Night Train to Lisbon Page 10

  12

  Early the next morning, Gregorius awoke to a day that was grey and foggy. Quite contrary to habit, last night he had fallen asleep quickly and plunged into a flood of dream images of ships, clothes, and prisons. Even though it was incomprehensible, the whole thing had not been unpleasant and was far from a nightmare. The confused, rhapsodic changing scenes were set off by an inaudible voice that possessed an overwhelming presence and belonged to a woman whose name he had sought with feverish haste, as if his life depended on it. Just as he woke up, the word for which he had been searching came to him: Conceição – the beautiful, fairy-tale part of the doctor’s full name on the brass plate at the entrance to her office: Mariana Conceição Eça. When he spoke the name softly to himself, another dream scene surfaced, in which a woman of quickly changing identity took off his glasses before pressing them firmly on his nose, so firmly that he still felt the pressure.

  It had been one in the morning and getting back to sleep was inconceivable. So he had leafed through Prado’s book and been drawn to a note with the title CARAS FUGAZES NA NOITE. FLEETING FACES IN THE NIGHT.

  Encounters between people, it often seems to me, are like trains passing at breakneck speed in the night. We cast fleeting looks at the passengers sitting behind dull glass in dim light, who disappear from our field of vision almost before we perceive them. Was it really a man and a woman who flashed past like phantoms, who came out of nothing into the empty dark, without meaning or purpose? Did they know each other? Did they talk? Laugh? Cry? People will say: That’s how it is when strangers pass one another in rain and wind and there might be something in the comparison. But we sit opposite people for longer, we eat and work together, lie next to each other, live under the same roof. Where is the haste? Yet everything that gives the illusion of permanence, familiarity, and intimate knowledge: isn’t it a deception invented to reassure, with which we try to conceal and ward off the flickering, disturbing haste because it would be impossible to live with it all the time? Isn’t every exchange of looks between people like the ghostly brief meeting of eyes between travellers passing one another, intoxicated by the inhuman speed and the shock of air pressure that makes everything shudder and clatter? Don’t our looks bounce off others, as in the hasty encounter of the night, and leave us with nothing but conjectures, slivers of thoughts and imagined qualities? Isn’t it true that it’s not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their imaginations?

  How would it have been, Gregorius thought, to be the sister of somebody whose loneliness spoke from such depths? Of somebody who, in his reflections, had revealed such a merciless consistency but whose words did not sound despairing or even agitated? How would it have been to assist him in his work, give injections and help bandage his patient. What his writings about distance and strangeness between people had meant for the atmosphere in the blue house? Had he kept his thoughts to himself or had the house been the place, the only place, where he had given them free rein? Were they apparent in the way he went from room to room, picked up a book and decided what music he wanted to listen to? What sounds best expressed lonely thoughts? Were they sounds that heightened his loneliness or were they melodies and rhythms that were like balm to the ear?

  With these questions in his mind, Gregorius had slipped back into a light sleep towards morning. He had found himself standing before a narrow blue door, torn between the wish to ring the bell and the certainty that he had no idea what he would say to the woman who opened the door. On waking, he went down to breakfast in the new clothes and wearing the new glasses. The waitress gave a start when she noticed his changed appearance, and then a smile flashed over her face. And now, on this grey, foggy Sunday morning, he was on his way to find the blue house old Coutinho had talked about.

  He had explored only a few streets in the upper part of the city when he saw the man he had followed home on his first evening in Lisbon, smoking at a window. In daylight the house looked even narrower and shabbier than it had then. The interior of the room was in shadow, but Gregorius caught a glimpse of the tapestry of the sofa, the glass cabinet with the colourful porcelain figures and the crucifix. He stopped and tried to catch the man’s eye.

  ‘Uma casa azul? ’ he asked.

  The man held his hand to his ear and Gregorius repeated the question. It provoked a surge of words he didn’t understand accompanied by gestures with the cigarette. As the man spoke, a very old, bent woman came to his side.

