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‘I’m forty, or so I believe. Four days ago, I found myself in an unknown place. You’ll never credit this. I found myself in an unknown place – not a clue how I got there. Absolutely at a loss, mind blank. Turned out that I was here, in Budapest. Budapest! Never been here before in my natural.’
He was already contradicting himself, Burnell thought. If he were lost, how had he known his luggage was stolen at the airport?
‘So now you’re staying in the Gellert?’ Burnell spoke challengingly, determined not to be touched for Monty’s air fare to England. Knowing something of the man’s background, he felt no particular inclination to help.
Monty leaned back in his chair so as to look as much the invalid as possible. ‘Terrible state poor old England’s in. Read the papers. To what do you ascribe it, Roy?’
‘Neglect of education, lack of statesmen. What’s your problem?’
‘Couldn’t agree more. I suppose that’s why someone like you has to scout round for a job abroad?’
‘No doubt. What’s your problem?’
‘It’s very serious. I know you’re a sympathetic chap. I’m attending the Antonescu Clinic. Mircea Antonescu is a foremost specialist, right at the cutting edge of psycho-technology. Well, he’s Romanian. They’re a clever race …’ He gave Burnell a sidelong glance under the eyebrow before hurrying on. ‘I’m not staying at the Gellert. Couldn’t afford it. Too expensive for someone like me. I’m renting a cheap room in Pest – view of the gasworks, ha ha … You see, Roy, old pal, this is the bottom line: I’ve lost ten years of my memory. Just lost them. Wiped clean. Can’t remember a thing.’
Burnell uttered a word of condolence. Monty looked slightly annoyed.
‘Perhaps you don’t understand. The last thing I can really remember is, I was thirty. Ten and a bit years have passed since then and I’ve absolutely no notion what I was doing all that time. No notion at all.’
‘How terrible.’ Burnell suspected a catch was coming, and was loath to commit himself.
‘FOAM. That’s Antonescu’s term. FOAM – Free Of All Memory. He sees it as a kind of, well, liberty. There I beg to differ. You know what it feels like to lose your memory?’
Despite himself, Burnell was interested.
‘It’s like an ocean, old chum. A wide wide ocean with a small island here and there. No continents. The continents have disappeared, sunk without trace. I suppose I couldn’t have a top-up of vodka, could I?’ He held out his glass.
As he poured, Burnell admitted he had seen Monty once or twice during the previous ten years, before his sacking; perhaps he could help to fill the gaps in his memory. Monty Broadwell-Smith made moderately grateful noises. There was no one else he could turn to in Budapest.
When asked if his memory-loss was caused by a virus, Monty professed ignorance. ‘No one knows – as yet at least. Could have been a car crash, causing amnesia. No bones broken if so. Lucky to be alive, I suppose you might say. But what’s going to happen to me, I’ve no idea.’
‘Your wife isn’t with you?’
Monty slapped his forehead with his free hand. A look of amazement crossed his face. ‘Oh my sainted aunt! Don’t say I was married!’
He drank the vodka, he kept the sweater, he shook Burnell’s hand. The next morning, Burnell went round to the Antonescu Clinic as he had promised. Monty wanted one of the specialists at the clinic to question Burnell, in order to construct a few points of identification. Monty suggested that this would help towards a restoration of his memory.
Burnell had agreed. He felt ashamed that he had so grudgingly given his old sweater to a friend in distress.
2
Murder in a Cathedral
‘Nothing to worry about, old chum,’ Monty Broadwell-Smith had said. ‘They’re masters of the healing art.’
The Antonescu Clinic was not as Burnell had imagined it. Cumbersome nineteenth-century apartment blocks, built of stone expressly quarried to grind the faces of the poor, lined a section of Fo Street. Secretive Hungarian lives were lived among heavy furniture in these blocks. They parted at one point to permit entrance to a small nameless square.
The buildings in the square huddled against each other, like teeth in a too-crowded mouth. Instead of dentistry, they had suffered the exhalations from lignite still burnt in the city. A nicotiney taint gave the façades an ancient aspect, as if they had been retrieved from a period long before the Dual Monarchy.
The exception to this antiquity was a leprous concrete structure, a contribution from the Communist era which announced itself as the Ministry of Light Industry. Next to it was wedged a small shop hoping to sell used computers. Above the shop, when Burnell ascended a narrow stair, he found a huddle of rooms partitioned out of a loft. A dated modernity had been achieved with track-lighting and interior glass. Tinkling Muzak proved the Age of the Foxtrot was not entirely dead.
