She fell silent. Did this not shock me? she then asked. “No,” I said, “but a little more cognac would hit the spot.” She poured some for me and for herself. When she had returned home, she said, her father had still been in his office. At his desk. He had barely looked up at her. She had told him everything. Then he had walked over to the billiard table and begun to play. What else did she want? he had asked. Revenge, she had answered. “Forget the whole thing,” her father had said. But she had insisted on revenge. He had stopped playing to look at her. He had advised her not to go, and she had gone. Her affair. No advice had to be followed, otherwise it would be an order. What had happened was unimportant, because it had happened. You had to shake off the things that happened to you, anyone who was unable to forget was simply throwing himself in the path of time and would be crushed. But she wanted her revenge, she had answered. “My child,” her father had said, and it was the only time that he had ever called her that, what he had urged her to do had been advice, no more. She wanted revenge, fine, revenge she would have. His affair. Then he had placed four balls on the billiard table and took a shot, just one, first one ball hit the cushion, bouncing off it and hitting another ball in the pocket, Winter, her father had said; as the next ball had disappeared into a pocket, Benno, then Daphne, and when he had said Steiermann, the table had been empty. And herself? she had asked. She had been the cue, he had answered. He would need her only once. What was going to happen to them, she had asked. “They will die,” he had answered. In the same sequence he had announced. She should go on to bed, he still had work to do.
This conversation, she added after a while as we sat over our third cognac listening to the balls bounce off one another in the next room, this conversation had haunted her memory far more than what had occurred at Mon Repos; she had turned off the light in her room and for a long while had watched the unmerciful stars in the endless night—stars indifferent to whether or not there was life upon this unutterably paltry nothing we call our earth, let alone to human fate, and then the suspicion had arisen within her that her father had wanted her to go, and had expected her curiosity to seduce her. But why had the dwarf chosen her? Was the humiliation intended for her, or for her father? If it had been intended for her father, why had he first advised Hélène not to take revenge? Had he merely been considering whether or not he wanted to take up the battle? But what was the point of this battle? Who was opposing whom? That there was something else, some considerably more important enterprise, behind this brick trust that her father was always joking about, and that from time to time he would mention that the future belonged to silicon, although everyone whom she asked and who had anything to say could only reply that they hadn’t the vaguest what her father meant by that—all of this unsettled her. Was there perhaps a power struggle going on between him and Lüdewitz? Was what had happened to her simply Steiermann’s signal to her father that she would no longer tolerate his interference?
I pondered all that she had told me. I was unclear about one thing, I said. Her father had told the story of the murder in Munich, fine, he had had to suggest the wrong motive, but that the idea of using the politician’s revolver had first occurred to him only as he drove up in front of the Du Théâtre—no, that was totally improbable. Hélène looked at me attentively. Damn but she was a beautiful woman. That was correct, she said, her father had not been telling the truth. They had talked the murder over together. Poor Spät had guessed it. Her father had shot Winter with his own revolver and shoved the weapon into the minister’s coat, which she had then removed from the pocket during the flight and had then tossed into the Thames in London. But the minister hadn’t flown to London on Swissair, I interjected. Stüssi-Leupin’s objection had been correct, she replied, but he could not have known that she had flown with the minister as his companion of choice. For just that reason, she had been his constant visitor at the private clinic. She fell silent. I gazed at her. She had her life behind her, and I mine behind me. “Spät?” I asked. She did not evade my eyes. I told her about my meeting with him. She listened. Spät had created for himself an image of her that was quite false, she said calmly, and I would create an equally false image of her. Within a few weeks after that night, she had begun an affair with Winter, then with Benno, which was the reason for Benno’s argument with Winter and for Daphne’s with Benno and for Daphne’s breaking off with Steiermann—and as for who else had she slept with, that was a question of no importance, with everyone was relatively close to an exact answer. She was forever trying to explain rationally what was in fact irrational, but her behavior was stronger than her reason. Perhaps all of her explanations were only an attempt to justify her own nature, which had erupted that night at Mon Repos, perhaps she was simply longing to be raped again and again, she said, because a person was only truly free when being raped: free from her own will as well. But that, too, was just another explanation. The uncanny feeling that she had been nothing but a tool of her father’s had never left her. All of the people he had named in his game of billiards had lost their lives in the predicted sequence, Steiermann last of all. Two years ago. On his advice, she had got involved in the armament business, which had been the ruin of Trög, Ltd. Then she had been found dead on her Greek island. Her four bodyguards had been riddled with bullets. Steiermann herself had not been found until six months later, head down in an olive tree. Hadn’t I read about it? The name had meant nothing to me, I replied. When the news of Steiermann’s disappearance had appeared in the newspapers, Hélène said, she had found a telegram on her father’s desk, consisting of just a series of numbers, 1171953, which, if one read them as a date, referred to the night of her rape. If the murder had occurred on order of her father, however, who had carried that order out, and who had been behind the people who carried it out, and who behind them? And had Steiermann’s death marked the end of a corporate war? And had that power struggle been something rational or irrational? What went on in that world? She didn’t know. I didn’t know either, I said.
