The Search Page 11

  The chimes haunted Walker, convincing him that he had been here before, but however hard he tried – in fact the harder he tried the more elusive the sense became – he was unable to fathom the origin of this sensation. He wondered if Malory had experienced the same thing when he had passed through Crescent City. Perhaps it was experienced by everyone who came here and the sensation of déjà vu – there was something familiar even about this sequence of reasoning – was the city’s distinguishing feature, like the canals of Venice, the garbage dumps of Leonia or the spires of Christminster. Walker’s sense of following in his own footsteps grew steadily but no less subtly stronger.

  Then, as he walked down Esplanade, each step adding to – without confirming – the feeling that he had done this before, he began to wonder if there were some way in which he could use this to his advantage. Until now he had been dragging memories in his wake; he had to try to allow these hinted memories to lead him onwards, to show him what to do next. Since it became more difficult to pin down the feeling the harder he concentrated, he had to make his mind blank, to cease being an active agent of his own intentions and allow the sensation to ebb and flow as he wandered. The problem was that a sense of déjà vu pervaded the entire city and as time passed the hinted memories he sought to follow became overlaid by the actual memories of the previous days. The strongest, deepest, most allusive sensations were the most elusive and least immediate.

  He drifted through the city, tugged by shifting currents of memory, until he found himself outside an old wooden house, painted white. Windows, open shutters. Chimes hanging from the balcony, stroked by a breeze no longer there.

  He unlatched the wrought-iron gate and walked round the side of the house. Strewn with leaves, a lawn extended from a conservatory to some flower-beds, bare except for clipped rose bushes. Beyond the flower-beds was a patch of rough ground and a grey-haired man scooping up armfuls of leaves and tossing them on to a bonfire. Walker stood in the middle of the lawn watching him. He appeared lost in thought, pausing in his work and watching the flames, tugging at his right ear-lobe with thumb and forefinger. Thin smoke smudged the sky. The man turned and looked at him, hesitated, and then resumed his work.

  Repeating a sequence of events enacted before, Walker passed through the conservatory and into the house. From a ground-floor room he heard a crackly recording of a cello, a woman humming gently in tune with it, the rattle of teacups. He went upstairs and into a small study. Typed pages were scattered over the floor. He looked out of the window and saw an old woman carrying a tray of cups and plates over to a weather-worn table in the garden. The man looked up, saw her, smiled.

  Beneath the window was an open roll-top desk. Propped on one side of the desk was an old postcard showing a silent piazza, empty except for a statue and striding shadows. On the back, in his own handwriting, was the name of the city in the picture: Imbria.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  He travelled there the next day. It was a city of empty piazzas, red towers and the endless perfect arches of arcades. Mustard-coloured walls, ochre streets. He noticed red towers and arcades but mainly he was aware of the space between things, as if there were more space here than was possible. There was no distance or direction, only perspective and white walls, mustard-coloured streets. The city looked the same in every direction – arcades, piazzas, towers, long shadows – but each new view was unfamiliar, strange. Whenever he turned a corner a new but identical vista of arcades and towers opened up before him. Only one sense mattered here. Everything was arranged for the eye.

  The sky was turquoise, becoming lighter, greener, close to the pencil-line horizon. The light made the walls of the buildings glow amber. On the other side of the square was the city hall, a tower and clock face that told nothing. Time slid across the piazza in angular shadows. Always it was the shadows, dark as a girl’s hair, that he noticed first. Even a stone in the middle of the piazza cast a shadow the length of a man. Shadows peeked from the edge of a wall and when he turned the corner to see what cast them his attention was held by another shadow, projected from beyond the next corner. Something seemed always to be going on just beyond the edge of his vision, around the next corner. Everything happened in the distance. In this way the city lured him through itself.

  Between the mustard walls of a building he caught a glimpse of the sea. He wandered in that direction but did not get any nearer. Space swallowed him up. Shadows slid into the cool arcades. Up ahead was a red tower with flags flying. He turned a corner and there was the sea. Flat, opalescent, lapping gently beyond the low wall. Near the horizon was a triangle of sail, brilliant white. A white cane had been left propped against the wall. A statue gazed out to sea. On the sea-wall was a book, pages flapping in the wind – except there was no wind. Everything was still but the pages were flapping as if in a spring breeze. He moved closer to the book, listened to the rustle of the pages: as if the book were alive, like a creature whose breath had only the strength to make this faint flutter.

  Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a shadow emerge from an arcade. A figure stood in the piazza where Walker himself had been standing minutes earlier. They stared at each other, each mirroring the other’s reaction, neither displaying shock or alarm, and then moved on. The sky was an even deeper turquoise than before. Instead of becoming darker, the light had been squeezed, concentrated. Beyond the city was the low swell of Renaissance hills.

  Walker was passing by a broken statue when, through the arches of an arcade, he saw the figure again, by the quay where he himself had been standing. Again there was a pause, a lingering surprise, and then they moved on, both looking back once. Later – time was as difficult to judge as distance – it happened again: on this occasion the figure was standing by the broken statue.

