Out of the Line of Fire (8 page)

She appears to have no pubic hair. Either she is too young, although this is unlikely because there are shadows clearly indicating her developing breasts, or the artist has chosen not to depict it. Her weight falls heavily on her right buttock and her torso is noticeably twisted upright in order for her to maintain her balance. Because of this one can feel the tension in the muscles of her right leg. Her arms are held high, as if she is using her hands to adjust a clip in her hair. Or perhaps she is merely stretching. This accounts for the title of the picture:
Nu aux bras lev
é
s.
In front of her is an ill-defined mass of crimson, while in the extreme foreground is the back and part of the seat of a simple chair.

It is only as you come back to view the composition as a whole that you realize that you, as viewer, are standing at the point from which the girl’s body would have been lit and that this is intentional. You are the picture’s illumination.

Why is it that having made this realization I can no longer look at the painting purely in terms of its pictorial content? What complex chemical reaction has taken place to effect this minute, but irrevocable, change to the overall composition of my self? Does Henriette Gomes, who owns the painting, also view it in this way?

On the back Wolfi had scrawled: ‘Was war die eigentliche Beziehung zwischen Rilke und der Mutter des Künstlers?’ [What was the real nature of Rilke’s relationship with the artist’s mother?].

It is also curious to note that the anonymous donations upon which Rilke was forced to live from time to time came, in fact, from Ludwig Wittgenstein.

At the bottom of Hauptstrasse is Bismarckplatz, Heidelberg’s busiest tram and bus terminus. On one side of Bismarckplatz is Bismarckgarten and on the other side, Hortens, a large department store. Outside Hortens under the plane tree near Sophienstrasse is a lotto-ticket stand. Beside this is a large three-sided billboard. Pedestrians walking down Hauptstrasse wishing to cross Sophienstrasse at the traffic lights are confronted with one facet of this billboard as they step back onto the kerb. It advertises the movies that are on show in the nearby porno theatre. Its displays change regularly but it usually shows some variation on the same theme—a naked woman sits looking (seductively?) back at the viewer. She is half reclined, her legs are spread. One finger is suggestively placed in her mouth. By law her pubes, but not her breasts, are required to be obscured.

When Wolfi asked me if I wanted to see a porno movie with him, I assumed he had some other purpose in mind.

What for? I asked.

I’ve never seen one.

You mean to say you’ve been to a prostitute but you’ve never seen a porno movie?

Yes. But as I’ve already told you, with Andrea it was different.

Scham
(f), no pl. 1) Shame

er wurde rot vor— , he went red with shame

die—stieg ihm ins Gesicht (old), he blushed with shame

Metaphor has been described as the yoking together of two fundamentally different experiences. If this is so, what sort of etymological commentary is this on the German people? How much does a language’s metaphoric resonance shape the consciousness of a nation? Wie deutsch ist es, eigentlich? [How German is it, really?]. It is no wonder that Freud was a native German speaker. [Es ist kein Wunder.]

‘Sex is such a weird business.’ Wolfi’s only comment after we left the theatre.

Elena sent me the most wonderful poster today [ein wunderschönes Plakat] and a photo of her and Anya. You must come down and have a look at them some time.

The poster, in black and white, is an advertisement for Herzen’s new ballet
Die Marquise von O
, based on Heinrich von Kleist’s powerful story of the same name. It is to be performed by the Vienna Dance Company and will be Elena’s first lead role. The poster shows her as Giulietta in a scene from the first act. She is lying in a swoon in the foreground of a dark, atmospherically lit stage. The lighting emphasizes the deep flowing folds in her gown. Her face is upturned and one hand lies across her breast. Lying there she has the same air of absolute serenity about her that many of Raphael’s portraits of the Madonna have.

In the background, to the far left of the stage, a single small floodlight reveals the face and shoulders of a young Russian officer standing in a doorway. He is looking back over his shoulder towards the figure of Giulietta lying on the floor.

