Out of the Line of Fire (2 page)

There is a scene in part three where the narrator, seeking information on Wolfi, is granted an audience with a Berlin policeman. The Inspector (that capital I makes me think of Gogol) listens to Wolfi’s story impassively. ‘When I finished he remained silent for some minutes. “You like Handke?” he said finally.’ These are the same words Wolfi puts to the narrator early in part one, at the start of their friendship, yet in the intervening pages the question has evolved from something innocent and happy to something uncertain and unnerving.

So why, in the years after his exhilarating debut, didn’t we hear more from Mark Henshaw, who is now sixty-three? The simple answer is that he stopped speaking, in a literary sense. Aside from a couple of crime novels (written, as J. M. Calder, in collaboration with his fellow Canberran John Clanchy), Henshaw did not publish, excepting the catalogues and other pieces produced in the course of his day job as a curator at the National Gallery of Australia.

That long silence was broken in late 2014 with the publication of a new novel,
The Snow Kimono
. Its existence resolves a question its author might appreciate: is Mark Henshaw, author of the remarkable Australian novel
Out of the Line of Fire
, real? Yes, he is.

Out of the Line of Fire

Ort und Personen der Handlung sind
frei erfunden. Jede Ähnlichkeit mit wirklichen
Personen ist rein zufällig.

All characters are fictional.
Any similarity between persons
living or dead is purely
coincidental.

FOR WOLFI

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s letters to Bertrand Russell are taken from
The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell
[Unwin Books, 1975].

Ramon Fernandez, extended quotes from
Internal Exile and other stories
[Kreuzer Verlag, 1982].

Klaus Brambach, ‘W.C.W. meets H.H. in Central Park’ from
Neue Gedichte
[Suhrkamp, 1981].

I am grateful to Dr T. Hatzenbühler for allowing me to use five lines from an article by him that appeared in
Schrift,
vol. 9, no. 1, which was originally given as a paper to the Verein Deutscher Schriftsteller in June 1986.

W.H. Walsh’s essay on Kant in
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy
[Crowell Collier and Macmillan, Inc, 1967] was of considerable use to me in the transcription of some sections of Part Two.

Note: Wolfi’s name is pronounced ‘Volfi’. The initial syllable rhymes with ‘golf’. Andrea is pronounced ‘Un-dray-a’.

…and since your outer and your inner world are soldered together like the two halves of a shell and enclose you, the mollusk…

Jean Paul

Even mechanistic views of man which see him as a complex of complex chemical reactions still lead to the most astonishing situation. Here is an arrangement of matter which takes other matter, re-shapes it, and then refers to it as ‘art’!

Swen Rhahkma

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel,
If on a winter’s night a traveler.
These are the words Italo Calvino selected to open his novel
If on a winter’s night a traveller.
Astonishingly he sets them out in the same order. Had Walter Abish chosen the same words he might have begun, after, of course, placing them in alphabetical order: You, Italo Calvino, are a winter’s night traveler about to begin reading a new novel
If.
But as yet he has not, and until he does we will have to wait.

In fact Calvino begins his novel: ‘Stai per cominciare a leggere il nuovo romanzo
Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore
di Italo Calvino.’ Thus the original avoids a peculiar problem which arises only in the translation—‘viagiatore’ with a single ‘g’ would simply be wrong.

The cover of the 1982 English Picador edition of the novel shows the title, ‘If on a winter’s night a traveller’, set into a transcription of the first page. It too begins: ‘You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel
If on a winter’s night a traveller
.’ There is already then a difference, admittedly a minor difference, between the first line of the text on the cover of the novel and the first line of the text in the body of the novel itself—the difference between ‘traveler’ and ‘traveller.’ But is this difference as minor, as insignificant or innocuous, as it first appears? Isn’t ‘traveller’, with its double ‘ll’, English, whereas ‘traveler’, with its single ‘ll’, is American? And doesn’t this alert us to the fact that, as a translation, it has been filtered through a particular linguistic, cultural and conceptual sieve, that an English translation is likely to be substantially different from an American one, and that if we were to compare the cumulative effect of the differences which might arise in these two hypothetical translations against the original, might we not end up reading three entirely different novels? And, in fact, isn’t this part of what
If on a winter’s night a traveller
is about; not the problems of translation (at least, not exclusively), but the nature of the problem of the perception of the original in the first place.

