Death in Rome (2 page)

Koeppen seems to sit on the shoulders of his four main protagonists and parrot their thoughts and impressions: the brutal, rueful
Judejahn
(rueful for not having killed more); the discriminations—havering but also frank in their way—of Siegfried; pat Adolf and fearful Pfaffrath. In the modernist manner, they take up prismatically different attitudes to the same things: sex, dress, food, the gods and God, myth, Rome.
Judejahn
has his desert, and Siegfried the Africa for his black symphony. The spooky arms-dealer Austerlitz has his warmed milk, Siegfried and Adolf their ice-cream. Everywhere there is congruence and difference. The events and perspectives of the book are related
in
a wonderful, highly wrought and rhythmic prose—how many novels are there about which you can say they have rhythm?—short, spat-out sentences, and long, sweeping, comma'd-off periods, protocols of consciousness that are actually less difficult to follow than they seem. Koeppen's style commends itself both to the eye and the ear, as much as to the cells of memory and knowledge. It was the style—gorgeous, bristling, pugnacious—that got me sold on the book, and that from the very first sentence: 'Once upon a time, this city was a home to gods
. . .'
If that worked, then everything else had to, too.

A note on the names. Both surnames are significant fabrications:
'Judejahn'
from
Jude,
a Jew, and
jahn,
not a word but like a cross between
Wahn
,
madness, and
jäten,
to weed out; and Pfaffrath, from
Pfaffe,
a disrespectful term for a priest, and
rath,
council or counsel. With the first names, there is an awful irony in the way the fathers have named the sons—and been named by their own fathers before them!—as they themselves should have been named. No one likes or fits his own name. There is a narcissistic syncopation in the way the Nazis have names from the pious empire,
Friedrich Wilhelm
and Gottlieb (love-god); and the rebels and expatriates are called Adolf and Siegfried. Siegfried's brother Dietrich is named by Koeppen after Diederich, the creepy and servile anti-hero of
Heinrich
Mann's novel
Der Untertan
;
while the word 'Dietrich' means a picklock. Truly, he will inherit the earth.

I have various debts to record: to the bookseller Barbara Stiess in Berlin, who first recommended Koeppen to me; to Daniel Halpern for his unforgettably impulsive agreement to publish the book; and to Joseph Brodsky, for the gift of a Mussolini T-shirt, in which I did as much of the work as was decently possible. Thank you!

Michael Hofmann London, March
1992

DEATH IN ROME

Il mal
seme
d'Adamo

Dante,
Inferno

And before nightfall
a
shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease.

Thomas Mann,
  Death in Venice

PART ONE

Once upon a time, this city was a home to gods, now there's only Raphael in the Pantheon, a demigod, a darling of Apollo's, but the corpses that joined him later are a sorry bunch, a cardinal of dubious merit, a couple of monarchs and their purblind generals, high-flying civil servants, scholars that made it into the reference books, artists of academic distinction. Who gives a damn about them? The tour group stand in the ancient vaults, and gawp up at the light falling on them like rain through the only window, the circular opening in the cupola that was once covered with bronze tiles. Is it golden rain? Danaë succumbs to the approaches of Thomas Cook and the Italian Tourist Board; but without much enthusiasm. She won't lift her skirts to receive the god into her. Perseus won't be born. Medusa gets to keep her head and moves into a swish apartment. And what about great Jupiter? Is he here in our midst? Could he be the old fellow in the Amex office, or the rep for the German-European Travel Agency? Or has he been banished to the edge of town somewhere, is he in the asylum enduring the questions of nosy psychiatrists, or languishing in the state's prisons? They've installed a she-wolf under the Capitol, a sick and depressed animal, not up to suckling Romulus and Remus. The faces of the tourists look pasty in the light of the Pantheon. Where is the baker that will knead them, where is the oven that will give them a bit of colour?

