6

The Confessions

I seemed fated to get tunes stuck in my head for days, weeks even. For five days I heard nothing but “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” On and on, on and on. I tried to forget it, but that lilting melody would not leave me. It made my solitary confinement worse—perhaps this is one of the secret punishments of solitary? It was a sign too of just how impoverished my world was. I had heard a guard whistling it—a new guard, I suppose; none of the old ones made a sound—and since then it had played on in my echoing skull, an interminable Gramophone record.

I turned to my only distraction. I pulled the chair over to the window, stood on it and looked out. The top two lights were plain glass, not frosted like the others. The view: a patch of longish grass leading to a steep ravine at whose bottom the river Lahn flowed. Beyond the ravine were the beech- and elm-wooded hills of the Taunus Forest. To the right, the palisaded square of the exercise yard where the “solitary” prisoners were permitted to exercise, and beyond that the dull square buildings of the veterinary science college where 150 Russian, 20 French and 4 Belgian officers were held prisoner. The four Belgians were all retired generals who had been captured when the Germans took Brussels. They had had no time to change after their arrest and had never been issued with uniforms; consequently they still wore their civilian clothes—three in tweed suits, one in gray worsted.

The solitary cells were above the college’s gymnasium. The gym was not used by the prisoners but sometimes the guards played volleyball there, and I would hear the thumps of the ball and the shouts of encouragement rise up through the floorboards of my bare room. I had been kept here in the solitary cells for over two months. I was the only prisoner.

As far as cells went, my room was not too uncomfortable. A pine table, a crude wooden chair that looked as though it belonged in a van Gogh painting, a bed with a thin straw-and-woodshaving mattress, two gray blankets and a white enamel chamber pot with an unmatching powder-blue lid. There were bare floorboards and whitewashed walls. It was cold.

My routine was invariable. I slept, if I could, until eight, when I was roused by a guard with my breakfast of watery coffee and two slices of hard brown bread. At nine I was taken to a small washroom where I shaved and emptied my slops. From ten to eleven o’clock I was outside in the palisaded yard, weather permitting, where I could do whatever exercise I saw fit. Midday was lunch—soup and a plate of vegetables. Three P.M.—more coffee and bread. Four to five—exercise yard. Six o’clock—slop emptying. Eight o’clock—dinner: soup and a plate of vegetables, sometimes augmented by salted fish or sauerkraut. Every two weeks I was given a brown paper cone of sugar.

I was not especially hungry and my day was one of constant interruption. I was not denied human company. The guards in the gymnasium were possibly as bored as their single prisoner. I spoke no German and we exchanged sign language or hopeful monosyllables. I am happy with my own company and the first week passed without undue strain. Into the second month, though, and the regime was proving more onerous. Nothing changed, and it was precisely this that began to worry me. Perhaps if conditions had worsened or improved I might not have begun to question them, but after forty days I became convinced that I had been forgotten. And this new worry suddenly made my reduced condition intolerable. I needed a sense of my incarceration being finite. (I think we all need the finite—limits of some kind; it is locked into our human natures. We need to know that things will end.) Two months of this bland solitary confinement gave me an unwelcome hint of what eternity was like. Soon the only way I could distinguish one day from the other was by the kind of soup I was served. At least it always changed. Barley soup, cabbage soup, peawater soup, something called mango soup, oil cake soup, fish soup, rice soup, macaroni soup, turnip soup … I began to think of the passage of time in terms of cabbage or peawater days. Had I not suffered a morning twinge of toothache last fish soup day? The weather on rice soup day had been unusually mild. Two turnip days ago I had had diarrhea … and so on. As I shaved each morning I looked at my face and saw chronological time reckoned by the rate of my hair growth. On capture I had been showered and deloused, my clothes fumigated—quite unnecessary—and had had my head shaved. In those days my hair grew at a rate of two inches a month. After eight weeks I was tucking it behind my ears like an artist. As a matter of personal record, my hair has never ever been as long as it was in those months of captivity in 1917–18. I shaved off my moustache too.

