In the Shape of a Boar Page 13

  ‘Rilke says nothing about eating,’ he said suddenly. ‘Not a single line.’

  Ruth and Jakob looked up, creamily moustached.

  ‘Why?’ he demanded, provoking stares from two well-dressed women at the table next to theirs.

  Jakob swallowed and shrugged.

  Ruth licked her fingers. ‘What?’

  At that moment a fragment of cream toppled from the peak of her half-eaten cake, collided with the cherry which she had moved to its lower slopes, and sent both in a tumble to disappear down the front of her dress. She plucked at the neckline and peered down. Sol and Jakob stared.

  ‘Perhaps one of you might ask Herr Weisz for cake-tongs,’ she suggested to her attentive companions. ‘Why are you talking about Rilke?’

  ‘I'm talking about eating,’ said Sol.

  Ringplatz grew busier. A swirl of bodies got up momentum around the three of them as men and women strode into the square. A bell sounded in the distance, signalling the trolley-car's return up Siebenbürgerstrasse. Presently it reappeared, spilled its passengers into the crowd, picked up others, and continued on its route back down the hill. The three seated at the Adler's outermost table watched these comings and goings in silence while the shadows of the surrounding buildings inched forward across the square towards them.

  ‘Come on,’ said Sol, stretching. ‘The park. Let's go and pay our respects.’

  Jakob groaned, but rose nonetheless. Ruth hesitated, holding the cherry between thumb and forefinger, as though inspecting it. She had retrieved it by a discreet contortion involving a feigned sneeze. A small boy being led by the hand stared with unabashed fascination at the red fruit, his head swivelling at an angle which grew increasingly impossible with every step. When it seemed the boy's head must come free of his shoulders if it were to twist about any further, Ruth popped the cherry into her mouth. The boy's face registered such outrage that both Sol and Jakob laughed out loud. An instant later both mother and son disappeared into the crowd.

  How many are lost? Sol wondered idly, as they edged their way towards the sidestreet. So many faces are seen only once. Where do they all go? The little boy would cross Ringplatz every day for the rest of his life, until the woman grasping his hand turned into his grand-daughter or the world went up in smoke. He turned to Jakob as though to share this thought. ‘They disappear!’ Jakob would say. ‘They leave and never come back. So what?’ Or something like that.

  Sol said nothing, falling into step with the other two as they rounded the corner into Theaterplatz, part-shadowed and almost deserted except for the tables of the Kaisercafé. Some decades ago, the town's masters had been distant and Austrian. Now they were Romanian and nearer. In keeping with the change of patriotic spirit, the statue of Schiller, which had stood in front of the theatre, had been replaced by one of Mihai Eminescu. The patrons of the Kaisercafé sat quietly at their tables as if waiting for the adjacent building to disgorge an entertainment.

  ‘The indignity,’ muttered Sol to the stone figure who was no longer Schiller.

  ‘And the injustice,’ added Jakob.

  ‘Who cares?’ Ruth complained. ‘It's not as if he's been banned.’ A year ago, she had sat through the three parts of Wallenstein on consecutive evenings in this very theatre. ‘Look, there's Lotte and Erich. And Rachel.’

  Three waving arms had been raised from amid the tables of the Kaisercafé. Ruth waved back and walked across, turning on her heel after a few paces to make a face at the two of them, who had not moved.

  When she was safely distant, Jakob turned to Sol.

  ‘She's in love with you,’ he said.

  ‘Or with you,’ said Sol.

  Jakob shook his head. Both looked up at Eminescu but there was nothing more to remark in the dark bronze features which looked out over the slow comings and goings in Theaterplatz. Ruth was squatting between the chairs of her friends, who leaned forward to catch her words, their tousled heads framing her face. She stood up suddenly, miming bafflement. The two girls laughed.

  ‘They're talking about you,’ said Jakob.

  ‘About us,’ Sol replied. ‘Or you. Or anything.’

