My American friends and relatives tell me I can’t say they’re nuts any more, not after Brexit. But I think I still can, up to a point. See, in the UK, no one had any idea what Brexit looked like. And in the US everyone knew exactly what Trump looked like. They’d been seeing little else for seventeen months. And if my British compatriots had known that Brexit looked like a hairy corn cob balancing on a Halloween pumpkin, then they would’ve voted Remain.
This brings us to the end of the first half.
…On the day after I got back from a book tour in Europe in October 2015 I said to Elena, ‘Now I know I’ve got to get on with my real-life novel, but in Munich I walked straight into a real-life short story – and I’d better write it while it’s fresh.’ I did write it, and the story came out in the New Yorker at the end of that year. The title was ‘Oktober’; and it appears below.
The novel I’d gone on the road for – my most recent – was set in Auschwitz in 1942–3. ‘Oktober’ makes no mention of the book about the Holocaust, so I’ll add a few lines about the German response to it, which powerfully surprised me (and not because it was in any way positive).
I saw very many homeless nomads in Europe, most of them self-evacuees from the Middle East.
That was over a year ago, and now, for Christmas 2016, we’re off to our house in the Sunshine State, me, Elena, and our two daughters, Eliza and Inez (to be joined, we hope, by my two sons, Nat and Gus) – before proudly returning, on New Year’s Eve, to all the comfort and security of Strong Place…
I sat drinking black tea in the foyer of the the Munich hotel. A lady in a lustrous purple trouser suit attended to the keys of the baby grand in the far corner, her rendition of Hungarian Rhapsody (with many graces and curlicues) for now unable to drown out the inarticulate howling and baying from the bar beyond the lifts. For it was the time of the Oktoberfest, and the city was playing host to 6 million visitors, thereby quintupling its population – visitors from all over Bavaria, and from all over Germany, and from all over the world. Other visitors (a far smaller contingent) were also expected, visitors who hoped to stay, and to stay indefinitely; they were coming from what was once known as the Fertile Crescent…
‘Let’s see if we can make a bit of sense of this,’ an itinerant executive was stonily saying, bent over his mobile phone two tables away, with clipboard, legal pad, gaping laptop. He spoke in the only language I could understand – English; and his accent derived from northern regions, northern cities (Leeds, Doncaster, Barnsley). ‘Yes yes, I should’ve rung two weeks ago. Three. All right, a month ago. But that doesn’t affect the matter at hand, now does it. Believe me, the only thing that’s kept me back’s the prospect of having to go through all this with the likes of…Listen. Are you listening to me? We need to resolve the indemnity clause. Clause 4C.’ He sighed. ‘Have you got the paperwork in front of you at least? Quite honestly, it beats me how you get anything done. I’m a businessman, and I’m accustomed to dealing with people who have some idea of what they’re about. Will you listen? Will you listen?’
The photographer arrived and after a minute he and I went out into the street. In great numbers the Oktoberfesters were parading past, the women in cinched dirndls and wenchy blouses, the men in suede or leather shorts laced just below the knee, and tight jackets studded with medals or badges, and jaunty little hats with feathers, rosettes, cockades. On the pavement Bernhardt erected his tripod and his tilted umbrella, and I prepared myself to enter the usual trance of inanition – forgetting that in this part of Eurasia, at least for now, there was only one subject, and that subject was of intense interest – to the entire planet. But first I said,
‘What do they actually do in that park of theirs?’
‘In the funfair?’ Bernhardt smiled with a touch of sceptical fondness. ‘A lot of drinking. A lot of eating. And singing. And dancing – if you can call it that. On tabletops.’
‘Sort of clumping about?’
‘The word is schunkeln. They link arms, and sway while they sing. From side to side. Thousands of them.’
‘…Schunkeln’s the infinitive, right? How d’you spell that?’
‘I’ll write it down for you – yes, the infinitive.’
Our session began. Broad-shouldered and stubbly but also delicately handsome, Bernhardt was an Iranian-German (his family had come over in the 1950s); he was also very quick and courteous and of course seamlessly fluent.
‘Last week I came by train from Salzburg,’ he said, ‘and there were eight hundred refugees on board.’
‘Eight hundred. And how were they?’
‘Very tired. And hungry. And dirty. Some with children, some with old people. They all want to get to this country because they have friends and family here. Germany is trying to be generous, trying to be kind, but…I took many photographs. If you like I’ll drop some off for you.’
‘Please do. I’d be grateful.’
And I remembered that other photograph from the front pages a few days ago: two or three dozen refugees arriving at a German rail station and being greeted by applause. In the photograph some of the arrivals are smiling, some laughing; and some are just breathing deeply and walking that much taller, it seemed, as if a needful thing had at last been restored to them. I said,
‘Trying to be kind. When I was in Berlin the police closed a crossroads in the Tiergarten. Then bikes and a motorcade coming through. The Austrian prime minister. Faymann, for a little summit with Merkel. Hours later they announced they were sealing the border.’
‘The numbers. The scale.’
‘And the day before yesterday – I was in Salzburg and there were no trains to Munich. All cancelled. We came here by car.’
‘Long wait at the border?’
