It simply can’t be summed up in three sentences. Believe me! Not in our time. Not since everything has been growing frighteningly, running rampant, running riot, devouring the people, the cities, the objects, the events, the stimuli. Hybrid cell growth is also an explosion, after all, isn’t it? To be sure, a slow-motion explosion. Describing this sort of thing requires details. Abbia pazienza!
Needless to say, one strives to restrict oneself to the essential. One sticks to the tersest, most economical outline. One focuses on what one would like to say, as transparently and graphically as possible, and so one plies one’s craft decently and honestly, until—well, yes: until it suddenly urges you to say something that was not even foreseen in this outline, that does not even go into it, that has nothing to do with it, and that no amount of effort can visibly connect with it . . . yet it has to be said and it drives you until you finally say it.
One can only hope that the it is wiser than we are. That it says something more essential than what we are trying to say—or even: than what we have yet been capable of saying. Something we did not realize, whose meaning we did not grasp but which is instantly grasped by everybody once it is said because it is in the zeitgeist and was as yet unborn—and if you hadn’t said it, then someone else would have done so a moment later.
“I hope I don’t have to spell out for you what consequences this has for the nervous system,” I said to Schwab. “People like us live like someone who’s hard of hearing, always tormented by the fear of missing something. The fear that something may be spoken of that we don’t know or aren’t supposed to hear. I tell you: Our eyes aren’t red just from scribbling by lamplight. Mainly they’re red because we keep peering around mistrustfully to see whether something is being scribbled behind our backs. Imagine what I am going to have to endure until I figure out why those chewing horlàs, those anthropoids who must have already anticipated the posthuman evolutionary stage—why they’ve stuck with me so solidly that I can’t get rid of them! All because you, of course, had been without alcohol for two hours and had to have a drink; otherwise the withdrawal symptoms would have hit you like epilepsy. It was you who lured me into that bloody roadhouse, man. It will probably take years now for this crop to grow before I can harvest its meaning. And until then that little group of highway people will stay with me: father, mother, aunt, four children, shoveling, chomping, chewing, swallowing—making me wonder what they signify. One has to be prudent as a writer. Live cautiously. A poet, as we know, is a mouthpiece through which a god speaks (mainly to tell what he is suffering). But even simple people like us are chosen to speak and at the same time frail, vulnerable, easily exasperated. After all, our kind too lead lives of devotion: we are tense strings over which the zeitgeist passes, making us quiver. And the zeitgeist strums quite vehemently, does it not? Il nous joue de la belle musique; we do not even know where to flee. However, the intrinsic feature of the zeitgeist, its exclusive peculiarity, which determines its style (and thereby ours), is something we do not hear so long as we remain in its tempestuous contractions; this is recognized only by those who come after us. Even we who are chosen to speak know it at best after it has urged us to express this knowledge. And he who wishes to hear the mystery of the zeitgeist, that which says itself through us but is not yet named—he who wishes to name it must make himself so taut that sooner or later he will snap. For the zeitgeist only whispers it; you have to filch it from its breath . . . Yet when we ultimately reach the point of jumping out of our skins at every fart because we mistake it for a breath of the zeitgeist, thinking we can hear something in it that no one else can hear, and when we absolutely want to be the first to express it . . . when our throats tighten with fear lest we are late with everything, forgotten by our zeitgeist, never its mouthpiece, when we are epigoni after all, adding only frills, unable to say anything fundamental to our era, then our situation will affect our souls, dear friend. No one could be more aware of this than you.”
31
No one knew this better than he, my brother Schwab, and he accepted the consequences and kicked the bucket. I, however, have survived.
Even though the parasitic egg of having to write was laid in me and has been devouring me for nearly two decades, I have survived. I have survived him just as, to his consternation, I survived my romance with Dawn and, two years later, with Gaia. Just as I survived Cousin Wolfgang and Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha and Aunt Selma. And presumably Uncle Ferdinand and ultimately John too. Just as I had survived Stella, although surviving her was the most shameful of all.
That is what prompts me to think back so often to the winter of 1940 in Uncle Ferdinand’s home: my innocence back then! The fullness of a world that had not yet gone under in the Ice Ages. The world of the first half of my life, which I had not yet survived.
Uncle Ferdinand is still alive.
