Secret Protocols
Page 20
An opportunity to tell him the Lagerkvist story, ‘The Lift That Went Down to Hell’.
‘Yes. You wouldn’t have needed to tell it at Meinnenberg. But you knew what teaching’s actually about. Are kids today permitted tales, marvellous tales? I doubt it.’
‘Your own stories, Alex. To be really understood …’
‘I distrust anything that can be really understood. Nothing’s so mad as paper. Perhaps the wisest books are only written in dust. Buddha told monks that blank scrolls were more truthful than written scripts. The real writer shows the obvious which nobody else has seen, Pound’s nightingale too far off to be heard – though he also excused the inexcusable. My stories are never signs of the times, only signs of my own time.’
‘You don’t stay long on one note.’
‘Naturally, though the best remain written on the air. Stories, extraordinary shapes, starting from something small then exploding. I myself need several extra letters of the alphabet to really tackle their gist. My The Stuffed Ones outwardly caricatures Whitehall charlatans; inwardly, it seeks linkage with the unseen and unknown – a shudder after dark, an unopened envelope, an imaginary telephone. The fallacy of appearances. But I began writing from, less pretentiously, hearing of Mr Teinbaum.’
‘A Whitehall charlatan?’
He is grave, head flaring in the featureless room. ‘Every week, Mr Teinbaum of Battersea walked two miles to place flowers on his wife’s grave. Year after year, children watched, and, after he’d gone, stole them, to sell. They grew up, passed the scheme to others. Yet neither they nor him directly entered my eventual story. Only a single flower.’
We listen to gulls circling above the Thames, a ship’s hoot, the stir of traffic. He is reluctant to end whatever was absorbing him. ‘We’re apt to be out of tune, Erich. Like a gypsy band at a Romanian wedding.’ Looking at the dusty floor, he jerks a thumb downward. ‘We’ve both some talent. People listen. You, no doubt, stir continents. The glibness of authority. But, like Ministries of Information assiduously misinforming and intelligent lunatics braying regardless, we achieve little. Speaking, though, of intelligence, can anyone seriously credit this quack about IQs? Mine is two points above zero, yours almost as high. Most of those at Nuremburg were of respectable height. Still, returnez. My favourite story?’- he leans back, hands behind his head – ‘Monte Cristo, of course. My own first story sprang from my first night at boarding school, vital stage of initiation. Each dorm had its bard, storyteller, chronicler. Lights out, and a piping voice was scaring us with inside knowledge. That behind jewellers’ windows hung a knife. You smashed the glass, stretched your hand, then … wham!’ He rolls eyes, subsides into a cough, recovers for my account of Pasternak, when a child, seeing African women exhibited in a Russian zoo.
‘Excellent, Erich. One day I’ll tell you about a certain Alexandrian zoo. But now, my choicest single line in all literature. It’s not an old song resung.’
I brace myself for a stiff wad of Joyce, Pound, Proust, the thud of Hugo or Whitman, though he is manifestly offhand. ‘Just this: “Pauline needed money that year, so Turgenev mortgaged an estate, sold a forest and proceeded to Paris.” There. Scarcely an elegy for missed chances.’
Later, we resume in the corner of a small restaurant. Bottles glimmer under candles, other diners are almost invisible. He chortles over an English wartime joke. Hitler, anxious to cross the Channel, heard of the existence of Moses’ Rod that divided the Red Sea, only to be told, yes, it did exist but was in the British Museum.
He is tolerant of Khrushchev, recently in London and, at taunts of the Pact, bawled at Labour leaders that were he British he would vote Tory. In America, clowning, shouting at insults from Wall Street, from Gary Cooper, he had sworn to bury them all alive. ‘A rubber ball,’ Alex says, ‘but I agree we’d better do the bouncing.’
He pushes away uneaten food, in his tiresome routine of studying the menu as he might J.S. Mill, order the most expensive dish, abandon it after a peck, bay for more wine, reluctantly agree to share the bill.
Like many Englishmen, he seldom strays far from his school-days. ‘Schools were nests of lying, cheating, stealing, useful in adult hurly-burly. Thieves and poets prevent stagnation. At school I played a deaf-and-dumb hag in The Tales of Hoffmann, which came in handy for journalism. One master walked in beauty like the night, seduced the under-matron and taught me the difference between Night and Evening. He enjoyed things crooked. His son gave him ample opportunity, once getting acquitted by pleading he didn’t know bigamy was illegal.’
