Young Adolf

by Beryl Bainbridge

‘Such a smooth shave,’ Alois said. ‘Such a gentle action against the skin. Take my word for it, they’re all the rage.’

  ‘Another time,’ remembered Adolf, ‘I had the notion that there was a great deal of money to be made out of filling old tins with paste and selling them to shopkeepers. In Vienna during the winter the windows freeze over. You can’t see the goods displayed.’

  ‘Surely,’ Alois objected, ‘the paste would be as bad as the frost.’

  ‘It was never put to the test,’ said Adolf. He was temporarily blinded. There were so many points of light in the room, so many glittering reflections – he could hardly distinguish his brother. It wasn’t, in any case, a recognisable face. Alois had left home when Adolf was nine years old. There seemed little connection between that thin, poorly complexioned youth of sixteen and the somewhat stout and prosperous man who sat opposite, obsessed with razor blades.

  Alois insisted on divulging his plans for trade expansion. He spoke of freight trains and cargo boats and a shrinking world. In time, God willing, it could be more economical to finance one’s own railroad. ‘It’ll be simple for me,’ he reasoned. ‘Child’s play. I have after all numerous contacts in Paris and in Munich … and with Angela so conveniently situated in Linz …’ He broke off abruptly and glared across the table.

  Adolf was almost asleep. He was so relaxed, head lolling against the padded back of the seat, that he felt his limbs were drifting away from his body; his mouth had fallen open. Steam began to rise from his damp clothing. Somewhere, long ago he had leapt from the barn loft into the stack below … Just such a stifling scent of dried clover rose to engulf him as he drowned in the colourless hay.

  A violent rocking of the table and a hand at his throat jerked him into consciousness. He opened his eyes to find Alois looming over him, demanding to know how he’d wheedled the money out of Angela.

  ‘What money?’ he asked, shocked. He thought his brother was still thinking in terms of millions.

  ‘My money,’ shouted Alois. ‘The money I sent Angela for her ticket.’ He gripped the front of Adolf’s shirt and twisted it so severely that its wearer was in danger of being asphyxiated.

  ‘I didn’t wheedle,’ cried Adolf. ‘She gave it to me freely. She said she couldn’t leave the children.’ Already the skin across his cheek-bones was growing mottled. He felt choked, not by the pressure of his brother’s fingers but by hatred. The room grew dark before his eyes; he heard the blood pounding in his ears.

  Alois released him and sat back angrily in his chair. Across his forehead, where the band of his elegant hat had pressed, beads of perspiration gathered. He muttered sullenly, ‘You had no right.’

  Adolf struggled to pull himself together, to utter some remark that would show how unaffected he was. He longed to shrug his shoulders indifferently, to smile mockingly. He could manage none of these pretences. He stared into the florid face of Alois and scowled in return. For a moment there came to him an image of his father holding his brother by the neck against a walnut tree and beating him with a leather strap until he fainted. The family dog ran round and round the tree, barking. Seizing him too by the scruff of the neck, Father struck him repeatedly. Released, the animal crawled on its belly in the grass and wet itself.

  ‘You had no right,’ repeated Alois, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. ‘It was my money.’

  ‘I shall repay it instantly,’ shouted Adolf, foolishly proud.

  Fortunately, while he was thrusting his hands deep into his empty pockets, a man carrying a violin case approached the table. Alois started up and greeted him warmly. He wanted the man to sit down. He was all smiles again.

  ‘I came merely to welcome Adolphus,’ said the stranger. ‘I mean no permanent intrusion.’ He stood with his hand resting on Alois’s shoulder.

  Adolf sat bolt upright, his collar askew and a button gone from his shirt. His worst fears were confirmed. Though the official scrutinising him, dressed in black from head to foot like an undertaker, bore no resemblance either to the man on the boat or to the improbable figure on the balcony of the tower, he had no doubt that they were in collusion. He waited, legs trembling beneath the shining surface of the table, expecting at any moment to be arrested.

  And yet, the stranger’s expression wasn’t altogether hostile. Biding his time, he studied Adolf carefully, as if not entirely sure he was the one.

