Читать книгу Vienna - Nick S. Thomas - Страница 7

The train was moving faster now, hitting its stride at top speed, and grabbing a few seconds’ lead on the timetable. The speed in the darkness seemed reckless, then unreal, as though the rails must arc wildly into the sky to take up the time, with Vienna still nine hours away. It couldn’t take that long to cross little Europe at such a rate.

It had been thirty-nine years since Herbert Christie had seen Vienna, although it seemed longer, for he had never quite been able to believe in the defeated, starving capital with its four foreign masters in the aftermath of war. The place had looked not so much damaged as incomplete, as though a rough copy of the city he had known in 1934 had been hastily and haphazardly erected for his personal deception. He had not seen Vienna, in a Europe still technically at peace, debauched by swastikas, neither had he known the Vienna that sent its men to the war, only to watch them bring it home with them. Destruction, invasion, these were things he had seen elsewhere, while the streets and cafés of his memory remained intact. They shared the private immortality of people whose deaths he had not witnessed, his parents, grandparents and many friends, who lived forever on the list of those he would visit again, one day, when he had the time. Thus the dozens of the living who waited for a visit or a letter from Herbert shared their status in the mind of their friend with others whose loss was too painful to acknowledge.

Now Herbert was going to make one of those visits. The Viennese, he knew, had repaired their city, with much foreign help. He had been told that the place felt now very much as it had before the war, that he could look forward to finding again, in all its bright complexity, something he had lost when he was nineteen, if only he could dare to believe in it.

But belief was the problem, accepting that desire and reality could be one. The present so quickly became the past, and memory, romanticised and stripped of detail, became more precious than the truth itself. Accepting reality was the real leap of faith.

She was back. Herbert remained still, listening to the door open and close, the two footsteps, the body settling itself on the seat opposite him, a waking prisoner counting off the sounds and the seconds before he must face the lights again. The pages of the notebook turned, the pen clicked ready. This was it.

“Ah! Elspeth. I’m sorry, my dear, I. . . I was miles away. Where were we?”

She showed no sign of fatigue, this girl. She was bright and eager for more. She had even adjusted her make-up.

“Well, ah. . . I think we’ve covered everything outside of the central theme. . .”

“The central theme?”

“I mean of the book. I’m sure I’m looking at a book here. But the guts of it will be you, you know, coming back to Vienna after all these years, and climaxing with your uncle’s will, and how it ties in with what happened back then. The rest of your career will be kind of a build-up for that. So let’s talk about Vienna.”

“Well, we can, of course. . . but there’s lots more, you know, that I haven’t told you, much more about Burma, and Berlin, Malaya, Korea. . .”

“I really want to get into Vienna now. We can always go back, later on. I just want to know, like, where I am, when we get there. Is that OK?”

“Of course, of course.”

“OK. . .”

She referred again to her notebook, to the pages at the back where she kept the questions. Herbert braced himself. This was going to be the hardest part, the part he didn’t want to disturb. He wanted to see the place again before he brought its memory into the light. Memories were gossamer to the touch, no matter how powerful.

“OK. So, you were, what, twenty?”

“It was February of 1934. I was nineteen, nearly twenty, yes.”

“And why did you go there?”

“Oh. . . my parents thought it would be good for me. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I was thinking about the Church, but I wasn’t really sure. It would have meant Oxford, probably, and my mother wasn’t keen. I don’t know. Anyway, it was arranged that I should go and stay with Uncle Wolf. He lived in Vienna, an uncle by marriage, the aunt died before I was born . . . that’s neither here nor there . . . Wolf was considered to be, I suppose, the family intellectual.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Yes. So off I went.” He reached into the small bag he’d brought with him from the other compartment, and produced a fat brown envelope. “Actually I found something that might interest you. Wolf’s letter, inviting me to stay, with a lot of helpful information about the neighbourhood. In fact my father had written to him, but. . . It is in English.”

“Oh, wow!”

She took the packet of paper as though it were an orphaned chick, and looked, for a long moment of awe, at the postmark. Herbert sat back and took a break. He had glossed over that, at least. He would not have to return, now, to that dreadful year after school when he questioned everything, the bewilderment and distress of his parents, the rector’s irritation. In that year he had been branded both as a religious maniac and an atheist, and had narrowly escaped the charge of lunacy—which meant a torture-cell and family shame, back then.

