Well, I must confess that I don’t have a friend in
St Petersburg. I didn’t have one there when it was still called Leningrad,
either. It was briefly called Petrograd, but that was before my father was
born, so it doesn’t even come into question. If you’ve encountered my stories
before, though, you’ll know that the titles don’t usually make sense until
after you’ve reached the end.
The person who did have a friend in St
Petersburg was a character in a story by someone else – by Franz Kafka, in
fact, who had the happy knack of describing ordinary things in such a clear and
precise way that you barely recognise them, while at the same time presenting
the most extraordinary events as if they were everyday occurrences. He lived in
Prague, which was probably a help.
Georg Bendemann, who had the friend in St
Petersburg, is – or perhaps was, since he lets himself fall into the
River Vltava at the end of the story and presumably drowns – the main character
(certainly not ‘the hero’) of The Judgment, and his friend in St
Petersburg is someone from whom he is trying to conceal the true nature of the
changes that have taken place in his life over the past three years – the
period since he last saw his friend.
Even before Einstein formulated his Theory of
Relativity, and despite the inventions of Samuel Morse and Alexander Graham
Bell, it was always clear to people that time and distance were interchangeable
commodities. It isn’t where Georg’s friend lives that’s important. It’s when
– namely, three years in the past. Literary critics, of course, provide
interpretations of this ‘mysterious symbolic figure’ that would have made Kafka
laugh like a drain. (There are drains in Prague – which, considering the
quantity of beer produced and consumed there, is just as well.)
Now, while I don’t have any friends in St
Petersburg, I do have them in quite a lot of other places in Europe. These are
friendships made in different contexts and at different periods of my life, but
always with the same enthusiasm, the same feeling (on both sides) of having
encountered a kindred spirit, and given added intensity by the shortness of
time together and the length of distance apart.
Correspondence, as Georg Bendemann found, is always
erratic. Some things you don’t want to write down, because you would have to
face up to them in a way that you don’t when you simply live through them.
That’s what writing does: it brings things into a sharper focus, while daily
life tends to blur them. But if it’s only three lines on a Christmas card, or
on the back of a picture of Salisbury Cathedral, you can get away with murder.
My life is scattered all over Europe. Somewhere,
there are people for whom I’m still a twenty-year-old, or a
twenty-three-year-old. Of course, I’m not any more – and I’m not quite sure how
I’ve changed, when, where, by what stages – that always remains a mystery, like
Zeno’s Paradox of the Arrow which disproves the possibility of motion, because
at every moment the arrow must be somewhere. If I had observed myself
changing at every moment – well, that would have interfered with the process. I
don’t have a diary to tell me all about it: I have these friends. And the
languages I speak with them. A different language, said Charlemagne, is a
different soul. And he should have known.
And these friends have me, to remind them of the way
they were when we first met. We meet infrequently enough to have the chance to
edit what we are, to suppress the merely temporary, and communicate our
essences. We can only really be ourselves for very short periods of time,
before the pressure of the outside world, of external routines and society’s
expectations, makes us conform and fit the mould we never made. Authentic
living is a quantum phenomenon, delivered and experienced in little discrete
packets. And for my friends in Europe I see myself as the postman.
In recent years, my excuse for travel had been
visiting my students during their year abroad. Needless to say, I advised them
to go to places that I personally liked, (Freiburg, Bamberg, Würzburg) and I
took up contact with teachers in schools in Germany and Austria where my
students worked as language assistants. I felt especially drawn to one teacher
and his family. They had a marvellous house, architect-designed, as if Gustav
Klimt had been employed to build the witch’s gingerbread cottage for Hänsel and
Gretel.
I visited them even when I didn’t have a student at
that school – provided it fitted with the itinerary. I always travelled round
by train. Working out the route and the connections was my way of imposing
organisation on the chaos of the world, and also of being connected to exotic
places, without actually having to go there.
