If You''re Reading This, I''m Already Dead

by Andrew Nicoll

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Otto Witte. Acrobat of Hamburg. King of Albania. Sitting in his caravan, drinking what is left of his coffee (dust), Otto has narrowly escaped death at the hands of allied bombs. Convinced his luck has run out and he will not see morning, he decides to record the story of his life for the poor soul who finds his body. And what a story it is. Years earlier, when he was in either Buda or Pest, working at the circus, a newspaper article was brought to his attention. Why? Because in it was a picture of a particular Turkish prince, called to Albania to be their new king. And this prince just so happened to bear a striking resemblance to Otto . . . A plan is formed, adventure is born and with the help of Otto''s friends, enemies (and a camel), Otto is about to give the performance of his life.

Release date: April 26, 2012

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

We were in Pest when this story began. Christ, was it Pest? It might have been Buda. One of them is up the hill and the other one is across the river. It doesn’t matter. We were in Budapest when this story began and I was a young man and as strong as an ox with the looks of a young Hercules, whiskers like the horns on a prize bull and a whang you could hang wet towels off.

Now I’m an old man and I’m shit-scared and I’ve left it too late and, if you’re reading this, I’m already dead. I’ve always wanted to write that: ‘By the time you read this I shall be dead.’ That and ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ Stories come after words like that.

Well, this is a dark and stormy night all right, pitch black except for where the fires are burning all along the docks, black as hell, except for the flashes of bombs going off, thunder and lightning, the fires screaming like a gale, lumps of metal the size of pianos falling out of the sky and screaming all the way down and bits of shrapnel, fizzing and spitting off the roof like a rain of red-hot needles.

Two hours ago I was in Wilhelmstrasse. There was this kid – I don’t know how old he was, maybe fourteen, maybe fifteen, I don’t know, they’re throwing anybody they can get into the mincer now. So there he was, in his crappy uniform, proud as a dog with two pricks, marching a column of Italians back to spend the night in the docks. That’s the punishment for our gallant allies. That’s what they get for throwing in the towel. Screw the Axis. Stuff the international brotherhood of Fascism and National Socialism. To hell with all of that. We work the poor bastards half to death all day and then we tuck them in at the docks to see if another night of bombing might cheer them up a bit.

They shuffled along in their cardboard shoes with the kid pretending to march, acting like he was driving them on when the only thing keeping them going was the thought of black bread and cabbage soup. And, all of a sudden, he shouts, ‘Halt!’ and he looks at me like I’m Winston Churchill, sticks me with his rifle and demands to see my papers. Little shit. I’m seventy-three years old, for God’s sake. How many seventy-three-year-old spies have you ever heard of?

I reached into my jacket while he stood there, keeping me covered, half hunched, two hands on the rifle, ready to spring into action if I should suddenly decide to overpower him and steal his Italians. So of course, when I produced my papers like a good citizen of the Reich, he couldn’t take them because his hands were busy.

‘Open them,’ he said.

I did.

‘Hold them up a bit higher.’

I did.

‘That can’t be right.’ He was looking at me really hard, his eyes darting to the picture on my pass and then back at me again.

‘Bring it closer,’ he said.

So I did. I was right up against him with my hand in his face when I felt the rush of wind and the kid wasn’t there any more. No warning. Not even a siren. Just a bomb that dropped so close we didn’t even hear it until it landed, straight through the roof of the house on the corner and right down to the ground floor. That whole wall disappeared just as if somebody had cut it out like a slice of cake, and it took the kid and it left me. Nothing touched me. Not a brick, not a stick or a bit of broken glass. Nothing. I felt the fire of it pass me and I thought I was going to die. I felt it roar and growl and rumble so it shook my heart inside my chest and now every bone aches like I’ve been three rounds with a Turkish wrestler or three days in a Turkish brothel, and my suit’s scorched and there’s plaster between my teeth but I didn’t die. The kid died but I didn’t die. I ran – and I can still run, believe me. I ran until I got back here to my little caravan and I climbed inside and I locked the door as if a few slats of wood and a couple of sheets of tin could keep the bombs out. I got away with it, but I expect to be dead by morning. It’s been five months since the Allies landed in Normandy and the radio says our unstoppable forces are about to throw them back into the sea any day now. In the meantime they come as they please and the bombs fall in long lines, crump, crump, crump, like an angry child trampling on sandcastles, flames bloom in the night like jungle flowers, kids vanish in the gale of a bomb. That’s what we get. That’s all we deserve for following that stupid, Jew-hating bastard into hell.

