by Greg Baxter
Jack and I picked up the habit of running out on tabs and shoplifting. I stole about fifty books from Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road – this was when Foyles was the only bookshop in the developed world without theft detectors. The first time, I stole just one book, Ubu Rex by Alfred Jarry. The last time I must have taken five or six. I wandered through the aisles and stuffed them into the waist of my jeans, which was concealed by my coat. In Boots, I’d buy something small and pack twenty pounds’ worth of unnecessary items in my pockets. I’d wear three shirts out of department stores. In pubs, if they charged us, we paid, and if they did not, we ran out the door as fast as we could, sprinted until we couldn’t breathe, and found another pub.
One day – this was probably spring – we were sitting in Trafalgar Square, up on a plinth beside one of the large bronze lions, drinking cans of cheap beer, listening to a radical religious group tell passers-by they were going to hell. They might have told us the same thing, but we were right behind them, and we were not moving. They wanted to shout outrage at people who wished to escape their wrath, not at people who were, for whatever reason, happy enough to listen. So we drank and yawned and mocked them a bit. Then we stole two bibles from the small stage they had erected. We simply looked those people in the eyes and took the books, as if to say, Try and stop me. A man said, They’re free; take as many as you like. But we tucked them inside our coats anyway, and stepped away slowly.
This is how all our Saturdays began: a few drinks in Trafalgar Square, then a wander through the National Gallery. I can’t remember why it seemed so funny, but when I dropped my bible in the gallery, Jack said, loudly, You dropped your bible. Moments later, I knocked his out of his hands and said, You dropped your bible. Or maybe that is not how it happened. I can’t remember. But I know we began to throw our bibles at each other, across the big rooms, screaming, You dropped your bible! Security began to follow us. When Jack threw his the length of three rooms, we were escorted out. But not before Jack demanded his bible back.
That night, and many other nights, we drank wine and beer at a place called Café Apogee in Leicester Square. It was a large, three-storey restaurant that served drinks until four a.m. We ordered carafes of red wine, and made a big show of ourselves – flirting with our waitress, talking the most enormous shit to each other about art or politics. It was always loud and facetious. We used to play a game in which we argued something viciously, personally attacking each other, but when one of us cried switch, we had to change sides, and argue the opposite. When it got late, and the place began to clear out, we ordered the bill and fled. Even after a dozen escapes, some narrow, and even one capture, we were never recognized. We used to enter the place with dread in our intestines, like two trembling cowards leading each other into a dark cave. But when we were not recognized, in that instant, we unwound. Our technique was this: wait until there were other people leaving, walk quietly toward the front door, then bolt. Once, we knocked ourselves down trying to get through the doorway at the same time. We always ran in separate directions, and though we had no idea where the other was going, and had no phones, we always found each other wandering around about twenty minutes later, slightly out of breath. Once, Jack had four bottles of beer inside his coat, and running through Leicester Square, assuming he was being chased, he fell and smashed all the bottles, but was unharmed. I found him trying to hold the bottom of one shattered bottle together, so he could drink the dregs of it.
When he moved to a larger apartment in Crystal Palace, I remember lying around in total stillness, except when we were going places in a panic – always giving ourselves impossible windows to catch the train, eating toasted sandwiches while on the run to the station, which was half a mile away, sprinting with untied shoelaces. Sometimes we made it, and sat in gasping heaps on the way to Victoria Station. Sometimes we didn’t, so we drank cans on the platform and blamed each other. We used to start fist fights with each other, waiting for the last bus back from Trafalgar Square – the fastest way to do that was to knock the other’s hot dog out of his hands – or throw coins at buses, and run when the drivers came after us.
Of the four or five old friends I have contact with still, Jack’s effect on my life was the most tumultuous. When we met in Germany, I was reluctantly studying science to one day study medicine, but my interest was already bottoming out. I nearly failed botany, and passed chemistry only because of a chemical leak in the building during our final exam. I could not understand calculus. I’d taken one or two courses in literature at the University of Texas and liked them very much, but had not done well in them: the cancer of my disinterest in everything else had destroyed my ability to think, or perhaps it was just that I was completely new to a field that required acumen in writing, which I lacked. I had no interest in drinking with the people I knew, in socializing with strangers, only a defeatist obsession with women, and I wrote naïve poems about unrequited love – and that was when I had the energy to act; mostly I stood in my dorm room, looking out my giant window high over the city of Austin, and mourned the premature end of my life. Two years passed – eighteen years old, nineteen years old – and all I had to show for it was the affectation of grief. Then I turned twenty, and moved to Germany for a year as an exchange student, and met Jack, who was studying English literature. From him I learned that good scholarship came from the solidity of language, not the vagueness I had blindly come to adore. It was nice not to feel ashamed of an interest in something like the arts. The acquaintances I had in Austin, until then, would have had a very long laugh if I had said something like, I like the poetry of Dylan Thomas, or (as it was in those early days) I want to walk around the Lake District and read the poetry of Wordsworth.
