We came to a standstill in a narrow iron tunnel, inside the steamer. With a judder, the carriage was secured.
‘I’d like to know . . .’ the Princess said, ‘what makes a ship float. They weigh such a lot: why don’t they sink? You’re an educated bloke!’
‘It’s er . . . the air trapped in the bulkheads . . . you see . . . the specific gravity of water . . . well, really it’s the displacement . . .’
‘Love,’ said the Princess, ‘when someone uses that many technical terms, something’s wrong. So you don’t really know. It’s a shame you’re so awfully ignorant, Peter. But then I suppose you can’t have everything.’
Up on deck we wandered the length of the ship, and from port to starboard. The engines were churning away very quietly. We pulled out of Warnemünde, and imperceptibly drew away from land. Past the end of the jetty we could see the coast.
There was Germany. You could just see a flat, wooded strip of coastline with houses and hotels, dwindling and receding, and the beach . . . Was that a very slight, faint, almost unnoticeable lurch? Let’s hope not. I looked at the Princess. She sensed immediately what I was getting at.
‘If you puked, laddie,’ she said, ‘that would really be a sooksay foo!’
‘A what?’
‘That’s French.’ She was getting very tetchy. ‘Now he doesn’t even understand French, when he’s spent five years in Paris, learning about Culture . . . Tell me, what did you actually do all that time? I can imagine! Running around with the little French tarts, eh! Such a rake! What are they like, then? Come on, you can tell Lydia. We’ll go up and down on deck, and if you feel sick, you can just lean over the railing, the way they do in books. Right!’
I told her that Frenchwomen were very sensible creatures, given to capriciousness, but always planning their caprices well in advance. Mostly they kept to one man apiece, a husband, or of course, a boyfriend – and perhaps a lover thrown in for the sake of respectability. And if they were unfaithful, they would be wildly cautious about it. But almost every other woman had a job. Though they didn’t have the vote, they ran the country, not on their backs, but with their common sense. They were calculating darlings, with sensible hearts which sometimes ran away with them, but always brought them back. I didn’t quite understand them.
‘They sound just like women,’ said Lydia.
The ferry wasn’t quite rolling – it was only threatening to. I was threatening something, too, but the Princess ordered me into the dining-room. There they all were, sitting and eating. I didn’t feel at all well when I saw that. They eat a lot of fatty foods in Denmark, and this was a Danish ferry. The assembled company were tucking into smoked eel and herring: herring fillets, marinaded herring, something they called sild, freshly caught herring and plain unvarnished herring. On dry land, each one more delicious than the last. To wash it all down, they were drinking that gorgeous schnaps for which all Scandinavians deserve to go to Heaven. The Princess deigned to eat. I watched, awestruck: she could hold her food.
‘Won’t you have anything?’ she asked between two herrings. I looked at the two herrings, the two herrings looked at me, and none of us said anything. I only revived once the ferry had docked. The Princess gently stroked my knee and said respectfully, ‘My little pirate!’ I felt thoroughly ashamed.
We chugged through Lolland, which is as flat as a pancake, and we flicked through our newspapers. Then we played the book-game: each of us in turn would read out a sentence from his or her book. The sentences fitted together quite beautifully. The Princess turned the pages, and I gazed at her hands . . . she had such dependable hands. For a while she stood in the corridor, staring out of the window. Then she went off, and I couldn’t see her any more. I reached for her bag, which retained the warmth of her hands. I stroked it. They ferried us across another stretch of sea, and then we chugged some more. At last, we reached Copenhagen.
‘If we take a room over the courtyard at the rear,’ I said in the hotel, ‘then we’ll get cooking smells, and the drunken Spanish composer will probably still be around from last time, composing ten hours a day on the piano. But if we take a room at the front, where the town hall clock strikes every quarter hour, we’ll be reminded of time passing.’
‘Couldn’t we take somewhere in the middle . . .’
So we took a room overlooking the town hall square, the clock struck, and it was all marvellous.
