Cleaver

by Tim Parks

  Wie heisst du? Cleaver asked. He was aware of the challenge of convincing her to stay. Bier? Another glass? He motioned to Olga’s seat. Ich heisse, Harry, he said. Harry is easier than Harold, he thought. The girl hesitated, puzzled. She is not used to invitations, Cleaver decided. She crouched by the dog again. Behind her the fire had begun to disturb the room with its flickering light. Cleaver stood up, took her glass and went back into the kitchen to refill it. It was almost dark here. How strange all this is, your first night at six-thousand feet and you are pouring drinks for a young woman.

  Back in the sitting room everything was changed now in the fluid glow of the fire. Wie heisst du? he insisted. Seffa, she said. For one second she looked him in the eye. She was afraid.

  Seffa?

  Jo.

  She looked away. She is not stupid, he decided. He couldn’t think now what to say. The fire spat out an ember and the dog grumbled. The girl brushed a hand across the animal’s coat. For the first time, a vague smile crossed her face.

  Ist Uli dein Hund? he asked again.

  Nein, she said. Nein.

  She took the dog’s snout between her hands and ruffled his fur and began speaking what sounded like baby-talk, her face close to the creature’s foul breath. Then very slowly and clearly she said: Aber er schläft in meinem Zimmer.

  Cleaver watched. He recognised that over-generous physicality, the rough, exaggerated affection people give to animals. Frau Stolberg was too old to be the girl’s mother, he realised. Was it the town-dressed woman? Seffa! she had shouted running into the cemetery.

  Ist Jürgen dein Vater? he asked.

  The girl looked up from the dog, narrowing her eyes and biting a lip in almost pantomime fashion. She stood up. Then she remembered the beer, crouched down, picked it up off the floor and again drained it in one. From the rush of words she was speaking he picked up Nach Hause … zurück gehen. Uli!

  Cleaver followed her through the dark kitchen. Where’s my hat, I wonder? he thought. It had somehow become an important part of his image of himself living alone in the mountains, a broad-brimmed, grey hat. Where have I put it?

  The girl picked up her torch from the table but didn’t turn it on as she walked out into the raw air. Her arse is monumental Cleaver thought, but already familiarity had removed that earlier sense of the grotesque. Seffa, he called. She turned. Es gibt, he struggled for words, ein Zimmer, erm … Hoch, he pointed up to the little window in the timber above the kitchen. Ein Zimmer geschlossen. Ich kann nicht … He made the gesture of turning a key. She was looking at him. Warum? he finished.

  Verstehe nicht, she said. She seemed alarmed, turned away.

  Achtung, Cleaver pointed, Scheisse! But the girl hadn’t heard. She hurried off up the track without turning on her torch.

  It was curious, Cleaver thought later, how completely this encounter with the girl had calmed him down. She had returned him to his ordinary, recognisable self: a hospitable, middle-aged man. It was a relief really that she was fat. On the hard narrow bed opposite the locked door he listened to the noise the wind was making in the trees. Perhaps I will have to sleep with my earplugs: that would be ironic, above the noise line. Nice young lady, he had told Olga, returning to the sitting room with a second bottle of beer. He had sat by the fire, toasting his cold feet while the logs burned through. Not that she could remotely be compared with you, my dear, physically. If there was a rule Cleaver had learned it was never to praise one girl to another. Olga’s glassy eyes glinted in the firelight. Fortunately, she had no problems with self-esteem. She was unwavering, Cleaver saw, in her Tyrolese pride.

  He sipped his beer, staring at the coals. You are curious about that family, he realised later, trying the locked door again before retiring to bed. It was something, he thought, that my son simply refused to acknowledge when he criticised the way I analysed his friends: I am curious. For anyone who read that stupid book, it would seem I had fucked all those women, or appeared on television, out of sheer vanity. Sometimes, his elder son had written, my father would have three or even four women on the go at the same time. But you had no idea of the nature of those relationships, Cleaver protested out loud, the hours of conversation. Did I go to bed with them, perhaps, he wondered, because it was the best way of finding out about their lives? Of possessing their secrets? No, Cleaver shook his big head on the pillow, I went to bed with them to fuck them. He chuckled. But not only. The truth was, his elder son had written, that my father seemed to fear he would cease to exist if he didn’t see himself reflected in a young woman’s eyes, preferably at the moment of orgasm, just as he feared he might melt into thin air if his image wasn’t constantly present on the country’s television screens. He always had at least three or four shows and documentaries on the go. It wasn’t the truth at all, Cleaver protested. I was genuinely curious. That was all.

