Death in Rome

by Wolfgang Koeppen

  The champagne was finished, he felt no intoxication, the victories had gone flat. Judejahn felt a dull roaring, like buzzing in his ears, but affecting his whole body; his blood pressure must be dangerously high, he walked over to the window, and he looked across at Rome. Once he had almost ruled Rome. Certainly he had ruled the man who had ruled Rome. Mussolini had been afraid of Judejahn. Now Rome had given Judejahn a mangy tomcat. A whore had run away from Judejahn. He was unable to have her shot. A whore had run off with his son, who was a Roman priest. Judejahn could not have any priests shot, either. He was powerless. Would he fight to regain his power? It was a long road. The road was too long to be travelled twice. He admitted it to himself now. The road was too long. Judejahn could no longer see the objective. The objective grew blurred. A red mist drifted round the objective. A whore had slipped away from Judejahn, and now a naked Jewess was displaying herself to him; the Jewess should be stood in front of a mass grave, but there she was triumphantly, mocking Judejahn; she loomed nakedly over Rome. He saw her in the clouds.

  After standing together for a long time in the lee of the ancient masonry—many times the clock of Santa Maria degli Angeli had struck, the locomotives had screamed, perhaps an owl had hooted too, but they had heard nothing—Siegfried's music suddenly resounded again in Adolf's ears, and he touched Laura's face, he tried to hold her smile, a high note, humanity, sweet rapture, and then he was frightened, and he ran off into the night, which was to be long and without smiles.

  The angels had not come. The angels from the Angels' Bridge did not take up the invitation of the old gods. They did not dance with the old gods on the Capitoline Hill. I should have liked to see Stravinsky sitting at a black grand among the broken pillars. At the black concert grand, the Maestro would have played his Passacaglia, surrounded by the rather off-white marble wings of the angels, and under the great pure wing-beat of the gods, all light and air; but the angels had stayed away, the gods hid themselves, clouds loomed in the sky, and Stravinsky merely said: 'Je salue le monde confraternel.' The music congress was received on the Capitoline Hill. I thought we must have looked funny in our suits, and the gods hidden behind the ruins, the fauns in the shrubbery and the nymphs among the rank weeds probably laughed a great deal. It wasn't they who were old-fashioned, it was us. We were old and foolish, and even the younger ones among us were old and foolish. Kürenberg winked at me. It was as if to say: 'Take it seriously, but not too seriously.' He was in favour of letting the agents get on with it, so that one might occasionally take the muse of music out to dinner in an expensive restaurant. The prizes were presented by the mayor of Rome, a mayor like my father, and he gave me my half-prize. He gave me a half-prize for my symphony, and I was surprised that he gave me the half-prize, and I thought, Kürenberg arranged that, and I was grateful to Kürenberg, and I thought my father would be proud of me for a whole day, because the mayor had given me the half-prize, but my father would never understand why the mayor had honoured me. I was glad of the prize-money. I would use it to go to Africa. In Africa, I would write my new symphony. Maybe I would play it to the angels in Rome next year: the black symphony of the Dark Continent. I would play to the white angels of Rome on the old hill of the gods. I know Europe is blacker really. But I want to go to Africa, I want to see the desert. My father won't understand the idea of travelling to Africa to see the desert, and to hear music from the desert. My father has no idea that I'm the devout composer of the Roman angels. The Council approved Palestrina's music, the congress honoured my music.

