The Hothouse (3 page)

This time he did not remain coolly intellectual in his thinking, he acted on impulse, furiously, and Elke, who had always held it against him that he lived with his head between the pages of a book, Elke would have rejoiced now to witness the prompt and unswerving way he went about his business, while yet, like a film hero, remaining mindful of his safety. He saw himself striding through the street of secondhand stalls, saw himself purchasing his widower's raiment in various nooks and basements. He bought the striped trousers, the morning coat, the white waistcoat (grubby, just like Herr Possehl's), the stiff black hat, the gold watch chain, only the ram's tooth pendant proved impossible to find, and so he was unable to celebrate a triumph over the animal in him. In a large department store, an escalator carried him up to the floor where work clothes were sold, and there he bought a white overall of the sort that cattle drovers wear. The ax he stole from a timber yard. It was very simple; the carpenters were having their evening meal, and he saw an ax lying on a pile of shavings, bent down to pick it up, and slowly walked off with it.

A large and bustling hotel with several exits was the killer's chosen base. He took a room there,
Keetenheuve Member of the Bundestag/Possehl Widower from
Kleinwesenfeld.
He got in disguise. In front of the mirror he slipped into his widower's outfit. Now he resembled Possehl. He was Possehl. Finally he had achieved respectability. In the evening he went out, with the drover's coat over his arm with the ax. In the gloomy street, a green scorpion glowed from the black glass of a pub window. That was the only light around, a marshy light in a grim story. The bakery and the little dairies and greengrocers all slumbered behind their rusty drawn shutters. There was a musty, moldy, sour smell, a smell of dirt, of rats, of potatoes germinating in basements and of rising bread dough. Phonograph music could be heard coming out of the "Scorpion." It was Rosemary Clooney singing "Botch-a-me." Keetenheuve moved into a gateway He pulled on his drover's coat, he picked up his ax—he was a butcher waiting for the bull.

And there was the bull dyke, la Wanowski appeared, a coarse frizz of hair on her bull's skull, a woman who struck fear as a pub brawler, and had gained sway over the tribades; they felt a pang of sweetness when she appeared, they called her the mother of the nation. She wore a man's suit, a suit to fit a fat man, the seat bulged tautly around her buttocks, the square padded shoulders were a metaphor for penis envy, laughable and terrifying at the same time, and between the puffy lips under the burnt cork fluff, she was chewing on the sodden stump of a bitter cigar. No pity! No pity for the ogre! And no laughter to dispel the tension! Keetenheuve raised the ax, and smote. He smote the frizzy mat of hair that he supposed covered her all over, he split the skull of the bull. The bull sank to its knees. It rolled over. The drover's coat was stained by the blood of the bull.

He tossed the ax and coat into the river, did the widower Possehl, he leaned down over the railing of the bridge, ax and coat sank to the bottom, they were gone, the waters closed over them,
water from the Alps snow-melt glacier debris smooth flavorful trout.

No one had seen him, no one could have seen him, because unfortunately he hadn't committed the act, once again he'd only dreamed it, it had been a daydream and a fantasy, and he had thought it instead of doing it, his old failing, it was always that way with him. He had failed. Failed at every one of life's crossroads. He had failed in 1933 and failed again in 1945. He had failed in politics. He had failed in his profession. He couldn't cope with existence, besides, who could, only idiots, it was like a curse, but this part of it concerned him alone, that he had failed in his marriage as well, and now that he was thinking sadly of Elke, with the widower's genuine and not at all ridiculous pain, Elke lying in the cemetery earth, already given over to the unknowable, to an appalling transformation if there was a void, and something just as appalling if it was more than that, it showed him he was capable of neither love nor hate, everything was just a lecherous fumbling, a groping of surfaces. He hadn't brained the Wanowski woman. She was alive. She was holding court in the "Scorpion." She was ruling, drinking, procuring for the dykes. She was listening to the Rosemary Clooney record, "botch-a-me, botch-a-me"—and then he felt his heart turn over, because he had murdered after all!

Wagalaweia, wailed the locomotive. Elke had come to him when she'd been hungry, and at a time when he'd had cans of food, a warm room, drinks, a small black cat, and, after a long fast, an appetite once again for human flesh, to use Novalis's phrase for love.

He had never ceased to feel German; but in the first summer after the war, it wasn't easy for someone who'd been out of the country for eleven years to orient himself. He was a busy man. After leaving him idle for a long time, Time reached for him, and took him in her toils once again, and he believed that, given time, something would become of him.

