The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (53 page)

I had been pleased to see my father. I loved him, although I had spent many years insisting I did not. But each time he did not understand my speech, he emphasized our eleven years of separation. This was the father who could not do the time. He could do what was ‘brave’ and ‘dramatic’, go to the Mall and say,
‘This is my son, Tristan Smith,’
or paint his face with Zinc 3001, but he did not have the spine to be a father.

When I saw the flashy gondel bobbing at the wharf, I saw one more of his dramatic gestures.

Of course I now know that this was unfair, that a gondel is not ‘flashy’, that it is, in fact, a perfectly ordinary conveyance for a Saarlim bhurger. But when I was carried inside the cabin, I did not understand that gondels are hired by the hour by bank clerks and fishmongers, or that the liquors displayed so proudly in spotlit niches cost a very reasonable 3 Guilders a nip. Laugh if you like, but when I saw the black leather banquettes and small brass lamps, I thought he was trying to seduce me with his money, and by the time I sat on the banquette I was as depressed as Wally was, although for different reasons.

Bill, meanwhile, plunged anxiously onwards. He was in full gallop, round and round, smiling, laughing, juggling tall-stemmed glasses in one hand while with the other he eased the cork from a dripping wet bottle of Veuve Clicquot.

I declined the glass in sign language, holding my Mouse head to show him why I could not drink.

Then the damn fool began to fiddle with my suit.

If he had only thought a moment more he would have realized I might not wish to undress myself in public, to show myself to him like this. I pulled away from him and turned, not towards Wally who was staring mournfully out into the night, but towards Jacqui who was seated on my left. In our days of tin-rattling my nurse and I had finally become allies. In the Water Sirkus she had been my friend and companion. Twice she had touched my knee, once my arm.

‘Stop … him,’ I said. ‘Please … get … him … off … me.’

But when I touched her arm she gave a small, apologetic shrug and slipped off the banquette away from me.

‘Just … tell … him …’ I said, but I saw she had become my father’s friend. She walked out of the cabin and up towards the prow, and let me tell you – it was obvious to me then – as she walked up and down that little deck, she walked not like a man, but like a woman, and a damn frisky one at that.

You may be thinking, Madam, Meneer, that Jacqui left the cabin from a sense of delicacy, a wish to leave me alone for my difficult reunion with my father. Equally you may imagine that Bill Millefleur, in carrying champagne to her on the deck, might have been performing his role as a gracious Saarlim host.

I was in no state to imagine any such thing. I watched Bill and Jacqui, a man and a woman silhouetted against the lights of the filtreeders and wolkekrabbers.

It made me half mad with jealousy – this whole world that I could never enter.

I turned to Wally. ‘Let’s … go … back … to … the … hotel.’

But Wally had found a bottle of whisky and was pouring himself a generous drink.

‘Take your suit off,’ he said. ‘Have a little drink. Enjoy yourself.’

‘He’s … a … creep.’

‘Give him a chance.’

‘He’s … such … a … phoney.’

‘Don’t be such a rucking Bruder. Take your damn suit off. Can’t you see he’s pleased to see you?’

‘Mr … Walk … Away.’

‘Relax, he’ll be back in a moment.’

‘Fuck … him.’

But then Bill did come back, stooping under the low roof and seating himself beside me.

‘Now, Tristan, speak to me.’

But he seemed so far from me, so far, far away.

‘You … don’t … know … what … I’ve … become.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, laying his hand gently on my shoulder.

For a moment I imagined he was apologizing for something that had happened on the deck, but then I saw it was the same old thing.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t catch that first bit. Maybe if you took the suit off. Maybe then you wouldn’t be so muffled.’ It was typical of him that he did not ask me why I wore the suit, or what I was doing with it.

In any case – I did not wish to take my suit off, and suffer his misunderstanding, all the false pity in his eyes. I wanted to set it straight with him – I was a man. Thus I began to speak to him, slowly, very carefully.

‘We … have … not … seen … each … other … for … many … years.’

‘We have not seen your mother?’

‘
No
!’

