Foreigners, Drunks and Babies

by Peter Robinson

  Flicking over the pages of one yearbook after another, scanning down the columns of names and passport-style photographs, reading the minutes of societies and meetings, my capacity for obsession re-engaged, I saw flash before my eyes, as they say happens when you’re drowning, like silent newsreel footage, the flickering images of what seemed to be someone else’s life. I saw in the back of my mind’s eye, as it were, a young man carrying a battered leather suitcase wandering through the old streets round Tokyo Station – a Tokyo Station looking like before the firebombs about a decade later. He’s lost, it appears, and turning forlornly to left and right, till some Keystone-cop-like figures gather around an old wind-up telephone, followed by the arrival of a bowing and apologetic personage in spats.

  Then these scenes cut to a Kabuki play, one with a curiously martial theme, for there are characters in army uniforms on stage, and beautifully painted sets of battle-field scenes. A little military band comes marching up to the footlights, and it’s as if I can hear martial music and a patriotic song accompanied by traditional, stylized actions. Some young actors look like they’re dressed as human bullets. Mothers and daughters smile proudly and wave to them. Though sections of the audience look half-asleep, at the end they all get to their feet, lift both hands into the air, and shout what must be ‘Banzai’, three times – ‘Banzai, Banzai, Banzai’.

  Then the scene changes to an open-air swimming pool on the side of a broad river. This young Charles appears in his swimming togs, shivering among a group of student figures. In fun, it must be, he’s pushing a few of them into the water too. One of these students falls back with his arms raised in the air, like a redskin shot in a cowboy film. Then they push their foreign teacher in the water. He swims badly with a sort of doggy paddle. The students on the side of the pool look momentarily afraid he won’t be able to get out again. They appear to be thinking of jumping in to save him. But, oddly enough, as I read on and picture these scenes I can feel a sort of embarrassment rising, as if it were myself in those images ashamed.

  But now here he is again, alone, with the face of one thinking aloud. He’s up to his ears under a brightly patterned futon cover, picking up manuscript scattered all over the bed, flicking over pages, then throwing them back in a heap. Passing outside are mothers and babies, bicycles, taxis, and crowds of street vendors. His face is a mask of anxiety. His hands are shaking. He seems to be trying to write a letter, scrunching up sheet after sheet and tossing them onto that traditional-style tatami floor.

  Then another cut and there’s one more futon beside his with a sleeping Asian girl under its blanket. Suddenly the camera starts shaking and shelf-loads of books come tumbling down. The two of them scramble to their feet, dithering about in that shuddering room. After some hasty dressing and more telegraphed exchanges of words, she runs out of the house, through the tree-filled garden. He follows her further into the street and they try to hail a taxi. One stops and the girl gets in, leaving the young foreigner to step back into that garden with its strangely wavering trees.

  Now he’s walking under high river cliffs with traditional houses built right up to their edges, precariously teetering over the drop. Then the woman from the earthquake scene turns up again. She’s pleading with him about something, wringing her hands, with tears in her eyes. Her performance is fond and pathetic – so much so that I’m practically blushing myself. This Charley is trying to reassure her, it seems, and the whole scene is like nothing so much as a duet from Madame Butterfly.

  And so it goes on, like a silent movie running in my head without those frames of written dialogue that cue the takes. And as I was researching further in the library basement archives, the flickering images and pictures moved to what looks like an enormous residence in the British Embassy. There are conversations with diplomatic types over tea round a table in its garden, a servant bringing in plates of scones. This Charles is introduced to someone who looks like a plotter in Hitchcock’s Secret Agent. Then come inter-cut scenes of liberals and leftists being arrested, other suspicious-looking foreigners watched by secret policemen with gold-rimmed glasses.

  Then there are flashes of this Charles with that parody spy going into the house from the earthquake scenes, where he’s offered a room of his own. There are gestures of warning and concealment of papers. The revolutionary’s wild arm-waving talk cuts to a scene with him being interrogated by army officers in a tiny cell. He’s been stripped of his clothes and put into prison garb. Then there’s a trial scene, with the man from the British Embassy leading the dissident, still in prison garb, out onto the swarming streets. Back in his house, this Charles of mine provides the spy, if that’s what he is, with a change of clothes and theatrical disguise. Then we’re in the docks at Yokohama, our Charles, the spy, and the man from the Embassy. Japanese secret policemen approach them. They present the spy with the clothes taken from him when he’d been interrogated. They are neatly cleaned and pressed.

  Which is how it was that all the time I read on in the library basement, such images flickering before my mind’s eye, faint bells were ringing in my head. But the odd thing was that when I checked again on a full list of foreigners who had held this post, it turned out only one of them was christened Charles and – you might think it a strange coincidence – he had the same surname too (though it’s such a common or garden one that there could quite easily have been two of us). What’s more, the list couldn’t have included the two or three most recent professors because the information was printed in the back of a particular yearbook dated a couple of decades back now. Naturally, I assumed my university wouldn’t include details of the present holder in its records, not until that person’s contract had been finally terminated.

