The Mule

by David Quantick

  ‘They are,’ said Frant. ‘Naturally, for a “pragmatist” such as yourself, rooted in the mundane, they are perhaps absurd. But I can assure you that they are in fact some of the most remarkable documents in creation.’

  Frant pulled out another book.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said, indicating a crippled settee. I perched on the edge and Frant sat next to me with the book on his lap.

  ‘Look,’ said Frant, and opened the book with something approaching affection. I swear he was like a proud grandmother showing off a family album.

  * * *

  For the next hour or so, Frant let me into his obsession. I won’t say that I was won over to his view of the world exactly – I’m too much of a realist for that – but for the first time I began to see just why he was so keen on this stuff. There was a book written in a script that nobody could read, with extraordinary drawings of plants and constellations. There was a stone with inscriptions that looked like they ought to make sense, but just stayed slightly out of understandability. There were alphabets that looked like codes, and languages that looked like picture stories. I had no idea if any of these manuscripts and documents were real or not, but in a way it didn’t matter. They were exotic and mysterious and – something I would never have found myself thinking a few days ago – it sort of didn’t matter that nobody had been able to translate them and work them out.

  My feelings must have shown on my face because Frant looked at me in an almost kindly way and said, ‘Now you understand, I think, something of what inspires me.’

  ‘But what has all this got to do with the text I brought you?’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘You are not an observant man, are you?’ He opened the Von Fremdenplatz book again.

  ‘See this word here?’ he said, and I looked. In the middle of a caption apparently referring to an engraving of monoplanes were two words.

  La Furcheuxne.

  ‘It’s the same,’ I said. ‘My text and the Von Fremdenplatz are in the same language.’

  ‘Well done,’ Frant said. ‘Now you see what I mean. The Alice is the key to the Von Fremdenplatz.’

  ‘It’s a Rosetta Stone,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Frant. ‘It should be the work of a day or two to put this Alice back into English, and use it as a rudimentary grammar-cum-vocabulary. Once I have achieved this, I should be able to commence rendering the Von Fremdenplatz into English. It will be a major breakthrough.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ I said, and in a way I was. Frant could have his major breakthrough in translating made-up books from made-up languages. But I also wasn’t sure how much wiser I now was. True, this was a lead of sorts, but a lead in the direction of what? I didn’t know anything about these Von Fremdenplatz documents, let alone what they had to do with anything. But they were now the nearest to a way forward I had, so I said to Frant, ‘I’d really like to take a proper look at that Von Fremdenplatz book, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Not so fast,’ said Frant, moving the book away from me as though I were about to grab it and jump through the window. ‘I’ve answered your questions. Now if you don’t mind I have a few of my own for you.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, though I didn’t recall this being part of the arrangement.

  ‘Where did you come by this book?’ Frant said.

  I hesitated. Frant noticed my hesitation.

  ‘Normally I would not ask the provenance of a text,’ he said, ‘but in this instance it may be very important.’

  ‘I was shown it,’ I said, ‘by … someone.’

  ‘Well, that narrows it down,’ Frant said. ‘Was that “someone”’ in the book trade? Were they trying to sell it to you? More relevantly, why do you only have this palimpsest?’

  ‘Excuse me?’ I said.

  ‘I’m no detective,’ Frant said, ‘but from the blurred nature of the text it appears that you copied it in something of a hurry, to say the least. As though you were trying to get it done, perhaps, before the owner discovered what you were doing.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Frant. ‘I myself am no stranger to the tiresome restrictions imposed by privacy issues. There have been times when I have been forced to circumvent the irrelevance of who owns what.’

  I realised he was telling me that he stole things, and nodded. I imagined that Frant saw himself as a kind of archaeologist and explorer all in one, as entitled to take what he wanted like some modern-day Lord Elgin, or that Tutankhamun fellow. I nodded, to show Frant that yes, I was like him, even though we were in reality as different as water and earth.