But I can’t sit here all night just pissing my pants and waiting for the bombs to drop, and that’s why I’m writing this.

I want one final round of applause before the curtain. I want somebody to come picking through what’s left of my caravan to find this and say, ‘That can’t be right,’ the way that kid said, ‘That can’t be right,’ when he saw my pass. I want people to know how Otto Witte, acrobat of Hamburg, became the crowned King of Albania.

A story like that needs a drum roll and trumpets. It needs girls with feathers in their hair and spangled tights. It needs coloured lights and velvet curtains. You can’t start that story with an old man pissing his pants in an air raid. I’m going to tear this up and start again.

We were in Pest when this story began. Christ, was it Pest? It might have been Buda. One of them is up the hill and the other one is across the river. We were in Budapest, that’s where we were. There was me, Otto Witte, acrobat of Hamburg; my old mate Max Schlepsig the sword swallower and professional strongman; Professor Alberto von Mesmer, the Human Encyclopaedia, who did a mind-reading act with his gorgeous daughter, Sarah; and Tifty Gourdas. Tifty said she was a Magyar countess, kicked out of the family palace because she fell in love with a humble dancing master. We all thought that was probably a lie, but she could dance to set the sawdust on fire and she knew how to strip. And when she said ‘fell in love with a humble dancing master’ that probably meant something else altogether. Tifty and me, we used to do something else altogether from time to time, just for a little bit of comfort on the cold winter nights. It gets cold when you’re sleeping out under canvas. You couldn’t blame her. I was gorgeous.

Tifty used to do private performances for select groups of gentlemen after the last show. Just for the quality. None of your riff-raff. We’d all hurry and get the bears and the ponies bedded down for the night, sweep up the horseapples from the big top and spread a velvet cloth over a couple of benches in the ringside seats. Then I’d go and untie the tent flaps and they’d be waiting there in the shadows, one or two of them, gentlemen of quality, with their canes and their opera capes and their fancy bow ties. I’ve no idea how they found out about it. We never advertised as far as I knew, but I suppose word got round. There’s not much to do in Kosice on a Monday night, and by God she could strip.

Me and Max used to stand around at the back. Tifty liked to have us there, just to make sure that these intimate little performances didn’t get too intimate. We took the cash and never kept a penny for ourselves. That was fair enough. Nobody was paying to watch us take our pants off. No, we gave every farthing to Tifty, but she always saw us right one way or another – in cash or kind. I was never stuck for a beer or a cuddle when Tifty was around, and I’m guessing neither was Max. Well, that’s fair enough too. We shared everything else.

So there we were in Budapest, me and Max and Professor Alberto von Mesmer and the girls.

We had the afternoon off between shows and I fancied a few beers, but Max wanted to go to the pictures so we all went. Going to the pictures was a different thing entirely in those days. For starters, there was no such thing as a picture house. These days a picture house is a magnificent palace with seats for hundreds and mirrors and chandeliers and fancy curtains and girls with trays of ice cream. Of course, that was when we still had ice cream and before the picture houses all got bombed flat.

Back then they used to put on a picture show in any old beer hall. You could get a bit of singing and a beer and maybe a comic or dancers, unless it was a Sunday, or performing dogs – I always liked that – and then they’d turn the lights out and put the pictures on. A film show was just one more item on the programme. Nobody ever thought they were going to last.

