A Perfect Spy (36 page)

As to Pym, he was gazing at last on the glories of the kingdom he had dreamed of for so long. The German muse had no particular draw for him, then or later, for all his loud enthusiasm. If she had been Chinese or Polish or Indian, it would have made no earthly odds. The point was, she supplied Pym with the means, for the first time, to regard himself intellectually as a gentleman. And for that Pym was eternally grateful to her. By willing Pym night and day to accompany Axel on his explorations, she gave him the world inside his head that Lippsie had said he would be able to take with him anywhere. And Lippsie was right, because when he went down to the warehouse in Ostring where Herr Ollinger had obtained illegal nightwork for him at the hands of a fellow philanthropist, he neither walked nor took the tram but rode with Mozart in his coach to Prague. When he washed his elephants at night he endured the humiliations of Lenz's
Soldaten.
When he sat in the third-class buffet bestowing soulful looks on Elisabeth, he imagined himself as the young Werther, planning his wardrobe before committing suicide. And when he considered all his failures and hopes together, he was able to compare his
Werdegang
with Wilhelm Meister's years of apprenticeship, and planned even then a great autobiographical novel that would show the world what a noble sensitive fellow he was compared with Rick.

And yes, Jack, the other seeds were there, of course they were: a crash diet of Hegel, as much as they both could swallow at a time, a burst of Marx and Engels and the bad bears of Communism—for after all, said Axel, this was the first day of the world. “If we are to judge Christianity by the misery it has caused mankind, who would ever be a Christian? We accept no prejudices, Sir Magnus. We believe everything as we read it and only afterwards reject it. If Hitler hated these fellows so much, they can't be all bad, I say.” Out came Rousseau and the revolutionaries, and
Das Kapital,
and
Anti-Dühring,
and in went the sun for several weeks, though I swear we came to no conclusions that I remember, except that we were glad when it was over. And I honestly doubt now whether the substance of Axel's teaching was of importance beside Pym's joy that he was teaching him at all. What counted was that Pym was happy from the moment he got up until the early hours of the following morning; and that when they finally went to bed on either side of their black radiator, sleeping, to use Axel's phrase, like God in France, Pym's mind went on exploring in his sleep.

“Axel's got the Order of the Frozen Meat,” Pym told Frau Ollinger proudly one day, carving bread for family fondue.

Frau Ollinger gave an exclamation of disgust. “Magnus, what nonsense are you talking now?”

“It's true! It's German soldiers' slang for a Russian campaign medal. He volunteered from his
Gymnasium.
His father could have got him a safe post in France or Belgium. A
Druckposten,
somewhere he could keep his head down. Axel wouldn't let him. He wanted to be a hero like his classmates.”

Frau Ollinger was not pleased. “Then better you keep quiet about where he fought,” she said sternly. “Axel is here to study, not to boast.”

“He has women up there,” said Pym. “They creep up the stairs in the afternoons and scream when he makes love to them.”

“If they give him happiness and help him to study they are welcome. Do you wish to invite your passionate Jemima?”

Furious, Pym stalked to his room and penned a long letter to Rick about the unfairness of the average Swiss in daily matters. “Sometimes I think the law here does duty for common kindness,” he wrote stuffily. “Particularly where women are concerned.”

Rick wrote back by return, urging chastity: “Better you remain Clean until you have made the choice that is Meant for you.”

A day came when Axel fell ill. Pym hurried back from the zoo full of funny stories about his adventures to find him in bed, where he hated most to be. His tiny room was heavy with cigar smoke, his pale head darkened with stubble and shadows. A girl was hanging about but Axel ordered her out when Pym arrived.

“What's wrong with him?” Pym asked Herr Ollinger's doctor, peering over his shoulder, trying to decipher the prescription.

“What is wrong with him, Sir Magnus, is that he was bombed by the heroic British,” said Axel savagely from the bed, in a barbed unfamiliar voice. “What is wrong with him is that he got half a British shell up his arse and is having trouble shitting it out.”

The doctor was sworn not just to secrecy but to silence and with a friendly pat for Pym departed.

“Maybe it was you who fired it at me, Sir Magnus. Did you land in Normandy, by any chance? Perhaps you led the invasion?”

“I didn't do anything like that at all,” said Pym.

So Pym became Axel's legs again, fetching his medicines and cigars and cooking for him and ransacking the university libraries for ever more books which he could read aloud to him.

“No more Nietzsche, thank you, Sir Magnus. I think we know enough about the cleansing effect of violence. Kleist is not as bad but you don't read him properly. You must bark Kleist. He was a Prussian officer, not an English hero. Get the painters.”

“Which ones?”

“Abstractionists. Decadents. Jews. Anyone who was
entartet
or forbidden. Give me a holiday from these mad writers.”

Pym consulted Frau Ollinger. “Then you must ask the librarian for whomever the Nazis did not like, Magnus,” she explained in her governess voice.

The librarian was an émigré who knew Axel's needs by heart. Pym brought Klee and Nolde, Kokoschka and Klimt, Kandinsky and Picasso. He stood their picture books and catalogues open on the mantelshelf where Axel could see them without moving his head. He turned the pages and read the captions out loud. When women came, Axel again sent them away. “I am being attended to. Wait till I am well.” Pym brought Max Beckmann. He brought Steinlen, then Schiele and more Schiele. Next day the writers were reinstated. Pym fetched Brecht and Zuckmayer, Tucholsky and Remarque. He read them aloud, hours of them. “Music,” Axel commanded. Pym borrowed Herr Ollinger's wind-up gramophone and played him Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky until Axel fell asleep. He woke delirious, the sweat falling off him like raindrops while he described a retreat through snow with the blind hanging on to the lame and the blood freezing in the wounds. He talked of a hospital, two to a bed and the dead lying on the floor. He asked for water. Pym fetched it and Axel took the glass in both hands, shaking wildly. He lifted the glass till his hands froze, then he lowered his head in jerks until his lips reached the brim. Then he sucked the water like an animal, spilling it while his fevered eyes kept guard. He drew up his legs and wetted himself and sat shaking and grumpy in an armchair while Pym changed his sheets.

