If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead Read online

  But now I need to pee. It’s no fun being old. Even for kings.

  We were in Buda when this story began. Definitely Buda and not Pest. I remember it all so clearly now. It’s all coming back to me. Buda is up the hill and Pest is across the river and after me and the barmaid from the beer hall got finished I went across the river and up the hill so I was definitely in Pest and going back to Buda, so that’s that sorted out.

  Anyway, it’s a lovely town—or two lovely towns. Or it was, at any rate. God knows what it must be like now. Joining up with us might have been better than getting bent over the table to take it roughly up the chute from our heroic Aryan storm troopers but it comes to the same thing in the end. We signed up for a one-way ticket to hell, and they decided to come along for the ride, so some place in Budapest tonight there’s probably an old man like me, sitting in the dark and trying not to piss his pants as the bombs fall all around him. We should drink a toast, him and me. I’ve still got a little bit of sloe gin left in the bottom of the bottle. I was saving it up for my chest in the winter but, since I might not have a chest by the morning, there’s not much point.

  So here’s to you, old man in Budapest (I should say here that I have been under the sink and got the bottle. It’s pretty sludgy, full of dusty bits of broken sloe berries and even a couple of leaves. I will strain it through my mustache). Here’s to you, old man in Budapest. You’re as shit-scared as I am and you didn’t want this war any more than I did so God bless you and see you safe through the night, old man in Budapest. Or old woman. There must be an old woman there too, under those bombs, and young women and little kids. God bless you all, you poor bastards.

  Maybe she’s there. The barmaid. She would be getting on a bit now. Sixty or so, I suppose. Fifty anyway, which is old for a woman—especially in wartime.

  I can’t remember her name and I’m not going to try. I don’t know if I even knew it. I bet I said, “What’s your name?” and she would’ve told me and I’d’ve said, “That’s a pretty name,” without even hearing it. If she’d asked me right there and then, that very second, what her name was, I couldn’t’ve told her.

  I didn’t give that girl anything like the time and attention she deserved, but she wasn’t alone in that, poor kid. No, she was not alone in that. I suppose, given the circumstances and how it’s very likely that a ton weight of exploding iron is going to come through my roof any second, I suppose that is something I should repent. Well, I do repent it. I could’ve shown a great deal more care and respect in a lot of cases and, I have to acknowledge, if I’d’ve had a sister and somebody like me had come along then, in fairness, I would not have been pleased.

  I was never cruel to anybody. I never made anybody any promises and, consequently, I never let anybody down. I was careful about that and, if anybody started building castles in the air and putting Otto Witte inside them, with his magnificent whiskers and his magnificent muscles and one magnificent muscle in particular, that was not my fault. This is not to excuse myself.

  But that girl in the beer hall, that girl who might be sitting now, under a storm of bombs, right now, maybe with a pack of grandchildren round her knees (and, God forgive me, I’m not even going to think about the end of that sentence), that girl I did not give the attention she deserved. No, it was just down to the cellar, a quick kiss and a cuddle, “Oh, Otto, ain’t you strong!,” knickers down, up on a barrel and away we go!

  Now, I was always careful. Nobody left the party until everybody got a dance, if you know what I mean, but I could’ve taken a bit more time and had a bit of a cuddle afterward. Girls do like a cuddle afterward. The fact is, there just wasn’t time. I had to get back up the hill for the next show and, anyway, her dad was coming down the stairs, yelling and screaming. I don’t know what he was saying. I could never make out a word of Hungarian—even written down it looks like an explosion in a sign-writers’ shop—but he did not sound happy so I buttoned my trousers quick smart, hauled myself up to the roof by my fingertips, swung my feet up to the cellar trapdoor, where the barrels came in, kicked it open and flew out on to the street. By God, I was fit then. Still am. I bet I could still do it now.

