Kraven Images (3 page)

Kraven coughed.

‘But what do the
Annales
tell us? Get this: when the Battle of White Chapel was over, a feller called Merlinus, “a poet and a prophet”, went berserk,
meshuggah
, what you British call bonkers. That’s only background, that’s nothing. So far, so good. Just the same, no cigar. But it brings me to my discovery.’

It also brought them to the building that housed the English Department, a quonset hut, really, which in former days had accommodated a string of solitary-confinement cells. Now Feibelman followed him to his door, waited while he unlocked it. Would he never be rid of the man?

‘That I suppose is that, Mr Feibelman.’

Cunningly, Feibelman put a trembling hand over his heart. ‘If I could just sit down for a minute.’ He followed Kraven inside.

The office measured twelve feet by nine. It had once been the guard’s communication room with the central prison complex; it was the only office in the Department, apart from the chairman’s, that had a genuine window. Kraven had come into his good fortune shortly after receiving tenure when he had explained to a compassionate Mrs Trutitz, the Department’s principal secretary, that he suffered severely from claustrophobia. Notwithstanding the window, the blind always remained discreetly closed.

Kraven had a desk, a comfortable chair (removed one carefree Summer Session from the Dean of Faculty’s office over in the Administration Building: an open door, an empty corridor, and the chair, conveniently equipped with rollers, was his), a stuffed wastepaper basket, a filing cabinet in which were collected his precious notes, a bookcase, a grey
metal
folding chair for conferees, and a chaise longue, a gift from an Hermione Gumm of five years ago, whose mother was discarding it in favour of something more ‘modren’. (Miss Gumm, to her credit – a definite A+ student – had immediately recognized its potential.)

The walls were variously decorated: a print of Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet; a Shakespeare calendar, this month displaying a nineteenth-century German etching of an Othello who looked like Erich von Stroheim in blackface, his left hand gesturing heavenwards, his right apparently fumbling with his privates; last year’s list of campus events; an enlarged photograph of Dame Edith Sitwell, gaunt in melancholic weeds; a rubbing from a pseudo-Gothic college fireplace that read ‘and gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche’.

The desk, the bookshelves, and much of the floor were piled with papers: departmental announcements, college notices, publishers’ catalogues, paperbacks, invitations, examination booklets, student essays, sandwich wrappers, advertisements, requests for letters of recommendation. It was Kraven’s policy to throw out all such detritus at the end of each semester. Thus he prepared for the new. Only his chaise longue and his comfortable chair were uncluttered.

Feibelman eyed the chaise longue eagerly. Kraven swept a pile of recent quizzes and other papers from the metal conferee’s chair to the floor.

‘Sit down, Feibelman. I can give you two more minutes.’

Feibelman sank wearily into the metal chair. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and began to dab his eyes and his temples, moving on at last to mop his bald crown. His beard hung in white glinting driblets. He held his sopping handkerchief by two corners, quickly twisted it into a tight tube, and draped it around his neck.

‘A couple seconds, that’s all.’ The old man’s wheeze moved by degrees through heavy into normal breathing. ‘Oy.’

Kraven drummed his fingers on the desk top.

‘So about my discovery. Naturally, you’ve heard of Gryllus’s
Apologia pro vita sua
?’

‘Discovered a few years ago – behind a chimney in Podsnap Parva, as I recall.’ Kraven was on top of things all right. He kept up. ‘Modelled on Augustine’s
Confessions
. What of it?’

‘You’ve read it, perfessor!’ What a man! said Feibelman’s expression. This is some perfessor I’ve got me here!

‘Ah, as to that, it must wait its turn.’ Kraven waved airily at his bookshelves. ‘Not exactly in my field, you know. In fact, why don’t you trot along to the History Department, talk to a medievalist. Dillinger’s the chap for you. Have a word with him.’

‘When I tell you what I got, you’ll understand maybe why I don’t go to the History Department. This is dynamite. You think I can trust just anybody?’

Kraven sighed.