Beginning a novel then is a difficult thing. Books have been written on the subject, from Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
: ‘Vse schastlivye sem’i pokhozhi drug na druga, kazhdaya neschastlivaya sem’ya neschastliva po-svoemu’ [All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way] to Camus’
The Outsider
: ‘Aujourd’hui Maman est morte’ [Mother died today]. And what about Kafka’s problematical opening to
The Trial
: ‘Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben’ [Someone must have slandered Josef K]?

Whatever the case, this first sharp barb designed to ensnare the reader, to capture his or her attention, is likely to cost the writer more time and effort than any other sentence in the entire novel.

But what does one do if the novel is based on fact?

Through the half open door I can see the complementary arcs of an arm and a leg. The gap in the doorway is narrow and I cannot see the person’s back, although I can tell that they are facing away from me. Held in the outstretched arm is a wooden-handled mirror and because the arm is raised the shirt sleeve has fallen back to the bend in the elbow leaving most of the forearm bare. It is difficult to tell what the person, who is male, is doing. He could be practising fencing and even while I watch he appears to execute strange little lunging movements. He is muttering to himself as he does so but I am unable to make out just what it is he is saying.

The upstairs toilet flushes and I assume that once again it has been fixed. This is the second time in the week I have been here that it has been blocked. As I move back down the corridor towards the stairs I can hear what sounds like an argument break out in the courtyard below. Then the ground-floor door crashes violently to and someone begins heavily ascending the stairs. I lean over the balustrade and my landlady’s large floral buttocks appear briefly on the landing below. I know this is going to be unpleasant. She has already made it clear that we are barely tolerated. Most of us are foreigners, we use too much hot water, our German is bad and worst of all, we compromise her social standing.

She is very overweight and stops two steps short of the second landing. She stands there with one bloated hand on the rail. She has not yet seen me and is wheezing audibly. The noise is quite disgusting. I realize I am witnessing one of those rare and intensely private moments of another human being who, had they realized they were being observed, would have concealed their quite distressing vulnerability. Despite this, I must confess I have difficulty feeling sympathy for her.

Finally she raises her head. When she sees me she gives a tiny involuntary start which sends a tremor coursing up through her body. Then she bellows: Vardashdoo?

I stare uncomprehendingly back at two tiny black eyes set in the fat of her pink face. We are so close that I can see the beads of perspiration that have begun to form on her forehead beneath her hairline and amongst the dark stubble of her upper lip.

Vardashdoo? she repeats even more angrily.

Bitte?

She turns away from me and, with an exasperated wave of her hand, continues up the stairs. Not wanting to get involved in another confrontation with her I make my way down to the ground floor.

Outside it is obvious what has happened. A section of downpipe lies disconnected in the courtyard. Two men in overalls are washing their hands in a bucket of water a few metres away. They glare at me as I pass. One of the other ‘guests’, the one I had been watching through the open door, is looking down on the scene from his upstairs window. He gives a friendly wave and I wave back. I unlatch the gate and as I head off to town I can hear my landlady’s irate voice again coming from one of the open windows above me.

If Italo Calvino had written these lines he would probably stop here and ask: How adequate is this as an introduction? Not very? Why not? After all, this is the way it happened. Perhaps the tone is not quite right. Perhaps the description ‘two tiny black eyes set in the fat of her pink face’ doesn’t sit well with the neutrality of ‘two men in overalls are washing their hands in a bucket of water’. But aren’t they the same thing? Two little imagist poems, one no different from the other?

I’m sure every writer ponders over such questions. Is this what I want to say? Does this work, is it adequate, does it introduce the themes, the characters, the locations I wish to develop? If not why not, and how do I change it so that it does?

