"There's an eyeful."
The lobbyist left the lavatory, adjusted his cock, nihil humanum, etc. He rejoined the other lobbyists in their compartment at the front of the carriage, a man among men.
"Bit on the pale side."
"Who cares."
"Rumble, fumble, tumble."
"Spent too long underneath."
Wagalaweia.
The girl came in a floating gown, an angel of the line, a night angel in a floating night gown, lace brushed the dust, snot, and dirt of the varnished corridor, nipples, full buds rubbing against the lace, the feet tittupping in dainty slippers, laced with satin ribbons, Salome's feet like white doves, the toenails lacquered red, the girl was still half asleep, moody, sulky, lots of girls wore sulky expressions on their pretty china dolls' faces, it was the fashion for girls to be sulky, in her throat she felt her smoker's tickle, the men watched as the girl, tittupping, lacquered, long-legged, pretty and sulky, went to the little girls' room. Perfume tickled their noses and mingled behind the door with the lobbyist's steady consumption of bocks the previous night—he wasn't one on whom hops and malt were wasted.
"Nice case you've got there. Real diplomat's accessoiy. Like it's just come from the Foreign Ministry of the Reich. Black red and gold stripe and all."
"Black red and mustard, we used to call it."
Wagalaweia.
The Rhine was now wending its way between flat beds, a winding silver ribbon. Distant hills arced up out of the early morning haze. Keetenheuve breathed in the mild air and straightaway felt sad. Chambers of commerce and tour operators described the area as the Rhine Riviera. A hothouse climate flourished in the basin between the hills; the air stagnated over the river and its banks. Villas stood beside the water, roses were bred, prosperity strode through the parkland wielding hedge clippers, gravel crunched crisply under the pensioner's lightweight footwear, Keetenheuve would never join their ranks, never own a home here, never trim or breed roses, the nobiles, Rosa indica, which put him in mind of Erysipelas traumaticum, faith healers were at work here, Germany was one large public hothouse, Keetenheuve took in rare flora, greedy, curious plants, giant phalluses like chimney stacks full of billowing smoke, blue-green, red-yellow, toxic, but it was a fertility without youth and sap, it was all putrid, all ancient, the growths swelled, but it was all Elephantiasis arabum. Engaged, it said over the door handle, and on the other side the girl was peeing—prettily, sulkily— over the tracks.
Jonathan Swift, the dean of St. Patrick's in Dublin had taken a seat between Stella and Vanessa, and was offended by their corporality. In old Berlin, Keetenheuve had known one Dr. Forelle. Forelle had had a general practice in a tenement block in Wedding. He was squeamish about bodies, for decades he had been working on a psychoanalytical study of Swift, and at night he would line his front door bell with cotton wool, in case he was called out to a birth. Now he lay in the ruins of his tenement together with all the other detested bodies. The lobbyists, with empty bladder, with voided burbling intestines, gabbled and slanged, they knew what they were after.
"I'd go see Hanke if I were you. Hanke's been in the Defense Ministry for as long as I can remember. Tell him I sent you."
"But I can't just treat him to a frankfurter."
"Take him to the Royal. Three hundred. But it's first rate. Worth every penny. Never fails."
"Or else just go and tell him we can't provide the merchandise after all."
"I think the minister ought to take care of the bond. What's he a minister for?"
"Plischer was at Technical College with me."
"Then Plischer's my man."
"Soft knees."
Wagalaweia.
The girl, pretty and sulky, tittupped back to bed. The girl, pretty and sulky, was headed for Düsseldorf, she could go back to bed for a little, and the men's lusts slipped in beside her, pretty and sulky under her blankets. Lust chauffed. The girl worked in fashion, beauty queen in some competition or other. The girl was poor, and lived, not badly, off the rich. Von Timborn opened the door of his compartment, von Timborn neatly shaved, von Timborn comme il faut, von Timborn already presenting his credentials to the Court of St. James.
"Good morning, Herr Keetenheuve."
