Out of the Line of Fire (7 page)

The girl kneeling wraps her left hand around the other girl’s thigh and with her right hand she begins caressing her again. The camera moves closer as the girl’s fingers begin to probe her. First one finger, then another, and then three fingers are slowly eased into her. Her thumb flicks over the pale bud of her clitoris. She starts rotating her hand slowly, trying to force the other girl’s pubic muscles to relax. The girl’s face on the lounge flashes onto the screen. Her head is arched back and her eyes are closed. She is frowning slightly, as though concentrating on what the other woman is doing to her. Her hand reaches down to touch the hand of the girl kneeling between her legs. She draws the three fingers into her as far as they will go. The kneeling girl stops for a moment and withdraws almost entirely. She folds her thumb against the palm of her hand and brings her four fingers together so that her hand forms a conical shape. She places the tip of this cone at the entrance of the prone woman’s vagina. She pushes her fingers in gently. At first there is little real resistance. Four fingers disappear up to the second joint of her index finger. The prone girl’s hand directs her rhythm. She penetrates a little deeper. The camera has moved in close now. It is only then that I realize that she is going to try to push her entire hand into the other woman.

She withdraws a little, then resumes her relentless pressure. The girl’s face flashes momentarily onto the screen again. Her mouth is open and she is breathing heavily. She frowns again as she feels another, deeper thrust. The other girl’s hand is now in as far as her knuckles. Despite the fact that this is obviously a performance, I am a little amazed to see that the woman on the lounge is, nevertheless, clearly aroused.

They both seem to relax for a moment. Then, with the blonde girl’s hand clasped around her wrist, the dark girl gives one last, long push and her entire hand disappears slowly into her. She moves it tentatively back and forth. With the woman’s labia, white at their periphery, encircling her wrist the whole scene suddenly appears wildly surrealistic, as if someone were groping around inside her, trying to find something they had lost. The camera pans up to the prone woman’s face again. Her eyes are half-open and her smiling lips suggest the ecstasy she is supposed to be feeling as she is rocked to and fro. Then the rhythm increases and her buttocks seem to respond as though to some reciprocal harmony. She begins writhing, twisting, thrusting at the hand within her. Her movements grow wilder, more violent. Then suddenly her body arches and she appears to shudder. Again and again she shudders, as if she is trying to impale herself on the other woman’s arm. Her movements are frenzied, almost frightening. It is as though both of them have suddenly become oblivious to the presence of the camera. Then, all at once, it is over and they both sink slowly back onto the lounge. The final scene shows the dark-haired woman bending to kiss her companion on the mouth. Her manner is such that her action could easily be mistaken for tenderness.

What, I ask, are we to make of this?

Machiavelli’s (1462–1527) political philosophy was scientific and empirical. It was based on his own experience of affairs and was concerned to set forth the means to assigned ends, regardless of the question whether the ends were to be considered good or bad. That is what is so horrifying about it.

Federico Garcia Lorca (1898–1936), one of the outstanding poets and dramatists of this century, was murdered at the age of thirty-nine by Nationalist rebels in his native Granada. The Franco regime sought constantly to suppress the facts surrounding Lorca’s death and the death of thousands of other Republican sympathisers executed in the thirties.

This is a familiar story.

What is it about the polarity of human thought which requires the eradication of the agent of its expression? In a dictatorship ‘I think, therefore I am’ becomes the most fundamentally non-tenable political dictum. Language empowers existence [ermächtigt das Dasein].

How does this square with what Wittgenstein had to say about the
powerlessness
of language?

Wolfi bursts into my room. He runs to the radio, turns it on. Nothing happens.

What’s the matter with this bloody thing?

It’s not plugged in.

Es ist nicht eingesteckt, he repeats.

He fumbles for the cord, plugs it in and switches it on. He searches frantically for the station.

Wait until you hear this.

Also, sensationelle Ereignisse hier in München. Ich bin Dieter Winter, Bayern Drei und Sie hören Nachrichten. Nach einer kurzen Pause—der Papst vergibt seinem Attentäter [After a short break—the Pope forgives his assassin].

Verdammte Scheisse…Idioten!

Forget it, I heard it earlier. They say it’s just a flesh wound. He’ll live.

