Eventually, as a last resort, I took my novel to an elderly Jewish publisher in Mala Strana. It was a small outfit dedicated to publishing Jewish material, mostly but not always by Jewish authors. We sat in his office overlooking the olive waters of the Vltava. Outside, the wind was making herringbone patterns on the surface of the river below. On Karlov Bridge a group of children played happily around a life-size figure wearing a Mickey Mouse costume. The editor-in-chief looked at me seriously over his desk, a small wizened man wearing a crocheted skull cap:
Look out of the window, Mr Grinz, and tell me that those children playing there would have been better off under the Nazis, or the Soviet communists. Have you not thought about what you are saying here? That the freedoms you have now are not worth it – that they are a sort of unfreedom worse for you than being in a concentration camp? He stared at me with hostility and for a moment I was distracted by his spectacles, one lens of which was chipped just as my father’s had been. He shook his head: I ask you to reconsider, Mr Ginz. We could not publish this. What you are saying here is a blasphemy. An outrage. How can you think that this life is worse? He closed up my manuscript and handed it back to me over the table.
The trouble was, I thought, as I walked downhill through the steep cobbled streets of the old town, that I did think this life for a writer was worse. It felt so to me because rejection on account of marketability made it personal. I could no longer blame the system. At one time I could hold up two fingers to the Nazi system or the Communist system. Now I had to hold up two fingers to myself. It was my fault.
Already an idea for a new story was forming in my head.
LET ME OUT
He was small, enigmatic and bright. My first encounter with him was on the day I started work in the foundry. A holiday job. As a student I wanted to earn money for an Inter-rail ticket to Europe. The business was a small concern amongst ramshackle workshops and scrap metal firms on an industrial estate in Yarmouth where I lived. They fashioned metal sculptures and various other works of art. I arrived early on that first day. The L-shaped building was surprisingly clean and airy, full of light with white-painted walls. There was no-one else there except a man whom I took to be some sort of janitor or watchman. He was perched on one of the tables. He had a small sharp face and his black clothes had an old-fashioned look. They were too big for him. He seemed to have taken it upon himself to give me instructions.
In front of me stood a bucket of soapy water.
‘Ye just wash him down fust,’ he instructed, ‘with a clean cloth.’ His head was cocked to one side. ‘Like ye might do a corpse, before ye lay it out.’ He chuckled and looked to see my reaction.
The bronze statue was laid out on a long table in front of me. It did, indeed, look like a huge metal corpse. A politician or dignitary of some sort. No-one I recognised. I started cleaning one leg, tentatively.
‘Go on. Give it some welly.’ His manner was cocky. ‘D’ye know where that saying comes from? The Duke of Wellington. Give it some welly. Some power. A bit of elbow grease.’
I scrubbed away.
‘That wax on him, you’ll have to take it all off. That’s the last thing they do when they’re making a bronze statue. Give him a coat of wax. Then the air and humidity can’t turn him green, d’ye see? Oxidisation. I know it all. Been there. Done that.’
He slid off the table and took a step forward to examine the figure.
‘But this chap, the patina has worn off and he’s looking a bit mouldy. When ye get to the fiddly bits ye might need a soft toothbrush to get in the nooks and crannies, clean off the bird droppings. There are some old toothbrushes in a jar over there.’
He wandered off, calling back:
‘When ye’re done ye’ll need to wipe him down with clean water to get rid of the soap residue. Then give him a couple of hours to dry. He has to dry completely because he’ll need to be re-waxed and we don’t want to trap any moisture underneath.’
He turned back at the door grinning.
‘How dead are the dead? That’s what we need to know, eh?’
The foundry manager came in to find me already at work. He was a solid, balding man who wore a navy canvas apron and moved with particular lightness on his feet. His private passion was pottery and he had a potter’s wheel around the corner where he worked when he was not busy on the sculptures. He was surprised that I had already started work and knew what to do.
‘Oh, you’ve met Ernie, have you? He’s a bit of a joke here. He drops in now and then. Tells people what’s what. He doesn’t work here. I never see him. He keeps out of my way in case I tell him to mind his own business. Fancy you bumping into him on your first day.’
