35
Certainly: I have spent nineteen years of my life pouring the bell metal of my memories into the mold of a story. I was, I am, ready to explain in detail how and why. Nevertheless, nineteen years is a considerable stretch of time. It adds up to—I’ve figured it out—six thousand nine hundred thirty-five days (plus five days for leap years) that I have spent as attendant to my own lunatic self. Six thousand nine hundred forty days and nights of which not a single one has passed without doubt assailing me, paralyzing me at some point or other: doubt in myself, in my strengths, in my gifts, my intelligence, my knowledge, my memory, my perspicacity, my honesty, my character, my calling, my good fortune, and everything else one needs in order to write. And even doubt in what I was doing . . . Good God, how often was this not discussed with Brother Schwab! How often was it not discussed in the intellectual chitchat of the feuilletons! The doubt in the necessity of writing, if you please, or in its effectiveness. Why write at all, nowadays? Don’t the highway rest stop people have their fill? Aren’t they crammed up to their eyebrows with newspapers, movies, television, comic strips? And let’s not even talk about the craftman’s doubts in the rightness of a conceived form, the possibility of carrying it through . . . You yawn, dearest friend? I couldn’t agree more. Nevertheless, our sort take our profession seriously to the point of self-destruction. Just imagine: six thousand nine hundred forty days, of which perhaps a dozen may have been completely happy, because I didn’t think about writing—and afterward they struck me as sinful, as licentiously wasted time.
I can also tell you that, of course, there have been days of fulfillment. Days of euphoria, of creative ecstasy. The bliss of procreation, you know. When nuptially white paper is irrigated by myrmidons of script and becomes gravid with significance. A magical act of creation (which can bring forth not only literature but also newspaper articles, film scripts, cutthroat publishing contracts, love letters, death sentences, declarations of war). Here, however, under my pen, the book of my generation is emerging. Indited by the conscience of our race, Jacob. It is emerging out of such states of self-intoxication. The writing days . . . But these blissful moments are buried in weeks, months, seasons, years of weary indolence, incapability, irresolution, dullness. In days so sluggish as to make the daily life of Oblomov’s footman seem Stakhanovite. And he, Oblomov’s footman, has a totally un-burdened conscience about his indolence. People like us wouldn’t. For us, an unburdened conscience is theft of our own work. A carefree spirit is embezzlement. The man who works away toward a quick end is a saboteur.
You can, of course (like beautiful Maud), reply that the art of life consists in relaxing ever-new cramps before they actually appear. The same holds for the art of writing. Golden words, assuming that one lived a self-determining life and wasn’t in fact for the most part passively lived. It is not I who write, Brodny-leben: it writes out of me. Ask Uncle Helmuth about the torments that a medium suffers before the vessel of her physis is so utterly purified by her that an otherworldly spirit can slip into it and use it for a while as an earthly instrument of expression. But I do not wish to lament. Though hopelessly behind the times, I live the destiny of my era. Anyone who is not a performer in it will, presumably, have an even worse time.
However, you must understand that your blithe request for me to tell you my story in three sentences touched on things deep within me. It was as if you had met a mother who devotes everything to keeping her child alive despite its simultaneous malignant tumors, scrofula, and consumption, and you asked her how many seconds the child does the hundred-meter sprint in. I found you a bit tactless. A bit too forceful, Yankele Brodny. I approved of Uncle Ferdinand’s slightly vexed gesture of dismissal in Bessarabia. You were obviously buying too well, too cheaply, from the peasants. We were not certain whether you, clapping us on the shoulder, might not claim that the grain on the stalk was half-rotten. I felt you lacked savoir faire in dealing with grands seigneurs. In six thousand nine hundred forty days of alternating between compulsive expression and juvenile ink-retention—one hundred sixty-six thousand five hundred and sixty hours of testing and rejecting, of anxieties, flickering hopes, blazing certitudes, and ashen disappointments, as well as faith and courage—people like us achieve a certain dignity. After which you don’t squander your grain anymore. Just a few days ago—about a week before I received the message that you, the powerful literary agent Jacob G. Brodny, wished to see me and would be delighted to dine with me chez Calvet—a few days earlier, I tell you (I had just barely arrived here from Munich via Reims), I fancied I had something to say in my book. Despite all theoretical and particular doubts. During my drive here from Reims, it had suddenly emerged before me quite clearly. I had only to cheat my producer-piglets, who had ordered me to Paris, of a few short weeks; I had only to sneak off for a while, to some place where no one would suspect me of staying. I had only to unpack my papers there and launch into my shaman arts: with the anthracite-gray magic conjuring up spirits by means of black letters on virgin-white paper . . .
