The White Body of Evening (24 page)

Albert’s notebook was open on the table and Klessmann had started making notes in German on separate sheets of paper. The ashtray beside him was nearly full. Paul took one of his own cigarettes off the table. He’d never got the packet back from Klessmann and saw that it was almost empty. Klessmann pretended not to notice.

“Your father – how do I start with this, Paul? I think he was a genius misanthrope.”

“What are you doing?” Paul said, still half asleep.

“With your permission, as executor of the literary estate, I’m translating.”

Paul glanced at the notebook and at Klessmann’s tentative renditions. His father had constructed an awful scene in which he was pulling a woman along a street. She was struggling to keep up with him, almost tripping. Then some curtains were drawn aside and they were standing against a dirty brick wall streaked with grime that stuck to their skin. There was a rank smell, like rotten meat. He put his hand to her cold cheek. “Please,” she begged him, “not here.”

It was a matter of a few lines, scratched neatly down the page, no punctuation, no sense of coherence. It was simply an image, a suggestion. Although Paul read it with some difficulty, Klessmann’s German had done something wonderful with it. There were six lines of bare, brooding verse crafted with the care of an artisan. The other pages on the table indicated that he had been at this for some time, that he had gone through a number of drafts and that he was still not nearly done.

“You see,” Klessmann said after a while, “my condition is aggravated by my excitement. I hold your father responsible.”

Paul didn’t say anything. It was almost three o’clock in the morning. He was suddenly nervous. He couldn’t quite explain why. The city outside had come to a dead standstill. Everything was unreal. The clutter in front of him, the ashtray, the paper, the smoke, and most of all Klessmann – invalid, foundling, vagabond Klessmann – looking at him like a frail bird.

“Paul,” he said, “I am to assume your father never published this?”

Paul nodded.

“So let me try to make something of it. In German. I have no notion of what passes in English, but in German I will bring it all to life, like ghosts rising from their graves.”

Paul was uneasy about it, but he hadn’t the heart or the energy to dampen Klessmann’s resolve.

He continued to tinker away through the night. On the train the next morning he was still at it, spreading pieces of notepaper out around their compartment as they left the Eastern station. He was maniacal, Paul thought, as only a true artist is. It put him in mind of his own failure. Hadn’t he felt the same irresistible urge, the same drive, the same impossible desire to quell a need that only grew with every brushstroke?

“Your mother,” Klessmann said, looking up at Paul with a little jerk of the head.”I am very curious about her.”

The train was picking up speed. Paul noticed that its movement was disturbing the cursive flourish of Klessmann’s handwriting.

“You’re going to have a hard time writing as we move,” he said.

“Irrelevant. I’ll type this out in Vienna. We’ll need a machine. Fifty kronen, one hundred. I don’t really know.”

Klessmann twitched as the train jostled them in their seats. Outside it was grey. It felt to Paul as if they were on the edge of another Ice Age. If his father could have seen this country, he thought, what might he have been? What might he still be? Klessmann’s image of ghosts rising up from their graves gripped him like two frozen hands closing around his spine.

K
lessmann worked virtually without a break throughout their journey. In Prague he needed more medicine. Paul left him alone with the family archive in a café near the station, grateful for an excuse to get away and wander intrepidly through the winding streets, marvelling at the masonry, the spires and the turrets. Melbourne might as well have never existed. It was unimaginable for him now and try as he might to retrieve it from his memory, it was mute and powerless against the splendour that surrounded him. I’ll never go back there, he said to himself. I’ve shaken myself free. But he had to hurry back to Klessmann, who was working himself up into a frenzied state as he read through his father’s notebooks. This was aggravating his tic as the medicine wore off and his nervous energy began to segue into more violent seizures.

When they finally arrived in Vienna there was still no rest for either of them. The family archive had saturated Klessmann so thoroughly that he couldn’t think or talk about anything else. He hurried Paul along, almost stumbling on the cobblestones in his haste, nervously clutching a bundle of papers under his arm.

“The Ringstraße can wait,” Klessmann said. “It can all wait. It will still be here tomorrow.”

He hailed a cab and directed the driver to the hotel. Paul gazed out longingly at the foggy streets and sombre tenements. Yellow haloes floated in the cold, shadows stretched down alleyways, curving away into darkness.

