SECOND INTERMEZZO: ANCIENT TIMES
Some cities fulfil their obligations. They present the traveler with the image he has of them, even if that image is false. This traveler, who has left the Angel of Peace behind (he can still feel the golden flourish of her farewell on his back) and is now ambling through the green temptation of the Englischer Garten to Prinzregentenstraße, is sensitive to the martial element of the city around him. Field Marshals’ Hall, Victory Gate, Hall of Fame, the cenotaph of Ludwig the Bavarian, with its black marble, described by the sculptor as a “castrum doloris,” a “castle of grief”—the military is never far away. It shimmers even in the clothing of the passers-by, their dramatic hats, their trophies of feathers and fur, their green loden coats. It is as though the wearers of these garments, perhaps precisely because they form a minority, are moving through the city with strategic goals, all on their own missions. A German friend has explained that this is traditional attire, not a uniform, but even so. These people appear to be clad in iron, laden with loden.
They are surrounded by the air of ancient times. Tally-ho, muffled shots in a dark forest, campfires at night, incomprehensible songs. The traveler has seen a photograph of Heidegger in traditional costume. He does not wish to draw any modish conclusions from this; after all, he has himself posed in the traditional costume of the burghers of Volendam, but he found that he looked comical rather than anything else. Heidegger, however, did not look comical. Was it possible to don some kind of uniform, because that is what it was, for thinking? And was this the same man who had written about boredom, angst and time, and who had dared to wrap strings of words around das Nichts, nothingness?
You see what you want to see, his friend had said, and that was precisely the point. It was hard to remove oneself from the equation, and before you even wanted to see something, memories of what you had seen before imposed themselves: other uniforms in these settings, still so familiar and recognizable, the marches, the demonstrations. And yet when he caught vague snatches of marching music from the direction of the Hofgarten, he quickened his pace. The traveler was ashamed to admit it, but military music had always excited him. He crossed a temporary bridge over a main road and came to a ruin. The music had stopped; a group of young soldiers was standing there, as still as could be. Words came wafting over to him: death and remembrance. They were about the war that refused to die, which would only disappear when the last person who had tasted it in his own mouth was himself dead. And not until then. He saw old men down there too, people who could never have been young, not the men of the wartime broadcasts, not the soldiers he had seen on the streets as a child following the same kind of regimental colors, yet different, and the same kind of banner, yet different. The eagle on this flag was silver, but the mysterious symbol had fallen from its claws. That symbol no longer existed. He felt his own age flowing together with that of the old men standing down there in a sort of square formation. He had more to do with those men than with the young soldiers, and that was strange. He could not catch the words, but he did not need to; he knew them anyway: honor, loyalty, sorrow, sacrifice, once, then. These men nurtured the past so they could have a present, and that past took the form of flowers, flags, blue-and-white ribbons. All of this was happening within an enclosure, beside an excavation, in front of a ruin—the fumbling of people who are tugging at time.
The traveler goes slowly down the steps and walks to the Hofgarten. This leads to an encounter. As he reaches the bottom of the stairs and enters the Hofgarten, the young soldiers are rounding the corner, as only soldiers do: rather than take a curve as normal people would, they turn at an angle of ninety degrees. And no, these are not the same uniforms, and yes, the man who is carrying the standard with the eagle, the sunlight reflecting on its silver, is tall and blond, and no, the orders are not yelled or barked, but almost spoken, and no, the music does not sound martial, but instead is played en sourdine, as Couperus would say—muffled, veiled—and no, there is no stamping of feet, because when the music stops, he watches the big, clodhopping shoes, still marching in time, treading almost tentatively upon the stone chippings of the path, and it sounds almost like a rhythmic rustling. He thinks himself back into his earlier life, almost fifty years ago now, soldiers marching in, more men, the uniforms a deeper, more fundamental grey. The men back then had helmets that almost covered their eyes, so that all expression vanished from their faces and they lost their individuality, exchanging it for an unbearable similarity in which each of them became the other.
