Shroud (3 page)

Unnerved, I went into what was known, I do not know why, as the lounge. It was the dimmest room in the house; a lamp had to be kept burning wanly there, too, day and night. Perhaps that was the reason people were always unwilling to linger in the room, despite the sofa and the easy chairs and the invitingly jumbled bookshelves. People? What am I saying? There never were people, to speak of, except me, and Magda. We did not encourage visitors; we were not sociable; we barely knew the names of our nearest neighbours; it was how I had insisted it should be, and Magda had willingly complied, at least I think she did so willingly. I sat down on the couch, crapulent and tired and squelchy with sudden, sweet self-pity. I never feel more acutely the pathos and perils of my life as in the early morning, the very time when I should be full of renewed hope and vigour. Briefly my resolve faltered; why was I going on this journey, what did I think I would achieve? I clasped a hand under my knee and heaved up my dead leg and banged it down on one of the little tables, making the lamp-bulb jump and blink. What choice did I have, but to go?

There was a single window in the room, large and long, giving on to a narrow walkway and the siding of the next-door house. Day had fully taken hold now and the window was a big rectangle of wettish sunlight slashed through with diagonals of indigo shadow; against the gloom in which I sat it might have been a painting, garish and flat as a primitive depiction of a tropical scene. I remarked inwardly again how uninsistent was the sunlight in this part of the world, a matt radiance, unvarying and calm, that would fill every square inch of the day like a bright, colourless gas, seeming not to have its source in the sky but to shine out of the very things on which it was falling, the buildings white as sugar cubes, the pastel motor cars, the burnished, black-green trees that lined every street like so many dreamy guardians. I noted too, more immediately, the dustiness of the room. Since Magda's going I had made no attempt at maintaining the place; I was not even sure where the cleaning things were stored, though I thought surely there must be a broom, a mop, a pail…? I had been under the impression that Magda had kept a daily woman, who came when I was not there, but although I waited in on successive mornings, no one turned up. Perhaps I only imagined gleaming-black Jemima, with her rolling eye and stupendous bosom and cotton-white headscarf tied in a top-knot. Then did Magda do all the household chores herself? I do not know why this possibility should be surprising, but it is. Now, with her gone, dust lay everywhere undisturbed, a fine, soft, mole-coloured fur, cut through by a pathway maze that marked out the pattern of my widowed life in the house: door to hall, kitchen to table, bathroom to bedroom. The margins of my world were disappearing, crumbling into this grey penumbra of soft dirt.

Widowed, or widowered? Is there such a word? Sometimes even still the language puts out a foot for me to trip over.

In her last years it was a mystery to me how Magda passed the time when I was not at home, as increasingly I made sure not to be. Housework was hardly the whole answer, even for one as slow-moving and deliberate as she always was. Whenever I enquired of her what she had done during the day she would take on a cornered look, holding her face at that three-quarters angle away from me and letting one shoulder droop, so that I felt I was being edged around by a large, wary ruminant. These cringing reactions of hers always annoyed me, although I could not think in what terms exactly to protest, and I would have to content myself with giving her my steeliest, white-lipped smile, drawing air in swiftly through my nostrils with a reptilian hiss that made her flinch. After these exchanges it gratified me that she would go about the house all evening heaving troubled little sighs, or being extra quiet, as if she were listening anxiously for the abatement of my anger. When we were in company together, at some unavoidable party or college reception, I could not resist making dry asides about her, inviting those unwise enough to engage us in conversation to join in my amusement at her incongruous, ill-attired, mute presence by my side. Those witticisms of mine at her expense were at least part of what made her into a public joke; through the years I had overheard her referred to variously as "Vander's Màdchen," and "Mutter Vander," and, mysteriously, "Old Eva." She did not seem to resent these petty public cruelties to which I subjected her, and would even smile a little, shyly, as if in pride at how appallingly I could behave, her large, button-black eyes shining and her upper lip protruding plumply. And of course this happy tolerance infuriated me all the more, and I would want to strike her, as she stood there amid the press of people in her overcoat and her broad, flat shoes, holding a glass of wine she kept forgetting to sip, contentedly isolated in the unfathomable depths of herself, my big, slow, enigmatic mate whom for the best part of forty years I must have loved or else I would have left.

