A minute or two later some agonized howls in the street drew me out onto the balcony. In the middle of the Paseo the designer was yelling up at the front of the hotel, shouting himself hoarse. The poor kid, I decided, was shortsighted and couldn’t see me. It took me a while to realize that he was just saying “asshole,” over and over. His hair was matted and he was wearing a mustardcolored blazer with huge shoulder pads. For an instant I was afraid he would be hit by a car, but luckily the Paseo Marítimo was almost deserted at that hour.
Unnerved, I went back to bed, but I couldn’t sleep anymore. The insults had ceased a while ago, but the mysterious and hurtful words still echoed in my head. I asked myself who the long-winded stranger spotted with Frau Else could be. Her lover? A friend of the family? The doctor? No, doctors are quieter, more reserved. I asked myself whether Conrad had seen Ingeborg again. I imagined them holding hands and strolling down an autumn street. If only Conrad were less shy! The scene, full of possibilities as I saw it, brought tears of pain and happiness to my eyes. How I loved both of them, in my innermost being.
As I lay there thinking, I suddenly realized that the hotel was sunk in a wintry silence. I got nervous and began to pace the room again. With no hope of getting things straight, I studied the strategic situation: at best I could hold out for three turns or, with great luck, four. I coughed, I talked out loud, I searched through my notebooks for a postcard that I then wrote while listening to the sound of the pen as it moved across the stiffsurface. I recited these lines by Goethe:
All for nothing. I tried to assuage the loneliness, the sense of forlornness, by calling Conrad, Ingeborg, Franz Grabowski, but no one answered. For a moment I wondered whether there was a single soul left in Stuttgart. I began to make random calls, flipping through my address book. It was fate that led me to dial the number of Mathias Müller, the pompous kid from Forced Marches, one of my sworn enemies. He was in. The surprise, I suppose, was mutual.
Müller’s voice, phonily masculine, obeys his intent to show no emotion. Coldly, then, he welcomes me home. Naturally, he thinks I’ve returned. Naturally, too, he expects that I have some professional reason for calling, that perhaps I want to invite him to work together to prepare our Paris lectures. I disabuse him of this notion. I’m still in Spain. I heard something of the kind, he lies. Immediately he turns defensive, as if calling from Spain in itself constituted a trap or an insult. I’m just calling you at random, I said. Silence. I’m in my room making calls at random, and you’re the lucky winner. I burst out laughing and Müller tried in vain to imitate me. All he managed was a kind of squawk.
“I’m the lucky winner,” he repeated.
“That’s right. It could have been any other citizen of Stuttgart, but it was you.”
“It was me. So did you get the numbers from a phone book or your address book?”
“My address book.”
“Then I wasn’t so lucky.”
Suddenly Müller’s voice changed markedly. It was as if I were talking to a ten-year-old boy trying out bizarre ideas for size. Yesterday I saw Conrad, he said, at the club; he’s changed a lot, did you know? Conrad? How could I know when I’ve been in Spain for ages? This summer it looks like someone snagged him at last. Snagged him? Yes, dropped him, roped him, brought him down, took him out, put a bullet in him. He’s in love, he concluded. Conrad in love? On the other end of the line there was an affirmative “uh-huh” and then the two of us retreated into an embarrassing silence as we realized that we’d said too much. At last, Müller said: The Elephant is dead. Who the hell is the Elephant? My dog, he said, and then he burst into a torrent of onomatopoeic sounds: oink oink oink. That was a pig! Did his dog bark like a pig? See you later, I said hurriedly, and I hung up.
When it got dark I called the reception desk asking for Clarita. The clerk said she wasn’t there. I thought I caught a hint of disgust in her reply. To whom am I speaking? The suspicion that it was Frau Else disguising her voice again lodged in my breast like a horror movie with swimming pools full of blood. This is Nuria, the receptionist, said the voice. How are you, Nuria? I asked in German. Fine, thank you, and you? she answered, also in German. Fine, fine, very well. It wasn’t Frau Else. Convulsing with happiness, I rolled to the edge of the bed and fell off, hurting myself. With my face buried in the rug, I let out all the tears that had built up over the course of the afternoon. Then I showered, shaved, and kept waiting.
