Mr Vogel

by Lloyd Jones

  No-one in the bar prostrated himself before Mr Vogel; as you might expect, he was the butt of many hurtful remarks during the next hour.

  But as for me, well, I saw the man’s dream. We all need to have our little hopes, don’t we? I have to concede, however, that Mr Vogel’s dream was quite an enormous one.

  He made a heartfelt speech, something on the lines of: I might not do it, but it’ll be a glorious failure. If I succeed you’ll be amazed. If I fail you will have enough material to laugh for the rest of your useless lives.

  Mr Vogel clumped to his corner, ordered a large whisky, and sulked.

  Standing next to him, silently, I felt a deep sympathy with him: he was trying to realise a dream. He wanted to be someone like Rocky Mountain Jim, living in a land of wild Indians and buffaloes, with new railroads girding the earth, rolling prairies, high bluffs and whirling rapids; he wanted to talk to hunters and adventurers in smoky log cabins, eat johnny-cake, squirrel and buffalo-hump. There were problems with this dream: Rocky Mountain Jim was a bold adventurer loved deeply by a horde of women, whereas Vogel had never been out of the region and had never been kissed, never mind loved – either carnally or spiritually. Who the hell would touch old Vogel! Rocky Mountain Jim was a man with Desperado written in large letters all over him, a man with a fine aquiline nose, a dense moustache and one grey-blue eye (the other had been gouged out by a grizzly bear who had left him for dead). Whereas Mr Vogel, well...

  ‘Order!’ cried Sancho Panza above the chatter.

  ‘Order!’ He stood drunkenly on the window seat, almost losing his footing. Everyone turned round, but instead of looking at his face they all seemed to be looking between his legs, straight out through the window.

  He continued.

  ‘Gentlemen. It behoves me, this afternoon, to say a few words about our gallant comrade Mr Vogel, who has announced his intention to make a great pilgrimage to be cured of all his maladies. Friends, please raise your glasses to St Jude, patron saint of lost causes, and foolish Mr Vogel, who’ll get no further than the lunatic asylum if he...’

  Here he trailed off, since his glazed eyes had eventually realised that everyone was looking between his legs, and fearing his flies were open, he made an effort to adjust his clothing, whereupon he fell back into one of the geranium pots. I was glad to see that his glass had remained in his hand, and with great consideration he hadn’t spilled a single drop. One of my blooms, however, was completely crushed and red petals now fluttered over the table and onto the floor. Humboldt became extremely emotional, and seizing his opportunity he made a dash for freedom through a window which had been opened by Don Quixote, who wanted to see what was going on outside.

  As my parrot disappeared Sancho turned round to follow his flight, and saw what everyone else had been staring at. I myself also saw the object of their interest – a peculiar sight, since all that was visible was a head, belonging to a young woman. What I remember is that her hair was light brown and was cut in a distinctly old-fashioned bob with a blue ribbon in it; and she had a little upturned nose propping up a pair of those round glasses which make people look intelligent. She merely stared at us through the bottom pane of glass. It was very odd – I thought she must be on her knees.

  Don Quixote told me later that she was, in fact, sitting in a wheelchair, which was being pushed by a man who looked as if he should be sitting in it, not her. Apparently she was carrying something, a present perhaps, wrapped in tissue paper. The woman, it transpired, was looking for someone, and soon we all knew who it was. Mr Vogel, on his way to the toilets, stopped suddenly when he saw her face in the window. He gave a cry of amazement and made a bee-line for the front door – it was the fastest I’d ever seen him move. Opening it, he [the remaining pages of the Vogel Papers, being on the outside, had been damaged by dampness and mould, and were therefore illegible].

  PART TWO

  Jorge introduced me to the company director. J Antonio was the technical expert. He led me to the boardroom, where a rack of umbrellas stood against the far wall. With a deft flourish Antonio opened each umbrella and described its attributes. There were umbrellas with short or long shafts; with beech, plastic or Malacca handles; models with eight and ten ribs and one the diameter of a military satellite dish, with sixteen ribs.

