I crossed a large and handsome stone street. The houses were getting taller and taller, and looked as though giant children had been playing a game with giant building blocks, and as if all the buildings would fall down if one more block was put on top of them.
I often played like that myself earlier, when I used to have three sets of building blocks. I always enjoyed building. But once everything had fallen down, I had to tidy it all away. I would never be able to tidy New York away if it collapsed, I was already far too tired.
I saw some wonderful flower shops, and some of the flowers looked almost like lilacs – maybe they were lilacs. Unfortunately I couldn’t smell them through the plate-glass windows. But women walked past me with wafts of scent, and I quickly did some magic: I looked at all the lilac-like flowers in the shop window and at the same time I smelled what the women wafted at me – and suddenly I had lilac and May and my mother. I kissed the window, and so I kissed her.
As I did, I remembered the nasty chewing gum that was still in my mouth. I took it out and stuck it on the window. Unfortunately I couldn’t remember where I was staying, I barely knew my name. That’s why I couldn’t stop a car and ask the driver to take me home. I had done that kind of thing before.
I wanted to be a bird made out of lilac, and I became one and fluttered between the giant stone houses. My feathers were lilac, and I sang and twittered little birdsongs. It was so pretty to listen to, I sang louder and louder. All at once a policeman grabbed me. He completely failed to understand that I was a fluttering songbird. He didn’t even like my singing. But it hadn’t been me singing; it was the lilac bird singing and wafting scent.
I really wasn’t myself at the moment the policeman picked me up, but later on I was able to describe my father and our hotel to him. He led me by the hand, and was quite nice to me. As we happened to be passing it, he pointed out the Empire State Building to me, which is the tallest building in New York. We stood at the foot of it, and looked up, and I couldn’t even see the top. Afterwards I went up there once, and then I could see everything. Now I understand why people are always talking about ‘making it to the top’ – you can see so much more from up there.
And the policeman duly asked me: ‘How do you like America?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and before I fell asleep, he was carrying me again. And he kindly warned me not to sing again while I was in New York.
I could explain to him that I wasn’t singing for money, and that it wasn’t my fault that it sounded so horrible. But how could I explain to him that someone other than myself had been doing the singing? Why did I like it so much? And why did everyone else think it was horrible? Now I’m never going to sing again.
I was dropped off in the hotel – my father wasn’t back yet. I was put in the lift, and all the men took off their hats for me. The hotel management let me into our room with a little star-shaped key. On the bed, which was still its daytime-sofa self, were my torn socks – I lay down on them and fell asleep, because the holey socks were proof that this was where I belonged.
I didn’t see much of my father in New York. He was running around all over the place, much more than any American. He was trying to pull off deals that wouldn’t be pulled off. Once, he was paid some money by a little man called Mr Lief, who was an agent.
But what good was that? My father gave me his cents, so I could play on the slot machines, on those thousands and thousands of amazing slot machines that America has. And the dollars my father gave to poor emigrants, some of whom were so poor that they even had a use for ten dollars.
I sometimes think my father wouldn’t be rich even if he was a millionaire, but then again he isn’t poor even when he hasn’t got a cent to his name. He once said: money runs away from young men, pretty women run away from old men, and some men live to experience both – in which case either they kill themselves, or they become wise and happy. What they’re left with are children and dogs.
In his old car, my father drove himself and me through America. In America only rich people take trains, the poor drive everywhere.
There were no deals to be made in New York, and we were in desperate difficulties. The American publisher took us to lunch once at the Rockefeller Center, and then he lost interest in us and went away. The other people we could have turned to went fishing.
My father would greet each day by vomiting in the sink; he usually does that when times are especially exciting. When it’s like that, I know better than to ask any questions.
Thank God my father remembered a boyhood friend of his who had emigrated. That is, he’d never really liked him when he was a boy, because he was so stupid. But apparently the stupidity has abated, slightly.
