The Search (14 page)

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.

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.’

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.’