He ran his hand over the statue to make sure the wax had been properly cleaned off.
As it happened, I was grateful for Ernie’s advice. It saved me making mistakes and losing time. I could see him through the window outside the adjoining outfit where they recycled used car tires. He was in front of a wall leaning against a stack of old tyres writing something on a sheaf of papers. On top of the wall behind him a black cat was licking itself. Later on I discovered that he was full of odd bits of information, an autodidact who had picked up scraps of random knowledge through his trade – whatever his trade might have been.
‘Sennacherib.’ He said one time when I was sweeping up. ‘Ever heard of him? Ancient Assyrian. Wolf on the fold. Claimed to be the first to make a bronze statue. A curse on him for that.’
The atmosphere in the foundry was relaxed. Not many people worked there. The few employees sauntered about casually with caked plaster on their jeans or aprons, setting about their various tasks. They were sculptors and craftsmen, some part-time, each with his own interest. No-one explained much to me. I was the general dogsbody.
Three or four days after I started a sculptor arrived with a model that was to be transformed into a statue. It was the life-size figure of a soldier for a local war memorial in Yarmouth. The first stage was to make a rubber mould and cast a wax copy. Ernie came up behind me. He spoke with some distaste as the men struggled with the slithery rubber mould:
‘See that mould. It’s all floppy and flexible, a giggling uncontrollable sort of thing.’ Ernie shuddered with dislike. ‘Nobody would like to see themselves like that. It’s humiliating. That would embarrass anybody, seeing a rubber mould of themselves wobbling all over. Especially a military man.’
Two men poured hot wax into the mould as I watched. Later when the wax had solidified, Ernie muttered in my ear:
‘He’ll be dismembered now. Divided into sections for firing in the kiln. I don’t like to see this.’
The soldier was laid out on one of the long tables and I was astonished to see how exactly every last detail was reproduced in the wax model, down to the broad nose, the fine strands of hair and the defiant expression on his face. Once the wax had set one of the workmen took a large knife and cut into the throat. The knife slid through the soft wax severing the head. I had a feeling of horror as the head came away. I looked round. Ernie had gone. The rest of the figure was routinely dissected, the limbs and torso placed separately on the table.
The boss came up to me:
‘All right, lad, you can help with this next bit now.’
Soon I was in an apron and up to my elbows in the wet, heat-resistant plaster which we packed round the divided sections of the figure. When the plaster had set, the men stacked the sections in the kiln. Then they shut the kiln door and fired the kiln.
Ernie appeared when I was standing at the sink with my arms under the tap washing off the plaster before it congealed.
‘There’s a thought,’ he said. ‘He’ll be locked in there for five days at a temperature of six hundred degrees centigrade until the wax is vaporised. They have to go through every stage of the inferno these people. This wasn’t the sort of after-life they were expecting, eh?’
There was something odd about Ernie. His age was indeterminate and he seemed to spring out of nowhere in
his long black coat, as if someone’s shadow had torn itself away and burst into a three-dimensional life of its own. The inquisitive blue eyes in his small face were always following me about. He had taken a liking to me and cornered me to bend my ear when no-one else was around.
‘They brought Friedrich Engels back to Manchester. He was abandoned in Poltava in Eastern Ukraine. Concrete. All covered in lichen. It would be a mistake to think that all those abandoned statues lack power.’ He wandered over to look at a plaster replica of the Venus de Milo standing by the door. ‘The French understood that. They beheaded the statues of their kings in the French Revolution. And there’s a marble statue of Queen Victoria forsaken in the tropics somewhere, shoved there during a political upheaval, her nose broken off so the surface is all pitted and rough. But she still exerts some mysterious power over the surrounding foliage. Oh yes.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘They all host living forces, y’know.’
