The Death of Noah Glass Page 19

  Over tea Evie described to Angela her job speaking movies, making light of her attraction to Benjamin. She confided that she would ask Martin if they could sell their father’s apartment. Yes, it was fine; but no, she wouldn’t stay there. Angela told her of property prices and land taxes and the gentrification of the inner suburbs. She knew a great deal on the topic, and spoke with passion. It was intolerable, Evie thought, this Sydney conversation, so riveted to home ownership and the endless imagining of a better somewhere. Perhaps it was like this across the globe, the subsumption of imaginative life into fantasies of ownership. The dream of the room of one’s own as a material asset. She was wearied by it. They paused to watch Nina dismantle a biscuit and place its fragments in a circle around her plate.

  ‘You can’t live like this forever,’ Angela warned. ‘No real job, no real prospects.’

  It had come out of nowhere. Evie didn’t respond. Prospects. What were prospects?

  When she left, Angela stood by impassively as Nina waved from the window. Evie waved back. Again, she felt her love fly out to the little girl, up high, and, yes, happy. Nina jumped on the spot. Her wave lasted longer than Evie expected. Children inflated such moments, she thought; they knew their true importance.

  When at last Angela drew her away, Evie continued across the breezy oval, full of the dashing vectors of kids and dogs. Then she saw the boy again, cruising past on his bicycle. This time he carried a girl, a few years younger, sitting sidelong on the crossbar, her skirt tucked at the panties, her pale legs dangling. They looked remarkably alike. They were brother and sister. So Angela was wrong: he was not a boy all alone, he was a boy with a sister.

  No real job, no prospects. But the afternoon by the harbour was magnificently colourful. Another kind of prospect. Evie set up a list: azurite, carmine, cerrusite, cinnabar, cobalt, galena, graphite, gypsum, haematite, indigo, lapis lazuli, limonite, malachite, Naples yellow, orpiment, realgar, smalt, ultramarine, umber, vermilion, zincite…these were the fifteenth-century pigments her father had taught her. She loved the words and their associations; she loved the memory of her father speaking of plasticity and luminosity and the mineral constitution of images. His finger pointing to a detail. The way he peered both over and through his spectacles.

  What was that moment at the manuscript room of the old British Library? Noah was showing them Byzantine manuscripts, featuring angels. They were remarkably well preserved, the ultramarine and vermilion of their garments, the scrolls of the borders, the elaborate penwork. But the faces of the angels were all jet-black. Noah began his lecture, explaining that in the nineteenth century hydrogen sulphide from gas lamps in the library had reacted with the flesh-tone faces and created lead sulphide, not a pigment at all, but a chemical blackness. Irreversible blackness. Pink angels turned black.

  How delighted she was. How entertained. Martin was standing apart, having a bad day. He had his fingers in his ears and was chanting ‘rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb’. Naughty, Evie thought then, with a degree of self-satisfaction.

  Noah was exasperated, but emphatically ignored him. He lifted his daughter closer to the glass case and began explaining the general points of Raman spectroscopy, dating procedures and the detection of forgeries.

  ‘And there,’ he would say, ‘that is gold leaf. That is lapis lazuli. That is malachite.’

  He might have been reciting a poem. Evie peered at small figures, birds, black faces, exotic curly print. Martin continued his derisive and monotonous chant. She hated him then, but she also sensed her father’s pride in her interest, and felt his warm whisper on her neck, his arms firm around her waist. In the subdued light of the Manuscript Room, in its fusty sepia hall, she felt his binding touch and committed to memory all that he told her.

  It was not too late for a swim. The prospect of ocean. Evie would take the ferry and bus back to Elizabeth Bay, then catch another bus past skyscrapers to Bondi Beach. She would ride through the sprawl of the city, full of longings and real estate and children and unspoken memories, and throw off her clothes and run headlong into the sea. She would swim far out, out of sight, so that the dark of deep water would slide leviathan-like beneath her. Then she would return to the shallows and splash in spray and dive under as the dumpers came towards her. She would find her other, aquatic life and float outstretched on her back, looking at the sky, listing the poetry of pigments. Drifting, she would imagine her face going black in the sunlight.