  No reveille woke him, it was the yowling tomcat that startled him awake, Judejahn's head was growling, the desert fort was a long way off, Africa was a long way off, Germany was still further away, he awoke in Rome with a throbbing skull, with feeble limbs, with rage at waking at all, with a taste of perfume in his mouth that came from the champagne and the flat victories, mixed with sourness, with something acrid, with cellular decay, and behind his brow the image of the room shook, his feet and thighs trembled, but the virile member was erect, charged, stuffed with blood, it burned in unappeased irritation. He showered, scrubbed himself down, he thought in officers' slang, a yomp now, field exercises, but he was sweating in the shower, he couldn't get his skin dry, the sweat kept pouring off him, shimmering in little beads, Judejahn gasped for air, and the air of Rome was too soft. Hair of the dog was the old drinker's adage. Judejahn ordered a half-bottle of champagne, the champagne of victories. He asked for a lot of ice to go with it. He threw bits of ice into the glass. Judejahn's hand shook. He drained the bumper in a single draught. Now he saw clearly. Fogs vanished. He had a rendezvous with Laura. That was important. What if she'd slept with Adolf. He needed her, Jewess or no, he needed her to free himself from his distressing visions. He rang for the black ambassadorial car, but a while later a call came from the soldierly chauffeur, in clipped tones, without a trace of feeling, reporting a mechanical fault that would take all day to repair. Judejahn had heard the voice of Death. He failed to recognize it. He swore.

  One of the churches where one might confess in many tongues was the old church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, the house of worship by the walls of the baths, and Adolf Judejahn knelt in the confessional of the German-speaking priest, and he told the German-speaking priest what had passed the previous night outside the church doors between himself and Laura, and, as nothing had happened that might cause the Church to be seriously angry with a deacon, Adolf was admonished to avoid temptation in future, and he was given absolution. He looked through the grille of the confessional at the face of his confessor. The face of his confessor looked tired. Adolf would have liked to say: 'Father, I am unhappy.' But the priest looked tired and dismissive. He had heard so many confessions. So many travellers came to Rome and confessed things they wouldn't entrust to their confessors at home. They were ashamed before the confessors they knew. In Rome they were strangers and felt no shame, and that was what had made the priest's face so tired. And Adolf thought: Will I one day be as tired as that as I sit in my confessional, and will my face look so dismissive? He thought: Where will I have my confessional? In a village? In an old village church among shady trees? Or is it not my vocation, am I spurned, spurned from the start? Adolf had wanted to push Judejahn's money into an offertory box, but, just as he was about to do so, he changed his mind. His action was not spiritually motivated. He did not trust the Church's care for the poor. The Church's ministry to the poor was vinegary, vinegary as all poor relief, and it smelled of soup-kitchens; the money went into watery soup for the poor. Adolf wanted someone to have joy of the money. He pressed his father's dirty notes into the wrinkled hands of an old woman who was begging for alms at the church door.

  Judejahn was waiting. He was waiting on the station concourse, outside the CIT office, but Laura didn't show. Did she mean to jilt him in the morning as well? Was she lying in a seamy embrace with Adolf? Rage was bad for his health. Judejahn still had trouble breathing. From time to time the mist returned, a poisonous mist of red gas. Maybe mist like that would blow round the world in the next great war. Judejahn went to a refreshment wagon and asked for a cognac. He stood in front of the refreshment wagon for travellers as before the supply wagon on the battlefield. He knocked back the cognac. The red mist lifted. Judejahn looked across to the CIT, but Laura still wasn't there. Judejahn passed the news-stand. He saw the magazine Oggi hanging up, and there on the cover of Oggi was a picture of Mussolini. His old friend looked battered, and Judejahn thought: I look battered today as well. Behind Mussolini stood a man in an SS cap. He stood behind Mussolini like a minder. He stood behind him like an executioner. You could clearly see the death's head on the cap. Who was the fellow? Judejahn thought: He must be one of my officers. In the picture, the S S man had lowered his gaze, and Judejahn couldn't identify him. The man was probably dead. Most of his men were dead. Mussolini was dead. He had died a grisly death. A grisly death had been planned for Judejahn too. But Judejahn was alive, he had given them the slip. He was al
ive, and time was on his side, and just then Laura appeared. There was her smile, and for an instant Judejahn thought, Let her go, but then he thought again, She's a Jewess, and the thought excited him.