Where did he know him from? Some foreign press banquet. People toasting each other and listening out for scraps. Keetenheuve didn't remember the occasion. He didn't know who was greeting him. He nodded a greeting. But Herr von Timborn had a remarkable memory for names and faces, and he trained it for professional reasons. He set down his suitcase on the grille of the heater in the passage. He observed Keetenheuve. Timborn had the habit of thrusting out his lower lip, a rabbit snuffling in clover. Maybe the Lord had provided for His servant in the night. The rabbit didn't hear the grass growing, but he did hear the whisperings in the corridors and anterooms. Keetenheuve had a dodgy scent, he was hard to discipline, he was uncomfortable, he gave offense, he was an enfant terrible in his particular party, that might yet harm a body, for Timborn that would have meant the end of all his hopes, but then again, these outsiders, you could never be sure, their mistakes might be the making of them yet. There were good jobs and pressure jobs, government jobs and dead-end jobs a long way from Madrid, and Timborn once more was led by the nose, trotting along the strait path, not of virtue exactly, but of promotion, step by step, up or down, that couldn't be ascertained just yet, but all the same, one was back at the center, eight years previously one had been in Nuremberg, eight years before that one had also been in Nuremberg, on the podium then, the Nuremberg Laws were promulgated, the first of them, the system of mutual reinsurance seemed to be working, he was on the comeback trail, and everything was up for grabs once more. And now if Herr Keetenheuve gambled on the election result and maybe was rewarded with a ministerial portfolio? Then Keetenheuve would kick up. Idiotic of him—even Gandhi didn't milk his own goats any more. Keetenheuve and Gandhi, he could see them walking hand in hand on the banks of the Ganges. Gandhi would have been irresistible to Keetenheuve. Timborn retracted his lip and gazed dreamily across the Rhine. He could picture Keetenheuve seated under palm trees—not a pretty sight. Timborn himself would look far better in a safari suit. The gateway to India was open. Alexander killed his best friend with a spear.
The train stopped in Godesberg. Herr von Timborn doffed his hat, the correct, the becoming, the Antony Eden felt. Godesberg was where the top people lived, the Foreign Ministry wallahs. Herr von Timborn strode briskly away over the platform. The engine driver swore. What a line! Get up steam and break. It was supposed to be an express. They'd used to rattle through Godesberg and Bonn. Now they stopped. The lobbyists blocked the doorway. They had sharp elbows, and they were the first into the capital. Schoolchildren came running up the stairs of the underpass. It smelled provincial, the staleness of tight little streets, cluttered rooms, fusty wallpaper. The platform was roofed in and gray—
and there at the gate, in the drab hall, he set foot in the capital, hunt him, catch him, O God Apollo O, and they grabbed hold of him again, fell upon him, overwhelmed him, dizziness and shortage of breath, a cardiac cramp shook him, an iron band laid itself around his chest, was tightened, soldered, riveted fast, every step helped to solder and rivet it, the movements of his stiff legs, his numb feet, were like hammer blows knocking in rivets in a wreck on the devil's wharf, and so he took one step after another (where was there a bench where he might sit, a wall he might lean against?) walked, even though he thought walking was beyond him, wanted to put out his hand for support, even though he didn't dare put out his hand for support, emptiness, emptiness stretched mightily in his skull, pressed, climbed like the pressure of a balloon rising into remote atmospheric distance, but like a balloon that was filled with the merest nothing, a void, an un-substance, non-substance, something baffling that had the urge to expand, that wanted to break through his bones and skin, and he could hear, it wasn't yet happening but he could hear it, the silk ripping like a glacial wind, and that was the extreme
instant, an invisible juncture not even definable in mathematics, where everything stopped, there was no beyond, and this was the interpretation of it, see, see!, you will see!, ask, ask!, you will hear, and he lowered his glance, coward, coward, coward, his mouth remained closed, poor, poor, poor, and he clutched at himself and the balloon was a disappointing dirty shell, he felt terribly exposed, and then he began to fall. He showed his travel permit, and his sense was that the station official saw him naked, the way prison guards and corporals see the men in their charge before they are put into uniform.
