The Hothouse (7 page)

Sweat beaded his brow. He walked over to the newsstand. The sun was just paying a call, peering through a window and casting its spectrum over the latest news, over the Gutenberg picture of the world, an ironic flicker of iridescence. Keetenheuve bought the morning papers No
Discussions with the Russians.
Well, evidently not. Who wanted to discuss or not discuss what? And who came running at the sound of a whistle? Who was a dog? A constitutional dispute—was there some disagreement? Could someone not read? The Basic Law had been drawn up. Were people saying they shouldn't have bothered? What was going on in Mehlem? The High Commissar had been up the Zugspitze. He had enjoyed the wonderful view. The Chancellor was a little off color, but continued to perform well. Seven a.m.—he would be at his desk already. It wasn't just Frost-Forestier who worked in Bonn. Keetenheuve still hadn't got over his panic. The main section of the station restaurant was closed. Keetenheuve went into the little buffet room, schoolchildren were sitting around a table, charmlessly clad girls, boys already with the faces of civil servants, smoking furtively, they too were industrious, like the Chancellor, had open books spread out in front of them, were studying, striving (like the Chancellor?), grim-faced young people, because that was supposed to be sensible and help them to get ahead, they steeled their hearts, they were mindful of the timetable and not of the stars. The waitress gave it as her opinion that she should have been born with wings, Keetenheuve could see her float off, a halibut with pinions, the establishment wasn't large enough to accommodate all the custom issuing from the big trains, the lobbyists were cross, they wanted their eggs, Keetenheuve ordered a lager. He loathed beer, but on this occasion the bitter fizz seemed to calm his heart. Keetenheuve opened the newspaper at the local page. What was happening in Bonn? He was like the spa guest, who, having been banished to a bleak watering hole for too long, ends up listening to all the village scuttlebutt. Sophie Mergentheim had agreed to a soaking for the benefit of the refugees. There, she never failed. At a reception for God knows whom, she had charitably knelt under a watering can. Sophie, Sophie, the ambitious goose, didn't save the Capitol. You paid your money and you got to give her a drenching. Pretty tulip. The newspaper carried the photograph of a wet Sophie Mergentheim in a wet evening gown, wet to her panties, wet to her powdered scented skin. Colleague Mergentheim was positioned by the microphone, gazing pluckily into the flashlight through his thick black horn rims. Let's see your owl!
All quiet in Insterburg. Dog barks.
Mergentheim specialized in Jewish jokes; on the old
Volksblatt
, he had been in charge of the funnies.
What
,
who
barked in Insterburg? Yesterday? Today? Who barked? Jews? Silence. Dog joke.
In the cinema—Willy Birgel riding for Germany.
The loathsome beer foam on his lips.
Elke,
a name from Nordic mythology. The
norns
Urd
,
Werdandi
,
and Skuld under the tree
Yggdrasil.
Polished boots. Death in capsule form. Beer over a grave.

2

K
ORODIN
GOT
OFF
THE
TRAM
AT
THE
MAIN
STATION
. A traffic policeman was playacting at being a traffic policeman in the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. He waved the traffic on down the Bonner Strasse. It swarmed and buzzed and squeaked and honked. Cars, bicycles, pedestrians, and wheezy asthmatic trams squeezed out of narrow side streets onto the main station square. This was where coaches had once trundled, drawn by four horses, steered by royal coachmen, Prince Wilhelm had been a student at the university—and was thereby a few meters closer to his ultimate exile in Holland— he wore a tailcoat, the order of the Saxo-Borussian fraternity and their white cap. The traffic got snarled up, impeded and constricted by construction sites, cable laying, canalization pipes, concrete mixers, asphalt boilers. The snarl-up, the labyrinth, the knotty tangle, emblematic of losing ones way, of wandering and erring, the insoluble, inextricable knot, the ancients already had known the curse, had experienced the deception, found themselves ensnared, had lived it and thought about it and described it. Always the next generation would be wiser, would arrange things better for itself. (And this for five thousand years now.) Not everyone had a sword. Anyway, what was a sword good for? You could wave it around, kill people with it, die by it. And the point? None. You needed to show up in Gordium at the right moment. Opportunity makes the hero. By the time Alexander breezed in from Macedonia, the knot was tired of resisting. Besides, the event was without consequence. India did not fall; at the most, some fringe territories were occupied for a few years, and between the locals and the occupying forces there was barter.

