Leone gives up his grilling about the possibility of evoking the encounter between Lutz and Eichmann. Anna says he is curious to know if there are any memories that are very important to me — and Anna’s look reveals that she at any rate, unlike Leone, is expecting me to say something. That hopeful, provocative gaze summons up a sound. It is a transient sound; I can hear it coming from very deep down; its shriek is rising. I remember a shriek best of all, I say. Leone is baffled. A cry, Anna translates but does not translate that as if questioning it but like someone who is repeating what I had said, as if she were trying to confirm it. And why is that so important to you? Leone asks in Anna’s translation.
I do not speak French, but I can sense a difference in the way their words are weighted. The hand-held camera again moves in. I smile. Well, that is exactly what I would like to keep for myself, I say. An intimate detail perhaps, Anna translates. Not a bit of it, I declare, simply the key for my being able to remember at all, and I don’t have multiple copies of that.
The following day I am asked if I would care to watch the shooting of the encounter between Lutz and Eichmann.
One of the first-storey apartments has been opened. Dilapidated furniture; lighting is used in an attempt to overcome the drabness of the place. The actors’ costumes and make-up reminds one of all the clichés of war films seen a hundred times before. Leone explains to the actor playing Carl Lutz to look at Eichmann with an impassive face, under no circumstances to betray emotion. I would be curious what he thinks about Lutz’s feelings, but he says nothing about them. The actor nods; he is willing and unhesitating. I’ve played that sort of role before, he says and mentions the title of a film — which rings a bell — an action film. I’m thinking of the scene when I know who the serial killer is, he says to Leone, but to be completely certain I have to make him show his hand — that’s how Anna translates it for me. I take care that my features show nothing or he will slip through my fingers, the actor continues. It’s something like that you have in mind, isn’t it, though, of course, the figure has to be neatly turned out.
Leone turns away from him. That will be fine, you’ll see, fine, he says.
Anna whispers in my ear. Leone also said it for my benefit, so he was sure that I knew that work with actors always requires compromises. They had wanted someone else for the role, but that actor was in the middle of shooting for another production.
I go outside into the park.
The couple I saw earlier are now strolling on the far side of the bushes. The skirt is now orange, the trousers cream-coloured, with one in a polo-neck sweater with a black diagonal stripe, the other in an orange blouse. They are holding hands.
Along the path I see posters about a Joseph Beuys exhibition in Ascona. I buy a return ticket for the boat and look for a seat on the outermost back row on the deck. In front I have the pristine blue lake, spread out among mountainsides clad in emerald-green forests, and behind me the fantastically colourful line of Locarno’s hotels and, high above the buildings, the pristine sunlight-yellow Monastery of Madonna del Sasso from 1480 and snow-white peaks. I take a look at the exhibition in a pristine pink building on a slightly sloping, gently winding little road, and while I wait for the boat to make the return trip I drink a beer on the terrace opposite the harbour. Everyone is strolling or sitting, sunshades, white ducks, white Bermuda shorts, palm trees, the splashing of water.
I stood for a long time in each of the three exhibition rooms, reading all the captions. I was aware earlier but could now study how a work of art is produced from an object picked out of nature and, on being set back into nature, preserves its aesthetic objectness by dissolving into its infinitude. I am not particularly disposed to creative approaches of that kind, but on the way back I reflect on whether or not I do, in fact, work in this manner, and is not fate my natural material, which, after working on it, I then place back if not into nature but, as it were, into its natural medium of history.
Again I chose the bench on the outermost back row on the deck and have another look at Ancona’s dream harbour, see the wicker chair in which I drank my beer. By now the colours of sunset dominate the pristine blue of the lake and emerald-green of the mountainsides as if a heavy metal gate had been lowered from the clouds. A layer of darkness is forming on the lake, as if the air were stratifying, one layer covering the other; all has been thrown into uncertainty; the line of Ancona’s hotels in the distance seems both to be and not to be. The Madonna del Sasso hovers, but it is impossible to tell whether that is above the city or below the clouds. The snow has perhaps melted off the peaks, the rocks float in the dusk, and when a farewell finally has to be taken from everything that was visible the light glimmers, quite from where is inexplicable — not at the base of the sky, not between the clouds as they open up, nor reflected from the calm surface of the lake; it glimmers and once more illumines everything.
A seagull is perched on the rail of the deck, an arm’s length away, watching me, its body quivering.
After the sun has set the rose-tinted block of the Grand Hotel makes its appearance in its vespertine light. The huge terrace is outlined. The walls become transparent; one can imagine black-coated ministers seated at diplomats’ tables, lining up with ceremonial steps. Each takes his place in turn in the same armchair; secretaries hand each other pens to sign the agreements.
As if it were not the Madonna del Sasso which is many hundreds of years old but the Grand Hotel.
I had to come here in order to live to see the moment in which so much becomes transparent, to be able to glimpse even myself as I sit on a balcony of the first-floor room and note down that I had to come here, and so that after sunset I am able to participate once more in the illumining strength of the glimmering light, and it occurs to me that I encountered such a feeling a long time ago, but where was that and when …?
The seagull takes wing from the railing. It circles around, its trajectory cannot be followed.
The string of market stalls, the cafés under the arcades, the hotel terraces that overlook the lake, shoppers. Ice-cream eaters, diners. Perambulators. Elderly women in jeans; young women in beribboned straw hats.
The couple is a few metres behind. Are they following me? They are in identical diamond-mosaic harlequin costumes, not holding hands, although their fingertips are touching each other.
A warning bell sounds in the distance. The sound is not shrill or soft; not quiet and not loud — I find it hard to say quite what the sound is like.
The lights of the Grand Hotel come on.
Every window is alight.
The big terrace overlooking the park is also floodlit; the walls, witnesses to history, are like backdrops. The boughs of the trees are fluttering in the wind as it picks up. Assistants are racing down the paths; make-up artists are at work on the steps leading to the terrace; camera operators arrive, cameras on shoulders. A young man in a white polo-neck sweater and white Bermuda shorts races towards the building with a military uniform over one arm; he has slapped an SS officer’s cap with its death’s-head badge on to his head.
The actors and the survivors gather on the terrace. Make-up artists are diligently at work on the faces. The actor playing the role of Eichmann feels the cap is too big for his head and is padding paper under the sweatband to make it fit better. My travelling companions are drinking coffee; the woman who was in Auschwitz asks for a tea.
The grounds slowly fill up with onlookers.
The two harlequins slip in not far from me, as if they really were under instructions to do so. Up till now I had always seen them as a couple moving about on a stage. Now they are watching as spectators.