Bandits! part the second and last

Your eyes do not deceive you: I have finished a work of prose fiction! Now that the exam-wave has crested I have a lot of time on my hands, so I'll have to be careful not to make it a habit. To guard against this contingency I am making myself proper dinners and finding other inventive ways to waste my time. Witness the results!

This is my newest craze, Balkan spaghetti. You simply fry a couple of chopped garlic cloves in a big splodge of tomato-paste, spoon on, and mix with lots of yogurt.

And this is how I have spent a thoroughly productive day:

I've had these rather fine measuring-matryoshki since Christmas (cheers, folks!) but they now appear for the first time in glorious technicolour, in the national blazons of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. It goes without saying that the whole thing is unbelievably rich in symbolic significance, possibly.

Should a newly-minted adult citizen be this pleased with himself about anything accomplished using Crayola paint-pots? Do I care?

And now, Bandits!: the not-so-thrilling conclusion.

Nebless Tom was selected, by the rough and silent democracy of cattle-rustlers, to represent the suit. As the planner of the raid and distributor of the loot, he could rely on his comrades to keep their eyes trained on each-other even while he exposed his back for some seconds together. And of course if there turned out to be some hitch in his plan waiting beyond the locked door, it was only fair that he should be the first to know.

The door, designed for a civilised modern age in which it is possible to fortify your tower with so many interlocking bastions of glamour, distraction, and deceit that actual fortification can be all but done away with, yielded to one determined boot. In strode Tom – and behind him the other chieftains (Watt was one of the few people in history to master the striding limp), squeezing through the door together before Tom was left alone with the loot for too long. 

‘Intae the neuk thare, you!,’ cried Skellit Harry, brandishing his pistol with a motion so expansive as to permit no doubt that the unfortunate ‘you’ might be any of the men around the conference table. (I regret to say that this sample of executives and officials were all indeed men; but in fairness to them so were all of there 16^th century adversaries, so you can’t say fairer than that then.) But for some lengthy seconds there was no exodus into the corner, or any other movement at all. In hindsight, of course, we can call this dangerously stupid; but then the whole point of hindsight is that it makes everything clearer, no?

In any case they all jumped to it after Jack Pott shot the windows out – which was his normal method of expressing agreement, disagreement, approval, disapproval, anger, jubiliation, surprise, and sundry other emotions.

‘Richt!,’ said Tom, slapping his gauntleted hands in satisfaction. ‘We’re gey sorrae it haed tae be denner-time whan we cawed, but juist haun’ ower the clink an we’ll be aff.’ 

This request, succinct and gentlemanlike though it certainly was, didn’t have quite the desired effect. The Bolivian chap, and many others besides, appeared to take it as some sort of mortal threat. The mass of neat suits containing the conference-goers shivered as if it had been one being.

‘Thare’s naw muckle a body can say for hou thay eat here,’ said Watt, surveying the supper of papers and Blackberries on the conference-table. This was interpreted as further elaboration of a cruel and unusual death.

It dawned on Peter Laidlaw that he was almost alone in understanding what had just been said. He cleared this throat. Whether he was a coward or not, or whether it was at this moment that he ceased to be one, are questions that need not detain us here. Suffice it to say that he found a quavering voice.

‘…What do you want?...’ His words hung uncomfortably in the air, demanding in the next few moments a dramatic resolution, one way or the other. (Rather like what kept happening to Jack Pott.)

‘The clink, ye gawkie,’ said Tom generously. ‘The siller. The money.’

There was a rippling of suits as frightened and quizzical glances were exchanged. The rievers had enough career experience to tell the fear of being robbed from the fear of being shot: it was clear enough that there was no money to hand.

Nebless Tom and Peter Laidlaw looked intently through each-other in the hush that followed, both rather surprised that nobody had deigned to shoot them yet.

‘We haed an ettlin,’ said Tom cautiously, his tongue weighing each new word much as his hands weighed the pistol and sabre at his belt, ‘That a guid severals hunder-thousand pound waur passin haunds the evening.”

Strictly, the conference-goers had to admit to themselves (for even the Bolivian chappie was able to follow the outline of this remark, thanks to that powerful thing, the survival-instinct), that was true. That was the purpose of the deal. What kind of a world would it be if people made efficiency savings purely for efficiency’s sake? But you didn’t say it! Men in steel bonnets didn’t burst in on meetings, either, but that at least was something you could by virtue of its clear impossibility avoid thinking about, when it wasn’t happening. No, it was the shocks that hovered over you waiting for their moment that were the worst.

‘Sae thare’s naw ony clink,’ said Watt philosophically. ‘Let’s awa. We’re still naw ony iller aff, whilk’s better nor some raids hae endit, aye, Harry?’ He was actually better-off, by several surreptitiously lifted Blackberries.

Harry nodded disappointedly, as did a relieved Tom. The three of them moved with a measured gait towards the door – measured once again so that they would all pass through it together. It was when this proved less of a squeeze than you might have thought that they realised Jack Pott had stayed perfectly still.

‘This is nae denner,’ he said slowly, like a man caught up in calculations. 'Thare’s money in this, a maiter gin it’s here for takin or naw. Wha’s is that, then? Yours, or yours?’

He gestured violently at the suits with his hand. You would almost have preferred it to be his sword; at least you know precisely why you were frightened to death of swords.

‘D’ye mind whan ye stealt thae hunder kyne aff o ma faither, Harry?,’ he said suddenly, almost conversationally. Skellit Harry tried to suppress a look of profound self-satisfaction. ‘A mind, aye,’ he said with masterful self-control.

‘But A cud aye hae liftit thaim back again…’ In fact he had; but Harry might have thought better of mentioning this even had Jack not sounded as if he expected no answer.

‘Gin we’re gangin, we maun gang,’ said Tom, looking nervously out of the broken window at the silvery smudge of the rising moon. But Watt hirpled back across the threshold with a bemused look on his face. 

‘We sud tak some wee thingum, ye’re sayin, aye, Jack? Something mebbe that’s haird for tae buy back?’

Jack nodded.

‘…Forby thae wee black things we waur liftin juist than, Watt?,’ said Harry. ‘Och, daed ye think a daedna see? A waes myndin tae git ma skare efterhaund.’

‘A’v a queesitive naitur,’ said Watt smoothly, tossing him a Blackberry. After a pointed cough, Tom received one of his own, after which he went over to the window, to signal to the men holding the horses far below. But Jack, though offered his portion, was still far away.

‘Something thay canna buy back…’

The papers were all full of it the next day, of course: perhaps it wasn’t a very weighty story, and perhaps they had received some hints that it should certainly be handled lightly from important quarters; but journalists, too, are human. Each was once a smiling child, hard as it may be to imagine. And there is such a thing as good old-fashioned fun. Some of the papers made rather good puns.

The men were found naked and bound in various skips and wheelie-bins south of the Clyde; their clothes eventually washed up in County Antrim; their documentation and their Blackberries were nowhere to be found. The consequences of this development for Bolivia turned out to be quite momentous; but why should I trouble myself about Bolivia? Hardly anybody did. LifeSunTechGrow and the World Bank never had. The papers promptly forgot about it – in spite of the best efforts of one Peter Laidlaw, who left his job and went to live there as a legal advisor to the peasants and who wrote several pretty good books about his experiences, the first of which was called ‘21^st-century Bandits’ and was rather confessional in nature.

And what of the men receding, in a clatter of pistols and sabres and Blackberries, over the brow of the purple hills and into the famous Mists of History? I can’t honestly say that they even knew where Bolivia was. They just knew fair when they saw it and – what is much more important – when they didn’t. 

Bandits!

I'm guiltily conscious that during the present lead-up to my exams I've been neglecting this blog to focus on procrastination. Here, then, is something I'm working on: not finished, as usual, but perhaps even as much as half-done.

Eric Hobsbawm, who is the best, was on the radio the other day and the interview set me after some books by him and others. At length (who even puts Eric Hobsbawm in psychology? Fortunately it was on the short-loan shelves so I didn't have to visit their floor; I mean, who knows what they keep up there?) I unearthed his classic study Primitive Rebels. He said of this in the interview that, although almost everybody in it now disagrees with him, he feels proud to have pretty much founded the history of how the anonymous masses of ordinary people thought about society, justice, resistance, and rebellion before the invention of modern politics.

One of the things he explores in the book is the noble or 'social' bandit. Every culture has got one of these and as one of the prototypes for all heroism, his shadow is everywhere. Humble-birth-foreign-war-return-family-wronged-blood-vengeange-outlaw-steals-rich-gives-poor-got-swagger-good-life-sense-humour-strong-drink-superhuman-skill-band-outlaws-huge-sidekick-jolly-priest-daring-escape-royal-pardon-betrayal-last-stand-but-escaped-disguise-and/or-sleeping-under-mountain; the English-speaking example is of course good old Robin Hood.

The narrative pattern is staring us in the face: the more controversial assertion of the book is that while you can't entertain any illusions about them - they certainly weren't revolutionaries, and they sometimes were really ruthless criminals who made a show of acting this way because of the power of the story - such people very often actually existed; until very recent times, in countries like Italy. They embodied an early kind of social protest: they were, arguably, a force for good.

This brought to my attention a bit of laxity in my thought and language. When roused to politics by my revolutionary chums I'm awfully fond of the word 'bandit' as a term of abuse towards the Parasite Exploiter Class; and yet as a good Marxist dedicated to the nationalisation of the boat-race, the abolition of Yorkshire pudding, and the overthrow of all that the Daily Mail holds dear I have rather a good opinion of actual bandits. Ho-hum.

So I did what any sensible person would and started to write a story about it.

I am rather pleased with ‘Langdreen’, which means, approximately, Longsuffering. It is located in Scottish Myth and Legend somewhere between Auchenfankle and Balwearie.

