The White Body of Evening (22 page)

That night, having set himself down in a modest hotel, he was still thinking about her. To test his resolve he decided to walk back to the waterfront and through the infamous St Pauli. Sailors and workers loitered about the streets, drank in taverns and cavorted with prostitutes who looked hard and pitiless in the cold, damp air. He was about to give it up when Arthur Hume, the antiquarian book collector from the
Abendstern,
appeared at the next corner. He greeted Paul with a reticent, embarrassed grin, and claimed that he was heading off to some theatrical entertainment. Would he like to join him? Why not, Paul thought to himself, curious to see what an old lecher like that could get up to.

They walked to a theatrette a few streets away. Hume said something to the attendant about knowing a man called Wedelkind, but this was to no avail. The old man at the door insisted that they pay just the same, Wedelkind or no Wedelkind. Inside, the audience was seated at separate tables, not in rows as in a conventional theatre. It was a run-down place, full of people who looked to Paul like scions of aristocratic families, fallen dignitaries, and outcast, vagabond royals deprived of their kingdoms by an age of revolution. Men wore dinner suits that appeared as if they’d been slept in the night before while the women wore faded silks, old lace and even the odd tiara. They all reeked of stale cigar smoke. The place had the aura not of genteel poverty, but of fallen empires and historical anachronisms.

“An old friend of mine is performing,” Hume said. “Max Wedelkind.”

Before Paul could ask who he was, clashing cymbals and a run of notes on a double bass announced the commencement of the play. The curtain went up on a stage decked out to look like a hospital ward. In one corner sat a doctor, wearing a white coat and a greenish wig of thick, disordered hair. He was made up with ghoulish white face paint, glossy red lips and deep purplish shadows under his eyes. Paul couldn’t decide whether he looked more like a mad scientist or a disinterred corpse. He was at a desk perusing some medical charts when two other men, evidently newspaper reporters, approached him armed with notepads. The doctor began to describe to them his revolutionary cure for madness and some garbled theories about the flow of the blood through the brain. He spoke very bad, comically-stilted German, as if he were imitating a foreigner’s accent. Offstage the cries of lunatics and their ominous poundings grew gradually louder until finally they almost drowned him out. The doctor raised his voice to a scream and then collapsed into a fit of hysterical twitching, laughing to make light of it. The audience laughed as well while his body shook as if from repeated electrical shocks. It was outlandish. Paul had never seen anything so farcical.

“That’s Wedelkind for you,” Hume whispered to him. Paul smelt something distasteful, like sour milk or week-old flower water, on his breath.

As the doctor laughed the two reporters looked at each other suspiciously. To allay their fears the doctor called out to his attendants and staff, who began to parade like a menagerie of wild animals. Soon the doctor himself had joined in, leading a savage dance around the two journalists, who now realised the danger they were in. As the doctor whipped the attendants into a frenzy they pounced on one of the journalists and dismembered him on stage to the horrified shrieks of the audience. The whole scene was an inspired piece of visual trickery. The marauding lunatics crouched over the prone body, hiding it from the audience, as they seemed to hack into it with their hands and hurl pieces of what must have been butcher’s meat and pulped paper soaked in red dye across the stage. In a moment, the set was strewn with gore, its white surfaces streaked with blood. When the lunatics turned to the second journalist all that remained of the first was a pile of torn clothes and raw body parts. The doctor danced a ridiculous jig and kicked a wax head off the edge of the stage, provoking fits of hysterical laughter. As the head hit the ground and rolled awkwardly across the wooden floor, Paul started in amazement. He stared at the doctor on the stage. Behind the wig, the make-up and the exaggerated antics, the actor was none other than Reuben Gines.

At that moment something gripped him and he too gave out, collapsing into a confused spasm of horror, hilarity and bewilderment. He turned to Hume, who was just about choking, and pointed at the stage.

“Wedelkind,” Hume gasped back at Paul, his face red with the strain of it all.”Wedelkind.”

Finally, some policemen appeared on stage and beat the lunatics back, saving the second reporter. With the menagerie cowering in the corner, the police chief revealed that the lunatics had taken over the madhouse and that the real Dr Goudron had been murdered and replaced by one of his patients. In a horrifying finale, one of the policemen produced the mutilated corpse of the real doctor, which from where Paul sat looked like a side of beef wearing a white coat and a stethoscope. The audience again howled as the curtain fell.

