The Song Before It Is Sung Read online

  'Only necessary distress. You know what I found in Jerusalem? I found that you were never meant to allow possessions to take the place of ideals.'

  'Luckily for you, that's never likely to be your problem.'

  'You looked beautiful on our wedding day.'

  'Why did you say that? Why now?'

  'I said it because you had serenity then. Now all you think about is your work and - what you said, your words - your career path. Before we go back to looking at the crockery and debating ownership of the Dyson, what is a career path? To me it seems like planning your own funeral fifty years in advance. All the way to the grave. No thanks, I don't want a career path, I want to follow, in my aimless and depressing way, the life that interests me. How do I know what will interest me in ten years' time? In ten years' time I might want to farm coconuts in Mozambique or learn Sanskrit, or fuck pigs, I don't know. But I just don't want a career path.'

  She wasn't listening. She was opening up a flat box that contained a collections of schnapps glasses, unused, unseen, for six years. He could have gone on to tell her about the benefits of depaysement, the opening of your mind to wonder, but he knew that she was in no mood for this kind of thing.

  Is he trying to get close to Mendel? Did he really say that? One of Mendel's favourite themes was the impossibility of knowing another mind. Take Francine's mind. He finds it astonishing that for all these years he believed he knew her mind quite well. He thought he understood her tastes, her determination to understand how things worked, her anxieties about disorder, and still he thought that deep down she loved him, but somehow it seems her face, with its almost-too-strong nose and her widely spaced eyes and distinctly ribbed lips — the top lip protrudes slightly — has fooled him all this time. It suggested a kind of softness; he could never have guessed that she would dispose of him so decisively. He imagined that they had exchanged enough of their human essences to become in some way one person. He had often lain in bed — the bed he had just been granted - and thought about the minute sloughing-off of skin, the exchange of air as they lay close. He had adapted himself happily to her night habits. (She sometimes appears to be awake, with her eyes wide open and her teeth grinding lightly.) And not to forget in this round-up the semen rushing eagerly on its short, Darwinian sprint, the bed-sheets made not grubby by the spillage, but intimate, even numinous; how she would eat breakfast standing up, unaware that he saw her absolute belief that she was going to be late as endearingly irrational. And all this she has ignored, because John's claims to intimacy are stronger than his.

  If he doesn't know her mind, how can he know Mendel's? We see through a glass darkly, von Gottberg's wife, Liselotte, had written to Conrad of her experiences. But this idea of darkness, he thinks, is romantic, a mistake, because it suggests that we are moving towards light, that we must look closely for the truth, that there is some end in view - religious or personal or historical or philosophical. He remembers so well that the last time he saw Mendel, breathing air and oxygen through a plastic tube, he said with his faintly ironic smile, 'Life has no meaning. I rejoice in that. Things are what they are. There is no more.'

  Mendel had written that to him the history of ideas was often more interesting than the ideas themselves: what he meant -Conrad believes — is that the search for meaning is more revealing than the nostrums, the prescriptions, the ideologies, concocted in the name of this search. But still he is far from clear about what Mendel had in mind for him. Maybe all he had in mind — surely plenty — was an extended tutorial in how to live your life. Francine intended something similar, if a little more practical.

  'Conrad,' she said, 'I know you don't really care, but can we get this sorted? Once and for all? And fairly? You have a talent for putting off very simple matters. In fact you find them almost intolerable.'

  'I do.'

  'It's a kind of resistance to reality.'

  'Oh thanks for that. And I thought I was just lazy. That's the scientific mind for you.'

  'I was being polite.'

  'I was thinking about how you could possibly have sex with John.'

  'Shall we stick to the programme?'

  'That's another thing I find difficult.'

  For no good reason he debated her every choice, the wedding photographs, the used chequebooks, the Dualit toaster, the curtains he had never liked. He made a stand over the books and his demands were mostly met, because he had, somehow, a moral lien over them, although not of course over the medical textbooks. In idle moments — plenty of those in the last nine years — he has looked through them. It is amazing to him what these doctors know. She thinks it is a matter of pride with him to decline all opportunities of practical knowledge, but the truth is that when he looks at these textbooks he sees mountains of facts - even protein molecules require pages of explanations and tricky little diagrams - mountains that he could never have scaled.