Nithsdale in the West March of Scotland, on a moor nearest to the farm-town of Langdreen. About 1570.
It was a day of fog, grey and cold as iron, piling up on the horizon until there was no horizon but only the ghosts of hills - perhaps low and close, or perhaps far away and towering. It was a wet, clammy day: the very air seemed to grope and grip. It was a short day: it fell at the soggy end of Winter, that grimmest season of the year when the snow has retreated to expose the black nakedness of the exhausted earth. To cap all this it was a day nearing its end.

Sunshine, then, for bandits!

Down the moors they went: pistols and sabers clattered like teeth shivering in the cold. They were stout little men on stout little nags: all gristle and bone, no fat to spare between them. The faces of the riders were drawn, silent, and alert under their steel bonnets; but below each face as it came out of the fog and briefly into view was the face of his weary, wild-eyed horse. They seemed made to contrast with one-another, like the masks of comedy and tragedy.

There were riders there from up and down the March country. They came from Scotland and from England, but then, those grand old names mattered little here. What mattered were the harsh, unwelcoming names of all the valleys with their old grudges, all the villages strung out along rushing rivers between the dark shoulders of the hills. What mattered were the names of the families, and the men. There were Laidlaws, Armstrongs, Hunters, Stampers. Grim old Hirplin Watt was there, and Skellit Harry who had sprung him out of the castle of Carlisle and, on another occasion under different circumstances, shot him through the knee (this being why he hirpled). Although the documents clearly show that he was at this time in Ireland, serving a life-sentence as a soldier as punishment for his crimes against the Queen’s Majesty, Nebless Tom was nevertheless there. So was Jack Pott the Bastard, who was in a similar condition except that it was the King’s Majesty and he’d been hanged.

There were no cattle with them, nor any torches lit: this was a raid, and on its way out.

Down the moors and up again: as the fog and the dark gathered and stirred thickly together, it became impossible to distinguish one ridge from the next. Down and up again went the riders; down and down went the sun. But just as vision grew useless it sent a few final rays over the horizon - like men laying an ambush where their raid has retreated – and showed in silhouette the rievers’ destination.

It was a tower: there were a lot of towers in the border-country, then, and this one was much like the rest. Stark, square, and black, it had no grace or beauty or even much in the way of showing-off. It proclaimed only this: that a man had had the wealth and power to have it built and that, come what would, he meant to keep them.

Swords were drawn, but without that satisfying ‘shing!’ noise which is actually, I believe, produced by cleaning a kitchen-knife with a damp flannel; without even so much as a steely glint, since polishing with sheep-grease had given the blades a dull bronze colour. After all, this was all clearly taking place long before the age of Hollywood. Clearly.

Finnieston, Glasgow, Scotland. About now.
The Crowne Plaza Hotel glowered across the Clyde. Stark, square, and black, it had no grace or beauty or even much in the way of showing-off. It proclaimed only this: that a man had had the wealth and power to have it built and that, come what would, he meant to keep them.

After all, the people able to stay there didn’t need it to be beautiful, because they didn’t have to look at it. They stayed in it, protected by its mirrored sides, and looked at the rest of the world: there was even a glass lift for this purpose. The appalling tower-blocks of Glasgow were being busily blown up so that they wouldn’t spoil the view for the people in the equally appalling high-rise hotels; they were to be replaced with more high-rise hotels.

In the function room, representatives of LifeSunTechGrowLife Private Equity were busy acquiring a controlling share in the utilities of Bolivia. Of course they didn’t look terribly busy: they sat around a table with representatives of that distant and beautiful country (one of whom, by an astonishing coincidence, was himself Bolivian!) and the World Bank; and listened to long speeches recited partly in numbers and partly in that special coded language known as advertising-copy. They could, in the conditions of complete privacy for which they had paid a good deal, have been frank about what they were doing - but habit is powerful. And the view from the windows, as the lights of the city winked on like eyes, would have made them uncomfortable.

Busy as they apparently were, at least one of them was profoundly bored. Peter Laidlaw was discreetly trying to build a tripod out of his fountain-pens, without success. It was the wretched rounded ends, he was sure of it. He was a great picker-up of fountain pens. He was probably a rich man these days – of course the thing about being rich is that, no matter how much money you receive on a monthly basis, there is always less after you’ve finished spending it – and still he refused to buy his own pens, instead picking them subtly off other people’s desks. Perhaps it was a kind of cosmic defense. Were he ever to confront his namesake saint at the celestial gate and be asked about his sins, he could cite his habit of stealing pens. This saved him from pondering just how he’d gotten his money, and whether it was possible to steal something from the other side of the world.

Outside the dark gathered, stirred thickly together with the fog from the Clyde.


A lone nag, shaggy and long-suffering and clearly wondering why it put up with his sort of thing, wondered into the car-park of the Crowne Plaza. It shook itself and whinnied irritably.

Hearing this in his booth, the duty guard looked up from his reading and stared. He was a Glasgow boy, and had never actually seen a border-nag in the flesh, never mind in the car-park. He regarded it as it was about to explode.

Jack Pott grimaced. A decent watchman who knew his part in the proceedings would have chosen this moment to run out into the dark to restrain the stray animal and been clouted neatly over the head. But clearly standards had declined.

He urged his own pony up to the barrier, drew a pistol from under his oily cloak, and fired it lazily in no particular direction.

‘Staun’ tae! Haunds ower yer hied!’

Ah, good. At least they still understood the basics.


Peter Laidlaw’s mind was already on the way home, so it is hardly surprising that he was the first to hear the noise being made by the unexpected guests that it met on the way out. Like the unfortunate security guard now trussed to his swivelling chair, he for a while did nothing about it, since it almost certainly didn’t exist.


Hirplin Watt hirpled into the glass lift and glared suspiciously at the control panel.

‘Aicht,’ said Nebless Tom helpfully, and prodded the appropriate button with his pistol.

‘Why for thare’s no ony thriteen?,’ said Watt.

‘It’s ill-luckit,’ said Nebless Tom, who’s job it was to know this sort of thing.

Watt wrinkled his nose. ‘Are thay daft here?’

‘An anither thing,’ said Skellit Harry, attempting to work himself a corner, the iron sewn into his shirt clanking unpleasantly. ‘Gin this is the Crowne Plaza Hotel, whaur’s the Crowne Plaza?’

Nebless Tom sighed – causing an odd, unsettling noise to come from the hole where his nose had been. ‘We daed confabble anent this. It’s cried efter the fowk that awn it.’

There was a contemplative silence, broken by Jack Pott. ‘Crowne Plaza? Bluidy stupit name.’

On this, at least, there was general consensus, and the lift completed its journey in silence.


Peter Laidlaw had just succeeded in erecting his tripod. Most unfairly, the conference did not choose that moment to end. And now it’s droning was accompanied by an intensification of those odd noises from outside: clattering metal and harsh raised voices. Wasn’t this place supposed to be four-star?

Train-robbery

On my journeys to and from the Orkney islands by train and ferry I finished my books and then got writers' block; but anything can be produced artificially in the 21st century and that includes inspiration. First I chose my theme: train-robbery (the first thing that came to mind as something that could have enlivened my surroundings). Then I wrote a list of characters, roles, events, plot-twists, and other things of that nature, and gave them all sorts of designations – one, two, a, b, up, down, sideways, that sort of thing. Then I made little papers chits bearing the same symbols. Finally I sneezed on the whole assembly. The result: P.G Wodehouse meets The White Guard. The story so far is below: more to follow. For once I have actually come up with an ending and, what's more, written it. It's just the in-the-middle bits left to sort out.

(Yes I reused the bit about Autumn and mortality from 'Meanwhile, in the 1930s...'. I have to eat, you know.)


It was mid-afternoon on a pleasant estate in southeastern Ukraine, at the end of the long, troubled final summer of the Russian aristocracy. Autumn had arrived, bringing with it a revolution of such world-changing proportions that even the venerable landscaped woodlands had broken out in Bolshevik red and gold. This, combined with the birds singing elegies and the greatly exaggerated slowness with which petals fell from the dying flowers, made it clear to anyone with any knowledge of the Russian climate that a revolutionary front was incoming.

In the parlour of the manor-house it was afternoon tea. The beautiful young duchess (if you are young and a duchess beauty takes care of itself) Zina Panina, who had come into the ownership when Colonel Panin died in '17 of a venereal disease complicated by German shellfire, stared glumly out of the window at the insurgent forest.

On the one hand, of course, she was in favour of revolution as a necessary antidote to the sheer banality of everything, and the bloodier the better. The Bolsheviks only had their social theories to tell them that the upper classes should be shot and deprived of civil rights; she actually knew them. But on the other... well... a few years ago it had meant something to be a modernist poetess, famous bisexual, and semi-professional subject of scandal. (Zina was a well-educated, independent-minded woman and would never consent to be the direct or indirect object of anything.)

The other problem with the revolution was the deluge of Moscow refugees. Their factories, their diamonds, their command of Russian history they had all left to Comrade Lenin; but they had been sure to take their banality with them to Ukraine. Take her aunt Sofia, who knew as much about poetry as she did about bisexuality: that they were both probably virulent rashes of some kind. She was, as usual, asking the most ghastly questions.

'I meantersay, under Comrade Trotsky, who will serve the tea? Speaking of which... thankyou, Fedya.' Fedya, the aged, serf-born family retainer, had been a model of loyalty in every year which didn't have a social revolution (isn't statistical analysis a bitch?). Now he regarded his mistress with a look suggesting that it could well be her.

Zina turned away from the window and set down her teacup with a sound like the champing of teeth. 'Auntie. We are privileged to witness the emergence of the blazing red phoenix of chaos and change from the ashes of the old world. Can you not take your mind off the tea?'

Fedya and Sofia, united for once, gave her a look suggesting that it was very easy for a person with a cup of tea in hand to say this. The silence was broken by Bondaruk the village school-master. 'Ah, but it's all about who serves the tea and so on, isn't it? Marxism, I mean.'