I sit across from him at a long table. I am wearing the uniform of a good regiment, which may not be the same one in which he once served his old Fatherland—a Fatherland that is no longer his and indeed is hostilely facing his (and thus my) present Fatherland—but no matter! Uncle Ferdinand’s real Fatherland is the Middle Kingdom, and he counts me as part of it. He treats me with the paternal camaraderie that the commander of the Imperial Russian garde à cheval would show toward a cadet who had just been promoted to cornet.
I am grateful to him, with mixed feelings. True, I am sitting at a table at which I sat as a child, waited on by servants some of whom claim they knew me back then. I sit beneath ancestral portraits that in depicting Uncle Ferdinand’s forebears may possibly be depicting mine—but none of this matters. We haven’t seen each other for fourteen years. Uncle Ferdinand is certainly enough a man of the world to see right off how much or how little is left of Miss Fern’s upbringing, but he cannot really know who I am. Anything might have become of the child that was once troublesome enough as a hanger-on (or even worse: a charitable gift) of a delightful mistress. The child that once annoyingly ran underfoot and has now surfaced again, a young blade sent to his home by his old friend and confrere John, to whom he is deeply attached, whose father he once knew and on whose estate he, Uncle Ferdinand, shot the most unforgettable grouse of his life, but a man whose diplomatic missions have always been rather obscure, suspect particularly now that he is married to this bluestocking Bucharest Jewess. Pretty, yes, spirited, and to be seen everywhere, elegant, witty, quick, but—well, you know.
I wonder if Uncle Ferdinand knows that I am Stella’s lover. I wish he did. I have a guilty conscience toward John, but I’m proud nevertheless. I love Stella. Love her intelligence, her wit, her maternal tenderness, her unerring frankness, her fairness and honesty. I love her with all my senses. I love her taut body, the dull-shimmering olive tone of her skin. She is fourteen years older than I, and I love her ripeness, her experience, the mellowness of her beauty, her sharp spiritedness, the first gray threads in her black thick-stranded desert-Jewish hair. (Absalom supposedly was blond, but one of my most beautiful erotic fantasies is to see Stella dangling from a branch by this black shock and to ride toward her to bore through her with my lance.)
I was just thinking of her, in the bathtub. I was looking down at my thin, tough body, still tan from the summer. It lay in the water covered by a floating galaxy of dissolving soapsuds. But from a dark moss bed in the sepia skin, a sturdy stalagmite grew through the greenish transparency of the water. Stella, my star (indeed, that was her maiden name: Stella Stern).
It would not surprise, much less scandalize, Uncle Ferdinand if he knew that I was Stella’s kept lover. Along with the glue of gossip, of the ceaseless informing by everyone on everyone, the unflagging mutual mentioning, naming, citing of all by all, the Middle Kingdom is held together by two further glues: money and a sperm thread industriously spun by everyone, everywhere, up and down, back and forth, in and out. Every man has slept with every man and every woman. Everyone, thank goodness, is rich enough to think of money as a means to the most exciting, most amusi
ng games, and to leave moral considerations out altogether. Every man and every woman have satellites, escorts, parasites, flatterers, whores, floozies, gigolos, catamites, henchmen. Everyone has his little court, and it’s in a courtier’s power to be treated as a lackey or to command respect (yes, experience teaches that members of the Middle Kingdom at some point like being treated rather insolently by some such creatures).
Uncle Ferdinand could not treat me with more exquisite charm and paternal kindness if the ancestral portraits along the walls, the pale Fanariots with the saber-crooked noses and the fiery-eyed boyars with the crooked feathers on otterskin caps, were truly my forebears too and he really were the commander of the garde à cheval in which I had been freshly promoted to cornet. He sits opposite me, watching me dine. He himself eats almost nothing anymore; he briefly pokes his fork into the meager food on his plate and then leaves it untouched. His yellowish-gray spider head over his stiff white shirtfront, which has pushed his bow tie all the way up to his earlobes, is mystically transfigured in the glow of the table candles, like the head of a pagan priest. The glasses of wine before him sparkle like test tubes containing reagent fluids of different colors. He does not touch them, either. His round, thin-lidded eyes are nailed to me. And I sit opposite him, bolt upright, in my operetta uniform, striving to appear as relaxed and casual as possible. I use elegant John as my model—he is a model for me in many respects—and I deceive him.
