Doctor Criminale

by Malcolm Bradbury

  Though the Archdukes of Wurttemberg had been famed for their philosophical reverence for nature, this had plainly not prevented them attacking it violently from time to time. The tusked heads of angry boar, the soft eyes of tender does, the beady gaze of predatory buzzards, stared down from the gothic walls beside the weaponry that had engineered their slaughter. Down below the Postmoderns were already gathering: dusty Eastern Europeans, exhausted from their journeys on wander­ing Mitteleuropean trains or obscure airlines that timed their departures not by the minute but the day; our feisty Americans, filled with jouissance and clad in the designer sports clothing that tells us ours is an age of play. The heat hung heavy, but there were tables in the courtyard where you could battle dehydration with good Swabian wine.

  We started that night with a candelit dinner in the great hall. There were no candles, thanks to strict German fire regulations, but the East Europeans did not mind. As one of them explained, what they usually have is a candlelight dinner with no dinner. They were just as pleased over the following days, as the lectures and seminars unfolded. As they told me, when I interviewed them, after forty-five years of grim old unreality they were delighted to learn of the bright new unreality. Our postmodern Americans did truly Sterling work: we covered everything, Chaos Theory and commodity fetishism, glitz architecture and depthless art, computer culture and cyberpunk, dead irony and global gentrification, the literature of exhaustion and the literature of replenishment. And when we, too, were exhausted, we replenished ourselves, out in the courtyard, drinking the Swabian wines in the unending heat.

  There were blips and aporias, of course. Professor Henri Mensonge failed to arrive, even though when his office was phoned we were told he had left. No message of explanation ever came, though his name remained in the programme as the sign of his absence. In the event, a jolly boat-trip down the Neckar River proved an effective substitute, a relief from the deeply unpleasant weather. It remained too hot to sleep at night (but who, at a congress, wants to?), too hot to think, too hot to shave. Then, on the fourth day, when the sun rose yet again in the murky sky like, well, why not a bright and unburnished shield (simile was not entirely an acceptable trope at Schlossburg), deliverance came, and Bazlo Criminale stepped among us.

  He arrived, alone, in a taxi, clad in one of his shining blue suits, hair splendidly bouffanted, mopping his brow. By the time he was out and climbing the lodge steps, a small but deeply admiring crowd had gathered to greet him. I looked, and thought him decidedly jaded; the bounce had gone somehow from his step, there was weariness in his manner. Then I learned what was wrong. At Frankfurt airport, where Otto Codicil had come to grief, as have others in the past, Criminale had lost touch with his luggage. Lufthansa had invented a whole new concept of airline travel, a new aircraft that has no wings, never leaves the ground, runs on tracks and is tugged by an engine. Naive people might call it a train, but it had an airline flight number, boarding passes, and flight attendants who served microwaved food. Flying in from LA, Criminale, being human, had successfully made this unusual change of craft. His baggage, being inanimate and dumb, had not. Even now it was either shuttling back home to LA or being blown up by the anti-terrorist squad as unattended luggage.

  I looked at Criminale, and felt sorry for him: even sorrier, for him and all of us, when I learned that his suitcase not only contained more fine suits and distinguished shirts, eventually replaceable, but notebooks holding his work of the last weeks, the draft of a new novel, successor to Homeless, which was not. Angry calls flew here and there; the airport reported that noth­ing had been found. Criminale retired furiously to his upstairs suite; I learned from the conference organizers that he was cancelling all his onward engagements – his lectures in Belgrade and Macerata, his honorary degree in Stockholm, and several diplomatic treats. He had decided to remain at Schlossburg, close to his German publisher, for as long as his missing luggage took to reappear, which could well be many days, if at all. Dismayed for him, I now suddenly felt dismayed for myself. We were a small group, of around thirty, who breakfasted, lunched, and dined together; I could not go on avoiding him for ever.

  My first thought was to leave, but something stopped me. Now Criminale was back in my sightlines, now he was writing fiction again, my curiosity revived. I wanted to find out how it was with him, what he was up to, how he thought these days. In the end I chose the Ildiko strategy. Let him hold the foreground, where he liked to be; I would keep to the background, remaining as obscure as I naturally was. And so when, later that afternoon, Criminale reappeared, and stood up on the podium in the gothic hall to give his keynote lecture, simply and purely entitled ‘The Postmodern Condition’, I was there, face in shadow, in the darkest flange of the very back row.

