Death in Rome (18 page)

Judejahn
arrived. He filled the room. He filled the room with his squat bull-like form. The small room shrank further. It shrivelled up. It was as though the walls were pressing together, and the ceiling dropping towards the floor.
Judejahn
went up to Eva. He embraced her. He said: 'You're in mourning?' She said: 'I'm in mourning.' And she thought: He's arrived, he's arrived, but not from Valhalla. He said: 'I know.' He led her to the bed. She let herself fall on to the bed, and he sat down beside her. He saw the room, the little room overlooking the yard, he heard the nigger song rising from the kitchen, he saw the vulcanite suitcase, solid and cheap, and he remembered the leather-bound trunks she had once had. He said: 'The Jews are to blame.' And she replied: 'The Jews.' He saw his son in his priest's robes standing in the harsh sunlight, blackish, dusty, shoddy, he had twisted the rosary round his hands, and was holding the cross up to him, he was pale, and he seemed now to be praying after all.
Judejahn
said: 'It was betrayal.' And she replied: 'Betrayal.' 'Jews,' he said, 'international Jewry.' And she repeated, 'Jews, international
Je
wry.' And Adolf saw them sitting, like
Laocoön
and his sons on the shore in Greece, entwined in the coils of the serpent; the hate-dripping, venom-tongued, giant serpents of their madness had enveloped his parents. He prayed. He said the Lord's Prayer. And she asked
Judejahn:
'Will you fight on?' And he said: 'I'll deal with them. I'll deal with every one of them.' She gazed at him, and her swimmy blue eyes saw more than they could see; her eyes came from fog and they penetrated the fog of being. She didn't believe a word. He hadn't come from Valhalla. But Eva saw Death standing behind him. She wasn't afraid of Death. Death would fix everything. It would conduct the hero to Valhalla.
Judejahn
looked at her befogged face, and he thought: She's aged a lot, as I expected. And then he thought: She's my comrade, the only comrade I ever had. He felt her hand grow warm in his. He said: 'I will go to Germany. I will speak to Pfaffrath. I'll deal with those traitors. I'm the same old
Judejahn!'
He still was the same old
Judejahn,
he still was the great
Judejahn.
He bulked large in the little room. He was the size of little Gottlieb's shadow.
Judejahn
gave orders. He gave orders to her to leave immediately. She was to go home. He took money from his large wallet, money for the wagon-lit. He gave her the money. He would send her more money later to buy a house. And then he pulled out some more large, dirty Italian banknotes, swollen post-war denominations, and pressed them into Adolf's folded hands.
Judejahn
enjoyed that. He said: 'Buy yourself something to eat. Or get pissed. Or spend it on a girl, if you're still a man.' The money weighed in Adolf's hands, but he didn't dare refuse it. He clasped the money with his rosary and his crucifix.
Judejahn
packed his wife's few belongings, and threw them into the cheap, ugly plastic suitcase. She never stirred. She let him get on with it. She was glad he was giving orders, glad to see him take action, but her eyes didn't believe him, they saw Death standing behind him, they saw that he'd been on the way to the heroes' banqueting hall of Valhalla for a long time. Whatever he did and decreed here didn't matter; she obeyed him apathetically, and left the room on his arm, left the nigger song in the courtyard, left her son, that strange being that could only be her enemy. Jews. Betrayal. Priests.
Judejahn
had paid his son off with money, with dirty notes and inflated denominations; he didn't look at Adolf as he led his mother out of the room. And in the lobby of the hotel frequented by Germans, they ran into the Pfaffraths, the tanned day-trippers, coming home from the battlefield in a state of high excitement, invigorated, inspired and noisy.
Friedrich Wilhelm
Pfaffrath was surprised and disturbed to see
Judejahn
in the hotel, and Eva on his arm. 'I'm taking my wife to the station,' said
Judejahn,
'I wasn't happy with her room. We'll talk later.' And then
Judejahn
was glad to stare at his brother-in-law's astounded and bewildered face. This face spurred
Judejahn
to poke fun, and he called out: 'Going to the concert tonight? Your Siegfried will be fiddling!'

But as though to repay him for his joke, there was
Adolf,
a black shadow, who dogged him through the lobby. He was a lanky embodiment of seriousness and sorrow. What could they possibly say to him? They looked away, discomfited. He spoiled the day. His black form was the writing on the wall at Belshazzar's feast. Then Dietrich, after a moment's thought, hurried after his cousin, caught up with him and said: 'Hi, Adolf, you might be a cardinal one day. Best be on good terms with you.'

