Mortal Happiness: Chapter Twenty-One

Tomaso Perotti knocked on the door of the Assistant Director’s office and stepped inside.

Marcus Gutenberg did not look up as the door closed but said, ‘Sit down, sit down, Tomaso. I know why you’re here.’

Perotti remained standing.

Gutenberg finished his paperwork and screwed the cap back onto his fountain pen before looking at Perotti and saying, ‘There has been a clash of some kind in north-west Georgia, I know, I just heard the news.’

Walking to Gutenberg’s office Perotti had decided to reveal as little as possible in this meeting, just enough to learn what news Gutenberg had that Perotti might have missed on the radio and discuss a leave of absence himself. Now, speaking about it for the first time, he said, ‘Before she left, Enna was concerned about an escalation of the border conflict, that it might affect her visit to her family. I said there was no reason to think there’d be a problem.’ Perotti moved abruptly, pacing the length of the room. ‘But she was right and I didn’t believe her.’ He hadn’t intended to say any of this but it was coming out anyway. ‘She wanted to warn people and I dissuaded her.’

‘Does this have anything directly to do with her family – with why she left so suddenly?’

Perotti shook his head to emphasise the lie. ‘No, of course not. But if her family live in the zone where the conflict is reported to be, then she is in danger.’

‘She must have had information. No one else seems to have known about this. Where did her inside knowledge come from?’

Perotti gave an open-handed shrug.

Gutenberg leant back in his chair. ‘I wish you would sit down.’

Perotti perched on the edge of a seat and gave his boss a careful version of the truth.

‘I should have listened more carefully to what she told me about where she was going. I just thought she’d be back in a few days, that I didn’t need to know. I didn’t really believe what she said about the conflict. I thought she was being over anxious for her family. I should have believed her.’

‘What difference would that have made?’

Seeing Perotti hesitate, Gutenberg said, ‘Did she ask you to go with her?’ When Perotti said nothing, he continued, ‘Well, I’m glad one of you had the sense to know where your duty lies.’

Perotti felt his heart hesitate then speed up. He gripped the edge of the seat and sat down.

Oblivious to the effect of his words, Gutenberg continued, ‘How could you possibly have gone with her? How could this camp run without two of its senior staff?’ He nodded to emphasise his point. ‘Losing one is very serious, Tomaso.’

Perotti’s hands twitched with the urge to smash something important to Gutenberg, like his face. Instead he said, ‘Don’t over-dramatise Marcus. She’s not lost, she’s on compassionate leave due to family ill-health.’

‘So you say. It just happens to be immediately before one of the worst incidents in the region which, according to you, Enna knew about in advance.’

Perotti stood up and headed towards the door.

‘Listen to me,’ Gutenberg’s chair dropped with a thud as he leant forward across his desk, hands clasped before him. ‘You either went with her or you physically prevented her from leaving. Neither option sounds satisfactory, does it? Your wife is a woman of considerable personal – uh, authority. I’m certain that whatever difficulties she finds herself in she’ll be more than equipped to deal with. In the meantime, I suggest you don’t blame yourself. Given Doctor Serpukhova’s absence I need your full focus on this camp. There can be no leave for anyone, and I mean anyone, until she returns. We can’t spare any more staff.’ He shook his head. ‘Everyone is affected by your wife’s actions.’

Looking at Gutenberg’s pale, smug face, Perotti realised that having no wife of his own the Assistant Director had imagined Perotti would be angry with Enna, wash his hands of her behaviour and knuckle down to compensate for her absence, which was probably what Gutenberg himself would have done. ‘I’m owed more than two month’s leave Marcus, I want to take it, starting today.’

‘Perhaps I didn’t make myself plain Tomaso. Doctor Serpukhova is not some waitress to disappear when the mood takes her.’ He held up a hand for silence. ‘I understand that you are concerned for her. I’m afraid she should have thought about your feelings before deciding to leave us.’

Perotti gripped the edge of Gutenberg’s desk with both hands and leant forward until his face was very close to the director’s own. ‘Do you realise what a prig you sound, Marcus? How self-satisfied? You never liked Enna because she challenges you …’

Gutenberg backed away from Perotti and went to a cupboard. ‘Drink?’ He poured himself a Scotch and offered one to Perotti, who refused.

