The End of the Alphabet (4 page)

 

A list of what? said Zipper.

…Calcutta…sorry? whispered Ambrose. List? Yes. What?

Come back to bed.

Places…things…

What things?

Places…A is for…

Zipper pulled the duvet and her knees to her chin and watched her husband empty the suitcase. Scores of brochures, advertisements, maps,
booklets, supplements, catalogues and flyers spilled onto the bed. Together with hundreds of drawings: some childish and faded, others by a more accomplished hand. All of them letters. A through Z. Everything formed a small mountain on the bed and spilled onto the floor.

Where? said Zipper.

Things, said Ambrose.

Like?

Places. A to Z equals twenty-six. A month equals thirty. The doctor said as much. Or is it twenty-nine? What year is this? Twenty-eight? A month, give or take.

I know what the doctor said. Are you all right?

Fine.

Then come back to bed.

What would you do?

What?

DO. What. Would. You. Do.

About what?

Time, time, time. Thirty days. No time. Weren't you listening?

Don't ask me that.

Tea came and went as Zipper reviewed her husband's list.
Places…Things. 1) A is for a Portrait in Amsterdam….
There was no mention of putting affairs in order, no alternative remedies, no sprinkling of ashes under an anonymous willow in Kensington Gardens. Zipper's mind spun. This was not her Ambrose, she thought at first. But then, apparently, it was.

Paris being so far down the list and what happened after Zanzibar and why was X blank and how and what with and what if and are you mad and should we and shouldn't we and how could you and don't do this don't
be
this don't go without me don't go at all were thoughts Zipper fought to keep down.

Instead, she frowned and suggested that Andalusia might be nicer this time of year.

Habitually (in blind panic, she would later admit), Zipper edited. She pencilled a stroke through Valparaiso, a place she had never heard of, and in the margin wrote
Venice
.

 

The love they made that morning was tender, lingering and generous. She before he.

After, they talked of the Bridge of Sighs.

 

A.

The ferry from Harwich crossed a rough and cold sea. The passage did not agree with Zipper and she spent most of it below decks. Ambrose, waved off for useless hovering, spent most of it at the railing watching the lights along the European shore grow brighter on the horizon. They ate lunch the next day in a café at the edge of a pretty square in Amsterdam.

Ambrose was dressed in his linen travel number: hastily pressed, pocket-squared. Zipper in a
white cotton blouse and black trousers cut in a capri style. Ambrose had always admired the way her back moved in that outfit. Her shoes were comfortable. Red.

Amidst sips of coffee and suggested itineraries, Zipper remembered a conversation.

 

Lovely, she said.

Sorry. What? Ambrose said.

The Velázquez.

Sorry? Yes.

They had been married most of a year. Having coaxed Ambrose into taking her on one of his usually solitary visits to the National Gallery, Zipper had done some reading beforehand.

Venus at Her Mirror
, Zipper said.

The Rockeby Venus, said Ambrose.

The model was somebody's mistress?

The king of Spain. Philip, I think.

Had a thing for black taffeta sheets.

The king?

The mistress. And didn't a suffragette attack her with a knife?

The mistress?

The painting. Are you listening?

Right. Yes.

It's the sheets, Zipper said. They highlight the form. Her form. And Velázquez painted her hazy reflection in the mirror on purpose. Forces the eye to the form. Sorry,
her
form. Critics said the reflection looked unfinished. The optics were wrong. We should be seeing her torso reflected in the mirror. How am I doing?

Sorry. Yes. Lovely.

What, precisely, is so lovely?

Her. This. The Velázquez.

Why?

Because it is.

That's it?

I think so. Yes.

You're impossible, Zipper said. All I know is what I've read. All I'd like to know is what
you
know. What
you
think.

About what?

About
why
, damn it. Why the sheets and the optics and the mistress and the unfinished reflection? Why love it so much? Why her?

It is what it is, said Ambrose. Lovely.

You're exhausting.

Fine. If you insist, it reminds me of you.

Really. My backside is not nearly so lovely.

I wasn't looking at her backside.

Really.

I was looking at her front. The slope of the neck. Curve of the breasts, the smooth stomach. The gentle hollow around the navel. Her face.

You're imagining things.

Isn't that the point?

 

They thought better of visiting the Rijksmuseum together.

