Napoleon's Roads Read online

  ~

  You trawl your mind for a phrase, write down what you find, use it as bait for others. With luck more will come and you will find yourself with a scattering of them, each feeling out for the others, some connecting by themselves, others suggesting new connections to you. Today, for example, it was the story of the photocopier, the walk in the park, the necks of the doves. You spread them out before you, trying to remember the idea as it first came, the shape that was lost in the welter of phone calls, interruptions. You had been walking across the Tuileries, and stopped amongst a small flock of birds on the grass. Everything had seemed suddenly so clear and so sensuous, as if a needle had passed through the most disparate things, threading them together. The doves had invested you with their secrets. The words as they formed in your mind had passed over their proffered necks like fingers. And you had sat down immediately, at the nearest bench, to write down this sudden understanding, the phrases polished, clear, exact. A poem it was, a fragment of reality no less tangible than reality itself. But then, two days later, visiting Claude in the Bibliothèque, you had been persuaded to copy your notes, to insure against loss; travelling is so dangerous, he said. And this one sheet, this one sheet only, passed into the photocopier and did not come out, neither it nor its copy, and not a thing you did could retrieve it. You had opened the machine but found nothing, and a week later the man who had come to service it – Claude had called you – invited you to look even deeper inside. Nothing, of course: nothing. And all you have now is the trace, the report, as of someone who has seen a ghost, or an angel, and knows it, and will never believe otherwise.

  ~

  We should look not at the fragments, B. insists, but at the gaps, the spaces between. These are the cities and the highways of a dark landscape, she says, or the beginnings of them. She says that within all of us there is a kind of tiny capillary like a lane or a neglected path in a wood that connects us – that would lead us, eventually, if we could follow it, to one of these highways, one of these cities. Except that we can’t follow it, at least not with language. The fragments we sometimes find ourselves with, that disappear or fall apart in our hands, are a kind of accident, a slipping of silence, into an illusion of language. It’s not just lost pages, after all, she says, but lost sentences, lost phrases, lost words, lost sight, lost will.

  ~

  one must tread/proceed so

  carefully, as if between the

  rocks where

  emptiness

  ~

  The heavens did open, and not infrequently, and much of what then seemed to be revealed had been preserved. It was this that troubled him – that he could not actually say that the quick of things/heart of the system had been withdrawn, but only, here and there, some marginal note, some particular formulation, some key or trace to something that may not have been quick or core or system at all, and the nagging, paradoxical suspicion this left him with, that what hitherto had seemed quick or heart or core may not have been so, for the very reason that it had so seemed, and that the losses of which he was actually aware, and which it had never before occurred to him to piece together – which nobody he knew had ever yet suspected or attempted to connect – might hold a clue to a different heart or system entirely. The possibility, then, that some hitherto quite unsuspected method – some actual cartography of loss, could that ever be devised – might lead him to a heart, a core, a quick he had never yet imagined. If It can be seen it is not It. And the equally nagging suspicion that, could he trace it, could he write any of it down, perhaps the only thing he should consider himself sure of was that he had therefore found nothing, that he had not traced it at all. (This, for example – this very paragraph, which he had risen at 3.30 a.m. to write, trying to ensure that it not be among those potential pages all too often lost in failure to rise, in the too-quick succumbing to the seduction of sleep: would it be here when he returned, after returning to sleep, signifying by its very existence that it signified nothing? He almost prayed that it would disappear, and yet was it not also just faintly possible that, in order to truly mislead him, some fragment of the truth, once accidentally detected thus, might be preserved, in order that it might continue safely, undetected or at least unconfirmed, in the guise of falsehood?)

  ~

  The cold snow. All night it snows. Blanketing everything. The village silent. The fires extinguished. Nothing left to resist the whiteness that, in the morning, covers the huts, the paths, the bodies. Only here and there a few sticks exposed, the frame of a burned hut, or cart, black against the snow, like a hieroglyph.