Jack would sometimes walk over to my tiny room in that German dorm and say things like: I finally get D. H. Lawrence; you’ve got to live life with your dick in your hands. I was usually watching television at the time: by accident I had become the television broker in the dorm, a position I inherited from the previous television broker, who must have seen something of a Shylock in me. I had a dozen black-and-white sets, and I gave them out for favours and swaps. I gave one for a blow job, another for a David Hasselhoff CD (I could hardly believe such a thing existed), another for a bicycle. I watched incomprehensible drivel – I could barely follow any of it. I wanted to be a writer, not a reader. Jack had no interest in writing, only an appreciation of literature that rounded him out.
I can’t remember when it started exactly, but at some point Jack and I began to develop a campaign of repudiation against the kind of society that appreciated things like intelligent conversation. We called this campaign disinformation. Truth be told, this was more my baby than Jack’s – he was the kind of guy who was everyone’s best friend, and inside a hundred different private jokes. But it was nice to have him to bounce ideas off. Disinformation was probably developed while I was in Austin and he in North Carolina – our senior years at separate universities – but we put it to the test in England. Disinformation had to be practised to be understood, but we taught ourselves this: you must come up with an epigrammatic response to every figure, every theory, every historical event. This response must be dismissive, both of the actual importance of the subject matter, and, through that, the unimportance of the man or woman who spoke it – if it is not dismissive, you do not understand the point of the game. Moreover, disinformation is a gestalt, a lifestyle: one dismissal wins you nothing.
This was all incredible childishness, but we lived, that year, by our faith that every proof of decency was a fraud: the people we knew pretended to be cultured, pretended to be intelligent, pretended to be magnanimous, unselfish, successful, humble, moral, caring. I waged the campaign because I thought it was funny, and because I was defending my sanity against the things a postgraduate English student at the University of Sussex heard during the course of a week in term. One day, our lecturer used the word lid – I can’t remember the context. A girl in the class began to talk about th
e theoretical significance of the eyelid on perception and consciousness, and ontology, and soon everyone in class was debating this: they had lost me (lost is inaccurate, since we were nowhere), but I noted down eyelid on my notebook, so that I could come up with a response to it. Finally, the professor said, That’s interesting, but I just meant a lid, like a lid for a jar. The girl said, Oh, and began to scribble something on a piece of paper, chuckling away. It should have horrified us all. Instead, someone proposed that we develop a theory about eyelids, and give it something like a patent.
I should have walked out of my little house in Brighton with a backpack and vanished. I would have found some way to educate myself, live in some tiny flat high above a city street, give up all ambition, and learn a few more languages. Instead, I purged in London on the weekends – enough to go back each week and participate in the conspiracy. Yet I did not just participate, I excelled. I was so adept at drawing together totally incongruous thoughts by theorists and philosophers that it seemed pointless to do anything else.
A Romanian friend has begun to send me her translations of a writer called Nicolae Steinhardt. She seems to have found her stride in it. She says she cannot sleep at night sometimes, and sits at her computer and opens Steinhardt’s The Happiness Diary, and types a couple of paragraphs, then emails them to me. It is strange to hear of a person translating her mother tongue into her second language, but what she lacks in eloquence, she makes up for with lack of vanity. And a sense of belonging: she has absorbed the book so deeply into her thoughts that she is writing words that belong to her. She lives with her mother and daughter in Castleknock. Her mother does not speak a word of English. Her daughter is a teenager. I like to think of her walking around in the chilly darkness, making something warm to drink, and flipping through her favourite pages by lamplight. I’m starting to realize that only character matters. Political convictions, philosophical opinions, social origins, religious faith, are nothing more than accidents: only character remains after all the filtrations produced by years of prison – or of life – after all the wear and fatigue.
Her translations are quiet, sophisticated revolts: they put my time in England to shame. They are acts of adoration first, but also repudiations. I pretend to be doing her a favour by polishing her translations, but the reality is that they invigorate me. Not merely the content, but the image of her at work on them. I think of her awake in her bed, restless. She stands up and puts some slippers on, and a dressing gown. The house is warm and dark, and she does not turn on the lights, because she will wake the others up. She turns her computer on: I imagine there is a window over her desk, which looks out over a street that is busy in the mornings and evenings. She opens a book and begins to translate. Everyone else in the city is sleeping.
11
Abschied
I shall describe my room first. It is a small square with brown-red carpet, brown-gold walls, and threadbare, olive-green curtains. There is a large desk in one corner – the largest thing in the room – which I have already cluttered with books, maps, receipts, toiletries. In another corner is a single bed with a small stool beside it, where I have placed a reading lamp. There is a bookshelf between those corners, but it is already full of my cousin Walter’s books. I went through them: lots of self-help material he has collected over the last decade, some religious things. He tells me he has given all that up, but he likes the way books give a room colour. There is a piano on the other side of the room, which I may try to play if I get drunk enough. I am three storeys up, and I overlook the sleepy street – Amalienstrasse, in Ober St Veit, on the far west side of Vienna. There is a small balcony outside the room, but it is too cold to stand on it. Because it is the end of December, the sun is very low, and in the early mornings, if the sky is clear, it burns right through the weak green curtains.
