by D. W. Buffa
“Does Henry know you’re going?”
“No, I’ll tell him about it when I get back. I’m still a little angry with him. I know it sounds hypocritical, but I’ve been a lawyer too long to approve of what he did, even though I’m glad he did it.”
Summer tilted her head to the side the way she did when something was said she thought worth exploring.
“Don’t you think he feels the same way himself? - Bothered by what he did, though he knows that he would do the same thing in the same set of circumstances. That’s the nature of the thing, isn’t it, when you do what you know is right but what everyone else thinks is wrong?”
“Yes, I suppose it is,” said Darnell, surprised, as he often was, by how much she understood that he did not.
“But you still haven’t told me what you think this man Holderlin can tell you.”
“What he lied to me about; whether anything he told me was the truth. Whether he was ever on that island, and, if he was, whether any of the rest of it – Atlantis, what happened to the survivors, the whole history of the last twelve thousand years – was true, or just some fable he invented because for some reason I don’t understand he wanted to help Adam and thought he could do it by telling me this incredible story that no one in his right mind would believe – no one but me, that is.”
“That’s what bothers you, isn’t it? - Not that he might have lied, but that you believed it.”
“No, not that I believed it, but that I wanted to believe it.” With a rueful expression, he added, “The truth is I still want to believe it. That’s the real reason I’m going: to find out what exactly Holderlin lied about so I can know whether Adam is really a descendant of some ancient civilization, someone we can learn from; or whether he is what Hillary Clark kept saying he was: a member of some illiterate tribe that needs to be brought into the modern world.”
Three days later, Summer drove Darnell to the airport and, after making him promise for at least the fourth time that he would take his medication and call every night, kissed him goodbye. As he watched the car pull away, Darnell thought she might be crying. He felt a hollow sense of loneliness and began to regret the decision he had made.
When he landed in Berlin he checked into the Adlon Hotel and wandered along the Kurfurstendam, the most fashionable street in the city. He found himself wishing that he had waited until Summer could have come along. The crowds were different here than they were on the streets of San Francisco, the faces more interesting, more defined, drawn, as it were, as much by what they remembered of the past as what they hoped for from the future. Then there were the voices, the intriguing sound of languages he did not understand, and on occasion, to his acute embarrassment, the rising, garish sound of Americans, tourists mainly, who seemed to think that because they were Americans the city belonged to them. He noticed that his eye lingered most often on men old enough to have been in the war. He tried to read in their healthy, prosperous looking faces some sense of guilt or regret, some sign that they remembered the brutal savagery of what had been done. He found nothing, and wondered why he thought he would. The war, the twelve year nightmare through which Germany had lived and died, was too painful to remember. And besides, Darnell reminded himself, the past was always being re-written in the same way that each of us was always re-writing our own lives, changing the meaning of each thing that had happened in light of the things that happened later. The world had always been a fiction masquerading as the truth.
Or was that something we told ourselves to make our ignorance seem reasonable? - The principle of relativity made a convenient means by which to excuse any serious interest in the truth. Darnell did not know, but he thought that there had to be something more solid and lasting than the cacophony of gabbling noise that kept shouting in the modern ear that no opinion was any better than another and that there was no such thing as the truth.
Darnell had arrived in Berlin on a Saturday and spent most of Sunday seeing what he could of the city. On Monday, he took a cab from his hotel to the University of Berlin and, after getting directions from an obliging student, made his way down a long hallway to the philosophy department and his much anticipated visit with Gerhardt Holderlin. It reminded him of Berkeley, the way the students in their shaggy, unpressed clothes looked as if the weight of the world were on their young shoulders. There was the same intensity in their eyes, a reflection of the long struggle to understand Kant or Hegel; the same certainty that what they were doing was the only thing important. Darnell wished he had had the time to have known what that was like, studying for the sake of what he could learn instead of what it taught him about how to become proficient in his profession.
The office of the philosophy department was a small, cramped affair with a bulletin board a tangled web of announcements and two decrepit wooden desks where two secretaries typed the manuscripts faculty hoped to get published as well as the chairman’s correspondence.
“Excuse me, but does anyone here speak English?” asked Darnell with a brief, apologetic smile.
The department chairman, a thin, angular man in his forties, was talking to one of the secretaries. When he looked up and saw Darnell dressed in a suit and tie, he came right over.
“Yes, I speak English. How can I help you?”
Darnell introduced himself, explained that he had just come from San Francisco and wanted to see a member of the faculty, Professor Gerhardt Holderlin. The chairman seemed puzzled.
“Holderlin, you say? Gerhardt Holderlin? I’m afraid there is no one on our faculty by that name. Perhaps he’s in some other department. Let me find out.”
While Darnell waited, the chairman picked up the telephone and had a short conversation.
“No, I’m afraid he doesn’t teach anywhere in the university. Are you sure you have the right name?” He took into account Darnell’s age, but was too kind to mention it. “Sometimes when we hear a name in a language we don’t understand, it’s easy to get confused.”