After two months of this unrelenting routine I was beginning to fall apart. My mind was occupied by four things. One: “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” Two: the near-hysterical fear that my “case” had been forgotten. Three: a frenzied craving for a cigarette. And four: an overwhelming desire for mental diversion—anything, something to occupy me other than those three obsessions listed above. All my thoughts were quite overused by now—limp, soft and transparent like an overlaundered shirt. I wanted new thoughts, new stimulation. I wanted something to read. I suppose pencil and paper, a source of music, lively conversation would have been equally welcome, but in my desperation I saw my salvation in a book. Any book. I wanted to be entertained, beguiled, but above all to commune with another mind, another imagination, than my own. I had stopped dreaming; I had stopped masturbating. I was empty, a husk. I required a little fertilization. A drop of fuel to start the machine running again.

My first flight, across the front and on into Belgium, had been oddly entrancing despite the danger of my predicament. My slowly deflating gray sausage balloon appeared to possess the entire Belgian sky. The wind drove me silently eastwards, the only noises being the creaking of wicker and the occasionally audible hiss of escaping hydrogen from the balloon. I was descending very gradually and—so it seemed—quite safely. At about two hundred feet I passed over a small market town and caused consternation in the streets. Traffic halted, houses and shops emptied as people ran out to stare and point at me. I waved. The children waved back.

But of course as the air escaped the rate of descent increased. Soon I was palpably aware of a dropping sensation. Fortunately, the wind had increased and my lateral movement compensated for the vertical fall. At under a hundred feet, or thereabouts, I was wondering how best to brace myself for my eventual landing. I threw out the tripod of my Aeroscope and lashed the camera to the basket side.

We cleared—just—a ghostly coppice of silver birch, the base of the basket being scratched by the topmost twigs, and looked set to land square in the middle of a plowed field. As I perched on the edge of the basket, waiting, I saw over to my right a man on a bicycle, pedaling violently along a mud lane, trying to keep up with me. The balloon moved across the field, a tantalizing ten or fifteen feet above the ground. I contemplated jumping. Up ahead was a drainage ditch with tall patchy hawthorn hedges on both banks and six or seven young poplars. The trees loomed as the wind gusted. I jumped at five feet and turned my ankle on the hard uneven furrows. Winded, I watched the soft collision of my wrinkled flying machine with the trees. Twigs and a few dead leaves fell to the ground. I got up and limped over to the basket, well snagged by the jaggy hawthorns, and with some difficulty retrieved the Aeroscope. I looked about me. Dismal, flat, wintry Belgian fields. The mad cyclist had abandoned his bicycle at the edge of the field and was now endeavoring to sprint across it. As he approached I saw he was wearing a uniform—navy-blue with red piping—and a tall cap with three brass buttons on it. We faced each other. I did not know what to say and was in any event astonished by the man’s face, a hot pink flowing with perspiration, wordless mouth gasping for air. I assumed I was under arrest.

I should have taken the opportunity to hide or bury the Aeroscope, because with it I was immediately taken to be an agent in some sort of fiendish espionage exercise. My uniform, devoid of rank badges, was further cause for suspicion. In the series of patient interrogations I underwent as I was transported back towards Germany, my story was universally and wearily regarded as the most blatant fabrication. For me the initial and most painful loss was the confiscation of my wonderful film of the two front lines. My strident demands that the film be kept safe were naturally ignored. Equally, the universal skepticism that greeted my account did not encourage people to check out the few details I gave them. I was playing for time, they told me; well, they were patient men. Gradually I began to find myself in a kind of administrative limbo: I was regarded as a spy, but spies do not wear uniform. I was dressed as an officer but wore no rank badges and was attached to no regiment. My pass and my documents were sitting in the briefcase I left in my Humber. The interrogations were protracted, tedious and civilized but could get no further because I was telling them the truth. They chose not to believe me and somewhere, somebody decided to let me stew. I claimed to be an officer so I was not to be sent to an “other ranks” camp. But at the same time my suspicious circumstances (and, to be fair, I could see their point of view) dictated some more heedful form of confinement. I was to be kept apart from my own countrymen and held incommunicado until either I told the truth or the facts of my story were authenticated, or so the genial major interrogating me said.

