Kraven Images (10 page)

Warmth immediately suffused his body. He ceased his struggling, no longer knew why he struggled. Sensing the
change
in him, Diotima shifted, swinging around nimbly until, maintaining the same position, she was facing the other way. He was looking at her raised buttocks. He saw the stretch marks, the drooping deadwhite skin, the bluish discolorations, the wiry hair; he saw her parted vagina, glinting and foam flecked, saw the dingy beard. And yet he was filled with a pleasurable excitement, a steadying delight. Diotima was panting. She was struggling with his belt, unzipping his fly. He felt himself grow magnificently stiff.

And then the world faded and disappeared, along with his consciousness.

KRAVEN STOOD WITHIN
the chthonic fastnesses of the Brooklyn Bridge subway station. The muttered directions, reluctantly divulged, of the sergeant major’s morning relief, a swarthy corporal, had led him from the Koh-i-Noor not to the promised Clark Street IRT subway but eventually, after nervous meanderings, to Borough Hall. His stomach rumbled, and well it might. Since lunchtime yesterday he had not eaten. Oh yes, a few peanuts last night at the Papadakises, an olive or two, but no real food. Certainly he had drunk too much. An excess of alcohol was far more likely to have caused him to pass out in Diotima’s room than the foul potion the old witch had poured down his throat. The conscious Kraven mind shied nervously away from the tale the Kraven memory insisted on relating. Had it happened? Surely not. He was reluctant to recast that grotesque figure in the role of naked nymphomaniacal Valkyrie. As for what followed her attack upon him, over
that
, fortunately, the Kraven memory drew a kindly veil. Yet an image persisted, ineradicable, of vaginal dewlaps. No, far better to attribute what he thought he had seen to sottish nightmare.

He had awoken that morning alone in the tousled bed, alone in Diotima’s magnificent suite, alone (thank God!), vigorous, and unusually alert – alone and sporting an erection of colossal proportions. Nor had it been the familiar matutinal index of a full bladder. He knew the difference
well
enough. No, this had been an erection of rampant lust, and yet one curiously divorced from sexual desire. He had sat up in the bed and admired it. With his forefinger he had depressed it to the level of the sheets, but it had slipped sideways from beneath the pressure and sprung up again, buoyant and free. He had got up and stood before the mirror, turning sideways, first this way then that. Why, it exceeded the full straining span between the tip of his little finger and the tip of his thumb! There it had stood, swaying gently, curving grandly upward, majestic. Excelsior!

The astonishing erection had lasted through the shower, had responded eagerly to a brisk towelling. Kraven had returned to the bedroom, the independent baton, the magical stick, enthusiastically pointing the way. It leaped and jounced, it dipped and perkily swayed.

He saw that Diotima had folded his clothing neatly over a chair. A note had been pinned to his shirt: ‘Always an old violin plays the most beautiful melody, is not this true? Until next time, your Didi.’ Could there be some truth to the shocking images now teasing the outer edges of his consciousness?

Hocusing-pocusing,

Didi von Hoden,

Wagnerian temptress and Circean witch,

Shimmied and shook herself

While she was wearing, e-

Rotomaniac’lly,

Nary a stitch.

Kraven shuddered.

He had had to wait half an hour before it was possible to dress. Indeed, only after he had taken matters personally in hand had the mutinous member, albeit reluctantly, slowly
submitted
, crestfallen, its pride humbled, but at last at one with the rest of his body again.

The platform was crowded. A train was pulling in at last. A diminutive woman, her hair done up in large plastic curlers, elbowed her way deliberately in front of Kraven. Familiar with the strong territorialism of regular subway riders, he gave ground. But when the doors opened before them he raced her for the only available seat. She won, fortunately for the vestiges of Kraven gallantry, and winked up at him saucily. He winked back. Here was subway goodfellowship at its very best.

Strap-hanging, jerked rudely by the train’s fits and starts, Kraven closed his eyes and found himself listening to the fairy tale a plump lady beneath him was reading to the child curling sleepily on her lap. ‘At that moment the little tailor ran from his shop into the street, waving his fly swatter above his head. “I killed seven with one blow!” he shouted. “Think of it! Seven with a single blow!” All the people in the street looked at him in amazement…’

When Onkel Koko broke the dreadful news to Opa, the old man said simply, ‘So it was no use, all for nothing the escape from Vienna. They found them anyway.’ That was before he fully understood the magnitude of his loss.

