Death in Rome (6 page)

Now Judajahn's thoughts returned to his in-laws, who were waiting to welcome their hero back from the dead. He took a look at the street map which he had folded up and taken with him. He quickly got his bearings, as he had learned to do: in forest, swamp and desert, he was incapable of getting lost. Nor would he get lost now in the jungle of the city. He walked down the Via di Porta Pinciana, parallel to a high old wall, behind which he guessed was a large, beautiful shady garden, perhaps belonging to one of the wealthy aristocrats, the royalist clique that had betrayed the Duce. It was warm and there was a smell of rain in the air. A puff of wind whirled up the dust and made his skin tingle. There were posters stuck on the garden wall. The next year's intake was being called up for military service. That could only be of benefit to the weaklings. Uncle Sam would provide the weapons. But where were the German trainers? Without German trainers, every dollar was wasted. Had Uncle Sam forgotten how to count? A red CP poster burned like a beacon.
Judejahn
thought of the night of the Reichstag fire. That was the uprising! They had answered the call! The beginning of an era! An era without Goethe! What did the Russian-Roman commune want?
Judejahn
couldn't read the text. Why should he read it? They should be put against the wall: up against this very wall here. In
Lichterfelde
they'd been put against the wall.
Judejahn
took a hand in the shooting, just for the hell of it. Who said all men were brothers? Those weaklings with their demands! What if there'd been an agreement with Moscow? There were no weaklings in Moscow. If the two big, strong brothers had come to an understanding, a wider, more sweeping Stalin-Hitler pact? Judejahn's head hurt. Missed opportunities, or had they really been conclusively missed, and 'The World will be Ours' belted out into a bright dawn. On Sunday there was some race, Rome-Naples, Naples-Rome. Gladiatorial bouts for weak nerves. What were their names, the fighter with the net and trident, and the other one with the sword? Germans pitted against wild animals in the circus. Germans were too good-natured, they were outwitted. There was a Church decree printed on white paper with a black cross. The Church always won out in the end. Priests were cunning and stayed on the sidelines. Let everyone else exhaust one another. After wars, they built up their own strength. Grave-robbers. Jesuit jiu-jitsu. Green paper.
Olio Sasso.
To grease the wheels. War? Mobilization? Not yet. Not for a while yet. No one dared. Little rehearsals in deserts, jungles and remote territories. As once in Spain. The coyote beckoned from the ground floor of a swanky apartment house. A coyote was a prairie wolf;
Judejahn
remembered his Karl May. In this instance, the Coyote was an American bar. There was plenty of polished brass on the door, and it looked exclusive and expensive.
Judejahn
had money, but he wouldn't venture into the bar.
Judejahn
was thirsty, but he wouldn't venture into the Coyote. Why not? Little Gottlieb was in the way, and he wouldn't do anything out of uniform.
Judejahn
went on. He came upon a
fiaschetteria.
Straw-wrapped bottles lay in heaps, the floor was awash with wine. This was where the common people drank. There was no cause to fear the common people. You could control them. There was no reason to talk to the common people. The people were gunfodder. The
Führer
stood over the people.
Judejahn
called for
a Chianti.
He gulped it down. The wine did him good. He ordered another glass. He didn't taste the wine, but he felt reinvigorated. He strode out, to the famous square in front of the
Trinità
dei Monti church. The church had two pointed towers. Nuns from the
Sacré Coeur
cloisters stood on the church steps.
Judejahn
was revolted by their long skirts, their cloaks, their coifs. Witches! Now he had the Spanish Steps at his feet, and Rome, and in the background the mighty dome of St Peter's—the old enemy. He wasn't beaten. No one was beaten. The game had been drawn—thanks to treachery: the
Führer
had held all the trumps, gnomes stole them from him, orders hadn't been carried out—only
Judejahn
had carried out every order he had been given.

