In Babylon

MARCEL MÖRING

IN BABYLON

Translated from the Dutch by Stacey Knecht

Dedication

To Hanneke and my parents

Epigraph

‘Trees have roots. Jews have legs.’

ISAAC DEUTSCHER

‘Our civilisation is characterised by the word “progress’”. Progress is its form rather than making progress one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves.

‘I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.’

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Culture and Value

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

PART ONE

Travellers

Sauerkraut

There is a God

The Kotzker

Who’s There?

A Land of Milk and Butter

Zeno

PART TWO

On Our Way (to the Middle)

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

Lacrima Christi

The Tower

Quid Pro Quo

This is Germany

PART THREE/FOUR

Punishment

A Fairy Tale

Long Ago and Far Away

Fathers and Sons

The Depths of the Depths

PART FIVE

Stranger

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One

Travellers

THE LAST TIME I ever saw Uncle Herman, he was lying on a king-size bed in the finest room at the Hotel Memphis, in the company of six people: the hotel manager, a doctor, two police officers with crackling walkie-talkies, a girl who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, and me. The manager conferred with the policemen about how the matter might be settled as discreetly as possible, the doctor stood at the foot of the bed regarding my uncle with a look of mild disgust, and I did nothing. It was just past midnight and Herman lay stretched out, his white body sinewy and taut, on that crumpled white catafalque. He was naked and dead.

He had sent up for a woman. She had arrived, and less than an hour later his life was over. When I got there the young hooker, a small blond thing with crimped hair and childishly painted lips, sat hunched in one of the two white leather chairs next to the ubiquitous hotel writing table. She stared at the carpet, mumbling softly. Uncle Herman lay on his back on the big bed, his pubic hair still glistening with … all right, with the juices of love, a condom rolled halfway down his wrinkled sex like a misplaced clown’s nose. His pale, old man’s body, the tanned face with the shock of grey hair and the large, slightly hooked nose evoked the image of a warrior fallen in battle and laid in state, here, on this dishevelled altar.

I stood in that room and thought of what Zeno, with a touch of bitterness in his voice, had once said, long ago, that you could plot family histories on a graph, as a line that rippled up and down, up and down, up and down; people made their fortune, their offspring benefited from that fortune, the third generation squandered it all, and the family returned to the bottom of the curve and began working its way back up. An endless cycle of profit and loss, wealth and poverty, rise and fall. Except for the history of our family, Zeno had said, that was a whole other thing. Our family history could best be compared to a railway timetable: one person left, and while he was on his way, another returned, and while he was busy arriving, others were setting out on a new journey. ‘Normal families stay in the same place for centuries,’ said Zeno. ‘If they do ever leave it’s a major historical event. In our family it would be a historical event if, even after just half a generation, we associated suitcases with a holiday instead of a new life.’

‘Right,’ said the doctor, who probably wasn’t much younger than the victim himself. ‘Let’s get to work.’ He placed his bag on the writing table, opened it, stuck his hand in the gaping leather mouth, and pulled out a spectacle case. The glasses gave him an air of efficiency, like a tailor about to pin up a hem. He went to the bed, moved the body over so he could sit down, and began poking and prodding. Then, peering into the dead man’s clouded eyes, he asked what had happened. I turned to the girl, who was still hunched over in her chair. She seemed to sense my gaze, and lifted her head. She looked extremely unhappy. ‘The doctor would like to know whether you noticed anything unusual.’ She shook her head. ‘Well?’ said the doctor. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘She didn’t notice a thing.’ The doctor frowned. ‘Are you saying he just popped off?’ I looked back down at the floor. She shrugged. Sighing, the doctor got to his feet and took off his spectacles. His eyes travelled around the room. Then he went up to the girl. He stood before her and, jabbing the air with his glasses, said, ‘What were you doing to him?’ The girl clapped her hand to her mouth and ran out the door. We heard her in the bathroom, quietly retching.