And so, one damp early morning in February, with long tracts of mist hanging still in the Taunus Forest, I was marched off the train at Weilburg Station and met by four guards from Offizier-Kriegenstagenlager 18, escorted through the near-deserted town and down the hill past terraced fields to the gray walls of the veterinary science college and my joyless cell above the gymnasium.

One morning before breakfast I lay beneath my blankets fretting about how I could get to see someone in authority. The guards—all middle-aged men—seemed to understand my repeated requests, nodded and grunted in acquiescence to my urgent demands that action be taken about me, but nothing ultimately happened. I was beginning to wonder if an act of disobedience would be necessary to attract some attention—an assault on a guard, an escape attempt, perhaps—when I heard quick footsteps in the corridor and somebody, a man, singing. The footsteps passed my door in an instant, but I heard enough to make out:

As the tune dwindled I inevitably took it up in my head (it effectively banished “If You Were the Only Girl in the World”), but it was not until some seconds later that I realized it had been sung in English. So when a guard (a dull fellow with a purple pickled nose) came with my breakfast, I sang a snatch of the tune at him—“Dashing away with a smoothing iron, she stole my heart away”—and said, “Engländer?”

He looked puzzled, then gave a weak smile and said, “Schön,” and applauded.

Two days later, none the wiser, I paced slowly round the exercise yard. It was a generous size for one prisoner, about thirty yards square, surrounded by a palisade about twelve feet high. On the other side of the wall was a raised boardwalk to allow a guard to supervise me. This practice was soon abandoned. Today, however, there was a guard watching. I glanced at him momentarily, then carried on with my exercise. All I did was walk, but I tried to walk randomly round the enclosed square. The thought of beating out a path obscurely depressed me. I moved hither and thither, turned on my heel, with no system except to establish no system.

I had plucked a dandelion leaf absentmindedly from the ground and as I walked, still going through my futile options, I tore bits of it off. As one trajectory carried me beneath the guard on the boardwalk, he spoke to me.

“She loves me, she loves me not … ahhh.”

“Sorry?”

“Don’t be unquiet, old fellow. She’ll be waiting, I promise you, a fire burning in the window.”

He spoke English, with a marked but pleasant German accent. This must be my singer. He leaned against the palisade top, rifle slung across his back, hands and forearms dangling over. He was young, much younger than the other guards, my age possibly. His round forage cap was pushed back on his head, revealing the short black fringe favored by German Army barbers. His face was long and thin, pale, with a thin wide mouth. It was strongly characterized by his eyebrows, almost circumflex, dark and bushy, and that met above his nose. It gave him a sharp Mephistophelian look. A mischief-maker, but not necessarily malicious. Amoral, perhaps, but not necessarily malign.

“I like your hair,” he said. “Mine, it used to be so long. But now …” He doffed his cap. I half-expected his ears to be elvish, pointed, green-tipped. He rubbed his hand over his stubbly head.

“Little prickles, all over,” he said. “I hate it.” He smiled. “I shouldn’t talk with you,” he said, lowering his voice, “but I can’t speak bloody Russian, I can’t speak bloody French, and these old fellows”—he gestured at the gymnasium—“all they do is play cards, and talk about food and their disgusting illnesses.”

“You speak excellent English.”

“Listen, I live in London, 1912. For one year I’m painting, an artist. Camden Town. The Islington Angel. You know it?”

“No. I come from Scotland. Edinburgh.”

“Ah. Bonny Scotland.” He looked round. “Scheisse, here comes fat offo. Seeing you anon.” He reslung his rifle and began ostentatiously to pace round the boardwalk.