Lydia picked at her food, and watched me admiringly. ‘You do gobble . . .’ she said agreeably. ‘I’ve seen people who eat a lot, and people who eat quickly . . . but so much and so fast!’
‘Pure envy,’ I muttered, and turned to the radishes. It wasn’t a gastronomic supper, but it was a very nutritious one.
As the clock struck, she turned over to sleep and I heard her say softly, as though talking to herself. ‘You’re on a ship now. There’s a really heavy swell . . . a cup of luke-warm machine-oil . . .’
I had to get up and drink plenty of soda water.
4
Copenhagen.
‘Shall I show you the sea-food restaurant where Ludendorff always used to eat, when he was still a war hero?’
‘Yes, show me . . . no, let’s go to the Lange Linie instead!’ We looked at everything: the Tivoli Gardens, the beautiful town hall and the Thorwaldsen Museum, where everything looked as though it was made of plaster.
‘Lydia!’ I called, ‘Lydia! I almost forgot. We absolutely have to visit the Polysandrion!’
‘The . . . what?’
‘The Polysandrion! You’ve got to see it. Come along.’ It was a long walk, because the little museum was right outside the city.
‘What is it?’ asked the Princess.
‘You’ll see,’ I said. ‘It’s where a couple of Balts built a house for themselves. One of them, Polysander von Kuckers zu Tiesenhausen, imagines he can paint. But he can’t.’
‘And we’re going all this way just to see that?’
‘No, not exactly. He can’t paint, but he does – and he always paints the same thing, his adolescent fantasies: young boys and butterflies.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ asked the Princess.
‘Ask him, he’ll be there. And if he isn’t, then his friend will tell the whole story. Because it has to be told. It’s wonderful.’
‘Is it at least improper?’
‘Would I be taking you if it were, my raven-haired beauty?’
There stood the little villa – it was unattractive, and it didn’t fit in here at all, either; you might have expected to find it somewhere in the south, in Tuscany or somewhere. We went inside.
The Princess’ eyes grew round as saucers, and I beheld the Polysandrion for the second time.
Here a dream had become reality – may God protect us from the like! The good Polysander had covered about forty square kilometres of expensive canvas with paint. There were the youths, standing and reclining, floating and dancing. It was always the same picture, always the same young men. Pale pink, blue and yellow; the youths in the foreground, the perspective at the back.
‘Those butterflies!’ exclaimed Lydia, and took my hand.
‘Shh!’ I said. ‘Not so loud! The cleaning woman is following us round. She’ll report everything back to the artist, and we don’t want to hurt him.’ But really, those butterflies. They fluttered in the painted air, they had landed on the plump shoulders of the young men, and if until now we had thought that butterflies liked to settle on flowers, this was shown not to be the case. These butterflies much preferred to perch on the young men’s bottoms. It was all highly lyrical.
‘Now I ask you . . .’ said the Princess.
‘Be quiet!’ I said. ‘His friend!’
The painter’s friend appeared, quite an old, pleasant-looking man. He was very respectably dressed, but he had the air of despising the standard grey clothes of our grey century. And his suit got its own back by making him look like an emeritus ephebe. He murmured an introduction, and began explaining. In front of
us was the picture of a young man who stood very upright with sword and butterfly, his right hand raised in salute. In the most beautiful, lilting Baltic tones, with all the r’s rolled, the friend said, ‘What you have before you is an entirrely spirritualised verrsion of militarrism.’ I turned away – quite appalled. We saw dancing lads, in sailor-suits with floppy collars, and over their heads hung a little lamp with tassels – the kind you have in corridors. It was a sort of furnished version of the Elysian Fields. A whole Paradise had blossomed here, little bits of which so many of the painter’s bosom friends carried around in their souls. Whether it was through being unjustly persecuted, or whatever it was, when they dreamed, they dreamed in soft sky blue, the pinkest shade of blue, so to speak. And they indulged in an awful lot of it. On one wall was a photograph of the artist in his Italian phase, dressed only in sandals and a Zulu-type spear. So paunches were all the rage in Capri.
‘It takes your breath away!’ said the Princess, once we were outside. ‘They aren’t all like that . . . are they?’
