by Tim Parks
He gets to the tenth channel, the twelfth. Suddenly it’s English. BBC World. They have a satellite. This is unexpected. Perhaps at the top of the hour there will be a word about his, Harold Cleaver’s, surprise resignation from Britain’s most serious, most successful talk show: Crossfire. But for the moment an old acquaintance, Martin Clabburn, is interviewing a man in a turban. Surely you’re not going to pretend that you were unaware of collaborating with one of the most ruthless governments of modern times? Martin appears to be outraged, but poised too. The man in the turban gives a poised and combative reply. They are allies. The show proceeds. Cleaver sucks his teeth. Nothing, a voice has started to repeat in his head, could more emphatically confirm the rightness of your decision to bail out than this rehearsal of a completely fake confrontation. Clabburn again makes some piously offensive remark to which the turbaned man once more replies with offensive piety. How wearying. Yet so long as you lie here watching the show, you haven’t really left. The viewer is always complicit. A close-up suggests that the only real emotion Clabburn is experiencing is his pleasure in the discomfort he imagines he is causing the man. Cleaver Carves Up President, was how the Guardian had described his famous interview. The fellow in the turban seemed to be relishing the fight.
Then Cleaver must have missed a few minutes – perhaps he actually dozed off – because now quite unexpectedly the theme music explodes; the screen is a kaleidoscope of dramatic scenes and hi-tech items that appear to be whirling through space between riots and bloodshed and exulting athletes. Television has been taken over by these clips, Cleaver’s elder son had written in his discussion of his father’s many controversial TV debates and topical documentaries. How the boy could have claimed the book was a novel is beyond Cleaver. A mixture of the air-raid siren and the sexiest, state-of-the-art gadget, his son had written: the intention being, as my father once told me in one of his interminable attempts to coach me as a journalist, as a writer, because it must be understood that my father couldn’t speak to someone, to anyone, without trying to seduce them if they were a woman or to coach them if they were a man – the intention being, my father explained, to instil in the viewer both intense anxiety and extreme complacency, simultaneously. Did I really say something as intelligent as that, Cleaver wondered? He smiled. Certainly his son had become a past master. I coached him well. My elder son. Then in the shifting red lights of this grotesquely long, end-of-show clip, Cleaver glanced at the doll on the chest of drawers. She is watching; her porcelain eyes are rapt, her smile enviably vacant. Cleaver lifted the remote and killed the screen.
At once he became aware of singing. The men downstairs are singing something. There’s the strain of an accordion. I’m hungry, Cleaver realises. I mustn’t expect to be compos mentis today of all days. Just stick to plan. Compost mentis. That was an old joke. He put on his shoes and went out on the landing but couldn’t find the light switch. Perhaps the handsome landlady had explained something. From the dark stairwell the singing swelled up louder. Cleaver ran his finger blindly over the walls. They were male voices singing boisterously, in German. This was risking a splinter. He went back into his own room, turned the light on again and, leaving the door open, found his way to the top of the stairs. From every shadowy ledge, as he descended, the dolls stared and smiled in facile approbation. There is something noisy about these dolls, Cleaver decided. Something choral. From beneath, the male chorus grew louder as he trod carefully down past the mute, female dolls. There was something military to the rhythm now. Almost all the politicians I interviewed, Cleaver reflected, pausing to let his eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, were men; while almost all the viewers and readers who wrote to me were women.
Then, on the very last stair, imagining he was already at ground level, he stumbled and fell forward against a table where two shiny eyes stared blindly. A door banged open and there was bright light to his right; the card-players were cheering and thumping the table in self-congratulation at the end of their song. A tall bearded man paid Cleaver no attention as he stamped off down the corridor. Cleaver replaced the doll in a standing position and walked into the bar.
