Arno said out loud:
“A fine text. But don’t you have something darker…? Or, should we say –”
“Enough, I know what you mean. I do have something right here that might charm even you. I write in all keys. Dark skies, headlights, Flying Fortresses sweeping clean over the Ruhr, the riposte of friendly forces… Oh well. Old dreams. And I live in them. I live Beyond the Beyond and Within the Within. But on the whole… well… what can I say? I mean, I came home from the war and survived. There have been some ups and downs. I’ve been a journalist and a tramp, a film director, newspaper editor, everything. But here I am. And you too, Mr. Greif.”
“I can’t complain,” Arno said. “I live under scudding clouds, in old battlefields, under the searchlights, under burning magnesium.”
“You should write something yourself,” Tanz said, lit his pipe and puffed.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Arno said and lit a cigarette. They talked for a while about surviving in the combat zone and surviving afterwards, about having mental strength. Tanz had thought about this. For example, he had the motto: everything is decided within.
“Everything is decided within,” Arno repeated.
“Yes,” said Tanz and disappeared in a cloud of pipe smoke. When the smoke had lifted he added:
“The line was coined by Goethe: I’m Innern ist’s getan.”
Then Renate reminded him of the other text he had said he would read, the somewhat darker one. Tanz put down his pipe and began to read:
“I venture out in the Grey Area, looking for the impossible freedom. I stroll in search of exquisite views, but how should this be done in this city of impossible perspectives…? I walk into a bar, I talk to people, I forge ahead in the culverts, I glide along the rain-soaked streets… I’m enjoying this excruciating city, this mind-blowing street, this pitch-black sky, these streetlights which wander away into infinity and into my mind – in my mind, within and beyond the Beyond, beyond a beach in Provence, beyond a cave at Lascaux, beyond a plain in Szechuan, beyond a Pacific island with concrete paths for the Flying Fortresses to start and go bomb Japan so that everything is burning up, leaving only one rice paper lantern blowing away in the wind between the purple mountains and the sepia scree.”
Arno nodded and said:
“Some writing, eh? Alluring, enchanting. You know this.”
“Well, I’m a journalist,” Tanz said.
“But more than that,” Arno said. “Such things you can’t read in Der Spiegel…!”
They talked about history; they talked about Berlin and Sweden, about everything and nothing. Renate and Arno were with Tanz for several hours, time just flew by. In the end they bade farewell and left the man with his writing in his bizarre ruin, situated on the border between east and west, good and bad, positive and negative, zero and infinity.
As for Arno’s other meetings with veterans and comrades from the war, a few things can be said. Among other things, he once came across Major Wolf in a shopping centre in Bremen in 1965. The Major was, as before, somewhat round, with rosy cheeks and in good health. He had recovered fully from the car accident he had in December 1944, the one which forced him to withdraw as head of the Battalion.
In the Bremian Mall Arno asked:
“How did it go after the accident? Did you survive?”
The question was a bit rhetorical. Wolf smiled a faint smile and said:
“Yes, I survived. I got a whiplash injury and had to go around wearing a support collar. And I got a face full of glass splinters. But they saved my sight. At least in one eye. The other one’s glass eye. Look!”
Wolf glared at him with his glass eye, and tapped it with the back of his thumbnail. Arno shivered slightly and said:
“Imagine that. But you survived.”
“Indeed,” Wolf said. “I’m quite recovered.”
The rest of the war, Wolf spent in an Army HQ at the Eastern Front. He was taken prisoner by the Russians in March 1945 and spent five years in a Russian prison camp. Arno asked some questions about this stage in Wolf’s life. Then Wolf told him that he entered the Bundeswehr in 1950. And now he was actually a Lieutenant Colonel and Chief of Staff of an Army Corps.
At the store where they happened to be Wolf had a trolley filled with sausages, wine and delicacies. That, and Wolf’s entire body language, suggested an orderly family life, stability and contentment. Arno then told a little about his life. They exchanged a few pleasantries and parted. And that’s all there was to it.
However, such meetings were still important, this Arno had to admit. Ships passing in the night, but still…! And in addition to these meetings with the living he sought out the dead. He went visiting graves, including Wistinghausen’s and Shasta’s. Indeed, he was touched by this: the peace of the churchyard, tombstones and inscriptions like “Thomas Shasta – 1920-1962”. But how much…? How in the essence-of-his-being affected was Arno by this…? That is the question. Arno was a hardliner, a Nietzschean of sorts, a rigourist. He wasn’t heartless but he could come across as that.
He was what he was and that’s all he was. That he had a spiritual outlook on life, we’ve already seen. It didn’t make him into a saint, but neither was he insensitive to the fact of being human.
Back to Berlin in 1966. Arno and Renate sat in a café on the Kurfürstendamm, a western main street. It was a smart, fashionable place with mirrors, carpets and waitresses. They drank tea and ate expensive sandwiches.
It was a few days after the meeting with Tanz. The days had been spent with reconnaissance. Arno had gathered some facts that he could use about the car theft gang. The very reason he went to Berlin. The pair would go back to Munich the next day.
“Do you like Berlin?” Arno asked his lady. She wiped her lips with a napkin and said:
“No…! Not really. I mean, sure, it was fun to go in the Potsdamer Platz desert and see the ruins and meet Tanz and all that, but Berlin as a whole… it’s too flat. I miss the mountains. Here, everything flows out like a sauce. I mean, thanks for the trip, it was fun to holiday here, but I prefer Munich with its mountains and its tastier climate.”
“Tastier…?”
“It’s more fun, more alive. Berlin has some character, true, but to me it’s just a giant city on a potato field.”
Arno poured himself more tea from the pot.
“Maybe so,” he said. “The city is a bit flat and monotonous. And now I understand why I myself like Munich: there are mountains! You see mountains. It’s like in Karlstad where I grew up: hills surrounding the town. You have to have something to look at, something that draws your eye to the horizon. This we don’t find here.”
“Berlin, shit city…!” Renate said, covered her mouth and smiled at her outspokenness. Now I was a naughty girl…
They left the city and drove home. The highway from Berlin to West Germany was covered during a sunny day. After spending the night in Kassel they had the Autobahn through middle and southern Germany left. The Ford went well, everything rolled on. Arno drove. At a certain point they stopped and refueled, had refreshments and rested a bit. Finally, everything was ready and in the grey afternoon they would get going again.
They sat in the car with Arno at the wheel. He was about to start. Then, suddenly, he became paralysed. Everything around him disappeared, everything went black. Only a sharp, white headlight seemed to light up his world. He was in burning magnesium in artificial moonlight, in a catatonic state.