Madame

by Antoni Libera

  ‘Yes, I can imagine,’ I said earnestly, gazing at the bookshelves.

  ‘Well, she didn’t change at all. She was just as she’d always been: calm and serene, good-humoured, able to laugh at herself. I say that not just because of what he told me,’ he said, motioning with his head at the photograph. He put aside the album and took a worn book with a brown paper cover off a small bookshelf above the lamp. ‘This says something about her, too.’ He opened it carefully at the title page. The words were printed in Gothic script and there was a faded inscription in pencil. The frontispiece showed a photograph of a building façade with steps leading up to a front door. ‘Jugendleben und Wanderbilder,’ he read out, in a good German accent. Then he pointed to the bottom of the page. It said: Danziger Verlagsgesellschaft, Danzig 1922. ‘This is the Gdansk edition of the memoirs of Joanna Schopenhauer,’ he explained, and then glanced at me. ‘Do you know anything about her?’

  ‘I just know that she was Schopenhauer’s mother,’ I admitted.

  ‘Well, that’s better than nothing. And why do you think her memoirs were published in Gdansk?’

  I shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Because that’s where she was born,’ he said with emphasis, as if my ignorance in the matter were some outrageous failing. ‘Right here, in this house,’ he said, pointing at the frontispiece, ‘on the south side of Holy Spirit Street. Her famous philosopher son was also born there. Didn’t you learn that in your philosophy lessons or whatever they’re called now?’

  ‘Propaedeu –’ I began, but he didn’t let me finish.

  ‘That’s right – propaedeutics!’ He repeated the pretentious term with a sneer. ‘Propaedeutics in Marxism!’

  I was about to correct him (the subject was in fact called propaedeutics in philosophy) but decided against it. He was right, after all.

  His voice full of scorn, he went on: ‘Of course, you can hardly expect them to teach you about Schopenhauer in an introduction to Marxism-Leninism – especially about where he was born and where his famous maman was born: in the supposedly pure-Polish city of Gdansk! How inconvenient for them! Better to talk about other things more deserving of mention – how, for example, the great Leader of the Revolution, Lenin, stayed in our little village of Poronin. Now that’s a real reason for pride – much more interesting and significant! But never mind, I’m straying from the subject . . .

  ‘So, this rare edition that you see here somehow found its way to France. And that’s where they’ – he motioned again at the old album – ‘found it, at a second-hand bookseller’s in Paris, when they were passing through. And later, when they were in the Alps, they sent it to me as a gift – or, rather, she sent it to me, with this inscription. Here, read it.’ He held the book out to me.

  I took it and gazed with concentration at the faint pencilling. The writing was neat and even, the letters small and gracefully formed. This is what I read:

  See chapter thirty-nine.

  My own peregrinations, compared with those, are child’s play.

  There’s no cause for anxiety: the philosopher won’t be gloomy; whatever this person turns out to be, it won’t be a misanthrope.

  Denn

  Wie du anfingst, wirst du bleiben,

  So viel auch wirket die Not

  Und die Zucht, das meiste nämlich

  Vermag die Geburt,

  Und der Lichtstral, der

  Dem Neugebornen begegnet.

  For Constant from C.

  1 January 1935

  I looked up from the book.

  ‘There are probably some things you didn’t understand,’ said Constant, smiling mysteriously.

  ‘Well, yes, I don’t know German,’ I said evasively.

  ‘Oh, the poem fragment, you mean? That’s not the most important thing here.’ He came over to me and, keeping his finger on the words to show me the place, translated it for me: ‘‘‘For as you are born, so will you remain. Stronger than hardship and education is the moment of birth, the ray of light which greets the newborn.” That’s Hölderlin: it’s from the Rhine, one of his most famous hymns. You know where the sources of the Rhine are, I take it?’

  My most extravagant speculations about this visit had not included the possibility of a geography test. ‘Well, I know they’re somewhere in the Alps,’ I said. ‘Somewhere . . . in Splügen, in the Alps,’ I concluded, remembering the title of a famous poem by Mickiewicz.

