I wished him good luck although I had my doubts about Lorsy’s willingness to comply with Bandi’s wishes, and went back to my desk. Valy was away visiting one of her communist girl-friends whom I had thrown out a few days ago when she declared that the war was the affair of the French bourgeoisie, and I was profiting by her absence to write a poem. I wrote that Europe was disappearing from the face of the world like Atlantis and that in this situation there was nothing left for me but to take refuge in the subconscious layers of my soul or to flee to the continent where the subconscious past was still alive and for which I longed: Africa. For a moment it occurred to me that I should, perhaps, write about Freud but I realized that he was just as present in the mythical poem I was writing as he was in the one I had written three years earlier on the occasion of his eightieth birthday which, though it dealt with my own emotional problems and never mentioned him by name, was still a tribute to him. By the time I finished Valy was back and I had completely forgotten about Bandi when I heard a taxi stop before the hotel.
‘Get dressed, you two!’ Bandi shouted from below. ‘Ernö is waiting in the cab, he is taking us out to dinner!’
At first Valy protested, but I dispelled her doubts by reminding her that we had not eaten a bite that day. Thereupon she began, slowly and circumstantially, to rub cream into her face. It never took her less than an hour to get dressed and though I was sorry for Lorsy waiting below in the cab, there was nothing I could do about it.
For several months now, on my way home from the Café Napolitaine, I would drop in on a former mistress, the Viennese actress, who lived in the Rue de Névers exactly half-way between the café and my hotel. My wife was incomparably more beautiful, more attractive and more intelligent than Eva; the only thing they had in common was their hysteria. The real reason for my visits was not the erotic one, although after some obligatory yet sincere preliminary conversation they always ended in love-making.
In my student days Eva had been a famous actress in Vienna. Although I was only an unknown young student she remained faithful to me for years. She often came to fetch me in the evening at the University Library – usually, because she loved to cause a sensation, in her stage costume. Once she arrived in full armour with her long, dark hair streaming over her shoulders from under her helmet. She was playing Jeanne d’Arc that night. If, after the show was over, she noticed me standing on the other side of the Josefstädter Strasse under the gas-lamp, she would leave a world-famous director without saying goodbye and run across the road between automobiles and streetcars to join me. At such times Max Reinhardt gazed after her with a melancholy expression, thinking, no doubt, about the ruthlessness of youth. Now she was living in exile, poor and almost friendless. In the last four years, since she had left Reinhardt, she had aged unbelievably. I felt that by climbing up six flights to her room I was repaying at least some of her past kindnesses to me. On the way down again there was no smile of self-satisfaction on my lips; I sighed a deep sigh and repeated mechanically: Salvavi animam meam…
Apart from the gratitude I owed her I was led also by the consideration that this relationship gave me sexual independence from my wife, though the delights awaiting me at the top of those flights of stairs in no way vied with those awaiting me at home. My poverty, which prevented me from taking a woman to a café or seeing her home in a taxi, made new conquests impossible, or rather, it deprived me of the opportunity to create a situation in which a woman could seduce me. Thus, I had to make do with those who knew me from the past, with whom I still had intellectual credit.
One day when, contrary to my custom, I visited Eva before lunch, she informed me that she was pregnant. She added however, that to the best of her knowledge I was innocent. The blond young man who was responsible for this state of affairs had been called up on the first day of the war and was now in the Maginot Line. She begged me, seeing that she had no one in the world to turn to, to help her get rid of the child or, should that be impossible, to provide for it after its birth. This problem, to which I saw no solution, preoccupied me day and night so that I was somewhat reconciled to my wife and thus watched her patiently, regardless of the ticking of the taxi-meter, until fifty-five minutes later she was at last ready to go. She was beautiful in her simple black frock, almost perfect. Throwing a last glance at the mirror reflecting her bare shoulders, shining like sixty-watt, frosted-glass electric bulbs, she caught sight of me standing behind her, green with hunger. Going down the stairs she took my arm because, on such occasions, she always behaved ceremoniously even when we were alone.