‘Only if you go on the highway. That’s what the driver told us. He took the parallel roads…In Salzburg there were scores of refugees gathered at the roadsides. Girding themselves for the last leg.’
Bernhardt said, ‘You know, they won’t stop coming. They give up all they have – job, family, house, olive trees. They pay large sums of money to risk their lives crossing the sea, and then they walk across Europe. They walk across Europe. A few policemen and a stretch of barbed wire won’t keep them out. And there are millions more where they came from. Unless Merkel yields to domestic pressure – you know, to the people who call them aliens – the flow’s going to go on for years. And they won’t stop coming. Wir schaffen das, she says – we can do this. But can we?’
It was two o’clock. I had forty-five minutes (my book tour was winding down, and this was not a busy day). In the bar I waited at the steel counter…When Bernhardt asked me how I was bearing up after three weeks on the road in Europe, I said I was well enough, though chronically underslept. Which was true…And actually, Bernhardt, to be even more frank with you, I feel unaccountably anxious, anxious almost to the point of formication (which the dictionary defines as ‘a sensation like insects crawling over the skin’); it comes and goes…Home was 4,000 miles away, and six hours behind; pretty soon, it would be quite reasonable, surely, to return yet again to my room and see if there were any fresh bulletins from that quarter. For now I looked mistrustfully at my phone; in the email inbox there were over 1,800 unopened messages, but from wife, from children, as far as I could tell, there was nothing new.
The heroically methodical bartender duly set his course in my direction. I asked for a beer.
‘Non-alcoholic. D’you have that?’
‘I have – one per cent alcoholic.’
We were both needing to shout.
‘One per cent.’
‘Alcohol is everywhere. Even an apple is one per cent alcoholic.’
I shrugged. ‘Go on then.’
The beer the Oktobrists were drinking by the quart was 13 per cent, or double strength; this at any rate was the claim of the young Thomas Wolfe who, after a couple of steins of it, acquired a broken nose, four scalp wounds, and a cerebral haemorrhage after a frenzied brawl (which he started) in some festival mud pit – but that was in 1928. These male celebrants in fancy dress at the bar had been drinking since 9 a.m. (I saw and heard them at breakfast) before setting off for the Biergarten, if indeed they ever went there. I saw them and heard them the night before, too; at that point they were either gesticulating and yelling in inhumanly loud voices, or else staring at the floor in rigid penitence, their eyes woeful and clogged. Then as now, the barman served even the drunkest of them with unconcern, going about his tasks with practised neutrality.
I was carrying a book: a bound review proof of the forthcoming Letters to Véra, by Véra’s husband, Vladimir Nabokov. But the voices around me were insurmountably shrill – I could concentrate on what I was reading, just about, but I could extract no pleasure from it. So I took my drink back into the foyer, where the pianist had resumed. The businessman was still on the phone; as before we were sitting two tables from each other, and back to back. Occasionally I heard snatches (‘Have you got any office method where you are? Have you?’). But now I was slowly and appreciatively turning the pages, listening to that other voice, VN’s: humorous, resilient, boundlessly inquisitive and energetic. The letters to Véra begin in 1923; two years earlier he sent his mother a short poem – as proof ‘that my mood is as radiant as ever. If I live to be a hundred, my spirit will still go around in short trousers’.
As January dawned in 1924, Vladimir (a year older than the century) was in Prague, helping his mother and two younger sisters settle into their cheap and freezing new apartment. (‘Jesus Christ, will you listen? Will you listen?’) These former boyars were now displaced and deracinated – and had ‘no money at all’. (‘5C? No. No, 4C. 4C for Christ’s sake.’) Vladimir himself, like his future wife, the Judin Véra Slonim, had settled in Berlin, along with almost half a million other Russian fugitives from October 1917. And in Berlin they would blithely and stubbornly remain. Their lone child, Dmitri, was born there in 1934; the Nuremberg Laws were passed in September 1935, and were expanded (and strictly enforced) after the Berlin Olympics of 1936; but not until 1937 did the Nabokovs hurriedly decamp to France, after a (never-ending) struggle with visas and exit permits and Nansen passports.
‘No, I bet you don’t. Okay, here’s an idea. Why don’t you pop on a plane and come and tell them that here in Germany? With your approach, so-called? They’d laugh you out of town. Because here they can handle the ABC and the two times two. Unlike some I could mention. Here they happen to understand a thing or two about system. And that’s why they’re the powerhouse of Europe. Go on, pop on a plane. Or is that beyond you too?’
The muted TV screen showed the chancellor in mid-explication, her face patient and reasonable and mildly beseeching…I put the book aside and briefly reminisced about Angela (with the hard g) – Frau Merkel.
I was introduced to her (a handshake and an exchange of hellos) by Tony Blair, in 2007, when she was two years into her first term (and I was spending several weeks on and off in the prime minister’s entourage). We were in the top floor of the titanic new Chancellery: the full bar arrayed on the table, the (as yet spotless) ashtrays, Angela’s humorous and particularising smile. The Chancellery was ten times the size of the White House – where Blair would also squire me a week or two later; but I had no more than a sudden moment of eye contact with President Bush, as he and Tony came up from the subterranean Situation Room (this was the time of the Surge in Iraq). And from Washington we went via London to Kuwait City, and to Basra, and to Baghdad.
