The Valley of Unknowing (11 page)

We came out on to the main road. A tram sparked by, motor droning, picking up speed as it headed towards the Hauptbahnhof. Another was approaching from the west.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘That’s awful.’

Theresa gave me a reassuring squeeze. ‘Don’t worry. It was twenty-five years ago, and it’s not like I have any memory of it. All I have is’ – she shrugged – ‘. . . no more than a feeling really.’

‘A feeling of what?’

Of sorrow, I imagined. But it was Theresa’s turn not to answer the question.

‘Let’s go home,’ she said.

We hurried towards the tram stop and made it just in time. A man with a plump face and thinning blond hair jumped in behind us. I realised I had seen him before, a few minutes earlier, hanging around a corner of the Neumarkt. He looked at me with dull, unseeing eyes, then turned to face the window. I was just coming round to the idea that perhaps we
were
being followed when he got off again, at the next stop.

I didn’t delve further into the question of Theresa’s twin. We had shared enough history for one day, and – this came to me as we stood silent in the sullen crush, our bodies gently colliding, her hair ghosting against my cheek – the exchange had brought us closer. All the same, I couldn’t help imagining what it must have been like for her, growing up a twinless twin, aware always of an absence, of her own unnatural singularity. Was it a burden to be always the lucky one, the one who got the chance to live? Was it this that had brought Theresa to the valley: the hope of lessening that burden, or laying it down altogether?

Perhaps, I thought, having an absent twin was not so very different from having a vanished mother, a woman who sets out to raise you and then is lost without explanation, leaving the job, like the child, incomplete.

18

The first time I took Theresa back to my apartment she wandered around the place as if it were a museum, her hands clasped together in front of her, in case she should inadvertently touch something. It was there that events took a fateful turn. ‘So this is it: the writer’s lair,’ she said.

The building, once a private villa of brazenly plutocratic proportions, was now a labyrinth of subdivided flats. Mine was larger than most, with many of its original details in evidence, although not all in an ideal state of preservation: moulded ceilings, panelled doors, a parquet floor that I myself had repaired, bartering replacement blocks where necessary for all manner of hydrodynamical services. I even enjoyed the benefit of a turntable and a passable hi-fi system, the loudspeakers being Japanese.

‘Where do you work?’ Theresa asked. ‘Where do you sit when you write?’

The desk and the typewriter, the only permanent accoutrements of my official occupation, were strategically situated in the bedroom. I had some days earlier dressed the surroundings so as to lend them an unmistakable air of ongoing artistic endeavour, the leading props being a copy of
The Magic Mountain
lying open and face down, a small stack of leather-bound notebooks, carefully disordered, a pewter mug full of freshly sharpened pencils, a photograph of Ernest Hemingway in a cable-knit sweater, two items of fan mail, dates necessarily obscured, a map of Budapest and an edition of
The Orphans of Neustadt
in Portuguese (which I had stopped short of annotating, for fear of tactical overreach). I let Theresa discover this cockpit of creativity on her own, busying myself in the kitchen making coffee and humming. I was pleased – in fact, relieved – that she seemed to take her time exploring it. I pictured her fingertips tentatively tracing the outlines of the landscape, checking the intentful sharpness of the pencils, flipping through a notebook, turning over the Thomas Mann to see for herself what I had supposedly just read: ‘
The ocean of time, rolling onwards in monotonous rhythm, bore the Easter-tide on its billows . . .’

I was not simply showing off. This piece of theatre was a precaution. If Theresa’s friends said she had ‘a thing’ about writers, that didn’t mean they were wrong. Richter had been a writer. I was a writer. Viewed statistically, the case was cut and dried. But to qualify as a writer, was it enough to have written? Didn’t you have to be writ
ing
: productive, fertile, creatively priapic? Where previous female conquests were concerned, this had not been an issue. They had been interested in the fruits of my labours (the modest perks and privileges my foreign royalties afforded me), not the labours themselves. But Theresa was different. She was an artist. Besides, she had no reason to be impressed by my Intershop lifestyle, having access to similar retail Elysia every time she went home. For all these reasons I preferred not to take any chances.

‘So is this the work-in-progress?’ Theresa called from the bedroom, after what must have been several minutes of silence.

I was in the kitchen by this time, waiting for the kettle to boil and contemplating which of my Russian LPs would put her most in the mood for sexual intercourse. ‘Is what the work-in-progress?’

‘This thing on the chair,’ Theresa said. She sounded excited. ‘Is it finished?’

