The New Confessions (28 page)

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Chapter One

My heart beat vigorously with anticipation. The first sentences, the first paragraph … what would they be like? I read.

I had to set the page down, such was my emotion. My heart clubbed, struggled violently in my chest. My God.… I felt drugged, intoxicated, almost swooning.

I know I was in every possible way in reduced circumstances. Like a parched man in the desert coming across a spring of fresh water. But I have never read such an opening to a book, have never been so powerfully and immediately engaged. Who was this man? Whose was this voice that spoke to me so directly, whose brazen immodesty rang with such candid integrity? I read on, mesmerized. Ten pages were all Karl-Heinz had supplied this time. I read and reread them. But the suspense was insufferable, agonizing. I had to wait two restless days for the next installment.

Karl-Heinz “fed” me the entire book over the next seven weeks. The metaphor is exact. The thin wads of pages were like crucial scraps of nutrition. I devoured them. I masticated, swallowed and digested that book. I cracked its bones and sipped its marrow; every fiber of meat, every cartilaginous nodule of gristle was dined on with gourmandising fervor. I have never read before or since with such miserly love and profound concentration. I paid for half that book with lingering chaste kisses, but the remaining portion was purchased more orthodoxly. I received my first Red Cross parcel. There had been some pilfering but I was left with a scarf, a pair of socks, a one-pound plum pudding and a bag of peppermints. Parcels began to arrive once a fortnight. I gave away my food for a book.

And the book? You will have recognized the unmistakable tones of Jean Jacques Rousseau in
The Confessions
. I was seized and captivated by this extraordinary autobiography—so intensely I could have been reading about myself. Buy it, read it and you will see what I mean. I
knew nothing of Rousseau, nothing of his life, his work, his ideas, and precious little about eighteenth-century Europe, but the voice was so fresh, the candor so moving and unusual, it made no difference. Here was the story of the first truly honest man. The first modern man. Here was the life of the individual spirit recounted in all its nobility and squalor for the first time in the history of the human race. When I set the dog-eared stack of pages down at the end of my seven-week, fervid read, I wept. Then I started reading it again. This man spoke for all of us suffering mortals, our vanities, our hopes, our moments of greatness and our base corrupted natures.

Pause. Stop. Reflect. We will come back to
The Confessions
. Suffice it to say that at this juncture the book released me from prison, metaphorically speaking. Rousseau and his autobiography delivered me. I never forgot that precious exceptional gift. The book, as you will see, was to become my life.

Karl-Heinz found it hard to understand my fervent gratitude.

“I can get another book if you like.”

“God, no! That’s enough. I just need the one.”

“What’s so special about this book?”

I tried to explain but I could see it made no sense to him. I think he thought I had become slightly demented by my imprisonment. Perhaps I was. I have to say that a kind of love had grown up in me for Karl-Heinz—not carnal in the least, but not simply fraternal either. I cared for him in an odd way and found his lazy corruption (I discovered later he had been pilfering my parcels), his casual attempt at seducing me, surprisingly unreprehensible. I suppose our long dry kisses did bring us together. Even though he was some years older than me I felt as I imagine the father did for the Prodigal Son, say a week after he had returned home and the remains of the fatted calf had finally been consumed. The passion had died and there was an odds-on chance that the boy would go to the bad again, but somehow he was still enfolded and protected by a blanket of tolerant paternal affection. I think this is about as close as I can get to expressing the way I felt about Karl-Heinz.

One day in May I was pacing erratically round the exercise yard when Karl-Heinz’s head and shoulders appeared above the palisade.

“Good news,” he said. “They have confirmed your story. You’re going to transfer.”

I felt suddenly, strangely unsettled at this information.

“Where?” I asked.

“A camp for British officers. In Mainz.”

Later that day this was officially confirmed by the camp commandant, a man who I had only seen once before, on arrival, some six months earlier. He was thin and sickly looking, his collar loose around his scrawny neck. His tone was semi-apologetic; he used once or twice the adjective “regrettable.”