And, thought the traveler, who could feel how time was at that very moment coloring his hair grey, pressing him down, ageing his bones and veiling his eyes until they became those of a man searching the horizon for the distance from whence he himself must have come, in the past those standards were held higher, there was brass, those mouths had sung something to a tune he would obviously never forget. These heads wore no helmets, they were almost pueri imberbi, or so it seemed to him, beardless boys. They had difficulty keeping in step and their uniforms belonged to some tiny, forgotten principality, the grey far too pale, and it felt as though choruses should have been sung, but no one was singing, only those rustling feet and the shy faces passing by, and the old man in front of him removing his hat and bowing to the banner. When the man straightened his back, the traveler felt a twinge in his own spine because the pain was clearly too much for that other back. And then it was over. He took a step back into the trimmed privet, the mutilated flowers and plants that were meant to express the national colors here in this spot, and let the old men pass, wrapped in their vague, untranslatable thoughts, and then he turned around. The angelus began to ring and he caught himself thinking a sentence in Latin. It seemed as though his life simply did not wish to move on to later things.
The traveler walked past the benches where people were sitting in the autumn sunshine, as if trying to stock up before the Alpine winter. They looked peaceful, absorbed in dreams or meditation, their eyes closed. Soon they would again become anonymous passers-by, but now, in their vulnerability, faces surrendered to the light, they were their own fragile selves, big-city dwellers in a garden, that regimented imitation of nature. As he turned away and started to walk towards the colonnade to look at the poems on the walls, an apparition came along that lent the new afternoon a different hue. Again it made him think about the past, where most of his points of reference were evidently anchored. But this man too came from a different era. He wore a white straw hat and pale clothes and had one of those dogs that consist mainly of hair. The two men greeted each other as though they were acquainted, or at least knew that they were of the same kind. “What nonsense,” the old man said, and the traveler knew he was talking about the military ceremony.
Where do I know him from? the traveler wondered, immediately realizing that he did not know the man as a person, but as an idea, a type, a species, or however one might put it. Not a species, as in an extinct species. An actor perhaps. Boulevard theater, operetta, or—who knows?—maybe Schnitzler. Someone who had survived it all. Photographs appeared in his mind’s eye, ones he must have seen in the past, during the war. They were in color; even back then the rose in the buttonhole of the white Palm Beach suit would have been red. He heard names too: Hans Moser, Heinz Rühmann . . . Moser’s nasal voice, the strange Viennese accent. He had not replied to the man and there was no need to do so. Memories. Paul Steenbergen in a play by Anouilh, the great days of the Dutch stage, a world that now appeared to have fallen into the hands of talented children. The old man laughed, as though he knew what the traveler was thinking. His face was distinguished, joyful, ironic. They spoke a few sentences that someone had written for them, which signified nothing other than that they appreciated performing this semblance of a conversation. Then the other man removed his straw hat, gave it a little wave in the air, said “Sehr verehrt” or something similar, and turned, exactly in the middle of the wide path, just as a director would have instructed him to. There was no one else on the path. The dog followed him, and the traveler watched them go, as they steered a straight line over the shadows of the trees and the intervening pale patches, keeping midway between the expanses of grass on either side of the path. This man knew how he would look if someone was watching him from behind; he knew his Platz. He also knew he would spoil the effect of walking away if he looked around or chose one side of the path. What was it that moved the traveler so profoundly? An apparition from a vanished world? He thought about other old men he had known, one of whom had just died, the father of a friend, Jewish, cosmopolitan, as old as the century, from this very country, maybe even this very city, hounded out in the 1930s by those others whose memory still haunted this place. Maybe it was the sheer mass of the memories that moved him—all those notions that resided in names, parks, statues, triumphal arches, and which had also interfered with his own past, until it seemed as though you could not take a step anywhere on this continent, his own part of the world, without being presented with fragments, allusions, exhortations to mourning or contemplation.
