Cleaver

by Tim Parks

  But there was no hurry. He toiled very slowly up the steep slopes for about an hour and a half. How the old flesh weighs on you, the sheer bulk of one’s body! If there had been an original sin … no, that was the wrong word, if there had been a defining impulse that had made him who he was, he thought, it was this always being in a hurry to achieve. Cleaver stopped for breath. He was panting. You were always hungry for praise. He looked upwards through the tall trunks. I’m not going back down, he decided, without having climbed above the trees. His eyes searched. There was no sign of an end. The air seems strangely still, as if trapped in the tangle of dark ivies and twigs. And that included your own praise, oddly enough. The branches of the larch drooped like loose sleeves. You were hungry for your own praise, he thought. You were in a hurry to admire yourself. He shook his head. I’ll make it to the treeline, he thought, or just above, take a quick look around, then turn back.

  Cleaver walked. Using the poles was jarring his shoulders. His left boot was rubbing at the heel now. He has blisters. All this was to be expected. With each hairpin twist he paused a moment; he had begun to notice the play of difference and sameness each time a new section of the path appeared: roots embedded in mossy rock; white fungus on brown bark; the ground thick with pine needles and cones and huge anthills; sparse wet grass and scrubby vegetation where the sun broke through in little streaks. Occasionally something moved, or rustled, or wings beat in the branches above. If I knew how to read all this better, Cleaver muttered, if I had lived here for many years, each turn of the path would be as different to me as people are different. And as similar. You’re going to let everything die, are you, just like that? Amanda demanded. She had woken him in the middle of the night. Less than forty-eight hours ago, come to think of it. Her mouth was tight with anger. She had been drinking. After all we’ve been through? Just because of that stupid book you’re going to abandon everything we’ve built together? You’re going to chicken out? I was right not to answer, Cleaver told himself. Who cares about a stupid book? she demanded. Who cares? You’ve just interviewed the President of the United States, for God’s sake! You’re the most important journalist in the United bloody Kingdom. She turned on the bedside lamp. He remembered her tight lips, the extraordinary energy of her contempt. When Amanda drank, she drank seriously. Answer me! she demanded. However painful it might be, he thought, not answering Amanda must be the first step, not accepting any back and forth. Nothing would appease her but capitulation. Phillip had been pleasant on the phone. Dad, you do whatever you want. Phillip is always pleasant, impenetrable. It’s your life in the end. Text me from time to time, Dads, Caroline whispered. She was in a library. She couldn’t talk. Caroline hasn’t understood yet, Cleaver thought. His younger daughter understood books not people.

  He sat down on a stone, completely exhausted. Why am I not relaxing? The wood was truly hushed now. Pine needles and moss. He strained to hear the traffic. Gone. No sound. He waited. Suddenly he felt disorientated. Hey! Cleaver shouted. Oy! There was no echo. Anyone around! No one. It was strange. He picked up a pine cone and threw it. I feel like an overripe fruit that has fallen from its branch, he announced. Perhaps that was what he should text Amanda. That would explain. But it was trite. My feet are in shreds. Last night they ached with cold and now they are burning with blisters. One has to get used to new boots. I knew that. Cleaver turned back. By the time he entered Luttach the afternoon was growing chill and he could barely walk. I must learn to take things slowly.

  The President of the United States will be re-elected President of the United States regardless of his disastrous interview with me, Harold Cleaver thought. He was watching television again. He had eaten alone in the big Stube. The sooner I’m living in a place without a television, he told himself, the better. That was obvious. The card players hadn’t arrived yet. My father always argued out loud with the television, his elder son had written in Under His Shadow. In fact, he talked more to the television than he ever did to us. It is also clear that I’m never going to lose weight eating dumplings and stew. But how could you refuse the only thing on the menu? Especially when you couldn’t understand what was written there anyway. Knödel. Cleaver flicked through the channels. He must remember that word. They were all talking about the presidential elections in languages he couldn’t understand: a scandal that wasn’t really a scandal, or so it seemed, in the Democratic camp. He had gathered that much. And regardless of our interminable war of attrition, our betrayals on either side, he reflected, my partnership with Amanda always continued. The first lady, if not the first wife, as she always said. He was tempted to turn on the phone. Do I hope there will be messages, or not? Actually, they weren’t really betrayals, Cleaver decided. When will this old territory come to an end? This echoing on and on. With the exception of Priya, perhaps. A lifetime has been spent, Cleaver thought, and untold megawatts of mental energy, revising my position on the word betrayal. It is a concept he has never got his mind around, not to his absolute and final satisfaction, the way one is never sure if one wants to believe that the universe has a boundary, or that it goes on beyond and beyond forever. Either way is inconceivable. Life with betrayal, life without it.

