Here I am humble and confess my poverty. I have nothing to offer but my bare self. And this self becomes more and more wretched with each passing day. I am no longer who I was when I began to write my book. At that time, I was rich: I lived on the dividends from my innocence. Today, I live guiltily, hand to mouth. At that time, I was able to dream, and I fed from the honey pots of fantasy. Now, I gnaw on the bare bone of reality. Whatever I suck from it merely increases my hunger.
•
Never in the preceding days and nights did I so ardently long for reality as at this moment. Somewhere in the marsh of my consciousness, a drifting memory had sunk to the bottom, and every so often (in the fidgety daze of overexhaustion, or after an evening of stuffing my belly, or under the new moon, or the devil knows when), the wraith-like, dissolving image of that memory rose to the surface—and it looked damn near like a corpse—
and I screamed with longing to recognize that memory. As on my first day here, in the terror that befell me when I reread the notes on Schwab, I yearned for this recognition. I wanted to have committed this murder, no matter how dreadful, cowardly, and contemptible, and no matter how shameful the reason—so long as it was true, and real. I knew I had the possibility within me. Everyone has the possibility of murder within him. But I needed reality. I needed it for my absolution. A deed, no matter how cruel and vile, can be acknowledged and admitted as a misdeed, can be regretted and expiated. But there is no absolution for the mental predisposition to be a murderer.
I needed something solid as testimony for myself. I had to be able to grasp who I was. I could no longer be merely a possibility of myself. Schwab had put a bug in my ear when he said that if he were really going to write his book, he would begin with my eyes gazing up the Seine.
He had wanted to write me before I did so myself—my cunning friend. He had wanted to beat me to the punch with his book, as much as he allegedly wished that I should write my book. But what had he wanted to write about me? What could he write about me? My story—what was that? The story of a checkered life. Was that my SELF? A chain of more or less loosely connected incidents. A pattern of circumstances that had produced their consequences in me. A cooperation of more or less causal processes that had led to me. What did that mean to him? What did I—my SELF—mean to him? Just what can anyone mean to anyone? He can be his brother or opponent, friend or foe, his slave or his master, his model or his horror . . . but those are projections, self-relations, metaphorical assimilations of the other into one’s own self. In other words: fancies, figments, fictions. How does one break through the web of deceptions and truly reach the other person? Only by murdering him (or being murdered by him)? With what can one really still identify? Only with a murderer or with his victim?
It was ridiculous. Probably the closest I ever got to murdering someone was my last good-bye to Cousin Wolfgang. 1939: I was already in Romania to be a soldier myself, thus could not say good-bye to him when he was loaded onto a train to storm into the land of the Poles. In military gray, in which he had appeared a few weeks earlier, poignantly planting himself in front of me (“Well, what do you have to say now?”). But I had asked Aunt Selma to put a cluster of oak leaves in his rifle barrel (as is customary in Germany in historic hours), and, touched by my tenderness, she had obediently done so. Cousin Wolfgang took the train straight into his baptism of fire. He had no time or chance to pull the oak leaves out of the rifle barrel. He probably didn’t even recall they were there. All he knew was that the train stopped, out in the open somewhere, and he was surrounded by splintering and crashing. He thus realized he was being shot at and that it was his duty to shoot back at whatever he could see with his purblind eyes. So he shot back. And since my oak-leaf cluster was stopping up his rifle, the bullet flew back out and tore the bolt off the chamber and the thumb off his right hand. A million-dollar wound. Nagel, with the sacrifice of his entire right arm, was not more thoroughly exempted from further military service.
Cousin Wolfgang was sent back to Vienna with a transport of wounded soldiers on the very next train. En route, he was bitten by a rat, which had snuck (unscheduled) into the railroad car meant to hold eight horses or forty (damaged) men. By the time he arrived in Vienna several days later, Wolfgang was dying. It was tragic, if you overlooked the comic part. But you couldn’t make a murder of it.
