Little Caesar

by Tommy Wieringa

  Then the crates arrived. At an invisible signal they had been loaded onto a vessel in the harbor of Alexandria, sailed across the sea and unloaded at Norwich. The house was flooded with the ten thousand things. I had watched them being packed with regret, now I watched them being unpacked with reluctance. This house was so much smaller than the other one, yet still everything fit in. I didn’t understand my own reluctance. Perhaps, having grown accustomed to temporary addresses, I had realized that it is no shame to live without a history. Since leaving Aunt Edith and Uncle Gerard we had stayed at hotels, we had seen Venice and spent a long time in London; it had been difficult for her to find a house that was suitable and not too expensive. Hotel rooms, I had noticed, can serve as an antidote to melancholy.

  The house was now overrun by the past. The piano was in the living room. Pathways had been cleared between the cupboards of dark, heavy wood from Rajasthan, the glass chandeliers, between artworks by Bedouins from the Sinai, camel-hide lampshades, floor lamps of chased copper – a museum in which only she knew the origins of things. With the arrival of the crates, the light had been pressed out of the house. A tomb full of magic objects for a highly individual mystic religion.

  I fled into the summer. Skylarks soared up to higher spheres and sang in religious ecstasy. Farm machinery growled through the rolling fields. I loved the flowing life on the beach. As soon as the weather even slightly allowed, the English tossed off their clothes and surrendered to the sun. How on earth could people be so white? I received mugs of tea from women sitting in front of their beach cabins. The cabins were smaller than the crates from Alexandria, and furnished with homemade cupboards full of glasses and a counter with a stove. The women sat in deckchairs all day, wearing their floral bathing suits and exchanging high, sing-song noises.

  Usually I was alone. I didn’t mind being alone. Sorrow and happiness had a deeper hue then. Sometimes I looked up suddenly, at the edge of the cliff, and saw my mother there, gesturing to me. She never shouted. She waited until I could feel her eyes burning at the back of my neck.

  She almost never went into the village, and the beach was a place she rarely visited. Sometimes she would go for a swim very early in the morning, or later, once the bathers had gone home. On very rare occasions she would sit in the shade of a windbreak, wearing her big Dior sunglasses and wiggling her toes in the sand. She established no bonds, exhibited no social behavior.

  *

  We found a housekeeper, Margareth. Her boyfriend, an unemployed Arsenal fan, brought her and fetched her again each day around noon. Margareth polished and dusted the objects in the house, slowly and carefully, and when she got to the end she started all over again. She did the shopping for us in Alburgh and prepared the evening meals.

  I grew up in a world of women. I developed an unhealthy interest in bath oils. Sometimes my mother got the urge to cover me in makeup. I never put up a struggle. There was no masculine counterpressure, no male role model. Warren was too far away for that. I understood girls very well indeed, in fact I shared their interests and pursuits. I wrote in a diary with a little golden padlock and burned incense in my room. On my thirteenth birthday my mother gave me olive oil shampoo and a pot of Lancôme facial crème, and I was pleased. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. That’s not normal. It was a wonder that I wasn’t teased about it at school. It was perhaps only because there were girls who were in love with me that I avoided the suspicion of homosexuality. From my very first day at that school I was awash in excited whispers. That never stopped.

  Virtually all my father’s possessions had been put out on the sidewalk in Alexandria, except for the scale model of a tower he had been building in the harbor of Alexandria, a few rolls of blueprints, his sketchbooks and the preliminary models for a group of statues. Those statuettes were in my mother’s bedroom. They depicted my father and my mother locked in the act of mating. From the shadows of her boudoir they came out to meet me, fantastical creatures of rough clay, half-human, half-beast. It was only now that I began to notice them; they had been around all my life and had simply become a part of things.

  The first time I asked where the models came from was during one of our sessions before the mirror at her vanity. She was doing my face. Painting me, that might be a better way to put it – first she applied a heavy foundation of Pan-Cake that obliterated all expression, then drew a new face on top of that. She looked at me so intensely while she worked, the way she usually looked only at herself in the mirror; I loved that undivided attention.

