Out of the Line of Fire (9 page)

I sat down next to my mother and she linked her arm through mine. She lay her head on my shoulder.

It will be so nice to have you home again, she said.

It will be so nice to be home, I said, even if I still have to put up with father’s interrogation.

And I remember, when we arrived home that evening, Elena had rushed out to meet us as we opened the gate and made our way up the path to the house. She had kissed me on both cheeks and after cursorily asking me how I felt, started telling me excitedly about the new love of her life—how wonderful he was, how talented, how sophisticated, mature and handsome. When I could I asked who the lucky fellow might be.

Anybody I know?

Yes.

Who?

Guess!

Give me a clue.

His first name is Mikhail.

Mikhail? Mikhail. I don’t know any Mikhails.

Yes you do.

I give up.

Baryshnikov! Mikhail Baryshnikov. I’m in love with Mikhail Baryshnikov. He’s wonderful.

Isn’t he a little old for you?

Not at all. He could have
me
any time.

Elena! my mother exclaimed.

It’s true, it’s true. I don’t care what anyone says.

Even my father seemed happy, if this is not putting it too strongly, to see me. Perhaps he had finally admitted to himself that his school was not the right school for me, that in fact I was different from him. He stood there on the steps, stiff but smiling. He was nervous and didn’t know what to say.

Father, I said.

He took my hand and shook it.

Wolfgang.

He looked at my mother and then at Elena. Neither was quite sure how to react. His conciliatory behaviour seemed to set us all on edge. Elena broke the tension by grasping me by the arm and saying: Papa, can I take Wolfi up to my room and show him what I’ve done to it?

My father fumbled for something to say and Elena, interpreting this to mean yes, pulled me past him through the door and up the stairs to her room.

The next morning the months of misery at school seemed to catch up on me and I awoke feeling dizzy and drained of energy. When I got up to take a shower I must have passed out in the hall. I awoke to find my mother leaning over me asking anxiously if I was alright. She insisted then that I be examined by the family doctor.

When he had finished he told her that I was suffering from severe nervous exhaustion and prescribed bed rest; bed rest and no undue excitement, whatever that was supposed to mean.

In the weeks that followed, my father seemed to revert somewhat to his former aloof self although, happily, not to quite the same extent as previously, when mealtimes had been periods of silent torture, each of us forced to flee to some inner sanctuary with only the restrained clatter of cutlery punctuating the silence around us. Except, of course, for the times when Omi came to visit us. She would wreak havoc with my father’s pomposity. But now, even without my grandmother, the evenings were less oppressive than they used to be and a workable truce seemed to have been achieved between my two parents. Moreover, Elena’s and my behaviour no longer seemed inexplicably to provoke the bitter scenes it once did.

Nevertheless, when my father announced one evening at dinner that we would be taking a holiday in Yugoslavia, it took us all by surprise. We had not been on a holiday as a family for almost ten years. There was a moment’s hiatus as my father’s words registered in each of our consciousnesses. We glanced quickly at each other and then at my father, who sat dabbing his mouth with his napkin which he then proceeded to fold self-consciously and meticulously before finally placing it beside his empty plate. Instead of his usual cold and supercilious smile, for the second time in a matter of weeks, he looked utterly lost. His gesture was so clearly unexpected that he himself seemed to be aware of how uncharacteristic it was and of how much it contrasted with what we had all come to expect from him. Again no one quite knew how to react. This was definitely uncharted territory.

Fortunately, the prospect of a couple of weeks on a foreign beach had really begun to work on Elena and, unable to contain her excitement any longer, she let out a whoop of delight. She jumped up from the table, ran to my father and threw her arms around him.

Oh Papa, it will be wonderful, won’t it, she said.

She began interrogating him about where and when we would go, what we would see and what Yugoslavia was like. Then she broke loose and ran off to find her atlas. Uncharitably, my mother and I were, at first, a little suspicious about my father’s motives.

But in the weeks leading up to the trip and in fact for the entire holiday, my father was totally unlike the person I had known him to be for as long as I could remember. I could see why my mother had married him; his charm, his urbanity and his open smile could be totally disarming.

That this was only a temporary thaw in the ice age that quickly followed did nothing to diminish the reality of my father’s good intentions at the time. It was like a remission from a dreadful disease. We were all surprised and happy that it had happened and desperately sad when it didn’t continue.

Ultimately, his relapse seemed to be the necessary catalyst for the catastrophic events which followed and he seemed to emerge as merely a pawn in some greater, more protracted, game.

*

By definition, a priori judgements have the twin characteristics of necessity and universality, neither of which can be found in conclusions from experience (in other words, experience presents us with no more than contingent truths).

Kant, however, came to the conclusion that there were
some
features of sensory experience which could not be accepted as empirically given. In other words—there
were
a priori elements involved in sensory knowledge. This led inevitably to his famous distinction between appearances (phenomena) and things-in-themselves (noumena). The argument:

If the world we confronted were one of things-in-themselves, a priori knowledge of it, even in a very restricted sense, would be quite impossible. The fact that we have such knowledge is proof that the objects of our knowledge
are
phenomena or appearances.

It, in fact, proves no such thing. If the basis on which we have a priori knowledge is dependent on making the distinction between phenomena (or appearances) and things-in-themselves, then we can hardly say that the fact that we have such knowledge is proof that the objects of our knowledge are, as a consequence, phenomena. The difference between Descartes and Kant then is the difference between epistemology and ontology—
how
we know as against
what
we know.

*

Initially my father’s intention was to stay in Dubrovnik, which he had visited a few years earlier while at a conference in Titograd. But because we had left booking so late we were unable to find anywhere suitable to stay. Eventually, after a number of phone calls, my father was forced to make a reservation at a hotel, incongruously called the Hotel Belvedere, in one of the small coastal villages to the south.

