to return her intact at the end of the month.”
The conversation, though brief, had provided a glimpse into the very private, reclusive existence of the only truly quiet writer in a country whose authors liked above all to talk. As I’d listened to Campari I’d grown more and more surprised and couldn’t help voicing my thoughts: Kloster, the terrible Kloster, had a wife? He even had something as unthinkable, as positively bourgeois, as a secretary?
“And a little girl he adores,” added Campari. “He was almost forty when she was born. I’ve bumped into him a couple of times when he’s been taking her to the park. Yes, he’s a loving family man. Who’d have thought it?”
At any rate, although sales of Kloster’s books hadn’t yet exploded, as they later would, he had for some time, particularly since the publication of his tetralogy, been the writer we all wanted to destroy. Since his first book, he’d been too big, too good. Between novels, he withdrew into bewildering silence, which we found unsettling, threatening: it was the silence of the cat while the mice published their efforts. With each new groundbreaking work, we wondered not how he’d done it but how he’d done it again. And to make matters worse, he wasn’t even as old, as far removed from our generation, as we’d have liked. We comforted ourselves with the thought that Kloster must be from another species, a malevolent freak, rejected by humanity, shut away, resentful and alone, as hideous in appearance as any of his characters. We imagined that before becoming a writer he had been a forensic pathologist, or museum embalmer, or hearse driver. After all, he had chosen as the epigraph for one of his books the contemptuous words of Kafka’s ‘hunger artist’: “I had to fast because I couldn’t find a food I enjoyed. If I had found that I would have eaten to my heart’s content.”
On the back cover of his first book it said politely that there was something ‘unholy’ about his observations, but as soon as you started reading his work it became clear that Kloster wasn’t unholy, he was merciless. From the opening paragraphs, his novels dazzled, like the headlights of a car on the road, and too late you realised that you’d become the terrified rabbit, frozen, heart beating, and all you could do was continue, hypnotically, to turn the pages. There was something almost physical, and cruel, in the way his stories pierced layers, stirring long-buried fears, as if Kloster had the sinister gift of boring into your brain while holding you down with the subtlest of pincers. Nor were they exactly, reassuringly, detective stories (how we would have liked to dismiss him as the author of mere detective stories). What there was in them was evil, in its purest form. And if the word hadn’t been so overused and devalued by TV soaps it might have provided the best definition of his novels: they were evil. Proof of how he loomed over us like a colossus was the way we spoke of him in hushed tones, as if nobody ‘outside’ would find out about him if we strove to keep him secret. Nor did the critics really know how to deal with him, and all they could do was stammer that Kloster wrote ‘too’ well, so as to seem unimpressed. And they were right: he did write too well. Out of reach. In every scene, every line of dialogue, every finishing touch, the lesson was the same—and discouraging. I’d tried a hundred times to ‘see’ how he did it, but I’d concluded simply that behind the desk there must be an obsessive, magnificently sick mind with the power of life and death, a barely restrained megalomaniac. So it’s hardly surprising that ten years ago I was absolutely fascinated by the prospect of seeing what the ‘perfect’ secretary of this fanatical perfectionist was like.
I phoned her—a calm, cheerful, polite voice—as soon as I got back to my flat, and we arranged to meet. When I went down to let her in I found a tall, slim girl, with a serious yet smiling face, high forehead, brown hair drawn back into a ponytail. Attractive? Very attractive, and terribly young—she looked like a first-year student, just out of the shower. Jeans and a loose blouse, coloured wristbands on one wrist, trainers with a star print. We smiled at each other without speaking in the narrow confines of the lift: very white, even teeth,