The White Body of Evening (23 page)

“Don’t be stupid,” Paul said. “You’re a wreck.”

“But Max?” he said, rubbing his eyes.”We must be here to present ourselves.”

“We’ll be back in a minute,” Paul said, leading him out through the theatre onto the street, where the cold air of early winter caught them both full in the face.

In a tavern across the street Klessmann sat timidly while Paul ordered him bread, beer and soup. He lingered over the meal for a moment, embarrassed by his pitiful situation.

“Are you going to eat that?” Paul asked finally, as Klessmann picked at some crumbs with his fingertips. “I’ll tell you what,” he added impatiently, “I’ll go back in and tell Hume where we are, and Max can come and meet us after the show.”

Klessmann smiled wanly. Paul lingered on the street by the window just long enough to see him fall upon the food like a wolf, slurping up the soup in great spoonfuls that, too big for his narrow mouth, dribbled over his chin, which he hastily and unashamedly wiped clean with the cuff of his jacket. When Paul returned, Klessmann had sucked down the last of the beer. The soup bowl was mopped clean.

“I can’t go on calling you Klessmann,” he said. “What’s your Christian name?”

“Theodore,” he answered.

“And how is it that you are half-starving?”

“Don’t overstate the case.”

“Do they keep you locked up in a box somewhere, on a diet of thin air and darkness?”

“Who is ‘they’?” He furrowed his brow at the question, as if it presented a grammatical quandary.

Paul shrugged. A fireplace in the corner cast a warm, flickering light over the plaster walls. Klessmann’s face looked like a squashed cumquat in its glow.

“I have a nice place for you to stay in Vienna,” Klessmann said.

“You don’t say?”

“Very comfortable, in the heart of the city. I wired this morning. I hope it will suit you.”

“I’m sure it will suit me wonderfully,” Paul said. “But why take the trouble?”

Klessmann looked puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

Before Paul could say another word, Wedelkind came stumbling into the tavern, Hume close behind. He clamped his hands on Paul’s shoulders and gave them a hearty shake.

“Now don’t say I’m not trying to make amends,”Wedelkind said as he sat down next to Paul.

He still had traces of make-up smeared over his face, and had forgotten to wipe off his lip paint altogether, giving his mouth a garish sensuality that Paul found repulsive.

“Klessmann is just the man to lead you through the maze of Viennese humbug, the decorative nonsense of the Habsburgs, the Pandora’s box of God-only-knows-what, streets paved with culture and all the rest of it. And he knows the difference between a
Weib
and a
Frau,
if you catch my drift. Oh, Arthur, I wish I were young again.”

Glancing at Klessmann, who sat dumb as Wedelkind babbled on incoherently, Paul doubted he’d be able to guide him as far as the end of the street.

“Klessmann is a protégé of mine, you might say,”Wedelkind said, slowing himself down to catch his breath.

“Is that right?” Paul said. “You might feed him once in a while.”

Wedelkind’s eyes wandered to the empty soup bowl. “Don’t tell me you haven’t been eating?” His mouth dropped open as he looked imploringly at Klessmann. “Oh, Arthur, don’t tell me you allowed this.” He clutched his head. “You see, Paul, I’ve been taking care of Klessmann, and I take any criticism of my custodial duties quite to heart.” He shook his head in disappointment, looking a bit exhausted, as if this final burst of histrionic nonsense had taken its toll.

“You’ll have your work cut out with young Walters here,” he said to Klessmann. “I expect you to take good care of him. And now, my friends, Arthur and I have business to attend to, don’t we?”

“I’ll say we do,” Hume added with a grin.

“All the best to you both,”Wedelkind said, bowing farewell as he stood up. “So glad I could make amends, Paul.” He paused over the table. “We all even? Clean slate? What d’ya say?” He raised his hairless eyebrows, as if he needed an answer quick smart before he vanished into the smoke drift.

Paul couldn’t help laughing.

“Never mind.” He snapped his fingers and headed for the door, Hume at his heels.

The next day Klessmann was waiting on the street outside Paul’s hotel, wearing a battered felt hat with a wide brim and pointed peak. He’d already ordered a cab to take them to the station.

“You don’t mean to say that Wedelkind was serious last night, do you, Theodore?” Paul asked.