The past as an occupation—it must be a disease. Normal people occupied themselves with the future or with the drifting ice floe they called life, that moving station that belonged nowhere, that was always on the move. He was standing on that floe and looking back. Everything in Europe was old, but here, at its center, the age seemed to have a different relative density. He was walking through a vanished kingdom, but that in itself did not summon any particular emotions—no, if he carried on walking to the east, that was where it really began, the shattered world of Musil, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, all that debris, the fragments, the power become impotence, the closed world of Poland and Czechoslovakia, which seemed to have been torn away from this continent, and Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Trieste too, the gravitational pull of what had happened to those regions in this century, of what was still happening, the doubly lost worlds of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Vladimir Nabokov, of Kafka and Rilke, of Roth and Canetti. It seemed to him that this was a vantage point from where one might look deep into time and see just how much those remote areas had once belonged, how deep the wounds were. Retrieving them would mean descending deep into a mine. He did not have the same feeling in France, in Italy, or in his own country. Those places had enough past, but somehow it had transformed more or less organically into a present. Here, the transition was not complete. The past had become stuck, bogged down, coagulated, curdled, been torn away. But it was still there. Perhaps it was just waiting. The wind he felt on his face came from that direction, warm, scorching, as though it too had something to say. The old man had long disappeared. “What nonsense,” he had said, and now that he had gone, in his light-hearted disguise, those words hung in the air, so much less innocent than when he had spoken them. What had happened here, in this city, that beginning, already over sixty years ago, could never be described as Unsinn, nonsense, unless you took the word literally, as non-sense, the negation of sense that had nothing to do with Wahnsinn, madness, even though that is how people often chose to refer to that era, because of the word’s suggestion of insanity as an excuse. The lack of sense, then, once. That had been the end, an end that still continued and one which, if he was to believe his friends, was going to be turned around. But the servants of the past do not make good voyagers into the future, the traveler thought, and he set course for the towers of the Theatinerkirche, their color reminding him of the custard at boarding school, which the boys always said the kitchens made on the first of January, in one big batch for the whole year.
Boarding school, Augustinians, custard, food. Busy bustling beneath the matt glass dome of Restaurant Augustiner in Neuhauser Straße. The waitresses are dressed in traditional costume, low-cut, white, billowing blouses. They slip the bills into their bodices, between those Bavarian breasts. Embroidered aprons, red sashes, puffed sleeves, the chorus for Die Csárdásfürstin. The traveler appears to have no objection to women wearing traditional costume.
“Karpfen im Bierteig, aus dunklem Bier und Kräutern, mit Butterkartoffeln. Rapunzelsalat mit Würfelkartoffeln. Fränkische Blut- und Leberwurst im Naturdarm. Fränkische Kartoffelsuppe mit Steinpilzen und Majoran, 1/4 Fränkischer Gansbraten mit handgeriebenem Kartoffelkloß, Blaukraut oder Selleriesalat, 3 Stück Reiberdatschi mit Apfelmus, gefüllte Dampfäpfel.”
Peasant food in the big city—that is something that does not exist in his own country these days, but then there is very little actual country left in his country. The list of dishes sounded like an incantation of national peculiarities. Why was that so repellent, yet attractive? Volkseigen: peculiar to the people, the people’s own—a word that might refer to scabies, but at the same time to tradition, preservation, conservatism in the sense of conservation, not throwing things away, allowing them to occupy a longer space within time, delaying the death of the familiar world. Why were some forms of preservation permitted (brown bears in Spain, goshawks and badgers in the Netherlands), while others (traditional costumes, languages, dances, food) were viewed with suspicion? Both types of preservation involved a dogged struggle against time, impotent last-ditch efforts. The suspect element was probably the trouble caused by the involvement of human affairs, or when the word Blut was invoked, together with its twin brother, Boden: blood and soil. It seemed to be impossible to think about such things without first working through what he called the “repertoire.” The mind, that thinking and feeling authority, cannot get to work until its more or less automatic surface, where the repertoire is situated, is activated and satisfied. The repertoire contains the idées reçues, the things that everyone has to say about everything, a series of clichés that have to be worked through and dismissed before the real thinking begins.
