The 2 12 Pillars of Wisdom (28 page)

Not having seen the German press while he was in Italy, he had of course failed to read the item which was carried by most of the nationals: GERMAN PROFESSOR LOST AT SEA! Nor had he read the fulsome tribute from Prinzel, quoted at length in the same newspapers, or the remarks of other members of the philological community, including Unterholzer, who had referred in most generous terms to
Portuguese Irregular Verbs
and had commented that it was a very great loss indeed that there would now be no successor volume. Even had he read these, he might not have expected to find, on his return to the Institute, that things had been changed, and that a new name had appeared on his door.

‘Why are you in my room?’ he asked, as he opened the door of his office, to find Unterholzer sitting at his desk.

Unterholzer looked up, and turned quite white. It was as if he had seen a ghost.

‘But you’re dead!’ he blurted out after a few moments.

‘I most certainly am not!’ said von Igelfeld.

‘Are you sure?’ stammered Unterholzer. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous, Herr Unterholzer,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘There are very few things of which we can be sure in this life, but that, I should have thought, is one of them.’

‘I see,’ said Unterholzer, lamely. ‘The only reason why I am here in this office is that the papers said that you had been lost at sea. I thought that you would like the thought of my having your office after you’ve gone.’

Von Igelfeld bristled. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’ he said sharply. ‘I might well have quite different ideas.’

Unterholzer had risen to his feet. ‘Oh, Moritz-Maria, I am so pleased that you are alive! I cannot tell you how sad I was . . .’ He stopped as he realized his terrible solecism. He had addressed von Igelfeld by his first name, and they had only known one another for, what was it, fifteen years?’

‘I’m so sorry,’ he rapidly continued. ‘I didn’t mean to call you that. It was the emotion of the occasion . . .’

Von Igelfeld raised a hand to stop him. He was touched that Unterholzer, for all his faults, had been so upset at his death. One might even overlook his presumption in taking his room, or almost . . .

‘Don’t apologise,’ he said, adding, ‘Detlev.’

It was a terrible effort for von Igelfeld to utter Unterholzer’s first name, but it had to be done.

‘Yes, Detlev, we have known one another for many years now, and it might be appropriate to move to first name terms. So it will be
du
from now on.’

Unterholzer looked immensely relieved. ‘Let us go down to the café and drink . . .’

‘And drink a toast to
Brüderschaft
,’ said von Igelfeld kindly. It was good to be alive, he thought. Life was so precious, so unexpected in its developments, and so very rich in possibilities.

They left the Institute and walked down to the café.

‘To
Brüderschaft!
’ said Unterholzer, raising his glass. ‘To brotherhood.’

‘To
Brüderschaft!
’ said von Igelfeld.

They sipped at the wine. Outside in the streets, a passing band of students suddenly raised their voices in song, singing those wonderful haunting words of the
Gaudeamus
:

Gaudeamus igitur,

Juvenes dum sumus.

Post iucundum iuventutem

Post molestam senectutem

Nos habebit humus,

Nos habebit humus!*

Von Igelfeld smiled at Unterholzer. ‘Aut Habebit mare!’† he joked. And Unterholtzer, who had not heard so good a joke for many years, laughed and laughed.

∗ Let us rejoice therefore / While we are young. / After a pleasant youth / After a troublesome old age / The earth will have us.

† Or the sea will have us!

AT THE VILLA OF
REDUCED CIRCUMSTANCES

This is for
ARVIN and MARGARET
SLOMAN

Contents

EINS
  On Being Light Blue

ZWEI
  At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances

eins

On Being Light Blue

Professor Dr Moritz-Maria Von Igelfeld’s birthday fell on the first of May. He would not always have remembered it had the anniversary not occurred on May Day itself; as a small boy he had been convinced that the newspaper photographs of parades in Red Square, those intimidating displays of missiles, and the grim-faced line-up of Politburo officials, all had something to do with the fact that he was turning six or seven, or whatever birthday it was. Such is the complete confidence of childhood that we are each of us at the centre of the world – a conviction out of which not all of us grow, and those who do grow out of it sometimes do so only with some difficulty. And this is so very understandable; as Auden remarked, how fascinating is that class of which I am the only member.

