Authors: Thomas Berger
Lying still, pale, and full, like a sack of mozzarella, he tasted of the air with porcine nostrils, and began:
“Now we can converse at our ease. My name is Bach, which as you perhaps know, signifies ‘brook’ in German, and, naturally, to every German, and very likely to others as well, simply to utter the name is to conjure up the image of the master of the Thomasschule and the three most eminent of his twenty offspring—for his loins were apparently as prolific as his brain—who were also composers of a high rank, but not quite so well known outside their own land. So far as I know, I am not a descendant of that noble line. And you are called...?”
“Reinhart.”
“The name, of course, means ‘pure of heart,’
Hart
being the Low German variant of
Herz.
But I have a feeling that you, like so many Americans, have no great interest in etymology. Unfortunately, it is one of my many weaknesses. And I do have more than my share.” He indicated his body with a sweep of the hand. “The main among them being a physical impuissance, if you’ll permit the word, in spite of a monstrous size. This misfortune has caused my energy to be diverted directly to my brain, which as a result is extraordinarily active and frequently denies me sleep, occupied as it forever is with a thousand and one theories, ideas, and bits of information which it should like to synthesize. I speak of this brain as if it acts of its own volition, has a life, as it were, of its own. For indeed it seems to have such an independent existence—awe-inspiring, to say the least. I—it is ridiculous, is it not, to speak of an ‘I’ separate from one’s brain? but it really seems that way to me—I conceive of my own identity as relating more closely to the emotions, for I am their creature and toil under the dominion of the harsh ambassadors they send to the external world, the senses.” Here he snorted: “Smell!” Poked a pair of spread fingers into his eyes: “Sight!” Extended a fat, pink tongue, swollen as a bladder: “Taste! And so on. Do I make myself clear?” He stared for a while at Reinhart, as if he had forgotten him, then asked, shyly: “I say, do you smoke?”
Reinhart offered the cigarettes, saying, “Please keep them all. I have many.”
“Oh, kind, kind. I cannot thank you enough.” He seemed about to rise, but decided against it. He dropped a tear. Wiping his nose on his dressing gown of dirty-orange cotton, he reverently chose a cigarette from the pack, called for a light from Lori, and getting it puffed luxuriously, his huge bald skull reflecting light like a mirrored ball upon a lawn.
“Now where were we? Oh yes, I believe some biography may be in order. Perhaps you would like to hear of my term of years in the Orient, where I served as cultural attaché in the Embassy in Tokyo. A strange people, the Japanese, rather stolid, in spite of their reputation for wit. Their art is curiously constipated. Nevertheless, it has a kind of mordant humor all its own, in its juxtaposition of human limitation and the infinity of nature. But perhaps I’m doing them an injustice. They have, like all peoples, much to recommend them. Good clear skins, for example; one never finds them shriveling up in later years, and scrupulously clean. Absolutely no odor! This may owe to their arriving at puberty earlier than we. Our Western pubescence, which, although we think it consonant with some divine ordinance, is the slave of social, rather than natural, imperatives, has certain unpleasant concomitants: the foul stink of perspiration, for example. Children, you will note, never stink, even in the heat of strenuous play. The Japanese, arriving at adulthood still in the vigor of extreme youth, consume the life-stuff
in toto,
while in us a certain excess accrues which maturates. Your excellent English verb, by the way, expresses beautifully both aspects of this process: the fructification and the rot. Orientals maintain that white men smell like corpses.”
The slight movement of Bach’s trunk, as he pitched the cigarette butt to the cracked concrete floor, where Lori stamped it dead, communicated a tremor to his lower extremities; the robe slipped away, exposing a view of verdigrised leg braces, complex in rods, wires, and articulations.
“The Japanese have an unusual poetry, which resists qualitative judgment. So long as a
haiku
is written in accordance with the traditional seventeen-syllable form, it is the peer of every other constructed in the past, or to be constructed in the future. If it violates the form, it is not a
haiku.
A Westerner at his first exposure is nearly driven mad by the question as to whether this is the beginning or the end of art, not to mention morality and history. Of course, this question is of no concern to the Japanese: it simply
is,
without qualification. They are wise and courageous enough to accept the given. Westerners can approach this knowledge only by burlesque, as when the Englishman says the great thing about the Order of the Garter is that no damned merit’s involved.”
