Russell Hoban: Her Name Was Lola

Louder now, with strings, percussion, brass, woodwinds, the heartbeat, footsteps perhaps, now near, now far. Loud, loud suddenly, a summons from the horns. Max’s and Lola’s hands find each other. Is there, they wonder, a madness that we inhabit and call reality? Is this music letting it in? Was this always in Schubert, waiting to be called up? When will the singer be heard? Now at last, gently with strings the melody of ‘ Gute Nacht ’, and now the voice of Christoph Pregardien: ‘ Fremd bin ich eingezogen, Fremd zieh ich wieder aus’ ; ‘A stranger I came, a stranger I go again’. That voice! Pure, ingenuous, going straight to the heart more than Fischer-Dieskau, more than any other tenor that Max and Lola have ever heard. Tears are running down Lola’s face, Max’s also. He squeezes her hand, she squeezes back.

January 1997. Zender’s Die Winterreise goes on with all kinds of surprises, loud and soft, shouted, brassed, stringed, clanged and thumped. Pregardien’s singing is a revelation. But the main event of the evening is the crying. Ending up in bed with Max this night would not shock Lola. But to cry together? She hasn’t been prepared for that degree of intimacy on the first date. On the way back over the Hungerford Bridge both she and Max look up at Ursa Major. This time she too thinks of it as the Big Dipper. Now it’s standing on its handle, so that whatever was in it has poured out. Is Max already someone to be seriously reckoned with? Despite youthful romances Lola has never given her heart completely and for ever. If she finds herself at the edge of This-Is-It she won’t be afraid to leap. Is that edge getting closer?

Now we’re back in November 2001. Max is on his way home from Grace Kowalski’s as the memory of that first date bursts into his head ten times more vivid than it was before Apasmara took it away. And it hurts. It hurts like a head full of double-edged razor blades. ‘Shit!’ says Max as he realises that Apasmara’s thing isn’t only forgetfulness — it’s whatever hurts the most.

‘Oi!’ comes a loathsome whisper behind him. ‘Have I got to writhe all the way back to Fulham or are you going to take me aboard?’ There he is in his run-over-dog mode.

‘Get lost, Napasmara,’ says Max. ‘You’re nothing but a whole lot of emptiness.’

‘That makes two of us then,’ says the dwarf, ‘because I’m whatever you are and that denial shit only works when you’re with Kowalski. Come on, pick me up. I ain’t heavy, I’m your brother.’

So Max picks him up. Apasmara’s weight and smell are just as bad as before but somehow Max feels more … what? More complete with the dwarf demon on his back as they near Oxford Circus. ‘I suppose,’ says his mind, ‘it’s better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.’

‘Except that he’s inside pissing in,’ says Max.

‘Anyhow, I’m getting used to it,’ says his mind. ‘What an evening that first date was. What a memory. It hurts like hell but it’s a beauty. Those stars over Charing Cross Station! The feel of Lola’s hand squeezing yours!’

‘Don’t distract me,’ says Max. ‘I’m reviewing the situation. Lola put Apasmara on to me with this CD. Could she have been the one who put it through the letterbox?’

‘You think she’s still in London?’ says his mind.

‘Hang on,’ says Max as WHAM, another memory lights up his brain: Trafalgar Square the Monday evening a couple of days after Die Winterreise . The Coliseum Shop closes at six on Mondays and it’s only about half-past now. The National Gallery also closes at six so people from there have joined those already in the Square. Gentle rain coming down. Max and Lola in macs and broad-brimmed canvas hats, one of which Max bought for Lola this afternoon. ‘Do you buy a lot of hats,’ she says, ‘for women?’

‘First time,’ says Max. ‘I thought you might like to walk in the rain without an umbrella.’

‘I do, and you got the size right too. Well done.’ She’s on his arm and the two of them are the little village of each other in the winter night. Under the lights and the rain the lions are gleaming, the fountains are sending up their white spray, the passing sightseeing buses are juicily red, and Nelson, as in all weathers, keeps watch from his column.

‘I’ve been thinking about Die Winterreise ,’ says Lola.

‘Me too,’ says Max. ‘Some of those songs seem to describe exactly where I am in my own Reise .’

‘Same here,’ says Lola. ‘In that very first song, “ Gute Nacht ”, the second verse keeps singing itself in my head. I did my own translation with the help of the Fischer-Dieskau CD text: “I can to my journey not choose me the time. I must myself the way find in this darkness. It goes a moon-shadow as my companion. And in the white fields seek I the wild animals’ tracks.” That got to me: “I can to my journey not choose me the time.”’

‘Nobody can,’ says Max.

‘But what if you’re not ready for the journey?’

‘I think maybe nobody’s ever ready for the big ones,’ says Max.

Lola says nothing, she presses closer to him.

‘What a memory,’ says Max’s mind. ‘But those razor blades!’

‘She’s in London,’ says Max. ‘I can feel it.’

‘What year are you in?’

‘This one, right now.’ He turns on his heel and heads for Trafalgar Square.

November 2001. Vibrating like a caesium clock, Max makes his way southeast through Soho. The years from 1996 onwards print his footsteps as he goes. From Berwick Street to Broadwick, Broadwick to Wardour, then across Shaftesbury to Whitcomb and Pall Mall East. Lola-and-Max phantasms beckon and lure as he passes places where they ate, drank, and dawdled. Max’s thoughts pop like camera flashes and flutter like the pigeons of, here it is: Trafalgar Square.

England expects! shouts Nelson from his column.

‘Me too,’ says Max. So many footsteps, faces, seconds, minutes, hours, pigeons. Is she here? If not, why not? Multitudes of voices, wings, cameras. Was that Trafalgar Square memory a message from Lola or was it not? His chest feels wet. ‘You pissed on me!’ he says to Apasmara.

‘It’s all in your mind,’ says the dwarf.

‘I have no control over him,’ says Max’s mind.

‘Why not?’ says Max.

‘Don’t get heavy with me,’ says his mind. ‘We’ve got to stick together to get through this.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Maybe you’re trying too hard. Maybe if you ease up a little …’

‘If I ease up a little, what? Suddenly she’ll appear and everything will be the way it was before it stopped being that way?’

‘Stop straining for special effects, Max. Just go for ordinary memories with no frills.’

‘Can we do straight memories now?’ says Max, ‘like regular people?’

‘Let’s try,’ says his mind.

February 1997. The lights of the Albert Bridge are beads of hope strung across the night. Max and Lola both have songs in their heads: Max’s song is the Frank Sinatra version of ‘My One and Only Love’. Lola’s is the Doris Day ‘If I Give My Heart to You’. They’re both thinking a lot and not talking much as they walk along the Embankment towards the Chelsea Bridge. After a while Lola says, ‘I think I should tell you about Basil Meissen-Potts.’

‘Fragile, is he?’ says Max. In his mind stamping heavily upon the Meissen-Pottsery of the unknown Basil.