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

  “To hear is to obey. It shall be as Your Majesty wishes,” and we clinked our empty glasses again.

  After that it was time for bed. I heaved the Professor out of his chair and gave him my arm as we went into the bouncing, rolling corridor.

  Max’s bunk was silent, Tifty’s was alive with the sounds of two people making a great effort to be very quiet, Sarah’s cabin was all in darkness, and then we were at the Professor’s door.

  “This is yours,” I said. “Need any help?”

  The lamps were lit in the Professor’s cabin—which seemed like a waste of paraffin to me, but it let me see the carpets and the velvet curtains with their thick gold tassels, a neat porcelain sink in the corner, the mirrors, the polished wood and a little bed, as white as a goose and as plump as a widow.

  “I’ll be fine. Goodnight.” And he shut the door in my face.

  My room was in darkness but, when I opened the door, the light from the corridor was enough to show me Sarah standing there, waiting. That’s why the night train to the Adriatic was my very favorite journey ever. I don’t want to say any more. I can’t say more.

  She put her fingertips across my lips and said, “Promise me, after this, no more Tifty.”

  There never was. Never again. I can’t say more. I can tell you about Tifty or that girl in the beer hall, that’s all right. I can talk about that. That’s just a bit of fun. But Sarah was my wife.

  Fish swim together in the seas by their thousands, great shoals of them, moving and heaving and circling together, never stopping, never making a home in one place. When the day comes and something tells them that it is time to continue their race, something in the water or some strange pull of the moon, then they mingle and have their joy of each other and cast their babies adrift in the sea, clouds of them, baby fish by the millions scattered across the whole ocean with never a mother to bring them up. Hundreds of thousands are gobbled up, hundreds of thousands more sink to the bottom, hundreds of thousands of others grow up and starve to death but thousands live, swimming alone through the endless ocean. They never see themselves, they have no one to tell them who or what they are and yet, somehow, they come together again. They find their way across all the unmeasured sea. They find one another again, their own kind. They recognize one another and they never part again.

  That was Sarah and me. We found one another.

  I remember every moment of that train journey, even the ones I spent asleep, and we did sleep, eventually, the comfortable, exhausted sleep of two happy people jammed into a single bed. Some people say they can’t sleep on a train. All the rattling and bumping, the endless clicketyclacking keeps them awake, but for me it was like a lullaby, it was like being rocked in a warm cradle and I fell asleep, holding Sarah.

  That lovely old train went trundling through the night, taking our hot little bed with it. From time to time we stopped, wheels squealed, signals clanked, coal rattled into the bunkers, water gushed on board in torrents and disappeared again in hisses of steam, and then we would wake up and, all amazed, discover one another again. I hope you know what that means. I hope you know what it’s like to wake from a dream and discover that, after all, it’s true. You do. I know you do. But not everybody knows that sometimes it can be a happy thing. I hope you know the surprising joy of that.

  The train gave another jolt and, when it woke us, there was a soft gray light coming through the crack in the curtains.

  “I have to go,” she said, and she crept away.

  Not long after that the steward was working along the carriage, waking everybody up with jugs of hot water. I had a shave in the tiny little sink, brushed my teeth, combed my face and, when I was looking respectable again, as the Imperial Camel Keeper deserved to look, then I went along to the saloon for my ham and eggs.

  My mate Max was already there, sharing a table with the Professor. I watched them from the door for a moment, Max with his great bear paws, holding the Professor by the elbow, helping him into his seat, pouring out his coffee. Tifty had the decency to arrive a bit late for breakfast. She came up behind me in the narrow doorway and gave me a little goose to hurry me on, “Come on, darling, we can’t have you blocking my passage!” and she laughed that beautiful, filthy laugh of hers and squeezed past me.

  Tifty was every bit as gorgeous as she had been the night before—perhaps the more so, since she had that replete glow about her which sometimes hangs on a woman after a night of love, or something very like love. She was a hell of a girl, Tifty, and I had gone to bed the night before envying Max, but that morning I knew better.

