Had the eyes of the Chinese boy soldier made the same petition? And the others he had witnessed die during the war? Why was he to be the angel of ironical death? It was those last few seconds that were most horrifying for Hector; at least the mien of the long-dead he had collected doing graves registration was generally one of distinct unconcern, or perhaps the mildest bemusement, if they had faces left at all. He could take their expressions blackened with rot or dried blood or else blown away, cheekless or jawless or lacking a brow, all countless mutilations, the frightful carnage, but watching a living face fade and pale was to him the most grotesque of turns, the one thing he could no longer bear. The promise of being with June at her end made him want to crawl away, to run, and he knew he would indeed have to leave her, that it was inevitable, that he must desert her before the final hour.
He wandered down the steep, arid hillside with the bottle in his hand, drinking it down as he went. The homemade liquor was coursing through him more hotly than usual, almost painfully; he could feel it drawing out into his extremities, these lines of ants on the march. He was going to drink some more, maybe drink the rest. If it was poison, let it be. He found a deer path through the scraggly brush but instead of stepping mindfully he let the pitch take him and he dropped himself headlong in its leafy track, pumping his legs in a velocity of desperate escape; to view him from above was to see, paradoxically, a man running as fast as he could in order to keep from falling.
But even Hector could not sustain the necessary speed, create enough balancing momentum, and he flew down the hill, tumbling head over knee so violently that it appeared he was there to thrash clear the greenery, the rocks, the dusty earth itself. He came to rest in a dark glade of cork trees, their sinuous trunks stripped of bark to the height of eight feet. They were old trees but now naked and smooth, and he felt as exposed as they. He was cut and bruised about the face and knuckles; he was crying, but not from any physical distress. The bottle, emptied, was still in his hand. He’d just missed an exposed sharp spine of rock and he cursed his luck and smashed the bottle against it. He was going to fight himself, pugilist as onanist, because there was nobody else to fight, nobody left to take on. Here he is, your undying low-life champion. With the jagged neck of the bottle he slashed across each wrist and also his neck, and jabbed at his side and thighs. Then he got on his feet and bull-rushed the largest tree. He rammed it with his chest, and then his shoulder, and as he grew weary he pushed against it with his now bloody carmine hands, his carmine-stained forehead, grunting and pumping his legs as if he were a football lineman toiling against a practice sled.
After a stretch of time long enough to be embarrassing, even to a man alone, he relented, his punctures already congealed and crusting over in the unnatural manner they always did. This was the only pain he actually felt, which actually registered, the sear of the too-swift healing. His exhaustion was fed less by exertion than frustration, the closed loop of his thwarted rage, and he fell against the roots and lay staring up at the stilled canopy, the sky dimming to indigo behind the web of gnarled black limbs. The sight was vaguely Eastern in aspect, like a beautiful silk-screened panel, but then lovely for nothing, and he thought that this was the diseased tableau of his life: forever there to witness splendor, while death coolly drifted upon everything else. Up the hill only the chimney of the cottage loomed. If she cried out, if she called for him, would he stay silent? And if she didn’t see the morning, would he simply leave her in the bed for the huntsman to find, or else bury her, as he had buried so many others, dig the necessary hole, his best dark talent among all his dark talents?
THIRTEEN
JUNE SLEPT MOST OF THE NIGHT and on waking realized that Hector was gone from the cottage. She panicked and stumbled onto the floor and nearly hurt herself, but when she stepped outside she spotted him up the hillside from the hunter’s cottage, sitting in the driver’s seat of the car. She practically ran up the rutted drive and would have leaped for the bumper had he accelerated but as she drew near she saw that he was asleep.
