The Prince's Boy (18 page)

‘Was he as good as me in bed?’

‘You thought you were good in bed, did you?’

‘You know I was. You know so. I sent you crazy, crazy, crazy, Dinu.’

‘Yes, you did,’ I said, honestly.

‘So was he as good as Billy Hawkins?’

‘He was different. Please don’t ask me why. He was different.’

That was all I could say, and that had been more than enough already.

I have not seen Billy Hawkins again. There were times I craved his company – his sexual company, to be correct – and was tempted to phone him, but I desisted. He was an amiable young man, with whom I might have had a liaison, of a kind. It was the caveat ‘of a kind’ that prevented me opening what was left of my heart to him. He was too young for me, though he insisted that I was just the right age to keep him happy. I sensed, on the morning of December 21, that he had only his body to share with me. He lacked, pleasant as he was, what we Romanians know as
sufletul
: a soul. It was a word you only heard in churches in London, whereas R
ã
zvan and I, at our most contented, used it without embarrassment, often. I feared giving Billy the chance to prove to me that he possessed the depths of sadness and doubt that made the prince’s boy so abidingly attractive to me.

I’d poured him a second cup of coffee and watched him eat buttered toast topped with the Dundee marmalade I had first enjoyed with Amalia some thirty years before. It had been one of the many delicacies she had bought on the account my father kept at Dragomir.

‘We are breaking the law, Billy. We are criminals. We could be sent to prison,’ I said as we kissed goodbye.

‘I like living dangerously. It’s more fun that way.’

Then I thanked him for the night of bliss we had had together.

‘You were pretty good yourself. It takes two to tango.’

I closed the door behind him and returned to the dishevelled bed we had abandoned two hours ago. I lay back and paid homage to R
ã
zvan with my now slightly liver-spotted right hand.

My cousin Eduard, who had introduced me to the art of the free spirit that was Josephine Baker in Paris in 1927, was shot dead by a firing squad in the company of unrepentant Fascists. This I knew from my work as a translator for the World Service. Of my father’s fate, of Amalia’s, of Elisabeta’s, I was still, to my misfortune, completely ignorant. They had been absorbed into a general anonymity, consigned to the nothingness of subjugation. They were as good as ghosts to me now.

They were brought back to life, or something like it, when my secretary announced that Ciprian V
ã
duva wished to speak to me. It was with trepidation that I instructed her to show him into my tiniest of offices at the university. Ciprian? V
ã
duva? I wondered exactly who he was.

‘Good afternoon, Professor Grigorescu. I am the son of Elisabeta and George V
ã
duva, the poet you have rescued from oblivion. I am more than happy to meet you at last.’

We shook hands. I invited him to sit down.

‘It was not too difficult tracing you. I am pleased to see you alive and well. My mother sends you kisses.’

‘How is she?’

‘She survives. That is her word, Professor. She has willed herself to survive.’

‘Do you still live with her?’

‘We are inseparable. She would have me leave home and marry, but I cannot do so, yet.’

I asked him where home was. It had been in Basle, but now it was in Paris, of course, the refuge if not hiding place of despairing Romanians. He was, if anything, a Parisian. He spoke his native language, but had never visited his birthplace.

‘My mother wanted me to appreciate my father’s poetry. I think it defies translation.’

‘I think so, too.’

‘My mother has taught me to love and forgive him. It has been a long and difficult lesson.’

I could not imagine the spoiled and skittish Elisabeta as a teacher of almost anything remotely interesting. But then I was picturing her as she was before she met and fell in love with George. I saw them again at the first night of
Tristan und Isolde
, their ears indifferent to the glorious music, their eyes fixed glowingly on each other’s comeliness. Perhaps her seriousness, her stoicism, had its inspiration in his cruel way of dying.

‘She liked to joke that she was a widow even before she became one. Doamna V
ã
duva – Mrs Widow. Do you remember him, Professor Grigorescu ?’

‘I shall remember him better if you call me Dinu.’

‘Then I shall definitely call you Dinu, Professor.’

‘Your father was a shy and modest man. He was diffident about showing his poems to anyone. Your mother contrived to make him show them to me. I thought then, and I think now, that they are exquisite. He has left enough of them for generations to delight in. Forgive me, Ciprian, for sounding professorial.’

‘Do I look like him? Do I resemble him in any way?’

‘You want me to say yes, don’t you?’

‘My mother says I am the image of him.’

He wasn’t, as far as I could recall.

‘You have his nose and his prominent ears.’

‘Thank you.’

It was a Friday afternoon. On Friday evenings I always dined at Chez Victor, at the table set aside for me.

‘Could you bear to eat French food? You must have it all the time.’

He replied that he would be honoured to dine with his father’s champion. So that’s who I was. I knew my place, had known it for decades. I lived in the shadows cast by genius.

The greatest Hamlet of his time was seated in his usual place, dining with the greatest Falstaff. Ion Rohrlich and I had marvelled at their performances, during and after the war. Hamlet gave me his customary nod of recognition as the two of them went off to appear in a play they had both confessed they had trouble understanding.

‘You have more news concerning my family, haven’t you, Ciprian?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘I am waiting to hear it, patiently.’

‘Did you know that Amalia is still alive?’

‘That is very good news. That is the best news you could have brought me.’

‘She is not well, Dinu. She has lapses of memory that sometimes go on for days. It’s then that she believes my mother is no one closer to her than a nurse, and screams at her to do her job properly. When she is lucid, she calls her daughter Elisabeta and complains about the nurse who had been caring for her. If you met her, there is a chance that she would not recognize you. She is either garrulous or silent, depending on her mood.’

