About
Me
|
Every man past his forties has become a
certified rogue!
|
Chinese Proverb
|

My mother was the daughter of a Holocaust
victim. She was what the Nazis
called a “Mischling.” Her mother, too, had problems to certify as a
person of
an Aryan pedigree; she was raised in an orphanage in Baden, a spa in
the South
of Germany. Granny was tenacious and indestructible and very loud. When
I slept
over in her place, she was living with a Polish refugee, a rabbi and
tailor of
fine clothing. Why everybody was calling him “Schlemiel” is not quite
clear;
although when he talked to me it was always about the shaggy mare he’d
left
behind in Poland. How her head used to vigorously nod up and down with
every
step. Horses was the chosen topic between him and me and visiting him
was my
alibi when I went out to play. After Schlemiel’s death, already in her
eighties, frail and walking almost in a right angle, granny still made
her own
arrangements and traveled unaccompanied to India, the country of her
honeymoon
and years of happiness, before her first husband, old Cohn, had made
his fatal
decision to repatriate to the fatherland. It gives an idea of her
mental
toughness and how she managed to keep her three surviving daughters
away from
the unwanted attention of the Nazis.
My mother was her youngest and in 1946 or
1947, an
allied officer fell in love with her. The first time they laid eyes on
each
other was at the cinema when she ushered the soldier with a torchlight
to his
seat. There followed a bit of stalking on my father’s part, my mother
noticed,
and after five weeks the two did something that was strictly against
the rules
in occupied Berlin. They fraternized. In 1949, this became the cause
for my
existence.
According to Aristotle, we are not yet
fully human
before the fortieth day after birth. It is the moment when most babies
learn to
gratify their parents for their round-the-clock services with a little
peal of
laughter. There is more to the old schoolmaster than meets the eye. I
do
remember to be wheeled about in the pram, but this was of course later,
when I
already was a toddler and grew up to become this insufferably cheerful
boy on
the photographs with blond curls and ringlets running down to the
shoulders.
From the time before I’ve heard anecdotes.
The winter in ‘49 was murderous and there
was nothing
money could buy to heat the home. So my mother and her friend, Frau
Nolte, went
out on a pillaging spree. The friend was a neighbor living in a studio
further
down the corridor. I still recall a very tall woman, smelling of
marzipan and
mothballs; now and then she gave me a drop of milk in a tiny demitasse
and our
dog once stole a fish from her. The two women had to travel some
distance
before they found a fence with enough planks left to tear it off, break
it to size
and pack it underneath me into the pram. My contribution was to lie on
top,
swaddled in blankets, and look cute. My first career-move as a thief.
It was a
long way home and the two women lugged the pram down the stairs to the
underground. A cop noticed, and, as friendly servant to the public,
he
offered a hand to carry the pram. The moment he lifted it he realized
of course
that something here was wrong. Our neighbor saw the change in his face:
“Yeah,” she said,
talking down on him with a booming voice,
“it’s a heavy baby, isn’t it?”
The man looked up to her, kept quiet and continued helping the women
down the
stairs.
Our home had once been a baron’s city
mansion. Along
a windowless corridor, we and six other families occupied rooms with
tall
ceilings and stucco ornaments of seashells and chubby little boys. The
loo was
outdoor in the backyard.
From time to time some kind of hiss, a
drizzle from
somewhere behind or inside the wall would send a reminder that the
structure
was crumbling. Nobody heeded the warning until one day a patch of
stucco fell
from the ceiling and missed my mother’s buttocks by a hair’s breadth as
she
bent over at the stove. I saw it from my high chair by the window.
Behind the house the court for drying the laundry and beating the dust
out of the carpets opened to a weed infested bombing site. Beating the
dust out of your carpet is a rather therapeutic activity – much better
than hovering or the couch of Dr. Freud. My mother took down the carpet
at least twice a week for a comprehensive thrashing, I could hear the
thumping echo ricocheting in the narrow confines of the backyard.
Towards the
bombing
site, at the bottom of an improvised and rather steep stairway, there
was a
flower bed fringed with bricks set in a jagged saw-pattern. I fell down
these
stairs and hit my head on one of those pointy bricks. When I came
around the
chauffeur living upstairs was already driving me in his delivery van to
the
doctor. I received stitches on my forehead, the scar is now barely
visible.
My earliest out-of-house memory is a
sports event my
father took me to. I still have a sharp visual image of a boxing ring
and two
guys in olive green shirts throwing punches at each other with
something, at
the end of their forearms, that looked to me like the brown earthenware
vessel
my mother used for storing her salt and honing her kitchen knife on the
vessel’s rim. I had never seen a boxing glove before. I don’t recall
protective
head gear.