  HORSES

  ‘It’s a bit of a maze,’ she told him as they were making off under the arch at the edge of the office garden. She wasn’t sure that it was, but that is what Mr Bannister had said as he’d shown her around on her first day three years earlier, and she had been saying it ever since. People would get lost, especially in their grief, and it was good to offer them an excuse. And so they wound off through the Elysian Grove, up and over the small rise, towards the Forest of Peace, one of the new allotments, to look for N4.26. Saying nothing – for what was there to say, after all? one didn’t intrude – though she was looking back all the time to make sure that he was alright and that she wasn’t walking too fast. He seemed a bit unsteady, with that stick.

  At one point he paused. She sensed it immediately, and paused with him. On the path through the Salmon Gums, to listen to a bird. She didn’t recognise the call, but clearly it meant something to him, since he looked up and about him in the branches, half-smiling, as if he’d not heard such a sound in a long time, and then, the bird stopping – he hadn’t been able to see it – moved on.

  And they came to it. Easy enough, even if you’d never been to that part of the cemetery before, since the N meant the North, the city side, and the 4 meant the quarter (they always worked clockwise) between nine and twelve o’clock. John Arlington Heigh, it read, 1940-2009, Beloved husband of … Beloved father of … The Peace That Passes All Understanding, one of her favourite phrases.

  They stood there a few moments, as if it had been a destination for her as well as him, but then, realising, snapping out of her brief daydream, she looked at him – a strange, gypsy-like man with his thick moustache and his long white hair in a straggly ponytail. Rather like Johnny Depp might look, she thought to herself, in his seventies – and his eyes turned to her, though they seemed miles away.

  ‘I’d better be getting back,’ she murmured, and asked him whether he would be alright, finding his own way. He nodded – it could have been a nod – and she left, but within twenty paces, amongst the trees at the edge of the plot, she stopped and turned. He seemed so lost. Perhaps, if he wasn’t going to be too long – people were never very long – she could wait there, unobtrusively, and keep him company to the entrance when he was finished. She stepped back into the shade.

  Carefully he moved over to the grave next door to John Arlington Heigh and leant his cane on the headstone. And then, with a slight stumble, moved back to face squarely the grave of his friend. As people do, when they are about to pray or to stand for a few moments’ silence, their hands in front of them – always a problem, what to do with the hands – clasped just below the waist. But no, he was fumbling there, doing something, then, having accomplished it, leant back, eyes closed, or looking upwards, as he had done when they had heard the bird, and she saw it, clear as you could imagine, arching out from where his hands were, splattering over John Arlington Heigh, his wife, his children, the Peace that was Passing All Understanding, a long, golden stream – so long and so golden that, for all her horror, she couldn’t help thinking of horses.

  SWAN

  There is at least one man who has seen it, covering the figure of the tall, pale woman who lives in the attic of the grey house on Cathedral Street near the wooden footbridge, on the eastern side of the river. A large, white bird, moving slowly, with a kind of concentrated violence. Intense. Erotic. Frightening. A glimpse of it, nothing mo
re, as if through a light mist, although there can’t have been mist in the room. Nor can he, this man, ever have been there to see. Not mist then but the veil of dream. It is not, after all, as if he knows her, or could in any way have been prepared to find himself stumbling upon them in this way, with shock – awe – in some dark corridor of one of the almost-nightmares that have been assailing him, like the sounds of people beating on a wall. A woman he has only seen four or five times, in the market or on Poets Square, near the entrance to the Alley of the Booksellers. And noticed, of course, every time: he could not deny that. A single man alone in the city, too intent on his project to contemplate a relationship, yet longing for one. And now he is both desperate to glimpse her again and almost afraid of doing so. To him, after so vivid a dream, it would be as if he knew her intimately. To her it would mean nothing at all. But there seems to be a law to such things. The more you want a glimpse of this kind, the less likely it is that a glimpse will occur. As if the very intensity of a desire serves to distance its object.

