Making History, Page 2

  Holding the paper by the edges I go outside and hold it against the sun. It is enough. ’Twill serve.

  There by the telegraph pole is the space where the Renault should be.

  “You bitch!”

  Oh dear. Bad move.

  “Sorry!”

  Little delivery girl veers and races away, thrust over the handle­bars remembering every terrible story she ever glimpsed on the front of the newspapers she daily dumps onto the doormats. Telling mummy on you.

  Oh dear. Better give her time or she’ll think I’m following and that won’t do. I don’t know why we have to have a newspaper delivery in the first place. Jane is a newspaper junkie, that’s the fact of the matter. We even get the Cambridge Evening News delivered. Every afternoon. I mean, please.

  I turn and wheel out the bicycle from the passageway. The ticking of the wheels pleases me. Hell, I am young. I am free. My teeth are clean. In my noble old school briefcase there nestles a future. Nestles the future. The sun shines. To hell with everything else.

  MAKING BREAKFAST

  The smell of the rats

  Alois swung into the saddle, shifted the knapsack over his shoulders and began to pump rhythmically up the hill, the green stripes on his uniform trousers and the golden eagle on his helmet flashing in the sun. Klara, watching him go, wondered why he never stood in the pedals to give himself impetus, as children do. Always with him the same absolutely mechanical, frighteningly regular, purposefully subdued action.

  She had risen at five to light the stove and scrub the kitchen table before the maid was awake. She always felt the need to purge the table of wine stains and the sticky pools of schnapps and shards of broken glass. As if hoping perhaps that the sight of a clean table might make Alois forget how much he had drunk the night before. Nor did she ever want the children to see the ruins of their father’s “little evenings in.”

  When the maid, Anna, rose at six she had sniffed, as always, at the sight of the clean table and her wrinkled nose had seemed to say to Klara, behind Alois’ back, as he buffed his boots before the stove, “I know you. We’re the same. You were a maid too once. Not even a housemaid. Just a kitchen maid. And inside that’s what you still are and always will be.”

  Klara, as ever, had watched her husband polish away, envying the love and detail and pride he invested in his uniform. Lulled by the swinging rhythm of brush on leather she had, as ever, wished herself back at Spital with its fields and milk pails and silage smell, back with her brothers and sisters and their children, away from the respectability, the stiffness, the brutality of Uncle Alois and uniforms and people whose conversations and conventions she could not understand.

  Uncle Alois! He had forbidden her ever to call him that again.

  “I am not your uncle, girl. A cousin by marriage at most. You will not call me ‘uncle.’ Understand?” But when talking to herself she could not help it. Uncle Alois he had always been, and Uncle Alois he would always remain.

  The night before he had been no more drunk than usual, no more violent, no more abusive, no more insulting. Always with him the same absolutely mechanical, frighteningly regular, purposefully sub­dued action.

  When she was being hurt she never made enough noise to awaken Angela and little Alois for she could not bear the idea that they knew what their father was doing to her. Klara was not an intelligent woman, but she was sensitive and she understood that her step­children would feel not sorrow but only contempt for her if they knew she submitted so spiritlessly to their father’s beatings. She was after all, and what a ridiculous fact it was, closer in age to the chil­dren than to Alois. That is why, she supposed, he was so determined to have children by her. He wanted to age her, to turn her from a silly country girl into a mother. Remove the smell of silage. Get some fat on her, some substance, some respectability. Oh, he loved respect­ability. But then, he was a bastard. It was the one thing she had over him. She may have been a silly country girl, but at least she knew who her father was. Uncle Alois the Bastard did not. Yet she wanted his children too. How desperately she wanted them.

  Three years earlier their son Gustav had died after just a week of blue, coughing life. The next year a little girl was stillborn and just a year ago the baby Josef had struggled, plucky as a gamecock, for a month before he too was taken. That was when the beatings began. Uncle Bastard had bought a hippopotamus whip and hung it on the wall with a terrible smile.

