by Peter Nadas
The tile stove in the meantime warmed up the room again; both of us were depressed, and quiet.
I didn't turn on the light; my hands found his head in the dark and I said we could go for a walk if he felt like it.
He said he didn't feel like it at all, and didn't know what it was that had happened earlier; what he'd really like to do was go to sleep for the night, but we could go for a walk.
This city in the middle of a well-kept park which is Europe—to continue and amend with my own impressions his fascinating line of thinking—struck me more as a unique memorial to irremediable destruction than a real, living city, as a frighteningly well-preserved ruin of romantic park architecture, because a truly living city is never the mere fossil of an unclarified past but a surging flow, continually abandoning the stony bed of tradition, solidifying and then flowing on, rolling over decades and centuries, from the past into the future, a continuum of hardened thrusts and ceaseless pulses unaware of its ultimate goal, yet it's this irrepressible, insatiable vitality, often wasteful and avaricious, destructive yet creative, that we call, approvingly or disapprovingly, the inner nature or spirituality of a city's existence; but this city, or at least the sector of it I had come to know, showed none of these alluring urban characteristics, neither preserved nor continued its past, at best patched it up, sterilized it out of necessity or, worse, obliterated it, ashamed; it had become a place to live in, a shelter, a night lodging, a vast bedroom, and consequently by eight in the evening was completely deserted, its windows darkened; from behind the drawn curtains only the bluish flickering of TV screens reached the street, the puny light of that small window through which its residents could glimpse another, more lively world across the Wall; as far as I could tell, people preferred programs coming from the other side, thus isolating themselves from the locale of their own existence much as Melchior did or tried to do, and for understandable reasons preferred to peek into that other, improbable and titillating world than take a look at themselves.
And if at such a late hour, or later, in the dead of night, we descended from our fifth-floor nest to the lifeless streets below, our echoing footsteps made us feel our loneliness, isolation, and infinite interdependence more acutely than we did in the apartment, where behind locked doors we could still pretend we lived in a real city and not on top of a heap of stones declared to be a war memorial.
Some more advanced mammals, like cats, foxes, dogs, wolves, and the like, use their urine and excrement to mark out territory they consider their own, which they then protect and rule as their homeland; other less developed and less aggressive animals like mice, moles, ants, rats, hard-shelled insects, and lizards prefer to move about on beaten tracks, in ruts and burrows: we were more like the latter group, compelled by the almost biological conditioning of our cultures, by our reverence for tradition, and by our upbringing, which could be labeled bourgeois; we flaunted our finicky tastes, our penchant for refinement, and, with a hesitant intellectual relish rooted in our affinity for fin-de-siècle decadence, chose only those routes that in this city could still be considered appropriate for a leisurely old-fashioned walk.
When one's freedom of movement is restricted, then in the very interest of maintaining the appearance of personal freedom one is compelled—in keeping with one's needs—to impose further restrictions on oneself within the larger restrictive limits.
In our evening or nighttime walks we made sure never to wander into the new residential areas, where we would have come face-to-face with the palpable form of the coercive principle that lacked all notion of human individuality and that considered people, quite pragmatically, beasts of burden and, mindful only of the bare necessities of rest, procreation, and child care, packed them into grim concrete boxes—No, not that way! we'd cry, and choose routes where one could still see, feel, smell something of the city's ravaged, continually deteriorating, patched-up, blackened, disintegrating individuality.
I might say that we took our walks through the stage set of individuality's Europe-size tragedy, though in the end we could choose only between the bleak and the bleaker—that was the extent of our freedom.
For instance, if we walked down Prenzlauer Allee, an empty streetcar would clatter past now and then, or we might see a Trabant chugging along, its two-stroke engine belching noxious little fumes—and of course Prenzlauer Allee was a tree-lined avenue, an allée in name only—after a good half-hour stroll we'd come to an empty lot as big as a city block, riddled with bomb craters and overgrown with weeds and shrubs, going around which we'd turn into Ostsee Strasse or, better yet, Pistorius Strasse farther up, and pass the old churchyard of the parish named after St. George, and after another twenty minutes through various winding side streets, we'd reach Weissensee, or White Lake.
