by Peter Nadas
Suffering that might be eased but cannot be relieved.
A lonely bird was hooting outside, perhaps an owl. This too was rather odd at this tense moment, as if deriding the tension. And while he examined each small painting on the walls, one by one—undistinguished landscapes or still lifes done by untrained local painters or perhaps family members—he thought that no matter how colorful and rich the world might appear in its various transformations, ultimately it was a pile or collection of homogeneous materials, and that was why objects seen for the first time seem familiar or full of significance. The owl brings no misfortune to anyone, but the person anticipating danger notices its hooting. The young man’s back curved nicely. Under his thin sweater his spine was nicely outlined, vertebra by vertebra. He was staring at the flames licking the kindling, which he carefully nudged with the poker, and kept radiantly quiet with his back.
The miserable people we should consider exceptional are those who do not kill out of suffering or at least acknowledge in retrospect what they have done.
The room was furnished simply and sparingly. Between the two larger windows stood a chest of drawers, above it a rustic mirror which for a fraction of a moment while he passed before it distorted Kienast’s face, but he nonetheless found himself attractive because he was looking at the two last nights he had spent so joyously. He saw that it was really he. Facing the fireplace in the middle of the room stood a threadbare sofa with flower-patterned upholstery on which the young man most likely had slept the previous nights under the shabby blanket; perhaps he stayed there yesterday too. Next to the sofa was a deep easy chair, upholstered with the same flower-patterned material, from which a hitherto unnoticed cat jumped out and silently disappeared under the sofa as he approached. Kienast stood behind the abandoned chair. He resisted the murderously tense silence with all his physical self-awareness, overheated by love, and alternately looked out the little window, under which stood a single rough-hewn peasant chair, and kept an eye on the nape of the young man’s neck as he squatted before the fire.
Döhring sensed this precisely on his bare cervical vertebrae—his nakedness, his spinal marrow, and the forever-lost dignity in his groin.
Kienast made himself comfortable in the flower-patterned armchair abandoned by the cat, almost voluptuously stretching his limbs, like a person who, because he believes in the total homogeneity of the material and spiritual world, also believes he can feel at home in a strange place.
Kienast impudently reciprocated the young man’s disdain for mutuality, his defiance wrapped in apathy.
Does anyone smoke here, he asked after a few moments, when the flames were humming and hissing in the fireplace, which helped both men become used to the presence of the other.
Döhring said no but Kienast could light up anyway. He’d find an ashtray by the fireplace, and he pointed at it with the poker. He wanted the detective to be closer, let him come close to him and the fire; he loved the fire. Cigarette smoke didn’t bother him. He liked to light fires, play with fire, stare into fires. He found it hard to tear himself away from this one. Maybe his twin sister would grumble, but he liked that too, it actually made him feel good. It’s easy to get her mad and then it shows more clearly what sort of person each of them is.
He giggled a little at this, though the giggle turned into a rough and grating laugh, not a pleasant one.
He didn’t know Döhring had a twin sister, Kienast remarked, sounds like you don’t like her very much.
So what if he hates her.
They probably look alike.
Why wouldn’t they.
Unfortunately he’d left his cigarettes in the car, Kienast replied, and could Döhring help him out.
He asked for a cigarette mainly because he wanted to know what brand of cigarettes he’d find in the house. When he’d traveled seven hundred kilometers he wanted a fast return, if a small one. In the coat pocket of the dead man they’d found enough scraps of tobacco to determine the cigarette or brand of cigarettes he smoked, et cetera. During his illegal visit to the victim’s apartment in Fasanen Street the day before, Kienast had pocketed a suspiciously crumpled cigarette pack while the concierge helpfully looked the other way.
Experience told him that in such a much-crumpled pack he might find either grass or hash.
Presumably Döhring is lying in this and in other matters, but everything’s going along on its steady way. By now the lab technician has probably identified the tobacco.
Unfortunately there’s not a cigarette in the house, the unsuspecting Döhring answered. Unfortunately he can’t help. Even though he knows what this lack means to a smoker. Moreover, he added, for once he wouldn’t mind having a smoke himself. Because it’s a real shock for him that Dr. Kienast took his telephone calls seriously and really came all the way here.
He is not a heavy smoker either, Kienast remarked, very satisfied with Döhring’s response, but he’d driven seven hundred kilometers in one go and had even made a little detour into Düsseldorf.
It would be good to keep up the tone of this slow-to-start chat, and so he quickly continued, if he smoked four a day that would be too many for him.
Maybe one, unless I’m in company, Döhring responded willingly, though he did not answer like this because it was the truth.
Döhring indeed lied continuously, now to himself, now to others, which in itself caused no great problem for people. But he could not always neatly separate the two levels of his lies; he was too young for this, and his schizoid attacks further hindered him. Of course he kept no company of any sort and did not go anywhere, yet that’s how other people usually learned how to say things, and he thought he could say anything that others had said. And why would he share something about his private life, on any level, with a stranger, especially with such a miserable common man.
