The Hothouse Page 3

  Elke stroked him. It was the time of power cuts. The nights were oppressive and dark. Keetenheuve had got himself a battery-powered lamp to work by. Elke brought it to bed, and its harsh light fell across their bodies, like the beam of a headlight catching a naked couple embracing on the roadway. Elke studied Keetenheuve long and attentively She said: "You must have been good-looking when you were twenty." She said: "Have you had many girls?" He was thirty-nine. He hadn't had many girls. Elke said: "Tell me something." To her, his life was exciting and colorful, full of baffling leaps, like the life of an adventurer, almost. It was all strange to her. She didn't understand what star he was following. When he told her why he had rejected the politics of the National Socialists and gone abroad, she saw no reason for such behavior, and if there was a reason, it was something she couldn't herself see or feel; he was just a moralist. She said: "You're a schoolmaster." He laughed. But perhaps it was just his face that laughed. Maybe he had always been an old schoolmaster, an old schoolmaster and before that an old schoolboy, a naughty boy who wouldn't do his prep because he loved books too much. Elke came to hate all Keetenheuve's books, she fulminated against the innumerable documents, papers, notebooks, journals, digests, and drafts that lay about everywhere and took Keetenheuve away from her bed into areas where she could not follow him, kingdoms that were inaccessible to her.

  Keetenheuve's pursuits, his involvement in the reconstruction, his eagerness to reinvent the nation as a liberal democracy, had brought it in their train that he was returned as a member of the Bundestag. He was given a preferential place on the list of candidates, and had won his seat without having had to exert himself on the hustings to any great extent. The end of the war had made him somewhat optimistic, and he thought it was right that he should now devote himself to a cause, having been a marginal figure for so long. He wanted to realize his youthful dreams, at the time he had been a believer in change, but he soon saw what a foolish belief that was, people had naturally remained the same, it didn't even occur to them to change, merely because the form of government had changed, because the uniforms thronging the streets and making babies were now olive-green instead of brown, black, and field gray, and once again everything came to grief over petty matters of detail, the thick ooze on the streambed that blocked the flow of fresh water, and left everything as it was before, in a hand-me-down type of life that, everybody knew really, was a lie. At first, Keetenheuve plunged himself enthusiastically into the work of the committees, he wanted to make up for all the lost years, and he would have blossomed if he'd gone with the Nazis, because that was the break, the stupid miscalculation of his generation, and now all his eagerness was simply wasted and laughable, a graying youth, beaten from the start.

  And what he lost in politics, what he had to give up on in his exhaustion, he lost also in love, for politics and love had both come to him too late in life, Elke loved him, but with his parliamentarian's free travel pass, he was chasing after phantoms, the phantom of liberty, of which people were afraid, and preferred to leave to the unfruitful investigations of professional philosophers, and the phantom of human rights, which raised its head only when people had suffered wrongs, the problems were infinitely difficult, and one might well despair at them. Keetenheuve could see himself back in opposition, but permanent opposition was no fun any more, because he asked himself: can I change anything, can I make things better, do I know the way?

