Death in Rome (19 page)

After an awkward and fraught farewell,
Judejahn
left for the hotel favoured by Germans to ask his brother-in-law Pfaffrath to arrange his return home for him, but at the hotel he was told that the party had gone to the concert; and indeed, spurred on by Dietrich, who, nettled by the photograph in the newspaper, wanted to check on his brother's situation, also prey to their own curiosity, and motivated by a mixture of unease, doubt and pride, they had got the porter to make reservations for them right at the back, and had got there without incident.
Judejahn
with his mission unaccomplished asked to be driven back to his palatial hotel, and on the way there it occurred to him that his appointment with Laura was not for several hours and that it might be amusing to watch brother-in-law Pfaffrath's boy playing the fiddle. That laughably disreputable event might help him through the boring time before his rendezvous, and it would furthermore strengthen his position
vis-à-vis
his brother-in-law if he had witnessed it and seen for himself the family's degeneration. So
Judejahn
ordered a ticket for the concert through the hall porter, and, as the call came from an expensive hotel, the booking was for a seat in the front row. However, as he had no white tie, people tried to prevent him from taking up his seat.
Judejahn,
not understanding the usher's Italian, only feeling the man was being obstructive, and feeling himself in the right after shelling out for a surprisingly expensive ticket, barged the featherweight usher out of the way. What did the miserable lackey want?
Judejahn
tossed him a banknote, strode into the hall and sat down demonstratively in his seat. Once there, he noticed that he was surrounded by people in evening dress and he thought for a moment he was sitting among the musicians, in the ranks of the very clowns who were to amuse him and who did their work in tails and white tie. However, as the orchestra was tuning up on stage in front of him, that hypothesis could not be sustained, and
Judejahn
was left to wonder at the formality of the proceedings. Little Gottlieb was impressed; he felt intimidated. But
Judejahn
wasn't having any intimidation, he sat back even more expansively in his seat, and looked aggressively round the hall. As once before, in the corso hour on the Via Veneto, he had the feeling he was sitting amongst crafty Jews and rootless spivs. Foppish bunch, he thought. He recognized the new society, the new society of traitorous Italians, the scum that had floated to the top after the disgraceful betrayal of Mussolini. So it was in front of these people, who belonged in prison, in a concentration camp, in a gas chamber, that Siegfried Pfaffrath would be fiddling away!
Judejahn
tried to spot his nephew on the stage, but he couldn't find him. Perhaps Siegfried wouldn't appear till later, the lead fiddlers always arrived late, they were a stuck-up and pampered bunch; they could do with a little discipline.
Judejahn
saw that right away. The only music he had any use for was martial music. Why didn't they play a jolly march, instead of boring the audience with their endless tuning? He went on looking round the hall, and in the only box he discovered his son, Adolf, and sitting next to him a woman who took Judejahn's fancy. Had Adolf given her the money
Judejahn
had pressed into his praying hands? Was she his lover? Or was he her fancy man? He hadn't thought of the priest as anyone's possible lover. It confused him.

It confused Dietrich as well, seeing Adolf up in the box. How did he come to be up there? Had the Church given him a seat? Did they want to make an exhibition of Adolf on account of his name? As a significant turncoat, a major convert? Did they have plans for him? Maybe Adolf was a sharp cookie, and he would become a bishop—a powerful fellow in the making. How should he play it? And what about the woman sitting next to him in the box? Dietrich couldn't quite make her out from where he was sitting. And his parents couldn't quite, either. Was she with Adolf? And where was Siegfried? Would he have had any information for them? Questions. So many questions.

On sitting down, Ilse Kürenberg had given a friendly nod to the priest sitting up in her box, but subsequently his face disturbed her, it was a nightmarish face, she couldn't say why, but it was a face from terrible dreams. She thought: He looks like a flagellant, a flogger. She pictured him whipping himself. She wondered: Does he whip others too, does he whip heretics? But surely he wouldn't do that, nor would a priest whip Jews. And then she thought: Perhaps he's a mystic. And then: He may be a Catholic clergyman, but he looks like the rebellious Luther.