‘I’ll tell you what Tomaso. Let’s do each other a favour shall we? That conference, the one next week - why don’t you go instead of me? It will be a change and if Enna isn’t back by then, well, it will take your mind off things. What do you say?’

Perotti looked at Gutenberg with amazement. ‘You’ve just spent twenty minutes telling me that I’m indispensable here and now you want to send me to some pointless chatter meeting?’

‘I thought I was offering you the rest of your career.’ Gutenberg finished the last of the whiskey and draped his glass carefully with a white cloth before looking at Perotti over the green rims of his spectacles. ‘I’ll put your name down for the conference then.’

Perotti walked towards the door.

‘She’s a resourceful woman, maybe more resourceful than you know. Don’t throw away twenty years Tomaso.’

Perotti walked home heart still pounding in his chest. It occurred to him that four of his uncles had suffered heart attacks under similar conditions. He breathed deeply until his pulse slowed and the blood moved more quietly around his body. Four days since she’d left and her absence was an insistent physical pain.

Last night he’d sat in a chair by the open window and argued with her, over and over. Why did you do it? Why, why? I want to know how you could leave me when I could never leave you. Now the news was here and his anger was almost all with himself. How could he not have believed her? Where was she now? What was happening to her? He could scarcely bring himself to consider what she told him of her dream – or whatever it was. Logic suggested that if what she saw was true, it must be because she would be present to see it and that thought, that thought, was too much to bear.

And what the fuck had Gutenberg meant about Enna being ‘resourceful’? He was well aware that his wife was a woman he might never entirely know; that there were secret places in which they would never meet. He recognised, if only in outline, the other Enna, the part of her she chose mostly to ignore. A week ago it would never occurred to him that there might be any struggle, any contradiction between Enna the scientist and the other Enna he barely knew. With him, that other woman, the one she sometimes referred to stiffly as her ‘forest self’, had always seemed quiescent, soothed. He’d never wondered how that self would be without him around.

He’d known or had guessed most of this before inviting her to drive out of Rome with him in the old Maserati. Things had been hard in the Congo and he’d believed that Italy would soothe her; soothe both of them. Later he’d wondered if it was her delight in roads that made him propose; but that afternoon on the Via Appia he had looked and considered for a long time before speaking of marriage. They’d made love slowly in the late sun and as he entered her she had held his face in her hands and looked directly into his eyes until he’d felt like he was falling, drawn deeper into her and held by her gaze and by the long legs wrapping his hips. ‘Here is my home,’ she had said placing a hand over his thumping heart, ‘and here,’ clutching him inside her body.

After, they had lain in the tall yellow grass against the warm stones of an ancient tomb and listened to crickets. Enna drew pine-needles and slivers of bark from the hairs of his groin as he had stroked the full curve of her hip over and over and thought how foreign she felt, how very different to the other women he had known: her skin richer, her golden eyes more expressive, her hair more lustrous. She had felt like an exotic fruit that day, a ripe fruit, fallen by accident into his undeserving hands. And in a single moment he had recognised beneath the buttery surface of her flesh, a stoniness he would not be allowed to explore and could never hope to match.

Now, alone and still overwhelmed by her, by his longing for her voice, her mouth, Perotti recalled leaning against the tomb to brush off his clothing. He had silently translated the early Christian graffiti scratched into the worn surface: Save me o Lord, from the Princes of this world who would persecute and destroy me. You alone hear my cry o Lord – help and save me. The sun had already dropped behind the pines and was casting low bars of light across a ploughed field as they’d walked back to the car. They had held hands.

Entering the house he went directly to the bedroom and knelt at her side of the bed, grasping the pillow, wanting evidence of her. He found a long, shining hair, wound it between his index fingers and lifted it to his face, dragging it across closed lids down to his mouth, over his lips and tongue. Resting his head on the sheet he ground the heels of his hands into his eyes and searched the sparkling darkness for answers he knew weren’t there.