by Tim Parks
I stand by the front seat. There’s the huge curved windscreen, spattered with spray from the road, but gorgeously clear, clearer somehow than the air it pushes before it, or giving a greater illusion of clarity. And here, standing up front while we overtake a truck from Trieste carrying two great blocks of stone up to France in that constant sorting and resorting of things the race always seems to be involved in so that a million Chambersee Service Stations can be built all over the world and can all look exactly the same, I’m able to overhear Vikram wanting to know from the driver how much extra he would charge for taking us into central Strasbourg tonight and what’s the latest he’d be willing to pick us up on the way back, because having come all this way, Vikram laughs, appealing to that old male solidarity, we’re eager to see a bit of action, aren’t we, and if…
But I’m too agitated to hear this out. I butt in.
Vikram, about that meeting they want this evening …
When he turns to look at me, there’s surprise on his face, as there was surprise on his face when I suggested I might be the spy, and likewise that day I grabbed his clipboard and said, yes, of course I would come on his trip, of course I would lend my support.
You do realize it’s all been set up to dump you?
The driver is saying something and Vikram with his fingers in his sideburns laughs and says eleven’s okay but later would be better, and no, he won’t be leaving the dog in the coach. He takes the dog with him. Everywhere.
Dimitra’s in on it, I insist, and Colin and Georg and - and I said her name. But her surname. She’s in on it. They let you set up the trip because you’re the only one who believed in it, but now they’re going to vote that you’re not fit to represent us when we actually get there. Because you’re too unstable. And I said: I just want you to know that I’m on your side. I’ll vote for you.
Vikram fiddles in the pocket of his shabby tweed jacket. His dark eyes are bloodshot. You should have a swig of this, boyo, he says, producing the whisky flask. Because you look terrible.
I lifted the bottle to my mouth. I took an extremely long slug, and exactly as I did so a truck went past and the address of the company written on the container this truck was carrying was Stuttgart, Widenmayerstrasse, 45.
Part Two
Everything that partakes of life is, both
in the literal sense and the figurative
sense, unbalanced.
Cioran, The Fall into Time
CHAPTER SIX
I am lying on a narrow bed in an anonymous hotel room in the suburbs of Strasbourg, whether north south east or west I have no idea, nor interest, all I can see is that headlights pass at regular intervals stretching and flitting over wall and ceiling, their yellow glow softened by the synthetic mesh of the curtains, but with swift shards, as though of unpleasantly illuminating thoughts, where the material doesn’t pull to at the top. Attended by a slight rise and fall in the background swell of traffic noise, the intermittent brightness passes, a split second before the auditory peak, over a reproduction of something from Picasso’s blue period, a reproduction so flat in its printed melancholy, and so poorly framed in what must be extruded poly-something-or-other, it immediately makes you aware of all the other reproductions of famous paintings bought in bulk no doubt for all the other fifty or so rooms of this prefabricated, out-of-town hotel so suitable for accommodating large and unprosperous groups of coach travellers - pensioners, strikers, pilgrims - until the very subject, it occurs to me, of this reproduction hung between TV and bathroom in this room that could be any of fifty rooms in this hotel that could be any of a thousand hotels' has become, exquisitely and irretrievably, reproduction itself. This printed copy, I reflect, lying quietly in my bed, of a picture that by universal consent marks one of the supreme achievements of twentieth-century visual art is really none other than the epitome of reproduction, of reflected repeated printed-to-death sublimity, of modern myth turned motel chronicle, mass-produced and bought in bulk, as the meaning, I am now aware, of the lights that regularly slide over its textureless surface, and of the constantly rising and falling drone of traffic noise outside, must be monotony pure and simple, people following each other along the same tracks at the same speed at the same distance in the same vehicles through the night, through the day. And I realize, suddenly I know, that the couple embracing in this blue, but intermittently green landscape - beachscape - are not that intense blue couple the fabled Pablo Picasso painted, or sought to paint, or imagined he was painting, but another. They’re another. They look exactly the same, I tell myself, but they’re a different couple, both of whom are seeking to recapture, this must be the explanation, with no more than a stranger perhaps, or with a familiar person become a stranger, something they once felt elsewhere and with someone else, or with the same person before they became someone else. And watching them embrace there as the headlights pass again and again, each headlight different but each with the same effect, like the passing seconds, the passing hours, watching them locked in that embrace, the sea entirely flat behind them, you can see these two are at the thousandth attempt now, I mean at recapturing whatever it was, they’re years, if not decades on, so that it’s not really a conscious seeking they’re engaged in any more, they’re not expecting to recapture anything, but more a sort of mysterious imposition, this clasping, this rehearsal of intimacy, this placing of cheek against cheek, a blue and green ceremony they have forgotten the origins of, like the ceremonies Plutarch mentioned in Quaestiones Graecae and suggested were the most faithfully observed of all, the ones nobody could understand or explain to him any more.
