Mr Vogel

by Lloyd Jones

  As I told you, nowadays it is an antiquarian bookshop, the very shop I stand in now as I mop the floor – as that old barman must have done too – in the wan light of a small desk-lamp, with the shadows of books rising in jumbled towers all around me, teetering skyscrapers; no, more like Tryfan and Glyder Fach stacked in granite cobs on either side of me in a white spring mist below Bristly Ridge.

  I told you, right at the beginning, about a small badge or token, showing a dancing bear, nailed to the black oak lintel over the doorway. It is there still.

  I told you that I had read a cheaply printed version of the Vogel Papers when I was recovering at the local sanatorium.

  I had become intrigued, and one evening, shortly after leaving hospital, I had walked to the Blue Angel bookshop and stood in the shadow of its doorway. A thunder shower had broken in a crackling explosion which rolled in the hills above the town; the air had smelt of sulphur, sadness, wet earth and change.

  And then nothing, simply nothing, had happened.

  Some of you, the ones with long memories, the pedants, the finicky and the querulous, will put this book down now and mutter awhile, saying something like: hang about, haven’t we been dragged the whole way around Wales, lugged along an ill-lit and poorly-signposted path through a deranged mind, looking for a figment of a man called Mr Vogel who had an invalid carriage, who left the lights on every night so that people would knock on his door, who had his own little bridge of sighs to the Blue Angel, who mysteriously won a fortune, and who went on a quest around an island? Didn’t we traipse across three continents behind this wanderlust-infected fool, didn’t we travel through time to find a hopeless little alcoholic with dandruff and bent legs?

  And I would understand, completely, if you wanted to know exactly who it was that slept in the church porch at Tallarn Green and watched the bats and the shooting stars, walked along Hell’s Mouth like a fly along a saucer rim, and had his toes sucked by the Rhymney River Mud-Monster.

  My answer to you is – wait: wait awhile, and you will understand. If your own life is simple then lucky you; we have a rather tangled skein here, and I’m trying very, very hard to unravel it.

  With your permission, I will continue.

  When I recovered from my operation I sought a job, and fate, like a pedagogue, led me to the Blue Angel bookshop. A pedagogue was a slave who led children to school in ancient Rome: that’s what my work does to me – I am enslaved by books; I am trapped among a restless and jostling crowd of words trying to break through the book-covers, covers which restrain a mob of sentences like baton-wielding policemen at a protest rally. Each of us has his own chains; I too have my fetters, but I have journeyed in other people’s fables – on foot, on ships, on trains, on clouds – to release me from my deskbound enthralment.

  This is the truth for you – the absolute truth.

  I had spotted an advert in the local newspaper, The Daily Informer, seeking a bookshop attendant for the Blue Angel, and because I am supple in the mother tongue, and knowledgeable about the history, fauna and flora of the region, I got the job.

  I needn’t tell you the consequences: here I am, within its ancient walls, dreaming daily of the scenes depicted in the Vogel Papers, when it was an inn. Business is poor. I have too much time to dust the tomes and to read pages at random; if it’s a love story I’m adulterous, sneaking a few stolen moments with one of the lovers, or if it’s a travelogue I become a pilgrim, enjoying conversations with people I meet on cliff tops. If plots have got dogs I bark at the moon, if they’ve got bears I eat honey and roar. With sanyassins I talk in tongues in the shade of the banyan trees, and when my eyes gleam white in the night I tremble and groan: I am the incubus who haunts your midnight shadows.

  The man who wobbled into my bookshop was confused, and he looked ill. I realised, immediately, who he was. I succoured him; showed compassion, listened to his twisted and convoluted story. Even then, on the first day, the footings of friendship were laid in our muddy trench. I began to understand him; I began to comprehend the forces driving this frail little man. Friendship, in its early moments, relies heavily on intuition, and I knew, straight away, that Mr Vogel had certain dimensions, rooms in his mansion – which I wanted to explore. In time I came to realise that Mr Vogel’s life was an endless corridor onto which thousands of doors opened, each chamber jammed to the ceiling with letters, postcards, journals, diaries, keepsakes, mementoes and other desiderata, all those little things which give us pleasure.

