David Lodge - Small World (14 page)

Meanwhile the telephone conversation between Berlin and Chicago is coming to its conclusion. A voice whose English is impeccable, and only slightly tinged with a German accent, is speaking.

“So, Arthur, we cannot tempt you to speak at our conference in Heidelberg? I am most disappointed, your thoughts on
Rezeptionsästhetik
would have been deeply appreciated, I am sure.”

“I’m sorry Siegfried, I just have nothing to say.”

“You are excessively modest, as usual, Arthur.”

“Believe me, it’s not false modesty. I wish it was.”

“But I quite understand. You have many demands upon your time… By the way, what do you think of this new UNESCO chair of literary criticism?”

After a prolonged pause, Arthur Kingfisher says: “News travels fast. It’s not even official yet.”

“But it is true?”

Choosing his words with evident care, Arthur Kingfisher says, “I have reason to think so.”

“I understand you will be one of the chief assessors for the chair, Arthur, is that so?”

“Is this what you really called me about, Siegfried?”

Hearty, mirthless laughter from Berlin. “How could you imagine such a thing, my dear fellow? I assure you that our desire for your presence at Heidelberg is perfectly sincere.”

“I thought you had the chair at Baden-Baden?”

“I do, but we are collaborating with Heidelberg for the conference.”

“And what are you doing in Berlin?”

“The same as you are doing in Chicago, I presume. Attending another conference—what else? ‘Postmodernism and the Ontological Quest.’ Some interesting papers. But our Heidelberg conference will be better organized… Arthur, since you raise the question of the UNESCO chair—”

“I didn’t raise it, Siegfried. You did.”

“It would be hypocritical of me to pretend that I would not be interested.”

“I’m not surprised, Siegfried.”

“We have always been good friends, Arthur, have we not? Ever since I reviewed the fourth volume of your
Collected Papers
in the
New York Review of Books
.”

“Yes, Siegfried, it was a nice review. And nice talking to you.”

The hand that replaces the telephone receiver in its cradle in a sleekly functional hotel room on the Kurfurstendamm is sheathed in a black kid glove, in spite of the fact that its owner is sitting up in bed, wearing silk pyjamas and eating a Continental breakfast from a tray. Siegfried von Turpitz has never been known to remove this glove in the presence of another person. No one knows what hideous injury or deformity it conceals, though there have been many speculations: a repulsive birthmark, a suppurating wound, some unheimlich mutation such as talons instead of fingers, or an artificial hand made of stainless steel and plastic—the original, it is alleged by those who favour this theory, having been crushed and mangled in the machinery of the Panzer tank which Siegfried von Turpitz commanded in the later stages of World War II. He allows the black hand to rest for a moment on the telephone receiver, as if to seal the instrument against any leakage of information left in the cable that connected him, a few moments before, to Chicago, while with his ungloved hand he meditatively crumbles a croissant. Then he removes the receiver and with a black leathern index finger dials the operator. Consulting a black leather-bound notebook, he places a long-distance call to Paris. His face is pale and expressionless beneath a skullcap of flat blond hair.

Morris Zapp’s taxi throbs impatiently at red traffic-lights on a broad shopping street, deserted at this hour except for a milk float and a newspaper delivery van. A large billboard advertising British Airways Poundstretcher fares suggests that the airport is not far away. Another, smaller advertisement urging the passer-by to “Have a Fling with Faggots Tonight” is not, Morris knows from his previous sojourn in the region, a manifesto issued by Rummidge Gay Liberation, but an allusion to some local delicacy based on offal. With any luck he himself will be tucking in, tonight, to a steaming dish of tender, fragrant tagliatelli, before passing on to, say, costoletta alla milanese, and perhaps a slice or two of panettone for dessert. Morris’s mouth floods with saliva. The taxi lurches forward. A clock above a jeweller’s shop says that the time is 6.30.

In Paris, as in Berlin, it is 7.30, because of the different arrangements on the Continent for daylight saving. In the high-ceilinged bedroom of an elegant apartment on the Boulevard Huysmans, the telephone rings beside the double bed. Without opening his eyes, hooded like a lizard’s in the brown, leathery face, Michel Tardieu, Professor of Narratology at the Sorbonne, extends a bare arm from beneath his duvet to lift the telephone from its cradle. “Oui?” he murmurs, without opening his eyes.

“Jacques?” inquires a Germanic voice.

“Non. Michel.”

“Michel qui?”

“Michel Tardieu.”

There is a Germanic grunt of annoyance. “Please accept my profound apologies,” says the caller in correct but heavily accented French. “I dialled the wrong number.”

