Death in Rome (24 page)

And Laura saw the highly promising stranger, and she thought: What present will he give me? Now she was looking at the displays in the shop windows. A girl needed jewellery, a girl needed clothes, even a girl who can't do sums needs sheer stockings, and she was used to being given things every so often. Every so often she went on little fishing expeditions, in all innocence and usually in the mornings, she didn't have a steady boyfriend, and after the queers in the evenings, it was nice to spend the morning in bed with a real man, you needed that for your health, and later she would confess it in all innocence, and old men weren't bad, true, they weren't beautiful, but they weren't bad, their old men's love filled the morning, and besides they were more generous than the younger men, who wanted something for themselves, and Adolf had disappointed her, the young foreign priest had been a disappointment, they had been so happy in the night, but then the priest had run off, he had been afraid of sin, and Laura had cried and from now on she was sticking to old men; old men weren't afraid of sin and they didn't run off. It was hard to communicate with Judejahn, but she managed to make him understand that they were going to a hotel near the station.

Kürenberg had invited me to the fine restaurant on the Piazza Navona. He wanted to celebrate my prize with me. He apologized for the fact that his wife wouldn't be breakfasting with us, and I understood that Ilse Kürenberg did not want to celebrate with me, and I understood why. The restaurant was still empty at this hour, and Kürenberg ordered a selection of sea-creatures that lay on our plates like little monsters, and we washed down the monsters with a dry Chablis. It was our farewell. Kürenberg was off to Australia. He was conducting the
Ring
cycle during the Australian season. He sat opposite me cracking the shells of the monstrous sea-creatures, sucking out their savoury juices. Tomorrow he would be up in the air with his wife, eating an airline dinner, and the day after he would be eating in Australia, sampling the curious sea-creatures of the Pacific Ocean. It's a small world. Kürenberg was my friend, he was my only true friend, but I had too much respect for him to treat him like a friend, I was quiet in his company, and he perhaps thought me ungrateful. I told him I wanted to go to Africa with my prize money, and I told him about my black symphony. Kürenberg approved of the idea. He recommended a place called Mogador. The name Mogador sounded good. It sounded black. Mogador was an old Moorish fortress. But as the Moors are no longer powerful, there was no reason why I shouldn't go and live in their old fortress.

She had wondered whether he would take off his dark glasses in bed, and when he did take them off, she giggled, but then his eyes frightened her, they were bloodshot, and she shrank from his treacherous greedy expression, from his lowered bull's brow approaching her, and he asked her, 'Are you afraid?' and she didn't understand him, and she smiled, but it wasn't her wholehearted smile, and he threw her on to the bed. She hadn't thought him capable of such passion, usually the men she slept with for the presents that a girl so badly needs didn't get so excited, their bed scenes were pretty placid, but this man threw himself at her like an animal, he opened her up, he tugged at her skin, and then he took her brutally, he was brutal with her, even though she was slender and delicate. He was heavy, he lay heavy on top of her body, which was so light and so good to hold, and she thought of the queers, thought of the queers in the bar, their soft movements, their fragrant curls, their colourful shirts and jangling bracelets, and she thought, Maybe it's good to be queer, maybe I should be queer too, this is horrible, he stinks of sweat, he stinks like a ram, stinks like the dirty old billy-goat in the stall. When she was little she'd gone to the country once, she'd gone to Calabria, she had been scared and she had missed Rome, her wonderful city, and the house in Calabria had stunk, and she'd had to watch the she-goats being taken to the billy-goat, and on the wooden staircase a boy had exposed himself to her, and she'd had to touch the boy, she hated the country, and sometimes she would dream of the billy-goat, and then she wanted to touch the boy, but the boy had horns that butted her, and the horns broke off, in her dream the horns had broken off like rotten teeth. And she cried out, 'You're hurting me,' but Judejahn didn't understand as she cried out in Italian, and it didn't matter that he didn't understand because it hurt, but it hurt pleasantly, yes, now she wanted this sacrifice, the old man was satisfying her, the promising stranger was delivering in a quite unexpected way, now she pressed herself against him, heightening his excitement, streams of sweat ran down from the ram, they ran on to her body, they flowed down her breasts, and collected in the little dip of her belly, they burned a little, but it didn't hurt, and the man was angry, he whispered, 'You're a Jewess, you're a Jewess,' and she didn't understand him, but in her subconscious she understood him, when there were German soldiers in Rome the word had meant something, and she asked '
Ebreo?'
and he whispered, 'Hebrew,' and laid his hands round her neck, and she cried, '
No e poi no,
cattólico
,' and the word
cattólico
seemed further to inflame his rage and his lust, and in the end it didn't matter, rage or lust, she floated off, and he drove himself into exhaustion, gurgled and threw himself aside, drained, knocked out, half dead. She thought: It's his own fault, why did he have to show off like that, old men don't usually try so hard? But soon she was smiling again, and she stroked the sweaty hair on his chest because he had tried so hard; she was grateful to him for having tried so hard; she was grateful to him because he had given her pleasure and because he had satisfied her. She went on stroking him for a while. She felt his heart beating; it was a valiant heart, exhausting itself for her woman's pleasure. She got up and went over to the basin to wash.

