Lions of the Grunewald by Aidan Higgins

Author:Aidan Higgins [Higgins, Aidan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Our thoughts now fly in a north-easterly direction across some twenty degrees of latitude in Bonne’s projection to a hot summer night in the old walled city of Dubrovnik during an open-air performance of Carl Orffs Carmina Burana, for Nancy’s tastes in music were eclectic. She had just been misdirected to a nonexistent Toilet for the Ladies on an upper landing, with some embarrassing consequences, as shall be told. This she carried off with panache. It fell out in this way.

They sat on good seats in the company of an oldtimer from Mlini named Karlovic Maria who had appeared in an old Hollywood movie under the direction of Francis X. Bushman in the days when men were male and women were feminine and stars were stars, in the olden times. She was be-ringed and heavily scented in a musky way and she thirsted after English-spoken culture as a bee for pollen. To-pee-or-not-to-pee-deass-ease-ze-quest-ti-yon, she intoned, making the row of seats quiver, her head thrown back, eyes closed, breathing deeply through cavernous nostrils—a bravura performance received with a sly rustling of programmes and tittering in front.

‘Precisely my own problem,’ said our Nancy, ‘where is it?’

‘Where is what, m’dare?’

‘The toilet. The Ladies.’

‘Uuup steers, I believe,’ drawled Karlovic Maria grandly, waving her withered claw, as if she had just willed the place into existence. ‘Try uup steers, m’dare.’

Nancy had a smattering of German, Karlovic Maria had unreliable French and Italian, and the ladies around them, fanning themselves with programmes and awaiting the return of a large mixed choir, were all either Serbs or Croats and thus no help at all.

One of the more helpful lady programme-sellers was pointing upwards and Nancy was nodding, taking directions in a language she knew something of from her days in the Yugoslav Embassy in Holland Park, before setting off, waving back to them. She found the empty landing and was crouching down with skirt about her waist and in full flow already when, as if in response to a signal, two doors burst open on either side of her, and out of one trooped fifty powdered lady singers and from the other door fifty cleanshaven men in faultless evening dress; the entire mixed choir filed by on either side of her, fording the stream with averted eyes, and nobody offering any comment.

‘I could not stop myself,’ Nancy laughed. Karlovic Maria shook all over and wheezed, laying a companionable claw on Nancy’s knee.

‘Serbs are used to much worse than that, m’dare.’

Weaver recalled the swifts dive-bombing the pool of light that was the podium, the sheen of brass, the bare shoulders of the female singers, the dinner jackets of the males as they filed to their places again and the white-haired conductor came vainly forward to all the applause and Nancy quite composed taking her seat by Madame Karlovic Maria who was nodding and applauding and becoming mustier by the minute as the mixed choir went rampaging after the loudly emphatic thumpety-thumpety-thump godawful Orffmusik and glancing sideways he saw Nancy’s wellrounded hamster cheeks set in a pleased smirk; a contained smile of quiet satisfaction.

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