Robert said that Paul hardly ever talked about his childhood, but his childhood started coming back to him the minute Ray was in the flat again—he’d had a brother who died at home from some hideous childhood disease, Robert wasn’t clear what it was, encephalitis possibly or TB, one of those wasting diseases that drags on for years and never gets any better. Ray had pneumonia, there was nothing to treat that type of pneumonia at the time, except conventional antibiotics, which were basically useless. But he had to go right into hospital a week after he arrived from Sydney, and Paul believed it was all over, because people were popping off overnight from pneumonia then. If they had KS or shingles or what have you, they lasted a bit longer.
As soon as he checked Ray into the hospital Paul said, He’s so wasted I don’t see how he can last another day. But then Ray went into some sort of spontaneous remission, he came out very weakened, but Paul figured they could manage him in the apartment—except that Ray had other things going wrong, he couldn’t always walk, in fact he was bedridden most of the time. Paul put him in the main bedroom, and he also slept in there with Ray at first, but Ray got these terrible sweats, great gallons of fluid seeping out of him, the sheets had to be changed several times a day and besides that he couldn’t control his bladder or his bowels quite often, and furthermore he had some type of internal bleeding. He disintegrated very rapidly in Munich, and Paul, who was never exactly Mother Teresa in the first place, became a total nervous wreck; for one thing the doctors didn’t have the slightest idea how to treat half the problems Ray was experiencing. There were all kinds of theories flying around—you’d hear about special things they had in America or France, but mainly the medical profession acted as if the plague had broken out, forget the Hippocratic Oath, the average doctor was strapping on masks and gloves and space suits before he’d lance a pimple.
There were still debates raging in the newspapers about quarantine and special laws that allowed the police to arrest people who might be harboring the virus. Bavaria. There was quite a lot of hysteria, even from some of Paul’s friends. He said it was absolutely demoralizing the way certain people shunned him, not phoning up, or if they did run into him, acting as if he’d get some of it on them. By that time, Robert said, a number of people they knew were sick with AIDS in one form or another. Paul, of course, wasn’t sick, but managing Ray from day to day began making him sick. That was where, Robert said, Valentina, maybe to her credit—although there are two ways of looking at it in retrospect—came through for both of them quite remarkably.
People get used to anything, of course, Robert said, and I’d love to say Paul adapted to this situation where someone he loved, someone he’d had a great physical passion for at one time apart from everything else, inspired extraordinary sacrifices—well, Paul did do what he was able to, for all his cynicism Paul had plenty of human compassion, he wasn’t a shit. On the other hand, after this had dragged on for a while Paul developed an abstracted quality that made you wonder what was passing through his mind. He’d relied for so many years on that sardonic merciless humor of his, he really didn’t have a separate mode with which to deal with the new situation. Because, you know, Robert said, Paul despised self-pity—he wouldn’t allow it, not from himself, anyway, and he lacked the ability to accept anything resembling pity from another person. So he kind of got stuck in a constant effort to regain that steadying comic despair he’d always had as a defense against the grandiose emotional exhibitionism of certain people in Rudolph’s circle, Rudolph included. And this self-deprecating need to be trenchant and witty and aloof about his real feelings took on a kind of demonic edge when he talked about Ray. Ray started losing a bit of his human status. He was becoming this difficult lump of matter in the bedroom.
Valentina spent a great deal of time at their apartment; so did Robert. So did Irma, who happened to be acting in a Schiller play in Munich at the time. Irma sometimes sat with Ray in the afternoons or dropped off groceries to save Paul a trip to the supermarket. Everyone maintained the fiction that things would “improve.” Meanwhile, Ray had tremendous difficulty holding anything in his stomach. He lost an incredible amount of weight. The doctors had him on an intravenous drip hanging from a metal rod beside the bed. When he could actually sit up or shuffle out of the bedroom, he’d always want a cup of coffee or something perfectly unhealthy which he’d throw up immediately and then have a coughing fit, where he’d lose his breath and have to be pounded on the back for half an hour.
