Dr Posnanski was now haunted by his figure. He’d read his letter and taken it on board. Then in deepening silence he’d studied his black notebook, which contained drawings, scraps of verse, thoughts, opinions, impressions, questions. To begin with Posnanski had been interested in the notebook because of a particular hobby of his: he loved shorthand, which he considered to be a valuable and sensible invention; he knew all the systems and ways of abbreviating and even at school had excelled at deciphering unknown handwriting. Even the style of Kroysing’s pencil strokes appealed to his inner being. An honest, clear-minded man had made those marks, and his good opinion was confirmed on every page by the content of the notebook. Young Kroysing had been someone. He had campaigned against injustice not with a particular end in mind, but simply because it was injustice – an ugly blemish on the body of the community he loved. A pure and wonderful love of Germany spoke from that young man. He didn’t have an heroically distorted vision of his nation. He saw its weaknesses. ‘I don’t understand,’ he once complained, ‘why our men let themselves be manipulated. They’re not dim-witted or without a sense of justice, but they’re almost more sensitive than women. Are we a feminine nation? Is it our fate simply to know what ails us and express it? If so, I don’t want to join in.’ He clearly realised that the high moral development of German writers and thinkers had its roots in the nation. ‘…but it seems to me that root is long and fibrous and takes a convoluted route and only sends up a beautiful plant to the light much later and somewhere far away. I wish we had a short, strong tap root that sent up healthy growth full of spikes and stings against violence.’ Another time he complained ‘that the beauty of life as expressed in a sunset, a starry night or even just ordinary daylight doesn’t seem to have any influence on the ways of the Germans. They enjoy nature for a couple of minutes and then fall back into old habits that might just as well have been developed in underground caves. But Goethe and Hölderlin, Mörike and Gottfried Keller, seem constantly aware of plants, wind, clouds, streams. The air of the countryside goes with them into their studies and offices, and to the lectern. That’s why they’re free. That’s why they’re great.’ Yes, my young friend, thought Posnanski, what you say there is very true and important. Such things cannot be learnt from working life. It’s a shame that we can’t talk about them any more. Men like you will be missed. Your verses are lovely and sensitive, though still very juvenile. But let us imagine that Hölderlin, who was a volunteer for a year, Sergeant Heinrich Heine, Lieutenant von Liliencron or Sergeant Major C.F. Meyer had been killed at your age – with assistance or otherwise, it doesn’t matter – or that the little cadet von Hardenberg had died at 14 of a cold caught on a training march – to say nothing of officer trainee Schiller drowned at 18 while swimming in a mountain stream in Swabia: would those young men’s legacy have looked much different from yours? Not at all. But how much poorer and more miserable the world would have been! We wouldn’t have known what we’d lost. ‘Yes,’ he sighed to himself, ‘it’s not an easy problem, and whoever can solve it for me gets a thaler and five Pfennigs: whether the people live for the gifted, or the gifted live for the people, so that any old Niggl has the right to abuse them. That’s why I’m going to have a look and see what Herr Bertin made of his meeting with you.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Kroysing novella
AT THAT HE opened the manuscript that Bertin had sent him. He poured another glass of wine, lit another slim Dutch cigar, looked disapprovingly at Bertin’s rather cramped handwriting, began to read the story, holding each sheet up to the light, and was quickly absorbed and captivated. The light cast a soft glow, the mouse rustled behind the wallpaper, people passed the window, talking, but Posnanski was now in Fosses wood in a hollow full of shot-up trees where two abandoned guns raised their long, mournful necks to the sky and amongst a group of workers in field grey he saw the tanned, friendly face of young Kroysing, his curved forehead and calm eyes. The work could hardly pass as a novella, since it contained no artful characterisation or surprising plot twists. Sometimes the language wasn’t very polished, which could be excused by the speed of writing, or was too bold where a more restrained expression would’ve been more powerful. But it did invoke the figure of the man as perceived by the author and it showed what had happened clearly and pitilessly, shaking the world from its sleep so that it could not just snore on as a French shell dispatched the writer’s recently won friend. And it made it quite clear that the burden of this death did not lie with the French. No, behind the miserable ASC chiefs lay the gigantic outline of the owners and unleashers of violence – all those who were planning and carrying out the suicide of Europe, those backward types who saw their neighbours only as something to attack and whose last trump card in international competition was: the gun.
The fact that Bertin had not invented names in this draft created an unusual and convincing effect. The hero was simply called Christoph, and other names were indicated by initial capital letters. At the end of the fourth page he found a note from the author to himself: ‘Improve names.’ But however essential it might be for artistic effect to invent credible characters and refine real events to bring out their essence, the relaxed handling of names and events meant this first draft spoke all the more directly to the lonely reader. Posnanski groaned in agony and also in satisfaction; under no circumstances should he let the unprepossessing Bertin get away. He belonged to the same group of men as young Kroysing and Posnanski himself: those who tried to sort the world out and using the right tools for the job – justice, reason and informed debate. It might seem laughable but it was true: whoever used those tools inevitably excited the anger of the evil principle and its minions, the men of violence with their feverish thirst for action and desire to oppress. And as Posnanksi buttoned his housecoat over his rotund body, because it was a cold March night and he was tired, to his amazement he found himself marching over to the fireplace at the far end of the room where embers still glowed. Marching because the glow embodied the enemy, the eternal foe of all creativity, the opponent and the opposition in one, the blocker, Satan himself. He literally saw him squatting there with claws, a beak, bat-like wings and a dragon’s tail, casting around with his ambiguous basilisk’s eyes, always on the brink of shrill laughter. It was this rash, devouring element, allied with ubiquitous steel, that had given birth to every technology and forged every gun, and whose omnipotent laughter lay behind every explosion. It had killed young Kroysing and wounded his older brother. It threatened Bertin in the form of duds, it had killed Judge Advocate Mertens in the form of an aerial bomb, it lurked over him, Posnanski, over Winfried, over that old Junker Lychow – over every man and every woman. Man had made a bad job of taming the fire that had fallen from Heaven; reason too, the light of Heaven, and morality, born on Mount Sinai, he had handled like a schoolboy. In that dark hour before bedtime, Posnanski was inclined to give the human race as a whole a mark of three minus. That made Pupil Bertin all the more indispensable. Fire had consumed Pupil Kroysing, and the same thing happened to countless others every day. It was sheeplike logic to plunge into the fire in ever greater numbers because of that and not bother about individuals because that had no purpose in such times. But Pupil Posnanski knew that there was a purpose and that it was the only purpose because it was always at hand; it didn’t wait for the fire to go out but quietly smuggled the creative principle away from the destroyers. At present there was nothing to be done about the Kroysing case, and Posnanski carefully laid the various sheets of paper in the orange folder with a Montmédy file reference. He put the Kroysing novel in there too.