Siegfried

by Harry Mulisch

  Herter, shocked, was silent.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes, I’m still here. So it’ll become an ash glass.”

  “Yes!” laughed Marnix.

  “But you’re not going to die for a long time yet. You’re going to live to be a hundred and ten; you’re going to make it into the twenty-second century. By that time the doctors will be able to take care of that.”

  “They haven’t even been born yet!”

  “That’s right. They’ll have to wait for a bit yet.”

  They talked on for a little, but Herter’s mind was distracted. When they had hung up, he told Maria what Marnix had said about his ashes.

  “Talk about congenital afflictions . . .” she said, looking at him out of the corner of her eye.

  “There is a Chinese saying that goes, ‘Great people talk about ideas, medium-level ones about events, and small ones about people.’ It’s clear which category he belongs in.”

  “Just as long as it doesn’t cause him problems.”

  Herter looked pensively at the carpet between his feet.

  “Literature involves all three, but usually the ideas are missing.”

  He stretched out on the bed, turned off his hearing aid, and looked at the ceiling. He slowly repeated Marnix’s words: “That way a person can be of some use forever. . . .”

  “What was that?”

  “That was how Marnix put it. Could you write that down? I may be able to use that sentence sometime.”

  While she did as he had asked, he closed his eyes. Perhaps Marnix would make the twenty-second century, but one day he, too, would be dead, after which the living could measure time forever with his ashes. The ash glass the risen symbol of the mathematically infinite. Eternal, infinite . . . it was all rather long drawn out, but the whole world, the whole spatiotemporal world, was long drawn out. In a hundred years’ time the world would be unrecognizable, perhaps even less recognizable than ours would be for people of a hundred years ago. And what will it be like in a thousand years? In ten thousand? A hundred thousand? It was almost inconceivable that that time would come, and yet it would come. Just turn the ash glass again. A million years? Keep counting. Nothing was as patient as numbers. In four or five billion years’ time, the sun would swell into a red giant that would swallow up the earth and would then slowly turn to a cinder. Then there would be no more days—but that would be of no importance, because by that time man would have established himself deep in the universe—or at least what had developed from him. Now, approximately halfway through the life of the solar system, you ought to be able to survey in a single moment with the clarity of the present the abysses of the past and future, but how did you reach that moment?

  For a second he opened his eyes, as if to make sure that he was still here in Vienna, at the Sacher. In a small armchair by the window, Maria was filing her nails—her image persisted on his retina like a photograph. Maria, filing her nails; exposure one second.

  He thought of Constant Ernst, who had devoted his life to music. For Herter, too, music had meant more than literature, at least other writers’ literature, but that had come to an end when he’d had to sacrifice an essential part of his hearing on the altar of the revolution. In 1967, with scores of other European artists and intellectuals, he had been in Cuba, about which he intended to write a book. For the official commemoration of Fidel’s failed attempt at revolution on July 26, 1953, they were flown on the twenty-fifth to Santiago, in the hot province of Oriente on the eastern end of the island. There he started awake at sunrise the following morning to the ear-splitting roar of cannon. For a moment he thought that the American invasion had begun, but it turned out to be salutes, twenty-six of them, fired by an antiaircraft battery stationed right next to the building in which they were accommodated. His ears rang for hours afterward—and three days later, on the night of his fortieth birthday, he suddenly discovered that he had acquired magical powers over nature. If he lay on his right side, he could hear the irrepressible concert of the myriads of crickets in the tropical night, but if he turned over, they were immediately silent. Twenty years later, after his left ear had also been subjected to a trauma, from exploding fireworks, on an icy New Year’s Eve, the finer register of his hearing had gone for good. From then on, listening to music gave him as little pleasure as eating.

  “That way a person can be of some use forever. . . .” he said softly, without opening his eyes.

