‘Yes, please. Vielen Dank!’
As soon as I opened the basement door I got a whiff of the Dieter Scharf workshop smell: electrical wiring, oiled metal, solder, and cheap cigars. It wasn’t quite the same as my father’s workshop but it was close enough to make me feel cosy and comfortable. There in the darkness was the bright jumbly island of his work-bench under the green-metal-shaded bulb; and there was Dieter wreathed in vile blue smoke with his invisible charcoal-burner’s hut around him and a goblin-haunted forest in the shadows. He was sixty-three, so he wasn’t quite old enough to be my father and there was no Jack Daniel’s but I always felt safer in his workshop than in my own.
‘Wie geht’s?’ he said. He had begun little by little to bring simple German words and phrases into our conversation.
‘Gut,’ I replied, ‘und dir?’ Because we had quickly reached the familiar pronoun.
‘Man lebt,’ he said. ‘One lives, but from now until the new year I keep my head down and wait for the holidays to go away. I think perhaps there was a fourth wise man and he saw what was coming and stayed home.’
‘Do you do anything for Christmas?’
‘I drink very much and read Morgenstern until it’s over.’
‘Who’s Morgenstern?’
‘German poet, born 1871, died 1914. Good flavour, very sharp, very funny.’ From a shelf over the work-bench he took down a volume with a lot of mileage on it and let the book fall open where it would. ‘Listen to this — just take in the sound of it: “Der Werwolf: Ein Werwolf eines Nachts entwich von Weib und Kind und sich begab an eines Dorfschullehrers Grab und bat ihn: ‘Bitte, beuge mich!’” That’s only the beginning of the poem. This is about a werewolf who one night goes from his wife and children to the grave of a village schoolmaster and says to him, “Decline me!”’
‘Decline?’
‘Declension is what he wants. He wants to know the genitive and the dative and so on for Werwolf. The dead schoolmaster can only decline Werwolf in the singular but the werewolf wants the plural so his wife and children can be included. When the schoolmaster can’t do it the werewolf cries, he has tears running down. But he accepts this and he thanks the dead schoolmaster and goes home.’
At this point Martha came down the stairs with black coffee and Marillenschnaps for Dieter and me. ‘Get a glass and have one with us, Martha,’ he said.
‘Nein, danke, I have still the shopping to do. If I drink now you don’t get your frog-in-the-ditch for supper.’
‘Toad-in-the-hole,’ said Dieter.
‘Whatever,’ said Martha. ‘Don’t drink too much. The last time I schlepped you up the stairs I put out my back.’
‘We drink to your back and also your front, Martha,’ said Dieter as he poured for us and we raised our glasses. ‘Zwm wohl!’
Martha wagged a finger at him and disappeared upstairs.
‘Like this Schnaps is Morgenstern,’ said Dieter. ‘Clears the brain. Prosit!’
‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ I responded. We both sipped delicately but greedily. The Schnaps was chilled and it went down like bright and sparkling winters and left me with a cosy fire inside at which to warm myself.
‘What do you do about Christmas?’ he said.
‘I drink very much and read M. R. James.’
‘Mensch! Look what I have on my bench.’ He indicated something I’d been going to ask him about. On a base about four feet long and a foot and a half wide was a spooky little wood with black trunks and branches and dark leaves shadowing a path on which was the figure of a man in black with a very pale face. One shoulder was lifted as if to ward off an attack. Some paces behind him was something that was difficult to see clearly because Dieter had veiled some of the spaces between the trees with scrim cloth. It was a creature draped in white to halfway down its legs which were brown and speckled, the feet very nasty.
‘That’s from “Casting the Runes”,’ I said, ‘but in the story it’s a boy.’ There was a collected M. R. James on the work-bench, and I quickly found the lines which I almost knew by heart:
And this poor boy was followed, and at last pursued and overtaken, and either torn to pieces or somehow made away with, by a horrible hopping creature in white, which you saw first dodging about among the trees, and gradually it appeared more and more plainly.
‘This I know,’ said Dieter, ‘but my client wants not a boy but a little man with a pale face. Press the button.’
When I did that, there sprang up from concealed speakers ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’. As if activated by the music, the thing with speckled legs began to hop in the most dreadful way, disappearing and reappearing among the trees as the man tried to double back and lose it. Dieter’s use of the scrim cloth was wonderful: the trunks of the trees revolved like the rollers of window blinds so that the action was sometimes obscured and sometimes clearly seen. ‘Jesus!’ I said as the hopping thing caught up with the man. Everything under the trees went dark as the Disney track continued its sugary vocal. Our glasses were empty and Dieter refilled them for either the fourth or fifth time; they were very small glasses. The fireside corner inside me was the cosiest place I’d been for a long time, and my head felt as if it would ping like crystal if I tapped it.
‘Heppy days,’ said Dieter.
‘Here’s mud in your eye,’ I replied. Alcohol makes me more American. ‘I suppose this is a commission?’
‘From a rich American,’ he said. ‘For this one I get fifteen thousand pounds.’
