My dear friend. When I tell you not to worry I mean it.
There is absolutely no reason for us to meet. Best, M
That would have to do. I sent it off, closed Martin’s mailbox and spent a few minutes glancing through the Swedish news. There was nothing of interest, and nowhere did I find any reports of a missing professor or the discovery of a dead body on the Polish Baltic coast. With a sigh of relief I switched off the computer and left the centre.
We went for a short walk through the village, and as we walked through the thin drizzle, stopping every ten metres or so for Castor to give himself a good shake, it occurred to me that I hadn’t read a single e-mail from Morocco. Wasn’t that a bit odd? I wondered. Martin had said that he had contacts down there, and it was these contacts that would help him to arrange our accommodation for the winter. Hadn’t he made any preliminary arrangements before we left Sweden? Hadn’t he contacted anybody at all, somebody who by now ought to be wondering why we hadn’t turned up and hence been in touch with a question or two? This was surely very odd, and perhaps something that ought to have occurred to me some time ago? Despite the fact that I had so much more to be thinking about.
But so what? I thought when we had both installed ourselves in the car next to the war memorial. So much the better if there wasn’t a Moroccan complication to keep an eye on and take into account.
Apart from that old one, that is — that Taza business which it seemed was lurking inside a suitcase in a wardrobe in Darne Lodge, and which by now had been lying there undisturbed for over a week. I started the car and began the now familiar drive up the road to Winsford Hill. There seemed to be enough daylight left for us to undertake a fairly substantial walk, but I was well aware that afterwards, during the long evening hours when darkness held sway over the moor, I would have to sit down once again with those confounded notes.
Those summers that had long since disappeared from a life that didn’t concern me, and never had.
25
It took me nearly seven hours to go through the rest of the handwritten material from Samos. The week that still remained from 1978, and the whole of the summer of 1979.
It was turned one by the time I was finished, and when I snuggled down into bed with Castor, exhausted and with my eyes aching, I said a silent prayer hoping that I would remember enough to write a summary the next morning.
My prayer was answered. After Monday’s morning walk (plus six degrees, quite a strong northerly wind, a greyish-white sky and only thin streaks of mist) I sat down in the rocking chair remembering and noting down what I considered to be the most significant things. As I did so I had a distinct feeling of being watched. That I was performing some sort of task that I had been instructed to carry out, and that the instigator — whether it was Martin or somebody else: Eugen Bergman perhaps, or the elusive G, or why not the two dead main characters, Herold and Hyatt? — was sitting like a raven, or even more than one, on my shoulders, making sure that nothing was overlooked.
Because something was afoot. Something was happening down there on that Greek fairy-tale island: one didn’t need to be a raven to understand that.
Nothing sensational happened during the rest of the 1978 stay. Martin describes the final week in his usual restrained manner: Hyatt and Herold are only mentioned in passing, Halvorsen and Soblewski rather more often. The day before Martin travels back to Sweden he and those other two go for quite a long walk along a ravine in the mountains, and Martin really does his best to record his impressions. The recurrent theme is that it is strenuous and terribly hot. And that Halvorsen has chafed feet and has to be more or less carried the last part of the homeward trek.
By the following summer, July-August 1979, the situation has changed somewhat. Martin is no longer living with the so-called collective. Instead he is lodging in a small house just a stone’s throw away from Herold’s and Hyatt’s villa. He lives there for five weeks with various different people who come and go, but Soblewski arrives after a week and is still there when Martin goes home, and not long after Soblewski somebody called Grass turns up. I guess that he might well be the person hiding behind the pseudonym G — well, I suppose in fact I decide that is the explanation, and for some reason it comes as a relief. He is a writer and media researcher, originally from Monterey in California, but currently based in Europe.
The house they share seems to accommodate up to eight people: couples or women live in two of the rooms, and after Soblewski’s arrival he and Martin share a room for the rest of their stay. There is a kitchen, a toilet and outside shower: on the whole the place is an improvement on where they lived in previous summers.
The fact that they are closer to Hyatt and Herold is obvious, and it is not just Martin skewing matters to give that impression. By this time the couple are famous and worldwide celebrities, and the main reason for this is Bessie Hyatt’s debut novel. Her second (and last) book, Men’s Blood Circulation, has been edited and proof-read and will be published in the English-speaking world in October. Martin writes that all kinds of journalists and paparazzi ‘are crawling around the pine-clad hillsides like cockroaches,’ but that Tom Herold in particular makes sure that ‘not so much as a bloody autograph-hunter crosses over the bridge.’
Grass turns out to be an old acquaintance of Bessie Hyatt’s. They evidently come from the same part of California, went to high school together, and there might even be closer ties although Martin doesn’t succeed in uncovering them. In any case there is a lot of socializing with the hosts: I gather that there is a group of six, in addition to Hyatt and Herold, who generally spend the long evenings on that famous terrace ‘with views over the pine trees, the cypresses, the beach, the sea, the setting sun: if it is true that human beings are the creatures the Creator produced so that they could observe and admire one another, this is the right place and we are the chosen people’ (sic!). The half-dozen comprise: Martin, Soblewski, Grass, the German women writers from the previous year (Doris Guttmann and Gisela Fromm) and the inevitable Russian Gusov. Occasionally also Bruno, who is still playing the role of a sort of caretaker and hence seems to be degraded to a kind of second-rate citizen. That is not something stated by Martin, but a conclusion I have reached. Other people occasionally also appear on the terrace, of course: for two evenings the icon Allen Ginsberg is a house guest, and a week later Seamus Heaney joins the party — the Irishman who is awarded the Nobel Prize sixteen years later.
And these lengthy sessions, with Greek snacks served up in a never-ending stream by the housekeeper Paula, with boutari wine and retsina, with ouzo and tsipouro and beer, with witty discussions on Existentialism and hermeneutics, on Kuhn and Levinas, Baader-Meinhof and Solzhenitsyn and the Devil and his grandmother, with guitars and bouzoukis, these orgies in hyper-intellectual exuberance and Gauloise cigarettes with or without extras — well, as far as I can judge these happenings take place every evening, week after week, and usually end up with a group of participants trudging down to the beach about an hour or so after midnight for a session of skinny-dipping. For Christ’s sake, this is heaven for a streber like Martin Holinek, a twenty-six-year-old research assistant from Stockholm in the backwoods of ultima Thule. For Christ’s sake.