by Alan Isler
Hocusing-pocusing,
Didi von Hoden,
Wagnerian temptress and Circean witch,
Shimmied and shook herself
While she was wearing, e-
Rotomaniac’lly,
Nary a stitch.
Kraven shuddered.
He had had to wait half an hour before it was possible to dress. Indeed, only after he had taken matters personally in hand had the mutinous member, albeit reluctantly, slowly submitted, crestfallen, its pride humbled, but at last at one with the rest of his body again.
The platform was crowded. A train was pulling in at last. A diminutive woman, her hair done up in large plastic curlers, elbowed her way deliberately in front of Kraven. Familiar with the strong territorialism of regular subway riders, he gave ground. But when the doors opened before them he raced her for the only available seat. She won, fortunately for the vestiges of Kraven gallantry, and winked up at him saucily. He winked back. Here was subway goodfellowship at its very best.
Strap-hanging, jerked rudely by the train’s fits and starts, Kraven closed his eyes and found himself listening to the fairy tale a plump lady beneath him was reading to the child curling sleepily on her lap. ‘At that moment the little tailor ran from his shop into the street, waving his fly swatter above his head. “I killed seven with one blow!” he shouted. “Think of it! Seven with a single blow!” All the people in the street looked at him in amazement…’
When Onkel Koko broke the dreadful news to Opa, the old man said simply, ‘So it was no use, all for nothing the escape from Vienna. They found them anyway.’ That was before he fully understood the magnitude of his loss.
In the early hours of 2 November 1941, a lone German bomber, separated from its squadron during a raid on the East End docks and wandering off course, flew over Hampstead and jettisoned its remaining bomb. Nicko, Mummy, and Opa were living in the big house in Harrogate by this time. They had been in the north for almost a year, ever since Nicko’s father had decided that London wasn’t really safe enough any more. Daddy would come up to see them on weekends and holidays, whenever he could, and usually he had brought a Kraven or two with him. Sometimes Grandpa Blum and Aunt Cicely came too, but never on the same train as the Kravens. On this particular weekend Onkel Koko had brought cousins Tillie and Marko for a visit. But by then Daddy had been eight months dead. He had reached for a rose in the Harrogate garden, and … and then he had died. Crumbs of soil stuck to the blood on Daddy’s face, where the thorns had scratched him as he fell.
For the first few weeks Nicko had had to share with Opa the huge double bed in the first-floor back bedroom. It was this very bed that now stood, thanks to Marko, in Kraven’s New York apartment. Not that Nicko minded sharing. It was super to sleep with Opa, who had a million midnight stories to tell.
The train pulled into Astor Place. Damn it! In his sportive eagerness to race for a seat, Kraven had mistakenly boarded a local. The winner in that contest, meanwhile, had got up to leave. Kraven sighed and sat down. He was still far from Grand Central, where he would change trains. Next to him the child had fallen asleep on his mother’s lap, his dirty sneakers rubbing from time to time against Kraven’s trouser leg.
He was still sharing the bed with Opa when Onkel Koko brought the news of the bombing. They had believed Nicko was asleep and they talked in strangled whispers. He did fall asleep after that in terror. But he awoke once briefly in the night to hear Opa sobbing beside him.
In a way it was Daddy’s fault, although as always his intentions had been of the best. In the autumn of 1939, before there had been any thought of moving his family to the north of England, Felix Kraven had had an air-raid shelter built at the foot of their Hampstead garden. Such private shelters were springing up all over suburban London, although the real terrors of Blitzkrieg were as yet unimagined. Theirs had been the first in Beauchamp Close.
It was a small square structure of double brick with a reinforced concrete roof. ‘Safe as ’ouses, them there’, the builder, a man of nice irony, had assured Daddy. ‘Stand anything bar a direct ’it. Y’might try a bitter camouflage, just t’be on the safe side. Most do.’ ‘Do you think so?’ ‘Yerss. Frow up an ’ill all round, just the door showing. Plant it, ‘erbaceous borders, that sorter thing. Rock gardens is popular. Don’t take much to confuse the ’un.’ He glanced at Daddy. ‘No offence, sir.’ ‘And none taken, my dear fellow’, said Daddy, who prided himself on his colloquial English.