Merkel was born in East Germany in the early days of the Cold War…So far, there have been several dozen female heads of state; and I thought then that Angela was perhaps the first who was capable of ruling as a woman. In the summer months of 2015, in the world’s eyes she became the brutal auditress of the Greek Republic; by late September they were calling her Mutti Merkel, as she opened her gates as wide as she could to the multitudes of the dispossessed. Willkomenskultur was the word.
Blair was practically teetotal, but he was visibly charmed and stimulated by Angela Merkel (he was full of praise for her, adding with amused affection that she liked to sit up late and have a lively time), and on the Chancellery roof that evening the British premier could be seen with a beer in his hand, a beer perhaps of festival strength…
This is to some degree true of every human community on earth, but the national poet, here, said long ago of his Germans, with a strain of anguish: how impressive they were singly (how balanced, how reflective, how dry), and how desperately disappointing they were plurally, in groups, in cadres, in leagues, in blocs. And yet here they all were (for now), the Germans, both as a polity and a people, setting a progressive, even a futuristic example to the continent and to the world.
With the refugee crisis of 2015, ‘Europe’, Chancellor Merkel had said, was about to face its ‘historic test’.
‘Will you listen to me? Will you listen to me?’
But like a washing machine the businessman had moved on to a quieter cycle. Still tensed, still crouched, but reduced to a sour mutter. The pianist’s shift was apparently at an end, and I was grimacing into a phone myself, trying to hear the questions of a studious young profilist I had talked to in Frankfurt. Eavesdroppers and those active in identity theft might have been tempted to draw near, but the foyer was practically deserted; the businessman and I had the space to ourselves.
‘1949,’ I said, ‘in Oxford. Not Wales – Wales was later. Yes, go ahead. Why did my wife and I move to America? Because…well, it sounds complicated, but it’s an ordinary story. In 2010 my mother Hilary died. She was on the verge of eighty-two. My mother-in-law, Betty, was also eighty-two at the time. So in response to that we moved to New York.’ Yes, and Elena ended a voluntary and much-punctuated exile in London that had lasted twenty-seven years, returning to her childhood home in Greenwich Village. ‘Us now? No. Brooklyn. Since 2011. You get too old for Manhattan.’ We made our way to the final question. ‘This trip? Six countries.’ And ten cities. ‘Oh definitely. And I’m reading all I can find on it, and everyone’s talking about nothing else. Well, I haven’t spent time with any experts – but of course I have impressions.’
Our call wound up. The businessman was going on in his minatory whisper,
‘You know who you remind me of? The hordes of ragamuffins who’re piling into this country even as I speak. You, you just can’t stand on your own two feet, can you? You’re helpless.’
An angular youth from the reception desk approached and handed me a foolscap Manila envelope. In it were Bernhardt’s photographs. Registering this, I felt the rhythm of my unease slightly accelerate. I moved next door into the restaurant, and I fanned them out on the table.
The Europeans you talked to offered different views and prescriptions, but the underfeeling seemed to centre on an encounter with something, something not quite unknown but known only at a distance. The entity accumulating on the borders, the entity for which they were bracing and even rousing themselves to meet with goodwill and good grace, seemed amorphous, undifferentiated, almost insensate – like an act of God or a force of nature.
And it was as if Bernhardt’s camera had set itself the task of individualisation, because here was a black-and-white galère of immediately and endearingly recognisable shapes and faces, bantering, yawning, frowning, grinning, scowling, weeping, in postures of exhaustion, stoic dynamism, and of course extreme uncertainty and dismay…
When you glimpsed them in the train stations, they were configured in narrow strings or little knots, always moving, moving, their gaze and gait strictly forward-directed (with no waste of attention, with no attention to spare). But in Salzburg two days earlier I saw seventy or eighty of them lined up on the street corner, very predominantly very young men, in international teenage gear, baseball caps, luminous windcheaters, dark glasses. Soon they would be approaching the German border (just a few miles away) – and then what? Theirs was a journey with charts and graphs and updates (those cell phones), but with no certain destination. Dawn had just arrived in Austria, and the buildings shone sheepishly in the dew. And you thought, How will all this look and feel a few weeks from now – after Oktober?
At four o’clock, as scheduled, I was joined by my penultimate interviewer, an academic, who began by reminding me of a salient historical fact. She was middle-aged, so it was not in her living memory; but it was in the living memory of her mother. In the period 1945–7 there were 10 million homeless supplicants on the periphery of what was once the Reich, all of them deported, ejected (in spasms of greater or lesser hatred and violence, with at least half a million deaths en route), from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania. And they were all Germans – the ‘ethnic’ Germans that Hitler claimed were so close to his heart.
‘And your mother remembers that?’
‘She was at the station. She was seven or eight. She remembers the iced-up cattle cars. It was Christmas.’
I had been gone for seventy-five minutes and the businessman was still in mid-conversation. By now his phone had a charger in it; and the short lead, plugged into a ground-level socket, required him to bend even tighter – he was jackknifed forward with his chin an inch from the knee-high tabletop.
