Chapter Twenty
“He looked unshaven and underslept, and smelled of cigarettes”? “There was the hint of a lubricious, or tipsy, glow in his eyes”? “His pudgy frame jolting with after-belches”? Well, of course: Martine was a writer and writers feast on the idiosyncracies of others (never mind Derrida's employment of concepts sous rapture) and I was the very embodiment of Idiosyncracy, from my receding hairline via my burping voice to my increasingly carrot-incarnadined visage down to my spatula-shaped toes. Good God, what a hoot I must be to her! Had she mentally been taking notes the whole time she and I…? Undoubtedly. How, then, could I contemplate marriage? The woman was a novelist; there it was. For a brief horrid moment I saw myself as I imagined a novelist might—not Gax, or Baldas, or any of those fellows, but a lady novelist. Martine, to be exact. Women were notoriously more observant than men to start with. They had to be, they were the hunted. A woman novelist is therefore a forensic scientist with a pen (or word processor). Sweat stood out on my brow; I put the book down.
In any case, to a literal-minded academic a little slow on the uptake, the tale was meandering down byways only a novelist could have taken. What had started out as a quasi-biography of Stefanie von Rothenberg was now in full fictive flood. The plot was thickening like chilled fondue, what with Kohler popping up again and the streets of Paris aswarm with intrigue and the heavy breathing of all those Hitlers and Goerings in the background. I always preferred breezy wordplays in the Sebald or Banville (or Kafka) style, those rambling yet fluent efforts (Joyce was another) that avoid like the plague all attempts at plot structure and end up where they started, usually squarely on the author’s navel. Give me atmospherics, I say, and damn the whodunits! Still, my gal’s book was an easy enough read, and the atmosphere rang true. And the lunch with Leon Blum—now that was a nice touch, in fact—although I’d never met Leon, dead two years before I was born—I knew the Restaurant Drouand, I’d dined there often during my regular visits to Paris (which any educated Genevese considers his real capital city, and which must, of all cities, take the palm, and bow its head to none bar Rome). Oh, Mlle. Jeanrenaud had the atmosphere all right, the smokiness, still thank God a characteristic of hostelries in the City of Light; the loud hum of lunchtime voices; the intrigue …this was all very well, but truth to tell, despite the glowing memories of the other night (or because of them, unbesmirched by further experience) I was feeling a little shy of seeing Martine herself again, and shyer yet of proposing any long-term arrangement for us. The gulf between our ages, backgrounds, social positions and mentalities seemed to gape wider than Hades. I was a shambolic woolly mammoth of a man; she was a graceful, elegant sylph of a woman. The other night suddenly seemed like a dreadful mistake, a formula for humiliation. Especially when I saw her again in her telereporter guise, after tuning in for my mid-morning news digest on the television. Yes, there was the woman who’d recently joined me in my bed, pert and pretty, not wearing glasses, dressed in three shades of auburn with her hair contributing a fourth, pointing at a legion of dirndl-clad Heidis assembled on a hillside behind her. Alpenhorns droned; bells tinkled. A choir burst into dreadful song.
“The hotel’s Chinese owners are taking Swiss-German lessons,” said my girlfriend, smiling at me and a hundred thousand others. “But they confess they find it very difficult. The manager of the hotel has suggested it might be a better idea if the staff learned Chinese. Stay tuned. Martine Jeanrenaud at the Grand-Hotel Wong-Edelweiss Supremo in Interlaken. Back to you, Geneva.”
And she was gone, replaced by a bland studio visage of no consequence that I extinguished with a flick of the remote, fighting back a sudden urge to telephone Martine, a sudden need for reassurance, a black panic that I was wrong, it was all a dream, that I’d destroyed my last chance at love, I’d been obnoxious and drunk as usual, she’d only tolerated my gross caresses because she was afraid I was a psycho. No, she’d never come again, celibacy and bachelorhood were my natural habitat and it was too late to change.
Enough, I self-chided. Best to let the pot simmer, not boil over. So I went out and walked across town to the Naville bookstore across from the bus station on the Rue Lévrier. There I ran into Paul Trenet, my chum on the Biology faculty, buying a copy of Max Menninger’s latest Charlus-Prize winning blockbuster The Fatal Squeeze. On the cover was a blonde model’s face pouting fellatial lips against a macho backdrop of a sinister male in half-shadow and St. Tropez-style blue sea, speedboats, beach, and palms.