This small lake in whose murky, polluted water sluggish swans with filthy feathers and attentive wild ducks swam after crumbs thrown by passersby, was surrounded by a cluster of trees, the remains of a formal garden of an elegant summer palace that used to stand there, replaced now by a nondescript beer hall.
That Sunday evening we took a shortcut through Kollowitz, formerly Weissenburger, Strasse, the street where, in my increasingly complicated tale, I had placed the residence of the young man who arrived in Berlin in the final decade of the last century and who, in my imagination, based on Melchior's stories, seemed to resemble me a little, and from Kollowitz Strasse we turned into Dimitroff Strasse.
Of course Melchior had no inkling that living alongside him I was leading a double life, indeed multiple lives; ostensibly, I also thought this route ideal for a peaceful stroll for the same reason he did, namely that after a mere ten minutes the broad curve of Dimitroff Strasse seemed to pull you into the winding little alleys among the trees of Friedrichschain, Friedrich Park, but for me this wasn't pleasant at all, because under the impenetrable evening shadows cast by the trees, lurid little scenes were unfolding in my imagination.
During those weeks, after morning rehearsals, I also spent more and more time traipsing around with Thea.
Being autumn, it got dark rather early; the long hours spent in the artificial light of the rehearsal hall, the twilight meanderings with Thea in the open spaces outside the city, the evenings and nights spent with Melchior—these tightly compartmentalized my days, so tightly that sometimes while touching Melchior I caught myself thinking of Thea, and it happened the other way around, too: I'd be sitting peacefully with Thea in the cool grass near a lake and suddenly would miss Melchior so much that his very absence would conjure him up in my mind's eye; leisurely, and unknown to each other, the two of them kept flowing into and out of each other, creating a strange and baffling chaos that my imagination found hard to keep in check, a strange world that imperceptibly isolated me from my past and from my future—but that at least was a welcome blessing.
And anyway, who is to tell what's strange? suppose that after a rehearsal someone, anyone, an actor or observer, finally leaves the theater at three o'clock in the afternoon and steps out into an ordinary, truly unremarkable, sunny or gloomy, windy or rainy street and stands among rationally constructed houses inhabited by real-life people, while on the sidewalk all kinds of other people, attractive or ugly, cheerful or dejected, old or young, well-dressed or dowdy, all propelled by the same drive as if constantly listening to the invisibly ticking time, hurry about their business, carrying shopping bags, briefcases, packages, run errands, walk in and out of buildings, drive their cars, park and get out of them, buy and sell, greet one another with feigned or genuine pleasure, and then part with loud words, angrily or indifferently or perhaps with a painful sigh; at the corner sausage stand they dip their hot wurst into mustard and bite into it so the juice squirts out, while aggressive sparrows and pigeons puffed up in agitation wait for the falling crumbs; streetcars packed with still more people, and trucks groaning under the weight of mysterious loads, clatter across the background of this picture which, as one comes out of the theater, seems frighteningly improbabl
e, as if it weren't the spectacle of real life, because the movement, beauty, ugliness, happiness, and indifference seen here, on the street, are neither symbols nor condensations of real, complete attributes or states of being nourished by truly experienced feelings: even if it allows its participants the highest possible degree of awareness, a street scene is real precisely because it is unaware, cannot possibly be aware, of its own reality, and the pedestrian hurrying down the street—a professor of psychology, a muscle-bound laborer, a cruising hooker—is a little like the professional actor who naturally and most appropriately adjusts his expressions and movements to his surroundings, which means that on the one hand, assuming his streetwise persona, he neutralizes himself, blends in, observes very keenly and sensitively the subtlest moral rules of public behavior, and on the other hand, he takes into account the prevailing light conditions and air temperature, and, while preserving the rhythm of his own body and conforming to that of the general traffic, pays attention to time—his own, that is: only for a brief segment of time are his movements regulated by the street's shared circumstances and consensual principles, only for the fleeting moments it takes to pass through this common existence; here nothing is done or left undone with the whole course of life in mind, unlike on the stage, where, as the rules of tragedy or comedy demand, the smallest action must include the whole of life, birth, and death; and since in all probability time is also perspective, the person on the street has only a very narrow and very practical perspective on himself, which is why the real world seems so improbable to one who steps out on the street with his eyes still used to the greater, anyway more universal, perspectives of the stage.
