He was presumably resting under the flowers, having finally passed on into the lighthearted self-lavishing that had been so difficult for his prim and prudent character.
•
A dead man’s generosity enabled anyone who might like to worship this prize piece of a flower growers’ contest (Dawn’s longing for the Mardi Gras in Cannes!) to do so. Needless to say, Scherping was present: as a bearer of culture, employer, and rival. He expressed the first function by means of a silk-lined black hat (which he held in his lap like a soup pot) and the latter two functions with a cunning contentment in his apple cheeks. At times, however, his soft mouth twitched painfully—with the corresponding emphasis of pleasure. The drapery of his face was tied back for the solemn occasion, but with a frivolous touch, like the hem of a Belle Époque cocotte, who sees a puddle on the pavement as an excuse to reveal her calves.
And Schwab’s respectable, serially unfaithful former spouse Carlotta at his side was a widow transcending all conventions in so comradely a fashion that no one would have dreamed of asking how many years ago she had left the deceased because there wasn’t even the smallest spot left on his head for another horn.
And Witte too, the Nestor of her countless lovers—and patron, laundry detergent king, and culture-fertilizer manufacturer—sat near her; in his lap, the same civic-association-representative black hat that is always sported in Hamburg to show economic prosperity in a dignified way despite a never denied (and certainly never doubted) lower-class background. Whereas Scherping’s hat would, when donned, slide down over both ears, Witte usually pushed his own smartly off his forehead: Stadtluft macht frei.
Witte sat next to the legendary aunt who, in far-off days of youth, when bearing the name Wiebke, with its sound like the evening song of a plover, had been his betrothed for a time, and for whom he had nurtured tender feelings ever since. He sat sturdily at her side as if ever ready to support her should the need arise—
not only out of devotion but also in the full weatherproof awareness that here—and here more than anywhere else—it befitted him to bear the club banner. His apoplectic skull shone like the cocarde of a champion sharpshooter: blue in the red-framed core, surrounded by the blazing white of his silvery lion’s mane.
The aunt had slipped her nicotine-tanned paw into the arm of Schwab’s niece Uschi (who so far seemed ready to let any man bed her); and next to Uschi, his thick eyebrows somberly spiraling into the bridge of the nose, sat her new fiancé, Klaus, in stiff, sap-fermenting young manhood, which Herr von Rönnekamp in turn kept jealous watch over, raising his master-detective profile with derisive pride. In short: the more or less immediately affected mourners in this Middle Kingdom were also intertwined by a busily spun sperm thread, which also pulled in more remote people.
In the second row, wedged between the production managers of Scherping Publishers (black hats) and the sales directors (black hats), sat the loyal secretary Elisabeth Schmidschelm (called Schelmchen or Schelmie or even Ellie the Alkie), who had once seen better days, before she had been gently nudged into retirement at Lücke’s Bar after Schwab’s departure.
And over her shoulder (heightened hump-like by a brand-new Persian lamb coat collar—Scherping with his usual generosity had been forced to pay her off too) peered—oh, graceful folly!—the enchanted eyes of Lovely Heli (it is with such timid curiosity that the unicorn sticks its head out between the oak trunks in the forest to see if its knight is coming). I looked out to see if Gisela was coming. There was no reason why she too should not make an appearance and say farewell to someone who had offered up his soul to her like a youth his manhood on the altar of Astarte. But I couldn’t find her. Presumably, she took her profession too seriously. It was a Saturday afternoon, a time when the regular clients (as she had reported) turn up at the brothel (Scherping’s bad reputation in respectable Hamburg circles was largely due to his occasional midweek outings there, to devote himself to his dark quest for salvation).
Hertzog too was missing, by the way. True, it’s not customary for physicians to come to the bier of patients whose passage to the beyond they have scrupulously made more difficult—and thus all the more desirable (after all, Professor Leblanc did not attend Gaia’s funeral either). However, this very special case was more than just a medical relationship, and one might have been justified in expecting that the Great Psychopompous would describe, in his full-weighted presence, the ticklish cases to which he had been summoned to help out not merely qua scientist but also qua philosopher. But as luck would have it (and luck occasionally has a fatality that goes against the rules), a congress of psychologists and psychiatrists had been convened in Münster on that very day. And a dillar-a-dollar scholar of Professor Hertzog’s stature could not fail to attend.