In the early hours of 2 November 1941, a lone German bomber, separated from its squadron during a raid on the East End docks and wandering off course, flew over Hampstead and jettisoned its remaining bomb. Nicko, Mummy, and Opa were living in the big house in Harrogate by this time. They had been in the north for almost a year, ever since Nicko’s father had decided that London wasn’t really safe enough any more. Daddy would come up to see them on weekends and holidays, whenever he could, and usually he had brought a Kraven or two with him. Sometimes Grandpa Blum and Aunt Cicely came too, but never on the same train as the Kravens. On this particular weekend Onkel
Koko
had brought cousins Tillie and Marko for a visit. But by then Daddy had been eight months dead. He had reached for a rose in the Harrogate garden, and … and then he had died. Crumbs of soil stuck to the blood on Daddy’s face, where the thorns had scratched him as he fell.

For the first few weeks Nicko had had to share with Opa the huge double bed in the first-floor back bedroom. It was this very bed that now stood, thanks to Marko, in Kraven’s New York apartment. Not that Nicko minded sharing. It was super to sleep with Opa, who had a million midnight stories to tell.

The train pulled into Astor Place. Damn it! In his sportive eagerness to race for a seat, Kraven had mistakenly boarded a local. The winner in that contest, meanwhile, had got up to leave. Kraven sighed and sat down. He was still far from Grand Central, where he would change trains. Next to him the child had fallen asleep on his mother’s lap, his dirty sneakers rubbing from time to time against Kraven’s trouser leg.

He was still sharing the bed with Opa when Onkel Koko brought the news of the bombing. They had believed Nicko was asleep and they talked in strangled whispers. He did fall asleep after that in terror. But he awoke once briefly in the night to hear Opa sobbing beside him.

In a way it was Daddy’s fault, although as always his intentions had been of the best. In the autumn of 1939, before there had been any thought of moving his family to the north of England, Felix Kraven had had an air-raid shelter built at the foot of their Hampstead garden. Such private shelters were springing up all over suburban London, although the real terrors of
Blitzkrieg
were as yet unimagined. Theirs had been the first in Beauchamp Close.

It was a small square structure of double brick with a reinforced concrete roof. ‘Safe as ’ouses, them there’, the builder, a man of nice irony, had assured Daddy. ‘Stand anything bar a direct ’it. Y’might try a bitter camouflage,
just
t’be on the safe side. Most do.’ ‘Do you think so?’ ‘Yerss. Frow up an ’ill all round, just the door showing. Plant it, ‘erbaceous borders, that sorter thing. Rock gardens is popular. Don’t take much to confuse the ’un.’ He glanced at Daddy. ‘No offence, sir.’ ‘And none taken, my dear fellow’, said Daddy, who prided himself on his colloquial English.

Mummy had bunk beds moved into the shelter, a table, some kitchen chairs, lamps, an oil heater. It was quite cozy, just the place to play ludo or snakes-and-ladders. Meanwhile, Daddy busied himself on the roof, periodically arranging and rearranging an assortment of branches. ‘Why are you doing that, Daddy?’ Nicko had asked once, awed by his father’s perilous acrobatics. ‘To confuse the Hun, of course. Doesn’t take much, you know.’

But Felix had reckoned without the Kraven demons.

When the sirens wailed in the early morning hours of 2 November 1941, Tante Carlotta, Tante Erica, and Onkel Gusti zipped themselves into their siren suits and made for the air raid shelter. They took with them a large thermos flask of tea and a tin of sandwiches.

Onkel Ferri, helmet on head, gas mask over his shoulder, binoculars around his neck, was at that time some five miles away at his post on the roof of an office building. He was an air raid warden and proud to be doing his bit. On the roof with him was Vice-Admiral Bunny Mayhew, retired, VC, a fellow watcher of the skies.

Many years later Ferri admitted to Kraven that he had actually heard the lone bomber fly over, had even started to telephone the local anti-aircraft battery on his observer-post telephone. Mayhew had stopped him.

‘Plucky beggar. Must be separated from his chaps. Goin’ it alone, don’t y’now.’

‘But it’s a German bomber!’

‘Don’t need
you
to tell me it’s Jerry. They’ll get him
before
he reaches the coast, poor blighter. Give him a sportin’ chance, old boy.’

Onkel Ferri had replaced the receiver.

