Vertigo (15 page)

henceforth follows him as the ghostly shadow of his own restlessness. Would this sort of scenario not have struck Dr K. as the description of a struggle in which, as in the contest he himself had set against the backdrop of the Laurenziberg, the principal character and his opponent are in the most intimate and self-destructive of relationships, such that, when the hero is driven into a corner by his companion he is forced to declare: I am betrothed, I admit it. And what alternative does a man so cornered have but to try and rid himself of his dumb attendant by means of a shot from a pistol? - a shot which, in the silent film, is visible as a puff of smoke. In that moment, in which time itself seems to dissolve, Balduin is released from his delusions. He breathes freely once more and, realising in the same instant that the bullet has penetrated his own heart, dies a dramatic, not to say ostentatious death, the whole scene like a flickering light about to be extinguished, representing the soundless aria of the hero's demise. Final contortions of this kind, which regularly occur in opera when, as Dr K. once wrote, the dying voice aimlessly wanders through the music, did not by any means seem ridiculous to him; rather he believed them to be an expression of our, so to speak, natural misfortune, since after all, as he remarks elsewhere, we lie prostrate on the boards, dying, our whole lives long.

On the 21st of September Dr K. is in Desenzano on the southern shore of Lake Garda. Most of the townspeople have gathered in the market square to welcome the Deputy Secretary of the Prague Workers' Insurance Company. Dr K.,

however, is reclining on the grass down by the lake, before him the waves lapping the reeds, to his right the promontory of Sirmione, to his left the shore towards Manerba. Simply to lie in the grass is one of Dr K.'s favourite ways of passing the time, when reasonably well disposed. If at such a moment, as once happened in Prague, a gentleman of some distinction with whom he has occasionally had official dealings rides by in a two-horse carriage, Dr K. relishes the pleasures (but only, as he notes himself, the pleasures) of being declassed and freed from all social standing. In Desenzano, however, even this modest happiness eludes him. Rather he feels ill, sick, as he puts it, at every point of the compass. There remains only the one consolation that nobody knows where he is. We have no record of how long the people of Desenzano continued their watch for the Deputy Secretary from Prague that afternoon, nor when, disappointed, they finally dispersed.

One of them is reported to have observed that those in whom we invest our hopes only ever make their appearance when they are no longer needed.

Following this failed encounter, which was as disheartening for him as it was for the people of Desenzano, Dr K.
spends three weeks in Riva at Dr von Hartungen's hydropathic establishment, arriving by steamer just before nightfall that day. A porter wearing a long green apron fastened at the back with a brass chain shows Dr K. to his room, from the balcony of which he gazes out over the lake, serenely peaceful in the gathering darkness. All is now blue on blue, and nothing appears to move, not even the steamer, already some way out upon the water. In the morning, the daily routine of the hydro begins. In the intervals between the various cold douches and the electrical treatment prescribed for him, Dr K. tries as far as possible to immerse himself entirely in quiet and tranquillity, but the woes he endured with Felice, and she with him, continually come over him, like a living thing, usually when he

awakes, though also at mealtimes when he often feels quite paralysed and unable to pick up his knife and fork. At table, as it happens, the place to Dr K.'s right is occupied by an old general who remains silent for the most part, but now and then will venture a cryptic yet penetrating observation. Thus on one occasion, looking up abruptly from the book which always lies open beside him, he remarks that, when one thinks about it, a vast range of unfathomable contingencies come between the logic of the battleplan and that of the final despatches, both of which he knew inside out. Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything! Even the greatest battles in the history of the world were won or lost like that. Tiny details, but they weigh as heavy as the 50,000 dead soldiers and horses at Waterloo. The fact is that ultimately it all comes down to the question of specific gravity. Stendhal had a clearer grasp of this than any high command, he says, and now, in my old age, I have apprenticed myself to that old master, so that I may not die quite without understanding. It is a fundamentally insane notion, he continues, that one is able to influence the course of events by a turn of the helm, by will-power alone, whereas in fact all is determined by the most complex interdependencies.