I had one more meeting with Karl-Heinz before I left. He escorted me to the gymnasium washroom for my morning shave. He seemed entirely unaffected by my departure, which rather irritated me. (I suppose this was vanity. I was reluctant to accept that his sexual interest in me was simply opportunism.) I made him write my name and address on a piece of paper and promise to contact me once the war was over.

“Of course,” he said politely. “That would be fun.”

“Give me your address.”

“I don’t have one yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“All I know is that when I get out of this uniform I will be in Berlin.” He said this with unusual vehemence. Then he laughed. “Go to Berlin and ask where is Karl-Heinz Kornfeld. They will tell you.”

I did not see him again. A day later I was marched back to the station—up the hill to town, through the cobbled streets—and put on the train for Mainz.

The new camp was in a barracks on a hill overlooking the city. From the window of our room we had a pleasant view of the cathedral and the Rhine. Compared to the gloom and deprivation of Weilburg, the camp at Mainz was a hotel. Six hundred English officers were held there. We slept ten to a room in an atmosphere that was half boarding school—hearty conviviality—and half Boy Scout camp—all ingenious make-do-and-mend. Officers were allowed to cash one 5-pound check a month at a Swiss bank in town, and with that money we could modestly supplement our rations (almost the same as at Weilburg) with purchases from a small canteen: fish and liver pastes, plum jam, packets of dehydrated soup. With the usual relish that the British seem to exhibit when forcibly confined, the place boasted more educational possibilities than the average university. Classes, seminars and study groups existed in every subject from Aramaic to Zoroastrianism. There was a theater club, a
light-opera society and a debating competition with dozens of teams that seemed to run for months. There was a well-stocked library and, of course, a literary society for those who wished to talk about what they had read.

I went to the library from time to time. On the advice of others I borrowed and tried to read Maupassant, Turgenev and Walter Pater. I read them listlessly and with no enthusiasm. Having been burned by the flame of
The Confessions
, I found the alternatives pallid and lukewarm. I abandoned the library. My brain was still full of Rousseau’s life and words. My memory was haunted by those last weeks in Weilburg and, oddly, with the image of Karl-Heinz. Was it there in Mainz, in the tedious stuffy summer evenings when we were confined to our airless dormitories, that the first glimmerings of the enterprise that was later to dominate my life was conceived?… In all honesty I do not think so. I had no idea what I was going to do. In my empty docile moods I did not even think of “after the war,” far less of a career or prospects. I lived monotonously in the present. I cashed my checks, bartered the contents of my food parcels, played kabuki, dumb crambo and gin rummy and—a measure of how alien my mood was—I learned to play the banjo quite proficiently. Eighteen months later, in London at a party, someone brought along a banjo. I picked it up, people gathered round expectantly (I had been loud about my accomplishments), but I discovered to my embarrassment I could not play a single tune. It was as if some twin or sibling had learned the instrument, some ghostly edition of myself. The skill was fixed and localized both temporally and historically—Mainz, 1918—beyond that it disappeared.

I was in the camp at Mainz for five months, and in a way I look on them as more dulling to the spirit than my time at Weilburg. In Mainz I became like the Russians—morose, pessimistic, unwilling to be plucky or cheerful. Nothing happened to me there to rival my experiences in my solitary room above the gymnasium. My fellow prisoners were affable enough, but to me—grown used to the exhilaration of my own company, Rousseau’s and Karl-Heinz’s—they seemed insufferably bland. In a funny way I came to feel nostalgic for Weilburg and its melancholic absurdities—the glum alcoholic Russians, the dotard generals in tweed. I felt left out here in beefy British Mainz (always
l’homme de l’extrême gauche)
. I attracted no attention; my participation in the camp’s social life was minimal; I was in no sense a character or personality. I would wager that none of my fellow inmates, a few years
later, would have been able even to recall the features of my face. “Todd?… Todd?…” I can hear them say, faces screwed up to goad their memories. “Was he the chap with the ginger hair and a wooden leg?… No? Oh.… Can’t help you, I’m afraid.”

