3
When he reached his room, to which the porter had already delivered his luggage, the guest first spread his manuscripts out on the table and then began to jot down his impressions of the day. In the last few years the man without a country had been writing more and more frequently in hotel rooms at night, or by day in cafés, on tables of artificial marble.
4
He captured in haste a few observations, a few Bilder: a newspaper vendor slurping her soup from a plate, next to her nostril a wound the size of a coin, a raw open wound; a female midget attempting to climb up into a train; a waiter totting up a bill with his pencil between his little finger and index finger because the rest of his fingers were missing; and a pimply porter with a boil on his neck. And so on.
5
He despised duels as a symbol of Junker arrogance, in the same way that he scorned commonplace scandal and showdowns with fists or knife, but for all that he was no less obsessed with human cruelty, which he saw simply as a depiction of the cruelty of society. Physical deformity and every kind of abnormality fascinated him as the flip side of the “normal.” Giants, dwarves, boxing champions, and circus freaks triggered in him a whole chain of metaphysical associations. Deaf from the noise of the fans, he watched their maniacal faces. Squeezed in amongst hysterical fans, he grasped, he sensed corporeally, the meaning of certain abstract concepts such as community, leader, and idea, as well as the connotation of that hoary adage about bread and circuses that sententiously presents us with the whole starting point of modern history.
6
Back in his homeland this poet had a monument, and streets, named after him; he had generations of admirers and his own mythos, as well as followers who praised him to the skies and stood in awe of his verse and lyrics as the pure emanation of the national spirit; and he also had sworn enemies who considered him a traitor to national ideals, a sell-out to the Germans and the Jews, the nobles and the moneyed classes, and these enemies denied that he had any originality, proclaiming him an ordinary imitator of the French Symbolists, a plagiarist of Verlaine and Baudelaire, and they wrote pamphlets about him full of accusations and every manner of slander.
7
His father, Aladár von Németh, began his “diplomatic career” quite modestly covering the shipping news for the Pester Lloyd newspaper, and his first posting was in Rijeka (Fiume). The journey to Fiume coincided with the honeymoon of this young diplomat who had just married a certain Zofia, née Dvořak. In that city of consuls and diplomats the future “man without a country” came into the world; he would retain for the whole of his life the memory of the sea and of a palm tree in front of his window, straining beneath the hammering of a gale, as an illustration of a Spartan proverb that was near and dear to his father’s heart: the power of resistance is acquired through constant struggle against the elements.
8
His room was lined with carpets and the floor covered by sheepskins; in summer the blinds were let down over the windows to shield him from the sun while in winter the sitting rooms were heated by a gargantuan tile stove that looked like a Secessionist cathedral. From the time he was five years old the nursery had been unheated, as a hygienic precaution and a part of his training in the Spartan mode; sometimes the nursemaids would lie down in the child’s bed so that their wholesome commonplace warmth would fill the heavy feather duvet.
9
His great-grandfather on his mother’s side (mutton chops, stove-pipe hat clutched in his left arm, his right resting at the elbow on a high shelf; on the shelf, in a vase, paper roses; at his feet a faience figure of a tremendous mastiff) was named Feldner. He didn’t leave much of a paper trail around the house, with the exception of that photograph with the paper roses, and it was with a certain feeling of guilt that they referred to him as “the late Feldner” (using his last name and always with the addition of “late”). That some ancient wrongdoing had come down from him, some type of original family sin—this was beyond certain. Hence the sparse documentation on him; hence the sole photograph in the album.
10
And this round face, with its big black moustache and hefty sideburns, that’s the writer’s father, Dr. Aladár von Németh, accompanied by Lajos von Hatvany (“who corresponded with T. Mann and Romain Rolland”). And here is the writer’s mother (a cheerful face under a crown of blonde hair pinned up in plaits). And here we see the family in a boat, on a river. Au verso: “Belgrade, 1905.” The high walls with the tower that one can almost make out in the background are the walls of the Kalemegdan fortress.—A clearing in the woods, with guests seated around a roughly hewn wooden table. The boy is sitting in his mother’s lap; next to them is Dr. Aladár von Németh, with his hunting rifle, the stock of which he has leaned against the table like a hajduk would do; at the head of the table, a gentleman in a hunting hat; the women are also wearing hunting hats, and the men Hungarian tunics: “Dr. Aladár von Németh in the company of His Highness Ludwig III, King of Bavaria. Pressburg/Bratislava.”—The boy on his bicycle. With one hand he’s propping himself up against an ivy-clad wall: “Budapest, Rákóczianum, 1913.”—The lad with a group of other schoolboys and professors; an arrow indicates Egon von Németh: “München. Wilhelmsgymnasium, 1914.” And so forth.