I didn't have a white tie, but I could have bought myself a white tie, or I should have hired a white tie, there must be people in Rome who make a living by hiring out white ties, but I didn't want to buy a white tie nor did I want to hire one; I didn't see why one had to have a white tie in order to be able to listen to music.

I put on a white shirt. The Trevi Fountain was murmuring. I didn't wash myself; I wanted to keep a little of the Tiber smell under the white shirt. The Trevi Fountain was murmuring. I put on a dark suit. It wasn't a Roman suit. It didn't have the soft cut of Italian tailoring. The Trevi Fountain was murmuring. My suit was a German suit. I was a German composer. I was a German composer in Rome. The opera fountain was murmuring. Water fell into the basin. Money poured into the basin. The gods and mythological beings didn't say thank you. Visitors crossed off the fountain from their list of attractions; they had inspected the fountain, taken pictures of the water and the gods, the fountain had been harvested, it had been committed to memory, it was a holiday snap. To me it was a dream. Little boys fished for the coins the foreigners had thrown into the water. The boys were beautiful; they had rolled up their shorts over their slender legs. I would have liked to sit down on the edge of the fountain in my
white
shirt and my black suit and my faint Tiber smell. I would have liked to watch the boys; I would have liked to observe how beautiful and how greedy for money the boys were.

There was a great commotion on the approach to the concert hall. I heard the policeman's piccolo trilling. His gloves were like elegant white birds. Lace princesses arrived, veiled dowagers, diamonded coiffures, advertising barons and foreign-ministry barons, notorious con-men, ambassadors grown grey in the transmitting of bad news, Snow White's mother and Cinderella's sisters drove up, they were beauty queens, and photographers blitzed them in flashlight, mincing fashion designers mounted their new business dreams on ambitious mannequins and pushed them forth into the light, famous celluloid features yawned at little rich girls, and all of them were honouring music, they were society, they were indistinguishable one from another, they all had one face. The critics hid behind character masks, and publishers beamed benevolently like full moons. Managers put their sick and sensitive hearts on show. A lorry full of red flags clattered past. Leaflets fluttered over the policeman's white gloves like a swarm of envious grey sparrows. The jungle bastion had fallen. Who cared? The stock market took it well. The
Aga
Khan didn't put in an appearance. He was waiting for Hokusai's wave in his villa by the sea. But a dozen company directors had come, they knew and greeted one another, their spouses were minor divinities. I had no hat, otherwise I should have taken it off; the people assembling here were my supporters and my patrons. Even industry was represented here; advised by a celebrated pessimistic philosopher, it had endowed a music prize, and after the industry prize there would be a trade-union prize, on the heels of the Ford Foundation there would be the Marx
Foundation, and patronage
was becoming increasingly anonymous. Mozart had been in service to some distinguished noblemen, whose servant was I, who wanted to be free, and where were Augustine's great men, who, having done their day's work, gave themselves to music to restore their souls? I saw no souls here. Perhaps their clothes had cost too much.

Maybe I was embittered because I hadn't bought myself a white tie. Who would be delighted by my music? Was it meant to delight anyone? It was meant to disquiet. It would disquiet no one here.

Outside the upper circle there were no photographers. There were young men, young women, and interestingly also a few old people. An artist likes to think he has a following among youth, and he thinks the future's on his side when the upper circle applauds. Would they applaud? Did I appeal to them, those proud poor girls? They didn't give me a look. And the poor young men? They were probably students, future atomic wizards, in constant danger of being kidnapped and worn and torn between East and West, but maybe they were only future dentists and accountants—I probably was longing for Augustine's significant audience. A few priests were there, a few young workers. Would I disquiet them? I would have liked to feel comradeship with the young people, the young scientists, students, workers, priests, girls; but the word comrade had been forced down my throat in my early youth, and made repellent to me. I also thought, seeing the students and workers, 'Proletarians and intelligentsia unite,' but I didn't believe in that, I didn't believe a new world would be created from such a union, Hitler,
Judejahn,
my family and military service had robbed me of belief in all unions. So I welcomed the few old people who clambered up to Olympus along with the youngsters; they were lonely, and maybe my concert was meant for lonely people.