  Criminale started seriously enough, singing the song of the names that always toll on these occasions: Habermas and Horkheimer; Adorno and Althusser; De Man and Derrida; Baudrillard and Lyotard; Deleuze and Guattari; Foucault and Fukuyama. He reflected on all those things that cheer thinking spirits up these days – the end of humanism, the death of the subject, the loss of the great meta-narratives, the disappearance of the self in the age of universal simulacra, the depthlessness of history, the slippage of the referent, the culture of pastiche, the departure of reality, and so on. Then his manner grew more personal, his tone more sharply ironic; it had always struck me at Barolo that, for a philosopher, Criminale was somehow peculiarly personal. He reminded us of his own famous phrase, that in such a time philosophy itself could only be ‘a form of irony’.

  As he turned to this, I felt something was affecting him. Maybe it was the loss of his suitcase, and the manuscript with it; possibly it was the presence of so many of his fellow Eastern Europeans in the audience in front of him. At one point I thought perhaps it was even my own presence there; several times in the lecture I thought I caught him staring straight at me, in what seemed a questioning way. The postmodern condition, he now started to say, was something more than a post-technological situation, a phenomenon of late capitalism, a loss of narratives, or whatever the interpreters called it. What it most resembled, he said, was his own situation now—jet-lagged, culture-shocked, stuffed with too much inflight food and too much vacant inflight entertainment, mind disordered, body gross, thoughts hectic and hypertense, spirits dislodged from space and time, baggageless, without normal possessions.

  ‘How to sum up?’ he asked at last, as we sweated grossly in the foetid hall, ‘Leibniz, a good man, once told the first question of philosophy is: why is there something rather than nothing? We are more lucky, we have proved him wrong. Now we can honestly say: there is much more nothing, so how can you show me something? Here am I, a theoretical nothing, a dead subject. I have travelled three thousand miles through a world of very little to lecture to you from the heartless heart of my nothing on the state of nothing as I understand it. So please, friends, especially East European friends, who are not aware of all these affairs yet: let me welcome you, very personally, to the postmodern con­dition. Now thank you, one or two questions.’ As a few bemused questions began arising from the floor, I slipped away.

  A little later, from the balcony of my room, I looked down at the courtyard and saw Criminale. The usual crowd of admirers was around him; he was mopping his brow, his suit evidently far too heavy for the sultry weather. He went and stood by a wooden balustrade; a group of conferees pressed all round him. Criminale straightened his body nobly, raised his eyes, and seemed to stare directly at the sun. What was happening? Nothing at all significant, I realized. All the conferees had brought their cameras; and Criminale was simply having his photograph taken. I slipped downstairs and went out, to take a quiet, I hoped cooling, walk in the vast romantischer grounds, and gather up some questions for an interview I wanted to do with a Romanian participant just before dinner. The informal gardens quickly gave way to thick trees and wilderness, the rough path sloped down towards the river.

  I turned a bend, and there on a rough wooden ben
ch were two people. They too offered a familiar romantischer prospect, sitting close together, male and female. One was Criminale, still in his now sagging blue suit; he was talking warmly with, graciously grasping, now and then, the hand of, one of the more attractive members of our band, a Russian lady. She fluttered at him; he bowed and nodded at her. A sexy bounce had come back into his manner. Remembering the Ildiko strategy, I changed course, through the trees, to pass them by. The Russian lady looked through the branches and saw me. ‘Oh, see, the journalist,’ she said. ‘So sorry,’ I said, ‘Just walking.’ ‘Come,’ said the Russian lady encouragingly, ‘We were just comparing our laptops.’ ‘Really?’ I said. ‘This lady has a German laptop and I have an American laptop,’ said Criminale, looking me up and down. ‘Good, enjoy yourselves,’ I said, and turned to walk off down the twisty path.