Unfortunately, something interfered with my plans.
However, bullheaded as a human being is (behind the times not only in the flight of years but also the flight of days), I was still not ready to admit final defeat. I became aware of my failure only when you asked me to tell you my story in three sentences.
36
And since things deep within me were touched by your Mephistophelian demand, I had a vision. I saw with what appetite you ate your thrush pâté. I scrutinized your mouth. I was fascinated by the dumb show it was performing with no spiritual effort on your part. You were relishing the taste with such gusto; one could see that your entire essence was sublimated into the fine-tasting food mush. After each morsel, your lips closed solidly, like rubber cushions lying snugly on top of each other, and while your jaws were crushing, your lips kneaded along, stretching and twisting as they assumed an expression now of bitterness and indignation, now of insult, hatred, baseness, and finally of almost majestic scorn. Scornfully, with sneeringly pulled-down corners, your lips suffered a swallowing hop of your Adam’s apple; they waited for the rather choky slide of the delicacy down your gullet; then they opened, contorting into a gorgon’s grimace in order to give a pale-violet tongue tip a chance to cleanse any pâté remnants from suspiciously perfect jacket crowns.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not a neurotic aesthete. Business breakfasts in gourmet restaurants with producer-piglets are part of my professional routine. I know the expression of involuntary disgust that one sees in people eating sumptuously. Their autonomously working mouths. Incidentally, as you know, I once wed such a mouth. It was in Nuremberg, at the canteen for German attorneys and witnesses in the gigantic Fürth courthouse. You got the same food as in the Allied cafeteria, but here it was poured out for you like swill. It looked half-fermented and maggoty. Still, it had nutritional value, vitamins. Germans were not picky in 1946. That mouth too was detached from the human being it belonged to. It too remained closed while the human being chewed. It too worked valiantly, albeit with the most peculiar clowneries for itself, just like yours. And the chewing, swallowing human being to whom it belonged and about whom it was completely unconcerned, and who was likewise unconcerned about it, was entirely sublimated into the taking in of nutrients. It was a young girl, corn-blond, with lovely posture, like someone who knows how to ride well. Over the capering mouth hovered a pair of aquamarine-clear fairy-tale eyes, seeing nothing. They were switched off, so to speak, or were listening (so far as eyes can listen), likewise into themselves, to the intake of vitamins from the disgusting canteen grub.
A burning pity overcame me at this sight, a pity not for the girl but for the condition humaine in general: for the human creature and the tragicomedy of its existence. Outside, the city of Nuremberg lay in rubble, as did the rest of Europe. The mass graves from the Don to the Pyramids, from Andalsnes to Salonika, were barely covered. The land was still full of iron men, and children ate from their g
arbage cans as from troughs. Here in Nuremberg, judgment was to be pronounced on WWII: the crime of war, war crimes; crimes against humanity, the crimes of conspiracy for all these things—twenty million victims. The self-assured zeal with which the gallows were constructed for several of the accused did not permit the hope that the twenty million victims would be the last. And amidst these atrocities sat a foolish, lovely young girl, eating with ardor and physical devotion, as though she were eating the flesh of the LORD. Ate with utter creaturely devotion. Sated herself, provided her body with nutrients. Had turned all her senses to this act of providing nutrients . . . this too a kind of gratitude: indeed, that of the flesh. I began to love her.