A large, black, coffin-shaped taxi stood before the door. The darkness inside was so dense that I found my way to my seat only by sounds, smell and the electromagnetic repulsion of three bodies. Only when we had left behind the Porte d’Orléans on our way to Fontainebleau was I able to distinguish in a corner of the taxi Lorsy’s immense, sprawling body, looming in the twilight like some pulpy and formless monster in the subconscious regions of the soul. As always, he was in black from top to bottom, holding in his hand his huge, soft hat that, according to Bandi’s testimony, he put down on the bedside table before going to sleep and put on again first thing in the morning before shaving. He was holding a bottle of cognac between his knees which he offered first to Valy, who refused indignantly, then to me.
The drink put me immediately on the same level with Lorsy and Bandi. The facts that had been imparted to me before, namely that Lorsy had dictated an article on Freud to Bandi, that Bandi had immediately sold it to a weekly for three thousand francs, that Lorsy had ordered a dinner by telephone in one of Fontainebleau’s finest restaurants – explained the situation but somehow failed to penetrate my mind. The slow drive without headlights through the blacked-out city, then along the inky highway increased the mail-coach atmosphere I had felt when climbing into the taxi. In this completely secluded world Lorsy and Bandi were quarrelling passionately and intimately. I had joined them like a kindly stranger but now, at one stroke, I understood it all.
My first coherent thought was that at last, after months of semi-starvation, I would eat a complete, multi-course dinner. The prospect, however, rather repelled than attracted me. I felt my bowels contract before the merciless, triumphant onrush of food, like citizens in the cellars of a besieged fortress before the final attack of the enemy, of which the outcome is certain. The habitual and almost chronic melancholy of hunger would now – I thought bitterly – be replaced for a few weeks by acute pangs of starvation.
Suddenly the towers of Warsaw appeared before me with painful sharpness and a map from my history textbook showing how Poland was dissected three times in the eighteenth century. Behind the towers of Warsaw I saw the smoking ruins of Budapest and German tank divisions, not in Polish territory but between the draw-wells of the Hungarian lowlands, advancing with geometrical precision like a long column of figures; from which I deduced the mathematical thesis that the occupation of Poland involved, necessarily, the occupation of Hungary.
Then came Freud. According to my habit I tried to recall his features, gestures and actions with the sentimental and magical idea that a dead man is a little less dead or may even come back to life if someone thinks of him intensively. But Freud’s face escaped my memory. Instead I remembered old dreams and the sexual experiences of my childhood while with half my attention I was listening to Bandi’s and Lorsy’s conversation, thinking with satisfaction that they were in the same boat with me. Columbus was dead, and the subject of conversation was not Columbus but America.
‘Continue with the dreams of your childhood,’ Lorsy urged Bandi.
Bandi refused, though I knew that there was no living man who loved to confess as much as he did. He considered public confession a spiritual need and a duty to himself. Now, however, he was angry with Lorsy. The fact that he had succeeded in forcing Lorsy to write an article and thereby earn some money deprived Lorsy of his greatest attraction: his poverty, his helplessness, his need for others. With a few thousand francs
in his pocket Lorsy felt rich and made careful plans to enjoy this Sancho Panza’s kingdom to the full for a night. The circumstance that for once he was the host added arrogance to his natural conceit. But, strangely enough, Lorsy was also angry with Bandi. For him the only natural way to live was to live on advances and to cheat his editors and publishers. And now he had worked and was still deeply shaken. He felt that he had enriched himself on Freud’s death and was now driving over his grave as he took us to dinner. Yet, it was not really himself that he blamed but Bandi who had made him sell the Master for thirty gold pieces to the editor of Candide.
‘Bandi promised,’ Lorsy turned to me, ‘that he would deliver a lecture on the animals of his childhood dreams. Everyone has his own individual animals. Leonardo da Vinci, for instance, had vultures in his head …’
‘First we should like to hear about your vultures!’ cried Bandi angrily. ‘Isn’t it revolting that someone should know everything there is to know about mankind’s childhood, the childhood of Freud, of Charles XII and Henry IV, but nothing at all about his own? When you were still in your cradle you must have reached for the New York Times instead of your mother’s teats! I am afraid you have never been young!’
