He had left no mess. Had he cleaned up everywhere? Unfortunately not. In fact, as it happened, nowhere. The hydra had more than nine heads. It had millions. One Judejahn was not enough. He returned from the war, no conqueror, a beggar, a nobody. He had to support himself on the parapet. His fingers gripped the crumbling masonry. Pain welled up inside him. Rome swam before his eyes, a sea of dissolving stone, and the dome of St Peter's was a bubble adrift on the wild sea. An old lady with blue-rinsed hair pointed with her umbrella at the great panorama of the Eternal City. She called out, 'Isn't it wonderful!' The left tower of Trinità dei Monti rang out its benediction.
He went down. He went down the Spanish Steps, climbed down into picturesque Italy, into the idling population that was sitting on the steps, lying, reading, studying, chatting, quarrelling or embracing one another. A boy offered Judejahn some maize, yellow roasted kernels of maize. He held out a paper cornet to the foreigner, to the barbarian from the north, said 'cento lire' in a wheedling voice, and Judejahn knocked the bag out of his hand. The maize scattered over the steps, and Judejahn trod it underfoot. He hadn't meant it. It was clumsiness. He felt like giving the boy a thrashing.
He crossed the square and reached the Via Condotti, panting. The pavement was narrow. People squeezed together in the busy shopping street, squeezed in front of the shop windows, squeezed past each other. Judejahn jostled and was jostled back. He didn't understand. He was surprised that no one made way for him, that no one got out of his road. He was surprised to find himself being jostled.
He looked for the cross street, looked for it on the map — but was he really looking? His years on the fringe of the desert seemed to him like time spent under anaesthetic, he had felt no pain, but now he felt sick, he felt fever and pain, felt the cuts that had pruned his life to a stump, felt the cuts that severed this stump from the wide flourishing of his power. What was he? A shadow of his former self. Should he rise from the dead, or remain a spook in the desert, a ghost in the Fatherland's colour magazines? Judejahn was not afraid to keep the world at bay. What did it want with him, anyway? Let it come, let it come in all its softness and venality, all its dirty, buzzard lusts, concealed under the mask of respectability. The world should be glad there were fellows like himself. Judejahn wasn't afraid of the rope. He was afraid of living. He feared the absence of commands in which he was expected to live. He had issued any number: the higher he'd been promoted, the more he'd issued, and the responsibility had never bothered him; he merely said, 'That's on my say-so,' or 'I'm in command here,' but that had been a phrase, an intoxicating phrase, because in reality he had only ever followed orders himself. Judejahn had been mighty. He had tasted power, but in order to enjoy it, he required it to be limited, he required the Führer as an embodiment and visible god of power, the commander who was his excuse before the Creator, man and the Devil: I only did what I was told, I only obeyed orders. Did he have a conscience then? No, he was just afraid. He was afraid it might be discovered that he was little Gottlieb going around in boots too big for him. Judejahn heard a voice, not the voice of God nor the voice of conscience, it was the thin, hungry, self-improving voice of his father, the primary schoolteacher, whispering to him: You're a fool, you didn't do your homework, you're a bad pupil, a zero, an inflated zero. And so it was as well that he had stayed in the shadow of a greater being, stayed a satellite, the shining satellite of the most powerful celestial body, and even now he didn't realize that this sun from whom he had borrowed light and the licence to kill had himself been nothing but a cheat, another bad pupil, another little Gottlieb who happened to be the Devil's chosen tool, a magical zero, a chimera of the people, a bubble that ultimately burst.
Judejahn felt a sudden craving to fill his belly. Even in his Freikorps days he had had bouts of gluttony, and shovelled ladles of peas from the field-kitchen down his throat. Now, at the corner of the street he was looking for, he scented food. A cheap eating-place had various dishes on display in its windows, and Judejahn went inside and ordered fried liver, which he had seen in the window under a little sign, 'Fritto scelto'. And so now Judejahn ordered the liver by asking for 'fritto scelto', but that means 'fried food on request', and so, at a loss what to do, they brought him a plate of sea-creatures fried in oil and batter. He gulped them down; they tasted like fried earthworms to him, and he felt nauseated. He felt his heavy body turning into worms, he felt his guts squirming with putrescence, and in order to fight off his disintegration, and in spite of his nausea, he polished off everything on the plate. Then he drank a quarter-litre of wine, this too, standing up, and then he was able to go on no more than a few paces, and there was the German hotel where his in-laws were staying. Cars bearing 'D' licence plates stood in tidy ranks outside the hotel. Judejahn saw the emblems of German recovery, the sleek metal of the German economic miracle. He was impressed. He was attracted. Should he go inside, click his heels together and rap out, 'At your service!'? They would receive him with open arms. Would they? But there was also something that repelled him about these shiny cars. Recovery, life going on, going on fatly and prosperously after total war, total battle and total defeat, it was betrayal, betrayal of the Führer's plans and his vision for the future, it was disgraceful collaboration with the arch-enemy in the West, who needed German blood and German troops to ward off its former Eastern allies and sharers in the stolen victory. What to do? Already the lights were going on in the hotel. One window after another was lit up, and behind one of them Eva would be sitting and waiting. Her letters, with their obscure turns of phrase that spoke of the disappointment that awaited him, the degeneracy and the shame, allowed him no hope of finding Adolf his son here. Was it worth going home? The desert was still open to him. The net of the German bourgeoisie had not yet been thrown over the old warrior. Hesitant, uncertain, he strode in through the door, came into the wood-panelled lobby, and there he saw German men, his brother-in-law, Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, was among them, he had hardly changed at all, and the German men stood facing one another in the German fashion; they were holding glasses in their hands, not mugs of German barley brew, but glasses of Italian swill, but then he Judejahn drank swill like that himself and God knows what else besides, no blame attached to that away from home. And these men, they were strong and stout, he could hear that, they were singing 'A Fortress Sure', and then he felt himself being observed, not by the singers, he felt himself being observed from the doorway, it was a serious, a seeking, an imploring, a desperate look that was levelled at him.
