meant the Vierzehnheiligen, and he seemed determined to do it down.

When she started to praise the tumbling fecundity of its decoration, he took it almost personally.

‘I just don’t like it,’ he said. ‘OK?’

She laughed. ‘OK. Fine.’

‘I’m sorry. Whatever. You liked it. I didn’t. Fine.’

They drove back to the motorway – a few kilometres through humid fields of yellow rapeseed.

‘Why did you light that candle?’ he asked, trying to sound no more than vaguely interested.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I didn’t know you were religious,’ he said.

‘I’m not.’

‘So?’

‘I just felt like it. Is it a problem?’

‘Of course not. I was wondering, that’s all.’

‘I just felt like it,’ she said again.

He asked, ‘You don’t believe in God?’

‘I don’t know. No. Do you?’

He laughed as if it should be obvious. ‘No. Not even slightly.’

And then they were on the motorway again, north-east, towards Dresden.

He said, after a while, ‘I’ll pay for it of course. The . . .’ He tried to find a neutral word. ‘Procedure.’

He needed to know that the decision still stood.

It seemed it did.

She said, just looking levelly out at the motorway, ‘OK.’ And then, ‘Thank you.’

‘Of course.’

He wondered, having started to talk about it, whether to talk about it some more. To ask, for instance,
where
she wanted to have it done. The procedure. To nail it down with details. Specific places. Times.

The silence, while he wondered this, ended up lasting for over an hour.

And now they are stuck in a traffic jam outside Dresden. It is five in the afternoon. Light screams off windscreens. The air conditioning pours frigid air over them.

Satisfied again that he has no major problem, small ones start to trouble him. It was a fault in his plan for today, he thinks, that they should be passing Dresden at this time. He ought to have known that this would happen. It was foreseeable. (He moves forward another few metres, sick of the sight of the van in front of him. A scruffy white van. Ukrainian plates.) It was an unforced error.

And the damage to Stańko’s paintwork, the unspeakable scuff – yes, that is still there, to be dealt with, to be talked about, to be apologised for.

To be paid for.

Another thing to be paid for.

He is thinking about the piece he needs to write for the
Journal of English and Germanic Philology
. ‘Anomalous Factors in the Form “Slēan” – Some Suggestions’. He is in the shower, offering his face to the warm streams of water, thinking about it. Thinking about the work that needs to be done. The hours that will need to be spent in libraries – Oxford, London, Paris, Heidelberg. The shower is in a sort of hollow in a stone wall – the whole bathroom is like that. The windows, two of them, are narrow slits. The functional elements, though, are impeccably modern. The tiles on the floor are warm to the soles of his feet when he steps out of the shower and takes a heavy towel. Tastefully done, everything. Once it was a monastery, now it is an upmarket hotel. While he towels himself he leans towards one of the windows, which is set in a deep narrowing slot in the wall, to see out – steep forested hills, quite far away. He likes to imagine the time when this
was
a monastery, when it sat in fields next to the meandering, pristine waters of the Elbe. When the only way to get to Königstein was by walking for
an hour. When Dresden was a whole day’s walk away. He towels his hair, flattens it with his hand until he is satisfied with how it looks. ‘Anomalous Factors in the Form “Slēan”’. That must be his focus now. Now that this nightmare is over, and the future is there again.

It is early evening. The sun puts warm shapes on the wall opposite the windows. The decoration is monastic minimalist: fluid lines, unelaborated. Polished stone. White sheets. Everything white.

She is sitting on a pale leather sofa, hugging her knees, looking towards one of the windows, with its view over neat modern houses to the hills further away. Slightly disappointingly, the hotel is surrounded by suburban normality. Some streets of newish single-family houses, and a sort of industrial estate.

Kilted in the white towel he descends the two stone steps from the shower room. He starts to search in his suitcase for his deodorant. ‘Are you hungry?’ he asks.

She is sitting on the sofa, hugging her knees.

He applies deodorant.

‘Are you hungry?’ he asks again, not impatiently, just with a different intonation, as if she might not have heard him the first time, though she must have.

‘The food’s supposed to be excellent,’ he tells her, looking forward to the meal himself. ‘French. They’ve got a Michelin star.’

This was to be their treat, this immaculate hotel and its Michelinstarred food – their indulgence, their luxury. Tomorrow night they will be at her place in Kraków. The day after that, she will be at work again, on television, and he will be on a flight to Stansted. She likes her work. Just after they arrived at the hotel, late this afternoon, someone had phoned her. It turned out to be her producer. It was interesting to hear her work voice, and it had seemed obvious, overhearing her – just from the tone, he understood nothing else – where her priorities were.

He is doing up his linen shirt.

She is sitting on the sofa, hugging her knees.

‘I can’t do it.’

‘Can’t do what?’ He thinks she might mean the Michelin-starred
meal, that she is feeling too depressed or something.

When she doesn’t answer him, he starts to see that this is wrong. She does not mean the meal.

‘I thought you decided,’ he says, quietly, trying to sound unperturbed as he does up his shirt.

‘So did I.’

He finishes doing up his shirt. What this means, he thinks, is that he will have to do it all again. He will have to do yesterday evening, again. She is going to make them do that again. He sighs, through his nose. Then he sits down on the pale sofa. She is sitting sideways with her feet on the sofa, facing away from him, and he puts his hands on her shoulders and starts to say, again, all the things he said yesterday.

‘I know,’ she says.

He is saying the things, softly saying them, with a tired voice, as if he is unpacking them, and putting them out on a table for her to see.

‘I know,’ she says.

He is whispering them in her ear, his mouth is next to her ear. He is able to smell the light scent of her sweat – fresh sweat and stale sweat. To feel on his face, which sometimes touches hers, the dampness of her tears.

‘I know,’ she says, ‘I know.’

His arms are encircling her, his hands on her stomach.

‘It’s all true what you’re saying,’ she says.

‘Yes, it is . . .’

‘And none of it makes any difference. I just can’t.’

She takes his hands in her hands. Other than that, she does not move. Her hands are very warm and very damp.

She says, ‘This child has chosen me to be its mother, and . . . and I just can’t turn it away. Please understand.

‘Karel,’ she says, ‘please understand.’

His forehead is heavy on her shoulder. He has tears in his own eyes now and they are wetting the cotton of her shirt.

‘Do you understand?’ she wants to know, in a whisper.

‘No,’ he says. It is not quite true. Not quite.

The situation, anyway, is simpler than he thought. It was always very simple. The last two days have been a sort of illusion. There was only ever one possible outcome. He sees that now.

They stay there for a long time, on the pale sofa.

The sun won’t stop shining.

‘Now what?’ he says finally. What he means is: where does this leave us? Where does this leave our two lives?

‘Are you hungry?’ she asks.

‘No,’ he immediately says. He finds it hard to imagine ever feeling hunger again. He finds it hard to imagine anything. The future, again, seems no longer to be there.

‘Do you want to go for a walk?’ she asks, for the first time shifting her position, turning slightly towards him, so that her shoulder moves, and he has to lift his head. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she says.

‘Where?’ Having lifted his head, he is looking at the elegantly minimalist room as if he does not know where he is.

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Wherever. Why don’t you put some trousers on?’

Docilely, he does.

T
hey leave the hotel and start to walk towards Königstein. The pavement follows the main road. Traffic sometimes whizzes past. Sometimes there is silence, or a hazy noise of insects. Sometimes there are trees, or from somewhere the smell of cut grass.

It is five kilometres to Königstein, the sign says. They do not stop. It is high summer. The light will last for hours. They have time to walk it, if they want to.