2666 (106 page)

"And who is that?" asked
the former pilot.

"My son," said the
one-legged man.

"He looks like a giraffe
fish," said the former pilot, and he laughed.

So in 1933 Hans Reiter left
school, charged with apathy and poor attendance, which was strictly true, and
his parents and relatives found him a job on a fishing boat, which lasted three
months, until the skipper let him go, because young Reiter was more interested
in gazing at the bottom of the sea than helping to cast the nets, and then he
worked for a little while as a farm laborer, until he was let go for idling,
and as a gatherer of peat and an apprentice at a tool shop in the Town of the
Fat and as a helper to a farmer who traveled to Stettin to sell his vegetables,
until he was once again let go because he was more of a burden than a help, and
finally he was put to work at the country house of a Prussian baron, a house in
the middle of a forest, near a lake of black waters, where his one-eyed mother
also worked, dusting the furniture and paintings and enormous curtains and Gobelins
and the different rooms, each with a mysterious name of its own that evoked the
rites of a secret sect, where the dust inevitably built up, rooms that had to
be aired to be rid of the smell of damp and neglect that crept in every so
often, and there was also dusting to be done of the books in the huge library,
books the baron hardly ever read, old tomes his father had tended and that had
been handed down by the baron's grandfather, seemingly the only member of that
vast family who read books and who had inculcated the love of books in his
descendants, a love that translated not into reading but into the preservation
of the library, which was exactly as the baron's grandfather had left it, no
bigger and no smaller.

And Hans Reiter, who had never
in his life seen so many books all together, dusted them one by one and handled
them with care, but didn't read them either, partly because he was satisfied
with his book of marine life and partly because he feared the sudden appearance
of the baron, who rarely visited the country house, busy as he was with his
affairs in Berlin and Paris, although every so often his nephew came to stay,
the son of the baron's younger sister, prematurely deceased, and a painter who
had settled in the south of France, despised by the baron. This nephew was a
boy of twenty who often spent a week at the country house, entirely alone,
never getting in anyone's way, retreating to the library for hours on end to
read and drink cognac until he fell asleep in his chair.

Other times the baron's
daughter came, but her visits were shorter, no longer than a weekend, although
for the servants that weekend was like a month because the baron's daughter
never came alone but with a retinue of friends, sometimes more than ten, all
gay, all voracious, all untidy, who turned the house into a chaotic and noisy
place, with parties every night that lasted until dawn.

Sometimes the daughter's
arrival coincided with one of the visits from the baron's nephew, and then the
baron's nephew almost always left immediately, despite his cousin's urging,
sometimes even without waiting for the cart drawn by a draft horse that in such
cases usually conveyed him to the train station in the Town of
Chattering Girls
.

With the arrival of his cousin, the
baron's nephew, already timid, was thrown into a state of such stiffness and
awkwardness that the servants, when they discussed the day's events, were
unanimous in their verdict: he loved her or desired her or yearned for her or
was pining away for her, opinions that the young Hans Reiter listened to,
sitting cross-legged and eating bread and butter, without saying a word or
adding any commentary of his own, although the truth is he knew the baron's
nephew, whose name was Hugo Halder, much better than the other servants, who seemed
blind to reality and saw only what they wanted to see, which was a young orphan
in love and distress and a young orphan girl (although the baron's daughter had
a father and mother, as everyone well knew), headstrong and awaiting a vague,
dense redemption.

A redemption that smelled of
peat smoke, of cabbage soup, of the wind tangled in the forest undergrowth. A
redemption that smelled of mirror, thought young Reiter, nearly choking on his
bread.

And why did the boy Reiter know
Hugo Halder, a youth of some twenty years, better than the rest of the
servants? Well, for one very simple reason. Or two very simple reasons, which,
intertwined or combined, supply a fuller and also more complicated portrait of
the baron's nephew.

First: he had watched him in
the library as he ran his feather duster over the books, he had watched, from
the top of the rolling ladder, as the baron's nephew slept, breathing deeply or
snoring, talking to himself, though not in whole sentences, like sweet Lotte,
but in monosyllables, scraps of words, particles of insults, defensive, as if
in his sleep he were about to be killed. He had also seen the titles of the
books the baron's nephew read. Most were history books, which meant the baron's
nephew loved history or found it interesting, which at first struck the young
Reiter as repulsive. Nights spent drinking cognac and smoking and reading
history books. Repulsive. Which led him to wonder: all that silence for this?
And he'd heard the words uttered by the baron's nephew when he was woken by the
least sound, the rustle of a mouse or the soft scrape of a leather-bound book
as it was returned to its place between two other books, words of total
confusion, as if the world had shifted on its axis, not the words of a man in
love but words of total confusion, the words of a sufferer, words issuing from
a trap.

The second reason was even more
solid. On one of the several occasions when Hugo Halder had decided to make a
quick exit from the country house upon the sudden appearance of his cousin, young
Hans Reiter had accompanied him, carrying his valise. There were two paths from
the country house to the train station in the Town of
Chattering Girls
. One, the longest, passed
Pig
Village
and
Egg
Village
and occasionally ran along the
rocks and the sea. The other, much shorter, cut through a huge forest of oaks
and beeches and poplars and emerged on the edge of the Town of Chattering
Girls, near an abandoned pickle factory, very near the station.