“Utter rubbish.”
“Yes, but so what?” said Trenet, peevishly. “I just want a distraction from my everyday life, Termi, without necessarily reducing my liver to pâté. Surely you can understand that.”
“Of course. Much easier to reduce your brain to pâté.”
But Trenet was an old mate, and I forgave him much. We repaired to a small out-of-the-way tearoom in the quiet courtyard of the old building on the Place Grenus that had once housed the nineteenth-century Hotel de Russie, which had itself once housed the nineteenth-century Russian expatriate rake Fyodor Dostoevsky, who spent his entire sojourn in Geneva sitting at his hotel window growling, at least when he wasn’t crossing the lake for a self-hating fling at the roulette tables of Evian-les-Bains. An unsmiling Iberian-looking woman with a handsome mustache (probably Portuguese, from the lesbian fado bar down the street) served me orangeade and a side dish of sliced carrots, Trenet a hot chocolate and cinnamon escargot. As she retreated, we indulged in simultaneous coughing fits. What old men we are become! I inwardly wailed as the vibrations diminished, the oysters ejected. Once he’d coughed himself out Trenet attended to his chocolate with the rapid, puckered sips of a hummingbird, although he otherwise resembled a stoat, being skinny and nervous, with bulging eyes. Strands from a once-abundant chevelure lay limply across his parchment-pale pate. He had the sort of ridiculous dignity that I prize in men. He was married to an admirably tolerant Lausannoise named Odette who let him depart on brewery tours and wine-country jaunts without demur and was rumored to even put up with his frequenting of a certain dame des Paquis I’d once seen him with late at night at the Palais Mascotte, through a fog of smoke and the sounds of badly played Dixieland jazz. Odette and Paul had two kids, now grown and absurdly respectable: one a teacher, the other a doctor. To all appearances a happy family; but I’d often wondered what Odette got up to in her free time…
Trenet was given to finger-wagging lectures of his friends and proceeded to indulge himself.
“Now look here, Termi, you really can’t let yourself be pushed about. Well, first of all you’re quite safe, quite safe. Rest assured it’s only Petitpoix doing a power number on you to see if you can stand up to the pressure. But just in case you should find a decent lawyer who won’t take you round the block to the cleaners and leave you high and dry with an icepick in your nose and cotton swabs in your ears, as you might say. I know one: Maître Levine of Eaux-Vives. He stepped in when they tried to ease me out a couple of years ago, do you remember that…?”
I did. Trenet had signed a contract with a textbook publisher to edit a biology book and the college had swooped down like a wolf on the fold, claiming conflict of interest.
“So they couldn’t fire me and they can’t fire you, Termi. You have investment tenure. You’re as safe in your job as the Pope is in his. It’s that simple. God bless Switzerland. We’re not like America, where they hire and fire on alternate days of the week. Yes, you just ask Maitre Levine. I mean, you’re an authority in your field, a published poet, a respected professor, and God knows what else…No, you have to be the one who takes the final step out the front door.”
“Well, now that you mention it, yes. I’ve been thinking I’d do exactly that.”
“Excellent. I mean, just because you’ve been having these visions.…”
“Aha!” I said. “How did you know about that?”
“But my dear fellow, it’s all over the college. You can’t swoon in ecstasy during class and not expect it to get around.”
I felt the prickles of acute self-consciousness dance over me from top to toe.
“Merde. They must think I’m an idiot.”
“Not at all. I have a cousin, Lise Chaudet, who for a while saw St. Edith Stein every Sunday night in the dining room of her house out in Versoix and she went on to become a Federal Councillor in Berne and ambassador to Israel…of course, she lives alone, too…but anyway, listen, you’ve been in that job for how long? Twenty years? You’re a known quantity. Brusque, yes; your own man, well, as much as one can be and keep a job; pretty much a loony, yes, I can attest to that; but an idiot? Not at all, my dear chap. Now.” He finished his chocolat chaud with a slurp, pushed his cup aside, and leaned forward, arms folded, eyes unblinking, momentarily resembling a gargoyle more than a stoat—the winged one on the southeast corner of the South Tower of Notre Dame, to be specific. You know, the one with the huge beak and bulging Trenet-like eyes.
