"Shroud" - читать интересную книгу автора (Banville John)

TWO

Come, my ghostly girl, plump up my pillows and sit by me here and I shall tell you a tale, a tale I had thought to think of no more until you brought it all back. It begins long, long ago, in the town of Antwerp, with a stroll along those little winding streets the name to which I gave, inevitably, was the Vander Way. The corner of the square with the plane trees was the crossing point from my world into his. When I think of that spot the weather in it is always grey, the luminous, quicksilver grey of an early northern spring, the colour for me of the past itself. On our side, the street leading up to the square was very narrow, and had to climb a slight incline, at a tilt, the left-hand pavement set higher than its counterpart on the right, giving me a giddy, toppling sensation as I walked up it, always, for some reason, on the lower level. Instead of a shifting church spire and the fragrance of hawthorn blossom I have as memory-points the three golden balls over Wassermann's pawnshop – how did they keep such a high shine, I always wondered, were they made of real gold? – and the warm, cloying aroma of vanilla from the pastry shop on the corner of the square. The big houses in the terrace on the far side, the Vander side, beyond the trees, were tall and brown and many-chimneyed; in the frost-smoke of winter mornings their upper reaches would crumble into dreamy insubstantiality, like the diaphanous edifices in the background to a Memling or a Tintoretto. They had shutters, and wrought-iron balconies, and here and there one of the tall windows would afford a glimpse of the opulent life within: a blazing chandelier, a bowl of roses on an antique table, a slender woman in silk standing with one arm folded and an elbow cupped in the palm of her hand, smoking a cigarette and looking down upon the world with an expression of lazy dissatisfaction. The Vander apartment itself was a numerous succession of high, cool rooms painted silvery white, or Greek blue, or deep, rich red. To my youthful, hungry eye the furnishings, all that brocade and ormolu and dark, gleaming wood, seemed the very epitome of taste and discreet luxury, although I suppose in reality it was just the usual high-bourgeois clutter. The Vanders did not seek to hide the fact of their wealth. Vander senior was a diamond merchant, an occupation that in a city other than ours would have seemed excitingly louche and exotic. He was very shrewd and careful behind a breezy manner. He travelled a great deal, to Amsterdam, Paris, London, and I suspect kept a mistress in more than one of those cities: he had a way of fingering his small moustache and smiling drowsily to himself that betokened a rich mental store of voluptuous images. His wife was a large, fretful woman, soft as a pigeon, big-bosomed and broad-beamed, with very round, starting eyes, of a washed-out blue that was almost colourless, and that gave her a permanent look of surprise and alarm. Everyone addressed her as Mama, even her husband. Axel treated his parents with indulgent disdain, affecting to be amused by their complacencies and pretensions. "Typical of their kind, of course," he would say, and heave a languid sigh. "I know I should hate them, but I can't." The apartment also housed a number of Vander relations, aunts and uncles, a brace of distant cousins, elderly, timid, curiously ill-defined persons, who kept out of sight as much as they could, as if fearing to risk expulsion by drawing attention to themselves. On Sunday evenings they would dispose themselves about the shadowy corners of the drawing room to listen with mournful earnestness as Mama Vander sang lieder to the piano accompaniment of her husband, or sometimes an unwilling Axel. She had a lachrymose mezzo voice that quavered perilously on the lower notes. She favoured the more saccharine songs of Schubert and Robert Schumann. These recitals would leave Axel shaking with mingled mirth and exasperation. He was a more than passable pianist. When we were at school together he had tried to teach me one or two easy pieces, without success. "Oh, you are hopeless,"he would say, and call me Hanswurst, and make a play of punching me in the chest. He was right. I could not keep the tunes in my head, and my outsized fingers – Hanswurst was right – wallowed over the keys like two huge handfuls of raw sausages.

In those days – I am speaking now, my dear, of fifty years ago, and more – the Vander's were for me the very ideal of what a family should be: civilised, handsome, amused and amusing, at ease with themselves, knowing precisely their position in the world. I see myself moving amongst them, my face on fire with their reflected light, like a rough youth who has been invited up from the stew of groundlings to take part, in however small and passive a role, in the performance of a marvellous, sophisticated, glittering comedy of manners. If I had not exactly been spawned in an estaminet, as the poet so prettily puts it, our place – I would never have thought to call that low, dim warren an apartment – was the opposite of where the Vander's grandly resided. Our family shared no candlelit Saturday night dinners abuzz with lively dispute and multilingual jokes, enjoyed, or endured, no Sunday song recitals; shouts, shrieks and the sound of many siblings exchanging energetic blows were our weekend music. We lived an underground life; I have a sense of something torpid, brownish, exhausted; the smell is the smell of re-breathed air… But I do not intend to oppress you with reminiscences of my family. It is not that they are any longer an embarrassment to me – I have so many, more recent, things to be ashamed of – but because, because, well, I do not know. Father, mother, my older brothers and sisters, those botched prototypes along the way to producing me, and the many younger ones who were always under my feet, they have in my memory a quaint, outmoded, in some cases badly blurred, aspect, like that of the incidental figures standing about self-consciously in very old photographs, smiling worriedly and not knowing what to do with their hands. Among them I was too big, in all ways; I was the giant whose head threatened to knock a hole in their ceiling, whom they must feed and tend and humour, and encourage away from the windows lest the neighbours look in and be frightened.

I believe I would have thought better of my family, or at least more warmly, if we had been really poor, I mean ghetto poor. There was a touch of desert romance to the real shtetl people one met in the streets round about where we lived, a hint of the tent and the thorn fire and fiddle music and religious gaiety, mat we entirely lacked, or had long ago suppressed. We had our own pretensions: my father too was a merchant, although it was not jewels but second-hand clothes that he dealt in. I was, of course, accepted by the Vanders; they had assimilated me; I was Axel's friend, and therefore a special case, exempt from the general distaste – I would not put it more strongly than that – with which the Vanders regarded what in my presence were referred to delicately as your people. Over dinner at the apartment Axel's father liked to divert the table with a routine he had developed, involving an archetypal couple, Moses and Rahel, both of which parts he would play in turn, screwing up his eyes and bowing from the shoulders and crooning and rubbing his hands, until his wife, laughing tearfully, would flap her napkin at him and cry, "For shame, Leon, for shame, you will bring a judgment on us!" It did not occur to anyone around that table, not even to me, on the few, treasured occasions when I was invited to dine there, that I should feel insulted or humiliated by what was, after all, only a piece of good-humoured mimicry. Axel too was more than anything else amused to have for a friend a member of that very race whose pernicious influence on the body politic he claimed to reprehend. I say claimed to, because I do not believe that Axel cared in any serious way about these public matters, despite his frequent and bellicose pronouncements on them. Things that did not touch him directly could not be of true, deep, thoroughgoing consequence; it was as simple as that.

He was beautiful, was Axel. Not handsome, you understand, but beautiful. He had the smooth, sculpted, slightly cruel, faintly feminine good looks of one of those French film actors of the day. He knew it, too. He was careful of his hair and his fingernails – I suspect he visited a manicurist – and dressed with the studied negligence of the true dandy. I can see him strolling by the lake in the Nachtegalenpark in Wilrijk on a Sunday morning, in old linen slacks and an open-collared white silk shirt, a cricket pullover – they were enthusiastic Anglophiles, the Vanders – thrown over his shoulders, the arms loosely knotted on his slightly concave chest, and his sunglasses pushed up into that oiled quiff, the colour of polished wheat, the moulding of which must have taken a careful five minutes' work in front of the looking-glass. His girls… how I envied him his girls, a long line of them, beginning in early adolescence. The bright, earnest ones in particular fell for him, but he favoured shop girls, secretaries, actresses, and the like; he was always shrewd in choosing whom to allow to view him up close. Did I resent him? Of course I did. I wanted to be him, obviously.

And yet, I despised him, too, a little. Underneath the sparkling talk, the charm, the lavish good looks, there was an entire area inside him that was vacant, vapid, entirely lacking in intellectual conviction and certainty. At moments a wary, almost a frightened, look would register in his eyes. It was the look of a limited being who knows that at any moment his limits might be reached and his narrowness revealed. He was, I am afraid, a dabbler, an opportunist of ideas, in short a dilettante, though no one, especially not I, would have dared to say so. Since I have started along this line I may as well continue: he did not have a first-rate mind, as he and so many others would claim. He was gifted; he was precocious; he could talk, in that allusive, lazy, uninterruptible way of his, but that is what it was, talk, and not much more than that. Nevertheless, great things were forecast for him, he was going to make a great noise in the world, I joined in proclaiming it myself, but I am sure that in my heart I knew better. He was a bright boy who could read fast and had a good memory; ideas, genuine thought, foundered in the shallows of his intellect. He was especially vulnerable to teasing, or anything that smacked of mockery, no matter how fond, and was constantly on the alert for slights of any kind. If in company he thought a joke that everyone was laughing at might have been made at his expense something would thicken in his face, his brow would darken, his gaze turn muddy, and he would fall upon the one who had offended him with the crushing weight and force of a school-yard bully whom a weakling has unwisely dared to cross. These flashes of vengefulness were dispiriting to witness, especially as one's urge to protest and protect sprang instinctively to the defence of Axel and not of his squirming victim. He was one of those people, the beautiful, the vivid ones, whose sense of themselves must be preserved above everything else, so that the rest of us shall not be undone, in ways we cannot quite specify. So his parents spoiled him, the poor relations flattered him, and the rest of us endured without complaint his bright disdain, content if only something of his luminence should reflect on us, and from us. I know, I know, it is not convincing, this patronising tone that I put on when speaking of him. I can still feel the envy and the bitterness, the peculiar, unassuageable, objectless yearning, the anxious and always vain scramble for self-justification, all there, boiling and muddily bubbling inside me, all still there, after so long.

I do not know, or cannot remember, or have suppressed, who it was that approached him to write those newspaper articles. It is scarcely possible that I was the go-between; although at the time I had a foot in the door of a number of papers and periodicals, the Vlaamsche Gazet was unlikely to have been amongst them. The paper's editorial attitude was one of noisy and confident anticipation of what it called the Day of Unity, when all the country's unnamed enemies would finally be dealt with. This Day of Unity was never defined, and a date was never put on it, but everyone knew what it would be when it came, and knew who those enemies were, too. The editor, Hendriks – I have forgotten his first name – large, overweight, glistening, with a wheezing laugh and furtive eyes, had, in the early years of that dirty decade that was now coming to a calamitous end, decided in which direction the future was headed, despite the fact that, in private, he expressed nothing but contempt for our immediate and increasingly menacing neighbour to the east. In the early hours, when work was over for the night and the presses were rolling, he would hold court for his writing staff, knuckle-duster nationalists to a man, in the Stoof, next door to the Gazet offices on the Nationalestraat, a fine old tavern, still going strong, I am told, although the air must surely be polluted even yet by the lingering vapours of Hendriks and his gang. There he would squat, in his special corner, banging his special pewter stein, sharing gossip and telling jokes and spitting when he laughed, his womanly bosom wobbling. It was Axel who brought me there. I suppose he was curious to see how I would fare, how I would defend myself, among that feral gathering. For the most part I was kept firmly off at the outer edge of things, where I circled, hungry as a hyena, always on the watch for an opening through which I might dart and get my head, too, into the smoking innards of the times. I would catch Axel glancing at me now and then, with that charmingly crooked half-smile of his, amused at my avidity, my glittering eagerness. My presence did nothing to tone down the rabid talk or curb Hendriks's yid jokes; it was all in fun, we were all hearty fellows here, thick of skin and merciless of purpose, and besides, to pay special consideration to those of us whose origins were… different, would have been really to offer insult, surely? As Hendriks was fond of repeating, his eyes skittering sideways, the issue was not Race, but Culture, our Great European Heritage. Now, isn't that so? yes? yes? the pewter stein banging, those fat bubs bobbing. And Axel would nod along with the others, and look at me sidelong again from under his pale lashes, and smile, and faintly shrug.

