Doctor Criminale (15 page)

But such things were happening everywhere in 1889. On that other great European river, the Rhine, in the Swiss city of Basel, another great professor, Professor Doktor Friedrich Nietzsche, had
devoted himself to bringing the modern about. It had not been an easy job, and in fact in 1889 he started to go mad from rather too much of it. He began singing and grimacing uncontrollably in the
streets, was found embracing carthorses, and he took to predicting, not very accurately, various plagues, earthquakes, droughts, global warmings, world wars and other millennial things. He sent
letters to the Pope and other world notables, signed ‘Nietzsche Caesar’, suggesting that various people and some entire races should be shot. It was his divine and imperial mission to
bring the fatality of the modern into existence, as he explained to various fellow academics (‘Dear Professor, in the end I would much have preferred being a Basel professor to being God. But
I did not care to carry my personal egotism so far that for its sake I should fail to complete the creation of the world’). They got the great philosopher to the doctor at last. He conducted
an examination, noting in his report: ‘Claims he is a famous man and asks for women all the time.’ Well, why not; he was, after all, a Herr Doktor Professor, the maker of the modern,
and surely deserved his fair share of kindly human attention.

And despite all his difficulties, Nietzsche did manage to bring out a last book in that year of 1889. Called
Götzendämmerung,
or
The Twilight of the Fake Gods,
it was all
about the age of earthquakes, apocalypse, and the coming of the modern. It was subtitled ‘How to Philosophize With a Hammer’, and this new technique in philosophy was to interest
several people who came to birth in 1889. One was the child of a customs official at Braunau, up on the German-Austrian border, who attended the same school as Ludwig Wittgenstein, and then went to
Vienna, hoping to become a painter. He did, though only of houses. But he joined the German army, survived the great collapse of 1918, and then reappeared, philosophical hammer at the ready, as
Adolf Hitler, trying to forge the new world order exactly fifty years further on, in the year of 1939, and fifty years before the Berlin Wall came down.

So when you thought about it 1889 was quite a year, right across Europe – the time of Freud and Nietzsche, Ibsen and Zola, Max Nordau and Max Weber. In fact it was the great year of
Modernismus, modern thought. And in Britain that year . . . well, in Britain that year, the British, as the British do, were coming along just a little late. The book of the year (I recalled from
my research for my piece) was Jerome K. Jerome’s
Three Men in a Boat
, and London’s newest opera, all fantastic dreams and celestial-sounding music, was Gilbert and
Sullivan’s
The Gondoliers
. But a dock strike produced a famous anthem, ‘The Red Flag’, George Bernard Shaw produced his
Fabian Essays
, and people started talking
about Decadence. That year Oscar Wilde was fêted, and Emile Zola’s British publisher was sent to prison for foulness. Six years later it was all changed. Emile Zola was being
fêted, and Oscar Wilde was being sent to prison for foulness. But nobody, not even Gustave Eiffel, ever claimed that the modern always proceeded in straight lines.

Nonetheless, it proceeded. Twenty-five years after 1889, the famous shot was fired at the Archduke in Sarajevo, somewhere to the south of me now. The Habsburg Empire fell, the whole map of
Europe was reshaped, and, as Gerstenbacker had so thoughtfully explained to me, the Blue Danube became even bluer. Twenty-five years after that, the age of disaster resumed. Freud died in London,
James Joyce published the finale of Modernism,
Finnegans Wake
, in Paris, Hitler unwrapped his philosophical hammer in Poland, world war started again. Violence went crazy, modernity
exploded, Europe tore up its borders and its cities, the Holocaust came, and the Blue Danube became bluer still. Twenty-five years after that was a quieter year, though some things of importance
happened. The Cold War peaked, President Kennedy had just been assassinated, Leonid Brezhnev, Harold Wilson and Lyndon B. Johnson were all appointed to various top offices, and I saw the light of
day. And twenty-five years after that . . . well, we all know about twenty-five years after that. In the world as graced now by my own presence, the statues of a hundred years ago, fifty years ago,
twenty-five years ago, all came tumbling down. And the Hungarian border – which I just happened to be crossing at this particular moment, guards going down the train – opened up. And so
did the entire eastern landscape my train now began to cross.