A few days later I sat outside in the sunshine eating my sandwiches. The bronze pouring was to take place that day. I had been told I could watch but I must keep well away for fear of being splashed with the incandescent liquid. The morning had been spent putting the plaster moulds into the pit. When I went back the foundry boss had changed his clothes. He and another workman now wore protective clothing, leather gaiters, spats, long thick leather gloves and full-face protective visors. I stood by the doorway and watched as they loaded the bronze ingots into the crucible and then into the furnace. They used pouring shanks to lift the crucible out again, a long metal rod with square handles at each end, like the handlebars on a bike. In the centre was the circular grip for the pot. As they lifted the crucible out of the furnace its outer surface glowed crimson with the heat from the molten bronze inside. I could feel the heat from where I stood. They staggered over to the pit, one at each end of the pole, the scorching liquid bronze skimming the edge of the pot. There, with great skill they tipped the crucible and guided the bright yellow stream of scalding bronze into the plaster moulds.
Ernie was suddenly next to me in the doorway, wiping his forehead with a large handkerchief:
‘That’s him in the inferno. Poor soul. Molten fury. Pure molten rage in ‘im. It’ll tek ‘im twenty-four hours or so to cool down. Then you’ll have to chip away the plaster casting and let him breathe again,’ he said, before folding his handkerchief and heading outside.
Ernie was beginning to irritate me with his bits of information. He had button-holed me one day to lecture me about the difference between marble and bronze statues.
‘It’s the bronze ones that have all the anger. Look and ye’ll see it. The marble ones are milder, more malleable, softer in appearance. They’ve been released y’see from blocks of marble or stone. The bronze ones have been messed about, hacked, burnt, dismembered, welded together again. There’s a rage and fury in them, even in the ones that seem to be smiling. Look close and ye’ll see it. The smile in’t no more than a grimace, an attempt to conceal all that pain.’
He walked away, his coat flaring behind him as he went.
I wanted to shake Ernie off. I found myself deliberately staying closer to the other workmen so that he couldn’t find me on my own.
The next day when the bronze had cooled I was ordered to help knock away the plaster to reveal the figure inside which was still in separate pieces. One man worked with an axe. I laboured alongside him with a hammer and chisel until parts of the figure gradually emerged from the mounting pile of plaster rubble around our feet. The powdery white plaster dust made me sneeze. When all the sections were free the soldier came out in pieces, looking rougher than I had expected. Fragments of plaster still stuck to his face. He appeared different. Instead of the bold creature the artist had brought in the soldier now looked troubled and distracted, as if he were frowning. I mentioned this to the boss.
‘It will come good, you’ll see,’ he said, wiping his hands on his apron. ‘We’ll weld the sections together with a TIG welder and Silicon Bronze welding rods and then the sculptor will come back and do a bit of fettling. It’s often those fine touches at the end that brings them back to life.’
And so they did. When the sculptor came back he worked on details and added touches that re-humanised the work. Under his careful hands the soldier became more relaxed. But not completely. His mouth still had a fixed rigour of tension and wariness that had not been there before.
It was my last day. My four weeks at the foundry were over. Pay packet in my pocket, I was all set to travel to Europe. Just as I was leaving the industrial estate for good Ernie came hurrying after me. I hadn’t seen him for a while. He caught up with me:
‘Are ye off, lad?’ His sharp eyes fixed me with that penetrating stare. The collar of his black coat stood up round his neck although it was a hot day and he still had that odd metallic smell from the foundry. He took hold of my jacket sleeve: ‘Have ye learned something here? I hope so. Ye’ll need to study them statues more carefully now, eh? Mustn’t ignore them.’
He fidgeted for a moment before suddenly erupting with anger.
‘Don’t ye think it’s disgusting, eh? That the spirit should be locked up in that way? Locked in all that unyielding metal. For hundreds of years. That’s how long statues can last, y’know. How would you like it? They’ve gone through every circle of the inferno, they have, from the molten rage to the frozen fury. Did ye know that the last and deepest level of Dante’s inferno is not fire but ice? That’s them. Pent up in ice. Benumbed. Frozen. Paralysed. Frigid. Petrified. All those trapped desires inside. And everybody scurrying by, ignoring them. No-one talks of the relief that Ozymandias felt when the sands began to erode and free him. Set him free.’
I was standing by the gate, embarrassed by the outburst and not knowing how to get away.
