by Tim Parks
Cleaver walked down into the woods to take possession of his new home. Rosenkranzhof, he muttered. Hoist with his own petard, etc. Needless to say, Under His Shadow had made hay of the great man’s resistance to his children’s desire for pets. My father was obsessed and oppressed, his elder son had written – first it had been hamsters – by the thought that a human being’s relationship with an animal is always and exclusively one of domination. Then rabbits, budgies, goldfish. It pained him to think of us having dumb creatures – finally dogs – under our absolute power. I don’t even care if that’s true or not, Cleaver decided, resigning himself to the wet creature trotting beside him. He thought it was bad for us and bad for them, his elder son had written, because he himself could think of relationships in no other terms than those of power, competition, domination, and an animal, he said, was not a worthy opponent. It was a massacre.
How bloody right I was! Cleaver stopped and rested the milk can on a boulder. The woods around him dripped and whispered. He spied a mushroom. What was the publication of Under His Shadow after all, if not a devastating assertion of the young author’s newly discovered power, an attempt to deliver his father a lethal blow? I even die at the end of the damn thing, for Christ’s sake! More of a massacre than that! My father simply didn’t see, his elder son had claimed, that it might be enriching to be intimate with other forms of life. Blah blah blah. The Trennerhof dog sat and waggled his rump in the earth and whined. Hit back, Amanda insisted. Take him to court, if you’re so angry. First she confided all kinds of intimate details to the boy, then told Cleaver to hit back when he published them. Opening the newspapers, his elder son had recounted, my parents were always eager to see how so and so would hit back in response to such and such an accusation. That was the fun of the media for them. The news was an ongoing war, which kept all the antagonists, winners and losers alike, constantly in the public eye. Only conflict is newsworthy. Every relationship is a power struggle. When my parents weren’t fighting each other, it was because they had found a common enemy.
You, Cleaver thought, you little runt. He picked up the can and decided to drink off some milk, before it got spilled anyway. There was a stone in his boot. I am now entirely, completely and utterly on my own, he reminded himself once again. How creamy it was! I am not obliged to think about my son’s autobiographical novel. I do not have to choose my weapon. I won’t even know, he told himself, if they give him the Booker or not. As soon as he started walking again, the dog padded along behind. Cleaver rounded on it: What’s your name?
It was definitely chillier down here in the gloom among the trees. On the ground the dead pine needles squelched and the frequent rocky outcrops were slimy with lichens, rust-coloured and green. Wie heisst du? he tried. The stone could wait till he was back at the house. The dog let his tongue hang out. His eyes are pleading. Then for the first time it occurred to Cleaver that it was the interview with the President of the United States that had stopped him from hitting back at his son. Sitting stiff with fury in the taxi on the way to the studios, he had seen the painful conflict that lay ahead. An abyss opened before him. He would go to a lawyer. Amanda knew lots of lawyers. He would file a suit against his son. My eldest son. He would have the book withdrawn. Then the knives would be out in earnest. Then blood would flow and more blood. Mr President, Cleaver had asked – he had done none of the homework one normally does for such an interview – in your reactions to terrorism, your celebrated determination to meet violence with violence, is it possible, do you think, that you allowed yourself, and with you the American people, indeed the whole Western world, to be trapped into a cycle of escalating antagonism, strike and counterstrike, that can never produce a winner? If we hadn’t hit back, the President retorted smoothly, we would certainly have been the losers. Cleaver stumbled on a loose stone. A little more milk splashed. Again the dog was there with his pink tongue. Recovering, Cleaver listened to the silence of the gorge. Is that a stream in the distance? The house, he had noticed, had water channelled from somewhere along yards of primitive wooden conduits. Utterly alone, he whispered. He felt vaguely anxious, as if at any moment he might be caught trespassing, somebody might be watching. With time these thoughts will lose their urgency, he decided. The dog barked and made as though to tug at his feet. He knows where we’re going.
