The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs

by Alexander McCall Smith

  ‘Unterholzer?’ asked the doctor. ‘You protected this . . . this Unterholzer?’

  ‘Yes,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘He was a very unhappy boy. He had been sent to the military academy by his parents, who hoped that the discipline of such a place would cure him of his dreadful lies. But it did not work, and he continued to be unable to tell truth from falsehood. The other boys did not like this – we had this strict code of honour, you see – and they responded by bullying him. I was the only one to defend him.’

  Dr Hubertoffel stared at von Igelfeld.

  ‘So he lied all the time?’ he said, eventually.

  ‘Everything he said was untrue,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘And I suspect it is just the same today. Such people do not really change, do they?’

  Dr Hubertoffel thought for a moment. ‘Usually not,’ he said, gravely. ‘Such behaviour indicates a fundamental personality disorder and there is very little we can do about that. Even psychoanalysis is of little help.’

  ‘That’s very sad,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘It must be a great disappointment to you to have patients of that sort.’ Adding hurriedly: ‘That is, if you do have any like that.’

  He left the consulting room shortly afterwards, feeling immensely pleased with himself. He was sure that he had completely derailed Unterholzer’s analysis; Dr Hubertoffel had become virtually silent after he had mentioned Unterholzer. He was probably seething with anger that Unterholzer had misled him during the analysis; to sit there and write down all the lies – just as a judge has to do in court – must be a difficult experience.

  He walked out into the street. It was a fine evening and he had decided to walk home. Analysis was extraordinary, he reflected. He had gone in feeling somewhat gloomy and had come out feeling quite optimistic. He looked up at the cloudless evening sky and smiled with satisfaction. Unterholzer’s little plans would be spiked now; Dr Hubertoffel may have given him the confidence to launch an attack on Portuguese Irregular Verbs, but where would that confidence be once he had lost the support of the psychoanalyst?

  He walked past a bookshop window and glanced in. There was a display of new academic titles. The Economy of the Sudanese Uplands – extremely dull, he thought. The Upanishads Reviewed – more promising. Then: Truth: a Philosophical Defence.

  He paused. Truth. He was on the side of truth, and always had been: it would need no defending while he was around. And was not the motto of the von Igelfelds Truth Always? His gaze shifted from the book to his own reflection in the glass of the window, and at that moment an awful pang of guilt shook him. He was looking at the face of a liar!

  Von Igelfeld stood stock still. He had done a terrible, dreadful thing. He had walked into the consulting rooms of that poor Freudian and had told him a whole pack of lies. There never was a military academy. He had never had an Uncle Oedipus. It was all nonsense, of the sort that these misguided Freudians like to hear. And as for the accusations against Unterholzer – even if Unterholzer had behaved appallingly in criticising his hypothesis, that was no excuse for him, a von Igelfeld, to stoop to that level. He remembered his scorn for Unterholzer when Unterholzer had claimed to be von Unterholzer. Now he, a real von, was behaving just as badly.

  He stood stock still for a moment, consumed by misery. Then, his head lowered in shame, he continued his walk home, his mind a turmoil. Should he rush back and apologise to Dr Hubertoffel? Should he write him a letter and try to explain? Whatever he did, he would look ridiculous.

  He paused. His route had taken him past a small Catholic church, set back from the street. And there on the notice board was a sign which read: Sinned? Confessions are heard in this House of God from 6 pm to 8 pm each Wednesday and Saturday evening. Inside, there is one who listens. And today, von Igelfeld recalled, was Wednesday, and it was undoubtedly evening.

  The inside of the church was half-lit. A woman was kneeling at the altar rail of a small side-chapel, but apart from her the church seemed deserted. Von Igelfeld went forward hesitantly, glancing at the pictures that hung on one wall. The Virgin herself looked down on him, a smile of compassion on her lips. And there was Saint Francis, his hands extended towards the birds, and another saint whom he did not recognise, a finger raised in silent admonition, as if of von Igelfeld himself.

  He spotted the confessional and moved towards it. He was not a Catholic – the von Igelfelds had always been Lutheran – but he was familiar with the procedure. You went in and sat on a small bench and spoke to the priest behind the grille. It did not matter whether you were a member of the Church; the priest was there for all manner and conditions of men – mendacious philologists not excepted.

