The Pages

by Hugo Hamilton

  She was crying at that point. Crying in anger. She repeated the whole raging manoeuvre, just to show Bogdanov that she meant it. Also, perhaps, to show everyone else in the café that it hadn’t been a fluke, she could do this kind of circus show with her leg as often as they wished. It had nothing whatsoever to do with being Muslim, which she isn’t. She brought the false limb down once more with an even better second swing. There was nothing left of his cup and saucer. Then she sat down and began to fit the leg back on again.

  Everyone was waiting.

  Bogdanov didn’t mind being stared at. He calmly stood up and pushed his chair back into position. He allowed her time to finish putting her prosthetic leg in place and sit up to look at him. He leaned slowly forward and knocked on the table with his knuckles, a minimal applause. Then he pulled his leather jacket around his stomach and left.

  Julia says – bet the customers were on her side.

  The café staff wouldn’t take any money, Lena says. They told Madina it was on the house.

  And then he turns up at the bar, Julia says.

  He’s not going to let it go.

  Did she tell his wife?

  No way, Lena says. She would never do that.

  Armin began to talk about the possibility of going on tour with his sister. Rotterdam. Antwerp. He’s thinking he might take up the job as their roadie. He could map out the best routes and plan out the logistics, what places to stop for lunch along the way. Where to stay overnight, what the band need in terms of riders. He could design their stage show, lay out the equipment, be the rigger. Have her accordion ready on a small stand, get the guitars tuned up. He would be good at keeping the crowds back, Armin joked. Good at slipping her out the stage door unrecognized, wearing sunglasses.

  Lena and Julia agree it might be a good idea to get some sleep.

  Can I borrow your book? Julia says.

  Rebellion.

  I wouldn’t mind reading it.

  Sure, Lena says.

  So, I find myself staying awake with Julia as she lies down beside her son in his bed. He is quietly breathing in and out. Now and again he snorts and his legs jump as though he’s running in his sleep, then he utters a startled sound like a word half-formed. Julia puts her hand on his arm to calm down his nightmares and turns him on his side for a while. Then she continues reading until dawn, until she finally falls asleep herself and leaves me lying face down on the bedside table like a sunken roof.

  23

  Frieda has been ill again. A high temperature keeps her in bed for days. It’s impossible to know what’s wrong. It’s in her lungs. In her arms. Inside her head. It’s in the suitcases, in the screech of wheels, in the train stations, in the view from each new hotel bedroom window. It’s in the emptiness when he goes on assignment and she’s left behind with nothing but the curtains moving. He asks his friends to write to her while he’s away. It would make her feel better.

  He comes back to find her lying face down on the bed. She hasn’t eaten a thing in days. She needs protein and minerals, so he goes out to the market to buy liver, which he brings back on a bloodstained sheet of paper and cooks in the hotel room for her. The corridors are heavy with the smell of liver. It’s in the carpet like a lingering trace of previous occupants.

  He begins to shape her like a novel.

  He puts her on trains to faraway places. He takes her walking, early and late, across the bridges of Paris. Arm in arm, from one side of the city to the other, with his coat draped over his shoulders and a cane in his hand, they walk as newcomers, arriving and never arriving, stopping only to move on again. He makes her laugh. The boy inside him does imitations of horses’ hoofs. Entire regiments of cavalry horses with high black feathers sticking out of their heads. Like an athlete in patent black shoes, lifting her dress for the freedom of her knees, she clacks along the cobbled pavement until she is forced to stop with a breathless laugh and hold on to him because one of the shoes has come off.

  He keeps reinventing her late into the night in his books, sitting at a small table at the back of a restaurant with a glass of brandy while she tries to sleep. The strain of being written down is beginning to show. She has become quiet in company. Afraid of gatherings. Sitting in a corner waiting for him to fill the pages, her reflection in his mind.

  She has stopped being herself.