Valentina worked out a routine. She changed the sheets and cleaned the shit off him, the things Paul couldn’t bear doing very often. Ray had started to smell funny. He gave off kind of a close, gluey odor. Paul said, The whole house smells of death, it’s unbearable. Sometimes if he said things like that, he’d go into a laughing jag right away, as if he really couldn’t credit what was happening. First thing every day he looked in on Ray, they had these rambling dialogues for hours, Ray’s conversation had become a little weird, as you might imagine, his mind wandered . . . Meanwhile Paul was petrified out of his wits about his own health, Ray was getting weaker by the day and it was like, “I’m next.”
Ray had good days and bad days, but every good day was a little worse than the one before and the bad days were a lot worse. He had an intolerable amount of pain and the doctors were overcautious about painkillers. They never prescribed enough, so Paul and Valentina began overdosing him, which would put him out for days at a time when he didn’t have any nourishment except the drip. Sometimes the medication made him constipated, they’d have to administer an enema, other times he pissed and shat in his sleep, and they’d have to clean that up with him unconscious, hauling and heaving this naked dead weight around the bedroom while Valentina stripped the bed and freshened the sheets, and sometimes he woke up screaming in the middle of all that, screaming and weeping, Just let me die, I want to die. Naturally, they did consider sending him into the next world, plenty of times, if he’d agree to it, and when he was lucid, not out of his mind with pain, they discussed exactly at what point they should cop enough Dilaudid to finish him off. Unfortunately, that seemed always to be followed by several days of fairly tolerable peace and quiet, where he just lay there suffering, or stoned on medication. He couldn’t read or concentrate on anything, couldn’t follow TV except for the soccer matches, which did seem to take his mind off it. But his body was just this big disaster area by August. He really couldn’t talk very much. It was often impossible to tell if he was awake or asleep, he slept with his eyes open sometimes.
Paul left the flat as often as possible, said Robert, half the time walking down to the Chinese Tower in the English Gardens to get drunk. Robert said he forced Paul to join him at a health club for a sauna, or to take in a movie. Paul had stopped snorting coke, Robert believed, but he would do a line or two when he thought he might absolutely go crazy otherwise. At ten in the morning, every ashtray in the flat was overflowing with cigarette butts, Paul couldn’t put his mind on anything, though he did force himself to look after money, at least to the extent that the bills got paid. And of course, said Robert, any catastrophe that drags on too long begins to look normal.
Paul took a quickie acting job at Bavaria Studios, an American coproduction, playing a Nazi officer as usual, he merely had to open a door for Himmler at the Wannsee Conference and salute. I remember, Robert said, that the director knew Paul’s situation and gave him a line, “Heil Hitler,” which turned it into a speaking role, so Paul was paid a lot more for it. Paul told Robert he had never felt quite so much conviction in a line of dialogue before, since he figured “Heil Hitler” would be paying for his lover’s euthanasia. You know what his humor was like, Robert said, I began telling you the childhood business, Robert said, oh yes—why it came up, he told me he grew up in a house full of gloomy kitsch, this kitsch proliferated all through the hunger years and the economic miracle, all these thousands of hideous knicknacks his mother collected and arranged all over every shelf and windowsill. Little elves and trolls and Santa Clauses and toadstools with frogs and ceramic squirrels. Robert said that Paul said that he now felt he was being buried alive in his own kitsch. First he’d been suffocated by the mental kitsch of the Third Reich, and the kitsch of his mother, all her painted dwarves and Hansels and Gretels and what have you, every sort of mass-produced horror, and now, thirty years later, his grown-up adult life began to look as empty and desperate and terrible as theirs. He suddenly saw his antisentimentality, that “nonstyle” of the apartment, as a form of sentimentality. The Warhol painting in the hall, the tasteful little handicraft gewgaws from all over the planet, the modular furniture, the psuedo-Aubusson carpet, the semichic café just under his third-floor balcony. And then, also, the kitsch of his feelings, the code of sentiments, which Paul said were exactly reproduced in all the “moving” accounts that were coming out about the same catastrophe. Paul said that even his homosexuality had turned into sozialkitsch, because this nightmare which was so particular and moving to himself was happening to thousands of other people at the same time, and being treated as a “social problem,” or a political cause, and therefore his entire existence was becoming leftist kitsch or fascist kitsch, depending on the vantage point. He cited in particular a dreadfully insipid “AIDS memoir” written, Paul said, by some hack Hollywood screenwriter that someone had sent him in the mail. Even the worst sort of people, Robert said that Paul said, are dragging out the violins—Ray can’t even have his own death as a personal tragedy, Paul told Robert. Instead, Ray is having a kitsch death, thanks to sentimental morons and fascist monsters. Paul could not envision any real life for himself after Ray, and he said that somehow the generic nature of Ray’s demise was transforming the time they had already had together into a chimera, a retroactive hallucination or a dream that had continually promised an entirely different outcome and now made no sense at all.