It was around one in the morning by the time the four of us emerged outside, in the moonlit doorway of the hotel. A hearse glided soundlessly by. The wind rustled the tall oaks around the patio, there was faint music in the distance. The doctor and the hotel manager reminisced about a man who had once been found tied to the bedposts, the girl and I watched the police car as it turned onto the road in a cloud of flying gravel. The doctor and the manager said goodbye and we were left behind. We stood outside the door listening to the music. It sounded like Ives.

‘I think he would have enjoyed dying that way,’ I said. ‘In a hotel, with a young woman at his side.’

She started retching again.

I stared into the half-darkness of the city and thought, for the first time in years, about the future, which had once lain before me and now, now that I was old and worn, lay behind me.

‘He was a traveller,’ I said.

The girl turned to me and opened her mouth. The heavy lipstick was smeared along one cheek, which made her whole face look lopsided. She breathed out quick, small puffs of steam and shivered in her baseball jacket.

‘We were all travellers,’ I said.

She turned away and looked at the empty street and the light that hung yellow and still beneath the tall trees. I saw her glance at me from the corner of her eyes, hurried, fearful, like someone who has found herself with an unpredictable psychopath and doesn’t know which would be better: to stay or leave, respond or ignore.

There was a pale blue haze around the moon. A gentle breeze rustled the treetops. As if Uncle Herman’s soul had dissolved in the night, I thought, and now, the final matters settled, the remains of his life carried off, had disappeared in a last contented sigh. On its way, forever.

And at that very moment, there, outside the hotel where Uncle Herman … had lost his life, at that moment I saw myself for the first time in maybe twenty years, and the image that loomed up out of the labyrinth of my life was that of a face in the crowd, a man nobody knows, yet is there nonetheless, an eyewitness, a stowaway in time.

The fire in the hearth burned peacefully, like a flower with red, orange, and yellow petals, swaying in the wind. The mahogany claw of a chair leg jutted out of the flames, as if we had been sacrificing some wooden animal.

‘Are you asleep?’

I looked sideways, at Nina, who sat cross-legged in the big armchair next to me. She was sitting on a sleeping bag, her long red hair hanging down, and leaning on the palms of her hands.

‘No, I’m not asleep. But I might just as well be. I’ve rarely felt as old as I feel today.’

She nodded. ‘What were you thinking?’

‘Nothing special.’

‘Come on, N. If we’re really going to be snowed in here for the next few days I don’t want you playing the mystery man. Do your Decamerone. Give me the Canterbury Tales. You’re a fairy tale writer. Amuse me.’

‘You want to hear fairy tales?’

‘Maybe later. All I want to hear now is what you were thinking.’

‘I was thinking about Uncle Herman. I suddenly remembered the last time I saw him.’

‘When was that?’

‘When he was dead.’

‘Oh, that.’

‘My God, how times have changed. You say: Oh, that. For me … it was a shock, I can tell you.’

‘After the sixties? I thought all you men ever did in the sixties was fuck and get high.’

‘Them, niece. Not me. I would’ve liked to. But I’m a Hollander. Nathan Hollander. A respectable man. I eat my poultry with a knife and fork, I hold my wine glass by the stem. I’ve never fucked around or used drugs.’

‘Nuncle, would you mind not calling me “niece”? It sounds like grey woollen skirts and sensible shoes.’

We grinned.

‘But haven’t you ever …’

‘Oh, sure. Hash. Long time ago. Not my style. I like being in control.’

She sighed. ‘The two-glasses-of-wine-five-cigarettes-a-day man.’

‘That’s me.’

‘And the sex wasn’t so hot either?’

‘Nina! I’m your uncle. I just turned sixty. That’s not the sort of thing you’re supposed to ask old people.’

‘Old people … You’re not old. What’s sixty anyway, nowadays? You’re still in great shape.’

‘Thank you. I only said I was old to hear you say I wasn’t.’

‘And that’s why I said it.’

‘No, I haven’t had a very thrilling sex life. Certainly a lot less thrilling than Uncle Herman’s.’

Nina stared into the fire. It was burning low. I stood up and threw on a few more chair legs and a piece of the piano lid. When I was sitting back down again she said, ‘With all that traipsing around the world I reckoned you must have had a sweetheart in every port.’