When those articles of his began to be published I was jealous, I will not deny it. Why had Hendriks not invited me to write for his paper, instead of Axel? I would have been far fiercer on the threat to our – their! – culture that my people were supposed to represent, if it had been asked of me. Yes, I would! I was tougher than Axel, more relentless, more daring, more vicious. I would have sold my soul, I would have sold my people, for one sustained moment of the public's attention, even if it was only in a rag like the Gazet. Why did they turn to him, to Ariel, when in me they had a more than willing Caliban? Those half-dozen articles he wrote were much too elaborated and opaque for what was required of them. But that was how it was: people like Hendriks, even brutes like him, were mesmerised by that mixture of self-esteem and false diffidence that Axel displayed, by that remote, amused, knowing air that enveloped him and into which he would retreat, like Zarathustra into his cloud, leaving only a soft laugh behind him. To me the last piece of the six that he wrote was the sharpest refinement of the insult, the blob of poison smeared on the sharp end of the series. It was cast in the form of an interview with me – with me! – as a typical specimen of dissatisfied intellectual youth. He wrote not only the questions but most of the answers, and freely modified the few opinions that he did allow me to express. Why did I let him do it, why did I let him put words into my mouth? Abject, abject, abject; how they rankle, these old self-betrayals. When the so-called interview appeared, and I saw our photographs accompanying it, printed side by side, I was shamefully, chokingly, unconfessably, proud, although at the same time childishly gratified that Axel's picture was a bad one – he could look quite peaky and anxious in certain lights – and his name underneath it misprinted.

For all my protests, though, I am compelled, in bitter spite of myself, to admit that he did a more successful job as a polemicist than I would have done. It was his very restraint, his scrupulousness, what one might call his insistent tact, that gave those feuilletons their force. I would have ranted, mocked, hurled abuse, amid shrill peals of forced Mephistophelean laughter. The poise and studied distance of Axel's style, with its high patrician burnish and flashes of covert wit – it could take two or more readings to get one of Axel's jokes – the attitude of aristocratic weariness, the sense that he was writing only because world-historical duty had dragged him to his desk and thrust the pen into his hand, these were the things that made him so effective, or would have, had he been addressing a serious audience and not the rabblement who read the Gazet, moving their lips as they did so. What can they have made,'for instance, of his call for the aestheticisation of national life, or his suggestion to them that they might escape the plight of the self by sublimation in the totalitarian ethic? Music to their thick ears, though, simple and rousing as a marching tune, must have been his suggestion – one could hear one of Axel's studiedly otiose sighs rustling amid the words like a breeze in the grass – that nothing of consequence would be lost to the cultural and intellectual life of Europe, really, nothing at all, if certain supposedly assimilated, oriental elements were to be removed and settled somewhere far away, in the steppes of Central Asia, perhaps, or on one of Africa's more clement coasts.

Mama Vander's pill-box was the first thing I ever stole – a surprisingly intense little thrill – although of course I did not think of it as stealing, only borrowing. I saw it there, in a drape-hung anteroom in the Vander apartment, resting on the edge of a pedestal that bore a bust of Goethe, where Mama Vander had put it down in passing and forgotten it; the silver glint of it was as inviting as a wink. I pocketed it without thinking, without breaking my stride. I needed money, and quickly, for there were books I was anxious to buy while there was still time, before they were banned from the shops, or consigned to the pyre. I intended to tell Axel what I had done, after I had redeemed the box, thinking it would surely amuse him, but I never did, tell him, I mean. What kept me silent was a sense of gravity, not the gravity of my misdemeanour, but of the thing itself: the stolen object, I discovered, takes on a mysterious weight, becomes far heavier than the sum of the materials of which it is made. That little box – all it contained was a few of the sugared violet pastilles that its owner, its former owner, was addicted to – was so ponderous in my pocket it made me feel I must list to that side as I hurried away with my purloined prize. I did not delay in getting rid of it. It turned out to be a valuable piece, French, early eighteenth century; old Wassermann was reluctant to part with it, I could see, when I came back to redeem it. After that I kept it, for many years, through all manner of vicissitude and loss, and although in time it ceased to be as emblematic as once it had been, it never quite shed that unaccountable, undue weighti-ness. Now it has disappeared, made off stealthily without my noticing, in that mysterious way that objects have of escaping one's disregardant grasp.

That was the last time I was in the Vander apartment, the time I stole the pill-box. The theft was not the reason for my banishment; I am not sure it was ever detected, or, if it was, that I was held to be the culprit. In those days of invasion, defeat, occupation – all of which dizzying disasters came quickly to be referred to primly as the events – I was no longer as welcome among the Vanders as I had once been. Nothing was said, of course, but there was a constriction that occurred in the atmosphere now when I entered those spacious, overheated rooms that my heightened sensibilities could not but register. So I withdrew. The break was decorous, and went unremarked, on both sides. It is a curious thing, how even the most violently disrupted circumstances will quickly improvise and impose their own rules of mannerliness. In the early days, after it had sunk in that les événements, de gebeurtenissen, "were irreversible and would somehow or other have to be lived with, there was a certain small smile, wry, rueful, pained, accompanied by a flicker of the eyes heavenward, that people would exchange at unwontedly difficult moments, such as when some new and seemingly capricious edict had been announced, restricting the movement or meeting of persons, or imposing yet more levies on this or that section of society, most usually that section to which I belonged. At first these measures were merely an annoyance. We suffered them, having no choice, while at the same time we strove at least to maintain the appearance of disdaining them. However, as the months went on, life in those mean little streets on the wrong side of the square became increasingly attenuated, until we seemed truly to be living on air. We had a sense of floating above ourselves, buffeted now this way, now that, the frail tethering lines jerking and straining with each new ordinance that was issued against us. We grew lighter and lighter as all that we possessed was taken from us, article by article. One week we were forbidden to ride on trams, the next to ride on bicycles. One Monday morning it was ordered that every household must hand up so many men's suits, women's dresses, children's overcoats; at noon the order was rescinded, without explanation, only to be issued again the next day. We were told we could no longer keep household pets; it was the middle of winter, and, for days, long straggles of people wound their way on foot – no trams for us, remember – along snowbound roads to the designated pound on the outskirts of the city where our dogs and cats and budgerigars were to be put down. Yet in its usual uncaring way, life went on. There was the theatre, there were concerts to go to, and lectures and public meetings to attend, and when all that was put out of bounds to us there were the cafés where we could meet and talk, and then when even talk was proscribed there was the wireless, bringing news from elsewhere, all those elsewheres, crackling along the airwaves. Music broadcasts I treasured especially; they came from Stuttgart, Hilversum, Paris, sometimes London, even, if the atmospherics were right. The music was, well, the music, but how strangely affecting it was in the intervals to hear the stir and heave of the audience as it relaxed for a minute, all those people, so far away, and yet magically here, their presence so palpable I might be sitting in their midst. Even yet I cannot hear in the concert hall the sound of that murmurously expectant concourse without being transported immediately back across half a century to the little wallpapered living room with the tasselled tablecloth and the lampshade the colour of dried skin, and the big wooden wireless set with the Bakelite knobs and the canvas grille and the single, glowing green cat's-eye pulsing and contracting, and the blurred music pouring into the room and filling it like a luminous fog. I could not but hate them, too, of course, those audiences; they seemed to my ear so at ease, so lumpenly careless of all they had and I did not, here, where all around, stealthily, the world was closing in, armed with cudgels and flaming torches.

Axel and I continued to meet, not as often as before, away from his home, away from the Stoof, and away from the shtetl people, too, needless to say. We met on neutral ground, while there still remained ground that could be called neutral. His attitude toward me, at least in the early days of de gebeurtenissen, was one of affability tinged with impatience, restrained exasperation. He would tap me on the wrist, not unfondly, and accuse me of being overly alarmist in the face of my plight and that of my people. "Yes yes yes," he would say, with a frowning smile, waving a hand, "I am aware of all that, I read the papers too, you know." But surely, he would go on, surely I must agree that something had to be done, that matters could not go on as they had been doing? And even if people were to be sent away somewhere, would that be so bad? They might thrive, in a climate better suited to their temperament and racial characteristics. Anyway, it would only be the troublemakers who would go, them, and perhaps the sick, the very old, the mad, the syphilitic. They would be sent to Heligoland, to the Tatra Mountains; Hendriks had told him for a fact that only last week a thousand had been put on a ship at the Hook of Holland bound for South America. And in any case, Axel said, why was I worrying? I was safe, I was his friend. Had not our photographs appeared side by side in De Vlaamsche Gazet?

What could I say to him, what reply? He could not know that sense I had now when I ventured beyond our side of the square of being crouched in hiding behind myself even as I walked down one of his streets, sat in one of his cafés, listening to him tell me, with an irritated rictus, that this was just the trouble with me, with all of my people, this hysteria, this cringing and complaining, this constant, kicked-dog whining Why had we not thought of the consequences before we infiltrated the banks and the judiciary and the government ministries until they were full to bursting with our secret, burrowing brood? It was all perfectly straightforward, perfectly obvious. Something had needed doing, as he had always insisted, and now it was being done. How could we not have seen what was coming, until it had arrived in our midst, clanking and smoking? Anyway, it would all soon be over and done with. That things were bad, and would get worse, he did not deny; most likely the last act would be bloody – "As it always," with a flash of small, square, white teeth, "is" – but when all the bodies had been dragged by the heels into the wings, how clean and free and filled with possibilities would be that emptied stage! While he was saying these things he looked me calmly in the face, shaking his head a little, with that smile, as if he were recounting to a child in simplified terms the plot of a tragedy the convolutions of which only grown-ups could properly disentangle. The possibility did not seem to occur to him that the directors and the stage managers of all this drama might end up by bringing the house down. I was embarrassed – yes, really, I was embarrassed, for myself, and for him. This, mark you, this was that same Axel Vander whose monograph on Heine which he wrote when he was seventeen had provoked more than one wise professor to mumble into his beard of the arrival in our midst of a new Hofmannsthal. What would I find to say if, one day, I were to be called upon to help him exonerate himself, when at last, slapping a hand to his forehead, he should come to his senses and see all this present foolishness and vile fantasy for what it was? He had put himself among fanatics and barbarians, the most reasonable-seeming of whom would in an instant turn a perfectly mild-mannered conversation into ranting, stamping theatrics. One quickly learned to spot in these people the signs of an incipient tirade: the reddening brow, the glazing eye, the bullish thrusting forward of the head. Women were some of the worst, adding to male fury their dash of hysteria and sexual revulsion. I was in bed one afternoon with an actress – porcelain face, bobbed hair, mouth like a scarlet insect, one of Axel's cast-offs – who halted in the middle of the act itself and lifted herself above me, her braced arms shaking from the strain and her little breasts trembling, and told me in tones of florid indignation how the previous night a vuile jood in a fur-collared coat had accosted her at the stage door and offered her money to come to his house and do with him what she would have realised, had she thought for a moment, was exactly the thing that she was doing now, here, in this bed, with one of the impudent fellow's pure-blooded brethren.

And yet, and yet… How often in my life have I said those words, and yet? Everything has to be qualified. The fact is, a part of me, too, was of Axel's camp. Oh, yes. Here it is, my deepest, dirtiest secret. In my heart, I too wanted to see the stage cleared, the boards swept clean, the audience cowed and aghast. It was all for love of the idea, you see, the one, dark, radiant idea. Aestheticise, aestheticise! Such was our cry. Had not our favourite philosopher decreed that human existence is only to be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon? We were sick of mere life, all that mess, confusion, weakness. All must be made over – made over or destroyed. We would have, I would have, sacrificed anything to that transfiguring fire. I whisper it: and I still would. The people who turned my people to ash, they were the ones I hoped would win; I regret it yet that they lost. Are you shocked? It was not those posturing brutes themselves I wanted to see victorious – for them, vulgarians to a man, if man is the word, I felt only revulsion – but the Idea that they insensately carried, like the wooden horse with its secret force of Argives. Do you see, my Cassandra? Something had been smuggled into the world, something terrible and true, which must be allowed to prevail, at whatever cost. True: yes. Never mind the necessary lies. In time they would have been dispensed with, along with the liars. Only let the Idea triumph, the great instauration begin!

How, you will ask, did I square with the terrors of everyday life these murky longings for an apocatastasis? For certainly among my people everyone was afraid, myself no less than the others. Fear is mostly a transient thing, it flashes out in the dark at the thought of death, or on the empty road at night, or in the imminence of fire or flood; the human animal is not equipped to live constantly in fear, the system cannot sustain it. Yet for the best part, the worst part, of two years, we were frightened almost all of the time. Fear burned in us unquenchably. There were periods when it was no more than a smouldering coal lodged at the base of the breast bone, then suddenly it would leap up in jagged sheets of flame, leaving behind a hot fall of cinders. These were the poles of existence for us: consuming, irresistible terror, or a sort of gluey apathy, with intervals of futile rage in between. Frenzied hope would expire into exhaustion, indifference; days that began with us crowded in hopeful excitement around a newspaper headline would see us at nightfall lolling in blank-eyed stupor like the addicts in an opium den. Headaches, stomach cramps, a constant churning in the gut, these were the body's protests at the insupportable strain of living always in fear. One suffered from an incontinence of the emotions. The slightest kindness, the slightest nod of seeming sympathy, could bring one to one's knees in grovelling appreciation. There was that gasp of gratitude we could not restrain when someone of the ones in authority over us chose to relent in the prosecution of some trivial order of the day. I heard myself doing it, that gasp, even with Axel, on those occasions, rare enough, when he would express indignation at a particularly egregious piece of petty-minded cruelty that had been ordered to be inflicted on our side of the square. His quizzical glance and silent turning away from my breathless earnests of gratefulness, however, were as jarring a rebuff as would have been an unceremonious push in the chest from someone else.