'Marx!' Zina waved her hand, as if wiping away the forces of historical inevitability in exasperation. 'Marx no more leads the Reds than St. George leads the Whites. It is the end for all bearded prophets. That's the whole aesthetic merit of the revolution.'

'...Lenin's got a beard, doesn't he?'

'Auntie.'

'She's right, you know,' said Bondaruk. 'And Trotsky.'

'And Denikin,' said Father Grigoriy, who had been hurt by the dismissal of bearded prophets. He, too, needed to eat, after all.

'Kolchak was clean-shaven.'

'Is Kolchak dead?'

'Did Petlyura have a beard?'

'Is he dead?'

'You know, I always used to say the same thing to dear Vladimir when he was alive. Beards, I said-'

Zina put her head in her hands. Who knows what she would have done if not the the fortuitous bullet which at that moment shattered the window, smashed Father Grigoriy's teacup (had she been looking, Zina could have made rather a good poem out of the resulting black-and-white explosion; but she wasn't, and the old priest merely fainted), and buried itself in the stucco ceiling.

'Aw laun' tae the tylin masses!,' cried a voice from below in Ukrainian. (I have taken the liberty of a cultural-idiomatic translation.) 'Doun wi the pah-rasite explyter class!'

'What tiling masses?,' said Aunt Sofia. 'All the cottages round here are thatched. We can't keep that many tilers employed, surely.'

'Toiling, I think he was saying,' said Bondaruk discreetly: ten years spent trying to stop youngsters from speaking any Ukrainian in his classroom had given him a fair command of it.

Zina did not write in Ukrainian but had had a half-hearted affair or two with people who did, so it is probably just as well that she didn't hear this exchange. She was storming down to the garden; and it was a storm as portentous, as black and broiling and fertile with lightning-flashes, as that which had engulfed Russia generally at the start of the revolution. This really was too much.


To be continued! Thrill to tales of train-robbery! Gasp at the ruthlessness of psychotic White bandit Ataman Burbosh! Be flabbergasted by the cunning of People's Commissar Sholokhov! Witness Aunt Sofia confront and defeat the Red Army of Workers and Peasants! All this and more coming soon.

Exploits of Orwell and Pinter

During his Oxford days, Pinter was reckoned an ace oarsman and was a favourite of the boat-race team. One day he met up with his pal Orwell for a drink. As he rose to go to the bar, Orwell couldn’t help noticing that the seat of his trousers was sodden wet. Exercising the greatest possible tact, he pointed this out.

Pinter grimaced. “Ah, yes. We were out practicing, you see, and sprung a leak. A very small one, and so we kept on blithely rowing without noticing the water until it was almost at our ankles. Our fault, really, we’ve been putting the craft under too much strain lately.”

Orwell nodded agreement. “Actions have consequences, old boy. You seep as you row.”

Of magic and Marxism

I’m a socialist, you may have gathered from some of the stuff down there: it’s out of some mixture of ardent desire for world justice and Morningside belief that everything is just so untidy the way it is. I’m not any good at parties, economies, issues etcetera and hope never to be elected to anything, but I have my convictions and I stick by them, and I occasionally feel the urge to write something on behalf of The Movement.

So for some time past I’ve been turning an idea over in my mind. It’s something that troubles me a lot about fantastical settings and which – fantastical settings not being a byword, in the English-speaking world, for literary seriousness – nobody seems to bring up. All modern people of goodwill, whatever their opinions about parties, economies, issues and all that sort of thing, would surely accept the principle that every person ought to come into the world the same kind of human being with the same rights and duties and chances. There is no room for slaves and masters in a civilised country.

In our world we know that all the mechanisms set up to divide people into real people and, you know, them – race, class, gender, the whole sordid heap – are made up in an attempt to fend off 'that dreaded, hated thing, a world of free and equal human beings' and it is part of the job of literature to show this. But hang on, in worlds where some people have magical powers, the assumption on which our notion of a just society is based is out of the window. People aren’t equal. What kind of a society do you get, then, according to Ye Aulde Marxisme, when the means of magical production are in the hands of this small class, who are obviously going to hold gigantic power in society? And is it a society in which your or I would want to live?

I thought further about this. A lot of the time, magic just sort of happens to you around puberty without any obvious reason. Surely that means that somewhere, sometime, the people on the bottom of the sordid heap of history are going to find themselves in possession of some undiluted magical whizz-bang? And that’s not going to end well: you don’t ask slaves to be reasonable to the slavers, we can’t all be Nelson Mandela. Magic, it seems, is just like capitalism: doesn’t solve any problems, just moves them about.

So for a long time I’ve been meaning to do something with this idea. I’ve got a sketch. Magic is coming back into the world (again like capitalism, magic operates on long waves which nobody really understands) just as a country whose name isn’t important is undergoing a hodge-podge of my favourite revolutions. And it nearly all seems to be coming back into one particular chap, our protagonist, an illiterate boy from some obscure hinterland scoured by slave-takers. Everybody wants to get their mitts on him, of course – surely there needs to be a mechanism for finding and indoctrinating magical people if a society is to stay up – but the Revolution gets there before the Dastardly Enemies of the People.

And then? I don’t know. There’ll an ensemble cast of bespectacled revolutionary heroes, defiant prostitutes, good-hearted White Guards; and gallons of blood, of course. I feel it might veer towards a sympathetic treatment of our protagonist as he himself veers into being a sort of magical Stalin (you never ‘veer’ into anything pleasant); because in the end, I am firmly convinced, no good ever comes of damn magic. But it must have an ending sufficiently ambiguous to pass as happy. The Revolution can’t fail; it’s an aesthetic necessity, dammit! The main thing is to approach this kind of setting with a concern for power and society that's generally absent.

And it’s all Dreadfully Serious, though the narrator doesn’t always succeed in keeping a perfectly straight face because my narrators don’t. So here, dwarfed by the explanation of them, are some odds and ends I did. Nobody has any names yet, so forgive the confusing proliferation of pronouns.



Space-time is a frightfully complicated thing which I won’t pretend to understand. But probably it wouldn’t be lying to tell you that, in the world concerned by this narrative, about three-hundred years have passed since its end. A great many books have been written about these events. You could learn all about how they affected the production of fine pottery in the countries where they took place, if you like that sort of thing. My book, the latest on the pile, is neither cutting-edge research nor authoritative summary, and if you are a serious student and somebody has put this on your reading-list you should protest.

No, my ambitions are small: I don’t propose to tell you why any of this happened, only that it happened, and that it happened to living people and not to a series of names, dates, blobs of ink on maps. My sources were cherry-picked, my biases show, and I took artistic liberties with the translation. But oh well: my humble hope is that, if it is not certifiably true, and in fact not very probable, and in fact not even terribly plausible, my history is at least believable. And one cannot believe in fine pottery alone.

Anyway, I really cannot stand introductions of more than a page.


The wind made waves on the heather: a brown sea, under a grey sky. The effect was completed, improbably, by a ship on the brow of the moor, a very fine ship, sleek, painted, and carved with a dragon’s head. On its deck, a sacrificial goat bleated its last strangled bleat, as if aware of the necessity of the proceedings but wishing they could have been a bit more professional. The blood on the deck looked brown as well.

It was spring, but you wouldn’t have known. Winter had been long, and only persons of naïve and sentimental disposition will tell you that a long cold winter means a long warm summer. After all, there is only so much year. No, a cold winter, in melting, soaks all the other seasons and you end up with a sodden summer and a sodden spring like this one. The young grass was sad stubble on the muddy chin of the world. The new flowers smelled like death.

[The start, at a funeral. The protagonist comes from a sort of Norse-Gaelic-looking setting, but they're the victims of something much like the African slave-trade. People making up fictional worlds that are supposed to be recognisably like our own often transplant historical societies in poor imitation of Tolkien, I gather. But the Searing Light of Marxist Science tells us that cultures and so on are all just built on geography and economy, so change the geography and you change all the cultures and their relations to each-other. In other worlds, why should the 'white northern Europeans' be the most successful at world-banditry just because they were in our world? I’d like to challenge some assumptions.]


His voice was not loud; it demanded quiet from others. It was not his mouth that did the work at all, but his eyes. You looked into them and knew they weren’t looking back; they were fixed on something invisible to you. He couldn’t hear your noise, either, and his obliviousness made everybody feel that talking would be futile. He was in fact slightly deaf: a childhood in the printing-shop had done that to him. It had done more than that. Metal-forged words had crashed daily down around his young mind, and in that mind their sound became the sounds of cannon, and toppled empires crashing to the ground.

Probably – even the omnipotence of the historian has got its limits, I’m afraid, when it comes to some things – it was at this moment that she fell in love with him. If people fall in love in measurable moments, which they clearly don’t; but then gross oversimplification is the whole business of the historian. So she fell in love with him, in her dogged pugnacious way. When you have lived a life full of people worn out, broken, vanished, hardly seen, well, it must be easy to fall in love with a mind like a red-hot printing-press. Perhaps she felt that a mind like that could love as well as it hated, if it was given the chance.

[I promised you bespectacled revolutionary heroes and defiant prostitutes. You were sold a bill of goods.]


He heard the sound of stars, saw hopes and fears, tasted love and hate, and felt himself shaken by the heavy-footfalls of time. I’m making this sound far too fun, amn’t I? No: it was without a doubt the most horrible thing that had ever happened to him.

[Our protagonist warns kids that this is your brain on serious magic.]


He stood perfectly still and looked intently over the fields, as though they were a piece of writing he was determined to memorise before it was snatched away. But in fact it was the same view he had seen often enough before: of the fields clambering up to the iron-grey horizon and sliding away into the mists and ghost-shapes. There were the same fences, the same rich blacks and subdued greens, the same skeletal smudges made by the bare trees.

