Or were they the eyes—rings without gems—of Freud’s four sisters? Having no prospects for maintaining them in London, Freud had had to leave his four elderly sisters, Rosa Graf, Dolfi Freud, Mitzi Freud, and Pauli Winternitz, in Vienna, but when the Nazi danger drew near—Jones specifies—he and his brother Alexander gave them the sum of 160,000 Austrian schillings (about $22,400 dollars) which would suffice for their old age, provided that the Nazis did not confiscate it. Toward the end of the year Marie Bonaparte endeavored to bring the sisters to France, but she failed to get permission from the French authorities. Freud had no special reason to be anxious about their welfare, since the persecution of the Jews was still in an early stage. Fortunately, he never knew of their fate; they were incinerated some five years later.
What was Klee thinking about as he was painting his (not Giotto’s) O, the O that cut the name of Walaschek in half, decapitating him? Was he thinking of that fierce inhospitableness? On March 28, 1938, seventeen days after the arrival of Hitler’s troops in Vienna, three weeks before the Swiss Cup final at the Wankdorf in Bern, the Federal Council decided that visas would be required for Austrian passport holders, visas that were promptly granted to Austrians entering Switzerland for commercial or industrial purposes and refused to everyone else. If someone had relatives or assets here, the case was turned over to the federal Foreigners’ Police. After an accord with Berlin, the passports of all non-Aryan German citizen refugees had to bear the letter J.
Mr. Vuilleumier, with a certain confidence, but tact as well, brought his mouth to Scribe O/17360’s ear—clearly he wanted to share a secret:
– Did you know about this? The secretary of the Writers’ Society, being questioned by the Foreigners’ Police any time between 1938 and 1939 about possibly granting a German or Austrian writer temporary residency, acted no differently than someone in any other profession or union, the working classes included. Yes, they were capable of being charitable on occasion, but still they were out to protect the interests of their own.
– And may our writers have long and happy lives! Scribe O/17360 blurted out. Klee looked at him, curious. Once again he seemed the crimson Creator circling like an owl looking down at the shoddy world he has just (in the year 1934) created, and then going back to rest on his perch, pouring himself a whisky, maybe paring his nails a little. Why should Klee have been thinking of those dying of starvation or gas or torture in 1938? After all, he was painting, working with colors. Perhaps he was like a child looking for a piece of candy in one corner while his mother, who hid it in the opposite corner, knitting and smiling, indulgently guides him: “Cold, cold,” which is to say: you’re way off base. Ernest Jones is instructive in this regard:
“So my first act on reaching London on March 22 was to obtain from Wilfred Trotter, who was on the Council of the Society, a letter of introduction to Sir William Bragg, the famous physicist who was then the President of the Royal Society. I saw him again the next day and he at once gave me a letter to the Home Secretary. I was taken aback at discovering, though not for the first time, how naïve in worldly matters a distinguished scientist can be. He asked me: ‘Do you really think the Germans are unkind to the Jews?’”
But it’s likely (or certain) that Klee was well aware. Klee didn’t live on the innocent isle of England. He’d been acquainted with the Nazis since the thirties and, when they took power, upon his return to Switzerland to seek—in vain—citizenship there, he got to know them even better. Someone who between 1932 and 1934 painted Mask of Fear, The Scholar, and Angst, is someone who knows. “The more horrible this world (as today), the more abstract our art, while a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now. [. . .] I have long had this war inside me. This is why, interiorly, it means nothing to me. [. . .] I remain in this ruined world only in memory, as one occasionally does in retrospect.”
Maybe Klee’s O was an O long and hoarse, the kind that comes over the stadium when the ball, from the edge of the box, after the player has—with intent, with will, with muscular force, with his foot—infused it with power and dynamic tension, flies past the barricade of defenders, goes just over the crossbar, or more dramatically, hits the crossbar, the goalkeeper stranded? Yes, it could be a collective expression of pain or remorse, which then makes the outpouring of joy when the ball hits the net so much more unrestrained, and the teammates run to embrace the man who struck it with victorious force. To embrace the player who is still running with his arms up toward the crowd in the stands behind the goal, up toward the sky and the gods. Those who live on Via Leopardi in Naples say that when Maradona scores, their houses shake from the roar of the crowd.