  ‘Close, but not quite. In fact they’re in the Adula range and in the St Gotthard Pass.’ He closed his eyes, tilted his head slightly upwards and proceeded, in beautiful, fluent German, to recite the poem from memory, stressing the rhythm (I give it here in translation):

  But now, from within

  The mountains’ hidden depths,

  Beneath silvery peaks

  And joyful green spaces,

  From the place at which trembling

  Forests and crags high above

  Look down, day by day,

  There, from that icy abyss, came the voice

  Of a youth, begging

  For mercy . . .

  It was the voice of the noblest of rivers,

  The freeborn Rhine . . .

  ‘It used to be my favourite poem in those days,’ he explained. ‘I knew the whole of it by heart. And she knew it because I taught her. That’s why she quotes it: she’s telling me that she has taken its meaning to heart. But, as I say, that’s not the main thing. What’s important is the joke – here,’ he tapped the place with his finger, ‘in this sentence.’ The finger pointed to the phrase ‘There’s no cause for anxiety.’ ‘But in order to get the joke, you have to see . . . what’s in chapter thirty-nine.’

  Neununddreissigster Kapitel, one of the last chapters in the book, started on here. I found it and slowly turned the pages. The text was abundantly underlined, and the margins were a forest of crosses and dashes which sometimes, through the addition of a dot, formed an irregular sort of exclamation mark.

  ‘She had no trouble reading Gothic script,’ I remarked, intending at the same time to remind him that I myself understood neither the script nor the language.

  ‘Oh, that’s not so hard,’ he said dismissively. ‘And she knew several languages.’ He pointed again at the album. ‘She also spoke fluent Italian and quite good English.’

  ‘Oh.’ I nodded, waiting for further elucidation. At last he decided to provide it.

  ‘This,’ he said, ‘is Joanna Schopenhauer’s description of her journey from London to Gdansk in the year of Our Lord 1787. She was pregnant – with Arthur, the future philosopher.’ Then he told me the story.

  Her husband had wanted the child to be born in England, because that would have made him a British subject – an invaluable asset for the merchant prince he wanted his son to become. But in the end he got cold feet and decided to take her back to his home town.

  Their journey took them through Dover, Calais and Lille to Aachen, then through Westphalia to Berlin and onwards from there. Today the trip takes a day and a half at most (unless, of course, you fly), but then it took more than four weeks and was not without its hardships and strange adventures.

  In Dover they were summoned aboard ship in the middle of the night, at about three o’clock in the morning, because there was a good wind just then. They were half asleep when they got to the dock, and Joanna’s husband didn’t want her to go aboard in the normal way, which at that time meant a rickety, swaying ladder with no safety rails. He insisted that she be hauled up in an armchair, like a special kind of cargo, and furthermore that before this operation was attempted it should be tried out on him, to test the strength of the ropes. Ample remuneration reconciled the sailors to the idea, and following the anxious husband, the armchair with its pregnant cargo, blown about by gusts of icy wind, was duly hauled up a height of three storeys.

  They had hardly left the harbour when a terrible storm blew up, and the ship, tossed about by the waves, rolled and pitched horribly all the way to Calais. They arr
ived after four hours, exhausted by hunger and seasickness.

  In Aachen they had another adventure. The town was known among other things for its hot sulphur springs, and Joanna, who had been curious about this natural wonder ever since she was a child, was eager to try the waters. While attempting to fill her cup straight from the boiling source she scalded her hand and in the process lost a valuable ring.

  The harshest trials, however, awaited them on the journey through Westphalia. The bumpy high road cried out to the heavens for vengeance: their carriage bounced and shook over the rough ground, and the axles were constantly getting stuck in the mud. In their night lodgings rats and mice ran riot, while the kitchen, the only place one could get warm, was thick with black smoke, for there was no chimney, and after a few minutes one began to choke. The sullen local peasantry, oblivious to this, enriched the atmosphere further with their pipes.

