A Book of Memories (18 page)

Thea finally looked at me.

She probably couldn't see me, I sat too far away in the hall, and her glance could not easily pass over the sharp line separating light and darkness there, but the vague feeling that somebody was sitting calmly, watching her, and not without empathy, was evidently enough for her to retreat from unpleasant, all-too-human openness into the more secure role of the actress; anyway, I had the feeling that my sheer presence was of some help; at almost the same moment, a bit later, Langerhans must also have noticed her poignant confusion, and rather gently, but with the professional aloofness of a man who knows that the psychological maintenance of his actors is part of his job, he placed his hand on her shoulder, squeezed it encouragingly, helped her recovery along; and Thea, sensing the warmth of a strange body, suddenly tipped her head sideways without otherwise altering her position in the slightest, touching the hand with her face and locking it between her face and shoulder.

And they stayed that way, their images reflected on the huge, slightly raised glass panel covering the walls of the rehearsal hall.

Hübchen was still kneeling, with the makeup man bent over him trying to remove his hump; Langerhans was watching his actress's face; and Thea, still clutching the lowered sword, rested her head on her director's hand.

The tableau-like scene seemed infinitely tender, but the greenishly sparkling glass backdrop made it look stiff and cold.

It was late afternoon by now, only a few of us were left, and it was so quiet you could hear the hum of the radiators and the gently tapping rain on the roof.

"There's nothing wrong with my seeing his hump," Thea now said; although there was a cooing tone in her voice as she tried to match her emotions to his touch, Langerhans wasn't going to be taken in so easily and cheaply; he withdrew his hand with undignified haste and blushed, as he always did when contradicted: "It seems you still don't understand your own situation, Thea," he said quietly, his voice devoid of emotions not relevant to the subject at hand (it was this voice that made him so detestable and unapproachable): "You shouldn't worry about yourself so much, you know; after all, what can happen? Nothing. Go ahead, don't be afraid to be a little more vulgar, it's okay, we're talking business here, plain and simple. You'll simply sell your body, that crack between your legs, to be exact, because that's all you've got left, that slit. Your life has finally revealed its true nature to you. That's all there is, that hole, that body, and nothing else. He's killed your husband. So what? He's killed your father-in-law. Big deal. He's also killed your father, but that doesn't matter either, because you're scared, because you're all alone. They're all dead, but you're alive, and when he tears off his shirt you can see he's quite attractive. You don't even want to see his hump. So his offer sounds like a good deal all around. Be a slut, my dear, and don't try to be his mother."

"But even a slut could be a mother, have you ever thought of that?" Thea said, even more quietly.

"Go ahead, catch your breath. Take your time."

"You're being very nice."

"No, I'm just trying to understand you."

"But what should I do with all that phlegm? while I'm doing all that cursing it just builds up, almost choking me. What should I do? I think I should be spitting at that point. It was dumb to cut that. I'll choke on it, I'm telling you. What should I do?"

"Swallow it."

"I can't, I just can't."

"You can't spit on the glass, if that's what you had in mind."

Thea shrugged her shoulders. "You still need me?"

"We'll take a short break," Langerhans said.

I got up from the chair on which I had been comfortably swinging back and forth; Thea was heading toward us.

