by Tim Parks
232 new messages, the screen told him. Cleaver scrolled down through the names. Allison was there. And Anna, and Lisa and Sandra and Melanie. My fragmented life. Really, his son had no idea. Scandalously indiscreet, the book was also poorly researched. Cleaver didn’t open them. His agent had written three or four times, despite having been warned not to. This is typical. And Michaels. Even Larry has written. Object: Where are you? Be in touch! Miscellaneous invitations, reminders, offers. The Sarajevo Film Festival. Names he’s never seen. Junk mail. Viruses various. Discount medicines. Editorial meetings. It’s late in the day to enlarge my penis, Cleaver smiled. His accountant. Personnel. He breathed deeply, hand on the mouse. Am I going to click on something? My elder son hasn’t written, he told himself. None of the children. If Caroline or Phillip had written, I would certainly read what they said. But they wouldn’t. The bank yes, though. And an Australian media company.
Cleaver closed the mail window and typed in www.guardian.co.uk. The headlines were all war and elections. The President of the United States had the main photo. He is wearing combat gear, more square-jawed than ever. Cleaver’s eye was caught by an orange square at the top left of the page: EXPERTS GIVE BOOKER ODDS. He hesitated, My son is on the Booker list because of my celebrity, it occurred to him. Was that a consolation? Or maybe not. Perhaps it really is an excellent book. He looked out across the street with its neat Teutonic facades. To be away from home, truly away, in the twenty-first century requires a constant effort. He remembered a story of a man who, in order to stop smoking, had had himself locked up somewhere and ordered his paid gaolers not to bring him any cigarettes, even if he begged for them, though when he begged, of course, someone promptly brought him some. He then paid this man not to tell the others. Cleaver did not check the paper Amanda worked for and did not type his name into any search engine. How sombre I feel, he realised, getting up to pay: a ghost shackled to old haunts, but unable to take pleasure in them, eager to be exorcised. Was it a triumph, having opened nothing, or a failure to have gone into the place at all? Why must I think of my life in terms of success and failure? Waiting at the bus stop, he saw a taxi and hailed it.
Barely had Cleaver settled in his room that evening for his last night at Unterfurnerhof than there was a tap at the door. He was sitting on his bed, surveying his purchases. The broad felt hat is particularly pleasing. The television was on. There was no point in fighting the small screen this last night it was available, just as there had been no reason to resist the lure of a cab only one day before he moved to where no taxi would ever go. Olga had her back to the wall beside the pillow. It can be a sort of stag night, he thought, flicking through all thirty-six channels. Pancake day before the fast. He put the hat on his big bald head. It is charcoal grey. The tap was repeated. Come in, Cleaver shouted.
Frau Schleiermacher stood in the doorway. She seemed embarrassed and determined. Herr Cleaver, she said. Her son is not with her, he noticed. The language barrier forced them to look into each other’s eyes. He didn’t register any colour, only the intensity of her unexpected presence. Ja? he asked. He took the hat off. She had noticed the doll sitting on the bed against the wall. A faint smile lifted one eyebrow. She said something he didn’t understand, something ironic, he suspected. You came to this neck of the woods because you speak no German, Cleaver thought. You can’t hold forth. Yet he was distinctly conscious now of wishing to speak to Frau Schleiermacher.
She had taken a step into the room. In her hands she had the notepad and pen she used for orders in the Stube. Hier, she said. She went to the window, put the pad on the ledge and started to write. She could have said whatever she wants to say when I was eating, Cleaver thought. Hermann had been there. He would have translated. She could have called her son. The BBC was rounding up the financial markets. Every day we must know what the Hang Seng has done. Herr Cleaver, Frau Schleiermacher called him over to her. Möchten Sie … If I spoke German, Cleaver was thinking, I could explain to her my theory about the liturgical aspect of financial news, how it subtly disguises the ritual of ceremonial repetition by sending stocks up and down by a percentage point or two, as if it were these tiny differences that made us listen. The landlady has come to fix my bill, he thought. He got up off the bed. My father, his elder son had written, had become so obsessed by the meta-functions of the information culture that he no longer granted any importance at all to its content. All that matters is punctuality and packaging, he used to say, the repetition of well-worn formulas, reassuring signature tunes. The woman’s hair had fallen forward over her face, her rather sharp nose. Writing, she moved her tongue across her lips. She just didn’t want to be embarrassed, he decided, by letting the others hear how much she was going to charge him for his six days’ room and board. He liked her old-fashioned, green wool dress. It was as if the syntax a person used, his elder son had protested, were actually more important than what they said.