  ‘O consultório azul?’ Gregorius asked now.

  ‘Sim! ’ shouted the old woman in a creaky voice and then once again: ‘Sim!’

  She gesticulated excitedly with her stick-thin arms and shrivelled hands and after a while, Gregorius realized that she was waving him inside. Hesitantly, he entered the house that smelt of mould and rancid oil. He felt as if he had to push through a thick wall of nauseating smells to reach the door where the man was waiting, a fresh cigarette between his lips. Limping, he led Gregorius into the living room, mumbled some question and gestured a vague invitation to sit on the tapestry-covered sofa.

  In the next half-hour, Gregorius struggled to find some meaning in the mostly incomprehensible words and ambiguous gestures of the two old people who were trying to explain what it had been like forty years ago, when Amadeu de Prado had been the local doctor. There was respect in their voices, a respect you feel for someone far above you. But another feeling also filled the room, which Gregorius recognized only gradually as shyness originating in a long-ago accusation that it was difficult to expunge from the memory. After that, people avoided him. That broke his heart, he heard Coutinho say, after telling him how Prado had saved the life of Rui Luís Mendes, the Butcher of Lisbon.

  Now the man pulled up a trouser leg and showed Gregorius a scar. ‘Ele fez isto.’ He did it, he said, and ran his nicotine-stained fingertips over it. The woman rubbed her temples with her shrivelled fingers and then made the gesture of flying away: Prado had made her headaches disappear. And then she too showed him a small scar on a finger where a wart had probably been removed.

  Later, when Gregorius asked himself what had been the decisive factor that had finally made him ring the bell at the blue door, he always recalled these two old people whose bodies bore traces of the doctor who was respected, then ostracized and finally won their respect again. It had been as if his hands had come back to life.

  When they had given him directions to Prado’s former office, Gregorius got up to leave. Head to head, they watched him from the window and it seemed to him that there was envy in their look, a paradoxical envy that he could do something they no longer could: meet Amadeu de Prado by making his way into the doctor’s past.

  Was it possible that the best way to be sure of yourself was to know and understand someone else? Even someone whose life had been completely different and based on a different logic from your own? How did curiosity about another life coexist with the awareness that your own time was running out?

  Gregorious stood at the counter of a small bar and drank a coffee. It was the second time he had had stood here. An hour ago, he had climbed up to Rua Luz Soriano and stood a few steps away away from Prado’s old office, a three-storey house that he had recognized not only because of the blue ceramic tiles, but because all the windows were covered with high arches painted dark blue. The paint was old and crumbling and there were damp patches where black moss grew rampant. The blue paint was also peeling off the cast-iron bars on the bottom of the windows. Only the blue front door had an impeccable coat of paint as if someone wanted to say: This is what matters.

  His heart pounding, Gregorius had looked at the door with the brass knocker. As if my whole future were behind this door, he had thought. Then he had gone to a bar a few doors away and struggled with the threatening feeling that he was losing his grip. He had looked at his watch: it had been six days ago since he had taken the damp coat off the hook in the classroom and run away from the security of his life without a single backward glance. He had reached i
nto the pocket of this coat and groped for the key to his flat in Bern. And suddenly, as withan attack of ravenous hunger, he was assailed by the desire to read a Greek or Hebrew text; to see the beautiful Oriental letters that hadn’t lost any of their fabulous elegance for him even after forty years; to make sure that, during the past six confusing days, he hadn’t lost any of his ability to understand everything they expressed.

  In the hotel was the New Testament, in Greek and Portuguese, that Coutinho had given him; but the hotel was some distance away; it was the urge to read it here and now, not far from the blue house, that threatened to consume him, even before the door had opened. He had quickly paid for his coffee and set off in search of a bookshop where he could find such texts. But it was Sunday and the only one he found was closed; it was a religious bookshop with Greek and Hebrew titles in the window. He had leaned his forehead on the fog-damp windowpane and again felt overcome by the temptation to go to the airport and take the next plane to Zurich. It was a relief to see that he could experience the impulse as a surging and ebbing fever and patiently wait for it to pass. Finally he had slowly retraced his steps to the bar near the blue house.

