Cleaver

by Tim Parks

  He looked at the troll’s crooked face. There was dust in all his wrinkles. It was a fat troll with a knotty upturned nose. One wooden hand raised an axe. You imagined you were going to find something significant when you broke down the door, Cleaver remembered. What a strange mood he’d been in that day. Something about Ulrike Stolberg, a family tragedy that bound these people together in uneasy silence, a ghost of the mountains. He definitely heard footsteps again now, but they didn’t seem to be moving away. There is something thoughtful and exploratory about this intruder. He is looking for something. Pressed on the floor, Cleaver’s hands were black with dust. When you opened the tall cupboard, he remembered, you were convinced that there would be an SS uniform in there. If a man is a Nazi, he must be reduced to his Nazism. Er war ein Krimineller, Frau Schleiermacher had said. Instead there was only this gloomy troll, his face turned to the wall, and the accordion with its red-and-white strap. Everything is traditional in the Tyrol. Everything is in tune: the crucifixes and rosaries and rough pine furniture, the red-and-white Tyrolese banners. The troll was cutting wood no doubt.

  With some effort Cleaver got to his feet. Of course, if you do go after the man, you will disappoint him. Despite the grey beard he’s grown and his increasingly bushy, unplucked eyebrows, Harold Cleaver is manifestly not your echt Tyrolese; he is an anomaly, an impostor, an escapee. You always speak of freedom, Mr President, as an escape from coercion, the throwing off of shackles – Islam, Communism – the right to choose, as if that were the end of the problem. You never mention the life chosen after the escape, or the kind of unconscious collective ethos where people are so in tune with their conventions that freedom is simply not an issue. Yes, he had definitely launched that provocation. He remembered now. If not exactly in those words. Well, I sure know a man’s not free when I see chains on his back, the President had replied easily. Had he understood? Hitching up his backpack, putting the camera away in a pocket, the visitor was striding off down the track that led to the ledge, the old cableway, the photo of Ulrike Stolberg. What would he make of that? Cleaver wondered. Unless, of course, he has come here to look for me.

  This thought galvanised Cleaver. Perhaps they have found me! He hurried downstairs, though taking care with that fourth step. He is organised now. He lives in a rigid routine. The stove is never allowed to go out. With every passing day, the late autumn sun is losing its warmth. Keep your clothes dry at all costs. He has hung a clothes horse over the stove. He stacks firewood in the kitchen three or four days before he will need it. He mustn’t let his feet get cold. Each morning he walks for two or three hours. He has climbed upward towards the Speikboden, north to the clouded slopes of the Schwarzstein, south along the high plateau beyond Trennerhof. That was where he came across the abandoned mounting frame. It would have been fun to have brought that up in the debate with the President. The cow would be led into the iron frame, Mr President – a sort of small cage really – and immobilised with shackles so as to make it easier for the bull to penetrate her. Cleaver had heard of such things but never actually seen one. The bars were tubular and painted pale yellow. He had run his hand across the rusting structure, surprised at its rather rough, home-made look. There were rubber wheels so that it could be towed from farm to farm, wherever a beast was in heat. There were bars at a convenient height so that the bull could rest its front hoofs while it fucked. All this in aid of meat and milk production. But was the cow unhappy, Mr President, as it was led into the mounting frame? Do cows have much choice anyway? Or any of us? Certainly there were days when Cleaver had experienced sex as an imperative. I felt compelled.

  Every fourth day or so he took a shower. He had discovered the old Nazi’s system of showering. Cleaver still calls the previous occupant the old Nazi, even if there wasn’t a single wartime trophy in the locked room, just boxes of clothes and bric-a-brac, the accordion most usefully, and a cowbell with a bright embroidered ribbon that he has hung from a nail in the kitchen and likes to ring from time to time. Olga! Lunch is served! As he walked each day, the high valleys clanged and tinkled with cowbells. More than once it has occurred to Cleaver that the peasants are perhaps afraid of the silence. Or that the bells are a sort of prayer. Did the farmers remove the cow’s bell from her neck for the ritual coupling in the mounting frame? Or did it clang and clang as the bull thrust? The mounting frame was abandoned, Cleaver thought, because, of course, they use artificial insemination now – it costs less – in much the same way that lunatics these days are constrained with injections rather than straitjackets. There were weeds growing round the flaking yellow bars and stains of rust at the joints. But that only takes the trauma and the pleasure out of the event, don’t you think, Mr President, the sense of having really lived, however unpleasantly? Or am I talking to Amanda now? It was so strange how Amanda had always excited him, yet he had got used to not having sex with her. Mother liked to tell dinner guests, his elder son had written, that as soon as it was cheap and reliable, artificial insemination would be much the more civilised method of starting a family.