Despite all that I have said so far, I do not think harshly of him. When he died I believe I would have wept, for shock, if nothing else, were I the type to weep.

I learned of his death from the newspaper, a couple of paragraphs on an inside page of the Staandard. Perhaps it was the way I chanced upon the item that prevented me from absorbing its contents straight away. I had been sitting on a park bench, in coat and muffler, and was about to get up and leave, the late-autumn day having turned bitterly cold, and had snapped wide the pages of the paper in outspread arms prior to folding it, when all at once the thing turned into a winged messenger and thrust Axel's name at me, alone out of all those columns of print. My first reactions were the usual ones – it must be some error, a case of mistaken identity, maybe even a practical joke – accompanied by an odd, lifting sensation in the chest, a sort of dreadful exhilaration. Giddily I read that pair of paragraphs again. They were frustratingly, scandalously and, I thought, deliberately vague. It seemed to be that he had died violently, but whether by accident or at the hands of some person or persons was not made clear. The anonymous reporter had chosen his phrases with care – tragic demise of, friends shocked at, great loss to – as if he had been advised to go cautiously in the matter, and were covertly passing on the same advice to his readers. I jumped up from the bench, rolling the paper into a wad and stuffing it guiltily into my pocket, and walked swiftly out of the park, pulling the upturned collar of my overcoat tight around my chin and resisting the urge to take to my heels and run. It was as if I were personally implicated in Axel's death, without knowing how. Before me an enormous, grape-blue cloud was nudging its way up out of the low west, like a slow, sullen thickening of nameless possibilities.

I threw away the Staandard and went in search of the Gazet. It was late afternoon, and the first newsstand I came to, on the corner of Maria-Theresialei, was the one kept by the old fellow with the goitre – good God, suddenly I see him, plain as day, in his fin-gerless gloves and the woollen cap with the earflaps that he always wore – who made a great fuss of retrieving for me from under a pile of grubby magazines what he claimed was the very last copy of the late edition, grumbling under his breath. I took the paper from him and skulked off like a rat with a stolen tidbit. Rounding the corner, I stopped and scanned the pages, once, twice, a third time. There was no mention of Axel. I was surprised not to be surprised.

I went next to the Gazet offices, to try to speak to Hendriks. I do not know what I expected of him: I had not seen or heard from him for eighteen months or more. I was kept waiting in the front office for a long time. The familiar smells, of newsprint, ink, paper dust, provoked in me an inward sob of nostalgia, distant relation, it might be, to the grief for my dead friend I supposed I was too shocked to have begun to feel yet. The girl behind the counter who took in classified advertisements pretended not to know me; we used to flirt with each other, in the old days. I turned over the already dry and brittle pages of the previous week's editions, filed in their big wooden clasps. Newsboys ran in and out, whistling. A mad old woman came in from the street and shouted something and went out again. Wind-driven scuds of wet snow were flopping against the windows. I was remembering the walking holiday Axel and I had taken together in the Ardennes before the war, and the little inn we had stumbled on one rainy night, where we sat drinking plum brandy by the light of a log fire and he told me of his plans to write a study of Coleridge's aesthetics; how enthusiastic he was, his eyes shining in the firelight; how young he looked; how young he was, and I, too. He did not live to write that book, and when, years later, I tried to write it instead – to write it for him, as it were – I could not do it either.

Hendriks would not come down, and sent one of his deputies to fob me off. I remembered the fellow's face from those late nights at the Stoof, but could not recall his name. I saw that he remembered me, too; he had the decency not to meet my eye. He was fat, like his boss, and out of breath from the stairs, and leaned against the counter, exaggeratedly gasping, with a hand pressed flat against his chest. When I demanded to know if he knew the circumstances of Axel's death he only shrugged. Everything was confused, he said, no one was certain of what had happened. I pressed him, but he only shook his head, and said again what he had said already. His petulant, brusque tone told me that the Gazet had no intention of being associated with this death, one among so many, after all. The girl behind the counter gazed away, tapping a pencil against her teeth, pretending not to be listening. I left, and walked dully through the streets. The snow had stopped, but a big-bellied, mauvish sky hung low over the city, promising a heavy fall later. On a street by the train station an armoured car was stopped, with a trio of teenage soldiers in outsized greatcoats sitting side by side on the front of it, dangling their legs over the edge, like three school truants paddling in a pond. And further along, by the Stads-park, three dead girls in belted, lumpy overcoats with ragged bullet holes across the front, gruesome counterparts somehow to those idling boy soldiers, were tied to the railings with placards hung about their necks on which was daubed a message I did not care to read; I thought of the dead crows, their blue-black plumage rubied with dried blood, that my grandfather long ago would string up on the fences in his cornfields to discourage their ravening fellows.

I never did discover the true circumstances of Axel's death. I thought of asking his family, and went more than once and stood under the trees in the square looking up at the windows of the Vander apartment, but each time my nerve failed me. Then they moved away, or so it seemed, for on the last occasion when I skulked under their windows there was no sign of life within, no lamp burning or vase of flowers on display, only a broken roller blind, hanging down crookedly. I made enquiries of people whom Axel and I had both known, but either they would not speak to me, or claimed not to know any more about what had befallen him than I did. Extravagant rumours began to fly about. Some were too ludicrous to listen to, for example that he had committed suicide when a love affair went wrong – imagine Axel hanging himself, and over a woman! Others were slightly more plausible, but I could not believe them, either. It was said for instance that he was not dead at all, but had been rounded up by mistake with a band of communists and interned at Breendonck, from where his father was seeking to buy his release. A journalist of my acquaintance, of my former acquaintance, whom I encountered in the street late one wet night, drunk and wild-eyed, his face running with rain or tears, it was hard to tell which, grasped me by the lapels and assured me in an urgent, sobbing whisper that Axel had been caught up in a dispute among the factions surrounding the military authorities, that the affair had ended in bloodshed, and that he had been shot and his body flung into an unmarked grave. At the time all sorts of stories like that were in the air, about all sorts of people. Most amazing of all the explanations I heard of Axel's disappearance, however, was the heroic farrago, recounted to me one ice-hung morning in a café on the Groenplaats, in tones of tragic wonderment, by one of his former girlfriends, that he had been betrayed, arrested, tortured, and summarily executed for the leading part he had played in the organisation of an underground Resistance cell. She looked so sorrowful and solemn, saucer-eyed Monique, and the pink-tinged air outside was so still, so coldly lovely, that I could only nod and say nothing, trying not to laugh. Many years later, however, in Arcady, one night at a gruesome academic dinner I found myself seated opposite a withered old fellow with ash on his waistcoat and soup on his tie, a visiting savant from old Europe, of Walloon origin, who on hearing my name became greatly excited and hailed me warmly as a former colleague in arms. Holding him off with what I knew must be a horrible, temporising grin, I studied that time-ruined visage – collapsed cheek and lolling Bourbon lip, moist rheumy eye, the pallid skull smooth and domed like the cap of a giant toadstool – and tried urgently to discern in it the features of one I might once have known or at least have met in Axel's company long ago. No blank-eyed bust stirred in the shadowed gallery of my memory. And what did he think, the old fool, if he really had known Axel and now believed that I was he – that forty years had added a foot or so to his height and turned his film star's profile into that of a superannuated carthorse? The more discouragingly diffident I became the more emotional he waxed, lapsing from laughable English into execrable, macaronic French, reaching infirmly across the table and trying to clasp my crabwise retreating hand, exclaiming the while about les beaux jours d'antan aux Pays-bas when, shoulder to shoulder with our amis ardents, we wrought havoc upon the military housekeeping of the invading sale Boche. He would have worried me more had he not been such a caricature; nevertheless, I extricated myself as quickly as I could from his humid attentions and left the building and walked across the campus in the balmy dark, under the eucalyptus trees draped with the strenuously abradant music of crickets, wondering if I should invite the old warrior to come for a hike with me up into the hills next day and kill him. However, when I arrived at Sprague Hall next morning to hear him speak, a notice on the door informed me that due to unforeseen circumstances Professor de Becker's lecture had been cancelled. It turned out that over a shaky breakfast in the college dining room the hung-over Professor had got into an altercation – on the validity of Durkheim's concept of the conscience collective, as I recall – with one of the faculty's many young Turks, and became so heated that he suffered an infarction and fell dead with his face on the table among the coffee cups and the bowls of muesli. I have always had the devil's luck.

For a long time I found it hard to accustom myself to the thought of Axel gone; indeed, I am not entirely accustomed to it yet. At the time it should not have been so difficult; in those perilous years the state of being alive often seemed an altogether less plausible proposition than that of being peacefully dead. In Axel's case, however, death seemed somehow… inappropriate. Anyone can die, of course, at any moment. The beloved child, the circus strongman, the Cranach maiden, all are sustained by the merest thread. Afterwards, though, when the first shock has worn off, we seem to discern in even the unlikeliest extinction an inevitability that had been there all along, hidden from us, the embryo of death growing steadily toward its moment of fatal parturition. This is where ghosts come from, I suppose, this phenomenon of lives unfinished before they ended. The role of revenant fitted Axel ill. He had been meant to live. Deadi, an early death, was something too serious, too weighty, to have befallen him. So I found myself returning again and again, with increasing speculative uncertainty, to those outlandish rumours as to what had happened to him. In particular I could not get out of my head Monique's theatrically tearful account of his involvement with the Resistance – a Resistance, by the way, of which at the time I could see little sign. Could it be true? Could what she told me be a garbled and melodramatised version of something that had really been the case, and of which the story of his having been mistakenly interned was another mangled variant? Might Axel really have been involved in some mad exploit that had turned deadly, and for which he had been picked up and had an unceremonious bullet put in the back of his head? Was it possible that I had utterly mistaken him, that in all the years I had known him he had hidden his true convictions from me? This is the trouble with the dead, that they take their secrets with them to the grave. When I tried to picture Axel huddled amid a band of bandoliered partisans in some smoke-filled cellar, poring over maps by the light of a guttering candle – "We intercept the convoy here" – the thing seemed preposterous, and yet I had to admit it was the kind of venture that would have fed an image he probably nursed of himself as a Byron, or a Pimpernel. I do not miss the irony for me in all of this. If, despite the comical implausibility of it, he really was an unsung hero, how piquant has been my predicament all along! I would be like the protagonist of one of those third-rate, so-called philosophical novels that were so popular in the haunted postwar years, the man who takes on the identity of a sinner all unaware that the one he is impersonating was a saint all along.

Given that possibility – I mean, that he might have been a martyr of the Resistance – given that, if nothing else, why, you will wonder, was I always so afraid of one day being unmasked? I suspect I understand it hardly any better than you do. What was it I did, after all, except adopt a dead man's name in a time of danger and mortal need? I took, or borrowed, rather, nothing except his identity, and death had already as good as deprived him of that. What has it profited me to have maintained this deception for half a century? Axel Vander's reputation in the world is of my making. It was I who clawed my way to this high place. I wrote the books, seized the prizes, flattered those who had to be flattered, struck down my rivals. What did he achieve, what legacy did he leave behind? A couple of monographs, a few not unperceptive reviews in little magazines, a handful of ill-judged poems. He was precocious, I grant him that, but you could drop the middle syllable from that word and it would better apply. And then there are those Gazet pieces, what about them? Although it was he who wrote them, the tarnished golden boy, they are my responsibility now. It was for his sake, in part, at least, that I hid them from the world for so long, until you, my curious cat, chanced upon them. You will not believe me, I suppose, when I say that when eventually it dawned upon my sometimes sluggish understanding that in taking on his identity I had also automatically taken on responsibility for his deeds, I made a pact with myself that in the event of being shown up as an impostor I would claim – wait for it – I would claim that it was I, and not he, who had written those damning articles, and that I had persuaded him to put his name to them because that was the only way that Hendriks would publish them in the Gazet! Laugh all you like, in the Elysian fields where you wander, but I have my own, peculiar code of honour. If you had exposed me to the world I would have been reviled for abandoning my people, betraying my race. It would have been said of me that in order to shed an identity of which I was ashamed, I had willingly stepped into the place left vacant by a minor monster whose poisonous opinions might one day be uncovered and attributed to me. Perhaps this is true. Yet if it was all no more, no less, than a cowardly attempt to throw off a past, and a people, of which I was ashamed, then the attempt failed. The past, my own past, the past of all the others, is still there, a secret chamber inside me, like one of those sealed rooms, behind a false wall, where a whole family might live in hiding for years. In the silence, in solitude, I close my eyes and hear them in there, the mouse-scuffles of the little ones, the grown-ups' murmurings, their sighs. How quiet they go when danger draws near. Shush! Something creaks. A child's wail is promptly stifled. Someone puts an ear to the wall, a cautioning finger lifted, while the others stand motionless, unbreathing, big-eyed. Knives of light come in through cracks in the plaster. Down in the courtyard engines are running, and boot-heels stamp on the cold cobbles. There are cries in the distance, shouts and cries. My eyelids lift. A breath. All gone, all of them; gone.