Wearing her short red wraparound coat, the kind that used to be called a coolie jacket, Thea would quickly cross the street toward her car, and with the hand holding the keys she'd wave back invitingly and insistently: would I like to come along? a gesture implying a request for me to get in the car, and also a curt signal to the others that the two of us had things to do on our own, which is how she meant to help me part with the rest of them, though she must have known I was always ready to go with her.
Some days we'd take Frau Kühnert home to Steffelbauerstrasse, and other times we'd simply leave her in front of the theater.
When someone walks out the stage door of a theater, alone or with others, at three o'clock in the afternoon and suddenly finds himself in this dumb state of improbability and realizes, moreover, that it's still light outside, then he can do one of two things: he can walk right into this humdrum, unpromising, sad world that nevertheless has a more tangible perspective and more measurable time and, instead of pondering the relationship between reality and unreality—which is what he should do— quickly go get something to eat though he's not hungry, drink something though he's not thirsty, go shopping though he doesn't really need anything; in other words, by falling back on basic life functions and consumer needs he can artificially readjust to the reality of a world operating with small prospects, even smaller insights, and minuscule perspectives; or he can protect, defend, hold on to his dazed incomprehension in this so-called real world and try to escape from the cold, restrictive scenery of time—even if he has nowhere else to go.
I couldn't or maybe didn't want to understand that I was living in the reality of improbability, though the signs were there, right in front of my nose, in Thea's every gesture and also in mine, undefined but present in our daily experience, but I didn't dare call that experience reality.
I was a wholesome child of my age, contaminated by the dominant ideas of the era, who also waited, along with the others, for the opportunity to seize the true, genuine reality that contained everything personal and ephemeral but was itself impersonal and not ephemeral, a reality that various theories, newspaper articles, and public speeches kept referring to, which had to be seized, which we had to strive for, but about which I had a very guilty conscience, because no matter where I turned I found only my own reality; and since the ideal, supposedly perfect, and complete reality was nowhere to be found, I considered that my own, however crude or cruel or pleasurable but for me perfect and complete in every way, was not reality but the reality of improbability.
Interestingly, I felt and knew exactly what I was supposed to feel and know, yet was forever asking myself what reality was—if my improbable reality wasn't reality, then what was I in this whole false existence?—and although the still-sensible part of my mind kept asking questions, in the end I came to believe that my improbability was not reality, that I was some strange transition between the actual and the real, and the ideal reality was up there somewhere, out of reach, ruling my life against my will, ideal and tyrannical, which I could never be a part of and could not touch, for it did not represent me, it was so powerful and great I couldn't even be worthy of its name, being but an unreal worm; yes, that's what I would have thought of myself if I'd been capable of such extreme self-abasement; and since despite my protests I did think of myself in those terms (without realizing it), the ideological rape used by the era achieved its most profound goal with me: I voluntarily relinquished the right to be my own person.
Thea did not deal in ideas—or, more precisely, they were embedded in her instincts—and I don't believe she gave them any thought, which was exactly why she was so violently opposed to the kind of acting that relies on identifying with or trying to become the character to be portrayed; she wasn't willing to cheapen the improbable experiences of her own sensuous reality, everything that's alive and visceral in a human being—and that is also the matrix of all ideas—to a mere formula and fit it into the uncomfortable narrow bed of an aesthetically prepared, cleverly confining form that others have declared to be, or by some convention accepted as, reality, an approach that for her would have been shamelessly false and ludicrously untrue, and she never had to ask where she was, for she had to be present in her own gestures, an incomparably riskier task than making a sentence or piece of dialogue your own: unaffected by the scruples of the age and using herself as a free human being, she demonstrated what was common to us all, and she knew she didn't have, couldn't possibly have, a single tendency or trait, a single expression of her body or face, that we wouldn't all instantly recognize and share.
