The Long and Spectacular Life of Agnes Magnusdottir 19

The Third Translation. Zelig Krüger’s Diary. Pages 4, 5 & 6

 

Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. What developments there have been. They say pride comes before a fall but they don't say how far that fall can be or how much it will hurt. 

    For eight weeks I carried on, eight weeks in which I completed eight or more writer reports. Then my beautiful dream of wilful ignorance was popped. 

    Number 1. What exactly had I believed I had been doing?

    Number 2. Did I really believe the reports were innocent things?

    My awakening started at one of my Friday meetings with Wolf. 

    "You have been quite the success," he said, smiling, it seemed, genuinely for once, his plump hands laced relaxedly over his large stomach. "All I hear around the Directorate these days is your name."

    A jolt of shock sent my heart racing down to my arsehole. Why would anyone be wanting to mention my name?

    "Well, your name coupled with my name." Wolf lent forward, actually grinned. "’Wolf’s man so and so,’ they say, ’he's been quite the revelation, quite made the difference when all is said and done. Finally we might be winning the war.’" Wolf still beaming in my direction popped one of his eggs in his mouth and while still chewing said, "Tell me, what are you doing Saturday night?"

    "Saturday night," I stammered. "Tomorrow, you mean?"

    "I will send a car to pick you up. Is seven o’clock ok?"

   

Hang me from a bridge, cut off my penis and let me bleed out slowly into the river. It is no more or no less than I deserve.

    The party took place in Wolf’s own house. And what a sumptuous pile it was! Truly a home to grace the pages of the decadent and exuberant Formann whose books I had done a report on the previous week. It was many windowed, many floored and with a paved covered area out back where there was an actual swimming pool. Even the servant who answered the door chime looked down his nose at me, like I didn't belong there. 

    There must have been a hundred people, the men all wearing the same kind of sharp black suit and the women, proud peacocks, or peahens I suppose, in multicoloured robes and voluminous hats.

    "And so you made it. How splendid!” Wolf appeared out of the crowd like a whale breaching the waves. "Oppenheimer! This is the very man I was telling you about."

    Oppenheimer, the little weasel, was as small as Wolf was large so the pair standing side by side looked almost comical. Not that I was laughing. There was an awful tension in the air.

    "Ah," said Oppenheimer, looking me up and down through half-moon glasses perched on the end of his nose. "The critic. Yes I have heard of you. What the Directorate needs is more fine young men of your caliber. Then we would be truly free."

    "Excuse me," I said, "I must relieve myself."  

    Coming back from the toilet, and I had spent as much time in there as common decency would allow, I spied Oppenheimer. He was holding court to a group of eight or ten other guests. Overcome by an idle curiosity, what exactly was it that he was saying, I sidled up to a convenient pillar and turning me head to the left, so that this ear was facing them, I was able to listen in.

    "...ten at least, and just from these reports. Wolf is a genius to think of it. I almost pity these so-called subversives fools, they are like simple Hansel and Gretels leaving breadcrumbs right up to their doors."

    Then another voice piped up, both smoother and more unctuous, "And my dear man, what is it that you do when you find them?"

    Here Oppenheimer lowered his voice and I had to strain harder to hear, leaning forwards towards the speaker but at the same time being careful not to show myself and thus give away my position. 

    "We couldn't risk a trial you see, or even a public arrest. That would only make martyrs of them. No, that is where I come in. Assassination is the name of the game and in such a way that the body might never be recognised. All in all it is a very clever plan. Remove the writers and thus stop the flow of books at source. What do you say to that?"

 

Chapter 13.

 

Room four two five was at the end of a long red carpeted corridor on the top floor of the establishment. Unless this was just one of those coincidences that life is so often peppered with this made me believe the guest had deliberately chosen the most private of rooms. 

    Privacy equalled secrecy and I felt my heart begin to thud. This excitement only increased when, as soon as I brushed my knuckles against the door, it opened and standing there was a tiny woman. Mount her on a couple of our capital’s very thick telephone directories and she still wouldn't have been able to comfortably tap me on the shoulder. 

    "Finally!”

    The woman pushed her hands together in the manner of one praying.

    “You’ve come."

    Her accent was like Eldur’s but softer, more feminine. I was not sure how I had ever thought she might be a man. She was as pretty as Pinocchio’s Tinkerbell, although terribly aged. 

    Arisa, she gave me her name once as we crossed a room much larger than the one I was sharing with Eldur, and then again as she led me out through double open doors to a grand balcony. Here on a table was a champagne bottle in a tall bucket of ice.

