Little Caesar (12 page)

There were three storms that winter, none of them with the force of the legends of 1286, 1342, 1740 or 1953. Warren’s seawall was battered away at a few spots, it was only below our house that a piece of the cliff was actually lost. A severe chasm now extended inland. Grass sods hung over its edge. Things were starting to get
personal
. Whenever the water struck, when the shivers rang through the house, we sat bolt upright. Then the silence drifted in like the fog.

At the end of that next spring I finished secondary school. I was eighteen, older than most of the pupils in my class because of the year I’d missed after Alexandria. Despite the urging of my tutor and the headmaster, I refused to consider university. As I walked out the door of the latter’s office, he said to me, ‘You have a good mind, Ludwig, it would be a pity not to use it well.’

I played piano at the Whaler and earned a lot of money for a boy my age. I was one of the first to buy a cell phone, and I had a computer in my bedroom. For the rest, I played rugby. Whenever I put in my mouth guard the sand would crunch between my teeth; lying in my bed at night, after the match, the grains of sand grated beneath my eyelids. I enjoyed the armor of aching muscles that girded me up for days after a match, the satisfied frisson of the body sorely tested. Someday, far in the future, you’d pass a rugby field and feel the painful yearning for Vaseline on your eyebrows, sports tape around your vulnerable spots, the pre-match nerves in stomach and fingertips that caused even the best, most experienced players to pop off again to the loo beforehand – and you would ask yourself how in heaven’s name you had ever become locked up inside that old body, and when you saw the bodies out there smacking together and scrambling back to their feet as though they had merely tripped, you would shut your eyes.

My mother and I live together in elegant separation. There is no reason to go into things any deeper. Sometimes I am able to see her the way I used to; that is to say, without the things I know now. The fact that things are ambiguous, not clear-cut, has been peppered into me. My mother has led so many lives already, her life with me was merely one manifestation. That makes you unsure of yourself. You can imagine suddenly being all alone, all the rest falling from you like wilted leaves, the skin of an onion.

It is our last summer on the hill. I have been excused from the assignment of having to belong anywhere; my mother’s past has everything to do with that. Now I am a freak, and therefore free. I could walk around naked, my skin no longer a shield against heat or cold but a permeable membrane – my body glides through the mild outdoor air like a paraglider above fields of corn. Along the wooded banks, trees stand like congealed forest fires, the dust of Flint Road covers my shoes. Even though I’m amid the lush nature of Essex, the cedar-like crowns of the Scots pine in the distance still remind me of Africa, my image of the savanna, a sensation so powerful that I can let it roll on for minutes at a time. The farmer’s binder has been shuffling back and forth across the fields for days, spitting out black bales of straw. The undeveloped plots between the road and the cliff’s edge are choked with head-high thistles, tansy, poppies big as a fist and daisies radiant in their simplicity. Butterflies waver above the polyphonic buzz of a field of flowers. The telephone poles along the road breathe creosote vapors, sparrows and sand martins sitting on the wires like notes on a staff. The borders at Warren and Catherine’s are exploding with voluptuous blue hydrangeas and then, suddenly, seen from the corner of my eye, the sparrows fall from the lines as one and dissolve into the mulberry hedges at the side of the road.

That winter our house was lost. At last, I would add from this vantage. A storm just before Christmas put an end to the wall, granting the second flood tide free access to the cliff. Warren never got the chance to fill up the lost earth; those were the first weeks of the new year, weeks during which almost no building was going on and no rubble was available.

Factors, circumstances.

When the forecasts began speaking again of bad weather, Warren appeared at the door with a face like iron.

‘I need to talk to your mother,’ he said.

I traipsed upstairs like a little boy and tried to listen in, but by the time they reached my ears the words had become unintelligible. Once he had left, I asked, rather casually, ‘So what’s the news?’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Warren thinks . . . the forecasts are bad. He’s afraid, I mean, he thinks this might be the end.’

But still. The weight. The irreversible. It hasn’t made itself known, it was simply waiting for you all that time in the dark.

‘What are you thinking, love?’

I blinked back tears and said from the doorway, ‘I’m going to pack my things.’