He knew that he would not reach that stage that afternoon; there was too much to see, and seeing, because of the superficial categorization it involves, is all part of the repertoire. There was a young punk in the restaurant, stiff black Mohican above her innocent face: a plump girl dressed as a gladiator. He noticed that she kept asking for more apple sauce, children’s food. The waitress was kind to her, motherly. Categories, the limbo of what he called thinking. To see, that was why he was here. An older man in traditional costume, with a fat book and a font full of beer. If he kept looking for long enough, he would see them all, like a list of characters in a play: “Some Soldiers, the Priest, the Lady, an Aristocratic Family.” He looked at the old man, who was absorbed in his book and who naturally reminded him of Heidegger again. Traditional costumes were perhaps no more than a mild form of anachronism: some people wearing something that other people no longer wore, even though everyone had worn it in the past. Heidegger had refused to accept time as a series of successive present moments, seeing it instead as a link, a connection between what had happened once, before, back then, and what would happen soon, later, sometime. The traveler, who had never felt really at home in the present because, by his very nature, he always saw it as colored and determined by a past, could identify with that thought. Even the past that did not belong to your own life made all kinds of demands on that life. That was inevitable, although most people seemed perfectly capable of living without any thoughts of the past, and entire countries were able, when it suited them, to forget their past with the greatest of ease. He never had a great deal to say about the future other than that, no matter how dark the past often appeared, there was no way he could ever be a pessimist. As far as he was concerned, humanity was a collection of mutants on their way to an invisible goal that might not even exist. The problem was that they were not moving towards this goal at the same speed. While one person was still locked in medieval fundamentalism, another was working away on a computer or travelling to Mars. There was no harm in that; it was the mixtures of the two situations that was so explosive, the instruments of one in the hands of another, the terrorist who wants to take his enemies with him when he commits suicide, because he thinks that will get him into some kind of heaven.
But was it true that he had never really felt at home in the present? That would be a romantic idea, but somewhat infantile. It was more that he did not feel at home among people who felt at home only in the present, who had such high expectations of it. If you were not able, at the same time, to detach yourself from it—which was perhaps paradoxical—you could not really experience it. The past was desiccated, everything superfluous had been stripped away; the same could not be said of the present. For the last time (and only because that man with his book and his traditional attire was sitting opposite him), the traveler thought about that photograph of Heidegger in his peculiar costume. Nietzsche had said that philosophy often had a physical cause, and the traveler wondered if the philosopher’s body had felt comfortable in that traditional costume which, like the doctrine he devised, was so fixated on the past. Maybe that was going too far, but now, as he ordered an Oberberger Vulkanfelsen, he came back to blood and soil, because the wine was blood red, and that, combined with the name and its suggestion of volcanoes and rocks, made him feel as though he was drinking the earth. Seeing wine as blood—it had to be his Catholic background. And why had he chosen that wine in particular? Language reflects the psyche: after all, he could have gone for a Randersackerer Ewigleben ’86, or a Rödelseer Schwanleite. The deconstruction of wine names—someone really should do a study. He looked at the ferns, the bronze busts, the baskets of dried Alpine flowers hanging from the ceiling. Deer antlers, house plants, ornamental shells. He was somewhere else. Around him he could hear the Bavarian variety of German, and for the first time he realized that German must have been the first foreign language he had heard.
Sixteen years before, in a white wooden country house in Maine, an old man, also white-haired, who looked like his friend’s dead father and therefore also like the old man who had just greeted him in the park, had asked the traveler to read Rilke to him. That man had the same accent in English as his friend’s father had in Dutch. A German accent, but more than German, an entire past in Mitteleuropa was contained within that accent, an ineradicable, thick, attractive accent; even his friend, who had been living in the Netherlands for so long, still had traces of it. That request back then, there in Maine, had taken him by surprise, not least because he was full of admiration for his host, who had won the Nobel Prize for a discovery in biochemistry. As soon as he heard that the traveler came from the Netherlands, the scientist had started to talk about Multatuli, ignoring the Americans who made up the rest of the party. The traveler had often met people over the age of eighty who would strike up a conversation about Multatuli or Couperus; the Netherlands had truly existed in the past. As for Rilke, his host had insisted. The traveler had protested that his German was not up to it, but the old man would not take no for an answer. Thanksgiving, November, Indian summer, the garden stretching down to Penobscot Bay, leaves aflame. The traveler had opened up the book, yellowing, falling apart, signs of homesickness on every page, and he had read. The Americans had been very quiet, and he could hear the fire crackling in the hearth, but he had not read for the others, only for that bowed white head, which was thinking about who knows what, something from fifty years ago, before he had been banished or fled, something old, and as he read, it was as though a bubble of old air burst open, like in the story by Mulisch, and his own voice mixed with that rare air, decanted for the first time:
Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren
Und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.
Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
Wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
Und wird in den Alleen hin und her
Unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben. 1
He would have read more, that late afternoon, but as he read the last lines of that poem he had seen his host’s lips moving along with his, and he had felt the same emotion that swept over him now, as though there was no fracture between that then and his now. The old man was dead, as was his friend’s father, along with a few more of those men that life constantly seemed to place in his path, as though some strange sort of predestination was involved. They had all lived to over eighty. A cellist, a restorer of paintings, a banker. Survival had rippled around them like a second soul, not survival itself, because they were dead now, all five of them, but what they had survived, something that none of the five men had ever spoken to him about.
Wasn’t this Munich? He had not come here to remember, but to look, but as he sat there so peacefully with his glass of volcano wine he found himself in the eye of a storm of memories. How strange it was. Time itself, that weightless thing, could only move in one direction, no matter how you defined it or tried to pin it down; that at least appeared to be certain. No one knew what time was, but even if you gave every clock in the world the shape of a circle, time would still keep on going in a straight line, and if that line had an end, humans could never imagine it without being overwhelmed by giddiness. So what were memories, then? Time left behind, which caught up with you later, or which you could pull back towards you, against the flow of time, doing the impossible. And not only your own memories, but other people’s memories too. His friend’s father, who had been a friend of Toller’s, had once told him that he had been there during Toller’s failed revolution in Munich, the city where the traveler was now, with all the accom-panying violence, shouting, death. Toller had gone into exile afterwards, first in London, then in New York. Once, in New York, the traveler’s friend had pointed out the Mayflower Hotel to him: “That’s where Toller committed suicide.” But the supreme irony was that, long after Toller’s death, his friend’s father had gone to see a play about Toller in Amsterdam. The survivor went to watch an actor playing his dead friend, but that evening the theater was besieged by members of the “Actie Tomaat” movement—protesters yelling, tear gas, performance cancelled—and the old man had left the theater with tears in his eyes, the real revolution supplanted by an imitation. The traveler could still picture his friend’s father now. Even well into his eighties, he had been a handsome man, someone you noticed, slightly stooped, dark eyes, the face of an elderly Native American, a white mane. He was often mentioned in Thomas Mann’s diaries. “Dr. L. came to visit. We had some delicious spinach.” “Yes,” his son said, “but what did you talk about? It doesn’t say.”
When a memory fails to appear, it seems as though the time when it was created did not really exist, and maybe that is true. Time itself is nothing; only the experience of it is something. When that dies, it assumes the form of a denial, the symbol of mortality, what you have already lost before you lose everything. When his friend had said something similar to his father, his response had been, “If you had to retain everything, you’d explode. There’s simply not enough space for it all. Forgetting is like medicine; you have to take it at the right time.”
