My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

by Russell Hoban

  ‘Scapegoat?’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ said Grace.

  ‘Odd thing for someone to wear.’

  ‘I have odd customers.’

  ‘There’s a verse in Leviticus that tells how Aaron put all the iniquities and sins of the children of Israel on the head of the goat and drove it out into the wilderness.’

  ‘To Azazel,’ said Grace, ‘the demon of the desert.’

  ‘So who’s ordered this goat?’

  ‘I’m not at liberty to say. But there are a lot of deserts about, and where there’s a desert you’ll find Azazel. Drink is next on the programme: all I have is vodka.’

  ‘Didn’t you say that the ravages of time had forced you to switch to beer?’

  ‘I lied,’ she said. She went to the fridge and took a bottle of Stolichnaya from the freezer. She poured two glasses and we clinked. ‘Here’s looking at you,’ said Grace.

  ‘Here’s looking right back.’ The cold vodka went down my neck beautifully, and after the third glass it seemed the icy blast of pure reason. ‘Your bat’s named after one some,’ I said. ‘Someone.’

  Grace nodded. ‘Irv Goodman. Fell in love too late.’

  ‘With you?’

  ‘With me. He was eighty-three.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘We were both in the nick and he got pneumonia and died a week after they let us go.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Why were you in the nick?’

  ‘DI Hunter didn’t believe what we told him and he was pissed off so he locked us up.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe it either.’

  ‘Anything to do with vumpires, ampires?’

  ‘Maybe, but not the usual kind – there’s a batrachian elephant, element.’

  ‘What’s a batrachian elephant?’

  ‘Frogs and toads. Am I making myself queer?’

  ‘Transparently but can leave it for another time. Now think I’ll go home and have little lie-down.’

  Getting home wasn’t easy – the Underground was shut down and taxis were not to be had. I walked for a long time and then stood by the curb looking hopeful and was finally picked up by a man on a red Yamaha who lived in Hammersmith and chivalrously dropped me at my door.

  I got there just in time for a throw-up before the lie-down. Up came breakfast and vodka, the bombs in the Underground and bus, the dead and the injured, my morning sadness and everything else.

  I slept until almost five, realised I didn’t know if Phil was all right, and rang him up. I got his answering machine and left a message for him to phone me. Then I made a coffee and waited for the phone to ring. After the third cup it rang. ‘Barbara,’ said Phil, ‘are you all right?’

  ‘I’m OK. I was nowhere near any explosions. What about you?’

  ‘I’m OK. It’s a surreal kind of day and I haven’t really taken it in yet. I’m at Euston, about to leave for Scotland.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘I’m tutoring a writing course at Diamond Heart – it’s near Port Malkie on the Moray Firth. I didn’t know about it until this morning – the guy who was scheduled to do it is off sick so they called me.’

  ‘How long will you be gone?’

  ‘A week – it’s a residential thing. The course I’m taking over is “The Search for Page One”.’

  ‘I hope you find it. How is it with all those people living together up there?’

  ‘It’s about what you’d expect – people talk bollocks, get laid, and do a little writing that I have to read and help them with.’

  ‘Do the women tend to need a lot of help?’

  ‘Depends on the tutor. Ken Hackett who was meant to do the course is a good-looking guy with a high scoring average.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘This time I’ll confine my tutoring to talking bollocks. But no sex.’

  ‘You’re giving it up for Yom Kippur?’

  ‘I don’t want to weaken the connection.’

  ‘What connection is that?’

  ‘The one between you and me.’

  Pause.

  ‘Barbara?’

  ‘I’m here. I was letting your words linger in my ear.’

  ‘Ah, that’s nice. I have to go now, I’ll phone you when I get there.’

  ‘Don’t phone – I’d like a week where we can walk around in each other’s minds and listen to each other without telephones.’

  ‘OK. If I say anything good, write it down. I’m off, see you in a week.’

  ‘See you.’

  I was thinking about that connection between us, wondering if it was like the string between two tin-can telephones. I sat there with my finger in my navel for a while, then I went into the kitchen to make some coffee.

