2666 (129 page)

Meanwhile,
Ingeborg's illness had sharpened her craving for sex, but the attic was small
and they all slept in the same room, which inhibited Reiter when he came home
from work at five or six in the morning and Ingeborg demanded that they make
love. When he tried to explain that her mother would almost certainly hear
them, she wasn't deaf, Ingeborg grew angry and said he didn't want her anymore.
One afternoon the younger sister, sixteen-year-old Grete, took a walk with
Reiter through the shattered neighborhood and told him that a number of
psychiatrists and neurologists had visited her sister in
Berlin
and the general diagnosis was
insanity.

Reiter
looked at her: she resembled Ingeborg but she was plumper and taller. In fact,
she was so tall and looked so athletic that she might have been a javelin
thrower.

"Our
father was a Nazi," said Grete, "and Ingeborg was, too, back then,
she was a Nazi. Ask her. She belonged to the Hitler Youth."

"So according
to you she's crazy?" asked Reiter.

"Completely
insane," said the sister.

Soon
afterward, Hilde told Reiter that Grete was falling in love with him.

"So she's in
love with me, you say?"

"Madly in
love," said Hilde, rolling her eyes.

"How
interesting," said Reiter.

One
morning, after coming in silently, trying not to wake any of the four sleeping
women, Reiter got into bed and drew Ingeborg's hot body against him and he knew
immediately that Ingeborg had a fever and his eyes filled with tears and he
began to feel sick, but so gradually that the feeling wasn't entirely
unpleasant.

Then he felt Ingeborg's hand take hold of his cock and begin to
stroke it and with his hand he pulled Ingeborg's nightdress up to her waist and
found her clitoris and in turn began to stroke her, thinking about other
things, about his novel, which was progressing, about the seas of Prussia and
the rivers of Russia and the benevolent monsters that dwell in the deep waters
off the Crimean coast, until he felt Ingeborg slip two fingers into her vagina
and then moisten the entrance to her ass with the same fingers and ask him, no,
order him, to penetrate her, sodomize her, right now, immediately, before
another moment passed, which Reiter did without thinking twice or weighing the
consequences of his actions, though he knew very well how Ingeborg would react,
but that night his urges were like the urges of a man in his sleep, unable to
foresee anything and attuned only to the moment and so, as they fucked and
Ingeborg moaned, from a corner he saw rise not a ghostly figure but a pair of
cat eyes, and the eyes floated up and hovered in the dark, and then another
pair of eyes rose and settled in the shadows, and he heard Ingeborg order the
eyes, in a hoarse voice, to go back to bed, and then Reiter noticed that
Ingeborg's'body had begun to sweat and he began to sweat too and he thought
this was good for the fever, and he closed his eyes and kept caressing
Ingeborg's sex with his left hand and when he opened his eyes he saw five pairs
of cat eyes floating in the dark, and that did strike him as an unequivocal
sign that he was dreaming, because three pairs of eyes, belonging to Ingeborg's
sisters and mother, made some sense, but five pairs of eyes lacked spatiotemporal
coherence, unless each of the sisters had brought home a lover that night,
which was outside the realm of possibility, neither feasible nor credible.

The
next day Ingeborg was in a temper and everything her sisters or mother did or
said seemed to be done or said to vex her. From then on, the situation grew so
tense that she was unable to read and he was unable to write. Sometimes Reiter
got the sense that Ingeborg was jealous of Hilde, when the sister she had good
reason to be jealous of was Grete. Sometimes, before he left for work, Reiter
watched from the attic window as Hilde's two officers shouted her name and
whistled from the pavement across the street. More than once he walked her down
the stairs and advised her to be careful. Unconcerned, Hilde answered:

"What can they
do to me? bomb me?"

And then she
laughed and Reiter laughed too.

"The
worst thing they can do to me is what you've done to Ingeborg," she said
once, and Reiter spent a long time turning her answer over in his head.

What
I've done to Ingeborg. Rut what had he done to Ingeborg but love her?

Finally
one day Ingeborg's mother and sisters decided to return to the town in the
Westerwald where the family had settled and Reiter and Ingeborg were left alone
again. Now we can love each other in peace, said Ingeborg. Reiter looked at
her: Ingeborg had gotten up and was tidying the place a little. Her nightdress
was ivory and her feet were bony and long and nearly the same color. From that
day on her health improved considerably and when the fateful date proclaimed by
the English doctor arrived she was better than ever.

Shortly
afterward she found work at a seamstress's shop where old dresses were made
into new dresses and unfashionable dresses into fashionable dresses. At the
shop they had just three sewing machines, but thanks to the resourcefulness of
the owner, an enterprising and pessimistic woman who was certain that World War
III would begin by 1950 at the latest, the business prospered. At first
Ingeborg's work consisted of piecing together patterns created by Mrs. Raab,
but soon, due to the small shop's huge volume of work, her task was to visit
women's clothing shops and take orders that she later filled herself.

Around
this time Reiter finished his first novel. He called it
Lüdiche
and he
had to roam the backstreets of
Cologne
in search of someone who would rent him a typewriter, because he had decided
that he wouldn't borrow or rent one from anyone he knew, in other words no one
who knew his name was Hans Reiter. Finally he found an old man who owned an old
French typewriter and wasn't in the habit of renting it but would sometimes
make an exception for writers.

The
sum the old man requested was high and at first Reiter thought he had better
keep looking, but when he saw the typewriter, in perfect condition, not a speck
of dust, every letter ready to leave its impression on the paper, he decided he
could permit himself the luxury. The old man asked for the money up front, and
that same night, at the bar, Reiter requested and obtained several loans from
the girls. The next day he returned and showed the old man the money, but then
the man took an accounting book out of his desk and wanted to know his name.
Reiter said the first thing that came into his head.

