A Small Revolution in Germany

by Philip Hensher

  We went out for a pizza. It was not the same. She talked about people. There were no principles to be gone over any longer, just individuals – people she had met, people who were shagging other people she had met, people who had made a name for themselves, and people who were only famous within a tiny circle of twenty or so. There was nothing really to contribute. That was the point of her conversation. James Frinton kept it going – he knew the people she was talking about, or knew who they were. He could encourage her with an occasional ‘Didn’t he get arrested in Pakistan, trying to join the mujahideen?’ or ‘I thought her brother worked for BP,’ or ‘They were at school together.’ From time to time she threw us a bone, a ‘Do you remember that time when we …’ And we dutifully remembered. But it went nowhere.

  Once she gave a little shriek and clutched Mohammed’s left arm, pushing his rolled-up blue shirtsleeve towards his shoulder. ‘Look, look,’ she said. ‘You had that done – you had that done in Scarborough. I remember! It took so long! I thought it was going to be in and out but we must have been an hour standing outside. And there it is, your rose. I love it. What a charming thing to have, a souvenir. I almost envy you. I do envy you. I do.’

  ‘You held my hand,’ Mohammed said. ‘I thought it was going to hurt and you said you’d hold my hand. It was the others who were standing outside waiting. And my hand was really sweaty and I worried it was disgusting, but it did hurt, and you did hold my hand.’

  The smile grew bright, the eyes were wide. The target of Tracy’s expression might have stood ten feet behind Mohammed. ‘Happy days,’ she said eventually. The saddest part of that pizza was that we all knew exactly what the others would order ‒ we had discovered Pizza Express some months before the end of school: Mohammed a Marinara with no cheese, me a Four Seasons, James Frinton a Margherita, to save money. Tracy had that strange one with onion and sultanas, of which ten pence of every pizza went to help save Venice from Peril. Venice is still where it always was. The strange pizza still sits on the menu at Pizza Express. But Tracy is long gone. We had a bottle of wine. Tracy had a gin and tonic as well. Nothing had changed. Mohammed still ate his pizza from the inside out. Frinton still carved his into neat sixteenths before rolling them up and eating them. Tracy was still the last to finish. And everything had changed. We saw that.

  On the pavement outside, I said I thought we could go to the King’s Arms or to the college bar. Something barely perceptible passed between Tracy and James Frinton. The smooth surface of charm that he later developed was still incomplete. I saw this exchange. She lowered her eyelids and let him take control.

  ‘I’ve got to get on with a couple of things,’ he said. ‘But we’ll see you tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow night. Come round about six, yeah?’

  ‘I’ll be in terrible trouble if I don’t finish this essay. Start it, even,’ Tracy said. ‘I can’t believe you’ve just turned up on a Thursday, you two. It’s crazy. You’re mental. I love it. We’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m going to walk Alexandra home,’ James Frinton said.

  ‘Walk who?’ Mohammed said. ‘Half those invites in your room – to Alexandra. Who the fuck’s Alexandra?’

  ‘I guess it’s just what people call me here,’ Tracy said. ‘It’s just … I guess they thought it suited me better, like a kind of nickname or …’ She trailed off. She smiled brightly.

  ‘Are we supposed to call you Alexandra now?’ I said.

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ Tracy said. James Frinton put his arm around her shoulders. It was a gesture of consolation after a friend had suffered a terrible experience of some sort. They walked away. Mohammed and I went to the pub.

  At some point that evening, Mohammed looked at me directly – we had been talking about our disgusted reactions to the pair of them – and said, ‘Fuck them. Let’s do something else tomorrow.’ And we did. It was the last time I spent any time with Tracy. I saw Frinton only once again. Friends of my youth.

  ‘I love this story,’ Joaquin said. We were finally on the walk back to the hotel in Sorge. ‘And most of all I love that tomorrow we are going to be able to get on a bus and go back to the hotel we are paying good money for, back in Quedlinburg. We say goodbye to James Frinton’s brother and we say goodbye to the girl, Sybille, that’s her name, and then they are with the friends of our youth, we never see them again, okay?’

  ‘But Nala,’ I said. The dog was tired out. He was no longer running off into the forests. He padded by our side, sometimes giving an incredulous look upwards at us. ‘I don’t want to say goodbye to Nala. Nala’s great.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Joaquin said. ‘We aren’t saying goodbye to Nala, no way. We are kidnapping Nala and taking him home with us. Nala is getting on the bus with us tomorrow, I swear to God. Nala is the best. Nala. Nala.’

  Nala raised his head at each iteration of his name, wearily acknowledging, like a film star at the end of a tour, his fame and celebrity. He knew how far it was, still, to go to his bed.

  ‘That girl Sybille,’ I said. ‘I bet she wants to come with us too. I can’t work it out.’

  ‘What I can’t work out,’ Joaquin said.‘Is she beautiful even though she is fat? Or is she the sort of beautiful that depends on being quite fat? Would she be not as beautiful if she were thirty kilos the less?’

  ‘What does she do all day long?’ I said.

  ‘What you are saying is this question,’ Joaquin said. ‘Why is she here? And this question is the same as the big question, what is it that women should do with their lives?’

