by Gee, Maurice
‘A present from a lady,’ he said.
‘Anyone I know?’
He yawned. ‘She’ll be down soon. You can wait and say hello.’
‘So, you’re staying here? In the St George? It’s hardly a Stundenhotel.’
‘You are jealous, Josef. I can find someone for you.’
‘No thanks.’
‘You will go home to Nancy? Marriage is prostitution, don’t you know that? You buy yourself a cosy little fuck every night.’
‘Shut up, Willi.’ I was tired of him. I wanted to leave before this man, this bore, began to erode the Willi I held safe – who, all the same, flashed into composite being with him and held me there, flashed on and off like a light. I drank my whisky, listening to Silver-hair boast; and learned that the lady in the room upstairs was Norma Cooksley.
‘You have grown into a New Zealander, Josef, you have learned to purse your mouth.’
‘She’s married,’ I said.
‘So it is the rights of the husband now? It is the house and car and the little wife. You will be an expert on this.’
‘You’ve got a daughter, don’t you know that?’
‘Who might not like her mother fucking in a hotel. Even when the man she is in bed with is her daddy.’
‘You make me sick, Willi.’ But even then I could not leave. I wanted a sign, I wanted a word – to peel him clean and let me see Willi Gauss again, and know that I had not been wrong. Nothing came. I listened and was bored and angry by turns; and got up at last, bought him another drink and put it on the table.
‘Goodbye, Willi.’
‘You are going, Josef?’ He was surprised. He understood the fascination that he held for me, and would never believe I was tired of him. ‘Stay and see Norma. Say hello.’
‘No. Sorry. Goodbye. Be careful in Berlin.’
I left him sitting in the private bar and did not look back; and never saw Willi Gauss again – although I saw Norma Cooksley descending the stairs. A woman well set up, arrogant, majestic; but desperate and elated and in love. It flashed in her, as Willi Gauss, my Willi, had flashed in the silver-haired man. She did not see me. Her eyes glowed, then darkened; her mouth was prim, then opened, then gasped, making fine hairs shine on her upper lip. I gave no sign but went on my way, home to Nancy.
We fed the children and sent them early to bed, then ate Kümmelbraten and drank expensive, very expensive wine. Do I mention that to put Willi further in his place? I can hear him sneer that of course the thing that would impress me was the cost. But I mean wine from Bordeaux, which we paid a ridiculous price for in those days. Nancy had been willing to open it for Willi, which really meant open it for me. We drank and enjoyed it, at the table first, then sitting in our chairs by the living-room fire. I told her Somes Island stories, Willi stories, most of which she had heard before, but in words that were happy and elegiac both. We drank coffee. We showered, washing off the day – in my case washing Willi off – and went to bed and were happy there, as Willi and Norma were happy no doubt in the St George hotel. But not once did I think of him, the silver-haired man, and have seldom thought of him since.
Willi Gauss, Willi of Somes Island, I think of him.
And now I must say what happened to Willi, and confess that I don’t know which Willi it happened to. Perhaps he recovered himself in Berlin. It (the West) was surrounded by a wall as Somes Island had been by the sea. There were reasons for him to be at home, apart from growing up there. The wire of the first few weeks had been replaced by concrete – a wall one hundred miles long and twelve feet high, with watchtowers and searchlights and dogs on running wires and guards (Vopos) ‘licensed to kill’. I cannot see him as the sneering man of the St George. His hair turns to blond, he loses the fat on his belly and jowls, he grins at people with all his teeth and does foolish things which succeed. But I know nothing. I know what I’ve read about the Berlin of the sixties, both sides of the wall, and Willi occupies it, when I’m relaxed, as the Willi Gauss of Somes Island – a person I’ve dreamed up, a ghost, substantial ghost, to whom I can say, ‘Für immer Freunden, Willi.’
At other times, more sensibly, I say, ‘He must have been lost there, he wouldn’t have known what to do.’ That explains his marriage. Yes, he married: news I had from Moser, whose interest in Willi matched my own. Moser had a friend in Berlin (in the West), a minor bureaucrat with a twitchy nose, and had him sniff out Willi and ‘keep an eye on him’. So when I say I know nothing, it is nothing that adds up.
His wife was a woman called Renate. I never learned how old she was or whether she was fat or thin, short or tall, clever or stupid. When I try to imagine her I end up with Norma Cooksley coming down the stairs. They lived in Kreuzberg at an address Moser’s friend supplied him with. I sent a card there once but had no reply.