I stood up from the couch and went into the bedroom again, where I was startled to discover that I had already packed a suitcase. I must have done it in the early hours, when I was drunk. I had no memory of it. I recalled telephoning the airline, and my surprise at being answered not by a machine but by a wide-awake and irritatingly bright human voice – I cannot adjust to the world's increasing nightlessness – but after that diere was only the fuzzy, faintly humming blank of inebriated sleep. Perhaps it was more than the bourbon, I thought; perhaps my mind was going.

How would one detect the encroachment of senility, when what is being attacked is the very faculty of detection itself? Would there be intervals of respite, flashes of frightful clarity in the midst of maunderings, moments of shivery recognition before the looking-glass, goggling in horror at the dribbled-on shirt-front, the piss-stained flies? Probably not; probably I shall shuffle into senility all unaware. The onset of extreme old age as I am experiencing it is a gradual process of accumulation, a slow settling as of soft grey stuff, like the dust in the untended house, under which the once-sharp edges of my self are blurring. There is an opposite process, too, by which things grow rigid and immovable, turning my stools into ingots of hot iron, drying out my joints until they grate on each other like pumice stones, making my toenails hard as horn. Things out in the world, the supposedly inanimate objects, join in the conspiracy against me. I misplace things, lose things, my spectacles, the book I was reading a minute ago, Mama Vander's redeemed silver pill-box – there is that bibelot again – that I kept as a talisman for more than half a century but that now seems to be gone, fallen into a crevice in time. Objects topple on me from high shelves, items of furniture plant themselves in my path. I cut myself repeatedly, with razor, fruit knife, scissors; hardly a week passes when I do not find myself some morning hunched over the handbasin fumblingly trying to unpeel a plaster with my teeth while blood from a sliced finger drips with shocking matter-of-factness on to the porcelain. Are these mishaps not of a different order from heretofore? I was never adroit, even in the quickest years of youth, but I wonder if my clumsiness now might be something new, not merely a physical unhandiness but a radical form of discontinuity, the outward manifestation of lapses and final closures occurring deep in the brain. The smallest things are always the surest warning, if one but heeded them. The first sign I registered of Magda's malady was the sudden craving that she developed for children's food of all kinds, popcorn and potato chips, toffee bars, sherbet bags, penny lollipops.

In the street outside a car horn brayed; for me the sound of the car horn is that great republic's most characteristic call, full-throated, peremptory, with an undertone of amused mockery. I snatched up my suitcase and my stick and lurched to the door, like a long-term convict who has heard the dead-bolts shooting.

The taxi driver was a caricature immigrant from the East, bearish and taciturn, a Russian, most likely, as so many of them seem to be in these newly liberated days. He took my bag unwillingly and turned and lumbered with it down the porch steps. There are times when that entire coastal strip seems a film set and everyone on it a character actor. In the street the lush trees shone in the sun and there were bright blooms in every front yard, yet even now, in this early morning at the height of spring, the air had a musty, used-up feel to it, another effect of the general lack of weather, and no wind, and the smog that even the dawn rains cannot fully dispel. The driver did not open the taxi door for me, and I had difficulty getting into the low-slung vehicle, first throwing in my walking stick and then turning and folding my torso in half and shoving myself backwards through the door on to the seat and grasping my useless leg in both hands and hauling it in after me. Hard to be graceful when you are half a cripple. Throughout my laboured manoeuvrings, the Russian sat in front like a stone man, facing impassively forward, hairy-eared, his thick shoulders stooped. Now he shifted a lever somewhere – I never did learn to drive that country's vast and terrifying motor cars – and trod on the accelerator and the engine roared and the taxi surged away from the kerb like a stuck animal. Turning, I spied one of my neighbours standing out on his porch in string vest and shorts, watching me go, with what seemed a look of confirmed suspicion, as if he were only waiting for the taxi to turn the corner before running to the telephone and calling the authorities to inform them that the suspect bird next door had flown the coop. He is one of those indigenous, lean, tall types with greying curls and a bandit's drooping moustache. In the two decades and more that he lived beside us I exchanged no more than a handful of guardedly polite greetings with him, although once he came to the house to complain about a stray dog that Magda had taken in; I got rid of the dog, naturally. Now for the first time it occurred to me to wonder if the fellow might be a Hebrew. I thought it likely – those springy curls, that nose. Half the population of Arcady and its environs seemed to be of the Chosen, though not the kind that I was once used to; these
Luftmenschen
were altogether too sure of themselves, too pushy and uncomplaining.

