Vertigo (14 page)

through this operatic tale a few months ago. For me, the only remarkable thing about it was the fact that the copy that had come into my hands, by a circuitous route, had in it the ex libris plate of one Dr Hermann Samson, who must have loved
Aida
so dearly that he had chosen the pyramids, monuments of death, as his insignia.

O
n Saturday the 6th of September, 1913, Dr K., the Deputy Secretary of the Prague Workers' Insurance Company, is on his way to Vienna to attend a congress on rescue services and hygiene. Just as the fate of a man wounded on the battlefield depends upon the quality of the first dressing, he reads in a newspaper he has bought at the border-post of Gmünd, so too the first aid administered at everyday accidents is of the greatest importance for the casualty's recovery. Dr K. finds this statement almost as disquieting as the reference to the social events which will accompany the congress. Outside, Heiligenstadt already: an ominous, deserted station, the trains empty. Dr K. feels he has reached the end of the line and realises that he should have begged the Director on his knees to let him stay in Prague. But of course it is too late now.

In Vienna Dr K. takes a room at the Hotel Matschakerhof, out of sympathy with Grillparzer, who always dined there. It is a gesture of reverence which sadly has no good effect. For most of the time, Dr K. is extremely unwell. He is suffering from dejectedness, and his sight is troubling him. Though he cancels whatever appointments he can, he has a sense of being continually among an alarming number of people. At such times he sits like a ghost at table, suffers bouts of claustrophobia, and imagines that every fleeting glance sees right through him. By his side, close enough to touch, as it were, sits Grillparzer, a man now so ancient that he has almost faded away. He indulges in all sorts of tomfoolery and on one occasion even lays a hand on Dr K.'s knee. During the following night, Dr K. is in a wretched state. His Berlin misadventures are haunting him. He tosses and turns in bed to no avail, puts cold compresses on his head, and stands at the window for a long time gazing down into the street and wishes he lay buried there, a few storeys deeper, in the ground. It is impossible, he notes the following day, to lead the only possible life, to live together with a woman, each one free and independent, married neither in outer appearance nor in reality, to be merely together; and even more impossible to take the only possible step beyond a friendship withe men for there, on the other side of the prescribed boundary, the boot is already upraised that will crush you under its heel.

The most disconcerting part of it, perhaps, is that life nonetheless always goes on, somehow or other. Thus, for instance, in the course of the morning Dr K. is persuaded by Otto Pick to accompany him out to Ottakring to visit Albert Ehrenstein, whose verses he, Dr K., cannot make any sense of, not with the best will in the world.
You, however, take delight in the ship, despoiling the lake with sails. I will go down to the deep. Plunge, thaw, go blind, become ice.
In the tram, Dr K. is suddenly convulsed by a violent aversion to Pick, because the latter has a small, unpleasant hole in his nature through which he sometimes creeps forth in his entirety, as Dr K. now observes. Dr K.'s fretful state of mind is exacerbated when Ehrenstein proves to have a black moustache, exactly like Pick, whom he so resembles he could be his twin brother. As like as two eggs, Dr K. keeps on thinking compulsively. On the way to the Prater he finds the company of the two others increasingly unnerving, and on the gondola pond he feels himself to be a prisoner of their whims. When at last he is returned to dry land, it is small consolation. They might just as well have struck him dead with an oar. Lise Kaznelson, who has also come on the outing, now takes a carousel ride, through the jungle. Dr K. notes how helplessly she sits up there in her billowy, well-cut but ill-worn dress. He experiences a surge of sociable feeling in her presence, as he so often does in the company of women, but otherwise is constantly plagued by one of his headaches. When as a jest they have their photograph taken as passengers in an aeroplane which appears to be flying above the big Ferris wheel and the spires of the Votivkirche, Dr K. is himself bemused to find that he is the only one who can still manage some kind of smile at such dizzy heights. On the 14th of September Dr K. travels

to Trieste. He spends the best part of eight hours on Southern Railways, ensconced in a corner of his compartment. He is seized by a creeping paralysis. Outside the country slips by, in a series of seamlessly changing views, bathed in an altogether improbable autumn light. Although he barely moves a limb, that evening at ten past nine Dr K., incomprehensibly, really is in Trieste. The city lies in darkness. Dr K. is being driven to a harbour-front hotel, and sitting in the horse-drawn hackney-cab, with the broad back of the coachman before him, he has a vision of himself as a most mysterious figure. It seems to him that people are stopping in the street, following him with their eyes, as if to say: there he is at last.

