I began awkwardly, to a circle of adults and children, some prepared to jeer, disrupt, slink away. I read aloud or recited half-remembered poems, anecdotes, flakes of history, inviting questions, often insolent, over-simple: did angels fart; was Jesus left-handed; were Greenlanders green? Later, I encouraged them to speak, about personal habits, memories, Utopian fancies, factual accounts of work, trees, wheels. I found myself accepted, less for this than from making a football, irregularly sphered, from tarred strings and broken boot-soles.Wilfrid did not stimulate me by disclosing Tolstoy’s confession that, when seeing school children, dirty, ragged but sometimes angelic, he was filled with restlessness and terror, as though at people drowning. I saw no angels, only the scrawny, suspicious, puzzled, some as if already drowned, staring and indecipherable. Nevertheless, numbers increased. Wilfrid was appreciative. ‘But tell them more stories.’ Some I had less to teach words than help recover them. Speech could be dangerous.
I, too, was learning. These children and parents would once have known gardens, hotels, steamboats, mountains, had dreamt of becoming foresters, naturalists, pirates, doctors. Like my new associates, I myself expected little, so gained more.
Stories sufficed to rouse the listless and moribund. Stories of Forest Uncle and Margarita-Who-Grieves, of the Nail in the Sky and Heimdall’s nine mothers, stories of magic pipers and children’s crusades. Nothing sounded extraordinary or incredible to such a class. I ransacked memories for anecdotes, however ludicrous, of Catherine and Potemkin, Hamlet and Gotz von Berlichingen of the Iron Hand. I told them of Pahlen and the crazed Tsar. Old and young enjoyed lurid distortions of the French Revolution: Danton rallying the thousands, Charlotte Corday carefully selecting a knife, the Queen, still young but grey and haggard, trussed in a cart while the crowd screamed insults, and apologizing to the executioner for stumbling on his foot. They were silenced, until some laughed, by Andersen’s tale of the widow boasting that her son would be a king: the boy joined the 1848 revolutionaries invading the palace and was killed, his body lying bleeding on the satin, gold, lilies of the throne of France.
Once Wilfrid joined them, sitting beneath me on the floor, while I struggled to make them feel part of history, in a seamless Europe, linked to Bretons crouching in woods, the unlucky victimized by the Law of Suspects. Terror swirling in narrowing circles, profiteers fatly toasting success.
With Wilfrid I ventured no familiarity, no slang of intimacy. Like the Herr General, he was saviour from the unknowable, though himself seldom lacking words, enjoying questions as if sincerely expecting useful responses. ‘Tell me, Erich, after your French experiences… you made us feel you had witnessed them… Would you say that we, too, are endangered by innocent rogues?’
Inexperienced, gullible, needing a hero, I marvelled at his refusal to be discouraged by disappointments and let-downs, his façade of accepting setbacks as minor pleasantries necessary for experiments unreliable as surgery under siege conditions. I myself was too easily hurt by ruffian contempt, tyro mistakes, accidents, by the constant swindles and cruelties. As if brooding over something more important, Wilfrid would relieve me by suggesting I accompany him to settle a dispute, tend some suppurating gash – a tactful gesture for which I was not always grateful.
His office-bedroom-committee-room had several cupboards filled with books, a folio of Picasso drawings, another of those by himself, of woodland pools, classical streets, a horse, not startling or exceptional but apt. Here suggestions, mishaps, achievements were discussed, inquests held and, thanks to the enigmatic Vello, wine enjoyed. Women were the more talkative, also the more dependable, as we perched or lay under a cracked glass dome, between blotched murals of Riviera beaches, flowery waves, trim bodies, pointillistic sunlight. It was a bright refuge in a shantytown slum. More books were stacked on planks and under the bed, itself set on rough logs. A small granite Bodhisattva sat, rather smug, between bound Beethoven scores. Children contrived to bring dusty sunflowers, plantain leaves, even bundles of grass, which Wilfrid arranged as precisely as he might gifts from Aladdin, reminiscent of Mother receiving exquisite roses, cool lilies, lyrics of hothouse or the most sumptuous Reval florist. I heard that Vello, as though in grudging attempt at humour in riposte to Wilfrid’s own, had once dumped on the table what was a treasure trove here, a large casket of cigarettes, knowing of course that he never smoked. For this token of brigandage two Acrobats had died fighting the van driver. A girl, dirty mouth thick with malice, then told me she had seen my ghost.
After one wearisome day, when I brought him a report of the imminent capture of Berlin, which he heard in disconcerting silence, I lingered, flinching from a return to the stink of urine, famished dogs, illness. As if from the air, he produced a dusty bottle, nodded as if I had consented to join him, handed me a full glass, pouring himself another, though giving it only an occasional sip, to keep me in countenance. Reaching for a book, he read me, ‘A thrice-wise speech sleeps in a foolish ear’, looking across at me for criticism that of course did not come. ‘Would you not say, Erich, that, in whatever disguise, Dionysus has driven us here, tempting us beyond ourselves. From ecstatic delirium down to literal earth? But, in our own sort of freedom, unappetizing save to philosophers of an unenviable school and to self-wounding poets, we should surely give ear to the opportunities offered by poor, unimaginative, suffering Pentheus.’
That I did not recognize the allusion he affected not to notice, and at once refilled my glass, which I had hurriedly emptied through nervousness.
‘As you know, the Chinese respect the concept of sha, a current of destructive energy invading human affairs, a cousin, sometimes closer, of feng-shui. It roams at will, upsetting our plans, relationships, pride. It need not, I suppose, always travel far to do so.’ His small smile suggested a joke withheld only to titillate. ‘Sha is fallible…’ Pale, one eyebrow raised, oblivious to the outside rowdiness, he lifted his glass, laid it down. ‘It must move only straight forward. Like Romans, like the Little Caesars around us, engineering their own collapse. The Chinese, you remember, were more imaginative, building in criss-crosses, very crookedly, to avoid the unexpected. The irregular and sensitive could thus outwit the vigorous but undeviating sha.’
Was any of this true, or mere intellectual fooling, so often, the Herr General had said, the play of the second-rate? I could not decide but would always associate serenity with the complex simplicity of Chinese art. I would have thought Wilfrid’s personality sublime, had not Father once said that this word was usually followed by something foolish. I easily saw him in a kimono, fondling porcelain, examining the methodical entanglement within a Hangchow carpet, writing tiny odes to chrysanthemums and cassia trees, on ivory-coloured parchment, while, unobtrusively, governing a province. Physically, too, he had the near transparency of delicate jade, giving and receiving light. He could scarcely be impervious to suffering and fear but had, at whatever cost, relinquished his natural talents, themselves opaque and, from grotesque experiences, developed what he called ataraxia, emotional tranquillity. Reserved, he was never aloof, he delighted in the unforeseen: Vello’s cigarettes, a notoriously unpleasant child offering to walk with him, a girl, deeply withdrawn, possibly autistic, starting to dance, frantic, joyless but eager for attention.