The Firewalkers

by Francis King

  ‘And what about you, Götz?’ I asked one afternoon, when I found myself alone with the German. ‘‘ Will you be going to Turkey or returning to Germany?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Götz was sewing on to the back of Theo’s tall grey felt hat a roll of canvas which could be drawn up or let down at will by the pulling of a cord; it was Theo’s own idea, to protect, as he declared, the back of his neck from the violence of the Turkish sun. ‘ I had a letter yesterday from my father—my first for over a year—asking me to go back. He’s getting old and his sight is bad. I think he is willing to forget and forgive everything; that is the impression I have.’

  I am naturally inquisitive, and my years in Greece where everyone asks personal questions, have made me even more so. ‘What has he got to forget and forgive?’ I asked.

  Götz rammed his needle through the thick felt. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been the ideal son. I was never any good at the University and the Army rejected me. Then I had trouble with a girl and he had to pay her off.’ He blushed deeply and his harelip quivered, as it always did at times of embarrassment or emotion. Blinking his short pink eyelashes, he added: ‘Besides, I never had any interest in the business. I wanted to travel.’

  ‘What business is it?’

  ‘I don’t know how you call it. We sell things like kettles and pans and nails and paraffin.’

  ‘Hardware.’

  ‘I think my father would like me to take it over from him. It’s a good business,’ he added.

  ‘And would you like to take it over?’

  Götz raised his head from his sewing and looked at me with his sad, brooding eyes. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘It would be death.’

  ‘But don’t you think, if your father is willing to have a reconciliation, that you ought to do what he asks?’

  ‘It might be wiser,’ Götz agreed. As he again pushed the needle into the felt, I noticed that his forefinger was encrusted with a rim of blood where he had savagely bitten the nail. ‘But then—’ he sighed—‘there’s always Theo.’

  ‘Theo?’

  ‘He can’t go alone to Turkey, can he?’

  I looked dubious.

  ‘He’s going to stay at the Embassy,’ I said at last.

  ‘Only for a few days. And even that may not be true. You know how he—he imagines things.’ Götz brought out these last words almost as if he were afraid that he was being guilty of a disloyalty to Theo in saying them at all. ‘He wants to visit all the old Greek cities on the Asia Minor coast—Troy and Pergamum and Ephesus—and he’s really too old to do that sort of thing alone. Isn’t he?’

  ‘But, Götz, you must think of yourself. After all, if this is your chance to put things right with your family.…’

  ‘Yes, I know, I know. And I’d like to see them again. I quarrel with my father, but I’m fond of him, I think. And I’m very fond of my mother. And only last night—it was so hot that I couldn’t go to sleep—I began to think of Germany and how nice it would be to return there and find everything so green and fresh after the dust and dryness here. I want to go back. Not for ever, of course, but just for a few weeks. But I don’t see how I can. After all, Theo’s been so good to me, hasn’t he? I owe him so much. And it would be sad if this visit which he’s been so much looking forward to should now get spoiled.’

  Although after this I doubted if I should interfere any further, I made a half-hearted attempt to hint my feelings to Theo when we next discussed the trip.

  ‘Is Götz going to accompany you?’ I asked.

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Then he won’t be returning to Germany?’

  ‘Why should he? You know how he hates his home.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s nearly three years since he was last there, isn’t it? He must want to go back some time. I should have thought this was a good opportunity for him. He always says that he can’t bear the heat anyway. Do you want him all that much?’

  ‘Frank, Frank, Frank!’ Theo was playfully reproving. ‘I know what you’re thinking, you horrid little snob! You’re imagining that they’re going to look down their noses at him at the Embassy. Well—let them! If they want me to stay, they must put up with Götz too. And if they don’t like it, there are always hotels: not very good hotels, so I hear, but dirt and bugs have never worried me. No, Frank. If you think that I’m going to push Götz off to Germany, because he’s not what is considered ‘‘acceptable’’ in the eyes of the beau monde, you’re very much mistaken. It would be a thoroughly disloyal thing. Appearances may, at the first glance, tend to be against him, but what do appearances matter? The boy has a heart of gold. Eighteen carat.’