The first time I slept in this room, I was fifteen years old. I was in Austria for a few weeks with my grandmother, Maria. Sometimes, without provocation, the image of my first night in Vienna springs back to life in daydreams: the picture of Erika – Herbert’s sister – leading me down the short corridor, speaking in a voice so high-pitched that it plays again in my head like some alarm ringing over a street in panic, referring to the room as my chamber – possibly because she wanted to present me with some Austrian elegance, choosing Kammer over Zimmer. I have not seen the room for eighteen years, and although it was not a sacrosanct place before I returned to it, somehow it is now, and I feel as though I have disturbed the grave of a peaceful memory.
The apartment used to belong to Erika, but she lives in a nursing home near Schönbrunn now. The day after I arrived, she had an accident that knocked all her teeth out – only two of them were real, but she cannot get new dentures immediately – so she is too depressed to see anyone outside immediate family. Which is a pity, because I’d hoped to talk to her about her memories of Herbert.
Walter has made the old place about as modern as anyone could without knocking down walls or replacing shelves and appliances. He has repainted all the rooms – all but mine – in bold, bright colours. He has also reorganized the space somewhat. The dining room is now a sitting room – and this has created an unexpected intimacy, a place for long conversations – and the sitting room is now a dining room with a small space set aside for meditation and reading, a comfortable chair surrounded by lots and lots of plants.
The apartment is on the top floor of the building, and Walter’s parents – Dieter and Heidi – live in the apartment below. On the ground floor is unused office space. Below that is a basement with a room for big dinners, a storage room – which was, at one time, Walter’s bedroom – and a utility room with a washing machine.
I have six weeks to do nothing in Vienna. Walter is exhausted from December celebrations, and works from three p.m. to five a.m. most days; he’s a waiter, and he’s just changed jobs. He leaves restaurants much as fickle people leave lovers: the first short while he is overjoyed; then the fighting begins; then he storms out. He seems unable to bear a life without drama – he is gay, yet falls only for heterosexual men – but the drama weighs on him heavily. Every year, usually in October and November, he has a nervous breakdown. He didn’t have one this year, and his parents think it’s because he kept himself busy renovating his new space.
I travel into town with Walter, we have a beer or coffee, then he goes to work. After that, I go for long walks around the First District to reorient myself. I pause to admire the architecture, even when it is not exceptional. I walk with my eyes up. In the evenings, I observe the city twinkling to life. I am keen to feel something awakening in me, some recognition of myself in Vienna. I visit bars and cafés I remember liking, but do not always enter; I only want to prove to myself that I know where they are. I follow crowds for a while, then abandon them. The last U4 leaves Karlsplatz at twelve-thirty a.m., but I always grow a little restless with solitude, or, rather, faintly out of sorts being seen to be on my own, and head home earlier. I listen to some of Walter’s classical CDs – which I’ve begun to copy onto my computer, so that I may transfer them to my iPod and play them while strolling through the city – and drink two bottles of wine, finish my pack of cigarettes, and fall asleep.
The amount of space the city inhabits in my mind is totally out of proportion to the time I have spent in it. I came for a few weeks in 1990, but travelled a good deal elsewhere in Austria. When I lived in Germany, in 1994 and 1995, I came to visit three or four times, but never for more than a handful of days. In 2002, I spent one month here. In 2005, a week; in March 2008, five days. That is all – no more than three months altogether. But when anyone asks, I tell them I have lived here an incontiguous year, at least.
I was once very close to fluency in German – so close I could fake fluency – and the language comes back to life in me, slowly. I have already had long conversations with Walter, and separately with Dieter and Heidi, and on the telephone with a friend, Christl. Talking stirs the language out of dormancy – there is
no other way for me to remember it. I begin a sentence like a man jumping from an airplane without checking his parachute. I arrive at the spot for the word, and suddenly, the word has come out of my mouth, and the sentence drifts coherently to the ground. Or the word does not come, and I must approach the subject from another direction. German words storm my inner English monologues – mühsam, leider, leisten, unerträglich, Ausnahmen, undsoweiter. In the beginning, I might say, when I speak to Clare on the phone, because my brain is getting used to starting sentences with Am Anfang.
I like to memorize interesting words from books I really ought to be reading in English. This time I have brought along Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen. I jot down nice words in a large spiral notebook I brought from Ireland – this morning it was irreleitend (misleading) – and spend the day inventing contexts to use them in. The first time someone hears a foreigner with bad German use vorführen correctly in a sentence, they are astounded; the fifth time in an hour, they grow suspicious. All this means I am confounding people with advanced speech, or idiom, or accent, one minute, and idiotic mistakes, or baffled simplicity, the next. The other night, Walter asked me to explain some of Wittgenstein’s concepts. I handled this with some fluency. But when he asked me what I did on New Year’s Eve – he had to work, so I spent the night with family friends – I was stumped. I simply said it was lovely (genial) but extremely cold (abarschkalt) – we spent the night drinking on the street, listening to music at various points around the inner city – and that I was tired and had a headache. I have no flexibility in German; I lack the capacity, so far, to rearrange what I know into something that is individual, original. I think this must be exactly how a small child approaches language: when he imitates, he succeeds, but he cannot express himself through imitation; he wears the language like ill-fitting clothes.