‘You carry on like this and you won’t have a roof over your head. You’ll be on the street and you’ll deserve it. The wheels are coming off your whole operation. And I’m not surprised. Bloody hell, people like you. You make me sick, you do. Professionally sick.’
The pianist had gone but other noisemakers were on duty – a factory-size vacuum cleaner, a lorry revving and panting in the forecourt. I went back to my book. August 1924, and Vladimir was in Czechoslovakia again, holidaying with his mother in DobŘichovice. The hotel was expensive and they were sharing a (sizable) room divided in two by a white wardrobe. Soon he would return to Berlin, where Véra…
All ambient sounds suddenly ceased, and the businessman was saying,
‘D’you know who this is? Do you? It’s Geoffrey. Geoffrey Vane. Yeah, Geoffrey. Geoff. You know me. And you know what I’m like…Right, my patience is at an end. Congratulations. Or as you’d say, Super…
‘Now. Get your fucking Mac and turn to your fucking emails. Do you understand me? Do you understand me? Go to the communication from the fucking agent. The on-site agent. You know, that fucking Argy – Feron. Fucking Roddy Feron. Got it? Now bring up the fucking attachment. Got it? Right – fucking 4C.’
The often-used intensifier he pronounced like cooking or booking. At this point I slowly went and slid on to the chair opposite me, so I could have a proper look at him – the clerical halo of grey hair, the head, still direly bowed and intent, the laptop, the legal pad.
‘It’s the fucking liability. Do you understand me? Now say. 4C. Does that, or does that not, square with Tulkinghorn’s F6? It does? Well praise fucking be. Now go back to fucking 4C. And fucking okay it. Okay? Okay.’ And he added with especial menace, ‘And the Lord pity you if we have to go through this again. You fucking got that? Sweet dreams. Yeah, cheers.’
And now, in unwelcome symmetry, the businessman also moved to the seat opposite, though swiftly and without rising above a crouch; with his meaty right hand he appeared to be mopping himself down, seeing to the pink brow dotted with motes of sweat, the pale and moist upper lip. Our eyes met inexorably, and he focused.
‘…Do you understand English?’
Do I understand English? ‘Uh, yeah,’ I said.
‘Ah.’
And I speak it, too. Like everyone else around here. Great Britain no longer had an empire – except the empire of words; not the imperial state, just the imperial tongue. Everyone knew English. The refugees knew English, a little bit. That partly explained why they wanted to get to the UK and Eire, because everyone there knew English. And it was why they wanted to get to Germany: the refugees knew no German, but the Germans all knew English – the nut-brown maid who was brushing the curtains knew English, the sandy-haired bellhop knew English.
‘…You’re English,’ he announced with reluctant wonder.
I found myself saying, ‘London, born and bred.’ Not quite true; but this wasn’t the time to expatiate on my babyhood – with the mother who was barely older than I was – in the Home Counties circa 1950, or to dream out loud about that early decade in South Wales, infancy, childhood, when the family was poor but still nuclear. For half a century after that, though, yes, it was London. He said,
‘I can tell by the way you talk…That was a tough one, that.’
‘The phone call.’
‘The phone call. You know, with some people, they haven’t got a fucking clue, quite honestly. You’ve just got to start from scratch. Every – every time.’
‘I bet.’ And I cursorily imagined a youngish middle manager, slumped over his disorderly workstation in a depot or showroom out by an airport somewhere, loosening his tie as he pressed the hot phone to his reddened ear.
‘Look at that,’ he said, meaning the television – the eternally silent television. On its flat screen half a dozen uniformed guards were tossing shop sandwiches (cellophane-wrapped) into a caged enclosure, and those within seemed to snap at them – and it was impossible to evade the mental image of feeding time at the zoo. The businessman said with contented absorption, as he made some calculations on the yellow page,
‘Amazing the lengths people’ll go to for a handout, in’t it?’
The in’t it? was rhetorical: his truism anticipated no reply. In Cracow and Warsaw (I recalled, as the businessman immersed himself in his columned figures) everyone was saying that Poland would be exempt: the only homogenous country in Central Europe, the only monoculture, blue-eyed Poland thought it would be exempt because ‘the state gives no benefits’. I heard this from a translator so urbane that he could quote at length not only from Tennyson but also from Robert Browning; and in answer I nodded, and resumed work on my heavy meal. But when I was dropped off at the hotel (and stood on the square facing the antique prosthetic leg of Stalin’s Palace of Culture), I shook my head. Someone who has trekked across the Hindu Kush would not be coming to Europe for a shop sandwich. The businessman said,
‘Where are we. What country’s this?’
He meant the country where dark-skinned travellers were being tumbled and scattered by water cannon (followed up with tear gas and pepper spray). I said,
‘Looks like Hungary.’
‘Eh, that bloke there’s got the right idea.’ He paused as he closed his eyes and the bloodless lips mimed a stretch of mental arithmetic. ‘What’s he called?’
I told him.
‘Yeah. Orbán. We ought to be doing likewise in Calais. No choice. It’s the only language they understand.’