I did not see him again for a couple of days. Then, one evening, he brought me my eight o’clock dinner. Having only seen his head and shoulders I was surprised at how tall and thin he was—at least six foot two or three. His uniform fitted him badly and he looked very out of place in it. It was something to do with his posture. Everything about his attitude was the opposite of erect or stiff. He seemed permanently at ease, always in an attitude of total repose.

He put the tray down.

“Macaroni soup and—yes!—I see a bit of fish. A lucky day.” He smiled, showing sharp-looking, uneven teeth. “I hear you’re a dangerous spy. Very exciting.”

I told him my story. At first I was a little suspicious of his affability, but I soon saw it was entirely disinterested. Over the next week or so we had several short conversations. They never lasted more than five minutes as, for all his insouciance, he seemed constantly alert to the possibility of being discovered fraternizing. He told me his name was Karl-Heinz Kornfeld (“Charlie Cornfield,” he translated badly). He was twenty-two years old and he was serving as a prison camp guard because he was unfit for the front. He pointed at his stomach. “I have Magengeschwür.” He mimed stomach cramps and swigging from a bottle. “Too much drinking,” he said, and smiled his thin rude grin.

Steadily, over the next fortnight, a curious acquaintanceship grew up between us. He told me he had abandoned painting and had become an actor before being conscripted. He said he had a cousin in Vienna, an eminent playwright who was going to write him a play. I let him know something of my background, but oddly it was he who seemed to have the need to talk more than I. From him I learned more about the camp and its inhabitants—the generals in mufti, the lugubrious Russian officers, now doubly pessimistic since the revolution, who made delicate, beautiful wooden toys that they sold to the Weilburg villagers to buy alcohol. They would drink anything, Karl-Heinz said. From time to time he sold them turpentine when they were desperate.

This last piece of information was casually dropped, to let me know, I surmised, that he was corruptible. I had no money (my panting florid captor had relieved me of my wallet) and had received no Red Cross parcels. I let him know this.

“You have your sugar,” he said. “You can exchange.”

And so the bartering began. For half my sugar ration I received three cigarettes and a dozen matches. I cut them into inch-long sections and smoked them at night, opening the window a crack and exhaling through it into the night air. Suddenly, my life appeared immeasurably rich. I had Karl-Heinz’s irregular companionship and I had my tobacco. I made the tiny cigarettes last three nights, rationing my avid puffs, constructing from the dry straw in my mattress a simple holder that allowed me to smoke down to the last shreds of tobacco. Now I had something to plan for and look forward to, nightly, and it was illicit. At last my life acquired some texture.

The next thing I asked for was meat. I said I had nothing to barter for it. Karl-Heinz thought for a moment. “That’s all right,” he said. “You can pay me later.” I was not sure what he meant, but I had no complaints three days later when he brought me my breakfast and withdrew a thin sausage from his jacket pocket. It was dry and shriveled and full of gristle. I ate it with unreal pleasure.

Then I asked him to find out about my predicament. He screwed up his eyes. “Difficult,” he said. “I see what I can do.”

And so it continued for two weeks—three weeks? I do not know. Time was passing with slightly more variation, but as much sloth as always. It was to counteract this that I asked him for one more favor.

“Karl-Heinz?” I said one day as he escorted me to the washroom. “Do you think you could get me something to read?”

“My good God!” he said, feigning surprise. “An English book? Where do you think I get that?”

“I don’t know. But you seem to be able to get most things.”

“Difficult,” he said. He expounded further on the difficulties as I shaved. I wrapped the safety razor and bar of soap in the flannel and handed it back to him.

“There’s a schoolteacher in Weilburg,” he said. “Maybe I could borrow from him. No. Better to buy.” He made a sad face. “But you got no money.” He looked at me. “You give me something and I get an English book for you.”

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

“A kiss.”