Sweat beaded his brow. He walked over to the newsstand. The sun was just paying a call, peering through a window and casting its spectrum over the latest news, over the Gutenberg picture of the world, an ironic flicker of iridescence. Keetenheuve bought the morning papers No Discussions with the Russians. Well, evidently not. Who wanted to discuss or not discuss what? And who came running at the sound of a whistle? Who was a dog? A constitutional dispute—was there some disagreement? Could someone not read? The Basic Law had been drawn up. Were people saying they shouldn't have bothered? What was going on in Mehlem? The High Commissar had been up the Zugspitze. He had enjoyed the wonderful view. The Chancellor was a little off color, but continued to perform well. Seven a.m.—he would be at his desk already. It wasn't just Frost-Forestier who worked in Bonn. Keetenheuve still hadn't got over his panic. The main section of the station restaurant was closed. Keetenheuve went into the little buffet room, schoolchildren were sitting around a table, charmlessly clad girls, boys already with the faces of civil servants, smoking furtively, they too were industrious, like the Chancellor, had open books spread out in front of them, were studying, striving (like the Chancellor?), grim-faced young people, because that was supposed to be sensible and help them to get ahead, they steeled their hearts, they were mindful of the timetable and not of the stars. The waitress gave it as her opinion that she should have been born with wings, Keetenheuve could see her float off, a halibut with pinions, the establishment wasn't large enough to accommodate all the custom issuing from the big trains, the lobbyists were cross, they wanted their eggs, Keetenheuve ordered a lager. He loathed beer, but on this occasion the bitter fizz seemed to calm his heart. Keetenheuve opened the newspaper at the local page. What was happening in Bonn? He was like the spa guest, who, having been banished to a bleak watering hole for too long, ends up listening to all the village scuttlebutt. Sophie Mergentheim had agreed to a soaking for the benefit of the refugees. There, she never failed. At a reception for God knows whom, she had charitably knelt under a watering can. Sophie, Sophie, the ambitious goose, didn't save the Capitol. You paid your money and you got to give her a drenching. Pretty tulip. The newspaper carried the photograph of a wet Sophie Mergentheim in a wet evening gown, wet to her panties, wet to her powdered scented skin. Colleague Mergentheim was positioned by the microphone, gazing pluckily into the flashlight through his thick black horn rims. Let's see your owl! All quiet in Insterburg. Dog barks. Mergentheim specialized in Jewish jokes; on the old Volksblatt, he had been in charge of the funnies. What, who barked in Insterburg? Yesterday? Today? Who barked? Jews? Silence. Dog joke. In the cinema—Willy Birgel riding for Germany. The loathsome beer foam on his lips. Elke, a name from Nordic mythology. The norns Urd, Werdandi, and Skuld under the tree Yggdrasil. Polished boots. Death in capsule form. Beer over a grave.
2
KORODIN GOT OFF THE TRAM AT THE MAIN STATION. A traffic policeman was playacting at being a traffic policeman in the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. He waved the traffic on down the Bonner Strasse. It swarmed and buzzed and squeaked and honked. Cars, bicycles, pedestrians, and wheezy asthmatic trams squeezed out of narrow side streets onto the main station square. This was where coaches had once trundled, drawn by four horses, steered by royal coachmen, Prince Wilhelm had been a student at the university—and was thereby a few meters closer to his ultimate exile in Holland— he wore a tailcoat, the order of the Saxo-Borussian fraternity and their white cap. The traffic got snarled up, impeded and constricted by construction sites, cable laying, canalization pipes, concrete mixers, asphalt boilers. The snarl-up, the labyrinth, the knotty tangle, emblematic of losing ones way, of wandering and erring, the insoluble, inextricable knot, the ancients already had known the curse, had experienced the deception, found themselves ensnared, had lived it and thought about it and described it. Always the next generation would be wiser, would arrange things better for itself. (And this for five thousand years now.) Not everyone had a sword. Anyway, what was a sword good for? You could wave it around, kill people with it, die by it. And the point? None. You needed to show up in Gordium at the right moment. Opportunity makes the hero. By the time Alexander breezed in from Macedonia, the knot was tired of resisting. Besides, the event was without consequence. India did not fall; at the most, some fringe territories were occupied for a few years, and between the locals and the occupying forces there was barter.
