The White Body of Evening (28 page)

Paul felt faint. A wave of nervousness washed through him as he looked anxiously around the room, where eyes were either fixed upon him, or just as deliberately averted. His knees felt weak, his palms sweated. His first instinct was to run out into the street and call the whole thing off, to throw the book away and forget that it had ever been written.

“Your father has turned a damned whore into a virgin,” Eisner said. The others at the table lowered their voices when he spoke and directed their attention towards him. “I understand he lived many years in Australia.”

“Yes,” said Paul. As soon as he spoke his panic dissipated, but his body remained tense. He still glanced over his shoulder every once in a while. The place had settled back into its usual repose, but Paul couldn’t shake the sense that he was being watched from all directions. He glanced up at the high ceiling, half expecting to find a face gazing down at him through the glass.

“Well, that is probably what saved him from the rot,” Eisner said. “You should write a little something about him – how he got there, what he did. A savage pilgrim,” he added thoughtfully. “A German Rimbaud.”

“Or a German Baudelaire,” a younger man said. “Amazing. I wonder what Felix will think.”

“And Kraus,” said another.

The misconception under which his father’s poems had been received was now clear to Paul. None of them had any idea that the poems had been translated from English. They had found the miracle of a German voice in exile, a vein of linguistic purity that had survived the decadence of Europe and the barbarity of the colonies to strike back at the centre with renewed force.

“Where did he come from originally?” Eisner asked.

“Boppard, on the Rhine,” Paul said without hesitation. It was the town in which Anna’s mother had been born.

“And why on earth Australia?” Eisner asked. “Did you see those clowns from Berlin in the Prater? Apparently a young Australian woman made a bit of a fuss until the whole thing was explained.”

There were some sniggers around the table and Paul laughed as well. He ordered a coffee, lit a cigarette, and began to fill in the details of his father’s life. Immigration, gold, poverty, the drudgery of Melbourne, the
danse macabre
of married life. They listened attentively. Someone made notes. It was Eisner’s secretary, Bressler later told Paul as he shook his hand on the street.

“It has all worked out very nicely,” he said. “A coup in fact. And a fine opening for you as well.”

Paul had managed to lie flawlessly throughout the entire conversation. But now, as Bressler left him, he was again overcome by the nervousness that had seized him inside. He caught a glimpse of himself in the window of the Café Central. His exterior was unruffled. He held his face still, but noticed that it seemed a bit too stiff. He tried to practise a more relaxed posture. He let his shoulders hang a little lower, tried to relax the muscles in his neck, but still his face retained the same mask-like appearance – flat cheeks, loose mouth and dulled eyes. He tried to smile at himself, contorting his mouth into a grotesque wooden grin. He shook his hands at his side, as if he might be able to shake the stiffness from his frame. He had the comical sensation of having to play-act at being himself.

Nothing, nothing, nothing, a voice inside him echoed through his hollowness, keeping pace with his footfalls as he turned towards Michaelerplatz. His flesh prickled and he stopped cold. From the very instant Eisner had offered him a seat he had felt queer. The scene inside flashed before him. He turned back towards the Café Central, just as Klessmann was walking out onto the sidewalk, his beady eyes fixed accusingly on Paul.

“Why have you been ignoring me?” he said flatly. He was rake thin and his rough, unshaven cheeks were unhealthily red as he coughed ominously into his hand.

Paul rubbed his eyes. “What?”

“Every day I wait for you and you look right through me. Am I so thin that I’ve become invisible?” He didn’t stop for an answer, turning his back on Paul and walking away.

“Now look here,” Paul said, following him. “That’s utter nonsense.”

Klessmann shooed him away and kept walking, hunching his shoulders and drawing in his arms so that he could dart between the cracks in the pedestrian traffic like a mouse squeezing itself through narrow skirting-board crevices.

Paul went after him. Klessmann didn’t turn around once, though his swift steps and skilful feints around slower pedestrians suggested that he sensed Paul’s presence behind him. He walked in the direction opposite to that which he’d taken on the night Paul had followed him, and kept up the same frantic pace the whole way – through the city, over the canal, through crowds of peddlers, hawkers and day labourers, into the slums of Leopoldstadt, along the edge of the Augarten, finally turning into a street of tenements near the train station. Paul noted the building into which he vanished and waited outside for a few minutes. He was exhausted. Klessmann had done the whole journey, at least a mile Paul thought, at a freakish speed. He leant against a lamppost and caught his breath in the fading twilight, then walked over the road and into the building.

