In the Shape of a Boar

by Lawrence Norfolk

  Jakob's footnotes began as textual references: thickets of abbreviated names, followed by chapter, section and line numbers. After several pages of these, comments began to intrude, brief interruptions in the near-indecipherable blocks which squatted below the lines of the poem. Short and sparse at first, they expanded gradually into sentences, then short paragraphs, while the textual references from which they were derived were relegated to parentheses. A commentary began to emerge and, as it did so, a smile spread across Sol's face. He could almost hear the arch self-certainty in Jakob's voice; the sound of it was as present to him as if its owner were sitting across from him at a table outside the café in Ringplatz, or with Ruth sandwiched between them on the grass of Schillerpark. But now the irritation he would once have felt at the first note of that voice – its presumption of rectitude, Jakob's blithe indifference to its effect – was displaced by pleasure.

  True, Jakob disapproved of his dolphins. He censured his choice of weapons. Composite bows were no more available to the fathers of the warriors at Troy than his ‘snub-nosed’ machine-guns were to their distant ancestors. His apples were unseasonal and the flora of Mount Zygos simply wrong. A flood sweeping through the Kleisura? Impossible: the local watersheds forbade it. And so on. Had this been the cause of Reichmann's anxiety?

  As the commentary continued it seemed that its author's thoughts had been increasingly dominated by details of geography, the placement and orientation of buildings, or the altitudes and aspects proper to different plants. Questions of where things could plausibly exist battled laboriously with where he, Solomon Memel, had situated them. Of the reed-choked lake where Atalanta had bathed Meleager and whence Thyella had made her miraculous escape, ‘self-fading into a darkness she had breathed, fleeing her “I” and mine’ (one of the poem's rare ventures into the first-person), Jakob noted the vegetation conspicuous by its absence. Where were the terebinths and oleanders, the club-rushes and knapweeds? The crater of the Cauldron was a geological and cartographical aberration.

  But you guided me there yourself, Sol murmured. He imagined Jakob sitting as he did now, turning the pages of his poem. Beginning, then ending, and beginning again. In Tel Aviv! How did he come to be there?

  Sol looked up from the closely-printed page. Reichmann floated out of the darkness.

  There had been a moment in the Jardin des Plantes when Walter Reichmann's voice had cracked. Sol fancied the man had been close to tears. Now I must ask my questions. He had known him in that instant. Of course he would answer the critic's questions. It was very important to provide answers, he recalled, and promptly too. He would do so. Had done so. Reichmann's war was burdensome enough a memory without the mysteries of its victims.

  Sol glanced down at the page before him. Jakob appeared to be buttressing an incident near the end of the poem with documentary sources. A convoluted joke was being played; humour, reflected Sol, had never been Jakob's strongest suit. The footnote advanced solidly down the page, citing this, referring to that. There was something odd about the references, which Sol might have missed had not the last echoed the name of a region and tolled a distant bell in his memory. That was it. The texts Jakob referred to in support of the passage were lost. He closed the book. But Reichmann's strange reappearance at the Hotel d’Orléans remained incomprehensible.

  The article that Moderssohn had promised was in fact a clipping from a column which had appeared two weeks before in Maariv. A translation had been stapled to it, together with a message from his new editor asking him to telephone once he had read ‘the attached’.

  ‘With editors like Professor Feuerstein of the University of Tel Aviv who needs enemies? After the spelling has been corrected, the grammar untangled, and the right number of commas sprinkled over the text, what is an editor to do with himself? The answer, according to Professor Feuerstein, is notes!’

  ‘Readers will remember the stir caused last year by Solomon Memel's sensational poem Die Keilerjäger, and the even greater stir caused by its author's wartime reminiscences. But while we marvelled at the exploits lying behind that masterwork, Professor Feuerstein wondered at them. It seems those “exploits” might have been remembered just a little differently from the way they really happened. Who knows the truth of the matter? Professor Feuerstein, it seems.’

  Jakob was quoted: ‘The truth is always both self-evident and obscure. But assertions are correct or incorrect. Proven or provable or not. I have applied simple criteria to a well-known text, a poetic text because poetry is an occasion of truth, the place where it becomes tellable. Or so it claims.’

