The cardboard box containing his thesis material had travelled with him to each of his postings, and was now in a cabinet in his study, labelled “
“To live is to dream, and death, I think, is what awakens us.”
A line from a poem. Oscar stood where he was, letting his mind wander. Then he set his bag on the floor, went over to the sofa, gathered the newspapers and burned them in the fireplace. Slowly, his soul returned to him. And Lara. She had been with him all along, inseparable from him in mind, locked in soundless, abstract dialogue. He would phone her shortly, tell her he had arrived in Berne and would be going straight on to Fribourg. Fribourg, the name of the town sounded so free, so fresh and unfettered, so like her. This was it, there was no going back now. Love by accident, by fate, without escape or future. He wished he could have stayed with her in the snow of the Berner Oberland – which was what he had wished from the start, a little over three months ago. From Berne to Fribourg was a stone’s throw, so why not pick up his bag and go?
He had no answer. He left the bag where it stood, and stretched out on the sofa. Dog-tired he was, his legs leaden, even lying down made him ache. The machine ground to a halt. He dozed, though not for long. A dream jolted him awake, something to do with his mother. His first impulse was to telephone her. Old habits – his mother had been dead for a good five years. She had died with the illusion that peace could be maintained, having kept her war resister’s brooch with the broken rifle like a crucifix on her bedside table, next to the photograph of his father, whose early death meant that Oscar had never got to know him properly. His mother, a one-man woman, as she liked to call herself, had not remarried. She remained wedded to an absence that cast a long shadow both forwards and back. The dream that woke him was not new: it was of his mother raising her arm like a drawbridge in an attempt to wave.
He knew where the image sprang from. “You should get me some poison, Oscar. I cannot, will not go on like this.” It had not been a recommendation, rather a non-negotiable order. The belligerence of a very old, lifelong pacifist. The words did not seem to be her own, just as her voice seemed to rise from unknown depths, dark, imperious, even repellent at times. Week after week saw her intoning her mantra of self-willed death, and him refusing to act on it. His loving, strong, desperate mother, who subsequently threatened to throw herself from the window. The ultimate deed, the rebellion of a life under duress. She meant what she said, of that he had been convinced. His response had been no less adamant: she should stop eating and drinking, he would stay with her, keep vigil, hold her hand to the last. He knew a doctor who would prescribe morphine if the pain grew unbearable. At length she conceded. When the doctor came with his potion for everlasting sleep and Oscar took her hand in his, she said: “I won’t have to jump now.”
The nights on a mattress beside her bed would stay with him forever. So would the groans and whimpers of her frame, now shrunken to a comma. A night on a mattress, two steps away from death, lasts a long time. The feeble wave of a stray arm, raised at a passing signal, at the moon through the clouds. So much is certain: in the hour of our vanishing all is unknown.
“Kate de Winther?” a courteous voice enquired from below. Her name sounded droll in Italian, she thought. She was sitting on her balcony waiting for Roy, whom she expected any moment. She leaned over the stone balustrade. The man looking up at her wore the Italian railway uniform.
“Lost your way, have you? The station is miles away,” she retorted laughingly. To her surprise, there was no reply. All he did was motion her to come down. So Kate was left to smile at her own joke as she descended the cool stairs in her bare feet. Her pale yellow dress was almost white in the sunshine, and she remembered thinking how hot the railway man must be feeling. He began to say something she did not understand. She would never understand. He must have caught her as she fell.
The scene leaping unbidden into her mind was one that had obsessed her a lifetime ago. In the days before Oscar.
