At the Kaiser Café, there before the pianist, I ordered a Berliner, I looked relaxed, sitting in a club chair by the window, resolved not to knot my legs like snakes nor scrunch my shoulders up, I must say that after my Café Einstein experience I was defensive. You’re terrifying him with your wired body language, my sister said, think what you’d be like in a massage parlor or a Turkish bath! I couldn’t see myself in a Turkish bath, I’ve never frequented baths of any stripe or massage parlors, hairdressers are torture enough, I said to my sister, letting myself be shampooed, then snipped and styled and sent to the dryer to wait under that hood and finished off with hair spray, it destroys me every time, pamper myself at the hairdresser? not on your nelly, beneath this hair I resist hairdressing so hard that instead of feeling better leaving than when I went in, I feel worse, to be honest, I come out of there each time with a stranger’s head on my shoulders, no relation to the rest of me, interior and exterior no longer connected, capillary alienation as re-self-estrangement, die Entfremdung beim Friseur, I translated, you’re mixing everything up said my sister, you confuse getting your hair done with looking after yourself but they’re two separate things, my sister knows what I’m like, looking after yourself means aligning your mind to be in tune with your body, my sister sometimes comes out with this kind of thing. I could already picture the healthy mind in a healthy body, it was the end and the means brought together but which one to begin with, I asked myself there in the Kaiser Café. First I tried to focus on the healthy body and started smoking as if it was my last smoke in this life, all smokers believe they’re smoking their last smoke more than they ever used to and until they feel sick. Thomas Mann and Theodor W Adorno were in my bag, I was counting on them for the healthy mind, between them those two would get me over my DTs, Thomas Mann had good reason to worry about culture and literature, Theodor W Adorno his own reasons to fear the worst for music and philosophy, here in the Kaiser in this cozy ambiance I had no real reason to worry, I was trying to keep perspective by switching between the two and in order not to be found waiting for the pianist while I waited for him, when in he came.
The pianist’s entrance is always a big moment, I had expected this moment to be a big one and I wasn’t disappointed. He was admirably himself, pianist and composer and himself all at once, did not appear as the pianist making his entrance but entered, made his entrance without ostentation or affectation or complication, nor in any other manner but simply and authentically without care for authenticity, not trying to make an authentic entrance and not presenting himself as a pianist entering but simply came in. The simplicity of the pianist’s entrance struck me like a bullseye in my club chair, already I was under his spell before he’d said a single word and without his having to play a single note, in any case there wasn’t a piano in the Kaiser Café and he wasn’t there for a recital, wasn’t dressed as a pianist but in everyday things, was not wearing his pianist’s black polo-neck or his standard black trousers with the crease at the front or his black polished recital shoes, presented himself au naturel but not naked, in casuals, I instantly noticed the pianist’s lack of elegance, elegant at Café Einstein but not at the Kaiser, the pianist quite as awkward and under-cover as the para in his civvies, the pianist komisch in civvies, laidback like any friend coming by for a coffee in the company of any lady friend, as one does now and then when one is well brought up and this pianist was that, had no need of any special education to make him well brought up without, for all that, having to comply with the requirements of collective happiness. Not a trace of collective happiness in our pianist. Nothing in his eyes to make you think that the pianist might at some time or another have been burdened by the quest or the realization of this collective happiness, no trace of happiness in this smiling, warm and friendly person, sitting in the club chair beside mine, I began to shiver from head to toe, couldn’t stop shivering although it wasn’t cold and I didn’t have the flu, but was trembling like a sick sheep. From cow to sheep my bestiary is domestic, I realized to my annoyance, I should have preferred a wild animal without a pack on its back, I could just see myself galloping across the steppe or the pampas or the taiga and gamboling unwittingly like a savage without a stitch on, skin and bones nothing more, what a stupid sick Dolly I am, the pianist has noticed, he has seen the sheep’s shivering but made no comment either agreeable or disagreeable, he has counted to ten unlike others such as myself, ordered a blended rather than a single malt, topped up to the brim with water and ice, so straight away, despite my sheepish and shaky