  As it turns out, and for the record, I couldn’t do it now. I had a go and it didn’t work out entirely to plan. It was all right when I reached up to the rafter—which is really remarkably sturdy considering how this caravan rattles about in every breeze—but I didn’t quite get my feet up to the roof before I fell off. And I hit a shelf on my way down and the coffee can hit the floor and the few little bits of brown dust I was saving for Christmas fell out. I salvaged something—most of it, I think—but there’s probably even less coffee in there than there was before and a good deal more floor sweepings.

  I’ve got to stop doing this, this babbling about coffee cans and falling off the roof and the fun I had with this girl here and that girl there. It’s got to stop. The words come easier if I imagine that the person who finds this is a friend and we are sitting round yarning about the old days and death seems more distant with a kind friend in the room, but I don’t have time for all this wandering about in the story. And it is inappropriate. This is a story about a king, and kings don’t fall off the roof and kick their coffee can on the way down. Kings don’t have to button their trousers up in a hurry when an angry daddy shows up in a pub cellar. No, we need a bit of dignity. I am definitely going to tear all these pages out and start again.

  To begin.

  We were in Budapest when this story began, twin capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that lay, like a sleeping dragon, sprawled across Europe from the Adriatic to Russia, from the Alps to the Carpathians.

  How can we tell of the grandeur and the beauty of this place, crowded with the plunder of centuries, groaning with the weight of its own Imperial power, awash with treasures and art, its magnificent buildings and wide avenues expressing more eloquently than mere words its glorious history and kissed by the sparkling Danube at its very heart? How–

  Jesus Christ! That one was close. Not so close as the one that got the kid this afternoon but pretty damned close. It whistled all the way down and then the ground shook and then there was this thunderclap that rattled my teeth and shook my heart around inside my ribs and that damned coffee can fell off the shelf again. My little caravan was pelted with stones and bits of earth, as if somebody was firing bags of nails out of a cannon, but I don’t think any of them came through. It probably sounded a lot worse than it was—like being inside a drum. It’s a good thing I closed the shutters or I wouldn’t have a window left, and whatever else that bomb has done, it’s completely knackered my literary good intentions.

  Screw high-flown prose style, I’m going to go back to talking to myself. Or you. I wonder who you are. A little boy come out of the shelter after a night of explosions and looking for a really good bit of shrapnel, maybe? They do that, the kids, the ones who haven’t been dragged away from their mothers and sent off to defend the Reich. I’ve seen them stopping to pick up lumps of jagged metal from the street and swapping them with their mates. Hideous. What a world we have made for them that they think broken bombs are playthings. No, I wouldn’t want it to be you. I wouldn’t want a kid to find my little caravan all blown to bits and me plastered all over it. And I wouldn’t want you here with me now.

  I wish my old mate Max was here. That would be really nice. But Max would probably have his own version of this story. He’d be bound to remember it different and he’d want to tell it different. But I reckon Max would stay and hold my hand. Fair’s fair. I did it for him, and it was always turn and turn about with me and Max, but he’s already done his fair share of dying, and I reckon I’ll get to shake him by the hand before too long anyway.

  It might be nice if you were a pretty girl, young and easily impressed, but supposing you were, then what? I am not the man I was. Best not.

  A dog would be nice. Dogs are good at listening but not too good at reading books. So it’s you. You’re just a bloke. A decent b
loke. Not heroic, not interested in politics, just doing your best. A plumber, or a schoolteacher and an airraid volunteer, and you’re going to come along and help to clear up the mess, and you’ll find my book and you’ll put it in your pocket and you’ll get your shovel and put me in a sandbag and you’ll tuck me up all cozy and wipe your hands and say, “Poor old bugger.” But before that happens we’ll sit here and have a couple of beers and yarn about the old days.

  Sit down, friend, pull up a chair, pour yourself a glass of something and don’t pay any attention to the bombs. It’s only thunder. It can’t hurt you. Now, I’ve got a story to tell you.

  I was in Pest when this story began. No doubt about that. I was in Pest and I’d had a couple of beers and I’d had a bit of fun with a pretty girl and I’d come bouncing out on to the pavement like a bat out of hell. It was a bright sunny day in May. Or June. Or August. Well, in the summer, definitely, and I took off down the road like a rabbit running from a fox.

