Old Masters (23 page)

really empty
and, what is more, for ever, Reger said. And you realize that it was not those great minds and not those old masters which kept you alive for decades but that it was this one single person whom you loved more than anyone else. And you stand alone in this realization and with this realization and there is nothing and no one to help you, Reger said. You lock yourself up in your flat in despair, Reger said, and from day to day your despair grows deeper and from week to week you get into ever more desperate despair, Reger said, yet suddenly you emerge from that despair. You get up and walk out of that mortal despair, you still have the strength to walk out of that deepest despair, Reger said, suddenly I got up from the Singerstrasse-side stool and walked out of my despair and down into the Singerstrasse, Reger said, and walked a few hundred yards into the Inner City; I got up from the Singerstrasse-side stool and walked out of my flat and into the Inner City with the idea of making just one single attempt, an attempt at survival, Reger said. I walked out of the Singerstrasse flat and I thought I will make one more, one single, attempt at survival and with this idea I walked into the Inner City, Reger said. And this attempt at survival was successful, I probably got up from the Singerstrasse-side stool at the crucial and probably the very last moment to walk down into the Singerstrasse and into the Inner City, Reger said. Naturally, back home in my flat I experienced one relapse after another,
you will realize that this one single attempt at survival was not enough, I had to make several hundred such survival attempts,
but I did make them, time and again, and I would get up, time and again, from my Singerstrasse-side stool and walk out into the street and actually back among people, among
those
people, and eventually saved myself, Reger said. Of course I ask myself whether it was right and not, after all, a mistake to save myself, but that is not the point, Reger said. We sincerely wish to
follow
someone into death and yet we do not then wish to go through with it, Reger said, that is the torment of despair in which I have existed, if you know what I mean, for over a year now. We hate people and yet we want to be with them because only with people and among people do we stand a chance of carrying on without going insane. We cannot in fact bear to be alone for very long, Reger said, we believe we can be alone, we believe we can be left on our own, we persuade ourselves that we can manage on our own, Reger said, but this is a chimera. Without people we have not the slightest hope of survival, Reger said, no matter how many great minds and old masters we have taken on as companions,
they do not replace a human being,
Reger said,
in the end we are abandoned by all those so-called great minds and by all those so-called old masters and we realize that we are, on top of it, being mocked in the vilest manner by these great minds and old masters
and we find that with all those great minds and with all those old masters we have always only had a mocking relationship. To begin with, he said, he had only lived on bread and water at the Singerstrasse flat, later, on about the eighth or ninth day, he had eaten a little tinned meat, which he had himself heated up in the kitchen, he had soaked some dried prunes and eaten them with noodles over which he had poured boiling water, after which however he had felt sick each time. On the eighth or ninth day eventually he had ordered his housekeeper to return and had sent her across the road to the Hotel Royal to bring him back a meal. He had come to a convenient arrangement with the Hotel Royal,
from the end of May onward they have supplied me every day, by way of the housekeeper whom we had always called
Stella
although her name was
Rosa,
Reger said,
with soup and a main course in aluminium containers specially bought for the purpose. I pay for two helpings,
Reger said to me at the Ambassador,
I would eat half a helping and the
housekee
per a helping and a half,
Reger said. I ate the Royal food with certain reluctance, Reger said, but I ate it because I had no choice ce, I ate it because I had to eat it, Reger said, but then I would feel sick just at the sight of the housekeeper who, naturally, sat facing me during the meal, I could never stand the housekeeper, ut then she was my wife's housekeeper, I myself would have never engaged that person, Reger said, that stupid, lying person Reger said, who actually sat facing me, eating one and a half helpings of the Royal food while I only ate half a one. We accept housekeepers because otherwise we would choke in our dirt, Reger said at the Ambassador, but all in all they are always distasteful. We are dependent on housekeepers, that's what it is, Reger said. Besides, she would always bring over from the Royal the dishes
she
wanted to eat, the ones she had chosen
for herself,
and not the dishes which I would have liked. She preferred pork, so she always brought over pork, but I only eat beef if I am asked, Reger said, I have always been a beef eater, housekeepers are all pork eaters. After my wife's death, in fact immediately after the funeral, Reger said, the housekeeper drew my attention to the fact that my wife had
bequeathed
her this and that, Reger said, although I know that my wife never bequeathed anything to the housekeeper, since my wife never thought about dying and never spoke
to anybody about things to be bequeathed or to be left,
not even to me, let alone to the housekeeper. But the housekeeper came to me immediately after the funeral and told me my wife had left this and that to her, clothes, shoes, pots and pans, materials, and so on. Housekeepers never flinch from any embarrassment, Reger said at the Ambassador. They are utterly shameless in their demands. Everyone everywhere sings the praises of housekeepers, even though people know perfectly well that today's housekeepers do not deserve praise, today's housekeepers are distasteful in their demands and utterly slovenly in their work, but people are hypocrites and say that housekeepers deserve praise because they are dependent on them, Reger said at the Ambassador. My wife never even for an instant thought of leaving the housekeeper anything, even two days before her death my wife did not suspect that she would die, so how could she have promised anything to the housekeeper? Reger asked. She is lying, I thought, when the housekeeper drew my attention to the fact that my wife had promised her various articles, the funeral guests had not even left the cemetery when the housekeeper appeared before me to say that my wife had promised her this and that. Time and again we stand up for people because we cannot believe and do not want to believe that they can be so vile, until, over and over again, we discover that they are far more vile than we would credit. Several times, when I was still standing by the open grave, the housekeeper said the words
frying pan,
Reger said, imagine it, again and again the words
frying pan
while I was still standing by the open grave. For weeks the housekeeper kept pestering me with the infamous lie that my wife had promised her
a lot.
