by John Berger
We walked towards the end of the garden, where there is a small lawn surrounded by bushes and a willow tree. He used to lie there talking with animated gestures, fingers plucking, hands turning out and drawing in — as though literally winding the wool from off his listeners’ eyes. As he talked, his shoulders bent forward to follow his hands; as he listened, his head inclined forward to follow the speaker’s words. (He knew the exact angle at which to adjust the back of his deckchair.)
Now the same lawn, the deckchairs piled in the outhouse, appears oppressively, flagrantly empty. It is far harder to walk across it without a shiver than it was to turn down the sheet and look again and again at his face. The Russian believers say that the spirits of the departed stay in their familiar surroundings for forty days. Perhaps this is based on a fairly accurate observation of the stages of mourning. At any rate it is hard for me to believe that if a total stranger wandered into the garden now, he would not notice that the end under the willow tree surrounded by bushes was flagrantly empty, like a deserted house on the point of becoming a ruin. Its emptiness is palpable. And yet it is not.
It had already begun to rain and so we went to sit in his room for a while before going out to lunch. We used to sit, the four of us, round a small round table, talking. Sometimes I faced the window and looked out at the trees and the forests on the hills. That morning I pointed out that when the frame with the mosquito net was fitted over the window, everything looked more or less two-dimensional and so composed itself. We give too much weight to space, I went on — there’s perhaps more of nature in a Persian carpet than in most landscape paintings. ‘We’ll take the hills down, push the trees aside and hang up carpets for you,’ said Ernst. ‘Your other trousers,’ remarked Lou, ‘why don’t you put them on as we’re going out?’ Whilst he changed we went on talking. ‘There,’ he said, smiling ironically at the task he had just performed, ‘is that better now?’ ‘They are very elegant, but they are the same pair!’ I said. He laughed, delighted at this remark. Delighted because it emphasized that he had changed his trousers only to satisfy Lou’s whim, and that that was reason enough for him; delighted because an insignificant difference was treated as though it didn’t exist; delighted because, encapsulated in a tiny joke, there was a tiny conspiracy against the existent.
The Etruscans buried their dead in chambers under the ground and on the walls they painted scenes of pleasure and everyday life such as the dead had known. To have the light to see what they were painting they made a small hole in the ground above and then used mirrors to reflect the sunlight onto the particular image on which they were working. With words I try to decorate, as though it were a tomb, the last day of his life.
We were going to have lunch in a pension high up in the forests and hills. The idea was to look and see whether it would be suitable for Ernst to work there during September or October. Earlier in the year Lou had written to dozens of small hotels and boarding houses and this was the only one which was cheap and sounded promising. They wanted to take advantage of my having a car to go and have a look.
There are no scandals to make. But there is a contrast to draw. Two days after his death there was a long article about him in Le Monde. ‘Little by little,’ it wrote, ‘Ernst Fischer has established himself as one of the most original and rewarding thinkers of “heretical” Marxism.’ He had influenced an entire generation of the left in Austria. During the last four years he was continually denounced in Eastern Europe for the significant influence he had had on the thinking of the Czechs who had created the Prague Spring. His books were translated into most languages. But the conditions of his life during the last five years were cramped and harsh. The Fischers had little money, were always subject to financial worries, and lived in a small, noisy workers’ flat in Vienna. Why not? I hear his opponents ask. Was he better than the workers? No, but he needed professional working conditions. In any case he himself did not complain. But with the unceasing noise of families and radios in the flats above and on each side he found it impossible to work as concentratedly in Vienna as he wished to do and was capable of doing. Hence the annual search for quiet, cheap places in the country — where three months might represent so many chapters completed. The three sisters’ house was not available after August.
We drove up a steep dust road through the forest. Once I asked a child the way in my terrible German and the child did not understand and simply stuffed her fist into her mouth in amazement. The others laughed at me. It was raining lightly: the trees were absolutely still. And I remember thinking as I drove round the hairpin bends that if I could define or realize the nature of the submission of the trees, I would learn something about the human body too — at least about the human body when loved. The rain ran down the trees. A leaf is so easily moved. A breath of wind is sufficient. And yet not a leaf moved.
We found the pension. The young woman and her husband were expecting us and they showed us to a long table where some other guests were already eating. The room was large with a bare wooden floor and big windows from which you looked over the shoulders of some nearby steep fields across the forest to the plain below. It was not unlike a canteen in a youth hostel, except that there were cushions on the benches and flowers on the tables. The food was simple but good. After the meal we were to be shown the rooms. The husband came over with an architect’s plan in his hands. ‘By next year everything will be different,’ he explained; ‘the owners want to make more money and so they’re going to convert the rooms and put bathrooms in and put up their prices. But this autumn you can still have the two rooms on the top floor as they are, and there’ll be nobody else up there, you’ll be quiet.’
