Little Caesar

by Tommy Wieringa

‘I need to talk to your mother,’ he said.

  I traipsed upstairs like a little boy and tried to listen in, but by the time they reached my ears the words had become unintelligible. Once he had left, I asked, rather casually, ‘So what’s the news?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Warren thinks . . . the forecasts are bad. He’s afraid, I mean, he thinks this might be the end.’

  But still. The weight. The irreversible. It hasn’t made itself known, it was simply waiting for you all that time in the dark.

  ‘What are you thinking, love?’

  I blinked back tears and said from the doorway, ‘I’m going to pack my things.’

  What a house means. The walls around a cavity. It means inside, it protects you against the outside. Now inside was about to become outside. The roof would be ripped open, the dark sky would force its way in, the cold, black sea. I looked around my room, pondering over what should be taken and what not. There was no plan, no destination; the best thing was to pack as lightly as possible. I had a brown cardboard suitcase, found along the street, with stickers from a Rhine cruiser and the Lorelei. Two pairs of trousers, shirts, underwear, a bound-up packet of letters and postcards. For the rest, those valuables I thought I could probably hock should life turn against me: mother-of-pearl cufflinks, the automatic Tissot watch that had belonged to my great-grandfather, Friedrich Unger. (He, Friedrich Unger, had crossed the border from Ostfriesland to east Groningen province to marry a Dutch girl, Aleida Wanningen – ancestors immortalized in photographs in which time seemed recalcitrant and stiff, you couldn’t imagine people laughing out loud or cheating on their spouses. My mother got her beauty from Aleida; even the fashion of that day and the sepia print couldn’t hide her regular, noble features. Friedrich and Aleida’s son, Wilhelm Unger, known as Willem, was the father of my mother and Aunt Edith. I had never seen my grandparents; my grandmother died early on of heart problems, my grandfather had turned his back on my mother after Lilith. As far as my mother knew, he still lived with his second wife in the brick colossus close to Bourtange, the farm I knew from pictures in which my mother wore cotton dresses and walked barefoot through the dust of dry summers. When we were in Holland, the stopping-off place between Alexandria and here, he had refused to see us. That’s what his second wife, Aunt Wichie, said; he himself refused to come to the phone. At the time I had noticed nothing of that, that I had a grandfather not so far away.)

  I took along some sheet music and three books, Moby Dick (my loveliest book), The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski (from my mother’s bookcase, the promise of grown-up literature) and A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell; still unread, but impressive after our English teacher, Mr. Dowd, told us that Russell had written the book during a passage by steamer to the United States, from memory, almost without reference works.

  A quiet knock on the door, my mother. Her arms folded across her chest, she leaned against the doorpost. I asked what she wanted.

  ‘There’s a truck coming the day after tomorrow,’ she said.

  I looked around, the posters on the walls, the computer, the metal bed, the cupboard that listed to the right because it was not screwed together well.

  ‘That’s what I want to keep,’ I said, pointing to the things on the bed.

  The howling of the wind, only the beginning.

  ‘It’s just a forecast,’ she said.

  ‘Dream on.’

  ‘We do have to be prepared,’ she admitted, ‘you’re right.’

  We talked about the end, my mother and I. It was our best conversation in a long while. We were not melancholy or dramatic, those were moods that had gone before; in the cold light of the fait accompli, the evacuation and the loss seemed easier to bear.

  ‘And afterwards?’ I asked.

  ‘When this is gone, you mean?’

  She nodded at the window, outside which the chasm had approached to within a single bound.

  ‘There has to be something then,’ I said.

  ‘I have faith that something will come along.’

  Faith was her secret charm, the abracadabra of holistic magic. For a moment there was the wrenching feeling of irritation, but I let it pass. She said, ‘I can always get work cleaning houses, or . . .’

  ‘Or at a roadside garage, then we’ll be white trash and we can live in a mobile home along the highway! And we’ll drive around in a van full of junk and neglect our teeth, okay?’

  She laughed. The tinkling sound of ice cubes in a glass.

  ‘So, the day after tomorrow.’

  She nodded and said, still in the doorway, ‘We have to be strong, okay, sweetheart?’