The light in the ring was harsh and the
cheering all
around never stopped. The seat must have been close to the ring; I had
a good
view of the faces and to my right my father repeatedly jumped up and
shouted
something. He was a member of his unit’s boxing squad and he also
played
ping-pong. He had ambition and a good forehand while I only play a
so-so
backhand and somehow lack the killer instinct. This was years before I
went to
school, I must have been four or even younger! Another recollection
from the
time when I just had emerged from the amnesia of infancy – why is it
that we
don’t remember our earliest years? – was the towering height and the
not
exactly pleasing smell of Shantih, and the bristles on his furrowed
skin.
My grandmother hadn’t yet teamed up with
Schlemiel at
the time and was working for the local Zoo. On weekends I was brought
out to
visit her. One of the elephants was employed as a people carrier and
lumbered
along with hordes of squealing kids on his back. My mother was talking
with
somebody when I, standing closer to the elephant, reached out and began
to
pummel his enormous leg with the palm of my hand. Suddenly I felt a
tight grip
around my chest, lost ground under my feet and was lifted up towards an
inspecting eye. I was too surprised to feel fear and Shantih had a good
hard
look at this bundle of stunned petulance before he gently set me down
again.
Shantih and I became friends. For the rest of the season I saw him
almost every
morning and he lifted me up to his back and patiently listened to what
I had to
tell him. I liked to pull at his bristles and his ears. He didn’t mind.
One day
his handler didn’t allow me to get near. The animal was in the must and
incessantly weaving from side to side. The smell was intense; it was
the last
time I’ve seen Shantih. My father transferred to a base in Bavaria and
I
entered primary school.
On the public holidays we used to watch
the Catholics
follow in procession their priest, a balding man decked in heavy
brocade. He
seemed to be hiding his face behind the monstrance, a reliquary with
nothing
but a wafer in it, supposed to be the Christ’s living flesh. When the
procession had past, the road was clear to cross over to where our car
was
parked and like almost every Sunday we set out for – what was the
expression? –
“a spot of motoring.”
On the way we stopped for lunch in the
towns
surrounding the area. Towards the South you could see the Alps looming,
sometimes letting through the Sirocco from Africa. It causes changes in
the
local air pressure and many people have a headache on such day. Only
many years
later I discovered that our weekly excursions – by whose design I
cannot tell –
more or less followed the itinerary of Monsieur Montaigne who’d
traveled the
very same region some four hundred years earlier. His book made me
realize the
changes this once hospital region of Bavaria had undergone since the
religious
wars. After eating we indulged my mother and stared at the loud colors
and
histrionic displays of the local Baroque churches. Well, they are pretty. “Look at this flatulent angel;
this one,
he blows the horn,” my
mother said.
My father didn’t bat an eyelid; I thought of the chubby little boys
with
tiny
penises on the stucco ceiling in Berlin.
In those days they didn’t terrorize kids
with “preschool” and at school I assimilated letters rather slow
and with
dyslexic quirks in the “q,” “p,” “g” and “d” department, and
not just when writing longhand. These letters are still my most common
typos. I
sometimes heard voices shouting at me. I looked around, but there was
nobody.
The episode ended after I had managed to finish my first book at the
age of
seven. It was Cooper’s Deerslayer.
I began perusing my parents’ rather odd
collection of books, most of it unsuitable for children, except for a
Youngster’s Encyclopedia from 1928, with photographs from the interior
of a gigantic zeppelin and blueprints for a winged box-kite of about my
own size that allowed to carry a camera and do aerial photography. Mind
you, 1928! A
little later I read Emil and the Detectives. It was followed by Tintin’s adventures
in the
jungles of the Andes, a comic book. The next book was enormous and most
of it was not meant for children. It comprised a translation of the Völsunga
Saga; the Edda, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, the Legends of King Charlemagne, mixed
with often lewd legends from the crusades, Musäus’ ironic and dry Legends of Rübezahl, and
Gottfried August Bürger's Wondrous
Tales of the Campaigns and Adventures at Sea and Land of Baron of
Münchhausen, all in one mighty tome. The death of Bayard,
the battle charger of Count Raymond, a horse of miraculous strength, is
still with me.
When the seditious count finally
surrendered to his liege he was required, to kill this horse as a
penance. The king’s retainers hung millstones around Bayard’s neck and
feet and pushed the steed into the river. Bayard emerged from the
water, turns the head, and crying out for his master. The eyes of the
horse and of the count meet, and the horse gaining strength struggles
back on dry land. So the King orders Count Raymond to look away next
time. They burden the horse with even more millstones and push it back
into the water. Again the whinnying Bayard surfaces from the deep
waters. This time the weeping count turns his back to the scene. Bayard
realizes he is abandoned, loses strength and drowns. The scene left me
in tears.
I also had my first lesson in cosmology
and learned that the world was created from the corpses of the first
sentient beings, a giant and his wife, killed by the gods of Asgard. A
story very similar to the stories of the Babylonians and the Canaanites
and even of the Bible.
