Death in Rome (3 page)

A large automobile, gleaming black, noiseless engine, a lacquered coffin, the windows mirroring and impenetrable, had driven up to the Pantheon. It looked like a diplomatic conveyance—maybe the ambassador from Pluto was nestling on the plump upholstery, or a delegate from Hell—and Siegfried, drinking his brandy on the piazza and dreaming, aware of some activity but nothing out of the ordinary, looked at the licence plate and had an impression of Arab script. Who was it just drawing up, a prince from the Arabian Nights, an exiled king? A dusky-faced chauffeur in military livery leapt from his seat, tore open the passenger door, and stayed in bustling close attendance on a man in a well-fitting grey suit. The suit was English flannel, and it was the work of an expensive tailor, but on the squat body of the man—thick neck, broad shoulders, high ribcage, round elastic belly like a medicine ball, stocky thighs—the suit took on a rustic, Alpine aspect. The man had cropped bristly iron-grey hair, and he wore large dark glasses that were everything other than rustic, that suggested secrecy, cunning, foreign travel, diplomatic corps or wanted by Interpol. Was this Odysseus, on a visit to the gods? No, it was not Odysseus, not the wily king of Ithaca; this man was a butcher. He came from the Underworld, carrion smells wafted round him, he himself was Death, a brutal, mean, crude and unquestioning Death. Siegfried hadn't seen his Uncle Judejahn, who had terrorized him as a child, for thirteen years. Many times Siegfried had been punished for hiding from his uncle, and the boy had come to see his Uncle Gottlieb as the embodiment of everything he most feared and hated, the personification of duress, marching, the war. Even now he sometimes imagined he could hear the scolding, forever angry voice of the man with the bull neck, but he only dimly remembered the innumerable images of the mighty and universally feared tribune—on hoardings, on classroom walls, or as a paralysing shade on cinema screens that showed the man in ostentatiously plain Party uniform and unpolished boots, with his head thrust avidly forward. Thus, Siegfried, since escaped into freedom, drinking grappa
à la
Hemingway, thinking about this square in Rome and about the music which was his personal adventure, failed to recognize Gottlieb Judejahn, it never even crossed his mind that this monster had come back from the dead and surfaced in Rome. Siegfried only observed casually, and with an involuntary shudder, a corpulent, presumably wealthy foreigner, someone of consequence and unpleasant, luring the cat Benito to him, grabbing him by the scruff, and taking him off—amid the shouts and cries of the children—to his magnificent car. The chauffeur stiffened to attention like a tin soldier, and shut the door respectfully after Judejahn and Benito. The large black automobile glided silently out of the square, and in the afternoon sun Siegfried caught a glimpse of Arab script on the licence plate, until abruptly a cloud passed in front of the sun, and the car vanished in a puff of haze and dust.

Asked along to the rehearsal by Kürenberg her husband, Ilse had been sitting, unnoticed by Siegfried, in the back row of the concert hall (which was darkened except for the lights over the orchestra pit) next to one of the green potted trees, listening to the symphony. She didn't like it. What she heard were discordant, inharmonious, mutually antagonistic sounds, a vague searching, a half-hearted experiment in which many paths were taken and none followed to its end, in which no idea asserted itself, where from the outset everything was brittle, full of doubt, doomed to despair. It seemed to Ilse that the person who had written these notes didn't know what he wanted. Did he despair because he was lost or was he lost because whichever way he went, he spread the black night of his depression, and made it impassable for himself? Kürenberg had talked a lot about Siegfried, but Ilse had yet to meet him. Up until now, she had been merely indifferent. But now Siegfried's music disturbed her, and she didn't want to be disturbed. There was something in it, some tone that made her sad. But life had taught her that sorrow and pain were best avoided. She didn't want to suffer. Not any more. She had suffered long enough. She gave beggars unusually large sums, without asking what had forced them to beg. Kürenberg could have conducted elsewhere in the world for more money, in Sydney or New York; and Ilse hadn't advised him against putting on Siegfried's symphony for the congress in Rome, but now she was sorry that he was taking trouble over something inchoate and hopeless, an expression of naked and unworthy despair.