Wrong, the music sounded wrong, it no longer moved him, it was almost unpleasant to him, like hearing your own voice for the first time, a recording coming out of a loudspeaker, and you think, well, so that's me, that braying twit, that phoney, that smoothie, and in particular it was the violins that were wrong, their sound was too lush; it wasn't the unearthly wind in the trees, it wasn't the child's conversation with the daemon at nightfall, that wasn't what fear of being sounded like, it wasn't so measured, so well-tempered, it should be more tormenting, more passionate, old panic fear of the green trees, of the expanse of the sky, of the drifting clouds—that was what Siegfried had meant to sing, and he had totally and utterly failed, and so now he felt weak and timid, he felt like crying, but Kürenberg had been reassuring and praised the symphony. Siegfried admired Kürenberg, the way he ruled with his baton, the plenipotentiary of the notes; but still there were times when Siegfried felt violated by him. Then Siegfried would get angry with himself for not putting up any fight. He couldn't; Kürenberg was so knowledgeable, and Siegfried was green and no match for him in musical theory. Kürenberg smoothed, accented, articulated Siegfried's score, and Siegfried's painful groping, his search for a sound, the memory of an Edenic garden before the dawn of mankind, an approximation to the truth of things, which was by definition unhuman—all that, under Kürenberg's conducting hand, had become humanistic and enlightened, music for a cultured audience; but to Siegfried it sounded unfamiliar and disappointing, the feeling now tamed and striving for harmony, and Siegfried was worried, but then again the artist in him enjoyed the precision, the clarity of the instruments, the care with which the celebrated hundred-strong orchestra were playing his composition.

In the concert hall there were laurel trees growing in green-painted tubs, or perhaps it was oleander; anyway the same thing that grew in crematoria, and even in high summer looked somehow wintry. 'Variations on Death and the Colour of Oleander' had been the title of Siegfried's first major composition, a septet that had remained unperformed. In the first draft he had had in mind his dead grandmother, the only member of his family to whom he had been at all close; perhaps because she had been such a strange and silent presence in the noisy and bustling house of his parents, forever echoing to the tramp of jackboots. And what a ghastly send-off they'd given her. His grandmother was the widow of a pastor, and had she been able to watch, she would have hated the technology and comfort, the hygiene and slickness, with which she had been turned to ashes, the deft and indifferent address, while the wreath, with the garish swastika ribbon that the
SA
Women's Section had contributed, was certainly repugnant to her, even if she would never have spoken out against it. But then, in the second version of his septet, Siegfried had tried to express something more universal and more suspect, a secret opposition, suppressed, brittle, romantic scraps of feelings, and in its posture of resistance his composition resembled a rose-garlanded marble torso, the torso of a young warrior or a hermaphrodite in the blaze of single combat: it represented Siegfried's rebellion against his surroundings, against the prisoner-of-war camp, against the barbed-wire fences, against his comrades with their boring conversations, against the war, for which he held his parents responsible, against his whole hellish and hellbent Fatherland. Siegfried wanted to pay them all back, and so, having read in an English newspaper that
Kürenberg,
who had been a rising conductor in Germany before the war, was now in Edinburgh, he had written to him, asking for some examples of twelve-tone music, a form of composition that was considered unacceptable in Siegfried's youth, and which now attracted him for that very reason, because it was frowned upon by those in power, his hated teachers at the military academy, his feared Uncle
Judejahn,
the mighty man whose glowering image in the vile uniform had hung over his despised father's desk, and
Kürenberg
had sent works by
Schönberg
and
Webern
to Siegfried in his camp, and sent a friendly note to accompany them. The scores were in the old Universal edition, published in Vienna before Siegfried's time and then banned after the Anschluss of Austria. The music represented a new world for Siegfried, it opened a gate for him, not just in the barbed-wire prisoner-of-war compound, but in something still more constricting. And afterwards he refused to crawl back under the yoke as he called it, the war was lost, and he at least had been freed, and no longer deferred to the views of the family to have been born into which had always seemed ghastly to him.

