Authors: Wolfgang Koeppen
he stood at the end of the Via del Lavatore, which was silent and deserted. It was a mild night. From the far end of the dead street came the sound of singing.
I wanted to shut the window, I wanted to close the sun-warped, wind-beaten wooden shutters in front of the windows, I wanted locks and bolts, because now babel was finished, they were no longer speaking Babel-fashion in the Piazza of the Trevi Fountain, one language had asserted itself over the others, and a choir of German women were standing in front of the pillared grotto, standing in front of the gods and demigods and mythic creatures in baroque costume, standing in front of the ancient myth cast in stone, standing in front of water flowing from Roman pipes, standing in the floodlight of tourism and the candelabra lights of the city, singing, 'There stands a linden tree by the fountain at the gate,' singing it in the middle of Rome, singing the song in the middle of the night, where was no rustling of lindens and no tree grew for miles. But down there by the fountain they kept the faith, kept faith with their faith, they had their linden tree, their fountain there at the gate, a sublime hour and they marked it in their song, they had saved their money and travelled far, and what could I do but shut the windows and the wooden shutters, but he came across to me by the open window, he brushed me with his cassock, and we leaned out, and he told me once more that he had seen my parents, my parents and my brother Dietrich, seen them through a glass door at the hotel, and he said to me: 'Your parents are even more terrible than mine, their lives are completely lost.' And I could see them sitting behind the glass door in their hotel, I hadn't been there but I could see them, I was too proud to go there to see them, and what could I do, I said 'Keep your theology,' but what could I do? Down there they were singing the linden-tree song verse by verse, and an Italian who wanted to sleep shouted at them from his window, and a man who was with the women's choir, and was an admirer of the women's choir, yelled back, 'Shut up, you wop!' yelled 'Shut up, you wop!' to whichever window it was. What could I do? And a police car came and stopped by the fountain, and the policemen watched the singing women in silent astonishment, and then the police slowly drove off, disappeared down a side street. What could they do? And a man emerged from the Via del Lavatore and joined the women and the man who had yelled, 'Shut up, you wop!' And
he was glad to find them, glad to have bumped into them. He was glad. Judejahn had followed the song, the German song, and the once-mighty man listened in reverence to the song of the German women. Their singing was Germany, was the motherland, it was 'By the Fountain at the Gate,' it was the German linden tree, it was everything one lived and fought and died for. Not murdered for. Judejahn had never murdered. He was just an old warrior, and this was balm to his old warrior's soul, this was music to renew the soul at night. When they finished, Judejahn called out 'Bravo', and he went up to them, and introduced himself, albeit under his assumed name, and since they were standing in line like a company for inspection, he followed his instinct and addressed them briefly. He spoke of lofty singing in historic hour, of German women and a stirring encounter on Italian soil, greetings from home in the regrettably faithless land of German longings. And they understood him, they took his meaning, and the man who had called out 'Shut up, you wop!' shook Judejahn by the hand and thanked him for his pithy words, and both felt the tears well up in their eyes, and both manfully held them back, for German men don't cry being full of German hardness but they are soft-souled when they think home thoughts abroad, thoughts of the fountain at the gate, of the linden tree evoked by the voice of German women
I thought:
I don't believe you, it's not your vocation, and you know that God didn't call you; you were free, for one single night you were free, one night in the woods, and that was all you could stand, you were like a dog who's lost his master, you had to find yourself a new master; then the priest found you, and you told yourself it was God calling you.
But I didn't tell him what I was thinking. He bothered me. He bothered me with his news of the family. What could I do? I didn't want to hear his news. I didn't want to hear anything about them. I wanted my life, just my own little life, no life everlasting, I wasn't greedy, no life of sin. What was sin, anyway? I just wanted to live my selfish life, I wanted to be there just for myself alone and to get on with my own life, and he wanted to talk me into going with him, I was to go with him, he was scared on his own, and call on our family, and how I hate that word, and how I use it purposely to express my loathing—the family, the prison they wanted to lock me up in for life, but I'd escaped, I'd been sprung, I'd set myself free, I was truly free, I never wanted to go back there! Why was Adolf looking for them? And why didn't he go to them, once he'd found them, why did he come to me? Did he want to convert them? Did he want to convert me? He said: 'He's my father.' And I said: 'He's my father, but I don't want to see him.' And he said: 'She's my mother.' And I said: 'She's my mother, but I don't want to see her.' And I wanted nothing to do with my brother Dietrich. And
Judejahn
was dead, so I'd hoped, and if the Devil had let him go, then that was the Devil's own business. I wanted to stay out of the way of Uncle
Judejahn,
the mighty Party general, lord over life and death, terror of my childhood, black bogeyman to the brown adolescent.