No, no, no. Not the Pope. They had a newsflash on the Bessermann trial.

I thought that had finished weeks ago.

No, the commital proceedings had to be held over. His daughter tried to commit suicide. It’s just been revealed that she and her father were lovers.

The Schönborns have been prominent in the cultural life of Klagenfurt since the seventeenth century. Theodore Schönborn was rector of the nearby university from 1780 to 1791. Kant stayed under his roof during his visit to Klagenfurt in the spring of 1783 and Theodore was his guest at Königsberg a number of times in the years that followed. He wrote a famous introduction to one of Kant’s philosophical works (
Die Metaphysik der Sitten in zwei Teilen
). Like his father before him, Wolfi’s grandfather was a well-respected intellectual who later became town councillor and, like Wolfi’s father, his grandfather married someone considerably younger than himself.

His wife, Wolfi’s grandmother, belonged to one of Vienna’s most wealthy families, although the rapid decline in the family fortunes through a series of ill-judged business ventures had already set in by the time she married Wolfi’s grandfather. She had been great friends with the young and beautiful Manon Gropius until the latter’s tragic death in 1935 at the age of twenty. According to Wolfi, his grandmother was a woman of great vitality, quick witted and sharp tongued. At fifteen she scandalized her family by having an affair with the painter Hans Meidner (1884–1939). At twenty she again stunned her family by agreeing to marry Walter Heinrich Schönborn who, at the relatively young age of forty-five, had just been elected vice-chancellor of the university. While everyone agreed that socially it was a good match despite the difference in their ages, it turned out to be a disastrous misalliance of temperaments. He was pompous, bureaucratic and unimaginative. She did not bear the matrimonial yoke well and was always surrounded by scandalous rumour, something she did nothing about and, in fact, seemed positively to encourage. When her husband died eighteen years later, when Wolfi’s father was fifteen, his death appeared to be a source of considerable relief to her rather than a cause for any great sorrow.

By contrast, both his mother’s parents were open, happy and hospitable people. Her father adored his wife and his three daughters. He was a hard-working, God-fearing man who was not unaware of the good fortune with which he said he had been blessed. His only failure was that when he had had a little too much to drink he was inclined to become red-faced and maudlin. Surprisingly Wolfi’s father and he got on well together. They were both keen clay-pigeon shooters and Wolfi’s father, as a result of his earlier training as a military cadet, was an impressive horseman, something his mother’s father greatly admired.

Wolfi’s mother was the eldest of three sisters and from the time she was young she was well known for her remarkable beauty. When she met Wolfi’s father she was studying to be a concert pianist. Wolfi had in fact been named after Mozart. His father, who at the time occupied a junior post at Heidelberg university, had first seen her at a performance she gave in the town’s Konzertsaal. He had become instantly and completely besotted by her, something that was even more remarkable given the fact that at the time he had a reputation for being, if not exactly a ladies’ man [ein Charmeur], then at least someone whose elegant manner would not have gone unnoticed amongst the women with whom he came in contact.

Apparently the first few years of their marriage
were
idyllic. They were both blissfully happy. His mother had been content to give up her career as a pianist to devote herself to her husband and the child she was now expecting. Even when Elena was born three years later they were still happy. But according to Wolfi, in the years that followed, his father became more and more aloof, more and more involved in his own research and the increasing administrative burden of his university post. It was as though his dead father had cast a shadow over him, a shadow that slowly transformed him into the person his father had been years earlier.

This was very cruel for my mother, Wolfi said. As a girl she had loved life and the early years of her marriage had awakened new demands in her as a woman. Then at the very moment she was discovering her own sensuality my father withdrew her access to it. An affair was something she could not easily contemplate and so for years she remained frustrated and unhappy. Eventually, however, she did discover someone with whom she fell in love and with whom she maintained a passionate and clandestine affair. I think this period was the happiest in my mother’s life.