However, the ranks of mourners were serried seamlessly even without these two figures (so important in the history of the deceased): from the grieving to the sympathetic; from the mutely moved to the deeply affected; from the long-time supplier (of alcohol) to the relative by marriage; from the dutifully attending representative of the Municipal Agency for Culture (black hat) to the stigmatized newspaper reader who had once felt profoundly touched by a feuilleton by the deceased and had responded with a letter to the editor, presenting his own intricate thoughts, which had eventually degenerated into a correspondence and finally a meeting in person—
(after all, even when moving house, everyone learns how much unexpected property has gathered in the nooks and crannies of his home: because you acquired it sometime or other for a temporary necessity or even quite spontaneously and with no special purpose in mind, and you were too neglectful to get rid of it in time . . . Now just imagine what has been collected in the spaciousness of a lifetime exposed to so many random events, even if one leaves it in the prime of manhood! . . .)
Here, a man had passed on who, whether he liked it or not (and whether or not he might have wished for other cities as his adopted home), had been rooted in the solid, land-cultivating citizenry of a Hanseatic Gotham, which, only yesterday, had been planted in the green countryside with gabled gingerbread houses:
—one of the still well-housed comfort lovers whose childhoods were gaily illustrated with anecdotes of the clan, from which a whole chest full of the toy German world comes into being: Grandfather’s shop close to the free harbor (which shop proliferated into a supermarket chain) and Mother’s farm in the marshlands, which farm his uncle had run into the ground, alas, because he had been rather easygoing and a bit status-hungry during his stint in the cuirassiers (nevertheless, the moor meadows had brought in some twenty million as the building site for a squadron of high-rises); the pharmacist cousin in Ochsenzoll with his jars of poison and his officinal bottles from days of yore (monthly turnover: sixty thousand deutschmarks); and the aunt who had displayed such a great gift for the piano that she had been sent to the conservatory (where she began her rather shady life, which she ended, prosperously, as the owner of a guesthouse on Schwanenteich): all these Buddenbrooks in miniature and mini-miniature had leaped into the new era so successfully that they became its masters; the wind of freedom had swept them out of their respectable nook-and-cranny existences into mass administration, and they now carefully throttled that wind in order to steer it, house-fatherly, to their mills—so archetypal in their tough, sly, prudent economics and attachment to objects that any world-beatifying zeal is wasted on them and must ultimately admit defeat in the face of the welfare brilliance of their now-fattened necks—
In front of the flower-laden coffin, their heads were thick and dense as cobblestones. God-fearingly bared or else bonneted with reasonably priced millinery creations, their hair curled mildly, maternally, in permanent waves, or charily parted, thinning, or bald—and from the shoulders down, they were welded into a block. If, overhead, the pipe organ sounds had not been clambering through and over one another like puppies in a basket, I would have expected a thundering hymn, as if from one mouth, from the many mouths of these many heads:
a mighty fortress was their God.
And they acted as if this were true for my friend Schwab as well.
•
My dead friend’s irony allowed the survivors elbow room for their life-lie:
It sovereignly let them falsify his sloughed-off life to bear witness to the upright character of their own, and to declare as humus and topsoil what actually had merely given birth to his hatred and nurtured his questionable majesty:
the ridiculous potentate gesture of the intellectual, who, imperious as Tamberlaine, subjugates the endless terrains of intellect and rules, unrestrained, in the realm of possibility: out of hatred for a reality in which he never succeeds in tearing himself from the tangle of narrow-minded middle-class interests in which his existence is inextricably interwoven with thousands of fibers
Now he had succeeded in doing so (albeit in a different manner). Hence, he could afford to be magnanimous.
