by William Boyd
“I can get another book if you like.”
“God, no! That’s enough. I just need the one.”
“What’s so special about this book?”
I tried to explain but I could see it made no sense to him. I think he thought I had become slightly demented by my imprisonment. Perhaps I was. I have to say that a kind of love had grown up in me for Karl-Heinz—not carnal in the least, but not simply fraternal either. I cared for him in an odd way and found his lazy corruption (I discovered later he had been pilfering my parcels), his casual attempt at seducing me, surprisingly unreprehensible. I suppose our long dry kisses did bring us together. Even though he was some years older than me I felt as I imagine the father did for the Prodigal Son, say a week after he had returned home and the remains of the fatted calf had finally been consumed. The passion had died and there was an odds-on chance that the boy would go to the bad again, but somehow he was still enfolded and protected by a blanket of tolerant paternal affection. I think this is about as close as I can get to expressing the way I felt about Karl-Heinz.
One day in May I was pacing erratically round the exercise yard when Karl-Heinz’s head and shoulders appeared above the palisade.
“Good news,” he said. “They have confirmed your story. You’re going to transfer.”
I felt suddenly, strangely unsettled at this information.
“Where?” I asked.
“A camp for British officers. In Mainz.”
Later that day this was officially confirmed by the camp commandant, a man who I had only seen once before, on arrival, some six months earlier. He was thin and sickly looking, his collar loose around his scrawny neck. His tone was semi-apologetic; he used once or twice the adjective “regrettable.”
I had one more meeting with Karl-Heinz before I left. He escorted me to the gymnasium washroom for my morning shave. He seemed entirely unaffected by my departure, which rather irritated me. (I suppose this was vanity. I was reluctant to accept that his sexual interest in me was simply opportunism.) I made him write my name and address on a piece of paper and promise to contact me once the war was over.
“Of course,” he said politely. “That would be fun.”
“Give me your address.”
“I don’t have one yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“All I know is that when I get out of this uniform I will be in Berlin.” He said this with unusual vehemence. Then he laughed. “Go to Berlin and ask where is Karl-Heinz Kornfeld. They will tell you.”
I did not see him again. A day later I was marched back to the station—up the hill to town, through the cobbled streets—and put on the train for Mainz.
The new camp was in a barracks on a hill overlooking the city. From the window of our room we had a pleasant view of the cathedral and the Rhine. Compared to the gloom and deprivation of Weilburg, the camp at Mainz was a hotel. Six hundred English officers were held there. We slept ten to a room in an atmosphere that was half boarding school—hearty conviviality—and half Boy Scout camp—all ingenious make-do-and-mend. Officers were allowed to cash one 5-pound check a month at a Swiss bank in town, and with that money we could modestly supplement our rations (almost the same as at Weilburg) with purchases from a small canteen: fish and liver pastes, plum jam, packets of dehydrated soup. With the usual relish that the British seem to exhibit when forcibly confined, the place boasted more educational possibilities than the average university. Classes, seminars and study groups existed in every subject from Aramaic to Zoroastrianism. There was a theater club, a light-opera society and a debating competition with dozens of teams that seemed to run for months. There was a well-stocked library and, of course, a literary society for those who wished to talk about what they had read.
I went to the library from time to time. On the advice of others I borrowed and tried to read Maupassant, Turgenev and Walter Pater. I read them listlessly and with no enthusiasm. Having been burned by the flame of The Confessions, I found the alternatives pallid and lukewarm. I abandoned the library. My brain was still full of Rousseau’s life and words. My memory was haunted by those last weeks in Weilburg and, oddly, with the image of Karl-Heinz. Was it there in Mainz, in the tedious stuffy summer evenings when we were confined to our airless dormitories, that the first glimmerings of the enterprise that was later to dominate my life was conceived?… In all honesty I do not think so. I had no idea what I was going to do. In my empty docile moods I did not even think of “after the war,” far less of a career or prospects. I lived monotonously in the present. I cashed my checks, bartered the contents of my food parcels, played kabuki, dumb crambo and gin rummy and—a measure of how alien my mood was—I learned to play the banjo quite proficiently. Eighteen months later, in London at a party, someone brought along a banjo. I picked it up, people gathered round expectantly (I had been loud about my accomplishments), but I discovered to my embarrassment I could not play a single tune. It was as if some twin or sibling had learned the instrument, some ghostly edition of myself. The skill was fixed and localized both temporally and historically—Mainz, 1918—beyond that it disappeared.
