by William Boyd
Matt Friedrich Aurélien came to see me before he left, which was gracious of him, I thought, especially for a film director, and he told me what had happened. I commiserated and told him other sorry stories about this town, this place. But he needed no consoling. ‘I enjoyed my visit,’ he said. ‘No, I did. And I made the film. It was a curious but interesting experience.’
’It’s just a dance,’ I think I remember saying to him. ‘It’s just a dance we have to do.’
He laughed. He found that funny.
END ROLLER
Bob Berger
is working from home,
where he is writing several screenplays
Delphine Drelle
plays the character Suzi de la Tour
in NBC’s Till Darkness Falls
Kaiser Prevost
works for the investment bank
Harbinger Cohen in New York City
Marius No
is in his first year at L’Ecole Supérieur
des Etudes Cinématographiques
Bertrand Holbish
manages the Seattle band Morbid Anatomy
Naomi Tashourian
has written her first novel, Credits Not Contractual
Michael Scott Gehn
is chief executive critic
and on the editorial board of ’film/e
Kit Vermeer
is a practising Sikh and wishes
to be known as Khalsa Hari Atmar
Lanier Cross
is scheduled to star in Lucy Wang’s film
Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal
George Malinverno
has opened a third pizzeria in Pacific Palisades
Vincent Bandine
has announced Alcazar Films’
eighteen-picture slate for the coming year
Barker Lear
lives in San Luis Obispo
Matt Friedrich
has taken his own life
Nathalie ‘X’ aux Etats-Unis
has been nominated for an Academy Award
in the ‘Best Foreign Film’ category
Aurélien No
is not returning your calls
Transfigured Night
‘From my 10th or 11th year I
remember the following incident:
box on the ear
looking for a gymnasium
Aryan origin
Gymnasium love for Erich
fight
relation to Paul
to Gretl
to Rudi good
memories
Wolfrum I attempt to win him over
and entice him away from my
brother
being in love Paul a mischief
maker
innocent expression
lewdness
Latin exercises for Papa thoughts of suicide’
The private papers of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Selbstmord
In this city, and at this time, you should understand that suicide was a completely acceptable option, an entirely understandable, rational course of action to take. And I speak as one who knows its temptations intimately: three of my elder brothers took their own lives – Hans, Rudi and Kurt. That left Paul, me, and my three older sisters. My sisters, I am sure, were immune to suicide’s powerful contagion. I cannot speak for Paul. As for myself, I can only say that its clean resolution of all my problems – intellectual and emotional – was always most appealing; that open door to oblivion always beckoned to me and, odd though it may seem, suicide – the idea of suicide – lies at the very foundations of all my work in ethics and logic.
The Benefactor
I came down from the Hochreith, our house in the country, to Vienna especially to meet Herr Ficker. The big white villa in the park of Neuwaldegg was closed up for the summer. I had one of the gardeners prepare my room and make up a bed and his wife laid the table on the terrace and helped me cook dinner. We were to have Naturschnitzel with Kochsalat with a cold bottle of Zóbinger. Simple, honest food. I hoped Ficker would notice.
I shaved and dressed and went out on to the terrace to wait for him to arrive. I was wearing a banana-yellow, soft-collared shirt with no tie and a light tweed jacket that I had bought years before in Manchester. Its fraying cuffs had been repaired, in the English way, with a dun green leather. My hair was clean and still damp, my face was cool, scraped smooth. I drank a glass of sherbet-water as I waited for Ficker. The evening light was milky and diffused, as if hung with dust. I could hear the faint noise of motors and carriages on the roads of Neuwaldegg and in the gathering dusk I could make out the figure of the gardener moving about in the Allee of pleached limes. A fleeting but palpable peace descended on me and I thought for some minutes of David and our holidays together in Iceland and Norway. I missed him.
Ficker was an earnest young man, taller than me (mind you, I am not particularly tall), with fine thinning hair brushed back off his brow. He wore spectacles with crooked wire frames, as if he had accidently sat upon them and had hastily straightened them out himself. He was neatly and soberly dressed, wore no hat and was clean-shaven. His lopsided spectacles suggested a spirit of frivolity and facetiousness which, I soon found out, was entirely inaccurate.
I had already explained to him, by letter, about my father’s death, my legacy and how I wished to dispose of a proportion of it. He had agreed to my conditions and promised to respect my demand for total anonymity. We talked, in business-like fashion, about the details but I could sense, as he expressed his gratitude, strong currents of astonishment and curiosity.
Eventually he had to ask. ‘But why me? Why my magazine . . . in particular?’
I shrugged. ‘It seems to be exemplary, of its sort. I like its attitude, its, its seriousness. And besides, your writers seem the most needy.’
‘Yes . . . That’s true.’ He was none the wiser.
‘It’s a family trait. My father was a great benefactor – to musicians mainly. We just like to do it.’
Ficker then produced a list of writers and painters he thought were the most deserving. I glanced through it: very few of the names were familiar to me, and beside each one Ficker had written an appropriate sum of money. Two names, at the top of the list, were to receive by far the largest amounts.