  Hilary was sitting there with a cup of tea and her Bible. ‘How was your day?’ I said. She’s an estate agent with Vanston here in Fulham.

  ‘“And I looked,”’ she said, ‘“and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” We closed early but some of the staff probably aren’t home yet. There’s an Alpha meeting tonight and I expect I’ll be back later than usual.’

  Her Bible remained on the kitchen table after she left, still open at Revelation 6. Hilary likes to do that, leave the open book where my eye might be caught by the Word of God. I’m impervious to it.

  Back at work the next day I was wondering where the stars and planets stood with yesterday’s bombings. The Times had star maps every month and the constellations drawn in white lines and dots on the black circle of July’s night sky certainly seemed to be telling us something. Mercury and Venus were low in the northwest but there was nothing that interested me in the rest of the text.

  At the studio I googled around and found The Visual Astrology Newsletter. ‘Nergal claims the empty sky…’ was the first thing it said. I liked the sound of that so I read on. ‘The sky has never stopped talking; rather we have stopped listening,’ said Bernadette Brady, the writer of the newsletter. Using ‘concepts discussed by the Chaldean priests of over 2,500 years ago’ she claimed clear predictions of the death of the pope and London’s successful Olympics bid.

  Nergal is Mars, said Brady. She was into the astrological explanation of the bombings when I was sidetracked by that name. Where had I heard it before? I googled for it and found a website by Lishtar. In the Mesopotamian Underworld Ereshkigal is ‘the inflexible goddess of the Land of No Return …’ Such splendid names! And Nergal is ‘the stubborn god of War and Pestilences’. I’d heard of those two in one of Brian’s lectures and they’d just been names you hear in a lecture but now they grew big and pushed astrology to one side. ‘Aha!’ I said as it came to me that Ereshkigal and Nergal both lived in me and the two of them lived in Phil also and that’s why nothing was simple.

  On Saturday I craved the melancholy sunlight of Claude’s paintings so I went to the National Gallery. I was stood in front of The Embarkation of Saint Ursula, taking in the sadness and goodbyeness of it, the blueness and farawayness of the Claudian waves that were like rollers cranked by stagehands, and remembering what Brian had said in another of his slide lectures. ‘She took eleven thousand Christian virgins with her on a pilgrimage to Rome and on the way back they were all slaughtered by the Huns. I call that a terrible waste of virginity.

  ‘This subject was painted in the fourteenth century by Tommaso da Modena; in the fifteenth by Vittore Carpaccio and Hans Memling; and in the seventeenth by Claude. Tommaso gives us a William Morris sort of thing; Carpaccio offers a workmanlike and completely prosaic job with pretty costumes; Memling’s version is compact and tidy with pleasantly chunky ships and people cleverly fitted into the space. But only in Claude do we find the great sadness of doomed innocence. The colours and the atmosphere are elegaic; the ships are ships of dreams; the virgins already have a sacrificial look. This picture says it all – the innocence of mortal life embarking always on its deathward voyage.’

  ‘This world
is not a safe place for virgins, is it?’ said the woman who had joined me and Claude. It was Mimi, Phil’s ex.

  ‘It’s not safe for anyone,’ I said. She was wearing the brooch that I’d seen on Grace Kowalski’s workbench. ‘What’s that in aid of?’ I asked.

  ‘Do you know what it is?’

  ‘It’s a scapegoat.’

  ‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘My ID.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Doesn’t Phil blame me for his failure?’

  ‘Is he a failure?’

  ‘Did you ever finish Hope of a Tree?

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Well done you! What’s your opinion of it?’

  ‘It’s not the most exciting thing I’ve ever read but that doesn’t make Phil a failure. In any case, whatever he is, he’s out of your life now and you can move oh.’

  ‘Nobody you’ve been married to for twelve years is ever completely out of your life,’ she said. A wistful note there?

  ‘And now you want him back?’

  ‘No, but I can’t help wondering how he’s doing under new management. Would you say that you inspire him?’

