by Stephen Fry
The old man turned to me. “It is better if you approach from windward,” he said, Germanically pronouncing the Ws as Vs, “your body will shelter the papers.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks. Yeah. Thank you.”
“And you should maybe do up your laces?”
There’s always some wisearse, isn’t there. Someone who can make it look like you have absolutely no common sense. My father was like that until he learned better than to try to teach me the most rudimentary elements of carpentry or sailing. Then he died before I could repay him by showing any interest at all. This wisearse was bearded, favoring the Tolstoy model over the Branagh-Shakespearean, and continued to step serenely through the car-park picking up the loose pages that lay down and played dead at his bidding.
The “vindvood” technique kind of worked for me too and we both shuttled back and forth between the fallen pages and that landed fish of a dead, gasping briefcase.
Once all the visible paper had been gathered, I checked under each car and got myself as good and filthy and bleeding and torn on the outside as I was feeling on the in. The last page to be found was lying facedown on the bonnet of the Clio, stuck to the drying Liquid Paper. I peeled it gently off.
This disaster only put me a day behind, of course. I mean, everything was there on hard disk back at our house in the village of Newnham but it wasn’t, you know, it just wasn’t a good omen. It meant buying another five hundred sheets of laser printer paper and . . . well, somehow it scraped the gilt off the gingerbread, that’s what I felt. The celebrations last night, the £62.00 Chateauneuf du Pape, that feeling of freedom as I had bicycled into town . . . all premature.
A cloud went over the sun and I shivered. The old man was standing absolutely still and staring at one of the pages of the Meisterwerk.
“Thanks so much,” I panted pinkly. “Stupidest thing. Must get a new briefcase.”
He looked up at me and there was something in that look, something that even then I could plainly recognize as monumental. A thing absolutely eternal and unutterable.
He returned the piece of paper he had been reading with a stiff bow. I saw that it was page 49, from the first section of Das Meister- werk, the part that covered the legitimization of Alois right up to the marriage with Klara Pölzl.
“What is this, please?” he asked.
“It’s, uh, my doctoral thesis,” I said.
“You are a graduate?”
I was accustomed to the surprise in his voice. I looked too young to be a graduate. Frankly, I looked too young to be an undergraduate sometimes. Maybe I would have to start trying to grow a beard again. If I had the testosterone that is. I had tried last year and the flak had nearly driven me to self-slaughter. I pinkened more and nodded.
“Why?” he asked, nodding down at the paper in his hand.
“I’m sorry?”
“Why that subject? Why?”
“Why?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Well . . .”
I mean, everyone knows how you choose a subject for a doctoral thesis in history. You go round the libraries in a fever, looking for a subject that no one else has covered, or at least a subject that hasn’t been covered for, say, twenty years and then you bag it. You stake your claim for that one seam. Everyone knows that. But the look the old man was giving me was of such imponderable gravity that I didn’t know how to begin to answer him, so I gave a helpless shrug and smiled stupidly at the ground. Jane was always giving me grief for this feeble tactic, but I just couldn’t ever help it.
“What is your name?” he asked, not harshly as one who has a good mind to report you to the authorities, but in a kind of bewilderment, with a high upward inflection, as if astonished and slightly frightened that he had not been told it long before.
“Michael Young.”
“Michael Young,” he repeated, again with puzzlement. “And you are a graduate? Here? At this college?” I nodded and he looked up at the clouds covering the sun behind me. “I can’t see your face properly,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I moved round so that he could get a better look.
Absolutely surreal. What was he, a plastic surgeon? A portrait painter? What had my face got to do with anything?
“No, no. The sunglasses.” With emphasis on the second syllable, “sunglasses” definitely German, perhaps a little east or south.
I whipped off the Killer Loops, which made me even shyer and we stood there looking at each other. Well, he was looking. I was stealing quick glances from under my lashes like the young Lady Di.