  He did not know it. Every decision was festooned with thousands of ifs and buts, like lianas, like jungle lianas. Practical politics was a jungle, you ran into big beasts. You might be brave and defend the dove against the lion, but while you were doing that, the snake snuck up on you from behind, and bit you. As it happened, the lions in this particular jungle were toothless, and the doves not as innocent as their cooing tried to make out, only the snakes' venom was good and strong, and they picked their moment to administer it. This was the terrain where he was fighting and losing his way. And in all that tangle, he forgot that a sun was shining on him, that a miracle had befallen him, that a woman loved him, that Elke, with her smooth young skin, loved him. Their embraces between trains were rushed, and he was back on his wanderings once more, a foolish knight, crusading against power that was so entwined with all the old power, that it could afford to laugh at the knight who sallied out to challenge her, and sometimes, in a spirit almost of kindness, to offer a target for his zeal, she tossed a windmill his way, good enough for that old-fashioned Don Quixote. At home, meanwhile, Elke fell into the lap of hell, the hell of solitude, the hell of boredom, the hell of apathy, the hell of daily trips to the movies—where, in the velvety darkness, the devil swaps a pseudo-life for your own life, the soul is dispelled by shades— the hell of emptiness, the hell of a tormenting eternity, the hell of a merely vegetative existence, which only plants could endure without losing heaven. "The sun? A deception," Elke told herself, "its light is black." The only beautiful thing really was youth youth it'll not come back to us not once not twice it was scythed down in May and Keetenheuve a good fellow he was one of the harvesters she'd been without a schoolmaster now she had a schoolmaster in Bonn and he set her no tasks she wouldn't be able to perform any tasks how could she the governor's daughter prisoners raked the gravel, and that was when she ran into Wanowski, Wanowski with her great padded shoulders, an invert from the National Socialist Women's Association, Wanowski with her enormous low imperious voice she reminded her of home a strangely altered version of home but she was home she was Daddy's voice she was Mommy's voice she was the beer evenings of the old warriors that the Gauleiter liked to get himself up for and drop into as into a rejuvenating mud wallow and Wanowski said "Come, child" and Elke came, she came into the tribades embrace, where was warmth, where was oblivion, where was shelter from overmuch distance, shelter from the sun, shelter from eternity, where simple words were spoken, no blather of abstractions, not the ghastly, oppressive, voluble, swarming, frothing intellectualism of Keetenheuve who had stolen her when she was weak he a schoolmaster and a dragon and she the princess and now she took vengeance vengeance on Keetenheuve vengeance on the dragon vengeance on Daddy who had failed to triumph and took the cowardly way out and left her to the dragons vengeance on this damnable existence vengeance with female homosexuals they were the hellhounds of her vengeance, and she avenged herself with others besides Wanowski, because Wanowski not only gave satisfaction herself, she was also a procuress and she recruited other disciples for the unholy Vestal rites, she had contempt for men, milksops milksops the lot of them limp dicks and so she could strut about with her padded shoulders, the cheeks of her stout ass in men's trousers, the cigar in her mouth a penile stump, she would have liked to deprive the unfairly kitted-out pathetic priapids of the woman altogether, monster of sexual envy, a fat and angry pub Penthesilea who had missed out on her Achilles. What Wanowski had to offer Elke was the irresistible offer of beer and company. Elke no longer felt abandoned when Keetenheuve was off in Bonn. She drank. She drank with bitter dykes who were waiting for her to get drunk. She drank bottle after bottle. She ordered beer over the phone, and it was delivered in iron rectangular crates. When Keetenheuve returned from his travels, the shameless so-and-so's squeaked out the door with sardonic grins like glutted rats. He lashed out at them; they skittered into their holes. The room stank of female sweat, fruitless arousal, senseless fatigue, and beer beer beer. Elke was stupid with beer, a drooling cretin. Dribble ran from her pretty, painted, lovable mouth. She drooled: "What are you doing here?" She drooled: "I hate you!" She drooled: "I love you." She drooled: "Come to bed." The sun was black. Could he fight? He could not fight. The women sat in their ratholes. They observed him. And in cahoots with them, also in their ratholes sat others—men—they too observing him. He leaned down over Elke's mouth, beer fumes, holy spirits, the bottle genies all rose toward him on her breath, it disgusted him, but he still felt impelled, and in the end it was he who had to yield to his own weakness. In the morning they made it up. Generally it
was on a Sunday morning. The bells pealed for church. Keetenheuve was happy to hear them pealing, they didn't appeal to him, and maybe he even regretted that they didn't appeal to him, but any summons struck Elke as more in the nature of a demand, the bells represented the claim of some absolute, and she resisted them. She cried: "I hate that jangling. That jangling is so horrible." He had to calm her down. She cried. She fell into despondency. She started cursing God. Elke's God was a wrathful god, a monster and a sadist. "There is no God," said Keetenheuve, and he took away her last support, the belief in a bloody idol. They sang nursery songs in bed, and chanted counting rhymes. He loved her. He let her drop. He had been put in charge of a human being, and he let her drop. He set off in pursuit of his will-o'-the-wisps, wrestled in committee rooms for nebulous rights that were not secured, his efforts in the committee rooms were utterly ineffectual, he would not achieve anything for anyone, but he set off just the same, and he left Elke, the one person who had been entrusted to him, who was his sole responsibility, to fall into despair. The shameless so-and-so's killed her. Beer killed her. A few drugs also. But actually it was being abandoned that had asphyxiated her, a premonition of eternity and temporality, space, so confined and so boundless, space with its black light, space, the black baffling backdrop behind the stars.

  Keetenheuve schoolmaster; Keetenheuve rapist, Keetenheuve dragon from legend, Keetenheuve / Possehl widower; Keetenheuve moralist and voluptuary; Keetenheuve member of parliament, Keetenheuve chevalier of human rights, Keetenheuve killer

  In a newspaper a wise countenance an old man a kindly face under snow-white hair a figure in a gardener's well-worn outfit Einstein pursued a fata morgana and found a fata morgana the clear beautiful formula for the ultimate equation the connection of results harmony of the spheres the unified field theory of the natural laws of gravity and electricity traced back to their common source in the Fourth Equation

  Wagalaweia. They say the righteous sleep easy in their beds. And could he sleep? With sleep came dreams that were no dreams, that were ghosts and terrors. Lying crosswise, east-west, his closed eyes facing west, what might Keetenheuve have been able to see? The Saar, la belle France, the Benelux states, the patchwork of Europe, the Montanunion.{1} Any arms dumps? Arms dumps. There was prowling around the frontiers. Notes were exchanged. Treaties signed. The game was on once more. The same old game? The same. The Federal Republic was a player again. Writing letters to the Americans in Washington and being irritated by the Americans in Mannheim. The Chancellor found himself seated at various round tables. As one among equals? One among equals. What did he have behind him? Defense lines, rivers. Hold the Rhine. Hold the Elbe. Hold the Oder. Attack over the Vistula. What else? A war. Graves. Ahead of him? A new war? Fresh graves? Retreat to the Pyrenees? The cards were shuffled again. Who was it referred to the foreign minister of one of the great powers as a jackanapes? An old Wilhelmstrasse hand. He was feeling his way back to great-power status himself, panting along the old running track, along the Koblenzer Strasse, tongue out, and at the starting line and the finishing line sat the obscenity and his wife. On the Rhine, a line of coal barges labored upstream. They looked like dead whales in the fog.