Zipper said she wasn't sure how she would spend the day. Ambrose did his best to reassure. There was, he said, no need to worry. They kissed and Ambrose set off to find a portrait he had seen before. But long ago and from very far away.

 

A younger Ambrose arrived behind his time, having spent most of the previous day in the pub with Freddie Wilkes.

It was the oldest lecture theatre on campus: a cavernous circular space with graceful plaster-work, smelling of mould and varnish and nervous sweat. The few windows it had were small, painted forever shut, and set high behind tiers of
hard benches worn by a century or two of first-term buttocks.

Ambrose found a seat in the back rows and consulted his schedule.
The Place of the Portrait.
Below him the professor paced the dais, a small man gesturing with a long pointer at his latest slide: a Rembrandt, late in the artist's career. The reproduction was poor. The slide was scratched from years of projection, the contrast blown, the detail flattened to blobs.

It was a group portrait.
The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch,
announced the professor. Painted in 1642. You may, if you must, call it
The Night Watch
.

Captain Cocq's company—by the professor's pointed count—consisted of thirty-five adults, two children, one chicken and one dog, as well as various lances, spears, pikes, walking canes, drums, flags and muskets.

The professor rambled at length about dynamic magnetism and profound insight and asymmetric composition. NOTE IF YOU WILL, he kept yelling…the significance of this…symbolism of that…transcendence of genre…portrait of genius…

Ambrose raised his thick head and stared at the projection. Not once had the professor mentioned a shadowed half-face, hardly visible behind the painted crowd, peeking back at Ambrose with a pair of bright and smiling eyes.

 

In a grand and old department store Zipper wandered from floor to floor. Here a blouse held to her chest and re-hung on its rack; there the silk of a scarf, fingered and left folded. She sampled a lipstick that matched, precisely, the colour of her shoes. Assistants asked if madame required help. Zipper felt her eyes water and managed no thank you. She left the store without buying anything.

She came across a small bookshop in a tilted narrow building. A sign in the window advertised Gently Read Literature, Items for Composition and Correspondence Within. Zipper shuffled around the shop, finally settling on a small leather journal, rounded at the corners. An envelope for keeping reminders and receipts and bits of things was bound inside the back cover, a thick elastic band held all in place. The proprietor was still counting change as Zipper ran out of the shop.

She struggled to catch her breath, needed to sit down, went cold, thought she was going to vomit. She found a bench overlooking a canal and sat on her hands to hide the tremors. She stared at a passing tourist barge, her eyes filling with panic as those on board practised ducking under footbridges yet to come.

The shaking stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Zipper had nothing to wipe her eyes. Flustered, she used the sleeve of her blouse. She stood, unsure of her knees, and headed off to meet her husband at the train station.

 

Ambrose Zephyr reviewed the departures board, confirmed the overnight train would be leaving on time and made his way to the platform to meet his wife. If someone were no wiser, he might have looked as content as a man on holiday.

Zipper watched her husband approach. Relieved at his relaxed way, she closed her journal. A souvenir postcard—a garish reproduction of a group portrait by Rembrandt—peeked from the envelope inside the cover. Ambrose paid no attention. He was too busy telling his story.

…bigger than I expected. Enormous. More like a company of giants…There he was, behind the watchmen, the children, the chicken, the dog, the lances and spears and pikes and canes, the drums, the flags, the muskets…the master himself, peeking over a shoulder with those laughing eyes, I swear they winked…

Ambrose flailed and paced like an awkward conductor.

…and sweep and swirl and banners and action and such a good Rembrandt and luscious and bold and warm and thick with amazing outfits…the lieutenant in yellow of all things…

Ambrose caught his breath.

…and the genius?

Zipper ventured a guess. His use of light?

Work for hire, said Ambrose. Commissioned and paid for by the Captain et al. Hah!
There's
your genius. There's the art.

Zipper smiled. Until then, she had always assumed the Rembrandt was what it was.

 

On the night train to Berlin, Ambrose slept as well as anyone sitting upright on a train might. Zipper sat clutching the journal until her hands
went clammy. She tried opening it a few times. A thousand words flew through her head but she couldn't manage to land any on the page.

After a while she gave up and watched the dark grey countryside speed past her reflection in the window.

 

B.