I was in the camp at Mainz for five months, and in a way I look on them as more dulling to the spirit than my time at Weilburg. In Mainz I became like the Russians—morose, pessimistic, unwilling to be plucky or cheerful. Nothing happened to me there to rival my experiences in my solitary room above the gymnasium. My fellow prisoners were affable enough, but to me—grown used to the exhilaration of my own company, Rousseau’s and Karl-Heinz’s—they seemed insufferably bland. In a funny way I came to feel nostalgic for Weilburg and its melancholic absurdities—the glum alcoholic Russians, the dotard generals in tweed. I felt left out here in beefy British Mainz (always l’homme de l’extrême gauche). I attracted no attention; my participation in the camp’s social life was minimal; I was in no sense a character or personality. I would wager that none of my fellow inmates, a few years later, would have been able even to recall the features of my face. “Todd?… Todd?…” I can hear them say, faces screwed up to goad their memories. “Was he the chap with the ginger hair and a wooden leg?… No? Oh.… Can’t help you, I’m afraid.”
Perhaps it was a psychological problem? After Weilburg, to find myself in the society of men once more, in all its crude stinking intimacy, must have subdued me. Who can say? The war ended in November and within a month I was back in Edinburgh, just in time for New Year’s Eve.
VILLA LUXE, June 13, 1972
This morning as I shave I catch myself wondering how often in my life I have performed this mundane operation. On average, say once a day since I was eighteen years old? Thousands upon thousands of times …
I rinse the bristles from my razor. All gray now. Whitebeard. My mind still works at the notion. Suppose, for the sake of argument, I shave off a quarter of an inch of bristle every week. That’s one inch a month. A foot a year. That’s a fifty-foot beard during a life, give or take a foot or two.… I try to imagine myself with a fifty-foot beard. Think of all the hair we men remove in a lifetime. Think of all the hair the human race cuts and shaves, plucks and depilates from heads, armpits, legs and groins. Think of all those locks and fuzz, whiskers and fluff, building up through the history of recorded time. Where has it all gone? How astonishing that the world has been able to absorb it!
Later, Emilia arrives and sets about her cleaning. Ostentatiously, I pick up a book and go out to my lookout. I sit there half an hour and then, unobserved, I follow a circuitous route round the field, through a small clump of banana trees, to arrive at the back of the house. There, behind an obligingly thick jasmine creeper, is the small shuttered window of Emilia’s WC.
I squinny through my tiny hole and settle down to wait. My heart beats with alarming strength, my breaths are deep and urgent. I reflect that this voyeuristic thrill seems hardly worth the strain it puts on the cardiovascular system.
I wait, it seems, for hours. Hot, scratched by the jasmine, pestered by flies … Finall
y, Emilia comes in. I breathe quietly through my mouth. The small hole is perfectly angled. I can see the top of the cistern and, where she is standing now, Emilia’s legs from her ankles to her knees.… She doesn’t move. She hums to herself. She must be looking in the mirror. Then she approaches the toilet bowl. She flips up her skirt, thumbs fit into her pants and in one fast smooth action she sits down.
Nothing. I didn’t see a thing. I lean back against the wall. The toilet flushes and I hear the door close.
I feel the very opposite of aroused. I feel grimy, shameful, bothered. Suddenly I loathe my snouty old man’s craving. What has driven me to this sordid pastime?… I know. The German girls. Ulrike. Old memories have crawled out like lizards from beneath their stones. The past is catching up with me.
7
Superb-Imperial
London. July 1922. I kissed my pregnant wife good-bye and walked down the stairs to the front door. Sonia stood and watched me go.
“Remember. Be sensible. Use your head.”
