John Banville - Nightspawn

Some things remain, scraps and bits. I did not stay for long on the island. It had changed. I had lost it somewhere, somehow, in the coils of the year that had passed. Apostolas, Erik’s man, came to see me one night. He was a great hulking inarticulate boy with burns on his hands from hot cordite. I asked him if he was still practising with his dynamite in the hills. He shook his head. He was worried, and asked for my help; he thought that the police were watching him. Imagine, he asked me for help. I told him that I could do nothing for him. He went away. Next day, the police arrested him. By then, it seemed superfluous to add that as another crime to my list. I could not have helped him. I could not help myself.

I returned to the city. I took my old hotel room again, just to tempt the fates, to tempt Papa Dop’s police, that is. They steadfastly refused to be tempted. I went to see Iakavos. He seemed not to remember me at first, but then, when I mentioned Erik, he smiled, and put his arm around my shoulder. He was a mine of information, if one could have deciphered more of his strange language. One surprise which he gave me was the fact that old Rabin had been arrested. He had, it seemed, been Mr Big in the counter-revolution which we had been helping. Helping, ha. I found that hard to believe. But then, why not? Rabin had his secrets.

My arm healed, and I could use it again, but something vital must have been severed in it, for I could but barely move the fingers. I taught myself to type with my left hand only. The departure of dexterity seemed a fitting symbol.

I found, in an old newspaper, a photograph of Erik being carried on a stretcher from the hotel where Andreas had shot him. The picture fascinated me, I cannot say why. It had been taken at the usual crooked angle, and the stretcher, which one of the white-coated orderlies seemed about to drop, stretched from the top left corner of the snap to the bottom right. The thing had the proportions of a carefully posed painting. But as for Erik himself (a twisted face with something dark streaming from the mouth) I could not feel anything. It was not really him, but someone else, a one dimensional creature in an unreal agony. I tore it up, and threw it away. I wish I had not done that.

I went up to the house on the hill, one day, but the place was locked and barred. I rang the bell, but nothing came back to me, only silence. Everything was silent. I scratched, with the toe of my sandal, a message in the dust outside the gate. And then I went away.

One last report, the one which seems to me to sum it all up, in some way which I cannot identify. Here it is, for what it is worth.

One night, very late, well after midnight, there was a knock upon the door of my hotel room. This is it, I thought, with relief, almost. Outside, in the corridor, stood a little man whom I vaguely recognized, but could not place.

‘White?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Come with me. Colonel Sesosteris wants to see you.’

The long limousine, which I recognized, stood outside in the street. Purring, it carried me and the silent driver across the city, to Aristotle’s house. A light burned in an upper window.

‘Listen,’ I said, laying my hand on the driver’s arm. ‘What’s this about?’

He shrugged, and said nothing, and led me into the house. The place was cold, and smelled like a hospital. I went up the stairs, and along a hall. The driver opened a door, and stood back, motioning me inside.

A weak bulb burned over the bed, and through the downward sifting of its light, the scene slowly advanced. In one corner of the room a table stood, draped with a napkin, and bearing instruments of burnished steel. There was a bowl of needles, a syringe and a wicked pair of scissors. The stiff white linen of the napkin fell from the corners of the table in fluted folds, and the folds created shadows. Shadow ascending, and substance falling, produced, together, a false sense of movement at the edge of my vision. Beside the table there was a chair, with slender legs, delicately curved, terminating in carved and polished claws which gripped the vague design of the carpet with inexplicable fierceness. Upon the chair a woman sat, dressed in white, with a white cap precariously perched on her hair. She was reading a novel, and nibbling, with the intensity of the plot, the nail of her little finger. The bed was huge, ornate, and low, and across the headboard a band of nymphs and satyrs pranced, flesh-pink, and forest-green, and the glittering silver of a stream, which knew no flow or flood, appeared through painted leaves. The old man lay motionless under the counterpane, his head turned sideward upon the pillow, his eyes closed. Two thoughts came strangely to me; I remembered such another bed, in another world, and I remembered the taxi driver who had carried me to Papa Iakavos. I advanced into the room. The nurse lifted her head.

‘Sh.’

She folded back an ear of the page, closed the book, and, taking my arm, she marched me firmly from the room. The hall was silent and empty. Two mirrors, one of them cracked, faced each other from opposing alcoves, bearing away a bowl of blown roses through an infinity of images. I stared at what seemed to be the solid version of the flowers, while the nurse, with her hands folded under her breasts, spoke to me.

‘Are you Mr White?’

‘Yes.’

‘He has been calling for you.’

‘Why?’

‘He wants to explain something, I don’t know what. He is very weak, you must understand, and his voice is not strong.’

A question, unspoken, hovered between us. She had a strong kind face, ands her eyebrows needed to be plucked. I said,

‘I didn’t know him very well.’

‘No?’

‘He knew a friend of mine, who’s dead now.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you?’

The nurse put her hands behind her back, and considered her black shoes.

‘I think I do,’ she said.

‘Then I wish you’d explain it to me.’

She smiled. We walked some steps down the corridor. I asked,

‘Is he dying?’

Her mouth tightened, and she said,

‘You must ask the doctor that, in the morning.’

‘But I’m asking you, now.’

We turned back, and stopped between the mirrors. She made some indecisive sounds, and then said,

‘We are hoping for an improvement, so that he can be taken into hospital. It’s always possible that —’

‘He’s dying.’

Her hands fluttered nervously, and fell together like frightened animals. She turned away from me, and opened the door of the room, saying,

‘I am not supposed to leave him.’

I followed her inside, and we sat down on either side of the bed. She made as if to speak to me again, but changed her mind, and picked up the novel. I looked at Aristotle. He had lost most of his hair, and the flesh of his face was stretched tightly over the bone. The grin of the skull was already breaking through. The long hours of darkness crept past. My chin fell to my breast, and I began to doze fitfully. A nerve, quivering in my leg, brought me awake again with a start. The bulb was flickering, and the old man was staring at me with wide, moist eyes. I waved frantically at the nurse. She left her chair, and bent over him, took a glass of water from the table, and, with her hand behind his head, held it to his lips. Another echo. He took the tiniest sip, and turned his head away. His gaze settled on me again. He had a look of intense preoccupation. At last he spoke. The voice was barely audible as it travelled over the black, deserted spaces of his illness.

‘Spiro,’ he said, querulously. ‘Spiro?’

I lifted my hands, and put them away again.

‘Ben White,’ I said, and smiled. ‘Don’t you remember me? You wanted to see me.’