  His book proceeds very slowly. The chapter he has been working on has taken months to compile. Each day now a few paragraphs, if he is lucky, and twice already, with the process considerably advanced, a tearing up of the draft, a beginning again, the tone, the point of view off-target, bringing him to an impasse. Writing each morning from eight until noon, then showering, dressing, going to one of the restaurants on the other side of the river, coming back through the market, shopping for his evening meal. A piece of fish sometimes at first – supposedly it was good for thought – but increasingly just cheese, bread, vegetables, the idea of dead flesh locked up and rotting inside him more and more repulsive. And now as he shops – buying vegetables, purchasing stationery, searching out a rare volume – he is looking for her, every moment, through the market, in the squares, in the Alley of the Booksellers, along River Street, along the Saint Michael Passage, along Cathedral Street. But nothing. She is nowhere. Nothing.

  She becomes an obsession; swans become an obsession. As if they betoken her, might be a means of summoning. One day he is coming back by a different route, along the old stone galleries cut into the riverbank where the fishmongers have traditionally set up their stalls to keep their wares fresh in the warm summer months, and they are there, as he turns to mount the street-level stairs. Four of them, gleaming white on the black water, gliding majestically with the slow current, crimson-beaked, astonishing in their brightness. So that now, each day, he looks also for them, and extends his riverside walks to improve his chances. One day, on his way to interview an elderly woman in his grandfather’s native village, he drives to the river marshes on the edge of the city in the vain hope that he might find them nesting there. On another he travels by bus across the city to the Royal Gardens and feeds the swans on the lake with pieces from a large pretzel he has bought at the cart by the entrance. The swans have a strange, spongy knob between and below their eyes, and some of them have raw-looking, puce-coloured bills, instead of the predominant orange. A gardener who comes over to talk to him, a short, muscular woman with bright-blue spiky hair, tells him that they are called mute swans. They shouldn’t be eating pretzel, she says: their diet is water weed. They live on the small island in the middle of the lake. None of them are breeding pairs, she tells him. There are breeding pairs on more isolated lakes elsewhere in the country, but these are largely un-mated swans. They wander. When he tells her that he has seen them on the river near the markets, she nods and says that those are probably from this group. She asks him if he has heard the rumour – that is all it is, she says, an urban myth – of the swan that wanders the streets around the market at night. It isn’t true, she says, though people keep thinking they have seen it.

  One night, after a long day’s work, he watches a program about Trumpeter Swans, huge birds on a vast lake in Alaska, then dreams of them taking off, lumbering into the air where they form a great V as they fly southward across the pink arctic sunset. There is something about them that seems deeply familiar, as if he might be one of them. Or perhaps it is just his loneliness, without the woman.

  He is writing a biography of his grandfather, who came to live with him and his mother after the death of his father when he, the writer, was seven years old. A war hero, once a leader of partisans, his grandfather had become almost a father to him, teaching him about the forest, teaching him about birds, teaching him to garden, and so much more. Some of his earliest memories are of following him about their small plot on the edge of the city, helping him with his various chores. His grandfather’s shadow, his mother used to call him, though this has come to mean something else after recent discoveries. Twenty-seven years dead now, his grandfather can no longer be asked anything, and nor can his mother, who died ten years later. If he is to find out anything it must be from the village itself, but no-one there is talking.

  He has, on his desk, a photograph of his grandfather wearing a beret, rifle slung over his shoulder. A man in his early forties, virile, strong, only a few years older than the writer is now. Beside it is a photograph of his mother, taken at what must have been nearly the same time, a beautiful girl with long blonde hair, dressed in white for a church festival, her arms around her younger sisters. One of those sisters, he knows, died before the war ended. The other one her mother and her grandfather lost trace of soon afterward, and had presumed dead also. A shadow, all through his childhood, like a dark lake in the background. Beside these photographs are now photographs of swans. He wishes implausibly that he could have a photograph of the woman from the house on Cathedral Street, but knows this is absurd. For all he knows, she has moved away; indeed, she may never have existed.