So there we were, all together, sitting on this long bench. I can see us now, my old mate Max at one end and then the Professor and then Sarah – did I mention the Professor was blind? Sarah was sitting next to him so she could whisper in his ear to tell him what was happening on the screen.

It was really good in those days. They could make a picture in England or America or Germany and it didn’t make any difference because there weren’t any words. Anybody could understand it. That was proper acting. Now it’s all in the words. It’s no use showing an American picture in Germany even if we could get them. Talkies ruined the films, I’m telling you. Nobody acts any more.

So there was my old mate Max, and the Professor, and Sarah whispering in his ear. People get so excited about that kind of thing now. They don’t like chatting in the middle of the show. There’s a lot of ‘shushing’ and I just call that rude. Back then people used to join in a lot more, shout out at the people in the picture and tell them to ‘look out’ or ‘hurry up’. Now it’s all so polite. Anyway, I suppose people made allowances since the Professor was blind and he wasn’t going to get his money’s worth unless somebody told him what was going on. And Sarah was sitting on my left and I got my hand down her skirt in the dark and gave her bum a bit of a tickle and Tifty was sitting on my right and I got my other hand down her skirt and gave her bum a bit of a tickle too, and I’m not going to tell you what Tifty was doing with her hand while I was doing that. Luckily Sarah wasn’t that kind of girl. There would have been hell to pay if their hands had touched but Sarah was a good girl. Sarah was the kind of girl you marry.

It’s a great thing, sitting in the dark with a pretty girl, but sitting in the dark with two pretty girls is even nicer.

Now, if you’re like me I don’t suppose you remember too many films. If you went to the pictures one day and something came on in the second feature and you’d seen it before, it might come back to you, but how many films could you actually remember, frame by frame, scene by scene, and play them over again on the inside of your eyelids if you sat down in the dark and closed your eyes?

Well, I can remember that one. Every last cough, spit and fart of it. By God, that was a picture. I’d never seen anything like it. It was a sensation. As far as I recall the people who made it stole the idea from somebody else’s book, which sounds like a very fine plan to me. Somebody else has all the trouble of making up a story and all the labour of writing down a mountain of words (which is no small thing, as I am discovering) and then you just come along and make a picture out of it. When you think about it, that really is the easy bit. A picture paints a thousand words right enough. You don’t have to waste a gallon of ink describing the hero’s jutting jaw or his prancing stallion. You don’t have all the bother of coming up with fancy metaphors; like saying that the princess has skin as soft and white as goose feathers or anything like that. You just take their pictures and anybody can see for themselves that the princess is a knockout and the hero has a jaw like the prow of the Tirpitz and a horse the size of a train.

But, like I said, I don’t blame them for stealing this story. It was such a good story it almost made me want to read the book. It was called The Prisoner of Zenda and it was about this bloke who went to a faraway country and found out that he was the living image of the new king, only the king was locked up in a dungeon, hidden away by his villainous cousin and, if the king didn’t turn up for his coronation, the cousin would take the throne. So the king’s friends found the bloke who looked exactly like the king and passed him off and got him crowned and rescued the real king and then, by way of thanks, they kicked the doppelgänger out of the country.

It was a fantastic picture. It had everything: romance and suspense and sword fights – lots of sword fights – and I remember the pianist was very good, really caught the mood, knew what to play for the kissy bits when the bloke was making up to the princess and what to play when the villains came on and what to do when they were having their sword fights. And this was proper sword fights, none of this nancyboy stuff like they do in those fancy student houses, where they stand on milking stools and whack each other about the head until somebody ends up with a lump sliced out of their face to prove what an aristocrat they are while they’re killing little Jewish girls. No, this was the real thing, with running about and climbing up and down stairs and throwing the furniture around. By God, it was good.

None of us had ever seen anything like it. Sarah was gabbling away in her father’s ear, telling him what was happening and what it said on those signs they used to put up on the screen when there was something important to explain and – I’ve got to say – people were pretty good about it. I like to think that’s because people in general are pretty nice and they wanted to be a bit kind to an old blind man and help him out a bit. Or it might have been because they saw me and Max and they decided not to make a fuss.