  But I wasn’t to be put off: once again, I asked why he had portrayed them in that way.

  ‘Your mouth, Ludwig, you moved!’

  But she knew very well that there was no getting around an answer. And so it arrived by fits and starts. During the first year they were in love he had immortalized them countless times. As man and woman, was what she called it. That answer didn’t satisfy me.

  ‘As we were making love,’ she said then.

  He had photographed their coupling from various angles – material for Blind, a group of what was to be seventeen life-sized porcelain statues of my copulating parents, in a host of positions. Some overlaid with mosaics, others with cloisonné, they had long stood in the Guggenheim at Bilbao. A Kama Sutra built to scale.

  ‘But if I wasn’t born yet,’ I said to her face in the mirror, ‘then it could be that I was being conceived right there, at that moment, right?’

  Her shy laugh, the hand reaching for the mascara.

  ‘Now just sit still for a moment.’

  She brushed the mascara onto my lashes, I kept my eyes fixed on the clay figure of the woman on her knees, the bearded man behind her. The satyr taking her from behind. I thought: Here you come, Ludwig Alexander Unger, here you come! and laughed – straight through all the makeup, the face of innocence, the laugh burst forth like a new day.

  ‘Oh, damn it,’ she grumbled, ‘I was almost finished.’

  We spent a lot of time in front of the mirror. Gradually my eyes opened wider. I loved the narcotic sweetness of her bedroom, the heat of her body close to mine. It excited me. Sometimes I masturbated afterwards.

  I was her makeup doll, she would tell me things from before my memory began. I had the impression that in making her historical sketches she used the eraser more often than the pencil. While she was painting me, my eyes opened to her icons as well: a pen and ink portrait of the Maitreya, a pastel of Jesus of Nazareth, a photograph of Bhagwan torn not entirely intact from a magazine. These were the fixed points in her personal pantheon.

  ‘They look like him,’ I said.

  My geisha face was expressionless.

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘Those men, they look like him. Like my father.’

  Her smile wavered. Mentioning him caused her pain. Physically.

  ‘No they don’t,’ she said.

  ‘Yes they do. They all have beards.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean . . .’

  ‘And those piercing eyes, like they want something from you.’

  She shook her head. I pushed in the knife and twisted it.

  ‘Why are all of them hanging here on the wall, but there isn’t a picture of him in the whole house?’

  ‘Stop it, Ludwig. Those are examples to me . . . universal teachers . . . inspiration. Call it whatever you like. But it doesn’t have anything to do with your father.’

  I pointed at the statue of them mating.

  ‘They look like him,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know what’s got into you today, but I want you to stop right now.’

  But I didn’t stop. There was a pleasant sort of wakefulness in my head, something related to hunger. What can be seen, will be seen.

  We lived at the edge of the world and could fall off at any moment. We knew that when we moved in. That the house was a risk. That although Warren was building a line of defense, there were unknown factors. Our preservation depended on the pace at which the wall progressed, the quantity of mate
rial he could obtain. We didn’t know that in the month before we arrived five meters of the hillside had been lost. Warren did the best he could, we never doubted his trust-worthiness.

  ‘Put everything inside,’ he said once during our first winter there. ‘Make sure everything’s battened down. Seriously.’

  From my bedroom window on the first floor I saw it coming. First the gusts of wind. The playful nudges. I heard it crack. In the sky above the sea psychedelic colors flowed together, bursts of rain lashed our house. I saw sulfurous skies, then watched as everything turned green, the green of sunglasses – the sky had fallen on its side, the rain was coming in horizontally. Clouds of dark blue ink curled in on themselves, like an animal writhing in pain. The storm came closer, the light was sucked out of the world in a vortex.

  ‘Ludwig!’ my mother shouted from downstairs. ‘Stay away from the windows! Don’t get close to the windows, that’s what Warren said.’

  The wind grew stronger, I remember my amazement at the power of something that was invisible.