By the way, I had a dream, last night, or this morning, some time recently, at any rate. It has just come back to me. Shall I tell it to you? It was not properly a dream, or what I recall of it is not; it may be only a fragment of a night-long saga the rest of which I have forgotten. As is so often the case with dreams, it impresses me as highly significant even though I cannot say what it might signify. I was standing in darkness, on a high promontory; I knew it was high because of the air that wafted against my face, deep and chill, not at all pestilential. I had the sense of a precipice before me, and of a great plain below, stretching a great way off. Lightning fitfully illuminated a far horizon. Nothing happened. I was simply standing there on the brink of that dark immensity, like Dante awaiting the arrival of Virgil. Then from out of the darkness – I note the increasingly ecclesiastical sonorousness of these formulations – a great voice spoke, the voice of Yahweh himself, it might be. Here, it said, here are interred all the Abrahams and Isaacs; here is their tomb. That is all I remember: the darkness, the high place, the dim horizon, and that voice. And a great feeling of sorrow, too, not the sorrow of mourning or loss, but of being present at some grand and terrible, unpreventable tragedy.

No, I did not attend Axel's funeral. I knew that I would not be welcome, that my presence would be an embarrassment, possibly a danger, to the Vanders. I do not know when it took place, or where, even. I think now I should have been there to see him into the ground. It is said that those close to a person who goes missing will not find peace and an end to their grieving until they know the fate of their loved one, and, especially, the place where he, or she, is interred. I would not wish to appear fanciful, but when I look back over the years of my life, and those moments in it of great stress and suicidal urgings, I wonder if all along I may have been in a state of suspended mourning for my friend. Does this make me seem too good, too faithful? It does. But certainly there is something buried deep down in me that I do not understand and the nature of which I can only intuit. It will seem too obvious if I say that it is another self – am I not, like everyone, like you, like you especially, my protean dear, thrown together from a legion of selves? – but all the same that is the only way I can think of to describe the sensation. This separate, hidden I is prey to affects and emotions that do not touch me at all, except insofar as I am the channel through which its responses must necessarily be manifest. It will prick up its ears at the tritest, most trivial plangency; it is a sucker for the sentimental. Sunsets, the thought of a lost dog, the slushy slow movement of a symphony, any old hackneyed thing can set the funereal organ churning. I will be passing by in the street and hear a snatch of some cheap melody coming from the open window of an adolescent's bedroom and there will suddenly swell within me a huge, hot bubble of something that is as good as grief, and I will have to hurry on, head down, swallowing hard against that choking bolus of woe. A beggar will approach me, toothless and foul-smelling, and I will have an urge to open wide my arms and gather him to me and crush him against my breast in a burning, brotherly embrace, instead of which, of course, I will dodge past him, swivelling my eyes away from the spectacle of his misery and keeping my tight fists firmly plunged in my pockets. Can these splurges of unbidden and surely spurious emotion really have their source in a bereavement nearly half a century old? Did I care for Axel that much? Perhaps it is not for him alone that I am grieving, but for all my dead, congregated in a twittering underworld within me, clamouring weakly for the warm blood of life. But why should I think myself special – which amongst us has not his private Hades thronged with shades?

Yes, I should have gone to Axel's funeral, and seen him into the ground, if only to have an end of him. Even when in my heart I came at last to accept that he must truly have died, in some ancillary ventricle there still lodged a stubborn clot of doubt. I recalled the empty windows of what had been the Vander home; was there a connection between his disappearance and the family's abrupt decampment? Why had Hendriks's deputy been so evasive when I questioned him that morning at the Gazet? What did he know that he was not prepared to tell me? To this day I find myself wondering, with a mingled sense of unease and peculiar excitement, if after all Axel might not be dead, but living somewhere still, in hiding, for whatever reason, and going, like me, under another name, mine, perhaps, that would be a joke. Maybe back then he committed a crime none of us knew about that was so shameful that he cannot bring himself even now to step out of the shadows and confess to it. If so, it would have to have been something far more serious than that handful of Gazet articles, for even in senility Axel would be able to charm the world into excusing him for that peccadillo. Or is it my usurpation of his identity that has somehow prevented him, all this time, out of who knows what scruple or fear of looking a fool, from laying claim to the name, to the life, even, that is rightfully his? The possibility affords me, I admit, a certain base satisfaction. It is not entirely ungratifying to think of Axel, with all his wit, his quickness, his assurance, his good looks, languishing in obscurity these fifty years, gnawed by frustration and failure, while I strutted the world's stage, making, in all senses of the saying, a name for myself.

Oh, but I know, it is impossible. I would have heard from him, sooner or later; Axel would not have worked a vanishing act like that without coming forward to boast about it, if only to me. All the same, on occasion down the years I have experienced an eerie, crawling sensation across the back of my neck, as if I were being spied on, and quietly laughed at; as if I were being toyed with. Certainly someone did look after me that day of the deportations, although I do not insist it was Axel. It may have been Max Schaudeine, for instance, manipulating the strings from up in the flies. I am thinking of the message that came to me that snowy morning only a month or so after the announcement of Axel's death, scrawled on a scrap of paper and pushed under our front door. My mother brought it to me. We stood in the bluish snow-light by the window in my room, I in my ragged old night-shirt and she with a shawl pulled over her shoulders. Her long hair was unpinned, and I remember thinking distractedly how grey she had become without my noticing. She waited, in that silent, apprehensive way that she did everything nowadays, while I unfolded the sheet of cheap, ruled paper, torn from a school copybook, and read the terse instructions written there. The handwriting I did not recognise; it might have been that of a schoolchild, the big, square capitals pencilled hard into the paper, the grains of graphite glinting in the furrows. I was to take the noon train to Brussels tiiat day, sitting in a certain compartment, in a certain carriage, and board the very next return train, and take the same numbered seat as on the outward journey. There was no signature. I could not think who might have sent it, nor could I say what it might portend, but, the times being so, I knew straight away that I would comply with its command. My mother was searching my face more anxiously than ever, looking for a response; I did not doubt that she had read the note before bringing it to me. It was all right, I said casually, it was from a friend, I had been expecting it. I still wonder why I lied to her. She nodded, sadly, knowing it was a lie, and shuffled off into the shadows.

I pause; I falter. My mother I rarely think of, or my father, in waking hours. It seems absurd for a man of my age even to have had parents; I am so very much older now than they were when I lost them that it might be not my parents at all that I am remembering, but my children, rather, grown to sad adulthood – the children, I hasten to say, that I never had, so far as I know. However, if mother and father are largely absent from my daytime thoughts, they do make frequent, unwilling appearances in my dreams, or at any rate at the periphery of them. There they hover, pressing close together, hesitant, uncertain, afraid, it seems, like the Vander cousins, of being seized upon and ejected, amid ridicule and general, spiteful hilarity. They are dressed in black, and my father the rag merchant wears a flowing black neck-tie, an improbably bohemian flourish. I notice they are holding hands, and my father's expression is sheepish. They are like a pair of humble guests who have turned up without costumes at a riotous and strenuously orgiastic fancy-dress party, in the steaming midst of which my sleeping self is trapped, a comatose Tiberius, unable to welcome them, invite them in, offer them hospitality, unable even to see that they are allowed to leave discreetly and 'with dignity. My mother has that notch in the clear space between her eyebrows that always signified her deepest, inexpressible woes. She is shy of me, and will not look at me, and keeps her eyes downcast, which makes her demeanour seem all the more desperately beseeching. My father wears his usual expression of wary amusement. He was a humorous, even a witty, man, but he made his sallies so tentatively, with such diffidence, that people rarely appreciated them, or appreciated them too late, so that in my memories of him he is always turning away with a wistful, disappointed half-smile. My parents. Did I know them at all? When they were there I think I hardly noticed them, except when they got in my light, restricting my view of the radiant future. I used piously to hope they would not have suffered, at the end, them, and the others, but since then I have learned about hope.

I took the train to Brussels, as instructed. The compartment had only one other occupant, a skinny, furtive-eyed, clerkly-looking young man in a double-breasted pin-striped suit a size or more too big for him. In looks he was unremarkable save for his nose, huge, pale, high-bridged, and pitted all over, like the stone head of a ceremonial axe. From it, the rest of his features receded, despairing of the contest. He held on his knees a small scuffed cardboard suitcase, such as conjurors keep their effects in, the lid of which he would now and then lift a little way and peer inside.

Papers? An urgent dispatch? Bars of gold bullion? Assassin's pistol? We exchanged the barest of politenesses and settled down to watch in the window the snowbound countryside opening endlessly around us its broad, slow fan. Our glances would float toward each other like amoebas, meet, and immediately flick away again. When we entered the gloom of a station and his ghostly reflection appeared in the window beside him, it would seem from the direction of his gaze that he was fixed on me intently, as if he were worried I would leap at him if he were to let fall his guard for an instant. I wondered if he might be connected with the warning note, even if perhaps he might be the one who had written it. Should I address him in some way, ask him some question, challenge him? On we rolled, through the frozen countryside, the wheels beneath us weaving their maddeningly irregular cross-rhythms, and we shifted our haunches on the dusty plush, and cleared our throats and sighed, and said nothing. Once, in the middle of nowhere, the train ground to a slow stop and stood breathing for a tormentingly long time. We peered out bleakly at the deserted snowscape. Two soldiers came to the door of the compartment and looked in at us and moved on. The Nose ran a finger around the inside of his shirt collar and gave a little puff of relief, and looked at me and ventured a queasy smile. Still I did not speak: he could be the most enthusiastic collaborationist and yet be wary of the attentions of the military. Outside, someone shouted, and with a series of clangs and wrenchings we were off again.

In Brussels I sat in the steamy station buffet and drank three glasses of schnapps in quick succession and my hands stopped trembling. When I went back out to the platform the return train was already moving, and I had to run and leap on, barking my shin badly. I limped along swaying corridors until I found the right compartment, and there he was, with his agitated eyes and his suitcase on his knees and his big nose empurpled from fear and the cold. I produced the note and he produced another just like it. I laughed. He laughed. We both laughed. It sounded as if we were gasping for breath. He knew no more than I did, he said. Someone unknown must have gone about the city in the night from door to singled-out door, delivering these forewarnings. We speculated if there might be others like us on the train, a scattered band of baffled fugitives. There must be something happening, at home, he said, and it sounded so strange, that word, home, and he gave a soundless gulp and looked away. Presently he opened his conjuror's case. He had in it sandwiches, an apple, a flask of aquavit, all of which he shared with me. We drank from the flask in turns; our comradeship could not have been sealed more solemnly had we cut our wrists and mingled our blood. By the end of the journey I was tipsy and heedlessly euphoric. On the platform we exchanged addresses, shouting above the din of trains and tannoyed announcements, shook hands fervently, vowed to meet, then turned and with a relieved straightening of shoulders went our separate ways, hurriedly, knowing we would never see each other again, unless perhaps the Angel of the Lord should pay another warning visit to our doors.