  With some ingenuity, the old Nazi had diverted a small hose from the larger pipe that carried the stream-water into the kitchen. The hose came down the rock face beside the house at the back and, at head height, was made to protrude perhaps two feet, tied to an iron rod jammed deep into a tight fissure. A primitive screw tap was attached. Cleaver had learned to strip naked, stand under the hose – there was a rough slab of stone directly beneath – and unscrew the tap. It was a strong, solid jet. The icy cold burned on his scalp and down his back. He could bear it just long enough to soap armpits and crotch and rinse. If ever anyone felt guilty of anything, he thought, here was a way of imagining you had done penance. The water splashed on his hairy paunch. The flesh was mortified. And I am losing weight, Cleaver noticed. I’m tightening up.

  Now, opening the front door, checking the clothes on the line to see if they were dry, it occurred to Cleaver that if he were to take a shower in, say, ten minutes’ time, then the intruder, on returning from the ledge – for there was nothing a hiker could do once he had reached the end of that path but turn back – would discover the tenant of Rosenkranzhof naked under the freezing water. His stereotyped impression of the primitive Tyrolese picturesque would be confirmed. He could set off home content. Unless, of course, the man were to recognise in this shivering hulk the TV celebrity he had been paid to hunt down and promptly snap the photo that would appear the following weekend in one of the Sunday tabloids.

  What day is it? Cleaver wondered. And weren’t such exhibitionist fantasies just another indication of his pathetic vanity? You don’t want to confront anyone or speak to anyone, so as not to lose the thread of your precious ruminations, yet at the same time you yearn to be photographed naked for the Sunday Mirror so that the very few people (women) who are in a position to judge will see that you are standing up a little straighter than of yore and have lost a good stone and more into the bargain. Cleaver laughed. It must be Monday or Thursday, he decided, the days Seffa went down to Luttach. Otherwise Uli would have been here. The dog spends most afternoons lying by the Rosenkranzhof fire before pricking up his ears and whining to be let out on hearing the distant call of the girl from Trennerhof shortly after dusk.

  Am I going to confront this intruder or not? Cleaver asked himself. Moving about the kitchen, he put away a pan and checked through the packets of groceries on the shelf beside the window to see what he could eat this evening. Pasta e basta. This incorrigible gourmet, as his elder son interminably referred to him, actually needs neither sauce nor Parmesan. Nor sex for that matter. There was a little butter to help it slither down. Unusually, closing a cupboard door, Cleaver felt the silence of the empty house all around him. I thought I had got over that.

  He went back into the sitting room. Olga, poppet, we need to restock the larder. One of us is going to have to break cover and head down to Luttach. Two or three days ago Cleaver had taken his doll out of the house to shake the dust off her
dress and kerchief. That old troll is never going to pull his weight, he laughed. She didn’t reply. The axe is pure theatre. So, should I bother speaking to this intruder or not, Cleaver demanded? Trolls, he recalled, were supposed to turn to stone in sunlight. Olga sat with her permanent smile on the armchair beside the accordion. What do you think? One plan might be, he thought, simply to sit down and squeeze out a couple of chords on the old instrument. The stranger could hardly help but hear them and would then be in a position to decide for himself whether to knock and meet the occupant of Rosenkranzhof. Perhaps he needs to ask for directions. Where could he be staying, so far from anywhere? Though as soon as he hears a few notes, Cleaver realised, the man will know that this accordion player is not Tyrolese.

  Cleaver heaved the thing onto his lap. It was heavy. He slipped his hands under the straps and spread his fingers across the keyboard. At once, he was aware of a slight tension, as though about to go out under the studio lights. You don’t relax when you play, Paps, Angela used to complain. She soon gave up asking her father to accompany her singing on the piano. Why can’t you relax, Paps? she shook her head. But I do, Cleaver laughed. I do relax. God knows he performed on TV more or less every day. It’s just my hand shakes.