state, I allowed myself to use the whisky to break his ice. Why I started with the whisky I’ll never know but what I do know is that’s where I started and nothing now can make it so I didn’t. He’d hardly ordered his tall blended whisky on the rocks when I pointed out, in the thoughtless way I’ve made my own, that he was a real American to be drinking a thing like that; why I said that I’ve no idea however I turn it around in my head, perhaps because I couldn’t make myself wait, sat like a sheep in my club chair, for him to begin the conversation himself, perhaps because as soon as he arrived I noticed a slight malaise about the pianist, and by way of reassurance could muster only an old-fashioned bit of chaffing, perhaps a way of establishing our relationship on a level of frank camaraderie from the outset. If I’d been able to show off my frank camaraderie by taking a spin round the table while sat backwards astride my chair like those imbecile Nazis of course I’d have done it, I thought there in the plane, I could see myself singing one of those Nazi hymns to the glory of comradeship, schmettern die hellen Fanfaren, I established my relationship with the pianist thoroughly indifferent to collective happiness on this repugnant platform, calling him American in a stupid and frankly Nazi-comradeish fashion despite knowing nothing at all about his personal feelings towards America. You never know what kind of bond an American may have with America, one not only American but also German, not only German but also a pianist, that not only but moreover a composer, not only him but actually anyone at all with America, it’s a mystery this bond any Tom or Dick can have with America, the pianist’s America was measured out in bourbon, topped up with water and chilled with ice, that was the only way to appreciate whisky in its American incarnation, which is what I was missing, I was sticking with my well-known good taste, not innate but belatedly acquired, in the context of an apparently successful marriage which had led me to encounter though not necessarily recognize all kinds of whiskys, single and pure malts, and to despise fans of blended whisky, those drinkers being not enlightened enthusiasts but a lower class of consumers, as conceded by all true enthusiasts distinguished by their refusal of admixture, consumption combines while good taste defines, this is what I’d learned in the context of my marriage, my objective then: success founded on the theoretical knowledge of whisky, I therefore pursued the single-mindedness particular to good taste which cannot be learned for lack of a particular upbringing. These were my prejudices around taste, acquired belatedly and still channeling my judgment in accordance with conventions whose universally relative nature I didn’t always understand, I judged without considering the pianist’s capacity to judge which had enabled him serenely to sip his tall blended whisky on the rocks without in any way snapping back at this my anti-American sarcasm of the lowest kind, the most questionable sarcasm given the knee-jerk anti-Americanism that the pianist was always condemning and which I’d never meant to be part of, in which I was participating despite myself, which I made no attempt to resist: pro-Americanism would have been equally poorly received, the pianist has never been pro-American, has never supported America for America’s sake nor America versus the rest of the world, he has more than once taken a stand against America but without anti-Americanism either knee-jerk or of any other kind, ordering a blended whisky on the rocks was not a pro-American decision and called for no further anti-American critique, yet I criticized the pianist’s choice without first taking a deep breath and counting to ten or any other number, criticism he thought uncalled-for, being fir
st and foremost a pianist-composer well up on America, better informed than he is hard to find. The pianist’s bond with blended whisky was in some way loaded, so I gathered from the nervy way the pianist had placed his order, as if it were quite a complex order and called for lengthy explanation to the Kaiser’s waiter, who it seemed did not serve tall blended whiskys on the rocks every day, the way he snatched up the glass and made the ice swirl inside it. Doubtless the pianist felt a personal bond with blended whisky, not in the way an alcoholic effectively fosters a personal bond with her drink, the pianist, I’d observed right from the start, has nothing remotely alcoholic about him, nothing could be further removed from the pianist than alcoholism, since our first encounter he’d behaved in that naturally unalcoholic manner typical not of teetotalers, for to be dry one must once have drunk, I mean drunk the way an alcoholic drinks, teetotalism is quite as excessive as alcoholism, one high-flying alcoholic used to say who knew what he was talking about. I knew an alcoholic, he used to practice moderation in his abstinence and