Bowl of Fruit
Page 22
‘She’s lived with us since soon after they met, for more than two years now... But she goes to her brother’s bed-and-breakfast in Torquay quite a lot.’
‘Look!’ Karl cried out. ‘There’s Armstrong coming out of the capsule.’
‘Is that really the moon?’ Dr Schmidt had recited the words like a child.
The weightlessness, the crackle, the blur; I thought the effect was otherworldly.
‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind…’
‘So banal,’ said Karl.
‘Karl tells me that you’re reading Franz Kafka,’ said Dr Schmidt. And going back to the bouncing about on the moon, ‘Ach, the symbolism! While they slowly murder Vietnam, even on another planet they show off their flag.’ Then returning to me, ‘A tortured man but a marvellous writer, complex and yet also entirely simple. As I always say, one is never too young to be reading Kafka, and never too old to be reading him differently.’
‘The moon isn’t a planet,’ said Karl.
‘Wednesdays are my Sabbath, non-religious of course. Would you like to have lunch with us the day after tomorrow, let’s say at half past two? I’m planning a very late lie-in.’
‘I’d love to, Dr Schmidt, if Karl doesn’t mind.’
‘Karl would be delighted,’ said Karl, winking at me surreptitiously as I got up to leave. ‘And I’m also free tomorrow evening, if you’re not reading Kafka.’
‘Wait!’ Frau Angela instructed, lifting up one arm to bar my way. I turned to Karl, but he looked as at a loss as I was. Leaning forward in her chair, his mother had her face almost rubbing with the static from the television screen. ‘Richard Nixon!’ she cried out, as though his likeness had jumped out from the grain. ‘The man is so obviously a crook, and if he’s managed to become the president of the United States, then I’m sure he’s also capable of that! It’s so ridiculously bad that it’s almost convincing. “That’s one small step for man…” Was that really the best they could come up with? Did they honestly believe they could fool us with a cliché and a B-movie set in the desert? If that is the moon, I will eat Paul McCartney’s guitar.’
‘But why, Dr Schmidt, why would they do that?’
‘A red-under-the-bed anti-communist hysteria,’ answered Frau Angela succinctly. ‘In the new war everything’s becoming propaganda. But lies are not a good way to fight lies. It’s like throwing out the baby with the bathwater, an old German saying that reminds me very much of Confucius.’
‘We have the same saying in English,’ I said.
‘No! What you have is the German saying translated into English. But really, Karl, I cannot bear to watch this any more. Please, turn it off.’
End of extract from The Madness of Grief