The Secret Knowledge (23 page)

Adorno is in his office at the university next day when he gets a phone call. The woman says her name but he doesn’t catch it; he assumes it’s one of the protesters and considers putting the receiver down; but no, she isn’t phoning to apologise or launch a further attack, she had nothing to do with the demonstration; in fact, she says with an embarrassed laugh when he questions her, she’s an elderly and, she likes to think, perfectly respectable lady. She simply wants to meet and discuss with him a matter concerning Walter Benjamin. This afternoon, perhaps?

She proposes a park; the weather recommends it, though there is also an air of mystery to the assignation. Is the conversation to be of a kind she would prefer no one to overhear? Parks, in Adorno’s mind, are a place for clandestine lovers wishing to proclaim an illusory freedom. The woman says she’s elderly but that could still signify fewer years than his own. Her voice is beautiful.

He arrives early and waits on a bench. Some sort of bird is hopping on the grass, he doesn’t know the name. Sunlight perforates the trees, momentarily dazzles him, connects him with primal warmth. He remembers hearing it claimed that the sun emits radio waves.

Then he sees her, approaching slowly. Yes, he thinks, it’s surely her, incongruous by her dignity, a moving statue, relic of an earlier time, perhaps a decade older than himself, yet straight-backed and without a walking stick. And yes, she’s beautiful. He rises to greet her; she extends her slender hand.

“I am Yvette Carreau.”

He finds himself making a bow, crooking his arm for her to hold. An old, extinguished world has come alive.

“My late husband was a collector,” she explains as they begin walking, for she says she would prefer it, and he hears a trace of a French accent that hadn’t been apparent on the telephone.

“A collector of what?”

“Miscellaneous objects and distractions. Also something of a gambler, willing to part with large amounts of money for items that might prove worthless. And a hunter, determined to catch the quarry he sought.” She stops and turns to look at Adorno. “He met your friend Walter Benjamin on the night before he died.”

Now Teddie understands. This woman has no interest in him, only in the past he represents, the connection with history. She wants to tell him an anecdote he can put in a book or lecture. “Were Benjamin and your late husband intimately acquainted?”

“They met on only that single occasion. Some people say once is as good as never, but I’ve always felt that a single meeting can mean more than a thousand.”

“An interesting observation. So your husband was in Portbou?”

“And I was with him, at the Hotel de Francia. Louis had the visas and Benjamin had what Louis wanted in return.”

“My God.”

“You see now why I wanted to meet.”

“You could have told me this long ago.”

“Not while Louis was alive. My late husband insisted there was a plot against my life, a secret cabal, from which he alone could protect me.” They’re reaching a boating pond; now Yvette would like to sit and watch the glittering water broken only by paddling ducks and the empty boats moored and rocking at the edge. They position themselves at a respectful distance from one another on the bench she selects. “Louis was a good and loyal husband. But he never believed that I really loved him, I see that now.”

Adorno gives a cough of embarrassment. “What went wrong with the visas? Did Benjamin not have enough money for them?”

Yvette shakes her head. “All I know is what Louis told me, which is that Benjamin had somehow, quite unwittingly, acquired a book containing crucial evidence of the conspiracy. Louis wanted it in exchange for the visas he’d procured at great risk. And so I sat in the restaurant of the hotel while Louis went upstairs to see Benjamin, who had been arrested with some other Jews. A gramophone played nearby, it was a balmy evening and in different circumstances it could all have been romantic and pleasurable, yet I was tired, depressed, fearful. And when Louis came back he told me that he had the book, its former owner had the travel documents. We returned to our own hotel and next day back across the border to France. It was only much later that I learned the poor refugee had been a scholar of some importance, and that instead of trying to use the visas he had decided to take his own life.”

Adorno is sceptical. “What was the book?”

