Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [5]
Once, responding to persistent inquiries from an earnest Terry McIver, Boogie allowed that in the opening chapter of his discombobulating novel-in-progress, set in 1912, his protagonist disembarks from the Titanic, which has just completed its maiden voyage, docking safely in New York, only to be accosted by a reporter. “What was the trip like?” she asks.
“Boring.”
Improvising, I’m sure, Boogie went on to say that, two years later, his protagonist, riding in a carriage with Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria–Hungary and his missus, drops his opera glasses as they bounce over a bump in the road. The archduke, big on noblesse oblige, stoops to retrieve them, thereby avoiding an assassination attempt by a Serb nutter. A couple of months later, however, the Germans invade Belgium all the same. Then, in 1917, Boogie’s protagonist, shooting the breeze with Lenin in a Zurich café, asks for an explanation of surplus value, and Lenin, warming to the subject, lingers too long over his millefeuille and café au lait, and misses his train, the sealed car arriving in the Finland Station without him.
“Isn’t that just like that fucking Ilyich?” says the leader of the delegation come to greet him on the platform. “Now what is to be done?”
“Maybe Leon would get up and say a few words?”
“A few words? Leon? We’ll be standing here for hours.”
Boogie told Terry he was fulfilling the artist’s primary function — making order out of chaos.
“I should have known better than to ask you a serious question,” said Terry, retreating from our café table.
In the ensuing silence, Boogie, by way of apology, turned to me and explained that he had inherited, from Heinrich Heine, le droit de moribondage.
Boogie could yank that sort of conversation-stopper out of the back pocket of his mind, propelling me to a library, educating me.
I loved Boogie and miss him something awful. I would give up my fortune (say half) to have that enigma, that six-foot-two scarecrow, lope through my door again, pulling on a Romeo y Julieta, his smile charged with ambiguity, demanding, “Have you read Thomas Bernhard yet?” or “What do you make of Chomsky?”
God knows he had his dark side, disappearing for weeks on end — some said to a yeshiva in Mea Shearim and others swore to a monastery in Tuscany — but nobody really knew where. Then one day he would appear — no, materialize — without explanation at one of the cafés we favoured, accompanied by a gorgeous Spanish duchess or an Italian contessa.
On his bad days Boogie wouldn’t answer my knock on his hotel-room door or, if he did, would say no more than “Go away. Let me be,” and I knew that he was lying on his bed, high on horse, or that he was seated at his table, compiling lists of the names of those young men who had fought alongside him and were already dead.
It was Boogie who introduced me to Goncharov, Huysmans, Céline, and Nathanael West. He was taking language lessons from a White Russian watchmaker whom he had befriended. “How can anybody go through life,