Burnell sat in a windowless waiting-room, looking at a post-Rothko poster which displayed a large black cross with wavery edges on a dark grey background.
A man with a thin cigar in his mouth looked round the door, sketched a salute in greeting and said, ‘Antonescu not here. Business elsewhere. Meet Dr Maté. Maté Joszef, Joszef Maté.’
He then entered the cubicle and proffered a long wiry hand.
In jerky English, Dr Maté explained that he was Mircea Antonescu’s second-in-command. They could get to work immediately. The best procedure would be for Burnell to ascend to a room where a series of questions concerning the forgotten years of Monty Broadwell-Smith could be put to him and the answers recorded electronically.
‘You understand me, Dr Burnell? Here using most modern proprietary methods. Dealing extensively with brain-injury cases. Exclusive. Special to our clinic. To produce best results in Europe, satisfied customers …’ Maté’s thick furry voice was as chewed as his cigar. As he bustled Burnell from the room, his haste almost precluded the use of finite verbs.
Burnell was shown up a spiral stair to a room with a skylight and technical equipment. Here stood a uniformed nurse with grey hair and eyes. She came forward, shaking Burnell’s hand in a friendly manner, requesting him in good German to remove his anorak.
As he did so, and handed the garment to the woman, he caught her expression. She was still smiling, but the smile had become fixed; he read something between pity and contempt in her cold eye.
At once, he felt premonitions of danger. They came on him like a stab of sorrow. He saw, seating himself as directed in an enveloping black chair, what clear-sighted men sometimes see. His life, until now modestly successful, was about to dip into a darkness beyond his control. In that moment there came to him a fear not for but of his own existence. He knew little about medical practice, but the operating table and anaesthetïc apparatus were familiar enough, with black tubes of gas waiting like torpedoes for launch. On the other side of the crowded room, e-mnemonicvision equipment stood like glum secretary birds, their crenellated helmets ready to be swung down and fixed to the cranium. These birds were tethered to computerized controls, already humming, showing their pimples of red light.
Maté bustled about, muttering to the nurse, stubbing out his cigar in an overflowing ashtray.
‘If you’re busy, I will come back tomorrow,’ Burnell said. The nurse pushed him gently into the depths of the chair, telling him soothingly to relax.
‘Like wartime,’ said Maté. ‘Still too many difficulties. Too many problems. Is not good, nicht gut. Many problems unknown.’ Switching on a VDU, he biffed it with the heel of his left hand.
‘Large inflation rate problems, too high taxes … Too many gipsy in town. All time … The Germans of course … The Poles … Vietnamese minority … How we get all work done …’
He swung abruptly into another mode, suddenly looming over Burnell. ‘Just some questions, Dr Burnell. You are nervous, no?’
As his long stained fingers chased themselves through Burnell’s hair, he attempted reassurance. The clinic had developed a method of inserting memories into regions of the brain, to restore amnesiacs to health. The method was a development of e-mnemonicvision. First, those memories had to be recorded with full sensory data on microchip, and then projected into the brain. While he gave a somewhat technical explanation, the nurse gave Burnell an injection in his arm. He felt it as little more than a bee sting.
‘But I don’t know Monty Broadwell-Smith well …’
‘Good, good, Dr Burnell. Now we must append electrodes to the head … Obtain full data in response to my questioning … No dancer will rival you, but every step you take will be as if you were treading on sharp nights …’
Burnell tried to struggle, as the words became confused with the heat.
He could still hear Dr Maté, but the man’s words had become mixed with a colourful ball, which bounced erratically away into the distance. Burnell tried to get out the word ‘discomfort’, but it was too mountainous.
He was walking with Maté in a cathedral, huge and unlit. Their steps were ponderous, as if they waded up to their thighs in water. To confuse the issue further, Maté was smoking a cigar he referred to as ‘The Trial’.
Offended, Burnell attempted a defence of Franz Kafka, distinguished Czech author of a novel of the same name.
‘As a psychologist, you must understand that there are men like Kafka for whom existence is an entanglement, while for others – why, they sail through life like your torpedoes.’
‘These differences are accounted for by minute biochemical changes in the brain. Neither state is more truthful than the other. For some people like the author to whom you refer, truth lies in mystery, for others in clarity. We have the science of medicine now, but prayer used to be the great clarifier. The old Christian churches used to serve as clarifying machines.’
‘You mean they helped you to think straight in what you might call “this doleful jeste of life”.’
‘I’ve just got to get a millimetre further in.’
They continued to walk in a darkness the extent of which Burnell could hardly comprehend.
