Kraven Images (2 page)

Grandpa Blum had crossed the Channel well before the turn of the century. Apart from the old gravedigger, he could claim to have lived in England longer than anyone present. His English, as a matter of fact, was almost free of a foreign accent. It was perhaps natural that he should presume to translate the words into Yiddish.

‘I think he’s telling us to pour cold water on them.’

‘So?’ said Himmelglick. ‘Get water.’

Onkel Ferri, dangerously close now to convulsions, took this opportunity to withdraw. The dogs had by this time grown quiet, merely whimpering, as if they knew that help
was
on the way. Onkel Ferri returned after a few minutes with a bucket, its water spilling over on to his trousers and shoes. His coughing was mercifully over. He prepared to slosh the water into the grave. Everyone stirred and craned forward with interest.

‘Stop!’ shrieked Himmelglick. He had roused himself at the last moment. ‘Wait!’ He held aloft his prayer book, as if offering it for witness. ‘Earth! The coffin must first be covered with earth!’ His teeth remained bared, an indication of his alarm.

‘We’ll pretend, rabbi,’ said Grandpa Blum grimly, ‘that it’s been raining all this time. The coffin simply got wet. Pour, Ferdinand.’

Himmelglick bowed his head. Onkel Ferri dumped the water on the dogs, who let out a scream in unison, parted as if by magic, shot out of the pit and took off at top speed for opposite sides of the cemetery, barking joyfully, leaping over graves, and finally disappearing.

Himmelglick bared his teeth and picked up where he had left off. ‘May he come to his place in peace.’

Everyone in turn quickly shovelled a little earth into the grave. It sounded horrible when it hit the coffin, a sequence of hollow
crumps
. Then Nicko said the mourner’s
kaddish
, repeating the words after Opa, whose voice trembled as he prompted.

Then it was over. Onkel Koko and Onkel Gusti, pale and dazed, supported Opa, one on either side of him, as the old man tottered from the graveside. Onkel Ferri held Nicko’s hand and led him after. Poor Onkel Ferri’s feet squished, and there was a thickening cake of mud around his shoes. Nicko glanced back at the grave. The gravediggers were already filling it from the earth mound.

‘It’s a hard thing,’ Opa was saying, ‘no, it’s not an easy thing for a son to bury a father. But for a father to bury a son, it’s a bitter pill, a bitter, bitter pill.’

Nevertheless, even though he certainly knew better, Nicko half-expected to find his father waiting for him when he got home.

NICHOLAS MARCUS KRAVEN STOOD AT
his lectern in the well of the lecture hall. Of the two hundred banked seats before him only about thirty were occupied, and these at random intervals. A small knot of students here, another there, a couple toward the rear in passionate embrace, a knitter, a dozer, the odd revolutionary, a wilted flowerchild, a compulsive doodler, a mad grinner: in short, a perfectly ordinary class. It was 1974 and in recent years violent winds of change had blown through the groves of academe, uprooting the once sturdy tree of knowledge, scattering its fruit and leaving it to rot on inhospitable ground. So, at any rate, it seemed to Kraven.

He shifted his position, aware that the posture of graceful intensity he had sought – legs casually crossed, shoulders curved forward over his lecture notes, fingers gripping the lectern’s high far edge – gave him not only the anticipated view up Miss Anstruther’s hiked skirt but an unanticipated pain where the lower edge of the lectern cut into his diaphragm. Antonia Anstruther wore no panties. Three times a week between twelve and twelve-fifty she was to be found, impassive of face, arms crossed over bountiful breasts, seated always at eye level, a little to the left of centre, her legs parted, one heel raised and hooked on to the back of the chair beneath her. She neither moved nor spoke but gazed imperturbably at a point some six inches above his
head
. Once, early in the term, he had attempted to disturb her maddening composure by addressing a harmless question to her. She had merely closed her eyes and kept them closed until he, embarrassed by the lengthening silence, had redirected his question to the class at large.

Kraven stepped back from the lectern, absently massaging his diaphragm. ‘We come now to a crucial matter.’ He circled the lectern and leaned back against the table upon which it stood, a graceful posture, one of his best. ‘I mean, of course, the state of Lear’s understanding in the moments before his death. How we interpret this passage will determine ultimately how we interpret the play. We should expect to receive an answer to the question with which we began: What is the nature of the Lear universe?’

Kraven paused, allowing his gaze to travel earnestly over the faces of the students before him. What cared they for the state of Lear’s understanding? It was enough, surely, if by the end of the term they all agreed on a common spelling of the mad king’s name.