  ‘Please,’ said Jorge after Antonio had finished. ‘We would like to give you an umbrella for your journey.’ He thought for a moment, then chose a ten-ribbed, beech-handled model with a tubular steel shaft and black fabric. ‘This is good for walking,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘It is strong.’

  As I was leaving, Jorge handed me his business card. On it was a coloured illustration showing two Galicians in local dress sitting on a bench, the man in riding boots, the woman in wooden clogs. They were kissing beneath a large brown umbrella which was being pummelled by rain. Beneath the entwined couple was the slogan

  Que chova?

  ‘In the galego language,’ explained Jorge, ‘it means “What rain?”’

  It was the perfect apothegm for a journey which depended to some degree on self-delusion.

  Nicholas Crane, Clear Waters Rising, A Mountain Walk Across Europe.

  A VISIT FROM TASMANIA

  I WAS RELIEVED when I came to the end of the Vogel Papers – I’m sure you were too.

  If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. Reading the barman’s wacky story felt like a hard slog up a mountain – somewhere like the Crib Goch ridge. Now we’ve reached the top of the horseshoe and it’s time to turn round, look at the view, and see if it was worth all the effort. It’s all downhill from here, I assure you.

  It’s strange, isn’t it – if the Blue Angel manuscript had decayed just a little bit more we’d have been spared all that rot: a rambling journey around a make-believe colonial outpost, stuck in a time warp, peopled by oddballs. And who was our guide, the quirky barman with a taste for Dickensian English? Let’s face it, the Vogel Papers don’t make much sense. Not a pretty read at all – if you’re still with us it’s a tribute to your doggedness, your resolve to get to the end of a journey, rather than a reflection on the literary merit of the tale. But once we’ve started on an expedition we’re reluctant to turn back, all of us, aren’t we?

  I’m not much of a reading man but it don’t take a professor to realise that the Vogel Papers are completely fictitious. Credibility – nil. Wordy, romantic, sentimental: it’s a flight of fancy, a crude fairytale. There’s not much to be learnt from the handwriting either; it’s a slanting, uneducated scrawl.

  There’s a Welsh word for the sort of man who wrote it – gwladaidd, which conjures up English words like rustic, yokel, bog-trotter... you get my drift.

  The Vogel Papers were written by a peasant: a naive country boy with straw in his hair and mud on his boots. A man who learnt his English from second-hand, out-of-date novels. But it’s a story, and I find it... what’s the word – intriguing?

  In those idle moments of the mind I find myself glancing backwards, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mr Vogel and his oddball crew, but of course they’re never there. When the light’s out and I’m stretched out in my bed I can’t help wondering about the story; sleepless minutes become sleepless hours as I worm my way into the plot and become a fourth passenger, lurching about in the back of their Tardis as it wobbles through the countryside.

  I’m not sure why I became involved in the first place.

  With hindsight the Vogel Papers should have been left to rest in peace. But there’s something about the human mind which wants to explore every possibility, no matter what the consequences. Pandora’s Box and all that. And I’m a sucker for losers. Mr Vogel was a loser, and the author of his little story sounded like a loser too.

  I should have walked away like Martin did. Martin was the man who lived next door to me. A strange little man with a strange little surname, which I can’t remember. He was fattish, glasses, faintly sweaty. He always seemed prepossessed. He wasn’t one of those people who noticed you first,
more of a head-down, wait-for-it-to-happen sort of man. Always in a world of his own. We talked irregularly through a hole in the threadbare privet hedge between us. Nearly always he was alone; sometime his greying wife, her eyes burnt with some inexpressible secret, would wander slowly from the lean-to kitchen, drying her hands on something and murmuring like a chorister in a Greek play who had forgotten to exit with the rest. There were weeks when I saw neither of them. I was aware that they had two children in their early teens, but I never saw them at the back of the house, as if they were banned from the garden. At the end of both gardens there was the residue of an old granite wall which had partly tumbled into our plots.

