‘Another’s pain should never be welcome. It usually is.’ He preened himself on nonsense, then, as if I had only that instant arrived, bowed. ‘Regrets. It’s bathtime for baby.’ The smile had degenerated to simper. ‘Ties will be worn, decorum preserved. Ties for the tidy. I’m dining with moustaches. Clubland warriors.’
Critikin on the make. Anything more? No guidance would come from Claire, now standing, apart, brooding, bound to him by whatever offshoots of blood and necessity.
At the door, he regarded me with a polite recognition, small, slender half-man, then lightened, was almost radiant, with the silent whoop of a child finding a coin. ‘You’re really more than them, Erich. Thousands of them already here, on the hunt. Even Ukrainians. The Eighth Galician Division. To quote the monks, Throwmerunapiece.’
One finger on the door, he was reluctant to leave us together. His legs fidgeted, as if about to skip. ‘You’re not a wooden block. But there’s a time to go thinking. People should be silent when they weep. In music, the simplest …’
In feeble crucifixion parody, he spread arms, head tilting as if too heavy. ‘Don’t think I’ve flipped. I’ll be back, like Doug MacWhatsit, the Jap-baiting clown.’
Losing poise, moving as if by remote control, he left for the stairs. Involuntarily, I felt a sudden poignancy, then a twinge of self-pity. Product of European disintegration, I had hankered for romantic England, inordinate love, and attracted only misfits.
Claire’s hands were quivering like broken birds, her face a waste between darkish page-boy hair and within the wrap now cheap against the stark white, a body tremulous, feathery.
Very tentative, she stepped towards me but stopped, as if at water, not Rheingold glimmer but a soggy ditch. She was almost inaudible.
‘What will happen to us?’
Us. The ambiguity revived a flicker of desire, then failed. Still distanced, she was calm but spiritless, as if dutifully reading aloud.
‘I don’t have much left. Feelings. Certainties. Even things to admire. It has been a long while since a stranger stopped our father in the street and asked permission to shake hands with a gentleman so beautifully dressed.’
Her stance awaited permission to continue, though I was at once convinced that the gentlemanly father was a charlatan, child-abuser. Whatever the truth, he was more plausible than my Surrey hills fantasy of twins born without parents, surviving on honeydew amid laurel and myrtle, vulnerable only to sunrise that could strike them to dust. Silliness is its own reward.
Not tender, not encouraging, I was merely embarrassed, as I had been when Wilfrid introduced me to a blind man. She was near tears.
‘We’re poorly bred. Neither of us can …’ Defeated, she contrived an apologetic smile, straightening her Queen of Sheba garment. ‘Erich, try to be more grateful to yourself.’
Signal for my departure.
Back in Guilford Street I tried to compress conflicting thoughts, shamed by my unresponsiveness, my treachery, almost limbless in an apathy immune to midnight bulletins and the periodic roar of planes. A U-2 spy plane was missing, de Gaulle was orating against Ahmed Ben Bella, the Russians were within sight of Cuba. Then the landlady, who had not risked retiring to bed, called me to the telephone, to hear Claire’s imploring outcry, telling me of Sinclair’s arrest.
MEDITERRANEAN GARDEN
1
High walls protected us from goats, neighbours, the nagging mistral. Also, we had many trees: planes, Spanish oaks, a few palms, magnolia, rowan – bane of the witches. Also lemon and cactus, emblems of fiery suns and rites more cruel than bullfight, and Basque or Algerian terrorism. Sheets of blossom, green, then reds and golds, accompanied the fountain’s murmur, the bird’s flutter. Undisturbed even when wind leapt from the sea, we were open only to the sky.
Despite such peace, all was in surreptitious movement, like a clock. Sunlight grappled with shadow, colours shifted, so that green rims and yellow surfaces glittered while a branch, a stone seat, faded. Garden scents mingled with those from hills, soft air rested now on pearl-grey water, now on scarlet, glossy petals. With so much branch and leaf under rich Mediterranean blue we could step from noon into dusk, from luminous shade to dappled clarities. In moonlight, all rejoined in massed yet skeletal silver that sea-mist could transform to a maze. Patterns were readable as a book. Under cloud, marigolds lapsed into moon-daisies, a marble Hermes, smiling at secret motives, could dissolve into the shimmering laurel, which, I joked, Nadja polished before breakfast.
