Kleinzeit

  I promise, said Kleinzeit to his dead mother, I’ll be, I’ll make, I’ll do. You’ll be proud of me.

  ‘Suppose they fail in some undertaking; they make good the loss immediately by setting their hopes in some other direction. Of them alone it may be said that they possess a thing almost as soon as they have begun to desire it, so quickly with them does action follow upon decision. And so they go on working away in hardship and danger all the days of their lives, seldom enjoying their possessions because they are always adding to them. Their view of a holiday is to do what needs doing; they prefer hardship and activity to peace and quiet. In a word, they are by nature incapable of either living a quiet life themselves or of allowing anyone else to do so.’

  Right, said Kleinzeit. Enough. He opened the door of the yellow paper’s cage, and it sprang upon him. Over and over they rolled together, bloody and roaring. Doesn’t matter what the title is to start with, he said, anything will do. HERO, I’ll call it. Chapter I. He wrote the first line while the yellow paper clawed his guts, the pain was blinding. It’ll kill me, said Kleinzeit, there’s no surviving this. He wrote the second line, the third, completed the first paragraph. The roaring and the blood stopped, the yellow paper rubbed purring against his leg, the first paragraph danced and sang, leaped and played on the green grass in the dawn.

  Up the Athenians, said Kleinzeit, and went to sleep.

  Ha Ha

  Kleinzeit woke up scared, thought of the paragraph, felt it towering in him like a tremendous wave, rushing, rushing, rushing forward, too much? Steady, he said to himself. Think Athenian. Oars flashing, beaked ships cleaving the sea, he went to the wardrobe for his tracksuit and running shoes. No tracksuit, no running shoes. He’d forgotten the big clean-up. Never mind, he said, took his hoplites out for a walk on the embankment where he did his morning running.

  Brown and yellow leaves lay heaped against the parapet. Winter coming, darkness in the light. Grey river, grey sky, quiet men black against the grey with shovels and yellow sand, levelling up the paving stones. A gilt-faced statue of Thomas More. A string of motor cruisers, heavy with the responsibilities of pleasure, moored to orange buoys. A dredge bucketing up the river bottom. A green bronze statue of a naked girl. The greyness around her quivered in its stillness, held its breath. What if the great towering wave stops rushing forward, thought Kleinzeit. What then?

  A tremendous lorry came to a stop beside him and stood there puttering. ‘How do I get to your place?’ said the driver.

  ‘What for?’ said Kleinzeit.

  ‘Blimey, I’ve got to deliver this lot, haven’t I?’

  ‘What is it?’ said Kleinzeit.

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘Don’t think I’m just going to accept any shipment that comes along.’

  ‘You the one that’s waiting for it then?’

  ‘Depends what it is,’ said Kleinzeit.

  ‘Mortal terror,’ said the driver. The lorry was about a quarter of a mile long, had a sign on its rear end, LONG VEHICLE.

  ‘Right,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘Turn left over the bridge, second right before the lights, second lights after the left, third roundabout after the diversion, first left right after The Green Man on the corner.’ That should lose him nicely in Battersea, thought Kleinzeit, give me at least an hour’s start.

  ‘Would you mind going through that again?’ said the driver.

  ‘I’ll do my part again if you do yours,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘What was the first thing you said?’

  The driver looked at Kleinzeit carefully, lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply. ‘I said how do I get to Moor Place.’

  ‘And you said you were delivering … ?’

  ‘From Morton Taylor. You some kind of inspector or something?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘I hear funny.’ He sneaked a look at the side of the lorry. There was the name in letters three feet high, harmless enough: MORTAL TERROR. ‘Moor Place is somewhere in the City,’ he said. ‘You have to turn round and go back the way you came, right along the embankment past Blackfriars Bridge and into Victoria Street, then ask from there.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said the driver. The lorry moved on.

  ‘My pleasure,’ said Kleinzeit. He walked on past the landmarks of his running, past the bridge, the telephone kiosk, the traffic lights, to the street that led to a pharmaceutical garden. There he turned and went back, thinking Athenian, paragraph, and key. In the distance ahead, through the brown leaves and the yellow, phantom children no longer his walked away. That’s how we do it, said Memory. Everybody walking away.