With a jolt I understood what she was talking about. A few days earlier, tired of having it clog up the sitting room, I had moved Wolfgang Richter’s manuscript to the one place where it would not be in the way: the chair in front of my desk. There it had stayed, unnoticed, even as I was carefully arranging my writerly camouflage around the desk itself.

I hurried towards the bedroom, scenes from a nightmare cascading through my mind like the visions of a drowning man: me telling Theresa about Richter’s book; her asking why I’d kept quiet about it all this time; me making up some unconvincing excuse about it being a big secret (as if I couldn’t trust her) or not wanting to upset her; her demanding to read the manuscript and discovering that it was very good; her discerning my jealousy and falling out of love with me even before she was in it.

I stopped in the doorway. Theresa was sitting on the end of the bed (clean sheets, new goose-down duvet) and was already glued to the manuscript.
They kept always to the edge of the road, where their shuffling, silent progress was hidden among the shadows of the trees.
I didn’t know what to say. Deceit was dangerous, but the truth was suicidal.

Theresa looked up at me and smiled. If only she had known how that smile made my heart sink. ‘So this is it,’ she said. ‘The book they’ve all been waiting for. For twenty years.’

At first, I didn’t understand what she meant. Then it came to me: she still thought the manuscript was mine. And why not? The first page was blank, revealing no author, no title. The relief left me momentarily unsteady.

‘You know, I was starting to think . . .’ Theresa said. ‘I mean, you never talk about your work.’

‘Starting to think what?’ I sat beside her.

‘That you weren’t writing any more, that you’d given it up.’

‘Like your friends said.’

Apparently the
Factory Gate Fables
didn’t even count as writing.

Theresa put her head on my shoulder. I slid my arm round her waist. For the first time it felt awkward.

‘But you were just being modest. I should have known.’ She reached up and touched my face. ‘That’s one of the things I love about you, Bruno. You’ve got nothing to prove.’

To my knowledge, that was the first time she ever used the words ‘love’ and ‘you’ in the same sentence – an occurrence I would have liked to savour, had Richter’s manuscript not been sitting there in her lap. I took it away from her and dumped it on the desk.

‘You’re going to let me read it, aren’t you?’ she said.

‘Maybe. Some time. It isn’t finished.’

‘It looks wonderful.’

‘It needs work.’

‘Well, the opening’s wonderful. You’ve just
got
to know what’s round that corner.’

‘Openings are easy. It’s middles that are difficult.’

‘I won’t tell anyone about it, not if you don’t want me to.’

‘You can read it when it’s ready, maybe. Some of it needs a complete rewrite.’

I tried to shove the manuscript in a drawer, but the drawer was already half full and refused to close. I had to take half the manuscript out again and find another drawer. Even then, I could feel the top sheets crumple as I rammed it home. All this Theresa watched in silence. When I turned back to her, I could see her cheeks burning.

I sat down. She stood up.

‘I’m thirsty,’ she said and went back to the sitting room.

It was the first time Theresa had been upset with me. Not that she didn’t try to hide it. Over coffee (she declined the vodka) we conversed on a variety of neutral subjects, but I could see that it was an effort for her, that underneath she was disappointed. This was about more than missing a good read. I suppose she felt I had shut her out, that the openness we had shown towards each other was to be temporary and limited. I wanted to reassure her on that point, but that would have meant reopening the subject of the Richter manuscript, a book that confirmed not only the brilliance of the man she had lost, but also the creative sterility of the man who had replaced him. So I let the matter drop, hoping it would simply go away and never come up again. Years in the future, perhaps, Theresa would ask me what happened to that story of the people on the road and the boy with the revolver in his pocket; and I would say that I had thrown it away, because I simply couldn’t make it work. ‘It was just a genre piece anyway,’ would be my final dismissive comment.

But that still left this evening: Theresa’s first evening under my roof, our first night in a double bed (so I’d hoped) where, at last, sexual congress might be enjoyed without the accompanying hours of sleeplessness and cramp. When Theresa yawned – another first in my presence – I gave up on conversation and opted for abject service. Moving behind her, I started to massage her shoulders, which I declared (without evidence or authority) were terribly tense. Half an hour later my hands and fingers were pulsing with fatigue while Theresa lay sprawled out across the sofa in her underwear, sighing gratefully. It was then, at last, that she accepted the vodka, drinking it with her eyes shut and shivering as it went down.

‘You know, Wolfgang was working on a book,’ she said, out of nowhere.

‘How do you know?’

‘He told me. I was surprised, actually. I’d have thought movies were much more fun. Everyone likes movies. Books . . .’

