A Perfect Spy

“Things are a bit sticky here at the moment. Some of the foreign students in the house are taking things a bit far with their womenfolk and I have had to step in or I’ll never get my work done. Perhaps if you adopted the same firm line with Jem, you might in the long run be doing her a favour.”

A day came when Axel fell ill. Pym hurried back from the zoo full of funny stories about his adventures to find him in bed, where he hated most to be. His tiny room was heavy with cigar smoke, his pale head darkened with stubble and shadows. A girl was hanging about but Axel ordered her out when Pym arrived.

“What’s wrong with him?” Pym asked Herr Ollinger’s doctor, peering over his shoulder, trying to decipher the prescription.

“What is wrong with him, Sir Magnus, is that he was bombed by the heroic British,” said Axel savagely from the bed, in a barbed unfamiliar voice. “What is wrong with him is that he got half a British shell up his arse and is having trouble shitting it out.”

The doctor was sworn not just to secrecy but to silence and with a friendly pat for Pym departed.

“Maybe it was you who fired it at me, Sir Magnus. Did you land in Normandy, by any chance? Perhaps you led the invasion?”

“I didn’t do anything like that at all,” said Pym.

So Pym became Axel’s legs again, fetching his medicines and cigars and cooking for him and ransacking the university libraries for ever more books which he could read aloud to him.

“No more Nietzsche, thank you, Sir Magnus. I think we know enough about the cleansing effect of violence. Kleist is not as bad but you don’t read him properly. You must bark Kleist. He was a Prussian officer, not an English hero. Get the painters.”

“Which ones?”

“Abstractionists. Decadents. Jews. Anyone who was entartet or forbidden. Give me a holiday from these mad writers.”

Pym consulted Frau Ollinger. “Then you must ask the librarian for whomever the Nazis did not like, Magnus,” she explained in her governess voice.

The librarian was an émigré who knew Axel’s needs by heart. Pym brought Klee and Nolde, Kokoschka and Klimt, Kandinsky and Picasso. He stood their picture books and catalogues open on the mantelshelf where Axel could see them without moving his head. He turned the pages and read the captions out loud. When women came, Axel again sent them away. “I am being attended to. Wait till I am well.” Pym brought Max Beckmann. He brought Steinlen, then Schiele and more Schiele. Next day the writers were reinstated. Pym fetched Brecht and Zuckmayer, Tucholsky and Remarque. He read them aloud, hours of them. “Music,” Axel commanded. Pym borrowed Herr Ollinger’s wind-up gramophone and played him Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky until Axel fell asleep. He woke delirious, the sweat falling off him like raindrops while he described a retreat through snow with the blind hanging on to the lame and the blood freezing in the wounds. He talked of a hospital, two to a bed and the dead lying on the floor. He asked for water. Pym fetched it and Axel took the glass in both hands, shaking wildly. He lifted the glass till his hands froze, then he lowered his head in jerks until his lips reached the brim. Then he sucked the water like an animal, spilling it while his fevered eyes kept guard. He drew up his legs and wetted himself and sat shaking and grumpy in an armchair while Pym changed his sheets.

“Who are you afraid of?” Pym asked again. “There’s no one here. It’s just us.”

“Then I must be afraid of you. What’s that poodle in the corner?”

“It’s Herr Bastl and he’s a chow chow, not a poodle.”

“I thought it was the Devil.”

Till a day when Pym woke to find Axel standing fully dressed at his bedside. “It is Goethe’s birthday and it’s four in the afternoon,” he announced in his military voice. “We must go into town and listen to the idiot Thomas Mann.”

“But you’re ill.”

“Nobody who stands up is ill. Nobody marches who is ill. Dress.”

“Was Mann on the forbidden list too?” Pym asked as he pulled on his clothes.

“He never made it.”

“Why’s he an idiot?”