The Capital

by Robert Menasse

  THE

  CAPITAL

  ROBERT MENASSE

  Translated from the German by

  Jamie Bulloch

  LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  A Division of W. W. Norton & Company

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  New York • London

  “Rêver, c’est le bonheur;

  attendre, c’est la vie.”

  VICTOR HUGO

  Prologue

  THERE’S A PIG on the loose! David de Vriend caught sight of it when he opened his sitting-room window for one last glance at the square before leaving this apartment for good. He wasn’t a sentimental man. He had lived here for sixty years, looked out onto this square for sixty years and was now bringing it to an end. That’s all. It was his favourite phrase; whenever he had something to say, report, attest, he would utter two or three sentences, followed by, “That’s all.” For David de Vriend this phrase was the only legitimate résumé of each moment or chapter in his life. The removal firm had been to fetch the few personal effects he was taking to his new home. Effects – a strange word, but it had no effect on him. Then the men came to clear out everything else, including those things that were screwed and nailed down, and the screws and nails too. They yanked it out, dismantled it and took it all away until the apartment was “as clean as a whistle”, as people say. De Vriend had made himself a coffee while his cooker and moka pot were still there, watching the men, taking care not to get in their way, and he had held on to his empty cup for a long moment before dropping it into a rubbish bag. Then the men were gone and the apartment was empty. As clean as a whistle. One last glance out of the window. There was nothing there he did not know, and now he had to move out because another time had come – but there it was: down below was . . . a real pig! In Sainte-Catherine, the centre of Brussels. It must have come from rue de la Braie, it trotted along the construction hoarding in front of the building, de Vriend leaned out of the window and saw the pig turn right at the corner into rue du Vieux Marché aux Grains, avoiding a few passers-by and almost running under a taxi.

  Kai-Uwe Frigge, thrown forwards by the emergency stop, fell back into the seat. He grimaced. Frigge was late, he was stressed. What was wrong now? He wasn’t really late, but he liked to get to his appointments ten minutes early, especially when it was raining, so he could tidy himself up a bit in the loo – his soaked hair, fogged-up glasses – before the person he was meeting arrived —

  A pig! Did you see that, Monsieur? the taxi driver exclaimed. It almost leaped into my car! He was bent right over his steering wheel: There! There! Can you see it?

  Now Kai-Uwe Frigge did see it. He wiped the window with the back of his hand and caught the pig trotting off sideways, its wet body glistening a dirty pink in the glow of the streetlamps.

  Here we are, Monsieur! I can’t drive any closer. Fancy that! Almost went slap bang into a pig. What a road hog! But I saved his bacon, didn’t I, eh?

  In Menelas, Fenia Xenopoulou sat at the first table by the large window with a view of the square. It annoyed her that she had got there so early. To be waiting in the restaurant when he arrived didn’t convey self-confidence. She was nervous. She had worried that the rain might make the traffic worse and had left herself too much time. She was already on her second ouzo. The waiter buzzed around her like an irritating wasp. Fenia stared at the glass and told herself not to touch it. The waiter brought a carafe of fresh water. Then he came with a small dish of olives – and said, A pig!

