Kornel Esti

XII

In which the president, Baron Wilhelm Eduard von Wüstenfeld,

immortal figure of his student years in Germany

and his mentor and preceptor,

sleeps through the entire chapter.

MY DATE WAS FOR A QUARTER TO TWO IN THE MORNING AT the Torpedo coffeehouse.

I tried to be precisely on time. But I couldn’t get a cab straightaway. Then it started to rain cats and dogs. The cab could go only very cautiously, at walking pace. It was approaching a quarter past two when I opened the door of the private room in the Torpedo.

My arrival was greeted by a frantic hushing. Kornél Esti, who had been in full flow, glanced disparagingly in my direction and fell silent.

Around him was his usual motley company, nine or ten writers of various sorts and a woman or two. In front of him was a glass of Bull’s Blood^* and a silver dish on which lay the fabulously delicate skeleton of a trout and the remains of a light green sauce.

In the unfriendly silence I threw down my fur coat and lit a cigarette. Someone informed me in a whisper of the preliminaries of the story which had begun.

He had been telling them about his student years in Germany and about a distinguished, refined elderly gentleman, prominent in public life in Darmstadt — his full name was Baron Wilhelm Friedrich Eduard von Wüstenfeld — who had been president of Germania, the local cultural association, and also president and director of numerous other political, literary, and scientific associations, societies, clubs, unions, conferences, committees, and subcommittees.

“So,” Kornél went on, “it always happened as I said. The president would open the session and go to sleep. The lecturer wouldn’t even have reached the table and he’d be asleep. He’d go off quickly, like lightning, the way little children do. He’d plunge from the brink of wakefulness straight into the bottomless abyss of sleep. He’d close his eyes and sleep deeply and sweetly.

“The lecturer would step to the table, acknowledge the applause, bow, sit down, shuffle his ominously high pile of script, clear his throat, and set about his lecture on something like The Observation of the Essence of Dynamic Existence or Plant and Animal Names in the Erotic Poetry of Heinrich von Morungen, but that no longer concerned the president, who had slipped discreetly from the world of consciousness by an invisible secret door, leaving behind only his body as a token in the presidential chair.

“When the lecturer had finished, the president would call the second and then the third to the rostrum from the printed program, and when they had performed their duties he too performed his.

“Understand me: the lecturers and the president’s briefly interrupted sleep, which could yet be called uninterrupted and continuous, interacted, were in close contact, almost in a causal relationship. The president opened the session and closed his eyes. The president closed the session and opened his eyes. At first this was a mystery to me.

“I was young and inexperienced when I went to Germany. At the time I’d been drifting around among the lighthearted, easygoing French, but in Paris I received a stern telegram from my father telling me to go at once to Germany and there continue my studies, and work only at my studies, not at creating literature as I had been doing. In his telegram he emphasized that if I didn’t do as I was told he’d cut off my monthly allowance. Whether for that reason, or because of my measureless love for him, I complied with his request right away. And to this day I’m grateful to him for making me go.

Otherwise I’d hardly have gotten to know the Germans.

“Naturally, I’d heard a thing or two about them. I knew that they were one of the world’s greatest peoples and had given humanity music and abstract thought. They were Cloudy and burdened with thought, as their divine Hölderlin has it. When I’m really down in the dumps I hum Bach fugues and say lines of Goethe to myself. ‘Among pine forests and hills lives an earnest, industrious people,’ I thought, ‘with the starry sky and the moral world order above their heads.’ So I had a great respect for the Germans. Perhaps I respected them more than any other people. But I didn’t know them. The French, however, I loved.

“What a loss it would have been had I missed this close acquaintance. A new world opened before me. As soon as my train had rolled onto German soil, one surprise followed another. My mouth, so to speak, was constantly agape, from which my fellow-travelers deduced that I was a half-wit. Order and cleanliness were everywhere, in things and, indeed, in people alike.

“I got off first at a small spa, to wash the dust off. I didn’t have to ask anyone where the sea was. There were elegant pillars at precise ten-yard intervals in the clean, swept streets, bearing white enamel signs showing a pointing hand with the words To the Sea beneath. The stranger could not have been given clearer directions. I reached the sea. There, however, I was rather taken aback. On the pebble beach, a yard from the water, another pillar drew my attention; it was identical to the rest, but the white enamel sign was rather larger and bore the words: The Sea.

“Having come from among the Latin races, I felt at first that this was exceedingly superfluous. Before me foamed restless infinity, and it was obvious that no one could mistake the Baltic for a spittoon or a steam laundry. Later I realized that I had been wrong in my youthful superiority. This was where the true greatness of the Germans lay. This was perfection itself. Their philosophical tendency demanded that the argument be concluded and the outcome demonstrated, as the mathematician often writes in the course of a deduction that 1 = 1, or as is often stated in logical proofs, Peter = Peter (and not Paul).

“In Darmstadt I rented a modest little student’s room in the house of a master cooper. There too a series of surprises awaited me. The family was pleasant, considerate, and very clean. The cooper’s father, an old man who seemed to be simple, treated me, a nobody who had been tossed ashore there from abroad, with kindly, human affection. In the evening, when I came in, he always questioned me: Well, young man, tell me, what have you experienced today, 1. humanly, 2. literarily, 3. philosophically? I couldn’t answer this question at first. Not only because I could as yet hardly speak German. This profundity, this classification so normal to the German mind but to which I was not accustomed, confused me. My unrefined brain all but exploded. It came to my mind that that morning I had read Hegel in the library, then had some dill sauce in the refectory, and in the afternoon strolled with Minna in the town park. Was the library a human experience, the dill sauce a literary experience, and Minna a philosophical experience, or vice versa? To me these three had been one until then. I mixed up the library with the dill sauce and Minna, experiences human, literary, and philosophical. It was quite some time — and required constant mental gymnastics — before I was able to separate them.

“They’re an enigmatic people, I can tell you. There’s no people so enigmatic. They think all the time. One after another I met eccentrics who ‘on principle’ ate only things that were raw, who every morning ‘on principle’ did breathing exercises, who in the evening, ‘on principle,’ slept on hard beds with no quilts, even in the dead of winter. Their level of culture is astounding. They go from school to university but don’t finish their studies even then, and I suspect that after that all of them enroll in the universe. The universe with its myriad stars is there in their calculations, indeed in their appointment diaries too. Even girls and women refer to it like a popular place of entertainment. German women are, on the whole, sensitive and romantic. They’re like French women. The only difference between them is perhaps that French women tend to have large eyes, whereas German women have large feet and souls which absorb at once everything that is noble and beautiful. The moment one makes their acquaintance, they describe themselves exhaustingly, cleverly, and abstractly. They reveal the length and breadth of their spiritual lives, two or three of its fundamental attributes, and their basic symptoms, like a patient revealing the history of his disease to a doctor. They are terribly sincere. And they don’t conceal their faults. They are not embarrassed by anything human. I had scarcely begun courting one delightful, divorced little woman, beneath the limes one sunny autumn morning, than she confessed that she had had hemorrhoids since giving birth and was suffering badly from them that very day. All that not for my interest, just because it was sincere and human. It’s a bewildering world.