  Something about the man was peculiarly familiar. Adolf couldn’t help but think of his two closest acquaintances in Vienna, Josef Neumann and Jakob Altenburg. At certain angles, seen through the window of a café or in profile on the street, Josef appeared haughty, almost contemptuous. This impression was due to the mask-like composure of his features and had little to do with the shape of his nose or the fullness of his lips. It was as though, rather in the manner of the leopard and its spots, he had inherited from others before him a uniformity that enabled him to move undetected through the surrounding jungle. But suddenly, his attention drawn by a rapping on the glass or the calling of his name, he would turn and smile like a woman, warmly and seductively, his whole face transformed. Then it was perfectly plain to which species he belonged.

  ‘Journeys,’ said the man, ‘are often uncomfortable. Sometimes one’s feet hurt abominably.’

  Adolf stared.

  ‘Unless one can afford to travel in style,’ added the man.

  ‘He can’t afford to travel at all,’ Alois said. He winked maliciously. ‘These struggling artists never have a halfpenny’

  Adolf began another futile search of his pockets. He said bitterly, ‘I’m a painter of postcards. It isn’t the same thing.’ He hated being referred to as an artist, struggling or otherwise. Since his last and final rejection by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he preferred to think of himself as a student. He yawned, both from tiredness and a sense of failure.

  ‘If it was me,’ the man said, ‘I would go wherever I was going and lie down and close my eyes. For a time I would hear noises in my head. Am I right?’

  Adolf pursed his lips and wouldn’t reply. He thought he was being tricked into some admission. He gazed fixedly at the far wall and the painting of a black ship that sailed across a cracked and varnished sea.

  ‘When I was a young boy,’ the fiddle-player recollected, ‘my mother feared I had the sleeping sickness. I could stay in bed from dawn till dusk. No effort at all. My body burned with activity, but my mind slumbered. Now … it is the other way round. I wake in the night like an infant … I nibble slices of sausage as though my life depended on it … I pace up and down like a sentry though there is nothing left to guard. My body is tired out but the mind refuses to rest.’

  At this, Adolf couldn’t resist glancing upwards. The man smiled. His large, melancholy eyes shone with dreadful tenderness.

  Adolf was greatly affected by the quality of this smile. He had been unnaturally controlled for many hours. The long train journey full of unfathomable alarms, Alois’s boisterous greeting and his vulgar talk of intrigues and empires had held him in a state of perpetual suspense, of tension. He had been in the position of the hunter who, sighting his prey when least expected, knows that the slightest sign of agitation will produce a stench of fear and bring the beast with outstretched claws bounding towards him. Now, he could run to that equal beside the camp-fire and admit he had come face to face with death.

  ‘It’s true,’ he stammered, ‘I can’t stop thinking.’ He realised that the man so kindly regarding him was unlike either Neumann or Jakob Altenburg. There was someone else whom he resembled, some earlier figure who carried not a violin case but a Gladstone bag containing wads of gauze and a bottle of iodoform. It was the doctor who had attended his mother when she was dying of cancer and who had comforted him when, the life gone from her, she lay with a rosary piously tangled in her fingers. ‘My dear boy,’ Dr Bloch had promised, ‘in time you will get over it. Believe me.’

  One doesn’t lose all sense of judgment, thought Adolf, after a single glass of spirits. He
re at last was an individual of the same calibre as himself, a human being of sensitivity, one who could speak of important matters, of things that nourished the soul.

  The man, turning to Alois, began to talk in English. Adolf watched their faces and listened to the strange sounds. All the while he was conscious that the eyes of the fiddler still glowed with that mournful expression of sweet concern.

  ‘Do you want me to try for cutlets tonight, or would you prefer the fish? You have the mutton, don’t forget.’

  ‘Fish,’ replied Alois. ‘Peaches too, if it could be managed.’

  ‘It can be managed.’ Looking at Adolf, the stranger lifted his violin case in the air and tapped it significantly.

  ‘I don’t play an instrument,’ confessed Adolf. ‘I never had the opportunity. But I love music – Wagner in particular.’

  ‘We have a very fine concert hall,’ the man told him. ‘You must go there.’ Assuring Adolf that they would meet presently, he raised his black felt hat in a polite gesture of farewell and threaded his way between the tables to the door.

