My Other Life (45 page)

He went on eating his toast, sipping his coffee in his methodical, rationing way, showing no interest in me. If I had praised him, I am sure he would have listened.

"Your English is very good."

"I have traveled extensively."

I wanted to tell him: People who speak English well know better than to use the word "extensively."

"Though it has been exceedingly difficult at times to purchase tickets."

"Exceedingly" was another one, and so was "purchase."

But I said, "I lived in Africa for quite a few years."

"So much of the world is English-speaking. Africa. India. Singapore. And America, of course."

Was he putting me on? I said, "You've lived in all those places, really?"

"Yes," he said quietly. "And I have written about them."

I did not say that so had I—I hated the sort of conversation between strangers that turned into a tennis match. He seemed just as happy to leave the subject, and he became animated only when I asked, "What do you think of the festival?"

"It is like all literary festivals. It is a tea party, everyone is very polite. No one says anything about the horror and boredom of writing. We are performers, like dogs walking on their hind legs."

I stared at him. Hadn't I felt precisely that way, in just those words?

"These novelists with sex on the brain," Andreas Vorlaufer said. "She is fat. He is pimply. Everyone is disappointed. People say, 'I thought he was taller,' 'He has shaved off his beard,' or 'He is so old.' It is most humiliating, don't you agree?"

I think I nodded. I registered the phrase "most humiliating"—native English speakers didn't say that either. I looked closely at him.

"Physically we writers are of no importance. It is the thing within us that matters. Spirit or thought. It is a kind of gyroscope. This festival is a huge English tea party. The Kenyan poet that everyone is so concerned about—why is it always poets?"

"So you didn't sign the open letter?"

Vorlaufer said, "I have an inflexible rule of never signing anything that I have not written myself. But no matter. I came for other reasons."

"So did I." I got up from the table, feeling that I was being mocked and diminished by this stranger.

He stood and bowed slightly and I thought how there is something almost Oriental in some Eastern Europeans, and something deeply melancholy—their sad eyes, their sallowness, their cynicism, their school clothes.

I checked out of the hotel and set off to do what I had come to do—visit Robert Louis Stevenson's childhood home at Swanston, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, under the Pentland Hills. I hired a car and drove out of town, following signs, and had no trouble finding the turnoff to Swanston. Suddenly I was in the Scottish countryside, of steep grassy hills, and heather and gorse and blowing broom. The small village was at the end of a steep, narrow road, six or eight cottages and one detached house, the whitewashed manor where Stevenson had spent most of his summers as a boy.

It was a majestic house of stucco and mellow granite, surrounded by a low wall and old, twisted trees. On this windy late summer day the trees were struggling, their leaves turning over and looking silver in the doud-muted daylight. The grass streaming under the wind had long, beautiful tassels. The sheep on the hillside were motionless, and when the sun broke through the rising meadows were mottled with scraps of cloud shadow. Swanston, shaped like a bowl, holding only this manor house and a few cottages, was as peaceful as a valley can be, and even the clusters of ravens in the oaks looked as unthreatening and emblematic as heraldic symbols.

The gate to the house was ajar, as though in welcome. I did not need to push it open any farther to slide through. I rapped on the heavy front door and thought how this venerable door could have
been the same one that Stevenson had swung open. Waiting for an answer I heard laughter inside—children—and a woman's voice. I had to rap again before anyone heard, and when I saw the children and the television set I understood the delay.

"Yes?" The voice was gruff, the woman indistinct—she had not opened the door very wide. And yet I could see beyond her to where the children were watching television. I saw the toys, the calendar, the picture of the Queen. It was an unremarkable interior, but its plainness was not the worst of it. The wood-paneled walls were scratched and marked with clumsy drawings, the floor had been splashed with paint, a hunk of plaster was missing from the ceiling, and what I could see looked cluttered if not vandalized. I thought of Robert Louis Stevenson and did not want to see more.

I said, "Isn't this Stevenson's home?"

"There's no one by that name here," the woman said, in a voice filled with suspicion—and now she was easing the door shut.

"I'm looking for Swanston House."

"This is Swanston House."

"But who owns it?"

She was still talking as she shut the door, and so I was not sure whether I heard "the Council" or "the Corporation," but in any case I got the message: she was a tenant, living here at a reduced rent with her big messy family, and she was sending me away.

I turned to walk down the path and saw a familiar figure glance up at the house and walk on. It was the old man I had seen that morning at breakfast.

"Herr Vorlaufer."

He was puzzled. "You know me?"

"We met at the hotel this morning."

He smiled. Did he remember? He hardly seemed to care. He did not ask me my name.

I was still shutting the gate. I said, "Robert Louis Stevenson used to live in this house."

"Yes. I know. That is why I came here."

You could not tell that man anything.

He was still walking slowly, saying, "There is a lovely path to the top of that hill."

He seemed to be pointing to a row of gnarled trees. No hill was
visible here—just a damaged wall and two sheep which were unshorn and looked overdressed, not to say topheavy.

To call his bluff I followed him. I had nothing else to do. I had found my story: being turned away from Stevenson's house by a suspicious Scottish mother protecting her children and her TV set was better than being allowed in for a tour of the damaged premises.

Vorlaufer led the way, and forty feet on he stepped away from the road onto a narrow path, and there was the hill, as he had said.

"Do you mind if I come with you?"

"Not at all," he said, though it sounded to me like utter indifference.

"You said you lived in Africa and wrote books about it?"

He smiled indulgently. "You would not have read any of them. They have not been translated into English, though there are many. One of my first was about a girls' school in Kenya."

"There aren't many girls' schools in Kenya," I said. And I was going to say that I knew why: because I had done the same thing, written the same book.

"This one was in Embu," he said.