“I’ll give Maitre Levine a call and ask him to get in touch with you, if you like. He specializes in wrongful termination cases.”
And of course, out of friendship I let him ramble on, not filling him in on the porphyria diagnosis, which would only provoke a litany of blood-and-urine specialists
I hadn’t the slightest intention of speaking to. But a certain intensity of spirit had always been typical of Trenet, entirely well-motivated, mind you. He had others’ interests at heart; although like so many idealists he could be a pain in the arse with his nagging. We’d always been like a mismatched pair of animals—he the stoat, as previously noted, I some kind of puffing walrus. We met in our early days at the college, and amazingly had sustained a friendship, based on our deep and abiding skepticism toward life and people in authority, and our mutual love of good food and drink, ever since. We had little enough else in common. We never talked about art. He was a biologist, he’d not know a work of art if it flung itself around his neck. As for biology, although I was of course an example of it, however lamentable, it bored me stiff. Oh, he enjoyed a spot of Mozart, a touch of Debussy, and a dash of jazz; and he’d labored his way through Apollinaire and (God help us) Blake; and I could stand to read Darwin, and Joliot-Curie, and a few of the more mass-market scientists like Hoyle and Andersen and Von Ranke. But mostly we enjoyed the rising heat and loosened tongue of too much beer consumed over a plate of oysters or a wienerschnitzel. So he traveled to countries known for beer and I’d gone with him on three such journeys: one to Germany and Norway, one to Belgium, and one to Sweden. He’d always been the one to arrange things and make plans. Back in the ‘80s, deep in my bachelor years when the only women I knew were my mother, a colleague or two, and those whose company I paid for, he was my boon companion. He enjoyed the theatrical touch. He’d phoned me one morning during the Easter break in ’87 and told me to meet him at Cornavin station in half an hour, and I did, having nothing better to do, and no responsibilities to anyone but myself; and so our German tour began, progressing from the rim of the ex-Reich at Rosenheim and making our way up the map via Munich and various capacious beerhalls associated with a certain lovelorn mini-mustachioed fanatic to Hof in Saxony at the then-formidable Iron Curtain that separated us, but not for long, from the Stalinist slumber of Dresden and Leipzig and Magdeburg, where I received an acute sense of the undead, Nazi past—for the dictatorships had only, really, swapped slogans, Brotherhood instead of Fatherland, Capitalism instead of Jewry. Admittedly, the communists eased up on the anti-Semitism, but not by much, and anyway the Nazis had done their best to make anti-Semitism redundant by killing most of the Jews. Breweries there were still, however, in abundance, although administered by the dead hand of the DDR state. We tasted hopfenperle, dunkelbier, hefeweiss of full-bodied, preindustrial strength. The hangovers were considerable. Then it was on to Berlin East and West (although it was only in the West that the other side was conceded to exist; in the East they had streetmaps that showed everything beyond Checkpoint Charlie as one huge gray blob, the wonderful stage-management of totalitarian fanstasy) and more fun times in seedy Kreuzberg strip joints and Ku’damm bars and so onward, via rattling, tobacco-scented and Stasi-staffed East German railways to the windy pebbled coast at Travemunde on the Baltic and over the Zone to vibrant, no-nonsense Hamburg and lovely, placid Friesland and its red-brick churches and thatched-roof farmhouses amid wheatfields under the big blue Nordic sky. We’d shared all that, and Norway and Belgium too.
So I let him prattle on, for old times’ sake. But then he stopped and looked me full in the eyes.
“Tell me, Termi,” he said. “What does this archangel of yours look like?”
“Why, the Archangel Michael, of course.”
“Of course. And what does the Archangel Michael look like on a good day?”
“The statue on top of the Castel Sant’Angelo.”
“Ah. Big chap, as I recall. And do you really believe you see him?”
“I do. And not only do I see him, I hear him. Sounds potty, doesn’t it?”
He shook his head.
“Not so much. Remember my cousin Lise. And had you ever seen him before?”
“Not that I can recall.”