At the mention of Leopardi, who possessed perhaps the most sensitive ear in the world, Schopenhauer wanted to sneak in what he called one of his “little thoughts”:
– I have long been of the opinion that the amount of noise which any person can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity, and therefore may be regarded as a fairly decent measure of it. Therefore, if I hear the dogs barking for hours together in the court of a house without being stopped, I know what to think of the intellectual capacity of the inhabitants. Goethe in his last years bought a house which had fallen into disrepair close to his own, simply in order that he might not have to endure the noise that would be made in repairing it.
With the air of a lawyer at trial, Schopenhauer looked around to assess the effect of Goethe’s purchase, but he ascertained that Tsvetaeva hadn’t even cracked a smile, nor had Joseph Roth.
So Snoozy threw out another name:
– Beniamino Gigli!
Yes, just as Maradona could make the houses on Via Leopardi shake, Beniamino Gigli’s voice could shatter a glass an armlength away, like the waves of wind that caused the new (in 1940) bridge in Tacoma to collapse. The wind blew at the same harmonic frequency (with the same character) as the bridge itself, thus creating resonance and making it oscillate too much, until the bridge at last gave way. A harbinger of the end of the world, when the hour of the abomination comes? When will the wave vibrating at the same frequency as the world arrive? What about those choruses at night in Nuremberg, with thousands upon thousands of flags and swastikas?
Walaschek’s favorite memory from his soccer career (he played twenty-six or twenty-eight times with the national team) was the double-header against Greater Germany, in Paris, for the World Cup. Walaschek, who hadn’t been able to play against Portugal in Milan (Italy had protested Walaschek’s selection, given that his application for naturalization was still being processed), got FIFA’s approval for Paris. Once FIFA recognized (fourteen votes in favor, ten against) Walaschek’s Swiss-soccer citizenship, Jules Rimet, the “inventor” of the World Cup, could say that soccer naturalized Walaschek before the country officially did.
The first match ended in a tie, and the rematch took place on June 9, 1938 at the Parc des Princes. With the Anschluss, Germany and Austria formed a single team, and at the twenty-second minute of the first half Goliath-Germany was already ahead two to zero. But David and his slingshot repeated the miracle. Walaschek initiated the comeback, Amadò brought them to a tie, and then came Trello Abegglen’s two goals. Did news of the great match in Paris make it to Moscow? Certainly not. Did the grandfather and grandmother in Moscow, orchestra director for the circus and circus employee, know about their grandson in the West who instead of taming horses or elephants, being a trapeze artist or acrobat, juggled a soccer ball for the Swiss national team? If Juno had decided to bring the message to the grandmother in her corner of the circus (though in 1938, during Stalin’s purges, was the circus still running?), perhaps she would have started spurring on the horses (since animals are polyglot) with a “hop Suisse!” and the grandfather, directing the orchestra, would have slipped a few notes from the Swiss national anthem into the triumphal march at the finale, just as Tchaikovsky had done with “La Marseillaise” in the 1812 Overture.
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Perhaps Klee’s O was the oval destined for Sindelar, for his grave. He was the star of the Wunderteam, but he refused to play with the white shirt and the black soul of Hitler’s Germany, and one day was found dead in his house, extinguished by gas. Suicide? Revenge made to look like suicide? One of the great forwards “of all time” was dead, but all of Austria was dead too, and no one on the Wunderteam of writers could, like Pindar or Homer, sufficiently honor that geometric weaver of intricate patterns with a leather ball. Thus the tombstone’s oval would remain empty, it too a ring without its gem; and so, an old Walaschek, fifty years after the victory over the Germans in Paris, on his way from Bern to Geneva, his home, on the InterCity train (there’d been a reunion of the old glories—the remaining survivors with gray or sparse hair, wool vests, Walaschek with a cane for his achy hip—to commemorate Rappan, the old fox, the coach of the miracle; they’d made several toasts, posed for group photos, for TV cameras), and so, on the train, on his way home, he dreamed up a team that was all offense, apologizing to the Czechs and Belgians and Dutch and then a little to everybody, to the English greats too (but we also beat them in ’38—that’s Walaschek’s second favorite memory) because he had to leave them out of the ideal team, there where the divine act floods the universe, penetrates all living things, submerges them: wherever they may be, it is; it precedes them, accompanies them, follows them. One must simply surrender to its waves:
Zamora (or Plánička?)