Bach repeated the phrase, fondling it word by word, with the lust of a gourmand measuring off the links of a sausage, and developing an amusement which terminated in a high-pressure giggle, half-audible; the remainder being in the upper, silent-dog-whistle ranges, where it worked a secret violance on Reinhart’s nerves, so that forboding ballooned the membranes of his heart as might a seizure of gas.
Bach gasped and grunted a tongue which Reinhart took for Japanese. “Let me translate:
The snow crowns pale Fuji
Here below, it is spring.
That is of my own authorship, but it will do.”
He spoke Orientally again, in an altered voice.
“Chinese. Their verse is considerably different, but I am too exhausted to explore the subtleties of the difference at this time.”
Despite his growing nausea, Reinhart asked for a translation. He was determined not to permit this strange man to elude fact, believing that the secret of power lay in its mystery.
“Oh, yes, that is Meng Hsien-Wong.
Like a shimmer of bird calls
The petals of the pear-flower drift
Through the late clear air;
Already since the morning rain
The blossoms have grown older.
So does the pear-branch, snow-perfumed,
Hold a bright mirror up to man.
“You can see right off that this is not so pure as the
haiku,
being corrupted with morality. You perceived the moral, of course?”
Reinhart did not attend to this bit of malice. He had, at the mention of the “pear-flower,” discovered a primary cause of his illness: the room stank of rotten fruit.
“The latter was a tributary verse to an incomparable thirteenth-century painting by Chien Hsuan which I once owned but was confiscated, supposedly for some use in the advancement of the war, but how such an item could be used for such a purpose, I have no idea.”
“No, Bach,” said Lori, still standing by the table. “You sold it, don’t you remember?”
He narrowed his eyes at Reinhart, and his massive face became mean, piggish, as he spoke to Lori in German: “Manners, manners! We here speak the language of our guest.”
“But I have no English, as you know.”
Reinhart, working at a piece of gum, felt slightly relieved. He explained that he knew German and suggested that it be spoken for Lori’s benefit.
“To be sure,” said Bach, “I am at your command. Yet, I am about to tell you something in confidence. However, I wonder if I dare? She understood enough of my comments on the painting to correct me.”
“You probably have told the story before,” observed Reinhart, in a schoolmasterish voice.
“Of course! That’s exactly it.” He peered sagely at Reinhart. “You look like quite a decent fellow. Tell me, how many Germans have you shot?”
Reinhart enjoyed a brief daydream of cutting down rank upon rank of blond men with a Thompson submachine gun. But he lacked in nerve to carry it off. He sheepishly admitted:
“I’ve never fired a gun since I put on the uniform. I’m a medic, a sort of half a soldier. Geneva Convention...”
Bach made the best of it. “An appropriate office for an American, really; an exemplary role.” With a beatific smile, “A marvelous people: one-hundred thirty millions of decent chaps spread out across that strange Siberia. I have been there, of course, so I will not amuse you by asking if you know my friend Smith in New York.”
“My home is in Ohio,” said Reinhart, dolefully.
“Quite so. Very near Chicago. You see, I do know. I once, with a friend, took a motor trip from that city to Michigan. We passed a number of persons who hailed us with leafy stalks, and felt like Christ entering Jerusalem through the palm branches. However, when we were eventually brought to halt by an exceptionally violent signal, we were asked to purchase celery. But excuse me for a moment, won’t you?”
He called Lori, and with the same kind of help Reinhart had rendered earlier, performed the impressive ritual of rising. By a tottering, brink-of-disaster, Humpty-Dumpty locomotion he arrived at the door, where he leaned briefly against the jamb, while that frail member moaned at the weight, and then went out. The door stood open. His voice boomed in the hall in a complaint about the lack of light, and another door could be heard to open, but not afterwards to close. The rich rush of his water was audible.
Lori sat on the edge of the couch, extending both hands in supplication. “I fear he’s been drinking. It’s horribly embarrassing, you must forgive me.”
Reinhart was also embarrassed—for his own membership in the sex that made noise at the toilet. To cover up, he said, “It’s true, then, that he knows Chinese, and so on.”