But he said: 'We have to do something. We have to help them.' He didn't say, 'I must save them.' He lacked faith for that, and he didn't dare say it to my face, either. And I said no. And I looked at him. Gaunt, uncertain, wretched he looked in his clerical robes, the lanky deacon, not even ordained yet. And I teased him: 'How do you want to help your father
Judejahn?
What about baptizing him, since you're not able to forgive sins? That's what you told me, that you can't forgive sins yet.'
He trembled. I went on looking at him. He was powerless. I felt sorry for him. He thought he had God on his side, and he was powerless.
There were manuscripts on the marble top of the wash-stand, there were sheets of music, and
Kürenberg
was expecting me to come up with music that important men would listen to to renew their souls. Flies were dancing round the bare light-bulb. Under the light-bulb, the broad hotel bed lay exposed, chaste and unchaste, the
letto
matrimoniale
,
the bed of marriage and concubinage. I imagined a man and a woman copulating, and I was disgusted, because their union might produce life. I was powerless as well; and I didn't even want power. A fly had drowned in the remains of the wine in the tooth-mug. It had drowned in an almighty binge, in a sea of intoxication; and what did air matter to us, earth and sea and sky! Had God guided the fly? No sparrow falls from a roof. I asked: 'Where will you sleep?' And I thought: Shall I offer to share my bed with him? And I thought: I mustn't offer him my bed. He had lodgings in the dormitory for priests. He made to leave and I saw him going towards the door, and I felt sorry for him again, and I thought: He is trying to get free of them. And I asked him what his plans were for tomorrow, and he seemed not to know, he was loath to reply, maybe he didn't want to give me a reply, and then he said he was going to St Peter's and I offered to meet him at the Angels' Bridge, by the Angels' Castle, I didn't want to see him again, but I said a time, and he said he'd be there. Now it was becoming quiet in Rome. The women's choir had gone, the tourists had left, and a man somewhere had turned a stopcock and the water in the Trevi Fountain no longer bubbled up over the baroque Olympus of gods and demigods and fabulous beings. The bubbling of the fountain stopped; it was history. The silence was audible. In it I now heard his footfall, going down the stone steps, he, the priest, the deacon, climbed down through time as through a tunnel. I looked out of the window, I saw him leave the building, I followed his progress. Like a lean black dog, he loped across the silent, dead square and turned into the passage that leads to the Piazza Colonna. I took the glass with the rest of the wine and the dead fly in it, and I tipped wine and fly down the drain. He was powerless
they were both walking down the passage, one already at the exit to the Corso, the other still near the churches in the Via Santa Maria in Via, and workmen were cleaning the mosaic floor of the passage, they sprinkled sawdust over the dirt people had brought in with their shoes, and with large brooms they swept up the mixture of dirt and sawdust. Other workmen spread ready-mixed plaster on the swept stones, then with a sander smoothed it into the cracks and gaps in the mosaic. It made a sound like the whetting of long knives. The sleeping city was a provocation to Judejahn. The city mocked him. It wasn't the sleepers that annoyed Judejahn, let them lie in their stinking beds, in the arms of their lustful wives, let them be sapped and lose the battle of their lives, no, he was indignant at the totality of the sleeping city, each closed window, each bolted door, each lowered blind incensed him; he was furious that the city was sleeping without his say-so; there should be steel-helmeted patrols going through the streets, with MP insignia on their chests and submachine guns in their hands, and the patrols would see to it that Judejahn's command to sleep was kept; but Rome was sleeping without his dispensation, it dreamed, it lulled itself to security. Rome sleeping was sabotage, it sabotaged a war that was far from over, or that hadn't properly begun yet, Judejahn's war. If he could, Judejahn would have roused the city; he would have used the trumpets of Jericho to rouse the city, those trumpets that made walls collapse, the last trump, which had first impressed little Gottlieb, and which he learned to laugh at in heathen scorn. Judejahn was out of power. He was dismayed. He couldn't stand it. In the desert he had lived in a dream. The barracks in the desert were under his command; the barracks had left him the illusion of power. A wall was stuck with fresh posters; they were still wet, and smelled of printer's ink and of paste. Again there was a commandment from the Church next to a Communistic summons; the summons red and aggressive, the Church's edict white and dignified. One was the work of an old power, the other of a new, but both lacked a straightforward brutality, a final disavowal of thought and persuasion, there was no clenched fist, no absolute belief in force and command, and Judejahn wondered whether he shouldn't throw in his lot with the Reds, he would teach them discipline, but little Gottlieb was against that, he hated the unpatriotic lot, he believed in Germany, and he believed in private ownership too, albeit with a reallocation of property to Judejahn's advantage and into exclusively German hands, and because of little Gottlieb's unwillingness, Judejahn couldn't join the Communists; he had once intended their elimination, only a feeble and corrupt world had got in the way. In the Piazza Colonna he took a taxi back to the Via Veneto, back to the big hotel, back to the fortress that had been his headquarters, the headquarters of the great and powerful Judejahn.
