John Banville - Mefisto

When I think of those aimless, dreamy journeys, I think always of the girl. When she left the flat that first night I went with her. We walked through the dark streets in silence. When the bus came we were the only passengers, except for a drunk slumped on the bench seat at the back. We watched the glossy darkness sliding past the window. She smoked a cigarette. Her name was Adele. She looked at me sharply.

— I’m not a Jew, you know, she said. You needn’t think I’m a Jew.

The conductor told her she was not to smoke. She paid him no heed. She held the cigarette aloft in her thin, white fingers, flicking the end of it with a bitten thumbnail. We went by the river, under the jagged shadows of warehouses and cranes. The drunk woke up and shouted for a while, then fell into a stupor again. The conductor walked up and down between the rows of seats, chewing a matchstick, getting a good look at us, my face, her frantic hair, grinning to himself. Adele kept her eyes fixed on the window, flicking her cigarette, flicking, flicking, vibrating faintly, as if a thin, continuous current were passing through her.

— I hate him, she said. That hair. The way he walks, as if he had no backbone.

I knew who she meant.

Suddenly she laughed, a brief, psittacine cry. Then she frowned, and stood up quickly and pressed the bell. The drunk mumbled in his sleep. We alighted at a deserted corner, under a leaning lamp. There was a bit of broken wall painted blue, and a high rickety wooden fence with things scrawled on it, names and curses and hearts with arrows in them, and a bulbous, cleft woman drawn in chalk. Adele looked about her with a preoccupied expression, clutching her handbag to her narrow chest. Her lips were black in the lamplight. The silence of the night arranged itself around us.

— Is this where you live? I said.

She looked at me in surprise.

— No, she said. Why?

A dull pain throbbed in my right arm, like an old dog yanking at the leash. I swallowed a pill.

— Where do you get them, she said, those?

I offered her one. An Oread, the last of my supply. She examined it, and put it in her mouth and swallowed it carefully, as if it were not a pill but a bit of my pain itself I had given her. For a second time she looked at me directly.

— Gabriel, she said. Is that your name?

She never smiled. She had only that laugh, and now and then a sort of grin, wild-eyed, distraught. There was a bus coming on the other side. She put her head down and walked away from me quickly across the road, the heels of her white shoes tap-tapping the asphalt. The headlights of the bus caught her briefly. She got on board and it churned away, trumpeting, into the darkness.

I went down the quays again next morning, but everything looked different by day, I could not find that corner with the blue wall and the wooden fence. The cranes and the blank sides of the warehouses had the look of things turned away, smirking in derision.

Felix came with me to the hospital for my weekly visit. We had to wait a long time, sitting in a row of wooden benches in the outpatients’ hall. There were mothers with cowed children, raw-faced young men in suits, and doll-like girls with impossible hairstyles, their mouths painted scarlet. All stared before them with the same expression of mingled boredom, disbelief and fear. At intervals a door in front of us would open and a nurse would appear and call out a name, and a boy in splints would get up, or a rheum-eyed old fellow with the shakes, and shuffle forward meekly. Then all would shift, sliding sideways, and the one at the end of each row would nip into the place vacated on the bench in front. Felix laughed.

— Like a little chapel, he said. And we’re all going to confession.

He sat at ease with his legs crossed and one arm draped along the back of the bench, smiling about him at the whey-faced coughers and the painted girls. He nudged me and whispered:

— What a bunch, eh?

When my turn came he rose eagerly to accompany me, but the nurse prevented him. He got to the threshold of the consulting room, and managed a good look inside before the door was shut in his face.

— Such cheek! the nurse said.

But she smiled all the same.

The place was busy as always, assistants in white coats walking about hurriedly with files under their arms, the consultants at their tables, magisterially bored, half listening to whispered tales of frights and night-sweats and sudden, astounding pains. An old chap was being weighed, standing atremble on the scales, clutching the waistband of his trousers in a bony fist. In a curtainless cubicle a fat old biddy sat on the side of the bed fumbling with her suspenders, while a nurse stood by, tapping one foot. Dr Cranitch looked at me blankly, then consulted his file.

— Ah, yes, he said. Swan. How is it?

I showed him my arms, my shins. The grafts had held, new skin was spreading, a roseate lichen. He nodded, humming. I asked him for a prescription. He pursed his lips and looked past me as if he had not heard.

— I can’t sleep, I said.

He nodded.

— Perhaps, he said absently, you’re meant to stay awake.

He flexed my right arm, studying the action of the joint.

— Much pain?

I didn’t answer. He let go my arm, and leaned over my file and wrote in it, in his slow, meticulous hand.

— You can lead a normal life, he said. There is no reason not to.

He didn’t look up. He had a way of speaking, toneless and dispassionate, as if he were alone, trying out the words just to see how they sounded.

— Give me a prescription, I said. Help me.

But he went on writing, slowly, carefully.

— I have helped you, he murmured.

Felix was not in the waiting room. I found him in the corridor, smoking. He asked me what the doctor had said, and when I told him he cackled, and threw his fag-end on the floor and trod on it. Then we went upstairs, and matron gave me a pocketful of pills. She looked at Felix in silence. He grinned. On the way out he said:

— That stuff, she just gives it to you, does she, no record of it or anything?

November rain in the streets, the traffic fuming and snorting. He liked to hear about the hours I had spent on the operating table, about the tinfoil bandages, the swabs and the scissors. He would wince, gritting his teeth and shutting one eye, waving his hands at me, pretending he wanted me to stop.

— But they brought you back to life, he said. And then you met up with me again. You see how things fall out? The Lord tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.

The lights were on at noon in the flat. Professor Kosok was pacing the cluttered front room. He wore black tubular trousers, boots with laces, a greasy bow-tie. He had an angry, waddling walk, his fat legs jerked, he twitched his arms, as if he were constricted at the groin, the armpits. He fixed me with his clouded small dark eyes. Adele sat in an armchair by the fireplace, wearing her plastic raincoat, leaning forward intently with her arms folded on her knees, staring at the single bar of the electric fire in the grate. There were dark shadows under her eyes. The fire had brought out a diamond pattern on her shins. An ashtray beside her on the floor was full.

— Well! said Felix happily, looking around at us and rubbing his hands. Here we are again!

Adele showed me places in the city I had never noticed, walled gardens in the midst of office blocks, odd-shaped little courtyards, an overgrown cemetery between a bakery and a bank. She walked quickly through the streets, canted forward a little, her sharp little face thrust out. Now and then she would stop and look about her searchingly, as if to verify something, some detail of the scene. She hardly spoke to me, glancing sidelong at my knees. We went into the big department stores and wandered along the brightly lit aisles, gazing in silence at the racks of gaudy clothes and toiletries and packaged foods as if they were artefacts in a museum, the works of an immemorial golden age. People stared at us, children tugged at their mothers’ skirts and pointed, avid and agape. Adele took no notice. She lived in the city as if she were alone in it, as if it were somehow hers, a vast, windswept pleasure garden, deserted and decayed.