I walked home through the hushed city, hearing the snow squeal under my boots. The effect of the aquavit quickly wore off. My shin still throbbed where I had barked it that afternoon running for the train. When I got to our street it was darker than dark, not a single window lit, and all in silence, and then I knew. Three sentries with rifles were standing around a burning brazier, stamping their feet in the cold. I did not dare approach them, and crept past in the shadows, catching the sharp, hot stink of the burning coals, a consternating waft straight out of childhood. I recall the scene in expressionist terms, the brutish forms of the soldiers there, the terrible intensity of the brazier, and the street sliced clean in two by a glaring moon. Frost glittered everywhere on the pavements amid the snow, but when I trod on it I found it was not frost but broken glass. The shop windows were all shattered, their doors boarded over with fresh-cut planks; the piney fragrance of the wood was another incongruous whiff, this time of forest and mountain flank. The building where I lived, or at least where I had lived until now, was as dark and empty as all the others. The broken front door hung by a single hinge. Behind it, the hall was a square black hole giving on to another universe.

I went to a cinema. The film, as I recall, was Jew Suss, unless my memory, with its lamentable hunger for congruence, has substituted that title for something less apt. The audience seemed as subdued as I was, sitting back at a tilt, row after row of them, staring motionlessly, as if frozen in astonishment or fear, their faces lifted in the flickering gloom and the tips of their cigarettes glowing and fading like a swarm of fireflies, the billows of smoke in slow motion swirling up into the projector's spasmic cone of mingled light and muddied shadow. When the film was over I was the last to leave. In the street I stopped at a late-night stall and bought a paper twist of roasted chestnuts and distributed them in the pockets of my trousers, first for warmth and then for sustenance. Without thinking where I was going I made my way back to the central station, and there I spent the night on a bench in the echoing nave, like a fugitive in the sanctuary of a cathedral. I would doze off only to wake again almost immediately with a start of what was first fright and then a sort of slow, disbelieving amazement at all this that was happening. In the middle of the night the cold grew intense and I went into the lavatory and wrapped the sheets of a discarded newspaper – the Gazet, not inappropriately – around my legs under my trousers. Where had I learned all this vagabond lore? Sometime before dawn a fellow outcast tried to pick my pockets. It was an amateurish effort, and I woke at once and made a tremendous kick at him that missed. He was an old fellow with a beard. I remember his mouth, a pink, round hole sunk in tangled hair. He backed away from me cautiously, in an attitude of reproach, as if I were the aggressor, his brown-palmed hands lifted, that mouth opening and closing wordlessly. I did not sleep again, but waited for morning, when I rose stiffly and went to a workman's café and spent the last of my money on a plate of bread and sausage; I can still taste that meal. I walked the streets again. The day was clear and hard and bright, and everything rang and chimed as if the city were enclosed under a bell-jar. Frost stood in the air, a crystalline fog. Inside my stiffened boots my toes were numb. Also my barked shin was still sore, which angered me greatly. That same, hardly accountable anger was to recur often in the coming months; for the fugitive, it is the persistence of trivial afflictions that pains the most. At last, I went home. There was nowhere else to go.

I expected there would be soldiers in the street again. In daylight I would not be able to hide from them. I did not know what I would do if they should challenge me. I thought perhaps I should run at them, flailing my fists and howling, then they would shoot me and that would be an end of it. I might even get to give one of them a black eye or a smashed jaw before I fell. But the street was deserted. The brazier was no longer burning, although the clinkers were still surprisingly warm, and I stood for a while chafing my hands over them. Nothing moved, except a curtain in a shattered upstairs window, billowing in a draught. The winter sunlight made hard edges of everything, and I remembered with sudden vividness the mornings like this when I was a child setting off for school. I went into our building by the low door beside the butcher's shop, which was boarded up like all the others, and entered the courtyard with its smell of damp mortar and drains. In the vestibule there was my prohibited bicycle, and the wheelless black perambulator someone had abandoned years ago. I stood and peered up the stairwell. A great silence here, too, and an inhuman cold, and all the doors shut fast as if they would never open again. Halfway up the first flight of stairs, trite as could be, a child's shoe lay on its side, its strap torn and the button missing. On our landing the wall was scuffed where it had been rubbed and scored by years of passing shoulders, elbows, shoes; I had never taken notice of these marks before, but now they seemed as mysterious and suggestive as a set of immemorial hieroglyphs. I took out my key, but in some access of caution I paused, and put the key back in my pocket again, and knocked on the door, softly, unassumingly, as a mendicant might do, or a returning prodigal. I waited. What was I expecting? Presently I heard soft steps within approach the door and stop. Yes, you, my most assiduous reader, will recognise the moment and its image, for I have employed it in many contexts, as a mocking emblem of the human condition: two people standing on either side of a locked door, one shut out and the other listening from inside, each trying to divine the other's identity and intentions. I knocked again, more diffidently still, a mere brushing of the knuckles on the wood, and, as if this second knock were the signal, were the verification, that the one inside had been waiting for, immediately the lock clicked and the door was opened a crack and a wary, pale-lashed eye looked out at me. I mumbled something, I hardly knew what, but whatever it was it provoked a snicker from within, and the door was drawn wide open.

He was thin, remarkably thin, with a narrow, long white face and crinkled red hair. He wore a long overcoat, open, and a long, grey muffler hanging down that lent a comically doleful touch to his appearance. He was about my age, although he had the air of being somehow far older. He had a newspaper under his arm, rolled into a tight baton. He looked me up and down almost merrily, and with a large, friendly gesture invited me to step inside. I entered, but stopped just past the threshold. He stood beside me, following my gaze with interest as I looked about. I had anticipated disorder, drawers wrenched open and things thrown on the floor, but everything seemed as usual, only a little more shabby, perhaps, and a little shamefaced, under this stranger's twinkling, sceptical eye. As each moment passed, however, the place was ceasing to be real, was becoming a reproduction, as it were, skilfully done, the details all exact yet lacking all authenticity. Everything looked flat and hollow, like a stage set. I noted the flinty sunlight in the window, it might have been thrown by a powerful electric lamp set up just outside the casement. Even the smell in the air was not quite right. "The name is Schaudeine," the intruder said. "You might call me Max, if you wish. I have been having a look around." He shrugged, and smiled resignedly, showing how he made light of his responsibilities, whatever they were. I have used the word intruder, but in fact he seemed perfectly at ease, seemed at home, almost, certainly more so than I was. He sighed. There was so much to be done in these cases, he said, shaking his head, so much to be checked and listed and accounted for – really, people never thought. "When it is the whole family, that is," he said, and looked at me sidelong, and was it my fancy or did I see his eyelid twitch? Where were they, I heard myself ask, the family, where had they gone? I had been about to add, Where have they been taken to? but stopped myself in time. He made a show of considering for a moment, gnawing at his lower lip. "East?" he said at last, with lifted brows, as if I might be better expected than he to know the answer. He began to walk about the place then, looking at this and that but touching nothing. I followed after him. He stopped in the doorway of my parents' room, with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and rocking on his heels. "Ah," he said, "the master bedroom!" Together we took in the low bed, stripped of bedclothes, with the two ghostly dents side by side in the mattress, the faded quilt folded on the foot of it, the rush-bottomed chair, the night-stand with water jug and basin. The wardrobe stood open, containing not even a hanger. The room had never been so tidy, so orderly, so empty. Schaudeine turned to me. "Did I catch your name?" he said. How polite he was, as if we were a pair of prospective tenants whose appointments to view the property had coincided by mistake, and he had taken the lead in smoothing over any awkwardnesses. "My name?" I said. "My name is Axel Vander."

I had not known what I was about to say, yet it was no surprise to hear myself say it. On the contrary, it felt entirely natural, like putting on a new suit of clothes that had been tailored expressly for me, or, rather, for my identical twin, now dead. It was thrilling, too, in a way that I could not exactly account for. Immediately I had spoken there came a breathless, tottery sensation, as if I had managed a marvellous feat of dare-devilry, as if I had leapt across a chasm, in my dazzling new raiment, or climbed to a dizzyingly high place, from which I could survey another country, one that I had heard fabulous accounts of but had never visited. Nor did I mark the disproportion of these sensations to their cause – I had merely given a false name, after all, as a petty miscreant might to an enquiring policeman. Is this what the actor experiences every night when he steps on to the stage, this weightlessness, this sudden freedom, what Goethe somewhere calls der Fall nach oben, accompanied by its tremor of secret, hardly containable hilarity? "Vander, eh?" Schaudeine said, and looked me up and down with redoubled interest. "That's a name I seem to know." He rubbed the palms of his slender white hands briskly against each other, producing a scraping, papery sound. "Well, we shall have to think what is to be done with you, since you seem to have been…" He shot me a swift, sly grin. "Since you seem to have been left behind." I was never to find out who he was, or why he was there, or from whom he derived his authority. Nor do I know why he decided to help me. He wanted no money, which was as well, since I had none. It will seem absurd, perhaps, but I suspect he saved me, and save me he did, for no other reason than that it amused him that I had escaped seizure and deportation simply by not being at home. "What a thing, eh!" he kept saying, with his comedian's downturned grin, shaking his head as if indeed I had effected some piece of acrobatic daring. Naturally, I had not mentioned the warning note. I still wonder if it was he who wrote it, although I can offer no reasonable explanation as to why he should have done. What profit would there have been for him in an act of such selfless magnanimity? Because, again, it amused him? I have no doubt he was a scoundrel. Hard to credit he is still surviving. How did he escape the rope? They hanged lesser ones than he. Hendriks, for instance, a few years later, in the general high spirits after liberation, was strung up from a lamppost by his own belt, for not much more than writing those editorials that now suddenly everyone, in a late rush of enlightenment, realised had been treasonous. But Schaudeine, Schaudeine was not the kind to let himself be lynched.

He took me to the café on the corner of the square that Axel and I used to frequent, and treated me to a second breakfast, of coffee and rolls, saying I would need feeding up for the journey that lay ahead; I did not enquire what journey he meant. He took nothing himself, but as I ate he sat looking on with avuncular approval and pleasure, still with his rolled newspaper under his arm. I felt like a schoolboy who has been rescued from the clutches of a gang of toughs at the school gate; here I was, without bruise or bloodied nose, enjoying a grand treat generously laid on by my smiling and only slightly sinister new friend. He talked a great deal, dropping hints of powerful contacts in high places; he had access, he assured me airily, to a network of facilitators that stretched across the continent; they were friends, business associates, sympathisers – what cause it was they, and presumably he, sympathised with he did not specify – who would help me to make my way to a new life, beyond the seas, if necessary. He smiled again; this time he definitely winked; he may even have tapped a finger to the side of his nose. I nodded, reaching for another roll. I was not paying full heed. My attention was bent on something that was occurring inside me, a shift, a transformation; it was as if all the particles of which I was made up were being realigned along an entirely new axis. It is not every day one loses one's entire family at a stroke. I will not say I was not upset, or fearful for them. I did not know then that I would never see them again, that the whirlwind into which they had disappeared would release nothing of them but their dust. I took it that they had been sent away, probably to somewhere far off and uncongenial, Axel's Heligoland or Hendriks's Amazon, and I assumed that presently I too would be seized and sent to join them. I even wondered if the new life for me that Schaudeine was speaking of so glowingly might be a euphemism for my imminent arrest and transportation. Indeed, I thought, this might be exactly his job, to go about the city allaying people's fears, so that they would be prepared, however deludedly, and give no trouble, when the soldiers came, with the trucks. But even if this were to be the case I did not mind. At the moment I was too preoccupied to care. For I had been confronted with the all-excluding prospect of freedom. That was the electric possibility toward which all my bristling and crepitant particles were pointed. I was at last, I realised, a wholly free agent. Everything had been taken from me, therefore everything was to be permitted. I could do whatever I wished, follow my wildest whim. I could lie, cheat, steal, maim, murder, and justify it all. More: the necessity of justification would not arise, for the land I was entering now was a land without laws. Historians never tire of observing that one of the ways in which tyranny triumphs is by offering its helpers the freedom to fulfil their most secret and most base desires; few care to understand, however, that its victims too can be made free men. Adrift and homeless, without family or friend, unless Schaudeine should be counted a friend, I could at last become that most elusive thing, namely – namely! – myself. I sometimes surmise that this might be the real and only reason that I took on Axel's identity. If you think this a paradox you know nothing about the problematics of authenticity.

As I have already repeated – perhaps too insistently? – I am not at all given to the mystical, but I must record a curious, not to say unnerving, phenomenon from that time. In the days before I met Max Schaudeine I experienced a truly extraordinary succession of coincidences. They were trivial, as these things usually are, but no less remarkable for that. I would begin to read about a character in a novel, say, and put down the book and walk outside and encounter someone in the street of the same and not at all commonplace name. I had started to write an essay on Napoleon at Jena the morning that a letter came to me from that city, from an acquaintance who was at the university there, studying Hegel, of course. I knew two girls both of whom were called Sara; I arranged to meet one of them at a particular corner at a particular time one evening; she did not turn up, but at precisely the arranged hour I spotted the other Sara walking past on the far side of the street. What could be the explanation for these strange conjunctions? Probably no more than that I was at such a pitch of watchfulness that I fixed on things that otherwise would have passed unremarked, even unnoticed. But why in those days in particular, for was I not constantly on the watch now for the world's sly and menacing stratagems? Was it an animal presentiment of approaching danger? Were these unlikely minor events a way that kindly fate had found of delivering me a warning nudge? I do not want to think so, for if they were, then my conception of the random nature of reality is put in question, and I do not like to entertain such a possibility.