  I had masked my own broken-up boundary with a trellis.

  One day my neighbour actually engaged me in conversation. He seemed jauntier than usual. We talked about his job – he was a driving instructor and he told me about one of his learners. The story wasn’t particularly funny but he clearly thought it hilarious so I joined him in a hearty round of laughter.

  He looked at the end of his garden and a strong silence ensued. He pointed towards it and looked at me keenly, as if wishing to pass on a coded message.

  He was going to rebuild his wall, his barricade. That was to be his task for the winter, he said. He started mumbling, just like his wife. He mumbled all through November as he cleared the stones and piled them neatly, then re-dug the footings.

  He was meticulous.

  He measured and marked out the wall’s domain with exaggerated precision. Small neat wooden crosses and strong twine delineated his winter’s work.

  Throughout December he constructed his wall and mumbled. This time it wasn’t dry-built. He bought an orange cement-mixer and made a mix before each session.

  The wall took shape, and still he mumbled. I caught the occasional word or phrase, which sounded like archaic poetry. He said things like fate is decreed... there’s not a man alive that I dare tell my tale to him... a dismal thing, deep in the chest... I cannot think about this world but memory darken my mind when I do...then this middle earth each and every day disintegrates... a haven awaits the homeless soul... the ocean’s lanes...

  Was the man going bonkers?

  ‘Middle Earth,’ I said to him one day. ‘I think you said Middle Earth. Am I right?’

  He was passing, a gleaming spade in his left hand and a gleaming pickaxe in his right hand, both freshly cleaned.

  ‘Yes, I think you’re right there,’ he said.

  ‘Middle Earth,’ I repeated. ‘Lord of the Rings? The Hobbit?’

  ‘Much earlier,’ he replied. ‘Think much earlier.’

  I thought hard, but shook my head, perplexed.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘I’ll leave that with you. Middle Earth. See what you come up with. Middle Earth. We’ll see, shall we?’ He tried to look enigmatic.

  At the town library I looked up Middle Earth on the internet and finally found a lead. Martin’s mumbled phrases appeared to come from an Old English text in the Beowulf mould, from a poem called ‘The Wanderer’. I figured he was either cracking up or winding me up, so I didn’t mention it again. He appeared to forget about all worldly matters as his wall took shape.

  I noticed that he had incorporated what appeared to be a buttress along part of it. Gradually, as the wall grew and the buttress rose, it became apparent that Martin had introduced a set of steps alongside the wall, and rising steadily with it. They looked rather nice. They almost invited you to climb them. Immediately after his last driving lesson each day Martin would change hurriedly into overalls and make a mix, then lay part of a course. Each day revolved feverishly around the weather forecast, and an evening lost to rain was an evening destroyed. I think his wife became worried about him at this stage. I could see her face, motionless, in the kitchen window, looking at him for long periods.

  Once or twice I saw the children looking at him from a bedroom window

  When the wall reached the height of the small, unkempt wood which borders our little kingdoms I noticed an aura around Martin. There was a palpable mysticism about him. Finally, he capped the wall with weighty slabs and topped off his steps, which now gave direct access to the wood. The cement mixer, the pickaxe, the spade, the trowels and all the paraphernalia left over after his feat were sold at a car boot sale. The garden was cleared and tidied, and a few snowdrops and crocuses made an appearance. Spring was on its way.

  Martin had done well. The wall and the steps looked as impressive as the approach to any medieval fortification. On the very next day after completion, as I tidied my own patch in a belated and slightly guilty attempt to match Martin’s efforts, I saw him walking past me down his garden. He was dressed, not in his usual overalls, but in walking gear, with strong boots and a rucksack. He stopped.

  ‘Off to Middle Earth?’ I said, and he laughed a short ironic laugh.

  ‘Something like that,’ he replied.

  ‘Off for a little wander, perhaps,’ I added.

  His eyes acknowledged my little morsel of knowledge.