‘No, you shouldn’t blame the species for that. That house is just a plush sofa stuck in the 1890s; they’re not all like that by any means. That man could just as well have peopled his chocolate-box paintings with little elves and gnomes . . . But imagine what a whole museum would be like, full of those fantasies come true – exquisite!’
‘But it’s so . . . anaemic!’ said the Princess. ‘Well, it takes all sorts! Let’s drink a schnaps to that!’ And we did.
The city streets: the animal wild-pack that belongs to the King, with its tame deer running wild and letting you pat their necks when they’re in the mood; and those tall old trees . . .
Departure.
‘What about the language problem?’ asked the Princess when we were sitting in the train to Helsingör. ‘You’ve been there before. Is your Swedish good?’
‘I get by like this,’ I said. ‘First I speak German, and if they don’t understand that, English, and if they don’t understand that, Platt, and if that doesn’t work either, then I stick an “as” ending onto German words, and I find they understand that quite well.’ This was all we needed. She thought it absolutely wonderful, and immediately incorporated it into her linguistic paraphernalia.
‘So it’s Sweden next. What do you think will happenas to us now in Sweden?’
‘Whatever happens on a holiday . . . You, I hope.’
‘You know,’ said the Princess, ‘I’m not really on holiday at all yet. I’m sitting next to you in this compartment; but I’ve still got the office droning away in my head, and . . . Christ!’
‘What is it?’
‘I forgot to phone Tichauer!’
‘Who’s Tichauer?’
‘Tichauer is the director of the N.G.S.W. – the North German Soap Works. My boss said I was to cancel him, because he was going on holiday . . . and the conference is on Tuesday . . . Oh blast!’
‘So what do we do?’
‘We’d best send him a telegram before we get on the ferry at Helsingör. Bloody hell! Oh, Poppa, why does Berlin always follow you around like that? It takes at least a fortnight to be rid of it, and just when you’ve managed to forget all about it, it’s time to go back. What a wonderful profession!
‘Profession . . . I always thought of it as more of an occupation.’
‘You’re only an author, but still you’re right. Distract me. Stand on the seats and put on a show. Sing something – what did I take you along for?’ Only calm and patience could help here . . .
‘Look over there, those hens on the water!’ I said.
‘Hens? What sort of hens?’
‘Visible hens. Jakopp the naturalist distinguishes between two types of hen: the visible hen, which you can only see, and the edible hen, which you can eat too. These are visible hens. How d’you like the country here?’
‘A bit bleak, to tell the truth. If I didn’t know we were still in Denmark and just about to cross over into Sweden.’
She had put her finger on it. Nothing distracts people from their real perceptions more than place-names, heavy with ancient longings and crammed with a multitude of associations. Then, when they finally reach the place, it’s just a shadow of what they’d hoped it would be. But who would admit it openly?
Helsingör. We sent the wire to Tichauer and boarded the small ferry. Down below, in the ship’s restaurant, were three Austrians. They were obviously aristocrats: one of them had that very languid voice. He narrowed his eyes in a peculiar way, like someone paying a bill with a cigar in his mouth, and I heard him mutter, ‘Sound fellow – rather mediocre . . .’ I’m not in favour of the Anschluss.
We stood on deck, by the railing, breathing the clear air and looking at both shorelines: the Danish coast behind us, and the Swedish coast approaching. I watched the Princess out of the corner of my eye. Sometimes she was like a complete stranger, but I kept falling in love with this stranger, and having to win her all over again. The distance between a man and a woman! But then how lovely, to dive into a woman like diving into the sea, without thinking . . . Many of them wear glasses, as it were; they have forgotten what it is to be a woman in the real sense. They just have that thin layer of charm left. Damn it! I suppose we ask a bit much of them: intelligent conversation, logic, good looks and a certain degree of fidelity – and yet there is still that irrepressible longing to be gobbled up like a beefsteak by the woman with jaws crunching . . .
‘Do you have any Swedish currency?’ asked the Princess dreamily.