In that case, if I may trouble you, please let me have a nice glass of cold water, if you’d be kind enough, said the policeman after a silence and in a surprisingly quiet voice, as if he was testing him. Where are the limits to his self-contempt. He already had the impression in the Tiergarten that this young man had no one in the world, never had had and never would either, not a woman and not a man, or if he ever did he wouldn’t feel them on his skin.
Then the awful voice turned into a buzzing in his ears, perhaps his ears began to ring, which slowly roused his snoozing hypochondria.
Almost frightened, he repeated that he would not mind a nice glass of cold water.
But despite his deliberate intention he failed to surprise the young man with his request.
I can offer you some apple wine.
Apple wine, Kienast repeated hesitantly, as if this unusual suggestion, or perhaps the circumstance that this time he had found his match in deception and simulation, had somewhat startled him and made him think things over.
Maybe I should be a little apologetic, the apple wine is our own and frankly not of very high quality, he said with the same unpleasant laugh as before, but there’s not a single additive in it, I can assure you of that. Which by the way gives everyone headaches.
I have the feeling I’m dizzy from dehydration, so I’d be glad to have some apple wine or water, anything.
That’s the kind of thing people around here drink.
Since I left Berlin I’ve had nothing to drink.
He lied now to make the image he had given of his thirst sound spectacular. He wanted to draw the other man’s attention to himself, but this quickly became a fiasco.
Drink apple wine, make children, grow asparagus, and dry plums, that’s what people do in this region. The asparagus, which they also eat, they poison carefully and with due forethought.
Forgive me for burdening you with my request, said Kienast, who was not quite certain whether the young man was listening to him.
Mothers’ milk is poisoned with heavy metals. Other people’s apple wine is either stronger than ours, in which case they’ve mixed in a separate cancer-causing apple aroma, or weaker than ours, in which cas
e it keeps its natural aroma, fortunately. These people’s obsession is that they must constantly choose between two bad things, and don’t forget these are my relatives, this is my extended family.
You’re probably expecting guests, perhaps your sister, and here I am bothering you with a weak spell.
Wholesale or retail, everyone deals in asparagus here—growing it, storing it, or selling it. My parents—which is to say our father and stepmother, because this woman is not our real mother, I’m telling you this so you understand everything—grow asparagus.
Perhaps I’m not being too forward, after all, by asking for a glass of water.
Or maybe I’ve already mentioned this.
No, you haven’t. I don’t remember your mentioning it.
I’m saying it because it doesn’t go in any other way except with effective plant-protective sprays. Don’t ever eat asparagus.
It’s very awkward if I’ve disturbed you with my visit.
Who said you’ve disturbed me in anything. I’m not doing anything, how could you have disturbed me.
I didn’t know that asparagus was so dangerous.
They’ve got this weak apple wine, they don’t really have anything else. They have money, though, but not under their pillows, they keep it under their skin. If you take just two steps over to Holland, you’ll see how much more modestly people live there. Yet we were the people who lost the last war. In the spring the trees get a little rinsing spray, nothing more.
Both of them stared wearily into the fire when they reached the end of what they had to say.
The detective had no response to Döhring’s last remark, the young man’s rigid isolation and deaf attitude having truly nonplussed him. Whether from the reflection of the flames or his sudden loquaciousness, his face seemed to be all heated up. The sight of his sick face and sick body strengthened Kienast’s aversion, touched with disgust; it gained shape. Which he himself could not accept. Their profession often exposes detectives to experiences they would prefer not to see or live through. He saw the young man in an agitated state that theoretically he should not have seen, even though it was the young man who had called him and even though he now had no way of avoiding the effect the young man’s agitation had on him. Which meant that this young man had another face, one that he himself may not have known, and if the detective wanted to extract his secrets he had to witness the bodily manifestations that went with that other face.
The voice the police had recorded on magnetic tape, with its diffuse, dark tone and deep vibrations, indicated something of the young man’s secret life.
Kienast could not tell whether, given the agitated face and dark tone of voice, the young man was attractive or insane, whether he was attracted to his insanity or whether all these impressions in fact repelled him.
Anyone poking around in the drawers of a schizophrenic’s brain is likely to feel close to the person’s whims and perverse ideas. At any rate Kienast’s peculiar feeling, which he’d been struggling with independently of the young man, was growing stronger.
Everything in the world that surrounds one and might influence one is, in reality, only a copy, and everything on earth is condemned to permanent repetition. Once, ten times, a hundred times, infinite times, even the feeling of love is but a copy of an earlier feeling. The act of love is surely more important for everyone than the object of love, more important than the other person is, though without an object of love one cannot perform the act of love. Perhaps his exertion had made him overly sensitive and he had grown so weak because of his barely two-day-old focus on love, or perhaps he had become both weaker and more sensitive because what really interested him, certainly more than what has been happening here, was the person he’d left behind. Something was definitely not right. The phenomenon of love is probably preceded by the idea of love, but that truth greatly irritates and humiliates the person in love, no matter how hard Socrates tried to convince Alcibiades of the opposite.