  Now he took Prado’s book out of the pocket of his new jacket and looked at the bold, intrepid face of the Portuguese man. A doctor who had practised his profession with rock-hard consistency. A resistance fighter who put himself in mortal danger to expiate a guilt that didn’t exist. A goldsmith of words whose deepest passion had been to put into words the silent experiences of human life.

  Suddenly Gregorius was struck by the fear that someone quite different might now live in the blue house. The doorbell had no nameplate. He quickly left some coins for his coffee on the counter and rushed to the house. Before the blue door, he took two deep breaths and very slowly let the air escape from his lungs. Then he rang the bell.

  A rattling chime that sounded as if it came from a medieval fortress reverberated excessively loudly through the house. Nothing happened. No light, no steps. Once again, Gregorius forced himself to be calm, then he rang again. Nothing. He turned round and leaned against the door, exhausted. He thought of his flat in Bern. He was glad that his time there was over. Slowly, he shoved Prado’s book into his coat pocket, touching the cool metal of the house key as he did so. Then he broke away from the door and was about to leave.

  At that moment, he heard steps inside. Someone was coming down the stairs. Through a window, a lamp could be seen. The steps approached the door.

  ‘Quem é? ’ called a sharp female voice.

  Gregorius didn’t know what he should say. He waited in silence. Seconds passed. Then a key was turned in the lock and the door opened.

  PART II

  THE ENCOUNTER

  13

  In her strict, nun-like beauty the tall woman in black who stood before him could have come from a Greek tragedy. The pale gaunt face was framed by a crocheted kerchief she held together under her chin with a hand, a slim, bony hand with protruding dark veins that revealed her old age more clearly than the features of her face. From deep-set eyes shining like black diamonds, she examined Gregorius with a bitter look that spoke of deprivation, self-control and self-denial. These eyes could flame, thought Gregorius, if someone opposed the unbending will of this woman, who held herself straight as a candle and bore her head a little higher than her size really allowed. An icy glow came from her and Gregorius had no idea how he was to face up to her. He couldn’t even remember how to say ‘Good morning’ in Portuguese any more.

  ‘Bonjour,’ he said hoarsely as the woman silently observed him, and then he pulled Prado’s book out of his coat pocket, opened it at the portrait and showed it to her.

  ‘I know that this man, a doctor, lived and worked here,’ he went on in French. ‘I … I wanted to see where he lived and to talk with somebody who knew him. They’re such impressive sentences that he wrote. Wise sentences. Wonderful sentences. I’d like to know what the man was like who could write such sentences. What it was like to live with him.’

  The change in the woman’s stern white face, glowing faintly against the black of the kerchief, was hardly discernible. Only someone with the special wakefulness Gregorius possessed at that moment could have seen that the taut features relaxed a little – a tiny bit – and the look lost a trace of its chilly sharpness. But she remained silent and time began to stretch.

  ‘Pardonnez-moi, je ne voulais pas …’ Gregorius now began. He took two steps away from the door and fumbled in his coat pocket, which suddenly seemed too small to accommodate the book. He turned to go.

  ‘Attendez!’ said the woman. The voice now sounded less irritated and a shade warmer than just now, behind the door. And in French, the same accent resonated as in the voice of the nameless Portuguese woman on the Kirchenfeldbrücke. It sounded like an order you didn’t dare refuse, and Gregorius thought of Coutinho’s comment about the overbearing way that Adriana had treated the patients. He turned back to her, the bulky book still in his hand.

  ‘Entrez,’ said the woman, moving back from the door and pointing upstairs. She locked the door with a big key that seemed to come from another century, and then followed him upstairs. When she released the hand with the white knuckles from the banister and went past him into the parlour, he heard her gasping and he was aware of an astringent fragrance that could have come from either a medicine or a perfume.