‘Anyhow, you’re good company,’ Maté said, affectionately. ‘Is there anything I can do for you in return?’
‘More oxygen,’ Burnell said. ‘It’s hot in this …’ Uncertain between the words ‘chair’ and ‘cathedral’, he came out with ‘chairch’. ‘As a chairch architect, I’ve visited most of the cathedrals in Europe – Chartres, Burgos, Canterbury, Cologne, Saragossa, Milano, Ely, Zagreb, Gozo, Rheims …’
He listened to his voice going on and on. When it too had faded into the distance, he added, ‘But this is the first time I’ve ever been in a hot and stuffy cathedral or chairch.’
‘I’ll put this match out. There are new ways. What we medicos call neural pathwise. Your friend Kafka – personally I’d have lobotomized him – he said that “all protective walls are smashed by the iron fist of technology”. Whingeing, of course, the fucker was always whingeing. But it’s the tiny little fist of nanotechnology which is smashing the walls between human and human. In the future, we shall all be able to share memories and understandings. Everything will be common property. Private thought will be a thing of the past.’
Burnell laughed. He had not realized that Maté was such good company. To continue the joke, he said, ‘In that connection, Jesus Christ was pretty au fait with nanotechnology. You remember? That resurrection of the body stuff? Strictly Frankenstein stuff. Dead one day, up and running the next.’
Maté professed himself puzzled. They halted under a statue of Averroës. He had heard of Frankenstein. It was the other great Christian myth which puzzled him. This was almost the first time Burnell had ever encountered anyone walking in a cathedral who had never heard of Jesus Christ.
Since the man was interested, Burnell tried to deliver a brief résumé of the Saviour’s life. The heat and darkness confused him. He could not recall how exactly Jesus was related to John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary. Nor could he remember whether Christ was his surname or Christian name.
‘I see, so they hanged him in the end, did they?’ said Maté. ‘You’d be better not to remember such depressing things.’
It seemed sacrilegious to mention the name of Jesus in such a place.
The cathedral was constructed in the form of a T, the horizontal limb being much longer than the vertical, stretching away into the dark. The weight of masonry pressed down on Burnell’s head and shoulders. Great columns like fossil vertebrae reared up on every side, humming with the extreme messages they carried. In defiance of the laws of physics, they writhed like the vital parts of the chordata, click-clack, clickety-clack, climbing lizard-tailed into the deeper darknesses of the vaulting overhead. He could feel them entwined up there.
Burnell and Maté had come to the junction of the great T. The vertical limb of this overpowering masterpiece sloped downwards. Burnell stopped to stare down the slope, though it was more sensed than seen. Instead of imagining that hordes of women were passing by in the gloom, he giggled at Maté’s latest joke; the demon claimed not to have heard of the Virgin Mary either. He was now sitting on Burnell’s shoulder in an uncomfortable posture.
‘The devil’s about to appear,’ he said. ‘Hold tight.’
‘The devil? But you hadn’t heard of the—’
‘Forget reality, Roy. It’s one of the universe’s dead ends …’
‘But would you happen to know if this is Sainsbury Cathedral?’
At the far distant end of the slope, the sallopian tube, a stage became wanly illuminated. In infinite time. The. Pause. Stage. Pause. Be. Pause. Came. Pause. Wan. Pause. Lee. Pause. Ill. Pause. You. Pause. Min. Pause. Ay. Pause. Ted. Trumpets. It was flushed with a dull diseased Doppler shift red.
Funebrial music had begun, mushroom-shaped bass predominating, like a Tibetan at his best prayers.
For a few eons, these low levels of consciousness were in keeping with the old red sandstone silences of the Duomo-like structure. They were shattered by the incursion of a resounding bass voice breaking into song.
That timbre! That mingled threat and exultation!
It was unmistakable even to a layman.
‘The devil you know!’ Burnell exclaimed.
‘I’d better shove off now,’ said Maté.
‘Hey, what about those playing cods?’ But the man had gone.
Until that moment, the devil had been represented only as a vocal outpouring roughly equivalent to Niagara. Now he appeared on the wine-dark stage.
The devil was ludicrously out of scale, far too large to be credible, thought Burnell – even if it was disrespectful to think the thought. In the confused dark – weren’t those lost women somehow still pouring by? – it was hard to see the devil properly. He was an articulation, and approaching, black and gleaming, his outline as smooth as a dolphin’s, right down to the hint of rubber. Nor was the stench of brimstone, as pungent as Maté’s cigar, forgotten.