But that was in my mind when I saw you eating, Mr. Brodny. The year 1962 was also in my mind, the year when I was at the peak of my fame as the writer of shitty movie stories and completely at a standstill with the work on my book, on which I pegged hopes of my salvation from screenplays. It was the year I finally got divorced from Christa and soon didn’t even have a place to live. I moved from hotel to boardinghouse and from boardinghouse to hotel, while people in the street pointed their fingers at me because I was the lover of a world-famous star, Nadine Carrier. The escape from Nadine to the crazy love for Dawn was also in my mind—Dawn and the abstract existence I entered into because of her: the growing unbelievability, unreality, of my existence (which so fascinated Schwab), while all around me lay a world of tormentingly immutable facticity: millions of people teeming over highways, hundreds of thousands eating at rest stops. Everyone, it appeared, knew what he was doing, how much he was earning by doing it, what he could afford with it, what things cost. The supply of purchasable goods was overwhelming, the choice soon imprisoned the entire individual. Everything was getting better, more perfect, more obligating; you had to have it, otherwise you didn’t count . . . And I sleepwalked through the sorrows of a lover whose beloved has been abducted to Hades like Eurydice (I still remember very precisely a conversation with Schwab on the Pont Neuf)—sleepwalked through Paris, the bright and beautiful underworld . . .
all these things were in my mind, as well as Bessarabia and Uncle Ferdinand. And then I heard you speak (without, of course, noticing your angelic voice). Aside from the free and easy “Hi,” which, I must confess, got on my nerves, you very soon said, “I’ve heard about you, young man.” (Why so young? At worst, you’re only five or six years older than I.) “You’re writing a book.” (Indeed.) “Tell me the story in three sentences!” This was said by your hardworking mouth, which lent such original expression to feelings, sentiments, moods that you did not even have, while you consumed pieces of white bread, mashed in Margaux and sputum, with pâté de grives. And quite to my surprise, I heard familiar sounds in your diction. Neither your bellowed r in “story” nor the thick l of the recent immigrant conceals the slightly nasal Viennese Kaffeehaus yiddle of your speech pattern, Jaykopp Gee.
And with that the lid was off my memories. There was no stopping now, and I was not solidly immur’d in earth, I was floating away from myself, floating through the catastrophe-land of Europe, back to the lost half of my life. There was too much of my past in your tender yiddling cadence, from Ostbahnhof to Hofmannsthal, I couldn’t pull myself away.
And yet there you sat and were everything that Europe no longer was, everything that it had meanwhile become, to my sorrow: the same Hilton Hotel from Madrid to Oslo, the same service-station diner, the same airport, the same jukebox from Bückeburg to Calabria, the same supermarket, the same T-shirt on girlish tits, the same hard neon light on evenings when the sky turns to stone over the phallic cities.
And there I had a vision all at once. You, Mr. Brodny, were the model American (hadn’t gone over on the Mayflower, to be sure, but all the more militant in New World spirit for that: a pogrom-tested Babbitt from Galicia), and as the personification of that spirit you were devouring not pâté de grives but a dish named Yurop. The thing you smeared so thickly on your little pieces of white bread and inserted between your perfectly serviced teeth, the thing on which you closed your lips, leaving them to their so original play of expressions while you were totally sublimated to being a chewer and swallower—that thing was not thrush pâté, it was Europe. Her spirit, her soul, her dream of herself, her self-illusion. Her old skillfulness, her inexhaustible wealth of forms, all her many forms so thoroughly imbued with her spirit, with the essence of her being. You devoured her, perfected by Walt Disney and frozen and packed in nylon, in the candy color of a Time & Life magazine insert. Indeed, that was a feast! I saw palaces and cathedrals vanishing into your mouth, which closed over them, contorting—either disdainful or offended, mocking or arrogant—while your teeth chewed. Entire cities, lovelier than Nuremberg, were gobbled up by you, for instance Bruges or Siena or Prague. With you, I tasted Paestum still in swampland and a tangle of wild roses, I saw a spring morning in Brabant melting on your tongue. You forked up the Lübeck Dance of Death and chewed it with delight; you then inserted Michelangelo’s David with its oversize head and fists (but what a head, what fists!), promptly followed by a Klimt portrait of a lady. Shakespeare’s sonnets tickled your palate. You swallowed the façade of Chartres with all the mysterious queens and angels and granted yourself, last but not least, the concluding chapter of Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann. And you washed all this down with a wine that got its color from Giordano Bruno’s blood and its charmingly virile spirit from Spinoza. And on top of this your angelic voice now clambered over the threshold of my consciousness . . .