  29

  AT TERMINAL TWO, lugging the heavy Ragusa, Noah found he was sweating and anxious. He had rushed, and not even caught a retreating glimpse. There was a throb at his throat that he knew to be his rash erupting, and he found a seat so that he could rest. He settled the duffle bag between his legs and resisted the urge to check if the sculpture was there, to zip open the bag and examine it. He sat and waited.

  He thought of his blood pressure and dicky heart, and imagined that he might collapse and fall fainting in a shaft of light among the rows of navy-blue chairs. Efficient women would run to attend him. A natty man in a cap and black suit would command that his body be lifted and taken away. In the commotion someone kind would collect his bag, notice its weight and discover the stolen sculpture. One of Noah’s lovers had once called him a ‘catastrophist’, always on the lookout for disastrous consequences. He resented the comment at the time, but now it returned to him as a shining insight.

  A Japanese woman, dressed in a crimson kimono and employed to promote sake, approached him with a tray of glistening samples. Noah took a tiny cup, thanked the woman, and downed it. The woman bowed, just a bob, and shuffled away to offer her wares to another man sitting nearby. She approached only men. No one refused. In this little airport drama of costume and free drinks, she was a welcome distraction. Noah watched as she went from man to man, bending slightly, speaking in a high pleasant tone. He wondered if Eleonora Ragusa would have moved in this way, in this erect, formal manner, almost cut in half by her obi and hobbling in white socks on her solid wooden platforms. Eleonora Ragusa—Kiyohara Tama—had returned and was serving sake at Narita airport. She had punctured time, risen from the dead, and come to offer him a drink.

  It may have been a kind of creeping hysteria, but it was also guilt. Noah knew he must look exceptionally guilty. Each time anyone in uniform walked past, even a pilot, he broke out in another sweat and didn’t know where to look. Dora, who seemed so resolute and courageous, would be truly ashamed of him. Noah hoped for more sake and considered his wretched condition.

  He became aware, all of a sudden, of familiar accents circulating around him. The flight to Sydney: Australians. Soon he would be disguised in the passenger mass; he would enter the temporary community of the plane, all with their overweight hand luggage and loud end-of-holiday voices, all with their merry air of innocents abroad. Just as he had subsided into dull suspension on the flight from Rome, he could do so again, be blank again in the context of a more generalised entrapment. He was missing Dora, sensing her proximity but tormented by her invisibility. Soon they would fly in opposite directions, shooting in a V up into the blameless sky.

  Watching the woman in the kimono walk back towards him, her tray now empty, Noah was revisited by an old regret: that he had plied Martin with sherry after Katherine died. Martin, his child-senses frayed by grief, had been unable to sleep, was indeed almost crazy with sleeplessness. Noah began dosing him each evening, watching as the boy became slurry and woozy, his head tilting to the pillow, his eyes drunkenly closing, his breath sounding deep and low, like the suck of the sea. His son had experienced what he now thought of as a juvenile breakdown, but instead of seeking a doctor or psychological help, he had given him booze. In his own defence, had he been asked, Noah would say that he was a mess himself, that he too had trouble sleeping and that alcohol had helped. But it was a disastrous decision, unforgivable. Later, Martin developed chemical and social habits. He resorted to stupefaction when miserable or distressed. For a while he blotted himself with he
roin, and then recovered in a clinic. He was a brilliant artist but essentially unstable. It was no wonder his marriage to Angela had failed.

  Noah did a calculation: it was 8.54 a.m. in Tokyo, so it was 1.54 a.m. in Rome. It was earlier in Rome, and in his tired body. He had sped through longitudes and retrogrades of motion, he had denied prograde and rotational speed. Air travel: it was outrageous, what people did to their bodies, flinging through space. Noah felt as if he was composed of neon light, a glaring brittle thing, lightly flickering, charged up and gaseous. He might shatter if tapped. He felt manufactured, inhuman. Soon he would enter the tunnel to another long flight, and confuse his body further. Soon he would be airborne and insensible, the bust of Eleonora resting above him again, his various guilts and shames stored in a compartment while he tried again to sleep. Dora would be far away.