We had never wished to observe all at a glance, preferring the half-glimpsed, suggestive, surprising, like those side alleys of Vermeer and de Hooch. Imagination peoples deserts. We had tamed wilderness into leafy aisles, arched side chapels, hedged confessionals, vistas arresting the light, hinting at more than they first revealed. Awareness of the sea heaving far below was countered by the shadows, striped tints, unexpected angles, the gaps fruitful in gardens as in people. Comprehension – Beauty’s love for the Beast, Theseus’ treachery, Matisse, Rilke – was best approached by the slow, the oblique. From lacunae came discussion, debate. What happened to Lazarus afterwards? Did mythical descents to the Underworld require further interpretations? From such talk we lived both in and through each other.
Summer had returned, perfectly launched, laden with flowers, deep colours, sunsets of long, bee-buzzing afternoons, the toneless drone of cicadas. Heliotrope turned with the sun, lingering in fierce, mustard slats before sinking into crimson afterglow. Closing eyes, I could almost feel colours drifting against me: mauve water-lilies, blue and red geranium, rough at noon, smoothed by twilight, when poplars stilled, the moth flew above dark red Ingrid Bergman roses and bats looped between the laurels.
Dropping my book, savouring woodiness of box-hedge and phlox, I noticed yet again how Jules’s mowing brightened the air, like rain purifying coastal lights usually gaudy as costume jewellery flaunted in the rash of pleasure resorts which the Nazi invaders had called a perfumed ghetto.
Along the coast decayed fishing ports, villages, châteaux were now marinas, gasoline complexes, candied hotels, beach huts, wedding-cake casinos, Club Med marzipan bungalow estates, golf clubs, a bright frieze of villas, Moorish, Grecian, Hollywood, pinnacled, domed, castellated, gleaming between spurs of palm, tamarisk, orange, bougainvillaea, facing a sea often radiant, always polluted, massed above NATO sonics, submarines and a wrecked plane with nuclear weaponry. Pink glimmered on headlands, the sands beneath crowded with swimmers equipped with nets, tridents, masks, flippers, water skis.
Nature was conscripted into soundless warfare. The nearest bird, dog, cat, dolphin might carry Semtex or microphone. Also, a children’s theme park was famed for illicit sale of Xanax, Valium, morphine, Prozac.
The littoral, source of myth and commerce, had been softened to foppish playgrounds for sun addict, surfers, skin divers, gamblers, footballers and pensioners. Near us, an Italianate launderette and jardin publique had replaced cottages painted by Dufy and where a veteran, born 1870, was christened Plébiscite and several successors Libération.
Like fugitives from plague, we had sanctuary from the shiny cavalcade of cars swarming between Nice, Menton, Italy, to son et lumière at Monte Carlo, to a Cocteau chapel, a Picasso home, to prettified villages or an hour of absinthe and losses at a casino.
Reading, strolling, watching a sulphur-yellow butterfly or gold-rimmed cloud, I was what Father called a Faulenzer, idle bag of bones. We could not readily define neurons and, though respectful, were not envious of two passing Swedes in light-green, perma-creased suits, teeth glittering on ochred faces under fleecy hair, who, in an hour, calculated Mexican oil reserves to the last barrel. We eschewed the Global Village, microchip gadgetry, biotechnology, multifarious busyness within which physicists separated genetic acids, scrutinized plasmas, created pills to outwit Fate. More immediate were North African alcaids huddled in the Old Port and Lebanese with vivid eloquence and morals, failing to sell us ten acres of the Sahara.
Af
ter northern greys and sodden greens, the south touched me dead centre: shocks of fiery sunflowers lolling by a road, dew still shining on torrid cow-meadows, mottled blue-and-white seas, red roofs and green shutters, terraced vines twisted by mistral.
Many hills, florid, bare, ransacked for long-vanished fleets, sloped to the sea as if for coolness. Some retained straggling trees, were former refuges for Maquis snipers and allegedly still sheltered illegal immigrants and refugees from the Politics of Understanding. More discernable, wartime feuds festered within tourist scenery, one family remaining ostracized for betraying a Jewish family hitherto unpopular. Chromium, plastic, artificial intelligence had yet to subdue hunting instincts.
Hinterlands were never crushed by Rome, monarchy, anarchist communes, squatters. In summer, men descended, in imitation peasant attire, selling fruit, begging or standing silent, baleful, clutching a mule or rusty bicycle, shreds of a dispensation which New Europe’s hygiene and educational regulations were pledged to eliminate.