All the same, it was also something concrete and intractible involving hospitals and doctors and a private-duty nurse at one point, before Valentina took over things—Ray looking less and less like Ray, Robert said. Ray aged about fifty years between July and September, which became, somehow, even more disturbing when he did recover slightly and dress himself and stagger out into the living room. There were a few occasions when he even felt well enough to take a drive, Robert said. Paul took him out a number of times, to a bar, for example, never the Eiche or Harry’s where they’d run into people they knew, but places like Philomar Bar, which wasn’t popular then, except with Turks, and other times to restaurants, where Ray typically had trouble eating anything. Whenever Ray made that type of exertion, the relapse was more or less instantaneous. They didn’t have AZT, or rather they had it at one hospital but only were giving it to a limited number of experimental patients—and they were giving huge doses of it that produced pernicious anemia. Paul kept trying to get Ray into one of the treatment protocols, but whenever they went for evaluation, Ray had some new pathology, for example, Robert told me, a green fungus he started getting in his mouth, also some rare type of tissue degeneration in his rectum, so he’d have to be treated symptomatically, with whatever drug the doctors had any vague intuition about. Actually, Robert said, what they gave him did seem to help, but then he developed KS lesions, either in August or early September, Robert couldn’t recall exactly, the soles of his feet first of all—so that affected his walking, he said that when he walked it was like stepping on cockroaches with your bare feet. Then the lesions spread across his chest and down his left arm, a big one right in the center of his forehead. They were growing into his internal organs as well. You can picture it, Robert said, like an endless horror dream. Whenever they thought it couldn’t possibly advance to a worse stage, it did.
Naturally, there was so much stress in the flat, Valentina and Paul both needed to blow off steam. There were arguments, nothing too dramatic, but intense scuffles over who should look after him, during which hours and so forth. Valentina had taken it on herself, but this was a little bit different than frying up schnitzel for Rudolph at three in the morning after he’d ODed on Mandrax or drunk a quart of Rémy Martin. The whole thing was taking its toll. Valentina had made such a brave Florence Nightingale thing out of her role in it that she couldn’t then back out of it and, Robert said, as you probably know, this other situation developed out of the blue.
It started one night when Robert stopped over at the flat. There had, he said, just been some unbelievable episode of Ray falling out of bed and crawling down the hall puking out his guts. They’d cleaned him off and given him some heroin—that was another point, Robert said, Paul had started copping heroin from a dealer named Billy Sauberman who hung out in Harry’s New York Bar. Sauberman was a joke name, Robert said. It was like what people say about the Germans, that they’re “Sauberman,” you know, “clean,” like the typical German has a floor you can eat your dinner on. And Billy was called Billy Sauberman because he never used any of these drugs he sold. Paul was giving Ray a little chip of heroin every once in a while, on top of his hospital medication. Anyway, Valentina was on her hands and knees scrubbing puke off the hall carpet, they were both laughing, a little hysterically, at the horror of it all. Robert said that Paul was amazed that Ray could still be alive and this kind of gothic household pathology had become absolutely routine. Paul said that they were so accustomed to cascades of body waste, they could probably become Red Cross nurses in Lebanon when it was over.