  ‘And in this particular case.’

  ‘Oh, the particular case, I am not invested in the particular case. But, yes, she is not going to come away with us. But why is she here? She wants to leave her village where she grows up. But anywhere will do. She applies for a job in the capitalist military complex, in an oil company in Berlin, and she gets on a train. That is what women do, the same as men do. They insert themselves into the capitalist structure. Then their life is over.’

  ‘It’s not much of an improvement, running away with Pete Frinton,’ I said. ‘She’s here with nothing to do. Do you think she fancied him? Hard to imagine.’

  The question, what did she do all day long, was in fact a real one. There could be such a thing as a purposeful life that was nevertheless quite unoccupied. I thought of Lenin, kicking his heels in Geneva. I thought of the lives of painters, sitting still and gazing, thinking. Perhaps it is wrong to extrapolate from a single glimpse, but in the way this woman emerged from the kitchen, her flip-flops slapping, to find out what this pair wanted now was not quite what it appeared. She was impatient with us, but not with her life as a whole. Our demands had taken her away from something that mattered to her. Soon she would return to it. She knew what she was about. If one could observe her for a week, unseen, what that about consisted of would emerge.

  ‘Do you know what Pope said about women,’ I said.

  ‘Pope? What pope? This pope?’

  ‘No, a poet called Pope, an English poet. He said Most women have no characters at all.’

  ‘Your poet sounds like an asshole.’

  ‘I think he was making a subtle point.’

  ‘Hit me with your asshole poet’s subtle point.’

  ‘I think he was saying that women aren’t allowed to take charge of things – they have to fit in with what’s expected of them.’

  I thought of something I could never say to Joaquin, that twenty years ago his mother had returned to Chile, and his sister had felt obliged to go too. Joaquin had taken charge of his life, and there was no question of going back with the women. Men want women to do something, and if they want to eat, they go along with it. They just perform one thing after another. When they’re seven, they have to be sweet, innocent little girls. Then when they’re seventeen they have to be innocent but sexy. Then they have to be like a geisha or something. Then suddenly they have to be strong,
capable women but still sexy, so someone will give them a job. And so it goes on. A total change every seven years, I would say. But Pete Frinton’s woman hadn’t done any of that. Somehow, in this corner of Europe, she had settled herself down to do nothing more than she wanted to do. She ran her own show.

  We got back to Sorge around six in the evening – a ten-hour walk sustained by a couple of cold sausages, two cheese rolls and a boiled egg that we had eaten at the midpoint. Nala had eaten the promised herrings. We were ravenously hungry. In the front garden of one house, a small, wrinkled, fit old man was trimming a tight-bushed shrub with a pair of angry shears. It hardly seemed to need it, but he was dedicating a good deal of energy to the task. He stopped to watch us approach, fixing us with a baleful blue stare. We passed; we smiled; we were on the verge of greeting him. But we did not greet him. He watched us go until we were quite out of sight. I am sure of it. In the door of the hotel stood the woman, Sybille.

  ‘I cleaned your room,’ she said accusingly. ‘Do you sleep in the same bed, like gays? Peter had to replace the beds when he bought this place. They were all single beds otherwise. He thought people would like a double bed. Do you like a double bed? You could have had two rooms. There’s no one else staying here.’

  ‘We prefer to sleep in the same bed,’ I said. Joaquin sat on the bench by the door. He began to take off his boots, inch deep in mud.

  ‘Oh,’ Sybille said. A silence fell between us. She had been struck by something. For a while she examined me quite minutely. It was hardly polite by any standards. From a hotel owner, it was the sort of examination that might be trying to work out whether a guest is going to be trouble or not. All at once the scrutiny switched off. ‘It’s Peter’s habit to cook an Indian dinner on Sundays. He likes it. He said I am to ask you if you want to eat with us. Also, he used to know you once.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘We’d like that.’

  She turned to go with a satisfied nod. Then something occurred to her. ‘We won’t charge you for it,’ she said. She walked off.

  So much of the significant lives of women is hidden from us. When I say us I don’t use the word as Percy Ogden used the pronoun, the first person plural. When he wrote in his columns that we must do something or believe something or sign up to something that he approved of, that we was somewhere between we the human race and me and the people I approve of. When I use the word us I use it, confidently, only of Joaquin and me. We are friends with women. At the end of the evening we say goodnight to them and leave. Not all the important things in a woman’s life could be shared with us.

  But now I think I know what happened to Tracy, and what happened after Mohammed and I left her and James Frinton on the pavement outside Pizza Express in the early 1980s. They said goodbye to us. They started to walk in the other direction. He would have said something noncommittal, perhaps about a party they’d both been at. She would have said she really did have an essay crisis. He would have said there was always an essay crisis ‒ the whole of Oxford was one long essay crisis interspersed with gross amounts of drinking.

  ‘And then you’re stuck with these people for the rest of your life,’ she would have said.

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘The people you get to know here. They’re the people who are still going to be around in thirty years’ time. That’s what they say.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  They would have carried on walking, talking companionably. By the time they got back to Tracy’s room, they were laughing about something everyone always said, that you made friends here in the first two weeks that you then spent the next three years trying to get rid of.