‘Not nearly enough. People are getting fifty thousand pounds for unemptied chamber pots these days and the pots aren’t even new. This thing here is museum-standard work — you should have got at least fifty thousand pounds.’
‘What did you get for the gorilla?’
‘Thirty thousand.’ At this Dieter’s lower jaw dropped. I’d paid him twenty-five hundred for the mechanism and motor but that left me with twenty-seven thousand five hundred for a crash-dummy primate that was nothing compared to the whole little horror show he’d put together for fifteen thousand.
‘Your millionaire is bigger than mine then,’ said Dieter. He shook his head philosophically and poured us both another Marillenschnaps.
I looked at the toy again. The sound was off; the dreadful hopping creature had returned to its original position among the trees, the man to his on the path. This scaled-down replication of an imaginary scene held a fascination that was disturbing. I turned from it to St Eustace on his horse on the wall. When I pressed the button the little Jesus appeared between the antlers of the stag and Eustace leapt from the saddle and knelt as before. ‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,’ crooned Bing Crosby.
‘Do you ever feel like hopping through the woods and doing what the hopping creature does?’ I asked Dieter.
‘All the time,’ he answered, and raised his glass to me.
19
Sarah Varley
Sometimes little good things happen, like a break in heavy grey clouds and a bit of blue sky shining through; I read in The Times the other day that a secret buyer had acquired all of Maria Callas’s underwear that was being auctioned in Paris and vowed to burn it to save her ‘dignity and honour’: definitely a bit of blue sky, that.
There’s been a lot of rain lately and I’m surprised at how often I find myself on the banks of the Euphrates; that’s an operatic allusion, and I can’t do many of those because I know very little about opera. Giles and I used to go to the ENO sometimes but I hadn’t been for years when Linda gave me a ticket for Nabucco; she was going to visit a daughter who was ill and she wouldn’t take any money for the ticket. I’ll get to the Euphrates shortly.
I wanted to give myself time for a leisurely coffee before the seven-thirty start of the opera, so I left the house at quarter-past six. It was warm for December and raining. The houses and shops were aggressive with Christmas illumination and decorations; the lamps on Parsons Green and the two lantern-like telephone boxes, the figures in ones and twos moving into and out
of the lamplight all heightened the singleness of my footsteps. The platform at the top of the station stairs was bustling and festive with people coming and going with shopping bags, and the houses and flats they were coming from or going to were made cosy in my imagination because of the rain all around us.
When I changed to the Piccadilly Line at Earls Court the early evening crush wasn’t too bad and I found a seat, took Middlemarch out of my bag — I’d first read it years ago — and settled down comfortably with it. I couldn’t help shaking my head and smiling at Mrs Cadwallader’s remark on page 537 of my Penguin edition: ‘“We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.”’ After a few moments I stopped smiling. I don’t care about calling things by the same names as other people but I was wondering whether I’d always called things by the names that were true for me: what I had with Giles, for example. We’d gone to the opera, to concerts, to films; we’d done what lovers do and I’d chosen him as a life partner. He turned out to be a non-finisher, a faller-by-the-wayside. Had I wanted someone I could work on and improve? Was I a faller-by-the-wayside-saver?
Going up the escalator at Leicester Square I passed a young couple kissing on the down escalator and I remembered when Giles and I had done that on that same moving stairs.
VAUXHALL WORKERS’ SHOCK AT CLOSURE, said the Evening Standard headline as I came out of the station. Over the road Leicester Square presented itself as Hell in modern dress, swarming and throbbing, its noise made visible in neon and glittering lights. BEST COMEDY, flaunted the sign under the marquee of Wyndham’s Theatre on this side of Charing Cross Road. RICHLY PERCEPTIVE, SPARKLING, boasted the critical quotes hanging there. ‘Big Issue,’ said a vendor.
Although I always exert myself to keep sane I’m not always sure that I’m calling things by the same names I used to call them by. GABY’S DELI in glittering metallic letters over the yellow awning — was that the name when Giles and I had hot salt-beef sandwiches there? Est. 1965, so only the sign was new. The tastes came back to me of the too-muchness of salt beef, mustard, rye bread, beer, and the simple pleasure of gluttony. No one had ever heard of mad cows back then.
Is it a sign of growing old, I wonder, when the faces coming towards you in the street are full of stories that you don’t want to know? Here now were Cecil Court and Lipman & Sons Formal Wear, reassuringly itself and staunch through the years with correct attire for morning and evening. As I walked through the rain towards St Martin’s Lane in the lamplit and quickstepping darkness the shops on both sides held out their racks and windows to me, entreating me to buy old books, rare books, prints and maps, antiques old and new, ephemera, esoterica, and works on the occult. Stuart and Watkins! No, now they were just Watkins Books. Had they always had ibis-headed Thoth on their signboard? That’s where I bought my copy of I Ching and Giles bought his Tarot cards. Living with Zen was currently being featured in their windows. It was always difficult for me to walk past the maps at Edward Storey’s Ltd without buying one; I can’t help feeling there’s a place they want to show me but I’ve never taken the chance for fear of falling off the edge of my world. There were prints as well, and the people bent over them assumed, as always, the postures in which Daumier painted print-browsers. I suppose the postures for every action are always there and successive generations fall into them.
