This painting was of Wagner’s exhortation before the Vaterlandsverein two months before the outbreak of the original Revolution, in March of 1849. He stands at the rostrum in the old Assembly Hall, one hand upraised, eyes lifted, giving the famous speech about the need for freedom for the artist and the common man that led directly to the creation of the Citizens’ Militia. It is as iconic a moment as you could hope for in the history of the Revolution.
There are many upturned faces in the painting, some recognizable, some not. Roeckel, of course, and, turned slightly away, like Judas in the old religious paintings of “The Last Supper,” the three men who had first led the Revolutionary Council but then slunk away to Chemnitz as soon as they got the first whiff of grapeshot. One person near the front raises his copy of The Communist Manifesto, hot off the press, so Marx and Engels make in-absentia appearances. Very stirring, very representational of the ideas in the air at the time.
As I said, the painting is so omnipresent it has become like wallpaper in our lives. We have all passed by it a thousand times without looking at it.
Today I stopped and took it in.
I know now he has been there all the time, just a small detail. Over at the edge of the stage, among other excited young men, is Eisenmann—then still Emil Gaspard. You can tell it’s him by the floppy red beret he was always depicted in when young (here and in “Night Watch”) and the small tricolor pin on his lapel, showing he had still not become a citizen of the adopted land to which he would someday become Comrade Leader. He would at the time have been twenty-nine years old.
I have seen the painting or reproductions of it most of my life (I believe the original was painted in 1854, just after the end of the Prussian Counter-Revolution).
It is only just now, after my time in the Archives, that I know the meeting of the Vaterlandsverein took place while Eisenmann was six weeks away from starting toward Dresden. I believe he was still teaching at the Workingman’s College and organizing petition drives in Paris, his nose to the wind, sniffing for the next hot spot in Europe, which he and everyone else thought would be Prague.
Perhaps this was artistic license on the painter’s part? But then someone who put Marx and Engels present only in spirit would have found a way to put Eisenmann there inabsentia, too.
I walked from one end of the mezzanine to the other, taking in the whole monumental painting, noting faces and figures, the play of light and shadow (there are torches in the audience, besides the early candle-and-gaslight from chandeliers over the stage), the small touches in the painting.
It is, through familiarity, mostly background to office work. As far as such things go, it is a decent piece of Socialist-Realist art—there are far worse examples around. And this is probably the copy of a copy of a copy by a sixth-hand copy of the original from the State Art Studio.
I looked at the Eisenmann figure once more—if you don’t know the iconography, he’s just one more excitable boy-man, thrilled by Wagner’s words, at the edge of the painting.
The eyes are the same as the ones in the Delacroix painting; the same ones I looked into a few hours earlier this morning.
Those eyes saw two full Revolutions, a Counter-Revolution, and the final, successful Second Revolution, which flamed throughout Europe (except Britain). I looked into those eyes in the painting.
They looked back.
I felt nothing.
9
No Room Here for the Shirk
I returned to the Peoples’ Archives, and as I walked into the lobby, I saw the Chief Archivist rise from his desk and hurry toward me.
“Comrade Rienzi,” he said, “we wondered when you were coming back to your book.”
I misunderstood him for a moment. “I originally had no plan to come back,” I said, “though the pull of this place is overwhelming.”
“We left your book out, as per instructions,” he said.
“My instructions?”
“The one with the marker,” he said.
I distinctly remember closing all the books and placing the dozen ribbons in a stack on the left of the table.
“Thank you,” I said. “Is there anyone else here?”
“Comrade Roeckel, the younger, looking at Wagner’s music. He came in this morning.”
“Very good,” I said, and went down the hallway into the reading room.
A man in his twenties had three weighty tomes open before him; I could see the staff lines on the pages all the way from the doorway. He was at the third table down. He looked up at me, nodded, and went back to copying with a pencil on one of the stack of loose sheets of paper beside him.
At the desk I had used two days ago lay a notebook with a ribbon marking a place in it. I knew it to be Wagner’s last notebook, just before the Prussian Counter-Revolution of 1853—a time of scarcity, this last notebook had not been uniform with his regular notebooks, but purchased from some local source. It was larger and slimmer than the others I had looked at. I had glanced through it on my previous visit—but from what I had seen the contents were mostly hurried jottings—days of battle and unrest everywhere—and weeks would be skipped in some places. The official correspondence from the period was more informative, so I had lain this one aside.
I placed other books atop it later in the day. But I had put all twelve ribbons aside. All the books should have been cleared away that evening.
I sat down in the chair and opened the book to where the ribbon was.