On reaching Rosenkranzhof, and it was towards two in the afternoon now, Cleaver noticed that the Haflinger had crapped barely a yard from his front door. Wasn’t that supposed to bring good luck? The heavy rain had made the shit soggy. He looked over his property, the grey stone of the ground floor, the splintery black timber above, the grim trophy-like decoration of bleached and twisted branches. Why had they built it here, smothered in trees, on this cramped ledge, not quite at the top of the gorge? Looking closely, he saw there was a layer of moss between each strip of planking. No wonder it smelt bad. Does the track go on from here? he wondered. I must explore. He must change his damp clothes. His crotch is sore. This is your remote habitation, he told himself. You’ve got this far. The roof tiles were also wooden, warped. It was quite an achievement, he decided. The dog was pawing at the door. Perhaps he had been the old Nazi’s dog. Now all you have to do is metamorphose.
VI
CLEAVER WAS PLEASED with his progress over the first hour or so. He changed his clothes, sorted out the groceries, the little miscellany of tools and equipment, put everything away in drawers and cupboards and shelves. The dog curled up on a mat that he clearly knew of old. There were four rooms in all. The front door opened directly into a kitchen, with stove, table and sink. Cutlery and crockery were old and muddled, but someone had rinsed them. They were grey, but not dirty. The walls were all roughly timber-clad. And someone had removed all the clutter and cobwebs he had seen on his first visit. Frau Stolberg, he imagined. Or the younger woman. Or the fat girl. Jürgen, on the other hand, would have removed the rockfall from the track.
Then you went down a step into the main room which had two shapeless black armchairs, a stone floor and a fireplace with threadbare hearthrug that the dog had claimed. It’s only dark in here, Cleaver assured himself, because the windows are filthy and outside there are branches pressing against the panes. The owners had done nothing to rectify this, but then they had hardly had much time. There was a large stuffed bird above the mantlepiece. Could it be an eagle? It wasn’t the town-dressed woman did the cleaning, Cleaver told himself, or she wouldn’t have spoken as she had about his coming to live here. Frau Stolberg, perhaps, had tried to keep the business of my renting the house to herself. Open everything up, he proposed, on a bright clear day and that smell of damp upholstery will go. For lunch, he cut a piece of sausage and pressed it between two thin slices of Vollkornbrot. When the dog begged, he ignored it. Unfed, it would go back to Trennerhof. The irony, Cleaver smiled, was that when we did finally get a dog, because I always caved in in the end, who was it wound up taking the damn thing for walks? His son hadn’t mentioned this. The great Harold Cleaver, more often than not. Taking the dog out, he had discovered, offered an opportunity to make the kind of phone call you couldn’t feel easy about making at home. I don’t think Amanda took the creature walkies even once.
Against the far wall of the main room, a rough wooden stairway led to the upper floor, but under the stairs was another door with a bolt. A deep cubbyhole had been hewn from the rock face against which the back of the house was resting. It was cold. Waiting for his eyes to adjust, Cleaver began to make out lines of unlabelled bottles under thick dust, then a keg, a sickle, an axe, a spade, a saw. They hadn’t cleaned in here. There were other tools. It was the fat girl who cleaned, Cleaver thought, under the supervision of Frau Stolberg, while the town-dressed woman sat in the parlour in Trennerhof with her decomposing grandmother. Oma, she had called her. But I completely misunderstood the Schleiermacher ménage, he remembered. The big hooks emerging from cobwebs on the ceiling must be for hams and sausages. Or even game perhaps. The spade would be useful for removing
the shit. He imagined a hare hung by its hind legs. With a dog I might learn to hunt. But he hadn’t come here to ape the locals. It was not a question of going native, of adopting new habits to replace the old. Quite the contrary. I want no habits at all.
Then Cleaver tackled the stairs. The wood creaked. There was a faint chuckle of running water. It’s little more than a ladder, he thought. He had done no more than poke his head up here on his first visit. One of the characteristics everybody noticed about my father, his elder son had written, and that invariably irritated or amused, depending on how vulnerable you felt, was the way he loved to give the impression of having understood from a conversation more, far more, than you had intended to tell him. Cleaver pushed his head into a small, dusty loft bedroom. You would say that you were having trouble preparing such and such an exam, you couldn’t sleep, and he would say, Ah, re-eally? as if he had seen through and behind this fact, this symptom rather, to some tormented psychological scenario that could only get worse, the sort of thing he might make a documentary about, if only he could tear himself away from a thousand other projects. There was a single wood-framed bed against the wall to the left of the stairs, a small, smeared window opposite, almost entirely obscured by pine fronds. You would tell him a girlfriend had cancelled a holiday because she’d been taken ill, and at once you could see, from his knowing grey eyes, from a sudden narrowing of the pupils, that he had deduced that she was phobic, she had made herself ill to avoid taking this step toward a greater intimacy with you.