It was the first time she had seen him so, since they’d flown from the States, and she could study him for a moment. His seat was slightly reclined and his face was turned toward the window, his reddish-brown locks untouched by a single strand of gray. His complexion was a wonder to look at, even after all these years and despite his roughness and obvious disinterest in caring for himself. He glowed like a saint in some Renaissance painting but the rendering here was of a man clearly fallen, marked by the most subtle of colorations, an incipient, brooding shade. He was a shockingly beautiful man. She had always thought him so, from the moment they crossed paths that first day on the refugee road, even if his radiance had meant nothing to her. And yet there was something definitely restorative in simply regarding him now, a momentary suspension of the sentence on her body, her demise. She had always considered beauty more perilous than useful, and yet, when it persevered, it became its own element and property, indivisible, original. Something to have faith in. She should have left him undisturbed for a little longer but she was made irrationally anxious by the fact that he was literally in the driver’s seat and could easily motor away, and when she roused him with a tap on the glass he shivered ever so slightly, as might a child, the sight of which only honed her guilt.
She asked him to put the cabin back in order as best he could, and she added money to what he had left on the table for the owner, writing
Mi dispiace
across the top banknote with a grease pencil she’d found in a drawer, the sentiment of regret seeming more fitting than one of thanks. If anything, she was grateful to Hector for having made her stop and rest; she was definitely stronger today, or at least after waking him she was, the ground not shifting or rolling beneath her feet as it had been most of the last two days, her eyes able to look at an object without fixing on it so forcefully that everything else whirled about its axis in a furious, breakneck orbit. Among the many dozen complications and eventualities that Dr. Koenig had listed in his imperious fount-of-the-Maker tone was vertigo, a case of which she’d suffered once long before the cancer and was likely now not a simple disturbance of the inner ear but a sign that there might be tumors in her brain.
Of course she knew that the longer she survived, the more any extension would mean something like this, that the cancer would duly migrate and settle and prosper, and if during the past rounds of treatment she had yielded completely she would certainly give herself over now for as long as possible, endure the role of host to the last. In her painfully sentimental dreams of late, like the one she had had last night, the tumors were wards of her nursery and she was naming them as she would children, these eager clumps in her bones, in her lymph nodes, speckles on her liver and lungs, all racing to see which of them would bring her its final gift:
You’re darlings
, she said to them, in a warm, matronly voice. She was dressed in white burial garments, just as her great-grandmother had been enrobed as she lay on her funeral bier. She pressed her hands against the length of herself, her still-sturdy body.
Ah, thank you, thank you.
Thank you, Mrs. Singer!
After closing up the hunter’s cottage they went back up to the car. She lost her footing on a stone while walking up the steep driveway and Hector offered to carry her up and although it wasn’t really necessary she let him. He lifted her easily, his arms girding her fragile spine, her fragile knees, and as her hand curled around his taut neck she drew herself close. She let her cheek lean on his shoulder and neck. He smelled grassy and sharp and there was a denser scent rising from under his shirt, like of a worked horse, and she wondered how long it had been since she’d been this close to a man. It had been David, of course, but he was admittedly overattentive to his hygiene and regularly used her body lotions and powders, and as he was remarkably smooth of skin and hairless (especially for a Jew, as he pointed out to her more than once) she would sometimes imagine when embracing him that it was a woman in her bed. Before David it was Nicholas, during his adolescence, when the air of his small bedroom was fetid and gymlike with soiled socks and clothes, and she’d briefly hold her breath on entering, and sometimes even when Nicholas hugged her. She didn’t feel guilty at the time-what guilt had she felt at all, in those days?-but the regret was now keen and though it would have been fitting for Hector to repel her it was nothing like punishment at all, quite the opposite rather, and now a welling arose low enough in her belly that she could almost believe it was not a pang of the illness.
“I’m sorry you had to sleep in the car,” she said to him. He was driving them slowly about the switchbacks of the wooded hillsides, braking and accelerating gently enough to minimize the tug of the turns. “When I woke up I realized there was no place for you to sleep.”
“I was only in the car for an hour or two.”
“You were awake the whole night? What were you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“You weren’t drinking more?”
“I’m always doing that.”
“You weren’t thinking about driving off?”
He didn’t answer her.
She said, “You must be tired, anyway. I shouldn’t have woken you.”
“I’m okay,” he said.