  What? Looking up, she saw that the waiter was staring out at the square, mesmerised, and now she could see it too: the pig was making a dash for the restaurant, a ridiculous sight as its short legs flitted back and forth beneath its solid, round body. At first glance she thought it was a dog, one of those revolting creatures overfed by widows, but no – it really was a pig! It could have been straight out of a picture book. She saw the snout and the ears as lines, contours, that’s how you would draw a pig for a child, but this one seemed to have sprung from a children’s horror story. It wasn’t a wild boar, it was a filthy, but unquestionably pink domestic pig, with something mad, something menacing about it. The rain continued to pour down the window and, in a blur, Fenia Xenopoulou saw the pig screech to a halt as it encountered some passers-by. The creature’s legs were at full stretch, it skidded, threw itself to one side, jack-knifed, gained traction again and galloped back, now in the direction of Hotel Atlas. At that moment Ryszard Oświecki was leaving the hotel. He had already pulled the hood of his coat over his head on his way through the hotel lobby. Now he stepped out into the rain, briskly, but not in too much of a hurry; he didn’t want to attract attention. The rain was a boon; in the circumstances both his hood and lively pace were perfectly normal and inconspicuous. Later, nobody would be able to say that they had seen a man running away – about this old, roughly this tall, and yes, of course they remembered the colour of the coat . . . Turning smartly to his right, he heard animated cries, a scream and a bizarre panting mixed with squeals. He gasped and looked back. Now he spotted the pig. He couldn’t believe his eyes. There, between two of the wrought-iron poles that lined the hotel forecourt, was a pig. It stood, head lowered, like a bull about to launch an attack. There was something both preposterous and menacing about this creature. It was a total mystery: where had the pig come from and why was it there? Ryszard Oświecki got the impression that all life in this square – at least as far as he could see – had stiffened, frozen, the animal’s tiny eyes reflected the neon light from the hotel’s façade. Oświecki started to run! He ran to the right, glanced back, the pig yanked up its head with a snort, took a few steps backwards, turned around, then ran right across the square to the row of trees outside the Flemish Cultural Centre, De Markten. The passers-by witnessing the scene kept their eyes on the pig rather than the man in the hood, and now Martin Susman saw the creature too. He lived in a building next to Hotel Atlas and was just opening the window to let in some fresh air. Susman couldn’t believe his eyes: that looked like a pig! He had just been contemplating his life, thinking about the coincidences that had led him, the son of Austrian farmers, to be living and working in Brussels. In his present mood everything seemed crazy and alien, but a pig on the loose in the square below, that was just too crazy, it must be his mind playing tricks on him, a projection of his memory! He scanned the square but the pig had vanished.

  The creature sprinted across rue Sainte-Catherine, keeping left to avoid the tourists coming out of the church, and raced on past to the quai au Briques. The tourists laughed, no doubt thinking that this stressed pig on the verge of collapse was a Brussels tradition, a local phenomenon. Some of them would later check their guidebooks for an explanation. Weren’t bulls driven through the streets of Pamplona in Spain to mark some holiday? Maybe they did the same in Brussels, but with pigs? If you encounter the incomprehensible in a place where you don’t expect to understand everything, then life can be very amusing indeed.

  At that moment Gouda Mustafa turned the corner and almost walked straight into the pig. Almost? Hadn’t it in fact touched him, brushed his leg? A pig? Leaping aside in panic, Gouda Mustafa lost his balance and fell. Now he was lying in a puddle, which made the whole thing even worse. It wasn’t the grime of the gutter that made him feel defiled, but contact – if there had been contact – with the unclean animal.

  Then Mustafa saw a hand reaching down to him, he saw the face of an elderly gentleman, a sad, troubled, rain-sodden face; the old man seemed to be crying. It was Professor Alois Erhart. Gouda Mustafa couldn’t understand what he was saying, all he grasped was the word “O.K.”

  O.K.! O.K.! Mustafa said.

  Professor Erhart kept talking, said in English that he’d had a fall today too, but
he was so confused that he said “fail” instead of “fall”. Gouda Mustafa didn’t understand him and said O.K. again.

  The blue lights had arrived. Emergency services. Police. The entire square rotated, flickered, twitched in the blue light. The emergency vehicles sped howling towards Hotel Atlas. The sky above Brussels played its part: the rain fell. Now it appeared to be raining blue, twinkling drops. A strong gust of wind joined in, tugging at several umbrellas and wrenching them inside out. Gouda Mustafa took Professor Erhart’s hand and allowed himself to be helped up. His father had warned him about Europe.

  One

  Connections need not really exist, but without them everything would fall apart.

  WHO INVENTED MUSTARD? Not a great beginning for a novel. Having said that, there can be no good beginning because, whether good or not so good, there is no beginning. For every conceivable opening sentence is already an end – even if things continue afterwards. It sits at the end of thousands upon thousands of pages which were never written: the prehistory.

