Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (33 page)

But Death is always a chancy fellow. Suddenly the horse whinnies, a high-pitched noise almost like a woman’s scream, and lunges off through the snow away from the windfall. He is safe, for the moment.

He lies under the trees for a long time, or it might be no time at all. One can never tell in these in-between landscapes, populated as they are with demons from bygone times and snow-walking mermaids. But even this suspended time cannot last, for he is cold and knows he must move if he is not to freeze and be found there someday, perfectly preserved in the frost.

He leaves his shelter reluctantly, for the cold out in the open is much worse. It bites into his skin like a thousand needles but he walks forward, for he knows numbness is worse. It is the sleeping dwarf that heralds death.

He keeps on through the forest, under the heavy boughs, ears alert for any movement, for the stealth of a spray of snow, a branch that shouldn’t be moving, a noise that does not belong to night in the forest. He comes out into the open so suddenly that it is a little like falling and he has to stop to get his bearings.

In the open field, the snow blushes silver and a silence like the moment before the world began hangs there, holding him fast. Across the field, skimming its edges, there is a ripple, sinuous as water, in and out of the shadows, cream against the snow, a creature that belongs to moonlight, to cold blue taiga, to trees that bleed gold upon the ground. A tiger, one that could kill a man with a single swipe, and it is as if he can already smell his own blood upon the snow, spilling hot, scenting the field with chilling copper. The blood, which in its heat and movement under fragile skin, sings to the tiger the oldest siren song of all.

And then he sees them as they move out from under the dark branches that ring the field, upon their black horses, swathed in their black cloaks with their severed dog heads and icy brooms. He is surrounded, and there is no way out. The tiger has melted into the shadows as though it never existed.

The black horses step forward in unison. He can hear the cloaks snap upon the rising wind and knows himself trapped more surely than a winter hare in a hunter’s cruel-jawed trap.

Later, when there was time for thought, he would wonder if he had sensed them coming in his dream. Those men in the long coats moving even then through the darkness toward the low-eaved dacha in the woods.

From the Journals of James Kirkpatrick

May____, 1955

The past rises up in layers, slowly surrounding me until I feel that if I were to slip down that side street, enter that house, I would come face to face with the men we have followed down through these hundred years and more. When we first arrived, they were mere shadows, ink-stained angels or demons, depending upon the day’s view, but now they have acquired form and shape. They slip in and out of the sides of my vision. Ah, there, that auburn-haired fellow, slim as a wraith wading into the sea—certainly that must be Shelley. Shelley who foresaw his death, who felt the sea rise and overwhelm his house, his family, and his very soul.

But it is Byron I came to seek more than any other and find the man as elusive here as he is in his own writings. Just when one thinks one has caught a handful of his coat tails and will be able to ride the starry trails of his imaginings with him, one realizes he is away laughing, off in the distance, eluding understanding. He hid so much of himself from public view in life, even leaving his own country so that he might live less in subterfuge.

I imagine him passing in his coach, that resplendent vehicle that cost such a fortune in its day, with its dinner service, its traveling library and plate chest, and its lounging sofa for the days after the nights of excess. I hear the jangle of harness, the snort of horses still warm from the stable, stamping their hooves in the pre-dawn light of Pisa.

But here it is not possible to think of Byron without conjuring Shelley, pale, tired, worn from his ever-whirling household and all the people who wanted things from him. I see him walking along the shore, his mind on fire with all the words there would not be time to write down, all the feverish-winged thoughts that went out in the Gulf of Spezia forever. It was upon a shore not far from here that Shelley’s body was put to fire, though his heart, held in Byron’s grieving hands, would not, they say, take the flame. Perhaps Shelley was tired of burning, for he had been in the crucible all his life.

Why are we haunted by all the things poets do not live long enough to say?

May____, 1955

We have found a place to stay for the next several weeks, a crumbling, decrepit casa with its feet in the sea. Behind us rise hills, rolling and heady with cypress and olive trees and the smell of ripe lemons wafting in through the windows—which is just as well as it helps to overpower the mildew.

