Kraven Images (7 page)

‘Of course, I’ll honour your decision.’ Kraven now felt
confident
he had discovered her wavelength. ‘My thoughts will be of you, my brave darling.’ He must be careful. He too was beginning to overplay his part.

‘When will you be back? Or can I phone you at the College?’

‘Ay, there’s the rub. I’m not supposed to know it, but Papa Doc – that’s what we call Ari Papadakis, our chairman, darling – Papa Doc is giving a party in my honour directly after the meeting. My acceptance, you see, is taken as certain. But if I go to the meeting, I don’t see how I can avoid the party. What the heck! Join me there, why don’t you? I can give you the address.’

‘I’ll scarcely be in a mood for a party, darling, especially among strangers. Don’t be impatient, beloved. Get in touch with me as soon as you get back, okay?’

They kissed, a delicious, lingering kiss.

‘Before I go up to … to Robert, I think we could all do with a drink, something stronger than Early’s excellent coffee perhaps.’

‘A little
schnapps
. Wouldn’t hurt, wouldn’t be bad.’ Widerschein patted his stomach.

‘How about some cognac? Early, you know where it’s kept. As for me, I must shower and change. But go ahead, enjoy yourselves.’ And Kraven fled to the sanctuary of his bedroom.

* * *

DIGNITY HAD LONG TURNED A CALLOUS BACK to the Kravens. Only consider Opa: death had overtaken that marvellous old man as he sat filling out his pools coupon, trousers down, vulnerable to attack, a frail figure in the upstairs toilet. Not even Marko had cared to check whether Opa had written a winning column. And which of them had made a better end? Kraven was acutely aware of being the last of his line. The gods, or Onkel Ferri’s demons, had one more chance to play before the game was ended.

And now Stella claimed to love him. Kraven looked at himself in the mirror: hair in disarray, hair growing perhaps a trifle thin, the odd grey thread in plain sight; a face somewhat gaunt, badly in need of a shave; bloodshot eyes from which depended bluish rings; the curving fullness of the Kraven nose. No, not an appealing sight. Still – he straightened his back – better at his present worst than Poore-Moody at his best. All in all, a shower, shave and change of clothing would work wonders. Stella was no fool.

Kraven selected a tie that might suggest at once the sobriety of the established academic about to confer with president and dean and the gaiety of the young (well, not old) bachelor whose mistress has just confessed to adoring him. Either Stella loved him because, simply put, she loved him; or because, caught
in flagrante delicto
and making a virtue of necessity, she had convinced herself she did; or because the shocking events of the morning had eliminated for her the line between the fantasies of
grand amour
she must secretly always have harboured and, to speak plain, the grunting sweaty carnality of a Thursday-night lay. Why involve Menachem Widerschein and Early Byrd in what was patently a private matter? Because she needed the co-operation of an audience in investing airy nothing with a local habitation and a name. The thing existed – not merely because Stella said so but because independent witnesses could attest to it. Their acceptance of Stella’s truth would do more than corroborate Stella, it would also convince her.

Kraven remembered Marko’s advice to the young Nicko, years and years ago: ‘Lying’s easy. You’ve got to say the first thing that comes into your head. Right out, I mean. It’s no use stopping to think.’ The lie thus spoken soon convinced even the liar of its veritude. It transformed reality, imposing the order of necessity on to the chaos of circumstance. This lesson was a large part of his inheritance from Marko.

Kraven put on his jacket. The sounds of revelry penetrated
his
door, a shriek of laughter. The cognac was working its social magic. It was time for them all to go about the business of the day, Early to her household chores, Widerschein to complete his rounds, Stella to face her Robert. And Kraven? A decent luncheon downtown, a walk in the spring sunshine, and then a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, which today was offering a film documentary on the life and times of Sarah Bernhardt. This evening he might drop in on the Papadakises. Once a year at their ‘annual bash’, as they called it, the chairman of the English Department and his wife paid off their accumulated social obligations. To him the invitation had been a bit desultory – they owed him nothing, after all – but he had told Stella he was going to a party and, good as his word, to a party he would go. He checked himself in the mirror. Not too bad.

Before leaving the bedroom he took from a drawer the
Tickety-Boo
file, leafed through it, and looked for a limerick, composed some time ago, that, as he remembered it, was singularly suited to the present occasion. Yes, here it was.

