Flight Without End

XIX

It was a small Sunday party, although the guests did not give the impression that they needed to wait for Sunday to participate in such a gathering. For they belonged to the elevated ranks, those ranks which could also be invited on Wednesdays, or Thursdays, or even Mondays, and were so invited. They included artists, academics and councillors. A deputy mayor who had musical interests was among the guests; also a professor from the University, who gave readings on Friday evenings between six and eight and was frequented by society ladies; an actor who had played successfully at the Staatstheater in Berlin; a petite young actress who had undoubtedly slept with the stout deputy mayor, but had re-emerged from his embrace unharmed and even, to some extent, invigorated; a museum director who had written about some of van Gogh’s works, though his heart lay with Böcklin; the music critic of one of the larger newspapers, who seemed to have concluded an implicit pact with the conductor.

One or two of them had brought their wives. These ladies fell into two categories: the elegant, who exhibited Parisian leanings; and the prosaic, who reminded one of the Masurian lakes. The latter were burnished with a glitter of steel and victory. Three groups formed: first, the prosaic ladies; second, the elegant ladies; and third, the men. Only Franz and his sister-in-law oscillated between the three groups, dispensing refreshments. Around Franz, decked in his Siberian halo and exhaling the great breath of the steppes and the polar sea, competed the bold glances of a number of the elegant women. Men clapped him on the back and told him what it was like in Siberia. The music critic enquired about the new music in Russia. But he did not wait for an answer and began a discourse on the conductorless Moscow Orchestra, The museum director knew the Hermitage in St Petersburg inside out. The professor, who despised Marx, quoted the places in which Lenin contradicted himself. He was even familiar with Trotsky’s book about the genesis of the Red Army.

There was no particular structure to the conversation. To bring this about, a manufacturer was called on who only arrived around midnight. He had an honorary doctorate and was a member of the Club. Red-faced, with the desperately clutching hands of a drowning man, even though he was standing with both feet on solid ground, he began to cross-examine Tunda.

The manfacturer had concessions in Russia. ‘What is the state of the industries in the Urals?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Tunda confessed.

‘And what about the petroleum in Baku?’

‘Quite good,’ said Tunda, feeling that he had lost ground.

‘Are the workers contented?’

‘Not always!’

‘Exactly,’ said the manufacturer. ‘So the workers are not satisfied. But you know damn-all about Russia, my dear friend. One loses one’s perspective about things when one is close to them, I know. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, dear friend.’

‘Yes,’ said Tunda, ‘one loses perspective. One is so close to things that they cease to be of concern. Just as you give no thought to how many buttons there are on your waistcoat. One can live in the present as if deep in a forest. One encounters people and sheds them again as trees shed leaves. Can’t you understand that it doesn’t seem to me to be of the slightest importance how much petroleum they extract in Baku? It’s a marvellous city. When a wind springs up in Baku …’

‘You are a poet,’ said the manufacturer.

‘Do they read Ilya Ehrenburg in Russia?’ asked the little actress. ‘He is a sceptic.’

‘I’ve never heard that name; who is he?’ said the professor severely.

‘He is a young Russian author,’ said Frau Klara, to the general astonishment.

‘Are you going to Paris this year?’ one of the Parisian group of women asked another.

‘I’ve been looking at the latest hats in Femina, potshaped again, and the costume jackets are slightly belled out. I don’t think it’s worth the trouble this year.’

‘My husband and I were in Berlin last week,’ said the music critic’s wife. ‘There’s a city that’s growing at a tremendous rate. The women get more elegant every day.’

‘Fantastic, fantastic,’ opined the manufacturer. ‘That city leaves the rest of Germany speechless.’

He introduced some story on the theme of Berlin. He always knew exactly when to provide a new focus for the flagging conversation.

He talked about industry and of the new Germany, the workers and the decline of Marxism, politics and the League of Nations, art and Max Reinhardt.

