Authors: Malcolm Bradbury
A week after that came the attempted coup against Gorbachev and reform in the Soviet Union; three days, as the press said, that shook the late modern world. The hands of the coup leader, Gennady
Yanayev, visibly shook on the television screens as he announced the taking of emergency powers and the ‘illness’ of Mikhail Gorbachev, isolated at his holiday dacha in the Crimea. It
was not only Yanayev’s hands that shivered; a whole era, a whole epochal direction of history (
my
history, by the way – yours too, perhaps), a whole set of promises and
half-curdled hopes, seemed to be shaking too. Even some of those who had taken the brave step beyond the old imprisoning world began to fear and doubt, as they saw the age turning backwards again.
The rules of blame and confession, of guilt and betrayal, seemed once again to go into reverse.
Three days later, it was the coup itself that died – of courage and determined human spirit, of incompetence and contradiction. So did two of its leaders, and more followed after. Then
came the obscure days of defiance and confession, as those arrested proclaimed their error, their deception by others, their absence on the day, their historical mistake. To me, as they were
filmed, talking, it seemed, without coercion, they all seemed strangely innocent, people from a simpler world. Nobody had told them to blame their parents, discrimination, PMT or passive smoking
for what had gone wrong. They said
I
as if they meant it; they said they
did
it. They had made an error and they announced it. Then as they fell, as others did after them, the statues
of the long century once more began to tumble. Tall, black, phallic Felix Dzherzhinsky came down from his slim pedestal outside the Lubyanka. Stalin toppled, Lenin was swung upside-down, the bust
of squat-headed Karl Marx came off the stand.
Three weeks after that, I attended yet another conference: in Norwich, England, ‘a fine city’, as the signs said as you drove in (and so it had better be, after you’ve
struggled for hours across heath, fen and breckland to reach it). This was the summer’s big one: 650 teachers of English from universities across Europe were gathering in the University of
East Anglia’s Sixties concrete bunkers to found a truly European association. Most came from the European Community; some were from Eastern Europe, highly relieved to be there at all. George
Steiner spoke, and Frank Kermode. Seamus Heaney read from his poems, and three British novelists read sections from their novels in progress, new stories whose ends they seemed not to know. And
this time I spoke myself, in the small section on ‘The Writer as Philosopher’. I had been invited along to make my address at the very last moment. My topic, topical of course because
of his death, was Bazlo Criminale.
Quite honestly I had no wish at all to turn up at the event. As you know, I’d been to far too many of that kind of thing lately, and, whatever the impression you might have, I have never
been all that keen on solemn gatherings of studious specialists. In fact I had firmly decided to refuse the invitation of the organizers when a slightly disconcerting thing occurred. A few days
before the congress began, an odd little letter came through the post. It had a Hungarian stamp on it, and was stuffed with newspaper cuttings. Of course I could not read these, since they were in
Hungarian, which really is one of the world’s more obscure languages, but it was clear enough from the headlines and the photographs that they were the Budapest obituaries of Bazlo Criminale.
With them was a brief handwritten letter. It said: ‘So he has gone now, our great philosopher. I hope it will make you like to write something about him. You know about him – perhaps
not such a big lot, but more than most of those in the West. And now I hear you will go to this big Norwich congress to speak of him. I hope you speak well. Remember, he was a good man, of course a
little bit flexible like I told you, but he did always his best. I am going to come there too. I like very much to see you again, and I think in Norwich they do not have goulasch. Are you still just a little bit
Hungarian? I hope so. I tried hard to show you how. Love + kisses from Ildiko H.’
Of course, I was wildly delighted to get a letter from Ildiko. I was also surprised and mystified. For one thing, I couldn’t imagine how she could possibly have got my home address.
Admittedly she’d had plenty of time working with the contents of my wallet, and could have found one. But since then, my career improving, I’d moved, to Islington – so far into
Islington that I can’t tell you how we despise Camden. And then I couldn’t imagine how she knew I had been asked to the conference. I’d been approached late, I hadn’t even
accepted, and my name wasn’t on the advance conference programme. It’s true that, when I got the telephone call inviting me to speak, I’d been told my name had been suggested by a
Hungarian delegate, who called me one of the few people in Britain equipped to speak on Criminale. Perhaps this had become the chatter of the Budapest bars and bazaars. The letter bewildered me,
but it did settle one thing. I picked up the telephone, called Norwich, and left a message on a machine to say I accepted their invitation.