He had been sitting five minutes at a corner table before the woman detached herself from the far wall and came to him. She stood still in her apron, hair gathered beneath a white headscarf. Most of the dolls had headscarves too. Cleaver did not want to be reduced to pointing fingers at his mouth. He smiled apologetically: Do you, um, have anything to eat? She passed her tongue over her lower lip, watching him steadily. She is unaware of course that Harold Cleaver is used to talking to audiences of upwards of ten million people. Bread? He asked. The woman raised her eyebrows and looked around in evident impatience. Two men were singing softly, clinking their glasses on the table. Bier? she enquired brusquely. Cleaver surrendered and made the timeless gesture. He lifted his right hand and pushed three fingers toward his ample mouth, widening his eyes in what he knows any audience would register as a charming smile of self-irony and supplication. Zu spät, the woman said. Her face is attractive – there are friendly wrinkles round bright eyes – but the cheeks betray the slight jowliness of early middle age. Trinkn, trinkn, trinkn! the men have begun to chant. The knocking of their glasses has become a clatter. The woman pushed her cardigan off her wrist and tapped her watch. Zu spät. Brot, Cleaver remembered and then, Speck? She pursed her lips and turned away.
Cleaver ate with his head forward over a wooden platter. The beer is icy. He wonders if the men have stopped singing because of his presence. More than fifty million had watched his interview with the President when CBS picked it up stateside. I put it to you, Mr President – Cleaver realised he would have to cut the speck into smaller pieces – that you have simply allowed your agenda to be driven by a series of ongoing debates and conflicts, the Middle East, terrorism, the white-collar tax burden – while the real challenges for the future – global warming, excessive consumption, alternative energy sources, you have largely ignored. When the President had hesitated, Cleaver added: Or do you think that in a democracy it’s inevitable that the successful politician will be no more than a choirmaster for the loudest chorus? The stringy ham keeps catching in his teeth. Let me get this straight, the handsome President said aggressively, I am my own man. Then Cleaver smiled his famously dangerous smile. He smiles it again now, chewing his food: Mr President, you have just used two clichés, one right after the other. He needed a toothpick. A robot could be programmed to give better answers than that.
Suddenly the card players were arguing. Someone was being accused of cheating. Or so it seemed to Cleaver. The only man wearing a jacket and tie threw his hand down on the table and pushed his chair back in disgust. As he stood up, another jumped to his feet and pushed him back. Incongruously, he wore a leather cowboy hat. The well-dressed man stumbled and almost fell. Everyone was shouting or laughing. The landlady ran to the table. A younger man, a boy almost, in green corduroy trousers and chequered shirt lifted a red accordion from the floor and began to play, softly and squeezily, some peasant dance. Perfect background, Cleaver decided. All at once the quarrel was over and another tray of beers was crossing the floor.
My room is cold, he told the woman. Do you have an extra blanket? He made the gesture of snuggling into wool, of pulling something up over his head. She concentrated on counting coins from a pouch at her waist. Blanket! Or I’ll freeze. Brrr! It had been a mistake to order cold beer. But now the man in the cowboy hat came over. A big blanket for a big man! he boomed. He said something to the woman. She nodded. Welcome to the Südtirol! he went on expansively. He has a thin, almost cylindrical head, a hooked eagle nose, twinkling eyes. You want to ride a horse while you are in Luttach, you come to Hermann! Onkel Hermann’s Stable! Already he was putting a business card in Cleaver’s chill fingers. A big horse for a big arse! He clapped and laughed. You want a woman, you ask Frau Schleiermacher. She knows everybody. Ha, ha, ha! A bigger whore for the man who has more, Cleaver quipped. My father’s quips were intermin
able and interminably crude, his son had written. But Hermann couldn’t follow this. The Südtirol welcomes you, he repeated nodding and laughing and offering his hand. His grip was iron.
