Young Adolf

by Beryl Bainbridge

  12

  Partly Adolf was curious to meet Dr Kephalus. He had heard Alois refer to him as a maniac. If Alois’s sense of judgment ran true to form then undoubtedly the doctor would prove to be exceptionally sane and composed. He was beginning also to feel that he had reacted foolishly to Meyer’s question. When Meyer asked him how long he intended to stay in Liverpool he had possibly meant that he hoped it was for a long time. Probably he had been about to suggest alternative accommodation, away from Alois and his constantly belittling remarks. Bridget had told him that the rooms on the third floor were unoccupied. There was an attic too, rented by a commercial traveller who was never there.

  Kephalus himself opened the door of the house with broken windows. He was holding to his lips a cigarette plunged in a long ivory tube and blowing smoke-rings. His eyes were so large and discoloured, like those of an old sick horse left out in a field, that Adolf was startled. He took a step backwards and was nudged forward again by Meyer. Between leaving the hall and entering the back room, Meyer aged twenty years. He became unctuous and sentimental and began rubbing his hands together as if he were cold.

  ‘At last,’ he pronounced, ‘my two friends are facing one another.’

  It wasn’t strictly true. Kephalus was six-foot tall and looking down on Adolf, who shrank both from the gaze of those rainbow-tinted eyes and from the overpowering smell of perspiration and tobacco that pervaded the doctor’s clothing.

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ commanded Kephalus, pushing Adolf towards a solitary chair beside a little round table at the window. Apart from a bookcase and an upturned crate near the hearth, the room was bare of furniture. Above the fireplace, festooned with cobwebs, jutted the head of an antelope with spiralled horns.

  ‘So you are the artist?’ said Kephalus, towering over Adolf in his rickety chair.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am no longer an artist.’

  ‘Then you are a student, perhaps?’ The doctor spoke German fluently but with a strange, harsh accent.

  ‘Yes,’ said Adolf reluctantly.

  ‘A student of what, may I ask?’

  ‘At the moment,’ Adolf said stiffly, ‘I have not decided.’

  ‘An undecided student,’ cried Kephalus boisterously, and he clapped Adolf so heartily on the shoulder that he was in danger of falling off his chair.

  Having discomfited him by such questions, the doctor proceeded to ignore him. There being nothing to sit on, he and Meyer began to pace the floor, talking volubly, the one still rubbing his hands gleefully together, the other gesturing wildly and lighting one cigarette after another. Kephalus was wearing a grey shirt and a black silk tie under a crumpled jacket; as he moved, quantities of ash spilled from him. Now and then he leaned against the wall in real or mock despair and covered his alarming face with the crook of his arm. His hands, Adolf noticed, were those of a labourer, thick and swollen, with nails so deformed and shortened that it seemed he must at one time have trapped his fingers in a door. The two men were talking about some incident of violence that had taken place two days previously.

  ‘The shame of it,’ cried Kephalus at one point. ‘The shame of it.’

  ‘Next time,’ Meyer said, ‘we will be better prepared.’

  Kephalus then launched into a description of the injuries received by certain persons. ‘The fellow who was heckling us earlier in the evening,’ he said, ‘the one with the squint – had a broken jaw and contusions to the left side of his face. I put twelve stitches into Michael Murphy’s scalp. The Connolly woman has internal bleeding from a boot in her belly. She’s in the Infirmary now. That child in Maguire Street had his foot crushed, but it was an accident.’

  ‘And Constable Rafferty?’ asked Meyer.

  ‘Dead,’ said Kephalus. ‘I thought you were told. He broke his neck when they shoved him off the roof.’

  What in God’s name, fretted Adolf, did Meyer see in the dreadful doctor, standing there rolling his baleful, stallion eyes and waving his arms like a madman as he spat from beneath those nicotine-stained moustaches the most revolting details of his trade? Kephalus, he understood, was attached to the local police division and attended only those cases that came under their auspices. If there was a fire involving loss of life at a warehouse or a fatality on the docks, an explosion in the engine room, a suicide or some poor brute mangled in the machinery of the saw mills, they sent for him. By the sound of it he was more undertaker than healer. Adolf would have been morbidly interested in the conversation but for the fact that he was excluded from it.