“Do you remember that night in Bremen?”
I remembered several nights in Bremen, but only vaguely. There’d been the Hansens Brau night, the St. Pauli Girl night, and the Holstenbrau night. And a woman named Ursula who kept asking me if she could touch me. (I let her, in the end.)
“Yes. Well, the less said about Ursula the better. No, I’m thinking of when you and I were standing on the docks around one a.m., waiting for the night ferry for Oslo. You went to get some cigarettes, I think, and when you came back you had a dazed look in your eyes…”
Then I remembered. The lost cry of the gulls, the damp air, the smell-sonata of diesel and seawater and harbor muck, the slick cobblestones gleaming in the streetlights, the snarling Mercedes taxis, the muted farting of foghorns, the Turkish currywurst vendors …. I went back the way we’d come, down Am Wall to the steamy, seamy quayside bars full of jersey-clad whores and their exuberant clientele from all the coasts of the North Sea, the Baltic, and beyond. (Ah, truly, the spirit of Brueghel still rules in the old harbors of Northern Europe, the wild spirit of pagan fun so far from the tut-tutting of nanny states and health zealots and the hundred and one rules of conduct in today’s hypochondriacal world! Dans le por-r-r-r-t d’Amsterdam….!) I was tempted to stay and buy a round for a couple of jolly tarts in the Kneipe Zur Hafen, but funds were diminishing and we had Helsinki and the North yet to conquer; so after I’d bought a packet of HB filters I headed back to the ferry dock via a short cut down a wet alleyway off the Am Wall, puffing away contentedly, pissed out of my gourd, having a great time until my way was blocked by what appeared at first to be a lorry with its bright headlamps on, then a helicopter fully lit and slowly ascending, then a large human figure surrounded by a bluish light and rising slowly and mechanically from the ground. My first thought was: Fuck. Aliens. Just my luck. (Of course, those were hot times for the little green men, with new sci-fi films coming out every other month.) Then I noticed the halo.
“God, Trenet. You’re right. It was him. But he didn’t say anything to me then.”
“Maybe he did but you were just too pissed. Or maybe it was in Bremen dialect and you didn’t understand.”
“No, I’m sure of it, he said nothing. As if it were the first try, you know? To see if he looked right. Although of course there was that other time…” I remembered the cemetery in Edinburgh, the chill spookiness of the unraveling mist…no porphyria then, surely? “Maybe not. Anyway, it took me a minute or two to catch on. First of course I thought it was an alien, then I reckoned it was a hoax, or a pantomime, an escapee from one of those raucous North German festivals, you know, the kind of mad uproar that can erupt in Germany during the autumn and winter. (They say the Brazilians go wild during carnival, well my God they haven’t seen the Germans when they get going.) But now I can clearly remember my feeling of awe at being slowly and painstakingly scrutinized by a mighty intelligence that was taking notes, studying me as a scientist studies a specimen. Afterward I had a good puke and took off, of course already busy working out the explanation in my head: too much beer and mussels, the effect of shellfish on the brain, never mix your drinks, etc.”
“Yes, when you came back I think I said you looked as if you’d seen a ghost. Not very original but to the point.”
We sat in silence for a minute or so. The Portuguese lesbian contemptuously tossed us our bill. On the way out Trenet tapped me on the elbow.
“The odd thing is, Termi: I believe you. I know you’re as rational a man as I am, and I don’t think you have the DTs or hashish flashbacks or anything like that. Personally, I’ve seen ghosts all my life. Did you know? Our house in Charmilles is teeming with the buggers, including, Odette insists, a nineteenth-century postman forever trying to deliver a registered letter to long-gone residents. And I say this as a materialist and atheist and worshipper of the ground Darwin and Pasteur walked on. Never told you all that, did I? No, well; I thought this might be a good time. Remember Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.”
“Ah yes, the fairies.”
“No, not just the fairies. The most rational mind of his generation.”
“It’s kind of you to humor me, Trenet. But honestly. You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“Oh, I’m not just humoring you. If I thought you were really bonkers—dangerously so, as you might say—I would make my opinion known. No, Termi, what I’m doing is expressing a certain degree of fellow feeling.”
