The World as I Found It (70 page)

The ripples mounted into waves. His nights were interminable. One night, hearing a dog howling, he remembered the scavenging, corpse-eating dogs during the war, how their cries carried for miles in the crystalline night air, amid the rumbling of the war trains laden with men, horses and explosives. His peasant soldiers said the barking dogs meant that someone had just died, a not unreasonable belief, since men were always dying and dogs were always barking. It was true what the peasants said, he thought, the dog did have the most intimate connection with death. Wittgenstein must have drifted off then, because later he awoke and heard the dog bark. Three times, distinctly, the dog barked. And then it stopped like the crowing cock that signaled Peter's betrayal. For twenty minutes, Wittgenstein lay there in a sweat, praying that the dog would bark again to prove it was not a sign but a dog, not a curse but a simple cry. But the dog did not bark again, and Wittgenstein realized that he was furiously biting at the twisted end of his sheet, tearing at it like a dying man in his hateful big bed of money.

That was the end for him. The next morning, Gretl received an urgent call from Herr Brundolf, the family's solicitor, asking her to come to his office immediately. He said it was her brother Ludwig. He was in a state of great agitation, insisting that he be forthwith and forever relieved of his entire fortune.

After much cajoling, Gretl managed to get her brother home from the solicitor's office, but nothing could shake his resolve. Paul and Mining and other members of the family were hurriedly called and consulted. Sanitariums and temporary conservatorships were discussed. Wittgenstein was incensed by their questions. He insisted he was of sound mind and said he would go to court if necessary to be freed from this accursed, mutating money; when that didn't work, he even hinted at suicide. Gretl told Mining that it would have made a great drawing room farce had it not been so tragic.

For two weeks, Gretl managed to stave him off. Then early one spring morning, when the weather was rainy and gusty, Wittgenstein called Gretl to the window. Pointing to a man down the street who was struggling with his whipping umbrella, Wittgenstein said in a voice drained of emotion:

You know, if you did not know there was a heavy wind outside, you might see that man tumbling along with his umbrella and think, How ungainly and clumsy. And so unnecessary, all this man's vain twisting. But, big sister, your window is shut. In the end, you do not know, and cannot theorize, what forces drive the man. And look, he said, pointing. The man is being driven down the road.

Since childhood they had spoken to each other in this way, using similes and parables. Wittgenstein had made his point. Gretl gave in to his wishes and followed them to the letter as quickly as possible. This was just as well. The truth was, he was then in no condition to see after his own affairs.

With that done, there remained the larger problem of what Wittgenstein was to do with his life. Actually, he had given away two estates: having written a book that, to his mind, answered all the essential philosophical questions, Wittgenstein had literally worked himself out of a job as a philosopher; and having given away his fortune, he was bankrupt but no better off. As he saw it, if he could be of no further use to himself, it was only fitting that he make himself useful by doing something of service to others. Indeed, in following this path, he would be continuing a family tradition, pursuing a course of which even his father might have dimly approved. It was Mining, with her connections with the new school reform movement, who suggested teaching. Wittgenstein seized upon the idea and spent the next year in the teachers' training college, the Lehrerbildungsanstalt. The school had virtually nothing to teach him, and he hated it. Every day his face stung with the almost unspeakable humiliation of sitting at a little desk, submitting to the tutelage of various sincere but inferior minds whose thoughts he was expected to absorb and parrot without question or protest.

Wanting to break with the past, he refused at this time to live with Mining in the Palais Wittgenstein. Nor would he accept Gretl's clearly
pro forma
invitation to live with her and Rolf. Instead, he took a little room on the Untere Viaduktgasse, close to the teachers' college but, as he well knew, much too close to the Prater meadows, where toward dusk the young men would gather like feeding deer among the enshrouding trees.

All that summer there was a siege in him as various moral props gave way. He was not a star in the sky but only a shallow vessel, a spittoon. Now there was only sex, wrenching spasms of uncontrollable, indiscriminate sex. Again and again, there he'd be, stripping and sucking the salty dog from some rimmed cock that stood bent like a swollen jugular in his mouth while some stranger's strong legs strummed in the wind. Unwilling to rationalize his guilt, unable to forgive himself and start afresh, utterly glutted with his native rottenness, he had sunk to the very bottom. Sin reeked from his pores. Indeed, at times, the only sign of life he discerned in himself was his surging erections, uncoiling down his trouser leg on trams, in class and in other inappropriate places, quite mentally unattended, like a dog that had snapped its leash. There was no fighting it. Battling like an exhausted swimmer against the tide, his will would inevitably collapse before a torrent of anxiety that drove him into the Prater, there to kneel beneath the sucking stomach of some unemployed butcher or mechanic with nocturnal eyes, the type who'd no sooner finish than he'd be shaking himself off as if before a urinal while Wittgenstein delicately turned away, spitting the eggy spunk like poison into the bushes.