  Before his rapid decline, his father had often talked about Everest. Mountaineering represented not man's ability to conquer some turbulent geology, but his ability to make life in his image. Later when he discovered that even the best intentioned can be disappointed, his father lost his faith in the human enterprise. But back in the fifties it was a young man's task to subdue chaos wherever it was found; in personal relations or in the garden or in the colonies, the imperative was much the same. And Conrad sees that ideas have their time: von Gottberg, with his spirit and destiny, belonged to a different time. Mendel, back then, was already interested in the effect of ideas, often deleterious. He hated particularly the lie at the heart of Marxism, that ordinary people are suffering from false consciousness. And when, soon after his trip to Jerusalem with Mendel, von Gottberg went back to Germany and wrote his infamous letter to the Manchester Guardian, things were never the same between them. Von Gottberg wrote that the Guardian was wrong to say that there was discrimination against Jews in the courts in Hamburg. He had never seen it, and he was working there as a prosecutor. He had even spoken to some active storm troopers who, though they supported their leader's race policies, said they would never have countenanced violence against Jews.

  And now, in this wrangle, Conrad saw what he already knew, that there was no hope of recovering what he and Francine had lost.

  'Fran, take whatever you want. And we'll sell the flat whenever you are ready. Or you can buy me out. You decide how much it's worth. I don't care.'

  This insouciance upset her more than the wrangling. Maybe she thought it was a ploy. Her throat was colouring and her tired, tired eyes, flecked with late-night blood spots, looked at him for the first time today.

  'What's the matter with you? Why are you doing this to me? You know we were going nowhere.'

  'Going nowhere. It's a common but untrue belief that life is a journey.'

  'Please, Conrad. Please, please, spare me, spare us, this hell.'

  'You take whatever you want. And pay me out when you can. I mean it.'

  She started to cry, but resisted his attempt to put an arm around her.

  'No, Conrad. I've made up my mind. Conrad, you are an extraordinary person, wonderful really and I loved you. But you have, I don't know, a kind of contempt for me and the world I live in which has hurt me terribly.'

  'I don't have a contempt for you. Not at all, I admire you. It's almost unbelievable to me what you do and what you know.'

  'Yes, unbelievable is the word. But you are engaged, in your estimation anyway, in the higher pursuits.'

  'That's just not true. But you know, you are what you are. You once said to me, "Who asked you?" and the answer is nobody. Nobody asked me. But it's in my nature. And, by the way, the contempt is largely from your side, from the practical side of life, towards the airy-fairy, represented by me. I never wanted to hurt you. Never.'

  'You see where we've got to? It's hopeless.'

  'Do you love John?'

  'Yes. I love John.'

  'Do you know what Axel von Gottberg's brother called him on the day he was hanged by Hitle
r? He called him an outcast dog.'

  'Am I supposed to see a connection?'

  'No. But to me it suggests that desperate people will do or say anything. Are you desperate?'

  Zur selben Stunde starb Axel in Berlin-Plotzensee. That was what von Gottberg's wife wrote in her memoir: one brother called the other an outcast dog in the same hour as Axel died in Berlin-Plotzensee. This is where all his talk with Mendel led von Gottberg, to a blank wall in a prison, a wall decorated with meat-hooks to which thin cords were attached to form nooses. How could you call your own brother an outcast dog? What is it about us, we presumptuous human creatures, that makes us on the one hand desperate for order and certainty, and on the other craven, vicious murderers? I don't know and, for all her knowledge, Francine doesn't either.

