That same evening, about half past nine, the phone rang in our flat. Vroni picked it up, and passed it to me with the whisper: For you, Viktor, it’s Konrad.
Supposing Zündel to be long gone and far away, I was surprised to hear from him. He said: I can tell I’m disturbing you, and I’m sorry, the telephone is a chancy tool. – I’m glad to hear from you, Konrad, you’re not bothering me at all. – One is always a nuisance, he replied, a nuisance from birth. – I said: That’s such a contentious statement that I’d like to have it out with you right away, are you at home? – Yes, he said, but I expect you were just going to bed, you don’t have holidays after all. (Striking technique of Konrad’s: he would always anticipate possible rejection by offering you arguments that made rejection justifiable, understandable, all but inevitable.) – I tried to placate him: You know I rarely go to bed before midnight. – He: If someone . . . – Zündel paused. I said: If someone? – He: If someone . . . I’m just thinking aloud, but isn’t it like this: if someone says he wants to see me, if he’s prepared to meet me, then theoretically there are three . . . – Once again Konrad stalled, and I asked: Three what? – Oh, crap, he said, it’s not true anyway, all right, listen, can I pop up and see you for a minute?
It was eleven o’clock before Zündel showed up. On the landing he was saying: Incredible, the things that are done to us, but we stand for it! – Beer or wine? I asked, pushing him gently into the sitting room. – Something harder! he called out. Has Vroni gone to bed already? – Yes, she says hi, but she was feeling very tired. – I see, she says hi, he mumbled, I see, I’m always tired too, always always tired, I’d like to sleep for a hundred thousand hours while the world turns. – Kirsch, whiskey or brandy? I asked. – Wine, he said.
Ah, Konrad, it’s nice you’re here, what shall we drink to? Love? – Oh, give over, he said, what a thing to say. – But didn’t you once refer to it as a tropical island in the middle of a sea of ice? – I said that? he asked, really? Pure kitsch. Love is nothing but chronic anxiety punctuated by occasional spasms of pleasure. – Is anything the matter with Magda? I asked. – She’s gone!
Later, after he had told the story (including that of his unscheduled early return), I asked him whether he meant everything he said, with his opening sentence out on the landing. – No, he said, that was a reference to a sign he’d seen on the tram – thousands of people must see it every day, read it and stand for it, and even for me it was the first time I hoisted in that bestiality – well, what it says is: Exit promptly – doors close automatically! – Zündel looked at me expectantly. I looked back at him. Finally, he said: Well, I was just thinking that it wasn’t every day that you get such a perfect coincidence of actual and metaphorical contempt.
One day, he went on, he meant to write a pamphlet that would skewer the fear-mongers and suffering-merchants, a kind of compendium of contemporary skullduggery, a reaching out to the silent and the discouraged, who shuffled around in a daze, with outbreaks of panic sweat each time one of those wolves asked them what they were after. – Wolves? I asked. – That’s right, he said, and pulled out a piece of paper: I thought this might make a beginning for my screed, I wrote it earlier this evening.
One day the hungry wolf asked the sheep about the nature of its objections to the world as presently constituted. – May I be perfectly open with you? asked the sheep. – Of course! replied the wolf. – Well, said the sheep nervously, everything in this vale of tears feels just a tad wolfish to me. – I see! replied the wolf, baring his fangs. But if that’s enough to make you blub, how do you think you’ll survive a proper mauling?
What do you think? asked Zündel tensely. – I see, I replied. – Do you think it’s stupid? he asked. – I said: Why don’t you ask me if I like it? – He thought for a while, took a sip of wine, lit a cigarette, and said: To make it easier for you to reply, to guard against direct answers, and to elicit from you the desired “No, it’s not at all stupid.” A categorical positive I wouldn’t believe, a categorical negative I couldn’t endure. By the way, Viktor, I’ve got a question for you: I expect you have some sense of how often you and Vroni have sex; would you be able to say how often you upbraid her for something, how often – say in a year, on average – you criticize her, tell her off, rebuke her? – What on earth has that got to do with your fable? I asked him. – There is some indirect connection, but first I need you to answer. – I’ve never thought about it, I said, perhaps I should attend to it a bit more, but at a rough estimate, maybe twice if you count criticism out of concern, as for instance: Must you sit in the draft? – Twice a year? Konrad looked up at me. – No, twice a week of course, I corrected him. – He asked me for my pocket calculator.
OK, he said after a few minutes, you got married five years ago, same time as we did, and it seems that in the period of your marriage you’ve leveled some 570 criticisms at Vroni! And me? Magda was barely able to scrape together twenty little reproaches – she wrote them all down for me, that’s something I didn’t mention to you previously – twenty criticisms in five years, that makes four per annum, 0.07 in a week and 0.01 per day. Imagine! One hundredth of a criticism per day is enough to kill off your marriage, and so on and so forth, I‘m sorry, I’m talking you to death, I’d better go home. – But you still owe me a reply, I said, on the matter of the wolf and the sheep. – To which Zündel (more or less): Every atmospheric low in the so-called intimate or personal sphere heightens my sensitivity to foulness. The general air may be, objectively speaking, sullied, but it’s only as a private casualty that I sniff the ordure. And so it comes about that instead of meditating on the particular, here, the crisis in my marriage, I allow myself to be distracted by the wider condition of the general. Hence the fable. And as I say, one day all wolves will be brought to account, pitilessly, only it will take many years for my sheep’s claws to become sufficiently sharp and sufficiently terrifying in my doubtless fearsome paws. – Zündel laughed heartily, and I laughed with him, and we drank to his paws. Then he said: No, it’s not on their account that the time is not yet ripe for retribution and counter-blow, but because the energy source for such an enterprise must not be hatred or private pain. Neither stand a chance against cunning and might. Something more positive needs to grow in me and give me sustenance, something luminous. Only if you argue from inner plenitude, from happiness, from love, only then will you come out victorious. – So long as, I said, so long as you still have any inclination to argue. – Ha, you’re right, you rascal, and there I was, moved to tears by my own insight, which, in spite of all, I will cling on to.
Zündel stayed until four in the morning. He talked a lot of stuff. He avoided questions relating to Magda. He expressed himself vaguely about holiday plans. He spoke for a long time about his job, but when I asked him why he didn’t give up teaching if it left him feeling so hollow and misshapen, he replied that having to answer questions was the opposite of contentment.
We stood outside the door, waiting for the taxi. Konrad drew in the early July morning air. I feel a bit sick, he said, but life’s not all bad.