  It didn’t take long before I got to the river, all green and sparkling, with queues of barges moving up and down it and the sides all built up with big stone blocks. The place was heaving—people rushing back and forth, carts loaded with stuff and horses tramping like marching soldiers, and fancy coaches, all shiny and painted, with their spindly little wheels and matched pairs trotting along on dancers’ legs, footmen on the back making solemn faces and grand ladies inside with their big hats and pretty dresses, peeking out from behind their gloves at me and wondering. Believe me, the toffs are the worst of the lot. Don’t you go thinking that they’re any better than that landlord’s daughter. Look at Tifty—not that I’m judging. Anyway, everybody in Pest was heading for the same place, all of them crowding along the riverbank to the big bridge—I forget what they call it, but it’s all hung with these huge, great, square-linked chains, enormous things with enormous stone lions at either end. It’s a very handsome thing. Or it was.

  So everybody in Pest was crowding on to this bridge to get to Buda and everybody in Buda was trying to get to Pest. It was a very handy thing, that bridge, and when I got to the other side I climbed the stone stairs that wind up the side of the hill, right the way to the top. It’s lovely up there, all those little streets and the arches and the palaces and the music hall where Beethoven played and the spun candy towers and the views all around. I remember one little place with a tavern where we used to go sometimes and, marching all along the walls, a whole parade of stone lions, right up to the corner where two poor lions had to share one head. But I didn’t have time to stop for a drink. I ran along the little streets, across the square beside that big church and through the gate in the town wall at the other side. That’s all I remember—not that it’s the end of the story, but I couldn’t tell you exactly where I went after that. I couldn’t draw you a map. All I know is it was quicker to run up one side of Buda hill and down the other than it was to run round to the flat field where we had our tent.

  Oh, my friend, that tent. I miss that tent. Sometimes, you know, I go there still in dreams. The smell of it, the lamps hung all around the ring, the straw, the sawdust, the animals, the noises they made, the way they smelled, the warmth of them, the heat of their bodies—you have no idea how damned hot a tiger is—the drums and the music, the girls all dressed up, and my friends. I see them now. I see them just as they were. Night after night they stand there smiling. My old mate Max throws back the tent flap and suddenly the shadows are bright with his lantern and he beckons me inside and they are all standing there waiting, Max and the Professor and Tifty and Sarah. My Sarah. Sometimes I wonder if that’s what it might be like. On a night like tonight, when a big black exploding piano comes crashing through the roof, or some other night when my heart just seizes up and the blood stops moving in my veins, I wonder if it might be like that, if I might find myself walking across a shadowed field toward the light of a lantern that’s shining out from a warm tent, with my good friends waiting inside. Sometimes I wonder that and then I wake up in my little narrow bed, in my little tin house, and it’s dark and all the blankets have fallen off and, in the space of a night, I have grown old.

  But not then. Then I was young.

  I must have run for miles by the time I got to the tent and I don’t think I’d even broken a sweat and, when I arrived, Tifty was standing there in her pink tights, looking like a Roman statue.

  She had that smile on her face, that naughty smile she used to get when the nights were cold and she needed a cuddle.

  I smiled back.

  Tifty smiled some more. She had a lovely smile. She was a lovely girl, but it wasn’t all that long since the cellar of the beer hall and I suppose I could have managed something, a little something, but time was really getting short and we had a show to put on.

  Tifty was still smiling.

  “What?” I said.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said. And she went away across the sawdust ring, carrying a bucket of horse-apples and swaying like a palm tree on a desert island.

  Well, I kept on walking through the tent after her. I had things to do, stuff to get ready, fancy painted barrels for balancing on, seesaws for bouncing, that kind of thing, and then there was Max grinning at me like a bear having a seizure.

  Now I’m not stupid. I could tell something was going on, so I said, “What?” again. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, Max. What’s up?”

