They love old Rome, antique Roman Rome, they love the fora with their battered grandeur, they love looking at the ancient hills in the evenings, the views of cypresses and solitary pines, they love the now functionless pillars, the marble staircases leading nowhere, the sundered arches over the filled-in chasms commemorating victories whose names figure in schoolbooks, they love the House of Augustus and they quote from Horace and Virgil, they adore the Rotunda of the Vestal Virgins, and they pray at the Temple of Fortune. I listen to them, speaking knowledgeably of new finds, discussing archaeological digs and museum treasures; and I love them too, love the old gods, love beauty long buried in the ground now visible once more, I love the proportions and the smooth cold stone skin of the old statuary, but still more I love Rome as it is now, alive and manifest to me, I love its skies, Jupiter's fathomless sea, and I imagine we're drowned, we're Vineta, and up on top of the element that washes around us are ships never seen by us, sailing on dazzling seas, and Death casts his invisible net over the city, I love the streets, the corners, the stairways, the quiet courtyards with urns, ivy and lares, and the raucous squares with daredevil Lambretta riders, I love the people sitting on their doorsteps of an evening, their jokes, their expressive gestures, their gift for comedy, their conversation which is lost on me, I love the bubbling fountains with their sea gods, nymphs and tritons, I love the children sitting on the marble edge of the fountains, those tumbling, garlanded, cruel little Neros, I love the bustle, friction, barging, and shouting and laughter and looks on the Corso, and the obscenities that are whispered to ladies in passing, and I love the stiff, empty larvae of the ladies' countenances, which the dirt helps to form, and I love their replies, their humiliation and their pleasure in these indecent tributes, which they bury underneath their street-masks in their real faces, and carry home with them and into their women's dreams, I love the gleaming affluent shopfronts, the displays of the jewellers and the bird hats of the milliners, I love the snooty little Communist on the Piazza della Rotonda, I love the long, shiny espresso bar with the hissing, steam-belching machine and the men sitting there, drinking hot strong bitter-sweet coffee from little cups, I love hearing Verdi's music booming out in the passage in front of the Piazza Colonna from the loudspeakers of the television studios and echoing back from the fin de siècle stucco façades, I love the Via Veneto, the cafés of Vanity Fair, with their funny chairs and colourful awnings, I love the leggy, slim-hipped models, their dyed hair the colour of flame, their pale faces, their great staring eyes, fire that I can't touch, I love the happy, stupid athletic gigolos in attendance, traded by the wealthy corseted ladies, I love the dignified American senators who get audiences with the Pope and can buy anything they want, I love the gentle, white-haired automobile kings, who spend their fortunes on supporting science, art and literature, I love the homosexual poets in their tight drainpipe jeans and pointy thin-soled shoes, living off awards and shaking their jangling silver bracelets coquettishly back from the overlong cuffs of their shirts, I love the old mouldering bathing-ship anchored in front of the Castle of the Angels on the turbid Tiber, and its naked red light-bulbs in the night, I love the small, secret, incense-steeped, art- and ornament-crammed churches, even though Kürenberg finds baroque Rome disappointing, I love the priests in their robes of black, red, violet and white, the Latin Mass, the seminarians with fear in their faces, the old prebendaries in stained soutanes and beautiful greasy Monsignore hats with funny red cords round their waists and fear in their faces, the old women kneeling at confessionals with fear in their faces, the poor cracked hands of the beggars in front of the carved and worked portals of the chapels and their fear trembling like the vein in their throats, I love the little shopkeeper in the Street of the Workers, cutting great slices of mortadella like leaves, I love the little markets, the fruit-sellers' stalls all green red orange, the tubs of the fishmongers full of obscure sea-creatures and all the cats of Rome prowling along the walls
and the two of them, two firm silhouettes, had stepped up to the window, the tall French window, and they looked down into the illuminated pit of the street below, and they looked across at other hotels like their own in many-storied stone buildings by the station, full of travellers, electrical signs flashed their temptations, and Rome was ready as ever to be conquered, and Kürenberg was thinking about Siegfried's music, the flow of feeling he wanted to tighten and compress and cool for this city tomorrow, and Ilse stood beside him and looked at the roofs of automobiles creeping along the bottom of the street like an armoured column of cockroaches, she saw the brief, harmless flash of lightning in the wires over the electric trolleybuses, she saw through the convention of pretending death didn't exist, the unanimous agreement to deny terror, the ownership of the buildings she saw was set out in the land register, and even the Romans, well acquainted with ruin and the devastation of former splendour, believed in the everlastingness of this particular arrangement of stones on the old earth, she saw the mystery plays of trade, these also based on the delusions of eternity, inheritance and certainty, she saw the blooming and withering miracles of advertisements, whose colours had played on her own childhood too, quicksilver lights or dragon candles, and how simple-minded of her father it had been to put up a wall of books, music and art between her girlish life and the store, a false bastion, mild lamplight extinguished for ever. She shivered and thought how cold everything felt. It's late, she thought. And she thought: This young man has come from my home town and he writes symphonies, and his grandfather may have played the harpsichord or the flute, but his father killed my father, who collected books and loved listening to the Brandenburg Concertos. She took Kürenberg's hand, forced her own cold and inert hand into the fist of the conductor, which felt warm, dry, firm and dependable.
