Merciless Gods Read online

  Instead of answering she threw her bag on a chair, barked at him to look after it and walked over to the bar herself. She returned with a white wine, placed the backpack between her feet and took the seat.

  He leaned over to her, whispered, ‘I missed you.’

  And he had, he really had; he had pined for the presence of her by his side. The city he had wandered through that afternoon had seemed grimier and far less miraculous than when she was with him, when she was seeing what he was seeing, taking in what he was taking in. He was jealous of all that she had done that day without him.

  ‘I didn’t miss you at all.’

  The bar, the city, everything fell away and there was only a rising panic, a fear of what she would say next. During and after their worst rows, their most cauterising arguments, he had fantasised about life without her and had decided it would be possible. He knew he could survive leaving her. It was a truth that he zealously kept from her, a trump card that he would only play if she dared him with the threat of walking out. In the past, that certainty had warmed him: that he could answer back that he didn’t need her. But now, for the first time not assured of her devotion to him, he realised it was not the truth. He could not live without her.

  He dared not speak.

  A black youth, a khaki satchel flung over his shoulder, was running against a red light, crossing the road towards them. The youth jumped onto the kerb and walked over to the table.

  ‘How you all doing?’ He was remarkably handsome, still only an adolescent, with an open sincere smile. His clothes stank of his sleeping in them. ‘I am very sorry to disturb you but I was hoping you might have some loose change to give me.’

  Trina had already brought her backpack to her knee, was opening it. Bill pulled out his wallet. He took out a ten-dollar note and handed it to the youth.

  The smile widened. ‘Sir, I am so very grateful.’

  There was a whistle from behind the bar. The three of them turned; the bartender was gesturing to the young man that he should leave. He dipped his head, almost a bow, and sauntered up the street.

  Trina was shaking her head. ‘Was that some kind of fucking absolution? You think that makes up for what you said?’

  Before he could speak, before he could even begin to think about what a possible answer could be, two older gentlemen came into the bar and sat at the next table. They were both slim and dressed in fine linen suits. The taller man was wearing a beret, which he placed on the table as soon as he sat down. He took off his jacket and carefully folded it across his knees. They were both softly spoken but Bill was sure that they were speaking Italian. One of the men took out a small map of the city and examined it while the other went to the bar, returning with two glasses of beer. He nodded to Bill and Trina. The two men clinked glasses and took a sip. Bill watched as the tall man leaned over and very tenderly wiped a line of foam from the other man’s top lip. Oh, he realised, they are lovers.

  Trina got up and went over to their table. He heard her introduce herself and the three of them began a conversation in Italian. He did not feel slighted at all: he adored it when his wife spoke the language. She seemed more animated, more alive, when she spoke in her parents’ tongue. At one point one of the men pointed to Bill and she said something that made the three of them laugh. Bill lifted his shoulders and frowned in pretend annoyance.

  Trina sat back down beside him. ‘They came to New York twenty years ago,’ she explained, ‘and they haven’t been back since then. Vincente,’ she indicated the taller man, ‘is from Abruzzo, not far from where my father was born. Carlo is from the Veneto. They met in university, in Padua, thirty-five years ago. Isn’t that wonderful?’

  Bill wished she had said that without sounding so melancholy. ‘It is wonderful.’

  Trina smiled at him, the first smile she had offered him all afternoon. ‘Carlo said that you are very handsome and I said that you need to keep your weight down.’

  Bill laughed, heartily, hungrily; he tilted his head back and roared. He was sated by her smile.

  After their second drink he asked her what she had thought of the Whitney.

  ‘The smug emptiness of the work stunned me.’ Trina gazed out onto the street. ‘I thought it was art that suited a city that had brought an entire economy to near collapse by speculating on the value of nothing.’

  Trina shook her head as they both watched an old Chinese woman walk by carrying an enormous plastic bag full of empty aluminium cans. ‘I thought the art there was arrogant and vain and that none of it will survive. I don’t think any of it deserves to survive.’

  He listened, wanting to tell her about the video installation, how that had not been cheap or inert, that it had moved him. But he dared say nothing.