Judejahn heard the water splash, and he sat up in bed. The red mists were around him again. He saw Laura standing naked in the red mist, and the black basin of the wash-stand was the black ditch into which the executed victims fell. The Jewess had to be liquidated. The Führer had been betrayed. Not enough people had been liquidated. He staggered into his clothes. She asked: 'Don't you want to wash?' But he didn't hear her. He wouldn't have understood her, anyway. In his trouser pocket was Austerlitz's pistol and silencer.

Now the pistol would decide everything. He would clean up. The pistol would restore order. He just needed some air first, he was panting and trembling too much. He staggered over to the window, pulled it open, and leaned down over the street, which was full of thick red mist. The street was a canyon, and at the bottom of it were automobiles squealing and clattering, making a fiendish racket and looking like creeping monsters under the red mist. But a clearing appeared in the mist directly before him, a tunnel through the fog, and there at the open French window in the large hotel opposite stood
Ilse Kürenberg,
the
Aufhäuser
girl, the Jew girl, the escapee, the woman in the theatre box, the woman he had seen naked at night in the clouds above Rome, there stood
Ilse Kürenberg
in a white dressing gown, a little back from the window, but he saw her naked, naked as she'd been in the night, naked as the women in front of the ditch, and
Judejahn
emptied the magazine of Austerlitz's pistol, he was the firing squad, he fired all the shots himself, he didn't just give the orders, orders were disregarded, he had to do his own shooting, and at the last shot,
Ilse Kürenberg
fell, and the
Führer's
command had been executed. Laura screamed, a single scream, and then a flood of Italian burst from her lips, and splashed away with the washing water in the red mist.
Judejahn
found his way to the door, and Laura wept into the bedding, she wept into the sweaty warm pillows, something terrible had happened, but she didn't know what, the man had fired a gun, he had fired out of the window—and he had given her no present. She was still naked, and she now held the pillow over her head, because her face was no longer smiling, and she wanted to choke her crying. On the rumpled bed she looked like the headless, beautiful body of the headless Aphrodite Anadyomene.

He had not seen her naked, and so the naked body did not remind Adolf of Laura, nor did he even think of Laura's body, he thought of her smile as he stood in front of the headless Aphrodite Anadyomene in the museum of Diocletian's baths, the headless Aphrodite was still holding the ends of her two plaits in her raised hands, as though trying to secure her head by her plaits, and Adolf wondered what her face had been like, and whether she might have smiled like Laura. They bewildered him. The cold marble bodies all around bewildered him. This was Siegfried's world here. A world of beautiful bodies. There was the Venus of Cirene. She was flawless. Anyone could see she was flawless. A firm, well-made body, but cold cold cold. And then the fauns and the hermaphrodites in all their physicality. They didn't rot away. They didn't turn to earth. They weren't threatened by hell. Even the head of the Sleeping Eumenide didn't speak of terrors. It told of sleep. Its story was of beauty and sleep; even the Underworld had been friendly, only Hell was something else. They had no knowledge of Hell. Was it right to threaten, to terrorize, in order to rescue the soul, and was the soul lost if one responded to beauty? Adolf sat down in the garden among the stone witnesses of antiquity. He was excluded from their society, his vows excluded him, his faith excluded him, for ever. He wept. The old statues looked on, dry-eyed.

