The Hothouse (20 page)

Keetenheuve lay on his narrow foldaway bed. He stared up at the bed frame, a shelf covered with books, and he stared past it at the low ceiling, where cracks in barely dry plaster had run together into curving lines, a tangled web of roads, the general staff map of some unknown country. Now Frau Pierhelm was to be heard on the wireless: "We housewives must not, we housewives must, we housewives put our trust." What must Frau Pierhelm not, what must she, where did she put her trust? A fine dusting from the general staff map. The opening of a new front. Frau Pierhelm from Cologne exclaimed: "I believe! I believe!" Frau Pierhelm on the airwaves believed. Frau Pierhelm, the other side of the wall from Keetenheuve in the ghetto building, Frau Pierhelm, her cup full of the mix of Nescafe and condensed milk, in front of her an ashtray with her morning cigarette, Frau Pierhelm the honorable member, an ostrich, head buried in her chest of drawers, hunting for clean linen, who washed your clothes while you were securing the future of your country, Frau Pierhelm the politician was listening with satisfaction to Frau Pierhelm the orator, as she reached the conclusion that the pact gave security to German women, a ringing conclusion, if a little reminiscent of a recent advertisement for tampons.

It was still early Keetenheuve was an early riser, as almost everyone in Bonn was a morning person. The Chancellor was preparing himself for the plenary session, rose-scented and fortified by the Rhine air, which sapped his opponents, and Frost-Forestier would long since have started up his powerful juddering machine. Keetenheuve thought: Will he venture something else, will he have a fresh offer for me today, Cape Town or Tokyo? But he knew Frost-Forestier wouldn't offer him another embassy, and, come evening, the knives would be out for him.

Keetenheuve was calm. His heart was beating calmly. He felt a little sorry to be missing out on Guatemala. He thought regretfully of passing up his death on the Spanish colonial veranda. Guatemala had been tempting. He hadn't fallen for it. He had made a decision. He was going to fight. The wirelesses were silent. All that could be heard was the morning song of the capital in summer: the clatter of lawn mowers, like ancient sewing machines, that were being dragged over the grass.

Sedesaum the human frog hopped downstairs. With every smacking step, the flimsy building shook. Sedesaum was a professional Christian, God help him, and since there wasn't a chapel anywhere nearabouts, he took his morning hop to the little dairy, to do a work of humility and publicity, and the Sunday color supplements had already featured the populist representative of the people
your concerns are my concerns
with milk bottle and bag of rolls in his arms, and besides, what he was doing there was an act of tolerance, the Samaritan was supporting his fallen brother, and they would give him extra credit for that in heaven. Sedesaum bought his breakfast at Dörflich's. Far and wide, Dörflich's was the only shop, which gave him a monopoly, you had no option but to take him your custom, but unfortunately Dörflich was a pain, he was the equivalent of a lapsed priest, he was a member of parliament who had been expelled from the orders of his party, but remained a consecrated parliamentarian. He had gotten tangled up in a disreputable and initially remunerative affair, which unfortunately the press had gotten wind of, and which then, stirred by denials and statements of support, had become impossible to hush up, and had ceased to be profitable; Dörflich was made a scapegoat and banished from his party into the wilderness, where, to the horror of all his colleagues in the parliamentary ghetto, he opened his little dairy business. Whether Dörflich hoped to wash himself whiter than white with his milk, speculating that his customers would give him their votes, or whether he was merely laundering the profits from his disreputable affair; whichever, "non olet," the only thing that perceptibly stank at Dörflich's was the cheese, though Keetenheuve thought he sometimes caught a whiff of carrion in Dörflich's vicinity, which wasn't from the cheese cloche. Actually, Keetenheuve thought it was sensible on the part of Dörflich to diversify away from the uncertain prospects of reelection, and into the milk trade. He didn't share the outrage of their parliamentary colleagues, and he went so far as to think: Each of us should have his own milk shop, so we're not left clinging to the raft of our perished ideas. And so it amused Keetenheuve to watch from the window of the ghetto block, as Dörflich brought in his wares out of the back of his parliamentarian's car, and Keetenheuve didn't mind that the Catholic and now whipless representative of the people was probably using the federal purse to pay for his transport overheads. But, his possibly immoral amusement aside, Keetenheuve did not like Dörflich, and Dörflich for his part loathed
Keetenheuve the intellectual scumbag.
And so Keetenheuve, when he went to Dörflich's once to try the milk, was duly served some that was off, and Keetenheuve thought: Well, who knows, who knows, maybe we'll see each other in the Fourth Reich, Dörflich's ministerial chair will already be parked in among his milk churns, and my death sentence will have been written.