Frenchmen, our friend Alain said too often and with some pride, are like brothers: they hate each other more than their enemies.
Behind the hills and remote, scantily charted valleys, white mountains were sharp against the blue or blocked by storms and mist, at other times seeming to advance. I never approached them, never losing horror of isolated peaks, deadly chasms, silences freezing the bone, bequeathed by German movies.
For long weeks, the sea, curving between cliffs, would be exquisitely calm, polite, tints keeping pace with the sky, until abruptly tumbling, darkening, flecks of silver rattling the shore, and as swiftly flattened, scrawled with golden lines at evening, primrose at dawn.
Such was montage for Nadja, tall by waves, beside a groyne, under a palm. Her daytime kiss or embrace, always rare but never perfunctory, could alter landscapes. With her, stone, flower, water were new, her talk a remedy against fossilization, memories over-adhesive. I believe in yesterday, the Beatles still moaned. Though no man is an island, most are peninsulas tied both to dates and events, many painful, and to the inexorable now. Nevertheless, within our walls, by Nadja’s work, the quiet delights of a garden, music, books, we were protected. A greeting on the road, the arrival of swallows affected us more than a hijack, reputed murder of a Pope, the sorrows of Indonesia, the resurgence of international students – Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible:Sex, Drugs, Treason. ‘Milksops,’ grumbled our neighbour, Dick Haylock. Brecht’s thin voice lingered, ‘Civilians are guilty.’
New Europe was rising around us as if baying the moon, but we concerned ourselves with it no more than we did black holes beyond the serene blue. The coast vibrated with financial acrobats, oil sharks, pop screamers, but Nadja was intent only on puzzling the contradictions within Theseus, Jesus, Alexander, the crowded ramifications of myth, history, hearsay, her dark brows relaxing at a solution, contracting on discovering its fallacy.
The outside could not be wholly evaded. Kennedys murdered, National Guardsmen shooting anti-war Ohio students, Chancellor Brandt’s fall, when his secretary was exposed as a Stasi spy, the British Cabinet escaping Irish bombs, Mountbatten less fortunate. Russian scientists dosed monkeys with leukaemia to save mankind, Professor Leary had issued a diktat, that killing police was a sacred act. What, we idly wondered, was he professor of? Blood dried on the anti-Fascist rampart, the Berlin Wall.
Our day was simple as an egg. For me, names that convulsed the world – My Lai, Ayatollah, moon landing, Khmer Rouge – meant less than Malraux’s cleaning of Paris, were remote as Thebes, Carthage, the Planetary Influences Needful for Sexual Compatibility, Black Power or the Inflammable Ray.
Nadja, more easily moved, had wept at the election of a Polish Pope, then, shrugging, demanded a bucket to water her plants.
With all human knowledge apparently available by touch of an electronic button, and human understanding virtually unaffected, we saw ourselves as snugly harmonious, with vast, unskilled populations being steered by multinational quangos towards Pleasure Island. Workers paid not to work, symphony orchestras not to perform, publishers not to publish; armies hired as movie extras, bishops rebuked for Faith, treason boasted, stupendous roads built on unprecedented taxes for forbidden vehicles. A new imagination was seeping into the West disburdened of literature, history, the supernatural and with the unconscious controlled by drugs.
We preferred small stories to accounts of sensational coups and deranged singers. Stories of the West German professor forbidden to leave campus without students’ permission; our builder, M. Malraut, always completing his labours with some petty theft, like a Monet signing his masterpiece or, Nadja amended, a wolf urinating on a tree.
Becalmed in domesticity, the Danish hygge, we trailed long pasts, older than Pact, war, invasion. Suffused with the primitive and lost, one May we stood naked to watch the ‘sun dance’ at dawn. Yet the past had to be treated carefully, like a pistol finely chased but loaded. My forebears, die Erste Gessellschaft, had once slaughtered Nadja’s. Livonian Knights, Teutonic Knights, Knights of the Sword. I seldom risked mention of the Herr General. ‘Such gentlemen damage. They are the hard edge.’ She was glad to imagine him whimpering after capture, bereft of pride, almost eyeless.
She enjoyed me reading aloud Estonian poems salvaged from the Miscellany, notably Ivar Ivorsk’s ‘Twilight’:
This solemn rite of twilight’s falling
Occurs around our wearied house;
The pine tree crosses itself,
The gable folds its hand,
The moon opens its eyes on another world.
