let himself in.
The long thin apartment was bathed in near-sepulchral light. Too calm – the goldfish coasting slowly in their bowl, the shiny kitchen counter, the fine rugs and polished floors, Amsterdam's saline sky through diamond-paned windows. “Inneka!” he called, but no one answered. He left his bag by the bed and went downstairs and along Reguliersgracht over the double humped bridges where two canals met, toward Rembrandts Plein and the river, the wind at his back.
THE PRIEST was droning on and André's glance wandered to the pale limestone walls downcast with sun, the stained stone bleeding its slow calcium rot, the time-gnawed lion and human gargoyles on the column crowns, stone faces that had leered down on so many centuries of humans reaching up for God, sneering for centuries at the same human hunger, pain, and sorrow. Is that hatred in their eyes, he wondered, or only irony?
The gray midmorning Normandy light spilled through the faded glass, streaking the pale walls. This imitation, he thought, of the first temples at this ancient curve of the Seine, hallowed rock beneath the oaks, the eye following their columns upward to the arched leafy boughs and the azure of a ceiling you could take for Heaven, if you wanted.
This church at Les Andelys that Richard the Lionheart had built after he came back from the Holy Land and prison in Dürnstein, after he'd built Château Gaillard on the limestone promontory above – two years to build the castle then two months for the church, the castle incorporating the most advanced military defense techniques he'd copied from the Saracens in the Holy Land. Like Richard, André realized, like his brother Yves, now he too was leaving Normandy for the Holy Land. But not to defend it.
Richard taught that to serve the cause of vengeance is to serve the cause of God: build a church or castle, it's all the same. Richard came back from Lebanon with the secrets of Saracen defensive architecture, but they didn't save him. Yves came back in shreds in a black box. Who am I avenging, really? And how will I come back?
Bread and wine into body and blood, every word so sharp that everyone inside this church hears it with a single heart, one mind, for these few moments. He saw the crewcut rugged soldiers in the far pews, some bored, some in conscientious attention to the priest whose words washed over them like so many words over so many souls over eight hundred years inside these same stone walls. The children sucking thumbs and wheedling, old people rapt or diligent in prayer, the priest's prayer now for Pierre Duclair, the sports teacher, forty-three, with a wife and four children, fallen dead on Tuesday as he waited for medicine at the chemist, the priest's prayer for all those hungry and despairing, his admonition to see the scorned beggar at the roadside as Christ, and André made a mental note that this was foolishness because if you did you'd soon be a beggar yourself – but then wouldn't you be like Christ?
A woman in front of him, with three kids, young and pert with short blonde hair curled over her ears, a pretty young body despite the kids. Beyond her another, a little older, tall and slim, hardly any breasts, with a composed ravenous look – which would he spend the night with, if he could?
He chose the young blonde, thought of croissants aux amandes and a café crème to break his fast, after Communion. He could meet Monique at Le Central, but she wouldn't want to with Hermann coming home; at lunch today there'd be fine St. Emilion to go with the lamb, Papa bringing up an armful of bottles spiderwebbed and dusty from the cave – the way they painted the church walls in the twelfth century, you could still see it, frail and dim, the reds last longest, color of wine, color of blood, or is it just that everything turns to that?
The Host in the priest's hands in the mordant light, boys passing each other in the Communion line with quick glances of complicity, coming and going round him the people he'd grown up with, the couples of his early youth now older and tenuous, the girls he'd been a boy with now with girls of their own, lines of worry and comprehension graven in their faces – it was all there for him, hadn't he understood it, at the moment of the Host, the full mystery and miracle of life?
Filing into the street, there was a patter of tires on cobblestones, rain soft as a woman shedding silken clothes, a sad hunger for vengeance and the dry taste of the Host at the back of his throat.
5
AT A CAFÉ by the river Neill bought a 25-guilder bag of Afghani grass and sat smoking on the terrace with a cappuccino. Across the street cars were lined along the canal, parking meters spaced among them like guards among prisoners on a work detail. On the far side of the Amstel rose the stone gingerbread and brick of the Hotel de l’Europe; everywhere cars, bicycles, and trucks were fleeting back and forth as if seeking somewhere to go, people hustling past, the tall slender women with beautiful chiseled faces and red lips set off by their blonde hair; he smiled, imagining their cool long naked skin.
The grass was chunky and sticky and didn't roll easily, the smoke sweet and powerful down into his lungs out into his blood, putting all in perspective, Bev and Freeman and Inneka and the newspaper and the kids and this trip and his forty-two years crowned with no success, no future. It didn't matter, your future, if you could understand this, live fully in this.
Across the street policemen with two trucks were towing away first a gray Toyota then a red Lada. One tall bearded cop had a key that opened the Lada's door instantly. Oh to have a key, Neill thought, that opens everything. A few passersby watched half curiously, a man in a tan beret complaining quietly and rancorously. On the radio a man was whining over some woman's desertion:
And if you leave me now
You'll take away
The very best part of me
A tall slender black man, athletic, passed by with a smaller dark-haired white man – a laughing young-hearted couple. How can I look down on that? Neill thought. Then a blonde girl in a camelhair coat, black high heels, black foam pads on wires over her ears. “You don't have to be alone,” sang the café radio, a husky woman's voice.
Two girls sat at the next table, drinking espressos and smoking hash from a clay pipe. “Hey!” one of them said, and he looked up, but she was calling a young long-haired guy on the pavement who smiled and came over, kissed them and sat down, his hand on one girl's thigh, smoking their hash. I'm the kind of graying soft-faced man, Neill realized, that nobody notices. He caught his reflection in the café's side window: soon an old man, ripe for defeat.
The joint was too resiny and kept going out; he relit it, inhaling the sweet smoke through his nostrils, tasting it. The CIA had shipped Afghani weed like this to Europe to help pay for weapons to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan. Like everyone in Lebanon was selling opium and hash to pay for their weapons.
Through the smoke everything seemed clearer, the blue Jaguar that had parked where the Lada had been towed away, half up on the pavement, the wet leaves on the dirty stones, the rail beyond and the Amstel River gray slate, an orange houseboat chugging up it, the Hotel de l’Europe primly awaiting a change of season, the weary houses, wet streets beneath damp clouds.
For a moment he'd been happy just to let the game of life go on around him.
BY AFTERNOON IT WAS SUNNY and the dew had dried out of the garden. They set the long wooden table on the stone patio, with wine and salad and bread, lamb and potatoes and peas, André's mother not wanting to sit because then there'd be thirteen at table. “Don't be silly,” he said. “You think we'd eat without you?”
She waited till the others, his sisters and their husbands and children, had filed through the kitchen to the patio. “You're going again, aren't you?”
“Just a little while, Mama. Down south.”
“Your father knows but he won't tell me.”
How savage age is, he thought, seeing her lined face, the pallid flesh and dark worry under the faded eyes. “Papa doesn't know anything because there's nothing to know.”
“You've resigned your commission.”
“You know why, Mama. Because they did nothing. After the bombing.”
He saw that the word hurt her and regretted it, took her hand, her skin cold, the flesh bony. When we get old, he thought, the sun doesn't