  ‘I can assume then that you were unable to acquire the original Alice,’ said Frant. ‘But equally it is clear that you had access to it.’

  ‘I did,’ I said. ‘But only for a short time.’ I tried to look like an important thief, rather than someone who’d messed up badly.

  ‘A pity you failed to retain the original,’ said Frant. He paused, as if giving me time to consider my folly. ‘Still, we have enough text here to begin our task.’

  ‘Our task?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Frant. ‘You and I are in this together, are we not? And now we must translate the Von Fremdenplatz.’

  I looked at him. An hour ago he disliked me with a mouldy fervour, but all of a sudden Frant wanted me to work with him. I was keen to pursue all options, true, but I didn’t see how becoming Euros Frant’s new collaborator was going to help any.

  ‘You want us to sit down with that bit of Alice and go through your Von Fremdenplatz book?’ I said.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Frant. ‘This book is only a series of extracts, a gift-shop chocolate box for dilettantes.’

  I said nothing, wondering how much time Frant had spent poring over this particular gift-shop chocolate box.

  ‘No,’ Frant continued. ‘If we’re to truly unlock the secrets of the Von Fremdenplatz, the mountain must go to Mahomet. A filleted copy is not enough. We need to study the actual documents, the originals.’

  ‘And where are they?’ I said.

  Frant’s eyes gleamed.

  ‘Paris!’ he said.

  * * *

  One of the words that Madame Ferber’s characters are fond of using, in their peculiarly inhuman way of talking, is ‘epiphany’. It’s also a word whose meaning I never knew until I became a translator, because people in real life tend not to have epiphanies. Ferber characters have them all the time, of course, and are always telling each other that they’re having epiphanies, like some kind of minor surgery. In fact, my favourite moment in any A.J.L. Ferber novel would be the scene towards the end of Society’s Elephant – which despite its heavy title is in fact the shortest of her books, a comparative novella at 580 pages – when the two main characters have what I think today’s movie critics would call an epiphany face-off. It’s meant to be a crucial illustration of the difference between the philosophies of the two main characters – the arms manufacturer Kelf Matternicht and the ballet dancer Søren O – but it hinges on them both having their epiphanies at exactly the same moment.

  Matternicht goes first, and explains that he has seen the light and will renounce his arms trading, all because he realised not, as you might expect, the effects of his weaponry, but he has become so wealthy from arms dealing that he has somehow entered a financially enhanced karmic state. Conversely, O has had both her legs broken by her ex-lover, a jealous strongman, and this has enabled her to see that the true dance comes from within.

  All this would be confusing enough were the twin epiphanies not laid out in overlapping dialogue, as Matternicht and O seemingly try to outdo each other in a battle of freshly minted spiritual awarenesses. In fact, the scene is so confusing that some readers maintain that it’s Matternicht who believes dance comes from within, while O just expresses some conventional pacifist views. As a translator, I can say that this chapter cost me days of sleep, and it has never been a surprise to me that Society’s Elephant is the worst-selling of all Madame Ferber�
��s books. But at least it hammered home to me the meaning of the word ‘epiphany’ and its lack of application in my daily life.

  Until now, that is. Because for the first time in my life, as far as I could see, I was having an epiphany. As Frant prattled on about taking the train to Paris and packing for a short journey, the events of the last few days seemed finally to sort themselves into a coherent order in my mind. That night in the bar, where I met the girl. The return to my apartment and the embarrassment thereafter. The discovery of her notebook, and its odd contents. The report of the girl’s disappearance and the appearance of the police. And finally, the revelation of the meaning of the Alice text, and Frant’s insistence that we needed to take a trip to Paris to see his beloved Von Fremdenplatz documents. All these events coursed through my mind, sifting and correlating themselves until a pattern seemed to emerge.