  But studying the names of those foreigners who had held the same position, and following up traces of my namesake’s case, it got me thinking that maybe more than one of them must have died in harness. So would they have been buried here, or been granted a mortuary passport and repatriated in their coffins or as flasks of ashes? Studying an old map of the city led me to the Buddhist temple with its adjacent graveyard in which land was given over to the burial of expatriate corpses. In a fit of sympathetic piety, I decided on another of those late winter afternoons to wander over and see what it was like. It turned out this particular Buddhist temple had been located on a hill some distance from the centre, right next to where, it turned out, they were putting through a new ring road.

  At first it looked like any other temple. There were the ornamental-roofed buildings, a pagoda, and a garden with an island of paradise in it, reached by a row of what looked like stepping-stones. There was the usual Buddhist graveyard. You know how it is: Shinto for weddings, Buddhist for funerals. So picking my way along the rings of stones, the ash from incense sticks, and mini-cans of Asahi beer ornamenting their pediments, I came of a sudden to the limit of the graveyard. It ended beyond a screen of bamboo trees, in a sudden drop, a cliff-face of raw earth and rock chopped out so they could widen the highway directly into town. But had they destroyed any sections of that old burial ground? Would my attempt to find the letter’s addressee end thus in disappointment? Glancing at each stone in turn, I was beginning to lose heart.

  But I needn’t have worried, for here they were, along a rising slope some distance further off, a row of great marble tombs with inscriptions in English. So I set to studying each and every one, until, right near the end, there, there it was: Charles Smith 1902-1938 Requiescat in Pace. And there it was: my own familiar name. Believe me, it felt like I’d discovered my own grave.

  But, if so, what on earth had become of me? How then had I died? Back I went to the university archives for a further trawl along shelves and through boxes. In a folder at the bottom of one such box was a file of medical reports from the local hospital. They told how this Charles Smith, my namesake or double, had fallen ill with some undiagnosed condition involving headaches, hearing loss, balance problems, difficulty swallowing and other things besides. The doctors
hadn’t been able to identify the cause of his rapid decline. They’d been treating him with morphine simply to dull the symptoms. For months, it seemed, he had hung between life and death, till finally the scales had tipped and his vital chain snapped. So had he died of a broken heart? No doctor diagnoses heartbreak any more. Had Marian been aware of his plight? Evidently his ashes had not been repatriated and mingled with those of his lost Esmeralda. But what, for that matter, had become of his beloved, gone to recover from their miserable winter, at Penwith in the far west of England? Understandably enough, my researches into that, out here on the far aside of the globe, drew nothing but a blank.

  And I had to admit it could happen: the researcher’s capacity for obsession may get the better of him. You can sometimes become so wrapped up in your subject that you start to resemble your topic, to lose a sense of where your own life ended and his began. Yes, I had to admit it: it was as if I had been suffering from post-mortem amnesia, suffering from it all this time. Yet now, at least, I had an idea of the life I might have led and how it could have ended, all this way from anywhere that such a person as this Charles Smith might want to call a home.

  On the subject of home, the archives did in fact reveal his residence, and another day I walked over to see what it was like. At the point where a wave of pine trees turned beyond a rusty iron fence, again I could picture that wooden house with blue corrugated iron roof, its stairwell stained with dampness, a casual spill, or shrivelled leaf here and there as if to chill the heart. Their sleeping quarters had been a single room perched on the roof. The risen sun would move across its frayed tatami floor. There were souvenirs of elsewhere on its walls. But none of what they came to know, none of that was there any more. It had all been bulldozed flat. First they’d been exiled from their exile; then years back it must have been condemned, demolished. Now as I stood by where the gate once was, gazing across an empty building plot, it appeared as if those years had never been.

  Still, every now and then, I will come back to the old places, the rusted swings and sandpit where other aliens’ children must have played. Drifting down those broad avenues, going the rounds of their old haunts, the house where my doppelgänger lived all those years before, the restaurants and bars that he would have visited, the bandstand out in the rain … or floating towards the haunted suicides’ bridge, the bridge across its gorge, naturally enough I might see coming towards me some other poor old wandering ghost. On that particular occasion it would be another of the foreign schoolteachers … and though he too drifted past me as if I weren’t there, as if he couldn’t have been himself, by then a ghost character too, at least I had an explanation now for why he behaved that way.

  I never did discover, though, if Charles Smith had an archive anywhere, or, as I say, what happened to Marian. And, after a while, as that state of obsession died down, I did wonder what I should do with her letter. Which is how, one lunchtime a little while later, I came to descend into the library basement once more, made my way to the same closed shelves, pressed the lighting up button, and slipped down between them, to replace that blue envelope in exactly those same pages of the very same volume of Death’s Jest Book where it could remain till a later Beddoes fan would come along and find it there.

  However, if you were to go there now, perhaps in search of that very same letter, you would find the access rules have changed. Now in the bowels of the library, if you look for the concertina stacks where I would browse, you’re sure to find many people searching along the shelves, taking note of titles, checking quotations, all the things you would expect. Now, you see, graduate students too are allowed to go down and look at the library’s holdings. You might say the stacks feel as if they have been exorcised.