The hotel apartment was four floors above the street. It consisted of an anteroom, a sitting room with a writing desk and a chaise longue, and a bedroom leading into a small, tiled bathroom. Paul was relieved to be there at last. Klessmann spread Albert’s notebooks over the table, arranging things into an orderly work space, while Paul took stock in a more leisurely way.

“Paul, it’s very late. If you are settled here I’ll leave you now and return in the morning to continue the translation.”

Klessmann stood up, hat in hand, and moved towards the door.

“What are you talking about? It’s the middle of the night, where are you going to go? And in your state?”

“I am quite all right.
Bettgeher.
I have a place waiting.”

Klessmann’s eyes narrowed fractionally as they fixed upon Paul’s.

“Bettgeher?”
Paul didn’t really know what he was talking about. He puzzled out the meaning of the word. “You have a place to sleep. Very well then.”

“I’ll return again tomorrow.” He bowed with a jerk of his head and left.

It was almost midnight. For the first time in two days Paul was truly by himself. The room was eerie in the wake of Klessmann’s sudden departure. Paul opened the door onto the hallway to make sure he wasn’t crouching at the keyhole or sleeping bat-like in the rafters above the stairwell.

He closed the door, threw himself onto the bed and lit a cigarette. He was exhausted, too exhausted to sleep. He stood up and walked over to the desk where Klessmann had arranged the translations into a neat pile beside Albert’s notebooks. He had left four pencils tied with a piece of cotton from his sewing kit between them, as if he were anxious that they not get confused in his absence. Paul sat down and, careful not to disturb the order of the table, glanced over Klessmann’s translations. He could recognise his father’s thoughts and images in a phrase here and there, and these served to evoke the rest of the sentence even when the German was of such complexity that he couldn’t read it with ease. He remembered Klessmann saying he was curious about his mother. Paul saw his father dragging her down a feculent alleyway off Little Lonsdale Street where vermin scurried through the rubbish left to rot behind the dubious establishments that thrived along those backblocks.”Not here,” she sobbed.

What did Klessmann know about that world? Where in God’s name had he gone? Paul regretted that he had not been quick enough to follow him and imagined the German jerking his way into a nest hidden under the street. When he wasn’t twitching, Klessmann had a gentle, almost scholarly air about him. But there was something off-putting in the black eyebrows and the sharp nose. Paul could imagine him studying in a library. He could just as readily imagine him burrowing under the ground with his sharp nails and crawling into some abysmal hollow for the night.

When he finally dozed off his dreams were overwhelmed by the city, though he’d barely set eyes on it. He explained to his sister how opulent, dark and lyrical it was, but his words sounded hollow, like something he might have read in a book. “Coming here is like returning to a place that I’ve always known in my heart,” he said to her. She smiled. Matthews stood behind her, touching her somewhere that Paul couldn’t quite see. “I don’t mean that it actually looks familiar,” he continued, “but you recognise its possibilities.” Ondine closed her eyes, tilted her head back and breathed deeply as Matthews ran his hand up behind her ears. “The Ringstraße, for instance,” he went on. Ondine was standing in a corset. There was something he wanted to tell her about the Ringstraße. How it circles the old city. How it is lined with grand public buildings, like the parliament, the opera house and the university. How the place looks wonderful, just wonderful. He hated the sound of his own voice, so trite, so bloody trite. His sister wasn’t even looking at him now. She’d lost interest, but still his voice droned on. He couldn’t shut up. He was rambling into one cliché after another, making an utter fool of himself. He felt sick with embarrassment. When he finally awoke into the wan light of his room, it was minutes before his mortification dissolved and he could leave the dream behind him.

He barely had time to dress when there was an abrupt knock at the door. Klessmann was standing in the hallway, hat in hand, his red eyes looking no better for a night’s rest. Paul stepped back, already feeling wearied by the nervous energy Klessmann brought with him. As he stepped into the room and made his way over to the writing desk, he seemed to examine it for any sign that Paul might have disturbed his work during the night.

“You must think me an eccentric,” he said as he sat down and opened Albert’s notebook.

“No, but I’m damned anxious to get out of here and have a look around.”