This man lived in Virginia, a long way away, where he owns a gentlemen’s outfitters, which is like a clothes shop, only better. He was making a lot of money. My father called him at the hotel’s expense. The telephone call gave the man the impression that we were hugely wealthy, and he invited us to his cottage in Virginia Beach.
I cried because I had no idea how we were going to get back to Europe and my mother. In her letters she was mentioning the war again. In Virginia they mentioned the war a lot too, but it wasn’t one that might be coming, but one they’d had fifty or a hundred or two hundred years before, called the Civil War.
They didn’t have too much idea about Europe. They thought things like Denmark was a French port, and Marseilles a Spanish river. But then we hardly know anything about America. I went up to the top of the Empire State Building once, and looked over the vast expanse of New York as far as the sea. And I thought that was it, that was all of America. But really it was just beginning.
My father told his boyhood friend something about money transfers from Europe being late. The only currency for which the Americans don’t have contempt are English pounds. And that’s why my father was careful to mention them specifically. After that his boyhood friend sent him some dollars. That was so we could pay for the hotel.
We couldn’t afford the train, but then we had our old car. By the time we left New York, we’d been fined seven times, and had run over someone’s soda fountain. My father had had enough of the police, and I think the police had had enough of him too. As soon as we were out of the city, we were unmolested.
We had our boat tickets back to Europe, but our ship wasn’t due to leave for another three weeks, and my father wanted to see his publisher again, and wait for the decision on a film script first. So we needed somewhere to stay till then. We drove for three days. At night we slept either in the car, or in the open air; once was by the banks of the Delaware, which is so huge I don’t think it should qualify as a river at all.
After that, we saw more rivers as big, including some with beautiful, wild, floating islands in them. Everything in America is so gigantically huge that the whole of Europe felt to me like my doll’s kitchen. You don’t notice the size of the houses so much, because they’re built miles away from each other, surrounded by gardens and parks, and anyway the whole country is so enormous.
Everything is there. The rivers are as wide as seas, the forests are as wild and endless as the forests in Indian stories, and the highways go on for ever. The heat is so baking hot, your feet burn through the thin soles of your shoes. If it rains, a waterfall comes down from the sky, the cars turn into motorboats, and you can happily drown in the street. One time in Norfolk, Virginia, I swam from one side of the road to the other, with three Negro children.
When I was in Ostende, I found a shell as big as a matchbox, and kept it because I thought it was such a freak. On the beach in Virginia I found shells as big as my father’s shoes. I was terribly excited. At first I couldn’t believe it, and thought the Americans must have manufactured those giant shells and left them for publicity. But they were real seashells all right. By the way, there are absolutely no shells in Nice and in Bordighera. Only those white stones.
If we had driven like the wind, we could have got to my father’s boyhood friend in Vir
ginia Beach in a single day. We did drive like the wind, actually, only a lot of the time we were going the wrong way. Sometimes the car just stopped, because there was something wrong with it. Then we couldn’t do anything, but just sat there and waited for another car to come and help.
My father doesn’t have the first idea of how a car works. He can’t learn either, he can’t even take apart and fix a fountain pen. Only watches he loves repairing. He hurls himself at any watch within reach, even though my mother has officially banned him. His repairs have caused a lot of irritation and expense, because afterwards the watches are always so well and truly broken that no one can fix them.
Sometimes we puttered along from gas station to gas station. People were always terribly nice to us, only neither of us wanted to drink the American national beverage, which is a sort of brown fizzy lemonade that tastes of liquid mothballs. Americans drink it nonstop. In fact my father doesn’t like lemonade, period, and that’s what made it difficult for him in Virginia.
Once we’d rendezvoused with Boyhood Friend in Norfolk and driven him to Virginia Beach, we went to a restaurant with him, feeling tired but happy. We felt we were safe at last.