  Then an alien thought crossed his mind. An idea is breaking in. He recognised that special alertness, that peculiar mix of excitement and anxiety: After Angela died, they were all daughters to you. The fat man lay rigidly still on the old Nazi’s bed. Somewhere a branch was fretting against the timbers of the house. I will need my earplugs, he decided. That’s why it had never been serious again, after Angela. Or not in the same way. They were daughters. I could write a book, Cleaver had often reflected, 100 Biographies, or almost, detailing all these women’s problems. I talked to them for hours about their futures, their boyfriends, their jobs. I still have it all in my head. Certainly, his elder son had written, my father had far more time for his string of sluts than he ever did for us.

  Rummaging in the dark, Cleaver eventually found the box with his earplugs in a side pocket of the suitcase. I must keep them within reach of the bed. But no sooner was the world muffled and hushed, his head on the pillow again, than he became intensely conscious of his isolation, six-thousand feet up in the neck of this wild gorge. I’m utterly alone, Cleaver whispered. The thought induced a primitive alertness. Perhaps it’s dangerous to wear earplugs here. But what danger could there be? Now he found himself picturing, as if on some topographical relief model, first Luttach in relation to Bruneck, then Bruneck to Bolzano, then Bolzano to Milan, and finally, on a larger map, Milan in relation to London, to Chelsea, to Amanda. A thousand miles. But that was nothing. It was the winding track from Luttach to Trennerhof that did it, the long steep climb through wolfish pines and stone cliffs up and up to that high plateau, this tremendous gorge. The peasant family in the farmhouse cuts off your retreat, he whispered. Frau Stolberg blocks your return. And the old Nazi. It was a stupid idea. You are suspended here, in a bed at the top of a chasm. Gebirgsgeist. Thank God my feet are warm, he smiled. They were daughters, he thought, after Angela’s death they were daughters. You could hardly expect your son to have grasped that. It was strange, though, the way the fat girl kept pulling at her ear lobe. For a moment Cleaver had a powerful sense of Seffa’s presence as she drained her beer by the fireplace. Then he knew he would soon be asleep.

  VII

  THE MOST UNEXPECTED things returned to mind with disquieting urgency. The years of celebrity interviews, shooting scripts and political punditry melted away. I have no interest at all, Cleaver woke up to find, in the fate of Tony Blair. The Booker was already won or lost. Very shortly, he realised, I will not even know who is the President of the United States. I must prepare for the winter, he thought. On the second day of his stay at Rosenkranzhof he discovered the memorial to Ulrike Stolberg. That was also the day he recovered his hat.

  He had achieved a great deal in his first twenty-four hours. He had risen early, eaten a full bowl of cereal and christened, so to speak, the outdoor lavatory with reassuring promptness. In a tiny wooden shed at the opposite end of the clearing an old loo seat had been fixed on some kind of metal cylinder, with, to judge by the splash, a fairly deep hole beneath. Re-emerging, still clutching the toilet roll, Cleaver surveyed his property. The gables of the house were dwarfed by the high stone cliff behind. The coarse grass
is soaked with dew. To his left the landscape plunged into the gorge where, far below, a procession of small white clouds meandered south between wooded slopes towards Luttach. To his right the track climbed round the house and the cliff through the pines to the high plateau and Trennerhof. For perhaps half an hour, when it rose above the mountains on the eastern side of the gorge, the autumn sun cast a slanting ray that grazed the cliff face above the house and gave its grey surface a buttery glow. The white branches beneath the eaves gleamed like bones. Then it circled behind the rock, leaving Rosenkranzhof in deep shadow, and it was only towards mid afternoon that it sent another obliquely angled beam into the clearing for perhaps twenty minutes before disappearing behind the high western mass of the Schwarzstein. Who would have built a house, Cleaver wondered, in a place that received so little sunlight? He discovered a hencoop together with the stacked firewood on the clearing side of the house. The wood is protected under an old tarpaulin. Amanda, he remembered, was always very attentive to the question of sunlight when they were renting and later purchasing houses. I could keep a couple of chickens, he thought, and have an egg a day, for protein.

