Following the Summer Read online

Marie rises, doesn’t even run a comb through her hair before she leaves, or take her purse. In the evening, not so acrid as the day because the wind has driven the smoke from the blast furnaces farther north, a smell of powder remains. “In this town it’s a perfume,” she says as soon as they’ve passed the corner, taking up a conversation from yesterday or before.

  He learns all the mundane things about this place from her.

  First they walk past the gas stations, separated here and there by a small grocery store or a snack bar. The hiss of the pumps, the creaking from shops with doors thrown open on the close of day, greetings shouted amidst banging doors, all this tumult is absorbed by the road that leads out of town, that you take here in the opposite direction. On either side the streets run uphill, with frame houses, some covered with brick paper siding and cramped together. Each is one or two storeys high and accessible only by steps, for the cellars open at ground level. Scraps of lawn, tufts of dried grass interspersed with dry earth, are strewn with bicycles, with that afternoon’s toys. Apartment houses halfway up the slope fill the space between sidewalk and alley, houses already silent behind the narrow screens tacked to the bottoms of the windows for the brief days of heat.

  On their right, finally, where the first curve of the lake appears, the schoolyard masks the entrance to the newer, richer part of town, where the waterside houses are made of real brick, with street-level entrances and garages that extend their length. You turn off before they come into view, then go down the two commercial streets, their businesses closed now, where the constant to and fro between taverns, restaurants, and movie houses continues to bring a little life. You can tell the older shops by their double display windows, which disappear into arcades. The more recent ones make a quicker impression, with their sidewalk-level facades and sometimes, on the richer ones, revolving doors.

  The corner where the Paris Café stands, with its opaque green windows and its smell of French fries wafted outside by the fan, is the heart of the town. Teenage girls swap cigarettes, then go inside for another hour; young people go through the side door of the hotel across the street into the Moulin Rouge, where they’ll drink for a long time, then dance in the violet light from faceted lamps. Life stops abruptly at the last traffic light, here where public buildings meet, the courthouse with its square wings cut from a monumental staircase, and the hospital on its high triangular plane, its cornices and windows in relief. It’s like a resort before the bay of the lake, final indentation of the city.

  This summer you must stay on the hospital side, for the walk along the bay is impassable, muddy, and strewn with rubble. In the arc of the circle that was once a beach stand the foundations of what will be a water-filtration plant, voted in long after the lake had been poisoned, long after the algae appeared, long after rot first showed up in the aspens. The building will be blind, and yellow, but that can’t yet be seen. They walk faster now as they approach the only green in town, a narrow park that protects the most discreet neighbourhood, the one most restrained in its wealth, with stone houses of which only the pointed dormer windows, outlined in grey wood and roofed in copper, are visible over the hedges. They can be made out more easily if you skirt the park along the low stone wall, then go down one of the leafy lanes where they sleep, short streets that open abruptly onto the avenue that circles the mine.

  You climb up towards the fence, letting yourself be swallowed up by the rumbling of the black mass that blocks the horizon, that breathes above the last dwellings, dilapidated ochre-coloured hovels whose joints are loose, all alike save for the yellow stucco of the last, with a windmill in front of it, barely a metre high. These houses are childless, made for the solitude of men come from afar, temporary mining cottages. Behind its windmill the last one looks empty, and they stop there, at the rim of the day-in-night created by the spotlights pointed at the railway that plunges inside the buildings. Locked up since it stopped receiving westward-bound passengers, the name of the station is Northland.

  Marie knows nothing of what takes place on the other side of that fence. She was there for an hour, long ago, a school visit, and that was enough. All they’d seen was the cage, empty then, that the men would use later to travel up and down, and they’d walked through the neat and tidy control rooms. Ten minutes at most they could spend in the cavern of the blast furnaces, where coal-black human forms passed through walls of flames, holding long poles in their hands. Tightrope walkers seen from afar, as on a screen that eradicates terror. From high above flows golden lava that beleaguered eyes see as red. Men screamed who could not be heard, and in that inferno they were gods. On the platform from which they were observed, doors at either end opened on inner courtyards they fled to when their throats were tightened by the smoke, by the searing dryness of vats barely visible.