I never told you this, I said in spirit to Schwab’s spirit. Out of tact, of course. And naturally also to avoid revealing all my professional secrets. Now that you’re over there in the beyond and know everything that goes on in my mind, it’s no use my concealing anything. So, then, listen: I didn’t want to confess to you that I wanted to keep the idea of myself as a murderer, albeit such a pathetic one, for myself. I didn’t want to grant you the possibility of expanding me on a literary level. If you were to write me, then it would have to be my SELF whom you drew, not some literary fiction of me. I refused to give you this possibility of myself—like the Dollar Princess of operetta fame, who reveals nothing of her riches because she wants to be loved for her own sake and not for her money. I wanted to experience myself through you as a pure SELF—which, needless to say, is sheer nonsense, or, even worse, self-deception. The feeblemindedness of vanity. I wanted to see a representation of myself, mirrored in your beautiful envy. The admiring envy of the happily unchallenged invulnerability and sovereign frivolity of the foster child of Sir Agop Garabetian, Bully Olivera, and Uncle Ferdinand, embellished with the listening, spellbound eyes of Aunt Selma’s adopted child. And my disappointment was consistent with this when I learned that the first of your notes about me used me only to describe Paris.
Very intense blue, now lightened by the reflection of the extraordinarily dramatic sky: announcement of the Last Judgment (describe the scale of cloud formations & illumination effects in the Paris sky: from the most transparent aquamarine—“pale-blue like your corset”—to lead-blue and lemon-yellow as in Seurat, and so forth up to the color violences of the Apocalypse). Eyes that have gazed until aching at what he sees: the river now reflecting as if polished and notched hard-edged along the quais, where the roaring lava of the cars rolls in a swift, tenacious, compact torrent that is skin-covered and streaked by a metal virtually oxidizing with spectral colors; the torrent stops at the traffic light at regular intervals, damming up there for minutes at a time, and then roaring loose again in a metallurgic vomitatio. The rows of buildings along the riverbanks have become the real quai walls, a makeshift dike for these evil flows which the mirroring ribbon of the river divides into two crosscurrent beds. The rows of buildings, against the catastrophic sky, seem broken, like teeth, streets of ruins; in the garrets a Golgotha of window crosses.
You see that this note is in my possession. And I am quite capable of reading it as a literary metaphor—now that I, thanks to the folder Schelmie tactfully turned over to me after your death, have been able to peer into your professional secrets; now that, thanks to your occult return, the crumbling masonry of my self-confidence has been dismantled stone by stone, and I dare not set pen to paper without first permitting you to test me, punctiliously and painstakingly. With self-tormenting pleasure, I assist you in this game. Enjoy it when you hurl my visions, intentions, ideas, emotions, into your mortar, pound them into powder, weigh them on your apothecary’s scales and then drown them in aquafortis, only to shrug off coldly the result of the examination and ask me, with a disparaging wave of your hand, to get rid of the residuum:
—as if writing were primarily an act of conscience, and every sentence a touchstone of the moral person of the writer who undertakes to write that sentence down:
so that, with every line, the author’s responsibility increases—not only toward the reader (whose fragile salvation might be imperiled by the slightest dishonesty of literary intention, the least impurity of form), but also toward himself:
because dealing with the magic device of words on the page unleashes not only the demons, who seize other people’s lives, but also the devil, who
carries off the inattentive writer himself—
The results of the self-investigation in which you so kindly help me are not encouraging. My dream is my last hope. Kindly understand this. If my dream is not telling the truth, then I am done for. I, my SELF, would not really exist. I would be in no way essentially different from any horlà maggot, any highway rest stop person. I would then no longer be your brother, dear Schwab. If this dream (and its dark echo during the days) is nothing but a dream, then I, my SELF, am nothing but the cluster of concepts to which so-called science wishes to reduce man, nothing but a banal object of town-and-country psychology. A man-in-the-street type, who can at best lay claim to being haunted occasionally by a man-in-the-street trauma, the ordinary aftereffect of some even more ordinary early experience, some silly, deep-seated shock from the piss-sphere. For the scientifically enlightened, of course, a keyhole to the soul, into which every degree-holding underpants inspector can insert his skeleton key in order to snap open the mechanism of the causal relationship between dick length, frustration, and manifested ideals, and to ascertain a quite normal, meaningless deformation of the psyche, which should not occasion any serious concern.
