palms.
‘What?’
‘It’s a Zippo. The lighter of choice for the American military. Since last year, Zippo have been producing and distributing them free to servicemen. We’ve all got them. But the shape …’ he weighed the lighter in his palm, the back of his hand moving gently up and down on the lever of his wrist, ‘… is actually modelled on an Austrian lighter. Can’t you tell? The heft of it, the dumb solidity. It’s so Teutonic. So Germanic. And yet …’ he patted his breast pocket ‘… we the Nazi-fighters keep them next to our very hearts.’
Violet felt at a loss to know how to react to this speech. She had never really heard anyone else talk like this – certainly not a soldier, certainly not a man trying to chat her up – and it seemed to leave her with nowhere to go. She understood his point, but could think of nothing to say in addition.
‘They give off a good strong flame though, don’t they?’ was what she said in the end, and instantly felt the banality of it. In answer, he flipped the lid of the lighter again, stroking the wheel twice before the blue flame rose once more from the wick. He moved it closer to her face: she could feel the warmth and smell the butane, its chemical scent dizzying her a little. Through the blue she could see his eyes, what seemed sadness in them now overridden by curiosity. There was an expression Gwen used about men – she used it a lot, in order to make their attention known – saying they were undressing her with their eyes; Violet felt something of this now – not that he was undressing her, because his eyes did not move from her face – but that sense of feeling a man’s eyes on your body, as if his sight were touch. It made her cheeks prickle. She felt, obscurely and for the first time, that when men are examining a woman’s face, their method of weighing her beauty is to search for flaws.
‘What’s your name?’ she said, because she wanted to know, but also because she wanted to be released from his gaze. He smiled, a wider grin than she expected, bringing his nose down over his mouth: he looked suddenly medieval, cartoonish.
‘I shall answer that in what I believe is the customary manner.’ He spoke in an exaggerated cut-glass English accent, waving his left hand in a florid eighteenth-century style. Before Violet had time to react, he stood on tiptoe, lifting the still aflame lighter above his head. It was only then that she realized he was quite a tall man: he had been slouching against the post, and bending down in order to have the conversation with her. He seemed to Violet almost to uncoil.
Her eyes went upwards, to the low ceiling of this section of the Rainbow Corner. Lifting the Zippo to the ceiling created a circle of light, revealing a messy sprawl of signatures, doodles and numbers burnt into the plaster, written by GIs keen to preserve something of themselves in this foreign country, before war or peace took them away. Dodds, 98205D she read, before the flame in the man’s hand began to move, forming a blackening line that slowly became the upright pillar of an ‘E’. Despite the general smokiness of the room, she could detect in her nostrils the acrid smell of burning plaster. A couple of other American soldiers, noticing this familiar custom being performed, clapped and cheered. The man – El someone, it seemed: was he Spanish? – seemed to be absorbed in his task. Most of the names on the ceiling were just scrawls, bearing the marks of having been written on tiptoe, in public and by drunken hands; he had the appearance, however, of deep concentration, as if he were Michelangelo on his back at the Sistine Chapel. The words were bold and clear, and he spent long enough on each letter to burn it thickly into the wood: it looked, by the end, more like an imprint, more like the International Shipbrokers company stamp that her fist had to plonk down over and over again on the envelopes at work, than letters inscribed by hand – by flame. When he had finished, he spent a little while looking up at his name, admiring his handiwork. Violet noticed that he didn’t have a very protruding Adam’s apple – there was no triangular skin stretch in the gullet pressing against his extended neck – which made her glad, as her previous boyfriend had done, and the feel of it pressing against her throat when they were kissing had always put her off.
‘Eli Gold …’ she said, intoning the words, brushing her blonde hair out of her eyes as she tilted her head back to read.
‘E-li,’ he said. He pronounced it ‘lie’. She had said ‘Ely’, like the town.
‘That’s a funny name.’
‘Is it? Eli, Eli, lema sabachtani.’
‘Beg pardon?’
‘It means God. Literally …’ And here he raised the lighter to the ceiling again, although this time unlit, ‘… Elia, the Highest.’
‘In what language?’
Eli’s face creased, his smile revealing his face to be lined for his age.
Somehow, it did not make him look old.
‘Hebrew, of course. Elia’s own language.’
‘Hebrew?’
‘I’m Jewish. On my father’s side.’
‘Oh,’ said Violet, who – having occasionally made the journey from her parents’ house in Walthamstow to Spitalfields for meat and vegetables – had seen some Jews, but only the ones in the big black hats with the curly sideburns. ‘I thought you were an American.’
Eli looked at her, his composure for the first time dented. The lines around his eyes all went upwards, as he stared at Violet’s pretty, open, easy face, a face standing firmly behind the straightforwardness, the frank neutrality, of her statement. Then he laughed, loud, long peals that seemed to drown out even the brass section of the Bill Ambrose band. Violet felt frightened, but unfathomably drawn to the fear. She looked up at his name, still smoking on the ceiling. A swell hit her soul and, as can happen in moments of epiphany, she thought she saw this moment as it would be described years from now, saying to friends, perhaps to children, that it was as if he had been burning the words Eli Gold into her heart. And she did say that, to friends if not to children, and soon came to believe that such was indeed the true quality of her experience. It was only later she realized that Eli had just been writing.
* * *
He is not certain he should be wearing black, in summer. It is not the heat – that is not bothering him, though he is used to the white chill of Utah – but thinks that it might, somehow, give him away. When, earlier, he had ventured into the hospital reception area, an orderly had looked at him suspiciously. This is paradoxical, as he is wearing it to fit in. Where he comes from, no one wears black: not even any of the younger, trendier Mormons, in their younger, trendier sects, the Bullaites, or Zions Order Inc., or The Restoration Church. But he is wearing it, because his third wife, Dovetta, told him that that was the first thing she noticed when she went to New York on her mission trip, On Fire for Christ: everyone wears black.
He wears a black jacket and a black T-shirt. Blue jeans, though. That feels self-conscious, as well, because he is fifty-five, perhaps too old for jeans. Although everyone wears jeans now, even old men; even old women. They hang off them, off their legs. This sense of himself as old, an old man in blue jeans, disturbs him. Not through vanity, even though he used to be a handsome man, and maybe still is, despite the stuck eye. It disturbs him because of the task ahead.
A lot of journalists and photographers are still milling about after the doctor’s statement. Some of them clearly think he is one of them. He has to be a little careful not to be seen in the back of shot when the TV cameras are around. He doesn’t want to be spotted by somebody, somewhere, on some Summit County TV, who might recognize him and question why on earth he is there, knowing that he could not be a well-wisher, or a mourner. Also, when the
