Monument Maker, page 31
Another Danish? Miss Swedenborg suggested as she struggled to her feet and made her way to the kitchen. Pierre followed behind her. At the far end of the kitchen, facing the front windows, there was a wicker rocking horse in the shape of a swan. When we first met you told me about your walking tour of Scotland, Pierre began, how you went out in search of something. You inspired me to do the same. I’m going to bike around Africa and find what’s waiting for me. I suppose I came to get your blessing or mark the start of the journey somehow.
There is a flower that grows in Africa, Miss Swedenborg said, as she handed Pierre a tea in a chipped enamel mug, that only blooms once, for a single summer. After that, never again. But forever, from that point on, it is a flower that has bloomed, even when the petals have fallen off and the head has grown old and died.
Afterwards, in the soft glow of the streetlights, in the uncanny silence of his youth, Pierre stood outside Miss Swedenborg’s house and watched through the window as she rocked slowly back and forth on the wicker swan, her eyes fixed on some newly distant horizon. Then he turned away, and never saw her again.
BOOK FOUR: CHOIR
1. THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO FRATER JIM
I have come to rescue all of the disappeared, to reunite all true loves, to turn history to dust. I write as the captain of a ship, the ship of my fate, a fate that went down in the Mediterranean during the evacuation of Crete with everyone onboard.
There were few deaths during the war, despite all that has been written, all that has been spoken in lecture halls, in ministries, in schools and in memorials. Most of us went missing, were lost, our bodies unaccounted for, our deaths deduced, implied, though never verified, by our continued silence.
My own silence lasted thirty years and was facilitated by fortune or fate, the ship that I sailed on. Then I returned, I came back, and with me I brought back all of the lost, in secret, inside of me.
I read the pathetic letters that had been sent, heard the tear-stained pleas. Dear Sir, they read, Dear Madam, I am writing to see if you might have any information on the whereabouts of my husband. He was the captain of a ship operating out of Malta which was reported sunk in May of 1941. I am pregnant with his son inside of me and would be grateful if you might have any news of his survival or the possibility that he was captured and interned somewhere. I have heard talk of the concentration camps and fear that he may have been sent there. I am writing because I know your husband was returned to you and hold out the hope that mine, too, will one day be back in my arms.
Mumu Corlanis was the name of the rescue ship from Malta. A young man with a beard picked me up from the sea. He saved me, and I am still alive although now near the end of a third life, the one that I returned to after my life in secret, which in turn I was given to from my first life, my first life with marriage and a house in Calderbank and a family too, a father and a mother and a brother, much younger than me and so not eligible for disappearance himself.
My body was received by resistance fighters in Crete. I suffered from burns across my back and my hands and across my right leg. My face was a blackened mess. I was transferred to an improvised field hospital beneath a small town on the south coast of the island that had not yet been overrun by the Nazis. There a doctor attempted, with a modicum of success, to treat my wounds. I spent weeks drifting in and out of consciousness, my body in a tub of ice water beneath flickering strip lights.
Other times the orderlies would wheel me prone in a stretcher to the mouth of the cave. I was in so much pain that the wind felt like it was driving tiny diamonds into my flesh. Why have I been saved? I would ask them. But the words were confused. There were no mirrors in this hospital, this hole in the ground filled with the dead and the dying and the miraculously born again, and besides, for weeks afterwards my face was bandaged like the Invisible Man. My ID card became my reflection and when I wasn’t staring at the sea, that strange green-blue sea of the southern Mediterranean, now tinged orange with the diluted blood and the rusted carcasses of everything I had previously known, I would plumb the depths of myself, my round mouth the same cave I now emerged from, my eyes sunken, my memories a great chest of treasure, my marriage, my garden, my books. To be robbed of your own face is to truly recognise yourself for the first time.
Listen. Can you hear the sound of your own blood? Can you feel the force of the life inside of you? Do you dare?
The hospital was raided. They came in the early hours. They killed most of us. They pulled the bandages from my face and they marvelled. The first time I saw my true reflection was in the eyes of a Nazi officer. A golem, he called me. Not a monster but a golem. A golem is something that is created from the dust and that is gifted life. I thanked him for that. He spat in my face in return. A golem is a Jewish creation.
My eyelids were burned and torn. My eyes are filled with scum, I said. They beat me to the floor. I put my hand up to my face. My nose was missing. My mouth was an open wound. Drown him, they said, drown the golem. Look at the back of his neck, someone said, there you will find a letter. They picked me up and scratched at the flesh at the base of my skull. Omega, I said to myself. Omega. Nothing, they said, he’s already dead, and they pushed me in front of them. They dragged me to the edge of the cliffs and they pushed me off. I fell into the water as into a deep sleep. When I awoke I was weightless as an angel.
I floated through schools of jellyfish in the undersea light. I believed I had died and gone to heaven and that the fishes with their divine contorted faces were a manifestation of some final state of grace. Then something told me that I could not be drowned, not in this life, and I started for the surface. I appeared on a beach beneath the high cliffs, where I sat down and wept for the first time. There was no longer anything to stop my tears.