  I forgot how things wait by the river in the mornings, said Kleinzeit. He quickly thought as Athenian as possible, formed his hoplites into a thin red line ahead of him, marched home, had breakfast, took his chair pad, glockenspiel, Thucydides, yellow paper, poems and paragraph, put the key in his pocket and went into the Underground.

  In the train he read about the siege of Plataea, the Peloponnesians building a mound on the outside, the Plataeans raising the wall on the inside. No cowards in those days, thought Kleinzeit. And they weren’t even Athenians.

  At his place in the corridor he taped his two poems to the wall and wrote two new ones: a green bronze girl poem and a Morton Taylor poem. He rather fancied the last two lines of the second one:

  Walk in danger, walk in error,

  Walk ahead in Morton Taylor.

  Esoteric, thought Kleinzeit. Keep them guessing. While he was sitting cross-legged writing on the yellow paper a young couple stopped in front of him. Great big orange back-packs, jeans, ankhs hanging from their necks, shoes for walking across continents.

  ‘Do you tell fortunes?’ said the girl.

  ‘All the time,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘50p.’

  ‘Come on, Karen,’ said the boy.

  ‘Tell our fortune,’ said Karen. She gave Kleinzeit sop.

  ‘Right,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘Write your names on the yellow paper.’

  They wrote their names: Karen and Peter. Kleinzeit tore up the paper, shook up the bits, let them fall to the floor, shifted them about.

  ‘Travel,’ he said.

  ‘No kidding,’ said Peter.

  ‘Searching,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘A tangled way, a long seeking, many findings. A place of sowing and harvesting. Candlelight, home-baked bread, fellowship with like minded seekers, harmony with self and environment. Peace, but always the inner seeking.’

  ‘Together?’ said Karen.

  ‘Together,’ said Kleinzeit, ‘but not necessarily in the same place.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ said Karen.

  ‘Shit,’ said Peter. They went away.

  Fast 50p, thought Kleinzeit, and wrote up a yellow paper poster:

  FORTUNES TOLD

  50p

  Two ladies showed up next, both in black trouser suits. The larger of the two was very tall and broad, looked like the captain of a clipper ship, had short grey hair, a dangling cigarette. ‘Let’s go, Emily,’ she said as the other paused. ‘I want to get to American Express before it closes.’

  ‘But you always want to get somewhere whenever I stop for a minute,’ said Emily, smiling at Kleinzeit. She was delicate-looking, younger than the other, looked as if she might be a favourite with the crew of the ship the large lady was captain of. ‘Poems,’ she said. ‘Fortunes told. What do you suppose is ahead for us?’

  ‘You’d know that sooner than he,’ said the large lady.

  Emily bought a poem and their fortune. Kleinzeit predicted change and fulfilment. The captain lit another cigarette from the one she was smoking. Emily looked dreamy as they walked away.

  Curious, thought Kleinzeit. The people who want the future predicted are the ones whose future seems predictable.

  An elderly American couple next. Two poems and their fortune. Kleinzeit looked at their hand-made sandals, hand-knitted socks, the western leather thong tie around the man’s neck, his formidable photographic equipment, three-foot telephoto lens. New growth in the personal developm
ent area, said Kleinzeit. Possibly the arts. Ceramics, maybe. Graphics. He decided on the spot always to call crafts arts and photography graphics. They were astonished at his insight.

  A lull followed, Kleinzeit’s first chance that morning to play the glockenspiel and think about the key. It’s going to be today, he thought. The person who dropped the key will speak to me today. He kept his mind away from the thought of the next paragraph he was going to write. Let it happen. Somewhere a voice yelled Hoo hoo, let it happen, happen, happen.

  Business boomed again. £3.53 by lunch time. Kleinzeit was paid for music, poems, fortunes. It’s all a matter of thinking big, he realized, and considered raising the poems to 15p. No, he decided. People pay big for fortunes but not for poems. Let the poems be a bargain.

  Late in the afternoon a fading lady appeared. Fifty cats and some sooty geraniums in a window box was Kleinzeit’s guess. Two meals a day and a diary in purple ink. Too poor for a fortune, and 10p for a poem would eat into the cat food. Let her have a free listen, he thought, and did a Dies Irae variation on the green turtle theme.

  ‘Yesterday,’ said the lady, ‘I passed this way and gave you money.’