Meanwhile, in the air raid shelter at the foot of 15 Beauchamp Close, Onkel Gusti and Tante Erica sat playing gin rummy. Tante Carlotta had just poured three mugs of tea from the large thermos flask when the bomb struck the shelter, blowing it to pieces. It had been a direct hit. Curiously the mugs of tea survived undisturbed. A charred scrap of paper found in the rubble showed that Tante Erica’s famed luck at cards had held to the end. The house itself had sustained almost no damage, merely a broken windowpane or two.

But why had Onkel Ferri, now transformed into the Compleat Mourner, failed in his duty? Had his yearning to be accepted as a sporting Englishman softened his resistance to Admiral Mayhew? It was shortly after his release from the asylum that the Compleat Mourner revealed his theory about the anti-Kraven demons.

The train came to a skittering halt. Metal ground on metal and howled. It was Fifty-first Street. Kraven had missed his station.

* * *

IT COST HIM ANOTHER TOKEN to reach the downtown platform. Perhaps there had been something in the witch’s potion, some mind-diverting ingredient, say, that prevented him from focusing on the simple task of getting home. Then too, the ugliness of his surroundings surely prompted a sensitive concentration to flee, thoughts to turn defensively inward. The New York subway system, after all, had succeeded in granting contemporary incivility a formal expression.

On the tracks at the entrance to the tunnel a signalman
idled
, whistling to the spirit ditties of no tone. Over his clothes he wore a bright orange tunic, and he held a lantern in his hand. He was there to warn his fellows, out of Kraven’s line of vision but presumably working in the tunnel at the other end of the platform, of a train’s approach. A pleasant enough sort of occupation, Kraven mused, but for its location almost pastoral in its simplicity. At the end of another grateful day, Corin would cease his whistling, twitch his orange mantle, and be off: tomorrow to fresh tracks and stations new.

Kraven retired from the edge of the platform. It made him nervous to stand there. One always feared the shove from behind that would send one teetering over the edge and into the filthy well, sprawling amid the unutterable disjecta of countless subway riders, the oily soot, the rat faeces, one’s head coming to rest in the Stygian trickle that ran ceaselessly between the tracks, one’s leg fetching up against the live rail, the death rail.

From the distance came the rumble of a train. Corin courageously faced the sound and began to swing his lantern before him, left, right, left, right. Three unnerving siren blasts answered his signal. He turned and faced the other way. Once more he swung his lantern. Satisfied, he turned again and walked boldly into the tunnel’s mouth. It swallowed him up. The train clattered into the station emitting angry blasts. It was gaudily disfigured but relatively empty. Kraven got into the last compartment and sat down. A faulty fluorescent light flickered on and off. A copy of the
News
was scattered the length of the floor, twisted, torn, much trodden on. The doors closed but the train remained in the station.

Evil Eddie, Ducky 128 and Shaddow 19 had been in the compartment before him and had not scrupled to leave clear signs of their passing. The cognoscenti, Kraven knew, claimed for such effusions of the People the lofty status of
Art
. Academicians and literati, instant diagnosticians of the
Zeitgeist
, saw in such optical migraines the efforts of the inarticulate to articulate, the longing of the oppressed, the nameless and the alienated to assert their selfhood. Shaddow 19, Ducky 128, Evil Eddie, the epigraffiti of the damned. Alas, alas, Kraven searched his heart in vain for understanding.

With the sound of a snapping femur and a mighty shake that sent him sliding down his seat, the train at last began to move. When it re-entered the tunnel, Kraven peered through the grimy window. There, each in his individual cubby carved out of the tunnel wall, each wearing the distinctive orange tunic and carrying his tool, stood Corin’s fellows, all secure.

So
that
was how it was done. Poor Koko, had he but known!

Oskar Kraven had been Nicko’s favourite uncle. Indeed, he was a universal favourite. Tall, handsome, charming, he possessed a chivalric grace that dissolved all opposition. Women melted at his glance, men found him a jocund companion. Tillie and Marko, his children, had from their infancy supposed him a fool, which perhaps he was, but had also fiercely defended him as a lovable fool. He was Tante Carlotta’s despair and joy. His fecklessness, inordinate even in a Kraven, was a constant worry to her, but, as she had once admitted to Felix, had he been more responsible he would have been less Koko, and that was unthinkable. He gambled too fondly, drank too enthusiastically. But Lotti was proud simply to be seen with him. And indeed they made a fine pair, Onkel Oskar, elegant, swinging his cane, his hat angled just so, a fresh boutonnière in his lapel, and Tante Carlotta, still a lovely woman in her forties, short but liberally endowed, her delicate hand resting gently on his arm.