But when the music started she was sure he really was a mystic, a German priest and a German mystic, because Siegfried's symphony, for all its modernity, contained a mystical urge, a mystic's sense of the world, though tamed by the classicizing
Kürenberg.
But
Ilse Kürenberg
now found why the original composition remained disagreeable to her, in spite of the clarity of the interpretation. There was too much death in those sounds, and a death without the merry dance of death present on antique sarcophagi. At times the music attempted a joy and sweetness like those of the old tombs, but then it seemed that Siegfried had blundered, written down wrong notes, chosen the wrong tone; in spite of
Kürenberg's
cool conducting, it became harsh and excessive, the music was cramped for space, it screamed, it was fear of death, a Northern dance of death, a plague procession, and finally the passages dissolved into one wall of fog. Compositionally it wasn't botched, in its way it showed talent,
Ilse Kürenberg
had a fine ear, the music excited her, but there was at its heart a foggy mystery, a perverse dedication to death, which was repugnant to her and excited her in spite of herself.

How boring the music was! Was it even music, or were they still tuning up, under the supervision of the bandleader now? And was that the main piece? Siegfried didn't appear. Had he pulled out? Judejahn felt let down. He'd been cheated of his pleasure. Hunger squeezed his stomach, thirst parched his tongue, but little Gottlieb didn't have the nerve to get up and leave. He felt paralysed. The sound of the orchestra paralysed him. The noise made it impossible for Judejahn to think, he couldn't decide who the woman was next to Adolf, he couldn't make up his mind whether he would sooner sleep with Laura or with this woman in the box.

They were shocked. They were shocked and disappointed. The music was not like any other music they had ever heard. It didn't resemble any notion of music that the Pfaffraths had. It didn't even resemble the notion the Pfaffraths had of the kind of music their son might make. But what notions did they have? And if they had any, then what were they expecting now? Beethoven's too frequently dusted-off death-mask over the twelve-valve radiogram in the music corner of their living-room, or Wagner's portentous beret-wearer, manifestly kissed by genius? The two older Pfaffraths missed the sound of elevation, the high, exalted tone and the clear harmonies, they looked for the warm flow of melody, they listened in vain for the music of the spheres, music from some higher region, accessible as they thought to their hearing, a region they didn't inhabit, nor did they ever want to, but which they pictured to themselves as an optimistic sky, a rosy dome over the grey globe. Here on earth you had to live soberly and sensibly, and, if need be, resolutely taking responsibility for all man's inhuman cruelty, and so, correspondingly, the more loftily the pink superstructure had to float over the all too human. The Pfaffraths believed in the confectioner's temple of art, a sweet substance formed into ideal allegory; it was, so they said, deceiving even themselves, a necessity, which they liked to call 'love of beauty', and music was productive of a cultural feeling of pleasure and a contented drowsiness. But Siegfried's tones made them shudder, they felt thoroughly ill at ease, it was as though an icy wind were blowing over them, and occasionally it sounded like persiflage of German-bourgeois values; they thought they detected jazz rhythms, an imaginary jungle, a nigger kraal full of lust stripped bare, and this jungle of degenerate noise alternated with other bits that were plain boring, truly monotonous sections of disharmony. Did this discord bring pleasure? Did they accept it? Timorous as mice they looked round and were afraid of scandal and outcry, discredit to their family name that, as they knew, was held in such regard at home. But everyone around them still seemed to be sitting there politely, people's faces bore the usual concert expression of reflective appreciation, and a few of them even had absorption written on them. Dietrich thought he could detect some calculation in his brother's music, a conjuror's trick or a mathematical equation he couldn't quite solve; this music hadn't come to the composer in the way the great and beautiful sounds of Beethoven and Wagner must have come to them, this music was manufactured, it was a sophisticated swindle, there was careful thought in these dissonances, and that bothered Dietrich—maybe Siegfried was no fool, maybe he was dangerous and at the beginning of a great career. Dietrich whispered to his parents: 'He's avant-garde!' That was meant slightingly, but it could also be construed as proof of Dietrich's objectivity, his dispassionate and well-informed judgement, even in this department. But the remark caused some twisted foreigner in a curiously tight-fitting smoking-jacket and with a provocative goatee to utter a censorious 'Shh!'