Mummy had bunk beds moved into the shelter, a table, some kitchen chairs, lamps, an oil heater. It was quite cozy, just the place to play ludo or snakes-and-ladders. Meanwhile, Daddy busied himself on the roof, periodically arranging and rearranging an assortment of branches. ‘Why are you doing that, Daddy?’ Nicko had asked once, awed by his father’s perilous acrobatics. ‘To confuse the Hun, of course. Doesn’t take much, you know.’
But Felix had reckoned without the Kraven demons.
When the sirens wailed in the early morning hours of 2 November 1941, Tante Carlotta, Tante Erica, and Onkel Gusti zipped themselves into their siren suits and made for the air raid shelter. They took with them a large thermos flask of tea and a tin of sandwiches.
Onkel Ferri, helmet on head, gas mask over his shoulder, binoculars around his neck, was at that time some five miles away at his post on the roof of an office building. He was an air raid warden and proud to be doing his bit. On the roof with him was Vice-Admiral Bunny Mayhew, retired, VC, a fellow watcher of the skies.
Many years later Ferri admitted to Kraven that he had actually heard the lone bomber fly over, had even started to telephone the local anti-aircraft battery on his observer-post telephone. Mayhew had stopped him.
‘Plucky beggar. Must be separated from his chaps. Goin’ it alone, don’t y’now.’
‘But it’s a German bomber!’
‘Don’t need you to tell me it’s Jerry. They’ll get him before he reaches the coast, poor blighter. Give him a sportin’ chance, old boy.’
Onkel Ferri had replaced the receiver.
Meanwhile, in the air raid shelter at the foot of 15 Beauchamp Close, Onkel Gusti and Tante Erica sat playing gin rummy. Tante Carlotta had just poured three mugs of tea from the large thermos flask when the bomb struck the shelter, blowing it to pieces. It had been a direct hit. Curiously the mugs of tea survived undisturbed. A charred scrap of paper found in the rubble showed that Tante Erica’s famed luck at cards had held to the end. The house itself had sustained almost no damage, merely a broken windowpane or two.
But why had Onkel Ferri, now transformed into the Compleat Mourner, failed in his duty? Had his yearning to be accepted as a sporting Englishman softened his resistance to Admiral Mayhew? It was shortly after his release from the asylum that the Compleat Mourner revealed his theory about the anti-Kraven demons.
The train came to a skittering halt. Metal ground on metal and howled. It was Fifty-first Street. Kraven had missed his station.
* * *
IT COST HIM ANOTHER TOKEN to reach the downtown platform. Perhaps there had been something in the witch’s potion, some mind-diverting ingredient, say, that prevented him from focusing on the simple task of getting home. Then too, the ugliness of his surroundings surely prompted a sensitive concentration to flee, thoughts to turn defensively inward. The New York subway system, after all, had succeeded in granting contemporary incivility a formal expression.
On the tracks at the entrance to the tunnel a signalman idled, whistling to the spirit ditties of no tone. Over his clothes he wore a bright orange tunic, and he held a lantern in his hand. He was there to warn his fellows, out of Kraven’s line of vision but presumably working in the tunnel at the other end of the platform, of a train’s approach. A pleasant enough sort of occupation, Kraven mused, but for its location almost pastoral in its simplicity. At the end of another grateful day, Corin would cease his whistling, twitch his orange mantle, and be off: tomorrow to fresh tracks and stations new.
Kraven retired f
rom the edge of the platform. It made him nervous to stand there. One always feared the shove from behind that would send one teetering over the edge and into the filthy well, sprawling amid the unutterable disjecta of countless subway riders, the oily soot, the rat faeces, one’s head coming to rest in the Stygian trickle that ran ceaselessly between the tracks, one’s leg fetching up against the live rail, the death rail.
From the distance came the rumble of a train. Corin courageously faced the sound and began to swing his lantern before him, left, right, left, right. Three unnerving siren blasts answered his signal. He turned and faced the other way. Once more he swung his lantern. Satisfied, he turned again and walked boldly into the tunnel’s mouth. It swallowed him up. The train clattered into the station emitting angry blasts. It was gaudily disfigured but relatively empty. Kraven got into the last compartment and sat down. A faulty fluorescent light flickered on and off. A copy of the News was scattered the length of the floor, twisted, torn, much trodden on. The doors closed but the train remained in the station.
