Part 33 (2/2)

”I can't. I've tried. Nothing comes.”

Pym lifted the door latch, stepped inside and smelt cigar smoke and horse. St. Moritz, he thought, lightheaded in his apprehension. The bam was cavernous and beautiful and raised at one end like an old s.h.i.+p. On the dais stood a table and on the table, to Pym's surprise, a lighted oil lamp. By its glow he admired the ancient beams and roof. ”Wait inside and he will come,” Sabina had said. ”He will want to see you go in first. My brother's friend is very cautious. Like many Czechs, he has a great and cautious mind.” Two high-backed wooden chairs were pulled to the table and magazines were strewn on it like in a dentist's waiting-room. Must be where the former does his paperwork. At the end of the barn, he noticed a rustic ladder leading to a loft. At the weekend I'll bring you here. I'll bring wine and cheese and bread, and blankets in case it's p.r.i.c.kly, and you can wear your flouncy skirt with nothing underneath. He climbed halfway up the ladder and peered over. Sound floor, dry hay, no sign of rats. An admirable location for rustic Rococo. He returned to the ground floor and made his way towards the dais where the light burned, intending to settle down in one of the chairs. ”You must be patient, if necessary all night,” Sabina had said. ”Crossing the border is extremely dangerous now. It is late summer and the doubters are coming over before the pa.s.ses close. Therefore they have many guards and spies.” A stone pathway ran between two cattle drains. His feet echoed thickly in the roof. The echo stopped, his feet with it. A slender figure was seated at the head of the table. He was leaning alertly forward, posing for something. He held a cigar in one hand and an automatic pistol in the other. His gaze, like the barrel of the automatic, was fixed on Pym.

”Keep walking towards me, Sir Magnus,” Axel urged in a tone of considerable anxiety. ”Put your arms up and for heaven's sake don't go imagining you are a great cowboy or a war hero. Neither of us is a member of the shooting cla.s.ses. We put our guns away and we have a nice chat. Be reasonable. Please.”

It would take our Maker himself, Tom, with help from all of us, to describe the range of thoughts and emotions charging at that moment through Pym's poor head. His first response, I am sure, was disbelief. He had encountered Axel very often in the last few years and this was merely another example of the phenomenon. Axel watching him in his sleep, Axel standing at his bedside with his beret on--”Let's take another look at Thomas Mann.” Axel laughing at him for his addiction to Old High German and remonstrating with him for his bad habit of protesting loyalty to everyone he met: to the Oxford Communists, to all women, to the Jacks and Michaels and to Rick. ”You are a serious fool, Sir Magnus,” he had warned him once, when Pym returned to his rooms after a particularly deft night of juggling girls and social opposites. ”You think that by dividing everything you can pa.s.s between.” Axel had limped at his side along the Isis towpath and watched him dash his knuckles against the wall in order to impress Jemima. At the election Pym could not have told you how often Axel's glistening white dome had popped up in the audience, or his long, restive hands flapped in sarcastic applause. With Axel so much upon his conscience, therefore, Pym knew for a fact that Axel did not exist. And with this certainty in his head it was perfectly reasonable that his next response to seeing Axel was downright indignation that someone so thoroughly forbidden, someone who had been literally, for whatever reason, banished out of sight or mention over the borders of Pym's kingdom, should presume to be sitting here, smoking and smiling and pointing a pistol at him--at me, Pym, a bulletproof, fornicating member of the British Occupational cla.s.ses gifted with supernatural powers. And after that, of course, paradoxical as ever, Pym was more exultant, more thrilled and more happy to see Axel than anyone since the day Rick rode round the corner on his bicycle singing ”Underneath the Arches.”

