The Pages

by Hugo Hamilton

  She said she was working on a novel about the woman who smuggled Chopin’s heart from Paris back to Warsaw underneath her dress.

  She laughed and said she sat down to breakfast one morning with a blue ear.

  My author would have described her laugh as something that flew up into the trees. Perhaps a pair of colourful things with a swift flight that didn’t stay too long in one place.

  Glückstein then took me out of his pocket and placed me into her hands as encouragement.

  You’ll love this book, he said to her.

  Rebellion.

  It has a new tone of urgency, he said. What other writer would have thought of making a barrel organ player his central character?

  I can’t wait to read it, she said.

  When it was time for him to go, they returned to the house. He stood in the hallway while she went to her room to get a letter that she asked him to post for her on his way. She wrote the address of her aunt in Prague on the envelope with a blue fountain pen, but the nib was broken. He took out his own pen and gave it to her. He told her to keep it while he got the nib on her pen replaced.

  Oh – thanks, she said.

  He examined her pen and said there was something aeronautic about the blue design, as if it could take off and fly like a rocket.

  That’s a cheap pen, she said. Be careful it doesn’t ruin your jacket.

  She walked him to the farm gate, where his bike was leaning against one of the red-brick pillars. After they embraced and he set off on his journey back to Berlin, she sat down right away in the living room to begin reading. Her mother could be heard speaking to the dog on the doorstep and the chickens came running across the yard for food. Her brother walked in after dark and put some wildfowl on the kitchen table. The light was left on in her room until late.

  27

  Henning finally comes to the map at the back and speaks about how they found the place. It’s out there near the Polish border, he says. Near the Oder river. Your grandfather eventually worked it out by studying the annotations in the margins. He was too old to undertake the journey himself at that stage, so he asked us to find the place for him.

  We went there, your father and me, one day in the summer after your grandfather died. It was a matter of honouring his wish more than anything else. We found the religious shrine. We found the small river with the bridge, just as it is pictured in the diagram. Henning shows Lena the map and says – we followed that path and came to the farmhouse. We were quite certain we had the right place, but then a lot of those farms out there look the same. The single-storey house, the barns erected in an oblong around the inner yard, the walled orchard.

  The people living there had taken over the farm during the Nazi period. The family of Angela Kaufmann had been dispossessed, so the records showed. At first we were in two minds whether to go up to the farmhouse itself, but your father was braver than I was and insisted we talk to the new owners. There was a dog on a chain in the yard. He started barking at us and pulling on the chain which was attached to an old water pump with a long handle.

  A woman came out of the house and stood on the steps by the door. She wanted to know what we were doing there, so we told her we were out walking and that we had lost our way. We were looking for a path that might lead us to the next village, and she pointed us in the right direction. She told us to keep going along the path, we would come across an oak tree with a bench underneath. All we had to do is carry on, then we would eventually come to the village, a walk of maybe half an hour, she said.

  This confirmed that the place corresponded with the map in the book.

  We thanked her and apologized for disturbing her.

  She said it was not a problem, then she continued watching as we made our way back out towards the path.

  At the last minute, Henning goes on, your father turned around to ask another question. He just wanted to make absolutely sure that we had found the right place. Ideally, we would have loved to take out the book and show her the map, perhaps ask if we could walk around to have a look. But she was not all that friendly and the dog was continuing to lunge at us, making a lot of choking noises as the chain cut into his neck. And then your father decided quite spontaneously, since we had come all that way, to ask the woman something that would put everything beyond doubt.

  Is there a barn here with a swing in the doorway?

  The woman stared with instant suspicion. Her eyes narrowed. She took a long breath and said – how do you know that?

  Her answer told us everything. It confirmed to us right away, however unwillingly, that there was a swing in one of the barn doorways.

  The woman said – who are you?

  In a raised voice, she wanted to know what we were doing there and why we had come all the way to her farm to ask such a specific question. Perhaps she thought we had come to accuse her of taking over the farm from the original owners after the war. She became quite agitated. The dog almost strangled himself. She turned back into the house to call her husband – Karl, Karl.

  We left as quickly as we could. We found the path and made our way past the oak tree. There was no time to sit down on the bench, Henning says. We had to keep moving. We heard shouting from behind us in the farmyard, and when we looked back there was a man running after us carrying a farm implement. Perhaps it was a scythe, we couldn’t see with the sun in our eyes. He was joined by two young boys also carrying farm implements as weapons.

  We had no option but to run, Henning continues. It was a while before the dog was released from his chain, so we had a good head start by the time he came bounding out of the farmyard and overtook the man and his sons. We continued running along the path towards the village and then we decided to split up. Because your father was carrying the book, we thought it best that I run across the open fields to distract the dog, so that he could make his way back through the forest. I was worried when I got home to Magdeburg and he was still out. He got lost in the forest and only returned late that night.