However, as the saying goes, I
turned a deaf ear.
Not until three months after my wife's death did I tell the housekeeper she should
choose some
of the clothes, which I had intended for my wife's nieces, and take whatever pots and pans she found useful. You cannot imagine how the housekeeper acted in response to this! Reger said, the person snatched whole armfuls of clothes to herself and stuffed them into large twohundred-pound bags which she had all ready, until nothing more would go into those bags. I stood there, flabbergasted, watching the scene. Like a lunatic the housekeeper ran through the flat, grabbing up whatever she could grab up. In the end she had filled five two-hundred-pound bags and crammed whatever would not go into the two-hundred-pound bags into three large cases. Eventually her daughter also appeared on the scene, and the two jointly lugged down the bags and the cases into the Singerstrasse, where the daughter had parked a borrowed van. When the two had carried all the bags and cases down to the Singerstrasse the housekeeper in addition ranged dozens of casseroles on the floor, without even asking if I minded her taking those casseroles as well. After all, she was
letting me keep
this casserole or that, she said, while tying up the casseroles with string threaded through the casserole handles in order to carry them down more easily to the Singerstrasse. I stood there, flabbergasted, watching the housekeeper and her daughter as, like lunatics, they dragged these casseroles down out of the flat as well. My wife had never even seen the housekeeper's daughter, Reger said, if she had seen her once at least in the many years the housekeeper was in service with us, she would have been aghast at the sight, Reger said. The more we invest in a person, in a manner of speaking, and the kinder we are to them, the worse they repay us, Reger said at the Ambassador. This experience with the housekeeper and her daughter once again demonstrated to me how abysmally hideous man can be, Reger said. The so-called lower orders, surely this is the truth, are every bit as vile and infamous and every bit as mendacious as the upper classes. This is actually one of the most repulsive characteristics of our age that it is always claimed that the so-called simple and the so-called oppressed people are good and the others bad, that is one of the most repulsive lies I know, Reger said. The so-called housekeeper is no better than the so-called mistress, and anyway things are really the other way round nowadays, as indeed everything nowadays is the other way round, Reger said, surely the housekeeper is the mistress nowadays, not the other way round. The so-called powerless are the powerful today, not the other way round, Reger said at the Ambassador. While he was now gazing at the
White-Bearded
Man
I could still hear what he had said to me at the Ambassador, that everything today was the other way round, over and over again that
everything today is the other way round.
I
was still standing by the open grave when the housekeeper buttonholed me, asserting that my wife had bequeathed her the green winter coat she had bought in Badgastein. That beautiful expensive coat, of all things, the idea that my wife would have bequeathed that to the housekeeper, Reger said angrily. These people exploit any situation and shrink from nothing, stupid though they are, these people turn anything, even the most distasteful things, to their advantage. And we fall for these people time and again, because in the distastefulness of everyday matters they are of course superior to us, Reger said. That hypocrisy about the people is another repulsive thing, those pledges to the people which are so typical of, for instance, our politicians. Whenever we have an idealistic notion it always turns out very soon that this notion is nothing but a nonsensical notion, Reger said; we all have to grow old, and there is nothing more repulsive than this currying of favour with the young, this has always profoundly repelled me, when an old person tries to curry favour with the young, my dear Atzbacher, and he said a person today is at everyone's mercy, unprotected, we are dealing today with a totally unprotected person, totally at everyone's mercy, a mere decade ago people still felt more or less protected but today they are exposed to total unprotectedness, Reger said at the Ambassador. They can no longer hide, there is no hiding place left, that is what is so terrible, Reger said, everything has become transparent and thereby unprotected; in other words there is no hope of escape left today, people, no matter where they are, are everywhere hustled and incited and flee and escape and no longer find a refuge to escape to, unless of course they choose death, that is a fact, Reger said, that is the sinister aspect, because the world today is no longer mysterious but only sinister. With this sinister world you have to come to terms, Atzbacher, whether you like it or not,
you are completely and totally at the mercy of this sinister world
and if someone tries to tell you otherwise then he is trying to tell you a lie, today's lie which is ceaselessly drummed into your ears, the lie on which the politicians and the political twaddlers have specialized, Reger said. The world is one big sinister place where no one can find shelter any more, no one, Reger said at the Ambassador. Reger was looking at the
White-Bearded
Man
and said, the death of my wife has not only been my greatest misfortune, it has also set me free. With the death of my wife I have become free, he said, and when I say
free
I mean
entirely free, wholly free, completely free,
if you know, or if at least you surmise, what I mean. I am no longer waiting for death, it will come by itself, it will come without my thinking of it, it does not matter to me when. The death of a beloved person is also an enormous liberation of our whole system, Reger now said. I have lived for some time now with the feeling of being totally free.
I can now let anything approach me, really anything, without having to resist, I no longer resist anything, that is it,
Reger now said. Looking at the
White-Bearded
Man
he said, I have always really loved the
White-Bearded
Man.
I never loved Tintoretto, but I have loved Tintoretto's
White-Bearded
Man.
I have looked at this painting for over thirty years and I still find it possible to look at it, there is no other painting I could have looked at for over thirty years. The old masters tire quickly if we study them scrupulously and they always disappoint us if we subject them to closer scrutiny, if, as it were, we make them the ruthless object of our critical intellect. Not one of these so-called old masters will stand up to such a truly critical scrutiny, Reger now said. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian, all this dissolves in our eyes with incredible rapidity and ultimately reveals itself as paltry survival art, no matter how inspired, as a paltry attempt at survival. Now Goya is a tougher nut, Reger said, but even Goya ultimately is no use to us and means nothing to us. Everything here at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which incidentally does not even possess a Goya, Reger now said, ultimately means nothing to us,