I had to hold my breath and writhe and squirm to keep from throwing up.
37
I ought to have been overcome by the same pity that I once felt for Christa in Nuremberg. Or rather for the condition humaine in general: for the human creature and the tragicomedy of its existence. But this would have led only to my suffering, and I have avoided suffering as best I could ever since I lost the first half of my life. There has been too much cause for pity since then; one simply can’t manage it.
Do credit me, however, with not dragging the past into presence at least on this occasion. Imagine how simplifying and abbreviating it would have been had I been able to give vent to my dichotomous feelings with a nice hearty “Kike!” What a lovely tension, with the possibility of release granted by such short circuits, has been lost to us because of German immoderation! Europe without hatred of Jews—why, that’s like faith in God without the devil. The loss of a metaphysical dimension. Naturally we’ve subbed in something else in its place: irony. As time goes by it gets ever more bloody. I, however, become more of a coward accordingly.
It was sheer cowardice that prevented me from confronting you, Mr. Brodny. I was afraid of the black bug on your heart. Your bug and mine might have pounced on each other. We would have had to become brothers, like Schwab and me. Even without the clarion fanfare of your voice, I would have recognized God’s angel in you, J. G. And I did not want to wrestle with the angel. Not after what I’d encountered in the past days and nights.
Out of cowardice I have armed myself with irony. The rest was simple and logical. I dropped into a couple of bistros and drank. I did not feel like eating (which you may understand). I even went to the Crillon and asked for Nadine. Luckily, she wasn’t in. A couple of Americans at the bar tempted me to bait them. But they noticed I was drunk and good-naturedly gave me the brush-off. I could have gotten pushy and provoked them into a fistfight, but I didn’t want the bartender to tell Nadine, because then she’d know I was in Paris. This way, he’d take it for granted that I was with her in the Crillon and find it superfluous to talk about me.
I wanted to walk across town again. The fog had lightened, but the golden day underneath had vanished. It was already getting toward evening; I don’t know what time it was. At the Madeleine, I ran into a streetwalker and unloaded my grief on her. I didn’t get home till late at night.
“Home,” as you know, is at present the Hôtel Épicure by the place des Ternes. I owe it to Dawn. This i
s where I tracked her down in 1963 the first time she disappeared. This is where the scene with the Indian doll (and Schwab) took place, and this is where she became my mistress. This is where I deposited her for good after her mouth had eaten the white rose in the Bois de Boulogne.
Since then, I’ve been returning here regularly: whenever I’m fed up with the true-blue folkloristically preserved greasiness of the deluxe tourist hostels on the Left Bank; whenever the movie piglets won’t foot the bill for the George V; whenever I want to write undisturbed for a couple of days or read Nagel’s latest best-selling novel; sometimes simply because I want to be as alone as I truly am; sometimes, in Gaia’s days, whenever we had fought or I was overcome with a surfeit of my luxury-consumer existence; and over and over again when I have the compulsive thought that I might be pounced on in some hour of grace by the vision of a form for my book (as occurred during my drive here from Reims, as has occurred all too often throughout the last nineteen years; for the IT, which wants to be spoken through this book, constantly prowls after me; I can sense it at the back of my neck—only whenever I try to make a swift grab at it, it evaporates) . . .
in short: I return to this lousy dump like a murderer to the scene of his crime.
You know the details of my stay this time: I spent over a week here (one day more or less makes no difference) as a voluntary inmate (solitary confinement). The cause, as indicated several times, was an illumination during the drive here from Reims: I finally had collared my pursuer. The it that wanted to be spoken through me had revealed itself. The parasitic egg that Schwab had once (nineteen years ago!) planted in me had hatched, had gotten through its caterpillar stage, and was now floating before my eyes as a richly colored butterfly. All I had to do was grab him. Only—since we’re dealing with such pretty metaphors—I had reckoned without zoology and without the relationship between the guest and the host.
Abel and Cain Page 30