Flight Without End

XXIII

The idea occurred to him to have his Siberian stories published. The book was unfinished. I wrote an epilogue in which I stated that the author had disappeared in Siberia, and that the manuscript had come into my possession in some miraculous fashion. It appeared under the name of Baranowicz, in Tunda’s translated version. It was brought out by a large Berlin publishing house.

I still recall how amazed Tunda was by the streets, the houses, how he noted improbable incidents and activities because to him even the ordinary appeared remarkable. He sat on the tops of buses. He stood before each of the hundred ghastly wooden posts which indicate direction or bar entry in Berlin. He possessed the uncanny capacity of seizing the uncannily sensible frenzy of this city. He had almost forgotten Irene.

‘This city,’ he said, ‘exists outside Germany, outside Europe. It is its own capital. It does not draw its supplies from the land. It obtains nothing from the earth on which it is built. It converts this earth into asphalt, bricks and walls. It shades the plain with its houses, it supplies the plain with bread from its factories, it determines the plain’s dialect, its national mores, its national costume. It is the very embodiment of a city. The country owes its existence to it, and expresses its gratitude by becoming absorbed by it. It has its own animal kingdom in the Zoological Gardens and the Aquarium, the Aviary and the Monkey House, its own vegetation in the Botanic Garden, its own stretches of sand on which foundations are laid and factories erected, it even has its own harbour, its river is a sea, it is a continent. Of all the cities I have seen, this one alone has humanity — for lack of time and other practical reasons. Many more people would perish here if it were not for a thousand cautious, circumspect measures to defend life and health, created not because of any dictates of the heart but because an accident interferes with the traffic, costs money, and offends against order. This city had the courage to be built in an ugly style, and this inclines it to further ugliness. It places signposts, boards, hoardings, loathsome, glassy, internally illuminated toads on the roadsides, at the intersections, on the squares. Its traffic police stand there with metal signals which look as if they were on temporary loan from the railway administration, and use them wearing spectral white gloves.

‘What is more, it still tolerates the German provinces as part of itself, if only in order to devour them one day. It nourishes the natives of Düsseldorf, of Cologne, of Breslau, and draws nourishment from them. It has no culture of its own as have Breslau, Cologne, Frankfurt, Königsberg. It has no religion. It has the most hideous churches in the world. It has no society. But it has everything that society alone provides in every other city: theatres, art, a stock-exchange, trade, cinema, subways.’

In the course of a few days we saw: a man running amok and a procession; a film premiere, filming on location, the death leap of an artist in the Unter den Linden, the victim of an assault, the centre for the homeless, a love-scene in the Tiergarten in broad daylight, revolving advertising pillars turned by donkeys, thirteen clubs for homosexual and lesbian couples, a shy normal couple of between fourteen and sixteen who had carved their names on the trees and had their names taken by a park attendant because they had damaged public property, a man who had to pay a fine because he had walked diagonally across a square instead of at right angles, a meeting of the onion-eating sect and of the Salvation Army.

I also conducted my friend Tunda to the café where the artists met.

This was the time when literary men, actors, film-producers and painters were once more making money. It was the time following the stabilization of the German currency, when new bank-accounts were being opened, when even the most radical journals carried well-paid advertisements, and when radical writers earned honoraria in the literary supplements of the bourgeois papers. The world was so firmly back on its feet that even the feuilletons dared to be revolutionary; civil war was now so remote that revolutionary writers contemplated lawsuits and public prosecutors with a certain gratification and took their threats as friendly compliments.

I pointed out all the famous personalities to Tunda: the writer who sat there with beautiful prematurely bleached hair, his head silvered as if by a jeweller, the originator of gentle spitefulnesses in a style compounded in equal measure of good taste and the avoidance of sentimentality; the publisher of a journal who tendered his kindness of heart to all and sundry — even those who were not particularly interested — exhibited a commonplace masculine conceit instead of literary ambition, and was endowed with a great aptitude for stock-exchange transactions, making money and campaigning against big business. The famous artist of mediocre talent, who went on drawing the various celebrities until they had no option but to reflect their own lustre onto him. The revolutionary author of revolutionary tales who, a victim of the law, had spent three months in jail for freedom, for justice, for a new world, without securing anything but his own, not unwelcome, notoriety.

I showed Tunda the young people, a self-perpetuating throng greeting those already present with the arrogance of late arrivals, discussing foreign successes in order to promote their own, wearing monocles and coloured cravats, calling to mind the progeny of rich bankers, and oscillating indecisively between being the grandsons of Jewish grandmothers or the illegitimate sons of Hohenzollern princes.

I showed Tunda all those who look down on me, and whom I have to acknowledge because I make my living as a writer.

The following day Tunda sent money to his wife in Baku and to Baranowicz at Irkutsk. He wrote Baranowicz a detailed letter.

I was not to meet him again until the 27th of August, in Paris.