Read Online Shroud by John Banville - Free Book Online Page B

leather belt that terrified me as it shuddered and slapped like a thing in agony. In the shed it was always a luminous dusk, and the men moved about like ghosts, with cloths tied over their mouths. Low down at one end of the machine the golden grain flowed through an open funnel into the sacks, while, high above, the stripped and broken straw was shucked out in ceaseless, wild and somehow comic eruptions. I stood beside my grandfather, who above the noise attempted to explain to me how the parts of the machine worked. What a sense of splendour and communion I felt, before this scene of labour and its rewards! And then at midday all work stopped and an extraordinary, ringing silence descended, and we all marched off together to the cavernous stone kitchen of the farm where my grandmother served up a meal of beer and bread and eggs and thick-sliced sausage. At rest as at work the men treated each other as if they were a band of brothers, slapping each other on the back, shouting at each other across the length of the room, laughing, swearing, calling out ribald insults. I wandered freely among these men who were exhausted yet elated, too. No one paid me any particular attention; it was as if I were one of them. Then, with the help of the beer, the first artless murmurings of a song would be heard, halting at first, seeming to go wrong and lose its way, only to break out at last in an exultant cacophony that caught me up in its sweep and made my chest constrict and my throat swell with emotion. In a pause in the singing I was made to take a drink of beer, and although I hated the sour taste, which reminded me of the pigsty, I smiled and smacked my lips and held out my cup for more, and was applauded, and then the singing welled up again, and from the far end of the long table my grandfather smiled at me . . . All this I remembered, even though it had never happened. Certainly, there was a threshing machine, but I only ever glimpsed it at work, from outside the shed, which I was forbidden to enter because of my supposed weak constitution; I was kept away from the workmen, too, for fear I might see and hear things unsuitable to a child of my tender years. It was all a dream I had worked up out of my desire to be there, in the threshing shed and the kitchen, in the midst of men, a fantasy born of my longing to belong. Now through time-dimmed eyes I peered from this high place out at the city, all burned-looking beyond the smoked glass of the walls, and it was as if I had come round from a swoon to find myself among a band of survivors huddled here above the site of a vast and ruinous conflagration.
    A touch on my arm made me turn. For a second I did not recognise Kristina Kovacs. It was not that she had aged very much, or changed greatly in appearance since I had seen her last, yet all the same something had happened to her. She looked not like herself but like a close relative, her own twin, perhaps, vaguer than the woman I had known, less sharply defined, faded, somehow, and somehow hollow-seeming. I could not think what to say to her, and instead leaned down quickly and kissed her on the cheek. Her skin was warm and dry, and seemed to vibrate tinily all over its surface, as if she were in the grip of a fever. She put a hand to the spot where I had kissed her and gave a familiar, dusky laugh—I am not the kissing kind—and leaned back from the shoulders to look up at me, holding her head to one side, her black eyes bright with fond malice and amusement. She exclaimed at how well I looked; she seemed genuinely surprised, as if she had come to a place in her life that allowed only of disimprovements. And yet she was no more than half my age. I wondered if she could recall with the same sweet, poignant clarity as I did that afternoon years before when she had come unannounced to my hotel room, in Budapest, or Bucharest, was it, or Belgrade? The place does not matter, only the moment. I remembered her salmon-coloured slip and the