A Fool's Alphabet (12 page)

‘Has anyone seen Gloria?' she called out as she glided past.

‘She's still in the café,' he called back.

‘Typical,' laughed Laura.

‘Yes, typical,' called Pietro, though she was already out of earshot.

That night he and Harry counted their bruises. It wasn't the sodomy of the drag lift or the pain from hip bones blue from sudden impact on the ice so much as the fierce ache in
the calves that bothered them. The showers were cold. Harry, for the first time, looked defeated.

‘I know,' said Pietro. ‘We could ask Laura and Gloria if they'd let us use their bath.'

Gloria answered the door in her dressing gown, her hair up in a scarf. She wasn't pleased to see them. ‘The Blazers want to use the tub,' she called out to Laura. She hadn't called them that for a long time. ‘I'm so tired,' said Gloria. ‘Maybe tomorrow, OK?'

‘Tired? But you sat in the café all day,' said Harry.

Pietro didn't think this was the right way to get round Gloria. ‘Please, Laura,' he called out. ‘Remember we did let you have the room.' He thought that if he could get past the presence of Gloria in the doorway Laura's better nature would be vulnerable. It worked, and he was able to climb into the small but hot bathtub a few minutes later.

It seemed impolite not to linger a little while and take a drink with them afterwards; he didn't want to use them like a hotel. The next evening he took some salami and some peanuts to go with Gloria's gin and orange. From then on the routine became established. Gloria eventually put down her book and listened to the exaggerated stories they told of what had happened during the day. Pietro sat at the foot of Laura's bed while Laura sat tucked under the duvet, smiling seraphically as she swallowed tumblers full of gin.

On the third day things came to a head with the Gauner skiing boots. For some time Pietro had wondered whether their inventor, Herr Dr Gauner, had not been a defendant at the Nuremberg trials. As he limped down the main road of Les Houches he hid them under an old blue Peugeot and prayed never to see them again. With some hired boots and a padding of thick socks over the Gauner-inflicted weals, he made progress. By the fifth day he and Harry could navigate slopes of medium difficulty. After lunch on the terrace of the restaurant, washed down with wine from Dôle, they joined a large party of skiers that included Laura, Dave and Kurt.
Harry said it was foolhardy, but Pietro reckoned the boys would have to slow down a little for the girls. Grim-faced, they exchanged curt nods and set off, leaving Gloria Katz sunbathing on the terrace.

Laura skied with minimal effort. She said she was afraid and she didn't go fast, but on narrow tracks she could keep on turning from side to side just by swivelling her skis, which remained parallel; she never seemed to do any of the knee-bending, trunk-twisting or ankle-flexing recommended by Bernard. Luckily Rania, a slim Saudi Arabian girl with brown eyes, fell over twice, and while Kurt and Dave were fussing over her bindings and dusting the snow from her thighs, Harry and Pietro came over the horizon, heads down, in a hectic
schuss
that brought them up alongside.

At the bottom, Laura looked at the pair of them panting and grimacing. ‘Look, you're all hot,' she laughed, not unkindly. Pietro vowed that he would one day ski with his skis so close together that not even a razor blade could be slid between them.

It was the late-afternoon hour at the bottom of the slope. The sun had gone off the mountain and the skiers were heading into cafés for tea and chocolate. Mothers stood anxiously in the fading light, calling to their errant children. The mountains, no longer a sunny playground, had begun to look cold and menacing. Pietro hoisted his skis once more on to shoulders sore from carrying them and trudged off up the village street. He breathed in the atmosphere of bustle underlaid by Alpine calm; he saw the lights coming on in the shops and chalets and thought of the hot bath and the excitement of the cocktail hour that awaited him.

On the way back to the hotel he stopped in a supermarket and bought some black olives and some cashew nuts. As he left the shop he noticed that the road was called the Chemin des Anes. Opposite his hotel he had already seen a cul-de-sac called the Impasse du Désir. What strange names these places had. ‘Dear Dad,' he would start a postcard, ‘I am having a lovely time. I am in Thwarted Desire, Asses
Way, France. Love to all. PS Would your army friend collect this place under L or H?'