There was another precedent in Wittgenstein's decision to take up teaching the poor. Count Tolstoy himself had taught school for a time, instructing the little peasant children on his country estate, Yasnaya Polyana. But Trattenbach wasn't Yasnaya Polyana. For all their backwardness, the Trattenbachers weren't real peasants with red noses, nor was he a God on his own estate, teaching the fearful children of his humble servants.

This was where Max came in. Max could deal with these people. Max could speak their language and so became Wittgenstein's intermediary in the most ordinary transactions.

They met at Trattenbach's dank little cellar cinema about six months after Wittgenstein had arrived in the village. Wittgenstein had bought a bag of nuts and was sitting on one of the wooden seats, waiting for the show to begin, when this lunk with a broad calf's face pounced down beside him and started talking in midstream as if he were resuming a conversation rather than starting one. Never before had Wittgenstein seen this young man. He thought he was some disturbed person, the way he was carrying on about cowboy pictures and Russia and full of impertinent questions. Ignoring him did no good; it only drove him on. Fumbling and gesticulating, sprawling into Wittgenstein and glaring into his eyes, the stranger would punctuate his jokes with an obnoxious laugh, then immediately goose Wittgenstein on the shoulder with an excited
But listen to this!
as he launched into another wild story. As the stranger continued talking and carrying on, Wittgenstein suddenly felt the bag in his lap rumble, then saw the fellow cram a dribbling fistful of nuts into his mouth.
Gaggmmmm
, the man mumbled approvingly, crunching and shaking his head like a feeding horse. Good and fresh, huh?

Shock kept Wittgenstein from believing that this young hooligan had just helped himself — it was impossible. But then, sure enough, the bag rumbled again, and Wittgenstein plainly saw the freeloader's ham hand haul out a second fistful of nuts and mash them into his mouth, chewing fitfully as the lights went out and the screen flickered. At this, the man jumped up in alarm and called back to the projectionist,
Hold it!
I'll be
right
back! Then he barged down the aisle to fetch more nuts, not because he had devoured Wittgenstein's bag, but simply because he had a tooth for nuts.

Within a week, they were inseparable. At first, Max reminded Wittgenstein vaguely of his old corporal, Ernst. But he soon realized that Max was far more intelligent and perceptive than Ernst. There was something preternatural in him. He had an uncanny knack with people, an idiot grace that enabled him to get away with almost anything. Even those in Trattenbach who thought Max a wild good-for-nothing couldn't help but like him. Children would bring Max home like a stray dog, and within minutes he would have their parents enthralled as well. Wittgenstein saw Max work his magic on many people during the tramps they took through lower Austria during those summers. Max's way of addressing complete strangers in midstream, as he had done with Wittgenstein in the theater, was quite typical. But by Max's ideal and inflexible logic, this made perfect sense: if all men were his brothers, then it stood to reason that they were all familiar to him. Wittgenstein remembered the way a farmer, a complete stranger, had once squinted into Max's eyes, asking, Don't I know you? And how Max had stood back like a prodigal whose image would shortly float into focus, mesmerizing as he said, Don't you, brother?
Don't
you? …

All the world was Max's larder, property, for him, being another arbitrary and artificial barrier obstructing human commerce. Do you see up there? Max would say to Wittgenstein as they hiked along. The old lady who lives in that house makes good black honey bread and apple jam. Whereupon Max, with the powerful instincts of a bear, would walk straight up to the house to be fed by the old woman, who would be delighted by his company, and whom he'd repay by tearing down an old shed for firewood or fixing her roof.

Then there were Max's stories — wild, convoluted stories, one leading to another, like jokes, like parables. And because Max feared no one and would talk to anybody, he heard everything until it all ran together as in a powerful dream. Only later, while retelling some preposterous tale, would he realize that too much didn't fit, whereupon a scandalized look would crease his face and he would say, That man lied to me! unable to comprehend why anyone would do such a useless and despicable thing.