  Just then the doctor, who was in the middle of a particularly lurid account of a scalded stoker whose skin had peeled away from his body in layers like an over-ripe onion, turned to him and said: ‘I believe there is a difficulty concerning your papers. They are made out in the wrong name. We will have to find you new ones.’

  Before Adolf could confirm or deny that he had any such problem he was asked if he would take a glass of wine.

  He was on the point of accepting when Meyer said: ‘He doesn’t drink, but like you he has a sweet tooth. One of your sugary cakes would be most appreciated.’

  ‘Excellent,’ cried Kephalus, and he bounded from the room, trailing smoke.

  ‘A remarkable man,’ burst out Meyer, ‘isn’t he?’

  ‘Very,’ said Adolf.

  ‘Do not,’ warned Meyer, ‘talk to him of racial struggles or contaminated blood. He is not as tolerant as I am, nor as small. He has a fist like a sledge-hammer.’

  Adolf made no reply. On one occasion when living at the Männerheim he had become involved in a political discussion with two transport workers. They were sitting in the cellar kitchen, having just finished their evening meal, and he was preparing his at the stove. During the ensuing argument – left versus right, Darwinism, the unification of Germany – it emerged that his two opponents belonged to a labour organisation formed by the Social Democrats. He had promptly called them lunatics. Rising united from the table they flung his fried egg into the banked-up snow outside the window and thumped him mercilessly. He was left lying on the greasy floor with his lip split and his nose bleeding. He had still managed, through a bubble of blood, to repeat that they were lunatics. Did Meyer imagine he couldn’t take care of himself?

  He stared impassively out of the window at a yard only slightly less dingy than the room he was occupying. He began to wonder if perhaps Meyer wasn’t deeply frivolous. How else could he tolerate such totally unrewarding characters as Mary O’Leary and Alois and the unspeakable Dr Kephalus? Every evening he met Alois and had a drink with him, including those nights they were both employed in the same hotel. On Sundays, after eating his dinner in her company Meyer promenaded along the Boulevard with the hairy Mary O’Leary or took a ride on the ferry with her to Seacombe. He didn’t seem to notice her tatty bonnet or those men’s boots she wore under her torn and wretched petticoats. He never alluded to her moustache. And now it was painfully obvious that Meyer actually preferred to talk of first-degree burns or the effect on a human body of a ton of grain dropped from a height, rather than ponder the more subtle impression made by art and philosophy and music. He too was a lunatic.

  Kephalus returned and set down on the table a chipped plate on which wobbled three custard tarts.

  ‘How kind,’ murmured Meyer, seeing that Adolf’s mouth was clamped tight. The doctor went to the bookcase and took from the top shelf a half-empty bottle and two glasses.

  ‘My mother,’ said Adolf, ‘died of cancer. She was treated with iodoform. At the end she couldn’t swallow.’

  ‘Iodoform,’ Kephalus told him, ‘has fallen into disrepute. At the time it was one of the wonders of medicine. Unfortunately it had such side effects as you mention.’

  Adolf was scandalised at this casual admission of malpractice. He was more than ever convinced that physicians were an ignorant aristocracy kept afloat by witchcraft and the pathetic need of relations to witness miracles. ‘She thought it was helping her,’ he said accusingly.
/>   ‘Well then,’ reasoned Kephalus, ‘it probably did. I well remember attending a man on the deck of a ship who had been eating a hunk of bread when a hawser snapped. It sliced through him like a wire through cheese. He was severed practically in half. With his dying breath he asked me to give him something to make him better. In the circumstances a pellet of bread was as good as anything else. He expired thirty seconds later with a look of unutterable relief in his eyes. Eat your cake.’

  Adolf stared at the creamy surface of the custard tart dusted with cinnamon and saw the speckled skin of his mother’s constricted throat. He feared he was going to be sick.

  ‘Death is everywhere,’ said Kephalus. ‘We are essentially fragile. We don’t have to wait for the sword or some other equally sensational weapon to strike us down. One may go just as easily with the measles or diphtheria, meningitis, colic, influenza or mere hunger. There are so many ways of dying it’s astonishing any of us choose old age.’

