War & War

by Krasznahorkai, László

  9.

  Now he keeps talking about this guy Kirsárt or whatever his name is, said the interpreter to his partner, shaking his head incredulously, like the other night there he is in the kitchen again and he is beginning to feel that the man is literally stalking him, hiding in wait somewhere between the front door, the kitchen and the hallway, just looking for that moment when he might “accidentally” bump into him, and what a ridiculous state of affairs, trying to evade someone, having constantly to be on the alert in his own apartment, having to hesitate before entering the kitchen in case the guy should be there, it really was intolerable, for after all he is perfectly aware of what the man is up to, hanging around behind doors, listening, but there are times he just can’t avoid these so-called “accidental” encounters, like the one last night when he pounced on him too, asking him if he could spare a moment while he babbled on about how his work was progressing and about this Misfart, or Firshart, or whatever his name was, unloading all this nonsense on him, nonsense of which you can’t understand a single word of course, because it’s all confused and he talks as if he, the interpreter, should have some clue as to who the hell this Dirsmars was: the guy was crazy, crazy in the strictest sense of the word, crazy and scary, there was no doubt about that anymore, scary and dangerous, you could see it in his eyes, in other words it was time to put a stop to all this because if he didn’t, he felt things would come to a bad end, and in any case it was fair to say that Korin’s days were numbered because Korin would be out on his ass now that he’d had this great offer, which was the chance of his life, believe me, said the interpreter to his partner, and if it worked out, and the way it looked was that it would need divine intervention to foul things up now, it would mean the end of poverty for them, they could get a new TV, new video machine and everything, whatever she wanted, a new gas stove, a new pantry, in other words an utterly new life down to the last saucepan, don’t you worry, and Korin would be sent packing too, there’d be no more need to hide from him or to scurry about like rats in their own apartment in order to avoid him, nor would she have to spend hours listening to the affairs of Birshart, no, Hirschhardt, Korin corrected him in confusion for he didn’t know how to conclude the conversation he had unfortunately become engaged in, for Hirschhardt was his name and Mr. Sárváry should picture him as someone who hated any kind of mystery, for mystery meant ignorance, which was why he loathed mystery, was ashamed of it and tried to dispel it whatever way he could, in the case of Kasser and his companions, by taking note of any incidental, casual and, for the most part, misunderstood remarks and, in his own fashion, drawing quite unfounded conclusions from them, constructing an entirely arbitrary view of affairs on the basis of extremely shaky foundations, presenting himself to his fellow citizens as someone wholly in the know when he sat down at various tables and told tales about them, quietly so they shouldn’t hear, suggesting that they were of some strange monastic order, the four of them there by the window, never saying anything, mysteriously coming and going, nobody knowing the least thing about them, what with their foreign names, not even where they were from, and of course they were all peculiar creatures, but they should regard them as refugees from the triumph at Königgrätz, or rather the hell of Königgrätz as anyone would say had they witnessed the Prussian victory on that notorious July 3 three years ago, a victory bought at the price of forty-three thousand dead, and that was just the Austrian casualties, Hirschhardt told the local drinkers, forty-three thousand in a single day and that was just the enemy, and, well, I ask you, he said, anyone seeing forty-three thousand dead Austrians is never going to be the same again, and that lot, said Hirschhardt indicating the four of them, were part of the entourage of the famous general, members of the strategic corps, in other words no strangers to the smell of gunpowder, and must have come face to face with death in many engagements, Hirschhardt concluded, his voice lingering on the word “death,” but the hell of Königgrätz had shocked even them, for that was hell, it really was, for the Austrians he meant of course, he quickly added, in other words they were heroes of Königgrätz, and that’s how they should be regarded, nor should they wonder that they did not seem in exactly high spirits: and, having heard this, people naturally did regard them as such, saying to each other as they walked into the bar, oh yes, indeed, there are the heroes of Königgrätz, before looking round for a vacant table or for their friends, calling for beers while surreptitiously casting sidelong glances in the direction of the window, assuring themselves that there, indeed, sat the heroes of Königgrätz, as Hirschhardt had told them time and time again, participants in that heroic battle, that great victory, which was a triumph looked at from one point of view but absolute hell from another, what with forty-three thousand dead, which was part of the history of the four men over there who were involved in the glorious battle and had had to witness the death of forty-three thousand people, all on a single day.

  10.

