by Takis Würger
Alex
Goya went deaf in early 1792. He’d had a fever, and became so ill that he lost his hearing. Afterwards he moved to a villa outside Madrid, where he painted fourteen pictures on his dining-room and drawing-room walls. Goya didn’t name these pictures. He is assumed to have painted them for no one but himself. They are known as the Pinturas negras, the Black Paintings. I think it’s a beautiful name.
Dark, disturbing works, full of violence, hatred, and insanity. They’re works of genius, but they’re hard to look at. One of the paintings depicts the god Saturn devouring his son because of a prophecy that one of his progeny would overthrow him. Some say Goya’s deafness made him go mad. There is madness in the eyes of the god in that picture.
Is it part of my illness when I feel that pictures speak to me, or do other people feel the same?
Madness was already part of my life when my sister died. It’s easy for me to admit this, because it explains a lot. The doctors didn’t call it that; they talked about dissociation and trauma, but I know that I was grappling with madness. I had to vanquish it alone. If I’d taken Hans in I would have destroyed us both. The dark thoughts would have infected him. I knew what it was like to grow up without a stable family, and I couldn’t have provided that stable family for him. At boarding school he was safe.
They broke Goya’s picture of Saturn off the wall, and now it hangs in the Prado. Everyone raves about the eyes, but they’re not the crucial thing. The crucial thing is a section that was painted over because people would have been too distressed by it. I’ve examined that painting very closely. Under the dark patch that covers the god’s nether regions you can make out that Goya painted him with an erect penis.
I would have dragged the boy with me into the abyss. I wasn’t ready yet. I wasn’t myself.
Hans
Our horse was taken away, and I was sent to boarding school. My aunt became my legal guardian; I thought she would come and fetch me, but she didn’t. I didn’t dare ask her why she decided not to. She sold our house in the forest and used the money to pay for the Jesuit school. In the brochure it said: “Order and decorum in everyday life are essential, along with respectfulness and the willingness to help one’s fellow man. We ensure that each individual pupil is guaranteed a well-regulated boarding school environment in which he is motivated and willing to learn.” This sentence made me uneasy.
My suitcase contained five pairs of trousers and five shirts, underwear, socks, one of my father’s woolen jerseys, my mother’s necklace, a hat, a twig from the cherry tree, my brown diary with the unlined pages and the black cowhide boxing gloves.
Johannes Theological College was situated on the slopes of the Bavarian Forest; it looked to me like a knight’s castle, with its towers and crenellated walls. For centuries it served the Jesuits as a place of retreat, and in World War II some members of the resistance group known as the Kreisau Circle met here to plan the murder of Adolf Hitler.
When I saw the boarding school for the first time, the sun was shining through the fir trees and the mountain breeze blew Italian warmth into the countryside, but this was just part of the deception.
On my first day at boarding school I visited the principal’s study. He was a friendly young man; we sat at a table covered with a linen cloth. I gripped the cloth under the table and thought of my mother’s yellow dress.
The principal said he understood if I needed time, but I knew that he didn’t understand a thing. He had a wart on his forehead and smiled, although there was no reason to do so. I wondered why he was taking notes.
At Johannes Theological College every pupil had to give a urine sample on Monday morning, which was tested for narcotics. The pupils were either the sons of rich businessmen or boys who had taken so many drugs their parents thought the monks would be better equipped to deal with them.
Twelve monks lived in the castle; eleven taught, and one was a cook. His name was Father Gerald and he was from Sudan. I liked him because he was different and had a sad smile. Father Gerald didn’t talk much; when he did, it was in English, and his voice sounded deep and foreign. When he cooked, he boiled everything for too long.
On the first day I went to the washroom and looked at the basins hanging all along the wall. I counted them: there were forty. Everyone here seemed to live on an equal footing. That night a few of the pupils threw balls of paper at me, chewed into compact projectiles. I pretended not to notice. Later they stole my pillow. After a few weeks, an older boy slapped the back of my neck with the flat of his hand as I was queuing in the dining hall. I felt my ears turn red. I grinned, because I didn’t know what else to do; it only hurt a little. The boy stood behind me and asked loudly if I missed my mama, and if that was why I always whimpered in my sleep at night. I turned and punched the boy in the face with a left hook. The impact made a sound like the opening of a jam jar.
Father Gerald saw it all, and grabbed me by the arms. I thought I’d be expelled from the school, and I was glad, because I hoped that meant I’d be able to go and live with my aunt in England. I didn’t know that the school needed the money because some of the monks had invested in Icelandic high-tech companies and had lost a lot of the foundation’s capital. Also, the boy I’d hit was a troublemaker and the principal was secretly glad that he was in the sick bay. He made me reorganize and clean the wine cellar as a punishment.
After the punch-up the other children avoided me. I let them copy my math homework, and once, after spending days summoning up the courage, I asked if anyone wanted to play hide-and-seek in the forest. I resolved not to run as far away this time, but the children weren’t interested in me and said playing hide-and-seek was childish. Perhaps I need to tell them more about myself, I thought, so I told them how oranges tasted of adventure, and how the soft hair at the nape of girls’ necks sometimes looked like candyfloss. They just jeered at me.