  Must’ve been one of the 2p customers, thought Kleinzeit. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘I think I may have dropped a key as well,’ said the lady.

  Very good, thought Kleinzeit. Wonderful. That’s that. It’s nothing, really. Only a flesh wound. He hadn’t been aware of the towering wave rushing forward in him all day but it must have been because now it broke, dropped him down, down, down among the dead men at the bottom of the ocean. Bones and muck but no treasure. Solid black. Kleinzeit smiled, took the key out of his pocket and gave it to the lady.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s it. Thank you so muck’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ said Kleinzeit. She didn’t know how to stay, didn’t know how to go. He smelled the sooty geraniums, the cats.

  ‘Quite a long time ago I knew a young man who played the glockenspiel in a regimental band,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen anyone busking with one before.’ She prised open her tiny purse with wintry-looking fingers, furtively dropped a coin. ‘Thank you so much,’ she said, and turned to go.

  ‘Wait,’ said Kleinzeit. He wrote a glockenspiel poem, gave it to her.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ said the lady, and walked slowly on.

  No key, said Kleinzeit to the yellow paper. Just me and Morton Taylor.

  And me, said the yellow paper. Us. I’m pregnant. I’m carrying your novel inside me. Your big long thick fat novel. It’ll be wonderful, won’t it.

  Of course, said Kleinzeit, choking. Mile-long lorries from Morton Taylor zoomed through the corridor. Kleinzeit closed his eyes. NOBODY IS LOOKING AFTER ME, he screamed silently. THE KEY WAS A FALSE ALARM.

  Ha ha, said the footsteps in the corridor. Hoo hoo, the black hairy voice.

  Pull yourself together, said Thucydides. The honour of the regiment and all that.

  Right, said Kleinzeit. It’s that Athenian spirit that won the Peloponnesian War, right?

  Thucydides said nothing.

  The Athenians did win, didn’t they? said Kleinzeit.

  Thucydides disappeared.

  Shit, said Kleinzeit, afraid to look at the end of the book, afraid to read the introduction. I’ll find out when I come to it, he said.

  He packed up, went to a telephone, rang up Sister as the pain arrived. No longer a simple A to B, C to D, E to F affair, it was a complex solid polyphonic geometry of contrapuntal many-coloured lightnings and thunderous volume, bigger than any Morton Taylor lorry, so big that it was no longer inside him, he was inside it.

  Where to? said the pain.

  Sister’s place, said Kleinzeit.

  The pain drove him there and dropped him off.

  Nonsense

  ‘Guess who’s in hospital,’ said Sister to Kleinzeit.

  HOSPITAL, HOSPITAL, HOSPITAL, yelled the echo in Kleinzeit’s skull. ‘Redbeard,’ he said.

  ‘Right,’ said Sister. ‘Slipped fulcrum.’

  ‘I don’t want to know the details,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘How’s Schwarzgang?’

  ‘Still blipping.’

  ‘He’ll outlive the lot of us,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘What sort of shape is Redbeard in?’

  ‘You know how it is with a slipped fulcrum,’ said Sister. ‘No leverage?’

  ‘Right, and he’s completely lost his appetite as well. We’ve had to hook him up to a drip-feed.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll go see him,’ said Kleinzeit. After supper when it was time for Sister to go on duty he went to the hospital with her.

  SWEETHEART! roared Hospital when he walked in. IT’S SO GOOD TO HAVE YOU BACK! WAS UMS NAUGHTY, DID UMS RUN AWAY, PRECIOUS? ALL IS FORGIVEN. UMMMMM-MMMNHH! It gave him a big wet kiss. Kleinzeit wiped off the kiss.

  Redbeard was in the same bed Kleinzeit had had, the one by the window. Braced by a complex metal framework with pulleys and counterweights he was sitting up and looking at the tube attached to his arm. When Kleinzeit appeared he looked hard at him. ‘Any luck?’ he said.

  ‘With what?’ said Kleinzeit.

  ‘You know,’ said Redbeard.

  ‘Paragraph so far,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘I’d rather not talk about it.’

  Redbeard raised his eyebrows, whistled. ‘ “Paragraph so far,”’ he repeated. ‘You’re doing paragraphs, pages, chapters – the lot?’

  Kleinzeit nodded, shrugged, looked away.