  ‘I don’t manage him, and the rest is none of your business. Whether you’re being a dog in the manger or a bitch in heat I’d be delighted if we could agree not to be friends and if you could just bugger off.’

  After she’d gone I found myself thinking Brian thoughts. Remembering the times we’d had, the things we’d done. He’d asked me if I could do better and I’d said that maybe I already had. Still, when he wasn’t in courtship mode he was very easy to be with and I didn’t have to break my head trying to work out what we were to each other. Simple is what everybody wants but very few of us get.

  9

  Phil Ockerman

  Max Lesser has some time ago described Diamond Heart [See Her Name Was Lola, Bloomsbury, 2003] and with his permission we borrow from it for the present narrative. ‘Diamond Heart,’ says the brochure, ‘is not a retreat. It is a centre of dynamic calm in which mind and spirit gather energy for the next forward move. On offer are Yoga, Tai Chi, Feng Shui, and Zen disciplines including meditation, gardening, flower arrangement, archery, snooker, and poker. Vegetarian, Kosher, and Halal cuisine. Acupuncture, Reflexology, Aromatherapy, and homeopathic medicine. Tuition in classical Indian music with Hariprasad and Indira Khan. This year we have added writing courses which will be tutored by established novelists, playwrights and poets.’

  Diamond Heart has given a new lease of life to the defunct herring port of Port Mackie on the Firth of Moray. The harbour is almost empty, stretching out its arms to the past. The tide comes in, goes out around Kirsty’s Knowe, Teeny Titties and Deil’s Hurdies. The wind sighs in the grasses. The pebbles rattle in the tidewash, the sea-shapen rocks abide. There are plenty of gulls, shags, and cormorants but no herring. Port Mackie now buzzes with new businesses supplying goods and services to Diamond Heart.

  Diamond Heart is not cheap. The one thing its varied clientele have in common is that they can all afford it. There are ageing hippies, youthful rebels, stressed-out executives, ex-husbands and ex-wives, broken-down pop stars, actors between (sometimes for years) engagements, and various unemployed of independent means. Cannabis and cocaine are not compulsory. The Diamond Heart complex is made up of dome-shaped buildings (called tholoi in the brochure) overlooking the sea. It has the added attraction of its own myths and legends of which more later.

  There were nine people in my group: four men and five women. Three of the women were chronic course-takers with hopeful smiles and it’s-so-nice-to-be-here expressions. The fourth looked dead serious and probably had two or three unpublished novels in her rucksack. The fifth was Constanze Webber. Two of the men looked like course-takers to me and the other two looked serious.

  ‘Hi, Constanze,’ I said. ‘How’s it going with the music?’

  ‘Very slowly,’ she said. ‘I’d like to have a go at fiction for a change. I’ve got a couple of ideas for stories but I don’t know how to get started.’

  ‘I have the same problem,’ said one of the serious men.

  ‘Me too,’ said one of the female course-takers. ‘I have things in my head but when I try to put them down on paper I can’t get past the first line.’

  ‘That’s what I’m here for,’ I said.

  ‘It said in the brochure that Ken Hackett would be doing “The Search for Page One”,’ said Constanze.

  ‘He’s got flu,’ I said, ‘but not to worry – there’s nothing I don’t know about searching for Page One.’

  ‘What about finding it?’ she said.

  ‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘We might get lucky. The most common failing of the inexperienced writer is thinking that you have to begin at the beginning.’

  ‘Where else would you begin?’ said the dead-serious young woman whose bulging rucksack threatened many pages for me to read.

  ‘Wherever the thing presents itself to you – the arse or the elbow or the foot. The raw material is showing you that because it’s what you can bring everything out of by working backwards and forwards from it. Look at the opening of Daniel Deronda – it’s not the chronological beginning of the novel; quite a few things have happened and most of the main characters have appeared in the story earlier but not on the page, so from that opening scene in the casino Eliot has to develop people and events around the psychological centre which is the action between Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda. Because that was the beginning.’

  ‘In media res,’ said she of the serious rucksack.