  I sat down at the table with the others—the Professor staring straight ahead, looking at nothing, Tifty and Max playing footsie under the table and trying not to giggle, and me, sitting with a cup of coffee and looking at the door that led back to the sleeping car. Sure enough, Sarah came through it. She was like summer; I told you that, didn’t I? Well, imagine what it would be like if it had been winter all your life and it was, all of a sudden, summer. That’s what it was like when Sarah came in. All along the sides of the track flowers burst into bloom and the windows filled with sunshine and nobody seemed to notice but me.

  This is where I trip up and fall flat on my face, writing nonsense like that. I’ve read a book before. I know how it is. I’m supposed to tell you how I felt. Well, I felt like that. And I’m supposed to write about what it was like to be inside Sarah’s head and in her heart and tell you how she felt, seeing me, but I can’t do that. I can’t write about how “her heart leapt like a startled deer in the forest.” I can’t do that. All I can tell you is that I saw her and I loved her and I knew she loved me.

  Sarah said, “Good morning, everybody,” sat down beside her dad and gave him a kiss. “So what’s the plan, Otto?” She said that—Sarah, who had been running the whole show from the start without my noticing.

  I took out my watch and wound it. “The steward says we should be in Fumey in about an hour. Professor, over to you.”

  “Fiume”—he was careful about the pronunciation—“is the principal harbor of the Kaiserliche und Königliche Kriegsmarine, the naval force of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and home of the Naval Academy. Fortified since Roman times, its natural harbor on the mouth of the Rječina and at the head of Kvarner Bay, an inlet of the Adriatic Sea, overlooks the islands of Cres and Krk to the south. The city is ringed by mountains on the other three sides, creating a humid, subtropical climate with frequent rainfall and cold ‘bura’ winds in the winter.”

  When he was finished, it was as if somebody had flipped a switch on one of those musical clockwork monkeys. Snap! And it all stopped and he went back to looking at nothing and lifting bread to his mouth.

  “So there we have it,” I said. “This is the end of the line and as close as we can get to the poor, lonely Albanoks, crying out to meet me. I reckon we have to get the camel unloaded—can you take care of that, Max? He seems to like you.”

  Max nodded. Nothing was ever too much trouble for my mate Max.

  “Then we have to get down to the docks and find a boat.”

  Max said, “I would think that the Keeper of the Imperial Camels ought to be entitled to a berth on board any ship of the Kaiserliche und … what he said.”

  The Professor said, “We can’t just commandeer an Imperial warship.”

  “Oh, but it’s all right to steal an entire country, is it? Anyway, I wasn’t talking about anything fancy, just a cruiser or something.”

  “A cruiser!” And the Professor turned those black goggles to the roof again.

  It was up to Sarah to calm things down. “Let’s just play it by ear,” she said. “We’ll get the camel off the train first, like Otto says, and then we can see about boats and things—don’t you think, Otto?”

  So that was the start of it. That was the very first time I ever had to make a choice between siding with Max and siding with a woman—any woman—and it turned out to be Sarah.

  “Yes,” I said, “that’s what to do. On
e step at a time and, you know, Max, even an Imperial cruiser might be a little bit ambitious.”

  Tifty put her spoon down in her saucer with a noise like a tiny silver bell. She said, “I don’t know about that, darling. I seem to recall a young man I used to know. I’m sure he’s something in the navy.”

  I’m cold and my fingers are getting stiff. I’ve boiled the kettle again and made myself another cup of hot water, but there’s nothing to put in it: no sugar, no tea, no coffee, well, none to speak of. I have been sitting here, holding my cup, warming my hands on it. Do you do that? There’s no fuel. I sit here in my coat and my hat with my scarf wrapped round my chin but I’m still freezing. It’s as if the cold has been injected under my skin. There’s never enough fuel. There’s hardly been anything for months. If we were wise we would pool our resources—like the Bolshevik hordes who are definitely not about to come charging into town any minute now because our gallant forces are on the brink of wiping them off the face of the earth. They might be half-human Slavic apes, but they share what they’ve got.