  When he looked at Francine she was ticking the list frantically and he saw with an upwelling of sympathy that rose like a tidal bore from within him, starting somewhere at the bottom of his torso, that her face was blotched now: the colour had escaped from the neck. All her composure was in that moment gone. She was a frightened woman, young but not very young, and she was exhausted by her work, by his intransigence, by her childlessness, by the realisation that life is full of disappointments. He put his arm around her now, brushing away her muted protest. He kissed her and she was trembling and he was shaking too, because there was something exciting about taking back, even for a short time, his sexual property, that another man had used.

  Afterwards they lay together silently, their skins damp. For both of them what had happened was shocking, although of course they had made love thousands of times before. How strange then, he thought, how perverse, that this love-making should seem illicit.

  His father loved a singer called Tim Hardin. He had a vinyl recording of his songs which he played endlessly and would sing in the bath. Now the words come to Conrad unbidden, and he sings:

  If I listened long enough to you, I would find a way to believe It's all true, knowing that you lied straight-faced while I cried. Still I'd find a reason to believe.

  'Tim Hardin?'

  'Tim Hardin.'

  'Conrad, I'm glad we did this. But it'll never happen again.'

  If I listened long enough to you, I would find a way to believe It's all true, knowing that you lied straight-faced while I cried. If I gave you time to change my mind, I'd find a way to leave the past behind.

  'Do you still love me, Conrad?'

  The bakery smells that rose up from below were strong now, coming in gusts. Their possessions, arranged as if in a charity shop, seemed to him utterly worthless, without purpose or substance. He could hear his father, singing quite tunefully in the bath. Two thirty-five-year-olds were lying semi-naked in the Camden afternoon, which intruded weakly through the dirty panes.

  'Fran, even gannets mate for life.'

  'Oh shit. I'll sort out all our things and make sure it's fair. I owe you that.'

  She seemed to be eager to go. Perhaps John was waiting somewhere to hear how her encounter with the erratic one had gone. He watched her get dressed again. She usually goes into the hospital in jeans and changes into her blue scrubs there. In future John will be sharing this intimate knowledge of her, how she pulls on her jeans and leans slightly forward to do up the top button and how she passes both her hands through her hair, and then leans forward again to shake it for a moment, before raking it back. What do these little things mean? He couldn't believe this would never happen again.

  His intimacy with Francine, whose buttocks, he noticed, were beginning, ever so slightly, to droop, would be relegated, like his father's singing, to a different and more treacherous intimacy, the realm of memory where almost anything goes.

  When she had gone, he felt strangely exalted. He lay on the bed and then fell asleep for a while, and he heard his father singing I would find a way to believe. Sometimes in his memory his father shuffles, small steps, like a dutiful Japanese woman's, as he sings It will never happen again.

  4

  MENDEL WAS ELECTED a fellow of All Souls in the autumn after he returned from Jerusalem. In those days Englishness had a sort of radiance and Mendel's parents could not help basking in it, explaining to their relatives and friends that a fellowship of All Souls was the highest honour in the English academic world. Their son Elya's triumph had allowed them to feel that they were sitting in the box-seat, as the saying went. Actually their son was also an immigrant, six years old when his family arrived in Britain by steamer, but the children shake off the whiff of the old country very quickly even as it clings to the parents like some faintly noxious gas, for ever.

  By the time Conrad met him, Mendel was that necessary figure, the publicly acknowledged wise man, known not just in Oxford but in the wider world. A few of these people spring up in every generation. So, reading the letters, Conrad was surprised and touched by Mendel's pride in his election to All Souls. We tend to think that well-known people were always celebrated.

  Conrad visited Mendel once in All Souls, for lunch. It was 1991. He remembers the elderly college servant — a dying breed, said Mendel, and this one was clearly moribund - serving the oxtail soup with his thumb dangerously close to the brown Plim-soll line.

  'Often he doesn't notice when his thumb goes in,' said Mendel. 'That's probably why the soup is served cool, for health-and-safety reasons.'

  They sat in a small panelled room, the Common Room, which the Fellows used when there were not many of them dining. Mendel told him that dessert was always served here after dining in hall, a custom whose origins had been forgotten. The eggheads of all shapes and sizes, boyish, awkward — some, he fondly imagined, idiots savants - greeted Mendel before they moved to their tables. Mendel was like a saint in an obscure church, whose effigy or relics have to be touched or kissed or stroked when entering.