"It's still there."

He was not listening. He was picking his way slowly along the path, talking softly in the patient, wondering way that old people talk about their early lives. There was a note of detachment in his tone, too, as though he were talking about someone else.

"I wrote two other novels, and then I went to Singapore," he said. "If you stay too long in Africa, something happens—you turn into a white person. It is much better that Africans should run their own affairs. I saw that I didn't belong. Anyway, I was curious about Singapore."

"So was I when I went there," I said. "I wanted to write about it." Did he hear that? "I did, actually. A novel."

"I found Singapore a disappointing place," Vorlaufer said.

"Did you write anything there?"

"I had a family to support," he said. "I was young. In those days I could write a novel in six months or less. That one was about the old Singapore—brothels, bars, and hot steamy streets. The hero was a sort of misfit. If I call him a procurer I would be misrepresenting him."

"I understand perfectly," I said. "My book was very similar to yours." If not exactly the same, I wanted to add.

He was walking in front of me on the path, which was too narrow for us to walk side by side. It was not more than a rut through the grass, and I had the feeling that it was one the sheep had made with their mincing little hooves. I could not see Andreas Vorlaufer's face and did not know whether he heard me.

"It seems a trivial book to me now. The central character was fifty years old. I was hardly thirty when I wrote it."

So was I, I thought. I said, "I thought you wrote travel books."

He heard that; we were talking about him now.

"Many travel books," he said. "I used to live for travel. I went everywhere by train."

"You don't say?" I hurried after him. "It's a shame the books aren't translated."

"Who in the English-speaking world cares about East German literature? Even Thomas Mann is not read today! And my books"—he flung out his hand to dismiss the idea—"they were probably put off by my tides. None of them sounds right in English."

"Give me an example."

"A literal translation of my best-known book would be
The Great Railway Bazaar.
"

I stared at the back of his head, wondering whether he was smiling as he walked on. Did he know who I was?

I said, "There is an American who wrote a book with that tide."

"Yes. So I was told," Vorlaufer said. "But I used it first. My book was published in Leipzig in 1946."

"What did you do then?"

"The book was a modest success. I continued to write novels. I went to South America. I resided in Britain, and did some traveling there."

"Resided" was another one of those perfect, pedantic words that gave a foreign student away.

"And you continued to write?"

"Indeed"—yet another—"a novel about a family in Honduras. It's setting was the Mosquito Coast—a good tide, I think. A novel set in the future. Travel books. China."

"More train trips?"

"After the China book I stopped writing about trains."

The path had widened slightly. I walked a bit faster to be abreast of him, so that I could see his face—and I expected a devilish grin. But he was frowning, feeling the strain of this steep path, and he was breathless from all the talk. If what he said was mockery, he was making a good pretense of looking deadpan.

I said, "What exactly did you write after you finished your book about China."

I had just finished my book about China.

"My children were at university—"

"Two boys," I said.

"Yes. And so I traveled around the world with my wife."

"I was thinking of doing that."

He did not care what I was thinking. He said, "My situation changed. I went back to the Pacific and wrote about myself. There is no word for
Bildungsroman
in English. Then I wrote about the South Pacific."

"I have never been to the Pacific," I said.

"I wrote less," he said. "I became involved in films."

"Oh, God."

"I lived in America. I was happy there. I had lived in London for many years. Did I mention that?"

"Yes, you said for about twenty years."

I wondered how he would handle my niggling deception. He appeared not to notice. He said, "Eighteen years."

"I have lived in London for seventeen years myself," I said, and immediately sensed a shadow pass over me.

"Yes, I wrote less," he said reflectively. "But I began writing about myself."

"And none of it has been translated?"

"Not into English.
Mein Geheime Leben
was eventually filmed."

He must have seen me squint at him. The tide meant nothing to me, not even the English version I could manage.

He said, "You don't speak German?" and shrugged.

"Have you been happy?" I asked suddenly.

"That is a desperate question," he said. "There are other ways of asking it, but it takes a lifetime to answer."

Only his words were philosophical. His way of saying them was impatient, and I knew he was bored—he wanted to get away from me and my questions.

But I persisted. I said, "Can't you tell me anything specific that has happened to you over the past few years?"

I was hoping for some good news, or any encouragement, and I watched his face closely for some sign of it. Finally, he shook his head as though refusing to speak.

I said, "Back there you used the expression 'My situation changed.' What did you mean by that?"

"My wife and I separated," he said, and made the utterance tragic and bleak by giving it no emotion.

And I felt a terrible pain, as though a dull knife had been drawn through my heart.

"Why?" I asked, and hardly managed to speak the word.

"Oh." Then he thought a moment, looking into the distance, all the bald hills. "Our children were not living at home anymore. My wife and I were each busy with our own lives. I think, for a crucial period, we forgot how necessary we were to each other's happiness. I know that, because when we separated, something in me was wrecked, and then it was dear that we could never go back."

"What made you separate in the first place?"

"A writer is alone too much," he said. "That solitude can make a person think that he is missing something. That he is not living. It is simple greed, like Dante's Ulysses—you know the lines? 'Nothing—not fondness for my son, not piety for my father, nor love for my wife—could dampen my ardor for experiencing the wider world and human vice and courage.' Something like that."

"So you got exactly what you wanted."

He smiled at this. "What we want is distant and dim. That is why we desire it. Distance is the great maker of fantasies."

"If it were close and you could see it, you wouldn't want it?"

"The things that people crave the most are never near to them," he said. "That is why they are craved. The Hindus are right. The world is
maya,
an illusion."

"I would be very happy if you told me you haven't suffered," I said.

"Everyone suffers," he said. "I have, too. But on the whole I can say I have been very lucky."

"That's good to hear."