  Each time they occurred the mood of these encounters changed, imperceptibly, until they were virtually stalking each other round the city. The figure had a similar realization simultaneously, for now he looked at Walker with suspicion. Walker felt the first twinge of unease and the figure’s movements immediately acquired an edge of urgency. Walker began sweating; he had an impulse to run and saw the figure trot across the piazza and disappear from sight.

  He continued walking through the bewildered city, uneasy now. He glanced round and saw the figure looking at him. Walker ran across the piazza and into the darkness of an arcade. When he emerged into sunlight the figure was silhouetted, his back to Walker. Immediately, he looked around and ran off. So a pattern was established with Walker alternating between fleeing from the figure who would suddenly appear behind him and surprising this same person who would run from him.

  The situation petered out exactly as it had begun. Walker felt confident he could outrace the figure who simultaneously reacted less nervously when Walker came up on him unawares. As their sense of mutual alarm diminished, so did the frequency of these encounters until they spotted each other rarely, harmlessly, at a distance, and Walker resumed his stroll through the city.

  Later, lodged in the stone fingers of a statue, he found a card showing the piazza he was now walking across. He pocketed the card and walked on. At the top of a tower a flag fluttered in the absent breeze. In the distance a train steamed silently into the station. A cloud drifted over the train as if it had always been there. The light remained suspended between late afternoon and early evening, the sun never quite setting, the city receding all around.

  Walker found himself once again by the quay, the sea lapping green and clear, the statue gazing calmly, the book still lying there, the cane propped by the wall. He picked up the book and leafed through it. On each page, blurred and smudged by spray from the sea, was written the name of one of the cities he had passed through, in the order he had visited them. Imbria was the second last name in the book. The last city, the only one he had not been to, was called Nemesis. Next to it, was what he assumed to be a date, 4.9.—, with the year an illegible blur of ink: five days from now.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN
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br />   Nemesis was a medieval town built on two low hills, dominated by a vast cathedral and, for five months of the year at least, by tourists who swarmed all over it. It was the last day of August when Walker arrived and all the hotels and pensions were full. After a morning’s trudging he found, at an inflated price, a room in a hotel high up on one of the hills overlooking the cathedral and the red-tiled roofs crowding around it.

  Walking through the city he became certain that the search would end here. Maybe the trail didn’t stop here but he lacked the will to pursue it any further. In the past he had always found something that urged him forward – or at least he had had a strong impulse to move on. Relying on the same logic – on the same lack of logic – that had brought him here, the fact that he had no urge to go any further meant that the trail ended here, in Nemesis. There had been times when he had longed for the search to be over with but now, faced with this becoming a reality, he was aware, sadly, of the sense of purpose it lent to everything. A bee hovering over the petals of a flower, trees twisting in a gale, water dripping from a faucet . . . Overlooked in the normal routine of his life, the search filled such details with possibility. In Despond he had almost given up and in other places he had been unsure where to go next but this was different: this time there was nowhere else to go. He had followed a trail by inventing it and now there was nothing else to follow, nothing left to invent. There was no more to discover – or what remained to be discovered would be discovered here.

  He was sitting on a curved metal bench in a busy piazza: his second day in the city. He scrawled ‘Imbria’ on the back of the postcard he had found there and addressed it to Rachel. Picturing himself arriving back and seeing the card again made Walker think of what she had told him the night they had first met: dreaming of a garden where you pick a rose, waking to find your bed strewn with petals.

  Seeing Walker seal the envelope a small boy offered to post it for him. Walker handed over a few coins and the boy ran to the other side of the piazza. Through the pigeon-scattering crowd Walker saw him stand on tiptoe and slot the card into a yellow letter-box.

  The man who had been sitting at the other end of the bench, meanwhile, hauled himself to his feet and left. Lodged between the metal slats where he had been sitting Walker noticed a leaflet which he picked up and read, vacantly, in the way you read nutritional information or special offers on the sides of cereal packets. It was a letter, written by a local film-maker named Marek. He was making a film of the city and the people who visited it, the letter explained. It would be a new kind of film, made up entirely of photographs, snaps, videos and Super 8 films taken by residents or tourists who were in the city on 9 April. He would then combine the diverse material into ‘a narrative montage of the city’. The success of the enterprise depended largely on the co-operation of the people themselves and he asked any visitors to send copies of the snaps or films they took that day in Nemesis. Obviously he would reinburse them for the cost of the developing. This had been made possible by the generous sponsorship of . . . Walker skimmed the list of participating film-manufacturers and moved on to the bottom of the letter where he had set out the titles of his previous films, a few laudatory quotes from the press and the address to send material to.

  Walker looked at the date: 9 April, The ninth of the fourth. He had assumed that the date in the book in Imbria had meant 4 September, the fourth of the ninth, three days from now; but if the dates had been set down American-style with the month preceding the day, then the date in the book was the day on which the film was being compiled.