  After dinner they took the lift to the rooftop bar of the hotel for one final drink, a whisky for him and a vodka and soda for her. But a DJ was playing relentlessly anodyne house music, it was crowded, with every sofa and chair taken, and the bouncer at the door had moved to forbid them entry till Bill flashed him their room key.

  They stood with their drinks in a corner, crushed against each other, looking east along Houston to the shadows of Alphabet City.

  ‘This was probably a really tough neighbourhood.’ Trina was shouting to be heard, her words sliding into each other. ‘Imagine what it would have been like when Vincente and Carlo came here twenty years ago.’

  He could only nod. The pulsating drone of the music, the constant motion of a train of people pressing by them, the semidarkness which strained his eyes: he wanted it all gone, he wanted only to be alone with his wife.

  Her lip curled, her face fell and he thought for a moment she was about to cry. ‘You bastard,’ she said up close to him, ‘when we do have kids, you dare say one racist thing to them, just one, and I swear I’ll leave you and take them away from you.’ She was thumping his chest, hard.

  Next to them, a young woman giggled and whispered something to her boyfriend.

  Bill took hold of Trina’s hands. ‘I promise,’ he repeated, frantically, earnestly, like a schoolboy pledging a vow on his mother’s life. ‘I promise, I promise.’

  He had never been so desperate to assure her—and himself—of anything.

  When they got back to their room, they found that the maid had scattered a handful of mints on the pillow where they had left the tip.

  The Hair of the Dog

  MY MOTHER IS BEST KNOWN FOR giving blowjobs to Pete Best and Paul McCartney in the toilets of the Star-Club in Hamburg one night in the early sixties. She said that Best’s penis was thicker, the bigger one, but that McCartney’s was the more beautiful. ‘Paul’s cock was elegant,’ she liked to say. I know too that she had spat both men’s semen into a tissue, and that neither man had looked at the other while she took turns servicing them. Afterwards, she had shared a cigarette with Paul.

  There is no exact date for when the above incident took place but we do know that The Beatles were performing in Germany from 1960 to the end of 1962. The musicians would have not yet been twenty; my mother, born towards the end of the war, would have been even younger.

  My grandmother was a widow when she gave birth to my mother, having lost her husband in the battle for the Dukla Pass. Even on her deathbed my grandmother refused to name my mother’s father, preferring as she did the entire time I’d grown up in her house to remain silent about the war years and those following.

  I know that much of my mother’s bitterness about her own mother arose from the obduracy of this denial. My mother saw it, as did many of her generation, as an unwillingness to face the past, as a denial that went beyond the personal and embodied the collective stink of German history. But I don’t see it that way. It was painful for my Oma to stir up those memories. Though she never told me of it directly, I sensed her loneliness. I was not burdened by it; I think it made me want to please her more. I do know that she loved her husband; the way she sighed when she spoke his name, Manfred, when she remembered him, told me that
. And she must have remembered him every day of her life, or at least every day of those eighteen years I lived with her. Until I was an adult and left home, I would hear her sigh his name at least once a day.

  •

  My own father was called Eddie Price. He was a booking agent for nightclubs and music halls in England. My mother had already had two terminations by the time she was pregnant with me and there is no doubt I would have been her third but for a dream she had on the eve of visiting the abortionist. In the dream, she was back in the science laboratory of the Realschule. All she remembers is seeing two jars, each containing a foetus suspended in formaldehyde, and that next to them there was a third jar smashed on the shelf. She awoke convinced that if she had another abortion, she would never be able to bear a child again.

  I met Eddie once: we shared an uncomfortable lunch in a pub in Manchester. A handsome man in his youth, he was by then obese, his face destroyed by too many years of drinking, smoking and God knows what other excesses. He had married an English woman, Louise, but his wife knew nothing of me. Eddie died in the early eighties and I am still in contact with my half-brother, Alan, who is a generous, stolid northern Englishman. My two half-sisters, Bernie and Alice, still want nothing to do with me.