The stars came out. I read something in them, something incoherent. I believed them to be upside down. The world has been inverted, I told myself. Or perhaps it has only just begun. I was still in great pain. I walked by night along the beach. It was as if I could smell the planets. They were huge and they hung in space like my own eyeballs, red, luminous and with storms on the surface. They smelled of sweat and sulphur and of dead fish washed up on a beach. As I walked, the tide snatched my footprints from me. I will leave no trace, I told myself. I will disappear. What is the colour of Venus? I tell you it is red.
My mind began to play tricks on me. Like an unsupervised child with a pair of scissors it began to cut and paste my surroundings so as to appear senseless. A line of German soldiers stood motionless along the cliffs. They held their flashlights high as if they too had become puzzled by the sky. In the distance I could hear explosions. Something has fallen from the sky, I thought, and in my incoherence I believed it to be Wormwood as The Bible had predicted. It was in this state of mania that I encountered an old priest gathering driftwood on the sand. He froze on my approach. Then he raised his right hand in a Nazi salute. I replied with a V for victory and he simply nodded and turned away. I followed him with the hissing of the sea and the roaring of the fallen stars in my ears. I spat in the sand as I went.
He led me to a small white cottage secreted in a cove. He wore a dark-blue robe and a black fez. His eyes were like glassy marbles. Is he blind? I wondered, although unlike me he blinked. Can you see? I asked him. English, he said, English, and he nodded. He put some of the dried wood on the fire. No escape? he said. No, I said, yes, I said, I did escape. Can you see me? I asked him.
He touched my shoulder. Please, he said, please. He handed me a glass jar filled with goat’s milk. I had difficulty swallowing and the milk ran from what was left of my mouth and stained my clothes. The man rose and, running his arm along the wall, disappeared into another room. He brought me a robe like his own. I took off my clothes, stained with blood and milk and seawater, and stood naked in front of him. He didn’t look away. It is the state of my body that will figure the final judgement, I told him. Please, he said, please, and he handed me the robe. Joshua, he said, and he laughed, Joshua. I thought he was calling me Jesus. But perhaps it was the name of the person who owned the robes. God knows I looked like no one else. We ate fish cooked on the open fire and sat in silence as the bombs rained down and the waves rolled up the beach. Soon I realised it was the sound of the storm inside me.
If your face was taken from you and you washed up as the ghost of yourself in a hermitage on a small island in the middle of a war, what would you do? Would you try to find your way back home? I confess that it never crossed my mind, at first, though exactly why that should be I am at a loss to explain. I am a dead man, I told my companion, and he rolled back his lips in the mockery of a smile. I had taken a step into thin air. I had walked through walls. I had sloughed off my own flesh. I was a monster that even the Germans had no name for and I felt the same distortion in my heart, in my brain, in my capacity for sympathy and love, in my feelings for the past and for the future. Still there is much that goes against the grain.
After many remarkable nights spent in silence with the priest, I left the coast and travelled inland. I made my way like a thief in the night as searchlights poured over the sky and the hum of invisible planes coursed through my veins. I slept in ditches by the side of roads, in clusters of thick trees, once in a chicken coop in a burned-out farmyard. By this time the stars had righted themselves though the moon still appeared as a wound. I developed a taste for rough weeds and roadside flora and also for burglary, although the pickings were scant as most of the dwellings I encountered had been raped and ransacked prior to my arrival. I recall one family home, a small three-room bungalow, where what appeared to be recently extracted human teeth lay scattered across the stone floor. I gathered them up and put them in my pocket. Who knows what currency the future will trade in? I encountered mirrors, too, and I looked upon myself. I was not horrified. I fancied I had the aspect of a shark. Its torn mouth, its rudimentary nasal cavity, its lidless eyes. A shark never blinks, I told myself.
The rain came down and I sought shelter in an old shed. I could hear a cat calling somewhere, a wounded animal, horrible, like a torture. Then I realised it was the sound of someone planing wood. I crossed the courtyard through the black mud and peered through a slatted door. A man with a pair of goggles was carving a wooden Madonna. I laughed, then caught myself. What an occupation, I thought, in all of this, and I almost raised my arms to the heavens. I fought the urge to go in, to make myself known, to ask him why he continued in his task. This is too much, I told myself. This is like a book. But I couldn’t restrain myself. I pushed open the door and stood there in the frame. The man was startled. It was my first look of horror. And though there were more to come, a lifetime’s worth, truth told, there was something in this first look that made me proud, proud of the capacity of my skin, of the skill with which my body possessed itself, of my singularity, my ridiculousness. I am a little boy, I said to the man, and he understood me and was terrified. Until then the fact of my youth had deserted me. Now it came flooding back in awe. I advanced upon him like tomorrow.
