by Ian Wedde
‘And anyway, Professor Klepka,’ she said with a careful smile—that’s what she called me, it was a little bit mocking—pushing her cigarette into the ashtray on her desk, where some neat stacks of books and a red and blue striped mug with assorted pens and pencils stood next to a closed laptop and a small vase of wild autumn flowers—I do, I do remember it, all the details—‘and anyway, this was just for now, just for now, as you know, wasn’t it.’
Wasn’t it. Punkt. Not a question.
Back in the good old days of youthful fervour, Jörg used to quote Dutschke: ‘We are not desperate idiots of history.’ The sound of stoned Jilly crying out ‘Oh, Jörg!’ sounded pretty much like a desperate idiot of history to me. And then, in the same place near enough, all those years later, wasn’t it, the grammar, the tense so precise, an emphatic endorsement of historical closure, and Professor Klepka, another desperate idiot of history, half-running back to his double-glazed accommodation with the scarf he’d stolen from the back of Gertrud’s chair, and sitting on the edge of his hotel bed with the scarf’s citrus aroma crammed into his mouth to stop the sobs from transmuting into a howl that might have raised the wardens of the nearby Botanischen Garten and sent them hunting among the bare trees with flashlights for some wounded animal, or some creature out of old German myth, but more likely some student prankster the same age as Gertrud Schoening, whose name of course contains the root-word for ‘beautiful’ in German, and is an old and familiar German name, but whose ‘-ing’ component doesn’t really translate, except in the hybrid speech of English and German in which we spoke to each other for three days in 2007, where it can translate perhaps as ‘Becoming Beautiful’, which Gertrud was, no desperate idiot of history she; no doubt she’s long forgotten the moment when she slipped her hand into that of the quite different Professor from Auckland, New Zealand, who was made sad, she thought, by the installation of chairs in the Bauhaus-Archiv Museum für Gestaltung, Klingelhöfferstrasse 14, Tiergarten, 10785 Berlin, but she didn’t know why.
Because that was when he’d remembered, or realised, why he’d come to Berlin in the first place, all those years ago in 1974.
Why do you want to go to Germany?
Why do you think.
My father’s terrible anger. My father’s terrible shame.
Only she didn’t know anything about that, and I never told her.
My father’s face had been crimson with fury back then, or that’s how I read it, but lately I’ve begun to wonder if it wasn’t grief and frustration. His mad desire not to be a desperate idiot of history, and now look what this stupid son of his is doing.
I’ve still got the banana smoothie in one hand but it tastes like sickly gluey shit, so I chuck it with unnecessary force into a rubbish bin on the corner of Courtenay Place by Downstage Theatre. This used to be Micky’s zone; whatever strife he got into during his time at high school, and he got into plenty, it mostly happened around here. I’ve got just over twenty minutes before Vero’s going to turn up at ‘the house’, but I take a detour down as far as Taranaki Street and then back up the other side of Courtenay Place past the strip joint and the TAB. There’s a bunch of pan-handlers there, including a crazy-eyed man with long hair wearing a sleeveless puffer jacket with synthetic stuffing sprouting out of it, who’s raving about burning Bibles or something. How easy it would have been for Mick to end up like that, although perhaps he did in a sense, only he had a four-bedroom Mount Vic house all to himself, the crazy bastard. He just couldn’t let it go. Couldn’t or wouldn’t, I don’t know which.
But it’s indeed true that Professor Klepka’s very sad, so I stop halfway down the next block, and turn around, and go back across the Tory Street intersection with a drab crowd of pedestrians to the TAB, because that’s where Mick rang from, so he said, the last time I heard from him. A few punters are standing outside on the footpath, smoking, and there seems to be a cartoon-cut-out Mick shape among them, a silhouette, a poor ghost.
And a very good morning to you, too, Sandy.
His harsh voice ranting down the phone yesterday about some horse and an arts page reporter—I’ve got no idea what was going on in that amazing mind of his. The moment you tried to put the word ‘help’ next to the word ‘Sandy’, some kind of violence would result. But this was different. This felt different. Though we’d always fought, I knew my crazy brother.
