Europa Read online

  Copyright © 1997, 2011 by Tim Parks

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  First published in Great Britain by Seeker & Warburg 1997

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

  10 9876543 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-575-5

  BY TIM PARKS

  Fiction

  Tongues of Flame

  Loving Roger

  Home Thoughts

  Family Planning

  Goodness

  Cara MassiminavShear

  Mimi’s Ghost

  Europa

  Non-Fiction

  Italian Neighbors

  An Italian Education

  Europa (in Athens) does business

  at truly reasonable rates.

  You needn’t fear interraption

  or the gainsaying of whims;

  also, she offers irreproachable

  sheets, and - in winter -

  a coal-fire. This time, Zeus,

  come as you are. No bull.

  Antipater of

  Thessalonika

  Love’s night & a lamp

  judged our vows:

  that she would love me ever

  & I should neper leave her.

  Love’s night & you, lamp,

  witnessed the pact.

  Today the vow runs:

  ‘Oaths such as these, waterwords.’

  Tonight, lamp, witness her lying

  - in other arms.

  Meleager

  Part One

  ‘My dear girl, where there are women

  there are sure to be slaps. It was

  Napoleon who said that, I think.’

  Zola, Nana

  CHAPTER ONE

  I am sitting slightly off-centre on the long back seat of a modern coach crossing Europe. And this in itself is extraordinary. For I hate coaches, I have always hated coaches, and above all I hate modern coaches, not just because of the strong and nauseating smell of plastics and synthetic upholstery, but because of the way the supposed desires of the majority are now foisted upon everybody - I mean myself - in the form of videoscreens projecting from beneath the luggage rack every six seats or so, and of course piped music oozing from concealed loudspeakers. So that even as we pull out of Piazza dell’Università into the morning traffic on Corso Vercelli in this strange city I have lived in for so long of stone and trams and noble facades and Moroccans selling boxes of contraband cigarettes laid out on the pavements under propped-up umbrellas - because it’s raining, as it will in Milan in May - even now, before the long trip has hardly started, we are having to listen to a smug male voice singing with fake and complacent hoarseness about un amore passionale, which he cannot, he claims, forget, and which has destroyed his life forever, a theme, I suspect, that may be the very last thing one needs to be subjected to at only shortly after eight on a Monday morning, and not long after one’s forty-fifth birthday. Though many of the younger travellers are singing along (the way fresh recruits, I believe, will sing along on their way to war).

  Yes, that it was a mistake, I reflect, sitting slightly right of centre on the long back seat of this modern coach setting out across Europe, that it was a big mistake to have come on this trip, I have never doubted from the moment I agreed to it, and perhaps even before, if such a thing is possible. Or let’s say that the very instant I took this decision was also the instant I recognized, and recognized that I had always recognized, that coming on this trip was one of those mistakes I was made to make. You were made to make this mistake, I thought. By which I don’t mean of course to put it on a par with the grander and more spectacular mistakes that have given shape and structure to what one can only refer to as one’s life, just that, upon having agreed, in answer to a request from a colleague, to sign my name at the bottom of a list of other signatures of other colleagues, I immediately appreciated that this was precisely the kind of squalid, absurd and wilful mistake that somebody like myself would make. This is the kind of thing you do, I told myself. You agree to travel for twelve hours on a coach in one direction and then, two days later, for twelve hours on the same coach (a modern coach to boot, with piped music and videos and synthetic smell) in the return direction, in order to lend your name, for the very little it is worth, to a cause which not only do you not support, but which from a purely intellectual point of view, if such a miracle exists, you oppose, you oppose it, and this, what’s more, through an appeal to an institution which again not only do you not support, nor subscribe to in any way, but which you frequently feel perhaps should not exist at all. This is the kind of person you are. And trying to find a comfortable position for my head on a brushed nylon headrest at the back of this big coach presently jammed at a crossing despite the green light, I reject once again that when, and this would have been early April, Vikram Griffiths said to me, clearing his throat and rubbing his fingers across a polished Indian baldness, as he will, or in his sideburns, or in the down of hair behind his thick neck, and then adjusting his spectacles, as he is doing at this very moment some way up the central corridor of this hideous modern coach, leaning stockily, dog nipping his ankles, over the shoulders and doubtless breasts of a young girl, gestures one presumes he makes out of nervousness and a desire to give people the impression that what he is saying is important and exciting - a dramatized nervousness is perhaps what I mean, a nervousness become conscious of itself and then tool of itself in a never-ending and self consuming but always coercive narcissism - when Vikram Griffiths said to me, swallowing catarrh, though without his dog that day, Jerry, boyo - because Vikram is not just an Indian but a Welsh Indian, the only Indian ever to speak Welsh, he claims - Jerry, boyo, we are going to appeal to Europe - clearing his throat again - and we would much appreciate your support, what I should have done, of course, was to laugh in his face, or produce some more polite gesture but of similar subtext, as for example enquiring, Europe? or just, Where, sorry? as though genuinely unaware that such an entity existed.