The traffic is steady. The lights stretch and flit. It is past one 0’clock in this cheap Strasbourg hotel and for the last ten minutes, lying in just boxer shorts on this narrow bed staring at a poor reproduction of a sentimental painting by a lecherous Spaniard, I have been quietly laughing my head off.
I am laughing my head off because I am to be the Foreign Language Lectors’ Official Spokesman at the European Parliament tomorrow, and I am to address an assembly of the European Petitions Committee in English and another of Italian Euro MPs in Italian.
How it came about that these tasks were entrusted to me, how it came about that I, so incongruously, accepted this trust, and above all how it came about that I agreed to do so under her technical guidance and supervision, to the extent that I have already talked to her for several minutes about the exact composition and competence of the Petitions Committee and the political orientation of the dozen or so Italian Euro MPs who RSVPed our invitation to attend a meeting intended to voice our grievances to an audience who might see some small advantage in currying our favour — since EC nationals can now vote for Euro MPs in their adoptive countries - these are things that I am not sure I can fully explain, though they may have to do with the whisky I shared with Vikram Griffiths at the front of the coach as we drove across Switzerland, the exhilaration of finding a hand on my knee as the matter was discussed over dinner, my quotation, cruel but apropos, of Benjamin Constant, when Barnaby Hilson offered his own candidature as representative in a falsely self-deprecating attempt to resolve the deadlock between Dimitra and Vikram, and, last but by no means, as they say, least, my belated awareness, heightened perhaps by a disastrous phone conversation with my daughter, that I am once again on the edge of a tremendous psychological abyss, that the next two days, and in particular, the fourth of the fifth (though I have been unable to find the number 45 anywhere in my room), could prove fatal if I do not somehow break out of the suffocating isolation which brought me within an inch of striking the woman I love, I hate, in a crowded coach beneath the bearded smile and dubbed pieties of an American actor I have always loathed, thinking back on an incident of two years before that involved the sexual preferences of a man who appreciated that the only way to unite Europe was to run backwards and forwards across it with an army.
You should have a slug of this, boyo, Vikram Griffiths said, turning from trying to bribe the dri
ver to take us into town in the evening of his own initiative without referring the time and expense to the coach company. You look terrible, he said, What’s up? So, lying with the instinctive fluency that years of betrayal engender (and if one is lying one owes it to the world to do it well), I said the combination of the coach’s movement and trying to watch Robin Williams seize the day had given me the most atrocious headache, and I told Vikram Griffiths, this feckless fragment of Empire (as he himself once described himself), this genius of broken marriages, bizarre manners and interminable good causes, this man who came to my house just once, his dog only a puppy then, and frightened my wife with his life story - told him that I had come to the front of the coach to speak to him because I had heard, in the Chambersee Service Station, Dimitra and Georg and her agreeing that he, Vikram, would have to be replaced, because incapable of putting a presentable face, I said (partly inventing, partly quoting), to our claims; he would make us look ridiculous, I said they had said, with his unkempt baldness, his bushy sideburns and wild gestures. Nobody sensible had sideburns like that, they said. Nobody drank like that! And of course I would have passed these observations on to him a half an hour earlier, I explained, I lied, when he spoke to me at my seat, except that the appalling Doris Rohr had been beside me then, Doris Rohr who inevitably, in her constant dread that we would overstep the mark, was doubtless on their (Dimitra’s) side and would have passed on my remarks (to him) to them. But the long and the short of the matter was, I insisted (partly inventing, partly not), that they were frantic; they were frantic, I said (frantic myself), and in particular they were frantic because he had started drinking in the Chambersee Service Station at only ten-thirty in the morning and getting the students to drink too, and nobody knew, I said they’d said, what state he would be in tomorrow, and people were rumouring that it had to do with the custody battle over his child, his son, which he had engaged in, they said, because of his ex-wife’s, first ex-wife’s worsening depressive state, but was nevertheless losing, partly because of his difficult separation from his second wife, which the court could hardly ignore, and so they felt it important, I finished, in a state of total self-loathing, staring past Vikram’s mottled baldness at the great sweep of windscreen collecting filth and spray from a French truck ahead, important to replace him with someone more apparently reasonable, someone who would guarantee respectability for our cause.