I’d walked around Victoria Park after leaving the gym and Mick’s phone call—an acid of unease was agitating all my joints and I needed to walk it off. The great piles of brown plane-tree leaves were wet after a night’s downpour, but a Japanese woman photographer was lying on her stomach in the middle of a heap of them, aiming the extended snout of a video camera at a man in an orange visibility jacket and knee-length lycra running pants who was sprinting flat out towards her along the edge of the trees’ shadow line—flitting through the bright dappled sunlight, then stopping with a great huff of breath just short of the videoist and trudging back to his starting place. They kept it up the whole time as I walked around the park, which was full of sunlight and the cheerful, busy sound of traffic on the motorway overpass, and the yapping of dogs chasing balls and sticks, and the hearty shrieks of a personal trainer urging her small group of young women to work it, work it!—and the lovelier it all was, with those big melodramatic Auckland clouds in the blue sky, and the autumn smell of damp grass, and the more I saw the aliveness of everything, including the orange-vested sprinter, the heavier the sense of dread and grief in my chest became, and the more the gravelly sound of Mick’s voice replayed in my head. I don’t hate my brother, but I can’t stand him, and his behaviour over the house is stupid and selfish—but every so often, when he goes off the rails, I see that Clyde Quay Primary kid with the top button of his shirt done up, or the grinning Kraftwerk crazy in his stupid vinyl jacket, or I rehear those stories he made up.
How many times had this happened—he’d got some paranoid idea and then gone on a bender of some kind, usually involving those fucking drugs, or done something crazy like getting the back lawn at the house concreted over, and all any of us could do was say to ourselves, Don’t try to put ‘help’ and ‘Mick’ together?
But this felt different. By the time I’d walked around the park it was getting late, so I caught the Link bus up the hill to the university instead of walking, and the horrible dread sat down with me in a seat towards the back. From there I could see the length of the bus, and I watched a young woman near the front begin to comb and tidy her dark hair into a kind of bun, her quick methodical fingers flicking and tucking, while another young dark-haired woman next to her began to notice what she was doing—her head kept turning to take quick peeks at the hair-work going on next to her. Then the first one noticed herself being noticed, and offered the comb to the woman next to her in the seat. I saw a fragment of her friendly smile in profile, the bright glint of teeth. Perhaps they were friends? Then the second woman accepted the comb, and quickly and neatly reorganised her own hair with little shakes of her head. Then she gave the comb back. Another teeth-glint. They were like a couple of birds on a branch in the sunshine at the park, grooming together in the fresh, flickering light. Then another, older woman sitting behind the two young groomers on the other side of the bus noticed what they were doing and began to push her own straight, blond hair back behind her ears. And then a man with a huge pile of dreads under his big knitted cap couldn’t stop himself from adjusting the load of hair on his head, putting both hands up to fix his coloured hat. And then a shaved-head gym guy put first one hand and then the other up to the smooth crown of his head, and gave it a bit of a shine.
I got off the bus a stop earlier than I’d planned, because the outbreak of grooming was like a message about Mick’s loneliness, as if he’d been hoping that his phone call to me would set off a chain reaction of some kind that would unite us, but of course I didn’t know that any more than I knew what had set him off on his own. But I couldn’t help it. All at once it was unbearabl
e to stay on the bus with the sound of my voice saying, ‘Shut the fuck up, Mick, and stop wasting my time.’
The last thing I ever said to him.
Inside the TAB under the bleak neon light there’s a desultory bustle of activity, but no one seems to be talking to anyone else much. The payphones are on the far side of the room. I pick one up and listen to the waiting hum that comes from it. The mouthpiece smells of cigarettes.
I take the short-cut up Tory Street and stop around the corner to blow my nose and wipe up the tears. Very sad Professor Klepka. A merry babble of voices and the sound of clattering plates and cups come from Caffe l’Affare, and a jostling bunch of people going in give me quick looks over their shoulders. It’s late already, but Vero won’t be, and she won’t know where the key is.
Only the nominated ‘next of kin’ knows that.
