In the Shape of a Boar

by Lawrence Norfolk

  Leon Fleischer's letter had arrived directly, however, at the Hotel d'Orléans. By that point, Sol had learned to regard such envelopes without anticipation. Those few publishers who had replied had confined themselves to expressions of regret. This time, however, he had read, ‘Thank you for your recent submission which is receiving the attention of the editorial committee of Fleischer Verlag.’

  ‘Surrer! Don't tell me you haven't heard of Surrer Verlag.’

  ‘Yes, I have. But what is wrong, Herr Fleischer?’

  ‘Poverty. Why else does one sell one's publishing house?’

  ‘I mean your health.’

  ‘Just age.’

  He had received a second communication from Fleischer Verlag in the late spring of 1951. ‘Your recent submission has been considered by the editorial committee of Fleischer Verlag in whose judgement it merits publication. Please sign and return the contracts enclosed.’ Underneath, a handwritten note from Leon Fleischer had invited him to visit, if ever he were to find himself in Vienna.

  Sol had stared at the note then walked slowly upstairs, closed The Service and Maintenance Manual for the Mauer Large-Particle Filtration Pump (Models P35, PS35 and P55) and reached into the wardrobe for his coat. He wanted to tell someone, he realised. Or he wanted someone to tell. He had read the note again and then gone to Gare de l'Est to inquire after trains to Vienna.

  ‘Poetry I have. Paper I lack.’ Leon Fleischer had waved a near-transparent sheet which drooped like a handkerchief. He pointed a sharp nose in Sol's direction. His small dark eyes swept over his guest. Pinched cheeks and a bald angular head suggested some kind of diagnostic instrument, thought Sol. Fleischer edged his way around chairs piled with books bound in Fleischer Verlag's dark blue covers, extending a hand towards Sol, who shook it.

  ‘You would be?’

  The telephone rang before he could answer.

  Fleischer listened for a moment then said, ‘Your problem. But my loss. No, I do not wish to speak with Herr Friessner.’

  A longer pause followed, during which he motioned for Sol to sit down.

  Leon Fleischer said, ‘Delivery is not a commutative process.’

  The receiver clattered in its cradle.

  ‘Solomon Memel,’ said Sol, but then the telephone had rung again.

  Fleischer hovered over a crowded desk, the backs of his knees knocking against a wooden swivel-chair into which he seemed always almost on the point of settling. His pen scratched quickly at the blotter while he spoke into the mouthpiece. A number of typed manuscript pages engaged his attention between these interruptions, or perhaps they were themselves the interruptions, for they elicited from him similarly discontinuous volleys of words. He would look up after each outburst as if to include Sol in the private commentary which either text or telephone had provoked. Sol nodded or shook his head as seemed appropriate, understanding only that the editorial committee of Fleischer Verlag, and all others of its officers, appeared to consist in Leon Fleischer alone.

  ‘Nonsense and no,’ the publisher said finally, at once dropping the receiver of the telephone and turning over the last page of the manuscript.

  ‘Done. Herr Solomon Memel, forgive me. I did not expect you and I am very glad you have come. On the strength of the work you have sent me, I believe you to be the most significant poet of your generation. Now let us talk.’

  Sol had left Vienna two days later. The smart blue volume had appeared from Fleischer Verlag eight months after that, in December. To date, a little more than a year since Sol's first meeting with Leon Fleischer, Die Keilerjagd had sold forty-one copies.

  Now he asked, ‘But what do you mean, Herr Fleischer, when you say “Just age"?’

  ‘Is it the adverb confusing you, Herr Memel, or the noun? Why do poets never wish to hear the good news?’

  ‘What is the good news, Herr Fleischer?’

  ‘Reichmann has called.’

  ‘Walter Reichmann?’

  ‘He wants to interview you.’

  The following week a broad-shouldered man in a black linen suit stood in the hall of the Hotel d’Orléans. He turned lightly on his feet at the sound of Sol's footsteps. An owlish face was framed by a close-trimmed beard and short grey hair. He smiled, disclosing tobacco-stained teeth.