He advanced slowly up the ramp towards Burnell, raising the rafters with his voice as he came.
Striving to break from the networks of his terror, Burnell threw out his arms and peered along the wide lateral arm of the cathedral.
‘Anyone there? Help! Help! Taxi!’
To the left, in the direction from which they had come, everything had been amputated by night, the black from which ignorance and imagination is fashioned. Towards the right, however, along that other orbit, something was materializing. A stain of uninvented liquid. An ox-bow of the Styx. Light with its back turned to the electromagnetic spectrum.
‘Help! My hour is almost come!’
The devil still singing was approaching still.
Atheist Burnell certainly was, in an age when no courage was denoted by the term. But too many years had been spent in his capacity as church custodian for WACH, investigating the mortal remains, the fossils, of the old faith of Christendom, for something of the old superstitions not to have rubbed off on him. He also had some belief in the Jungian notion of the way in which traits of human personality became dramatized as personages – as gods or demons, as Jekylls or Hydes. This singing devil, this bugaboo of bel canto, could well be an embodiment of the dark side of his own character. In which case, Burnell was the less likely to escape him.
Nor did he.
Burnell took a glutinous pace or two to his right. He began to begin to paddle towards that dull deceitful promise of escape. Violet was the vision reviving there. Fading into sight came a magnificent Palladian façade: a stream of perfection that scarcely could brook human visitation. Doric columns, porticoes, blind doorways. No man – however worthy of this unwedding cake – was there to answer Burnell’s gurgle for help.
If the burrow to the left represented the squalors of the subconscious, to the right towered the refrigerated glory of the super-ego.
Still Burnell swam for it, convulsing his body into action.
‘Mountebank!’ he screamed as he went.
But the black monster was there, reaching out a hand, reaching him. Now Burnell’s scream was even higher, even more sincere. The thing caught him by his hair. Snatched him up …
… and bit off his head.
Blanche Bretesche was drinking steadily. She was in her Madrid apartment with friends. It was late. The red wine of Andalucia was slipping down her red gullet as she talked to her friend Teresa Cabaroccas. The two women were discussing love in an age without faith. They’d been in a Madrid back street, watching a performance by a once famous flamenco dancer, now a little past it and married to an innkeeper. The singing had been in progress after midnight.
‘Oh, one more damned passionate wail!’ – suddenly Blanche had screamed and stood up. She practically dragged Teresa from the crowded tavern.
‘Why have these people some kind of licence to yell their sufferings?’
‘The audience empathizes, Blanche. You can wallow in it for a bit, can’t you? And with the suffering – that spirited arrogance! Oh, it’s the arrogance I admire, not the suffering. The defiance of poverty, misery, betrayal, fate. The body says it, not just the voice …’ Annoyed at being pulled from the entertainment she had not greatly enjoyed, Teresa was drinking as rapidly as Blanche.
‘Why shouldn’t I get up and wail my sufferings?’ Blanche asked. ‘My bloody discontents? Wail them from – oh, the square, the mountains, the TV studios …’ She kicked her shoes to the far end of the room and put her bare feet up on the table.
‘But your whole life – that speaks out for women, for fulfilment.’
‘Fulfilment. I spit on the word. When was anyone really fulfilled? When did anyone ever have enough? Tell me that. Go on, tell me when anyone ever had enough. I mean there’s not enough to have. The imagination’s always greedy for more. Like that Madame Fotril when I was a girl – she lived next door to us and she ate her five-year-old daughter, cooked – with cabbage, of all vile things. Cabbage! I’ve never eaten cabbage since. The mere thought makes me sick. And then my parents took me with them to the funeral. Funeral! What could have been in the coffin, I kept asking myself. I was possibly twelve, just growing breasts like unripe apricots and hair between the legs, and all I could think was that maybe the priest had thrown the saucepan into the coffin with the bones.
‘There was a woman – a fearsome woman – who wasn’t afraid of her imagination, who demanded enough, whatever it cost. Well, I feel like that. It’s love – no, it’s not really even love, it’s wanting something I can’t have, almost like a principle, the principle that we should never ever in this life be satisfied—’
‘Oh, calm down, we’ve all got problems,’ said Teresa. She got up and walked unsteadily to the balcony, trying to cool her cheek against a stone pillar. ‘Who is this guy you were talking about, anyway? A Hungarian?’
‘Not a Hungarian,’ said Blanche. She looked down into her glass, afraid to say ‘English’ in case her Spanish friend laughed. She didn’t wish to spoil the drama of the moment.
