by Paul Theroux
I think I nodded. I registered the phrase "most humiliating"—native English speakers didn't say that either. I looked closely at him.
"Physically we writers are of no importance. It is the thing within us that matters. Spirit or thought. It is a kind of gyroscope. This festival is a huge English tea party. The Kenyan poet that everyone is so concerned about—why is it always poets?"
"So you didn't sign the open letter?"
Vorlaufer said, "I have an inflexible rule of never signing anything that I have not written myself. But no matter. I came for other reasons."
"So did I." I got up from the table, feeling that I was being mocked and diminished by this stranger.
He stood and bowed slightly and I thought how there is something almost Oriental in some Eastern Europeans, and something deeply melancholy—their sad eyes, their sallowness, their cynicism, their school clothes.
I checked out of the hotel and set off to do what I had come to do—visit Robert Louis Stevenson's childhood home at Swanston, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, under the Pentland Hills. I hired a car and drove out of town, following signs, and had no trouble finding the turnoff to Swanston. Suddenly I was in the Scottish countryside, of steep grassy hills, and heather and gorse and blowing broom. The small village was at the end of a steep, narrow road, six or eight cottages and one detached house, the whitewashed manor where Stevenson had spent most of his summers as a boy.
It was a majestic house of stucco and mellow granite, surrounded by a low wall and old, twisted trees. On this windy late summer day the trees were struggling, their leaves turning over and looking silver in the doud-muted daylight. The grass streaming under the wind had long, beautiful tassels. The sheep on the hillside were motionless, and when the sun broke through the rising meadows were mottled with scraps of cloud shadow. Swanston, shaped like a bowl, holding only this manor house and a few cottages, was as peaceful as a valley can be, and even the clusters of ravens in the oaks looked as unthreatening and emblematic as heraldic symbols.
The gate to the house was ajar, as though in welcome. I did not need to push it open any farther to slide through. I rapped on the heavy front door and thought how this venerable door could have been the same one that Stevenson had swung open. Waiting for an answer I heard laughter inside—children—and a woman's voice. I had to rap again before anyone heard, and when I saw the children and the television set I understood the delay.
"Yes?" The voice was gruff, the woman indistinct—she had not opened the door very wide. And yet I could see beyond her to where the children were watching television. I saw the toys, the calendar, the picture of the Queen. It was an unremarkable interior, but its plainness was not the worst of it. The wood-paneled walls were scratched and marked with clumsy drawings, the floor had been splashed with paint, a hunk of plaster was missing from the ceiling, and what I could see looked cluttered if not vandalized. I thought of Robert Louis Stevenson and did not want to see more.
I said, "Isn't this Stevenson's home?"
"There's no one by that name here," the woman said, in a voice filled with suspicion—and now she was easing the door shut.
"I'm looking for Swanston House."
"This is Swanston House."
"But who owns it?"
She was still talking as she shut the door, and so I was not sure whether I heard "the Council" or "the Corporation," but in any case I got the message: she was a tenant, living here at a reduced rent with her big messy family, and she was sending me away.
I turned to walk down the path and saw a familiar figure glance up at the house and walk on. It was the old man I had seen that morning at breakfast.
"Herr Vorlaufer."
He was puzzled. "You know me?"
"We met at the hotel this morning."
He smiled. Did he remember? He hardly seemed to care. He did not ask me my name.
I was still shutting the gate. I said, "Robert Louis Stevenson used to live in this house."
"Yes. I know. That is why I came here."
You could not tell that man anything.
He was still walking slowly, saying, "There is a lovely path to the top of that hill."
He seemed to be pointing to a row of gnarled trees. No hill was visible here—just a damaged wall and two sheep which were unshorn and looked overdressed, not to say topheavy.
To call his bluff I followed him. I had nothing else to do. I had found my story: being turned away from Stevenson's house by a suspicious Scottish mother protecting her children and her TV set was better than being allowed in for a tour of the damaged premises.
Vorlaufer led the way, and forty feet on he stepped away from the road onto a narrow path, and there was the hill, as he had said.
"Do you mind if I come with you?"
"Not at all," he said, though it sounded to me like utter indifference.
"You said you lived in Africa and wrote books about it?"
He smiled indulgently. "You would not have read any of them. They have not been translated into English, though there are many. One of my first was about a girls' school in Kenya."
"There aren't many girls' schools in Kenya," I said. And I was going to say that I knew why: because I had done the same thing, written the same book.
"This one was in Embu," he said.
"It's still there."
He was not listening. He was picking his way slowly along the path, talking softly in the patient, wondering way that old people talk about their early lives. There was a note of detachment in his tone, too, as though he were talking about someone else.
"I wrote two other novels, and then I went to Singapore," he said. "If you stay too long in Africa, something happens—you turn into a white person. It is much better that Africans should run their own affairs. I saw that I didn't belong. Anyway, I was curious about Singapore."
"So was I when I went there," I said. "I wanted to write about it." Did he hear that? "I did, actually. A novel."