Wolf would sort him out, they decided. Funny old Wolf, whom no one had seen since the Great War, a shady character, a black sheep by marriage, was nonetheless undoubtedly learned, and lived far away, in a city famed as a centre of ideas. The sickly mind was packed off to a warmer mental climate.

Elspeth looked up, wide-eyed.

“And this was the uncle who died, and left the pile of stuff, and said, what was it. . .?”

“Left instructions that the parcel should be opened fifty years after his death. Yes. It’s going to be two months late, but I don’t suppose it matters. The lawyers were quite right, I think, to wait for me. I am the only relative, apart from Mickey, of course.”

“Two months. . . Oh, were you there when he died?”

“Oh yes.”

“Oh my, how awful!”

“Yes. Yes it was, quite. I was very young, you see, and a long way from home. And I couldn’t stay, really, with the. . . well, it was almost civil war. It was, really, but it didn’t last long, as it happened.”

“So did your uncle die in the war?”

“Yes . . . no . . . that is he wasn’t shot, or anything. He died of a heart attack. He was well over eighty, he’d had a rough time of it here and there. It could have happened at any moment. But, as it was . . .”

Elspeth stared in silence, humbled by grief. He wished she would say something, now, anything, rather than leave him there, looking down at the rigid face of the old man, with the sobs and the screaming all around. The red wine on his uncle’s shirt looked like a splash of blood, but there was real blood on his own hands as the windows shattered in. There was firing outside, and a girl near him screaming at a pitch too high for her voice, a dry, silent scream, with both hands held to one side of her face. She was the pretty one, the one he never got to know because she didn’t speak English. Then the blood started running from her arms onto the dead man, dripping from her elbows onto the stiff white shirt, bloody tears shed for the death of beauty.

The door slid open, and Mickey said;

“What’s the matter with you two? Somebody died?”

“Oh honey, your father was just telling me about his uncle.”

“The mysterious Uncle Wolf? Good Lord, it sounds as if you’ve only just started.”

“We’ve been kind of filling in the background. Like I told you.”

“I see. Well, Mother was wondering when you were planning to turn in. If at all.”

“Give us a few more minutes, OK? A half hour, maybe.”

“OK. See you later.”

The door closed again, and she leaned forward to look at him, solicitous, apologetic.

“You OK?”

“Oh yes, I’m quite all right, thank you. I just couldn’t help thinking . . . It’s a long time ago, of course, but it made a very profound impression on me, for one reason and another.”

“Right, right.”

“I was there, you see.”

“Right.”

“I was with him when he died, as he died.”

“Right, OK. You want to talk about something else?”

“No, no, that’s all right. I don’t mind.”

“Because there was something else I wanted to ask you, aside from Vienna and everything.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. . . It’s kind of personal?”

Herbert allowed himself a small smile, which he hoped would appear as one of encouragement. How much more personal was she going to get?

“Ask away, Elspeth. I don’t mind, I assure you.”

“OK. I just wanted to ask you, are you a really committed Christian?”

“Well, yes . . . as I told you, I was thinking of entering the church . . . I have always been a believer, I think, in some way.”

“Right. Only, you know, Mickey’s name is really Miles? Miles Christie, doesn’t that mean Christian soldier?”

“Christian soldier, soldier of Christ. Without the final E it would, yes.”

“Right. Was that deliberate? I mean, was that why you named your son Miles?”

“Christened him, you mean. Yes, oh yes. I thought it was . . . appropriate, perhaps, or rather, shall we say, suitable. No different, really, from an ordinary saint’s name, like yours, in that way.”

“Hey, I didn’t mean to embarrass you, I’m sorry. I just think that was a really beautiful thing to do. l want to tell you that.”

“Ah . . . yes. Yes, thank you. I don’t know if Mickey would agree. I intended it really as a gift of sorts.”

“A gift of God. Right.”

“Actually, I’m afraid, a gift from me. A gift from the past. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I had no title, you see, no coat of arms. Money, of course, but he could make that for himself.”

“But you’re English. That would be enough.”

“Ha! How nice of you to think so.”

“I do. Really.”