There were far more beautiful countries in the world, of course, and he knew it: as a young boy he’d gazed long and hard at the illustrations of any book of travels passing through the printing-shop. But quite suddenly, he felt that these weary hills were worth any hantle of majestic mountains: partly it was the gladness of regaining something you thought lost, and partly the keen attachment people feel to an heirloom from the dead, and partly the pride in something made by the work of their hands. The land he had always known had become his, somehow.

[B.R.H, a patriot after all. The haircuts will be French, the inability of anyone to stop being tooth-grindingly dramatic for the shortest time will be Russian, I hope; but the scenes I take from our iron-grey island. Bagpipes on cue at this point. Lovely!]


Spring came again, and came as a surprise. It had been another long winter, and a winter of hardship and death, and a winter when rumours and lies circulated at parity with the truth owing to shortages; and truth to tell people had begun to doubt whether the long-promised spring would ever turn up. Had there been spring before the war? Wasn't it all another malicious propaganda trick?

But the world must spin on around its axis, else we should all inevitably fall off. Spring came. Frozen rivers buckled, cracked, burst the ice and resumed their courses. So did History, and we come to the final phase of our narrative.

Meanwhile, in the 1930s...

I have had great fun reading Orlando and have felt for some time an urge to give it the sort of affectionate parody that I gave Jane Eyre. The problem is, a parody of Orlando would be Orlando only not as good.

Here's something, however. One of my favourite bits of the novel is the stuff about The Spirit of the Age, so I decided to create a scene in which the Age it helped to define gives way to a new one.


The scene was a moderately-sized country residence amidst its grounds. Autumn was coming: the landscape of that well-known but elusive place, which has had libraries written about it but cannot be found on an OS map, Rural England, looked dignified but weary. Everything was at its most achingly beautiful and also its most painfully transitory. Birds sang about mortality. Petals fell from roses with exaggerated slowness.

Inside the house, some of the rising and established stars of English literature had gathered for tea and debate. It was impressive to hear: with only their words, they dismantled centuries of literary heritage and re-assembled it in new and exciting shapes. They were very keen, indeed, on the new and exciting. There was little of it to be found occurring naturally on their snoozing amber island, forcing them into more and more extreme experimentation: they ripped up the boundaries of class, race, gender, time, and space.

Were one in a position to listen quietly in at the breakfast table on a particular September morning, one could here all of the following: the renowned critic Scratching demonstrating that Donne had been the first modernist; Euphrosinia Plum-Duff proving that being a man and being a woman were both equally impossible; a recitation by the avant-garde poet Smealley in which the motor-car was hymned as the lily of the 20th century; a discussion of the latest piece by Schotterboldt, ‘Man in blackface coughing repeatedly on the piano keys’; and a lot of really quite good homoerotic stuff.

Young David Oats, who had been proclaimed the proletarian Blake of the 20th century by Scratching, speared himself a fried egg with a sense of vague unease. It is true that any proper socialist feels uneasy after his fourth fried egg, but he had long since convinced himself that socialism did not mean that nobody would have four fried eggs for breakfast: it meant that everybody would, and so for a son of the mines to enjoy them in a country house amongst the finest intellectuals of the age was no doubt a step in the right direction. The left direction, that is.

But still, he felt troubled. He took advantage of a lull in the conversation to get up and go over to the French window. From this admirable vantage point, he witnessed one of the decisive moments in history. (It is true that nothing really decisive had ever happened at Tanglethorn Hall per se. But a look out of the French windows revealed a general world phenomenon.)

Storm clouds gathered, fat, black, and bombastic. Then they broke. Then they gathered again. Then they broke again. Then they gathered again. Then they broke again. It was clear that this process would continue for some time.

The rains they poured down instantly sent the entire world into a grim, soggy, demoralizing winter. All sorts of extra-ordinary things took place. In China, the piercing claws of a small, agile dragon in an awful pince-nez stirred a far larger, older, craggier dragon from its ancient slumber (although this all took place in conditions of immense inscrutability). In America, the party was declared over and the drunken guests were fished out of the swimming-pool and driven home, where to their horror they discovered that most people in America weren’t obscenely rich. In Russia, muscular heroes of labour were sent to sink a mine-shaft into the unexplored and surpassingly deep depths of the Slavic Soul. In Germany, a magnificent cabaret about the end of civilization had to be suspended in the middle of the second act when the theatre ran out of money and the producer was sent to a concentration camp. India, which up to then had been all adventurous Afghan frontier until you got to the temples of lost civilizations, turned out to be miles and miles of bloody India, full of coolies joining trade-unions and political parties. Africa was shown to exist for the first time.

Weighed down by heavy thoughts (and possibly also fried egg, we must confess) Oats returned to the breakfast table, listening to the rain patter on the roof like the machine-guns of aircraft in the coming war, which everybody had just realized was inevitable.

The atmosphere had changed in his absence. Scratching had joined the Communist Party and was now showing that Donne had been a pioneering Marxist. Euphrosynia Plum-Duff was trying to prevent the war by sponsoring seminars; everybody of course knew that the war was inevitable, but this only made them feel even more urgently the need for seminars. Smealey had gone off to Tuscany on invitation from Mussolini, but the company had been made up again by Schotterboldt, who had had to flee into exile.

Breakfast was allowed to go stale as everybody chewed on the world crisis. The servants came in to clear it away, and several people felt intense existential guilt about their existence.

Oats, who was particularly so affected, went outside to watch the drizzle on the hillsides. He lit a soggy fag and puffed at it, discontentedly. Standing in the doorway, we has suddenly jostled aside by the Scotsman Robert Wilson, who was on his way to catch a train.

Not much has been seen of Wilson at Tanglethorn that Summer except at dinner-time: he had been invited to replace a whole succession of Irishmen, all of whom had succumbed to the urge to travel to Paris which affects the men of Eirinn so strongly for some reason, as a provider of Celticism; but when it turned out that his brand involved no Lillies of the 20th century but only the potatoes, rain, poverty, and Calvinism of the 20th century he had fallen out of favour. These were the things literature was supposed to help abolish, people felt, or at any rate successfully ignore.

Oats had thought he might have stayed around to gloat now that the march of history had so eloquently proved him right, but as he explained, he suddenly felt an irresistible calling to alight on his native moors, there to brood more satisfactorily. Unfortunately Oats didn’t understand much of this, as Wilson said it in a new form of broad Scots which he had just invented.

Oats wished he had a native moor: he could do with a bit of brooding-room. He scanned the rainy grey horizon of Rural England. In a rush its oldness, its grayness, the endearing mediocrity of its landscape suddenly overcame him in a way that would have been quite impossible when it was the centre of the world, the sun never set on it, and its roses never wilted. Wilted roses, dead trees, and slag-heaps seemed suddenly to find their voices and join in a chorus of forgotten hymns.

Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the rain intensified. Oats sighed significantly.

Well, he said in the privacy of his mind, there’s nothing else for it. I shall have to fight fascism.

Down with non-partisan bloggers!

We're back! That is to say myself, my camera, my dinner, and my muse (the latter two are possibly one and the same). And here is the proof:



My budget was in a small surplus the other day: I could have gotten myself a new shirt, or an album on iTunes. I could have saved up to repair my bicycle, or helped end world hunger. I could have blown it all on sin and vice. But why would I do any of those things when I could have smoked salmon for tea?

Well, anyway, there are no more excuses to not be writing. Essays are done, and what is more, after much lingering awkwardly at the door, twiddling on the balls of her feet, Spring has come to Scotland! The sun spills light on sandstone and slate; buds blossom brightly in the Botanics; alliteration adds appeal. The lines of hills beyond Glasgow have gone from iron-grey to cautiously green; even the moss and creepers on the bare trees seem to have a richer colour.

It is just as well that my essays are indeed done: so that I can take time to go outside and write things using a pen and paper as my ancestors did in ancient days, yes; but also because Winter is a much more suitable season for the stern Marxist finger-wagging of which my essays invariably consist. Some residue of revolutionary fervour is left, however, and under the touch of the sun it has taken on a rather whimsical character.

During the long lead-up to the opening of the preliminaries of the preparation for the first round of the contest that precedes the American presidential election, we heard from various mouths that Corporations are People and they (as distinct from the people who own them and whom they employ) have all the rights of Americans. I wait keenly for the state of Texas to execute one. The whole idea seems to me an eloquently stupid example of how we have been accustomed to viewing society in late decades: as a mechanism for defending us, by tributes of treasure and the periodic sacrifice of a virgin welfare-state, against the dragon Economy. Nobody can predict the continent-shaking stirrings of this beast - who is certainly not just people making things and doing things whose relations might be re-organised to the general good. No, it is something beyond mere mortal kenning, with breath like the desert wind and a mouth like the pit of damnation.

But rather than just get pissed off, I decided to follow on with the idea of 'corporate personhood'. There follows part 1 of, hopefully, a recurring series.


Jonathan Bracejaw turned. He tossed. He turned again. He tossed again. All to no avail: sleep eluded him. He was tired, more tired than he had felt in a long time; but tonight... it was almost as if some alien presence were lying there in the darkness, forbidding sleep, watching him.

In point of fact of course there was a presence in the bed beside him, that of Marmalade. Marmalade, I should clarify, was a young woman (the bed had been stained with a great many things literal and metaphorical but never orange-flavoured jam) whose real name was Marya Sergeevna Bondaruka, or had been, long ago and far away; her pseudonym arose from a misunderstanding. But she was not really alien: she, or somebody physically very much like her (by surgical means, if necessary) had become something of a fixture.

Still, Jonathan could have done without her. She snored like a soprano sawmill, which cut across his ideas of how blonde amply-breasted young women to whom the adjective 'lithe' might be applied if anybody could tell me what it meant were supposed to behave, at any rate on the job. And he found it particularly distressing now: he felt, as he so seldom did, a need to think in the quiet and the dark.

