by Gee, Maurice
‘He’s sick, isn’t he?’
‘Yes, he is. He’s got asbestosis.’
‘Well, what’s she worrying about? She’ll get a decent payout for that.’
I put down the phone. I’ve written this to stop myself from trembling. It was a straight course when we came to this house. How can things have gone so crooked?
Julie is dancing again.
THIRTEEN
Now Willi comes back.
He was well known in Auckland and I seldom went there so I had to depend on Moser for news – Moser and Truth, which Willi sued for calling him a Nazi. He won his case, and was awarded damages of a shilling! He wrote and published several short stories about his love affairs in the mangroves up north. I wonder who corrected his English. He almost had a play produced. The company pulled out when he refused to moderate his language. Willi attempted revolutions years ahead of their time – a hippy in the fifties, before the word was coined, a loud four-letter man long before language was freed up. As for sexual freedoms – he published a magazine called Flesh, which the police closed down after one issue. He organised a nude moonlight swim at Browns Bay. There were more policemen than swimmers there. He asked a Hospital Board member at a public meeting why she didn’t promote masturbation as a way of improving mental health. He was cited as co-respondent in a divorce case and lost all his money – where did he get money? – in damages.
What else was he into? Composting. Republicanism. ‘Bacchanalianism’. Carrots and parsnips for a while, then a diet of raw liver to prolong the sexual life. (It was good for the political intelligence too.) Lowering the age of consent. Federation with Australia.
It sounded to me as if Willi had broken into pieces. I wondered where his Marxism had gone, and his ambition to be boss. The most he could do, it seemed, was call himself ‘the oldest teenager in Auckland.’
‘Is he married?’ I asked Moser.
‘Only to other men’s wives.’
‘Is he a New Zealand citizen yet?’
‘They’d deport him if he wasn’t.’
‘What about politics?’
‘It is little games in this country. Willi likes big games.’
His activities sounded small to me. I grew disappointed in Willi and hoped I would not see him again. I had him safe, well rounded, in the past.
One night in 1962 as we sat at dinner a knock sounded on the door, no different from other knocks, and I put my knife and fork down and whispered, ‘It’s Willi.’
‘Who?’ Nancy said.
‘It’s Willi Gauss.’
‘Shall I go?’
‘No. Let me.’
‘Get up from your chair then, Josef. Whoever it is won’t bite.’
Kenny and Susan made a run for the door.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Both of you sit down.’
I took a deep breath – I am taking one now – and opened the door. He grinned at me.
‘Willi,’ I said, reaching out my hands. He was wearing a duffel coat spotted with rain and had a woollen hat pulled over his ears.
‘It is fucking frigid,’ he said.
‘Come in, Willi. Come out of the cold.’
‘Into your mansion, Josef. You are a big man now.’
‘No different,’ I said, and closed the door behind him; patted him, the arms of his wet coat.
He pulled off his hat and smoothed his hair, which I saw was silver. Silver hair. I turned to Nancy (who looked at me almost with fright – tears in my eyes?) and said, ‘Nancy, this is my friend Willi from Somes Island.’
‘From Berlin,’ he said.
‘Willi Gauss. He’s the one you saw in the paper.’
‘How do you do?’ Nancy said.
‘Take your coat off. Sit down, Willi. Have you eaten yet?’
He dug in the clothes tangled in his rucksack, pulled out a bottle of wine and put it in my hands. It had no label. (Naked wine, they call it now.)
‘Yours?’ I said. ‘You made it?’
‘What I need is your toilet,’ he said.
While he was gone I whispered to Nancy that we must feed him and give him a bed.
‘Calm down, Josef,’ she said.
‘He’s my friend.’
‘Calm down, I didn’t say no. I don’t care what he looks like, I’m sure he’ll be OK.’
What he looked like was fat and old. In 1962 he must have been fifty-two or – three. His ageing – middle-ageing – had gone differently from mine, and in any case I was seven years younger. His cheeks had fallen. His eyes had creased. A tooth was missing in the side of his upper jaw and another in the lower, in front. Gap-toothed Willi, who had always been so pleased with his grin. We heard the toilet flush. He cleared his throat in the bathroom and spat.