Cleaver stood beside her. Next to his bulk Frau Schleiermacher seems slim, smaller. If anyone should be on the Booker list, he smiled to himself, it’s me. She gave him the pad and watched while he read:
WENN SIE HIER DENWINTER DURCH BLEIBEN WOLLEN – each letter had been printed quite separately – PREIS = 450 EURO/MONAT, MIT ESSEN.
She smiled. Verstehen Sie? Cleaver nodded. She is asking me to stay, offering a bargain. She took the pad and, writing as if taking an order in the Stube, added: NO PROBLEM.
When she had gone, he lay on the bed for perhaps two or even three hours as the television hurried him back and forth across the world. You are very generous, he had told her. She had not understood. He was determined he wouldn’t hold forth. The language barrier helped. Do you like my hat? he had asked. He had squashed it on his head again. In the window he saw he cut quite a figure: a big bulky man with a cavalier hat. She shook her head too. Der ist schön, aber unpraktisch. It is a kind offer, he said. She didn’t understand. You are simpatica. He felt a strong urge to touch her face. Katrin Schleiermacher has a small mole above the corner of a full upper lip. Aber ich kann nicht, he said. Nicht … bleiben. She tossed her head: Wollen Sie mir nicht sagen, warum?
She wants me to become part of the family, it occurred to Cleaver now, watching a French programme about child prostitution in the Philippines. He had been here six days, largely speechless, and already she saw the Englishman as occupying a possible role in her South Tyrolese household. Italian TV had a talent show for would-be tango dancers; some seemed barely pubescent. Even the audience were scantily dressed. She had liked the way he joked with Armin perhaps. He had said something light-hearted yesterday about the skull and crossbones on the boy’s T-shirt. He had complimented the lad on his trumpet playing. Angela had had a go at the saxophone, but her real instrument was the piano. Keyboards rather. She sees me as a possible stepfather, Cleaver thought. She sees a Cleaver-shaped space in her family. He still hadn’t figured whether the woman was divorced or widowed. Which was actually a pretty large space. Or rather, she sees a man with no history, no context of his own, and she thinks, He will do. Er war ein Mann, she had said of the dead Nazi. To the casual visitor, Cleaver’s elder son had written, my father always seemed a very fatherly person. In the end that was all Amanda wanted of me, Cleaver thought. They had not had sex together since Phillip was conceived. She liked to retail the story of his impotence.
Does television help or hinder reflection? Cleaver wondered. Constantly changing channels, he recognised a familiar feeling of resignation. I could go to Manila and have sex with a twelve-year-old. Fat as I am, I could fit in anywhere. Don’t you think, Olga? Now the BBC was marvelling that the US President’s popularity ratings remained solid despite everything that had gone wrong during his administration. Better the devil you know, a young journalist was observing. They are all so young, so knowing. Nobody commented on Cleaver’s devastating exposure of the President’s neurotic concern for popularity polls. Deny it if you will, Mr President, but I put it to you that your policies are determined by an
almost pathological craving for instant approval. It is as if my interview had never been, Cleaver thought. But you knew that would happen. Amanda … he tapped out the name on the phone’s small keypad. The battery was down to its last bar … tomorrow I move to a place with no signal. Cleaver never used abbreviations when he wrote text messages. He always put in all the caps and all the punctuation. I want to be alone for a while. Please don’t worry about me. Look after yourself. LOVE, HARRY.
Holding the phone at arm’s length, Cleaver considered this message, then cut the last two words. How to sign off? he wondered. It was an old problem. LOVE seemed inappropriate. WITH AFFECTION would be ridiculous. After thirty years together you can’t write, With affection. Harry was her name for him. I never called myself Harry. Not that there wasn’t affection. He stared at a German programme speaking authoritatively, it seemed, about financial fraud. What word could there be now for all that had passed between himself and Amanda? There is no word for how I feel, Cleaver thought. Or how I don’t feel. He didn’t know. In comprehensive rebuttal of his elder son, he might have said: By convincing me to be a parent and partner, but only rarely and in recent years never a lover, your mother lured me into pursuing a dispersed and fragmented emotional life, since there are few women who wish to be clandestine lovers on a permanent basis. Yes, I could make that defence. Cleaver watched the television. Words mean less as experience accumulates, he thought. The more you have of both – of words and experience – the less they seem to have to do with each other. Back on the BBC, a survey on religious belief worldwide showed the British lagging behind. That was the expression the presenter used! Cleaver burst out laughing. I’m lagging behind! He shook his head. You backward freethinker, you! But in the end, damn it, you chose your life, he objected. You enjoyed your string of mistresses, you always changed channels obsessively. What point was there in whining? Let the boy make money out of me. I need no defence.