11
With the help of a poet he discovered at an early age the mysterious, encrypted language of love. As an eighteen-year-old, in love with a fellow student, a German girl, he discovered that in this poet’s works there was one poem for every phase of amour (for raptures, disappointment, dread, regret); and he commenced translating. And so he translated—“completely à propos”—fifty of the poems, and at the point when the love-cycle had quickened in the German language and was already in the printer’s hands, love evolved for him, via the process of crystallization (to put it in Stendhal-ese), to that point at which passion begins to smolder and go out. All that remained of the whole youthful adventure and amorous delirium was this anthology of translated poems, like some dog-eared photo album. And that purplish echo around the issue of love in his novels, and that lyric tension in his sentences that was to be noted by critics, and not without a certain perplexity.
12
Every sensitive young nature, above all when it is flooded by education and music as in his case, tends to regard the powerful, turbulent fascinations of body and soul, that lyrical magma of youth, as precocious signs of talent. These natures are inclined to think that the issue is more often than not simply one of the secret quiverings of their susceptibilities, the imprecise teaming up of glandular secretions and sympathetic spasms, a symbiosis of their organism’s tectonics and the music of the soul—those things that are the gift of youthfulness and intellectual precociousness and, similar to poetry in their tremblings, are easily mistaken for it. And once under the power of this magic—which grows over the years to be a dangerous habit, like tobacco and alcohol—a person will continue writing, with the skilled hand of a hack, writing sonnets and elegies, patriotic verse and occasional pieces; and it is now obviously just a matter of being a wound-up mechanism that lurched into motion in one’s youth and now continues to turn, by the force of habit or inertia, at each and every brush of the breeze, like an empty windmill.
13
In that epoch, when the Bildungsroman was in full flower in European literature and writers were basing their work on the social origins of the protagonist (the “narrator,” behind whom was concealed a slightly altered autobiography), in a kind of perpetual self-recrimination and escape from their own environment and in a belabored emphasis on their disloyalty, or, on the contrary, in that other version of vanitas that underscores the writer’s ordinary origins, emancipating him from inherited sin and any fatalistic responsibility for the evils of this world, and vouchsafing him the divine right to label things evil with no contrition—it was in that period, then, that Egon von Németh consciously did away with the autobiographical elements in his work. He considered the question of his parents and origins to be
a triviality and an accident of fate, even while intuiting with great foresight that in the theory of social origins there were signs of a new and dangerous theology of original sin, in the face of which the individual was helpless, marked for all time, with the stamp of sin on his brow as if put there by a red-hot brand.
14
“I am a typical mixture from the Habsburg Empire of blessed memory: simultaneously Hungarian, Croat, Slovak, German, Czech, and if I were to nose around in my genealogy and have my blood analyzed—which these days is a very popular kind of science in the world of nationalities—then I would find there, as in a stream-bed, traces of Tsintsar, Armenian, and, yes, maybe even Roma and Jewish blood. But this science of the spectral analysis of blood is one that I do not recognize. It is a science by the way of very dubious value; it’s dangerous and inhumane, especially nowadays and in our region where this menacing theory of Blut und Boden engenders nothing but mistrust and hatred, and where this ‘spectral analysis of blood and origins’ is typically carried out in a sensationalistic and primitive manner—with a knife and revolver. I’ve been bilingual since birth, and I wrote in Hungarian and German until I was eighteen; that was when I translated that collection by the Hungarian poet and opted for the German language, because it’s the nearest to my heart. I am, good sirs, a German writer; the world is my homeland.”
(On the basis of this text, which forms part of an interview from 1934, one gets the feeling that “the late Feldner” in that family photo album might have had one of those dangerous “blood types” that the nationalists considered inheritable, like syphilis.)
15
First and foremost, this stand of his was the product of his organic resistance to banality. For the theory of origins, of racial ones on the one hand and social ones on the other, had taken on monstrous proportions in those years and become a commonplace amid all the misunderstandings and rapprochements: the great idea of community descended upon the salons and in the marketplaces. It gathered under its banner people wise and stupid, noble spirits and the dregs of society—people, therefore, who were linked neither by any personal affinity nor by any intellectual kinship but solely by this banal, hackneyed, and dangerous theory of race and social origins. That is why in the works of Egon von Németh, works that otherwise teem with representatives of all the social strata of Europe of that day—the nobility, the upper bourgeoisie, the middle class, intellectuals from every possible background, merchants and craftsmen, officials and functionaries, parasites and the Lumpenproletariat, workers, peasants, nationalists, soldiers, traditionalists, social democrats, revolutionaries—in these works the autobiographical elements are absent. The witness must be impartial; the grief and repentance of the one party must be as alien to him as the prejudiced thinking of the other.