‘You think language …’
‘I think of little else. Neither of us is a French puritan, whining that language is a deceiving, distorting, tyrannical bourgeois prison. Language is the escape from prison. Auden’s text: Clear from our heads the masses of impressive rubbish.’
He sways between bottles, though the deep voice remains steady. ‘Verbs are depth-charges, adjectives the resource of the unimaginative, weakening or defusing them.’ His grimace in the candlelight is itself an adjective, affectionate, excited or shrewd. ‘Joyce thought the extraordinary best left to journalists. You yourself are very soberly, and rightly, restoring Estonia to the map. You quote Solzhenitsyn, that a writer is a rival government. Just so. Language changed me from a swarthy-minded wing-forward to a useful chucker of words into necessary places. A sort of lover. Pain and joy. From dissonance, behold harmony.’ As if eager for dissonance his ravaged face crumples, then relaxes. ‘Do Estonians actually believe that touching your mother-in-law can cause suicide?’
During August vacation, he drove me, with scant concern for the public good, into deeper England, in his wasp-coloured roadster that conformed, with its coughings, snarlings, roarings, stumblings, to his respect for verbs. Trips to Greenwich masts and classical frontages; to a Slough youth club for erratic table tennis and intolerable weightlifting; to a Hertfordshire pub gleaming with horse brasses and sporting prints, where he forced me to a Ploughman’s Lunch at which Greg would have stared with indignant incredulity. Like a riverboat gambler producing an ace, he astonished me by having memorized an Estonian poet, Ivar Ivash:
Here a steep limestone coast watches the Northern Lights,
But in the caves the breakers carve dead history out of the rocks;
A giant lake wards off Eastern endlessness.
Sharing love of the sagas, we swapped names we thought private to ourselves – Bifrost, Grimnir, Jotenheim, Ragnarok, he trumping me with Gullinbursti. His tales I could counter with my own: the girl who ran, Vello triumphant, amputation without anaesthetics in a dirty shed. For Alex I did not always need to complete the childhood drama of a scarlet slipper washed on to ‘Ogygia’, unknown words found in a bottle, great-grandfather Rolf, very old, waiting on the high road for a carriage drawn by black-plumed horses; it arrives, he clambers in, and a green-faced, yellow-eyed creature, bony, toothless, hauls him away for ever.
Summer folk, we enjoyed each other. I was live in skin and thought. When we could not meet, he sent postcards. ‘St John Nepumuk is Patron of Tongue Cancer.’ ‘For her Civil War efforts, Franco has promoted the Virgin Mary, Field Marshal.’ ‘The Soviet Yearbook announces that Russian Happiness has increased by 78 per cent.’ I opened an envelope, found a cutting, ‘Pope Cracks Filthy Joke’, without explanation that Pope was a disc jockey.
Our duet must be too extravagant to long continue. Once, with misgiving, I scrutinized his head in a triptych mirror. One profile harshly vindictive, the other slacker, irresolute. Full-faced, an undergraduate, rather simple energy, enthusiasm, seeking complicity. They added up to a general with a plan, exciting but hazardous, a declassed nobleman belching over an empty bowl, to avoid admitting poverty and hunger. An earlier English type, Elizabethan, jewelled, flattered but in pain, hideously alone.
‘Most of us,’ Alex said, ‘have little to say and some sophistication in saying it.’
Ragnarok or the Second Coming he would have resented as wilful interruption.
Still dissatisfied, he knew my discomfort. ‘You’ve presence, like a pastor or Bernard Shaw. One never thinks of him as Bernie. You look what you are, stalwart from polar fastness, head up, shoulders squared, while virgins spin like tops in chilly bedrooms and waxen-faced Grafs go mad in the library. Or some Günter Grass character gibbering on the Vistula or drinking from skulls on the Elbe.’
For the Miscellany he secured gratifying reviews and a radio discussion and on television thrust in a lengthy if irrelevant mention. Sales pleased the Ambassador; Mr Tortoise was tearful.
