After that letter, I decided not to respond. He, too, did not write to me again. Not the next New Year, nor the next. Gradually the whole story faded away, and if it hadn’t been for the few letters that I have saved to this day, I surely would not have believed it ever happened myself. But fate had other plans for me. Several years later, I once again got a letter from Gaustine. I had a bad feeling about it, so I didn’t hurry to open it. I wondered whether he had come to his senses after all this time, or whether things had gotten worse. I finally opened the envelope in the evening. Inside, there were only a few lines. I will quote them here in their entirety:
Forgive me for disturbing you again after so much time. But you yourself see what is happening all around us. You read the newspapers and with that political sense of yours, you certainly long ago could presage the slaughter that is now upon our doorstep. The Germans are amassing troops on the Polish border. Until now, I have never mentioned that my mother is Jewish (recall what happened last year in Austria, and “Kristallnacht” in Germany). This man will stop at nothing. I have made up my mind and made the necessary arrangements to leave tomorrow morning by train for Madrid, then Lisbon, and from there to New York . . .
Farewell for now.
Yours truly, Gaustine
August 14, 1939
Today is September 1.
6.
On September 1, 1939, Wystan Hugh Auden woke up in New York and wrote in his diary:
I woke up with a headache after a night of bad dreams, in which Ch. cheated on me. The newspapers say that Germany has attacked Poland . . .
Now, there’s everything you need for a true beginning—bad dreams, war, and a headache.
I was at the New York Public Library when I came across Auden’s diary, which is otherwise kept in London, but by some happy accident his archive happened to be on loan there.
Only a diary could bring together the personal and the historical like that. The world is no longer the same—Germany is attacking Poland, the war is starting, my head is aching, and that idiot Ch. has the cheek to cheat on me in my dreams. Today in dreams, tomorrow while awake. (Was that what Auden was thinking?) Let us recall that after discovering such infidelity, Shahryar begins his slaughter of women in One Thousand and One Nights. Did Auden even realize how many things those two lines register, how precise, how personally and cynically precise they are? Two lines about the most important day of the century. Later that same day, when his headache eased a bit, he would start jotting down some lines of poetry:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
And now the dive on Fifty-Second Street, the headache, the cheating and the bad dream, the invasion of Poland on that Friday, September 1—all of it has become history. And that’s exactly what the poem will be called: September 1, 1939.
When does the everyday become history?
Wait a second. That so-oft-quoted We must love one another or die toward the end of the poem, which Auden later did not like at all and was constantly getting rid of, isn’t it connected to exactly that dreamed-up infidelity? Who would want to remember such nightmares?
I would like to know everything about that day, one day in the late summer of 1939, to sit in the kitchens of the world with each person, to peek into the newspapers they have opened while drinking their coffee, to hungrily read everything—from the gathered troops on the German-Polish border to the final days of the summer sales and the new bar Cinzano, which had opened in Lower Manhattan. Fall is already on the doorstep, the ads in the newspapers, paid for in advance, now sit side by side with brief communiqués from the last hours in Europe.
7.
On another September 1, I’m sitting on the grass in Bryant Park, the dive on Fifty-Second has long since disappeared, I’ve just come from Europe, and, tired (the soul, too, has its jet lag), I look at people’s faces. I’ve taken my little volume of Auden, we owe ourselves the ritual, don’t we? After a day spent in the library, I sit “uncertain and afraid.” I had slept badly, I didn’t dream about infidelity, or perhaps I did but I’ve forgotten . . . The world is at the same level of anxiety, the local sheriff and the sheriff of a far-off country have been trading threats. They’re doing it on Twitter, all within the character limit. There’s none of the old rhetoric, there’s no eloquence. A briefcase, a button, and . . . the end of the world’s workday. A bureaucrat’s apocalypse.
Yes, they are gone now, the old dives and the old masters, the war, which was then impending, it is already over, other wars have come and gone as well, only the anxiety remains.
I tell you, I tell you,
I tell you we must die.
Somewhere nearby that Doors song was playing, and suddenly it seemed to me that there was a secret conversation going on, that Morrison was actually talking to Auden. Exactly in that refrain, that line, as if resolving the hesitation in Auden’s least favorite line, We must love one another or die. In Morrison’s case there is no longer any hesitation, the answer is categoricaclass="underline" I tell you we must die.
After some searching I discover that in fact the song had been written way back in 1925 by Bertolt Brecht with music by Kurt Weill. Weill himself performed it during the 1930s in the most deranged, almost horrifying way . . . And this only made things more entangled. Auden had grabbed and twisted around a line from that song by Brecht and is in fact speaking to him. Both Brecht from 1925 and Morrison from 1966 have set off on death’s trail. I tell you we must die. Against their backdrop, Auden sounds like he’s still giving us a chance—we must love one another or die. Only before wars, even on the very eve of them, is a person inclined to hope. On September 1 most likely the world still could have been saved.
I had come here on urgent business, as one usually comes to New York, running away from something, seeking something else. I’d run away from the Continent of the past toward a place that claimed it had no past, even though it had accumulated some in the meantime. I was carrying a yellow notebook. I was looking for a certain person. I wanted to tell the story before my memory slipped away from me.
8.
Several years before that I would be standing in a city where there had been no 1939. A city that is good for living and even better for dying. A city quiet as a grave. Aren’t you bored? they’d ask me over the phone. Boredom is the emblem of this city. Here Canetti, Joyce, Dürrenmatt, Frisch, and even Thomas Mann have been bored. It’s somehow a bit presumptuous to measure your boredom against theirs. I’m not bored, I’d say. Who am I to be bored? Even though secretly I longed to taste the decadence of boredom.
Time had passed since I had lost Gaustine’s trail in Vienna.
As I was waiting for him to give a sign from somewhere, I looked through the pages of the most obscure newspapers, but clearly he had become more cautious. One day I received a postcard, with no name or return address.
Greetings from Zurich, I’ve got an idea, if it works out, I’ll write.
It could only be him. He didn’t write anything in the following months, but I hurried to accept an invitation for a short residency at the Literaturhaus there.
And so—I had almost a month there—I wandered through the empty streets on Sunday, I enjoyed the sun, which lingered longer on the hill, and at sunset you could see, way back at the far end of the landscape, the peaks of the Alps changing color into a cold violet. I understood why everyone came here in the end. Zurich is a good city for growing old. And for dying as well. If there is some sort of European geography of age, then it must be distributed as follows. Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam are for youth, with all its informality, its whiff of joints, beer-drinking in Mauerpark and rolling around in the grass, Sunday flea markets, the frivolity of sex . . . Then comes the maturity of Vienna or Brussels. A slowing of tempo, comfort, streetcars, proper health insurance, schools for the kids, a bit of a career, Euro-pencil-pushing. Okay, for those who still do not wish to grow old—Rome, Barcelona, Madrid . . . Good food and warm afternoons will make up for the traffic, noise, and slight chaos. To late youth I would also add New York, yes, I count it as a European city that ended up across the ocean due to a certain chain of events.