The manufacturer betook himself to an adjoining room. He lay down, half-hidden by a copper font, a Catholic rarity, on a broad sofa. He had loosened his patent-leather shoes, undone his collar, his shirt-front gaped like a double folding door, a silk handkerchief lay on his bare chest. That was how Tunda found him.

‘I understood you perfectly well earlier, Herr Tunda,’ said the manufacturer. ‘I understood perfectly what you meant about the wind in Baku. I understood perfectly that you have experienced a great deal, and that we come along in our ignorance and ask you stupid questions. As far as I’m concerned, I put my practical questions for purely selfish reasons. It was, to some extent, my duty. You won’t understand that just yet. You’ll have to live with us a little longer first. Then you too will have to pose specific questions and give specific answers. Everyone here lives by established rules and against his will. Naturally, in the beginning, that is when he first came here, we each had our own opinion. We arranged our lives perfectly freely, no one interfered with us. But after a time, almost without our noticing it, what we had arranged out of free choice became, without actually being written down, a divine decree and so ceased to be the consequence of our choice. All our later thoughts and actions had to be forced through against this decree. Or else we had to circumvent it in some way; we had, so to speak, to wait until it closed its eyes for a moment, out of fatigue. But you are not yet acquainted with this decree.

‘You haven’t as yet any idea what terribly wide-open eyes it has, eyelids stuck to its brows which never close. For instance, when I first came here, I liked wearing coloured shirts with attached collars and without cuffs; but, as time passed it was really in obedience to a very powerful and immutable decree that I should wear this kind of shirt. You cannot imagine how difficult it was for practical reasons — for this was a period when things were going badly for me — to wear white shirts with detachable collars. The decree ordained: manufacturer X wears coloured shirts with attached collars, thereby establishing that he is one of the working people, like his workers and employees. He need only undo his tie, and at once he appears a proletarian. Then, gradually and quite circumspectly, as if I had stolen them from someone, I began to wear white shirts. First once a week, for on that day the decree deigns occasionally to turn a blind eye, then on Saturday afternoons, then on Fridays. When I wore a white shirt for the first time on a Wednesday — Wednesday is my unlucky day anyway — everyone, including my secretary at the office and my foreman in the factory, looked at me reproachfully.

‘Now shirts may not be very important. But they are symbolic. At least, in this case. And it is the same with the really important things. If I came here as a manufacturer, do you think I could ever become a conductor, even if I were ten times better than your brother? Or do you think that your brother could ever become a manufacturer? Now, for all I care, vocation is not such an important matter. It’s not so important how one makes one’s living. But what is important, for example, is love for one’s wife and child. Once you elect voluntarily to be a good paterfamilias, do you think you can ever stop? If, one day, you have announced to your cook: “I don’t like white meat,” do you think you can change your mind ten years later? When I first came here I was very busy, I had to make money, organize a factory — for you must know that I am the son of a Jewish pedlar — I had no time for the theatre, art, music, crafts, religious objects, the Jewish community or Catholic cathedral. So if anyone got too close to me in any connection, I repelled him in a boorish manner. I was, so to say, a boor or a man of action, people were amazed at my energy. The decree seized hold of me, ordained my boorishness, my uncouth behaviour — you will understand that I am compelled to speak to you as the decree lays down. Who ordered me to take up concessions in this stinking Russia? The decree! Don’t you think the wind in Baku interests me more than petroleum? But dare I ask you about the wind? Am I a meteorologist? What would the decree have to say about it?

‘And everyone lies, just as I do. Everyone says what the decree prescribes. The little actress who was asking you earlier about a Russian writer is probably more interested in petroleum. But no, the roles are all allotted. The music critic and your brother, for instance. I know they both gamble on the stock exchange. But what do they talk about? About cultural matters. When you enter a room and see other people present, you know at once what each has to say. Each has his role. That’s how it is in our city. The skin in which each one hides is not his own. And just as it is in our city, so it is everywhere, in at least a hundred great cities in our country.

