Death in Rome (7 page)

I didn't want to stand around idly. I asked
Kürenberg
what I could do to help, and he gave me a bowl, a cheese-grater and a piece of Parmesan, and told me to grate it. At first the cheese merely crumbled away into the bowl in hard lumps, and
Kürenberg
showed me how it should be done, and then he asked me whether I hadn't ever helped my mother in the kitchen at home. I said no. And I remembered the great cold kitchen in our house, the floor tiles always damp and just washed; the boots of the uniformed messengers and the friends of the domestics were forever making new marks on the wet, gleaming tiled surface to the irritation of the servants, who always seemed to be flying off the handle, hectically noisy and hectically nervous. 'Where are you from originally?' asked
Kürenberg.
I told him the name of the place, and I was going to add that nothing tied me to it any longer, nothing but the accident of my birth, when I noticed
Kürenberg
looking at me in surprise. And then he cried,
'Ilse
comes from the same town,' and she, wiping glasses, now turned to me, with a look that went right through me. And I thought, She can see the old avenue, the avenue with the
cafés
and the trees which have burned down now, but the
cafés
have probably been reopened, and people are sitting in them again, under parasols maybe because the trees burned down, or they've planted new trees, fast-growing poplars, she can see that just as I see it, objectively but with some emotion as well; or does she not know the trees burned down? I wanted to ask her, but she bustled out again into the bathroom, and
Kürenberg
was making a sauce using an egg-whisk, but I noticed his thoughts were elsewhere, he was upset, and then he said, having looked across to the bathroom as though to check she wasn't too close by, 'I was once the conductor there. They had a good orchestra, good singers, a fine hall.' 'It's in ruins,' I said. 'They play in the castle now.' He nodded. The sauce was finished. He said: 'There was an
Oberpresident
Pfaffrath. Are you any relation?' I said: 'He's my father, but he's the
bürgermeister
now.' He peered into a steaming pot and called,
'Ilse,
quick, the colander.' And she brought the colander from the bathroom, a sturdy mesh, sturdy like herself, and he shook the rice out into the colander, leapt with it full of steaming rice across to the tub, poured cold water over it, shook it dry again, and hung the colander and rice in the steam rising from the saucepan, and said to me: 'It's a Javan recipe, the rice cooks and stays crunchy.' They had got around a lot, he had conducted orchestras all over the world, and they had settled into this life, they had no house, no permanent residence, they owned suitcases, fine, large suitcases, and lived in hotel rooms like the one I was standing in. And then I realized that I'd known
Kürenberg
for far longer than I'd thought, I remembered, of course I wasn't aware of it at the time, I was a child, I didn't understand what was going on, but now I saw it as though it was before my very eyes: I saw my father showing
Kürenberg
out, I was playing in the hall, and the way Father shut the door behind
Kürenberg
I could tell by his reddened face that he was angry and he told me off for playing in the hall, and he went in to Mother, and I followed him, because I didn't know where in the big house I was supposed to go, and I was curious as well, even though I knew he was in a bad mood, as he generally was when people came to him for help, they didn't seem to understand him in our town, because they often came to him for help, and it never even crossed his mind to intervene in lost causes. Not out of hatred, no, he wasn't twisted (he didn't like them, that was probably true enough), but he was afraid of them since they had been declared lepers. And most of all, even at that time, he feared Uncle
Judejahn.
