by Tim Parks
Determinedly, I turn the novel over in my hands, inspecting its extravagant cover, the extravagant endorsements of names one presumes are famous. And I find myself asking, Why did your daughter give you this book? Why did she do that? Presumably in the hope that her father would share her enthusiasm for this fantastical tale of five poor young ethnically mixed East End urchins who start a rock band to collect money for the Third World and are constantly cheated and done down by the forces of capitalism and in particular because the lead singer is black and lesbian and has magical powers. Your daughter must have imagined, I tell myself, trying to ignore a story from the girl with her leg in the aisle about a woman in Naples who repeatedly dreamt the number of the hotel room she died in on the day of the great mezzogiorno earthquake, your daughter must have hoped, expected, that you would share her enthusiasm for this book. So you should be more patient, I tell myself, more tolerant. If only out of fairness to your daughter. You should try to relax and enjoy this book, which was certainly written with the best of intentions. Now they are talking about someone who dreamt the date of his child’s murder. I find my place some thirty pages in. But no sooner have I read a paragraph of this, as I said, extravagantly praised book by a fashionable woman writer, no sooner have I begun to tackle a flashback to lesbian incest between the lead singer and her twin sister, later tragically killed in a racist arson attack on a Brixton discotheque, than I remember how fascinated I was when she told me all the details of her lesbian affair with an Islamic girl who had been her housemaid and who the monstrous (but wealthy) husband had slapped round the face when he discovered them in bed. Why didn’t he slap her? I wonder now. Until suddenly it occurs to me - and at last this is a new thought, the first for many days if I am not mistaken, and for that reason alone electrifying - it occurs to me, as the narrator returns from the flashback to resume interracial love-making with the ruthless record producer’s neglected wife, that given this tendency on her part (and now the girl on Georg’s left is talking about a pilot whose income tax code, or at least alternate letters and digits, coincided with the flight number of the plane he crashed), given this tendency, lesbian I mean, on her part, she may one day attempt to seduce my daughter, who sometimes baby-sits for her daughter. Such a thing is perfectly plausible, I tell myself. Your daughter is an attractive girl. She often goes to her flat now she has moved to Milan. To baby-sit. Why shouldn’t she try to seduce her? After all, she is eighteen as of tomorrow. And I have to ask myself, is this perhaps what the gift of this literary eulogy to lesbianism is foreshadowing, or even post-dating? Could it be that your daughter is already having an affair with your ex-mistress?
Sitting slightly off-centre in the back of this coach hammering due north towards the imagined focal point of a continent whose precise borders have never been clear to me, and in the midst of this chatter of anecdotes about coincidences and intuitions notoriously catastrophic, I suddenly find myself bound to consider as lucidly as ever I can this new and increasingly shocking thought, this hypothetical lesbian relationship between my ex-lover and my daughter, a relationship, I reflect now, which would in no way be a crime under the law as it stands, as so many of the most terrible things we do to each other, I tell myself, are not even misdemeanours, in legal terms, are they? since we are all free agents, so called, I tell myself, except where property and money and the most basic aspects of physical well-being are concerned. Yes, I try to consider such a relationship - her and my daughter - in its practical, erotic, social and spiritual aspects, with all the awful and fascinating images such an eventuality conjures up. And I’m appalled. Partly by the idea itself, but mostly by the thought that I have had this idea. Why do you have ideas like this, I demand of myself? I’m furious. Though at the same time I can’t help wondering at the astonishing fact that after eighteen miserable months I am still able to formulate a new thought, however unsavoury, however unwanted, about a situation whose exotic and squalid permutations I imagined I had already shuffled and reshuffled in every possible self-destructive combination.
Such, in any event, is my state of mind when Vikram Griffiths appears at the back of the coach together with his dog, snuffling and wagging, to say in a low but excited voice, squatting down, to myself and to Georg, and hence inevitably to the girl between us, that he is convinced there is a spy amongst us, a turncoat, a scab, someone who, in return for guarantees that they won’t lose their position, is keeping the University informed as to our every move and who, when we arrive in Strasbourg, will be behind the scenes putting the University’s case to the very important people we have arranged to meet and above all taking notes of what we say so that the University will then be in a better position to prepare a rebuttal. And the thing to do, Vikram Griffiths says in his low, deep voice that everybody can hear, all the time playing with the ears of this nondescript mongrel dog, the thing to do if we manage to find out who this spy is, would be to throw them off the coach immediately and leave them to walk back home.