  The Japanese woman bearing sake reappeared, her tray replenished. Lady Bountiful. Although she recognised Noah, she approached him again, and offered him another drink. Noah took two. She smiled indulgently, with no hesitation or censure. So Noah sat with a small plastic cup in each hand, like a greedy child, then tipped each into his stinging throat in a single gulp. The gasses inside him fizzed. The woman continued her task, administering to barely awake men in transit. She moved with ceremonial slowness, disguising commerce as ritual.

  When she turned away, there was something in the shape of her kimono, seen from behind, that reminded Noah of Katherine in her dressing-gown, pregnant with Evie. It was the strangest connection. He stared at the Japanese woman, grasping the way images slide into and onto each other, the unpredictable metonymies of seeing, the unexpected association. When Katherine had appeared with her new dressing-gown, lapis blue, bought to celebrate her second pregnancy, he had seen her immediately as Piero’s pregnant Madonna, the Madonna del Parto, in which Mary stands with her gown slightly agape over her swelling belly. One hand rests at the centre, protectively cupping her mystery, the other is on her hip. Noah believed it to be one of the most unusual Madonnas ever painted. Half-sized angels stand either side of her, holding back curtains: see here, a miraculous pregnancy, they seem to declare.

  Katherine had laughed when he told her. In good humour she derided his arty and sentimental comparisons. But it remained, this vision, this lyrical amazement. He’d stared at her, there, standing in the kitchen, holding a mug of tea in each hand, and was overcome by a feeling he imagined to be both his alone and experienced by men everywhere through countless generations. He dared not describe it to her, this quiver of knowing, or to name it as anything more than a common paternal pride. Still he stared at her, comely, even at breakfast, and ageless in what she meant to him.

  The Japanese woman turned and destroyed the shape of the long-dead Katherine. What state was he in, visited by such resemblances, stretched to breaking with desire for Dora Caselli? All that Noah felt was in a ghastly welter. He was demoralised by air travel. Thirsty and lost. If he had seen himself in a mirror, he would have wondered who that old man was, carrying luggage too heavy, bent into the wrong time zone. He stood and fumbled to locate his boarding pass and passport.

  At the scanner Noah’s bag was hauled aside and placed on a metal trolley. He was asked to unpack his carry-on luggage and display his possessions. Trembling, Noah unwrapped Eleonora Ragusa. It was the first time he had seen her. The sketch was slight by comparison; this face carried especial presence. Noah stared. He was aware that his breath smelled of sake and he must look guilty as hell. His hands flapped like small wings.

  The airport official, dapper and stern, rapped at the sculpture, turned it over, and held it up before him, as if it were the severed head of John the Baptist. ‘Beautiful,’ he said in English. ‘She is very beautiful.’

  The man was a connoisseur. He asked Noah to repack his bag, and sent him through to his flight. There were no questions, there was no catastrophe, there was no criminal identification. All Noah assumed about to happen had fallen away. ‘Yes,’ he affirmed. ‘Yes, she is very beautiful.’

  On the plane, his body shaking, Noah closed his eyes. He must still himself and attempt to regain control. The time at Narita had been a calling up of phantoms. Katherine in her pregnancy. Martin bereaved, and distressed. He saw again the tousled head of his drunken boy, the way he seemed to drown into sleep. He saw the child-frown on his brow, his small face pinched and suffering. He saw him becoming floaty with alcohol, first quiet, then slowly sinking, his face pacified and finally unreachable.

  30

  PALERMO WAS ALSO, of course, a city of supermarkets and stadia and multiplexes and chain clothing stores; those places like everywhere else, in the vortex of a blended modernity. Capital. Chrome. A car showroom of new Fiats. The glassy façade of a building committed to the administration of tax. On the outskirts were the high-rises that surrounded most Italian cities, painted pale yellow as if to recall a noble era of architecture. Clunky air conditioners stuck to their sides like ticks. They were of the sixties or seventies, and already crumbling.

  It was the other Palermo that Martin inhabited. The old centre of wreckage, of irremissible melancholy. He loved the haywire of the graffiti, the rickety scaffolding, the grimy passages and laneways. He loved ‘dilapidation’. The occasional bag of cement, spilt on a building site, did not change Martin’s sense that enticing ruin persisted. Le chiese sconsacrate still moved his irreligious heart; each time he walked past the ‘Church of the Three Kings of the Orient’ and saw its concreted windows, he longed for the building to be opened up and filled with people. When a carthorse appeared in the lethal traffic, a beast with bulging eyes, terrified, its neck a clench of swollen veins, he felt it was the past intercepting and becoming visible.

