New and Collected Stories (50 page)

‘I come here always for an hour after lunch or dinner,' he said, lighting a small cigar, ‘to partake coffee and perhaps meet interesting people, by which I signify any foreigner who happens to be moving through. As you imagine, not many stay in our little God-forgotten town – as your charming and rational wife surmised on your precipitant arrival here. My English is coming back the more I talk to you, which makes me happy. I read much, to maintain my vocabulary, but speech is rare. I haven't spoken it with anyone for fourteen months. You express motions of disbelief? It's true. Few motorists happen to break up at this particular spot in Spain. Many English who come prefer the coasts. Not that the mosquitoes are any lesser there than here. Still, I killed that one: a last midnight black-out for the little blighter. Ah, there's another. There, on your hand. Get it, England. Bravo. You are also quick. They are not usually so bad, because we Flit them to death.

‘I suppose the English like Spain in this modern epoch because of its politics, which are on the right side – a little primitive, but safe and solid. Excuse me, I did not know you were speeding through to Africa, and did not care for political Spain. Not many visit the artistic qualities of Iberia, which I have always preferred. You are fed up with politics, you say, and want to leave them all behind? I don't blame you. You are wisdom himself, because politics can make peril for a man's life, especially if he is an artist. It is good to do nothing but paint, and good that you should not linger among this country. Why does an artist sit at politics? He is not used to it, tries his hand, and then all is explosioned in him. Shelley? Yes, of course, but that was a long time ago, my dear England. Excuse me again, yes, I will have a
coñac.
When I was in London, in 1932, somebody taught me a smart toast: health, wealth, and stealth!
Gesundheit!

‘Forgive my discretion, England, but I see from your luggage that you are an artist, and I must talk of it. I have a great opinion of artists, and can see why it is that your car broke down. Artists know little of mechanical things, and those that do can't ever be great artists. I myself began as a middling artist. It is a long story, which starts when I was eighteen, and I shall tell you soon.

‘Your car is in good hands. Don't worry. And you, madam, I forbid you. We can relax after such a dinner. My mechanics have taken out the engine, and are already shaping off the spare necessary on the lathe. There are no spare parts for your particular name of car in this section of Spain, therefore we have to use our intelligent handicraft – to make them from nothing, from scrape, as you say. That doesn't daunt me, England, because in Russia I had to make spare parts for captured tanks. Ah! I learned a lot in Russia. But I wish I hadn't ever been there. My fighting was tragical, my bullets shooting so that I bleed to death every night for my perpetrations. But bygones are bypassed, and arc a long time ago. At least I learned the language.
Chto dyelaets?

‘Well, it is a pity you don't have a Volkswagen, which I have all the spare pieces for. Yet if you'd had a Volkswagen we wouldn't have been talking here. You would have been in Marrakech. Like my own countrymen: they overtake every traveller on the road in their fast Volkswagens, as if they departed Hamburg that morning and have to get the ferry ship for Tangier this evening, so as to be in Marrakech tomorrow. Then after a swift weekend in the Atlas Mountains they speed back to the office work for another economic miracle, little perceiving that I am one of those that made that miracle possible. What do I mean? How?

‘Ah, ah, ah! You are sympathetic. When I laugh loud, so, you don't get up and walk away. You don't stare at me or flinch. Often the English do that, especially those who come to Spain. Red-faced and lonely, they stare and stare, then walk off. But you understand my laugh, England. You smile even. Maybe it is because you are an artist. You say it is because I am an artist? Oh, you are so kind, so kind. I have been an artist and a soldier both, also a mechanic. Unhappily I have done too many things, fallen between cleft stools.

‘But, believe it or not, I earned a living for longer years by my drawing than I have done as a garage man. The first money I earned in my life was during my student days in Königsberg – by drawing my uncle who was a ship-captain. My father wanted me to be a lawyer but I desired to be an artist. It was difficult to shake words with my father at that time, because he had just made a return from the war and he was very dispirited about Germany and himself. Therefore he wanted me to obey him as if I had lost the war for him, and he wouldn't let me choose. I had to give up all drawing and become a lawyer, nothing less. I said no. He said yes. So I departed home. I walked twenty miles to the railway station with all the money I'd saved for years, and when I got there, the next day, it transpires that the young fortune I thought I had wouldn't even take me on a mile of my long journey. All my banknotes were useless, yet I asked myself how could that be, because houses and factories still stood up, and there were fields and gardens all around me. I was flabbergasted. But I set off for Berlin with no money, and it took me a month to get there, drawing people's faces for slices of bread and sausage. I began to see what my father meant, but by now it was too late. I had taken the jump, and went hungry for it, like all rebellious youths.

