A Dog's Life(46)

A passage in the epilogue of Athene Palace strikes me as especially perceptive:

I left the Athene Palace at the end of January 1941, knowing that Germany’s bloodless conquest of Romania was as complete as if her armies had trampled the land underfoot and her airplanes bombarded the cities from the skies… Here nobody complained about the ‘end of civilization’ just because Hitler tried to set up a mere one-thousand-year Empire. A people that saw the Roman Empire come and go and saw all sorts of barbarians invade their country, and still survived, does not believe there is a definite end to anything. Such people are instinctively wise in the strange ways of history, which invariably seems to run into compromise, and so they are less afraid than many great nations of the West. The Romanians possess to the highest degree the capacity of receiving the blows of destiny while relaxed. They fall artfully, soft and loose in every joint and muscle as only those trained in falling can be. The secret of the art of falling is, of course, not to be afraid of falling and the Romanians are not afraid, as Western people are. Long experience in survival has taught them that each fall may result in unforeseen opportunities and that somehow they always get on their feet again.


Under Cleo’s patient tutelage I began to understand Romanian grammar. A Course in Contemporary Romanian also contains, besides the inevitable lists of nouns and verbs and advice on how to employ them correctly, a selection of poems by the greatest Romanian poets. Thus it was that I discovered Mihai Eminescu, the great Romantic who is regarded as his country’s Keats, and George Bacovia, the melancholy genius whose life was plagued by drink, depression and bouts of madness, but whose poetry has an eerie radiance.

At school in the 1950s, my English teachers had encouraged me to learn poems by heart. It has been a lifelong practice. With Cleo to correct and improve my pronunciation, I committed one of Eminescu’s poems to memory. ‘Peste Vîrfurí’ (O’er the Treetops) has the poet hearing the sound of a distant horn in the woods where the alder trees are shaking in the evening breeze. The moon appears and the sound fades away and he thinks of soothing death.

In 1996, I returned to Romania with a group of writers. On the first day I attended a reception in a Bucharest bookshop to celebrate the publication of two of my novels. Cleopatra’s mother was there, and I told her how much I liked her beautiful daughter. A Romanian friend, Irina, asked me to recite ‘Peste Vîrfurí’, which I did. My brief recitation made front page news the next morning. I love the absurdity of it, and a certain sweetness. An Englishman reciting a masterpiece by the national poet seemed to assume more importance than murder or politics. Romanians are overjoyed when foreigners exhibit an interest in their literature – which is little translated, and mostly unknown abroad.

In Oradea, near the Hungarian border, the mayor welcomed the British and Romanian writers who had come to take part in a three-day seminar. Among those writers was the novelist Jonathan Coe. The mayor had no trouble with ‘Jonathan’, but ‘Coe’ confused him. He hesitated, and then pronounced it ‘Coaie’, to hoots of laughter from all the Romanians. ‘Coaie’ means ‘balls’.

On that trip, my publisher, Denisa, gave me a copy of the complete works of Bacovia. It’s a treasured book. On those mornings when I was alone in the park with Circe I would mutter his poems under my breath as I threw the ball for her.

Cleo went back to Bucharest, where she found a job with an American company. She is married now, and hopes to emigrate to Canada with her husband. She sees no future in Romania, which Bacovia encompasses in the exquisite line O, ţară tristă, plină de humor. ‘O, sad country, full of humour.’





Raskolnikov



I called him Raskolnikov, after the would-be Superman turned repentant murderer in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. He was tall and pale, with lank hair and a black beard. He wore a long black overcoat with black trousers and black shoes that had flapping soles. His white shirt was collarless, in the Russian style.

From a short distance, he looked anguished, his burning dark eyes signalling pain fiercely borne. ‘It’s Raskolnikov to the life,’ I caught myself muttering the first time I saw him coming towards me on Uxbridge Road. I knew I stared at him in amazement. Then, as he passed me and the dog, he began to sing, in a very loud and effeminate voice:


Step inside, love,

Let me find you a place


and stopped abruptly, his frail body shaking with laughter.

I passed him often that year. He seemed to live on the streets of west London, this vision of blackness and spiritual torment with a passion for a song by Paul McCartney. I sighted him once in the park as he walked determinedly across the grass, laughing fiendishly.