by Amis, Martin
And now, in unwelcome symmetry, the businessman also moved to the seat opposite, though swiftly and without rising above a crouch; with his meaty right hand he appeared to be mopping himself down, seeing to the pink brow dotted with motes of sweat, the pale and moist upper lip. Our eyes met inexorably, and he focused.
‘…Do you understand English?’
IV
Do I understand English? ‘Uh, yeah,’ I said.
‘Ah.’
And I speak it, too. Like everyone else around here. Great Britain no longer had an empire – except the empire of words; not the imperial state, just the imperial tongue. Everyone knew English. The refugees knew English, a little bit. That partly explained why they wanted to get to the UK and Eire, because everyone there knew English. And it was why they wanted to get to Germany: the refugees knew no German, but the Germans all knew English – the nut-brown maid who was brushing the curtains knew English, the sandy-haired bellhop knew English.
‘…You’re English,’ he announced with reluctant wonder.
I found myself saying, ‘London, born and bred.’ Not quite true; but this wasn’t the time to expatiate on my babyhood – with the mother who was barely older than I was – in the Home Counties circa 1950, or to dream out loud about that early decade in South Wales, infancy, childhood, when the family was poor but still nuclear. For half a century after that, though, yes, it was London. He said,
‘I can tell by the way you talk…That was a tough one, that.’
‘The phone call.’
‘The phone call. You know, with some people, they haven’t got a fucking clue, quite honestly. You’ve just got to start from scratch. Every – every time.’
‘I bet.’ And I cursorily imagined a youngish middle manager, slumped over his disorderly workstation in a depot or showroom out by an airport somewhere, loosening his tie as he pressed the hot phone to his reddened ear.
‘Look at that,’ he said, meaning the television – the eternally silent television. On its flat screen half a dozen uniformed guards were tossing shop sandwiches (cellophane-wrapped) into a caged enclosure, and those within seemed to snap at them – and it was impossible to evade the mental image of feeding time at the zoo. The businessman said with contented absorption, as he made some calculations on the yellow page,
‘Amazing the lengths people’ll go to for a handout, in’t it?’
The in’t it? was rhetorical: his truism anticipated no reply. In Cracow and Warsaw (I recalled, as the businessman immersed himself in his columned figures) everyone was saying that Poland would be exempt: the only homogenous country in Central Europe, the only monoculture, blue-eyed Poland thought it would be exempt because ‘the state gives no benefits’. I heard this from a translator so urbane that he could quote at length not only from Tennyson but also from Robert Browning; and in answer I nodded, and resumed work on my heavy meal. But when I was dropped off at the hotel (and stood on the square facing the antique prosthetic leg of Stalin’s Palace of Culture), I shook my head. Someone who has trekked across the Hindu Kush would not be coming to Europe for a shop sandwich. The businessman said,
‘Where are we. What country’s this?’
He meant the country where dark-skinned travellers were being tumbled and scattered by water cannon (followed up with tear gas and pepper spray). I said,
‘Looks like Hungary.’
‘Eh, that bloke there’s got the right idea.’ He paused as he closed his eyes and the bloodless lips mimed a stretch of mental arithmetic. ‘What’s he called?’
I told him.
‘Yeah. Orbán. We ought to be doing likewise in Calais. No choice. It’s the only language they understand.’
Oh no, sir, the language they understand is much harsher than that. The language they understand consists of barrel bombs and nerve gas and the scimitars of incandescent theists. They’re not in search of a nanny state, Mr Vane. It’s more likely that they seek a state that just leaves them alone…
‘Merkel,’ he said. ‘Frau Merkel should take a leaf out of Orbán’s book. She won’t of course. I know you shouldn’t say this, but I think women are too emotional to be heads of state – too tender-hearted. By rights, Merkel should do an Orbán. Recognise what she’s dealing with, namely illegal aliens. Criminal aliens. See? There you go.’
He meant the footage evidently posted by ISIS – a truck exploding in slow motion, three prisoners in orange jumpsuits kneeling on a sand dune, multipronged fighters tearing by in SUVs.
