"Doctor Criminale" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Malcolm)2 How did I become so involved with Doctor Criminale?Now to this day, this very day, I have no very clear idea of why – in those difficult weeks after the Booker, when my whole journalistic career collapsed, and I housesat (and a good deal more) for Ros – my fate and fortunes, life and future, became so inextricably involved with those of Doctor Bazlo Criminale. I had heard of Criminale, naturally; who has not? In the last few years his name has shown up everywhere. One week they’re profiling him in In short, Criminale was the text, and I was the decoder. He was an author, and I was a reader. Now I belong, as I’ve already said, to the age of the Death of the Author. According to the rules of my excellent education, writers don’t write; they are written, by language, by the world outside, but above all by us, the sharp-eyed readers. The word Criminale, the sign Criminale, the signature on the spine Criminale – that was more than enough for me. I had him there, a text, and had no wish to go further with him, no intention of doing so. So, I repeat, just how There was certainly nothing in the ordinary logic of things likely to bring us together. He was a great international figure, the man known as the philosopher for our times, the Lukacs of the Nineties; I was an out-of-work hack from the provinces. He was one of the superpowers of contemporary thought; I was a pygmy from Patagonia. He was the keynote speaker, I was the footnote or appendix. Seemingly no great congress of world writers, no international meeting of intellectuals devoted to whatever it might be (world peace, human rights, the survival of the ecosphere, the future of photography), no high-level diplomatic reception to celebrate some new treaty of cultural friendship and co-operation, was complete without the presence of Criminale; I of course was never invited. Here was a man who measured out his life in summit conferences, ministerial receptions, congress programmes, Concorde take-off times; my main travelling adventures were attempts to get to work on the decrepit Northern line. While he travelled the world in the best interests of modern thought, staying at grand hotels the Villa d’Este in northern Italy, Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in Saint Moritz – of such splendour that even the chambermaids had been finished in Switzerland and the desk clerks had degrees from the Sorbonne, my idea of luxury was a bottle of aftershave for Christmas. No, there seemed little or nothing that could possibly link together the lives of Bazlo Criminale and myself. Even so, over the next few days, as I began to research the man for the one-hour programme in the arts documentary series ‘Great Thinkers of the Age of Glasnost’ that Nada Productions – the small independent company that Ros ran with, as she put it, ‘my big friend Lavinia’ – was offering to Eldorado Television, I naturally came to know him better. These were not easy days, I assure you. No cheque came from my collapsed newspaper. There was no word of compassion, never mind compensation, from the Official Receiver who had so kindly taken over its troubled affairs. Luckily I had Ros’s offer of bed and board – though the board was, it became very apparent, completely dependent on the bed. Each night Ros would claim her rental in the great gymnasium of her bedroom, where her experiments in revisionist gender-pairing and new theories of orgasm proved remarkably demanding. Ros was one of those people who believe that the outer parameters of sex have still not been entirely discovered yet. Each morning she would rise refreshed, to water the houseplants, feed the armadillo, and set off, bright as a new BMW, for Soho and the small one-room offices of Nada Productions. And each day, a little more weary from what had so refreshed her, I sat down in the country kitchen of the town house in the Bangladeshi district behind Liverpool Street station to set to work on my new career: reading and noting, sifting and filing, computing and scrolling, trying to find my way around and into the complicated and mythical figure of Bazlo Criminale. Each evening, fresh and bracing as an arctic storm, Ros would return, bearing yet more books and journals, photos and clippings, files and faxes, by or about or otherwise pertaining to our subject. Next we would consume the oven-ready vegetarian low-cholesterol pastas I had slipped out to buy during the afternoon, and then retire to the upstairs laboratory for yet more advanced physical research. Then each next day I would get up, feeling a little less whole than before, and return to my other duty, the probing and pushing and plotting and planning that took me just a little closer to the mysterious world of Bazlo Criminale. Small wonder that before long I began to feel like one of those nameless non-heroes that live in Samuel Beckett’s novels – a hermit of thought, a tired scribe whose every written word is each day collected and taken away by some higher power, a worn and lifespent soul whose every recollection and every bodily juice has somehow been squeezed out and extracted for use elsewhere. And so it went on, day after day for a week or two or three. There was myself, there was Ros, and there was the paper figure of Doctor