What was the scene at the real Potsdamer Platz? A wire enclosure, a new international frontier, the end of the world, the Iron Curtain that God had caused to fall, God alone knew why. Korodin hastened to the stop for the trolleybus, the proud, modern conveyance commensurate to the needs of the capital city, the carrier for the masses traveling between the widely separated government quarters. Korodin did not, strictly speaking, have to join the line of those waiting at the stop. Two automobiles were garaged at his house. It was an act of modesty and self-denial for Korodin to ride to politics on public transport, while his chauffeur, alert, rested, and comfortable, drove Korodin's kids to school. Korodin was greeted. He acknowledged the greetings. He was a man of the people. But greetings from anonymous citizens not only incurred his gratitude; they also made him uncomfortable. The first bus came. They piled onto it, and Korodin stood back, modestly and self-denyingly he stood back, but he also felt squeamish (a sinful feeling) at the thought of these hurrying people struggling for their daily bread. Then the conveyance set off for parliament, the various ministries, the proliferation of offices, they were packed together like sardines, the gaggles of secretaries, the armies of pencil pushers, the companies of middle-ranking officials, all one trawl, emigrated from Berlin, emigrated from Frankfurt, emigrated from the caves of the Wolfsschanze,{5} relocated along with their jobs, bundled up together with their files, by the dozen they had been shoehorned into apartments in the new prefab blocks, where the walls barely separated their bedheads from the bedheads of others, perpetually under observation, never alone, always snooped on, always snooping, who's the visitor in the corner apartment, what are they saying, are they talking about me, they sniffed, who's been eating onions, who's having a late bath, it's Fräulein Irmgard, she's the one who uses chlorophyl soap, she needs it, who's been combing his hair over the sink, who's been using my towel, they were irritable, rancorous, embittered, indebted, separated from their families, seeking consolation, but not seeking it too often, anyway they were too tired in the evenings, they slaved away, typing up the new laws, doing overtime, sacrificing themselves for their boss, whom they hated, and on whom they snooped, against whom they intrigued, to whom they addressed anonymous letters, whose coffee they heated up, in whose window they put flowers—and they wrote proud letters home, sending bleached box brownie snapshots showing themselves in ministry gardens, or little Leica pictures that the boss had taken of them in the office: they were working for the administration, they were governing Germany It struck Korodin that he hadn't prayed yet that day and he decided to step out of the stream, and finish his journey on foot.
Keetenheuve hadn't been in to his apartment in the parliamentary ghetto in Bonn that morning, for him it was just a joyless pied-à-terre, a doll's chamber of constriction tomorrow; children, we'll be joyful, tomorrow we will celebrate, why should he go there; everything he needed was in his briefcase, and even that sometimes seemed to him like useless ballast on the journey. Keetenheuve had declined to take the bus. In the square in front of the cathedral, Keetenheuve encountere
d the modest Korodin. Korodin had prayed to Cassius and Florentius, the patron saints of the place, and he had confessed to the sin of pride I thank thee God that I am not as these men are, and he had absolved himself for now and for today of his guilt. Being seen coming out of the cathedral by Keetenheuve made Korodin feel uncomfortable again. Were the saints perhaps dissatisfied with the delegate's prayers and were they now punishing Korodin by putting Keetenheuve in his way? Or perhaps the encounter had been arranged by a kindly Providence, and was a sign that Korodin was in good odor once again.
The Hothouse Page 5
