Punishments, page 13
But Jeremy struggled on, as though in the belief that not to do so would be cowardice.
When at last he’d finished, the chairman turned to Eric Friend: ‘Any comment?’
Eric, again perched on the corner of the desk, spidery fingers laced and head cocked on one side, had been listening with an expression of ironic patience on his long face. Now he gathered himself, rose and turned towards the chairman. ‘No. I’m afraid I’ve no comment to make on that.’
The chairman nodded. ‘No comment.’
‘Poor darling,’ Edna whispered to me, as Jeremy, head lowered and exercise book now tucked under an arm, trailed back to his seat.
‘Anyone else?’ the chairman invited.
Harry, always voluble, hurried up to the dais, Jessica watching him with intent admiration. He spoke, as he invariably did, at so low a pitch and at so fast a rate that only half of what he said was audible even to me in the front row. He wished, he announced, ‘to take the economic view’ – that, at least, everyone heard – and it was the economic view that he then proceeded to take for minutes on end, now reading from a prepared statement and now improvising with frequent hesitations and repetitions.
When he’d finished, Eric declared that he had no comment to make on that either.
The meeting then fizzled out, with the chairman again and again asking with increasing insistence whether there was anyone who wished to make a contribution, and the students paying him and Eric Friend less and less attention as they began to chat among themselves.
‘Perhaps this heat has shrivelled your brains,’ the chairman concluded playfully in his excellent English.
‘Or perhaps they’ve become waterlogged from all that swimming in the river,’ Eric added.
A few people tittered. ‘Indeed, yes,’ the chairman said. Again he looked round at the faces that were now, almost without exception, turned away from him. ‘Well, it seems as if I must call this meeting to a close. Thank you, Eric, for a discourse which I think that we would all agree was – er – thought-provoking.’ He turned to nod at Eric, who put in: ‘Even if it has failed to provoke anyone to thought.’ The chairman went on: ‘We are very grateful to you, very grateful indeed.’ Now he rose, crossed over to Eric and, heels together and body leaning forward, shook his limp, reluctant hand in his strong, eager one.
‘I need a drink,’ Mervyn said, as we emerged from the lecture hall.
‘I also need a drink.’ Jürgen threw a comradely arm around Mervyn’s shoulders. ‘ I will buy you a drink, Mervyn.’
‘No, no! I will buy you a drink, my dear chap. After that “discourse’’ ’ – he put the word into mocking inverted commas – ‘that’s the least an Englishman can do for a German.’
Then, without saying anything to Jutta, Sally or me – Jeremy had already claimed Edna – the two of them strode off.
‘Are we allowed to join them, do you think?’
Jutta took my question seriously. ‘Oh, yes, Michael, surely! I think that they expect us to come too. No?’
We followed them down the corridor, often having to make detours round knots of excitedly chatting students, and entered the Mensa, with its oppressive smells of cigarette smoke, cabbage and carbolic disinfectant. Jürgen had seated himself at a table, while Mervyn, holding a book of the coupons with which each of us had been issued on arrival, stood in the long queue. As I peered at Jürgen through a gap between the two people dawdling ahead of me, I was suddenly overcome. How beautiful he was, with his broad shoulders, narrow waist, sunburned, scrupulously kept hands, and that wide forehead above blue-green eyes set at an almost oriental angle under thick, arched brows! I had never before thought of a man as being beautiful. But beautiful was the only adjective to describe him. In comparison every other man and woman in the cafeteria seemed commonplace.
Jutta had moved ahead of Sally and me, to push her way vigorously through the crowd to Jürgen’s table. When he saw her, he didn’t get up for her, but merely pointed at another table where three more chairs stood vacant. Obediently, Jutta crossed over and hefted first one of the chairs and then another. I rushed to her. ‘Let me carry one of those!’
Jutta struggled on, a chair under either fragile arm. ‘No, no, Michael. No need. They are very light. But bring the other one.’
‘You should have fetched those, Jürgen,’ Sally said. ‘Not left it to Jutta.’
Jürgen grinned, as though at a joke.
‘It’s all right, Sally.’ Jutta set down the chairs. ‘Jürgen has swum very much this afternoon. He is tired, I expect.’
Jürgen did not contradict her.
When Mervyn returned to the table, he was carrying only two tankards. He stared at Jutta, Sally and me, as though we were the last people he’d expected to be there. ‘Oh, God!’