  ‘Strong . . .’

  ‘You already are, you always have been. I don’t know anyone else like you, Ludwig. In fact, you don’t really need anyone anymore.’

  Gently, I pushed the door closed behind her.

  Sometimes the final notes of a song will go nagging on in my mind. For hours, until a new melody arrives to replace the old one. The same happens to me sometimes with the final words before a silence. They nestle in my head and echo there for a long time. A mysterious, internal repetition. That evening it was my mother’s voice. In fact, you don’t really need anyone anymore. Later, as I was playing the piano as well: In fact, you don’t really need anyone anymore. It summoned up an entire world view. The crowning element in personal development was to not need anyone, to be alone, a mote in the darkness. The final consequence of this view of life, of course, was that she didn’t need me either, anymore.

  On my way home I noticed that the wind had picked up. The foam on the surf glowed in the moonlight. The waves were already washing up against the sea wall, but still lacked the force to do it any harm. But it would swell, gather momentum, bubbling and hissing, to strike at our Achilles’ heel. I would sleep poorly in my bed beside the chasm.

  Movers arrived. She pointed out the things to them. That needs to go with, that one doesn’t, careful with that lamp, you’re going to dent the copper if you do that. I remembered the house on the Rue Mahmoud Abou El Ela, the faded negatives of cupboards and tapestries on its walls after the dismemberment, and felt the brief stab of loss when I thought about the treasure buried in the Eden of roses, bougainvillea and blue-blossoming jacaranda.

  There were three of them. The driver was the boss. He shook his head as he worked.

  ‘I can have them bring a bigger lorry,’ he said a few times.

  They wound their way amid the ten thousand things, an elephant ballet. Outside the wind mocked our efforts. The mover drove back and forth twice between our house and Warren and Catherine’s shed, where we could store our things until further notice. A double row of moving boxes was piled up against the back wall, full of objects swaddled in soft tissue paper, starting in on their period of waiting in the dark.

  *

  The walls shuddered. So close, you could see the waves from the window. The gray masses of water being pressed up along the cliff and shooting three, four meters in the air, to the top of the roof, where they seemed to pause for one brief, ghastly moment in order to eye us, their prey, before collapsing back into the sea. The end game. The whirlwind of snippets in my head, the age-old questions: where are we going to live? Who will take care of us? An all-embracing what now? But I also knew I would be disappointed if it didn’t happen now – I was tired of dawdling, of pacing the waiting room until the doctor returned with the verdict. Downstairs I heard the vacuum cleaner, my mother trying to undo at least a little of the ravages the movers had left behind. The state in which she left the house behind, I realized, would determine her memories of it. The arrangement and cleansing of that which is doomed to perish is a crucial act, a paradoxical expression of how to live.

  A premature brand of disaster tourism had begun. Heads popped up from behind the bushes to observe our evacuation. It was impossible for them to get any closer to the house without standing right at the window, so they watched from a distance, sometimes with binoculars. We were the house
that wouldn’t last long now, we were the sea reclaims its own and we were also, as the headline in the Norwich Evening News put it: CASTRUM’S LAST HEROES. One caption read that this, it was rumored, was the house where former porno star Eve LeSage lived with her son. By the time the Sun latched onto the juicy story – SEX GODDESS LOSES HEARTH AND HOME– we were no longer available for comment; they had to use old pictures along with their story, my mother on her back with Wills Horn on top. A team picture from the year our second XV won the championship. In it, I am kneeling at the front, my arms resting on one knee. A circle has been drawn around my head. Selwyn is standing behind me, his arms crossed, beside him you see Leland wearing his scrumcap. Bailey and Dalrymple have just burst out laughing – it’s a cheerful photograph. I had no idea who had been accommodating enough to pass it along to the paper.

  In the same way my mother did her vacuuming, so I performed my duties that evening in the Whaler. I played as though the sand were not being washed away from beneath our house at that very moment, I sang as though no block of basalt lay on my heart.

  ‘It’s gonna happen now, isn’t it?’ Leland said when I took a little pause between sets.