"I found Singapore a disappointing place," Vorlaufer said.
"Did you write anything there?"
"I had a family to support," he said. "I was young. In those days I could write a novel in six months or less. That one was about the old Singapore—brothels, bars, and hot steamy streets. The hero was a sort of misfit. If I call him a procurer I would be misrepresenting him."
"I understand perfectly," I said. "My book was very similar to yours." If not exactly the same, I wanted to add.
He was walking in front of me on the path, which was too narrow for us to walk side by side. It was not more than a rut through the grass, and I had the feeling that it was one the sheep had made with their mincing little hooves. I could not see Andreas Vorlaufer's face and did not know whether he heard me.
"It seems a trivial book to me now. The central character was fifty years old. I was hardly thirty when I wrote it."
So was I, I thought. I said, "I thought you wrote travel books."
He heard that; we were talking about him now.
"Many travel books," he said. "I used to live for travel. I went everywhere by train."
"You don't say?" I hurried after him. "It's a shame the books aren't translated."
"Who in the English-speaking world cares about East German literature? Even Thomas Mann is not read today! And my books"—he flung out his hand to dismiss the idea—"they were probably put off by my tides. None of them sounds right in English."
"Give me an example."
"A literal translation of my best-known book would be The Great Railway Bazaar."
I stared at the back of his head, wondering whether he was smiling as he walked on. Did he know who I was?
I said, "There is an American who wrote a book with that tide."
"Yes. So I was told," Vorlaufer said. "But I used it first. My book was published in Leipzig in 1946."
"What did you do then?"
"The book was a modest success. I continued to write novels. I went to South America. I resided in Britain, and did some traveling there.
"
"Resided" was another one of those perfect, pedantic words that gave a foreign student away.
"And you continued to write?"
"Indeed"—yet another—"a novel about a family in Honduras. It's setting was the Mosquito Coast—a good tide, I think. A novel set in the future. Travel books. China."
"More train trips?"
"After the China book I stopped writing about trains."
The path had widened slightly. I walked a bit faster to be abreast of him, so that I could see his face—and I expected a devilish grin. But he was frowning, feeling the strain of this steep path, and he was breathless from all the talk. If what he said was mockery, he was making a good pretense of looking deadpan.
I said, "What exactly did you write after you finished your book about China."
I had just finished my book about China.
"My children were at university—"
"Two boys," I said.
"Yes. And so I traveled around the world with my wife."
"I was thinking of doing that."
He did not care what I was thinking. He said, "My situation changed. I went back to the Pacific and wrote about myself. There is no word for Bildungsroman in English. Then I wrote about the South Pacific."
"I have never been to the Pacific," I said.
"I wrote less," he said. "I became involved in films."
"Oh, God."
"I lived in America. I was happy there. I had lived in London for many years. Did I mention that?"
"Yes, you said for about twenty years."
I wondered how he would handle my niggling deception. He appeared not to notice. He said, "Eighteen years."
"I have lived in London for seventeen years myself," I said, and immediately sensed a shadow pass over me.
"Yes, I wrote less," he said reflectively. "But I began writing about myself."
"And none of it has been translated?"
"Not into English. Mein Geheime Leben was eventually filmed."
He must have seen me squint at him. The tide meant nothing to me, not even the English version I could manage.
He said, "You don't speak German?" and shrugged.
"Have you been happy?" I asked suddenly.
"That is a desperate question," he said. "There are other ways of asking it, but it takes a lifetime to answer."
Only his words were philosophical. His way of saying them was impatient, and I knew he was bored—he wanted to get away from me and my questions.
But I persisted. I said, "Can't you tell me anything specific that has happened to you over the past few years?"
I was hoping for some good news, or any encouragement, and I watched his face closely for some sign of it. Finally, he shook his head as though refusing to speak.
I said, "Back there you used the expression 'My situation changed.' What did you mean by that?"
"My wife and I separated," he said, and made the utterance tragic and bleak by giving it no emotion.
And I felt a terrible pain, as though a dull knife had been drawn through my heart.
"Why?" I asked, and hardly managed to speak the word.
"Oh." Then he thought a moment, looking into the distance, all the bald hills. "Our children were not living at home anymore. My wife and I were each busy with our own lives. I think, for a crucial period, we forgot how necessary we were to each other's happiness. I know that, because when we separated, something in me was wrecked, and then it was dear that we could never go back."
"What made you separate in the first place?"
"A writer is alone too much," he said. "That solitude can make a person think that he is missing something. That he is not living. It is simple greed, like Dante's Ulysses—you know the lines? 'Nothing—not fondness for my son, not piety for my father, nor love for my wife—could dampen my ardor for experiencing the wider world and human vice and courage.' Something like that."
"So you got exactly what you wanted."
He smiled at this. "What we want is distant and dim. That is why we desire it. Distance is the great maker of fantasies."
"If it were close and you could see it, you wouldn't want it?"
"The things that people crave the most are never near to them," he said. "That is why they are craved. The Hindus are right. The world is maya, an illusion."
