Kraven Images

by Alan Isler

  ‘I stay at the Hotel Ispahan in Swiss Cottage, a hop, a leap and a chump from the station. But where do you stay?’

  ‘The Inn on the Park.’ Kraven spoke as one inspired. ‘Come to me there tonight, about half-past eight. We’ll have dinner in my suite, just the two of us. Champagne, music, and then…’

  ‘Oh yes! Tonight, my treasure! Oh yes, oh yes!’

  He waggled an admonitory finger at her and winked. ‘Don’t forget the potion, Didi.’

  ‘Never doubt me, beloved.’ She caught his hand and kissed his knuckles roughly. ‘Tonight, Nobby Poore-Moody! Tonight, you beautiful little sausage you! Tonight!’

  * * *

  KRAVEN, WITH BLISTERED FEET, SAT NOW in the genteely worn lounge of the English-Speaking Union waiting for Stella. Two of her countrywomen occupied a far corner and discussed Spode, cashmere and the London theatre. They were much bothered, it seemed, by a draught, but the ancient waiter, perhaps deaf in fact, was certainly deaf to their complaints. Kraven smiled at them sympathetically. It was well known, his smile said, that in America there were no draughts.

  He turned the pages of an old copy of the Tatler, glancing impatiently every few moments at his watch. He was on the brink of something. Love, it could not be other than love, flooded through him. And who could doubt that his love was returned? Ripe she was and bright she was, and she was his. She was also, some might say, Poore-Moody’s, but that was a trifling technicality, a problem that the next day or two would solve. In fact, her loyalty to that elderly reprobate endeared her all the more to Kraven. That she should fly three thousand miles in compassionate pursuit of her mad monk was somehow touching. It was in Kraven’s arms, however, that she would find her rest.

  Stella’s voice, emanating from the reception hall, broke in upon these happy thoughts. She had arrived! He rose to his feet even as she appeared in the doorway. They kissed long and passionately.

  He held her by the shoulders at arm’s length and gazed at her. ‘You grow more and more beautiful,’ he said. And so she did. She looked glorious. The dark rings of sleeplessness were on her a sensual fillip and conveyed a heavy warmth.

  ‘Why didn’t you phone? You’re such a cheapskate! Christ, you could’ve called collect.’ She kissed his earlobe, nipping it as she did so, gently, with her teeth. The tip of her tongue darted into his ear and out again. ‘We’ve so much to talk about. All hell’s broken loose in New York. I phoned the college, and then there’s the apartment. And what about Robert?’ She kissed him again, urgently.

  The rattle of a teacup in its saucer reminded him that they were not alone. ‘First things first,’ he said. ‘Let’s get you settled in your room.’ He jerked his head to indicate to her her compatriots, who were sitting rapt, no longer bothered by the draught.

  Stella winked at them. ‘Come on, first things first,’ she said with Stellar lewdness. ‘Get me settled in my room, why don’t you?’

  ‘My fiancée,’ said Kraven.

  ‘My British lover,’ said Stella, and dragged him by the arm.

  * * *

  THEY MADE LOVE IMPORTUNATELY, wildly, selfishly. They lay in one another’s arms, softly caressing skin now made tender, and they kissed and turned and rolled flesh to flesh. And soon they began anew, but gently; and, exhausted at last, lay side by side, her hand gently cupping him, his resting heavily on her cleft wetness.

  ‘Hungry?’ he said after a while. ‘We’d better make a dinner reservation somewhere. The Red Lion all right?’

  ‘It might seem a little indelicate,’ she said, ‘in view of our current condition, but I think it’s time you told me about Robert.’

  ‘Later. You’re right, it’s indelicate.’

  ‘But Nicholas –’

  ‘Later. Tell me first about New York. Did I understand you to say you’d phoned the college?’

  ‘What the hell was I supposed to do? I desperately needed to get in touch. I thought they’d give me your London address.’

  ‘I never told them I was coming, for pity’s sake! God, Stella, what have you done?’ He leaped from the bed and began to pull on his trousers.

  ‘How was I to know?’ she said. ‘Where are you going?’

