Napoleon's Roads (11 page)

SWAN

There is at least one man who has seen it, covering the figure of the tall, pale woman who lives in the attic of the grey house on Cathedral Street near the wooden footbridge, on the eastern side of the river. A large, white bird, moving slowly, with a kind of concentrated violence. Intense. Erotic. Frightening. A glimpse of it, nothing more, as if through a light mist, although there can't have been mist in the room. Nor can he, this man, ever have been there to see. Not mist then but the veil of dream. It is not, after all, as if he knows her, or could in any way have been prepared to find himself stumbling upon them in this way, with shock – awe – in some dark corridor of one of the almost-nightmares that have been assailing him, like the sounds of people beating on a wall. A woman he has only seen four or five times, in the market or on Poets Square, near the entrance to the Alley of the Booksellers. And noticed, of course, every time: he could not deny that. A single man alone in the city, too intent on his project to contemplate a relationship, yet longing for one. And now he is both desperate to glimpse her again and almost afraid of doing so. To him, after so vivid a dream, it would be as if he knew her intimately. To her it would mean nothing at all. But there seems to be a law to such things. The more you want a glimpse of this kind, the less likely it is that a glimpse will occur. As if the very intensity of a desire serves to distance its object.

His book proceeds very slowly. The chapter he has been working on has taken months to compile. Each day now a few paragraphs, if he is lucky, and twice already, with the process considerably advanced, a tearing up of the draft, a beginning again, the tone, the point of view off-target, bringing him to an impasse. Writing each morning from eight until noon, then showering, dressing, going to one of the restaurants on the other side of the river, coming back through the market, shopping for his evening meal. A piece of fish sometimes at first – supposedly it was good for thought – but increasingly just cheese, bread, vegetables, the idea of dead flesh locked up and rotting inside him more and more repulsive. And now as he shops – buying vegetables, purchasing stationery, searching out a rare volume – he is looking for her, every moment, through the market, in the squares, in the Alley of the Booksellers, along River Street, along the Saint Michael Passage, along Cathedral Street. But nothing. She is nowhere. Nothing.

She becomes an obsession;
swans
become an obsession. As if they betoken her, might be a means of summoning. One day he is coming back by a different route, along the old stone galleries cut into the riverbank where the fishmongers have traditionally set up their stalls to keep their wares fresh in the warm summer months, and they are there, as he turns to mount the street-level stairs. Four of them, gleaming white on the black water, gliding majestically with the slow current, crimson-beaked, astonishing in their brightness. So that now, each day, he looks also for them, and extends his riverside walks to improve his chances. One day, on his way to interview an elderly woman in his grandfather's native village, he drives to the river marshes on the edge of the city in the vain hope that he might find them nesting there. On another he travels by bus across the city to the Royal Gardens and feeds the swans on the lake with pieces from a large pretzel he has bought at the cart by the entrance. The swans have a strange, spongy knob between and below their eyes, and some of them have raw-looking, puce-coloured bills, instead of the predominant orange. A gardener who comes over to talk to him, a short, muscular woman with bright-blue spiky hair, tells him that they are called
mute
swans. They shouldn't be eating pretzel, she says: their diet is water weed. They live on the small island in the middle of the lake. None of them are breeding pairs, she tells him. There are breeding pairs on more isolated lakes elsewhere in the country, but these are largely un-mated swans. They wander. When he tells her that he has seen them on the river near the markets, she nods and says that those are probably from this group. She asks him if he has heard the rumour – that is all it is, she says, an urban myth – of the swan that wanders the streets around the market at night. It isn't true, she says, though people keep thinking they have seen it.

One night, after a long day's work, he watches a program about Trumpeter Swans, huge birds on a vast lake in Alaska, then dreams of them taking off, lumbering into the air where they form a great V as they fly southward across the pink arctic sunset. There is something about them that seems deeply familiar, as if he might be one of them. Or perhaps it is just his loneliness, without the woman.

