Dead Europe (38 page)

We had a hot pie each, which I struggled to get through, another beer, and then she walked me across the narrow bridge over the Cam. The Colleges of the university were spread across fields of lush green. The tour she took me on was lackadaisical and irreverent.

—It is a very boring place, Isaac, she told me, these students are devoid of life. This town is like a village. It shuts at midnight.

But when I pressed her she admitted that she much preferred living in Cambridge to being in London, or Sheffield, which was where she had first been placed when she arrived in England.

—It was too big, too cold. I felt invisible. I felt as if I was nothing, I was an insignificant little insect when I was in London. It is good here. Zivan loves the libraries. He loves being close to the universities.

—Do you think he'll study again?

—He will always be a student.

I photographed her on a bridge over the Cam River and she took a photo of me perched precariously on one of the punts.

She checked her watch.

—I must go. I have a tea to serve at the College of Kings. She sniffed haughtily. They have visitors from South Africa and it is very formal. They make prayers in Latin and sing an old silly song. I'm sure the South Africans will be embarrassed.

—Who knows? It is Cambridge. They'll probably wet their pants at all that traditional shit.

—Wet their pants? They will urinate?

—Yes, I explain, we colonials get so excited by tradition we piss ourselves.

—Yes, of course, all that tradition. She rubbed her fingers together. Tradition makes them much money. She kissed me on the cheek, and with a cigarette in her right hand, she started a slow run across the green. I watched her disappear into the dour melancholy majesty of King's College.

I had my eyes closed to the mid-afternoon sun when Zivan found me. I heard a voice booming my name and I looked up to see his gleaming face looking down at me. He took the seat across from me and yelled out to the bored young waitress for a coffee. She was about to glare at him but his smile won her over and she smiled back. He took a cigarette from my shirt pocket.

—Did you meet with Vera?

—Yes. She gave me a tour.

—She is not very respectful, Vera. It is a wonderful university. I have been at the library all morning. I have had a swim. It is a good place to live. So many utilities, and as a townie you have some access.

—I don't think Vera likes the English much.

—They are okay. They are, as they themselves say, stiff. But you must know this already. You are Australian, after all. He took my hand and squeezed it. Don't judge her harshly, my Verushka. She wants to study. She is very jealous of these boys and girls who study in a place like this.

—I'm not judging her at all. I'd feel the same way. He slipped his hand off mine and I looked around at the chilly grandeur of the university town.

—I am jealous too, I continued. I understand her. They don't know how lucky they are, having the opportunity to study in a place like this.

He was silent and no longer smiling. I was uncomfortable in the silence and was glad when the waitress arrived with the coffee. He poured three sugars into the cup and stirred furiously.

—Zivan, can I ask you something?

—Let me take a photograph of you first. You look like a student yourself, sitting here, lazily sipping your coffee at Cambridge. Why not pretend to be a student for a day?

I smiled into the camera. I could smell him. I could smell that he had pissed and shat just before he sat down with me. His shirt smelt of dry sweat, his shoes of grass and oil, and an obstinate trace of dogshit. His messy hair was greasy. I could smell it. My stomach rumbled as he took the shot. My cock stirred.

—Last night, were you being anti-Semitic?

He handed over the camera.

—I don't believe so. Do you believe I was? He kept stirring his coffee, but his eyes were fixed firmly on mine. They were not angry. Just curious, patient.

I took ages to answer him. I was trying to comprehend Vera's fury at the close of the night.

—You believe that Judaism is at the root of the problems in the world today?

Zivan's laugh was a loud, merry outburst that startled the tables around us.

—You drank too much, Isaac. Or you do not listen well.

I was not offended by his remarks. If anything, I thought both observations to be true.

—Listen, he continued, in a very drunk manner I was making one point. That the moral categories of contemporary Islamicists and of contemporary democrats come from Judaism. Jewish ethics are very different from the morality of other people in antiquity. Isaac, he exclaimed joyfully, playfully slapping my cheek. It is nothing original. I was being vain, trying to impress. I was making a common banal point.

I insisted on challenging him.

