Authors: Wolfgang Koeppen
Korodin also looked at Keetenheuve, but in his expression there was less blame than expectancy. Once more Korodin wondered whether Keetenheuve might have undergone a transformation, whether he was perhaps delayed because he had been to a church, praying to God for enlightenment, and had now come to them to say: I have found God, I am reborn. Korodin would have accepted a conversation with the Lord as a reason for being delayed, and he would have forgiven Keetenheuve. But Keetenheuve didn't mention anything about having found enlightenment, he muttered a casual and inaudible apology and sat down. He sat down (only they didn't notice) feeling ashamed of himself, ashamed like a bad pupil, unable to think of any defense for his laziness. He had let himself drift today. Like an old boat that had broken away from its mooring, he had slipped away on the variable current of the day. He thought. He had better look after himself. What was the mooring that he had lost? He had lost Elke, the Gauleiter's daughter, the war orphan, and he didn't think of her now as a woman, he saw her as a child that had been entrusted to him, and that he had failed to protect. The child or the duty of care he felt for her, they had been his mooring, a fixed point in the flowing stream, the anchor to his vessel in the, it now appeared, sterile lake of his life, and the anchor had sunk down, the chain had snapped, the anchor would remain for ever in the scary, unknown, dismal depths. Poor little anchor! He hadn't kept it clean. He had allowed it to rust. What had become of Elke at his side? An alcoholic. Where had she fallen in her drunken stupor? Into the arms of lesbians, the arms of those thoroughly damned by love.
{14}
He had failed to look after Elke. He couldn't understand it. He had attended committee meetings, he had written hundreds of thousands of letters, he had spoken in parliament, he had revised legislation, he didn't understand it, he could have stayed at Elke's side, stayed on the side of youth, and perhaps, if he hadn't done everything wrong, it might have been on the side of life as well. One human being was enough to give meaning to life. Work wasn't enough. Politics weren't enough. Those things didn't protect him from the colossal futility of existence. It was a mild futility. It didn't hurt. It didn't stretch out long ghost arms to catch at the MP. It didn't throttle him. It was just there. And it remained. Futility had shown itself to him, it had introduced itself to him, and now his eyes were open, now he could see it everywhere, and it would never disappear, it would never become invisible to him. What was it? What did it look like? It was the void, it had no appearance. It looked like everything else. It looked like the committee, like the parliament, like the town, like the Rhine, like the country, it was all futile, it was all the void in a terrifyingly infinite vista, which was indestructible, because even the end, even entropy could do nothing to the void. The void was in fact eternity. And Keetenheuve just then felt his own existence very clearly, he was there, he was something, he knew it, he was surrounded and riddled by the void, but he was something by and of itself, an I, all alone against the void, and that represented a tiny hope, a slender chance for David against Goliath—only David wasn't sad. Keetenheuve was full of sadness. Korodin would have told him that despair—wan-hope—was a mortal sin. But how would it have helped Keetenheuve to know that? Besides, he did know it. He was no more ignorant than Korodin. —Keetenheuve couldn't follow the language of the committee any more. What were they speaking in? Chinese? It was committee German. It was a language he knew! He had to force himself to understand it again. He began to sweat. He sweated with the effort of following the discussion; but the others were sweating as well. They wiped away their sweat with handkerchiefs; they wiped their faces, they wiped their bald heads, they wiped their necks, they stuffed their handkerchiefs inside the damp collars of their shirts. In the room it smelled of sweat and lavender, and Keetenheuve smelled the way they did: there was always something rotting, and people always used scent to try to mask the smell.