  Then, after they’d passed Osnabrück, an axle broke and they found themselves stuck, in gathering darkness and pouring rain, in the middle of nowhere, nothing but fields as far as the eye could see. Assistance was summoned: it arrived in the form of half a dozen farmhands from a nearby estate who came to haul the carriage out of the mud, and the local giant, known for his huge strength, who was to carry the exhausted Joanna to safety in his enormous arms. The giant, sure enough, picked up the pregnant Joanna as if she weighed no more than a feather. Unfortunately he was also asthmatic, and in consequence had to stop and catch his breath every few yards, putting the unfortunate woman down each time he did so without troubling much about the nature of her landing place (and by then it was dark anyway).

  As if this were not enough, God chose that day to summon into His presence the only blacksmith in the vicinity, and another, who lived much farther away, had to be sent for. He could not come until the next day; when at last he arrived and had succeeded in repairing the broken axle, the compensation he demanded was so extravagant that Joanna’s husband refused to pay. The blacksmith insisted; a quarrel broke out. In the end they decided to refer the matter to the local court, which was just then meeting in a nearby village.

  The judge, however, pronounced a verdict so feeble and equivocal that neither party was satisfied: he decided that repairing an axle was work of an ‘artistic nature’ and therefore could not be appraised without seeking the opinion of at least three other blacksmiths. Consequently, either the parties must wait for the professional assessment, which would take a few days, or the sum claimed by the blacksmith as his due must be entrusted to the court, which would dispose of it appropriately once the assessment had been rendered.

  The debtor naturally chose the latter alternative, privately resigning himself to the loss of the entire sum, but the blacksmith was unconsoled. Either he did not believe the court would ever disburse even a portion of the money entrusted to its safe-keeping, or he was simply angry at having to wait to claim what he thought was due him. In any event, he decided to take justice into his own hands – namely to destroy what he had just repaired. It was only with great difficulty that he was dissuaded from this course as, cursing horribly, he approached the carriage, axe in hand. But the benefit from this turned out to be slight, for a few hours into the resumed journey the repaired axle again came apart, condemning the unfortunate travellers to further misery, trouble and expense.

  ‘Is everything clear now?’ Constant concluded, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘You mean that . . . as a result of all these mishaps . . . a philosopher was born?’

  ‘Rather, what kind of philosopher. And what kind of person in general. Do you know anything about him?’

  ‘I know that his view of the world was radically pessimistic,’ I pronounced, in the formulaic style of Agnes Wanko.

  ‘Exactly. And apart from that he was an unpleasant character. Irritable, eccentric and full of hate, a recluse and a coward.’

  ‘But such a beautiful writer!’ I exclaimed, letting him know I had caught on to the joke and joined in the game. ‘And so talented! Why shouldn’t we rather see that as a result of the sufferings he went through in the womb? In her place,’ I went on, opening the book at the title page and putting my hand on the faint inscription, ‘I would have made a different joke. After the sentence “My own peregrinations, compared with hers, were child’s play,” I would have written sadly, “Alas, it won’t be a genius.”’

  ‘Aren’t you pleased with your teacher?’ He smiled enigmatically. ‘She’s very intelligent.’

  Danger, danger! said a flashing red light in my head. Go back, go back at once!

  ‘Indeed I am,’ I conceded matter-of-factly, as if assessing a student. ‘But she isn’t a genius. Since you mention her, though,’ I added, changing direction, ‘didn’t your son call her La belle . . . Victoire? Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said, still smiling.

  ‘Well, why did he call her that?’

  ‘Don’t you know what belle means?’ he teased. ‘I can’t believe you don’t know the word, especially if you’re her pupil.’

  ‘You know perfectly well what I mean,’ I said, returning his smile. ‘I mean the name itself, not the “beautiful” sobriquet.’

  ‘Well, the name’s just a name, what’s so odd about it?’ He was playing with me; clearly he had something up his sleeve.

  ‘Oh, nothing, nothing at all,’ I said, closing Joanna Schopenhauer’s memoirs and putting them on the desk next to the album. ‘Except I wasn’t aware’ – and here I could not bring myself to look my interlocutor in the eye – ‘that it was the name she was christened with.’

  ‘Well, it’s true it’s her middle name, but what of it? If you knew why she was called that, I’m sure you’d consider it much more important than her first.’ He picked up the memoirs and replaced them on the shelf.