It didn't shock him, but it did abash Siegfried to see the broad unmade bed, which drew his eye though he tried in vain to avert it, the broad bed, the marriage bed standing four-square in the spacious room, it was shameless and undeniable, without sensuality and without shame, cold, clean linen laid bare, and it bore witness coldly and cleanly to functions that no one wanted to disavow, to embraces of which no one was ashamed, to deep and healthy sleep
and all at once I realized that the Kürenbergs were ahead of me, they were the people I wanted to be, they were without sin, they were at once old-fashioned and new, they were antique and avant-garde, pre-Christian and post-Christian, Graeco-Roman citizens and airline passengers crossing the oceans, they were locked up in bodies, but in bodies that were well-explored and -maintained: they were excursionists who had made themselves at home in a possibly inhospitable planet, and who took pleasure in the world as they found it.
Kürenberg was attuned to nomadism. In shirt sleeves and white linen trousers with a rubber apron tied over them, he was bustling about at a pair of extra tables the hotel had put at his disposal, and I was made to ask myself what special arrangements he had come to with the management, because they must have had new wiring put in for him, he had adaptors with three and four plugs in the sockets, and electric leads ran like intertwining snakes to gleaming electrical gear, grills, ovens, infra-red cookers, steamers, pressure-cookers; it was the most comprehensive of mobile kitchens, which delighted him and went everywhere w
ith him, and he was preparing the dinner to which he had invited me, he was mixing, tasting, beating and spicing, his face was firm and manly, it had a massive calm that did me good to look at, while Frau Kürenberg, having given me her hand and spoken a few welcoming words, 'How do you like Rome? Is this the first time you've been here?', twittering swallows of small talk, low swooping flights, was laying the table, bustled about, went to the bathroom, leaving the door ajar behind her, rinsed glasses, put flowers in a vase, and left the wine to chill under running water.
I didn't want to stand around idly. I asked Kürenberg what I could do to help, and he gave me a bowl, a cheese-grater and a piece of Parmesan, and told me to grate it. At first the cheese merely crumbled away into the bowl in hard lumps, and Kürenberg showed me how it should be done, and then he asked me whether I hadn't ever helped my mother in the kitchen at home. I said no. And I remembered the great cold kitchen in our house, the floor tiles always damp and just washed; the boots of the uniformed messengers and the friends of the domestics were forever making new marks on the wet, gleaming tiled surface to the irritation of the servants, who always seemed to be flying off the handle, hectically noisy and hectically nervous. 'Where are you from originally?' asked Kürenberg. I told him the name of the place, and I was going to add that nothing tied me to it any longer, nothing but the accident of my birth, when I noticed Kürenberg looking at me in surprise. And then he cried, 'Ilse comes from the same town,' and she, wiping glasses, now turned to me, with a look that went right through me. And I thought, She can see the old avenue, the avenue with the cafés and the trees which have burned down now, but the cafés have probably been reopened, and people are sitting in them again, under parasols maybe because the trees burned down, or they've planted new trees, fast-growing poplars, she can see that just as I see it, objectively but with some emotion as well; or does she not know the trees burned down? I wanted to ask her, but she bustled out again into the bathroom, and Kürenberg was making a sauce using an egg-whisk, but I noticed his thoughts were elsewhere, he was upset, and then he said, having looked across to the bathroom as though to check she wasn't too close by, 'I was once the conductor there. They had a good orchestra, good singers, a fine hall.' 'It's in ruins,' I said. 'They play in the castle now.' He nodded. The sauce was finished. He said: 'There was an Oberpresident Pfaffrath. Are you any relation?' I said: 'He's my father, but he's the bürgermeister now.' He peered into a steaming pot and called, 'Ilse, quick, the colander.' And she brought the colander from the bathroom, a sturdy mesh, sturdy like herself, and he shook the rice out into the colander, leapt with it full of steaming rice across to the tub, poured cold water over it, shook it dry again, and hung the colander and rice in the steam rising from the saucepan, and said to me: 'It's a Javan recipe, the rice cooks and stays crunchy.' They had got around a lot, he had conducted orchestras all over the world, and they had settled into this life, they had no house, no