Landscape of Farewell (3 page)

As I stepped down from the lectern for the last time that day, it occurred to me, with a little jolt of pleasure, that there was one decent thing I might yet do before going home and killing myself. I knew at once that Winifred would approve the spirited generosity of the intention. Even though I had just been given
my dishonourable discharge, as it were, I smiled at the thought of Winifred’s pleasure.

My old colleague and friend, the gifted teacher and amateur flautist Tamás Bartsch, stepped alongside me and took my arm in his—I have known Tamás ever since we were schoolboys together. ‘So what is it you find in all this to smile at, dear friend?’ he inquired of me solemnly.

‘It is the thought of Winifred’s pleasure at what I am about to do,’ I replied at once, for Tamás and Winifred had greatly admired each other and there was nothing I wished to conceal from this dear man—except, of course, my decision to die within the hour.

‘Ah, my poor fellow,’ he said and squeezed my arm.

She—I mean the black princess, of course—was standing by the doors at the far side of the library in conversation with the group of admiring students and junior members of staff who had chanted their enthusiastic approval of her performance a few moments before. As Tamás and I came towards them one of the young women indicated my approach to her and she turned and looked at me. When she saw who it was, it was clear from her expression, and in the way she physically set herself to encounter me, that she anticipated a fight. Tamás murmured a desire not to meet her and went on through the door to get himself some lunch. The young woman introduced herself to me as Professor Vita McLelland, from Sydney University.

I offered my hand. She examined my extended hand for a moment as if she thought it might conceal a weapon, then took it in her own. Her clasp was firm, definite and brief, her gaze direct and challenging. She was ready for me. Her manner said,
Bring it on, Professor Otto!

‘Permit me to apologise to you, Professor McLelland,’ I said, ‘for the poor quality of my paper. You are right, of course, to condemn such shoddiness. It saddens me greatly to have been responsible for your anger. Let me say again, I am sorry. It was not such an end to my career as this that I envisaged when I was a young man of your own age, believe me. Indeed I do not truly understand by what means I have arrived at this shabby state. It is a puzzle to me and has not been by my conscious design, I assure you. I sincerely hope that when you reach the end of your own career, which I am certain will be illustrious, you will do better than I with the question of the succession.’

She looked at me in silence after my little speech. The expression in her beautiful dark eyes was curious, engaged I would say, but disbelieving. She suspected irony, no doubt.

Recalling my beloved father and his state of bewilderment at his death, I said, ‘Passing the baton of truth from our own generation to the next has always been a perilous affair. Perhaps especially in my country.’ It was an artless expression of my thoughts on this difficult subject, and I feared, even as I said it, that my clumsy expression might give further encouragement to
her contempt for me. We may not ourselves have participated directly in massacring our fellow humans—and surely no sane person will hold the children responsible for the murders committed by their fathers—but our troubling sense that we are guilty-by-association with their crimes is surely justified by our knowledge that we are ourselves members of the same murdering species as they. I am a human being first and only second, and by the chance of birth, am I the son of my father and mother. I know myself to be implicated in the guilt of both my species and my parents, for it is to these categories of being, and to these only, that I own a sense of membership.

I was concerned that my apology might have sounded pompous to her, for it had been delivered in the very voice of the old order, which she was determined to silence. She did not relax but remained on her guard, evidently anticipating some trickery on my part. ‘Goodbye, Professor McLelland,’ I said and I smiled to see a doubt still for an instant the fierce and uneasy lights that flickered within the depths of her dark eyes. ‘May I wish you good fortune in the struggle.’ I inclined my head to her, an indulgence in an old-fashioned courtesy more familiar to my father’s generation than to my own. It was a private, and somewhat symbolic, gesture of farewell, however, to life and to a generation, and perhaps to my father’s hopes for me. Yes, even that. It was a homage to the ghosts of my own fallen heroes, to those men—and they had all been men—whose books in my
youth had seemed destined to stand forever as imperishable landmarks in the epic story of a Europe that had, since then, ceased to exist, their names unknown to this woman’s generation, their works no longer valued or read. New histories have arisen since then. In our youth it is only the histories we write ourselves that seem to us to be just and true. As we grow old ourselves, however, our youthful certainties begin to fail us, just as our bodies do, and we see at last that we have been wrong to have believed as we have believed and that truth has no permanence but is a shifting thing.