"I would be very happy if you told me you haven't suffered," I said.
"Everyone suffers," he said. "I have, too. But on the whole I can say I have been very lucky."
"That's good to hear."
He lost his smile. There was nothing for a moment—just a blankness in his eyes, and then his whole face seemed to tighten with reluctance.
"I must tell you one thing. When I was your age I was on good terms with the world. Perhaps for too long. It ended suddenly, and I became lost, more unhappy than I have ever been in my life. I consoled myself by saying it was for the best, and perhaps it was necessary."
This made me feel very sorry, and I knew the feeling would stay with me and become sorrow, like an illness I would have to learn to live with.
"Worse than that, after some years—and I am not speaking of any war—I had personal reasons to be convinced of the existence of evil."
That shocked me: just the word "evil" was enough. But as he said it, he turned and hurried up the path, as though to emphasize that he did not wish to answer any more questions. I followed at a distance, and within a few minutes we were at the top of the hill. Just past the gorse bushes that densely covered its crest there was a strong wind blowing from the west. I was almost knocked down by it, and then I looked back at Swanston in the valley below. Andreas Vorlaufer had been right: it was a lovely walk.
"You know this place," I said. "You've been here before."
"Once. I was thinking of writing a piece about Stevenson," he said. He pointed to the small village in the valley. "I went to that manor house."
I stared at the house, the front door I had knocked upon an hour before.
"I never finished the piece," he said. "I was forty-nine. I met a man." He was still peering down, into the valley, and his smile was grim. "It's a strange story. You would never believe it."
TWELVE
Champagne
SOMETIMES YOU HEAR a strange name, one you have never heard before, and soon after you keep hearing it; and everywhere you turn you see it. It was that way with Andreas Vorlaufer. As soon as I got back to London I saw a piece about him in the Times Literary Supplement. He was alluded to in another book review, he was mentioned in the preface of a collection of Dürrenmatt's short novels that I happened to pick up, and there was a quotation from him on a calendar that was sent to me, something about travel being "the saddest of life's pleasures." Like the details of his life and work that Vorlaufer had told me, that quote too sounded familiar.
Some months later, feeling a loneliness that kept me from writing, I took to walking in the afternoons, waiting for the pubs to open. Passing a secondhand shop on Lavender Hill, I saw in the box of battered books out front a volume of short stories about London, all written by foreigners. One of them, translated from German, was entitled "Champagne." The author was Andreas Vorlaufer.
"How much is this one?"
"One book for fifty p. Three for a pound," the junk dealer said.
It seemed less like a business transaction than a ritual, buying a book from a man with dirty hands. And reading the story seemed like part of the same dark ritual.
This is what I read.
Champagne
Andreas Vorlaufer
***
I HAD ALREADY opened the bottle of champagne, but out of courtesy had not formally drunk any. I had sneaked half a glass, because I was still a little nervous. I was about to sneak another when I heard her.
There are announcing sounds of approach that only spouses or the dearest companions make, like friendly signals that mean, It's only me. The sounds are slight yet so distinct that they create the sense of a loved one's arrival like instant premoniti
on. I heard no more than the vibration of a latchkey, and then the lisp of a raincoat passing a doorjamb, and the footsteps—those particular shoes; and not a sigh, but just an audible breath like a low, murmured word of yearning. All of these; and so I called, "I'm in here!"
"So it's going to be a celebration, then?" she said as she entered the warm room.
Her eyes were glazed from the freezing air and the darkness, her pale face seeming apprehensive, as though seeing something pleasant that might turn out to be an apparition and trick her; all that—uncertainty, anxiety, happiness, fear—flickered in her expression, until I kissed her lips that were still cool from the night air. I clasped her hand and was surprised and even shocked by how cold her fingers were.
"My tiny hand is frozen." And she laughed. "I feel like the little match girl."
"I think you're confusing your heroines. Here, this will bring color to your cheeks."
"Lovely," she said, seeing that I had filled the glasses. "I won't say no. Is it champers? Crikey!"
Every word of hers was her own, and I saw that there was no one like her in the world, and that we had a special language of precious clichés, like trusty artifacts and baggage, a whole culture of two people, with its own rituals and humor and habits, that had taken a whole long marriage to make. Happy people were able to talk this way, in their own private expressions and words, which had a meaning for them alone, and were untranslatable.
I handed her the more graceful glass of the two, and said, "To us."
Only then did she hesitate, her lips regretful, her eyes losing their light, a sadness in her jaw.
"Please," I said, and managed to tap her glass with my own.
"Is this a mistake?" she asked. Her spirit was receding swiftly, the champagne flute was limp in her fingers, about to spill.
"No, of course not," I said. "This was the whole idea. Please drink up."
"Oh, all right," she said, and sipped and smiled and got brave in that same instant.
She went to the window, which the night had made into a mirror, and she said, "I look like a little old lady," and she began to look uncertain and a bit tearful again.
"You look fantastic," I said. "Sit down—let's punish this bottle."