    "Beautiful, isn't it?"

    Far below in the pool two bodies still floated. They might have been mistaken for corpses if it wasn't for the occasion flick or an arm or leg or a companionable shout, the foreign words echoing off the surrounding rocks.

    I nodded my head. Its beauty was unquestionable, as was the money it must have cost to stay here.

    "Eldur tells me you are making enquiries about Agnes Magnusdottir? Oh dear me, how could I have forgotten?"

    When Arisa returned she had a large leather-bound book almost as long as her torso under her arm.

    "I started this in June of eighty-nine. I was intrigued that someone from a family I had once had such a close association with had done so well for herself.”

    She gave a small tight smile. 

    "Before they moved away at the outbreak of the Second World War Magnusdottir’s family had managed the farm next to ours. I can still remember the curses my father made when he found out what had happened. You see, they had absconded in the middle of the night leaving all their animals. If my father hadn't taken them in they would have died. But it wasn't the girl’s fault. She hadn't even been born then."

    Arisa paused and gave me a direct stare.

    "Are we responsible for the actions of our ancestors?" She shook her head and supplied the answer I was incapable of giving. "How can we be?"

    The first pages of Arisa’s book were filled with reviews of The Ministry of Complaints, cut and then pasted in. I was surprised both that some were quite short and others decidedly hostile. Considering the sensation it was to become, one of the best selling books of all time, I had almost expected these professional reviewers to have recognised it for what it was right off the bat, an out and out masterpiece. But then wasn't that always the case? It takes time for a sensation to take hold. Wasn't it an oft repeated truth that Van Gogh had never made a penny in his lifetime?

    After the reviews came some interviews. I didn't read them in depth, it would have been rude to do so in Arisa’s company, but the few lines that I did scan showed Agnes to be a modest woman, reluctant to reveal any detail about her private life. The only thing that did come out, again and again like this was a line she had learnt and then repeated, was that she lived a quiet life, alone except for her two beloved black Labradors, Hans and Amelia, named of course after two of the characters in the book.

    The big change in the tone and sheer volume of the clippings came about when the movie rights for the book were ’snapped up’. 'Snapped up’ was the phrase that was used again and again although this event happened a good eighteen months after the book’s initial publication. To add spice to the mill the company that bought the rights was owned by one of Hollywood’s hottest stars and there were rumours that he himself wished to take a lead role. 

    After the movie rights were sold press interest in the author herself increased ten-fold. It helped that she was beautiful, exotic, and that there was an aura of mystery about her. Could she really live such a secluded life? Surely there was more to her than that? 

    "This is all marvellous," I wrote although I wasn't being completely honest. This information I already knew. Is this what I had been brought up to the room for, simply to peruse an old woman’s scrapbook? Still, under Arisa’s gaze, I carried on flicking through the pages hoping to find something that was really useful. 

    The disappearance when it came was abrupt although not initially noticed. The newspapers didn't agree on the circumstances. One said that a maid in a hotel had found her bed empty one morning, another that she had last been seen getting into a cab outside her own home one rain-slicked night. What they did agree on was that when she failed to turn up to gala event held in her honour at a famous hospital she had donated a large some of money to it was clear that nobody knew where she was.

    After the expected and obvious ’Author Missing Possibly Dead’ articles all sorts of weird and wonderful stories started to be posited. I don't think until then I had understand what a huge scandal it was. At that time she was at the height of her fame. Thousands of people gathered outside her home with candles, a children's TV show had a counsellor come in and speak directly to the watching viewers. There were also the dissenters. The ones who thought it was all one big publicity stunt. For of course while all this was going on sales of the book rocketed. 

    "So what do you think happened?" I wrote. 

    Arisa shrugged and refilled our glasses.

    "I really don't know, except that I guess that everything Agnes wanted to say she put into that book of hers. You have to remember that stories are not only what they are about but also about what they are not about." She paused and put her hands flat on the table. "If you think about what The Ministry of Complaintsis not about then it is really quite sad, really quite sad indeed."

    Puzzled by this contradiction I drew a large question mark on the page and turned it to face Arisa. 

    "Happy families," she said. "How many happy families are there in the book?" And then she said, and she said it with such intensity that I immediately realised that this was the real reason I had been invited up to the room and that everything up to that point had been a smokescreen. "But that reminds me. There’s a story I know about Agnes’s grandfather. Maybe it is important and maybe it isn't. But it is a story that was told to me when I was a child and it is still something I have nightmares about even now."

 

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