  Priya was definitely a betrayal, he told himself.

  Cleaver stood up, crossed the room, picked up the big Tyrolese doll from the cupboard and sat it beside him on the bed. The body was enamel hard under brittle grey frills. The baby face retained its vacant smile. Olga, he decided. Meanwhile, a German TV channel was putting little orange circles around the head of a handsome woman who, it appeared, was never more than a couple of yards from the Democratic candidate at his various would-be charismatic appearances. Scandal too, Cleaver thought, is a word that one increasingly struggles to get to grips with: is it a stumbling block, a form of promotion, or an initiation ceremony? For me to be found in this hotel room with you, for example, he told Olga, is that a scandal? Two tiny TV screens flickered in her eyes. Cleaver changed channel.

  An interesting game he had learned to play over many years in foreign hotel rooms was to see how much he could guess about the leading news stories in languages he didn’t know and then compare what he’d deduced with the BBC and CNN. Tonight it turned out that he’d missed the twist that the supposed mistress was married to a Republican senator. The Democratic candidate wasn’t despairing of his chances. He is getting more airtime. Every time, Cleaver remembered, that a betrayal or a scandal seemed to have blasted them apart forever – Harold Cleaver and Amanda Cunningham – it later turned out, on the contrary, that the crisis had fused them together in new combinations of cohabitation and conflict. I always thought this was a good thing, he remembered, though a little frightening.

  Suddenly, the Democrat evaporated and the frightening President was smiling at the camera, waving, congratulating himself. Cleaver stared. He put a hand in the doll’s hair. Perhaps the most curious thing about this sudden turn his life had taken was how, precisely in the euphoria of self-congratulation that had followed that interview – Mr President, I can remember no other administration that has presided over such a loss of moral capital – he had become aware, even before he was out of the studio, that something was about to change. But in Cleaver’s life, not the President’s. What made it almost impossible to escape from my father’s shadow, his elder son had concluded one of the central chapters of his fictionalised autobiography, was his completely castrating take on all the things you have to be able to treat seriously for life to make any sense. He rubbished everything, then went on subscribing to it all anyway, exactly as he had before, exactly as everybody else did. Television debates were meaningless, but my father was the undisputed master of them. Documentaries were always falsifications, but he went on making excellent documentaries and accepting praise for their authenticity. Marriage in particular was utterly pointless, yet in a way my father was more married than all his divorcing friends. Paper gatherers, he called them.

