Mother Night (10 page)

“All people are insane,” he said. “They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”

As for the kind of woman Heinz’s wife had been: I knew her only slightly, though I saw her fairly often. She was a nonstop talker, which made her hard to know, and her theme was always the same: successful people who saw opportunities and grasped them firmly, people who, unlike her husband, were important and rich.

“Young Kurt Ehrens—” she would say, “only twenty-six, and a full colonel in the S.S.! And his brother Heinrich—he can’t be more than thirty-four, but he has eighteen thousand foreign workers under him, all building tank traps. Heinrich knows more about tank traps than any man alive, they say, and I used to dance with him.”

On and on she would talk this way, with poor Heinz in the background, smoking his brains out. And one thing she did to me was made me deaf to all success stories. The people she saw as succeeding in a brave new world were, after all, being rewarded as specialists in slavery, destruction, and death. I don’t consider people who work in those fields successful.

As the war drew to a close, Heinz and I couldn’t drink in our pillbox any more. An eighty-eight was set up in it, and the gun was manned by boys about fifteen or sixteen years old. There was a success story for Heinz’s late wife—boys that young, and yet with men’s uniforms and a fully-armed death trap all their own.

So Heinz and I did our drinking and talking in our
dormitory, a riding hall jammed with bombed-out government workers sleeping on straw mattresses. We kept our bottle hidden, since we did not care to share it.

“Heinz—” I said to him one night, “I wonder how good a friend you really are.”

He was stung. “Why should you ask me that?” he said.

“I want to ask a favor of you—a very big one—and I don’t know if I should,” I said.

“I demand that you ask it!” he said.

“Lend me your motorcycle, so I can visit my in-laws tomorrow,” I said.

He did not hesitate, did not quail. “Take it!” he said.

So the next morning I did.

We started out the next morning side by side, Heinz on my bicycle, me on his motorcycle.

I kicked the starter, put the motorcycle in gear, and off I went, leaving my best friend smiling in a cloud of blue exhaust.

Off I went—vroooom, ka-pow, kapow-vaaaaaaa-roooooom!

And he never saw his motorcycle or his best friend again.

I have asked the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of War Criminals if they have any news of Heinz, though he wasn’t much of a war criminal. The Institute delights me with the news that Heinz is now in Ireland,
is chief grounds-keeper for Baron Ulrich Werther von Schwefelbad. Von Schwefelbad bought a big estate in Ireland after the war.

The Institute tells me that Heinz is an expert on the death of Hitler, having stumbled into Hitler’s bunker while Hitler’s gasoline-soaked body was burning but still recognizable.

Hello, out there, Heinz, in case you read this.

I was really very fond of you, to the extent that I am capable of being fond of anybody.

Give the Blarney Stone a kiss for me.

What were you doing in Hitler’s bunker—looking for your motorcycle and your best friend?

“L
OOK
,”
I
SAID
to my Helga in Greenwich Village, after I had told her what little I knew about her mother, father, and sister, “this attic will never do for a love nest, not even for one night. We’ll get a taxi. We’ll go to some hotel. And tomorrow we’ll throw out all this furniture, get everything brand new. And then we’ll look for a really nice place to live.”

“I’m very happy here,” she said.

“Tomorrow,” I said, “we’ll find a bed like our old bed—two miles long and three miles wide, with a headboard like an Italian sunset. Remember—oh Lord, remember?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Tonight in a hotel,” I said. “Tomorrow night in a bed like that.”

“We leave right now?” she said.

“Whatever you say,” I said.

“Can I show you my presents first?” she said.

“Presents?” I said.

“For you,” she said.

“You’re my present,” I said. “What more would I want?”

“You might want these, too,” she said, freeing the catches on a suitcase. “I hope you do.” She opened the suitcase, showed me that it was full of manuscripts. Her present to me was my collected works, my collected serious works, almost every heartfelt word ever written by me, the late Howard W. Campbell, Jr. There were poems, stories, plays, letters, one unpublished book—the collected works of myself as a buoyant, free, and young, young man.

“How queer this makes me feel,” I said.

“I shouldn’t have brought them?” she said.

“I hardly know,” I said. “These pieces of paper were me at one time.” I picked up the book manuscript, a bizarre experiment called
Memoirs of a Monogamous Casanova
. “This you should have burned,” I said.

“I would just as gladly burn my own right arm,” she said.

I put the book aside, took up a sheaf of poems. “What does this young stranger have to say about life?” I said, and I read a poem, a poem in German, aloud:

In English? Roughly:

I read that poem out loud, and then I read another. I was and am a very bad poet. I do not set down these poems to be admired. The second poem I read was, I think, the next-to-the-last poem I ever wrote. It was dated 1937, and it had this title:
“Gedanken über unseren Abstand vom Zietgeschehen,”
or, roughly, “Reflections on Not Participating in Current Events.”