  He had been in Cuba recovering from “Eichmann syndrome.” He had attended the latter’s trial in Jerusalem five years before and had written a book about that, too. For weeks, day in and day out, he had listened to the unbearable stories of the Jewish survivors of the extermination camps, while the stage manager of that tragedy seemed to be going slowly mad in his glass cage. His chief, SS artistic director Himmler, had committed suicide, following in the footsteps of the author of that whole chromatic genocide, that inspired maestro in the art of mass murder, whose path Herter had once again crossed—he hoped for the last time. For Herter himself the stupid upshot was that he could no longer fully enjoy not only Tristan and Isolde or Twilight of the Gods but not even The Art of Fugue. Hitler . . . From his cradle to his missing grave, the joy he had spread around him had grown and grown. At his birth only his parents were glad; later he made the whole German people glad, then the Austrian people, too; and when he died, all mankind was glad. . . . He must write this down, or get someone else to. Soon he might forget, but the languid feeling had too strong a hold over him. He started calculating and discovered that by now Hitler had been dead for almost as many years as he had lived. . . . After the disappearance of the Nazi system, Germany and Austria had turned into decently ordered states, while in Russia after the disappearance of the Soviet system, surrealistic anarchism had broken out. Around the corner, in the Balkans, the slaughter had recently returned with a vengeance, albeit in an old-fashioned, preindustrial way, at which Hitler would have shrugged his shoulders; but within a few years that conventional killing spree would have been forgotten.

  What was further away: the bloody business in Yugoslavia or the vast exterminations in Auschwitz? Forty-five minutes from Vienna and you were in the Balkans, but the fifty-five years to the Second World War could never be bridged. Yet that war was closer for him, just around the corner in time. . . . Gradually he was becoming part of the only generation that still had memories of it—insignificant ones compared with the horrors that many others had endured, but nevertheless they were still permeated with the invisible, poisonous gases that, since the National Socialist eruption, had hung in every farthest corner of Europe.

  One evening, a little after curfew, he sees himself walking home down a dark street, on tiptoe, close to the houses so as not to be seen; the streetlights have been turned off, and all the windows are blacked out. There is not a sound to be heard. Then, at an intersection in the distance, by the light of the stars, he sees two Home Guards, with helmets and rifles, Dutchmen working for the Germans, walking slowly to and fro and chatting. He dives into a doorway, mouth open and breathing as silently as possible, his heart pounding with fear. . . . That was the war. It was a microscopic facet of what was going on everywhere that evening, in the concentration camps, in the Gestapo cellars, in the bombed cities, at the fronts, at sea—but also petty fear, that the darkness and silence of that moment were also a part of that vast stream of exterminating lava pouring forth from the Hitler crater and flooding Europe, and it could not be explained to those born later. . . . That creature had failed at everything, first as an artist in Vienna and then as a politician in Berlin; he wanted to eradicate Bolshevism, but he lured it into the heart of Germany; he wanted to exterminate the Jews, but he initiated the state of Israel. He had succeeded in dragging 55 million people to their deaths with him—and perhaps that was precisely his intention. If he had had a way of blowing up the world, he would have used it. Death was the dominant theme in his essence. How could Herter investigate to see if there were some
last grain of love of life in that mortal? Something to do with his favorite dog perhaps? Or Eva Braun, whom he married at the last moment? Why? How could Herter set up a laboratory experiment to put Hitler under high pressure, so that he was forced to show his full face straight on? . . . A mirror, he had said to Ernst. A mirror machine . . . His breathing slows. He is sitting at the edge of a large pond with Olga; she is showing him photos, but she is dazzled by the bright sunlight on the water. . . . Suddenly he is violently abducted by a man and a boy. . . . When he sees the room in which they imprison him, he cries, “Yes, this is where I want to live.” . . . That embarrasses them, but they cannot go back, so that they have become his prisoners. . . .

  SIX

  “Have you done some preparation for this?” asked Maria in the elevator.

  “Of course. You saw me sleeping, didn’t you?”

  “Have you got your book with you?”

  “They’re bound to have it there.”

