Which Schuer, involved in this subject, had instinctively sensed in her face and figure when he first saw her approach on the garden path alongside Baroness Thum. With some satisfaction he acknowledged that she had an exemplary Nordic physique. Even Eichstedt, that skeptical scientist, would be happy to see such pigment-poor skin and hair, so supple and slender a figure, on which there was nothing superfluous, the long face with its slim nose, with its exceptionally high base and unusually close-sitting nostrils; with their sensitivity, these features moved him to the core. He will start an affair with her, a secret affair. He lingered long on her unpainted lips and then sought out her barely protruding cheekbones to observe how she spoke, chewed, and swallowed, in a way to possess, from an anatomical viewpoint, the young woman’s bite.
But she was sorry that Eva Braun was not present, her lips said.* Another topic her listeners would not talk about, and they were appropriately taken aback by her mention of the name. She had heard so many good things about her, she must be a charming personality, they probably knew her. They fidgeted, what is this foolish little Hungarian countess going on about, and began to speak over and above her scandalous utterances, so as not to hear them. Speer’s charming wife, Margret, she was there, however, in the dazzling array of ladies, Magda Goebbels and the others, all of them. Any man would be happy in the company of so many dazzling women, but she had the definite impression that they had left this great artist cold. Artists, after all, are busy with their art, and for a great artist we forgive everything, do we not. And with that remark, and an amiable laugh, she glanced around at her table companions, all of whom were preoccupied with themselves and, except for Siegfried, talking about themselves. Countess Imola received no answer, but this did not seem to bother her. Margret Speer is a dazzling woman, she continued, instructively, as if going more deeply into the subject might elicit curiosity. Her modesty is so winning, and the two of them quickly established a friendly relationship, a few words sufficed and then they understood each other, they would visit each other. Margret would come to them in Fánt and she would very happily visit the Speers in Berchtesgaden. Her shyness and objectivity were touching. Downright touching, she said, with an embarrassed little laugh underlining this impression of Margret, who said, yes, she also could not fail to notice the resemblance between the physiognomies of the two men.
It is probably no accident that the two of them are such good friends.
So much openness and chatter charmed everyone at the table, as if they now forgot about her earlier scandalous statements.
Men are truly enviable for the profound friendships they develop among themselves. Men are peculiar, very peculiar. Women are not prepared for things like that, for such great, heroic friendships. Their pure feeling for one another is what makes men psychologically so strong, in her view. And they need their strength too, because somebody has to protect the women. Still, everybody was surprised to see that somebody would have such a likeness, which was indeed beyond all human imagination. Perhaps we should read the Bible a little more carefully. Or take it more seriously. Because if we are all created in God’s image and He wants it that way, then there can’t be too much difference among us. And how in the world could there be so many likenesses in one big pile, she thought in Hungarian, which seemed disdainful enough for her not to say aloud. However, the true focus of her disdain was Bolshevik and Nazi ideas of equality, neither of which was to her liking; they both seemed to her to be terrible populisms, inundating many societies with their vulgarity. And Schuer surely knew this too; he must have noticed that in bodily shapes there are other similarities around the world. Perhaps everyone recognizes this, but not everyone is fortunate enough to live in proximity to his likenesses. Schuer, with such splendid achievements in his research on twins, as the baroness had told her with great enthusiasm, must have an explanation for this phenomenon. She regaled him with the story of her official visit only to mention the shocking phenomenon for which she could find no scientific explanation. She could call this nothing but a miracle, a miracle. Surely there was a scientific explanation, of which she, because of her feminine ignorance, was not aware, even though she had taken biology courses in Prague.
She wanted to let the man of science know this fact too.
She’s always had a special interest in genetics, and she mentions this now only because when she mentioned it this morning she had the impression the professor thought she’d done so only out of politeness. Which offended her a little. How is it possible that there are so many multiple resemblances and simultaneities among different lines of heredity, would Schuer be kind enough to allow her to pose this question directly to him. But she would not say aloud that when, as part of the crowd streaming out of St. Anne’s Church in Dahlem, Schuer stopped in front of her, she glanced at the four of them linked in their physical reality.
She glanced at Mihály’s lookalike, who was the likeness of these two who in turn were each other’s likeness.
I’m losing my mind, she thought in Hungarian, what a dizzy person I am, I see him in every man, she said to herself, though she could not have said who she was seeing in whom among the many likenesses.
She knew Mihály best of all, of course, which is why she thinks they all resemble him, but perhaps it’s the other way around, that he resembles them. And the attraction of this thought was so strong she could not banish it.
Another reason she did not say this out loud was that at the table, very near a full glass of water, she was whirling within her own thought and in dread of what she felt about it. If four such insane likenesses may occur in creation, if Albert Speer can resemble Arno Breker so much that it seems as if Breker had modeled himself on the architect, who happens to be his friend, and these two so eerily resemble Schuer — this is how her insane calculation went — whose shape is eerily like Mihály Horthy’s, then there must be countless others like them who keep exchanging their personalities and profiles, in which case we are talking about the possibility not that one of these men will by chance become her husband, with his own or someone else’s personality, but that any one of the others could be her husband.
What frightened her most was that she accepted this thought from herself without protest and broke down every barrier in her thinking. Even though she had been raised to fear and dread black magic, reject esotericism, and disdain superstition. There were secret passages, then, among individual lives. Which she has now uncovered, found the trail of, but should not tell anyone about lest they think she’s gone mad.
Frightened and suspicious, she asked herself whether these unhindered secret passages existed only among men.
Whose powerful probability she could not but feel in the muscles of her thighs; she should have spread them a little more, which she did, but in her fright she closed them again, modestly. She had only to look at this variant sitting across the table from her to feel that she was insanely attracted not to their personalities but to their sheer physical forms. These men have no personalities. In which case, she has gone mad. Her mother must have left her and her sisters for some reason like this. The big trickster probably strongly resembled their father; more correctly, their father was only a doppelganger of the trickster and their mother had to leave the copy for the original, and so she made short shrift of exchanging one for the other.