  The storm lasted a day and a night. Its voice made our ears ring. Everything shook beneath the pounding drumbeats. We lit a fire in the hearth but the smoke came back through the flue. We had put some things in the shed and fastened down others, but we had thought too much about the word storm and too little about a sky that was turned against us. The roof of the pantry was lifted and ripped off, we found it later in the bushes. The house felt like it was being torn from its foundations. Everything clattered and whistled. My mother went outside with a flashlight to fasten a shutter. She came back inside in a frenzy.

  ‘The wind,’ she panted. ‘So strong. Can’t breathe.’

  We sat up for part of the night, wrapped in blankets, and finally fell asleep in the living room. We knew: when we awoke, the sea would have come even closer.

  Looking out the window in the half-light of morning, I saw the dark figure of a man out there. His coattails were flapping. I pulled on my boots. The wind knocked the air out of my lungs. Along the path between the thorn bushes I walked to the cliff’s edge, where Warren was leaning into the wind.

  ‘Here . . .’ he shouted. ‘And there.’

  A huge breach had been knocked out of the seawall further up. Under our feet the waves were washing up all the way to the cliff. His hand on my shoulder, don’t get too close, boy. The cliff could have been undermined, it could collapse, we would drown in the foaming sea. We looked at the ragged edge, and I saw Warren’s concern. A new boundary had been cut out. I tried to stand beside him like a man sharing his concern, I knitted my brows and let earnestness take possession of my body.

  When we bought the house, Warren had said that by the next winter his wall would extend all the way in front our house – he hadn’t made it, not by a long shot. We saw his struggle, the great effort; my mother didn’t want to remind him of his promise already, not now. Besides, there was no use. It was painful. He was doing his utmost.

  During the storm flood of 1953, Alburgh had been almost entirely surrounded by the sea. Six people drowned. At Dwight Busby’s café you could see how high the water rose: on the wall, Busby had painted little waves at the height of a man’s shoulder. A storm surge of that caliber was rare. The North Sea was a shallow bowl, the water flowed into it from the north and back out again through the Strait of Calais. During that storm the wind had pushed more water into the bowl than it could take, ebb and flow were disturbed, the water from one high tide had not yet disappeared before the next came rolling in. The tides piled up: the volume of water in the bowl had now doubled. And all that pent-up energy exploded against the coast – the cliff was eaten away at from below and ultimately collapsed.

  During our first winter at Kings Ness, a great deal of land was lost as well. There was not enough filling material coming in, the work sometimes stopped altogether. When it started again, sounds of protest were heard from Alburgh about the trucks driving up and down the cobble-stone streets. A letter to the editor of the Alburgh Chronicle, grumbling among the citizens. They felt sympathy for Mr. Feldman’s War, but the village wasn’t built for such heavy transport, its rustic charm was being violated, people came here for the quiet and natural beauty.

  On one occasion the work on the soft seawall was halted for six months. Chemical waste had been found amid the debris. The contaminated section was dug away, and since then Warren had kept careful track of what was dumped where, so that polluted ground could be traced back to a source. Warren had a shipment of concrete WWII tank traps placed at the bottom of the cliff, in front of our house. This served to slow the erosion somewhat. We started looking at the sea differently. Its aesthetic and recreational functions began waning in importance. Before us lay an element that was out to destroy us; we interpreted its indifferent destructiveness as an act of aggression.

  Warren Feldman wasn’t the first person to try and safeguard the coastline, and he wouldn’t be the last. It was inevitable that large parts of East Anglia would one day be under water again. People would continue to struggle against that, just as the inhabitants of the lost town of Castrum had once thrown up walls of mud and twigs against the tide.

  Sometimes, drawn by the romanticism of that drowned city, tourists came to look from our garden. You had to have a good imagination, for there was nothing to see. Looking east from Kings Ness, out over the sea, you looked out across the empty space where the town had once been. From the murky waters, divers sometimes brought up chunks of church wall and coping stones; it was this marine archeology that told us what Castrum may once have looked like. Spread across the sea floor were the remains of at least eight churches, four abbeys, two hospices and an unknown number of chapels – where crabs and fish now lived, as well as sponges, lobsters and the occasional eel.