I turned aside and walked through the lunching crowd. I pushed the doors open and walked down the steps, leaving the grand old library of Aby Warburg behind me. Professor Vita McLelland from Sydney University was the future. I was glad I had met her face to face. I was glad, too, to have held her hand and to have seen how she had at the last moment looked searchingly into my eyes and been affected by the heartfelt sincerity of my apology. I was glad for my father’s memory, for his
sake
, indeed—for he still lived in my heart—that mine had not, after all, been a dishonourable end. On my way to my death I was feeling a rather silly optimism for the future of humankind, my judgment rattled, no doubt by the emotion of the moment, and my senses a little dizzy with the wonder of Professor Vita McLelland’s glorious youth. How wonderful it would have been to live again that grand illusion.

Outside the library the street was strangely still and deserted, the big houses of the wealthy burghers silent and shuttered. A sense of impending action confronted me along the avenue of great trees—I might have stepped onto the set of a film between takes. Then I saw the van, a nasty amateurish green, obviously repainted hurriedly in a back alley only the night before. It crouched at the kerb, low and menacing. At any moment its doors would burst open and the assassins tumble out shouting obscenities and firing their automatic weapons.

Her shout close behind startled me and as I spun around I tripped on an uneven paving stone. She grasped me strongly by my upper arm and dragged me upright against her. ‘You can’t get away from me that easily, Professor Otto!’ She laughed, her face
so close to mine I caught the sweet nutty tang of her breath. She did not relinquish my arm but held onto me, as if she expected me to fall to the ground without her support. She searched my eyes with such a close and intimate inspection of their contents that she might have suspected me of secreting within myself some precious stolen possession of her own. Her scrutiny was disconcerting and faintly exciting, exposing me to something against which I had no defence and arousing in me the rare and rather delightful delusion of erotic expectation—I might have found myself suddenly naked and alone with her on the street. She laughed at my confusion and, apparently reassured by what she had seen within, relaxed her close examination and slipped her arm comfortably through mine, pressing it to her fleshy side.

‘You can shout me a drink before you go. I want to hear that apology of yours in triplicate,’ she said. ‘I’ve never had one of those from any of you guys before.’ With sudden impatience she set off, hauling me along with her. ‘I feel as if I’m beginning to smell of old books in those places,’ she said. Gripping my arm with a confidence that astounded me, she flung a contemptuous look over her shoulder at Warburg Haus and, with a crude vehemence that I found a little shocking, she announced loudly to the empty street, ‘God, don’t you just
hate
those old libraries.’

We had gone quite a little way before I gathered myself sufficiently to respond to her. ‘Erich Auerbach,’ I gasped—I was
short of breath from a combination of the suddenness of the action and the sheer physical awe she inspired in me. ‘Auerbach,’ I said breathlessly, ‘claimed he would never have written his great book if he had had access to the specialised libraries of Europe.’

‘I know just how he felt,’ she said.

I held back—almost skidding my heels against her momentum, becoming a stubborn mule and refusing to go further, and eventually forcing her to slacken her pace.

She stopped and frowned at me. ‘What’s up, Professor?’

I drew breath. ‘I should like very much to buy you a drink, Professor McLelland,’ I said. ‘Indeed nothing would give me greater pleasure, but unfortunately I have an urgent appointment.’ She looked so downcast at this that I at once regretted it—the fierce flame of her passion was evidently fragile and could be doused in a moment.

‘Urgent?’ she queried me doubtfully. ‘And it’s Vita. Never mind the
professor
.’ She frowned at me, distrustful. ‘What is it then, a deadline?’

‘Well, yes, that is exactly what it is.’ It is strange how often our language inveigles us into pronouncing the literal truth when our intention is to deceive.

