Winter's End (21 page)

“I didn’t understand. I was naïve. They let her escape into the mountains with a few companions. One of them, I learned later, was Bart’s father. They let them all go, but only to have more fun killing them. On Van Vlyck’s orders, they set the dog-men on them. I’m sorry, Bart. I’m sorry, Milena.”

Milena was weeping silently.

“Oh, my God!” groaned Helen, and she took her friend in her arms.

“I spent four months in their prisons,” Dora went on, “and then they let me out. The city had changed a lot in a very short time. People looked suspiciously at each other. No one dared speak to anyone else in the streets or on the trams. I wasn’t a musician anymore. I became a cleaner. All the
theaters had been closed. And they’d opened the arena.”

“What arena?”

“The arena where they stage their fights. You’ll find out all about that. You’ll find out quite soon enough. I looked for Milena everywhere. She was only three years old, and I was her godmother, you see. I managed to get inside over ten orphanages, but I couldn’t find her. I ended up thinking they’d . . . thinking they’d got rid of her. I mourned her for fifteen years until last week, when she walked right into the canteen with her short hair and her big blue eyes. It was like seeing Eva resurrected from the dead, coming toward me. I nearly fainted. But it’s better now. I’m beginning to get used to it.” Dora wiped her eyes, sighed, and smiled again. “Well, I think that’s the whole story, isn’t it? We’d better go down again. You’re all frozen, and so am I. And tomorrow morning we’ll have to —”

“Just a moment,” Helen interrupted her. “Bart said we may have weapons to fight them. What weapons?”

“Our weapon,” he said, “is Milena’s voice. Dora says she has her mother’s voice. Younger, of course, but Dora says it will be exactly the same in a few years’ time. And she says it’s a voice that can inspire people and rouse them to action.”

All three of them looked at Milena, who stood there with her head bent, and they were all secretly thinking the same thing: she looked so frail, so fragile, a young girl freezing in her black coat, eyes
red with weeping, one tear still hanging from the end of her nose. How could anyone imagine that what she had in her throat could “rouse people to action”? She herself didn’t seem to think so at this moment.

“That’s what you said, Dora, isn’t it?” Bart said, as if reassuring himself. “You said her voice could rouse the people?”

“That’s what I said,” Dora agreed sadly. “But they’d have to hear it first.”

All four of them set off, arm in arm. The moon came out again, shimmering on the slate roofs of church belfries and the steely river.

“Did you go back to playing the piano?” Helen ventured to ask after they had gone about a hundred yards.

“No, I’ve never played again,” sighed Dora.

“Because of your hand?”

“It wasn’t my hand that refused to do it. A hand can be retrained. But my heart wasn’t in it anymore.”

G
us Van Vlyck was still in a furious temper. He was angrily pacing the corridors on the fourth floor of the high-rise building occupied by the Phalange headquarters, chin jutting out, eyes blazing. He marched into his subordinates’ offices without knocking and found a good reason to get angry at every one of them. Then he went out again, slamming doors behind him, returned to his own office, and for the tenth time made phone calls to people who kept telling him the same thing: there was no more news. As he hung up, he crashed the handset down hard enough to split it, swearing furiously.

It was not the loss of Mills that had upset him so much, still less the death of Pastor, whom he hardly knew. He had felt some slight compassion for the regional police chief on hearing of his terrible end. After all, this was the man who had obeyed his orders fifteen years ago when he’d set the dogs
on Eva-Maria Bach. Many men wouldn’t have had the guts to do it, and Mills deserved respect if only for his absence of qualms. But as for mourning his death . . .

No, what infuriated Gus Van Vlyck so much was to know that Milena Bach, Eva-Maria’s daughter, was at large and that they hadn’t been able to lay hands on her. The police hadn’t been so soft a few years ago, and he was going to say so at the next Council meeting. If they gave him time to speak, that is, because some of them never missed a chance to bring up the bitter memory of his mistake, now long past but coming back to confront him full on today.

When asked, just after the execution of Eva-Maria Bach, “What do we do with the child?” he had hesitated. The mother had given them trouble enough. Why encumber themselves with the daughter and risk the possibility of her reviving the singer’s memory someday? Common sense called for the child’s death. There was a special unit for that kind of thing, efficient men who acted fast and well. You didn’t have to face the details yourself. “What do we do with the child?” All you had to do was keep your mouth shut, and the killing machines would know what that silence meant. You wouldn’t even have to feel responsible.

But his opinion had been asked, and he’d been as weak as a woman. “The girl? An orphanage, as far away from here as possible. At the other end of the country!” Even as he barked out this order, he
had a presentiment that it was the wrong decision. Today he knew it, and the certainty had him seething with rage.

He left the headquarters at five in the afternoon without telling anyone. Disdaining the elevator, he ran four floors down the service staircase. Seeing him emerge at the front of the building, a driver stood up very straight, cap in hand, and opened the back door of a black limousine. Van Vlyck ignored him and marched straight on ahead, his wide shoulders taking up half the sidewalk. A tram screeched to a halt a few yards away from him, but he preferred to continue on foot.

In Opera House Square, he cast a look of dislike at the abandoned theater, its door obstructed by piles of refuse, windows boarded up with planks roughly nailed across them. He spat on the ground. Why couldn’t he rid his mind of such poisonous memories the way a rotten tooth can be taken out, or a gangrenous limb amputated? When would they get around to demolishing these walls, razing the building to the ground, and renaming the square itsel f? It was getting too much to bear! Voices came through the stones, still vibrating here after all this time. Sometimes at night he heard them echoing, joining in unison, responding to one another. Didn’t other people hear them? Were they deaf?