  ‘You were bought a piano by Mother,’ said Alois. ‘According to Angela it was an expensive model. And you had lessons.’

  ‘Very few,’ Adolf said sharply. ‘Later, the piano was sold. Angela and Paula shared the money.’

  Feeling perhaps that he had spoken unfairly, Alois offered to buy his brother another drink. Adolf shook his head primly.

  ‘Just one more,’ persisted Alois. ‘I don’t mind about the money. You can pay me back when you’re on your feet.’

  ‘I don’t approve of spirits,’ said Adolf, his face growing more pinched and disapproving than ever.

  ‘Goddammit,’ cried Alois, exasperated. ‘I can’t stand a man who doesn’t drink’, and manoeuvring himself from his chair he strode angrily away.

  5

  Adolf sprawled listlessly against the partition. Now that the musician had gone, doubts began to assail him. Had there been an implied threat behind the words ‘We shall meet again’? Why the ferocious insistence that he should visit the concert hall? And those noises he might hear in his head – were they whispered injunctions to give himself up, or the more ominous sound of military boots tramping towards him? What was the old Jew getting at with his maudlin anecdotes of lazy adolescence, his tragic expression, that bamboozling air of feigned and moist compassion? There was nowhere he could hide and no one he could turn to for help. He supposed his half-brother had deserted him. He slumped deeper in his chair, horribly awake, and stared at the band of grey silk that encircled the crown of Alois’s splendid and abandoned hat.

  However, after only a few minutes absence at the bar, Alois returned and seated himself once more behind the table. Adolf was immensely relieved, but he said nothing.

  ‘What’s the time?’ asked Alois, although he knew already. He could think of no other way of ending the unfriendly silence.

  Adolf replied sullenly that he hadn’t any idea, so sullenly that his brother couldn’t resist stating the obvious. ‘You haven’t a watch.’

  ‘I have no time for watches.’

  ‘You have no hat either. And no overcoat.’

  Adolf ignored him. He was filled with contempt for those outward signs of Alois’s success – his fat cheeks, his thin elegant cane that stood propped against the wall, those links of heavy silver that hung in a glittering loop from button-hole to inside vest.

  ‘What’s that disagreeable smell?’ demanded Alois wrinkling his fleshy nose in distaste.

  Offended, Adolf crouched there, holding his breath as though to deny the existence of any odour. He imagined that his portly relation, dressed in layers of expensive cloth, had never suffered the humiliation of poverty. While Alois had been swaggering through the foyers of swanky hotels, ogling women between the potted palms, he himself, wearing this same suit of clothes, had slept on a bench in the Prater and sometimes, in wet weather, under the arches of the Rotunda. When winter came and the first fall of snow, fearing he might freeze to death he had trudged the two and a half miles to Meidling on the outskirts of Vienna and queued for admittance at the Asyl für Obdachlose. Once inside he had been interrogated and his particulars written down. He had no job, no address, no qualifications and he refused to admit to any religious beliefs. His entire life, with its small triumphs and disasters, its boundless hopes and aspirations for the future, was condensed to a few words scrawled on a piece of grey paper the size of a visiting card. This puny dossier was no sooner completed than it was stamped with a row of figures that effectively obliterated his name and date of birth. For some reason he had been terrified at the sight of those impersonal digits. He longed to make a scene, to insist they brand these same numbers on his forehead or his wrist, thus drawing attention to their own lack of humanity. But he hadn’t the courage, and besides from the corridors beyond had come a delicious aroma of potato soup. At that moment he was no longer a man, merely a huge mouth that gushed with saliva. Subdued and listed as 848763/Male, he was led to a large room and told to undress. The ceiling was covered in intricate lengths of piping and the floor was tiled. Here he bathed in public and later stood with a square of towelling held modestly in front of him while his clothes were disinfected. When they were returned to him, the armpits of his jacket and the crotch of his threadbare trousers had turned a delicate shade of lilac. Periodically over the last three years he had undergone the same demeaning ritual in various other institutions. He was now like a walking weather-vane – the least hint of dampness in the air and an unmistakable reek of lysol instantly emanated from him.

