Napoleon's Roads Page 11

  The idea, however, stays with him. The next day he must go back to his grandfather’s village. A lead has opened; there is someone who might be willing to talk. As he drives – it is almost two hours away – he finds himself counting up how many such alleys there are in the old part of the city. He can think of at least eleven, on either side of the river, and certainly there are more; alleys, and some ancient cobbled arcades, with darker and more likely spaces even than the alcoves he had found in the Bishop’s lane. He decides to search them all, if only to convince himself that there is nothing.

  As he drives back, he is frustrated but also more hopeful about his project than usual, since although this person has claimed they know nothing, they have told him of a man in another village who had been a young partisan in his grandfather’s brigade. Rain begins to fall, light at first but eventually torrential. It sets in for days. There is no possibility, until it thoroughly clears, that any creature would think to forage, let alone sleep in the alleys. Yet the idea of them nags at him, seems to want to draw him in. It is a week before he can explore the first of them, and a month before he has visited them all, and by that time he has long realised that the process is much more complicated than he had envisioned. Why should the swan, if the swan exists, stay in one place? What is to say that at one time it is not in an alley not yet visited, and at another in an alley he has searched already?

  When the winter nights allow, he begins to go through them again – the alleys, the lanes, the impasses – and to visit them randomly. Not every night, and sometimes not for a week or more. He comes to think of it more as an evening walk than as a search. He is drawn to it, he would probably say, if there were ever anyone to ask him; it is not even something that he has consciously chosen. Some nights he does not bother to take a torch. On one such night he is walking slowly through a lane that has become quite familiar to him. Though cobbled and as ancient as any, it is a little wider than most, with an arcade along one of its sides, and towards the centre a section of it built in overhead so that it becomes, for six or seven metres, a kind of tunnel. He has just come through this section when he senses – it is senses, rather than sees – something in a dark passageway, a space barely a shoulder’s width wide, off to his right. He has just decided that it can have been no more than a cat, or a large rat, and turned to resume his progress when a door opens a few metres ahead to the left and someone comes out, caught briefly in silhouette in the sudden light from a stairway. He steps back into the narrow passage, not wanting to be seen, knowing how disturbing some might find it to encounter a stranger in their alley at this time. A small, curtained window opposite him is throwing a little light into the alley, barely sufficient to see his own hand by. As the figure passes, however, he can make out enough, and the racing in his chest, a kind of giddiness, confirms it. It is her.

  The next day, on the way to his lunch, he goes back to find the door. There is a plaque beside it and a picture of a broad white beach. A travel agency. Perhaps she is employed there. Perhaps, the evening before, she had been working late. He goes up the stairs to a small landing. A door to the left, a door to the right, and before him the door to the agency. He knocks and, when there is no response, turns the handle and walks in. A small, cluttered office. A thin, bald man with round, wire-rimmed glasses and a drooping moustache, and a gum-chewing secretary with lank blonde hair and an acned face, each of them looking so bemused they might have forgotten what a customer looks like. He asks them – it is the first thing that comes to his mind – about airfares to Thailand. They cannot help him. They deal only with eastern Europe. The beach, he calculates, as he walks back down the stairs, must be somewhere on the Black Sea. And clearly she does not work there. Perhaps she lives or works behind one of the other doors. Or has a friend there. Or lover. Unless he watches the place – and that for the moment seems impossible – he will never know.

  He changes his lunch-hour walk and for a time passes through the lane almost daily, but never sees her. His book is drawing towards an end; at least, his most difficult chapters are. Hopefully the rest will recompose itself around them. The person in the other village – it was in fact a hospice, and the man, although eighty-five and clearly dying, had a lucid memory and was anxious to unburden himself – had told him more than enough. The old man had been just twenty when the war ended, a partisan for almost three years; and his, the writer’s, grandfather had been the leader of the local brigade. When the war finished the man had thought the brigade’s work over but it was clear that it wasn’t. For weeks after the Germans had withdrawn there had been a steady flow of collaborators following them, in fear of their lives, and now, with the fighting over and the neighbouring countries refusing to harbour them, there began a steady flow back. Contingents, in forced marches. The collaborators who found themselves forcibly returned to the villages in their area had had a nasty time of it. There were beatings, murders, executions, rapes. From leading the local fight against the occupiers, his grandfather and those men under him who were prepared to help, found themselves in a peacekeeping role, trying to hold back a flood of fury and revenge. And it hadn’t just been locals forced to return. There had been others, passing through, on their way to the next border. A miserable lot, going back as some of them were – for some had worked in extermination camps – to almost certain death.