‘Make room, children,’ Nancy said.
The word that came to me for Willi was ‘ruined’. Even with him back from the bathroom, sitting easy at the kitchen table, slicked down, warmed up, I could not get it out of my mind. All that fragmentation I had heard and read about had slackened him, decayed him, and I feared some parallel ruin in his mind.
‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost, Josef,’ he said.
‘Sixteen years is too long,’ I replied.
He grinned at Nancy. ‘Has he been counting? What paper did you see me in?’
I explained that she had been a schoolgirl and had seen our pictures after our escape.
‘Did you write to me?’
‘God, no,’ Nancy said. ‘Why should I do that?’
‘I had letters from women. The censor cut them to bits. I had to guess what they were offering.’
‘Leave the table, children. Go and do your homework,’ she said.
Willi gave a crenellated grin. ‘I must not corrupt the little ones, Josef, is that it?’
Nancy said, ‘They’ve finished, Mr Gauss. They’ve got things to do. Go on, Kenny. Susan.’
‘I’ll open this wine,’ I said.
It was horrible wine – creek water and sugar and vinegar – and it shocked me as much as his appearance. Uncorking the bottle, I had thought, Willi’s wine, it will be good, but it tasted fat and sour, the way he looked. It had the effect of shrinking me, of disappointing me back down the years, until I came to Willi on Somes Island, walking up the hill track as I sailed out; and I thought, That’s when Willi finished for me. It was hard to grasp, and I sat dumb as he laughed at me. Then I pushed my glass away and said, ‘It’s horse’s pee, Willi. Let’s have some beer.’
Nancy brought a bottle from the refrigerator. She sipped the wine I’d poured her, then left it and went to see how the children were.
‘A cosy wife, Josef. You are in clover,’ Willi said. He pushed his own wine away and took a glass of beer. ‘It was made by a woman I was with. She plays games, they all do, women play games. Wine is a new one. And politics. It helps take their minds off the fact that all they are good for is making babies.’
‘Your English has got better,’ I said. ‘Would you like some food?’
‘I ate a pie at the pie cart.’
‘I’m glad you came up here. We can find a bed for you for the night.’
‘Two nights. Can you manage two?’
There was a sneer in it, and in most things that he said, but I found myself smiling; I was not affected by this Willi at all.
‘Tell me what you’ve been doing. All I know is what I’ve read in Truth.’
‘That fucking rag. They follow me like little sniffing dogs. They think I am going to start a revolution.’
‘Are you still a Marxist?’
‘You ask like an agent for them. For the Security.’
‘No, Willi, I’m not. But I’m not a communist either.’
‘How could you be? All this.’ He waved his hand round the kitchen.
‘I’m a socialist.’
‘Yes, they all are,’ he said. ‘All the rich commies, socialists now. They play conscience games.’
‘So what are you?’
He smiled. ‘Many th
ings’ – an answer that, blindingly for a moment, brought the old Willi back. I drank some beer. I went to the fridge for another bottle.
‘But I am still a Marxist. I hate Russians and Americans,’ he said.
‘So what do you do now?’
‘Watch and listen. I sit in the back row at the Socialist Forum. It is full of ex-communists – the class of 1956. They can’t get out of the habit of going to meetings. It will be good to get away from them.’
‘Are you going somewhere?’
‘To Berlin,’ he said.
‘Ah, Willi, no,’ I said – talking to this one or the old?
‘What would I stay here for? In a little country, little men. Bakers and bed-makers and brewers of flat beer, they think they are the kings of the world.’
‘But why Berlin? Why now?’
‘They have built a wall there,’ Willi said. ‘I am going for the wall.’ He smiled at me and stroked his silver hair. He looked like Buddha. ‘Do you understand, Josef? Berlin is the live place in the world.’
‘But what will you do? And anyway, will they let you in?’