During exile the same bigots who kept
whining and swearing over “worshipping
in high places,” had replaced the original creation story of the
Bible with the domesticated story of a busy squire who forms out of
chaos Heaven and Earth, attending to trees and plants and the fishes in
his pond. The editorial purges were not as thorough as the rabbinical
editors may have wished for; it left enough traces in the texts to
reconstruct the original beginning of the Bible, telling us of a
primeval conflict between "Tehom" (Gen 1:2)
the dragon of water-world and the tribe of the Elohim (a plural but not the
Pluralis Majestatis) in high heaven. Tehom threatened to drown
all the Elohim. So the warlike "Yahweh,"
the god of thunder, mounts his chariot of fire and assails Tehom with
hail and lightning, slaying Tehom’s son “Leviathan,” and cutting to pieces
an unidentifiable "Rahab" (Ps. Ps. 74:14-15; 89:9-10; Isaiah 51:9-10).
Yahweh shouts in triumph and the waters subside. The Elohim then shape
the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars from the slain carcass. They stretch
out the skies like a tent cloth
(Job 9:7-8, 26:13), thus hiding behind a veil the abyss
beneath and their secret dwellings above the waters of high
(Job 26:5-10). Moon and Sun are set to divide the
seasons, separating day and night. And the stars are singing in a chorus
(Job 38:7-8).
From the “Edda” and the
mythology of classic Greece we know that even the gods live under the
constant threat of darkness and chaos. So the state of panic when the
Elohim issued Adam’s deportation order – lest “men become one of us” (Gen 3:24) – is making perfect sense. Yet even in
exile away from Eden the immortals indulge themselves, abducting the
daughters of the human race and take them for their wives (Gen 6:4).
When I was nine I read the Bible from
cover to cover;
out of sheer curiosity, nobody asked me to. God’s command not to “boil
a kid
in his mother's milk”
struck a
sympathetic chord, but Jesus’ curse of the fig tree left me singularly
unimpressed. It still does. The thing is naively presented as an
example of
miracle working and where it can get you if you have faith, as if
destroying a
tree isn’t something everybody can do; make it bloom and yield, that would have been the miracle.
Of course it didn’t yet occur to me, but
on our job applications we are asked for our qualifications, and I
wouldn’t allow a plumber to lay hands on my appendicitis. Even my
dentist in London told me he trusted only a colleague in Newcastle: "But I am
supposed to trust you?"
– "Of course, you don't know shit,"
he said. So when it comes to our “immortal soul,” shouldn’t we ask for
qualifications as well? An autistic refugee, sought for murder by the
Egyptian police, a charismatic carpenter living off the married women
in his retinue, or a merchant and highwayman poisoning water-wells in
the Arabian desert – how do they fill the blanks? The Hohenstauffen
emperor, Frederick II (1194
– 1250) and his opposite
number, Sultan Al-Kamil had a good laugh at “the three conmen, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed.”
Bavaria was (still is?) a catholic country
with
a capital "C" and no anti-clerical traditions whatsoever. The intensity
these lederhosen people attached to religion was pretty scary. On every
wall there hung a crucifix, at school, in the shops, at the crossroads.
The schools segregated the denominations, I was the odd kid out and for
lack of a better alternative they did put me together with the
Lutherans. So I guess my crush on Buddhism at the age of 8 or 9 was a
reaction to all this. It ended in yawns over the endless litanies to
prevent suffering by dissociating yourself from your attachments. My
attachments define who I am. If I suffer for it, well, that is the
price for being anything at all. The motto on the Sympsons’ coat of
arms is “nil desperandum,”
never give up, and not: “Better don’t
try.”
My next book was Dostoyevsky’s Crime
and
Punishment, in bed, hidden
under the cover, with a flashlight, I read 600 pages in one sitting
over night. After my second small pocks vaccination, I ran a high fever
and became delirious. In panic my mother called our practitioner from
across the street, Dr. Löw. I insisted on reading Dickens' Oliver Twist and it made me feel
awful. I still find the gloom in Dickens overpowering: “These tumbling tenements contain,
by
night, a swarm of misery, breed a crowd of foul existence that crawls
in and
out of gaps in walls and boards, and coils itself to sleep in maggot
numbers
where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying
fever, and
sowing evil in every footprint” (Dickens, Bleak House). Many years later I made the acquaintance
of a London spinster; she was in her twenties and just came back from a
trip to Central-America; mosquito bitten and suntanned. We all have
seen her, the bony type with a shrill laughter under a head of wiry
blond hair. I am fairly tall but she could look down on me with ease.
This woman had an uncanny eye for the little ticks of each and everyone
and from my window she pointed out a whole collection of Dickensian
characters parading underneath. Mr. Podsnap is still working on the
stock exchange and during the latest recession his flourish has come in
handy. My friend’s crash course in Dickensian typology, however, didn’t
do much to diminish my reservations.