‘Then there’s that.’ He achieved some climactic grand total on his pad, underlined it three times and circled it before tossing the pen aside. ‘Jihadis.’
‘Might be complicated,’ I said.
‘Complicated…Hang about,’ he said with a frown. ‘Silly me. Forgot to factor in the three point five. Give us a minute.’
Perhaps a better name for them, sir, would be takfiri. The takfir accusation (the lethal accusation of unbelief) is almost as old as Islam, but in current usage takfiris, Mr Vane, is sharply derogatory and it means, Muslims who kill Muslims (and not just infidels). And the logic of it goes on from there. If there are militants in the influx, and they act, Geoffrey, then it’s the Muslims of Europe who will suffer; and the takfiris won’t mind that because their policy, here, is the same as Lenin’s during the Russian Civil War: ‘the worse the better’. Is it fanciful, Geoff, to suggest that this lesson is the evil child of the witches in the Scottish play – ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’?
‘Complicated? That’s the understatement of the year.’
Suddenly he became aware of the phone he had reflexively reached for. He inhaled with resignation and said, ‘You know what gets me? The repetitions. You plod through the same things again and again. And it just doesn’t sink in. Not with that one, oh no. Not with her.’
V
Her? I sat up straight.
‘Tell me something,’ he insisted. ‘Why’re they all coming now? They say despair. Despair, they say. But they can’t all have despaired in the same week. Why’re a million of them coming now? Tell me that.’
I regrouped and said, ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to find out. Apparently a safe route opened up. Through the Balkans. They’re all in touch with each other and then there it was on Facebook.’
He went blank or withdrew for a moment. But then he returned. ‘I’ll give them bleeding Facebook. I’ll give them bleeding Balkans. They…They’ve turned their own countries into, into hellholes quite frankly, and now they’re coming here. And even if they don’t start killing us all they’re going to want their own ways, aren’t they. Halal, mosques. Uh, sharia, in’t it. Arranged marriages – for ten-year-old first cousins…But let’s uh be uh, “enlightened” about it. Okay. They’ll have to adapt, and fucking quick about it and all. They’ll have to bow their heads and toe the line. Socially. On the women question and that.’
He closed his computer, and gazed for a moment at its surface and even stroked his knuckles across it.
‘You know, I’ll have to call her back.’ And there was now a sudden weak diffidence in his smile as he looked up and said, ‘Well it is my mum.’
I had to make an effort to dissimulate the scope of my surprise…Shorn of context (the business hotel, the business suit – the expensive posture-pedic shoes, like velvet Crocs), his bland round white-fringed face looked as though it would be happiest, or at least happier, on a village green on a summer afternoon; that face could have belonged to anybody non-metropolitan, a newsagent, a retired colonel, a vicar. With a nod I reached for my electronic cigarette and drew on it.
‘Eighty-one, she is.’
‘Ah well.’ After a moment I said, ‘My mother-in-law’s eighty-six.’ And you see, sir, it’s a long story, but she was the reason we left England; and we never regretted it. The process felt natural for my wife, naturally, but it also felt natural for me. There must’ve
been filial love left over after the death of Hilary Bardwell, and it had nowhere else to go. I said, ‘Eighty-six – five years further on than yours.’
‘Yeah? And what’s the state of her then, eh? Can she hold a thought in her head for two seconds? Or is she all over the fucking gaff like mine. I mean, when your bonce goes, I ask you, what is the sense in carrying on?’
I gestured at the instrument he still held in his hand and said, ‘Just wondering, but what was that – what was all that to do with?’
He sat back and grunted it out: Lanzarote. Sinking deeper, he reached up and eased his writhing neck. ‘For her eightieth, see, I bought her a beautiful little timeshare in Lanzarote. Beautiful little holiday home. Maid looking in every morning. A bloke doing the garden. Good place to park her in the winter. Roof terrace overlooking the bay. And now she’s meant to renew the insurance. That’s all it is. The contents insurance and that. Shouldn’t have taken but a minute.’