  ‘Do you mean why or after whom, in whose honour?’

  ‘I mean why, as a result of what circumstances,’ he said.

  ‘Well? You’ve piqued my curiosity. In ’35?’

  ‘Who said it was ’35?’

  ‘That’s when she was born.’

  ‘Which doesn’t necessarily mean that’s when she was christened.’

  ‘And when was she christened?’

  ‘Not until two years later, in the autumn of ’37.’

  ‘Why so late?’

  ‘Aha! That’s the question.’ Again he smiled his playful smile.

  ‘How long are you going to keep me in suspense?’

  ‘They wanted to have her christened in Poland, so they put it off until they got back here. But after that – after that, quite frankly I’m not sure what they were waiting for.’

  ‘So what happened in the autumn of ’37 that finally made them do it?’

  ‘What happened?!’ A kind of sadness seemed to overtake him, and for a long moment he was silent. When he spoke, it was in an undertone. ‘He made a certain decision that involved great risk. So he wanted to put all his family affairs in order.’

  ‘Another expedition? Into the Himalayas? The Hindu Kush?’

  ‘No, no,’ he said bitterly. ‘Worse than that. Much worse.’

  ‘Worse?’ The suspense was unbearable. ‘What was it, for God’s sake?’

  ‘I’m just wondering if I ought to tell you,’ he said, gazing into the distance. He shook his head. ‘I’ve talked too much. These aren’t things you should hear.’

  I was stunned. He’d spoken so freely, and now this sudden change for no apparent reason – after all he’d told me! I cast around for a way to break his resistance. I knew that if I didn’t, I would lose what was perhaps my only chance of learning the truth; if I didn’t drag it out of him now, all my trouble would have been for naught. I closed my eyes for a moment and staked all my chips on one throw: va banque.

  ‘That’s not fair,’ I said. ‘You start telling me something, and then you stop halfway through . . . What have I done to deserve being treated like a child?’

  ‘You’re right.’ (I breathed a sigh of relie
f.) ‘It’s true, that’s no way to behave.’ He put his right hand to his brow and, contorting his face into a time-of-painful-decision grimace, drew it down over his smooth-shaven cheeks. ‘All right, I’ll tell you. But you must promise me you won’t talk about this to anyone. No one! Not a soul. Do you promise?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘I’m counting on you to keep your word.’ He raised a cautionary finger. ‘All right. That autumn he startled everyone by suddenly deciding to go to Spain, which had been in the throes of civil war for a year and a half. Hence the middle name.’

  After his enigmatic introductory remarks I had expected some extraordinary revelation, but this took me totally by surprise.

  ‘Not as a tourist, I take it.’

  ‘You take it correctly,’ he said wryly.

  ‘Was he a communist?’

  ‘Have you ever heard of a communist who christened his children?’

  ‘Well, yes, that’s just it . . .’

  ‘That’s just it, that’s just it!’ he mimicked. ‘I knew you’d start asking questions, that’s why I stopped. It’s a long story and I didn’t want to get into it. But, oh, well, I’ve promised now – what’s done is done.’ (Another sigh of relief.) He concentrated his gaze on a distant point, gathering his thoughts.

  ‘I’m sorry, but before you begin . . . would you mind if I took this off?’ I asked, gesturing to my anorak and opening it slightly. Having taken the fort, I wanted to consolidate my position.

  ‘Took this off?’ he repeated absently, clearly elsewhere.

  ‘I’m hot.’

  He still didn’t reply. He was obviously worried about something. The most prominent object in his line of vision was the telephone on the little shelf. Suddenly he seemed to rouse himself. ‘You know what?’ he said briskly.

  ‘What?’ I replied in an undertone, my vigilance heightened.

  ‘What would you say to a walk? I haven’t been out all day; I’d be glad of a bit of fresh air.’

  Damn, I thought anxiously, what on earth can he be up to now? I mustn’t let him slip away. I tried dissuasive tactics. ‘It’s cold and wet outside,’ I said. ‘Typical November weather. Horrible!’