  The brigade was part of a system of safe passage. They would meet another brigade, from villages to the west, and a party of repatriants would be handed over. They would take them through the woods, avoiding the villages themselves, where things could get out of hand, and would hand their charges over to the next brigade a few kilometres to the east. They had done this four times already, but there was something different about the fifth group. Maybe it was because there was some particular person in it, or maybe there was some change of policy: he had not been told. They took them to an old mine entrance, high up along the ridges, that they had used to rest the earlier groups, under guard. As before, they had fed them, issued them blankets and straw and lamps and locked them in behind the huge wooden doors that had been put in place when the mine closed. Only this time – it was a group of almost twenty, men mainly but a few women, a couple of the men and women quite elderly – his grandfather had ordered them to brick the entrance closed. Not straight away. At first they had gone to a nearby village for a meeting, and for some food of their own; but then they had gone back and done the brickwork by torchlight. He, the man in the nursing home, had only done what he was told; others – there were seven of them altogether – had seemed to follow the orders without question, and so he had done likewise.

  It had been eerily silent behind the wooden doors as they worked. As if everyone within were too deeply asleep to hear. When they had finished they had gone back down to the village and behaved as normal. As far as anyone else knew they had passed this group on to the next brigade just as they had the others. And no-one had spoken. There had been an unvoiced understanding that no-one would ever talk about it, and no-one had. But now that the bones had been found, now that the other partisans were all dead, and the old man himself as good as dead, he could tell it all at last. Whether his grandfather had done it on his own initiative, however, or whether he was following orders from elsewhere, he could not or would not say. The old man had always assumed it was the latter. One of the other partisans, after a long night of drinking, twenty years afterwards, when they had spoken about that eerie silence, had said something about strychnine in the food: that they had been taken away for their ‘meeting’ so that they couldn’t hear the screaming, the hammering on the wood. But who knows? Perhaps, after all, that would have been the kindest way. The old man has had dreams, he tells the writer, all his life since, terrible dreams.

  It is a grey day. The bells have woken him again. The Angelus. Normally he can sleep through it, or at least go back to sleep, but there are mornings, and it seems this is one of them, when he knows that that will be impossible. He must, in any case, write.
He is just a sentence away from the end of this most difficult chapter, and he should type it while it is clear in his mind. He gets up and, beginning to dress, looks back at the bedsheets and the strange, bird-like shape that has formed itself among them – almost expected by now, almost familiar – and wonders if he will ever know how it gets there, ever know what it means.

  A TRAVELLER’S TALE

  Some stories float in time and space, unattached to anything. You know the kind: There once was a man, a traveller, who set out on a long journey … I want you to think about that. A voice tells these stories to you the reader, but that voice says nothing about itself, tells you nothing of the teller or even why the story is being told in the first place, apart from the fact that it seems to be assumed that it is a good and interesting and entertaining thing to do. Instead, the story floats in a bubble of time that moves, as if hermetically sealed, from time to time as it is told and retold, in a bubble of space that is sealed in the same way.

  Space that is no space. Time that is no time. I want you to think about that, too. I want you to think about it because I am conscious that this story might in some ways, at some points, seem like that. Perhaps inevitably. And I want you to know that, if it does, it is not because the events upon which the story is based – the events which inspired the story, or perhaps it would be better to say threw off the story, as a cicada leaves behind its carapace or a snake a skin it has outgrown – occurred in some timeless time or placeless place. Sometimes the teller does not say anything about themselves because they cannot. Sometimes the story is not being told because it is a good or an entertaining thing. Sometimes the story is being told because it has to be.

  I don’t know why I have written that paragraph. It was not my intention to do so. There’s a nervousness when you are about to begin a long story – to begin to spin it, as it were, from all the fibres that have gathered about you, some of which you have gathered yourself, and others of which have come like nocturnal creatures drawn by the light of a fire. It’s as if an older person were about to set out on a long journey and they don’t know if they have quite the strength to do it, if their legs will carry them all that way, if the terrain or the weather will be too much for them. They don’t know what the politics are going to be like, let’s say, or the bureaucracy – whether they will be held up at borders, or ambushed on country roads, or waylaid in strange streets in strange towns by officers of ambiguous allegiance demanding papers that they do not have. A nervousness like that, anyway, if not quite that. One sits there, with the paper and the pen, or perhaps the computer screen in front of one, and like that traveller one checks one’s pockets to make sure that one has one’s wallet, one’s passport, one’s pills, one’s keys; looks around one, checks again for the map, the toiletries, the changes of clothes; looks out at the weather, goes, mentally, one more time through the checklist of the things one does in order to enable oneself to depart.

  Normally, of course, this is all removed from the narrative that the reader encounters. But for some reason – something instinctual, I can’t really say much more about it than that – I can’t yet erase them, indeed I think that, for once, just this once, perhaps I shouldn’t. The journey, this journey, is too important. The heart is too involved. And when I say the heart, of course, I’m not sure that I’ll be understood – well, no, what I mean to say is that, to be understood, I feel that I need to explain that what I have in mind when I say the heart is a very durable thing that stretches over a whole lifetime, that is one of the most stressed and yet most constant, toughest, most durable organs of the body; the heart that has to get up in the morning and take up the often heavy – often very heavy, often too heavy – burden of being, let’s call it, and carry it, somehow, to the day’s other end. Even though it might just have been ‘broken’; even though it might just have been stretched, or laden beyond measure. But that is of course not only the bodily organ but also the metaphor, for the supposed centre and origin of love, for example, though of course not only of love – for tenacity, too, and other things are involved: courage, let’s say, or generosity. The heart that is, in the human mind, heart-shaped. The heart that is in so many ways also so vulnerable, that one also seeks to protect. So that the heart that I speak of – write of – here, is, as the heart has to be, as it can only be, a mixture, an amalgam of the two, of the bodily and the metaphoric hearts, as if they could ever be separated.

