The Hothouse (10 page)

After a few months in the Canadian logging camp, they separated the inmates into black sheep and white, and Keetenheuve, put up and vouched for by a Quaker, returned to London.

He spoke in England. He fought behind the microphone, and he fought not least for Germany, he thought, for peace and the fall of the tyrant; it was a good fight, and not one to be ashamed of. An end to madness, was the slogan, and an early end would have been useful to the world, and extremely useful for Germany. Keetenheuve felt he stood shoulder to shoulder with anyone rebellious, including those in the military, the men of the 20 July
{9}
He said as much to Mergentheim.

But he gave back: "I'm not a missionary. I'm a journalist. Take a look at the members' register of the High House! Resistance is something your colleagues have already-scrubbed from their vitas. This is the latest edition here. You seem to be stuck with the last one. And that's been pulped! Don't you get it! Why don't you make peace! There are plenty of people who say they can do business with your boss, but they can't talk to you. Knurrewahn was a noncommissioned officer. You confuse him. They call you his evil spirit. You make him wobble." Keetenheuve said: "That would be worth doing. That would mean I was getting somewhere. If Knurrewahn hesitates, he'll begin to think. And thinking will make him hesitate still more about his politics.'' Mergentheim interrupted him impatiently "You're mad," he cried. "You're past help. But I've got one more thing to say to you: you'll lose. You'll lose more than you can imagine. This time you won't be able to emigrate. Where would you go? Your former friends think like us about most things, and every continent, I tell you, every continent is sealed by mistrust. Maybe you're just a gnat. But the elephants and tigers are afraid of you. And you'd better watch out for them."

The ships corridor between the press offices didn't sway any more than it usually did under his departing steps. He didn't have any feeling of going down or personal risk. Mergentheim's warning didn't particularly bother Keetenheuve. It only made him sadder, and he was sad already; but it isn't shocking to hear a confirmation of what one has already known and been afraid of for a long time, in this case the national restoration, the restorative nationalism, that everything was pointing toward. The borders weren't falling. They were going up again.

And then a man was back in the cage he'd been born into, the cage called Fatherland, which dangled along with a bunch of other cages called Fatherland, all on a rod, which a great collector of cages and peoples was carrying deeper into history. Of course Keetenheuve loved his country, loved it as much as anyone who noisily said so, perhaps even more because he'd been away from it for a long time, had missed it, and had idealized it from a distance.
Keetenheuve Romantic.
But he didn't want to sit in a cage, access to which was controlled by the police, who only let you out with a passport that you had to get off the head of the cage, and then it went on from there, you stood in the inhospitable space between cages, and you rubbed up against all the bars, and to get into one of the other cages you needed something called a visa, a residence permit from the head of that cage. He didn't like giving permission. In all the cages, they were worried about declining population numbers, but the only additions that were welcome came from the wombs of the female denizens of the cage, and that was a terrible image of the lack of freedom all over the world. Another factor was that you were swung on the pole that the great cage bearer had over his shoulder. Who could say where he was going? And did you have any say in the matter? You and your cage might wind up on the pole of the other cage bearer, who was just as unpredictable as the first (and who knows what daemon, what idée fixe was actuating him) in heading for the unknown—an anabasis that would be taught to the children in time. On his way out of the press building, of the news ship, beside the pine table with the communiqués, Keetenheuve ran into Philip Dana, a God of true rumors, high above ebb and flow of official proclamations, sifting the meager fare. Dana took Keetenheuve by the hand and led him off to his room.

