The Living and the Dead in Winsford

27

I leaf through the Morocco material before starting to read it carefully.

Martin seems to have spent thirteen days in Taza in the summer of 1980. Or at least, that is the number of days there described in the diary, but he doesn’t pack up and travel back home, nor does he even say goodbye to Herold and Hyatt. I seem to recall that he was away from Stockholm for at least three weeks, but of course it’s possible he took the opportunity of visiting Casablanca and Marrakesh, not just the notorious couple in Taza, having already gone all the way to Morocco. Perhaps he told me about it when he got back home, but when you’re in the eighth month of pregnancy with your first child, other things don’t register.

Maybe he realized that it was time for him to leave Taza. Maybe something happened that caused him to stop writing — something of which he didn’t want to have a written record, for whatever reason. Perhaps I’ll find the answer in the type-written material, or on the computer.

I no longer know if there really are ravens on my shoulders, and if I am obliged to continue with this undertaking I have embarked upon. The thought of a big nocturnal bonfire out on the moor, with all Martin’s belongings, has become increasingly attractive this last week, but that might be overhasty. Why it should be overhasty is something I still don’t understand: there is a difference between burning clothes and burning bridges, but perhaps it’s not as great as I’d like to think. I really am ambivalent about it, but think that I might as well read these irritating notes to the end — just as well as I should play patience or become acquainted with Lorna Doone’s and John Ridd’s exploits on seventeenth-century Exmoor. What is important and what ought to be done are questions that become less obvious for every day that passes. I assume that is the legitimate price of isolation.

In any case, the situation in Taza in 1980 is different from what it had been on Samos the three previous years, and I can’t help wondering why Martin has been invited at all.

Or why anybody has been invited, come to that. Have they been invited in fact? By whom? Seven people have come to visit the big house outside the town of Taza this summer: Grass, Gusov and Soblewski, one of the Germans, plus a much older French novelist called Maurice Megal and his wife Bernadette. And Martin. Nobody else is mentioned, apart from Hyatt and Herold. On checking I confirm that this charmed inner circle comprises six men and three women; in addition there is also a female chef, a gardener and a swimming pool supervisor. So if one were to write a play about the goings-on, one would need a dozen actors.

Why on earth would anybody want to write a play about it?

But why on earth would anybody not want to write a play about it? Good Lord, I haven’t had much to do with drama at the Monkey house, but I have been involved in four or five productions and think I can claim to know the rules of the game. Evenings in Taza? It sounds almost like a classic already.

Martin arrives in the evening of the twentieth of July, and his last handwritten note is dated the first of August.

Bessie Hyatt is pregnant, that is the hub around which everything else revolves. Martin doesn’t discover this fact until the third day of his visit, and her body shows no sign of pregnancy. But it is a fact even so. She is in the beginning of the third month, and the same evening that Martin hears the news he is in a private conversation with Grass and is informed of a possible complication. Martin has underlined the word ‘possible’ twice, because Grass is not yet certain of the circumstances — namely that the father of the expected child is alleged to be someone other than Tom Herold.

I stop reading at this point because I am suddenly reminded of that comment Martin made about Gunvald when we were driving through the night to Kristianstad before continuing to Poland. His suggestion that he wasn’t the father of his son. Is this where he had got the idea from? He had been talking about Strindberg’s play The Father, and said it was a question all men asked themselves, fairly seriously. But if the problem had been a key point in the drama between Hyatt and Herold, perhaps it had a special sort of relevance for Martin? A heavier weight? But so what? I thrust the thought to one side and continue reading.

Before the question of Bessie’s pregnancy crops up in the notes there are quite a lot of descriptions of the surroundings and the house; but from the twenty-fourth of July onwards everything is about events and relationships between people at Al-Hafez, as the palace-like creation is evidently called. It is built in Moorish style and is owned by a Swiss billionaire, Martin writes. Tom Herold has rented it for two years, and since it is so incredibly hot in the middle of summer, residents and guests rarely venture outside the white stone wall that encloses the property. Inside this wall, topped with broken glass, there is everything one could possibly want: shade-providing trees (oleanders, tamarisks and a generous plane, according to Martin), a large kidney-shaped swimming pool, stimulating conversation, food, drink, a certain amount of mild drugs, and the three aforementioned servants.

And so we have the stage setting and scenography — that thought keeps on recurring, despite everything.

‘Had a long conversation with Grass,’ writes Martin on the twenty-fourth of July.

I find it hard to judge if there is anything in what he says, or if he is just paranoid. He drinks too much, and has presumably popped some kind of pills, I don’t know what, but they make him exceptionally intense and insistent. Words come flooding out of his mouth, and he pays absolutely no attention to objections — not when you are talking privately to him at least. When Herold is present, on the other hand, he usually sits there in silence and keeps his thoughts to himself.

