In Milan, where I had some strange adventures fifteen years ago, Max and Franz (one almost envisages them as a couple invented by Franz himself) decided to go on to Paris, since cholera had broken out in Italy. At a coffee-house table in the cathedral square, they discuss apparent death and shooting pains in the region of the heart — obviously a particular obsession in the now sclerotic Habsburg empire, which had been suspended in a kind of afterlife for decades. Mahler, notes Kafka, had expected those pains in the heart too. He had died only a few months earlier, on May 18, at the Löw Sanatorium as a thunderstorm broke over the town, just as there was a thunderstorm on the day of Beethoven’s death.
Open in front of me now I have a recently published album containing photographs of Mahler. He is sitting on the deck of an oceangoing liner, walking in the countryside near his house in Toblach, on the beach in Zandvoort, asking a passerby the way in Rome. He looks to me very small, rather like the impresario of a touring theatrical company down on its luck. In fact, the passages of his music I like best are those where you can still hear the Jewish village musicians playing in the distance. Not so long ago I was listening to some Lithuanian buskers in the pedestrian zone of a north German town, and their music sounded exactly the same. One had an accordion, another a battered tuba, the third a double bass. As I listened, hardly able to tear myself away, I understood why Wiesengrund once wrote of Mahler that his music was the cardiogram of a breaking heart.
The friends spent their few days in Paris in a rather melancholy mood, going on several sightseeing expeditions and searching for the joys of love in a “rationally furnished” brothel with “an electric bell,” where the business was conducted so swiftly that you were out in the street again before you knew it. “It is difficult,” writes Kafka, “to see the girls there very closely.… I really remember only the one who was standing straight in front of me. She had gaps in her teeth, stood very upright, held her dress together with her clenched fist over her pudenda, and rapidly opened and closed her large eyes and her large mouth. Her blond hair was untidy. She was thin. Felt afraid of forgetting to keep my hat on. You positively have to wrench your hand away from the brim.” Even the brothel has its own social standards. “A long, lonely, pointless way home,” the note concludes. Max returns to Prague on September 14. Kafka spends another week in the sanatorium at the natural spa of Erlenbach in Zürich. “Traveled with a Jewish goldsmith from Krakow,” he writes after arriving. Kafka must have met this young man, who had already traveled widely, on the way back from Paris to Zürich. He mentions that getting out of the train the goldsmith carries his small suitcase like a heavy burden. “He has,” writes Kafka, “long, curly hair through which he occasionally runs his fingers, a bright gleam in his eyes, a slightly hooked nose, hollow cheeks, a suit of American cut, a frayed shirt, socks falling down over his shoes.” A traveling journeyman — what had he been doing in Switzerland? Kafka, we are told, took another walk that first evening in the dark little garden of the sanatorium, and next day there were “morning gymnastic exercises to the sound of a song from Des Knaben Wunderhorn played by someone on the cornet.”
Dream Textures: A Brief Note on Nabokov
At the very beginning of Nabokov’s autobiography, programmatically entitled Speak, Memory, there is the story of a man who, we must assume, is still very young, and who suffers a panic attack when he first sees a home movie shot in his parents’ house a few weeks before his birth. All the images trembling on the screen are familiar to him, he recognizes everything, everything is right except for the fact, which disturbs him deeply, that he himself is not where he has always been, and the other people in the house do not seem to mourn his absence. The sight of his mother waving from one of the windows on the upper floor is felt by the distressed viewer to be a farewell gesture, and he is terrified by the sight of the new baby carriage standing on the porch—“with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; and even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.” Nabokov is here suggesting an experience of the anticipation of death in the memory of a time before life, something that makes the viewer a kind of ghost in his own family. Nabokov repeatedly tried, as he himself has said, to cast a little light into the darkness lying on both sides of our life, and thus to illuminate our incomprehensible existence. Few subjects therefore, to my mind, preoccupied him more than the study of spirits, of which his famous passion for moths and butterflies was probably only an offshoot. At any rate, the most brilliant passages in his prose often give the impression that our worldly doings are being observed by some other species, not yet known to any system of taxonomy, whose emissaries sometimes assume a guest role in the plays performed by the living. Just as they appear to us, Nabokov conjectures, so we appear to them: fleeting, transparent beings of uncertain provenance and purpose. They are most commonly encountered in dreams, “in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence,” and are “silent, bothered, strangely depressed,” obviously suffering severely from their exclusion from society, and for that reason, says Nabokov, “they sit apart, staring at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret.” Nabokov’s speculations about those who tread the border between life and the world beyond originate in the realm of his childhood, which vanished without trace in the October Revolution; despite the evocative accuracy of his memories, he sometimes wonders whether that Arcadian land ever really existed. Cut off irrevocably as he was from his place of origin by the decades of terror in Russian history, he must surely have felt that retrieving one of its images caused him severe phantom pains, even though he usually looks discreetly, only through the prism of irony, at what he has lost. In the fifth chapter of Pnin he speaks at length and in different voices of the price you must pay on going into exile: not least, besides the material goods of life, the certainty of your own reality. The young emigrants of the early novels, Ganin, Fyodor, and Edelweiss, are already marked much more deeply by the experience of loss than by their new and foreign surroundings. Unexpectedly finding themselves on the wrong side of the frontier, they are airy beings living a quasi-extraterritorial, somehow unlawful afterlife in rented rooms and boardinghouses, just as their author lived at one remove from the reality of Berlin in the twenties. The strange unreality of such an existence in a foreign land seems to me nowhere more clearly expressed than in Nabokov’s remark, made in passing, that he had appeared as an extra in evening dress in several of the films shot in Berlin at that time, which frequently included doppelgängers and such shadowy figures among their characters. There is no proof anywhere else of these appearances of his, so we do not know whether any of them may still be faintly preserved on a brittle strip of celluloid or whether they are now all extinguished, and it seems to me that they have something of the ghostly quality to be found in Nabokov’s own prose, for instance in