‘All right,’ Wally stood. ‘Don’t shout. Mollo mollo. Just say it again. Your dab will get the hang of it.’

But my father did not ‘get the hang’ of how I spoke, and thus I travelled towards the Baan, not deep in the intimate conversation Jacqui imagined, but in a misery of anger and misunderstanding.

My father, in returning from the Water Sirkus, was late for an important dinner party in his own apartment. He had planned this dinner party three months before, and once it was planned it could not be cancelled – this inflexibility being a reflection, not of his character, but of manners in Saarlim City.

As you know, Saarlim has its etiquette. One does not, as in Chemin Rouge, drop over for a roteuse and stay all day. One does not arrive with a round of cheese and a baton and expect to be welcomed. There is this surprising strictness, this lack of ease, which is disturbing for an Efican, and it co-exists with what feels like exactly the opposite tendency: it is not in the least impolite for a host to be absent from the greater part of his or her own dinner party.

If you are from Saarlim, you will find nothing unusual in all of this, but for the rest of us, let me tell you, Saarlim dinner parties at first appear anarchic – confusing empty chairs and inexplicably appearing and disappearing guests. It is not until somewhere around eleven at night, when the Sirkuses are finally dark, well after we Ootlanders have lost all patience, that the table finally unifies. The tablecloth is replaced. New silverware appears. Ornate candlesticks are brought from hiding, and the pudding is served with a formality that we in Efica reserve for a good pork bake.
^*

You know this already, Meneer, Madam? Then skip ahead. There are other readers, however, to whom this may be surprising, Ootlanders who have until this moment expected your manners to be just like Bruder Mouse’s or Bruder Duck’s. You think this is preposterous? Then let me tell you: you have no idea how you are perceived.

Elsewhere in the world, when they imagine your personal character, they expect to see you blowing bubbles in your soup. They have seen the Drool or Dog pee in the Sirkus. They have heard the Mouse fart and play the bagpipes. They draw the wrong conclusion, and not merely about your table manners.

Having passed their lifetimes spending one eighth of their gross incomes on Sirkuses, it is hard for some Ootlanders to accept that they are not attuned to the soul of Saarlim. They may never have visited Voorstand but they know the names of the Steegs, the kanals, the parks, the bars, the Domes. They own programme notes from performances they have never seen. They can discuss tragic deaths you never heard of, minor performers you have long forgotten. But they do not live in Saarlim and therefore there is
much that they do not understand. It might be difficult to convince someone from Ukrainia, for instance, that it requires a highly tuned sense of etiquette to live in a building like the Baan.

So for the Ootland readers, let me make this thing clear: in the Sirkus, Bruder Mouse could say ‘gaaf-morning’ to any of God’s Creatures, whether they had met before or no, but in the Baan it took a whole necklace of introductions for Bill to engineer a meeting with his neighbour, Kram. It was a slow process – almost a year before he could put her, socially speaking, in check. And then another six months of toing and froing with the gold-toothed intermediary, Clive Baarder, before they could confirm a night which was suitable for both of them.

They lived in the same building, used the same glass-walled elevators, walked into or out of the foyers next to each other, and although she was a Sirkus Produkter and he a Sirkus Star, they might as well have lived on different planets, and even after the invitation was issued and accepted they waited until the dinner when they would finally know each other. This is one aspect of karakter.

You are always explaining karakter to us visitors, telling us it means politeness, manners, breeding – but even as you do so you let us know we can never hope to understand exactly what it is. It is in the blood more than in the language. It is a Saarlim thing and after twenty years in Saarlim City it was still a notion that made my father not quite easy.

Bill had a six-room apartment. Peggy Kram occupied an entire floor, a real Bleskran trothaus with topiary and library. She dressed in long flowing garments in various earth tones which you could wear down to the Kakdorp among the throng without being remarked on as anyone wealthy but which, in the muted lights of a trothaus with the lights and the little lasers dancing on the ceiling fibre, was obviously a Van Kline with a price tag of 100,000 Guilders.

Such was life in the society whose original Christian vegetarian heresies still reflected the character of the ‘Sirkus with no prisoners’.