When the rehearsal was over, the
Kürenbergs
went out to eat. They liked to eat; they ate often, plentifully and well. Happily it didn't show. They did well on their good and abundant food; both were solid, not fat, well-nourished and sleek like healthy animals. As
Ilse
didn't say anything,
Kürenberg
knew that she'd disliked the symphony. It's difficult to argue with a silent opponent, and before long
Kürenberg
was hailing Siegfried as the most gifted composer of his generation. He had invited him back for that evening. Now he wasn't sure how
Ilse
would respond. He mentioned it in passing, and
Ilse
said, 'You asked him to our hotel?' 'Yes,' said
Kürenberg.
Then
Ilse
knew that
Kürenberg,
who was a passionate cook, even on the road, and they were always on the road, was going to cook for him, and that was proof that he genuinely did admire Siegfried and was courting him, and once more she was silent. But why shouldn't she join him in inviting Siegfried? She didn't like to be left out. Nor did she want to quarrel with
Kürenberg.
They hardly ever quarrelled. Their union was harmonious, they had been all over the world together, often travelling in grim and dangerous circumstances, without friction. Very well, Siegfried could visit them in their hotel, and they would give him dinner, that was fine by her.
Kürenberg
assured her Siegfried was a pleasant man, and perhaps he was; but his music, unless it were to change—and
Ilse
refused to believe that it could change, because these notes, however incoherent and disagreeable to her, were in their way a true reflection of a particular human destiny, and that made them unalterable—his music, however nice Siegfried might be, she would never get on with.
Ilse
looked at
Kürenberg,
walking along at her side, in his stout shoes and suit of coarse Scottish tweed, grizzled, balding, but with bright eyes in his good, solid face, a little heavy but with a firm stride and agile amid the bustle and confusion of the Roman streets.
Kür
enberg appeared taciturn, or, perhaps more accurately, firmly anchored in himself. Living on an intellectual plane, he was never impatient and never sentimental, and yet
Ilse
was convinced that his support for Siegfried was emotionally inspired; it had somehow moved him that in
'44
a German prisoner-of-war in an English camp had turned to him, the voluntary
émigré,
and involuntary volunteer infantryman in the First World War at Langemarck, and asked him for samples of the new music. For
Kürenberg,
Siegfried's prisoner-of-war letter had been a sign, a message from a Europe that had collapsed into barbarism, the dove that signalled that the flood waters were receding.

They sat down in the sun, they enjoyed the sun, they sat down on the terrace of the wickedly expensive restaurant on the Piazza Navona, they enjoyed sitting there. They looked out into the calm harmonious oval of the one-time arena, they were glad that violent era was at an end, and they lunched. They lunched on little prawns crisply fried in butter, on tender grilled chicken, dry salad leaves dressed with oil and lemon juice, large sensuous red strawberries, and with their lunch they drank a dry lively Frascati. They enjoyed the wine. They enjoyed the food. They were serious and calm eaters. They were serious and blithe drinkers. They hardly spoke, but they were very much in love.

After lunch, they took the bus to the station district where they were staying. The bus was overcrowded as ever. They stood pressed against one another, and against other passengers. They stood in silence, calm and satisfied. At the station, they decided to pay a short visit to the National Museum in the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian. They loved antiquity. They loved the solid marble, the exalted forms made by man in his own image, the cool sarcophagi, the delicious rondure of the mixing-bowls. They saw the Eroses, fauns, gods and heroes. They studied the mythical monsters and gazed at the lovely body of the Cirenian Venus and the head of the Sleeping Fury. Then they stepped out into the cool, sleepy lane, shaded by high buildings, behind their hotel, nothing special but comfortable enough. They went into a butcher's shop, saw the bodies hanging on cruel hooks, bled, fresh, cool, and saw the heads of sheep and oxen, dumb, quiet sacrificial victims, and from the clean and beautiful diagonally hewn marble slab of the butcher, they ordered tender matured steaks, once
Kürenberg
had poked and prodded them with his fingers to test their hanging; they bought fruit and vegetables at open-air stands; they purchased oil and wine in old cellars; and, after looking for some time, and testing it with his teeth,
Kürenberg
found a type of rice that promised not to turn soggy when cooked. They carried their parcels home and took the lift up to their large bright room, the hotel's best suite. They were tired, and they enjoyed their tiredness. They saw the wide bed and they enjoyed the prospect of the cool clean linen. It was broad afternoon. They didn't draw the curtains. They undressed in the light, and lay down between the sheets. They thought of the beautiful Venus and the leaping fauns. They enjoyed their thoughts, they enjoyed the memory, then they enjoyed one another, and fell into a deep sleep, that condition of anticipated death that takes up a third of our lives; but
Ilse
dreamed she was the Eumenide, the sleeping Eumenide, appeasingly called the Kindly One, the Goddess of Revenge.