‘You’re not being very convincing. It’s your wife, isn’t it?’ With a sudden outburst of exasperation—and once again she seemed to interrogate not me but the world at large—she said, ‘Why has every man I ever meet got a wife waiting at home for him?’

I said, ‘My wife is dead.’

She closed her eyes. ‘Oh God!’ She opened her eyes and looked at me beseechingly. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m truly sorry. I’ve done it again. Please forgive me. I go charging in. I tell myself,
Don’t do it, Vita!
Then I do it. I’m always bullying people before I know half their story.’ She pressed my arm to her side and asked with gentle concern, ‘Will you please forgive me? Can I ask you how long it has been?’

‘A few months only.’

‘You poor man. You must miss her terribly.’

‘Yes, I do.’ I thought I might weep.

‘Please tell me you forgive me, or I shall have to kill myself.’ She was at once playful again; the pretty child twisting her beloved daddy’s feelings around her little finger. I found it impossible to resist gazing into the inviting ocean of Vita McLelland’s generous dark eyes—deep pools of emotion, they were, in which thoughts and ideas and uncertainties flashed and darted about in excited shoals. Such abundance, so long absent from my own interior life, mesmerised me. I hoped she would not notice how distracted I was by her.

‘There is nothing for me to forgive,’ I said. ‘How could you have known?’

The assured familiarity with which she held my arm throughout this exchange was a strangely compelling comfort to me, and I hoped she would not soon let me go. She might have laid
claim to me. Although she was so much younger than I, there was something motherly and protective in the way she held me. I sensed an almost familial appeal in this direct, unabashed intimacy; a need to offer comfort where comfort was needed. Or perhaps she appealed for my understanding, for my protection, for my friendship? I was not sure. Was she lonely? Not without a circle of friends and intimates, I mean, but deeply lonely, a solitary who would cling to a stranger briefly, a sudden flare of recognition and companionship, then emptiness, nothing, the awful dragging void of melancholy. Could a visionary such as she—a leader, no doubt, among her people—ever be other than alone? Were not such fierce people always alone? Perhaps it was only what I wanted to believe of her.

‘Now
you’ve
said sorry to me and
I’ve
said sorry to you,’ she said. ‘Hey, Max! Come on!’ She let go of me and flung open her arms so that her clothes bloomed suddenly about her. ‘You and I have got to get past this stage of trying to out-apologise each other.’

We both laughed.

‘There, we’re even now,’ she said and she tucked my arm against her side again—where she and I evidently felt it was most right for it to be. ‘
I’ll
buy
you
a drink. And don’t tell me you haven’t got time for just the one before your appointment. Be late for once.’ She stood still and examined me. ‘I’ve never struck one like you. You old blokes defend your work viciously to the
last breath in your bodies. You never,
never
say sorry. Hey, folks, I got it wrong. I’m sorry. No. Never that. I’ve never heard it. You’re a rare bird, Max. What do people around here think of you? I’ll bet you’ve got a few of them puzzled. You’re not getting rid of me until we’ve had a tête-à-tête.’

She adjusted my arm against her side and we set off down the street. She was more sedate now in her pace, more certain, I suppose, that she had secured a companion for the next hour or two. ‘So where’s the pub?’ she said. ‘Point me at it.’

By the way, I am not making any of this up. It all happened to me only a little over a year ago, just as I am reporting it here. I loathe books that are made up, as if life is not enough.

We were sitting across from each other at a table in the recess of a window, the remains of our meal still on the table. I had never been inside the bar but had often passed it on my way to the railway station. Vita was talking, the long slender fingers of her left hand played with her glass—her wedding hand, she said, without a ring, holding it up, ‘See?’ And she smiled her vulnerable, sad smile, not the fierce smile of the warrior princess. Though her hand had once carried the precious ornament for a little while, she said. I watched her. She had lovely hands. She played with her glass, her head on one side, considering—what? Her voice was loud and penetrating at first, and the young man who had brought
our meal had looked across at her and listened, and she had given him to understand that she knew he was listening to her and that she did not care. As the bar filled up with drinkers her voice drew back and became softer and more private.