by Alan Isler
Mr Feibelman, white-bearded and gnomelike, a retiree, raised his hand. Kraven ignored him. Feibelman was a man of quirky erudition, and hence a nuisance. Whatever the subject of class discussion, he would bring it around somehow to the Jewish Problem.
As Kraven looked elsewhere for a suitable volunteer, heads bowed over play-texts, hands began scribbling in notebooks. This predictable behaviour pleased Kraven even as it irritated him. Only Giulietta Corombona serenely met his gaze. Now she pursed her lips, moistened them with her tongue, and winked at him. Kraven was startled. She had transgressed the cardinal rule: Female students must never reveal in public whatever ‘special understandings’ they had or hoped to have with their male professors.
‘Mr Princip, perhaps you would be good enough to share your thoughts with us. What is it that Lear sees?’
Princip’s fellows, spared this time, looked up. Feibelman sadly lowered his hand. Meanwhile, the smile had left Princip’s fleshy lips.
‘The thing is, you told us that like when Lear says his fool was dead, he din mean the Fool, he like meant Cordelia.’
‘Indeed I did. Although I’m sure I did not phrase it quite so felicitously.’
The class sniggered obediently. Someone else was in the hotseat.
‘Well, I mean, how d’you know? The guy says his fool is dead, right? I mean, why not believe him?’
Why not indeed? Kraven had no idea. It was true that every editor of every modern edition of the play that Kraven had seen inevitably glossed fool as Cordelia (a term of endearment). But why must the word carry that meaning here? It had never occurred to Kraven before to wonder. The fault of his own generation, he supposed, this unquestioning acceptance of authority. Still, he recognized Princip’s ploy for what it was, a defensive counter-attack. In his mindless striking out, Princip had scored a palpable hit. Kraven summoned his forces.
‘I take it, Mr Princip, you are prepared to demonstrate the relevance of your question to my own?’
Princip had lost the scent of victory now. He looked quite cast down. Well, the lad was obviously a prick, a prick of the first water. (Yes, Kraven was well pleased with his conceit.) A raucous buzzer sounded. Match and set.
‘Saved by the bell, eh, Mr Princip? It seems you have the weekend to think of a reply.’ Kraven’s smile made clear his good humour. ‘We’ll pick up on Monday where we’ve left off. Meanwhile, ladies and gentlemen, I urge you to begin reading Macbeth.’
He gathered together his precious notes and strode triumphantly from the lecture hall. Princip, he knew, would absent himself from Monday’s class.
Kraven began a private hum, the outward audible sound transformed magically within his cranium to voice and orchestra. In this way he edged into a group of young women who were streaming along the corridor. As the the crowd approached the stairwell it slowed down and constricted. Kraven cheerfully ignored the girls’ jostling and, sinking deeper into hum and thought, was in this way agreeably titillated down the steps and out into the ardent April sunshine. He began the trek across campus towards his office, smiling a private smile and humming his private hum. ‘Sapro, sapro …’
* * *
MOSHOLU COLLEGE was located where an impudent finger of the Bronx reached for the private parts of Westchester. The campus had once been a ‘correctional facility’ for delinquent girls. Indeed, the searchlight turrets and conning towers that still surmounted the older buildings around the Great Quad bore witness to Mosholu’s bleak beginnings. But in the early 1950s the former Asylum for the Reformation and Rehabilitation of Wayward Women (founded 1867) became Mosholu College, devoted to the preservation, the cultivation and the dissemination of the liberal arts. This task the college had faithfully executed until the eruptions on campuses across the nation in the late 1960s and early 1970s at last shattered its peace. In point of fact, the students of Mosholu had sauntered woefully late to the barricades. Now students tumbled and cavorted on the greensward, some intertwined in panting embraces; others threw frisbees, did handsprings, strummed guitars, scratched crotches, exchanged term papers, hooted, laughed, shouted. They turned on and made out. The bulls with their truncheons were long since gone. Only the odd member of the faculty sunk in thought – Kraven at this moment was such a one – picked his way absently around and between healthy young bodies, sound too in mind.
‘Yoohoo, perfessor!’
It was Feibelman. Kraven picked up his stride.