‘In my native home-house I had been sheltered from the gales of economy, because I saw now how the country was. Destituted. In Frankfurt a man landed at my foot because he had dropped from a lot of floors up. England, it was terrible: the man had worked for forty years to save his money, and he had none remaining. Someone else ran down the street screaming: “I'm ruined! Ruined utterly!” But all those other shop-keepers who would be ruined tomorrow turned back to their coffee and brandy. No one was solid, England. No solidarity anywhere. Can your mind imagine it? In such a confusion I decided more than ever that the only term one could be was an artist. Coming from Königsberg to Berlin had shown me a thrill for travel. But Berlin was dirty and dangerous. It was full of people singing about socialism – not national socialism, you understand, but communist socialism. So I soon left and went to Vienna – walking. You must comprehend that all this takes months, but I am young, and I like it. I do not eat well, but I did eat, and I have many adventures, with women especially. I think that it was the best time of my life. You want to go, madam? Ah, goodnight. I kiss your hand, even if you do not like my prattle. Goodnight, madam, goodnight. A charming wife, England.

‘I didn't like Vienna, because its past glories are too past, and it was full of unemployed. One of the few sorts of people I can't like are the people without work. They make my stomach ill. I am not rational when I see them, so I try not to see them as soon as I can. I went to Budapest, walking along the banks of the Danube with nothing except a knapsack and a stick, free, healthy, and young. I was not the old-fashioned artist who sits gloomily starving in his studio-garret, or talks all day in cafés, but I wanted to get out among the world of people. But in every city there was much conflict, where maybe people were finishing off what they had started in the trenches. I watched the steamers travelling by, always catching me up, then leaving me a long way back, until all I could listen was their little toots of progress from the next switch of the river. The money crashed, but the steamers went on. What else could Germany do? It was a good time though, England, because I never thought of the future, or wondered where I would be in the years to reach. I certainly didn't see that I should throw so much of my good years in this little Spanish town – in a country even more destituted than the one in Germany after I set off so easily from my birth-home. Excuse me, if I talk so much. It is the brandy, and it is also making me affectionate and sentimental. People are least intelligent when most affectionate, so forgive me if I do not always keep up the high standard of talk that two artists should kindle among them.

‘No, I insist that it is my turn this time. Your wife has gone, no, to look after the baby? In fact I shall order a bottle of brandy. This Spanish liquid is hot, but not too intoxicating. Ah! I shall now pour. It's not that I have the courage to talk to you only when I am up to my neck in bottle-drink, as that I have the courage to talk to you while you are drunk. You can drink me under the table, England? Ah! We shall see, dear comrade. Say when. I have travelled a long way, to many places: Capri, Turkey, Stalingrad, Majorca, Lisbon, but I never foresaw that I should end up in the awkward state I am now in. It is unjust, my dear England, unjust. My heart becomes like a flitterbat when I think that the end is so close.

‘Why? Ah! Where was I? Yes, in Budapest there was even more killing, so I went to Klausenburg (I don't know which country that town is in any more) and passed many of these beautiful dean Saxon towns. The peasants wore their ancient pictorial costume, and on the lonely dusty road were full of friendships and dignity. We spoke to each other, and then went on. I walked through the mountains and woods of Transylvania, over the high Carpathians. The horizons changed every day; blue, purple, white, shining like the sun; and on days when there were no horizons because of rain or mist I stayed in some cowshed, or the salon of a farmhouse if I had pleased the family with my sketching likenesses. I went on, walking, walking (I walked every mile, England, a German pilgrim), across the great plain, through Bucharest and over the Danube again, and into Bulgaria. I had left Germany far behind, and my soul was liberal. Politics didn't interest me, and I was amazed, in freedom at my father being sad at the war.

