by Peter Nadas
And if up to that time even the moments of tension between us had been pleasant, this drawn-out telephone conversation excluding me in more ways than one managed to render them unpleasant; for a few more minutes I let my face be warmed by the feeble winter sun—it had been receding since midmorning and was now only a thin strip of light on Melchior's eyes and hair and on the wall over his head—then I withdrew into the study, took out the blanket from under the pillow, lay down on the sofa, turned to the wall, and, like someone who has finally found rest and solace, wrapped myself in the soft blanket, for perhaps he was right: I didn't take his story quite seriously, and considered his undying hatred for Germans a form of self-hatred stemming from very different causes, just as he shut himself off from the heartrending story of my life, at times shedding real tears over it but in the end making the cold remark that he saw in it nothing but merely the personal, and of course in that sense moving, consequence of the final collapse of anarchistic, communistic, socialistic mass movements caught in the struggle between two superpowers, we were both unfortunate products of that same collapse, two odd mutants, he said, and laughed.
Slightly offended, I reminded him of the special aspects of Hungarian history, offended because of course nobody likes his entire existence to be seen as the symptom of a disease, even an aberration of European proportions, but all my arguments proved futile, he stuck to his guns and launched into a comprehensive geopolitical analysis in which he elaborated on his theory that the 1956 Hungarian uprising—he said uprising, not revolution—was the first and most substantial symptom, one might even call it a turning point in contemporary European history, signaling the collapse and liquidation, the practical demise, of all traditionally motivated struggles, and while at the time the Hungarians appealed very heroically but just as foolishly to a traditional European ideal, that ideal, as it turned out, no longer existed, all that was left of it were a few slogans and a few Hungarian corpses.
Several thousand dead and executed people, I put in reproachfully, my own friend among them.
These ideals and principles, he continued as if he hadn't even heard me, had ceased to be viable with the end of World War II, except that Europe, ashamed at having been unable to defend itself but also euphoric in victory, failed to notice that at the Elbe River the soldiers of the two great powers were already representatives of two superpowers, embracing over the charred corpse of Hitler.
Whatever the aim of the struggle—national self-determination or social equality—to the new world powers it was all the same, he said, because in their respective spheres of influence, reshaped in their own image, they both strove to thwart independent development.
What on the one side meant a return to pre-democratic conditions, suppressing all attempts at democratization or national independence, and to which, I should please note, the other superpower, espousing principles of freedom and self-determination, gave its ready blessing, that very same thing meant on the other side keeping in check all practical achievements stemming from and spread by the movement of bourgeois emancipation, denying them room to grow and flourish, forcing all radical initiatives inspired by the principles of equality before the law, of social justice, into the Procrustean bed of conservatism, to which the superpower on the other side, championing the cause of social justice, gave equally ready blessing, because, for one thing, it too was basically conservative, and also because it felt that any social transformation based on ideals of equality would threaten its own hierarchical practices.
That's how it is, he said, somewhat amused by his own political philosophizing; taking advantage of a momentary, hesitant pause in which he seemed to gather further strength from his own thinking and self-mockery, I expressed my doubts about so crudely equating the two superpowers, whether in intention or practice.
And I shouldn't think, he went on, ignoring me again, that he hadn't heard our little debate as we were walking up the stairs in the theater; he was listening to Thea but heard it just the same, and thought that in our little verbal duel the breakdown of traditional European aspirations was even more evident than it was in the so-called political arena, where crude rhetoric and overcautious diplomatic phraseology tended to blunt the edge of real conflict or push it to absurd extremes; we were being ridiculous, we didn't need a Wall, we kept snarling like mad dogs, not interested in guessing or inquiring what really was happening on the other side, forgetting completely that the Wall was erected to make us bark at each other.
At least three times they said goodbye and then started talking again, so engrossed in each other they couldn't let go; they must have talked for at least forty minutes, and I not only sensed but understood that having retreated behind the protective screen of another language, Melchior was talking about me, gossiping, or, in the squabble going on between the two of them, using me to his advantage—they were jabbering, arguing, fighting, and gabbing like old hags—fuming silently, I huddled under my blanket, hoping that on the waves of his annoying, nasal singsong I might drift off into a light sleep, for I wanted everything to fade away into the distance; if I had to be alone, then let me be really alone.
His arguments seemed persuasive enough, even more so because, unlike me, he never got worked up, never exploded or flew into a rage, not even when his analyses touched on the most sensitive subjects, as if he were short on excitability but long on being cool and reserved, with an uncanny analytical ability, highlighted with ironic overtones, sticking to his own self-chosen matter at hand; but for all that I almost always remained distrustful of his showy theories, for he gave me the impression of a man who talked this way because at each crucial point in his life he had avoided, and still continued to avoid, himself, so that all he did was analyze the evasions with an unerring, seamless logic which he used to conceal his open, bleeding emotional wounds.