After several attempts - the covers were all over the place - he kicked her.

"How much do I owe you?"

"Yeet's thriy o'clawk yeen the mauwrneeng," she said indistinctly. She could actually speak English with a cut-glass Home Counties accent, but she had learned not to: like the snoring, about which nothing could be done, it for some reason upset people.

"What, 'nothing', did you say?"

"Oh, peeez awf. Fawr-hahndred."

Jonathan clambered out of the bed and shivered. He disliked being naked as a rule (why he was willing to pay four-hundred dollars for a procedure to which nakedness was more-or-less essential is a question for the sociologists): it turned his imposing height into gangliness. "It wasn't worth it," he said as he fumbled for the money kept on his desk for this purpose.

"I know the feeling," said Marmalade irritably, neglecting her accent.

"Clear out." He tossed a wad at her with vehemence.

"I have to get dressed!"

"Do it in the toilet."

She sighed, got out of the bed, and switched on the lights. For all that her naked body, besides being the sort to which the poets and rock-and-roll stars of the human race have devoted too many fine words to justify me any adding some more, was entirely natural and just went to show what comes of a healthy diet and frequent exercise, the sight of it did not arose Jonathan so much as a fully-clothed and icy secretary of even moderate beauty would have: some mixture of gnawing guilt, distractedness, and excessive familiarity was the reason. He occupied himself in gathering up his own clothes from the floor.

"This is disgusting!," said a voice from the bathroom as he wrestled with his underwear.

"Fuck off back to Russia!"

"Ukraine!"

"Fuck off!"

He slumped on the bed, stared at the ceiling of his office, and listened to the receding sound of some exceedingly high heels. He was alone, for a little while at least. When he was alone, he felt less profoundly lonely.

But now it was no good. The ceiling was too large and bright, so he turned over, and found the pillow too dark and mysterious. A nagging voice - like his own, but not quite his own, belonging to his younger, better self, or to his conscience, or possibly to his mother - kept asking him how long it had been since he'd talked to someone he didn't, in one way or another, employ. He urged silence on the voice, but it took no heed: it wondered aloud where Marmalade had gone, and whether she was sparing him a thought; it speculated about these distant countries which he had never visited even though their citizens had almost certainly contributed to his fortune, Russia and Ukraine and - where had that other girl come from? Morocco! He hadn't been able to remember until now, and now he was assailed with memories. He remembered New England: the green fields, and stone walls, and the thundering green field of the Atlantic walled in by the little towns where he had spent his childhood. He had visions - wildly inaccurate, the dutiful narrator must record - of Russian, Ukrainian, Moroccan childhoods, and the hopes they nurtured, and the memories they left to torment their exiled children years later, in other countries, their hopes betrayed. And had he, who had ended up on top of them in the same soiled bed, done any better?

This was not the first such episode, though it was the most intense to date, and it would have ended as they all did - drowned in an artisan vodka that was, with an irony Jonathan might have appreciated had he ever noticed, Ukrainian - had it not been for one of those inexplicable farts of the vast digestive system of the universe.

It is necessary here to draw back the all-seeing narrative eye from Jonathan's office on the 567th floor of the LifeSunTechGrowLife Industries Building and cast it a short distance into the past. There we can view a sum of money orders of magnitude than that paid to the long-suffering Marmalade as it is transferred from the accounts of LifeSunTechGrowLife Industries to a gentleman with the rather absurd name of Athanasius McGill, an utterly trustworthy person, who pools it with even more money and distributes the whole to representatives and senators of the great United States.

As a result of all this, reality was altered in a small but important respect. After all, the United States government is certainly the most powerful institution ever constructed by humans, and if they can't alter the universe, who the hell can, I ask you? They have the power to legislate that green is blue and so it shall be. This explains a great deal. And if, a mere author of frivolous fiction, can cause such a person as Jonathan Bracejaw to exist, then the United States government can by the same means as me create whole categories of person.

The United States government declared that LifeSunTechGrowth Industries was as much a person as Athanasius McGill and Jonathan Bracejaw and Marmalade - possibly moreso than her, in fact. And so it was.

Now, we skip ahead again, to where we left Jonathan deep in introspection, guilt, and self-confrontation. By an astonishing coincidence, it was just as he made a heartfelt appeal to whatever higher power his battered soul believed in for company that the bill which he had a part in creating was passed into law, and caused his cry to be heeded in a highly - even an excessively - literal fashion.

There was a brisk knock at the door.

'Mr. Bracejaw, sir?'

We now return to your regularly scheduled A.B.S.T

Seven full chapters, and in almost that number of days: I call that a success.

First, a whinge (possibly I should come up with a name for my whinge-column). This probably betrays my origins among the southern Edinburgh boowrrrrrrrrr-jwa-zie-ih (as we say in our native dialect) even more obviously than my belief that apple juice ought to come in glass bottles or getting me to say the word 'dear', but I must say it: why do people here in the Murano SSV not understand how door-intercoms work? You have to identify yourself! and give some semi-plausible reason for wanting in. I realise that saying aloud the words 'I've come to shove batches of postcards depicting scowling half-naked young men in horrible haircuts through everybody's letterboxes' might force a person to take a long uncomfortable look at their life and what they once dreamed it might be, but still, I can't let you in on the strength of 'hi'.

And now, we resume our serial.


"Rise and shine, Ottokar."

I was floating on the surface of a deep, dark, warm sleep. Who was calling my name? Why? Why this ungodly hour? And come to think of it, why did we even say 'rise and shine'? Didn't the sun more 'glow' than 'shine'? Shining implies reflection...

Such curious and disorderly thoughts as these swirled behind my eyes. I rubbed them, stiffly and sleepily at first, but with each press of my hands I became more lucid and when I was finished I felt already fully awake. I sat up, stretched dramatically, and let go a colossal yawn.

"Ahhhhhhh! Morning, Christian."

"Morning, Ottokar."

"Breakfast time, is it? I could eat a whole pig!"

"You're in good spirits," said Christian as if this were a harmless but telling vice. "And you can't have been asleep for too long, either, I know that. I got tired waiting to let you in last night and went to bed. Did you drink yourself off to dreamland? I keep trying and I always seem to end up in the hangover frontier."

I chuckled. "Sorry, old man, didn't touch a drop the other night. Keep trying, eh?"

"What a shame..."

"I'll be down in a moment, just let me get dressed. Skip along!"

Christian shrugged and left the room (not skipping, but on those treacherous stairs I could hardly blame him), leaving me to get dressed or, more accurately, change myself: I slept in my day-clothes even when I hadn't fallen asleep sitting up, for the attic was drafty and my blanket none too thick. My clothing was much the same from day to day: I had only the one coat and a few pairs of trousers, enlivened by a collection of differently-coloured neckcloths, which I'd somehow contrived to acquire in the course of my life without ever actually going into a shop and buying one.

I skipped along down to breakfast and found no whole pigs on offer, but my disappointment was limited: the food was good, and the conversation better (although Jan spent the meal with puff under his eyes, gargling and eying each mouthful suspiciously before swallowing it: he could cope with staying up all night, but merely late nights took it out of him for some reason). It was in a pause after I had just finished giving my thoughts about the Tsar of Russia's promises to the Poles in the most enthusiastic terms (don't ask me to remember what they were: like many students, I liked to have strong political opinions so much that I tried out new ones every week) that Madam Gottlieb said:

"This is all very well, Ottokar, but I'd be more fascinated to know why you missed dinner last night. If the story's a good one, I might even be persuaded not to charge you for it."

"Oh, I was smuggling books! That's excusable, surely?," I said with too much easy confidence.

"It might be. Do tell me next time. We had to divide your share up, and Christian and Rudi nearly came to blows over a chop."

The conversation moved rapidly on, and I finished up my plate - relieved that I'd been pressed no further about last night's events, but pretending even to myself that I was not, because after all what was there to be reticent about? Absolutely nothing! I told myself to get on with the day.

So I promptly went upstairs for my books and scarf, and then set out for the lecture with this Professor Amsel that Macebulski had set us on to - or rather, to find out when the lecture was, as I had never had the time yesterday to find out... But - I sent my train of thought away from that troublesome juntion - I didn't mind leaving early. It was a splendid day, cold and bright so that everything flashed with frost like an enormous ice-sculpture, and I wanted to be out in the city. I went to the philosophy department noticeboard, found the time, and then let the wind blow me by a roundabout route to the library to spend my surplus hours in some background reading. I saw some classmates there, and in the learned silence we nodded our heads in greeting.

Professor Amsel turned out to be a small gentleman who had difficulty keeping control of his bulky sheaf of notes (and yet never actually appeared to consult them) and was struck by coughing fits whenever the story of Great Moravia's decline and fall became especially exciting - but he knew an enormous amount about his subject and passed it one with such enthusiasm that you'd feel guilty if you didn't remember it. The two classes in attendance regarded each-other with a mutual suspicion that escaped the professor's notice.

The philology set beat a hasty retreat once the lecture was complete, but at this point Professor Amsel stuck up his finger dramatically as if receiving a sudden revelation.

"Oh! Is there a Mr. Jánkovač here?"

I shuffled out of the throng to the piercing looks of the history students, ready to receive my sentence.

"Your professor asked me to tell Mr. Jánkovač that he'd like his book back. That's all!"

The history lot, as one, looked away with sighs and mutters. For people who ostensibly study words, this gang aren't very careful with them, mutter, mutter...

I withdrew into the shelter of my own people, face red. It took me a moment to hear the queries of my classmates: I was rather dazed, and unseeingly let myself be jostled out of the theatre.