  Kasser and his companions were perfectly aware, Korin explained to the woman, that the landlord of the inn was talking all kinds of nonsense but since they observed that the result of the landlord’s fabrications was that the locals by and large left them in peace, they only occasionally tried to broach the subject with Hirschhardt to ask him why he went about saying they were heroes of Königgrätz when they had never in their lives visited Königgrätz nor had ever claimed to have been there, adding that taking flight before the battle of Königgrätz was not the same as fleeing from Königgrätz itself and so forth, that they were not members of Moltke’s entourage, not even soldiers, and had only tried to escape an impending battle, not emerged from the heat of one, though, truth to tell, they only occasionally pointed this out because there was no point telling Hirschhardt anything for Hirschhardt was incapable of comprehending and simply nodded, his broad, completely bald skull covered in perspiration, his face set in a false smile as if he knew what the truth really was, so that eventually they gave up trying altogether and Kasser picked up a train of thought he had long been following, the original thread, the thing they had been talking about since they first arrived, that is the notion of preparing themselves for utter failure, for that was a genuine, unarguable possibility, since history was undoubtedly tending toward the ever more extensive force, violence, although no proper survey of affairs should omit the fact that a marvelous work was under construction here, a brilliant product of human endeavor, the chief element of which was the discovery of sanctity, holiness, the holiness of unknown space and time, of God and the divine, for there is no finer sight, Kasser declared, than a man who realizes that there is a God, and who recognizes in this God the spellbinding reality of holiness while knowing that reality to be the product of his own awakening and consciousness, for these were moments of enormous significance, he said, resulting in momentous works, for at the center of it all, at the very apex of each and every achievement stood the radiant single figure of God, the one God, and that it was always the man with the vision, the one who beheld him, that was capable of constructing an entire universe in his own soul, a universe like a cathedral aspiring to heaven, and the remarkable thing, the thing in Cologne, was that mortal creatures felt the need for a sacred domain, and this was the thing that completely overwhelmed him, said Kasser, that this desire persisted in the midst of an undeniable failure, a precipitous collapse into ultimate defeat, and yes, Falke took over, that was indeed extraordinary, but what was still more extraordinary was the personal quality of this God, since man, in discovering that there might be a God in heaven, that there might indeed be a heaven beyond this earth, had found not only a kind of lord, someone who sat in a throne and ruled over the world, but a personal God to whom he could speak, and what was the result of that? what happened? asked Falke rhetorically—what happened, Korin echoed him—what happened, Falke answered his own question, was that it extended man’s sense of being at home in the world, and this was the truly startling, truly extraordinary thing, they said, this all-consuming idea that weak and
feeble man was capable of creating a universe that far exceeded himself, since ultimately it was this that was great and entrancing here, this tower man raised to soar way beyond himself, and that man was capable of raising something so much greater than his own petty being, said Falke, the way he grasped the vastness he himself created, the way he defended himself by producing this brilliant, beautiful and unforgettable, yet moving, poignant, thing, because of course he was not capable of governing such grandeur, unable to handle something so enormous, and it would collapse and the edifice he had created would tumble about his ears so the whole thing would have to start all over again, and so it would go on ad infìnitum, said Falke, the systematic preparation for failure changing nothing in the desire to create ever greater and greater monuments that collapsed, it being a natural product of an eternal desire to resolve an all-consuming, overwhelming tension between the creator of vast and tiny things.

  11.

  The conversation continued into the late evening and ended with praise of the discovery of love and goodness, which, as Toót put it, may be regarded as the two most significant European inventions, and this, said Korin, was roughly when Hirschhardt did his round of the tables and totaled up the bills of the various drinkers so that he might send them home, and, while he was at it, to say goodnight to Kasser and his companions too; and so it went night after night, like clockwork, and no one imagined that it would all change soon or that the accustomed order of things would be overturned, not even Kasser’s friends on their way back along the Rhine who felt a little heavy on account of the beer and spent their time discussing whether the peculiarly frightening figure who had recently appeared in the vicinity of the cathedral and whom they had spotted through the window, a gangling, exceedingly thin man with pale blue eyes wearing a black silk cloak, had anything to do with the building, for all they knew about him was what the ever informative Hirschhardt told them when they enquired, which was that he was named Herr von Mastemann, and while that was all he or anyone else knew, there was no lack of gossip on the subject, a gossip that varied from day to day so that now he was supposed to represent the State, and now the Church; now he was said to be from a country on the far side of the Alps, now from some northeastern principality; and while one couldn’t exclude the possibility that one or other of these rumors was true it was impossible to be certain, for there was nothing but rumor, hearsay, said Korin, to go on, rumors such as that he had been seen with the master of the works, or with the foreman of the carpenters and eventually with Master Voigtel too, or that he had a servant, a very young man with curly hair whose only task seemed to be to carry a portable folding chair, to appear with it each morning in front of the cathedral, and to put it down dead in the center facing the west front so that his master might sit in it when he arrived and remain there for hours, immobile, in silence; rumors that women, the women, Korin explained in English, particularly the servant girls at the inn were head over heels in love with him, that he had made them wild; that here in the celebrated city of St. Ursula, the city of beer, he did not drink beer at all but—scandalously—confined himself to wine; in other words, said Korin, there were endless petty rumors but nothing firm, no convincing overall picture, nothing of the essence, as a result of which of course the evil reputation of this von Mastemann increased hour by hour while the whole of Cologne looked on and feared; so that in the end there was no chance at all of discovering the facts, the truth, said Korin, rumor having grown ever wilder and spread ever more quickly, people saying that the air grew significantly cooler as you drew closer to him and that those pale blue eyes were not in fact blue at all, nor were they real, but were actually made of a peculiarly sparkling steel, which must mean that this von Mastemann character was quite blind, and taking all rumors into account the truth itself would have seemed pretty dull so that no one actually sought it any longer and even Toót, who was the least likely to pay attention to idle chatter, remarked that cold shivers ran down his spine as he watched von Mastemann sitting immobile for hours, his two metal eyes sparkling and staring at the cathedral.

