Journey by Moonlight

“ … My God, what is the whole civilisation coming to if they have forgotten what even the modern Negroes know: summon up the dead.”

This was how Millicent found him.

“Have you a fever?” she asked, and put her large lovely hand on his brow. At her touch, Mihály turned slightly towards her.

“Come for a walk, Mike. It’s such a beautiful evening. And everyone’s out in the streets, and they’ve all got children with such marvellous names, like Emerita and Assunta. Such a tiny little girl and she’s called Annunziata.”

With the greatest difficulty he struggled to his feet and went out. He walked heavily and uncertainly. It was as if he was seeing everything through a veil, and listening to the sounds of the Italian evening through ears filled with wax. His feet were heavy as lead. “When have I felt this way before?” he wondered.

They went down to the Campo, and he stared at the, Torre del Mangia the huge tower of the city hall that rose over a hundred metres, like a needle piercing the evening sky. His gaze slowly followed the tower upwards to its dizzy height. And the tower itself seemed to go on and on, soaring into the reverberating dark-blue sky.

Then it happened. The ground opened up around a deep well, and again he stood before the whirlpool. It must have lasted only a moment, then vanished. Everything was back in its place. The Torre del Mangia was again merely an extremely tall tower. Millicent had noticed nothing.

But that evening, when their sated bodies finally turned away from each other, and he was alone in that profound solitude that a man feels after he has embraced a woman with whom he has nothing in common, the whirlpool opened again (or was he just remembering it?) and this time it remained. He knew he had only to stretch out his hand to feel the presence of the other person, the comforting reality of the friendly body. But he could not bring himself to reach out, and he lay in solitary distress, by choice, for endless hours.

The next morning his head ached and his eyes were horribly red from sleeplessness.

“I’m ill, Millicent,” he told her. “The problem has come back, the one that kept me in bed in Foligno.”

“What sort of illness is it?” she asked suspiciously.

“I can’t exactly say. Some sort of sporadic cataleptic apodictitis,” he declared nonsensically.

“I see.”

“I must get back to Foligno, to the good Doctor Ellesley. Perhaps he can do something. At least I know him. What will you do, Millicent?”

“Well naturally I’ll go with you, if you’re sick. I won’t just leave you on your own. In any case I’ve seen all the Siena Primitives.”

He kissed her hand with emotion. They reached Foligno late that afternoon.

They took separate rooms, at his suggestion. “On the whole, it’s better that Ellesley shouldn’t know,” he explained.

Ellesley called on Mihály towards evening. He listened thoughtfully to his complaints, and made humming noises over the whirlpool sensation.

“It’s a kind of agoraphobia. For the time being, simply rest. Then we’ll see.”

He spent several days in bed. The whirlpool did not recur, but he had no desire to get up. He felt that if he did it would return. He slept as much as possible. He took every tranquilliser and mild sedative Ellesley brought him. If he slept, he might manage to dream of Tamás and Éva.

“I know what’s wrong with me,” he told the doctor. “Acute nostalgia. I want to be young again. Is there a cure for that?”

“Hmmm,” said Ellesley. “Certainly, but not one I can tell you about. Think of Faust. Don’t hanker after youth. God gave you manhood and old age too.”

Millicent visited him regularly and dutifully, though she seemed rather bored. She would call in on Ellesley towards evening, and they would also leave together after the visit.

“Tell me honestly,” the doctor asked one day, in her absence, as he sat on Mihály’s bed. “Tell me honestly, is there some dead person who is very dear to you?”

“Of course.”

“Do you think about them nowadays?”

“I do.”

From that point onwards his methods became less medically orthodox. On one occasion he brought a Bible with him, on another a garland of roses, then a Virgin Mary from Lourdes. Once Mihály became aware as he was talking with Millicent that Ellesley was drawing crosses on his door. And one fine day he produced a string of garlic.

“Tie this round your neck when you go to sleep. The smell of garlic is very good for the nerves.”

Mihály burst out laughing.

“Doctor, even I have read Dracula. I know what garlic is supposed to do: keep the vampire at bay, who sucks human blood in the night.”

“That’s right. I’m glad you understand. Because there’s no point in your insisting that the dead don’t exist in some form or other. They are what is making you ill. They visit you and suck your life out. Medical science can’t help you with that.”

“Then take your garlic back home. My dead can’t be kept away by that sort of thing. They’re inside me.”