And to look at him was to see that he was okay, at least on the surface, the only difference this morning being that he hadn’t shaved. Besides the drinking, it seemed to be his only habitual practice. He had shaved every morning they had been together (at least when they were housed in regular lodgings), which struck her as odd for a man who otherwise appeared willfully ensconced in a life so down in the mouth. But strangely enough the shadow of a day’s growth on his face made him seem only more respectable, not less, for in the new, still-creased denim shirt he’d changed into (one of a half-dozen she’d bought him on landing at the airport), he could easily be one of David’s square-jawed colleagues at a country home on the weekend, driving to the hardware store for a pet project in the yard.
“It must have been cold last night.”
“A little.”
“Tonight you’ll have a decent room.”
He nodded.
“I decided something, while you were cleaning up.”
“Okay.”
“After we find Nicholas, I want to go directly on to Solferino. For all we know he could be there right now. But wherever he is, I want to go there quickly. Even if it’s late in the day.”
“It could take five or six hours from Siena, judging from the map.”
“I don’t care. I feel stronger now, but you’re right.” She took a breath. “I’m going to die soon.”
“I said you’d die if you didn’t rest.”
“I know what you said. I know what you were thinking, too. So this is my wish. When he’s with us we’ll start right away. We can’t lose any time. I know you have doubts about finding him. I can see it in your face. But I know we will find him, and once we do he’ll come with us.”
“And if he doesn’t want to?”
“He can’t say no to me. Not the way I am. If he tries, I want you to persuade him.”
“Me?”
“He won’t say no to you.”
“He won’t give a damn about me.”
“I don’t mean that way.”
“What? What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to make sure he comes with us. Will you do that for me, Hector?”
“You want me to threaten him? Handle him?”
“I want him to be with me. If I had to, and could grab him and hold on to him myself, I would. But I don’t have any strength left. I have money but I can no longer exert myself. I have no strength at all. You’re my body now. You’ll be my limbs. It’s best for both of us if you just do what I want. As I told you, my attorney in New York will expect to hear from you after all this. After I’m gone. Or wherever you are, you can call him and he’ll wire what I’ve set aside for you. Then you’ll be able to do what you really wish.”
“And what’s that?”
“You really want to know what I think?”
“Sure.”
“To go bury yourself for good.”
Hector drove on in silence. She didn’t care that he was cross at her. He was not here for the money, or for her, maybe not even for himself, if “for himself ” meant the usual reasons a person did anything: some principle, or necessity, or pleasure, or the avoidance of displeasure, pain. June had not thought it as a girl, for back then she was even more fixed in her purpose than she was now-to survive, always survive-but she had come to see over the last several days that he was a being who completely lacked desire. Clearly he had had deep feeling for Dora, but she was gone and now it seemed he had fallen back into an existence most familiar to him, which he wore like a grotty old cap. He wanted nothing. He yearned for nothing. Even his drinking was just marking the time, a busyness of the hands, the mouth. He hardly seemed to care whether he was living or dead. At moments this infuriated her, given how she herself was gripping the edge of the precipice; it made her want to push him out of the car and take the wheel. If anything, she thought, he was here to wallow in the memory of Sylvie Tanner, to punish himself over her, which she knew would also be her tightest lashing, her darkest charm, and keep him longer at her side.
She had plenty to punish herself with, too, but she was focused on Nicholas. She was becoming afraid that he might resist seeing her. Even refuse. It was perhaps mad, but she pictured how if Hector had to corral him, forcibly hold the boy down, she might decide to stick him with her syringe, in order to calm him down. Certainly Nicholas would have to accept them as the best option: either she and Hector would arrest him or the authorities would. And while they journeyed to Solferino together in the back of the car, she would tell him the things she had been meaning to tell him, since the day he left for Europe: that she was sorry for her selfishness during his childhood, her focus too narrow to include even him; that she thought him vastly talented; that his sensitivity was not, as she might have led him to believe, a weakness, but could be turned into strength, of which his stubborn distance from her was a sure sign; that she forgave him for taking her book on Solferino and that he should forgive her, if he could, if not now, then someday. Lastly, she would tell him that she had always loved him, despite her meager capacity to show it, that if she could will herself eternal life it would be wholly spent at his side.