Evil Eddie, Ducky 128 and Shaddow 19 had been in the compartment before him and had not scrupled to leave clear signs of their passing. The cognoscenti, Kraven knew, claimed for such effusions of the People the lofty status of Art. Academicians and literati, instant diagnosticians of the Zeitgeist, saw in such optical migraines the efforts of the inarticulate to articulate, the longing of the oppressed, the nameless and the alienated to assert their selfhood. Shaddow 19, Ducky 128, Evil Eddie, the epigraffiti of the damned. Alas, alas, Kraven searched his heart in vain for understanding.
With the sound of a snapping femur and a mighty shake that sent him sliding down his seat, the train at last began to move. When it re-entered the tunnel, Kraven peered through the grimy window. There, each in his individual cubby carved out of the tunnel wall, each wearing the distinctive orange tunic and carrying his tool, stood Corin’s fellows, all secure.
So that was how it was done. Poor Koko, had he but known!
Oskar Kraven had been Nicko’s favourite uncle. Indeed, he was a universal favourite. Tall, handsome, charming, he possessed a chivalric grace that dissolved all opposition. Women melted at his glance, men found him a jocund companion. Tillie and Marko, his children, had from their infancy supposed him a fool, which perhaps he was, but had also fiercely defended him as a lovable fool. He was Tante Carlotta’s despair and joy. His fecklessness, inordinate even in a Kraven, was a constant worry to her, but, as she had once admitted to Felix, had he been more responsible he would have been less Koko, and that was unthinkable. He gambled too fondly, drank too enthusiastically. But Lotti was proud simply to be seen with him. And indeed they made a fine pair, Onkel Oskar, elegant, swinging his cane, his hat angled just so, a fresh boutonnière in his lapel, and Tante Carlotta, still a lovely woman in her forties, short but liberally endowed, her delicate hand resting gently on his arm.
She worshipped him. After twenty years of marriage he loved her deeply, warmly, but no longer passionately. His passion he reserved for a series of mistresses. But he chose discreetly and well, for he would not have hurt Lotti for the world. Infidelity is too harsh, too narrow a word to describe Koko’s … what? peccadillos? adventures? amours? He and Lotti enjoyed a marriage of mutual contentedness and kindliness, in the middle years an idyllic state.
Then came the German bomb, assembled in a cursed hour and blasting to smithereens the shelter at 15 Beauchamp Close. Koko endured the death of his beloved Lotti by the simple expedient of refusing to acknowledge it. She was away on holiday, it would do her a world of good. He would join her as soon as he could get away.
Probably no one will ever possess all the facts having to do with Koko’s violent death. Precisely what followed his ill-timed arrival on the platform of the Tottenham Court Road station and preceded his ill-fated interference with the smooth-running of the Northern Line will almost certainly always remain shrouded in mystery. The official facts, however, are these: (1) ‘On or about eleven o’clock on the night of 12 September 1946,’ Oskar Kraven, widower, womanizer and poker player, had purchased a ninepenny ticket at Tottenham Court Road underground station; (2) at eleven twenty-three he had been overtaken in the tunnel, within eight hundred feet of Goodge Street, by a train already slowing down for the station approach; (3) according to the Medical Examiner’s report, ‘deceased was discovered to possess in his bloodstream a level of alcohol far in excess of what might be expected from convivial drinking.’ Deceased, in short, as the Medical Examiner had added when pressed by the Coroner for clarification, had been ‘blind reeling drunk’.
This last ‘fact’ Onkel Ferri, the Compleat Mourner, had dismissed as a caddish insinuation, a vile affront to the memory of his fallen brother. In Ferri’s reconstruction of the melancholy events, Koko had probably peered over the edge of the platform in a vain search for some sign of his train. He had been struck from behind ‘by a person or by persons unknown’, – the Kraven demon(s)! – who had seized this opportunity of catching a Kraven in so defenceless a position. His assailant(s) had immediately fled into the night.
The anti-Kraven forces, as the Compleat Mourner saw it in that far-off time, were still legion in the world. Flushed with their successes of 1941, the malevolent demons had struck again. The recent defeat of Nazi Germany had not diminished their fervour or ingenuity. Pity the poor Kraven who let down his guard!
