Somewhere East of Life

‘It’s still Stephanie, isn’t it?’ Lines of gathering frown appeared on her forehead. ‘I thought you might have stopped that foolishness.’

He shook his head, not in denial but in impatience with his own nature. The green eyes were suddenly luminous with anger.

‘Why don’t you bloody well forget Stephanie? She’s bloody well forgotten you.’

Then she was off, raising her boarding card above her head as she swept past the official at the entrance to the departures lounge. Elegant, in full control, moderately famous, one of the modern ladies of a united Europe.

He made his way up to the observation deck. Tall tails of planes like sails of yachts moved their insignia past his vision: Malev, Lufthansa, KLM, United British, EuroUnion, Singapore Airlines, SAS, Aeroflot, EuroBerlin, Alitalia, Bulgair, and her airline, her flight, Iberia, about to carry her back through Europe’s skies to the place where she lived and moved and spoke Castilian.

At last Burnell turned away. He jingled his keys abstractedly as he made his way to the short-term car park. Nothing for it now but the museum and old things, relics connected with death. His milieu.

He let self-hatred gnaw within him as he eased himself into the hired BMW.

Under genuine regret at Blanche’s departure, he tried to stifle some relief. Supposing he went to live with her, what then? What would he do? Find to do? Shouldn’t Castles in Spain – Châteaux en Asie, as the French called them – remain splendidly imaginary? What would it feel like to love, to have continuous intercourse with, another woman, while Stephanie remained as much part of his interior monologue as a separating language? He could ask himself the question even with Blanche’s physical presence still aromatically close. As he drove to the museum, he attempted a macrocosmic analogy. How could England ever become genuinely part of the European Community while its language kept the USA ever in mind?

By such linguistic artifice, he tried to distract himself from that ignoble sense of relief at Blanche’s departure. But self-knowledge is generally a traitor.

The dead were driving the living to the grave. The dead were represented by skeletons, frisky and grinning, unaware they were anatomically incorrect. The line of the living began with prelates in grand robes, the Pope in the lead. Following the prelates came a procession of merchants, hands on purses, then ordinary men and women, a soldier, then a prostitute in a low-cut, tight-laced dress; lastly, a crippled beggar bringing up the rear. Thus most ranks of medieval society were represented, together with inescapable gradations of decay.

This danse macabre had once formed an integral part of the stonework of the cathedral at Nogykanizsa. The slab on which it was carved had been saved when the cathedral was partially destroyed, to repose in the grandly named National Museum of Hungarian Anthropology and Religion.

‘Sorry, to do photographs is strickly forbidden,’ said the guide, seeing Burnell unzip his camera bag. ‘Better give it me your camera.’

She was a narrow bent woman in her fifties. A dewdrop pended at the end of her narrow nose. Her attitude suggested that nobody knew the trouble she’d seen, or that she was preparing to see in the near future. Her clothes – the nearest thing possible to a uniform – indicated that she neither shared nor approved the prosperity the new order of things had brought to her city.

She jangled her keys in best gaoler fashion. This part of the museum was officially closed for alterations, on the principle all museums adhere to, that some sections should always remain inaccessible. Only when Burnell had shown his World Antiquities and Cultural Heritage pass had he been reluctantly allowed entry.

He took a few measurements. In his black notebook he made notes and sketches. Could it conceivably be that the Pope was a representation of one of the sixteenth-century Clements whose portrait hung in the Uffizi in Florence? He made a more careful drawing of the papal figure. The frieze, severed and displayed on a bench, had suffered from weathering. Yet it was possible that the emblem carved on the Pope’s pocket represented the Castle of St Angelo, in which the pontiff Clement had been incarcerated. If so, Burnell had established an important connection hitherto overlooked.

Steering herself in her heavy shoes, the guide came to stare over Burnell’s shoulder. ‘It’s a disgust, der Todten Tantz. These skeleton, pah!’ She gestured towards the stone with an open hand.

‘Mortality – Christian stock-in-trade. But elegant rather than repulsive, to my mind.’

‘Repulsive, you say? Yes.’

He admired the way the leading Death gestured with some gallantry towards the open grave, its skull bizarrely decked with flags. The gesture could have been copied from a painting of skeletons disrupting a rural scene in a painting in the Campo Santo in Pisa. The helpful guidebook to the museum, published in Hungarian and German, attributed to the sportive Death the saying, ‘In this doleful jeste of Life, I shew the state of Manne, and how he is called at uncertayne tymes by Me to forget all that he hath and lose All.’