  “This is Pnina,” he said. “Pnina die Pietsche. Pnina the Whip, our new child.”

  Klara stood now by the door and watched the upright uniformed figure reach the top of the hill. Only Alois could make such a ridicu­lous machine as a bicycle seem dignified. And how he loved it. Every new development in patent tires and pedals and chains excited him. Yesterday he had read out excitedly to little Alois from a newspaper. In Mannheim an engineer called Benz had built a three-wheeled machine that traveled at ten miles an hour without human effort, without horses, without steam.

  “Imagine that, my boy! Like a private little train that needs no tracks! One day we shall have such a self-propelled machine and travel together to Linz or Vienna like princes.”

  Klara turned back into the house and watched Anna frying eggs for the children.

  “Let me do that,” she wanted to say. She knew how to stop her­self now, so she moved instead with quick guilt toward the empty pail by the back door, feeling rather than seeing Anna turn at the squeak of the bucket handle.

  “Let me . . .” Anna began, but Klara was outside and the kitchen door shut before the whining sentence could be finished.

  Klara realized with amusement that she had, as so often, timed her visit to the pump to coincide with the passing of the Innsbruck train. She imagined its earlier progress through meadows and farms and watched, in her mind’s eye, her nephews and nieces in Spital jumping up and down and waving to the driver. She pushed down the handle more quickly and forced the water to plunge into the bucket in just the rhythm of the mighty locomotive as it pushed its imperial white mustaches into the sky.

  And then the smell. Oh my God the smell.

  Klara clapped a hand to her mouth and nose. But to no avail. Vomit leaked from between her fingers as her body tried to force out the reek, the terrible, terrible stench. Death and corruption filled the air.

  MAKING GOOD

  Parks

  It had been a big error to have neglected socks. By the time I passed the Mill my feet were sweaty and bruised. As, when it came down to it, was I.

  First years, as I pounded wearily over the bridge along Silver Street, bubbled merrily, skipping to avoid the traffic and exhibiting that blend of world-weariness and bragging bounce that is their fool­ish birthright. I could never do all that when I was an undergraduate. Too self-conscious. That way the studentry have of calling out each other’s names across the street.

  “Lucius! D’you go to that party in the end?”

  “Kate!”

  “Dave!”

  “Mark, catchalater, guy!”

  “Bridget, woah, babe!”

  If I weren’t part of it all I’d puke.

  I remembered a huge piece of graffiti along Downing Street, done round about the time of the collapse of communism and still defi­antly and screamingly legible on the brickwork of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

  the wall is not coming down here.

  killagrad 85

  You could hardly blame any kid who grew up in Cambridge for redesigning himself as a class warrior. Imagine being surrounded your whole life through by all those floppy-haired Fabians and baseball-capped Brians with money and complexions and money and height and money and looks and money and books and money and money. Wankers.

  Wank-us! The class warriors shouted at you in football crowd chorus. Wank-uss! With accompanying hand gestures.

  Killagrad 85. The Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology should restore that faded lettering and treasure it as their most prized acquisition, an alfresco exhibit saying more than all their collec­tions of plinthed Celtic amulets, spotlit Incan jars and Bornean nose bones.

  A colleague in Oxford (how wonderful to be a graduate, a Junior Bye Fellow and to be able to use words like “colleague”) a colleague, yes a colleague, a Fellow Historian, told me about a photograph he saw on show in a gallery there. It was really two photographs, side by side, of two different bottle banks, for the recycling of glass. The picture on the left was taken in Cowley, on the outskirts of the town, near the car factory. This bottle bank was, as most are I guess, built in three sections, color-coded to represent the three varieties of glass destined for each bin. There was a section painted white for clear glass, a green section for green and, three times the width of the other two, a brown section. The photograph next to it, which at first glance you thought was identical, showed another bottle bank, but taken this time in the center of Oxford, the university quarter. After a puzzled look, the difference hit you. A white section, a brown section and, get this, three times the width of the other two, a green section. What else do you need to know about the world? They should screen that photograph of those two bottle banks at close down while the national anthem plays.