It would be incorrect to suppose Kraven unaware of his posturing. He stood, so to speak, outside of himself, not so much observing a genuinely scornful Kraven addressing the sons and daughters of anti-intellectualism in its revolutionary ascendancy as watching himself play the role of such a one. By now he had transformed his career into theatre, a private entertainment in which he starred, and thus he coped with his uncertain times.

The table shifted under his weight, producing an unseemly sound. Gabriel Princip grinned at him from his seat by the window. Princip, an organizer in the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, played his own role with an enthusiasm that matched Kraven’s. His costume demonstrated his solidarity with the Movement, a T-shirt with jaundiced armpits, denim overalls on which were painted crude peace signs and the legend ‘OFF THE PIGS!’ and
scuffed
sneakers. He was bearded and his tumbling torrent of unbarbered hair was circumscribed by a scarlet cloth of a kind that in Kraven’s childhood was called a headache band. In this Princip had stuck a jaunty quill, thus making clear his sympathy for the plight of the American Indian. Kraven shifted his weight back to his feet and returned to his position behind the lectern.

‘Let us turn to Lear’s last words, his final utterance before he dies. “Look on her lips,” he cries, “look there! look there!”’ Kraven allowed his eyes to glint. ‘Undoubtedly you have asked yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, what it was that Lear saw.’

He smiled to show that his was a gentle, a friendly irony. He knew, his smile implied, that before this moment they had not even recognized the question. But that was all right, not to worry, absolutely no rancour on his part – so long as they addressed themselves to the question now. All this was in his smile. Thirty or so faces gazed blankly back at him, while the eyes of one still focused above his head. He wondered, not for the first time, whether Antonia Anstruther possessed tunnel vision.

Kraven expected no response at this stage. He glanced at the clock on the far wall. In ten minutes he would be on his way back to his office, the business of the day over. ‘Think, ladies and gentlemen, think. “Pray you undo this button,” says Lear. Whose button? His own? The dead Cordelia’s? Have we here a clue to what it is the old king sees?’ Kraven had adjusted his tone to indicate that this time he wanted an answer. The moment for amiable bantering was past.

Mr Feibelman, white-bearded and gnomelike, a retiree, raised his hand. Kraven ignored him. Feibelman was a man of quirky erudition, and hence a nuisance. Whatever the subject of class discussion, he would bring it around somehow to the Jewish Problem.

As Kraven looked elsewhere for a suitable volunteer, heads bowed over play-texts, hands began scribbling in notebooks. This predictable behaviour pleased Kraven even as it irritated him. Only Giulietta Corombona serenely met his gaze. Now she pursed her lips, moistened them with her tongue, and winked at him. Kraven was startled. She had transgressed the cardinal rule:
Female students must
never
reveal in public whatever ‘special understandings’ they had or hoped to have with their male professors
.

‘Mr Princip, perhaps you would be good enough to share your thoughts with us. What is it that Lear sees?’

Princip’s fellows, spared this time, looked up. Feibelman sadly lowered his hand. Meanwhile, the smile had left Princip’s fleshy lips.

‘The thing is, you told us that like when Lear says his fool was dead, he din mean the Fool, he like meant Cordelia.’

‘Indeed I did. Although I’m sure I did not phrase it quite so felicitously.’

The class sniggered obediently. Someone else was in the hotseat.

‘Well, I mean, how d’you know? The guy says his fool is dead, right? I mean, why not believe him?’

Why not indeed? Kraven had no idea. It was true that every editor of every modern edition of the play that Kraven had seen inevitably glossed
fool
as
Cordelia (a term of endearment)
. But why must the word carry that meaning here? It had never occurred to Kraven before to wonder. The fault of his own generation, he supposed, this unquestioning acceptance of authority. Still, he recognized Princip’s ploy for what it was, a defensive counter-attack. In his mindless striking out, Princip had scored a palpable hit. Kraven summoned his forces.

‘I take it, Mr Princip, you are prepared to demonstrate the relevance of your question to my own?’

Princip had lost the scent of victory now. He looked quite cast down. Well, the lad was obviously a prick, a prick of the first water. (Yes, Kraven was well pleased with his conceit.) A raucous buzzer sounded. Match and set.

‘Saved by the bell, eh, Mr Princip? It seems you have the weekend to think of a reply.’ Kraven’s smile made clear his good humour. ‘We’ll pick up on Monday where we’ve left off. Meanwhile, ladies and gentlemen, I urge you to begin reading
Macbeth
.’

He gathered together his precious notes and strode triumphantly from the lecture hall. Princip, he knew, would absent himself from Monday’s class.