Perhaps it was a psychological problem? After Weilburg, to find myself in the society of men once more, in all its crude stinking intimacy, must have subdued me. Who can say? The war ended in November and within a month I was back in Edinburgh, just in time for New Year’s Eve.

This morning as I shave I catch myself wondering how often in my life I have performed this mundane operation. On average, say once a day since I was eighteen years old? Thousands upon thousands of times …

I rinse the bristles from my razor. All gray now. Whitebeard. My mind still works at the notion. Suppose, for the sake of argument, I shave off a quarter of an inch of bristle every week. That’s one inch a month. A foot a year. That’s a fifty-foot beard during a life, give or take a foot or two.… I try to imagine myself with a fifty-foot beard. Think of all the hair we men remove in a lifetime. Think of all the hair the human race cuts and shaves, plucks and depilates from heads, armpits, legs and groins. Think of all those locks and fuzz, whiskers and fluff, building up through the history of recorded time. Where has it all gone? How astonishing that the world has been able to absorb it!

Later, Emilia arrives and sets about her cleaning. Ostentatiously, I pick up a book and go out to my lookout. I sit there half an hour and then, unobserved, I follow a circuitous route round the field, through a small clump of banana trees, to arrive at the back of the house. There, behind an obligingly thick jasmine creeper, is the small shuttered window of Emilia’s WC.

I squinny through my tiny hole and settle down to wait. My heart beats with alarming strength, my breaths are deep and urgent. I reflect that this voyeuristic thrill seems hardly worth the strain it puts on the cardiovascular system.

I wait, it seems, for hours. Hot, scratched by the jasmine, pestered by flies … Finally, Emilia comes in. I breathe quietly through my mouth. The small hole is perfectly angled. I can see the top of the
cistern and, where she is standing now, Emilia’s legs from her ankles to her knees.… She doesn’t move. She hums to herself. She must be looking in the mirror. Then she approaches the toilet bowl. She flips up her skirt, thumbs fit into her pants and in one fast smooth action she sits down.

Nothing. I didn’t see a thing. I lean back against the wall. The toilet flushes and I hear the door close.

I feel the very opposite of aroused. I feel grimy, shameful, bothered. Suddenly I loathe my snouty old man’s craving. What has driven me to this sordid pastime?… I know. The German girls. Ulrike. Old memories have crawled out like lizards from beneath their stones. The past is catching up with me.

London. July 1922. I kissed my pregnant wife good-bye and walked down the stairs to the front door. Sonia stood and watched me go.

“Remember. Be sensible. Use your head.”

“Don’t worry.”

I stepped outside onto the Dawes Road, Fulham. A dray was delivering beer to the pub, the Salisbury, above which we lived. The weather was sultry, overcast, but not too hot. I took off my hat and resettled it on my head. Ten-thirty in the morning—it was not such a bad time to be going to work. I felt in quite a good mood. I crossed the road to the news agent and bought a copy of the
Morning Post
, I sauntered off down the road to Walham Green underground station. I worked in Islington and had a long journey to make across the city from Fulham. We lived in Fulham because Sonia had been born there and did not want to move far from her parents (a moderately pleasant couple: he was a retired salesman in pharmacological goods; we were never short of medicaments).

At Walham Green I bought a first-class ticket to King’s Cross. I was
earning over six hundred pounds a year: I could afford to travel first class—which was one reason I preferred the underground to the more egalitarian “tube,” which had no first-class carriages.

I smoked a cigarette as I waited for the train. I felt calm, pleasantly secure, as if my life had finally reached the plateau of stability it had always been striving for.

When I returned to Edinburgh from Mainz at the end of 1918 I had possessed no such equilibrium. I have to say, though, that the side effects of my war experience and confinement had left no physical scars. My hands did not tremble, I did not start at every slamming door, I slept tolerably well with no nightmares. The immediate psychological effect, apart from the permanent one I mentioned earlier, was a curious disorienting lassitude. At first I lived reasonably happily with it, thankful that this was the sole consequence of those two traumatic years I would have to bear. But as 1919 wore on and I still found myself held in this lethargic stasis, I began to grow more worried.