Jutta leapt to her feet. ‘Never mind! I will get beer for us.’
I hurried after her. But ‘No, no!’ she cried, turning to push me away. ‘Go back. I will fetch!’
‘Really, Mervyn!’ Sally chided him.
Mervyn carefully set down one tankard before Jürgen and the other before the chair that he himself was about to occupy. ‘You women must be more logical.’
‘Logical?’
‘At the university you’ve now achieved the same status as men. Yes? Well, in that case, you shouldn’t demand another kind of status as soon as there’s anything difficult or tiresome to be done. Am I right, Jürgen?’
Jürgen smiled not at Mervyn but at me. ‘You are perfectly right, Mervyn.’
‘You carried Sally’s luggage when we arrived,’ I reminded him. ‘You insisted.’
‘If I remember correctly, I also carried Mervyn’s. That was because both Sally and Mervyn were foreigners and guests.
‘But surely, in similar circumstances, you’d carry Jutta’s luggage?’
‘Perhaps.’ Jürgen laughed, tossing back his head. ‘Or perhaps not. It would depend.’
‘On what would it depend?’
‘On what I thought about her at the moment.’
Suddenly I felt discouraged and tired. I couldn’t be bothered to argue any further.
Jutta returned with five tankards on a tin tray. ‘There!’ As she lowered one of the tankards, she splashed some of the beer on to Mervyn’s slacks.
‘Oh, Jutta, Jutta! What a clumsy girl!’ Mervyn began to mop himself with a handkerchief.
‘Sorry, sorry!’ Jutta was abject. ‘I brought five because I thought you and Jürgen will soon want some more and the line is so long.’
I drew a tankard towards me. ‘ You shouldn’t spoil them, Jutta.’
‘Thank you, Jutta.’ Jürgen raised the fresh tankard set down before him, even though he’d not yet drained the other. ‘Prosit!’ he said, looking only at her. Jutta gave him a radiant smile. Then he turned to me: ‘ You say that Jutta should not spoil us. But all her life Jutta has spoiled men. She can do nothing else. It is a habit. Yes, Jutta?’
Edging herself on to her chair, Jutta again smiled and nodded her head, as though in acknowledgement of a compliment.
‘Well, what did you think of clever Eric’s “ discourse’’?’ Once again Mervyn put the word into mocking inverted commas. The question was for Jürgen.
Jürgen shrugged and then pulled a face.
‘No, I didn’t think you’d like it. I didn’t think any of the Germans would like it.’
‘I didn’t like it either,’ I said. ‘He’s supposed to be so brilliant and yet all he had to say was so banal.’
‘Really, Michael? So that’s your opinion? Well, you always were a sentimentalist, weren’t you?’ Mervyn put a finger in the small puddle of beer on the table between him and Jutta, and elongated it first in one direction and then in another until it made a rough star. ‘ Of course Eric has that ghastly Wykehamist manner and voice, as though he were speaking to cretins. And he’s got an unerring knack for hitting on a cliché. But, you know, he talked sense.’
‘He talked rubbish.’
‘No, Michael, he did not talk rubbish. What he said was the truth – or as near to the truth as makes no difference. The Weimar Republic was an aberration – a kind of a caricature of a liberal democracy, invented by a people who had no real idea of what a liberal democracy was but had read about it in other countries and did their best to produce a copy. Jürgen?’
Jürgen, his head turned to gaze at another table, might not have heard.
‘Jürgen, am I right or wrong?’
Jürgen now swivelled round to gaze at Mervyn. I could see the clenched muscles of the jaw closest to me, and the colour that had risen in the cheekbone above it. ‘No, you are not right, my dear Mervyn. You are not right. In fact – if Sally and Jutta will pardon me for using the expression – you are talking – how do you say? balls.’
Delighted, Mervyn threw back his head and burst into peal after peal of laughter. ‘ Oh, Jürgen, marvellous! Well done! Where on earth did you hear that expression?’
Now Jürgen, his fury gone, was also laughing. ‘From you. From you! Don’t you remember? You told me that you think The Magic Mountain balls, and I had no idea what you meant. I asked you to explain.’
‘Yes, yes, I remember now, of course I remember.’