  And what was that pattern? Simply put, it was a tracery of nothing. A random set of images. Blind alleys and culs-de-sac going nowhere. If there was any meaning or direction in these events, I couldn’t see it. If any of the things that had happened to me lately were clues, then I was too dim to work them out. And now Euros Frant wanted me to go abroad to look at some weird book whose connection to the girl’s disappearance seemed tenuous at best and coincidental at worst. This was the nature of my epiphany. It wasn’t a very positive epiphany, but it was at least entirely clear. And so with a sense, finally, that I was following the straight path of reason and that for once I knew exactly what I had to do next, I found a weight lifting from my shoulders. I was, in short, relieved to know what I had to do.

  I looked at Frant and I said, ‘Thanks for your help, but I’ve had enough. I’m not going to Paris.’

  * * *

  I hadn’t felt this good in a long time as I walked down the stairs and out of Frant’s block. Until now I’d been unaware of it, but for the past few days I had been gripped by a strange sense that I was being spiralled down into a kind of mental whirlpool, or that I couldn’t control what was happening to me. This was absurd, I realised, because nobody had asked me to take this course of action and I had always been free to just carry on with my life as normal. I’d met a girl and she had disappeared. I’d been shown one book and found another. And that was it. The oddest thing that had happened all week – the sudden announcement by A.J.L. Ferber that I was now her favourite boy – wasn’t even connected to anything else, as far as I could see.

  And it had taken Euros Frant and his ridiculous obsession with made-up books and silly languages to snap me out of it. I doubted I would ever be grateful to Frant for anything, but on this occasion I could almost have shaken his hand and thanked him for allowing me to extricate myself from this situation. Now I could go home and carry on with my work and my normal life. I would capitalise on the new situation with Madame Ferber and talk to Walker-Hebborn about getting some sort of hike in my freelance rate. And instead of hanging out in bars on the off-chance of meeting women, I would start answering lonely-hearts ads or join some sort of club. That sort of thing.

  Frant had looked displeased, although it was hard to tell if my announcement had given him fresh displeasure or merely topped up his usual permanent well of displeasure. He had made a few remarks about fair-weather friends but this had only helped to confirm me in my decision, as I had no desire to be thought of as any kind of friend of his, fair-weather or otherwise. I stood firm as Frant’s eyebrows waved their disapproval at me and headed out of the door with, for once, a sense of relief in my heart. Now I approached my own front door with these happy thoughts. The rest of the day was mine. I would throw away the notebook and the piece of paper – well, perhaps I would keep the notebook, but I would be well shot of the Alice. Perhaps I could telephone my mother to see how she was and …

  I suddenly stopped in my tracks. Outside my apartment block were the two cops, Quigley and Chick, and they weren’t alone. There was a large police van idling nearby with its lights flashing, and in the back sat three or four uniformed officers. I couldn’t see clearly in the increasing afternoon gloom but at least one of the officers appeared to be armed. Chick was ringing several doorbells, and then someone must have buzzed her in, because the door opened and she and Quigley went in. The uniformed officers followed and I saw that what I’d thought was a gun was in fact a kind of portable battering ram. The inference was clear. Clearly Quigley and Chick did not believe I would bring the notebook in. Jumping to conclusions, they had arrived at my apartment with back-up and were now going to break the door down, an action for which I presumed they had a warrant. I wasn’t going to hang around to find out, though. Suddenly my epiphany seemed entirely irrelevant. I was, in the eyes of the police, apparently the last person to see the girl alive. It was clear that the police had failed to find the cab driver and I wasn’t even sure if they had thought it was worth looking for someone they probably thought had never existed. Worse, when asked to produce a piece of evidence, I had lied and failed to co-operate.

  I could, I suppose, have handed myself in but something held me back. I was now an official suspect and, on the basis of the facts as I saw them, there was little or no chance of convincing anyone of my innocence. Quigley and Chick looked the types to secure a conviction for the first likely person they met, and as they hadn’t exactly taken to me, I wouldn’t have been surprised to be that person. I also doubted they could have solved an open and shut case, let alone the nebulous situation they were currently investigating. Plus I had the notebook with me, which made me look like not just a suspect, but also a bit creepy.

