The Hothouse (8 page)

Korodin saw the possibility of a metaphor. "Think of the children!" he said. Even to his own ears, it sounded sanctimonious. He was annoyed with himself. Keetenheuve wouldn't be converted like that.

Keetenheuve thought of the children. He would have liked to go over to the seesaw to play with the pretty girl. He was an aesthete too, and the aesthete is unfair. He was unfair to the fat girl. Nature was unfair. Everything was unfair and unfathomable. Now he longed for bourgeois domesticity, for a wife to be a mother to his children. An attractive wife, of course, and a charming child.
He lifted a little girl on to a swing, he stood in the garden
,
the beautiful wife and beautiful mother called him in to lunch
,
Keetenheuve head of a household
,
Keetenheuve kind to children
,
Keetenheuve trimmer of hedges.
There were unused feelings of tenderness curdling within him.

He said: "I am thinking of the children!"

And he saw a scene that often came to him, that he always remembered as a moment of eerie prophetic vision. When Keetenheuve had voluntarily left the Fatherland, driven by nothing beyond his own profound disagreement with what was happening and what would shortly happen, on his way to Paris, Keetenheuve had spent a night in Frankfurt, and in the morning, outside the theater in Frankfurt, breakfasting on a café terrace on Himalayan blossom tea and crisp croissants, he had watched a procession of the Hitler Youth, and there before his eyes the large and colorful square had widened, and all of them, with their flags and pennants, and fifes and drums and daggers, they had marched into a wide and deep grave. They were the fourteen-year-olds following their Führer, and by 1939 they were twenty-year-olds, which made them storm troopers, airmen, and sailors—the very generation that died. Korodin gazed up at the sky. Black clouds were gathering. A child had been struck by lightning just where they were standing, and Korodin was afraid once more of the wrath of heaven. He flagged down a passing taxi. He hated Keetenheuve. A man without responsibility, a vagabond, childless, doomed. Korodin felt like leaving Keetenheuve behind. Hope he gets struck by lightning! And maybe Korodin was endangering himself and the taxi if he gave the pariah a lift. But in the end Korodin's good breeding prevailed over fear and dislike, and with a chilly smile he allowed Keetenheuve to climb into the car.

They sat together in silence. It spattered and flashed, and sheets of rain swathed the tops of the trees like fog, but the thunder boomed feebly, as though the storm were already tired or still far off. There was a powerful smell of damp, of earth and blossom, the air grew warmer, he sweated, his shirt clung to him, and once again Keetenheuve had the impression of being in a gigantic hothouse. They drove past the back of the presidential mansion, and the front of the Chancellor's villa, the wrought iron gates stood open. Sentries guarded the open drive, they could see flower beds, sweeping lawns, ornamental beds, flowers glowed, a dachshund and a German shepherd walked together, an odd couple, as though deep in conversation, slowly along the gravel paths. A botanical landscape, botanical gardens, princesses had lived here and sugar manufacturers, con men had dined with them and still not managed to melt their fortunes. A few bombs had fallen too. Blackened stumps of masonry reached out of the dense greenery. The federal flag was waving. A man walked slowly to work, a ridiculous pop-up lady's umbrella dangling unused from his wrist, in spite of the rain. A former, a future, a once-and-future ambassador? Extras on the political stage wandered down the alleys, and with them wandered their biography, their printed vita, a versatile whore on many sidewalks. There were the extras. But where was the director grazing? Where was the protagonist cropping his grass? But of course there had never been any directors or protagonists. The taxi merely passed a lot of so-called resisters, who had prevented worse things from happening. It was raining; otherwise, they should have been sunning themselves in their fame.