  ‘Greetings, Herr Memel,’ said Walter Reichmann. ‘I am honoured to meet the author of Die Keilerjagd.‘

  The two men shook hands.

  ‘There used to be a restaurant not far from here,’ Reichmann continued. ‘In rue Domat, if I remember correctly. Wonderful spinach. Do you know it?’

  The restaurant had changed hands. It was too early in the season for spinach. The two men ate a thick chicken stew and watched each other over their spoons. After his initial burst of bonhomie, Reichmann had made only the smallest of small-talk, commenting first on the framed photographs displayed on the walls, then on the string of pennants which hung above the bar. When Sol enquired after his dining companion's journey, Reichmann replied, with a self-deprecating smile, that it was he who ought to be asking the questions. But he resolutely failed to ask any. Sol watched the interviewer's hands carefully tear the remaining bread into fragments, then drop these into his stew. From time to time the dull clangour of pots being washed sounded from the kitchen. Reichmann had large hands for his size. They were as unexpressive as their owner. The two men were the restaurant's only customers.

  ‘Shall we walk?’ suggested Reichmann when the meal was over.

  They stepped out into a street of shuttered shops and began an aimless progress in which Reichmann seemed guided by a search for occasions to recall the history of the quarter. Here Verlaine had died, and here an American novelist had lived between the wars, and here Descartes was thought to have written the Discourse on Method ('But this is not true'). Reichmann presented each observation with a little shrug and Sol nodded or agreed. The irony that he, who had occupied this quarter for three years, was being shown its sights by his visitor seemed unremarkable. I have not lived here, he thought. His Paris flowed around him like air. In which future would someone look up at the Hotel d’Orléans and point out the room of Solomon Memel?

  The afternoon wore on. They ambled deeper into the back-streets, their route taking them further away from the river. Sol's puzzlement at Reichmann's aimlessness became mild irritation, and finally a perturbed boredom. Something lay under what Reichmann was telling him and something else underlay Sol's unease. They were related. Eventually, the two men arrived outside a door with a tiny grille set into a high windowless wall. Pink onion-domes rose behind it.

  ‘They serve wonderful mint tea here,’ said Reichmann. ‘Are you thirsty?’

  But Sol was no longer willing to continue the other's enigmatic charade.

  ‘No,’ he said, and pointed across the road. ‘Let's go in there.’

  An imposing edifice was set back from the thoroughfare by an open courtyard and a broad flight of stone steps. Fluted columns rose into the air and supported an enormous pediment bearing an elaborate frieze depicting animals.

  ‘The Jardin des Plantes?’ queried Reichmann. ‘But of course. It will be perfect.’

  They entered and climbed the staircase to the first floor. A varnished wooden sign above a high doorway announced: Les Espèces Disparues. Within, two rows of glass cases ran the length of the gallery. Sol smelt chalk dust and old air. Inside the cases stuffed animals were displayed. Their yellowed claws had been wired to branches to hold them in dramatic poses. Beneath the faded fur and thinning plumage showed the dull sheen of embalmed skin. Their glass eyes glittered implausibly, as if such creatures had never existed at all in nature but had been constructed here. Soon, Sol thought vaguely, even their extinctions would be extinct.

  The gallery was high and narrow and the least sound echoed in the glassed roofspace. But it was silent, Sol realised. Reichmann had stopped talking. Dodo, he read. Quagga. The dried skin of a sea cow lay stretched out in a cabinet with a wooden rule to indicate its length, whi
ch was four metres and twenty-two centimetres.

  Enough waiting, Sol thought. He had not understood Walter Reichmann's small-talk, nor his pedantic commentary during their tour of the Latin Quarter. Both were clear in the eloquence of his silence.

  ‘When did you eat the wonderful spinach?’ Sol asked.

  They were standing a little apart, in front of a cabinet from which an over-sized bison-like creature regarded them.

  L'Aurochs était un grand boeuf d'Europe, proche du zébu d'Asie . . .

  ‘I served here during the war,’ replied Reichmann.

  Moa. Hydrodramalis gigas.

  There was a long silence, which Reichmann eventually broke. ‘I have to ask my questions.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Sol.

