Hopeful Monsters (14 page)

Sometime in the middle of the night I woke and it seemed that Bruno and Trixie were making love. I lay with my back to them. I thought - Well, I am not jealous: am I supposed to be jealous?

In the morning Bruno said 'Now it's your turn, Nellie.'

I said 'You never, Bruno!'

Trixie watched us. She said 'Am I supposed to be jealous?'

I thought - I suppose things may never be so good between the three of us again.

When later that morning I got home to our apartment my father heard me and came out into the hall. He looked as if he might be somehow frightened of me. He said 'Are you all right?' I said 'Yes, I'm all right.' He said Trixie's mother telephoned last night and asked if she could speak to her.' After a time I said 'So what did you say?' He said 'I said that you and she were taking the cat for a walk.' I thought - But one doesn't take cats for walks. Then - Oh I see. I said 'Thank you. Thank you very much.' He said 'But you are all right?' I said 'Yes, I'm all right.' My father said 'You look all right.' He came and put his arms around me. He said 'You will always tell me, won't you, if you are not?' I said 'Yes, I will.' I thought suddenly - But perhaps now I will not be so close to my father. He let go of me, and stepped back. I said 'You do know, don't you, that I've learned everything from you.'

He said 'Oh you needn't say that.'

I said 'Oh but that's something I can say!'

In 1926 my father moved to Heidelberg. I think he left Berlin because he felt he could do nothing more for my mother.

I went with him, and to a new school in Heidelberg. By this time I hardly missed my mother. I wondered - There must have been a time when I was close to her; she may indeed one day come back to haunt me. Occasionally in the holiday I visited her in Berlin: she worked in a room with an old printing press like a steam-organ. I thought - Here are the rolls of paper that provide the coloured lights, shapes, music, that my mother thinks are suitable for the masses.

Sometimes I still went with her to her soup-kitchen. Wooden compartments had been set up in which people reclined and tried to sleep with their heads on each other's shoulders. I thought - But there are no messages getting through: there is a blockage in intestines.

Nothing much remains in my memory of my time at Heidelberg: I suppose I was in some sort of limbo. I missed Bruno and Trixie: I made no real new friends. Bruno and Trixie and I wrote to each other - messages that tried to be sophisticated, witty. We did not

talk about feelings. I thought - But I am happy when I write to Bruno and Trixie: you do not talk about happiness.

Bruno and Trixie visited me one weekend; we went on a walk through forests, over hills. This was the time of the Wandervogel in Germany - when troupes of people, mostly young, went striding across landscapes, singing, talking, sleeping out, living rough; sharing what they had in the way of food and money. But Trixie now was rather grand: she had a girlfriend in Berlin who was older than she and who gave her money. Bruno seemed sad: he looked for boys he might pick up in the forest. On our walk it rained most of the day, and at night we had to take shelter in a youth hostel. Bruno was put in a separate dormitory: Trixie and I remained in separate beds.

I said 'Perhaps one can never repeat things.'

Bruno said 'But in a way one does nothing else.'

Trixie said to me 'You must come to Berlin, darling.'

I thought - Perhaps it was because it was unrepeatable, that that time in Berlin was so good.

When the time came for me to leave school and go to a university, I said to my father 'Do you think I should stay here in Heidelberg, or do you think I should go somewhere else?

He said 'What do you think?'

I said 'I suppose I should go on.'

He said 'You sound as if you don't want to.' Then - 'That's probably right.'

I said 'I can always come back.'

He said 'Yes, you can always come back.'

I thought - But I will be carrying it with me, what I have got from my father.

I went to the University of Freiburg in 1928. I was to study medicine, but I also wanted to take a course in philosophy. Freiburg is a hundred miles from Heidelberg: four hundred miles from Berlin. I thought - I could walk to Heidelberg in about three days: I will not want to get to Berlin.

Conditions in German universities had always been different, I suppose, from conditions in British universities in that one arranged one's own accommodation and could go to what lectures one liked; one could move from discipline to discipline and could work (or not) in one's own time. I got a room with a family who were acquaintances of my father, but I spent as little time with them as I could. I wanted to be on my own. I thought - But what is this

extraordinary condition in which one wants to be alone, and yet is always making arrangements so that one is not.