  ‘Wait,’ said Criminale. I turned; he had risen and was staring after me. ‘Excuse me, I was thinking,’ he said, ‘Somewhere in another place we met before, no?’ ‘It’s possible,’ I agreed. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘Barolo, then Lausanne.’ ‘I was there,’ I said. ‘You were in love with Ildiko Hazy,’ he said triumphantly, ‘And why not, it is perfectly natural. A vivid person.’ ‘I didn’t know you’d noticed,’ I said cautiously. ‘Now I know who you are exactly,’ he said, ‘Valeria Magno told me. You are that young man from Britain who likes to make a story of me, yes?’ ‘Once,’ I said, ‘Not now, that whole idea’s been dropped.’ ‘You dropped my life?’ asked Criminale, looking at me, ‘What a thing! I hope you were not influenced by Otto Codicil.’ ‘No, not Codicil,’ I said, ‘In the end it was money.’ ‘Money, that is all?’ he said, ‘We know it is important, but not everything. I hope I am more important than money.’

  You should know, I thought, and saw he was looking at me keenly. ‘You are here now,’ he said. That’s pure chance,’ I said. ‘You think chance is pure?’ he asked. ‘I mean our being here together is completely random,’ I said, ‘I just came to write a magazine piece on Po-Mo.’ ‘What is Po-Mo?’ asked Criminale. ‘Postmodernism,’ I said. ‘Ah, what follows Mo,’ said Criminale, nodding, ‘Why do all these people come for it? Are there no women? What is wrong with drink?’ ‘Well, they do have both here,’ I said. ‘So, it is entirely random we meet again,’ he said. ‘Entirely,’ I said. Now Criminale turned with a flourish of courtesy to the Russian lady, seated patiently, contemplatively, on the bench. ‘My dear Yevgenya, may we examine our laptops another time?’ he asked, ‘I like a serious talk with this young man. I will meet you in the lobby in one half-hour, and we will do what we agreed.’ ‘Of course, Bazlo,’ said the lady, rising. ‘It’s all right, I have an interview to do,’ I said hastily. ‘Another time will do,’ said Criminale, putting his heavy arm across my shoulders, ‘Let us turn round the lake.’

  A large gloomy lake lay in the centre of the woods> a-piece of artifice. Stone ruins, mostly constructed, stood on little islands and promontories; the water was green and stagnant. Swans and geese swam lazily in the weeds, angry flies buzzed up from the undergrowth as we approached. ‘It is true perhaps your programme was not so good idea,’ said Criminale, ‘A person is not interesting, only his thought. And how can you show such impossible, improbable things with little moving pictures?’ ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘It is also true,’ said Criminale, ‘that nobody likes to be investigated without his knowledge. Even though where I come from I am used to this, I am surprised. Are there no ethics of these things?’ ‘We were just scouting the programme,’ I said, ‘Going ahead of the story to see if there really was a story.’ ‘Was there?’ he asked, ‘I see there was not.’ ‘Not the kind of story we were looking for,’ I said.

  ‘No?’ asked Criminale, ‘May we sit down? I have spoiled already your interview, perhaps you have a little time.’ He pointed to a mossed stone bench squatting in the long grass right by the water, we sat down. He took off his jacket, and once more wiped his brow. He was perfectly friendly, more than I deserved; he was also trying to put me firmly in the wrong. I was in it already, of course; I had never really approved of Lavinia’s indirect techniques of investigation, but at that time I was young and job-hungry, though I had always dreaded the moment when Criminale had to be told we were making a programme on him. But now it seemed to me it was he who had no right to the moral ground he was assuming. ‘At Barolo, if you had asked, well, I might have helped,’ he was saying, ‘Now, no. If your programme fails I am not disappointed. My life is not so interesting to deserve the honour, a story of small confusions, mostly.’ ‘I don’t agree,’ I said, ‘I think it’s very interesting.’