  ‘I’m really one of those people who everyone can’t get rid of,’ Tracy said. James Frinton followed her in, throwing himself down on the sofa. ‘I’m your general embarrassing friend.’

  ‘Oh, rubbish,’ James Frinton said. ‘Have you got any gin?’

  ‘Go on, then,’ Tracy said. ‘Friendship, eh?’

  ‘Friends,’ James Frinton said.

  ‘It all seems a bit of a long time ago,’ Tracy said. ‘You know the slightly embarrassing thing?’

  ‘Mohammed’s a nice guy,’ James Frinton said reprovingly. ‘He’s a bit … earnest. But he’s a nice guy.’

  ‘We were all earnest,’ Tracy said. ‘But you know the slightly embarrassing thing? I actually had forgotten that Spike was at Oxford too. I was carrying on for about half an hour as if he’d come for a visit with Mohammed.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ James Frinton said abstractedly. ‘Thanks. Cheers. Did you put any tonic in that? No, doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It all seems a very long time ago,’ Tracy said. ‘Spike, though.’

  ‘As you say,’ James Frinton said. ‘Spike. He was Ogden’s idea.’

  ‘And whatever happened to Ogden? Cheers,’ Tracy said. She drank her gin in one – a theatrical effect that is always amusing.

  ‘I’m going to stick around,’ James Frinton said. He held up his glass as if toasting her. She refilled hers.

  There was a pause. Sometimes people have to face the possibility of their conversation moving into a different place, like a surprising change of key in a song. That shift into a place of intimacy was, for all of the Ogden group, often a move into explorations of general truth. The specific human case, talk of one man or another, was a trivial exchange that could happen with anyone. The consideration of wider humanity was a bond almost of secrecy, an understanding that some grand perception linked two people together.

  ‘The thing is,’ Tracy said, ‘some people move on and some people stay as they are.’

  ‘In my view,’ James Frinton said, ‘the fatal thing about this evening was that neither of us felt we could tell those two where we’d been last night.’

  ‘Oh, no way,’ Tracy said. ‘They wouldn’t have understood. They don’t understand just how awful it would be to go on thinking the same things that you did when you were fifteen.’

  ‘Still,’ James Frinton said. ‘The fact remains. We went to a party hosted by the Oxford University Conservative Association last night.’

  ‘Isn’t it awful?’

  ‘Those two, they’re going to believe the same things when they’re fifty,’ James Frinton said. (I’m sure he said this. He was correct if he said this. There was no reason for him to say it with an edge of amused disgust.) ‘It’s not even the principles they believe in. It’s membership of one club or another. I don’t feel as if we’ve lost any of our principles, you and I. What am I?’

  Tracy smiled. That what are you had meant only one thing, back at school, when one of the Ogden lot said it of someone else. ‘You’re overly committed to the single issue. You don’t have a complete and consistent ideological framework.’

  ‘Exactly. And what are you?’

  ‘I’m fascinated by the principles of anarchy. And I like a drink.’

  ‘Well, it seems quite clear, doesn’t it?’ James Frinton said. ‘On pure ideological grounds, our most appropriate home is where we went last night. Political home. I’ve got the bonnet up and I’m addressing all sorts of technical questions in a fix-it way. And you’ve seen the value of creative disruption and the possibilities of a state that has withered away. Bakunin.’

  ‘I love, love, love Bakunin,’ Tracy said, just as she always had. ‘He’s got no home in a party that wants to bring all economic activity within state ownership. Are you mental? Of course we went to their cocktail party. I wouldn’t have thought Spike gets free gin at the Spartacist caucus in Cowley.’

  ‘Of course it was fun,’ James Frinton said. ‘They’re much cleverer than the old lot. Last night, talking to those Monday Club boys, it was really as if you could say anything. One of them wanted to privatize the army.’

  ‘Could you sell shares in it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And when this countr
y went to war with Germany, what would the German shareholders think?’

  ‘Of course I’m saying what those boys were saying last night. Bakunin would have loved it.’

  They were on the sofa together. Tracy had kicked off her shoes. She was kneading James Frinton’s hips. Beneath the soles of her feet, his joints were hard as stones. He was looking ahead.

  ‘That big girl over the fire,’ he said. ‘The one with no clothes on. Is that you?’

  ‘No, you idiot,’ Tracy said. ‘Of course it’s not me. Look, she’s got ginger pubes. And she’s a lot fatter than me. Idiot.’

  ‘I thought those might be just modern-art touches,’ James Frinton said with simplicity. ‘Picasso painted women with three eyes, didn’t he?’

  ‘You’re such an idiot,’ Tracy said. ‘I’ve borrowed it from the college art collection. You can take a painting away for the term. It’s brilliant. Nobody else wanted that ‒ it’s too rude. Doesn’t Trinity have anything like it?’

  ‘God, no,’ James Frinton said. ‘I couldn’t have that in my room. I’d do no work. I’d just wank all day long.’

  ‘When did you think I could have had it painted, apart from anything else?’

  ‘You could have had it done in the summer,’ James Frinton said. ‘I suppose you might have mentioned it. In your letters.’