by Stephen Fry
He came back from the bathroom, a towel round his waist. He frowned when he saw her holding the book. “I have to get changed now,” he said, without moving. She sighed and withdrew. A year ago he would let her bathe him, and now he could not even dress in her presence. His voice was breaking too and every day he became more secretive and private; that was the trouble with boys, they grew away from you. She went slowly downstairs and into the kitchen. Anna was there, preparing little Paula’s tea. Klara decided to go outside and tend to the garden. There was, conveniently, a flower bed outside Alois’s study that needed weeding.
“Come in, please!” Alois was wearing his icily polite customs officer’s voice. Klara knelt below the open window, her hand around a tendril of convolvulus, and heard the study door open and close.
A long silence followed. His childish trick of pretending to read, while poor Dolfi stood there, marooned on the carpet.
“Are your shoes dirty?”
“No, sir.”
“Then why do you polish them against your trousers? Stand on both legs, boy! You aren’t a stork, are you?”
“No, sir. I am not a stork.”
“And you can take that impertinent tone out of your voice at once!”
Silence again, broken by a theatrical rustling of papers and the dry clearing of a throat as Alois began to read.
“‘Some brain, but he lacks self-discipline . . . cantankerous, willful, arrogant and bad-tempered. He has clear difficulty in fitting in at the school. He adopts enthusiasms with a zealous energy which evaporates the moment he realizes that thought, application and study are required. He reacts, moreover, with ill-concealed hostility to any advice or reproof. A thoroughly unsatisfactory term’s work.’ Well? What have you to say to that?”
“Dr. Hümer. That’s Dr. Hümer’s report, isn’t it? He hates me.”
“Never you mind whose report it is! Have you any idea how much the Realschule charges me for the dubious honor of teaching you? And this is how you repay me? ‘Nor can his influence on the other boys be said to be healthy. He seems to demand unqualified subservience from them, fancying himself in the role of leader.’ Leader? You couldn’t lead a kindergarten paper chase, boy!”
“What about Dr. Pötsch? What does he say?”
“Pötsch? He says you have talent and enthusiasm.”
“There!”
“But he also accuses you of indiscipline and laziness.”
“I don’t believe you! He wouldn’t say any such thing. Dr. Pötsch understands me. You’ve made that up.”
“How dare you! Come here. Come here!”
Tears filled Klara’s eyes as she heard the whip swish through the air and smack flatly on the tight cloth of Alois Junior’s old suit. And Dolfi shouting, shouting, shouting, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” Why could he not learn to submit as she did? Did he not understand that the more he protested the more the Bastard liked it?
“Go to your room and stay there until you learn to apologize!”
“Very well.” Dolfi’s cracked half-child half-man voice did not waver. Only the sound of liquid bubbling from his nose defiantly sniffed back betrayed his fury and his pain. “Then I shall stay up there until you are dead.”
“No, no, darling!” Klara whispered, hugging herself in distress, terrified that Alois might raise up Pnina again.
Instead she was surprised to hear him give a queer little laugh. “Your mother may spoil you and flatter your disgusting vanity, but believe me, Adolf, I shall break you yet. Oh yes. Now get out.”
“Don’t you . . . dare . . .”—she could hear a tremble in Dolfi’s voice as he fought back the tears—“don’t you dare touch her. I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!”
Open sobbing now.
Alois laughed again. “Oh run along, little boy, before your snot dribbles onto the carpet.”
MAKING MISTAKES
School report: II
Sweat dripped off my nose and onto the floor. Stuff this for a plover, I thought to myself.