Now, eight years later, when he banged his hands together in the cold and nodded silently to the skiers as they showed their passes, he thought of the extraordinary mixture they had then felt of real anguish and continuing hilarity. He remembered Harry's generosity and the way he had laughed things away.

The mountains guarded the valley. To the west was the Marmalada, a slope with a single swooping run served by three vertiginous cable cars. The mountains merged imperceptibly across the top of Italy into the Alps; so according to the maps, the place he stood was part of the same upthrust formation as the hills that underlay les Houches.

He was connected to his former schoolboy self by a geological feature as well as by memory. In his solitary distress, he reminded himself of such physical connections. He needed to believe that places were joined to each other; that they formed one continuous world, not distinct universes. Then he might be able to believe that he had not lost touch with his former life and with himself.

‘
I DO APPRECIATE
it,' said Pietro. It was hard to thank his father warmly enough for taking him on holiday without sounding surprised that he had agreed to it. He hadn't yet mastered the subtle falsities of tact. ‘It's marvellous,' he gushed, ‘I mean it.'

‘Of course you do,' said his father kindly.

The package to Ibiza left from Gatwick. When Pietro had gone to Italy with his mother they had flown from Heathrow, so this was the first time he had seen the thronging families of uncertain Britons preparing for abroad. He liked it much better than Heathrow. There were pretty girls of about his age, slightly over-made-up, peering out from beneath the wings of their harassed families. Their fathers gave orders in loud voices to show they weren't nervous and their mothers talked about the price of refreshments, the whereabouts of toilets and tickets, the closeness of the hand baggage. The girls tried by their looks to disown their parents as they would later be able to on the beach and in the discothèques; Pietro felt at an advantage having only a father to shrug off.

They were in an apartment in a new block about two hundred yards back from the beach. Pietro was sharing a room with his father, which had its drawbacks for both of them. The old man's idea of a good morning was to go to the beach early to get a favourable spot, erect a sunshade and read a book on etymology. Pietro found getting up before ten was a torture. He liked to go to the beach about eleven with a book recommended by Mr Maxwell at the US
Collegiate, sunbathe for an hour, swim vigorously, open the book and close his eyes. He looked enviously at the Spanish men in their twenties with their hairy chests. He noticed how the English girls fluttered towards them and didn't seem to mind that all the men could say was ‘Bobby Charlton, very good, Bobby Moore, very good, ha, ha.'

He was happy nevertheless. He liked not only the hot beach with its pointless games but also the town, which was responding to its northern visitors. The white buildings were cool and exotic, the people in the bars spoke little English and the beer was still
cerveza
. But small handcraft stalls had started to appear beneath awnings at the side of the sloping streets; local traders consulted young Europeans with tangled hair and six-string wooden guitars. They collaborated in the making of primitive jewellery with pliers, beads and strips of leather. Pietro liked the steamy shade of an outdoor restaurant at lunchtime when all the muscles were relaxed by heat and the willing waiter brought sangria and then pans full of paella which seemed indulgently sophisticated with its greasy mixture of shellfish and chicken. He smiled at his father, who nodded back over the melon.

One day Pietro got into a five-a-side game of football on the beach. A boy called Tony suggested that he come along to the discothèque that night. It was a little way out of town in a whitewashed building with stuccoed arches and red tile floors. It played mostly Spanish songs with the occasional British or American pop record. Whatever they played, it was loud enough and fast enough to pack the floor. With a pack of local cigarettes in his shirt pocket and a bottle of red wine under his belt, Pietro danced until the place closed, and still they weren't tired.

‘Dear Harry,' he wrote, ‘this place is great. I danced with a girl called Marsha who comes from Birmingham. Her favourite singer is Cliff Richard!! Got into a great football match against the locals. We lost 1–4. Guess who scored our goal? There are a lot of girls here. Hope you had a good time in France. I will be a changed man by next term. Tanned,
suave. You won't recognise me. Nor will Laura. Must dash. P.'

‘Dear Laura, this place is a bit crowded (package trips!) but I quite like it. Sun, sand and so on. Hope you're having fun in California. So much discoing here I'm exhausted! See you in September. Love, Pietro.'