  “Nothing.” But it was all he could do to stop from bursting out laughing.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Look, I had a bit of a tumble with that barmaid, all right. Is that it? You’d’ve done the same. Is that what this is about?”

  Max looked astonished. “You never did!”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “You lucky bugger. You lucky, dirty bugger.” But he wasn’t angry or jealous. We were friends. He was just congratulating me. It’s no loss what a friend gets, that’s what we used to say.

  “So it’s not that?” I said.

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  Max made his big bear grin again and he said, “You’re in the paper, mate,” and then he reached backward, took the rolled-up newspaper out of his back pocket and handed it to me.

  But it was no damned good. I can read well enough. I am neither stupid nor ignorant but, unless it was coming from an angry daddy stamping down the stairs, that Hungarish stuff made no sense to me and I knew it made no more sense to Max.

  Max said, “Page three.”

  I opened the paper but there was nothing to see. Just a jangle of letters that would make your eyes hurt. I said, “Stop messing about,” and I gave him his paper back.

  But by then Tifty had come back from emptying the horse-apples and she said, “Darling, it’s quite true.” With an elegant finger she pointed to a picture in the middle of the page. “That’s you, darling, isn’t it? Now what have you been up to? Have you been naughty, darling? Tell Tifty.”

  “No, I have not been ‘naughty.’ Well, a little bit naughty—” they laughed then, Tifty and Max—“but nothing that would get me in the papers.”

  “Silly Otto,” she said. “Tifty’s just teasing.” She was trailing her fingertip over my ear. “Darling, you know how Tifty likes to tease.” I did know. There was this thing she did with that finger. I’ll tell you about that later. Maybe. “Darling,” she said, “did you forget that this is my native land and this is my native—” tapping that lovely finger on Max’s paper again—“tongue?”

  “That’s still not my picture,” I said.

  “Are you sure? Really sure?”

  “What’s it say, Tifty?”

  “Oh, darling, it’s a very boring article. Very boring. Nobody would ever have read it if your picture hadn’t been at the top of it.”

  “Tifty, what’s it say?”

  “My dear, if you must know it says, ‘Albánok keres új király’” Tifty had a voice like fairy bells dipped in rum and smoked ou
t of a meerschaum pipe. If anybody else said something like that it would sound like a bag of marbles falling in a tin bath. She could say it and make it sound like angels kissing your ears.

  Still, I was getting impatient and it must have shown in my eyes.

  Tifty said, “It means, ‘Albanians seeking a new king.’” And then she read out the whole thing, all about this silly little country that nobody ever heard of before, the haunt of pirates and bandits and how it used to be under the heel of the barbarous Turk but now it was breaking free and it was looking for a king.

  “And it seems they have chosen you, darling. It is you,” she said.

  Max said, “Looks like you.”

  “It does, you know,” said Tifty.

  “It’s nothing like me.”

  “We can settle it,” Max said.

  “We can settle it,” Tifty said.

  Now, we never argued, my friends and me, but if there was ever a disagreement, we knew how to settle it; we’d ask Professor von Mesmer. So that’s what we did. We all of us trooped out of the tent and round the back to the caravans. Sarah was just going up the steps when we arrived, carrying a tray with her father’s coffee on it, and Tifty asked if we could see him. That’s how it was. You couldn’t just walk in on Professor von Mesmer.

  “Just a moment,” Sarah said. She went inside with the coffee tray and, a little bit later, he came out on her arm.

  They say the doctors have this trick where they make you look at ink blots and decide how mad you are by what you can see there. The Professor wore eyeglasses like great round pools of ink. I won’t tell you what I saw there in case those doctors decide to lock me up. Nothing good. Like an evil butterfly clamped across his face where his eyes should be.

  He got to the bottom of his caravan steps and he leaned on his cane and he said, “How can I help you?”

  Bold as brass, Max steps up and holds out the paper. “Settle an argument,” he said. “Is this Otto or is this not Otto?”