Doctor Criminale (11 page)

Codicil stared at me, then laughed. ‘Everything, and what is everything?’ he asked, ‘Who has ever known everything, except Our Good Lord above? There is no everything. Do we
begin to know everything about ourselves? Remember Wittgenstein, now you are in Vienna. What did he say? “How could I expect you to understand me, when I barely understand myself!” Or
as Criminale himself put it better: “Where is the man who can even begin to name himself?”’ He smiled blandly at me. I knew very well that the role of elusive thinker and
questioner had an undying charm for his whole profession, but I felt that he was using the art to divert me, so I ploughed on. ‘But Criminale did give you many of the biographical facts of
your study?’ I asked. ‘A fact, explain me, what is a fact?’ asked Codicil, starting the fancy philosophical footwork all over again. ‘By a fact I just mean the plain simple
details,’ I said, ‘Like where he actually was born, who his parents were, where he studied, who he married, who taught him, who influenced him.’ ‘But any ordinary scholar
could find all this,’ said Codicil. ‘Not really,’ I said, ‘There seems to be an awful lot of misinformation around about Criminale.’

‘So, about what?’ asked Codicil. ‘About how he left Bulgaria after the war, how he got here to Vienna,’ I said, ‘About how he got on with the Marxist authorities,
about his political attitudes. Half the stories contradict one another.’ Codicil pulled a face. ‘These things are not all facts,’ he said, ‘They are interpretations. If you
like to be a dry-as-dust sort of person, you may well believe in facts. But surely you do not come to the home of linguistic philosophy and the Vienna Circle to waste your time only on some little
facts.’ ‘I believe you’re described as a historian as well as a philosopher,’ I said. ‘So?’ asked Codicil. ‘So how would
you
judge Criminale’s
role in recent political history?’ ‘In intellectual history, please,’ said Codicil, ‘Here he is of utmost importance. The great thinker of our time.’ ‘But
don’t you find some of his thought ambiguous and contradictory?’ I asked. ‘What thought is not?’ said Codicil, shifting heavily on his bentwood chair.

I tried again. ‘I’m talking about his dealings with the Communist Party and so on,’ I said. ‘My dear sir, allow me to say this to you,’ said Codicil at last,
‘To understand thought, you must first understand thinking, and where it occurs. In the mind and in history. To understand history, you must first have experienced it. I will confess to you I
think you understand neither one of these things. There is a saying: to think greatly, you must also err greatly. I do not say Criminale erred. But we are talking of a great mind, the Nietzsche of
our long, dark, dying century. We cannot presume even to begin to advise such a man, a man bigger than men, how to understand history, or interpret it correctly. We may merely observe how
he
has chosen to understand it. Do you follow me?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And you agree?’ ‘Well, no, not quite,’ I said, ‘I think everyone can be held
responsible for their thinking.’

‘So, I see,’ said Codicil, ‘What is the time, Gerstenbacker?’ Gerstenbacker looked at him blankly for a moment, and then said, ‘Oh dear, your lecture, Herr
Professor. I think your students are already waiting you.’ ‘Quite, now that really is what our very young friend would call a fact. Please excuse me, sir, I have duties to
perform.’ Codicil stood up, vast, and waved at the waiter. He had evidently had enough, if not too much, of me; I saw I was about to lose him. ‘One more question,’ I said,
‘Would you be willing to appear in our programme, just saying this?’ ‘Ever the sweet sweet blandishments of the media,’ said Codicil, opening his wallet wide to pay the
waiter, ‘No, I am not. I am a busy man. I am a friend of ministers. I am extremely sorry, but I really have no time for your little ephemera.’ ‘Then may we stay in touch?’ I
asked quickly, ‘Can we come to you for advice?’

‘If you have questions, pass them through Gerstenbacker,’ said Codicil, pulling on his topcoat, ‘I am giving you Gerstenbacker.’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ I asked,
not understanding. ‘My young assistant has offered to show you Vienna, since I think you do not know it very well,’ said Codicil, ‘He will give you his best assistance in any
researches you like to make. However, I fear you will quickly find that not everyone in this city likes questions. Also I think you will discover there is almost nothing to learn of Criminale in
Vienna. His main life was always elsewhere, in other cities. But Gerstenbacker is helpful and a very good fellow. And as he told you he was in Britain once, so he knows your ways. Wiedersehen,
young man.’ And Codicil patted my shoulder, shook my hand very firmly, and the great professor walked out through the other great professors, nodding gravely here and there. Through the
window I could see him turn in the street, and stride off, briskly, largely, and I thought angrily, in the direction of the university buildings. I had not, alas, much advanced my quest for Bazlo
Criminale.