“Who are you afraid of?” Pym asked again. “There's no one here. It's just us.”

“Then I must be afraid of you. What's that poodle in the corner?”

“It's Herr Bastl and he's a chow chow, not a poodle.”

“I thought it was the Devil.”

Till a day when Pym woke to find Axel standing fully dressed at his bedside. “It is Goethe's birthday and it's four in the afternoon,” he announced in his military voice. “We must go into town and listen to the idiot Thomas Mann.”

“But you're ill.”

“Nobody who stands up is ill. Nobody marches who is ill. Dress.”

“Was Mann on the forbidden list too?” Pym asked as he pulled on his clothes.

“He never made it.”

“Why's he an idiot?”

Herr Ollinger supplied a raincoat that could have gone twice round Axel's body, Mr. San provided a broad black hat. Herr Ollinger drove them to the door in his broken car two hours early and they took their places at the back before the great hall filled. When the lecture was over, Axel marched Pym backstage and hammered on the dressing-room door. Pym had not cared for Thomas Mann till now. He found his prose perfumed and unwieldy, though he had tried his best for Axel's sake. But now, there stood God Himself, tall and angular like Uncle Makepeace. “This young English nobleman wishes to shake your hand, sir,” Axel advised him with authority from underneath Mr. San's broad hat. Thomas Mann peered at Pym, then at Axel so pale and ethereal from his fever. Thomas Mann frowned at the palm of his own right hand as if asking himself whether it could take the strain of an aristocratic embrace. He held out his hand and Pym shook it, waiting to feel Mann's genius flow into him like one of those electric shocks you used to be able to buy at railway stations—hold this knob and let my energy revive you. Nothing happened, but Axel's enthusiasm was enough for both of them:

“You touched him, Sir Magnus! You are blessed! You are immortal!”

Within a week, they had saved enough cash to take themselves to Davos to visit the shrine of Mann's diseased souls. They travelled in the lavatory, Pym standing and Axel, in his beret, sitting patiently on the seat. The conductor knocked on the door and yelled,
“Alle Billette, bitte”;
Axel gave a girlish whimper of discomfort and pushed their one ticket under the door. Pym waited, his eyes fixed on the shadows of the conductor's feet. He felt the conductor stoop, he heard him grunt as he straightened up. He heard a snap that felt like his own nerve breaking as the ticket reappeared under the door with a hole punched in it. The shadows moved on. This is how you walked here, thought Pym with admiration, as they silently shook hands. These are the tricks that got you to Switzerland. In Davos that evening Axel told Pym all about his nightmare journey from Carlsbad to Bern. Pym felt so proud and rich he decided that Thomas Mann was the best writer in the world.

Meanwhile there was good old you, wasn't there, Jack? Jack the other war hero, Jack the other side of my head. I will describe to you who you were because I don't expect we know the same person any more. I will describe what you were to me and what I did for you and as best I can why, because there again I doubt whether we share the same interpretation of events and personalities. I doubt it very much. To Jack, Pym was just another baby Joe, one more addition to his private army in the making, not broken and certainly not trained, but with the halter already slipped nicely round his neck and willing to run a long way for his lump of sugar. You probably don't remember—why should you?—how you picked him up or made your overtures to him. All you knew was he was the type the Firm liked, and so did you, and so did part of me. Short back and sides, speaks the King's English, decent linguist, good country public school. A games player, understands discipline. Not an arty chap, certainly not one of your overintellectual types. Levelheaded, one of us. Comfortably off but not too grand, father some sort of minor tycoon—how typical that you never bothered to check Rick out. And where else should you meet this paragon of tomorrow's men but at the English church, where the flag of Saint George fluttered victorious in the neutral Swiss breeze?

How long you had been tracking Pym I don't know. I'll bet you don't either. You liked the way he read the Lesson, you said, so you must have had your eye on him from at least before Christmas because it was an early Advent text. You seemed surprised when he told you he was studying at the university, so I guess your first enquiries were made before he enrolled there and you hadn't topped them up. It was on Christmas Day after matins that Pym shook your hand for the first time. The church porch was like a crowded lift with everyone rattling umbrellas and making rah-rah English noises, and the diplomatic kids pelting each other with snowballs in the street. Pym was wearing his E. Weber jacket, and you, Jack, you were a tweedy, unscalable English mountain of twenty-four. In terms of war and peace the seven years between us were a generation, more like two. Much as they were with Axel, as a matter of fact; you both had those crucial years on me, still do.

Do you know what else you wore apart from your good brown suit? Your Airborne tie. Prancing silver-winged horses and crowned Britannias on a maroon field, congratulations. You never told me where you had been for it, but the reality as I now know it is no less impressive than my imaginings: with the Partisans in Yugoslavia and the Resistance in Czechoslovakia, behind the lines with the Long Range Desert Group in Africa and even, if I remember right, in Crete. You are an inch taller than I, but I remember as if it were yesterday how, as Pym grasped your great dry hand, that Airborne tie looked him in the eye. He lifted his head, he saw your rock jaw and your blue eyes—the ferocious bushy eyebrows even then—and he knew he was standing face to face with the character he was supposed to have become at all his schools, and sometimes in his fancy had: a straight-backed English brave of the officer class, the one who keeps his head when all about him are losing theirs. You wished him Happy Christmas and when you spoke your name he thought you were making a sort of Everyman's joke to do with Christmas Day—you are Good Fellowship and I will be Brotherhood.