I shook my head. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ve learned in the past sixty years. If you really want to get someone into bed, fast, don’t ever start talking to them. I talked. My mistake was that I thought you had to get to know each other first, at least well enough to carry on a conversation. By the time I had my hand on the bedroom doorknob, the women around me were only interested in more talking. I became a friend, not a lover.’

She nodded, as if she could imagine that. ‘So you were the only one in that crazy family who didn’t get enough.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t exactly say …’

‘Herman did it with call girls.’

‘Once. We know he did it once with a call girl and that was after Sophie died. I believe he was faithful to Sophie all his life.’

‘As if that were normal! Faithful to your brother’s wife.’

I shrugged. ‘Zeno …’ I said. ‘We know he did it at least once. Had … er … sex, I mean. You’re proof of that.’

‘Zeno,’ she said. Bitterness tugged at her lips. ‘And Zoe thrived on it.’

I sighed.

‘Manny.’

‘My father was undoubtedly … active,’ I said, ‘but only after he and Sophie were divorced. Zelda, on the other hand, almost certainly died a virgin.’

‘A bunch of loonies,’ Nina concluded.

‘And you? Now that you’ve defined the rest of the family in sexual terms, what’s your story?’

‘Imagine asking a young girl such a thing, an old man like you …’

We laughed.

I looked at Nina. Shadows leapt about in her face. In the firelight, her pale skin had a warm, rosy glow. Her curly red hair even looked like fire, a churning mountain stream of arabesques and garlands. Nina? No, she would never have trouble getting what she wanted. I gazed at my niece with the satisfaction of a father who sees that his daughter has blossomed into an attractive young woman: intelligent, sharp, well-dressed and well-bred. Even now, in the old clothes we had found in Herman’s wardrobe, corduroy trousers that were much too large for her and cinched at the waist with a leather belt, a jumper with the sleeves rolled up four times, thick woollen socks, even now she looked like the sort of tubercular, red-haired beauty the Pre-Raphaelites were so mad about. Her lightly rounded lips were freshly painted. There was a shimmer of rouge across her cheekbones. The green of her eyes was pure enamel.

‘We have got to eat,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and cook us something.’

‘Cook?’

‘That’s what I said. There’s plenty of food. Enough supplies to last us through the next world war.’

She looked at me blankly.

‘I’ll show you,’ I said. ‘But only if you promise not to be frightened.’

I picked up a candelabra and we walked out of the library. In the stone-cold hall the warmth was driven instantly out of our clothes. Nina shivered. I felt her hand in my back, and even though I was still shaky from all that sitting, I hurried to the door of the cellar. At the top of the stairs, shadows bolted into the darkness of the second floor hallway. Sofas, chairs, tables, a wardrobe, a pustule of furniture swelled and shrank as the light glided across it. Nina rushed up beside me, grasping my arm so firmly that I nearly bit my tongue. Then I opened the cellar door and went ahead of her down the small flight of steps. When my feet touched the concrete floor I stopped and waited for her to follow. I raised the candelabra and let the light do the rest. Nina was halfway down the stairs, but the last step seemed to take forever. It was as if she were suddenly moving in slow motion. She clapped one hand to her mouth and, holding closed the collar of Uncle Herman’s jacket with the other hand, looked about in stunned silence.

‘Sauerkraut,’ I said. ‘Do you have any objection to sauerkraut?’ She shook her head. I handed her the candelabra and walked past the shelves of provisions, where I chose a tin of beef sausages, a bag of dried apples, condensed milk, a jar of stock, potatoes, a packet of sauerkraut, spices, mustard, a rectangular piece of dried meat, and a bottle of Pinot Gris.

‘What …’ She was still looking around. ‘What’s all this?’ The candlelight glided over the towering walls of cans and jars. ‘My God. There’s enough here for … for …’

‘For the next world war,’ I said.

‘Was he some kind of fanatical hoarder?’