‘Perfessor Kraven,’ panted Feibelman, drawing abreast, ‘you got a minute?’
‘Of course.’ Kraven looked doubtfully at his watch.
‘Your two o’clock office hour today, you could fit me in maybe?’
‘Not a chance, I’m afraid. Too bad.’ But Kraven recalled a recent decision of the Academic Senate, a body now infiltrated by student activist-nihilists and their faculty toadies: henceforth the college committees on promotion would take into account student evaluations of faculty performance. ‘Still, if you can walk with me to my office, perhaps we can dispose of your little problem along the way.’
‘It’s like this. The Prizes Competition? I’m working on something, original research, could be I’ve got a winner.’
‘Good, good.’
‘Could also be a loser, you know what I mean?’
‘The point, Mr Feibelman?’
‘So, you should be so good, before I get in too deep…’
Kraven gestured impatiently.
‘I been reading up on King Arthur. Now a person like you, an educated person, I put a premium on your opinion. What about Merlin? You think there maybe was a Merlin?’
‘Pure fabrication. Merlin is the stuff of Celtic myth.’
Feibelman grinned happily. ‘Boy, have I got news for you! Not only I can prove there was a Merlin but, a long story short, Merlin was a Jew.’
Kraven stopped in mid-stride. ‘Good God, Feibelman, you must be mad!’
The sun glanced brightly off Feibelman’s skull. ‘In other words, what you’re telling me, no work’s been done on it yet?’
‘Of course not!’
Students cavorted about them. Kraven began walking again, Feibelman trailing after, a little run and a hop. The old man was insane, that much was clear; harmless perhaps, but insane. Should he be referred to one of the college counsellors, one of the resident shrinks? Was there a rabbi on campus?
‘Naturally, a feller like you, a scholar, needs a bit evidence, what you might call proof, am I right? Nowadays, who believes in wizards? Only loonies. So what difference to you I mention Geoffrey of Monmouth, I throw in Gildas or Nennius? A bunch superstitious, you should excuse the expression, farts from the olden days, you’ll say. Nennius? He lived in the ninth century, dummy, you’re gonna tell me. And if I should happen to mention Gildas was Merlin’s contemporary? Big deal, right? Never mind they both talk about a wizard called Myrrdin, what did they know?’ Feibelman paused, as if expecting a reply. Kraven merely hurried his pace. The old man began to wheeze, but his legs pumped along, he kept up. ‘How do we get from Myrrdin to Merlin? Easy. Geoffrey changed the name. Why? If you ask me, what he wanted was to get rid of a possible pun.’ He looked at Kraven knowingly. Kraven raised his eyebrows. ‘In French,’ said Feibelman. ‘Merde? Shit? Get it?’ He plunged on. ‘So now we come to the Annales Cambriae. What d’you know, here’s Merlin again. Knuckle-brain, you’ll tell me, the Annales is thirteenth century.’
Kraven coughed.
‘But what do the Annales tell us? Get this: when the Battle of White Chapel was over, a feller called Merlinus, “a poet and a prophet”, went berserk, meshuggah, what you British call bonkers. That’s only background, that’s nothing. So far, so good. Just the same, no cigar. But it brings me to my discovery.’
It also brought them to the building that housed the English Department, a quonset hut, really, which in former days had accommodated a string of solitary-confinement cells. Now Feibelman followed him to his door, waited while he unlocked it. Would he never be rid of the man?
Cunningly, Feibelman put a trembling hand over his heart. ‘If I could just sit down for a minute.’ He followed Kraven inside.
The office measured twelve feet by nine. It had once been the guard’s communication room with the central prison complex; it was the only office in the Department, apart from the chairman’s, that had a genuine window. Kraven had come into his good fortune shortly after receiving tenure when he had explained to a compassionate Mrs Trutitz, the Department’s principal secretary, that he suffered severely from claustrophobia. Notwithstanding the window, the blind always remained discreetly closed.