And as though it were yesterday, I could hear him saying to Mother: 'Our General Musical Director'—he always expressed himself in long-winded ways, and titles never failed to impress him—'paid me a call, and asked me to try to obtain the release of old
Aufhäuser,
his father-in-law. I urged him to be mindful of his career and apply for a divorce
-'
And then Father caught sight of me, and sent me out in a rage, and today I know that old
Aufhäuser
had just been arrested for the first time; it was the day of the first little anti-Jewish boycott, and it wasn't till later, the
Kristallnacht,
that
Aufhäu
ser's store was set on fire. I got the day off at the Junker school and I saw it burning, the first building I saw burned down. And
Aufhäuser
was back in protective custody, and my Father sat at the head of the table, ladling out soup, he liked to play the patriarch occasionally, and Goring and
Goebbels
were spitting venom on the wireless, and my mother said: 'I must say it's a shame about all the beautiful things that were lost to the flames.' And old
Aufhäuser
was once again in protective custody, and later on I came across his library; it lay in disorderly heaps in the attic of the
Hitlerjugendheim
,
somebody must have carted it off there and then forgotten all about
it. Aufhäuser
was a bibliophile, and I found first editions of the Classics and Romantics, precious old German and Latin volumes, first editions of the Naturalists, of the Mann brothers, of the works of
Hofmannsthal, Rilke,
George, bound volumes of periodicals like
Blätter für
die
Kunst
and
Neue
Rundschau
,
the literature of the First World War, the Expressionists up to Kafka. I helped myself, and later whatever was left was burned, was blown up by bombs along with the rest of the
Hitlerjugendheim
,
and
Aufhäuser,
the captive in protective custody was murdered—and this was his daughter. Could I bear to look at her? Where were my thoughts running off to? My thoughts rebelled. They said: She's in pretty good shape, she must be forty and hardly a wrinkle on her. And my thoughts went on: The
Aufhäusers
were wealthy, wonder if she got compensation? And then: He didn't marry her money, it was too late for that, he did it to oppose evil. And then: They love each other, they've stayed together, they're still in love. And we went to table, we sat down,
Kürenberg
served the food, she poured the wine. It must have been a delicious meal, the chef deserved my compliments, but I couldn't bring myself to do it, nothing had a taste—or rather, it tasted of ashes, dead ashes blowing on the wind. And I thought: She didn't see her father's store on fire. And I thought: She didn't see our houses burning down, either. And I thought: It's over over over, nothing can be done about it, nothing nothing, it's finished finished finished finished. There was fresh spinach,
sautéed
in fine oil, and over it we sprinkled the cheese I'd grated myself, and my steak was two fingers thick, as soft as butter, and blood ran out of the heart of it, and the wine was as cold and dry as a fresh spring, I was able to taste that still in spite of all the ash coating my tongue, we didn't speak during the meal, the
Kürenbergs
leaned over their plates and took their nourishment seriously, and once I said, 'This is wonderful,' but maybe I didn't say it loud enough, no one replied, and then there was a raspberry
soufflé, flambéed,
almost tropical and yet with the aroma of German forests, and
Kürenberg
said, 'We'll get coffee brought up; there's nothing like a real espresso.'
Ilse Kürenberg
ordered coffee over the hotel telephone; a bottle of cognac appeared on the table and we talked about Rome.

They love old Rome, antique Roman Rome, they love the
fora
with their battered grandeur, they love looking at the ancient hills in the evenings, the views of cypresses and solitary pines, they love the now functionless pillars, the marble staircases leading nowhere, the sundered arches over the filled-in chasms commemorating victories whose names figure in schoolbooks, they love the House of Augustus and they quote from Horace and Virgil, they adore the Rotunda of the Vestal Virgins, and they pray at the Temple of Fortune. I listen to them, speaking knowledgeably of new finds, discussing archaeological digs and museum treasures; and I love them too, love the old gods, love beauty long buried in the ground now visible once more, I love the proportions and the smooth cold stone skin of the old statuary, but still more I love Rome as it is now, alive and manifest to me, I love its skies, Jupiter's fathomless sea, and I imagine we're drowned, we're Vineta, and up on top of the element that washes around us are ships never seen by us, sailing on dazzling seas, and Death casts his invisible net over the city, I love the streets, the corners, the stairways, the quiet courtyards with urns, ivy and lares, and the raucous squares with daredevil Lambretta riders, I love the people sitting on their doorsteps of an evening, their jokes, their expressive gestures, their gift for comedy, their conversation which is lost on me, I love the bubbling fountains with their sea gods, nymphs and