Oh no, sir, the language they understand is much harsher than that. The language they understand consists of barrel bombs and nerve gas and the scimitars of incandescent theists. They’re not in search of a nanny state, Mr Vane. It’s more likely that they seek a state that just leaves them alone…
‘Merkel,’ he said. ‘Frau Merkel should take a leaf out of Orbán’s book. She won’t of course. I know you shouldn’t say this, but I think women are too emotional to be heads of state – too tender-hearted. By rights, Merkel should do an Orbán. Recognise what she’s dealing with, namely illegal aliens. Criminal aliens. See? There you go.’
He meant the footage evidently posted by ISIS – a truck exploding in slow motion, three prisoners in orange jumpsuits kneeling on a sand dune, multipronged fighters tearing by in SUVs.
‘Then there’s that.’ He achieved some climactic grand total on his pad, underlined it three times and circled it before tossing the pen aside. ‘Jihadis.’
‘Might be complicated,’ I said.
‘Complicated…Hang about,’ he said with a frown. ‘Silly me. Forgot to factor in the three point five. Give us a minute.’
Perhaps a better name for them, sir, would be takfiri. The takfir accusation (the lethal accusation of unbelief) is almost as old as Islam, but in current usage takfiris, Mr Vane, is sharply derogatory and it means, Muslims who kill Muslims (and not just infidels). And the logic of it goes on from there. If there are militants in the influx, and they act, Geoffrey, then it’s the Muslims of Europe who will suffer; and the takfiris won’t mind that because their policy, here, is the same as Lenin’s during the Russian Civil War: ‘the worse the better’. Is it fanciful, Geoff, to suggest that this lesson is the evil child of the witches in the Scottish play – ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’?
‘Complicated? That’s the understatement of the year.’
Suddenly he became aware of the phone he had reflexively reached for. He inhaled with resignation and said, ‘You know what gets me? The repetitions. You plod through the same things again and again. And it just doesn’t sink in. Not with that one, oh no. Not with her.’
Her? I sat up straight.
‘Tell me something,’ he insisted. ‘Why’re they all coming now? They say despair. Despair, they say. But they can’t all have despaired in the same week. Why’re a million of them coming now? Tell me that.’
I regrouped and said, ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to find out. Apparently a safe route opened up. Through the Balkans. They’re all in touch with each other and then there it was on Facebook.’
He went blank or withdrew for a moment. But then he returned. ‘I’ll give them bleeding Facebook. I’ll give them bleeding Balkans. They…They’ve turned their own countries into, into hellholes quite frankly, and now they’re coming here. And even if they don’t start killing us all they’re going to want their own ways, aren’t they. Halal, mosques. Uh, sharia, in’t it. Arranged marriages – for ten-year-old first cousins…But let’s uh be uh, “enlightened” about it. Okay. They’ll have to adapt, and fucking quick about it and all. They’ll have to bow their heads and toe the line. Socially. On the women question and that.’
He closed his computer, and gazed for a moment at its surface and even stroked his knuckles across it.
‘You know, I’ll have to call her back.’ And there was now a sudden weak diffidence in his smile as he looked up and said, ‘Well it is my mum.’
I had to make an effort to dissimulate the scope of my surprise…Shorn of context (the business hotel, the business suit – the expensive posture-pedic shoes, like velvet Crocs), his bland round white-fringed face looked as though it would be happiest, or at least happier, on a village green on a summer afternoon; that face could have belonged to anybody non-metropolitan, a newsagent, a retired colonel, a vicar. With a nod I reached for my electronic cigarette and drew on it.
‘Eighty-one, she is.’
‘Ah well.’ After a moment I said, ‘My mother-in-law’s eighty-six.’ And you see, sir, it’s a long story, but she was the reason we left England; and we never regretted it. The process felt natural for my wife, naturally, but it also felt natural for me. There must’ve been filial love left over after the death of Hilary Bardwell, and it had nowhere else to go. I said, ‘Eighty-six – five years further on than yours.’
‘Yeah? And what’s the state of her then, eh? Can she hold a thought in her head for two seconds? Or is she all over the fucking gaff like mine. I mean, when your bonce goes, I ask you, what is the sense in carrying on?’
I gestured at the instrument he still held in his hand and said, ‘Just wondering, but what was that – what was all that to do with?’
He sat back and grunted it out: Lanzarote. Sinking deeper, he reached up and eased his writhing neck. ‘For her eightieth, see, I bought her a beautiful little timeshare in Lanzarote. Beautiful little holiday home. Maid looking in every morning. A bloke doing the garden. Good place to park her in the winter. Roof terrace overlooking the bay. And now she’s meant to renew the insurance. That’s all it is. The contents insurance and that. Shouldn’t have taken but a minute.’
‘Well. They do find it hard to…’
‘You know, I’ve got four brothers. All younger. And not one of them’ll touch her with a fucking bargepole. They won’t have anything to do with her. It’s true the old – she does drive you mad, there’s no question. But you’ve got to grind it out, haven’t you. And the four of them, they won’t go near her. Can you credit it? They won’t go near their own fucking mum. Pardon the language. Well, they haven’t got my resources, admittedly. So answer me this. Where would she be without my support?’
