The group were on their way to the opera and had dressed for a cultural evening in July — that is, the men in white dinner jackets and the women with long skirts, and fur stoles they hugged around themselves in spite of the heat. They knew pretty well what the curator was yelling about because the most revolting of the photographs had been shown on television and in the picture magazines, and had been discussed in a syndicated editorial of the opposition press. The result was that this little frontier town, with its teacup-with-mumps museum, its reputation for pornography, and its forward-looking curator, was quite famous now. Most members of the group had actually heard the curator mouthing cultural insults in their own living rooms, with the colour TV lending a strange mauve tinge to his ears and chin. The photographer had scarcely been interviewed at all. He had nothing in the way of a social theory; he could only bleat that he loved his wife and thought marriage was noble and fulfilling. For some reason this irritated the public. He said nothing but simple and gentle things, yet everyone hated him and people had written letters to the government saying he ought to be lynched.
Now he walked along the platform with the curator in the boiling heat and said he had been wondering if the caricature of himself as a gorilla might not be just a little libellous. And the curator, sweating and cross, sick to death of art and artists, looked down at his legs and socks and snapped, “Oh, it’s probably not libellous at all.”
Little Bert stayed close to Christine and curled his hand tightly around her fingers. She remembered how he had wakened night after night in a strange room and found himself alone in the dark. At first he had not even known how the foreign light switch worked. She and Herbert had spoken French much of the time; no wonder the child had finally preferred to have conversation with a sponge.
“You’ll soon be home,” she said. “Are you hungry?”
The station buffet had run out of food and the newsstand sold nothing to eat except cough drops and chewing gum. Little Bert did not seem to notice; at least he did not say he was hungry. He was only slightly interested in the comic book. He was taking in the opera party, all in their sixties or so, looking rather alike. They sat facing one another on two long rows of benches, the women holding their fat knees together under their long gowns. Perhaps these people did not know each other well, except for their cultural meetings. There was too much shy laughter, and too many Oh, do you think so’s after every remark. What they had in common at this moment was their need of comfort; here they were, forced to change trains, the new train late, and the women in particular having a bad time of it, their makeup melting in the heat and having to hear their sex and station in life criticized by the trumpet-voiced curator. Luckily to console them they had their own cultural group leader, a match for the curator any day.
The group leader, whose long chin all but hid his collar, and whose eyes seemed startled and wise because his glasses magnified them, sat with one hand on each knee, legs wide apart, shoulders forward. It was not quite the position of a cultured person, more the way a train conductor might perch between rounds, but this might have been only because the bench was so narrow. He spoke to them softly, looking from face to face, and leaning left and right for those sharing his bench.
Within a few minutes he had wiped out of their memories every vexation and discomfort they had been feeling. He mentioned
Bach
Brahms
Mozart
Mahler
Wagner
Schubert
Goethe
Schiller
Luther and Luther’s bible
Kant
Hegel
the Mann brothers, Thomas and Heinrich;
true connoisseurs prefer the latter
Brecht — yes, Brecht
several Strausses
Schopenhauer
Gropius
and went on until he had mentioned perhaps one hundred familiar names. Just as everyone was beginning to feel pleasantly lulled, and even to feel oddly well fed, though a moment ago they had all been saying that they could eat the wooden benches, their leader suddenly said, “The Adolf-time …”
In the silence that followed he looked into every face, one after the other, sadly and accusingly, like a dog about to be left behind; the reproachful silence and sliding dog’s glance went on for so long that one could have heard a thought. Christine did hear some, in fact: they were creaking thoughts, as old chairs creak. The whole cultural group held its breath and the thoughts creaked, “Oh, God, where is this kind of talk taking us?” Finally the cultural leader had to end his sentence because they could not go on holding their breath that way, especially those who were stout and easily winded. He concluded, “… was a sad time for art in this country.”
Who could disagree? Certainly no cultivated person on his way to the opera. Yes, a sad time for art, though no one could remember much preoccupation with art at the time, rather more with coal and margarine. There had been no public exhibitions of women showing their private parts like baboons, if that was art. There had been none of that, said some of the creaking thoughts. Yet others creaked, “But stop! What does he mean when he says ‘art’? For isn’t music art too?” There had been concerts, hadn’t there? And the Ring cycle, never before so rich and full of meaning, and The Magic Flute, with its mysterious trials, the Mass in B Minor, the various Passions, and the Ninth Symphony almost whenever you wanted it? There must have been architecture, sculpture, historical memoirs, bookbinding, splendid colour films. Plays, ballet — all that went on. Cranach, Dürer, the museums. Surely the cultural leader must have meant that it was a sad time in general, especially towards the end.
He was still speaking: “As I stood before the new opera house, the same house you are about to see — if our train ever does arrive —” (smiles and anxiety) “a distinguished foreigner said to me, ‘If only you Germans had thought more about that …’ “ pointing as the distinguished foreigner had pointed, but really indicating a gap between two women sitting with their knees clenched. He continued, “ ‘… instead of material things, it would have been better for you and for everybody …’ ”
Following this closely, Little Bert turned to where the man had pointed and saw nothing but the newsstand, which was not any kind of a house. Christine saw little Bert looking at a row of pornographic magazines, the sort that were sold everywhere now, and wanted to cover his eyes, but as Herbert had said, one could not protect him forever.
The cultural group exhaled, then breathed in deeply and gently. The women did something melancholy with the corners of their mouths. “As for the orchestras in those days,” said the leader cheerfully, “they played like cows and they knew it. I remember how one execrable fiddle said to another, equally vile, ‘Are you a Party member too?’ ”
This was a comic story — it must be. Their sad faces began to clear. All the same, no one was doing much more than breathing carefully in and out. Their creaking thoughts were scattered and lost as two new people, the Norwegian and the American army wife, appeared. The Norwegian greeted Herbert rather formally; the girl marched up to the newsstand, and after giving the rack of pornography a short, cool glance, indicated, somewhere beyond it, Time, Life, and Newsweek.
“They take their culture with them,” said the Norwegian. “And what a culture it has become. Drugs, madness, sadism, poverty, lice, syphilis, and several other diseases believed to have died out in the Middle Ages.”
“The girl is German,” said Herbert, smiling.