Cleaver had been back in his room five minutes when the boy with the dyed black hair brought the extra blanket. His satanic earring made Cleaver smile. But he couldn’t remember the kid’s name. Had it really been Amen? Foreign names find no pigeonholes in our minds. Cleaver’s elder daughter, Angela, had been through a phase when she wore all kinds of rather grotesque emblems of death. It was gross misrepresentation, surely, to describe this as an attempt to reveal the depth of her unhappiness to her distracted parents. There are droves of adolescents, Cleaver announced out loud, wearing satanic bric-a-brac. Mainly earrings and bracelets of dark silver, or grey steel, or black T-shirts with orange, hell-fire motifs. It is part of the modern world’s parody of everything that once meant something and made us tremble. But Cleaver had never considered confronting his son over the account he had given in his book. Almost as soon as he lay down, he realised that the extra blanket would not be enough.
The problem is his feet. The extra blanket would certainly be enough, Cleaver thought, if only his feet were already warm. He turned off the bedside lamp. As it was, he couldn’t feel them at all. He reached for the wire and turned the lamp on again. The Tyrolese doll is still staring at the blank TV screen. Oh to be as thoughtless as a doll! As careless of heat and cold!
Cleaver got up. He had stripped to his pants and vest. Leaving the door open, he padded out onto the landing – what a fat figure he would cut now – and tried the door that the landlady had indicated as the bathroom. What he did at home when his feet were cold was to take a hot bath. The times when Amanda would warm them between her thighs were over almost before they began. To say my parents had a stormy relationship, his elder son had written, would be like saying that Arafat and Sharon enjoyed the occasional tiff. The water in the shower was cold. Cleaver waited, advancing a finger from time to time. Sometimes my son’s analogies leave a tad to be desired, he thought. He even laughed. The water gushed from the shower head but stayed cold, cold as the streams tumbling from alpine rocks in the night. Heißes Wasser. She had definitely said that, though now Cleaver began to wonder if the idea hadn’t been associated with Frühstück in some way. Noch nicht. Returning to his room, he had the first inkling that this was a serious problem.
Cleaver put all his clothes back on, including his leather coat and climbed back into bed. Then he got out again and arranged the two blankets so that he could roll himself into them. Roly-poly pudding, he muttered. His face and his bald spot are covered now. He breathed his own warm breath in the dark. This room smells, he realised. He hadn’t noticed before. My feet aren’t warming up at all. They seemed to be separate from the rest of his body, as if what he perceived as cold was in fact the famous ghost pain after amputation.
Damn! Suddenly he wants a cigarette. Cleaver turned on the light. There was no doubt that the sections of Under His Shadow that dealt with the narrator’s father’s chronic hypochondria were among the cruellest and the funniest in the book. Cleaver unrolled the blankets, sat up, hauled in his feet and began to massage them. Fuck the book. The skin is a queer, greyish colour. The wonder, his eldest son had written, is that my father’s constant conviction that he was only a few moments away from a heart attack never prevented him from eating and whoring and drinking and smoking. However hard he rubbed them, Cleaver’s feet remained exactly as they were, grey, cold and slightly damp. He hadn’t had a cigarette for at least three months, nor a woman for six, so it was depressing to feel he wanted one now. How can I pass the time till my feet get warm? He looked around for the remote. And this is the man who is planning to go and live in a mountain cabin! Tomorrow he must sort himself out. I’ll get all the kit.
He put his shoes back on and began to walk up and down the room. He was moving on blocks of ice. After fifteen minutes, no change. The doll is staring. Just go and bloody-well ask for another bloody blanket, a voice announced, or four, or a quilt, or a hot-water bottle. Didn’t the Germans all use quilts these days? But Cleaver isn’t going to go and ask. He knows that. It is something to do with the language problem. And a challenge too: he knows he would feel ashamed. The landlady has judged that two thick blankets should be enough. It isn’t really a cold night. It’s autumn, but not winter. Cleaver doesn’t want to draw attention to his weakness. My father, his son had written, would have competed with Carl Lewis at the hundred metres, with Muhammad Ali in the ring, with Pete Sampras on the tennis court. He was quite simply the most competitive man who ever lived. Sometimes I felt that he had chosen Mother and she him because, since they both worked in the media, they would be able to compete with each other day in day out their lives long. It’s a lie that I competed with the children, though, Cleaver thought. Damn these feet. He grabbed the TV remote and pointed it.