  Certain dreams of his, which he made known to me during our early association (little knowing, then, that I would be like a father to him eventually) revealed that he had no real grasp on reality. It seemed as if he were in a completely different world to mine; indeed, by the end I hardly knew what had actually happened and what had been imagined. As an example I will tell you the first nightmare he recounted to me:

  I was directed, in my dream, to a bookshop near the old docks. It was a Wednesday – February the twenty-eighth according to a calendar on the wall; this had an eerie and supernatural significance. The date glowed on the page. The shadows swirled around me and the books were alive, moving, clamouring for my attention. In front of me I saw an unwritten scene from Great Expectations: in the corner Miss Havisham stood by her husband, and their peculiar offspring sat behind the Blue Angel counter, cobweb-garbed. Two book dealers were rifling the shelves like cannibals picking their teeth: one was called Billy Silverfish, the other Dryfeld. They whispered a great conspiracy in my ear. I was impelled to get rid of them. My ruse was perfect: I took them to the American section and persuaded them to orchestrate one last concerted hunt for the great white whale Moby Dick; I offered them Queequeg, the novel’s massive tattooed savage, alive again as a helper, then directed the three of them to Moel-y-Gaer fort near Mold, from where a ley line would take them straight to Hay-on-Wye. I told them a distressed author was searching for them, needing them in another book. By now a tempest heaved the street outside. A great oak tree with an eagle in it threshed and cracked behind the shop; various buildings had sunk or were sinking, their keels bubbling downwards into the void, all except one shop, a liquor store bolted to the pavement, yellow light fanning perfectly outwards, lamping the dismal night...

  Naturally, when I realised he was confused as to whom he was and where he was, I called the authorities, since we all need, occasionally at least, to know who we are and where we’re going. What else could I do? It’s easy to blame me now, with hindsight, isn’t it? Was I supposed to let him sit there for ever, looking at me mulishly, talking himself into Bedlam, driving away the few customers who ventured in?

  Mr Vogel, the man who stumbled into the Blue Angel bookshop, thought he’d come to the end of a glorious quest, a magnificent walk around the whole of our country, Wales, fairest of all lands, Kohinoor in the encircling diadem of Britain’s shoreline. Upon my instigation, and perhaps I regret it now, he was taken to a place of safety. Soon enough he saw it as a prison.

  I went to see him nearly every evening, and our friendship began – I say friendship because I am unsure which word to use: Liaison? Fellowship? Comradeship? Brotherhood?

  Since he had wandered into my domain like a lamb in a storm, I felt partly responsible for him, rather like someone who has taken an injured animal, found by the roadside, to the RSPCA; I wanted to know why he had wandered away from the herd, and how he was faring. In dribs and drabs, he told me his entire story – the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. I decided to write it all down.

  Now there was one very interesting thing about Mr Vogel. For although he wanted his story to be told truthfully, he also wanted it told his way.

  He would grasp my arm with his bent little hand as I sat by his bedside and say:

  ‘For God’s sake Gwydion, tell it like a story-teller. Don’t make me sound ordinary. Make it all sound interesting. I want people to like it, to read it to the last word, and to smile when they close the last page. Who cares if there’s a slight blur here
or there? Accuracy never filled a sack in the Celtic granary, we all know that. Give it some verve, some pizzazz. Will you do that for me, Gwydion?’

  I asked him exactly what he meant, and he sighed, then thought for some time.

  ‘Look at this room now,’ he said, sweeping his withered paw around the place.

  There was something quite appealing about him: the way he looked at you; because his back was so bent, and he was so hunched over, he always seemed as if he were peering over nonexistent glasses, asking everyone, Are You Sure?

  ‘You’ve read plenty of books – give it atmosphere, tell it how people really see it but can’t describe it. Don’t tell any lies. Tell them how I feel inside, not how I look or act.’

  For days, as I tended my flock of books, I pondered how I could paint another man’s grass greener. I made a fumbled effort, threw it away, then tried again.