At once, then, I set foot upon the sticky web of Schaudeine's continent-wide network, and began the journey that would take me in big, unsteady, bouncing bounds to a place of refuge elsewhere. Perhaps, if I am still alive when I have done with this confession, and have energy enough left over, I shall write a full account of that time: Katabasis, or, My Flight to Freedom. For now, the merest sketch must suffice. Sit up and pay attention, please.

The route of my escape – I do not like the word, it sounds so cloak-and-daggerish, but what else can I call it? – took me initially in a sharp diagonal across France to the south-east corner of the Bay of Biscay. It was not such hard going; there were Schaudeine's people to help me at each knot of the network along which I made my way, they offered food, shelter, forged documents, cautionary advice. I stole things, even from those who were aiding me. I became quite a skilled thief; there is an art to stealing, as there is to everything, if one's approach is pure enough, disinterested enough. That especially is something I learned, that one must be disinterested, or at least present a credible semblance of being so, if one is to succeed in the tricky business of survival. The farther south I travelled, though, the more heartsick I became. I was not despairing, I was not even afraid, really, any more, only I could see no end to this flight I was embarked upon, and felt sometimes that this would be my life forever, just this endless journeying, and that eventually I would find myself retracing this same route from the start, seeing this same spider, and this same moonlight between the trees, over and over. I reached my lowest point on a December twilight in Hendaye, where I sat in a tenebrous bar listening to the flags flapping mournfully along the deserted sea front and realised with a sad start that it was Christmas Eve. Matters lightened next day, however – even the pendent sky lifted a little – when I met my contact in the town, a crop-haired girl in a beret and an out-sized black coat whom I took for a boy until she spoke. She and her father were to drive me that night in her father's truck across the border to San Sebastian. Meantime she looked me over with a bright gleam in her dark eye – remember, I was young then, and large, and vigorous, still sound in limb and whole of sight – and brought me to her tiny room overlooking the sea, where we took off our clothes in the fish-coloured marine light, and she clambered all over me, lithe and quick as a minnow, nosing into cracks and crevices as if in search of some elusive tidbit. When we had finished, and I was finally, utterly empty, she sprang up and sat on my chest like a gymnast straddling the wooden horse, and I saw a silvery filament of my semen strung for a second between her open lips as she grinned and said in her hot, high little voice, "Joyeux Noël, mon petit!"

She was called, quaintly, Josette. I am ashamed to say I stole her watch, a chunky, cheap thing, but remarkably sturdy, for I have it still, and it still keeps time, of a sort. It had been given to her by one of my predecessors along this route, which probably for him too had included a detour through that bedroom above the sea front. Josette. In manner as well as stature she was an eerie prefigurement of my Lady Laura, whom some weeks later, in an English spring all sleet and spiked, wet sunlight, I met on a train travelling up to London from the port of Southampton. I had arrived that morning on a boat from Lisbon, a city of which I recall only the smell of tar and the rank taste of raw olive oil, and the aluminium-bright sheets of rain undulating across the docks at dawn when I was leaving. At Southampton a military official of indeterminate rank sitting behind a table had glared crossly for a long moment at my passport, lovingly made for me by an octogenarian forger in Liège, then with a snort of unamused laughter had snapped it shut and dealt it to me across the table, my winning card. I was supposed to be a pilot with the Free French forces, I had a paper to prove it. There was no heating on the train. The compartment was crowded with army officers, and smelled of cigarette smoke and wet wool. Lady Laura was huddled in a corner diagonally across from me, wearing a huge coat, just like Josette's only much more costly, and a drooping black hat with a drooping, pavonian plume. It was hard to make out her features under all that felt and feather, except for a pair of darkly glowing eyes, which I sensed settling upon me now and then, speculatively. I noticed her silk-stockinged white little feet in their expensive shoes with the strap buttoned tightly across the instep. Her tiny hands were pale as polished bone, and came out of the coat's wide sleeves like the claws of an animal's skeleton peeping out of its pelt. She was hardly bigger than a child. The soldiers, fizzing with battle fatigue, talked loudly among themselves and paid her no heed. Beads of melting sleet ran slantwise like spit across the fogged windows. The ticket collector came, and breathed worriedly over my ticket, and told me in a tone of awkward regret, for which I remember him with a warm spot of fondness even yet, that I was in a first class carriage and would have to move. Before I could get my things together the coat in the corner stirred and a hand dipped into a purse made of woven miniature silver chains and came up with a large white bank note and wagged it languidly back and forth in the air. The ticket collector took the money and clipped my ticket and tipped his cap and withdrew, giving me a wink as he went. From under the wing of the feathered hat those eyes, big and dark and velvety as pansies, held me briefly, without expression, and looked away.

She had been seeing one of her men off to the war. He had signed them into a hotel in Southampton the night before as Major and Mrs. Smith. "I felt quite the tart," she said, and laughed. The man was afraid he would be killed in battle, and had wept in the night and clung to her. "Honestly," she said in wonderment, "just like a baby." She was sorry now she had not said goodbye to him in London and avoided seeing him go to pieces like that. She had told me all this before we were off the train. She asked if I thought she was awful, and gave me an appraising, a testing, look. We stood in the drizzle outside the station waiting for a taxi. The crown of her hat, sprinkled all over with gemlike drops of rain, was level with the centre of my chest. "I did not think the French were made on your scale," she said. I said I was not French but she paid no heed; I would come to know well her capacity for not hearing things she considered inconvenient. For my part I was already suffering my first London headache. A taxi came. She offered to drop me at my destination but I said I had nowhere to go, which was true. She pursed her lips at that and frowned into the middle distance, thinking. We went and had a late breakfast in a hotel in Knights-bridge, which she paid for. From the dining room window we could look down on the traffic creeping through the rain. Under her overcoat she was dressed in dove-grey silk. She sipped at a cup of lemon tea and ate nothing. "They do fresh eggs here, for me," she said. "Would you like some?" And for the first time she smiled. When I had finished my food – dear me, how I could eat in those days! – she said that she would go home to sleep now, but that I must come and visit her in the afternoon. She produced another big bank note and wrote her address on it with a little silver pencil on a fine black cord. "It is a test of chivalry," she said. "If you spend it you will not know where I live." I walked around the city for hours, feeling nothing very much. There are times like that, every refugee knows them, when one seems to hang suspended, without volition, neither despairing nor hopeful, but waiting, merely, for what will come next. Daylight was already waning when I rang the bell at her tall, narrow little house in Belgravia. She came to the door in a crimson crepe-de-chine dressing-gown and smoking a cigarette in an ebony holder, a perfect parody of the stage vamp. Her very black hair was fixed elaborately with many pearl-headed pins, and she wore a mask of clay-white make-up and crimson lipstick that gave to her delicate features an excitingly oriental cast. All these preparations had been made to welcome someone, but not me, and for the first moment after she had opened the door she looked at me in blank consternation, before remembering who I was. She led me down the hall. "Damn Southampton," she said over her shoulder, "I have caught a cold." I could see, under the make-up, the delicate pink bloom along the edges of her nostrils and in the little groove above her upper lip. Her drawing room was furnished in the chilly, angular modern style of the day: there were low steel-and-glass tables, stick-insect chairs, a chandelier of menacing crystal spikes; the walls were covered with a black woven material that kept shimmering troublingly at the side of my vision. There was the thick heat of a hothouse, but she kept complaining that she was cold. Without asking she gave me gin to drink, and sat in the corner of an uncomfortable-looking, cuboid white sofa, hugging herself and shivering delicately. "I feel terrible about Eddie, now," she said, "the poor pet." Eddie was the pseudonymous Major Smith, he of the cowardly tears. "I should not have told you those things about him. You must think me horribly unfeeling." And she looked at me from under her long and matted lashes, then dropped her gaze and bit her lip delicately in an almost-smiling travesty of contrition and remorse. The doorbell rang, adding a further theatrical touch to the proceedings. She made no move to answer it, gave no sign of having heard it, even. No doubt it was the man she had been expecting instead of me. The bell went again. We sat in silence. Calmly she considered me. My stomach, still struggling with the remains of that unaccustomedly rich breakfast, growled and rumbled. The one at the door gave the bell a last, brief, half-hearted push, and then went away. Lady Laura was running a fingertip along a seam of the sofa covering. A swatch of her hair had come loose from its pins and hung down by her ear like a shiny black seashell. In a small voice she said that perhaps we should go to bed – "even though I have only just got up."

She really was tiny; had it occurred to me I might have felt some disquiet at the ease with which I had attracted in rapid succession these two distinctly boyish little persons. When she took off her gown, under which she was conveniently naked, and lay down before me on the bed, I was nervous of putting my hands on her for fear of breaking something. Where women are concerned I have always been, as you can attest, the bull in the china shop. So many I have caused to shatter in pieces, like Meissen figurines. Even the great, glazed urn that was Magda in the end was smashed under my stamping hoofs. Lady Laura was excited by the prospect of exquisite damage. She lifted her affectingly frail knees and opened her arms and smiled up into my face with slitted eyes. "Come on," she said, in a cat's thick gurgle, "break me in two, and make a wish."

She kept me, more or less, on and off, for nigh on two years. The arrangement between us she set out clearly from the start; it was to be entirely on her terms. There was no question, for instance, of my having exclusive rights to her bed; in fact, I was to have no rights at all, worth speaking of, to anything that was hers. She already had many admirers, and went on accumulating more of them all the time. She moved in a narrow, rackety milieu where aristocratic black sheep met and mingled with the art world crowd. She had a very great deal of money from her dead father, who had been a duke, but although she was a spendthrift, she was not generous. She bought me good clothes, handmade shoes, wearable trinkets of all kinds, but they were less an adornment for me than for her, by proxy. She continued to insist on my being French – "Really, darling, no one comes from your country" – and introduced me everywhere as my Frog. I liked her, really, I did; perhaps I more than liked her. There was something unwholesome about her, something acrid, discoloured, used, that I found deeply appealing; I am remembering the stale smell of her hair, the raspy touch of her shaven legs, the deep hollows under her eyes, with their bruised, plum-brown shadows.Yet no one I have ever known, not even you, dear Cass, was as tender, as delicate, as voluptuously helpless as she was, when she chose to be. She loved, she said, my size, the improbable, impossible bulk of me, her blond, contraband brute with big square jaw and killer's paws and ridiculous, unplaceable accent.

We knew nothing about each other, I mean nothing of any consequence. She led me briefly, her slim, cool hand lying lightly in mine, into the pages of one of those smart and amusingly cruel novels which were fashionable in that era, whole shelves of which I read, to improve my English, and the echo of which, I suspect, can be detected still in the colder, primmer interiors of my lamentably heterogeneous prose style. All I saw of Laura was the brittle, bright façade she chose to present to the world at large, that undistinguished, commonplace world in which, and she was careful that I should make no mistake about it, I was as far as she was concerned just another commoner. Who knows what she saw in me, beyond the merely physical. She took me everywhere, to parties and clubs, to artists' studios, to hunt balls in huge houses, even to court, once. She knew all sorts of shady people. We went to dog races, gambling dens, to a place in the East End where cock fights were held, and where, at the end of one particularly sanguinary contest, she turned to me with a terrible, glittering smile and I saw a crescent-shaped stipple of cockerel's blood on her cheek and thought inconsequently of the bramble scratches I used to get as a child picking blackberries on my grandfather's farm. She ate too much, smoked too much, slept too late and with too many lovers. Most of all, though, she drank.