Klessmann’s tic was under control, but to make sure he swallowed a handful of pills before he untied his pencils.

“Your father was an eccentric. How did he manage to survive out there?”

There was no hint of condescension in this. Klessmann spoke with complete indifference. The phrase “out there” had a peculiar hollowness to it, as if it had been emptied of all its possible connotations. Convicts, the massacres, gold rushes, doomed explorers, the violence of settlement – none of it had ever happened for Klessmann.

“Do you know what Oscar Wilde said about your colonies? Once is an adventure, twice is insanity. He’s the only English author I read.”

“Irish, actually, Ted,” Paul said. Klessmann seemed not to hear him. “I would really like to get out a bit and look around. Maybe introduce myself at the academy. I’m a painter, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Can I leave you here?”

“Of course.” Klessmann stood up and fumbled about in his coat pocket, finally producing a grubby piece of paper with an address written on it.

“I’ll need a typewriter,” he said. “Second–hand, of course.”

The impudence of the fellow, Paul thought as he walked out onto the street. But in fact, he didn’t care. The money was a matter of indifference to him. He was flush with Winton’s funds and thrilled to be finally on the streets of Vienna. It was early. The city was still rousing itself. He walked wide–eyed along the Graben to the Stephansdom, and then headed down Kärntner Straße to the opera house and the Ringstraße. It was overwhelming – the detail and density of an imperial city draped in ornaments of its own authority.

Whereas Melbourne still had streets where glutinous yellow mud stuck to the soles of your shoes as you walked, the vistas that now confronted him put that sort of disorder at a convenient remove. A flow of automobiles, cabs, horse-drawn omnibuses and trams jolted over a wide expanse of cobblestones. Most of the tenements were higher than almost anything he had seen in Melbourne save the steeples of the churches and the dome of the Exhibition. The public façades were grander, the masonry was more elaborate, and the monuments were more resonant with the history they commemorated. Melbourne was a drab place by comparison. One reality quickly eclipsed the other. “Ich
bin hier, ich bin hier,”
Paul said to himself as he pushed his dream of the previous night well away and strolled off with the pleasure of his aimlessness evident in his gait.

It was late in the day when he got back to the hotel, overwhelmed by the splendour of the city but tired from so much walking and finally from having to lug the old Remington Klessmann had ordered back to the room. He was still hunched over the table when Paul opened the door and lumbered towards him, eager to unload the machine onto the desk. Klessmann waved him away.

“Over there in the corner if you please.”

Pompous ass, Paul thought to himself. He sat down on the edge of his bed in a huff.

“Have you eaten anything?” Paul asked from the bedroom. “I’m anxious that you don’t starve to death before you’ve finished.”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Klessmann said as he meticulously crossed out a word and corrected the line with another, written above it in a minuscule hand. On the page before him was a wall of words, cross-outs and corrections, connected by neat vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines that deviated into a curve only when the congestion on the page made a straight line impossible. The more curved lines there were, the more unworkable the page became, until finally Klessmann transcribed what he wanted from the maze, spacing the lines out across a clean page.

“Some coffee though,” Klessmann said eventually, not even bothering to raise his eyes.”Some coffee and a cigarette would help me to concentrate.”

The next day was the same. Paul realised Klessmann was working to a routine. He’d arrive at eight o’clock in the morning, as Paul was rousing himself. After a handful of pills he’d begin work, occupying the room while Paul sauntered around the Ringstraße, lingered in front of the fine public buildings and examined the artworks within.

Unable to take the Art Academy exam until the new year, Paul quickly got into the habit of spending the afternoon writing letters or slouching over a coffee in the Café Central. Past the alcoves and down a narrow hallway, the high glass roof of the main court reminded him of the arcades at home. Murky light filtered down over the green tablecloths. He had the same deep-sea feeling, and imagined he was sitting at the bottom of a lagoon watching the famed literary society of the city float past him. It was the middle of December. The cold was bracing, but it also invigorated him. As he stumbled out of the warm, smoky interior of the Café Central onto Herrengasse his tiredness left him and he could walk for hours more, finally arriving back at his room in time to see Klessmann ordering his writing materials and readying for his departure.