‘All right, I wasn’t,’ Lorsy replied sadly.
‘Of course you were,’ I broke in consolingly. ‘You sat there with the peasant kids, on the side of the ditch baking sand-cakes and tasting them when nobody was looking …’
‘He tasted them but he never baked them,’ Bandi insisted. ‘Ernö watched while the others were doing the work. Ernö doesn’t know that he once wanted to kill his father and sleep with his mother, but he knows who else has tried to kill his father and sleep with his mother, when and where, from the founding of Troy to yesterday midnight …’
‘When I last talked to Freud,’ Lorsy said musingly, ‘I asked him why he had not psycho-analysed psycho-analysis out of his system. What was the psychological cause that had made him and nobody else discover the jungle of depth psychology? Was it because he himself was full of inhibitions, frustrations and over-compensations? Or was it because these things were completely missing from his psychological make-up? What do you think he replied?’
‘He said: “Go to hell, my good Mr Lorsy, go to hell!” ’ I suggested.
‘Essentially you are right. That’s what he said, only in a more polite form. He said that he was far too old to ask himself such far-reaching, complex questions… True enough. He was nearly eighty at the time.’
‘Lorsy, on the other hand, is only fifty,’ Bandi insisted. ‘There is no reason why he should not ask himself why he isn’t working on his book. The contract was signed six weeks ago but so far he has written nothing but the first six lines of the foreword.’
We were approaching Fontainebleau but the further we got from Paris the more uncertain our driver became. Only at long intervals did we notice a pale, cobalt-blue light seeping out from behind the blacked-out windows of roadside bistros or little houses; it seemed to me as if we were advancing between the obsolete trenches forgotten here from the 1914 war, an abandoned, crumbly front line filled with the fetid smell of thick, invisible layers of fallen autumn leaves.
‘Do you refuse to answer?’ Bandi cried belligerently.
The huge body moved.
‘I could give you a number of answers,’ Lorsy said. ‘For instance, that such is my nature. I am lazy, phlegmatic, indolent. I could also say that you made me drunk and dragged me by brute force to the publisher’s office to make me sign the contract. But let us leave recriminations aside and examine the essence of the question. After having left fifty-seven good books unwritten I, as an historian, cannot take it upon my conscience to write one that tries to convince my contemporaries of the impregnability of the Maginot Line. The Maginot Line is beset with cowardly soldiers led by a moronic general staff. Experience teaches us that such fortresses can be blown away by the farting of a cow. What I wish to say cannot be said – namely that the Maginot Line could protect France only if there were Frenchmen to protect the Maginot Line. Under such conditions the only ethical thing is to write nothing.’
For a moment we fell silent.
‘Dear friends,’ he continued and his voice softened, ‘Carthage fell and so did Athens. Corinth fell and Alesia, Rome and Granada. Why should Paris not fall too?’
The restaurant, when we at last arrived, was elegant and warm, as if we had suddenly entered the gates of heaven. I looked up at the large, funnel-shaped chandelier with its innumerable candle-holders, then I closed my eyes tight and imagined that the chandelier was a Christmas tree held by an angel hovering above the room. A moment later I had thrown off the depression that had held me in its throes in the infernal darkness of the taxi, listening to Lorsy’s sinister prophecies. I shared his views on conditions in France yet considered his conclusions too pessimistic. Observed so closely, every war looks the same and the fact that people have no desire to die does not necessarily mean that they are going to lose the war. The same phenomena existed among the enemy.
To whet our appetites Lorsy had ordered dark Malaga wine. Then came the first course: wine soup with black mussels, then saddle of venison with cranberries, accompanied by a dark red wine. I found the idea of serving black foods to fit the occasion – an idea of which Lorsy was very proud – somewhat ridiculous. But at least it taught me something about our host’s, the polyhistor’s psychology that must have run to ground somewhere between Baudelaire and the fin de siècle.