  Kraven had no idea. He sat down beside her on the bed. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘What you would call “a regular cock-up”, I guess. At first, they said you were in LA, insisted on it, but I told them I was holding your telegram from London in my hand. Then they said, yes, they’d already heard you hadn’t shown up on the Coast and that there were some serious questions pending. Then I had to hold on for a bit. Then they said, who was this and would I have a word with your chairman? I thought I’d better hang up.’

  ‘Ah well, not to worry,’ said Kraven with a sigh. ‘It would all have come out anyway.’ He took her hand to his lips and kissed her on the knuckles.

  ‘I admire your gallantry, darling, and I’m well aware that but for me you wouldn’t be in this mess. No, don’t deny it. I mean your dropping everything to find Robert for me.’

  ‘Ah, that, yes. I had given you my word, after all. But Stella, I think I ought to tell you –’

  She put her hand to his lips. Her eyes were moist. Well, Kraven had tried.

  ‘What put you on his trail?’ she wanted to know then.

  ‘It’s a long story. Besides, we’re not to talk of Robert yet, remember?’

  ‘You ought to phone the college, though.’ She turned his wrist and looked at his watch. ‘It’s still early afternoon over there. Perhaps you can contain some of the fall-out.’

  ‘Perhaps I shall in a bit. But there’s more to tell, isn’t there? What happened to your apartment, Stella? Was that why you had to get in touch?’

  She looked at him in amazement, her eyes wide. ‘Good God, Nicholas, not my apartment, yours!’

  ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘It was trashed, a fucking shambles, utterly destroyed.’

  A neighbour on Kraven’s floor, it appeared, had noticed Kraven’s open front door, had knocked, peered in, and quickly withdrawn. He had told the super, who had told the police, who had questioned the other tenants. That was how Stella had found out. She had claimed friendship and taken responsibility for locating him. She had also seen the apartment.

  Not a photograph or print or painting was left on the walls. The entire Kraven collection, family photographs, Opa’s Sarah Bernhardt memorabilia, all ripped, all crushed, all tattered, all gathered in a heap in the centre of the living room on a bed of shattered glass, pottery shards and smaller wooden pieces: snapped picture frames and hacked-off table legs, inner white wood exposed like bone, a pyre never ignited. The barbarians had balked at actually striking a match. Instead, they had urinated on the heap.

  An axe had been used on the furniture. The heavier wooden pieces bore ugly hackings and gashings. Here and there on the couch and the other upholstered furniture they had left their faeces, dessicating mounds mimicking the nobler heaps of Kraven possessions, in Stella’s word, shit, the signature of the vandal. Only the great bed had been spared. On the walls, in several hands, appeared spray-can epigraffiti, offering ideological justification for the destruction: VIVA MAO, DEATH TO ALL CUNT PROFFS, UP PLO, SHAKSPIR SUCKS, PEOPLE POWER.

  The news struck him with the sickening force of a blow to the guts. In the course of her telling, he blenched, all strength draining from him, fought to right himself, steadied, held on to her, listened, tried to make sense of her words.

  So it was all over. The material representations of his past, his household gods, were shattered, and Sarah herself lay mingled with the shit and the dust. In one mighty bound the hobnail boots had leaped to the top of the stair. He was now, in a sense that Aunt Cicely could not have anticipated, adrift. The substantial sources of his being, his mythic roots, his sense of self – all these were gone: the highly polished, small table made by hand in Graz in 1847, for example, and figuring in the earliest family photographs, a table that had travelled unharmed from Vi
enna to Hampstead and, after Marko had claimed it, unharmed from Hampstead to New York. It was gone now, no different at last from the whole tribe of Kravens. Now even their shadows were gone, their images in sepia tones, in blacks and whites, instants of time once captured and secured, now gone forever, torn, crushed, pissed on and beshat.

  Stella held him hard by the hand. ‘I’m so sorry, darling.’

  Kraven said nothing.

  ‘But who could have done such a thing?’ she said.

  Kraven still said nothing. He knew well enough: it was Princip, of course, Princip and his gang of louts, his cohort of hooligans. The barbarians had swept on through. Such were the times. A bishop of Rome, he recalled, had once interposed himself between the Hun and his beloved city, had thrust his chest defiantly at the very spears of the invader: ‘Over my dead body!’ The Hun had been very happy to oblige.

  ‘Nicholas,’ said Stella with alarm, ‘are you all right?’