Kürenberg was still looking down into the street, thinking: One could tell their future. He had met analysts, sociologists, economic planners, atom-splitters, international lawyers, politicians and PR men. They were a devilish breed. The devilish breed made up his audience. They went to his concerts. He shut the window and asked Siegfried, 'Do you remember Augustine's saying about music, that it was what great men gave themselves over to when their day's work was done, to refashion their souls?' Siegfried didn't remember. He hadn't read Augustine. He was an ignoramus. There was so much that he didn't know. He blushed. Are they great, the men I know? Kürenberg asked himself. And if they aren't, where are the truly great men? And do they have souls that can be refashioned by music in the evening? Did Augustine know great men? And did those whom he thought to be great men think him one? So many questions! Kürenberg had a high opinion of Siegfried's work. He looked to him for surprise, for a wholly new language. It might sound horrible to the generality which lagged behind the times; but it would carry a new message. A new message for the few who were capable of hearing it. Were those the great men Augustine had in mind? Man wants to know, even if knowledge makes him unhappy. Kürenberg smiled. But he spoke seriously: 'I don't know who you compose for. But I believe your music has a purpose in the world. Ignorant people may whistle when they hear it. Don't let that put you off. Never try to satisfy people's wishes. Disappoint the season-ticket holder. But disappoint him with humility, not with arrogance. I'm not advising you to climb the ivory tower. For heaven's sake, don't live for your art! Go out on the street. Listen. Remain alone. You're lucky to be lonely. When you're on the street, stay as lonely as you might be in the isolation of a lab. Experiment with everything, all the splendour and grime of our world, with humiliation and greatness—maybe you'll find a new sound!'
And Siegfried thought of voices, of the voices of the street, he thought of the voices of vulgarity, of fear, of torment, of greed, of love, goodness and prayer, he thought of the sound of evil, the whisper of unchastity and the shout of crime. And he thought: Tomorrow he will humble me, come to me with his laws of harmony and his schoolmasterly strictness, celebrated chef d'orchestre that he is, an exact reader of a score, a gardener with pruning shears
, while I'm all weeds and wilderness. And Kürenberg said, as though he read Siegfried's mind: 'I believe in our collaboration. There are contradictions in me and in you that don't contradict each other.' And the life into which they had been pitched was contradictory, and they contradicted their kind.