  Is it gold or copper; she doesn’t know. Of the inner mine she remembers just as well the gravelly places peppered with coal under a forest of pipes that link buildings with no name. This place is filled with the rhythmical rumbling that covers the town when all the others are silent. You can guess at the underground world and at the same time trample it. She has never tried to go back, especially since Ervant, who doesn’t go near the fire, or doesn’t talk about it to her: it’s all the same.

  The questions she asks are about the other place, about before, about the places he comes from, that he recreates for her.

  Three

  “THE DANUBE IS DIRTY,” HE SAID, “AND Viennese men wear green hats.”

  His story about Vienna began long after the crossing of the border, about which he was silent. It got under way on Mommensgasse Street, at the corner of Theresianumgasse, at the door of a boarding house, a Gasthaus — the Gastwirschaft Zipler — which had seven square windows on each of its four storeys. Mornings he turned left and went to Julius Schöttner Textiles, where half of the boarders were employed. Evenings he crossed the street to the Maria Schneider café, where there was no Maria and coffee only rarely. The front entrance was that of a market stall, the bar a former butcher’s counter flanked by two tables, too low, where Leonel, a Spaniard who worked at Schöttner’s, too, served nothing but beer. He was open from five until midnight, and silent between the two.

  He lived alone with his young daughter, Fatima, who was eight years old, perhaps ten, and Ervant’s story was rooted there, on the night he first noticed her shortly after his arrival at Zipler’s. She was wearing a red sweater under the torn, faded dress he’d seen on so many women in the refugee camps — but of that, so near the border, he would say nothing. She went back and forth between the café and the Theresianumgasse, softly, like a cat in the sun, though coolness had long since settled in between the tall houses.

  Meeting her on his way into the café, he felt the child’s hand on his elbow, holding him back. Peculiar eyes, dark and too large under her heavy lids, a lamb’s eyes that stopped the fall of a sparse fringe of hair. She wasn’t beautiful, this city child raised on a diet of starches and dust, any plumpness of chin, cheeks, shoulders already gone. She plunged her old woman’s gaze deep into the man’s and made him lower his head towards her outstretched hand. She was begging.

  From his jacket pocket he took a banknote and held it out furtively, guiltily. She took it, silently, slowly, ignoring the man’s discomfort, and smoothed it with both hands so she could study it. He saw small rings, junky pieces that slipped a little on her fingers. He stammered a few words of German, asking her name. But she had finished and turned away from him. The red sweater was too big, it made a hump under her refugee’s dress. Walking, she seemed to brush against shadows, then stood stock-still at the corner of the street, scrutinizing the evening’s movements, no doubt hoping for some passerby.

  The café door slammed, made him start before the cry from Leonel, whom he didn’t yet know. “Fatima!” He heard it as “fatma,” an Arabic sound, a female heaviness. But she was eight years old, ten at most, and he chuckled when he saw her answer the echo, then turn sharply without seeing him. A
ll evening she sat near the bar, except when she went to the tables at a signal from Leonel to collect the dirty glasses that she’d wash in the back of the café. Clinking glasses, running water could be heard amidst scraps of conversation between workers who spoke different languages, who waited here for night. Around ten p.m. she left, at an order from Leonel.

  That autumn was warm, and it took the Danube a long time to cleanse itself of the summer’s filth.

  Ervant was scouring the city in search of the youth of the world for which he had left behind stone roads, a roughcast village. He wanted glass, perhaps, or nickel, or wind that swoops into a corridor of concrete. But Vienna was living the new world in the old.

