Roads to Berlin

by Cees Nooteboom

  And, thought the traveler, who could feel how time was at that very moment coloring his hair grey, pressing him down, ageing his bones and veiling his eyes until they became those of a man searching the horizon for the distance from whence he himself must have come, in the past those standards were held higher, there was brass, those mouths had sung something to a tune he would obviously never forget. These heads wore no helmets, they were almost pueri imberbi, or so it seemed to him, beardless boys. They had difficulty keeping in step and their uniforms belonged to some tiny, forgotten principality, the grey far too pale, and it felt as though choruses should have been sung, but no one was singing, only those rustling feet and the shy faces passing by, and the old man in front of him removing his hat and bowing to the banner. When the man straightened his back, the traveler felt a twinge in his own spine because the pain was clearly too much for that other back. And then it was over. He took a step back into the trimmed privet, the mutilated flowers and plants that were meant to express the national colors here in this spot, and let the old men pass, wrapped in their vague, untranslatable thoughts, and then he turned around. The angelus began to ring and he caught himself thinking a sentence in Latin. It seemed as though his life simply did not wish to move on to later things.

  The traveler walked past the benches where people were sitting in the autumn sunshine, as if trying to stock up before the Alpine winter. They looked peaceful, absorbed in dreams or meditation, their eyes closed. Soon they would again become anonymous passers-by, but now, in their vulnerability, faces surrendered to the light, they were their own fragile selves, big-city dwellers in a garden, that regimented imitation of nature. As he turned away and started to walk towards the colonnade to look at the poems on the walls, an apparition came along that lent the new afternoon a different hue. Again it made him think about the past, where most of his points of reference were evidently anchored. But this man too came from a different era. He wore a white straw hat and pale clothes and had one of those dogs that consist mainly of hair. The two men greeted each other as though they were acquainted, or at least knew that they were of the same kind. “What nonsense,” the old man said, and the traveler knew he was talking about the military ceremony.

  Where do I know him from? the traveler wondered, immediately realizing that he did not know the man as a person, but as an idea, a type, a species, or however one might put it. Not a species, as in an extinct species. An actor perhaps. Boulevard theater, operetta, or—who knows?—maybe Schnitzler. Someone who had survived it all. Photographs appeared in his mind’s eye, ones he must have seen in the past, during the war. They were in color; even back then the rose in the buttonhole of the white Palm Beach suit would have been red. He heard names too: Hans Moser, Heinz Rühmann . . . Moser’s nasal voice, the strange Viennese accent. He had not replied to the man and there was no need to do so. Memories. Paul Steenbergen in a play by Anouilh, the great days of the Dutch stage, a world that now appeared to have fallen into the hands of talented children. The old man laughed, as though he knew what the traveler was thinking. His face was distinguished, joyful, ironic. They spoke a few sentences that someone had written for them, which signified nothing other than that they appreciated performing this semblance of a conversation. Then the other man removed his straw hat, gave it a little wave in the air, said “Sehr verehrt” or something similar, and turned, exactly in the middle of the wide path, just as a director would have instructed him to. There was no one else on the path. The dog followed him, and the traveler watched them go, as they steered a straight line over the shadows of the trees and the intervening pale patches, keeping midway between the expanses of grass on either side of the path. This man knew how he would look if someone was watching him from behind; he knew his Platz. He also knew he would spoil the effect of walking away if he looked around or chose one side of the path. What was it that moved the traveler so profoundly? An apparition from a vanished world? He thought about other old men he had known, one of whom had just died, the father of a friend, Jewish, cosmopolitan, as old as the century, from this very country, maybe even this very city, hounded out in the 1930s by those others whose memory still haunted this place. Maybe it was the sheer mass of the memories that moved him—all those notions that resided in names, parks, statues, triumphal arches, and which had also interfered with his own past, until it seemed as though you could not take a step anywhere on this continent, his own part of the world, without being presented with fragments, allusions, exhortations to mourning or contemplation.

  The past as an occupation—it must be a disease. Normal people occupied themselves with the future or with the drifting ice floe they called life, that moving station that belonged nowhere, that was always on the move. He was standing on that floe and looking back. Everything in Europe was old, but here, at its center, the age seemed to have a different relative density. He was walking through a vanished kingdom, but that in itself did not summon any particular emotions—no, if he carried on walking to the east, that was where it really began, the shattered world of Musil, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, all that debris, the fragments, the power become impotence, the closed world of Poland and Czechoslovakia, which seemed to have been torn away from this continent, and Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Trieste too, the gravitational pull of what had happened to those regions in this century, of what was still happening, the doubly lost worlds of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Vladimir Nabokov, of Kafka and Rilke, of Roth and Canetti. It seemed to him that this was a vantage point from where one might look deep into time and see just how much those remote areas had once belonged, how deep the wounds were. Retrieving them would mean descending deep into a mine. He did not have the same feeling in France, in Italy, or in his own country. Those places had enough past, but somehow it had transformed more or less organically into a present. Here, the transition was not complete. The past had become stuck, bogged down, coagulated, curdled, been torn away. But it was still there. Perhaps it was just waiting. The wind he felt on his face came from that direction, warm, scorching, as though it too had something to say. The old man had long disappeared. “What nonsense,” he had said, and now that he had gone, in his light-hearted disguise, those words hung in the air, so much less innocent than when he had spoken them. What had happened here, in this city, that beginning, already over sixty years ago, could never be described as Unsinn, nonsense, unless you took the word literally, as non-sense, the negation of sense that had nothing to do with Wahnsinn, madness, even though that is how people often chose to refer to that era, because of the word’s suggestion of insanity as an excuse. The lack of sense, then, once. That had been the end, an end that still continued and one which, if he was to believe his friends, was going to be turned around. But the servants of the past do not make good voyagers into the future, the traveler thought, and he set course for the towers of the Theatinerkirche, their color reminding him of the custard at boarding school, which the boys always said the kitchens made on the first of January, in one big batch for the whole year.

