The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry

Author:Stephen Fry [Fry, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780517193495
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1994-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

I

Albert and Michael Bienenstock grew sugar beet in a part of Hun­gary that in 1919 was redesignated Czechoslovakia. This act of cartographical tyranny had transformed Michael into an overnight Zionist and, inspired by a childish sense of adventure and the inflam­matory writings of Chaim Herzog, he took a boat to Haifa in 1923, under a proud new name, Amos Golan. Golan, Michael had satisfied himself after extensive, and in Albert’s view preposterous, researches into family history, was the Bienenstocks’ true Israelite patronymic. Golan was a fit name for a man travelling to claim his homeland for his people.

“Sailing into trouble,” said Albert, words with which he was later to mock himself.

Albert’s own son was named Michael in honour of his foolish uncle, to the great consternation and scandal of Albert’s cousins in Vienna. Tradition held it to be bad luck for members of the same family to share a given name. Albert was not a traditionalist. He had no religion, he had no real sense of Jewishness. He was a farmer and a horseman, closer to the anti-Semitic Magyars of the old Habsburg Empire than to the scholarly gabardine beetles of shtetl and city, who scuttled about the streets with their heads down, cravenly hugging the walls when the gentiles walked by, as if fearful of catching or per­haps transmitting some terrible disease.

As a young man in 1914, Albert had fought for his Emperor. Rigged up like a chocolate soldier in gleaming cuirass and nodding plume, Albert the Blue Hussar was among the first to charge the Ser­bian guns in the early weeks when the Great War was a small Balkan affair that nobody believed could matter. Later, the proud troops of horses humbled by the titanic ordnance of the twentieth century, Al­bert was appointed to their reassignment as no more than drays and dispatch ponies, pulling with lowered heads the carriages and ambu­lances that shuffled behind the lines in the frozen Carpathian moun­tains or relaying fatuous messages between staff and field. With ironic resignation he told himself that loyalty to a great moustache in Vienna was no more stupid than loyalty to a great beard in Jerusalem. By the end, however, he had seen too many white worms crawling in the eye-sockets of too many dead comrades, and too many living comrades frying up the livers and lights of too many slaughtered Cossacks with baby faces. He exaggerated the symptoms of some light shell-shock he sustained during a bombardment and was happy to be transferred to a remount division in that district of Romania known as Transylvania, where he was to sit out the war processing the remnants of the cavalry.

Albert possessed a very special gift with horses. He understood them far better than did the equestrian instructors and veterinary surgeons of the Imperial Army, a fact which generated ill-feeling in some of his brother officers. Others preferred to trumpet Albert’s skills as a healer, making extraordinary claims which he was always quick to repudiate.

“There is nothing so mysterious about what I do,” he said.

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