  Cleaver had read these comments in his elder son�
�s autobiographical first novel the day before the great interview, less than twenty-four hours, that is, before the culminating moment in his long career as one of the country’s most authoritative commentators on public life. An English interviewer would be a neutral figure, that was the bait they had hooked the President with. I always felt, his elder son had written, that I wanted to emulate my successful father, to write the way he did, to make conversation the way he could, since no one was wittier and sharper than my father when he put his mind to it, no one enchanted a dinner party, a studio audience, more completely than he did. But then when the guests had gone and you were alone with him, moving the dishes back to the kitchen perhaps, putting the corks in the bottles, he would tell you that it was a farce, an illusion. You were stupid for having been taken in. He told you that his documentaries were successful only because they played to the public’s desire to be shocked, to feel guilty, that his conversation was only attractive because it followed well-worked riffs. The artist is always a puppet, my father said. Never the puppeteer. The public is the puppeteer, he insisted. Shakespeare’s Prospero, he used to say, begs the audience to set him free at the end. He puts all the other characters under a spell but then has to beg to be set free himself. By the public. I must have heard my father say this at least a dozen times. So that, thinking back on it now, Cleaver’s elder son had written, to live with my father meant to be told that nothing you admired and aspired to was actually worth doing and, in any event, even if it was, he was already doing it far better than you ever could. He was a better talker, a better film-maker, a better writer, a better viveur, than you could ever be. Viveur, as it were, he would rhyme. Nothing could have been more paralysing. Our whole family – Harold Cleaver must have been reading these words only hours before the interview with the President of the United States, when he should have been scanning through pages of statistics and election promises – our whole family was as if frozen in the high noon of my father’s celebrity. The words frozen and celebrity were still reverberating in Cleaver’s head in the taxi on the way to the studio. My twin sister Angela got locked into drugs, his elder son had written; what is there to do in life when your father has done everything and informed you that it’s pointless, when he is famous and has told you that fame is ridiculous? She was paralysed and reckless. My younger sister, Caroline, did nothing but study. Study, study, study. She hardly spoke to anyone. My little brother, Phillip, lived, and still lives, in a complete fantasy world; reality, after all, had already been entirely cornered, occupied and written off by my father. For my part I always felt, almost from the moment that I became conscious of myself, as if I were under a strange spell. I so much wanted to get started in life, to make things change and move, but I couldn’t, because my father had explained to me – and my father was nothing if not convincing – that life, or at least the kind of life I wanted, was meaningless. So why start? Until the night the Berlin Wall came down. That was the turning point. Two days after my twentieth birthday and maybe two months after Angela got herself killed. Perhaps that shake-up was important. Anyway, the night the Wall came down I finally decided he was wrong. The people of Berlin, I realised as I watched the drama unfold on the television – do you remember, the crowds, the masonry torn down, the dancing? – the people of Berlin are proving my father wrong. The world can be changed. Only then, on that fateful evening, awestruck by the pictures, the jubilation, the unexpected triumph, did I push a first tentative foot into the light beyond my father’s shadow. Only then did I realise how completely he had been suffocating me.

  This account, Harold Cleaver had reflected, as he climbed out of the cab that evening, marvelling at the levels of security in force around the TV centre – and in particular this sentimental stuff about the night of the Berlin Wall – was pure fantasy, pure effect, pure fiction, in a book that called itself fiction, a novel indeed, while at the same time making it perfectly clear to anyone halfway in the know – to wit the entire British public – that it was fact, when actually it wasn’t, not quite. Angela died after the Wall came down. It was disgraceful, brilliant.

  And yet, Cleaver told himself now, in his room in the Unterfurnerhof, watching, on a generous TV screen, as the President of the United States repeated the very line he had gone on repeating throughout that extraordinary interview – Let’s get this straight, I am my own man – and yet it was thanks to my son’s mendacious book, that I was so devastating that evening with the President. I was furious, fearless, I who usually avoided head-on confrontation. And it was thanks to the completeness of that success, that tidal wave of media attention, my coronation, no less, as the most effective, authoritative and above all intrepid figure in British political journalism, with an interestingly troubled private life to boot and a son who was making a remarkable literary debut, that I had to give up and get out.

  For Cleaver had understood at once that even this devastating interview would change nothing, for the President. I was right that such things are meaningless. The President of the United States, Cleaver sensed immediately upon leaving the studios, would be re-elected anyway, regardless of how foolish he had made himself. We have gone beyond the days when interviews change things. And indeed here the man was, less than a week later, seen from a dusty guest room in the South Tyrol, entirely at his Texas ease and quite confident that he was on his way to re-election; no more perturbed or changed, Cleaver said out loud, than you are, dear Olga. In the glow of the screen, the doll’s expression appeared to be one of rapt attention as the President assured her that he would defend the American way of life from every threat. Even that of English interviewers. Perhaps my evident contempt for his simplistic evangelicalism, actually helped him, Cleaver thought. Viveur as it were, he told Olga. Incredible, he thought, how his elder son had missed the point there. No, I am the one who was changed, he decided. Verily, if any of ye were paralysed by my celebrity, he announced out loud in the cold room, take up your beds and walk. Killing the TV shortly after eleven, Cleaver slept easily that night, quietly pleased with himself for not having turned on his phone.