What was the scene at the real Potsdamer Platz? A wire enclosure, a new international frontier, the end of the world, the Iron Curtain that God had caused to fall, God alone knew why. Korodin hastened to the stop for the trolleybus, the proud, modern conveyance commensurate to the needs of the capital city, the carrier for the masses traveling between the widely separated government quarters. Korodin did not, strictly speaking, have to join the line of those waiting at the stop. Two automobiles were garaged at his house. It was an act of modesty and self-denial for Korodin to ride to politics on public transport, while his chauffeur, alert, rested, and comfortable, drove Korodin's kids to school. Korodin was greeted. He acknowledged the greetings. He was a man of the people. But greetings from anonymous citizens not only incurred his gratitude; they also made him uncomfortable. The first bus came. They piled onto it, and Korodin stood back, modestly and self-denyingly he stood back, but he also felt squeamish (a sinful feeling) at the thought of these hurrying people struggling for their daily bread. Then the conveyance set off for parliament, the various ministries, the proliferation of offices, they were packed together like sardines, the gaggles of secretaries, the armies of pencil pushers, the companies of middle-ranking officials, all one trawl, emigrated from Berlin, emigrated from Frankfurt, emigrated from the caves of the Wolfsschanze,
{5}
relocated along with their jobs, bundled up together with their files, by the dozen they had been shoehorned into apartments in the new prefab blocks, where the walls barely separated their bedheads from the bedheads of others, perpetually under observation, never alone, always snooped on, always snooping, who's the visitor in the corner apartment, what are they saying, are they talking about me, they sniffed, who's been eating onions, who's having a late bath, it's Fräulein Irmgard, she's the one who uses chlorophyl soap, she needs it, who's been combing his hair over the sink, who's been using my towel, they were irritable, rancorous, embittered, indebted, separated from their families, seeking consolation, but not seeking it too often, anyway they were too tired in the evenings, they slaved away, typing up the new laws, doing overtime, sacrificing themselves for their boss, whom they hated, and on whom they snooped, against whom they intrigued, to whom they addressed anonymous letters, whose coffee they heated up, in whose window they put flowers—and they wrote proud letters home, sending bleached box brownie snapshots showing themselves in ministry gardens, or little Leica pictures that the boss had taken of them in the office: they were working for the administration, they were governing Germany It struck Korodin that he hadn't prayed yet that day and he decided to step out of the stream, and finish his journey on foot.

Keetenheuve hadn't been in to his apartment in the parliamentary ghetto in Bonn that morning, for him it was just a joyless pied-à-terre, a doll's chamber of constriction
tomorrow
;
children
,
we'll be joyful
,
tomorrow we will celebrate
, why should he go there; everything he needed was in his briefcase, and even that sometimes seemed to him like useless ballast on the journey. Keetenheuve had declined to take the bus. In the square in front of the cathedral, Keetenheuve encountered the modest Korodin. Korodin had prayed to Cassius and Florentius, the patron saints of the place, and he had confessed to the sin of pride
I thank thee God that I am not as these men are
, and he had absolved himself for now and for today of his guilt. Being seen coming out of the cathedral by Keetenheuve made Korodin feel uncomfortable again. Were the saints perhaps dissatisfied with the delegate's prayers and were they now punishing Korodin by putting Keetenheuve in his way? Or perhaps the encounter had been arranged by a kindly Providence, and was a sign that Korodin was in good odor once again.