Then to his fair question, after a slug from his flask, why was I on his side over this matter, I who had never shown any interest in any side in this affair, let alone his, I who had even been heard to speak of wanting to be fired, I replied, no doubt rather distractedly, since actually I wasn’t thinking about the lectors’ grievance or our mission to Europe or Vikram Griffiths at all, nothing could have been further from my mind, but simply and miserably and exclusively about her and about Napoleon and the taste of his cunty triumph (so that if I was talking now, and in detail, about the lectors’ crisis and above all about the problem of our proper representation it was only in the forlorn hope that this would help me to stop thinking about what I couldn’t help but think about, stop myself from doing something irremediable, as if I hadn’t already done so much that is irremediable, surely that is the problem, that is why I am behaving in this quite absurd fashion, speaking so urgently of a subject that does not even minimally interest me) - yes, to his fair question, vis-a-vis my suspect allegiance, I replied that I hated it when people stabbed other people in the back. Yes, I hated that, I said, and at the same time was telling myself: You have done so much that is irremediable, and here you are now trying to stop yourself doing something else. Irremediable. That’s simple enough, surely. Even reasonable. Then the fact was, I said, because it seemed important to go on speaking, that I liked the way he,Vikram, treated the whole thing as a battle. Yes, he was willing to get his hands dirty, I said, at random, he didn’t whine, I invented, about rights as everybody else did, he didn’t believe that we really deserved the salary and conditions of work we were demanding, no, he just used all these complicated laws about Europe to see if they could be manipulated in our favour in the particular dire situation we were in back at the University. Quite irremediable, I told myself, remembering the blood at the corner of her mouth. Which was more honest, I said, taking a third and very long slug from his whisky flask. Yes, altogether he was more honest. And what I meant now was more honest than her, who always used to try to explain everything she did in terms of human rights and the need for experience and discovery of her inner being and her vraie sympathie pour les autres and never never never in terms of appetite and selfishness and stupidity. Since quite plainly, I told myself, the reason she doesn’t want Vikram to be representative has nothing to do with his ability or presentability or anything of the kind, and everything to do with her eagerness to grab the job herself as part of the PR operation involved in furthering her, as she sees it, career in Europe, which I too would have been invited to share in, I can’t help thinking, if only I hadn’t lost control of myself, as she always put it. You lost control, I told myself, as Vikram’s dog found something to lick from the side of my shoe. You did things that were irremediable. The dog licked earnestly. Someone must have spilt something on my shoe. Yes, we could have gone away to Brussels together. I can see that now. I watched the dog’s pink tongue against the leather of my shoe. And I could hear her saying the words: Let’s go away to Brussels, Jerry Let’s go away. Except that you lost control of yourself.
Vikram Griffiths was braced between two front seats when I said what I said. He had both hands raised to grip the luggage rack, coalie sideburns bristling and eyes narrow behind the cheap lenses he goes back to the UK for, to Cardiff, to get on the National Health (as she always went back to Rheims to have her teeth fixed, and as Georg, it finally came out, goes regularly to Germany for the drugs the mother of his child needs, driving through Verona on the way). And seeing how greasy those NHS lenses were, and how red and watery and unhealthy Vikram’s poor eyes behind them, as his dog’s eyes likewise are red-rimmed and unhealthy, it vaguely crossed my mind, so far as anything could get across that minefield at such a moment, that my colleague would be upset by what I had just said - that he didn’t believe we deserved what we were asking - he would see it as an outrageous accusation, a cynical assault on his sincerity, his credentials - wasn’t he the champion of modern left-wing holier-than-thou (except where women were concerned) political thought? Yes, I told myself, you have spoken out of turn, carelessly, as you so often do, you have offended a man whose whisky you are drinking and who is clearly eager to make friends with you, in the end a charming man, a man who has overcome all kinds of disadvantages, who is dealing with all kinds of personal problems, you have insulted him blindly, at random, merely in order to drag your mind away from the vomit it will not be dragged from. You have offended him, I told myself, and now Vikram Griffiths is going to be outraged, or cold, or upset, as I have seen him be on other occasions. Of course he believes we deserve what werre asking for. Of course he believes in Europe. And instead he laughed, Vikram Griffiths laughed, happily and throatily, and clapped