Invited to the private view, he was clean-shaven and his hair brushed but not over-brushed, the nonchalance of his hairstyle a style but nonetheless not an affectation, knowing as the pianist did the difference between style and affectation not only in the artistry of his playing, in particular, but also in his art of life, in general, the art of living with hair at ease and the art of playing with moderate pedal-usage, was driving on those still-chaotic roads and through the relatively medieval countryside, that smooth, masterful driving, not overusing the pedals, as the driver so the pianist, both gauging their pedaling just right, I gauge admirably the pianist was thinking of traversing fields and woods, gauging away, driving towards the cultural castle, he was not going to the private view for private viewing but intending to see the show without ulterior motive, had heard about the exhibition long before receiving the invitation, had received the invitation but long before receiving it already decided to visit the Brandenburgian castle of Neuhardenberg, was regardless of the invitation au fait with the music of the Third Reich, had practically no expectations of the private view, expected neither primary nor secondary benefits, had never expected more of private views than that he would not linger over them but he did have expectations of the exhibition; from the private view of course he would gain nothing more than the grease of hands shaken and presentations on autopilot but from the exhibition something, an affirmation, why not even a discovery, had indeed discovered Schoenberg’s Blue Self-Portrait, seen the majority of Schoenberg’s paintings, got to know the musician and also the painter. Most composers know nothing of Schoenberg’s approach to painting nor do most painters know much about his style of composition. The pianist had seen most of the self-portraits, yet had never before seen the Blue Self-Portrait, so stopped before that blue, felt the anxiety and chill, the awareness of time and negative space folding into itself, sought some affirmation that he knew would be pointless, bent over the case that held Schoenberg’s letter. He had peered at the letter and read it three or four times from the bottom up, starting with the signature which he knew and recognized, it was a humdrum letter to the Reich’s culture minister, Schoenberg pleading with the culture minister to recognize his music’s value to the nation, imploring one last time but too late, had in reality already said fuck off to the Nazis, fuck off face-to-face, Scheisse! Schoenberg’s face versus the Nazis’ face—that Schoenberg had balls, the pianist reflected as indeed he did every time he thought about Schoenberg, thought to himself while standing there facing the Blue Self-Portrait, to have balls or not to have them, the blue’s affront to the radiant sky and its chortling countryside, Scheisse to the Nazis long before they were marching through Munich. Look at that look, thought the pianist, anti-Nazi the look and anti-Nazi the portrait’s blue, Schoenberg’s expression promised nothing positive for the art of the future, conveyed an anxiety for the future, looked far beyond any definition of the work of art or of the future; the pianist weighed Schoenberg’s solitude and Schoenberg’s solitary conscience flaunted in advance: an insult to the national-socialist ethic, and it was with the pure, burning joy of having deepened his conscience, as pianist both composer and musician, thanks to this proof of Schoenberg’s courage as a painter displayed in the Neuhardenberg castle, that the pianist got in his car and drove back to Berlin, his heart punching his ribs, that he found, perhaps precisely in his own little car, puttering along the zoned-out roads of the Brandenburg countryside, a sparkling new, completely original and perfectly formed line of music, shaping there at the wheel and in anticipation the perfection of man in his time and man in the idea. The idea is indeed beautiful but it’s nothing without time and time is nothing without the idea; as a musician he had a sense of time as tempo, driving around in the pre-Polish countryside, the sense of this musical idea in time, dazzled by his insight, perceived the limits of his idea outside time, had to stop the car in order to get his brand-new melody down on paper, sitting in his car pulled over on the hard shoulder, right there he wrote down the melody. Thinking back to the pianist’s car made me feel sick, my knees went weak and my head was burning, I could have passed it off as airsickness but really it was shame, plain and simple, and by association of shames I recalled driving the pianist-composer-driver right round the bend by making him go up and down Neue Kanstrasse three times because I could no longer find the entrance to my Polish hostel, and my shameometer measured a new record with that devastating memory, my soles were damp, my temples throbbing and my eyes squeezed shut in aged penitent-nun style—which comes straight from my education—remembering the pianist’s exasperation after the third of our three back-and-forths, his deep sigh, his ever more visible and ever less restrained impatience for us to be done, um Gottes Willen, by the grace of God Schluss! Will this never end! I heard him, the irritation in his gritted teeth, I burned with shame as I pictured once more the pianist’s hands clamped rigid on the wheel, the pianist’s exasperation you had to see his clenched jaw, the pianist was wondering given apparent circumstances and who could blame him when this interminable evening would be over and at what hour he might finally go home to bed not to dream but to sleep that peaceful, silent, restorative sleep without visions that would allow him to hope for a new day just like all the other new days required for the equilibrium of a pianist-composer, a new day shaped by the essential practice that the pianist relied on to play the piano and the composer to compose.
