Dantzig Rudi van - For a Lost Soldier

The telephone.

Naked I walk down the stairs and look at my body: the soldier stepping hastily off the rocks and into the sea, caught out.

‘Yes, Govert,’ I say, ‘sorry, but better not come round tonight. I think I’m going to turn in early for once, I’m dead beat.’

Back in bed I make myself come, the soldier is doing drill with a boy, enervating exercises to develop their endurance.

The Canadians are sitting down to dinner now in the Palace. What do they remember, what are they thinking of? And of whom? Or have they stopped thinking, have all the details become blurred?

Are events that were highlights for us trifles for them in a gigantic, heroic whole?

Are you alive, do you still exist?

The idea that you might have died strikes me suddenly as absurd, unthinkable. You can’t possibly have disappeared for good before we have looked each other in the eye just one more time, wondering together or perhaps smiling together as we reconsider our strange encounter.

When I was small – yes, that time, during the war – it was simple: I saw all of you sitting there, the minister’s wife, my mother and you, on a large grey bench. Like statues, staring fixedly into the void. I could read eternity in your eyes.

How simple it was then to walk up to you, to watch you move up and make room for me on that bench and to wait for the moment – and I felt sure that moment would come -when you would silently place your hand on my knee.

I rub my body dry as I used to dry my tears.

Paris, June 1984 – Amsterdam, December 1985 With thanks to Inge, C.P. and Toer

Anthony Arthur Kildwick, born in 1919 to a well-to-do Yorkshire family, finds the love of his life in a German exchange student at his boarding school. Both boys are passionate to avoid another war between their countries, but when Manfred returns to Germany he is seduced by Hitler’s nationalist rhetoric, while Tony meets the outbreak of war as a conscientious objector. Yet as the Nazi regime shows itself ever more demonic, Tony reluctantly decides he must fight, is recruited into the Intelligence Corps, and is eventually parachuted into southern France, to work with the Resistance. There he discovers Manfred is now an officer with the occupying forces, and their paths cross again in dramatic circumstances.

Noel Currer-Briggs, well known as a writer on history and genealogy, has based this novel in part on his own experience. As well as a fascinating story, it conveys a vivid sense of the conflicts of the 1930s, and the interplay between friendship and internationalism, homosexuality and pacifism, patriotism and democracy, that was characteristic of those years.

“A rare achievement… casts a searching retrospective light upon its age” — Glen Cavaliero

ISBN 0 85449 236 4

UK £9.95/US $14.95/AUS $19.95

A classical guitar teacher from New York seeks a new life in Portugal after the death of so many friends. But the viral eclipse over sexuality pursues him even there, when Antonio, his talented and beloved student, tests HIV-positive and threatens to give up on life. Desperate to show the young man that he still has a future, ‘the Professor’ arranges a car trip to Paris, hoping to be able to convince a leading virtuoso there to begin preparing his protege for a concert career. Antonio’s father Miguel, a stonemason by trade, insists in coming along with them, and en route the three fall into a triangle of adventure, personal disclosure, violence, and at last a strange redemption.

Wittily funny and deeply moving, Unholy Ghosts was written with the support of the US National Endowment for the Arts. Richard Zimler won the 1994 Panurge prize for his short fiction, which has been widely published in Britain and America. He has lived in Portugal since 1990, where his historical novel The Last Kabbalist of Lisbonhas been a number-one bestseller.

ISBN 0 85449 233 X

UK £9.95/US $14.95/AUS $19.95

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Originally published in Dutch under the title Voor een Verloren Soldaat. Uitgeverij: De Arbeiderspers, 1986.

World copyright © 1986 Rudi van Dantzig.

English translation © 1990 by Arnold J. Pomerans

First English publication 1991

This edition first published 1996

GMP Publishers Ltd, P.O. Box 247,

Swaffham, Norfolk PE37 8PA, England

Second impression 1997

Third impression 1998

Fourth impression 1999

Rudi van Dantzig has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Dantzig, Rudi van

For a Lost Soldier

1. Dutch fiction – 20th century – Translations into English

2. English fiction – 20th century – Translated from Dutch

I. Title

839.3’1’364[F]

ISBN 0 85449 237 2

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