  He hurried to a pay-phone, half expecting it to ring, like a dog warning him not to approach, and dialled Marek’s number. Engaged. He waited a minute and dialled again. This time the phone was answered almost immediately, by the film-maker himself. Walker explained that he was a journalist interested in Marek’s work and wondered if it would be possible to do an interview. When there was silence on the other end Walker reeled off a list of the publications he wrote for, mentioned a book he was writing. Marek sounded sceptical but he agreed to meet with Walker ‘for a quick chat’.

  ‘When would be a good time?’ said Walker.

  ‘Would it be possible to come today?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could you come soon?’

  ‘That would be fine.’

  ‘In about one hour?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  Walker replaced the receiver and caught a taxi. He was full of anticipation and paid no attention to his surroundings until the cab dropped him near the docks in the warehouse district. He found the right building and jabbed the bell. The intercom cleared its throat and Marek told him to come up.

  The studio was a large loft space, screened off into separate areas. Marek came to meet him and they shook hands. He was shorter than Walker, wearing an old sweater and jeans. Espresso stubble, dark eyes ringed by insomnia circles. Walker formed an impression of a man who returns from dinner at midnight, makes himself coffee and settles down to work until dawn.

  They waited for the coffee to drip and then walked to the back of the studio, to what Marek called his office. It was partitioned off from the rest of the studio and contained a desk, table, telephone, two chairs, graphics instruments. Walker set up his dictaphone on the edge of the desk and asked Marek about his films. He had no interest, apparently, in talking about his past films but, to Walker’s relief, was eager to answer questions about the new film, the city montage.

  ‘We printed five thousand leaflets – you’ve seen the leaflets, yes? – in five different languages. So, twenty-five thousand leaflets. We left them in bars and restaurants, galleries. Then, from dawn of the ninth we handed them out in the main tourist parts of the city.’

  As Marek talked he reached up to a shelf behind him and took down a snow-storm of the city’s cathedral. He shook it up and let the snow swirl around the model’s twin towers.

  ‘We had no idea what the response was going to be. At best we expected to get, I don’t know, maybe two thousand replies. There were so many things that could go wrong. You know, people just chuck it away without reading it, others read it and aren’t interested. People intend doing it but lose the leaflet or the address or just don’t get round to doing it when they get home. Or they see their photos and think nobody could be interested in these. It all hinged on this initial response but for a week there was nothing. Then a few things from local people but after three weeks it looked like it hadn’t worked.’

  The snow had settled, the cathedral was plainly visible. Marek picked it up again, shook it and placed it on the table. Walker kept glancing at the silent swirl of flakes.

  ‘Then it started pouring in. Stuff was arriving from all over the place, Germany, Greece, Japan, Australia. Photos were still coming in up until a month ago – by now it’s just about dried up. Then the real work had to begin. The response was almost too good. The amount of material we had to get through was so daunting. And that’s what we’ve been doing for the last couple of months.’

  ‘So what form is it taking?’ asked Walker, nodding like a journalist.

  ‘First we needed to arrange everything in chronological order. That’s actually much easier than you think. The individual snaps on a film are all in order and then there are other indications – shadows, light. Sometimes there’s even a clock. We’ve taken copies and now have everything broken down into quarters of an hour. At the same time we’ve been filing everything by place, all the shots at Piazza San Pietro, for example. That way it can all be cross-referenced. It will make the assembling easier later on but, you know, it’s taken a lot of time and it’s difficult to see the wood for the trees.’

  ‘You have no idea of the form it might take?’

  ‘Some kind of form will emerge but with a mass of material like this that doesn’t happen until you start nudging it a bit. Besides, there are all sorts of technical problems. How to integrate the snaps and the moving footage, how to get a kind of narrative.’

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p; Marek waited for the next question; they both looked over at the snow-storm which had almost settled.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Walker, shifting in his seat. ‘Perhaps it would be possible to follow an individual through the day. I mean, the person featured in one picture would crop up in the corner of another, and a third and a fourth. It might be possible to track someone’s movements through the day.’

  ‘That’s something I hadn’t thought of,’ said Marek. ‘But it might be possible, yes.’ Walker could see that the idea instantly attracted Marek. He was silent and Walker sensed that he was already working through the inherent possibilities and difficulties of such a project. He picked up the snow-storm and turned it over in his hands, looked at Walker. The dictaphone continued running, measuring the silence between the two men.

  ‘Maybe you had this idea before you came to speak to me,’ said Marek finally.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘But you are more interested in this idea than you are in . . . What was the name of the book you are writing?’

  Walker smiled, ‘I am looking for a man named Malory. I believe he was in the city on 9 April, on the day of your filming.’

  ‘That is a coincidence.’

  ‘The more I think about that word the less sure I am of what it means. I sometimes think it means the opposite of what it’s meant to,’ said Walker.

  ‘The inevitability of coincidence,’ said Marek and waited for Walker to continue.

  ‘I wonder if it would be possible to find this man in your film, to discover what his movements were.’

  ‘It would certainly lend an element of suspense to the film.’