Then it occurred to Cleaver that he might close his message, FORGIVE ME. Tomorrow I move to a place with no signal. I want to be alone for a while. Please don’t worry about me. Look after yourself. FORGIVE ME. But he knew he didn’t mean it. I got so used to saying what women wanted to hear, he thought. Asking forgiveness became routine. He never imagined he had really done anything wrong. I was good at that. Though as a result he had never been quite sure what he felt. Or he could just sign off, YOUR OLD PRETENDER. The great crisis, his elder son had written, in my parents’ relationship came some two or three years after my younger brother Phillip was born. No doubt my father was having one of his countless relationships with publicity girls, receptionists, sound-production secretaries, whatever, though we children knew nothing at the time. In any event, he walked out. Angela and I must have been thirteen. Mother went completely crazy. She had been abandoned with four children to bring up. She didn’t even have a marriage certificate to protect her. In a fit of rage she went up to his study on the second floor. It was a big house in Kilburn. My father had all his books and old vinyls carefully catalogued. It is curious how meticulous he was in this regard, considering what a messy life he led in general. But as far as his work was concerned, he was always extremely professional. I remember in particular a filing cabinet with thousands of newspaper articles on the widest range of subjects, all very carefully classified and sorted. Anyhow, Mother began to throw everything out of the window and into the street. The study was at the side of the house and there was only a narrow passage, then a creosoted fence, then the street. After the books had been flying for half an hour and all my father’s precious old LPs and all these files and files of newspaper cuttings, fluttering down in the passage or out onto the street, someone called the police. And someone must have called my father too, because he arrived to find a young constable trying to restrain Mother from kicking his belongings up and down the road. Afterwards, Angela and I helped him to bring everything back inside and carry it upstairs again. I remember there was dog shit on some of the books. But my father seemed to be in a very cheerful mood. This has helped him to decide to leave forever, I thought. I remember feeling upset, with a lump in my throat, though deep down, I already realised that it would be much better if they split up. I loved my father and very much wanted to be like him. Instead, a couple of hours later, when he had got everything more or less back in place, if not in order, he fixed himself a drink – I even remember it was a gin – sat down on the sofa, turned on the TV and generally made it clear that he had decided to stay. Angela and I were so happy. We chopped up lemons and filled the ice bucket. Now I understand he just didn’t have the courage.
KISSES, Cleaver reflected, was how he signed off to most of his girlfriends. There was a safe mix of sexual promise and friendly affection in KISSES. If it became too perfunctory, you could up the stakes with some playful remark about nipple nibbling. Up the stakes! He shook his head. There really was no way to sign off this message to Amanda. It wasn’t true I lacked the courage, he told Olga. He spoke out loud. The doll had her eyes on the TV. Words are so categorical, Cleaver thought. Courage. Love. The Nigerians were also ahead, BBC World claimed, when it came to the number of people willing to die for their God. Seventy-eight per cent (a little bar chart appeared) as opposed to only seventeen in the UK. No doubt that was courage. GOODBYE would be far too dramatic, and in the end hardly credible. I am not going to die, after all, Cleaver told himself, in Rosenkranzhof. He was bound to see her again.
For a few moments Cleaver was painfully aware of having no plans, no clear vision of what life would be like, next year, next week even. In part, it was this uncertainty that made signing off to Amanda so difficult. He had no idea what impression he wanted to create, what state of mind he wanted to leave her in. Regards to Larry? He chuckled. We exhausted ourselves with these affairs. The problem I had, Cleaver told Olga – I like a traditionally dressed lady, he decided – whenever I sat down to write my masterpiece, was exactly – he smiled – exactly this problem of credibility, of being able to say anything that remotely got it right. You know? All at once, he distinctly recalled the anxiety, the various quiet rooms, the desks, the windows opening on suburban streets, himself sitting there shoving a knuckle in his mouth, jerking his knee up and down, fretting – the anxiety that you would never be able to get it right. And the same now signing off to Amanda. Not that you were obliged to put down the whole truth – Cleaver had never been so ambitious – but at least to be pertinent, candid. Otherwise there was no point. Otherwise you might as well go back to broadcasting, or publisher’s commissions, a short introduction to the Balkans, perhaps. Recycle the material from his documentaries.