Koko had perhaps lain on the tracks for a short while, momentarily stunned. But then he had pulled himself to his feet, dusted himself off as best he could, and with typical Koko-esque insouciance had decided to return home on foot. He had set off into the tunnel’s black mouth, no doubt swinging his cane.
* * *
KRAVEN’S TRAIN SCREECHED INTO BLEECKER STREET. Once more he had overshot his station. This must stop, and now. He was becoming a Pynchonian yoyo. The human brain, he had read somewhere, began daily at age thirty to shed particles in shocking quantities, a kind of galloping intelligential dandruff, the seborrhea of the mind. He ploughed today through drifts of such stuff as once his dreams were made on.
Kraven got off the train right there, at Bleecker Street. The pattern must be broken before it gelled, before it became a way of life. How many of the ancient derelicts he had seen over the years and at all hours, male and female, sitting sometimes in their own urine on platform benches, pawing through refuse bins, shunned like lepers of an earlier time, left alone to their haunted dreams, their fitful catnaps, how many of them, he wondered, had been caught long ago as he had almost been caught today in a Moëbian nightmare, a goetistic spell, the lifetime shuttle? Fanciful, no doubt. But he left the platform for all that.
Climbing to street level, he found himself in a neighbourhood of factories and gas stations, an area of converging dirty streets, a place of giant trucks and honking automobiles. The streets hummed with noise and activity. Large, heavily muscled men in T-shirts and Levis, stomachs bulging with beer, shouted at one another, kidded, cursed. Kraven walked quickly towards Houston, hailed a cab, and got in.
‘Where to, Mac?’
‘Home, please.’
‘You kiddin me? Where’s home, mistuh?’
‘Oh, sorry.’ Kraven told him.
The driver soon found the heaviest traffic and contrived to stay with it. He aimed his cab unerringly at the larger potholes, even when to do so threatened bloody collision. A neatly printed sign on the rear of the driver’s seat advised passengers to ‘Sit Back And Relax.’ Kraven watched the meter tick away.
About an hour later the taxi drew up just short of Kraven’s building. The fare was witheringly high. Kraven stepped, right foot first, out of the cab. As the foot took his weight, he felt the ground beneath it momentarily subside and then hold slippery-firm. He had never developed the specialized antennae of the native New Yorker. ‘Oh, shit!’ he said, with perfect accuracy.
FIVE
RING-RING! KRAVEN’S TELEPHONE, sounding its shrill summons, reminded him abruptly and cruelly of unfinished business
. Almost certainly it was Stella. The events of yesterday morning flooded back to torment him. Into what snares and befuddlements had Stella carelessly led him? Ring-ring! He could not cope with her now. She must allow him time to think, a minimal courtesy to the victim.
He walked through to the living-room windows and shifted the blinds slightly. A huddle of loutish youths across the Drive were staring up at him. Was that Princip, the SDS champion of his Shakespeare class, among them? The costume and the scoliotic posture were all too familiar. They seemed to be arguing among themselves, gesticulating. One of them pointed at his window. Instinctively Kraven pulled back. What were they up to? Princip gave a clenched-fist salute. Immediately below, the doorman from the next building was in neighbourly conversation with his own doorman, Clarence. We are not safe, Clarence; we are not safe. The phone meanwhile had ceased its importunings. Kraven turned from the window. Princip and his fellows, whatever their fancied intentions, were the least of his concerns.
The apartment comprised, essentially, four large rooms. The dining room, across the gallery from the living room, he had transformed into a study: book-lined walls, reading lamps, easy chairs, the sanctuary of the scholar. The living room could easily accommodate the dining table and chairs; in any case, he took most of his meals in the kitchen, a large and forbidding area of exposed pipes and gauges, a turn-of-the-century Engine Room of a transatlantic steamer. In view of their size, living room and bedroom might seem to the casual eye sparsely furnished. Kraven’s purchases had been a couch, two easy chairs, a coffee table, and some rugs, Persian in type if not in provenance. All the other furniture, large items and small, had come from the house in Hampstead. Here were the pieces that just before his planned departure for New York Marko had claimed as belonging to his own branch of the family in Vienna. As it turned out, Marko’s destination had been not the New but the Other World. When that unhappy fact became known, the furniture itself had already been long upon the high seas, obedient to the established westward yearning of Kraven destiny. It was Nicholas not Marcus Kraven who had reclaimed it from dockside storage.