  Sol said, ‘I do not know, in literal terms, how I arrived at the place where Die Keilerjagd was written, but it had to be written. In the context of my situation – I may say our situation – my journey was inevitable. One speaks of loss as something one carries, or bears, but that is not the case. I know that my father died of typhus in a work camp and that my mother was shot as ‘unfit for work’. To me they have disappeared, leaving no evidence that they existed. I returned one morning to the place where I had left them and they were gone. One may approach such realities, but only by circuitous routes. Such absences, I mean . . .

  ‘When I was discovered by the andartes, the Greek partisans, I was unconscious. I had given up. I did not know what country I was in, nor how far I had travelled to reach it. I came to the task with nothing, nothing at all . . .

  ‘There must once have been a boar, in some shape or form. And a hunt. Kalydon was a coastal kingdom, where the Greek heroes gathered. The boar could only have led them north, into the mountains. Towards myself. So I saw their fate, instead of those I did not see. Through them I was the witness of the fate I had fled, do you follow?

  ‘The situation was confused. I understood little at the time. In the mountains I could not speak the language and in the camp there were only rumours. The Germans were readying themselves for the withdrawal; everyone knew that. Some andarte groups were trying to prevent this and others were willing to let them go. Of course there were elements of bluff on both sides. Traps were set. The events in which I was involved formed part of this, I believe . . .

  ‘Eberhardt, Oberfeldkommandant Oberstleutnant Heinrich Eberhardt, to give him his full title, was responsible for the worst. There were military objectives, to ensure the withdrawal, for example, but towards the end even this pretext disappeared. There were no objectives, no purpose, only savagery and waste, a visitation of rage. The boar's mark, as I saw it . . .

  ‘No. I can say no more of Thyella than I have said. She took that as her nom de guerre. Her real name was Anastasia Kosta, although I learned it only after the war. It was her arrow that found him, so to speak, just as Atalanta's first found the boar . . .

  ‘But how does one write of a disappearance? What of those events which leave no trace and those beings who leave no footprints? There are terrains which admit nothing and record nothing. Such places do exist. If the poem grows “mysterious”, as you say, when it enters the cave then there must exist a mystery to solve. But it is not so. The invisibility of what takes place there is necessary. Some acts will be performed only under cover of such a darkness. I tried to bear witness to what I could not see. To what could not be seen . . .

  ‘No, not quite. Her face was the one I awoke to, but it was only after the attack that I saw it as an image. There were flashes, you see, openings in the smoke. The Thyella of Die Keilerjagd is remembered from one such. But I saw the bodies of the partisans in the same way. They had been hung from the branches of a tree. Just a glimpse. Like a grotesque menorah. That image would become the death of the sons of Thestius, high on Aracynthus. The last image was the entrance to the gorge. There was a fissure in the cliff behind the village, with soldiers around it. At its far end was the Cauldron and the cave. I had already passed through the gorge, of course, but unconscious. I would not see it again for a year and a half, and then the circumstances were very different. Then it was we who were hunting. And Eberhardt was the hunted . . .

  ‘Yes, with my own eyes. You asked how?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was barbaric, of course, but it used to be common practice in the villages outside the town where I grew up. I doubt it was different in the mountains of Greece. The peasants used to say that the meat would be tainted unless it was done while the animal was alive. But to children, especially Jewish children, the allure was irresistible: blood, death, knives. And the sexual aspect perhaps. The genitals themselves. Its being a pig added another illicit thrill. I never actually stood there and watched but she must have seen it done many times, as a child.’

  Finally, ‘Correct. Just as I described. Then she shot him.’

  Reichmann wrote quickly, in a compact hand.

  A train stirred beneath the cover of the siding-shed, a train identical to the one that had carried him to Paris. It had rested here for at least the six years since his arrival. Now cobwebs quivered in the angles of its windows. Couplings clanked and fine dust rose from its empty seats. The carriages shuddered as the locomotive's insistence tautened through their length. The long shed wrapped them in darkness but there was a glare of daylight ahead, where the doors had been opened and the track stretched into the distance.