We climbed to the rooms. They were identical, side by side, with the lavatory on the same landing opposite them. Each room was narrow, with a bed against the wall, a wash-basin and an austere cupboard, and at the end of it a window with a view of miles and miles of landscape. ‘You can put a table in front of the window and work here.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘You’ll finish the book.’ ‘Perhaps not all of it, but I could get much done.’ ‘You must take it,’ I said. I visualized him sitting at the table in front of the window, looking down at the still trees. The book was the second volume of his autobiography. It covered the period 1945-55 — when he had been very active in Austrian and international politics — and it was to deal principally with the development and consequences of the Cold War which he saw, I think, as the counter-revolutionary reaction, on both sides of what was to become the Iron Curtain, to the popular victories of 1945. I visualized his magnifying glass on the small table, his note-pad, the pile of current reference books, the chair pushed away when, stiffly but light on his feet, he had gone downstairs to take his regular walk before lunch. ‘You must take it,’ I said again.
We went for a walk together, the walk into the forest he would take each morning. I asked him why in the first volume of his memoirs he wrote in several distinctly different styles.
‘Each style belongs to a different person.’
‘To a different aspect of yourself?’
‘No, rather it belongs to a different self.’
‘Do these different selves coexist, or, when one is predominant, are the others absent?’
‘They are present together at the same time. None can disappear. The two strongest are my violent, hot, extremist, romantic self and the other my distant, sceptical self.’
‘Do they discourse together in your head?’
‘No.’ (He had a special way of saying No. As if he had long ago considered the question at length and after much patient investigation had arrived at the answer.)
‘They watch each other,’ he continued. ‘The sculptor Hrdlicka has done a head of me in marble. It makes me look much younger than I am. But you can see these two predominant selves in me — each corresponding to a side of my face. One is perhaps a little like Danton, the other a little like Voltaire.’
As we walked along the forest path, I changed sides so as to e
xamine his face, first from the right and then from the left. Each eye was different and was confirmed in its difference by the corner of the mouth on each side of his face. The right side was tender and wild. He had mentioned Danton. I thought rather of an animal: perhaps a kind of goat, light on its feet, a chamois maybe. The left side was sceptical but harsher: it made judgements but kept them to itself, it appealed to reason with an unswerving certainty. The left side would have been inflexible had it not been compelled to live with the right. I changed sides again to check my observations.
‘And have their relative strengths always been the same?’ I asked.
‘The sceptical self has become stronger,’ he said. ‘But there are other selves too.’ He smiled at me and took my arm and added, as though to reassure me: ‘Its hegemony is not complete!’
He said this a little breathlessly and in a slightly deeper voice than usual — in the voice in which he spoke when moved, for example when embracing a person he loved.
His walk was very characteristic. His hips moved stiffly, but otherwise he walked like a young man, quickly, lightly, to the rhythm of his own reflections. ‘The present book,’ he said, ‘is written in a consistent style — detached, reasoning, cool.’
‘Because it comes later?’
‘No, because it is not really about myself. It is about an historical period. The first volume is also about myself and I could not have told the truth if I had written it all in the same voice. There was no self which was above the struggle of the others and could have told the story evenly. The categories we make between different aspects of experience — so that, for instance, some people say I should not have spoken about love and about the Comintern in the same book — these categories are mostly there for the convenience of liars.’
‘Does one self hide its decisions from the others?’
Maybe he didn’t hear the question. Maybe he wanted to say what he said whatever the question.
‘My first decision,’ he said, ‘was not to die. I decided when I was a child, in a sick-bed, with death at hand, that I wanted to live.’
From the pension we drove down to Graz. Lou and Anya needed to do some shopping; Ernst and I installed ourselves in the lounge of an old hotel by the river. It was in this hotel that I had come to see Ernst on my way to Prague in the summer of ’68. He had given me addresses, advice, information, and summarized for me the historical background to the new events taking place. Our interpretation of these events was not exactly the same, but it seems pointless now to try to define our small differences. Not because Ernst is dead, but because those events were buried alive and we see only their large contours heaped beneath the earth. Our specific points of difference no longer exist because the choices to which they applied no longer exist. Nor will they ever exist again in quite the same way. Opportunities can be irretrievably lost and then their loss is like a death. When the Russian tanks entered Prague in August 1968 Ernst was absolutely lucid about that death.
In the lounge of the hotel I remembered the occasion of four years before. He had already been worried. Unlike many Czechs, he considered it quite likely that Brezhnev would order the Red Army to move in. But he still hoped. And this hope still carried within it all the other hopes which had been born in Prague that spring.
After 1968 Ernst began to concentrate his thoughts on the past. But he remained incorrigibly orientated towards the future. His view of the past was for the benefit of the future — for the benefit of the great or terrible transformations it held in store. But after ’68 he recognized that the path towards any revolutionary transformation was bound to be long and tortuous and that Socialism in Europe would be deferred beyond his life-span. Hence the best use of his remaining time was to bear witness to the past.
We did not talk about this in the hotel, for there was nothing new to decide. The important thing was to finish the second volume of his memoirs and that very morning we had found a way of making this happen more quickly. Instead, we talked of love: or, more exactly, about the state of being in love. Our talk followed roughly these lines.