The greenery in the concert hall looked dusty. It probably was laurel after all, the leaves had the look of dried herbs swimming in soup, moistened but still brittle and unsoftened by cooking. They depressed Siegfried, who didn't want to be sad in Rome. The leaves reminded him of a succession of soups in his life: the Eintopf at the Party school that his father had sent him to on Uncle Judejahn's recommendation, the field-kitchens of the army, to which Siegfried had fled from school; the Party's Junker school had had green bay trees too, and there were oak leaves in the barracks, proliferating on decorations and on tombstones, and there had always been a picture of that twitchy and repressed type, the
Führer,
with his Charlie Chaplin moustache, looking benevolently down on his herd of sacrificial lambs, the boys in uniform now ready for the slaughter. Here, among the laurel and oleander of the concert hall, in this chilly indoor grove, there was an old portrait of the master, Palestrina, looking far from benevolent, no, surveying the orchestra's efforts sternly and reproachfully. The Council of Trent had accepted Palestrina's music. The congress in Rome would reject Siegfried's. That too depressed Siegfried, depressed him while still rehearsing, depressed him even though he'd come to Rome expecting to be rejected, telling himself he didn't care.

There is a trench going round the Pantheon that was once the street that led from the Temple of All the Gods to the Baths of Agrippa; the Roman imperium collapsed, debris filled up the trench, archaeologists laid it bare again, masonry stumps rise up mossy and ruined, and sitting on top of them are the cats. There are cats all over Rome, they are the city's oldest inhabitants, a proud race like the Orsinis and the Colonnas, they are really the last true Romans, but they have fallen on hard times. Imperial names they have! Othello, Caligula, Nero, Tiberius. Children swarm round them, calling to them, taunting them. The voices of the children are loud, shrill, voluble, so appealing to a foreign ear. They lie on their fronts on the wall that runs alongside the ditch. School ribbons transform the grimy faces into little Renoirs. The girls' pinafores have ridden up, the boys wear tiny shorts, their legs look like those of statues under a patina of dust and sun. That's the beauty of Italy. Suddenly laughter rings out. They're laughing at an old woman. Compassion always has a pathetic aspect. The old woman hobbles along with a stick, bringing the cats something to eat. Something wrapped in a foul, sodden newspaper. Fishheads. On a blood-smeared newspaper photograph the American secretary of state and the Russian foreign minister are shaking hands. Myopic the pair of them. Their glasses blink. Thin lips compressed in a smile. The cats growl and hiss at each other. The old woman tosses the paper into the trench. Severed heads of sea-creatures, dull eyes, discoloured gills, opalescent scales, tumble among the yowling moggy mob. Carrion, a sharp whiff of excrement, secretions and sex, and the sweet smell of decay and purulence rise into the air, mixed with the exhaust fumes on the street, and the fresh, tempting aroma of coffee from the espresso bar on the corner of the Piazza della Rotonda. The cats fight over the leftovers. It's a matter of life and death. Foolish creatures, why did they have to multiply! There are hundreds of them starving and homeless, randy, pregnant, cannibalistic; they are diseased and abandoned, and they have sunk about as far as cats can sink. One torn with a bullish skull, sulphur-yellow and bristle-haired, lords it over the weaker ones. He puts his paw down. He doles out. He takes for himself. His face bears the scars of past power struggles. He is missing part of an ear—a lost campaign. There is mange on his fur. The adoring children call him 'Benito'.