She smiles. “Long ago I was engaged to a musician named Pierre Klauer. Fate stole him from me, but I was left with the key to his desk, where he said his latest work was to be found. It was Louis who retrieved it, a piano score ominously titled
The Secret Knowledge
. And how I treasured that relic of my sweetheart. So many times I wept over it, clutching it until the pages became bent and faded, but determined that it should live forever. Louis’ acquisition of the work, right from under the noses of Pierre’s parents, was the first indication to me, both of his ingenuity, and of the threat we jointly faced. Pierre’s death was the work of an underground sect; I risked being their next victim. The music, Louis explained, was a coded message, the protocols of the organisation, but it lacked one vital thing. Pierre gave me the key to his desk, but not the key to the code. This was what had somehow fallen into the hands of Walter Benjamin, a book the society was determined to recover, at whatever cost.”

Adorno glances at his watch. “This is most… unusual.”

“I see that you are doubtful of my story. And you are right to be – for it was built on a lie. Louis always kept from me the secret knowledge that he said could only harm me, but when he passed away I felt as though my own life were no longer worth living. Come now, damned conspirators, I said to myself. Come and kill me, but before I die I shall unlock the code, break the spell of fear itself. I knew where the book was kept, knew the combination of the safe. Louis had forbidden me from opening it and I had obeyed, but now what else was I to do? So I brought it out into the light of the day, the slender volume that Walter Benjamin thought could save his life, as well as other papers stored with it. I sat at Louis’ desk and looked at those cursed documents. And I realised at once: I had been deceived.”

“What did you see?”

“First the book, written in some unknown language and peppered with symbols, hieroglyphs; it was no cipher but was itself in code. Why had this confused jumble been kept hidden from me? What might I have learned from it? Only that it was meaningless. But more than the book, it was the other papers that drew my attention, for what I had before me were notes for Pierre’s work, sketches and drafts. Surely my husband must have retrieved these from the composer’s desk along with the score, for a moment this was what I thought. But the pages told a different story. Mingled with musical notation there were verbal comments, suggestions, mathematical equations. The handwriting was not Pierre’s. I even retrieved the letters I still kept from him, in order to verify what was so immediately obvious to me.”

“He could have worked with an assistant.”

“No, professor, there was no assistant. Because you see, I recognised the handwriting at once. I told myself it couldn’t be true, yet there was no other explanation. The man who wrote those words was my husband. Certainly there was another hand at work in the drafts, another style of writing, but when I examined it all closely, so very closely, I understood what had gone on. As well as Pierre’s letters I revisited the most sacred item of all, the score. And like a detective, with a magnifying glass in my hand, I discovered what I knew must be the truth. The work was a forgery. My husband, Louis Carreau, cobbled it together as a way of winning me for himself. He said he knew Pierre, this much I believe is true, and he must have seen his writing, practised until he was able to replicate it, penned what looks like an entire piece of music and claimed to have taken it from Pierre’s desk. Made me hide it, so that in all the years I never heard it. I expect it would be only crude noise. Poor Louis had no ear for music.”

“Surely you must hate him for it.”

“I pity him. He saved me from my misery after Pierre died, but that was not enough, instead he felt the need to invent some other kind of salvation, more tangible and persuasive, that would bind us together. A great hoax reinforced by so many strange incidents over the decades, obscure items he acquired. And I never suspected a thing, because from the very start, Louis had done what would make his story most convincing, he had created the essential piece of material evidence that would extinguish all doubt. Some women lose a husband and discover he had another wife and home, another life, making a mockery of the love they claimed to feel. But when I discovered how I’d been deceived, it had the opposite effect. He did it all for me, because he thought he had to. He simply couldn’t believe that I might love him only for what he was, for the good and pure heart that he had. How I miss the years of happiness we might have shared.”

Adorno imagines the aftermath of his own death, Gretel reading every letter, recognising every name, being surprised by nothing. “Your story is a tragic one.”

“The word is overused. They say your friend Benjamin was tragic; others might call his demise typical.”

“He made a fatal error.”

“He was a fool, like Louis.”

Adorno finds it a wise and admirable comment, but also deduces that the woman’s late husband was not wholly wrong in doubting the possibility of love. “I thank you for this interesting piece of history, now I ought to return to my work.” He begins to rise, Yvette holds his arm.

“I admit my story is bizarre and you had no need to hear it. But I wanted to speak of Walter Benjamin. The book he gave my husband is real.”

“You thought it nonsense.”