We paused at the corner of the Rue du Mont Blanc and its hurtling traffic. I was on the point of telling him about Martine, but for reasons that felt more like superstition than common sense I didn’t; or maybe I was becoming a little less certain myself, or self-conscious. Or maybe I just wanted Time to take care of things one way or another.
He was heading home to Charmilles, I the other way. We shook hands.
“Now, the next time the angel comes, take a picture of him, there’s a good chap, all right?”
“Of course. I’ll carry a video cam at all times.”
At home I picked up the phone to call her but put it down again and picked up her book instead. It was easier that way.
In any case, to a literal-minded academic a little slow on the uptake, the tale was meandering down byways only a novelist could have taken. What had started out as a quasi-biography of Stefanie von Rothenberg was now in full fictive flood. The plot was thickening like chilled fondue, what with Kohler popping up again and the streets of Paris aswarm with intrigue and the heavy breathing of all those Hitlers and Goerings in the background. I always preferred breezy wordplays in the Sebald or Banville (or Kafka) style, those rambling yet fluent efforts (Joyce was another) that avoid like the plague all attempts at plot structure and end up where they started, usually squarely on the author’s navel. Give me atmospherics, I say, and damn the whodunits! Still, my gal’s book was an easy enough read, and the atmosphere rang true. And the lunch with Leon Blum—now that was a nice touch, in fact—although I’d never met Leon, dead two years before I was born—I knew the Restaurant Drouand, I’d dined there often during my regular visits to Paris (which any educated Genevese considers his real capital city, and which must, of all cities, take the palm, and bow its head to none bar Rome). Oh, Mlle. Jeanrenaud had the atmosphere all right, the smokiness, still thank God a characteristic of hostelries in the City of Light; the loud hum of lunchtime voices; the intrigue …this was all very well, but truth to tell, despite the glowing memories of the other night (or because of them, unbesmirched by further experience) I was feeling a little shy of seeing Martine herself again, and shyer yet of proposing any long-term arrangement for us. The gulf between our ages, backgrounds, social positions and mentalities seemed to gape wider than Hades. I was a shambolic woolly mammoth of a man; she was a graceful, elegant sylph of a woman. The other night suddenly seemed like a dreadful mistake, a formula for humiliation. Especially when I saw her again in her telereporter guise, after tuning in for my mid-morning news digest on the television. Yes, there was the woman who’d recently joined me in my bed, pert and pretty, not wearing glasses, dressed in three shades of auburn with her hair contributing a fourth, pointing at a legion of dirndl-clad Heidis assembled on a hillside behind her. Alpenhorns droned; bells tinkled. A choir burst into dreadful song.
“The hotel’s Chinese owners are taking Swiss-German lessons,” said my girlfriend, smiling at me and a hundred thousand others. “But they confess they find it very difficult. The manager of the hotel has suggested it might be a better idea if the staff learned Chinese. Stay tuned. Martine Jeanrenaud at the Grand-Hotel Wong-Edelweiss Supremo in Interlaken. Back to you, Geneva.”
And she was gone, replaced by a bland studio visage of no consequence that I extinguished with a flick of the remote, fighting back a sudden urge to telephone Martine, a sudden need for reassurance, a black panic that I was wrong, it was all a dream, that I’d destroyed my last chance at love, I’d been obnoxious and drunk as usual, she’d only tolerated my gross caresses because she was afraid I was a psycho. No, she’d never come again, celibacy and bachelorhood were my natural habitat and it was too late to change.
Enough, I self-chided. Best to let the pot simmer, not boil over. So I went out and walked across town to the Naville bookstore across from the bus station on the Rue Lévrier. There I ran into Paul Trenet, my chum on the Biology faculty, buying a copy of Max Menninger’s latest Charlus-Prize winning blockbuster The Fatal Squeeze. On the cover was a blonde model’s face pouting fellatial lips against a macho backdrop of a sinister male in half-shadow and St. Tropez-style blue sea, speedboats, beach, and palms.
“Utter rubbish.”
“Yes, but so what?” said Trenet, peevishly. “I just want a distraction from my everyday life, Termi, without necessarily reducing my liver to pâté. Surely you can understand that.”
“Of course. Much easier to reduce your brain to pâté.”