  He watched the girls huddle together, telling their secrets or guessing those of others. His fellow students were drawn to what he might represent for them. At the same time they held back from him through fear of discovering that he was no different from themselves. Were he to reach out, to Lotte or Liesl or Edith, they would shrink back in puzzlement at his ordinary need for contact, touch, whatever it was that he craved and did not find. He had known Jakob since he was six years old, Ruth since nine. To the others he was untouchable. He had been their champion at the Gymnasium. When, once, he had stood up to ask Herr Zoller how, if it was so crude a language as he maintained, Shakespeare himself had been translated into Yiddish, then he had felt himself propelled forward by all of them: Lotte, Rachel, Erich, Jakob, even Gust! Ritter who was amiable and simple. Even by Ruth. Zoller had made no answer. But there was no mystery. He spent his time in the libraries of the Toynbeehalle and the University. He spoke French, some English, his mother's German. He puzzled over Latin and Greek, and the Hebrew his father had insisted on from the age of six to fourteen, after which he had rebelled and given it up. He was apart: an unpoetical poète maudit. Ruth was threading her way back through the tables.

  He wrote late at night or early in the morning, when he could believe that the only waking consciousness in the house was his own, piling up the stubborn lines until the heap would accept no more or collapse. It was some weeks after his last lesson at the Safah-Ivriah Hebrew School when his father had walked into his room and found him staring blankly out at the bare branches of the chestnut which grew behind their apartment. He had glanced at his son's distracted face, then to the page before him and its mass of crossings-out. ‘So that's it,’ he had said, prying Sol's protective arm from the manuscript. ‘That's how you prefer to waste your time.’ The remark had not been clarified at the time. But Sol had recalled it a few days later, and understood it then, when it had been purged of all possible ambiguity. After that Sol had told no one what he did, not even Jakob. He watched his friend watching Ruth walk across the square. Everyone had secrets.

  ‘"Here we are, telling the time at home. Speak! Proclaim!"’ Ruth called out as she approached. Three quick steps brought her to them. Then, pushing between them, she reached for their hands and pulled them about to follow her.

  ‘"We are here just in time to tell whatever is speakable and proclaim . . . the It!"’ Jakob responded from her right.

  Sol sighed. The previous winter he had pressed the ungarbled original of this line upon them, repeating it until even these, his most indulgent friends, had rebelled and taken to spouting it back to him in the form of gibberish. He had stormed off in a temper, stamping through this very square, where the words of his uncle David had come back to him, words to the effect that no one else was ever likely to take him as seriously as he took himself and to persist in this was a near-guarantee of unhappiness. He had forgiven Ruth and Jakob, or they had forgiven him, and the game continued intermittently, gradually becoming a private joke between the three of them. He smiled thinly and thought that his nineteenth year had gone on long enough.

  Behind Theaterplatz, the town staged one of its unexpected disappearances. The houses and public buildings gave out and in their place was Schillerpark. A ‘Schillerallee’ led to parkland which rose gently before them to a ridge marked by a line of chestnuts, still in full leaf. The roots of one, curving up like hawsers to anchor the trunk in its sea of soil, marked out their three places. A crowd of boys was playing football over towards their right, but they seemed too young to cause trouble. Ruth, Sol and Jakob eased themselves into their accustomed seats and leaned back against the trunk. The slope of the hill fell away in front of them and they looked out over the plain to the distant Cecina mountains, whose slopes were a ripple of grey-blue shadow. The sun bore down on the day's remaining light. Sol felt its ebbing wa
rmth on his face. Ruth had closed her eyes but Jakob watched the boys, whose chaotic game pulled them further and further down the slope of the hill. The three of them had been together all summer, as they had the summer before and the one before that. Their days together ended here more often than not.

  ‘You'll spend the rest of your life missing us,’ said Jakob. ‘When you leave.’

  Ruth opened her eyes.

  ‘If I leave,’ Sol replied, masking his surprise. They had had this conversation before. Vienna or Paris, Florence or Berlin; distant cities moved among his thoughts, whirling them through orbits which took him far away from here. An imagined future awaited him, somewhere. The three of them would think about their pasts here, but he would be gone, leading the fabulous existence of those who depart never to return.