—You argued that the Jews and the Americans no longer had a right to make use of that morality.

—I made the argument that they are not any longer dispossessed. And as for being chosen by God, I find that an unacceptable and irrational moral position.

—As do I. But you were saying that the Americans and the Jews had equivalent power in the world. That's certainly not true.

—They do not have equivalent power, but they are now bound to each other. The Jewish nation and the American nation are centres of power—economic, military, intellectual—in the world. That is what I mean.

—But that's where I disagree. Judaism is a religion, Israel is a nation. Jews aren't a country. They're a people.

—The Jews are a nation. Zivan, now impatient with me, began counting down on his fingers. The law of their God define them as nation. Israel is nation-state. Most Jews identify as a distinct cultural national body. And maybe most important of all, the Hebrew language binds the Jews as a nation.

—No, I disagree. An Australian Jew is an Australian. An American Jew is an American.

—And an Israeli.

—Okay, yes, they are a nation. My tone was defensive.

Zivan rolled a cigarette along his fingers. When he finally spoke again, his question took me by surprise.

—Are you religous?

Am I religious?

—No.

—But interested in theology?

I felt scrutinised. Zivan saw my hesitation.

—You were born Orthodox?

—Yes. But my father was an atheist.

—As was mine.

—And your mother?

—She became a non-believer. My mother's family was a mixture, some Catholic, some Orthodox, possible some Jewish. He laughed, a merry flicker of music. You are surprised?

I thought of Vera's insistent cruel words of the night before.

I blurted out my confusion to Zivan.

When I finished, I snatched another cigarette. Two women with freckled skins and short spiky hair took a seat next to us. Zivan was watching them.

—My Vera is impatient with Sam. They argue politics all the time. Her words to you last night were—how do I make you understand—she was frustrated. This explains her outburst.

—Does it? I was not smoking my cigarette. I was watching the packed tobacco burn. If I looked up at the square I believed I would see shadows move past me. My stomach was a clenched ball and my nostrils were full of Zivan. I could smell the perfume and bitter moisture on the skin of the two women across from us. Europe stank, it stank of ghosts and shadows.

—You did not listen well to Vera last night. She believed in a place called Yugoslavia, she believed in her home. Not blindly—not any more blindly than you believe in your home—but she loved it and misses it. Then Sam tried to convince her that it is a good thing, that it is just that it has disappeared.
Justice.

He bit hard on the word and shook his head. Sam, of course, believes that his exile is identical to hers. Which it is not. He has a home to return to. It is possible to see my wife's anger as envy,
ressentiment
. Do you understand? Like your resentment of these pretty young students who have the opportunity to study at this fabulous university. Sometimes when I am too intoxicated by alcohol I can curse them too,
blame them for all my problems, for all the problems in the world. His smile has gone. Do you understand?

—No. I still don't understand what Vera meant last night.

—The Jews at least have a homeland that can never be taken from them. It is God's to give. Can you understand how this may make someone like Vera feel? Envy, of course. Anger, certainly. Resentment, understandably. Her homeland has vanished.

Zivan pointed across the square, to the spires of the colleges and the cathedrals.

—Look, Isaac, there and there. The world created by the Greeks and the world created by the Jews. Alongside each other. Do they belong together? He was teasing me, his smile was across his every word. I was too dumb, too ignorant for his teasing. I looked at him blankly, embarrassed.

—That is Europe. He touched my chest. That is who you are. As for Vera and I, both the Greeks and the Jews considered us barbarians. And you still do.

He rose, pushed back his chair, and nodded at the two women. I have to get ready for work, my friend. Come and have a drink at the bar tonight. It is a lovely hotel.

As I walked with him, Zivan described the splendours of the building in which he worked, told me how much he admired the restrained British elegance of the architecture.

