in which we learn of an unhappy love affair and the deaths of loved ones, Hedvige reveals to Emmanuel her last and greatest secret, we hear of the cruel death of countless animals and are overwhelmed with powerless remorse
from: emmanuel@gmail.com
Dr Schulz was particularly intrigued by my father being a detective. ‘How interesting, how very interesting,’ he muttered into his beard as he paced in circles, gnawing on his pipe and puffing at his vanilla-scented tobacco.
‘You see, the desire for an Apocalypse is a sure sign of the inability to cope with anxiety – the inevitable angst of waiting for the endgame which we hope will provide an outcome and an explanation. Not to mention the anxiety of waiting for an answer to the question: is there an outcome and an explanation at all? This anxiety grows as we get closer to an answer and as it becomes ever clearer that there is actually no answer. When we desire an Apocalypse, we’re instinctively reaching for the remote control so we can fast-forward through our own life history to the end, like we might do with a gripping detective film. It’s like we can no longer resist the urge to find out who committed the crime,’ Dr Schulz said.
‘God the Father, who brings the Apocalypse, does the same as the sleuth at the end of a well-crafted detective story. At the end, God assembles all those involved in the crime – and what is history but a crime story with humanity as its cast? He gathers everyone together, be they now living or dead, and explains the role of each character in turn: he discloses their hidden motives and intentions, exonerates the innocent, brandmarks the guilty, reveals the truth and clarifies the meaning of every seemingly senseless move by each of the actors. When a good sleuth and God are finished, no further interpretation is possible, there’s only applause,’ Dr Schulz exclaimed and clapped his hands loudly because he’d noticed that my thoughts had wandered off.
When he was in a good mood or I’d done or said something to arouse his intellectual curiosity, which must have been simply irrepressible in his younger days, Dr Schulz would launch into a long monologue. Of all the days I’ve spent in this asylum – where I’m confined for my own good, they never forget to say – I best remember those when Dr Schulz held one of his inspired discourses.
‘Do you want to hear about the funny side of the end of the world?’ he asked me once, and, in his usual way, continued without waiting for my reply. I swallowed his words avidly as he spoke about the apocalyptic prophecy pronounced by the Montanists in the second century AD. The sect was founded in 156 AD by Montanus, a prophet who seems to have had the ability to speak in unintelligible languages. This phenomenon has virtually become part of pop culture today: we know it under the name ‘speaking in tongues’ and it’s an everyday practice in Pentecostal churches. It’s also common in mental institutions, where we call it schizophrenia. In any case, Jesus had scarcely gone, but Montanus believed he’d soon come again. The prophet wrongly predicted the date of Christ’s return, but his cult lived on for several centuries.
‘Elipando, Bishop of Toledo, described the uproar which took hold of the city’s inhabitants on 6 April 793. He wrote that a monk by the name of Beatus, a manic street preacher, called the people together on the main square and told them the end of the world was coming that same evening. The city was panic-stricken. Later, when the people realised that the End hadn’t occurred, they were enraged and went on a spree of plundering.
‘Who better than the Pope to answer the question When’s the next time round?’ Dr Schulz laughed loudly. ‘Pope Innocent III was unequivocal: the Second Coming would occur in 1284, that being 666 years after the advent of Islam. Jesus didn’t come, despite the Pope’s authority. Since the Pope was infallible, by inference Christ himself must have been wrong.
‘Botticelli couldn’t resist Apocalypse forecasting either. On a painting completed in 1500, he added a caption in Greek saying that the great cataclysm was coming in three and a half years: “Satan will be chained and cast down, as in this picture.”
‘Martin Luther believed the End would come by 1600. Tommaso Campanella was even more precise: the Earth would collide with the sun in 1603,’ Dr Schulz said.
‘Isaac Newton devoted a large part of his life and thought, which was not only mathematical but also theological, to the attempt to find what he considered the Bible code. And ultimately he succeeded, as he himself asserted. In 2003, the media were all abuzz about hitherto unpublished writings by Newton which state that the end of the world will come in 2060.