  ‘Something like that.’ He looked back at the house and waved to his wife, who waved back at him bleakly, like a scorched letter at the edge of a bonfire.

  It was the last time she saw him.

  He reached the top of those steps and walked along the flags he had keyed into the crown of the wall, then he entered the woods and disappeared. I heard twigs snap for some time after, and I thought I heard a snatch of song.

  It was as if those steps had been his only means of escape, like the shroud in The Count of Monte Cristo. The police failed to find any trace of him and he was presumed dead. His wife started an affair with one of his pupils, the one who had failed his driving test so often he eventually gave up and bought a bike.

  Some months later, when I was browsing through a book on birds, I read that martins may have got their name from St Martin of Tours, possibly because the birds migrate around the time of his feast day in mid-November. Our own Martin, it seems, was a few months late on his flight into the unknown.

  Perhaps I delved into the Vogel Papers simply because I had too much time on my hands that year. I had spent the winter recuperating from a minor hip operation, which had been necessary – in middle age – to correct a defect caused by a childhood disease. Once my left hip was working well again I felt wonderfully free.

  I hadn’t realised how static I’d become as the hip slowly seized up. Now I felt like a child again, walking about the countryside with renewed pleasure, greeting old friends and seeing once-familiar sights with fresh delight.

  I hatched a great dream – a wonderful plan – to walk entirely around my country, a journey of a thousand miles or more. I would take a year off work – I was in transit between jobs anyway, having decided to become a psychiatric nurse; it seemed like an ideal time to step aside from life’s teeming thoroughfares and enter the cool green sanctuary of my country’s past. I would have green thoughts in a green shade.

  It would be a middle-age rite of passage, a new start to life, a celebration of my newfound liberty.

  When the consultant discharged me he said:

  ‘Consider yourself lucky. A few years ago you would have been a cripple. Make the most of it!’

  He mumbled an apology for using the word cripple. ‘Disabled – I should have said disabled.’

  I told him of my plan to walk completely around my country.

  ‘Amazing,’ he responded, almost ruefully. ‘I’m so jealous. You can see Wales at first hand, and there’s something magnificent about a great trek, so good for the spirits as well as the body – but don’t overdo it, I don’t want to see you back here with a limp again!’

  The world suddenly seemed different. I stood on mountains and on sea-cliffs looking at it all. I sat in places without humans, watching the tides come and go. I had no stomach for the conventions of society. I looked at the people around me. They seemed busy, occupied. I felt estranged, but not unhappily so. Each new day I observed the small rituals o
f life, as my ancestors might have done: I arose, washed in the clear cold water of the brook outside my door, and took stock of the weather. (Having been a farm boy on the edge of the moors, some twenty miles inland, I am still adept at foretelling the weather. Simply by looking at clouds and animal movements – sheep and cattle snaking down from the hills, into the lee of the lowland hedges, I can see forewarnings of storms.)

  I also looked for each morning’s new arrivals, such as birds of passage, and I explored the hedgerows for the most recent flowers as spring strengthened and prepared for a new burgeoning, as I was. I walked and read and wrote, and shared thoughts and experiences with the people I met on the roads, on paths, on shores. No, I wouldn’t work that year. Sometimes I thought I would never work again. I felt pangs of guilt, of course. But I would be dead soon enough, and I wanted to stand and watch awhile. I had two new possessions – time and freedom. That is why I read the Vogel Papers.

  It seemed to me that the author was a man who had wanted to say a lot very quickly, and had failed. But there was a central, discernible, theme. A crippled man wanted to regain or revisit someone, something or somewhere, and his search involved an island, a teddy bear, and probably a woman in a wheelchair.

  The author also wanted to convey the busyness, the bustle of the landscape.

  The Vogel Papers were one man’s attempt to convey the fleetingness, the transience of each human visit to the world. Perhaps the constantly-moving backdrop was a crude device to heighten Mr Vogel’s physical imprisonment. Perhaps the teeming stage was meant as a simple juxtaposition with the cripple’s immobility.