Judejahn had felt himself under observation, and had withdrawn. He retreated, with his angular skull between his hunched shoulders—retreat or tactical withdrawal, the way a patrol between the lines in no man's land retreats or withdraws when they feel they've been spotted; no shots are fired, no flares light the night sky, fate hangs in the balance, but they withdraw, creep back through barbed wire and vegetation, back to their own position, and conclude for the moment that the enemy position is impregnable. And the murderer too, the hunted criminal, presses back into the shadows, the jungle, the city, when he senses the bloodhounds are near by, when he knows he's in the policeman's field of vision. Likewise the sinner flees the eye of the Lord. But what of the godless man who doesn't know himself to be a sinner, where does he turn? Straight past God, and into the desert! Judejahn didn't know who was watching him. He saw no spies. There was only a priest in the lobby—Rome was crawling with religious brethren—standing strangely transfixed and staring like Judejahn through the glazed double door at the animated company sitting at the table, drinking and talking. It was a German Stammtisch, a table established in the German way but transported provisionally to a southern latitude; and, objectively speaking, there was only the wood and glass of the double door to separate Judejahn and his brother-in-law, Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, but he had remained seated: whether he was holding forth here or in front of the town council at home, he had remained seated, whereas Judejahn had strode boldly on, boldly and blindly on with the watchword that God is dead. He had gone further than the burghers in the hall, but it was they who had made it possible for him to go so far. They had underwritten his wanderings with their lives. They had invoked blood, they had summoned him, exhorted him, the world will be won by the sword, they had made speeches, there was no death to compare with death in battle, they had given him his first uniform, and had cowered before the new uniform he had made for himself, they had praised his every action, they had held him up as an example to their children, they had summoned the 'Reich' into being, and endured death and injury and the smoke from burning bodies all for the sake of Germany. But they themselves had remained seated at their table in the old German beer hall, German slogans on their garrulous tongues, Nietzsche clichés in their brains, and even the Führer's words and the Rosenberg myth had only been exhilarating clichés for them, while for Judejahn they had been a call to arms: he had set out, little Gottlieb wanted to change the world, well well, so he was a revolutionary, and yet he detested revolutionaries and had them flogged and hanged. He was stupid, a dim little Gottlieb, worshipping punishment, little Gottlieb afraid of a beating and desiring to beat, powerless little Gottlieb, who had gone on a pilgrimage to power, and when he had reached it and had seen it face to face, what had he seen? Death. Power was Death. Death was the true Almighty. Judejahn had accepted it, he wasn't frightened, even little Gottlieb had guessed that there was only this one power, the power of death, and only one exercise of power, which was killing. There is no resurrection. Judejahn had served Death. He had fed plentiful Death. That set him apart from the burghers, the Italian holiday-makers, the battlefield tourists; they had nothing, they had nothing except that nothing, they sat fatly in the midst of nothing, they got ahead in nothing, until finally they perished in nothing and became part of it, as they always had been. But he, Judejahn, he had his Death and he clung to it, only the priest might try to steal it from him. But Judejahn wasn't about to be robbed. Priests might be murdered. Who was the fellow in the black frock? A pimply face, a haggard youth seething with lust under the womanish robes. The priest too was looking at the assembly in the lobby, and he too seemed to be repulsed by it. But he was no ally for Judejahn. Judejahn was equally revolted by the priest and the burghers. He recognized that the burghers' position was impregnable for today. But time was in Judejahn's favour, and so he would return to the desert, drill recruits for Death, and one day, when battlefields were more than tourist attractions, then Judejahn would be on the march again.
He fled the hotel. He fled the sight of the burghers, the priest, fled the eye of the unseen spy. It wasn't cowardice, it wasn't disgrace, it was a tactical withdrawal. If Judejahn had set foot in the lobby, if Judejahn had shown his face among them, the burghers would have leapt up, they would have clustered round him, but it would have been for an evening of hero-worship, and then they would have cast their bourgeois net over him. Eva might be lurking at one of the lit-up windows—a mother and a heroine, why hadn't she died that May of shame? But she was still alive; and Judejahn could imagine sitting with her in a German lounge, going to the job that Pfaffrath would fix up for him, coming home from the job that Pfaffrath had fixed up for him; they would eat roast goose and drink Rhine wine, presumably brother-in-law Pfaffrath's job would run to that, and on the Führer's birthday and on the ninth of November Eva would wear the brooch on her dress—so long as it hadn't been stolen, the occupying forces were after souvenirs and valuables, Judejahn knew that—the golden swastika brooch, a present from the Führer, and she would stare at him when the news came on the radio, and Heuss spoke, and Adenauer spoke, when their neighbours played nigger songs, and she would stare and think: You're alive you're alive you're alive. And he would be alive and think of the desert, the desert from which he would reconquer Germany. He dropped into a cookshop somewhere on his way, which was now aimless, he entered a miasma of oil and batter and sea smells, he went up to the buffet, he could have wolfed the lot down, he was racked by an incredible hunger. There were some large white beans, a German dish, a dish from his schooldays and his childhood. He pointed to it, but the beans were not warm, they were not German, they were slick with oil, tart with vinegar, and they had a fishy taste as well, because what he had taken to be meat was blubbery fish; but he wolfed it all down, and then an order of pasta to follow, regular Italian-style noodles, the tomato sauce rimmed his mouth in a slobbery wet kiss, spaghetti dangled from his lips, they'd forgotten to bring him a knife, and he sucked them into his mouth like a cow eating long grass, and it took another half-litre of Chianti to cleanse Judejahn and make him human again. Or so he thought.