What did Willi do? Made a nuisance of himself, the bureaucrat said, and married a German national to avoid being deported. I suppose it is true. Willi would need a practical reason for taking a wife. He mixed with people ‘too young for him’ – students, noisy radicals, artists, anarchists, Turks. He was on the fringes of Rudi Dutschke’s group, and was probably a joke there, a nuisance – or was he young Willi Gauss again? I thought I saw him in a news photograph once, throwing an egg at the Shah of Persia – an arm obscured his face but he had a Willi jaw, and there was a shine of silver hair …
West Berlin in the sixties was an interesting place. I imagine it pleased Willi very much. But what of East Berlin? How would he see it – outside or inside the wall? His wife had family there – another reason for him to marry her? It’s all questions. I only know that he went back and forth several times on his New Zealand passport before West Germans were allowed, and that he was, in the bureaucrat’s words, ‘up to something’. Then one night he failed to reappear at Checkpoint Charlie. He never came back. What went wrong? Was he a victim or a criminal? Did he walk in somewhere and show his Marxist credentials? In Ulbricht’s Stalinist Berlin they would have been unacceptable. And Willi hated Stalinism anyway. Did he show his letter from Keith Holyoake?
In Berlin his wife made enquiries. No answer came. According to Moser’s contact it meant that Willi was ‘operating’ there in some way. But he was ‘a minor player’ and everyone forgot him in short time. Except his wife, who loved him. Except Moser. Except me.
Six years went by. I tried to picture him growing old in East Berlin; could not see him ‘retired’, could not see him as a ‘functionary’, but only as an ‘operator’, which was shadowy. Nancy and I began to talk of an overseas trip – the UK of course, and France and Italy. Austria was up to me. We never mentioned Berlin.
Then one night Moser telephoned. ‘I’ve heard from Max in Berlin. Willi’s dead.’
The DDR and the FDR had exchanged information on criminals and there on the list was Willi’s name, imprisoned in 1971 for illicit trading (in information, goods, money, what?); died of a brain haemorrhage in 1974. That was all; all there ever was. I suppose his wife found out where he was buried but if so the information never reached Moser’s friend, who was close to retiring and had no interest left.
‘So Willi is finished,’ Moser said. ‘I knew he must be up to no good.’ Moser’s English was improving. ‘Josef, I can’t hear you. Are you there?’
‘I hope they didn’t hurt him,’ I said.
It silenced Moser, who for all his sharpness was a kind man. We ended by agreeing that Willi was lucky if he really had been imprisoned on criminal charges. Political would have been more dangerous. But I don’t know which is more likely. Sometimes I hope it was one and sometimes the other. There’s little variation in the picture I see: an old ruined man with silver hair in a prison cell. Footsteps approach in the corridor. A key turns. The door swings wide and bangs against the wall, and I see that Willi is afraid. His mouth trembles and his eyes blink. I switch off then.
After Moser’s phone call I poured myself a glass of whisky and went on to the porch. I sat on the top step and looked at the harbour
, where Somes Island made a black hole in the starlit water. Willi had been dead for three years. ‘I’m sorry I’m late with this,’ I said, and drank to him.
Nancy had heard my side of the conversation. She came out and sat with me, close against my shoulder, and took a sip of whisky from my glass. Willi resonated, back down the years, but the steadier sound, the deeper sound, came from Nancy. After a while I said, ‘It’s cold out here. Come inside.’
We drank coffee and talked about Kenny and Elizabeth and Susan, and only after that about Willi.
It’s a different love. There’s room for both.
One more thing. When we made our trip overseas in 1982 we visited West Berlin and made the tourist stop at Checkpoint Charlie. We looked with sick excitement at the Wall, and I have to confess that I found it impossible to think of Willi there; he did not fit. We walked in the Tiergarten and came out by the Brandenburg Gate, where the Wall made a great horseshoe bulge into the West, ten feet thick to stop the tanks. On top of the Gate the Goddess of Victory galloped her quadriga east, along the road doomed armies take. I managed to sense, and shiver at, history. But Willi was not there either.
I went by taxi to Kreuzberg to see where he had lived. The house was in a narrow building in a squalid street. Squalor would not have troubled him – and, knowing that, I found a ghostly Willi. But no Mrs Gauss. The Turkish woman who answered the door had never heard of her. I went back to my hotel and did not try to find Willi Gauss any more.