The house was owned by nobility until early this century but the war put an end to that. When I asked the old caretaker who rented it to us what happened to the family, he shrugged, one of those Italian shrugs that are more eloquent than thousands of words from a different race and said—‘They are all gone, disappeared after the war.’ This could mean any number of things—they were all killed, or they had to leave for their own safety, and for one reason or another never returned.

Like all good casas worth their salt, it also comes, Giuseppe assures us, with its own ghost. He told us this as the night rolled in, blanketing the house like thick muffling velvet. He said it’s the ghost of a woman who lived here in the 16
th
century, who was imprisoned in the stone tower that looks out over the sea for the crime of not producing a male heir for her lord. She eventually died there, still imprisoned in the tower. It is said she roams the house in the night, looking for a doorway out but never finding it. Andrei looked suitably alarmed at this news, for he is used to Russian ghosts who tend to come back only for vengeful purposes. I am used to Irish ghosts however, who are an altogether milder species.

My room looks out over the sea. I opened the tall windows and left them that way for the night, the shushing of the waves lulling me to sleep.

May____, 1955

We spent a sleepless night here, due to the peregrinations of the ghost—or so we thought at first. It occurs to me that an Irishman and a Russian ought not to share such old, decrepit lodgings. It seems inevitable we would summon a ghost eventually.

I was fully asleep, having imbibed too much grappa during the evening, when the most unearthly moaning woke me up. I sat up in bed, rather startling the woman who had accompanied me home. It didn’t take her long to understand what had wakened me, and she set to jibbering in Italian in a manner not designed to pluck up a man’s courage.

I left the bed swiftly, for the moaning continued, seeming to come from both the rafters and the window and then quite suddenly from the tree outside my window. I shook my head to clear the cobwebs and immediately regretted it—perhaps I was only having a grappa-induced hallucination. I felt it was time to put on some pants, as no man can meet a phantom with dignity when he’s naked as a new-minted babe.

Pants on, I opened the door to my bedroom, feeling a bit like Shelley going off to face the terrifying apparitions that heralded his own death. Colliding with an angry Russian in the hall somewhat dampened this Romantic illusion. Andrei was, like myself, only half-clad, but ornamented with a signorina wrapped in a sheet. She too was letting loose a stream of Italian invective which I felt certain would either banish said ghost or bring it down upon our heads in fiery vengeance.

A thing—a wafty, white sort of thing—was floating up in the tower near the cap in spiraling loops. In the gloom of the night, with the sea moaning and crashing in a lugubrious manner outside our walls, it looked utterly terrifying. There was no making head nor tail of it, for it was most oddly shaped and drifted in no comprehensible manner. Truly, it seemed that we were being paid a visit from the other side. As we stood there craning our necks, trying to rationalize it, the women very sensibly began praying loudly to Mary and went to retrieve their clothing, after which they made haste to leave our lodgings. I can’t say I blame them, for had I anywhere to run, I might well have done so. A ghost is hardly like a bug. You can’t merely eject it from your lodgings with a pat of its wings and a blessing to guide its path away from your door.

This left Andrei and me looking at one another in blank dismay, neither of us being versed in the finer points of how to exorcise a ghost. Admittedly, a damp, crumbling casa by the sea in Pisa does not lend itself to a feeling of jolly calm. In fact, I was beginning to feel rather like a vapor-given character in a Gothic novel when the ghost—how to say this delicately—emitted a rather worldly substance that landed squarely on my shoulder. That, I am assured by our housekeeper Gina, is a sign of great fortune. We shall see.

Our phantom was an owl that had somehow not only managed to fly in through the gaps in the tower, but arrived with a pair of commodious ladies’ underwear attached to its head. The resulting confusion had understandably upset it, hence the mournful moaning.

How to get it down became the issue. And get it down we must for it was bumping about up there like a demented ghoul intent on dashing its brains out.

Before I really thought about it, I started to climb the sides of the tower. It was an exhilarating climb, though in retrospect, suicidal. I could feel the stones crumble in places as my feet left their purchase. I felt as though I had quicksilver along all my limbs and that I merely flowed along the wall as if I were as much part of it as the stone and lichen, wind and rain.