I dived into my book with ridiculous zeal, I gulped down a dozen of Thomas Mann’s letters to Theodor W Adorno and a dozen of Theodor W Adorno’s to Thomas Mann, thinking it’s never too late to learn and staking everything on general knowledge and on literature in particular as if I could understand anything of the very lofty adumbrations of the one and of the equally lofty cogitations of the other, the other being just as singular as the one and the one as particular as the other, as if, through this correspondence about returning and in the language of Goethe which was beginning to escape me in great swathes and to dissolve into airspace, I might hope to grasp the most piddling portion of meaning in the pianist’s music, to accede to the pianist’s interpretation, knowing as he does better than anyone Adorno by heart and Mann by heart, and able, at the drop of a hat to give a public lecture on music in literature or on literature in music, when my sister said for the umpteenth time “I just love planes.” My sister just loves planes, she has flown over Madagascar in a plane, seen Johannesburg by plane, Venice by plane, she’s been in love with an aviator, fallen head over heels for the aviator’s plane and when you’re in love it’s forever, she had her eyes glued to the porthole, admiring our plane’s wing or, more precisely, its air brakes, saying it was crazy to think that one fine day some guy had invented the air brake, she said that was a real boy thing to invent the air brake, as if girls all had other fish to fry, lucky we had men to invent the air brake I thought, otherwise the only way out of here would be by parachute and parachutes also needed men to invent them. I used to know a para a time ago. He used to vacuum between the sheets, slept with a revolver under his pillow and played chess against himself. He had dumbbells and resistance bands and used to rub petrol into his hair so he wouldn’t go bald. He had a set of identical paratrooper’s shirts with epaulets and a set of stripy vests, also identical; a pile of indistinguishable shirts, a pile of vests: that was his wardrobe. Later on I copied him with the vests, I had a stash of them which I built up one by one, gradually, a vest for every jilting, quite soon I had a fair number, I had compiled my anti-marital wardrobe, having everything the same does not encourage connubiality, I revealed to my sister who has no inside knowledge of the subject but extensive acquaintance from the outside, my stack of vests was my para uniform, Debout les paras il est temps d’s’en aller sur la route au pas cadencé, he would sing Debout les paras, il est temps de sauter sur notre Patrie bien-aimée, had come to my parents’ house to whisk me away, had arrived at the parental home by sky like a true para, cooee, here I am, from time to time he would throw himself at my feet and sa
y, hands clasped in supplication, “I doan’ deserve ya” in his over-egged manner that confirmed my belief in very little indeed despite my religious education. Why do I remember the para now, perhaps so I can forget the pianist a minute, it makes a change but not much of one in the end, my identi-kitted para and pianist, para uniform and the pianist’s not so different, the para’s fatigues and those of the pianist comparable in every respect, the pianist dressed as a pianist and the para as a para, both of them dressed equally comme il faut for civvy street and for combat, the pianist’s civvies equivalent to the para’s, the pianist as much in awkward camouflage as the para in their respective civvies, I noted the consistency of get-up that marked the pianist as belonging to one classification and the para to another without making either one or other truly classifiable, each man first of all himself and not the other but each of them equally standard-issue, the one adapted to the international concert stage and the other to the French-speaking lands of Africa, the pianist at heart a fish out of water in francophone Africa and the para a shadow of himself on that stage I mean on his knees hands clasped I doan’ deserve ya, the pianist frankly looking rather silly out of uniform, that’s why I made that observation about his get-up as if this pianist’s mufti were my business, why I pointed out his civvy style, it’s funny seeing you like this, I said without counting to ten, nine or any number at all, I said I actually said it without a moment’s pause for thought it’s funny to see you in civvies, das ist komisch, said it without even counting to one, dropped that word komisch about his get-up just as I had once also found the para’s wardrobe of identical shirts and identical vests thoroughly komisch, it seems I haven’t made much progress between him and him, however different they were I had to spout my observation unsupported by any prior observing, why did I bring in the para? it was my sister and planes, my sister and her beloved air brakes, a fine masculine invention my sister gushed, and I thought she would have loved personally to have been the inventor of the air brake, seeing how she watched them rise and sink, why didn’t she invent the air brake, I suppose that comes down to her education. Thinking about my sister’s education triggered inside me, that is in my deepest and most true self, the muffled, heart-rending cry of a cow, a cow calling to her calf suffocating in silence. Not that my sister is poorly educated, at the end of the day her education isn’t as disastrous as all that, but it’s because of mine, my education, which was give or take very little the same as hers, and thinking about my own education has me plumbing the depths of my own identity. I think about it very rarely but that’s still a good deal too often and I think a good deal more often about my sister’s education, almost every time I see my sister, not—once again—that she was mis-educated, there are many worse educations than my sister’s, but because I know that education like no one else since it was practically the same as my own and because I often catch myself attributing her behaviors to the fallout of her education—which is a mistake for, unlike me, my sister has always been ineducable. That’s where I’d got to: doing my best not to get hung up on my sister’s failed education and my own successful one, when the plane swerved to the left, well to what I felt might be a left for I’ve never managed to acquire any certainty as to right and left not in the general sense but in the specific field of spatial scenarios, and there in the porthole, thanks to that sinister swerve, appeared the Wannsee.