He had left no mess. Had he cleaned up everywhere? Unfortunately not. In fact, as it happened, nowhere. The hydra had more than nine heads. It had millions. One
Judejahn
was not enough. He returned from the war, no conqueror, a beggar, a nobody. He had to support himself on the parapet. His fingers gripped the crumbling masonry. Pain welled up inside him. Rome swam before his eyes, a sea of dissolving stone, and the dome of St Peter's was a bubble adrift on the wild sea. An old lady with blue-rinsed hair pointed with her umbrella at the great panorama of the Eternal City. She called out, 'Isn't it wonderful!' The left tower of
Trinità
dei Monti rang out its benediction.

He went down. He went down the Spanish Steps, climbed down into picturesque Italy, into the idling population that was sitting on the steps, lying, reading, studying, chatting, quarrelling or embracing one another. A boy offered
Judejahn
some maize, yellow roasted kernels of maize. He held out a paper cornet to the foreigner, to the barbarian from the north, said
'cento lire
'
in a wheedling voice, and
Judejahn
knocked the bag out of his hand. The maize scattered over the steps, and
Judejahn
trod it underfoot. He hadn't meant it. It was clumsiness. He felt like giving the boy a thrashing.

He crossed the square and reached the Via Condotti, panting. The pavement was narrow. People squeezed together in the busy shopping street, squeezed in front of the shop windows, squeezed past each other.
Judejahn
jostled and was jostled back. He didn't understand. He was surprised that no one made way for him, that no one got out of his road. He was surprised to find himself being jostled.

He looked for the cross street, looked for it on the map
—
but was he really looking? His years on the fringe of the desert seemed to him like time spent under anaesthetic, he had felt no pain, but now he felt sick, he felt fever and pain, felt the cuts that had pruned his life to a stump, felt the cuts that severed this stump from the wide flourishing of his power. What was he? A shadow of his former self. Should he rise from the dead, or remain a spook in the desert, a ghost in the Fatherland's colour magazines?
Judejahn
was not afraid to keep the world at bay. What did it want with him, anyway? Let it come, let it come in all its softness and venality, all its dirty, buzzard lusts, concealed under the mask of respectability. The world should be glad there were fellows like himself.
Judejahn
wasn't afraid of the rope. He was afraid of living. He feared the absence of commands in which he was expected to live. He had issued any number: the higher he'd been promoted, the more he'd issued, and the responsibility had never bothered him; he merely said, 'That's on my say-so,' or 'I'm in command here,' but that had been a phrase, an intoxicating phrase, because in reality he had only ever followed orders himself.
Judejahn
had been mighty. He had tasted power, but in order to enjoy it, he required it to be limited, he required the
Führer
as an embodiment and visible god of power, the commander who was his excuse before the Creator, man and the Devil: I only did what I was told, I only obeyed orders. Did he have a conscience then? No, he was just afraid. He was afraid it might be discovered that he was little Gottlieb going around in boots too big for him.
Judejahn
heard a voice, not the voice of God nor the voice of conscience, it was the thin, hungry, self-improving voice of his father, the primary schoolteacher, whispering to him: You're a fool, you didn't do your homework, you're a bad pupil, a zero, an inflated zero. And so it was as well that he had stayed in the shadow of a greater being, stayed a satellite, the shining satellite of the most powerful celestial body, and even now he didn't realize that this sun from whom he had borrowed light and the licence to kill had himself been nothing but a cheat, another bad pupil, another little Gottlieb who happened to be the Devil's chosen tool, a magical zero, a chimera of the people, a bubble that ultimately burst.