  Never had Gregorius seen such a room, not even in the movies. It seemed to stretch over the entire house. The immaculately shining parquet floor consisted of rosettes in a variety of different kinds and tints of wood and extended as far as the eye could see. One’s gaze was then drawn to the trees beyond, that now, at the end of February, presented a tangle of black boughs rising into the blue grey sky. In one corner was a round table with a French-style sofa and three chairs, the seats of olive green velvet, the curved backs and legs of reddish wood – in another corner a shiny black grandfather clock, whose gold pendulum was still, the hands stopped at six twenty-three. And in the corner by the window was a grand piano, covered with a heavy throw of black brocade, laced with shining gold and silver threads.

  Yet, what impressed Gregorius more than anything else were the endless shelves of books built into the ochre-coloured walls. Small Art Nouveau lamps ran along the wall above them, and the coffered ceiling combined the ochre tone of the walls, mixed with dark red geometric patterns. Like a monastery library, thought Gregorius, like the library of someone who had received a classical education and came from an affluent home. He didn’t dare walk along the walls of books but his eye quickly found the Greek classics in the dark blue, gold-inscribed Oxford volumes; further back he caught sight of Cicero, Horace, the writings of the Church Fathers, the Obras Completas of San Ignacio. He hadn’t been in this house even ten minutes and was already wishing he would never have to leave it again. It simply must be Amadeu de Prado’s library. Was it?

  The woman’s voice brought him back to the present. ‘Amadeu loved the room, the books. “I have so little time, Adriana,” he often said, “much too little time to read. Maybe I should have become a priest.” But he wanted the practice to be open at all times, from morning to night. “Anyone who has pain or fear can’t wait,” he used to say when I saw his exhaustion and tried to restrain him. Reading and writing he did at night when he couldn’t sleep. Or maybe he couldn’t sleep because he had the feeling that he must read, write, and meditate, I don’t know. It was a curse, his sleeplessness, and I’m sure, without this suffering and without his restlessness, his eternal, breathless search for words, his brain would have held out much longer. Maybe he’d still be alive. He would have been eighty-four years old this year, on December 20.’

  Without asking him a single question and without introducing herself to him, she had spoken of her brother, his suffering, his devotion, his passion and his death. All the things – her words and her changing expressions left no doubt – that had been most important in her life. And she had spoken of them so abruptly, a
s if she had a right to expect that Gregorius, in a lightning-fast, unearthly metamorphosis outside all time, had turned into a denizen of her mind and an omniscient witness of her memories. He was someone who carried the book with the mysterious sign of the Cedros vermelhos, the red cedars, and that was enough to give him entry to the sacred region of her thoughts. How many years had she been waiting for someone like him to appear, someone she could talk to about her dead brother? Nineteen seventy-three had been the year of death on the tombstone. So, Adriana had lived in this house by herself for thirty-one years, thirty-one years alone with the memories and the emptiness left behind by her brother.

  So far she had held the kerchief together under her chin, as if to hide something. Now, she took her hand away; the crocheted kerchief parted to reveal a black velvet ribbon encircling her neck. Gregorius was never to forget this view of the dividing cloth, exposing the broad ribbon over the white lines of the neck; it crystallized into a firm, precisely detailed image and later, when he knew what the ribbon hid, it became an icon of his memory, along with Adriana’s gesture of checking whether the ribbon was still in place. This was an action that seemed to happen to her rather than be performed by her, and yet it was a gesture into which she sank completely and that seemed to say more about her than anything she did deliberately and consciously.

  The kerchief had slipped far back and now Gregorius saw her greying hair, with a few strands that still recalled the previous black. Adriana gripped the sliding kerchief, raised it and pulled it forward, embarrassed, paused a moment, and then ripped it off her head defiantly. Their eyes met for a moment and hers seemed to say: Yes, I’ve grown old. She bent her head, a curl slid over her eyes, her torso collapsed and then, slowly and as if lost, she ran the hands with the dark purple veins over the kerchief in her lap.