I’d recognize it anywhere, you can forget trying it on with me about the Wannsee, I know it like the back of my hand, no other stretch of water seen from above can match the shape of the great Wannsee with her Peacock Island and her outlying lakes, why the clouds parted at the precise instant that the plane swerved to its supposed left so as to reveal the Wannsee I have no idea, I’d thought we were already much further from Berlin but we were still only flying over the Wannsee. And seeing it appear all at once like that socked me yet another attack of acute interior bellowing, I bellowed as hard as I could without outward expression, all the while projecting perfect serenity, pinpointed the Wannsee’s beach, bovine bellow, the Berliners bathing in the summer-blue water, those renowned Berlin family picnics with baguettes and Berlin camembert and Berlin Coca-Cola, beneath trees lining that beach of sand imported from the North Sea, warm water rippled by the completely naked swimmers who’ve been the majority for more than a century, Berliners in their birthday suits, in fact, doing gymnastic moves on the imported sand, after practicing their sidestroke and their German crawl, reputedly so dynamic and powerful, were hopping about on the artificial beach in the buff, touching their left hands to their right feet and right hands to their left feet, but as for the Wannsee Conference I hadn’t the first notion; the pianist has always known exactly what to think about it, he comprehends the substance of the word Wannsee, has no need to be reminded about the conference nor what was decided on the 20th of January 1942, the conference date is branded on the pianist’s brain, never flies out of his pianist’s head while in mine occupying only a tiny and un-synched mental broom cupboard; the 20th of January is my sister’s birthday nevertheless that never reminds me of 20th January 1942, every 20th of January I think of my sister’s birthday, a date which fatally recalls my own approaching birthday and vile time that keeps on passing but not once on that date have I thought I am wishing my sister a happy birthday on the Wannsee Conference; for the pianist the date of that conference is, should a single date be called for, the only one to remember, no other date is more significant than that 20th of January 1942, not for him but for the whole of humanity, as he tells not absolutely everyone but he does tell anyone who’ll listen, he knows who was there and why on that twentieth day in January of that year, 1942, who was sitting around the table, sitting and playing their part in the decision, knows the name of each of the participants though I don’t. I spotted the Wannsee from my porthole but instead of remembering first of all the 20th of January 1942, I thought first of the Berliners who go to bathe there every summer since they brought in that fine sand from the North Sea shores, of the Berliners stretched out on that artificial beach chatting about the weather and love and the fine Berlin lifestyle without worrying again and again over Heydrich whose father was a composer and director of the conservatorium, both one and the other and who had given his son the worst of bad educations, the pianist said pointedly more than once, a bastard of a dad will make scum of his son, educated him in such a way that one day, that notorious day of my sister’s birthday whose date I remembered only out by a few years, his son along with his pal Goering, yes Goering was his pal, one day he organized a conference for his friends. The pianist cannot play at all nor the composer compose without recalling that conference on the Wannsee, and Heydrich: the name is not only familiar to him but this name, Heydrich, is on his mind every moment of the day, forgetting a single Heydrich, father or son, would have immediate consequences for his interpretation of Beethoven and of Liszt, the pianist said to whoever would listen, immediate consequences for his composition and for everything else, you can’t play any of that romantic, so-called classical music as if the Heydrichs had not existed, he would say giving his angelic smile before launching into Beethoven, without letting up would explain in his polite and respectful manner to the Auditorium audience which was there to listen to classical music and not to hear a pianist saying that to play Beethoven you must know not only Beethoven but also the Heydrichs, not only Heydrich the son but Heydrich the father too, the composer, der Komponist with a big K, a second-rate capital-letter composer nonetheless a craftsman of German music, you do follow my meaning, as director of the conservatorium, the pianist explained to the girl who was keen to listen, and thus director of musical minds, and thus instructor of young people with bright futures such as Germany was mass-producing at the time, instructor to the musical youth that would only, from one day to the next, turn into Hitler Youth, verstehst du? She did understand, the pianist saw in the girl’s eyes, the training of musical consciences means nothing to anyone but for this girl it does, the pianist thought