  This was where the Nibelungs' treasure had lain, the gold under the water, the hoard stashed in a cave. It was stolen, plundered, embezzled, accursed. Ruse, furtiveness, deception, lie, murder, bravery, loyalty, betrayal, and fog, ever and aye, amen. Wagalaweia, sang the daughters of the Rhine. Digestion, decomposition, metabolism, and cellular renewal, at the end of seven years you were someone else, only in the area of memory there were certain encrustations—and to them you owed obedience.

  Wagalaweia. In Bayreuth the girls, glittering goddesses, floated over the stage in swings. The dictator had been aroused by the spectacle, he had felt a surge in his marrow, his hand over his belt buckle, his kiss-curl flopping over his eyes, his cap straightened, dark brooding gave rise to destruction. And then the high commissars were received with open arms, come to my bosom! come to my bosom! Tears flowed, tears of emotion, little salt streams of re-meeting and forgiving, the skin had turned gray, a little rouge bobbed along on the tears, and Wotan’s inheritance was safe again.

  Flags are always available—rumpled prostitutes. Hoisting the flag is duty. Today I hoist one flag tomorrow the next I do my duty The weathercocks clatter in the wind.{2} O Hölderlin, what's that rattling? The ringing phrase, the hollow bones of the dead. Society was once again disciplined, important tasks needed to be performed, fortunes to be saved, ranks to be closed, property to be preserved, contact to be maintained, because being there is all, in the creations of haute couture and the well-pressed dinner jacket, or, if nothing else is possible, with the stomp of boots. Tails flatter their wearer, but a uniform is snug and trim. It confers greatness, it gives security. Keetenheuve didn't give anything for uniforms. Did he not give anything for greatness, or security either?

  He had been dreaming. Fallen into an unquiet sleep, he had dreamed he was on his way to a campaign rally. The little railway station was in a valley. No one had turned out to greet the incumbent. The tracks trailed off into infinity, without any other trains on them. The grass was withering beside the sleepers. Thistles sprouted from the ballast. The town was made up of four hills, which had on them the Catholic cathedral, the Protestant church, the war memorial of barren granite, and the trade union house swiftly and crudely knocked together from unseasoned timber. The four structures stood isolated like the Greek temples in the bleak landscape of Selinunt. They were the past, the dust of history, Clio's frozen slogan, no one gave a damn about them, but he had been instructed to go up one of the hills, to one of the sites and there to proclaim: "I believe! I believe!"

  He was hot. Someone must have turned on the heat in the carriage, though it was a warm night. He switched on the light. He looked at his watch. It was five o'clock. The red second hand circled over the face with its luminous numbers like a high-pressure or explosion warning. Keetenheuve's time was ticking away. It ticked away luminously, that much could be seen, and without meaning, which was less apparent. The wheels of the train were conveying him to a meaningless and unluminous destination. Had he used his timer. Did he make the most of each day? Was it worth the candle? And was the question of the value of time not another expression of human twistedness? "Only depravity has an end in mind," Rathenau had observed, and by that token Keetenheuve was not depraved. Older now, he had the feeling of having barely begun, and yet of already nearing the end of his life's road. So much had happened that he had the impression he had just been standing still and hadn't made any progress; the catastrophes he had witnessed, the momentous events, historical decline, the dawning of new epochs whose parting gleam or bloody rise (who could tell?) had tinted and tanned his own features too, all that left him feeling, at forty-five, like a boy who had just come out of a thriller and was now rubbing his eyes, foolishly exhilarated, foolishly disappointed, and foolishly dissipated. He put out his hand to turn off the heat; but the dial was on cold. Maybe the heat was controlled by some further dial, maybe the conductor was responsible for adjusting the temperature in each carriage; or maybe again the heat wasn't on at all, and it was just the night that was oppressing Keetenheuve. He lay back on the cushion and closed his eyes. Nothing stirred in the corridor. The travelers lay in their pens, consigned to forgetfulness.

  And what if he wasn't reelected? He dreaded the grind of campaigning. He was more and more wary of public meetings, the hideous breadth of the halls, the necessity of using a microphone, the ghastliness of hearing his own distorted voice droning out of the loudspeakers, filling the room with its hollow and embarrassing echo, and coming back to him out of a fug of sweat, beer, and smoke. He was not a convincing speaker. The many-headed could sense his uncertainty, and they did not forgive him for it. At Keetenheuve's appearances, they missed the fanatics performance, the genuine or play-acted fury, the calculating rant, the froth at the mouth of the orator, the heartily familiar patriotic guff
that they couldn't get enough of. Could Keetenheuve be a proponent of party optimism, could he lay out the cabbages in the tidy seedbed of the party line so that they flourished in the sunshine of the party agenda? Phrases leaped from the mouths of his colleagues like croaking frogs; but frogs made Keetenheuve's flesh creep.