Malcolm Bradbury - Doctor Criminale

But he was still the hardy philosopher. As at Barolo, a crowd had gathered round, small at first, but growing all the time, listening to what he was saying. I stood on the fringes and caught some of it. ‘I read in the newspaper today a very interesting thing,’ he was remarking. ‘Always first in the morning when he wakes he reads the newspapers,’ explained Miss Belli. ‘I see the Japanese have now invented a special new toilet, the Happy Stool,’ said Criminale, ‘It takes what you drop in the bowl each morning and at once makes a medical diagnosis of it.’ ‘Bazlo, caro, you are disgusting,’ said Belli. ‘In goes your effluent, out from a slot in the wall comes your health report,’ said Criminale, ignoring this, ‘Too much vodka last night, sonny, now look what you have done with your cholesterol. Maybe even a needle comes into your rump and puts the matter right.’ ‘Bazlo caro, eat something,’ said Miss Belli, pushing forward a tray of canapés, ‘All this blasted lovely food and you don’t take any!’ ‘After I read this, how can I eat something?’ asked Criminale, ‘You see what it means, there is no secret anywhere any more.’

‘“Bazlo caro, eat something,”’ said Ildiko, beside me, mim­icking, ‘See how she pushes him around? Poor man, he might as well have stayed with Sepulchra, yes?’ ‘Belli has quite a few qualities Sepulchra lacks these days,’ I said, watching as Miss Belli began stuffing small morsels into Criminale’s upturned mouth. ‘Oh, you wish you could run away with her as well?’ asked Ildiko. I looked at her; her attitude seemed increasingly strange to me, but it was clear that the sight of Criminale on his erotic holiday had done her no good at all. I took her by the arm and led her outside onto the deck. It was chilly by now, and nearly dark. Our bright-lit steamer was thumping on down the lake, Swiss flag flying out behind. Where were we headed: Geneva, Evian, Montreux? I saw we were close to the shoreline, and there were odd illuminated glimpses of finely latticed vineyards sloping down to the edge of the lake. We must have been going toward Vevey and Montreux.

‘Don’t they look happy?’ asked Ildiko, very bitterly, I thought, ‘I remember once when he was just like this before.’ ‘When was that?’ I asked. ‘When he first left Gertla for Sepulchra,’ said Ildiko. ‘Gertla?’ I asked. ‘His second wife, you remember her, I think,’ she said, ‘You saw her nude in Budapest.’ ‘I did what?’ I asked. ‘Her photograph,’ said Ildiko, ‘You saw her nude in Budapest. He was married to Gertla many many years. Oh, some affairs, of course, he is a Hungarian man, after all. Then one day Sepulchra walked into his life. Not as she is now, she was a painter, very very pretty. So they had this nice thing, you know about these nice things, and he left Gertla. He was all excited, happy, looking quite different, just as he is here.’ ‘Well, why not?’ I asked. ‘Because it is when he is with women that Bazlo always destroys himself. Now he does it again.’ ‘Destroys himself, how?’ I asked. ‘He lets them make nonsense of his life,’ said Ildiko.

This rather baffled me: the last thing the Criminale I had just seen resembled was a man who was destroying himself, making nonsense of his life. Although I was no expert on love (a fact that must be fairly clear to you by now), it seemed to me that any rational man (and Criminale was above all things a rational man), faced with the choice between fat, fussy Sepulchra and beautiful Miss Belli, would be likely to make the same decision. No doubt I saw only what I wanted to see, as we all do, and Ildiko saw something else (in fact she must have seen quite a lot else). ‘Anyway, I think it’s time one of us spoke to him,’ I said. ‘But he will think we are following him,’ said Ildiko. ‘We are following him,’ I said, ‘Now we have to get in closer. Anyway, I thought you wanted to warn him.’ ‘I warn him?’ asked Ildiko, ‘Why?’ ‘About little Miss Black Trousers,’ I said. ‘Let her have him if she wants to,’ said Ildiko bitterly. ‘I thought you were worried for him,’ I said. ‘Why should I worry?’ asked Ildiko, ‘He is looked after so nicely by this other person.’ ‘You came all the way from Budapest to talk to him,’ I said. ‘Well, now I don’t like to,’ said Ildiko, Talk to him if you like, but do not tell him I am here. Do whatever you like, but all I like is to be left alone and get something a little to eat, okay? Do not come.’