  Castrum had been a port town even in Roman times. The pride of Alburgh’s museum was a scale model of the city, which also illustrated its gradual disappearance. Dotted lines showed how the coastline had run in former times, how it had kept moving up – Kings Ness was now its extreme western border. Each of the dotted lines was marked with a year: 1286, 1342, 1740, 1953. Hundreds of storms had raged through the centuries, but that handful of dates was important, for it was then that storms of exceptional violence had taken place. Great damage had been caused in those years, the coastline had changed drastically. Starting in 1740, the dotted line ran outside the western limit of the town and one could no longer really speak of a Castrum at all.

  It had been a large town, covering more than a square mile at its peak. There were four gates, protected by palisades and reinforced earthen walls. Castrum owed its prominence to its harbor, the largest in eastern England. At the height of its prosperity it had served as home port to eighty trading vessels, its fishing fleet went as far afield as Iceland. The town’s elite wore clothes of Flemish linen and drank French wines. Wood for its ships came from the Baltic. The streets were peopled by merchants from Antwerp, Stavoren and Kiel. It was a city one visited to go to the market, to get drunk down at portside and exchange blows with a boatswain from Jutland. Down there were also the workshops of master guildsmen and tanners and smiths. The houses of Castrum were made of wood, its houses of prayer and its abbeys of stone. Outside the town were the fields and the herds, but Castrum’s lifeblood was trade – the multilingual, noisy trade of the North Sea.

  On New Year’s Eve in 1286, a powerful northeasterly storm blew in. It was spring tide. A thick embankment of gravel was forced up by the waves at the mouth of the harbor; the entrance was blocked, ships could only make port at high tide. The people were unable to dredge a new channel. Castrum lost some of its importance to competing harbors. For the first time, the city saw more people leave than come in. Its inhabitants were seeking their fortunes elsewhere. And maintenance of the seawall, that work of many hands, was neglected.

  Then came the night of 14 January 1342. Masses of water, whipped up by the wind and the moon’s pull, crashed against the east coast. The storm shoved the water out
in front of it. A town lay in its way. Houses in the port district were torn apart, their inhabitants escaped to the upper city with whatever they could carry. Waves leapt up meters high, as though the sea were tossing lassoes after them. By the moonlight breaking occasionally through the coursing cover of clouds that night, the people watched all their earthly possessions being lost. The wailing storm blew in their faces salty rain and sulfurous yellow clots of foam, churned down below in the vaults of hell.

  By morning light they saw the ruins of houses, customs sheds, inns, warehouses, wharfs – all of it shattered by the incessant pounding. All that was left of St. George’s were the walls and the belfry; graves had been washed open, their horrific contents now revealed to the light of day.

  In the centuries that follow the city’s role dwindles steadily. By the seventeenth century, Castrum is only a quarter of its original size. Many of the original inhabitants have moved to a nearby hill, where they have founded a town by the name of Alburgh. Old Castrum and new Alburgh become locked in a bitter struggle for scarce means.

  December 1740 arrives. A powerful northeasterly wind has been blowing for days. It is very, very cold. The wind swells to storm velocity. Masses of water again pile up before the coast and come thundering down on the cliffs on which Castrum’s last remains are standing.

  A priest, William Mason, who led his last service in St. Paul’s a few days earlier, documented the consequences of that storm. St. Paul’s, Castrum’s largest church, is torn apart by the waves. Its eastern wall collapses. A few days later the belfry falls as well. When the sea calms at last, Mason sees that the waters have laid bare the foundations of buildings long forgotten. Old wells hidden by the soil till then rise from the ground like chimneys. What is left of the town is strewn with stones, crabs and fish. Rivulets of water race down the streets on their way back to the sea. Mud everywhere. The penetrating stench of rotting. The parade grounds are flooded, and that spring the sea asters blossom inland. Freshwater springs have turned silty. The Church of the Holy Trinity, atop the cliff, has lost its nave. The bell tower is all that remains standing. Bones stick out of the cliff, human skulls are found on the beach.