One evening found him looking out the window. He was tired. Darkness was falling early There were ominous-looking clouds in the sky. The wind picked up puffs of dust. At that point he saw Elke. He saw her slipping into the ruins opposite. She slipped through a crack in the wall into the caverns of rubble and scree. She was like an animal taking refuge.

It started to rain. He went out onto the street. The rain and the storm shook him. Dust whirled into his mouth and eyes. He fetched Elke out of the rubble. She was soaked and filthy. Her soiled dress clung to her bare skin. She had no underclothes. She was naked against the dust, the rain and the bare stones. Elke had come out of the war, and she was sixteen years old. He didn't like her name. It made him suspicious. Elke to him was a name out of Nordic mythology, it reminded him of Wagner and his hysterical heroes, a wily, unscrupulous, and violent set of gods, and in fact Elke turned out to be the daughter of a Gauleiter and a governor of the lord.

The Gauleiter and his wife were both dead. They had swallowed the little death capsules they had been given for all eventualities, and Elke had heard news of their deaths when she was in the forest. She heard the news (and it was no more than news, because Time seemed to have chloroformed that particular day, and Elke felt all the knocks as though she'd been bedded in cotton wool and was being thrown around by rough hands while inside a box lined with cotton wool) from a sniffing and snorting radio transmitter, overexcited by cipher messages and appeals for support, among a group of German soldiers who had surrendered and were waiting to be taken away to a prisoner-of-war camp.

Two Negroes were guarding them, and Elke could not forget them. The Negroes were lanky, loose-limbed types, who hunkered down in a strange and oddly vigilant kind of squat. It was a jungle posture. The rifles of civilization lay across their knees. Tucked in their ammunition belts, they had long, knotted leather whips. The whips looked altogether more imposing than the rifles.

From time to time, the Negroes stood up to relieve themselves. They relieved themselves with great seriousness and without taking their round white eyeballs (they looked somehow guileless) off the prisoners. The Negroes pissed in two great high streams into the grass under the trees. While they pissed, their whips dangled against their beautiful long thighs, and Elke thought of Owens, the Negro who had been victorious in the Olympic Games in Berlin. The German soldiers stank of rain, earth, sweat, and wounds, they stank of many miles of road, of sleeping in their clothes, of victories and defeats, of fear, exhaustion, weariness, and death, they stank of the word "injustice" and the word "futile."

And on forest paths behind the guarded enclosure, peeking shyly out of the bushes, still terrified of the soldiers, still suspicious of the Negroes, there emerged ghosts, famished bodies, broken skeletons, starved eyes, and anguished brows, they came crawling out of the caves where they had been hiding, they broke out of the death camps, they roamed as far as their bony, beaten feet could carry them, the cage was open, they were the persecuted, the harried, the prisoners of the government, who had given Elke her privileged upbringing,
games on Daddy's gubernatorial estate
,
butterflies flittering over the flowers on the terrace
,
a female prisoner sets the table for breakfast
,
prisoners rake the gravel
,
the stallion is led up for the morning gallop
,
Daddy's top boots cleaned to a mirroring shine
,
a prisoner brushed them
,
the saddle leather creaks
,
the beautifully turned out
,
well-fed stallion whinnies and paws the ground
—Elke couldn't remember how she had gone on from there; now with one refugee column, now another.

It was Keetenheuve's little kitty-cat that won Elke’s trust. They were both young, the girl and the cat, and so they played together. Their favorite game was balling up Keetenheuve's loose manuscript pages and batting them to and fro. Each time Keetenheuve returned from one of his many avocations, which took up more and more of his time, and left him more and more disillusioned, Elke would call out: "Master's home!" Keetenheuve probably was master, to both of them. But soon the cats companionship began to pall on Elke, she grew bad-tempered when Keetenheuve sat over his papers of an evening, still obsessed with the notion of helping, reconstructing, healing wounds, providing bread, and since their friendship had run aground, they decided to get married.