I cross the busy Cambridge Terrace intersection by the smelly pub I know Mick liked to frequent—the twin-carriageway vista of my childhood and youth has barely changed, and nor has the grainy filtration of the light on a day like this, with that low metallic cloud greying the air and taking the shine off the wet pavements, and, it seems to me as it used to when I lived here, infusing the movement of traffic up towards the Mount Victoria tunnel, and the heads-down scuttle of pedestrians, with a kind of dull menace, as if history was indeed something not even my—our—hyper-optimistic father could naysay. People used to apply the epithet ‘grungy’ to this aspect of the city, as if it was a virtue to be celebrated, but towards the end of my time here, and not least from the moment when my father’s scorn turned nasty over my decision to leave and go to Auckland, let alone to study German, the word ‘grungy’ began to stand for everything I hated about the place, and have gone on hating ever since, not least its self-congratulating, provincial, solipsistic gloating over its vaunted ‘grunginess’.
Yesterday as I walked from the bus stop up the hill through Albert Park to the university, trying but failing to get rid of the sound of my own voice saying ‘Shut the fuck up, Mick, and stop wasting my time’, I encountered the happy family groups who were gathering in graduation photo-opportunity clusters with big bouquets of flowers, and the autumn flowerbeds in their glory, and the fountain, and the coloured silks of the graduation robes, and the differently thrilled and proud intonations of different languages, and I might as well have said aloud, in fact I probably did, How do we open up to these bright glimpses of another world than ours?
What did I mean, ‘wasting my time’?
What does it mean, ‘desperate idiots of history’?
Agnes and Vero came up from Wellington for my graduation. We stood together in this park. Vero was chatting about the Japanese anemones in the herbaceous borders and Agnes was pleased by the fountain.
By the foodcourt in the student union yesterday morning a sound stage had been set up, and a group of big enthusiastic fa’afafine were belting out or maybe lip-synching show-biz standards with a ragged brass section in behind. Someone grabbed my arm—it was one of my students, not one of the brightest, but all lit up with her graduation moment.
‘Thanks for everything,’ she said, and gave me a shy, chaste kiss on the cheek.
I didn’t remember her name.
Vero is standing by the shuttered garage when I come up the hill towards the house. We seem to be lining each other up as we move steadily into focus. She’s ignoring a plump ginger cat that’s rubbing its arched body against her shins. Did Mick have one? That seems improbable. Though she’s my sister, Vero’s kiss seems on the face of it even less intimate than that of the student yesterday, the one whose name I don’t remember.
Vero and I hang on to each other for a while as if waiting like boxers to see who will break the hold first. I think what I’m saying into the springy mass of her hair is, How do we open up to these bright glimpses of another world than ours?—but that’s just what’s running through my mind.
‘You’re looking sprightly,’ is what I say, and she breaks our hold and pushes me away. There’s a look of forthright annoyance on her face. She gives my arms a little shake.
‘Jesus, I hate that word,’ she says.
‘What about in good shape?’
‘We don’t have to do this, Sandy,’ she says, and before I can say, ‘Do what?’ she pulls me back into the embrace and blurts, ‘Poor old Micky,’ into my chest. It’s true that she’s in good shape; her body against me is firm and steady, and her sobs are honest and powerful. Then, in that no-nonsense way she’s always had, she pulls free again, gets a tissue from the pocket of her parka and blows her nose loudly, never once taking her eyes off me.
I don’t really know what she’s looking at, or for—maybe she wants to see some sign of my sadness, the sadness of Professor Klepka, but that seems to belong somewhere else now.
‘So, have you been in yet?’ says my blunt sister, whose speech always sounds like an abbreviation of some more comprehensive thought. It sounds no-nonsense, but has the complicating effect of making you hesitate before answering, so that usually, as now, she just moves on impatiently. ‘No? So, okay, let’s get cracking, where’s the key?’
The key’s in the front pouch of my swimming-gear backpack, and a look of confusion and annoyance makes Vero’s face flinch as I unzip the pouch and get the keys out. There are several, on a keyring, for the garage, the front door and the door to the studio at the back.