So my man had gone. All I had left was young Gerstenbacker, sitting there opposite me in his natty wing collar, looking at me eagerly. Evidently he was waiting for me to say
something; I did. ‘Professor Codicil certainly speaks very good English,’ I remarked to him. ‘Of course, they say he speaks the best English in the world,’ said
Gerstenbacker, with the simple admiration of the perfect Germanic research assistant, ‘Now what do you like to do with yourself? I think you do not know Vienna so well?’ ‘My first
visit,’ I said. ‘Excellent,’ said Gerstenbacker, ‘Then to start I will take you to see some things you ought to see, and then you can tell me those things you would like to
see. By the way, the Spanish Riding School is closed, and the Belvedere is not yet open. But Vienna, you know, is many things.’ He took out a little handwritten list from his top pocket.
‘First we will start at the Hofburg, if this is all right, and then we will do some more things. I know you would like to see our gay Vienna. So now do we go?’

Seeing gay Vienna was not, I thought, going to help much in my search for Bazlo Criminale. On the other hand, there was Lavinia, engaging in naked tourism, and I could see no reason to refuse.
At the same time I thought it was odd that Professor Codicil, apparently so determined to be unhelpful in most things, should have assigned his little assistant to take such good care of me. Still,
as long as I had Gerstenbacker’s company, my path back towards Codicil was surely not closed completely. ‘Okay, fine,’ I said, ‘Let’s go.’ ‘Wiedersehen,
meine Herren,’ said the head waiter as the two of us, young neophytes at the mysteries, went through the academic conclave in the café and out into the chilly street. Once there,
Gerstenbacker pulled up his collar, turned, and began marching briskly along the Ringstrasse, through its great parade of late-nineteenth-century Habsburgian buildings: the imperial and the civic,
the academic and the political, the theatrical and the musical.

As he walked on, Gerstenbacker began a kind of continuous commentary: ‘Here once were the city walls where we defended Europe against the Turk. Then our Habsburg monarchs, who ruled so
much of the world, decided to make an imperial city. First do you see the university. One day you must go inside and see the hall where are displayed all our great professors.’ ‘Of
course,’ I said. ‘There the Burgtheater, there the Parliament building, here the Rathaus,’ said Gerstenbacker, ‘This is Vienna.’ Outside the Rathaus, a Christmas
street market was in progress. The chestnut sellers and the sausage fryers were all out; there were stalls stacked with elaborate ribboned candles, peasant woodcarving, great piles of gold and
silver baubles, bags of biscuits. I stopped to witness a triumph of kitsch: a stall covered entirely in pink fabric and laden with thousands of pink toy rabbits. A fair-haired very pretty girl
stood behind the counter, in a pink rabbit costume; she was teasingly running a rabbit glove puppet up and down her arm to tempt the children crowded round her to buy. ‘Isn’t that
wonderful?’ I said, turning to Gerstenbacker; he had gone. Then I saw him, yards ahead, still striding briskly onward. ‘In front the Nature History Museum, then the Art Historical
Museum, opposite the Heldenplatz . . .’ he was still saying, to no one in particular, as I caught him up.

Now certain memories began coming back to me. Heldenplatz, the great square outside the Hofburg; wasn’t this where Adolf Hitler had addressed a cheering Austrian crowd when he dropped his
troops, dressed as nuns, into the country in 1938? Well, now it was where all the tourists, mostly Japanese and American, gathered. Their great modern tour buses, equipped with central heating,
toilets, kitchens, television sets, a home on wheels, stood lined up in rows. Landau drivers sat waving their whips over their horses and calling for customers. Great tour groups eddied here and
there, herded by umbrella-waving female Austrian guides, evidently a formidable breed in their dirndls. ‘Hello, hello, my name is Angelika, do you like it?’ said one in English,
steering a party of tired elderly Americans. (A round of applause.) ‘Yes, I think you do. Notice please my pretty dirndl, very typical, do you like it too?’ (More applause from party.)
‘Yes, you do.’

I stopped to listen. ‘Well, we make very nice tour today, the Hofburg, Schönbrunn, then the Blue Danube, very nice, ja?’ (More applause from party.) ‘I hope you know our
Habsburgs, you remember the Empress Maria Theresa? Even if a woman she kept our empire great for many many years.’ (Murmurs of assent from party.) ‘Then, do you know, things went a
little wrong for us. You remember the tragedy of Mayerling in 1889?’ (Murmurs of assent from party.) ‘Yes, of course you do, the young Arch-duke Rudolph and his pretty little Baroness
Maria Vetsera, who died with him in his bed at the hunting lodge, ja?’ (Murmurs of sympathy from party.) ‘After this nothing went right for us. And yet you know those were our most
brilliant times? And that is what we say about Austrians. The more things went wrong, the more we learned to be so modern and so gay!’ (Loud applause from party.)