  Not that I’m from a generation that gets angry at social injustice, everyone knows our lot don’t care. I mean bloody hell, it’s get-a-job city here and the devil take the wimp-most. Besides, I’m a historian. A historian, me. An historian if you please.

  I sat up, folded my arms and freewheeled past the University Press humming an Oily-Moily number.

  I’ll never be a woman,

  I’ll never be you

  I must have lost count of how many bicycles I’d been through in the last seven years. This model, as it happened, was balanced enough to allow me to take my hands from the handlebars, which is a waycool thing I like to do.

  Bicycle theft at Cambridge is like car-radio theft in London or handbag snatching in Florence: which is to say en-bloody-demic. Every bike has a number elegantly and uselessly painted on its rear mudguard. There was even a time, which ought to have been humili­ating for the town, when they tried a Scheme. God save us from all Schemes, yeah? The town fathers bought thousands of bicycles, sprayed them green and left them in little bike parks all over the city. The idea was that you hopped on one, got to where you wanted to be and then left it on the street for the next user. Such a cute idea, so William Morris, so Utopian, so dumb.

  Reader, you will be amazed to hear, astonished you will be, thunderstruck to learn, that within a week all the green bicycles had disappeared. Every single one. There was something so cute and trusting and hopeful and noble and aaaah! in the Scheme that the city ended up prouder, not humbler, for the deal. We giggled. And, when the council announced a new improved Scheme, we rolled over on the ground howling with laughter, begging them between gasps to stop.

  Trouble is, you can’t skate in Cambridge, too many cobbles. There’s a sad little In-Line Skating Society and a Quad Society that tries to pretend that Midsummer Common is Central Park, but it won’t wash, kids. Bikes it has to be and mountain bikes—in the flat­test region of Britain, where a dog turd excites the attentions of the Mountaineering Society—they won’t wash either.

  Cambridge councillors love the word “park.” It is the one thing you can’t actually do in the town, so they use the word everywhere. Cambridge was just about the first place ever to offer Park ’n’ Ride buses. It boasts a Science Park, Business Parks and of course the late lamented Bike Parks. I shouldn’t wonder if by the turn of the century we have Sex Parks and Internet Parks and Shop Parks and perhaps, as a wild throw, Park Parks with swings and slides.

  You can’t park in Cambridge for a number of reasons. It is a small medieval town, whose street widths are delimited by the lines of col­leges facing each other, resolute and immovable as a chain of moun­tains. It becomes, in vacation months, stuffed with tourists, foreign students and conventioneers. Above all, it is the capital city of the Fens, the only serious shopping center for hundreds of thousands from Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Hertfordshire, Suffolk and Norfolk, poor sods. In May however, in May, Cambridge belongs to the undergraduacy, to all the young dudes in their little scrubby goa­tees and neat sideburns. The colleges close their gates and one word rises above the center of town, and swells to bursting like a huge water-filled balloon.

  Revision.

  Cambridge in May is Revision Park. The river and lawns, libraries, courts and corridors bloom with colorful young buds busting their brains over books. Panic, real panic, of a kind they never knew until the 1980s, washes over the third years like a tide. Examinations mat­ter. The class of degree counts.

  Unless, like me, you did your final exams years ago, swotted like a specky, got a First, have completed your doctoral thesis and are now free.

  Free! I shouted to myself.

  Fur-reee! answered the coasting bike and the buildings whip­ping by.

  God, I loved myself that day.

  Enjoy the itch and bruise of your feet on the pedals. What the heckety have you got to be down about? How many, like you, can stand up and call themselves free?

  Free of Jane too. Still not quite sure what I felt about that. I mean, I have to admit she was, as it happens, my first ever real girlfriend. I was never, like, one of the great and groovy studmuffins of the world as a student because . . . well, there’s no getting round it . . . I’m shy. I find it hard to meet people’s eyes. As my mother used to say of me (and in front of me) “he blushes in company you know.” That helped, obviously.