  ‘So now we know!’ the anonymous columnist had commented. His, or her, jaunty tone sat strangely with the gnomic comments of ‘Professor Feuerstein’. A few minor factual in-accuracies were quoted, or misquoted in one instance. The piece ended, ‘Who knows, perhaps there never was a hunt?’

  One rhetorical question too many, thought Sol. Jakob sounded pretentious and deliberately obscure, the columnist frivolous and unconvincing – even unconvinced. The examples did not make the points that the argument, such as it was, tried to draw from them. They were directed differently, although Sol could not make out the direction. The whole article rang false. Why had Moderssohn bothered him with this?

  He picked up the article and Jakob's edition, put on his coat and left for the café on rue Spontini, which he had begun to frequent after his move from rue d'Ecole. It was mid-morning and the café was quiet. He sat down and read the article again. He would have to reply to it, he supposed, and began to compose a letter in his head. It occurred to him that no mention was made of any relationship between Jakob and himself. The columnist surely would have included such an irrelevant tidbit. Why had Jakob concealed it? The paraphrase from Rilke's elegy could only have been intended for himself. What was Jakob trying to tell him? Even after a decade, and at a distance of a thousand miles, Jakob could still exasperate him. He flipped open his distant friend's edition and began to read the notes once again. They were subtly different now, clouded by the columnist's silliness. But here were the familiar culprits: the dolphins who never ventured into the gulf of Corinth, the mountains which must have rotated on their bases, the sun which rose in the west and set in the east, the impenetrable darkness of the cave.

  Then he stopped. Suddenly he understood why the columnist's twitterings had seemed so unconvincing and Jakob's utterances so pompous and empty in their context. The columnist had misread his source. As had Sol. Jakob's factual corrections were innocuous. His painstaking reconstructions were exercises in futility. None of the points he raised mattered. The elements of his poem were either as he, Sol, had described them or slightly different. The poem might have been written to accommodate both possibilities, and the events it described happened as securely as they ever had. Jakob's drift was different.

  Sol read more carefully, understanding now the subtlety of Jakob's commentary, how it accrued its authority under cover of a leaden-footed hike through sources and references and facts, how it seemed to march towards its pointless end while bending its course towards a far less obvious destination. As he read on, he saw his work begin to change shape before his eyes, growing independently and gaining a resilience he had not conceived. Here the heroes gathered, and here the hunt began, and here the boar's rage broke through the thin turf, with its back bristling and its tusks stained with old blood, its snout sniffing for new. Its violence was inevitable, as was its death. Atalanta and Thyella sprang forward and matched each other stride for stride, racing into their respective darknesses. The cave was waiting for them all.

  But this was not Sol's poem. Or not the poem he had intended to write. Atalanta's arrow sped towards its mark, still undeflected by the change in its landscape. The tale stood, and stood alone. And now could only stand alone. The consequent realisation came slowly.

  Jakob's arrow sought not the tale, but its teller. Its accusation was directed at himself. These events took place in an impossible country, said Professor Feuer
stein of the University of Tel Aviv over the course of a hundred or more footnotes, a country whose weather was impossible, whose plants could not grow, whose geography was unmarked on any map. The ‘reality’ behind the lines of Die Keilerjagd was distant, as though transcribed from far away, or long after the events. But not by one who had played a part. Not by one who had witnessed them. Jakob's hunt was for a different Solomon Memel: one who had never been there.

  Sol's eyes skated over the surface of his poem, searching among its images for the ground from which they had sprung. But his words resisted him now. Jakob had written a different country over his own. It was as if – his distant annotator implied – he had never set foot there at all.

  Moderssohn did not telephone until the following week. His voice sounded as slow to Sol's ears as before.

  ‘We have received a number of enquiries. And a strange message from Walter Reichmann,’ said Moderssohn.

  ‘He turned up here two days before you last called,’ said Sol. ‘With this new edition. He behaved rather oddly.’

  ‘I'm sure he did. Professor Feuerstein, or someone at this Adler Verlag, has sent copies of it to most of the newspapers. There is an unhelpful article in today's SZ.‘

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘It questions Reichmann's judgement. He must have anticipated something of the sort. We have been talking here about taking legal action, as I mentioned.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Sol.