But if a writer is dealing with real events doesn’t he or she have a moral obligation not to change them, not to embellish them, not to pollute their ordinariness by poeticizing the banal? Does it really matter that we know nothing about what sort of shirt the person I stood watching through the open door was wearing? If I had said that it was a blue-checked shirt, which it was, whose sleeves were open at the cuff, is this additional information significant? And significant by what criterion? And if I had written that her tiny black eyes were like ‘raisins dropped into the soft custard of her face’, is the description of her any the better for this? No, of course it isn’t. This is dreadful, dreadful stuff.

And then there’s the problem of those complementary arcs. Initially one doesn’t even know whether they’re clothed or unclothed, male or female. Perhaps, at first, we think they are the smooth, naked, sun-tanned limbs of a beautiful young ballerina practising a pas de deux. It is only retrospectively that they become clothed and male, and later wave down to us in the courtyard below.

So there appear to be at least two problems confronting the writer writing about real events. Firstly, the words he or she uses seem to add some sort of fictionalizing distortion to the events they purport to describe and, secondly, even when a writer thinks they have got it right there still appears to be infinite room for ambiguity and imprecision. You begin to wonder where truth actually lies.

Romantic Heidelberg, Germany’s oldest university town. Former capital of the Palatinate, Heidelberg is situated on the banks of the Neckar river where it spills out onto the broad plain of the Rhine. Hölderlin, who went mad, wrote poetry about it. So did Goethe. Famous philosophers (Kant, Hegel, Heidegger) walked its famous Philosophenweg. And if they were alive today they too could walk to the summit of the Heiligenberg and visit the cold grey stone arena where the Party faithful were harangued by the Führer.

Yes, Heidelberg—it’s old, it’s beautiful, it’s romantic and if you’ve never seen a place like it before it’s an enchanting fairy-tale-like town with its famous ruined castle hovering over the city, its narrow streets, its confusion of red-tiled roofs, its sombre churches, its towers and its graceful arched bridges, its undisclosed skeletons in its historical closet and off in the distance the tiny, yet unmistakable, shapes of its nuclear silos. Yes, even the charm of Heidelberg has had to make way for progress.

In December 1795, Hölderlin (1770–1843), one of Germany’s greatest poets, took a post as a tutor in the house of a Frankfurt banker, J. F. Gontard. At the time he was twenty-five years old. Here he soon fell in love with his employer’s young wife Suzette who, euphemistically, returned his affection. In 1798, however, he left the household after a scene with Gontard, the exact nature of which remains undisclosed, and after 1799 did not see Suzette again. In 1802 he returned home to Nurtingen in a seriously disturbed mental state. After a period at an institution he was entrusted to the care of a local master carpenter, named Zimmer, with whom he spent the next thirty-seven years of his life, without writing another single line.

Suzette Gontard died, significantly, in 1802, aged thirty-three. There seems, then, to be more to this than meets the eye.

The house itself is an unimpressive three-storeyed L-shaped structure, the walls of which are covered in white stucco. The gables are quite steep and the patterned eaves are painted black. Part of the house is occupied by my landlady’s family—three faceless children and a husband who appears not to work—while the rest has been converted into single rooms for visiting students. There is a bathroom and a small kitchen on each floor. The kitchens are ill-equipped, effectively discouraging any unnecessary consumption of electricity. Despite the fact that the house was probably built quite recently, more than likely during the fifties, it still has something characteristically German about it. It is solid. It will last.

There is a knock at my door. It is so soft that at first I think I am mistaken. It could so easily have been part of the music which is coming from the radio on the shelf above me. The music too is soft. It is Berg’s
Lyric Suite.
I know the piece well and yet it now seems somehow quite strange. This strangeness has something to do with the smooth reassuring voice that introduced it: ‘Jetzt hören wir etwas von Alban Berg. Geboren 1885 in Wien, Berg lebte…’ At the end I know I will hear the same soft authority announce: ‘Und das war Bergs Lyrische Suite. Es ist viertel vor zwölf und…’ But until now I have never heard Berg’s music enclosed within such a German framework. Somehow this has made the experience quite different.