Whenever I spent the afternoon with her she managed with her gestures to lift me, almost to thrust me out of the rut of my self-deceiving ideas, and she did this not with a single gesture but with everything she instinctively chose from her inner freedom and allowed to materialize as gestures.
Ultimately, in many respects, Thea and I were quite a bit alike.
Unlike Frau Kühnert, or Melchior for that matter, who used their bodies, their very lives, to block the way leading to hidden and surprising depths, Thea and I felt that it was only down there at the roots clinging to the silt of the senses, at the origins, that we can obtain the life of our bodies.
I also felt that though I might be dull, clumsy, mean, ugly, cruel, fawning, given to intrigues, or anything that from an aesthetic, intellectual, or moral standpoint might be considered inferior, I could balance this aesthetic, intellectual, and moral inferiority, as well as my moral turpitude, with the firm belief that my instincts were infallible and incorruptible: I'd feel first and know second, for I wasn't a coward, unlike those who know first and only then allow themselves to feel, according to the prevailing norms, and therefore knew intuitively and incontrovertibly what was good or bad, allowed or forbidden, because for me the moral sense was not imposed by a knowledge independent of feelings; I fought as single-mindedly as she for the right of the senses, wanted to use her as a means as much as she wanted to use me, wanted also, defying all taboos of mundane conventions and moral standards, to explore the innermost currents of the relationship among the three of us, and, like her, refused to accept the hopelessness of our situation, because then I would have had to admit the error of my supposedly unerring senses, my moral failure.
Strange as it may seem, one would rather let one's head be chopped off than c
ome out with the admission of such a failure.
She always had trouble with the ignition, cursed it, called her car a piece of shit, kept grumbling she'd have to grow old struggling with such shitty contraptions.
And it was also strange that I thought myself free when I was with Melchior, yet with him I was drowning in the story of my body.
From the clutter of the glove compartment or, not infrequently, from the crack between the seats, she would extract her awful glasses, with one earpiece missing, place them on her nose, and keep them there by throwing her head back a little, at the same time managing to get the car started, and from that moment on, her movements were defined for me by a rather endearing chaotic combination of eager dilettantism and flamboyant inattention: on the one hand, she'd pay no attention to what she was doing, let her mind wander and lose contact with the road and with whatever was happening under the hood and indicated on the dashboard; on the other hand, catching herself drifting off, which often got us into truly dangerous situations, like a frightened little girl she would try, of course too abruptly, to correct her movements, while her glasses, falling forward or slipping off, always hampered her in these corrective maneuvers.
Still, I felt quite safe next to her; if I saw, for instance, that she hadn't noticed an upcoming sharp curve or, ignoring the dividing line and heavy oncoming traffic, crossed into the other lane, all I had to do was remark quietly on how smooth or wet the road was, how straight or winding, and she'd make the necessary adjustment; an odd kind of security, I admit, but then I sought personal safety in realms far more profound than that of traffic conditions; in this situation, I first of all had to be ready to give up my life, to say, Well, what the hell, if I die, I die, and trust the comic aspect of her driving style, which clearly showed that she had too much faith in her life to be concerned with the petty demands of traffic, she was busy with other things, she couldn't die so silly and senseless a death: without mixing God or Providence in, she sought to demonstrate with her movements that no one ever died of carelessness, death was always something else, even if its direct cause appeared to be carelessness or inattention, no, this was so only in the newspapers, in reality no precaution or alertness can help us, no amount of attention will prevent our little accidents, we cut our finger, step on broken glass, on a shell, a nail, always by accident, but we do not die by accident; I completely agreed with this, as well as with her other conclusions about life, even if in doing so I held on to my seat more tightly—a visible display of being both able and unable to renounce life, which was funny enough to be enjoyable.