  I could write it black and biblical. Start every sentence I would with a verb.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Vogel, the sound of blood bubbling in the back of his throat.

  ‘Only joking,’ I said in a soothing voice. ‘I’m only teasing you Mr Vogel. I’m not going to throw in any choirs or chapels or boyos or butties, honest.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ he growled, ‘I thought you were going to give me hymns and rain.’

  I told him my story also, accidentally. It was padding; I threw him sprats to catch a mackerel. I gave him my own scraps as I tried to tease information from him. He was sharper than I thought. He noticed things, clung to throwaway lines and cobbled together a crude overview of my life. He realised that I, too, was addicted to something, as we all are, in one way or another...

  Finally, I found a style which invoked the quale of Mr Vogel’s life rather than its every nut and bolt. He liked it.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said with a flamboyant grin. ‘I want you to take the attar, the essence, and create a new flower from it. That budding, unfolding, will be the story of my life.’

  I thought of the tormentil, so common in the uplands of Wales – so unremarkable, inconspicuous almost; tiny and yellow, it was a member of the rose family, yet it was so much more delicate and subtle than its showy domestic cousin. That was his message: create a lovely mountain blossom from the most slender of fragrances, the essence of Mr Vogel, not his crippled and crushed human form.

  My next move was audacious by any standards. After preparing myself carefully: ripping my clothes, lathering my hair into a bouffant frenzy, blacking my teeth and rubbing grime into my pores, I feigned madness by running into the street and flinging my arms around the neck of a passing horse, talking wildly about the Antichrist; to seal matters I told the horse repeatedly that I loved it and wished to marry it. This had the desired effect and within the hour I was sitting next to Mr Vogel in the institution, taking care to utter regular protestations of love for my horse. I expected the staff to be surprised by my sudden descent into madness, but they thought nothing of it: as one of them said to me, most of us have at least one bout of mania in our lives. That night I slept soundly, waking at dawn to a troubled vision of Caligula steering a seventeen-hand stallion past my window with Nietzsche behind him, sleeping, his arms looped fondly around Caligula’s waist. Perhaps I was the mad one, not Mr Vogel.

  It was still peaceful when I awoke from my first night’s sleep at the institution. I walked through to the day room where I sat silently, watching the weak early sunshine quicksilvering the windows. Most of the patients were still asleep, and the only sound I could hear was a soft shuffle coming from a pair of moth-eaten slippers in the shape of two furry little animals with beady little eyes staring at me. They belonged to Sylvia, a little woman of indeterminate age and mixed race – nobody could deny that she was very mixed up – who was mousing up and down the corridor, collecting small fragments of litter and carpet fluff, and putting it all in a battered and bulging envelope. She would send it to Downing Street later that morning, as more proof that unseen forces were about to invade the world. Sylvia asked everyone she met to take her to Downing Street, but no-one ever took her there. She whispered the Nunc Dimittis to herself in a quiet rustle as she hoovered the corridor for madness. Myrddin, the new schizophrenic, was beginning to bang about in his room, so trouble was brewing.

  A young and very pretty nurse whom I came to know as Debbie had just come on duty; she nestled into her chair in the staff station, cradling a mug of coffee, still blushing with a soft radioactive glow after a night of flooded sexuality, and very tired in a tingly sort of way.

  Donovan, her lover of three nights, sat opposite her, looking like a young steer who had cleared a fence and found himself in the Elysian Fields among a thousand young and attractive heifers. She nestled a foot in his crotch and gave him a gentle nudge.

  ‘Tired?’

  He grinned comically and lolled his tongue out. ‘Fancy a quickie in the linen room?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, thinking about it seriously for a moment.

  ‘Good God,’ said Mr Vogel when I showed him my notes, ‘it’s good, very good. Is that what life is like, really? Sounds extremely realistic, actually, but why the canoodling, for heaven’s sake – are you a sex maniac or something?’

  ‘Look at it this way,’ I said to him as the blood returned to his face, ‘you’ve had none in your own life, as far as I can make out, so we need to make this story real for the real people out there who really do have sex.’

