John Banville - Nightspawn

And when, toward dawn, I returned to my flat, the place seemed curiously bare. There were my books, all my possessions, all intact, yet I could not rid myself of the feeling that something was missing. I thought of searching for it, but how could I, not knowing even where to start? The last of the storm was still grumbling in the sky. I went out on the balcony and watched the rain falling on the silent humbled city. Strange lights were burning, each with a moist, white halo. Down in the streets, the beasts were feeding. It was strange. I heard my name called across the roof tops. I thought that I was free again, that I was ready to begin writing, to leave Greece, to return home, even. I was not.

Before I move at last into the real grit and gristle of things, I have a little riddle. Perceive. One word, three syllables. The first is a wager. The second is a fish. The third is one third less than everything, and the whole is my theme. What is it?

Now I may proceed.

For all they tell one, there is really not very much variety in the world. Hills and dales, plains and seas, they are all much like one another; only in what is situated against their backdrops do they differ, and even that difference is not so great as one imagines. I do not speak of that abundance of squirming life which the maniacal scientist, with his pins and poisons, can detect upon two twin stalks of grass. No, I cannot believe in that unreasonable and grotesque underworld. I am talking of scenes and situations, meetings upon mountain paths, the child’s return, again and again, in five different continents, to the same scene of that crime by which he was conceived. On an afternoon full of soft sunlight and the cicada’s song, I climbed another hill toward another white wall, but this time, no music awaited me, none of love’s tuition. And yet …

In the courtyard before the main building, in the centre of that waste of packed brown dust, a single undernourished tree stood trapped in a metal cage or corset. I pulled the bell beside the massive door and heard it jangle afar, then waited with my hands in my pockets and looked at the tree. I could understand why one would come to rest here. The door groaned as it was drawn slowly open, and a little priest, with a full black beard and bright black eyes to match, ushered me into the hall. In the dimness there, the air was cool, traversed by slanting blades of ruby and blue light from a stained-glass window somewhere above me. There was a wide stairway which curved up to an empty landing. A low chair stood below the banisters. Ikons adorned the walls. The place had that androgynous dull atmosphere which marks the total absence of women. I was sent into a long high room, in the centre of which a huge rectangular table squatted. A window looked out through pillars into the unreal brilliance of the sunlight in the courtyard. There was that tree again, looking sad and innocent, as these things will, trying to disclaim the fact that it had scurried around here, cage and all, just to catch again my sentimental gaze.

I turned. Erik stood in the doorway, one hand on the knob, the other lifted hesitantly to his jaw. We said nothing. He tried to smile, but it was a poor effort, and he looked down at his feet. Embarrassment and shame, inexplicable though they were, lay between us. He looked awful, had lost weight, and his shoulders seemed to droop lower than ever, a dirty white shirt hanging from them like something left forgotten overnight on a clothesline. His sunken jaws were coloured a bluish grey, and on his nose, which the retreating flesh had left exposed almost to the roots, three large freckles lay in startling isolation. Behind the ugly spectacles, his eyes seemed smaller and redder than I remembered. I must have gasped, for he glanced at me quickly, and grinned, as if to say that this was nothing, that he could and would look worse. I have always felt that the little genes must have thrown up their hands in despair, and abandoned the job, halfway through Erik’s making. He closed the door and came toward me. His walk too had changed, and the springs which had given it that funny bounce seemed now to have gone slack. He shuffled like an old man. He wore a pair of incongruously gay yellow slippers, with Turkish toes that pointed up at him in something like amused derision. I think I put my fingers to the table to support myself in my shock, as they do in the films. It was some relief to find that Erik was laughing at me silently, walking down the length of one wall and glancing at me now and then from the corner of his eye. But we must have spoken, we must have said something by then.

‘Erik. How are you? You look terrible.’

‘Fine, I am fine.’

‘They said that this was a hospital, that you were in hospital.’

‘It is, a kind of hospital.’

‘But why are you here?’

He lifted an imaginary glass to his lips, emptied it, and smiled his crooked smile. I noticed for the first time that one of his side front teeth was missing. That black rectangular gap among the yellow restored to him for a moment his strained, funny ferocity. He said,

‘I fell through a window at that party. Were you there?’

‘Yes. You jumped through a window.’

He shrugged.

‘I do not remember. Kyd brought me here, unconscious, and now they will not let me free. Will you help me?’

‘Maybe you should stay here for a while. Have you been drinking all that much?’

‘More than that, my friend. Have you not noticed how like a bottle I am beginning to look?’

‘Aye, very like a bottle.’

I smiled, and shook my head, and pulled out a chair from the table, but as I made to sit down, he cried, with false heartiness,

‘Come up to my room, come.’

In the hall, we met another priest, a great brown brute of a man with a thick coat of fur on the backs of his hands. Erik said,

‘Papa, this is my friend, Ben White. Papa Iakavos.’

The priest inclined his square head toward me, and let fall through his large white teeth a stream of Greek which was unintelligible to me. I smiled, and nodded, and he left us. We went up the stairs, and Erik said,

‘Iakavos is a good man, you’ll like him.’

‘Eh?’ He did not pause, but looked down at me with a trace of appeal in his eyes.

‘I thought you might come and stay here for a while? I am told that Mrs Kyd and you …’

‘Now how do you know about that?’

‘I told you before, I know everything.’

A flash of the old Erik. We went on up the steps. It was a slow ascension. There was a long strip of gauze plastered to the back of his neck, in the centre of which lay an awful, dark little spot of blood. I said,

‘I see that window left its mark on you.’

‘Marks,’ he laughed. ‘Marks.’

He turned and peeled back his lip to show me that gap in his teeth.

‘I noticed that,’ I said. ‘Adds a certain something to your face.’

He nodded soberly. Some distressing notion seemed to have struck him. At the top of the stairs, a white stone corridor swallowed us, and halfway down it, Erik pushed open one of the anonymous narrow doors which were so flat and characterless that they seemed to have been painted on the wall. His room was a stark cell, with an iron bed, one chair, a tiny desk. Not a speck of dust disturbed the paranoiac neatness. In such a stifling bareness, the open window drew us to it immediately. Below was the courtyard, with two black priests pacing the dust; there was the high wall, and an open arch framing a view of pines and the sunlit city.

‘They say that wall is four feet thick,’ Erik mused.

‘To keep out the Turks.’

He laughed softly.

‘And the Germans too, perhaps, yes? An irony.’