What a house means. The walls around a cavity. It means inside, it protects you against the outside. Now inside was about to become outside. The roof would be ripped open, the dark sky would force its way in, the cold, black sea. I looked around my room, pondering over what should be taken and what not. There was no plan, no destination; the best thing was to pack as lightly as possible. I had a brown cardboard suitcase, found along the street, with stickers from a Rhine cruiser and the Lorelei. Two pairs of trousers, shirts, underwear, a bound-up packet of letters and postcards. For the rest, those valuables I thought I could probably hock should life turn against me: mother-of-pearl cufflinks, the automatic Tissot watch that had belonged to my great-grandfather, Friedrich Unger. (He, Friedrich Unger, had crossed the border from Ostfriesland to east Groningen province to marry a Dutch girl, Aleida Wanningen – ancestors immortalized in photographs in which time seemed recalcitrant and stiff, you couldn’t imagine people laughing out loud or cheating on their spouses. My mother got her beauty from Aleida; even the fashion of that day and the sepia print couldn’t hide her regular, noble features. Friedrich and Aleida’s son, Wilhelm Unger, known as Willem, was the father of my mother and Aunt Edith. I had never seen my grandparents; my grandmother died early on of heart problems, my grandfather had turned his back on my mother after
Lilith
. As far as my mother knew, he still lived with his second wife in the brick colossus close to Bourtange, the farm I knew from pictures in which my mother wore cotton dresses and walked barefoot through the dust of dry summers. When we were in Holland, the stopping-off place between Alexandria and here, he had refused to see us. That’s what his second wife, Aunt Wichie, said; he himself refused to come to the phone. At the time I had noticed nothing of that, that I had a grandfather not so far away.)

I took along some sheet music and three books,
Moby Dick
(my loveliest book),
The Painted Bird
by Jerzy Kosinski (from my mother’s bookcase, the promise of grown-up literature) and
A History of Western Philosophy
by Bertrand Russell; still unread, but impressive after our English teacher, Mr. Dowd, told us that Russell had written the book during a passage by steamer to the United States, from memory, almost without reference works.

A quiet knock on the door, my mother. Her arms folded across her chest, she leaned against the doorpost. I asked what she wanted.

‘There’s a truck coming the day after tomorrow,’ she said.

I looked around, the posters on the walls, the computer, the metal bed, the cupboard that listed to the right because it was not screwed together well.

‘That’s what I want to keep,’ I said, pointing to the things on the bed.

The howling of the wind, only the beginning.

‘It’s just a forecast,’ she said.

‘Dream on.’

‘We do have to be prepared,’ she admitted, ‘you’re right.’

We talked about the end, my mother and I. It was our best conversation in a long while. We were not melancholy or dramatic, those were moods that had gone before; in the cold light of the fait accompli, the evacuation and the loss seemed easier to bear.

‘And afterwards?’ I asked.

‘When this is gone, you mean?’

She nodded at the window, outside which the chasm had approached to within a single bound.

‘There has to be something then,’ I said.

‘I have faith that something will come along.’

Faith was her secret charm, the abracadabra of holistic magic. For a moment there was the wrenching feeling of irritation, but I let it pass. She said, ‘I can always get work cleaning houses, or . . .’

‘Or at a roadside garage, then we’ll be white trash and we can live in a mobile home along the highway! And we’ll drive around in a van full of junk and neglect our teeth, okay?’

She laughed. The tinkling sound of ice cubes in a glass.

‘So, the day after tomorrow.’

She nodded and said, still in the doorway, ‘We have to be strong, okay, sweetheart?’

‘Strong . . .’

‘You already are, you always have been. I don’t know anyone else like you, Ludwig. In fact, you don’t really need anyone anymore.’

Gently, I pushed the door closed behind her.

Sometimes the final notes of a song will go nagging on in my mind. For hours, until a new melody arrives to replace the old one. The same happens to me sometimes with the final words before a silence. They nestle in my head and echo there for a long time. A mysterious, internal repetition. That evening it was my mother’s voice.
In fact, you don’t really need anyone anymore
. Later, as I was playing the piano as well:
In fact, you don’t really need anyone anymore
. It summoned up an entire world view. The crowning element in personal development was to not need anyone, to be alone, a mote in the darkness. The final consequence of this view of life, of course, was that she didn’t need me either, anymore.