Bill’s whole dinner party (the one which had been irrevocably set for the night when he would finally have the chance to reunite with his lost son) centred on Peggy Kram, and not because Bill thought her charming or even interesting – he feared that she was neither – but
because Bill’s contract with the Sirkus Brits had finally been terminated and Peggy Kram was a produkter who not only owned twenty Ghostdorps (where she had whole families of actors playing out the ‘The Great Historical Past’) but also four Sirkus Domes in Saarlim City.

Bill needed work.

And when he returned to his own dinner party at half past ten he hoped that the family obligation which had made his absence necessary might further elevate Kram’s idea of his karakter. And yet, as he had never been totally confident that he truly understood the nuances of karakter, he entered his own apartment with some trepidation.

What he saw there did not encourage him.

His lover of that year (Malide Van Kraligan, the posturer) was asleep on the sofa with her little rose-bud mouth open and her slender arm across her eyes. Peggy Kram, a little plump, but very glamorous with her mane of blonde curls, was loudly quarrelling with the English bottelier (hired for the occasion) about the temperature of her Mersault.

The rented antique lace tablecloth was rumpled. The glassware and silver was in total disarray and Martel Difebaker, a legendary posturer, a man known for his fastidiousness, was sitting nodding his head in a stricken sort of way. Clive Baarder (who had been the intermediary for the meeting) was filing his nails.

When Mrs Kram looked up and saw the enigmatic figure of Bruder Mouse, she stopped arguing about the wine.

I barely noticed her. I knew nothing of karakter. Nor did I know that she was one of the most powerful women in Saarlim. I was hot, tired, thirsty, irritated to find my father entertaining strangers on what he had three times declared an Important Night. So when the gold-toothed Baarder rose from his ornate chair and took a mock karate position in relationship to me, I had had enough. I walked out of the room.

In doing this, it was not my intention to damage my father economically. I did not understand his situation. And when he finally found me, dipping my snout into a basin of water in the bathroom, he still did not explain who Mrs Kram was.

‘Tristan!’

I turned, with water pouring down my neck and wetting my
chest, in search of something practical to help me drink.

‘Get … me … a … straw … please.’

Bill knew he could keep his Big Shot Guest waiting a moment longer – two minutes, maybe three – while he finally established his meeting with me.

‘Please, please. Please take the head-bit off. We have to understand each other.’

‘Go … back … to … your … friends.’ I shrugged myself free of him.

‘They don’t have to see you,’ he said. ‘You can get back in your suit for them.’

‘Mo-dab … I’m … just … so … thirsty.’

But he began to fiddle with the suit. Or that is what I imagined. Later, on the road to Wilhelm, he swore to me that he had done no such thing, that he was simply patting me, but the fluttering feeling of his theatrically ringed fingers awakened old feelings of anger and I pushed him, hard.

He looked so hurt I thought he was going to cry.

‘Please … get … a … straw.’ I wrote s-t-r-a-w in the air, slowly.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘a
straw.’

He rushed out and came back with a whole damn box of straws. He had perhaps a minute before he had to go and be the host.

Tristan, I have to work when I go in there,’ he said. ‘I just need to know that we’re OK.’

At last I had a single straw. I began to syphon down the chlorinated water.

‘Tristan, I don’t know who you are in there.’

He did not know, because he had not been there. He did not know that I had hidden in the darkness of the Feu Follet for eleven years, that I had worked each day on all the tricks he taught me and then lost interest in, that I could do things no doctor could ever have predicted, that I could juggle, tumble, stand on one hand.

I wiped my wet synthetic fur with his dainty little guest towel.

‘You … want … to … know … who … I … am?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he frowned. ‘Mrs Kram is waiting.’

‘I’ll … show … you.’

If he had told me who Mrs Kram was, I might have acted differently.

Jacqui was sitting beside Clive Baarder, wondering if it would be rude to lean across the table and take the bottle of wine from in front of Peggy Kram, when she heard behind her a light bumping sound, like a baby falling down the stairs. Turning sideways in her ornate high-backed chair, she saw the Mouse tumbling.

I saw her see me.