‘Straddling life and death is tiring, mate. Believe you me. Hanging halfway between the two. But mark my words, their day will come. Just think of it. One day ye’ll hear that jarring grating clank as they lever themselves off their pedestals, all those equestrian bronze statues of kings and generals facing the Houses of Parliament, horses rearing in a wild cavalry charge against the living bastards.’ He shook his fist in the air with triumph. ‘And all those anonymous soldiers getting off their war memorials to join them in an infantry charge. Fixed bayonets. Oh, there’s some power in them yet. They want a war. D’ye know why? It’s their best chance of being destroyed. All statues are angry. Pent-up spirits. They want to be smashed up. That way the spirit is released into the air and can find its way into a living person and live again. That’s what the statues want. Not any halfway house. Freedom to inhabit the living. Smash us up, they say. Set us free.’
He spat on the ground, shook his head and with shoulders hunched he turned away towards the foundry without so much as a goodbye.
I was pleased to be on my way.
All the pleasures of Europe were ahead of me. Or should have been. I had just completed my first year at university studying Italian and German. My intention was to visit Italy first and then go north to Germany, brushing up my language skills as I went. I was excited about this trip. At first I had been going to travel with friends but in the end we couldn’t agree on routes and destinations so I decided to go on my own. I would arrive in London in the afternoon, catch the night train from St Pancras to Paris and travel from there direct to Florence.
I arrived in London and decided to make my way along the Thames embankment. It was difficult for me to shake off Ernie’s warning that I should pay close heed to statues. I tried to ignore them but each one I passed seemed to press its attention on me. By dusk I was walking past the Houses of Parliament. Placed around Parliament Square a gruesome collection of figures awaited me immobile and silent as if in a gigantic sulk. A vagrant lay hunched in his sleeping bag at the foot of George Canning’s plinth. For a moment I thought I saw the statue’s face twitch. On closer inspection I saw that the statue was overrun with mice. I walked on to Victoria Station and caught the tube to St Pa
ncras.
As soon as the train left St Pancras I experienced a sense of liberation. My anxiety fell away. We arrived at the Gare du Nord early in the morning where I had to scramble for my connection to Florence. I dozed and woke as we drew into Florence. It was four in the afternoon. I held my breath as I looked through the train window to see the great rust-coloured dome of the city’s cathedral against a hazy bluish backdrop of Tuscan hills. The hotel I had booked was small and serviceable. I left my bags there and straightaway ventured out to enjoy a bowl of coffee, soft bread twists, Parma ham and olives. This was life in Italy as I had imagined it.
My sense of elation did not last long. The next morning I dutifully joined other tourists to see the iconic statue of Michaelangelo’s David. The marble figure was benign and beautiful. From below I could not see whether the convoluted carving around the top of the head represented curly hair or some sort of laurel wreath. I took out my binoculars to get a better look. Immediately I was paralysed with shock. From below the face had seemed mild and tender. But as I looked through the binoculars the expression on the face changed. In close-up the face assumed such an unmistakeable expression of fear and dread that my heart went into palpitations and I fled back to my lodgings.
By the next day I seemed to have contracted some sort of virus. I was plagued with fever, headaches and a migraine which affected my vision. The migraine started by blacking out one half of the sight in my right eye. This was followed by nausea and brilliant zig-zag patterns in the eye. I pulled the shutters in my room so that it was dark and for the next few days I only left there to creep out in the evening for a snack in a nearby café before crawling back to bed. Most of my planned stay in Italy was spent under the bedcovers trying to shield myself from the light, although I did manage to go out and send a postcard to my mother in Yarmouth.
Five days later, still with fever and disappointed that I had wasted so much of the time left on my student rail card, I headed north to Munich. From there I would travel to Cologne where I had arranged to meet a friend from university. We were to meet in the large square in front of the cathedral. The two giant spires of that great Gothic church towered above me, blackened with grime. People came and went. I checked the time. Pigeons fluttered. I sat and waited in the square for an hour and a half. My phone buzzed with a text message. It was from my friend:
The Master of Chaos Page 12