Now he saw the members of the committee as gamblers seated around a roulette wheel. Oh, how vain their hopes, the ball leapt, luck deserted them! Heineweg and Bierbohm looked like small-time players, who played for low stakes, each of them with his system, hoping to extort a day's money from Lady Luck. But the game was about people, about large sums of money, and about the future. This was an important committee, it had important questions to debate, it had to provide people with housing. And how complicated that was! Every proposal had to be steered through dangerous rapids, if it was even committed to paper, the little paper boats were terribly vulnerable, got caught up on one of a thousand rocks, bogged down, and went under. Ministries and other committees got involved, questions of war compensation, of government bonds, of taxation, were touched upon, the effect on interest rates had to be considered, the accommodation of displaced persons, reparations for bomb victims, property rights, care for the mutilated, the laws of the regions and city planning should be respected, and how could the poor people be given anything if nobody was offering to contribute, how could one expropriate when the Basic Law was explicitly in favor of private ownership, and if one took the decision to expropriate anyway, cautiously, in a few special cases, then that opened the door to further injustice; if someone was clumsy enough to get tangled up with the paragraphs, that laid them open to punishment. Keetenheuve heard figures being quoted. It was like the sound of running water to him, impressive but so what. Six hundreds and fifty millions of public money. So and so much from central funds. Separate budget for pilot schemes; only fifteen millions. But then there was still the money that would accrue from debentures. Korodin read the figures out, from time to time he shot Keetenheuve a look, as though he expected him to object or perhaps agree. Keetenheuve didn't open his mouth. All at once, he had as little to say to Korodin's figures as someone at a magic show has to say to the baffling but ultimately inane goings-on on the stage; he knows that there's a trick somewhere, and he's being duped. Keetenheuve had been given his seat on this committee by the nation, to make sure that no one was deceived. But for him, this whole discussion was nothing but baffling numbers games! No one would see the millions that Korodin listed. No one had ever seen them. Even Korodin, the conjurer, hadn't seen them. They were on paper, they were handed on on paper, and they would be allocated—on paper. They were fed through an infinity of calculating machines. They were pumped through the calculating machines of the ministries, of the accounting departments, the main offices and the subsidiaries, they appeared in the statements of government bank accounts, diminished, melted away, but they remained paper, a number on a piece of paper, until they finally materialized somewhere, and became forty marks in someone's pay packet, and a stolen fifty-pfennig piece in a little boy's hand for an Indian comic book. No one truly understood it. Even Stierides, the plutocrats' banker, didn't understand the juju of the numbers; but he mastered a kind of yoga by which his accounts grew. Keetenheuve wanted to speak. Couldn't something be done? Couldn't twice the sum be fed through the calculating machines, as much again as had been suggested, and then wouldn't eighty marks arrive in the pay packets, instead of forty? But Keetenheuve didn't dare talk in those terms. Once again, Korodin was looking at him expectantly, encouragingly even, but Keetenheuve couldn't meet his eye. He was afraid of his party colleagues, he was afraid of Heineweg and Bierbohm, their astonishment, their dismay. Keetenheuve saw trams running across the committee table, and the trams were ringing their bells: Were doubling, we're doubling our prices; and he saw the bakers demonstrating: Twice the price for loaves; and he saw the greengrocers altering their price signs for potatoes and turnips. Doubling the paper sums was useless. The wage packet would remain half empty. It was a law of economics, or a law of relativity. Keetenheuve would have dearly liked to put more in the wage packets; but he couldn't see how it might be done either, and his head was spinning. All day, he had felt dizzy.
They were talking about apartments for mine workers now, a new settlement on the slag heaps, and an expert had worked out how many square meters per person, and a second expert had thought about how crudely and inexpensively the walls might be fashioned. Korodin had shares in the pits. The workers hacked out the coal, and by some mysterious mechanism, their efforts swelled Korodin's bank account. The workers rode the elevator down to the coal face, and Korodin read his new balance. The workers went home exhausted. They trudged through the suburb, walked past the slag heaps, which were still growing like the mountains in the early days of the earth, black table mountains, changing the face of the earth, and on whose dusty peaks dirty children were playing cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians. So Keetenheuve imagined the miner arriving at the new home in the settlement that they were discussing in the committee, that they crunched numbers for, that they passed into law, and for which they approved the means, the substantial insubstantial (paper) sums. The miner entered the minimum number of square meters that the experts had agreed. He shared them with his wife and his children and some relations that fate, tragedy, or unemployment had suddenly thrown upon his household, and with the lodgers whose rent he needed to pay the installments on the hideous, impractical, far too big and showy furniture, for the "Erika" style bedroom, and the "Adolf" style lounge, those torture chambers and housewives' dreams in the windows of the never-never shops. The miner was home. There was buzz and there was talk, and screams and creaks and squawks from mouths and loudspeakers, and yells and barks, oaths and smacks and shouts coming through the expert's cheapo walls in the form of
Iphigenia in Tauris
and the lottery results, and the miner remembers the pit, he thinks his way back down the long shaft, and thinks: Out there, when the pneumatic drills are droning, when the rocks are crunching and splitting, it's quiet in the middle of the din. And many went gladly to fight because they hated the daily grind, because they couldn't stand their tight lives any more, because, with all its terrors, war represented escape and freedom, the possibility of travel, the possibility of withdrawal, the possibility of living in Rothschild's villa. Tedium filled them, a creeping tedium that sometimes manifested itself in violence, in suicide, in apparently motiveless family drama, but there was so much tedium in the noise of the settlements, displeasure in the proximity of other beings, disgust at the miasma of kitchen and bathroom, at the stink of often worn clothes and clothes soaking in the tub, the miner felt sickened by his wife's sweat (he loved her), and by the excreta of his children (he loved them), and by the incessant blabber from their lips that swirled around him like a tornado.
