The Hothouse (21 page)

Keetenheuve was called to the telephone, he went into a cabin, and he heard the twittering of the busy deputies of Frost-Forestier, and then it was Frost-Forestier in person who murmured out of the earpiece to assure Keetenheuve that Guatemala would be okayed, that had been cleared, whatever happened; and Keetenheuve, admittedly slightly puzzled, had the distinct sense that it was Mephisto at the end of the line, even if he was now unmasked as a member of the conspiracy. He wanted a moment to get his thoughts together, to reconsider everything once more, and he had a long way to think, he had to think as far as the Saar and the Oder, he had to remember Paris, and Grünberg in Silesia and Ortelsburg in Masuria, he had to bear in mind America and Russia, the two identical/unidentical twins, Korea, China, and Japan, Persia and Israel and the Moslem states had to be included in his thoughts, and maybe India would be the Orient land from which salvation would arrive, the third force, balancing and conciliatory, and how tiny was the Fatherland in which he lived, and the tiny rostrum at which he would speak, while supersonic jets raced from one continent to another, atomic shells flew over the deserts to practice for the
panthanatos,
the universal dying, and death mushrooms, ripened in the most delicate brains, now flowered over tropical atolls. But then Maurice, the lawyer, went up to Keetenheuve and handed him a copy of Mergentheim's newspaper, saying, faithfully and lawyerishly, that surely there was some material there for Keetenheuve's speech. Keetenheuve held Mergentheim's newspaper in his hand, and indeed, he saw he had to remake his speech. He saw that his weapon had been twisted from his grasp, his explosive was damp. In a long article, Mergentheim presented a report on the interview with the generals on the Conseil Supérieur des Forces Armées, to which, plucky scribe, plucky Goal Attack, he added a commentary to the effect that with generals tainted to that degree with triumphalism, it wouldn't be possible to set up a German-Allied army Yes, Keetenheuve's powder was damp! They had got their hands on the press release that Dana had given him, and seeing as there'd only been one single copy of that rather obscure agency report here in Bonn, they must have helped themselves to his, the shadow of course, they had photographed it, and so beaten him to the punch, and so Frost-Forestier's call about the Spanish colonial death veranda in Guatemala was nothing more than the friendly scrap that was tossed to the toothless mutt. What had happened was clear to Keetenheuve, what would happen next almost as much. The Chancellor, probably not even party to the intrigue and briefly angry with Mergentheim, would react furiously to the article, he would have in his hands the assurances of the French and British governments that the generals' remarks were regrettable and unauthorized and taken out of context, and that the proposed military pact remained on course as a firm long-term policy objective.

The bell rang for the session. They streamed into the plenary, sheep on the left and sheep on the right, and the black sheep sat on the far left and the far right, but they felt no shame, they bleated noisily. Keetenheuve couldn't see the Rhine from his place. But he pictured its flow to himself, he knew it was just the other side of the large schoolroom window, and he thought of it as conjoining not sundering, he saw the water curling around the countries like a friendly arm, and the Wagalaweia sounded soothing, a lullaby, a peaceful berceuse.

The President was a heavyweight, and seeing as he belonged to the party of the just cause, he threw his weight on the scales. His little bell rang. The session was declared open.

There's tension over the stadium in Cologne. The 1st FC Kaiserslautern is playing the 1st FC Cologne. It's not important who wins, but twenty thousand spectators are on the edge of their seats. There's tension over the stadium in Dortmund. Borussia Dortmund is playing Hamburg SV. The result is a matter of sublime indifference; no one will starve if Hamburg come out on top, no one will die in agony if Borussia happen to score more goals; but twenty thousand spectators are trembling. The showdown in the plenary session affects everyone's lives, can mean everyone's death, it can bring this unfreedom and that slavery with it, it could mean your house falling down, your son losing his legs, your father being sent to Siberia, your daughter giving herself to three men for a tin of corned beef, that she'll share with you, you wolf it down, you pick up the stubs that someone else has spat into the gutter, or you make a fortune on rearmament, you grow fat from equipping death (How many pairs of underpants does an army require? If you set the profit at forty percent, you're being modest), and the bombs, the bullets, crippledom, death, exile will only catch up with you in Madrid, you've driven there in your new motor, had one last meal at Horchers, joined the line in front of the American consulate, maybe you'll get to Lisbon, where the ships are at anchor, but the ships won't take you, the planes will lift over the Atlantic without you, is it worth it? No, that's not being too lurid; but there's no trembling expectation in the chamber, no thousands of rapt onlookers. Justifiedly, boredom spreads. The few handpicked spectators are disappointed by the game. The journalists doodle on their pads; they'll be fed excerpts from the speeches, and the result of the vote is a foregone conclusion anyway The form of the two teams is well known, and no one is putting anything on the underdog. Keetenheuve thought: Why go to so much trouble, we could get the miserable final score in five minutes and no need for any speeches, the Chancellor wouldn't have to get to his feet, we could spare ourselves our arguments, and they could spare themselves their defense. Our heavyweight President would only have to say he thought the game would end eight to six, and if anyone disagreed, they could always count the sheep for themselves. There was the door for the jump. There were the girls with their trays of votes. Oh, and there was one representative of the people stifling a yawn. Oh, and there was another nodding off. Oh, and there was a third writing a letter home: Don't forget to call Unhold to come and look at the flush on the toilet, it's been dripping of late.