“Yes,” he said with a lilt, as if the question were a bit obtuse. “I’m taking you to Vienna.”

Paul’s case was almost too much for Klessmann. He wrestled with it for a moment before Paul came to his aid and flung it into the cab.

Getting Klessmann to talk on the way to the station was difficult. He answered Paul’s questions, but otherwise concealed himself behind his lethargy, as if he didn’t have the strength to speak. Paul soon found his silence draining. On the train, as the cold, grey landscape rushed by, as other passengers came and went, lingering in the passageway outside the compartments to smoke or chat, Paul too was eager to distract himself. Having come so far with barely a second thought, he now felt momentarily disoriented, and longed for a conversation, the sound of his own voice, to stave off the sense of unreality growing within him. Klessmann was no help. Finally Paul lost patience and asked him bluntly how he got mixed up with Wedelkind.

“I can’t easily explain,” Klessmann said, closing his eyes.

Disappointed, Paul turned to the window, fixing on his own reflection in the glass, watching it floating through a blur of light and shadow.

“And you? How did you get mixed up with him?” Klessmann returned, eyes still closed.

“Just as you said,” Paul said abruptly. “It’s not that easy to explain.”

He thought he saw Klessmann smile as he dozed off, letting the steady movement of the train rock him to sleep. Outside it was dark. Germany flashed by the window, frozen and desolate – dykes dug into the brown earth, patches of snow hardening into ice, the glow of fires burning on the horizon. Paul had never seen winter like this before, a winter in which everything dies away before it can be reborn.

Half an hour later Klessmann awoke with a sudden convulsion of his body that caught Paul’s attention. The German scratched his eyes like a cat. Paul wondered that he didn’t hack them right out of their sockets with his long, bony fingers and pointed fingernails.

“We must be nearing Berlin,” Paul said. Klessmann’s red eyes, now opening into their usual squint, rested on him from under those worryingly thick eyebrows.

“Are you hungry?” Paul asked, remembering that he had not seen him eat all day.

Klessmann shook his head.

“Cigarette then?”

Klessmann took the packet Paul offered him and rummaged in his pocket, hauling out some matches along with a length of cotton, a tiny needle kit, some lint, and a few stray coins.

“What are you reading?” Klessmann asked. He lit the cigarette and sucked in his hollow cheeks as he inhaled, coughing when the smoke hit his lungs.

Paul had his father’s notebook on his lap. The landscape rushing by him had evoked the memory of the journey he had made with Albert to Ballarat. He remembered the sense of revelation as he surrendered his control of the pencil to the plunging movement of the train, the sense of wonder at being directed by the oblivious energy of the locomotive. And the German winter, he thought, was like one of the landscapes his father had invented as he sought refuge from the tedium of Melbourne. Dense forests, cottage dwellings rooted in a distant past, birds of ill-omen moving across the horizon, fleeing a catastrophe or hurrying to a new one.

“It’s something my father wrote before he died,” Paul said after a moment of hesitation.

“Was he a writer?”

“After a manner of speaking.”

“May I?” Klessmann stretched his hand across to Paul who handed him the notebook and sank uncomfortably into his seat while the German’s eyes wandered over the page.

“My father died of cholera,” Klessmann said indifferently. “He always thought it was a worker’s disease.” It was as much as he had managed to say the whole trip.

Klessmann turned his attention to the notebook, studying the tiny handwriting with increasing intensity, taking in deep drags of his cigarette and letting the smoke float out through his open mouth. Paul in turn studied his responses, waiting for the slightest sign of criticism or approbation. He didn’t know why it mattered to him, the response of this sickly German. But it did, very much. If a person as obscure and rootless as Klessmann couldn’t see anything in the writing, then he’d have to ask himself again what he in fact saw, other than a dubious paternal inheritance, a wasted life and the spectral image of a waterlogged body drifting through the silty water of the Yarra.

Klessmann suddenly jerked his head over his left shoulder as he read. At first Paul thought the movement was merely the result of the train hitting a bump in the track that he hadn’t quite felt. But then Klessmann did the same thing again, the same jerk to the left, this time accompanied by a slight contraction of his cheek. He seemed completely unaware. When it happened a third time he raised his eyes to find Paul looking at him curiously.

