Mr Vogel

by Lloyd Jones

  Indeed, if his mother could but see him now; and what if Mr Vogel’s mother could also see her beautiful baby now, twisted and sad, slowly drinking himself to extinction and dreaming, always dreaming of better things. But we must press on with our story...

  THE GARDEN OF EDEN

  WHEN I was a boy of twelve I became the owner of a buzzard – if you can own a buzzard.

  A family of visitors, unversed in country ways, had picked it up and brought it to the farmstead where I was reared many years ago, near the trickling source of the great river which flows unswervingly through this town. I had seen it earlier in the day, on the grass below its nest, and had left it there, as my father had taught me, for it to have the best chance of survival. Since it had been handled and removed from the vicinity of the nest its parents would almost certainly reject it now, so I tried to rear it myself.

  The brief life of this chick came to mind later in my own life when I went back upstream, consumed with nostalgia for our little white farmstead; I longed to walk through uncontaminated fields, fragmented by the hedges into a lovely patchwork, like church windows patterned with lead.

  Once more, briefly, I felt comfortable among the crystal streams where I had fished and played, and felt at ease within the friendship of the language, customs and traditions. But like the chick, once I had left the nest I too had the smell about me of strangeness and difference, and just as the landscape had changed indefinably, so had I.

  After a while I became restless in my natal Garden of Eden, as edgy as a young man visiting a formative but aged grandparent. I went back into exile, returning to the Blue Angel keenly aware that I was now déclassé, and rejected organically by both sides since I had consorted adulterously with both.

  The chick died. I remember still the shock of sensing its death as soon as my eyes saw, at some distance, its ragdoll proneness in the bottom of the slatted wooden box which I had nailed together, laboriously and clumsily. I was surprised chiefly because the chick had shown every sign of living; it had thrived on the strips of raw meat I had fed it, with bowls of bread and milk, and had grown steadily from feeble baby pterodactyl to preening and resplendent raptor-in-waiting. Years later I was told that young birds of prey, bred in captivity, seldom survive this phase of their development unless given essential ingredients provided normally by their parents. So I had nurtured it as an executioner might feed a condemned prisoner, so that it would live long enough to walk to the gallows. Yesterday I entered one of the town’s little churches to rest my feet after a walk through the back streets – I had been visiting some of my upriver friends who live in the town. The building was laden brimful with flowers for a festival. In the far distance I could hear Humboldt, very faintly, chattering to the customers in the Blue Angel. The heavy church door had been shut since early morning, and the sun streaming through the leaded windows (reminding me once again of the quilted landscape of my homeland) had warmed the normally cool interior. The air was suffused with the heavy perfume of the blooms, so strong as to inebriate the senses; the overpowering strength of the fragrance, almost sickly in its intensity, reminded me of the chick, which in the last stage of its life had exuded a cloying smell – cutaneous, oleaginous, musky, sickly-sweet.

  Similar smells had come from Mr Vogel when he sat by the bar on the day of the celebration. Don Quixote had given me a meaningful look as Vogel wobbled in, propped his crutches against a wall and pivoted himself in the corner, where there was a stool for him. He was dressed in purple and black, as usual, but it was a newer shade of black, patchless and darned, since he had already started his forays into the area’s second hand shops. It became a joke: surely he was writing a guide to charity shops; almost every day someone said ‘Saw Vogel yesterday outside so-and-so,’ or ‘Bumped into old Vogel in South Street, so much stuff he could hardly walk.’

  The Vogel smell was singular, and although pungent it was also endearing in a baby-smell way; it made him seem vulnerable. His scoliosis had pushed his head downwards – you saw his bald patch, which reminded me of an island marooned in a disintegrating reef of red hair, coming at you before he levered his head upwards to talk to you, so that he was constantly looking at you from under his eyelids, as if he were saying: Are You Sure?