‘The London Stories about the End, if I may call them that, are especially cheerful and bring out the British sense of humour,’ Dr Schulz explained and refilled his pipe. ‘In June 1523, a handful of London astrologers calculated that the end of the world would be on 1 February of the following year. It would begin with a flood in London. The water would then cover the entire world. Tens of thousands of people left their homes, fleeing before the predicted deluge. When the day of the prophecy came, not a drop of rain fell in London.
‘The prophet William Bell said there would be a devastating earthquake on 5 April 1761 which would destroy the world. Previously he’d predicted a quake for 8 February. “So it didn’t occur, but don’t worry – it’ll be on 8 March,” he assured his listeners. Oops, wrong again. People left their homes and took to the hills yet again on 5 April, and when there was still no earthquake, an angry mob threw Bell into the London madhouse, Bethlem.
‘In his Book of Prophecies, Christopher Columbus wrote that the world was created in 5343 BC and would last for 7,000 years. The End would therefore come in 1658. He got it wrong, but what can you expect of a man who was searching for India and discovered America?’ Dr Schulz gibed.
He wasn’t always in such a good mood. There were days, oh there certainly were, when he was gloomy and almost inscrutable. The warm laughter which had resounded in his study the day before would unexpectedly switch to a cold keenness, a presence almost like a scalpel, and I felt he could dissect me with his thoughts if he wanted.
And again, there were moments when he seemed to truly sympathise with me, when a story I told him in confidence shook him more than I thought a person in his position was allowed to be shaken. Sometimes I felt he sympathised with me so completely and sincerely that I suddenly had the desire to help him, as paradoxical as it may sound. Gentle and pensive, he’d listen to me without interrupting with a single gesture as I told him about my love for Marushka.
I was in love with Marushka even before I met her. One day Hedvige dropped her wallet and it fell under the sink. When I stooped down to get it, I saw her picture on the floor. She was my age, pallid of face and ethereally beautiful. I knew from what Hedvige had told me that she was of fragile health and that her chronic bronchitis had developed into asthma at an early age.
I often imagined her coughing blood and holding up a snow-white embroidered handkerchief in her slender fingers. There was something compellingly romantic for me in that scene of beauty separated from death by a single strand of maiden’s hair. I’d always be there to keep her from falling. I’d bring up a chair and offer her a glass of water. She’d then raise her angelic blue eyes to me and, not letting go of my hand, say: thank you. The love between us couldn’t last for long. Her illness would tear her away from me, I imagined, and for that very reason I was convinced that she was the love of my life: the only love I’d have would be unhappy, but I’d fling myself into that tragedy like the Spartans charged the Persian hordes.
We met at the Amarcord brassiere, where I used to go in my late teenager days to watch the tumult of Naschmarkt. This marketplace had exercised a magnetic pull on me even as a child. It was strictly off-limits for me, needless to say. Yet how many times had I toured Naschmarkt wide-eyed, absorbing every nuance of the fruit and vegetables on display, every wrinkle on the faces of the dark-skinned porters and the fat saleswomen with their stentorian laughs and wide, aproned bellies which looked like they were hiding kangaroos. Amidst all those sounds, colours and not always pleasant smells, I felt a heady excitement such as only comes over us on the greatest of adventures – asail on the most distant oceans, braving the most perilous battlefields and scaling the highest mountain peaks. My heart beat like a tin drum whenever one of the saleswomen leaned towards me and spoke to me in her poor German. What a treasury of stories Naschmarkt was for me! Green olives and white cheeses, smoked salmon and pickled legs of pork, dried figs from the Adriatic islands and dried tomatoes from Turkey, early cherries from Italy and late oranges from Egypt: every market stall had the power, like an invisible lock, to sluice me into a dangerous new world far away from Schikanedergasse. But you mustn’t think I really wanted to travel to all those places: my journeys were so spectacular because of my confinement, and my confinement was so agreeable because of my journeys. Any change would only have disturbed that delicate equilibrium and would only have been for the worse.