Which brought me back again to Bazlo Criminale, the man I was chasing once more as my train edged slowly on towards Budapest. Where did he fit in all this, where did it put him? He belonged, I
reflected, just about one age back from mine: in the trough after the modern, but before what people now call post-modern times – rightly, I suppose, because the crises, the anxieties, the
hideous outrages left by the modern age have certainly not gone away. As Gerstenbacker had reminded me, he lived through the worst, as I had not: the Age of the Holocaust and the Age of Hiroshima,
the times of Stalin and Eisenhower, Khrushchev and Kennedy, Castro and Mao, Andropov and Khomeini, Gorbachev and Reagan. He had seen crisis follow crisis: the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian
Revolution, the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War and the Prague Spring, the Paris events of 1968 and the Watergate Crisis, the Afghanistan Crisis and the Iran Hostage
Crisis – and now, stirring in the background, the Gulf Crisis. He had lived through thaw and freeze, repression and then hope and then more repression. He had lived inoccupied cities, crossed
dangerous borders, been overlooked by watch-towers and telephone bugs and unmarked cars and censors, menaced by gulags and all the dangers that had been hidden in the kinds of landscape I saw
beyond the window. He had lived among theories and philosophies that had sought to territorialize the entire modern idea. He belonged to the age of forgetting, of avoiding, eliminating, blanking,
burning, in a time of terror and error, of ideas imprisoned, books forbidden, thoughts silenced, people unpersoned, classes eliminated.

And, in ways I did not understand, he had survived, become a hero of ideas. He had managed, in ways that I did not begin to understand, to be on both sides of the wall, find the key to the back
door, build the bridges of thinking, backwards and forwards, sideways and upwards, that were needed through a chaotic and tragic human age. He did not come from my age, and that meant I did not
understand his. In fact, as Codicil said, I was an investigative simpleton, and he was born in dramas and tragedies I could hardly begin to share. From what Gerstenbacker had said with the wine in
him last night, it seemed clear he had his share of secrets, that he’d made his tricky way through a time of chaos, terror, deception and disguise. He was probably flawed, tainted in some
fashion; he was certainly interesting. And now that I too lived in a time of transition, and saw in my own small way that no age lasts, that no framework is secure, that even the contemporary is
not for ever, I began to see a good deal more point to my search.

I stared out of the window of the Salieri Express. Contrary to myth, European trains are usually lumbering, contemplative, slow. They move reflectively through complicated landscapes, shuddering
over bridges and going through strange valleys or impossible passes. The crews change suddenly, the temperaments of the passengers shift. Now there was plainly an Eastern European world to be seen
outside. I saw high-rise concrete suburbs, workers’ apartments and grim-fronted stores, gridded streets and crowded yellow trams. There was a glimpse of water, a spire or two, a sudden sight
of a long stone aqueduct. I checked the railway timetable and saw the train must now be coming into Budapest, at just the time the management said it would. I picked up
The Magic Mountain
,
put it in the pocket of my anorak, there on the hook, took down the luggage from the rack, slipped the
Kurier
in my bag. I went down the corridor as the train doors jerked open, and stepped
onto the platform.

People in grey clothes and plastic leather caps pushed and bustled; overalled porters shoved along great barrows. The posters on the station walls were in a language of very great obscurity, but
they spoke of the things I immediately recognized – colas and jeans, television sets and pantihose. The architecture was grimly tiled, savagely functional. I looked round everywhere for a
glimpse of Eiffel’s ironwork and Eiffel’s glass, but there was nothing there to suggest the work of the old bridgebuilder. No, as seems to happen so often in the kind of life I lead, I
had plainly ended up in some completely different station. I went through a plastic-walled passage and out to the forecourt, found a small, air-polluting taxi, and gave the address of my hotel,
where I would call Sandor Hollo, the only real line I now had to Doctor Bazlo Criminale.

Budapest is, of course, really not one city at all, but two. Unlike Vienna, which has hidden the Danube away in a culvert on its fringes, Budapest allows the great river
– brown, wide, and fast-flowing by now, as it floods on southward and eastward – to surge through its middle, dividing it into two refracting capitals, looped together by great bridges,
which stare across its waters at each other. High old Buda looks down from its hilltops onto flat nineteenth-century Pest; lowdown Pest stares up at the castle, the battlements, the double hills
and deep valleys of ancient Buda. But when my taxi reached the hotel that Lavinia had booked for me that morning back in Vienna, I discovered that I was staying in neither of these places. My hotel
lay in the very centre of the river, on Margaret Island, reached by a zigzag bridge, a quiet green corner that made an excellent resort for lovers and joggers, summer walkers and playing children,
and no doubt, in the older, darker times just behind us, colluding spies and conspirators.