Criminale. Now if you read at all – and of course you must do, or you wouldn’t be here with me in the first place – you too have probably heard of Criminale. For if you read, he writes; oh, how he writes, or has written. In fact ‘writing’ seems far too small a word to describe the output of forty years that has spurted from his pen, too petty by far to define the prodigious mental energy, the overwhelming intellectual ambition, that had kept him in endless creation, far too simple a term to denote the output of works that stand stacked in the bookstores from Beijing to Berkeley, to the point where he must surely soon be due his own Dewey Decimal classification. Nothing reduced his output. No matter how far he travelled, how often he lectured, how many congresses he attended, he wrote, and was never silenced. Stories tell us that since he was seventeen he usually produced a poem a day, and probably a journalistic article too. And since then, just as he had seemed to visit every country, so he appeared to have visited every literary form: the novel and the philosophical treatise, the play and the travel essay, the epic poem and the economic tract. And if this were not enough, his photographic studies of the late modern nude are acknowledged everywhere (see the recent exhibition in Dresden, with Susan Sontag writing the exhibition catalogue). We are talking here about an all-round man. So the theatre-goers among you will doubtless know his great historical drama All this I expect you know very well. But, believe me, this is only the beginning of the man called Bazlo Criminale. Oh, you may have sat in the stalls and enjoyed the epic spectacle of In fact he had simply to catch sight of a German philosopher and he was in there after the jugular, only to glimpse a key modern idea and he was gnawing it like a bone. ‘The Philosopher King’ was the title of one of the articles (from an American magazine) I read in the pile that Ros brought home; it described him as the only true philosopher left in a post-philosophical culture, the man who has singlehandedly reinvigorated philosophy by writing its epitaph. Clearly no late modern idea was really an idea, no contemporary ideology pulling its weight as an ideology, until Criminale had tried it, put it through the fine grinder of his mind, tested it to destruction, given it – or withheld – his imprimatur. You could say, indeed, that by the beginning of the Eighties Criminale had already become to modern thought pretty much what Napoleon was to brandy. Nobody would have taken the stuff so seriously had not someone so obviously important and prestigious taken such an interest. In short, as I came to discover, in those taut and tiring days after the Booker, Criminale was a true Modern Master. In fact if you want to find out more about him, as I did, you only need turn to the small volume on him (by Roger Scruton) in the ‘Modern Masters’ series, edited by Frank Kermode, published by Fontana Books. Here he appears in the list between Chomsky and Derrida – a fate, to be fair, not of his own choosing, but simply deriving from the random lottery of the alphabet. In what the blurb aptly defines as ‘a truly exhilarating examination of Criminale’s work’, Scruton warmly compares him with Marx and Nietzsche, Lukacs and Rosa Luxemburg, Gorky and Adam Smith (of course Scruton compares everyone with Adam Smith), and sees him as the modern Goethe. Not every single one of these comparisons goes in Criminale’s favour, but there is one that does. The others were all dead. While Criminale was alive, and well, and living in . . . well, where on earth was Criminale living? Probably not on earth at all, but in some jumbo jet overflying the Pacific. For Criminale wasn’t just famous, he was also that new phenomenon: the intellectual as frequent flyer, more airmiles to his credit than Dan Quayle. And the truth is, as I soon found out, researching and re-researching our one-hour feature for the series ‘Great Thinkers of the Age of Glasnost’, trying to keep up with a truly all-round man is truly all-round work. Of Criminale there seemed to be simply no end. One day Ros’s big friend Lavinia showed up. Big she was indeed – big across the shoulders, monumental everywhere else, dressed like a sofa, but ten times more aggressive. I realized that some stormy dispute had blown up between Ros and her partner, and that what’s more I was its subject. Lavinia, it seemed, had serious doubts about whether someone like myself, untrained and unwashed in the field of television production, should have been entrusted with a key project on which the future of Nada Productions depended. The word ‘toyboy’ was used, I well remember, several times, both in my presence (‘So this is the toyboy, is it, darling?’) and then on the other side of a half-open door I happened to sit down quite close to. ‘But he’s brilliant, really,’ I heard Ros declare several times. ‘In bed maybe, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘But really, Ros. All he does is sit on his pretty little butt all day and read things. That’s not how you research a major programme. Perhaps you’re tiring the poor sod out.’ ‘No, Lav, he jogs every lunchtime, he can take it,’ I heard Ros say, not with perfect truthfulness. ‘Okay, you’re giving Then suddenly the door flew open, hefted by Lavinia’s vast shoulders, and she was all over me. ‘Okay, you, Francis,’ she said, ‘Just explain to me what’s happening. You’ve been working on this eight days and as far as I know you’ve come up with nothing.’ ‘I thought there was plenty,’ I said, ‘The refutation of Adorno, the quarrel with Heidegger —’ ‘Heidegger Schmeidegger,’ said Lavinia, looking at me with pity, ‘Darling, 1 you’re not writing your doctoral dissertation or an article for I looked at her. ‘But Bazlo Criminale is a Modern Master, Lavinia,’ I said. ‘Right, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘And I expect if you turn over a Modern Master, you’ll probably find a Modern Mistress. Honey, I want life and loves. I want friends and enemies. I want flesh and bones. I want peaks and troughs, failures and successes. I want locations, cities, houses, churches, parks. I want some people we can get our teeth into. I don’t want quarrels with Schmeidegger on being and non-being. I know he wrote a lot, darling. That doesn’t mean you have to. Just give me ten pages: life, loves, family, sex, money, politics. You have two more days, and then I’ll personally come and gut you. Find something we can use on television. It’s a fleshy human medium, with great stories. Is that my taxi? Terrific, all right, bye-bye darlings.’ ‘That bitch,’ said Ros, as we watched Lavinia climbing heavily into the taxi in the little street outside, ‘She’s jealous, of course. Did you like her?’ ‘Well, not entirely,’ I admitted. ‘Oh, brilliant,’ said Ros, ‘She always pulls stunts like this to take my men away from me.’ ‘The problem is, what am I supposed to do next?’ I asked. ‘Come upstairs and I’ll show you,’ said Ros. ‘No, I mean about Criminale,’ I said. ‘Do what Lavinia says,’ said Ros, ‘Everyone does what Lavinia says. Write ten simple pages. Break him down into segments.’ ‘Give him the treatment?’ ‘Yes,’ said Ros, ‘Come on.’ And so, over the next few days, when Ros wasn’t giving me the treatment, I set about Criminale. This may sound easy; it proved very difficult. There was no great problem about the works and the thought, and good old Scruton was a great help here. It was when I turned to the life that the hard graft began. In one sense, no one was more visible than Bazlo Criminale. His photograph – the mop of hair going from grey to white, the big bulky body, the sense of brooding presence – was in all the magazines. The man went everywhere. As I learned from Certainly Criminale was power in the land; but which land? Well, no one land in particular, it seemed. He knew everybody, everybody knew him; he was Doctor Criminale. But ask where he came from, who paid him, how he lived so well, which institution he was attached to, and things grew more obscure. He was just that vague and placeless creature, the European intellectual. Take the question of his origins, for instance. Different reference books gave him different dates of birth: 1921, 1926, 1929, depending which you checked. According to one source ( When I rang his London publisher, I learned no more. I asked their publicity girl (Fiona, of course) about their world-famous author, and source of many of their profits; she gave me nothing. She described Criminale as an unknown quantity, like Salinger or Pynchon, and quoted an office joke (‘What is the difference between God and Bazlo Criminale?’ ‘God is everywhere, Criminale is everywhere but here’) which did not strike me as funny. Fortunately it was Roger Scruton, helpful in this as other things, who set me on the right track. His book had only the slightest reference to Criminale’s actual life, but it had in its book-list a critical biography of our great man, written – but in German – by one Professor Otto Codicil of the University of Vienna. I pointed this out to Ros, who dialled some numbers and had the volume flown in by air express from Austria. Television, I found, works like that; it can really pull out the stops when needed, as I found many times more in the weeks and months to follow. Now, to be honest, I do not exactly know German. On the other hand I often think I understand, especially after drink or late at night. On a moderately full tank I can even read German philosophy. The small brown-paper-covered book that arrived by messenger from Vienna was plainly in a very exotic, philosophically enriched version of the language. Much of it was about Criminale’s ideas, with some of which the writer, Codicil, was clearly out of sympathy. But, using native wit, a German dictionary, and occasional assistance from Ros, who had done a course once but not remembered much, I was able to delve through it and piece together a rough and ready biography. According to Professor Codicil, who claimed to have received some assistance from his subject (even though his study was, he said, a critical interpretation), Criminale was born neither in Lithuania nor Moldavia. In fact he was in 1927 in Veliko Turnovo geboren. Some extra research with atlas and gazetteer established what and where Veliko Turnovo was – the ancient capital of Bulgaria, famous for its old university and monasteries, its storks and its frescos, its castle and its ancient Arabesque merchants’ houses. It lay not too far from the River Danube on the old trade routes that had run from East to West and, of course, vice versa, and was an important place of