“One after another the doors of the best houses opened to me. They accepted me into their circle as if I were not a foreigner. What little merit there was in me they appreciated. They respect all other nations just as much as they love their own. They do not proclaim international principles — they practice them. The Germans are instinctively welcoming. There was a place for me too at their table. I’ll not conceal, however, that here too I was surprised at this and that. At the end of dinner, for instance, they serve a longish, stick-shaped, dead-white, very smelly cheese, which they call ‘Dead Man’s Finger’ (Leichenfinger). They filled my glass with a dark red liqueur the name of which was, according to the manufacturer’s label, ‘Blood Blister’ (Blutgeschwür). As a well-brought-up person I sank my teeth into the dead man’s finger and washed it down with the sticky secretion of the blood blister.

“There was one thing that I couldn’t accept for a long time: their mustard pots. On the best families’ tables there is a very strange mustard pot from which — as I later found out — the manufacturer had become wealthy; his product was in demand everywhere and he could not make enough. This mustard pot was in the shape of a tiny, white porcelain lavatory pedestal, with a brown wooden lid that closed, a deceptively faithful replica with only the inscription ‘Mustard’ (Senft) to betray what it was. In this they keep the yellowish-brown mustard which they put on their blood sausage during a meal. At first they didn’t understand that I could only eat with limited appetite when that witty, risible little object was set playfully before me. They found it amusing. Even engaged couples looked at it with a smile and knew in advance that their future home would contain one like it. Respectable mothers of families, in whose presence it would be unthinkable to make the slightest risqué remark, passed it nonchalantly to guests. Small boys screwed up their faces as they sniffed at it and licked off the brown fragments that stuck to the porcelain bowl, and little girls, whom their doting parents had photographed with hands clasped in prayer, took a delight in scraping at the paste that had congealed in it and, like enthusiastic mudlarks, softening it with vinegar.

“I confess that for a while I found that healthily studentish good humor repulsive. Previously, however, I’d been through the school of Paris, enjoyed all the coarse slapstick and thinly veiled double entendres of the bawdy theater of Montmartre; I’d studied decadent poetry too, which often enthrones indecency and filth. This, however, was repugnant to me. It was the openness that shocked me, the cosy sniggering at this devilment. But who can understand a people?

“I repeat, this people is unfathomably enigmatic. They are loyal, clever, and attentive. If I was unwell, my landlady herself made my bed, plumped up my pillow and smoothed it down, made up embrocations, took my temperature, made me drink linden leaf tea, and nursed me with motherly love and with such knowing skill. Only German women know how to nurse the sick. A doctor would be called too. German doctors have no equal. The least of them is worth more than a university professor in another country. Their forget-me-not-blue eyes would look at my fevered brow with inexpressible objectivity and concern. Their medicines, prepared in a million forms by the best factories on earth, cure us the moment we look at them. I’ve often said that I’d like to be sick and die only among the Germans. But I’d rather live somewhere else — here in Hungary, and when I’m on holiday, in France.

“However, I hadn’t gone there to live, but to study. First and foremost, to study their rather difficult, harsh, tortuous, complex, but splendid and ancient language, in which as yet I could only stammer incompetently and inadequately. I frequently didn’t understand what they said. They frequently didn’t understand what I said. These two defects didn’t cancel one another out, they increased each other. It was my sole ambition to learn German. I listened like a secret policeman. I talked to everybody. Living grammars and dictionaries were all around me. I tried hard to turn the pages. I even spoke to three-year-old children, as they spoke better German than I did although I had read and understood Kant’s Prolegomena in the original. If I failed to understand a snatch of conversation in the street, my pride was injured. Once I almost felt disposed to commit suicide when a shopkeeper noticed the foreign accent of my otherwise tolerable speech and didn’t answer my questions but — no doubt out of consideration — made signs like a deaf-mute or a savage would. I worked with indefatigable industry and lost no opportunity to ensure progress. Unfortunately, numerous disasters befell me. I went home by cab late one night after a student feast. I asked the driver what I owed him. I presumably misunderstood him and didn’t give him enough. He began to shout, called me a lousy villain, even threatened me with his whip, but all that I could do was admire his wonderful command of strong verbs, the masterly way that he maneuvered subject and predicate, his rich and varied vocabulary, and took out a pencil with which to make notes of it all. At that the cabby too was amazed, but at the patient way I had borne his filthy tirade. He thought that I was either the founder of a religion or mad. But I was only being a linguist.

“And so I went everywhere that German was spoken, publicly or privately. There were few visitors at the Germania and other cultural institutions as keen as I. At all costs I meant to hear spoken German, the more the merrier, and I didn’t care what.

“Allow me, after this long but necessary digression, to return to Baron Wüstenfeld, the president, who was asleep when we left him, and I assure you is still asleep. What did the people of Darmstadt have to say about this? Well, they were used to it. So was I eventually. At first, however, I recall, at one lecture I turned to a citizen of Darmstadt who was sitting beside me and asked him why the president was always sleeping. He was surprised at my question. He looked at me, then at the president, and replied — dispassionately — that he was in fact asleep, but he was, after all, the president, and he shrugged as if I’d asked why the sun was shining. The president was president in order to sleep. It was accepted at that time, and they went on with the agenda regardless.

“I apologized for my inquisitiveness. As time went by I realized that they were right. The president was an old man. A very old man. Very old and very tired. Clearly, that was why he was always known as the ‘tireless fighter for public education.’ He was also called ‘the watchman of public education,’ and not out of weary contempt or without good reason. He was a man of great culture and great breadth of vision, with a long career behind him, who functioned actively from morning to night in public life. He would open an extraordinary meeting early in the forenoon, convene a preparatory subcommittee at noon, chair a political council in the afternoon, and in the evening propose the toast to the guest of honor at a banquet. In general he presided everywhere, rang the bell everywhere, spoke the introductory or closing words everywhere. In the meanwhile he appeared everywhere that he had to, and his name was never missing from the list of those present. Was it any wonder that the burden of the years weighed on him and he was worn out with so much feverish and useful activity?