In any case, it was a typical evening chez Paul. They went to the beer garden at the Chinese Tower, where they had those long church basement tables with paper tablecloths and on the bandstand a little orchestra of variously plump and scrawny ladies blowing on wind instruments—which reminded Robert, Robert said, of Joseph Conrad’s Victory, and the innkeeper Schomberg, and those tropical islands that Germans particularly tend to languish on. Just think how many dreams we Germans focus on the south, Robert told me, all that yearning for Capri and the bright sun, just to run away from Shitland.
All the fairies and bum boys and punks of Munich, Robert said, were cruising the pagoda. The tables were crowded with Paul’s actor friends, director friends, they paused to chat here and there. Paul told Robert, Robert said, that he could feel the wave of horrified sympathy rippling through the English Garden, sympathy and revulsion . . . There were so many in those days, Robert told me, who believed they could cheat death by turning away and pretending that the people who had it, the AIDS bug or whatever it was, had done anything different than they’d done—fucked the wrong kind of people or shot drugs or what have you.
They found a place at the end of a long table and ordered a pitcher of beer. It was a balmy evening, Robert said. Paul, he thought, had taken a little sedative pill, or a little chip of heroin, Robert didn’t know what, but Paul’s blood pressure seemed to have dropped during the brief walk from the apartment to the English Garden. When Paul was not in the apartment he tried to put Ray out of his mind entirely. He had even come out of his depression slightly, as if he knew the end could not be far off. Bear in mind, Robert told me, Ray no longer resembled Ray very much, although he still had his mind, intermittently at least, but he was so fogged with medication, and he seemed to withdraw more and more inside himself—at least that was how it seemed. And, Robert said, Ray had come to hate his body: it was a fearsome enemy making him crazy with pain. And Paul, at that point, needed some relief from everything, including Valentina, because he was starting to feel the two of them were married and had this dying child in the main bedroom.
We sat there, Robert said, under the spreading elms with the bandstand lights casting a greenish haze on the tables, just enough light to pick people’s faces out of the darkness as they moved around, and we talked and talked, scraping our minds for things to talk about that didn’t lead back to Ray and the apartment. I remember, Robert told me, Paul saying he’d been listening compulsively to Glenn Gould’s recording of The Goldberg Variations. Paul maintained, Robert said, that Gould’s Goldberg Variations were his supreme aesthetic experience. The more he drank, Robert said, or the more whatever he’d taken kicked in, the more insistent Paul became about The Goldberg Variations, specifically Gould’s performance of The Goldberg Variations—Paul’s mind had fixated on The Goldberg Variations and everything that kind of mathematical clarity and perfection implied—for Paul The Goldberg Variations represented an ideal condition of human temperament. At that moment, Robert said, Paul believed all the troubles of the world, including Ray’s illness, resulted from a collective failure to appreciate the purity of Bach and The Goldberg Variations.
A young man came over to the table. The branches rustled overhead. Robert said he felt little drops of rain, the type of rain you get on warm summer evenings. The young man introduced himself as Chris, as a friend of Mutti. You remember Mutti, Robert told me—Mutti is even now after years the bartender at the Kleist Keller, one of Rudolph’s first Munich boyfriends. Mutti who was so adorable at seventeen, when Rudolph discovered him selling vegetables on Leopoldstrasse, at the corner of the Münchener Freiheit station. Rudolph put Mutti in film after film, and gradually, said Robert, of course, Mutti has gone all beefy and bull-necked and fat-assed like they all did. Mutti Flatface as he’s now known. Anyway, Robert said, this Chris, friend of Mutti, knew Paul from seeing him at the Eiche, he jogged Paul’s memory, he gave the impression of a quite pleasant youth, rather graceful, with a nice open face and depthful eyes, he sat down and fell into some deep conversation with Paul, Robert said, possibly about The Goldberg Variations—and I, Robert told me, drifted off into my own head, which at that time was full of tiny little problems, an offer to ghostwrite the memoirs of a gangster on the Riviera, for example, which has now, Robert said, taken three years, and whether I should stay some further months in Munich, helping Paul through this difficult period, or go back to Paris . . . and if I would keep the relationship with the woman I was seeing then or if it was finished, all these urgent boring thoughts and problems. And a little puddle of beer was soaking into the tablecloth, it looked like a continent, Robert said, and if I tipped the tablecloth a little this way the stain looked like a comet with a tail, and the way the veins stood out on the back of my hand struck me for the first time as a sign of middle age, and so forth.
