Shroud Read Online Free Page B

the black boy who wore a torn singlet and had spat at us; even I was the I who was on my way to the airport, and from the airport to another, older world. Were we, any of us, anything more than the sum of our attributes, even to ourselves? Was I more than a moving complex of impulses, fears, random fancies? I spent the best part of what I suppose I must call my career trying to drum into those who would listen among the general mob of resistant sentimentalists surrounding me the simple lesson that there is no self: no ego, no precious individual spark breathed into each one of us by a bearded patriarch in the sky, who does not exist either. And yet . . . For all my insistence, and to my secret shame, I admit that even I cannot entirely rid myself of the conviction of an enduring core of selfhood amid the welter of the world, a kernel immune to any gale that might pluck the leaves from the almond tree and make the sustaining branches swing and shake.
    Here is the airport, in the morning’s splintered glare, the flustered travellers lugging their bags, the taxi cabs like milling hounds nosing at each other’s rear parts, the black man in the peaked cap grinning and saying, “
Good
morning, sir!” with enormous, false, emphatic cheerfulness. I paid the Russian his fare— the brute smiled!—and took my suitcase and turned on the swivel of my stick and went forward with my boatman’s gait to meet a shadowy otherself in the smoked-glass doors of the departure hall that at the last moment, just as it seemed I and my reflection must meet in mutual annihilation, suddenly bethought themselves and opened before me with a hot gasp.
    Fly! Fly!
    She placed the two frail scraps of newspaper on the little lamp-lit table by the bed and sat back on her heels and studied them for a long moment, her hands laid flat on the table edge and her chin resting on her hands, now the news report of his long-ago death, now the side-by-side photographs of him and of the other one, all faded by time. Each breath she breathed clouded briefly the glass top of the table and stirred the fragments of sepia-coloured paper. They were brittle and light as a butterfly’s wings. She felt a thrill of guilt; she had clipped them out with a nail scissors, hunched over the newspaper file, expecting the librarian to see what she was doing and come and upbraid her in guttural outrage and in a language not one word of which she would understand. She wondered again at the misprint in the caption to the photograph—
Axel
Vanden
—the inexplicable appropriateness of it. How young he looked, hardly more than a boy, very good-looking, but with such an alarmed expression; it was probably just that the camera flash had startled him, though she could not help seeing fright and foreboding in those eyes. The other one, beside him, wore a grin, insolent and yet self-mocking. She picked up delicately in her fingertips the two rectangles of rice paper, which she had trimmed to an exact fit, and laid one each over the two cuttings, first the report of his death, then the photographs. The fountain pen she had bought was of an old-fashioned design, plump in the middle and tapered at the end; it had cost an alarming amount of money. Inside, there had been not the rubber bulb she had expected—the fake-antique effect was confined to the exterior—only a rigid plastic ink cartridge. It was better this way: a bulb she would have had to remove, for fear of it leaking, or bursting, but she could leave the cartridge in, it would be safe, and small enough to give ample space for her purpose inside the hollow of the barrel. This way too the pen would work, and that was good; verisimilitude is in the details, that was a lesson she had learned at the knee of a master. Now she moved the two pieces of newsprint to the front edge of the table and carefully, not daring to breathe, rolled them tightly on to the spindle of the ink cartridge, first one, then the other, face down with the