After you have seen the heavens turned upside down anything is possible. Every belief is a fairy story. The state of war, once entered into, offers no possibility of respite. The whole world is a hospital. The rain came down on the tin roof. The man backed up against the wall. I held a single brown leaf in my hand, wet with rain. I held it out to him. I meant to terrify him. I kept repeating it. I am a little boy.
When he understood I was no threat to him, or more properly that the threat was to be overthrown by pity, he pulled himself together. He reached out his hand and took the leaf. Silently, I marvelled. I felt like the first man on earth. To me it was like a painting, the man, the leaf, the deformity, the pale light coming through the slats. But what to make of it? My appearance lent every gesture the weight of prophecy. Horror had made me dishonest. Behind the mask of suffering I leered and I leched. He looked at the leaf, now curled in his hand, the little veins that ran through it, and he wept. I had come upon the currency of the future.
An angel touched me on the head when I was born, I told him, and he nodded as if he understood. I felt unstoppable tears run down my face, though inside I felt nothing but a distant rattling, which I realised was what was left of my heart. I began to discourse automatically, vomiting baby words in a torrent. I said things like help me and daddy and small and in the rain, even as the way I looked, the very movement of my body, served to sicken it, to make of it a curse. My wife will be home soon, the man said, in faltering English, we will not betray you. I am the betrayer, my blood boiled, I am the enemy, though outwardly I sighed, and I snivelled, and I appeared as a fallen angel. I cast my eyes over the torso of the wooden Madonna, her tortured form emerging from a section of a gnarled tree. Christ was crucified upon his own mother, I thought to myself. And then he rose again. My own rebirth had been no less painful.
We drank coffee by the light of a single candle. The room is golden now, in my memory. The man has a thick black beard, small eyes, big hands. The coffee tastes of sand and of dirt. We talk of the war in simple sentences. It is a bad thing. It will never end. It is a madness. Some people are still alive. Many people are dead. Hitler is a monster. Giati? we asked. Why?
In the evening the man’s wife returned and showered me with pity. We ate bread and cheese and drank ouzo in the kitchen of their farmhouse. We played cards, even as in the distance the sound of shells reminded us of where we were and the pointlessness of our game. Still, there was time to kill. I heard a building crumble to the earth on the other side of the island, a fleet of aeroplanes strafing low across the sand and the dirt. I surveyed my hand. Suddenly I was caught somewhere in my past; fish-hooked, as The Bible would have it, my mouth agape.
My wife stands before me in the darkness of the kitchen. I go to speak, to venture her name, but instead I move up close to her. I place my hands just above her waist, just around her lower belly. I say that word to myself, belly, and I think of a ship, made of skin, and I draw back. She rolls on her toes back and forth. I feel her body tighten, contract. This is a murder mystery, I tell myself, this is a detective story. Then I realise where I am. I’m on an island in the war. I wrap my arms around her waist and I tell her something impossible, something terrifying. In response she tells me she is the three of hearts. Later, in bed, in a nook off the kitchen, she comes to me again. This time she is as sticky as a flower.
I rose in the night and entered the bedroom of my rescuers. By the wound of the moon I was able to make out the man’s wife, astonished though unafraid, staring back at me. Without thinking I blew her a kiss, a lipless kiss, though now it seems to me I was caught up in a song, a song that my own wife and I had chosen as ours before I had left on a boat for the war. It was an old song, a sentimental song, a song about saving all your kisses for a future point, for a blessed return. I had determined to spend all my kisses in advance. I helped myself to some provisions from the kitchen which I tied up in a dish towel and I stepped out into a scene from The Iliad where the sea lay aslant, like a mirror, or a stately sheet of glass. In the distance I could make out a flotilla of warships, their swastikas raised to the heavens, thin wisps of smoke rising up, behind them the first hint of dawn, war in peace, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
I walked the coast roads with no destination in mind other than a circuit of the island and a circuit of the island as though I was tunnelling into the sky. I passed the outskirts of Loutro and lost myself in the forests of the white mountains, where I descended through the clouds to the town of Omalos. I discovered many dead bodies. I slept with goats on the hills as a welcome guest. I sat cross-legged in the mouths of caves in my robes. I stole a pair of jackboots and a water bottle. I passed unseen through Lakkoi. Skines was burning. Vatolakkos too. On the road to Agia Marina I watched from the undergrowth as a convoy of tanks and motorcycles led a wretched group of boys and men to their doom. I saw burned-out houses, twisted metal stretching up, graveyards full of military equipment sunk in the sand like a surrealist vision of hell. I crossed the island once more. Outside Imbros I was shot in the leg from behind and taken prisoner before I could complete a circuit and create a vortex that would have delivered me to another future altogether, or so I had come to believe. Either way my SOS to the gods was not received. I was bundled into a truck and forced to stand in the dank hull of a boat that made the crossing to the Peloponnese. We were packed so tightly that I could feel the erection of the man behind me in my back. It was the first time I had experienced such a thing. An erection in this situation! I shouldn’t have been surprised.