tritons,
I love the children sitting on the marble edge of the fountains, those tumbling, garlanded, cruel little
Neros,
I love the bustle, friction, barging, and shouting and laughter and looks on the Corso, and the obscenities that are whispered to ladies in passing, and I love the stiff, empty larvae of the ladies' countenances, which the dirt helps to form, and I love their replies, their humiliation and their pleasure in these indecent tributes, which they bury underneath their street-masks in their real faces, and carry home with them and into their women's dreams, I love the gleaming affluent shopfronts, the displays of the jewellers and the bird hats of the milliners, I love the snooty little Communist on the Piazza della Rotonda, I love the long, shiny espresso bar with the hissing, steam-belching machine and the men sitting there, drinking hot strong bitter-sweet coffee from little cups, I love hearing Verdi's music booming out in the passage in front of the Piazza Colonna from the loudspeakers of the television studios and echoing back from the
fin de siècle
stucco
façades,
I love the Via Veneto, the
cafés
of Vanity Fair, with their funny chairs and colourful awnings, I love the leggy, slim-hipped models, their dyed hair the colour of flame, their pale faces, their great staring eyes, fire that I can't touch, I love the happy, stupid athletic gigolos in attendance, traded by the wealthy corseted ladies, I love the dignified American senators who get audiences with the Pope and can buy anything they want, I love the gentle, white-haired automobile kings, who spend their fortunes on supporting science, art and literature, I love the homosexual poets in their tight drainpipe jeans and pointy thin-soled shoes, living off awards and shaking their jangling silver bracelets coquettishly back from the overlong cuffs of their shirts, I love the old mouldering bathing-ship anchored in front of the Castle of the Angels on the turbid Tiber, and its naked red light-bulbs in the night, I love the small, secret, incense-steeped, art- and ornament-crammed churches, even though
Kürenberg
finds baroque Rome disappointing, I love the priests in their robes of black, red, violet and white, the Latin Mass, the seminarians with fear in their faces, the old prebendaries in stained soutanes and beautiful greasy Monsignore hats with funny red cords round their waists and fear in their faces, the old women kneeling at confessionals with fear in their faces, the poor cracked hands of the beggars in front of the carved and worked portals of the chapels and their fear trembling like the vein in their throats, I love the little shopkeeper in the Street of the Workers, cutting great slices of mortadella like leaves, I love the little markets, the fruit-sellers' stalls all green red orange, the tubs of the fishmongers full of obscure sea-creatures and all the cats of Rome prowling along the walls

and the two of them, two firm silhouettes, had stepped up to the window, the tall French window, and they looked down into the illuminated pit of the street below, and they looked across at other hotels like their own in many-storied stone buildings by the station, full of travellers, electrical signs flashed their temptations, and Rome was ready as ever to be conquered, and Kürenberg was thinking about Siegfried's music, the flow of feeling he wanted to tighten and compress and cool for this city tomorrow, and Ilse stood beside him and looked at the roofs of automobiles creeping along the bottom of the street like an armoured column of cockroaches, she saw the brief, harmless flash of lightning in the wires over the electric trolleybuses, she saw through the convention of pretending death didn't exist, the unanimous agreement to deny terror, the ownership of the buildings she saw was set out in the land register, and even the Romans, well acquainted with ruin and the devastation of former splendour, believed in the everlastingness of this particular arrangement of stones on the old earth, she saw the mystery plays of trade, these also based on the delusions of eternity, inheritance and certainty, she saw the blooming and withering miracles of advertisements, whose colours had played on her own childhood too, quicksilver lights or dragon candles, and how simple-minded of her father it had been to put up a wall of books, music and art between her girlish life and the store, a false bastion, mild lamplight extinguished for ever. She shivered and thought how cold everything felt. It's late, she thought. And she thought: This young man has come from my home town and he writes symphonies, and his grandfather may have played the harpsichord or the flute, but his father killed my father, who collected books and loved listening to the Brandenburg Concertos. She took Kürenberg's hand, forced her own cold and inert hand into the fist of the conductor, which felt warm, dry, firm and dependable.