“No, I’m sure that’s the name he used. I’m afraid that’s the only thing I’m sure of.” He thanked the chairman for his help and with a feeling of immense disappointment left the office and started down the hallway.
“Mr. Darnell,” someone called after him. The other secretary, an older woman with gray hair and a noticeable limp, was hurrying after him. “There used to be someone here by that name, years ago, when I first started working in the department. He used to come by once in a while, at first to see if he had any mail, but then, later, just to say hello. I haven’t seen him in a long time, but I still have his address, though I couldn’t tell you if he still lives there. But wait here, I’m sure I’ve got it somewhere.”
Darnell sat down on a bench, wondering what it meant. Holderlin had told him that he was still teaching. Why would he have lied about that? Why would anyone insist he was still at a university when he had not been there in years?”
“Yes, I have it,” said the secretary when she came back. The address had been written in ink on a sheet of departmental stationery. Darnell smiled at the elegant precision with which it had been done.
“Thank you,” he said as he folded it in half and put it into his jacket pocket. “You’ve been very kind.”
“I always liked Professor Holderlin. I hope he is all right,” she said with a worried, sympathetic glance.
“Do you know why he left, why he didn’t stay at the university?”
“I’m not sure. I had just started here; I was just a young girl. He was considered a man of extraordinary promise. It all happened quite abruptly. No one talked about it, but I had the feeling that something had happened, that he had had some kind of breakdown.”
What kind of breakdown, wondered Darnell as he made his way to the street outside and flagged down a taxi. How severe? Holderlin had seemed as clear-minded, as little subject to mental disturbance, as anyone he had met. But whatever had happened had happened forty years ago, he reminded himself, the same time he claimed he had gone on that rem
arkable adventure across the Atlantic and across South America out to a place in the Pacific that no one knew was there. Or had all that just been in his mind? Had Holderlin broken under the strain of all his late night studies? Had he become so convinced of what he imagined might have happened to the lost tribe of Atlantis that he believed that he had seen it for himself? Was the man Darnell had thought so intelligent simply an overworked scholar gone insane?
The taxi pulled up in front of a small restaurant on a busy street just off Friedrichstrasse. Darnell was confused. He pulled out the sheet of paper on which the address had been written.
“Just next door,” explained the driver. He pointed to a doorway with a buzzer and a set of tarnished brass nameplates.
Gerhardt Holderlin had one of the two apartments on the top floor of the four story building. Darnell hesitated. He was not sure now why he had come. He felt old, tired, a little demented himself for coming all this way to confront someone who probably did not know that his whole life had been a delusion. With a bitter, silent, laugh, Darnell pushed the buzzer.
“Yes?” said a voice through the static of the intercom.
“Gerhardt Holderlin?” asked Darnell.
The intercom went dead and a moment later the lock was released. Darnell pushed open the door. It was not what he expected. Instead of a narrow staircase in a tiny, congested space, the steps were broad enough that four or five people could climb them together. The banister and the doors he passed on each landing were heavy, dark, and ornamental. It was an endless climb for someone used to elevators, the staircase turning back on itself between floors, so that he had to go up the equivalent of eight normal flights to reach the fourth floor. He was out of breath when he finally knocked on Holderlin’s door.
It was the wrong apartment. The man who answered was not Holderlin.
“I’m sorry,” apologized Darnell, wiping the perspiration off his face. “I must have pushed the wrong buzzer.”
Well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a rather prominent jaw, the man looked at Darnell with some impatience.
“You asked for Gerhardt Holderlin. I am Gerhardt Holderlin.”
“But you’re not… I’m sorry, you’re Gerhardt Holderlin?” he asked, feeling more confused than he had felt in his life.
“Yes, I’m Gerhardt Holderlin.” His impatience was replaced with curiosity. “And you are?”
“William Darnell.”
“You’re an American, aren’t you?”
“Yes, from San Francisco. I came to Berlin to see Gerhardt Holderlin, but you’re not….”
“Why don’t you come in, Mr. Darnell? It might be easier to discuss this if we were sitting down. And you do look like you could use some water.”
Holderlin held a thick book in his hand, something he had been reading, or rather, as Darnell observed, studying, because from the look of things everything that happened in that apartment was dedicated to the same, serious end, whatever that end might be. There were books everywhere. Bookshelves, the cheap kind, unpainted boards braced against the wall, groaned under the weight of them, all the chairs except the one in front of the desk where he worked, were buried under them. They were stacked on the floor in free standing columns, stacked on countertops, stacked in closets that could not be closed and in front of windows that could not be opened. It was all chaotic, or so it seemed, because as Darnell looked closer he began to suspect that there was after all some organizing principle at work. Each book was filled with any number of small slips of paper, and from what he could see, each of them were filled with handwritten notes. And then there was the rosewood desk, polished to a hard, gleaming shine, everything on it arranged with a meticulous, one could almost say a regimental, eye for cleanliness and order, three stacks of paper, blank paper on the left, paper covered with a tiny, neatly printed scrawl on the right, and, between them, a page half written, the unfinished product of his latest labor. He wrote in pencil, and just below the shaded lamp there were three of them, each sharpened to a perfect point, enough so that when he sat down to work again he would not have to stop to sharpen another. Another thing caught Darnell’s attention. On the wall above the desk, a map of the world had been posted with a line drawn from the Pillars of Hercules across the Atlantic, over to Peru and out into the Pacific. Darnell was more confused than ever.