16
The man without a country, the stateless one, the cosmopolitan—as he was labeled by the newspapers in his home country—traveled to Amsterdam in the middle of April, after making a long arc through Italy, Yugoslavia, and Hungary. Along the way he wanted to visit his old, infirm father in Pest and absorb the European climate so that he would have some fresh and reliable material for his new novel Farewell to Europe. From Pest, where he took leave of his father in the awareness that he would probably never see him again, he traveled on in this way to Amsterdam, where he negotiated with his publisher, a certain van der Lange, the same man who had published his first novel a year ago, in German.
17
Mr. van der Lange was one of those young publishers who—because of some sudden resolution—reorient their love of literature, and perhaps their talents as well, from the goal of uncertain literary fame to the much more secure business of publishing the types of books, and even the very books themselves, that they would have wanted to write (and could have written?). After inheriting his father’s lending-library business, which was in addition part bookstore and part stationery store, Mr. van der Lange decided one day to print the books of his friends, having burned his own poems first, with a touch of regret. He was a lover of German literature; Heine was the first writer to poison him with poetic reveries and teach him the difference between the lyrical and the ironic, as well as the fragile relationship between them—a knack that is as hard to find among poets as it is among readers. In the 1930s, as German writers were becoming less and less able to find publishers in their fatherland, having been adjudged insufficiently transported by the national spirit or poisoned by the inheritance of their blood, Mr. van der Lange started publishing the books of German refugees, without being at all unfaithful to his preferences. The writers found in him not just a publisher of their works but also someone who gave them a friendly word and some encouragement. He was, in other words, one of those publishers whom success, money, and fame hadn’t made arrogant and inaccessible, or who just went through the motions, seeing their writers as frauds and malingerers who, instead of doing real work, spent their time in pursuit of something entirely vague and pointless . . .
18
If it hadn’t been for the papers (the stateless one read them early in the mornings, in the hotel restaurant) and their talk of armaments, of the dizzying increases in prices and unemployment, of diplomatic negotiations and anxious urgency, one could have believed, here in Amsterdam, that one still dwelled in the good old Europe of yore, and that the threat of war, Munich, the Reichstag fire—that they were all just nightmares and apparitions of a sick imagination. Mr. van der Lange, his publisher, a man with a jutting lower jaw and calm, gentle eyes (as if the bottom of his face were separated from the upper part by centuries of civilization), conversed with him over cognac and coffee, as if the two of them inhabited some island together. Mr. van der Lange was very well informed about the situation in Germany, and in their conversation he evinced—in spite of all the strict discipline that supposedly consigns men of good upbringing and high culture to lives of self-control and sangfroid—no little concern over the fate of German culture and the future of the continent. As for those matters strictly related to business, he again took care of these with the politeness of a man both realistic and sober, and he put together a contract with the stateless one about which neither of the signa-tories could be dissatisfied. But when the other man laid out the “German situation” for him on the basis of his own experience, that is to say as a witness, Mr. van der Lange grew morose, like a person hearing something horrifically unpleasant and difficult to refute about his very own mother.
19
After that nervous and depressed Europe where the people were gathering in the streets to catch the words of orators and demagogues on the balconies, and where armies were goose-stepping through the cities while masses howled in the stadiums, the man without a country suddenly found himself in Amsterdam on that bright April day, as if in another world altogether. The market women offered their goods with voices that were hoarse but merry and betrayed no trace of anxiety; the housewives continued flipping the big wriggling fish at the stands; the young men rode around quite civilly on their bicycles, pushing the pedals slowly and steadily, spokes gleaming in the sun. Next to the marketplace stood a huge barrel organ, painted orange, looking like an elegant coach and cranking out a medley of songs. Two girls in traditional folk outfits, with their white kerchiefs and yellow wooden slippers, held out to pedestrians tin cans bearing the symbol of the Red Cross. Boats moved calmly along on the canals; on one of them multicolored laundry hung on the ropes to dry, and someone on deck was playing the harmonica as if trying to imitate a canary . . . Through narrow uncurtained windows families could be seen around tables with steaming dishes of food: bright accents on idyllic scenes of family life, the way they would have appeared on the canvas of a Dutch master.
20
Here in Amsterdam, in a lonely little street a stone’s throw from a canal, the man without a country looked up a fortune-teller one afternoon whose business was attracting attention with its over-the-top advertisements that no one could say were lacking in imagination: “What awa
its you on the morrow? Only God and Satan know. And their pupil, Herr Gottlieb.” And so forth.
21
He walked through the door, then pushed aside a heavy plush curtain and found himself plunged into reddish twilight emanating from a lamp with a red shade, lying on its side. After he had scanned the room, which seemed empty to him, he felt somewhat disappointed, as if he were experiencing déjà vu, as if he had already seen all of this somewhere. Above all it was professional curiosity that brought him to this “premium fortune-teller”; he wanted to have a complete mental inventory of the scene in case he should ever need to evoke it. But right away, right at the door, it dawned on him that he should allow this “soothsayer” to decide his fate, since he had already exhausted all other means: the advice of friends, priests . . .
THE LUTE AND THE SCARS Page 2