My memory is a long way from being perfect and I often forget things; I have forgotten things far more important and irrecoverable than that false book. That alone would certainly not have left me in such a state. No: it was the realisation that this very day, without any more hems and haws and endeavours to think about something else, I would have to return to the Fruehauf household - to her house, as I suddenly found it was marked on the map of Vienna in my mind. I boiled over with excitement and nervousness too blended to distinguish, on which my rational mind tried resolutely to keep the lid.

"So, Ottokar, what might this book be? Ottokar?"

"Oh, just something I borrowed the other day - you can get a look at any of his books if you just ask." Truer than they knew! My inquisitors were satisfied, anyway, and the conversation turned to other things. I stayed quiet, and by the time we had reached the coffee-house my rational mind had re-asserted his control and squashed the objections of my fluttering heart, and other organs with agendas of their own.

My course was clear. That I could waste no time in recovering the false book was obvious: anything else would invite the wrath of Macebulski, which simply could not be contemplated (I contemplated it anyway, however: it seemed to involve hot knives). But I wouldn't go by myself: since they'd expressed some interest in my adventures of the last night, it would obviously be nothing more than good manners to bring along Jan and Christian and introduce them to my new friend. My rational mind was pleased with this elaboration, in particular 'my new friend'. I sought out my cohorts at their customary table.

"Say, chaps?"

"Yes?" "Yes?"

"I must go over to the scene of last night's business. I forgot, ah, I forgot my Plato." I took comfort in reminding myself that whatever happened, I still didn't actually have to read Plato for my fun. "Care to come along?"

"Certainly." Christian gulped down his drink (it was coffee, but he was a man of strong habits and stronger, leathery tongue). "If this 'old colleague' can keep you up half the night, he must be a very interesting man."

"Oh, he is. I think you'll get on with him very well, actually."

"Is that 'you'll' Jan and me, or just me?"

"Is it far? We do have a lecture in a bit," said Jan before we could carry that one any further.

"In Wieden. When's your lecture?"

"Three."

"Oh, you'll be fine. We needn't stay long."

"Wieden, eh?," said Christian. "On the right side of the tracks. One sort of expects Macebulski's old colleagues to live in ramshackle dens like ours, smoking opium, you know?"

"Oh no, it's very... well, you'll see it!"

We went up to the front to pay and set out on our way. I felt that strange sensation that one always gets from following by daylight a course that is only familiar by darkness, that sensation of walking through a world similar to the one you've known but somehow unnervingly different.

We discussed the Tsar of Russia and the Poles: Christian helped disabuse me or my current set of opinions by being acidly cynical about everyone and everything, as happened about once a fortnight. Jan, meanwhile, tried to wring more out of me about our destination and its inhabitant, but although I did explain how I had marooned the hollow book, I avoided replying with anything substantial. And why should I waste time telling him what he'd soon find out for himself, anyway? The Polish question was important!

By daylight, the Mittersteig seemed very white, even for Vienna under snow: it was full of large flat spaces where the sunlight could reflect. It was a street that could afford decent-sized houses (and could afford to clean them, which counted for something in those smoggy days) but didn't venture anything fancy: a bastion of the miscellaneous middle-classes. As a setting it rather suited Pascal, but I couldn't help thinking that it didn't suit... oh, go on, think it... Elke. But then, would any house really reflect her? She didn't have a domestic nature. She made me think of the distant lines of mountains in the south and east.

"This it?," said Jan, interrupting the reverie. "I rather like it. Comfortable, but without pretensions. No fake Greek stuff."

"This is it." I went up to the door, and paused, trying to order my thoughts and come up with some idea of what might happen when I knocked. Possible futures flickered before me, vivid yet maddeningly vague. As I stood there, Christian reached over my shoulder and knocked briskly. Ah, well.

He turned to me. "Tell us more about this mysterious 'old colleague', Ottokar. You've kept us quite in the dark. An old colleague of Stańczyk could be any of several interesting things."

"That's what I thought, too, actually. He's a linguist, I think. He knows a great deal about names-"

At that point the door, on which Christian was resting his arm, was pulled aside without warning.

"Argkh!"

"Ottokar! I thought it might be you."

"Ow."

"Oh, sorry." Elke glanced down and up again and down again. "...Do you want a hand up?"

Christian, looking rather alarmed at the idea, got back onto his legs with an agility surprising for his bulk.

"I'm quite alright, madam." He brushed down his coat and removed his cap. "Christian Graf von Hoyerswerda, at your service."

"You're an impoverished student-prince, then! Are you another book-smuggler?"

Jan had reached the threshold; he had put an unlit cigar to his mouth, solely so that he could now remove it with a dramatic flick and crush it under his boot-heel.

"Please, madam. We prefer the term 'gentlemen bibliophiles'."

"Speak for yourself, Jan. Myself, I'd rather be a book-smuggler," I said.

"I'd rather you were a book-smuggler, too!"

"But whatever you wish to call it, madam, I'm interested to know how you're aware of our... operation." I could tell that Christian's question was directed firstly at me; I smiled gingerly.

"She caught me red-handed, I'm afraid."

"I did! Those books were for me, anyway." Elke closed her eyes and extended four fingers. "There was János Arany, unexpurgated..." she checked it off, and suddenly her eyes snapped open again. "Gosh, I haven't even started reading any of them!" She grinned. "I blame you, Ottokar."

"Oh, not Ottokar, madam!" Jan was about to continue when she cut him off with a girlish chuckle. She held a hand up to her mouth as if to arrest the escaping air.

"Why is everyone calling me 'madam' today? I'm Elke!"

Christian had gone over to close the neglected door, through which some snow was blowing. It shut with a heavy click, and at this Elke hugged herself and shivered, as if she hadn't noticed the chill until it was brought to her attention. She certainly wasn't dressed for the weather: she was wearing exactly what she had been yesterday. I remembered with a twinge of guilt that, thanks to me, she'd fallen asleep in her clothes.

"Brrrrrrrrr! I feel dreadfully sorry for you, tramping all over the city. I mean, I like tramping over it, but this is a day to watch through the window with a fire and a drink and a blanket. It wasn't nearly this cold a couple of days ago. I always feel it's slightly unfair when it gets colder after the new year."

"It's the wind changing," I said as I hung up my coat. "We're getting southerlies now. Winds like a wild dog, howling and whining all the night, and gnawing at your bones!"

"I like that! How you said it, I mean, not the winds as such. A chilly wind's not the worst though, hailstones are the absolute worst."

"Oh, yes!," I said, enthused. "Now, hailstones are like the tatar horde! They come storming in, they make everyone hide indoors, for the fear of their stinging whips, and they go as soon as they come, leaving wreckage."

I hung up my cap, and caught a glimpse of Jan and Christian engaging in a synchronised eyebrow-raise.

"Gosh, we could do this all day!," said Elke obliviously, sounding as if she were all in favour of the idea. "What're we? Hrm. You'd be snow! You come from the north in the middle of winter and you're very literary and a bit mysterious."

...Really? I was still digesting this information when she reached up and ruffled my fringe. "You have some snow in your hair, too, which is a dead give-away, really. What am I?"

"A... a South China Sea hurricane! You're wild and swift and sudden, and where you pass the ground is strewn with debris!" I wondered, immediately after having said this, whether it was the right thing to have said; but my mouth didn't seem to be receiving orders from my brain in the ordinary way. The same went for quite a lot of my body, actually.

"That's me!" Elke twirled around on the spot and made wind noises. "I'd be a very moral hurricane, though, because I'd only sink slave-ships and opium-traders. When there were no slaves on board, obviously! But I'd sink the opium."

"I", said Christian decisively, "am slush. I'm cold and wet and dirty and nobody will be happy until I melt. What was all that talk about fires and drinks?"

"Oh, hush, Christian." Jan, having hung up his outdoor gear, gave me what was possibly the least subtle wink in the whole history of everything. Elke, fortunately, wasn't looking at him but at Christian. She had to crane a little, this close-to.

"I might let you have something to drink," she said severely. "Have you brought me anything to read?"

Christian shot me a glance as if to say that this was my problem. I hesitated: I hated to wipe the look of excitement and anticipation from her face. Jan saved me.

"Have pity on poor Christian, ma- Elke, he's an alcoholic. Tell you what! Next time he's round here, Ottokar can bring over the book he's writing! That way we wont go dipping any further into the Forbidden Knowledge Society's resources, which is entirely... out of the question... I'm afraid..." He trailed off: she had already spun around.

"Are you really?"

I reddened. "Not really, Jan's just, ah... it's a lot of short stories, or the starts of them, and strange ideas I had to write down while they lasted. They're all in Czech, anyway."

"You must translate them for me! I like translating things. It shows you what's different about languages, how they understand things. I like that. And I like your strange ideas!"

"Right, splendid, excellent, that's settled, then," said Christian. "About that drink...?"

Elke giggled again.

"Good things come to those who wait! I shouldn't say that, though, it's very hypocritical of me. I like to go and get things!"

"Oh, I absolutely agree," said Jan, taking out another cigar to twirl around. We finally proceeded into the hall, where we passed by Jutte the maid: a tremendous, sweaty, powerful figure of a women with an air of permanent bustle, over forty but you'd be afraid to guess more precisely than that, whose usual expression was of sharp disapproval. This she gave us now.

"Isn't there an arrangement, young miss? I don't do your studies for you and you don't answer the door for me?"

Elke defiantly stuck out her tongue. "I got there first, and I do a very fine job receiving vistors, don't I? Say I do!" The three of us obeyed and Elke went on, satisfied. "Do you know where the brandy is, Jutte?" She turned to us. "Do you like brandy?"

"We love it." Christian's voice allowed for no contradiction.

"Me too! Plum-brandy is best."

Jutte intensified her disapproval, but nevertheless bustled away.

"Thanks, Jutte!"