This was a time when student life in German universities was still dominated by what were called 'corporations' or 'fraternities'. There were nationalist fraternities, socialist fraternities, liberal fraternities, Catholic fraternities: inside each a boy might feel he was at home. Members of one fraternity were distinguished from those of another by the coloured ribbons they wore round their caps; otherwise the style of each was much the same. Members put up barriers against others to feel protected; but they did not feel seriously threatened because they knew that others were doing the same. The conventions were that members of fraternities should strut about carrying sticks and flaunt themselves during the day; then at night they should meet in beer-halls and drink and sing till they passed out. In this way they could imagine that they had asserted themselves without having incurred the dangers or indeed the responsibilities of self-assertion.

There were no such organisations for women. Girls to some extent felt themselves above such things; yet they were apt to hang about the boys' fraternities as if they were casual labourers waiting to be picked by gang bosses.

I thought - Of course I feel myself superior: but am I then hanging about on street corners in order to start a revolution?

There was a boy at Freiburg called Franz who was a member of the most elite of all fraternities, which was called The Corps (fraternities were graded strictly in terms of caste: members of one fraternity could properly have social contact only with their fellow members or with those of a fraternity immediately above or below it). Franz seemed to be aloof from even his elite fraternity. I understood that he was some sort of aristocrat; that he would have had to make no special effort to have become a member even of this elite fraternity; that he would have been included perhaps without even his wishing to be included. (I wondered - Does this make him more arrogant or less than other members of fraternities?) Franz would sit with other members of The Corps in the cellars of beer-halls in the evenings and he would drink and sometimes join in the songs, but for the most part would recline with his chair tilted back and his cap on the back of his head and smoking a pipe as if he were on a tightrope. I thought - He is like one of those people who show off by pretending to carry on normal life when on a tightrope. He was a tall thin boy with fair hair. His pipe was one of those long

curly things that went down to a bowl like a stove with a lid on. The other boys at their long narrow table would all be yelling and banging their beer mugs up and down and becoming red in the face and sweating: Franz, balanced, seemed to be keeping his head just above water - or perhaps above fire, his pipe going down like some sort of lifeline. The other boys seemed to be in awe of Franz and yet to pay little attention to him. I thought - It is as if he were some sort of god, yes: and they are so hot and sweating because it is as if they are some sort of offering in cooking pots to him.

I wanted to get to know Franz. I did not feel about him in the way I had felt about Trixie or even Bruno, but I thought - He is on his own: there is that sort of glow about him as there was about -who? Rosa Luxemburg? That fair-haired waiter?

Then - Or perhaps he is like my father?

There was a girl student I was quite fond of at the time called Minna. Minna was a nature-worshipper: she would sit in the sun whenever she could and take off her clothes. Minna was a bit in love with Franz. She and I and a few other girls would go into beer-cellars in the evenings and sit and watch the boys sizzling and bubbling as if in their cauldrons. Franz remained impervious, like a salamander. Towards the end of the evening many boys had to be carried out vomiting or unconscious.

I thought - Well of course women don't want to be like this: we do not want now even to carry off their bodies to Valhalla.

I said to Minna 'Perhaps they need help.'

Minna said 'They don't need help, they need to be sacrificed.'

I said 'Sacrificed to what?'

Minna said 'To Akhenaton the son of the great sun.'

Minna had huge blue eyes that were like the empty spaces between stars.

I thought - Oh but in the end I want someone with whom I do not have to struggle to feel at home with!

I took to following Franz when I came across him in the street. I found out where his lodgings were, and to what lectures he was going. He seemed to be studying both philosophy and physics. I thought - I can bump into him and say 'I am interested in your opinion on the connections between philosophy and physics' -

Then - In this I would be treating him like my father!