  The dog returned while he was at work cutting away the remaining trees that rattled their branches against the windows on the gorge side. Cleaver set about his task with a more practical eye this morning, calculating angles, measuring distances, choosing his footing with extreme care on the rocky slope. When the trees were down, he began sawing off their branches, hauling them out piece by piece to the flat clearing, chopping up the slim trunks to add to the firewood. It was exhausting work for a fat man in his mid-fifties. He kept dragging his shirtsleeve across his forehead. The old saw-blade was rusty. His soft hands were soon blistered. I should have brought work gloves, he told himself, not mittens for the cold.

  Then suddenly the dog was at his heels, yapping and whining. Alex! Cleaver was pleased. He hadn’t thought of his son’s book all morning. What is a book in the economy of a long and busy life like mine? Not Alex, Uli, he decided. Uli, here Uli! It was a she. The dog stuck his nose between his knees and wriggled. When he stopped for lunch, Cleaver gave the animal a bite of sausage. He considered tackling the lump of cheese that Jürgen had given him, but didn’t feel quite ready for this initiation. The advantage of a house with no sunlight, he decided, is that you really don’t need a fridge. He remembered the smell in the little dairy at Trennerhof. Amanda would never have chosen this place, he thought.

  In the afternoon he cleaned the windows, one upstairs, two down. I haven’t cleaned a window since I was a boy after extra pocket money. The water was channelled to the house on hollowed-out logs from a tiny stream in the woods above and beyond the cliff. A hosepipe brought it down the rock face, through the roof, to a tank above the sink in the kitchen. Hence the constant trickling and gurgling. It enters at the bottom of the tank, rises to an overflow and disappears down another pipe that empties, Cleaver supposed, some yards below in the gorge. He couldn’t find any rags. He used a dishcloth he had brought himself and washing-up liquid. There was an old tin bucket in the cave under the stairs. The water is icy and the glass cheap and thin. Even clean, it seemed opaque. How tiring it is to be constantly raising your arms above your head! He felt a pain in his shoulder, perhaps my chest. He was sweating again. Living this life, you can’t not get slim. How my friends will marvel. Cleaver laughed. He even whistled. It was some old signature tune. At least I haven’t imagined the camera zooming in, he thought. I haven’t spoken into an imaginary microphone.

  Towards evening he lit the stove. He tried to light it. It was hard to understand how the girl had got those three logs to burn last night. You should keep the stove alight all the time, he realised. You must always be able to keep warm. Eventually, he used half a toilet roll and a cardboard box and almost choked on the smoke. It billowed into the kitchen. There were levers to pull and push for the chimney and the ventilation. Why didn’t Hermann explain all this? For a few moments he could barely see. He was running to open door and window. These people couldn’t imagine a life without wood stoves, an adult who wasn’t familiar with such things.

  At dusk, he sat by the fireplace in the main room with Uli and ate bread and apples. He has brought two boxes of apples. They give the house a good smell. Tomorrow, I will cook, he announced. Perhaps one day I may even bake something. The stove seemed to have a baking oven. Could I manage a pie? But for some reason he was thinking of Amanda’s gardening gloves. She kept them in a basket on the windowsill outside the kitchen. You don’t look much of a gardener, Cleaver said conversationally to Olga, his mouth full of apple. Though obviously the doll was dressed for high holiday; I’m not seeing her in her ordinary clothes. Amanda was extremely attentive to a house’s exposition to sunlight, Cleaver again remembered, and later in life became an avid gardener. Under His Shadow mentioned none of this. It is in the way you cut and edit, his elder son had written, or so my father would always maintain when he held forth about his documentaries, that you turn reality into a good story, and a lie. Touché Cleaver thought. He imagined an obituary note: Over the winter of 2004 Mr Cleaver took time out from his work at the BBC, before returning to head the newsroom at a moment of exciting change and development. He smiled. These days and months will be edited out from the story they make of my life. Assuming anyone bothers. Occasionally, when there was some heavy job to be done, Amanda had bothered her partner to get involved. The patch in the corner behind the horse chestnut needs digging over, Harry. There are some bricks underneath to get out. Cleaver always refused: I don’t have time. Hire a gardener, he told her. Amanda never would. There were all kinds of gardening projects she couldn’t undertake, she complained, because her non-husband was also a non-gardener. He wouldn’t help her. He’s completely useless with his hands, so clumsy and impractical. This wasn’t actually true. Like my famous impotence. It was the kind of thing she loved to laugh about when they had guests to Saturday-evening barbecues. She would walk them round the lawn, cheerfully pointing and complaining, wry and seductive, while Cleaver sat at the table just inside the French window, pouring out wine for the male company, telling stories, holding court. Here, for example, she would say, we really need a big trellis to hold up these roses, but Harry just won’t be bothered. He has no sense of the complete picture. Will you, Harry? She brought her friends back to the table. My elder son missed the pathos of this, Cleaver reflected. And the perversity. Nothing would have been easier for Amanda than to find a gardener. Though of course he did dedicate a whole chapter to my garden shed-cum-office in Wandsworth. Then Cleaver reflected: was it after Angela died that Amanda’s gardening became obsessive? He hadn’t made this connection before. She dug in. She buried herself.