‘Yes, I have some Kroner,’ I said. ‘It’s a lot of money, and we’ll have to be careful how we spend it.’
‘Skinflint,’ said the Princess.
We had a joint travelling fund, which it had taken us six months to work out. We were in Sweden.
Customs again. Swedish German is different from Danish German. With the Danes, it’s a faint exhalation, which sounds light as a feather. The consonants emerge half a yard in front of the mouth, and dissolve in the air like birdsong. With the Swedes it comes from further back in the throat, and with a wonderful lilt . . . I showed off horribly with my ten words of Swedish, but no one understood them. They probably thought I was some particularly complicated type of foreigner. We had a light lunch.
‘The bouillon,’ said the Princess, ‘looks like water in half-mourning!’
‘That’s just what it tastes like too.’ We went on to Stockholm.
She slept again.
To watch someone sleeping is to feel superior to them – it’s probably something left over from prehistoric times, perhaps it’s the dormant thought: he can’t hurt me, but I can hurt him. At least she didn’t look foolish; her breathing was quiet and firm, and her mouth stayed shut. That’s how she’ll look when she’s dead. Then her head will be resting on a board. Whenever I think of death, I see rough, unplaned boards, with little splinters. She’ll be lying there, the colour of candle-wax, but there will be something awe-inspiring about her. Once, when we were talking about death, she said, ‘We all have to die – you sooner, me later.’ Her thinking could be so masculine. The rest, thank God, was all woman.
She awoke. ‘Where are we?’
‘In Rüdesheim on the Rüde.’ And then she did one of the things for which I loved her most, something she did in special psychological moments: she put her tongue between her teeth, and quickly withdrew it again, producing a blind whiplash of spray. She got a kiss for that – on this journey, we always seemed to have a compartment to ourselves – and immediately she used a newly acquired Danish oath: ‘May the Devil embroider you in baby pink!’ And then we started to sing.
In Kokenhusen
sings a nightingale
In Duna by the sea.
And the nightingale
singing sweetly
drops a present in my hand
Just when we were singing at the tops of our voices, the first houses of the city came into view. Points clicked, the train rattled over a low bridge and came to a halt. Come on! Suitcases. Po
rter. A cab. Hotel. Hello. Stockholm.
5
‘What shall we do now?’ I asked, when we’d washed. All we could see of Stockholm from our hotel window was four chimneys against a blue sky.
‘I think,’ the Princess said, ‘we should first get an interpreter – your Swedish is excellent, quite excellent . . . but it must be ancient Swedish, and the people here are so uneducated. So we should take an interpreter out into the countryside and find a very cheap little cottage, and we’ll stay there very quietly. I don’t want to travel another kilometre ever again.’
We took a walk through Stockholm.
They have a lovely town hall and attractive new houses. A city with water is always beautiful. Doves were cooing in a square and the harbour smelled of tar, but not quite strongly enough. The women in the streets were gorgeous . . . of a quite mesmerising blondness. And you could only get schnaps at certain times, which acted as a powerful spur on us to drink some – it was clear and pure, and didn’t do you any harm so long as you remained sober. As soon as you’d drunk it, the waiter would whisk the glasses away, as though he had been party to some crime. In a shop-window on the Vasagatan was a Swedish translation of the latest hit song from Berlin.
Well, and is that all you saw of Stockholm? Eh? And the national character? Ah, friends! How monotonous our cities have become! Go to Melbourne and spend a long time talking and arguing with the businessmen. Then, if you really want to get to know them, marry their daughters or do a deal with them or, better still, share an inheritance with them. You have to sound out what is below the surface . . . you won’t be able to see it at a glance. What is there to see? The same tram-bells ring everywhere, policemen raise their white-gloved hands, everywhere the same colourful posters for shaving-soap or women’s stockings. The world has put on an occidental uniform, with American trimmings. It’s no longer possible just to go out and see the world; you have to live with it, or against it.
The interpreter! The Princess’ idea was a good one, and we went to the office of a tourist-agency. Yes, they had an interpreter. Maybe. Definitely. Yes.
Castle Gripsholm Page 3