Kissing Karl-Heinz was not as unpleasant as I imagined. It was much more pleasant, for example than eating my dormmates’ wax-bogey balls at Minto Academy. Unlike Huguette, he did not open his mouth and use his tongue. We simply pressed our lips together and held them there for quite a long time, sometimes—I always counted—as long as a minute. We kissed four or five times, usually in the washroom, before the book arrived. I assume he expected things to go further. After our second kiss he asked me very politely if I would hold his penis, but I declined. “Fine,” he said, a little disappointed. “Only kissing, then.”

The book was delivered to me in loose-leaf sections in the exercise yard. Karl-Heinz would tear some pages out—twenty or thirty—fold them up and stuff them in a crack in the palisade wall. It was easy for me to retrieve them, hide them on my person and take them back to my cell undiscovered. I will never forget my excitement that first day as I prized the folded wad of pages from between the planks. Later, locked back in my cell, I stuffed all but the first page into my mattress. If anyone came in I would have time to crumple up the page I was reading and pocket it.

I was ready to start. I sat down on my chair and spread the page flat before me on the table. The page was small, so was the type, as if it came from an octavo pocket edition. The paper was thin, like Bible paper. My hands were visibly trembling as I smoothed out the folds. I shut my eyes and paused before reading the first sentence. I felt humbled with gratitude. Karl-Heinz had only given me the text—I did not know the title, I did not know the author. I was ignorant of the book’s subject and genre. Yet to me, sitting there in that cell, it felt as though I were on the brink of a fabulous adventure and that I held something immensely precious in my shaking hands. It was a divine moment. It was going to change my life.

*     *     *

Chapter One

My heart beat vigorously with anticipation. The first sentences, the first paragraph … what would they be like? I read.

I had to set the page down, such was my emotion. My heart clubbed, struggled violently in my chest. My God.… I felt drugged, intoxicated, almost swooning.

I know I was in every possible way in reduced circumstances. Like a parched man in the desert coming across a spring of fresh water. But I have never read such an opening to a book, have never been so powerfully and immediately engaged. Who was this man? Whose was this voice that spoke to me so directly, whose brazen immodesty rang with such candid integrity? I read on, mesmerized. Ten pages were all Karl-Heinz had supplied this time. I read and reread them. But the suspense was insufferable, agonizing. I had to wait two restless days for the next installment.

Karl-Heinz “fed” me the entire book over the next seven weeks. The metaphor is exact. The thin wads of pages were like crucial scraps of nutrition. I devoured them. I masticated, swallowed and digested that book. I cracked its bones and sipped its marrow; every fiber of meat, every cartilaginous nodule of gristle was dined on with gourmandising fervor. I have never read before or since with such miserly love and profound concentration. I paid for half that book with lingering chaste kisses, but the remaining portion was purchased more orthodoxly. I received my first Red Cross parcel. There had been some pilfering but I was left with a scarf, a pair of socks, a one-pound plum pudding and a bag of peppermints. Parcels began to arrive once a fortnight. I gave away my food for a book.

And the book? You will have recognized the unmistakable tones of Jean Jacques Rousseau in The Confessions. I was seized and captivated by this extraordinary autobiography—so intensely I could have been reading about myself. Buy it, read it and you will see what I mean. I knew nothing of Rousseau, nothing of his life, his work, his ideas, and precious little about eighteenth-century Europe, but the voice was so fresh, the candor so moving and unusual, it made no difference. Here was the story of the first truly honest man. The first modern man. Here was the life of the individual spirit recounted in all its nobility and squalor for the first time in the history of the human race. When I set the dog-eared stack of pages down at the end of my seven-week, fervid read, I wept. Then I started reading it again. This man spoke for all of us suffering mortals, our vanities, our hopes, our moments of greatness and our base corrupted natures.

Pause. Stop. Reflect. We will come back to The Confessions. Suffice it to say that at this juncture the book released me from prison, metaphorically speaking. Rousseau and his autobiography delivered me. I never forgot that precious exceptional gift. The book, as you will see, was to become my life.

Karl-Heinz found it hard to understand my fervent gratitude.