Although he is aware that the remarks of his dining companion are not directed at himself, Dr K. experiences a slight surge of confidence and a species of tacit solidarity as he listens. The girl to his left, whom he takes to be unhappy on account of the silent gentleman to her right, that is, on account of himself, now begins interestingly to acquire definition in his mind. She is somewhat short of stature, comes from Genoa, looks very Italian, but is in fact from Switzerland, and, it now transpires, has a voice of a curiously dark timbre. Whenever she speaks to him in that voice, an infrequent enough occurrence, it seems to Dr K. like an extraordinary expression of confidence and trust. In her frail condition she becomes most precious to him, and before long he is rowing out a short way onto the lake with her in the afternoons. The crags rise from the water in the mellow autumn light, nuanced in shades of green, as if the entire location were an album and the mountains had been drawn on an empty page by some sensitive dilettante, as a remembrance for the lady to whom the album belongs.

Out there they tell each other their ailments, both of them, as one would like to believe, buoyed up by an ephemeral improvement in their condition and sense of peaceable quiescence. Dr K. evolves a fragmentary theory of disembodied love, in which there is no difference between intimacy and disengagement. If only we were to open our eyes, he says, we would see that our happiness lies in our natural surroundings and not in our poor bodies which have-long since become separated from the natural order of things. That was the reason why all false lovers (and all lovers, he adds, are false) closed their eyes while lovemaking or else, which came to the same thing, kept them wide open with craving. Never were we more helpless or lacking in rational sense than in that condition. Our dreams could then be constrained no longer and we became subject to the compulsion of constantly going through the whole gamut of variations and repetitions which, as he himself had often enough found, extinguished everything, even the image of the lover one so wished to preserve. Curiously, when he became caught up in such states, which he considered bordered on madness, the only thing that helped was to clap an imaginary black Napoleonic tricorne over his thoughts. At present, however, there was nothing he had less need of than such a hat, for out here on the lake they were indeed almost disembodied, and possessed of a natural understanding of their own scant significance.

In accordance with the expressed hopes of Dr K., they agreed that neither would divulge the other's name, that they would exchange no pictures, nor a shred of paper, nor even a single written word, and that once the few days that remained to them were over they must simply let each other go. In the event though it was not easy. When the hour of their parting arrived, Dr K. had to create all manner of comical diversions to prevent the girl from Genoa from sobbing in front of the leave-taking party. When at last Dr K. accompanied her down to the steamer jetty, and she mounted the little gangplank to board the ship, with an unsteady step, he recalled how a few evenings previously they had joined some other residents and a young, extremely wealthy, very elegant Russian woman had told their fortunes from the cards, out of boredom and desperation - for elegant persons are more often alone among the unstylish than vice versa. Nothing of any consequence emerged out of this purely frivolous and foolish charade. Not until it was the turn of the girl from Genoa did an unambiguous constellation come up, which caused the Russian lady to inform her that she would never enter the so-called state of matrimony. For Dr K. it was uncanny in the extreme to hear a solitary life foretold from the cards for this girl of all people, the object of his affections, whom he had thought of as the mermaid ever since he had first seen her, on account of her water-green eyes; for there was nothing of a spinster about her at all, except perhaps the way she wore her hair, as he now thought to himself on seeing her for the last time, her right hand on the rail, while the left described, somewhat awkwardly, a sign in the air which betokened the end.

The steamer cast off and, sounding its horn a number of times, slipped out onto the lake at an oblique angle. Undine was still standing at the rail. After a while he could barely distinguish her outline, and then the ship itself had become almost invisible. Only the white wake which it trailed through the water was still to be seen until this was also smoothed over. As for the tarot cards, Dr K., walking back to the sanatorium, had to acknowledge that in his own case too they had resulted in quite unequivocal constellations, inasmuch as all the cards which showed not merely numbers but kings, queens and knaves were, invariably, as far as possible removed from his person, to the very limits of the game, so to speak. Indeed, on one occasion when the cards were laid, only two figures appeared at all, and another time none whatsoever, evidently a most unusual distribution and one which prompted the Russian lady to look upwards into his eyes and declare that he must surely be the strangest guest in Riva in a long time.