In the unfriendly silence I threw down my fur coat and lit a cigarette. Someone informed me in a whisper of the preliminaries of the story which had begun.
He had been telling them about his student years in Germany and about a distinguished, refined elderly gentleman, prominent in public life in Darmstadt — his full name was Baron Wilhelm Friedrich Eduard von Wüstenfeld — who had been president of Germania, the local cultural association, and also president and director of numerous other political, literary, and scientific associations, societies, clubs, unions, conferences, committees, and subcommittees.
“So,” Kornél went on, “it always happened as I said. The president would open the session and go to sleep. The lecturer wouldn’t even have reached the table and he’d be asleep. He’d go off quickly, like lightning, the way little children do. He’d plunge from the brink of wakefulness straight into the bottomless abyss of sleep. He’d close his eyes and sleep deeply and sweetly.
“The lecturer would step to the table, acknowledge the applause, bow, sit down, shuffle his ominously high pile of script, clear his throat, and set about his lecture on something like The Observation of the Essence of Dynamic Existence or Plant and Animal Names in the Erotic Poetry of Heinrich von Morungen, but that no longer concerned the president, who had slipped discreetly from the world of consciousness by an invisible secret door, leaving behind only his body as a token in the presidential chair.
“When the lecturer had finished, the president would call the second and then the third to the rostrum from the printed program, and when they had performed their duties he too performed his.
“Understand me: the lecturers and the president’s briefly interrupted sleep, which could yet be called uninterrupted and continuous, interacted, were in close contact, almost in a causal relationship. The president opened the session and closed his eyes. The president closed the session and opened his eyes. At first this was a mystery to me.
“I was young and inexperienced when I went to Germany. At the time I’d been drifting around among the lighthearted, easygoing French, but in Paris I received a stern telegram from my father telling me to go at once to Germany and there continue my studies, and work only at my studies, not at creating literature as I had been doing. In his telegram he emphasized that if I didn’t do as I was told he’d cut off my monthly allowance. Whether for that reason, or because of my measureless love for him, I complied with his request right away. And to this day I’m grateful to him for making me go.
Otherwise I’d hardly have gotten to know the Germans.
“Naturally, I’d heard a thing or two about them. I knew that they were one of the world’s greatest peoples and had given humanity music and abstract thought. They were Cloudy and burdened with thought, as their divine Hölderlin has it. When I’m really down in the dumps I hum Bach fugues and say lines of Goethe to myself. ‘Among pine forests and hills lives an earnest, industrious people,’ I thought, ‘with the starry sky and the moral world order above their heads.’ So I had a great respect for the Germans. Perhaps I respected them more than any other people. But I didn’t know them. The French, however, I loved.
“What a loss it would have been had I missed this close acquaintance. A new world opened before me. As soon as my train had rolled onto German soil, one surprise followed another. My mouth, so to speak, was constantly agape, from which my fellow-travelers deduced that I was a half-wit. Order and cleanliness were everywhere, in things and, indeed, in people alike.
“I got off first at a small spa, to wash the dust off. I didn’t have to ask anyone where the sea was. There were elegant pillars at precise ten-yard intervals in the clean, swept streets, bearing white enamel signs showing a pointing hand with the words To the Sea beneath. The stranger could not have been given clearer directions. I reached the sea. There, however, I was rather taken aback. On the pebble beach, a yard from the water, another pillar drew my attention; it was identical to the rest, but the white enamel sign was rather larger and bore the words: The Sea.
“Having come from among the Latin races, I felt at first that this was exceedingly superfluous. Before me foamed restless infinity, and it was obvious that no one could mistake the Baltic for a spittoon or a steam laundry. Later I realized that I had been wrong in my youthful superiority. This was where the true greatness of the Germans lay. This was perfection itself. Their philosophical tendency demanded that the argument be concluded and the outcome demonstrated, as the mathematician often writes in the course of a deduction that 1 = 1, or as is often stated in logical proofs, Peter = Peter (and not Paul).
“In Darmstadt I rented a modest little student’s room in the house of a master cooper. There too a series of surprises awaited me. The family was pleasant, considerate, and very clean. The cooper’s father, an old man who seemed to be simple, treated me, a nobody who had been tossed ashore there from abroad, with kindly, human affection. In the evening, when I came in, he always questioned me: Well, young man, tell me, what have you experienced today, 1. humanly, 2. literarily, 3. philosophically? I couldn’t answer this question at first. Not only because I could as yet hardly speak German. This profundity, this classification so normal to the German mind but to which I was not accustomed, confused me. My unrefined brain all but exploded. It came to my mind that that morning I had read Hegel in the library, then had some dill sauce in the refectory, and in the afternoon strolled with Minna in the town park. Was the library a human experience, the dill sauce a literary experience, and Minna a philosophical experience, or vice versa? To me these three had been one until then. I mixed up the library with the dill sauce and Minna, experiences human, literary, and philosophical. It was quite some time — and required constant mental gymnastics — before I was able to separate them.
“They’re an enigmatic people, I can tell you. There’s no people so enigmatic. They think all the time. One after another I met eccentrics who ‘on principle’ ate only things that were raw, who every morning ‘on principle’ did breathing exercises, who in the evening, ‘on principle,’ slept on hard beds with no quilts, even in the dead of winter. Their level of culture is astounding. They go from school to university but don’t finish their studies even then, and I suspect that after that all of them enroll in the universe. The universe with its myriad stars is there in their calculations, indeed in their appointment diaries too. Even girls and women refer to it like a popular place of entertainment. German women are, on the whole, sensitive and romantic. They’re like French women. The only difference between them is perhaps that French women tend to have large eyes, whereas German women have large feet and souls which absorb at once everything that is noble and beautiful. The moment one makes their acquaintance, they describe themselves exhaustingly, cleverly, and abstractly. They reveal the length and breadth of their spiritual lives, two or three of its fundamental attributes, and their basic symptoms, like a patient revealing the history of his disease to a doctor. They are terribly sincere. And they don’t conceal their faults. They are not embarrassed by anything human. I had scarcely begun courting one delightful, divorced little woman, beneath the limes one sunny autumn morning, than she confessed that she had had hemorrhoids since giving birth and was suffering badly from them that very day. All that not for my interest, just because it was sincere and human. It’s a bewildering world.