“So who does Axel belong to?” Pym asked.
“Only to us, I think,” said Herr Ollinger gravely. “And we must be careful of him or they will take him away from us, you may be sure.”
“He has women in his room,” said Pym.
Herr Ollinger’s face turned pink with impish pleasure. “I think he has all the women of Bern,” he agreed.
A couple of days passed. On the third Pym banged on Axel’s door and found him standing smoking at the open window with several heavy-looking books before him on the sill. He must have been freezing but he seemed to need the open air to read by.
“Come for a stroll,” said Pym boldly.
“At my speed?”
“Well we can’t go at mine, can we?”
“My constitution dislikes crowded places, Sir Magnus. If we are to walk, better we stay out of town.”
They borrowed Bastl and wandered with him along the empty towpath beside the racing Aare while Herr Bastl peed and refused to follow and Pym did his best to keep an eye open for anyone who looked like a policeman. In the sunless river valley the frost drifted about in evil clouds and the cold was merciless. Axel seemed not to notice. He puffed at his cigar while he tossed out questions in his soft, amused voice. If this is how he walked from Austria, thought Pym, shivering in his wake, he must have taken years.
“How did you reach Bern, Sir Magnus? Were you advancing or retreating?” Axel asked.
Never able to resist an opportunity to portray himself on a fresh page, Pym went to work. And though, as was his wont, he took care to improve upon the reality, rearranging the facts to fit his prevailing image of himself, an instinctive caution nevertheless counselled him restraint. True, he endowed himself with a noble and eccentric mother, and true, when he came to describe Rick he awarded him many of the qualities Rick unsuccessfully aspired to, such as wealth, military distinction and daily access to the Highest in the Land. But in other respects he was frugal and self-mocking and when he came to the story of E. Weber, which he had not told anyone till now, Axel laughed so much he had to sit on a bench and light another cigar to get his wind back, while Pym laughed with him, delighted by his success. And when he showed him her very letter saying, “Never mind. E. Weber love you always,” he shouted, “Nochmal! Tell it again, Sir Magnus! I order you! And make sure it is completely different this time. Did you sleep with her?”
“Of course.”
“How many times?”
“Four or five.”
“All in one night? You are a tiger! Was she grateful?”
“She was very, very experienced.”
“More than your Jemima?”
“Well, jolly nearly.”
“More than your wicked Lippsie who seduced you when you were still a little boy?”
“Well, Lippsie was in a class of her own.”
Axel slapped him gaily on the back. “Sir Magnus, you are a prince, no question. You are a dark horse, you know that? Such a good little boy, yet you sleep with dangerous adventuresses and young English aristocrats. I love you, hear me? I love all English aristocrats, but you best.”
Walking again, Axel had to shove his arm through Pym’s to support himself, and from then on used him unashamedly as his walking-stick. For the rest of our lives we have seldom walked in any other way.
* * *
Somewhere that evening under a bridge, Pym and Axel found an empty café and Axel insisted on paying for two vodkas from the black purse he kept on a leather thong round his neck. Somewhere on the freezing journey home they agreed that Axel and Pym must begin the education they had never had, and that they would appoint tomorrow the first day of the world, and that Grimmelshausen would be their first subject because he taught that the world was a mad place and getting madder by the moment, with everything that appeared right almost certainly wrong. They agreed that Axel would take charge of Pym’s spoken German and not rest till he spoke it to perfection. Thus, in a day and an evening, Pym became Axel’s legs and Axel’s intellectual companion and, though it was not initially meant that way, Axel’s pupil, for over the next few months he unveiled for Pym the German muse. If Axel’s knowledge was greater than Pym’s, his curiosity was no less, his energy equally relentless. Perhaps by resuscitating his country’s culture for an innocent, he was reconciling himself to its recent past.
As to Pym, he was gazing at last on the glories of the kingdom he had dreamed of for so long. The German muse had no particular draw for him, then or later, for all his loud enthusiasm. If she had been Chinese or Polish or Indian, it would have made no earthly odds. The point was, she supplied Pym with the means, for the first time, to regard himself intellectually as a gentleman. And for that Pym was eternally grateful to her. By willing Pym night and day to accompany Axel on his explorations, she gave him the world inside his head that Lippsie had said he would be able to take with him anywhere. And Lippsie was right, because when he went down to the warehouse in Ostring where Herr Ollinger had obtained illegal nightwork for him at the hands of a fellow philanthropist, he neither walked nor took the tram but rode with Mozart in his coach to Prague. When he washed his elephants at night he endured the humiliations of Lenz’s Soldaten. When he sat in the third-class buffet bestowing soulful looks on Elisabeth, he imagined himself as the young Werther, planning his wardrobe before committing suicide. And when he considered all his failures and hopes together, he was able to compare his Werdegang with Wilhelm Meister’s years of apprenticeship, and planned even then a great autobiographical novel that would show the world what a noble sensitive fellow he was compared with Rick.
And yes, Jack, the other seeds were there, of course they were: a crash diet of Hegel, as much as they both could swallow at a time, a burst of Marx and Engels and the bad bears of Communism — for after all, said Axel, this was the first day of the world. “If we are to judge Christianity by the misery it has caused mankind, who would ever be a Christian? We accept no prejudices, Sir Magnus. We believe everything as we read it and only afterwards reject it. If Hitler hated these fellows so much, they can’t be all bad, I say.” Out came Rousseau and the revolutionaries, and Das Kapital, and Anti-Dühring, and in went the sun for several weeks, though I swear we came to no conclusions that I remember, except that we were glad when it was over. And I honestly doubt now whether the substance of Axel’s teaching was of importance beside Pym’s joy that he was teaching him at all. What counted was that Pym was happy from the moment he got up until the early hours of the following morning; and that when they finally went to bed on either side of their black radiator, sleeping, to use Axel’s phrase, like God in France, Pym’s mind went on exploring in his sleep.
“Axel’s got the Order of the Frozen Meat,” Pym told Frau Ollinger proudly one day, carving bread for family fondue.
Frau Ollinger gave an exclamation of disgust. “Magnus, what nonsense are you talking now?”
“It’s true! It’s German soldiers’ slang for a Russian campaign medal. He volunteered from his Gymnasium. His father could have got him a safe post in France or Belgium. A Druckposten, somewhere he could keep his head down. Axel wouldn’t let him. He wanted to be a hero like his classmates.”
Frau Ollinger was not pleased. “Then better you keep quiet about where he fought,” she said sternly. “Axel is here to study, not to boast.”
“He has women up there,” said Pym. “They creep up the stairs in the afternoons and scream when he makes love to them.”