  I should have refused. It surely would not have been impossible even for a man who is known to be living alone and enjoying a life of very few professional commitments to have found some kind of excuse relative to one of the three designated days when this particular modern coach was to be speeding up interminable kilometres of autostrada and autoroute to present our case to Europe. It should not have been impossible. Yet not only did I not refuse, but I actually leapt at the chance, I said yes immediately. Not only did I not look for an excuse to avoid this tiresome and I suspect hypocritical pilgrimage, but I actually overlooked the perfectly good excuse that did present itself, to wit my daughter’s eighteenth birthday, the party to celebrate which will take place tomorrow in my no doubt much-censured absence. And not only, I reflect, as the coach’s big engine vibrates beneath my seat — and what I’m trying to do I suppose is to grasp the nettle, all the nettles, just as firmly a
s ever one can - not only did I accept immediately, by which I mean without a second’s mental mediation, on reflex as it were, but I then went out of my way to make my acceptance affable and even friendly. I said, Why surely, Vikram, of course I’ll come, and I signed my name immediately and immediately, without mediation, I reached into my pocket to pull out the new wallet I had recently bought, as I have bought so many new things of the small and vaguely intimate variety of late, and paid immediately (which was quite unnecessary) the two hundred and twenty thousand lire the trip is costing, a sum which frankly, given the present state of my finances, I can ill afford. You can ill afford it, I told myself. Though I must say that money for me of late has been taking on the feel of a currency one is eager to be rid of before moving on to some other country, a currency, that is, that will not be current for much longer, and which it does not even occur to me might be exchangeable.

  I paid my money to this Vikram of the dark skin, deep Indian voice and incongruously Welsh accent immediately and in order then to explain a readiness which I feared would not be understood (since when have you ever shown any inclination to fight for the cause?), I actually went so far as to say that since others were making the very considerable effort to organize this trip on everybody’s behalf, the least somebody like myself could do was to show solidarity and come along. I could read a book, I said, during the long journey, I had a lot to read for work, for prospective work, or I could just think (just!). And standing there in the spare because institutional room where our encounter took place, amongst graceless office furniture on a stone-patterned linoleum floor indifferently cleaned by a pampered and unmotivated menial staff, standing there talking to this man whose fecklessness rivals even my own, whose only stable relationship appears to be his passion for the mongrel dog whose hairs smother all his shabby clothes, I was trying to reassure him that there was nothing peculiar in my so rapidly subscribing to his courageous initiative, that there was nothing peculiar in my eagerly adding my name to his list of scrawled signatures. I was almost apologizing, for God’s sake, for enrolling in his expedition. Or rather, I was already concealing what 1 already knew in my heart to be the real and only reason for my behaving in this extraordinary and inconsistent fashion, for -my agreeing, that is, to come on this ridiculous and pointless trip; the same reason, it should be said, why I have now, even as I sit here churning these thoughts on the back seat of this coach as it inches its way out to one of those nodal points where the motorway system plugs into the city so that one can be sucked off at tremendous speed to some other and in every way similar city - the same reason why I have now suddenly buried my face in a book the words on whose pages I not only do not see but do not even really want to see. For she has just stood up to get down her dark leather document-case from the overhead luggage rack. She is in the third seat from the front on the left.

  And to think, to think that for more than six months now, or is it a year? I had been speaking of myself (to myself) as a man healed, as a man emerging once and for all from the throes and miseries, and I suppose it has to be added ecstasies, of what I can only refer to as the great crisis, the great adventure, the great collision of my life, Yes, I had begun to look upon myself as that person who has been through it all and emerges the other side ‘a happier and a wiser man’, who glances back at others crossing life’s rapids with a sort of affectionate and satisfying irony. And chattering to myself in my mind, as one does, or buying furniture for my little flat, or purchasing all those little things - my new wallet - that I suddenly felt it sensible to replace, so that life could start anew, free from every encumbering reminder, I would tell myself: Splendid, not even a whiff of albatross, not a hint of that weight and stench you have carried around with you for so long! Yes, the road to excess, I would quote to myself, and I remember doing this with a cheerful complacence that it is embarrassing to recall, the road to excess - perhaps I would be putting on a CD of Handel or of Mozart (I had been keeping very strict control on my listening material) - truly does lead to the Palace of Wisdom. Though one might have quibbled over the word ‘palace’, I suppose. But even if designations along the lines of ‘service flat or ‘hovel’ or even ‘bunker’ would perhaps be more appropriate for the species of wisdom I had arrived at, the point I’m trying to make is that prior to meeting Vikram Griffiths, our Indian Welshman, in the English Institute staffroom that day, I had felt I was cured. No, better still, I felt I had cured myself. There was pride involved. For at no point had I sought help from anyone, had I? No, I had fought my own way out of the flood, born up by the scraps of reason and self-respect one inevitably clutches at once it becomes clear one has no stomach for the darker option. And if, after what seemed a very long time at sea, the surf had set me down at the last in a place that was far away from where I plunged in and quite unknown to me and above all lonelier than any other place I had ever been before, all the same it did give me every impression once I got there, once I closed the door on my tiny apartment, of being terra firma, of being, that is, a place of arrival, the kind of place to which the words ‘home and dry’, or at least ‘dry’,might be applicable.