‘It’s a question of creative freedom,’ I said, from a seated position on the floor. ‘The scriptwriter’s not in control. Other people make the decisions. If you want to call the shots you write a book – even if they’re shots that hardly anyone ever hears. What was Wolfgang’s book about?’

‘He didn’t say. I’m not sure I asked him.’

‘Or you don’t remember the answer.’

‘Either way . . .’

‘Either way what?’

‘Either way it doesn’t matter, since he never got a chance to finish it.’

She rolled on to her front and wriggled her shoulder blades to indicate that more massage was required. I decided it would be best to comply, but not before I had put matters on a sexual basis by taking off the rest of her clothes.

‘How long am I going to have to wait?’ she said, as I slipped my thumbs into the elastic of her plain white knickers.

I hesitated. ‘Wait?’

‘To find out about Alex.’

She lifted her hips a fraction, enough to allow the undressing to be completed.

‘Who’s Alex?’

She looked back at me, frowning. ‘The boy with the gun. In your book.’

I had taken care never to say it was
my
book. I had simply declined to correct Theresa’s assumption that it was. I was reluctant to surrender that shred of deniability.

‘Not long,’ I said and slid both hands up her legs, forcefully kneading the muscles of her thighs so that she gasped with something between pleasure and pain.

The penis, I have discovered, presents particular difficulties of nomenclature to creators of English literature. The masters of previous eras, like their Continental counterparts, were prohibited by the mores of the day from mentioning its existence. Even when, between the world wars, indicative words began creeping on to the pages of respectable fiction, they were often placed in flashes of reported speech: vulgar slang placed in the mouths of vulgar characters. The modern artist felt at liberty to record this argot in the interests of verisimilitude. But coming up with a term that was not loaded with coarse or satirical connotations, that was merely honest without seeming technical, proved persistently problematic. In lovemaking scenes, one by one,
organs
began to rear their ugly heads;
tumescences
,
limbs
and
members
(some honourable, others not) soon followed in their wake – even the occasional
manhood
.
Penis
itself was too clinical for most writers;
cock
and
dick
smacked of smutty seaside postcards and bar-room jokes. The
sex
, long since discarded in the concrete nounal form, enjoyed a brief heyday during the 1930s, but eventually fell out of favour, being vague as well as inaccurate (would a man urinate with his
sex
?). The
pecker
and the
wang
made occasional post-war appearances in satirical Americana. My particular Anglo-Saxon favourite – useless for literary purposes – has always been
willy
. It seems familiar and affectionate, as well as being the name of choice for Saxon monarchs throughout history.

In any case these concerns, which apply as much to the female as to the male, merely betray a more fundamental ambivalence. Human genitals, most particularly our own, are a source of embarrassment and fear. We do not know what to call them (outside the bar room or the doctor’s surgery) because we do not know how to feel about them. Will our genitals, with their strange shapes and their regrettable but structurally unavoidable tendency to wrinkle, be aesthetically pleasing to our sexual partners? Granted, they are necessary, both for reproduction and for pleasure, but what reassurance is that? When the thrill of the new has faded, will the only genitals our bed mates want to dwell upon be the imaginary genitals of imaginary lovers? We hope not. We hope our hirsute and swarthy privates will be objects of fascination and erotic delight, and remain so through the years. But few of us are naive enough to expect it. We expect to be turning the bedroom lights off sooner rather than later, even assuming we had them on in the first place, so that the imagination can sustain what reality would only weaken and destroy.

So that night in bed, when Theresa took hold of me without warning and started pumping with all the vigour of a milkmaid at an agricultural competition, I regarded it as a welcome sign. My attentions had been assiduous, by design. When it came to foreplay, I was determined that there should be no unfavourable comparisons between me and Richter. Theresa and I were, I thought, moments from a long-delayed and explosive coupling. My hands were already on the insides of her thighs, making ready to part them. But Theresa, moved to a new pitch of desire, it seemed, wanted something else, something more immediate. She wanted to
see
. I didn’t protest. That she was interested in the appearance as well as the function, I took to be indicative of a deepening physical connection. I felt my anxieties melt away in this novel display of appetite and fascination.

It was only long afterwards, when Theresa lay asleep in my arms, that a different interpretation occurred to me: that she simply hadn’t wanted to make love. Rather than expressing her reluctance, she had taken the necessary steps to defuse my desire, as quickly as possible. All my efforts at arousing her – my aching fingers, my swollen lips – had been for nothing.

I thought back to the moment that evening when it had all gone wrong: Theresa bright-eyed and beaming, clutching Richter’s manuscript to her bosom. I should have let her read it, I thought. That was my mistake. I should have told her to help herself.