“No, indeed. Gradually I too came to regard as natural what all of Darmstadt, all Hesse, all Germany did. When as a scatterbrained student I rushed headlong into the distinguished, paneled hall of the Germania and wanted to be certain that I had arrived in time, I didn’t look at the table or at the audience, only at the presidential dais. If the president was asleep, I knew that the session had begun. If he was not, I knew that the session had not yet begun, and stepped outside for a cigarette or two. I became firmly assured that the sleeping of the president was at the same time the beginning of intellectual work and an infallible indicator and scientific measure of it.

“The lecturers themselves thought so too. Didn’t this habit of the president disturb or offend them? On the contrary. As the first word of their paper rocked the president to sleep with irresistible force, they too derived courage and inspiration from his slumbers. If they noticed that he was awake, they would pause briefly, sip their water, adjust the light, but they didn’t have to wait long before he was sleeping the age-old sleep of the just. Some scarcely dared speak for the first few minutes. They trembled quietly through the introductory remarks almost in a whisper, like mothers beside the cradles of their children, their thoughts and feelings coming almost on tiptoe, and only when they were convinced that the chairman’s sleep had reached the required depth and that nothing could now wake him did they raise and develop their voices, abandon themselves to flights of oratory. Need I remark that this touching, childlike attention on the part of the lecturers, this caution which sprang from profound respect, was in all cases superfluous?

“Yes, my friends, that man could certainly sleep. Never have I seen a president sleep like that, and I’ve seen many a president sleep in Germany and in other European countries, big and small. By that time I could get along quite well in German, and I only went to the Germania and elsewhere in order to admire him. And I wasn’t the only one that had a similar aim in view. Zwetschke was actually studying him — he was a slender, quick-witted young psychiatrist with whom I became friendly over this common interest. Foreigners came too — Norwegians, English, and Danes — presidents, for the most part, who despite their advanced ages made the pilgrimage to Darmstadt in order to spy out the modus operandi of their remarkable colleague, his secret, his stratagem, and to turn their experience to fruitful advantage in their demanding and responsible careers.

“But how did he sleep? In masterful fashion, remarkably, perfectly, with inimitable artistry. This was quite understandable. Even as a young man — at the age of twenty-eight — he had attained high office, and since then — for generations — had borne it constantly in the Germania and in other cultural organizations. He had vast experience. On each side of him on the dais sat a vice president, like the thieves on the right and the left. They were Professor Dr. Hubertus von Zeilenzig and Professor Dr. Eugen Ludwig von Wuttke. I’m not saying that they too nodded, dozed, snoozed, indeed actually slept, but they did it with only one eye, like hares, uneasily, like dogs do. A single glance at them was enough for the keen observer to appreciate at once the difference between master and apprentice, to realize that these were mere disciples, only vice presidents, and would never become presidents. He, however, who slept between them with profound conviction and expertise was a president, the real thing. God had created him such. I heard from Darmstadt people that this rare ability of his had shown itself even in boyhood, and while his frolicsome companions noisily played soccer in the field he would sit apart on a dais-like mound and preside.

“Significantly he slept, sternly and importantly, with indescribable dignity and pride. By that I don’t at all mean to imply that when he was awake he lacked any of these desirable qualities. Awake too he was a man of standing. He was likable, but ice cold; fair, but grave. If he appeared anywhere, with his frock coat buttoned to the chin, his freshly tied black cravat, and his trousers with their knifelike crease, smiles froze on faces. Our friends told us that one summer, when he was entertaining some German naturalists and escorting them officially in the Darmstadt woods, the thrushes, tits, and all the songbirds together suddenly stopped their singing, which was out of keeping with the gravity of the situation. His importance grew, however, when he was asleep. At such times he changed into an enigmatic statue of himself. Sleep drew a sort of superficial, improvised death mask over his face. He looked a little like Beethoven.

“Furthermore he slept refinedly, choicely, in gentlemanly fashion so to speak, aristocratically and chivalrously. For example, he never snored, never dribbled. He could exercise restraint. After all, he was a baron, a nobleman. He would hang his head slightly between his shoulders. He shut his eyes, and it seemed that by cutting off his sense of sight he merely intended to increase his attentiveness, as if in this way he meant only to render homage to science and literature. His face too was transfigured by inner absorption; a sort of church-like piety came over it. Certainly, next moment, the aged head, which the sinews of the neck now supported only laxly, sank lower and lower toward the green baize under the remorseless laws of gravity, and the head drew after itself the chest and then the torso. Many a time I was afraid that his face was going to fall onto the presidential bell, the bronze of which drew it like a magnet, and that his lips would kiss it. I can, however, assure you — that never happened.

“The amazing thing was this. He slept self-assuredly and masterfully. As soon as his nodding head reached the azimuth, it rose of its own accord, the torso became erect, and so the whole process began again. He was in command of himself. He recognized the territory marked out for him in infinite space in which he could range freely without contravening decorum and etiquette. Even in his sleep he knew that he was doing something illicit, and only conditionally allowed himself this trifling foible of old age, as pleasant and understandable as the taking of snuff. His discipline set a limit just when need arose.

“Nor did it ever happen that he overslept a lecturer. He would wake up of himself, just a couple of seconds before the end. How did he manage it? I could never make it out. According to my psychiatrist friend Zwetschke, the lecturers themselves must have warned him by speaking more loudly, with greater verve, as they were coming to a close. I didn’t accept that explanation. The delicate final lines of lyric verses, their sweetly allusive dying fall, had just as stimulating an effect on him as the stirring spirit of science and literature, and on all occasions he was alert, on watch in his lookout post, like one who had long been awake, and he would rise to his feet and with enviable knowledge of the subject express thanks in well-rounded sentences, as was his presidential right and duty, for the ‘elevated, thought-provoking, and still entertaining exposition’ or ‘brilliant, high-minded, and yet moving poetry.’

“Zwetschke observed that he slept according to types of subject. He said that he slept most soundly during philosophical discourses and most superficially during lyric poetry. It was his considered opinion that the president relied on his great experience and adjusted his sleep to match the characteristics of each category. That explanation I couldn’t accept either. I rather inclined to the thesis which several experts have recently upheld, that in the depths of our consciousness we are constantly aware of the passage of time while we sleep, and in particular follow the rotation of the earth by our ancient instincts, and this serves us as a time-measuring mechanism, so that when we really mean to wake up by a certain time we always do, and when we are to leave on a journey and set our alarm clocks for five we wake a few minutes before five. That instinct must have been at work in our president too.

