Malcolm Bradbury - Doctor Criminale

She leaned on the fence. I looked at her, and knew there was something very firm and steely about Gertla Riviero. I also knew she wasn’t telling me this by chance. She understood I was a journalist, and a story told to a journalist is a story for print. I said, ‘Why are you telling me this?’ She thought a moment and then said, ‘The Lukacs of the Nineties, that is just what Bazlo is not. Lukacs was a real philosopher. He used reason to prevent chaos and create a meaning to history. Bazlo needs chaos nowadays, and he cannot afford to think of history. He thinks it will save him from the past, and the future. But the past does not go away. Democracy, the free market, do you really think that can save us? Imagine, in a place like this? Inflation at 130 per cent, the rich against the poor, the army waiting, and only the exercise of power can prevent chaos? As Bazlo understood once, when he was with me, Marxism is a great idea, democracy just a small idea. It promises hope, and it gives you Kentucky Fried Chicken. You know what Bazlo is now? The philosopher of Kentucky Fried Chicken. I think we should go back to the house.’

I stood there. ‘You haven’t told me what happened to Irini,’ I said. ‘Is that what interests you?’ she asked, ‘Well, you cannot check anything with her, she died, a long time. All this surprises you, I think. It is not the usual story of Bazlo Criminale. The dissident, opponent of the regime. But you are a journalist, Mr Jay, you must know the real truth is always a little bit round the corner. Nothing is ever quite what the official story says it is, no?’ ‘True enough,’ I said. ‘Really,’ said Gertla, ‘Did you never ask what Bazlo did in 1956, when so many great choices had to be made? Didn’t you ask what side he was on who he supported? It never occurred to you?’ ‘Of course’ I said, ‘But according to the book by Otto Codicil .’ Gertla looked at me and laughed. ‘The book by Codicil?’ she said ‘I hope you didn’t believe a word of it?’ ‘Some of it,’ I said.

‘Well, I don’t believe a word of it,’ said Gertla, ‘And I wrote it.’ ’You wrote it?’ I asked, astonished. ‘It was thirty years after 1956, and the scores were still being settled,’ said Gertla, ‘It was best to show Bazlo in a very positive way. He was being challenged in many places.’ ‘Then why publish it under Codicil’s name?’ I asked. ‘Oh please, it was a whitewash, for both of us,’ said Gertla, ‘You can hardly think I would print it under my own name.’ ‘And why in the West?’ ‘To make his reputation,’ she said. ‘And how did it reach Codicil?’ ‘I had good channels, I had good friends,’ said Gertla, ‘And Codicil, well, that one had some debts it was time for him to pay. Let us go in, I have told you enough.’

She started walking quickly back, towards the hacienda; I followed, still trying to take in what she’d told me. I admired Criminale (I still do); I didn’t wish at all to believe the story about his politics, his duplicity, above all about his betrayal of Irini. My first thought was that, here in the land of labyrinthine fictions, I had been told yet another fiction. But Gertla was certainly not trying to amuse me; there was something firm, bitter, determined about her, a steely political temper, that made me suspect it was probably true. ‘You probably wonder why, if I wrote that then, I say this now,’ said Gertla, looking at me, ‘Well, I am here, and free. Political events have changed, it is time to tell the truth. And I am jealous for myself. The Criminale of 1956 was my Criminale, the best Criminale. Even those love letters he wrote to Sepulchra were not so good as the ones he wrote me. She made him foolish. I made him wise.’

‘You made him a hardline Marxist,’ I said. ‘And why not?’ asked Gertla, ‘Didn’t we work for the biggest truth, the best idea? Do you know that even when he went to the West he reported on everything, really, everything, through me?’ ‘And I suppose you had good contacts,’ I said, remembering again what Ildiko had said. ‘Yes, he is now my husband,’ she said. ‘Your husband here?’ I asked. ‘Yes, both of us are here,’ said Gertla, ‘Of course it is better we have new names.’ I said, ‘I suppose you understand what this would do to Criminale’s reputation, if I went home and printed the story. And you’d be a part of it too.’ She looked very directly at me. ‘You think I care?’ she asked, ‘Look, nobody comes here. Now I am free, I can explain. Why shouldn’t he explain too?’ ‘What should he explain?’ I asked. Gertla stopped for a moment, and stared hard at me. ‘Today they all pretend,’ she said, ‘They hide the past, they lie about how they became what they are. It just happened. I was forced by the Stasi, made to do it by the KGB. I only listened, I didn’t mean. They are just intellectual acrobats, you understand? But do you believe them? What they did, they chose.’

‘Or perhaps you persuaded him,’ I said, ‘He was in love with you.’ ‘No,’ said Gertla, ‘Do you really think none of them, those intellectuals, ever meant not to build the Marxist dream? You think nobody ever believed it, all of it? The crushing of the bourgeoisie, the destruction of property, the struggle against Fascism, the rise of the proletariat? Let them admit it, that was what they thought. And in a few years from now, people will say, of course, they were right. I like Bazlo to be remembered for what he used to be, not the amusing thing he is now. Oh, by the way, if you like it, you can check everything I say. The secret police files in Budapest, the Stasi files in Berlin, they are all open now. Unless maybe someone has been very kind, and burned everything. But I don’t think so. And one day it will all come out, anyway. And you will help me, you are a good journalist, yes?’

I took the jumbo flight back to London the very next day. The plane rose up over the wide River Plate; the pampa stretched out endlessly. Then cloud cover came in, and I thought hard about what had just happened down in the country down below. The last thing I had come for was more of the tale of Bazlo Criminale. Even so, I was coming back with a story, something no journalist can reject. And I was also coming back with terrible knowledge, or knowledge that was terrible if true. And the more I thought about it (I had a bad hotel-room night to think it over), the more I thought it probably was. What Gertla had told me seemed borne of two enduring and authentic forms of human emotion. One was ideology, but the other was sexual jealousy. Gertla, I thought, wanted to repossess two things she had once had: political certainty, and Bazlo Criminale.

In the afternoon, the plane landed at Rio de Janeiro and refuelled. It was another and different Latin America, steaming, mountainous, tropical, exotic. Then came the dull onward flight, as I looked through my notebooks, planned my pieces, tried to order my thoughts. I landed back in London the following morning, and returned tired to my flat. The next day, still jetlagged, I went into my newspaper office, tried to sort my thoughts on magical realism, and reported the happy resumption of cultural relations. All that done with, I leaned forward, over my computer terminal, there in the drab newspaper office, and realized that, like it or not, I had not entirely done with the uncomfortable quest for Doctor Criminale.

On a lovely evening in the early summer of 1991, in an extremely excellent restaurant in a corner of the Grand’ Place – the splendidly gabled market square that forms the heart of Brussels, just as Brussels itself nowadays forms the heart of our brave New Europe – I sat pleasantly drinking cham­pagne across the white-clothed table from Cosima Bruckner. Brussels, with its great stone public buildings, capped with green-domed roofs of verdigrised copper, glowed with the warmth of an early June day. Outside in the great cobbled square, the evening tourists were beginning to wander, the evening drinkers to gather on the café terraces. Inside the quiet restaurant in the corner, behind thick net curtains and velvet drapes, it was already quite clear that La Rochette was somewhere just a little bit special. In fact it was obviously the heart of the heart of the heart of Europe. As Cosima, leaning forward, and revealing a stunningly fine cleavage I had not even known was there before, quietly explained to me, while we sipped at our bubbles at a table for two by the window, power and privilege, politics and pleasure, all customarily met and mingled around the tables and banquettes of the Restaurant La Rochette.