  A foreigner was allowed such misconstruals, he told himself. He could never know enough of the history, or what this place really meant. Unlike Evie, who knew so many things, he had only a repertoire of consoling images; he saw only formal compositions and relations of colour and space. He saw the world thinned out, and made more easy. Riding on the bus one night, returning from an excursion to Bagheria, he was sitting in streetlight splash, watching headlights stream in tapers of rain, and saw how Palermo might be a film of surfaces, revealing nothing.

  Frank Malone made Martin think in this way. Apart from the food and wine, Frank told him, Palermo was a big disappointment. He had expected something more like Rome, or maybe Bologna. Martin could not resist a private sniff of contempt. They walked together in the drizzle towards the Fontana Pretoria—Martin had agreed to show him the sights—and talk turned to Noah, and what Frank insisted on calling ‘the case’.

  ‘Seems Noah left Palermo a day after this woman, this Dora Casetti.’

  ‘Dora Caselli.’

  ‘Her. He followed her to Tokyo. Same flight, actually.’

  ‘My father has never been to Tokyo.’

  ‘Alitalia says different.’

  ‘Ask Antonio Dotti. He can clarify.’

  ‘Antonio Dotti is uncontactable. The university said he’s gone on leave. No one knows where.’

  ‘Ask Dora.’

  ‘She refuses to speak to me. I don’t have any official power to compel her and the local cops are no help at all. They interviewed her early on. Got nothing at all. I’m fucked. Up shit creek.’

  He looked grim again. Martin was zoning out. He was recalling ‘pentimento’, a word Noah had taught him. He was thinking abbracci, baci. His mind stuttered and echoed. He was wondering how Frank Malone managed to swing a trip to Palermo on so flimsy a pretext.

  They were skirting Piazza Bologni, walking behind a truck full of concrete and rubble, when Martin looked up and saw an ornate sign carved in marble, set high on a building. He stopped and silently translated.

  ‘What?’ asked Malone.

  ‘It says Garibaldi slept in this house for two hours in May, in the year 1860.’

  ‘Garibaldi?’

  ‘Unification.’

  ‘Right.’ There was a pause. ‘You think I
don’t know who Garibaldi was?’

  Frank Malone sounded hurt. His case was non-existent; there was no crime, no reason for being in Palermo. Martin almost pitied him. He located his camera and took a photograph. Evie would like this one. Only two hours. There was something touching about this verification of weariness, the humble detail of human frailty and time out of time.

  ‘Two hours,’ Malone said, addressing nobody. ‘So what’s the big deal?’

  How long could he stand Frank Malone’s company? They could have another meal, he thought, a lunch after sightseeing, but then he wanted to draw. He wanted to be alone. His sketchbooks and camera chips were rapidly filling; he had a firm purpose now, unconnected to Noah. He figured two more weeks, three max, and he would head back to Sydney. He was missing Nina. She kept asking by sign when he would return and he wanted to give her a date she could mark on the calendar. Children need this limit, he thought, and perhaps he did too, this limit to stray thinking and dissociated roaming. And he was missing Evie. Now they were in contact again, his life seemed denser somehow; his memories were more accessible, his own sense of self bound with bright threads to her unusual authority. He was just glimpsing her now, as an adult. How many years does it take before siblings know each other? Perhaps—he hardly dared think it—they could not approach each other imaginatively while Noah was alive.

  Frank Malone wore a cap, and now, though the air was still damp and overcast, he added sunglasses. A disguise—Frank Malone was adopting a disguise. Frank had donned the look of a tourist and would become another kind of target. He had acquired a sheepish hunch and an anti-policeman manner. At the Fontana Pretoria they were the only tourists. One or two drifting figures crossed the square, but there were no other visitors who came to look at the fenced-off fountain. It was a drenched, sticky monument, grey in the poor light and coated with faded glory. A black dog, which may have been asleep or dead, lay still on the wet flagstones, curled at the foot of the fountain.