We continued into a living room. It was cluttered, but in a neat way, the way of a meticulously organised room in which by force of habit a little too much has been organised over the years. It was quite unlike Elke's room, which had an enclave of territory on a table by the fire, creaking with books and crumby dishes. There was a sofa pulled up to this table, on which I recognised several cushions from Elke's chair upstairs, peaking out from under a blanket embroidered in a lively eastern peasant fashion.

"Help me move this, would you?" Between us, we shifted up another sofa opposite the first; then Elke burrowed under the blanket and emerged on the other side. "Sit down, everybody, sit down!"

Jan abandoned his usual predatory grace and threw himself full-length on the newly-arrived sofa. "Oi, Jan, budge," said Christian. I hovered.

"Come on, Ottokar, there's enough blanket for both of us. I'm not very big! Not that I'd blame you if you didn't notice. I'm big in spirit."

I wasted no further time in burrowing in alongside Elke, and Jan conceded Christian a space.

"Right! This is nice." Elke stretched out and murmured contentedly. "We're not moving, we've got a blanket, so you two had better pour the drinks."

"Not much of a hostess, this one," said Christian to Jan, pretending to whisper.

"Oh, I can't stand the hostess type!," said Jan. "Eh, Ottokar?"

Jan, you bastard, I thought. "Well, I've never gotten to know any, really, so I feel a little off at judging them, but really I don't want to get to know any. All they do is host, talk, and knit, and knitting's a great profession and somebody's got to do it but with all that time, perhaps they could think of something worthwhile to talk about! But it all seems to be chatter about what people are wearing and whose having affairs with who. Lying about nothing seems worse than lying about something."

Elke nodded approvingly. "See, Christian? At least you know I'm honest."

"You're right, of course," said Christian. "Can't stand 'em."

"But if you upset them," Jan added, "They become like tigers! Tigers!"

"Tigresses."

"Excuse me, Elke, you're quite right. Tigresses."

"Now, Elke," said Christian, "Tell us, if you'll forgive the cliché, about yourself. I fear we've been sorely misled. When Ottokar told us that we were meeting an old colleague of our smuggling-chieftain, we were expecting a man, not to put too fine a point on it. A grown man."

"I'm grown! Just not very much..."

This was true, I must confirm: we were pretty close-in under the blanket, close enough to tell a young woman from a girl. Perhaps I wasn't keeping myself to myself as much as I might theoretically have done, but it was a small sofa and who will judge me? By the standards of those days, when the arbiters of fashion were stuck on bare shoulders for some reason, Elke dressed very modestly, of course - ah, 'modest', there's a tricky word. To be modest is to conceal what you've got, and she'd got it, alright.

"Don't talk nonsense, Christian," said Jan. "Elke is clearly not our 'colleague', just because she lives here doesn't mean she's any 'colleague', and if Ottokar neglected to mention her, what of it? You need more surprises in your life!"

Christian chuckled resignedly. "I do, I do."

At that point, the brandy arrived: Jutte saved Jan and Christian their labours by pouring us a glass each and then withdrawing the bottle. "I know what students are like, miss, and I know what you're like. The only thing I don't know is which of you is worse."

Elke stuck out her tongue.

"Spoilsport!"

"Shall I fetch Mr. Fruehauf?"

"You needn't bother him. Thanks!"

Jutte bustled away; Jan and I sipped; Christian and Elke downed. She foamed a little more than usual for a moment.

I, meanwhile, was exploring the pile of papers on the table before us. There was a notebook filled with an intense, baffling onslaught of numbers and symbols that might as well have been Hebrew to me; there was a book about calculus filled with same; there was a sheet headed 'Questions to ask Mr.Ansbacher'. The questions included:

1. So who did invent it, then, Newton or Leibniz?
2. If Mr. Leibniz was so clever, why didn't he invent anything fun? Newton was better. I liked the story about the apple. It just goes to show, sometimes the cleverest people need a bit of fresh air and a hard knock!
3. Anyway, what's the point?

"Bah!," said Elke, noticing my curiosity. "Wretched calculus! I don't like it, because it isn't real!"

Christian raised his eyebrows. "On the topic of reality, Elke, I have to point out that you are in fact not a South China Sea hurricane. This mathematics textbook, on the other hand, seems perfectly apparent."

She leaned over towards him, putting her hands on the table for support. "Yes I am! Shwoooh-shweeoh-shwoouh! Krakoom!
"

"...'Krakoom?'"

"That was a thunderbolt, stupid!"

"I see her point, though," I said, truthfully. "We all know what 'hurricane' means, what it looks like, what it is. I say 'hurricane' and you see one, and only after that do you start coming up with abstractions to explain it. Calculus is all abstraction. In one way, the way we think, or I think, anyway, it's less 'real' even than things which are fantastical or absurd. When I say 'kobold', you think of a kobold, no abstraction about it."

Elke beamed. "'Sright! Kobolds are real, though. Seen 'em."

At this exact moment we heard the polite little cough of a man who wants to intrude without intruding. Pascal had entered the sitting-room unnoticed and settled down to read. He now removed his reading-glasses and folded them up.

"Excuse me, young sirs. Elke has a very low tolerance for alcohol, I'm afraid."

Elke giggled irrepressibly.

"If I'll be honest, and I am always honest," said Christian, "she strikes me as someone for whom the drink is not so much the cause as the excuse. I'm not criticising, of course, I'm the same."

"'Sright! I'm just happy, is all! I am... ekhem! 'Perfectly lucid, composed, and sober', I am. My diction is exquisite! Wir Wiener Wäscheweiber würden weiße Wäsche waschen, wenn wir wüssten, wo weiches warmes Wasser wäre! See? If I wanted to, I could derive that equation right now. I just don't. Want to."

Pascal smiled. He was one of those kindly souls for whom a smile does the work of a sigh and a shake of the head.

"Mr. Ansbacher goes to a lot of trouble on your behalf, Elke."

"And I go through a lot of trouble on his! I don't...," her she broke down laughing and then recovered, "...I don't derive any pleasure from calculus!"

Pascal smiled again. "I'd hate you boys to get the wrong impression. She's a very diligent learner."

"Oh, don't worry, don't worry!," said Jan, and here Christian interjected: "Not at all. That was actually pretty funny." Jan gave him a look. "Don't worry, I was just saying. Our fault entirely, for getting Miss Vanderschmidt diverted, eh, Ottokar?."

Oh, don't you raise your eyebrows!

Pascal rescued me. "May I ask to what I owe the pleasure of your visit?"

Jan opened his mouth.

"Ottokar left a false book we use round here the other night. We just dropped by to pick it up," said Christian.

Jan closed his mouth.

"And you are...?"

"Sorry, I'm Christian Graf von Hoyerswerda. They call me Goethe. This is Jan Dietrich Wilhelm 'Il Capitano' Oberkirch, and this is Ottokar 'Sts.Cyril and Methodius' Jánkovač, you've met."

"Ah, Andrzej has mentioned you two, but not by your real names. Wilhelm, meaning 'vehement defender'... goes well with Dietrich, actually..."

"Mentioned us flatteringly, I hope?," said Jan with a grin. Good, he'd finally stopped giving me pointed looks!

"Oh, very. Now, 'Dietrich' is the same name as 'Theoderich'-."

"Theoderich the Goth."

"Yes, indeed, Elke, Theoderich the Goth-"

"His regime," she said confidently and with the brandy suddenly gone from her voice, "was not at all doomed to collapse from the start as some have suggested. The religious divide between Goths and Romans would have lessened over time, given that he enforced tolerance and allowed conversions. Arianism in isolation always tended to die out. If he hadn't been let down so badly by his heirs, I don't see any reason why the Goths couldn't have gone the way of the Franks."

I blinked. I had known Theoderich had been a Goth, and I was fairly certain he had fought Romans; that was the extent of my knowledge.

"I like history the best," said Elke by way of explanation. "It's the only subject where you do better by disagreeing with whatever the book says."

"I thought you'd make a good philologist, myself. You love languages and words."

"You're right, actually! I just never had lessons in them. I picked up my languages in bits and pieces and I read and read and read." She was altogether sober now; I felt perhaps that Christian had been right and she had never been really drunk. "You should teach me Czech! I'd like to learn it."

"I suppose I could give you those stories in the Czech as well, to start with-"

"Yes! And you must teach me how all your funny letters work."

"They're actually quite simple. It was a lot harder five-hundred years ago when we had to try and write everything in the German alphabet! The 'funny letters' were invented by Hus, back when we were starting the Reformation and beating the armies of all Germany while we did it," I said with a facetious grin. This, I may note here as well as anywhere, is the one bit of nationalistic chauvinism I permit myself. Those were fraught times, in many ways, between our peoples - though in other ways not nearly so fraught as the present - and I certainly held myself a patriot, and my smuggling to be in some vague sense on behalf of the much talked-about Nation; but I've never seen any reason to dislike the Germans and Germany. I was fed up on Goethe and Schiller in my youth, as every educated Czech still was; raised in what was then a mostly German town; and I feel I've always known the Germans too well not to be rather fond of them, though reserving the outsiders right to laugh or shake his head. I'd never liked the idea of going around setting fire to effigies of the emperor and who knows what else: to me, the vaunted National Revival meant speaking our language and reading it and, indeed, teaching it. And of course I've good fortune in the Germans I've met!

"I've always loved alphabets," said Elke. "Maybe one day I'll be like Jan Hus and make my own! There's lots of languages that aren't lettered. I'd like to go and make up alphabets for them all, for a living, and all my alphabets would be entirely different. I think it's wrong for all languages to look the same. Everyone writes Romanian in Latin letters now, as though it were Italian. Bah! Look at Asia! They have a hundred alphabets there, sometimes more than one for the same language. That's what we should be like."

"I quite agree. It's not as though they're hard to learn! And the Latin script is so bland when you look at some of those Indian ones, so blocky. They look like you'd have to be careful pronouncing them, or you'd catch your tongue on all those jagged edges."