  ‘Thank you for taking care of things,’ he said politely. Disengaging his hand from hers he got to his feet. ‘Excuse me for a moment, please.’ He walked to the bathroom with the painstaking deliberation of a drunk, knelt before the bowl, his head bowed piously above it, and then, very meekly, heaved the contents of his stomach into it.

  * * *

  CALMER NOW, KRAVEN PONDERED. Stella was soaking in the tub. Perhaps he should phone Mosholu, get that business over with before his present numbness passed. The Union operator was pleased to make the connection for him. In the distant Bronx a telephone rang.

  ‘English Department.’

  ‘Mrs Trutitz? Nicholas Kraven here. If you’d just put me through to Professor Papadakis?’

  ‘Ari’s kinda busy right now, he’s got Dean Pioggi in there with him. I don’t know I should interrupt them.’

  ‘Believe me, you should interrupt them.’

  Kraven, cushioned by the sustaining numbness, held on. In the bathtub Stella splashed and ah-ed contentedly. There was a click in his ear.

  ‘That you, Kraven? How was LA?’ Acid dripped from Papa Doc’s tongue.

  ‘Ah, you see –’

  ‘You weren’t there, were you, feller?’

  ‘The thing is –’

  ‘Don’t lie to me, guy. We’ve already heard from Dillinger. I mean, there he was before this learned body, people with names, Nicky-baby, you know, like this was the Big Time, history-wise, and the Dill’s ready to introduce Mosholu’s Number Two attraction, pun very much intended, you shit. Wait, it gets worse. Seems there’s a guy from Harvard name of Hill, an international biggie, introduces one of our students, one of your students, guy called Feibelman, and this Feibelman announces to the assembled throng the Big Idea, which, according to the Dill, you had claimed as your own. We’re lucky, I guess, we’re not in the middle of a major plagiarism scandal. So you wanna tell me where the hell you are?’

  ‘I’m in –’

  ‘You’re in London, right? No need to answer, bunky, we know. How’s the season over there? Anything worthwhile at the Old Vic? What the fuck are you doing in London?’

  ‘There’s no need to be abusive.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, are you kidding me? You figured, what the hell, who’ll know, right? You think that’s the worst? I’ve hardly begun. You see, the Dean had this conversation with a former teacher of yours, guy by the name of Quimby, remember him? I told you about him, right, about his coming over here? The Dean happens to mention your name, Mosholu being so proud of you and all. Know what Quimby said? He said you’re dead. Now ain’t that a rib-tickler? Yup, he said you’re dead. One of his most promising students, if a bit erratic, cut off in his prime. Said he attended your funeral. How about that?’

  ‘I can explain.’

  ‘Sure you can, feller. Thing is, I got this photocopy of a PhD sheepskin right here on the desk in front of me, London University. Just tell me this one thing: you the Marcus Nicholas Kraven whose name appears here in, let’s see, in modified Gothic?’

  ‘He was my –’

  ‘Hold it right there. Is this your sheepskin? Yes or no?’

  ‘Not mine exactly, it’s –’

  ‘Do you have one of your own?’

  ‘No, I –’

  ‘That’s all she wrote. Misrepresentation in addition to simple, albeit grand, larceny. You’re into Mosholu for maybe ten years’ salary, medical benefits, pension, God knows what. Kinda makes your little jaunt to London look like peanuts. D’you have any idea how serious this is? Impersonating a doctor of philosophy! My God, you must be crazy! And how about Illegal Entry? Almost as bad, wouldn’t y’say, Mal? Dean Pioggi is right here with me.

  A mild but certain anger Was beginning to dissipate the numbness. ‘I entered the US, as it happens, with my own passport and visa. And there are simple explanations for what you slanderously call misrepresentation and larceny.’

  ‘I’ll bet. Only I don’t happen to be simple. What’s that, Mal? The Dean says he’s not simple either. You got a simple explanation for moral turpitude too?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘No? I got a letter here from a certain female student, girl by the name of Giulietta Corombona. Let’s see now. She makes certain allegations of sexual misconduct against a certain member of our department, said misconduct having taken place on college property; in fact, behind a closed college door. How about that? Something about a passing grade depending on her “putting out”, by which she means performing certain unnatural, filthy, and shameful sex acts. Miss Corombona’s preferences in English grammar and spelling are as perverse as her mentor’s sexual proclivities, but she gets her point across, no problem there.’