It was time, he ought to go, he had said he would go, it was the agreed hour, they were waiting for him, and he felt unwilling, reluctant, afraid. He, Judejahn, was afraid, and what was his favourite saying? 'I don't know the meaning of the word fear!' That saying had a lot to answer for, a lot of men had bitten the dust, always the others of course; he had issued the orders and they had fallen, on pointless assaults or holding doomed positions to satisfy an insane sense of honour, holding them to the last man, as Judejahn then reported to his Führer with swelled breast, and anyone who was chicken swung for it, dangled from trees and lamp-posts, swayed in the stiff breeze of the dead with his confession round his broken neck: 'I was too cowardly to defend my Fatherland.' But then whose Fatherland was it? Judejahn's? Judejahn's arm-twisting empire and marching club, hell take it. And there weren't just hangings, there were beheadings, torturings, shootings, deaths behind closed doors and up against walls. The enemy took aim, yes, of course the enemy was peppering away as well, but here it was your comrade who dispatched you with a bullet, you'll not find a better; it was your compatriot ranting, your greatly admired superior, and the young, condemned man didn't start thinking until it was too late about which was the enemy and which his comrade. Judejahn addressed them in fatherly fashion as 'my lads' and Judejahn said crudely, latrine-style, 'Kill the cunt,' he always had the popular touch, always a hell of a guy, great sense of humour, old Landsberg assassin, in bloody charge of the Black Reichswehr camps on the estates of Mecklenburg, death's head on his steel helmet, but even they, the old gods, had turned their coats, Ehrhardt the captain dining with writers and other such shitheads, and Rossbach with his troupe of pale-skinned boys, putting on mystery plays for the delectation of headmasters and clerics, but he, Judejahn, had taken the right road, unwavering and straight ahead, to Führer and Reich and full military honours.

He strode through his room, the carpets were thick, the walls were silk, silk screened the streetlights, on the damask bed lay Benito the mangy cat, looking blinkingly, sardonically up at
Judejahn,
as if to purr, 'So you've survived,' and then looking in disgust at the fried liver on a silver dish by the foot of the bed. Why had he brought that animal in here? Was it some kind of magic charm?
Judejahn
didn't believe in ghosts. He was just a sentimental bastard, he couldn't stand to see it, it had infuriated him, a kingly animal like that being tormented. Benito! Those snotnoses!
Judejahn
was staying on the Via Veneto, staying in an ambassador-class hotel, a billet for NATO generals, lodgings for presidents of US Steel, home from home for directors of chemicals companies, showcase for award-winning wide-screen epic bosoms, blackmailers and
poules
had their little coops here, all odd birds went to Rome, weird beards and wasp waists, fantastically expensive outfits, waists you could strangle the life out of with one hand, but it was better to grab the firm tits and ass, feel the arousing, palpitating flesh under the nylon skin, the wispy garter-belt stretched tautly over belly and thighs to the sheer-textured stockings—there were no cardinals staying here.

He had taken off his dark glasses. Runny eyes, watery blue. Was it foolish of him to stay here? He laughed. First, he was in the right, and had always been in the right, and secondly, well, the wind blew, didn't it? Forgiven and forgotten. It was a little joke of Judejahn's, and
Judejahn
liked his little jokes, like putting up at this particular hotel, albeit with a passport in which the name given was not his real name, and the country of birth was not his real country of birth, but apart from that the document was genuine enough, it was stamped with diplomatic visas, he was Someone, he had always been Someone, and he was now. He could afford to stay here, and enjoy the memory of his palmy days: he had resided under this roof once before, it was from here that he had sent messages to the Palazzo Venezia, it was in the hall of this building that he had ordered the hostages to be shot.