I shook my head. ‘No. There was always an adequate supply of food in the cellar, but nothing out of the ordinary. I have no idea where all this has come from or when these shelves were stocked.’

Nina went over to one of the racks and picked up a tin. She turned it around in the light of her candle, squinting. Then she picked up another tin, a glass jar, a box, a crackling bag of pasta. ‘I’d say a year, maybe a year and a half. Not much more. Tins and jars usually have a shelf life of two to three years.’ She handed me a tin of peas and showed me the date on the bottom. Their edibility was guaranteed for at least two more years. ‘You can tell best by looking at the coffee. Here. This packet’ll be good for three more months. That means it couldn’t have been bought more than a year ago.’

‘Smart girl,’ I said.

She put back the tin and looked at me impassively.

‘Come on, I think we should go back upstairs,’ I said. ‘It’s much too cold down here. There’s a fire going in the kitchen.’ I opened the door and let her go first. With the swaying globe of candlelight before her she walked to the kitchen. There, in the pleasing glow of the Aga, which I had lit earlier that afternoon, I set out the ingredients. I handed Nina a knife and let her peel the potatoes, while I arranged the apples in a baking dish and poured myself a glass of wine. I slid the dish into a lukewarm spot in the oven.

‘What’s going on, Nathan?’ she asked after a while.

I filled a large pot with an inch or two of water and placed it on the stove.

‘What do you mean? This house? The barricade? The supplies? I don’t know. I have no idea. And what’s more: I can’t imagine how any of it got here.’ I cut the dried meat in thin strips with one of the large knives from the block. The meat was as hard as a wooden beam and tasted like Bressaola, as the Italians called their dried fillet of ox.

‘Mrs Sanders?’

Mrs Sanders managed the house during Uncle Herman’s absence and played housekeeper whenever he was there.

‘Why would she bother? Uncle Herman left the house five years ago. I haven’t been back here in all that time. Besides, when we did use to come here, Uncle Herman had everything delivered fresh.’

Nina handed me the potatoes and leaned against the counter. ‘But how …’

I cut the potatoes in four, tossed them into the pan and topped them with the sauerkraut.

We stared silently at the dark sky behind the kitchen window. Now and then a cloud of snow was hurled against the glass, as if someone were playing Mother Holle and shaking out a feather pillow.

The water boiled, I added thyme, salt and rosemary and moved the pan to a part of the stove where the sauerkraut could simmer gently.

‘I don’t like it,’ said Nina. ‘I don’t like it one bit.’

I poured a generous dash of Pinot Gris and the contents of the jar of stock over the sauerkraut and covered the whole thing with the dried apples.

‘So I’d noticed.’

Slowly the odours began to fill the kitchen. Wine-tinged fumes curled up along the lid and droplets of steam began forming on the windowpanes. I pricked the potatoes with a fork: time to add the shredded meat. I slid it off the marble chopping board I had found in a cabinet and stirred it into the sauerkraut. At the bottom of the big cupboard, where it had always stood, was the little saucepan. I emptied in the tin of sausages and put it on the back burner. I opened the can of condensed milk, added a few heaped spoonfuls of mustard (whoever had stocked these shelves certainly knew their condiments: it was Colman’s), and mixed it all together. A dash of the wine, a spoonful of cooking liquid from the pan. I stirred and tasted.

The windows were steamed up. Those farthest from the stove were already beginning to freeze over. I took two plates out of the cupboard, put them in the sink, and poured hot water over them from the kettle standing on the back of the stove.

‘This is the story of my life,’ said Nina. ‘I’m snowed-up in a haunted house with a fairy tale writer who’s writing the biography of his mad uncle, and he’s making sauerkraut and potatoes. My mother was right. I wasn’t destined for happiness.’

‘It could have been worse,’ I said. ‘I might have been an accountant. Then what would you have done for the next few days? Read my ledger?’

‘What do you mean: then what would I have done?’

I tipped the water out of the plates, got a dishtowel out of the cupboard, and began drying them. The towel smelled like it badly needed airing.

‘Now that we’re stuck here you’ll have plenty of time to read Uncle Herman’s biography.’