"My
name is Benno von Archimboldi."

The
old man looked him in the eye and said don't play games with me, what's your
real name?

"My name is Benno von Archimboldi, sir," said Reiter,
"and if you think I'm joking I'd better go."

For
a few seconds both were silent. The old man's eyes were dark brown, although in
the dim light of his study they looked black. Archimboldi's eyes were blue and
to the old man they looked like the eyes of a young poet, tired, strained,
reddened, but young and in a certain sense pure, although it had been a long time
since the old man stopped believing in purity.

"This country," he said to Reiter, who that afternoon,
perhaps, became Archimboldi, "has tried to topple any number of countries
into the abyss in the name of purity and will. As far as I'm concerned, you understand,
purity and will are utter tripe. Thanks to purity and will we've all, every one
of us, hear me you, become cowards and thugs, which in the end are one and the
same. Now we sob and moan and say we didn't know! we had no idea! it was the
Nazis! we never would have done such a thing! We know how to whimper. We know
how to drum up sympathy. We don't care whether we're mocked so long as they
pity us and forgive us. There'll be plenty of time for us to embark on a long
holiday of forgetting. Do you understand me?"

"I
understand," said Archimboldi.

"I was a
writer," said the old man.

"But
I gave it up. This typewriter was a gift from my father. An affectionate and
cultured man who lived to the age of ninety-three. An essentially good man. A
man who believed in progress, it goes without saying. My poor father. He
believed in progress and of course he believed in the intrinsic goodness of
human beings. I too believe in the intrinsic goodness of human beings, but it
means nothing. In their hearts, killers are good, as we Germans have reason to
know. So what? I might spend a night drinking with a killer, and as the two of
us watch the sun come up, perhaps we'll burst into song or hum some Beethoven.
So what? The killer might weep on my shoulder. Naturally. Being a killer isn't
easy, as you and I well know. It isn't easy at all. It requires purity and
will, will and purity. Crystalline purity and steel-hard will. And I myself
might even weep on the killer's shoulder and whisper sweet words to him, words
like 'brother,' 'friend,' 'comrade in misfortune.' At this moment the killer is
good, because he's intrinsically good, and I'm an idiot, because I'm
intrinsically an idiot, and we're both sentimental, because our culture tends
inexorably toward sentimentality. But when the performance is over and I'm
alone, the killer will open the window of my room and come tiptoeing in like a
nurse and slit my throat, bleed me dry.

"My
poor father. I was a writer, I was a writer, but my indolent, voracious brain
gnawed at my own entrails. Vulture of my Prometheus self or Prometheus of my
vulture self, one day I understood that I might go so far as to publish
excellent articles in magazines and newspapers, and even books that weren't
unworthy of the paper on which they were printed. But I also understood that I
would never manage to create anything like a masterpiece. You may say that
literature doesn't consist solely of masterpieces, but rather is populated by
so-called minor works. I believed that, too. Literature is a vast forest and
the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the
lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of
ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and
little wild-flowers. I was wrong. There's actually no such thing as a minor
work. I mean: the author of the minor work isn't Mr. X or Mr. Y. Mr. X and Mr.
Y do exist, there's no question about that, and they struggle and toil and
publish in newspapers and magazines and sometimes they even come out with a
book that isn't unworthy of the paper it's printed on, but those books or
articles, if you pay close attention,
are not written by them.

"Every minor work has a
secret author and every secret author is, by definition, a writer of masterpieces.
Who writes the minor work? A minor writer, or so it appears. The poor man's
wife can testify to that, she's seen him sitting at the table, bent over the
blank pages, restless in his chair, his pen racing over the paper. The evidence
would seem to be incontrovertible. But what she's seen is only the outside. The
shell of literature. A semblance," said the old man to Archimboldi and
Archimboldi thought of Ansky. "The person who really writes the minor work
is a secret writer who accepts only the dictates of a masterpiece.

"Our
good craftsman writes. He's absorbed in what takes shape well or badly on the
page. His wife, though he doesn't know it, is watching him. It really is he
who's writing. But if his wife had X-ray vision she would see that instead of
being present at an exercise of literary creation, she's witnessing a session
of hypnosis. There's
nothing
inside the man who sits there writing.
Nothing of himself, I mean. How much better off the poor man would be if he
devoted himself to reading.
Reading
is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's
knowledge and questions. Writing, meanwhile, is almost always empty. There's
nothing
in the guts of the man who sits there writing. Nothing, I mean to say, that
his wife, at a given moment, might recognize. He writes like someone taking
dictation. His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an
exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result
of an exercise of
concealment.
There must be many books, many lovely
pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched
cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!

"Excuse the metaphors. Sometimes, in my excitement, I wax
romantic. But listen. Every work that isn't a masterpiece is, in a sense, a
part of a vast camouflage. You've been a soldier, I imagine, and you know what
I mean. Every book that isn't a masterpiece is cannon fodder, a slogging foot
soldier, a piece to be sacrificed, since in multiple ways it mimics the design
of the masterpiece. When I came to this realization, I gave up writing. Still,
my mind didn't stop working. In fact, it worked better when I wasn't writing. I
asked myself: why does a masterpiece need to be hidden? what strange forces wreath
it in secrecy and mystery?

"By
now I knew it was pointless to write. Or that it was worth it only if one was
prepared to write a masterpiece. Most writers are deluded or playing. Perhaps
delusion and play are the same thing, two sides of the same coin. The truth is
we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty
veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we
never stop clinging to life because we
are
life. One might also say:
we're theater, we're music. By the same token, few are the writers who give up.
We play at believing ourselves immortal. We delude ourselves in the appraisal
of our own works and in our perpetual misappraisal of the works of others. See
you at the Nobel, writers say, as one might say: see you in hell.