  The dog suddenly pricked up his ears. His rheumy eyes gleamed in the yellow light of the oil lamp. Cleaver listened: Uli! It was a faint cry. Oo-li! The animal whined. Cleaver stood up, went to the kitchen in the half dark and opened the door. It seemed the girl didn’t care about the dog during the day, but she wanted him there at night to sleep in her room. The creature trotted off into the gloom. Oo-li! The distant voice was plangent. It can’t be much fun for a seventeen-year-old at Trennerhof. Cleaver was sorry she hadn’t come down to talk to him. He wondered if the name Seffa was short for something more recognisable. I can’t connect it with anything. Seffa, Jürgen, Frau Stolberg, Hermann, Uli, the town woman, the bead-telling spectre in her black headscarf: they were from another planet. This may be the first day in your whole life, Cleaver realised then, that you haven’t talked to a single soul, barring Olga of course, beg your pardon. He made a little bow. And not a great deal even to yourself, he reflected. Soul! Cleaver smiled. He picked up a whisky bottle from the shelf and a grey glass and went back into the sitting room. So what was your son’s book all about in the end? he asked out loud, settling into his armchair. What shape did the lad cut out of the whole? Or did he intend to cut? Cleaver filled his glass to the brim and stared into the fire.

  There were thre
e sections to Under His Shadow, as he recalled. You are now going to think about this with the utmost calm and detachment, Cleaver decided. Part one, part two, part three. That will be a major victory. Get it out of the way. He picked up a log from the box and placed it in the centre of the fire. How fine it was to watch the little flames licking at their new prey! And how compulsive. Once a fire is lit you have to watch it. Perhaps the success of television, Cleaver wondered, had largely depended on the banning of coal and wood fires in built-up areas. The rise of the one form of enchantment, after all, was almost contemporary with the decline of the other. And it was curious, he decided, how much better logs crackled together, in threes and fours, as if collaborating, or at least twos, whereas the one log alone seemed doomed to do no more than smoke and smoulder. Certainly more interesting than a stock market report.

  But don’t digress! Cleaver protested out loud. He took a sip of his whisky. The supermarket in Luttach stocked various brands that appeared to be Scottish, but whose names Cleaver had never heard of before. Flintock’s Gold. My father, he remembered his elder son had written – but this was in the last part of the book – was the supreme master of digression. At dinner-table conversation he would routinely prevent any contentious debate from reaching a climax. He hated confrontations, showdowns. One moment you were animatedly discussing nuclear disarmament, and the next, quite suddenly, what mattered were the lyrics of some new Leonard Cohen song, or the increasing number of ladies’ underwear shops on Kensington High Street. It was like the three-card trick. No one could ever quite understand where the issue you had been following had disappeared, or how. My father had spirited it away. He had defused whatever clash was brewing. It’s filling up time that matters, he liked to say, not deciding how it ought to be filled. He prided himself on a sort of jolly inconsequentiality that in the end was no more than a token of his failure to establish any principle or behave in any way consistent with his responsibilities. When everything is meaningless, what responsibilities can you have? The shape of the whole, Cleaver interrupted himself. He had had that passage on his mind as he went to confront the President of the United States. Concentrate on the shape of the whole, the way the boy cut it, the meaning he meant to give to the whole thing. Part one, part two, part three …