Kraven began a private hum, the outward audible sound transformed magically within his cranium to voice and orchestra. In this way he edged into a group of young women who were streaming along the corridor. As the the crowd approached the stairwell it slowed down and constricted. Kraven cheerfully ignored the girls’ jostling and, sinking deeper into hum and thought, was in this way agreeably titillated down the steps and out into the ardent April sunshine. He began the trek across campus towards his office, smiling a private smile and humming his private hum. ‘
Sapro, sapro
…’

* * *

MOSHOLU COLLEGE was located where an impudent finger of the Bronx reached for the private parts of Westchester. The campus had once been a ‘correctional facility’ for delinquent girls. Indeed, the searchlight turrets and conning towers that still surmounted the older buildings around the Great Quad bore witness to Mosholu’s bleak beginnings. But in the early 1950s the former Asylum for the Reformation and Rehabilitation of Wayward Women (founded 1867) became Mosholu College, devoted to the
preservation
, the cultivation and the dissemination of the liberal arts. This task the college had faithfully executed until the eruptions on campuses across the nation in the late 1960s and early 1970s at last shattered its peace. In point of fact, the students of Mosholu had sauntered woefully late to the barricades. Now students tumbled and cavorted on the greensward, some intertwined in panting embraces; others threw frisbees, did handsprings, strummed guitars, scratched crotches, exchanged term papers, hooted, laughed, shouted. They turned on and made out. The bulls with their truncheons were long since gone. Only the odd member of the faculty sunk in thought – Kraven at this moment was such a one – picked his way absently around and between healthy young bodies, sound too in mind.

‘Yoohoo, perfessor!’

It was Feibelman. Kraven picked up his stride.

‘Perfessor Kraven,’ panted Feibelman, drawing abreast, ‘you got a minute?’

‘Of course.’ Kraven looked doubtfully at his watch.

‘Your two o’clock office hour today, you could fit me in maybe?’

‘Not a chance, I’m afraid. Too bad.’ But Kraven recalled a recent decision of the Academic Senate, a body now infiltrated by student activist-nihilists and their faculty toadies: henceforth the college committees on promotion would take into account student evaluations of faculty performance. ‘Still, if you can walk with me to my office, perhaps we can dispose of your little problem along the way.’

‘It’s like this. The Prizes Competition? I’m working on something, original research, could be I’ve got a winner.’

‘Good, good.’

‘Could also be a loser, you know what I mean?’

‘The point, Mr Feibelman?’

‘So, you should be so good, before I get in too deep…’

Kraven gestured impatiently.

‘I been reading up on King Arthur. Now a person like you, an educated person, I put a premium on your opinion. What about Merlin? You think there maybe was a Merlin?’

‘Pure fabrication. Merlin is the stuff of Celtic myth.’

Feibelman grinned happily. ‘Boy, have I got news for you! Not only I can prove there was a Merlin but, a long story short, Merlin was a Jew.’

Kraven stopped in mid-stride. ‘Good God, Feibelman, you must be mad!’

The sun glanced brightly off Feibelman’s skull. ‘In other words, what you’re telling me, no work’s been done on it yet?’

‘Of course not!’

Students cavorted about them. Kraven began walking again, Feibelman trailing after, a little run and a hop. The old man was insane, that much was clear; harmless perhaps, but insane. Should he be referred to one of the college counsellors, one of the resident shrinks? Was there a rabbi on campus?

‘Naturally, a feller like you, a scholar, needs a bit evidence, what you might call proof, am I right? Nowadays, who believes in wizards? Only loonies. So what difference to you I mention Geoffrey of Monmouth, I throw in Gildas or Nennius? A bunch superstitious, you should excuse the expression, farts from the olden days, you’ll say. Nennius? He lived in the
ninth
century, dummy, you’re gonna tell me. And if I should happen to mention Gildas was Merlin’s contemporary? Big deal, right? Never mind they both talk about a wizard called Myrrdin, what did they know?’ Feibelman paused, as if expecting a reply. Kraven merely hurried his pace. The old man began to wheeze, but his legs pumped along, he kept up. ‘How do we get from Myrrdin to Merlin? Easy. Geoffrey changed the name. Why? If you ask me, what he wanted was to get rid of a possible pun.’ He looked at Kraven knowingly. Kraven raised his eyebrows. ‘In French,’
said
Feibelman. ‘
Merde
? Shit? Get it?’ He plunged on. ‘So now we come to the
Annales Cambriae
. What d’you know, here’s Merlin again. Knuckle-brain, you’ll tell me, the
Annales
is thirteenth century.’