  ‘May I open the window?’ interrupted Adolf.

  He was told it was impossible, the sash-cords having long since rotted away.

  ‘None of us,’ continued the doctor, loping about the room in his great dusty boots, ‘fully appreciates how easily we can be snuffed out. In my work I see such things that would make us live each day as though it were the last.’

  ‘True, true,’ agreed Meyer. Cheerfully he raised his glass and drank.

  ‘Imagine,’ proposed the doctor, fixing Adolf with his terrible eyes, ‘a young girl from Scotland and a big buck nigger from the Cameroons.’ He approached the table and locked his stubby thumbs together an inch from Adolf’s face. ‘It’s a dark night and she’s teetering along a little the worse for drink beneath the arches of the Overhead Railway. She’s humming to herself. For once she’s got a few coppers in her purse and a bed to go to. She doesn’t see him because he’s the Prince of Darkness, but he sees her.’

  He paused. Meyer’s breathing was audible.

  Suddenly the doctor shouted: ‘Straight up her nostrils!’ And making a noise with his mouth like a piece of silk being ripped asunder he wrenched his thumbs apart.

  Having removed the stud from the collar of Adolf’s brown shirt, Kephalus picked him up bodily and carried him down the hall. He opened the front door and sat him on the top step. A dog ran from across the road and trotted backwards and forwards on the pavement, sniffing. ‘You don’t breathe properly,’ Kephalus said, and he forced Adolf’s head down between his knees and held it there with one finger while he blew a cloud of smoke at the dog.

  13

  At first Alois didn’t notice that Adolf had taken to the couch again. He thought he was sleeping late and retiring early. He discovered the truth when he returned in the middle of the day to collect some samples he needed. Bridget was at the table giving the baby his dinner. He asked her if Adolf was ill.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he’s not ill.’

  ‘Is he eating?’

  ‘Like a horse,’ she said. It was only because she cooked him food all the time. Actually, she felt Adolf would be quite happy subsisting on a diet of jam butties.

  ‘How long has he been like this?’

  ‘Three days,’ she replied truthfully. She understood his point of view. It wasn’t fair Adolf lying in state, living off the fat of the land, so to speak, while Alois spent his waking hours wearing out his shoe leather in an attempt to better himself.

  Gripping the sleeper roughly by the shoulder, Alois rolled him off the couch and on to the floor. ‘I’m not angry,’ he shouted, the little veins purple in his cheeks. ‘I’ve no objection to a man lounging about till Kingdom Come if he pleases, so long as it’s in his own house and at his own expense. You can pack your bags and go.’

  ‘Go,’ said Adolf. ‘Go where?’

  ‘What the hell is it to me,’ fumed Alois. ‘Back where you came from. Anywhere you like. You didn’t care where I was going all those years ago.’

  Adolf made no attempt to rise from his knees. He crouched there clasping and unclasping his hands like a penitent schoolboy. In the time between dreams and hitting the floor his face had lost its look of stupor and acquired a haunted expression.

  ‘You’re welcome to the blankets,’ cried Alois, picking them off the carpet and throwing them at him. He strode to the hearth and seized hold of the length of bent piping. ‘And you can take this bloody work of art with you.’

  He hurled the metal with all his strength towards the couch. It skimmed the air a fraction above Adolf’s head and struck the wall. Rebounding, it clattered harmlessly to the floor. Alois ran into the adjoining room and slammed the door behind him. The baby, chuckling, waved its fists.

  ‘He might have brained you,’ said Bridget, looking severely at Adolf. She left darling Pat in his chair and followed her husband into the bedroom.

  ‘God forgive me,’ whispered Alois. ‘I could have been up on a murder charge.’

  ‘You missed,’ she consoled him. ‘He’d try the patience of a saint.’

  ‘Once,’ he said, ‘when I needed real help he wrote and told me to go hang myself.’

  ‘He never,’ she cried. ‘You shouldn’t give him house room.’

  ‘It was signed in my stepmother’s name,’ he said. ‘But it was in his handwriting.’

  She couldn’t think how to comfort him. They had grown so far apart. She was ashamed of herself for feeling a little glow of pleasure at his misery.