The skies in Dickens’ world are hidden in
a “soft
black drizzle, with
flakes of
soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one
might
imagine, for the death of the sun.” Reading this makes me all the more hanker
for the open blue and the sleepy heat of a Mediterranean summer at
noon. A nodding donkey is hitched to an olive
tree. He
must have a naughty dream. “Look at him!” my wife cries out. The donkey’s ears
twitch
in alarm, and the offending
extension between his hind-legs disappears; embarrassed the animal
looks away from
us.
I began reading my first real philosopher,
Plato, and developed a habit of sleeping in the buff under open window
curtains. In the light of the stars I dreamed of suntanned Greeks
debating ‘arete’ and ‘eros’ under marbled porticos, I
mused over Plato’s archetypes, a sort of transcendental cookie cutter.
Best of all, I liked Plato’s tale of universal inundation in Timaeus. Unlike the one off event in Genesis, Plato speaks of for ever recurring
floods, survived
only by the illiterate herdsmen in the mountains, while “those who
live in
the cities are swept into the sea.”
So “just when the nations are beginning to be provided with letters
and the
requisites of civilization, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence,
comes
pouring down, and leaves only those alive who are destitute of
education; and
so we have to begin all over again like children.” The idea of previous civilizations and
of more
advanced people gone extinct without a trace is not entirely absurd.
The layers
of sediment on the ocean floor give evidence to eight ice-ages in the
last
700,000 years.
You may have guessed it by now, I liked
reading, but even more I liked to be out with the other kids. We used
to be away from home all day and I often missed the curfew and got a
good talking-to.
One day, already running late, I was about
to cross
the street and had no eyes for the lorry rushing at me from the left.
It would
have squashed me to pulp had not from behind the hand of a stranger
grabbed my
arm. A matter of split seconds – I came sooo close, I could feel the
vehicle’s
slipstream pulling me towards the road. Then the anonymous hand
loosened its
grip and the hyperactive boy scooted across the street without even
looking
back or saying a word of thanks. I never told my parents. But should
the person
who saved my life read this, I extend a belated, a very belated, “thank
you.” Bless you Sir, or
Madam. Thankfully there were not
too many inquiries about my whereabouts. Almost every day our gang used
to meet
on the river under the weeping willows. The girls were at least as
intrepid as
the boys. As a test of mettle we crossed an out-of-town bridge on the
outside
of the handrail; lose your grip and you drop thirty meters into shallow
water,
the rapids running only inches over the rocks. Not that we didn’t
appreciate
the danger. One of us, and it wasn’t one of the girls, looked down and
froze
and it took some coaxing to get him to the other end. With our bicycles
we
toured the hamlets straining upwards towards the Alps and in late
afternoon
turned around rolling down the falling altitude with almost no
pedaling.
On weekends I was allowed to stay up late
and father and son bonded over a common interest in astronomy. Pretty
early in my youth I came to an understanding that this Universe is a
tad to vast for God's – any god's – DIY shop. Of course the world could
be much younger than we think it is; theoretically there is no logical
contradiction in the idea that the world – complete with fossils and
false memories – was created yesterday, or even
five minutes ago, when I believe to remember that I was typing at this
essay. And of course,
the Old Potter in this example has to do more than make things just look as if they
are ancient. "He" needs to produce something that works even after
leaving the maker's shop. The laws of nature fully apply. Who knows;
although creation is supposed to have occurred on Sunday, the 27th of
April, 3877 BC., it may have taken eons of trying and testing his toy
before God released it to the public? Did the Old Potter already
foresee the roses in my garden?
Of all the arguments for the existence of
God, the only one holding water, would be an empirical – not a logical
– proof, that things cannot work on their own, but need – operative
word! – the intervention of an external agent to help it along; an
intervention that is contravening the laws of nature (otherwise you
can't tell whether there is any intervention at all). Proclaiming the
“existence” of a non-interventionist god merely sitting on the fence
and twiddling his thumbs while things everywhere proceed at their own
pace, is merely abusing semantics for one’s own spiritual comfort.
Which I can understand – especially in old age one tends to yearn for a
last supper under the pergola – but it has no bearing on the question,
whatsoever. Our understanding of nature of course is far from complete,
but in the areas where we have turned the
stones – so far at least – no space is left for arbitrary intervention.
Apparently it is the element of time which is causing a bit of a
problem here, raising questions about the odds of things to happen.