“Wedelkind,” Hume said again, as if his vocabulary had been reduced to this single word, the mere utterance of which was enough to send him head over heels.

“Wedelkind,” Paul repeated, obligingly. “Only that’s not his name. It’s Gines. Reuben Gines.”

Hume blinked absurdly. “But I know him,” he said, still cackling. “Wedelkind.” He had to cough out the laughter before he could continue. “He came through Adelaide on a tour. About six months ago.” He paused to catch his breath and repress the chuckles still mounting in him. “Tamer stuff then – comedy of manners, gentle melodrama, you know.”

“Can we meet him?”

“By all means.”

Hume stood up, still vibrating with the aftershock of the performance, and walked bravely backstage. In the meantime the audience settled down and the theatre assumed a semblance of order.

At any other time Paul might have been ready to thrash Gines or Wedelkind, or whatever his name was. But after such an extravagant performance he was completely purged. Every violent impulse in him, in fact every bit of strength, had leached out with his laughter. He was thoroughly relaxed and at peace.

A few minutes later Hume reappeared with Gines, who had removed the wig and cleaned off the make-up, but who still looked a bit insane anyway. Paul leapt to his feet and congratulated him on such a fine performance.

“Young Paul Walters,” he declared shamelessly and with seemingly little surprise. “How good to see you. Fortune has brought you this far at least.”

Paul was flabbergasted at the ease of his manner, but also vastly amused at the thought of such a versatile charlatan.

“Buy you a drink?” he asked, raising his almost hairless eyebrows (they’d been painted on for the play), and gesturing in futility to an absent waiter.

“You can buy me several,” Paul said in the same spirit of high farce. “Don’t you remember that you ruined me?”

“Oh please,” he said with a laugh. “Much ado about nothing. A little levity.”

Hume was all ears as the encounter unfolded.

“He calls you Gines, Max.”

“Gines? Yes I was, once. Thought you’d get the joke. Gines, engines, something like that. It’s literary. Eighteenth century. The distant past I suppose.”

He thrust his hand out towards Paul and boldly proclaimed, by way of introduction, “Max Wedelkind. Pleased to meet you.” Then he winced, twisting his face into a grimace of self-deprecation. “You’re not still sore at me are you?”

“I don’t much care now. It’s all behind me. Just tell me what happened.”

“Well, your friend played a little trick on you. Mind, it went a bit far, but that was your doing, your own enthusiasm. And his, I suppose. No one could have reckoned on either of you giving in to temptation and going at it with such determination.”

“So, Arthur, Max is a sort of roving confidence man,” Paul said.

“Not a bit of it,”Wedelkind remonstrated.”I’m a reputable actor now, in a reputable company.” And then, with an impish grin plastered on his blubbery face, he pulled a five-mark note from behind Paul’s ear and gave it to him.

“The world of con men, drifters, itinerant showmen, vagabond magicians, and impersonators is fading. The Germans have a lovely word for a man of such callings –
Gaukler.
Today it means something wonderfully vague – juggler, charlatan,
Zauberkünstler. The
whole caboodle. But it’s a world that is disappearing, which is a pity, but it’s the truth. People just aren’t gullible enough today. The age of realism has killed off our gullibility, our innocence. It did my old soul no end of good, Paul, to see you so willing to play along. I don’t mind saying so. Perhaps there is hope for an old
Gaukler
yet, I told myself.”

“All right then Max,” Paul said, “just tell me who actually bought my painting, the one you paid for at the Gallery School.”

“Why you know as well as I do. It was your friend. What’s his name? Ralph.”

“Ralph Matthews?”

“That’s the one.”

Paul was shocked, but in such a ludicrous way that he wouldn’t have been offended to see Matthews walk in at that very moment and sit down with them. There was something so grandly bathetic in the conception of the plot, in Wedelkind himself and in his mesmerisingly absurd performance of insanity that he was overwhelmed with good humour and actually enthused by the air of trickery and the web of petty deceit in which he’d been so thoroughly caught. The thought of the fraud, coupled with the manifest grotesquerie of the play, both comic and horrifying, seemed to open up a new vista for Paul. He acknowledged that Max Wedelkind (and who was to say that that was really his name) was an artist – a bullshit artist – and in his own way a bit of a genius at it.

