Since his fall from power he has been traveling almost more than before, but I have seen him only once, at his own place. Whereas previously I could call on him at the office whenever I liked, now I was given an appointment—“We’ll squeeze you in.” And when I came, I had to wait a long time — as I get older, I like waiting — in a windowless vestibule; the “minister” (they spoke as if he were still in office) was being interviewed over the telephone by Swedish Radio. There was a dizzying to-and-fro of secretaries, butlers, bodyguards, chauffeurs, masseurs, creating the impression of an entire court. In the room I was ushered into, there was also only artificial light; although it was daytime, heavy draperies covered the windows. And when the retiree descended the staircase and also later, when he talked at me, in the presence of a third party, a sort of recording secretary, it was as if he did not recognize me, and I, too, found this politician, whom I had respected as I did no one else, more and more unrecognizable the longer he talked.
What he said reminded me of visits to mental hospitals when I was a lawyer. Here, too, areas shielded from the outside world, and indoor air, hovering near the floor, closing in around your feet; here, too, delusions of omnipotence. Except that in this case the pale figure, shuffled off into nowhereland, had really been — and not that long ago — the major historical actor for whom he now took himself. And that made the situation far less funny than with an obviously insane person in an asylum, and at the same time far more uncanny. There was nothing to laugh or smile about, and no one could even muster any sympathy for this man (as had strangely happened to me once on a visit to the commandant of Vilna, responsible for the murder of many Jews, who took himself for the author of “He who never ate his bread with tears …” and recited the poem accordingly, sternly and proudly, as if even the meter were his own creation, not Goethe’s). And while the former politician continued to play at power, I tried to catch the eye of the recording secretary, to exchange a conspiratorial glance, but in vain: she ignored me. In the past he had shown himself a statesman in the way he glossed the world situation with a casualness that breathed authority. Now, too, he issued an uninterrupted stream of commentary, but his casual remarks to those around him had turned into a sort of prattle. If in power he had been laconic and pithy, he now repeated each hollow comment at least three times. If as a man of power he had been the epitome of presence of mind, impossible to dupe, at the same time displaying a charming roguishness, he now seemed absentminded and humorless. Previously, even when he was reviewing the troops, his independence of mind had manifested itself; now he was merely officious, like a wooden doll (and his handshake felt mechanical when I took leave of him). As a man in power he had appeared muscular, massive; now, although he spent time every day in his workout room, he looked pasty and shapeless. And if he still read books at night, it was only to find material for the ones he himself was dictating.
I stood for a long time on the street outside his darkened house, horrified at this phenomenon that had once again leaped out at me, a chimerical world.
Several writing days have passed since the snowfall. It was snowing well into March, although close to the ground it was not cold at all; the early stinging nettles were already sprouting, the most painful ones. The snow came in fitful gusts, out of the underbrush, as if from a tree blooming in secret or as if tossed, just a handful of grains at a time, tiny snowballs that dissolved in flight into single flakes, floated down, para-chutelike, and immediately melted, leaving little dark spots on the asphalt.
But then with the waxing moon it turned bitter cold over the bay. The ponds, especially the wild nameless one deep in the woods, froze over, the dark ice patterned in the form of kinked reeds, and during my walk out there, before I settled down in my study off the garden, I skipped pebbles over the surface, which pinged, whirred, snapped, peeped through the forest as if from a plucked instrument, and sometimes one of the birds hidden in the water shrubbery felt spoken to and replied.
I did that also to invoke the image of another person who had once been close to me. It was maybe ten years ago that he and I had been out walking here on a winter’s day and came upon a frozen forest pond where we made the pebbles sing.
As I threw them alone this time, I recalled having him next to me, and I was reminded of his windup, awkward, like that of a chubby child, and when we played soccer, he always missed the ball with his foot, and yet it was always he, the clumsy one, who found the more innocent pleasure in such things. How else to explain his crowing laughter, even when, after a huge windup, his stone, always too large, plopped through the ice without a sound.
This man had been a reader for years, so full of enthusiasm that when he talked about a book even people soured on writing or on distant terms with books got fired up or at least grew pensive or puzzled, and those who still did read, halfheartedly, remembered what it had been like when they first discovered books. He, like the politician, was somewhat older than I, a teacher at a Jewish school on the western edge of Paris, without wife or children; in response to a book in which I described living with my son for the first time, he had written me the shortest, most trenchant letter, the kind I would have liked to bestow on someone else: “The story you have written is true. The child is your work.”
This man loved being outdoors, “even though I’m a Jew,” as he said, and thus as often as once a month the two of us would walk the two stretches of forest from Paris to Versailles, the southern stretch from Meudon and the northern one from St.-Cloud.
Along a firebreak, the piles of felled trees all pointed one time in the same direction, every treetop facing toward the mosque-white domes of Sacré-Coeur, many kilometers away, a vista I still look for today and do not find again, unlike the wild strawberries along the path that can be counted on to redden in the same ditches at the end of June.
No matter how citified he looked in his hat, tie, and oxfords, the teacher found no terrain too arduous. His clothes soaked by rain, his soles slipping and sliding in the clay, his glasses fogged up, he trudged along gamely. All through the war, while still a child, he had been in hiding in a cellar in the heart of Paris, and now he enjoyed life every day, especially the parts without deep significance. At certain moments while we walked, the tiered horizons of the Seine hills up ahead, even as he stumbled along — this seemed to be his rhythm — he, who was also often gripped by fear of death, preached of a sort of immortality there in the region beyond the hills; wasn’t the fact that this area repeatedly promised immortality a kind of proof in itself?
Yet even at that time he was convinced that the end of the world was imminent, and it would come from Germany, all of whose landscapes he carried around with him — and here he would point to his chest. In response to the violent acts of the Baader-Meinhof gang, he commented, “This is the end!” and then the same when they committed suicide in prison. We were sitting that autumn evening on a quiet, well-lit square in Paris, and he stared into the darkness, which under his eyes grew denser among the trees and seemed to close in on us; he said it without a trace of smugness, filled with childlike or primitive horror.