  Around the Stefansdom, along the lighted avenues to which he often escaped, always alone, he gave no thought to the loden-clad men, the gloved women with blotchy faces who on the stroke of six swept into restaurants with frosted windows and restored wood panelling. Once, on a side street near the Opera House, he’d lingered at a table in a student café, pretending to read a newspaper that was held in place by an iron rod. No one paid him any attention, but he felt that he’d created some kind of sombre smell, here among the fair-haired young people who called out to each other with drawling courtesy. Sitting erect in a booth beside him, a girl had gathered her coat around her, marking her distance. He had gone outside, and the sound of his own footsteps on the cobblestones conjured up the sound of horses. There were none to be seen now, but their ghosts still hovered, over a vague stench of frying and the stone of imperial statues.

  Eventually he found a place behind the cathedral, in a street of small hotels and movie houses. The blinking neon sign read WIMPY’S. The window came to the edge of the sidewalk, transparent over the row of red banquettes along which a boy in a peaked cap pushed a broom. Girls bustling behind the counter at the back wore pink boaters over hair pulled into a bun. The ritual was simple: the chime of the cash register, the posted menu with its numbered dishes, the plastic tray in its nickel-plated holder, the paper napkins, and the tables that were always clean. Near the one he selected were three short-haired young men speaking English, fast and loud, while huddled over a road map. Beside the exit an old woman in trousers, her back arched, sipped a Coca-Cola that she held aloft. She smiled at him over the waxed-paper cup. The broom creaked along the floor which seemed to be plastic, too. The light fell evenly over music that he didn’t hear. Here he was free.

  It was to this place that he brought Fatima, on the first Sunday they left the neighbourhood.

  For the child had continued to accost him, at random, when there was no one to witness their meeting and she could still hold out her hand. A ritual of silence, to which he lent himself wholeheartedly, vaguely curious to see if she’d impose it on the others in the café, too. But he didn’t know them well enough to ask, and above all he would have been afraid of putting an end to Fatima’s little game. Sometimes he caught himself looking for her in the dusk of an empty street. A form, a being, a violence. Someone, in a word, who was not indifferent to him.

  She never spoke, not even on the evening when they met some distance away, in the little square that dips down to mark the entrance to the Servitenkirsche. In any case they had no common language, and murmurs need time to acquire a meaning. It was raining, she wasn’t even shivering, but still he ventured a protective move, a hand on her shoulder, and it nudged her onto the square in front of the church. The side door was ajar, she wanted to go inside, and immediately stood rooted to the spot before the mass of the confessionals, the twisted columns, the drawn curtains blocking the entrance to a baptistry, which was perfectly bare. He loathed churches, this one as much as any other: the side aisles with their padlocked grilles over blank-eyed Virgins or martyrs in their grimy tombs; the creaking of an old lady’s chair, or the fearful rustling of a nun’s habit — this one was counting the take from the candles while Fatima looked on, astonished; the brass plates of benefactors that celebrated their own death. Absences disguised as presences, so many lies amidst the lingering smell of cold incense and the humiliation of the kneeling benches.

  A single rose-window cast its quicksilver light on the ageless statues, the plaster cones of paper flowers that marked the passage from one archway to the next. A Saint Sebastian carved in wood, as were the Stations of the Cross, hung from a column in the central nave, suffocated by the same flowers. Fatima dragged her creaking sandals across the false marble floor, slowly seeing everything there was to see. She touched nothing. But when the nun’s headdress had disappeared she lit five candles. Resenting the viscous light that made the child as credulous as the women, he waited for her in the shadows, at the back. She returned to him with her impudent walk, she was out on the street before he could catch up with her. He had to go home by himself.

  Then there was the castle, and the walk along the Danube. Fatima chose the places for their excursions, and he understood that she’d done so during the week. He became the guardian of longer escapades, of explorations. The castle was not a real castle but a big stone house dozing behind a high wall interrupted at either end by porte-cochères. The latches vanished under wall ornaments shaped like bunches of grapes, baroque reminders of some nouveau-riche splendour. One was broken, Fatima knew, and she waited for Ervant to push the heavy door. He did so without thinking, more sure of his abdication of will than of his curiosity.