  ‘That’s utterly ridiculous. Giulietta Corombona’s –’

  ‘Listen, we’ve been on the phone with our legal department, so we agree with you, it’s not an easy charge to sustain, you’re lucky. But another student claims – hold on, I’ve got her name here somewhere, yes Antonia Anstruther – she claims you deliberately position yourself in class so’s you can look up her skirt. Now that kinda thing doesn’t exactly help your case. Sure, Mal, sure. The Dean would like a word with you.’

  ‘Hallo, Nicholas? Malcolm here. How are you, old thing? I’m willing to accept your resignation now, Nicholas, over the telephone. That would be best. But you’d have to send us official letters just the same, one for President Proudfoot, one for Ari here, and one for rotten old me.’

  ‘I guess Dean Pioggi’s said it all, feller,’ said Papa Doc. ‘The college won’t prosecute so long as you don’t grieve, okay? Both sides can do without the embarrassment, right? But you grieve and we got no choice.’

  Kraven, who had been holding the phone at a distance from his ear for the last several minutes, decided to hang up. At that moment, Stella emerged naked from the bathroom. She glowed, all signs of tiredness gone. Kraven marvelled.

  ‘Straighten things out at the college?’

  Kraven smiled a smile he would himself have been hard put to explain. ‘It seems,’ he said, ‘that I am absolutely free.’

  TWELVE

  AS THEY WALKED towards the Inn on the Park, Stella spoke of what she hoped to accomplish. There was a little village in the Swiss Alps, Villars, not far from Vevey, where she and Robert had stayed years before, quiet, semi-rustic. She had phoned ahead. ‘He needs rest and love. Above all, love.’

  Kraven was bitterly disappointed that she had even conceived such a plan, but since he was quite sure she would be unable to pull it off, he simply asked, ‘And how much time do you propose to devote to his convalescence?’

  ‘Who can say?’

  ‘He probably can use the rest, poor old sod, but love? What the hell d’you think he’s been up to all this while?’

  She tossed her head in anger. ‘What do you know about love? You think it’s just a function of your prick.’

  She made a visible effort to control herself. ‘Try to understand Robert. You don’t know him. He’s so sensitive, so easily hurt.’ She took his han
d. ‘Finding out about us crushed him. Even so, he thought first about me and my happiness. That’s why he wrote the letter, don’t you see? He wanted to give me an easy out, he thought I wanted it that way.’

  ‘And don’t you?’

  ‘That’s beside the point. We’re talking about him now and his needs.’

  ‘My God, Stella! He’s running around with a stripper. A burlesque queen. He’s even got her sisters along. For someone who wants to fade out quietly, he’s leaving with a most remarkable bang.’

  She dropped his hand. ‘Go ahead, make jokes. I tell you he’s bruised.’

  ‘His balls are perhaps.’

  ‘Ssh, Nicholas!’ Stella glanced from side to side. She placed a forefinger to her lips. It was an old fashioned, melodramatic, and utterly enchanting gesture.

  It was true that he had been raising his voice. They had paused before the entrance to the hotel. There were people in evidence, people arriving, people waiting for taxis.

  ‘Obviously you’re going to have to see for yourself. You seem to think he’s walking around in some kind of a trance. I tell you, he’s involved, he’s got plans, and they don’t include being coddled in Switzerland. Look, he’s going to put on some kind of a Shakespearean strip show for them. That’s where the monastery endowment is going. Probably he hopes to make a bundle out of it; maybe he will.’ Kraven felt that Stella was slipping from him. Couldn’t she see what Poore-Moody was up to? Wasn’t his hypocrisy plain? ‘Did you ever stop to consider this: maybe he doesn’t want to be saved? maybe he likes things the way they are?’

  ‘That’s enough, Nicholas, not another word. He’s sick, he doesn’t know what he wants. He needs his ego rebuilt. We destroyed that, you and I. How can I abandon him now? His letter was right about one thing: he’s getting old. Who knows how much longer he’s got? He’s a human being. He needs love and understanding.’

  ‘What about me? I’m a human being too. You think I don’t need love?’ He glanced despairingly about him. ‘What about us?’

  ‘Us?’ she hissed. ‘We’re here today because of us. Now we must see what we can do about him.’