What Grass keeps coming back to and stressing is that his childhood friend (childhood sweetheart? Martin wonders) Bessie is in danger. She is on the brink of a nervous breakdown, and it’s her pregnancy and her husband’s interpretation of it that are the key causes of the rapidly escalating crisis. Martin can see with his own eyes that the successful young author is clearly in a state. Grass is not imagining things: anybody can see that Bessie Hyatt is unwell, she staggers between a state of manic exhilaration and almost catatonic introversion. She is always present at the obligatory, prolonged meals — which begin as soon as dusk and cool evening air begins to descend on Al-Hafez, and usually continue into the early hours — but from one evening to the next it can seem as if Bessie is two different people.

All nine of them sit there, and it is Tom Herold who holds court. Martin uses that expression several times. It’s Herold who is very definitely the main character, and to stress this role he likes to dress up and act like a sort of Arab prince. He has a long beard now, wears a white ankle-length djellaba and a red fez. He likes to hold forth about Arabic culture and how superior it is to that of the West; he quotes Sufi poets and at every meal recites something of his own invention, often just a few intense lines composed that morning — he spends a few hours every morning shut away in his cool study. He likes to repeat these lines several times during the course of the evening, and calls it ‘tattooing the souls of the cretins’.

Martin doesn’t describe the others present in much detail, apart from the French couple whom he hasn’t met before. He compares the novelist Maurice Megal to a short-sighted goat, but he also calls him ‘an over-cultivated snob who is careful never to say anything comprehensible, and so it is not possible to comment on it or oppose it’. His wife Bernadette, who is a good twenty-five years younger, is a ‘dark-haired, slim and mysterious woman who plays with Tarot cards and has a reputation as a hypnotist’. She demonstrates her latter skills one of the first evenings she is present, when she persuades Doris Guttmann to undress and in her naked state to perform some kind of snake dance for the rest of those present, convinced that she is a harem lady from the fourteenth century.

‘It’s also entirely possible,’ Martin notes, ‘that she wasn’t hypnotized at all but didn’t want to miss an opportunity of dancing naked before an audience.’

I assume Martin must have felt both stimulated and somewhat embarrassed in this company, even if he never admits to either of those reactions. He tries to make it sound as if it is nothing very unusual, in the early days at least, but as time passes (he devotes at least four pages of text to each day) his account acquires a special focus: Bessie Hyatt. On the morning of the twenty-eighth of July he has his first (and only, I think) private conversation with her, and what she says to him in one way strengthens Grass’s case, but in another way it demonstrates how extremely dependent this young American woman is on her husband. She swears that she worships him, literally worships. She laughs and cries indiscriminately, behaves ‘with a level of controlled hysteria that is so close to the surface that you can detect it even when she is sitting still and saying nothing. Like a bridge over dark water, her face is.’ (sic!) Obviously Martin can’t ask her outright about her pregnancy, about who is the father of the child she is expecting, but the question is answered as loudly as a trumpet call as early as the following evening. In the play Evenings in Taza, we have reached the first highlight — even if that term is inappropriate in every respect as far as those present are concerned.

To sum it up: thanks to a combination of potent recreational drugs and the efforts of the hypnotist Bernadette Megal, Tom Herold, in full view of all present, has a vision in which he discovers the rapist Ahib, who has clandestinely placed an unwanted olive-coloured bastard foetus in Bessie Hyatt’s swelling stomach. Ahib is clearly possessed by a demon, or several demons, and must die. It is a duty to kill him, and more especially it is a duty to kill him before the child has grown too big and strong inside Bessie. This performance is enacted with a series of remarkable pirouettes and poetic outpourings over twenty minutes: Madame Megal accompanies it all on the bongo drums and some sort of native stringed instrument, and the drama ends with Tom Herold howling in pain and anger like an injured lion, and Bessie throwing herself into the swimming pool.

I stop reading after this description. Martin has three more days in Taza, but a thought has suddenly occurred to me: what is there to indicate that he wasn’t sitting in a hotel room in Copenhagen or Amsterdam, making up the whole story? What proof is there that the whole rigmarole is not an invention?

None, so far as I can see. Why haven’t I heard anything about all this before? Why has he kept quiet about these bizarre happenings for more than thirty years? Why hasn’t he written about it? I decide to check that there really is a place in Morocco called Taza. That will have to be the next time I go to the Winsford Community Computer Centre — I realize that it’s over a week since the last visit, so it’s presumably high time.

But then I recall that e-mail from G.

Have always felt an inkling that this would surface one day.

And the promise to Bergman and the conversation with Soblewski in his big house that night. . No, there must be a reality behind these notes, I have to accept that. It actually did happen.

Which of course doesn’t necessarily mean that every word is true. I decide to put the whole business on ice for a few days, put the notebooks back in the suitcase and the wardrobe, and think that if nothing else I should try to get hold of Bessie Hyatt’s two novels. For reasons I don’t really understand I haven’t read either of them: they are no doubt on the shelves in Nynäshamn, but those shelves are a long way away. Perhaps that nice lady in the second-hand bookshop in Dulverton can help?

I look at Castor, lying there in front of the almost dead fire. Ask him if he wants to go for a walk. He doesn’t answer. Through the window, on the other side of the wall, I can see a whole herd of Exmoor ponies grazing in the gathering dusk. At least twenty of them. In an hour we shall be swallowed up by darkness, both us and them.