And yet, and yet… How often in my life have I said those words, and yet? Everything has to be qualified. The fact is, a part of me, too, was of Axel's camp. Oh, yes. Here it is, my deepest, dirtiest secret. In my heart, I too wanted to see the stage cleared, the boards swept clean, the audience cowed and aghast. It was all for love of the idea, you see, the one, dark, radiant idea. Aestheticise, aestheticise! Such was our cry. Had not our favourite philosopher decreed that human existence is only to be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon? We were sick of mere life, all that mess, confusion, weakness. All must be made over – made over or destroyed. We would have, I would have, sacrificed anything to that transfiguring fire. I whisper it: and I still would. The people who turned my people to ash, they were the ones I hoped would win; I regret it yet that they lost. Are you shocked? It was not those posturing brutes themselves I wanted to see victorious – for them, vulgarians to a man, if man is the word, I felt only revulsion – but the Idea that they insensately carried, like the wooden horse with its secret force of Argives. Do you see, my Cassandra? Something had been smuggled into the world, something terrible and true, which must be allowed to prevail, at whatever cost. True: yes. Never mind the necessary lies. In time they would have been dispensed with, along with the liars. Only let the Idea triumph, the great instauration begin!
How, you will ask, did I square with the terrors of everyday life these murky longings for an apocatastasis? For certainly among my people everyone was afraid, myself no less than the others. Fear is mostly a transient thing, it flashes out in the dark at the thought of death, or on the empty road at night, or in the imminence of fire or flood; the human animal is not equipped to live constantly in fear, the system cannot sustain it. Yet for the best part, the worst part, of two years, we were frightened almost all of the time. Fear burned in us unquenchably. There were periods when it was no more than a smouldering coal lodged at the base of the breast bone, then suddenly it would leap up in jagged sheets of flame, leaving behind a hot fall of cinders. These were the poles of existence for us: consuming, irresistible terror, or a sort of gluey apathy, with intervals of futile rage in between. Frenzied hope would expire into exhaustion, indifference; days that began with us crowded in hopeful excitement around a newspaper headline would see us at nightfall lolling in blank-eyed stupor like the addicts in an opium den. Headaches, stomach cramps, a constant churning in the gut, these were the body's protests at the insupportable strain of living always in fear. One suffered from an incontinence of the emotions. The slightest kindness, the slightest nod of seeming sympathy, could bring one to one's knees in grovelling appreciation. There was that gasp of gratitude we could not restrain when someone of the ones in authority over us chose to relent in the prosecution of some trivial order of the day. I heard myself doing it, that gasp, even with Axel, on those occasions, rare enough, when he would express indignation at a particularly egregious piece of petty-minded cruelty that had been ordered to be inflicted on our side of the square. His quizzical glance and silent turning away from my breathless earnests of gratefulness, however, were as jarring a rebuff as would have been an unceremonious push in the chest from someone else.
Despite all that I have said so far, I do not think harshly of him. When he died I believe I would have wept, for shock, if nothing else, were I the type to weep.
I learned of his death from the newspaper, a couple of paragraphs on an inside page of the Staandard. Perhaps it was the way I chanced upon the item that prevented me from absorbing its contents straight away. I had been sitting on a park bench, in coat and muffler, and was about to get up and leave, the late-autumn day having turned bitterly cold, and had snapped wide the pages of the paper in outspread arms prior to folding it, when all at once the thing turned into a winged messenger and thrust Axel's name at me, alone out of all those columns of print. My first reactions were the usual ones – it must be some error, a case of mistaken identity, maybe even a practical joke – accompanied by an odd, lifting sensation in the chest, a sort of dreadful exhilaration. Giddily I read that pair of paragraphs again. They were frustratingly, scandalously and, I thought, deliberately vague. It seemed to be that he had died violently, but whether by accident or at the hands of some person or persons was not made clear. The anonymous reporter had chosen his phrases with care – tragic demise of, friends shocked at, great loss to – as if he had been advised to go cautiously in the matter, and were covertly passing on the same advice to his readers. I jumped up from the bench, rolling the paper into a wad and stuffing it guiltily into my pocket, and walked swiftly out of the park, pulling the upturned collar of my overcoat tight around my chin and resisting the urge to take to my heels and run. It was as if I were personally implicated in Axel's death, without knowing how. Before me an enormous, grape-blue cloud was nudging its way up out of the low west, like a slow, sullen thickening of nameless possibilities.
I threw away the Staandard and went in search of the Gazet. It was late afternoon, and the first newsstand I came to, on the corner of Maria-Theresialei, was the one kept by the old fellow with the goitre – good God, suddenly I see him, plain as day, in his fin-gerless gloves and the woollen cap with the earflaps that he always wore – who made a great fuss of retrieving for me from under a pile of grubby magazines what he claimed was the very last copy of the late edition, grumbling under his breath. I took the paper from him and skulked off like a rat with a stolen tidbit. Rounding the corner, I stopped and scanned the pages, once, twice, a third time. There was no mention of Axel. I was surprised not to be surprised.