Turning to look out of the window, still with my daughter’s possible lesbian seduction in mind, I see the drizzle is thinly persistent as we leave the dull ribbon development north of the city for the duller reafforestation of the first hills that climb towards Switzerland, a country which despite its centrality and its admirable example of the possibility of federal coexistence between different ethnic groupings is ironically not part of that Europe to which we are appealing. Through spattered perspex I see the drizzle, the sharply rising hills, the fleeting proliferation of all those details one so pointlessly takes in each moment one travels, only to expel them a moment later, like the air we breathe, the people we speak to on the street, and I must say, looking at that glum rain, the dark gesturing of those slopes, that the idea of walking back home is not unattractive, not unattractive at all, though from further up in the mountains would be better. Yes, walking back, I reflect, as the crow flies, under rain, through wet grass, alone, sovereign, preferably with streams to wade, rocks to scale, is not an unattractive prospect. I can imagine bruising my knee and my cheeks scoured by strong winds, a half-eaten apple in my pocket, and there would be mud, nightfall and dawn, ditches and crusts. How adolescent and attractive that is! But I say this of course because I’m already remembering how I once thought, indeed how I once wrote, in a letter to her, though whether it was one of those I sent or one of those I destroyed or one of those I neither sent nor destroyed, I cannot recall - how love (I meant our love) might be likened to some exotic holiday location where you arrive by plane with a pocket full of credit cards and an immense and criminally complacent smile on your face, only to find when the statutory fun is over that there is no flight back, you have to walk back home. And somehow you have lost everything, your ticket, your Eurocard, even, worst of all, your carta d’identitd. You have to walk back, no planes now, alone and barefoot, over the wildest terrain, crossing angry seas on makeshift rafts, without any sense of direction, without even looking forward particularly to the arrival, without even knowing perhaps what home would look like when and if you got there, for somehow you have no memory of what it might feel like to say to yourself, Now I am at home, now I am back. Until, caught deep in the forest, or exposed on a rocky hillside under a twittering of unseen birds, the obvious finally occurs to you: you’re not even on the same planet. That plane- you boarded flew you to a different world. The love plane. Thus my scribblings in a letter to her, remembered now on the swaying coach. It was a miracle of science, I wrote. I don’t know whether I sent the thing or not. As for walking home, you might as well set out for Andromeda on foot.
A spy! Vikram Griffiths repeats, clearing his gravelly throat.
But Georg, to my left, is wry. Georg has an immense capacity to be composed and to be wry, about which much, very much could be said. On the other hand, who would want to take this quality away from him? Who would not envy him? To Vikram’s Welsh-English, Georg replies in German-Italian. How does Vikram know there is a spy? he asks. Has he found a cigarette packet
with a radio transmitter inside? A bug taped under the collar of his dog? Or a false moustache? Has some top-secret document gone missing?
But at this point both Colin and Dimitra come down the aisle to join us, for with the kind of postures Vikram has been assuming, bending down, loudly whispering, scratching in his sideburns, adjusting his cheaply framed glasses always askew on a somehow exotic stubbornness, a nervous intellectual charm, set off and thus enhanced by this shaggy, nondescript outdoors sort of dog he has, and smells of - with all this posturing it is perfectly obvious that the trip’s first serious confabulation has begun, the first council of war. So now there are three people plus the animal crowded into the aisle where it meets the big back seat and of course the girl on the seat in front of me turns round again, kneeling, and she smiles, and noticing her Vikram Griffiths ruffles her jet-dark hair with great familiarity, much as he does with his dog, and calls her Sneaky and asks her how she’s doin', without a 'g', because it ought to be said in Vikram’s defence that he knows the names of all the students, whereas I can never remember any of them, and if he can’t remember their names, he gives them nicknames like Sneaky, or Sly, or Boris, so it’s as if he knew their names, and understandably this makes him popular, the way clowns are popular, and renowned for finishing sadly and badly.