  The locomotive's blunt nose emerged little by little into the light, pulling the protesting carriages. Some were windowless, mail-cars perhaps. After that came flatcars carrying the years’ accumulated detritus: broken cement sacks, fuel drums cut in half, tar-coated lengths of wood. No one had expected this train ever to move again, but here it was.

  He saw that there were already far more cars than could have been housed in the shed. The locomotive was hundreds of metres down the track. It sounded its horn – mee-mel! mee-mel! – and at that its composition changed again. Closed cars began to emerge, built of rough planks and bearing an encrustation of dried mud for livery. There were more and more of them. The head of the train was almost out of sight now and yet he seemed to be aware of every part of it. The locomotive was approaching the city he had left in favour of Paris years before, the city where Ruth would be waiting. Parts of the train were in tunnels, others slicing through cuttings or passing over viaducts. The rearmost section was still rolling out of the shed. As the closed cars trundled forward into the light they were met by men and women who struggled to keep pace for a while then fell back, exhausted. He was inside, peering out between the planks of the walls. He recognised faces – Chaim Fingerhut was there and Gustl Ritter – but most of them were unknown to him. They were trying to grasp little pieces of paper which he was pushing between the planks. Mee-mel! mee-mel! mee-mel!

  The other cars were empty. He had his suitcase, which he was sitting on, and the twenty-seven notebook pages, which he was tearing into fragments small enough to push through the cracks between the planks, knowing that each one would be grasped by a fluttering hand outside, uncrumpled, smoothed and saved. The train was endless. He was its only passenger. He would be back in Venice soon.

  Mee-mel! Monsieur Mee-mel!

  ‘Have you received Reichmann's article? Ach! The post is a licence to sell stamps and betray. Not at all. Quite the opposite. Yesterday the orders were, wait, let me see. One moment, Herr Memel . . .’

  Leon Fleischer's voice had changed again. Now it rasped in Sol's ear as he stood in the hallway. He saw the concierge moving behind the frosted glass, a limbless insect. A truck rumbled slowly past, paused, engine throbbing, then continued on its way. It was two months since he had bade farewell to Walter Reichmann.

  Upstairs in his room, the book on the desk was opened at a page with black and white line drawings of a man, a woman and two children sitting down to supper. The legend above read: La Famille: Une Institution Type?’ A sheet of paper beside it displayed the handwritten words ‘Die Familie: Eine typische Anstalt (?)’ Sol's tr
anslation of La Sociologie, une Introduction aux Principes Fondamentals was all but done. It would, however, never be completed. Fleischer's voice returned and rasped again.

  ‘What? I beg your pardon, Herr Fleisch. . . . Could you, yes. I mean I did not hear you correctly. I see. Yes, I see. No, I'm simply surprised. Very surprised.’

  He put down the telephone and stood quietly in the hall-way, considering the creature who had come into being in Reichmann's article. A second Solomon Memel had been framed within its columns of text, as he saw when the magazine arrived some days later with his name prominent upon the cover. The protagonist of Reichmann's narrative had created himself in the harsh terrain of the mountains, turned on his enemy and defeated him.

  Over the months that followed, he repeated what he had first told Walter Reichmann to a procession of the critic's more junior colleagues and rivals. The face of Solomon Memel looked out from magazine covers and for a few days after each of these appearances he would be recognised in shops and cafés. He was asked to appear on television and refused. Leon Fleischer telephoned with news of the volume's continuing success and the details of his skirmishes with the executives of Surrer Verlag. The negotiations, Fleischer told him with glee, had been transformed by the success of Die Keilerjagd.

  ‘They are such clumsy huntsmen, Solomon. Crashing about in the undergrowth. They will never catch your boar.’ The publisher's voice grew gravelly through the summer. A breathy whistle appeared in the autumn.

  That October a Swiss newspaper published an overexposed photograph of three women standing on a hillside with rifles slung over their shoulders and bandoliers of bullets. The caption read: ‘Anastasia Kosta (left), the “Thyella” of Solomon Memel's Die Keilerjagd, photographed in the western foothills of the Pindus three years before her death.’ The accompanying article claimed that the picture had been taken in the summer of 1941.