  As I did not live with my mother as a child, what I know of her life over this period comes from reading her first book, the memoir Der Tropfen der das Fass zum Überlaufen brachte. In English this literally means ‘the drop that made the barrel run over’, and has the sense contained in the phrase ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’. But I think my mother’s English translator made the right choice rendering the title as The Hair of the Dog, for that is indeed the sense and the spirit of the book. It is just under ninety pages in the original German, a fiercely honest account of an addict who is unashamed of her drinking, who makes no apologies for her ferocious love of alcohol. It was difficult for me to read it at first—shocking, really—for very early in the book she describes how, faced with the choice of sobriety and motherhood or abandoning herself to the bottle, she chose the latter.

  She calls herself Maria in the book, and she doesn’t use my real name or that of my father, but she does call my Oma by her name, and she begins the book with what has become its most notorious passage: on her knees in the filthy toilet at the back of the Star-Club in Hamburg, sucking off two of The Beatles. I guess that also must have been a shock to read when I was fifteen, but it is the cavalier abrogation of any responsibility towards her child that of course hurt me the most.

  ‘It’s just a book,’ she would say to me, and would then turn to her mother. ‘It’s just a fucking book, don’t take it too seriously.’ ‘Your mother takes responsibility for nothing.’ My grandmother would spit out those words like a curse.

  They would have no effect on my mother; she would just turn around and laugh. ‘That’s a good one, you old witch. I love the audacity you have to talk to me about responsibility.’

  I have reread Der Tropfen der das Fass zum Überlaufen brachte recently and now I can see that it is indeed a marvellous book, written with that stupendous combination of arrogance and self-revelation that makes the first work of any writer with genuine talent such an electric experience to read. It is also undisciplined: the best writing in it is about drink, about chasing drink, about the euphoria that comes with drinking. But there are also rants in it, ill-informed condemnations of West German politicians and artists, long patches of repetitive exploits. There is righteous fury in it as well: her character Maria would gladly incinerate the whole of Western Europe for the inhumanity of the Holocaust and the cowardice of collaboration—but there is not one scrap of genuine kindness.

  Victor thinks me too critical. He says that though the writing is sometimes incoherent, he admires the avenging urgency of my mother’s tone. ‘What else could her generation do?’ he asks, always rhetorically. ‘They had to create an art that punished the poisonous legacy of National Socialism.’

  I don’t bother arguing with him. He is an Australian, of European heritage admittedly, but his knowledge of European history is limited to the broad brushstrokes of a television documentary. I have learned not to labour the point with him; he gets childishly irritable and offended when I counter that he wants history to be written at the level of good guys versus bad guys, when I reproach him for not being subtle in his thinking. I once accused him of thinking like an American and, my God, was that a mistake. He refused to speak to me for a week.

  It is not only with him: I have learned that discretion is necessary here in my adopted country when it comes to politics. But occasionally I will meet a German traveller to Melbourne and it is blissful to talk our language for an hour, to give vent to all my dissatisfaction and annoyance with Australia.

  But always the traveller will ask, ‘So, do you want to come back home?’ and I’ll answer, Nein. Nein nein nein.

  I wish that Victor had met my Oma.

  •

  My mother adored Victor. ‘He’s such a beautiful man,’ she would say to me in German, loudly, so he could hear. ‘He is a god.’

  She flirted with him and he basked in her admiration. And of course he loved her notoriety; I’m sure that he was writing letters back home nonchalantly mentioning that his German lover’s mother had sucked off Paul McCartney and was a celebrated cult writer. But he also saw how mean alcohol could make her. One terrible night, in a bar on the Dudenstrasse, my mother flayed me viciously, insulting my looks, my intelligence, my beliefs, my hopes, my dreams.

  ‘You are a nothing,’ she accused. She prided herself on being non-violent—oh yes, she was all peace and fucking love—but I’d rather she had smacked me or punched me or scratched my face. It would have been easier to bear.

  Victor shouted at her, I had never seen him so furious, and he led me away as I wept, my eyes swollen, everyone staring at us.