  In the restaurant with his friends, he becomes easily jealous. Even to see her laughing at another man’s joke is enough to make him think he’s lost her. He cannot bear her watching the violinist in the string ensemble playing on stage. He rewrites her as a more restrained woman, not the daughter of a poor Viennese family but a woman of means in wealthy clothes, less open-hearted, less innocent, more calculated in company with writers who can see into her head and imagine her most secret thoughts. He likes the honest, worldly comments she makes on his work, but he wants her to shroud her opinions in academic language. He turns her into somebody she is not. At times he can no longer tell the difference between the woman he married and the woman he describes in his novels.

  A courier arrives at the restaurant with a special transfer of money for him. He continues talking to his friends and asks Frieda to go and sign for it. Three thousand marks. A sizeable amount he’s earned from his newspaper reports. He has become so popular that readers have begun to say – whenever Joseph Roth writes, something will happen. While he continues talking to the group around him without dropping a word, she goes out to deal with the postman delivering the money.

  She steps out of his novel, free of the author. There is dramaturgy in her movements across the floor of the restaurant and out into the foyer. It gives the sound of her shoes a self-fabricated quality. She comes back inside a while later and lays the banknotes in a pile on the table. He sees only two thousand marks. What’s happened to the rest of it, a thousand marks missing? She smiles and shrugs her shoulders. Her dimples spring to life with delirious optimism.

  The violinist, she says. He has such sad eyes.

  He shouts at her in front of the other writers at the table. In a drunken rage he stands up and accuses her of having slept with the violinist.

  How can she deny what he invents?

  His imagination is closer to the truth than he knows. While he was away on assignment, sleeping on trains going all the way to Albania, he kept imagining her slipping out at night like one of his fictional characters. He thought of her standing in the street at night waiting for the violinist to come out of the restaurant with his case under his elbow. He could see them linking arms. Their feet in unison. Their laughter like coins rolling along the street. He imagined them arriving back at the hotel and the concierge keeping it all quiet with a wink. In the room from which he was so often absent, he could see her lying naked on the bed with her long white arms and her long white legs while the musician played a sad Polish mazurka for her and everyone in the hotel sat up to listen.

  With the other writers around the table looking on in shock, he continues shouting his accusations at her. She sits with her head in her hands, crying. He gets her up on her feet and takes her away by the arm, like a criminal being led out of the restaurant.

  On stage, the violinist continues playing.

  And then!

  That terrible cloud of writer’s guilt comes over him when he returns to the hotel bedroom and steps back into the real world, where everything is beyond his authorial power. He wishes he could withdraw the words left behind in the restaurant. But the living world cannot be torn up and rewritten. The words are gone to print in her memory and the affair with the violinist cannot be retracted.

  She can’t sleep and she can’t wake up. She looks in the mirror and fails to recognize herself. She can no longer trust her own face.

  You’re making me ill again, she says.

  He goes out to get more liver. The spongy meal clogs up her mouth. Between her teeth, she can feel the rub
bery arteries that once carried the animal’s blood. She coughs it up like a knot of medical tubing. The pulp of organs makes her choke. The smell of liver is in her hair, in the sheets and the pillowcases, the taste of it in their kisses.

  24

  He went to see his publisher in Berlin. Winter, early in the new year. That heavy overcoat of sky across the city. The cold coming up through the shoes. The streets were empty. The cafés were full. His suitcase was back in the same hotel by the train station, as close to the channels of departure as possible. His editor told him – Roth, you must become sadder. The sadder you are, the better you write.

  All his sadness came from Frieda’s illness. The hotel bedroom was full of books and magazines on psychiatry. The frontiers of the mind. He read Freud, his fellow countryman. The subconscious. Psychoanalysis. Was that not the science of literature? A novel bursting its banks.

