The collected stories (72 page)

I resolved to visit him that night. On the bus, I was amazed at my audacity: here I was visiting one of the most famous American poets. I wondered if I could bring it off. It was like anticipating a hard interview. Would I measure up, and could I get him to agree to the Berlin request? 1 did not know much about him, but I knew he was human. At the time, I was naive enough to find that a consolation.

The Abbey was a Victorian house behind a wall, with a tower to one side. Its tall church windows were heavily leaded. A mock Gothic villa, its rear garden was part of a private park - the most

THE EXILE

inaccessible park in London - and its Frankenstein-movie facade faced Wandsworth Common, many chestnut trees, and a row of bent-over hawthorns. Its sign, in old script, was well lighted, but the building itself was in darkness - the curtains were drawn, and it was impossible to get a glimpse of anything going on inside. When I rang the bell and entered I saw that it was a very deep house. Ahead of me, past the reception desk, was a long corridor.

A nurse took swift squeaky rubber-soled steps toward me, but before I could identify myself I heard a sudden yakking and the rattle of what was almost certainly lunatic laughter.

'Sorry about that/ the nurse said. 'Are you here to see one of the guests?'

'Mr Bellamy,' I said; and I thought: Guests?

'Is he expecting you?'

My first impulse was to lie and say yes. But I shook my head and said that I had not had time to get in touch with Mr Bellamy on the phone.

The nurse said, 'He can't use the phone.'

'Is he that bad?'

'No, no. He'd be on the phone all day, talking nineteen to the dozen, if we let him. But we have instructions from the family. He's not allowed to use the phone.'

'Poor fellow.'

'They're afraid of what he'll do.' She smiled at me.

'What will he do?'

'I mean, say.' She smiled again. 'He never gets any visitors.'

'Is it contagious?'

'Being manic?' She nodded with real conviction and said, 'It may sound silly but I honestly think it is. Crazy families! If you promise not to excite him you can see him. But don't stay too long. Have you been here before?'

I said no and she told me to follow her. Bellamy's room was on the top floor. The nurse knocked, there was a grunt from inside the room, and she left me there to go in on my own.

Bellamy lay on the bed. He was fully clothed - over-dressed if anything - wearing a jacket and turtleneck sweater and tweed trousers and thick socks. The room was small and hot and brightly lit and smelled of cough remedies: Bellamy also had a cold. On a chair there were books - three were Bellamy's own, including his Poems New and Selected. He was reading a small black Bible.

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY

He glanced up. It was a glance I recognized: his nod to the inevitable - not friendly, not hostile. But he was drugged - his lips were puffy and inexpressive, his eyes sleepy-looking.

He said, 'Read that,' and handed me the Bible, where a passage was circled in pencil. 'Read it out loud.'

' "I have digged and drunk strange waters, and with the soles of my feet have I dried up all the rivers of besieged places."' I gave the Bible back to him. Its leather cover was unpleasantly warm where he had been holding it.

'What does it mean?' he said.

I shrugged, and already I felt as if I had failed the interview.

'It's a poem,' Bellamy said. 'It's my poem.'

He tore the Bible page out and opened his mouth to smile. I thought he was going to eat the page. He crushed it into his pocket.

'How do you feel?' I asked.

'I don't sleep.'

'Can't they give you something?'

'That's not it,' he said in a drowsy voice. 'I haven't got time to sleep. Too much work to do. Look.' He picked up a book and said, 'Are you the tax man?'

On the bus I had thought: Will I measure up? Am I bright enough? The anticipation hurt my nerves. I imagined certain questions. But I had not expected this. I felt sorry for him.

I said, 'I'm from the Embassy. I have a message for you.'

'I've been getting messages for weeks. Taking them down. I don't want any more messages.' He showed me the book again, and again he said, 'Look.'

It was Poems New and Selected. He flipped the pages. I saw blue ink, a blue scrawl, poems scribbled over and smudged, balloons with words in them, and arrows, and asterisks. You see a person's bad handwriting and you get frightened or sad. It was the sort of book that students kept, full of underlinings and annotations and crossings-out. Now Bellamy was holding it open to a particular page. I could see that he had crossed out nearly all the lines in that poem and had rewritten them. I couldn't judge how good the new lines were - they were scarcely legible. The exclamation marks did not make me hopeful.