  ‘I don’t know what to do for the best,’ Alois said forlornly. He was used to making iron decisions. There was nowhere Adolf could go. He hadn’t the price of a tram ticket. He prowled back and forth between the bed and the wardrobe.

  ‘Take off your hat,’ said Bridget. ‘You’re sweating cobs.’ She fetched a towel from the back of a chair and watched while he mopped his perspiring face.

  ‘Am I being unreasonable, Bridie?’ he asked.

  She grew flustered. He hadn’t called her by that name or sought her advice for a long time.

  She said loyally: ‘No, you’re not. You’re in the right of it entirely. He can’t live the rest of his life horizontal in our front room. He should go home or find himself employment.’

  ‘He hasn’t a home to go to. He’s blotted his copybook. Angela won’t have him.’

  ‘The cheek of him,’ she cried. ‘Loafing around … sponging off you.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ said Alois. ‘We can’t all be breadwinners. It’s not his fault if he hasn’t found what he’s good at. He was always jumping from one thing to another … drawing, reading, studying maps. When he wasn’t doing that he was playing cowboys and Indians. Why, on the day of his confirmation he came back from the cathedral and without bothering to change his clothes he was off with his friends and he didn’t come home until nightfall. Aunt Johanna had come and my cousins. We never saw him, but you could hear him for miles around, whooping.’

  ‘Whooping!’ said Bridget.

  ‘On the war-path in the orchard.’

  ‘On such a day,’ said Bridget, shocked. Suddenly she saw that Alois was smiling, standing there with his hat pushed to the back of his head and the towel still in his hand. ‘What’s up with you?’ she asked.

  ‘Did you hear me telling him to pack his bags? If he had any, he wouldn’t have anything to put in them.’

  Bridget refused to see the humour in it. People had no business travelling the world unequipped. Though she’d been relieved to see the back of Adolf when first he had gone out every day, she was riddled with envy for the company he kept. She hadn’t set eyes on Meyer for weeks. Her apparent hostility towards the young man had a contrary effect on Alois. A moment ago he’d been prepared to tip Adolf down the stairs. Now he perched himself on the side of the bed and thought carefully what he should do. He could of course use some of his hard-earned savings and buy Adolf a return ticket to Vienna, but that was doing no more than sweeping the problem under the carpet. Adolf had already squandered a fortune. To pretend that he’d ever been a penniless stud
ent was sheer humbug. At one time his income must have amounted to fifty crowns a month, what with the inheritance from his father and his mother’s legacy, not to mention the considerable sum left to him by his aunt, Johanna Polzl. No sacrifice was involved when he relinquished his orphan’s pension in favour of Angela. God knows where the money had gone. He wasn’t a drinking man or a gambler, nor did he seem to bother with women. By the cut of him he certainly hadn’t spent any of it on clothes. Definitely Adolf needed guidance. It shouldn’t prove too difficult to handle him – though prone to tantrums he was easily intimidated. He was also lazy, self-opinionated, and unlikely to win prizes for his sense of humour. Only the other week while eating a hearty supper he announced he’d starve in the gutter rather than join in the stampede for wealth and power. No doubt about it, washing a few dishes would do him the world of good. He stood, his mind made up, and told Bridget: ‘I shall try to get him a position at the Adelphi. It’s nearly Christmas and with the banquets and parties they’ll need extra labour in the kitchens.’

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ exclaimed Bridget, appalled. ‘You’ll lose your place for recommending the likes of him.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Stay here while I have a private word.’

  Adolf was sitting dejectedly on the couch, clutching his blankets. He and darling Pat were eyeing one another unhappily across the carpet, each convinced that they had been left alone for ever.

  Alois sat too. ‘It’s not good for a young man to do nothing,’ he began. ‘The mind goes dull. A man needs to work.’

  ‘I read,’ protested Adolf. ‘I read all the time.’

  ‘Reading is a luxury,’ said Alois, determined at all costs to remain calm. ‘You don’t see me with my nose in a book. Life is more than a game. It isn’t all cowboys and Indians. A man has responsibilities.’

  Adolf made no reply. Obviously, he thought, Alois had never forgotten the time he had been struck in the calf by a wooden arrow aimed from the cemetery wall. He hadn’t even bled.