‘Didn’t know you had those,’ says Vero, but then she just turns and walks up the path, trundling her small suitcase.
I have the keys for the same reason I have the Trust documents with the lawyer’s note explaining that the will Agnes made has codicils to be opened when the house is finally disposed of—all of which Vero also has, being a trustee, but not the keys, there was only one set provided. Not counting Mick’s one.
It’s the ‘little things’.
The path is very clean and swept, the overhanging branches of the old taupata neatly trimmed back. The concrete apron above the garage has also been swept free of moss and leaves, but the reddish street-side wall of the house is even blotchier and more faded than the last time I saw it. When Vero turns around suddenly with a look of annoyance and grief on her face, it too is blotchy and red.
‘Go on, then,’ she says.
Inside, the house doesn’t smell musty or dirty, and I don’t know why I expected it to, since Mick was always compulsively fastidious. There are heavy wooden blinds on the windows in the big front downstairs rooms, but even in the dim light it’s clear they are completely empty. There’s plenty of light in the large open-plan back room with its French doors opening out to where the lawn was until Mick got it concreted over. There’s a big plasma TV with a horrible padded La-Z-Boy armchair in front of it, and against the southern wall a neatly made single bed, the pale sheet folded precisely over the duvet, whose geometrical cover pattern I recognise. The large kitchen benches are bare. My father’s pride-and-joy floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are empty except for five rows of tightly packed DVDs—there must be hundreds of them. There’s a fresh smell of household cleaner, something lemony. That’s all there is.
‘Oh, Micky,’ says Vero, but she’s not crying anymore—she stands flat on her feet with her legs planted somewhat apart, as if preparing to make some large physical effort, of lifting or reorganising, but there’s nothing to reorganise. The austere dimensions of Mick’s life are daunting; it’s as though he’s deliberately edited the traces of his day-to-day routines so as to pre-empt any interpretation of them.
I imagine we’re both visualising Mick sitting in his La-Z-Boy in front of the lifeless TV screen—I am; how could Vero not be?
‘Do you want to have a look at the rest?’ I say. ‘I mean, the rest of the house?’
‘I could do with a cup of tea first,’ says Vero, and starts opening cupboards in the kitchen. They’re all empty, except for a shelf of household cleaners. ‘There isn’t even a hot water jug,’ shouts my sister, and begins to laugh. Then she opens the outsize
fridge. There must be at least three dozen bottles of beer lined up neatly on the racks. ‘What the hell,’ she says. ‘Want one?’
I don’t say anything, but she gets a couple out and opens them with the bench-top device my father built in to the thick kauri plank with its worn, bevelled edge. The bottle-opener was one of his jokes, a little homage to the vernacular, and he loved it—he used to make the caps of the big brown bottles fly across the room.
‘Cheers, Micky,’ says Vero. She takes a sip from her bottle and grimaces, and is about to take another, but stops with the bottle tilted against her lips when I say, ‘Martin really loved the mad bugger, didn’t he.’
I feel the word ‘Martin’ hesitate in the moment before I say it, as if it has to jump over something.
I don’t want my beer, and I put the bottle on the bench that’s between my sister and me. She lowers her drink and is looking at me as though she’s been expecting something like this, but like what? All I mean is, it’s no surprise that Mick ended up in the house; it was always his as far as our father was concerned. But that’s not something you can see until you’re in it with him gone. All its details, like the bench-top bottle-opener, and the minimal bevel on the edges of the bench top, and the beautifully proportioned rectangular bookshelves, and how they are a horizontal match for the vertical dimensions of the tall window beside them—even the perversity of the La-Z-Boy—all seem to be framing and annotating the love those two had, according to which Mick could do no wrong. And now that he’s gone, the love has emptied from the room into which he’d compressed its last, concentrated trace. So now it just feels empty.
We must have left the front door ajar, because the cat from the street wanders in with its tail erect and runs away from Vero when she tries to chase it back out. She pulls the bolts on the French doors and pushes them open in their brass track, kicking a rolled-up towel out of the way, and the cat escapes into the concrete yard and then sits, not looking back, licking at its shoulder.