Dr. Angus Alexander Hugh Fraser-Stuart liked to gather his long white hair in a net. He favored silk kimonos, white cotton happi coats and ballooning trousers of black satin. His rooms, a spacious set of chambers occupying the corner of the Franklin building that overlooked the Cam, let in a great deal of light: direct sunlight dazzled through the windows, reflected light from the river rippled on the ceiling and white spotlight from modern tracks funneled onto studiedly arranged pictures and prints on the plain white walls. All around the room, on sills, ledges, tables and copra matting, cactus plants were disposed in trim lines. A huge Arizona specimen, as from a Larsen cowboy cartoon, dominated one corner of the room, thrusting up two asymmetric arms like a deformed traffic policeman. Above the fireplace, a smeared Bacon portrait leered with dissipated glee at a pair of crossed Turkish cavalry sabers on the opposite wall. Over all, a huge heat sat like a throttling fog. The day outside was searingly hot, the sky a sinister, cloudless sci-fi blue and within the room convection radiators threw dry boiling air at the cacti. More sweat ran down from my armpits and into the gap between shorts and hips. I saw then, prickling with horror, that things were preparing to get very much worse.
Fraser-Stuart, cross-legged on the floor, without looking up from the Meisterwerk spread on his lap, stretched out a hand toward his cigar box. When I had first sat in this room five years before, on just such a violently hot day and drowning in a thick ocean of Havana smoke, I had wondered if a window might be opened. The old man had looked sadly at his cactus collection and asked, blowing out a disappointed cloud, if I was wholly given over to my own comfort. A son of a bitch I had thought him then and a son of a bitch I thought him now.
I watched the smoke transmute from soft, round blue billows into elongated, yellow ellipses like the tops of cedar trees and settle high up near the ceiling as he continued to read.
“Just need to remind myself,” he had said when I came in. “Be sitting.”
So there I be: sitting. Also sweating, gasping, itching and prickling.
Perhaps you know how a PhD thesis works. You deliver it to your supervisor and he passes it to an examiner who in turn sends it on to an assessor from outside your university. The two examiners agree that the work has reached the required standard and, at a simple but affecting investiture in the Senate House, you are ordained Doctor by the Chancellor or his benevolent proxy. After a little toad-eating and bum-lapping in the right directions you become a fellow of your college, a lecturer within your faculty and a permanently tenured academic. Your thesis is published to acclaim; you let it be known to radio producers and television journalists around the English-speaking world that you are in the market for expert pronouncements when something touching your field arises in the news; a well-judged series of textbooks aimed at the lucrative schools market relieves you of any financial worries; you marry your best girl in the medieval splendor of your college chapel; your children turn out highly blond, intelligent, amusing and more than averagely proficient at skiing; your old students go on to become Prime Minister and are good enough to remember their best beloved history don when handing out such Chairmanships of Commissions, Knighthoods and College headships as lie within the Royal Gift: in short, life is good.
I was watching the first link of this chain being forged. Fraser- Stuart should have passed the Meisterwerk to Professor Bishop of Trinity Hall a week ago, but then Fraser-Stuart was as lazy as a cat. An ex-soldier possessed of a “brilliant mind,” whatever that means, he was one of those kooks who specialize in military history. Like Patton and Orde Wingate and many another self-regarding militarist before him he thought he cut a great figure mixing as he did a love of weapons and warfare with scraps of philosophy and louche arcana. Take a line through Sterling Hayden’s Colonel Jack Ripper and Marlon Brando’s Mr. Kurtz. A blood and thunder general is bad enough, but one who prides hi
mself on his knowledge of Taoism, French baroque music and the writings of Duns Scotus is your real menace to the world’s good order. If I’m to be sent into battle, give me Colonel Blimp any day, a fine, proud old bastard with a bristling mustache who reads John Buchan and thinks Kierkegaard is Sweden’s main airport, not some self-glorifying tit who plays polo in the nude and writes commentaries in silver Latin on the Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound.
At last, just as I was thinking he would never have done with it, he looked up and squirted a jet of smoke in my direction like an archer fish spearing its prey, a tight little fart ripping from his lips.
“So then, young Young, have you sought help?”
“I’m sorry?”
“For your drug problem.”
“My what?”
“You’re all smacked up with joints of heroin, man! You can’t deceive me. High on Euphoria or some other fashionable narcotic. I know this to be a problem for all people your age. I think you should do something about it. And that right urgently.”