observing her eyes, this girl who of youth and musicianship, of the ravages of music upon youth and of those of youth upon music, had no historical knowledge but who knew, how could she know, the girl’s eyes now, where to put himself in their light, he wished he’d not brought up the Heydrichs, wished he’d spoken neither of father nor son, thought he should have given up peddling his 20th January 1942 from one girl to the next but each time he catches himself banging on about that day, for the pianist discussion of 20th January 1942 is the prior condition for any relationship, but its inevitable end he knows from experience, still each time whips out his pet date and each time destroys the relationship, girls in good health fleeing one after the other or delicate girls dropping like ninepins, one or the other, but this one not fleeing or dropping, the pianist sees, flights and drops he’s seen a thousand variants, but not with her, this girl who crosses and uncrosses her legs, the Heydrichs father and son don’t finish her off, rather they bring the girl and the pianist so, so close together, each word on the Heydrichs from the pianist’s mouth could equally have come from the girl’s mouth, so naturally that the pianist would like to kiss and lay her down and hold her tight against him until all fundamental differences have been effaced; I should have remembered about the 20th of January 1942 when I caught sight of the Wannsee then saw it disappear again in the space of a heartbeat, I don’t know how I could see that water and not think first if not of the father at least of the son, I did think of them but too late, the mistake once again irreparable. The spontaneity of my non-thinking about Heydrich the younger pierced me like a dagger-thrust, the kind that makes warmongers regret war, once again I was ashamed too late as is always the case with me and shame, a belated shame with this devastating effect on my physical condition, and on that of my morale as well as my physique, so terribly moral and much too belated as ever when it comes to me and morality. Moral spontaneity should be learned as young as possible, a flaw in my education I thought, here I go again complaining about my education, a complaint that’s good for nothing but to justify a lack of moral spontaneity; that the two Heydrichs, the Nazi friend of Goering and the Nazi composer and conservatorium director should have zero moral spontaneity: that is what permitted the Wannsee Conference; that this education was catastrophic for Heydrich’s personal development and for humanity: that’s what the Wannsee Conference proved, and even if Heydrich had said something, pointless to expect a single word from Heydrich, however I’ve strained to hear it, the pianist said, I’ve never heard that one word: Entschuldigung. Thanks would not have made much difference, made absolutely no difference for the millions of cadavers foreseen by the younger Heydrich and his friends at the Wannsee of whom Goering was his closest pal, as badly educated as Heydrich, the education of Goering the man is far removed from the education of man in general, which is a construction of man in the idea, the pianist said one day at a conference at Humboldt University, Humboldt’s education is like that of Schiller an exemplary education, an ideal education, die Erziehung des Menschen, that of Goering was not and all’s done that’s done. The plane’s wing rose again, I dived into a letter from Adorno, I recalled the pianist’s saying that if Adorno had been attended to Heydrich would have stayed put in the place he belonged, he’d explained to the Auditorium audience before beginning the concerto, in his place as Heydrich’s son dramatically educated by his composer father, not only but also purveyor of a collective musical future and director of the Conservatorium, in his place as a murderer, and had Mann not written to Adorno we would have to read the correspondence between the Heydrichs father and son, the conservatorium director and the murderer, that’s what we’d have to read, the pianist said to the Auditorium audience which was losing patience, there not for history but for classical music, with no wish to rehash the old tale, what’s done is done, the impatience of the Auditorium audience which wanted to hear Beethoven’s music not listen to Beethoven’s howl, let themselves be moved by Beethoven’s music without knowing if Beethoven’s bust had ever been chiseled for Hitler and if Beethoven was played at Theresienstadt, I began to sweat so copiously that I had to take a handkerchief from my pocket and wipe my face and hands, my back was soaked, I had caught the Wannsee fever, I knew this was no air-sickness but rather the sight of water, of that water, of the Wannsee, which resembles no other waterway seen from above. You go to Venice and end up dying of cholera, you go to a sanatorium and contract tuberculosis, you catch sight of the Wannsee and burn with fever, step into the Kaiser Café and you’ll die of shame.
Blue Self-Portrait Page 2