  I don’t have enough to heat a quarter of my little caravan but, if there were four old men all jammed in here together, we could pool our rations. We’d be warm and we’d have somebody to talk to in the middle of the night. But we don’t do that. That’s not the German way. We respect the dignity of private property, so long as it’s not the dentist’s property, or the lawyer’s property or a jeweler’s or a furrier’s, of course. No, we sit alone in our own cellar or our own attic or our own shitty little tin house on wheels, all dignified and respectable, wondering if we’ll freeze to death before the bombs get us.

  Well, friend, it seems to me that the Bolshevik way is a damned sight closer to everything I was taught in Sunday school. I can say that of course, because I will be dead soon. These days, dead men are the only ones entitled to free expression of their opinions. It’s only because I am dead that I can speak my mind. I am beyond hurt. But you are still alive. Feel free to rip this page out if you like. I won’t think less of you.

  Anyway, I got my hands warmed up on that cup of hot water and then I had a brainwave. I boiled the kettle again, cooled it down a bit with a splash from the tap and then I filled up the old bottle that used to hold my sloe gin. I seem to have a lot of socks, and I can’t get any more of them on my feet, so now I have something like a hot-water bottle, wrapped in a nice warm sock. I should have thought of this a long time ago. We haven’t had hot-water bottles for years. They need the rubber, I suppose.

  And now I see I have wasted page after page, rattling on about Bolsheviks and hot-water bottles and already there is quite a little pile of pages but my friends and I haven’t even got the camel off the train yet. Let’s remedy that.

  Forget about all the handshaking and the formal thanks and the generous tips paid from circus funds and the noting of names and the firm assurances that a detailed account of loyal and excellent services rendered would be conveyed directly to the Imperial ear. That was all a lot of rubbish. That was about as sincere as saying, “But we will always be friends,” to the girl you’ve just dumped, or, “Promise you’ll come and visit,” to someone you meet on holiday—and then you write a false address on the back of a cigarette packet, just in case they ever try. Forget all that and come directly into the high street of Fiume (yes, I learned how to say it).

  Now, it seems to be an unwritten rule in life that the further away you get from the capital, the less you get of everything: paved roads, flush toilets, pianos, good coffee, music halls, all the things that make life nice—or used to. Well, Fiume was about as far away from the capital as you could get without falling off the edge, but it had the lot. Fiume was the empire’s toe in the water, the one place on earth where old Franz Josef could take his boats out of the bath and put them in the sea. That was why the railway went there, twisting and turning, puffing and panting all the way back to Vienna. There was a railway station, a port full of sailors and, in between, a town ready to supply anything and everything that a sailor might want, all done in the best possible taste, you know. The big bow-fronted shops got their windows polished every day, the pavements were nicely swept, boys would brush the horse-apples off the road for ladies who wanted to cross the street, take a penny and brush them back again. There were big government buildings, all carved with fruit and flowers and eagles and naked ladies and some nice, quiet houses with gardens and heavy lace curtains where the naked ladies stayed on the inside.

  My worst enemy could not accuse me of being stupid—well, there was that one time outside Stuttgart, but it’s got nothing to do with this story—and I knew we had to hurry. If it was morning in Fiume, it was morning in Buda. If we were getting up and having breakfast then, eventually, the boss would be getting up too, and even he would spot that he was missing a cash box and a large camel.

  A camel is not an easy thing to put in your pocket. A camel gets you noticed, and I knew that, before too long, stories of the Graf von Mucklenberg and his friends would be clacking up and down the telegraph wires.

  “We need to get out of town,” I said, which was a statement of the blindingly obvious if ever there was one. But the camel would not budge. He had stopped on the corner of the street to get rid of last night’s hay and, until he’d finished, not even Max could shift him.

  A surprisingly large number of people seemed interested in what our camel was doing and, even when he stopped doing it, they were still interested. There was next to no chance of making a quick getaway without drawing a lot of attention and, I have to admit, I was beginning to panic a little.