And Ildiko walked angrily off, disappearing inside the ship. I stayed there chilly against the ship’s rail, feeling very confused. I was a young man then – I still am to this day, this very day – and the truth is that for all my fondness for Ildiko (and I was, and still am, very fond of her indeed) I was finding her very difficult to handle and understand. In fact I wasn’t an inch anywhere nearer understanding her complicated and mercurial temper than I was on the day I met her with Sandor Hollo in Buda at the Restaurant Kiss. Of course I too had my own faults and failings. I’m something of a New Man, of course, but I realize from the magazine articles that I do lack some of the graces and subtleties I probably ought to possess. And when it comes to the crunch no one would admit more readily than I will that I’m not always the most thoughtful of lovers or the most understanding of friends. I had my obsession, of course, as she presumably had hers. If Ildiko was difficult, I suppose I was too.

So, there at the rail, I tried to think what had gone wrong with our joint quest for Criminale, and why we were at cross-purposes. It was true that, in the simple matter of finding adequate hotel accommodation, I had been less than an ideal travelling companion when I found us single bunks at the Hotel Zwingli. I regretted it already, and I’d made up my mind to shift camp next day down to the Hotel Movenpick, a very modern-looking chain hotel I’d spotted just a little way further down the Ouchy promenade, where good old-fashioned Swiss Calvinism was more likely to be tempered by some good old-fashioned Swiss commercialism. But even then of course it would be nothing like the splendours of the Beau Rivage Palace, which I could never provide. In fact nobody could, except for Bazlo Criminale. But perhaps that was the point. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure something more than a bad room in a bad hotel was making Ildiko behave in this angry and temperamental way.

I put it down to jealousy. It was clearly a part of her temperament; she had even been jealous of myself and Cosima Bruckner, one of the more unlikely sexual pairings to come out of the great dateline computer in the sky, it seemed to me. At Barolo, I had thought I understood her feelings. Here was Bazlo Criminale, breaking with Sepulchra at last, looking for some new erotic excitement in his life. There was Ildiko, back in his space again, but instead he’d opted for some brand-new Italian charmer he had just met at a conference. In spite of what she’d seen at Barolo Ildiko had insisted on following him to Lausanne. Yet she had kept in the background then, just as she did now. So what had changed, why was she suddenly so angry with him now? It seemed to me it was at Barolo, on the night of the storm and Criminale’s sudden departure, that her mood had really changed. Something new had begun to agitate her, but I couldn’t see at all what it was. No, the simple fact was I just didn’t understand Ildiko, and as I say I’m not really sure I do to this day.

I was still there, out on the cold deck, watching the Swiss lights flicker by on the shore and thinking these confused thoughts, or something very much like them, when someone came and leaned on the rail beside me. I turned, and there was a neat young man with a small beard, in a plum-coloured jacket, with a congress briefcase tucked under his arm. There then followed a familiar conference ritual, which resembles that of dogs sniffing each other; I checked his lapel badge, he checked mine. I saw that he was Hans de Graef, from somewhere in Belgium, and he saw that I was – well, whoever I was, because whoever I was I had completely forgotten by now. He said he knew my city very well, and how interested he was in the fact that it would not be called by that name for very much longer. ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘But I thought you all voted to call it Saint Petersburg now?’ he said. ‘Oh yes, that’s right,’ I said, trying to remember what the place was called before; and I quickly explained that, over the years of glasnost, I had chosen to move to the West and pursue my photographic career in the more attractive studios and dark-rooms of the British Isles.