“It happens when I get excited,” Klessmann said. “Or nervous.” He jerked his head again and now his whole face contracted into a spasm. “They call it a tic. I … I am going to need some medicine,” he said, handing the notebook back to Paul as he jerked his head two or three times in rapid succession over his shoulder. Paul leant over and put his hand on Klessmann’s shoulder, as if to steady him.

“It’s not dangerous,” he said. “But I’m going to need some medicine or I m-may end up being quite an embarrassment to you.”

Fortunately the train was now on the outskirts of Berlin. At any other time, Paul would have been riveted by the city, but now Klessmann’s condition was deteriorating. He jerked and grimaced and convulsed. He wasn’t in pain and could still speak very calmly in between the spasms, but to Paul, it looked as though he was on the verge of losing complete control of his body.

When the train pulled into the station Paul was flustered. They had to wait overnight for a connection to Vienna, which left from the other side of the city, and needed to find a hotel. Paul had a porter take his suitcase and guided Klessmann by the arm onto the platform, where his spasms had people clearing a path for him, snickering, and looking mildly disturbed. Steam and the smell of burning brakes wafted along the walkway. It was already late in the day and the platform had a surreal gloom about it, as if the grime and dust of the station had managed to colour the air with a dirty brownish tinge.

Outside the station, Klessmann pointed at a street opposite them running towards a large church spire. As they made their way towards it, Paul tried to take in as much as he could. There were some street vendors, a huddle of urchins on a corner, the odd factory worker and a few shopgirls. A grubby man sold newspapers from under a stand. A fat woman fried sausages, her head wrapped in a scarf. Bitter cold, the smell of roasted chestnuts mingling with exhaust, blue sparks from a streetcar grinding to a halt along its tracks. Paul imagined all the streets of the city twisting towards them like parts of a great maze, concentrating their energy on this one spot, where a strange, dreamlike calm prevailed in the midst of all the activity.

“Where are we?” Paul asked, dazed.

“Z-Z-Zoo,” Klessmann said. “I-I-I must … to b-b-bed.” He broke off, his whole body convulsing, and gestured towards a hotel on the corner in front of them. As Paul put his arm around him they made their way awkwardly across the road and into the foyer. Paul paid for a room and asked the concierge for a doctor. Klessmann shook his head, managed to extract a prescription from his pocket and explained in stuttering, broken speech that he needed the medicine right away. He handed it to the porter, his hand trembling. When the two of them were safely in the hotel room, Klessmann gave into the spasms racking his body and contorted horribly on the bed. He seemed to know what to do. He snatched a coaster off the bedstand and bit down on the corner, indicating with a wave and a jerk that Paul should hold it firmly in his mouth while they waited for the porter to return.

After he swallowed the medicine it took him half an hour to resume some semblance of normality. Paul watched the convulsions weaken as Klessmann fell into an exhausted sleep, a slight jerk and tic the only visible sign of his condition. When he was snoring lightly, hunched uncomfortably in his jacket, head cocked to one side, Paul too finally closed his eyes in a reading chair on the opposite side of the room.

He woke up sometime during the night with the power of old habit so strongly etched into his mind that he momentarily forgot where he was. He was sitting in a chair and had woken up stiff. Across the other side of a strange room, a young man with thin black hair and a sharp nose was bent over a book busily working away on something with a worn down stub of a pencil. Only an oil lamp illuminated the scene, creating deep pockets of shadow just out of the reach of its pale, greenish flicker. The young man held a cigarette in one hand. The thick smoke filling the room made Paul doubt he was awake at all. He rubbed his eyes. Where was he? For an instant he had the uncanny sensation of looking at himself sitting at the table opposite. He stirred in his chair.

Klessmann looked up at him.

“How are you?” Paul asked wearily. “It must be the middle of the night.”

Klessmann still jerked his head over his shoulder, but now very slightly and at such intervals that it barely bothered him.

“I am well. Thank you.” He seemed a bit embarrassed. “Thank you for your kindness. If your friend Max had seen that little performance he would never have let me leave.”

The comment piqued Paul’s curiosity. He stood up and walked over to the table.

“What do you mean?”

“He recruited me as an epileptic freak,” Klessmann said. “He trawls the madhouses and hospitals of Hamburg like a body-snatcher. But with the medicine I can control my condition. I was no real use to him. Perhaps I can be of more use to you. I have taken a liberty with your father’s work.”