But as Mihailovic had slowly worked his way around the locations of the poem, he had come upon two witnesses more compelling than the mute mountains and misplaced vegetation of the Greek countryside. The first was an emigrant to America who had returned to Greece in 1937 and claimed to have fought with Zervas during the war, until an injury had lamed him. He had worked briefly as an interpreter at the British Military Mission in Messolonghi and had been present at the interrogation of a young man in 1945 by a British intelligence officer. ‘But it was not an interrogation. They drank tea and talked about the war. He did not need an interpreter. He spoke good English. Better than mine,’ Mihailovic quoted his witness as saying.
The tea never came, thought Sol, recalling the man, and the British Captain who had questioned him.
The unneeded interpreter had remembered the young man's name but had no memory of his face and could not identify Sol from a photograph. In fact, he might not have remembered the incident at all if they had not spoken about Thyella. ‘Of course everyone knew about Thyella; there were a lot of rumours about her around that time,’ the man had said. ‘No one knew then what had happened to her. They talked about Colonel Eberhardt too. All we knew about him was that he was gone, along with the rest of them. And the young man was about to leave too. His papers had come through, from the Americans.’
Mihailovic's second witness had been encountered fortuitously. The journalist had headed north, into the mountains, in defiance of the military restrictions on travel in the area. Here his questions had provoked an increasing reticence among the villagers. Occasionally this reticence had become alarm. When he had persisted, he had been threatened and even chased out of one village. He had retraced his steps to Karpenisi, where he had been arrested after an argument with his guide and held overnight. Here, the reactions of the villagers had grown more comprehensible. The irritated chief of police had told him that he had ‘had enough of mad Germans’ before releasing him on the payment of a fine. He had been reminded that the area was closed to foreigners without permits and had been put on a bus back to Messolonghi.
Mihailovic spun out the rest of his detective story over more than a page, but its dénouement was already clear. After a number of false leads, he had finally run his quarry to ground in Naupaktos. The ‘mad German’ had, of course, been Jakob, although he had been travelling on an Israeli passport. He had been hospitalised in the port town after ‘a nervous collapse’, according to a doctor there who had treated him. The doctor was quoted:
‘He was brought in by a woman who claimed to be his wife. There had been an incident at their lodgings. He was unable to give any coherent account of his movements and the woman was obstructive. He had suffered a complete collapse. His symptoms were characterised by paranoid delusions which he could not distinguish from reality. We sedated him. He was here for four days, after which an ambulance arrived from Athens and he was discharged.’
‘And this,’ Mihailovic commented, ‘is the witness we have preferred over Solomon Memel.’
The article concluded with an attack on those ‘domestic cultural commissars’ who had proved so eager to vilify one of Europe's finest poets, and Mihailovic finished with the hope that they would now prove equally eager to recant.
‘But why?’ said Sol, aloud, and in German, drawing a glance from the bartender. ‘You never asked why he did it, Herr Mihailovic.’
He closed the magazine, placed some coins in the saucer, and walked out.
‘Now is the time to speak out,’ Moderssohn exulted.
It was three weeks since the Spiegel piece had appeared. In the intervening period, most of the major newspapers and magazines had run shame-faced pieces on ‘The Memel Affair’. Today it was the turn of the FAZ, who had hidden their blushes behind a bloated survey of literary hoaxes stretching over three full pages. It had ended with the pious caveat: ‘Now the stakes are higher. These literary games are no longer games. It is our history we are playing with. Let us never drop it again.’
‘Are they playing catch or roulette?’ asked Sol when Moderssohn read the concluding lines over the telephone.
‘They want to run an interview too,’ said Moderssohn. ‘But then, all the papers do. I have been speaking to my colleagues. We should choose eight or nine, not even the most important. Some smaller magazines.’
Moderssohn sounded youthful again, but his delivery was as ponderous as ever. The conversation was taking a long time to arrive at the point where Sol had chosen to wait for it. The previous day he had returned to the Hotel d’Orléans to collect his post from the ancient concierge.
‘Telephone rings a lot,’ she had grumbled, pointing a bent forefinger at his chest. ‘Always you!’
Moderssohn was now listing the possible journals, in order of preference. Eventually, Sol was able to interrupt the inexorable flow.
‘I do not think this arrangement will be practical, Herr Moderssohn.’
‘Not practical? No, of course it would be tiresome to repeat the same thing so many times. A press conference might be better. We could hold it here at the publishing house and invite some of the other journalists.’
‘Herr Moderssohn, you've misunderstood me. A press conference will not be any more practical.’
‘Herr Memel, the statement will be far more effective if you deliver it in person. But, if you do not wish to, we could simply distribute it in the normal way.’
‘Statement?’
‘Your statement, Herr Memel.’
‘I have no statement, Herr Moderssohn.’
‘But there must be a statement. You have been vindicated.’
‘I have given my last interview,’ said Sol. ‘I have answered my last question. I have made all the statements I am ever going to make.’