  Then suddenly she is there. He has just arrived at his usual restaurant, the Ifel, on the other side of the river, near the university. It is a warm late-summer day – no hint yet of autumn, though in most years it would already have shown signs of its coming – and he has taken a seat outside. Having carried a thought with him for the last hundred metres or so, he has taken out his notebook and started to write, and, looking up, the note finished, has seen her, being seated at the table opposite. She is wearing a soft-yellow blouse and light summer skirt, of an intricate Indian pattern. Her long, pale legs are bare and she is wearing light, elegant sandals. He tries to keep his eyes off her, perhaps unnecessarily since she seems quite unaware of him, but while she reads the menu he surreptitiously studies her face. She has a long slim nose, high cheekbones, eyes set so deeply that they would probably convey the impression of a tired sadness no matter what her mood. Wan, he thinks: a wanness.

  When his meal arrives – he has taken the daily vegetarian special so consistently that the waitress has felt no need to ask him – he eats slowly, turned slightly so that the woman is just at the edge of his vision. At one point he hears a shifting of her metal table and glances up at her more directly. She is adjusting it – one of the table legs must need bracing – and for a moment, oblivious to his watching, she parts her legs slightly as she tries to steady the table with her knee. For a few seconds – it is no more than that – he sees her inner thigh, white, secret, forbidden, and has to wrench his eyes away, in fear that she might glance up at him.

  Kept at bay for months, his dream now flushes through him, like a drug suddenly released into a vein. It is all that he can do to continue his meal, for the burning consciousness of her proximity. Her own meal, meanwhile, arrives, is eaten, paid for. When she leaves he watches her walk westward along the riverbank and then he rises, pays for his own meal, and walks off quickly in the opposite direction. Forsaking his daily market visit – he can do that later – he goes directly to his apartment and into its tiny bathroom. Closing the door, not turning on the light, he braces himself against the wall, in total darkness, and masturbates, more rapidly and violently than he has done in years.

  It is weeks later. He has not seen her. Again she seems to have disappeared. The weather is closing in. People are now wearing overcoats, scarves, heavy sweaters. A
lthough a few of the cafés and restaurants still have outdoor tables, they are for the braver clients who either want to be seen or to take advantage of the occasional outbreaks of sun. Evening comes earlier. He is in the local delicatessen for bread and wine and olives when he hears two elderly ladies by the cheese counter talking quietly about a swan. He pretends to be looking for cheese himself, in order to listen more closely. They are speaking of a third, a friend, Vladka, who has seen something in the Bishop’s lane, hard by the cathedral.

  ‘The one with the mushroom sellers?’ asks one.

  ‘No,’ says the other, ‘that little alleyway that runs off it, near the Bible shop, and slopes down to the river.’

  Nor is it clear whether what Vladka saw was the swan at all – that, the word that had initially caught his attention, was merely the first reaction of the smaller of these two women, when the other had mentioned it – but it was large, and feathered, or appeared to be, in a very dark part of the alley, an alcove, near some rubbish bins. She had only glimpsed it, Vladka, when someone had opened a door to let out a cat; it might just have been a bundle of rags, but she could have sworn.

  ‘Did she try to touch it, poke it with her stick?’ the smaller woman asks.

  ‘No! Of course not,’ says the other. ‘Imagine if it had moved! Hissed at her! She would probably have fallen and broken something.’

  ‘And it might have been a person after all, a man, trying to sleep.’

  ‘Yes, a man, and he wouldn’t have taken kindly to being poked with a stick!’

  Back in the apartment, hours later, his dinner over and his bottle of wine half-finished, he washes the dishes and, turning out the kitchen light, about to go back to his desk, looks out the window at the moon rising above the hill behind the house. It is a clear night. He can even see a few stars. And, hearing one of his neighbours coming slowly up the ancient stairs from the street below, resolves something. Rummaging in the cupboard beneath the kitchen bench he locates his torch, checks it, changes its batteries and sets out for the Bishop’s lane. He is there within minutes, at first walking its length, trying to accustom himself to the pitch dark, then retracing his steps, using the torch carefully, keeping its beam on the ground close by him, aware that whoever lives in these houses – priests, most of them – may not take kindly to someone searching their alleyway. But, although he finds three or four likely alcoves, a couple of them with bins in them, there is nothing untoward. No pile of rags, no homeless person trying to sleep, no swan.