For a while, as Burnell measured and sketched, silence prevailed. The only sound was the footsteps of the guide, as she walked to the end of the gallery and back. She sighed in her progress, jangling her keys like a gaoler in a novel by Zola. The two were alone in the gallery, confined within the museum’s stone walls. The woman paused to stare from a narrow window at the city below. Then she called to her visitor from a distance, her voice echoing in the empty space.

‘Theme of Todten Tantz is much popular in Mittel Ages. In the stadt of Nogykanizsa, half of the population is wipe out by the Plague only one year after building of the cathedral. Only one year!’ She gave a harsh laugh, her larynx rattling in her throat. ‘Now we know better than this, praise be.’

Approaching Burnell step by step to punctuate her sentences, she launched into a discourse regarding the horrors of the Middle Ages. She concluded by saying, ‘Why you draw bad dead things? In those times was much misery here in Budapest. In these times now, everyone makes many money. Christianity and Communism, both is finish, forgotten. God and Marx – gone away! So the world is better place. People have more enlightenment than previous times.’ She sighed so that her breath reached Burnell. ‘I am old woman, of course – too late to benefit.’

It is always unwise to argue with guides. Burnell rejected both her assumption and her breath. ‘Can you really suppose people have become more enlightened? On what ground do you suppose that, madam? Have you forgotten all the fratricidal wars at present in progress on the fringes of Europe?’

The guide gave a wicked smile, pointing a large key at Burnell as if it were a gun. ‘We kill off all the Russians. Then the world is a better place. Forget about every bad things.’

Burnell closed the black notebook with a snap. ‘It’s the living who distress me, not the dead. Kindly let me out of here.’

Burnell took a light lunch in his hotel room. He ordered a small honeycomb, which he ate with butter and brown bread rolls, and goat’s cheese.

He could not but contrast the day with the happiness of the previous day with Blanche. Nevertheless, as he was never continuously happy – and did not expect to be – he was rarely continuously sad.

He enjoyed good health. Burnell in his mid-thirties was a muscular man of above average height who spent a good part of life outdoors. As a boy he had enjoyed riding, mainly on the family estate in Norfolk, while at school he had excelled at sport, cricket in particular. He had lost interest in such competitive activities after his mother’s death.

His expression was generally set, but he smiled readily. When he did so, he became almost handsome. There were women, including Blanche, who waited on that smile, so honest, so conceding of the world’s frailties. Burnell’s view of himself was harsh: he saw himself as a wanderer, without vision. In that, he seemed a typical man of his time, ‘The Era of the Question Mark’, as one political commentator had dubbed it. The dreadful inheritance of the twentieth century rumbled about everyone’s heads.

A major interest in Burnell’s life, perhaps strangely for such a passive nature, was travel. The sort of travel he engaged in on behalf of WACH hardly involved the idea of escape. His consignments involved him in the usual discomforts travellers experience, particularly those who travel alone: delay, disappointment, indifferent rooms, poor food, the insolence of petty officials, and sometimes even danger. Although Burnell gave no indication that he willingly embraced such discomforts, his friends observed how he volunteered for work in those parts of the world where such discomforts were most readily available. Italy, and Milan, had been for him, as he said, ‘an easy number’.

He scarcely realized that to his English and foreign friends he was already something of a legend. They saw him as the cool Englishman of tradition. Those who knew him in the field discovered his preoccupation with trivia: airline timetables, various states of the prints of Piranesi’s Carceri, the alcoholic strengths of various Hungarian raki, the perfumes used by whores, details of brickwork, barrel vaulting and buttresses, and the flavour of a samsa eaten in an ex-Soviet republic.

He was cool under fire and in love. He was kind in a weak way, though certainly never intentionally cruel to women. Being well born, he had a mistrust of others well born.

He had no vision. He regretted his divorce. He was cynical. But he ate his honeycomb with slow pleasure. Sitting in the sun by his window, he drank coffee and read the newspaper.

The main headline of the paper ran: ‘STAVROPOL AIRPORT BATTLE. First Use of Tactical Nukes: Crimea “Ablaze”.’ The accompanying photo consisted mainly of smoke and men running, like the cover of a lowbrow thriller.

