David Szalay - All That Man Is

‘Meaning?’

‘People that just drift through life, always getting what they want.’ She was speaking quietly, not looking at him.

‘You don’t know me,’ he told her.

‘I know you well enough,’ she said.

‘Well enough for what?’

She went into the bathroom with her washbag.

He lay down on the soft mattress. He was still trying to think of a single significant instance, in his whole life, when he did not get what he wanted. The fact was, his life was exactly how he wanted it to be.

—

It had been his plan to visit Bamberg the next morning, and that is what they did. They stuck to his plan, and spent the morning sightseeing, as if nothing had happened. In the Romanesque simplicity of the cathedral, he pored over the tombs of Holy Roman Emperors.

Heinrich II, † 1024

The middle ages. Yesterday’s mad scenes next to the motorway, among the trucks, seemed very far away in the limpid atmosphere of the nave. Their feet whispered on the stone floor. They were walking together, looking at statues. He felt safe there, doing that. He did not want to leave, to step out of the hush into the sun, the blinding white square.

She still wasn’t saying much. She had hardly spoken to him all morning.

Maybe this was the end, he thought, as they walked in the streets of Bamberg, every blue shadow vibrating with detail.

Maybe she had decided — as he had intended, in the madness of yesterday — that she didn’t like him.

He had disappointed her, there was no doubt about that.

Lunch, though, was almost normal.

Sunlight fell through leaves into the quiet garden where waiters moved among the tables. This was what he had imagined. This was what he had had in mind. Not the scenes next to the motorway. This windless walled garden, the still shadows of these leaves. This was what he wanted.

That she was pregnant, and what would happen about that, was the one thing he did not want to talk about. The decision had been made. There was nothing else to say. They would, at some point, have to discuss practicalities. Doctors. Money. Until then, talking about it might simply open it up again — might somehow unmake the decision — so he stayed away from the subject, or anything like it.

—

After lunch they drove out of the town to the church of the Vierzehnheiligen. They were standing outside the church, and he was reading from a leaflet they had picked up at one of the tourist stands. ‘ “On 24 September 1445,” ’ he read, ‘ “Hermann Leicht, the young shepherd of a nearby Franciscan monastery, saw…” ’

He stopped.

He would not have started if he had known how the story went.

He went on, quickly, ‘ “A crying child in a field that belonged to the nearby Cistercian monastery of Langheim. As he bent down to pick up the child…” ’

He had already started on the next sentence when he saw that it was even worse.

‘ “As he bent down to pick up the child, it abruptly disappeared.” ’

He wondered whether to stop reading the thing out.

Deciding that that would only make matters worse, he went on. When he had finished, he shoved the leaflet into his pocket. ‘Should we go in?’ he said.

And then inside, in the mad marble dream of the interior, something similar happened.

They were standing at the altar, inspecting the statuary there — each statue was numbered and there was a key to indentify them. That was what he was doing. Pointing to each of the fourteen saints, and telling her who they were, and what they did. For instance, he pointed to one and said, ‘St Agathius, invoked against headache.’ Or, ‘St Catherine of Alexandria, invoked against sudden death.’ Or, ‘St Margaret of Antioch, invoked in…’

It was too late — he had to say it.

‘Childbirth.’

He wished then more than ever that they had not driven out there, in the heat of the day. He didn’t like baroque, or whatever this was. And he had a feeling that something was coming unstuck.

The next saint, he told her, was St Vitus, invoked against epilepsy.

‘St Vitus’s dance. And so on,’ he said. Her eyes, he was sure, were still on St Margaret of Antioch. ‘Here, I won’t read them all.’ He handed her the paper and, after standing there for a few seconds, started off at a leisurely pace across the brown marble floor, past pinkish columns, their markings swirling like the clouds of Jupiter.

She was still at the altar.

The place was as full as a station at rush hour.

Full of murmurous voices like the wind in a forest.

He found himself standing in front of the font — another extraordinary accretion of kitsch — staring at its pinks, its golds, its powder blues.

A stone bishop holding in his hands his own gold-hatted head.

As weird, he thought, as anything in any Inca or Hindu house of worship.

A stone bishop holding in his hands his own gold-hatted head.

A martyr. Presumably. And he wondered, with the habit of wanting to know, who this man was. This man, who had invited oblivion on himself, or taken it peaceably — the stone face on the severed head was nothing if not peaceful — when it took him.

Oblivion.

He looked up, looked for her.

She was not at the altar now. She was near the entrance, where the devotional candles were. And she had put a euro in the box and was taking a candle and lighting it from one of the ones already there.

He wondered, again, whether she was in any sense devout. Her personal mores — as far as he had been able to make them out — suggested not. Or at least had not in any way led him to think that she might be. The first time he had set eyes on her, more or less, she had been snorting cocaine, at Mani’s party.

Everyone else in that space was moving, it seemed, and she was standing still. She was standing still and watching the little flame that she had lit.

Which meant what?

He wanted to ask her. He did not dare. He was frightened about what she might say.

‘I preferred the cathedral in Bamberg,’ he said, as they walked down the hill, hoping that she would agree — as if that would mean anything. As if it would dispel the worries that had started, since they arrived at this place, to interfere with his tranquillity.

She said she would have expected him to prefer the cathedral. ‘You’re not interested in anything post about fifteen hundred,’ she said, ‘are you?’

‘Fifteen hundred,’ he said, pleased that she was at least being flippant, ‘at the very latest.’

‘Why is that, do you think?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You must have some idea. You must have thought about it.’

‘It’s just an aesthetic preference.’

‘Is it?’ She was sceptical.

‘I think so. I just feel no love,’ he said, ‘for a place like that.’ He meant the Vierzehnheiligen, and he seemed determined to do it down.

When she started to praise the tumbling fecundity of its decoration, he took it almost personally.

‘I just don’t like it,’ he said. ‘Okay?’

She laughed. ‘Okay.’

‘I’m sorry. Whatever. You liked it. I didn’t. Fine.’

They drove back to the motorway — a few kilometres through humid fields of yellow rapeseed.

‘Why did you light that candle?’ he asked, trying to sound no more than vaguely interested.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I didn’t know you were religious,’ he said.

‘I’m not.’

‘So?’

‘I just felt like it. Is it a problem?’

‘Of course not. I was wondering, that’s all.’

‘I just felt like it,’ she said again.

He asked, ‘You don’t believe in God?’

‘I don’t know. No. Do you?’

He laughed as if it should be obvious. ‘No. Not even slightly.’