The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [53]
Back in London this week, I even went to a psychic, one very drunken evening, and investigated my future and yours, and received satisfactory answers, and then I thought to ask if Shakespeare was watching us from the other side. Good news, Dana: “He’s writing there. Right now!”
Last night—in honor of our birthdays, or because of his egomaniacal paranormal interference—your Bard hogged the conversation with two Germans I met in a pub near our hotel. Heidi and Günter had come on holiday from Meisen to see the RSC in Stratford and were now taking two days in twentieth-century London before returning home. Over drinks, I explained the earl and Binyamin Feivel as best I could remember, and I asked if they’d suspected that half the plays they’d seen this week were written by a Jewish banker’s son. They laughed politely, not sure if they were the butt of some joke about Germans.
Heidi and Günter were “not engaging to marry,” according to Günter, standing at the bar, before we’d even had a first pint together. “We do not see the reason for it. We are together and that is all.” One of those premature explanations or unprovoked self-descriptions that fling and gyrate awkwardly in the middle of conversation, implying recent tiffs and incomplete makeups. Heidi’s answering silence set my suspicions up on their hind legs.
By the time we’d had a few rounds, Günter had been telling me for an hour how Shakespeare was the most brilliant man ever to write or even think, “more human even than Goethe,” whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean. He did not stop for an instant to ask what sort of work had brought me to London, but roared on and on, about the plays they’d seen up at Stratford, the “global humanness” he’d witnessed and understood even more deeply this time, how in every culture everyone loved him without fail, how grateful Günter was to great Shakespeare for “making us” and “opening our eyes.” Heidi nodded now and then and watched me nod politely. I could see it: when I allowed just the tiniest, most deniable flicker of mockery to sparkle on my face, to cast the tiniest shadow across Günter’s earnest, happy performance, she smiled and drank and Günter thought she was smiling for him, and he put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her close so her head cricked away from him, and she looked up at me, drew a swizzle stick between her lips and across the cradling tip of her tongue, draining a drop of Malibu and Coke from it as it passed, and Günter seemed further and further away, and his Shakespeare love was more and more laughable. Less than laughable: irrelevant to this planet. Inhuman. The opposite of universal. An annoying hobby. Stamps.
One drink led to another, and we walked out arm in arm in arm, Heidi in the middle, into the London night, until our mouths were sticky with salty mist and hours-old liquor and German cigarettes. We stumbled along, and then there were bells. “You know, it is today!” Günter yelled, as the clock above Dixon’s Gloves showed it was past midnight. “Today is probably his birthday. Four hundred twenty-eight! Do you know this? Happy birthday, Willy!” he shouted, quite pleased with himself, and from dark corners and behind shuttered windows voices called back, “Happy birthday!” Günter supported himself with one hand against an apartment building while with his other he fished out his lederhosenschnitzel (much ado about nothing, if I may) and urinated a shadow onto the wall and a black mirror onto the sidewalk, first a drizzle, then a tempest.
I delicately stepped out of view around the corner and was considering whether I’d had enough of my Krauts when Heidi joined me. From our shadow, we heard the bobby arrive: “Oi! You there!” and heard Günter stammer his excuses to the constable, though the sound of his flow continued on and on and embarrassingly on. The cop said, “You a German then?” in a tone implying it would be best if Günter claimed to be Swiss. “Yes, sir, and I am very sorry, Mr. Policeman, for the urining, but you know it is the birthday of your William Shakespeare.