  III

  WHAT AT ONCE gave Rosenkranzhof a sense of fatality for Cleaver, of a choice already made for him, was this business of finding, in the thickest of these foreign woods, but so near too to the most awesome of views, where the land fell dizzily away over Steinhaus and St Johan and the white water of the Ahrn – this business of his finding a name he could recognise, a place that already had its pigeonhole in his mind: Rosenkranz and Guildenstern are dead. For the most guileful aspect of my son’s book, Cleaver realised, on spying this name in flaking paint on rotting wood, was the way it created a caricature image of me, precisely in order to rub me out: My father thus died, his elder son had written – and quite probably, for the so-called reader-in-the-know, it was the only patently fictional episode of the whole novel – hoist with the petard of his own determination to be in the limelight.

  Waking up on his second morning in the South Tyrol, Cleaver appreciated that a change of plan was necessary. To spend the day, as he had intended, resting in his room and nursing his sore feet, would mean to pass the time watching television and, sooner or later, he had no doubt, reading Amanda’s text messages, which in turn would feed his general anxiety that nothing was being accomplished, this despite the fact that one of the major goals of this retreat, this exit rather, was to stop thinking in terms of accomplishments and live life in the simplest possible relationship with himself and the world. It was complicated. Overcome by a sudden fear of lost direction, an insecurity that had frequently haunted him whenever he was away from work and home for more than a day or two, Cleaver got out of bed, ate breakfast rapidly in the shadowy Stube, and set out into Luttach to find plasters and perhaps even a bandage for his blisters.

  This is one of the things my elder son knew nothing about, he reflected, waiting in a surprisingly slow queue in the village pharmacy, this anxiety I have always experienced away from home, this extraordinary insecurity. There
seemed to be an awful lot of consultation going on between customers and pharmacist. Sometimes it was as if a void were opening up – Cleaver began to grow impatient – not so much beneath his feet as all around his head. Away from home but, above all, from work, he became a consciousness anxiously adrift in empty space. My son knew nothing about this. A swarthy young man with a ponytail and black leather jacket seemed to be purchasing a remarkable quantity of medicines. It wouldn’t fit in with his caricature picture of me. A man half my age, Cleaver thought, considering the young fellow’s coarse, unwashed hair, but with twice my problems. Suddenly, away from home, or rather work, he would be swept by a feeling of vertigo, of having nothing to touch or hold, an inexplicable but absolutely urgent fear that would at once be dispelled, Cleaver knew, if someone put a microphone in his hand, or stood him in front of a camera, or told him to write a one-thousand-word editorial on some controversial issue for publication tomorrow morning. I always needed a yoke, he told himself, and a load to pull, if I wasn’t to feel I was merely floating in nothingness, underachieving. Perhaps home had been a kind of job, in the end.

  An elderly woman had removed her cardigan and was rolling up the sleeve of her blouse to show the pharmacist an ugly skin disorder all around the elbow. I always saw life as a task and a competition, Cleaver reflected. It was disturbing. The man adjusted his glasses to examine it. Psoriasis, perhaps. When will Harry write his masterpiece, Amanda would laugh and shake her head, and what she meant was: when would he, Cleaver, write that book they had always imagined him writing, or, more probably, make that film he was one day bound to make, that work of genius that hadn’t been ordered or commissioned with a contract and a deadline and a publicity budget, but that would come unbidden, unplanned-for from his brilliant head, without the need for any yoke at all. Take a break, she would whisper to him in their rare moments of intimacy. Amanda was ambitious for the father of her children. It was important for her to believe she lived with a man of genius. Take a break and do something all your own, Harry. You can do it, she told him. My father’s promised masterpiece, his elder son had written in Under His Shadow, was at once the longest standing joke in our family and the most sacred cow. The boy didn’t seem to have appreciated – Cleaver shook his head, spying the plasters on a rotating display beside the counter – that all that drinking and eating and smoking he satirised could only occur at the end of a day when his father felt he had achieved something. He had performed. Even if somebody else had called the tune. I pulled my weight. Even if there was nothing to be achieved and every performance a sham. You are a pig, Cleaver, Cleaver told himself, a great fat pig.