Di Stéfano Puskás
Pelé Falcão Schiaffino
Sindelar Walaschek Meazza Eusébio Mortensen
He could have made up a hundred ideal teams in his dreams, and he addressed everyone, included and excluded, with the informal tu; for instance, apologizing—I’m sorry, having to leave someone like tu out. Players, both teammates and opponents, had always and spontaneously addressed one another informally. No soccer player in the world would have been able to hold back his laughter (Walaschek was laughing, in his sleep, on the Bern-Geneva InterCity) upon reading (exactly on April 19th, 1938, on the exact day printed at the top of the page 13 of the National Zeitung that Paul Klee tore out to paint his alphabet, his sacred incisions made with a black-dipped paintbrush over Genia’s printed name, obscuring, like an impetuous wave in a stormy sea, his “Wala”) the proposal-injunction in the Giornale d’Italia, immediately reprinted in the other newspapers in the civilized world (“syphilisation!” Ulysses yelled in Dublin), that “all letters to figures in public service wherein the formal Lei is used instead of the preferred formal form Voi shall not be answered. Voi has also been fully adopted in the armed services.”
Voi, Captain Severino Minelli. The Captain of the Swiss National Team, Severino Minelli, evidently of Italian origin, and along with him the midfielder Sirio Vernati, perhaps aggravated the violently anti-Swiss, pro-Salazar Milanese fans even more, since it was precisely those two deserters who were the first to refuse the Fascist salute, whereas Salazar’s Portuguese were all too happy to oblige, from Azevedo to Cruz, the outside left. The Fascists in Spain were just a few kilometers from the coast; Daladier had recently succeeded Blum, the director of the Vienna State Opera; Bruno Walter had been dismissed, the Austrian bishops had recognized the Anschluss, a journalist for the Berner Tagwacht was fired over an offensive article about Hitler . . . In the group photo from Milan, Captain Severino Minelli had a grim look, like William Tell with Gessler.
Things go even better in dreams than they do on computers, which, in addition to being able to put together the ideal concert, will be able (in the year 2000 . . . ?) to “copy” the best plays of the great champions, “reinvent” them, put them into different “contexts,” put a player on the field with players from other eras. The impossible game, the Platonic ideal of soccer, shall soon be possible. In the arena of Genia Walaschek’s dreams, though, it was already happening. Maneuvering his words delicately, as if dancing on tiptoe, feinting, he conferred with Sindelar (as tu) to set up “golden head” Kocsis, who was right in front of the goal, poised to shoot into the top corner—even Plánička wouldn’t be able to stop a shot like that. He dreamed of the pleasure, with a dash of fear and trembling, when, near the flag, under the linesman’s watchful eye, he would go for a corner kick. He didn’t glance at the packed arena, the crowd facing him or the crowd behind him, the grandstand; there were people cheering and heckling, with anthems and curses, whistles and applause, almost as if all human suffering and thirst for glory had been relegated to those open mouths from the four cardinal points of the world. You’ll go for the diagonal shot, not too close to the goalie, not too far back—it should come out like a constellation of stars on a clear winter’s night, like Orion’s club; first there must be the mental calibration of impulse, power, and skill, so that the ball, parabolically aslant, perhaps ricocheting like the quotidian gossip and backbiting of life, meets Trello’s head or Aeby’s foot; and in the name of Switzerland, may God confound Germany. God (no, this isn’t taking His name in vain) help us, may He give the ball an anomalous unpredictability. Enlighten Trello so that he chooses the right moment to break free, to soar up. Luck, as with everything, matters. A goal can be a miracle, can verge on the banal or verge on the sublime. And the stadium entire, like a microcosmic humanity, can rejoice in it. O, the disappointment when the ball doesn’t make it into the goal. Going home at night and sitting on the train, staring down at your banged-up shins.