It went like this:

In English?

“How is it,” I said to Helga, “that you have all these things?”

“When I went to West Berlin,” she said, “I went
to the theater to see if there was a theater left—if there was anyone I knew left—if anyone had any news of you.” She didn’t have to explain which theater she meant. She meant the little theater where my plays had been produced in Berlin, where Helga had been the star so often.

“It got through most of the war, I know,” I said. “It still exists?”

“Yes,” she said. “And when I asked about you, they knew nothing. And when I told them what you had once meant to that theater, someone remembered that there was a trunk in the loft with your name on it.”

• • •

I passed my hand over the manuscripts. “And in it were these,” I said. I remembered the trunk now, remembered when I’d closed it up at the start of the war, remembered when I’d thought of the trunk as a coffin for the young man I would never be again.

“You already have copies of these things?” she said.

“No,” I said. “Not a scrap.”

“You don’t write any more?” she said.

“There hasn’t been anything I’ve wanted to say,” I said.

“After all you’ve seen, all you’ve been through, darling?” she said.

“It’s all I’ve seen, all I’ve been through,” I said,
“that makes it damn nearly impossible for me to say anything. I’ve lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind.”

“There was another poem, your last poem, it must have been—” she said, “written in eyebrow pencil on the inside of the trunk lid.”

“Oh?” I said.

She recited it for me:

In English?

There was a knock on the door.

It was George Kraft knocking on my door, and I let him in.

He was very jangled because his corn-cob pipe had disappeared. It was the first time I’d seen him without the pipe, the first time he showed me how dependent he was on the pipe for peace. He was so full of anxiety that he whined.

“Somebody took it or somebody knocked it down behind something or—I just can’t imagine why anybody would have done anything with it,” he whined. He expected Helga and me to share his anxiety, to think that the disappearance of the pipe was the most important event of the day.

He was insufferable.

“Why would anybody touch the pipe?” he said. “What good would it do anybody?” He was opening and shutting his hands, blinking often, sniffling, acting like a dope addict with withdrawal symptoms, though he had never smoked anything in the missing pipe. “Just tell me—” he said, “why would anybody take the pipe?”

“I don’t know, George,” I said testily. “If we find it, we’ll let you know.”

“Could I look around for myself?” he said. “Go ahead,” I said.

And he turned the place upside down, rattling pots and pans, banging cupboard doors, fishing back of the radiators with a poker, clangingly.

The effect of this performance on Helga and me
was to wed us—to urge us into an easy relationship that might otherwise have been a long while coming.

We stood side by side, resenting the invasion of our nation of two.

“It wasn’t a very valuable pipe, was it?” I said.

“Yes it was—to me,” he said.

“Buy another one,” I said.

“I want
that
one,” he said. “I’m used to it. That’s the pipe I want.” He opened the breadbox, looked inside.

“Maybe the ambulance attendants took it,” I said.

“Why would they do that?” he said.

“Maybe they thought it belonged to the dead man,” I said. “Maybe they put it in the dead man’s pocket.”

“That’s it!” cried Kraft, and he scuttled out the door.

O
NE OF THE THINGS
Helga had in her suitcase, as I’ve already said, was a book by me. It was a manuscript. I had never intended that it be published. I regarded it as unpublishable—except by pornographers.

It was called
Memoirs of a Monogamous Casanova
. In it I told of my conquests of all the hundreds of women my wife, my Helga, had been. It was clinical, obsessed—some say, insane. It was a diary, recording day by day for the first two years of the war, our erotic life—to the exclusion of all else. There is not one word in it to indicate even the century or the continent of its origin.

There is a man of many moods, a woman of many moods. In some of the early entries, settings are referred to sketchily. But from there on, there are no settings at all.

Helga knew I kept the peculiar diary. I kept it as
one of many devices for keeping our sexual pleasure keen. The book is not only a report of an experiment, but a part of the experiment it reports—a self-conscious experiment by a man and a woman to be endlessly fascinating to each other sexually—

To be more than that.

To be to each other, body and soul, sufficient reasons for living, though there might not be a single other satisfaction to be had.

The epigraph of the book is to the point, I think.

It is a poem by William Blake called “The Question Answered”:

I might aptly add here one last chapter to the
Memoirs
, chapter 643, describing the night I spent in a New York hotel with Helga, after having been without her for so many years.

I leave it to an editor of taste and delicacy to abridge with innocent polka dots whatever might offend.