High above their heads a tinny bell banged, once, twice, three times, then a quavering fourth, startling her. The gunmetal sky was turning ash-blue all up one side. She was cold now, in her thin blouse. Vander had been silent for so long she had almost forgotten he was there. She watched him stop to poke at an object on the ground with his stick. It was a white plastic bag with something soft in it, and tied at the neck with string. "A man in a bar," he said. "I see. And you happened to be reading my book. What a coincidence." He was not looking at her. "Tell me," he said, "what was the name of this mysterious man?" Max somebody, she said. "Scheindiene, Schaundeine, something like that, I cannot remember." He said he had never known anyone of that name. He was still poking at the bag, turning it this way and that. It was plump and vaguely heart-shaped, and wobbled and flopped under his proddings; the string at the neck had been knotted in a neat bow, with awful thoroughness. "He must have been speaking of someone else," he said. "He must have been mistaken." She had not told him all that the man had told her; she had kept back the most important part. Vander was frowning intently, as if the thing in the plastic bag, whatever it was, were taking all his attention. "But he knew you," she said. "He knew the dates the articles appeared. Five weeks, five issues." At last he looked at her, holding his head at a tilt, thinking, calculating. He had got the bag partly open; something dark was oozing out, a thick, dark liquid. She felt her stomach heave and settle again. "Come," he said, folding a hard hand on the tender underside of her arm above the elbow and turning her about, in the direction of the hotel, "let us go back, you are shivering." Dawn was strengthening rapidly. High cloudlets, tinged with pink. The starlings.
There was a general hesitation, and when the applause did come it was markedly restrained. I lingered for a moment longer than the clapping lasted, smiling menacingly up at the audience ranged before me in the tiered semi-circular rows of benches, my hands clamped so fiercely on the lectern edges it must have seemed to those sitting in the front rows that I was about to pick the thing up and heave it at their heads. They were offended that I had not prepared a paper especially for the occasion, but had chosen instead to read, and in a tone of tired irony at that, a chapter from After Words, the one, justly famous, if I may say so, on poor Nietzsche's last, calamitous days here in Turin, which the majority of them would already have read, of course. What did they expect? They should count themselves fortunate that I had agreed to address them at all. I was about to step down from the podium when Franco Bartoli shot up a hand and asked with false and nauseating sweetness if I would perhaps agree to take a question or two? I heaved a loud and pointed sigh. There was the usual interval of awkward, foot-shuffling silence, and Bartoli rose part-way in his seat and swivelled his head to cast an encouraging glance at this one or that of his tongue-tied students skulking among the audience, which was made up for the most part of middle-aged academics, instantly recognisable by the peculiar drabness of their attire. At last a young man up at the back cleared his throat and asked in an earnest mumble what was, please, Professor Vander's view on the current state of cultural criticism? I lifted my head high and back and smiled. "My view?" I said. "Very fine, from this elevation, thank you." I made a curt bow and stepped away from the lectern and went none too steadily toward my seat – I had taken more than a generous go of grappa with my morning coffee, and was feeling the effects. On all sides there were head-shakings and sarcastic laughter and even some slow handclapping. I glanced to where I expected Cass Cleave to be sitting – five minutes into my reading I had glimpsed her from the corner of my eye as she came in quickly and slipped into a seat near the door – but she was not there. The place where she should have been was occupied by a brawny Brunhilde from Gottingen with massive knees, a Nietzsche scholar, as it happened, who was glaring down on me in pop-eyed indignation at my admittedly skittish treatment of her subject's final transfiguration and collapse on the Piazza Carlo Alberto a century before to the year. Franco Bartoli, one of the slow-handclappers, was smiling at me with angry brightness. I sat down. The room had no window and the woolly air was barely breathable. I was tired, dispirited, irritated. Bartoli, rising and going forward to introduce the next speaker, paused as he passed me by and leaned down and spoke into my ear. "Very witty, Professor," he murmured with honeyed bitterness, "but not entirely original, I think." Kristina Kovacs, at the other side of the room, was squaring a sheaf of papers on her knee and looking toward Bartoli expectantly. No, no, I thought, I could not bear to listen to Kristina tease out another of her elegantly humorous conceits on the phenomenology of comic strips or the soccer star as existential hero – I do wonder sometimes why I chose to spend what I am compelled to call my professional life in that little sphere of preciosities and trivial arcana. I stood up hastily and made my way to the door like a man escaping a fire.