There was as yet no admission by the EU that war had broken out in the Crimea. It was represented merely as a disagreement between Russia and the Ukraine. The disruptions would cease after various threats and admonitions from the EU Security Council. It was the form of words that that admonition would take which was currently being discussed in Brussels and Berlin.

He set the newspaper aside to gaze vacantly at the window. He admitted to himself he was feeling lonely. Blanche would be back in Madrid by now. Perhaps one of her many friends would have met her. She moved in cultivated circles. He looked at the photograph of his ex-wife on his bedside table, without seeing it. He just moved in circles.

In the afternoon, he visited Remenyi, still silent in his coma, and read to him as usual.

The grand steam baths under the Gellert Hotel were choked with bodies, male and female. Many of the bathers exhibited the bulk and the posture of wallowing hippopotami. Encompassing steam provided some kind of cloak for the torpid anatomies, while reinforcing a general impression of a bacchanalia or, more accurately, a post-bacchanalia.

The baths had been in use since Roman times; occupying Turks had enlarged them. Allowing himself his usual afternoon soak, Burnell reflected that little had changed since then. Everyone was taking it easy. The hairy stomachs surrounding him, the monumental buttocks, belonged to affluent members of Hungarian and European society. Next to him, Swedish was being languidly spoken. What with wars and trouble in the old Soviet Union republics, in the Caucasus and beyond the Caspian Sea, Swedes were prospering. Hungary was neutral, the Switzerland, the crooked casino, of Central Europe. It sold Swedish-made armaments to all sides with business-like impartiality.

Surveying hirsute figures wantonly reclining, Burnell thought, ‘That one could have made Pope; he has the nose for it. And there’s Messalina, with the cruel and creamy thighs, and that one could be Theodora, her blue rinse beginning to run a little in the heat. That little rat is Iago to the life … Blanche would be amused.’ It was Blake, it was Doré, it was also super-heating. He thought of Blanche’s nakedness, and was embarrassed to find an erection developing. He climbed from the sulphurous waters, wrapping himself with English discretion in a white towelling bathrobe.

On the way back to his room, Burnell encountered a lean bearded man clad only in a towel and hotel slippers. He was moving towards the baths, head forward in something between a slouch and a run, one eyebrow raised as if it were the proprioceptor by which he navigated. He and Burnell looked at each other. Burnell recognized the haggard lineaments, the eroded temples, the eyebrows. They belonged to a distant acquaintance from university days, Monty Broadwell-Smith.

Monty, eyebrow swivelling, locked on to Burnell at once.

‘Roy, old chap! How jolly to see you.’

‘Hello, Monty.’ Burnell knotted the bathrobe more tightly. Monty had been sacked from his post at the University of East Anglia some while ago. There had been a small scandal. Finances had gone missing. Burnell, not caring about the matter, had forgotten the details. ‘What are you doing in Budapest?’

‘Little private matter, old chum.’ He had a dated way of addressing people, smiling and nodding as he did so, as if agreeing with something off-stage. ‘Helping out a bit at what they call the “Korszinhaz”, the round theatre in the park. Scenery, you know. Well, scene-shifting. To tell the truth, only been here four days. Wandered round in a daze at first. Didn’t know where I was …’ He paused and then, seeing Burnell was about to speak, went on hastily, leaning a little nearer. ‘Between you and me, old boy, I’m here consulting a very clever chap, sort of a … well … a specialist. You see, something rather strange has happened to me. To say the least. I’d like to tell you about it, as an old friend. You still with WACH, I presume? Perhaps you’d care to buy us a drink? Fellow countryman and all that kind of stuff, compatriot … Excuse the towel.’

They went up to Burnell’s room. After opening the mini-bar, Burnell slipped into a shell-suit. He handed Monty a sweater to wear.

‘Fits me to a T,’ said his visitor. ‘You wouldn’t mind if I hung on to it, would you? Bit short of clothing, to tell the truth – here in Budapest, I mean. Some crook nicked all my luggage at the airport. You know what it’s like … They’re a dodgy lot.’

Burnell poured two generous Smirnoffs on the rocks. They raised their glasses to each other.

‘That’s better.’ Monty Broadwell-Smith sighed. He licked his lips. ‘I’ll come straight to the point, old pal. “Music when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory …” So says the poet. I expect you remember the quotation. But let’s suppose there’s no memory in which those soft voices can vibrate …’

Burnell stood by the window, saying nothing, contemplating Monty with distrust.