As I mentioned, the Amarcord was directly opposite Nasch-markt. Here I’d drink Julius Meinl coffee, smoke and gaze out at that unofficial Vienna theatre of life, where I staged and played some of the most exciting episodes of my childhood. When Marushka got a job as a waitress at the Amarcord be cause Hedvige’s wages working for us weren’t enough to cover her education, I began dropping by every day. They served Guinness on tap and crispy roast duck in spicy orange sauce; everyone there knew me, from the cooks to the regular guests – failed artists who hung around all day in the alcoves, waylaying visitors careless enough to sit down at neighbouring tables and abusing them with tales of their ‘new art projects’.
When Marushka and I left the Amarcord together for the first time and I accompanied her to St Stephen’s Cathedral where she lit a candle on the anniversary of her grandmother’s death; and when we sat in the Bräunerhof afterwards drinking tea; and when I took her to the bus stop; and when she gave me a kiss on the cheek before running to the bus – we knew our relationship was inconceivable for everyone else. And precisely for that reason it was the only conceivable one for me.
We were as discreet as only those can be who know that to be noticed means danger. The slightest carelessness on our part could have brought a torrent of adversities, because maman et papa weren’t the only obstacle to our love: Hedvige would oppose it just as forcefully, if not more so. But I’d been good at keeping secrets since childhood – was I not Hedvige’s pupil, after all?
And then, within less than a year, Marushka and I were left alone in the world. First of all my mother died. They searched all the way from Vienna to Thailand to find a cure for her illness, but in vain. She passed away in a Swiss clinic in ‘the miraculous hands’ of a quack who ‘healed those whom the medical profession has written off’, as the pamphlets claimed which kept turning up in our home for months after the funeral. Knowing my mother, I have no doubt that she believed until the very end that she’d come through it. She could never accept the idea that she’d die; even the possibility of ageing and of her beauty waning was unthinkable for her: off the edge of all mental maps, deep within the dark territory no thought would penetrate, because those who enter there must abandon all hope. Her mother was like that too – the grandmother whom I never met. Apparently she had the habit of saying: If I should ever die… My mother, keeping with her convictions, didn’t write a will. Papa followed her example, which cost me a fortune in lawyers’ fees over years of litigation with his relatives, who descended like a flock of vultures on his estate. Fortunately it was quite large. Papa was a weak but good man. And a good father, too – except that he wasn’t my actual father.
Before long, Hedvige also died. After papa was buried, I insisted that she not leave – she was to stay and live with me in the apartment. At one stage I was determined that Marushka should move in too, but she energetically rejected the idea and forced me to repeat after her, for the umpteenth time: My mother must never find out. Hedvige did actually stay, but today I know it would’ve been better if she hadn’t. She hovered about the apartment like a ghost. I’d find her polishing a piece of furniture endlessly, as if in a trance, and raining down tears on it. Poor madame, poor monsieur, she’d say all of a sudden at dinner and burst into tears. Everything in the apartment reminded her of them. Schikanedergasse became Hedvige’s Calvary: the memories caused her great sorrow, and everything which still existed turned into a monument to the ephemeral. There was so much death all around: the neighbourhood changed, people died or moved away, and she no longer even knew the saleswomen at the local baker’s. Everything that had been hers, except for Marushka and I, was now in the world of the dead. She didn’t show it in any way, although it must have caused her pain, but I know she knew that we were no longer hers either. Then one day she joined the shadows she’d been living with in her last few months. She’d been with them in the other world for days on end, and it was only her body which periodically came back to us. So when she died she didn’t go away: she just didn’t come back.
Her death didn’t bind me and Marushka together. After they’d all been buried, you might have thought that nothing more could stand in the way of our happiness. Indeed, there was nothing – apart from my illness, which took on new and ever more frightening forms with every passing day. It worsened after my mother’s death, only to culminate in my breakdown on the day of Hedvige’s funeral. This turned out to be just the first in a series of breakdowns which ultimately led me to this hospital, here in the Alps.