Sarah was pretty good at that storytelling business. The Professor was sitting there stone blind, but I don’t think he missed a single thing that I saw with my own two eyes. Sarah was even putting in the colours and the smells and the Professor was getting ahead of her, guessing what was coming next or telling her to hurry up, ‘What’s happening now? Watch out for that step!’ and when it came to the sword fights or the chases on horseback our whole bench was bouncing along and Sarah was getting more and more excited – you could hear it in her voice – and bouncing along all the faster and so was Tifty. By God, that was a good picture.

But all good things must come to an end and, before too long, the lights went up again and I got my hands out of the girls’ knickers and back in my own pockets just in time for the performing dogs coming back on.

My mate Max said, ‘I’ve had enough of this. You coming?’

I wanted to see the dogs. I like dogs. I’ve always liked dogs, and dogs like me. Nobody else could be bothered. After a picture like that, things were bound to go a bit flat, I suppose, so they all decided to move on; it was almost time for us to get ready for that night’s show anyway.

‘I’m staying for the dogs,’ I said. Also there was a barmaid who was making sheep’s eyes at me before the picture show and she was still making sheep’s eyes at me after the picture show and I thought I might let her feel my muscles.

So Max said, ‘Fair enough.’ Never a cross word, me and Max. If it suited me, it suited Max, and if it suited Max, it suited me, and he gave me the money for another glass of beer before he left.

I didn’t stay long after that. God, this is long-winded and those bombs aren’t getting any further away. I’m going to have to write a bit faster if this story is going to get told before I get blown up. This isn’t how a king should tell the story of how he got to be the king. I’m going to tear this up and start again.

But now I need to pee. It’s no fun being old. Even for kings.

We were in Buda when this story began. Definitely Buda and not Pest. I remember it all so clearly now. It’s all coming back to me. Buda is up the hill and Pest is across the river and after me and the barmaid from the beer hall got finished I went across the river and up the hill so I was definitely in Pest and going back to Buda, so that’s that sorted out.

Anyway, it’s a lovely town – or two lovely towns. Or it was, at any rate. God knows what it must be like now. Joining up with us might have been better than getting bent over the table to take it roughly up the chute from our heroic Aryan storm troopers but it comes to the same thing in the end. We signed up for a one-way ticket to hell, and they decided to come along for the ride, so some place in Budapest tonight there’s probably an old man like me, sitting in the dark and trying not to piss his pants as the bombs fall all around him. We should drink a toast, him and me. I’ve still got a little bit of sloe gin left in the bottom of the bottle. I was saving it up for my chest in the winter but, since I might not have a chest by the morning, there’s not much point.

So here’s to you, old man in Budapest (I should say here that I have been under the sink and got the bottle. It’s pretty sludgy, full of dusty bits of broken sloe berries and even a couple of leaves. I will strain it through my moustache). Here’s to you, old man in Budapest. You’re as shit-scared as I am and you didn’t want this war any more than I did so God bless you and see you safe through the night, old man in Budapest. Or old woman. There must be an old woman there too, under those bombs, and young women and little kids. God bless you all, you poor bastards.

Maybe she’s there. The barmaid. She would be getting on a bit now. Sixty or so, I suppose. Fifty anyway, which is old for a woman – especially in wartime.

I can’t remember her name and I’m not going to try. I don’t know if I even knew it. I bet I said, ‘What’s your name?’ and she would’ve told me and I’d’ve said, ‘That’s a pretty name,’ without even hearing it. If she’d asked me right there and then, that very second, what her name was, I couldn’t’ve told her.

I didn’t give that girl anything like the time and attention she deserved, but she wasn’t alone in that, poor kid. No, she was not alone in that. I suppose, given the circumstances and how it’s very likely that a ton weight of exploding iron is going to come through my roof any second, I suppose that is something I should repent. Well, I do repent it. I could’ve shown a great deal more care and respect in a lot of cases and, I have to acknowledge, if I’d’ve had a sister and somebody like me had come along then, in fairness, I would not have been pleased.