The capacity to fall in love is now thought of as natural and universal — and as a passive capacity. (Love strikes. Love-struck.) Yet there have been whole periods when the possibility of falling in love did not exist. Being in love in fact depends upon the possibility of free active choice — or anyway an apparent possibility. What does the lover choose? He chooses to stake the world (the whole of his life) against the beloved. The beloved concentrates all the possibilities of the world within her and thus offers the realization of all his own potentialities. The beloved for the lover empties the world of hope (the world that does not include her). Strictly speaking, being in love is a mood in so far as it is infinitely extensive — it reaches beyond the stars; but it cannot develop without changing its nature, and so it cannot endure.
The equivalence between the beloved and the world is confirmed by sex. To make love with the beloved is, subjectively, to possess and be possessed by the world. Ideally, what remains outside the experience is — nothing. Death of course is within it.
This provokes the imagination to its very depths. One wants to use the world in the act of love. One wants to make love with fish, with fruit, with hills, with forests, in the sea.
And those, said Ernst, ‘are the metamorphoses! It is nearly always that way round in Ovid. The beloved becomes a tree, a stream, a hill. Ovid’s Metamorphoses are not poetic conceits, they are really about the relation between the world and the poet in love.’
I looked into his eyes. They were pale. (Invariably they were moist with the strain of seeing.) They were pale like some blue flower bleached to a whitish grey by the sun. Yet despite their moisture and their paleness, the light which had bleached them was still reflected in them.
‘The passion of my life,’ he said, ‘was Lou. I had many love affairs. Some of them, when I was a student here in Graz, in this hotel. I was married. With all the other women I loved there was a debate, a discourse about our different interests. With Lou there is no discourse because our interests are the same. I don’t mean we never argue. She argued for Trotsky when I was still a Stalinist. But our interest — below all our interests — is singular. When I first met her, I said No. I remember the evening very well. I knew immediately I saw her, and I said No to myself. I knew that if I had a love affair with her, everything would stop. I would never love another woman. I would live monogamously. I thought I would not be able to work. We would do nothing except make love over and over again. The world would never be the same. She knew too. Before going home to Berlin she asked me very calmly: “Do you want me to stay?” “No,” I said.’
Lou came back from the shops with some cheeses and yoghurts she had bought.
‘Today we have talked for hours about me,’ said Ernst, ‘you don’t talk about yourself. Tomorrow we shall talk about you.’
On the way out of Graz I stopped at a bookshop to find Ernst a copy of some poems by the Serbian poet Miodrag Pavlovic. Ernst had said sometime during the afternoon that he no longer wrote poems and no longer saw the purpose of poetry. ‘It may be,’ he added, ‘that my idea of poetry is outdated.’ I wanted him to read Pavlovic’s poems. I gave him the book in the car. ‘I already have it,’ he said. But he put his hand on my shoulders. For the last time without suffering.
We were going to have supper in the café in the village. On the stairs outside his room, Ernst, who was behind me, suddenly but softly cried out. I turned round immediately. He had both his hands pressed to the small of his back. ‘Sit down,’ I said, ‘lie down.’ He took no notice. He was looking past me into the distance. His attention was there, not here. At the time I thought this was because the pain was bad. But it seemed to pass quite quickly. He descended the stairs — no more slowly than usual. The three sisters were waiting at the front door to wish us good night. We stopped a moment to talk. Ernst explained that his rheumatism had jabbed him in the back.
There was a curious distance
about him. Either he consciously suspected what had happened, or else the chamois in him, the animal that was so strong in him, had already left to look for a secluded place in which to die. I question whether I am now using hindsight. I am not. He was already distant.
We walked, chatting, through the garden past the sounds of water. Ernst opened the gate and fastened it because it was difficult, for the last time.
We sat at our usual table in the public bar of the café. Some people were having their evening drink. They went out. The landlord, a man only interested in stalking and shooting deer, switched off two of the lights and went out to fetch our soup. Lou was furious and shouted after him. He didn’t hear. She got up, went behind the bar and switched on the two lights again. ‘I would have done the same,’ I said. Ernst smiled at Lou and then at Anya and me. ‘If you and Lou lived together,’ he said, ‘it would be explosive.’
When the next course came Ernst was unable to eat it. The landlord came up to enquire whether it was not good. ‘It is excellently prepared,’ said Ernst, holding up the untouched plate of food in front of him, ‘and excellently cooked, but I am afraid that I cannot eat it.’
He looked pale and he said he had pains in the lower part of his stomach.
‘Let us go back,’ I said. Again he appeared — in response to the suggestion — to look into the distance. ‘Not yet,’ he said, ‘in a little while.’
We finished eating. He was unsteady on his feet but he insisted on standing alone. On the way to the door he placed his hand on my shoulder — as he had in the car. But it expressed something very different. And the touch of his hand was now even lighter.