But had Max been more critical, had he been more discerning and cautious — or less gullible — people wouldn't have felt the freedom to tell him the things they did. Max had none of his later harshness and inflexibility then. He was young and had a marvelous freshness and purity of insight, which Wittgenstein found immediately arresting. Max was really a philosopher, of sorts, a behemoth deeply submerged in the midst of life. He was so much a part of his surroundings, so deeply imbedded in life, that it was hard to imagine anything bad ever befalling him. And when something bad did happen, Max laughed it off —
became
it, sunny as the young grass, happy to be reaped for the fullness of sprouting again.

By all appearances, even the war had been this way for Max. It seemed to have passed right through him. Still, there was something distinctly martial in Max's nature, no doubt about that. Standing before Max, one knew why men's eyes were not fastened on either side like those of cattle. One could see why man's predatory eyes were aimed squarely ahead like the wolf's, seeking rather than avoiding — blind. For fifteen months, until he was badly wounded and captured during a German counterstrike near Thiepval, Max had served in a crack batallion of shock troops specializing in surprise night assaults using flame throwers and stick bombs. There would be no moon and no stars visible under the dark clouds, no bombardment and no covering fire — nothing but speed, surprise and their own youthful ferocity. With cork-blackened faces, they would come sprinting down on the first paralyzed sentries, who would hardly have cried out when rocketing jets of flame sucked the air from their lungs. The Black Death, the French called them. For Max, it was how the Angel of Death must have felt passing in a hot wind over the blood-smeared doors of the Pharaoh's Egypt. It was the war which taught Max that men really had spirits: the boy could feel that turbulence as the souls of the dead took up in a greasy torrent of burning petrol. So exhilarating, how death liberates the mind. Fire cannot harm fire, and death is impervious to all harm. Max and his cohorts were a hot black wind chasing arcs of immolating liquid fire. To Max, the advancing sheets of fire felt like nothing, a summer wind. He was seventeen. In the enfilading darkness, he was a black death angel, invisible and invincible. Lost in his blackened face, his snarling open mouth looked disembodied, like a bite torn from an apple. Faced with the wobbling whites of his eyes, men gave in to the last panic of death, hearing their coshed skulls crumple as they sunk into the sulfurous fens of the Land of Lamentation. The Black Death broke the French lines. They did not stop, and they did not care, hurling stick bombs and hurling themselves in vengeance, hurling themselves to no purpose but to inflict death and terror, since ultimately they would be repulsed. Max was one of a new breed of specialized soldier, carefully selected and highly trained; he was that one man in a thousand ideally suited to this savage, cut-and-run fighting. In this reverse Darwinism, the strongest and fiercest tended to be the first killed, while those few who survived were propelled into a new consciousness. Older men — men over the age of about twenty-five, men who cared about life and knew themselves to be mortal — found the extreme stress and horror of this butchery intolerable. They broke down under it; their psyches were too well formed. But for the uncreated man, for the germinal man within the street youth from Nuremberg — for a big, sprawling, easygoing reform school boy, who, when pushed into a fight, would go berserk, heedless of any injury, severely beating bigger, older boys, beating two and three boys at a time even — for such a boy, this rough comradeship and terror seemed intensely natural, an ideal.

Fire cannot harm spirit, and time holds no sway outside of time. For the boy, the horror was never quite real, or rather had quite gone past reality. In those frenzied minutes of killing, like a weasel ripping through a hen house, the boy told himself that it would soon all be past, and as something past would no longer be real and thus would no longer matter — which was to say, it had never happened in the first place. The reality of it was thus quite magical. He was decorated and it never touched him. He was wounded many times, several times seriously, but it touched him no more than did the death of his comrades, sewn in pits in one long black sleep. By the dozens, and in every attitude, even in slumber, he had slaughtered his enemies, English, French, territorials. He killed so much that at last it seemed he had entered a condition of nature, showing neither malice nor mercy, sorrow nor anger. And after a battle, he would immediately forget everything, the men he had murdered, the comrades he had lost. He would tolerate no killing of wounded or prisoners and treated captured enemies with all the courtesy he showed his comrades. Still, it was clear to him that his own life did not matter, and so, in the end, nobody's life really mattered.