Partly this is, because most of us have a poor understanding about the
nature of chance. When you play the lottery your chance of
hitting the jackpot is a long shot of one to seventeen billion or
worse, but the larger the number of players participating, the better
are the odds that somebody
is going to win – somewhere in the area of one to thirty or better. In
other words, the doubts, expressed by the critics of evolution, are
based on the same anthropocentric bias that has threatened Copernicus
and Galilei with injunctions and thumbscrews and caused Giordano Bruno
to get himself burned alive. I never understood why the world out there
just has
to be the one for our own benefit. Granted, that things turned out in
our favor, does this mean along the way to the present stage this was
at any point a foregone necessity? I don’t think so. Despite of
Immanuel Kant’s contention that the essential attribute of “existence”
is that something must
exist, and is not just here by accident, what difference does it make
for my presence here and now, whether it was "necessary" that a single
cell organism three billion years ago has been evolving through many
stages to become me or the roses in my garden? Suppose it was an
accident?
My father was an engineer with a healthy
disrespect
for academic baloney; engineering has to get it right or the wheels
won’t spin.
So it was a real disappointment for the old man that in the end my
interest in
the classics got the better of me. Virgil’s elfin world of nymphs and
fauns in
the Georgics has
become
my inner island
of tranquility. C. Schneider’s hymn on the Hellenistic world in two
mighty
tomes, (Kulturgeschichte
des Hellenismus, 2 volumes, Munich 1967 – 1969) has never lost its lure, even now when
this glow lingers on only a nostalgic
memory. In the last year at college, four of us graduates began pooling
funds for
an old
Mercedes. We planned to take the route through the
Balkans,
Anatolia and Iran to Katmandu, then sell the car and from the proceeds
pay for
the flight home. That was before the Russians had invaded
Afghanistan.
On the way we stopped at the ruins of
Persepolis, the old capital of
King Cyrus (580
– 529 BC.). A barren plane;
the sun beating down on solitary columns and the denuded "cella" of the
royal audience hall; in the cloudless sky a huge bird drawing circles.
Once floor long silk curtains, translucent and flapping in the wind,
had shielded the King of Kings from the glare, the dust and the heat.
The people here were poor but hospitable
and always up in arms over some age-old feud, trading bullets from
rooftop to rooftop because once upon a time the one guy's granddaddy
had had the temerity of leering at the other guys granny when she was
washing her face. A story without a happy ending. The village elders
invited us to a meal and our guide motioned to the roofs to cease fire
and let us pass. They had cooked a sheep’s head and offered the best
part – the eyes – to the guest of honor; me. Soon after, I fell ill and
had to say good bye to my companions and take the plane from Kabul.
Back home I first went into advertising
and then studied French history before I dropped my somewhat
superfluous thesis on Cardinal Richelieu and after consultations with
my professor switched to Roman archeology and English literature. At
night I worked shifts as a subeditor for a tabloid, helped along with
uncounted cups of strong coffee. The brew by one of my colleagues truly
deserved the name “infernal.” The very first cup left me stunned;
literally. Psychologists on the campus paid me a fee for serving as
guinea-pig in their studies on sleep deprivation. I saw spider webs in
every corner and expected the walls to warp under my touch. In the
foliage of the trees and in the grain of my wooden furniture I felt
lurking dryads peeking at me; they became very real. Sometimes I
flinched from the imaginary swipe of fluttering hair on my face. How I
found the time to engage in a study of Immanuel Kant is now a complete
mystery to me; most of my reading was done while commuting on train and
bus. I think Kant’s philosophy is still holding up.
It was a time when we students engaged in “doublethink” and “newspeak,” without actually living
in a dictatorship. This was still the Cold War. Everybody’s language
was infected with socialist terminology like a dog with fleas, and
spewing sociological gobbledygook counted for having a social
conscience. People were actually capable of taking terms like "consumer terrorism" seriously. I
read the classics of Marxism. It didn’t make me reject capitalist
economy – my preferred philosopher is Mandeville – but I did realize
that capitalism is not a free lunch, the wished for utopia of
unstoppable progress. The beast comes for a price and especially the
lower incomes time and again are the ones to pay with layoffs and
misery in the inevitable downturns of cyclical boom and bust. In my opinion Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in
England should be required reading for everybody. To escape the
squalor in those days, the rural surplus labor flooded in to Manchester
seeking a better life, a journey from poverty to badly paid misery.
Something I later had the opportunity of observing first hand in the
early days of the “special economic zones” in China, which, after
Chairman Mao’s death, began replacing China’s Stalinist war-economy and
started the biggest boom in Chinese history.
I placed the Capital
somewhere where I could be sure never to find it again, when in the
course of my studies, I came across a collection of letters from the
5th century, written by the Roman senator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (340 – 405 AD.).
It has never been translated, except into French, and still is a rare
book. Up until then, I was your average agnostic, personally rejecting
the comforts of religion as “opium
for the common folk,” yet not really with an axe to grind. I was
young, I didn't yet fully appreciate the need for comfort, and on the
other hand still shared the common perception that over the centuries
the Christian church had been instrumental in the preservation of our
civilization. (Remember the naked little boys with tiny penises.)
