XVII. LOVE OF ONE’S NEIGHBOUR

During one of my visits, Ilsa asked me how I ended my affairs. Once again my money situation had grown tight, once again I’d travelled to Ilsa to fill out one of her bank-transfer slips, once again my financial difficulties had to do with overly expensive restaurants and hotels which I admitted to Ilsa after she’d triumphantly figured out exactly how my finances would look if I was only taking care of my family.

Ilsa considered it progressive to go straight into those things that usually required a tad more tact, and often confused shamelessness with openness. Be that as it may, that is where her progressiveness ended and began to suffocate under lectures on Rasputin. For after tossing Thomas Aquinas to the side as a clever but fainthearted copyist, she’d spent that summer with Rasputin. And the only reason she read Foucault was because she thought that she might finally be able to get me, my interest in power, my dictatorial genius.

‘As I am already paying for your escapades, I’d at least like to know what they look like,’ she demanded, leaning back on her Biedermeier sofa. Having recently had it re-covered in an even bolder yellow than before, she seemed somewhat awkward against all the blaring material. A pile of books tottered on the side table, topped off by a plate of cookies. The only place for the coffee cups was on the floor.

‘And so?’

‘Come on, Ilsa!’

Naturally, I didn’t tell her a thing about my affairs. I had trained myself to be tactful, which, in my family, was a real work of art, and I was quite proud of it. In Ilsa’s circle, no one understood the difference between eroticism, lust and apathy. Whoever lost a sense of shame could say goodbye to desire too. Whoever got rid of taboos annihilated lust. So much for Kommune Eins. I ended my affairs with an explanatory talk. Ilsa uncorked a bottle of grappa.

‘I told Hedda to leave you years ago,’ Ilsa said and handed me one of the mouth-blown glasses she’d picked up in Murano or Venice with one of those lovers of hers with whom she shared reading materials rather than the bed.

‘How lovely to learn she still possesses her own willpower,’ I answered.

‘You decimated her willpower long ago. You treat her miserably, my dear, and she allows you to do anything you want with her,’ Ilsa, schooled in strategies of annihilation against me, said.

‘I made an effort with her for a long time. Now it just doesn’t work any more, Ilsa, and there are reasons for that.’

‘Yes, reason, that’s a good word. I have never liked seeing this . . . your women stories. This risible conquering thing.’ She held out the glass to me more as a challenge than an offer, and in her gesture I could feel how unyieldingly and deeply she still despised me. But I couldn’t do a thing: what Ilsa held against me, what she couldn’t stand, was that I understood desire whereas she only understood control. Whereas I was able to enjoy, she was merely clever. And whereas she was idolized, I was loved and had even loved myself, not for long, true, but uncontrollably and abruptly. Ilsa, however, was far removed from those experiences.

‘You never let Hedda say a word,’ she said after downing her grappa. ‘You stifle her, you run roughshod over her before she can express her own opinion, and when she does, she’s worse off! That’s when you put her up against the wall. You’re always right. You refuse to entertain a single point of view outside your own. You’re a dictator due to your helplessness, my dear. You know what, Anton Stöver? You simply did not deserve Hedda.’

‘Did not deserve!’ I called out in amusement and thought about my father who, once outside her gravitational field, had managed to become a bureaucrat in school administration, maltreating everything and every one with prescriptions. What had she made of that man? How he had degenerated into a nothing on her leash.

‘You were never interested in Hedda,’ Ilsa stated with her inquisitorial charm. ‘But what am I saying—you were never interested in women.’

At that point I downed my grappa too. What kind of abstruse allegation was that? I was interested in women, constantly and all over the place. A lack of women was something you really could not accuse me of, and I wasn’t interested in their bodies but what was going on in their heads, what they thought about before falling asleep, when they woke up, when they got bored during their lunch break. I was interested in everything about them, I just wasn’t interested in one of them exclusively and that’s what Ilsa’s damned communism should have taught us. The removal of any exclusivity. The love of a class or, even better, unconditional love of one’s neighbour. Because what else was the thought of the collective good for? Why hadn’t it brought us anything other than the expropriation of land, the five-year plan and a few scruffy left-wing group flats?

‘Göttingen is just too small for me,’ I said.

‘Is that right? But it’s thanks to you that you went to Göttingen in the first place. Hedda had been offered a fantastic position at the Fine Art Museum in Bremen. And she said no, for your sake, because of your paltry job as a middle peasant at the university. Did you ever have an eye on a professorship?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘You’re the only one who believes it. Now Hedda is wasting away in that gallery which is far below her capabilities.’

‘As if you would know what her capabilities were.’

‘You ruined her life.’

‘You can only ruin your own life. And Göttingen is too small for me.’

‘Because your lovers keep running into your wife.’

There she was not completely wrong. There was precisely one cafe I could go to with women, it had been there for years and for years it had been the only one. In any event, it was odd that these women often spoke of abandonment when I said goodbye. The term ‘affair’ seemed to be understood less and less, which I held to be proof of the decline of culture, and an affair was the limit of what I shared with these women, and only because I enquired into what was going on with them, apparently no one else was interested, but that does not mean that we ever had anything like a relationship.

Göttingen was too small for my needs, and that was not the only reason I had suggested to Hedda again and again that we move to another, bigger, more culturally inclined city. Well. Hedda’s gallery. The gallerist was one of the few women who couldn’t stand me. Whenever I entered to pick Hedda up or tell her something, she cast me scathing looks, and the only reason she’d kept Hedda from going was because she knew that her full-time position screwed up my plans.

‘Have you ever thought of anyone other than yourself? Of your son, for example?’ Ilsa asked.

‘The way you think of yours?’

‘Do you not have even the slightest spark of morality within you, Anton Stöver?’

‘Morality? Your morality is nothing but an enormously formed provision. All of you with your romanticism of bureaucracy. Love is always amoral. You know what, Ilsa, what you’re talking about doesn’t have anything to do with love, anything to do with Marxism, at best it’s just Christian Democracy. Little shepherd’s hour at Ibis level.’

‘But for your affairs it’s always got to be Gebhard’s Hotel, of course. Nothing less will do for my son.’

‘I looked for alternatives, Ilsa, I’m sorry, but by-the-hour hotels in Göttingen are unacceptable. I can’t go with any woman there. If were in Cologne or Munich though—’

‘By-the-hour hotels! I’m disgusted, Anton. Your lifestyle disgusts me.’

‘My lifestyle can be of no interest to you. Where I go with women can be of no interest to you. And your Antonio Gramsci, by the way, was no poor guest with the prostitutes of Turin.’

‘He didn’t have the means,’ she defended him. I raised my eyebrows and looked at her amusedly, and, when it became clear to her that it was no defence to me, she added: ‘And no interest, either.’

‘Gramsci was a human being, Ilsa, not a holy pillar. Give him that much.’

‘Your by-the-hour hotels are the epitome of the bourgeois!’ she yelled.

‘And all of your communes were the epitome of prudery!’

‘I think you’d better leave now,’ Ilsa said, and her voice suddenly sounded unbearably cold.