  'They're always surprised, I hope pleasantly, to find I am still alive.'

  These brainy folks seemed to be physically tortured by their intelligence, stooped, contorted, with out-of-control hair and clothes that ranged blithely between the resolutely tweedy and the hopelessly ill-assorted, as though great minds were unable to take in the merely cosmetic.

  And now Conrad sees that those early days in All Souls, when Mendel was in love with Rosamund, had been wonderfully happy, the freedom to read and write and the encouragement to live the life of the mind unreservedly. In his own way, Conrad has been trying to do this for ten or more years, without much to show for it. And it is this aspect of the life of the mind, the snub to the free market and its bogus laws, which Francine resents most: where's the vaccine, where's the best-seller, where's the academic tenure? What's the product of this free-range thinking?

  Yes, it must have been bliss, with Rosamund coming up from London for the weekends, and Mendel going often to London to see her and reading her new chapters with that wonderful enthusiasm and humour, and the love-making which was still new and utterly entrancing to Mendel; love and sex dissolved the protective deposits of cynicism and selfishness. And, Conrad guesses, caused Mendel to understand that there are many human actions that are animal or irrational in essence. Conrad himself knows this all too well. Dumped by Francine he feels jealousy and rejection, but still more strongly, the loss of innocence. He wants to believe in love and its redemptive power; in fact he loves the idea of love perhaps more than he loves Francine, although he remembers The Leopard: Love. Flames for one year, ashes for thirty. It's the nature of love that you enter the lists knowing you will both lose.

  Rosamund and her cousin Elizabeth, who had become even more bored in Jerusalem, were making a visit to Germany and were proposing to see von Gottberg. Rosamund wanted Mendel to patch up his relations with Axel.

  'He's very hurt, Elizabeth says. Please write to him, Elya.'

  'I will write him. But what he wrote to the Guardian was unforgivable, although it is possible he had his reasons.'

  'Elizabeth says he is trying to avoid joining the Party.'

  'The only way to av
oid that is to emigrate.'

  'You are a hard man. And I thought you were soft.'

  'I have surprised myself. Perhaps I was reacting as a Jew. But Axel must have known exactly what laws were passed. When we were in Jerusalem we met German Jews arriving in their thousands. What were they fleeing? A few cartoons showing them heavily bearded? No, loss of property, loss of jobs, loss of life. What he wrote was that the only hardship the Jews were suffering was because of "aid" for German Jews from abroad. And he cited the storm troopers as witnesses of their excellent good treatment at the hands of the authorities. Do you know what angered me most? It was the idea that Jews should be grateful under the circumstances. Only the wilfully blind cannot see. Anyway, now you and Elizabeth can see for yourselves. But in my mind Axel has passed from the grey world to the black-and-white. Books have been burned. Jewish shops have been expropriated. Axel knows these things. His idiotic letter is not in keeping with his beliefs and character, or if it is, he has deceived me and all of us.'

  There is reference to a letter from von Gottberg, trying to explain himself, but Mendel dismisses it: 'He always takes refuge in generalities: "Europe must see that the true spirit of the German people is being subverted." Et cetera, et cetera.'

  'Still, Elya, write to him. He loves you.'

  'I will write to him, for your sake.'

  He writes a conciliatory letter to von Gottberg, saying that he hopes and believes that they will always be friends, and that he was probably unaware of all the circumstances surrounding the writing of the letter to the Guardian. But, Axel, you must know that what you wrote was foolish and — if not strictly interpreted — untrue, dangerous. It was not worthy of you. Please come and visit me in All Souls whenever you can.

  Conrad wonders if it is possible to read this letter as von Gottberg read it. They could both see that Europe's dark prejudices were surfacing in Germany, but neither of them could have any idea of the horrors to come, because, given the stock of available human experience, they were unimaginable.