Siegfried

by Harry Mulisch

  Herter shrugged his shoulders. “Congenital affliction. Like everyone else I am first and foremost a natural phenomenon. It may be connected with the fact that I had no brothers and sisters. I was alone a lot, and my parents were immigrants with few social contacts—none at all with Dutch people. At home everything was different from in Dutch families. In my friends’ homes they always said ‘Finish your plate,’ while my mother had taught me always to leave something—a potato, for example—since otherwise I would give the impression that I had been hungry, and that wasn’t chic. I didn’t really belong, so I created my own world. Divorced parents—that may be a factor, too. A combination of all that. In any case I never suffered from it. I did not want to belong anywhere. Other people always wanted to belong with me—in later life, too.”

  There was an uncharitable edge to his voice, which did not escape Maria. As she listened, she had been watching the television; now she took the remote off the table and turned on the sound. Rather irritated at her interrupting the conversation like this, Herter watched the nature film, too. Under a lowering African sky, a herd of buffalo was being attacked by jackals; the voice-over said that they had targeted a calf, which they first isolated from its mother. As the calf searched anxiously for its mother and a little later was pounced on and torn apart, Herter said, his face contorted, “Do we have to, Maria?”

  Since she did not react immediately, he took the remote from her lap and turned off the television.

  She looked at him wide-eyed.

  “What did you do that for?”

  “I don’t want to watch.”

  “But I do. Don’t be so idiotic, it’s nature. Give me that thing.”

  Herter put the remote in his inside pocket.

  “I don’t need to see it to know that nature is a magnificent failure.” He pointed to the gray screen. “That cameraman there should have done only one thing: put his camera on the ground and tried to save the calf. But no—wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, he thought.”

  “I’m going to bed,” said Maria, getting up. “I’m not in the mood for this.”

  Herter closed his eyes and sighed. Even he did not ultimately understand who he was—but that awareness was not a burden; rather, it gave him a feeling of affirmation. Much to his pleasure, she did not turn on the television in the bedroom; because she had left the door open, he could watch her undress, avoiding looking at him, although she of course knew that he was looking at her. Returning from the bathroom, she slid out of sight under the massive duvet and resumed her reading of a book she had brought from Amsterdam on the problems of gifted children.

  Herter put the remote on the table, poured two glasses, and sat close to her on the edge of the bed. As they clinked glasses, they looked at each other in silence for a few seconds, and Herter rested his free hand on Maria’s hip.

  Maria put her glass on the bedside table, laid her hand on his, and said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Yesterday Marnix suddenly asked who Hitler was. He’d picked up something about him. I told him a few things, and then he said, ‘Hitler is in hell. But because he likes bad things, it’s heaven for him. All Jewish people are in heaven, so that is hell for him. So really he should be in heaven as a punishment.’ What do you make of that? Seven years old. You can learn a few things from that.”

  FOUR

  Groaning and complaining that he had become a writer not to produce immortal masterpieces but only so that he could sleep late, Herter got out of bed at eight the following morning. In an hour he would have his first interview. The wine bottle was upside down in the cooler, flanked by another half bottle from the minibar; the festivities had lasted far into the night, the light had not been off for more than five hours. He cursed the pregnant right-hand man, who had made all those appointments, but after a shower and breakfast, which they ate in their room, things improved. When the first journalist knocked, Maria left for the Art History Museum.

  The nine-o’clock journalist, the ten-o’clock journalist, and the eleven-o’clock journalist, each accompanied by a photographer, had all seen him on television last night. Their first questions always related to The Invention of Love, which they actually turned out to have read, and he did his best to avoid repeating himself. It was unavoidable that he should often say the same things, but it must not happen in the same place and at the same moment; no one read everything, and if there were enough distance in space and time, it could do no harm. Only he himself knew that he had already said this or that spontaneously in Amsterdam, Paris, or London. But all three of them went on to ask about his bright idea of yesterday evening, of placing Hitler in an imaginary situation in order to understand him better. He was not entirely happy about this, as he knew that many of his fellow novelists were thieves and pickpockets, ready to rob him. So, in order to discourage them, he decided to qualify his idea with Maria’s argument: that no one could dream up a more extreme situation than the one that Hitler himself had made reality.

