John Banville - Shroud

I am waiting for Franco Bartoli to come, as he comes every day, to visit Kristina Kovacs. He is growing his beard again, as if in an attempt to compensate for the loss of Kristina's hair. I think she does not always recognise him. I leave them alone together, although I suspect Franco wishes I would stay. When he has done his duty and paid his visit I invite him to sit with me for a while before he leaves; we drink a glass of wine, he sniffles a little, blows his nose and tries to talk about things, Kristina Kovacs, his work, happenings out in the great world; Cass Cleave he does not mention, no doubt to spare my feelings. I tell him again Dr. Zoroaster's curious story about the people he met in the camp in the forest, the people calling themselves Vander. I am really retelling it to myself. What am I to think? I recall Axel's father doing his Moses and Rahel routine, how persuasive a mimic he was. But if they…? If Axel…?What am I to think? Franco Bartoli finishes his wine and, sighing, departs. When I have heard his car drive away I put on my slouch hat, take up my stick, and, having looked in on Kristina, go out and stroll the winter streets, my daily promenade, my daily harlequinade. I think on what a gallimaufry we are, Franco and poor Kristina, the Doctor, me. The city is quiet at this time of year. The dead, though, have their voice. The air through which I move is murmurous with absences. I shall soon be one of them. Good. Why should I have life and she have none? She. She.

We set up a word…but not"truths,"p. v, Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 482, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (NewYork, 1968).

"A city child… a fantasy born of my longing to belong,"pages 46 – 47, is adapted from a passage in The Future Lasts a Long Time, by Louis Althusser, edited by Olivier Corpet and Yann Moulier Boutang, translated by Richard Veasey (London, 1993). Other themes in that book have been alluded to and employed elsewhere in the text, as have themes in the life and various works of Paul de Man.

"Of all the traditional characters…He has none, this Harlequin," pages 241 – 42, is a combined adaptation of passages from The Italian Comedy, by Pierre Louis Duchartre, translated by Randolph T. Weaver (NewYork, 1966), and St. Petersburg Dialogues, by Joseph de Maistre, translated by Richard A. Lebrun (Toronto, 1993).

The description in Part Two of the persecution of Jews in Belgium is not historically accurate, and is based on eyewitness accounts from Germany in The Klemperer Diaries 1933 – 1945, by Victor Klemperer (London, 2000), and from Romania in Journal 1935-1944, by Mihail Sebastian (Chicago, 2000).

Thanks to: LudoAbicht, Ortwin de Graef, Fergus Martin, Hedwig Schwall.