But as though to repay him for his joke, there was Adolf, a black shadow, who dogged him through the lobby. He was a lanky embodiment of seriousness and sorrow. What could they possibly say to him? They looked away, discomfited. He spoiled the day. His black form was the writing on the wall at Belshazzar's feast. Then Dietrich, after a moment's thought, hurried after his cousin, caught up with him and said: 'Hi, Adolf, you might be a cardinal one day. Best be on good terms with you.'
I didn't have a white tie, but I could have bought myself a white tie, or I should have hired a white tie, there must be people in Rome who make a living by hiring out white ties, but I didn't want to buy a white tie nor did I want to hire one; I didn't see why one had to have a white tie in order to be able to listen to music.
I put on a white shirt. The Trevi Fountain was murmuring. I didn't wash myself; I wanted to keep a little of the Tiber smell under the white shirt. The Trevi Fountain was murmuring. I put on a dark suit. It wasn't a Roman suit. It didn't have the soft cut of Italian tailoring. The Trevi Fountain was murmuring. My suit was a German suit. I was a German composer. I was a German composer in Rome. The opera fountain was murmuring. Water fell into the basin. Money poured into the basin. The gods and mythological beings didn't say thank you. Visitors crossed off the fountain from their list of attractions; they had inspected the fountain, taken pictures of the water and the gods, the fountain had been harvested, it had been committed to memory, it was a holiday snap. To me it was a dream. Little boys fished for the coins the foreigners had thrown into the water. The boys were beautiful; they had rolled up their shorts over their slender legs. I would have liked to sit down on the edge of the fountain in my white shirt and my black suit and my faint Tiber smell. I would have liked to watch the boys; I would have liked to observe how beautiful and how greedy for money the boys were.
There was a great commotion on the approach to the concert hall. I heard the policeman's piccolo trilling. His gloves were like elegant white birds. Lace princesses arrived, veiled dowagers, diamonded coiffures, advertising barons and foreign-ministry barons, notorious con-men, ambassadors grown grey in the transmitting of bad news, Snow White's mother and Cinderella's sisters drove up, they were beauty queens, and photographers blitzed them in flashlight, mincing fashion designers mounted their new business dreams on ambitious mannequins and pushed them forth into the light, famous celluloid features yawned at little rich girls, and all of them were honouring music, they were society, they were indistinguishable one from another, they all had one face. The critics hid behind character masks, and publishers beamed benevolently like full moons. Managers put their sick and sensitive hearts on show. A lorry full of red flags clattered past. Leaflets fluttered over the policeman's white gloves like a swarm of envious grey sparrows. The jungle bastion had fallen. Who cared? The stock market took it well. The Aga Khan didn't put in an appearance. He was waiting for Hokusai's wave in his villa by the sea. But a dozen company directors had come, they knew and greeted one another, their spouses were minor divinities. I had no hat, otherwise I should have taken it off; the people assembling here were my supporters and my patrons. Even industry was represented here; advised by a celebrated pessimistic philosopher, it had endowed a music prize, and after the industry prize there would be a trade-union prize, on the heels of the Ford Foundation there would be the Marx Foundation, and patronage was becoming increasingly anonymous. Mozart had been in service to some distinguished noblemen, whose servant was I, who wanted to be free, and where were Augustine's great men, who, having done their day's work, gave themselves to music to restore their souls? I saw no souls here. Perhaps their clothes had cost too much.
Maybe I was embittered because I hadn't bought myself a white tie. Who would be delighted by my music? Was it meant to delight anyone? It was meant to disquiet. It would disquiet no one here.
Outside the upper circle there were no photographers. There were young men, young women, and interestingly also a few old people. An artist likes to think he has a following among youth, and he thinks the future's on his side when the upper circle applauds. Would they applaud? Did I appeal to them, those proud poor girls? They didn't give me a look. And the poor young men? They were probably students, future atomic wizards, in constant danger of being kidnapped and worn and torn between East and West, but maybe they were only future dentists and accountants—I probably was longing for Augustine's significant audience. A few priests were there, a few young workers. Would I disquiet them? I would have liked to feel comradeship with the young people, the young scientists, students, workers, priests, girls; but the word comrade had been forced down my throat in my early youth, and made repellent to me. I also thought, seeing the students and workers, 'Proletarians and intelligentsia unite,' but I didn't believe in that, I didn't believe a new world would be created from such a union, Hitler, Judejahn, my family and military service had robbed me of belief in all unions. So I welcomed the few old people who clambered up to Olympus along with the youngsters; they were lonely, and maybe my concert was meant for lonely people.