overdid nothing else; he’d disabused me by stealth, shooting down anything that moved, he was a crack marksman, taught me to aim and to fire into the crowd, he would shoot at point-blank range till none were left, till Auslöschung and would drink moderately till he could drink no more, would prep himself the night before for the last drink of the day to come, unfailingly downed propped upright till first light and would hold forth upon significances, philosophizing about the world, understanding the earth’s tendency to spin as his world tilted and the deep meaning of everything in the depths of the bottle, with his lubricated ideas resisted non-lubricated ideas which express nothing definitively true only half-truths for the alcoholic to denounce. Denouncing the world’s half-truths by means of unarguable alcoholic truths was the alcoholic’s ceaseless work, it’s my job as an alcoholic, he would say, wetting his ever-thirsty whistle, never missed the chance to do his job whatever the working conditions, he was that reliable with work, never put off even when it was obviously a good deal too much for one man alone. The para used to drop from the sky and skip right over the facts, swinging from his parachute he could see the army’s colorful lies in Africa’s outline while the alcoholic was penetrating the quintessence of the world and analyzing that quintessence which no one would ever see from a parachute, explaining how bodies fall, the free-fall of inertial bodies and Africa’s free-fall down the woozy truth of the world’s luge, truth lies not in the leap but in the slide, it’s in the full but not the empty; at the Kaiser Café the pianist was neither between heaven and earth nor between one drink and the next, simply keeping up his unalcoholic bond with blended whisky, an intimate and precious connection, perhaps even more intimate and precious than the pianist’s bond with his car, a relationship one doesn’t enter into just like that, in open comradeship, but that remains for ever mystical and personal.
So, drinking his tall blended whisky on the rocks in the Neuhardenberg castle’s restaurant, he waited, flanked by the black trees of three months of winter, for something to come and pluck him from this solitude which meant nothing to him, solitude often mattered to him, now and then he’d say I need solitude, would think I need it, solitude would come at his summons, on summoning it he would remain with it standing behind the wall listening to the noise of his contemporaries, could hear the noise from behind that wall better than anywhere else, sometimes he would go looking, crossing the Tiergarten on foot, beneath the striding angel, protected by the angel and whatever the weather, for solitude before the fall, would find in the garden, beneath the angel and following the path, the wall he needed for composing, on the path would be shot down by a firing squad and pictured himself falling, face-down in the dust thick with his head’s blood, after which he could walk on again, at a rapid pace, does he know how to walk any way other than as if between airports, listening out with just one ear, he could hear the brand-new sounds of the brand-new year, the end of the crows and the cuckoos’ début, when he thought of it though he rarely thought of it, he would set the new sounds to his walking tempo, considered the tempo, of the music not the walking, although walking and music are often associated, could hear the cuckoo, its insecure third dipping a little towards the fourth, so little it was barely, the random spacing of the cuckoo’s call, the uncalculated length of the silence between each call, he was measuring the times by his steps, three steps, two, then seven, then two, four, then three, circling around Neuhardenberg the still-dominant crows, perched on the black trees and the wrong solitude, he knew that this solitude did nothing for him, drinking his tall blended whisky on the rocks, alone and more than alone, the birds are no help, made the birds vanish, off you vanish now, more solitary than ever without them, leaving the exhibition so perfectly explicit as to the effects of collective happiness, his morale fatally punctured by the display of works from the times of collective happiness: those joyous, glowing, Aryan children singing songs of happiness; pink-cheeked, broad-hipped seed-sowers sowing joy and good health; and the sunlit landscapes of peasant labor, he was at the same time resolved to suffer no more of collective happiness, of the exhibition would retain only the Blue Self-Portrait, thought he glimpsed in the darkness of the estate’s trees something of nature resisting nature, like a natural idea of resistance. The pianist’s fingers practicing in mid-air, the pianist’s technique in practice on the fabric of his jacket, the pianist’s technique in counterpoint to nature, he grew impatient as if waiting for someone, Lord above um Gottes Willen I need someone to talk naturally about nature without giving in to