‘Look, I was in Paris. Let’s forget the fact that, after my return, I dared tell no one that I would rather live as a poor man in Paris under a Seine bridge than in our city with an average-sized factory. No one would believe me, I even doubt myself whether it is what I really wanted. But there’s something else I want to tell you. Someone accosts me in the Avenue de l’Opéra. He wants to show me the brothels. Naturally I am cautious; the man seeks to dispel my scruples. He enumerates his clients. He mentions the name of the very Minister with whom I had been negotiating the previous week. He not only names names, he has proof. He shows me letters. Yes, it is the Minister’s handwriting. “Dear Davidowiczi,” writes the Minister, obviously a good friend of Davidowiczi. Why does he call him “Dear”? Because the Minister has a very peculiar perversion. Because day and night he things only of goats, and nothing else. I ask you, goats! And he is not even the Minister of Agriculture! He sets about the negotiations with unbelievable zeal. One feels sure that his department can rely on him. And on what are his thoughts fixed? On animals. Who forbids him to speak of what really concerns him? The decree.’

The manufacturer had hurriedly to rearrange his clothing because of the approach of two ladies. Strange to relate, it was one of the prosaic group with one of the Parisian group. They were discussing clothes; it looked as if the prosaic lady was seeking information from the elegant one.

‘He need not,’ whispered the manufacturer, ‘have spoken as freely about animals to Davidowiczi as he did. He could have referred to them in a roundabout way, for instance to their usefulness in domestic economy. But he did not even do that. Who does? How many things do you think would be uncovered if we could rummage in the closets of each individual — and, more than that, in their innermost secret recesses?

‘When you spoke of the wind, tears came to my eyes. But do you think I would have dared to weep? I dared only bluster.

‘I confess to you that I sometimes go to the cinema just to have a good cry. Yes, the cinema.’

A lady approached, saw Tunda and smiled at him in a gracious, enticing yet aloof manner, as if she held a tape measure in front of her body, as if there were a specific law which laid down that only a certain number of teeth should be exposed when smiling.

‘And were you never homesick?’ she enquired. ‘We used to speak of you occasionally. Because you were missing.’ She inclined her head as she mentioned the word. She found it embarrassing to have to say to a man’s face that he had been missing. It was a painful, possibly even an improper condition to be missing. It was something like telling a living person that he has been taken for dead.

‘Your brother has often told us about you. How you were both in love with your cousin Klara when you came home for Christmas and Easter, and how you almost got angry with each other on that account. And how you said goodbye when you went off to the war (she very nearly said ‘marched’) and kissed your brother who was so grieved that he was compelled to stay at home on account of his leg. Yes, we often spoke of you. Did you sometime think that people might be talking about you, as if …’

She did not finish the sentence. Possibly she had intended to say: ‘As if you were dead.’ But one does not say that to the face of the living.

Franz was astonished by these stories his brother had told.

In any case, the only thing to say to a woman who talks about such things is ‘Let’s sit down!’ So they sat down. The conductor’s house offered many facilities for sitting down; and it was a particular quality of these facilities that one no sooner sat down than one lay back, a usage which seemed to be linked with feminine fashions. The clothes that were worn called for recumbency or, at any rate, they called recumbency to mind. Moreover, a certain renunciation of European customs was evident.

So Tunda sat down with the lady behind the broad brown back of a Buddha, almost as in an arbour, behind wild vines. The lady’s smoothly shaved legs lay side by side like two similarly clad sisters, both in silk sheaths. Tunda laid a hand on one leg, but the lady seemed quite unaware of it. Whenever steps approached she endeavoured to draw away.

Ah, what will one not do for a missing person?

If Tunda had exploited to the full the possibilities afforded by his Siberian glamour and by the solid city of the religious setting, his fate might possibly have been postponed but in no way averted. Whether he turned them to advantage later I do not know.