It is while I am performing this difficult manoeuvre that I notice the newspapers lying on the dashboard just above the steering wheel of the rental car — it is right-hand drive, whereas mine is left-hand drive. There are two papers and I recognize both of them: one is the Swedish Dagens Nyheter, and the other the Polish Gazeta Wyborcza.
I manage to sit down in the driver’s seat and close the door behind me. I look around. No sign of anybody. I start the engine and drive away. My heart is beating fast: I know that this is one of my vulnerable days, and I hope the fear that took possession of me in a flash will fade away provided I don’t feed it with unnecessary thoughts. As long as I concentrate on other things.
On the way home we drive once again through the narrow medieval streets of Dunster. I stop and buy four bottles of red wine and two of port. It will soon be Christmas, after all.
27
I leaf through the Morocco material before starting to read it carefully.
Martin seems to have spent thirteen days in Taza in the summer of 1980. Or at least, that is the number of days there described in the diary, but he doesn’t pack up and travel back home, nor does he even say goodbye to Herold and Hyatt. I seem to recall that he was away from Stockholm for at least three weeks, but of course it’s possible he took the opportunity of visiting Casablanca and Marrakesh, not just the notorious couple in Taza, having already gone all the way to Morocco. Perhaps he told me about it when he got back home, but when you’re in the eighth month of pregnancy with your first child, other things don’t register.
Maybe he realized that it was time for him to leave Taza. Maybe something happened that caused him to stop writing — something of which he didn’t want to have a written record, for whatever reason. Perhaps I’ll find the answer in the type-written material, or on the computer.
I no longer know if there really are ravens on my shoulders, and if I am obliged to continue with this undertaking I have embarked upon. The thought of a big nocturnal bonfire out on the moor, with all Martin’s belongings, has become increasingly attractive this last week, but that might be overhasty. Why it should be overhasty is something I still don’t understand: there is a difference between burning clothes and burning bridges, but perhaps it’s not as great as I’d like to think. I really am ambivalent about it, but think that I might as well read these irritating notes to the end — just as well as I should play patience or become acquainted with Lorna Doone’s and John Ridd’s exploits on seventeenth-century Exmoor. What is important and what ought to be done are questions that become less obvious for every day that passes. I assume that is the legitimate price of isolation.
In any case, the situation in Taza in 1980 is different from what it had been on Samos the three previous years, and I can’t help wondering why Martin has been invited at all.
Or why anybody has been invited, come to that. Have they been invited in fact? By whom? Seven people have come to visit the big house outside the town of Taza this summer: Grass, Gusov and Soblewski, one of the Germans, plus a much older French novelist called Maurice Megal and his wife Bernadette. And Martin. Nobody else is mentioned, apart from Hyatt and Herold. On checking I confirm that this charmed inner circle comprises six men and three women; in addition there is also a female chef, a gardener and a swimming pool supervisor. So if one were to write a play about the goings-on, one would need a dozen actors.
Why on earth would anybody want to write a play about it?
But why on earth would anybody not want to write a play about it? Good Lord, I haven’t had much to do with drama at the Monkey house, but I have been involved in four or five productions and think I can claim to know the rules of the game. Evenings in Taza? It sounds almost like a classic already.
Martin arrives in the evening of the twentieth of July, and his last handwritten note is dated the first of August.
Bessie Hyatt is pregnant, that is the hub around which everything else revolves. Martin doesn’t discover this fact until the third day of his visit, and her body shows no sign of pregnancy. But it is a fact even so. She is in the beginning of the third month, and the same evening that Martin hears the news he is in a private conversation with Grass and is informed of a possible complication. Martin has underlined the word ‘possible’ twice, because Grass is not yet certain of the circumstances — namely that the father of the expected child is alleged to be someone other than Tom Herold.
I stop reading at this point because I am suddenly reminded of that comment Martin made about Gunvald when we were driving through the night to Kristianstad before continuing to Poland. His suggestion that he wasn’t the father of his son. Is this where he had got the idea from? He had been talking about Strindberg’s play The Father, and said it was a question all men asked themselves, fairly seriously. But if the problem had been a key point in the drama between Hyatt and Herold, perhaps it had a special sort of relevance for Martin? A heavier weight? But so what? I thrust the thought to one side and continue reading.
Before the question of Bessie’s pregnancy crops up in the notes there are quite a lot of descriptions of the surroundings and the house; but from the twenty-fourth of July onwards everything is about events and relationships between people at Al-Hafez, as the palace-like creation is evidently called. It is built in Moorish style and is owned by a Swiss billionaire, Martin writes. Tom Herold has rented it for two years, and since it is so incredibly hot in the middle of summer, residents and guests rarely venture outside the white stone wall that encloses the property. Inside this wall, topped with broken glass, there is everything one could possibly want: shade-providing trees (oleanders, tamarisks and a generous plane, according to Martin), a large kidney-shaped swimming pool, stimulating conversation, food, drink, a certain amount of mild drugs, and the three aforementioned servants.
And so we have the stage setting and scenography — that thought keeps on recurring, despite everything.
‘Had a long conversation with Grass,’ writes Martin on the twenty-fourth of July.
I find it hard to judge if there is anything in what he says, or if he is just paranoid. He drinks too much, and has presumably popped some kind of pills, I don’t know what, but they make him exceptionally intense and insistent. Words come flooding out of his mouth, and he pays absolutely no attention to objections — not when you are talking privately to him at least. When Herold is present, on the other hand, he usually sits there in silence and keeps his thoughts to himself.
What Grass keeps coming back to and stressing is that his childhood friend (childhood sweetheart? Martin wonders) Bessie is in danger. She is on the brink of a nervous breakdown, and it’s her pregnancy and her husband’s interpretation of it that are the key causes of the rapidly escalating crisis. Martin can see with his own eyes that the successful young author is clearly in a state. Grass is not imagining things: anybody can see that Bessie Hyatt is unwell, she staggers between a state of manic exhilaration and almost catatonic introversion. She is always present at the obligatory, prolonged meals — which begin as soon as dusk and cool evening air begins to descend on Al-Hafez, and usually continue into the early hours — but from one evening to the next it can seem as if Bessie is two different people.
All nine of them sit there, and it is Tom Herold who holds court. Martin uses that expression several times. It’s Herold who is very definitely the main character, and to stress this role he likes to dress up and act like a sort of Arab prince. He has a long beard now, wears a white ankle-length djellaba and a red fez. He likes to hold forth about Arabic culture and how superior it is to that of the West; he quotes Sufi poets and at every meal recites something of his own invention, often just a few intense lines composed that morning — he spends a few hours every morning shut away in his cool study. He likes to repeat these lines several times during the course of the evening, and calls it ‘tattooing the souls of the cretins’.