Carefully, Cleaver undid the catch of the window and tugged. After a little resistance, the frame swung toward him, letting in a world of damp air and pine resin. He put his nose over the sill. The offending trees rose from the steep plunge of the gorge beyond the handkerchief of flat ground on which the house stood. In short, his elder son had written, my father knew more and more profoundly about you and your friends than you ever would yourself. Leaning further out of the window to assess the feasibility of cutting the things down, Cleaver remembered the incident of his son’s girlfriend. I was right in the end. The boy was wasting his energy. Every time the two of them were about to move in together, the girl – she was certainly pretty – would contrive to have some kind of strange ailment that obliged her to return to her mother. You don’t go to bed with scores of the creatures, Cleaver said out loud, without acquiring a certain familiarity with the terrain. Then, trying the door to the small room above the kitchen, he discovered it was locked.
Cleaver looked around for a key. The door had been open when he poked his head up the stairs on the first visit. It was an old, rusty keyhole. This bedroom is remarkably bare, he realised. Not a thing had been left. He remembered a clutter of photographs, ornaments, clothes, boots. There had been a military cap on a nail. Now, on the same nail, there was a crucifix. So in a way every room becomes the same room, he thought. Or even a church. Then he guessed they must have stored all the old man’s stuff in the small upstairs room and locked it up. Rather than cleaning the place, they had been removing the evidence, and preserving it too. Was it written in the contract he’d signed that he did not have the use of this room? The end result, his elder son had written, was that whenever you spoke to my father about anything personal, you came away feeling that there were dark forces at work in your life, forces you hadn’t even dreamt of. But having those secrets unlocked, or perhaps only invented for you, didn’t make things any easier. On the contrary, you felt more vulnerable than before. His documentary on anorexia, based no doubt on the experiences of some mistress or other, won an award for its “perception” and “uncompromising realism”; but the truth was that my father just enjoyed the melodrama of presenting other people’s predicaments as fascinating and hopeless.
Maeve.
Cleaver hurried down the stairs rather faster than was wise. One plank in particular protested loudly. He collapsed in an armchair and stared at Olga in the other. She stood on the black cushion in her Tyrolese red and white. You plan to be here for months, he reminded himself. Maybe years. It was as though the doll were intent on something just behind his right ear. There will be hundreds of these days. She was watching a television perhaps. Or the stuffed bird. Its wings were outspread in dust. So what do you think of the place, so far, Olga? he asked warmly. For a moment, he couldn’t help thinking of some fatuous reality show: Cleaver Outcast. You behave as though you’re alone, he imagined, but really there is a camera crew all around. The director suggests the doll to provide a little dialogue. Otherwise I’d have to talk to myself. Armchairs could be comfier, couldn’t they? Cleaver remarked. A little psychodrama. Reality Show is a contradiction in terms, of course. Though not as mendacious as Documentary.
The doll stared glassily, but on hearing Cleaver’s voice, the old dog opened one eye. The tail wagged slowly, once, thumping on the rug, and the eye closed again. We bought the bloody dog, in the end, Cleaver remembered – actually rather a beautiful dog – because, after years of successful resistance, Angela made a huge effort to convince me. She had begged, pleaded, promised: It will sit at my feet and help me study, she told him. He can hear his daughter’s voice, see her wry smile. She must have been sixteen at the time. Her hitherto brilliant schoolwork had taken a sudden turn for the worse. She was blooming. Cleaver was in love with her. You would do anything for Angela, Amanda told him when the announcement was made: We are getting a dog, folks. Why didn’t his son’s stupid book mention that it was Angela’s dog? Why do I feel so incredibly tense? Cleaver demanded of himself. You’re alone now. You can relax. Instead, it was as if something extremely unpleasant were about to happen, something that couldn’t be put off. Angela’s belongings, Cleaver remembered, had been preserved in her old room for years, though no one had ever locked the door. Is there something they don’t want me to see? he said out loud. Damn!
