by William Boyd
Then we get a big party in, birthday party, they’d already booked, fourteen people. She sits there drinking and smoking, Aurélien’s filming. Then we bring the cake out of the kitchen, candles all lit. Whenever there’s a birthday we get Chico to sing. Chico, the little waiter, tubby guy, wanted to be an opera singer. Got a fine strong voice. He’s singing “Happy Birthday to You”—he’s got a kind of drawn-out, elaborate way of singing it. Top of his voice, molto vibrato, you know. Next thing I know the girl’s on her feet with a fuckin’ gun in her hand, screaming in French. Nobody can hear because Chico’s singing his balls off. I tear out from behind the bar, but I’m too late. POW. First shot blows the cake away. BAM. Second one gets Chico in the thigh. Flesh wound, thank God. I charge her to the ground, Roberto jumps on top. We wrestle the gun away. She put up quite a fight for a little thing. Did something to my shoulder too, she twisted it in some way, never been the same since. Aurélien got the whole thing on film. I hear it looks great.
Aurélien sat outside the Alcazar screening room with Kaiser Prevost and Bob Berger. Berger combed and recombed his hair, he kept smelling his comb, smelling his fingertips. He asked Prevost to smell his hair. Prevost said it smelled of shampoo. Prevost went to the lavatory for the fourth time.
“Relax,” Aurélien said to them both. “I’m really pleased with the film. I couldn’t be more pleased.”
Berger groaned. “Don’t say that, don’t say that.”
“If he likes it,” Kaiser said, “we’re in business. Lanier will like it, for sure, and Aurélien will apologize. Won’t you, Aurélien? Of course you will. No problem. Lanier loved him. Lanier loved you, didn’t she, Aurélien?”
“Why are we worried about Lanier?” Aurélien said. “Delphine came back. We finished the film.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Bob Berger.
“Don’t worry, Bob,” Kaiser said. “Everything can be fixed.”
Vincent Bandine emerged from the screening room.
Aurélien stood up. “What do you think?”
VINCENT BANDINE. I believe in candor. I have a theory about this town, this place: we don’t put enough stock in candor. I am into candor in a big way. So I take Aurélien aside, gently, and I say, “Aurélien, or whatever your name is, I think your film is goatshit. I think it’s a disgusting boring piece of Grade A manure. I wouldn’t give the sweat off my balls for your goatshit film.” That’s what I said, verbatim. And I have to give it to the kid, he just stood there and looked at me, sort of a slight smile on his face. Usually when I’m this candid they’re in deep shock, or weeping, or vomiting by now. And he looks at me and says, “I can’t blame you for thinking like this. You’re not a man of culture, so I can’t blame you for thinking like this.” And he walks. He walks out jauntily. I should have had his fucking legs broken. I’ve got the biggest collection of Vuillard paintings on the West Coast of America. I should have had his fucking legs broken. We had to pay the waiter fifty grand not to press charges, keep the Alcazar name out of things. The girl went to a clinic for three weeks to dry out … Aurélien No. Not a man of culture, eh?
KIT VERMEER. Ah, Lanier took it badly. I don’t think that. Do you mind? Thank you. Bats and lemurs, man, wow, they didn’t get a look in. Bats and lemurs. Story of my life. Weltanschauung, that’s what I’m up for. No, Weltschmerz. That’s my bag. Bats and lemurs. Why not owls and armadillos? No, I’m not looking at you, sir, or talking to you. Forsooth. Fuckin’ nerd. Wank in a bath, that’s what an English friend of mine calls them. What a wank in a bath. Owls and armadillos.
MATT FRIEDRICH. Aurélien came to see me before he left, which was gracious of him, I thought, especially for a film director, and he told me what had happened. I commiserated and told him other sorry stories about this town, this place. But he needed no consoling. “I enjoyed my visit,” he said. “No, I did. And I made the film. It was a curious but interesting experience.”
“It’s just a dance,” I think I remember saying to him. “It’s just a dance we have to do.”
He laughed. He found that funny.