  ‘I'll be lucky to get as far as Klokucza,’ he said.

  He met Jakob's eye but his friend turned away in quest of the football players. They had drifted out of sight yet the still air carried their shrill voices and even the thudding of their boots against the ball so perfectly that they seemed closer even than before, a team of noisy ghosts.

  ‘Perhaps it's us who will go and Sol who will be left behind,’ ventured Ruth. ‘I have a pretend aunt in Venice. We could live on a canal, just you and I, Jakob. And if he does abandon us, we will buy a cottage right here and recite Schiller to each other.’ She was in rehearsal with a number of their schoolfriends for a performance of Die Jungfrau von Orleans.

  ‘Our neighbours will evict us,’ said Jakob.

  ‘Rilke then.’

  ‘They'll throw stones.’

  Jakob smiled quickly as he said this. Ruth was leading Jakob out of the gloomy thicket of his thoughts, of some eventual leave-taking, Sol thought.

  Here is the time for the Tellable. Here is its home. Speak and proclaim.

  There was nothing to tell. There were no secrets behind them then. He did not understand what Ruth was prompting Jakob towards. Perhaps it was a joke against himself. Where was the time for the Tellable? When was that?

  ‘Or worse than stones,’ Jakob continued after a pause. He rose to his feet and glanced down at Sol. ‘But you'll be long gone by then,’ he said in a hard voice. Then he turned without another word and strode back up the slope.

  ‘Jakob!’ Ruth called after him. ‘Wait Jakob, what are you doing?’

  The two of them got to their feet and Sol made as if to go after their friend. Ruth's hand touched his foream.

  ‘There's no point. Not when he's like this.’

  ‘What do you mean “Like this"'? Sol watched Jakob's retreating back as it climbed towards the ridge. Ruth's fingers closed about his wrist. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Stay,’ she said.

  Only the tops of the town's tallest structures showed above the ridge. Sol and Ruth saw Jakob pause before he dropped down the far slope. For a moment his tight jacket and untidy hair were etched among the towers and spires: a giant sinking into a drowned town. The weather vanes of the churches of Saint Maria and Heilige Kreuz swung in slow synchronicity as an easterly breeze blew in. Next to them in the depthless panorama, the clock tower of the Rathaus was a little temple topped by a double-headed eagle. The two of them walked slowly up the slope and the cupolas of the Orthodox Cathedral rose before them, then the spires and buttresses of the Armenian Cathedral. The last step gave them the strange spirals of Saint Nicholas's stubby towers and the very top of the old wooden church it had replaced. The synagogue was behind it, further down the hill, and invisible. The breeze reached them. Far off to their right, the single pennant of the casino in the Volksgarten fluttered into life, then the tricolour flown by the commissioners of the Toynbeehalle, and last of all the swastika which flew above the Deutschehaus. The town glowed in the sunset's powdery light.

  ‘You look like the saddest horse in the world,’ said Ruth. He smiled as she nudged him. ‘Don't worry about Jakob. Everything will be fine.’

  The walk home took him through the southern end of Schillerpark. The rough meadow narrowed between an avenue of poplars and a row of cottages fronted by vegetable plots, until it was no wider than a path. The path became a street and from here Sol had only to turn left, right, then left again to find himself in Masarykgasse and home. But instead of continuing into the street, Sol made for the first line of trees. He could see the old prison ahead, whose dark barred windows had frightened him as a child. Now it appeared no more threatening than the warehouse it had become. Beyond it was the timber market, surrounded by a high brick wall.

  Before they had parted, he had asked Ruth if she were coming back to take tea. A casual shake of her head had reminded him that Thursday was a rehearsal day. He should have thought of it earlier. If they had gone directly from Theaterplatz then Jakob would not have stamped off in a sulk. They might have brought Erich along, and Lotte and Rachel. He should have mentioned it as they walked back from the river. Regret must have shown on his face for Ruth had asked him what was wrong. She did not understand; none of them had guessed. His mother's demeanour was quite normal in the company of his friends. At that point he had contemplated asking her outright to miss her rehearsal and come back with him; even if there were just the two of them. He had choked back the impulse. She had run down the slope and he had begun the walk home.

