The Destiny of Nathalie X (6 page)

He stood now, looking expressionlessly about him, swaying slightly, as if buffeted by an invisible crowd. He appeared at once ill and strong—pale-faced, ugly, dark-eyed, but with something about the set of his shoulders, the way his feet were planted on the ground, that suggested reserves of strength. Indeed, the year before, Ficker had told me, he had almost died from an overdose of Veronal that would have killed an ordinary man in an hour or two. Since his school days, it transpired, he had been a compulsive user of narcotic drugs and was also an immoderate drinker. At school he used chloroform to intoxicate himself. He was now a qualified dispensing chemist, a career he had taken up, so Ficker informed me, solely because it gave him access to more effective drugs. I found this single-mindedness oddly impressive. To train for two years at the University of Vienna as a pharmacist, to pass the necessary exams to qualify, testified to an uncommon dedication. Ficker had given me some of his poems to read. I could not understand them at all; their images for me were strangely haunting and evocative but finally entirely opaque. But I liked their
tone;
their tone seemed to me to be quite remarkable.

I watched him now, discreetly, as Ficker completed the preliminary documentation and signaled him over to endorse the banker’s draft. Ficker—I think this was a mistake—presented the check to him with a small flourish and shook him by the hand, as if he had just won first prize in a lottery. I could sense that Georg knew very little of what was going on. I saw him turn the check over immediately so as to hide the amount from his own eyes. He exchanged a few urgent words with Ficker, who smiled encouragingly and patted him on the arm. Ficker was very happy, almost gleeful—in his role as the philanthropist’s
go-between he was vicariously enjoying what he imagined would be Georg’s astonishment. But he was wrong. I knew it the instant Georg turned over the check and read the amount: 20,000 crowns. A thriving dispensing chemist would have to work six or seven years to earn a similar sum. I saw the check flutter and tremble in his fingers. I saw Georg blanch and swallow violently several times. He put the back of his hand to his lips and his shoulders heaved. He reached out to a pillar for support, bending over from the waist. His body convulsed in a spasm as he tried to control his writhing stomach. I knew then that he was an honest man for he had the honest man’s profound fear of extreme good fortune. Ficker snatched the check from his shaking fingers as Georg appeared to totter. He uttered a faint cry as warm bile and vomit shot from his mouth to splash and splatter on the cool marble of the Nationalbank’s flagged floor.

I got to know Ficker quite well over our various meetings about the division and disposal of my benefaction. Once in our discussions the subject of suicide came up and he seemed genuinely surprised when I told him that scarcely a day went by when I did not think about it. But I explained to him that if I could not get along with life and the world, then to commit suicide would be the ultimate admission of failure. I pointed out that this notion was the very essence of ethics and morality. For if anything is not to be allowed, then surely that must be suicide. For if suicide is allowed, then anything is allowed.

Sometimes I think that a good life should end in a death that one could welcome. Perhaps, even, it is only a good death that allows us to call a life “good.”

Georg, I believe, has nearly died many times. For example, shortly before the Veronal incident he almost eliminated himself by accident. Georg lived for a time in Innsbruck. One
night, after a drinking bout in a small village near the city, he decided to walk home. At some stage on his journey back, overcome by tiredness, he decided to lie down in the snow and sleep. When he awoke in the morning the world had been replaced by a turbid white void. For a moment he thought … but almost immediately he realized he had been covered in the night by a new fall of snow. In fact it was about forty centimeters deep. He heaved himself to his feet, brushed off his clothes and, with a clanging, gonging headache, completed his journey to Innsbruck. Ficker related all this to me.

How I wish I had been passing that morning! The first sleepy traveler along that road when Georg awoke. In the still, crepuscular light, that large lump on the verge begins to stir, some cracks and declivities suddenly deform the smooth contours, then a fist punches free and finally that crude ugly face emerges, with its frosty beret of snow, staring stupidly, blinking, spitting …

The war saved my life. I really do not know what I would have done without it. On 7 August, the day war was declared on Russia, I enlisted as a volunteer gunner in the artillery for the duration and was instructed to report to a garrison artillery regiment in Cracow. In my elation I was reluctant to go straight home to pack my bags (my family had by now all returned to Vienna), so I took a taxi to the Café Museum.

I should say that I joined the army because it was my civic duty, yet I was even more glad to enlist because I knew at that time I had to
do
something, I had to subject myself to the rigors of a harsh routine that would divert me from my intellectual work. I had reached an impasse and the impossibility of ever proceeding further filled me with morbid despair.

By the time I reached the Café Museum it was about six o’clock in the evening. (I liked this café because its interior was modern: its square rooms were lined with square honeycolored
oak paneling, hung with prints of drawings by Charles Dana Gibson.) Inside, it was busy, the air noisy with speculation about the war. It was warm and muggy, the atmosphere suffused with the reek of beer and cigar smoke. The patrons were mostly young men, students from the nearby art schools, clean-shaven, casually and unaffectedly dressed. So I was a little surprised to catch a glimpse in one corner of a uniform. I pushed through the crowd to see who it was.

Georg, it was obvious, was already fairly drunk. He sat strangely hunched over, staring intently at the tabletop. His posture and the ferocious concentration of his gaze clearly put people off, as the three other seats around his table remained unoccupied. I told a waiter to bring a half-liter of Heuniger Wein to the table and then sat down opposite him.