With a glance at my wrist I said, ‘Damn. I’d better pack. Early flight.’
‘Here for a day or three yet, me. Take a well-earned rest. Look in at the gym. Room service. Uh, what’s your destination?’
I took his offered hand. ‘Home.’
As I bunched and crushed various items into the splayed bag, I activated my computer. And saw that there was still no message from my wife (nor from a single one of my children). Yes, well, it was the same with Nabokov: ‘Don’t you find our correspondence is a little…one-sided?’ And in my case it was curious, because when I was away like this I never fretted about my other life, my settled life, where everything was nearly always orderly and unchanging and fixed into place…
Otherwise I felt fine, and even quite vain of my vigour (health after all unbroken), and buoyant, and stimulated, and generally happy and proud; the tour had awakened anxiety in me but I have to say that even the anxiety was not unwelcome, because I recognised it as the kind of anxiety that would ask to be written about. At odd moments, though, I seriously questioned the existence of the house in Brooklyn, with its three female presences (wife, daughters), and I seriously questioned the existence of my two boys and my eldest daughter, all grown, in London – and my two grandchildren. So many! Could they, could any of them, still be there?
‘Good morning, this is your wakeup call…Good morning, this is your wakeup call…Good morning, this is your –’
I had one final appointment: a radio interview with a journalist called Konrad Purper, destined to take place in what they called the Centre d’Affaires, with its swivel seats and cord carpets. When it was over Konrad and I stood talking in the foyer until my chaperone promptly but worriedly appeared. There had been many chaperones, many helpers and minders – Alisz, Agata, Heidi, Marguerite, Hannah, Ana, Johanna.
‘There are no taxis!’ said Johanna. ‘They can’t get near us. Because there’s too many people!’
Normally I am very far from being an imperturbable transatlantic traveller. But at that moment I sensed that my watch was moving at its workaday pace; time did not start speeding up, did not start heating up. What was the worst thing that could happen? Nothing much. I said, ‘So we…’
‘Walk.’
‘To the airport.’
‘No – sorry. I’m not clear. To the train station. We can get there from there.’
‘Oh and the station’s close, isn’t it.’
‘Five minutes,’ said Konrad. ‘And every ten minutes a rail shuttle goes to Munich International.’
So with Johanna I started out, rolling my bag, and with Konrad perhaps coincidentally rolling his bike, and the three of us often rolling aside on to the carless tarmac in favour of the pageant of costumed revellers coming the other way. This narrow thoroughfare, Landwehrstrasse, with its negotiations between West and East – Erotic Studio, Turkish Restaurant, Deutsche Bank, Traditional Thai Massage, Daimler-Benz, Kabul Market…
We came out into the air and space of the Karlsplatz and the multitudes of Hansels and Gretels (many of the women, in the second week, decadently wearing the despised ‘Barbie’ alternative: a thick-stitched bodice and a much-shortened dirndl showing the white stocking tops just above the knee). How did it go in the Biergarten? According to Thomas Wolfe, they had merry-go-rounds, and an insane profusion of sausage shops, and whole oxen turning on spits. They ate and drank in tents that could seat 6,000, 7,000, 8,000. If you were in the middle of this, Wolfe wrote, Germany seemed to be ‘one enormous belly’. Swaying, singing, linking arms: Germans together, en masse, objectively ridiculous, and blissfully innocent of any irony…
Now Johanna, I saw, was talking to a policeman who was stretched out in a parked sidecar. Konrad stood by. She turned and said to me,
‘It’s – you can’t even get there by foot!’
For many years I lived in Notting Hill, and sat through many Carnivals (in earlier times often attending with my sons); I knew about cordons, police gauntlets, closed roads (for ambulance access), and panics and stampedes; once I was in a crush that firmly assured me that you could face death simply by means of a superfluity of life. Yes, there were affinities: Oktoberfest was like Carnival, but the flesh there was brown and the flesh here was pink. Hundreds of thousands of high-esprit scoutmasters – hundreds of thousands of festive dairymaids in their Sunday best.
‘The only way is underground. One stop.’
Soon we were looking into the rosy deep of the stone staircase. Getting on for a month ago, in Brooklyn, while she was helping me pack, Elena remarked that my family-sized suitcase was ‘not full enough’. Well it was certainly heavy enough, by now, with its sediment of gifts and autographed novels and poetry collections and things such as Bernhardt’s portfolio in its stiff brown envelope. Humping a big load through the underground: I can do it, I thought, but I won’t like doing it. And yet once again Konrad, having tethered his bike, was quietly at our side, tall, and calm, and my bag was now swinging easily in his grip.
In the Hauptbahnhof itself the crowd was interspersed with thin streams of dark-skinned and dark-clothed refugees, their eyes hagridden but determined, their tread leaden but firm, dragging their prams and goods-laden buggies, their children. Then came a rare sight, and then an even rarer one.