“It happened — I won’t deny it — that now and then even he made mistakes in this and that, unimportant things. After all, extraordinary spirit and peerless intellect that he was, he was only human. He only made two mistakes. The privy councillor Dr. Max Reindfleisch was reading an excerpt from his historical novel in verse about Friedrich Barbarossa. He had not been reading for ten minutes when the president opened his eyes. This gave rise to a general sensation and consternation. The audience began to whisper. Some stood up to get a better look. He himself was horrified too. The suspicion flashed through his soul that perhaps his dozing had been noticed, and he was a little embarrassed. At that he deceived the audience and perpetrated a devilish trick. He decided to close his eyes again straightaway, and also to open them again several times one after another, indicating thereby that he had been keeping his eyes closed deliberately because that way he could pay better attention. And he shut his eyes. But he didn’t open them again. His eyelids were instantly gummed together by the sweet, warm honey of sleep and his head set off on its usual flight path toward the table and back, and thus he wavered to and fro until Privy Councillor Dr. Max Reindfleisch had finished the informative and learned excerpt from his novel.

“What was the second occasion? Oh, yes. The second was even more startling. You need to know that in that cultural organization a lecture would last at least an hour and a half. Professor Dr. Blutholz, privy councillor and well-known philosopher, was lecturing on his favorite topic, a very popular one in Germany, On the First-Order Metaphysical Roots of the Intelligible World and Their Four Metaphysical Determinants; he was warming a little to his excitingly attractive exposition and had been speaking for two whole hours without pause. At that point the president opened his misty eyes. Like a man rising from the deepest metaphysical depths, he didn’t know where he was, didn’t know whether the concluding speech came next, and just looked at the lecturer and the audience like visions in a nightmare. Fortunately, however, Professor Dr. Blutholz announced at that moment that after that brief introduction he would at last move on to his subject proper. That sentence had the effect on the president of the chloroform that merciful anesthetists promptly drip onto the mask of the restlessly moaning patient, strapped down on the operating table, who regains consciousness in the course of the operation. He too instantly subsided, he too ‘moved on to his subject proper’: he slept on, nice and evenly.

“What did he dream of at such times? On this point opinions differed. The German women, who — as I’ve hinted — are sensitive and romantic, said that in his dreams he obviously saw little roe deer, and ran about in the meadows of his long-past childhood, butterfly net in hand. Zwetschke, who was interested in psychoanalysis at the time, considered it likely that the president was weaving a dream which would advance his sleeping, and as his sole desire was to sleep, according to him the dream could only reflect the fulfilment of that desire in alluring little images: the lecturer would crash down from the rostrum, split his skull, and die horribly, the audience would rush upon one another in blind panic, a war of extermination would break out among them, they would shriek and die, covered in blood, the chandeliers would go out, darkness would enfold it all, the walls of the Germania would collapse, and the president would finally close the session and go home to sleep in his feather bed. In principle I agreed with this interpretation. The only thing that hurt me was that the distinguished psychiatrist had such a role in mind for the president, whom I knew to be one of the gentlest men in the world. I suggested that even in his dream he would refrain from thoughts of murder and violence. I put it to my friend that the president’s interest was not in the closing of the session but its continuation. I rather imagined, therefore, that in his dream the president constantly saw Count Leo Tolstoy visiting his humble Darmstadt society, there to read the three fat volumes of War and Peace from beginning to end, which in the first place would be a great honor to German culture, and second would guarantee the president of the Germania at least a week of uninterrupted slumber. To this day I feel proud that the excellent Zwetschke accepted my explanation.

“I repeat, the president was a kindly man, noble, tolerant, and broad-minded. It was because of his broad-mindedness that he slept. What else could he have done? I, a young man of twenty, fit as a fiddle, with nerves of steel, who had listened only for nine months, day after day, to those lectures which he as president must have listened to for fifty-seven years, I went to pieces and developed alarming symptoms. As a result of the nauseating stupidity and eccentric bragging generally called lyric poetry, the dull and insipid nonsense which generally passed for science, that man-pleasing hairsplitting, that hodgepodge of theories generally called politics, one night in my student room I suffered a fit of rage, suddenly began to go crosseyed and shout, and bellowed at the top of my voice for two hours until the faithful Zwetschke hurried to my bedside and administered scopolamine, which — as you will know — is usually used to calm raving lunatics. Imagine what would happen to that respectable president, who truly deserved a better fate, if he had not discovered in early life the sole solution, and his healthy spirit had not taken the stand that it had against injury. It must have been simply his instinct for self-preservation that suggested it to him. By it, however, he saved not only himself but also culture, science, and literature too, saved his nation, and also humanity as it strove toward progress.

“Yes, his sleep was the very fulfillment of national and human obligation. As he slept objectively, impartially, apolitically and without bias, to left and right equally, toward men as toward women, toward Christians and Jews alike, in brief, as he slept without regard to distinctions of age, sex, or religion, it appeared that he closed his eyes to all human failings, and not only did it ‘appear,’ but it was in fact so. Believe me, that sleep was veritable approval. The sleeper nods, thereby approving everything. I’ll venture to state that at times in the honorable paneled lecture hall of the Germania, even the most forbearing member of the audience wished the lecturer to Hell, wished that he might have a seizure, that cancer of the tongue might render him dumb, distend his revolting mouth — and only one single person showed himself at all times tolerant toward him, the president, who was always asleep. Like outspread angelic wings, his sleep fluttered above millions upon millions of foolishnesses and vanities of the human spirit, above sterile ambition and paltry attention-seeking, the St. Vitus’ dance of envy and meanness, all the nastiness and futility that is public life, science, and literature. Qui tacet consentire videtur.^* He that is silent agrees to everything. But is there so true an agreement as sleep? His sleep was a bulwark against vandalism, it was reassurance, the saving of society; it was understanding itself, forgiveness itself.

“My friends, a sleeper is always understanding and forgiving. A sleeper can never be hostile to us. The moment he goes to sleep he turns his back on the world, and all hatred, all wickedness cease to be as far as he is concerned, as they cease for the dead. The French have a saying, ‘To go away is to die a little.’ That I’ve never believed, because I love traveling, and every time that I get on a train I feel revitalized. To sleep, however, is certainly to die a little, and not a little but a lot, as much as departing life (which, when all’s said and done, is nothing more than awareness of the self), as much as dying completely for a short time. This is precisely why the person who is asleep leaves the field, turns his will — with its sharp, damaging point — inward, and behaves toward us with the indifference of one who began long ago to decay. Who wants a greater benevolence on this earth? I have always insisted on respect for those who are asleep, and will not allow them to be disturbed in my presence. ‘Nothing but good of the sleeper’ has been my slogan. Frankly, I don’t understand why we don’t occasionally celebrate sleepers, why we don’t toss onto their beds at least a flower, why we don’t organize a minor, heartwarming wake after they go off, because we are for a while free of their often burdensome, often dull company, and why, when they wake, we don’t play children’s toy trumpets and so proclaim our daily resurrection. That’s the least they deserve.