END ROLLER
BOB BERGER
is working from home,
where he is writing several screenplays
DELPHINE DRELLE
plays the character “Suzi de la Tour” in NBC’s Till Darkness Falls
KAISER PREVOST
works for the investment bank Harbinger Cohen in New York City
MARIUS NO
is in his first year at l’Ecole Supérieure des Etudes Cinématographiques
BERTRAND HOLBISH
manages the Seattle band “Morbid Anatomy”
NAOMI TASHOURIAN
has written her first novel, Credits Not Contractual
MICHAEL SCOTT GEHN
is chief executive critic and on the editorial board of film/e
KIT VERMEER
is a practicing Sikh and wishes to be known as Khalsa Hari Atmar
LANIER CROSS
is scheduled to star in Lucy Wang’s film Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal
GEORGE MALINVERNO
has opened a third pizzeria in Pacific Palisades
VINCENT BANDINE
has announced Alcazar Films’ eighteen-picture slate for the coming year
BARKER LEAR
lives in San Luis Obispo
MATT FRIEDRICH
has taken his own life
“NATHALIE X AUX ETATS-UNIS”
has been nominated for an Academy Award in the “Best Foreign Film” category
AURÉLIEN NO
is not returning your calls
Transfigured Night
From my tenth or eleventh year I remember the following incident:
SELBSTMORD
In this city, and at this time, you should understand that suicide was a completely acceptable option, an entirely understandable, rational course of action to take. And I speak as one who knows its temptations intimately: three of my elder brothers took their own lives—Hans, Rudi and Kurt. That left Paul, me and my three older sisters. My sisters, I am sure, were immune to suicide’s powerful contagion. I cannot speak for Paul. As for myself, I can only say that its clean resolution of all my problems—intellectual and emotional—was always most appealing; that open door to oblivion always beckoned to me and, odd though it may seem, suicide—the idea of suicide—lies at the very foundation of all my work in ethics and logic.
THE BENEFACTOR
I came down from the Hochreith, our house in the country, to Vienna especially to meet Herr Ficker. The big white villa in the parks of Neuwaldegg was closed up for the summer. I had one of the gardeners prepare my room and make up a bed, and his wife laid the table on the terrace and helped me cook dinner. We were to have Naturschnitzel with Kochsalat with a cold bottle of Zöbinger. Simple, honest food. I hoped Ficker would notice.
I shaved and dressed and went out onto the terrace to wait for him to arrive. I was wearing a lemon-yellow, soft-collared shirt with no tie and a light tweed jacket that I had bought years before in Manchester. Its fraying cuffs had been repaired, in the English way, with a dun green leather. My hair was clean and still damp, my face was cool, scraped smooth. I drank a glass of sherbet water as I waited for Ficker. The evening light was milky and diffused, as if hung with dust. I could hear the faint noise of motors and carriages on the roads of Neuwaldegg and in the gathering dusk I could make out the figure of the gardener moving about in the allée of pleached limes. A fleeting but palpable peace descended on me and I thought for some minutes of David and our holidays together in Iceland and Norway. I missed him.
Ficker was an earnest young man, taller than me (mind you, I am not particularly tall) with fine thinning hair brushed back off his brow. He wore spectacles with crooked wire frames, as if he had accidentally sat upon them and had hastily straightened them out himself. He was neatly and soberly dressed, wore no hat and was clean-shaven. His lopsided spectacles suggested a spirit of frivolity and facetiousness that, I soon found out
, was entirely inaccurate.
I had already explained to him, by letter, about my father’s death, my legacy and how I wished to dispose of a proportion of it. He had agreed to my conditions and promised to respect my demand for total anonymity. We talked, in businesslike fashion, about the details but I could sense, as he expressed his gratitude, strong currents of astonishment and curiosity.
Eventually he had to ask, “But why me? Why my magazine … in particular?”
I shrugged. “It seemed to be exemplary, of its sort. I like its attitude, its, its seriousness. And besides, your writers seem the most needy.”
“Yes … That’s true.” He was none the wiser.
“It’s a family trait. My father was a great benefactor—to musicians mainly. We just like to do it.”