  It was a bitterly cold night. That ruthless Berlin wind was carving right through us and I just kept saying to him, ‘Take me to Australia, please take me away from here, please take me to your home.’

  And Victor, who had been dreaming about the romance of Europe since adolescence, who had read across philosophy and philology in order to be an intellectual in Europe, agreed. He held me in his arms that night on a bench in the Britzer Garten, and told me about swimming in the savage ocean, about the smells of the desert, about crocodiles and wombats and kangaroos.

  It was February and I worked double shifts at the bar to save money. In April, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I bought my one-way ticket to Australia.

  •

  My mother’s second book is called Brüderchen und Schwesterchen—Brother and Sister. It is a dark, unsettling fable, pornographic and compelling. It begins with two adolescent siblings discovering that their mother has disappeared. The father is long dead and there seems to be no one else in the village they trust or who shares any kinship with them. No location is named, nor a year, but through some carefully placed clues—the styling of the boy’s collar; a film magazine with Fredric March on the cover—we know it takes place in the early 1930s. Left alone, Rolf and Lisbeth, the brother and sister, begin to play at marriage, first cautiously, then passionately, and finally, desperately. The danger and release of their fucking is intoxicating but very soon they begin to tear at each other, wanting to destroy one another. By the end they have starved to death, Rolf expiring first as Lisbeth lies next to him. She hears his final breath and she also believes she can hear the first soft murmurings of their child’s heartbeat deep inside her.

  It is, of course, perverse; the unrepentant eroticism of her portrayal of incest was deemed outrageous, but by the end of the twentieth century, scandal no longer necessarily meant being an outcast. The book was a tremendous critical success. And that is how it should be. Brother and Sister gets under your skin and remains there; after reading it you want to raise your head and gulp for air, so entirely has her writing seduced you and dragged you into the siblings’ squ
alid, hermetic world.

  Many critics wrote of the novel as some kind of allegory of German history, sifting through the text to uncover metaphors for Weimar or for the divided Germanys of the Cold War. Undoubtedly such readings are accurate, but I am not a critic. My mother always had too much to say about history. But I think that novel is her finest work not because of the ferocity of her writing but because it is not a story about herself. I can read it without seeing her, something I cannot do with the memoir. I wonder too about the dead father in the novel. By the fogginess of the children’s recollections of him it is clear that he died in the Great War. Their memories of him are tender. We understand that the mother’s desertion of her children may have arisen from her inability to come to terms with the loss of her husband.

  The story is oblique but, as it was written after my grandmother’s death, I’d like to believe that Brother and Sister was also a rapprochement with my Oma’s ghost, that for the first time my mother could look at her personal past with some tenderness and could admit to her own mother’s suffering.

  We never really had the chance to have that conversation. I didn’t return to Germany for the publication of the second book, though I sent her a long lauding letter when I read it, and when I started to speak about it that last time in Hamburg, she dismissed my question with an exaggerated groan. ‘Mein Gott! It’s just a fucking book, don’t take it too seriously.’

  Victor, of course, who desires happy endings in reality if not in fiction, remains convinced that the novel proves that my mother had forgiven her own mother. All I know is that the morning we had agreed to visit my Oma’s grave, my mother rang, off her face, incoherent, to say she couldn’t make it.

  Unlike Victor, I am sceptical of happy endings.

  •

  My mother died just after her last book was published. It is a self-lacerating story, another memoir, about the destruction of age. It is merciless and very funny. She describes what it is like to try and masturbate when your cunt has become so dry that even poking one little finger up there causes unbearable pain, how the smells her body emits disgust her, what it is like to wake up after a night of boozing with excrement caking your buttocks and your thighs. She describes hiring a young Turkish man to touch her, to just run his fingers across her tits, her stomach, her cunt; how she witnessed the grim concentration in his eyes as he fought back his aversion to her body. The author is aware of the great cosmic joke time has played on her, leaving her lust and her fantasies sharp, youthful and intact, while deracinating and drying up the ageing body. And that is its title, Zeitlich. Time.