“I can get another book if you like.”

“God, no! That’s enough. I just need the one.”

“What’s so special about this book?”

I tried to explain but I could see it made no sense to him. I think he thought I had become slightly demented by my imprisonment. Perhaps I was. I have to say that a kind of love had grown up in me for Karl-Heinz—not carnal in the least, but not simply fraternal either. I cared for him in an odd way and found his lazy corruption (I discovered later he had been pilfering my parcels), his casual attempt at seducing me, surprisingly unreprehensible. I suppose our long dry kisses did bring us together. Even though he was some years older than me I felt as I imagine the father did for the Prodigal Son, say a week after he had returned home and the remains of the fatted calf had finally been consumed. The passion had died and there was an odds-on chance that the boy would go to the bad again, but somehow he was still enfolded and protected by a blanket of tolerant paternal affection. I think this is about as close as I can get to expressing the way I felt about Karl-Heinz.

One day in May I was pacing erratically round the exercise yard when Karl-Heinz’s head and shoulders appeared above the palisade.

“Good news,” he said. “They have confirmed your story. You’re going to transfer.”

I felt suddenly, strangely unsettled at this information.

“Where?” I asked.

“A camp for British officers. In Mainz.”

Later that day this was officially confirmed by the camp commandant, a man who I had only seen once before, on arrival, some six months earlier. He was thin and sickly looking, his collar loose around his scrawny neck. His tone was semi-apologetic; he used once or twice the adjective “regrettable.”

I had one more meeting with Karl-Heinz before I left. He escorted me to the gymnasium washroom for my morning shave. He seemed entirely unaffected by my departure, which rather irritated me. (I suppose this was vanity. I was reluctant to accept that his sexual interest in me was simply opportunism.) I made him write my name and address on a piece of paper and promise to contact me once the war was over.

“Of course,” he said politely. “That would be fun.”

“Give me your address.”

“I don’t have one yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“All I know is that when I get out of this uniform I will be in Berlin.” He said this with unusual vehemence. Then he laughed. “Go to Berlin and ask where is Karl-Heinz Kornfeld. They will tell you.”

I did not see him again. A day later I was marched back to the station—up the hill to town, through the cobbled streets—and put on the train for Mainz.

The new camp was in a barracks on a hill overlooking the city. From the window of our room we had a pleasant view of the cathedral and the Rhine. Compared to the gloom and deprivation of Weilburg, the camp at Mainz was a hotel. Six hundred English officers were held there. We slept ten to a room in an atmosphere that was half boarding school—hearty conviviality—and half Boy Scout camp—all ingenious make-do-and-mend. Officers were allowed to cash one 5-pound check a month at a Swiss bank in town, and with that money we could modestly supplement our rations (almost the same as at Weilburg) with purchases from a small canteen: fish and liver pastes, plum jam, packets of dehydrated soup. With the usual relish that the British seem to exhibit when forcibly confined, the place boasted more educational possibilities than the average university. Classes, seminars and study groups existed in every subject from Aramaic to Zoroastrianism. There was a theater club, a light-opera society and a debating competition with dozens of teams that seemed to run for months. There was a well-stocked library and, of course, a literary society for those who wished to talk about what they had read.

I went to the library from time to time. On the advice of others I borrowed and tried to read Maupassant, Turgenev and Walter Pater. I read them listlessly and with no enthusiasm. Having been burned by the flame of The Confessions, I found the alternatives pallid and lukewarm. I abandoned the library. My brain was still full of Rousseau’s life and words. My memory was haunted by those last weeks in Weilburg and, oddly, with the image of Karl-Heinz. Was it there in Mainz, in the tedious stuffy summer evenings when we were confined to our airless dormitories, that the first glimmerings of the enterprise that was later to dominate my life was conceived?… In all honesty I do not think so. I had no idea what I was going to do. In my empty docile moods I did not even think of “after the war,” far less of a career or prospects. I lived monotonously in the present. I cashed my checks, bartered the contents of my food parcels, played kabuki, dumb crambo and gin rummy and—a measure of how alien my mood was—I learned to play the banjo quite proficiently. Eighteen months later, in London at a party, someone brought along a banjo. I picked it up, people gathered round expectantly (I had been loud about my accomplishments), but I discovered to my embarrassment I could not play a single tune. It was as if some twin or sibling had learned the instrument, some ghostly edition of myself. The skill was fixed and localized both temporally and historically—Mainz, 1918—beyond that it disappeared.