Kürenberg was waiting for me in the conductor's room. He really was moulded by antiquity. His tailcoat fitted as on a marble statue, and, over the white of the collar, shirt-front and tie, his head looked Augustan. He was sage. He didn't stand around foolishly front of house and study his public. He was above that. What did he care about vanity and craziness? Society had one function for him, which was to support the fairy-tale palace of music, it had to prop up the magic temple of notes like caryatids, and it didn't matter at all out of what misapprehension it did so. Ilse Kürenberg was wearing a simple black dress. It too looked as though it had been pinned on marble. It was like a tight, black skin on a well-preserved marble bust. Kürenberg wanted to dispatch me into the box. He saw that I had turned up without a white tie, and that must have annoyed him. He stood above convention, and he told me that, by scorning the white tie and not subjecting myself to custom, I had given dress and convention a significance they didn't deserve. He was right. I was furious with myself. One should play by the rules and avoid making trouble and giving offence. The bells were ringing in the cloakroom, the orchestra was filing on stage, the one hundred famous musicians were tuning their instruments, and now and then I heard a few notes from my symphony; they sounded like the cries of a lost bird in a strange wood. I was to escort Ilse Kürenberg up to the box, and I said I had given my seat to a priest. I didn't say the priest was my cousin, and only now did it occur to me that Adolf Judejahn would share a box in Rome with Ilse Aufhäuser from our town. Her father had been murdered after his department store had been burned. Adolf's father bore much of the responsibility; he had contributed to the burning of the department store, and he had contributed to old Aufhäuser's death. My father could tell himself that he was innocent of murder and arson. All he'd done was watch. It was my father who'd been sitting in the box seat then. He had cheered on the actors from his box. But it didn't appal me that Adolf Judejahn and Ilse Kürenberg were sitting next to each other now. Why shouldn't they? The tragedy had happened, next up was the satyr play.
Judejahn had sent Eva back to Germany, he had put her in a bed first-class. The hotel room had been a cage, the compartment was a smaller, moving cage, in which she was caught, the Northern Erinys, black-clad, light-haired, full of lofty sorrow and now certain of her husband's going to Valhalla. But on the platform at Termini, the great Roman station named after the hot baths of Diocletian near by, the Termi, the fog cleared for a while under the neon lights of the great structure, the befogged face cleared—the second sight, the ghost-seeing sight, the werewolf eye which already saw Judejahn as a dead man—and she beheld him from the compartment of the train that was to carry her across the Alps, northwards and home, she beheld him and recognized him as he really was in the gleaming neon, a stout, grizzled man in dark glasses, and she cried: 'Take off those dreadful glasses and climb aboard, climb aboard the train and come away with me!' And he whiningly objected that his passp
ort was not valid for Germany, and his false name would be exposed, and she said crossly: 'You don't need any false name, you don't need any dark glasses, you don't even need a passport. The border guards will say: "The General's coming home. We're proud to welcome you home, sir," and they'll stand at attention to you, and let you go wherever you want, and they'll be proud of having spoken to you, and at home they'll welcome you with a 21-gun salute, and no one will be able to lay a finger on you.' Eva saw his return home. She saw this was his only chance of returning home, and he understood her, he knew she was right, there was his return, there was Germany. The General's home, we're proud to have you back among us, sir.' That was how it was, those were the words the border guards would call out. But Judejahn hesitated, something was keeping him in Rome, in the city of impotent priests. Was it Laura, was it fear? No, it wasn't fear, Judejahn was without fear, and of course it wasn't Laura who was keeping him either, it was something else, maybe it was the desert, the barracks at the edge of the desert where he was in command, and if they received him with 21-gun salutes in Germany, the echo of guns faded and died, and so too did the crack of live ammunition, and then it would be Monday morning, and what would he be then, a Judejahn without power, an old Gottlieb sitting among malcontents and yesterday's men. Judejahn was afraid of time, he was afraid of his age, he could no longer imagine victory—and so he said to Eva that he would let Pfaffrath fix it, Pfaffrath would prepare for his home-coming, and the fortune-teller's gaze closed in on Eva once more, and the fog and the befogged face both descended, she knew now that Judejahn no longer believed, he no longer believed in the border guards, he no longer believed in the twenty-one guns, no longer in Germany, and the second sight overcame Eva, the ghost-vision, and a dingy Death on a lean nag drove the hero towards Valhalla, while her train carried her north to the Alps.