They stopped outside the Bundeshaus. Korodin paid the taxi. He refused to allow Keetenheuve to pay any share of the short ride, though he asked the driver for a receipt, Korodin wasn't about to make the state a present. Hurriedly, fearfully—it was flashing again—he said goodbye to Keetenheuve with his frosty smile. He hurried off, as though the Law had summoned him and none other. Keetenheuve felt like going into the press barracks, but Mergentheim wouldn't be up yet, he had the exorbitant Sophie at home, and he wasn't a morning type anyway. Keetenheuve was loath to go up to his office. Then he saw that visitors had been bussed in to view the federal capital, to view the federal parliament, to lunch in the restaurant of the Bundeshaus, and were gathered together for a guided tour, and just as an old Berliner had once had the idea of taking part in Käse's tour, Keetenheuve joined the group as it set off. How strange! The official in his dark uniform, who was charged with conducting the sightseers, looked just like the Chancellor. He had a somewhat pinched face, dry, cunning, creased with humor, he looked like a wily fox, and he spoke with the same touch of dialect as the celebrated statesman. (In the time of the monarchy, loyal servants went around with the same style of beard as their respective emperor or king.) They walked up the steps to the plenary room, and their guide, whose resemblance to the Chancellor seemed to have gone unnoticed to the others, because no one paid him any particular attention, the guide was telling them that the building they were in had started life as a pedagogic academy, and unfortunately he forgot to play the German cultured card and pull his Goethe on them, and refer to the pedagogical province that might be ruled from here. Did the Chancellor know that his parliament was short of philosophers to go out and work the land for him?

For the first time Keetenheuve found himself standing up in the gallery of the plenary room, and saw the uncushioned seats that were reserved for the public and the press. Down below, all the seating was plush green, so even the Communists might enjoy the green comfort of the upholstered benches. The room was empty. A large empty classroom with row upon row of tidy desks. The teacher's desk at the front, fittingly elevated. The perchance Chancellor brought up the significant facts. He said the room had over a thousand meters of neon tubing. Delegates who were hard of hearing might have recourse to headphones, said the Chancellor-cum-guide. One joker among the group wondered if you could switch over to a music station. The Chancellor look-alike looked askance at the ribald suggestion. He pointed out the voting doors of the chamber, and alluded to the tradition of the division.
{6}
Keetenheuve at this juncture might have offered an anecdote for the amusement of the group, a charming little anecdote from the life of a politician.

Keetenheuve, the sheep in question, had once jumped the wrong way. Which is to say he didn't know whether he had jumped the wrong way or not, all at once he had felt uncertain, and he had skipped through the door with the ayes, while his grouping had decided in favor of the noes. The coalition had applauded him. They were mistaken. Korodin had seen his conversion campaign beginning to bear fruit. He was mistaken. In the party assembly room, they told off Keetenheuve in no uncertain terms. They too were mistaken. Keetenheuve had found the matter at issue rather trivial, and he had acted on the spur of the moment, he wanted to be a yea-sayer rather than a nay-sayer, and so he had fallen in with some minor government proposal. Why shouldn't the government sometimes be in the right? It seemed to him idiotic to seek to deny that, and to conduct a politics of stubbornness, or of political principle, which came to the same thing. Keetenheuve saw schoolboys seated there, farmers' sons, blockheads, quarrelsome and submissive, quarrelsome and turbulent, quarrelsome and slow-witted, with a couple of eager beavers in their midst. "Talking-shop" said one of the visitors. Keetenheuve looked at him. The visitor was of the beery nationalist sort, who loved to have a dictator grinding him down, so long as he himself got a pair of boots to trample on those below him. Keetenheuve looked at him. "In the chops," he thought. "Well, don't you agree?" said the man, with a challenging look at Keetenheuve. Keetenheuve might have replied: It's always seemed to me the least worst option, even this parliament here is the lesser evil. What he said was: "You damned well keep your mouth shut in here!" The man went purple, then he felt unsure of himself, and he cravenly knuckled under. He edged away from Keetenheuve. If he had recognized the delegate Keetenheuve, he could have thought to himself: I'll remember you, you're on my list, you wait till Judgment Day, I'll get you in the swamps or in the heath. But no one knew Keetenheuve, and the Chancellor perchance led his little troop out into the open.