If that was the case, friend Schwab, then I could just as well lower my flag. Then I could give the chambermaid a fat tip for taking my garbage heap of papers down to the furnace. I could pack up the rest of my belongings and go to Nadine at the Crillon.
She is waiting for me there anyhow. We meet again after a year apart. “Don’t say a word! I told you so, didn’t I? One day, you’ll vanish from my life the same way you dropped into it. No explanation is needed. It’s a character trait. It was just as assured that you would come back. Sooner or later, you all disappear, and sooner or later, you all come back to me.”
Tant pis pour toi, mon ange.
Incidentally, she didn’t have to put this into words. She would come toward me and offer me her lips, un-made-up and weary with kissing—the lips of the great tragedienne in a housedress. Wordlessly, she would then walk past the splendid floral arrangements to the folding table with the Second Empire silver tray, which she drags along to every hotel and every location. There, without asking, she would mix my margarita just the way I like it (smokingly cold and strong, with a furry crust of cryptocrystalline salt around the edge of the glass). Then (without the least triumph at the feat of memory gleaming in the spiritual bath of her dark-ringed eyes) with a smile she would offer me the drink: the grande dame, voice muffled to boudoir level, relaxed, loftily sophisticated: “I never forget that I grew up in a slum. The important thing is that other people forget it . . .”
This is stated so casually, as something so plainy self-evident (or expressed mutely with the eyes, mimicry, gestures) that the knot it ties in your bowels relaxes instantly. The evocation of a child sketched by Käthe Kollwitz gracefully withdraws to the wings, clearing the stage for the present figure: the delicate woman who, by dint of un-suspected strength (and high intelligence), has managed to overcome social inequity and establish her talent—and thus her ripely mellow humanity—in a halo of radiant light bulbs.
She knows all this. She would smile knowingly. It was the prelude to what she loved most: sibling togetherness. And if this softly mournful yet courageously hopeful chamber-music prelude to intimate sibling togetherness had sounded thirty-seven times during the previous twelve months in exactly the same way (although not with a margarita but with a whiskey and soda or whiskey on the rocks, a martini, a gin and tonic, or a bullshot), with thirty-seven men who, like me, had sooner or later disappeared only to come back again after one, two, seven, ten, or eighteen years; and if it turned out the most recent guest in her life was on the stairs about to disappear or waiting in the next room in order to take off either tomorrow or the day after tomorrow or in two weeks—none of it mattered in the least:
she lived for the moment, detached from its historical context. She playacted in life as little as she did in front of the movie camera (or, earlier, on stage). She was always completely herself. In full intensity. She lived only the present situation—which was fixed in space, isolated even from the next room. She lived it whether as Mary Stuart or Phaedra, the madwoman of Chaillot, Fräulein Elsa, Ninon de Lenclos, Mother Courage, or simply Nadine Carrier, the much-tried, much-tested woman: the great tragedienne, the lover, the intellectual, the bravely enduring, the nevertheless impish.
It did not matter what author had invented the situation; it did not matter if the creator of the moment was named Racine or Kleist, Ibsen, Shaw, Anouilh, Arthur Miller, or the Good Lord, Providence or Chance. She cozied up to the scene, filled out the moment and imbued it with her presence, raising it from the stream of events, incidents, occurrences, and nailing it fast to its unique, unrepeatable presentness.
This was certainly not alien to my nature. Oh, no. If ever there was a man who saw the past as a tangle of happenings more familiar from hearsay than from personal experience, more ghostly and spectrally illusory than real, if ever there was a man who viewed the future as an ocean of vague possibilities for such happenings (and thus regarded the present as a free-floating, pliant dimension open to any myth), if ever there was such a man, then it was I. Never was I so distinctly aware of this as when faced with Nadine’s highly cultivated, disarming naturalness. Thus, while I sipped my margarita (and she went to the record player to put on our record, the Beatles’ “And I Love Her”—her memory was really fabulous!), I would have the chance to mull over the notion that every intensely lived life is veined with betrayal: the blood path of reality. The Arabs, in their profound way, see things rightly when they say that memory is sin.