’I know of Rilke, of course,’ I said, ‘and I’m delighted you chose him. But who’s he?’ I pointed to the other name. ‘Why should he get so much? What does he do?’
’He’s a poet,’ Ficker said. ‘I think . . . well, no man on this list will benefit more from your generosity. To be completely frank, I think it might just save his life.’
Schubert
My brother Hans drowned himself in Chesapeake Bay. He was a musical prodigy who gave his first concert in Vienna at the age of nine. I never really knew him. My surviving brother, Paul, was also musically gifted, a brilliant pianist who was a pupil of Leschetitzky and made his début in 1913. I remember Paul saying to me once that of all musical tastes the love of Schubert required the least explanation. When one thinks of the huge misery of his life and sees in his work no trace of it at all – the complete absence in his music of all bitterness.
The Bank
I had arranged with Ficker that I would be in the Osterreichische Nationalbank on Schwarzspanier Strasse at three o’clock. I was there early and sat down at a writing desk in a far corner. It was quiet and peaceful: the afternoon rush had yet to begin and the occasional sound of heels on the marble floor as clients crossed from the entrance foyer to the rows of counters was soothing, like the background click of ivory dominoes or the ceramic kiss of billiard balls in the gaming-room of my favourite café near the art schools. . .
Ficker was on time and accompanied by our poet. Ficker caught my eye and I gave a slight nod and then bent my head over the spectral papers on my desk. Ficker went to a teller’s guichet to enquire about the banker’s draft, leaving the poet standing momentarily alone in the middle of the marble floor, gazing around him
like a peasant at the high dim vaults of the ceiling and the dazzle of afternoon sunshine on the ornamental brasswork of the chandeliers.
Georg, as I shall refer to him, was a young man, twenty-seven years old – two years older than me – small and quite sturdily built, and, like many small men, he seemed to have been provided with a head designed for a bigger body altogether. His head was crude and heavy-looking, its proportions exaggerated by his bristly, close-cropped hair. He was clean-shaven. He had a weak mouth, the upper lip overhung the bottom one slightly, and a thick triangular nose. He had low brows and slightly oriental-looking, almond-shaped eyes. He was what my mother would have called ‘an ugly customer’.
He stood now, looking expressionlessly about him, swaying slightly, as if buffeted by an invisible crowd. He appeared at once ill and strong – pale-faced, ugly, dark-eyed, but with something about the set of his shoulders, the way his feet were planted on the ground, that suggested reserves of strength. Indeed the year before, Ficker had told me, he had almost died from an overdose of Veronal that should have killed an ordinary man in an hour or two. Since his schooldays, it transpired, he had been a compulsive user of narcotic drugs and was also an immoderate drinker. At school he used chloroform to intoxicate himself. He was now a qualified dispensing chemist, a career he had taken up, so Ficker informed me, solely because it gave him access to more effective drugs. I found this single-mindedness oddly impressive. To train for two years at the University of Vienna as a pharmacist, to pass the necessary exams to qualify, testified to an uncommon dedication. Ficker had given me some of his poems to read. I could not understand them at all; their images for me were strangely haunting and evocative but finally entirely opaque. But I liked their tone; their tone seemed to me to be quite remarkable.
I watched him now, discreetly, as Ficker completed the preliminary documentation and signalled him over to endorse the banker’s draft. Ficker – I think this was a mistake – presented the cheque to him with a small flourish and shook him by the hand, as if he had just won first prize in a lottery. I could sense that Georg knew very little of what was going on. I saw him turn the cheque over immediately so as to hide the amount from his own eyes. He exchanged a few urgent words with Ficker, who smiled encouragingly and patted him on the arm. Ficker was very happy, almost gleeful – in his role as the philanthropist’s go-between he was vicariously enjoying what he imagined would be Georg’s astonished surprise. But he was wrong. I knew it the instant Georg turned over the cheque and read the amount. Twenty thousand crowns. A thriving dispensing chemist would have to work six or seven years to earn a similar sum. I saw the cheque flutter and tremble in his fingers. I saw Georg blanch and swallow violently several times. He put the back of his hand to his lips and his shoulders heaved. He reached out to a pillar for support, bending over from the waist. His body convulsed in a spasm as he tried to control his writhing stomach. I knew then that he was an honest man for he had the honest man’s profound fear of extreme good fortune. Ficker snatched the cheque from his shaking fingers as Georg appeared to totter. He uttered a faint cry as warm bile and vomit shot from his mouth to splash and splatter on the cool marble of the Nationalbank’s flagged floor.
A Good Life – A Good Death
I came to know Ficker quite well during our various meetings about the division and disposal of my benefaction. Once in our discussions the subject of suicide came up and he seemed genuinely surprised when I told him that scarcely a day went by when I did not think about it. But I explained to him that if I could not get along with life and the world then to commit suicide would be the ultimate admission of failure. I pointed out that this notion was the very essence of ethics and morality. For, if anything is not to be allowed, then surely that must be suicide. For if suicide is allowed, then anything is allowed.
Sometimes I think that a good life should end in a death that one could welcome. Perhaps, even, it is only a good death that allows us to call a life ‘good’.