But Trenet was an old mate, and I forgave him much. We repaired to a small out-of-the-way tearoom in the quiet courtyard of the old building on the Place Grenus that had once housed the nineteenth-century Hotel de Russie, which had itself once housed the nineteenth-century Russian expatriate rake Fyodor Dostoevsky, who spent his entire sojourn in Geneva sitting at his hotel window growling, at least when he wasn’t crossing the lake for a self-hating fling at the roulette tables of Evian-les-Bains. An unsmiling Iberian-looking woman with a handsome mustache (probably Portuguese, from the lesbian fado bar down the street) served me orangeade and a side dish of sliced carrots, Trenet a hot chocolate and cinnamon escargot. As she retreated, we indulged in simultaneous coughing fits. What old men we are become! I inwardly wailed as the vibrations diminished, the oysters ejected. Once he’d coughed himself out Trenet attended to his chocolate with the rapid, puckered sips of a hummingbird, although he otherwise resembled a stoat, being skinny and nervous, with bulging eyes. Strands from a once-abundant chevelure lay limply across his parchment-pale pate. He had the sort of ridiculous dignity that I prize in men. He was married to an admirably tolerant Lausannoise named Odette who let him depart on brewery tours and wine-country jaunts without demur and was rumored to even put up with his frequenting of a certain dame des Paquis I’d once seen him with late at night at the Palais Mascotte, through a fog of smoke and the sounds of badly played Dixieland jazz. Odette and Paul had two kids, now grown and absurdly respectable: one a teacher, the other a doctor. To all appearances a happy family; but I’d often wondered what Odette got up to in her free time…
Trenet was given to finger-wagging lectures of his friends and proceeded to indulge himself.
“Now look here, Termi, you really can’t let yourself be pushed about. Well, first of all you’re quite safe, quite safe. Rest assured it’s only Petitpoix doing a power number on you to see if you can stand up to the pressure. But just in case you should find a decent lawyer who won’t take you round the block to the cleaners and leave you high and dry with an icepick in your nose and cotton swabs in your ears, as you might say. I know one: Maître Levine of Eaux-Vives. He stepped in when they tried to ease me out a couple of years ago, do you remember that…?”
I did. Trenet had signed a contract with a textbook publisher to edit a biology book and the college had swooped down like a wolf on the fold, claiming conflict of interest.
“So they couldn’t fire me and they can’t fire you, Termi. You have investment tenure. You’re as safe in your job as the Pope is in his. It’s that simple. God bless Switzerland. We’re not like America, where they hire and fire on alternate days of the week. Yes, you just ask Maitre Levine. I mean, you’re an authority in your field, a published poet, a respected professor, and God knows what else…No, you have to be the one who takes the final step out the front door.”
“Well, now that you mention it, yes. I’ve been thinking I’d do exactly that.”
“Excellent. I mean, just because you’ve been having these visions.…”
“Aha!” I said. “How did you know about that?”
“But my dear fellow, it’s all over the college. You can’t swoon in ecstasy during class and not expect it to get around.”
I felt the prickles of acute self-consciousness dance over me from top to toe.
“Merde. They must think I’m an idiot.”
“Not at all. I have a cousin, Lise Chaudet, who for a while saw St. Edith Stein every Sunday night in the dining room of her house out in Versoix and she went on to become a Federal Councillor in Berne and ambassador to Israel…of course, she lives alone, too…but anyway, listen, you’ve been in that job for how long? Twenty years? You’re a known quantity. Brusque, yes; your own man, well, as much as one can be and keep a job; pretty much a loony, yes, I can attest to that; but an idiot? Not at all, my dear chap. Now.” He finished his chocolat chaud with a slurp, pushed his cup aside, and leaned forward, arms folded, eyes unblinking, momentarily resembling a gargoyle more than a stoat—the winged one on the southeast corner of the South Tower of Notre Dame, to be specific. You know, the one with the huge beak and bulging Trenet-like eyes.
“I’ll give Maitre Levine a call and ask him to get in touch with you, if you like. He specializes in wrongful termination cases.”
