A Perfect Spy

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.”

“If they give him happiness and help him to study they are welcome. Do you wish to invite your passionate Jemima?”

Furious, Pym stalked to his room and penned a long letter to Rick about the unfairness of the average Swiss in daily matters. “Sometimes I think the law here does duty for common kindness,” he wrote stuffily. “Particularly where women are concerned.”

Rick wrote back by return, urging chastity: “Better you remain Clean until you have made the choice that is Meant for you.”

“Dear Belinda,