He was bearded and old, as I have said. A lined face and a worn one, but hard to date exactly. Academics age in ways different from most people. Some remain unnaturally smooth and youthful well into their seventies, the boyish, sandy-haired Alan Bennetty type, which is how I supposed I would ripen. Others senesce prematurely and will begin to peer and blink and hunch like little library moles well before forty. This man reminded me of that photograph of . . . Chief Joseph is it? Or Geronimo? One of those figures. W. H. Auden in his sixties anyway. That in turn made me think of what David Hockney said, on first catching sight of the elderly Auden: “Blimey, if that’s his face, what can his scrotum look like?” This old man, judging from the crags and trenches on his forehead, must have had something like a savoy cabbage swinging in his trousers. The beard was white at the roots and it gradated, if that’s a word, into a mid-gray at the raggedy wiry ends.
I’m not sure what he saw as he looked back at me: twenty-four, all my hair, none of it facial, and, yes all right damn you, a baseball cap. Whatever he did see was enough, at any rate, to bring out his right hand to shake mine.
“Leo Zuckermann,” he said.
“Professor Zuckermann?” Get out of here. The man himself.
“I am a professor, yes.”
“Oh. Well. I’ve got something for you, actually.” The parcel from Seligmanns Verlag was lying facedown on the ground. I brushed some crud away and handed it over. “It was in my pigeonhole, which is above yours. Yours was full, so I . . .”
“Ah yes. Xenakis, Young, Zuckermann. X, Y, Z.” He preferred “zee” to “zed,” which fit the slightly Americanized swing to his accent. “I’m so sorry. I am sadly neglectful of clearing my pigeonholes.”
“No worries. Fine.”
“Not your only copy, I hope?” he said, gesturing at the shambles in my suitcase. “All backed up on computer, I am sure?”
“Ng. But it’s still a pain.”
“God’s punishment.”
“I’m sorry?”
“For taking rejection with such ill-grace.” He pointed, smilingly, toward the bonnet of the Clio and its message of love.
“Yeah,” I said. “Childish.”
He looked at me intently. “You, I should say, are a coffee man.”
“A coffee man?”
“From the way you skip and jump in the air when excited. A coffee man. I am a hot chocolate man. Would you be pleased to come and visit my rooms some time soon? For coffee?”
“Coffee? Right. Mm. Yeah. Why not? Sure. Thanks. Absolutely. Great.” Managing to avoid only “cheers” and “lovely” in the meaningless litany of polite British English.
“What day? What time? I am free all this afternoon.”
“Er . . . oh, this afternoon? Today? Sure! Yeah. Lovely. That’d be great. I’m . . . I’ve got to get this all printed out again but . . .”
“So what we say? Half-past fourish?”
“Sounds great to me, thanks. And thanks for helping with the . . . you know. Thanks.”
“I think probably you have thanked me enough.”
“What? Oh. Yes. Sorry.”
“Tshish!” he said.
Well it sounded like “tshish” anyway, and was meant, I suppose, to indicate foreign amusement at
the English disease of being unable, once started, to stop thanking and apologizing.
We walked backwards away from each other as academics do.
“Half-past four then,” I said.
“Hawthorn Tree Court,” he said, “2a.”
“Right,” I said. “Thanks. I mean sorry. Cheers. Cool.”
MAKING LOVE
Feathers and claws and fur
Klara lay underneath him and thought of daisies. Daisies, cowbells, milk-yokes, hay, the Mondsee choir at Easter Mass, anything, anything but the stink and weight and grunt of the Bastard wallowing above her.
His previous two wives must have been able to bear it, just as they had been able to bear him babies who lived. Perhaps this will be the one, she thought. This time. Not like poor Frieda Braun, who had miscarried just that afternoon after pumping the water from the cistern and smelling that awful stench and seeing a torrent of maggots stream into her pail. Poor Frieda. And now the cistern was emptied and they must borrow water from the people across the street, like peasants. Poor Frieda. She too had so wanted a child.