‘There are ways to get in. You can get in anywhere if you want. And I can leave this bullshit place behind, this God’s Own Country, and be where there is looking other men in the face and in the end he is gone or you, and none of this “Nice day, Josef. How is little wifey and the kiddies today?” ’
I said, ‘You’re too old. It will be too hard.’
‘What do you know, Josef? You were always afraid.’
‘Unless you obey the rules they’ll kill you.’
The old Willi might have survived, but I saw this new one as an innocent. Twenty years in this country had made him fat and simple. Winning easy, losing easy made him forget. He would make loud noises there, and do stupid things, and he would die. Yet I understood why he thought that he must go.
‘Willi,’ I said, ‘it’s too late.’
‘Pour some more of this flat beer, Josef. Smile at me and wish me luck.’
‘When?’ I said. ‘When is it?’
‘I’m booked on a ship from Auckland. It leaves next week. I’m getting off in Naples. Then I will be a tourist, and all the time heading for Berlin.’
‘I see.’
‘Josef, can you lend me a hundred pounds?’
‘What for?’
‘For travelling. For this and that. All right, give, not lend. One hundred pounds because we are friends.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll write you a cheque.’
‘Cash will be better. Tomorrow is all right. You owe me for feeding you with eggs.’
‘Yes, I do,’ I said, meaning that I owed him for much more than that, things I would never pay in money. But I was pleased to give money to this man here, pay him off. I felt broken, but was just a short way from being whole.
‘So,’ I said, ‘Berlin. What will you do for a job?’
‘Josef, you are bourgeois. I have never had a job.’
‘No?’
‘I live my life. I do what comes next. Perhaps I will build a tunnel under this wall they have made. I will take people in or take them out, whichever they want.’
‘You get scared in tunnels,’ I said.
‘I was saving you, Josef.’
‘So it was you who told, like Moser says?’
‘Of course it was me. It was going nowhere. It would have collapsed and you would have died. So, better than just give it up I made a betrayal. That is more dramatic. It is good for propaganda.’
‘Especially when you can blame a Jew.’
He shrugged. ‘It was Moser’s role. He has centuries of practice.’ He stopped me from rising with his hand. ‘Sit down, Josef. All I am doing is telling the truth.’
‘You can have a bed for two nights. I’ll give you a hundred pounds. But when you go, this time you’re gone for good.’
‘Paid off?’
I jerked my head at the island. ‘I’m paying you for there.’ I tried to grin. ‘For the eggs.’
‘Ah, sentimentalism. You are a classic case. Josef, I am hungry now. Perhaps I will have something to eat.’
I fed him. I gave him more beer. I sat drinking with him after Nancy had gone to bed. We grew friendly, as two men might who do not like each other but who lose their animosity in drink. By the time I showed him where to sleep I was almost fond of him. And always, always present, connected to this man by links that I glimpsed and then lost sight of, was the Willi Gauss I loved. Several times I displayed the sentimentalism he had accused me of – talking of our escape – and he curled his lip but let me go on; and I’m not ashamed, remembering it, for it meant that I was fixing them in place – Willi then and Willi now – and doing a repair job on myself, drunkenly but with effect.
He lumbered off, belching, to the toilet, and peed a bucketful in there; and I saw Kenny in his bedroom door, wet again, and called Nancy to look after him. She washed him and changed his sheets and found him clean pyjamas (Kenny wet his bed until he was twelve). She marched up the hall in her nightie and slammed the kitchen door so that Willi, at the table, should not see.
‘I think I am the lucky one, Josef,’ he said.
Nancy moved away from me when I went to bed. She did not see Willi in the morning, but left for work as soon as the children had gone to school. (Nancy in the rain, umbrella up.) I wanted to go to work myself but Will’s door stayed closed; and he was a stranger, I could not leave him in my house. What if Elizabeth or Susan should come home? He would not, surely not … But Elizabeth was twelve, and for him perhaps old enough. No, I said, not Willi. But he was also the man with silver hair and broken teeth and a head full of half-baked ideas and perhaps he had a need to punish me for having a family and ‘doing well’.
At ten o’clock I knocked on his door and gave him a cup of tea and the morning paper. ‘You can have a bath or shower,’ I said.