  When you embark on the reading of a novel you ought to be able to leaf back after the very first sentence. Such was Martin Susman’s dream, it’s what he had really wanted to be: a teller of prehistories. He had abandoned an archaeology degree and only then – well, it doesn’t matter, it’s part of the prehistory that has to be edited out of the opening to every novel, because otherwise in the end we would never get to the beginning.

  Martin Susman sat at his desk – he had pushed his laptop to one side – squeezing mustard from two different tubes onto a plate, a hot English mustard and a sweet German one, and wondering who had invented mustard. Who had hit upon the quirky idea of creating a paste that entirely masks the flavour of a dish without itself tasting good? And how was it possible that this had become a successful mass-produced item? It is, he thought, a product like Coca-Cola. A product that nobody would miss if it didn’t exist. On the way home Martin Susman had stopped at the branch of Delhaize on boulevard Anspach to buy two bottles of wine, a bunch of yellow tulips, a bratwurst and of course mustard, two tubes, because he couldn’t decide between sweet and hot.

  The bratwurst was now bouncing and hissing in the pan, the gas was too high, the fat was burning, the sausage charring, but Martin wasn’t paying any attention. He just sat there staring at the somewhat lighter yellow ring of mustard on the white plate and beside it the dark-brown one – miniature sculptures of dogshit. The specialist literature has yet to describe staring at mustard on a plate while a sausage burns in the frying pan as a clear and typical symptom of depression, but we may interpret it as such.

  The mustard on the plate. The open window, the curtain of rain. The musty air, the stench of carbonised meat, the sizzle of burst intestine and burning fat, the shit sculptures on the china plate – then Martin Susman heard the shot.

  He didn’t even jump. It sounded like a champagne bottle being opened nearby. But there was no apartment on the other side of the curiously thin wall. Next door stood Hotel Atlas – what a euphemistic name for this slight building which chiefly housed hunched lobbyists pulling wheelie suitcases in their wake. Time and again, without thinking any more of it, Martin Susman would hear things through the wall that he didn’t especially wish to hear. Reality T.V. or – who knows? – just reality, snoring or moaning.

  The rain grew heavier. Martin felt like leaving his apartment. He was well kitted out for Brussels. At his goodbye party in Vienna people had given him pointed presents in preparation for Brussels, including nine umbrellas, from the classic British “long” and German “telescopic” models to the Italian mini in three Benetton colours, plus two cycling ponchos.

  He sat motionless in front of his plate, staring at the mustard. Later he was able to tell the police exactly when the shot had been fired, because what he imagined to be the popping of a champagne cork had encouraged him to open a bottle of wine himself. Every day he postponed the first glass for as long as possible. He never drank before seven. He checked the time: it was 19.35. Martin went to the fridge, took out the bottle, turned off the gas, tossed the sausage into the bin, put the frying pan in the sink and turned on the tap. The hiss of water on the hot metal. Stop gawking! his mother would hiss whenever he sat there with a book, staring into space, instead of feeding the pigs or helping muck out the shed.

  Dr Martin Susman sat there in front of the plate with mustard and poured himself a glass of wine, then another. The window was open, from time to time he got up and went to peer out of it, then sat down at the table again. On the third glass a blue light swept the walls of his room. The tulips in the vase on the fireplace pulsed a bluish colour. The telephone rang. He didn’t pick up. Let it ring a few more times. From the display Martin Susman saw who the caller was. He didn’t pick up.

  Prehistory. It’s so significant and yet it flickers unremarkably, like the eternal flame in the church of Sainte-Catherine at the other end of place Vieux Marché aux Grains, where Martin Susman lived.

  In the church a few people had taken shelter from the rain, they stood around indecisively or wandered down the nave, tourists skimmed their guidebooks and followed the itinerary of sights: “Black Madonna, 14th century”, “Portrait of Saint Catherine”, “Typical Flemish pulpit, thought to be from Mechelen”, “Tombstone of Gilles-Lambert Godecharle” . . .

  The occasional camera flash.

