Napoleon's Roads (10 page)

Reminding us of Freud's statement that there is no such thing as accident – tracing it, humorously, back through Napoleon and Schiller – Raimondi, reconstructing from hints and fragments the position of the Heinborn, a position which he describes as the
lacuna
about which all the philosopher's work turns, argues not only that those things which are lost are
deliberately
so, as modes of repression, but that the loss does not come from within the individual, as a form of psychosis, but from without, given that the individual is a
social construct
, and is best conceived as infiltrated, from the point of his/her inception, by devices – psychosocial
strategia
– that filter discourse, determine what may or may not pass utterance. You ‘lose' text; you ‘lose' pages; your computer ‘swallows' a fragment, a paragraph, a document, a month's work, but it is never ‘accident'.

~

A barricaded village hemmed in by snow, wolves and mounted marauders, struggling to keep them at bay. True, a thought only. But who is to say that, even as these words are written, it is not being snuffed out, as the first gates are smashed, the first of the invaders break through, homes, barns, woodpiles already blazing from the burning arrows?

~

Clear
night words – or, if not clear, at least the spidery-because-unseeing hand decipherable – leading to a furrow or trench where two other lines cross and for a short space – four or five words – write over. As if another animal had used the same narrow pass, obliterating the tracks of the first. Memory, partial as it is, suggests one thing, although attempts to decipher the scrambled lines do not seem to support it:

that                     ,a      ssing

   but I

            pages             ssing

                   utterable as         they

            ggling

                                  dismiss

its

~

Raimondi, in
The Hidden Heinborn
(1986), identifies the thread of a counter-movement, a kind of rescue. Whereas Schiller, Napoleon, claim there is no accident because all is in fact
fate
, Heinborn demurs, although in a manner that suggests he is himself battling with his own in-filt(
rat
)ers, telling a tale of a philosopher, on the very margins of empire, exiled amongst savages, believing he is alone, and that the insights to which he has at last come, into the mind of empire, will die with him, unaware that the weakest point of empire, its periphery, is so not only because it is here that it meets its as-yet-unconquered resistance, but because it can be only so long before those internal resisters banished to it realise, counter-intuitively, that they are not alone, and that, in their very isolation, they have a power they had not thought they had. What are the implications for what has been lost? Is there hope of retrieval? Has he identified – embodied – that loss, within the person of the exiled man
who does not know that he is not alone
?

~

Save continually, B. says, back everything up. But even this will not stop it. There is a kind of rent that you pay to the Machine. A word here, an emended sentence there, a whole set of edits and corrections, a lapse of concentration, a mis-filing, a careless or accidental deletion. At last, she says, we've come to a point, a technology, where –
to all appearances
– words can
dis
appear without trace, or where only the True Adepts, the Technocrats, can retrieve them. There are also, out there, the viruses, that can be imported, can infiltrate, obeying some other program, cutting swathes through our documents, eating whole fields of text.

~

How there had been difficulty getting here this time – how
they
had had difficulty – and he had been afraid he'd lost his connection, his link to it, which would be like losing a sacred centre, one of the few he had, maybe the only, and how, perhaps, he should write this down, all of it, in a journal entry, or in a letter to someone, but before he had worked much on the idea, and by now at the foot of Carr Street, on the top of the beach track, he found himself making, still only in his mind, a different kind of journal entry, on a further idea the previous idea had suggested. But by the time he had found the first words for this he was slipping down the grassy sand-ledge to the beach itself, and taking off his clothes, and was soon swept up in the enchantment and exhilaration of the waves and the twilight and the utterly deserted place – his only companion a reef heron stepping slowly along the far edge of the tidal lagoon – and the rain which then started and continued while he swam and body-surfed, soaking his clothes up on the beach and stippling the sea's surface. His thinking, there, on the fringe of the continent, that he had come somehow to an edge of things, if only of a day full of people, uncertain weather, the frustrations of packing while the storm threatened, the driving through the earlier teeming rain (the heavens had opened around Nara), arguments …

~

Yen Dokla. The forest. Of which no-one in that city will speak, so few historians even make mention. And yet, as the regime was crumbling, I found, in a small worker's cottage by the railway, an old man – it was his son who had summoned me, having heard that I had been making enquiries – who seemed to want absolution. He had never spoken, he said, for, in the early years, he had watched the fate of anyone who had. But a survivor – there
had
been a survivor – had told a group of them, and presumably others. And had subsequently disappeared. The regime had tracked him. Three thousand in one night, that man had said. And those who had done the shooting were themselves shot, a long way away, taken there so that those who then shot them would not know why they were doing so.

~

So that
now he has only to pause, in something he is reading, pause and stare, for the paragraph to begin to disintegrate, the sentences break up and drift apart, each word seeming only a fragment of a lost original, each phrase just a trace of a now-obliterated, undecipherable text beyond it … no matter what truth, what verisimilitude the writer might be seeking to establish, sheet-ice, breaking up beneath the runner, fathomless sea beneath …

~

Carrying his wet clothes in a bundle as he climbed back up the hill in the near-dark, all he could think of was a hot shower. And it was only then, luxuriating in the hot water, that he began to think of the jewels again, and found them so ordinary – but – the
un
ordinary thing – realised at least what had happened, and what it was just possibly a part of, the business of the Lost Pages, this time of the tail of something – he thought of it, for a moment, melodramatically, as the great kite of Nothingness – that had passed overhead, again, and the realisation that (again) he had not caught it. And so wrote/is writing, this, as a record of that passing …

~

And yes, it's all very well to say that with a little careful attention one should be able to find the end of the narrow pass, the over-trodden track, and take up the trace once more, but there, at the other end, although the two paths divided again and went on their separate ways, there seemed – as if in proof of the power of what I had so carelessly obliterated – nothing to connect them to their former selves. What had been a doe was now a fox; what had been a goat was now a stag; what had been a wood was now a crowd of faces.

~

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,
un
detected 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.