I’m all right, thank you, Dottor Griffiths, the girl says, in English. Her strong chin dimples in embarrassment when she speaks, but with his fingers scratching at the back of his neck, Vikram has already turned away. He is saying excitedly: Dimitra, Dimitra, come here then, you tell them.
Dimitra is a Greek woman. She begins to explain. In her role of presidente of our union it was obviously her task to inform the head of the language faculty that we had voted to abstain from our duties for a period of three days in order to take our case to Europe. Right?
Dimitra has this manner of interrupting herself to demand consent, as if always ready to hear an unvoiced chorus of bloody-minded rejection. Her most characteristic gesture in our long, tedious and above all contentious meetings is to offer her resignation so that she can then be begged to withdraw it, arid she invariably is begged to withdraw it, not because any of us loves her or wants her to stay or even remotely likes her, but because none of us is sufficiently dedicated to the notions of justice and solidarity we all talk about to take upon ourselves the onerous job of president, excepting of course Vikram Griffiths, who cannot be president, because too conflictual and too crazy, but who nevertheless, despite holding no official position in the union at all, is effectively our leader anyway. Or at least, the only person who does anything.
Right? Dimitra demands.
Georg quickly agrees that of course Dimitra had to go and see Professor Ermani.
It was my job, she adds, never satisfied with mere consent. I had to go and see him. Otherwise we might have put ourselves in a position of illegality
Quite, Vikram says, rubbing his sideburns. God save us from illegality. And having been to prison twice and proud of it, he winks, which Dimitra chooses not to notice.
So, while waiting for Professor Ermani, she says, to finish a phone-call in his office, she, Dimitra, noticed a memorandum on his desk on which she managed to read, albeit upside down and in her second language, the results of the vote taken only the previous day and only after a long and fraught debate (in which Dimitra herself had actually opposed Griffiths” plan, or at least its timing, had said that it would be provocative and dangerous and all in all sheer folly to go to Europe during term-time). Crucially, she had been able to see on Professor Ermani’s memorandum that the names of those who had voted for and against were clearly indicated.
Which can only mean, Vikram Griffiths butts in, that some shit at the meeting went straight to Gauleiter Ermani afterwards to report. There is clearly a traitor among us, a spy.
Who is it? He covers both nostrils with thumb and forefinger and sucks hard to clear his sinuses.
Who was at the meeting? Colin asks in what is a Brummie Italian now, and he gives me a little wink of hello from above a facile moustache, too neatly trimmed, because Colin is “the person with whom I occasionally indulge in tottie-talk, or pork-talk as he calls it, a supremely blokish recounting of our various amorous adventures.
Everybody was at the meeting, Dimitra says, and even anybody who wasn’t could have found out who voted for what, within a name or two, from the others.
The point is, Vikram Griffiths announces - and it’s not hard to imagine, I tell myself, that he is actually quite happy to be away from the difficult separation proceedings with his second wife, the acrimonious child-custody battle with his first, and above all happy, I reflect, to find himself involved in a drama - our struggle with the University of Milan - where he is inconfutably on the side of justice and morality, since in the end this is what all of us long for, is it not, to be engaged in a drama where we know what we want and what we’re doing, and are quite sure we are in the right and can feel a strong sense of purpose and identity and self-esteem and heroism even. How else explain, I ask myself, all the religious crusades and wars pursued up to and far beyond the point of madness, the environmental movements and concern for animal welfare, not to mention all the novels about the same? How else explain this enthusiasm for Europe? — The point is, Vikram says, that from now on we will have to behave as if they knew everything we are doing and saying. And well have to find out who it is. He grins determinedly, digging his fingers into his dog’s fur: It’s going to be a witch hunt.