  We were glad to have found the place. We told ourselves the map had been drawn to remember a good day. We never thought of going back there again. When the Wall came down, there was too much else to think about. Your father went away with the book and I stayed behind with the library. Maybe it was the only thing your father had to connect him to his place of birth, like an unsolved memory.

  28

  The morning brings a pink glow into the library. It overlooks the herb garden with its low red-brick walls and a single pear tree in the centre. The fruits have now been removed. Henning has them lined up to ripen by the kitchen window like ornaments.

  Lena is still asleep upstairs.

  The library is awake. The books are quietly talking among themselves while the house is still silent. A low hum of voices, like a swirling cloud of pollen, hoping to take part in newly invented ecologies. Einstein compared the attempt to understand the universe to a child walking into a library. How can you figure out all those books at once? It’s like getting your head around the idea of God, or the concept of infinity – impossible to grasp that entire constellation.

  Books stacked on tables, some left on the windowsill, some yet unread, some in columns beside piles of newspapers and magazines waiting to be assigned places on newly built shelves in an adjoining room.

  All of them taking turns to tell their stories.

  An English poet says people fall apart after love, like two halves of a lopped melon.

  An Irish poet describes the act of love as two people getting the measure of each other.

  Then there is an older Irish drama in which a woman falls in love with an outlaw on the run from the police for murdering his father. When the father appears and the outlaw status evaporates, her love dies and she loses the only playboy in the Western world.

  And Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist who wrote about love as a dance between war and pea
ce. He and his wife both secretly read each other’s diaries. They became mind-readers in the same house, stealing from one another to get ahead in that lovers’ guessing game.

  And the German writer who felt love could not be love without an ending. After leaving behind their farewell letters, Kleist and his lover, who was dying of cancer and had agreed to take part in a glorious suicide pact, walked a short distance from their hotel to a lake where he first shot her and then shot himself.

  Effi Briest tells how her husband invented a ghost in the house to keep her from stepping out of line. It was only a matter of time before the ghost became real in the form of her lover. Effi ended up falling in love with a ghost in order to escape from a dead marriage.

  Is there a ghost in every marriage?

  Maybe it’s only in dissolution that marriage is interesting in literature.

  An American writer tells the story of a boy watching his father and mother as associates planning a serious crime. He finds a gun on the back seat of the car. His parents carry out a bank robbery and get caught. They are put on trial and go to prison, leaving him an orphan.

  Another American novel describes the pregnant April Wheeler engaging in a moment of meaningless sex with her neighbour in the back of his Pontiac. Afterwards, when he tells her that he loves her, she says – don’t say that. It’s the last thing she needs to hear. She is still out of breath when he says it again – it’s true, I’ve always loved you – but she tells him to be quiet – take me home. In the darkness outside the dance hall she can’t see his face and says she doesn’t know who he is, because she doesn’t know who she is herself.

  A memoir written by an Englishwoman talks about marriage as a fraud. Both parties are forced into extraordinary levels of self-deception just to keep the family enterprise afloat. A man is either a predator or a provider. She describes herself travelling further and further away from her disbanded marriage into places where love is never spoken about.

  An Italian novelist describes a woman whose husband walks out on her, leaving her with two children and a dog. The dog plays a central role in the story as a witness to her grief and abandonment. He is eventually poisoned and found dead in the park.

  A writer from California tells how she gave her husband’s clothes away after he died and then ran in grief to the charity shop to ask for his shoes back.

  Does the pain of loss not describe love better than all signs of happiness?

  The old man with his tape recorder comes across a love scene in his memory where he was once rocking in a boat with a woman. The brightness of that memory is too much. He can’t take it. He quickly spools forward to a more bearable part of his life.

  The great Norwegian dramatist tells the story of a woman who murders a book. It contains all the pain of a lost love. She kills what she loves. When the murdered book is brought back to life by her husband with the help of another woman, she goes into a room next door and shoots herself.

  And the contemporary Norwegian writer who murders his girlfriend with a poem. He describes how she ran off with his older brother. When she comes back to him, everything is set for a wonderful reunion. But instead of forgiving her, he takes out a poem written by the Romanian-born writer Paul Celan. The poem is called ‘Todesfuge’ – ‘Death Fugue’. It begins with the words – Black milk of the morning, we drink it in the evening. A powerful description of the Nazi terror, when people were forced to drink their own death. As he reads out the words, it becomes clear that he is using the poem to let her know that she is nothing in comparison to this enormous event in history.

  And the murdered story written by the American poet whose husband wrote the poem about lovers falling apart like a lopped melon. She loved him so much that she wanted to be one of his ribs, right next to his heart. Her collected letters talk about the day the two of them found an injured starling and took it in, feeding it milk and diced-up raw meat. But the starling got sick and weakened. Out of mercy, they placed the dying bird into a small box and gassed it in the oven. It was a shattering experience for her and she saw in it some fatalistic portent of what was happening to their love. The story was called ‘Bird in the House’. It was never published. It disappeared. Like a missing person. Presumed dead.