The photograph of Elena and Anya is in complete contrast. It has been taken with a Polaroid camera and shows Elena in jeans and a white T-shirt waving back at the camera. On her hip, supported by Elena’s other arm, is Anya. She must be about two years old and she too is waving excitedly back at the camera. Unlike Wolfi she is fair haired but she has the same piercing blue eyes. Scrawled along the bottom of the photograph is: ‘Viele Grüsse von Deinen zwei Lieblingen’ [A big hello from your two little darlings].

On November 20, 1811 Henriette Vogel, Kleist’s lover, wrote on the bottom of one of his letters to their friend Sophie Müller:

Lebt wohl denn! Ihr, meine lieben Freunde, und erinnert Euch in Freud und Leid der zwei wunderlichen Menschen, die bald ihre grosse Entdeckungsreise antreten werden.

[So, my dear friends, live well and in your joy and your sorrow remember the two wonderful people who are about to embark on their great journey of discovery.]

The next morning they went for a walk in the forest near Potsdam. They sat on a bench in the filtered sunlight and talked softly, joyously to one another for a few moments. Then, as arranged, Kleist took the pistol from his pocket and, with Henriette looking towards the lake sparkling through the trees, he shot her through the heart. Then he reloaded the pistol and shot himself.

In 1979, Christa Wolf published a novel entitled
Kein Ort. Nirgends
[No place. Nowhere]. It is a fictional account of a meeting between Kleist and the young poet Karoline von Günderode. Why, we are entitled to ask, did she choose Kleist and von Günderode? What is the real connection? Is it simply that in 1806, when Professor Friedrich Creuzer abandoned his intention to dissolve his marriage in order to marry Karoline, she too took her own life? Surely there is more to it than that?

Creuzer, who was a classical philologist, was professor at Heidelberg from 1807 to 1845. When Karoline died she was only twenty-six.

The teleology of memory

Die Teleologie des Erinnerungsvermögens

Are memories only reliable when they serve as an explanation? Is the powerful integrative function of human consciousness, whereby difference is recognized, categorized and assimilated, fundamentally metonymic? Is it also arbitrary?

Do I understand Wolfi correctly?

Sind Erinnerungen nur zuverlässig wenn sie uns als Erkläearungen dienen? Ist die starke integrierende Funktion des menschlichen Bewusstseins, wodurch Unterschiede erkannt, klassifiziert und aufgenommen werden, im Grunde metonymisch? Ist sie auch arbiträr?

I am beginning to realize how sketchy my real knowledge of Wolfi is. His phrase, ‘the teleology of memory’, makes me wonder whether in writing about him I am selecting what I remember of him to fit my conception of the person I thought he was. I know now how incomplete my knowledge of him is and how much what I knew of him then was built up from intangible things: silences on the bus; laughter over meals at the university; his peculiar way of squinting, like a pup unsure whether it was going to be patted or scolded; his habit of dancing from one foot to the other when he was excited; watching the changing pattern of moods sweep across his face as we walked in the cool forest air; or listening to his voice during hours of conversation about nothing.

Moreover, there were things he remained obstinately secretive about. I knew he was seeing a girl or a woman in Heidelberg. I used to catch glimpses of them together occasionally, but he never mentioned her and was evasive about her when I did. I used to pick up the mail from time to time so I knew also that he had an old girlfriend in Klagenfurt who wrote to him regularly. And then there was the photograph on his notice-board of a woman named Marta from Berlin with whom he said he was in love.

I am also aware that writing about him has begun to distort my understanding of him. Another Wolfi has been created who exists beside the real one in a relationship of narrational parallax. This shift is even more marked given the volume of material I now have which Wolfi actually wrote himself.

In addition to this, I ask myself how subconsciously easy has it been to suppress information that
appears
to have no connection with him or that is functionless in terms of any narrative momentum. How objective
have
I been? Worse, how much of myself have I inadvertently introduced into my portrait of him? How true, I ask myself, is one able to remain to reality in the first place? Why is it that there is no real sense of place or time in this account of him? How far can one go before the narrative fabric breaks down?

So what have you been up to this time?

I went to see Simenon.

What for?

To talk to him about women.

What did he say?

Nothing. He wasn’t there.

At the end of June, as planned, I went to Rome for a month to look through the papers that formed part of the Ingeborg Bachmann archive at the Biblioteca Nazionale. By this time Wolfi had already decided to leave Heidelberg to continue his studies in Berlin. My return was calculated to precede his departure by a week.