Judejahn
felt a sudden craving to fill his belly. Even in his
Freikorps
days he had had bouts of gluttony, and shovelled ladles of peas from the field-kitchen down his throat. Now, at the corner of the street he was looking for, he scented food. A cheap eating-place had various dishes on display in its windows, and
Judejahn
went inside and ordered fried liver, which he had seen in the window under a little sign,
'Fritto scelto'.
And so now
Judejahn
ordered the liver by asking for
'fritto scelto',
but that means 'fried food on request', and so, at a loss what to do, they brought him a plate of sea-creatures fried in oil and batter. He gulped them down; they tasted like fried earthworms to him, and he felt nauseated. He felt his heavy body turning into worms, he felt his guts squirming with putrescence, and in order to fight off his disintegration, and in spite of his nausea, he polished off everything on the plate. Then he drank a quarter-litre of wine, this too, standing up, and then he was able to go on no more than a few paces, and there was the German hotel where his in-laws were staying. Cars bearing 'D' licence plates stood in tidy ranks outside the hotel.
Judejahn
saw the emblems of German recovery, the sleek metal of the German economic miracle. He was impressed. He was attracted. Should he go inside, click his heels together and rap out, 'At your service!'? They would receive him with open arms. Would they? But there was also something that repelled him about these shiny cars. Recovery, life going on, going on fatly and prosperously after total war, total battle and total defeat, it was betrayal, betrayal of the Führer's plans and his vision for the future, it was disgraceful collaboration with the arch-enemy in the West, who needed German blood and German troops to ward off its former Eastern allies and sharers in the stolen victory. What to do? Already the lights were going on in the hotel. One window after another was lit up, and behind one of them Eva would be sitting and waiting. Her letters, with their obscure turns of phrase that spoke of the disappointment that awaited him, the degeneracy and the shame, allowed him no hope of finding Adolf his son here. Was it worth going home? The desert was still open to him. The net of the German bourgeoisie had not yet been thrown over the old warrior. Hesitant, uncertain, he strode in through the door, came into the wood-panelled lobby, and there he saw German men, his brother-in-law,
Friedrich
Wilhelm
Pfaffrath, was among them, he had hardly changed at all, and the German men stood facing one another in the German fashion; they were holding glasses in their hands, not mugs of German barley brew, but glasses of Italian swill, but then he
Judejahn
drank swill like that himself and God knows what else besides, no blame attached to that away from home. And these men, they were strong and stout, he could hear that, they were singing 'A Fortress Sure', and then he felt himself being observed, not by the singers, he felt himself being observed from the doorway, it was a serious, a seeking, an imploring, a desperate look that was levelled at him.

It didn't shock him, but it did abash Siegfried to see the broad unmade bed, which drew his eye though he tried in vain to avert it, the broad bed, the marriage bed standing four-square in the spacious room, it was shameless and undeniable, without sensuality and without shame, cold, clean linen laid bare, and it bore witness coldly and cleanly to functions that no one wanted to disavow, to embraces of which no one was ashamed, to deep and healthy sleep

and all at once I realized that the Kürenbergs were ahead of me, they were the people I wanted to be, they were without sin, they were at once old-fashioned and new, they were antique and avant-garde, pre-Christian and post-Christian, Graeco-Roman citizens and airline passengers crossing the oceans, they were locked up in bodies, but in bodies that were well-explored and -maintained: they were excursionists who had made themselves at home in a possibly inhospitable planet, and who took pleasure in the world as they found it.

Kürenberg
was attuned to nomadism. In shirt sleeves and white linen trousers with a rubber apron tied over them, he was bustling about at a pair of extra tables the hotel had put at his disposal, and I was made to ask myself what special arrangements he had come to with the management, because they must have had new wiring put in for him, he had adaptors with three and four plugs in the sockets, and electric leads ran like intertwining snakes to gleaming electrical gear, grills, ovens, infra-red cookers, steamers, pressure-cookers; it was the most comprehensive of mobile kitchens, which delighted him and went everywhere with him, and he was preparing the dinner to which he had invited me, he was mixing, tasting, beating and spicing, his face was firm and manly, it had a massive calm that did me good to look at, while
Frau Kürenberg,
having given me her hand and spoken a few welcoming words, 'How do you like Rome? Is this the first time you've been here?', twittering swallows of small talk, low swooping flights, was laying the table, bustled about, went to the bathroom, leaving the door ajar behind her, rinsed glasses, put flowers in a vase, and left the wine to chill under running water.