He left the field to those whom he had once so deeply despised. He lay there, so well concealed under his hill of flowers that one couldn’t even tell whether it was really he whom all the snowy wealth of blossoms had buried there, and whether he wasn’t actually viewing the spectacle, mildly amused, from some spherical corner of the crematorium’s pavilion vault or even from outside (blissfully enraptured, at any rate): the solemn laying of the cornerstone for the model building of his edifyingly falsified history.
A highly gifted son (and hence afflicted by that to which the extraordinary are susceptible) of the most solid bourgeoisie, rooted in the strongest national soil and shaped by the landscape; and his sense of duty toward the collective had ordered him modestly to exert a broad effect as an editor in a publishing house instead of focusing his uncommon strengths on creating an outstanding work of his own.
Thus he hung on the finally drawn noose of his life story like a home-cured ham from which each of the worshipfully gathered could slice off a piece (washed down with the schnapps of sentimental self-absorption). They were delivering unto the purging fire a lucid, educated intellect that had frequently hinted at genius. A man who had raised his brow over the short-lived squalls of the culture business and held it aloft in the grand wind of the true act of creation. And who, although never personally soaring to creativity, had stalked creativity and recognized it and cleared the way for it, and frequently and happily fecundated it, thus attaining an undisputed rank in the cultural reconstruction of postwar Germany.
And he was flesh of the flesh and bone of the bone of the mourners around him here, and blood of their blood (if not spirit of their spirit).
With all the distance that they, respectful toward his “genuine values,” recognized as existing between him and their more modest altitude, he had nonetheless emerged from their midst. They had produced him. And even though he had sometimes made them feel his scorn, he had never repudiated them. On the contrary, he had testified to his fateful attachment to them in many a painful utterance.
And it was to be that way for all eternity. He allowed it. It seemed to amuse him mildly. He was free now, hence without hatred.
And I realized that I had been taken in by his final act of crafty wickedness.
I was attending an ill-timed festival of reconciliation. Not, as I had secretly expected, an apotheotic demonstration of his passionately lived fundamental otherness (some of whose dark majesty I would have shared). He too now made me feel that I was what the burghers here considered me to be: chaff in the wind.
•
Furthermore, I had arrived a moment late, and I sneaked into the devotional temple when the mutely moved hellos and the mutual displays of presence were largely done with and everyone was primed for the actual act of devotion. And once again, I was embarrassed to realize that here too I had joined in more or less randomly, anyway peripherally, and that I had never been properly involved in the social biotope of the man whose intimate confidant, yes, indeed, only friend and spiritual brother I had considered myself to be. So as not to hug the temple door as an obvious straggler, I squeezed forward along the wall, running a gauntlet of gazes, and in so doing my eyes, as they say, were opened.
And quite literally: my eyes encountered another pair of eyes and were entirely lost in them: I henceforth gazed with them—gazed at myself. Saw myself not as in a mirror (Gaia: “Tiens—c’est comme ça que tu te vois!”), but with the gaze of the eternally unattained other. And in it I finally recognized myself.
The astonished “So that’s you!” in those other eyes signified a lightning-like illumination for me: “So that’s me!” For amidst the lymphatic scattering of Hanseatic heads, in which, between hairline and coat collar, the physiognomic characteristics of Frau Professor Else Schumann (bosom friend of the aunt and culture vulture), chauffeur Jochen Zoelke (African battle cap), housekeeper Frieda Harms, and auditor Horst Herbert Siemers (black hat) had bled out and left only the pale glyphs for female contemporary and male contemporary, Christa’s doll-face stood out sharply: the round Gothic forehead ringed by scattered blond curls and crowned by a small, brimless mourning hat, a so-called toque, its flat, unadorned cake-form giving chic and fashionable expression, if not to a nun’s renunciation of the world, then at least to her unconditional submission to the rules of her order.