“But don’t I know you?” says Michel Tardieu, yawning. “I seem to recognize your voice.”

“Siegfried von Turpitz. We were on the same panel at Ann Arbor last autumn.”

“Oh yes, I remember. ‘Author-Reader Relations in Narrative.’ “

“I was trying to call a friend called Textel. His name is next to yours in my little book, and both are Paris numbers, so I mixed them up. It was excessively stupid of me. I hope I did not disturb you too much.”

“Not too much,” says Michel, yawning again. “Au revoir.” He turns back to embrace the naked body beside him in the bed, curving himself spoonwise around the soft cushion of the buttocks, brushing with his fingers the suave, silky skin of belly and inner thigh, nuzzling the slender nape beneath the perfumed locks of golden hair. “Cheri,” he whispers soothingly, as the other stirs in his sleep.

In his oak-panelled bedroom at All Saints’ College, Oxford, the Regius Professor of Belles-Lettres sleeps chastely alone. No other person, man or woman, has shared that high, old-fashioned single bed—or, indeed, any other bed—with Rudyard Parkinson. He is a bachelor, a celibate, a virgin. Not that you would guess that from the evidence of his innumerable books, articles and reviews, which are full of knowing and sometimes risqué references to the variations and vagaries of human sexual behaviour. But it is all sex in the head—or on the page. Rudyard Parkinson was never in love, nor wished to be, observing with amused disdain the disastrous effects of that condition on the work-rate of his peers and rivals. When he was thirty-five, already secure and successful in his academic career, he considered the desirability of marrying—coolly, in the abstract, weighing the conveniences and drawbacks of the married state—and decided against it. Occasionally he would respond to the beauty of a young undergraduate to the extent of laying a timid hand on the young man’s shoulder, but no further.

From an early age, reading and writing have entirely occupied Rudyard Parkinson’s waking life, including those parts allocated by normal people to love and sex. Indeed, it could be said that reading is his love and writing his sex. He is in love with literature, with the English poets in particular—Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, and the rest. Reading their verse is pure, selfless pleasure, a privileged communion with great minds, a rapt enjoyment of truth and beauty. Writing, his own writing, is more like sex: an assertion of will, an exercise of power, a release of tension. If he doesn’t write something at least once a day he becomes irritable and depressed—and it has to be for publication, for to Rudyard Parkinson unpublished writing is like masturbation or
coitus interruptus
, something shameful and unsatisfying.

The highest form of writing is of course a book of one’s own, something that has to be prepared with tact, subtlety, and cunning, and sustained over many months, like an affair. But one cannot always be writing books, and even while thus engaged there are pauses and lulls when one is merely reading secondary sources, and the need for some release of pent-up ego on to the printed page, however trivial and ephemeral the occasion, becomes urgent. Hence Rudyard Parkinson never refuses an invitation to write a book review; and as he is a witty, elegant reviewer, he receives many such invitations. The literary editors of London’s daily and weekly newspapers are constantly on the telephone to him, parcels of books arrive at the porter’s lodge by every post, and he always has at least three assignments going at the same time—one in proof, one in draft and one at the note-taking stage. The book on which he is taking notes at this time lies, spreadeagled, open and face-down, on the bedside cabinet, next to his alarm clock, his spectacles and his dental plate. It is a work of literary theory by Morris Zapp, entitled
Beyond Criticism
, which Rudyard Parkinson is reviewing for
the Times Literary Supplement
. His denture seems to menace the volume with a fiendish grin, as though daring it to move while Rudyard Parkinson takes his rest.

The alarm rings. It is 6.45. Rudyard Parkinson stretches out a hand to silence the clock, blinks and yawns. He opens the door of his bedside cabinet and pulls out a heavy ceramic chamber pot emblazoned with the College arms. Sitting on the edge of the bed with his legs apart, he empties his bladder of the vestiges of last night’s sherry, claret and port. There is a bathroom with toilet in his suite of rooms, but Rudyard Parkinson, a South African who came to Oxford at the age of twenty-one and perfected an impersonation of Englishness that is now indistinguishable from authentic specimens, believes in keeping up old traditions. He replaces the chamber pot in its cupboard, and closes the door. Later a college servant, handsomely tipped for the service, will empty it. Rudyard Parkinson gets back into bed, turns on the bedside lamp, puts on his spectacles, inserts his teeth, and begins to read Morris Zapp’s book at the page where he abandoned it last night.