Back in the days of the Dual Monarchy and the
belle époque
, the tired and sated aristocrats of middle Europe had, I gathered, come here to its great Grand Hotel for the famous hot sulphur
baths, hoping to purge away their old amorous and gastronomic excesses and at the same time start on new ones. Rumour has it that Franz Schubert was made better here, though we can take it that
Franz Kafka was made a good deal worse. Then, in the new postwar order of things, it was Party bosses and members of the
nomenklatura
, small government officials and workers for the post
office, Russian tourists and East German attachés, who came to put on the grotesque rubber bathing-caps, splash in its fountains, take in its sulphurous steam, roll in its mud. Now the Grand
Hotel was not so grand, though it retained its shape and dignity. With the twists and turns of recent history, it has taken on another incarnation, and been quite heavily restored. Today it is the
Ramada Inn, and stressed German executives and excited American tourists now enjoy the pleasures of its stinking sulphur and eternal mud.

I checked in and got my key in the hotel’s now smart lobby, and changed Austrian schillings for Hungarian forints. Then a slow sad elevator took me upstairs to the long, many-bedroomed
corridor, smelling of sulphur and chlorine, on which I hunted for my room. I found it at the very end, one of the smaller suites; even at the former Grand Hotel of Budapest, Lavinia had done all
she could to make sure I had not ended up in total luxury. Nonetheless it had a tiny balcony, a view over the fast-flowing Danube, and an enchanting misty glimpse of fairytale battlements on the
hillside above. I could not complain. I unpacked a little, sat down at the desk, picked up the telephone, and called the number of Sandor Hollo, which Gerstenbacker had given me. There was a dull
dragging sound, then a crackling answer-phone message in Hungarian, one of the world’s most obscure languages, with the exception of African Click, then a quick flourish of Bartok, then the
dragging sound resumed.

I tried for most of the afternoon. From what Gerstenbacker had told me, I had assumed that Sandor Hollo was a teacher of philosophy at the university, and so I imagined that he was even now
closeted with his students, lecturing to his classes, sitting over books in the university library, or doing whatever university teachers do if they are not Professor Otto Codicil. Still, I kept on
trying, on the half-hour, until I saw that November darkness had begun to fall over the river, and bright floodlights were now picking out the battlements and buildings on the high Buda bank. So now I gave up, made my way downstairs, and went over to the hotel bar for a drink. Here, on the barstools, I found myself surrounded by a group of Hungarian beauties, all of them wearing
mini-dresses and leather boots that came up over their knees. They sat with their drinks and eyed me with the greatest curiosity. I quickly finished my beer, and went over to the maître
d’ at the entrance to the dining-room, to ask for a table for dinner.

The maître checked a plan that lay in front of him on his lectern-like desk. ‘I suppose you are with a film, sir, yes?’ he asked me. ‘Well, I am, that’s
right,’ I said. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Well, sir, tonight we have BBC making
Ashenden
, Granada TV making
Maigret
, Channel 4 making a series on the European Community
I think is very good. Which one, sir?’ ‘Oh, none of those,’ I said, ‘I’m here on my own.’ ‘Really it is too bad,’ said one of the Hungarian beauties,
who had wandered across from the bar with her Campari soda and was now standing by my side, ‘It is not good to be all alone. If you like it and have twenty dollar I will have dinner with
you.’ ‘A table for two, sir?’ asked the maître d’, looking at me with an air of deep human understanding. ‘No, thank you,’ I said, ‘Actually I quite
like being on my own.’ ‘You don’t?’ cried the Hungarian beauty, ‘It is too bad to be all alone. Everyone has twenty dollar.’ ‘Well, not tonight,’ I
said, ‘Tonight I have some work to do.’ ‘Oh, work to do,’ said the girl, ‘What a pity, well, tomorrow, when you have plenty dollar. You should not be alone, it is not
nice. Remember, you can find me here any time.’