Of all people, it was a gravedigger who knew the way to Eternal Love. In the end Professor Erhart had asked him where the mausoleum of unconditional love was, and this man knew. It’s called the mausoleum of Eternal Love, not unconditional love, he said, leaning on his shovel, I don’t know whether unconditional love exists. Eternal love, certainly. You mean the mausoleum with the heart of light on the sarcophagus, right? Well, then. You’re at the wrong cemetery here, see? The mausoleum of Eternal Love is at Laeken.
Where?
Laeken cemetery. North of the city centre.
He took a taxi, nodded off during a journey that took longer than anticipated, and found himself in a peculiar kind of trance when he arrived at Laeken. His bruised arm was aching, but now, in his almost somnambulistic state, he felt this pain as no more than a gentle and pleasant pressure, as if his late wife had linked arms with him, he felt her on his arm as if she were walking beside him, and with every step he seemed to adjust better to her rhythm and pace. This was all madness, of course. He shook his head, literally, and told himself not to be so silly. Now the pain in his arm was stronger, as was the unpleasant numbness in his swollen feet, which he carefully placed one in front of the other as if they were unfamiliar protheses.
Just beyond the gate leading into the cemetery was the management office. There he obtained a map on which were marked the graves of famous people, as well as monuments and memorials of historical interest. The official also marked with an “X” the location of the Mausoleum of Eternal Love. The professor wondered why the official looked so sad as he gave him the information, and so dismayed as he handed him the map. What was it about this mausoleum that produced such a reaction? Some sort of occupational hazard, perhaps. The man worked in a graveyard and at some point his face must have turned into a mask of commiseration. And so for him even eternal love – in the form of a mausoleum – was nothing but a bereavement.
Professor Erhart had yet to get over the death of his wife. He wondered whether he still had enough of that time which supposedly heals all wounds and, if so, whether this was a desirable state of affairs. The pain that he had felt since that ghastly process of dying and ultimately the death of his wife reminded him so . . . yes, so vividly of the immense late happiness he had enjoyed with her, and he was sure that this memory would dwindle to a mere phrase if the wound did in fact heal.
He walked with the map down the gravel path, surprised not to hear any crunching underfoot. In all films and novels, gravel crunched underfoot. He stopped. It was so quiet. The boughs of the trees rocked silently in the wind, the crows flapped their wings without a sound. Ahead in the distance a few people crossed the avenue like shadows, gliding as inaudibly as the grey clouds in the sky. He kept going and . . . yes, as if there were a layer of cotton wool over the gravel he could now hear his footsteps very faintly.
Then he was standing in front of the tomb. He checked several times that this was indeed the Mausoleum of Eternal Love, but there could be no doubt. It was sad. What had he been expecting? Not the Taj Mahal, obviously, but certainly something impressive, something in the most beautiful human proportions that would give architectural expression to the idea and experience of an unending love, eternity in the material of eternity: stone. But this here was a ruin. The roof, with its famous and precisely measured aperture through which a heart of sunlight should fall on the sarcophagus, had caved in, while the left side of the mausoleum had subsided, causing shifts and cracks between the stone blocks from which weeds grew. The iron door decorated with two flaming hearts was rusted and locked with a chain, one door panel hung crookedly from its hinges, leaving a gap through which you could peer inside, but there was no sign of the sarcophagus, only rubbish, even plastic waste – how had that got in there?
To the left of the mausoleum a primitive, wooden sign – skewed, rotten and covered in moss – said that the lease for this plot had expired in August 1990 and requested any descendants to contact the cemetery management. Beside it was an enamel plaque in a wrought-iron frame that identified the mausoleum as a cultural monument.
Alois Erhart had been fascinated by the concept of an eternal love which takes eternity so literally that it makes sure of its posterity. But so long as eternity was just a human construct rather than an absolute, a relationship between people, in effect a negotiation, it would, like any human construct, come to an end at some point, both rapidly and mercilessly.