  And Laura saw the highly promising stranger, and she thought: What present will he give me? Now she was looking at the displays in the shop windows. A girl needed jewellery, a girl needed clothes, even a girl who can't do sums needs sheer stockings, and she was used to being given things every so often. Every so often she went on little fishing expeditions, in all innocence and usually in the mornings, she didn't have a steady boyfriend, and after the queers in the evenings, it was nice to spend the morning in bed with a real man, you needed that for your health, and later she would confess it in all innocence, and old men weren't bad, true, they weren't beautiful, but they weren't bad, their old men's love filled the morning, and besides they were more generous than the younger men, who wanted something for themselves, and Adolf had disappointed her, the young foreign priest had been a disappointment, they had been so happy in the night, but then the priest had run off, he had been afraid of sin, and Laura had cried and from now on she was sticking to old men; old men weren't afraid of sin and they didn't run off. It was hard to communicate with Judejahn, but she managed to make him understand that they were going to a hotel near the station.

  Kürenberg had invited me to the fine restaurant on the Piazza Navona. He wanted to celebrate my prize with me. He apologized for the fact that his wife wouldn't be breakfasting with us, and I understood that Ilse Kürenberg did not want to celebrate with me, and I understood why. The restaurant was still empty at this hour, and Kürenberg ordered a selection of sea-creatures that lay on our plates like little monsters, and we washed down the monsters with a dry Chablis. It was our farewell. Kürenberg was off to Australia. He was conducting the Ring cycle during the Australian season. He sat opposite me cracking the shells of the monstrous sea-creatures, sucking out their savoury juices. Tomorrow he would be up in the air with his wife, eating an airline dinner, and the day after he would be eating in Australia, sampling the curious sea-creatures of the Pacific Ocean. It's a small world. Kürenberg was my friend, he was my only true friend, but I had too much respect for him to treat him like a friend, I was quiet in his company, and he perhaps thought me ungrateful. I told him I wanted to go to Africa with my prize money, and I told him about my black symphony. Kürenberg approved of the idea. He recommended a place called Mogador. The name Mogador sounded good. It sounded black. Mogador was an old Moorish fortress. But as the Moors are no longer powerful, there was no reason why I shouldn't go and live in their old fortress.

  She had wondered whether he would take off his dark glasses in bed, and when he did take them off, she giggled, but then his eyes frightened her, they were bloodshot, and she shrank from his treacherous greedy expression, from his lowered bull's brow approaching her, and he asked her, 'Are you afraid?' and she didn't understand him, and she smiled, but it wasn't her wholehearted smile, and he threw her on to the bed. She hadn't thought him capable of such passion, usually the men she slept with for the presents that a girl so badly needs didn't get so excited, their bed scenes were pretty placid, but this man threw himself at her like an animal, he opened her up, he tugged at her skin, and then he took her brutally, he was brutal with her, even though she was slender and delicate. He was heavy, he lay heavy on top of her body, which was so light and so good to hold, and she thought of the queers, thought of the queers in the bar, their soft movements, their fragrant curls, their colourful shirts and jangling bracelets, and she thought, Maybe it's good to be queer, maybe I should be queer too, this is horrible, he stinks of sweat, he stinks like a ram, stinks like the dirty old billy-goat in the stall. When she was little she'd gone to the country once, she'd gone to Calabria, she had been scared and she had missed Rome, her wonderful city, and the house in Calabria had stunk, and she'd had to watch the she-goats being taken to the billy-goat, and on the wooden staircase a boy had exposed himself to her, and she'd had to touch the boy, she hated the country, and sometimes she would dream of the billy-goat, and then she wanted to touch the boy, but the boy had horns that butted her, and the horns broke off, in her dream the horns had broken off like rotten teeth. And she cried out, 'You're hurting me,' but Judejahn didn't understand as she cried out in Italian, and it didn't matter that he didn't understand because it hurt, but it hurt pleasantly, yes, now she wanted this sacrifice, the old man was satisfying her, the promising stranger was delivering in a quite unexpected way, now she pressed herself against him, heightening his excitement, streams of sweat ran down from the ram, they ran on to her body, they flowed down her breasts, and collected in the little dip of her belly, they burned a little, but it didn't hurt, and the man was angry, he whispered, 'You're a Jewess, you're a Jewess,' and she didn't understand him, but in her subconscious she understood him, when there were German soldiers in Rome the word had meant something, and she asked 'Ebreo?' and he whispered, 'Hebrew,' and laid his hands round her neck, and she cried, 'No e poi no, cattólico,' and the word cattólico seemed further to inflame his rage and his lust, and in the end it didn't matter, rage or lust, she floated off, and he drove himself into exhaustion, gurgled and threw himself aside, drained, knocked out, half dead. She thought: It's his own fault, why did he have to show off like that, old men don't usually try so hard? But soon she was smiling again, and she stroked the sweaty hair on his chest because he had tried so hard; she was grateful to him for having tried so hard; she was grateful to him because he had given her pleasure and because he had satisfied her. She went on stroking him for a while. She felt his heart beating; it was a valiant heart, exhausting itself for her woman's pleasure. She got up and went over to the basin to wash.