In my opinion a university campus is a rather strange place, out of time, into space, away from the drab urban grey, in the lush urban green, caught in a separate world that seems to have little
to do with everyday history. In fact it all seemed rather like the strange, happy timeless time Ildiko and I had spent together at Barolo, until at last we were ejected from Paradise and thrown
back on real things again. But this one was a strange form of Paradise. Not so long ago, in a lush river valley some pre-postmodern architect had started pouring concrete; great staggered residence
blocks, huge teaching towers, rose from the grass, speaking of mass and monumentalism and eternity. Maybe it was home to some; it was not to me. It was already history, the white cement slowly
pitting and greying with age – just like the hundreds of professors of English whom I found at the opening conference reception. There they were, pressed tightly together amid breeze-block
walls, looking mystified at one another, as if they had never understood before they belonged to a species that had been replicated so often, all clutching their conference wallets, inspecting each
other’s lapel badges, sipping fizzy Bulgarian Riesling, and chattering extremely loudly. I pushed my way through, past fat structuralists and thin deconstructors, denimed feminists and
yuppified postculturalists, past the great bookstalls and the long publishers’ tables, past the bulletin boards fluttering with news of yet more conferences, looking everywhere for Ildiko.
But, though there was a sign for everything else, there was no sign of her, not a sign at all.
Every new morning I checked the mailbox in the lobby; her pigeonhole, H., was conveniently placed close to mine, J. Only an empty I. intervened. She hadn’t arrived; her conference wallet
and lapel badge, her ticket for the conference trip, her gilt-edged invitation to the final conference dinner, the little touches of identity that such events are kind enough to confer on us,
stayed lying there uncollected. And she certainly didn’t appear at my lecture, which frankly went quite well and attracted a small but reasonably interested audience. I rather enjoyed
standing up there and giving it. As I told you, I’m a verbal person, not a visual person. Criminale at Schlossburg was perfectly right; there is no way a small flickering screen can ever
really bring mental deeds to life. But perhaps, up to a point, words can. I was no scholar, and I certainly didn’t know him all that well. I had read him in snatches, seen him in brief
glimpses, and I was not a literary theorist. I did not entirely understand; but I did have something to say.
What did I say? I didn’t, as I might have done a year before, talk about his mystery, his deceptions, or betrayals. I spoke about his work – the great fiction, above all
Homeless
, the fine drama, the elaborate gestures of his philosophy. One advantage of my travels was that I now had some useful words (like Foucault and Derrida, Horkheimer and Habermas) that
are calculated to unlock the hard hearts of academics. I pointed to his place of historical importance, describing him as the philosopher not of the age of the Cold War and the atomic spy, but of
the time of Chaos Theory, the rock video and the Sony Walkman. In fact, I described him as a Great Thinker of the Age of Glasnost. No one better expressed, I claimed, the problematics of
contemporary thought, the collapse of subjectivity, the crisis of writing, the self-erasure and near-silence of the era after humanism (a fate academic audiences always take gladly in their
stride). I spoke of his great gift of irony, the final bridge for healing the contradictions and emptinesses the world has left us. I hinted, but only vaguely, as another form of irony, at his own
flawed self, the head in the sky, the feet in the mire, the gap between thought and historical need, the irony that, I said, so often strikes us when we consider all the modern and postmodern
masters.
As, afterwards, I gathered my notes and left the grey seminar room, a small dark-haired woman came up and shyly suggested we might take a plastic cup of coffee together. I checked out her bosom
– this is a well-accepted convention in the conference world – and grasped from her lapel that she was Dr Ludmilla Markova, from Veliko Turnovo in Bulgaria. The name – of the
place, not the person – rang bells; I accepted at once. She walked me off to some far more buoyant and postmodern building overlooking a pleasant broadland view, and we sat under indoor trees
in the coffee bar together. ‘Yes, very good lecture, quite deconstructive, I think,’ said Miss Markova, ‘Only one thing. You understand nothing.’ ‘Very likely,’
I said, ‘I see you come from Veliko Turnovo, where he came from. Did you know him?’ ‘I am so much too young,’ said Miss Markova sharply, ‘But yes, you are right, he
was born there, son of a metalworker, in a time of terrors.’ ‘Do they remember him?’ I asked. ‘Not so well,’ said Miss Markova, ‘Father supported the Nazis, so
was shot for fascist after the war. After this his family was not so happy. His mother paid him to go to Budapest, to make a new life. I think he never came back.’