He is writing a biography of his grandfather, who came to live with him and his mother after the death of his father when he, the writer, was seven years old. A war hero, once a leader of partisans, his grandfather had become almost a father to him, teaching him about the forest, teaching him about birds, teaching him to garden, and so much more. Some of his earliest memories are of following him about their small plot on the edge of the city, helping him with his various chores. His grandfather's shadow, his mother used to call him, though this has come to mean something else after recent discoveries. Twenty-seven years dead now, his grandfather can no longer be asked anything, and nor can his mother, who died ten years later. If he is to find out anything it must be from the village itself, but no-one there is talking.

He has, on his desk, a photograph of his grandfather wearing a beret, rifle slung over his shoulder. A man in his early forties, virile, strong, only a few years older than the writer is now. Beside it is a photograph of his mother, taken at what must have been nearly the same time, a beautiful girl with long blonde hair, dressed in white for a church festival, her arms around her younger sisters. One of those sisters, he knows, died before the war ended. The other one her mother and her grandfather lost trace of soon afterward, and had presumed dead also. A shadow, all through his childhood, like a dark lake in the background. Beside these photographs are now photographs of swans. He wishes implausibly that he could have a photograph of the woman from the house on Cathedral Street, but knows this is absurd. For all he knows, she has moved away; indeed, she may never have existed.

Then suddenly she is there. He has just arrived at his usual restaurant, the Ifel, on the other side of the river, near the university. It is a warm late-summer day – no hint yet of autumn, though in most years it would already have shown signs of its coming – and he has taken a seat outside. Having carried a thought with him for the last hundred metres or so, he has taken out his notebook and started to write, and, looking up, the note finished, has seen her, being seated at the table opposite. She is wearing a soft-yellow blouse and light summer skirt, of an intricate Indian pattern. Her long, pale legs are bare and she is wearing light, elegant sandals. He tries to keep his eyes off her, perhaps unnecessarily since she seems quite unaware of him, but while she reads the menu he surreptitiously studies her face. She has a long slim nose, high cheekbones, eyes set so deeply that they would probably convey the impression of a tired sadness no matter what her mood. Wan, he thinks: a
wan
ness.

When his meal arrives – he has taken the daily vegetarian special so consistently that the waitress has felt no need to ask him – he eats slowly, turned slightly so that the woman is just at the edge of his vision. At one point he hears a shifting of her metal table and glances up at her more directly. She is adjusting it – one of the table legs must need bracing – and for a moment, oblivious to his watching, she parts her legs slightly as she tries to steady the table with her knee. For a few seconds – it is no more than that – he sees her inner thigh, white, secret, forbidden, and has to wrench his eyes away, in fear that she might glance up at him.

Kept at bay for months, his dream now flushes through him, like a drug suddenly released into a vein. It is all that he can do to continue his meal, for the burning consciousness of her proximity. Her own meal, meanwhile, arrives, is eaten, paid for. When she leaves he watches her walk westward along the riverbank and then he rises, pays for his own meal, and walks off quickly in the opposite direction. Forsaking his daily market visit – he can do that later – he goes directly to his apartment and into its tiny bathroom. Closing the door, not turning on the light, he braces himself against the wall, in total darkness, and masturbates, more rapidly and violently than he has done in years.

It is weeks later. He has not seen her. Again she seems to have disappeared. The weather is closing in. People are now wearing overcoats, scarves, heavy sweaters. Although a few of the cafés and restaurants still have outdoor tables, they are for the braver clients who either want to be seen or to take advantage of the occasional outbreaks of sun. Evening comes earlier. He is in the local delicatessen for bread and wine and olives when he hears two elderly ladies by the cheese counter talking quietly about a swan. He pretends to be looking for cheese himself, in order to listen more closely. They are speaking of a third, a friend, Vladka, who has seen something in the Bishop's lane, hard by the cathedral.

‘The one with the mushroom sellers?' asks one.

‘No,' says the other, ‘that little alleyway that runs off it, near the Bible shop, and slopes down to the river.'