True to myself, I paid attention not so much to what he was saying as to the more revealing stylistic elements of his delivery, tried to absorb this emotional block, this ironic, cool, conscious maneuvering with which he distanced himself from himself, tried to understand it by pressing forward to a point where the evasion might occur, gaining a foothold on the slippery soil where his being, the system of his gestures, might be deciphered and he would become touchable, but it was like moving among shadows, for all his gestures remained emphatic allusions to something else, his external features, his smile, his voice, even the people around him were allusions, including Thea, whom he desired yet rejected, and Pierre-Max, whom he no longer desired but was unable to give up, not to mention that I myself was also no more to him than an allusion.
In a foreign city a visitor's eyes, nose, tongue, and ears make extremely curious, and for the natives incomprehensible and hair-raising, connections between the orderly or disorderly layout of streets, between houses—including façades and the feel of the insides of apartments—and their inhabitants' build, dress, behavior, and pace of actions and reactions, because in a strange city the familiarity of routine is absent, the so-called inner and outer natures cannot be separated as sharply as in our home city, where we are used to distinguishing between what we believe to be external constraints and what we assume to be our inner drives; in a foreign city the essential and the trivial merge in an impenetrable blur, a stone façade and a human face, a staircase and the people climbing it become one; colors, smells, lights, kissing, eating, lovemaking—all flash before us, though we cannot know their origins and histories, and their impact is all the stronger, lack of awareness and knowledge transporting you back to the paradisiacal state of a child's urge to observe and discover, a sensual state of unaccountability! perhaps this is the reason why twentieth-century people like so much to be on the move, the comforting, familiar state may be the one they are searching for as they roam about, singly, in pairs, or as part of a herd, in foreign cities all over the world; weighed down by duties and responsibilities, they want out, and this may be the only universally accepted state in which, with no particular danger, they can bre
ach the thick wall erected to isolate the events of one's unconscious childhood from the experiences of what one believes to be conscious adulthood: what infinite joy, what bliss, to be able, once again, to trust oneself to one's nose, taste buds, ears, and eyes, to one's elemental and undeceivable sense organs!
No matter how persuasive his arguments may have been or how self-tormenting and vindictive his theories and assumptions—and therefore apparently not self-hating—according to which he wasn't even German but a fraud who wallowed in his own lies, and since this was the only truth he could squeeze out of himself here, he had to get out, no matter what he said; his apartment, to me at least, exuded the same peculiar style that I felt, for example, in the opera house rebuilt and somewhat remodeled after the war, and not only did the exterior and inner spaces of this opera house evoke in me a mood very close to the one I experienced on Chausseestrasse, in that grand apartment turned workers' flat, but as every important public building in every city is meant to do, it too represented workaday experiences raised to an abstract architectural level.
I knew a few things about this city, but of course no more than one might learn by casually perusing a guidebook: because of my interest in the theater, I knew, for example, something about the history of the opera house, the circumstances in which it was built and then several times rebuilt, I knew that Prince Frederick—-Frederick the Great for the historically minded—eagerly sought out the company of his favorite court architect, Knobelsdorf, and while still a young prince presented him with plans to reconstruct the future state capital; when he ascended the throne after the death of his father, Frederick William, often remembered as the Soldier King, nothing could prevent him from embarking on an ambitious building project, which was preceded by the inevitable demolitions and destructions, so in flagrant violation of existing laws, the modest town houses along the Unter den Linden, all different in height and width and architecturally undistinguished—built during the reign of his dour and passionately hated father—were simply erased from the face of the earth to make room for sumptuous, uniform five-story dwellings styled after Venetian palazzi, whose façades nevertheless seemed to look at their surroundings with cold aversion; in the end, all this factual information served no purpose except to enable me, with increasing freedom and abandon, to make connections between things that Melchior found nearly impossible to follow.
I knew that of the public edifices planned for the Unter den Linden and meant to represent the court, the opera house was the first to go up; like all the buildings designed by Knobelsdorf, who followed Palladio's and Scamozzi's principles of architectural forms, it had to be an imposing, well-proportioned structure in the classical style, behind whose simple exterior of geometrical lines and symmetrical proportions every whim and fancy of both builder and patron could explode in the exuberant, lush rococo of the interior, running wild in the white, gold, and purple of its asymmetrical adornments; the site chosen for the theater was a vast open tract, cleared of all former buildings, between the city walls and the old moat (which is now a small winding street still called Festungsgraben).
It was as if someone had accidentally opened an old, dull-gray, squarish, military foot locker, only to find inside it an exquisite music box standing on a jasper base, decorated with sparkling precious stones and dancing figurines, and playing charming little melodies.