This rainy evening in Cecil Court seemed always to have been there with its pavement glistening under the many footsteps; even when the sun is shining Cecil Court is a reservoir of yesterdays, a pool of grey light in which moments long gone surface like carp rising to be fed.
St Martin’s Lane, of course, was all go, with a posh new anonymous hotel and CAFÉ ST MARTIN’S PIZZA confronting me when I left Cecil Court and crossed through the taxis to the English National Opera side. Linda had recommended Aroma coffee so I wove through the pedestrian traffic until I saw it just before the ENO.
The place was crowded but I found a seat at one of the little tables and the coffee was very good indeed. Some of the people there were clearly bound for Nabucco; a few even had programmes. Most of the ENO opera-goers don’t dress up as much as the punters at the Royal Opera House; I remember from the past that they tend to laugh very loudly at the feeblest joke or any naughty word and to shout ‘Bravo!’ as much as possible, even to the women. At the table next to mine there was a couple talking about Nabucco. The woman was a handsome lady in her fifties with hennaed hair; the man was in his seventies, short and bearded, with spectacles; they had a married air.
‘This is a David Pountney production,’ said the man. He had an American accent.
‘I know,’ said the woman. ‘There’ll probably be trench coats.’ Very slight German accent.
‘What do you think,’ he said, ‘Berlin or Moscow in the thirties? Beijing in the eighties?’
‘Whatever. Plus lots of children in smaller trench coats. Have you looked it up in the opera book?’
‘No. I’ve heard the chorus of the Hebrew slaves at one time and another but that’s all I know about Nabucco. I was just now trying to remember which Orpheus had the naked dancers standing on rocks and turning around slowly.’
‘Not the Monteverdi; that was the one with the twitchers.’
‘I know that. Was it Gluck? Orpheus and Eurydice?’
‘That’s the one. I don’t think you’ll get any naked dancers tonight.’
‘You win some, you lose some. Read any reviews?’
She looked thoughtful. ‘Yes, and I think somebody loved it and somebody hated it but I don’t remember who said what. Any idea what time it’s over?’
‘The brochure said five past ten, so figure it’s always a little later plus curtain calls — we might get out of there by ten-twenty, and with luck we’ll be home before eleven-thirty. I’m looking forward to the herring salad.’
‘Me too. Have you finished your coffee?’
‘Yes, let’s go so there’s time for the loo before we take our seats.’
They got up, took their shoulder bags, and made for the door. He was in jeans, large autonomous-looking black boots, black polo-neck, blue crocheted waistcoat, a scruffy green anorak, and one of those little tweed hats old duffers wear; she was taller than he and more elegant in a beaded fifties cardigan, a narrow snakeskin-patterned coat, a long black skirt, and black boots. I wondered what their life was like. He was not an impressive figure but despite his age he didn’t seem retired. How did they get together? When I see a good-looking woman with a much older man I tend to assume that money or fame must have been the attraction. Why do any two people get together? What about Giles and me? I still remember that he looked at me the way a man who knows horses looks at a horse; and how did I see him? As a man who needed to be improved by me. Oh dear.
The scaffolding on the outside of the Coliseum darkened the entrance and made it seem a place where a password might be required; the lobby was thick with people queueing for tickets while others went inside. At the Jubilee Market and other venues I find crowds invigorating but elsewhere they make me uncomfortable. Not reasonable of me but there it is. I bought a programme and made my way past various knees to the centre of the first row of stalls, seat A15; Linda is very short and doesn’t like to sit behind people who block her view.
The interior of the Coliseum was in the grip of scaffolding that seemed to have paused in the act of consuming the place. There were elevated walkways on both sides and behind me, with ladders and planking for ascents and descents, entrances and exits. There was a platform over the left side of the orchestra pit with chairs and music stands on it. The curtain was painted to resemble a torn scroll with Hebrew lettering. The house was filling up rapidly with the usual sound of a swarming audience: people with tickets on the right started from the far left and worked their way east past all the knees, handbags, umbrellas, canes and coats between them and their seats, while those with seats on the left started from the far right and worked their way west.
Having squashed my coat and hat under the seat I opened my programme at random and found Psalm 137 staring me in the face:
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying: Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed, happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
There were tears rolling down my face. I dug a tissue out of my bag and wiped my eyes and blew my nose. Years ago when I read straight through the Old Testament and the New I did all of the psalms at one go, since when I’ve looked at a few now and then, but the only one that sticks in my mind is 137. It isn’t associated with any person, place, or event in my past — it’s just that it gets to me in various ways at various times; there is a kind of spell in those words. ‘By the rivers of Babylon …’ Yes! Who has not been captive in some kind of Babylon and hanged his or her harp on a willow, unable to sing in a strange land? The psalm begins with lyrical lamentation and ends with a bloodthirsty cry for vengeance; the exiles so full of pity for themselves have none for the infants of Babylon whose brains they hope will be spattered on the stones. And yet! And yet words have an amoral power: put certain ones together in a particular way and people will weep or dance or pick up a paving stone or a gun or whatever comes to hand.