But the moment he says the word ‘witch’ I’m thinking of her again. Yes, here on the big back seat of this big ugly modern coach crossing Europe, in this controlled environment, so called, of ducts and vents and conditioned air, this triumph of modern mechanics, I’m thinking of her again, as if a great divide had slid down between myself and the others, some invisible screen with enormous and surely marketable capacities for insulation, or as in a dream where one is shouting screaming clawing unheard unseen only inches from people behaving politely at mundane cocktail parties.
But what do I think of when I think of her like this, suddenly isolated, shut away against my will, or in some curious perversion of the will, in this claustrophobic space, this living tomb I am inexplicably digging for myself? What do I think of? What does it really mean, I ask myself in sudden angry rebellion, to say that you me thinking of her? What is this relation between the enigma that is yourself, this voice of yours, and the enigma that is her, her body, her laugh, the area she occupies in space? Why don’t you turn your mind inward now, I suddenly decide, to resolve this once and for all, to confront, once and for all, these moments of sudden and tremendous alienation, so that you can then clear your thoughts and turn them freely to the pressing questions of your colleagues and your job and your future and your ability to maintain in the manner to which they are accustomed the family you have left, not to mention the wider issues of Italy and of Europe and of how you should behave on this trip in this coach where you are going to support a cause that not only do you not believe in but which you do not even remotely care about, since the only thing you care about, I tell myself, quite ruthlessly now, however much you might like to care about other things, as for example the new furniture you must choose for your flat, and the small car you would like to buy, and your daughter, yes, your daughter, the only thing you care about, I tell myself, is her, or rather what happened to you with her.
And what did happen? Do I even know? Perhaps not. Definitely not. Perhaps I shall never know what happened to me with her. Only I know that of all people I have known she was the one I was happiest with, the person I most idealized, the person I was prepared at the last to leave my wife and daughter for, and simultaneously; yes, exactly simultaneously, and both lines of thought are at once attached to and separate from a thousand corroborative details (words images songs smells moments situations), I am thinking that she is the person who most betrayed me, who most completely and so carelessly destroyed me, the person who most built
me up and then casually blew me away, blew me to smithereens, made a nothing of me. Because if a man, I reflect, is already next to nothing when he can’t take his work seriously and when people tell him, albeit kindly (and one is thinking here of old friends and family), that he has failed in his vocation, which was to have been, my vocation, but here one has to laugh, to make some sort of contribution to classical studies, so called, and above all, or so I once wrote on a piece of paper for others more important than myself who might have found a research position for me, to reconstruct, so far as such things can be reconstructed, the psychology of the ancients, to savour their minds and the way they lived inside the natural world, at home in it in a way we never can be, the patterned constellations over their heads throbbing with deities, the deep wells they drew their water from encircled by serpents, and not a single holy text (I’m thinking of pre-Orphic times) or social manifesto, or sniff of political correctness to slip a credit card between themselves and the sacred - if, as I was saying (and how relieved I am when I can digress a moment, when my mind, however briefly, finds some other channel to flood) - if a man is nothing when he can no longer follow even this most tenuous of vocations, classical scholarship, or some similar respectable spin-off, as for example teaching, or translating, or even writing a decent text-book, any sort of respectable and remunerative occupation that might have grown out of that presumptuous vocation, then he is doubly nothing when all at once at forty-three he finds himself leaving his wife and children, he finds himself without his family, so deeply betraying and betrayed that he himself cannot help, cannot help, I tell myself, committing the ultimate betrayal of all, which is not falling into somebody else’s bed (how remarkable that one should ever have imagined such a thing), but abandonment, abandonment. And certainly even if one never could and indeed one never would say that this is her fault any more than mine, or even see much point frankly now in attributing blame to anyone, still it is inescapably true that she had to do with it, with what has happened to me, she still has to do with it, she still holds me under her spell, she is or was and I don’t really know what I’m saying now or what I might mean by this, but it seems to me she is or was or might still be my access to the sacred, the irreducible element in my long negotiation with the other, by which perhaps I mean death, or nature, some part of life’s interminable equation that cannot come out until this harping voice, which is my mind, or part of it, is stilled forever. So that when I think of her, as I was trying to say, it is a witch I think of, a witch I cannot stop thinking of. A witch I am endlessly hunting. And at that very moment Colin leans forward and says her name.