As if he had turned on on purpose to hear the news, BBC World launched directly into its top-of-the hour bulletin. Eleven p. m. European time. BBC World! an authoritative voice declared, Demand a broader view! Cleaver sat on the bed and took his shoes off again. Anyone who truly took an intelligent view, he thought, would deny himself the use of the slogan. What my son lacks, Cleaver realised then, watching the camera pick over the ruins of some Palestinian village, which is what makes him so successful perhaps, is any sense of pathos. The pathos of journalism’s interminable superficiality, the pathos of marriage and parenthood, the pathos of cold feet, damn it. Though of course he and Amanda had never married. Every time Mother asked, my father said no, and every time my father asked, Mother said no. We’re the perfect mismatch, my father quipped. A match yes, but always a Miss, Mother would answer. Match, as in incendiary device, my father would come back. Cleaver massaged his miserable feet. My son is a genius of caricature, he decided. Everything and everyone was described in such a way that he, she or it could be slotted into some available cultural pigeonhole. Hence character and action were always memorable. That’s the key to success. A name the public can recognise. A situation where everything is clear. The boy missed all the pathos of it, Cleaver thought, and the fun too. I myself forgot the half and more long ago.
Without thinking, Cleaver reached for the bedside table and turned on the red mobile. I must get away from this sterile engagement with my son, he decided. It was exhausting. The small screen glowed. You did not come to the South Tyrol to conduct conversations with the world you left behind. The name HAROLD CLEAVER appeared together with his home phone number. I’ll have to change that. Then there was a few seconds’ wait. Cleaver had often tried to visualise this business of the little gadget sending its feelers out into the busy air for some welcoming network to lock into. At such moments, even the mobile has a pathos, he thought, an imagined pathos, the desire to lock in to the collective mind. The BBC began its ritual analysis of the world’s stock markets. By now everyone has a pigeonhole for the NASDAQ, the dollar against the yen.
OST-NET, the screen suddenly decides. Almost at once the phone began to vibrate. One message. Two messages. Three, four, five, six. The number stopped at fifteen and a small image of an envelope began to flash in the top left corner. Memory full. Cleaver felt in the inside pocket of his coat. He felt in his jacket. Don’t say! He can’t find his reading glasses. Rapidly he went through all his pockets, his jacket, his trousers. Could I have been so stupid? But perhaps it would be better not to read them. He had meant to give up reading in general. Straining his eyes to focus, he wondered what order the messages had been written in. Is there any way of knowing? All from Amanda. No, he couldn’t make out the letters.
Turning away from the television, Cleaver had to put the mobile under the lampshade right in the naked glare of the bulb. There, just.
What am i supposed 2 do with yr stuff mr renegade because if u’ve really gone no way i want it cluttering the place here
As soon as Cleaver pressed the erase button, the phone vibrated with the arr
ival of another message.
BTW u shld see the phonebill yr daughter has run up.
Again Cleaver erased and again the phone vibrated. Amanda could text, he reflected, while cooking, while driving, while on the john. Amanda loves texting. He squinted:
Michaels has called 5 times in 15 mins I reminded him deserters shld b shot as they ran
Cleaver smiled, clicked again.
I knew u wldn’t have the balls not 2 take yr phone
Now he had to close his eyes a moment. The letters had begun to blur. The BBC had started a feature about a language on the edge of extinction, in Siberia. It is extraordinary how much enthusiasm and drama a TV troupe can put into such reports that in no way affect the lives of 99.99 per cent of their audience. Apparently the marvel was that these Mongol-looking people needed only one word to say, I’m going out bear hunting.
I really will throw yr stuff out u no – he went back to the phone – 1st editions included
Though there were hardly any bears left, the journalist was lamenting now, and even fewer language speakers to hunt them.