Elke nodded keenly. "Tibetan, most of all, Tibetan or Mongolian! You could kill someone with those letters! But I like Arabic, it's exotic but gentle. I think Arabic letters might have killed lots of people long ago, but they're all tired out now, and very kind, really. Ooh!" She puffed up excitedly into my face. "I shall show you my..."

"Ahem."

I started about: Jan, Christian, and Pascal had left the room entirely without my notice and returned with the book of even-hollower-than-usual Plato.

"It's been delightful, Mr. Fruehauf," Christian was saying, "But I'm afraid we have a lecture to attend in a while. We'll call back soon, I imagine." Are you implying? Stop implying! "I'm sorry we couldn't stay longer."

"Oh, that's quite all right, dear boy. Elke ought to be getting on with her work in any case."

"Bah! I was just going to show Ottokar our qu'ran. Ah, well. It'll still be there tomorrow..."

She smiled hopefully. I was debating whether to point out that I didn't have any lecture to be attending, and had just reached my decision and mustered my resolve when Jan broke in.

"Oh, I'm terribly sorry, but tomorrow is impossible. You see, it's theatre night-"

Christian blinked. "Is it?"

"Yes of course it is, Christian, you silly ass. It's theatre night, and we have tickets for the Josefstadt, which is obviously an opportunity we can't pass up, can't afford to pass up..."

"Oh, well. The day after, then. I insist!," said Elke. "What are you seeing?"

"Oh, I can't tell you that. Smuggler's secrets." Jan rolled these two words about in his mouth with relish.

"Well, that's stupid, isn't it? If I really wanted to know, I could always just go to the box office and see what's on."

"You could, I can't deny. Girls are altogether too clever these days, would you not agree, Christian?"

"I decline comment."

"Well, Elke, if you're going to be like that, I suppose we'll have to take you along to keep you quiet."

She bounced on the spot.

"I'll finish everything I'm supposed to do for three days, Pascal, I promise! Can I?"

"Well, I think you should reimburse these gentlemen for your seat. Students have to work hard to make ends meet, Elke..."

"I will!"

"Ahem. What are we doing about tickets, anyway? Ahem," said Christian pointedly.

"Ahem. Tickets are fixed, as you know, and as for her seat suppose we'll just have to ask good old Maxi, who as you know is also coming, whether he'll be a good chap and give up his seat. Unless you want to? Ahem."

I had sat through all of this dumbly: it didn't take a brilliant mind to see that Jan was making it all up, or to discern why. Part of me wanted to protest, but other parts raised treacherous objections. Just what was I protesting? Having matters taken out of my hands!, said my rational mind indignantly.

You'd just sit there fiddling with them and never get anything done and you know it, said a treacherous part. It's Jan's watch now, isn't it? And she's thrilled! Do you not care what she thinks, hmm? Some gentleman you are.

Well, said my rational mind, there are such things as standards.

Ah, that smile of hers..., said the treacherous part.

My rational mind fumed silently and so, indeed, did I.

"Well then," Jan was saying, "We'll pick you up here, uh, when we pick you up. It's a secret! Be ready."

He bowed and then darted away like an exceptionally polite criminal caught in the act; Christian sighed.

"Goodbye, Mr. Fruehauf, on my colleague's behalf as well. Goodbye, Miss Vanderschmidt."

I stood up hurriedly.

"I, ah, ought to be going as well. I'll see you soon."

"Tomorrow, in fact!" Elke sprang up after me and tugged at my arm. "Wait a second!" Christian had already left the room, but she held me back, leaned close to me with an air of criminal conspiracy, and whispered:

"What's the play? I promise not to read it if you tell me what it is!"

"We've established that that is a secret!" I grinned outwardly and groaned inwardly. Argh, Ottokar, why are you an idiot?

Elke giggled. "This is tortuous!," she said at her normal volume. "I think I shall sleep in tomorrow to keep the wait short. I can do my work this evening if I put my mind... but no, you absolutely have to see that Qu'ran! I must find it. Pascal, do you have any idea where it might be?"

"I don't know," said Pascal, who had returned his reading glasses to his nose and his nose to his book. "It is yours, Elke. You remember? It was a present. We just don't keep it in your room because the shelves aren't big enough."

"I know, I know! Well, it must be somewhere."

"Books do sometimes seem to move about by themselves. I have my suspicions," I said.

"Not this one, though! It's very heavy and dignified. Oh, you must see it!"

We were in the cloakroom now, and I was buttoning up my coat.

"Well... I'm sure you'll have found it by tomorrow!" Such an idiot...

"Tomorrow!" The very concept seemed remarkable and wonderful to her.

"Tomorrow, then!" I stepped out of the door, and she hopped up to the threshold.

"Tomorrow!" We waved for a moment; then she shut the door and I stood for a moment, remembered my purpose, and broke into a run.


I caught up with Jan and Christian near the corner of the Mittersteig, panting a little, and brought them to a halt with a shout containing no coherent words. I contained no coherent words, and so for what felt like longer than it was Jan and I merely engaged in a staring contest. Well, I stared penetratingly; he feigned innocent surprise.

He was the first to speak. I scored that as a victory for myself.

"Something you must understand, Ottokar, is that I never come to any type of occasion or entertainment if I've been invited."

I felt another staring/surprise contest coming on, so I pre-empted it.

"...Is this relevant?"

"It means, alas, that I am quite unable to be your best man... or indeed anybody's best man, come to think of it. Any marriage schemes you've been forgetting to tell me about, Christian?"

I went back to the penetrating stare. Jan was not perturbed. "If you take my advice, you'll have an autumn wedding."

Stare. One might even have said 'glare'.

"Gosh, this is the thanks a fellow gets!"

Wintry silence.

"Well, mustn't dither! Four tickets to the Josefstadt the night before the show is doable in this city, for the man who knows a thing or two - and I know at least five - but that's not to say it's going to be easy... Christian, you reckon she likes Shakespeare? Pfuh, stupid question, let me rephrase it: Christian, what's her favourite Shakespeare, do you reckon?"

"I strongly suspect she favours plots of great historical importance with some witchcraft or ghosts or something and some nice juicy gore."

"You know, Christian, I think you're right. Something in her disposition... Well, we'll see what's on. Christian, you'd better sign my name and take my notes at the lecture. Wish me luck!"

Jan finally deigned to notice my ongoing attempt to stare him into shame (about what I was increasingly unsure) and an explanation (now that I could certainly do with!): he cheerfully scarpered.

"Ah, typical."

I looked expectantly at Christian, who had leaned against a wall with all the grim dignity of a martyr accepting his fate. He seemed like a man with an explanation on his lips.

He sighed. "Jan is fond of the eccentric-uncle-who-introduces-our-tender-young-lovers role, but he prefers to leave the tedious business of explaining to me. Oh, I could tell you so many stories... Ahem! I am digressing. Let Uncle Christian set things straight here."

I shuffled uncertainly before settling against the wall.

"Now, Ottokar, you come from a provincial town. Your parents, I may hazard a guess, were respectable pillars of the lowest middling sorts... perhaps 'cobbles' is better than 'pillars', if architecture is my metaphor. You've had a different upbringing from Jan, or me, and we're happy to look after you a bit while you adjust to the dip in the cold water. Don't worry, we don't have much money, and your moral upbringing will come right back when the cash runs out. But not to get away from the point: we like you. You're a good soul. You remind me a little of myself before I was a degenerate. Jan's always been a degenerate, of course. We're letting you share the room, and money counts more than anything in this time we live in, just listen to Maxi. Cash nexus, isn't it? We're doing you some real favours. Well, this business? Jan thinks he's doing you another favour, so why don't you do him one and humour him?"

He paused.

"And since I'm always honest, I don't think it's a bad idea, anyway. I'm not an expert in women and Jan is less of one, but I know that one's out of the ordinary and I think she deserves the ordinary to be well out of it. I'm out of the ordinary myself - I'm going to be a baron and I haven't got any money - and I feel an urge to look after the tribe, soft heart that I am. Well, we know what a moderate income and a pretty face add up to..." I thought of my aunt and flinched "...But you throw in an education and that changes everything! Probably couldn't fix Miss V what is called a good marriage for cash down in any civilised nation or America. And anyone can see she's off-her-wits in love with you, and vice-versa-"

"...!"

"Yes, what?"

"..."

"I thought as much. Where was I? Yes, you being desperately in love with her. I can see you're new to that show and I can see why anybody wouldn't want Jan and his harebrained matchmaking schemes dogging them, I'm not blind. And since I'm not blind, and since neither of you is any good at hiding anything... So why not do yourself a favour? Lose a bit of the bourgeois sense of decency? Try your luck? Make a confession? Anyway, we're taking her to the theatre, that's pretty bourgeois. If you knew some of what happens in this city..."

Christian chuckled to himself.

"Anyway, I don't mind the idea of going to see a show when there's no way in hell jan can make me pick up the price. Quite the treat for you, and once money changes hands it's a treat you can't refuse! Cash nexus, like I said, cash nexus or whatever it is. So, why not enjoy it? You've got every reason." He smiled, and I realised then how seldom he did. I couldn't help but smile back. "I'll let you have a think. After all, I'm not Jan."

I nodded and felt relieved and, as is the way with such things, made a point of not having a think all day. It was a good thing for my academic career: I was so determined not to have a think that I caught up with all my notes and required reading.

And at length I silently gave in, gathered up my little bits of paper, found a favourite, and began to translate it into German -scrupulously not thinking what I was doing. I was still at it when I fell asleep.



Author's note:

I confess: even though one (1) thing happens to advance the plot, this chapter is one of my favourite pieces of writing. I like doing Jan and Christian's speaking parts: they're such lads. And Elke's offensively cheery and un-Scottish disposition is rather catching; and it's fun watching Ottokar arguing with himself. I just like bouncing the characters off each-other. And it does give you more insight into them as people, or should, anyway.