me on the shoulder and he said dead fucking right, if fucking Europe decided against us he would never mention fucking Europe again, he couldn’t give a tinker’s fucking shite for a United Europe run by the German fucking Bundesbank who raised and lowered their interest rates exactly as it suited them, plunging the currency markets into turmoil. Rather the Raj, he laughed, though he had never been south of Rome himself, of course. The German lectors were the only ones who never never wanted to strike, he said, they always toed the line, always, they had such a respect for authority, for law and order; Doris Rohr, for example, he said, was, he knew, doing library work for her professor despite the strike, she was putting in her regular hours, despite the strike, so she could claim the salary she didn’t need. He put two fingers to his nostrils and sucked at his catarrh. Krauts were like that. No, he wouldn’t be at all surprised, Vikram Griffiths said, and clearly he was half
-drunk and they were right about his not being presentable, they were right, he wouldn’t be at all surprised if Doris wasn’t the spy, unless it was Heike the Dike, the Austrian lectress, or lecheress, though you had to take your hat off to dikes, he laughed, clapping me on the shoulder a second time, if only in the hope they’d let you watch someday, he giggled, though he couldn’t particularly care for the idea of seeing Professoressa Bertelli on the job, despite her seminal text on Sappho - ha ha - and no, the only thing about our job, boyo, he said, since we’re speaking of jobs, he laughed, and he was rubbing the whisky flask beside his mouth now in much the same way children will speak behind a hand so that everybody can see they've got a secret to tell, the only thing that made our cause just, as he saw it, though one could never say this out loud, was, why should we be fire-able when others, the Italian professors, were not, and why should people who did even less than we did get paid even more? We were the only ones in the faculty who did any teaching at all, Vikram Griffiths said, the only ones with any sense of duty. He himself worked far longer and far harder and far better and far more generously than any of the professors. He loved teaching, he said. He actually cared about his students' welfare. Though that was more than could be said for Doris Rohr, or Colin Mattheson, if we were going to call a spade a spade, he said. Anyway, it was a fucking battle, he finished. I was dead fucking right about that. To the death. If they wanted to fire Vikram Griffiths they’d have to walk over his dead fucking dusky body first. And Daffy’s too, right? He slipped a shabby shoe beneath the animal’s rump and lifted it up till it yowled. Dafydd ap Gwilym, renowned for his lyricism.
Vikram Griffiths laughed as he spoke behind his whisky flask and the coach lurched to avoid some miserable humpy machine from backward Eastern Europe where they never learnt to build cars the way we did, and clutching at a seat-back for balance as the driver switched lanes, finger-nails slipping on the synthetic red velvet that looks so plush, that promises such luxury, the way all that is modern promises such luxury, invites such complacence, such sitting back in this world of paved roads and metalled directions, gleaming surfaces, reclinable seats, this world where everything is ready for us, technically, to be happy, I was completely disorientated, as I am so again now in this narrow bed in this suburban hotel, watching the light flit over and over Picasso’s lovers, completely and utterly disorientated, thinking of the important responsibilities I have accepted for tomorrow; and which somebody like myself should never have accepted, thinking of all the half-truths I shall have to tell if I am to do my job well, if I am to be loyal to my feckless colleagues (and really only the feckless attract my loyalty), and thinking once again of the way Vikram Griffiths so blatantly sought to establish a complicity with me, a complicity directed against Colin Mattheson, who he knows is my present drinking companion, by making this disparaging remark about Colin's not caring for his students. For Christ’s sake! As if I cared for mine! And what amazes me, going back now over this conversation with my drunken but endearing colleague, Welsh of Indian extraction, as I seem to be condemned to going over and over all my conversations, so that if I’m not engaging in a conversation you can be sure that I am going over one and generally wishing I hadn’t engaged in it - what amazes me is how I have never been able to be either an earnest supporter of good causes, or a manipulator, as Vikram Griffiths is somehow both, never an idealist and never a pragmatist, as she is somehow both, so idealistic in her love and so pragmatic in its distribution, but always as it were almost an idealist, yet not quite ingenuous enough, almost a pragmatist, yet too romantic, too scared perhaps, until at some point I fell into this role of the eternally rancorous detractor, but dreaming of some unimaginable commitment, some unimaginable propriety, which I almost achieved with her, but never properly believed in, until the day she made it impossible.