“He would have deserved more, much more. Most of humanity, however, are incorrigible blockheads, full of fussy prejudice and false modesty. After a while even he was attacked. It was mainly the poets who plotted against him, those cantankerous crackpots who pretend to be apostles, but if two get together they flay the hide off a third; the poets, who sing of purity but avoid even the vicinity of the bathroom; the poets, who beg everyone, even beggars, at street-corners for just a little fame, just a little affection, just a little statue, beg mortals for immortality; those light-minded, jealous, wan exhibitionists who will sell their souls for a rhyme or an epithet, set out their innermost secrets for sale, turn to profit the deaths of their fathers, mothers, and children and in later years, in the ‘night of inspiration,’ dig up their graves, open their coffins, and rummage for ‘experiences’ by the dark lantern of vanity like grave robbers after gold teeth and jewels, then confess and snivel, those necrophiles, those fishwives. Forgive me, but I loathe them. There in Darmstadt, in my youth, I came to loathe them. They couldn’t abide that elevated president. And they had reason. They, who in their nauseating verse described themselves, without any basis, as ‘knights of dreams’ and ‘dreamers of dreams,’ envied that noble old man who was a dreamer in the strict sense of the word. They played interminable tasteless, malicious jokes on him. They said that after all those years he was satisfying his need for sleep in front of the biggest audience that he could find, like a hunger artist starving in an officially sealed glass cage in the public view. They said that he never took off his pince-nez during sessions just so as to be able to see the images more clearly in his dreams, because he was so shortsighted that he wouldn’t even be able to see dream images and would wake up out of boredom. They said that since he’d been active in the sphere of public life, that fine proverb ‘Life is a brief dream’ had lost its meaning, because life now seemed a very long dream. I clasped my hands together and begged them for mercy and clemency. I emphasized that even the most outstanding persons have some little shortcoming which we must disregard because of their other qualities. I quoted Horace at them too. Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.^* To which they replied that that was quite right, but the president didn’t just nod but slept all the time, and was incapable of anything else.

“I struggled desperately. The rising flood, however, soon threatened to cover everything. Sometimes the poets’ anger would appear publicly in a humorous publication or in a hostile article. They hated him. What was the reason? Well, probably their pompous-mawkish outlook. The very ones who deliberately lived their lives on a dunghill just so a few colorful toadstools should grow there could not endure that purity, that mighty, peerless quality of leadership, that irreproachable genius. While he was peacefully asleep in the presidential chair they saw all kinds of nightmares — without reason, naturally, because their view was always distorted, their judgment always clouded. They thought of the helmsman of a ship, overcome by sleep at the wheel while the ship ran onto an iceberg. They thought of the railwayman snoring beside the switch box while behind his back the skeleton grinned as it directed the train to thunder to its fate on the wrong track. What false perceptions, what lame comparisons. The ship and the train must of course be taken care of. They are physical entities. Harm could result if they collided with others. But I ask you, what harm could come to science and literature? I ask you, whom or what did that harmless, honorable president injure by sleeping, worn out by his manifold activities? I ask you, wasn’t he rather beneficial to everything and everybody? I think I’m right.

“It has been my experience, at least, that in public life peace and harmony can be maintained only if we let things take their course and don’t interfere with the eternal laws of life. These don’t depend on our wishes, so we can do virtually nothing to alter them. The president’s high-minded sleep, overarching opposition, gave expression to this. All the disorder on this earth has arisen from the desire of some to create order, all the filth from the fact that some have swept up. Make no mistake, the real curse in this world is planning, and true happiness the lack of it, the spontaneous, the capricious. I’ll give you an example. I was the first to arrive here. For a few minutes I was all alone in the private room of the Torpedo. In came Berta, the bakery girl. I bought a császárzsemle^* from her and kissed her on the lips. A second before I had no idea that I would do that. Nor had she. So it was beautiful. Nobody had planned that kiss. If kisses are planned they turn into marriage and duties, become sour and insipid. Wars and revolutions too are planned, and that’s why they’re so dreadfully hideous and vile. A stabbing in the street, the murder of a wife or husband, the massacre of a whole family, is much more humane. Planning kills literature too — the formation of cliques, the guild system, in-house criticism which writes ‘a few warm lines’ about the in-house sacred cow. Whereas the writer that scribbles his never-to-be-published verses on an iron table by the washroom in the coffeehouse is always a saint. Examples show that those who have dragged mankind into misfortune, blood, and filth have been those who were enthusiastic about public affairs, took their mission seriously, burned the midnight oil passionately and respectably, whereas the benefactors of humanity have been those who minded their own business, shunned responsibility, took no interest, and slept. The trouble’s not that the world has been guided with too little wisdom. The trouble is that it has been guided at all.

“Don’t be surprised, my friends, at hearing such profound philosophizing from me on this occasion, because I’m much happier with frivolous talk. I learned it from the man from whom I’ve learnt more than from anyone else in my life, my loved and respected mentor and preceptor, but he never taught me anything, merely slept all the time. He was wisdom itself. Those piffling, snotty, unkempt poets, who spoke of him so disparagingly, had no idea how wise he was. What had he not seen, what did he not know! He’d seen tendencies appear and disappear without trace. He’d seen the greatest writers in Germany become the least overnight and new poets suddenly go out of fashion — for no apparent reason, in just a few minutes, while they were shaving at home, not suspecting a thing. He’d welcomed geniuses who later rotted on straw in stables, and he’d condemned and officially denounced the false doctrines of charlatans in the cultural association under his direction, then a couple of years later endorsed those doctrines in the cultural association under his direction, and consequently later even taught them at the university. He knew that everything was hopelessly relative, and that there was no reliable means of assessment. He also knew that people generally disagreed through conflicts of interest, protested solemnly against things, but then generally solemnly retracted, made peace, and that the deadly enemies of yesteryear walked arm-in-arm in the corridors of the Germania and sat whispering on velvet couches in alcoves. Once he’d discovered that, nothing surprised him again. He had a wonderful knowledge of people and life, which would always sort itself out somehow, one should just not worry about it. What else can anyone so wise do but sleep? Put your hands on your hearts and tell me, can there be a better place for sleeping than in public, on the presidential dais, on which, like a bier, candles flicker, and there is a comfortable, imposing, presidential armchair? I tell you, he did indeed sleep out of wisdom, patience, insight, mature, manly contemplation, and therefore relied on the capricious and unexpected, and permitted the ship or train of science and literature to speed freely ahead.