Always curious about my feelings for Germany, Alex demanded my comment on a German-born London professor booed for his determinist genetic theories. ‘Yet, as a Berlin schoolboy at a mass Nazi rally, he blithely whistled our own “Land of Hope and Glory”. I’d have hid under an anonymous epigram. Effective but contemptible, like sarcasm towards children. What about you?’
‘Very little about me.’
‘Good! A hero of our time.’
August flamed, no rain, only pleasure. We drove to Brighton, its domes and pinnacles, flossy hotels by a placid sea; to Salisbury, its bells clanging in what he called Wet Bob Minor, fearless of contradiction: to the Home Counties mansion of a left-wing Christian publisher, its bunker against atomic attack forbidden to the servants. On a tripper’s steamer, we sailed towards Tilbury – towards Sweden, towards Estonia – where a barge slumped off an empty dock excited East London stories: a grotesque Triad murder, a seventeenth-century Wapping ghost with a crooked neck. ‘You see that old place with the smashed roof? In it, a marquis, Wellington’s pal, turned over in bed and strangled himself with the sheets. Flunkeys heard his gasps but didn’t dare investigate, fancying a boar was loose. Very malapert. Only Russians and Germans prefer pain to nothing. Did you know that, in bed, Wellington would use his mistress’s buttocks as a writing table?’
I did not.
At Arundel, beneath a grandly secure castle, we watched cricket, of which I was ignorant as the African who supposed it a reliable rain-making ceremony. All around were club marquees, regimental tents, temporary boxes, beflagged and patrician, rows of deckchairs for hundreds in many-coloured dresses, blazers, caps. I enjoyed the peaceful good cheer, the champagne, the white forms gliding across green in arcs and diagonals, the flowing ball, like red silk unwinding or soaring, falling to cupped hands, the wavelets of applause. At my enquiry about rules, ladies smiled sympathetically, gentlemen were forbearing. Alex shook his head. ‘Best left to the imagination. Like Browning. Like Stockhausen. Like me.’ To the girl beside him, prim as a lily, he was in fluent public voice. ‘I myself was a bowler. Very fast, very bad. And I loved it. Charging in, free of the earth, leaping. But …’ He struck his forehead, a ham Shakespearian Richard.
At lunch under badges and festoons, people were diligently polite, enquiring after Herr Brandt’s health, the state of the Rhine, patting my arm, filling my plate, while Alex commented that the booze was almost first-rate and that I should watch the slow bowler’s drift to leg.
Returning to London through long twilight, we stopped at a roadside lorry-driver’s cabin. Rough faces were jovial, ‘Here’s Alex’, good-naturedly gibing at our smooth suits and ties, over vile coffee, fearful pies. At once he was transformed, ramshackle, coarse, the delinquent officer barely escaping court-martial and who, in battle, might defend us all to the last or casually abandon us.
Outside again, he perhaps guessed my uncertainties. ‘They liked you, these chaps. The more I talked, the more they looked at you. You’ll survive me, as fresh wind outlasts Bing Crosby.’
I braced myself for his driving, exercise in low flying. At Guilford Street, we lingered, unwilling to relinquish a well-shaped day, his face in lamplight anxious to repair something amiss. Then glimmered relief. ‘Ah! I’d forgotten Dolly. Aphrodite Kallipygoi. Solid as a junk, unafflicted by pulmonary emphysema. Heart of gold and lavish thighs. Like Mr Toad, she owns a substantial hunk of Thame-side, rather more than a rapscallion pothouse. One knows her by eating her dinners, like getting a law degree. Anyway, she needs you for the Garden Party. Pure flame of hospitality, though it’s said that no good deed goes unpunished. Fear nothing, the armed and truculent are bounced out and drowned. Put on a funny hat, uncage your smile, remember you’re not a married couple. When you see eyes flitting like a blue-tit, voice honking like a goose … that’s Dolly.’
9
Looming, no goose but ice-lit Norn, Dolly was no more believable than Louise, the flick of another story. More important, I was planning another Miscellany and enjoying the action. A Russian monarchist wrote, accusing me of treason; an Estonian surgeon thanked me for defending the standard. The London press quoted me, usually inaccurately. I had achieved some standing independent of Alex, my foreign name adding decorative ambiguity.