Driving into Yugoslavia from Austria is like driving into the nineteenth century. The road surfaces are poor, agricultural methods are primitive and the people seem to be oppressed as much by the heat and dust as by their own inescapable poverty. Buildings appear to be on the verge of collapse and inland the people are sullen and taciturn.

But as you approach the coastal region of Montenegro, the countryside and the people seem miraculously to change. There is a new sense of vitality, of colour, a feeling of richness and warmth. The first glimpse of Dubrovnik from the surrounding hills is undeniably spectacular, with the bone-tinted buildings of the old city contrasting sharply against the deep blue sea of the Adriatic beyond. And the people of the region are also different. They are taller and darker, with high cheek bones and proud angular faces. The young women are particularly handsome and, if asked a question, have a habit of smiling enigmatically back at you with their dark, almost black, eyes before answering. But mostly it is their happiness which strikes you. To be on this part of the coast is to live within permanent earshot of laughter. It seems as natural as the sun shining or the trees growing.

When we arrived at the hotel after the short drive along the coast we were happily surprised at what, accidentally, a good choice it was. Originally the building had been a large two-storeyed family home but at some stage it had been converted into a small but comfortable hotel. It overlooked the town and from the first floor balcony, through the thin blue-grey foliage of the trees outside, you could see the beach stretching out beyond the rooftops below.

Elena and I shared a bedroom which was separated from my parents by a small sitting-room, a bathroom and a toilet. The walls were covered in old-fashioned wallpaper and the high ceilings were panelled in wood. It was sparsely furnished but comfortable nevertheless. On the wall next to the shuttered windows was a faded photograph of a family standing in front of the house long before it had been converted into a hotel.

It took us no time to settle in and before long Elena and I were wandering around the town as if we had lived in it for years.

Early in our stay—it must have been the third or fourth day because I recall we had already discovered an idyllic spot at the far end of the beach where Elena and I used to swim and which we had begun to think of as our own—I remember being awakened one morning by a thin shaft of flickering sunlight which penetrated our room through a crack in the shutters over the window.

Drowsily I moved my head out of the line of fire and looked across to Elena in the bed opposite. In the half-light I could see her lying there on her back. She had kicked off her sheets and the buttons of her nightdress had come undone so that her left breast was now exposed. I lay watching the slow rise and fall of her breathing. I could see where the line of her developing tan shaded into the paleness of her breast and I could also make out the small, flat, dark circle that surrounded her nipple.

As I watched I realized I had never really considered Elena as a separate being before. She had always been someone who was just there, who was simply my sister. But now, in the half-light, I suddenly caught a glimpse of the image of the young woman she was on the verge of becoming. For the first time I registered how beautiful she really was. It was as though I had never even seen her before, as if for years I had been anaesthetized, insensitive to what had grown up around me. I could not take my eyes off her, off her perfect face, her lips, her slender arms and hands, off the contours of her body beneath her nightdress.

Quietly I slipped out of bed and went to the window. I unlatched one of the shutters and pushed it slowly open so that the room began to fill with light. I turned and stood leaning against the wall watching her sleep. I felt its coolness against my back. Outside a faint breeze filtered through the leaves and, as I watched, Elena’s nipple began slowly to contract. I was fascinated as it changed shape, transforming itself from a smooth, even flatness to a textured, dark hardness.

As I stood there I wondered why, in all I had read, no one had written about the pain I now felt in my heart. What was it about this sudden and unexpected confrontation with Elena’s emerging beauty that made the experience so agonizing, so overwhelming, so physically wrenching? Everything I had ever read about love, or desire, or beauty expressed itself in such abstract terms, so abstract in fact that, in reality, it had meant nothing to me at all. Why had no one mentioned this
physical
tearing, this sick rending I felt in my soul? It was as though, unable to raise my hands quickly enough, I had suddenly been blinded by the glare from some accidentally perceived truth, the exact nature of which remained undisclosed to me. For the first time in my life I felt absolutely isolated. I became aware that between whatever it was that Elena seemed to incarnate and my own being there existed some mysterious and unbridgeable gap.

She began to stir and I slipped quietly out onto the balcony. I stood there with my eyes closed, warming my face against the sun. Then I heard her voice.

Wolfi…Wolfi? Where are you?

I’m out here on the balcony.

What time is it?

Half past six.

Oh God, she said, we have to get up. Otherwise we’ll be late.

I heard her get out of bed and creep up behind me. She reached up and covered my eyes with her hands. I could feel her body pressed lightly against mine.

Penny for your thoughts [woran denkst du gerade]? she said.

I was just thinking about you in fact, I said.

Thinking what?

Nothing in particular. Just thinking, that’s all.

She released her hands and came around beside me, shielding her eyes from the sun. Then, squinting, she leaned on the railing, her wrists turned outwards and yawned. A shiver passed through her body. She stretched and once again I could see her body outlined against the soft material of her nightdress.

Come on, she said. Let’s have a shower and go and get some breakfast.

By the time we were sitting at our table it was still only a little after seven. We waited impatiently for our breakfast to arrive, already anxious to be out walking along the white sand. Our mornings had become charged with a peculiar and inexplicable sense of expectancy, as though we both sensed that each of our destinies were in some way linked to the clear light and cool water of the small peninsula at the far end of the beach.

Through the window we could see groups of people already making their way down the narrow lane towards the sea, including a few whom we now recognized. Elena seemed more agitated than usual as she watched the trickle of passers-by and when our coffees and hot bread rolls arrived she exclaimed loudly: At last!

She immediately broke open a roll and spread it with butter and some of the locally produced apricot jam with which they came. She took a large gulp from her cup of coffee.