Kraven had a desk, a comfortable chair (removed one carefree Summer Session from the Dean of Faculty’s office over in the Administration Building: an open door, an empty corridor, and the chair, conveniently equipped with rollers, was his), a stuffed wastepaper basket, a filing cabinet in which were collected his precious notes, a bookcase, a grey metal folding chair for conferees, and a chaise longue, a gift from an Hermione Gumm of five years ago, whose mother was discarding it in favour of something more ‘modren’. (Miss Gumm, to her credit – a definite A+ student – had immediately recognized its potential.)
The walls were variously decorated: a print of Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet; a Shakespeare calendar, this month displaying a nineteenth-century German etching of an Othello who looked like Erich von Stroheim in blackface, his left hand gesturing heavenwards, his right apparently fumbling with his privates; last year’s list of campus events; an enlarged photograph of Dame Edith Sitwell, gaunt in melancholic weeds; a rubbing from a pseudo-Gothic college fireplace that read ‘and gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche’.
The desk, the bookshelves, and much of the floor were piled with papers: departmental announcements, college notices, publishers’ catalogues, paperbacks, invitations, examination booklets, student essays, sandwich wrappers, advertisements, requests for letters of recommendation. It was Kraven’s policy to throw out all such detritus at the end of each semester. Thus he prepared for the new. Only his chaise longue and his comfortable chair were uncluttered.
Feibelman eyed the chaise longue eagerly. Kraven swept a pile of recent quizzes and other papers from the metal conferee’s chair to the floor.
‘Sit down, Feibelman. I can give you two more minutes.’
Feibelman sank wearily into the metal chair. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and began to dab his eyes and his temples, moving on at last to mop his bald crown. His beard hung in white glinting driblets. He held his sopping handkerchief by two corners, quickly twisted it into a tight tube, and draped it around his neck.
‘A couple seconds, that’s all.’ The old man’s wheeze moved by degrees through heavy into normal breathing. ‘Oy.’
Kraven drummed his fingers on the desk top.
‘So about my discovery. Naturally, you’ve heard of Gryllus’s Apologia pro vita sua?’
‘Discovered a few years ago – behind a chimney in Podsnap Parva, as I recall.’ Kraven was on top of things all right. He kept up. ‘Modelled on Augustine’s Confessions. What of it?’
‘You’ve read it, perfessor!’ What a man! said Feibelman’s expression. This is some perfessor I’ve got me here!
‘Ah, as to that, it must wait its turn.’ Kraven waved airily at his bookshelves. ‘Not exactly in my field, you know. In fact, why don’t you trot along to the History Department, talk to a medievalist. Dillinger’s the chap for you. Have a word with him.’
‘When I tell you what I got, you’ll understand maybe why I don’t go to the History Department. This is dynamite. You think I can trust just anybody?’
Kraven sighed.
‘A long story short, Gryllus knew Merlin. How do I know? Simple. He says his monastery sheltered a meshugana called Myrrdin. This meshugana he also calls poeta, vates, magus. So it’s not Merlin, you’ll tell me please who it could be? Of course it’s Merlin. Okay, so here it comes now. Lucky you’re sitting down. Right there in the Apologia Gryllus records an actual incantation of this Myrrdin, a powerful spell he says the meshugana always muttered over the sacramental wine. Such a scaredy-cat is this Gryllus that he tells us he crosses himself while he’s jotting the words into his memoir. Well, you have to understand, this was a goy from a long line of goyim. A monk, after all. And what was this spell? I’ll give you one guess. Go ahead, be a sport.’
‘Not a clue. And now, since you’ve got your breath back, I really must…’ Kraven indicated the heaps of paper on his desk.
‘A piece paper, you should be so good.’ Feibelman held out his hand. Kraven plucked a sheet at random from his desk. The old man tore it in half and began to scribble. ‘Here, this is how it begins.’ He thrust the half-sheet at Kraven: BOREASQUE TAURUS ADONAIS. ‘Nu, what you think of that?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘You kidding me, perfessor? Okay, okay. Here.’ He scribbled on the second half. ‘It ends like this.’ He tossed his writing triumphantly on the desk before Kraven’s eyes: BOREAS PYRRHI HOC OPHINIUM. ‘Well, now what d’you say?’
‘You’ve lost me, Feibelman.’