First, a mother of a certain age, a grandmother probably, tall, dressed in the rigid black of the full abaya, with her half-veiled face pointed straight ahead. Then, second, a lavishly assimilated young woman with the same colouring, perhaps the granddaughter of a Turkish Gastarbeiter, in tight white jacket and tight white jeans – and she had a stupendously, an unignorably full and prominent backside. For half a minute the two women inadvertently walked in step, away from us: on the right, the black edifice gliding as smoothly as a Dalek; on the left, the hugely undulating orbs of white.
When he had pointed us to our platform Konrad took his leave, much thanked, much praised. I turned to Johanna.
‘The two women – did you see that?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well. She’s not embarrassed by it, is she. Looking so cheerful. Swinging her arms. And dressed like that? She’s not trying to hide it.’
‘No.’
‘I mean she’s not shy about it.’
‘No,’ said Johanna. ‘She likes it.’
The Nabokovs were refugees, and three times over. As teenagers they independently fled the October Revolution; on her way out Véra Slonim passed through a pogrom in the Ukraine involving tens of thousands of mob murders. That was in 1919. They fled the Bolsheviks, horsemen of terror and famine, and, via the Crimea, Greece, and England, sought sanctuary – in Berlin. Then France, until the Germans followed them there; then the eleventh-hour embarcation to New York in 1940, a few weeks ahead of the Wehrmacht (on its next westbound crossing their boat, the Champlain, was torpedoed and sunk). VN’s father (also Vladimir Nabokov), the liberal statesman, was murdered by a White Russian fascist in Berlin (1922); in the same city his brother Sergei was arrested in 1943 (for homosexuality), rearrested the following year (for sedition), and died in a concentration camp near Hamburg in January 1945. That was their Europe; and they went back there, in style and for good, in 1959.
Yes, and I met Véra too. I spent most of a day with her, in 1983, in the still centre of Europe, the Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland (where they had lived since 1961), breaking only for lunch with her son, the incredibly tall Dmitri, whom I would meet again. Véra was a riveting and convivial goldenskinned beauty; on sensitive subjects she could suddenly turn very fierce, but I was never disconcerted because there was always the contingent light of humour in her eyes.
Vladimir died in 1977, aged seventy-eight. Véra died in 1991, aged eighty-nine. And Dmitri died in 2012, aged seventy-seven.
From Dmitri’s funeral address in April 1991:
On the eve of a risky hip operation two years ago, my brave and considerate mother asked that I bring her her favourite blue dress, because she might be receiving someone. I had the eerie feeling she wanted that dress for a very different reason. She survived on that occasion. Now, for her last earthly encounter, she was clad in that very dress. It was Mother’s wish that her ashes be united with those of Father’s in the urn at the Clarens Cemetery. In a curiously Nabokovian twist of things, there was some difficulty in locating that urn. My instinct was to call Mother, and ask her what to do about it. But there was no Mother to ask.
I got to Munich International with an extra half hour to spare. And there in the terminal, bathed in watery early-morning light, behind the little rampart of his luggage (a squat gunmetal trunk, a suede briefcase with numerous zips and pouches), and leering into his cell phone, stood Geoffrey Vane. I hailed him.
‘Why are you here? I thought you were going to take it easy.’
‘Who, me? Me? Nah. No rest for the wicked. Her, her fucking bungalow burnt down last night. Electrics. It’s always electrics. Burnt to a fucking crisp.’
‘Really? She wasn’t in it, was she?’
‘Ma? No, at her sister’s in Sheffield. It’s muggins here that has to go and deal with the mess. See if we got any contents insurance. Or any insurance at all.’
‘Will it be hard to get to Lanzarote?’
His face narrowed shrewdly. ‘You know what you do when something like this happens? When you’re a bit stranded? You go down under. Under here.’ And he soundlessly tapped his padded shoe on the floor. ‘That’s where the airline offices are. Under here. Ryanair, easyJet, Germania, Condor. You go down and you go around and you sniff out the best deal.
‘Well, good luck.’
‘Oh, I’ll be all right. I’m not helpless. Because I’ve got the resources. Hey,’ he said, and winked. ‘Might even hop on a package. With all the old boilers. Cheers!’
So there was time for lots of coffee and for delicious and fattening croissants in the lounge. Then the brand-new, hangar-fresh Lufthansa jumbo took off, on schedule. Soon I was gorging myself on fine foods and choice wines, before relishing Alien (Ridley Scott) and then the sequel, Aliens (James Cameron). I landed punctually…Would-be immigrants and even asylum seekers often have to wait two years, but after two hours, in the admittedly inhospitable environs of Immigration, I was allowed into America.
And what I returned to still held, Elena, and the teenage daughters – who went far and wide, as they pleased, who boldly roamed Manhattan, where their grandmother (I now heard it confirmed) was still installed in that deluxe sunset home which, very understandably, she kept mistaking for a hotel…
How solid it all seemed, this other existence, how advanced, how evolved. It wasn’t the middling-class comforts that amazed me: it was the lights, the locks, the taps, the toilets, all eagerly obedient to my touch. How tightly joined to the earth it all was with its steel and concrete, the brownstone on Strong Place.
Yes, the house felt ready to stay in one piece. But now its co-owner, in an unfortunate turn of events, suddenly fell apart.