Jutta was looking uncomprehendingly, like a child among adults, from one face to another. ‘I do not understand. Balls?’ She turned to me for elucidation.
I told her crossly: ‘ Forget it, Jutta.’ Then I leaned forward, putting a hand on her forearm: ‘ What did you think of what Eric had to say?’
Jutta gave a short, embarrassed laugh. ‘I am sorry. I am ashamed. I slept!’
‘Good for you. One should always sleep when people are talking balls.’
Mervyn rose. ‘Another, Jürgen?’
‘Why not?’
Mervyn slouched off. I stared after him, angrily wondering if his exclusion of the rest of us had been deliberate. Yes, I eventually decided, it had. From time to time, when he had seen too much of people, he would display this kind of ugliness.
Sally got to her feet. ‘Jutta, I want a shower before we eat. I think I’ll start back for home.’
Jutta darted a nervous glance at Jürgen. ‘Do you wish me to come with you?’ All too clearly she wished to remain.
‘No, Jutta, of course not. Stay on here for a bit.’
Jutta’s anxious frown cleared. ‘I will not be long,’ she compromised.
But Jürgen was also getting up. ‘ I, too must go. I have someone to see.’ As always, he did not specify who this someone was.
Jutta put the question that I dared not put. ‘ Who is this someone?’ Jürgen smiled. ‘ No one you know.’ He turned to me. ‘You may
drink my beer,’ he said.
He went out by a different door from that taken by Sally.
Chapter Fourteen
The day before we left, we were to make an expedition. To Rosenheim. I had never before heard of the town. I was never to forget it.
For me the first mention of it was beside the river. Jürgen and Mervyn were arm-wrestling together, and of course it was Jürgen – so much stronger and so much more competitive, as though willing himself to avenge the defeat of his country in the war – who was always the winner. The lean, pale, wiry German whom everyone called Jo and who had been the chairman when Eric Friend had delivered his ‘ discourse’, all at once jumped to his feet, his wet bathing costume sticking to his bony haunches, and clapped his hands for silence. Ignoring him, Jürgen and Mervyn continued to sway from side to side on the grass, grunting and screwing up their eyes with the effort of their contest. Jo squinted down at them with annoyance. Then, deciding to leave them to it, he said: ‘You know that tomorrow we shall make an expedition, yes?’
‘Yes, yes!’ the dozen or so English students, led by Jessica, shouted back at him.
‘We have no more speeches, no more discussions. Speeches and discussions are over.’
‘Good show!’ Harry shouted, to be applauded by the others.
‘Edna has told me that in English you have a saying “All work and no play makes Jack a dull person.’’ ’
‘A dull boy,’ Edna corrected, adjusting a strap of her bathing-suit. Her body was glistening with the oil with which, each time that she sunbathed, it had now become the task of Jeremy to smear her.
‘A dull boy,’ Jo repeated, clearly not liking to be put right. ‘Well, tomorrow we take you to Rosenheim. This is Jürgen’s idea. He has made the plans.’
‘Three cheers for Jürgen!’ Harry cried out.
‘Have you heard of Rosenheim?’ Jo asked.
‘Of course,’ Eric Friend answered, while the rest of the English shook their heads and shouted out ‘No! No!’
Having finished yet another arm-wrestling match, Jürgen now leapt to his feet and raced across to Jo, throwing an arm about his bare shoulders. The contrast between the physiques of the two men was cruel. ‘Since this is my idea, I will explain to you. Rosenheim is one of the finest centres of German Romanesque architecture.’
‘German what?’ a female English voice demanded, to be followed by ‘Come again!’ from another male one.
‘Oh, for God’s sake shut up and don’t display your ignorance!’ Although Mervyn wasn’t joking, the students at whom he’d shouted fortunately thought that he was. There were cries, in mock upper-class accents, of ‘Oh, I say!’ and hoots of good-natured derision.
Jürgen continued: ‘Rosenheim contains one of the most beautiful cathedrals in Germany, perhaps in the whole world.’
‘Yes, in the whole world!’ Jo interjected.
‘There is also another basilica, almost as beautiful. It is called St Michael’s. It was built in the eleventh century after Christ. Its founder was St Bernard.’
‘Who ever heard of a basilica founded by a dog?’ Jeremy put in.
‘Oh, shut up!’ Jessica shouted at him.