  Criminale brought out his expensive cigar case, took one, then pointed the case at me. ‘The heat here is terrible,’ he said, ‘You think so, an interesting story? What did you find out?’ ‘A lot,’ I said, taking the cigar. ‘Ah,’ said Criminale, carefully applying his lighter, ‘Who did you talk to? Some people who did not give me such a good portrait?’ ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘Gertla, for one.’ ‘An envious and difficult woman, I have a fondness for that type,’ said Criminale, ‘Frankly, just to you, I always had problems with the ladies.’ ‘Yes, I know quite a bit about that too,’ I said. ‘You have done a lot,’ said Criminale, ‘You were wise to know Ildiko. So perhaps now you can understand why I do not expect my reputation to last for so much longer.’ He said this with a surprising brightness. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And in all these journalistic pryings just what did you find out?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, the Party, the KGB, the nomenklatura, used your accounts for all kinds of deals in the West,’ I said. ‘Oh, the missing millions,’ said Criminale, ‘To me this was no great concern. Money is not an important thing with me. Those Party people loved capitalist games, why not let them, maybe that is when they learned something.’ ‘You worked for the Party and reported on people abroad through Gertla,’ I said. ‘She said this?’ asked Criminale, ‘Not quite true. I was a two-way channel. I passed things to both sides. This was known perfectly well in a number of places. Messages could always come and go through me. People like myself were essential. You would be surprised how complicated these games could get.’ ‘So you didn’t really betray anyone?’ I asked. ‘I have good conscience,’ said Criminale. I could have left it there; I didn’t. ‘What about Irini?’ I asked.

  Criminale, breathing hard on the bench beside me, wiped his brow again. ‘Yes, I was not allowed my life with Irini,’ he said, ‘History came and took her away from me.’ ‘History?’ I asked, ‘Why is it that abstract nouns do so much?’ ‘But they do,’ said Criminale, ‘Impersonal forces are more powerful than personal forces.’ ‘Surely you could have done something,’ I said, ‘You had a lot of influence, friends everywhere.’ ‘In a state of chaos no one has influence,’ said Criminale, ‘Nagy had influence, they took him and shot him. Do you think you would have done better?’ ‘I don’t know, I can’t imagine,’ I said. ‘Why have you come?’ asked Criminale, ‘Is this your journalist’s set-up? You like to accuse me of something?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘It’s true, I’m here completely by chance.’ ‘Entirely random!’ said Criminale, ‘You intend to tell this story.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t.’ He looked at me in bewilderment. ‘Then what do you really want of me?’ he asked. ‘Nothing, nothing at all,’ I said, ‘Except perhaps for a quote on Po-Mo.’ He sat for a moment, almost as if this dismayed him more than its opposite. ‘Excuse me if I am not grateful,’ he said then, ‘I know journalists, I am one myself. Like secret policemen they keep a record of everything, and then one day . . . For a journalist to succeed, in here must be a bit the dishonest person.’ ‘And for the philosopher?’ I asked. Criminale looked at the lake, and then said, ‘This is an interesting question. Yes, I think so. Remember, the philosopher is only the clown of thought. He is granted the role of wisdom, he must appear wise. Every age, every idea comes along and demands him, give us a describable portrait of reality. He tries, he considers, he picks up the tools of thought. But he is no different from a
nyone else. Dirty with history, a man after all. Perhaps against his intention, the thought betrays.’

  ‘But what betrays, the thought or the person?’ I asked. ‘Another very interesting question,’ said Criminale, not answer­ing it, but staring down at the weed-filled water, ‘Please give me your view.’ ‘I remember a phrase I read somewhere, was it in George Steiner?’ I said. ‘It might be, if you read him,’ said Criminale. ‘He remarked how often it is that the great scholar-thinker is also the great betrayer,’ I said. ‘The great betrayer,’ said Criminale, looking at me ironically, ‘You mean myself? Please, in 1956 I was young, and I misread history, a very difficult book. It is easy, let me warn you, you will do it too. One thing I have learned, my friend, there is no such thing as the future. The future is just what we invent in the present to put an order over the past. Don’t live for the future, you will only find the wrong faction and make the wrong friend. I made the usual mistake, I thought I knew what was bound to happen. You will make it too.’

  ‘But you make your mistakes in public,’ I said, ‘A philoso­pher, people read and believe you.’ ‘I have written big books, yes, contributed to philosophy, made novels too, you know,’ he said, ‘What now? Do I tear up my books because I looked at the clock and saw the wrong time there? All books are like that. You know, if my bedroom life had been just a little different, in 1956 I would have come to the West. Then I would go to America, write just those same books. Would you talk of betrayal then? Would you doubt the words? I made a mistake, I shared it with millions. Let us agree that, and say no more about it. It is not betrayal.’ ‘You didn’t just get history wrong,’ I said, There was Irini.’ ‘Well, let me tell you, because you clearly know nothing about it,’ said Criminale, ‘In certain rimes, maybe all times, love and friendship become impossible. If for forty years you too had lived a double life, you would understand.’