  He read Joyce, the literary stream of consciousness. He dismissed that revolutionary device, not only because it inspired him and scared him like all great literature, but because he felt disbarred from doing anything similar in his own writing. It was too close. Too much like what was already happening to Frieda’s mind. Her thought progression sometimes came spilling out in a confession. She spoke like a clear-headed child, blunt and right, naive and insightful to the point of fortune-telling. She had the ability to see things back to front. She could take pleasure from life without thinking too much. Be head over heels in love. Be sad and happy in the same moment. Tear the stockings. Wake the neighbours. She could say what it was she wanted most in her life.

  Then she would suddenly become silent. She would go from happiness to regret like a person crossing the street. The furniture in the room would begin to move with the sunlight coming in at new angles. The clothes she left on the chair would be misplaced. She would hear voices in the corridor. The rinse of water turning in a drain. She would speak of being homesick for places that were no longer home. Read letters that stopped carrying any news. She would break into a stream of sudden anger at the people who had let her down, at herself for not living up to what she had wanted most. She would speak with her hands. She would descend into a deep solitude that lay across the room like a million words unsaid.

  How could he step inside her head and paraphrase those thoughts in fiction? It was not in his gift. He was too worried about that flow of unrestricted disclosure. He felt guilty for leaving her, for causing her condition, for all the unspoken things in her memory that could not be cured, for not having been there to protect her when she was a child.

  He failed to see the warning signals. He continued to believe she could be remade like a new chapter, with new smiles drawn around her silent mouth. New gloves. New clothes. He wanted to believe the winter winds blowing through the Rhône Valley made her sick and the Côte d’Azur would make her better. The sun, the beaches, the seafood, the life in the cafés of Saint-Raphaël would keep her well while he was away.

  She got dressed in her best clothes. She took her time getting ready. She packed no travelling case and left the hotel as though she was going for a walk, leaving the key at reception on her way out. She made her way through the streets. She found herself standing in the train station as if that was the only place her feet could take her. At the ticket counter she was forced to make up her mind where to go. Would she go back to Vienna to see her parents? Would she go back to Paris? Was there anyone else she could stay with?

  For hours she sat on trains, waiting for connections on platforms in the cold. Late in the evening she finally made it to Frankfurt, arriving at an address she had for his newspaper editor. Benno Reifenberg and his wife, Maryla, answered the door to find her in such a distressed state they could hardly recognize her. This young woman who was normally so well dressed, they said, now looked like a human wreck. Her hair was dishevelled. Her clothes crumpled. Her posture was full of fear, as though she had been attacked. What had happened on that journey that made her look so distraught?

  She spoke with her hands constantly moving.

  In a deep panic, she told them how she had come from Saint-Raphaël. The room at the hotel there was right above the central heating system, she could hear the voices of ghosts coming up through the pipes. There were toxic vapours rising into her room. She could no longer stay on her own in a place where nobody spoke but the radiators.

  I can see through them all, Frieda said.

  All those writers and intellectuals in the cafés, that cosy literary community. I can see into their hearts, she said. They’re all so fake. All rotten with jealousy. They hate me and they hate my husband. They hate any sign of talent because they have none of their own. They only praise things to get the better of each other.

  She mentioned them all by name.

  Friends pretending to be friends.

  They booked her a room in a hotel. They called her husband in Berlin to let him know what had happened. They stayed with her through the night, afraid she might harm herself or throw herself out the window. She could not sleep. She continued her deranged ranting until dawn, getting it all off her chest, those awful things she had been storing up for years.

  She spoke out against her mother and father. She began disowning her own childhood. She finally calmed down when the sunlight came in and the night of fear came to an end, falling into a state of exhaustion and lethargy.

  He came to collect her. It was just another episode of homesickness, he thought, now that she was smiling again. He took her to Paris and bought her some more clothes. He spent most of his time in her company, afraid to let her out of his sight. Whenever he had to go somewhere alone, he would lock her into the room.

  A prisoner in her illness.

  To a friend he wrote – she has contracted a chronic weakness, utterly defenceless. I know it must be my fault. Her condition is caused by so many unspeakable things I cannot begin to mention. Maybe in ten years I might be able to describe them, if I am still a writer then.