  Nothing happened. The courtyard was deserted, the gravel on the path poorly raked, and some dying ivy hung along the length of the servants’ quarters, with their blind casements. Standing out against the horizon in a classical harmony as surprising as it was perfect, the central part of the house was invisible behind the truncated pyramid of its double staircase. When Fatima had satisfied herself by lightly touching all the entrances they sat down in shared silence, sheltered by the bannister.

  Despite the acid autumn wind, the chill of the stone against his back, he was suffocating here as if he were in church, where objects were worn away, where fissures were worn smooth by worm holes and mildew, where flesh was everlasting marble. He wouldn’t move, though, as long as Fatima was there, questioning a pediment, a cornice, or simply the space, which was suddenly carved out differently for her, accustomed as she was to streets in blocks, to public squares, to the unbroken rustle of the city.

  She crouched on her heels just below him and he saw her from the back, her head more delicate now against her jutting shoulder blades. A father’s thoughts occurred to him now, just as she was escaping him by not asking for anything. Cut her hair, dress her as a little girl in white smocks and Viennese lace, in dirndl skirts of flowered wool. But she lacked the slimness of his models. He could see a sharp elbow under the red sweater, a harshness that did not belong to childhood. He observed on her wrist a bronze metallic line, slender thread of a bracelet that stood out only faintly against her olive skin.

  He took her hand, intrigued to find gold there rather than something nondescript made of glass. It was a perfect piece of jewellery, the clasp barely visible in the slim curved circle that clung to her wrist and moved so smoothly. He was sure he hadn’t seen it before.

  He gave her a questioning look, and she started to laugh, then gazed deeply into his eyes again with her old lady’s expression. She unfastened the bracelet, made it dance, put it back on her wrist. Then brought her hand to her neck and started kneading some imaginary necklace. He thought he heard words in her laughter, a smattering of Spanish, but it was only the hiccups of an excited child, silenced abruptly when no echo came.

  Their exploration of the castle was finished now; carefully he closed the porte-cochère, which would not engage, and they followed the brief maze of streets back to the square where they’d been just a short time ago. He didn’t know why he was unwilling to walk with her to the café, perhaps because she herself took her distance before it even came into view. That Sunday she begged another banknote from him, before she disappeared, and he went off to spend his evening elsewhere.

  The si
mplest of these October strolls had been their discovery of the path along the Danube. Ervant had gone there often, as had so many others like him who spent lonely Sundays in the city. There were no flowers, no fountains in their share of the border along the legendary river, where dreams no longer lingered as you drew near. From the paved walkway with its orderly row’s of benches one could inhale the always pallid Viennese sun in a kind of natural prison: opposite, the tall grey masses of the first post-war homes, to the left and right, identical bridges, and behind him, the embankment wall of a railway line. The closer you got to the centre the more ornate the bridges became, the more the paths opened up. On Sunday, though, each person stayed inside his own perimeter, and the men from elsewhere watched time drift by in rhythm with the brownish water which carried with it the scum of urban algae and garbage. Around the pillars that supported the bridges, under a projecting wharf, the Danube became decay. But in spite of everything you stood watching, because all rivers go somewhere, and they keep you awake.

  On Sundays around eleven o’clock, a man who rented bicycles opened his storage and display stand, setting up where the trains stopped. His only customers were young people who came here in groups and disappeared until nightfall. No sooner had Fatima come up to the platform than she was running towards the bicycles; they were too big for her and too heavy, but Ervant couldn’t refuse her. They made a childlike racket between her falls and her victories on the machine, never leaving the square which was usually so quiet. She learned slowly, too often shaking with laughter, too often tense with fear, but eventually they arrived at an agreement, with brusque words they didn’t need to understand.

  With her dishevelled hair and red face, she looked her age. He took the bicycle back around four o’clock, she was beginning to shiver, and in the hand that now held his for the first time, on their way home, he felt the unembarrassed confidence of the smallest children when they get a head start on their sleep, when all they want from you is your presence.