Cleaver jumped up, went back to the filthy stone cubbyhole below the stairs, picked up the axe, hurried out of the house and round to the gorge side. There was barely a foot of slippery ground here between the damp wall of the house and the precipitous slope. The first thing I should have done was light a fire, he told himself, to dry the place, to make it mine, to get rid of that musty smell. But now, sitting down on a rock, he looked for a foothold among the soaking ferns and slim trunks and boulders atop the gorge. Another pair of trousers would get wet.
Stumbling, grabbing at a branch, he found a good foothold, and at once swung the axe to attack the offending pines. There were at least three that would have to go. This place needs some fucking light, he shouted. He hadn’t bothered to assess the problem from a technical point of view. He was balancing awkwardly a couple of yards below the level of the house. When did I ever use an axe before? The blade sank so deeply into the slim trunk that he had to fight to pull it out. This job could easily have been left till tomorrow, or next week for that matter. You haven’t even taken your bedding upstairs. But he wanted to do it now. He wanted to destroy those trees. Being alone hasn’t calmed me down at all, he realised. Panting, he glanced back over his shoulder. The ground dropped away into the gorge beneath him. Fortunately there are trees and boulders to break a fall. His feet were well planted. Okay, one, he said. I’ll cut down one tree. Cleaver swung the axe again. At least one. That way I’ll have achieved something. I’ll have made my mark.
Bastard! Cleaver was surprised both by his own vigour and the stout resistance of this apparently meagre pine. The weapon was heavy, it swung wildly. Shit. He is sweating now. I’ve had bigger Christmas trees than this, he protested. He knew he had lost his cool. He didn’t want to know why. Something is threatening. Damn you, damn you, damn you! He slipped. He hit furiously. At last there was a loud crack. The slim tree spun and fell sideways onto the wall just beside the kitchen window. At once, the dog was barking. That woke the fucker up. The animal came bounding to the corner of the house and howled, his front paws just over the edge of the drop. Cleaver stood breathing heavily and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his shirt.
The dog they had got – what was he called? – always howled when Angela played the piano. He was Angela’s dog in the end. Ivan. A handsome Labrador. His son had mentioned none of this. He didn’t mention Angela’s remarkable piano playing. Only the piercing and tattoos, the joints and pills; all much exaggerated, as if she were some kind of terminal dropout. He hadn’t mentioned that his twin sister was a musical genius. If anyone in this house produces a masterpiece, Cleaver had started to say when they teased him, it will be Angela. Inevitably, a girl who played keyboards in a band experimented with a pill or two. Quite probably Armin does too. Haven’t I, in my time? Not because of her parents’ problems, for Christ’s sake. Frau Schleiermacher seemed to be an excellent mother. My son was jealous, Cleaver realised. Why hadn’t this occurred to him before? Jealous of my relationship with his sister. Trying to get at the next tree, he banged his ankle. Or hers with me. He slipped, had to grab at a trunk below, scraped his knuckles. Everybody was clamouring for my attention. The dog barked. Shut up! And for Angela’s. Cleaver tensed his jaw and took a mighty swing. Why didn’t he mention any of this? He created an image, Cleaver announced out loud, of Angela that would show me in the worst possible light, a version that would make me responsible almost for her death. Angela was a genius! Cleaver screamed. He struck the tree again. It was thicker than the other. The piano still has pride of place in the sitting room where the Sunday papers are read. It’s there now, at this very moment. Why didn’t he mention Angela playing the piano while we read the papers? You betrayed the memory of your twin to get at me, you creep! To his surprise, the tree came crashing down. It must have been rotten. Cleaver had to scramble to one side as the heavy thing fell toward him. There was a terrific cracking sound. The dog was going wild. Alex! Cleaver yelled. I shall call you Alex. Immediately, the fat man was pulling himself up the slope on his hands and knees. The phone! Where did I leave the phone?