  The man sitting alone in a pew appeared to be praying. Elbows propped up, chin on his interlaced hands, rounded back. He wore a black jacket with a hood which was pulled over his head, and if “Guinness” hadn’t been emblazoned on his back he could have been mistaken at first glance for a monk in a cowl.

  The Brussels rain probably accounted for the jacket with the hood, but the impression he gave wearing it also betrayed something fundamental about this man. In his own way he was a monk. He regarded the monastic existence, or whatever he understood by this – asceticism, meditation, retreat – as the saving grace of a life under constant threat of chaos and distraction. For him this wasn’t associated with any order or monastery, nor did it imply detachment from the world. Every man, irrespective of his job or function, could – must – be a monk in his field, the servant of a higher power, focused on his task.

  He loved to gaze at the tortured man on the cross and think of death. Each time he found it purified his feelings, concentrated his thoughts and refreshed his energies.

  This was Mateusz Oświecki. His baptismal name, however, and the one in his passport, was Ryszard. Oświecki first became Mateusz in the seminary of the Lubrański Academy in Poznań, where every “enlightened pupil” was given one of the eleven apostles’ names. He had been re-baptised and anointed as “Matthew, the tax collector”. Even though he had left the seminary, he kept Mateusz as his nom de guerre. Where he needed to show his passport at border crossings he was Ryszard. From statements given by former contacts he was known to intelligence services as Matek, a diminutive form of Mateusz. That’s what his comrades-in-arms called him. He undertook his missions as Mateusz, was a wanted man as Matek, and slipped through the cracks as Ryszard.

  Oświecki didn’t pray. He didn’t formulate sentences in his head which began with “Lord” and were only ever requests, “Give me strength . . .” to do this or that, “Bless . . .” this or that . . . There was nothing to be wished for from an absolute spirit who remained silent. He gazed at the man nailed to the cross. The experience that this man had undergone and ultimately put into words for the sake of mankind was that of complete abandonment at the moment of confrontation with the absolute: when the mortal coil is slashed, lacerated, gashed, pierced and torn open, when the agonising screams of a life fade to a whimper and finally to silence. Only in silence is life close to the almighty spirit, who on an inscrutable whim has discharged from his self the very opposite of his being: time. Starting at the point of their birth, a person can think back, back and back further, back into eternity, but they will never arrive at a beginning, and with their foolish concept of time will
grasp only one thing: before they existed, for an eternity they did not exist. And they can think ahead, from the moment of their death to as far as they wish in the future, never reaching an end, but only this realisation: they will be no more for all eternity. And the interlude between eternity and eternity is time – the clamour, the hubbub, the stamping of machines, the drone of engines, the crash and bang of weapons, the chorales of the furious and happily betrayed masses, the rumble of thunder and terrified panting in the microscopic terrarium of the earth.

  Mateusz Oświecki gazed at the tortured man.

  Rather than folding his hands he had interlocked them, and now dug his fingernails into the backs of his hands until his knuckles cracked and the skin stung. He felt a pain older than himself, a pain he could urgently recall at any time. In early 1940 his grandfather, Ryszard, had gone underground to fight in the Polish Resistance under General Stefan Rowecki against the Germans. In April of that year he was betrayed, arrested, tortured and then publicly shot in Lublin as a partisan. Mateusz’s grandmother was eight months pregnant at the time, her child was born in Kielce in May 1940 and was given his father’s name. To avoid the boy being punished by association, he was taken to the family of a great-uncle in Poznań, where he grew up, and witnessed the uprising when he was sixteen. The young schoolboy joined Major Franczak’s group to fight in the anti-communist resistance. He was used for acts of sabotage and later to abduct people working as informers for the S.B., the Polish secret police. In 1964 he was betrayed by a comrade for 6,000 zlotys. Ryszard was arrested in a safe house and tortured to death in an S.B. cellar. At the time his wife, Marija, was pregnant, their child was born in February 1965 in the village of Kozice Górne and christened with the same name as his grandfather and father. Another son who never knew his father, about whom his mother spoke little. Once she said, We would meet in fields or in the woods. He would turn up to our rendezvous with a pistol and hand grenades.