  A Mystery Murder

  I wonder what got into me. Why did I accept the invitation? Mortally wounded amour propre, most likely. After all the years of struggle and indifference, when finally an invitation comes, what was I supposed to do? The other invitees were to be writers and critics whom I had either abused out of earshot, or else in print. Some of them had stabbed me in the face in articles, columns, or reviews, and, nothing could stop me speculating, behind and in my back as well. There was likely to be that magazine editor who had serially rejected my work. There would be members of interview committees, reporters on manuscripts for publishers, and figures from the prize club. There was sure to be the critic who’d stolen my ideas, every one of them, and not a word of acknowledgement in his footnotes. I must have been mad to say I would. Our host, the notable poet-critic, had once interviewed for a job I desperately needed. It could even have saved my second marriage. All right, I know: but it might have given it a third or fourth chance. Still, when he came out as the successful candidate, I immediately took steps to leave the country. There’s only so much you can take.

  But now he was inviting me back, into his haunt, as it were. It was to be a brainstorming session, a high-level get-together, something of that sort: thirteen characters gathered round a conference table, being expected to thrash out the state of things, as if it were a matter of life and death. But whose life and whose death? Sleep-walking out of a fourteen-hour flight, I was feeling like the thirteenth invited as I made myself known at the porter’s lodge, followed her directions across a couple of quads, and found my semi-luxurious guest room. It was up two flights of narrow turning stairs.

  The view from the row of high-arched windows was of the splendid variety. It extended across meadows in all their summer glory, meadows guarded and overlooked by ancient oaks, as far as the slowly sliding glint of the distant river that gave this place its name …

  ‘Just look at this venerable pile –’ I’d exclaimed on first entering its great front quad, ‘– of shite!’ said the pre-jaded wag beside me; and indeed there were drawbacks to being educated in such surroundings.

  So here I was back in my old alma mater! The surface facts didn’t seem changed at all. Yet for the time I stayed in that spacious tall-windowed guestroom, it was like I was living with the ghost of a person I might have been. It was somebody sulking by a marble faun, or outside a jolly corner restaurant. Then, as that feeling came back more strongly, I recalled having tried, a few years back now, to squeeze a tad of fellow feeling from one of my old drinking pals.

  ‘The slights don’t ever really heal,’ I admitted. ‘I’m scarred for life.’

  ‘Oh get over yourself … and move on like the rest of us,’ came back his tart reply.

  Down across its local version of the Bridge of Sighs, out for my usual pre-breakfast constitutional, so useful for their moments of inspiration or vision, I headed for the meadows beyond the college’s long oak drive. Here were the old signs of so many murderous histories those trees had indifferently witnessed: civil wars, popular risings, and nights of long knives; and here was I back again in the checkered shade of the sandy towpath’s tree-shaped shadows.

  No need to hurry, no one caring if I lived or died – or so I thought. I could take my time about it, dawdling along to make each moment stretch out like those sharp-edged shadows. Ahead were the college boathouses set back from the river’s brink, their activities getting under way, individual oarsmen and women bearing the pointed boats above their heads, frail craft which would float them out on the current, as if to make me quote and remember.

  This early down the river, then, an oarsman was backing fast into his morning while a bike-rider with megaphone was bellowing words of advice. Another emblem there! Here the ones doing it couldn’t even see where they were going, while the others, out of their element, were giving advice about how it should be done. There would always be that possibility of the coach on his bike riding smack into a tree, as if in Carry On Studying or Gone with the Window, but that didn’t look likely to happen as both of them sped on round the bend.

  Whodunnit fashion, we didn’t have a shortage of candidate victims, this thirteen of us to be precise – and all with a portfolio of reasons to be bumped off. There was our host, the
quintessential poet-critic, his love handles turning to middle age spread. There was our Internet magazine founder, all pixels and dpi numbers, suffering from permanent headaches and eyestrain. The print journal editor, who naturally looked down on the virtual reality man, wore shades, and handed out subscription flyers like junk bonds going out of fashion. The jobbing reviewer had deadlines to meet, and would slip off to his room intent on converting the press release into an original article. There was our short-story writer with a twinkle in his eye – no, not me, I’m just trying my hand at the genre, typing out whatever comes into my head. The grand dame of verse had deigned to put in an appearance (between an Australian prize judging and a guest lecture in Finland). The professional nationalist was here with his holier-than-thou fringe benefits. There was a career feminist, of course, properly irate about being in a minority of two. Naturally the permanent writer-in-residence barely knew where his next meal was coming from, and indeed had to get back to a sheaf of grant applications. The academic hitman was escaping from some poor fool’s graduate thesis turned book-proposal lined up in his sights. The exhausted head of department was in need of a haircut, a style-rethink, and a ten-year sabbatical to get those skeletons out of his cupboard. Then there was our American scholar, fresh from a formalists-versus-free-verse symposium, full of the latest manifestos and agendas. The London literary man about town would be writing up our little get-together for his weekly column, while the story’s narrator, me myself I, had been flown in from another time zone for reasons as yet to be revealed, or revealed to me, at least.