Marriage complicated everything. In all the questionnaires—a thing devised by the National Socialists, and now perfected by the occupying powers—Keetenheuve now appeared as the son-in-law of the dead Gauleiter. That alienated a lot of people, but he was unconcerned, he was opposed to clannishness in all its forms, and that included his wife's clan. What was worse was that marriage was deeply alien to his own nature. He was a bachelor, a loner, maybe a voluptuary, or then again maybe an anchorite, he wasn't sure, he swung between the two types of existence, but one thing was certain, that in getting married he had let himself in for an experience for which he had not been intended, and which was a further burden to him. He had, moreover (and happily), married a child, someone young enough to be his daughter, and, in the face of her youth, was forced to recognize that he was not grown-up himself. They were a match for love, but not for life. He could desire, but not educate. He had no great opinion of education, but he could see that Elke was unhappy in her excessive freedom. She didn't know what to do with freedom. She lost herself in it. Her life, apparently without duties, was like an immense body of water, that washed around Elke without hope of land, an ocean of emptiness, whose unending featurelessness was only ever animated by the riffling breeze of lust, the froth of excess, the wind of bygone days. Keetenheuve was a signpost that had been pitched beside the way of Elke's life, but only, it appeared, to lead her astray. Next, Keetenheuve made the acquaintance— it was a new experience for him, and, again, not one for which he had been intended—of a mortal fatigue and sadness after many conjunctions, the believer's sense of mortal sin. But first of all, he sated his appetite. Elke needed plenty of loving. She was a sensual creature, and, once awakened, her demand for tenderness was powerful. "Hold me tight!" she said. She directed his hand. "Feel me!" she said. Her thighs grew hot, her belly burned, she used uncouth expressions. "Take me!" she cried. "Take me!" And he was thrilled, he remembered his own hunger, the time he'd spent wandering the streets of the foreign cities into which the hatred of Elke's parents had exiled him, he thought of the thousandfold seductions of shop windows, the blandishments of the dummies, their crudely lascivious poses, the displays of lingerie, the poster models who tugged their stockings up to the tops of their thighs, the girls whose language he didn't speak and who passed him like ice and fire in one. Authentic passion had so far manifested itself to him only in dreams, in dreams he had felt eros, in dreams, and only in dreams, the myriad pleasures of the skin, the becoming one, the altered breathing, the rank heat. And the brief moments of pleasure he'd experienced in cheap hotels, on park benches, in doorways of old towns, what were they, in comparison with the exhaustive seduction of the string of seconds, the chain of minutes, the run of hours, the wheel of days, weeks, and years, the constant opportunity vouchsafed by the marriage vows, an eternity of seduction, which out of horror at so much time, spurred the imagination on to the unthinkable?

Elke stroked him. It was the time of power cuts. The nights were oppressive and dark. Keetenheuve had got himself a battery-powered lamp to work by. Elke brought it to bed, and its harsh light fell across their bodies, like the beam of a headlight catching a naked couple embracing on the roadway. Elke studied Keetenheuve long and attentively She said: "You must have been good-looking when you were twenty." She said: "Have you had many girls?" He was thirty-nine. He hadn't had many girls. Elke said: "Tell me something." To her, his life was exciting and colorful, full of baffling leaps, like the life of an adventurer, almost. It was all strange to her. She didn't understand what star he was following. When he told her why he had rejected the politics of the National Socialists and gone abroad, she saw no reason for such behavior, and if there was a reason, it was something she couldn't herself see or feel; he was just a moralist. She said: "You're a schoolmaster." He laughed. But perhaps it was just his face that laughed. Maybe he had always been an old schoolmaster, an old schoolmaster and before that an old schoolboy, a naughty boy who wouldn't do his prep because he loved books too much. Elke came to hate all Keetenheuve's books, she fulminated against the innumerable documents, papers, notebooks, journals, digests, and drafts that lay about everywhere and took Keetenheuve away from her bed into areas where she could not follow him, kingdoms that were inaccessible to her.

Keetenheuve's pursuits, his involvement in the reconstruction, his eagerness to reinvent the nation as a liberal democracy, had brought it in their train that he was returned as a member of the Bundestag. He was given a preferential place on the list of candidates, and had won his seat without having had to exert himself on the hustings to any great extent. The end of the war had made him somewhat optimistic, and he thought it was right that he should now devote himself to a cause, having been a marginal figure for so long. He wanted to realize his youthful dreams, at the time he had been a believer in change, but he soon saw what a foolish belief that was, people had naturally remained the same, it didn't even occur to them to change, merely because the form of government had changed, because the uniforms thronging the streets and making babies were now olive-green instead of brown, black, and field gray, and once again everything came to grief over petty matters of detail, the thick ooze on the streambed that blocked the flow of fresh water, and left everything as it was before, in a hand-me-down type of life that, everybody knew really, was a lie. At first, Keetenheuve plunged himself enthusiastically into the work of the committees, he wanted to make up for all the lost years, and
he would have blossomed if he'd gone with the Nazis
,
because that was the break
,
the stupid miscalculation of his generation
,
and now all his eagerness was simply wasted and laughable
,
a graying youth
,
beaten from the start.