  And then, while I was standing there wondering what to do, I noticed the Professor. He had stopped looking at nothing. He cocked his head a little and then he turned and looked back up the street, listening to nothing instead. He could hear something, I knew it, and the very next second a man in uniform came around the corner at the other end of the street and, right behind him, came a band.

  “Shape up,” I said. “Everybody get in line right across the street. Camel in the middle, and walk away smartly.”

  The music was getting louder. The band was getting closer, and I knew it was only a matter of moments before they caught up. So there we were, me and Tifty on one side, my mate Max with the camel, and Sarah, arm in arm with her dad, on the other.

  “Wave,” I said. “Smile and wave. Acknowledge the loyal adulation of a grateful people—and walk slow!”

  That’s what we did. We walked nice and slow down the street, waving at the people who came to watch. There was no way to get out of town without being spotted so we let them look, we hid in plain sight. And there was no way to keep up with a marching band leading the way—not with a blind man in the company—so we walked ahead of them, slowly. When we started walking, the band was at the other end of the street. By the time we got to the corner they were right behind us and the bandmaster was snarling to “Get out of the way,” only less politely than that. We ignored him so he said it again, louder, and we ignored him some more.

  I grinned like a lunatic and said, “Keep waving.”

  All along the pavement, people were waving back, kids were running along, looking at the camel and waving and letting the band go by and then running again to get another look.

  The bandmaster was beside himself with fury. He was nearly spitting, but he couldn’t just push us off the street because a camel is a difficult thing to move and he didn’t want to be seen roughing up women and an old blind man. How times have changed. So he said again, in a very angry whisper, “This is the marching band of the Kaiserliche und Königliche Kriegsmarine, and I’m telling you to get off the damned road.” And then he took his big fancy stick and he poked the camel.

  That wasn’t a nice thing to do and the poor camel didn’t like it at all. He made an unhappy noise but he didn’t walk any faster, and then the bandmaster poked him again.

  That did it. My mate Max wouldn’t put up with that kind of needless cruelty so he grabbed the bandmaster’s
stick by its pointed end and jammed it under his own arm. The bandmaster was not pleased. I turned round and there he was, cursing like a sailor, face like a beetroot, tugging on his stick with two hands and not budging it by an inch and then, without even letting go of the camel’s reins, Max broke the end off the stick with his free hand and passed it back to him.

  “Do that again,” he said, “and I’ll jam it up your ass—splintered end first.”

  All credit to the bandmaster—he looked like he might burst into tears when he saw his stick in bits, but he never even broke his stride and the band never missed a single oompah. We seemed to reach an accommodation so that, before we got to the end of “Unter dem Doppeladler,” we were marching through the dock gates in good order.

  Sailor sentries standing inside little wooden houses snapped to attention as we walked past but, once we were through the gates, with no more crowds of happy Fiumers to cheer us on, things were getting a little chilly.

  The bandmaster stood marching on the spot, holding his broken stick up over his head and yelling orders to his men until the final clash of the cymbals … “and HALT!”

  None of his men fell out. They just stood there, wrapped in their euphoniums and balancing their glockenspiels and looking angry. The bandmaster put his hand on my shoulder—not Max’s shoulder, you’ll notice—and he said, “Now then. A word.”

  Max looked at me and I looked at Max. I knew the fun was about to start and we were going to have to talk fast or punch hard. Max had already decided which one he was going for. He dropped the camel’s rope, made a fist the size of a ham, picked his spot and landed one of his famous haymakers right on the bandmaster’s chin.

  The poor bloke went about four inches up in the air and came down again like a sack of potatoes and then the whole thing kicked off. The sailors in the band were loyal, I’ll say that for them, and they took a dim view of Max clocking their boss. Drums went flying, trumpets went flying, Sarah grabbed her dad by the hand and ran round the other side of the camel with him, I got a two-handed grip on my silver-topped cane and Tifty, God bless her, Tifty came to stand beside me, holding a glittering steel hatpin about a foot long.