The human reached the Piazza San Silvestro through a maze of alleys. He saw the electric sign announcing the telephone exchange. That suited his purpose. He went inside, saw the booths with telephones in them, didn't know how to use them, he wrote down the name of the Pfaffraths' hotel on a piece of paper, gave it to a girl at the counter, who looked up the number for him in a directory and sold him a telephone coupon, then he stood in one of the booths, dialled the number, he heard 'Pronto', and he spoke German into the mouthpiece, said he wanted Pfaffrath, heard, clicks and whirring and footsteps, and then Pfaffrath was there on the line, replying in the correct official style, aware of his rank. 'Oberbürgermeister Pfaffrath here. Who's calling, please?' And Judejahn felt like shouting back, 'Hello, you asshole!' Or should he rasp out his own titles, his military and party rank, or even the florid Arabian one he now held? Should he describe himself as Chief Eunuch or Harem Administrator or Desert Fox, or squeak out 'Gottlieb here'? And he was such a shrunken little Gottlieb that he didn't reach up to the mouthpiece and he merely said 'Judejahn', but he spoke the name with such emphasis that power, violence and death resonated down the line. Now it was Pfaffrath's turn to clear his throat, to change down from Oberbürgermeister to brother-in-law, presumably also getting over his terror on hearing the voice of the dear departed, pride and scourge of the family, whichever, whose resurrection he was awaiting; it probably took him a while to muster courage to confront Judejahn. And he said excitedly, 'Where are you? We've been waiting for you.' And Judejahn coolly replied that he had plenty to do and little time, and he summoned them to his own hotel for the following day, th
e splendid palace on the Via Veneto, there they would see Judejahn in all his glory, and he told him his assumed name, his cover name and passport name, ordered him, in the small booth—the Italian scribbles on whose walls were presumably smut as in any other booth, and Judejahn wondered whether the latrines at home had 'Germany awaken' written in them again—ordered him to 'repeat the name', and Oberbürgermeister Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath duly repeated the false name, the official lie: he wouldn't appear before Judejahn as his benefactor any more, he would stand at attention, and Judejahn's creeping away from the German hotel had been no flight, his sneaking away had been a tactical masterstroke.
And once again the human being felt on top of things, in charge of his destiny. He left the telephone exchange in triumph. He was crossing the Piazza San Silvestro, on his way to conquer Rome, when there was a sound of breakage, a hullabaloo as of battle, a crashing and sundering, screams of terror and cries of death. It was a new building that had collapsed, its foundations had been miscalculated, twisted girders protruded from clouds of dust, people ran by in panic, and Judejahn commanded: 'Seal it off, keep back, seal it off.' He wanted to bring a little discipline to the accident, but no one listened to his German voice, no one understood him, and then came the sirens and bells, police, ambulance and fire brigade, and from the church on the square came a priest, they stuck their noses in everywhere, and Judejahn saw that he was out of place here and in the way, useless at best, and he stepped aside, barged his way through the crowd, and then he remembered how at school, in his detested Gymnasium, he had learned about the Roman belief in omens, and this here was a bad portent. There were the wailing cries of a woman. Had she lost loved ones in the ruins? The sacrifices that Judejahn had offered to Death had never cried. It was odd, he had never heard any of them cry.
Death in Rome Page 6