We stopped outside the hotel. It was restrained and elegant. It was very English. The hotel had originally been a four-storey bluestone Victorian mansion. An imperial dome crowned the structure, and the cornices and buttresses were all freshly painted in a calming mint colour. It was evening by the time we arrived and the streetlights flickered, sprang to life as the white-haired doorman swung open the door for us. The interior was dark and masculine, all wooden surfaces and deep blood colours: thick burgundy velvet curtains ran down the length of the windows to the floor. There were black leather armchairs in the reception area and the rug spread on
the white sparse tiles was a plush swirl of scarlet and ochre coils. A young man with shining black hair smiled at us as we entered, and greeted Zivan warmly. A concierge sat beside a small desk, his eyes intent on a computer terminal. The only sign that this stern immutable building was now part of a chain of international hotels was the twisted black ensign engraved on the gleaming gold of the tags on the chests of the receptionist and the concierge.

—I must change.

—I'll come back tonight.

 

The pangs in my gut had been worsening throughout the afternoon. There were clouds billowing menacingly in the sky. This was a Patricia Highsmith England. Sam arrived at the house within minutes of my entry, with his arms full of shopping. He immediately went into the kitchen to cook for us.

I was unable to take more than a few bites of the steamed fish and rice salad he had prepared, and even so, I had to excuse myself and go to the toilet upstairs, where I retched for a good five minutes. Recognising that it would have cost a small fortune to prepare such a meal in England, I was mortified by my behaviour, but I was powerless to do anything about it. I looked into the bathroom mirror, at my gaunt, ashen face, and knew there was to be no deliverance.

Until Sam had got home, I'd sat in the dark lounge room, shivering and listening to the growling metamorphosis of my blood. I knew now that it was indeed my blood that was transforming me, making me ill. It was as if the very fluids coursing through my body were thickening, ballooning so that they could not be contained by the thin walls of my veins and arteries. It was as if my blood was resentful that I was refusing to feed it, and was deliberately spiting itself to force me to nourish it. It was not seeking mere food and water. In a terror, a vacant torment, I had allowed my nose to lead me through
the house and up the narrow stairs into the bathroom where on all fours I crawled, seeking the odour that my senses had convinced me was in this very house. I was led to a small wastepaper basket where I clawed through tangles of hair, cotton and dental floss until I came upon two strips of bloodied bandage. I suckled on them as relentlessly and as intensely as a nursing baby would at its mother's breast. Throwing the bandages back in the wastepaper basket, sitting back against the cold bath tiles, I found a moment of peace and contentment. It did not last long but it allowed me to present a composed face to Sam when he arrived.

He had wanted to ask me endless questions about my photographs. I told him curtly that they were a response to Europe. But he wanted to know how I had achieved my effects. I pretended that the bodies were grafted from pornography and the vileness of the internet, and this explanation seemed to satisfy him. Of course, he exclaimed, they're montage. Yes, I answered, glad that he had remained ignorant of the intricacies of digital photography. You ignorant sad old fuck, I was screaming inside, it's film, it's real, this is not digital. I grinned at him. He must have assumed a thousand depravities about where I had found the models for my work. The only question he posed was of the dubious moral worth of using such traumatic real subjects. I answered that what I was doing was akin to what samplers did in utilising fragments of other people's work in their own creation; I also answered that, unfortunately, these very images were free and public on the convoluted garbage dump which was the internet. I was convincing myself as I spoke. The inert fear that had taken hold of me when I first glimpsed the photographs had now left me. Instead, I was delighted with them, aware of their disturbing evil, excited by their ability to move and confuse people. I was proud of them. This emotion swelled and met the ravenous call of my blood. I was famished.

Wishing to feel only this ecstatic swoon of pride, on the way back to the hotel I tried to lure a small ginger cat that was sunning itself in the last faint pools of sunlight. It was stretched across a slender windowsill and at first it eyed my tender crooning with just suspicion. But it raised its nose and moved to my outstretched hand. I was not at all clear about what it was that I was intending to do. I had a whiff of its vivid carnal smell. My intention was to grab its neck, break it, and to immediately bite into it and drink the dying blood. I don't believe that there was anything rational or conscious in this intention. It was an instinct. But as soon as the animal approached my hand and sniffed, it recoiled, raised its back and fur in brittle aversion and hissed at me. It disappeared, fleeing through my legs and out into the street.