  Boarding school, Augustinians, custard, food. Busy bustling beneath the matt glass dome of Restaurant Augustiner in Neuhauser Straße. The waitresses are dressed in traditional costume, low-cut, white, billowing blouses. They slip the bills into their bodices, between those Bavarian breasts. Embroidered aprons, red sashes, puffed sleeves, the chorus for Die Csárdásfürstin. The traveler appears to have no objection to women wearing traditional costume.

  “Karpfen im Bierteig, aus dunklem Bier und Kräutern, mit Butterkartoffeln. Rapunzelsalat mit Würfelkartoffeln. Fränkische Blut- und Leberwurst im Naturdarm. Fränkische Kartoffelsuppe mit Steinpilzen und Majoran, 1/4 Fränkischer Gansbraten mit handgeriebenem Kartoffelkloß, Blaukraut oder Selleriesalat, 3 Stück Reiberdatschi mit Apfelmus, gefüllte Dampfäpfel.”

  Peasant food in the big city—that is something that does not exist in his own country these days, but then there is very little actual country left in his country. The list of dishes sounded like an inca
ntation of national peculiarities. Why was that so repellent, yet attractive? Volkseigen: peculiar to the people, the people’s own—a word that might refer to scabies, but at the same time to tradition, preservation, conservatism in the sense of conservation, not throwing things away, allowing them to occupy a longer space within time, delaying the death of the familiar world. Why were some forms of preservation permitted (brown bears in Spain, goshawks and badgers in the Netherlands), while others (traditional costumes, languages, dances, food) were viewed with suspicion? Both types of preservation involved a dogged struggle against time, impotent last-ditch efforts. The suspect element was probably the trouble caused by the involvement of human affairs, or when the word Blut was invoked, together with its twin brother, Boden: blood and soil. It seemed to be impossible to think about such things without first working through what he called the “repertoire.” The mind, that thinking and feeling authority, cannot get to work until its more or less automatic surface, where the repertoire is situated, is activated and satisfied. The repertoire contains the idées reçues, the things that everyone has to say about everything, a series of clichés that have to be worked through and dismissed before the real thinking begins.

  He knew that he would not reach that stage that afternoon; there was too much to see, and seeing, because of the superficial categorization it involves, is all part of the repertoire. There was a young punk in the restaurant, stiff black Mohican above her innocent face: a plump girl dressed as a gladiator. He noticed that she kept asking for more apple sauce, children’s food. The waitress was kind to her, motherly. Categories, the limbo of what he called thinking. To see, that was why he was here. An older man in traditional costume, with a fat book and a font full of beer. If he kept looking for long enough, he would see them all, like a list of characters in a play: “Some Soldiers, the Priest, the Lady, an Aristocratic Family.” He looked at the old man, who was absorbed in his book and who naturally reminded him of Heidegger again. Traditional costumes were perhaps no more than a mild form of anachronism: some people wearing something that other people no longer wore, even though everyone had worn it in the past. Heidegger had refused to accept time as a series of successive present moments, seeing it instead as a link, a connection between what had happened once, before, back then, and what would happen soon, later, sometime. The traveler, who had never felt really at home in the present because, by his very nature, he always saw it as colored and determined by a past, could identify with that thought. Even the past that did not belong to your own life made all kinds of demands on that life. That was inevitable, although most people seemed perfectly capable of living without any thoughts of the past, and entire countries were able, when it suited them, to forget their past with the greatest of ease. He never had a great deal to say about the future other than that, no matter how dark the past often appeared, there was no way he could ever be a pessimist. As far as he was concerned, humanity was a collection of mutants on their way to an invisible goal that might not even exist. The problem was that they were not moving towards this goal at the same speed. While one person was still locked in medieval fundamentalism, another was working away on a computer or travelling to Mars. There was no harm in that; it was the mixtures of the two situations that was so explosive, the instruments of one in the hands of another, the terrorist who wants to take his enemies with him when he commits suicide, because he thinks that will get him into some kind of heaven.