I managed to shove the shutters open so that the owl could fly out. Feeling the air, it did, though not before flapping furiously around my head for what seemed a very long time. Just as the owl gained its freedom, letting out a screech into the night that would have chilled a Viking to his core, I felt the stone under my hand give. There wasn’t time for thought, only blindly flailing and hoping for some solidity in a suddenly precarious universe.

It is difficult to give truth to this scene, so ridiculous was it. For there I was, hanging from a chandelier that was clearly about to tear itself out of its crumbling moorings and take me with it straight to the pits of hell—or at the very least, to the cold stone floor of the casa.

Andrei, seized with inspiration, grabbed the sheets from his bed and returned, frantically knotting them. I was still hanging on despite the chandelier groaning in a manner that indicated it was about done with my nonsense. He knotted the end with what seemed to me sadistic thoroughness and tossed it to me. I had a moment of free fall as the chandelier gave way and crashed to the floor below. I caught the knot of the sheet and fell like a stone. The sheet snapped tight. Andrei had the other end braced over the balustrade, the tendons in his neck and arms standing out like an anatomical drawing. I shimmied up the sheet with adrenaline booming through every cell, crawled over the shaky stone of the balustrade and collapsed at Andrei’s feet. I started to laugh, for the sheer ludicrousness of the situation and for the immense relief of being alive.

Andrei looked down the haughty length of his exceptionally aristocratic nose and said, “You are fucking mad, Yasha. Oh and by the way, you are welcome.”

“Thank you,” I said, suitably chastened as the adrenaline ebbed and the various contusions and cuts began to assert themselves.

Then being a good Russian, he poured us each a shot of vodka from the store he carries everywhere with him. We drank it back, said goodnight with what dignity remained to each of us, which is to say, none, and departed to our respective beds.

June____, 1955

We visited the ancient Bay of Baiae today, taking a boat over its drowned columns and cracked mosaics, the heaved blind arches thick with swaying mosses and the pearled remnants of ancient marbled cisterns. Here is the home of Poseidon, here where Caligula built his bridge of boats, giving lie to Thrasyllus’ prediction that he had no more chance of becoming Emperor than riding a horse across the Gulf of Baiae. Rome suffered famine for Caligula’s conceits, and here many drowned in the rose thick water as boats overturned after nights where wine spilled upon lip and over gem-studded prow with a profligacy only the most crazed of emperors could have summoned forth, even from a land as fertile as this one. It was here that Hadrian died, wasted away and bleeding from nose and mouth. Here that Caesar and Nero summered. Here that Cleopatra studied while waiting for her lover to return… but it was not Caesar that came to her, only the ghost of his violent death.

I could see, if I half-closed my eyes, the scented women and men, the warriors on furlough, the philosophers and hedonists all come to this aqueous garden that Seneca called a ‘harbor of vice’. How different they were and yet how much the same, drinking deep of the sun’s nectar, seeking pleasure, wanting love, planning battles and dreaming new philosophies amongst the terraced gardens. How many affairs were begun and ended amid the summer’s pleasures? How many hearts were broken briefly or, perhaps, permanently?

June____, 1955

Andrei and I have gathered round us a social group of mathematicians, poets and philosophers, students and vagabonds who are resting here before continuing the journey onward after the call of the Siren East. The evenings are pleasant, spent with the local wine and grappa, and the food that Gina makes for us. The weather has been perfect, as though we exist in some idyll in a story rather than a climate that can be brutally hot in summer. And if the days are perfect, the nights are beyond sublime, the stars so thick and heavy that they bring to mind Joyce’s words about the ‘heaven-tree of stars hung with night-blue fruit.’ And, of course, there are the Italian women. Andrei seems to be trying to sample as many of the locals as possible before the summer is over. I prefer to linger over the meal and find its secret delights. There is a beautiful divorcée living in the hills above us here who intrigues with smoky silence and a fierce hunger of infinite variety that leaves me hollow-eyed and making my way home in the pre-dawn silence with only the thick cypress and lemon and olive groves for my companions. John lectured me roundly on gluttony, debauchery, and the regrets that are their constant companions before I left Oxford for the summer. I know he referred not to food but to women and I have tried to keep his advice in mind, because I do not like to take a woman to my bed without feeling, even if it is only fondness and desire.