Kürenberg
was waiting for me in the conductor's room. He really was moulded by antiquity. His tailcoat fitted as on a marble statue, and, over the white of the collar, shirt-front and tie, his head looked Augustan. He was sage. He didn't stand around foolishly front of house and study his public. He was above that. What did he care about vanity and craziness? Society had one function for him, which was to support the fairy-tale palace of music, it had to prop up the magic temple of notes like caryatids, and it didn't matter at all out of what misapprehension it did so.
Ilse Kürenberg
was wearing a simple black dress. It too looked as though it had been pinned on marble. It was like a tight, black skin on a well-preserved marble bust.
Kürenberg
wanted to dispatch me into the box. He saw that I had turned up without a white tie, and that must have annoyed him. He stood above convention, and he told me that, by scorning the white tie and not subjecting myself to custom, I had given dress and convention a significance they didn't deserve. He was right. I was furious with myself. One should play by the rules and avoid making trouble and giving offence. The bells were ringing in the cloakroom, the orchestra was filing on stage, the one hundred famous musicians were tuning their instruments, and now and then I heard a few notes from my symphony; they sounded like the cries of a lost bird in a strange wood. I was to escort
Ilse Kürenberg
up to the box, and I said I had given my seat to a priest. I didn't say the priest was my cousin, and only now did it occur to me that Adolf
Judejahn
would share a box in Rome with
Ilse Aufhäuser
from our town. Her father had been murdered after his department store had been burned. Adolf's father bore much of the responsibility; he had contributed to the burning of the department store, and he had contributed to old
Aufhäuser's
death. My father could tell himself that he was innocent of murder and arson. All he'd done was watch. It was my father who'd been sitting in the box seat then. He had cheered on the actors from his box. But it didn't appal me that Adolf
Judejahn
and
Ilse Kürenberg
were sitting next to each other now. Why shouldn't they? The tragedy had happened, next up was the satyr play.

Judejahn had sent Eva back to Germany, he had put her in a bed first-class. The hotel room had been a cage, the compartment was a smaller, moving cage, in which she was caught, the Northern Erinys, black-clad, light-haired, full of lofty sorrow and now certain of her husband's going to Valhalla. But on the platform at Termini, the great Roman station named after the hot baths of Diocletian near by, the Termi, the fog cleared for a while under the neon lights of the great structure, the befogged face cleared—the second sight, the ghost-seeing sight, the werewolf eye which already saw Judejahn as a dead man—and she beheld him from the compartment of the train that was to carry her across the Alps, northwards and home, she beheld him and recognized him as he really was in the gleaming neon, a stout, grizzled man in dark glasses, and she cried: 'Take off those dreadful glasses and climb aboard, climb aboard the train and come away with me!' And he whiningly objected that his passport was not valid for Germany, and his false name would be exposed, and she said crossly: 'You don't need any false name, you don't need any dark glasses, you don't even need a passport. The border guards will say: "The General's coming home. We're proud to welcome you home, sir," and they'll stand at attention to you, and let you go wherever you want, and they'll be proud of having spoken to you, and at home they'll welcome you with a 21-gun salute, and no one will be able to lay a finger on you.' Eva saw his return home. She saw this was his only chance of returning home, and he understood her, he knew she was right, there was his return, there was Germany. The General's home, we're proud to have you back among us, sir.' That was how it was, those were the words the border guards would call out. But Judejahn hesitated, something was keeping him in Rome, in the city of impotent priests. Was it Laura, was it fear? No, it wasn't fear, Judejahn was without fear, and of course it wasn't Laura who was keeping him either, it was something else, maybe it was the desert, the barracks at the edge of the desert where he was in command, and if they received him with 21-gun salutes in Germany, the echo of guns faded and died, and so too did the crack of live ammunition, and then it would be Monday morning, and what would he be then, a Judejahn without power, an old Gottlieb sitting among malcontents and yesterday's men. Judejahn was afraid of time, he was afraid of his age, he could no longer imagine victory—and so he said to Eva that he would let Pfaffrath fix it, Pfaffrath would prepare for his home-coming, and the fortune-teller's gaze closed in on Eva once more, and the fog and the befogged face both descended, she knew now that Judejahn no longer believed, he no longer believed in the border guards, he no longer believed in the twenty-one guns, no longer in Germany, and the second sight overcame Eva, the ghost-vision, and a dingy Death on a lean nag drove the hero towards Valhalla, while her train carried her north to the Alps.