  And the book in which a mother murders her own child out of love, to protect it from slavery.

  And the story of the artist who lost all the people he loved in the Nazi years. He painted their portraits and then erased them again. When a painting was finished, he began to scrape at the paint until the features became unrecognizable and he was left with nothing but a studio covered in human dust. The artist, described in a book called The Emigrants, went to live in Manchester, where he almost vanished himself, covered in a fine layer of dust that made him look like one of his own paintings, translucent, resembling a photographic negative.

  Now it’s time to be quiet.

  The library has become silent because the bell has begun to ring at the cathedral. The sound comes in waves through the streets, slipping under the doors. It enters the morning thoughts of people waking up in their beds. It enters the library and steps into the bookshelves, a familiar sound that has been ringing ever since the Middle Ages. Carrying the stories of the people who lived in this city, their sorrow and their happiness, the children, the adults they became, those who left and those who stayed, the living and the dead, the love they had and the memory they left behind.

  There were twelve bells to begin with, but most of them disappeared over the centuries. The main bell, weighing as much as six elephants, crashed to the floor during the Second World War.

  The science of bells could fill the library many times over. Sound patterns that can be worked out mathematically and written down in a score, like music. But there is also, inside each bell, a unique set of frequencies that remain imaginary. Layers of subtones that cannot be measured. Like hearing things that are not actually there. Here we are, a couple of thousand books debating all night about the intensity of love, and this is our answer. The famous Apostolica bell of Magdeburg. A scale of harmonies and musical shapes coming and going on the morning breeze, like a choir performing the ‘Ode to Joy’.

  29

  Here is what happened to Joseph Roth’s marriage.

  In his novel about a Jewish family emigrating to America, he writes about his wife’s mental collapse. He calls her Miriam. She lay in a wide, white bed. Her hair was loose, black and shining across the white pillows. Her face was red, her dark eyes had bright-red rims.

  She began to laugh. Her laughter lasted a couple of minutes. It sounded like the clear ringing of relentless sirens in train stations, like the beating of a thousand brass rods on thin crystal glasses. Suddenly the laughing stopped. Then Miriam began to sob. She pushed back the covers and her bare legs were kicking, her feet hitting the soft bed, becoming more and more urgent and regular, while her fists swung through the air in the same steady rhythm.

  He describes the doctor arriving. His voice issuing the ominous words – she is insane. They hold her down while the doctor administers an injection – soon she will be quiet.

  She is tied to a stretcher and taken away.

  At the asylum, through the glass door separating the waiting room from the corridor, he describes seeing patients in blue striped robes being led past two by two. First the women, he writes, then the men. Occasionally one of them will throw a wild, contorted, worried, menacing face through the glass into the waiting room. He finds himself looking away in rotation at the floor, at the door handle, at the magazines on the table. In that moment of separation, handing her over into the care of the nurses to join those patients in their blue gowns, he is left staring in grief at a vase full of golden flowers.

  To her parents in Vienna he writes – don’t let Friedl read this book. It would not be good for her.

  To his friend and fellow author Stefan Zweig he writes – I am terribly sad. So cut
off from humanity.

  To her parents – if Friedl happens to talk about me, whatever she says, good or bad, true or made up, the details should be related to me at all costs. Don’t say she’s wrong, that’s nonsense. Listen to everything. Please. Promise.

  Friedl, thank God, he writes, appears not to be suffering from dementia. She probably has hysterical psychosis. If it weren’t for the fact that she is so intelligent and acutely sensitive, the whole thing might have been over within a few weeks. But she is obsessing over a small detail, can find no way out, and, in despair at this, it seems, is losing her mind.

  Her heart is sound, she can drink good strong coffee.

  Her weight must go back up to fifty-five kilos again. If she can tolerate liver and will take it, give her liver, as much as possible, and slightly underdone.

  At the sanatorium outside Vienna, she has come under the care of Dr Maria Diridl.

  She sits in the consultation room, staring into the distance. Her eyes bear a catatonic expression, the eyelids drooping, half closed over. Her hair has had to be cut short because she tends to pull it out in big clumps. She remains listless, refusing to answer questions. At times she complains about ‘degradations’ – having to take a bath, being told to eat, being told to sleep. She has been refusing her food, leaving most of it on the plate. Her weight is down to thirty-two kilos, she has to be ‘spoon-fed’ on some days. At lunchtime she threw her food on the floor and picked it up with her hands to bring it to her mouth.

  Doctor Maria is patient with her.

  Frieda, why don’t you tell me what happened.

  She stays mute, hurting herself again, bending her legs back underneath her body to make them disappear. This has already resulted in a malformation or fusion of the knee joints which prevents her from walking properly. Doctors tried to correct it surgically under general anaesthetic, but she goes back to this slow self-harming as though she wants to have no legs at all.