I read the page to the bottom. It was Wagner’s thoughts on the reorganization of the government—much like his paper in the pre-Revolutionary days on the orchestra—and the last paragraph began: “But I must warn others here now, or whoever follows me in this office, never to put too much faith or pow—”
I turned the page and read: “As respects the Peoples’ Department of Goods and Services, the need will be seen for coordinating railway and shipping schedules so that essential. . . .”
I turned the page back, thinking I had turned two together and missed one. The page with the ribbon in it was number 89. The next page was number 91. I looked closer. I took a magnifying glass from its holder at one of the empty tables and examined the two pages.
Page number 90 had been very professionally razored out of the notebook.
I opened the notebook back to the first unnumbered front flyleaf and worked my way through it. Pages number 23 and number 39 were missing, but they had no pendant sentences.
I went back to the Chief Archivist.
“You have a list of yesterday’s visitors?”
“There were no visitors yesterday,” he said.
“No one?”
“Not a mouse.”
“And Comrade Roeckel is the only one in this morning?”
“True.”
“And you trust your clerks?”
“Explicitly,” he said. “Is something wrong?”
“They have no curiosity of their own? I mean, surrounded by the Peoples’ Archives?”
“They are products of the State Librarians School. Curiosity has been bred right out of them.”
He looked at me. “I sense something is wrong,” he said.
“If it is, it’s my memory, Comrade Archivist. Thank you.”
I went back to the reading room. Might as well kill two birds with one stone.
“Comrade Roeckel,” I said, showing my badge. His eyes grew wide, then calm again. He stood.
“I see you’re busy. Please sit. This is in the line of another inquiry. You knew Peoples’ Martyr Wagner?”
He laughed. “When I was four, he was martyred. Good thing I was only four at the time, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” He knew that I knew the Prussian Counter-Revolution had put to death the children of all Revolutionary leaders over the age of ten, fig
uring children under that age had not been indoctrinated in Revolutionary concepts more so than any other schoolchild.
“I only have one memory of meeting him—people tell me it was just after the last Palm Sunday concert he ever conducted—it was just a bunch of people and music to me at the time. He turned my cap backwards and patted me on the shoulder. Not much to remember of a great leader and composer, but that’s all I have.”
“And your father was one of the few to get away during the Prussian Counter-Revolution, was he not?”
“Happily for the Second Revolution,” he said, “but it was a miserable time for me. I was six when he and Comrade Leader Eisenmann came back at the head of the Peoples’ Army. That was the happiest day of my life.”
“If I may ask, what brings you to this place of dead facts?”
“I’m reinstating Comrade Wagner’s works into the State Concerts— there was a great vogue for them in the first few years of the Second Revolution, but he’s fallen out of fashion, except with small town orchestras. I want people in the capital to appreciate him again as a composer, not as just the leader of the people he was.
“Right now I’m copying some of his unpublished works for the concert after next. I hope eventually, next spring, to have again a full performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—only not, as in the old days, on Palm Sunday, but for the Peoples’ Day, May 8, when the first Revolution succeeded at Dresden, as Wagner and Comrade Leader Eisenmann climbed down from the tower and declared the Peoples’ State.”
I knew him to be State Conductor for the Peoples’ Symphony and Opera, following in the footsteps of his late father. I also knew he had served with distinction as a sailor six years ago on the Battleship Kropotkin in the sea war against the Turkomen.
“The present concerts are warm-ups for the next season,” he said. “We hope to do them monthly till then. The first is this Saturday—we’ve been rehearsing it for a month.”
“I should very much like to attend,” I said. “The Palm Sunday concerts seemed to have quite an effect on everyone who attended them.”
“Except me, at the time,” he said. “I remember all I wanted to do was play with a rubber spider activated by an air-bulb I had just gotten; instead I had to sit and listen to a bunch of grown-up noise. It was only later, when I learned to read music, that I realized what I had missed. Beethoven, like Wagner, is quite out of fashion, too. There’s of course the rage now for symphonies and concerti celebrating battles and treaties. I’ll see there are tickets for you, Comrade . . . Rienzi. Saturday evening.”
“One more question. Was that book there on that table when you arrived?”
He looked toward the table. “I don’t know if it’s that exact one,” he said, “but there was a book there when I came in.”
“And no one else has been here?”
“Only the Chief Archivist, bringing me these things,” he said, pointing with his pencil to the monster books. “No one else.”
“Thank you very much. I look forward to the music.”
I was halfway back to the office when I realized I had never looked for what I had gone to the Archives for.
On the mezzanine of the Peoples’ Department for Security, workmen were moving things around. I went up.
There was a lighter rectangle on the wall where the official painting had been. I saw it over at the left; workmen wrestled it onto a long wheeled dolly.
“What is, Comrades?” I asked.