  ‘But we think, in the current climate, it would be inadvisable, Herr Memel.’

  ‘Inadvisable?’

  ‘The damage has been done. It might seem that we were trying to suppress the edition for dubious motives, and there might be difficulties mounting a local prosecution in any case. As far as we know, Feuerstein's edition has not been put on sale. I'm sure you would agree that it might do more harm than good, at this stage. Of course we are making it clear that Feuerstein's allegations are groundless. There is no question but that Surrer Verlag stands behind its authors.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘We must, however, make a difficult decision on the matter of the edition in preparation for the schools,’ Moderssohn continued. ‘As I said, the question of our authors’ integrity does not arise at Surrer. This would be a postponement, not a cancellation. Of course there will be a schools edition. At present, however, the feeling is that it might prove counter-productive to bring out such an edition now.’

  ‘What are you trying to tell me, Herr Moderssohn?’

  ‘I'm afraid several of the journalists have sought comments from the board responsible for the syllabus and as a result Die Keilerjagd has been withdrawn.’

  After a brief silence Sol said, ‘There is no truth in any of this.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Moderssohn. ‘I am very sorry, Herr Memel. If Jakob Feuerstein was your friend, why is he doing this?’

  Reichmann's odd manner grew more comprehensible when the post brought the first batch of newspaper clippings, forwarded without comment from the offices of Surrer.

  When even a critic with the acumen of a Walter Reichmann slips up, what hope for the rest of us? Last year's protégé, Solomon Memel, has come back to haunt the great Herr Reichmann. Pushed and puffed to fame and acclaim, it now seems there may be rather less to Solomon Memel than first met the eye. A new edition of Die Keilerjagd has made it clear, in not so many words – but plenty of footnotes – that Solomon Memel's memory contains some awkward gaps.

  One or two of the journalists speculated on the motives of ‘the independent scholar affiliated to the University of Tel Aviv’ or ‘the indefatigable annotator of Die Keilerjagd’, but the story was stronger with Jakob Feuerstein as a distant, somewhat mysterious figure. Through May and June most of the fun was had at Reichmann's expense, who did not reply. Der Spiegel did not deign to mention the affair.

  Sol, too, maintained his silence, mindful that no one yet had actually voiced the implication of Jakob's work in terms explicit enough to answer. At Andreas Moderssohn's urging he spent a week composing – and destroying – letters to Jakob. The message he finally sent, addressed to ‘Professor Jakob Feuerstein of the University of Tel Aviv’, read:

  ‘Dear Jakob, We have survived. Now we must talk. I will meet wherever you wish. Please write to me. Yours in hope, Solomon.’

  He received no reply.

  In the slack newsdays at the height of summer, several of the broadsheets ran long densely argued articles on the supposed authenticity of Die Keilerjagd, or on the integrity of its author. A fellow poet ‘defended’ Memel's right ‘to invent his life alongside his art’. An Austrian academic made the (carefully generalised) point that deliberate falsehood in poetry could be seen as a reaction against the unexamined normative falsehoods of everyday life, and thus as a higher form of truth. The only clipping that gave Sol any cheer was a letter addressed to the editor of Der Standard in Vienna:

  ‘Sir, My late husband, Leon Fleischer, would never have published the work of a charlatan. Solomon Memel is a great poet.’

  The editor had commented below Ingeborg Fleischer's letter: ‘This newspaper upholds the right of all great poets to be charlatans, and vice versa.’

  Sol spent his days working, in a desultory fashion, on translations of French poets – Char, Larbaud – and his evenings in the cafe on rue Spontini. When sleepless, he poured himself measures of American whiskey and wrote through the night, one measure per page. The work which resulted was formal, almost musical, with noisy bursts of strange imagery. He would wake late, sometimes slumped at the desk, and read through the night's yield. Invariably, come the morning, it was worthless.