He staggered across the square. With every step, he felt he was sinking into a bottomless pit, sliding down, for ever, he had to clutch the air in order to stay up. He knew what had happened, and he didn't know what had happened. He had fired shots. He had contributed to the final solution. He had fulfilled the Führer's orders. That was good. And now he had to hide. Final victory hadn't been secured yet. He had to go into hiding again, he had to go back to the desert, only the red mist was in the way. It was hard to find a hiding-place in all this red mist. There were some ruins. In Berlin he had hidden in the ruins. In Rome, you had to pay an entrance fee to be admitted to the ruins. Judejahn paid the entrance fee to the museum in the baths. He went though some passages, climbed a flight of stairs. There were naked figures standing in the red mist. It must be a whore-house. Or a gas chamber. That would explain the red mist. He was in a large gas chamber full of naked people who were being liquidated, in which case he had to get out of here. He wasn't supposed to be liquidated. He wasn't naked. He was the commandant. The hell hounds had turned the gas on early. What a pig's breakfast. He had to take action. Discipline must be maintained: Gallows must be erected. Judejahn reached a room that was the command post. The mist lifted. There were old mirrors here. The mirrors were blind. He stared into the blind mirrors. Was that him? He couldn't recognize himself. There was a purple face. A swollen face. It looked like the face of a boxer who had taken a lot of punishment. He had lost his dark glasses somewhere. He didn't need them any more. But then he saw a better mirror, and he recognized himself in it, he stood in front of the mosaic of an athlete, there was his face, his neck, his shoulders, it was his reflection from his prime looking back at him, he had stood in the arena, he had fought with a short sword, he had finished off a lot of adversaries. And there was Benito too. He saw the mosaic of the cat with the bird. Benito had had a lot to eat. The world wasn't such a bad place. They had done a lot of killing and eating together. They could be satisfied with themselves. Judejahn staggered into the garden. Naked women, naked Jew women were hiding behind the hedges. It wouldn't do them any good. Hedges didn't protect you against liquidation by Judejahn. He had to make his way through—and then he collapsed.

Adolf had seen him coming, with fear and trembling he had watched his approach, and then he saw him collapse, he fell down as though poleaxed, and Adolf ran to him, and the heavy body of his father lay there lifelessly. Was he dead? His face was purple. A museum attendant arrived, and he called to another attendant, and together the three of them carried Judejahn into a shed where plasterers restored the ancient plastics, and they laid him on the ground in front of a relief on a sarcophagus. The relief depicted a triumphal procession, arrogant Romans with humiliated German warriors tethered to their horses. The Roman plasterers stood around Judejahn in their white coats. One plasterer said: 'He's dead.' And another plasterer said: 'He's not dead. My father-in-law took a while to die, too.' The attendant went to telephone the first-aid post at the station. His father was not yet dead, and then the most important thing occurred to Adolf: there was Hell there was Hell there was Hell. And now there wasn't a moment to lose, he ran through the garden, he ran through the gates, he ran into the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. The German-speaking priest was still there. He was reading in his breviary. There was no one kneeling at the confessional. Stammering, Adolf asked him to give the Last Sacrament to his father who was dying, and the priest understood and made haste; he fetched the holy oil, and went with Adolf to the server, and they hurried as quickly as they decently could, and the ticket inspectors let them pass, and the attendants took off their caps, and the plasterers respectfully stepped aside. Judejahn lay there lifelessly, but he wasn't dead. Sweat and secretions dribbled out of him, preceding his dissolution. He was purging himself, cleansing himself. Purgatory is the winnowing fire. Had he reached it yet? Judejahn lay in a deep coma. No one knew what was happening to him. Was he riding to Valhalla, were devils coming for him, or was his soul jubilant because deliverance was at hand? The priest knelt down. He went on to perform the extreme unction, and grant conditional absolution as was right for one who had lost consciousness. With the oil that a bishop had blessed, the priest anointed Judejahn's eyes, his ears, his mouth and the palms of his hands. The priest prayed. He prayed: 'Through this Holy anointing and its most tender mercy, may the Lord forgive you whatever sins you have committed through your sense of sight, through your sense of hearing, of smell, of taste and touch.' Judejahn did not move. Was he not moved by the words of the priest? Judejahn never moved again. He lay there motionless, and the Roman priest commended him to God's mercy, and his son in the cassock of a Roman priest prayed for his father—two envoys from the enemy.