‘Well. They do find it hard to…’
‘You know, I’ve got four brothers. All younger. And not one of them’ll touch her with a fucking bargepole. They won’t have anything to do with her. It’s true the old – she does drive you mad, there’s no question. But you’ve got to grind it out, haven’t you. And the four of them, they won’t go near her. Can you credit it? They won’t go near their own fucking mum. Pardon the language. Well, they haven’t got my resources, admittedly. So answer me this. Where would she be without my support?’
With a glance at my wrist I said, ‘Damn. I’d better pack. Early flight.’
‘Here for a day or three yet, me. Take a well-earned rest. Look in at the gym. Room service. Uh, what’s your destination?’
I took his offered hand. ‘Home.’
VI
As I bunched and crushed various items into the splayed bag, I activated my computer. And saw that there was still no message from my wife (nor from a single one of my children). Yes, well, it was the same with Nabokov: ‘Don’t you find our correspondence is a little…one-sided?’ And in my case it was curious, because when I was away like this I never fretted about my other life, my settled life, where everything was nearly always orderly and unchanging and fixed into place…
Otherwise I felt fine, and even quite vain of my vigour (health after all unbroken), and buoyant, and stimulated, and generally happy and proud; the tour had awakened anxiety in me but I have to say that even the anxiety was not unwelcome, because I recognised it as the kind of anxiety that would ask to be written about. At odd moments, though, I seriously questioned the existence of the house in Brooklyn, with its three female presences (wife, daughters), and I seriously questioned the existence of my two boys and my eldest daughter, all grown, in London – and my two grandchildren. So many! Could they, could any of them, still be there?
‘Good morning, this is your wakeup call…Good morning, this is your wakeup call…Good morning, this is your –’
I had one final appointment: a radio interview with a journalist called Konrad Purper, destined to take place in what they called the Centre d’Affaires, with its swivel seats and cord carpets. When it was over Konrad and I stood talking in the foyer until my chaperone promptly but worriedly appeared. There had been many chaperones, many helpers and minders – Alisz, Agata, Heidi, Marguerite, Hannah, Ana, Johanna.
‘There are no taxis!’ said Johanna. ‘They can’t get near us. Because there’s too many people!’
Normally I am very far from being an imperturbable transatlantic traveller. But at that moment I sensed that my watch was moving at its workaday pace; time did not start speeding up, did not start heating up. What was the worst thing that could happen? Nothing much. I said, ‘So we…’
‘Walk.’
‘To the airport.’
‘No – sorry. I’m not clear. To the train station. We can get there from there.’
‘Oh and the station’s close, isn’t it.’
‘Five minutes,’ said Konrad. ‘And every ten minutes a rail shuttle goes to Munich International.’
So with Johanna I started out, rolling my bag, and with Konrad perhaps coincidentally rolling his bike, and the three of us often rolling aside on to the carless tarmac in favour of the pageant of costumed revellers coming the other way. This narrow thoroughfare, Landwehrstrasse, with its negotiations between West and East – Erotic Studio, Turkish Restaurant, Deutsche Bank, Traditional Thai Massage, Daimler-Benz, Kabul Market…
We came out into the air and space of the Karlsplatz and the multitudes of Hansels and Gretels (many of the women, in the second week, decadently wearing the despised ‘Barbie’ alternative: a thick-stitched bodice and a much-shortened dirndl showing the white stocking tops just above the knee). How did it go in the Biergarten? According to Thomas Wolfe, they had merry-go-rounds, and an insane profusion of sausage shops, and whole oxen turning on spits. They ate and drank in tents that could seat 6,000, 7,000, 8,000. If you were in the middle of this, Wolfe wrote, Germany seemed to be ‘one enormous belly’. Swaying, singing, linking arms: Germans together, en masse, objectively ridiculous, and blissfully innocent of any irony…
Now Johanna, I saw, was talking to a policeman who was stretched out in a parked sidecar. Konrad stood by. She turned and said to me,
‘It’s – you can’t even get there by foot!’