Nobody observed von Igelfeld’s birthday now. It was true that he was not entirely alone in the world – there were cousins in Graz, but they were on the Austrian side of the family and the two branches of von Igelfelds, separated by both distance and nationality, had drifted apart. There was an elderly aunt in Munich, and another aged female relative in Baden Baden, but they had both forgotten more or less everything and it had been many years since they had sent him a birthday card. If he had married, as he had firmly intended to do, then he undoubtedly would now have been surrounded by a loving wife and children, who would have made much of his birthday; but his resolution to propose to a charming dentist, Dr Lisbetta von Brautheim, had been thwarted by his colleague, Professor Dr Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer. That was a humiliation which von Igelfeld had found hard to bear. That Unterholzer of all people – a man whose work on the orthography of Romance languages was barely mentioned these days; a man whose idea of art was coloured reproductions of views of the Rhine; a man whose nose was so large and obtrusive – vulgar even – the sort of nose one saw on head waiters; that Unterholzer should succeed in marrying Dr von Brautheim when he himself had planned to do so, was quite unacceptable. But the fact remained that there was nothing one could do about it; Unterholzer’s birthday never went unmarked. Indeed, there were always cakes at coffee time in the Institute on Unterholzer’s birthday, made by Frau Dr Unterholzer herself; as Unterholzer pointed out, she might be a dentist but she had a sweet tooth nonetheless and made wonderful, quite wonderful cakes and pastries. And then there were the cards prominently displayed on his desk, not only from Unterholzer’s wife but from the receptionist and dental nurse in her practice. What did they care about Unterholzer? von Igelfeld asked himself. They could hardly
like
him, and so they must have sent the cards out of deference to their employer. That was not only wrong – a form of exploitation indeed – but it was also sickeningly sentimental, and if that was what happened on birthdays then he was best off without one, or at least best off without one to which anybody paid any attention.

On the first of May in question, von Igelfeld was in the Institute coffee room before anybody else. They normally all arrived at the same time, with a degree of punctuality which would have been admired by Immanuel Kant himself, but on that particular morning von Igelfeld would treat himself to an extra ten minutes’ break. Besides, if he arrived early, he could sit in the chair which Unterholzer normally contrived to occupy, and which von Igelfeld believed was more comfortable than any other in the room. As the best chair in the room it should by rights have gone to him, as he was, after all, the senior scholar, but these things were difficult to articulate in a formal way and he had been obliged to tolerate Unterholzer’s occupation of the chair. It would have been different, of course, if Professor Dr Dr Florianus Prinzel had taken that chair; von Igelfeld would have been delighted to let Prinzel have it, as he undoubtedly deserved it. He and Prinzel had been friends together at Heidelberg, in their youth, and he still thought of Prinzel as the scholar athlete, the noble youth, deserving of every consideration. Yes, there was little he would not have done for Prinzel, and it was a matter of secret regret to von Igelfeld that he had never actually been called upon to save Prinzel’s life. That would have secured Prinzel’s undying admiration and indebtedness, which von Igelfeld would have worn lightly. ‘It was nothing,’ he imagined himself saying. ‘One’s own personal safety is irrelevant in such circumstances. Believe me, I know that you would have done the same for me.’

In fact, the only time that Prinzel had been in danger von Igelfeld had either been responsible for creating the peril in the first place, or Prinzel had been able to handle the situation quite well without any assistance from him. In their student days in Heidelberg, von Igelfeld had unwisely persuaded Prinzel to engage in a duel with a shady member of some student Korps, and this, of course, had been disastrous. The very tip of Prinzel’s nose had been sliced off by his opponent’s sword, and although it had been sewn back on in hospital, the doctor, who had been slightly drunk, had sewn it on upside down. Prinzel had never said anything about this, being too gentlemanly to complain about such an affair (no true gentleman ever notices it if the tip of his nose is sliced off), and indeed it had occurred to von Igelfeld that he had not even been aware of what had happened. But it remained a reminder of an unfortunate incident, and von Igelfeld preferred not to think about it.