“Unfortunately, those poets whom I mentioned earlier were also active. Gradually the old, reliable generation died out. The privy councillors and distinguished lawyers who had declaimed regular ballads, epic poetry, and philosophical analyses went one after another beneath the weeping willows in Darmstadt cemetery. A new generation grew up who no longer respected the boundaries of art forms, and in due course forced an entry into the Germania halls. One callow youth stepped onto the dais and announced that he was going to read his synthetic-exotic novel, but this consisted of only a single word, and a tasteless, obscene word at that. Another similar wretch introduced his loose and disjointed neoclassic-metapsychic dialogues, the content of which the human mind could neither grasp nor anticipate. A futuristic prodigy extolled in his fanciful verse war, the twilight of the universe, the annihilation of the Earth, and its simultaneous reconstitution too. The president clutched his head nervously. At the ends of lines this bloodthirsty futurist either crowed or imitated the explosions of an assortment of weapons—bangbangbang, dagadagadaga and the like. At every crow the president was obliged to open his eyes as if dawn had suddenly broken. That was the first time I saw that coolheaded man aroused. He assessed those immature figures indignantly. He didn’t find fault with their literary tendency, nor yet with their views of the world. He approved them just like any other literary tendency and worldview. He merely dubbed them tactless and ill bred, and — let’s admit it — he was right.

“Such things were certainly a strain on his nerves. He often looked pale and worn out. But — as I’ve said — he wasn’t president only there. If he’d had three or four lecture sessions in a day, he was fresh again and went home as if he’d emerged from a tempering steel-bath to start work again next day with renewed vigor. Furthermore, he was never put out. He made good his deficiency anywhere. Should need arise, he could sleep anywhere at all, in the theater, during gala performances, during the noisiest revolutionary scenes, when the masses, freed from their chains, were howling and cheering freedom, equality, and fraternity, in the Opera, during the Twilight of the Gods, to the sound of kettledrums and trumpets, indeed, even when exhibitions were being opened, if for no more than a couple of minutes, in the standing position like the soldiers that were driven to death in the Russo-Japanese war. Once I saw him at a reception given by the duke of Hessen, where I’d sneaked in as the representative of a Hungarian paper. The duke came up and greeted him. He was an admirer of his. He immediately brought over his enchanting young wife, who with her bare neck and bare shoulders floated among the glittering flood of light from the chandeliers like a bittersweet swan. The Duchess took the president’s arm and got him to take her to a rococo divan embroidered with pink roses and with a gilded back. She sat him down and sat beside him. She began to chat to him. The president closed his eyes. The Duchess chattered on, laughing from time to time in her ringing contralto voice from behind her diamond-studded feather fan. Baron Wüstenfeld, who was an aristocrat and a recognized witty conversationalist, nodded. By then, however, he was asleep. The most beautiful and most décolleté young women had the same effect on that veteran philosopher as the strongest narcotic. He took every opportunity to recover from the exertions of public life, even the receptions which he likewise held as a matter of conscience at home. Many of the city’s poor also called on him because of his great influence. He received and listened to everyone. In this likewise he had his own system. The widow dressed in mourning, tear-soaked handkerchief at the ready, would plead for his support, implore him to help her, and ask his permission to state the facts of her situation. When the Baron, with a cold and gracious nod, had given his consent, the widow would excuse herself and emphasize that ‘I’ll be brief, very brief,’ and he, who knew that in all cases that meant ‘I’ll be long, very long,’ would close his eyes and then in his sleep, thanks to his tremendous experience, would nod frequently at the right places, sometimes even simulate attention, and sleep quietly for as long as was necessary, so that when he awoke, refreshed and rejuvenated, at almost the final word, he was able charmingly to reassure the grieving, prostrate widow that ‘he would do all that was possible on her behalf,’ knowing beforehand that he would do nothing. This, however, was not bad faith on his part, because the president also knew that those who were so foolish as to canvass the support of others were always doomed, under sentence of death, couldn’t be helped, weren’t even worth helping, because they were nothing but self-deceivers, so feeble that they weren’t even capable of self-deceit and went to others to deceive them instead of themselves, and that they only expected humbug, delusion, and opium, with which the president was not ungenerous. Nor were they ever disappointed. He was respected more and more, his reputation grew and grew, he was considered a charitable man, a gentleman from head to toe, and was loved everywhere.

“How much I loved him can’t be expressed in human words. I only emphasize that so that you can understand what comes next. Slowly the year went by. Summer came. Every theater, school, and cultural association closed its doors, including the Germania. No lectures were given anywhere. Lecturers rested on their laurels and read one another’s works in order to give out as their own the ideas that they found there, in brief, to gather strength. I put my knapsack on my back and went walking in the wild, romantic country around Darmstadt. One morning in July I had just set off for the Ludwigshöhe to see the view from the tower there, and was tramping briskly through the Luisenplatz with my genial fellow students, singing the Wacht am Rhein and other stirring patriotic songs, when suddenly a truly disturbing sight met my eyes. Two Red Cross nurses in uniform were leading a human wreck along the sidewalk, or rather dragging him, holding him up, like a cripple who could do nothing for himself, who lacked even the strength to walk. I won’t tell you to guess who it must have been. That’s what stupid narrators do who seem to think that their readers are equally stupid. You, quick-witted as you are, have probably guessed straightaway that it was Baron Wüstenfeld, of whom I’ve been speaking, the president, our president. I swear to you, however, that for a moment I didn’t recognize him. That otherwise robust, sprightly, resilient old man had become dreadfully emaciated, a shadow of his former self. His legs were giving way under him like the slender rods of a photographic tripod. He looked like a ghost. What more can I say? He was a pitiful sight.

“The president was suffering from insomnia. Those who are ignorant of this complaint make light of it. They think that if someone can’t sleep, let him stay awake and sooner or later he will go to sleep. The same goes for lack of appetite too. If anyone has no appetite, let him not eat and he’s sure to become hungry. The only thing is, both conditions can have a fatal outcome. Such was the president’s malady. For weeks he’d been fidgeting in fevered wakefulness, tossing and turning on his pillows without sleep ever coming to his eyes. And so German medicine was confronted with a serious, incomparably awkward case and for the time being could do nothing about it.