  He had once been tallish, but his deformity had pushed him down, giving him a quizzical air; add to this his expressive green eyes, his haggard air, his peculiar accent, and you have a general picture of the man we call Vogel, a little bird at the end of the bar, moving his whole torso rather than his recalcitrant neck to talk to people and to sip his whisky (Vogel rarely drank beer, since this would force him to clatter endlessly to and from the toilet). It was impossible to get an impression of his body, since he purposefully bought clothes which were far too large for him – primarily because he wanted to hide his malformations, and also because he couldn’t use the charity shop fitting rooms to try clothes on before buying them. He had tried once and had fallen backwards whilst putting on some trousers, tearing the curtain which hung over the doorway and presenting the two elderly women volunteers with the rare sight of Mr Vogel sans-culotte, as Mr Nosy Parker put it, referring to Vogel’s leanings towards the political left (Parker could never resist a damp double entendre). What those two women saw of Vogel’s maladroit legs they never recounted, making them the only discreet bodies in the whole town.

  We were able, however, to discern from the general fold of his trousers that his legs bent inwards, sharply, from the knees down. His black clothes accentuated his appalling dandruff, which lay on his shoulders like a fall of early snow.

  Mr Vogel had been declared the winner of the competition that morning in a formal announcement from the steps of the town hall, followed by a peal of bells from the mother church at noon. When this tintinnabulation had ceased, ships in the harbour sounded their whistles and foghorns, and drivers tooted their horns. Townspeople who had gathered in the square to hear the declaration cheered and clapped in a good-humoured way and then dispersed to the parks and pubs, the day having been declared a holiday. Mr Vogel had not yet taken possession of the old man’s house and land, but he had been given a large interim payment, and his first gesture was to fund a number of street parties, a grand concert featuring all the town’s rising musicians, and free food and drink – including beer and soft drinks, but no wines and spirits – in all the cafés, restaurants and pubs from six till eight o’clock. The town treated it as a massive party; the weather was warm and dry, and many people had exceeded capacity well before six, making Mr Vogel’s bill far less than might have been expected. In addition he awarded prizes for art, composition, scientific invention and architectural design. The winning entries would be displayed in a new gallery, library and cultural hub to be known as the Vogel Centre. Mr Vogel wanted to be remembered, and he wanted to be liked, as do most of us (his own longings accentuated, perhaps, by his loneliness over the years). Calls of ‘don’t forget me in your will’ and ‘got a fiver till tomorrow?’ greeted him when he sat in his corner, looking cleaner and shinier than usual. He asked me to put tables and chairs outside so that the boy Luther and other children could join his celebration, and he asked for crates of lemonade and boxes of crisps to be conveyed there continuously to replenish their feast. Each child was given a teddy bear or a doll. The sweet shop in the square had agreed to open its doors free of charge all day, Mr Vogel again footing the bill. No-one could accuse him of being mean or ungrateful, he said. We agreed. The boy Luther went to fetch Vogel’s fiddle, and he gave us a few tunes on it; we had often heard him play Abide With Me as we passed his house, and he delighted us with his unexpected prowess.

  Soon the party was in full swing, beer and banter flowing freely. Mr Vogel had invited many celebrated guests. I thought I saw the illustrious Mr Borrow, accompanied by a drover, a strange-looking man with a broad red face, incipient carbuncles and grey squinty eyes. This Mr Borrow, if it really was him, struck me as being exceedingly inquisitive, wanting to know everything abou
t me and the inn, asking if there were gipsies about, and smattering his speech with so many words from foreign languages that I barely understood him. Amazingly, he could speak my own native tongue, and he told me he had learnt it from an ostler – as I am! – before he went abroad to translate the Bible into many tongues. At one point he seemed to have an animated conversation with Humboldt.

  Another guest, a Mr Savage or Landor – I forget which – became inebriated and abusive, saying (cheeky rascal!) that my people were drunken, idle, mischievous and vengeful.

  ‘I shall never cease to wish,’ he slurred in my direction, ‘that Julius Caesar had utterly exterminated the lot of you – I am convinced that you are as irreclaimable as gipsies.’