For many years I lived in Notting Hill, and sat through many Carnivals (in earlier times often attending with my sons); I knew about cordons, police gauntlets, closed roads (for ambulance access), and panics and stampedes; once I was in a crush that firmly assured me that you could face death simply by means of a superfluity of life. Yes, there were affinities: Oktoberfest was like Carnival, but the flesh there was brown and the flesh here was pink. Hundreds of thousands of high-esprit scoutmasters – hundreds of thousands of festive dairymaids in their Sunday best.
‘The only way is underground. One stop.’
Soon we were looking into the rosy deep of the stone staircase. Getting on for a month ago, in Brooklyn, while she was helping me pack, Elena remarked that my family-sized suitcase was ‘not full enough’. Well it was certainly heavy enough, by now, with its sediment of gifts and autographed novels and poetry collections and things such as Bernhardt’s portfolio in its stiff brown envelope. Humping a big load through the underground: I can do it, I thought, but I won’t like doing it. And yet once again Konrad, having tethered his bike, was quietly at our side, tall, and calm, and my bag was now swinging easily in his grip.
In the Hauptbahnhof itself the crowd was interspersed with thin streams of dark-skinned and dark-clothed refugees, their eyes hagridden but determined, their tread leaden but firm, dragging their prams and goods-laden buggies, their children. Then came a rare sight, and then an even rarer one.
First, a mother of a certain age, a grandmother probably, tall, dressed in the rigid black of the full abaya, with her half-veiled face pointed straight ahead. Then, second, a lavishly assimilated young woman with the same colouring, perhaps the granddaughter of a Turkish Gastarbeiter, in tight white jacket and tight white jeans – and she had a stupendously, an unignorably full and prominent backside. For half a minute the two women inadvertently walked in step, away from us: on the right, the black edifice gliding as smoothly as a Dalek; on the left, the hugely undulating orbs of white.
When he had pointed us to our platform Konrad took his leave, much thanked, much praised. I turned to Johanna.
‘The two women – did you see that?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well. She’s not embarrassed by it, is she. Looking so cheerful. Swinging her arms. And dressed like that? She’s not trying to hide it.’
‘No.’
‘I mean she’s not shy about it.’
‘No,’ said Johanna. ‘She likes it.’
VII
The Nabokovs were refugees, and three times over. As teenagers they independent
ly fled the October Revolution; on her way out Véra Slonim passed through a pogrom in the Ukraine involving tens of thousands of mob murders. That was in 1919. They fled the Bolsheviks, horsemen of terror and famine, and, via the Crimea, Greece, and England, sought sanctuary – in Berlin. Then France, until the Germans followed them there; then the eleventh-hour embarcation to New York in 1940, a few weeks ahead of the Wehrmacht (on its next westbound crossing their boat, the Champlain, was torpedoed and sunk). VN’s father (also Vladimir Nabokov), the liberal statesman, was murdered by a White Russian fascist in Berlin (1922); in the same city his brother Sergei was arrested in 1943 (for homosexuality), rearrested the following year (for sedition), and died in a concentration camp near Hamburg in January 1945. That was their Europe; and they went back there, in style and for good, in 1959.
Yes, and I met Véra too. I spent most of a day with her, in 1983, in the still centre of Europe, the Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland (where they had lived since 1961), breaking only for lunch with her son, the incredibly tall Dmitri, whom I would meet again. Véra was a riveting and convivial goldenskinned beauty; on sensitive subjects she could suddenly turn very fierce, but I was never disconcerted because there was always the contingent light of humour in her eyes.
Vladimir died in 1977, aged seventy-eight. Véra died in 1991, aged eighty-nine. And Dmitri died in 2012, aged seventy-seven.
From Dmitri’s funeral address in April 1991:
On the eve of a risky hip operation two years ago, my brave and considerate mother asked that I bring her her favourite blue dress, because she might be receiving someone. I had the eerie feeling she wanted that dress for a very different reason. She survived on that occasion. Now, for her last earthly encounter, she was clad in that very dress. It was Mother’s wish that her ashes be united with those of Father’s in the urn at the Clarens Cemetery. In a curiously Nabokovian twist of things, there was some difficulty in locating that urn. My instinct was to call Mother, and ask her what to do about it. But there was no Mother to ask.