She herself was twilight, concealing more than she revealed, so that I told her that she was set in a Pasternak verse:
Into obscurity retreating,
You try to hide your movement,
As early morning, autumn mist
Shrouds the dreaming countryside.
That surrounding towns supported more astrologers than priests was, she thought, to be expected. Despite the books and orchestras to be superannuated, technology had not yet eliminated mind, wayward, unpredictable, dogged by primitive hopes and terrors of interlocking worlds, the heavens and hells of dazzling bodies and monstrous shapes. She spent several hours studying an interview with the clairvoyant favoured by Marlene Dietrich, and Nancy Reagan, spouse of once the most powerful man on the planet.
She divulged little direct of her past; when she did, it was usually on impulse, not obviously related to our discussion.
Her eyes darkened with meaning far beneath her words. ‘I listened to Chopin nocturnes and would see a woman, beautiful, always alone, at her piano. In night. Sometimes a young man walks through the park, knocks but is never admitted. He bows, smiles pleasantly, the music following him. Ah then! Schoolgirl sentimentality … not that I was ever at school.’
Her accents were still often misplaced, could appear jokey, however serious the discussion, so that, at some unhappy disclosure, a puzzled stranger might politely laugh.
Far back, in Stockholm, I had confessed regret, even guilt, at refusal to volunteer for Aktion Suchnezeichen, German youngsters, godchildren of the White Rose, helping to rebuild cities blasted by Reichsmarschall Goering, Grand Huntsman of the Reich. But then realized that acknowledgement of any German or Russian goodness was forbidden. Her nature, brave and searching, was also unforgiving, seared by the Pact.
My descent from Count Pahlen did not much interest her, but of my childhood her questions were incessant, particularly of the legends and tales bred from the forests, flat landscapes, indeterminate colours. From kitchen talk, tavern memories. Always remember, Levi had said. I could tell her of peasant awe of the number 77, of children baptized Nothing at All, Long Dead, Crippled, to fool the census and evade Tsarist conscription. Stories returned: ‘The Silly Men and Their Cunning Wives’, ‘The Troll’s Mother-in-Law’, ‘The Bear Says No’. Herself a mythologist, she listened for the stories behind the stories; rites, fears, needs. Gods, she reflected, made the sky more supple.
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sp; ‘What else?’ she demanded, dark eyes filling with light. ‘More.’
On Christmas Eve, Night of the Mothers, Father had shown me farmers rubbing salt into ploughs to assure harvest. Scribbling rapidly, she annotated Baltic tales of the World Tree rising in seven sections from a Cosmic Egg, periodically collapsing under sun, moon, stars; of the Underworld, where, by music, shamans controlled the dead; of the Finnish God, from a golden pillar above the sea, observing his reflection, commanding it to rise from the waves, it becoming the Devil.
I imaged Claire and Sinclair born of a psychedelic Cosmic Egg, but she frowned. ‘They feasted on flowers gone rotten.’ Several times she said she could love the girl who ran.
I drowsed through sun-locked afternoons, soothed by light curled by an arch, softened by roses, trimmed by stone and hedge, while indoors Nadja sought parallels and conclusions from antique myth. The glass door fronting her desk would tempt her to pause, contemplate a bird, bronze light aglow with message. Nothing was inanimate, the unexpected was always about to happen. Her real life, she thought, began with weeping when her mother called her favourite doll ‘It’.
With fresh light filling leaf, petal, grass, she might sigh, surrender, step out, followed by her cat, a shimmering Persian, with manners as decided as her own and, towards me, decidedly offensive. She treated it with respect but without gush, offending Daisy Haylock by remarking that the cats’ nine lives were sustained by English ladies’ conviction that animals understood speech.
Watching her approach, over the lawn, halting beneath a fringe of wisteria, I recollected young Parisians, strolling hand in hand, glad, heimlich, in each other. People, Nadja said, will never be perfect, but sometimes they behave perfectly.
‘Erich … Polybius thought Rome’s greatness was founded on superstition, deliberately introduced into public and private life.’
She always spoke, very rapidly, in French or English, though knowing German and Russian. Delighted, she spoke more of Polybius. For both of us, each day was possibility. Jules might dig up a coin – Galba, Domitian – a golden bowl be found in the grass. We were untroubled by Rilke’s injunction that lingering, even with intimate things, is not permitted.
Secret Protocols Page 26