There was a sharp tug at my sleeve. It was Gerstenbacker, and he did not look so modern and so gay. ‘Oh yes, 1889, when we learned to be so modern and so gay!’ he said, walking me
off to the entrance to the Hofburg, ‘But I hope a little bit more critical and analytical than this. To be modern is not always so amusing, I think.’ He took me inside, and we went
round the great complex of state rooms, the imperial fixtures, the regalia and the treasure chests. ‘The Emperor Franz Josef, he was not so modern,’ said Gerstenbacker, ‘Here in
the Hofburg he refused most things: the telephone, the toilet, the electricity light. Until he died and his age too, this place was lit only by torches. I will show you the Capuchin crypt where the
Habsburgs were buried. Of course first they took out their hearts and put them in another place.

‘Franz Josef was not so gay either,’ said Gerstenbacker, as we went down to the crypt, ‘He lived here in one room and watched his empire fall to pieces. Because you know here
was made a great dream of a glorious Europe. Once, you understand of course, we were Europe. We had Spain, the Nederland, Italy, the Balkans. All run from here. Not the crypt, of course, upstairs,
where is Waldheim now.’ ‘Oh, is he?’ I asked, ‘The great forgetter.’ ‘Well, some things we remember, some we forget,’ said Gerstenbacker, ‘Yes, here
was the Emperor, the archdukes, the courtiers, the diplomats. The bureaucrats, the policemen, the apparatus, the files, the rules of law, and trade, and censorship.’ ‘It all sounds a
bit like Brussels now,’ I said. ‘The same,’ said Gerstenbacker, ‘The European Community, you know we will join very soon. I believe we have some experiences that would be
useful.’ ‘I’m sure you do,’ I said. ‘Good, now you have seen some of our past, next I will show you some of our modern,’ said Gerstenbacker, checking his piece
of paper, ‘In fact I will show you everything.’

And sure enough, over the course of the next hours, Gerstenbacker did exactly that. He showed me as much of everything as time and the human frame would permit. He showed me Gothic, the church
of darkness and mystery, and he showed me baroque, the church of light and joy. He showed me Biedermeier, the art of the bourgeois, and he showed me Jugendstil, the art of dissent. He showed me
Calvinism; he showed me the New Eroticism. He showed me Egon Schiele and he showed me Gustav Klimt; he showed me Salome and he showed me Judith. He showed me the Café Central where Trotsky
used to sit and reflect, he showed me a table used by Krafft-Ebing, he showed me the home of Gustav Mahler. He showed me the consulting rooms of Sigmund Freud at Berggasse 19, its contents mostly
disappeared, where sex-shocked patients once used to lie among portraits of Minerva and pictures of Troy. He explained to me things that were there, things that had once been there, and even things
that had never been visibly there but came nonetheless. For he briefly took me out of the city and into the Vienna Woods, where Freud had once bicycled, and where a plaque among the trees read very
simply: ‘Here, on July 24, 1895, the secret of dreams revealed itself to Dr Sigm. Freud.’

And all the time, as we toured the city, getting on a tram here and taking a taxi there, I tried to encourage perfectly pleasant young Gerstenbacker to talk to me about Bazlo Criminale. There
was no obstruction; he seemed totally willing. Yet always, it seemed, there was some absolutely necessary diversion or other. ‘Look, tell me, do you have any idea where Criminale stays or who
he sees when he visits Vienna?’ I would ask. ‘You think he comes to Vienna?’ he would say. ‘Professor Codicil said he comes to Vienna,’ I would say, ‘He said it
was one of his homes from home, you remember.’ ‘Homes from home, not home from homes?’ he would say, ‘By the way, do you like to see a building with a cabbage on the top of
it?’ ‘Homes from home,’ I would say, ‘What do you mean a building with a cabbage on the top of it?’

‘It has a cabbage on the top of it.’ ‘Why does it have a cabbage on the top of it?’ I would ask. ‘It has a cabbage on the top of it because of course Josef-Marie
Olbrich put it there.’ ‘Who did?’ I asked. ‘Olbrich, don’t you know him? The friend of Otto Wagner? They all wanted to make a great Secession together.’ ‘I
see,’ I said, ‘So when Criminale comes to Vienna, where does he stay?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he would say. ‘Who are his friends?’ I would ask. ‘Does
he have some?’ he would say. ‘I expect so,’ I would say, ‘You’ve never met him?’ ‘I, of course not,’ Gerstenbacker would say, ‘I think the
Secession was really where the Viennese baroque shook hands with Viennese modernism.’ ‘We’re back to the cabbage, are we?’ ‘Don’t you like to see it? It is very
famous.’ ‘All right, Gerstenbacker,’ I said at last, ‘Let’s go and see a building with a cabbage on the top of it.’