Pym walked then ran to Axel's side. He kept his arms above his head as Axel ordered him. He waited impatiently while Axel flashed his army revolver from his waistband and laid it with his own respectfully at the further end of the table. Then at last he dropped his arms far enough to fling them round Axel's neck. I don't remember that they had ever embraced before or did so afterwards. But I remember that evening as the last of childish sentiments between them, the last day of Bern, because I see them hugging and laughing chest to chest, Slav style, before they hold one another at a distance to see what damage the years of separation have done to each of them. And we may a.s.sume from contemporary photographs and from my own memories of the mirror in those days, which still played a large part in the young officer's contemplations, that Axel saw the typical, uncut Anglo-Saxon features of a good-looking, fair young man still trying hard to put on the mantle of experience, whereas in Axel's face Pym witnessed at once a hardening, a hollowing-out, a shaping that was there for ever. Axel would look like this for the rest of his days. Life had had its say. He had the manly, human face that he deserved. The softer contours had gone, leaving an etched jauntiness and a.s.surance. His hairline had retreated but consolidated. Streaks of grey had joined the black, giving it a practical and military appearance. The clown's moustache, the clown's hooped eyebrows had acquired a sadder humour. But the twinkling dark eyes, peering beneath their languid eyelids, were as merry as ever, while everything around them seemed to give depth to their perception.”You look well, Sir Magnus!” Axel declared exuberantly, still holding him. ”You are a fine fellow, my G.o.d. We should buy you a white horse and give you India.”

”But who are you?” Pym cried in equal excitement. ”Where are you? What are you doing here? Should I arrest you?”

”Maybe I arrest you. Maybe I did already. You put your hands up, do you remember? Listen. We are in no-man's-land here. We can arrest each other.”

”You're under arrest,” Pym said.

”You too,” said Axel. ”How's Sabina?”

”Fine,” Pym said with a grin.

”She knows nothing, you understand? Only what her brother told her. You will protect her?”

”I promise I will,” Pym said.

Here a slight pause as Axel pretended to clap his hands over his ears. ”Don't promise, Sir Magnus. Just don't promise.”

For a frontier crosser Axel had come well equipped, Pym noticed. There was not a trace of mud on his boots, his clothes were pressed and official-looking. Releasing Pym, he grabbed a briefcase, plonked it on the table and drew from it a pair of gla.s.ses and a bottle of vodka. Then gherkins, sausage and a loaf of the black bread he used to send Pym out to buy in Bern. They toasted each other gravely, the way Axel had taught him. They refilled their gla.s.ses and drank again, a drink for each man. And it is my recollection that by the time they separated they had finished the bottle, for I remember Axel chucking it out into the lake to the outrage of about a thousand moorhens. But if Pym had drunk a case of the stuff it would not have affected him, such was the intensity of his feeling. Even while they began to talk, Pym kept secretly blinking into corners to make sure everything was how it was when he had last looked, so eerily similar at times was the barn to the Bern attic, right down to the soft wind that used to whirr in the skylights. And when he heard the fox again in the distance, he had the certain feeling it was Bastl barking on the wooden staircase after everyone had gone. Except that, as I say, those sentimental days were over. Magnus had killed them dead; the manhood of their friends.h.i.+p was beginning.

Now it is the way of old friends when they b.u.mp into each other, Tom, to put aside the immediate cause of their meeting until last. They prefer as a prelude to account for the years between, which gives a kind of rightness to whatever they have met to discuss. And that is what Pym and Axel did, though you will understand, now that you are familiar with the workings of Pym's mind, that it was he and not Axel who led this pa.s.sage of the conversation, if only in order to show to himself as well as to Axel that he was totally without sin in the tricky matter of Axel's disappearance. He did it well. He was a polished performer these days.

”Honestly, Axel, n.o.body ever went out of my life so abruptly,” he complained in a tone of jocular reproach as he sliced sausage, b.u.t.tered the bread and generally occupied himself with what actors call business. ”You were there all safely tucked up in the evening, we'd got a bit drunk, said good night. Next morning I hammered on your wall, no answer. I go downstairs and walk into poor old Frau O crying her heart out. 'Where's Axel? They've taken away our Axel! The Fremdenpolizei carried him down the stairs and one of them kicked Bastl.' From all they said, I must have been sleeping like the dead.”

Axel smiled his old warm smile. ”If we only knew how the dead sleep,” he said.

”We held a sort of wake, hung around the house, half expecting you to come back. Herr Ollinger made some useless phone calls and got absolutely nowhere, naturally. Frau O remembered she had a brother in one of the Ministries, he was no good. In the end I thought, To h.e.l.l with it, what have we got to lose? So I went down to the Fremdenpolizei myself. Pa.s.sport in hand. 'My friend's missing. Some men dragged him from the house early this morning, said they came from you. Where is he?' I banged the table a bit and got nowhere. Then two rather creepy gentlemen in raincoats took me into another room and told me that if I made any more trouble the same thing would happen to me.”

