John Banville - Shroud

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.