“We used to think so, too, we English. But never mind about that. I wanted to give him something he could carry with him, something, as I say, from the past, a thread of continuity, of something precious.”

She was letting him ramble, he realised, while she sat there with her lips parted and her pretty eyes huge and blank. He could run on and on, making a fool of himself, not that it mattered. But making his faith appear foolish, that was something else. That would never do. He added;

“Of course I could have laid down a case of claret, but 1956 was such a terrible year.”

She nodded in glum agreement.

“Right. I did a course in college, big years in history. Suez, Hungary. . . oh sure.”

“Ah, actually I was referring to the wine production. But you’re right, of course. An interesting theory, that the vines could respond to international events. I wonder what ’38 was like. Can’t remember.”

“You mean ’39?”

“No, no, Czechoslovakia, and the Anschluss, that was really the beginning. Yes, the Anschluss. I thought so, anyway.”

She hid her eyes in the notebook, clearly confused. Could he really see the words ‘wine production’ appearing there?

“Well, Elspeth, I think we ought to be settling down for the night. I’m sure we’ll have ample opportunity to talk further in Vienna.”

“Oh sure. OK. You want to go back?”

“I think we’d better.”

“I don’t know if I can sleep. I’m too excited! Do you ever have trouble sleeping?”

“From time to time, like everybody else. Some people count sheep. I count soldiers.”

He knew she wouldn’t understand, but she thought she did and wrote it down anyway.

In the other compartment Frances and Mickey were already stretched out in their seats. Frances was almost wholly concealed by her blanket, although the train was warm. Herbert pulled out the seat next to her, and took her hand. She squeezed his fingers, and smiled briefly with her eyes still closed.

“Mickey dear, would you turn out the light when you’re ready?”

“All right, Mother. Sleep well.”

“Goodnight, dear.”

Soon the compartment was dark and quiet, with the even hum and racket of the train deeper than true silence. It was a neutral sound that could be all the right chords to the simple refrain of a symphony in the mind, or a background of summer birdsong, or the chanting of a crowd, or the blare and clatter of midday traffic in a city long ago.

Herbert knew that he would sleep badly, but the memory that caught him was one he didn’t expect. He was tempted to curse his daughter-in-law, poor innocent fool that she was. Oh, how unfair, he thought, how very unfair. She couldn’t know, even if she were told. She could never see her husband, barely seven years old, using his turn on the telephone from an English prep school a hundred miles from home . . . Miles, little Miles Christie, Christie, M., sobbing and desperate, demanding to know why his parents had done this terrible thing to him. Suddenly Herbert had understood, had pictured perfectly the classroom in which he, too, had learnt his first words of Latin, the new vocabulary striking his small son like a cane, the bored schoolmaster on the look-out for cheap laughs, and the remorseless ridicule at which small boys excelled. Then Frances had put down the phone, and turned in distress to her husband, with a question made redundant by that far belated rush of intuition;

“Herbert, Herbert, why on earth didn’t you tell him?”

Until then he had believed that the name would be a source of pride, and a cherished gift, and now it would bring sorrow, perhaps for a terrible week or two, before the boy came home again. He would learn to cope, of course, but what would he think of his father now? Herbert closed his eyes, and opened them again to darkness. He still didn’t know the answer to that question. He had been sure, for a while, that his son was quieter, and talked to him less, but small changes were quickly lost in the rush of growth. He would never know, now, whether his gift had done more harm than good in the end; he would never really have known that. All he had done was to illuminate a difference between father and son, and the times of their growing up. For big, strong Herbert had suffered no bullying at a school still uncritically Christian, while his more bookish son had developed different, more subtle resources at the dismal dawn of a more sceptical age; and, within months of that awful day, everyone was to know him as Mickey Christie. The gift had been buried, perhaps for good.

Herbert turned, and stared unhappily into the darkness of his wife. Sometimes memory was just a random spin on a wheel of failure. And he couldn’t even trust the detail; buildings, weeks and conversations conflated in the press of a mind crowded by age. A moment’s pain could fill a night, but to relive a month might only take a fraction of a second’s dream. Yet he must pursue this mood, work it out, exhaust it. In the solitude of the night his life and his memory were the same. There was nowhere else to go, whether he slept or not.