  At six in the café of the Sacher, he had a preliminary discussion with the president of the organizing Austrian literary society, Mrs. Klinger, and with a critic, a very earnest young man, who introduced himself as “Marte.” He had closely cropped hair, a silver ring in his left earlobe, and over his shoulder he carried a kind of game bag full of papers. When Herter also saw a copy of The Invention of Love in German, he asked if he might use it later. There was not much to discuss; things would proceed as they always did: after the introduction he would say a few things about his novel, read for about three-quarters of an hour, after which the audience under the chairmanship of Marte could ask questions. Herter asked him if he would repeat each question briefly, as he was a little “gun deaf,” as it was called in military circles. Would Herter rather stand or sit? He preferred to sit. What would he like to drink? Water please, still. There would also be a book stand—was he prepared to sign? Of course he was prepared to sign. Writing was his greatest pleasure in life, he said. Following the lecture there would be a buffet reception.

  After half an hour, a boyish-looking man in his forties appeared, who with his red hair and pale skin resembled an Irish-man but introduced himself in melting Viennese as the manager of the Sacher. It was an honor for him to shake the hand of Herr Doktor Herter, and he asked if he might be so bold as to drive them to the National Library; it was ten minutes’ walk away, on the Josefplatz, but the weather was bad, and he himself wanted to attend the reading.

  Outside the door stood the hotel’s Rolls-Royce, the same brown color as the famous cake. Because he did not feel like talking, Herter sat next to the chauffeur. Apart from a group of inveterate Herter haters in his own country, everyone was behaving more and more nicely to him as he got older, but, aware that no one really knew who he was, he preferred to be at home in his study, alone, without appointments, without telephone, the day extending before him virgin and untouched. Even when he had had to go to school every morning, he experienced it as something that kept him from his real activities, but the teachers concluded from his poor marks that he was lazy and stupid and would come to no good. Fortunately they had been able to see, a number of years later, that he was the reverse of lazy, and moreover, see which of them was really stupid: he or they. No one had ever heard another word about all those bright pupils that they had held up to him with a shake of their heads as examples.

  The National Library was part of the Hofburg, the great imperial complex of palaces and government buildings, from where for centuries a world empire had been ruled, before it had turned into the hydrocephalic head of a dwarf. At the entrance to the library, under the umbrella that the driver held above his head, Herter was welcomed by the director, Herr Doktor Lichtwitz, who led him up marble staircases to the colossal baroque reception room, the most august location in Austria. Schimmelpenninck was there again, and in some strange way the pinstripes on his dark blue suit had disappeared. Under the exuberantly painted dome sat several hundred people; but because extra chairs were constantly being brought in through a side entrance, they waited until everyone had found a seat.

  As he entered, there was applause, and, as always, he found it difficult to look at the hundreds of faces turned in his direction, precisely because he could not register a single individual face. He knew that all of those here had devoted a few hours of their lives to his books. It embarrassed him—and perhaps, he reflected as he allowed himself to be led to his reserved chair in the middle of the front row, it was what distinguished him from Hitler, who was precisely in his element when confronted with such an anonymous mass: the element of his own individuality, which was the only one that counted in confrontation with all those hundreds, thousands, millions, that he was prepared to hound to their deaths. Herter realized he was at work again, but not on what he had been invited here for. What he would have most liked to do was to leave the auditorium and make notes in the hotel.

  After an introduction by Schimmelpenninck, who praised him as Holland’s cultural ambassador, Lichtwitz compared him to Hugo de Groot—or “Grotius,” as he called him. Herter looked up in surprise. He had already been compared to Homer, Dante, Milton, and Goethe, but Hugo de Groot was new. In order to put it in perspective, he made a brief, aristocratic military salute, with his hand slightly bent, like his father in photographs from the First World War. He knew that that gesture was risky, that it robbed the audience of some of the reverence they needed—but besides that, he knew he was lost if he ever started seeing himself in all earnestness as a second Homer, Dante, Milton, Goethe, or Hugo de Groot. There was only one person with whom he must continue to identify with, if he wanted to survive, and that was the boy behind the frost flowers that he had once been. Hitler on the other hand, the absolutist, modeled himself on Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon, while his youth might just as well never have existed.