The Nestor of the foreign correspondents was an old man, and handsome. He was the handsomest of all the handsome and busy old men in politics. With his shining snowy mane and his fresh complexion, he looked as though he'd just come in from the gale that he had caused to blow around his ears. It was hard to tell whether Dana was a personality of his own, or whether he only seemed to be important because he had spoken to celebrities and notorieties, who perhaps had only been able to give the world and themselves the illusion of importance, because Philip Dana had interviewed them on the telephone. At bottom, he despised the statesmen he interviewed; he had seen too many of that ilk rise, glitter, fall, and sometimes dangle from a gallows, which secretly was a more pleasing sight to Dana than seeing them robust and self-justifying in their presidential armchairs, or lying in state with their contented smile of natural death in their fat faces, while their people were cursing them. Dana had been present at every war and every conference that followed the fighting and paved way for a fresh wave of hostilities for forty years now; he had been fed diplomatic lies by the shovelful, he had seen blind men as leaders and had vainly tried to warn the deaf of approaching catastrophe, he had met rabid dogs who wrapped themselves in the flag, and Lenin, Chiang Kai-shek, Kaiser Wilhelm, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin had all stood before him in white angels' robes, with a dove on their shoulder, and the palm branch in their hand, and blessed was peace on earth. Dana had drunk with Roosevelt and dined with Negus, he had known cannibals and true saints, he had witnessed all the insurrections, the revolutions, the civil wars of our era, and invariably he had seen the defeat of ordinary people. The vanquished were no better than the victors; they only seemed briefly more attractive because they were the vanquished. The world whose pulse Dana had taken was now waiting for his memoirs, but it was his present to the world that he wasn't writing them—it would have been one long horror story. And so, mild and it would appear wise, he sat in Bonn, in a rocking chair (he had set it in his office for comfort and for the symbolism of it), and as he rocked he observed the to-and-fro of world politics in a diminished, but still neuralgic, way. Bonn was Dana's last detail; perhaps his grave. It was less taxing than Korea would have been, but here too he could hear the seed of incomprehension sprouting, and watch the grass of discord and inevitability grow. Keetenheuve knew Dana from the old
Volksblatt
days. Keetenheuve had written a piece for the
Volksblatt
on the great transport strike in Berlin, in which the Nazis and the Communists had briefly formed a bizarre, expedient, and highly volatile unity front, and Dana had picked this up for his international news-gathering service, and found readers for Keetenheuve all over the world. Later, Keetenheuve ran into Dana in London. Dana was writing a book on Hitler, which he conceived and sold as a best-seller; he turned his revulsion to good account. Keetenheuve's own antipathy to the Browns had merely served to impoverish and unhouse him, and he half envied Dana's diligence, with the caveat that Dana's book on the seducer was nothing but a best-seller, a smooth and canny piece of work.

God was in a good mood. He passed Keetenheuve a sheet from a news agency with which he stood in regular contact. Keetenheuve straightway spotted the item that Dana had wanted him to see, it was a bulletin from the Conseil Supérieur des Forces Armées, an interview with French and British generals, who were in the process of setting up a European army, and who saw the evolution of the peace, cemented by treaties, portending a perpetuation of the division of Germany; in their eyes, this division was the one positive outcome of the past war. In the context of the Federal Republic this was dynamite. Its kilotonnage would be highly significant if it were detonated at the right moment in parliament. There was no doubt about that. Only, Keetenheuve was no thrower of bombs. With that news, though, he could strengthen and support Knurrewahn, who dreamed of becoming the man of reunification (a common enough dream). But had the newspapers not picked up on the report yet, and run with it, so that the government would be tipped off, and have their denials already in place? Dana indicated no. The press in the Republic would give the interview little space, if any. The delight of the generals was too touchy a matter, a real body blow for the government, and so, at best, it would be tucked away somewhere where it would be overlooked. Keetenheuve had his dynamite. But he didn't care for explosives. All politics were squalid, it was like gang warfare, the means were dirty and divisive; even someone who was on the side of good, might easily become another Mephistopheles, who invariably does ill; for what was good and what ill, in this field that stretched, like a vast empire, far into the future? Keetenheuve looked sadly out the open window at the rain now spurting again like steam. Through the window came the botanical smell of warm dampish soil and plant mulch, and pale lightnings twitched over the hothouse. Even the storms seemed to be manmade here, an artificial entertainment in the restoration businesses of Fatherland & Sons, Inc., and Dana, the mild and experienced old man, had dropped off in spite of the rumble of thunder. He lay back in his sensitive rocking chair, a balanced observer, a sleeper, and a dreamer. He was dreaming of the Goddess of Peace, but unfortunately the goddess came to him in his dream in the guise of Irene, an Annamite prostitute, whom Dana had consorted with a quarter of a century ago, in a brothel in Saigon. Soft had been her arms, frisky as small rushing streams, and her skin had smelled of flowers. Dana had fallen asleep peacefully in the arms of the peaceful Irene, only later to have to take bitter medicine. That's the way it was with the Goddess of Peace. It's a game.
We're playing cops and robbers cops and robbers again and again