In the tranquillity of middle-distance hindsight I easily identified the probable cause: a synergy of long-postponed exhaustion, air-travel lag and air-travel bug (a very ambitious flu), and anxiety. Which persisted. The anxiety in me was deeply layered and durable because it went back to before I was born.
My insomnia persisted too. Coming to terms with this involved mental labour, most of it done in darkness. I was home in America, the immigrant nation, stretching from sea to shining sea; and I couldn’t sleep. ‘Night is always a giant,’ wrote the champion insomniac, Nabokov, in a late novella, ‘but this one was especially terrible.’ I had another book on my bedside table. It was a short and stylish study by the historian Mark Mazower called Dark Continent; and I would sometimes go next door with that for an hour before defeatedly returning.
When I closed my eyes I was met by the usual sights – an abstract battlefield or dismantled fairground at dusk, flowers in monochrome, figures cut out of limp white paper; and the thoughts and images verged encouragingly on the nonsensical. But no; my mind was in too low a gear for the cruise control of unconsciousness.
So many possible futures were queuing up and jockeying to be born. In time, one or other of them would break free and go surging clear of the rest…
They were coming here, the refugees, in the eye of a geohistorical convergence – themselves and their exodus on the one hand, and on the other al-Qaeda, and al-Shabaab, and Boko Haram, and the Taliban, and Sinai Province, and Islamic State.
And even now it was as if a tectonic force had taken hold of Europe and, using its fingernails, had scratched it open and tilted it, causing a heavy mudslide in the direction of old illusions, old dreams of purity and cruelty.
And that force will get heavier still, much heavier, immediately and irreversibly, after the first incidence of takfir. At which point Europe – that by now famously unrobust confederation – would meet another historic test.
And what they might be bringing, the refugees, was insignificant when set against what was already there, in the host nations, the spores and ash heaps of what was already there…Dark Continent is not a book about Africa. The rest of Mazower’s title is ‘Europe’s Twentieth Century’.
As well as Germany I went to Austria, Switzerland, Poland, France, and also Spain. I say ‘also Spain’ because that country wasn’t implicated in the Holocaust, unlike all the others (very much including Switzerland – see in due course ‘Afterthought: Masada and the Dead Sea’).
Postwar Deutschland obviously had the sternest work to do in arriving at an unillusioned reckoning. And it is my amateur impression that its efforts deserve to be called, well, broadly commensurate – in itself a stupendous achievement.* Not only is Nazi criminality a part of the national conversation; highly significantly, in my opinion, the young want to talk about it. And it has to be a ‘talking cure’, a long and nauseous iteration: what other way could there be?…And now Germany has become the first nation on earth to erect monuments to its own shame. So I expected the Germans to take my novel as a minor addition to the unresting debate.
And they didn’t do that. Nearly all of them (according to my publisher’s laconic summary) rejected the book out of hand on literary principle: you see, I had on occasion applied to satire (‘the use of ridicule, irony, sarcasm, etc., to expose folly or vice’); and the German reviewers all insisted that humour could not coexist with seriousness. This is a primitively literal-minded credo which, as I’m sure you’ve already sensed, more or less obliterates the anglophone canon. The fact is that seriousness – and morality, and indeed sanity – cannot exist at all without humour…
What did I infer from this? That German literary criticism had at some point made a benighted category error and then stuck to it? Well there was nothing of much interest to think about there. But I went on to wonder if I’d touched on an unexpected sensitivity; it could be that the Germans, while fully accepting that National Socialism was atrocious, were somehow unwilling to admit that it was also ridiculous.
And it wasn’t just the reviewers. After public events one or two old boys would shoulder their way to the signing table to air their objections, and a festival organiser, under his breath, made me really wonder at his vehemence: ‘How can you presume to laugh at Hitlerism?’ I wanted to say, ‘Mockery is a weapon. Why do you think it is that tyrants fear it and ban it, and why did Hitler seek to punish it with death?’
I am familiar with the theory of ‘Holocaust exceptionalism’, which has a literary application: in its bluntest form it maintains that the Holocaust is a subject that historians alone have the right to address. This has emotional force – it is an appeal to decent reticence. But I believe that nothing, nothing whatever, should be shielded from the writer’s eye. If this is the view of a literary fundamentalist, then that is what I am.
Oh. So you think they thought I was simply trespassing? Maybe that was part of it. And in that case another lesson beckons. In literature there is no room for territoriality. So politely ignore all warnings about ‘cultural appropriation’ and the like. Go where your pen takes you. Fiction is freedom, and freedom is indivisible.
On December 31, Inez and I – an advance guard – returned to Strong Place in late afternoon. Well before midnight we were out on the street. We too were homeless nomads. The house was a charred and sopping hulk.
I have crossed the equator and I’m now standing on the threshold of the second half…
Life, as I said, is artistically lifeless; and its only unifying theme is death.
*1 The Historikerstreit (‘the historians’ quarrel’ of 1986–9) saw the last attempts to ‘historicise’ or ‘relativise’ (or somehow normalise) the Third Reich. From then on Nazism was firmly identified as a geopolitical ‘singularity’; it stands alone.