  It was no surprise when a few of the men who couldn’t handle their drink started playing up. Jack the landlord dealt with them in his customary fashion. Grasping a collar with one spade-like hand and their trousers with the other, he hurled them into the street with frightening strength. Many had suffered this indignity before, and although one or two shouted insults or shook a fist, none tried to re-enter. They knew it was useless, since Jack was famed for his quickfire temper and his strength, despite being very short of stature (he was not much bigger than a dwarf). Born on the edge of the biggest bog in our land, he was extremely clever with his hands, and a silversmith of great renown. Like myself, but quite a few years earlier, he had arrived in the town from the hinterland, dusty and wary, possessing nothing but his clothes, shoes, and his gargantuan strength.

  Some said he had been a drover, others maintained he was a fugitive and had travelled here in search of a sanctuary. All agreed that when he arrived he was a firebrand and an agitator. He had quickly set up a society for those of us who speak the old tongue and we still meet regularly to discuss our history and to compete in the intricate metres of our archaic poetry. Jack had an uplands sort of humour, quite simple, mainly slapstick – for instance, when he climbed back up the stairs to the bar after changing a barrel he would bang the cellar door with his foot and enter clutching his head, as if he had walked into the lintel over the doorway – this was quite ridiculous, since he was less than five feet tall.

  He spoke an old variant of our language, used in only one small valley and instantly recognisable by the guttural pronunciation of the ch consonant, used as a shibboleth in olden days among our shepherds and crofters to detect rustlers and vagabonds.

  Jack had his own unique bartering system, and a whole day could pass without any money changing hands, depending on the nature of the task being performed for him in return for free beer. This puts me in mind of a story in one of my books about Alvise da Cadamosto, a Venetian who sailed with Henry the Navigator. When he was in Africa he met a tribe who dealt in salt – they carried huge blocks of it on their heads, to a river deep in the hinterland, and then carried out a most peculiar transaction.

  Their first move was to leave the salt by the side of the river. Then they retired half a day’s journey from the scene. Another tribe, who did not wish to be seen or to speak, arrived in boats and placed a large quantity of gold by each block of salt, then disappeared again. Whilst they were away the salt tribe returned, and if they were satisfied with the amount of gold left by each block of salt they took away the gold. Then the gold tribe returned and took away each block of salt which no longer had any gold by it. If they wanted to bargain further they placed more gold by the remaining blocks of salt. In this way, by long and ancient custom, they carried on their trade without seeing or speaking to each other.

  In the same way a man such as Don Quixote, painting a window at the Blue Angel, would occasionally give up his task and flop silently by the bar, mopping his brow in an enfeebled way; if he had done enough work Jack would give him a pint; if not, Jack would turn his back on him and continue with his tasks.

  The celebration was in full swing and I was slopping around in a squelch of spilt beer behind the bar of the Blue Angel, pulling pints as fast as I could, when I saw old Vogel and Don Quixote strike a deal. The barman’s eyes are constantly on the move, keeping a register of customers and an approximation of who’s next to be served – the average punter will allow you one or two mistakes in a session, but gets irritated if passed over repeatedly. So I saw them shake hands and return to their drinking, rather solemnly. Don Quixote had become animated when bar talk came round to football, and he became extremely excited when he discovered that Vogel was not only knowledgeable generally about football, but also knew a great deal about The Don’s favourite player of all time, the great Brazilian winger Garrincha, who was as great as Pele himself, if we are to believe The Don.

  Amazingly, Vogel knew even more about him than Don Quixote, down to his nine children, his alcoholism and his love affair with a popular singer. Vogel confided in me, when The Don had eased off to the toilet, that he’d taken a particular interest in Garrincha – known to his adoring Brazilian fans as the little bird – because he had deformed legs: his left peg was bent inwards and the right, which was six centimetres shorter, was bent outwards.