The corridor smelled of pencil lead, musty paper, and young bodies rich with humming hormones. A scrawny, ill-dressed person, vaguely male, a student, I presumed, leaning by an open window consuming a clandestine cigarette, gave me a defiant, surly stare. No call for truculence, pale ephebe – see, I am lighting up one myself. I heard the door of the lecture hall opening and rapid footsteps approaching behind me. It was Kristina Kovacs. She did not stop until she was almost under the lee of my chin – it was a thing I remembered about Kristina, how close she liked to stand to people, even strangers, even former casual lovers. She looked up at me with her knowing, sceptical smile, a fan of fine wrinkles opening at the outer corner of each eye. "Did you think I was next to speak?" she said, amused. "Is that why you left?" I really did wish she would not stand so near, her head tilted back and swaying infinitesimally from side to side in time to her sad, inner melody. I said that I could not have stayed another moment among that herd of earnest idiots. She laughed softly and clicked her tongue in soft reproach. She said she had enjoyed my contribution to the proceedings. "Very naughty of you, to read such a well-known piece," she said with an annoyingly merry twinkle. "Franco was furious, I am sure you saw." I scowled. Do you think, I thought of asking her, do you think the mere fact that we rolled and writhed naked in each other's arms for a few hours one afternoon long ago gives you the right to this insolent familiarity? But Kristina's gaze had turned inward. "Poor man," she said, and for a second I thought it was me that she meant, and was astonished to feel a warm something surge in response within me, with all the anxious eagerness of a dog leaping up at the sound of its master's key in the door. She put her fingers to my elbow as if in urgent supplication. "Poor creature," she said, "those letters he wrote when he was mad, speaking of the great emptiness around him." Firmly I freed my elbow from her touch; it was like being settled upon by a tremulous but insistent butterfly. I laughed. "He also informed one of his much put-upon correspondents, in what I believe is the very last of those letters, that he made his own tea, did his own shopping, and suffered from torn boots. Even Zarathustra must reckon with the dull requirements of the quotidian." She was not listening; her eyes were swimming again. "But writing to Wagner's wife," she said, "that woman, of all people, calling her Ariadne and declaring that he loved her, and then ordering that all anti-Semites should be shot…" She was, I saw impatiently, quite upset. In her agitation she looked suddenly old and drawn. I glanced about in desperation. The young smoker at the window was watching us with incredulous disgust, these two ancients standing together in scandalous intimacy, pawing and being pawed. Kristina linked her arm in mine and I had no choice but to turn and walk off along the corridor with her. I found faintly repelling the way she kept insisting on touching me, squeezing my arm against her side, for instance, making me feel the heat of her meagre flesh and the soft-seeming rib-cage beneath. I registered too the thinness of her arm inside its sleeve: it was as if there were no flesh there at all, just cloth and bone. At the end of the corridor, where a big window faced us, filled with a smoky white effulgence, the figure of Cass Cleave appeared and came forward, elongated and rippling in the blazing light. She faltered at the sight of the two of us advancing arm in arm. She was wearing a loose linen dress, inside which I clearly saw, as if the material had for an instant turned transparent, her lean, big-hipped, naked body. She came on, head down, looking at her feet. We met, and stopped all three. "Kristina," I said with a wave, "allow me to introduce Catherine Cleave." I watched them shake hands. There was something obscurely comical in the moment, and I had a strong urge to laugh. "Miss Cleave," I said, in a mode of lofty patronage, "is my biographer." At that I did laugh. Why had I not thought of it before? My biographer! Cass Cleave stared at me, then quickly looked away. Kristina was still holding her hand, looking her measuringly up and down, this tall, small-headed, affectingly ungainly girl. Magda, I found myself recalling, always hated shaking hands, would go to any lengths to avoid it; I wonder why? I am trying to remember her hands, to picture them; I know their shape, their feel, but I cannot see them. Is this how she will leave me at last, limb by limb, until there is nothing remaining, except my shame? "And have you seen the Shroud?" Kristina was asking of Cass Cleave. "Our famous Sindone." My memory snapped its fingers: sindone, not signore. Kristina set off walking again, and Cass Cleave and I turned and walked with her, me to the right and she to the left; Kristina was half a head shorter than Cass Cleave; I looked down at the little woman's lustreless hair, then up again at my girl, and grinned, and winked. My biographer. "Professor Vander has been reading to us," Kristina said, «till with her head down but addressing Cass. "'Effacement and Real Presence,' a chapter from his famous book. I was surprised," glancing up at me now, "that you did not mention the Shroud: effacement, you see." She laughed shortly. "They say it is the first self-portrait. I always think it was the Magdalene who held the cloth, not Veronica. But Magdalene was hair, is that not so?"