The place smelt horrible. The air was stagnant and the absence of lighting in the stairwell gave him the sense that it was choking on its own darkness. A few other stragglers were entering with him: an older woman with her hair held up in a net and her bare arms stained with a brown dye, and a youth whose face was black with soot. Paul followed them onto the second floor where the walls had been demolished to expand the floor space. What he saw staggered the senses. It was like a scene from the inferno. The interconnected rooms were dark, but for the bare illumination of the odd gas lamp hanging from a wall, and without furniture, but for the mattresses covering the floor. Paul stepped through a sea of exhausted bodies. Some rolled uneasily under filthy sheets and blankets, others coughed hideously or scratched away at scabious infestations. He covered his nose with his handkerchief and tried to breathe lightly.

Wedged up against a bit of wall he found Klessmann huddling into his jacket, panting with exhaustion. Paul picked him up. He was so light that he could carry him in his arms as if he were a small child. Klessmann’s eyes resisted, but his body was too enervated to protest. In the cab, heading back over the canal, he looked at Paul coldly.

“I will try hard not to splutter over you,” he said.

As he slouched in the corner, Paul noticed that his tic had vanished. It was as if his whole body were slowing down, drawing its last reserves of energy into itself, paring back to a few basic functions.

Paul carried him up to his room, put him down on the chaise longue and instantly wrote a note to Laura, asking her to bring a doctor. When she finally arrived with a Dr Hasek, he greeted her in the anteroom.

“What’s wrong, Paul?” The concern in her voice made it evident that she thought he was ill.

“Not me.” He gestured to the body on the lounge.

As Dr Hasek crouched over Klessmann, Laura edged closer, covering her mouth with her hands in disbelief. The blood drained from her face and her arm felt cold as Paul touched it. Klessmann opened his eyes and looked up at her, the hint of a smile creeping over his bird-like visage. He opened his mouth to wheeze and gulped at the air around him as the doctor pressed his chest and took his pulse. When Dr Hasek stood up and motioned to Paul confidentially, Laura quickly knelt down beside the invalid and took his hand, patting it calmly in hers.

“She is an angel,” Klessmann mumbled in a dead monotone. “A good angel.”

She looked at him, puzzled by the tone of his voice.

“Aber Weib oder Frau?” he said.

She didn’t quite understand.

“Yes,” she said softly.

When the doctor left, Paul touched her on the shoulder and lifted her away from Klessmann, who had closed his eyes as she sat beside him.

“He’s going to die, isn’t he?” she said.

Paul nodded.

“I’m going to stay here, Paul, and help you look after him. I’ll send a note to Mother. Don’t tell me otherwise.”

During the night Klessmann mumbled. For the most part he was incoherent, though Paul thought he could hear traces of his father’s poetry floating through the delirium, as if the poems had been dismantled and the phrases flung like bits of rubbish back into a formless babble.

In the middle of the night, while Laura slept in the bedroom, Klessmann raised himself on an elbow. “You cannot know how disappointed I am, Paul,” he said. It was the first moment of clarity he’d shown for hours. “Disappointed,” he repeated, the word sapping him of his energy as he sunk back down onto his back.

“Ted,” Paul said as gently as he could, “what did you do with my father’s notebooks?”

Klessmann turned to him and smiled. “I ate them.”

Paul looked at him in disbelief. He noticed that Klessmann was clutching the book, holding it over his chest as he wheezed. How had he found it? Had Laura given it to him? Klessmann closed his eyes. The thing was like a gravestone, weighing him down, effacing him, pushing him into oblivion. His hands tightened around it as if he were trying with all his might to push it from him. Then his hands wilted a little. The book fell onto his chest and stayed there, perfectly still.

Paul had no idea how long he had been standing over the corpse. Finally, as the sky outside lightened, Laura touched his shoulder. Her hand sent a shudder from his skull down to the floor. She had glided across to him so silently that he’d had no sense of her presence beside him.