And Adolf, who didn't hear the knife grinding, and didn't see the posters on the wall, Adolf found the sleeping city quiet and giving peace to the restless soul. His way home was like a walk through a great graveyard, with imposing tombs, ivy-grown crosses and old chapels, and Adolf was glad to find the city as quiet as the grave, perhaps he too was dead, that made him glad, perhaps he was a dead man walking through the dead city, a dead man looking for the lane with the hostel for visiting clergymen, they also dead, lying dead in their dead beds in the dead hostel—it couldn't be far. And there was its light, the light everlasting. And
Judejahn
had the taxi stop early, and got out
the homosexuals were gone. No need for Judejahn to hear their twittering. The pretty waiters in their cute purple tails were putting the chairs on the tables, they patted the red chair cushions with their hands, and perfumed dust swirled up, lavender, cologne and spicy aftershaves, and the beautiful, smiling Laura was counting up the money in the till and the coupons of the waiters, and once more the totals didn't match, but Laura smiled her beatific smile, the serene and mindless miracle of her smile, and the heterosexual owner of the homosexual bar accepted Laura's smile and the discrepant totals with pleasure and a good grace, business was good and he was a kind person, and Judejahn, unseen by Laura, the owner, the waiters, was stalking the terrain, he hadn't forgotten how to hunt, he peered through a crack in the shuttered door, the way a thief peers or a killer, and he saw Laura, saw her smile, it touched even him, did its magic on him, but the smile tortured him as well. Laura's eyelids were night-blue, her face powdered white and her lips were hardly painted, she seemed very pale, seemed delicate and timid, spun from the night and shrinking back into it, and Judejahn turned the door handle, it moved, his great heavy hand lay on the handle, a frail handle of silver bronze; but then Judejahn withdrew his hand again, a man can't be sure, she's a Jewess, a Jewish bint, in Poland anyone consorting with Jewesses swung for it, and again he pressed the handle, and again he left it, Jewish cunt. Was he frightened? The night porter of the hotel saluted him, touched his gloved hand to the peak of his cap, saluted Commander Judejahn, the man giving orders here, albeit under an assumed name. The silky stuff shone on the walls, it was like a room in a brothel, little Gottlieb could have imagined nothing finer. Why hadn't he picked up the girl? Why didn't he take her? He would have screwed her and slung her out. Screwing her would have done him good, and it would have done him good to sling her out afterwards. On the damask bedspread lay the mangy torn, Benito. He stretched, arched his back and blinked his eyes. Judejahn ran his fingers through his thin fur. The beast stank. He stank to high heaven. The tom looked at him sardonically: You've outlived yourself, you're out of power. Could Judejahn tell the porter he wanted a girl? Once he could have done. He could have got a hundred. He could have embraced them and sentenced them. Should he call Eva? They would be petrified in her middle-class hotel. They got scared there at night. They were scared of death. Why shouldn't Judejahn scare the middle-class hotel? Perhaps he could have spoken with Eva in the night. He could have cleared the air. It was good to speak on the phone. Orders to suicide squads were phoned or wired. You never gave them in person. Eva was a German woman, a National Socialist, she would understand him, she would appreciate that Judejahn hadn't yet died, that he was walking along the edge of life. Eva was a German woman like the German women by the fountain singing the beautiful German song, but she was more than those women, she came from the élite, she was his wife—she would understand him. It had been stupid of Judejahn to be apprehensive of meeting Eva. What was there to tempt him about that Italian—maybe even Jewish—woman in the purple bar? That girl wasn't his type. She wasn't German. But there was something about her that made him want her. She was a whore. Or she was a Jewess. A hot skinny Jewish harlot. That was miscegenation. He had no need to fear the girl. He could hate her. That was it, he needed a woman to hate, his hands, his body, needed another body, another life to have and to destroy, only when you killed were you alive—and who other than a bar girl was still attainable for Judejahn's hatred? He was deposed. He was powerless