Who is not familiar with that? Who has not held his beloved in his arms and told her in ardent or entrancedly stammering words something that, regrettably, he once (if not more often) said to someone else (and will presumably say again to a third, fourth, or fifth person): that this moment is the fulfillment of his being, and he would rather die than ever betray this uniqueness . . . Now, whether ten years or ten minutes lie between the confession and its repetitions alters nothing fundamental in the contradiction—nor, paradoxically, nothing in the possible (even probable) truth of this and all other assurances. Only in connection with one another will one or all the others seem like a lie. And who, if you please, will dare to make this connection? The continuity of the personality? . . . It was Nadine’s profession to change her personality as often as her costume, and mine (when I saw myself chiefly as a writer) to carry within myself the entire gamut of possible personalities between Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler. This was not the difficult part of the matter. The sibling intimacy of our togetherness was thoroughly genuine. (“All I want is to be close to you—do you understand?”) Yes, indeed. Sure. Me too. I do by the way want something else as well, but first let’s be close to each other.
It wouldn’t even get on my nerves. Nadine was an artist. The gently spontaneous way she would sit down on the farthest corner of the sofa (armed with a glass: I must confess I don’t know what mixed drink is her favorite), pull up her feet, and slip them into the folds of her dress (I have long since accepted circulatory deficiencies in the extremities as a hallmark of sublime femininity) would certainly have nothing aggressive about it. Being close to each other really meant nothing but making the moment last as long and undisturbed as possible. This was to be understood in terms of time and space, and thereby metaphysically too . . .
In support of the metaphysical, “our” record would be playing. Its melody, so often hummed back and forth between us in the past, was as insinuating as a suppository, and the straightforward suggestiveness of the lyrics (she gives me everything—and tenderlihy) would relieve us of the strain of having to bridge our closeness with spiritual emanations (technology had for once achieved its purpose!).
I could hold the glass, meanwhile drained of the margarita and licked free of its salt-crystal boa, and turn it back and forth in front of my right eye while keeping the left one shut, and I could mix my memo
ries with the delicate rainbow waves in which the colors of Nadine’s flowers dissolved behind the glass:
Memories of situations that, by means of arbitrarily drawn connections between the foregoing and the following, expose what is lived, said, and done moment by moment in the most sincere veracity as lies, deceit, betrayal. For instance:
I stand stark naked on the scrubbed planks of a grooved and dented floor in a schoolroom in Berlin-Charlottenburg, March 1942. One year earlier, with Stella’s help, I slipped out of Romania (and its army). Brilliantly grasping the situation (before Stalingrad, before sacrificing her life for me), Stella advised me to volunteer for the German army, so that I would no longer be regarded as a Romanian deserter. Bureaucracy took its sweet time (a breathing spell for me). But now the time has come. A notice fluttered into my hands from the military commission, I dutifully reported, presented my papers, and was told to strip to the skin—among a pack of glum, monosyllabic, already graying draftees. They peel themselves out of gray clothes, the bloated bodies of Hans Baldung Grien, the crooked hip bones, shoulder blades, the battered, constricted rib cages of Egon Schiele. Among them, my nakedness radiates like an Apollo’s. A coarse person in a veterinarian’s smock has placed me against a rod with centimeter notches, screwed a sliding peg hard against my skull, measured my height, peered at my soles, into my throat and larynx, as well as deep into my anus, tugged up the foreskin from my glans, questioned me about diseases and possible complaints, then pushed me in front of a long table, where the members of the Conscription Commission sit before heaps of papers and a collective ashtray filled to the brim (with the butts of collective cigarettes that are handed from man to man like a calumet). At their center, Chief White Horse, a hoary colonel, who (if he weren’t sitting) could presumably keep himself erect only with the help of his high riding boots. A terse, uncommonly snappy dialogue unfolds between him and me:
Abel and Cain Page 43