I was never cruel to anybody. I never made anybody any promises and, consequently, I never let anybody down. I was careful about that and, if anybody started building castles in the air and putting Otto Witte inside them, with his magnificent whiskers and his magnificent muscles and one magnificent muscle in particular, that was not my fault. This is not to excuse myself.

But that girl in the beer hall, that girl who might be sitting now, under a storm of bombs, right now, maybe with a pack of grandchildren round her knees (and, God forgive me, I’m not even going to think about the end of that sentence), that girl I did not give the attention she deserved. No, it was just down to the cellar, a quick kiss and a cuddle, ‘Oh, Otto, ain’t you strong!’, knickers down, up on a barrel and away we go!

Now, I was always careful. Nobody left the party until everybody got a dance, if you know what I mean, but I could’ve taken a bit more time and had a bit of a cuddle afterwards. Girls do like a cuddle afterwards. The fact is, there just wasn’t time. I had to get back up the hill for the next show and, anyway, her dad was coming down the stairs, yelling and screaming. I don’t know what he was saying. I could never make out a word of Hungarian – even written down it looks like an explosion in a sign-writers’ shop – but he did not sound happy so I buttoned my trousers quick smart, hauled myself up to the roof by my fingertips, swung my feet up to the cellar trapdoor, where the barrels came in, kicked it open and flew out on to the street. By God, I was fit then. Still am. I bet I could still do it now.

We were in Budapest when this story began, twin capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that lay, like a sleeping dragon, sprawled across Europe from the Adriatic to Russia, from the Alps to the Carpathians.

How can we tell of the grandeur and the beauty of this place, crowded with the plunder of centuries, groaning with the weight of its own Imperial power, awash with treasures and art, its magnificent buildings and wide avenues expressing more eloquently than mere words its glorious history and kissed by the sparkling Danube at its very heart? How–

Jesus Christ! That one was close. Not so close as the one that got the kid this afternoon but pretty damned close. It whistled all the way down and then the ground shook and then there was this thunderclap that rattled my teeth and shook my heart around inside my ribs and that damned coffee can fell off the shelf again. My little caravan was pelted with stones and bits of earth, as if somebody was firing bags of nails out of a cannon, but I don’t think any of them came through. It probably sounded a lot worse than it was – like being inside a drum. It’s a good thing I closed the shutters or I wouldn’t have a window left, and whatever else that bomb has done, it’s completely knackered my literary good intentions.

Screw high-flown prose style, I’m going to go back to talking to myself. Or you. I wonder who you are. A little boy come out of the shelter after a night of explosions and looking for a really good bit of shrapnel, maybe? They do that, the kids, the ones who haven’t been dragged away from their mothers and sent off to defend the Reich. I’ve seen them stopping to pick up lumps of jagged metal from the street and swapping them with their mates. Hideous. What a world we have made for them that they think broken bombs are playthings. No, I wouldn’t want it to be you. I wouldn’t want a kid to find my little caravan all blown to bits and me plastered all over it. And I wouldn’t want you here with me now.

I wish my old mate Max was here. That would be really nice. But Max would probably have his own version of this story. He’d be bound to remember it different and he’d want to tell it different. But I reckon Max would stay and hold my hand. Fair’s fair. I did it for him, and it was always turn and turn about with me and Max, but he’s already done his fair share of dying, and I reckon I’ll get to shake him by the hand before too long anyway.

It might be nice if you were a pretty girl, young and easily impressed, but supposing you were, then what? I am not the man I was. Best not.

A dog would be nice. Dogs are good at listening but not too good at reading books. So it’s you. You’re just a bloke. A decent bloke. Not heroic, not interested in politics, just doing your best. A plumber, or a schoolteacher and an airraid volunteer, and you’re going to come along and help to clear up the mess, and you’ll find my book and you’ll put it in your pocket and you’ll get your shovel and put me in a sandbag and you’ll tuck me up all cosy and wipe your hands and say, ‘Poor old bugger.’ But before that happens we’ll sit here and have a couple of beers and yarn about the old days.

