The Vorrh (62 page)

The American looks at his map once again. Brussels seems to be based on an irrational grid. Eventually, he locates the cul-de-sac, snatches up his briefcase and strides on, past clipped gardens that are manicured to retentive perfection.

As he walks on, the buildings become older and more dishevelled. He arrives at the entrance of the public nursing home, enters and is met by the universal smell of old age, an indelicate ambience of urine and sour cooking; here in central Europe, it is tinged with perfume and garlic. He talks to the staff in a remote French from his high school. Most of them are peasants, or foreigners with accents weirder than his. He claims good, proper French, taught to him and his classmates by a tutor from Montreal.

A Moroccan woman in a stained, threadbare uniform of blue and white takes him through the old house, which has been embalmed in magnolia and disinfectant. They climb two tasteless flights of stairs. The American is nervous and keeps pushing his spectacles back onto the bridge of his nose. He had imagined this meeting for months, but had only arranged it by letter in the last few weeks; now, it is becoming real. Suddenly, his guide stops in front of him, and he finds himself in a large room full of seated women.

‘Madame Dufrene, your visitor is here.’

All the old women look around. He panics: he has no idea what she looks like. Then a hand waves from a seat by the window.

The once grand room has crumbled into institutional decay. He carefully crosses it, avoiding the damp patches and dropped objects that redesign an exhausted carpet. She is frailer than he expected, double-wrapped in a heavy shawl as the sun floods the streets outside.

‘Madame Dufrene, good morning! Please allow me to introduce myself,’ he begins.

Charlotte listens and smiles kindly at the incorrect precision of his French. He pretends to make an effort to engage in polite conversation, but soon tires of the charade and pounces on his only interest. For the next hour, he asks endless questions about the Frenchman. Most of what he says is incomprehensible to her. She grows weary of the strain it takes to understand him, becoming more and more uncertain about what it is that he actually wants.

‘May we talk a little about the last days in Palermo?’

She is aware that he does not see her, does not look in her eyes. He is so appalled by her fall from grace that he cannot bear to acknowledge her tired gaze. He buries himself in the questions and pushes on relentlessly.

‘Is it true that he could not sleep in his bed, that he had a fear of falling from it? Is that why he was on the floor next to your door when they found him?’

She thinks of the genius of the man and knows it is not what this large, lumpy American wants. For her, his brilliance was not in his books or his words, but in the moments when he became a unique, infused, individual human being, doing what he loved most. She thought of him sitting at the piano, playing, improvising voices. He could mimic everything from the trams squealing outside to exotic animals, from opera divas to common street singers. It made them both laugh, in that time when he still could.

‘Do you have any pictures of your time together?’

She expected this and pulls a large, crumpled manila envelope out from under her shawl. She digs into it and, after a few moments, produces a dog-eared photograph. They are posed like a married couple: she seated, him standing behind her chair; her kindness radiates, even lending beauty to her startling hat, which resembles the neck of a dead, inverted swan. The American is mesmerised: this is the best image of his literary hero he has ever seen. It shows a taut, immaculate man of precise, if diminutive, proportions.

‘This is wonderful, truly wonderful!’

She sees the excitement light up something else in her guest, and there is a flicker of likeness; he has a taint of the same erratic, self-possessed dynamism. This stranger has been her only male visitor, and he bears a trace of the man he so admires. She warms towards him and relaxes. He listens as she begins to unwrap an explanation of what their relationship truly was. It has become quiet in the room; even the incessant coughing has stopped. The ladies subtly strain to catch the details.

As he is about to leave, he remembers the gift he has brought her and rummages about in his briefcase. He presents her with the chocolates and asks if they can meet again. She is delighted and says nothing would please her more.

They meet four times more; on the last occasion, he visits her in her own room in the elegant, private nursing home that houses her final days in a peaceful dignity.

He had worked hard ever since he had first left her in the crumbling decay. He had instigated the move, and surrealism had paid for it. He had contacted everybody who had dreamed in its crooked path or published and promoted its flamboyant imagery, and had collected enough wealth to change her last few years. Now she shone in her reflective surroundings. She beamed at him when he arrived and showed him around the room, pointing out her prized possessions, which had been locked away in storage for the last nine years. She wanted to tell him everything, but there was so little detail that he really wanted to know, and she had already forgotten so much. Only the joy and spite remained embedded over the years; the rest had fallen away. Nevertheless, they talked for hours. She enjoyed the company of the soft, shapeless man, and did not welcome his final departure; he started to rummage in the briefcase and she knew he had already left.

Like a disappointing conjuring trick, the chocolates had transformed into a book. She stared at it as he adjusted his spectacles.

‘I thought you would like this: it’s just been published, the latest edition.’

She took it from him; it seemed unfinished, without a spine or hard covers.

‘It’s the first publication in paperback,’ he said gleefully.

She thanked him and held it close. They said their goodbyes and he slipped away, waving back to her along the diminishing corridor: she knew she would never see him again. She crossed the plush carpet and lay down on the bed, bolstered slightly by the crisp, white pillows, her thoughts soft-edged and reminiscent.

The dove had won over the raven, at least up to the very last days. She had fought hard and dogmatically for its victory. His cruelty had been painful to her, but nothing like the carrion bird that had continually stabbed at his own heart. Now she would banish that and only see him as she wanted to: mimicking music hall stars, or playing Max Kinder’s hopeless decadent fop, seated at the piano again, his fingers skipping
across the keys, his warbling voice dimming into a plaintive hum.

The book was in English; its titles sounded more emphatic that way.
Impressions of Africa
– he would have liked that. She imagined him reading it out, in the mock British accent he so enjoyed. She smiled, closed her eyes and put the book aside. She would never read it, not in English. She had never read it in French.

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