I was sitting at a zinc table, on a zinc chair, so light the wind might have carried me off. I was happy, I was telling myself, because I was in Rome, on the pavement terrace of an espresso bar on the corner of the Piazza della Rotonda in Rome, and I was drinking a brandy. The brandy also was light and flighty, light metal, like distilled zinc. It was grappa, and I was drinking it because I'd read in Hemingway that that's what you should drink in Italy. I wanted to be cheerful, but I didn't feel cheerful. Something was gnawing me. Perhaps the awful mob of cats were gnawing me. No one likes seeing poverty, and a few pennies weren't enough to absolve you here. I never know what to do. I avert my eye. A lot of people do, but it bothers me. Hemingway doesn't seem to know the first thing about brandy. The grappa tasted mouldy and synthetic. It tasted like German black-market brandy from the Reichsmark period. Once I got ten bottles of brandy like that in exchange for a Lenbach. The Lenbach was a sketch of Bismarck; I did the deal with a Puerto Rican in GI uniform. The brandy was distilled from fuel for the V2 rockets that were supposed to destroy London: you flew off in the air when you drank it, but that's all right, the Lenbach was faked as well. Now we had the 'economic miracle' in Germany, and good brandy. The Italians probably had decent brandy too, but they didn't have an economic miracle. I surveyed the square. I saw the state being swindled. A young woman was selling American cigarettes from her dirty apron. I felt reminded of the cats. The woman was the human equivalent of those poor creatures, ragged and unkempt and covered with open sores. She was miserable and degraded; her kind too had multiplied too quickly, and they had been weakened by lust and hunger. Now she was hoping to get rich illegally. She was ready to worship the golden calf; but I wasn't sure whether it would answer her prayers. I had a feeling this woman might be murdered. I could see her strangled body, whereas she probably saw herself as a proper businesswoman, a dignified signora, enthroned in a legitimate kiosk. On the piazza, the golden calf condescended to nuzzle the woman. She seemed to be well known in the area. Like a buoy she stood in the flow of traffic, and the deft little Fiats swam boldly up to her. How the brakes squealed! The drivers, handsome men with curled, with waved, with pomaded hair, with buffed and scented scalps if they were bald, passed money out through the windows of their cars, took their packets on board, and their little Fiats would chase off to the next port of call, the next fraudulent little transaction. A young Communist woman walked up. I could tell by the bright red kerchief over her blue anorak. A proud visage! I thought, Why are you so arrogant? You deny everything, you deny the old woman feeding the cats, you deny all compassion. A youth lurked in a doorway, greasy, as though dipped in oil. He was the cigarette-seller's boyfriend, her protégé or her protector; or maybe he was her boss, a serious businessman concerned about his volumes and his margins; whatever he was, I think he was the Devil with whom Fate had paired this woman. Every so often the two of them would meet on the piazza, as though by chance. She would slip him her takings, a bunch of dirty lira notes, and he would pass her fresh, shiny cellophane-wrapped packs. A
carabiniere
was standing there in his flashy uniform like his own monument, and was looking across at the Pantheon with a bored sneer. I thought, You and that little Communist would make a fine pair, you'd nationalize the cats, the compassionate old woman would die in a state nursing home, the fishheads would be taken into public ownership, and everything would be organized out of existence. But for the moment there was still disorder and happening. Newspaper-sellers cried their wares with hoarse, pleading shouts. They've always had my admiration. They are the rhapsodes and panegyricists of crimes, of accidents, of scandals and national commotions. The European bastion in Indochina was about to fall. In those days, war and peace hung in the balance, only we didn't know. We didn't hear about the cataclysm that threatened us until much later, in newspapers that hadn't yet been printed. Whoever could, ate well. We sipped our coffee and our brandy; we worked hard to earn money, and if the circumstances were favourable, we slept with one another. Rome is a wonderful city for men. I was interested in music, and it looked as though a lot of other people in Rome were as well. They had come from many countries to attend the congress in the ancient capital. Asia? Asia was far off. Asia was ten hours' flight, and it was as big and remote as Hokusai's wave. The wave was coming. It lapped at the shores of Ostia, where a girl's body had been found washed up. The poor corpse went around Rome like a ghost, and her pallid image terrified cabinet ministers; but they managed, as usual, to save their skins. The wave was approaching the cliffs at Antibes. '
Bonsoir
,
Monsieur
Aga
Khan!'
Dare I say that it's not my concern? I have no bank accounts, no money, no jewels, I weigh as nothing in the balance; I am free, I have no strings of race horses and no starlets to protect. My name is Siegfried Pfaffrath. An absurd name, I know. But then again, no more absurd than many others. Why do I despise it so? I never chose it. I like to talk shamelessly, but then I feel ashamed: I behave rudely, and I long to be able to show respect. I'm a composer of serious music. My profession matches my name for absurdity. Siegfried Pfaffrath, it says on concert programmes. Why don't I use a pseudonym? I have no idea. Is it the hated name clinging to me, or do I cling to it? Will my family not let go of me? And yet I believe that everything that's done, thought, dreamed or ruined, everything in the universe, even invisible and impalpable things, concern me and reach out to me.