The Vorrh

botched and graceless job at rendering her more human.
    ‘We will be your servants now,’ said Luluwa. ‘I and the remaining Kin will be teachers to the child.’
    Ghertrude was running out of emotions, or at least the connective tissue that made sense of them.
    ‘I did not mean to kill him,’ she said.
    Luluwa bobbed her head in understanding. ‘Life is not durable. There is no blame.’ She got to her feet, then looked again at Ghertrude. ‘You did not know that the camera tower is aligned over the well?’
    To emphasise the point, she walked over to Ghertrude and placed one hand on her abdomen and the other above her head, where a halo might float. She made a small rotating movement; Ghertrude could smell the hum of Luluwa’s Bakelite. She realised that they were the same height. Luluwa had grown and stood looking at her, shoulder to shoulder and eye to eye.

EPILOGUE

The book was a present
Best to throw it away, to the bottom
Of the sea where ingenious fish may read it
Or not.
John Ashbery ,
A Snowball in Hell
    Belgium, 1961
    The streets are livid with bright cars; they seem to run at the same speed as their horns. The sunburnt boulevard is engorged with primary colours.
    The American looks at his map once again. Brussels seems to be based on an irrational grid. Eventually, he locates the cul-de-sac, snatches up his briefcase and strides on, past clipped gardens that are manicured to retentive perfection.
    As he walks on, the buildings become older and more dishevelled. He arrives at the entrance of the public nursing home, enters and is met by the universal smell of old age, an indelicate ambience of urine and sour cooking; here in central Europe, it is tinged with perfume and garlic. He talks to the staff in a remote French from his high school. Most of them are peasants, or foreigners with accents weirder than his. He claims good, proper French, taught to him and his classmates by a tutor from Montreal.
    A Moroccan woman in a stained, threadbare uniform of blue and white takes him through the old house, which has been embalmed in magnolia and disinfectant. They climb two tasteless flights of stairs. The American is nervous and keeps pushing his spectacles back onto the bridge of his nose. He had imagined this meeting for months, but had only arranged it by letter in the last few weeks; now, it is becoming real. Suddenly, his guide stops in front of him, and he finds himself in a large room full of seated women.
    ‘Madame Dufrene, your visitor is here.’
    All the old women look around. He panics: he has no idea what she looks like. Then a hand waves from a seat by the window.
    The once grand room has crumbled into institutional decay. He carefully crosses it, avoiding the damp patches and dropped objects that redesign an exhausted carpet. She is frailer than he expected, double-wrapped in a heavy shawl as the sun floods the streets outside.
    ‘Madame Dufrene, good morning! Please allow me to introduce myself,’ he begins.
    Charlotte listens and smiles kindly at the incorrect precision of his French. He pretends to make an effort to engage in polite conversation, but soon tires of the charade and pounces on his only interest. For the next hour, he asks endless questions about the Frenchman. Most of what he says is incomprehensible to her. She grows weary of the strain it takes to understand him, becoming more and more uncertain about what it is that he actually wants.
    ‘May we talk a little about the last days in Palermo?’
    She is aware that he does not see her, does not look in her eyes. He is so appalled by her fall from grace that he cannot bear to acknowledge her tired gaze. He buries himself in the questions and pushes on relentlessly.
    ‘Is it true that he could not sleep in his bed, that he had a fear of falling from it? Is that why he was on the floor next to your door when they found him?’
    She thinks of the genius of the man and knows it is not what this large, lumpy American wants. For her, his brilliance was not in his books or his words, but in the moments when he became a unique, infused, individual human being, doing what he loved most. She thought of him sitting at the piano, playing, improvising voices. He could mimic everything from the trams squealing outside to exotic animals, from opera divas to common street singers. It made them both laugh, in that time when he still could.
    ‘Do you have any pictures of your time together?’
    She expected this and pulls a large,