  Searching his memory, concentrating, he played a few notes. Should auld acquaintance be forgot … It was hard to combine the arm action with the fingers on the keys. The sound was more wheezy than plaintive. One of the chord buttons stuck. The day the Stolbergs hear that, Cleaver thought, they’ll know I broke into their room. Then there’ll be drama. He wondered, in the evenings, when Seffa was calling down for the dog, how far the sound of the instrument carried up the gorge. But perhaps Seffa wouldn’t tell the others even if she heard it. It’s crazy, Cleaver was suddenly angry with himself, the way you keep assuming that Frau Stolberg is preventing the girl from coming down to visit you. When he went up for milk, though, Seffa was somehow never around, whatever time of day he chose to go, as if she were being hidden, or avoiding him. It was odd too how Jürgen and Frau Stolberg kept pressing the grey cheese on him. He hadn’t asked for it. With a raw onion as well, last time, rolling around on the cracked plate. Sehr gut, man muss beides zusammen essen, Jürgen had insisted, pointing at the onion. His rough hand made a gesture to indicate that the onion must be chopped up fine. If this was a fairy story, Cleaver told Olga, I would find out too late that I was being poisoned, or transformed in some way by this mysterious food. That I had grown horns and hoofs. Or that I could no longer leave the Kingdom of the Dead. It would take some miraculous intervention to reverse the process. A kiss of course. What could be more miraculous than for a beautiful woman to kiss a fat old guy who’s gorged on grey cheese and raw onions? Jürgen was right, though. The two foods went well together. The palate tingled. Cleaver squeezed out a few notes. A-a-nd ne-ver come to mind! Should auld acquaintance … Damn and damn. He put the instrument down, found his jacket and hat and hurried out of the house. He would confront the man.

  Cleaver crossed the space at the front of Rosenkranzhof and walked purposefully down the path towards the ledge. He hadn’t been this way for a good two weeks. There was no point. I’ve been very calm these last few days, Cleaver reflected, almost serene. The air was soft and misty. Haven’t I? No, the irritating thing about Burns’s song, he decided, was that it actually set out to savour the pathos of lost acquaintance, of oblivion, while pretending to be scandalised by it. The words wallowed in imagining the extinction of emotion – friendship forgotten – the better to fall back into it, no doubt with the help of a few pints of wee heavy.

  A man who has really left the world, Cleaver told himself, striding along very determinedly after the intruder, in the sense of withdrawn, truly gone out of society, should not have to catch himself humming Auld Lang Syne, of all miserable songs. At the side of the path, the marmot’s bones, he noticed, had been picked clean, the smell was gone, though the skull was still caught in the loop of the snare. Old acquaintance could go hang itself.

  Is there anyone, Cleaver pulled up short to demand out loud, absolutely anyone, whom I, Harold Cleaver, would really like to see or speak to right now, after a month in the South Tyrol, a whole solid month entirely on my own? No one. I have completely overcome my attachment to the mobile phone. On the other hand, of course, and mainly thanks to the fact that his lifelong partner had been Scottish, Auld Lang Syne was one of the very few tunes that Cleaver really knew how to play on the piano. The only thing that can possibly be said in favour of a Scottish New Year’s Eve, my father liked to declare – and Cleaver had actually been rather pleased to find this remark in his son’s book – is that it serves as the ultimate benchmark for maudlin sentimentality. My father was brilliant, his elder son had written, at mimicking the drunken, sentimental Scot. Gie us a cup o’ kindness, laddie, he would say. The model was my grandfather. Yet whenever Mother’s relatives came down to London, he always got drunk with them and he always banged out Auld Lang Syne on the piano and sang at the top of his voice.

  That was true, Cleaver thought. He really didn’t mind that first section of the book at all. My fingers move to the tune automatically, he noticed, whenever I touch a keyboard. And it was curious, he thought for the hundredth time, how his son’s book had simply sidestepped the whole question of music. One of the few pleasures with Amanda had been discussing the different characters of their children. Very early they had noticed their son’s stubbornness at the piano. He was determined to impress, but he was trapped inside the score. If he made a mistake, he stopped at once and played the piece right through again from the beginning. It must be done right or not at all. The boy was frustrated. He would slam down the lid of the piano. Or, when once he got it right, he wouldn’t play it again. He had done it. He didn’t want to risk screwing up.