“Yes,” said Lori, smiling wearily. “For some years he was assistant curator of Oriental art at the museum. I am sorry we have no paintings or china left for him to show you. He can be very illuminating. But most of our own collection had to be sold and what few things remained went to the incendiary bombs.”
“You sold them to pay for his medical treatment?”
“Oh no—it is another long story.”
“You have so many.”
“Yes, life is merely several long stories laid end to end.” She reached across and patted his knee maternally. “They must not trouble you.”
Although they should have, at that moment they did not. His distress owed rather to the dreadful odor, which was on the point of laying him low. Life takes precedence over courtesy.
Lori shook her head at his apologetic question. “That is one of Bach’s conceits. He read in Eckermann that Schiller was stimulated by the aroma of rotting apples.” She opened a drawer in the table.
“Voila!”
Exposing, sure enough, three blackened, scabrous fruits.
Bach was missing for a long time after he could no longer be heard. When he reappeared he stated that, having taken the air, he was much refreshed, which claim was supported by his looking a shade stronger on his pins, though still not by any means competent.
Reinhart was not sure as to what proportion of Bach’s weakness could be attributed to gigantism and what to drink. Indeed, the drunkenness referred to by Lori had taken Reinhart by surprise, for Bach, given his odd body, had not spoken in a way that would have seemed, to Reinhart, out of consonance with it had Bach been sober.
At any rate, Bach swayed in, regained the sofa, where now with his new-found strength he sat rather than reclined, and confessed to copious draughts of potato schnapps; had, in truth, drained the bottle, otherwise he would have offered some to his guest. A pity, grievously hard to get; for the past few years in Germany, there were few potatoes to eat, let alone drink. He gauged the present state of his inebriation to be at the half-saturation point, but rapidly clearing.
“If you stay with me throughout the period of sobering, you will no doubt see the engine run diminuendo and eventually cough dead, so I had better make the most of what articulate time’s left.
“Now I am not unconscious of my failure to ask you of yourself, but your status is not in question. I have reason to believe that the American Intelligence, when it finds time, will be unusually interested in mine. You see in me one whose only engagement for the future is with Judgment Day, for, frankly, I was a National Socialist.”
Reinhart straightened in his chair, crossed his legs the other way, tugged at the margin of his jacket, and checked his buttons. How seldom we meet the real thing!
“It would be silly for me to do anything else, my record being readily available. For I was no more tepid in my political convictions than in anything else. In short, if I was a Nazi, I was an absolute one. My only wish is to tell my story without rancor, without extenuation, and submit myself to your mercy. Will you, as a matter of simple humanity, grant me this favor?
Hier stehe ich
—”
“Only you are reclining, Bach,” interrupted Lori, with a foolish giggle which made Bach frown and even Reinhart to turn his head in impatience. She had brought up another chair when dispossessed of the sofa, and slumped there like a discarded rag doll.
“Please, please,” Bach replied in German, “none of your
Quatsch.
This is a sober affair.”
“How can I hide it?” asked Bach. “What is done is done. Nazism might be defined as an extreme attempt to alter the relations of Jews and gentiles, in the latter’s favor. All the other involvements start from this, and this is one of those sublime simplicities that achieve the miracle of fecundity in reduction, like the Cartesian
cogito.
It requires the utmost in intellectual courage to accept the proposition that all human beings are either Jews or non-Jews; with anything less, the whole thing collapses into absurdity.
“Yes, exactly, you smile. So should have I genuinely, not too many years ago, and so do I now, with the hypocrisy of courtesy, and also with real sympathy, for I can deny myself no indulgence in my present state. But I did not begin life as an anti-Semite. There were no Jews in my birthplace, a small village in Bavaria, and it was not until I entered the Gymnasium at ten years old that I ever saw a Jew, and not until I entered the university that I ever, to my knowledge, heard Jews remarked on in a special way. In short, for many years I thought of Jews as simply Germans of a religious persuasion different from my own. Such hostile attitudes towards the Israelites as I came across from time to time, I believed to be the by-products of doctrinal differences of the sort that obtain between Catholics and Protestants—of which I was thoroughly aware, as a Protestant Bavarian.