That summer, Die Keilerjagd was added to the syllabus for secondary schools in Germany. Austria followed in the autumn and France the following spring. A trickle of postponed translations became a spate. He received a substantial cheque from Surrer and bought an apartment in a modern block overlooking pont Mirabeau. His second book, a collection of shorter poems, appeared and gained respectful notices. He arranged his editions along the lowest bookshelf in the living-room, placing Jakob's last. There had been no word of him since Mihailovic's article.
But Mihailovic himself did appear, in person, a small sharp-faced man who introduced himself as ‘Slava’, rising to shake hands over the restaurant table where the two men had arranged to meet.
‘I don't know why he is so determined to speak with you,’ Moderssohn had told him. ‘It's not an interview, Herr Memel. Perhaps it's the other way around: he wants you to interview him.’
Slava spoke broken German, but excellent French. Sol politely congratulated the journalist on his article. Slava shook his head.
‘Reichmann wrote it,’ he said. ‘You didn't guess?’
‘No.’
‘I was sent to Greece to find out what I could. I find things out, sometimes. I put people together. Fix things. I work for Spiegel now and again, and others, in the background. Reichmann wanted my name on the article. Or not his.’
Slava leaned forward over the table, eager to convince. His hands fluttered as he spoke. He wants me to like him, thought Sol. But that is not why he is here.
‘I didn't get as far as I had hoped, in the mountains,’ Slava said. ‘My guides refused to take me beyond Karpenisi. Do you know it?’
‘Only by name.’
‘It doesn't matter. I was arrested there, just as Feuerstein had been. The rest was simple.’
‘The interpreter, then the doctor in Naupaktos.’
‘The doctor didn't want to talk. I was frank with him, told him why I was there and what I was doing. At first, all he would say was that his patient, Feuerstein, had been delusional, had made a partial recovery, and then had been discharged. But when I mentioned your name he reacted strangely. He said that he had tried to contact you at the time, and had written later but got no reply.’
‘Writ
ten to me? But how?’
‘He gave me the address,’ said Slava, reaching into his briefcase and bringing out a battered notebook. He riffled through its pages. ‘It was Masarykgasse 10.’
‘My family's address, before the war.’
‘I see,’ said Slava. ‘The doctor asked if “Memel” was a pseudonym. On the hospital form, Feuerstein had named you as his next of kin. Or whoever had filled in the form for him. The doctor refused to show it to me. But he said that under “Nature of Relationship”, Feuerstein had put “Brother”. You have no brothers?’
‘No,’ Sol confirmed. ‘What about the woman? The woman who was or wasn't his wife.’
‘Reichmann insisted I include her, but I think the doctor invented her. There was no record of an ambulance to Athens, just his word for it, and of course the hospital didn't want him there. I don't know how he left, or where he went.’
‘Tel Aviv, evidently,’ said Sol. ‘He still had his notes to write. His edition to publish.’
The two men were silent.
‘I was puzzled, you see,’ Slava continued when the pause became awkward. ‘Because it was obvious that Feuerstein knew you in some capacity. It fitted with what the doctor said about his delusions. But you never defended yourself. If there was a history between you and Jakob Feuerstein, why did you never reveal it? It would have explained why he wrote this nonsense about your work. I never understood that.’
‘This is not an interview.’
‘Monsieur Memel, please believe me. I am here to pass on what I learned. Only that.’
‘The fact that Jakob Feuerstein knew my address from a decade ago, that he wrote my name on a hospital form, that he called himself my brother, these things prove nothing. They carry no more weight than the delusions you allude to.’
‘If I have offended you by raising these matters, please accept my apologies. I do not mean to make a mystery of any of this. Obviously, Jakob Feuerstein's delusions would take you as their focus.’
‘Obviously? How, exactly, do I fit into my non-existent brother's non-existent fantasy, Monsieur Mihailovic?’ The words marched out too quickly for him to smooth them. Slavko Mihailovic looked down.
‘According to the doctor, Feuerstein thought he was hunting for you. He spoke of having lost you in the mountains, during the war. He had come to Greece to find you.’
As the two men parted, Mihailovic apologised for any offence he might have caused. Sol assured him that he had not. Mihailovic pressed a card into his hand. The address was in Trieste.
‘I do not live there, but my mail is forwarded regularly,’ the man explained. ‘I am often in Paris. I am often in many places. If you need my services, Herr Memel, I can be contacted there. I arrange things. Bring people together who wish it. I work where I can. You understand, I'm sure.’
Sol listened politely. He had realised what he must do and now his thoughts were only of that course of action. It was a simple matter. The two men shook hands. It was barely four in the afternoon but the sky was already darkening. He found a taxi on avenue de Breteuil and cursed softly to himself when the traffic ground to a halt behind Gare d'Orsay. The car crawled forward. Place de la Concorde was a chaos of ill-temper, where the taxi stopped and started, inched forward then braked. Sol pressed his fingers to his lips and leaned forward in his seat. Car horns bellowed their ritual protests as the herds converging from north and south merged and jostled. Once across, the reluctant driver took the backstreets at Sol's urging, but they were no better. The traffic solidified around the Banque de France and they sat there for five minutes, Sol's impatience and the driver's irritation at his passenger growing apace. But it had been almost three years since last he had made this journey. His impatience was absurd, and rue du Louvre was only two streets away.