  He moved the curtain aside and slipped into the box. There was indeed a small grille and a sound behind it, a rustling of a cassock perhaps, told him that the priest was in.

  ‘Good evening,’ whispered von Igelfeld.

  ‘Hello,’ said a disembodied voice from behind the grille. ‘How are you this evening?’

  ‘Not very well,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘In fact, I am feeling very bad about a terrible thing that I have done.’

  The priest was silent for a moment, as if digesting the information. Then he spoke: ‘Terrible? How terrible, my son? Have you killed a man?’

  Von Igelfeld gasped. ‘Oh no! Nothing that bad.’

  ‘Well then,’ said the priest. ‘Most other things can be undone, can’t they? Tell me what this terrible thing is.’

  Von Igelfeld drew a deep breath. ‘I lied,’ he said.

  ‘Lied?’ said the priest. ‘Lied to the police? To your wife?’

  ‘To a psychoanalyst,’ said von Igelfeld.

  There was a strange sound from behind the grille, a sound which was rather difficult to interpret, but which sounded rather like disapproval.

  ‘That is very bad,’ said the priest. ‘Psychoanalysts are there to help us. If we lie to them, then we are lying to ourselves. It is a terrible thing.’

  ‘I know,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘I told him all sorts of lies about my past. And I even made up words in the free association.’

  ‘Both of those things are sins,’ said the priest firmly. ‘Free association is there to help the psychoanalyst unlock the secrets of the mind. If you mislead in that respect, then the analysis is distorted.’

  ‘But worse than that,’ went on von Igelfeld. ‘I told lies about my colleague, Unterholzer. He had published an attack on my book and I wanted to ruin his analysis.’

  ‘I see,’ said the priest. ‘And now you are feeling guilty?’

  ‘Yes,’ said von Igelfeld.

  ‘Guilt is natural,’ said the priest quietly. ‘It is a way in which the Super-ego asserts itself in the face of the primitive, anarchic urges of the Id. Guilt acts as a way of establishing psychic balance between the various parts of the personality. But we should not let it consume us.’

  ‘No?’ asked von Igelfeld.

  ‘No,’ said the priest. ‘Guilt fuels neurosis. A small measure of guilt is healthy – it affirms the intuitive sense of what is right or wrong. But if you become too focused on what you have done wrong, then you can become an obsessive neurotic.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘I truly am sorry for what I have done. Please forgive me.’

  ‘Oh, you’re absolved,’ said the priest. ‘That goes almost without saying. God is very forgiving these days. He’s moved on. He forgives everything, in fact. What you have to do now is to repair the damage that you have caused. You must go and see this Unterholzer and say to him that you are sorry that you have lied about him. You must ask his forgiveness. Then you must write to Dr Hubertoffel – I assume that you’re talking about him, by the way – and tell him what you told him about the military academy was untrue. I went to a military academy, incidentally.’

  ‘Oh?’ said von Igelfeld. ‘Were you unhappy there?’

  ‘Terribly,’ said the priest. ‘We were crammed together in dormitories, sharing everything, and they made us take cold showers all the time. I still shudd
er when I take a cold shower.’

  ‘You still take them?’ asked von Igelfeld.

  ‘Yes,’ said the priest. ‘I must confess that I do. I suppose that it’s ritualistic. But it may also be that it invokes memories of the military academy and I suspect that there’s part of me that wants to remember that.’

  ‘You should forget,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘You should try to move on.’

  ‘Oh, I try,’ said the priest. ‘But it’s not always easy.’

  ‘But if we may return to my case,’ said von Igelfeld, hesitantly. ‘Am I truly forgiven?’

  ‘Of course,’ said the priest. ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. ✠ Forgiven entirely.’

  Von Igelfeld returned home in high spirits. He had taken to this agreeable priest and had decided that he might well return to listen to some of his sermons. They would surely be very entertaining, unlike the Lutheran dirges he recalled from his boyhood. Filled with the spirit of forgiveness, he wrote an immediate letter of apology to Dr Hubertoffel and went out into the street to post it. Then, retiring to bed, he fell into the first sound sleep that he had had since the awful article had first appeared in the Zeitschrift.