Georg, I believe, has nearly died many times. For example, shortly before the Veronal incident he almost eliminated himself by accident. Georg lived for a time in Innsbruck. One night, after a drinking bout in a small village near the city he decided to walk home. At some stage on his journey back, overcome with tiredness, he decided to lie down in the snow and sleep. When he awoke in the morning the world had been replaced by a white turbid void. For a moment he thought . . . but almost immediately he realized he had been covered in the night by a new fall of snow. In fact it was about forty centimetres deep. He heaved himself to his feet, brushed off his clothes and, with a clanging, gonging headache, completed his journey to Innsbruck. Ficker related all this to me.
How I wish I had been passing that morning! The first sleepy traveller along that road when Georg awoke. In the still, crepuscular light, that large hump on the verge begins to stir, some cracks and declivities suddenly deform the smooth contours, then a fist punches free and finally that crude ugly face emerges, with its frosty beret of snow, staring stupidly, blinking, spitting . . .
The War
The war saved my life. I really do not know what I would have done without it. On 7 August, the day war was declared on Russia, I enlisted as a volunteer gunner in the artillery for the duration and was instructed to report to a garrison artillery regiment in Cracow. In my elation I was reluctant to go straight home to pack my bags (my family had by now all returned to Vienna) so I took a taxi to the Café Museum.
I should say that I joined the army because it was my civic duty, yet I was even more glad to enlist because I knew at that time I had to do something, I had to subject myself to the rigours of a harsh routine that would divert me from my intellectual work. I had reached an impasse and the impossibility of ever proceeding further filled me with morbid despair.
By the time I reached the Café Museum it was about six o’clock in the evening (I liked this café because its interior was modern: its square rooms were lined with square, honey-coloured oak panelling, hung with prints of the drawings of Charles Dana Gibson). Inside it was busy, the air noisy with speculation about the war. It was warm and muggy, the atmosphere suffused with the reek of beer and cigar smoke. The patrons were mostly young men, students from the nearby art schools, clean-shaven, casually and unaffectedly dressed. So I was a little surprised to catch a glimpse in one corner of a uniform. I pushed through the crowd to see who it was.
Georg, it was obvious, was already fairly drunk. He sat strangely hunched over, staring intently at the table top. His posture and the ferocious concentration of his gaze clearly put people off as the three other seats around his table remained unoccupied. I told a waiter to bring a half-litre of Heuniger Wein to the table and then sat down opposite him.
Georg was wearing the uniform of an officer, a lieutenant, in the Medical Corps. He looked at me candidly and without resentment, and of course without recognition. He seemed much the same as the last time I had seen him, at once ill-looking and possessed of a sinewy energy. I introduced myself and told him I was pleased to see a fellow soldier as I myself had just enlisted.
’It’s your civic duty,’ he said, his voice strong and unslurred. ‘Have a cigar.’
He offered me a Trabuco, those ones that have a straw mouthpiece because they are so strong. I declined – at that time I did not smoke. When the wine arrived he insisted on paying for it.
’I’m a rich man,’ he explained as he filled our glasses. ‘Where’re you posted?’
’Galicia.’
’Ah, the Russians are coming.’ He paused. ‘I want to go somewhere cold and dark. I detest this sun, and this city. Why aren’t we fighting the Eskimos? I hate daylight. Maybe I could declare war on the Lapps. One-man army.’
’Bit lonely, no?’
’I want to be lonely. All I do is pollute my mind talking to people . . . I want a dark cold lonely war. Please.’
’People will think you’re mad.’
He raised his glass. ‘God preserve me from sanity.’
>
I thought of something Nietzsche had said: ‘Our life, our happiness, is beyond the north, beyond ice, beyond death.’ I looked into Georg’s ugly face, his thin eyes and glossy lips, and felt a kind of love for him and his honesty. I clinked my glass against his and asked God to preserve me from sanity as well.
Tagebuch: 15 August. Cracow. . . . If your wife, for example, continually puts too much sugar in your tea it is not because she has too much sugar in her cupboard, it is because she is not educated in the ways of handling sweetness. Similarly, the problem of how to live a good life cannot ever be solved by continually assaulting it with the intellect. Certain things can only be shown, not stated.
The Searchlight
I enlisted in the artillery to fire howitzers but instead found myself manning a searchlight on a small, heavily armed paddle-steamer called the Goplana. We cruised up and down the Vistula, ostensibly looking for Russians but also to provide support for any river crossings by our own forces.
I enjoyed my role in charge of the searchlight. I took its mounting apart and oiled and greased its bearings. Reassembled, it moved effortlessly under the touch of my fingers. Its strong beam shone straight and true in the blurry semi-darkness of those late summer nights. However, I soon found the living conditions on the Goplana intolerable because of the stink, the proximity and the vulgarity of my fellow soldiers. And because we were constantly in motion life below decks was dominated by the thrum and grind of the Goplana’s churning paddles. I spent long hours in my corner of the bridge-house needlessly overhauling the mechanism of the searchlight – anything to escape the torrent of filth and viciousness that poured from the men. But despite these periods of solitude and isolation I found my old despair began to creep through me again, like a stain.