Yes indeed, Mr. Brodny: such is my innocence back then, twenty-eight years ago. Stella is still alive, and I love her. I don’t as yet know that I shall never see her again. She is with John in Bucharest, and I delude myself into thinking I can hurry into her arms at my next furlough (which Uncle Ferdinand effortlessly obtains for me by way of my regimental commander). Stella, my star! . . .
and all the while, I also love John. I measure myself against John; I compare myself with him. I know that of all the countless lovers of my mother, he was the only one whom she loved passionately. I would like to be like him. He is more plain: his profile and his hands are finer, more cultivated, his eyes are brighter, larger, more sincere, less shifty than mine—yes, it is that shiftiness which reveals Subicz’s lineage from a tribe of mountain Dalmatians. John has smoother, less unruly hair, which lies more naturally on his head—the hair of a model child, the kind of hair Miss Fern tried to make mine be with furious strokes of the brush. John must have been an exemplary child from a splendid home, un ragazzino molto fine, elegante, intelligente, perbenino (I am grateful to Lieutenant Colonel Subicz that I am not such a brat).
John has the best manners a person could possibly have. I am fascinated with the way he takes me for granted; that is, the way he, almost thirty years my senior, treats me as a perfect equal in every respect (in contrast to Uncle Helmuth’s Fafnir-like, menacing demand that we respect our elders). I was delighted with the way John took me for granted from the very beginning—or new beginning—when I met him again after twelve years: no longer Miss Fern’s spick-and-span, combed-and-brushed, piss-elegant little boy, the bastard of sweet little Maud; now a scrawny, towering youngster, wretchedly dressed, aureoled with the odor of a tenement apartment, dissipated because of certain back-courtyard experiences, with a dreamy and unreliable lurking in his eyes. I am enchanted by the way John took me for granted then, welcoming me as though not a single day had waned since last he saw me with my hand in Miss Fern’s; “Hello, dear boy, awfully glad to see you. Let’s have some booze.” (Two years before Uncle Ferdinand’s “Ah, te voilà, finalement. Il était grand temps qu’on te voie”: chips off the same block.)
John’s cordiality toward me has not diminished for an instant. I know that he is too rich to worry about the tailor bills that Stella pays for me (especially since he can tell himself that Stella, who is even richer than he, probably pays them out of her own pocket). Not the slightest shadow of a smile, not even a millimeter-high twitch of his eyebrows, an involuntarily accelerated blink, ever betrays his thoughts when he suddenly sees me all spruced up as if I had stepped forth from the latest issue of Adam. I virtually live in his home. Although my official place of residence since I left my relatives is the garconnière in the middle of Vienna (my rent paid by Stella), I am at John and Stella’s house in the Rennweg from dawn to dusk. I drive his car, drink his whiskey, screw his wife; his chambermaid washes my shirts, his valet presses my trousers—and John treats me as politely as if I were His Britannic Majesty’s ambassador. His savoir faire is enthralling; he is indefatigably attentive, obliging, friendly—and completely invulnerable to intimacy. I am in awe of his tact (and almost incapable of looking him in the eye ever since Stella told me that he is delighted with my tact). We are such an exemplary, civilized trio that I often cramp up and hold my breath to keep from throwing up.
32
All that I have survived. And not only that but also the farewell from the park of my childhood, when the Russians came to Bessarabia with the summer. A little later I survived the bombs on Berlin when, on a highly suspicious pseudodiplomatic mission, I avoided a heroic death on the front. I survived Stella’s disappearance when she—the Jewess, the wife of an Englishman in a position both important and mysterious—hit on the insane idea of trying to enter Germany unrecognized from Switzerland in order to see me once again . . .
and I also survived the shameful rat-flight the length and breadth of the German lands, the ludicrous game of hide-and-seek with the authorities and draft-dodger hunters: I survived the second Ice Age in Hamburg-on-the-Elbe and Nuremberg, where John hit on the insane idea of calling me as a witness to Stella’s murder . . .
and in Schwab’s eyes all these things were a remarkable wealth of enviable experience, which I absolutely had to get down on paper. I began to believe him and divided myself (already reduced by half a life) into two further halves, of which one half, the potential author of the masterpiece novel of the era and future Nobel laureate, set about systematically to undermine the life of the other self-half, a pioneer in the reconstruction of the postwar West German film industry. I undauntedly survived the marriage to Christa and an affair (which rocked the worldwide public) with the fading movie star Nadine Carrier (including several relapses); and I survived my son’s scorn. (A young man a father could be proud of, by the way: un ragazzino molto fine, elegante, intelligente, perbenino. The Dalmatians have Mendeled out. Christa’s clear, corn-blond brightness. Her better-bred hands. Her small mouth. Her eyes, brighter, larger, more sincere than mine. No cunning in them. Her hair, smooth under the brush stroke.)