Estonia was a particle netted in the quivering web of world connections beneath the panoply of cabinets, titles, handshakes, state visits, ideologies, summits. Oil politics masqueraded as concern for human rights; nurses smuggled anthrax and cholera virus into the Middle East; colluding with Moscow, Indonesians massacred their communists with American support. A biological warfare laboratory in Russia, designed and staffed by captured Nazis, still sported a huge Red Cross. Italian neo-Fascists were developing the heroin mart, International Charities Inc.; in Athens, Arab-controlled girls had been abducted and sold to Libya by West German Alliance, sometime insurer of death-camps against revolt.
In my wanderings in pubs and coffee bars, the young nicknamed me North Star, with the good-humoured indifference that called God the Dean of Admissions. They sat at coloured tables, juries without judges. Kennedy was glamorized as Prince of Camelot, then reviled for attempting to overthrow Castro. The Berlin Wall suffered suspended verdict, along with cybernetics, telekinesis, the latest UFO.
‘Forcemeat Balls Are Highly Indigestible,’ a young voice carolled under my window, while I read of Mao’s fury at Khrushchev for advocating not Terror but Peaceful Co-Existence. Mr K’s peasant joviality, lack of stuffiness, retained some popularity here, not only from the young.
In Moscow, Macmillan’s white fur hat had caused him to be mistaken for a Finn. Nearer home, a nanny kissed two babies, then threw them into the Round Pond, explaining that she was fed up.
A personal invitation was delivered to me by a uniformed youth. Embossed with armorial crests, signed by a Princess von Benckendorff, it was for an Eaton Square reception.
This required some hesitation, suspicion of enticement into West German politics, a means of suppressing my Estonian propaganda, the charm of undesirables.
‘You’ll go, of course,’ Alex was emphatic, ‘then snipe the snipers.’
As so often, I was as compliant to invitations as to tunes. They were part of interminable search, of curiosity, of muted ambition. The chores of loneliness.
I never ceased to wonder about houses, outside so familiar; the interior so unknown. The Benckendorff mansion lacked a heraldic flag and sentries in tricornes but inside had resemblance to a pre-1914 Atlantic liner, luxuriant with soft reds flecked with violet, cartouche ceilings of blue-and-damson
mazes, rock-crystal chandelier droplets eclipsed streaks of sunlight from windows flanked by thick gold curtains, malachite pillars glowed faintly, as if from within.
The main salon was heavy: towering mahogany cabinets and bookcases, ponderous doors, an overweight clock, bronze busts, black marble fireplace. Mirrors framed with cupids like infant deckhands, portraits of bustled Wilhelmine ladies delicately stepping from woodland haze, a bleached moon over a castle aloft on a misty crag, stern hunters in a clearing, solitaries brooding over empty sunset landscapes.
They foreboded no more than the failed pull of Germania, the knick-knacks of Bismarck’s Reich. Unthinkable here were the shouts of pulp anarchists and the millionaire hustle of West Germany. History had stalled, trapping elderly makeweights, breathing but harmless, by the frowning cabinets over-filled with porcelain shepherdesses, fawns, centaurs, dainty milkmaids; a white-chased regimental glove under a glass bell, Dresden powder boxes, slender ivory-handled pistols; Persian faience on velvet, blue against black; medieval chessmen, medallions, miniatures of forgotten electors and dukes; dulled amethysts, brooches, insects in green glass cubes, leering toy mandarins, all extinct as Cathay.
The gleaming grand piano paraded iconic photographs; massive beards, paunches like half-filled black sacks, proud crinolines and décolletage, uniforms sprayed with the stars, medals, epaulettes, sashes, ribbons of long-demoted regimes. I could recognize only the spindly, feeble-chinned Crown Prince and impassive, monolithic Hindenburg. ‘God was in this man,’ Gerhart Hauptmann said. Added as if in afterthought were my fellow guests, relics of my grandparents’ age, so that I inspected them for fans, lorgnettes, monocles, until slow voices recalled me to good manners. I was standing, however, disregarded by clusters of old men in formal, antiquated blacks and whites, their ladies in sombre, high-set gowns and thick jewels which, reflecting the chandeliers, made them too vehement, almost vulgar or coercive. One elderly matron wore black mittens, several had half-veils, at which London students would have gaped incredulously.