After an awkward and fraught farewell, Judejahn left for the hotel favoured by Germans to ask his brother-in-law Pfaffrath to arrange his return home for him, but at the hotel he was told that the party had gone to the concert; and indeed, spurred on by Dietrich, who, nettled by the photograph in the newspaper, wanted to check on his brother's situation, also prey to their own curiosity, and motivated by a mixture of unease, doubt and pride, they had got the porter to make reservations for them right at the back, and had got there without incident. Judejahn with his mission unaccomplished asked to be driven back to his palatial hotel, and on the way there it occurred to him that his appointment with Laura was not for several hours and that it might be amusing to watch brother-in-law Pfaffrath's boy playing the fiddle. That laughably disreputable event might help him through the boring time before his rendezvous, and it would furthermore strengthen his position vis-à-vis his brother-in-law if he had witnessed it and seen for himself the family's degeneration. So Judejahn ordered a ticket for the concert through the hall porter, and, as the call came from an expensive hotel, the booking was for a seat in the front row. However, as he had no white tie, people tried to prevent him from taking up his seat. Judejahn, not understanding the usher's Italian, only feeling the man was being obstructive, and feeling himself in the right after shelling out for a surprisingly expensive ticket, barged the featherweight usher out of the way. What did the miserable lackey want? Judejahn tossed him a banknote, strode into the hall and sat down demonstratively in his seat. Once there, he noticed that he was surrounded by people in evening dress and he thought for a moment he was sitting among the musicians, in the ranks of the very clowns who were to amuse him and who did their work in tails and white tie. However, as the orchestra was tuning up on stage in front of him, that hypothesis could not be sustained, and Judejahn was left to wonder at the formality of the proceedings. Little Gottlieb was impressed; he felt intimidated. But Judejahn wasn't having any intimidation, he sat back even more expansively in his seat, and looked aggressively round the hall. As once before, in the corso hour on the Via Veneto, he had the feeling he was sitting amongst crafty Jews and rootless spivs. Foppish bunch, he thought. He recognized the new society, the new society of traitorous Italians, the scum that had floated to the top after the disgraceful betrayal of Mussolini. So it was in front of these people, who belonged in prison, in a concentration camp, in a gas chamber, that Siegfried Pfaffrath would be fiddling away! Judejahn tried to spot his nephew on the stage, but he couldn't find him. Perhaps Siegfried wouldn't appear till later, the lead fiddlers always arrived late, they were a stuck-up and pampered bunch; they could do with a little discipline. Judejahn saw that right away. The only music he had any use for was martial music. Why didn't they play a jolly march, instead of boring the audience with their endless tuning? He went on looking round the hall, and in the only box he discovered his son, Adolf, and sitting next to him a woman who took Judejahn's fancy. Had Adolf given her the money Judejahn had pressed into his praying hands? Was she his lover? Or was he her fancy man? He hadn't thought of the priest as anyone's possible lover. It confused him.
It confused Dietrich as well, seeing Adolf up in the box. How did he come to be up there? Had the Church given him a seat? Did they want to make an exhibition of Adolf on account of his name? As a significant turncoat, a major convert? Did they have plans for him? Maybe Adolf was a sharp cookie, and he would become a bishop—a powerful fellow in the making. How should he play it? And what about the woman sitting next to him in the box? Dietrich couldn't quite make her out from where he was sitting. And his parents couldn't quite, either. Was she with Adolf? And where was Siegfried? Would he have had any information for them? Questions. So many questions.
On sitting down, Ilse Kürenberg had given a friendly nod to the priest sitting up in her box, but subsequently his face disturbed her, it was a nightmarish face, she couldn't say why, but it was a face from terrible dreams. She thought: He looks like a flagellant, a flogger. She pictured him whipping himself. She wondered: Does he whip others too, does he whip heretics? But surely he wouldn't do that, nor would a priest whip Jews. And then she thought: Perhaps he's a mystic. And then: He may be a Catholic clergyman, but he looks like the rebellious Luther.