‘A long story short, Gryllus
knew
Merlin. How do I know? Simple. He says his monastery sheltered a
meshugana
called Myrrdin. This
meshugana
he also calls
poeta, vates, magus
. So it’s not Merlin, you’ll tell me please who it could be? Of course it’s Merlin. Okay, so here it comes now. Lucky you’re sitting down. Right there in the
Apologia
Gryllus records an actual incantation of this Myrrdin, a powerful spell he says the
meshugana
always muttered over the sacramental wine. Such a scaredy-cat is this Gryllus that he tells us he crosses himself while he’s jotting the words into his memoir. Well, you have to understand, this was a
goy
from a long line of
goyim
. A monk, after all. And what was this spell? I’ll give you one guess. Go ahead, be a sport.’

‘Not a clue. And now, since you’ve got your breath back, I really must…’ Kraven indicated the heaps of paper on his desk.

‘A piece paper, you should be so good.’ Feibelman held out his hand. Kraven plucked a sheet at random from his desk. The old man tore it in half and began to scribble. ‘Here, this is how it begins.’ He thrust the half-sheet at Kraven: BOREASQUE TAURUS ADONAIS. ‘Nu, what you think of that?’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘You kidding me, perfessor? Okay, okay. Here.’ He scribbled on the second half. ‘It ends like this.’ He tossed his writing triumphantly on the desk before Kraven’s eyes: BOREAS PYRRHI HOC OPHINIUM. ‘Well,
now
what d’you say?’

‘You’ve lost me, Feibelman.’

Feibelman’s face registered his amazement. ‘But there it is, in front of your nose, the Hebrew blessing over wine!
Baruch atta adonai
, and so on. Of course, you’ve got to make allowances. By the time of the
Apologia
Gryllus wasn’t a spring chicken any more. His memory, well, you can imagine. Besides, what did he know, the
goy
, of Hebrew?’

Kraven felt a moment of compassion. Poor, sad old bastard. He must talk to him, give him a few more minutes of his time. If need were, Kraven was ready to blow this spark of pity into a lively flame.

‘You’ve come to me for advice, and you shall have it. Alas, Judaism has become your obsession. Lift a literary stone and there you find a Jew, or an antisemite. It just won’t do.’

‘You think my evidence is crap, is that it? Gildas, Geoffrey, Gryllus, they mean nothing?’ Feibelman was on the point of tears.

‘What evidence connects Geoffrey’s Merlinus with
Gryllus
’s Myrrdin? Or, for that matter, Gryllus’s lunatic with the one in the
Annales
? Wishful thinking, Feibelman.’

‘And the spell?’ He was slumped forward now, his horny fingers nervously combing his beard.

‘It’s no more than a coincidental combination of sounds. Look, has the Brooklynite’s
shut the door
never sounded to you like the Parisian’s
je t’adore
? You say we should make allowances for Gryllus, for his faulty memory, his superstitious terror, his lack of Hebrew. Should we not also make allowances for your obsession?’

Kraven paused. A tear ran down Feibelman’s cheek. His jaw trembled, fluttering his beard. Kraven, compassionate, spoke more gently.

‘Which of us, I wonder, has not at least once in his career pursued an
ignis fatuus
across the literary landscape? There is no shame in that. But the true scholar must measure his insights against the most rigorous of intellectual yardsticks, the probable truth. Only because I respect your scholarly integrity do I now advise you to abandon this harebrained notion of a Jewish Merlin.’

A sob escaped from Feibelman’s throat. He shuddered.

‘The path of the scholar,’ Kraven went on, launched now on a set piece, ‘is strewn with impedimenta. The truth may be found, it is there, atop a “huge hill, craggy and steep”. But you must first climb it, muscles aching, over giant boulders strewn on a wild landscape, avoiding as best you can the gentle, chimeric path that plunges only downward to Bedlam or Bellevue.’

Feibelman slumped in the conferee’s chair.

‘As a member of the Prizes Panel, I must tell you candidly that while I personally would grant an unbiased reading to a paper written on this insane topic, it is extremely doubtful whether any other panellist would read past your opening paragraph.’

Kraven brought his wristwatch before his eyes and glanced significantly at the time.

A cowed and despondent Feibelman struggled to his feet. ‘What it boils down to, I should forget the Arthurian topic?’

‘Unquestionably. Stop the madness here and now.’

A woefully stooping Feibelman stumbled to the door. ‘In any case, thank you for your time.’

‘Not at all. We must chat again.’

Kraven got to his feet and locked the door. The conference had been exhausting. He needed what he thought of as quality time with himself. He lay down on his chaise longue and sank contentedly into his thoughts.