It was on a visit to her mother's house in the country that I discovered the secret of her drinking, I mean her serious, full-time dipsomania. We had motored down, as the saying went, for the weekend. It was the first time I had been shown to the Dowager Duchess, and her daughter was nervous, I could tell by the metallic brightness of her voice and the altogether too brilliant smiles she kept flashing at me as she manoeuvred her dashing little car at breakneck speed along the verdant byways of Berkshire. This hitherto unsuspected vulnerability I found affecting, and I felt protective toward her, and determined to defend her against the Dowager, who in my indignant imaginings was growing by the moment to the dimensions and ferocity of a fairy-tale dragon. She lived in grand if somewhat faded style in a stone mansion set on a hill above a tiny hamlet, from the huddled roofs of which the house's many windows averted their haughty gaze. The lady herself, like her abode, was large and stately and fascinatingly ugly. My first sight of her did nothing to contradict my expectations of fierceness and flame, for she was standing in gumboots beside a bonfire into which she was poking a mattocklike implement with scowling vigour. In greeting her daughter she consented to receive a dry kiss on the cheek. Me she took in with instant cognisance and grimly set her jaw. Beside me Laura drooped perceptibly, all her brightness dimming. I realised at once that I had been brought here as a gesture of defiance against her mother – to whom my status as semi-paid lover would have been immediately obvious – but of course the old bag had the hide of a rhino and was not in the least surprised or shocked. For a long moment we regarded each other, she and I, and for all that I was half a foot higher than her I felt that she might be about to place the heel of her rubber boot on my brow and press me without effort into the earth, like a giant tent peg. A gust of wood-smoke from the fire blew in my face and made my eyes water. I said something about the journey, commended the weather, admired the house. "Are you a German?" the Dowager said loudly, with frowning incredulity. Laura muttered something and strode off toward the house, head down and hands jammed in the pockets of her long leather car-coat.

Matters grew steadily worse as the afternoon ground on. At four o'clock tea was served in the conservatory, under the leaning fronds of a giant fern. A grandfather clock directly behind my chair clicked its tongue in large, slow, monotonous disapproval. The Dowager complained of the land girls who had been sent down from London to dig up the lawns and plant potatoes; they knew nothing of country ways, she said, and cared only for cigarettes and going to dances; she suspected them of immoral carryings-on with the village men. I nodded sympathetically and inclined my face over my teacup; the giddy urge to laugh kept bubbling up. Laura sat wordless between her mother and me in what seemed an agony of anger and violent disgust, as if she were a child being forced to endure the torment of adult company. Eventually she flung herself from her chair and slouched off, supposedly to tell the maid to bring fresh tea. She had been gone for a considerable time, and I had begun to wonder uneasily how long such an errand could take in even so large a house as this – had she fled altogether, got in the car and driven away, abandoning me here, with this hideous termagant? – when I heard from far within and high up in the house a thin, ululant cry that made my backbone tingle. I put down my cup; no doubt I had a look of alarm. The Dowager, who also had heard the scream, folded her large, mannish hands on her thigh and considered me keenly, with, I thought, a certain gratified amusement. "For how long, Mr. Vandal," she asked, "have you known my daughter?"

After a search, I found Laura upstairs, locked in a little bathroom attached to what turned out to have been the nursery. She would not open the door at first, and I had to wait, looking somewhat desperately out of a circular window at a far field with grazing cows. At last I heard the lock turning. She had a gin bottle, half empty, the neck of which she had somehow managed to break off, cutting her hand quite badly. She sat on the wooden lid of the lavatory and I knelt before her and tore my handkerchief into strips and bound the wound while she mewled and wept. The fittings in the room, the lavatory, the rust-stained bath, the handbasin, the towel rail, were all made in miniature, to a child's scale, and I had a distracting sense of grotesque disproportion; we were back in a fairy tale again, I the worried giant now, and she the tiny, hysterical princess. She was already drunk, thoroughly, comprehensively, in a way I had not seen nor drunk before. She kept alternating between clawing apologies and accusatory, hair-shaking rages, big, iridescent bubbles of saliva forming and bursting between her slack, gin-raw lips. She said it was all my fault, she should never have brought me here, what had she been thinking of, it was mad, mad, she should have known, oh, how could I ever forgive her, she was sorry, so sorry, so very sorry… I took her in my arms, still kneeling before her, and she twined her legs around my waist and pressed her hot temple so hard against my cheek I thought a molar might crack. She wailed in my ear and dribbled on my shoulder. If I ever loved her, it was in that moment.

She slept until evening, there in the nursery, crouched in the narrow little bed with a cushion clutched to her stomach. The Dowager, in her gumboots again, and a suit of tweed that looked as heavy as chain-mail, glanced in nonchalantly and said she must be off to attend to some pressing agricultural matter; it was apparent she had long ago become inured to her daughter's distresses. She gave me an ironical little half grin and was gone. I sat by the bed, feeling strangely at peace. The April afternoon outside was quick with running shadows and sudden sun. I listened to the life of the house going on around me, the clocks chiming the hours, one of the maids singing down in the kitchens, a delivery boy whistling, and seemed to see it all from far above, all clear and detailed, like one of those impossible distances glimpsed through an arched window in a van Eyck setpiece, the house and fields, the village, and roads winding away, and little figures standing at gaze, and then here, in the foreground, this room, the bed, the sleeping child-woman, and I, the wakeful watcher, keeping vigil. Tell me this world is not the strangest place, stranger even than what the gods would have invented, did they exist. She woke eventually and smiled at me, and sat up, plucking away a strand of hair that had caught at the corner of her mouth. She said nothing, only put out her arms, like a child asking wordlessly to be lifted from the cradle. The little bed would not accommodate us both so we lay on the floor on an old worn rug. I had never known her so mild, so attentive, so undefended. She gave off a strong sweet smell of gin. Halfway through our slow-motion love-making she squirmed out from under me and made me turn on my back, and flipped herself upside down and lay with her belly on my chest and took me into her mouth and would not let me go until I had spent myself against the burning bud of her epiglottis. Then she swivelled right way up again – such an agile girl! – and balanced the length of herself along me, a sprat riding on a shark, and for a second I saw Josette, with her bobbed hair and upturned small breasts, smiling at me in the fish-scale light of Hendaye, and something went through me, needle-sharp, that was surprisingly like pain. Laura rested her swollen face in the hollow of my shoulder. A last, thin shaft of sunlight from the window fell across her thigh, sickle-shaped. "I am all mouth, aren't I," she said with a sigh. "You, the bottle, fags, food. Weaned too early, I imagine."

I have one last memory of that weekend to record. The next day, Sunday, in the morning, when Laura and her mother were off performing some bucolic ritual – distributing bibles to the cottagers, perhaps, or administering gruel to their children – in the performance of which, it was firmly made clear, my company was not required, I took the opportunity to explore the Dowager's domain. On a short flight of uncarpeted, well-worn wooden stairs down at the back of the house, near what I supposed were the servants' quarters, I encountered a maid, whose name was Daisy, or Dottie, a fine, strong, big-boned girl with the arms of a ploughman and a charming overlap in her front incisors, who smelled of loaves and soap, and who cheerfully allowed me to kiss her, and put my hand on her warm bodice. There had been a shower but it was stopped now, and the light was like watered silk, and the wind was blowing, and big shivery raindrops clung to the many panes of a tall window above us. I think of her often, even yet, dear Dot or Daise. I was not then the brute that I have since become. I hope that she has had a good life, and that she is living still, tended by the third or even the fourth generation. I hope too, with small confidence, that she has not altogether forgotten me. When she had freed herself from my embrace and turned aside, laughing, and tripped away up the steps, plucking up her long skirts between two fingers and two thumbs as daintily as any fine lady, I took out of my pocket a netsuke of clouded green-white jade that I had pinched from the drawing room, and, surprised at myself, went back and replaced it on the mantelpiece among its fellows.

The year and I are both declining; there is a chill in the air. Yesterday I looked up and saw that overnight the tips of the corona of mountains that rings the city were fringed with snow. The little shops along the Via dei Mercanti light their lamps early. The housewives have seized the opportunity to bring out their mink coats, of which they are touchingly proud; wearing these rich furs, or being worn by them, as it often seems, they look more than ever like large, exotic, pampered pets. I am not the only one who studies the dubious charms of these matrons. There is another old codger who paces the streets of our quarter, whose eye, black and bright as a raptor's, I sometimes catch, and who will flash at me the edge of a malicious-seeming grin before turning aside to feign deep interest in a bunch of asparagus on a vegetable stall. Like me he carries a stick, but his is an elegant malacca cane with a silver handle in the shape of an animal's head, a wolf, I think; I would not be surprised if the thing conceals a sword blade. He is shorter than I am, but then practically everyone is, and has dainty, liver-spotted hands and very small feet shod in patent leather. He dresses richly in camel hair and English tweed; his shirts, from what I can see of them beneath his cashmere muffler, are custom made, of the finest cotton and silk; they were measured for a sturdier version of him, though, and his tortoise neck waggles distressingly in the rigid, upright shackle of their loose-fitting collars. His head is narrow and almost entirely fleshless, with only the thinnest integument of tobacco-coloured skin stretched tightly over the bones of the face. A slick of oiled black hair, dyed assuredly, is smeared across his pate. He is old – that is, he is about my age. He seems never to be without a cigarette perched at a graceful angle in his tapered, bony fingers. I do not know why I notice him especially, there are many of his stamp in this ambiguous city. I fear we shall become acquainted, he and I, it is surely inevitable. I can see us in the Caffè Torino or the Caval 'd Brons, stooped forehead to forehead over a pocket chess set, with our cigarettes and our thimblefuls of oily grappa, as night falls, and the snow comes down, muffling the sounds of the city.

Kristina Kovacs, poor Kristina, will be dead before the springtime.

I am not the first to have exclaimed upon the pleasures of life in wartime London. I do not mean the great, new, warm sense of communality everyone is supposed to have felt, the keeping up of peckers and of home-fires burning and all the rest of that twaddle; no, what I am thinking of is the licence, voluptuous and languid, with just a whiff of brimstone to it, that was granted to us by the permanent likelihood of imminent, indiscriminate and violent death. Living there with Lady Laura and her money was like being on an ocean liner gone out of control and helplessly adrift yet on board which all the indulgent decorums of a luxury cruise are punctiliously observed. What did it matter that up on the bridge the captain was drunk and down in the bilges the crew was frantically pumping? Despite the bombs and rumours of bombs, despite the austerities and the tiresome restrictions on everyday living, we flitted, my little lover and I, from bar to bar, from club to club, from party to party, heedless, and as happy as probably either of us was capable of being. The city was all plangent airs and melancholy graces. I am thinking of the rich, deep sheen on the casings of wooden wirelesses; of asthmatic taxis, black and square as hearses, with crosses of black tape on their headlamps; of a certain dish of quails' eggs, washed down with mugs of woody-tasting tea, eaten late at night in a strange bed in someone's flat somewhere; of loud singing in low places; of Laura's hand on my wrist as she turned laughing at some joke and caught my eye and let the laugh turn into a look of love and longing that was no less affecting for being almost entirely fake. But of all the remembered sensations of that time that I can summon up, the most immediate is that of the smell that was everywhere in the bombed-out streets when I first arrived, a glum but to me deeply stimulating mixture of cordite and old mortar and fractured sewerage pipes. The bombers were tilling London, turning over its topsoil. And I was a sort of fifth column all of my own. The authorities took a sporadic interest in me. There was an unnerving interview with some kind of policeman in plain clothes, and for a worrying couple of weeks it seemed I might be interned on some ghastly, windswept offshore island, until Laura spoke to someone she knew in military intelligence and the threat was silently dropped; I suspect a bit of discreet blackmail was involved. There were those among her more immediate circle, too, who had their suspicions of me. There was that plummy peer, Lord Somebody, large and smooth and fabulously wealthy, a picture collector, amateur jazz pianist, and one of my people, who would point his big pale proboscis at me like an anteater searching out its prey and venture slyly that surely there was more to me than met the eye… Laura said everyone thought I was a spy; she was delighted.