Chris told them of his bartending job in a local disco. He was a student of literature, preparing his doctorate on the influence of something or other on Samuel Beckett. Also he had attended the Cordon Bleu, he drove a motorcycle, he hadn’t known he was gay until his nineteenth birthday when he found his will in the men’s room of the Bahnhof, with a Turk, et cetera, et cetera.
Signals flared back and forth, a sweet erotic tension between Paul and Chris that lingered in the air. Needles of rain fogged Robert’s glasses, he said. He could hardly follow what they said, but something was developing, they drained the second pitcher of beer and sent Chris for another, and Paul asked him what he should do, meaning what was the right thing to do, with a lover dying in the flat and so on, and Robert told him he ought to go have sex with Chris and relax for a change, and Paul decided he would. He asked Robert to go back and tell Valentina he wouldn’t be home, she should stay in the flat that night, so they drank for a while longer and then Robert walked back to Paul’s flat, where he found Valentina in a mildly inebriated funk, watching TV. What’s up? she says, Robert said. What’s he doing? Oh, Robert says, he’s actually found himself a date. I see, I see, Valentina says, Robert said, as if she’d been expecting this kind of thing all along. Why on earth should she care, I wonder? Robert said.
She’s never been especially friendly to me, Robert said, but on this night she’s Miss Congeniality. A little drunk. Well, she says, why not have a little wine. I’m not wild about this idea, Robert said, but I think, if she’s decided we should be friends I can’t very well refuse. Ray’s asleep. He’s much worse, she tells me. I think his brain’s going, she says. She says Ray has been talking about going to Nepal, expedition climbing. Delirious.
We sit at the table with the balcony doors open. I can hear people eating and drinking in the café downstairs, Robert told me, and some music coming up, and on the TV they’re showing a dubbed version of North by Northwest. The rain stops. The sky is a true Prussian blue, even though we’re in Bavaria, blue with dark ink clouds in it. Valentina pops open a bottle of burgundy. I hate burgundy sometimes, Robert said, pouring himself a little more vodka. It’s too heavy for summertime, he said, and besides, that big severe face of hers, serious, beetling, like it takes a week for an idea to form. Quite a pretty evening, she says; Robert said, it’s these nights Rudolph loved sitting in the English Garden, and I’m thinking, Robert told me, Please, let’s not start in on Rudolph, Blanche—and then she says, The only time I get to breathe is when Ray’s sleeping, and so on, and then asks about Paul’s date, does Paul know the guy or what? It’s a friend of Mutti, I tell her. Luckily I don’t say Mutti Flatface, because her eyebrows shoot up suddenly, she takes a big swig of wine and says, I suppose you know I’ve been seeing Mutti for a while. Well, I was not current, Robert told me. I can’t keep track of everyone’s erotischer life, can I. Oh yes, she says, he’s such a good person, a pure soul. I doubt if people understand what a special person he is. Her voice is a little spacey. Oh, I tell her, Robert said, he’s the salt of the earth. Everybody loves Mutti, he’s a sweetheart. Thinking, Robert said, that he was way too much of a sweetheart for the likes of her, actually. Oh, sure, she says, all the fags in the Kleist Keller adore Mutti because they’re in love with him, except he doesn’t swing in that direction anymore. This, Robert said, sent a chill up my back, I could hear this note of bitterness and resentment, and I thought, now we get the inner narrative at last. Don’t take this the wrong way, she says, but really, with this AIDS, it makes you wonder: I don’t judge people, but look how they don’t control themselves. Paul runs off with someone just for fuck, she says, Robert said—even now that we know what can happen.
