Russell Hoban - Kleinzeit

Business boomed again. £ 3.53 by lunch time. Kleinzeit was paid for music, poems, fortunes. It’s all a matter of thinking big, he realized, and considered raising the poems to 15p. No, he decided. People pay big for fortunes but not for poems. Let the poems be a bargain.

Late in the afternoon a fading lady appeared. Fifty cats and some sooty geraniums in a window box was Kleinzeit’s guess. Two meals a day and a diary in purple ink. Too poor for a fortune, and 10p for a poem would eat into the cat food. Let her have a free listen, he thought, and did a Dies Irae variation on the green turtle theme.

‘Yesterday,’ said the lady, ‘I passed this way and gave you money.’

Must’ve been one of the 2p customers, thought Kleinzeit. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘I think I may have dropped a key as well,’ said the lady.

Very good, thought Kleinzeit. Wonderful. That’s that. It’s nothing, really. Only a flesh wound. He hadn’t been aware of the towering wave rushing forward in him all day but it must have been because now it broke, dropped him down, down, down among the dead men at the bottom of the ocean. Bones and muck but no treasure. Solid black. Kleinzeit smiled, took the key out of his pocket and gave it to the lady.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s it. Thank you so muck’

‘You’re welcome,’ said Kleinzeit. She didn’t know how to stay, didn’t know how to go. He smelled the sooty geraniums, the cats.

‘Quite a long time ago I knew a young man who played the glockenspiel in a regimental band,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen anyone busking with one before.’ She prised open her tiny purse with wintry-looking fingers, furtively dropped a coin. ‘Thank you so much,’ she said, and turned to go.

‘Wait,’ said Kleinzeit. He wrote a glockenspiel poem, gave it to her.

‘Thank you so much,’ said the lady, and walked slowly on.

No key, said Kleinzeit to the yellow paper. Just me and Morton Taylor.

And me, said the yellow paper. Us. I’m pregnant. I’m carrying your novel inside me. Your big long thick fat novel. It’ll be wonderful, won’t it.

Of course, said Kleinzeit, choking. Mile-long lorries from Morton Taylor zoomed through the corridor. Kleinzeit closed his eyes. NOBODY IS LOOKING AFTER ME, he screamed silently. THE KEY WAS A FALSE ALARM.

Ha ha, said the footsteps in the corridor. Hoo hoo, the black hairy voice.

Pull yourself together, said Thucydides. The honour of the regiment and all that.

Right, said Kleinzeit. It’s that Athenian spirit that won the Peloponnesian War, right?

Thucydides said nothing.

The Athenians did win, didn’t they? said Kleinzeit.

Thucydides disappeared.

Shit, said Kleinzeit, afraid to look at the end of the book, afraid to read the introduction. I’ll find out when I come to it, he said.

He packed up, went to a telephone, rang up Sister as the pain arrived. No longer a simple A to B, C to D, E to F affair, it was a complex solid polyphonic geometry of contrapuntal many-coloured lightnings and thunderous volume, bigger than any Morton Taylor lorry, so big that it was no longer inside him, he was inside it.

Where to? said the pain.

Sister’s place, said Kleinzeit.

The pain drove him there and dropped him off.

‘Guess who’s in hospital,’ said Sister to Kleinzeit.

HOSPITAL, HOSPITAL, HOSPITAL, yelled the echo in Kleinzeit’s skull. ‘Redbeard,’ he said.

‘Right,’ said Sister. ‘Slipped fulcrum.’

‘I don’t want to know the details,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘How’s Schwarzgang?’

‘Still blipping.’

‘He’ll outlive the lot of us,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘What sort of shape is Redbeard in?’

‘You know how it is with a slipped fulcrum,’ said Sister. ‘No leverage?’

‘Right, and he’s completely lost his appetite as well. We’ve had to hook him up to a drip-feed.’

‘Maybe I’ll go see him,’ said Kleinzeit. After supper when it was time for Sister to go on duty he went to the hospital with her.

SWEETHEART! roared Hospital when he walked in. IT’S SO GOOD TO HAVE YOU BACK! WAS UMS NAUGHTY, DID UMS RUN AWAY, PRECIOUS? ALL IS FORGIVEN. UMMMMM-MMMNHH! It gave him a big wet kiss. Kleinzeit wiped off the kiss.

Redbeard was in the same bed Kleinzeit had had, the one by the window. Braced by a complex metal framework with pulleys and counterweights he was sitting up and looking at the tube attached to his arm. When Kleinzeit appeared he looked hard at him. ‘Any luck?’ he said.

‘With what?’ said Kleinzeit.

‘You know,’ said Redbeard.

‘Paragraph so far,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘I’d rather not talk about it.’

Redbeard raised his eyebrows, whistled. ‘ “Paragraph so far,”’ he repeated. ‘You’re doing paragraphs, pages, chapters — the lot?’

Kleinzeit nodded, shrugged, looked away.

Redbeard chuckled like a broken clock. ‘I gave you the bare room,’ he said. ‘For better or worse.’

‘Thank you,’ said Kleinzeit, ‘for better or worse.’

‘Don’t think I kept any of the money I got for your things,’ said Redbeard. ‘Spent it as fast as I could. Drink, women, etcetera. Nothing to show for it, absolutely pure spending, you know. Only way to do it.’

‘Quite,’ said Kleinzeit.

‘You’ll notice,’ said Redbeard, ‘what ward they’ve put me in.’

‘A4,’ said Kleinzeit.

‘Right,’ said Redbeard. ‘It all fits, eh?’

‘Nonsense,’ said Kleinzeit faintly.

‘Not nonsense,’ said Redbeard. ‘How do we know they’re not all yellow-paper men here? No use asking, of course. They’d never admit it. I’d never admit it if you didn’t already know. Tell you something.’ He motioned Kleinzeit closer.

‘What?’ said Kleinzeit.

‘The reason I used to drop yellow paper,’ said Redbeard. The way he said yellow paper made it sound a proper name, as if there were someone called Yellow Paper who had legs to walk about with. ‘I didn’t quite tell you the whole truth. Maybe when I started it was the way I told you it was. But after a while I was dropping it to see if I could put it on to someone else, get it off me, you know. Hoped it would give over, let me off.’

‘Did it?’

‘You see what it’s done. First it tried to drown me. Now it’s put me in hospital.’

‘How’d you slip your fulcrum?’

‘While I was spending your money. That’s how it goes. Excess brings its own moderation.’ He looked at the tube in his arm, looked at the hanging bottle, made swallowing motions as if his throat was very dry. ‘I’m scared,’ he said.

‘Who isn’t,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘Morton Taylor is rife.’

‘Still busking?’

‘Yes.’

‘Going like a bomb, I bet. That girl’s a gold mine.’

‘Doing it alone,’ said Kleinzeit.

‘Broken up already?’

‘No, I just want to do it alone.’

‘How’re you doing then?’

‘Pretty well. £ 4.75 today, and I knocked off early. I sell poems too, tell fortunes as well.’

Redbeard whistled again. ‘That’s the ticket,’ he said. ‘You’re a winner all right. You’ll do it.’

‘Do what?’ said Kleinzeit.

Redbeard motioned him closer again. ‘Maybe you think all this is off to one side, sort of. Not the real thing.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well,’ said Redbeard, ‘you had a job and all, didn’t you. Had some kind of a straight life going.’

‘Yes.’

‘Maybe you think the busking and the yellow paper and the bare room and so forth don’t count. Maybe you think you can drop it all and put everything together the way it was.’