  As X-rays had shown, he was a walking, running miracle, a glimmer of hope for all wobbly people. As for me, I know of Garrincha because of his drinking problem, which killed him in the end. We all have our special subjects.

  During a lull in this drunken mêlée I grabbed a chance to stand awhile near Vogel and The Don to rest my own little legs, sturdy little pins which have served me well, though it has been pointed out to me by Vogel that I am slightly bow-legged from my horse-riding days. I had never noticed, but Vogel, having an eye for these things (we all innately look for birds of a feather) had espied my curvatures.

  ‘Which family do you come from, then?’ I heard Vogel ask The Don mock-innocently, pursuing the region’s age-old hobby of tracing everyone’s lineage. This comes partly from inbred habit, partly from a need to make sure you didn’t get a clout by disparaging someone related to the person you’re talking to.

  The Don blew a smoke ring and left a long pause.

  ‘You wouldn’t know them.’

  ‘Heard you were one of the L–––– family,’ countered Vogel, referring to a large clan living around one of the island coves, an isolated inlet hiding below a ruined castle which lurched above the ship-slicing rocks in that corner of the island. They wore a gold earring in the right ear because they believed, proudly, that they were descended from a band of smugglers. Personally, I believe they were no more than wreckers.

  ‘Could be you’re right,’ said The Don, bending his head and feeling his earring.

  ‘You got family living below the castle?’ asked Vogel, like a dog who had happened on a buried bone and was unwilling to rebury it until he had gnawed every remaining scrap from it.

  ‘Could be you’re right,’ said The Don again.

  Vogel was alluding to an old story centred on the weather-bombed castle. Once, apparently, it was the home of a nobleman who led the happy-go-lucky life of a wealthy man – hunting, fishing, seducing his maids and getting so hopelessly drunk on market days that he had to be taken home by his servant. This servant was so strong willed that he had completely mastered his master, and laughed scornfully at any attempts to rein him in. The nobleman, who was also the local magistrate, disliked the heavy taxes imposed on the wines and spirits he so loved, so he turned a blind eye to the cove’s smugglers, who repaid him by leaving crates of his favourite tipple by his door.

  The high-handed behaviour of his servant troubled the nobleman and he hatched a plan to get rid of him, by paying the smugglers to kidnap him and carry him off to their next port of call, as far away as possible. His scheme worked perfectly and the servant awoke one morning with a sore head and a view of his homeland disappearing in the distance. But there’s a twist to the tale. The servant’s dogged and indomitable spirit didn’t sink below the waves as the smugglers’ vessel snailed its way along the sea’s highways and byways. He showed verve and fortitude, and he became a legend; he was so popular he became leade
r of the smugglers’ gang. Eventually the ship returned to these shores, where the servant repaid his master by doing exactly the same to him; his men kidnapped the nobleman, smuggled him on board, and sailed over the horizon whilst the servant retired to the castle. According to folklore he became prosperous and left many darkly intelligent descendants, known for their vigilance, watchfulness and cunning.

  ‘Not unlike yourself,’ commented Vogel, expecting The Don to take up the tale.

  The Don stared steadily into his glass.

  ‘Gives me an idea, though,’ said Vogel. ‘I need someone to help me...’

  With this a noisy disturbance in a side-room took me away from their conversation.

  I have to rely on the boy Luther’s version of what happened between the two men in my absence:

  On the day of the big party by Mr Vogel I went to the Blue Angel to see him and he got me lemonade and crisps and he left me outside and didn’t talk to me because he was with the big people and too busy and when he came out he was hard to understand. He said hello boy still here then, I’ve got a bit of news for you we’ve got another one with us on our next trip to the island, need an extra pair of eyes, he knows all about the coast and the smugglers and he can drive, and he pointed to the man they call Donkey Horty who winks at me and says you’re a naughty boy Luther Williams.

  And you won’t have to sit behind me on a box any more neither he said, tomorrow we will have a brand new bus and I will have my own seat too and there is a stove and cups and a cupboard for sweets he said and places for us to sleep.