“Don’t worry.”
I stepped outside onto the Dawes Road, Fulham. A dray was delivering beer to the pub, the Salisbury, above which we lived. The weather was sultry, overcast, but not too hot. I took off my hat and resettled it on my head. Ten-thirty in the morning—it was not such a bad time to be going to work. I felt in quite a good mood. I crossed the road to the news agent and bought a copy of the Morning Post, I sauntered off down the road to Walham Green underground station. I worked in Islington and had a long journey to make across the city from Fulham. We lived in Fulham because Sonia had been born there and did not want to move far from her parents (a moderately pleasant couple: he was a retired salesman in pharmacological goods; we were never short of medicaments).
At Walham Green I bought a first-class ticket to King’s Cross. I was earning over six hundred pounds a year: I could afford to travel first class—which was one reason I preferred the underground to the more egalitarian “tube,” which had no first-class carriages.
I smoked a cigarette as I waited for the train. I felt calm, pleasantly secure, as if my life had finally reached the plateau of stability it had always been striving for.
When I returned to Edinburgh from Mainz at the end of 1918 I had possessed no such equilibrium. I have to say, though, that the side effects of my war experience and confinement had left no physical scars. My hands did not tremble, I did not start at every slamming door, I slept tolerably well with no nightmares. The immediate psychological effect, apart from the permanent one I mentioned earlier, was a curious disorienting lassitude. At first I lived reasonably happily with it, thankful that this was the sole consequence of those two traumatic years I would have to bear. But as 1919 wore on and I still found myself held in this lethargic stasis, I began to grow more worried.
But I am jumping ahead.
Was there anyone to meet me at Waverley Station in response to my telegram from London announcing my return home from the war? Answer: no. I walked across George IV Bridge towards the High Street with a thin bitter smile on my face. It was a cold, steel morning in Edinburgh with the usual frigid, scouring wind. I wore a flat felt cap, a secondhand suit of clothes provided for me at a Portsmouth hospital, and an army greatcoat. Once again my unusual status as only an honorary officer had run me foul of established procedure. I did not look like a returning hero. I had imagined myself in my well-cut coat, my jodhpurs, my glossy boots, a jaunty cap. Now I looked as if I had just been turned out of a Salvation Army hostel.
I tramped up the worn spiral stairs to our apartment and beat on the door. Oonagh opened it. It was two and a half years since I had last seen her. She was a little plumper but otherwise unchanged.
“Good God, it’s you!” she said with some surprise. “John James … my, my.”
“Yes, it’s me,” I said avidly, stepping inside.
“Your father said you’d be back today sometime. But there’s no luncheon for you. You’re too late.”
“I don’t want any fucking luncheon!”
I threw my cap down on a hall chair.
“Dearie, dearie me. What a fuss!”
I had calmed down by the time my father returned. He looked older, the eyes more deeply set, the wrinkles on his face more emphatic, his cheekbones’ tufts more grizzled. His mood was one of faint embarrassment, clearly perceptible through his halfhearted attempts to go through the correct welcoming motions. For example, he put his hands on my shoulders and said with ghastly theatricality, “Let me look at you!”
He looked.
“You’re older,” he said at last.
“Well, it has been two and a half years. Of course I’m older.” I was exasperated. “You’re older, Oonagh’s older. Everyone’s older.’
“There’s no need for sarcasm, John. It’s a most unpleasant modem tone of voice.” He turned away. “As young people, we deplored sarcasm.”
I ignored the lie.
“Minto made me pay the fee for the whole term, you know.”
“What?”
“When you ran away. I had to pay the fee for the whole term. You might have timed it better.”
Later, when I thought about his reaction, I charitably decided that it was an attempt to cover up the real emotions he was feeling. Thompson, for his part, was entirely candid: he made no effort to disguise his edginess and unease. He had changed more than anyone. He was quite fat now, almost possessing a middle-aged portliness. His features had softened, his cheeks swelling over his jawbone into his chin. He was doing well at the bank and was snug in the pinstriped uniform of his trade.