  I was only seventeen when I started at university, and being baby-faced and blushy and not confident with anybody, let alone girls, I kind of kept myself to myself. I didn’t have school friends already there because I went to a state school that had never sent anyone to Cambridge before, and I was crap at sports and journal­ism and acting and all the things that get you noticed. Crap at them because they get you noticed, I suppose. No, let’s be honest, crap at them because I was crap at them. So Jane was . . . well, she was my life.

  But now, way-hey! If I could complete a doctorate in four years and personally recaffeinate Safeway’s natural decaf, I didn’t need anyone.

  Every Fiona and Frances frowning over her Flaubert looked dif­ferent to the new, free me as I freewheeled and freely dismounted at the gates of St. Matthew’s and wheeled the freely ticking 4857M into the lodge, feeling free.

  MAKING NEWS

  We Germans

  Alois pushed his bicycle through the gates and into the lodge.

  “Grüss Gott!”

  Klingermann’s cheeriness on these inspection visits always irri­tated him. The man was supposed to be nervous.

  “Gott,” he mumbled, somewhere between a greeting and an oath.

  “All quiet this morning. Herr Sammer sent a message on the tele­phone machine to say he couldn’t come in today. A summer cold.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t be a winter cold in July, would it, boy?”

  “No, sir!” twinkled Klingermann, taking this to be a good joke, which irritated Alois more. And this fear of the telephone, calling it Das Telefon Ding, as though it were not the future, but some demonic apparatus sent to perplex. Peasant attitude. Peasant atti­tudes were what held this country back.

  Alois walked coldly past Klingermann, sat at the desk, took a newspaper and a bottle of schnapps from his knapsack and settled down to read.

  “I beg pardon, sir?” said Klingermann.

  Alois ignored him and threw the paper aside. He had only barked the one word scheisse! He took a good pull of schnapps and gazed out of the window across the border poles and into Bavaria, into Germany, he begged its fucking pardon. Germany, where in Mann­heim even now they were perfecting horseless transportation. Where they were building telephone networks to stretch
across the nation and where that swine Bismarck was going to get what was coming to him.

  “We Germans fear God and nothing else in the world,” the Old Pig had blustered in the Reichstag, expecting the Russians and French to pee in their pants at the might of his fancy Triple Alliance. “We Germans!” What the hell was that supposed to mean? Conniv­ing bastard, with his Danish wars and his you-can’t-join-in tongue stuck out at Austria. “We Germans” were only what the Old Pig decided. Prussians. Shit-faced junkers. They decided. Westphalians could be Germans, oh yes. Hessians, Hamburgers, Thuringians and Saxons could be Germans. Even fucking Bavarians could be Ger­mans. But not Austrians. Oh no. They could slum it with the Czechs and the Slavs and the Magyars and the Serbs. I mean, wasn’t it obvi­ous, obvious even to an Arschloch like Bismarck, that the Austrians and the Germans had . . . oh, what was the use? It didn’t matter now, the Old Pig was going to get his.

  Piss-faced Wilhelm had been dead for weeks now, the mourning was over and Friedrich-Wilhelm was on the throne. Friedrich-Wilhelm and Bismarck detested each other, ha-ha! Good-bye, Iron Chancellor! Good shitting riddance, Old Pig. Your days are numbered.

  A cart was moving towards them. Alois rose and straightened his tunic. He hoped it was a Bavarian and not a returning Austrian. A German. Whenever he came out to inspect a frontier post he loved to give Germans a hard time.

  MAKING READY

  The pigeonhole

  Bill the Porter looked up from his window as I struggled in with the bike. I had suspected for a long time that he disapproved of me.

  “Morning, Mr. Young.”

  “Not for long, Bill.”

  He looked puzzled. “Forecast’s good.”

  “Not ‘Mister’ for long,” I said with a small blushing smile and held up the briefcase that housed the Meisterwerk. “I’ve finished my thesis!”