  Unterholzer looked at him suspiciously when he went into his office the following morning.

  ‘Good morning, Herr Unterholzer,’ von Igelfeld said brightly. ‘I have come to apologise.’

  Unterholzer gave a start. This was not what he had expected.

  ‘Yes,’ von Igelfeld continued. ‘I have done you several great wrongs.’

  ‘Several?’ stuttered Unterholzer.

  Von Igelfeld looked up at the ceiling. He had not expected it to be easy, and indeed it was not.

  ‘There was the matter of your poor sausage dog,’ he said. ‘That was most regrettable. I can only assure you that I had not intended that to happen.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Unterholzer. ‘I never said that . . . ’

  Von Igelfeld cut him short. ‘And then I went off to Dr Hubertoffel and tried to ruin your analysis. I told him all sorts of lies.’

  Unterholzer’s jaw dropped. ‘You told him lies about me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘I had intended that he should form a bad impression of you and that your analysis should come to an end.’

  For a moment Unterholzer stared mutely at von Igelfeld. Then he began to smile. ‘But that’s very convenient,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking for a way out of all that without offending Dr Hubertoffel. Now he will be pleased if I no longer go. Frankly, I found it all an expensive waste of time. I’ve already paid him thousands, you know.’

  ‘So you’re pleased?’ asked von Igelfeld lamely.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Unterholzer, beaming even more. ‘He kept trying to make me something I was not. I don’t like to be an assertive, gregarious person. That’s not my nature.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘Well, I must say that I’m glad that I have been able to help you.’

  Unterholzer had sunk back in his chair and the smile had disappeared. ‘But I have something for which to apologise,’ he muttered. ‘I wrote a very spiteful piece about Portuguese Irregular Verbs. I did it because of my sausage dog, but now I really regret it. Did you see it?’

  ‘No,’ said von Igelfeld. Truth Always. ‘Well, perhaps I glanced at it. But it was nothing.’

  ‘I shall do all that lies in my power to correct it,’ said Unterholzer. ‘I can assure you of that.’

  ‘You are very kind, Herr Unterholzer,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘Let us now put all this behind us and get on with the important work of the moment.’

  And that is exactly what happened. The life of the Institute returned to normal. In the next issue of the Zeitschrift there appeared a prominent piece by Unterholzer, entitled Further Thoughts on von Igelfeld’s Portuguese Irregular Verbs. It amounted to a complete recantation of the earlier piece, which was described as having been intended only to engender debate, written by one who had cast himself, unwillingly, in the role of Avocatus Diaboli.

  It was a thoroughly satisfactory outcome. Only the Librarian had appeared to regret how things had turned out.

  ‘Poor Herr Unterholzer seems to have lost his new drive,’ he commented to von Igelfeld. ‘I wonder why?’

  ‘No idea,’ began von Igelfeld, but then corrected himself. Truth Always. ‘At least I think I know, but these matters are confidential and I’m very sorry but I simply cannot tell you.’

  THE BONES OF FATHER CHRISTMAS

  ITALY BECKONED, AND THIS WAS a call which Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld always found very difficult to resist. He felt at home in Italy, especially in Siena, where he had once spent several idyllic months in the Istituto di Filologia Comparata. That was at the very time at which he was putting the finishing touches to his great work, and indeed many of the streets of that noble town were inextricably linked in his mind with insights he experienced during that creative period of his life. It had been walking along the Banco di Sopra, for example, that he had realised why it was that in Brazilian Portuguese there was a persistent desire to replace the imperative tense with the present indicative. Was it not linked with the tendency to confuse tu and voce, since the singular of the indicative had the same form as the imperative singular at least for the second person? It was: there could be no other explanation. And had he not rushed back to the Istituto, oblivious to the bemused stares of passers-by? Had he not stumbled briefly on the stairs as he mentally composed the paragraph which would encapsulate this insight, a stumble which had caused the prying concierge to whisper to his friend in the newsagent next door, ‘That German professor, the tall one, came back from lunch yesterday drunk! Yes, I saw it with my own eyes. Fell downstairs, at least two flights, head over heels.’

