Shroud Read Online Free Page B

wind, and the smog that even the dawn rains cannot fully dispel. The driver did not open the taxi door for me, and I had difficulty getting into the low-slung vehicle, first throwing in my walking stick and then turning and folding my torso in half and shoving myself backwards through the door on to the seat and grasping my useless leg in both hands and hauling it in after me. Hard to be graceful when you are half a cripple. Throughout my laboured manoeuvrings, the Russian sat in front like a stone man, facing impassively forward, hairy-eared, his thick shoulders stooped. Now he shifted a lever somewhere – I never did learn to drive that country's vast and terrifying motor cars – and trod on the accelerator and the engine roared and the taxi surged away from the kerb like a stuck animal. Turning, I spied one of my neighbours standing out on his porch in string vest and shorts, watching me go, with what seemed a look of confirmed suspicion, as if he were only waiting for the taxi to turn the corner before running to the telephone and calling the authorities to inform them that the suspect bird next door had flown the coop. He is one of those indigenous, lean, tall types with greying curls and a bandit's drooping moustache. In the two decades and more that he lived beside us I exchanged no more than a handful of guardedly polite greetings with him, although once he came to the house to complain about a stray dog that Magda had taken in; I got rid of the dog, naturally. Now for the first time it occurred to me to wonder if the fellow might be a Hebrew. I thought it likely – those springy curls, that nose. Half the population of Arcady and its environs seemed to be of the Chosen, though not the kind that I was once used to; these Luftmenschen were altogether too sure of themselves, too pushy and uncomplaining.
    We came down to the shore and turned in the direction of the bridge. I had been right, there was still mist on the bay, though the sun was steadily strengthening. The highway was congested with morning traffic, six lanes of it hurtling forward like a herd of maddened animals. I pressed my hands over my face. I was tired; my mind was tired; it is wearing out, like the rest of me, though not as quickly. And yet it cannot stop working, even for an instant, even when I am asleep; I can never quite come to terms with this appalling fact. Repeatedly now, especially in the night, I return to the awful possibility that the mind might survive the body's death. They say that Danton's severed head was heard to heap curses on Robespierre. To be trapped like that, even for a minute, to feel the system shutting down, to see the light finally failing – ah! The taxi banged over a ramp in the road and began the long scramble up the slope of the bridge, waddling along at a strained sixty, the tyres whooping and the engine rattling like a faulty air-conditioner. I leaned my head back on the greasy plastic of the seat and closed my eyes again. In the dark the old questions teemed. What do I know? Less now than yesterday. Time and age have brought not wisdom, as they are supposed to do, but confusion, and a broadening incomprehension, each year laying down another ring of nescience. What do I know? When I opened my eyes we had gained the first crest of the bridge, and the city was there before us, walking sedately up and down its line of low hills, the bristling buildings flat and featureless as in a stage backdrop at this still-early hour. A tiny aeroplane was poised on a high bank of petrol-blue smog. In all the time I lived there I was never once on the other bridge, the famous rust red one; I do not know for sure where it leads from or goes to. What do I care for mere topography? The topography of the mind, now, that is a different matter… The topography of the mind – do I really say such things, out loud, for people to hear?
    A battered white car driven by a frail black youth veered suddenly into the lane in front of us, and