Adam lit a stick of sandalwood incense and stuck it in the top of a miniature skull, then he put on a Django Reinhardt LP. ‘Nuages’ was one of the tracks and we drifted with it and had more Marillenschnaps. The red-shaded lamp made a pinky glow while we took our clothes off. Adam was lean and muscular with a sharp hawk-like face, he looked as if he was made for climbing mountains and maybe falling off them. His nakedness made my heart go out to him. The music was actually saying things that words couldn’t although I did say, ‘Am I better than a sphinx?’ and Adam said, ‘You’re better than anything.’ People speak of ‘making love’ when they talk about the sexual act. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. This time I thought it was. When we finally rolled apart and lay there catching our breath he said, ‘Trees are dangerous, you know.’
I said, ‘Actually, I haven’t had any trouble with them so far.’
‘You’ve heard of the Erlkonig, the Erlking?’
‘No.’
‘His name means Alderking but he hangs out in birches also. He goes where he wants.’
‘So what about him? What’s his thing?’
‘He and his daughters, they make people dead.’
‘Right. I’m not around alders or birches very much but I’ll be careful. Thanks for the tip.’
‘My grandfather was photographing birches on the Teufelsmoor, the Devil’s Moor near Worpswede one Christmas. He was found dead among those trees.’
‘What killed him?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Tell me.’
‘I’ll sing you a song.’ He climbed out of bed naked, picked up a guitar, and sang ‘Herr Oluf’ and translated it for me. ‘Nobody is safe anywhere, really,’ he said.
‘I feel safe being unsafe with you,’ I said. ‘Come back to bed.’ He did and we made love some more and fell asleep and I dreamt that Death stepped out of the Egon Schiele painting and made a pass at me.
When I got back to the Inter-Continental next morning I was told that Sid was dead. He’d jumped off the tenth-storey balcony some time during the night. He’d stuck a note to the balcony railing: ‘I’m catching a ride with Anubis.’ I hadn’t had any kind of premonition or whatever it is that I sometimes get. The last time I saw him he didn’t look like a photograph. Maybe I should have felt guilty about going off with Adam but I didn’t.
We still had the gig to do. Jimmy Wicks and I took over the songs that Sid would have done. When I saw Adam that evening I felt that I’d made a choice but I didn’t want to push it. If he’d asked me to drop everything and go away with him I’d have done it. I gave him my address and telephone number in London. ‘Give me yours,’ I said, ‘so we can stay in touch.’
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ he said. ‘My wife is very jealous.’
‘Your wife,’ I said.
‘She doesn’t mind what I do when I’m touring,’ he said, ‘but she doesn’t like it when I get phone calls at home.’ I looked at him and yes, he was like a photograph.
I was thinking about that when Elias brought me back to the present. ‘Can you sing “Herr Oluf” in German?’ he said.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘just the first verse:’
Herr Oluf reitet spat und weit
zu bieten auf seine Hochzeitleut.
Herr Oluf rides late and far
to invite guests to his wedding.
Da tanzten die Elfen auf grunem Sand,
Erlkonigs Tochter reicht ihm die Hand.
There dance the elves on a green bank,
the Erlking’s daughter reaches out her hand to him.
Wilkommen, Herr Oluf, komm tanze mit mir,
zwei goldene sporen schenke ich dir.
Welcome, Herr Oluf, come dance with me,
two golden spurs I give you.
Elias answered for Herr Oluf:
Ich darf nicht tanzen, nicht tanzen ich mag,
denn morgen ist mein Hochzeittag.”
I may not dance, I don’t want to dance,
tomorrow is my wedding day.
‘Your voice …’ he said.
‘My voice what?’
‘It’s like my mother’s. I could see the alders and the birches, I could hear the hoof-beats splashing through the swamp.’
I didn’t say anything. Hearing that song come out of me had been strange. And the dead man his mother had found among the trees had undoubtedly been Adam’s grandfather.
‘I’m thinking about how we met,’ said Elias. ‘How is it that you’re a patron of the Royal Academy?’
‘Goth rock isn’t a for ever thing, Elias, and the people who do it don’t always stay the same year after year. Sometimes they change.’
‘Maybe their luck changes too.’
‘Why’d you say that?’
‘I don’t know, the words just came out of my mouth.’
I looked at my watch. ‘I have a rehearsal to get to.’
‘Can I come along?’
I looked at him. Sixty-two but a little like a schoolboy asking for a date. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘The sooner we get through it, the sooner we get through it.’
‘Through what, the rehearsal?’
‘Not that — this.’
‘And what would you say this is?’
‘A mistake, probably. Let’s go.’
4 Anneliese Newman
22 January 2003. So. Now I have ninety-two years, that is how it is. The years lie one on top of another like a wobbly stack of plates. All of these plates have on them life-pictures and thought-pictures amd on the topmost plate I sit. When the stack topples, down I come and I am dead. The plates are all shattered, the pictures scattered in little sharp-edged pieces. Where will those little pieces go when I am dead? Maybe to people who are not dead; they will find pictures and bits of pictures in their heads and they won’t know what they mean, any more than I do with some of the little pieces in my head. Look, here is the moon, here are mountains, here is the sea, here are two sphinxes.
Why did I like to sing ‘Herr Oluf’ to my son? I think much about the Erlking’s daughter, how she appears not always the same, is not always to be recognised. I thought he might hear not in the words but in my voice that the Erlking’s daughter is what pulls you away from where you thought to go. From where it seemed you were meant to go. And maybe you want to go with her, maybe she brings you not to Death but to something new. Maybe if Herr Oluf had gone with her he would not have ridden home dead. Sometimes I talk nonsense, this comes of living too much alone.
That man I ran away with, that tenor. Schlange, Schinken, Schwenk. Peter Schwenk. Maybe now he is dead, not everyone lives so long as I. Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, he was Belmonte in the Susquehanna Opera production and he promised me I should one day be Constanze but I never rose above ‘Turkish woman’. Not a good man, really, not a nice man but I left my husband and my children and went with him. Now I am here in this place that stinks of old women and I have little pieces of pictures in my head, yes? What is the world but little pieces of pictures and who can see a whole one?
5 Elias Newman
22 January 2003. The whole time we were in the taxi we didn’t talk much, and when we did it was only to point out this or that or comment on what we were passing. I still wanted to know about her reaction to The Cyclops but I never found a way to ask, because even as little as I knew Christabel I sensed that a wrong word could bring the shutters down.