They sat at an outdoor table on the Unter den Linden. The sky was clear, blue, welcoming. The lime trees showed an early-spring green and offered comfortable shade.

Nearby stood a brooding Brandenburg Gate, all heavy stone and column. Tourists and locals and friends and lovers were enjoying the morning, strolling through the gate as if it wasn't there.

Zipper Ashkenazi's legs stretched from under
her, her shoes off. She watched a street entertainer prepare for the day's performance: unfolding a music stand, tuning a battered violin. She had passed a poor night, but on this morning and in this place she was content.

Ambrose stewed. He knew he needed to be here. He knew he needed to get past this. He knew it would make Zipper happy. But still he fussed and squirmed in search of a comfortable place in his chair. He kept an eye on the gate and scowled.

He claimed he was only thinking of his uncle, but Zipper knew there was more to it than that.

 

At one time or another, Ambrose had spoken of his Uncle Jack. How he had taught an annoyingly inquisitive nephew the subtleties of life. The first gentleman I ever met, Ambrose would say.

Every Remembrance Sunday, Jack came up to the city, wearing the same threadbare jacket and regimental tie he had worn the year before. His shoes always shone, he smelt freshly shaved, he stood whenever Mrs Zephyr entered or left the room. He had an unsure smile that matched his limp.

One particular November young Ambrose asked his uncle about the war. What had he done? Where had he been?

All over, said Jack. France, Holland, Berlin.

That's right. Germany.

Wasn't very nice.

People weren't very nice either.

Didn't like us, I suppose. They didn't like a lot of people.

They did. People they'd no business killing.

Friends? A few.

No. I didn't help my friends. I was away.

A few years later at his uncle's funeral, Ambrose read about someone named Sylvia. She had died when an air raid blew up her house near Spitalfields. Jack had left her a note, apologizing for not being there. For not keeping her safe.

 

Zipper knew that, with odd exception, Ambrose held a modern view of the world. He kept himself informed well enough, knew there was neither black nor white, believed what the BBC told him. Yet when she reminisced about her younger location-shoot days in Germany, she could watch
his view become as black and blind as ash. With an unnerving Berlin at its centre.

In its greyness. The weather always threatening, the streets always wet. The architecture all cold stone: large and hard and lacking in windows.

With its inhabitants. Sour and stiff with permanently furrowed expressions. They spoke a jarring language: phlegmy, incapable of expressions of love. No one smiled. Laughter was faked. There never seemed to be any children.

With its music. Unlistenable. Funereal. Loud.

And its ghosts. Prowling, wearing uniforms, black, brown, grey. Lurking in doorways, dropping bombs on houses, burning Zipper's books. Watching and waiting to steal her away.

 

That was then, Zipper said. Jack was then.

She pulled Ambrose to his feet and they set off to walk the city she knew.

They made their way through the Reichstag. Once an asylum run by madmen, now through its centre an atrium of glass and mirror poured sky into the building and warmed Ambrose's upturned face.

They visited the zoo, where people had once eaten the animals left behind. On this day it was full of children, laughing at the monkeys, waving at the pandas, having their photographs taken by tired parents.

Along more than one boulevard Ambrose and Zipper jostled past crowded coffee bars and neon dance clubs and persistent gypsy beggars; bored fashion models and charged young lovers and old people with old dogs; graffiti artists and boisterous hawkers and women for sale and men who smiled like cartoon spies and made Ambrose chuckle.

They walked, perhaps a little lost, along Oranienburgerstrasse and through an ancient neighbourhood. They asked directions from a young man with a long and unkempt beard. He mumbled through his whiskers and pointed vaguely down the street. Zipper thanked him in the only Yiddish she could recall. The man grinned and shuffled Ambrose and Zipper along their way.

As dusk came, they returned to the avenue under the lime trees. The street performer was calling for last requests. Ambrose watched a woman in tailored red trousers and a black turtle
neck approach the violinist. She whispered in his ear. The performer bowed and played the opening notes of the woman's request. She turned to her companion, a reluctant gentleman with greying hair, and offered her hand. The couple danced to a waltz composed by a German whose name Ambrose could not recall.

This is now, Zipper said, as she picked up a small stone and slid it in her pocket. The sky grew dark and the stars came out.

Ambrose smiled and asked if she had said something. If she was safe. If she was happy.