At the right time. Time. As he headed outside, through the large dining room, he could not help laughing at himself. How on earth could you ponder a concept that had forced itself into the language in a thousand different ways, obfuscating any image that you might have of it? Time has always been confused with the instruments that are used to measure it. Always. In one of the Scandinavian languages, that word, “always,” was expressed as “the whole time,” as if you could really say that about something that was not yet complete. Human time, scientific time, Newton’s time, which progressed uniformly and without reference to any external object; Einstein’s time, which allowed itself to be bewitched by space. And then the time of those infinitesimally tiny particles, pulverized, immeasurable diminution. He looked at the other people moving so solidly around him on Neuhauser Straße, each with their own internal clock upon which the little clock on their wrist vainly attempted to impose its wretched order. Watches were idle boasters; they claimed to be speaking on behalf of an authority, but no one had ever seen that authority. But they could inform him when the church doors would open, and a few moments later (later—there was no avoiding that tyrant) he was standing in the cool space of the St Michaelskirche. One of the first words he read was, of course, Uhr, hour: “Am 22.11.44 kurz nach 13.00 Uhr wurde die St Michaelskirche von mehreren Sprengbomben eines amerikanischen Fliegerverbandes getroffen”—and at the thought of those American bombs hitting the church, more memories hit home, the drone of bombers flying overhead during the war to the adults’ eager delight: “It’s the Americans. They’re going to bomb the blasted Krauts.” That noise was part of the soundtrack of eternity, an accompaniment to death and vengeance, filling the entire sky with a continuous bass tone, made by a musician who was bent on destruction. But he did not want to think about that now. The dead were dead, the church had been rebuilt, and a woman was walking through the filtered light of the pale-grey space, heading straight for her goal. She was impeccably dressed. Everything she wore was black, and her fair hair was tied back in a chignon with a black velvet ribbon. She knelt down and buried her face in her hands. Her patent leather shoes did not touch the floor, but hovered just above it. At that moment, the sun disappeared, the plaster of the vaulted ceiling grew dull, and the traveler saw three Japanese people staring at the woman. At the back of the church, a bronze angel leaned on a large font, casually, like someone who walks past a piano and stops for a moment to play something on it. He could see praying figures everywhere, confirming the scale of the edifice, dwarven supplicants in red, in hunting green, a man in traditional costume, hand on his heart, saying something to a statue. The traveler walked back to the angel and stopped beside it, just two random churchgoers, a man and an angel, one with wings and one without. The angel was larger and its bronze gleamed, but that was beside the point. He looked at the spread fingers, and then at the wings. It was his second angel today, but this one was not a woman.
Angels were officially men. They had men’s names—Lucifer, Gabriel, Michael—and yet they were not men. They were myriad, he had learnt, and they came in all varieties. Angels of darkness, of death, of light. Guardians, messengers. They had ranks: cherubim, seraphim, powers, thrones. Heavenly legions. He could not remember whether he had ever really believed in them, but he thought not. The idea was appealing though. Someone who did not have to be a human, but still looked like one, who did not need to get old, and, moreover, who could fly. Of course, there were all sorts of things they were not allowed to do, which was only logical when you considered their proximity to God. What he liked was that they were still around, and not only in churches. Made of wood, stone, bronze, on monuments to the Dead and for Peace, on secular buildings; they had maintained their position everywhere. The Arabs had them too. Did people still see angels these days? Or had they become invisible, in spite of their superhuman scale and presence? He thought not, but maybe other people did not make a point of seeking them out, of consciously seeing them, as he did, but instead perceived them as something that appears in a dream, and so the winged ones could make their way to those secret, inner places where our nameless ancestors reside without the recipient of the dream ever noticing. That brought him back to the idea of time, but he really did not want to think about that subject anymore. He had promised himself one more church that day, a church that he felt had more to do with this actual city rather than the rebirth of a wounded Athens, inspired by false nostalgia, and that is where he meant to go next. That church was in Sendlinger Straße, but then his guide popped up again, trying to send him in another direction.
He snapped at the guide. “Where do you want me to go now?” The guide must have been hiding under the table when the traveler was eating, because he had forgotten all about him. Could this kind of guide hear every thought that passed through your mind?
“The Viktualienmarkt,” the guide said.
Markets, along with churchyards, were the traveler’s weak spot, so he changed his plans without complaint. Eating is perhaps the act that is furthest removed from evil. Radishes, carrots, cheese, bread, mushrooms, pumpkins, eggs evoke the idea of nature, and therefore calm and patience, in the middle of the city, reminding the city of its origins as the marketplace for a rural district. The traveler wandered among all of those piled-up wares for half an hour or more: fresh herbs, sausages exceeding the imagination in their absurd variety, silky bacon, fish from rivers and from lakes, things that had looked exactly the same a thousand years ago, a thousand-year empire of tubers, carp and onions, surrendering themselves time and again, without protest, to be crushed between the grindstones of human molars.
The street outside the church was busy, but once he was inside the noise fell away. “St John of Nepomuk,” the guide whispered. A Bohemian saint. The traveler loved that word: Bohemia. Not only because it sounded so beautiful, but also because of all the misconceptions associated with it. The first Gypsies in France were seen as followers of Jan Hus, the Bohemian heretic, so some painters and poets were still referred to as Bohemians even now. A combination of prejudices based on a misconception—what could be better? Poets being identified with vagabonds, Gypsies and heathens never did any harm.