  But Angela plays while she plays, Amanda observed. Mistakes didn’t worry the girl. Angela absorbed mistakes into the piece. Or she laughed and played on. Mr President, Cleaver muttered, the problem is not freedom, then, in the negative sense of release from shackles, but the ability to choose the right yoke, to give yourself to a score that you really want to play. This was where his son was in difficulty. And myself too for that matter. Do you ever think, Mr President, about the overall purpose of the society you are leading, American society? It’s surely not enough to be negative. Cleaver had definitely asked the man something along those lines. It was the last question of the interview. I believe America has a great mission, the President replied. He had been on automatic pilot at this point. He began to talk about the inexorable spread of democracy.

  Angela seemed to inhabit the score, Cleaver remembered. It constrained her, of course, but she transformed it. The score became Angela. Perhaps that is what it means to have a gift. Half the time I’m on keyboards, Dad, I’m playing Bach, she giggled. The guys in the band have no idea! Aged fourteen Cleaver’s elder son had refused to go on with his piano lessons. If he can’t make up the tune, he won’t play, Amanda observed. Rather like someone else we know, she added.

  Grüß Gott, a voice announced. Cleaver looked up in surprise. The intruder was only a couple of yards away, walking quickly up the path toward him. Grüß Gott, Cleaver replied. It was the customary Tyrolese greeting. The man was smiling, at ease. The circumspect air he had had outside the house was gone. He was vigorous, swinging his arms energetically, apparently not at all annoyed to have explored a dead end, nor worried to find himself in the back of beyond above six-thousand feet only an hour or so before dusk. Was it an English face? Cleaver wondered. He stopped and stared after the man, who wore jeans and a sleeveless quilt jacket, modern mountain boots. The fact that he said Grüß Gott doesn’t mean anything. How did he sneak up on me so suddenly?

  Cleaver was in two minds now whether to go on down to the ledge or to turn and follow the man. He hesitated, standing in the overgrown track between slim pines and nettles and boulders. The weather was definitely colder today. Colder and sharper. Perhaps he is a brother of the Sto
lbergs, of Jürgen and the town-dressed woman. It was a shame she had left so soon. There’s a smell of winter, of snow even. Or Ulrike and the town-dressed woman. Though in the end Cleaver felt that the surname Stolberg on the memorial plaque meant that Jürgen would be Frau Stolberg’s son and Ulrike the daughter-in-law. This man was her brother, then, and comes here from time to time from some nearby village to look at the place where his sister died. A sort of pilgrimage. It is mad, Cleaver told himself, to cut yourself off from the world and then spend your time fantasising Gothic romances around a few primitive peasants you know nothing about.

  He walked down to the end of the path. The sun was already behind the dark bulk of Schwarzstein to his left. The valley was in shadow. The folds of the land far below merged softly into each other and likewise the greys and greens of leaf and rock. There was a touch of mist. It was almost as if, should you throw yourself out into the void, now, the world would be soft and supporting as water. They must have strung up the cableway, Cleaver had recently decided, to bring down charcoal from the high forests. And Rosenkranzhof had been built by charcoal burners in the nearest place possible to the ledge. They sent down the charcoal they produced and in return received provisions from the village below. Far from being isolated, Rosenkranzhof had been part of the local economy. There’s no way of knowing if I’m right, Cleaver reflected.

  Every time he looked at Ulrike Stolberg’s photo, she was different. The features are quieter and dreamier today. Perhaps the hiker had been her childhood lover and came here every now and then for auld lang syne. Now who’s being mawkish? Cleaver smiled. Though it was hard to shake off the thought that the young woman had killed herself because someone had been trying to force her into a mounting frame against her will. Trolls carried off young maidens. Angela had been pregnant when she died. I didn’t try to find out by whom. I was too busy trying to deal with the madness of Amanda’s having invited Priya to the funeral. Cleaver’s elder son was at university at the time. They had barely spoken about it all. I encouraged him in his studies, Cleaver remembered, though it was foolish of the boy to choose Political Science. As he recalled, what the charcoal burners did was to build big fires and then cover them almost entirely with earth so that the wood inside wasn’t consumed, but turned slowly to charcoal. He remembered reading something of the kind out loud to the twins as small children, in Swallows and Amazons perhaps. Then they broke it up and sent it down with the cableway.