learning. The birthdate given, 1927, was also interesting, because that made Criminale of university age just around the rime the Second World War finished. At that time Bulgaria was, as the saying had it, ‘liberated to the Russians’ by Georgy Dimitrov, whose mausoleum was a place of pilgrimage in Sofia’s main square over the dark Cold War years. (Now, I gather, since the winds of change blew, his resting place has been gutted and is up for commercial development, probably by McDonald’s Hamburgers.) This probably meant that Bulgaria, land of attar of roses, fine frescos and also poisoned umbrellas, was not, at the time, the ideal place for a free and inquiring spirit. At any rate, it seemed that, around the time that Stalin i walked in, Criminale smartly stepped out – though it was not at all clear how far. Certainly, according to Codicil, over the next years Criminale studiert, a great deal, and none of it at home. He had in Berlin ( Things, I thought, might look a little clearer when I got to the years of Criminale’s rising fame. Unfortunately, you couldn’t say they did. Criminale was now elected to various academies; he ran a great many congresses, in various fields ranging from world peace to experimental film; he joined the committee of various international writers’ associations linked with ‘progressive’ views. He became a regular traveller, came to know Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, met Castro and Madame Mao. Various international prizes came his way – for philosophy, economics, fiction. From time to time, in several different countries, he was offered political posts and even, once, ministerial office; he always refused. Apparently he preferred to concentrate on his articles and books, some of which were refused publication here, but managed to appear there. Codicil’s book, which predated by four years the coming down of the Berlin Wall, still talked about some of his books being held in reserve for ‘better times’. Attacked for his progressive attitudes in the West, he had also fallen foul of various bitter disputes in the Marxist citadel; yet all the while his reputation grew. His lectures drew large crowds, and foreign universities began to summon him. He spoke at Bologna, lectured at Yale, attracted large audiences in Brazil, received an honorary degree in Tokyo. He commented freely on political regimes. He also advised Walter Ulbricht on human rights and Nicolae Ceauseşcu on architecture – two items in his dossier that must have embarrassed him considerably. So came the years of international fame, when he, and his books, appeared everywhere. His sales were said to rival Lenin’s in Russia, Confucius’s in China, Jacqueline Susann’s in the United States. When by the end of the Seventies ideological hostilities began to soften, and the certainties of the left began to fade, Criminale grew not less but more influential. Now he was going everywhere, meeting everyone. When the world, or just some particular philosophical congress, needed someone who stood in advance of Marxism, or bridged Materialism, Subjectivity and Deconstruction, they went, it seems, for Bazlo Criminale. He travelled as if frontiers were abolished; his books crossed the East-West divide as if it had never been there. He became a master of the conference lapel badge, a virtuoso of the plenary address. He consulted for the great international institutions: Comecon and UNESCO, the Stalin Peace Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize, the World Bank and the European Community. He became friend to presidents. He took vacations with Gorbachev, went to the opera with Mitterrand, played golf with Reagan, drank beer with Helmut Kohl, scoffed tea and scones with Margaret Thatcher. When he lectured at Stanford in California, three thousand people turned out to hear him conduct an obscure discussion of Mandelbrot’s Fractals. Honorary degrees and other state honours came his way; he also became fame itself at its most serious level. One week he was photographed with Shevardnadze at the Bolshoi, the next with Madonna at the Brown Derby, the next in an argonaut’s cap on the steam yacht of some Italian socialite, arm carelessly tossed round some topless nymph or other,. Aegean in the background. So he had become the philosopher of the Nineties, the charismatic metaphysician of the age of the laptop and Chaos Theory, the philosopher who survived after the end of the old thinking. Finally, one evening, I put down Codicil’s difficult book, and reflected on what I’d more or less read. The more I thought about Bazlo Criminale, I realized, the more obscure and mysterious he now seemed. Upstairs Ros sat in the bath watching old videotapes. I climbed the stairs and went and spoke to her. ‘How can anyone please everyone all the time?’ I asked. ‘Get in, sonny, I’ll show you,’ said Ros. ‘I’m talking about Criminale,’ I said, ‘The man who is always praised for his devastating sense of order, his powers of logic. But I can’t say his life makes all that much sense to me.’ ‘Just forget Criminale for half an hour,’ said Ros, ‘Climb in, there’s plenty of room.’ ‘How can I forget Criminale?’ I asked, sitting down on the lavatory seat, ‘I’ve been living with this man for what seems like years.’ ‘A few days,’ said Ros. ‘And the more I think about him, the more I find out about him, the more he turns into a mystery.’ ‘What’s so mysterious?’ asked Ros, ‘He’s just a famous world intellectual and a hot-shot thinker of the Age of Glasnost.’ ‘Fine, but what about the times before glasnost?’ I said, This is a man who comes out of the old Marxist world, where they didn’t mess about, believe me. There was right thinking and there was wrong thinking. If you started on the wrong kind they took your head off to make sure they stopped it.’ ‘It must have been more complicated than that,’ said Ros, They always had hardliners and dissidents.’ ‘All right, which of them was Criminale?’ I asked, This is a man who’s friends with Brezhnev and mates with Honecker. At the same time he’s hanging around with Kissinger and giving big lectures in the West.’ ‘I expect he was useful to both sides,’ said Ros. ‘Okay, how?’ I asked, ‘Was he an international emissary, a spy, what?’ ‘You’re overloading it, Francis,’ said Ros, ‘He was a famous philosopher who was above all those things. Like Jean-Paul Sartre. He went everywhere.’ This is a man who likes high living,’ I said, ‘He stays at some of the best hotels in the West. The Badrutt’s Palace in Saint Moritz, for instance. Where they charge you a monkey for just letting you turn the revolving doors.’ ‘Well, wouldn’t you, if you could?’ asked Ros. ‘Of course,’ I said, The point is I couldn’t. This is a man from a poor world who lives like a prince. It’s almost as if some great international foundation had been set up especially for him.’ ‘Lecture fees, royalties from his books,’ said Ros. ‘All right, let’s take his books,’ I said, ‘Half of them were banned in Russia, but they still managed to appear all over the place.’ ‘He had to publish them abroad,’ said Ros. ‘But if they didn’t like them, why didn’t they freeze his bank accounts, take away his citizenship, put him in jail?’ ‘Maybe he was too famous abroad,’ said Ros. ‘You can always stop someone becoming famous abroad,’ I said, ‘Forbid him to travel, for one thing. They never did that.’ ‘Maybe he had friends in high places,’ said Ros, ‘Maybe they liked him to have a high reputation abroad but were careful of what he said back home. The Cold War was filled with these funny games. Or maybe they did forbid him to travel, put him in prison, and you just haven’t found out about it.’ ‘All right, but it doesn’t say so in Codicil,’ I said. ‘Why should Codicil know all that much about it?’ asked Ros, ‘He’s just some Austrian prof. Anyway, you may not have read it right. You know your German’s hopeless.’ ‘It was, it’s been getting better by the minute,’ I said, ‘I still think the whole thing is pretty damn strange.’ ‘It’s just the same as Brecht and Mann and Lukacs,’ said Ros, ‘All those great figures who tried to be on both sides of the fence. They were survivors, Francis. They learned how to play the political game and still stay serious. Maybe that’s what a modern master really is. Someone who learns to swim with the flow, turn with the tide. But still bends history to his own advantage, so he can still do something. I want to do something. Let’s go to bed.’ ‘I’m sorry, Ros,’ I said, ‘I still haven’t done the treatment. And Lavinia needs it tomorrow. I’m going to have to work all night.’ ‘I want you in bed,’ said Ros. ‘I’m sorry, Ros, really,’ I said, ‘But for a man’s whole life, what’s one night?’ ‘You bastard,’ said Ros. And so, right through the night, full to the brim and more with Bazlo-Criminale, I tried to put his life into some sort of shape, his story into some sort of order. From time to time Ros thumped angrily on the floor of the room above, but I bravely resisted all sexual temptation. Everything Lavinia had asked for I tried to provide: the life, the loves, the friends, the enemies, the peaks, the troughs, the history, the settings, the fleshy human being from whom the thought emerged. I plotted and planned it, topped and tailed it, edited and word-processed it, bound and ribboned it. And whatever I explored, wherever I looked, Criminale seemed more obscure and enigmatic than ‘ever. So, the job done at last, I labelled it on the cover ‘The Mystery of Doctor Criminale’, and handed it to Ros when she descended to breakfast in the morning, in very testy mood. ‘You didn’t come to bed at all,’ she said. ‘No, but I finished it,’ I said. ‘This is it?’ she said, glancing it over, ‘It’s a very full treatment.’ ‘It’s a very full life,’ I said. ‘More than thirty pages,’ said Ros, not reading but simply turning over the sheets, ‘Lavinia said no more than ten.’ ‘You try getting a remarkable man like Criminale down to ten,’ I said, ‘Aren’t you going to read it?’ ‘Haven’t time,’ said Ros, ‘I just hope you made it all perfectly understandable. Arts commissioning editors don’t know about ideas, only noise and pictures. All they do is listen to pop groups and go to art openings all the time.’ ‘I’ve cut down on most of the ideas,’ I said, ‘It’s nearly all about his mysterious life.’ ‘Does he have a mysterious life?’ asked Ros. ‘Yes, I told you last night,’ I said, ‘A life of contradictions, blanks, and deceptions.’ ‘Okay, Francis, I don’t have time to argue,’ said Ros, ‘Just call me a taxi and I’ll take it to the bitch. Oh, and since you haven’t anything to do today, could you chop the courgettes for when I get back?’ The courgettes were as dry as macadamia nuts, the armadillo was gasping, by the time Ros got back three days later, two bottles of Frascati in her hands and an erotic grin on her face. ‘Brilliant,’ she said. ‘What? We did it?’ I asked. ‘You did it, I did it, mostly Lavinia did it,’ said Ros, ‘She went to the Commissioning Editor at Eldorado and came back with a two-hour arts feature special.’ ‘Two hours?’ I said, ‘I thought it was only one.’ ‘Yes, but they fell in love with it, Francis,’ said Ros. ‘What, with my treatment?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know about the treatment,’ said Ros, ‘I’m not sure they exactly read the treatment. It’s far too long. No, the title. The Mystery of Doctor Criminale, that really pulled them in.’ ‘Oh, that’s terrific,’ I said. ‘Anyway,’ said Ros, ‘They’ve given us twice the development money, they’ve hooked in PBS in the USA, and they think the Europeans are interested. I told them Criminale was a European, he is, isn’t he?’ ‘Oh, definitely,’ I said, ‘As European as they come. So it’s good after all?’ ‘Brilliant,’ said Ros, ‘And when I say brilliant, I really mean brilliant. We’ll get a major slot, major budget, major production values. So come on, let’s celebrate. Up the stairs, Francis.’ ‘Surely we can drink Frascati down here,’ I said. ‘I have better things to do with Frascati than just drink it,’ said Ros, ‘Oh, and Lavinia thinks you’re brilliant too.’ No sooner were we standing there naked in the shower, pouring Frascati all over each other for some reason, when the portaphone rang. ‘It’s her, I know it,’ said Ros, popping out of the shower to get it, ‘That bloody bitch Lavinia. Darling!’ Ros talked a moment and then put down the phone. ‘Bitch, she wants to celebrate too. She’s coming round right away.’ ‘Oh, not Lavinia too,’ I said. ‘No, let’s be quick, honey,’ said Ros, ‘You can have too much of Lavinia at times.’ Well, there’s no doubt about it – television arts documentary is a fast and furious world. No sooner were we dry and dressed again than the doorbell rang and there was Lavinia on the step, a code-locked briefcase in her hand and a gratified grin on her wide face. ‘Not celebrating?’ she asked. ‘No, Lav, we just finished,’ said Ros, ‘But we can give you a drink instead.’ ‘It’s Francis I’ve come for,’ said Lavinia, ‘Francis, listen, I’ve put out a contract on your life, okay?’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘This is it,’ she said, taking a long and legal-seeming document from her bag, headed with the distinctive, indeed weird, logo of Nada Productions, ‘Just sign at the bottom, please.’ ‘What’s this?’ I asked. ‘Just a sort of paper thing that assigns us the rights in your glorious treatment, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘I just wanted to do the right thing and regularize your position. You do like a regular position, don’t you?’ ‘I don’t know, I haven’t been in one for ages,’ I said, ‘I’d better talk to my agent.’ ‘Does he have an agent?’ Lavinia asked Ros, ‘Isn’t he too young?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Ros, ‘I’ll be your agent, Francis. Sign it.’ ‘Shouldn’t I get a lawyer to check it out?’ I asked. ‘Listen to him,’ said Lavinia, scratching her way into a bottle of wine, ‘This is a cracked-up out-of-work journo who lives off women and he’s just been offered the best TV deal in town.’ ‘Have I really?’ I asked. ‘Take a look, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘You see? Researcher credit. Writer credit. Presenter credit. Three credits on one programme.’ ‘And the money?’ I asked. ‘That’s credit too,’ said Lavinia, ‘If we ever make this thing, and remember, TV is a very tricky world, you’ll get yours, dearie. Especially after Ros and I have got ours. Sign it, Francis.’ I looked at Ros. ‘Sign it,’ she said, ‘Everyone signs for Lavinia,’ I looked at Lavinia, bigger and bolder and rounder than ever. I signed it. That’s terrific,’ said Lavinia, shoving the contract into her briefcase and then taking from it a plastic wallet, ‘Now you need this.’ ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘It’s an air ticket, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘Austrian Airlines, economy class, check in seven o’clock tomorrow morning, Terminal Two, Heathrow, flight to Vienna. No upgrades allowed, by the way.’ ‘Why are you giving me this, Lavinia?’ I asked. ‘Just sit down here with me, darling, and I’ll explain,’ said Lavinia, ‘It may be a great treatment, God knows, I haven’t had time to read all of it, it’s very long.’ ‘Thirty pages,’ I said. ‘But it’s all questions and no answers,’ said Lavinia, ‘Now we actually have to make this programme. Our work isn’t done. The writing time’s over, recce time starts. You see?’ ‘I don’t see why I’m going to Vienna,’ I said. ‘Because, honey, you’ve only got one lead, haven’t you?’ asked Lavinia, ‘This man Otto Codicil. You have to go and talk to him. Nestle in his bosom like a viper. And get him to tell you all the mysterious secrets of our enigmatic Doctor Criminale.’ ‘How do we know there are any secrets?’ I asked. ‘Because it says so in your treatment, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘That’s why they bought it. The Mystery of Doctor Criminale.’ ‘I only meant he seemed a bit of a mystery to me,’ I said. ‘Let me quote one bit, darling, if I can find it,’ said Lavinia, putting on glasses and opening my document, ‘It struck me forcibly. “Criminale has evidently led a life of contradictions and obscurities, of blanks and deceptions, of fragments and evasions, slippages and,” what’s this word here, darling?’ ‘Aporias,’ I said. ‘What’s that?’ asked Lavinia, ‘Is he sick or something?’ ‘No, what it means is that there are gaps,’ I said, ‘To me, the reader, his presence is obscure, his sign is occluded. He’s hard to read and interpret.’ Lavinia stared at me. ‘What do you mean, hard to read?’ she asked. ‘I mean, he’s an incomplete text, difficult to deconstruct, yet for that reason requiring to be deconstructed,’ I said. ‘That’s what you mean by the Mystery of Criminale?’ asked Lavinia, ‘Thank God they didn’t read the damned thing. Now look, Francis, we have to have a better mystery. That’s what they paid for, that’s what they’ll get. I want political deceptions. I want sexual betrayals, financial frauds, that kind of thing.’ ‘I don’t know there are any,’ I said. ‘There’d better be,’ said Lavinia, ‘I want some.’ ‘Where from?’ I asked. ‘Find out from Codicil,’ said Lavinia. ‘Why would Professor Codicil tell me anything like that?’ I asked, ‘He calls Criminale the greatest contemporary philosopher, the leader of modern thought.’ ‘Darling, he’ll tell,’ said Lavinia, ‘They all tell. Just make him think you want him to be in the programme. Then he’ll tell you anything.’ ‘Do you mean he won’t be on the programme?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know, till we’ve checked him properly,’ said Lavinia, ‘He may not speak good English.’ ‘You could use subtitles,’ I said. ‘He may not even be telegenic,’ said Lavinia, ‘You can subtitle words, but you try subtitling his face. No, just go there, talk to him, probe him, find an angle, get a story. And then you’d better get him to tell you where you can find Criminale.’ ‘You want me to go after Criminale too?’ I asked. ‘Maybe, if the budget runs to it,’ said Lavinia, ‘It’s very tight, don’t forget. And we have to shape the programme first. So find out where he is, and then check back here with Ros.’ ‘With me?’ asked Ros, ‘I thought I was going to Vienna too?’ ‘Oh, no, darling, I need you to stay here with me and edit,’ said Lavinia, ‘Oh look, taxi’s waiting. Good luck, Francis, and auf Wiedersehen, pets.’ ‘That bitch, that bloody bitch,’ said Ros, ‘I just spent two nights in her bed and now she does this to me. Upstairs, Francis. If I’m not coming on this recce with you, I want you to have something to remember me by.’ ‘Honestly, Ros, I’ve got lots to remember you by,’ I said, ‘And if I’m going away for a few days I ought to go back to my flat and pack some things.’ ‘No you don’t,’ said Ros, ‘You can buy what you need at the airport in the morning. There are plenty of shops in the concourse.’ ‘I always wondered what they were for,’ I said, ‘After all, not many people arrive naked at an airport.’ ‘You’re learning a lot, aren’t you, Francis?’ asked Ros, ‘Come on, if this is our last night together for a bit we don’t want to waste time. Is there any more of the Frascati left?’ ‘No, there isn’t, Ros,’ I said very wearily, ‘There’s only orange-juice.’ ‘All right,’ said Ros, ‘Let’s try that.’ So that night before I set off for Vienna turned into a sleepless one, and for several reasons. Ros felt it necessary to give me a great deal to remember her by, but even when she slipped off into sleep’s kind oblivion at last I still lay there restless. Sounds of Bengali floated up occasionally from the street at me; now and then Ros groaned in her sleep. Why, just why, was I going off in quest of Bazlo Criminale? For, in the course of a hyper-active evening, something strange had plainly happened. Criminale had changed for me: no longer a text I had to decode, he had switched into a person I had to follow. But why, when nothing at all linked us together? He was the giant, one of the great superpowers of modern thought; I was the Patagonian pygmy. He was the Lukacs of the Nineties; I was an out-of-work journo. He was the modern master; I was the postmodern nobody in particular. He was the friend of the great and the good, or for that matter the big and the bad: Bush and Honecker, Gorbachev and Castro, Kohl and Mao. Important philosophers like Sartre and Foucault and Rorty had bowed to him; great leaders had honoured him; it was even said that Stalin (notoriously no respecter of persons or keeper of unwanted mementoes) had asked for his photograph. He was complex, confusing, contradictory. But why should I set off to chase an enigma that could well be of my own making? At that time, not so long ago, I was innocent (I suppose I still am to this day, this very day). But I was not so innocent that I couldn’t see that anyone who had survived and bested the second segment of our sad terrible century must have had some remarkable struggles with history and terror, contradiction and ambiguity. Silence, exile and cunning were James Joyce’s prescription for the task of the modern writer and thinker in an age of brutality and unreason, bombardment and slaughter, ideology and holocaust, a century of intellectual terrorism, an age, as Canetti once said, of burning flesh, when police thuggery had turned on thought itself. Thanks to silence, exile and cunning, some artists and intellectuals had had strange flirtations with the mad