Landscape of Farewell Page 2
When I finished reading my paper the applause was scattered and brief, an eager shuffling and murmuring arising at once in the body of the auditorium, almost before the last word was out of my mouth. Homer and massacre were not my subject. I had long ago settled for the intellectual upheavals of the twelfth century—my slim volume on the power achieved by the bishops during that century was the only work of mine to grace the shelves of the university library. The subject of massacre, however, had obsessed me for a time in my youth, but I had found myself unable to make any headway with it owing to my emotional inhibitions, not least of which was a paralysing sense of guilt-by-association with the crimes of my father’s generation, and after several false starts I had abandoned the subject and fallen silent. It had remained an unexamined silence throughout my life, and was my principal regret. Perhaps I chose to speak of it at this time because I believed I would not be called upon to defend what I had to say. If that were indeed the case, then I was blind to it and freely admit now that it would have been a dishonourable reason. But enough of these maunderings. The grand project of history, of its discontents, and of the necessity for each generation to rewrite it for themselves, was about to give way to the more immediate matter of the buffet lunch, which the caterers had laid out on trestles in the foyer while I was gibbering on about the obsessions of my youth. Like animals at the zoo that sniff the approach of the keepers with their food, the assembled delegates had grown restless. I stood a moment longer at the lectern.
Why I paused there I cannot say. Perhaps it was a last forlorn need for a sense of completion. Whatever it was, I hesitated to step out of the spotlight. I did not intend staying for the lunch, but was going home to the apartment at once to have done with my life. I was conscious as I stood there that my unblemished suicide stood before me. It was to be the last act of my free will. My noble exit. It was the one thing I might yet do well and not live to regret. As I made to step away from the lectern a young woman seated in the front row to my left rose to her feet and shouted something. Or it sounded like a shout. Her voice was loud and challenging and had about it the expectation almost of unfolding violence. Her wild shout arrested my movement and silenced the assembly. I teetered, neither going nor staying, then righted myself and stayed. The departing delegates turned and looked in her direction for the source of the commotion. Those who had not yet risen broke off their conversations and remained in their seats, and those who had already risen, sensing that something of moment was about to happen, sat down again. And I, caught in the spotlight, stood with my spectacles in one hand while dabbing at my watering eyes with my handkerchief in the other, waiting for what was to come.
She was like a bright, exotic raptor spreading her gorgeous plumage in the midst of the ranks of these drab fowls. Her wild cry evidently called me to account. Once she had established an expectant silence, her voice rode upon it, her words filled with scorn and contempt. She was a woman in command of her audience and was clearly intent upon defending territory. In other words, she was young, intelligent and ambitious. With a touch of annoyance, I realised that I was not going to be permitted to slip away without being required to answer for my shoddy paper. I remained at the lectern—no longer the lecturer, but the accused. I was not so much listening to what she was saying, as fascinated by the spectacle of her performance. She did not stand still but walked back and forth, waving her arms about with vigorous gestures and turning every so often to confront her audience, the loose carmine and green fabrics of her clothing billowing around her as if she danced her meaning for us, the power of her case as much in the brilliance and volume of her movements as in her words.
Settled to her task, her voice took on the largeness of a bassoon, its tones rich and dark like the tones of her flesh, its volume filling the broad confines of Aby Warburg’s stylish library—and evidently penetrating beyond the library to the foyer, for I noticed that the back doors were being held open by curious members of the catering staff, who were looking in at the goings on. The passion of a youthful and righteous conviction vibrated through this young woman and she held us spellbound. I had no doubt that she believed herself to be sounding the last trumpet for me. Her energy, her bright clothes, her large gestures, her determination, her sense that this was her moment, flew like a field of banners about her head. Despite the extravagance of her delivery, however, she proceeded methodically, severe and centred, demolishing my paper point by point, quoting my words precisely with an astonishing facility of recall, her manner haughty and contemptuous. Turned half towards me, she made a careless gesture in my direction—‘How can this man presume to speak of massacre,’ she asked the enthralled gathering, ‘and not speak of my people?’ She closed her appeal with a last enveloping, flinging gesture, both arms raised in my direction, as if she cast me and the whole tribe of old men to which I belonged from her presence, and from the presence of all serious intellectual endeavour, forever and ever, amen—or for even longer, if her curse would but endure. For her the wheel of history evidently no longer turned, but had come to a stop at her generation’s door. I had witnessed the phenomenon before. Such conviction is always impressive, slightly unnerving, and is usually accompanied by a tendency to an overstatement of the case. As if she suspected herself of just this fault, she laughed. It was a loud, baying, bellow of amusement that bordered on self-caricature—she might almost have shared my thought: the wheel of history indeed! She turned abruptly then and stepped down the centre aisle and walked towards the doors, wrapping herself in her colours and not offering me the dignity of a reply—for which last gesture of contempt I was grateful.