Feibelman’s face registered his amazement. ‘But there it is, in front of your nose, the Hebrew blessing over wine! Baruch atta adonai, and so on. Of course, you’ve got to make allowances. By the time of the Apologia Gryllus wasn’t a spring chicken any more. His memory, well, you can imagine. Besides, what did he know, the goy, of Hebrew?’
Kraven felt a moment of compassion. Poor, sad old bastard. He must talk to him, give him a few more minutes of his time. If need were, Kraven was ready to blow this spark of pity into a lively flame.
‘You’ve come to me for advice, and you shall have it. Alas, Judaism has become your obsession. Lift a literary stone and there you find a Jew, or an antisemite. It just won’t do.’
‘You think my evidence is crap, is that it? Gildas, Geoffrey, Gryllus, they mean nothing?’ Feibelman was on the point of tears.
‘What evidence connects Geoffrey’s Merlinus with Gryllus’s Myrrdin? Or, for that matter, Gryllus’s lunatic with the one in the Annales? Wishful thinking, Feibelman.’
‘And the spell?’ He was slumped forward now, his horny fingers nervously combing his beard.
‘It’s no more than a coincidental combination of sounds. Look, has the Brooklynite’s shut the door never sounded to you like the Parisian’s je t’adore? You say we should make allowances for Gryllus, for his faulty memory, his superstitious terror, his lack of Hebrew. Should we not also make allowances for your obsession?’
Kraven paused. A tear ran down Feibelman’s cheek. His jaw trembled, fluttering his beard. Kraven, compassionate, spoke more gently.
‘Which of us, I wonder, has not at least once in his career pursued an ignis fatuus across the literary landscape? There is no shame in that. But the true scholar must measure his insights against the most rigorous of intellectual yardsticks, the probable truth. Only because I respect your scholarly integrity do I now advise you to abandon this harebrained notion of a Jewish Merlin.’
A sob escaped from Feibelman’s throat. He shuddered.
‘The path of the scholar,’ Kraven went on, launched now on a set piece, ‘is strewn with impedimenta. The truth may be found, it is there, atop a “huge hill, craggy and steep”. But you must first climb it, muscles aching, over giant boulders strewn on a wild landscape, avoiding as best you can the gentle, chimeric path that plunges only downward to Bedlam or Bellevue.’
Feibelman slumped in the conferee’s chair.
‘As a member of the Prizes Panel, I must tell you candidly that while I personally would grant an unbiased reading to a paper written on this insane topic, it is extremely doubtful whether any other panellist would read past your opening paragraph.’
Kraven brought his wristwatch before his eyes and glanced significantly at the time.
A cowed and despondent Feibelman struggled to his feet. ‘What it boils down to, I should forget the Arthur
ian topic?’
‘Unquestionably. Stop the madness here and now.’
A woefully stooping Feibelman stumbled to the door. ‘In any case, thank you for your time.’
‘Not at all. We must chat again.’
Kraven got to his feet and locked the door. The conference had been exhausting. He needed what he thought of as quality time with himself. He lay down on his chaise longue and sank contentedly into his thoughts.
* * *
KRAVEN WAS NOT ONE who could trace his ancestry to the primordial ooze. Of the Kravens, he knew that they had migrated from somewhere in Poland to Vienna in the middle of the last century and from Vienna to London in this; of his mother’s parents, he knew only that they had left Cracow for London as a young bride and groom, arriving in time for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. But it was the Viennese Kravens to whom he gave his allegiance. All the Viennese Kravens indulged a devil-may-care attitude towards money and expressed disdain for penny-pinchers. Thus they were distinguished in Nicko’s mind from the Blums, whom the refugees from Vienna despised, and for whom the sum of earthly wisdom was to be found in such a popular gem as ‘Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves.’
It was from his father’s family that he had assimilated a bittersweet sense of the Austrian capital – so much so, indeed, that he often felt he had lived there. The likenesses of his ancestors had been preserved in dozens of photographs, sepia toned, stiff, statuesque, self-consciously posed, all now in Kraven’s possession. An anecdote of Opa’s, of Onkel Ferri’s, of his father’s, and these long dead Kravens were released once more into life, almost as vivid to Nicko as those Kravens he knew, Kravens who had petted him, who had pinched his cheeks and fed him chocolates.