  Did he poison her with his dystopian view? Did he make her ill with his dark vision of the world in ruins? His rage at the rise of Nazism? His unabridged forecast turning them both into lifelong fugitives in small hotel rooms with the sound of trains running through their sleep.

  Only when she tried to take her own life did he finally come to realize that she could no longer be left alone. He sought professional help and the doctors diagnosed schizophrenia. The terror in that word struck him with a hollow feeling of guilt that would never leave him.

  In desperation he turned to witchcraft. While they were staying with friends in Berlin, while she was in the constant care of a live-in nurse, he brought in a rabbi to exorcise her illness. After hours of torment and shouting in the room, she fell into a comatose state. When she awoke from that torpor, she broke out in further episodes of rage at everyone around her. She forgot who she was and where she was. He brought her back to her parents in Vienna, but that didn’t work out either because she continued vomiting, losing weight by the day.

  To a friend he wrote in great distress – my wife is very ill, psychosis, hysteria, murderous thoughts, she is hardly alive – and me, surrounded by demons, headless, powerless, unable to lift a finger, utterly helpless with no sight of improvement.

  There remained no other choice but to bring her to a sanatorium. An institution in the country, just outside Vienna. The day left him gutted. He was filled with unspeakable guilt, leading her by the arm up to the main door, speaking her name, handing her over like a prisoner to be incarcerated. Filling in the documents, writing his signature, taking possession of her jewellery in a small brown envelope with the name and address of the institution printed at the top. A small parcel containing her lovely clothes tied with twine. In the waiting room, he saw her staring at the floor in front of her without a word. He heard the sound of doors and keys. The sight of other patients in their blue gowns being led along the corridor. A kindness in the voice of a nurs
e that was more frightening than any brutality he could imagine.

  Friedl – his great love. He was forced to let her go. Kissing her goodbye. Speaking to her one last time. Trying to let her know he would be back soon. She would get well and everything would be fine, he would come and collect her, they would be together again, he would take her back to Paris. What could he do but stand outside on the street in tears? What could he do but find a bar to stop himself from thinking about her as she turned away?

  25

  I’m on the move again. Travelling inside Lena’s new bag with a copy of the New York Times she managed to pick up at the train station. It’s the same journey from Berlin to Magdeburg that her grandfather made the day after the book-burning. It feels to me like we’re in that same expanding moment, as if the years keep swapping seats on the train until they eventually get to a carriage at the back called History. Each year brings events never before thought possible.

  What can we do about the unimaginable?

  Lena spreads the newspaper out on the table in front of her. She likes hard copy. I’ve heard her say to Julia that reading the news on the printed page makes it feel more truthful. As if the path of knowledge into memory is more secure when it has been converted into solid form. As if digital information is more equivocal and has the option of retracting the facts after they have been read.

  As a book, I belong to the fixed-down world. Not yet deleted. The good news for me is that I have now been read by Julia and she loves the ending. She’s even decided to nominate me for her next book club.

  From what I hear, Julia intends to hold her book club in a bar that has been devoted to Joseph Roth, right next door to where he once lived briefly with Friedl, where he paced up and down like a prisoner unable to check out. It’s a ground-floor café on Potsdamer Strasse, same side as the milliner’s where Yoko Ono buys her hats. It used to be an undertaker’s, where people got measured for coffins, and is now called the Joseph Roth Café. It’s a reconstruction from the 1920s, with old photographs of Berlin around the walls and chequered tablecloths and a large mirror from a theatre dressing room suspended at an angle. His books are stacked in piles around the café. Quotes from his work around the ceiling – Hyla Hyla, white geese, Hyla Hyla, on the Danube. There is a baby grand piano on a small elevated stage at the back and the menu offers good hearty food such as Wiener with lentil stew, at prices any organ grinder could afford. They open only on weekdays. Always busy. You can’t get in the door at lunchtime.