This was the dull part of the day, as always happened when rehearsals stretched into the late afternoon: even if the rehearsal hall's tall, narrow, highly placed windows had not been covered with black curtains, anyone interested in the outside world and looking out through the heavily barred windows would see little besides a few slender chimneys rising above grim walls, darkening in the rapidly descending twilight, and blackened roof tiles across the way, and a sky that more often than not was depressingly, monotonously gray; still, sometimes I'd stand by those curtains for a while, usually after politely offering my chair to Thea, who, when not onstage, liked to sit next to Frau Kühnert at the little table near the edge of the director's platform; my small courtesy toward Thea came in handy because around that time of the day, as late afternoon was turning into evening, insecurity and anxiety took hold of me, nearly suffocated me; we'd call it simple anxiety, I suppose, since I really had nothing to do here, I was only an observer, which after a while proved to be not only exhausting but downright unhealthy; I just had to get up and look for something to do; but the view from the window didn't relieve my anxiety, if only because I went on being an observer
—though not of gestures, faces, and accents, which in the artificial light of the cavernous hall had become all too familiar, along with the personal, often secret motives animating them; what I saw from the window, from behind crude iron bars, was a different set of relationships, between walls, roofs, and the sky, and I had nothing to do with them either, except as an observer, yet even here I could see some subtle changes: no matter how relentlessly gray the sky may have appeared, the various shades of light had enough play to emphasize certain details over others, so that the same view in fact was constantly changing, looked new and different; and similarly, under the even glare of the rehearsal lights there were enough surprises to make transparently familiar gestures and responses seem startlingly fresh; in my better moments I could consider myself rich in the accumulated knowledge of these details and the relationships among them, but I had to forgo the natural desire to contribute actively, to participate; my mind may have been producing some very decent ideas, but I had no clearly defined role, no real niche, and this proved to be a fundamental handicap here, where one's place in the strict hierarchy was determined by the role one played, where only rank could give validity and weight to one's observations; in a certain sense I was tolerated only in the chair I occupied, and it wasn't a permanent chair either but an extra one put in for me, temporarily; I was nothing more than an "interested Hungarian," as somebody once said, standing right behind me, not at all concerned that I might overhear this odd characterization, which, come to think of it, wasn't offensive, given its factual correctness, perhaps more accurate than the person who spoke it might have thought; anyway, my situation was not so unusual or unfamiliar; I could have found it highly symbolic that I was deprived of a chance to interfere with the course of events, made a silent witness, an observer condemned to inaction who also had to bear, all by himself, the consequences of his silence and his helplessness, without the chance to blow off steam; I was indeed a Hungarian, in this sense very much a Hungarian: no wonder Frau Kühnert's pleasant attentiveness and Thea's flattering interest were so gratifying.

Thea stopped in front of us, and by now I was holding the back of the chair, ready to give her my seat; there was something characteristically exaggerated in my politeness
—I shouldn't have been so afraid of losing that modicum of goodwill she had shown me—but she wasn't ready to sit down yet, she didn't even step up on the platform as she usually did but, rather, she slid her two elbows to the table and without so much as casting a glance at us leaned her chin on its edge, like a child—-she had to get on her toes to do this—and then, resting her head on her arms, slowly closed her eyes.

"What a disgusting piddling around all this is," she said softly, without batting her eyelids; she was perfectly aware that her little performance, for all its hamming, was impressive enough to hold us captive; after all, a truly great actress was doing the hamming, by way of relaxing, and it seemed to betray real emotion. Frau Kühnert did not respond, let her go on, and I didn't start for the window, as was my custom, to disappear behind the black curtains, I was curious; she paused effectively, making us wait, then let out a small sigh, giving us time to watch her shoulders gently rise and fall; with her eyes still closed, she lowered her voice even more, making herself barely audible and, as someone yielding to exhaustion but unable to stop the flow of thoughts, continued, savoring her words: "He'll ruin me, he has ruined me, with this disgusting fussing and piddling."

By now the silence in the rehearsal hall was so deep you could hear not only the rain pattering on the roof and the radiators humming but Frau Kühnert closing her prompt book with a real thump; but she must have meant this rather abrupt gesture as only a prelude to another, more sensible move, because it made as little sense to close the prompt book as it did to leave it open: Frau Kühnert came to the first rehearsal with the full play already memorized, as the actors did, and from then on her only job was to enter the various changes in the text, erase them if necessary, re-enter the final version in ink, and make sure the changes were clearly marked in all copies of the script, and to be on the safe side, she had to sit there with the thick master copy, saving her attention and voice for the moments when someone unexpectedly got stuck, when she would feed them their cues with the eagerness of a good student; this happened very seldom, of course, so now, like one who has finally found real work for which she feels inner motivation, she rested her veiny, masculine hand on the closed book a second, and then gently yet eagerly slid the hand onto Thea's head.

"Come, darling, sit down here, rest a little," she whispered, and though her words were loud enough to be heard, people were too tired to turn around and give her a dirty look.

"He wore me out completely."

"Come, our young friend here will give you his seat."

They had their game down pat; Thea still didn't budge; her face, like an open landscape anyone could freely admire, was relaxed, absorbed in itself.

"You ought to give that boy a ring, Sieglinde; why don't you call him for me?" she continued in the same, softer than whispering voice: "Please. The way I feel, I don't think I have the strength to go home. The thought that my old man's been piddling around all day, just the thought of that makes me sick. How I'd like to enjoy myself for a change! Maybe we could go someplace together, I've no idea where. Someplace. And you could call the boy for me, right? Will you call him?"