the natural temptation quite naturally to love nature, it must be possible, on leaving the display of collective happiness, to find refuge in some unexplored region of nature in not its natural but its savage state, not admired but brutish, not beautiful but pre-Polish. He had looked for the girl in Neuhardenberg Castle, distractedly looked but not seen her. He would have liked to bump into the girl at the exhibition but she wasn’t there, he would have liked, yet hadn’t gone there in order to bump into her either, didn’t exactly have views on the girl nor hopes regarding her, had never looked to have any privileged relationship with her but now, over his topped-up whisky would rather have liked a girl and even that particular girl, precisely her, that one, why not, the girl laid up on rocks of ice, savored by every part of his tongue, he drove out the thought, had thought it only once but that day no, didn’t want, had pictured her laid out only once but at Neuhardenberg Castle balked, wanted to discuss the exhibition, exchange a few thoughts on music and the Third Reich, discuss Schoenberg perhaps or Eisler or Brecht or Theresienstadt or the resistance to collective happiness put up by all artists classed as degenerate and persecuted by happiness even in their nightmares, with that girl he’d have had no need to explain or comment or define or defend his idea which was not a vision of the world but a counter-vision, she would have understood how he’d seen the exhibition and how he’d been changed by what he’d seen, yes: changed, not amazed or shocked or surprised, she’d have understood the mood in which he was leaving, she yes understood perfectly for she’d have seen the exhibition how it was possible to see it and absolutely not in the way it was impossible and forbidden to see it, no need to show her, that girl, how to see the exhibition nor to make her comprehend the Nazis’ musical perversion. He was able at the drop of a hat to point out the alienation that music achieved, the cul-de-sac of it, the musical decay it demanded, to whoever would listen, he was ready to explain over and over, but for the girl no point, not getting hung up on these everyday obscenities, exchanging something other than harmony and something quite other than musical sentiment, she would spontaneously have kept well away from harmony and sentiments and would instantly have seen the impossibility of all ‘poetic’ poetry without his having to explain anything at all to her about poets, wouldn’t simply have grasped the impossibility but would have positioned herself entirely outside that poetic musical emotion, would, that girl, have been the ideal partner to take to the exhibition. But she wasn’t there. The pianist ha
d been alone with his thoughts about dead poetry and music’s abolition, had come out broken as a person by a barren and devastating solitude, hands gripping the glass and gaze lost in his tall whisky. He was not however, gaze in his glass, there in the Neuhardenberg castle’s restaurant, alone in the true sense of the word, his companion was right there, entirely pleasant company, the ideal accompaniment in fact, the very one for him, conducive to creativity for which you need serenity and calm and mental tranquility and for which what you really don’t need is complications; a habit, this accompaniment, an habitual accompaniment, the pianist might have been thinking, relieved in the end not to have bumped into the girl yet at the same time not altogether, for though he really didn’t want complications he did rather want them too, didn’t want the girl but did want her too, felt incapable of talking about the music but was also dying to give it a good talking-about, one would never say anything about Theresienstadt but something must be said, impossible to say anything to the usual accompaniment but impossible not to and most of all not to hear the accompaniment talk about Theresienstadt in terms both polished from the verb to polish and acceptable from the verb to accept, discussing Theresienstadt in terms initially inadequate and finally insulting and destructive. The black trees speak more eloquently of Theresienstadt than my usual accompaniment, thought the pianist, sucking the peatiness around his tongue, staring at the black trees outside, and being so implicated in the sombre nature of the coda to a Brandenburg winter was an even greater comfort to him than Schoenberg’s Blue Self-Portrait in and of itself, a self-portrait that he hung unthinkingly in the black branches whose musical significance he understood and whose palette of winter tones he found precisely those of the park at Neuhardenberg. The gloomy palette of the Brandenburgian winter added nothing to the painting; this direct connection between gloomy nature and the painting was an entirely personal fantasy, Schoenberg had painted his portrait without the black trees and the black trees themselves were self-sufficient, independent of Schoenberg.
Blue Self-Portrait Page 3