It would be pointless trying to understand something, get to the bottom of something, find something tangible in the other human being, or any proof of anything, or a handle on something, if everything is constantly being repeated a hundred or infinite times, and therefore happening within a person but not to him.
On some future night it might seem to him a delusion that he had actually discovered something the night before, or was discovering something now, but at the moment he was assailed by memories of nights alive with the sounds of amorous grappling and helpless pounding of flesh accompanied by shouts and squelches coming from the lubricating secretions of two different sexual organs.
In reality he had not become dizzy, of course—more precisely, his sensations did not have much to do with dizziness—but he could not have said whether they were copies or the original. There was a humming, like that of the wind in telegraph wires or an idling engine. Was his body simulating thirst because he was supposed to test the young man and possibly jolt him out of his schizoid fit.
Who had been waiting for his help, who knows why, but then pretended he hadn’t even heard the stupid request for water, or maybe he really didn’t hear it.
Which meant, again, that neither of them was an original specimen, only two copies working on each other. But a copy cannot satisfy a personal request.
The two of them had stepped into a world in which cues intended for the roles they were playing could not impede their mutual, laborious legerdemain.
Illusion, everything is only illusion.
The thought made him thirsty, or at least compelled him to get up defiantly and get a glass of water for himself in this peculiar house.
He had to pull himself out of his own illusion.
The short corridor opening from the far end of the room had three doors, which he had noted earlier. The first door was to a broom closet full of cleaning tools and miscellaneous items. He had no more time to waste. Like an electric shock it occurred to him that what he felt was neither thirst nor its illusion but the prelude to an epileptic fit, which would be his first; just when love was supposed to free him, his father’s fate was catching up with him.
That is how the final judgment arrives, ridiculously repeating itself. Then he went into a very clean toilet, and as in alarm he kept opening and closing doors, Döhring said not a word behind him.
Perhaps he would have made a move if Kienast had gone upstairs to the bedrooms. He must have been preoccupied with his own madness, because he sensed nothing of Kienast’s dread, which was ready to erupt; oddly, it was already enough to strengthen the embarrassing mutuality between them.
At least he will find out, before he has a fit, where things are in the house. The kitchen was icy cold. That meant the bathroom had to be upstairs. He was glad his brain was still under control and working professionally. He greedily drank water, which helped somewhat, and when he turned on the faucet a second time, the pump connecting the pipes to the outside well kicked in automatically, which made him wince, like a civilian. But he had a quick response to this: he slapped water on his face and drank from the palm of his hand in order to wake up from his torpor or from his illusion.
From the kitchen window he could see the old well.
Then he changed his mind: whatever has to happen, let it happen. He will not resist the madness and he will not surrender to his own fit, no way. He would have poured himself some apple wine; there were at least ten wax-sealed bottles of it on the table. But to have a little apple wine he needed a glass, a knife, and a corkscrew; he had to pull out drawers and deal with all sorts of objects. One can’t say he was calm when he returned to the living room; he at least admitted to himself that he was dead tired and extremely vexed. What with the things he’d had to do and those rotten little tools in the kitchen drawers, he was on the brink of losing patience.
He would rage and demand results.
The young man, poker in hand, was still squatting before the fire as if, as opposed to Kienast, he had found no reason to change his position.
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br /> Kienast continued shamming, however; he had to. He was the adult and the stronger of the two. Not only because of his profession but also because having grown up with two women meant he was used to the stereotypical role of the long-suffering strong male. He resettled himself in the armchair and, feigning great bodily comfort, busied himself with the wine for a while. What else could he do. He examined the wine’s color and bouquet, while watching himself to see whether he could weather his fit of anger.
I’d be willing to have an epileptic fit just so as to jolt this miserable little fairy, this little meat-beater, this sick little shit-head out of himself. But why should I. This is what his ambition dictated—his insight into human nature, his empathy, his compassion, and all his inclinations and abilities—which also happened to destroy and devastate his own life.
Less would have been more.
At least this way he understood something of himself and of the young man; he even understood that it would not be good for him to jolt Döhring out of himself or engage his attention. What interest would he have in that, save for the possible result.
To forgo that result would not be a professional self-sacrifice.
He found the young man abhorrent, but he was ready to do anything for him now, even show him some kindliness.
Noisily, he tasted the wine, found it rather awful and, clicking his tongue, went on sipping it. Under the guise of this purposeful activity, he had to reassure himself that his rotten life, his brand-new love—of which, by the way, he could have said anything but that it was animal-like—and his very ordinary, idiotic career weren’t going to end now because of an epileptic fit or because of his own dread.
It’s quite weak, he said, raising his glass in belated agreement.
Usually it doesn’t even keep until New Year’s.
What can I say, it has a pleasant bouquet, its temperature is good, what else could one wish for.
It becomes like water without any warning.
But until then it’s not bad at all.
To your health then.