  Redbeard chuckled like a broken clock. ‘I gave you the bare room,’ he said. ‘For better or worse.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Kleinzeit, ‘for better or worse.’

  ‘Don’t think I kept any of the money I got for your things,’ said Redbeard. ‘Spent it as fast as I could. Drink, women, etcetera. Nothing to show for it, absolutely pure spending, you know. Only way to do it.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Kleinzeit.

  ‘You’ll notice,’ said Redbeard, ‘what ward they’ve put me in.’

  ‘A4,’ said Kleinzeit.

  ‘Right,’ said Redbeard. ‘It all fits, eh?’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Kleinzeit faintly.

  ‘Not nonsense,’ said Redbeard. ‘How do we know they’re not all yellow-paper men here? No use asking, of course. They’d never admit it. I’d never admit it if you didn’t already know. Tell you something.’ He motioned Kleinzeit closer.

  ‘What?’ said Kleinzeit.

  ‘The reason I used to drop yellow paper,’ said Redbeard. The way he said yellow paper made it sound a proper name, as if there were someone called Yellow Paper who had legs to walk about with. ‘I didn’t quite tell you the whole truth. Maybe when I started it was the way I told you it was. But after a while I was dropping it to see if I could put it on to someone else, get it off me, you know. Hoped it would give over, let me off.’

  ‘Did it?’

  ‘You see what it’s done. First it tried to drown me. Now it’s put me in hospital.’

  ‘How’d you slip your fulcrum?’

  ‘While I was spending your money. That’s how it goes. Excess brings its own moderation.’ He looked at the tube in his arm, looked at the hanging bottle, made swallowing motions as if his throat was very dry. ‘I’m scared,’ he said.

  ‘Who isn’t,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘Morton Taylor is rife.’

  ‘Still busking?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Going like a bomb, I bet. That girl’s a gold mine.’

  ‘Doing it alone,’ said Kleinzeit.

  ‘Broken up already?’

  ‘No, I just want to do it alone.’

  ‘How’re you doing then?’

  ‘Pretty well. £4.75 today, and I knocked off early. I sell poems too, tell fortunes as well.’

  Redbeard whistled again. ‘That’s the ticket,’ he said. ‘You’re a winner all right. You’ll do it.’

  ‘Do what?’ said Kleinzeit.

  Redbeard motioned him closer again. ‘Maybe you think all this is off to one side, sort of. Not
the real thing.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ said Redbeard, ‘you had a job and all, didn’t you. Had some kind of a straight life going.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe you think the busking and the yellow paper and the bare room and so forth don’t count. Maybe you think you can drop it all and put everything together the way it was.’

  Why does he insist on naming everything, thought Kleinzeit. ‘See how it goes,’ he said.

  ‘Forget it,’ said Redbeard. ‘You can’t see how it goes. You’re in it now. This is it.’

  ‘Nothing is it,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘Anything is whatever it happens to be at the time.’

  ‘No,’ said Redbeard, ‘this is it all right. It’s yellow paper and you now. Good luck.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Kleinzeit, resisting an urge to tie a knot in Redbeard’s tube. ‘I’d better go now.’

  He stopped at Schwarzgang’s bed. ‘How’s it going?’ he said.

  ‘It’s going, I’m going,’ said Schwarzgang. ‘What stays?’

  ‘Whole sentences now,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘You’re stronger than you were.’

  ‘Stronger, weaker,’ said Schwarzgang. ‘At my age there’s not a lot of difference. Actually I feel pretty good. They’re going to let me out for an afternoon next week.’

  Kleinzeit took a piece of folded yellow paper out of his pocket so that Schwarzgang could see it, put it back again. No reaction from Schwarzgang. Of course it was nonsense, thought Kleinzeit. A ward of sick yellow-paper men!

  ‘You’re a writer?’ said Schwarzgang.

  Kleinzeit shrugged, made a nothing-much gesture.

  ‘Published?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘At one time,’ said Schwarzgang, ‘I wrote a little. Nothing much.’

  ‘Yellow paper?’ said Kleinzeit. Out of the corner: of his eye he saw Redbeard listening.

  ‘Funny you should ask,’ said Schwarzgang. ‘As a matter of fact I did use yellow paper. That must have been what made me ask if you were a writer.’