Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [40]
The Kaffee itself was supposed to be reminiscent of the barocco ice city that the wintering crew of the Tegethoff had built out of boredom on the floe that had imprisoned them. But the result was nothing if not slightly pretentious. The walls and ceiling seemed to be made out of whipped cream, the furniture to be glazed with dark chocolate. The room was decorated, on the rare moulded panels that were not hung with engravings of the Hansa or the Payer-Weyprecht expedition, with extracts of the famous Nordlicht poetic cycle by Theodor Daübler, most of them about Venice. Gabriel’s command of German was rather shaky, and all he knew was this: It had been at a masked ball in Venice that the adolescent Daübler had experienced his revelation, his “aurora of the soul.” For him, the Northern Lights were the proof that the Earth “longed to be a shining star again,” and would one day become “the spark of freedom in the universe.” The Seven Sleepers may have thought about this when—well, according to the local pronunciation—they put the ice back in Venice and Venice back on the ice. Or maybe they were pillortoq, simply stark raving mad.
Brentford was sitting on a curved plush sofa just against the window, basking in a slanting sunray in front of a light breakfast of coffee and croissants, a mooring post of sanity to Gabriel’s loose gondola. It was a strange place and time to see him, but then it was also a strange place and time for Gabriel to be there. His own excuse, however, was this: on “sick leave” from Doges College, he had spent the night, as he had every night since he had met her five days earlier, roaming through the city with Stella, pausing in their ramblings only for strong drinks and endless kisses, and he was now heading home to sleep through the few hours of remaining daylight. To speak frankly, it showed a bit. Brentford was not long in noticing, as he shook his friend’s hand, that he had sagging, ashen cheeks and haloes around his eyes that looked like pools of oil. But what he could not perceive was that Gabriel used this exhaustion to cover up his anxiety about a meeting whose outcome he feared for both their sakes.
“What are you doing here?” asked Gabriel, falling into more than sitting on the sofa in front of Brentford, and huffing a breath that carried the bitter whiff of absinthe.
“I quarrelled with Sybil,” admitted Brentford, with a wry smile to show it was nothing too worrying. “About the guest list. I discovered she had added Surville at the last moment. I certainly do not want to see him.”
It took Gabriel a migrainous while to understand the fuss was about Brentford’s former sweetheart.
“Seraphine’s husband?”
“Ex-husband, yes. But nevertheless. And the spokesman of the Council. Go figure.”
“Why would Sybil invite him?”
“I do not know, really. Sybil has an address book the size of Moby Dick. I think he is a kind of sponsor to the Cub-Clubbers, or something.”
Gabriel refrained from wincing at the name of the band, which was everything he detested. Though he had to admit that Sybil was, well, attractive.
“It infuriated me all the more,” continued Brentford, after Gabriel had ordered a double coffee with the vague, but visible, hope that he would not have to pay for it himself, “because I have an appointment with the Council this afternoon. I’ll spare you the details. Having to cope with them twice a day is beyond my patience, these days.”
Gabriel started at the mention of the appointment. He hoped that it had nothing to do with the book Brentford was, not without reason, suspected of having written. But he also realized that if they were seen together now, on display in the window, it would only mean to them that Gabriel was warning Brentford of the danger, which would point to his friend as the culprit and