Adolf didn't care for his cousin's music. It made him sad, yes, it tormented him; but he tried to understand it. He tried to understand Siegfried. What was Siegfried trying to get across with his symphony? What was he expressing? All kinds of contradictory things, Adolf thought, beneficent pains, comic despair, courageous fear, sweet bitterness, sick love and a desert furbished with potted plants, the decorated sandbox of irony. Was this music inimical to God? It probably wasn't. There was also the memory of a time before guilt in these sounds, of a paradisal peace and beauty, of sadness at the entry of death into the world, there was much clamour for amity in the notes, no hymn to joy, no panegyric, but still a longing for joy and praise of creation. At times, Adolf felt he could recognize himself in the sounds. It was like a reflection of his childhood in a broken mirror. The Teutonic fort was in the music, the exercise grounds, the woods, sunrise and sunsets and dormitory dreams. But the cynicism and unbelief, the narcissistic flirtation with despair, and the drift into anarchy drove Adolf away from the music. The Church would not approve these sounds; no Council of Trent would have found them exemplary. Did the deacon Adolf approve his cousin's music? He did not approve it. Did he then condemn it? He did not condemn it. It was not God who spoke in those sounds, it was some struggling soul, and so perhaps it was God after all, in one of his incomprehensible monologues that were so confounding to Christ's church.

They were whistling, I could hear them whistling, I had crept away to the door of the upper circle, I was waiting right at the back, a beggar by the church door, a beggar at my own music. They were whistling, I wasn't surprised, they were whistling in all manner of keys and like street-urchins with their fingers stuck in their mouths, they were whistling, my students, my young, imperilled nuclear physicists, my poor proud young girls, I had expected nothing else, the young priests were not whistling, but I think they should have whistled too. I had dreamed of a pure creation, but I had been tempted to meddle in the struggles of this world. I don't know whether a pure creation is possible, an immaculate conception from absolutely nothing, it's what I dream of, and maybe it's pride and delusion and the hubris of Icarus, and my wings broke before they could fly. Icarus must needs be arrogant. It is the arrogance of physicists in their labs, their unimaginative cleverness breaks up the natural world, and Kürenberg wants to encourage me to that destruction because his brain is delighted by beautiful formulae, because he can grasp the lofty laws by which destruction takes place. I don't grasp the rules, and I can't understand the formulae. Probably I'm stupid. How could I work something out, and to whom should I show my results? I still hope to get the right answer without doing the sums, by some inscrutable method which probably would not impress Kürenberg, which would seem dubious and dishonest to him. They were whistling, but downstairs in the stalls they were clapping now, they were shouting out my name, and the shrill whistling in the circle only seemed to encourage those in the stalls to more rapturous applause. Now would be the moment for me to show myself in my white tie. I should have shown myself. Kürenberg kept shaking hands with the first violinist, gesturing to the orchestra, pointing to the wings, from which I was failing to appear, doing everything possible to divert the applause from himself and to calm it down without bringing it to a stop, and with lavish gestures he lamented the inexplicable absence of the composer. One of the poor proud girls near me said: 'I could spit in his face.' She meant she wanted to spit in my face, the composer's. I understood her; she said it in English. And what did the people downstairs want with me, the gentlemen in evening dress, the ladies in expensive dresses, the critics, the publishers, the managers, what did they have in store for me, did they want to garland me, or did they want to spit at me, too?

Clapping loudest of all, from within a bizarre predicament, was Judejahn. His heavy hands were working like steam-hammers. He would far rather have roared, sworn, and had everyone in the hall and on stage stand at attention or clapped them in irons. He would have stood Siegfried against the base of the Palestrina statue; he would have loved to make Siegfried and the bandleader do thirty press-ups. But little Gottlieb didn't have the self-confidence to yell in the white-tie crowd, to swear, to call for attention and thirty press-ups, and when the upper circle began to whistle, he felt that was insubordination against those in the stalls, against the wealthy, those sitting in the light, whom he had long despised and envied, and whose maddening views of art and life he now found himself supporting with the steam-hammer clap of his palms.