Poore-Moody, a petit-point maven,

Whose forebears in fame are engraven,

Lost his wife to a chap

With cojones on tap,

And a name that is Nicholas Kraven.

Smiling, well pleased, he put it back in the file and returned the file to the drawer.

When he entered the living room Widerschein rose to greet him, a brimming glass of cognac in his hand. ‘
L’chayim!
’ he said, spilling a little cognac on the rug.

‘
Mazel tov!
’ said Early.

‘Darling!’ said Stella.

KRAVEN TURNED UP
Sixth Avenue from Fifty-third Street and walked towards the Park. The documentary,
Quand Même!
, had left him in a nostalgic mood. Satisfactory so far as it went, it lacked something of the warmth of his own feelings about Sarah Bernhardt. It might, too, have benefited from access to the Kraven archives. Perhaps he should consider bringing them to the Museum’s attention.

Quand même!
Even so! – Sarah’s defiant motto, adopted by his grandfather, August Alexander, in humble imitation and fanatic adoration. How Opa had loved her! No, not love, love was not the word to describe what the old man had felt for Sarah Bernhardt, not even hopeless love, respectful and distant. In his eyes she had been a being beyond the eliciting of any mere human response, however exalted. She was superhuman, supernatural, even divine, and Opa had ransacked the metaphysical in search of metaphors to describe her. He had been a moth to her great flame.

August Alexander had first seen her as Doña Sol in Victor Hugo’s
Hernani
on February 25, 1880. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the play and Hugo himself was in the audience. Opa had been twenty-one at the time – ‘a young
Bock
, Nicko’ – and in Paris alone. From Doña Sol’s first appearance he had felt he was witnessing a celestial manifestation. From her first words he had been possessed by a kind
of
ecstasy. Throughout the performance he was utterly fascinated. He had walked back to his lodgings, in the rain, dazed, weeping, running a temperature. The following morning he caused to have sent to Mlle. Bernhardt the largest bouquet of flowers obtainable in winterbound Paris. To this was attached a brief note: ‘From the humblest of your adorers.’ And that very afternoon he had himself photographed outside her house in the rue Fortuny.

‘Go, Nicko, the album, the first one, over there.’ Opa would settle Nicko on his lap and open the album. ‘Here I am, a young
Bock
.’ And there he was indeed. In his left hand he held an umbrella, with his right he held a small posy to his heart. One foot was set on the first step leading to the front door. He gazed up at a second-floor window, behind the curtains of which one could just make out a human shape. Sarah? Perhaps. Opa had thought so.

That had been only the beginning. Thereafter, the annual trip to Paris became a pilgrimage, a hegira, undertaken with the religious enthusiasm and awe of a zealot. Every year, except, of course, for the period 1914–18, he had had himself photographed, bouquet in hand, outside her house. In 1898, when Mlle. Bernhardt moved from the rue Fortuny to the Boulevard Pereire, the locus of August Alexander’s photographs changed accordingly. The pose did not alter with the passage of time; not so August Alexander, however, who gradually assumed the portliness of his middle years. The last photograph in the series, taken on an extraordinary visit to Paris at the end of March 1923, depicted Opa in deep mourning. The pose was different. He stood with his back to the house, his arms at his sides, his head bowed, in the attitude of a military guard at a state funeral. He was an old man now, greybearded. Scattered on the pavement at his feet were the flowers of a bouquet. This photograph Opa had had mounted and edged in black. Beneath the photograph in sober print appeared the following legend:

Sarah Bernhardt

1844–1923

Quand même
!

Over the years Opa had also had himself photographed outside the Odéon, the Renaissance, the Comédie Française, the Théâtre de l’Ambigu, and of course the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt. In the end he had accumulated eight large albums filled with photographs of Sarah, virtually every one of the hundreds of postcards in which she figured, dozens and dozens of theatre programmes, posters, prints, reviews, knick-knacks, a fantastic collection, perhaps the most complete in the world. These memorabilia, transferred in haste to Hampstead when, one week before the Führer announced to history the return of his homeland to the German Reich, August Alexander fled Vienna, were now in Kraven’s New York apartment.