“Let’s return to Spät,” I said, if she didn’t mind. She didn’t mind, she said, she had hoped that in taking on the commission her father had given him, Spät would clear it up. Clear what up? Clear up who had instigated her father to commit murder—herself. Not very logical, I said. Why is that? she answered, she might have put her father up to it. She could have made a choice. She was spinning in a circle, I declared, first she had assigned all the guilt to her father, now to herself. They were both guilty, she replied. That was splendidly crazy, I said. She was crazy, she replied. Go on, I demanded. She was not about to be unnerved. When, after her father’s acquittal and subsequent departure, Spät had pounced on her, almost chancing on the truth, she had gone to the commandant and admitted everything. What did she mean by that, I asked. Admitted it, admitted everything, she repeated. And so? I asked. She fell silent. Then she said the commandant had asked her that too, And so? Then he had lit one of his cigars and said, Spilled milk. As had been subsequently determined, Benno had taken his own life, and as to who had fired the shot, or to go searching the Thames for the revolver, impossible, there were cases where the justice system made no sense, became mere farce. She should leave now, he would forget what she had told him. Why hadn’t her father mentioned Spät even once? I asked. He had forgotten about him. Stüssi-Leupin too, I said. It was strange, she replied, how her father had taken it into his head that Benno and not he had committed the murder. She was the only person who still knew that her father had been the murderer. Did she know that for sure? I asked; it was rather probable, to be sure, but perhaps it had been Benno after all. She shook her head. It had been her father. She had examined the revolver that she took from the minister’s coat pocket and had loaded it at home herself.
Why was she telling me all this? I asked. She looked at me in amazement. Why for heaven’s sake had I sent her the manuscript? If not to get to the truth behind it all? I was a writer before anything else, who wasn’t interested in other people�
�s truth, only in my own; I was concerned about writing a novel, nothing else, and once the book was published, it would appear under my name, not under Spät’s. Was the manuscript Spät’s or mine? Only I knew that. I claimed I had got it from the commandant. She had known that old windbag too, he had often been a guest of her and her father, and had told tales out of school. He could have done that with me too. But if I was going to use her, then would I please not describe her like one of those sweet things in Goethe, all of whom should have their hides tanned, they were so boring, except for Philine, the only one of his creatures the old gentleman would have liked to sleep with. Then she stared ahead glassy-eyed. The young gardener walked past the window whistling. Could I find my own way out? I took my leave. The old man was still playing billiards in his study. A la bande.