When I mentioned him to Nancy as we flew out of Berlin she claimed that he had started Kenny wetting his bed again.
FOURTEEN
I have been writing in these notebooks long enough. I had not intended laying everything bare. In the beginning I wished only to say that Kenny had disappointed me; or, as it seemed then, betrayed. I set out to have a moan on paper, my pen was loosened by red wine – and look where I am now. Willi is dead. And Kenny disappoints me still.
But here, in my story, Nancy is alive. When, how, did it become a story? I sip the glass of wine Elizabeth allows and wonder if I have the heart to see her die again, see Nancy die. If I say no – this sick old man (old man who recovers!) – then I must stop. But do I have the right to say, The story stops?
I’ll keep on going for a while, drive on my pen (a funny language, English, demanding ‘pen’ although I use a biro). It is almost spring. I can see out my windows in the dawn without wiping a hole in the condensation. This morning the garden trees are standing still, resting it seems, after a night of thrashing in the wind. Now and then one of them gives a shudder, perhaps a sigh. We live in a tough place, the trees and I. It is hard to be relaxed.
Elizabeth brought the mail in a moment ago. All I got was bills. She’s good about bringing them to me, although she’d like to spare me the trouble. I should have my accountant or my bank handle them and not carry on with this old-fashioned writing of cheques. I try to explain that I enjoy paying bills, it’s like feeling your pulse throb in its regularity, and the seasonal fluctuation of some puts me in touch with the patterns of life – which provoked her to her usual exclamation I’m glad I didn’t tell her that they connect me with the city down there and the world outside, for that might call in question the cosiness I’m sure she feels she has created here. I don’t want cosiness, I’ve never liked it, although I’ve wanted privacy and closeness and contentment. One cannot, one mustn’t, exclude the world. I need ‘down there’, although differently from the way I’ve needed ‘up here’.
The tenses are interesting in that last sentence. I was not aware of choosing them and don’t quite know what they mean. Is it simply that Nancy is dead? I am, in my way, contented enough.
Now there are squeals in the kitchen. What is this? Not more trouble with Julie? Three voices whinny out there.
My daughter Susan has been to visit me, and my grand-daughter Bea. (Can one really call a two-hour stop between morning and midday flights a visit?) They were on their way from Hamilton to see Susan’s boy, who is studying dentistry in Dunedin. He, the boy, Jonas, wanted to be a doctor but could not make the grade and so settled for dentistry where, Susan says boldly, he’ll make more money anyway. Perhaps she only says it bravely. Reading Susan is not a skill I have. I can read the other two, Elizabeth like a book, though one that shifts now and then into a language I only half know, and Kenny like the label on a packet of water crackers. But Susan has been open, closed, open again, and I only see a word here and there, or glimpse a picture: I can get nothing complete. Here she is, at forty-three, beautiful in a way that tips me off balance, forces me to bump my senses, my sensibilities, straight; for it is Nancy’s beauty she has, which I’m the only one to see. (I overheard a woman whisper once that Nancy was plain.) Susan is large, round, blue-eyed, mild of countenance, and fiery, with those deep fires Nancy had. I should know her, recognising this – but read nothing in her with accuracy, and she berates me for my mistakes.
She pounced on me twice in her two hours in my house, the first time for supposing that pleasure in beauty must be a bonus in her job (she and her husband grow lilies for export to Japan), the second for mistaking her pride in Bea as less than pure. Elizabeth told her tartly to ‘dry up’, for flowers must bring pleasure to everyone, the grower too, or something’s wrong; and Bea said that fiddle-playing was her trade and of course she hoped to make some money out of it one day and stop being a drain on her mum and dad. Susan looked as if she would cry. ‘You’re not a drain, you’ve never been a drain, we love helping you.’
‘Oh, Mum,’ Bea said, and gave her a hug, and I was suddenly close to tears myself, at the love these two Nancy-women poured out.
I am not mistaken in saying that it includes me. I am warm with it still, and will be, if I’m sensible, for the rest of my days.
Bea takes more after her father, the lily-grower, in temperament. She is toned down, she works things out and then performs neatly what she must do, no excess; and I wondered how, without passion, she could hope to succeed as a violinist. But I’ve been wrong before, over Elinor Cleghorn; and Bea has a confidence that will perhaps serve just as well. She’s interested that Nancy and I knew Elinor, but not excited because, as I’ve said, she (Elinor) stayed in the second rank.
