“I didn’t hear anything about the president for a long time. War broke out, and I lost touch with everyone. Last year I was traveling in Germany. By a roundabout route I called at Darmstadt. I was changing trains and went to see Zwetschke. Oh, it was strange. I found my old friend there in the nervous and mental department, where I’d left him fifteen years before. He came to meet me in his white coat and embraced me. He was wearing a pince-nez with ivory frames and he’d acquired a beer belly, like the rest of the German scientists whom we’d made fun of in the old days. I just stared at him. He no longer had the tempestuous, impudent chuckle of his young days. Instead, however, he laughed all the time, slowly and prolongedly. Do you know the sort of people who laugh after every sentence, whether they’ve got something happy to tell us or something sad? That’s how he told me that he’d got married — hahaha — had a little girl — hahaha — then she’d died at the age of four from meningitis — hahaha. I wasn’t shocked at this. I knew that all psychiatrists had their personal peculiarities.
“He kept perfect order in the department. The corridors gleamed, as did the windows and the floors. Every spittoon was in place. The nurses were more frightened of him than of the raving lunatics. He had prepared demonstrations, charts, illustrative graphs. He was engaged in the study of brain tissue. In the laboratory diseased brains floated in formaldehyde, and he cut them with a machine like a bacon slicer, but much finer, into slices no thicker than skin, and from those he tried to make out the secret of the human soul and intellect. He took me round the department. Such a thing was not new to me. I’ve been irresistibly drawn to such places since my childhood. At all points on the earth mental departments are uniform, like parliaments. It seems that in all peoples of every clime, nature wants to pass the same message through the medium of mental disorder. The female ward dances and shrieks, the male ward is sunk in gloomy and meaningful cares. Outside in the garden, the idiots daydreamed beneath the trees, deep in their infantile foolishness. A stone mason’s assistant blew his nose like a trumpet day and night, because his body was full of air, but his efforts — such was his boast — were having good results. Seventeen years previously, when he’d been admitted, the air went up as far as his forehead, but now it had gone down to the level of his chest. We worked out together that if, in the meantime, no untoward event interfered with his activity, he would be completely free of air by the time he was seventy. Even there everyone has his occupation and amusement.
“I was at first intrigued by the sharp contrast between two groups which represent the whole of mankind. Paranoiacs are cheeky, impudent, prone to exaggeration, suspicious and suspecting, dissatisfied, and eager to act, like utopian politicians. They watched me from corners, their eyes dark slits, and I could feel that they had their doubts about me. They would have been ready to haul me off to the gallows at a moment’s notice in the interest of the well-being of society. They couldn’t abide themselves, and their spirits were bursting to get out into the world, and they wanted to split in two. Schizophrenics are strange, original, surprising, self-accusing, incalculable, and unknowable, like born writers. Their speech is full of allusions that we can’t understand. For me, the latter are the more agreeable. Two young men were standing like statues at the corner of a grassy bank, rigid. A third young man, the chalk-white-faced son of a Würzburg banker, was walking round and round, and every time he passed in front of me he greeted me with extraordinary civility, and I returned the greeting with similar respect. However, as he was passing me for the eighth time and I was returning his greeting again, he suddenly spat in my face — which pleased me immensely, as it verified and confirmed the opinion that I had long held of that disorder.
“The mentally ill didn’t interest Zwetschke. He said, with his strangely prolonged, slow laugh, that they were completely mad, not even worth bothering with, only their brain sections after dissection were of interest. He invited me to tea. He introduced me to his wife, a blonde, Madonna-like woman who wore her hair drawn tightly back from her prominent forehead, shook hands with me in silence, offered me things in silence, and didn’t say a single word the whole time. We ate liver pâté and drank beer. Finally I discovered what had become of the president. He’d survived everybody, even the war and the revolution. Generations had perished around him; futurists, expressionists, simultanists, neoclassicists, and constructivists alike had fallen on the battlefield or been ruined, but he had gone on working. He had the stamina of the sleeper. When he was ending his ninetieth year, he undertook even more presidencies on the advice of his general practitioner. In his final years he was presiding in seventeen places, uninterruptedly from morning to night. He’d died the previous winter at the age of ninety-nine. Poor fellow, he’d failed to see his century.
“I took leave of my friend to make a pilgrimage to his grave, there to discharge a debt of gratitude and piety. Zwetschke embraced me with a laugh. He stuffed a wrapped-up book into my raincoat pocket and commented that I would possibly need it. I took a car to the cemetery, leaving the company of the mad for that of the dead. I found the president’s grave right away. He lay in a grim family crypt, decorated with his family arms. On a marble column there was a single sentence: Sleep in peace. That man, whom in life nobody had dared to address by the familiar second person singular, was now thus unilaterally ordered about by the impudent living. ‘Be so good as to sleep in peace,’ I whispered with filial reverence, and thought with feeling of his memory and the vanished years of my youth. I brushed a tear from my eye.
“Sadly, I’d come empty-handed, in a great hurry, and hadn’t brought him so much as a single flower. But perhaps flowers would have been out of place on that severe tomb. In annoyance I began to search my pockets. I came across the book which Zwetschke had given me for the journey and unwrapped it. It was Klopstock’s Messiah,* that heroic poem in hexameters which — in the unanimous opinion of generations — is the dullest book in the world, so dull that nobody’s ever read it all, neither those who have praised it nor those who have belittled it. I’ve heard it said that Klopstock himself couldn’t read it, only write it. I opened the book and leafed pensively though it. What part should I read? It didn’t matter. Since I was aware that the departed had valued repose most highly when he’d been alive, and that it must have been his wish, as it is everyone’s, to sleep in peace when dead, I began to read the first canto in a monotone. The effect was astounding. A convolvulus on a neighboring tomb quivered and closed its petals as if night were descending upon it. A beetle plopped onto its back in the dust and stayed there, hypnotized. A butterfly which had been circling above the crypt fell from the air onto the stone, folded its wings, and went to sleep. I had the feeling that the hexameters were piercing the granite of the crypt, stealing their way into the mortal remains of the departed, and that his sleep in the grave — that eternal slumber — was all the deeper for them.
I awoke to feel somebody shaking me by both shoulders. It was my watchful taxi driver, whom I’d left outside at the cemetery gate. About halfway through the first canto, sleep had overcome me too. Quickly I rushed to the car. We made a frantic dash for the station. I only just had time to jump, at the very last minute, into the D-train, by then already moving, which raced with me — sparks and steam and much whistling — at sixty miles an hour toward Berlin.”
* A dry red Hungarian wine, by law a blend of at least three grapes.