* * *

KRAVEN WAS NOT ONE who could trace his ancestry to the primordial ooze. Of the Kravens, he knew that they had migrated from somewhere in Poland to Vienna in the middle of the last century and from Vienna to London in this; of his mother’s parents, he knew only that they had left Cracow for London as a young bride and groom, arriving in time for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. But it was the Viennese Kravens to whom he gave his allegiance. All the Viennese Kravens indulged a devil-may-care attitude towards money and expressed disdain for penny-pinchers. Thus they were distinguished in Nicko’s mind from the Blums, whom the refugees from Vienna despised, and for whom the sum of earthly wisdom was to be found in such a popular gem as ‘Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves.’

It was from his father’s family that he had assimilated a bittersweet sense of the Austrian capital – so much so, indeed, that he often felt he had lived there. The likenesses of his ancestors had been preserved in dozens of photographs, sepia toned, stiff, statuesque, self-consciously posed,
all
now in Kraven’s possession. An anecdote of Opa’s, of Onkel Ferri’s, of his father’s, and these long dead Kravens were released once more into life, almost as vivid to Nicko as those Kravens he knew, Kravens who had petted him, who had pinched his cheeks and fed him chocolates.

What he had as a child absorbed as unembroidered facts – the Kraven salon, for example, the pride of Vienna, where gathered painters and poets, musicians and journalists, bright eager young girls and their dashing escorts – were, after all, the reminiscences of exiles, refugees, lost and, but for one another, alone in an alien city. So they had clung together, deriving strength from shared memories of earlier happiness, memories from which anything less than the marvellous had been carefully filtered. In retrospect, the adult Kraven saw them, alas, as rather banal, mere sentimentalists, aspiring to what they were pleased to call
Kultur
rather than possessing it. (Cousin Marko, a natural Pavlovian, had once put on the turntable a record of Tauber singing ‘
Wien, Wien, nur du allein
’ simply to prove how quickly the tears would form in his mother’s eyes. ‘Told you so, Nicko, under thirty seconds!’) True, the Kravens had possessed a certain panache, a certain style, that distinguished them from the self-effacing English Jews among whom they found themselves. But as for the famous ‘salon’ of Viennese days, Kraven now rather doubted that it had achieved a level of intellectual attainment beyond that of the dreary cocktail parties he himself occasionally attended in New York.

The Kraven refugees had descended upon Felix’s London home in 1938 and transformed it, not merely in tone, but in furnishings, for they had brought their best pieces with them. The language of social intercourse became German. The cuisine was altered to accommodate Opa’s likes and dislikes. Felix was delighted, his wife less so. It was something to be a Kraven, a member of a moated enclave into
which
little Nicko had entrée by right of birth; poor Mummy, however, was, quite simply, not one of them. The Kravens stood against the world, a tight core of defence against hostile forces. And how could Nicko’s mother contend with that? She became after their arrival in England an alien intruder in her own home.

* * *

KRAVEN MUST HAVE FALLEN asleep. A rap at the office door brought him to his feet so suddenly that he knocked over a column of books on the floor. Groggily, he kicked his way through them. But, the door now open, what he saw before him shook him fully awake. For there, a frown of engaging perplexity upon her angelic face, stood a young woman of supernal beauty. Lissom she was and lithe. Her blonde hair – her tresses rather – tumbled to her shoulders. Her flawless skin was lightly tanned, her dark eyes huge, her lips a delightful moue. She was clad in well-bleached jeans that lovingly clung to her. A bumble-bee danced merrily on her upper thigh towards a rose, a brilliant red, emerging from her crotch. She wore a sleeveless white blouse that moulded itself to her small bosom, from which, after the happy fashion of the day, her nipples asserted themselves. In her hand she clutched a sheaf of papers. Kraven was enchanted.

‘You an English prof, and like that?’

‘Indeed I am.’

‘So I guess you know all about po-tree, right?’

‘Try me, my dear, just try me. Ask me anything from Homer and Virgil to Eliot and Molesworth. Test me on pastoral, Petrarch, ploce, or prosody. If it’s poetry you’re after, Kraven’s the name.’

‘O wow!’ she said. ‘Gee, you really talk funny, like weird, y’know?’

Strange, thought Kraven. The linguistic stigmata of her generation, against which he so frequently fulminated, tripped with endearing sweetness from her lips, less blemishes than beauty marks.