From time to time he underlines a phrase or makes a marginal note. A faint sneer plays over his lips, which are hedged by grey muttonchop whiskers. It is not going to be a favourable review. Rudyard Parkinson does not care for American scholars on the whole. His own work is sometimes treated by them with less respect than is its due. Or, as in the case of Morris Zapp, not treated at all, but totally ignored (he had of course checked the Index under P for his own name—always the first action to be taken with a new book). Besides, Rudyard Parkinson has written three favourable reviews in succession in the last ten days—for the
Sunday Times
, the
Listener
, and the
New York Review of Books
, and he is feeling a little bored with praise. A touch of venom would not come amiss this time, and what better target than a brash, braggart American Jew, pathetically anxious to demonstrate his familiarity with the latest pretentious critical jargon?

In Central Turkey it is 8.45. Dr Akbil Borak, BA (Ankara) PhD (Hull), is having breakfast in his little house on a new estate just outside the capital. He sips black tea from a glass, for there is no coffee to be found in Turkey these days. He warms his hands on the glass because the air is cool inside the house, there being no oil for the central heating either. His plump, pretty wife, Oya, puts before him bread, goat cheese and rose-hip jam. He eats abstractedly, reading a book propped up on the dining-room table. It is
The Collected Works of William Hazlitt
, Vol. XIV. At the other side of the table his three-year-old son knocks over a glass of milk. Akbil Borak turns a page obliviously.

“I do not think you should read at breakfast,” Oya complains, as she mops up the milk. “It is a bad example for Ahmed, and it is not nice for me. All day I am on my own here with no one to talk to. The least you can do is be sociable before you leave for work.”

Akbil grunts, wipes his moustache, closes the book, and rises from the table. “It will not be for much longer. There are only seven more volumes, and Professor Swallow arrives next week.”

The news, abruptly announced a few weeks earlier, of Philip Swallow’s imminent arrival in Turkey to lecture on William Hazlitt has struck dismay into the English faculty at Ankara, since the only member of the teaching staff who knows anything about the Romantic essayists (the man, in fact, who had originally mooted, two years earlier, the idea of marking Hazlitt’s bicentenary with a visiting lecturer from Britain, but, hearing no more about the proposal gradually forgot all about it) is absent on sabbatical leave in the United States; and nobody else in the Department, at the time of receiving the message, had knowingly read a single word of Hazlitt’s writings. Akbil, who was delegated, because of the acknowledged excellence of his spoken English, to meet Philip Swallow at the airport and escort him around Ankara, felt obliged to make good this deficiency and defend the honour of the Department. He has, accordingly, withdrawn the
Complete Works
of William Hazlitt in twenty-one volumes from the University Library, and is working his way through them at the rate of one volume every two or three days, his own research on Elizabethan sonnet sequences being temporarily sacrificed to this end.

Volume XIV is
The Spirit of the Age
. Akbil pops it into his briefcase, buttons up his topcoat, kisses the still pouting Oya, pinches Ahmed’s cheek, and leaves the house. It is the end unit of a row of new terraced houses, built of grey breeze-blocks. Each house has a small garden of identical size and shape, their boundaries neatly demarcated by low breeze-block walls. These gardens have a rather forlorn aspect. Nothing appears to grow inside the walls except the same coarse grass and spiky weeds that grow outside. They seem purely symbolic gardens, weak gestures towards some cosy suburban lifestyle glimpsed by an itinerant Turkish town-planner on a quick tour of Coventry or Cologne; or perhaps feeble attempts to ward off the psychic terror of the wilderness. For beyond the boundary walls at the bottom of each garden the central Anatolian plain abruptly begins. There is nothing for thousands of miles but barren, dusty, windswept steppes. Akbil shivers in a blast of air that comes straight out of central Asia, and climbs into his battered Citroen Deux Chevaux. He wonders, not for the first time, whether they did right to move out of the city, to this bleak and desolate spot, for the sake of a house of their own, a garden, and clean air for Ahmed to breathe. It had reminded him and Oya, when they first saw pictures of the estate in the brochure, of the little terraced house in which they had lived during his three years’ doctoral research as a British Council scholar. But in Hull there had been a pub and a fish-and-chip shop on the corner, a little park two streets away with swings and a see-saw, cranes and ships’ masts visible over the roofs, a general sense of nature well under the thumb of culture. This past winter—it had been a harsh one, made all the worse by the shortages of oil, food and electricity—he and Oya had huddled together round a small wood-burning stove and warmed themselves with the shared memories of Hull, murmuring the enchanted names of streets and shops, “George Street”, “Hedden Road”, “Marks and Spencer’s”, “British Home Stores”. It never seemed odd to Akbil and Oya Borak that the city’s main railway terminus was called Hull Paragon.