Keetenheuve looked out of the window, and he saw the scene like a snapshot, like an interesting setup in a film, a piece of lawn was in shot, and on the fresh green carpet a girl in a starched white apron, and a white maid's bonnet (a maid of the kind that no longer existed, and that had suddenly reappeared in Bonn like a rash of ghosts), was pushing against a clattering lawn mower, then pan down the cool steel, glass, and concrete façade of the ghetto block facing Keetenheuve, to Dörflich's milk shop, and there was Sedesaum, bottle of milk and bag of rolls clasped in his little round arms, hopping out of the shadow of the blue- and white-striped awning, small, vain, and humble, small, devout, and cunning, and just like that, with the milk and the rolls transferred to his little round belly, small, humble, and vain, small, cunning, and devout, he would hop into the plenary session, a yea-sayer, a singer unto the Lord, and the Lord didn't in fact have to live over the tented starry sky as the Lord God of Sabaoth, Sedesaum always found a way of squaring his earthly and his heavenly duties, so that they harmonized in his conscience and to the world, and there, as he hopped across the yard, his right foot smacking down with vanity, his left foot smacking down with humility, there came after him Dörflich, emerging from the shadow of his awning, having left his milk business in the hands of his lawfully wedded wife, and, in his blue suit and the laundered shirt of old-fashioned respectability, he seated himself at the wheel of his official parliamentarian's car—now cleared of milk churns and bread baskets—to drive to parliament and exercise the peoples mandate. The sight made Keetenheuve a little uneasy. He could not predict which way Dörflich would vote. He liked to side with the majority, but since he'd had the whip withdrawn, he had taken to grandstanding, he sought support among the country's malcontents, he cast his line in murky waters, and so it was to be feared that this time, albeit for selfish and dodgy motives, he would vote with the opposition. Keetenheuve was ashamed to have such an ally, stinking of old Nazism and aspiring toward a new Nazism (that wind was yet to rise), as he was irked and troubled and made to doubt by the chance coalitions that arose, by siding with the obstinate, the offended, the dictatorial, the at best mediocre, whom some schismatic whim had managed to antagonize. Not until he saw Frau Pierhelm and Sedesaum leaving the building together— he hopping, she head aloft, determination in her stride—poor knights of the old union of the firm hand, camp followers of conservatism and the Montan-Union (not that they were on the board, but it hadn't escaped them where profits were made, where the little spring sprang, where it dribbled into the electoral potty, not that they had sold themselves, heavens no, the policy was their policy, it was what they had been taught at school, and they had never seen the need to rethink it since, children in the political kindergarten, avid for the teacher's Good morning, Class), did Keetenheuve once more feel justified in opposing them, and setting them, bellwethers in the slaughterhouse, gadflies in their fleeces. But the lead sheep, it's why he is a bellwether, goes unwaveringly on its way, and the herd, as is in its nature, follows, warning cries only serve to accelerate its progress into catastrophe, as each follows the animal in front. The shepherd, meanwhile, has his own ideas about the destination of the sheep. He leaves the slaughterhouse alive, and dictates from that bloody site his
Memoirs of a Shepherd
, for the enlightenment and edification of his fellow shepherds.

That day, the parliament was sealed off by police, and the unit showed the hysterical zeal of any trained organization that has been drilled to see ghosts on the exercise ground, and they held the house of the people occupied and surrounded with weapons and water cannons and Spanish cavalry, as if the capital and the country were mounting an uprising against the Bundestag (and that would have been the end of it), whereas Keetenheuve, who kept having to identify himself to the officials, had the impression that, apart from sightseers and onlookers, only a few inexpensively procured individuals, a few people bussed in on the cheap, a few pathetic claqueurs were demonstrating with their cries, and only gained any significance by the massive presence of the police that had been ranged against them. They shouted that they wanted to talk to their representatives, and Keetenheuve thought: They have every right to do so, why shouldn't they be allowed to talk to their representatives? He would have been prepared to talk to them; but it was questionable whether they had him in mind, whether they wanted to talk to him.
Keetenheuve man of the people no man of the people.
The rather scanty demonstration was finally rather sad, because it demonstrated the dull submissiveness of the people, which came out of a feeling that everything will come to pass anyway, we can't make any difference, because it couldn't hinder laws and decisions that it probably opposed, didn't even try to, but was prepared to bear the consequences of them;—the die had been cast once more. So the scene in front of the parliament was not unlike the scene at a film premiere, a crowd, not too large, of stupid and curious people, who had nothing better to do than collect outside the cinema, to wait for the familiar faces of stars. There's a whisper, here comes Albers, and a critic who's seen the film is tempted to agree with the urchins who are whistling; but the scalliwags aren't tooting because they think it's a rotten film, they're whistling because they like to make a noise, and the negative opinion of the critic would only mystify and perhaps even enrage them. Keetenheuve knew, as he approached the parliament, how tangled and doubtful his mission was. But where was the system that was preferable to parliamentary democracy? Keetenheuve saw no other way; and the shouters who wanted to abolish the parliament were his enemies too.
Shut the talking shop. A lieutenant and ten men are enough. And the Captain of
Köpenick.
That was why Keetenheuve felt ashamed of the spectacle in front of him. The President of the Bundestag had policemen protect his building, whereas any parliament worth its salt should be at pains to keep the armed organs of the executive as far away from itself as possible, and in the good old days of the parliamentary idea, the delegates would have refused to meet under police protection, because back then, whatever its composition, the parliament was opposed to the police, because what it represented was opposition, opposition to the power of the crown, opposition to the tyranny of the nobility, opposition to the government, opposition to the executive and its saber, and so it was a perversion and an enfeeblement of the representation of the people when from out of its midst a majority constitutes itself as a government, and claims full executive powers. What does this amount to, given a worst case, but an elective dictatorship?
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The majority won't actually chop the heads off their opponents; but it remains a petty tyrant, and for as long as it's in power, the minority is routed, and condemned to pointless sterile opposition. The fronts were rigid, and unfortunately it was inconceivable that someone could get up from the benches of the minority in opposition and convince the ruling majority that he was right and they were wrong. Not even a Demosthenes could succeed in changing the policy of the government in Bonn from the opposition benches; even if one spoke with angels' tongues, one would be preaching to deaf ears, and Keetenheuve knew, as he passed the last barrier, that it was actually futile to come here and talk in the debate. It would affect nothing. He could as well have stayed in bed and dreamed. And so the delegate approached the headquarters of his party in a frame of mind not of exaltation but of dejection:
Napoleon on the morning of the battle knowing how Waterloo will end