The philosophy in fashion at that time was that of Husserl, who was Professor of Philosophy at Freiburg. Husserl taught that there could be no certain knowledge of a so-called 'objective' world: what

were called 'objects' were always structured by the operation of ideas. What there could be certain knowledge about was the mechanisms of these ideas; the mind could be turned scientifically to investigate itself; there were operations of ideas that were common to all humanity.

I did not find it difficult to feel that I understood this: was it not to do with that vision of which my father and I had seen the possibilities as well as the limitations - the image of people looking at just the backs of their own heads? As my father used to say 'But once you see this, what worlds open up together with people who see the same!'

But could I come across Franz as if unexpectedly on some corner and say 'We might have a lot in common, you and I, looking down from such a lofty height on what we know are the ideas in our own heads!'

I had once said to my father 'But there would still be no certainty.' He had said 'Oh no, but what a thing to want, certainty!'

After lectures Franz would sometimes walk up into the hills at the back of the town. He would carry a satchel which I imagined contained books. I did not think it would be difficult to follow him: there were just one or two paths that went zig-zagging up the hill. If he stopped, I could myself stop and smile; or I could carry on past him.

I thought - There is some image in my mind here of a rock, a fork in the pathway, a gate: a road along which a traveller might go for ever.

There was a day when I followed Franz into the hills. He went on a path which, in fact, I had been on before: it did come, yes, to an outcrop of rock where the path doubled back on one of its zigzags. But there had also been, when I had been here before, a faint track through the trees across pine-needles. I had followed this track and had come to a cave: I had thought - It might be Aladdin's cave: there were the signs of a fire in front of it, as if someone had recently camped there. But further inside the cave there had seemed to be bats, so I had not gone in.

Franz was on a level of the zig-zag path above me; I caught glimpses of him as he moved between trees. I thought - If he stops, why in fact should I not come up to him and say 'I am interested in the connections between philosophy and physics?' I had an image of Franz as Moses going up into the mountain to talk to God: in his satchel he might carry his tablets or whatever. Or was he, as Minna

had suggested, a devotee of some nature god; would he lay himself on an altar and offer himself to the sun? I was daydreaming like this - following haphazardly a path in my mind - when I saw that I had come to the outcrop of rock at which I had left the path before. Franz was going straight on across the pine-needles; he had his satchel over his shoulder; he was going towards the cave. Then I saw that in his hand he carried a pistol. At least it looked like a pistol: I thought - He is going to shoot deer? Hares? Rabbits? But you do not shoot such game with a pistol! Then - He is going to shoot himself? This was an idea quite likely to occur to someone at this time: there had been an alarming increase in suicides amongst students recently. There was the fashionable prototype of Werther who had killed himself because what else was there to do about love; there was the story of Kleist - often in my mind since the days when Trixie and Bruno and I used to visit his grave - who had shot himself because what else was there to do if one saw that one was trapped within one's own mind; and there were the suicidal characters in Dostoevsky, whom I also much loved and who was in vogue amongst students at this time. I thought - Well, yes, indeed, there are these patterns in people's minds.

I had stopped by the outcrop of rock where the path doubled back on one of its zig-zags. I thought - I can go on; I can turn back; what does it mean that the way in front might go on for ever?

I left the path and went off across the pine-needles following Franz who was now out of sight. I wondered - One has an impression of choice? Or one chooses to imagine one has a choice? I was trying not to make any sound as I moved over the pine-needles: it was as if I were slightly above myself, watching myself. I wondered if Franz was going to the cave that was full of bats: would he shoot at the bats; would he perform some ceremony there, to get rid of devils? When next I saw him he had stopped and was undoing the flap of his satchel and was pulling out a length of rope. I thought - So what is he going to do, hang himself as well as shoot himself? Go rock-climbing in the cave like a bat? Then - This is ridiculous. Franz went on towards the entrance of the cave. I had stopped at some distance away. I thought - To go any further might be like breaking into the back of someone else's head. I seemed to be listening - for the sound of the pistol? For noises unheard like those of bats? After a time I went on. I still trod carefully. I got to where I could see into the cave. Franz was sitting on the ground just inside: he had taken his clothes off; he seemed to be tying the rope