They came on fast: first I’d have an attack of vertigo, then a terrible pain in my head, and next I’d black out. I’d wake up in a bed at the casualty ward where they’d rushed me from the library, the park or the street where I’d collapsed with inhuman cries, they told me. I’d seen a rapid flux of sights, places and epochs tied together into a story whose connecting thread I was unable to apprehend, and that seems to have literally driven me mad. Sequences of historical events alternated with the sequences of stories of those who saw history from the side, askance – its victims. From the beaches of Normandy to Petrograd, from medieval abbeys to the glass-and-steel towers of multinational corporations, a story unfolded in my mind, imperceptibly fast and incomprehensibly complex, but one grand story; and whenever I felt I was finally so close, just one proverbial step away from decoding what at first looked like a chaos of random threads of information, I’d stumble and seize up, drowning in merciful nothingness, with my body sinking in behind.
As if that wasn’t enough, the pangs of remorse became more frequent and abrupt. To defend myself from those feelings of guilt would have aroused an even stronger sense of remorse in me because I considered my condition rightful punishment, and evading that punishment seemed unforgiveable. It all climaxed one day when I ordered my favourite roast duck at the Amarcord…and then realised I couldn’t live a second longer in a world kept in motion only by death. I was inundated with images of hundreds of millions of feathered animals lying on conveyer belts and having their heads sliced off by razor-sharp precision machines. Their cries – through which I clearly discerned the triumphant, self-contented tones of a Black Mass – stabbed into my mind like steely knives. Billions of chicken’s legs jerking in their death throes grated at my brain. Cows’ heads were severed from their bodies and blood gushed from the necks, bespattering the faces of rubber-suited figures that dragged the carcasses down endless slaughterhouse corridors. Pigs grazed on vast pastures by the sea, only to throw themselves off the cliff one after another, as if at some invisible sign. Lambs were separated from their mothers, whose skulls were then crushed with sledgehammers, and the little animals were herded from their pens to a tract fenced in with barbed wire. There they were gassed to death and mountains of their bodies shifted by bulldozer to restaurants and cafés for our consumption. The thought about how much death was needed to maintain just one human life, my life, made me bolt from the restaurant like a wayward maniac. They didn’t find me until evening – wandering aimlessly through the marshes of Lobau.
Marushka will never forgive me for the choice I made. I know she searched for me in all the hospitals in Austria, but I’d covered my tracks. I’d reached the end; she has to keep going. But she can only keep going if she forgets me and forsakes me. I know what she’d wish: to care for me and give me more and more of her unconditional, almost maternal love, the worse my condition became. That would cure me, she believed. She’d lay her life at the altar of my illness. But I can’t bear a single sacrifice more for my sake. Instead, I decided to erase myself from her life and liberate her from me. I divided my inheritance into two trusts: one which I manage and use to pay for my luxurious confinement here with a view of the willows and the lake, and a second, which she’ll manage when her children are born. That’s the closest I’ll ever get to fatherhood. I realised that during the first of our fruitless attempts at physical love. Each and every one of them ended in my complete incapacitation, such that we ultimately gave up. I’ll never be capable of giving life – but at least I can give money and all that money can buy.
When my mother died, Hedvige handed me a slim book bound in red leather, which she announced as my mother’s diary. And, in a way which had become habitual, she added in a conspirative-cum-demanding tone: ‘This has to stay between us.’ My mother turned out to have kept this diary in the period between the separation from you – forgive me for being so direct – and her marriage to the man who would play the role of my father through until the end as well as could be expected under the circumstances. The diary told me nothing about my mother I didn’t already know. They never concealed from me that papa wasn’t my father – a fact underscored multiple times in the diary. But it did reveal the greatest secret: the name of my real father. First you withheld it from me, then my mother; I doubt that papa was involved in the decision, although he’s sure to have gone along with it in his good-natured way, as with everything else my mother insisted on. Now, thanks to Hedvige, it’s become my most precious possession. You may take the mails you’re receiving from me as interest on the value you’ve renounced but which I, nevertheless, will duly reimburse.
PS
We’ll see each other soon. At last, I’m coming. Dr Schulz has approved my visit to you: he considers it could be of the greatest significance for my recovery.