She seemed to be playing at someone talking in her sleep, maybe overdoing her part a bit in the game; because she had to get Frau Kühnert to carry out a most unpleasant task, she almost went too far.

"I don't dare call him, because the other day he told me not to. He told me please to stop calling him. Not very polite, is he? But if you call him it's different, you might be able to soften him a little. Would you do that for me? It wouldn't take much, just a little buttering up," she said, and fell silent as though expecting a reply; but before Frau Kühnert had a chance to answer, Thea's unpainted lips began moving again: "I'd love to buy my old man a great big garden, and I shall, too, once I have lots of money, because it must be awful for him to sit in that horrible flat all day, just awful
—for me it's all right, except right now I don't feel like going home—but for him it must be depressing as hell, he ends up smelling bad after piddling about all day; I mean, imagine, that's all he does all day, sits down, gets up, lies down, sits down again, and that's how he spends his whole life; if he had a garden, he could at least move around while doing nothing; shouldn't I buy him a garden? will you call that boy?"

Our Afternoon Walk Continued

But after so many digressions, let's return to that afternoon walk
—we'll have enough time to deal with what is yet to happen, for it's the past we so often forget, and so quickly, too; let's go back to where we left off, to the moment when, having concluded the fresh-air cure in rather dramatic circumstances, we started on the straight road leading to the station, walking under the giant plane trees.

Here we immediately reached the peak of sensory delights, the gayest hour of the promenade; the trees' long shadows fluttered in the gentle sea breeze, which also carried the soft music of the dance band set up in the open lobby, now bringing the strains closer in unpredictable waves, now turning them into garbled snatches and scattering them into the distance; carriages were rolling toward the railroad station to pick up new arrivals and one could already hear the puffing, whistling locomotive; riders were trotting, alone and in groups, down the bridle path, switching to brisker gallops as they rounded the tidy stationhouse, only to be swallowed up by the dark and dense beech forest whose very name, the Great Wilderness, had a quaint archaic flavor; and the strollers! at this hour everyone whose cure did not call for bed rest was on his feet and out here, was expected to be here and to cover this short distance on foot, to and fro, stopping along the way for a brief chat or an exchange of pleasantries; if one walked with someone more serious or with a more interesting topic of conversation, the distance could be covered more than once and away from the general traffic, but one didn't tarry too long with any one partner, for that might he taken for unseemly eagerness, and here everyone was watching everyone else; one had to be careful that the casual informality
—the robust bursts of laughter, the abrupt darkening of brows, the waving of hats, kissing of hands, the knowing chuckles, trembling nods, and raised eyebrows—an informality full of resentments and petty jealousies, naturally, should not violate the familiar conventions and should seem spontaneous, for all its glib artificiality; young boys and girls, more or less my age, trundled colored hoops along the road's smooth marble slab, and thought they were especially adroit if the hoops did not get caught in the folds of ladies' dresses or roll under gentlemen's legs; on occasion, even Heinrich, Prince Mecklenburg, would appear, in the company of his much younger and somewhat taller Princess and surrounded by attendants, and each time he did, the promenade's unwritten rules were altered; outwardly nothing seemed to change except that the apparent naturalness appeared a shade less natural, but the experienced stroller, as soon as he reached the decorative marble urns on their slender white pedestals, could sense that the Prince would be there; the two marble urns with their velvet-smooth cascading purple petunias formed a kind of gateway to the tree-lined esplanade; yes, the Prince would definitely be present today, because backs were a bit straighter, smiles a shade friendlier, laughter and conversation so much softer; soon, though not yet, he would be seen on the arm of the Princess, in the wide semicircle of his attendants, listening attentively to someone, registering every word with grave nods of his gray head; it was improper to seek him out even with a curious glance; he had to be noticed accidentally, as it were, and with the same casual ease we also had to adjust our pace to the rhythm of his steps and seize that fraction of a second during which, without interrupting his conversation, he might honor us with his attention, so that our respectful greeting would not dissolve in the air but might be returned; we had to be alert to avoid any potentially embarrassing thing and to pay attention to proper decorum; and the strollers thronging the promenade were indeed alert, each and every one well prepared: what if the Prince should wish to exchange a few politely pleasant words with me! with my humble person, of all people! and they would watch and listen with mixed curiosity and envy, determined to learn the identity of the lucky person the Prince talked to, and later to find out what had been said.