The workman with the order-book said, “Standard maintenance, Comrade. Your official painting goes in for cleaning. We hang another that’s been cleaned, from somewhere else, here. Eventually, yours goes to some other department; any department, in fact, that takes Subject-Size II-B, and so on ad infinitum. We do this every day of the year except State holidays; throughout all the Peoples’ Republics there are teams like us doing the same work. You might say we have about the best job security in the Peoples’ Federated States of Europe.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Quite more than I wanted to know.”
“We aim to be thorough, Comrade,” he said.
I came out of my office later and passed the painting.
It was brighter and cleaner; it seemed to glow as if it were new.
Wagner still orated; Eisenmann was still over there where he shouldn’t have been; Marx and Engels’s names were still on the book.
Only, in the middle of the audience, where no one ever looks anyway, Erkheit, Sensucht, and Bullermann were gone, their faces replaced by those of nondescript rabble-roused hotheads.
10
No More Tradition’s Chains Shall Bind Us
I sent August Roeckel Jr. a pneumatique to confirm my ticket.
He sent me an invitation to meet him for lunch at the Café München.
I arrived at one door just as he appeared at the opposite entrance. We sat at a table in the middle of the café.
“Most pleasant,” I said, as we ate bowls of spicy potato soup. “I had merely wanted to confirm my ticket.”
“I remembered another thing I wanted to tell you about,” said Roeckel. “Although it was not about Former Leader Wagner, at least, not directly. I had heard rumors about recent . . . let us say, visitations, and enquiries. I hope I may be of help.”
“These . . . visitations seem to be the worst-kept secret in the history of the Revolution,” I said.
“The memory that came to me—I had quite forgotten it—was while my father was away, while the Prussians were here. We children of the Revolutionary leaders were kept at an orphanage—most of us were by that time true orphans, or separated from our mothers while the Junkers decided what to do with them.
“We were getting the usual Prussian-style kindergarten instruction in saluting and close-order drill, along with the rest of the children. At the end of the period, the other children were marched off to watch an instructional Punch and Judy show. We however were double-timed to more instruction, this time from a dead ringer for the later Bismarck.
“We were stood at attention while he explained to us that, as sons and daughters of the original Revolutionaries, we would be denied certain privileges until such time as we proved ourselves worthy as the other children.
“We could hear the laughter and high voices from the other end of the school, and it was more than one of us—I don’t remember which of the forty or fifty of us it was—could take anymore.
“ ‘But Herr Professor,’ she asked, ‘What have we done? Why us?’
“The professor grabbed her wrist, jerking her toward him, then opened her palm and smacked it three times with his rod, his face turning crimson and purple.
“‘Here,’ he yelled at her, ‘there is no Why! There only Is!’
“I had forgotten that till an hour ago. The memory is connected with Comrade Wagner. The contrast of being taught under the Revolution, and what we would have had under the Prussians, had there not been the Second Revolution under my father and Eisenmann. Good thing, too, their own people rose up and tossed them out and joined us, and got rid of those soldier-bastards.”
Then he looked at me. “Sorry to go on and on. I guess you had to have been there to understand.”
“My parents moved here from Italy,” I said, “the third year of the Second Revolution, to support the workers’ dream. Then they went back to Italy, when the Revolutions spread there, and gave their lives in the assault on the Vatican. I was just too young to have been part, raised here by an uncle and by this State.”
We talked more, and he told me the last concert rehearsal had gone swimmingly.
“It will not be the usual thing,” he told me. Then he explained.
There was no organ grinder on the corner, nor street-clogger, nor other police spy, that I could tell. I walked directly to the second house, up the walkway, and jerked t
he bell-pull.
Mrs. Woodhull herself opened the door.
“I was expecting you,” she said.
“And why is that?”
“Because you were the only one present under false pretenses. And the only skeptic.”
“I needed to determine if you could or could not help me.”
“And?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I hope so,” I said.
“You are still a skeptic. You know the spirits can sense that? They usually do not respond to doubt.”
“Perhaps I am less skeptical today.”
“Something has happened since the night before last,” she said. It wasn’t a question. She reached out slowly and touched my forehead. “You have been given some sign?”
“Please spare me the professional tricks. I know you would normally give me the answer I want. You will find that very hard, for I can formulate neither the question I need to ask, nor the answer I want.”
She looked up at me and widened her eyes: naturally, that is what she would do to convince me my case was different from the many thousands before.
“I see you are very troubled,” she said. “I will try to help, though your doubts may hold the truth back.”
“I will, of course, pay your usual fee for a private sitting,” I said.
“There is no need in this case, Mr. Rienzi,” she said.
We sat at the Table of Confidence, next to each other, our hands touching.
“Do you feel the charge of the Spirits?” she asked.
“No. Of course not.”
“Do you see the pendant ectoplasm trying to form over our heads?”
Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003 Page 33