Europe is criss-crossed by international trains –
not merely theoretical connections in a timetable, but actual physical rolling
stock: Romanian carriages sit in Paris at the Gare de l’Est, part of the Orient
Express; Russian sleeping-cars, massive, built like tanks, or mobile fall-out
shelters, trundle from the Balkans up through the middle of Germany and on to
Poland and beyond. You see them sat in tiny rural stations, waiting for the
signals to change, or in the marshalling yards of large towns, waiting to be
joined with others and sent back to where they came from. They pass through the
lives of ordinary people, and the most isolated and provincial little dump may
be linked in this way to a string of romantic and fabled cities.
In the present instance, I was having some trouble
completing my arrangements. One of the problems was this family. I’d not had a
Christmas card for a couple of years – but then, I’d also moved house, and
didn’t trust the forwarding arrangements. However often I rang them, I simply
couldn’t get through. There was no answering-machine, no connection at all, in
fact – but I kept on trying, because we’d promised to meet again after they
visited me in England, and promises are very important things, as far as I’m
concerned.
The other problem was being spoilt for choice.
You’ll have gathered that I’m a sucker for the Romance of Rail, and one of the
great disappointments of my youth had been the age-limits on Inter-Rail (there
were other disappointments, of course, but they’re much more embarrassing to
talk about, and some of them are still going on). They introduced the Inter-Rail
ticket (unlimited travel for one month over almost the whole of Europe) when I
was twenty-two. The upper age-limit was twenty-one. Later on, they raised it to
twenty-six. That was when I was twenty-seven. Now, as I hit my late forties,
they had upped the price a bit and shifted some of the conditions, but made it
available to all, regardless of age.
It was like being a teenager again! In some ways. I
had too many commitments and responsibilities to travel for a whole month, but
even for the ten days available to me it was quite a good bargain, and at least
I would be able to wave the coveted ticket around and feel the freedom of youth
in a vicarious fashion, even if the clock hadn’t actually been turned back.
In retrospect, I don’t think the phone actually
rang. I’d picked it up to make a call when I heard a familiar voice, through a
lot of crackling and static. It was my friend, the teacher in Germany. “When
are you coming?” he said. I told him the date and time I had planned, but that
I could only stay twenty-four hours. “I’ll pick you up from the station,” he
said, and then I was just listening to the crackle of an open line for a few
seconds, before the tone of a broken connection filled my ear. “Good,” I said
to myself, “I knew I could rely on him, I knew he wouldn’t let me down.”
And he didn’t. He was there to meet me, a distant
grey figure at the far end of a very long platform. We were all alone, it
seemed, in that cathedral-like station at midnight. The train I had come on was
going on to Prague. I’d sat in a Czech carriage, and some earlier occupant had
put a “Kafka lives here” sticker on the window, which I’d taken as a good omen.
No one else got off, which was not surprising, and before I’d reached the end
of the platform, the carriages had been uncoupled and another engine had taken
them away to be joined to the German carriages already waiting at another
platform in the brightly lit main part of the station. In the silence after
their departure, the clock was very loud. It flipped over all its metal plates
in one go, to show the four zeros of midnight, and the new date, the 20th
of January.
As we drove, I tried in vain to spot landmarks in
the town. There seemed to be a mist which I had not noticed before when I was
in the train. The teacher’s wife was still up, though their young daughter was
in bed, and we all three sat and chatted and drank wine until about three.
I don’t normally have dreams (why would I need to? I
write instead) – or at least, I don’t remember them – but this time I kept on
dreaming about travel. Not surprising, you may think – but it wasn’t a railway
track stretching endlessly in front of me, it was a German autobahn, and every
time the dream ended with a terrible crash, and I woke up sweating. I was glad
when I heard noises, and could get up for breakfast. It seemed to be a
school-free day (you lose track of the days of the week when you’re travelling)
so we had no rush and nothing else to do but talk.