  I said nothing more: but I wondered, perhaps cynically, if this passionate defence of Götz and, by inference, attack on myself were a genuine outburst of feeling or merely a clever side-stepping of an issue which Theo selfishly would not face. One could never be certain; Theo had, after all, always been more successful at deceiving himself than his friends.

  Cecil’s gift of fifty pounds was now being recklessly spent on equipment for the journey. I remember a folding canvas bath one of the struts of which was broken by Götz when he hoisted his massive buttocks into its flimsy structure; an insecticide so potent that, squirted in Theo’s sitting-room, it gave us all hay fever; a pair of boots which had the appearance of being lined with sponge; a portable pressure cooker, capable of reducing potatoes to pulp within five minutes, during all of which time it emitted a shrill whistle; and innumerable small gadgets, items of clothing and note-books of all shapes and sizes.

  One afternoon Theo arrived at Dino’s flat, where I was still staying. I was in the middle of a lesson, but since he had sent a message by the servant that the matter was urgent, I went out to see him.

  ‘So sorry to worry you, my dear, in the middle of your irregular verbs, but I must have your advice. I’ve just remembered that I’ve forgotten a most important item.… Ties!’

  ‘Ties!’

  ‘I must have some ties. Some new ties.’ He touched mine. ‘That’s a pretty one. And I like the one that you gave to Götz when you were in hospital.’ I wondered if this were a hint that I should also give one to him. ‘You have such good taste in ties. Won’t you come out with me and help me to buy some?’

  ‘But I have a lesson now.’

  ‘I can wait.’ Theo walked over to Dino’s desk and picked up a letter. ‘ This is from the Lord Chamberlain. Does Dino know him?’

  ‘I suppose so. I don’t know.’

  ‘Such a ‘‘ parvenu’’! … I shall be quite happy here.’ He sat at the desk. ‘ You go back to your student and I’ll wait for you to finish.’ He was already reading the letter.

  We went to one of the large multiple stores where artificial ties could be bought for the price of real silk ties in Italy. ‘You have such exquisite taste, my dear,’ Theo murmured, returning the ties I had chosen back to the shop-girl. ‘ Now that is rather fetching.’ He held up a swirl of liver, cucumber and carrot and then put it against my jacket. ‘ One notices the influence of our transatlantic cousins, of course. But it’s discreet. It catches the eye. What do you think?’

  ‘Frankly, Theo, I think it quite hideous.’

  Theo put it on one side; he intended to buy it.

  Soon he had accumulated half a dozen such monstrosities, his favourite bearing the face of a woman, pink on a black ground, with the inscription ‘Je cherche un homme’. He giggled as we left the shop and slipped his arm through mine: ‘Now I’m really set up. Do you know, I haven’t bought a new tie since I visited Paris in nineteen-thirty-seven?’

  When we reached home, he unwrapped his parcel and again examined the ties. ‘I shall give you this one,’ he said, holding up the fantasy of liver, cucumber and carrot, ‘as you’ve been so patient with me all this afternoon.’

  ‘No, really, Theo. Keep it, please.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d prefer one of the others?’

  I was not sure, as so often, whether he was
joking at my expense.

  ‘I have so many ties—far too many.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  He had fetched a sewing basket from the cupboard and, going into his bedroom, he returned trailing a number of tattered and soiled ties which he set beside the new ones. He took up a pair of scissors and began to pick at the one he had offered me. I watched him in bewildered silence.

  All at once, he looked up and smiled at me with an extraordinary cunning. ‘ I recommend this dodge to you,’ he said, inserting the point of the scissors into one of the old ties.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  He held up a label. ‘Charvet,’ he said. He held up another: ‘Sulka.’ Another: ‘Turnbull and Asser.’ Then, with tremendous contempt, he picked up the label of the Athens multiple store between finger and thumb, as though it were a used surgical dressing, and threw it into the fireplace. ‘Servants are such snobs,’ he said. ‘When one’s valeted at an Embassy, a Charvet label makes all the difference.’

  He continued to unpick and sew.

  Suddenly Götz ran in: he was breathless, his face was green and clammy, and his hair fell in an irregular fringe over his eyes. One of the shoe-laces of his gym-shoes was flapping loose, his shirt had worked out of his trousers at the back. ‘Ah, there you are!’ he gasped. ‘I went down to Dino’s, and then I came back here, and then I went down there again. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’ His powerful chest was heaving for breath.