  When one seeks to speak honestly (of course one cannot say speaks honestly, but only seeks to speak honestly, do you see?) one slows down, and has to grope through the words, like coming down a mountain path at dusk, having to choose each step most carefully, since the early dew has made the rocks slippery, since the gravel is unstable, since there are roots protruding that are hard to see in the half-light.

  That nervousness then, because the heart is involved. And because the ruggedness of the terrain one is about to attempt one’s journey through is also in some measure the country of, the terrain of, the heart. But enough. There is too much of this already. I must apologise. (But then the reader does not know, cannot yet know, how much the heart is involved!) I think, nonetheless, that I have brought myself to the door, as it were, and am ready to open it, to step out, although not without registering the small irony that the first thing one does after stepping out, after crossing the threshold, is to turn around and to face the door, either to lock it or to check that it has locked itself, just as, from the gate, it is likely that one will turn and look at the house itself – to see that the curtains are drawn, that there is no longer any smoke from the chimney – as at something, some beloved thing, that one might never see again. Even then, having checked that the door is locked and turned again to face the journey in front of one, it is not always quite so simple – one’s next move is not always quite so simple – as my metaphor, my allegory, might have seemed to suggest. In a real journey, even if it is going to be a journey of many thousands of kilometres, one would presumably, having stepped through the door, having crossed the threshold, know where to go. Down the path, let’s say, or the driveway, and turn left, towards the road, and then, at the road, turn right and walk towards the village or the highway, go down into the valley or up towards the mountain pass, or head out over the plain. But with a story, a long narrative, it is not always so easy. The paths diverge in the wood, let’s say, or other paths enter them. One comes over and over to crossroads and the choice is not clear. Many roads lead to one’s destination; many roads prevent one from getting there.

  One has, perhaps – for example – learnt of the importance of the narrative, come to realise, as indeed is the case here, that the story is a story that has to be told, only because one has come to an end of it (do you see that I say an end, not the end? a whole extra complication there, in this matter of beginnings and endings; how they don’t exist, for the most part, or how they only exist in story, how their existence is perhaps one of the ways of telling that a story is a story). And if one has come to understand the importance of a story because one has encountered the end of it, an end of it – because one has encountered, found oneself involved in, the horror or tragedy of it, the damage, let’s call it, because that is what it is after all, great damage, although in this instance the tough, worn heart has been able to deal with it, is dealing with it – if that is what one has encountered, and is what has convinced one that the story is so important in the first place, then the ending, that ending, may in fact be the beginning, if not of the story itself then of the need to be telling it, and perhaps therefore should be in some way the beginning of that telling. Although in truth – I skipped over it just now, because involved with another trajectory, but even as I did the skipping over I knew that that was what I was doing and that I would have to go back to it – one cannot ignore or allow to pass unremarked this matter of the complication of beginnings and endings. Things continue past ‘endings’, even and perhaps especially things deeply involved in those endings. The heart, let’s say –
but I have already said this – has to get up the next day. People have to live with those endings, and the consequences of those endings.

  And it’s not just endings. Begin with a beginning, look at it, and you know, of course, that it’s not really or only a beginning. The traveller seen in his cottage at the beginning of this story, for example, was already fifty-eight years old – such a life lived, to get there! – and in even the most confined limits of that cottage and that morning had risen, after what kind of sleep, with what apprehensions, what memories going through his mind? What fears, what expectations, what dreams of resolution, of peace, at last, upon the eventual conclusion of the journey he was only just about to begin?

  Nor, of course, is it a matter of him alone. How could it be? Nor of – only of – that other party – of her – whose damage he is setting out to tell, whose damage, indeed, is still unrolling and revealing itself even as he sets out to tell of it. No (and there is another fork in the road there, another thing being skipped over; I am well aware of it: the way that the thing being told can be changing even as the telling is progressing, that the telling changes the told, that the told abandons, diverges from the telling, sometimes leaving the telling wrong-footed – that there is this radical discordance of processes). No. For there are, of course, in almost any story, other parties involved. At the beginning of a story, let’s say, there is a moment – hence this nervousness; I am back at this nervousness again – when, as at the beginning of a parade, all of the participants in that parade, the walking participants, the participants on floats, the drivers of the trucks beneath those floats, the marching bands, the dancers and the acrobats, gather in a marshalling area and either sort out, or are given instructions by someone, an author, as to who will go out in which order. And, of course, everyone in that marshalling area has come from somewhere. Every one has journeyed to the ‘beginning’ of the story, even those who will seem only to transect it at some point deep into its progress. Have journeyed, to the beginning, from their own beginnings, and the beginnings of those beginnings.