  Mrs. Klinger also was proud of their guest. She listed a number of his awards and prizes, mentioned the honorary citizenship of his hometown, his membership here in Austria in the Academia Scientiarum et Artium Europaea, and told them that he had been published in thirty countries, including China. After briefly discussing a few of his best-known books, she reminded the audience of his Viennese family origins.

  “The great Dutch author Rudolf Herter belongs to us, too, in a small way,” she concluded. “The floor is yours.”

  She could not have made it more difficult for him. As he got up, he wobbled slightly, which he deftly disguised, but of course everyone had seen it anyway, if only from Maria’s outstretched hand. The critic passed him his novel, after which he sat down at a table between the columns and the life-size marble statues and took in the scene opposite him for a few seconds. In the horizontal plane, the many hundreds of faces; behind, twenty yards high, interrupted by a gallery, the thousands of precious volumes from the Habsburg library. There had been many high points in his life, but he experienced this as one of the most spectacular: if only his father could see him now.

  When he began to speak, his tiredness and distractedness vanished instantly. He told the audience something of the long gestation of The Invention of Love and the role of the Tristan legend in it, which he had interwoven with certain personal experiences. Exactly which experiences must of course remain a secret, since if he were to revisit them, he would have written for nothing. For him there were still those two worlds, each as real as the other: the world of his individual experiences and the world of mythical stories; they must create something like a chemical reaction with each other and form a new compound—only then was the kind of book that he wanted to write produced. He regarded his study as the no-man’s-land between those two worlds. When he saw that some of the audience were taking notes, he was about to say that they should not do so, because if they were to forget what he said, it couldn’t have been any good; but that might create the impression that he wanted a cheap laugh at the expense of those good souls. He got his laugh a little later anyway, when he opened The Invention of Love and sa
id he was going to read a chapter but that he hadn’t written a word of it himself, as it was a translation.

  The novel had been out of his system for a few years, like an illness that had been overcome; since then he had published other titles, but still he stumbled every few minutes over a word or expression that did not exactly render what the Dutch said. His memory of the events in his life was poor rather than good, and he was repeatedly forced to ask Maria or Olga what something had been like—but if he saw a passage quoted from something he had written fifty years ago and there was a period somewhere instead of a semicolon, he saw it immediately. No way would he have put a period there! Or the absence of an exclamation mark. When he checked, it turned out that he was never wrong. If all his books were to vanish from the face of the earth as a result of a dreadful natural phenomenon, he would be able to reconstruct them all word for word, from A to Z, in a short space of time. Given unlimited time, anyone could of course write them, and all other books, too, even the unwritten ones.

  In order to keep visual contact with the audience, he looked up briefly from his text now and then. He had to force himself, and each time it gave him a little jolt as he realized he was the focus of all those eyes and rapt faces. They were hanging on his every word, they were all absorbed in the scene he was reading—and each of them mastered an art that he himself could not master: that of listening. Even at school, long ago, in the war, the words of the teachers did not get through to him, since he was totally absorbed by looking at them, at their body language, the skin of their hands, how they wore their hair, the way they had knotted their tie, and at anything else that was happening in the classroom: the behavior of the other pupils, the fly on the top window, the waving of the leaves on the trees, the clouds scudding past. . . . “Pay attention, Rudi!”—yet he was paying not too little but too much attention. The result was that he had to study everything again at home that his classmates already knew after the lesson. That was no problem in itself—dyslexia was the last thing he suffered from. The problem was just that at home he preferred to read books that really interested him. This in turn led to weeks of playing hooky, and finally he was kicked out of the school, which was absolutely fine by him, because he was just wasting his time. “Aural dyslexia” was what he tended to call his defect. That syndrome, identical with his talent, of course, also underlay his lifelong inability to follow a lecture, a play, or even a simple thriller on television. As the patrol car roared down the hilly streets of San Francisco with its siren wailing, his attention was focused not on the exciting story, which he never understood, but on a woman who just happened to be strolling down the sidewalk blissfully unaware of what was to come. Who was she? Where was she going? Was she still alive? The only situation in which he was capable of listening was when someone addressed him personally.