Klaus Read Free

Albert is with his friend Moritz. They haven’t seen each other for a dozen years, not since Moritz got out, to the Soviet Union.
    “And you still believe?” Albert says.
    Someone had told him that Moritz spent three years in one of Stalin’s camps. Subject for an essay, he thinks: compare and contrast Nazi and Bolshevik discipline of deviants and dissenters.
    “But I was neither,” Moritz would say, “and yes, of course, I still believe.”
    Was that possible? More to the point, could he, as novelist, make it plausible?
    “Some early Christian,” he wrote – but who? Check – “said ‘Credo quia impossibile.’ I believe though it is impossible.” Moritz was in danger of seeming more credible than Albert who had come to believe in nothing, since what he wanted to believe in seemed more impossible than belief in a God in the sky. Or, it goes without saying, in the Kremlin.
    Perhaps they might – Albert and Moritz – be playing chess?
    “You win, my friend, because you do not care if you lose.”
    Someone had said that to him once – where? when? who?
    Klaus got to his feet, slowly and awkwardly. He was sweating again and there were stabbing pains in his calves.
    He lay down on the bed. The smell of the boy lingered there, faintly. It would soon be gone. He drifted into sleep to the sound of the rain pattering on the balcony.
    It was no more than a half-sleep in which he found himself lost in a labyrinth and trying vainly to push his way through the thick box hedges. When he woke he was sweating freely. Dream or drug?
    To the post office. Three letters of no importance; no money. Impossible to eat lunch. An afternoon to kill. And still this rain, certainly less awful than his mental and physical state, yet perhaps contributing to it. How to survive? Cinema, no matter how stupid and depressing the movie. But still light when he emerged. What to do? Impossible to return to the loneliness of the hotel room.
    He sat at a café table, ordered a whisky-soda, took out a notebook, and glanced through it. Jottings for an article on “The Ordeal of the Post-War Intellectual”. Oh là là.

III
    He was melancholy by nature, had always been, despite moments of gaiety, depressive. The drugs of course, but which came first? Cause and effect, effect and cause? Without them, and alcohol, so often life would have been impossible. He understood his own condition, but understanding pointed to no cure.
    Of course there had been times of happiness, ecstatic, excited happiness. Hamburg, for example. There were four of them: Erika naturally, Pamela, Gustaf and himself. They were so very young, though Gustaf was half a dozen years older; nevertheless in his single-minded ambition, innocent in those days, often seemed the child among them. A controlling and brilliant child, unspeakably precocious – and ignorant at the same time. A bizarre and irresistible combination. They were all in love with each other, though later it seemed Gustaf had really been in love with himself alone. Love-hate, for he was burnt up by bitterness and resentment, and all because he had been deprived by birth and upbringing of the world that belonged to the other three by inheritance. Klaus could never forget his first appearance – his irruption into their hotel room like a neurotic messenger of the gods, dressed in flapping leather overcoat, sandals on his feet, a monocle in his eye, his voice rising and soaring like birdsong.
    “Your play,” he shrieked, “marvellous, or will be when I have taken it in hand. I insist I must produce it, with all four of us in the cast…”
    They were overwhelmed. Klaus, utterly dazzled, fell in love with him on the spot. He wasn’t beautiful, except when he chose to be, as Hamlet for instance or a young man in a Wilde comedy. Other times ugly, in Strindberg wickedly ugly. Indeed he could be whatever he wanted. He was all talent, no substance. Klaus adored him for weeks, even months.
    He called to the waiter for