Mefisto by John Banville Page B

slept on.
    A doctor appeared, a stocky young man with restless eyes and a lank lock of fawn hair lolling on his brow. He had been at his tea, there were crumbs on the lapels of his white coat, and his breath smelled warmly of cake.
    – Windscreen, he said, smacking a fist into a palm. Like that. They were lucky. Big black dog, he says, ran right under the wheel.
    Aunt Philomena turned aside with a strangled sob, crushing a wadded handkerchief to her mouth. The doctor looked at his shoes and frowned. In a bed in the opposite aisle a large elderly man in striped pyjamas sat and watched us intently out of an inflamed, avid eye.
    – Well, the doctor said briskly, you’ll want to … ?
    Aunt Philomena, still chewing her hankie, shook her head violently, giving another muffled sob.
    I followed the doctor out of the ward, down the stairs past the simpering statue and the panoramic window. The rumble of tea-urns and the clatter of crockery came up through the stairwell. The doctor went heavily ahead of me, his knees working outwards like elbows and his white coat billowing. He told me his name, but I forgot that one also. A hunchbacked porter in a green hospital coat walked past the foot of the stairs. The doctor called out to him and he stopped and looked up at us warily, one hand resting lightly in his coat pocket, as if it were holding a gun. He had coarse oiled black hair, and thick glasses with heavy rims that seemed a part of him, like a bony armature growing out of his skull.
    – Whassa? he said.
    The doctor spoke to him quietly, and he nodded and led us away down a corridor, taking from his pocket an enormous bunch of keys on a metal ring. I could not take my eyes off his hump. We entered a curving, dull-green passageway with little round windows like portholes set high up in the wall, and came to a grey metal door, where we stopped and waited while the porter sorted through his keys. The doctor hitched back his coat and put his hands in the pockets of his trousers.
    – Sunday, he said, with an apologetic shrug. They lock up everything.
    The door swung open on a small, high room lit by a dangling bulb. A large press with steel doors was set into the wall. The porter threw it open, revealing three chilled corpses neatly stacked on sliding shelves. I looked at the tops of their heads, their bleached ears wreathed in wisps of frosty smoke. The porter leaned down and read the name-tags on the shelves, screwing up his eyes behind their thick lenses and baring his side teeth.
    – No, he said, not there.
    He shut the press and slouched into a farther room, beckoning us to follow. There was a sink in the corner, and a desk with a stool, and a tiny window through which there streamed an incongruous thick gold shaft of sunlight. Our shoes squealed on the rubber floor. A trolley. A shrouded form. The doctor belched softly into his fist.
    – There’s a formality, I’m afraid, he said, in a confidential tone. Identification. We have to have it, in a case like this. You just say it is her, and that’s it. Right?
    The porter folded back the sheet.
    – Now, he said, giving a professional little sniff.
    The woman on the bier did look somewhat like my mother. She was older, she had a narrow forehead, and her hair was different too, but there was a resemblance, all the same, and for a moment I did not know what to think. Could it be that this really was my mother, and they had arranged her face all wrong somehow? Was that why they needed me to identify her, so they could make the necessary readjustments? I shut my eyes. No, no, impossible. Then there was the problem of what to say. Embarrassment opened its jaws and breathed its hot breath in my face. I felt a fool, as if in some way it were all my fault. The moment stretched, thinner and thinner. The doctor was beginning to fidget. I stepped back a pace. I had to cough to get my voice to work. No, I said, no, I did not think, there must be some, this was not … The doctor