  All in all, I felt justified in turning around and retracing my steps down several back streets until I found myself some distance away from the police and my apartment and was able to take out my mobile phone and make a call in safety.

  ‘Hello?’ said a familiar voice.

  ‘Mr Frant?’ I said. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I’d like to leave right away.’

  I waited for, and was rewarded with, a long and deep sigh.

  PART TWO

  The theory of Victorian translation appears from our point of view to have been founded on a fundamental error.

  J.M. Cohen, English Translators and Translations

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘A lesser man might have sought to make a joke about the name of this train and my own name,’ said Euros Frant as the French countryside sped past.

  ‘I don’t enjoy puns,’ I said. ‘And besides, they’re not cognate. “Euros” is a Celtic word meaning “gold”.’

  ‘I know,’ said Frant. ‘It’s my name.’

  * * *

  Frant had not been delighted to get my call. He told me he had just managed to digest the annoyance and inconvenience (I’m quoting him here) of my refusal to come with him on what he insisted on calling ‘the Von Fremdenplatz adventure’.

  ‘I had resigned myself to the quest solitary,’ he said as I sat in his tiny apartment, watching him endlessly pack and repack a green paisley valise. ‘I was prepared, both physically and mentally, to face the challenge en tout seul. But then you came back, like a dog to its own vomit, and naturally I was forced to fly the flag of forgiveness and re-admit you to the adventure. No offence intended.’

  ‘No offence taken,’ I said dishonestly, wondering also just how much of a challenge Frant thought there might be in going to Paris on his own to look at a silly book in a museum (I supposed the Von Fremdenplatz was in a museum, but for all Frant had confided in me, it could actually be located in a bowling alley or an amusement arcade. He was playing his cards very close to his chest).

  Frant mumbled something into the green paisley valise. ‘Ça ne fait rien,’ he said, perhaps to show me that he was already preparing himself mentally for his trip to France. Our trip to France … I had used Frant’s telephone (he didn’t charge me, amazingly) to make the arrangements, putting everything onto my sole credit card and hoping for the best.

  He finally put a small pile of neatly folded and ill-advised waistcoats into t
he valise and closed it, next carefully locking it with a small key which, to my disappointment, he didn’t swallow but instead put into the pocket of the yellow and purple waistcoat he was already wearing. It was a wise plan; I reckoned no thief with any colour sense would go anywhere near that pocket.

  Frant picked up a floppy brown leather man-bag, stuffed some papers into it and slung it over his shoulder. ‘I am ready,’ Frant said. ‘Je suis prêt. Is that all you’re taking?’

  He flapped a suddenly boneless hand at the small bag I had placed on a chair. I’d just bought the bag on the way to Frant’s and filled it with a few essential items of clothing and hygiene products shortly after I’d fled the cops. Not that I was going to tell Frant this. In fact, it was safe to say that I wasn’t going to tell Frant anything if I could help it. Given that he had already flown into a big sulk just at the idea that I wasn’t going to France with him – and was only over the sulk now I had come crawling back to him, in his eyes – it seemed highly likely to me that he might not react well to being told that he was actually leaving the country in the company of a suspected murderer on the lam from the law. He’d probably turn me in himself and ask for a reward, too.

  ‘I travel light,’ I said.

  ‘I see that,’ Frant said. ‘I, however, am a scholar and as such am encumbered with the various properties of my calling.’

  He nodded as if in approval at the green paisley valise and six or seven other equally unpleasant-looking bags and cases that were strewn about the floor. Frant had spent the last few hours cramming his collection of luggage with all manner of dictionaries, grammars, pamphlets and sheaves of paper he’d clearly printed from the internet. He called these his ‘essential texts’, though I doubted that the world would be in any way deprived if a brief apartment fire took the lot.