The journalists were based in a couple of barracks. The barracks were long and low, and faced the Bundeshaus; from the outside they looked like military constructions, meant to last for the duration of a war (and wars go on for a long time), to accommodate military staffs and run a new exercise yard. But through the center of each building ran a central aisle that was like the corridor of a ship, perhaps not exactly a luxury liner, but at least a tourist vessel, with the cabins cheek by jowl on either side, and the clatter of typewriters and the ticking of telexes, the incessant shrilling of telephones giving the impression that beyond the various correspondents' quarters was the open sea with mewing gulls and steamer sirens, and so the press barracks became a pair of barges that were carried on the waves of the times, and rocked and shaken. "Press releases" arrived at intervals, like the tides. They were dropped on a pine table in the entrance, pale blurred snippets of information on cheap paper, left there by the indifferent messengers from the various arms of government, all concerned to talk up the activity of their ministries, to inform the public, to spread federal propaganda, to conceal or deny or throw smoke screens around events, to allay concerns, to deny truths or lies, and occasionally to toot into the horn of righteous indignation. The Foreign Ministry informs, the Federal Treasury, the Central Statistical Office, the Ministry of Post and Railways, the Occupying Forces Liaison Committee, the Ministry for the Interior responsible for Police or Justice, they all were informing of this or that, were loquacious or tight-lipped, as the case might be, showed their teeth, or an expression of concern, and a few even had a smile for the public, the encouraging come-hitherish smile of an available beauty. The press spokesman for the government let it be known that the opposition claims that the government had applied to the French secret service for help in the forthcoming elections were completely and utterly without foundation. This was something they were in earnest about, they threatened to take the matter to a prosecuting attorney because election funds, party coffers were always strictly off-limits, always a touchy subject; they needed money just as every citizen did, and from where else would it be forthcoming but from wealthy friends. Korodin had wealthy friends, but as is the way of rich people they were tightwads (Korodin could understand that) and they wanted something in return for their money.

The press ship was bobbing along that morning in a slight breeze. Keetenheuve could sense there wasn't anything particular going on. The planks were not atremble, no doors were thrown open and slammed shut; but then there are storms that break suddenly and unpredictably, unannounced by any weatherman. Keetenheuve knocked on Mergentheim's door. Mergentheim was the capital correspondent for a newspaper that rightly accounted itself one of the Republic's "most highly respected" newspapers (but what of the others? were they not respected or not respectable? poor little wallflowers at the national folk dance!), and on important days he spoke suave and trenchant commentaries on the wireless that were by no means uncritical, and had even provoked angry protests from the morbidly sensitive and gypsyishly jealous coalition parties.

Keetenheuve and Mergentheim—were they friends or enemies? They wouldn't have been too sure themselves: hardly friends, and neither would have spoken of the other with schoolboy fervor: my friend Mergentheim, my pal Keetenheuve. But on occasion they found themselves drawn together, because they had set out and been colleagues together at a time when everything might have turned out differently, and if history had taken a different course (inconceivable that it could), without the Austrian lunatic, without the monstrous upsurge, without crime, hubris, war, death, and destruction, then perhaps Keetenheuve and Mergentheim might have spent years of their lives in the same gloomy courtyard room of the old
Volksblatt
(Keetenheuve would have liked that, Mergentheim not at all) and really would have had the feeling, they were still young, of joint effort, shared opinions, and a common friendship. But in '33 there came a parting of the ways. Keetenheuve, dubbed a good-natured fool, wandered off into exile, while Mergentheim successfully took the probationary path that was to see him become senior editor, or
Hauptschriftleiter
{7}
,
as it was then known, of the somewhat changed newspaper. Later, admittedly, in spite of an obedient change of course that cost it readers, the
Volksblatt
ceased to publish, or it was swallowed up by the
Arbeitsfront,
{8}
one couldn't say for certain, and it continued to exist in the form of a subtitle with a party member at the helm, and Mergentheim got himself made a Rome correspondent. In the nick of time! The war began, and life in Rome was pleasant enough. Later again, in Mussolini’s Northern Italian republic, things got tricky for Mergentheim once more, he might easily have copped a bullet from the S S or the partisans, or fallen into the hands of the Allies, but once again, Mergentheim managed to get out in time, and so had made himself a sought-after and well-supported figure in the rebuilding with a relatively unbesmirched past record. It made Keetenheuve happy each time he saw Mergentheim in his office, because as long as Mergentheim was at his desk, as long as he hadn't taken off again to become Washington correspondent or whatever else, it signaled to Keetenheuve that the state was on a reasonably even keel, and its enemies distant.