  12.

  The bad thing was getting ever closer, its progress irresistible, Korin explained in the kitchen, and there were any number of signs of its approach, but it was one word that decided the issue in Cologne, after which there could be no doubt as to what was to follow, this word being Festungsgürtel, said Korin, or rather the event associated with it, an event whose importance outweighed everything else, at least for Kasser and his companions, for while the febrile mood they observed both in town and at the inn, and the ever more frequent sight of military detachments patrolling the streets were enough to set them thinking, they could still not be certain as to the true nature of events, and could only be so once they heard the military snap of the word one day when the inn was full of the tramp of soldiers’ boots and Hirschhardt sat down at their table to inform them that the army unit stationed in town, or rather the Festungsgouvernor, to give him his proper tide, that is to say Lieutenant-General von Frankenberg himself—despite the fury of the archbishop—had ordered the vacating of the Festungsgürtel to make space for a shooting gallery, the Festungsgürtel, Hirschhardt emphasized the word, which, as you gentlemen must know, serves as the spiritual center of the building works, where they keep the stones, in what we call the Domsteinlagerplatz, right next to the Banhof am Thürmchen, and the order had just been given so Herr Voigtel had immediately to stop all further railway deliveries, thereby severely endangering the whole project, and to begin hoarding the stone surreptitiously and in a great hurry, the very tone of the order making it clear that it would have to be obeyed immediately and that there would be no appeal against it, and indeed what could Herr Voigtel do but rescue that which was still possible to rescue and to remove whatever he could, burying the rest, for it was pointless referring to the overriding significance of the progress of the cathedral, the answer would have been that its overriding significance was merely an aspect of the glory of the German Empire, for the word was Festungsgürtel, and that’s what mattered, repeated Hirschhardt nodding significantly, then, seeing that his guests had fallen utterly silent, tried to cheer them with a discussion of the glorious prospects of the coming Krieg but without much success, for Kasser’s little band just sat there with vacant stares, in shock, before asking more questions in an attempt to understand more clearly what had happened, without much success for Hirschhardt could only repeat what he had already said before returning to his group of carousing soldiers, perfectly at peace with himself it seemed, relieved of his normal gloom, prepared even to take the liberty, as he had never done before, of downing a big tankard with them and joining in a roaring chorus celebrating the glorious forthcoming victory over the filthy French.

  13.

  They put the money down at the end of the bar counter and left quietly so that Hirschhardt, who was caught up in the general heartiness, failed to notice their departure and without anyone else remarking that they had paid and disappeared; from which fact, said Korin, the young lady might be able to deduce what was to follow, and indeed there was no need for him to tell her what followed for it was plain as the nose on her face what would, effectively, follow, although it was quite different hearing it in his words to reading it on the page, there being no comparison between the two experiences, and particularly in the case of the passage on this subject, an extraordinarily beautiful passage about the last evening with their walk home along the bank of the Rhine and how they then sat on the edge of their beds at their accommodation, waiting for the dawn without saying a word, at which time a conversation did begin, albeit with some difficulty, a conversation about the cathedral of course, about the point to the southwest of it from where, henceforth, they would no longer—never more said Korin—have the privilege of observing it as a solid, perfectly compact mass, with those splendid buttresses, the wondrous relief work on the walls and the vibrant ornamentation of the façade that concealed the weight and mass of the whole, and their talk kept
straying to the deep metaphysical aspect of this unsurpassable masterpiece of the human imagination, to heaven and earth and the underworld, and the governance of such things, the way these invisible domains were created, and, needless perhaps to say, how, from the moment Hirschhardt’s account had made it clear what the order to clear the Festungsgürtel had meant, they had immediately resolved to leave the place, this Cologne, to depart at first light, said Bengazza, and allow the military art of destruction, the art of soldiers as Korin put it studying his dictionary, to replace the unique spirit of the art of construction, and he knew, added Korin, that as another chapter in the lives of Kasser and his companions drew to a close, that nothing had been resolved or had grown any less mysterious, that there was still no clue as to what all this was leading to or what the manuscript was really about, what we should think as we read it or listened to its words, for as we do so we keep feeling that somehow we are looking in the wrong place for clues, in studying, for instance, its descriptions of the shadowy form of Kasser, for naturally one would like to understand what it all added up to, or at least Korin himself would, but the details did not help: he was left contemplating the whole thing, the sum of the images, and that was all he could see as he worked at the keyboard transcribing the manuscript, watching Kasser and his companions speed away from Cologne that morning, the dust of the mail-coach billowing behind them; and the image of the curly-headed young servant as he appears in front of the cathedral, folding chair in one hand, the other casually in his pocket, a light breeze raising the locks on the young man’s head as he puts the chair down directly facing the west front then stands beside it, waiting, and nothing happening as he continues to stand there, both hands now tucked into his pockets, there is no one about in the square at dawn and the chair is still vacant.