He ought to have known this. It had taken a small eternity – until he was sixty, that’s to say, forty years of marriage – before he had experienced this profound feeling of eternal love himself. And he had said to her, I will love you for ever!
How histrionic! And indeed he had been shocked to hear himself utter the phrase. At the time he’d felt he had arrived. And later he was surprised not to have realised straight away that there could be no for ever: it’s nothing but a short stop on the journey of history. I know I will love you for ever, he’d said, and two years later his wife had died. And irrespective of whether there is life after death, i.e. eternal life, his declaration of eternal love, just like the feeling that had generated it, was now no more than a memory, history.
Such pathos! The truth of the matter was that Alois Erhart had reached the age of sixty before discovering that there was such a thing as good sex.
In all his born days he had never understood the proliferation in discourse of the term “good sex”. Had those words really come to mind, “all his born days”? They could have come from his father, who had often come out with such expressions. At any rate he regarded “good sex” as nonsense, the dubious attempt to endow a human drive with an ideology, which, unlike the question of “good cooking” with respect to the human eating drive, could not be clearly substantiated or explained. Alois Erhart was one of the “you eat what gets put in front of you” contingent. You’re grateful and make the sign of the cross before a meal. He was a post-war child, a child of reconstruction, he knew what need was, and although he swiftly understood that people’s demands grew as prosperity increased, he couldn’t comprehend why good and free sex should be a demand, something that had to be discussed in political arenas and fought for, as if it were a social benefit everyone was entitled to, such as free university access or the right to a pension. That was in the sixties and seventies, it was his generation who had proclaimed the “sexual revolution”, but he had not been part of it.
His father had owned a sports shop on the Mariahilfer Strasse, one of the major shopping streets in Vienna. It was a good location, but what use was that if nobody had any money to buy things? Fired up by the “new era”, and bursting with euphoria and enterprise, his father had opened the shop as a young man in 1937, so still just about in the inter-war period. Why a sports shop? His father was a fanatical gymnast and, as a member of the Jahn Gymnastic Association in Vienna, he referred to himself as one of the “Gym Brothers”. He was also a footballer, playing for Wacker Wien, and soon securing a place in the first team as replacement for Josef Mahal, who was sold to Austria Wien. “With his greed, the Jew Mahal brought me great fortune,” his father said. “He moved to Austria Wien for ten shillings a game, which meant I was in the team, more than content with my five shillings!”
He opened his business. But business went badly. At a time of mass unemployment and hyperinflation, who was going to buy football boots when they didn’t even have the money for normal shoes? At the time many children went barefoot in the street. His father polished bicycles in the shop, selling the odd “Jahn vest” – also known colloquially for whatever reason as a “Ruder-Leiberl” – and fending off bankruptcy. In 1939 he was given fresh hope when via his contacts he succeeded in selling a large batch of tents and mess tins to the Vienna Hitler Youth and its division for younger boys, but he closed down the following year. In 1944 the house in Zollerstrasse, where his parents lived, was bombed; they survived in the air-raid shelter and camped in the storeroom of the shop, which was still standing. This was where Alois E
rhart was born. “You’re a camp child,” his mother liked to say, and he found this phrase as normal as “times were bad then”. It wasn’t until he became a student that he realised how unbelievably cynical it was, and at the top of his voice he forbade her from saying it ever again. It took him years to understand that his mother was far too naive to be guilty, or that her guilt was a result of her naivety, thus discharging her of all blame. For Frau Erhart to call her “Loisl” a “camp child” was just playing with words familiar to her because they were in the air somehow, a desperate bit of fun in the desperate misery she had lived through. She was a “German mother”, whose big heart and capacity for empathy towards people close to her had been abused without her knowing. The Nazis had forged their conception of womanhood and motherhood into an ideal, and this ideal, even if she didn’t have another to turn to, couldn’t be invalidated by defeat in a war. It was timeless in times that were bad, and even more convincing in times that were better. “Willing to make sacrifices” was a term in a similar vein, which described her accurately when her son started university, and so she cried when the haughty student came home