Sit down, friend, pull up a chair, pour yourself a glass of something and don’t pay any attention to the bombs. It’s only thunder. It can’t hurt you. Now, I’ve got a story to tell you.

I was in Pest when this story began. No doubt about that. I was in Pest and I’d had a couple of beers and I’d had a bit of fun with a pretty girl and I’d come bouncing out on to the pavement like a bat out of hell. It was a bright sunny day in May. Or June. Or August. Well, in the summer, definitely, and I took off down the road like a rabbit running from a fox.

It didn’t take long before I got to the river, all green and sparkling, with queues of barges moving up and down it and the sides all built up with big stone blocks. The place was heaving – people rushing back and forth, carts loaded with stuff and horses tramping like marching soldiers, and fancy coaches, all shiny and painted, with their spindly little wheels and matched pairs trotting along on dancers’ legs, footmen on the back making solemn faces and grand ladies inside with their big hats and pretty dresses, peeking out from behind their gloves at me and wondering. Believe me, the toffs are the worst of the lot. Don’t you go thinking that they’re any better than that landlord’s daughter. Look at Tifty – not that I’m judging. Anyway, everybody in Pest was heading for the same place, all of them crowding along the riverbank to the big bridge – I forget what they call it, but it’s all hung with these huge, great, square-linked chains, enormous things with enormous stone lions at either end. It’s a very handsome thing. Or it was.

So everybody in Pest was crowding on to this bridge to get to Buda and everybody in Buda was trying to get to Pest. It was a very handy thing, that bridge, and when I got to the other side I climbed the stone stairs that wind up the side of the hill, right the way to the top. It’s lovely up there, all those little streets and the arches and the palaces and the music hall where Beethoven played and the spun candy towers and the views all around. I remember one little place with a tavern where we used to go sometimes and, marching all along the walls, a whole parade of stone lions, right up to the corner where two poor lions had to share one head. But I didn’t have time to stop for a drink. I ran along the little streets, across the square beside that big church and through the gate in the town wall at the other side. That’s all I remember – not that it’s the end of the story, but I couldn’t tell you exactly where I went after that. I couldn’t draw you a map. All I know is it was quicker to run up one side of Buda hill and down the other than it was to run round to the flat field where we had our tent.

Oh, my friend, that tent. I miss that tent. Sometimes, you know, I go there still in dreams. The smell of it, the lamps hung all around the ring, the straw, the sawdust, the animals, the noises they made, the way they smelled, the warmth of them, the heat of their bodies – you have no idea how damned hot a tiger is – the drums and the music, the girls all dressed up, and my friends. I see them now. I see them just as they were. Night after night they stand there smiling. My old mate Max throws back the tent flap and suddenly the shadows are bright with his lantern and he beckons me inside and they are all standing there waiting, Max and the Professor and Tifty and Sarah. My Sarah. Sometimes I wonder if that’s what it might be like. On a night like tonight, when a big black exploding piano comes crashing through the roof, or some other night when my heart just seizes up and the blood stops moving in my veins, I wonder if it might be like that, if I might find myself walking across a shadowed field towards the light of a lantern that’s shining out from a warm tent, with my good friends waiting inside. Sometimes I wonder that and then I wake up in my little narrow bed, in my little tin house, and it’s dark and all the blankets have fallen off and, in the space of a night, I have grown old.

But not then. Then I was young.

I must have run for miles by the time I got to the tent and I don’t think I’d even broken a sweat and, when I arrived, Tifty was standing there in her pink tights, looking like a Roman statue.

She had that smile on her face, that naughty smile she used to get when the nights were cold and she needed a cuddle.

I smiled back.

Tifty smiled some more. She had a lovely smile. She was a lovely girl, but it wasn’t all that long since the cellar of the beer hall and I suppose I could have managed something, a little something, but time was really getting short an. . .