One of the monks told me I shouldn’t pay any attention to the fact that I was poorer than the other pupils. He gave me a Bible with a silk bookmark indicating a passage of Job in the Old Testament: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. I climbed the church tower and flung the Bible into the Bavarian Forest.
I stayed sane because I was able to spend time alone, which for the most part I enjoyed. I read and went for walks in the forest and tried to identify the birds. I became good at that.
Once, when we had been studying the Book of Genesis in religious education yet again, I thought about which hundred people I would save if the world were about to end. I couldn’t think of one hundred people who deserved to go in the ark, but I would have filled the boat anyway, with Father Gerald’s extended family. That wasn’t what preoccupied me, though. What first troubled me, then filled me with sadness, was the realization that there was no one who would let me onto their ark.
I missed my parents, and I missed the house, the smell of the old floorboards, the furniture my father had made, every corner of the cool walls that held a memory for me. It was like the hunger I used to feel when I wasn’t allowed to eat before one of my boxing matches because I had to lose two kilos to reach my weight class. The hunger was a hole I felt in my stomach. The loneliness was a hole I felt in my entire body, as if all that was left of me was an empty husk.
To begin with, my aunt wrote me a letter once a month, in English, in which she mostly told me what was happening at her university. I wrote her long letters about the noises in the dormitory, and the other children, and how I dreamt about my father without a face, but she never responded to this.
The wine cellar I was supposed to reorganize as a punishment was long and cool. Every now and then I threw a few punches in the air. I hadn’t asked if I could carry on boxing at boarding school. The gloves were stowed in the suitcase under my bed. I took off my shirt and shadowboxed until the sweat poured from my fists, dripping onto the bottles as I punched.
A shadow moved in the darkness. “Your left is too low.”
I stared at
the monk. I’d be in trouble now. Father Gerald in his black cassock was almost invisible in the dark of the cellar.
“You drop your left,” he said. He held up his right palm like a punch mitt. Seeing his stance, I knew that Father Gerald was a boxer. I hesitated for a moment, then stretched out my left arm and touched the pale-pink palm with my fist.
Father Gerald took a step back and raised both hands. I punched: left, right. The priest described a hook. I ducked. From one combination to another the pace of the punches increased. The sound of fists on palms echoed through the wine cellar, the rhythm of a language that needed no words. At the end Father Gerald let me hit three hard punches with my right. He winced, then laughed.
“Call me Gerald.”
“Hans.”
It was the first time in ages that I’d spoken because I wanted to.
“Thank you,” I said.
The next day I put my boxing gloves in a rucksack and took them with me to the wine cellar. Father Gerald had brought two small, hard sofa cushions; he had used a filleting knife to cut holes in them for his hands. They were the softest mitts I would ever hit.
“Let’s go,” said Father Gerald.
Hans
The months at boarding school passed me by. When I wasn’t in the wine cellar I spent a lot of time sitting in the tower next to the chapel bell, because there I could read undisturbed. Sometimes I would gaze at the edge of the forest and dream about how I would start a better life there when I finished school. Every hour a monk would pull on the bell rope down below, the bell would ring, and I would press my hands to my ears.
Then I received a letter with two mauve stamps displaying the profile of Queen Elizabeth II. My name was written on the envelope in small letters, a soft, round handwriting I knew belonged to my aunt. Her letters weren’t affectionate, but they still made me happy because they were the only ones I received.
Twice, early on, I had spent the holidays with Alex in England, but she had worked all day and when we sat at table in the evening, drinking warm beer, she had cried a lot. She put beer in front of me on the table every night, as if that was normal, and apologized when she cried.
I didn’t visit her again after that. I spent bank holidays and the whole of the summer with the monks. At boarding school I had a library full of books, and boxing lessons with Father Gerald; it wasn’t much, but it was better than an aunt who made me feel like the loneliest person in the world.
This letter was written on pale brown paper. It was too short, and in English.
Dear Hans,
I know: I haven’t written to you for a long time. I hope you are happy. I would like to invite you to visit me in Cambridge. There’s something you might be able to help me with. I will take care of your travel expenses.
With best wishes,
Alex
I read the letter again and again, and each time I got stuck on the sentence There’s something you might be able to help me with. I didn’t have many qualities that might be helpful to other people. Perhaps I was good at listening, because I spoke so little. Father Gerald said I was a talented boxer, but it had been a long time since I’d stood in the ring. My school grades were good, but that was mainly because I worked hard. I studied because I preferred being with books to being alone. My only friend was a monk from Sudan, but he was twice as old as me so he didn’t count, or that’s what I thought at the time.
There was hardly anyone who would have missed me if I’d jumped off the church tower. To me, the strangest thing was that I never felt any desire to jump. I just wanted a friend I could have a beer with.