  He mused over this, and replied:

  ‘Well just go easy on it, that’s all, I don’t want to die of shame before we’ve even started,’ and he added smartly: ‘Welsh people didn’t get where they are today by having sex all over the place.’ I think he was joking, though he had a very straight delivery. I realised, eventually, that the workings of his inner mind were far more complicated than was apparent to those around him.

  ‘OK, go on,’ he continued, waving his hand at me regally.

  The breakfast rattled in on a trolley. Porridge in a big aluminium canister and corn flakes. On Sundays the patients helped themselves when they rose. No matter how daft they were, I noticed, they always managed to feed themselves, the ones who wanted food. Many didn’t. Many were there in body alone.

  Sylvia knocked on the door of the staff station and gesticulated. She wanted a fag. Donovan gave her one and she shuffled through to the dayroom where two silent figures were waiting for a staff member to put the cable back on the television – it was removed every night in case someone used it to hang themselves, though the staff mumbled that it was something to do with lightning.

  ‘Got a new one,’ said Debbie. She looked at a fresh folder.

  ‘Found agitated, kissing a horse, outside that old bookshop near the docks. Wasn’t that lame fellah Mr Vogel found there too? Is there something about the place?’

  Both men had been disorientated and angry, she said.

  Donovan looked out at the dayroom. In the corner, by the almost empty book-case which held, inexplicably, part of a German guide book to Wales which had been torn in half, the lame patient had laboriously dragged twelve chairs into a circle.

  He sat, now, in one of them, looking at the room around him. The room had a very distinct smell, a smell he had never encountered before. It frightened him slightly. Mr Vogel felt very lonely. The sounds were different. People walked differently. They didn’t talk like other people.

  Mr Vogel stopped me by tapping on my sleeve.

  ‘Lovely touch,’ he beamed, ‘lovely – the twelve chairs, they’re for the twelve people invited as guests to the Blue Angel at the end of the great walk around Wales, right?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, proud of my ingeniousness.

  ‘But the German guide book?’ He frowned. ‘What’s that about? Needless detail, surely?’

  ‘Well actually, no. I thought I’d work in a reference to Julius, that little German boy you told me about – you know, the one who followed Esmie Falkirk around the hospital like a puppy and died of diph
theria.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘poor little Julius. He was in the bed next to me for a while at Gobowen. Poor little mite, with those big blue eyes, and his parents weren’t allowed to see him, must have been a nightmare. We teased him too, we did Nazi salutes and made little moustaches with our fingers. Children are so cruel, don’t you think? Even crippled children, we were also cruel you know. Little fleas have little fleas upon their backs and so ad infinitum... I’m ashamed to be human, sometimes.’

  ‘Don’t get maudlin, for God’s sake,’ I said to him.

  ‘All right,’ he gestured approvingly, ‘that’ll do for today. I’m still a bit weak you know. Need some sleep now.’ He closed his eyes, and went to sleep immediately, like a child.

  When I saw him the next day Mr Vogel was just full of himself. I sat by him, and noticed that he had a glob of jam in the corner of his mouth, and a pile of toast crumbs in his pullover folds. He also had a big pile of Calypso orange cartons by his side; he drank them steadily, and with relish, at regular intervals.

  ‘Come to the window,’ he urged me, grasping my arm a little too firmly, since he doesn’t realise what a very strong grip he has after years of handling crutches and sticks; our deficiencies, so often, are compensated for in other ways, sometimes marvellously.

  ‘Look,’ he said, indicating the scene below. The infirmary is on a hill, overlooking a plain, and the view is quite spectacular; we could see activity everywhere, with people whizzing to and fro, and lorries and cars zooming hither and thither at crazy speeds – but behind it all, behind all this frenetic human activity, we could see the earth, the soil, the rocks, the grass, the graceful trees, the crooked little rivers, and the faraway mountains of Wales, blue and misty, filling us both with longing.

  ‘Lovely, eh?’ said Mr Vogel. We stood and watched, until he grew tired. Below us, in one of the oaks, we could see a treecreeper hoovering the bole for insects. Another bird, much larger – a buzzard perhaps – nestled in the upper branches.