“Nepomuk,” the guide repeated. Once the most popular saint in Bavaria, after the Virgin Mary. A martyr’s death, drowned in the Vltava, six hundred years ago. The traveler felt a little as though he came from Bohemia himself, and so he decided to adopt Nepomuk as his patron saint. Now the guide wanted to tell him all sorts of things about the saint’s life, as it is carved on the wooden doors of the church porch, but the traveler was transported by the wondrous space around him. He would listen and read later, but not now. Now he wanted to be swept along by what he would once contemptuously have referred to as frills and furbelows. The Baroque, like opera, was a late discovery in his life; there had been a time when he could not understand what people saw in it, and even now he found it hard to put into words. There was no need for him to feel embarrassed about this failing; everyone makes mistakes. But this place? Maybe it was the sheer extravagance, combined with the contrast of the rigid framework in which this profusion was permitted. Luxuriant. Lush. And, what was perhaps the most difficult thing for an admirer of Romanesque churches to admit: lively. Even if you were alone, you had a sense of things going on all around you: angels jostling, clothes flapping, wind whipping around the stones, the marble, the gilded plaster, bustle, hustle, a cave in which faith and piety clung to every stalactite and stalagmite. Festoons, twisting pillars, lavish crypts, curving lines: maybe here he was looking into the soul of the Bavarian people for the very first time. The Athens of the Königsplatz was imposed from outside, dreamed up by other people, but here you could even yodel if you wanted to, because the building itself was doing something similar: trills, jubilation, crazy high notes. The Bohemian saint was also commemorated in the altarpiece, an eventful biography, in which the narrators had not headed straight for their goal. Carving, polishing, embellishing, adorning, interrupting—even though the altarpiece was perfectly still, it was full of life. In fact, it was as busy as a heavenly road junction. God in his crown leaned down over the cross, flanked by two angels with their wings pointing straight up like donkey’s ears. No one else was around, so the traveler walked backwards away from the altar, looking up. He realized that when you tried to look directly up, past the pilasters, over the golden capitals, the garlands of flowers and the round-bellied pillars of the balustrade, and slowly moved your head sideways, more and more of those innocent babies’ heads came into view. This was where they lived. When he moved, they moved too, gazing at him with inappropriately ecstatic expressions on their plaster faces, a look that was far too old and knowing. It was, he thought, as though the wall up there had started to foam and froth, and that froth had taken on human form. Out of nowhere, a line by Goethe, which he knew only from a Schubertlied, popped into his head: “Was bedeutet die Bewegung?”: “what does this movement mean?” And perhaps the answer here was that the movement meant only itself. It was the ultimate in reproducing motion in material that cannot move: movement and stasis, the solidification of supreme exuberance.
Does he know the city any better now? He is not sure, but decides that this is the moment to leave. And go where? To the south, following the birds that beckoned him this morning. To some Bohemia, to the mountains, the watershed of Europe, where the languages, the states, the rivers flow in every direction and his own continent feels dearest to him, with its chaos of lost kingdoms, conquered territories, conflicting languages, clashing systems, the contradiction of valleys and mountains, the old, fragmented Middle Kingdom. He walks through the grassy meadows of the Englischer Garten, sees the trees in the last fire of autumn, feeds the swans, lies in the grass and watches the clouds heading for the Alps. No, he does not know this city yet, but other cities are calling him now, and that call that no one else can hear, the secret singsong of the Bohemians, is one he cannot resist.
1 Lord: it is time. The summer was so large. / Lay your shadow on the sundials, / unleash your winds upon the fields.
Command the last few fruits to ripen; / grant them two more balmy days, / urge them now unto perfection / press lingering sweetness into wine.
He who has no home will now build none. / He who is alone will long be so, / will wait, and read, and write long letters / wandering to and fro along avenues, / restless, as leaves tumble all around.
“Herbsttag” / “Autumn Day” by Rainer Maria Rilke