‘You think that helps to explain his books, his mind?’ I asked. ‘Of course,’ said Miss Markova, ‘Nobody understands Bulgaria, it is too small a country, only eight
million. Nobody thinks of us, our image is negative, we are always the toy of others. But Criminale is ours, someone who struggled to exist in a world of forces no one can stop. He was born in
chaos, he lived in chaos. He expected chaos, he wrote of chaos. He saw the chaos that is hidden in all things, reason, history. Remember his great book is called
Homeless
. He had no
certainties to live by, nowhere safe to go. He did not only play with nothingness. He knew it. For us chaos is not a theory, it is a condition. We do not like him so much, but he is very Bulgarian
writer.’ ‘And that’s what I didn’t understand?’ I asked. ‘Oh, your lecture is like all lectures, everything about you, nothing about him,’ said Miss
Markova, ‘You need a Criminale, but it must be your Criminale, not our Criminale.’ ‘He belongs everywhere,’ I said. ‘Not quite,’ said Miss Markova, ‘You
talk about crisis and you mean some death of the subject or how hard it is to understand some book. You talk of the end of self and meanwhile you have very nice one, good suit and everything. You
speak of disaster and despair with such confidence and hope. Perhaps you do not see what seeds you are sowing.’
‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ I said. ‘What happens to all of you here?’ asked Miss Markova, ‘Why do you want the end of humanism, a great new collectivity? I
wish one day you would visit my country, very nice, also sad. Nothing works, chaos comes again, we are not Europe and cannot live like Europe. You see now what happens in Yugoslavia, not a country,
by the way, just lines on the wrong map. Or Russia, anywhere. But I suppose you are much too busy in your busy nice world to come and see how life is really.’ ‘I do have to earn a
living like everyone else,’ I said. ‘Of course, you cannot look at life when you must have a living,’ said Miss Markova, ‘Well, as I say to you, very good lecture, just this
one criticism, you don’t mind? Where do you publish? Promise, send me a copy, or I will never see it.’ ‘I don’t think I will publish it,’ I said, ‘I’m not
really an expert on Criminale.’ ‘You will,’ said Markova, ‘Send it to me when you do it, and I will criticize you, in a very friendly way. Now, don’t you want to go
and hear all those angry feminists?’
Why not? Conferences go on and on; one interesting new thought, one interesting new face, at once gives way to another. I thought no more about Markova, and Ildiko I never saw at all. Her
conference papers remained uncollected, still lying in the pigeonhole when we all left Norwich for the so-called ordinary world. So, I didn’t see her then, and I haven’t seen her since
– not to this day, this very day. I can’t imagine quite what happened. Maybe something detained her in London; there was sharp high-street recession in Britain that summer, and all the
stores were filled with cut-price bargains. Maybe at the last minute she remembered how little she liked conference lectures, and decided to stay in Budapest. Or maybe something else came up;
perhaps she met someone, over a lunch for instance, and some other foreign journey called. I sat down to reply to her letter, and find out what had gone wrong, but when I looked at it I saw there
was no address.
This made me wonder why she had sent it at all, and I read right through it again, hunting for clues. I picked up the press cuttings and shuffled through those. There was one vague hint of
something, though I’m not at all sure what it meant, or means. Beside some complex and unreadable Hungarian text, a photograph caught my eye. It was a bright summer shot of Bazlo Criminale,
taken perhaps five years before; at least the hair was darker and more luxuriant, the expensive suit cut differently from today, the tie wider. He had just stepped out of a yellow cab, in what must
have been New York, in fact somewhere in SoHo or Greenwich Village, because the storefronts behind him were mostly art galleries. Photographs are random, and much harder to read than books. But the
main point of this, if it had one, was that he was carrying a large framed photograph, one of his own erotic nudes. The unclothed model was, I recognized from detailed experience, Ildiko. The same
model, but very expensively clothed, also hung on Criminale’s arm, smiling warmly at the camera. Criminale simply stared expansively, just as he had at Schlossburg.