In the Shape of a Boar by Lawrence Norfolk

Author:Lawrence Norfolk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic

The last book on the shelf was different. Taller than the others, and bound in thin green cardboard, it resembled a school exercise book and leaned at an angle against the Romanian edition of Es gibt so eben. If he were ever to gather another volume of work, and if it were ever to be published, then this flimsy production would be shunted along the shelf again. It would always be the last of his books. But did it signal the end of one flight or the beginning of another? He had watched Ruth disappear up the hill. He had entered the shed.

The packages were there as promised. They had contained rye bread, onions, coarse sausage meat and a letter from Jakob, written in pencil on pages torn from an invoice book. He read with difficulty, Solomon, Your ‘Rilke’ won't help you now, or your ‘Goethe’, or your poems . . .

After that, Jakob's scrawl appeared to collapse. It was hard to distinguish underlinings from crossings-out and over the following three pages he could make out only odd words and phrases. Four times ‘The Truth’ was spelt out in carefully formed letters but the words surrounding it were each time illegible. The last page was covered in scribbling which bore no resemblance to writing at all. The letter had been signed with a character which might have been a ‘J’, or an approving tick.

So his flight had begun. That first journey's end and his first exhaustion were then still almost a year away. Jakob would be waiting there. In the last days, deep in the Pindus, he had had the impression that the mountains were moving, but very slightly, bending in towards him as if taking strange bows. He remembered a dulled sense of alarm which had accompanied this perception. His movement no longer contained any thought of ‘towards’, nor had it ever, he supposed. There was an unforeseeable place where the interminable distance would give out. Click. There. And there was another where he would be unable to continue.

The last book described one of these. He still did not know which.

He remembered becoming aware that the landscape had grown dry, with slopes of rattling scree and grey mosses. He would scrape them out and chew them with handfuls of snow, unable to taste their bitterness. His nose bled and the blood dried, clogging his nostrils. His throat burned from the coldness of the air. He bound his shoes with strips of cloth torn from his shirt.

Feet, thought Sol, pulling off a sock and looking down. A brusque American doctor in Venice had taken one look and told him that he would limp for the rest of his life. Later, here in Paris, he had been lectured by a stem-faced woman surgeon who had waved his X-rays at him and indicated badly-healed fractures, the floating fragments of cartilage, flicking her painted fingernails against the brittle plastic of the transparencies. ‘Your feet are your own, Monsieur. Now their aches are yours too.

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