  ‘I may have an overcoat that would fit you,’ said Alois, and added: ‘It’s hardly in my best interests to be seen with someone so shabbily dressed as yourself.’ He was looking down as he spoke, tapping the rim of his glass with the edge of his wedding ring.

  Until that moment Adolf had been huddling, metaphorically, on some ledge above an abyss. Several times he had felt himself swaying. Now, with that brutal offer of second-hand finery, Alois kicked him into the depths. Falling, he grasped at the table and tilted it towards him. The glass slid from beneath Alois’s fingers; he looked up and was startled by the absurd expression of rage on Adolf’s face. He was holding his head at a curious angle as though an invisible hand was pulling his hair out by the roots and sneering so ferociously it was almost comical. As he stared dumbfounded, Adolf began to snarl like a cornered fox.

  ‘Pull yourself together,’ said Alois, embarrassed. He shifted his chair further round the table, endeavouring to screen this extraordinary sight from the rest of the room. He had a fair temper himself, as he would be the first to admit, but he was staggered by this rather effeminate display of snickering frenzy. Some instinct prevented him from slapping his hysterical brother across the cheek.

  Adolf started to shout incoherently. Alois had swelled to such vast proportions that his mouth, beneath those hateful and beautifully trimmed moustaches, was capable of devouring him. He half raised his fist, prepared to burst those pink ballooning cheeks.

  Just then Alois, who had some experience of horses, realising that Adolf was ready to buck violently, smashing the glass panels to smithereens in the process, took out his handkerchief and began to murmur ‘Steady, whoa, steady’ over and over again. He managed eventually to slip an arm about his brother’s hunched and trembling shoulders. Twice Adolf, ranting incomprehensibly about vermin and redskins and men with beards, broke away from him. But he was wearing himself out. At last he allowed Alois, still uttering those little clucking noises of motherly firmness, to dab at his lower lip which was bleeding quite copiously from the constant snapping of his agitated jaws. Rising, and thinking glumly that this was yet another public house he wouldn’t care to show his face in for some time, Alois steered him through a dozen smirking onlookers to the door.

  6

  Adolf’s behaviour in the street was equally wayward. He shied at the approaching tram car and refused to board it. Wheeling, he was off at a fast trot. Fearing
a scandal might jeopardise his future business schemes, Alois pursued him and bundled him into a cab. During the brief journey Adolf complained that he could hear someone playing a violin. He sat with his hands clapped over his ears, swinging his head backwards and forwards.

  On the pavement outside the house he moaned about pianos and saxophones. He said the street throbbed to the beat of Dixieland jazz.

  ‘I thought you liked music?’ said Alois, aggrieved.

  Once upstairs, he explained to Bridget that their guest was exhausted.

  ‘Is that so?’ said Bridget, thinking that if it were true then Adolf had a queer way of showing it. He was walking round and round the room so rapidly that she grew dizzy just watching him. The pallor of his skin and the flecks of blood on his torn shirt alarmed her. ‘I told you not to get in a paddy,’ she scolded. ‘Look at the state of him.’

  ‘I’ve been like a lamb,’ Alois retorted. ‘A lesser man would have strangled him. He’s had some sort of fit.’

  ‘A fit?’ she cried, and her hands shook as she served the supper.

  Conversation at the table wasn’t as she’d imagined. No one complimented her on her cooking or asked how many teeth the baby had. Adolf took exception to the photograph of his father above the hat-stand. He said the old man’s ugly face was putting him off his food. Alois told him to keep a civil tongue in his head. Raising his fork threateningly in the air, he dripped gravy on the nice white cloth. At which Bridget, voluble with embarrassment, recounted the saga of the runaway cart with its wheels caught in the tramlines.

  ‘The old fella driving the cart,’ she said, ‘was clinging on for dear life. He was losing his hat.’ She lifted her hands to touch her auburn hair.

  In the middle of this description Adolf turned to Alois and demanded to know what she was saying. Impatiently Alois began the story again. Half-way through, Adolf leapt up from the table and spun round and round with knees bent and his arms held out like wings. The starched napkin tucked into his collar hung stiff as a board over his wretched shirt.