Four minutes till two. I walk to the door of my study. When I had it designed, I could see the lake from here. Now trees block the view. I have had to cut down some that weren’t even there when I first moved here. It’s sad to have to cut down trees, to murder them. The oak has grown to a mighty tree. Those trees give me a sense of time, my time. Different from the sense of it I get by gazing at the sky. With some regret, I can now see the Pleiades, Aldebaran, Capella, winter stars, and yet it’s still summer, an omen that I’ve grown older by a year in the space of four months. In the sky, objective time is unreeled, the measurable time of a man soon to turn sixty-five; with the trees time moves subjectively with me toward death, no longer measurable, only noticeable. But how does the earth sense time? I look out onto the lake by night; it has not changed, if one disregards what men have done to it. And yet how old does the earth sense itself to be? Objectively? Ancient? Four and a half billion years old? Or does it feel itself subjectively in the prime of life, since it may live on for another seven billion until the sun becomes a cinder. Or does it sense time racing by with lightning speed, does the earth feel itself as an impatient, violent force, boiling up, bursting continents apart, heaving mountains high, shoving layer atop layer, flooding the land with the sea; do we pass our lives on solid ground, or are we walking on shifting ground that at any moment may open up and swallow us? And what about humanity’s time? We’ve divided it as objectively as possible into antiquity, the Middle Ages, modern times, postmodern times, and are awaiting ever newer times; and, of course, there are even more delicate divisions—for instance, the Age of the Greeks follows upon the Legacy of the East, is succeeded by Caesar and Christ, is followed by the Age of Belief; the Renaissance merrily rings in the Age of Reformation, and then the age in which Reason will rise up can no longer be held back, is still rising even now, it rises and rises. And let’s not be small-minded: The first and second world wars and Auschwitz were episodes, Chaplin is better known than Hitler, only the Albanians still believe in Stalin, and a few Peruvian terrorists in Mao. Forty years of peace, that’s what counts, not universal peace, granted, actually only between the superpowers and in Europe, in the Pacific too, for the most part, and in Japan, washed innocent of all guilt by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and even China is opening up travel bureaus. And yet how does this peace, if it in any sense has the time to call itself such, experience its own time? Does time stand still for it, and if so, does it know what to do with it? Does time get away from it? Or does it perhaps sweep across peace like a storm wind, a tornado, slamming cars into one another, brushing trains from their tracks, flinging jumbo jets against mountains, burning cities to the ground? How does our time of forty measurable years of peace unroll objectively, our time, in which a real war, for which nations are arming, appears ever more inconceivable and yet is conceived? Has not our time of peace—for whose survival millions demonstrate, carry banners, sing pop songs, and pray—long since assumed the form of what we once called war, because to mollify ourselves we build catastrophes into our peace? World history dangles endless time before mankind. But perhaps for earth, measured objectively, it is only a short episode, not even that, an incident within an earth second, hardly detectable on a cosmic scale, barely leaving behind a meaningful dent. The Dorians believed that they had hardly sprung from the earth, were still stuck in the clay, when they fell upon one another. And thus, in reality, we fall upon one another, whether in peace or war, having barely escaped the Ice Age, men upon women, women upon men, men upon men, women upon women, guided not by reason but by instinct, the latter millions of years longer in development than the former, its motives inscrutable. And so, using the threat of atomic, hydrogen, and neutron bombs, we keep the worst at arm’s length, like gorillas drumming on their chests to frighten other gorilla bands, all the while in danger of perishing of the peace we want to preserve, covered in death by the branches of dead forests. Wearily I return to my desk. Return to my battlefield, under the spell of my creatures, but not to another reality—except that since its time has run out, it is no longer ours. My own invention, and yet I have been unable to puzzle it out. My creatures created their own reality, which they snatched from my imaginative powers and thus from my reality, from the time I surrendered to create them. And so they have become a part of our common reality and thus one of the possibilities, one of which we call world history—it too wrapped in the chrysalis of our fictions. And yet is this story, which became real only in my imagination and now, once written, slips away from me, any more pointless than world history, any less earthquake-proof than the ground on which we build our cities? And God? If we posit him, has he acted any differently from Dr.h.c. Isaak Kohler? Was not Spät free to turn down the job of seeking a murderer who did not exist? Did he not then have to find a murderer who did not exist, just as man, once he had eaten of the fruit of the tree of good and evil, had to find the God, who did not exist, or the devil? Is that not the fiction of God by which he justifies his wayward creation? Who is the guilty party? The one who commissions the job, or the one who takes it on? The one who forbids, or the one who disregards the prohibition? The one who passes the laws, or the one who breaks them? The one who allows for freedom, or the one who takes advantage of it? We are perishing of the freedom we permit others and ourselves. I leave my study, which is empty now, freed of my creatures. Four-thirty. In the sky I can see Orion for the first time. Whom is he chasing?
The Execution of Justice Page 17