In the party rooms, they were waiting for him; Heineweg and Bierbohm and the other committee room veterans, the procedural lynxes, the order paper demons, were once again casting reproachful looks in Keetenheuve's direction. Knurrewahn was inspecting the troops, and lo, not one sage head was missing. They had traveled up from the provinces to be there for the debate, the frowsty air of the provinces clung to their garments, they brought it with them into the chamber, a dull air from tiny rooms, where they seemed to lead isolated lives, because they too did not directly represent the people, no longer thought like the people, they too were— albeit small, very small—preceptors of the people, not exactly professors perhaps, but at least monitors, persons of respect or disrespect, in front of whom the people stayed mum. And they in their turn, the troops, they stayed mum in front of Knurrewahn, who occasionally felt that something was not quite right. He surveyed his taciturn lifeguard, roundheads and longheads, stout fellows on whom he could depend. They had remained loyal from the time they were persecuted, but to a man they were used to orders, a team that stood to attention in front of their sergeant, and Knurrewahn, in command, man of the people, of course, but now promoted to the circle of the gods, close to government and influential, Knurrewahn listened in vain for a yearning word from below, a cry of freedom, a heartbeat that came from the depths; no unused strength, barely able to be reined in, now stirred, no primordial desire for change, no courage to destroy the old order could be perceived, his messengers brought no echo from the streets and squares, the factories and workshops; on the contrary, it was they who were taking instruction, who were waiting for a word from on high, a nod, a command from Knurrewahn, they supported the centralized party bureaucracy, were, in fact, nothing other than the outer limits of that bureaucracy, and that was the root of the evil, they would travel back to their places in the provinces and make it known there that Knurrewahn wants us to behave in such and such a way, Knurrewahn and the party desire, Knurrewahn and the party instruct, instead of the other way around, instead of the provincial messengers coming to Knurrewahn and saying the people want, the people oppose, the people command you, Knurrewahn, the people expect you, Knurrewahn—nothing. Maybe the people knew what they wanted. But their representatives did not know, and so they pretended that at least there was a strong and clear party line. But where did that come from? From headquarters. It was impotent. The party's will was cut off from the seminal threads of popular feeling, the strands of power got lost in the invisible, and the result was stray emissions and fertilizations in the bed of the people. The party leadership knew its membership only as those who paid the annual subscription and, more rarely, as the ones to whom it issued its commands. That way, the machine worked without a hitch. And if Knurrewahn had decreed the dissolution of the party, the local groups would put it into effect, if Knurrewahn ordered the party to commit euthanasia in the national interest—well, the party had had a national heart complaint since 1914. Not many ever broke ranks (and thereby incurred suspicion). There was Maurice, the lawyer, and there was Pius König, the journalist, Knurrewahn needed them, but actually they made difficulties for him, and he found Keetenheuve a real handful. He took Keetenheuve by the arm, led him over to a window, and begged him not to become too vehement in the forthcoming debate, not to offend nationalist instincts (Did such exist? Were they anything more than complexes, neuroses, idiosyncrasies?), and he reminded him that the party was not principally and unconditionally opposed to rearmament in any shape or form, and that all it was opposed to was the form of rearmament being mooted just now. Keetenheuve had heard it all before. It made him sad. He was on his own. He was fighting death on his own. He was all alone in the fight against the oldest sin, the oldest shortcoming of mankind, the original folly, the original dementia, that a just cause could be advanced by the sword, that violence could improve anything. Pandora's box is a standard metaphor for the evil of female curiosity, but Keetenheuve would have liked to tell old Knurrewahn about a box belonging to Mars, which, once opened, disgorged all the conceivable ills of the world, far and wide, all-destroying and irresistible. Knurrewahn knew it too, he was aware of the dangers, but he was of the opinion (with the bullet lodged in his heart, he suffered particularly badly from the heart defect of his party) that he could keep the army in the control of a democratically accountable government, even though Noske
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had once already lost his democratic grip on the army.