A little girl, Klara prayed. A sweet little girl, Lilli, whom she would teach secretly to love the mountains and the fields and to despise the hateful stuffy towns. The Bastard had said this evening that he wanted to move the family soon to Linz. Linz, which was huge compared to Brunau. Linz, which made Klara think of feathers and claws and fur. The feathers in women’s hats, the bright blue ostrich feathers in vases in the colored tile hallways, the feathers fanned in stained glass above the front doors and the feathers of the stuffed birds in clear domes on the black oak sideboards in the dining rooms. Feathers and claws and fur. Deer claws with jewels set in them for brooches. Fox fur around the necks of the dowager-humped women; not just fox fur but the whole fox, the complete animal: feet, head, eyes, teeth, the V-shaped jaw bared in a grin, the entire beast flattened and dried like salted cod, like paper that can’t be torn.
They bring the country into the town, she thought. They kill the animals to wear them or to keep them in glass domes or they skin them into shiny town shoes and tan luggage. The horses they make pull buses through the towns all their lives before they boil them into glue or flay them into sofa stuffing and violin bows. The trees are thrown into furnaces to drive the machines and overheat the houses or they are carved into oak-leaf clusters, with acorns and nuts and briar, then stained all dark and brooding and dead. The flowers are dried and dyed and set in sprays on the pianos on squares of fringed silk. The whole wide, light countryside itself is oiled onto canvas as dark thundering mountains, misty booming ravines and tumultuous heavy clouds and then hung on the walls of gloomy passageways lit by dull hissing gas mantles to frighten children into a permanent terror of the world outside the city. How can anybody bear the town? Blood and iron and gas. Daisies. Think of daisies. But daisies are goose flowers. Goose flowers, goose flesh. Flesh that crawls and prickles under his wet touch.
She had known this would be a love night, as he called them. Liebesnacht. She had known, because he had not beaten her or looked like beating her, even after she had spilled soup into his lap at dinner. Not a glance toward Pnina on the wall, just a ghastly smile and a playful slap on the hand accompanied by the word “naughty!,” mockingly, in the falsetto of a governess. Such a vile smirk, as if he knew that his love was infinitely more terrible to her than his brutal fists.
How long he took about it! Klara remembered her sister joking of her husband Hermann and his impossible and wholly unsatisfactory speed.
“Out before he was in!”
Then Hermann was a country boy who only drank on saint’s days and holidays, not a man of fifty—heavens! Fifty-one. Alois was fifty-one last month—whose joke was that he only drank on Wednesdays or days with a letter G in them. Montag, Dienstag, Mittwoch, Donnerstag, Freitag, Samstag, Sontag.
Klara arched back her neck and gazed with longing at the Virgin on the wall above the headboard. Alois, after slithering out seven or eight times and swearing like a carter, seemed, at long last, to be getting there. She recognized the more frantic rhythms and waited for the final animal plunges.
Sky, she thought. Sky, lakes, forests, rabbits and eagles. Yes, a huge eagle to swoop down from his lair in the mountains and snatch away this squealing pig. A great soaring, all-powerful, all-seeing, all-conquering eagle with piercing eyes and mighty wings and talons that dripped with the blood of the pig!
MAKING UP
Little orange pills
Red fluid dripped into one of those spiraling, screwlike doodads they so love and I stared at it fascinated. Jane’s work was a dark mystery to me, which was the way she liked it, but there was no denying the pleasing prettiness of the paraphernalia it employed. Meters and meters of retort stands and capillaries and clear plastic tubing that went round and round, up and down, in and out, clockwise and counterclockwise, zigwise and zagwise. And centrifuges there were, sexy beyond anything. I had often watched her take a tiny stained dot of something bright and gloopy and fire a syringe gun with a delicate plip into little test tubes arranged in a tight round drum like hungry nestlings. When all the glass mouths had been fed the drum would be set spinning. The chrome precision and low hum of it all were just bitching. So much more solidly built than a dishwasher or tumble dryer. No vibration at all, just solid, smooth and scientific, like Jane herself. And on another bench I liked to look at colored slides of gel with elegant marblings of another color running down the middle, like something in a confectioner’s pantry or maybe like the wavy threads of blood you find in the yolk of an egg. Jane called her lab The Kitchen; the coming together of stainless steel and glass with colored organic goo and bright liquids brought out the little boy in me, the helpful, heel-kicking son who liked to watch his mother beating the batter and rolling the dough.