But when the music started she was sure he really was a mystic, a German priest and a German mystic, because Siegfried's symphony, for all its modernity, contained a mystical urge, a mystic's sense of the world, though tamed by the classicizing Kürenberg. But Ilse Kürenberg now found why the original composition remained disagreeable to her, in spite of the clarity of the interpretation. There was too much death in those sounds, and a death without the merry dance of death present on antique sarcophagi. At times the music attempted a joy and sweetness like those of the old tombs, but then it seemed that Siegfried had blundered, written down wrong notes, chosen the wrong tone; in spite of Kürenberg's cool conducting, it became harsh and excessive, the music was cramped for space, it screamed, it was fear of death, a Northern dance of death, a plague procession, and finally the passages dissolved into one wall of fog. Compositionally it wasn't botched, in its way it showed talent, Ilse Kürenberg had a fine ear, the music excited her, but there was at its heart a foggy mystery, a perverse dedication to death, which was repugnant to her and excited her in spite of herself.
How boring the music was! Was it even music, or were they still tuning up, under the supervision of the bandleader now? And was that the main piece? Siegfried didn't appear. Had he pulled out? Judejahn felt let down. He'd been cheated of his pleasure. Hunger squeezed his stomach, thirst parched his tongue, but little Gottlieb didn't have the nerve to get up and leave. He felt paralysed. The sound of the orchestra paralysed him. The noise made it impossible for Judejahn to think, he couldn't decide who the woman was next to Adolf, he couldn't make up his mind whether he would sooner sleep with Laura or with this woman in the box.
They were shocked. They were shocked and disappointed. The music was not like any other music they had ever heard. It didn't resemble any notion of music that the Pfaffraths had. It didn't even resemble the notion the Pfaffraths had of the kind of music their son might ma
ke. But what notions did they have? And if they had any, then what were they expecting now? Beethoven's too frequently dusted-off death-mask over the twelve-valve radiogram in the music corner of their living-room, or Wagner's portentous beret-wearer, manifestly kissed by genius? The two older Pfaffraths missed the sound of elevation, the high, exalted tone and the clear harmonies, they looked for the warm flow of melody, they listened in vain for the music of the spheres, music from some higher region, accessible as they thought to their hearing, a region they didn't inhabit, nor did they ever want to, but which they pictured to themselves as an optimistic sky, a rosy dome over the grey globe. Here on earth you had to live soberly and sensibly, and, if need be, resolutely taking responsibility for all man's inhuman cruelty, and so, correspondingly, the more loftily the pink superstructure had to float over the all too human. The Pfaffraths believed in the confectioner's temple of art, a sweet substance formed into ideal allegory; it was, so they said, deceiving even themselves, a necessity, which they liked to call 'love of beauty', and music was productive of a cultural feeling of pleasure and a contented drowsiness. But Siegfried's tones made them shudder, they felt thoroughly ill at ease, it was as though an icy wind were blowing over them, and occasionally it sounded like persiflage of German-bourgeois values; they thought they detected jazz rhythms, an imaginary jungle, a nigger kraal full of lust stripped bare, and this jungle of degenerate noise alternated with other bits that were plain boring, truly monotonous sections of disharmony. Did this discord bring pleasure? Did they accept it? Timorous as mice they looked round and were afraid of scandal and outcry, discredit to their family name that, as they knew, was held in such regard at home. But everyone around them still seemed to be sitting there politely, people's faces bore the usual concert expression of reflective appreciation, and a few of them even had absorption written on them. Dietrich thought he could detect some calculation in his brother's music, a conjuror's trick or a mathematical equation he couldn't quite solve; this music hadn't come to the composer in the way the great and beautiful sounds of Beethoven and Wagner must have come to them, this music was manufactured, it was a sophisticated swindle, there was careful thought in these dissonances, and that bothered Dietrich—maybe Siegfried was no fool, maybe he was dangerous and at the beginning of a great career. Dietrich whispered to his parents: 'He's avant-garde!' That was meant slightingly, but it could also be construed as proof of Dietrich's objectivity, his dispassionate and well-informed judgement, even in this department. But the remark caused some twisted foreigner in a curiously tight-fitting smoking-jacket and with a provocative goatee to utter a censorious 'Shh!'
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