The afternoon had waned. A chill wind, tinged with melancholy, blew in from the Atlantic. Kraven found himself more and more of late turning to memories of his childhood. Perhaps the phenomenon was a function of age. Approaching forty, he was himself becoming a figure of the past, towards which his thoughts quite naturally tended. He crossed Columbus Circle and began to walk up Broadway, stiffening his back and stepping out smartly.

* * *

KRAVEN REPLENISHED HIS DRINK at the makeshift bar and returned to the hubbub in the main room, the ‘salon,’ as Liz Papadakis called it. He had just spent a few ghastly minutes with Zinka Bleistift, the department’s most militant pacifist and most conspicuously publishing scholar. She had attached herself to him like a suckerfish. ‘Nickolino, hi! Haven’t seen you in simply eons! Not avoiding me, you
sexy
man? Tell me all about my new book, why don’t you.’ She was a tall dark creature already past the half-century mark, who possessed a huge nose that hung down limply over fleshy lips. Over her left nipple this evening she wore a brooch advising TRY GOD!, whether suggesting a new course of holy living or urging the indictment of the Almighty, Kraven was unsure. She had shaken him by the hand but had failed to let go, paddling his palm with her forefinger. ‘I’m a woman of profound moral convictions, whose strong sexual urges must be satisfied if I’m not to fall into looseness.’ With her other hand she had nervously picked shreds of nicotine from her tongue, the glowing tip of her cigarette almost burning her nose. ‘I rather think I feel a strong pulsation now! Yes, yes, that old black magic, Nick. Here.’ And she had conveyed his hand to her brooch, holding him clamped in place. ‘Tell me you feel it too.’

‘Ari’s looking for you. I think he went into the den.’

‘No kidding?’ She had released his hand immediately. ‘I think I’ll toddle off then.’ The rumours long circulating of hanky-panky in high departmental places were perhaps true after all.

The salon was filled with the usual Papadakis crowd, mostly ageing colleagues and their mates, shrill faculty wives or grunting husbands, accumulated in undiscriminating salad days and not now abandoned in the sere and yellow leaf. In a corner one of Papa Doc’s graduate students, alone, earnestly awkward among such luminaries, pretended interest in a gloomy gouache, petals on a wet black bough, the work, of Honoria, his hosts’ teenage daughter. Baxter Gosson, the department’s only living Emeritus, stood with his back to the fireplace, cocktail glass in hand, smiling vacantly and toasting whoever passed across his line of vision. Milo Thaler, resident poet, a young man who carried misery about with him like an open umbrella, hovered over Aubrey Lubert, music critic of a neighbourhood journal. Lubert was a
regular
at the ‘annual bash’, perhaps because he lived in the building. Dressed this evening in a dark-blue velvet tuxedo and bright red bow tie, he winked at Kraven and mouthed a tiny kiss.

Alone for the moment, Kraven sank gratefully into quality time, and while there he composed in his head a rhyme in that tight, short, complicated form called
clerihew
, the name of his cousin Marko’s college in London:

On again, off again,

A. Papadakis, the

Speedy Gonzalez of old Mosholu,

Fell on the floor atop

Lush Zinka Bleistift and,

Unzippered-trouseredly,

Started to screw.

The heat and the noise increased. People were still arriving. John Crowe Dillinger, the medievalist, was making his way to the bar. Now here was a man well worth cultivating. Without question the most incandescent of Mosholu’s luminaries, his appearance tonight was clearly something of a coup for the Papadakises. Dillinger was a meticulous scholar, a prolific author, who emerged from his study only to accept an award or to address some international symposium. The History Department did not require him to teach; it was enough that his name appeared in the catalogue and at the foot of a seemingly endless stream of first-rate publications. What on earth was Dillinger doing here?

Kraven, footing slow, followed the great man back to the bar.

‘Unexpected pleasure seeing you here, John.’

‘Eh?’ Dillinger eyed him suspiciously.

‘Kraven, English Department.’

‘Ah, of course, yes.’ He lowered his voice. ‘God, how I
hate
these faculty socials! Natter, natter, natter. No getting out of it this time, though. Diotima’s here, inside there somewhere. Our masters designated me her escort, and that was that. Jesus Christ! In any case, you’ll understand why I need this drink.’ He took a lusty swallow of scotch. His eyes narrowed. ‘She’s not, I take it, a particular friend of yours?’