I remembered my aunt’s white dress. I’d never had a long conversation with her, and I’d known, ever since the night when she’d sat by my bed in my room, that she was different somehow.
I’d Googled her once, after my mother’s death, and read her CV on the website of a charity she supported, which helped disadvantaged children. I could remember most of it: Alexandra Birk, born in Stoke-on-Trent in the north of England, studied History of Art at Cambridge, did her PhD somewhere in New York, became a lecturer at Cambridge at just twenty-eight. In the summary of her career it said that when she was fifteen she’d come second in a national painting competition, and that the awards ceremony had been the first time she’d ever set foot in a museum. She was an expert on eighteenth-century European art and ran ultramarathons in her spare time, races more than forty-two kilometers long.
The evening I got the letter I took a blanket up the church tower and thought about how often I had wished my aunt would drive up one of the winding roads, come and fetch me and take me in her arms the way my fellow pupils’ parents collected their children at the start of the summer holidays. She would fetch me and take me with her on an adventure.
Up in the church tower I remembered her hard face, her narrow cheeks, not an ounce of fat upon them. Alex Birk had never taken me in her arms, not even at the funeral.
The night was cold and the wind buffeted the church tower, making the pewter bell hum quietly.
Two weeks later I was sitting in a room in Chapel Court of St. John’s College, Cambridge, looking past Alex at a picture on the wall behind her. I wondered whether old paintings got darker with the years or whether they’d been painted that way.
The college courtyards looked as if their cobblestones had been laid in the Middle Ages, which they probably were. Over the centuries the hard leather soles of thousands of students had trodden down every corner of the stones, leaving them soft and round. I’d leaned against a wall for half an hour, watching the students; they looked like my fellow pupils at boarding school. I couldn’t see anything that connected them or suggested that they were somehow special. There were young black people, white people, and Asians; students in loose cotton trousers, short skirts, or suits; students carrying rucksacks, briefcases, or cloth bags, or carrying their books in their hands. At first I thought there was no such thing as a typical Cambridge student; but then I noticed that the men in particular held their heads a little higher than I was used to. They seemed to have a slightly clearer sense of who they were.
Alex’s study was paneled with dark wood; her white shelves looked as if they were from IKEA. They were packed with books that Alex had lined up so their spines were exactly level with the front of the shelf. Every surface, every corner was scrupulously clean: there was no dirt in this room, not even dust.
We had greeted each other with a handshake, like strangers, which was basically what we were.
As usual, I didn’t say anything at first. Alex regarded me without speaking, as if she were searching for something in my eyes.
“It’s … really beautiful here,” I said.
“Lots of people say it’s the most beautiful college.”
“Yes, such … such beautiful stones.”
I thought the colleges all looked the same: ancient, and hidden behind thick walls.
Alex went on looking at me, not once averting her gaze.
“Do you know who founded the college?”
“Lady Margaret Beaufort,” I said, pleased that I knew. I’d walked around the courts and had read it on a stone plaque.
“And do you know how?” asked Alex.
I shook my head and looked out of the window. Outside some tourists were taking photos of each other on their iPads in front of an apple tree.
“Lady Margaret died in 1509, after dining on swan, or so they say. Not long before, a friend of hers, Bishop John Fisher, had asked her to found a college in Cambridge. Fisher must have been a bold man, or possibly just a deceiver. In any case, he got hold of Lady Margaret’s will after her death and added—in black ink—that part of her legacy should be invested in the new St. John’s College.”
Alex paused for a moment.
“Why am I telling you this?” she asked.
I shrugged.
“Because sometimes deception is a way to achieve something good.”
I wriggled my toes inside my shoes; I sometimes did this
when I was nervous. Perhaps I’d misunderstood, I thought. I didn’t like the sound of “deception.”
“Hans, I want you to study here. You’ll be given a place and a scholarship, I’ll see to that. In return, you’ll become a member of a club. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of it. You’ll become a member of the Pitt Club.”
She looked at me and waited for a reaction.
“Sorry,” I said, for no reason. Alex didn’t respond.
The tourists in the courtyard were now photographing each other jumping in the air. It seemed the iPad shutter release was too slow; the women kept jumping over and over again.
Alex went on talking. She was calm.
“Your mission is to find out what the university boxers get up to there. You do still box, don’t you?”
“Sorry, I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” I said.
“I know it sounds strange. It’s a club for young men here at the university who think they’re better than everyone else.”
“A club?”
“A kind of student fraternity. Almost two hundred years old.”
“And they’re all boxers?”
“No, not only. I think they’re a sort of club within the Club. It’s only a suspicion. A lot of important people have boxed for the university.”
“What do you suspect?”
“I can’t tell you,” she said.
“Why not?”
“You’d ask the wrong questions at the Club.”
“You want me to move to England and you won’t tell me why?”
“You could put it like that,” she said.
I tried to stay calm by staring at the painting on the wall. It didn’t help.
“That’s insane,” I said.
“I’d be careful how you use that word.”
“Why would I move here?” I asked.