“How on earth did you get involved with a cleanskin like Ralph? Not at the Arcadia Club?”

“Good God no. I met him at the Melbourne Club, the week after you’d so mortally offended him in front of your sister.”

“The Melbourne Club?” Paul was amazed. “Who let you in there?”

“I was dining with old what’s-his-name, the one who brought out that family of acrobats. Or were they midgets? I don’t quite recall.”

A waiter finally appeared and Wedelkind demanded a bottle of brandy. “For my guests,” he added brusquely. After a glass or two and a couple of cigarettes, Paul felt quite drunk. He told Wedelkind about his plans and soaked up his insincere delight. Finally, when it seemed that they would stay sitting in the deserted theatre till morning, Wedelkind bounced to his feet and declared that he and Hume had “business to attend to”.

“Paul, I’ll tell you what,” he said, shaking his hand. “I’ve been a bit flippant about your little humiliation, haven’t I? Mind, you could be toiling away on society portraits by now, so really you should be thanking me. Anyway, come tomorrow night, with old Arthur here, and I’ll make amends.”

The next evening Paul returned to the theatre where he met Hume, seated alongside an odd young man whom he introduced simply as Klessmann. As Paul sat down Klessmann stood up and offered his hand.

“Very pleased,” he mumbled, with a slight bow. He squinted from under bushy black eyebrows and lids that looked as if they’d been encrusted with sleep picked off a few moments before. His face was thin and pale, with some patches of dry, flaking skin here and there. A pointed nose jutting out over a pinched little mouth created the unmistakable impression of a beak, ready to give you a peck for your trouble. Hume couldn’t conceal a smile as Paul took in the strangeness of Klessmann’s appearance.

“I understand you are returning to Vienna,” he said to Paul, in somewhat stilted English.

“Returning? No, I’m going. For the first time.”

“Yes,” Klessmann said apologetically. “That’s what I meant.”

Hume, eager to get the formalities over and done with before the curtain went up, hurried things along. “Klessmann knows Vienna. Max thought he might be of help to you as you settle in.”

“He did?” Paul said. “Very cordial of him.”

“I’d be very pleased,” Klessmann added.

Paul examined the blank bird-face. Klessmann’s voice sounded wooden.

The band cranked up from the wings and the curtains parted on the same scene Paul and Hume had seen the previous evening. Wedelkind’s performance lost nothing with repetition. His face contorted, his limbs trembled, his feet stamped, he threw his head back and waved his arms in spasms of dementia. Paul laughed less riotously than Hume. Klessmann, however, just smiled amusedly.

“You’ve already seen the play?” Paul asked him during a lull.

“Yes,” he answered.

“You don’t seem very interested.”

“No, no. I am most interested.”

Soon after, however, Paul noticed that Klessmann’s eyes were closing and that his chin was falling onto his chest. As his neck bent forward, his head almost touching the table, he jerked himself back into an erect posture and opened his eyes. A second later his eyes began to close again and with the same wilting movement his head lowered itself towards the table. Hume, absorbed in the play, hadn’t noticed at all, but Paul watched curiously out of the corner of his eye, eager not to give Klessmann the impression that he was being unduly scrutinised. Paul tried to guess his age. He couldn’t be more than twenty-five, but there was a lethargy about him, a washed–out, sickly look that made him appear quite decrepit. Paul imagined that the dry patches around his nose and hairline were caused by an obscure industrial disease slowly eating away at his skin. The poor bloke looks exhausted, he thought, wondering at Hume’s obliviousness. Finally he nudged the antiquarian and pointed to Klessmann, sound asleep as his head hit the table.

“Oh, all right,” Hume whispered impatiently. “He said he’d already eaten something.”

“You mean the poor bugger is starving?”

Hume waved off the question, trying to concentrate on the play. Wedelkind was leaping around in nervous consternation as the police lumbered across the stage in pursuit. Paul chuckled as he stood up and tapped Klessmann on the shoulder.

“Come on,” he said, lifting him up by the arm. “We’re going to get some food.”

In his stupor he muttered something in rapid German that Paul didn’t quite catch. Klessmann’s eyes rolled back into his bony, angular head until, returning to his senses, he stood up by himself and groggily insisted that he was quite all right.