Valy, although she obviously enjoyed the good dinner and the elegant environment, was preoccupied, as usual, with her own beauty. She turned her waist a little to the left towards the large Venetian mirror in its crystal frame, and everything she did, her chewing, her smiles, her wriggles, was all directed at her own reflection. Only from time to time did she swing her hip or her shoulder for our sake, or for that of the waiter or the guests.
Bandi’s face was the very symbol of misery. Here, in the brightly lit room, he became victim of a breathtaking, perspiring, almost convulsive soberness. I knew what was bothering him and although I realized that it had needed the Stalin–Hitler pact to drive him into a crisis of conscience, I was sorry for him.
‘To Poland and resurrection!’ Lorsy raised his glass.
‘And to Freud’s memory,’ Bandi added, somewhat comforted. As was his habit he did not raise his glass to his lips but dipped his face into it, and, pursing his lips, sucked up the wine noisily.
‘I shall drink to your recovery, Bandi, to your slow reconvalescence,’ I said. ‘I admit that for some people it is difficult to live without an ideology. Therefore I suggest a slow and quiet transition; I should not have mentioned this had not, simultaneously with the outbreak of war, a struggle broken out between your conscience and a hostile ideology.’
I fell silent, knowing that I had said more than necessary. Bandi filled his glass, drank and gazed rigidly before him. I followed his glance. His iris, resting on the crescent moon of his bloodshot eyelid, was glued to the slender red candle standing in the middle of the table.
Then murmuring as if he were talking to himself, or perhaps to the chocolate cake on the plate before him, he said:
‘My mummy has left me. My mummy is dead.’
‘What does he mean?’ Valy turned to me. ‘I thought his mother died five years ago …’
‘I had two mothers,’ Bandi said. ‘One came into my room and brought me fresh underwear when she knew I was going to a woman although I never told her. While I stole her money from her purse she pretended not to notice. Sometimes, when I was rude to her or indifferent, and turned away because her skirt smelled of cabbage, she would say: “You will want to dig me up with your bare hands when I am gone, Bandi, my boy …” This mother of mine died five years ago to rest her back against the bottom of her coffin. My other mummy was the communist party. People were always gossiping about her but I never would listen. And now I have caught my mummy in bed with Hitler, wriggling her shameless, bare behind.
I think the best thing for me to do is to pretend she is dead.’
Valy broke into a sharp, hooting laughter.
‘You are a silly goose,’ Bandi said, wrinkling his nose. ‘One doesn’t laugh beside a grave. But why do you look so frightened, George?’
‘What you said frightened me.’ I hesitated for a moment and resolved to be as tactful as possible. ‘I find your words too hasty… However estimable such outbursts of fury may be, I believe that they are merely emotional and of a temporary validity… The day after tomorrow you may again identify yourself with the communist practices of the day before yesterday… It would have been more reassuring had you not rejected communism so summarily but had only given voice to a few severe doubts …’
My words sounded as strange to me as if I were listening to a recording made several years before. At every beat of my heart I felt the alcohol mount to the frontal lobes of my brain, between my temples, driving me towards a superficial and irresponsible sincerity that I usually held in check even when drunk. However, my fury about the division of Poland was stronger than my customary sober drunkenness. I could have taken Bandi’s head between my two hands and knocked it against the mirror next to Valy’s reflection.
‘If someone,’ I continued, ‘enters a room and there finds his mother in bed with a stranger he will be shocked and indignant, disgusted and ashamed. He will be even more disgusted if he finds out that not human frailty, but business has made his mother act this way. But ever since 1917 everyone knows that in every world-historical procession, every carnival masquerade, it is mummy who leads the guild of whores with a red lamp raised high in her hand. I am sorry that you had to find this out at the most disagreeable moment and discover mummy making love with Hitler while a roast chicken is waiting for them on the bedside table. From time to time they reach out, tear off a leg and stuff it into their mouths, never stopping their acrobatics.
My Happy Days In Hell Page 7