We were so pleased to have found the man. We almost loved him because we’d have been lost without him, and because it was really him. That’s why we hardly listened to what he was saying, and didn’t check to see what he looked like. If we hadn’t felt so happy, we might have just gone to sleep.
We’d raced all over America for three days, and felt we no longer had any hope of finding New York or Europe or Virginia and Boyhood Friend again. I didn’t even care that he had long hairs growing out of his nose, and that he was like a little worm that crept along instead of walking.
He was telling us he had won a prestigious position among real Americans. We didn’t even listen to him. We kissed him. I did too. At the same time my father wanted to kiss the waitress out of sheer delight, and order a round of whiskeys to have a cosy chat and celebrate their seeing each other again after so many years, and meanwhile I was to eat – never mind what, just eat.
It was true, we hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for days, and my father got so thirsty sometimes he wished he could drink the last of our petrol from the tank.
And then everything turned out to be impossible. First, my father was prevented from kissing the waitress. Then Boyhood Friend told him he couldn’t get whiskey because the serving of alcoholic beverages was illegal in the state of Virginia.
‘I see,’ said my father, and grew pale, ‘so that’s what I get in the Land of the Free, that’s where you invited me to!’ After that, he didn’t want to speak any more.
My father calmed down a little when Boyhood Friend told him you could get wine and beer in some joints on Virginia Beach – Californian wine. My father tried some of that Californian wine later, and hated it so much, he said he’d rather drink hair oil. But then every place also has somewhere where they sell alcohol, called an ABC.* And my father was consoled when he heard that we’d be staying very near one of those in Virginia Beach.
My father told Boyhood Friend about the cocktails in New York; he had sampled every single one, and that had aged him by years, and comprehensively poisoned his system: ‘Every morning I fought for my life in the bathroom. And the little girl can confirm that.’
Then Boyhood Friend wanted to reminisce with my father about their shared boyhood – only for them each to tell completely different stories, whereupon it emerged that they had got each other mixed up, and they hadn’t gone to the same school at all, and in fact had never met before. My father cried that he was now twice as glad to meet Boyhood Friend, and he laughed and shouted excitedly. In time, he even managed to produce a kind of retrospective association with Boyhood Friend. After a while, they both thought they had been boyhood friends after all.
Boyhood Friend told us there was a German recording in this restaurant that he often asked to hear. He suggested my father listen to that, in lieu of whiskey.
I ate a big plate of rice with shrimp, which are a kind of pink prawns, though they don’t taste of fish, they taste of nothing at all. If you put some in tomato sauce and shredded lettuce, you get a prawn cocktail, which my father ordered because of the name, but that turned out to be very unsatisfactory. He was feeling pretty tired and drained, but he kept trying to gee up Boyhood Friend, who didn’t even know yet that we had no money and weren’t going to get any from Europe.
Boyhood Friend was complaining about business being bad. My father said he couldn’t imagine such a thing in America, and was very supportive. Boyhood Friend envied my father for having turned into such a famous writer, and said he must have loads of money, and had a fascinating life. He was proud of my father, and had told all his friends about him coming, and even read one of his books. The book turned out not to be one by my father at all.
Then the gramophone record played, and Boyhood Friend swayed his head around and got rheumy eyes. A man was gently and sadly singing: ‘When I got home – there she was, the old sweetheart!’
At first my father looked a bit surprised, but then he said: ‘Nice, very nice. That’s a type of nostalgia I can understand, I myself can remember a female cloakroom attendant…’
‘Listen to it all,’ said Boyhood Friend. And the gramophone voice went on sorrowfully: ‘And mother smiled at my old sweetheart…’ After that everything was quiet.
‘Bewildering,’ said my father, ‘such a mixture of sentimentality and plain speaking. Extraordinary, old boy, I wouldn’t have expected such a thing in America – maybe it’s only possible in the South. Where was the record produced? Quite remarkable, a mother like that, when I think of my own – rather charming, though, of such a woman to smile at an old tart.’