  And then there was the idea which had come to him one morning while he took a walk past the Monte di Paschi bank and had seen the bill-poster slapping a notice on the wall. The poster had been one of those announcements that the Italians like to put on walls; the death of a local baker’s mother. E morta! the poster had proclaimed in heavy, Bodoni type, and below that, simply, Mama! Von Igelfeld had stopped and read the still gluey text. How remarkable that private pain could be so publicly shared, which meant, of course, its dilution. For we are all members of one another, are we not, and the baker’s loss was the loss, in a tiny way, of all those fellow citizens who might know him only slightly, but who would have read his cry of sorrow. And like Proust’s tiny madeleine cakes dipped into tea, the sight of one of these posters could evoke in von Igelfeld’s mind the moment when, after passing on from that melancholy sign, he had suddenly realised how the system of regular vocalic alternations had developed in the verb poder.

  But Siena was more for him than those heady days of composition; he cherished, too, a great affection for the Sienese hills. He liked to go to the hills in spring, when the air was laden with the scent of wild flowers. His good friend, Professor Roberto Guerini, was always pleased to entertain him on his small wine estate outside Montalcino, where von Igelfeld had become well-known to the proprietors of surrounding estates and was much in demand at dinner parties in the region. One of these dinner parties was still talked about in Italy. That was the occasion when the current proprietor of the neighbouring estate, the Conte Vittorio Fantozzi, known locally as il Grasso (the fat one), had conducted a lengthy dinner-table conversation with von Igelfeld in which both participants spoke old Tuscan dialects now almost completely lost to all but a small band of linguistic enthusiasts. In recognition of his guest’s skill, the count had bottled a wine which he named after the distinguished visitor. The label showed a picture of a hedgehog in a field, an allusion to the literal translation of von Igelfeld’s name (hedgehog-field in English, campo del porcospino in Italian). Thereafter, von Igelfeld was referred to in Sienese society as ‘our dear friend from Germany, il Professore Porcospino’.

  It would have been good to get back to Tuscany – perhaps even to Montalcino itself
– but when the call arrived, it was of a rather different nature.

  ‘Florianus and I are going to Rome,’ said Ophelia Prinzel when she encountered von Igelfeld in the small park near his house. ‘Would you care to accompany us?’

  Von Igelfeld remembered with pleasure the trip to Venice which he had made with the Prinzels a few years earlier. It was true that the holiday had been cut short, when Prinzel discovered that he had been rendered slightly radioactive as a result of contact with polluted canal water, but that had soon been dealt with and was not allowed to place too much of a pall over the trip. Von Igelfeld might have been more pleased had the offer been to go to Venice again, or even to Naples or Palermo, but Rome in the agreeable company of his two old friends was still an attractive prospect, and he accepted readily.

  ‘As it happens,’ he said, ‘I have some work I’ve been meaning to do in Rome. I shall be able to spend the days in the Vatican Library and then devote the evenings to leisurely pursuits.’

  ‘So wise,’ said Ophelia. ‘A break is what you need. You push yourself too hard, Moritz-Maria. I’m quite happy to leave the Puccini project for weeks at a stretch.’

  Von Igelfeld was not surprised to hear this, and was tempted to say: That’s why you’ll never finish it, but did not. He had grave doubts whether Puccini’s correspondence would ever be published, at least in the lifetime of any of them, but loyalty to his friend forbade any comment.

  They set off at the end of April, winding their way down to the plains of Lombardy. They had decided to break the journey, spending a few days in Siena before making the final assault on Rome. From their hotel, perched on the top of the city walls, they had a fine view of the surrounding countryside and its warm, red buildings. Von Igelfeld sat on the terrace and gazed out over the terracotta-tiled rooftops down below him, reflecting on how everything in Italy seemed to be so utterly in harmony with its surroundings. Even the modern works of man, buildings which in any other country would be an imposition on the landscape, here in Italy seemed to have a grace and fluidity that moulded them into the natural flow and form of the countryside. And the people too – they occupied their surroundings as if they were meant to be there; unlike in Germany, where everybody seemed to be . . . well, they seemed to be so cross for some reason or another.