Big business of course, gene-spotting. You pretend to the world that you are working on a grand scheme called the Human Genome Project, which is worthy and noble—Nobel, in fact—Good Science, Human Achievement, Frontiers of Knowledge, all of that, but really you are trying to find a new gene and copyright the pants out of it before anyone else stumbles across it too. There were dozens of commercial “biotechnical” companies in Cambridge alone. God knows what kind of bribery and badness they got up to. Not that Jane was corruptible of course. Never.
Sometimes I called her on the nature of her work.
What would you do if you discovered that there really was a gay gene? Or that black people have less verbal intelligence than white? Or that Asians are better at numbers than Caucasians? Or that Jews are congenitally mean? Or that women are dumber than men? Or men dumber than women? Or that religion is a genetic disposition? Or that this very gene determined criminal tendencies and that very gene determined Alzheimer’s? You know, the insurance ramifications, the ammo it would hand to the racists. All that?
She would say that she would cross that bridge when she came to it and that, besides, her work was in a different field. Anyway, if you, as a historian, discovered that Churchill was screwing the Queen all through the war, would that be your problem? You report the facts. Shared humanity has the job of interpreting them. Same with science. It wasn’t Darwin’s problem that God didn’t create Adam and Eve, it was the bishops’ problem. Don’t blame the messenger, she’d say calmly, grow up and look to yourself instead.
I flicked the side of the dripping tube with my fingernail. Donald, Jane’s research assistant, had scuffed awkwardly off to find her ten minutes earlier. I heard a door bang down the corridor and straightened up. She did not like things to be touched.
“Well, bugger me. It’s actually here. It’s actually got the face to stand here and confront us.”
“Hi, baby . . .”
“What have you touched? Show mother what you’ve fiddled with and fucked with, so we don’t have to find out later.”
“Nothing! I haven’t touched anything . . . well
, I did just tap that tube there. The liquid was getting stuck so I helped it through. That’s all.”
Jane stared at me in horror. “That’s all? That’s all?” She shrieked at the door, “Donald! Donald! Get in here! We’ll have to start again. Ten weeks work down the fucking plughole. Christ!”
Donald came hurrying through. “What? What is it? What’s he done? What’s he done?”
“Jane, it was the gentlest tap, I swear—”
“The stupid dick only jogged the methyl orange reagent through the tartration pipe.”
“Bloody hell, Jane,” I wailed, “it can’t have made that much difference surely?”
Donald stared at the pipe work. “Oh Jesus,” he said. “No! No!” He fell against the workbench and buried his face in his hands.
I breathed a sigh of relief and turned to face Jane. “That was a bloody cruel trick, actually. If Donald weren’t such a pathetic liar I’d’ve been really upset.”
Jane’s eyebrows flew up. “Oh,” she said, “that was a cruel trick, was it? I see. You would have been upset.”
“Look, I know what you’re going to say—”
“Defacing my car, getting it towed from college for illegal parking. These were not cruel upsetting tricks, were they? These were the sweet reflexes of a loving, tortured soul. They were romantic games born in a beautiful, complex mind. Not childish, but mature. An ironic commentary on love and exchange. A most wonderful compliment. I should be grateful.”
I just hate it when she gets like that. And Donald giggling as if he knew what she was on about.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, throwing up a hand. “Cool.”
“Leave us, Donald,” said Jane, settling herself on a stool. “I need to have a conversation with this piece of work.”