Ficker then produced a list of writers and painters he thought were the most deserving. I glanced through it: very few of the names were familiar to me, and beside each one Ficker had written an appropriate sum of money. Two names, at the top of the list, were to receive by far the largest amounts.
“I know of Rilke, of course,” I said, “and I’m delighted you chose him. But who’s he?” I pointed to the other. “Why should he get so much? What does he do?”
“He’s a poet,” Ficker said. “I think … well, no man on this list will benefit more from your generosity. To be completely frank, I think it might just save his life.”
SCHUBERT
My brother Hans drowned himself in Chesapeake Bay. He was a musical prodigy who gave his first concert in Vienna at the age of nine. I never really knew him. My surviving brother Paul was also musically gifted, a brilliant pianist who was a pupil of Leschetizky and made his debut in 1913. I remember Paul saying to me once that of all musical tastes the love of Schubert required the least explanation. When one thinks of the huge misery of his life and sees in his work no trace of it at all—sees the complete absence in his music of all bitterness.
THE BANK
I had arranged with Ficker that I would be in the Österreichische Nationalbank on Swarzspanierstrasse at three o’clock. I was there early and sat down at a writing desk in a far corner. It was quiet and peaceful: the afternoon rush had yet to begin and the occasional sound of heels on the marble floor as clients crossed from the entrance foyer to the rows of counters was soothing, like the background click of ivory dominoes or the ceramic kiss of billiard balls in the gaming room of my favorite café near the art schools …
Ficker was on time and accompanied by our poet. Ficker caught my eye and I gave a slight nod and then bent my head over the spectral papers on my desk. Ficker went to a teller’s guichet to inquire about the banker’s draft, leaving the poet standing momentarily alone in the middle of the marble floor, gazing around him like a peasant at the high dim vaults of the ceiling and the play of afternoon sunshine on the ornamental brasswork of the chandeliers.
Georg——, as I shall refer to him, was a young man, twenty-seven years old—two years older than me—small and quite sturdily built, and, like many small men, seemed to have been provided with a head designed for a bigger body altogether. His head was crude- and heavy-looking, its proportions exaggerated by his bristly, close-cropped hair. He was clean-shaven. He had a weak mouth, the upper lip overhung the bottom one slightly, and a thick triangular nose. He had low brows and slightly Oriental-looking, almond-shaped eyes. He was what my mother would have called “an ugly customer.”
He stood now, looking expressionlessly about him, swaying slightly, as if buffeted by an invisible crowd. He appeared at once ill and strong—pale-faced, ugly, dark-eyed, but with something about the set of his shoulders, the way his feet were planted on the ground, that suggested reserves of strength. Indeed, the year before, Ficker had told me, he had almost died from an overdose of Veronal that would have killed an ordinary man in an hour or two. Since his school days, it transpired, he had been a compulsive user of narcotic drugs and was also an immoderate drinker. At school he used chloroform to intoxicate himself. He was now a qualified dispensing chemist, a career he had taken up, so Ficker informed me, solely because it gave him access to more effective drugs. I found this single-mindedness oddly impressive. To train for two years at the University of Vienna as a pharmacist, to pass the necessary exams to qualify, testified to an uncommon dedication. Ficker had given me some of his poems to read. I could not understand them at all; their images for me were strangely haunting and evocative but finally entirely opaque. But I liked their tone; their tone seemed to me to be quite remarkable.
I watched him now, discreetly, as Ficker completed the preliminary documentation and signaled him over to endorse the banker’s draft. Ficker—I think this was a mistake—presented the check to him with a small flourish and shook him by the hand, as if he had just won first prize in a lottery. I could sense that Georg knew very little of what was going on. I saw him turn the check over immediately so as to hide the amount from his own eyes. He exchanged a few urgent words with Ficker, who smiled encouragingly and patted him on the arm. Ficker was very happy, almost gleeful—in his role as the philanthropist’s go-between he was vicariously enjoying what he imagined would be Georg’s astonishment. But he was wrong. I knew it the instant Georg turned over the check and read the amount: 20,000 crowns. A thriving dispensing chemist would have to work six or seven years to earn a similar sum. I saw the check flutter and tremble in his fingers. I saw Georg blanch and swallow violently several times. He put the back of his hand to his lips and his shoulders heaved. He reached out to a pillar for support, bending over from the waist. His body convulsed in a spasm as he tried to control his writhing stomach. I knew then that he was an honest man for he had the honest man’s profound fear of extreme good fortune. Ficker snatched the check from his shaking fingers as Georg appeared to totter. He uttered a faint cry as warm bile and vomit shot from his mouth to splash and splatter on the cool marble of the Nationalbank’s flagged floor.
