The Lock-Up

THE LOCK-UP JOHNBANVILLE v alla mia cara amica Beatrice Monti della Corte vi They flee from me that sometime did me seek With naked foot, stalking in my chamber. Sir Thomas Wyatt Contents Title Page Dedication Epigraph ALTO ADIGE: after the war Chapter 1 DUBLIN: twelve years later Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 BAVARIA: the last of days Chapter 12 DUBLIN: there and then Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Epilogue Author’s note About the Author By the Same Author Copyright ALTO ADIGE after the war 1 Brother Damian stood with a hand held up to shield his eyes against the sun and watched the man, still far off, making his slow way up the steep track towards the monastery. It was April, but ragged patches of snow still clung on in the lee of drystone walls and in the blue-shadowed hollows under overhanging rocks. Below, the village nestled in the valley floor. The grass down there seemed unnaturally green, after the ice and storms of a long winter. The village, with its timbered houses and steeply slanted roofs, its narrow streets, its clock tower and steeple, was as quaint and timeless as a picture on a postcard. Faint sounds of village life could be heard on the clear, chill air: the chatter of housewives, the voices of children at play, the ringing notes of a blacksmith’s hammer. From the far side of the valley came the distant dinning of cowbells, and the soft, querulous bleating of unseen sheep. All round the skyline stood the soaring Alpine peaks, glassy and glittering, silver-blue, indifferent. Although he had been here for more than twenty years, at the monastery of Sankt-Fiacre, Brother Damian still found it hard sometimes to believe in the reality of this vast ring of mountains. In spring sunlight, as now, they looked flat and semi-transparent, as if they had been painted onto the sky in washes of water colour. Strange, he thought, not for the first time, that a place that had seen so much history, that had watched so many armies surging across its rocky landscape, should look so much like a chocolate-box picture of itself. Everything in the valley spoke of old days, old ways. The men of the village dressed in braided jackets and knee breeches and carried alpenstocks, while the girls wore dirndl dresses and arranged their wheat-coloured or inky-black hair – here was where the blonde north met the dark-eyed south – in long, gleaming plaits that they shaped into flat coils and pinned against their ears like big spiral-shaped pastries. Often, encircled here in the high Dolomites, the friar found himself longing for the soft grey rain and heaving purple seas of the far west of Ireland, his birthplace, his lost land, the home he had forsaken when, as a young student, he decided to pledge his life to God. The man wending his way up the dusty path had to stop frequently and mop his brow with a blue bandana. Then he would stand a while to rest, looking back down at the village, or upwards to the snow-capped peaks. He wore a faded green loden jacket, twill trousers, stout boots and a battered black hat with a yellow feather in the band. His stick was a shepherd’s crook. A small canvas knapsack was strapped to his back. He also seemed too convincing to be true. He might be a figure out of one of the tales of the Grimm Brothers, or a lone wayfarer in a story by Stifter or E. T. A. Hoffmann. But Brother Damian knew who he was. The man was expected. He should have been here three days ago. The delay was worrying. Had he been stopped at the border? Had he been noted and identified, and tracked, perhaps, as he made his perilous way south and up to this high place? The man arrived now at the top of the track. They met under the arched stone entranceway to the courtyard, around the four sides of which the ancient monastery was built. It had originally been a stopping place for Crusaders on their way to the Italian ports to board ship for the Holy Land. The Franciscan Order had taken it over in the fourteenth century, under the benefice of one of the Avignon popes, and had occupied it ever since. It was a self-sufficient establishment, with its own herds of cattle and sheep and flocks of poultry, its piggery, its bakery and brewery, its dairy, its orchards and extensive vineyards. Brother Damian had been Minister Provincial here for a decade now. His duties lay heavy upon him. In his heart he felt he wasn’t fitted for a position of authority. However, God had willed it that he should be raised up, and who was he to object to or complain of the Creator’s agency? The man had a wedge-shaped face, tapering from a broad, unlined brow to a thin-lipped mouth and small, sharp chin. His eyes were remarkable, the irises a shade of pale, translucent grey and the lids as fine as folds of crêpe paper. They were never still. He kept darting quick glances this way and that, as if he felt himself surrounded on all sides by unseen foes. He looked exhausted, and his breathing was shallow and rapid, as if he had been running for a long time, running hard. Which, in a way, he had. ‘The air up here is so thin,’ he said, panting, and fixed his distressed gaze for a second on the heavy iron cross the friar wore on a chain around his neck. ‘I feel light-headed.’ ‘You’ll soon get used to it,’ Brother Damian said. They spoke in English. The man was fluent in the language, with hardly a trace of an accent. He had lived for some