  At eleven-thirty he concluded the last interview; he had had enough and wanted to go outside. On the front step of the hotel, he breathed in the cold air deeply; it was windy, and he walked down the elegant shopping street to the Stefansdom with his collar turned up and hair waving in the wind. Even now Hitler would not let him alone. Almost a hundred years ago, he had walked here, on his way to the opera to line up for an orchestra ticket for The Twilight of the Gods, a down-and-out in threadbare clothes, torn by wild thoughts; perhaps his fanatical eyes had momentarily pierced those of a passing elegant officer of about his own age, the decorated ceremonial saber at his side, monocle in his eye, with Schopenhauer’s Philosophical Aphorisms in his inside pocket, who was on his way to a romantic assignation at the Sacher. Herter’s father perhaps. At the cathedral he turned left and into the Graben. The large space, somewhere between a square and a street, was dominated by the lofty plague column, erected in the seventeenth century to thank God for deliverance from the plague—which had hence been sent by the devil, Herter reflected. He stopped and let his eyes wander over the baroque work of art, which wound its way heavenward like a bronze cypress. The person who had finally put an end to the plague was not God but Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin; so in fact he deserved a monument as big as St. Peter’s in Rome. As he walked on, he thought of Albert Camus’s novel The Plague, in which the plague stood for the Black Death of National Socialism. The seventeenth-century epidemic cost the lives of thirty thousand Viennese, but two hundred thousand of them died of the six-year Hitler plague and its consequences. Where was the Fleming who could develop an antibiotic against those contagious diseases? And where was the grateful monument for the Allied physicians of 1945?

  “Germanski niks Kultur,” he muttered.

  Recognized from the television now and then, he went back to the hotel via a series of narrow streets—the embassy car would be coming in ten minutes to collect them for lunch. As he phoned Maria from the desk to tell her he was waiting downstairs, he saw a famous conductor coming out of the elevator, Constant Ernst, who seldom performed in Holland and whom he knew only by sight. The musician sat down in an armchair, laid a newspaper on his knee, and began rolling a cigarette in the Dutch way without looking at what he was doing. A little later they acknowledged each other with polite nods of the head.

  The bewhiskered chauffeur appeared in the lobby at the same time as Maria and looked around inquiringly. When Ernst also gestured and got up, the situation was clear. They approached each other with a smile and shook hands.

  “I suppose names are superfluous,” said Ernst.

  “We are the last two Dutchmen who didn’t yet know each other personally.”

  Ernst had an open smile and two curious eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses. He was ten years younger than Herter, thin, and dressed with superior nonchalance; despite his mustache and the tangled gray hair that hung over his forehead, he made a boyish impression. In the car, next to the driver, he told them that at present he was rehearsing a performance of Trista
n and Isolde with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra.

  “What a perfect coincidence,” said Herter, glancing at Maria with a slight shake of the head. “I’m giving a reading tonight.” Ernst said nothing about The Invention of Love, and it was of course out of the question that either Herter or Maria should ask someone if he had read the book, nor was Maria allowed to do so.

  The ambassador’s residence was in a grand neighborhood near the Belvedere, bordering the botanical garden. The ambassador and his wife, the Schimmelpennincks, received them standing in the elegantly furnished drawing room, like a living state portrait: the ambassador a thickset gentleman in a dark blue suit with narrow pinstripes, she a simply dressed lady with the kind of smile that generations of mothers and daughters had honed. At their feet lay a shapeless slob of a dog, whose ancestry was an affront to racial purity. When she said that The Invention of Love was one of the finest books she had ever read, Herter had the impression that she meant it.