One voice among them all never ceased to haunt him. He could stupefy himself with beer until he couldn’t stand upright, he could bury his head in his pillows at night, but it still rang out, pure and
deep, unchanged. There was nothing to be done about it: he would remember, he’d find himself back sitting in the front row in that church one late afternoon fifteen years before.

The young woman, the soloist, is sitting ten feet away. She is very young. Hardly more than twenty. To start with, he admires her blond hair and the delicacy of her forearms under the lacy sleeves of her blouse. What made him come into this church? He never sets foot inside a church! Perhaps he came in just because it would be cooler in here on an unbearably hot day. He got his ticket at a plain table outside in the porch and felt almost ashamed of buying it. Going to a concert! He, Van Vlyck!

The church was empty when he went in. He sat down in the front row and immediately felt so comfortable that he dozed off. Now that he’s woken up, the chorus and musicians have come in. The violinists are tuning their instruments. He hasn’t noticed all the seats behind him filling. He feels he is alone. He feels it’s just for him that the soloist now rises to her feet and sings.

She sings effortlessly. There’s only a tiny fold at the bridge of her nose, two little lines going up to her forehead. So close to him, at point-blank range, she crucifies him with her blue eyes and graceful bearing. For a full hour he observes her at his leisure: her fine hands, her fingers, her hair and the way it moves, caressing her shoulders. He sees the texture of her skin, the tender curve of her cheeks, the outline of her lips. And the woman’s voice pierces his dull soul. He isn’t used to such emotions, and he sheds tears. He, Van Vlyck, shedding tears! Listening to a singer and weeping!

When it’s over, he stands up and claps until his hands are red. As the singers take their bows, he could swear that she is looking at him, singling him out, smiling more for him than for the rest of the audience.

Back in the street, he knows that nothing will ever be the same again; another life is beginning.
My name is Van Vlyck,
he reminds himself.
I’m not just anybody. No one has ever resisted me yet. So why would this woman resist me?

Some weeks later he finds out that she sings at the Opera House, and he goes to a whole week’s worth of performances before venturing to approach her at the end of the evening with a bunch of red roses. That’s what you take singers, isn’t it? He casts anxious glances around him. Suppose someone happens to see him here! At last she comes out with two other women. He goes up to her, clumsy and awkward, feeling embarrassed about his flowers. He doesn’t know how to just give them to her. “Good evening. Do you remember . . . in that church the other day . . . I . . . you . . . well, we saw each other.” She doesn’t remember it at all.

All the same, he gets her to agree to meet him in a café
next day. As she drinks a cup of chocolate, she tries to explain. “No, really, I was looking at you in just the same way as I looked at everyone else. I’m happy when the audience applauds and I smile at them, that’s all. You were right in front of me; I couldn’t ignore you. This is a misunderstanding, you know.” He doesn’t believe it. The poison has entered his veins and is streaming along them. He pesters her. He follows her to the building where she lives. He rings her doorbell. She refuses to see him. “You frighten me! I wish you wouldn’t come to see me at the Opera House anymore.
Please. I don’t want you to go on giving my little girl so many presents. You frighten me. You really do. Can you understand that? You frighten me!” No, he can’t understand it. All he wants is to marry her and live with her. Besides, he’s already left his wife and abandoned his children to be free for her. She can’t let him down now! She has to be brought to understand! If only she had a little common sense!

One evening he makes his way to her dressing room in spite of her orders not to let him in. He tries to kiss her. She resists. He threatens her. He seizes her arm, pressing it too hard. She slaps his face. She slaps him, Van Vlyck! He strides away along the theater corridors with his reddened cheek, under the mocking gaze of the musicians and singers. His cheek bears the mark of his shame and dishonor.

From then on he isn’t the same man anymore. After two weeks he decides to take the plunge. He’s been thinking about it for a long time. Now the time has come: he joins the Phalange and takes the oath of loyalty to the movement.

That evening he and two other new recruits visit prostitutes in the slums and spend the night drinking. He goes home dead drunk and exhausted in the small hours. Passing the windows of the Opera House, he howls like a wild beast. From now on that’s what he’ll be, a wild beast. And he has found his pack. No one will ever laugh at him again.

When the Phalange seizes power in a bloody coup a year later, he has made headway: he gets a responsible position with the state police. He is among those who set off in pursuit of Eva-Maria Bach. “I have an account to settle,” is all he explains.

His colleagues understand. “Don’t worry, Gus. When we catch up with her, you can be in charge of the operation. Do
whatever you like with her.” They spend months tracking her down. She really gives them the runaround.

But one evening they catch her at last, in a little provincial concert hall in the north of the country. On that day he’s been drinking too much again. He’s not well. He doesn’t enter the hall with the others; he leans against the wall outside. He hears it all: the yells, the sound of the piano breaking up.

As she comes out of the hall, astonished to be going free, Eva-Maria Bach sees him lurking in the shadows. Their eyes meet. She thinks he has just saved her. She thinks he gave the order to let her go. How remorseful she feels for her cruelty to him! How generous he is to forgive her! She takes a step toward him, but he stops her from coming any closer with a gesture. She understands: he doesn’t want to compromise himself in front of his colleagues. So she simply says, from a distance, “Thank you.” She finds the strength to smile at him in spite of her terror, in spite of Dora, who is still in the hall, a prisoner, her hand nothing but a mass of crushed flesh. She repeats it, “Thank you.” She is thanking him for herself, but above all for her little daughter. She can be reunited with the child tomorrow and hold her in her arms. “Thank you,” she says.

They push her out into the road, telling her to get out for good. Van Vlyck can’t control the spasms of his stomach anymore. Resting his hands on the dingy wall of the little town hall, he throws up copiously. His vomit soils his boots and pants.