I cannot say when it was exactly that I became Axel Vander, I mean when I began to think of myself as him and no longer as myself. Not when I gave his name as mine to Max Schaudeine that day when we stood together in the snow-blue light of my parents' emptied bedroom; I had no thought, then, of taking on Axel's identity, the assumption of his name alone being enough excitement for one day. Was it in Liège that freezing November twilight when the old forger with the diffident shrug of the true artist produced my – my! – passport, ready-worn, with a crease along the cover, and Axel's name under my picture? Was it when I was with Lady Laura in bed the first time and in a rush of post-coital candour was about to tell her the truth of who I really was and then smoothly, without so much as a missed breath, changed my mind? Perhaps it is not possible to identify one certain moment of decision. Do we not on countless occasions every day step effortlessly into other selves without even noticing it? The man who rises from his lover's bed is not the same man who half an hour later meets his mortal enemy. Anyway, what interests me more than when is the question why. How I worked at it, this senseless deception. I became a virtuoso of the lie, making my instrument sing so sweetly that none could doubt the veracity of its song. Such grace-notes I achieved, such cadenzas! I lied about everything, even when there was no need, even when the plain truth would have been more effective in maintaining the pretence. I made up details of my made-up life with obsessive scruple and inventiveness, building an impregnable alibi for a case that no court was ever likely to be called upon to try. Yet I am fascinated by the paradox that even as I laboured to maintain the façade, at the same time it would not have mattered to me in the slightest if someone had suddenly stepped forward with irrefutable proof of my imposture. I would have laughed in his face and owned up with a shrug. Or her face, as the case might be. I ask what I have asked already: what did it benefit me to take on his identity? It must be, simply, that it was not so much that I wanted to be him – although I did, I did want to be him – but that I wanted so much more not to be me. That is to say, I desired to escape my own individuality, the hereness of my self, not the thereness of my world, the world of my lost, poor people. This seems to matter much. Yet I have lived as him for so long I can scarcely remember what it was like to be the one that I once was… I pause in uncertainty, losing my way in this welter of personal, impersonal, impersonating, pronouns. Do not imagine I meant to perpetuate his memory, or to live the life for him of which he had been deprived; no, nothing like that, I would not be so loyal, so large-hearted. I would have defended him, yes, I would have tried to protect his name, but had I been exposed I would have slithered out of him with the ease of a secret agent discarding his cover and stepping into another.

So many questions, so many quiddities, yet I am no further along. The mystery remains, as always: why? If, as I believe, as I insist, there is no essential, singular self, what is it exactly I am supposed to have escaped by pretending to be Axel Vander? Mere being, that insupportable medley of affects, desires, fears, tics, twitches? To be someone else is to be one thing, and one thing only. I think of an actor in the ancient world. He is a veteran of the Attic drama, a spear-carrier, an old trouper. The crowd knows him but cannot remember his name. He is never Oedipus, but once he has played Creon. He has his mask, he has had it for years; it is his talisman. The white clay from which it was fashioned has turned to the shade and texture of bone. The rough felt lining has been softened by years of sweat and friction so that it fits smoothly upon the contours of his face. Increasingly, indeed, he thinks the mask is more like his face than his face is. At the end of a performance when he takes it off he wonders if the other actors can see him at all, or if he is just a head with a blank front, like the old statue of Silenus in the marketplace the features of which the weather has entirely worn away. He takes to wearing the mask at home, when no one is there. It is a comfort, it sustains him; he finds it wonderfully restful, it is like being asleep and yet conscious. Then one day he comes to the table wearing it. His wife makes no remark, his children stare for a moment, then shrug and go back to their accustomed bickering. He has achieved his apotheosis. Man and mask are one.

Today at last he addressed me, my camel-haired doppelganger, as I knew he would, eventually. I had stopped to gaze into the window of a butcher's shop on the Via Barbaroux. I have always been fascinated by these cheerfully shameless displays of cloven flesh and blood and bone – they are always so eerily well-lit. "A barbarous sight, signore," a voice said behind me. I turned my head and there he was, the punster, in his expensive, old-fashioned coat, leaning crookedly on his cane. He bears a marked resemblance to Stravinsky in old age. When he smiles, his wide, thin lips roll back from his teeth in an unnervingly equine fashion. We went to that little caffè behind the church in the Piazza della Consolata and drank hot chocolate spiked with grappa, for the day was bitterly cold. He tells me the place is very old, and has always been owned and run exclusively by women. N., I am interested to learn, used to come here to drink his morning coffee and read the newspapers. I said I wondered if he brought his whip with him, and my new friend chuckled, and dropped cigarette ash on his lapel. He is not a Torinese, not even Italian, but I cannot place his accent. He enquired, as everyone does, if I have been to view the Shroud. I told him I had once made an attempt to see it but had failed. He said, glancing over his shoulder and lowering his voice, that he can arrange a private viewing for me, if I wish. He might have been offering me contraband, or a woman. I let the subject drop. He told me his name but I did not catch it; sounded like Zoroaster. He is a doctor, he says. I think he knows who I am. I shall have a hard time avoiding him, from now on.

I should not have stolen Laura's money. It was too easy to be resisted, a matter of a few forged cheques and some judicious pawnings – the house in Belgravia was a jewel box stuffed with unconsidered and certainly unguarded bibelots. I felt it was my due to awaken some of this slumbering wealth. She trusted me, did Laura. Which is to say she found it inconceivable that anyone, or at least anyone she knew, would be so tasteless as to steal from her. She was quite mean – have I mentioned it? – in the way that only the very rich can be. She saved candle stubs, stopped runs in her stockings with dabs of nail polish, that kind of thing. And refused to insure her diamonds. Pity. She might have spared us both a deal of pain and expense. Expense on her part, pain on mine.

My plan was to get to America, as quickly as possible. That was where I had been aimed at all along. I was not your usual hopeful refugee from a fouled and foundering Europe. America for me was not the land of liberty, bright prospects, new beginnings. No: America was emptiness. In my image of it the country had no people anywhere, only great, stark, silent buildings, and gleaming machinery, and endless, desolate spaces. Even the name seemed a nonce-word, or an unsolvable anagram, with too many vowels in it. In America, I would not be required to be anyone, or to believe anything. No cause would clamour for my support, no ideology would require my commitment. I would be pure existence there, an affectless point moving through time, nihilism's silver bullet, penetrating clean through every obstacle, shooting holes in the flanks of every moth-eaten monument of so-called civilisation. Negative faith! That was to be the foundation of my new religion. A passionate and all-consuming belief in nothing. What I pilfered from Laura I thought of as her contribution to my Church of the Singular Soul. My due, her dues.

It was spring again when the two toughs waylaid me in the park. They were big bruisers, not as big as I am, but big enough. There are professionals in all walks of life, and after some initial fumbling they did a thorough job. It all happened wordlessly. I wonder that I did not cry out for help – there were always bobbies on the beat in those days. Curiously, I recall the incident from outside, as if I had not been part of it, but a witness, rather, a bad Samaritan hanging back in the bushes. I see myself there, walking purposefully along a path with high laurel hedges on either side. It is coming on for twilight, very nice and calm, the air smelling of grass after its first cutting of the season. I am wearing a grey, double-breasted pin-striped suit, brown brogues, a grey fedora with a black satin band, every inch the gent. I am feeling full of vigour and purpose; I had been working steadily in secret – the secrecy necessitated by the tacit rule laid down by Lady Laura that as her paid paramour I was to appear an amiable but unlettered dolt – and had finished and sent off to a pinkish New York magazine what I consider my first major piece of work, that essay, "Shelley Defaced," which you so much admired. However, here comes a harder reality in the shape of one of my two assailants, in cap and tight, shiny suit, enquiring for a match for his cigarette. I should have known. While I was fishing in my pockets, the other one came up behind me and struck me with a cosh. Yes, a cosh, the real thing. I must have sensed him coming, however, and started to turn, for the blow fell a fraction wide and struck me on, rather than behind, the ear, the spot for which I am told an experienced footpad would have been aiming. Temporarily stunned, I half fell into the arms of the fellow in front of me. There followed a brief interval of strenuous pushing and pulling as he tried to free himself and I held on, while the wielder of the cosh danced heavy-footed around us looking for the chance to hit me again. The one I was clinging on to smelled of soot, a fact, a clue, that afterwards I thought the police would be extremely interested in, but they were not; perhaps violent ambushing is, or was, a common sideline for chimney sweeps – there were so many aspects of English customs and manners of which I remained in ignorance. He breathed effortfully, and seemed more man anything else impatient with me. My ear was humming angrily where the cosh had caught me, and in a moment of suspended stillness, the three of us locked together in straining equilibrium, I saw one of my teeth falling to the ground at the end of a quivering, thin string of bloodied spittle. At length they managed to haul me off the pathway into the laurels, and knocked me down, and went to work in earnest. It is not commonly known that the eyeball is one of me toughest, most resilient muscles in the human body. You could hit it a hammer blow without bursting it, although of course it would be unlikely to function afterwards, as an eye. It was a boot-heel that did for my left orb that evening. Such a blaze of colour I saw for a second, fireworks reds and greens and celestial gold, and then a deep, soft, satin blackness settled in, that I knew would never lift. Possibly it was the same heel, with its razor-sharp metal cleat, that tore open my left inner thigh through my trousers and severed a whole ganglion of nerves.

I was found, with what I think of now as cruel but faulty aptness, by a pair of lovers, boy and girl. I recall a policeman kneeling on one knee and bending over me, his helmet cradled in the crook of his arm, enquiring politely if I could see him. This struck me as comical. The wet on my face was blood, not rain, as at first I had thought, although plainly it was not raining. The young chap who had found me stepped forward politely and asked the policeman if he and his girl might be on their way, as the girl thought she was going to be sick. My gashed leg was entirely numb, it might have been severed altogemer at the hip for all I could feel of it. Presently an ambulance arrived and I was loaded in and taken away and deposited into a cavernous hospital ward in which all the other beds, twenty or thirty of them, were empty, and sinisterly waiting, their sheets turned down and blankets tucked, their pillows smooth as marble. A harassed little bulldog of a doctor came and examined me, sighing irritably the while. He bandaged my eye, and ordered me to be taken to the operating theatre, where I was inexpertly and partially anaesthetised while he sewed up my leg, and then I was trundled back to the still empty ward and left alone. In the small hours my eye became intolerably painful, but when I shouted for relief no one came. In the morning I was transferred to a private room – Laura had been on the telephone – and at the end of a week I was pronounced strong enough to be driven by ambulance into the country, to a ludicrously picturesque cottage hospital, with rose beds and a weather-vane and ivy around the windows, and white-clad nuns whose elaborate wimples looked to my drugged and pain-racked fancy like the ghosts of giant butterflies. It was here that Laura paid me her first visit.

She put her head around the door, and crept in, wincing and smiling. She was wearing, I noticed, the clinging blue-grey silk costume she had worn the day we met, or one exactly like it; she did have an instinct for the symbolic. She had brought a picnic hamper and a bottle of champagne and a pile of books for me. She looked at the books and at my bandaged eye and pulled a face. "Not very tactful," she said. "I am sorry." She touched a fingertip to the bandage; I could see her struggling to contain her curiosity. "Is it very painful, darling?" She sat on the bed, avoiding the mound of my trussed-up leg under the covers, and set the hamper between us. I opened the champagne. "My big strong man," she said. When I started to fill a glass for her she gave a little squeal and made a show of staying my hand, saying she had been for a week to a frightfully expensive place where they had thoroughly dried her out. She looked at me from under her lashes and grinned, biting her lip. "Oh, all right, then," she said, "but just the one glass, mind." She asked if they were treating me well here, and sighed crossly and said so they should be, considering the money they were charging her. I said I had expected her to come to see me before now. "He speaks!" she cried, clapping her hands together. Then she looked serious, pouting, and began picking at the coverlet. "I would have come, of course," she said, "only you know how squeamish I am." She told me her mother had sent her love, and could not keep from smirking. I smiled too. She took my hand and squeezed it. "You are not so unhappy, then, darling, are you?" she said. "And you have forgiven me? They were not supposed to hurt you, you know, only give you a fright." I asked her who had hired them for her. She shrugged. She had knocked back three glasses of the champagne and her eyes had a faintly frantic light. We were silent for a while. She went back to teasing a thread out of the coverlet, frowning. "You took my money," she said softly, not looking at me. "You sold my things. That was very naughty." A gust of wind smacked its palm against the window, and a cherry tree outside shook its head, shedding a flurry of pink blossoms. She was still holding my hand, and now she lifted it to her lips and kissed it. "Poor love," she said, smiling sadly.

She paid all my hospital bills. I wrote to her mother, mentioning some of Laura's more bizarre bedroom predilections, and how embarrassing it would be if word of them was to find its way into the gossip columns, and a week later I received a generous cheque in the post from Berkshire, accompanied by a remarkably dignified letter of reproach from the Dowager. I redeemed one of Laura's rings from the pawnbroker's and sent it back to her. She acknowledged it with a note, saying I was very sweet, and that she was missing me already. A month later I was on the Atlantic, sailing westwards, in a convoy of ten ships, three of which were torpedoed and sunk off the islands of the Azores. On board I met a man, a Swedish functionary of the Red Cross, who promised to enquire into the whereabouts of my family. A month after my arrival in New York he sent me the news that my father had died of malnutrition in a labour camp in southern Poland, where shortly afterwards my mother, no longer capable of productive work, had been shot. Of my siblings, unfortunately, so said the Swede, no information was available.

So you see, my dear.