  ‘What is it?’ Theo demanded.

  ‘It’s Nadia … They’ve just telephoned from the Red Cross hospital. She’s had a terrible accident. You must go there at once. They’ve been trying to trace you for hours.’

  Theo dropped the tie with its smudged woman’s face, the ‘Turnbull and Asser’ label trailing a needle, and rose, trembling and white, to go towards Götz. The German put out an arm and Theo clutched it with both hands. ‘Is she … really ill?’ he asked.

  ‘Very ill.’

  ‘Come with me, come with me,’ Theo said, first to Götz and then myself.

  While we were driving in the taxi to the Red Cross hospital, he kept asking Götz: ‘ But how did it happen? Where did it happen?’ and Götz would answer patiently: ‘Theo, I don’t know. They didn’t tell me.’ As he put these questions, in a kind of bewildered stupor, Theo never ceased to stroke the warts on his lean face with the tips of the fingers of his right hand.

  Nadia had come round from the anaesthetic and, though obviously in considerable pain, she was able to talk. She lay on her back, with one leg and an arm supported in the air; her nose looking extraordinarily long and sharp and pink as it poked up through the voluminous bandages wound all about her.

  Theo ran to her bedside: ‘ How are you? Are you all right, Nadia?’

  ‘I’m quite all right,’ she said, with a kind of obstinate petulance. ‘But they insisted on giving me some kind of dope which has made me feel odd and dreamy. I’m quite all right,’ she repeated, as though stretching her will to its agonised utmost. ‘Why make all this fuss? … Oh, do stop wringing your hands like that, Theo. You look so absurd. You’d better go; I want to go to sleep.’

  We led Theo off, and we and the doctors and the nurses all told him that Nadia would be all right, I certainly believed it, though later the surgeon said, as though to excuse himself: ‘ We knew all along that she hadn’t a chance in a thousand.’

  The next time we went to visit her complications had set in and she was running a high fever. Theo saw her first, while I waited outside with Götz; then he shambled out and told me: ‘ She wants you, Frank. She says she must see you.’

  I went in, feeling oddly terrified, and she whispered: ‘Is that you, Mr Cauldwell?’ Her eyes glittered sideways at me from under the bandage.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Now listen.’ Even at this moment her voice carried its quiet authority. ‘Sit down.’ I sat. ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Grecou.’

  ‘Good … I want to talk to you about my play. In case anything should happen to me. I shall get better. But in case anything should happen to me. You understand?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Grecou.’

  ‘I leave it to you. I make you my literary executor. You must prepare it for the B.B.C. and see that they perform it in … in a suitable fashion. I trust you for that.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Grecou.’

  ‘Of course this is only if something should … should happen to me. But I shall get better. I know I shall get better.’

  Theo had slipped in and he now came to the bed and squatted beside it, his knee joints creaking noisily as he lowered himself More than ever now, his face seemed to have the colour and texture of gruyère cheese, as he looked at Nadia in an agonised sharing of her suffering.

  Suddenly her eyes caught him: ‘ Don’t look at me like that!’ she hissed. ‘ I know what you’re thinking. How do you expect me to get well, when you surround me with these terrible thoughts of yours?’ Theo was continuing to stare at her with the same aching pity. ‘No, don’t look at me, don’t look at me! I forbid you to look at me! If only you had never held the thought that something like this might happen to me. It was your wrong thinking! It was your fault! Don’t look at me! Don’t even think about me! Don’t think about me! Don’t think about me! I forbid you to think about me!’

  But to think about Nadia was, unfortunately, something that Theo could never stop doing.

  In Greece they bury people quickly and Nadia was buried on the morning after her death.

  We returned, Götz and I, to the house with poor Theo. There seemed, as always on such occasions, nothing to be said that would not sound either insincerely pious or trite or trivial: so we said nothing at all. I do not think I was much comfort to Theo, but Götz obviously was: merely by putting a hand on the German’s shoulder or taking his arm, Theo seemed to derive the kind of consolation that children derive from curling up in the lap of a grown-up whom they love. ‘Dear Götz,’ he murmured once, removing between finger and thumb a hair that lay, platinum in the sunlight, on the German’s frayed and shiny blue suit. He made a small ‘T’t, t’t’ noise. Then he asked: ‘Are you frightened of death, Frank?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you, Götz?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wonder if there is anyone who isn’t.’