Susan wanted to telephone Kenny and tell him to close his office and get in his car and come on up, but Elizabeth said, ‘No, don’t do that’, then had to explain, which she did in terms less general than I would have liked. Susan made explosions of disbelief, while Bea went round-eyed and kept quiet. ‘I’d soon fix her,’ Susan said, turning to anger. ‘I’d give her a bloody good shake. Whatever Kenny is, he’s not like that.’
‘She’s getting better,’ Elizabeth said. ‘She’s with a sensible therapist now. It was all that other woman’s fault.’ She warned Susan that Julie would soon be home from one of her sessions and talk must be ordinary and nothing be even hinted at.
‘Poor Julie,’ Bea said, and meant it so profoundly that I thought, She’ll get there because she can feel, and she can keep it in control.
She had her violin with her and I asked her to play. Susan at once said no, what Bea needed was a room for an hour’s practice – which surprised me, remembering her fights with Nancy over just this sort of thing. Bea said, ‘Oh, but I’d like to play for Grandpa’, and I saw that although she might be dutiful, in music her mother would not tell her what to do. I grinned with pleasure at the instruction in it. The wheel turns.
We had a little concert and don’t ask me the pieces. They – Elizabeth accompanied Bea on the piano – kept it popular for me. Susan frowned at first, wanting hard stuff, I suppose, so we might see how clever her daughter was, but she was smiling before long. I watched them, Bea standing, going through those motions, those intricacies, I had first admired in Benjamin Ascher, Elizabeth sure-handed, light-handed, rolling her bottom on the piano stool in Nancy’s way, and Susan, the failed cellist, hearing more than I could hear; and I thought, It’s enough, I’m happy now. I closed my eyes and let the
melodies retreat, and dreamed of Nancy.
Julie arrived towards the end. We heard her car in the drive and her leather boots in the kitchen.
‘In here, Julie,’ Elizabeth called.
There were greetings then, embraces, and not what I had feared – a flow-over of Julie’s aggression on to this part of Kenny’s family. Her face went pink with happiness. She and Bea had not met for four or five years, when Julie had gone for a holiday in Hamilton and had helped pack lilies in the early days of Susan’s and Barry’s enterprise. She had flown home on the aeroplane with her arms full of blooms. She talked about it for a moment, while Susan watched too sharply.
‘I love the way you’re dressed,’ Bea said. ‘I wish I had the nerve to dress like that. I love your boots.’
I don’t think she did. She was being kind, and heading off her mother.
‘Can I hear you play? Can I hear how good you are?’ Julie asked.
‘We were just finished,’ Bea said. ‘I’ll do one more.’
‘Then I think we should ring for our taxi,’ Susan said.
Bea played something fast and clever, without the piano helping her – and I’ve just asked Elizabeth, coming in for my cup, what it was. ‘One of the Caprices. Paganini. It’s music for showing off with,’ she said with a smile. Julie clapped when it was over. Then the girls chattered in the lounge while mother and aunt (aunts) hissed in the kitchen, Susan wanting to know more, and boiling up more, until I, passing through, heard Elizabeth say, ‘If you do you’ll ruin three months’ hard work. And you might even drive her mad. Ah, Dad, break up those two. I’m going to drive Susan and Bea to their plane.’
They kissed me goodbye, gave me hugs. Julie shifted her car in the drive and Elizabeth drove them off in mine. The house was suddenly so quiet it seemed a whole crowd of people had gone. I sat down to rest in my room and saw Julie at the edge of the lawn, studying it with hands on hips, as though she were planning an attack. I’ve bought her a new mower, an electric one, very quiet, but the wet grass has stopped her from trying it out. Later, when I went to the lounge to catch more of the winter sun, I saw her sitting halfway down the steps – saw just the top of her head, but something there, its forward slant, told me she was crying. I went out, clumping so she should not think I was sneaking up, and sat beside her and asked what was wrong – meaning, now, right this minute, for I did not want the other stuff, and we are warned off anyhow. She dried her eyes on her sleeve, which had a greasy shine in the fabric, as though she wiped everything there, her nose, her mouth. I did not touch her, knowing that man-touch of any sort was assault.