This most appropriate headgear had often proved to be sensationally well chosen at memorial evenings for the victims of the twentieth of July 1944, and thus it was most likely suitable here too. And under its, as it were, narrow-lipped horizontality, Christa’s eternally young sapphire gaze struck me all the harder, saw me:
me, sneaking on tiptoe along the wall, without a hat, of course (much less a black one), and in an old raincoat (it hadn’t been cold in Paris, whereas here, an early November fog cut icily into your bones), my hair disheveled to boot (due to my “irresponsible speeding” with the windows down):
just barely making it on time to a bizarre, anything but private, yet very intimate ceremony, in which they had, for better or worse, been forced to ask me to participate (since I belonged to the unavoidable flotsam of a life that along with many ups had inevitably gone through many downs, inevitably coming into contact with all manner of undesirables)—just barely making it on time to a ceremony that no sure instinct for proper and suitable behavior would have advised me to stay away from.
Was I mistaken? Did Christa nevertheless give me an encouraging nod anyway? Conciliatory? Encouraging? Had her small, arrogant mouth softened into a smile?
—the mouth that, after each of her spare utterances, retreated and closed as definitively as the purse of a miser who has yielded a penny’s worth of alms; the mouth that—softer, purer, and poetic because of a precocious grief—was repeated in the face of our boy, who carried it into the painful ordeal of innate taciturnity:
in the vise of two fine creases as in the grip of tweezers, inserted in the innocence of the round cheeks: a coyly bent Cupid’s bow, destined for tenderness, but despicably scrawled by a never-begun love story in the Latin majuscule M, whose right-hand vertical stroke drops in a priori resignation (Gaia: “Sa bouche traîne la patte, pauvre petite”)—
yet without the pinched intransigence of the mother who had exasperated me, arousing one of those unjustifiably cruel impulses with which we take revenge for an eternal—because primordial—misunderstanding; letting myself go, I had told her that her mouth expressed the most recent German tragedy: in the pathological drop of its arrogant curve, it resembled, I said, the signature of Adolf Hitler—
(which, the evil words backfiring, naturally led to my never again being able to bring myself to kiss her. Which was why she could not believe that I still—despite this and despite many other things besides—loved her, even though our love had long since become the most efficient instrument in our conjugal torture chamber, because of that primordial lack of understanding, which perpetuated and increased the lack of understanding forever)—
•
Could it be possible that this mouth had softened into a smile:
ready to speak the words: “Come, I’ve forgiven you!”
No. She did not smile, nor did she nod. It was an illusion—like the illusion that her head was looming wondrously above all other heads and out from among them—
a nixie, suddenly in the still smooth surface of the well:
up to her shoulders in the hasty game of tag played by the rings of water, her hair flowing out and splotched with flashes of green light from the depths she rose out of, her eyes astonished by the alien human world she is gazing at.
It was an illusion, but it made me realize what the lack of understanding was all about that had existed between Christa and me from the start.
•
Among the papers from 1965, I can’t find anything referring directly to Schwab’s funeral (the occasion of my final stay in Hamburg, which lasted for just three days).
The date books for 1965 and 1966 are still somewhere with the things Gaia left when she died—I nurse the suspicion that she hid them in order to secretly keep them for herself. They contained our story in playful, foolishly tender code words that only the two of us could understand; and in the end, after her death, I hadn’t had the emotional fortitude to rummage through her apartment. Presumably they ended up with other personal effects at the Marché aux Puces (from which had come so much of what had often afforded us the bliss of discovery browsers and collectors feel when they make a find).
But I know for sure that while returning from Hamburg to Paris (this time via Saarbrücken), I sketched out a treatise on love. And I think I remember having at least set down an outline of it in the days that followed.
Splendid days, incidentally. The city of Paris was still alive. I was still alive. I had just loved Dawn and I now loved Gaia. Our wanderings through an autumnal Versailles: the brown-blue-golden backdrop to Gaia’s exoticism. Her large, brown hand in my coat pocket. The rhythm of our steps in the wet leaves (two of my steps for every one of hers, my caryatid; I, holding Miss Fern’s hand as I toddle along the Promenade des Anglais; Dawn at Lake Zurich, toddling along beside me, holding my hand, two doll-like steps on high-heeled shoes for every step I take).
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