‘You would like me to be clean, Josef? I will wash myself with scented soap.’
I told him it was still raining outside and I would wait for him while he had breakfast, and run him down town if he would like to go.
‘You can trust me, Josef. I will not steal your silver candlesticks.’
‘Yes, I trust you. All I’m doing is offering you a ride.’
He yawned. ‘I think this morning I will eat and sleep. And wash myself. Your Nancy is at work, yes? Then I can relax.’
I told him to make himself at home. I told him there were bread and cereals in the pantry. And bacon if he wanted it. And eggs.
‘Very good, Josef. And eggs.’ He looked, I thought, older in the morning, seedier. Grey-haired not silver on his chest, grey about his jowls, yellow in his eyeballs and his teeth; but he was still confident, behaving with his old authority. I saw him, though, uncertain as I left, holding back something he wanted to say.
‘It’s all right, Willi, I won’t forget your money,’ I said.
I met Nancy for lunch and apologised for him, but said I would have had him stay even if he had been much worse. ‘It’s the last time. He’s leaving for Berlin.’
‘Did he ask for money?’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘Will you give him some?’
‘A hundred pounds.’
‘It’s cheap,’ she said. ‘Cheap if he’s going. I’m sorry, Josef. I can see how he must have been all right. But people change. Are you OK?’
‘Yes.’
‘I know you’ve got to help him. I’m glad you can.’
‘I’m going up in a minute to make sure the children haven’t come home.’
‘Oh God,’ she said.
We drove up the hill together and found the house locked. No children – and why should they come home on this one day? No Willi. The only signs a few dirty dishes in the sink, an unflushed toilet, a rumpled bed.
‘Well,’ Nancy said, ‘I’ll stay home now. What do you think he’d like for tea?’
‘Make something German. Kümmelbraten,’ I said.
‘Go round to th
e butcher. Shall we open a bottle of decent wine?’
I was back in town by three o’clock so I could get his money from the bank. Just before I left the office he telephoned.
‘Josef? You do not have to have me tonight.’
I experienced a moment of desolation. ‘What’s happened?’ I said.
‘I have got a bed somewhere else. So I’m off your back.’
I almost said, You can’t. Nancy’s cooking. I meant he could not leave me. And then he was no longer Willi and I was all right. ‘Where are you? In the pub? Shall I come there?’
‘It is –’ he asked someone ‘– the St George. I will be in the private bar. We can have a drink.’
‘In ten minutes, Willi. One drink. Then I’ll have to go.’ I rang Nancy and told her, and she laughed.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘But I’ve opened the wine. You and me can drink it. And eat Kümmelbraten. And go to bed.’
She was rarely as frank as this. I saw how relieved she was to be rid of him.
I walked to the St George and looked in the private bar but there were only women and their escorts. Although the barnyard din was deafening and the beer-stink as thick as a fog, I looked into the big room at the back, the public bar, and saw his silver head above the crowd. He was with half a dozen men, none of them familiar to me, and I guessed they were chance-met and he was amusing them in return for drinks. I watched for a moment – his grinning teeth, his cheeks flushed red – and thought, Willi, how did you come to this? I wanted him out of it, I wanted him in Berlin, where it would be dangerous all right, but where he might recover himself.
I caught his eye and raised my hand, then went back to the private bar, bought two glasses of whisky – a drink I seldom touch but this, after all, was an occasion – and waited for him at a little table by the wall.
He came in, peering in the gloom, and grinned when he found me: ‘Hiding, Josef? When will you come into the light?’
I saw it was to be jibes, we would end in jibes, which was a pity, for I had hoped we might exchange a word; even that we might be serious, and that I might glimpse him again.
‘Have a drink, Willi. And here’s your money.’ I offered it over the glasses, a thick little wad of five-pound notes, but he hissed and put his hand under the table. So I passed the money there. Once it might have thrilled me, this game, but now I thought it sad and somehow in line with his ruin, his seediness. He slid the wad into his pocket, and I said, ‘Where did you get the jacket, Willi? And the scarf?’