And he travelled through the great cities of the civilized world. He saw the museums, in which the treasures of the past were hoarded in depositories like furniture for which one cannot find a use. He saw the theatres, on whose stages a slice of life was picked out, divided into acts, and portrayed by persons in pink make-up for an entrance fee. He read the newspapers in which reports were spread over current events like seductive veils over uninteresting objects. He sat in the cafés and the restaurants, in which people were collected like goods in a shop-window. He frequented the poor taverns where that part of society termed the ‘people’ diverted itself and enjoyed the vigorous robust glitter which is associated with the pleasures of poverty. As if he had never belonged to them, he visited like a stranger the halls in which they had gathered to hear about politics and to feel that they were part of the world’s bustle. And, as if he himself had never addressed them, he marvelled at their naïve enthusiasm, which greeted the hollow sound of a phrase as the devotion of the pious greeted the dull clang of a cheap bell. As if there had been no Revolution and no war! Nothing! Obliterated! Young men with wide floating trousers, with padded shoulders and flirtatious soft hips, a whole generation of sexless aviators permeated every layer of society. Football strengthened the muscles of the young workers in the same measure as those of the young bankers’ sons and gave the faces of both the same traits of presence of mind and absence of thought. The proletarians trained for revolution, the bourgeois for enjoyment. Flags waved, men marched, and just as particular vaudeville acts were repeated in every large town, so in every large town an Unknown Soldier lay buried. Even in the smaller places Friedrich encountered monuments to the fallen, as he did tap-dancing Negroes.
Now his eyes saw that ‘life’ whose distant, mysterious and wonder-revealing reflection had been shed over the wishes of his early years. It was exactly as if he had taken the play of the dark-red light, cast by an advertising sign on the window-panes opposite, for the reflection of a great and sinister conflagration. Now he saw the sources of his fine illusions. And he derided himself with the satisfaction a clever man experiences when he uncovers errors. He went around and uncovered one source after another, and he was triumphant because he won the day against himself.
In time all the sources were exposed, quicker than he had expected. Thus he learned to know forlornness in strange cities, the aimless wandering through the early twilight of evenings, when the silvery lanterns light up and afflict the body of the abandoned with the pain of a thousand sudden needle pricks. He walked through rain-soaked streets, over the gleaming asphalt of wide squares like stony lakes, coat-collar turned up, fastened from outside, and before him only his gaze to steer him through a foreign land. He rose early, walked in the bright morning full of hurrying people. Women he did not look at illuminated him with their beauty, children laughed from gardens, a forgiving clemency emanated from slow old men who seemed doubly venerable and doubly slow among the hurrying throng. Finally, there were days that revealed all the simple and indestructible beauty, days on which his wish to be able to begin life anew was almost exceeded by the solace that he could begin again without effort.
When the spring came, he found himself in Paris. Every night he walked through smooth and silent streets, encountered the fully-laden waggons on their way to the market halls, the even trot of the heavy shaggy horses, the pious rural tinkling of their bells, the shiny green of the neatly stacked bundles of cauliflowers and the smooth whiteness of their faces among the broad drooping leaves, the artificial pale red of the thin-tailed carrots, the bloody, moist and heavy glisten of the massive butchered cattle. Every night he visited a cellar where people danced, sailors, street-girls, whites and coloured men from the colonies. The accordion poured gay march tunes into the bright room, it was the instrument of exuberant melancholy. He liked it because it reminded him of his revolutionary comrades, because it was the music of abandonment and carefreeness, because it called to mind both peaceful evenings in eastern villages and the brooding heat of African deserts, because it contained both the song of the frost and the eternal stillness of summer. From every wall wide mirrors reflected the lavish rows of lamps on to the ceiling, made twenty rooms out of one, multiplied the dancing-girls a hundredfold. He no longer noticed the stairs and the door that led outside to the nocturnal streets. The mirrored walls sealed off the room more finally than stone and marble and transformed the cellar into a single endless subterranean paradise. He sat at a table and drank Schnapps. Once, in a moment when it seemed to him that he need have no fear of revealing himself because it was the last night of the world and there would be no morrow, he asked for a piece of paper and wrote, without any form of address:
‘I have not thought of you for many years. For several days I have been unable to get you out of my mind. I know that you no longer think of me. You lead a life which, today as always, is as remote from mine as one planet from another. However, this gives you my address. To be candid, I must confess that it is in no way an irresistible compulsion that induces me to write to you. Perhaps it is only an irresistible hope. …’
He went into the street. Dawn began to break, today as ever; the world had not perished. A blue light lay over the houses, someone opened a window. A car engine growled obstinately and rebelliously. In the light of the waking day Friedrich put the letter into the post-box.
6
These were no longer momentous times. The post functioned normally. The letter reached Hilde after an interval of three days. Then, one evening, when Friedrich returned to his hotel, someone was waiting for him.
He sat for a long time in his overcoat, damp and steaming from the rain, hat in hand and silent. She told him about her husband and children, of her bitter years, of her old father. She had, incidentally, brought him with her. He intended to visit a spa. He was there to reassure her jealous husband. They were now doing well. Her husband had made good use of his mediocrity. The others, the speculators with the inborn instinct for business, had been overwhelmed by the storms they had conjured up, like warriors fallen in adventures they had themselves provoked. Herr von Derschatta, however, was one of those mediocre bureaucrats of the business world who gain much though they risk nothing. She spoke in the jargon which is the mother tongue of Director Generals, of the ‘position’ that permitted certain things but not yet, or no longer, permitted others. A few strangers entered the room where they were sitting. She ceased her account. But the silence that ensued was capable of expressing all the admissions and completing all the half-admissions that she had minimized and half suppressed earlier. This silence disconcerted her the more in the presence of the other people. As if they were both as young as they had once been in the café, the fortuitousness of the external situation left them at a loss. Outside it was raining. Here strangers were sitting. ‘If she comes to my room now,’ he thought, ‘it is decided. She is expecting it.’ He said nothing.
‘Perhaps we should go up to your room?’ After the long silence it seemed as if she had prepared herself for this question.