Puzzled what to do, the man who called himself Holderlin looked for a place where his visitor could sit. Careful to keep them in order, he lifted a stack of books from a chair and carried them to an open spot on the floor in the corner.
“Mainly dictionaries,” he explained as he settled into his usual chair. He glanced around the room as one who has just realized what it must look like to a stranger, someone who had not lived every day in these same surroundings. “Dictionaries and ancient histories. I’ve been working on something – a dictionary, a language no one knows anymore. I’ve been….” He looked at Darnell. “Why are you looking for someone with my name? It’s not a very common name. And how did you happen to come here? I’m not in the telephone directory; I don’t have a telephone.”
“They gave me your address at the university.”
“The university? I haven’t been there in years. Someone there still remembers me, and still has my address?”
“A secretary in the philosophy department, where you used to teach.”
The lines in Holderlin’s high forehead deepened as he drew his sharp blue eyes close together. He was a handsome man for his age, athletic in build, agile and strong, with short-cropped iron gray hair and a ruddy complexion. He did not look the part of the reclusive scholar.
“That was a very long time ago,” he remarked with a clear sense of disappointment. “A very long time ago.”
“Forty years, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Yes, that’s about right. I was only there a year or so. I thought I would spend my life there, teaching philosophy to generations of eager students. Instead….But I’m still confused, Mr. Darnell. Who is this other Gerhardt Holderlin and why are you looking for him?”
The dictionaries, the map, the book he said he was working on, the fact that he had been at the University of Berlin – there were too many coincidences, too many things that otherwise would not make sense.
“Tell me, Mr. Holderlin, forty years ago, before you left the university, did you make a trip to Peru, and were you then taken on a boat, your money stolen, and you were thrown overboard? And where you then saved from the sea by what turned out to be the last descendants of the lost tribe of Atlantis, and did you then spend a year among them in that city high up on that mountain on that island no one had yet discovered? And is that dictionary on which you have been working all these years the language of Atlantis that, as you just put it, no one knows anymore?”
Gerhardt Holderlin stood straight up, staggered by what he had heard. His face turned pale white, his hands began to shake.
“How do you know…? How could you possibly know what happened then? I’ve never told anyone, I’ve never breathed a word. I kept my promise, I never….”
“The island was discovered – re-discovered, I suppose I should say – two years ago. You didn’t know?”
His eyes still wide with amazement, Holderlin gestured toward the cluttered shelves.
“I don’t pay much attention to what goes on in the outside world…. But, tell me, how – who discovered it?”
“A Norwegian captain – quite by accident.”
Holderlin sat down, placed his hands on his knees and stared straight ahead, pondering what Darnell had said.
“By accident?” he asked skeptically. “Only if they allowed it; only if they wanted to be discovered. But whoever discovered the island didn’t find the city, did he?”
“No,” replied Darnell, fascinated by the certainty in the other man’s eyes, the sense that he had almost been expecting it, that someone else would find the island but never find the city. “No one knows anything about it. I wouldn’t know anything
about it if someone who called himself Gerhardt Holderlin hadn’t come to see me in the middle of the trial.”
The reference to a trial was met with a blank stare. Darnell began to explain what had happened, what Adam had done and why he had been brought to America to stand trial. Holderlin stopped him before he went any further.
“Tell me about the man who used my name. How old was he, what did he look like?”
“Difficult to know exactly, but about your age, if I had to guess.”
“And what did he look like? What was the first thing that struck you when you saw him – the perfect balance of his face, the clear, penetrating look in his eyes?” he asked with growing excitement.
“Yes, exactly – I’d never seen a face quite like it. Just looking at him you knew you were in the presence of a remarkable intelligence.”
Holderlin stared into the middle distance, his face rigid under the pressure of what seemed an overwhelming shock.
“He was my friend, the one who taught me everything the year I was there. Even among that remarkable people, he had an exceptional gift. There was no question but that he would eventually become one of the council of elders, the ones who carry on the tradition and rule the city.”
Holderlin sank back in the chair. He seemed suddenly lost, too overwhelmed to know what to do next. Darnell went back to the beginning and described what had happened in the early stages of the trial. Then, careful not to leave anything out, he recounted what Holderlin, or rather Holderlin’s friend, had told him.
“Yes, it’s all true, every word of it,” said Holderlin when Darnell had finished. “He remembered everything I told him, and then, forty years later, repeated it back to you, an exact account of what led me to go on that search for the lost tribe of Atlantis and of how I finally stumbled on the truth. They learn everything by remembering the spoken word, and no one had a better memory than he. What you said about this young man you defended, that was no ordinary thing, that memory of his. It’s no wonder they came after him. When his time comes he’ll be one of those who rule.”
