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Henning Schnemmel began as a boy genius. He published a 500-page tome entitled Parallel Lives when he was 12, leading off with Chaplin and Hitler, finishing with a heady comparison of the then Vice-President Nixon and the gay French murderer and writer Jean Genet. But by the time he was adult, though he was twenty times as bright as before and more full of good ideas and new attitudes than any man ever, nobody took the slightest notice of him. At 50 he was an obscure, disgruntled academic, a bizarre failure, who suddenly had a stroke during a bad-tempered lecture and was wheeled away to a hut on an empty fold of the shore of Connecticut, and left to rot.
Charmian Sappel-Veitch, more interested in her unquestionable adorability than her academic career, was a fan of the Parallel Lives. - It was a book that was always zooming off on seemingly irrelevant tangents, which was her greatest joy in anything. She abhorred sharp focus as an artistic and personal lie. She hated all locked forms, shapeliness of all kinds. Parallel Lives, her favourite ever book, darted everywhere, up dead ends with half-thought ideas, always careless of its subject because to a great mind like Schnemmel's the subject was just a vehicle for saying something else.
Researching something at Yale, what she could hardly remember, she heard that Schnemmel was rotting nearby, and set off for a looksee. This was June 7th, 2015. Seventeen years ago.
"Herr Professor Schnemmel?"
Schnemmel wiped his watery left eye and letched with the other. Charmian Sappel-Veitch was the most beautiful human being he had ever seen. Perhaps his stroke had bled into the homosexual part of his brain, because he suddenly renounced a lifetime of happy deviancy and with every emotion left in him firing at once he fell into love with his visitor.
She looked around the hut. 20 feet square of not much.
"Is this home? You don't have another place?"
"This is the whole world," said the old bearded boy genius.
She wheeled him outside. They looked at the ocean. No sailboats. Then plenty. They talked. Watched the boats. Schnemmel sensed she was already bored and about to make her excuses - he needed an idea, something to keep her with him, not just for five more minutes, but forever. He was right, she was bored; then she thought: what if this old wreck can give me, for free, a brilliant idea - it could make me famous: talk shows, magazine covers, extra adorability by the ton.
Her mind took her off on a daydreaming tangent which ended with her brassily about to ask, right out, for the idea, when the lovesick ruin in the wheelchair gave it to her.
"What if," Schnemmel said in a voice higher than his usual, as if the ghost of the boy genius was speaking through him, "there had been another European country. As big as Spain or France. As distinct as Ireland or Italy. Its own unique culture, institutions, literature, language. Hm? Hm? Hm? Its own part in the creation of the United States, with a vital immigrant community here which influenced the direction of our every American thought. If there had been such a country, if there was such a country, what would it be like and what would we be like because of it? Hm? A lost European country, found now in the very idea which postulates it. Shall we discover it together?"
Charmian Sappel-Veitch's great beautiful glassy sky-blue eyes grew ever larger as the failed genius spoke. She held her breath and when he stopped talking she breathed out long, with a chuckle of ecstatic 'ooo's. She leaned over to kiss Schnemmel a thankyou, but suddenly held back. Instinct told her Schnemmel was dead. A tear dropped from his watery eye. He didn't slump. He gave no death rattle. He had just died as her smooth creamy face had loomed closer to him, its lips pursed for an impossible kiss.
Schnemmel's final visitor walked back to her car and drove away as if from demons, screaming ideas into her tape-machine, which turned out to be more laughter than words when she played the thing back later. But she was already writing the book, wasn't she, hm?
The Lost European Country by Charmian Sappel-Veitch, 1000 meandering mishmashy pages long, formless, wild, throbbing with passions, hopes, ideas, was a surprise international bestseller. Her pretty face was everywhere for a while, as was the sinister two-legged oblong silhouette which was the shape of Livia, the country she so charmingly, exhaustively contrived in her book, in such a way that everyone who read it felt that the world could be remade, reborn with the help of a few books like this, or maybe just with this one.
She never wrote another word. One night in Oklahoma, during her disorientating book tour, Ms Sappel-Veitch became interested in the scurrilously impossible idea that her lost country actually existed and that not only had Henning Schnemmel originated there, but that he had been reincarnated back in the old country. These and other associated facts were known, she maintained, by the U.S. Government, who kept Livia a secret because of a treaty with the Russians made in 1945. A whole department of the government was devoted to hiding Livia from the world.
The search consumed the whole talent and life of Charmian Sappel-Veitch. It was said in literary circles that she had disappeared. But no she had not! She was out there, somewhere, gaunt, sunburnt, sitting in a cafe in Lisbon or Havana, interviewing fishermen, her eyes half closed, her breath held behind clenched teeth. She had lost all focus in her thought, was off on an incredible tangent, or maybe on a new tangent altogether, and though time was escaping from her, she was enjoying herself.
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