The scene is the following:
Hugo Halder walks ahead of Hans Reiter with his hat in his hand and carefully
scans the forest canopy, a dark underbelly alive with the stealthy movement of
animals and birds he doesn't recognize. Thirty feet behind walks Hans Reiter
with the nephew's valise, which is too heavy and which every so often he shifts
from hand to hand. Suddenly both hear the grunt of a wild boar or what they
believe is a wild boar. Maybe it's just a dog. Maybe what they've heard is the
distant engine of a car about to crash. These two last scenarios are highly
improbable but not impossible. In any case, both quicken their step, without a
word, and suddenly Hans Reiter trips and falls and the valise falls too and it
opens and its contents are scattered over the dark path through the dark
forest. And in the tangle of Hugo Halder's clothes, as Hugo Halder keeps
walking, not noticing the boy has fallen, the exhausted young Hans Reiter sees
silver cutlery, candelabras, little lacquered wooden boxes, medallions
forgotten in the many chambers of the country house, which the baron's nephew
will surely pawn or sell for a pittance in
Berlin
.

Of course, Hugo Halder knew
Hans Reiter had found him out and the result of this was to bring him closer to
the young servant. The first sign came the same afternoon Hans Reiter carried
his valise to the train station. When Halder took his leave, he dropped a few
coins into Hans's hand (it was the first time he'd given him money and also the
first time Hans Reiter had received money over and above his meager wage). On
Halder's next visit to the country house he gave Hans a sweater. He said it was
his and it didn't fit him anymore because he'd gained a little weight, though
it was plain at a glance that this was untrue. In a word, Hans Reiter was no
longer invisible and his presence merited some sort of notice.

Sometimes, when Halder was in
the library reading or pretending to read his history books, he sent for
Reiter, with whom he held longer and longer conversations. At first he asked
about the other servants. He wanted to know what they thought of him, whether
they were inconvenienced by his presence, whether they minded having him,
whether anyone bore him a grudge. Next came the monologues. Halder talked about
his life, his dead mother, his uncle the baron, his only cousin (that unattainable
and headstrong girl), about the temptations of Berlin, a city he loved but that
also caused him untold suffering, at times unbearably fierce, about the state
of his nerves, always near the breaking point.

Then, in turn, he wanted the
young Hans Reiter to talk about his own life, what did he do? what did he want
to do? what were his dreams? what did he think the future held for him?

Regarding the future,
naturally, Halder had ideas of his own. He believed that someone would soon
invent and sell a kind of artificial stomach. The idea was so outrageous that
he was the first to laugh at it (it was the first time Hans Reiter had heard
him laugh and he found Halder's laugh deeply disagreeable). About his father,
the painter who lived in
France
,
Halder never spoke, but at the same time he liked to hear about other people's
parents. He was amused by young Reiter's response to his questions on the
subject. Hans said he didn't know anything about his father.

"True," said Halder,
"one never knows anything about one's father."

A father, he said, is a
passageway immersed in the deepest darkness, where we stumble blindly seeking a
way out. Still, he insisted that the boy at least tell him what his father
looked like, but the young Hans Reiter replied that he sincerely didn't know.
At this point Halder wanted to know whether he lived with his father or not.
I've always lived with him, answered Hans Reiter.

"So what does he look
like? Can't you describe him?"

"I can't because I don't
know," answered Hans Reiter.

For a few seconds both were
silent, one examining his nails and the other gazing up at the library's high
ceiling. It may have been hard to believe this reply, but Halder did.

Speaking very loosely, one
might call Halder Hans Reiter's first friend. Each time Halder came to the
country house he spent more time with Hans, whether shut in the library or
walking and talking in the parkland that surrounded the estate.

Halder, too, was the first to
get Hans to read something other than
Animals and Plants of the European
Coastal Region.
It wasn't easy. First he asked whether he knew how to read.
Hans Reiter said yes. Then he asked whether he'd ever read a good book. He
stressed the word
good.
Hans Reiter said yes. He had a good book, he
said. Halder asked what the book was. Hans Reiter told him it was
Animals
and Plants of the European Coastal Region.
Halder said that must be a
reference book and he meant a good literary book. Hans Reiter said he didn't
know the difference between a good refints (reference) book and a good litchy
(literary) book. Halder said the difference lay in beauty, in the beauty of the
story and the beauty of the language in which the story was told. Immediately
he began to cite examples. He talked about Goethe and Schiller, he talked about
Holderlin and Kleist, he raved about Novalis. He said he had read all these
authors and each time he reread them he wept.

"Wept," he said,
"wept, do you understand, Hans?"

To which Hans Reiter replied
that the only books he had seen Halder with were history books. Halder's answer
took him by surprise. Halder said:

"It's because I don't have
a proper grasp of history and I need to brush up."

"What for?" asked
Hans Reiter.

"To fill a void."

"Voids can't be
filled," said Hans Reiter.

"Yes, they can," said
Halder, "with a little effort everything in this world can be filled. When
I was your age," said Halder, clearly exaggerating, "I read Goethe
until I couldn't read anymore (although Goethe, of course, is infinite), but
anyway, I read Goethe, Eichendorff, Hoffman, and I neglected my studies of
history, which are also needed in order to hone both edges of the blade, so to
speak."

Then, as dusk fell and they
listened to the crackling of the fire, they tried to decide which book Hans
Reiter should read first and were unable to agree. When night had come, Halder
finally told him to take any book he wanted and return it in a week. The young
servant agreed that this was the best solution.

Soon afterward there was an
increase in small thefts by the barons nephew at the country estate, due, in
his words, to gambling debts and inescapable obligations to certain ladies he
was duty-bound to assist. Halder's clumsiness in disguising his purloinings was
great and the young Hans Reiter decided to help. To keep the pilfered objects from
being missed he
suggested that Halder order the other servants to shift things around
arbitrarily, to empty rooms under the pretext of airing them, to bring up old
trunks from the cellars and carry them back down. In a word: to make
rearrangements.