In the hotel he reclines on the bed, hands clasped behind his head, and looks up at the ceiling. Stray cries from outside drift into the room through curtains stirred by a breeze. Dr K. is aware that in this city there is an iron angel who kills travellers from the north, and he longs to go out. On the borderline between grinding weariness and half-sleep he wanders through the lanes of the harbour quarter, sensing under his skin how it is to be a free man waiting on the kerb, hovering an inch above the ground. The circling reflections of the streetlights on the ceiling above him are signs that any moment now it will break open and something will be revealed. Already cracks are appearing in the smooth surface, and then, in a cloud of plaster dust, gradually showing itself against the half-light, a figure descends on great silk-white wings, swathed in bluish-violet vestments and bound with golden cords, the upraised arm with the sword pointing forwards. A veritable angel, thought Dr K. when he could breathe again, all day long it has flown towards me and I of little faith knew nothing of it. Now he will speak to me, he thought, and lowered his gaze. But when he looked up again, the angel, though it was still there, suspended quite low under the ceiling, was no longer a living angel but a garishly painted ship's figurehead, such as hang from the ceilings of sailors' taverns. The sword guard was fashioned to hold candles and catch the dripping tallow.

The next morning Dr K. crossed the Adriatic in somewhat stormy weather, afflicted with slight seasickness. For a considerable time after he had made land, if that is the right expression, in Venice, the waves were still breaking within him. From the Sandwirth Hotel, where he was staying, he wrote to Felice in Berlin, in an optimistic mood that probably came upon him as his queasiness receded, saying that however tremulous he might feel, he now proposed to plunge into the city and all that it could offer a traveller such as himself. Even the pouring rain, which veiled every outline and shape in an even grey-green, would not deter him; no, quite the contrary, he averred, for the days in Vienna would be washed away all the better. However, there is no evidence to suggest that Dr K. did leave the hotel on that 15th of September. If, as he believed, it was impossible to be here at all, how much more was it impossible for him, on the brink of disintegration, to venture out beneath this watery sky under which the very stones dissolved. So Dr K. remains in the hotel. Towards evening, in the sombre lobby, he writes once more to Felice. Now he no longer makes any reference to exploring the city. Instead, set down in hasty lines underneath the hotel's letterhead with its pretty steam yachts, there are references to his mounting despair. That he was alone

and exchanged not a word with a living soul excepting the staff, that the misery within him was almost overflowing, and that - this much he could say with certainty - he was in a condition in keeping with his nature and ordained for him by a justice not of this world, a condition that he could not transcend and which he would have to endure till the very last of his days.

How Dr K. passed his few days in Venice in reality, we do not know. At all events, his sombre mood does not appear to have lifted. Indeed, he felt it was only this state of mind that sustained him when confronted with such a city as Venice, a city which must have made a deep impression upon him, despite there being newly wedded couples everywhere whose very presence seemed to make a mockery of his mournfulness. How it is beautiful, he wrote, with an exclamation mark, in one of those somewhat awry formulations in which language for a moment gives free rein to the emotions. How it is beautiful, and how we undervalue it! But more precise details Dr K. does not disclose. We know, as I have said, nothing of what he really saw. There is not even a reference to the Doge's Palace, the prison chambers of which were to play so prominent a part in the evolution of his own fantasies of trial and punishment some months later. All we know is that he spent those four days in Venice and that he then took the train from Santa Lucia to Verona.

On the afternoon of his arrival in Verona he walked from the station along the Corso into town, and then wandered among its narrow streets until, in weariness, he went into the Church of Sant'Anastasia. After resting in the cool, shadowy interior for a while, with feelings of both gratitude and distaste, he set off once more, and as he left, just as one might ruffle the hair of a son or younger brother, he ran his fingers over the marble locks of a dwarfish figure which, at the foot of one of the mighty columns, had been bearing the immense weight of a holy-water font for centuries. Nowhere is there anything to suggest that he saw the fine mural of St George painted by Pisanello over the entrance to the Pellegrini chapel. It might be shown, though, that when Dr K. stood in the porch once again, on the threshold between the dark interior and the brightness outside, he felt for a moment as if the selfsame church were replicated before him, its entrance fitting directly with that of the church he had just left, a mirroring effect he was familiar with from his dreams, in which everything was forever splitting and multiplying, over and again, in the most terrifying manner.