It was delightful. We covered everything:
literature, classical and contemporary; music (with plenty of examples from the
CD player and a small concert by Lucy, their daughter, on the clarinet);
education, in theory and practice; politics, with particular reference to the
German situation and the continuing East-West problems – and that was where
things became a little odd, because Rainer seemed ignorant of the developments
of the past two and a half years. I didn’t like to intervene and correct him or
inform him, because, after all, it wasn’t my country – and anyway, he was a
friend... And it didn’t matter, really, because we went back to literature and
jokes and reminiscences of holidays and recommendations of places to go and
types of food to eat, and all through this we were eating and drinking and
listening to music, and although I would normally have gone out for a walk at
some stage, it didn’t seem a good idea, because the mist of the night before
hadn’t cleared at all. If anything, it had become thicker, so there was no
point in doing anything except what we wanted to do: be together, and enjoy one
another’s company.
All good things, of course, have to come to an end.
(Funny, there isn’t a proverb like that about bad things.) Lucy was packed off
to bed, and we spent the last couple of hours talking about me and my life and
what was happening to me and what I was going to do. Personal things, and you
don’t need to know about them.
I always tell my students that going abroad and
talking a foreign language is one of the most liberating experiences you can
have. Whatever you say and do is most unlikely ever to get back to anybody at
home. I said things to my friends that I would never have said even to myself,
and a great deal became clear that I had deliberately obscured before. Maybe
Georg Bendemann should have gone to visit his friend in St Petersburg.
As Rainer drove me back to the station, I began
wondering about Lucy, his daughter. She’d seemed a little small to me, for her
age – indeed, I was trying to work out her age, because when they’d visited me
in England we’d had to call her Lucy 8, to distinguish her from our dog, who
was also called Lucy, but was 9 years old, and occasionally called Lucy Fur,
and if my Lucy was now 14, then... but I gave up on the arithmetic, because it
didn’t seem to make sense and it didn’t seem to be leading anywhere, and we’d
arrived at the station, despite the mist, which was still just as thick as
ever.
We went in from the side, not the front, because
that was where we had parked the car, and we came to the platform where my
train had drawn in the previous night. It seemed easier than traipsing through
to the platform in the main station where the German carriages were already
sitting. Rainer and I hugged each other, and then he turned and walked away.
“I’ll see you next year,” I called out after him. He
stopped, turned round, and walked back towards me, stopping again quite
deliberately a yard or so away, just out of my reach.
“No, you won’t,” he said, and I had that awful
sensation in the pit of my stomach that you get when the worst thing in the
world happens, and the girl dumps you, or they tell you that your father’s dead
– a terrible emptiness right inside, as if someone’s poked a long thin needle
into a balloon, and instead of exploding it’s crumpled and shrivelled to
nothing.
“You see,” he carried on, “we’re dead. We all three
of us died in a car crash two and a half years ago. Very quick. Very sudden.
But we wanted to see you again. Very much. Just one more time. As we promised
we would.”
I felt the tears in my eyes, but by the time I had
wiped them away, he was gone. I listened, to see if I could hear his footsteps
echoing in that big cathedral-like station. But all I heard was silence, and
then the train approaching. They didn’t bother with announcements on these side
platforms, where everyone would be getting off and nobody getting on. Except
me.
I caught sight of a Czech carriage, with a sticker
on its window that said “Kafka lives here”, and I got into it and settled down,
while we were pulled out into the darkness and then pushed back into the light,
to join the German part of the train. My carriage had stopped more or less
level with the clock. I watched, as it flipped over its metal plates to show
the four zeros of midnight and the new date: the 20th of January.
The annihilation of distance. The suspension of
time. I had gained a day in my life. The question was: how to use it? Some
people always carry a Bible with them. On trips like this, I was never parted
from my timetable. I had my ticket to everywhere. It had to be Prague. After
all, I had a friend there. A writer. Even if he had been dead for over seventy
years – what difference did that make? I’m sure you can guess his name.
And what happened in Prague? That’s another story –
and not necessarily one of mine.
9.30-15.00 26.iii.2002