  “But we have a terrible confession to make, Mr. Herter,” she said, pointing to the dog. “Kees buried your book. Here in the garden.” Herter bent down and stroked Kees on the head.

  “I saw at once that you’re an orthodox Jew,” he said.

  “What did you say?”

  “Religious Jews never throw old books away, nor do they sell them. They bury them. They know how to do things.”

  Ernst apologized that because of his busy life he had not yet got around to The Invention of Love, whereupon Schimmelpenninck helped him out of a tight corner by saying that they already had tickets for his premiere next week. Wagner! Hadn’t he, the ambassador asked with an ironic twinkle in the eye, begun his conducting career with the modern Viennese School, with Schoenberg and Webern and Alban Berg? Ernst laughed and said that he still conducted them, but that modernism had precisely begun with Wagner.

  “Don’t drink too much,” whispered Maria as Herter took a glass of white wine from the tray presented to him by an Asian waitress.

  “It’s the elixir of life.”

  Schimmelpenninck had seen Herter on television last night and said he was intrigued by his remarks about Hitler.

  “What was that, then?” inquired Ernst.

  “Mr. Herter is taking on Adolf Hitler,” said Schimmelpenninck with a deadpan expression. “The Führer has got it coming to him.”

  While Schimmelpenninck started explaining the gist, his wife and Maria went off to study the seventeenth-century masters on loan from the Rijksmuseum. Women were no longer interested in Hitler, thought Herter; that used to be different.

  When the ambassador had finished, Herter said that Hitler, precisely because of his enigmatic nature, was the dominant twentieth-century figure. Stalin and Mao were also mass murderers, but they were not enigmatic; that was why so much less had been written about them. There had been countless people like them in world history, and there still were and would always be, but there had been only one Hitler. Perhaps he was the most enigmatic human being of all time. That is also why National Socialism had in fact little or nothing to do with the comparatively insignificant fascism of Mussolini or Franco. Wouldn’t it be nice if at the conclusion of the twentieth century the last word could be said about him, as a kind of “Final Solution to the Hitler Question”?

  “Incidentally,” he said, looking at Ernst, “don’t take it personally, but a conductor is perhaps the purest example of a dictator.”

  “Go ahead and say tyrant,” said Ernst good-humoredly. “Otherwise it’s chaos.”

  “In fact the word ‘conductor’ is virtually synonymous with the word ‘Führer.’ He drills the orchestra, demands total obedience, and his trademark is that he stands with his back to the audience. He is the last to arrive in the auditorium. He receives the applause for a moment, turns his back on the audience, and gives his constant stream of orders. Finally he shows his face again for a moment, basks in the adulation, and is the first to disappear.”

  “Seems vaguely familiar,” said Ernst, and he licked a cigarette paper.

  “But Hitler never showed his face. He was a conductor who came onto the platform with his back toward the audience and did not turn around. What I am after now is to hang up something like a fictional mirror, in which we shall be able to see his face after all. I just don’t yet know how to approach it.”

  “Are you never afraid that an idea will come to nothing?” asked Schimmelpenninck cautiously, tugging an earlobe.

  “Ideas often come to nothing, but it never worries me. Another idea will come along.”

  “You have enviable self-confidence.”

  “If you don’t have that, you’ll never make it in art.”

  After that, Ernst told them that that fictional mirror reminded him of what was possibly the oddest experience in his life. About fifteen years ago, he was rehearsing a Mozart symphony in the Felsen Riding School in Salzburg. The musicians were having an off day; he repeatedly had to intervene and make them repeat passages. But suddenly it was as if they were collectively inspired; suddenly they were playing so marvelously that he could not believe his ears. It was as if he were not leading them but they were leading him. When he realized from their eyes that something was going on behind him, he turned around—and what did he see? Herbert von Karajan was standing listening in the doorway of the empty hall.

  Herter nodded. “A story like that makes my day.”

  “And who is standing on your threshold, Mr. Herter?” asked Schimmelpenninck with his head cocked to one side.