“Er . . . are you perhaps confusing me with someone else, sir?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. No indeed. What other explanation could there be?”
“For what?”
“For this, boy. For this!” He waved the Meisterwerk with a snarl.
My world began to disintegrate. “You mean . . . you don’t like it?”
“Like it? Like it? It’s garbage. Offal. It’s not a thesis, it’s feces! It’s pus, moral slime, ordure.”
“But . . . but . . . I thought we agreed that I was working along the right lines?”
“So far as I knew you were working along the right lines. That was before you started snorting jazz salt or fixing yourself with skank or whatever it is you’ve been doing. It’s that film Trainspotting, isn’t it? Don’t think I haven’t heard all about it. Christ, it makes me sick! Sick to the stomach. A whole benighted generation cut down before the scythe of dance drugs and recreational powders.”
“Look, I can assure you I don’t do drugs. Not even grass.”
“Then what? How? Hm?” He had worked himself up into a huge hacking cough. I watched in alarm as, with streaming eyes, he repeatedly flapped a hand at me to indicate that he was recovering and that it was still his turn to speak. “We . . . we talk about your work,” he resumed, in panting gasps, “and you give every sign of having all well in hand and then this . . . this effluent. It’s not an academic argument, it’s a novel and a perfectly disgusting one at that. What? What?”
“Are you sure you’ve been reading the right paper?” I leaned forward, more in hope than expectation. No, no doubt that it was the Meisterwerk he clutched.
“What do you take me for? Of course I’ve been reading the right paper! So, if you aren’t a doped-out crack fiend hallucinating on comic mushrooms, then what is the problem? Oh . . . ha! . . . of course!” His face brightened and he bared his yellow teeth to me in a gamesome grin. “It’s a joke, isn’t it? You have the real thesis tucked away somewhere else! This is a May Week prank of some kind. Skh! Honestly!”
“But I don’t understand what’s wrong with it!” I almost wailed in despair. My last best hope had been that it was he who had been doing the joking.
He stared at me in disbelief for what must have been six full seconds. Six seconds. Count them. An achingly long time in such circumstances. One-alligator-two-alligator-three-alligator-four-alligator-five-alligator-six. I gaped back at him like a goldfish, trying to keep the tears of frustration from my eyes.
“Oh Christ,” he whispered. “He means it. He really means it.”
I stared back, thinking just the same thing. “I admit . . .” I said, “I admit that parts of it are . . . unusual, but . . .”
“Unusual?” He took up a page and began to read. “‘A great soaring, all-powerful, all-seeing, all-conquering eagle with piercing eyes and mighty wings and talons that dripped with the blood of the pig!’ And you say you haven’t been injecting yourself with cannabis resin? ‘Another huge contraction sent her spinning higher even than the highest mountain. All Europe lay below her. Without customs posts, without borders or frontiers: all the animals running free.’ Your research was so extensive that you actually acquired information as to the minutest details of the Pölzl woman’s labor and the very images in her mind at the time? She kept a diary? She spoke her thoughts into a tape recorder? And I note that you claim that her husband took the advanced twentieth-century step of attending her lying-in? If so, fascinating! But where the attributions? Where the sources?”
“No, well, those are just linking passages. I agree they are unorthodox, but I thought they lent . . . you know . . . color and drama.”
“Color? Drama? In an academic thesis? Seek the shelter of a rehabilitation center before it is too late, lad!” He turned a few pages in wonderment, his eyebrows threatening to launch themselves clean into space. “Nor do you deign to tell the astounded reader how you came across the young Hitler’s school reports, I note.”
“I did take a few liberties, I admit. But Adolf’s teacher Eduard Hümer did say all that about Adolf being ill-disciplined and fancying himself as a leader.”
“Oh, it’s Adolf now, is it? Very chummy, aren’t we?”
“Well, if you’re talking about a twelve-year-old boy, you can hardly keep referring to him by his surname, surely?”