“Whatever it is, wherever it came from, even when we discard my husband’s deceptions, it remains the fact that your friend carried the book over the Pyrenees; for him it was equivalent to life itself. I should like you to have it. To me it means nothing.”

“And to me it should mean more?”

Yvette looks sadly at the bright water of the pond. “If you will not receive what I am offering then I shall destroy it. I suppose it has no place in the archive of Benjamin’s papers, but perhaps he might have liked you to have what cost him so much effort.”

Adorno considers the strange proposal; a gift that focuses with startling clarity the nullity of all gifts, their purely symbolic value, where what is symbolised is always an exchange, because the gift has to be accepted as well as given. This poor woman’s life has been an illusion, her marriage a sham, her love affairs counterfeit. His acceptance would amount to telling her: it has not been wasted.

“Send it to me,” he says, giving her his card. Then he bids farewell to Yvette Carreau, leaving her sitting on the bench where she watches the ducks, looking now like the old woman she always was. He walks away and forgets her. Already he’s late for an encounter with Ulrike at her apartment.

The package arrives at his home the following day. Wrapped in brown paper he finds the slim, elegantly bound volume the Frenchwoman described; also some Xeroxed pages of musical manuscript and an accompanying note explaining them to be the work she spoke of. She knows it to be a fake, she writes, yet still cannot part with the original that has been her trusted companion for so many years.

Adorno leafs through the book, whose age and provenance only a specialist could determine. It is, as she said, written in some form of invented language, incorporating tables, diagrams and symbols one could guess to be mathematical or magical (categories indistinguishable except to the initiated). A frequently recurring mark resembling the Greek letter
psi
could equally be a pitchfork; Adorno suspects the work to be a coded treatise on demonology or the Kabbalah, topics upon which Benjamin allowed his intellectual energies to be squandered.

Yet there is no evidence at all, other than the widow’s tale, that this book ever lay within his friend’s possession. Adorno puts it aside and considers the score, allegedly the fabrication of an unmusical man. A moment’s perusal throws doubt on that, for Adorno can see at once that it is not randomly written noise, but a credible composition. If Louis Carreau forged this then he must have worked from some original model, perhaps several. Adorno takes it to the piano, arranges the pages, and begins to play.

The style is instantly recognisable; it is certainly a piece that belongs to the first decade of the twentieth century. The revolution of serialism has not yet happened; there is perhaps something of Scriabin in it, or Stravinsky. And Adorno reminds himself: this is supposed to be a fake. Louis Carreau was no artist, but he must have had some understanding of what he pieced together from unknown sources. One could almost say there is a hint of Ravel, only a hint. And my word, a thinly concealed quotation from Beethoven.

All of it pastiche, apparently – for the love of a woman! This Carreau was a sensitive soul, poor Yvette doesn’t know how lucky she was to find him. The man who will build an entire world of falsehood around his beloved, surely that man is rare. More common is he who covers his own false life.

Abrupt transitions suggest the influence of Mahler; hurrying onwards to the recapitulation, Adorno is irritated by consecutive fifths that feel almost barbaric. But Beethoven, he realises, is the key. Thomas Mann, when he needed to invent a composer for his novel, called Adorno to his aid, and the result was a masterpiece. Mann and Carreau have something in common. Or is it Carreau and Adorno? Are we all counterfeiters? The thought of that stupid woman conned by her husband for years over this… this… extraordinary concoction. The strange fact is that for all its manifest flaws, the work displays genuine if modest artistic talent. It’s about as good as anything Adorno himself ever composed. Not a masterpiece, no, such things are as infrequent as faithful husbands. But even were it average, were it no better than the work of any music student, that would still make the hoax a most striking one. And all for the most inconsequential of motives.

Beethoven’s music represents the social process; the way in which the part can be understood only in relation to the totality. Yet this organic wholeness is also the mutual estrangement of individuals; Carreau-Klauer acknowledges, in the first movement of
The Secret Knowledge
, the tonic-mediant relationship so characteristic of Beethoven, but instead of merely imitating he highlights its strangeness. Only ears tired by the sounds of industry can fail to notice the abrupt juxtapositions and shocking montage that Beethoven made into a style, and that this fictitious composer whose work Adorno now plays has managed, albeit naively and intuitively, to comprehend.