'You're rewriting your poems.'

improving them,' he said. Tm getting messages.'

THE EXILE

'But these poems have already been printed,' I said.

'Full of mistakes.' His eyes brightened. He looked desperate, as if he had been tricked and trapped and could escape only through this great labor of rewriting. He looked at his hands. There were ink stains on them that brought his wrinkles into relief. He motioned to the other books, opened one — it was Londoners. It was a mass of blue ballpoint. The handwriting was wobbly and childish and actually frightening to look at. It indicated disorder and mania and big blue obsession: 'And these.'

His head lay to one side, on his shoulder, as if he were trying to read upside-down writing. But when he shut the book his head didn't move.

He said, 'The names of racehorses - they aren't names. They're numbers. Word-numbers. Meaningless.'

I said, 'I had never thought of that.'

'It's true. A Jew thought it up, the names, to confuse people. You can make a lot of money if you know how to confuse people.'

'How do you know it was a Jew?' I said.

'Because the Jews have all the money,' he said. 'What's wrong with you? Sit down.'

I was standing at the foot of his bed. I said, 'I can't stay. I just wanted to make sure you're all right.'

'I'm not all right,' Bellamy said. 'Didn't anyone tell you?'

'You should write some new poems - not rewrite the old ones,' I said, eager to change the subject.

'If your car was rusty, would you paint it or sell it?' he asked.

'I guess I'd fix it,' I said.

'A Jew would sell it,' he said. 'But I'm not selling these rusty poems. I'm fixing them.'

I wanted most of all to open a window. It was stuffy in here -and the smell of Vicks and old socks and last week's apples made it stuffier. I looked out through the window bars and saw a blackness: Spencer Park. I sat down.

Bellamy said, 'Tell them I'll have this book fixed pretty soon, and then I'll leave this place.'

'Whom shall I tell?'

'The rest of them,' he said. 'Roger, Philippa, all the Howletts.'

Now I was certain that I wanted to leave. He thought I was his publisher. It was a charade - and pathetic. He had no idea who I was. It was unfair and tormenting for him if I stayed longer.

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY

'Here's one,' he said. He took up a piece of paper and cleared his throat. 'They were naked at last and had no pockets to pick.' He smiled. He said, 'The Jews.'

I stood up.

'They knew they had to be purified, an angel gave them the news.' He smiled as before. 'The Jews.'

I said, 'I get the point.'

'Their shoes-'

I could not stop him. He read on. It was a short poem, but it was poisonous, as clumsy as the scribble it was written in. It was demented, it was awful, it was wrong. And the next one he tried to read was an attempt at comedy. Anti-Jewish feeling nearly always tries to pass itself off as humor, because there is a kind of easy freemasonry in anti-Semitism - the nudge, the shared joke. And it is worse because it is completely fearless hatred mimicking sanity as it mocks its victims.

I was glad for the knock on the door as he started poem three: 'The Jewnighted States.' The door opened.

'Hello, Walter,' the man said. 'Have you taken your pill?'

Bellamy reached for the pill and put it into his mouth and drank his water. Doing this, he became childish again - the way he pulled a face and had a hard time swallowing, the way he gulped his water and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, the way he drooled and sat forward, working his jaw.

'May I see you for a minute?' the man said to me, and led me into the corridor. 'I'm Doctor Chapman. Are you a friend of Walter's? Family?'

'Not really, no,' I said. 'Just an interested party.'

'Pity. He's doing marvelously well. But he'd do a great deal better if he got more visitors. I'm thinking of releasing him. He needs company.'

'He says some rather wild things. Racehorses. Jews. And he's rewriting his poems. I think he's crazy.'

The doctor smiled at me. 'That's not a word we use here.'

'You use all the others - why not that one?' I said. 'And Bellamy's in there babbling about the beauties of Auschwitz. Why don't you tell him there are certain words, certain ideas-'

The doctor was still smiling. It was a Bellamy smile, of a kind - impatient, patronizing, humorless. He said, 'A famous Jewish writer once said, "All men are Jews," meaning all men are victims.