Jürgen paid no attention. ‘There are many beautiful churches, museums, houses. I think that you will enjoy your visit. Yes, I know that you will.’
‘This evening,’ Jo said, ‘we shall show you some pictures of Rosenheim and Jürgen here will speak some more about it.’
‘Yes, we have some slides. This is not the place nor the time to give you a lecture, but please, if you are interested, come to the lecture room at eight o’clock tonight.’
Jürgen now crossed over to squat beside me, his hands dangling between his bare knees. My mouth all at once felt dry. I was conscious of the beating of my heart, a painful thudding within me.
‘You have really never heard of Rosenheim?’
‘Never.’
He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Incredible! It is as though I have never heard of Canterbury,’ Then his body tilted closer. ‘On the bus you will sit next to me. Will you do that?’
‘Of course, Jürgen!’ I laughed with pleasure.
‘Good.’ Leaning forward, he patted my left hand with his right. Then he gave me a conspiratorial wink, before he jumped up and hurried away from me.
Chapter Fifteen
That morning all of us, the Germans no less than the English, were behaving like small children just emerged from school. There was a lot of shouting, laughter and horseplay as, in pairs or small groups, rucksacks on backs or hold-alls dangling from hands, we gradually assembled beside the three charabancs – or ‘charas’, as Jutta, with her extraordinary gift for mimicry called them, after having heard Jeremy once use the word – parked in a gleaming line in the university square. The drivers, young men in military-looking khaki trousers and khaki shirts, with short-cut hair as glossy with the German equivalent of Brylcreem as their brown shoes were shiny with polish, looked so alike that they might have been brothers. They stood, each outside his bus, in a posture, legs apart and hands clasped behind back, that reinforced the impression of soldiers on parade.
I pushed impatiently through the crowds, with Jutta struggling along behind me. I had gone over to her lodgings, having heard that Sally was ill. Then, leaving Sally behind with yet another paperback detective-story – she seemed to have nothing worse than a stomach upset – we had come on together. A young German, whose name I couldn’t remember, grabbed at my arm. ‘Michael! You will sit with me, yes?’ I smiled vaguely at him and pulled myself free. ‘ Sorry, I’ve already promised …’
‘Have you seen Edna?’ Jeremy hurried up to ask. ‘ She said she’d meet me here at quarter to, and there’s not a sign of her.’
‘’Fraid not,’ I replied over a shoulder, still hurrying on.
I began to peer into the first of the buses, already half filled with people. No sign of Jürgen! The straps of the hold-all that I was carrying for Jutta – it contained the sandwiches that she had prepared for us early that morning – was biting deep into my palm. Although it was not yet ten o’clock, I could feel the sweat on my forehead and under my arms.
‘Why don’t we sit in here?’ Jutta asked, panting behind, her thin body bowed under the rucksack that contained further provisions.
‘I’m looking for the others.’ There was no need for me to say which others I meant.
‘Perhaps they have not yet arrived. There are more people than seats, I think. Some will have to stand. We do not wish to stand, do we? Let us sit somewhere quickly, yes?’
Paying no attention to her, I now began to edge my way through the crowd beside the second of the charabancs. For a moment I thought that I saw Jürgen’s head and my heart lifted. Then I realised that it was someone else: a student with a limp from a war-wound. He was of the same height as Jürgen, he had the same muscular physique, his eyes had the same kind of oriental slant above high cheekbones. But whereas everyone, male or female, always looked at Jürgen, mysteriously no one ever gave this other German more than an indifferent glance.
I arrived at the third bus. It was less full than the other two, perhaps because to reach it involved the longest walk. As though touting for custom, the driver smiled at me cheerfully and indicated the door beside him with a bow. ‘Bitte, bitte!’
I returned his smile, shook my head, and continued along the charabanc, peering into each window in turn. Then I saw Jürgen – in the last seat of all, a newspaper supported on the back of the seat ahead of him and his head lowered to read it. Eagerly, I raised a hand and tapped on the window. Paying no attention, Jürgen went on reading. It was only then that I realised that the seat beside him was occupied by Mervyn – who was gazing into space as he picked between his front teeth with what appeared to be a bus ticket. I felt a spasm of anger, intense but transient, like a nauseous churning of the gut. But probably he was only sitting there to keep Jürgen company until my arrival. Yes, that must be it, of course that must be it.