  But was it true that he had never really felt at home in the present? That would be a romantic idea, but somewhat infantile. It was more that he did not feel at home among people who felt at home only in the present, who had such high expectations of it. If you were not able, at the same time, to detach yourself from it—which was perhaps paradoxical—you could not really experience it. The past was desiccated, everything superfluous had been stripped away; the same could not be said of the present. For the last time (and only because that man with his book and his traditional attire was sitting opposite him), the traveler thought about that photograph of Heidegger in his peculiar costume. Nietzsche had said that philosophy often had a physical cause, and the traveler wondered if the philosopher’s body had felt comfortable in that traditional costume which, like the doctrine he devised, was so fixated on the past. Maybe that was going too far, but now, as he ordered an Oberberger Vulkanfelsen, he came back to blood and soil, because the wine was blood red, and that, combined with the name and its suggestion of volcanoes and rocks, made him feel as though he was drinking the earth. Seeing wine as blood—it had to be his Catholic background. And why had he chosen that wine in particular? Language reflects the psyche: after all, he could have gone for a Randersackerer Ewigleben ’86, or a Rödelseer Schwanleite. The deconstruction of wine names—someone really should do a study. He looked at the ferns, the bronze busts, the baskets of dried Alpine flowers hanging from the ceiling. Deer antlers, house plants, ornamental shells. He was somewhere else. Around him he could hear the Bavarian variety of German, and for the first time he realized that German must have been the first foreign language he had heard.

  Sixteen years before, in a white wooden country house in Maine, an old man, also white-haired, who looked like his friend’s dead father and therefore also like the old man who had just greeted him in the park, had asked the traveler to read Rilke to him. That man had the same accent in English as his friend’s father had in Dutch. A German accent, but more than German, an entire past in Mitteleuropa was contained within that accent, an ineradicable, thick, attractive accent; even his friend, who had been living in the Netherlands for so long, still had traces of it. That request back then, there in Maine, had taken him by surprise, not least because he was full of admiration for his host, who had won the Nobel Prize for a discovery in biochemistry. As soon as he heard that the traveler came from the Netherlands, the scientist had started to talk about Multatuli, ignoring the Americans who made up the rest of the party. The traveler had often met people over the age of eighty who would strike up a conversation about Multatuli or Couperus; the Netherlands had truly existed in the past. As for Rilke, his host had insisted. The traveler had protested that his German was not up to it, but the old man would not take no for an answer. Thanksgiving, November, Indian summer, the garden stretching down to Penobscot Bay, leaves aflame. The traveler had opened up the book, yellowing, falling apart, signs of homesickness on every page, and he had read. The Americans had been very quiet, and he could hear the fire crackling in the hearth, but he had not read for the others, only for that bowed white head, which was thinking about who knows what, something from fifty years ago, before he had been banished or fled, something old, and as he read, it was as though a bubble of old air burst open, like in the story by Mulisch, and his own voice mixed with that rare air, decanted for the first time:

  Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.

  Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren

  Und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.

  Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;

  gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,

  dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage

  die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein

  Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.

  Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,

  Wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben

  Und wird in den Alleen hin und her

  Unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben. 1

  He would have read more, that late afternoon, but as he read the last lines of that poem he had seen his host’s lips moving along with his, and he had felt the same emotion that swept over him now, as though there was no fracture between that then and his now. The old man was dead, as was his friend’s father, along with a few more of those men that life constantly seemed to place in his path, as though some strange sort of predestination was involved. They had all lived to over eighty. A cellist, a restorer of paintings, a banker. Survival had rippled around them like a sec
ond soul, not survival itself, because they were dead now, all five of them, but what they had survived, something that none of the five men had ever spoken to him about.

  Wasn’t this Munich? He had not come here to remember, but to look, but as he sat there so peacefully with his glass of volcano wine he found himself in the eye of a storm of memories. How strange it was. Time itself, that weightless thing, could only move in one direction, no matter how you defined it or tried to pin it down; that at least appeared to be certain. No one knew what time was, but even if you gave every clock in the world the shape of a circle, time would still keep on going in a straight line, and if that line had an end, humans could never imagine it without being overwhelmed by giddiness. So what were memories, then? Time left behind, which caught up with you later, or which you could pull back towards you, against the flow of time, doing the impossible. And not only your own memories, but other people’s memories too. His friend’s father, who had been a friend of Toller’s, had once told him that he had been there during Toller’s failed revolution in Munich, the city where the traveler was now, with all the accom-panying violence, shouting, death. Toller had gone into exile afterwards, first in London, then in New York. Once, in New York, the traveler’s friend had pointed out the Mayflower Hotel to him: “That’s where Toller committed suicide.” But the supreme irony was that, long after Toller’s death, his friend’s father had gone to see a play about Toller in Amsterdam. The survivor went to watch an actor playing his dead friend, but that evening the theater was besieged by members of the “Actie Tomaat” movement—protesters yelling, tear gas, performance cancelled—and the old man had left the theater with tears in his eyes, the real revolution supplanted by an imitation. The traveler could still picture his friend’s father now. Even well into his eighties, he had been a handsome man, someone you noticed, slightly stooped, dark eyes, the face of an elderly Native American, a white mane. He was often mentioned in Thomas Mann’s diaries. “Dr. L. came to visit. We had some delicious spinach.” “Yes,” his son said, “but what did you talk about? It doesn’t say.”