And of course, out of friendship I let him ramble on, not filling him in on the porphyria diagnosis, which would only provoke a litany of blood-and-urine specialists
I hadn’t the slightest intention of speaking to. But a certain intensity of spirit had always been typical of Trenet, entirely well-motivated, mind you. He had others’ interests at heart; although like so many idealists he could be a pain in the arse with his nagging. We’d always been like a mismatched pair of animals—he the stoat, as previously noted, I some kind of puffing walrus. We met in our early days at the college, and amazingly had sustained a friendship, based on our deep and abiding skepticism toward life and people in authority, and our mutual love of good food and drink, ever since. We had little enough else in common. We never talked about art. He was a biologist, he’d not know a work of art if it flung itself around his neck. As for biology, although I was of course an example of it, however lamentable, it bored me stiff. Oh, he enjoyed a spot of Mozart, a touch of Debussy, and a dash of jazz; and he’d labored his way through Apollinaire and (God help us) Blake; and I could stand to read Darwin, and Joliot-Curie, and a few of the more mass-market scientists like Hoyle and Andersen and Von Ranke. But mostly we enjoyed the rising heat and loosened tongue of too much beer consumed over a plate of oysters or a wienerschnitzel. So he traveled to countries known for beer and I’d gone with him on three such journeys: one to Germany and Norway, one to Belgium, and one to Sweden. He’d always been the one to arrange things and make plans. Back in the ‘80s, deep in my bachelor years when the only women I knew were my mother, a colleague or two, and those whose company I paid for, he was my boon companion. He enjoyed the theatrical touch. He’d phoned me one morning during the Easter break in ’87 and told me to meet him at Cornavin station in half an hour, and I did, having nothing better to do, and no responsibilities to anyone but myself; and so our German tour began, progressing from the rim of the ex-Reich at Rosenheim and making our way up the map via Munich and various capacious beerhalls associated with a certain lovelorn mini-mustachioed fanatic to Hof in Saxony at the then-formidable Iron Curtain that separated us, but not for long, from the Stalinist slumber of Dresden and Leipzig and Magdeburg, where I received an acute sense of the undead, Nazi past—for the dictatorships had only, really, swapped slogans, Brotherhood instead of Fatherland, Capitalism instead of Jewry. Admittedly, the communists eased up on the anti-Semitism, but not by much, and anyway the Nazis had done their best to make anti-Semitism redundant by killing most of the Jews. Breweries there were still, however, in abundance, although administered by the dead hand of the DDR state. We tasted hopfenperle, dunkelbier, hefeweiss of full-bodied, preindustrial strength. The hangovers were considerable. Then it was on to Berlin East and West (although it was only in the West that the other side was conceded to exist; in the East they had streetmaps that showed everything beyond Checkpoint Charlie as one huge gray blob, the wonderful stage-management of totalitarian fanstasy) and more fun times in seedy Kreuzberg strip joints and Ku’damm bars and so onward, via rattling, tobacco-scented and Stasi-staffed East German railways to the windy pebbled coast at Travemunde on the Baltic and over the Zone to vibrant, no-nonsense Hamburg and lovely, placid Friesland and its red-brick churches and thatched-roof farmhouses amid wheatfields under the big blue Nordic sky. We’d shared all that, and Norway and Belgium too.
So I let him prattle on, for old times’ sake. But then he stopped and looked me full in the eyes.
“Tell me, Termi,” he said. “What does this archangel of yours look like?”
“Why, the Archangel Michael, of course.”
“Of course. And what does the Archangel Michael look like on a good day?”
“The statue on top of the Castel Sant’Angelo.”
“Ah. Big chap, as I recall. And do you really believe you see him?”
“I do. And not only do I see him, I hear him. Sounds potty, doesn’t it?”
He shook his head.
“Not so much. Remember my cousin Lise. And had you ever seen him before?”
“Not that I can recall.”
“Do you remember that night in Bremen?”
I remembered several nights in Bremen, but only vaguely. There’d been the Hansens Brau night, the St. Pauli Girl night, and the Holstenbrau night. And a woman named Ursula who kept asking me if she could touch me. (I let her, in the end.)