She looked down at the wasted face. Already Klessmann seemed inhuman to her, the skeleton pushing its way through the skin, moulding the worn flesh in its own image. She stood in front of Paul and took his hands, looking into his eyes. She had an image of Klessmann flung into the world like a delicate bird, buffeted by the wind and finally hurled to the ground, crushed against the stones of the city.

“We are just thrown out there,” she said, a shiver running down her spine as she glimpsed the futility. “He was an artist, wasn’t he?”

“He translated my father’s poems.”

“Yes, he told me.”

She looked again at Klessmann. Paul followed her eyes as they wandered from the book, still lying on his chest, to his open mouth and the eyes sinking into their sockets.

It was an hour before they could get Klessmann’s body moved to the morgue. The morgue attendant left the contents of Klessmann’s pockets on the table beside the typewriter: some matches, some cigarette butts, a few loose coins and an old poster, folded into a small square and worn thin with time. It showed a photograph of Klessmann’s face contorted into an expression of epileptic anguish. Underneath were the words “Hamburg’s Theatre of Derangement”, jagged across the page. Paul folded it into his pocket and cleaned up the other bits of detritus.

After the body was wrapped and hauled down into the street, Laura stood in the window niche, watching the men load it onto the back of a horse-drawn cart.

“Paul,” she said. “The
chambre séparée.
I think I’d like to go there.”

She remained motionless, still staring down onto the street. He walked up behind her and put his hands around her waist. She turned to him and he kissed her, but her lips were shut and her face unmoved.

“Not here,” she said. “I want to go back to that place. The
chambre séparée.
Meet me in the foyer this evening at eight. Don’t speak to me. Don’t say anything to me. Not a word.”

She pressed his hand and left him. The morning broke through the window and the sound of traffic on the street below grew gradually louder until the unreality of the night withered away and he was finally able to lie down. In his waking dreams he saw Klessmann buried in some obscure colonial grave while his father ghosted through the streets of Vienna, a posthumous celebrity extolled in the city’s coffee houses and
feuilletons
as a modern master.

As he lay there he thought about the impression Klessmann had made on Laura. “He was an artist?” she’d asked, and he saw, behind the question, her secret admiration of the man’s suffering as he lay dying before her eyes.

And their rendezvous that evening? He couldn’t shake the idea that the thought of Klessmann had somehow led her to suggest it. Again he felt the emptiness open up within him. He had wasted more than six months playing at the fantasy of art with an increasingly sceptical attitude until he’d given it up altogether and degenerated into a flaccid dilettante, a tourist. It disgusted him. He couldn’t go to Laura like that. He couldn’t bear it. He got up and paced the room nervously, feeling his limbs tense as he pushed against the invisible wall that had closed around him.

He reached for his coat, pulling the poster of Klessmann out and rushing to his desk, where he folded it out flat in front of him. He saw Wedelkind’s outlandish lunacy parading across the stage, arms waving, body convulsing, hair standing up on end. He saw a body hacked to pieces by a twitching maniac as the instinctual terror of the bestial and the perverted burst through onto the stage. It would be enough to unsettle the strongest will and the most rational mind. He put a piece of paper in the typewriter and started hammering away at the keys.

The epileptic maniac. The maniac of Hamburg. A poet drives himself into a homicidal frenzy. A twitching, jerking maniac prowling the streets of St Pauli. A murdered prostitute. A slashed throat. A bleeding body in a brothel. The
chambre séparée. The
poet’s tic. Klessmann. The tic.

He stopped, looking down at the sheet, his heart beating with excitement. His mind was made up. Bressler would love it. He would call it “The Tic”.

B
y the middle of 1913, Hamish McDermott was working at the offices of the
Melburnian
thanks to the intervention of Robert Walters, who was then chief editor. The two had met coincidentally at the Railway Hotel and Hamish had complained about his job in the hospital. Robert, fondly remembering him as a boy and conscious of the fact they had both loitered about St Vincent Place pining for lost loves, offered him work as a trainee reviewer and packed him off to a Rossini opera the very next week. Robert liked his first article (in fact he’d merely copied the enthusiastic, camp style of the
Table Talk
reviewer) and Hamish soon settled into a world of typewriters and cable machines, transcribing the workaday realities of the city. Court cases, the occasional society divorce, traffic accidents, reviews and pieces of urban trivia that took up a couple of lines here and there were the stuff of his working life now.