We came down to the shore and turned in the direction of the bridge. I had been right, there was still mist on the bay, though the sun was steadily strengthening. The highway was congested with morning traffic, six lanes of it hurtling forward like a herd of maddened animals. I pressed my hands over my face. I was tired; my mind was tired; it is wearing out, like the rest of me, though not as quickly. And yet it cannot stop working, even for an instant, even when I am asleep; I can never quite come to terms with this appalling fact. Repeatedly now, especially in the night, I return to the awful possibility that the mind might survive the body's death. They say that Danton's severed head was heard to heap curses on Robespierre. To be trapped like that, even for a minute, to feel the system shutting down, to see the light finally failing – ah! The taxi banged over a ramp in the road and began the long scramble up the slope of the bridge, waddling along at a strained sixty, the tyres whooping and the engine rattling like a faulty air-conditioner. I leaned my head back on the greasy plastic of the seat and closed my eyes again. In the dark the old questions teemed. What do I know? Less now than yesterday. Time and age have brought not wisdom, as they are supposed to do, but confusion, and a broadening incomprehension, each year laying down another ring of nescience. What do I know? When I opened my eyes we had gained the first crest of the bridge, and the city was there before us, walking sedately up and down its line of low hills, the bristling buildings flat and featureless as in a stage backdrop at this still-early hour. A tiny aeroplane was poised on a high bank of petrol-blue smog. In all the time I lived there I was never once on the other bridge, the famous rust red one; I do not know for sure where it leads from or goes to. What do I care for mere topography? The topography of the mind, now, that is a different matter…
The topography of the mind
– do I really say such things, out loud, for people to hear?

A battered white car driven by a frail black youth veered suddenly into the lane in front of us, and the Russian stamped on the brake and the taxi groaned and perilously swayed, and I was thrown forward and struck my good knee painfully on something hard in the seat-back. A traffic accident, that quintessential American road show, was always one of my liveliest terrors, the intolerable absurdity of all that noise and heat and hissing steam and pain. The angered Russian began jockeying for position, and at last with a tremendous wrench of the steering wheel he pulled into the left lane and overtook the white car and opened the automatic window on the passenger side and flung out a polysyllabic Cossack curse. The black boy, a skinny arm resting on the door beside him, his long, delicate fingers drumming in time to the music thundering from his car radio, turned and gave us a broad smile, showing a mouthful of impossibly huge, impossibly white teeth, then hawked deeply and spat a stringy green gobbet that landed with a smack in the corner of the rear window by my face, making me start back in disgust. The boy threw up his Egyptian head and gave a heehaw laugh that I saw but could not hear above the traffic roar and the pounding of the radio, and shot forward gleefully in a black blast of exhaust smoke. The Russian spoke savagely some words that I was unperturbed not to understand.

From the bridge, by an exit I had never noticed before, we descended abruptly into an unfamiliar wilderness of filling stations and cheap motels and ochre scrubland. I wondered vaguely if the Russian really knew the way to the airport; it would not be the first time one of these angry exiles from Muscovy had taken me to the wrong destination. I watched the disheartened landscape with its raked shadows fleeting past and was struck yet again by the strangeness of being here, of being anywhere, in the company of all these deceptive singularities. The Russian was the Russian with the long arms and the hirsute ears, the black boy was the black boy who wore a torn singlet and had spat at us; even I was the I who was on my way to the airport, and from the airport to another, older world. Were we, any of us, anything more than the sum of our attributes, even to ourselves? Was I more than a moving complex of impulses, fears, random fancies? I spent the best part of what I suppose I must call my career trying to drum into those who would listen among the general mob of resistant sentimentalists surrounding me the simple lesson that there is no self: no ego, no precious individual spark breathed into each one of us by a bearded patriarch in the sky, who does not exist either. And yet… For all my insistence, and to my secret shame, I admit that even I cannot entirely rid myself of the conviction of an enduring core of selfhood amid the welter of the world, a kernel immune to any gale that might pluck the leaves from the almond tree and make the sustaining branches swing and shake.