  The rear gate to the timber market was left unlocked until sundown, when the clerks who lived in the town's south-west quarter used it as a short-cut home. He might have passed through unchallenged and emerged on Siebenbürgerstrasse. He thought of his mother waiting for him now, sitting by the window overlooking the street. Were her hopes rising or falling while the minutes ticked away?

  Go home, he thought. The streets beyond the southern boundary of the park drew him in. Men in threadbare suits or overalls carrying lunch-pails or briefcases walked with him. Their numbers thinned as they were claimed by their homes until he walked alone down the gentle slope of Masarykgasse. A little more than halfway down the street, a light showed from a window on the first floor of an apartment building. He drew a breath and pursed his lips.

  His mother opened the door.

  ‘Your father's out. He'll be out till late.’

  She had chosen a cotton summer dress printed with tiny blue flowers. Her make-up was light and her hair casually pinned. He glanced into the front parlour. Biscuits and cakes were laid out on the table.

  ‘Out where?’ he asked, although he knew the answer. His father was drinking with Petre Walter, who worked as a finisher in the Lupu furniture factory and lived in Flurgasse. They had a plan to emigrate with their families to South America which both knew would never be put into effect but which nevertheless required lengthy discussions two or three times a week. Before that it had been a venture to build a number of workshops with apartments above them on a small plot of land inherited by two brothers who worked in the timber yard. Before that a haulage-brokering scheme, or had the ill-fated partnership with his brother-in-law, Uncle David, intervened?

  ‘Where are they?’ asked his mother. ‘Where is Ruth?’

  ‘A rehearsal,’ he said neutrally. ‘She told you.’

  ‘Mondays and Thursdays,’ repeated his mother absently. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘we shall have to make do with Jakob, Lotte and who else? Erich? We had a wonderful talk about . . . What was it last time? There was so much more to say.’

  She was peering over his shoulder, searching the stairwell for the guests she knew were not there. There would be no continuation of the discussion of ‘last time’, which was now more than two months in the past.

  ‘You promised me, Sol,’ she reproached him. She gestured vaguely towards the kitchen. ‘Why do you make me take up my day with preparations and then not bother to bring your friends here for a simple tea? Why?’

  He listened to the rising edge in her voice, swallowing the impulse to deny that he had said any such thing. The saddest horse. What had Ruth meant? His mother's tone grew bitter.

  She shook her head and said, �
�You make me so tired, Sol. I feel so tired nowadays.’

  It was true, as Sol knew. He often returned and found that she had not stirred from her bed but had spent the day staring up, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. There was something wrong with her and it could not be mentioned. Once he had heard her weeping in the front parlour, had gone to her and told her that life could not continue like this. She had smiled sadly at his concern and told him that he must not worry himself. He had taken her hand in his and spoken plainly. They would have to change, all three of them. She nodded, then freed her hand from his and walked across the room to the sideboard where a vase of cut crystal held an arrangement of dried flowers. Then she had carried the vase out into the tiled hallway and dropped it on the floor.

  Now she turned her back on him and walked quickly into the kitchen, closing the door behind her. The clank of crockery and the sound of tea being swilled from the pot. It would have been standing, cold, for hours. The stacking of the plates and saucers and the rehanging of the cups. There was silence for a few seconds. Then he heard his mother begin to cry.

  He listened, unable to move nearer or further away. He wished neither to stay nor leave.

  Vienna. Paris. Berlin.

  ‘So what have you done to her this time?’

  He started at the sound of his father's voice. The older man was panting slightly from his climb up the stairs.

  ‘What have you done?’ he repeated.

  Sol shook his head and turned away.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘That's right,’ retorted his father. ‘Exactly what you've always done.’

  ***

  Sol passed through the ritual of his expulsion in a lucid daze: handshakes, make-up removal, corridors, lift. Its doors trundled open on distant glass walls in which images men and women slumped on low couches and armchairs watched screens suspended from the ceiling.