Free Doctor Criminale by Malcolm Bradbury Page A

know, till we’ve checked him properly,’ said Lavinia, ‘He may not speak good
English.’ ‘You could use subtitles,’ I said. ‘He may not even be telegenic,’ said Lavinia, ‘You can subtitle words, but you try subtitling his face. No, just go
there, talk to him, probe him, find an angle, get a story. And then you’d better get him to tell you where you can find Criminale.’ ‘You want me to go after Criminale too?’
I asked. ‘Maybe, if the budget runs to it,’ said Lavinia, ‘It’s very tight, don’t forget. And we have to shape the programme first. So find out where he is, and then
check back here with Ros.’ ‘With me?’ asked Ros, ‘I thought I was going to Vienna too?’ ‘Oh, no, darling, I need you to stay here with me and edit,’ said
Lavinia, ‘Oh look, taxi’s waiting. Good luck, Francis, and auf Wiedersehen, pets.’
    ‘That bitch, that bloody bitch,’ said Ros, ‘I just spent two nights in her bed and now she does this to me. Upstairs, Francis. If I’m not coming on this recce with you, I
want you to have something to remember me by.’ ‘Honestly, Ros, I’ve got lots to remember you by,’ I said, ‘And if I’m going away for a few days I ought to go
back to my flat and pack some things.’ ‘No you don’t,’ said Ros, ‘You can buy what you need at the airport in the morning. There are plenty of shops in the
concourse.’ ‘I always wondered what they were for,’ I said, ‘After all, not many people arrive naked at an airport.’ ‘You’re learning a lot, aren’t
you, Francis?’ asked Ros, ‘Come on, if this is our last night together for a bit we don’t want to waste time. Is there any more of the Frascati left?’ ‘No, there
isn’t, Ros,’ I said very wearily, ‘There’s only orange juice.’ ‘All right,’ said Ros, ‘Let’s try that.’
    So that night before I set off for Vienna turned into a sleepless one, and for several reasons. Ros felt it necessary to give me a great deal to remember her by, but even when she slipped off
into sleep’s kind oblivion at last I still lay there restless. Sounds of Bengali floated up occasionally from the street at me; now and then Ros groaned in her sleep. Why, just why, was I
going off in quest of Bazlo Criminale? For, in the course of a hyperactive evening, something strange had plainly happened. Criminale had changed for me: no longer a text I had to decode, he had
switched into a person I had to follow. But why, when nothing at all linked us together? He was the giant, one of the great superpowers of modern thought; I was the Patagonian pygmy. He was the
Lukacs of the Nineties; I was an out-of-work journo. He was the modern master; I was the postmodern nobody in particular. He was the friend of the great and the good, or for that matter the big and
the bad: Bush and Honecker, Gorbachev and Castro, Kohl and Mao. Important philosophers like Sartre and Foucault and Rorty had bowed to him; great leaders had honoured him; it was even said that
Stalin (notoriously no respecter of persons or keeper of unwanted mementoes) had asked for his photograph. He was complex, confusing, contradictory. But why should I set off to chase an enigma that
could well be of my own making?
    At that time, not so long ago, I was innocent (I suppose I still am to this day, this very day). But I was not so innocent that I couldn’t see that anyone who had survived and bested the
second segment of our sad terrible century must have had some remarkable struggles with history and terror, contradiction and ambiguity. Silence, exile and cunning were James Joyce’s
prescription for the task of the modern writer and thinker in an age of brutality and unreason, bombardment and slaughter, ideology and holocaust, a century of intellectual terrorism, an age, as
Canetti once said, of burning flesh, when police thuggery had turned on thought itself. Thanks to silence, exile and cunning, some artists and intellectuals had had