Nor is it clear whether what Vladka saw was the swan at all – that, the word that had initially caught his attention, was merely the first reaction of the smaller of these two women, when the other had mentioned it – but it was large, and feathered, or appeared to be, in a very dark part of the alley, an alcove, near some rubbish bins. She had only glimpsed it, Vladka, when someone had opened a door to let out a cat; it might just have been a bundle of rags, but she could have sworn.

‘Did she try to touch it, poke it with her stick?' the smaller woman asks.

‘No! Of course not,' says the other. ‘Imagine if it had moved! Hissed at her! She would probably have fallen and broken something.'

‘And it might have been a person after all, a man, trying to sleep.'

‘Yes, a man, and he wouldn't have taken kindly to being poked with a stick!'

Back in the apartment, hours later, his dinner over and his bottle of wine half-finished, he washes the dishes and, turning out the kitchen light, about to go back to his desk, looks out the window at the moon rising above the hill behind the house. It is a clear night. He can even see a few stars. And, hearing one of his neighbours coming slowly up the ancient stairs from the street below, resolves something. Rummaging in the cupboard beneath the kitchen bench he locates his torch, checks it, changes its batteries and sets out for the Bishop's lane. He is there within minutes, at first walking its length, trying to accustom himself to the pitch dark, then retracing his steps, using the torch carefully, keeping its beam on the ground close by him, aware that whoever lives in these houses – priests, most of them – may not take kindly to someone searching their alleyway. But, although he finds three or four likely alcoves, a couple of them with bins in them, there is nothing untoward. No pile of rags, no homeless person trying to sleep, no swan.

The idea, however, stays with him. The next day he must go back to his grandfather's village. A lead has opened; there is someone who might be willing to talk. As he drives – it is almost two hours away – he finds himself counting up how many such alleys there are in the old part of the city. He can think of at least eleven, on either side of the river, and certainly there are more; alleys, and some ancient cobbled arcades, with darker and more likely spaces even than the alcoves he had found in the Bishop's lane. He decides to search them all, if only to convince himself that there is nothing.

As he drives back, he is frustrated but also more hopeful about his project than usual, since although this person has claimed they know nothing, they have told him of a man in another village who had been a young partisan in his grandfather's brigade. Rain begins to fall, light at first but eventually torrential. It sets in for days. There is no possibility, until it thoroughly clears, that any creature would think to forage, let alone sleep in the alleys. Yet the idea of them nags at him, seems to want to draw him in. It is a week before he can explore the first of them, and a month before he has visited them all, and by that time he has long realised that the process is much more complicated than he had envisioned. Why should the swan, if the swan exists, stay in one place? What is to say that at one time it is not in an alley not yet visited, and at another in an alley he has searched already?

When the winter nights allow, he begins to go through them again – the alleys, the lanes, the impasses – and to visit them randomly. Not every night, and sometimes not for a week or more. He comes to think of it more as an evening walk than as a search. He is
drawn to
it, he would probably say, if there were ever anyone to ask him; it is not even something that he has consciously chosen. Some nights he does not bother to take a torch. On one such night he is walking slowly through a lane that has become quite familiar to him. Though cobbled and as ancient as any, it is a little wider than most, with an arcade along one of its sides, and towards the centre a section of it built in overhead so that it becomes, for six or seven metres, a kind of tunnel. He has just come through this section when he senses – it is senses, rather than sees – something in a dark passageway, a space barely a shoulder's width wide, off to his right. He has just decided that it can have been no more than a cat, or a large rat, and turned to resume his progress when a door opens a few metres ahead to the left and someone comes out, caught briefly in silhouette in the sudden light from a stairway. He steps back into the narrow passage, not wanting to be seen, knowing how disturbing some might find it to encounter a stranger in their alley at this time. A small, curtained window opposite him is throwing a little light into the alley, barely sufficient to see his own hand by. As the figure passes, however, he can make out enough, and the racing in his chest, a kind of giddiness, confirms it. It is her.