Heineweg raised a point of order. There was a vicious, hairsplitting debate on it, before, as might have been predicted, it was voted down.

On the platform, the newsreel lights went up, the camera tele-lenses pointed at the big star of the house, now climbing onto the rostrum in casual, practiced fashion. The Chancellor set out his policy. He was in a rather listless mood, and there were no fireworks. He wasn't a dictator, but he was the boss who had set everything in motion, taken all the steps, and he despised the rhetorical drama in which he was obliged to participate. He sounded tired and confident, like an actor having to do a run-through of an often performed play in the repertoire, because of changes to the cast. The actor/Chancellor was also the director of the piece. He told the other actors where to stand. He was a commanding figure. Keetenheuve thought of him as a cold and gifted arithmetician, who, unexpectedly, after years of irritable retirement, had been given the chance to enter the history books as a great man, the savior of his Fatherland, but Keetenheuve also admired the performance, the implacable and euphoric tenacity with which an old man stuck to his guns. Didn't he see that his entire plan would come to grief, not through his opponents, but through his supporters? Keetenheuve accepted that the Chancellor was acting in good faith. It truly was his view of the world that he was unfolding, it was a world that was burning, and he was calling for fire brigades, and establishing fire brigades to control and fight the blaze. But the Chancellor, thought Keetenheuve, was losing track of the situation, he suffered, thought Keetenheuve, from a characteristically German rigidity of outlook, and thereby he failed to notice, thought Keetenheuve, that other statesmen in other parts of the world also thought the world was ablaze, and that they too had called in their fire brigades and had equipped teams of men to go out and fight the fire. So that there was now the prospect of the variously instructed firemen getting in each other's way as they went about their tasks and, ultimately, of coming to blows. Keetenheuve thought: Let's not set up any more global fire brigades, let's all just say "the world isn't burning," and let's come together and tell each other about our nightmares, let's admit that we're given to seeing conflagrations, and we will learn from the fears of the others that our own fears are delusory, and we will have better dreams in the future. He wanted to dream of a paradise of earthly contentment, a world of abundance, a planet where toil was no longer necessary, a Utopia without war and without want, and for a time, he forgot that this world too had been cast out of heaven, condemned to whirl ignorantly and mutely through black space, where behind the twinkling familiar stars there might be great monsters.

No one but Korodin seemed to be paying any attention to the Chancellor, and Korodin was listening for signs that God was using the statesman as his mouthpiece; but Korodin couldn't hear the voice of the Almighty, instead he had the somewhat irritating sensation of listening to his banker. Heineweg and Bierbohm risked the occasional heckle. Now they were calling out: "You put him up to it!" Keetenheuve was startled, because that didn't seem to make any sense to him. Only then did he notice that the Chancellor was quoting from Mergentheim's piece about the generals on the Conseil Supérieur, calling it treacherous. Poor Mergentheim! Still, he could take it. The statements of support were probably safely on the dispatch box, and there they were being read out, the denials from Paris and London, the assurances of loyalty, the words of friendship, the pledges of brotherhood, soon to become brotherhood-in-arms. The appointment was as good as in the bag, one could proceed to arm, and put on the helmet, the helmet adored by the burgher, the helmet that shows who's in charge, the helmet that gives a face to the faceless state, and only in the bosoms of the far right was there still the lurking and envious thought of the old enemy, and they thought of Landsberg, of the fortresses of Werl and Spandau, they cried out "give us our generals back" (and the great flounder came up out of the water and replied: Go home, they're already there); and the bullet burned in Knurrewahn's breast, and Knurrewahn was full of suspicion and worry.