No one was especially curious about what had befallen me. Thompson had no desire to hear of my adventures—my presence alone was a sufficient rebuke to his sleek prosperity. My father was still too busy, and Oonagh, although a willing listener, was maddeningly unimpressed.
I spent a lot of time with her in the kitchen, as I had as a little boy. Then she had been amused by my stories; now she nodded a lot and made remarks like “Goodness me,” and “Well, I never.” Prison camp made the only impact.
“Terrible things for a family to have had a son in prison. Awful shame.”
Hamish was the only one who showed genuine curiosity. We met shortly into the New Year when he returned to the University, where he was doing postgraduate work in mathematics. He had completed his honors degree two years prematurely.
At his suggestion we arranged to meet in a pub in the Grassmarket. I arrived there a little late. It was dark outside and not much lighter within. There was a feeble, smoky coal fire in the grate and the bar was crowded with men in greatcoats and still wearing their hats. It took me some minutes to spot Hamish. He wore a gray homburg hat and stood at the farthest end of the bar looking up at the ceiling. He had a cigarette in his mouth and a pint of beer in his hand. I checked to see what he was staring at, but the corner of the ceiling that attracted his gaze seemed unexceptionable.
“Malahide,” I said.
He removed his cigarette from his mouth, careful not to let the ash drop. Most of his spots had gone; a few lingered around his ears and at his collar edge. His face, cleared, was terribly scarred by the acne, as he had predicted, stippled with pocks and color changes, the spectrum of pinks.
“Todd! Excellent … excellent!”
We shook hands warmly. He had grown taller; he had a couple of inches on me now. And thin. He smiled, showing his soft uneven teeth. At last, someone really pleased to see me. We found two seats not far from the fire and sat down. I told Hamish most of what had happened to me. He sat quietly and listened. He smoked constantly, keeping the cigarette in his mouth. He was scrupulous about ash falling and would ferry the cigarette to the ashtray—as if it were some fragile crystal phial—with a precautionary palm held beneath it, where it was gently and precisely tapped.
“I kept all your letters,” he said. “Did you keep mine?”
“Yes. They were in my kit. Sent back when I—”
“Good.”
I smil
ed. “How’s it going? The maths?”
“Incredible,” he said simply. “I can hardly go to sleep at night. The things that are happening.”
He started to explain what he was engaged on. Theories of relativity, I think he said. I could make nothing of it, but I was strangely affected by his passion. I was, for a brief moment, intensely jealous. I envied the strange world he was at home in. I said so, innocuously.
“It’s not so difficult,” he said. “You would understand the concepts. You were good at school.”
“I was good.”
“You started it all for me, you know.” He took the cigarette from his mouth and set it delicately down on the tin ashtray.
“I did?”
“Remember? Who invented prime numbers? I could do maths. But I never thought about it, what it all meant.” There was a clear subterranean glow in his sludge-green eyes. I wondered briefly if he was slightly mad—or a kind of genius.
Then he said, shyly, “Astonishing things are happening, John. The most amazing revelations. Everything is changing. Science is changing. We look at the world differently now. We thought we understood how it worked, but we were wrong. So wrong.”
“I see.”
“I’ll keep you posted.”
“Grand.” I did not know what to say. “Another pint?”
“Yes, please.”
Hamish and I met once or twice a week, the only moments of interest in an otherwise dull and featureless four months. I mooched around Edinburgh, sat in cheerless pubs, played the odd game of golf. Thompson, to his credit, introduced me to his set of friends—eager young Scots, crammed with ambition, full of getting and spending. I was poor company; after a month or two the invitations died away. For one week I developed a foolish passion for a girl who worked in the millinery department in Jenner’s and I took to following her discreetly in her lunch hour and on her journeys home to Davidson’s Mains.
In the summer we spent our usual two months at Drumlarish. Old Sir Hector was now over eighty, distracted and drooling with impending senility. I spent long afternoons pushing him in his bath chair through the blown gardens, my head probably emptier than his, to and fro, up and down, the wooden wheels of his bath chair crunching the gravel on the garden paths.