She heaved a sigh.

I took some wood out of the basket next to the stove and threw it in the Aga.

‘Do we have enough firewood to last us a while?’

I nodded. ‘After we’ve eaten we’ll have to chop some more, but that barricade is so huge, it’ll go a long way.’

She looked at me glumly.

Sauerkraut

WE HAD ARRIVED in the winter to end all winters. That morning Nina had been standing at the appointed place, behind the gate in the arrivals hall, left arm flung around her body in a half embrace, the other raised and waving, her long, deep red curls a torch above the dark blue coat.

‘N,’ she had said, as her cold lips brushed my cheeks.

‘N,’ I had answered.

In the car, leaning forward slightly to adjust the heat, she asked if I’d had a good trip, and didn’t I think it was cold, fifteen below … Had I heard there was more snow on the way? And she had turned the car onto the motorway, as the chromium grin of a delivery van loomed up in the corner of my eye. Without thinking, I jerked back in my seat. Nina straightened the wheel and sniffed as the van barely missed us and slithered, honking, into the left lane.

‘Trolls,’ she muttered.

The further inland we drove, the whiter the world became. There were cars parked along the roadside, a pair of snowploughs chugged along ahead of us. Halfway there, we stopped for coffee in a snowbound petrol station, full of lorry drivers smoking strong tobacco and phoning their bosses to ask what they should do. After that the snow began falling with such a vengeance, you could hardly tell the difference anymore between road and land. The snow banked up and blew in thick eddies across the whitened countryside. Nina and I leaned forward and peered into the whorls.

After more than three hours we neared our destination. The car danced a helpless cakewalk on the rising and falling country roads. Nina sat motionless, one hand clamped around the wheel, the other on the gearstick, eyes narrowed and fixed on the horizon. We were going less than twenty miles an hour. Her hair blazed so fiercely, I could almost hear it crackling. Her pale skin was whiter than ever.

‘Another fifteen minutes or so.’

Nina nodded. She turned the wheel to the right. The car drifted into a side road.

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘Not at all. That is, as long as it isn’t one of those filthy cigars.’

‘That was Uncle Herman, dear girl. And they weren’t filthy cigars. He only ever smoked Partagas and Romeo y Juliettas.’

‘It’s like setting fire to a pile of dry leaves.’

I grinned.

‘I can’t believe you still do that,’ she said, as I lit up my Belgian cigarette and blew the smoke at my window.

‘I’m too old to stop. It’s too late for me anyway.’

She shot me a sidelong glance.

‘Sixty,’ I said. ‘When this century retires, so will I.’

Nina frowned.

‘When we bid farewell to the twentieth century, I’ll be sixty-five.’

I gazed out at the picture book of white fields and paths, and smoked. Every so often we dipped down, into a shallow valley, and the akkers, the fertile slopes for which this region was famous, spread out before us, only white now, gentle curves beneath the endlessly falling snow.

‘Hey, was that a joke?’

I looked sideways. ‘About the century, you mean?’

She shook her head. ‘What you said over the phone, that Uncle Herman’s biography has turned into more of a family chronicle.’

I rested my head against the cold doorjamb and closed my eyes. Even then, I could see the whiteness slipping past us. I pulled at my cigarette and blew more smoke at the window. I knew that Nina was truly interested, not just in the family history, but also in the things I made. She was the only one of the Hollanders who had read everything I’d ever written. For several years now she had even been my European agent. As a result of her efforts my fairy tales were leading new lives. A number of them had appeared as cd-roms, a group of Scandinavian television stations had banded together to turn them into a thirty-two-part series, and in the Czech Republic a director had bought the rights to Kei. He had phoned me one night, in Uncle Herman’s Manhattan apartment, and I had listened in amazement. He wanted to film Kei as a realistic story. ‘Let us forget that fairy tales belong to the realm of fantasy,’ he said. ‘Let us accept them as an expansion of our own limited reality.’ In the nearly forty years that I had travelled the world as a fairy tale writer, he was the first to speak about my work as something that could be taken seriously.