No use imagining that if Uncle Ferdinand were still alive, he might be interested in meeting my son, grandson of beautiful Maud. Except for the data in the Almanach de Gotha, the only genealogies that interested Uncle Ferdinand were those of horses and dogs. And even they did not interest him anymore during that faraway February 1940 when I saw him for the last time. The only thing that interested him then was the act of handing down.
I still sense the unerring gaze with which he watches over my table manners. In them, he does not read my aptitude for someday entering the ranks of the Middle Kingdom but only my polite willingness to listen to him. My powerful appetite evidently pleases him; I won’t tire easily. His fatherly concern, his elegant, seemingly unconditional familiarity and comradely intimacy, should not deceive me. I would make an embarrassing mistake if I presumed to derive any privileges from them. “I like to treat everyone as my equal,” says Uncle Ferdinand. “But that doesn’t mean that he may treat me as his equal.”
The elegant as-if of our equality is quite naturally due to his not asking me anything. He does not wish to know why I am not seen in the right places at the right time through the annual course of the “seasons.” Why I do not play polo near the Pyramids in January, zoom down the Cresta run on my knees, belly, and elbows in Saint Moritz in February, play in tennis tournaments on the Riviera in March, sail near Ragusa in April, dine with Lady Diana Duff-Cooper in London in May, attend the night races at Auteuil in June, walt
z with Geraldine Apponyi on Budapest’s Margaret Island in July—and so on through the moons until the graceful cycle concludes and recommences. It is tacitly assumed that only private reasons are holding me back. In case of doubt, at my age, a romance that must be discreetly handled (and then indiscreetly gossiped about). Otherwise I would quite obviously be doing all those things, though to be sure WWII is, to some extent, a hindrance.
Nor does Uncle Ferdinand ask to hear where and how I have spent the almost one and one half decades since my short pants and long, buttoned gaiters and little Norfolk jacket with the tremendous navy-blue-and-white polka-dotted bow under the Eton collar, and Miss Fern’s admonishing English dove-cooing in my ear. And even if he became absentminded and let the question slip out, he would not wait for my answer. For if he doesn’t know the answer, then the events must have taken place outside his world, and anything happening beyond Uncle Ferdinand’s world has but remote significance for him. There is no room in the Middle Kingdom for the people, things, circumstances, incidents I could tell him about—except, at best, Uncle Helmuth’s spiritist séances. And Uncle Ferdinand would know about them from Countess Kannwitz without Uncle Helmuth’s making an appearance.
But perhaps Uncle Ferdinand himself does not even wish to hear anything about his Middle Kingdom. If he wants to keep informed and up to date, it is probably only for the sake of inventory. Like the task of the ornithologists and shell collectors among his princely cousins, his true chore is to sift, count, arrange, and name, not to analyze and observe. The world is as God the Almighty has created it: è così perchè è così. Uncle Ferdinand has already told me basically everything worth knowing about his Middle Kingdom—its structure, its mechanics, its functioning. Only seldom do I hear something more, lessons about habits and conduct—say, that the toughest hunts are ridden not in England in red nor in France in green but in Ireland in glen check and brown boots. I am told of Count Dankelmann’s famous five driven partridges in Upper Silesia: two shots at the approaching covey, change guns, shoot only one barrel, change guns again lightning quick and take the last two shots at the flushed fowl . . . Anecdotes likewise recede into the background. (For instance: “She was terrified of having a baby, but she didn’t want to do anything to protect herself because she was afraid that some birth-control device might injure her and then she couldn’t have the child that she wanted someday from a man she really loved. And that was why—” I understand. Expressed in the floweriness of folk poetry:
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