Klee’s O could be the oval idea of an ordered cosmos, the annual ring on a transversal section of a tree trunk, halfway between roots and leaves, in a continuous cycle. Klee showed them a pink circle on a section of an old larch. – Here I was born, and there I died. Then with the pencil he marked another circle, two millimeters wider. – But the tree doesn’t know—you took no notice!
– The cosmos of form, Klee tells his students at Bauhaus, itself an expression of religious sentiment, resembles creation so closely that only a breath is needed to bring it to life. Or perhaps the O is a container of seeds, an assemblage of stages of growth: an archetypal egg—a musical note.
Or is it a magnifying lens? The rim of a pan? Nadezhda Mandelstam said she went around Russia with Osip’s poems hidden in pans. Then she decided to memorize them for fear that the authorities would take them from her. Perhaps it’s a ring on which to dock the ship of life? Is it, in the gray fog of the National Zeitung, the pale (black) sphere of the sun? Or God’s signature on Ulysses’s diabolical question-challenge?
Three times it turned her round with all the waters . . .
Alain de Lille, the platonic theologian, to whom Dante also refers, says that “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Is Ulysses’s ship, swirling in on itself three times, meant to imitate the signature of God? Or is it a serpent, symbol of eternity, curling into a circle (putting its tail in its mouth)?
Is it the first circle of Hell?
Klee raised his hand. Head bowed, he said:
– Cheer up! Value such country outings, which let you have a new point of view for once as well as a change of air, and transport you to a world which, by diverting you, strengthens you for the inevitable returns to the grayness of the working day. More than that, they help you to slough off your earthly skin, to fancy for a moment that you are God; to look forward to new holidays, when the soul goes to a banquet in order to nourish its starved nerves, and to fill its languishing blood vessels with new sap.
Where to dock the ship of life? A soccer player’s ship speeds toward algae-filled waters, the lacustrine trash dumps of coves. In Walaschek’s time, in Switzerland, only two or three teams earned enough to put food on the table. In 1938, for the three world championship matches, the players got 133 francs each. At the age of thirty or even before, they send a soccer player to Serie B; at thirty-two he’s an old nag, and it’s rare for him to get any field time, perhaps only if he trains diligently, doesn’t drink, doesn’t s
moke, has a wife who, Penelope-like, shrivels up in the exercise of pure fidelity, and because he’s a good strategist, plays with his head and makes the younger ones do the running. But then it’s over. And there’s nothing left for ex-players but going to the stadium to watch other people play. Stare at them on the television, when television comes. There’s still the chitchat at the café. The ex-player can only talk. Experience the form. Life is over; all that keeps him afloat is the ephemeral wisdom of life. He loses himself, happy to be lost, in the sports pages, as others lose themselves in card games, Jass or Scala Quaranta. For a painter, a poet, a sculptor, it’s completely different. When Paul Klee grabs page 13 of the National Zeitung to make his marks—the O that decapitates Walaschek, who on April 19, 1938 wasn’t even twenty-two years old—he, Klee, is almost sixty, having been born on December 18, 1879 in the Canton of Bern. He can feel his life coming to an end. In his last days, he seeks help from the tonic sun of the Ticino (where he will die on June 29, 1940, at the Sant’Agnese clinic in Muralto), and when he gets there something mournfully cheerful happens that confirms the difference between a football player and an artist. The artist is generally a fire that burns slowly and can singe anyone who comes near for centuries. Not so the soccer player—he has to do whatever he can in a hurry, burning with a bright but short-lived flame, like the bonfires on Swiss National Day, August 1st, made with tree branches and dry twigs—fleeting. In 1938, a federal councilor was officially present in the stands to keep an eye on the soccer players who gathered for the cup final—the ritual could no longer go unobserved. The Federal Council, our government, sent the winners in Paris, who had beaten Nazi Germany, a heartfelt telegram on behalf of the Swiss people. When Klee is forced to leave Germany and return to Bern, his native canton, due to the rise of Hitler, only a few connoisseurs appreciate him; sure, Picasso and Braque come and visit him, but all in all Klee is considered an eccentric, a madman—the well-meaning popular conclusion is a fair one.
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