Georg was wearing the uniform of an officer, a lieutenant, in the Medical Corps. He looked at me candidly and without resentment, and, of course, without any sign of recognition. He seemed much the same as the last time I had seen him, at once ill-looking and possessed of a sinewy energy. I introduced myself and told him I was pleased to see a fellow soldier as I myself had just enlisted.

“It’s your civic duty,” he said, his voice strong and unslurred. “Have a cigar.”

He offered me a trabuco, those ones that have a straw mouthpiece because they are so strong. I declined—at that time I did not smoke. When the wine arrived he insisted on paying for it.

“I’m a rich man,” he said as he filled our glasses. “Where’re you posted?”

“Galicia.”

“Ah, the Russians are coming.” He paused. “I want to go somewhere cold and dark. I detest this sun, and this city. Why aren’t we fighting the Eskimos? I hate daylight. Maybe I could declare war on the Lapps. One-man army.”

“Bit lonely, no?”

“I want to be lonely. All I do is pollute my mind talking to people … I want a dark cold lonely war. Please.”

“People will think you’re mad.”

He raised his glass. “God preserve me from sanity.”

I thought of something Nietzsche had said: “Our life, our happiness, is beyond the north, beyond ice, beyond death.” I looked into Georg’s ugly face, his thin eyes and glossy lips, and felt a kind of love for him and his honesty. I clinked my glass against his and asked God to preserve me from sanity as well.

 … If your wife, for example, continually puts too much sugar in your tea it is not because she has too much sugar in her cupboard, it is because she is not educated in the ways of handling sweetness. Similarly, the problem of how to live a good life cannot ever be solved by continually assaulting it with the intellect. Certain things can only be shown, not stated …

I enlisted in the artillery to fire howitzers but instead found myself manning a searchlight on a small, heavily armed paddle steamer called the
Goplana
. We cruised up and down the Vistula, ostensibly looking for Russians but also to provide support for any river crossings by our own forces.

I enjoyed my role in charge of the searchlight. I took its mounting apart and oiled and greased its bearings. Reassembled, it moved effortlessly under the touch of my fingers. Its strong beam shone straight and true in the blurry semidarkness of those late summer nights. However, I soon found the living conditions on the
Goplana
intolerable because of the
stink, the proximity and the vulgarity of my fellow soldiers. And because we were constantly in motion, life belowdecks was dominated by the thrum and grind of the
Goplana’s
churning paddles. I spent long hours in my corner of the bridge house needlessly overhauling the mechanism of the searchlight—anything to escape the torrent of filth and viciousness that poured from the men. But despite these periods of solitude and isolation I found that my old despair began to creep through me again, like a stain.

One day we disembarked at Sandomierz and were sent to a bathhouse. As we washed I looked at my naked companions, their brown faces and forearms, their gray-white bodies and dark, dripping genitals as they soaped and sluiced themselves with garrulous ostentation. I felt only loathing for them, my fellow men. It was impossible both to work with them and to have nothing to do with them. I was glad that I felt no stirrings of sensuality as I contemplated their naked bodies. I saw that they were men but I could not see they were human beings.

 … The news is worse. All the talk is of Cracow being besieged. Last night there was an alarm. I ran up on deck to man the searchlight. It was raining and I wore only a shirt and trousers. I played the beam of the searchlight to and fro on the opposite bank of the river for hours, my feet and hands slowly becoming numb. Then we heard the sound of gunfire and I at once became convinced I was going to die that night. The beam of the searchlight was a lucent arrow pointing directly at me. And for the first time I felt, being face-to-face with my own death, with possibly only an hour or two of life remaining to me, that I had in those few hours the chance to be a good man, if only because of this uniquely potent consciousness
of myself. And, as ever, my attempts to articulate my experience as I understood and felt it, and to seize intellectually its profound implications, slipped beyond the power of language. “I did my duty and stayed at my post.” That is all I can say about that tremendous night.

Of course I did not die and of course I fell back into more abject moods of self-disgust and loathing. Perhaps the only consolation was that my enormous fatigue made it impossible for me to think about my work.

It was about this time—in September or October—that I heard the news about my brother Paul. He was a quite different personality from me—fierce and somewhat dominating—and he had tackled his vocation as concert pianist with uncompromising dedication. Since his debut his future seemed assured, an avenue of bright tomorrows. To receive the news, then, that he had been captured by the Russians and had had his right arm amputated at the elbow, as the result of wounds he had sustained, was devastating. For days my thoughts were of Paul and of what I would do in his situation. Poor Paul, I thought, if only there were some solution other than suicide. What philosophy it will take to get over this!

 … We have sailed here, waited for twelve hours and have now been ordered to return to Sawichost. All day we can hear the mumble of artillery in the east. I find myself drawn down into dark depression again, remorselessly. Why? What is the real basis of this malaise?… I see one of my fellow soldiers pissing over the side of the boat in full view of the few citizens of Nadbrzesze who have gathered on the quayside to stare at us. The long pale arc of his urine sparkles in the thin autumn
sunshine. Another soldier leans on his elbows staring candidly at the man’s flaccid white penis, held daintily between two fingers like a titbit. This is shaken, its tip squeezed and then tucked away in the coarse serge of his trousers. I think if I were standing at a machine gun rather than at a searchlight I could kill them both without a qualm … Why do I detest these simple foolish men so? Why can I not be impassive? I despise my own weakness, my inability to distance myself from the commonplace.

On our return from Sawichost I received mail. A long letter from David—I wonder if he thinks of me half as much as I think of him?—and a most distressing communication from Ficker, to whom I had written asking for some books to be sent to me. I quote: