But they hadn’t worked it out—and I hadn’t worked it out either.
The stage revolved, bringing me first Atterley then the woman, speaking with her hands. It got so that I hated seeing them coming and going—the two of them somehow being worse than twice as bad as one of them alone.
I hated seeing them coming and going—but I also just hated them, for what they were doing. They were showing me I was exactly like that goddamned horse in the winner’s circle at Ascot. I may toss my head and prance like a champion, but when it comes right down to it, I can’t make out any difference between the Queen of England and a stable boy.
They had found a sore spot in me that I didn’t even know I had—and I detested them for it. They went on for another forty minutes or so. I heard it all, and I closed my ears to every bit of it—though my hand went on taking it down. Then suddenly the screens went dark, the lights on the stage dimmed, and Atterley and his pal stepped off into the darkness.
I got out of there like a drunk who has just remembered where he stashed a bottle. In fact, I needed a drink, but I didn’t want one there or at my hotel, where I might conceivably run into Herr Reichmann again.
No problem. Munich is a big, big city, with plenty of drinks in it.
* The text of this speech will be found in Chapter 25–The Great Forgetting.
Friday, May 17
Aftershocks
Quite probably I’ve screwed up, though I don’t suppose I’ve screwed up irrevocably. I came, I saw, I ran away. I’m obviously not going to make a point of reporting this to Fr. Lulfre.
It’s also obvious that I have to get back on Atterley’s trail.
Later
Herr Reichmann isn’t registered at the hotel, and the barman who introduced us says he’d never seen him before. I didn’t really expect it to be that easy. The concierge looked up Der Bau and learned that it opens at three in the afternoon, information that proved to be false or outdated. It opened—rather reluctantly, it seemed to me—at around five-thirty. The staff on hand for this event didn’t have enough English to be of any help, but they managed to make it clear that they would send me someone named Harry if I’d sit down and wait for an hour or so.
I sat down and waited for an hour or so, and, surprisingly enough, they sent me someone named Harry, who turned out to be an Englishman or maybe a German who had schooled in England. I told him I was trying to find Charles Atterley.
“The name isn’t familiar to me, I’m afraid,” said Harry.
“The man who spoke here last night,” I said.
“Ah. Is that his name?”
I looked at him incredulously. “You don’t know his name?”
“I don’t know that one.”
“What do you mean?”
Harry shrugged. “The name I know may not be a name at all. He’s known as B.”
“B? B as in boy?”
“That’s right.”
“Why does he call himself that?”
Harry gave me the sort of smile you give a toddler who inquires about Santa’s elves. I asked where I might find him.
“No idea at all,” Harry said.
“Do you know where he might be speaking next?”
“No.”
I thought for a moment. “How did you happen to book him into Der Bau?”
He frowned over this question as if I might be approaching the boundary between curiosity and presumptuousness. “This isn’t Caesars Palace here, my friend. Arrangements are made in all sorts of ways and are usually very offhand. We don’t go through any process you would recognize as ‘booking acts.’”
“But you must have had some way of reaching him….”
“We might have had, and if you put a gun to my head, I might be able to dig it up, but short of that, I’m not likely to.” He shrugged again. “That’s just the way it is. This isn’t a missing-persons bureau, and I’ve got other things to do.”
I told him I understood, thanked him anyway, and got up to leave.
“Come back later,” Harry said. “You can always find people to talk to if you’re buying drinks, and someone in the crowd may know more than I do about this guy.”
I thanked him again and went back to the hotel.
Sitting here in my room—sitting, pacing, staring out the window—it suddenly popped into my memory that, when the heroes of fairy tales don’t know what to do, they just sit down and weep. In the same circumstances, a modern hero can slug somebody or go out and get drunk, but he can never just sit down and weep.
I’ve read enough detective stories to know I should go pry some information out of somebody, but whom?
Sitting here staring at this notebook, it has finally occurred to me there’s something I’ve avoided doing, and that’s reading the talk I took down in my other notebook last night at Der Bau. I confess to having a strong reluctance to do that.
Interesting: I remember the title of the talk (“The Great Forgetting”), but I’ve forgotten what The Great Forgetting is. I haven’t really forgotten it, of course, but I’ve shut the door of my memory on it, which means that—
Saved by the telephone bell. As I should have been. When the hero sits down and weeps because he doesn’t know what to do, the fairy-tale universe sends magical helpers. Mine wasn’t very magical but he was certainly mysterious. I think I can put it all down verbatim.
ME: Hello.
HIM: Fr. Osborne?
ME: Yes. Who is this?
HIM: What the devil do you think you’re doing?
ME: What?
HIM: Do you understand what you’re supposed to be doing here?
ME: Who is this?
HIM: I was led to expect someone marginally competent.
It was impossible to miss the drift of the conversation, and I was certainly getting the rough end of it. I tried to rally a bit of self-defense.
ME: I don’t know who you are or who appointed you my housemother, but I know who I am. I’m a parish priest. If you were expecting James Bond, either you were misled or you misled yourself.
HIM: Does being a parish priest mean you live in a coma?
ME: I’m sorry to have been a source of disappointment for you.
With that crusher, I hung up, something I don’t think I’ve done to a caller since junior high. There’s nothing to beat it when your back is against the wall. As expected, he called back immediately.
“The girl is sick,” he told me, sounding as if nothing had happened. “The girl is dying.”
“What?” For a second I thought he was giving me a password of some kind. Maybe I was supposed to reply with, “But the swallows will return to Capistrano anyway.” Luckily I caught myself and said, “You mean the one who was signing?”
“Of course. Didn’t you see her face?”
“I saw her face. I just didn’t realize it was—What is it, lupus? Lupus isn’t fatal, is it?”
“It’s scleroderma, or possibly mixed connective-tissue disease. They’re all in the same family, including lupus. It’s an autoimmune collagen disease, degenerative, incurable.”
“Okay. And what am I supposed to do with this information?”
“Radenau has a research facility devoted to the study and treatment of collagen diseases. That’s what the two of them are doing in Central Europe. Radenau is the center of the circle, ninety kilometers south of Hamburg.”
“So what are you saying? When in doubt, head for Radenau?”
“When in doubt, remember that Radenau is the center of the circle.”
“Somebody could have told me this at the outset.”
My caller sighed. It made him sound almost human. “Somebody could have told it to me too, but nobody did. I dug it out for myself.”
This news did not make me happy, but I managed to keep it to myself. I said, “That brings me back to my original question. Who the hell are you? And if you’re taking care of this, what am I supposed to be doing?”
“You’re supposed to be leading and I’m supposed to b
e following. You’re not even supposed to know I’m here.”
“Why am I not supposed to know you’re here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the idea is not to tax your powers of dissimulation. Or maybe the idea is to make you take some initiative.”
“Fuck you, Charlie,” I said. Some people are shocked when they hear a cleric talk as dirty as a third-grader, but this one just waited. “Listen,” I told him, “I’m not a detective. I admit it. I could use some help.”
“Not from me. Get out there and do some work.”
The line went dead.
Detective work
I got out my map, and that helped a lot. In a circle around Radenau there were fifty major cities where B might be speaking—Nuremberg, Dresden, Berlin, Kiel, Hamburg, Bremen, Essen, Koln, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, and Stuttgart, to mention just a few. There would have been nothing to it if Billy Graham had been out there touring, but how the devil was I supposed to track the speaking engagements of a virtual unknown named B?
Finding no inspiration in geography, I spent some time wondering who Charlie is. A civilian, surely. As people will, I conjured up a figure to fit the voice. I put him at age thirty-five, wiry, of middling height and weight, some sort of military or paramilitary type with a ratlike face and cheap clothes dating from the 1950s. As is evident from all this, Charlie had failed to win my affection. I toyed briefly with the idea of calling Fr. Lulfre and asking what the deal was but couldn’t find a shadow of an argument to support it.
If Charlie knows where B is, what does he gain by withholding this information from me? If he wants to make me look bad, why call and give me hints? On the phone he tried to sell me an explanation for these mysteries: He was dealing with a lazy schoolboy; I’d done my homework poorly, and he wasn’t there to give me the right answers, he was there to give me a taste of the stick. That makes sense if he really is a military type. He’s treating this like boot camp. Okay.
As far as I can see, there’s only one fact in everything he told me that is both hard and relevant: Wherever else B and “the girl” go, they eventually end up back in Radenau. I have to assume this is the best information Charlie has. If he knew for a fact that B is going to spend the summer in Spitzbergen, for example, he certainly wouldn’t give me all this dizdazz about Radenau. If I’m right about this, then Charlie himself is heading for Radenau.
And that, I have to suppose, is what he called to tell me.
Isn’t it grand to be educated?
Saturday, May 18
Radenau
Departing after a late, leisurely breakfast, I was in Hamburg by midafternoon. Germany is smaller than Montana, and traveling from one end of it to another on the high-speed intercity express makes it seem even smaller. Having a couple hours to kill before making a connection to Radenau, I visited the tourist office at the Hauptbahnhof and was earnestly advised not to miss the Jungfernstieg, an easy walk away, which would give me the city’s magnificent artificial lake on the one hand and its most elegant shops on the other. I took the advice, and there it was, by golly, exactly as advertised.
Not much of Radenau predates the 1940s. Albert Speer, Hitlers architect and technocrat-in-chief had something or other in mind for it during the late stages of the war but certainly not a fine-arts center. I think it was going to be a place where factories would really feel at home during the Thousand-Year Reich. Now it’s a sprawling industrial park dotted with apartment complexes indistinguishable from barracks. The only good things my guidebook could find to say about the hotel where I’d booked was that it was modern and scrupulously clean, and it was both of those. It was also “downtown,” which is to say in the older part of the city. Old Radenau doesn’t even pretend to be quaint.
I’d spent my time on the train making a readable longhand copy of “The Great Forgetting” to send Fr. Lulfre. When I checked in at the hotel, I asked the desk clerk if they had a fax machine, and he drew himself up as indignantly as if I’d asked about indoor plumbing. I’m glad I had a fax to placate him with.
I’m going to have a bath, a long, meditative dinner (meditating about as few things as possible), and perhaps a stroll before bed. No more than that. No work till tomorrow.
A long night begins
As I said I might, I took myself out for a walk after dinner. The night was pleasant, the streets were quiet. I’m not a big explorer. About three blocks out (in other words, near the limit of my adventurousness), I heard a mild sort of hubbub somewhere ahead. If this had been Beirut, naturally I would’ve just turned around and gone back to the hotel, but since it was Radenau, I was curious. I let the noise guide me to a nearby side street where a small theater was being picketed by forty or fifty citizens who seemed rather stunned to find themselves employed in such a vulgar display of rowdiness. They were milling about in an undisciplined way, parading crudely scrawled signs to nonexistent witnesses and halfheartedly chanting slogans whose exact wording was still being worked on.
It took me about three seconds to realize that I’d found B, or at least the site of his next gig. A favorite activity among the sign makers was to publish the supposed meaning of B’s name. Thus he was named as the blasphemer, the bastard, the bunghole, the bigmouth, the blowhard, the bonehead, le badaud, la bête, le bobard, le boucher, le bruit, die Beerdigung, der Bettler, and die Blattern, among others I no longer recall. Still others identified him as Beelzebub, the Beast, Belial, and Barabbas, and two or three, ignoring the initial problem altogether, confidently dubbed him the Antichrist, which I must say surprised me on the basis of what I knew so far. Really, the whole thing surprised me.
The theater entrance was being defended by a uniformed guard who looked both more fierce and more worried than I thought necessary under the circumstances. The only rule he seemed to be enforcing for admittance was that protest signs had to be left outside. Watching the traffic at the door, I soon saw that the procedure was to picket for a while, then to go in and heckle the speaker for a while, then to come back out and picket some more. I pushed my way in.
First I took in the fact that the lecture hall wasn’t very large, seating some three or four hundred, then I took in the much more important fact that the hecklers were definitely not putting their hearts into their work. Perhaps it’s true that Germans are uncomfortable defying authority. The first twenty rows pretty clearly held B’s supporters, looking sullen and tense, while behind them—and everywhere else—were arrayed his glowering (but largely silent) antagonists. There was an empty seat near the front, and I headed for it after grabbing a stack of handbills to use as writing paper. I was disappointed to see that, except for B, the stage was empty.
B lifted his eyes to mine as I sat down, and an electric charge of recognition flashed between us, or so I imagined.
He was sideways to the audience, slouching against the podium and leaning forward to bring his lips to within a millimeter of the microphone. I bother with these details in an effort to recreate the impression he gave of being entirely indifferent to conditions that might have silenced or intimidated other speakers, for while the hecklers were not very noisy, their hostility was palpable. His hands were still and relaxed, and he seemed wholly focused on his thoughts, which he was sharing with the audience as intimately and spontaneously as if in private conversation.
I had no idea how long he’d been talking, but as I listened I began to recognize familiar ground within “The Great Forgetting.” But though the ground was familiar, it was less extensive. In other words, this was just a review. Eventually he paused and sent his eyes deliberately around the auditorium.
“Tonight,” he said, “I’d like to talk to you about the boiling of a frog.”
I uncapped my pen and started taking it down.*
An invitation is issued
Till now I’ve never had reason to examine it (or even to notice it), but I go into a sort of trancelike state when I start transcribing a lecture. There is a very pleasant sensation (now that I look at it) that the words co
ming off the end of the pen are my own. I have the illusion that my hand is anticipating what my ears hear—that I know the words before they’re spoken and could transcribe the lecture even if the lecturer stopped speaking. I experience a strange sense of intimacy with the speaker. I may have no very exact understanding of what he’s saying, but I imagine I have a profound perception of his meaning. When he stops speaking, I may be unable to answer the simplest question about his topic, but this doesn’t worry me, because I know it’s all securely locked away in my transcription.
Since on this occasion B was using no visual aids, I closed my eyes, which usually helps concentration. About half an hour later, however, they popped open quite involuntarily. I looked up at B, he looked down at me, and our eyes met briefly, without special acknowledgment or recognition. Without a pause between words, he swept his eyes over the crowd, registering no difference, as far as I could see, between friends and foes. Then, in a gesture that had no evident correlation to anything he was saying, he lifted the index finger of his left hand straight into the air, held it there for a moment, then decisively angled it to his right. It was unmistakably a signal of some kind, but I couldn’t spot anyone who had caught it or seemed be reacting to it in any way. I considered the idea that the signal had been picked up only by me because it was meant only for me.
He went on speaking. I closed my eyes to shut out the relentless noise of the crowd and went on transcribing. Minutes passed. Suddenly I noticed that my hand had stopped moving, and I actually wondered why. Opening my eyes, I saw that B was finished. Even so, it wasn’t till he’d gathered up his papers and stepped away from the podium that the audience seemed to waken to the fact that B’s talk was over. His hecklers sent up a cheer of self-congratulation for a job well done, while his supporters hurried to organize some applause. Already moving, B gave them an indifferent nod and disappeared into the wings.