The soft, thick, deep-red carpeting on the white floor of Melchior's apartment, the white-lacquered furniture, the heavy folds of the floor-length silk drapes with their gold lilac design, the white wallpaper on the smooth walls, the baroque mirrors, the graceful candelabra, the antique-yellow glow of the tiny flames trembling with each gust of draft, sending up spiraling strips of thin smoke—to me, all this represented the same dazzling strangeness between exterior and interior; in that box of an apartment, originally built for maids and workmen, tucked away on the top floor of a crumbling, turn-of-the-century apartment house that still bore the pockmarks of shelling and the untreated machine-gun wounds of the last war, I felt the presence of that same earnest, constrained aloofness, that same aristocratic aversion to what is external, what is real in the here and now, which I sensed in the historically significant shrine to music and song, the repository of the city's cultural past.
For some reason the builders had been in a hurry, wanting to break away from the hated past as rapidly as possible, so it took barely two years to complete the theater, so extraordinary for its day, used not only for operas but also for social gatherings and festivities, for which reason Knobelsdorf put kitchens, storerooms, servants' quarters, and washrooms on the ground floor, where the lobby and box office are today, and above them three large halls, one behind the other, so that with the help of the available technical equipment, with levers and traps, the three theater spaces of auditorium, stage, and backstage could be turned into one vast hall—no wonder the contemporary world was in awe! and even after repeated renovations and remodeling, this three-way division was preserved to this day.
And so, when I interrupted Melchior's coolly delivered confession about being a man of lies, careful not to offend him, I tried to share some of these observations with him, telling him I found nothing false in the way he had furnished his apartment but, on the contrary, saw in it a unique fusion of bourgeois practicality, proletarian contentment with bare necessities, and aristocratic aloofness, in which all the signs and elements of the past were present, albeit shifted from their original places, a peculiar, warped system of animate and inanimate traces of the past and present mingling with one another that could be found all over the city; he listened, looking at me askance, and though I felt I was straying into an area where he couldn't and wouldn't even want to follow me, I went on, pointing out that to me the overall effect of the apartment was neither intimate nor attractive but very truthful and, above all, very German, and without knowing how things were on the other side, I'd be willing to guess that all this was uniquely local in character, and therefore it wasn't so much my brain as my nose and eyes that objected to his reflections on his own people and to his statements, which, to me, smacked of self-hatred.
It was enough, I said, to take a good look at the refurbished opera house, where the latest reconstruction made the gods and little angels disappear, knocked out the walls between boxes, and, by considerably reducing the use of gold and ornamentation, seemed to sterilize the past of the theater's interior, leaving only stylistic reminders, rococo emblems along the front of the balconies and up in the cupola, the idea being to cool the sensual, overwrought exuberance of the former decor and bring it in line with the studied simplicity of the theater's exterior, architecturally a sound idea, preserving the past even while destroying it, preserving, more specifically, its grim and ugly orderliness, thus matching perfectly the prevailing atmosphere today, in which the aim was to satisfy only the most basic needs of the people; anyway, I said, there seemed to be a constant threat of secret contagion, because everything here stank of some powerful disinfectant.
It was this wariness about the past, these stylistic twists of simultaneously preserving and obliterating it, that I also noticed in people's homes: in this sense I didn't think Melchior could completely isolate himself from anything, but in fact was repeating, involuntarily imitating, what others were doing: dragging his ancestors' bourgeois furniture into a proletarian flat—and doing so to flaunt his eccentricity—was not very different from how that proletarian family lived in the Chausseestrasse apartment, designed originally for ostentatious haut-bourgeois life.
He didn't quite understand what I was getting at, and as we sat facing each other in the candlelight, I could see on his face how he was struggling, quietly, to overcome the hurt he felt.
If I was so well versed in the history of German architecture, he said, not to mention the soul of the German people, then I must also know what Voltaire jotted down in his diary after meeting Frederick the Great.
Just what he'd thought: I didn't know.
Still sitt
ing, he leaned forward a little and, with the tenderness of confident superiority, placed his hand on my knee, and while he talked he kept looking into my eyes, taking pleasure in mocking both me and himself, smiling a small, supercilious smile.
Five feet two inches tall, Melchior said, in playful imitation of a schoolmaster, the king had a well-proportioned but by no means perfect build, and because of his self-consciously rigid posture he looked a bit awkward, but his face was pleasant and spiritual, polite and friendly, and his voice was attractive even when he swore, which he did as frequently as a common coachman; he wore his nice light-brown hair in a pigtail, and always combed it himself—he could do it rather well—but when powdering his face he sat before the mirror never in his nightcap, gown, and slippers but in a filthy old silk dressing gown—in general he eschewed conventional attire, for years he traipsed around in the unadorned uniform of his infantry regiment, was never seen wearing shoes, only boots, and didn't like to put his hat under his arm as was then the custom; despite his undeniable charm, there was something unnatural in the details of his physical appearance and his behavior; for example, he spoke French better than he did German, and was willing to converse in his native tongue only with those whom he knew spoke no French, because he considered his own language barbaric.
