John Banville - Shroud

In Brussels I sat in the steamy station buffet and drank three glasses of schnapps in quick succession and my hands stopped trembling. When I went back out to the platform the return train was already moving, and I had to run and leap on, barking my shin badly. I limped along swaying corridors until I found the right compartment, and there he was, with his agitated eyes and his suitcase on his knees and his big nose empurpled from fear and the cold. I produced the note and he produced another just like it. I laughed. He laughed. We both laughed. It sounded as if we were gasping for breath. He knew no more than I did, he said. Someone unknown must have gone about the city in the night from door to singled-out door, delivering these forewarnings. We speculated if there might be others like us on the train, a scattered band of baffled fugitives. There must be something happening, at home, he said, and it sounded so strange, that word, home, and he gave a soundless gulp and looked away. Presently he opened his conjuror's case. He had in it sandwiches, an apple, a flask of aquavit, all of which he shared with me. We drank from the flask in turns; our comradeship could not have been sealed more solemnly had we cut our wrists and mingled our blood. By the end of the journey I was tipsy and heedlessly euphoric. On the platform we exchanged addresses, shouting above the din of trains and tannoyed announcements, shook hands fervently, vowed to meet, then turned and with a relieved straightening of shoulders went our separate ways, hurriedly, knowing we would never see each other again, unless perhaps the Angel of the Lord should pay another warning visit to our doors.

I walked home through the hushed city, hearing the snow squeal under my boots. The effect of the aquavit quickly wore off. My shin still throbbed where I had barked it that afternoon running for the train. When I got to our street it was darker than dark, not a single window lit, and all in silence, and then I knew. Three sentries with rifles were standing around a burning brazier, stamping their feet in the cold. I did not dare approach them, and crept past in the shadows, catching the sharp, hot stink of the burning coals, a consternating waft straight out of childhood. I recall the scene in expressionist terms, the brutish forms of the soldiers there, the terrible intensity of the brazier, and the street sliced clean in two by a glaring moon. Frost glittered everywhere on the pavements amid the snow, but when I trod on it I found it was not frost but broken glass. The shop windows were all shattered, their doors boarded over with fresh-cut planks; the piney fragrance of the wood was another incongruous whiff, this time of forest and mountain flank. The building where I lived, or at least where I had lived until now, was as dark and empty as all the others. The broken front door hung by a single hinge. Behind it, the hall was a square black hole giving on to another universe.

I went to a cinema. The film, as I recall, was Jew Suss, unless my memory, with its lamentable hunger for congruence, has substituted that title for something less apt. The audience seemed as subdued as I was, sitting back at a tilt, row after row of them, staring motionlessly, as if frozen in astonishment or fear, their faces lifted in the flickering gloom and the tips of their cigarettes glowing and fading like a swarm of fireflies, the billows of smoke in slow motion swirling up into the projector's spasmic cone of mingled light and muddied shadow. When the film was over I was the last to leave. In the street I stopped at a late-night stall and bought a paper twist of roasted chestnuts and distributed them in the pockets of my trousers, first for warmth and then for sustenance. Without thinking where I was going I made my way back to the central station, and there I spent the night on a bench in the echoing nave, like a fugitive in the sanctuary of a cathedral. I would doze off only to wake again almost immediately with a start of what was first fright and then a sort of slow, disbelieving amazement at all this that was happening. In the middle of the night the cold grew intense and I went into the lavatory and wrapped the sheets of a discarded newspaper – the Gazet, not inappropriately – around my legs under my trousers. Where had I learned all this vagabond lore? Sometime before dawn a fellow outcast tried to pick my pockets. It was an amateurish effort, and I woke at once and made a tremendous kick at him that missed. He was an old fellow with a beard. I remember his mouth, a pink, round hole sunk in tangled hair. He backed away from me cautiously, in an attitude of reproach, as if I were the aggressor, his brown-palmed hands lifted, that mouth opening and closing wordlessly. I did not sleep again, but waited for morning, when I rose stiffly and went to a workman's café and spent the last of my money on a plate of bread and sausage; I can still taste that meal. I walked the streets again. The day was clear and hard and bright, and everything rang and chimed as if the city were enclosed under a bell-jar. Frost stood in the air, a crystalline fog. Inside my stiffened boots my toes were numb. Also my barked shin was still sore, which angered me greatly. That same, hardly accountable anger was to recur often in the coming months; for the fugitive, it is the persistence of trivial afflictions that pains the most. At last, I went home. There was nowhere else to go.

I expected there would be soldiers in the street again. In daylight I would not be able to hide from them. I did not know what I would do if they should challenge me. I thought perhaps I should run at them, flailing my fists and howling, then they would shoot me and that would be an end of it. I might even get to give one of them a black eye or a smashed jaw before I fell. But the street was deserted. The brazier was no longer burning, although the clinkers were still surprisingly warm, and I stood for a while chafing my hands over them. Nothing moved, except a curtain in a shattered upstairs window, billowing in a draught. The winter sunlight made hard edges of everything, and I remembered with sudden vividness the mornings like this when I was a child setting off for school. I went into our building by the low door beside the butcher's shop, which was boarded up like all the others, and entered the courtyard with its smell of damp mortar and drains. In the vestibule there was my prohibited bicycle, and the wheelless black perambulator someone had abandoned years ago. I stood and peered up the stairwell. A great silence here, too, and an inhuman cold, and all the doors shut fast as if they would never open again. Halfway up the first flight of stairs, trite as could be, a child's shoe lay on its side, its strap torn and the button missing. On our landing the wall was scuffed where it had been rubbed and scored by years of passing shoulders, elbows, shoes; I had never taken notice of these marks before, but now they seemed as mysterious and suggestive as a set of immemorial hieroglyphs. I took out my key, but in some access of caution I paused, and put the key back in my pocket again, and knocked on the door, softly, unassumingly, as a mendicant might do, or a returning prodigal. I waited. What was I expecting? Presently I heard soft steps within approach the door and stop. Yes, you, my most assiduous reader, will recognise the moment and its image, for I have employed it in many contexts, as a mocking emblem of the human condition: two people standing on either side of a locked door, one shut out and the other listening from inside, each trying to divine the other's identity and intentions. I knocked again, more diffidently still, a mere brushing of the knuckles on the wood, and, as if this second knock were the signal, were the verification, that the one inside had been waiting for, immediately the lock clicked and the door was opened a crack and a wary, pale-lashed eye looked out at me. I mumbled something, I hardly knew what, but whatever it was it provoked a snicker from within, and the door was drawn wide open.