  There was no stopping Miss Julie Henry. Her empathy went beyond the bounds of decency; I could picture her deflowering me in the walk-in cooler. Leland asked where I was going to sleep. First at Warren and Catherine’s, I said, we would spend the night there, after that we weren’t sure.

  The hotel was busy, a crowd had been drawn by the spectacle of the storm, the waves shooting up meters above the jetties. I took off earlier than usual and ran to Kings Ness. The tempest had now thickened to more substantial stuff, I had difficulty making headway. Torrents of rain. Salty globs of foam were being blown across the land, grains of sand and grass and leaves lashed me about the ears. The sky was open and clear. Over there the dark contours of the house. I stormed into Warren and Catherine’s. The three of them were sitting around the lamp.

  ‘It’s still there!’ I shouted.

  As though something had fallen to the floor and shattered.

  ‘Take your shoes off,’ Catherine said.

  I slid up to the table.

  ‘Your shoes!’ Warren said.

  I went back to the dark vestibule and kicked them off. A glass was waiting for me, the windows rattled in their frames. The substance in my glass was pungent and brought tears to my eyes – I had learned to drink beer in rugby canteens, but whisky was new to me. A hard and unrelenting master. I couldn’t quite get a hold on the mood around the table, I was locked out of the circle.

  ‘We’ve been talking about it, Ludwig,’ my mother said. ‘Warren and Catherine have offered to let you stay here for a while until things are a bit clearer.’

  I didn’t say a word. I waited.

  ‘I’m leaving for London early tomorrow morning,’ she went on. ‘I don’t know exactly how it will work out, I want to talk to some other lawyers. Warren agrees that this is a case that might go all the way to the European Court of Justice. Because it’s about – a kind of protection. How did it go again, Warren? The right to defend your home? A basic human right, that’s what you said, wasn’t it?’

  I was too excited to pay attention. I asked Warren for a torch; he handed me a Maglite heavy enough to brain a cow. The light blazed a trail for me through the bushes. I moved towards the edge and stopped about ten meters from it. The waves were slamming against the cliff with the dull, punishing blows of a heavyweight. A haunted house, lonesome and forlorn. It made you feel the kind of pity you might feel for a mistreated pony. My eyes fixed on the darkened house, I ducked down in the bushes to get out of the wind and bid welcome to my memories. It was cold, so I crouched down further. Hissing fountains came rocketing up from the depths. Scuds of rain were whipping down on me. It must have been past midnight, I had visions of our house as a ship, of the listing and the floating away, of how it would forget us on its journey.

  Then a voice, my name. LUD‐WIG! I stood up. Stinging needles in my flesh as the blood started flowing again. A beam of light close by, Warren, his spectacles dotted with rain. He screamed, ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING?’

  ‘I WANT TO WATCH!’

  He stood there for a moment, looking, shouted CAREFUL! and moved back towards the house, shoulders hunched up around his ears. Waves broke over the edge, white shapes scaled the cliff like enemy soldiers. Foam flew through the cone of light from the streetlamp. I couldn’t take my eyes off the water’s rise and fall, the towers collapsing one by one. Even if the house survived this, its eastern wall would be badly damaged, the water must be in the front room already. Sometimes I thought I detected motion, the shiver that came before the collapse into the depths – an illusion. The house was still standing, perhaps it would be spared! A twinge of absurd hope. I ran and screamed at the wind, the sky – I was the loneliest, oh joy, the loneliest of all! I danced like a demon in the beating rain. A noise made me stop, I pointed the torch at the house. The groaning of a nocturnal animal, an inexpressible pain. With amazing lightness the house spun low on its axis and slid moaning, screeching, into the chasm. The music of my nightmares. A sound like an underground explosion – then it was over. I stared agape at the void where the house had been standing just a moment earlier. I had never experienced such lucidity. A chosen one. At this very moment, even as I had the thought, things were going as they had always gone on, first a house, then no house – true erosion wasn’t about losing a house but about time; I had seen time in action, the being, the not-being, the glorious indifference. I fell to my knees and clawed at the earth, let it run through my fingers like a farmer. Cold rains washed over me, on the back of a whale I traveled to the ends of the earth, nothing remained hidden to my eyes.