  Yes, for six months, I reflect, sitting slightly right of centre on the big back seat of this powerful modern coach setting out across Europe, for six months you have been telling yourself that you are out of the woods, safe, even happy. Not to the point of clapping your hands and stamping your feet, perhaps, but happy enough, happy enough. Until a man for whom you have no particular respect approaches you in your loathsome place of work, an occasional drinking companion, affectedly shabby, determinedly Indian, though brought up entirely Welsh, with a clipboard and a pen in his hand and a nervous over-excited coercive manner manifested above all by his constant throat-clearing and catarrh-swallowing, his constant fingering of sideburns and baldness, and this man explains to you an ambitious initiative for saving the very job you have been trying for years to find the courage to leave, a job that is the source perhaps, when looked at from one angle, of all your woes, and what do you do? What do you do? In the space of a very few seconds you forget the resolve, for such it had seemed, of the last six months and you offer, promptly, immediately, without mediation, your - and these were the very words you used - personal contribution to the group effort. And then because you have never, but never, shown the slightest interest in the past in saving this miserable but of course well-paid, fatally well-paid job which has kept us all hanging on here in a limbo without future or return, trapped us in a stagnant backwater where the leaves of falling years turn slowly on themselves as they drift and rot, and because you are sure that this man-with the handsome sideburns and balding nervousness never for one moment imagined you would lend your support, and in fact only really asked you because you both happened to be in the same room at the same time and he with his clipboard in his hand, you start to make all kinds of affable apologies of the variety, If others are doing so much, the least I could do, etc, and even explaining to him that you won’t really be wasting the time because you can take books to read. I have plenty of work I can take, you said in a ludicrous pretence of having pressing outside interests, and Vikram Griffiths said: Oh, no need to worry about entertainment, boyo - because Vikram, who has no official role in the foreign teachers” union, yet appears to be the only person who is capable of getting anything done, has this way of calling all males of whatever age ‘boyo’, as indeed he has of calling all females of whatever age ‘girlie’, which is part and parcel of declaring his Welshness, his incongruous Welshness, which of course draws attention to his Indianness, his un-Welshness, and also his matey, alcohol-fed nervousness and above all his alternativeness, his belonging to that revolution permanente, as the French like to say, or used to, that army of special and enlightened people, who are now so much an accepted and uninspiring part of our shadow establishment -No need to worry about entertainment, boyo, Vikram Griffiths says, clearing his throat and rubbing his hands together, because almost all the students coming along will
be girlies, of course. At which point this man, no doubt delighted to have found such an unlikely supporter for his imaginative initiative, gives you the kind of wink which is also a leer, the kind of facial contortion, 1 mean, that a stand-up comedian might wish to cultivate so that not a single member of a huge theatre audience could misunderstand his insinuation. Because part of Vikram Griffiths’ manner, I reject, is to assume, ostentatiously, provocatively, a renegade complicity even with people whom he suspects may be on the other side. In fact, he said, his face still untwisting from its leer, the boys are already calling it The Shag Wagon, and he laughed a throaty, smoke-and-whisky laugh, and sucking in catarrh repeated, The Shag Wagon, still laughing, and then was giving me some statistics on what he expected to be the breakdown between the students, mostly girls and numerous, and the foreign teachers, ourselves, mostly men and few, and true to the totally inconsistent and 1 think 1 ought to recognize shameful way I was behaving, I am behaving, I laughed too. The Shag Wagon! I shouted with a quite unforgiveable mirth. The flicking Shag Wagon, who thought of calling it that? It’s brilliant! And Vikram said, Georg thought of it. You know what Georg’s like.

  Which I did. I do.

  And he picked up his list, which already had her name and Georg’s name signed on it, and, smelling of dog, dog hairs on his shabby jacket, though he can hardly bring the creature into the University, he went across the room to talk to another of my colleagues, while what I was immediately trying to remember was whether their names, hers and Georg’s, had been one above the other or one below the other on that list I had just signed and whether they had been written in the same colour and hence perhaps the same pen. And I couldn’t remember. As even now, sitting on the back seat of this modern coach setting out towards the putative heart of Europe and forcing my mind’s eye to open once again on the moment when I saw that list on his clipboard, the moment I so precipitously and it has to be said pathetically added my name to it, even now I cannot recall whether their names were together, or far apart, and not remembering, but trying so hard to remember, I am obliged for it must be the millionth time to acknowledge how humiliating it is to be throwing all my mental energy at a matter which is of absolutely no importance, and not even pleasurable in the way that so many other matters of absolutely no importance but to which one regularly gives one’s mind, as for example billiards, or TV documentaries, or even, though more rarely, one’s work, can be, if nothing else, at least pleasurable. Why does a man feel he has to take his dog with him everywhere? I ask myself. Why does a man have to put himself so much in evidence! An ugly dog at that. And how could it possibly matter whether she and Georg signed the Strasbourg list with the same pen and hence were perhaps together at the moment of signing? How could such a trivial coincidence signify anything at all?