The restaurant was fairly dark, with a cabaret atmosphere, like Maria Farrar and other expressionist stuff the knucklehead had been devoted to in his youth. The tables were of rough wood, the other furniture charming, the walls full of photos. He examined the photos. He knew most of them, had seen so many of them while looking through dossiers in his office. His assistants had even taken a few of these pictures. Whoremonger, he said to himself, you were a real whoremonger, a moralist without morals. He studied the menu: the lady never knew how to win over lovers, but at least she’d succeeded with food, all her life she’d demanded Austrian cuisine, and the restaurant respected her tastes. Appetizers, best not. First course, soup. He began pondering. There was a potato soup he liked better than the German version. Actually he’d never much liked German food, too greasy, the Austrians were more refined, but maybe he should avoid the potato soup, it was hot out. The roe deer? Why not the roe deer? You couldn’t beat the Austrians at cooking roe deer. Too heavy, the physician would disagree. He decided on a simple wiener schnitzel. The fact is, wiener schnitzel done the Austrian way was sublime, and then those potatoes they made here, well yes, he’d take the wiener schnitzel. He drank white Austrian wine, even if he didn’t like fruity wines, and mentally made a toast to the memory of Helene. To your thick skin, he said, my dear prima donna. To finish, a decaf, to avoid nighttime arrhythmia.
When he went out into the courtyard he was tempted to visit the house, a house museum now, how amusing. But, who knows, maybe the place had been renovated, painted, all traces of life scrubbed away, adapted for intelligent tourists. He recalled the house one night in ’54 when that jerk was there in the wings with the Berliner Ensemble, staring at Mother Courage’s cart. He’d inspected each room, drawer by drawer, sheet by sheet, letter by letter. He knew it like no one else: he’d violated it. I’m sorry, he said softly, I’m sorry, really, but those were my orders. He went out onto the street and walked a few meters. The little neighboring cemetery, protected by a gate, was accessed by a driveway. It was deserted. There were many trees, everyone resting in the shade. A little cemetery, but racé, he thought, with certain names: philosophers, physicians, literary figures: happy few. What do they do, the important people in a cemetery? They sleep, they sleep just like the ones who don’t count for shit. And everyone in the same position: horizontal. Eternity is horizontal. He turned around and there was Anna Seghers’s tombstone. When he was young he’d really loved her poems. One came to mind: years ago, a Jewish actor recited it every evening in a little theater in Le Marais, a frightening, heartrending poem that the man didn’t have the courage to say by heart.
When he arrived before the tomb he said: hi, I’ve come to see you. Suddenly he had no desire at all to talk with him about the house and how he’d set himself up well for his old age. He hesitated and then said only: you don’t know me, my name is Karl, it’s my baptismal name, look, it’s my real name. Just then, a butterfly arrived. It was a common little butterfly with white wings, a small cabbage butterfly wandering into the cemetery. He stood stock-still and closed his eyes, as if making a wish. But he had no wish to make. He reopened his eyes: the butterfly had perched on the tip of the nose of the bronze bust in front of the tomb.
I’m really sorry, he said, that they didn’t give you the epitaph you dictated when you were alive: here lies B.B., clean, objective, bad. I’m really sorry they didn’t put it on there for you, a person should never come up with his own epitaph ahead of time, since his descendants never obey. The little butterfly beat its wings, raised them, then drew them together as if about to take flight, though it didn’t move. You really did have a great big nose, he said, and a bristly head of hair, you were a knucklehead, you’ve always been a knucklehead, you gave me a whole lot to do. The butterfly took off briefly, then settled back on the statue’s nose.
You fool, he said, I was one of your friends, I loved you, are you amazed that I loved you? So now listen, that August in ’56, when your coronary arteries exploded, I cried, really, I cried, I haven’t cried that much in my life, you know? When he had the time, Karl cried very little, but for you I cried.