‘I have discovered how my cousin, Eduard Vasiliu, died. Is Cezar Grigorescu alive? I should like to know.’

‘I cannot answer your question. I assume he must be dead. He disappeared, Dinu. He simply disappeared.’

‘Complicatedly, Ciprian, not simply. Nothing he did was simple.’

‘Do you have no affection for him?’

‘I wish I had. I sincerely wish I had. I cannot warm to him. It upsets me more than I can say that I see no reason, no earthly reason, to warm to him.’

‘You had a tangible, living father to love or hate,’ Ciprian remarked after a considered silence.

I could do nothing but agree.

I made two suggestions over the meal that evening, both of which delighted the young engineer. The first was that he might attend, in a silent, anonymous capacity if he wished, a lecture I would give the following Tuesday on the poetry of George V
ã
duva, and the second was that I should take a weekend trip to Paris. I had a present for his mother, whom I longed to see again, and to pay my respects to Amalia, my very-far-from-wicked stepmother, if she was lucid enough to accept them. I did not express my sudden, impulsive longing to tend my lover’s grave – to remove the weeds that had sprouted over it, I imagined, and to replace them with fresh flowers.

‘Cognac, I think?’ I heard myself say, and there was the solicitous Eduard of 1927 opposite me for a second. ‘Would you care for a cognac, Ciprian?’

‘Yes, I think I would. My mother forewarned me to expect kindness and courtesy from her stepbrother. Is there such a person as a step-uncle, Dinu?’

‘I imagine so. If there is, then you are my step-nephew. They do sound cumbersome, don’t they?’

Fifteen students attended my lecture on George V
ã
duva. They were already seated – notebooks open; pens poised – when the poet’s modest son sneaked in and placed himself in the back row.

I treated the class to a history lesson first. I spoke of the two years at the close of the 1920s when Romania had an infant king on her shaky throne, due to the fact that his priapic father, the rightful sovereign, had put love or lust before duty. That father, King Carol the Second, had regained the even shakier throne in 1930, and from then on Romania swiftly asserted herself as one of the foremost beasts of a bestial Europe. The unlikeliest men and women became apostles of Nazism: hitherto distinguished philosophers and essayists; novelists and poets; dramatists, actors, painters. Adolf Hitler was their saviour, with Goebbels, Göring, Ribbentrop and Hess their Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The gospels of venomous hatred were written and read in the land.

But not by George V
ã
duva. He contented himself, in his discontented fashion, with unimportant matters like swallows darkening the sky before the onset of spring or music playing in a distant room or a dead woman commenting sadly, but with traces of bitterness, on her husband’s imminent funeral. His poems survive because they were not immediately popular or controversial. They seemed to say absolutely nothing relevant to the major issues of the time. They are neither public nor determinedly private, for their imagery is commonplace – so commonplace, in truth, as to invite rejection and dismissal. The very few critics who bothered to review his poetry were united in their contempt. They made play with his name. ‘These are the verses of a melancholic widow’ wrote one, who signed himself simply Valentin, while others were even more confidently abusive. ‘These poems are a widow’s weeds sprouting in a pestilential garden’ and ‘George V
ã
duva’s funeral baked meats leave a sour taste on the Romanian palate.’

Lyricists are said not to be political. Petrarch, Dowland, Keats and Leopardi seem to have nothing more than unhappiness to share with their readers. Yet their sorrows are eternal, reflecting as they do the unspoken sadnesses to which we all are prone. It wasn’t V
ã
duva’s intention to be subversive, but it is possible to regard him as a dissident. A hand captured in a moment of tenderness has more lasting resonance than has a Nazi salute. When Auden observes that poetry makes nothing happen he is both right and wrong. When a heart is stirred to depths of feeling hitherto unregarded, something is happening. Great poetry has the power to deepen our awareness of the transience of life. It takes an inordinate amount of literary courage to write with delicacy, and that is what V
ã
duva did. He was brave enough to concern himself with fragile things and that, paradoxically, is his strength. He has a secure place among the melancholic immortals.

The inconspicuous Ciprian said nothing during my encomium and the reading of his father’s lyrics by two of my brightest students that followed. He neither smiled nor wept. He did not introduce himself, as others might have done, as the offspring of a genius.

‘I should like to drink a whole pint of strong English beer,’ he said to me when the celebration was over.

I accompanied Ciprian on his brief tour of the sights of London. He had seen the Tower and the Houses of Parliament on newsreels and picture postcards, and neither seemed to impress him. It was in the City itself that he became animated. He was bewitched by the churches designed by Wren and Hawksmoor, as R
ã
zvan would have been had he lived to be at my side in my half-life. Ciprian shared his grandmother’s scorn for religion, but that distaste of piety evaporated in the face of pure architectural symmetry in Wren and contained disorder in the work of Hawksmoor. An engineer, he reminded me, is an aesthete, too.

Elisabeta had never remarried. She was content to remain Mme Veuve, she joked. What with Ciprian and Amalia to raise and care for, she had had no room or time for another husband. She had counted her blessings, such as they were.

‘I have brought you a present.’

‘What is it, Dinu? A box of chocolates? Is it a bottle of perfume or cologne?’

‘Nothing so mundane.’

‘You are being mischievous.’

She was right. I
was
being mischievous. I was about to give her the pearl necklace Prince Radziwill had bestowed upon the golden beauty who was the young Albert Le Cuziat. I’d had no cause or reason to wear it in the thirty years it had been in my bemused possession – no sensible cause or reason at all. I handed it to her in the paper, faded now, in which Albert had wrapped it for me.