  That was how I’d always imagined it, the slow-motion image of a house sinking into the depths, like the opening up of the earth’s crust, but that was not how it was. It tilted and disappeared into the turbulence below. Strangely enough, the version I actually saw never supplanted the imaginary version. Even now they exist side by side in my head, they are both equally real. Sometimes I have to tell myself oh no, that’s not how it went.

  I stayed with Warren and Catherine for two weeks, and it drove me crazy. I was brimming over with destructive energy. There wasn’t enough room for me under one roof with two old people. I moved in with Cameron Fitzpatrick, a boy from my team. He had a flat of his own above Webster’s greengrocer’s. It was a little place. During the daytime I rolled up my sleeping bag and stowed the mattress in the cupboard. I remember cigarette butts everywhere and the exhausted furnishings from the second-hand shop. Cameron’s father had disappeared from sight, his mother couldn’t handle him anymore. He had been to a few boarding schools. Rugby sort of helped to keep him in line. Now he worked in the stockroom at Fraser’s. He was lost. A boy who would only make it with a lot of good luck, which he didn’t have. Cameron had once smoked a joint on the steeple of St. George’s. God knows how he got up there. He talked about it to anyone who would listen. He lacked the class to keep quiet about things like that.

  I tried to let things run their normal course, but things got in the way. The article appeared in the Sun, with that disgusting picture of my mother and the one of my team. In which I played piano in that respectable hotel on Alburgh’s quaint market square. You’d be surprised how many well-heeled people read that rag. I became that boy with some kind of problem. The moles had dug deeply, their burrowing had even unearthed Bodo Schultz. They wrote horrible things about him, horrible in the sense that they might have been true. About his destructive art, the riots it provoked. I bore the dubious patina of fame, my origins were a myth. I tried to be unyielding and distant. I thought about my mother’s words, the sentence branded on my skin: In fact, you don’t really need anyone anymore. The evil spell that pushed my life in a certain direction. The future looms up before me like the mouth of a smooth metal tube, nothing to grab hold of: I slide, I fall, nothing sticks to me, just as I stick to nothing. My fin
gers glide across the keys, a Chopin nocturne in G-minor, opus 15-3, I nod politely at the quiet applause. I am a good little monkey.

  My mother took a room at the Belfort in London. I called her once a week. I couldn’t quite pin down what she was doing there. When we spoke she put on her long-distance voice, the voice of people who aren’t alone in the room. A claim was being prepared, she said, she had a lot of confidence in the new lawyers. And she had to go to Holland for the reading of a will, but she didn’t say whose. She was behind her veil and she wasn’t coming out. I had the feeling that the house was the rind that had held us together, and that now we had fallen apart into two clean halves. I was worried. I couldn’t imagine her alone in the world, doing everyday things, I had experienced so little of her dealings with anyone other than me.

  Twice a week I ate at the house of Selwyn’s parents, Paula and Ashley Loyd. Selwyn had indeed gone off to study medicine at Cambridge, he came home with stories about nightly scrambles across the slate roofs of the city. About vomiting in the dean’s front garden. He played rugby for the university’s first team, and punted on the Cam with stunning girls. His life had taken on an infectious dynamism.

  It was with a feeling of relief that I left Cameron’s perspective-free cubicle on those evenings to dine with Paula and Ashley. They didn’t make me feel like they were doing me a favor, they enjoyed having company now that their children had all left home. They asked no prying questions and would never blame you for something you couldn’t do anything about. When we watched TV I could see the old barf spot on the carpet.

  Paula had something carelessly aristocratic about her. She wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing a crazy hat at Ascot, but carrying a butterfly net in the jungles of Belize was perhaps a different matter. Ashley was a slyly humorous, good-natured man, a man with see-through, innocent secrets. A general practitioner, he was preparing for retirement by fixing up old furniture in the garage. Hunting was his real passion. He always asked whether I wanted to take a nice piece of venison, a haunch home with me. A leg of hare, perhaps? Sometimes Cameron and I, when we were stoned at night and had the munchies, would fry up the contents of the package I took with me and attack it with blunt cutlery.