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘In the middle of things is where you often find the beginning.’

  ‘How many Is in Eliot?’ said one of the course-takers.

  ‘One,’ I said. ‘What I’d like all of you to do now is to give me whatever you’ve brought with you so I can start reading. If you haven’t brought anything you should write whatever you can for me to look at tomorrow. Don’t demand too much of yourself – heavy expectations tend to be self-defeating.’

  Those who had manuscripts passed them along to me while the others scratched their heads, looked around, and slowly put pen to paper. Constanze’s was the last of the mss. It was a single sheet of blue A4 copy paper, somewhat crumpled. On it was printed a single line: ‘“That’s what uncles do,” he said.’

  ‘Uncle Teddy?’ I said as various of the group turned to look at me.

  Constanze nodded. I put the page into a folder and picked up a thick wodge of paper from the dead-serious girl whose name was Clara Petersen. Low Pressure Love was the title. ‘It rained whenever we met’. was the first line. ‘Listen to this,’ I said to the group, and I read them the line. ‘That right away pulls me in,’ I said, ‘because it rings true: there are times like that and there are lives like that. I want to read on and find out who the narrator is and what’s coming next. I already care about the narrator and I want to get into the action. If your story doesn’t engage the reader and make him or her want to know more you haven’t got a story. It doesn’t have to be a person that the reader is drawn in by: Bleak House opens with “implacable November weather”, with mud and smoke and fog and you want to go where the weather is taking you because the writer has made you care by putting you into a place and an atmosphere of impending excitement.’

  Some people nodded, others took notes, others did both. I refrained from launching into the first page of Moby Dick although damp drizzly Novembers are a regular feature of my internal climate and I asked Clara to read the whole first page of her ms to the group. It was a good Page One and I made good comments after the reading. The whole novella, which I read later, was excellent. Clara had talent and the necessary strength of character for the long haul and I told her I’d do my best to put her in touch with an agent. She was quite a good-looking girl too, very intense with her dark hair worn long and a Wuthering Heights air about her which would do nicely in jacket photos and book promotion. I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to live with her and I wa
s glad I didn’t. But now I’m going to leave Clara and the rest of the group in order to report my conversation with Constanze about Uncle Teddy. After supper I found her waiting for me. The summer evening was mild and the sound of the sea had a confidential air. Secrets! it whispered in the hissing of the waves on the strand, Secrets! I hold them, I keep them. There was a little thin sickle moon hanging in the clear sky. Lights glimmered all over Diamond Heart and a murmur of voices rose up with the smell of cannabis and the sound of an accordion and someone singing, in Russian, the song in which the English refrain begins with ‘Those were the days, my friend …’ We passed the Xanadu dome where the drinkers mostly stood outside and made pub noises.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I said.

  ‘Kirsty’s Knowe,’ said Constanze. ‘I like to go there to be quiet.’ She took me to a grassy hill overlooking the sea where the susurrus of the waves made a whispering stillness that seemed to wait for something.

  ‘What’s it waiting for?’ I asked her.

  ‘Ah!’ she said, ‘you feel it too. This place is haunted. There was a Kirsty who hanged herself when her lover abandoned her. Kirsty’s Fetch, her ghost is called, and men who see it are fated to be drowned. And they say if you go to the Deil’s Hurdies you can hear the voices of the dead.’

  ‘I don’t see Kirsty’s Fetch so far,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think you’re destined to drown.’

  ‘Are you going to write about Uncle Teddy?’

  ‘I don’t want to but that line jumped on to the paper and it’s pulling me after it.’

  ‘All of us have the ghosts of ourselves inside us,’ I said. She turned to me and her five foot ten seemed smaller and unsure. Mostly she looked like a confident winner but now she was touchingly vulnerable – I wanted to cuddle her but it would have been a wrong move and unwanted as well. Moshe Leib’s words recurred to me. ‘There’s a sorrow in you,’ I said, ‘just as there is in all of us. This sorrow clothes itself in various memories. I find it’s best to let the thing get on to the paper. You can always tear it up later if you want to.’