After dinner that night Pietro and his father walked back up the hill to the block they were staying in. It had been decided that visits to the discothèque should not be a nightly event.

Pietro undressed in the hot bedroom while his father cleaned his teeth in the slit of a bathroom at the side. The room was too small for two people and their belongings. Pietro sat on the bed, waiting for his turn in the bathroom. When he came back he found his father in bed reading a book. He climbed into his own bed, pulled up the sheet and turned off his light. He wished his father would do the same. He found their physical proximity almost unbearable. His father continued to read, the sound of regularly turning pages the only noise in the room. Outside there was a ragged sound of cicadas and dimly audible beyond that the intermittent thump of the discothèque. Another page turned. Pietro wondered what sort of earthquake or natural disaster it would take to make his father turn his light out. Please, he silently begged, just reach out your hand, just a small pressure of the fingers on the switch . . .

IN THE
SHERUT
,
a shared taxi, through the surprisingly dumb and threatening suburbs of Tel Aviv, usually characterised as international city, Hilton-sur-mer, and out into the Sharon Plain, invisible under darkness except for vague swellings, no hint of abandoned tank or other mementoes left to mark the millennial argument, regular as a heartbeat, over the dry soil.

The twinkling dining room of the Jerusalem hotel, full of visitors, tourists, Americans, Germans, a few British. Someone says a
kiddush
and Harry places a napkin on Pietro's head. They watch the soup growing cold on the table as other diners intone ‘Amen'. They eat the bland food and go up to their room. Although both are tired, they find it hard to sleep. Guests are advised to leave all valuables in the hotel safe.

In the morning Daoud, the Israeli guide, arrives at the hotel. He is a man in his late forties, thickset, balding, who wears an open-neck shirt, sandals and aviator shades. He has an air of world-weariness and a deep mocking laugh that rises from his chest. He carries a leather key-fob with a metal flap that he flicks back and forth in place of worry beads. As they walk towards the old city, Daoud says, ‘OK, you want a history lesson first?'

‘Sure.'

‘How many different peoples do you think have controlled Jerusalem?'

‘I don't know,' says Harry. ‘Four or five.'

‘I don't know either,' says Daoud. ‘I can give you maybe ten to think about before we start. Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Egyptians, Syrians, Romans, Idumeans – Herod was one of them – the Christians, the Byzantine empire, the Moslems, the Turks.'

They are at the start of the via Dolorosa, the Lions' Gate, or Stephen's Gate, as the Christians prefer.

‘And what about the Jews?' says Pietro.

‘I'd almost forgotten them,' Daoud says drily. ‘And of course the Jordanians.'

Along the stations of the Cross are lamps, beads, relics, Coca-Cola, crosses, camera films, hats, pardons.

‘Hey,' says Daoud, ‘I can fix you an egg from The Cock That Crowed.'

Beneath the Ecce Homo arch, past the second station of the Cross, Daoud explains that it was named after Pilate's scornful words of dismissal when the captive Christ was brought to him. Under the assault of souvenir sellers and the lit signs saying ‘Gifts', Pietro pictures the slow progress of the man beneath the heavy cross, his bare feet pressed where they now stand.

‘Then the archaeologists discovered the arch didn't even exist in Christ's time.' Daoud laughs as he leads them on.

Harry takes notes of the facts that Daoud gives them. Pietro tries to form pictures in his mind of what happened.

At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre they find that the place where the Christian God died is guarded by Moslem Arabs. At the top of a marble staircase a Greek priest yawns by the spot where the cross was raised. Cheap icons and lamps surround it; similar lighting, a sort of Middle-East kitsch, glows over the sepulchre where he lay. Pietro fights a feeling of distaste, which he guiltily ascribes to vestigial snobbery, Englishness, unacknowledged racial prejudice.

‘The place was discovered by Queen Helena in the year 326,' Daoud recites. ‘Three crosses of mysteriously preserved wood were in the crypt. She was guided by an angel.' He
flaps his keyfob. ‘Your English General Gordon didn't believe her. He couldn't stand the place. Do you know why?'

Pietro feels himself addressed. He shrugs.