Kersh The Best of Gerald Kersh

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ISBN: 978-0-571-30449-3
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

'[Gerald Kersh] is a story-teller of an almost vanished kind - though the proper description is perhaps a teller of 'rattling good yarns'... He is fascinated by the grotesque and the bizarre, by the misfits of life, the angry, the down-and-outs and the damned. A girl of eight commits a murder. Some circus freaks are shipwrecked on an island. A chess champion walks in his sleep and destroys the games he has so carefully planned...' TLS 'Beneath his talented lightness and fantasy, Gerald Kersh is a serious man... [He] has the ability... to create a world which is not realistic and which is yet entirely credible and convincing on its own fantastic terms.' New York Times 'Mr Kersh tells a story; as such, rather better than anybody else.' Pamela Hansford Johnson, Telegraph

Gerald Kersh was born in Teddington on August 26 1911. He quit schooling early, and took a succession of jobs while developing his ambition to write. In 1934 he published a roman a clef, Jews without Jehovah, immediately suppressed by members of his family who took exception to its contents. Following the outbreak of war Kersh joined the Coldstream Guards in 1940. The following year he drew on his Guardsman experience to write the bestselling They Die with their Boots Clean, a classic fictional account of basic training. A sequel followed, The Nine Lives of Bill Nelson, and the pair would be re-published together as Sergeant Nelson of the Guards. Thereafter Kersh was hugely productive: a writer not merely of novels(such as The Song Of The Flea in 1948 and The Thousand Deaths Of Mr Small in 1950) but also stories, journalism, sketches and columns, radio and documentary film scripts. His stories are collected in volumes including The Horrible Dummy and Other Stories and The Best of Gerald Kersh. His success was tempered by troubles over money, health and personal affairs, but through this turmoil he wrote some of his best novels: Fowler's End (1958), The Implacable Hunter (1961) and The Angel and the Cuckoo (1966). He died in New York on 5th November 1968, aged 57.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kersh, Gerald

Leseproben

The Devil that Troubled the Chessboard

A SHOCKING book might be written about Pio Busto’s apartment-house. It stands on a corner not far from Oxford Street. It stands. No doubt Busto, who knows all the laws pertaining to real-estate, has managed to find some loophole in the Law of Gravity; I can think of no other reason to account for the fact that his house has not yet fallen down. Pio Busto knows how to make a living by letting furnished rooms. He puts a sheet of wallboard across a small bedroom and calls it two apartments. His house is furnished with odds and ends raked from the junk-heaps in the Cattle Market. No space is wasted. He sleeps in a subterranean wash-house, and would convert even this into a bed-sitting-room if the coal-cellar were not crammed with spare furniture and bed-linen. He is something of a character, this Busto; he looks like Lorenzo the Magnificent, and sleeps with a savage old dog named Ouif; in case of burglars he keeps a service revolver under his pillow, and a cavalry sabre hung on a bootlace over his head. He keeps evil spirits at bay with a rusty horseshoe, the lower half of a broken crucifix, and a lithograph of the Mona Lisa whom he believes to be the Virgin Mary.

His rooms are dangerous. You sigh; they shake. You sneeze, and down comes a little piece of ceiling. What is more, the walls are full of holes, bored by tenants of an inquisitive turn of mind. The curiosity of these people is often highly irritating – your view is sometimes obscured by the eye of your neighbour, who is trying to peep back at you. But Busto’s tenants rarely stay long. They are mostly rolling stones, and by the time they come down to Busto’s house, which is very far from the bottom of things, they have acquired momentum. They come, and they go.

As for me, I lived for more than three months in one of the cheapest of those spy-hole-riddled bedrooms. I completed my education there. Through three or four tiny holes, which must have been bored by some neglected genius of espionage, I watched people when they thought they were alone. I saw things which walls and the darkness were made to conceal; I heard things which no man was ever supposed to hear. It was degrading, but impossible to resist. I stooped. I stooped to the keyhole of hell, and I learned the secrets of the damned.

Among the damned was Shakmatko.

*

Picture for yourself this terrifying man.

I saw him for the first time in the saloon bar of the ‘Duchess of Duoro’– long-drawn-out, sombre, pallid, and mysterious; dressed all in black. He had the unearthly, only partly human appearance of a figure in a Japanese print. I glanced at him, and said to myself, with a sensation of shock: ‘Good God, this man is all forehead!’ Imagine one of those old-fashioned square felt hats without a brim: his skull was shaped exactly like that. It towered straight upwards, white and glabrous. His forehead conveyed an impression of enormous weight – it seemed to have pressed his face out of shape. You can reproduce something of his aspect if you model a human face in white plasticine, and then foreshorten it by squashing it down on the table. In plasticine that is all very well; but alive, in a public-house, it does not look so good.

And if all this were not enough, his eyes were hidden behind dark-blue spectacles.

As I looked he rose from his chair, stretching himself out in three jerks, like a telescope, and came towards me and said, in a hushed voice, with a peculiar foreign intonation:

‘Can you please give me a match?’