There were further reflections of that general stripe—liquor talking, Robert said, Valentina didn’t fancy being alone if Ray died in the night. I didn’t blame her, Robert said. Anyway, she puffs herself up with a little more booze and delivers her sermon on the situation, and I figured, Robert said, that could change 180 degrees in two seconds flat. The Germans are crazy, Robert told me—for good and bad, both. During the war, the most popular song was the “Spring Song” of Mendelsohn with words by Heinrich Heine, a one-hundred-percent Jewish product, they tried to suppress it but they couldn’t. People liked it too well. And when bombs were falling on Dresden and Hamburg, Zara Leander was singing, because of that the world doesn’t crumble, tomorrow the skies will be Himmelblau—heavenly blue. Completely crazy.
As I listened to Valentina talking, Robert told me, I began almost unconsciously to detect an “influence,” if you see what I mean. I had never known her to have a single idea of her own. When she lived with Rudolph she talked exactly in his vocabulary and parroted his ideas, word for word. If Rudolph told you it was healthy to fart forty times a day, she farted. Then again, with Paul, monkey see, monkey do. And on this night I hear another voice coming out, and sharp opinions about things, decisive, well-informed. She speaks about the epidemic: it’s just common sense, she tells me, Robert told me, these doctors must be taking the wrong path with this multifaceted illness. I know, Robert said, that she doesn’t have phrases like “multifaceted,” she’s got to have picked it up somewhere—next she’s citing new theories about how the virus attaches to the cells, how “progressive doctors” working with AIDS now believe there are more causes besides just the virus, cofactors, and so on. Perhaps the virus theory itself is a hoax—have I thought about that?
What I think, Robert said, is that she’s had a generous dose of someone else’s rap, though I can’t imagine whose. So then she says, some cousin of hers has become friendly with a Dr. Zryd, who’s running a clinic in Bad Endorf, near Rosenheim. Ironically enough, she says, this clinic is in a mansion once owned by the Bechstein family. There, she says, in the 1920s, the Bechsteins had a literary salon. And Gottfried Benn was coming there, and Thomas Mann, and Elizabeth Nietzsche, all very posh, she says, I’m thinking, yeah, and tomorrow the sky is himmelblau—and now, she says, ironically, according to her, this Dr. Zryd, a vital young researcher (“on the side of life,” as she puts it), Robert said, is having tremendous success with AIDS patients. Her cousin So-and-so has introduced her to this “dynamic” doctor, at a little informal dinner—as if anybody we knew went to any other kind of dinner, Robert weighed in, informal dinner as opposed to state dinner or god knows what other kind of dinner?—and Zryd, the doctor, Valentina says, Robert said, “has a revolutionary concept,” she says, that the immune system failure everyone has chosen to call AIDS might actually be the result of syphilis that was left untreated.
I had already heard about Dr. Zryd and his revolutionary concept, said Robert, it was in the Suddeutschen Zeitung, I used to zoom in on any article having to do with AIDS, especially to do with treatment, because nothing seemed to be working anywhere. There were rumors that Zryd had “cured” one man we all knew who’d evidently been at death’s door the previous winter—and now, thanks to Zryd and his revolutionary concept, was going around Munich extremely fit, giving blowjobs in various lavatories. On the one hand, the whole thing sounded like a pile of horseshit; on the other hand, anybody involved with this health debacle was willing to grasp at straws. The Zryd concept did have a certain plausible ring to it, especially if you knew nothing about medicine. I mean, Robert said, when somebody starts yammering on about the blood-brain barrier and etiology and mutation of enzymes and Christ knows what else, you tend to glaze over and believe they know what they’re talking about. That was definitely the case here. What Valentina wanted to know, Robert said, was whether I thought Paul would consider putting Ray into this Zryd Clinic, this place in Bad Endorf near Rosenheim, even if the treatment were highly experimental and possibly unsuccessful. Well—at that point, Paul would’ve taken Ray to a faith healer. Valentina knew that already, but she wanted reassurance, said Robert, so I said yes, I think so, yes.