The butterfly rose in flight, made two turns over the head of the statue and fluttered off. I have to tell you something, he said rapidly as if he were talking to the butterfly, I have to tell you something, it’s urgent. The butterfly disappeared beyond the trees, and he lowered his voice. I know everything about you, I know everything about your life, day by day, everything: your women, your ideas, your friends, your travels, even your nights and all your little secrets, even the tiniest one: everything. He realized he was sweating. He took a breath. On the other hand, I didn’t know a thing about myself, I thought I knew it all but I didn’t know a thing. He paused and lit a cigarette. He needed a cigarette. It was only two years ago, when they opened the archives, that I discovered Renate had been betraying me all along. Who knows why it suddenly occurred to me that even I might have a file like everyone else. It was a complete file, detailed, of someone who’d been spied on every day. The item “Relatives” was a whole dossier, with photos taken with a zoom lens, showing Renate and the head of the Internal Office naked in the sun, on a riverbank, like in a nudist colony. Underneath was the caption: Prague, 1952. I was in Paris by then. And there are many others: in ’62 while leaving a hotel in Budapest, in ’69 on a beach on the Black Sea, in ’74 in Sofia. Up till ’82 when he died, his coronaries exploded like yours, he was old, twenty years older than Renate, proof positive.
He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and stepped back. He was bathed in sweat. He sat on the wooden bench, on the other side of the little alley. You know, he said, I would have liked to tell Renate, I would have liked to tell her I knew everything, I’d discovered everything, but things are comic, Renate had a stroke, there was hope at first that she’d recover, and in fact they took good care of her, with physiotherapy too, everything that was necessary, but she didn’t get better, in the final years she remained in a wheelchair, and her facial paralysis didn’t go away either, every evening I said to myself: tomorrow I will tell her, but how can you say you’ve discovered everything to someone who has a distorted face and twisted legs? I didn’t have the courage, really, I didn’t have the courage.
He checked his watch. Maybe it was time to go. He felt tired, maybe he’d get a taxi. He said: what I like most of all about my new house is the view over Unter den Linden, it’s a nice house, with all the modern conveniences. He started down the little alley to the entrance gate. He hesitated and turned, waved good-bye to the trees. In the evening I eat in classy restaurants, he said again, for instance tonight I’m thinking of going to an Italian restaurant where they make this spaghetti with shrimp you can’t imagine, with more shrimp than spaghetti. He closed the gate delicately, careful not to make a sound. Back in our time, such places didn’t exist, caro, he murmured to himself, we missed out on the best.
Between Generals
“I’ve never believed life imitates art, that saying’s widespread because it’s so easy, reality always outstrips the imagination, that’s why some stories can’t be written, they’re too pallid to evoke what actually was. But let’s forget about theories, I’ll gladly tell you the story, but then you can write it yourself if you wish — you’ve got the advantage over me — you don’t know who lived it. The truth is he only told me the backstory, I learned the ending from a friend of his, a man of few words; we limit ourselves to talking about music or chess moves, probably had Homer known Ulysses he would’ve thought him a banal man. I’ve come to realize one thing, that stories are always bigger than we are, they happen to us and we are their protagonists without realizing it, but in the stories we live, we aren’t the true protagonists, the true protagonist is the story itself. Who knows why he came to this city to die when it doesn’t remind him of a thing, perhaps because it’s a Tower of Babel and he started to suspect that his story was an emblem of the babel of life, his own country was too small to die in. He must be almost ninety, he spends his afternoons gazing out the window at New York’s skyscrapers, a Puerto Rican girl comes each morning to tidy up his apartment, she brings him a dish from Tony’s Café that he reheats in the microwave, and after he listens religiously to the old Béla Bartók records that he knows by heart, he ventures out for a short walk to the entrance of Central Park, in his armoire, in a plastic garment bag, he preserves his general’s uniform, and when he returns from the park, he opens its door and pats the uniform twice on the shoulder, like he would an old friend, then he goes to bed, he’s told me he doesn’t dream, but if he does, it’s only of the sky over the Hungarian plains, he thinks that must be the effect of the sleeping pill an American doctor prescribed. So I’ll tell you the story in a few words just as the one who lived it told me, all the rest is conjecture, but that is your concern.”