‘With pleasure.’

He recoiled from the light of the match-flame, shading his concealed eyes with a gloved hand. I thought of the Devil in Bon-Bon. The tightly clamped mouth parted a little, to let out a puff of smoke and a few more words.

‘I find the light hurts my eyes. Will you drink?’

‘Oh, thank you.’

He indicated a chair. When we were seated, he asked:

‘Pardon me. You live in this vicinity?’

‘Almost next door.’

‘Ah. In apartments?’

‘That would be a polite name for them.’

‘You will excuse my asking?’

‘Of course. Are you looking for a room?’

‘Yes, I am. But it must be cheap.’

‘I live on the corner. They have one or two rooms vacant there. They’re cheap enough, but——’

‘Are there tables?’

‘Oh! Yes, I think so.’

‘Then I will go there. One thing: I can pay in advance, but I have no references.’

‘I don’t suppose Busto will mind that.’

‘You see, I never stay long at one place.’

‘You like variety, I suppose?’

‘I detest variety, but I have to move.’

‘Ah, landladies are often very difficult to get on with.’

‘It is not that. A large number of people live in this house of yours?’

‘A good few. Why?’

‘I do not like to be alone.’ At this, he looked over his shoulder. ‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me the address?’

‘I’m going that way. Come along with me, if you like.’

‘You are far too kind.’ He reached down and picked up a great black suitcase which had been standing between his feet. It seemed to drag him down as if it were full of lead. I said:

‘Can I give you a hand?’

‘No, no, no, thank you so very much.’

We walked back to the house.

*

‘First afloor fronta vacant, thirteen bob. Very nice aroom. Top floor back aten bob, electric light include. Spotless. No bug,’ lied Busto.

‘Ten shillings. Is there a table in that room?’

‘Corluvaduck! Bess table ina da world. You come up. I soon show you, mister.’

‘As long as there is a table.’

We went upstairs. Straining at his suitcase the stranger climbed slowly. It took us a long time to reach the top of the house, where there was a vacant bedroom next to mine. ‘Ecco!’ said Busto, proudly indicating the misbegotten divan, the rickety old round table and the cracked skylight, half blind with soot. ‘Hokay?’

‘It will do. Ten shillings a week; here is a fortnight’s rent in advance. If I leave within a week, the residue is in lieu of notice. I have no references.’

‘Hokay. What name, in case of letters?’

‘There will be no letters. My name is Shakmatko.’

‘Good.’

Shakmatko leaned against the door. He had an air of a man dying of fatigue. His trembling hand fumbled for a cigarette. Again he recoiled from the light of the match, and glanced over his shoulder.

Pity took possession of me. I put an arm about his shoulders, and led him to the divan. He sat down, gasping. Then I went back to pick up his suitcase. I stooped, clutched the handle; tensed myself in anticipation of a fifty-six-pound lift; heaved, and nearly fell backwards down the stairs.

The suitcase weighed next to nothing. It was empty except for something that gave out a dry rattling noise. I did not like that.

*

Shakmatko sat perfectly still. I watched him through the holes in the wallboard partition. Time passed. The autumn afternoon began to fade. Absorbed by the opacity of the skylight, the light of day gradually disappeared. The room filled with shadow. All that was left of the light seemed to be focused upon the naked top of Shakmatko’s skull, as he sat with his head hanging down. His face was invisible. He looked like the featureless larva of some elephantine insect. At last when night had fallen, he began to move. His right hand became gradually visible; it emerged from his sleeve like something squeezed out of a tube. He did not switch the light on, but, standing a little night-light in a saucer, he lit it cautiously. In this vague and sickly circle of orange-coloured light he took off his spectacles, and began to look about him. He turned his back to me. Snick-snick! He opened the suitcase. My heart beat faster. He returned to the table, carrying an oblong box and a large board. I held my breath.

He drew a chair up to the table, upon which he carefully placed the board. For a second he hugged the box to his breast, while he looked over his shoulder; then he slid the lid off the box, and, with a sudden clatter, shot out on to the board a set of small ivory chessmen. He arranged these, with indescribable haste, sat for a while with his chin on his clenched hands, then began to move the pieces.

I wish I could convey to you the unearthly atmosphere of that room where, half buried in the shadows, with the back of his head illuminated by a ray of moonlight, and his enormous forehead shining yellow in the feeble radiance of the night-light, Shakmatko sat and played chess with himself.

After a while he began to slide forward in his chair, shake his head, and shrug his shoulders. Sometimes in the middle of a move the hand would waver and his head would nod; then he would force himself to sit upright, rub his eyes violently, look wildly round the room, or listen intently with a hand at his ear.

It occurred to me that he was tired – desperately tired – and afraid of going to sleep.

Before getting into bed I locked my door.

*

It seemed to me that I had not been asleep for more than a minute or so when I was awakened by a loud noise. There was a heavy crash – this, actually, awoke me – followed by the noise of a shower of small hard objects scattered over a floor. Then Shakmatko’s voice, raised in a cry of anguish and...