Thoroughly entertained, the delegates applauded and watched her progress back along the aisle with delighted approval. A group of students standing by the doors shouted repeated bravos. She was the new Wallenstein and armies of scholars would fall back at her approach. Well, such was the theatre of the moment. Or so it seems to me now as I sit here writing this and doing my best to recollect the details of that day with its dramas and reversals. I am reminded again that it is never simply a matter of deciding to do something in order to actually do it. Certain other forces, complementary to our decision to act, must arise and range themselves alongside us or, despite our will and determination, we achieve nothing. However great our resolve, we never do anything alone—whether for good or ill—even in the matter of our own death, except of course in the interior ideal world of our imagination, where our private will is the unhindered master of ceremonies.
I was still standing at the lectern, clutching my spectacles and dabbing at my eyes with my damp handkerchief, and no doubt cutting quite as forlorn a figure as any abandoned bride at the altar. It seemed only right that this black princess of a barbarous new order should have arrived at the very moment of my departure. Such efficiencies of the unexpected must surely be more than mere coincidence. Is there not in them a conjunction of historical lines of fracture whose sources are mysterious and ancient? Could she and I be more than merely actors on the stage at this fortuitous moment, playing out our parts as puppets do, without a will or a cause or an effect to call our own? As I watched her triumphant progress along the aisle, I saw in her the new commander-in-chief of the expedition against the old order, her intention none other than Agamemnon’s: We are not going to leave a single one of them alive! We—I mean my generation of old men—had failed. Oh, I had known it years ago. I had not doubted our failure for decades. It delighted me now that the baton of the struggle for truth—if we must call it that, and what other word do we possess?—was to pass from my deluded, exhausted and defeated generation into the hands of such as this woman. I would not have been her match even in my youth. There had been none like her then. Just for this moment she had made it seem to us that a moral advancement of our kind might yet be achieved, and we were grateful to her for that. She had made it seem that all was not lost, that things might yet be done that we had dreamed of doing. Humankind, for example, might yet be made good, let us say—the
re was nothing modest in her style. She was a leader and she had insisted we acknowledge her message. There is a kind of genius of intuition in these things which enables certain individuals to choose their moment well. She had the style of it. And she sowed within each of us—for an hour or two at any rate—new thoughts of liberty and justice. We saw in her the exercise of an incandescent power to preach the word of truth and we were not immune. For goodness’ sake, who is? We knew this power—or at least my own generation knew it—to be a dangerous power that is given to a few individuals to exercise briefly over the minds of their fellows. We did not think of danger, however, but happily submitted to her spell. There is a greatly seductive, indeed there is a sensual pleasure in such momentary submission, and we do not resist. No spell, however, no matter how potent, can withstand for long the assault of sceptical reflection. Which is why it is the sceptic, and not the believer, who is in the end our saviour. We go home, we drink a glass or two of wine, we watch the latest news of massacres and famines on the television, and we are restored to sanity, our ecstasy forgotten.
As I stepped down from the lectern for the last time that day, it occurred to me, with a little jolt of pleasure, that there was one decent thing I might yet do before going home and killing myself. I knew at once that Winifred would approve the spirited generosity of the intention. Even though I had just been given my dishonourable discharge, as it were, I smiled at the thought of Winifred’s pleasure.
My old colleague and friend, the gifted teacher and amateur flautist Tamás Bartsch, stepped alongside me and took my arm in his—I have known Tamás ever since we were schoolboys together. ‘So what is it you find in all this to smile at, dear friend?’ he inquired of me solemnly.
‘It is the thought of Winifred’s pleasure at what I am about to do,’ I replied at once, for Tamás and Winifred had greatly admired each other and there was nothing I wished to conceal from this dear man—except, of course, my decision to die within the hour.
‘Ah, my poor fellow,’ he said and squeezed my arm.
She—I mean the black princess, of course—was standing by the doors at the far side of the library in conversation with the group of admiring students and junior members of staff who had chanted their enthusiastic approval of her performance a few moments before. As Tamás and I came towards them one of the young women indicated my approach to her and she turned and looked at me. When she saw who it was, it was clear from her expression, and in the way she physically set herself to encounter me, that she anticipated a fight. Tamás murmured a desire not to meet her and went on through the door to get himself some lunch. The young woman introduced herself to me as Professor Vita McLelland, from Sydney University.
I offered my hand. She examined my extended hand for a moment as if she thought it might conceal a weapon, then took it in her own. Her clasp was firm, definite and brief, her gaze direct and challenging. She was ready for me. Her manner said, Bring it on, Professor Otto!
‘Permit me to apologise to you, Professor McLelland,’ I said, ‘for the poor quality of my paper. You are right, of course, to condemn such shoddiness. It saddens me greatly to have been responsible for your anger. Let me say again, I am sorry. It was not such an end to my career as this that I envisaged when I was a young man of your own age, believe me. Indeed I do not truly understand by what means I have arrived at this shabby state. It is a puzzle to me and has not been by my conscious design, I assure you. I sincerely hope that when you reach the end of your own career, which I am certain will be illustrious, you will do better than I with the question of the succession.’
She looked at me in silence after my little speech. The expression in her beautiful dark eyes was curious, engaged I would say, but disbelieving. She suspected irony, no doubt.