  Judejahn heard the water splash, and he sat up in bed. The red mists were around him again. He saw Laura standing naked in the red mist, and the black basin of the wash-stand was the black ditch into which the executed victims fell. The Jewess had to be liquidated. The Führer had been betrayed. Not enough people had been liquidated. He staggered into his clothes. She asked: 'Don't you want to wash?' But he didn't hear her. He wouldn't have understood her, anyway. In his trouser pocket was Austerlitz's pistol and silencer.

  Now the pistol would decide everything. He would clean up. The pistol would restore order. He just needed some air first, he was panting and trembling too much. He staggered over to the window, pulled it open, and leaned down over the street, which was full of thick red mist. The street was a canyon, and at the bottom of it were automobiles squealing and clattering, making a fiendish racket and looking like creeping monsters under the red mist. But a clearing appeared in the mist directly before him, a tunnel through the fog, and there at the open French window in the large hotel opposite stood Ilse Kürenberg, the Aufhäuser girl, the Jew girl, the escapee, the woman in the theatre box, the woman he had seen naked at night in the clouds above Rome, there stood Ilse Kürenberg in a white dressing gown, a little back from the window, but he saw her naked, naked as she'd been in the night, naked as the women in front of the ditch, and Judejahn emptied the magazine of Austerlitz's pistol, he was the firing squad, he fired all the shots himself, he didn't just give the orders, orders were disregarded, he had to do his own shooting, and at the last shot, Ilse Kürenberg fell, and the Führer's command had been executed. Laura screamed, a single scream, and then a flood of Italian burst from her lips, and splashed away with the washing water in the red mist. Judejahn found his way to the door, and Laura wept into the bedding, she wept into the sweaty warm pillows, something terrible had happened, but she didn't know what, the man had fired a gun, he had fired out of the window—and he had given her no present. She was still naked, and she now held the pillow over her head, because her face was no longer smiling, and she wanted to choke her crying. On the rumpled bed she looked like the headless, beautiful body of the headless Aphrodite Anadyomene.

  He had not seen her naked, and so the naked body did not remind Adolf of Laura
, nor did he even think of Laura's body, he thought of her smile as he stood in front of the headless Aphrodite Anadyomene in the museum of Diocletian's baths, the headless Aphrodite was still holding the ends of her two plaits in her raised hands, as though trying to secure her head by her plaits, and Adolf wondered what her face had been like, and whether she might have smiled like Laura. They bewildered him. The cold marble bodies all around bewildered him. This was Siegfried's world here. A world of beautiful bodies. There was the Venus of Cirene. She was flawless. Anyone could see she was flawless. A firm, well-made body, but cold cold cold. And then the fauns and the hermaphrodites in all their physicality. They didn't rot away. They didn't turn to earth. They weren't threatened by hell. Even the head of the Sleeping Eumenide didn't speak of terrors. It told of sleep. Its story was of beauty and sleep; even the Underworld had been friendly, only Hell was something else. They had no knowledge of Hell. Was it right to threaten, to terrorize, in order to rescue the soul, and was the soul lost if one responded to beauty? Adolf sat down in the garden among the stone witnesses of antiquity. He was excluded from their society, his vows excluded him, his faith excluded him, for ever. He wept. The old statues looked on, dry-eyed.