That was one incident. The other occasion on which Prinzel had been in danger was when von Igelfeld had accompanied him and his wife to Venice, at a time when the city was threatened by an insidious corruption. The corruption turned out not to be cholera, as so graphically portrayed by Thomas Mann, but radio-activity in the water, and Prinzel had become mildly radioactive as a result of swimming off the Lido. Again von Igelfeld was unable to come to the rescue, and Prinzel, quite calmly, had taken the situation in hand and returned to Germany for iodine treatment at the University of Mainz. There he had been decontaminated and pronounced safe, or as safe as one could be after ingesting small quantities of strontium-90.

Thoughts of radioactivity, however, were far from von Igelfeld’s mind as he enjoyed his first cup of coffee in the Institute coffee room and glanced at the headlines in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine
. There was nothing of note, of course. Industrialists were sounding off about interest rates, as they always did, and there was a picture of an earnest finance minister pointing a finger at a chart. The chart could have been upside down, like Prinzel’s nose, for all that von Igelfeld cared; matters of this sort left him unmoved. It was the job of politicians and bankers to run the economy and he could not understand why they often failed to do so in a competent way. It was, he assumed, something to do with their general venality and with the fact that quite the wrong type went into politics and finance. But it seemed as if there would never be any change in that, and so they would have to put up with these insolent people and with their persistent mismanagement. Far more interesting was the front-page item about a row which was developing over the appointment of a new director to a museum in Wiesbaden.

The new director, a man of modern tastes, had thrown out the old cases of fossils and rocks, and had replaced them with installations by contemporary artists. This had the effect of confusing those people who came to the museum hoping to see items of interest and found only empty galleries with a small pile of wooden boxes in a corner or a heap of old clothing, artistically arranged under a skylight and labelled:
The Garments of Identity
. These visitors peered into the wooden boxes, hoping to see fossils or rocks within, and found that they were empty, and that the boxes themselves were the exhibit. And as for the piles of clothing, what was the difference between them and the museum cloakroom, where people hung their overcoats? Were both not
Garments of Identity
, or would it be confusing to label the cloakroom
Garments of Identity
? Would people know that it was a cloakroom, or would they search in vain for a room labelled
Cloakroom
? Von Igelfeld frowned. This sort of thing was becoming far too common in Germany, and he had every sympathy with the friends of the fossils and rocks who were attempting to secure the new director’s resignation. This was far more interesting than news of interest rates, and far more significant, too, von Igelfeld thought. What if the levers of power at universities were to fall into similar hands to the hands of this new director? Would he himself be considered a fossil or a rock, and thrown out, to be replaced, perhaps, by a wooden box? How would Romance philology survive in a world that honoured the works of Joseph Beuys and the like?

It was while von Igelfeld was thinking of these dire possibilities that he heard the door of the coffee room open. He looked up, to see his colleagues entering, deep in what appeared to be animated conversation. There was sudden silence when they saw von Igelfeld.

‘Good morning,’ said von Igelfeld, laying the newspaper to one side. ‘It seems that I am here first today.’

For a moment nothing was said. Then the Librarian cleared his throat and spoke. ‘That would appear to be so, Herr von Igelfeld. And seeing you here solves the mystery which I was discussing with Professor Dr Prinzel outside, in the corridor. “Where is Professor Dr von Igelfeld?” I asked. And Professor Dr Prinzel said that he did not know. Well, now we all know. You are here, in the coffee room, sitting in . . .’ He tailed off, and moved quickly to the table where the coffee pot and cups stood in readiness.

They served themselves coffee in silence, and then came to join von Igelfeld around his table.

‘How is your aunt?’ von Igelfeld asked the Librarian. ‘This spring weather will be cheering her up, no doubt.’ The health of his demanding aunt was the Librarian’s main topic of conversation, and it was rare for anybody to raise it, as they had all heard everything there was to be said about this aunt.