Heineweg and Bierbohm were content. They supported the proposals of the experts; they approved the minimum expenditure, the minimum number of square meters, the minimum dwelling. The dwellings would be built. Heineweg and Bierbohm advocated the joys of allotments. They saw little gabled houses being created, and they imagined them as cosy; they saw satisfied laborers class-consciously planting seeds in their own little plots, and through the open window the wireless was broadcasting an uplifting speech of Knurrewahn's.
We may face the future and face the world with confidence.
And Korodin was content. He supported the proposals of the experts; he approved the minimum expenditure, the minimum number of square meters, the minimum dwellings. The dwellings would be built. Korodin too advocated the joys of allotments for the workers, he too found favor in gabled huts in the green; only he saw the doors and windows decorated with birch on Corpus Christi, and the radio was broadcasting the bishop's sermon, and the contented workers were kneeling in the front garden, devoutly on their own sod, in front of the Holy of Holies that was carried past in the procession.
The Lord is my shepherd
,
I'll not want.
They wanted mollification. Heineweg, Bierbohm, and Korodin were rival brothers. They didn't know they were brothers in spirit. They thought they were enemies. But they were brothers. They all got tiddly on the same watery lemonade.
What was Keetenheuve after? Any roof was better than none. He ought to know that. He had known bunks in barracks and Nissen huts, put-you-ups in bomb shelters, rubble billets, emergency lodgings, he knew the slums of London and the basement holes in Rotterdam's Chinatown, and he knew that the minimum apartments that the committee was putting its weight behind were a step up. But he didn't like mollification. He couldn't see any allotment heaven. He thought he could see through the designs: he sensed poison and bacteria. How were these settlements any different from the National Socialist settlements for large families, or the SA and SS settlements, only cheaper and narrower and grimmer and shabbier? And if you looked at the blueprints, it was the Nazi idiom they were still building in, and if you looked at the names of the architects, it was the Nazi architects who were still working, and Heineweg and Bierbohm approved of the brown style and okayed the architects. The program of the National Socialist Union for Large Families was Heineweg and Bierbohm's program, it was their approach to the mollification of the population, it was their idea of social progress. So what was Keetenheuve after? Did he want the Revolution? Such a big and beautiful word, toppled in the dust! No, Keetenheuve didn't want the Revolution, he couldn't want it any more—it no longer existed. The Revolution was dead. It was withered and dead. The Revolution was an offshoot of Romanticism, a crisis of puberty. It had had its time. Its possibilities had not been investigated. And now it was a corpse, a dry leaf in the herbarium of ideas, a dead notion, an antiquated word to look up in the encyclopedia, that didn't come up in daily speech. Only a gushing youth would still enthuse about Revolution for a while longer, and after that it would be nothing but a pash or dream, an odorless bloom—the pressed blue flower of Romanticism.
{15}
The time for the tender faith in liberty, equality, fraternity, it was over
the morning of America the poems of Whitman strength and genius it was all onanism and the epigone lay down contentedly in the broad marital bed of law and order the night stand with the calendar that marked the fruitful and unfruitful days of his wife's cycle next to the pessary and the encyclical from Rome.
Korodin had prevailed over the Revolution, and he guessed he had lost something in the process. Heineweg and Bierbohm had prevailed over the Revolution, and they felt they had betrayed something of themselves in the process. Between them, they had succeeded in emasculating religion and the Revolution. Any idea of society had gone to the Devil, and he was holding it in his claws. There might still be the occasional coup d'état, they came in hot or cold versions, like punch, but the drink was always mixed from cheap ingredients and it left the people who tried it with sore heads. Keetenheuve was not in favor of mollification. He was in favor of looking the Gorgon in the eye. He didn't want to lower his gaze in front of horror. But he wanted an agreeable life, and he wanted to trick the devil of his due. He was in favor of happiness in despair. He was in favor of a happiness built from convenience and solitude, a happiness within reach of everyman, a lonely, convenient and despairing happiness in the technological world that had been created. There was no need to feel cold as well as miserable; or hungry as well as suicidal; one shouldn't have to wade through dirt while one's thoughts were on the void. And it was in such a spirit that Keetenheuve wanted new homes built for the working class, Corbusier machines-for-living, contemporary castles, an entire city in a single high-rise, with artificial roof gardens, artificial climate control, he saw the possibility of insulating man from excesses of heat and cold, of freeing him from dust and dirt, from housework, from domestic squabbles and noise. Keetenheuve wanted to have ten thousand under a single roof to isolate them from one another, in the way that metropolises take a man out of his neighborhood and make him alone, a lone beast of prey, a lone hunter, a lone victim, and every room in Keetenheuve's gigalith would be soundproofed against every other, and everyone should be able to set the temperature to his own liking, and he should be alone with his books, alone with his thoughts, alone with his work, alone with his idleness, alone with his love, alone with his despair, alone with his human reek.