I was in the camp at Mainz for five months, and in a way I look on them as more dulling to the spirit than my time at Weilburg. In Mainz I became like the Russians—morose, pessimistic, unwilling to be plucky or cheerful. Nothing happened to me there to rival my experiences in my solitary room above the gymnasium. My fellow prisoners were affable enough, but to me—grown used to the exhilaration of my own company, Rousseau’s and Karl-Heinz’s—they seemed insufferably bland. In a funny way I came to feel nostalgic for Weilburg and its melancholic absurdities—the glum alcoholic Russians, the dotard generals in tweed. I felt left out here in beefy British Mainz (always l’homme de l’extrême gauche). I attracted no attention; my participation in the camp’s social life was minimal; I was in no sense a character or personality. I would wager that none of my fellow inmates, a few years later, would have been able even to recall the features of my face. “Todd?… Todd?…” I can hear them say, faces screwed up to goad their memories. “Was he the chap with the ginger hair and a wooden leg?… No? Oh.… Can’t help you, I’m afraid.”

Perhaps it was a psychological problem? After Weilburg, to find myself in the society of men once more, in all its crude stinking intimacy, must have subdued me. Who can say? The war ended in November and within a month I was back in Edinburgh, just in time for New Year’s Eve.

VILLA LUXE, June 13, 1972

This morning as I shave I catch myself wondering how often in my life I have performed this mundane operation. On average, say once a day since I was eighteen years old? Thousands upon thousands of times …

I rinse the bristles from my razor. All gray now. Whitebeard. My mind still works at the notion. Suppose, for the sake of argument, I shave off a quarter of an inch of bristle every week. That’s one inch a month. A foot a year. That’s a fifty-foot beard during a life, give or take a foot or two.… I try to imagine myself with a fifty-foot beard. Think of all the hair we men remove in a lifetime. Think of all the hair the human race cuts and shaves, plucks and depilates from heads, armpits, legs and groins. Think of all those locks and fuzz, whiskers and fluff, building up through the history of recorded time. Where has it all gone? How astonishing that the world has been able to absorb it!

Later, Emilia arrives and sets about her cleaning. Ostentatiously, I pick up a book and go out to my lookout. I sit there half an hour and then, unobserved, I follow a circuitous route round the field, through a small clump of banana trees, to arrive at the back of the house. There, behind an obligingly thick jasmine creeper, is the small shuttered window of Emilia’s WC.

I squinny through my tiny hole and settle down to wait. My heart beats with alarming strength, my breaths are deep and urgent. I reflect that this voyeuristic thrill seems hardly worth the strain it puts on the cardiovascular system.

I wait, it seems, for hours. Hot, scratched by the jasmine, pestered by flies … Finally, Emilia comes in. I breathe quietly through my mouth. The small hole is perfectly angled. I can see the top of the cistern and, where she is standing now, Emilia’s legs from her ankles to her knees.… She doesn’t move. She hums to herself. She must be looking in the mirror. Then she approaches the toilet bowl. She flips up her skirt, thumbs fit into her pants and in one fast smooth action she sits down.

Nothing. I didn’t see a thing. I lean back against the wall. The toilet flushes and I hear the door close.

I feel the very opposite of aroused. I feel grimy, shameful, bothered. Suddenly I loathe my snouty old man’s craving. What has driven me to this sordid pastime?… I know. The German girls. Ulrike. Old memories have crawled out like lizards from beneath their stones. The past is catching up with me.