  Herter looked at him in surprise.

  “What a good question!” Whom should he name? Goethe? Dostoyevsky? He had the vague feeling that there was a third man, too. “I’m not so sure. If I were a second-rate hack, the answer would be easy.”

  “I think,” said Ernst, “that you are the one standing on the threshold of some other writers.”

  “In that case I’m saving them a whole lot of work.”

  They now walked to the dining room. Herter sat on the right of Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, Maria on the ambassador’s right. The crockery and the silver cutlery bore the Dutch coat of arms.

  “What a coincidence this is,” said Mrs. Schimmelpenninck as she was being served. “Mr. Herter writes a novel on the theme of Tristan and Isolde, Mr. Ernst conducts Tristan and Isolde, and now they’re both sitting down to lunch with us.”

  “It’s not a coincidence at all, dear,” said Schimmelpenninck. “On the contrary. Mr. Herter has once again succeeded in shaping reality to his own ends.”

  “Je maintiendrai,” said Herter, pointing to the motto on his plate.

  The ambassador raised his glass.

  “We’ll drink to that.”

  When Ernst made an appreciative comment on the house, Schimmelpenninck mentioned that Richard Strauss had lived there, and that that was of course no coincidence either. Herter looked around, as if he could still see a ghost somewhere. Here Strauss had sat with Hugo von Hofmannsthal and discussed the latter’s libretto for The Woman Without a Shadow. Herter himself had also written opera libretti; he knew those kinds of conversations—they were like those of a married couple, with the composer in the role of the wife.

  “Strauss is inconceivable without Wagner,” Ernst remarked.

  Herter fixed him with the look of a detective and asked, “What is the secret of Wagner?”

  “His chromaticism,” said the conductor without a moment’s hesitation. Suddenly he was in his element. “In a certain sense, it points forward to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone scale. His endless melodies are never resolved in the tonic as with all previous composers; they constantly brush past it—that is the intoxication of his music, that unfulfilled desire, that delayed gratification.”

  “So a kind of musical coitus interruptus in fact.” Schimmelpenninck nodded.

  “Control yourself, Rutger,” said his wife.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “Your husband is quite right, Mrs. Schimmelpenninck. In Tristan the eventual harmonic resoluti
on comes only at the end, with the release of death, when there is a black flag waving onstage. There are really only three operas in the world. The first is Monteverdi’s Orfeo, the second is Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Wagner was a loathsome individual, an anti-Semite of the first order, but with his Tristan he wrote the third.”

  “Eventual harmonic resolution . . .” repeated Herter slowly, staring at the red meat on his plate. Since cancer had necessitated the removal of his entire stomach, he would be able to eat less than a quarter. He looked up. “You might equally well call it the ‘Harmonic Final Solution.’ The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music.”

  FIVE

  “That’s the title of a book that Nietzsche wrote as a young man in honor of Wagner,” he said back in their suite as he took off his jacket. He pulled his tie loose and faltered. “I don’t really know what I’m doing. Maybe it’s all completely wrong.”

  “You look rather pale.”

  “I feel just like the twentieth century. I think I’m going to lie down for a bit. Perhaps that will teach me something.”

  “Give Marnix a ring first,” said Maria as he hung up his jacket. “It’s Wednesday, he’s home today. He was already asking for you yesterday.”

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, he dialed the number of Olga, his wife. The moment he heard her voice, he knew she was having a good day: she sounded like a bright spring morning, but it could just as well have been a foggy November afternoon. Her boyfriend, whom she lived with, a cardiologist, had already suggested to him that the University of Amsterdam should set up a chair in Olga Studies. As he took off his shoes, he told Olga how things had gone in Vienna, while she listened patiently, though without great interest. Then his little son came on the line and got straight to the point:

  “Daddy, when I die I want to be burned.”

  “Oh? And why not buried?”

  “Then my ashes must be put into that hourglass in your study. That way a person can be of some use forever.”