and insulted her, calling her an old Nazi witch. Now she used sentences that began, “When I’m no longer here . . .” – he’d miss her then. Then he’d realise all she’d done for him. Then he’d feel sorry for having been so mean to her. Then he’d see that. Then he’d see what. Then he’d see how. When she was no longer here. She, who in the eyes of her son was stuck in the past, anticipated justice in the afterlife, where eternities would collide in her soul: the eternal past and the eternal afterlife. Alois increasingly avoided his mother, her gaze when he studied at the kitchen table, the conversations, the arguments, the tears, and he would walk to the shop in Mariahilfer Strasse and sit in the storeroom with his lecture notes. This wasn’t a regression, however, no return to being the “camp child”. It was an escape forwards, into a future that was now emerging. The economic upturn was evident; his father’s business was going from strength to strength. Ever since the 1954 World Cup, to have football boots with the new type of studs had been the most ardent desire of all athletic boys, and now, at the beginning of the sixties, most fathers could afford to make their sons’ wish come true. And genuine leather footballs. And genuine jerseys. Everything had to be “genuine”, no more substitutes, no more fakes, no more making do with “what was there” because somehow you still had it despite the shortages. Now “what was there” was on display in the shop windows and on the shelves of the supermarkets, and you could buy these things – you could afford them. So, for example, his mother now bought Fru Fru instead of stirring a spoonful of homemade jam into a glass of soured milk. Anything homemade was the substitute, anything bought was genuine. Now his father employed a sales assistant, Herr Schramek, an acquaintance from his gymnastic association days, and then he also hired an apprentice, Trude.
Trude. She was sixteen and had a sinewy body which moved lithely between the shelves. Like a noble beast, Alois thought, suspecting that this simile might be rather silly. She had a “pixie cut”, a short hairstyle then fashionable amongst young women and which Alois found remarkably bold. The flimsy material of her blue work coat looked almost diaphanous when she crossed the shafts of light that fell into the room through the windows, allowing him to see the contours of her body as if he had X-ray vision. She was a most serious girl, but occasionally when he said something she would laugh with such innocent glee that Alois was bowled over, and instead of studying he would ponder how he might make her laugh the next time. He noticed that with greater regularity she found an excuse to look for something in the storeroom behind the shop. But she didn’t laugh at his pre-prepared jokes.
A year later they married. Alois needed a declaration of consent from his father; as a war orphan, Trudi was already deemed to be of legal age.
The escape forwards: moving out of home. Alois Erhart’s father knew a fellow party member from years before who now worked in Vienna municipality’s social housing division. And so the young couple obtained a cheap flat in the 11th district’s Friedrich-Engels-Hof, in the very same year that the red lettering on the front of this communal housing complex was restored and replaced. The “Friedrich” and the “s” of Engels had been chipped off by the Nazis, and so during the National Socialist era the apartment block had to bear the name “Engel-Hof”.
In the now renovated Friedrich-Engels-Hof, in their small council apartment, Alois Erhart was about as far as he could be from the house-shares and communes in which the sexual revolution was being discussed at the time.
Forty years later he discovered what “good sex” was. That such a sensation really did exist.
They had stayed together long after love and desire had parted company. They had stayed together after both love and desire had moved out. Respect and solidarity had moved in to share their home. Alois Erhart was alone among his friends and acquaintances in still being married. It’s a good marriage, he said.
It was a Sunday, they had slept in, but for some reason didn’t do their usual thing of getting out of bed straight away. A sunny day, light poured onto their bed through the two windows. He looked at her. His back was aching. She laid a hand on his back. He blinked in the light and then . . . why did he do it all of a sudden? He sat up and threw back the covers. He pushed up her nightie and felt a brief stabbing pain in the small of his back, like an electric shock. He moaned, she took off the nightie. She smiled. Surprised? Intrigued? He looked at her body, studied it, reading every wrinkle, every blue or red blood vessel and every roll of fat like a map on which a long common path was marked out, a life’s path with peaks and troughs, and he pressed up against her in his excitement, cried, pressed, the light, the X-ray vision and suddenly, at the height of his excitement, he felt it: a melting in which their souls touched.