Symmachus’ letters opened the window to a very different perspective.
When a dwindling half of the ancient population was still Gentile, the
majority of the Christian half followed the non-Trinitarian creed of
the Presbyter Arius. Today the Trinitarian dogma is the common creed
across the denominations, even if they disagree on everything else.
When in a belated attempt the physician Michael Servetus begged to
differ and in Geneva sought asylum from the Inquisition, the reformer
Calvin, himself a refugee from the Inquisition, had him arrested and
burned alive, apparently without losing sleep over it. Do people who
end their prayers with the formula of the “father, son and holy ghost”
actually know that this creed is the product of a political coup, and I
don’t mean the intervention by Emperor Constantine on the assembly in
Nicea? That it was a minority group overpowering a majority of
non-Trinitarian Christians? A Coup that inaugurated 1,500 years of
systematic persecution if you begged to differ? Of inquisition, of
murder, of genocide and of censorship? In the early centuries even
classic learning was persecuted. It was Catholicism who provided the
ideological premise – including the idea of “limpizza de sangre,” (pure blood) –
for hunting and killing Jews. These facts are not hidden in the
archives; it is all out in the open. The period’s legislation is a
matter of record, the correspondence of the key players is in the
public domain. They figure as “saints” on the Catholic calendar.
During
the last semester I
assisted in Yugoslavia
to excavations of a “Mithreum” – a chapel of Mithras – the bull slaying
redeemer of the Roman soldier, and then joined up with a team in
Tunisia and
Morocco, dusting and photographing Roman epigraphs for a new survey. A
veteran
of the French legion assisted the team and liaised with the authorities
and the
natives.
In
his youth he had been
enlisted the old-fashioned
way; he was seventeen when French recruiting officers in civvies
shanghaied him
from a coal mine across the border. That was his story and he stuck to
it. Now
he looked forward to retirement and a little home in the Loire Valley.
He
introduced me to a sheikh (or “Amenokal”)
of the Touareg. They call themselves the “Imouhar,” the free people. A formal visit was
arranged, I
showered and in my best outfit drove to the camp, accompanied by the
veteran.
The reception was friendly. I became a bit uneasy when I was led to a
man-sized
cauldron on a blazing fire underneath and was asked to undress. Was I
to
become the
meal’s main course?
Water is on a premium in the Sahara, and
only a
shallow puddle steamed at the bottom of the bathtub, practically
singeing my
testicles. The actual cleaning was done by an assistant with a couple
of
missing teeth in his smile and, as I soon realized, with a pair of very
strong
hands.
Without using soap he began massaging the
dirt out of
my epidermis. It was a humbling experience, even with the excuse of an
hour’s
drive through the desert in an open jeep. I thought I was clean, but
the man
collected from my skin a ball of gunk the size of a walnut. The meal
was a
spicy affair, but the legionnaire’s experience got me through this:
don’t try
washing down the heat in your mouth with water; use bread and chew it
slowly!
The meal ended with tea in tiny thimbles, the kind of tea that enables
you to
speak fluently in fourteen languages at once.
A good visit for the project, but for me
it did not become the beginning of an academic career. I had some
experience in chemical analysis – DNA profiling was still in its
infancy – and a manufacturer of chemical products offered the
opportunity for worldwide travels on expense account. I took it.
Before I could go on the road my contract
required me
to do six months in research and development. So I donned a white smock
and
checked in into the laboratory on a Tuesday. Chemistry had always been
my least
loved subject before an informal chat with a physicist (sic!) had opened my eyes. Chemists never speak
about electrons on the outer
shell of an atom. But chemistry, it seems, is all about the right
number of
these electrons when atoms interact. The researchers in the lab were
after a
new photosensitive compound and by trial and error the team time and
again
tabulated dozens of substances according to their
“radicals” (the little dot to the right of the symbol). Most scientists
don’t bother with philosophy. If they absolutely must, their darling is
Sir Carl Popper and his principle of “falsification,” a neat way of rationalizing the
scientific method. The falsification of wrong leads was still in full
swing when my stint was over, and I finally got ready to do what I was
hired for.
My first assignment was to a client in
Czechoslovakia, still under the communists then. Almost at midnight I
entered the outskirts of Prague in my company car. I knew that a hotel
room was waiting for me, a moldy time capsule of
gilded elegance in scarlet velvet. The maids, instead of dusting and
changing sheets, would rather have coffee with the head waiter. Guests
were invited to join. I was still miles away from such invitation,
threading my way through the suburbs. Not really a difficult task; the
lights of the city’s approaching downtown floated assertively across
the windscreen. Underneath these lights, I knew, socialist tourists
from East-Germany were making themselves obnoxious. They used to feel
like the communist elite in those days, everywhere strutting about with
a big chip on their shoulder. The area I was driving through, however,
was pitch dark and suddenly I was caught in a crossroad that seemed to
receive one way lanes from every possible direction. It was eerily
quiet. Prague is the hometown of the writer Franz Kafka and the moment
gave a whole new meaning to the word "Kafkaesque." I tried backing out,
but I already knew what was going to happen next. There would be a cop
waiting to give me a ticket. And so it was.