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Boyhood Friend. ‘For Christ’s sake, not so loud! I know the people at the next table, and they’re here with their wives. I know one of them speaks German.’
‘Really very interesting,’ said my father. ‘There’s always more to learn, every country seems to harbour its own contradictions. All I ask of you is that you continue to point them out to me, my man. So, here in this respectable restaurant, they’re quite openly singing a song about an old tart, but to speak on such a subject is not permissible.’
‘What song are you talking about?’
‘Why, the one you just had played.’
‘What, the one about the sweetheart?’
‘Sweetheart?’ said my father. ‘Ah, a little mishearing, I must be exhausted. What word did you think the man sang, Kully?’
‘Tart.’
‘You see, old man – it’s all right, the girl has no idea what’s meant, anyway she’s dead on her feet. Shall we head off, old man, and see what sort of billet you’ve got in mind for us? I think it’s better, by the way, if you take care of our bills. I don’t think I’ve got the hang of this foreign money yet, and I don’t know how they tip here. But you mentioned an ABC store a while ago. I’d be keenly interested to see that – fascinating to me as a writer, of course. We might stop off on the way, what d’you say?’
Virginia Beach was beautiful, the beach itself was endlessly long and wide. There were little green lawns between the pretty little houses. We were staying in a cottage at the edge of a forest, which was also endlessly long and wide.
All the people were happy and tanned and ran around in just their swimming costumes. It got so hot, you almost couldn’t bear to move. Even my father lay there stiffly and silently for hours on end in the water next to Boyhood Friend.
But there was some astonishing wildlife on the beach too. Strange little black eyes popped out of holes in the sand. The beast they belonged to came out after them and whisked across the beach on long legs. Then it vanished into another hole, and I was never able to capture one. They look like a cross between giant spiders and crabs.
I would have liked to watch the animals digging their holes and seen whether they do it from inside or from outside. My fathe
r didn’t like the creatures. He was suspicious of them, and thought they only craftily used holes that other animals had dug.
Once I saw a rattlesnake in the forest, but I wasn’t allowed to go near it. I’m interested in snakes. The snake is a criminal, you see, and, as it says in the Bible, it was always up to mischief. By way of punishment it was told it had to creep on its belly all the days of its life. But I don’t think it had legs up to that point either. I’ve seen loads of pictures of Adam and Eve and the serpent, as they sometimes call it. Every snake I’ve seen looks identical before and after, and I’ve yet to see a single one that could run or fly.
Once I saw a big field full of flowering white camellias. The blossoms were bedded like chilly snow-white stars against the dark green leaves; they were the whitest flowers I’ve ever seen. In Europe they cost a fortune, and here they just come out of the ground for nothing. There were also amazing water lilies that kids sold or gave away and trampled on.
Great and small tortoises swam in streams in the forest or pottered around on land. By the end I had seventeen and they stank up the cottage quite a bit. I observed exactly how much they had to eat, and I was never able to understand that ten times more stuff came out of them than had gone into them by way of food and water. It was as if it secretly multiplied in their stomachs.
Boyhood Friend partly got used to us, partly he was fed up with us because he wanted to get married. As long as we were in the cottage, there was nowhere for him to keep a woman.
If my mother had been able to see the house, she would have fainted with happiness. And all the houses were as nice as that one, especially the ones with electric refrigerators in their kitchens, where you could make ice all day long.
Every morning Toxy came, who was a lovely Negro girl, and we used to tidy up the house together and cook. Sometimes Toxy would forget to come, or else she’d got hold of some money and then she didn’t bother. Then things would get a bit untidy in the house, and Boyhood Friend was embarrassed if visitors came. He had his clothes store in Norfolk, and he drove there every morning and came back every night. It was half an hour’s drive. Just like everyone in Holland and Denmark has bicycles, everyone in America has cars; it’s nothing special at all. But also there are some people who are dirt poor, and they have absolutely nothing.
Child of All Nations Page 13