“As you can imagine, all the doctors in Darmstadt and Germany flocked to the patient’s bedside. Dr. Weyprecht, the celebrated general practitioner, attributed the president’s insomnia simply to nervous exhaustion brought on by years of unremitting intensive work. He prescribed that for the time being he should abstain strictly from all excitement, all forms of intellectual stimulus, even forbidding him to read the papers, and recommended that he should relax, listen to cheerful music, take a longish drive every day in his four-horse carriage, and for seven minutes daily — and no longer — take a little stroll in Luisenplatz, near his mansion, on the arms of those scientifically trained and absolutely reliable nurses in whose company I saw him that July day. Professor Dr. Finger, lecturer on gastroenterology at Heidelburg University, prescribed a diet of raw food — rye bread, fruit, and yogurt — with once a day (at seven in the morning) a gentle purgative and once a day (at seven in the evening) an infusion of camomile at 90 degrees, flavored with a couple of drops of lemon juice. Professor Dr. Gersfeld — the famous Gersfeld, who was summoned by telegram from Berlin University — spent several days examining the patient and only then reached a decision and made a statement. He ordered warm hip baths, which he prepared himself in the presence of the nurses. These had to be gradually cooled, then heated again, then cooled once more, but this time suddenly. Meanwhile a cold compress was applied to the head and changed every three minutes. The patient performed gentle exercises before retiring, and as soon as he was in bed a modern head-cooler of German manufacture was put on him, in which cool water ran through tubes, pleasantly chilling the bones of the skull and the agitated brain. After explaining these operations in great detail several times and causing the nurses to repeat them, the professor returned calmly to Berlin, but the patient still got no sleep. Dr. H. L. Schmidt, who was a neurologist, tried with narcotics — sodium bromide, veronal, chloral hydrate, and trianol, at first in small doses, later huge ones — but change the drugs and mix them though he might, he achieved no result. Dr. Zwiedineck, Dr. Reichensberg, and Dr. Wittingen, Jr., all three neurologists of high renown, made some use of psychoanalysis, likewise with no effect. The president became weaker and weaker. By now it was whispered in Darmstadt that the doctors had given up.

“Imagine my condition on hearing this news. I couldn’t allow that irreplaceable treasure, that benefactor of humanity, to be lost. One day I called on him at his luxurious palace. When I stepped into the huge bedroom, which was completely darkened except for a single green electric light, I glanced at the president and my heart sank. There he lay in the bed, propped up on pillows piled high, his head clamped in the cooling helmet, like the wounded soldier of science and literature. I caught a heavy scent of poppy seed, wafted toward him by an automatic electric apparatus at his bedside. Facing the bed — clearly on medical instructions — could be seen the colored image of a magic lantern projected on a screen, a calm lake surface, for the purpose of evoking sleep, the redeemer, long desired in vain. All the time, however, the president was trying to jump out of bed. Two nurses were holding his hands. His face was as white as chalk.

“He was pleased to see me, for he knew me and once or twice had actually spoken to me after lectures — an unforgettable distinction for me. Now his deathly pale hand took mine and squeezed my fingers nervously. I recommended him to call in my young friend Zwetschke, who had opened his practice only recently but whom I knew to be a clever man and trusted implicitly. His apathetic entourage — an old lady, a retired colonel, and a legal adviser — seized upon my proposal. They sent for him, and a few minutes later he appeared.

“First of all Zwetschke opened the shutters and turned out the electric light and the magic lantern. The light of noon flooded the bedroom. He sat down at the patient’s bedside and smiled at him. He didn’t examine him. Like me, he knew him very well from the Germania lecture sessions. He didn’t sound his chest, didn’t look studiously at his pupils or take his pulse, nor tap his knee with the little steel hammer that he had. He took the ridiculous cooling gadget off his head and advised him not to worry about a thing, to go on living as before, not to spare himself at all. He would have thought it best if he could call an extraordinary session at once, or a special committee, but because of the summer recess that was not possible. Zwetschke shook his head and bit his lip. Suddenly he got up. He told me to get the president dressed, then turned on his heel and on the way out whispered to me to stay with him.

“We had scarcely given him his frock coat, his black cravat, and his sharply creased trousers when from outside, from the next room, from behind the closed double door, we heard Zwetschke’s distinctive voice. He was giving orders in a somewhat Prussian tone: left, right, forward, forward. We all listened in astonishment. Even the president himself raised his gray head inquisitively. The double door of the bedroom opened. Then we saw six footmen, under the personal supervision of Zwetschke, slowly but surely bringing in the familiar massive oak table from the Germania. Another servant carried the presidential chair. Zwetschke watched the scene without saying a word. He gave a nod of approval. From his pocket he took the presidential bell and placed it on the table. At that he led the president to the table with infinite tact and delicacy, sat him in the chair, and asked him to ring and open the session. The president rang. ‘I declare the session open,’ he said. And then there took place the miracle which medical science and anxious public opinion had been awaiting in vain for a month: the president’s eyelids closed and he sank into a deep, healthy sleep.

“My friend and I stood side by side in excitement and watched — he with the understanding of the expert, I with only the curiosity of the writer. Zwetschke took out his pocket watch, started the timer, and measured his rate of respiration. He glanced at me triumphantly. The chest was rising and falling rhythmically, the pale face was slowly gaining color, filling out almost visibly. The organs that had so long been driven were at rest. Blessed Mother Nature herself had taken over the cure. The president was now asleep, as he could only be in the lecture hall, within a framework of decorum and etiquette. His head sank down and rose again. That circumstance increased my admiration for him even more, because it indicated that he behaved at home as elsewhere, that he was a real gentleman. He slept for twelve hours without a break. Zwetschke, who didn’t leave his side for a moment, even taking his lunch and dinner beside him, was surprised to see as midnight approached that the president picked up the bell, shook it, and declared ‘the session is closed,’ which meant that he’d had his sleep out, but also that we’d saved his life.

“The president wouldn’t even allow Zwetschke to leave the mansion. He opened a separate wing for him, and he had to stay with him for a fortnight until he was back on his feet. Actually, the matter was hardly any trouble. If the president wanted to sleep — always fully dressed and buttoned up to the chin — he would sit in the presidential chair, ring the bell, and when he woke up ring it again. He only made use of this remarkably simple treatment (which the German medical professional journals didn’t record) until the start of the season. Then, once the lectures had begun again, there was no need of it. He didn’t, however, forget Zwetschke. He appointed him his doctor, and as Zwetschke had excellent connections despite his youth — he was still only just twenty-six — he was appointed doctor in charge of the nervous and mental department of the local hospital, and six months later was awarded the title of privy councillor.

“So that was my German adventure. The bill, please. Dinner, Bull’s Blood, four coffees, twenty-five Mirjáms. Goodness me. I’ve been talking all this time. I’ve only just realized. Look, dawn’s breaking in the January mist on the streets of Pest and smiling in at the window of the Torpedo. Dawn, rosy-fingered with dirty nails. Well, let’s go and get some sleep. Or are you staying? In that case I’ll have another coffee and tell you how it ended. My only entertainment these days is the sound of my own voice.