Asked to wind down the window, I got a
nose full of exhalations from a cigarette accompanied by a sour scent
of stale beer. The man steadied himself with one hand on the roof of my
car. The law clearly was in need of a shave, but he was the authority,
and I understood that there was no point in protesting my innocence. So
I paid and didn’t ask for a receipt. Lost in thoughts the man continued
holding on to the roof. I waited. At last he took off his hand and gave
way. The film director Milos Forman used
Prague as
location for his film Amadeus
with the secret police as extras on his set. Most of them were in it
more for
the American cigarettes and the cans of pineapple than the sinister
suspicions
of the regime. Time and again Milos had to remind his American crew to “forget
logic! This is Checkoslovakia.”
Actually Forman used the wrong word. It was not the lack of logic that
was
worrying me. The next day, my contacts directed me into
a haze of sulfuric dust. It came from factory stacks and burning
dumping sites which surround Prague in a ring, like a circle from
Dante’s hell.
After Prague I was sent to Italy,
Portugal and Spain. In a restaurant in Madrid I shook hands with a man
in an expensive suit, a bit on the stocky side, well fed, soft skinned,
articulate, a handshake like a wet sponge. He arrived in a motorcade
and introduced himself under a generic name – “Senior Muños.” Everybody
else in the room knew him as the king’s chief of security. Before the
soufflé he passed around the table his identity card and his
Beretta. The document showed his photograph and a number with an
endless row of zeros followed by a six at the end. This seemed to be
the point. Only the royal family had figures that low on their ID. The
Beretta was a macho thing. They do this in those countries. My firm
thought I was ready to represent them in Los Angeles. I landed in New
York and decided to travel the distance by car on the Interstate 80,
seeing something of America. A friend provided me with an old Cadillac.
She was put together from two wrecks from
the fifties and although the paint was not great – I would lie if I
said it was pink – the tail fins were as flashy as ever. It got me
safely across the continent, although the handwritten license plate on
a piece of red cardboard in the rear window raised more than one patrol
officer’s eyebrow, but it was perfectly legal. After my arrival in L.A.
I lined up to open a bank account and after presenting my passport
received from the girl at the counter a lecture that in America only
the drivers license is a “proper ID.”
This settled, I went out for lunch. There was a humble hot dog stand
where the rich and beautiful used to gather, eating and licking their
fingers while reclining in their Lincolns and Porsches, with relish and
mustard dripping on their diamond rings. The weekend was scheduled for
a much anticipated trip to Nevada.
From the distance and at night, Las Vegas
was a mysterious mirage. I had retired the Cad and in a Buick Skylark,
red as a fire engine, drifted through Nevada’s nocturnal void, with
patrol cars lurking left and right to catch you speeding. On a good
day, a car studded with antennas, like a porcupine with spikes, would
overturn you, tailgated by an entire convoy inviting you to fall in
with them. The porcupine in front carried illegal radar detecting
equipment. Gradually, something, that looked like a fully lit airstrip,
was filling the windscreen from left to right. For a long time it
hovered there, motionless.
That night I was determined to make 10,000
at
the roulette. That was my target. Oh I was good, I could set myself
targets. I
started with five hundred and in a very short time I piled up stacks of
chips
before me, worth a trifle more than 5,000. It should have been the
signal to
leave and had I done so I probably would still be gambling. I didn’t.
The croupier and I were the only people at
this
table. My target was ten thousand. The croupier looked at me and barely
noticeable shrugged his shoulders when I placed my next bet. Two hours
later I
left the Casino without my American Express card. Cold turkey. Never
again the
clinking of stacked jetons and the nervous patter of little thuds
hurtling
across the crap table. No more sympathetic noises from the young man
next to me
who says he is admiring my game. A typical night on the strip. The
trance of
neon lights; people sliding by in their cars like in a fluorescent fish
tank.
The chills after the adrenaline crash when stepping out into the
street. The aimless walk before backtracking to the car park. A
drop of water from some air-conditioner hitting the face. I still had a
car key and a
car
fitting to the key. Back in L.A. I was offered a career change and I
can’t deny
that for a moment it got me thinking. The offer came from a mild
mannered man
with the looks of Mahatma Gandhi without the loincloth. Kirby his
Doberman was
positively worshipping the man.