On my way home I noticed that the wind had picked up. The foam on the surf glowed in the moonlight. The waves were already washing up against the sea wall, but still lacked the force to do it any harm. But it would swell, gather momentum, bubbling and hissing, to strike at our Achilles’ heel. I would sleep poorly in my bed beside the chasm.

Movers arrived. She pointed out the things to them. That needs to go with, that one doesn’t, careful with that lamp, you’re going to dent the copper if you do that. I remembered the house on the Rue Mahmoud Abou El Ela, the faded negatives of cupboards and tapestries on its walls after the dismemberment, and felt the brief stab of loss when I thought about the treasure buried in the Eden of roses, bougainvillea and blue-blossoming jacaranda.

There were three of them. The driver was the boss. He shook his head as he worked.

‘I can have them bring a bigger lorry,’ he said a few times.

They wound their way amid the ten thousand things, an elephant ballet. Outside the wind mocked our efforts. The mover drove back and forth twice between our house and Warren and Catherine’s shed, where we could store our things until further notice. A double row of moving boxes was piled up against the back wall, full of objects swaddled in soft tissue paper, starting in on their period of waiting in the dark.

*

The walls shuddered. So close, you could see the waves from the window. The gray masses of water being pressed up along the cliff and shooting three, four meters in the air, to the top of the roof, where they seemed to pause for one brief, ghastly moment in order to eye us, their prey, before collapsing back into the sea. The end game. The whirlwind of snippets in my head, the age-old questions: where are we going to live? Who will take care of us? An all-embracing
what now?
But I also knew I would be disappointed if it didn’t happen now – I was tired of dawdling, of pacing the waiting room until the doctor returned with the verdict. Downstairs I heard the vacuum cleaner, my mother trying to undo at least a little of the ravages the movers had left behind. The state in which she left the house behind, I realized, would determine her memories of it. The arrangement and cleansing of that which is doomed to perish is a crucial act, a paradoxical expression of how to live.

A premature brand of disaster tourism had begun. Heads popped up from behind the bushes to observe our evacuation. It was impossible for them to get any closer to the house without standing right at the window, so they watched from a distance, sometimes with binoculars. We were
the house that wouldn’t last long now
, we were
the sea reclaims its own
and we were also, as the headline in the
Norwich Evening News
put it:
CASTRUM’S LAST HEROES
. One caption read that this, it was rumored, was the house where former porno star Eve LeSage lived with her son. By the time the
Sun
latched onto the juicy story –
SEX GODDESS LOSES HEARTH AND HOME
– we were no longer available for comment; they had to use old pictures along with their story, my mother on her back with Wills Horn on top. A team picture from the year our second XV won the championship. In it, I am kneeling at the front, my arms resting on one knee. A circle has been drawn around my head. Selwyn is standing behind me, his arms crossed, beside him you see Leland wearing his scrumcap. Bailey and Dalrymple have just burst out laughing – it’s a cheerful photograph. I had no idea who had been accommodating enough to pass it along to the paper.

In the same way my mother did her vacuuming, so I performed my duties that evening in the Whaler. I played as though the sand were not being washed away from beneath our house at that very moment, I sang as though no block of basalt lay on my heart.

‘It’s gonna happen now, isn’t it?’ Leland said when I took a little pause between sets.

There was no stopping Miss Julie Henry. Her empathy went beyond the bounds of decency; I could picture her deflowering me in the walk-in cooler. Leland asked where I was going to sleep. First at Warren and Catherine’s, I said, we would spend the night there, after that we weren’t sure.

The hotel was busy, a crowd had been drawn by the spectacle of the storm, the waves shooting up meters above the jetties. I took off earlier than usual and ran to Kings Ness. The tempest had now thickened to more substantial stuff, I had difficulty making headway. Torrents of rain. Salty globs of foam were being blown across the land, grains of sand and grass and leaves lashed me about the ears. The sky was open and clear. Over there the dark contours of the house. I stormed into Warren and Catherine’s. The three of them were sitting around the lamp.