It was accounted unusual if members of hostile parties— while they might work together, and even on occasion vote together in committee—went for walks à deux. For each it was suspicious to be seen with the other, while for the party bosses the sight ranked with that of one of their flock openly consorting with rent boys, a display of straightforward perversion. Gossip inevitably put the worst construction on every casual conversation, which might revolve around the oppressive climate or a still more oppressive heart condition, gossip suspected conspiracy, collusion, betrayal, heresy, and the overthrow of the Chancellor. The town, moreover, was crawling with journalists, and the photograph of the individuals in question might appear in Monday's
Spiegel
, where it would give rise to furious indignation. All this Korodin was mindful of, but Keetenheuve (he felt like saying "God damn him") was not unsympathetic to him, with the result that he hated him sometimes with a personal animus, and not just with the chilly routine rejection of party rivalry, because he had ("Damn him") the striking and unignorable feeling that here was a soul to be rescued, that Keetenheuve might yet be brought back to the straight and narrow, might even, ultimately, be converted. Korodin, with his two large and expensive automobiles generally consigned to their garage, had an honest infatuation with the new generation of worker priests in the industrial Ruhrgebiet. They were grumpy men in clumping shoes, who, Korodin liked to think, had read their Bernanos and their Bloy, whereas in fact it was only he himself who—and this was to his credit—had been perturbed by these authors, and so the grumpy men from time to time would receive a check from Korodin, though apart from that, he seemed to them rather a cold fish. To Korodin, however, these checks represented a kind of primitive Christianity of pure opposition to the existing order, against one's own class and against expensive automobiles, and already he was experiencing difficulties on account of his "radicalism," and receiving mild rebukes, and his friend the bishop, who, like Korodin, had read Bernanos, but had not been disturbed, but merely appalled, the bishop would have preferred to see the check on some other offertory tray elsewhere.

Korodin, who always knew everything, always had a list of birthdays committed to memory, if only so as not to alienate anyone in his wife's extensive landed family, Korodin wanted to express his condolences to Keetenheuve, and maybe he hoped that a moment of shattering grief might make him more amenable to conversion, that the loss of transitory earthly happiness might turn his mind to the joys of eternity, but then, standing in front of Keetenheuve, Korodin thought commiseration was not called for, would even be unpleasantly and tactlessly intrusive, because to such a man as Keetenheuve, everything that would be taken for granted in Korodin's circles, such as, for instance, expressions of sympathy, was dubious, one could not say for sure whether Keetenheuve was even grieving, there was nothing visible, no black armband, no mourning riband on the lapel, and no tears in the widowers eyes, but that again made the man attractive, perhaps he wasn't one to make a public display of his grief, and so Korodin, lowering his gaze, and fixing the cobbles in front of the cathedral, said: "We are standing on the site of a huge cemetery from Roman-Frankish times." And there it was—the sentence, already spoken, no longer merely a casual or thoughtless conversation opener, a chance association that had come up, the sentence was more crassly stupid than any condolence, and Keetenheuve might take it as an allusion to his grief, but at the same time as a banal and cynical ignoring of it. And so, in his confusion, Korodin went from the cemetery straight onto the question he might otherwise have spent a long time circling round, without perhaps even putting in the end, because it was an invitation to him to commit betrayal, albeit betrayal of a wicked party.

He asked: "Might you not change your position?"

Keetenheuve understood Korodin. Keetenheuve understood too that Korodin had wanted to express his sympathies, and he was grateful to him that he had not done so. Of course, he might change his position. He might easily change his position. Anyone might change his position, but the fact was that, with Elke, Keetenheuve had lost the only person with intimate knowledge of his position, the only spectator at his turbulence, and that meant that he could not now change his position. He could not change it himself, from within, because he
was
that position, it was an ancient disgust in himself, and he could change it least of all now when he thought of Elke's short life ruined by war and criminality, and Korodin had already given him the answer with his Roman-Frankish cemetery.

Keetenheuve said: "I don't want any more cemeteries.''

He could just as well have said he didn't want any more cemeteries in Europe or in northern Europe; but that would have had a little too much pathos. But of course you could use the cemetery as an argument against the cemetery. Both of them knew that. Korodin didn't want any more cemeteries either. He wasn't a militarist. He was an officer in the reserve. But he was willing to risk the sort of cemetery that Keetenheuve was thinking of in order to forestall the digging of another, much larger and otherwise unavoidable cemetery later (in which he himself, and his automobiles and his wife and children, would all be buried). But what could or could not be forestalled? History was a clumsy child or an ancient guide with a blind man in tow, it alone knew the way, and it was in a hurry to get there. They were strolling toward the Hofgarten now, and stopped in front of a playground. Two little girls were playing on the seesaw. One of them was fat; the other little girl was slender, with long, shapely legs. The fat one had to push to get off the ground.