“Yes. Well, the less said about Ursula the better. No, I’m thinking of when you and I were standing on the docks around one a.m., waiting for the night ferry for Oslo. You went to get some cigarettes, I think, and when you came back you had a dazed look in your eyes…”
Then I remembered. The lost cry of the gulls, the damp air, the smell-sonata of diesel and seawater and harbor muck, the slick cobblestones gleaming in the streetlights, the snarling Mercedes taxis, the muted farting of foghorns, the Turkish currywurst vendors …. I went back the way we’d come, down Am Wall to the steamy, seamy quayside bars full of jersey-clad whores and their exuberant clientele from all the coasts of the North Sea, the Baltic, and beyond. (Ah, truly, the spirit of Brueghel still rules in the old harbors of Northern Europe, the wild spirit of pagan fun so far from the tut-tutting of nanny states and health zealots and the hundred and one rules of conduct in today’s hypochondriacal world! Dans le por-r-r-r-t d’Amsterdam….!) I was tempted to stay and buy a round for a couple of jolly tarts in the Kneipe Zur Hafen, but funds were diminishing and we had Helsinki and the North yet to conquer; so after I’d bought a packet of HB filters I headed back to the ferry dock via a short cut down a wet alleyway off the Am Wall, puffing away contentedly, pissed out of my gourd, having a great time until my way was blocked by what appeared at first to be a lorry with its bright headlamps on, then a helicopter fully lit and slowly ascending, then a large human figure surrounded by a bluish light and rising slowly and mechanically from the ground. My first thought was: Fuck. Aliens. Just my luck. (Of course, those were hot times for the little green men, with new sci-fi films coming out every other month.) Then I noticed the halo.
“God, Trenet. You’re right. It was him. But he didn’t say anything to me then.”
“Maybe he did but you were just too pissed. Or maybe it was in Bremen dialect and you didn’t understand.”
“No, I’m sure of it, he said nothing. As if it were the first try, you know? To see if he looked right. Although of course there was that other time…” I remembered the cemetery in Edinburgh, the chill spookiness of the unraveling mist…no porphyria then, surely? “Maybe not. Anyway, it took me a minute or two to catch on. First of course I thought it was an alien, then I reckoned it was a hoax, or a pantomime, an escapee from one of those raucous North German festivals, you know, the kind of mad uproar that can erupt in Germany during the autumn and winter. (They say the Brazilians go wild during carnival, well my God they haven’t seen the Germans when they get going.) But now I can clearly remember my feeling of awe at being slowly and painstakingly scrutinized by a mighty intelligence that was taking notes, studying me as a scientist studies a specimen. Afterward I had a good puke and took off, of course already busy working out the explanation in my head: too much beer and mussels, the effect of shellfish on the brain, never mix your drinks, etc.”
“Yes, when you came back I think I said you looked as if you’d seen a ghost. Not very original but to the point.”
We sat in silence for a minute or so. The Portuguese lesbian contemptuously tossed us our bill. On the way out Trenet tapped me on the elbow.
“The odd thing is, Termi: I believe you. I know you’re as rational a man as I am, and I don’t think you have the DTs or hashish flashbacks or anything like that. Personally, I’ve seen ghosts all my life. Did you know? Our house in Charmilles is teeming with the buggers, including, Odette insists, a nineteenth-century postman forever trying to deliver a registered letter to long-gone residents. And I say this as a materialist and atheist and worshipper of the ground Darwin and Pasteur walked on. Never told you all that, did I? No, well; I thought this might be a good time. Remember Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.”
“Ah yes, the fairies.”
“No, not just the fairies. The most rational mind of his generation.”
“It’s kind of you to humor me, Trenet. But honestly. You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“Oh, I’m not just humoring you. If I thought you were really bonkers—dangerously so, as you might say—I would make my opinion known. No, Termi, what I’m doing is expressing a certain degree of fellow feeling.”
We paused at the corner of the Rue du Mont Blanc and its hurtling traffic. I was on the point of telling him about Martine, but for reasons that felt more like superstition than common sense I didn’t; or maybe I was becoming a little less certain myself, or self-conscious. Or maybe I just wanted Time to take care of things one way or another.
He was heading home to Charmilles, I the other way. We shook hands.
“Now, the next time the angel comes, take a picture of him, there’s a good chap, all right?”
“Of course. I’ll carry a video cam at all times.”
At home I picked up the phone to call her but put it down again and picked up her book instead. It was easier that way.