In the event, however, the day before I was due to leave Rome, Italy was paralyzed by yet another rail strike and I ended up being stranded in the capital. I decided to call Wolfi from the pensione I was staying at to let him know what was happening. Frau Bartsch had answered the phone. I told her who I was and asked to speak to Wolfi.

Er ist schon weg, she said gruffly.

Gone! I said. When? When did he go?

Vor zwei Wochen.

There was a malicious tone to her voice, as if to say: See, I told you so. You can’t trust a word anybody says these days.

Two weeks ago, I repeated a little stunned. Did he say where he was going?

Berlin.

Berlin. I could hear the resignation in my own voice.

Ja, Berlin.

Then she hung up.

When I got back to Heidelberg, Wolfi had indeed gone. He left no messages, nothing. It was as though he had never existed, and a couple of weeks later I returned to Australia without having seen or heard from him again.

In September 1982, after more than a year had gone by, a carefully wrapped cardboard carton turned up on my doorstep completely unannounced from Germany. Inside were bundles of papers, news-clippings, letters, postcards and God knows what. There was also an infuriatingly brief note which read:

‘Vielleicht kannst
Du
etwas damit anfangen.’

[Perhaps
you
can make something of this.]

I have been cast; to play for no audience and no applause, but solely for the sake of the performance itself which I am and beyond which I am nothing.

Heidegger

Und wie steht Kant dazu [Where does Kant stand on this]? He claimed that we cannot know things as they really are through sense perception. If space and time are contributed through the knowing mind then spatial and temporal objects will be altered in the very act of being apprehended. It follows then that the world known through the senses can be no more than a phenomenal world and that above this phenomenal world is another world of real objects, knowable not to the senses but to reason. The ideas of space and time he says are ‘intuitive’ rather than conceptual; moreover they are ‘pure’ intuitions insofar as the essential nature of their referents is known in advance of experience and not as a result of it. This is an extraordinary statement; the extraordinariness [Sonderbarkeit] of which seems to have escaped Kant. Elsewhere he says: ‘Reason lacks intuitive power, we cannot be acquainted with things as they are.’

If
reason
lacks intuitive power
and
we cannot know things as they are through sense perception, where do we go from here?

*

The year before moving into the new house, my father decided we would spend the summer vacation in Yugoslavia.

A few months earlier, against my father’s wishes, my mother had come to rescue me one morning from my prison, after the school authorities had informed her that I had collapsed the previous day during one of the ‘training’ sessions and had had to be taken to the nearby infirmary. That morning the sun had been shining and when my mother was shown into my room she hurried anxiously to my bedside and began covering me with kisses. She had been crying and I was a little overwhelmed by her quite open display of emotion until I realized that it represented not only her concern for my wellbeing but a long-suppressed victory over my father. She had finally dared to go against his will.

After we collected my things we said a relieved goodbye to Colonel Kollwitz, the school’s headmaster. He muttered something ambiguous about military schools not being the place for ‘dreamers or women’, shook my hand and showed us awkwardly to the door. We then took the taxi that had been ordered for us on the short journey to the nearby train station.

It was a perfect day, warm and sunny, and we were virtually the only people at the tiny station. My mother had recovered from her anxiety and now sat composed and smiling on one of the platform’s wooden benches. It reminded me of the times when the three of us, Elena, my mother and I, used to go walking in the woods near Klagenfurt or in the beautiful gardens of the university. Instead of feeling nervously exhausted I now felt euphoric. As I paced up and down waiting for the train I watched my mother sitting there, our luggage and one large trunk beside her. I felt like a poet, exhilarated, free and wonderfully alive. All my mother needed was a brightly coloured parasol and we would have been transported back a hundred years. She kept laughing as I ran along the platform kicking my heels in the air. I remember the fat, uniformed station master stepping out from his office at the far end of the platform and standing there for a few moments watching me as he puffed on his cigar. He had pulled a white handkerchief out of his top pocket, took his glasses off and cleaned them. Then he looked down the tracks in the opposite direction, shook his head and went back inside.