Spring 1944. I lose Spain and Portugal, Italy (except for Trieste), the last bridgehead on the western side of the Rhine, Hungary, Königsberg, Danzig, Kraków, Breslau, Poznan, Lodz (east of the Oder, only Kolberg still stands), Belgrade, Sarajevo, Ragusa (in Yugoslavia, only Zagreb still stands), four armored corps, ten infantry corps, fourteen air factors…
SEPTEMBER 23
I’m woken by a noise from the street. When I sit up in bed I can’t hear anything. And yet the feeling of having been called is strong and ineffable. I go out to the balcony in my undershorts: the sun isn’t up yet or maybe it has set already, and parked in front of the hotel is an ambulance with all its lights on. Between the back of the ambulance and the stairs, three people are speaking in soft voices, though they gesture emphatically. Their voices reach the balconies reduced to an unintelligible murmur. The horizon glows dark blue with phosphorescent streaks, like the prelude to a storm. The Paseo Marítimo is empty except for a shadow that vanishes along the boardwalk toward the tourist district, which at this time of day (but what time of day is it?) resembles a milky gray cupola, a bulge in the curve of the beach. At the other end, the lights of the port have faded or simply gone out. The asphalt of the Paseo is wet, a clear sign that it has rained. Suddenly an order rouses the men who are waiting. The doors to the hotel and the ambulance open simultaneously and a stretcher comes down the stairs carried by a couple of medics. With them, lagging solicitously a few steps behind, near the head of the prone figure, come Frau Else dressed in a long red coat and the big talker with the heavy tan, followed by the receptionist, the night watchman, a waiter, the fat lady from the kitchen. On the stretcher, a blanket pulled up to his chin, is Frau Else’s husband. The way they come down the stairs is extremely cautious, or so it seems to me. Everyone is watching the sick man. Lying on his back and looking desolate, he murmurs instructions for going down the stairs. No one pays any attention to him. Just then our gazes meet in the transparent (and shuddering) space between the balcony and the street.
Like this:
Then the doors close, the ambulance sets off with its siren blaring, though there isn’t a single car to be seen on the Paseo, the light coming through the ground-floor windows goes out, silence descends once again on the Del Mar.
Summer 1944. Like Krebs, Freytag-Loringhoven, Gerhard Boldt, I record the stages of war despite knowing that it is lost. The storm has broken and now the rain is beating down on the open balcony like a long and bony hand, strangely maternal, as if trying to warn me of the hazards of hubris. There’s no one keeping watch over the doors to the hotel, so El Quemado had no problem coming up to my room on his own. The sea is rising. It whispers inside the bathroom where I’ve brought El Quemado to towel offhis hair. It’s the perfect moment to hit him, but I don’t move a muscle. El Quemado’s head, wrapped in the towel, exerts a cold and bright fascination over me. Under his feet a little puddle of water forms. Before we start playing I make him take off his wet T-shirt and put on one of mine. It’s a bit tight on him but at least it’s dry. As if at this point it were only natural for me to give him something, El Quemado puts it on without a word. It’s the end of summer and the end of the game. The Oder front and the Rhine front collapse at the first onslaught. El Quemado moves around the table as if he’s dancing. Which may be the case. My final circle of defense is Berlin–Stettin–Bremen– Berlin; everything else, including my armies in Bavaria and the north of Italy, is cut offfrom supply lines. Where will you sleep tonight, Quemado? I ask. At my place, answers El Quemado. The other questions, of which there are many, stick in my throat. After we parted, I went out on the balcony and stared into the rainy night. Big enough to swallow us all up. Tomorrow there is no doubt I’ll be defeated.