Gandhi owned five houses with a Jaguar
(the car) in each garage and was married to a woman in her first
pregnancy. There was a blonde mistress and her just born baby, and a
Japanese ex-wife, the mother of an already married son, who was serving
with the marines. They all were living within a mile’s distance helping
each other change diapers and buy dresses for parties. Gandhi’s firm
was registered in Switzerland. Most of his business he conducted from
his fax machine in the bedroom. Do you need a tank or a fighter plane?
Gandhi is your man. For handguns go to Walmart. In the end I thought
better of the offer and stuck with my employer. He sent me on new
assignments to South East Asia and China. That's where I met my wife
and decided to settle down, teaching and studying.
China inflicted a bit of a culture shock.
At moments the surrounding suddenly shrank to a chaotic congestion of
screeching traffic, of shop signs I couldn’t read, of disintegrating
concrete and an unspeakable, roach infested ugliness in the utilitarian
architecture. But after midnight the city was able to exude an
intoxicating magic. We toured the abandoned streets on our scooter, a
red Vespa, the drifting dust from the numerous construction sites had
settled, and despite, or perhaps as an effect of the polluted air, the
krypton lights disseminated the gentle luster of a gigantic jellyfish
hovering in the greenish, slightly hazy, translucence of the sky, with
countless tentacles dangling onto the empty playgrounds. Now and then
we stopped there for a moment on the swings; from the chains our hands
rubbed off the slimy sweat of the big city. At this late hour even home
was quiet. Chinese families are a noisy affair; the headlight over the
door to your room is left open, the clan would be very unhappy should
one of their own drift out of earshot. In the eighties privacy was
still a foreign concept in China.
A Jesuit helped me to find my way through
the Chinese classics. A period of quiet content. “That which befalls
men befalls
the
beasts and man has no preeminence. Wherefore nothing is better than to
rejoice
in your own works” says
Kohelet (Ecclesiastes 3:19-22). The one Chinese writer I consider as a
an absolute must read is the Han historian Ssu-ma ch‘ien (145 – 90 BC.), a stupendous story teller with the
temperament of an anthropologist. His emperor gave him a rough deal.
When Ssu-ma stood up and defend the integrity of a colleague in office,
they castrated him.
Ssu-ma’s work was written before the
innovation of ink and paper. With untiring patience, his clerks singed
signs with read hot needles onto uncounted slabs of bamboo, 1,500,000
words altogether. Ssu-ma was not your typical Confucian gentleman,
uptight, polished and slightly bigoted. In fact it would be difficult
to rubricate Ssu-ma under any philosophical school. He was a sensitive
individual with loyalty high on his agenda. Status and influence
however came for a price, it was a life under tight supervision. The
court officials were confined in dormitories and given leave only once
every five days to wash their hair. He did not think of his treatment
as an injustice; by standing up for Li Ling, who was not even his
friend, Ssu-ma knew he had it coming, and his refusal to commit
“honorable” suicide marked him as an outcast in the eyes of his peers,
but he could
not bear the thought to leave his work unfinished. He certainly is
deserving of our admiration.
It was around nine o’clock in the evening
after rush
hour. The street under the windows of my apartment block was empty and
barely
lit. My wife should have been home for some time by now, and I decided
to walk
into the direction from which I was expecting her arrival. About a
kilometer
further down the road it became utterly desolate except for a parked
pickup
with a load of protruding scaffolding poles. The poles extended towards
what
seemed a large puddle of axle grease on the tarmac. I noticed the
crumpled
wreck of a red Vespa on the sidewalk. My brain refused to register what
the
senses reported so loud and clear. Then I suddenly realized I’d stepped
into
the puddle.
Later that night, a friend – the chief
surgeon of the
local university clinic – helped searching for my wife in the hospitals
and
morgues up and down the city. We found her and when I was asked to
identify her
they kept her upper body covered; they said it would be better not to
look at
her face if I could help it. In 1991 I returned to England.
In 1997 I began a correspondence with the
person who became my sweetheart and whom I have to thank that this
website ever materialized. If the reader wishes to thank her, do feel
free to drop an email. Dawn and I first moved to Florida and in the
year after 9/11 we went back to England, and, with the blessing of the
immortals, we shall live happily ever after in Kent. We first moved
into an apartment overlooking the River Thames. Only a hundred yards
away from my desk was the crypt where Pocahontas is laid to rest. This
desk has now moved to a place deeper in Kent where we have purchased
property, surrounded by green and trees and a quiet life.
The best piece of advice I’ve ever
received? My aunt
insisted that there is nothing, nothing at all, that cannot be said in
plain
language so that everybody will understand it.
A wish? I would like to end my life in
France, in the light and smells of the South, the Occitanie, the
ancient land of the troubadors and the Cathars; or perhaps at Avignon,
where the dust is resting lightly on the car’s bonnet.
© – 3/24/2009 – by
michael sympson, 7,900 words, all rights reserved
to be continued