permanent residence, they owned suitcases, fine, large suitcases, and lived in hotel rooms like the one I was standing in. And then I realized that I'd known Kürenberg for far longer than I'd thought, I remembered, of course I wasn't aware of it at the time, I was a child, I didn't understand what was going on, but now I saw it as though it was before my very eyes: I saw my father showing Kürenberg out, I was playing in the hall, and the way Father shut the door behind Kürenberg I could tell by his reddened face that he was angry and he told me off for playing in the hall, and he went in to Mother, and I followed him, because I didn't know where in the big house I was supposed to go, and I was curious as well, even though I knew he was in a bad mood, as he generally was when people came to him for help, they didn't seem to understand him in our town, because they often came to him for help, and it never even crossed his mind to intervene in lost causes. Not out of hatred, no, he wasn't twisted (he didn't like them, that was probably true enough), but he was afraid of them since they had been declared lepers. And most of all, even at that time, he feared Uncle Judejahn. And as though it were yesterday, I could hear him saying to Mother: 'Our General Musical Director'—he always expressed himself in long-winded ways, and titles never failed to impress him—'paid me a call, and asked me to try to obtain the release of old Aufhäuser, his father-in-law. I urged him to be mindful of his career and apply for a divorce -' And then Father caught sight of me, and sent me out in a rage, and today I know that old Aufhäuser had just been arrested for the first time; it was the day of the first little anti-Jewish boycott, and it wasn't till later, the Kristallnacht, that Aufhäuser's store was set on fire. I got the day off at the Junker school and I saw it burning, the first building I saw burned down. And Aufhäuser was back in protective custody, and my Father sat at the head of the table, ladling out soup, he liked to play the patriarch occasionally, and Goring and Goebbels were spitting venom on the wireless, and my mother said: 'I must say it's a shame about all the beautiful things that were lost to the flames.' And old Aufhäuser was once again in protective custody, and later on I came across his library; it lay in disorderly heaps in the attic of the Hitlerjugendheim, somebody must have carted it off there and then forgotten all about it. Aufhäuser was a bibliophile, and I found first editions of the Classics and Romantics, precious old German and Latin volumes, first editions of the Naturalists, of the Mann brothers, of the works of Hofmannsthal, Rilke, George, bound volumes of periodicals like Blätter für die Kunst and Neue Rundschau, the literature of the First World War, the Expressionists up to Kafka. I helped myself, and later whatever was left was burned, was blown up by bombs along with the rest of the Hitlerjugendheim, and Aufhäuser, the captive in protective custody was murdered—and this was his daughter. Could I bear to look at her? Where were my thoughts running off to? My thoughts rebelled. They said: She's in pretty good shape, she must be forty and hardly a wrinkle on her. And my thoughts went on: The Aufhäusers were wealthy, wonder if she got compensation? And then: He didn't marry her money, it was too late for that, he did it to oppose evil. And then: They love each other, they've stayed together, they're still in love. And we went to table, we sat down, Kürenberg served the food, she poured the wine. It must have been a delicious meal, the chef deserved my compliments, but I couldn't bring myself to do it, nothing had a taste—or rather, it tasted of ashes, dead ashes blowing on the wind. And I thought: She didn't see her father's store on fire. And I thought: She didn't see our houses burning down, either. And I thought: It's over over over, nothing can be done about it, nothing nothing, it's finished finished finished finished. There was fresh spinach, sautéed in fine oil, and over it we sprinkled the cheese I'd grated myself, and my steak was two fingers thick, as soft as butter, and blood ran out of the heart of it, and the wine was as cold and dry as a fresh spring, I was able to taste that still in spite of all the ash coating my tongue, we didn't speak during the meal, the Kürenbergs leaned over their plates and took their nourishment seriously, and once I said, 'This is wonderful,' but maybe I didn't say it loud enough, no one replied, and then there was a raspberry soufflé, flambéed, almost tropical and yet with the aroma of German forests, and Kürenberg said, 'We'll get coffee brought up; there's nothing like a real espresso.' Ilse Kürenberg ordered coffee over the hotel telephone; a bottle of cognac appeared on the table and we talked about Rome.
Death in Rome Page 5