Sol paid the driver and made his way up rue du Bouloi, then crossed the road and pushed through the rush-hour crowd to climb the steps of the Hotel des Postes. The collection office was a large windowless room on the first floor with a hatch set into one wall. Nothing had changed since his last visit. Sol took his place at the back of the line. When his turn came, he handed over his identity card to a capped official who scrutinised it. Yes, Sol thought to himself, the poet. The official looked up, nodded curtly then disappeared into the depths of the building. Through the hatch Sol saw long rows of shelves, built floor to ceiling, upon which rested sheaves of letters, small parcels, loose papers and cards which might have been either mail awaiting collection or part of the Hotel des Postes’ system of classification. The men and women behind him were silent, as he had been. The official was gone a long time.
***
Not Rilke. Not Klopstock. Not Trakl.
Above the ruins rose hills covered with thick woods. They were not permitted up there. Below, the floor of the valley broadened. This was where they worked. The river running through it meandered, carving multiple channels in a wide gravelly bed. The Naupaktos–Messolonghi road crossed it at its shallowest point by a low bridge supported by stone arches. Tufts of stringy grass stitched the reddish-brown soil on either bank, the land rising gradually towards the valley's sides, where olive groves clustered in the shade cast by Varassova to the east and a spur of Mount Zygos to the west. The river widened further as it neared the coast, then emptied into the gulf through a confusion of channels and banks. From the edge of its mouth curled a tongue of land which enclosed a reed-fringed lagoon to the west. Down there were marshlands, salt-pans and the short-lived silty beaches washed down by the river, which was called the Evinos, or Evenus, or the Phidharis, or once, long ago, the Lykormas.
But the bridge marked the lower of their two boundaries. The band of territory permitted them extended from the crossing-point to the ruins further up, and stretched across the width of the valley. Within it was the Kurtaga Work Camp.
Heads and shoulders rose out of the ground then fell again. Seventy-five men worked here, a fact they were reminded of daily at the roll-call. Other men watched them, fifteen or sixteen of these. They leaned on their rifles and looked idly about, now and again removing their caps to mop their brows. Sometimes one of the guards shouted at the men digging nearest him, and sometimes this ritual outburst would pass all the way down the line. The men digging appeared to pay no attention. The shouting concerned only their guards; it was internal to them, because they were few in number and their rifles were old. Most were from Naupaktos, which was a day's walk east, around the back of Varassova. The men of the Kurtaga Camp were from Messolonghi and Aitolikon, black marketeers, curfew-breakers, petty thieves, relatives of men suspected as partisan sympathisers, and Sol.
The men lived in four wooden huts which stood behind the spur of the Zygos and which were overlooked by a small farmhouse where their guards were billeted. A barbed-wire fence encircled the huts and defined the inner perimeter of the Kurtaga Work Camp. The guards shared the duty of walking its perimeter in pairs during the hours of darkness. The prisoners inhabited the huts between Monday, when they arrived, and Friday, when they were marched back along the coastal road, past the outskirts of Messolonghi, to a much larger camp where the barbed-wire fencing was more formidable, the huts longer and more crowded and the stench of ordure stronger. There, groups of women and children would wait outside the main gate for their arrival, often after nightfall, and would rush forward and press small parcels of food into the hands of husbands, fathers, or brothers, sometimes exchange a few words with them, then be pushed back by the guards while the prisoners were marched inside.
The Messolonghi camp had been built about an abandoned monastery. A swastika flying from an improvised flagpole tied on top of the bell tower looked as though it had been raised by children for a prank. Sol had been taken there three days after his interrogation. He had stood to attention while a German officer read several handwritten forms then looked up at him curiously.
‘You will not be joining your comrade,’ he said, ‘Fortunately for you. But you will work.’
Sol had nodded
. His ‘comrade’ must be Xanthos.
He had been escorted out by two Greeks, detainees like himself, who had shown him his bunk then had gone through his clothes in a systematic, impersonal fashion. Finding nothing, they had left him there. The barracks’ other inhabitants had returned at sunset, stamping their boots and beating the dust from their clothes. They had passed Sol without a glance and thrown themselves on their bunks. Sol fell asleep to the rise and fall of breathing all around him. Then, at some point during the night, he had been awoken by a hand on his shoulder. Someone had knelt behind him and addressed him in quick, but heavily accented English.
‘You speak this language?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tomorrow you will be assigned a work detail. You cannot be protected here.’
‘Protected? From who?’
‘Geraxos has enemies here. Do not mention him, or Thyella, or Xanthos. Say nothing about where you have been.’
‘Xanthos?’
There was a short silence and Sol, fearing that the man would slip away, turned and found himself looking at a slight, bespectacled man with a sharp face.
‘He is with the politicals in the Upper Compound. Forget him. He cannot be helped now. Find me if you believe yourself in danger. Say that you know something about a man called “Miguel”. Just that. I will hear of it very quickly.’
The next morning, as ‘Miguel’ had predicted, he had been called out by a Greek officer and assigned to a work detail. The other men had stared at the bruises and cuts on his face. Sol had ignored their curious stares.
In the Shape of a Boar Page 28