”That was brave of you, Sir Magnus,” said Axel. Reaching out a pale fist he tapped Pym lightly on the shoulder to say thanks.

”No, it wasn't. Not really. I mean I did have somewhere to go. I was British and I had rights.”

”Sure. And you knew people at the Emba.s.sy. That's true also.”

”And they'd have helped me out too. I mean they tried to. When I went to them.”

”You did?”

”Absolutely. Later, of course. Not immediately. Rather as a last resort. But they had a go.... So anyway, back I went to the Langga.s.se and we--honestly, we buried you. It was awful. Frau O was up in your room still crying, trying to sort out whatever you'd left behind without looking at it. Which wasn't much. The Fremdenpolizei seemed to have pinched most of your papers. I took your library books back. Your gramophone records. We hung your clothes in the cellar. Then we sort of wandered round the house as if it had been bombed. 'To think this could happen in Switzerland,' we kept saying. Really just like a death.”

Axel laughed. ”It was good of you to mourn me at least. Thank you, Sir Magnus. Did you hold a funeral service also?”

”With no body and no forwarding address? All Frau O wanted to do was look for the culprit. She was convinced you'd been informed against.”

”Who did she think did it?”

”Everyone in turn really. The neighbours. The shopkeepers. Maybe someone from the Cosmo. One of the Marthas.”

”Which one did she choose?”

Pym picked the prettiest and frowned. ”I seem to remember there was a leggy blonde one who was reading English.”

”Isabella? Isabella informed against me?” said Axel incredulously. ”But she was in love with me, Sir Magnus. Why would she do that?”

”Maybe that was the reason,” said Pym boldly. ”She came round a few days after you'd gone, you see. Asked for you. I told her what had happened. She howled and wept and said she was going to kill herself. But when I mentioned to Frau O that she'd called, she promptly said, Isabella is the one. She was jealous of his other women so she informed against him.'”

”What did you think?”

”Seemed a bit far-fetched to me, but then everything else did too. So yes, maybe Isabella did it. She did seem a bit crazy sometimes, to be honest. I could sort of imagine her doing something awful out of jealousy--on an impulse, you know--then persuading herself she hadn't done it in the first place. It's a sort of syndrome, isn't it, with jealous people?”

Axel took his time to reply. For a defector in the throes of negotiating his terms, Pym reflected, he was remarkably relaxed. ”I don't know, Sir Magnus. I don't have your gifts of imagination sometimes. Do you have any other theories?”

”Not really. It could have happened so many ways.”

In the silence of the night, Axel replenished their gla.s.ses, smiling broadly. ”You all seem to have thought about it far more than I have,” he confessed. ”I'm very touched.” He lifted his palms, Slav style, languidly. ”Listen. I was illegal. I was a b.u.m. No money, no papers. On the run. So they caught me, they threw me out. That's what happens to illegals. A fish gets a hook in its throat. A traitor gets a bullet in his head. An illegal gets marched across the border. Don't frown so much. It's over. Who gives a d.a.m.n who did it? To tomorrow!”

”Tomorrow,” Pym said, and they drank. ”Hey--how did the great book go by the way?” he asked in the secret euphoria of his absolution.

Axel laughed louder. ”Go? My G.o.d, it went! Four hundred pages of immortal philosophising, Sir Magnus, Imagine the Fremdenpolizei wading their way through that!”

”You mean they kept it--stole it? That's outrageous!”

”Maybe I was not too polite about the good Swiss burghers.”

”But you've written it again since?”

Nothing could quench his laughter. ”Written it again? It would have been twice as bad next time. Better we bury it with Axel H. You still have Simplicissimus? You haven't sold him?”

”Of course not.”

A pause intervened. Axel smiled at Pym. Pym smiled at his hands, then raised his eyes to Axel.

”So here we both are,” said Pym.

”That's right.”

”I'm Lieutenant Pym and you're Jan's intelligent friend.”

”That's right,” Axel agreed, still smiling.

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