  When we got home, Götz settled Theo in the best armchair, as though he were an invalid, and put a rug over his knees. ‘Now I shall make some tea,’ he said. ‘And you stay here and talk to Frank, will you?’

  But Theo was in no mood to talk. His hands clasped, the thumb and forefinger of the right ceaselessly turning the ring on the little finger of the left, he stared at the fireplace in which were still lying the pips and skin of the orange of which he made his breakfast. ‘Ah, yes … yes … yes …’ From time to time he would sigh out that characteristic phrase, and his head would be shaken from side to side.

  Suddenly, he rose to his feet, letting the rug slip to the floor.

  ‘Can I fetch you something?’

  He ignored me. Going to a cupboard, he began pulling out an extraordinary collection of haphazard objects—letters, and tattered bits of cloth, a broken vase, a recorder, a draughts board, a bird-cage—which he flung irritably on to the floor regardless of whether they would smash there or not.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘This.’ He held up a glass jar, vast enough to contain sweets in a village store in England, which still carried the label ‘Bath Salts. Blue Grass’. ‘She always used these,’ he said.

  He put the jar on his desk, and then going from drawer to drawer, cupboard to cupboard, room to room, repeatedly loped back with something to add to it. He fetched a button off a Tsarist uniform; a strip of grey chiffon, perhaps that same material Nadia had worn when I first met her; a crushed orchid (‘I found it in the Crimea’) removed gently from between the pages of a book on botany; a glove stretcher; a buff for the nails; a piece of Turkish delight (‘She gave m
e the box for Christmas’); the cover of a number of the Christian Science Journal …

  Götz brought in the tea, and twice we called Theo: ‘Your tea will get cold.’

  Theo did not answer; he did not even appear to hear us. Slowly, fragment by fragment, he was building up one of his ‘objects’ inside the glass jar.

  Götz went over to him; he put a hand on his shoulder, and said gently: ‘Theo, what are you doing? Please drink your tea.’

  Absorbed, Theo took up a pair of scissors and began to cut the cover of the Christian Science Journal into a woman’s face. ‘ Proust was right,’ he said. He held up the paper and examined it; then he gave another snip. ‘I remember once he said to me in Bruges: ‘‘Theo,” he said, ‘‘ it is Art—not Time—that heals all wounds.’’ ’

  Chapter Eight

  I RETURNED to Athens to find a change in both Theo and Götz. Physically, they were thinner and the sun which had burned Theo’s usually yellow face to the colour and texture of a pomegranate, had so peeled Götz’s nose and cheeks that it looked as if he were in the first stages of lupus. But, in Theo’s case, the change was not only physical. He seemed to suffer from increasing periods of despondency when he did not wish to go out or to read or to talk or to thump at his piano, but only to sit, turning his signet ring and staring at the fire-place. In the past he had prosecuted all his various feuds with disapproving relatives, friends who had ‘let him down’ and ‘ jealous’ fellow artists, with a vigorous acerbity. But now he was strangely softened. If he wished to take me to task for some imagined slight, he would not, as once, lash out at me with sarcasm and abuse, but instead he would gently and sorrowfully show how deep had been the wound that I, in my thoughtlessness, had inflicted on a man who was too old and tired to rise to defend himself. This new attitude—as he probably knew—made me feel far worse than the old one.

  Financially, with Nadia’s death, he was now better off, and instead of merely looking into the bars when he did his evening tour, he could now afford to sit down and buy himself, and sometimes even his friends, a glass of ouzo or of cognac. Yet this tour, which once he would insist on making even when he was suffering from neuralgia or rheumatism or influenza, now seemed to have lost for him most of its interest. If at seven he put his beret on his head, knotted his scarf and demanded: ‘Well, how about a stroll?’ one felt it was habit, not inclination, that was drawing him from his chair. ‘ Your friend seems vastly improved,’ Dino remarked. But I was apprehensive; I was not at all sure that this was, in fact, an improvement.