And she laughed. Trudi. Their souls touched. That was the secret, Alois Erhart thought, this – touching a body so that your souls touched – was the “good sex” that gave him a hitherto unimagined pleasure, and which kept triggering the desire and lust, again and again.
Two years later Trudi was dead. Eternal love. How short eternity was.
Ciggy break?
O.K.
No, wait! Not the fire escape, Bohumil said. Far too cold and you’re unwell as it is. Come to my office!
But the . . . Martin pointed up at the ceiling, he didn’t know the English for smoke alarm. Bohumil understood:
I took the battery out earlier. It’s dead.
Bohumil sat down at his desk, put a cigarette between his lips and grinned like a cheeky little boy. Martin Susman sat on the visitor’s chair opposite and stared at the ceiling.
And just to make sure, I stuck a plaster over the sensor. Light?
Martin lit his cigarette.
I’m a civil servant, Bohumil said. I’m used to meticulous tasks. Taping up a dead alarm – now that’s a metaphor for our work! At least we’re not freezing. But tell me, what were you doing in Ukraine?
Me? In Ukraine? What gave you that idea?
That’s what I heard. A salamander said you were in Ukraine and that you gave him some very useful information —
Rubbish! What made them think that? I was in Poland. Auschwitz. You know that!
Well, it did make me wonder. What does that say about our in-house Task Force? Do the salamanders think Auschwitz is in Ukraine?
What if they’re right? Auschwitz is everywhere.
You’ve got a temperature.
Yes.
Why don’t you go home and have a lie down?
I’m waiting for Xeno. I need to talk to her.
As Martin took out his smartphone his fingers got caught up in the ribbon of his Auschwitz lanyard, which was still in his jacket pocket. He checked to see whether he had a message from Xeno; at that very same moment Fenia Xenopoulou was peering at her Blackberry a couple of rooms down the corridor to see if Fridsch had finally texted her. This simultaneity is not contrived and nor was it a coincidence,
for Fenia was checking her mobile every minute.
Martin took the lanyard out of his pocket and put away his telephone.
So, how was Auschwitz?
Look! Martin said, handing Bohumil the badge.
Guest of Honour in Auschwitz, Bohumil said. Cool.
Turn it over and see what it says.
Please do not lose this card. If the card is lost you are no longer permitted to stay in the camp . . . Is that . . . is it – Bohumil turned the lanyard over and over – real? Did you really get this badge in Auschwitz? And have it dangling from your neck? Seriously?
Yes, it’s deadly serious. On the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz the camp is closed to tourists, and that’s when the heads of state, high-level representatives and diplomats come from all over the world. Of course there are security measures, I mean, I can understand that, but —
But this badge is like a bad joke, it’s a parody that —
Yes, all those things. When I lit a cigarette on the camp thoroughfare, just by the ruins of the crematorium, a man in uniform appeared and said, No smoking in Auschwitz.
Bohumil shook his head, blew out smoke and said, Hitler was a non-smoker.
It was grotesque. Just like the machines where you can get hot drinks. The vending-machine company is called “Enjoy!” It was so horribly cold in Auschwitz that I was glad get a hot coffee. But maybe we’re just shocked by normality where we least expect it. I mean, this lanyard isn’t a cynical parody, it’s perfectly normal. It’s only in Auschwitz that we think it grotesque, that it ought to be worded differently, styled differently. Just as everything ought to be different there. But if we turned it around, if we saw everything that is normal or usual in that light . . . Do you see what I’m saying? That’s why I said: Auschwitz is everywhere. It’s just that we don’t see it. If we could see it, we would understand the bizarreness and cynicism of a normality that here in Europe ought to be a response to Auschwitz, a lesson drawn from this history. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not talking about more sensitively worded badges or more reverent coffee machines, I mean fundamentally . . .
The Capital Page 13