‘How the brandy goes! But I don't get drunk. If only I could get drunk. But the more brandy I drink the colder I get, cool and icy on the heart. Even good brandy is the same. Health, wealth, and stealth! I got to Constantinople, and stayed for six months. Strangely, in the poorest city of all, I made a good living. In an oriental city unemployment didn't bother me: it seemed natural. I went around the terraces of hotels along the Bosphorus making portraits of the clienteles, and of all the money I made I gave the proprietors ten per cent. If they were modern I drew them or their wives also against the background of the Straits, and sometimes I would take a commission to portray a palace or historic house.

‘One day I met a man who questioned if I would draw a building for him a few kilometres along the coast. He would give me five English pounds now, and five more when we came back to the hotel. Of course I accepted, and we drove in his car. He was a middle-aged Englishman, tall and formal, but he'd offered me a good price for the hour's drawing necessary. By now I had developed the quickness of draughtsmanship, and sat on the headland easily sketching the building on the next cape. While I worked your Englishman, England, walked up and down smoking swiftly on a cigar, and looked nervous about something. I had ended, and was packing my sketches in, when two Turkish soldiers stood from behind a rock and came to us with rifles sticking out. “Walk to the car,” the Englishman said to me, hissing, “as if you haven't done anything.”

‘“But,” I said, “we've made nothing wrong, truly.”

‘“I should say not, my boy,” he told me. “That was a Turkish fort you just sketched.”

‘We run, but two more soldiers stand in front of us, and the Englishman joked with them all four, patted them on the savage head, but he had to give out twenty pounds before they let us go, and then he cursed all the way back.

‘It might have been worse, I realize at the hotel, and the Englishman is pleased, but said we'll have to move on for our next venture, and he asked me if I'd ever thought of hiking to the frontier of Turkey and Russia. “Beautiful, wild country,” he told me. “You'll never forget it.
You
go there on your own, and make a few sketches for me, and it'll prove lucrative – while I sit back over my sherbet here. Ha, ha, ha!”

‘So I questioned him: “Do you want me to sketch Turkish forts, or Soviet ones?”

‘“Well,” he said, “both.”

‘That, England, was my first piece of stealthy work, but it never made me wealthy, and I already was healthy. Ah, ah, ah, ho, ho! You are strong, England. I cannot make you flinch when I hit you on the back like a friend. So! Before then I had been too naïve to feel dishonest. Once on the Turkish border I was captured, with my sketches, and nearly hanged, but my Englishman pays money, and I go free. Charming days. I wasn't even interested in politics.

‘I hear a baby crying. What a sweet sound it is! England, I think your wife calls for you.'

III

‘It is fine night tonight, England, a beautiful star-dark around this town. I have travelled most of my life. Even without trouble I would have travelled, never possessing one jot of wealth, only needing food at the sunset and hot water for breakfast. During the war my voyaging was also simple.

‘In my youth, after I was exported from Turkey by the soldiers (They took all my money before letting me go. If only we had conquered them during the war, then I would have met them again and made them repay it with every drop of their blood!) I travelled in innumerous countries of the Balkans and Central East, until I was so confused by the multiple currencies that I began to lose count of the exchange. I would recite my travellers' cataclysm as I crossed country limits: “Ten Slibs equals one Flap; a hundred Clackies makes one Golden Crud; four Stuks comes out at one Drek” – but usually I went to the next nation with not Slib Flap Clackie or Golden Crud to my name, nothing except what I wear and a pair of worn sandals. I joke about the currencies, because there is no fact I cannot remember. Some borders I have crossed a dozen times, but even so far back I can memory the dates of them, and stand aside to watch myself at that particular time walking along, carefreed, towards the custom post.

‘One of my adventures is that I get married, and my wife is a strong and healthy girl from Hamburg who also likes the walking life. Once we trampled from Alexandria, stepping all along the coast of Africa to Tangier, but it was hard because the Mussulmans do not like to have their faces drawn. However, there were many white people we met, and I also sketch a lot of buildings and interesting features – which were later found to be of much use to certain circles in Berlin. You understand, eh?