Keetenheuve spoke. He too stood in the lights of the camera teams, he too would appear on the newsreels.
Keetenheuve matinee idol.
He began worried and pensive, as Knurrewahn would have him. He referred to the doubts and fears of his party, he warned of inherently unpredictable obligations, he turned the gaze of the world on the divided Germany, on the two diseased zones, to reassemble which was the first duty of any German, and even as he spoke, he felt: This is pointless, who is listening to me, who can be expected to listen to me, they know I have to say this and will go on to say that, they know my arguments, and they know I don't have a miracle cure that will have the patient up and about tomorrow, and so they continue to put their faith in the therapy that promises to save the one-half that they think is healthy and capable of life, where the Rhine happens to flow, and the Ruhr happens to flow, and where the chimneys of the Ruhrgebiet happen to rise.

The Chancellor held his head propped in his hands. He was impassive. Was he listening to Keetenheuve? It was impossible to tell. Was anyone listening to him? Hard to tell. Frau Pierhelm was hurling her advertising slogan,
Security for all women
, at the dispatch box; but Frau Pierhelm hadn't been paying attention either. Knurrewahn was leaning his head back, with his brush cut he looked like Hindenburg, or an actor playing some aging general; the century was reduced to imitating its own movie actors, even a miner looked like a film star playing a miner, and Keetenheuve couldn't see whether Knurrewahn was asleep, or lost in thought, or whether he was flattered at hearing his own thoughts coming from Keetenheuve's mouth. Only one person was truly listening to Keetenheuve, and that was Korodin; but Keetenheuve didn't see Korodin, who, in spite of himself, was enthralled and once more of the opinion that the delegate Keetenheuve was at a crossroads that must bring him to God.

Keetenheuve wanted to stop. He wanted to stand down. There was no point in continuing to speak if no one was listening to him; it was senseless to give out words without the belief that they could point the way. Keetenheuve wanted to leave the way of the beast of prey and go the way of the lamb. He wanted to lead the meek. But who was meek, and prepared to follow him? And beyond that, even if they all meekly grouped themselves around Keetenheuve, they might not wind up on a battlefield, but it was doubtful whether they would manage to avoid Gomorrah, the skull hill. Unquestionably, it was morally better to be murdered than to fall in battle, and the determination not to die in battle was the only possibility of changing the face of the earth. But was anyone prepared to climb onto the dizzying, perilous, ethical high-wire? They preferred to keep their feet on the ground, allowed a damned weapon to be pressed into their hands, and died cursing with their guts ripped open, just as stupidly as the enemy. And if, so thought Keetenheuve, such an appalling death in battle was the will of God, then a cruel God shouldn't be afforded the support and the disguise of warfare, instead man should walk out onto the field, unarmed, and cry: Show us your terrible face, show it to us naked, kill and slaughter as you please, and don't give mankind the blame for it. And, as Keetenheuve looked around the inattentive, unmoved, bored faces all around, his eye lit on the Chancellor again, rigid, bored, his head in his hands, and he called out to him: "You want to have an army, Chancellor, you want to be included in the alliance, but what alliances will your general want to enter into? What treaties will your general break? Which way will your general march? Under which flag will your general fight? Can you tell us the colors, Chancellor, can you tell us the direction? You want an army Your ministers want parades. Your ministers want to walk tall, want to
look their men in the eye again.
Fine. Forget about those fools, whom you secretly despise anyway, but, Chancellor, what about your dream of being buried on a gun carriage? Fine, be buried on a gun carriage, but your cortege will consist of millions of corpses, who won't even be buried in the cheapest pine coffin, who will burn wherever they happen to stand, who will be buried wherever the earth happens to fall on their bodies. May you grow old, Chancellor, may you live to a ripe old age, become honorary professor and honorary senator and honorary doctor at all kinds of universities. May you be transported on a rose-covered hearse, with all possible honors, to your final resting place, but forget the gun carriage—that's no distinction for a man as wise and important and inspired as yourself!" Had Keetenheuve really called out the words, or had he once again merely thought them? The Chancellor continued to prop his head in his hands. He looked drained. He looked not unpensive. The chamber was whispering. The President stared dully down at his paunch. The stenographers, looking bored, twiddled their pens. Keetenheuve got down. He was bathed in sweat. His party applauded perfunctorily. From the left there issued a shrill whistle.