“I didn’t hear anything about the president for a long time. War broke out, and I lost touch with everyone. Last year I was traveling in Germany. By a roundabout route I called at Darmstadt. I was changing trains and went to see Zwetschke. Oh, it was strange. I found my old friend there in the nervous and mental department, where I’d left him fifteen years before. He came to meet me in his white coat and embraced me. He was wearing a pince-nez with ivory frames and he’d acquired a beer belly, like the rest of the German scientists whom we’d made fun of in the old days. I just stared at him. He no longer had the tempestuous, impudent chuckle of his young days. Instead, however, he laughed all the time, slowly and prolongedly. Do you know the sort of people who laugh after every sentence, whether they’ve got something happy to tell us or something sad? That’s how he told me that he’d got married — hahaha — had a little girl — hahaha — then she’d died at the age of four from meningitis — hahaha. I wasn’t shocked at this. I knew that all psychiatrists had their personal peculiarities.

“He kept perfect order in the department. The corridors gleamed, as did the windows and the floors. Every spittoon was in place. The nurses were more frightened of him than of the raving lunatics. He had prepared demonstrations, charts, illustrative graphs. He was engaged in the study of brain tissue. In the laboratory diseased brains floated in formaldehyde, and he cut them with a machine like a bacon slicer, but much finer, into slices no thicker than skin, and from those he tried to make out the secret of the human soul and intellect. He took me round the department. Such a thing was not new to me. I’ve been irresistibly drawn to such places since my childhood. At all points on the earth mental departments are uniform, like parliaments. It seems that in all peoples of every clime, nature wants to pass the same message through the medium of mental disorder. The female ward dances and shrieks, the male ward is sunk in gloomy and meaningful cares. Outside in the garden, the idiots daydreamed beneath the trees, deep in their infantile foolishness. A stone mason’s assistant blew his nose like a trumpet day and night, because his body was full of air, but his efforts — such was his boast — were having good results. Seventeen years previously, when he’d been admitted, the air went up as far as his forehead, but now it had gone down to the level of his chest. We worked out together that if, in the meantime, no untoward event interfered with his activity, he would be completely free of air by the time he was seventy. Even there everyone has his occupation and amusement.

“I was at first intrigued by the sharp contrast between two groups which represent the whole of mankind. Paranoiacs are cheeky, impudent, prone to exaggeration, suspicious and suspecting, dissatisfied, and eager to act, like utopian politicians. They watched me from corners, their eyes dark slits, and I could feel that they had their doubts about me. They would have been ready to haul me off to the gallows at a moment’s notice in the interest of the well-being of society. They couldn’t abide themselves, and their spirits were bursting to get out into the world, and they wanted to split in two. Schizophrenics are strange, original, surprising, self-accusing, incalculable, and unknowable, like born writers. Their speech is full of allusions that we can’t understand. For me, the latter are the more agreeable. Two young men were standing like statues at the corner of a grassy bank, rigid. A third young man, the chalk-white-faced son of a Würzburg banker, was walking round and round, and every time he passed in front of me he greeted me with extraordinary civility, and I returned the greeting with similar respect. However, as he was passing me for the eighth time and I was returning his greeting again, he suddenly spat in my face — which pleased me immensely, as it verified and confirmed the opinion that I had long held of that disorder.

“The mentally ill didn’t interest Zwetschke. He said, with his strangely prolonged, slow laugh, that they were completely mad, not even worth bothering with, only their brain sections after dissection were of interest. He invited me to tea. He introduced me to his wife, a blonde, Madonna-like woman who wore her hair drawn tightly back from her prominent forehead, shook hands with me in silence, offered me things in silence, and didn’t say a single word the whole time. We ate liver pâté and drank beer. Finally I discovered what had become of the president. He’d survived everybody, even the war and the revolution. Generations had perished around him; futurists, expressionists, simultanists, neoclassicists, and constructivists alike had fallen on the battlefield or been ruined, but he had gone on working. He had the stamina of the sleeper. When he was ending his ninetieth year, he undertook even more presidencies on the advice of his general practitioner. In his final years he was presiding in seventeen places, uninterruptedly from morning to night. He’d died the previous winter at the age of ninety-nine. Poor fellow, he’d failed to see his century.

“I took leave of my friend to make a pilgrimage to his grave, there to discharge a debt of gratitude and piety. Zwetschke embraced me with a laugh. He stuffed a wrapped-up book into my raincoat pocket and commented that I would possibly need it. I took a car to the cemetery, leaving the company of the mad for that of the dead. I found the president’s grave right away. He lay in a grim family crypt, decorated with his family arms. On a marble column there was a single sentence: Sleep in peace. That man, whom in life nobody had dared to address by the familiar second person singular, was now thus unilaterally ordered about by the impudent living. ‘Be so good as to sleep in peace,’ I whispered with filial reverence, and thought with feeling of his memory and the vanished years of my youth. I brushed a tear from my eye.

“Sadly, I’d come empty-handed, in a great hurry, and hadn’t brought him so much as a single flower. But perhaps flowers would have been out of place on that severe tomb. In annoyance I began to search my pockets. I came across the book which Zwetschke had given me for the journey and unwrapped it. It was Klopstock’s Messiah,^* that heroic poem in hexameters which — in the unanimous opinion of generations — is the dullest book in the world, so dull that nobody’s ever read it all, neither those who have praised it nor those who have belittled it. I’ve heard it said that Klopstock himself couldn’t read it, only write it. I opened the book and leafed pensively though it. What part should I read? It didn’t matter. Since I was aware that the departed had valued repose most highly when he’d been alive, and that it must have been his wish, as it is everyone’s, to sleep in peace when dead, I began to read the first canto in a monotone. The effect was astounding. A convolvulus on a neighboring tomb quivered and closed its petals as if night were descending upon it. A beetle plopped onto its back in the dust and stayed there, hypnotized. A butterfly which had been circling above the crypt fell from the air onto the stone, folded its wings, and went to sleep. I had the feeling that the hexameters were piercing the granite of the crypt, stealing their way into the mortal remains of the departed, and that his sleep in the grave — that eternal slumber — was all the deeper for them.

I awoke to feel somebody shaking me by both shoulders. It was my watchful taxi driver, whom I’d left outside at the cemetery gate. About halfway through the first canto, sleep had overcome me too. Quickly I rushed to the car. We made a frantic dash for the station. I only just had time to jump, at the very last minute, into the D-train, by then already moving, which raced with me — sparks and steam and much whistling — at sixty miles an hour toward Berlin.”

* A dry red Hungarian wine, by law a blend of at least three grapes.

* Attributed to Pope Boniface VIII.

* Sometimes even the worthy Homer nods. Horace, Ars Poetica 359

* A flattish roll, marked on the top with a radial pattern of grooves.

* Friederich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803), regarded in his time as a great religious poet, began The Messiah in 1745, completing it in 1773. Much influenced by Virgil and Milton, his odes and lyric verse helped inaugurate the golden age of German literature.