“And Adolf’s mummy pumping water from the well while the train goes chug chug chugging by ‘puffing imperial white mustaches’? Adolf’s mummy clutching the tendril of a convolvulus? Adolf’s mummy smelling of violets? What?”
“I just thought it made it all more readable, you know, for when it’s published . . .”
“Published?” I swear to God I thought he was going to explode. “Published? Great fuck, child, even Mills and Boon would blush at the prospect.”
“I haven’t applied to them,” I said, trying not to lose it. “Seligmanns Verlag have expressed an interest though.”
“For their psychopathology list possibly. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is simply insupportable.”
“Well, I could take those bits out,” I said desperately. “I mean, they only amount to a twentieth of the whole. If that.”
“Take them out? Hm . . .” He considered this for a while.
“I mean how’s the rest of it?”
“The rest of it? Oh, competent I suppose. Dull but competent. It’s just that I simply can’t understand why you dropped in all that imponderable shit in the first place. Even if it were cut out I shouldn’t be able to read the whole in the same light. It is contaminated. You can fish a turd out of a water tank, but anyone who knows the turd was there won’t drink from it, will they, eh? Hm? What? Isn’t it? Hey? Hm?”
“But no one will know, will they?” I suffered a frantic vision of Fraser-Stuart, in some excess of integrity and fanatical zeal, writing sorrowful letters to my two examiners warning them off the polluted Meisterwerk.
“I just wonder if you are quite sure that you’re cut out for an academic career, you see. You don’t think you’d be happier in some other atmosphere? The media, for example? Advertising? Newspapering? The Beee Beee C?”
“This is my atmosphere,” I said, as firmly as I could. “I know it.”
“Very well, very well. Go back to your rooms then and type it all out again, this time omitting all fictitious and speculative impertinences. It may be something can be rescued from the wreckage. I find myself simply amazed that you thought I would ever consent to pass on such drivel to my colleagues.” He burped suddenly and slapped his thigh, rocking backward and forward. “I mean, toss it, they would have thought I was barking mad, hey?”
I rose to leave. “Good heavens,” I said eyeing him from bagged hair to rope-soled sandals, “we wouldn’t want that, would we?”
Free of the suffocating heat of his rooms, I lean
ed over the side of Sonnet Bridge, allowing such breeze as there was to fan out the damp heat trapped in the private corners of my body and the hot indignation swirling in the private corners of my mind. Below me punts were gliding up and down the river, loud with the bobbery of those lucky sons of bitches newly released from the examination halls. Christ, I thought. Heck and pants and great big vests. Life can be a bummer.
“Coo-ee!”
On the bank nestled Jamie McDonell and Double Eddie, snug in Speedoes, reconciled and happy. I gave them a shy wave.
“Go on, Puppy! Dive in, you know you want to.”
“I’ve, er, I’ve still got your CDs,” I called down. “Shall I drop them off some time?”
They laughed, their arms around each other’s waists. “Oh do! Yes do. Drop them off. Please do! Do, do, do! Just drop ’em!”
A voice startled me from close behind. “There is something so very melancholy about the happiness of youth, don’t you agree?” Leo Zuckermann, an improbable Panama perched on his head, looked down at Jamie and Double Eddie wriggling on the riverbank. “If summer comes,” he said, “can fall be far behind?”
“It’s all right for them,” I said with morose relish. “They’re second years. No finals, no prelims. Just May Week and wine.”
“And of course, it is so fashionable to be queer, as they like to call it now.”
“Well, I suppose so . . .”
“The pink triangle is a badge of pride. You know something, Michael? You know in the camps there was a purple triangle too.”
“Really? Who for?”
“Take a guess.”
“A purple triangle?”
“Purple.”
I pondered awhile. This was the sort of thing I was supposed to know. “That wasn’t the Gypsies?”
“No.”
“Er . . . criminals then?”
“No.”
“Lesbians?”
“No.”
“Communists?”
“No, no.”