54i

THE EXILE

It's not true, you know. The opposite is closer to the truth. All men are Nazis, really. I mean, if all men are anything, which of course they're not. What a depressing subject! But I'm keeping you from Walter. Sorry. I just wanted to find out if you were close to him. 1

Tm from the Embassy,' I said. 'We try to keep an eye on our citizens, even if they are determined to be exiles.'

'He's that, all right. Exile - it's a good word for his condition.'

I did not re-enter Bellamy's room. I did not stay. He had no idea who I was. I took a bus home and drafted a cable to Berlin, which I sent the next day, explaining that Walter Van Bellamy could not attend this seminar, or any other.

And of course, for months afterward, whenever I saw a book of Bellamy's or a newly published poem, I searched it for signs of madness or Jew-baiting or plain stupidity. But there was nothing, nothing, nothing. His poems were serene and unmemorable; they never touched these subjects; and afterward, when I couldn't remember them, they frightened me.

rOMB w I in A VII w

fighting her cockney accent, and losing. She had a voice of astounding monotony.

1 said, 'Cio on. 1

'Well 1 - wayew - 'it's about my lodger then, isn't it?'

She looked around the office; she peered at the walls; she spoke again. She was one of those people who seem, in the way they \\ hisper and squint, to be addressing eavesdroppers.

'Mind you, I'm not really a landlady in the normal way. It's just that I live in Mortlake and the Council put up me rates, didn't they? Practically doubled them. I had to take in lodgers to pay the additional. That's Mr Wubb. Colored.'

'What color, Miss Gowrie?'

'There's only one color,' she said. 'Black. One of yours.'

I tried to convey, with silence and cold eyes, that I did not like this at all.

'And that's why I'm here,' she said.

'Because your lodger is black?'

'Because he's a thief.' Feef was what Miss Gowrie said.

'British?'

'Of course not.'

'Before you go any further, I think I should remind you that this is the American Embassy,' I said. 'Properly speaking, if you have a problem with your lodger you should go to the police.'

'He's one of yours,' she repeated. 'American. And he's driving me mental. It's not fair!'

'How do you know he's a thief?'

'He keeps the rubbish under his bed, don't he?'

'Rubbish?'

'Rubbish is what he steals - pots and pans and that. He's driving me mental.'

As she spoke, I resolved to check the man's citizenship. I didn't like Miss Gowrie's manner. She behaved as if she were holding me responsible for this thieving lodger. I hoped I could get rid of her without becoming involved in her problem. I had had enough that day, dealing with the ashes of Herbert Fleamarsh. The worst problems in any office arise at roughly four in the afternoon. It was four-ten, and I wished that I had gone home early.

'Mr Wubb has no right whatsoever to come here and steal from people. Some college student! I suppose he's studying how to steal. Why don't he stay in his own country and steal?'

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY

'That's a good question,' I said, picking up the telephone. 'Let's see if the police have an answer to it.'

'Oh, please, sir!' she said, and her fear brought forth a terrible tone of respectfulness, almost of groveling. She looked suddenly frightened and small, and I felt genuinely sorry for her. 'Please don't tell them. It would be in all the papers. There'd be talk. It would kill me.'

'That you had a dishonest lodger?'

'That I had a flaming lodger at all,' she said, i don't want the rest of them to know.'

'The rest?'

'The street,' she said. 'They don't take lodgers, certainly not black ones. They're awfully decent.'

She was asking me to agree with her. I said nothing.

'He's one of yours,' she said. 'You'll know what to do.'

But he wasn't, and I didn't.

It seemed no business of ours, this light-fingered lodger who might or might not have been an American. I checked the files. There was no one named Wubb registered with the Embassy - but not every American registered, and would a thief? Miss Gowrie telephoned me the next afternoon. She was desperate, and I had a free evening: the combination often ends badly. But I liked the idea of going upriver to Mortlake, so 1 visited her, just to look around, and perhaps to find excuses for my curiosity.

'He's rearranged all his furniture, hasn't he?' Miss Gowrie said, letting me into the tall gloomy house. It was just off the Mortlake Road, which ran along the river, and the river could be seen - we were mounting the steps to the lodger's room - from Miss Gowrie's upper windows. On this wet black afternoon the river's dampness seemed to penetrate every brick of the house, and the trees dripped gray water from the tips of their bony branches. 'In his room,' she said. 'He's moved everything, every stick.'