Is such an arrangement so unusual? Wilfried Berghahn, in his short biography of Robert Musil who, coincidentally, was born in Klagenfurt, writes of Musil’s mother:

Hermine Bergauer ist, als sie heiratet, zwanzig Jahre alt. Sie scheint auf einen Mann zu hoffen, der ihr Leben fest in seine Hand nimmt und ihre Phantasie beschäftigt. Aber Alfred Musil liegt es offensichtlich nicht, Autorität auszuüben. Er steht dem Temperament und Heftigkeit der Gefühle seiner Frau zeitlebens ein wenig hilflos gegenüber. Sie indes vermag in seiner beruflichen Karriere keinen Inhalt für ihr eigenes Leben zu finden. Als sie 1881 nach sieben Ehejahren und bald nach der Geburt ihres Sohnes in Komotau einen Bekannten ihres Mannes namens Heinrich Reiter kennenlernt, schliesst sie sich an ihn an. Alfred Musil toleriert dieses Verhältnis. Reiter gehört von stund an zur Familie, begleitet Musils regelmässig in die Sommerferien…Wir finden ihn noch 1924 am Sterbebett Hermine Musils, das zu bewachen und zu besorgen offenbar seine Aufgabe ist, nicht die ihres Mannes.

Wilfried Berghahn,
Robert Musil.
p.22

[When Hermine Bergauer married she was twenty years old. She seemed to be hoping for a man who would take her life in his hands and capture her imagination. But Alfred Musil seemed incapable of exercising any sort of authority. During his entire life he seemed to be a little helpless in the face of his wife’s temperament and the passionateness of her feelings. She, on the other hand, could find no satisfaction in her husband’s professional career. Then, in 1881, after seven years of marriage and shortly after the birth of her son, she met and formed a liaison with an acquaintance of her husband named Heinrich Reiter. Alfred Musil tolerated this relationship and from that time on Reiter was part of the family, regularly accompanying the Musils on their summer holidays…It was he, and not her husband, who in 1924 attended her on her death-bed.]

What is the real mystery of language? Why do the German sentences above mean nothing to someone who does not read German? Or do they mean nothing? Why is it that as we read the translation in English tiny little scenarios of so much import in the lives of these three people unfold so clearly before our eyes?

Yet how adequate is ‘to form a liaison with’ as a translation of ‘sich anschliessen’? Does it not, in fact, mean ‘to join’ or ‘be connected’ to somebody? And if so, connected in what way? And what does ‘Heftigkeit der Gefühle’ really mean? Doesn’t it really mean she liked to fuck her eyes out, or is this putting it too strongly? I would like to put this question to Walter Abish. And, finally, what is the real significance for Wolfi of this quote from Berghahn? Isn’t the parallel obvious?

Wolfi reads me part of a letter his father sent his mother during their courtship:

I cannot explain what I feel as I write to you. I feel I am dreaming, and I can hardly believe myself, my heart. I think of you, of all the things that could give you pleasure, of the best ways to embellish the life we will lead together. I think of our nest –

Nest!

That’s what it says: nest. Ich stelle mir unser Nest vor—I think of or imagine our little nest.

But this doesn’t fit the picture I have of your father at all. Not from what you’ve told me.

I know, incredible isn’t it. But you haven’t heard anything yet. Just listen to this. Now where was I…ah yes, our little nest. I think of our little nest, of the house that will welcome us; I am building up a whole world of plans for the future…The dawn of my new life has put to flight forever the mists that were clouding my mind. Now the future appears clearly before my eyes. Now my sun is born! You are my sun, my peace, my purpose. I have your image present and living before my eyes. On the journey back I gazed for hours at the star you liked. I am awaiting your portrait impatiently. When will it come? As soon as possible, I beg you…Think of me, love me…You will love me, you must love me because I…

These last few words Wolfi delivers in a melodramatic parody. He clearly knows these lines well. With the piece of paper held in his outstretched hand above his head, he clutches desperately at the lapel of his coat with the other.

And to think that my mother was sucked in by this crap.

On Wolfi’s notice-board there is a postcard of a painting of an adolescent girl. The format is unusual. It is shaped like an open doorway or window. The girl in the painting is naked. Closer inspection, however, shows that she is still wearing a slipper on her right foot. She is half sitting on a bed and although her body faces us her head is turned sharply to her right. One leg, her left leg, is stretched out so that her foot rests on the floor, although this is not shown. The other leg lies along the bed and is drawn up under her. Against the darker background the soft flesh tones of her body appear almost orange, as though she is lit by the glow from a late afternoon sun.