ideological world. Pound had played with Fascism, Heideggerwith Nazism, Brecht with Stalinism, Sartre with Marxism, and so on and on. Right to our time the terrible game went on, and still would, whenever intelligence faces power, totalitarianism and fundamentalism of any kind. As for me, I lived on a small island on the edge, spared much of this history, and tucked away at what looked like the safe end of the century. No doubt, if I went looking, if I searched hard or critically enough, I would find something. Criminale had lived through dark passages and false directions; he must have had his weak spots, his feet of clay, his own deals on silence, exile and cunning. Anyone who had struggled through the brutalities and absurdities of the modern chaos, the gulag horrors and extremities, had probably come put a little marked or impure. The enigmas I believed I’d seen were perhaps no more than the devious ways needed for a man of public thought simply to survive. And who was I to go unmasking? Wasn’t there something just as impure about the investigative journalist who, trying to hold on to a career, make a living, make a programme, goes gaily out hunting secrets, hoping to find the worst? And did I really want to go down in the record as the man who’d misread, misused, misrepresented the great career of that hero of late modern thought, Bazlo Criminale? So I had a bad night, followed by a bad morning. When dawn light came up, I got out of bed and kissed Ros lightly on the forehead, not wanting to stir the sleeping beast again. Luggageless in the street outside, I found a taxi that took me, as sore in body as I was in mind, out to Heathrow. I went gratefully round the franchise stores, buying socks at Sock Shop, ties at Tie Rack, knickers at Knickerbox, shirts at Shirt Factory, shampoos and stuff at the Body Shop. Finally I bought a lightweight carry-on suitcase at the last franchise, and sat on a bench by check-in, packing my new wardrobe carefully inside. ‘Did you pack the bag yourself?’ asked the girl at the desk, when I checked in for the Austrian Airlines flight. ‘Of course I did, you just watched me,’ I said; but of course she unpacked it anyway, unloading what I’d loaded, stripping the case to its linings before she would grant me a boarding pass. I went through Security, where it was not my baggage but my very self they stripped down to the bare forked basics. The guards felt me up unmercifully, as if I had not just had enough of that sort of thing with Ros during the night. In the departure lounge, as I headed into duty-free to buy a razor, a girl in satin tricoloured panties came over and sprayed me with perfume. ‘A new male parfum from Chanel called Egoiste,’ she said, ‘We ’ope you like it.’ ‘Egoiste?’ I said, ‘If Chanel want to sell perfumes in airports, why don’t they make one called Terminal Depression?’ I went to the bar, where all the seats were taken by travellers watching screens for information about their delayed flights. Standing by the wall, with a gin and tonic melting rapidly in a plastic glass, I looked for news of the Vienna flight. Then the intercom announced it would be two hours late, because of lack of landing slots for the incoming flight, which they had decided to leave hanging up there in the sky for most of the morning. I stank of perfume, my baggage was new, my body was sore, and the lounge filled to the point of maximum congestion. It was as I was standing there that it occurred to me, for the first time, that even the life of a great world-traveller like Bazlo Criminale, a man who hopped like a rabbit from government meeting to international congress, from hub airport to hub airport, from VIP lounge to stretch airport limo, from first-lass recliner to prison-like plane toilet, a man who made homelessness into a postmodern art form and had never stayed in one place for anything like a reasonable length of time, probably also had its downside. He must have had more than his share of delays, crowds, congestions, strip-searches, luggage losses, misdirections; he too must have his portion of Terminal Depression. They called the Austrian Airlines flight to Vienna three hours late. I dragged my way down the long Heathrow passages, through the green-seated lounge, down the grim boarding tunnel, in through the plane door – and found myself suddenly in the world of ‘What are you doing here, Lavinia?’ I asked. ‘Hallo, darling, I just came back to see if you were all right,’ said Lavinia, ‘I’m in the club, if you see what I mean.’ ‘You’re sitting in club class, are you, Lavinia?’ I asked, ‘Why?’ ‘Well, I am the executive producer,’ said Lavinia, ‘But I could only afford it for one, this show is on a very tight budget. Would you like me to get them to send you back a bottle of champagne?’ ‘No, Lavinia, I meant, where are you going?’ I asked, as if I didn’t know. ‘Vienna, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘Home of the waltz and the Sachertorte, those wonderful creamy cakes, have you ever tried them? I just couldn’t resist. Well, I’d better get back up front for the liqueurs.’ ‘So I’ll see you in Vienna?’ I asked. ‘Yes, you will, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘We’ll have an absolutely brilliant time there, hunting for that old bugger Criminale.’ |
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