He shook his head. I can’t do it. Whereas nothing, he suddenly realised, could be easier than correcting someone who was claiming to tell the truth but had manifestly got it wrong. Nothing would be easier than a back and forth of claim and counterclaim over his son’s ridiculous book. I did not go back home to stay the day Amanda threw my stuff into the street. Quite the contrary. His elder son’s vaunted memory had let him down rather badly there. I stayed away at least a further couple of weeks. Unless of course the boy was lying for effect; it was supposed to be a novel after all. He had ordered a taxi and taken his certain precious belongings with him. Amanda was hanging out of the bathroom window shouting abuse. Be sure, he might write to her now, I’ll be thinking of you. That would be true, guaranteed even, yet somehow even more inappropriate, more cruel, than the other solutions.
Then Cleaver remembered that he had already said goodbye to his partner twice. First the night before he left, in her bedroom – I’m really going, Amanda, he had told her; he had spoken her name out loud – then the following morning, on the phone from Victoria station: Just to say I’m on my way to the airport. Had Siddharta Gautama gone on sending his wife text messages after his sudden and scandalous departure? Just as Cleaver was erasing what he had written, the phone vibrated in his hand: BOOTS. Cleaver clicked, squinted, held the little screen under the bedside lamp. U-no-hoo, he read,
has given an interview to the Torygraph. You should see it!
V
CLEAVER ATE AN early and hearty breakfast and was already sitting on Hermann’s cart among a dozen boxes when Frau Schleiermacher came out to say goodbye. She had a hand behind her back. These people are never going to read the Telegraph, Cleaver was telling himself. So why should I? A man who is going to live on a mountain top has no use for a reputation. Frau Schleiermacher offered her hand, smiling. Her eyes are very alive. Gallantly, Cleaver bent down from the cart to kiss her cheek. Then the handsome woman said: Wollen Sie die Puppe mitnehmen? He didn’t understand. From behind her back she produced the doll. Olga! Cleaver cried. Hermann said something rapidly and Armin burst out laughing. Frau Schleiermacher appeared to be protesting, but her voice too was full of mirth. What did it matter if Cleaver didn’t understand? Aufwiedersehen, he told them.
Yet no sooner was Hermann guiding the Haflinger up the now familiar track than it seemed to Cleaver that he missed Frau Schleiermacher immensely. The doll is no substitute. He missed Armin with his black leather jacket, his necklace and inverted crucifix. He missed them more than all the people he had left behind in London. More than his daughter Caroline, his son Phillip. This is perverse, Cleaver thought. He even missed his place by the window in the Stube where Frau Schleiermacher had served him his breakfast in the morning, his Knödel in the evening. Only six days and already he had felt that that place was his and no one else’s. I should have stayed perhaps. I felt secure. Economically speaking, Cleaver told himself, you could probably afford to live in the Unterfurnerhof for the rest of your days, regardless of what your son says about you in the London newspapers. My father, his elder son had written in Under His Shadow, never took less than half a dozen newspapers. As a child, it seemed to me that nothing could be more important, more urgent, more real, than a newspaper. The chapter, Cleaver remembered now, as the trees closed around the cart and the track grew steeper, describing Harold and Amanda’s Sunday mornings, with the carpet, the sofas and the furniture all smothered in newsprint (there was barely a square inch of upholstery, his elder son had written, that wasn’t stained with printer’s ink) was clearly supposed to be one of the book’s main comic set pieces. I don’t miss the papers at all, Cleaver reflected, as the Haflinger pulled the cart higher and higher up the narrowing gorge. The air was still and strangely heavy. Cleaver put on his hat. He shivered. It was as if, his elder son had written, my parents could only feel confident about themselves once they had checked every section of every Sunday paper, once they had a grip on the whole world. And since that is an impossible proposition they shared the papers out between them and exchanged notes. So Sunday morning was also the moment when they were most a team. Or rather, they were a conspiracy against the world. They knew the name of every journalist, every pundit. They knew who would be offended by this piece, who would hit back at that, who had persuaded so and so to write such and such. They were terrorists planning an assassination, or generals plotting reprisals. And for us children too, this was the happiest time of the week. Mum and Dad were swimming together in a jacuzzi of newsprint. They were happy. It was a sort of enchantment, a different world. I miss Armin, Cleaver decided. A jacuzzi of newsprint was a stupid analogy. He had the doll on his knees. I feel closer to Armin, at this moment, he realised, than to any of my own children. If anyone else, Amanda had told him, had betrayed you like this, you would have fought like a lion. She is jealous, Cleaver realised. She can’t believe my restraint. If I had written this stuff, she protested, you would kill me. It occurred to Cleaver then that his partner had given his elder son those intimate and damning details in order to be sure that her Harry would hit back. She wanted a fight.