A GOOD LIFE—A GOOD DEATH
I got to know Ficker quite well over our various meetings about the division and disposal of my benefaction. Once in our discussions the subject of suicide came up and he seemed genuinely surprised when I told him that scarcely a day went by when I did not think about it. But I explained to him that if I could not get along with life and the world, then to commit suicide would be the ultimate admission of failure. I pointed out that this notion was the very essence of ethics and morality. For if anything is not to be allowed, then surely that must be suicide. For if suicide is allowed, then anything is allowed.
Sometimes I think that a good life should end in a death that one could welcome. Perhaps, even, it is only a good death that allows us to call a life “good.”
Georg, I believe, has nearly died many times. For example, shortly before the Veronal incident he almost eliminated himself by accident. Georg lived for a time in Innsbruck. One night, after a drinking bout in a small village near the city, he decided to walk home. At some stage on his journey back, overcome by tiredness, he decided to lie down in the snow and sleep. When he awoke in the morning the world had been replaced by a turbid white void. For a moment he thought … but almost immediately he realized he had been covered in the night by a new fall of snow. In fact it was about forty centimeters deep. He heaved himself to his feet, brushed off his clothes and, with a clanging, gonging headache, completed his journey to Innsbruck. Ficker related all this to me.
How I wish I had been passing that morning! The first sleepy traveler along that road when Georg awoke. In the still, crepuscular light, that large lump on the verge begins to stir, some cracks and declivities suddenly deform the smooth contours, then a fist punches free and finally that crude ugly face emerges, with its frosty beret of snow, staring stupidly, blinking, spitting …
THE WAR
The war saved my life. I really do not know what I would have done without it. On 7 August, the day war was declared on Russia, I enlisted as a volunteer gunner in the artillery for the duration and was instruct
ed to report to a garrison artillery regiment in Cracow. In my elation I was reluctant to go straight home to pack my bags (my family had by now all returned to Vienna), so I took a taxi to the Café Museum.
I should say that I joined the army because it was my civic duty, yet I was even more glad to enlist because I knew at that time I had to do something, I had to subject myself to the rigors of a harsh routine that would divert me from my intellectual work. I had reached an impasse and the impossibility of ever proceeding further filled me with morbid despair.
By the time I reached the Café Museum it was about six o’clock in the evening. (I liked this café because its interior was modern: its square rooms were lined with square honeycolored oak paneling, hung with prints of drawings by Charles Dana Gibson.) Inside, it was busy, the air noisy with speculation about the war. It was warm and muggy, the atmosphere suffused with the reek of beer and cigar smoke. The patrons were mostly young men, students from the nearby art schools, clean-shaven, casually and unaffectedly dressed. So I was a little surprised to catch a glimpse in one corner of a uniform. I pushed through the crowd to see who it was.
Georg, it was obvious, was already fairly drunk. He sat strangely hunched over, staring intently at the tabletop. His posture and the ferocious concentration of his gaze clearly put people off, as the three other seats around his table remained unoccupied. I told a waiter to bring a half-liter of Heuniger Wein to the table and then sat down opposite him.
Georg was wearing the uniform of an officer, a lieutenant, in the Medical Corps. He looked at me candidly and without resentment, and, of course, without any sign of recognition. He seemed much the same as the last time I had seen him, at once ill-looking and possessed of a sinewy energy. I introduced myself and told him I was pleased to see a fellow soldier as I myself had just enlisted.