Recalling my beloved father and his state of bewilderment at his death, I said, ‘Passing the baton of truth from our own generation to the next has always been a perilous affair. Perhaps especially in my country.’ It was an artless expression of my thoughts on this difficult subject, and I feared, even as I said it, that my clumsy expression might give further encouragement to her contempt for me. We may not ourselves have participated directly in massacring our fellow humans—and surely no sane person will hold the children responsible for the murders committed by their fathers—but our troubling sense that we are guilty-by-association with their crimes is surely justified by our knowledge that we are ourselves members of the same murdering species as they. I am a human being first and only second, and by the chance of birth, am I the son of my father and mother. I know myself to be implicated in the guilt of both my species and my parents, for it is to these categories of being, and to these only, that I own a sense of membership.
I was concerned that my apology might have sounded pompous to her, for it had been delivered in the very voice of the old order, which she was determined to silence. She did not relax but remained on her guard, evidently anticipating some trickery on my part. ‘Goodbye, Professor McLelland,’ I said and I smiled to see a doubt still for an instant the fierce and uneasy lights that flickered within the depths of her dark eyes. ‘May I wish you good fortune in the struggle.’ I inclined my head to her, an indulgence in an old-fashioned courtesy more familiar to my father’s generation than to my own. It was a private, and somewhat symbolic, gesture of farewell, however, to life and to a generation, and perhaps to my father’s hopes for me. Yes, even that. It was a homage to the ghosts of my own fallen heroes, to those men—and they had all been men—whose books in my youth had seemed destined to stand forever as imperishable landmarks in the epic story of a Europe that had, since then, ceased to exist, their names unknown to this woman’s generation, their works no longer valued or read. New histories have arisen since then. In our youth it is only the histories we write ourselves that seem to us to be just and true. As we grow old ourselves, however, our youthful certainties begin to fail us, just as our bodies do, and we see at last that we have been wrong to have believed as we have believed and that truth has no permanence but is a shifting thing.
I turned aside and walked through the lunching crowd. I pushed the doors open and walked down the steps, leaving the grand old library of Aby Warburg behind me. Professor Vita McLelland from Sydney University was the future. I was glad I had met her face to face. I was glad, too, to have held her hand and to have seen how she had at the last moment looked searchingly into my eyes and been affected by the heartfelt sincerity of my apology. I was glad for my father’s memory, for his sake, indeed—for he still lived in my heart—that mine had not, after all, been a dishonourable end. On my way to my death I was feeling a rather silly optimism for the future of humankind, my judgment rattled, no doubt by the emotion of the moment, and my senses a little dizzy with the wonder of Professor Vita McLelland’s glorious youth. How wonderful it would have been to live again that grand illusion.
2
The appointment
Outside the library the street was strangely still and deserted, the big houses of the wealthy burghers silent and shuttered. A sense of impending action confronted me along the avenue of great trees—I might have stepped onto the set of a film between takes. Then I saw the van, a nasty amateurish green, obviously repainted hurriedly in a back alley only the night before. It crouched at the kerb, low and menacing. At any moment its doors would burst open and the assassins tumble out shouting obscenities and firing their automatic weapons.
Her shout close behind startled me and as I spun around I tripped on an uneven paving stone. She grasped me strongly by my upper arm and dragged me upright against her. ‘You can’t get away from me that easily, Professor Otto!’ She laughed, her face so close to mine I caught the sweet nutty tang of her breath. She did not relinquish my arm but held onto me, as if she expected me to fall to the ground without her support. She searched my eyes with such a close and intimate inspection of their contents that she might have suspected me of secreting within myself some precious stolen possession of her own. Her scrutin
y was disconcerting and faintly exciting, exposing me to something against which I had no defence and arousing in me the rare and rather delightful delusion of erotic expectation—I might have found myself suddenly naked and alone with her on the street. She laughed at my confusion and, apparently reassured by what she had seen within, relaxed her close examination and slipped her arm comfortably through mine, pressing it to her fleshy side.
‘You can shout me a drink before you go. I want to hear that apology of yours in triplicate,’ she said. ‘I’ve never had one of those from any of you guys before.’ With sudden impatience she set off, hauling me along with her. ‘I feel as if I’m beginning to smell of old books in those places,’ she said. Gripping my arm with a confidence that astounded me, she flung a contemptuous look over her shoulder at Warburg Haus and, with a crude vehemence that I found a little shocking, she announced loudly to the empty street, ‘God, don’t you just hate those old libraries.’
We had gone quite a little way before I gathered myself sufficiently to respond to her. ‘Erich Auerbach,’ I gasped—I was short of breath from a combination of the suddenness of the action and the sheer physical awe she inspired in me. ‘Auerbach,’ I said breathlessly, ‘claimed he would never have written his great book if he had had access to the specialised libraries of Europe.’
‘I know just how he felt,’ she said.
I held back—almost skidding my heels against her momentum, becoming a stubborn mule and refusing to go further, and eventually forcing her to slacken her pace.
She stopped and frowned at me. ‘What’s up, Professor?’
I drew breath. ‘I should like very much to buy you a drink, Professor McLelland,’ I said. ‘Indeed nothing would give me greater pleasure, but unfortunately I have an urgent appointment.’ She looked so downcast at this that I at once regretted it—the fierce flame of her passion was evidently fragile and could be doused in a moment.