  By the autumn, the newspaper clippings no longer arrived in thick packets from Surrer. October saw only a mention in an academic article chiefly concerned with a literary controversy which had taken place in Australia in the 1920s. November brought nothing at all. Then, in the last post of the year, a letter arrived from Tel Aviv. His own letter fell from the envelope. It was unopened. A covering note had been typed on headed paper from a Professor Zvi Yavetz of the Department of Philology. It read:

  ‘Please find enclosed your letter addressed to “Professor Jakob Feuerstein of the University of Tel Aviv”. This institution wishes to state that Professor Feuerstein neither gained his professorship from the University of Tel Aviv, nor has he ever been employed by or affiliated to this university in any way. We dissociate ourselves from the comments he has made and note that his publication(s) have not been published under the auspices of this university.’

  Underneath, in handwriting composed of large, untidily formed characters, Professor Yavetz had added, ‘I and the Hebrew Writers Circle of Tel Aviv salute you, Solomon Memel. We have spent many hours discussing your work and wish you well in this time of trial.’

  A Parisian Christmas passed, Sol's fifth, he realised as he listened to the bells ring out. He decided to open the whiskey bottle earlier than usual, in a secular celebration. Later he scrawled ‘Happy Christmas’ over Professor Yavetz's letter and addressed an envelope to Andreas Moderssohn at Surrer Verlag. His editor had not telephoned since . . . He could not remember. November? October?

  ‘Happy New Year, Herr Memel!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Happy New Year! This is Andreas Moderssohn. Did I wake you?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, no. Happy New Year, Herr Moderssohn.’

  It was January the ninth or tenth. Morning, he supposed.

  ‘Herr Memel, Spiegel has broken its silence. There is a long article. A wonderful article. Can you find a copy there in Paris or shall I send one?’

  The vendor at the International Presse kiosk at Gare du Nord looked at him curiously after he had cut open a bale and handed Sol the magazine. Sol glanced down and saw his own face staring up at him, ‘The Memel Affair’ stamped across his features. He walked across the road to the brasserie beneath the Hotel Terminus. Several of the interviews after Die Keilerjagd’s success had been conducted among the mirrors of its back dinin
g-room. He recognised the maître d'hôtel, but was not recognised in return. He ordered coffee at the bar.

  To his surprise, the article was not by Walter Reichmann, although the critic appeared as an actor within it. It was credited to ‘Slavko Mihailovic’, who began by recounting the familiar story of how Die Keilerjagd had come to be written, then published, how its success had been assured by a ‘ground-breaking’ article by ‘Germany's most respected literary critic and journalist’.

  Then the fall. Jakob's edition had appeared from an unknown Tel Aviv publishing house ‘in circumstances almost as mysterious as those of the text upon which it commented’. Mihailovic analysed how the edition made its allegations under cover of a disinterested process of bland annotation and how the cumulative effect of Jakob's corrections and quibbles resulted in a fatal undermining of the author of Die Keilerjagd. But then he broke off this analysis.

  ‘All this is beside the point. Jakob Feuerstein's charge is made implicitly; it is nowhere stated in his text. Nor has it been stated elsewhere, save by innuendo, rumour and slur. It is this: that the success of Solomon Memel's poem, Die Keilerjagd, derives not from its formal strengths but from its authenticity. It must be document as much as poem. Memel himself has spoken of the events lying behind his lines, the hunt for Eberhardt and his own part in it. Thyella herself has gained an iconic status. No one disputes that these events occurred, not even Professor Jakob Feuerstein. The charge is against their witness, Solomon Memel: that, contrary to Memel's own account, given to Walter Reichmann and published in this magazine, he was not there and so played no part in the events that inspired Die Keilerjagd. His poem rests thus on a falsehood, or has already sunk within it.

  ‘But Feuerstein's allegations are baseless, as even the most cursory examination would have shown. It has not been performed, until now.’

  Sol drained his cup and ordered another. As he read on, he reflected that ‘cursory’ hardly did justice to the extent of Slavko Mihailovic's ‘examination’. The journalist had travelled to Greece with what he called ‘a simple question needing a complicated answer’ and had set about disentangling the true from the false, the false from the merely mistaken and the merely mistaken from the wilfully misunderstood. Perhaps predictably, this project had led him into a morass of conflicting detail over which neither Jakob's account nor his own could claim greater authority.