3

K
EETENHEUVE
HAD
GONE
TO
HIS
OFFICE
IN
THE
NEW
section of the Bundeshaus, the annex built onto the Pedagogic Academy. The corridors and the MPs' offices were floored with a waxy, dust-free linoleum. In their gleaming salubriousness, they were reminiscent of the antiseptic wards of a clinic, and maybe the politics that were practiced here on the sick electorate were sterile as well. In his office, Keetenheuve might be a few steps closer to heaven, but he was no nearer to clarity; new clouds and new thunderstorms kept rolling up, and the horizon was draped in brooding black or sulfurous mists. To help his concentration, Keetenheuve had switched on the neon lighting and sat in a kind of twilight where its brilliance encountered the uncertain light of day. His desk was full of mail, full of petitions, full of cries for help; it was full of abuse and insoluble difficulties. Under the neon, Elke was eyeing him. It was just a little picture of her that he had here, a snapshot of her with untidy hair in a street of rubble (but dear to him, because that was how he had found her), but now it seemed to him as if she was as big as a flickering shadow on the cinema screen, and her hair was now brushed, and she was regarding him with friendly mockery, as if to say: "Well, you can have your politics now and your deals, because you're rid of me!" It pained Keetenheuve to hear her talking like that, particularly as it was her voice from the grave that was talking to him, and that could no longer be revised. He picked up Elke's picture and put it away. He filed Elke away, laid her
ad acta.
But what did that mean,
ad acta
,
to be filed? The files were unimportant, and what was important, whether it appeared in the files or not, was current and pending, was there all by itself, and would remain until sleep, until dream, until death. Keetenheuve put off the moment of dealing with his correspondence, the pleas and the abuse, the letters from professional beggars, moaners, business people, and madmen, the cries of despair—he would have liked to sweep the lot of them off his desk. He picked up a sheet of official stationery, and wrote out
"Le beau navire
"
"The beautiful ship," because Elke had reminded him of that wonderful poem in praise of women, that was how he wanted her to live on in his memory, and he tried to translate Baudelaire's deathless lines from memory, '
'je veux te raconter, o molle enchanteresse,"
I want to say to you, let me tell you, let me confess to you . . . , he liked that, he wanted to confess to Elke that he loved her, that he missed her, he was looking for the right word, the
mot juste,
he thought, he scribbled, he crossed out, he emended, he sank back in feelings of aesthetic melancholy. Was he lying? No, he felt it; his love was great, and his sorrow profound, but along with them was an undertow of vanity and self-pity and the suspicion that, in poetry and in love, he was a dilettante. He bewailed Elke, but he also dreaded the desolation he had called for all his life, and which now gripped him. He translated from
The Flowers of Evil,
"
o
molle enchanteresse,"
my sweet, my soft, my warm rapture,
o my soft
,
my smooth
,
my enraptured word;
—he didn't have anyone to write to. There were a hundred letters on his desk, wails, bewildered stammerings, and cursings, but no one was expecting a letter from him, except by way of reply. Keetenheuve had written Elke letters from Bonn, and if they were written with one eye on posterity as well, still Elke had been much more than a postal address; she was the medium that permitted him to speak and put him in touch with the world. Pale as one of the damned, Keetenheuve sat in the Bundeshaus, pale lightnings twitched outside his window, clouds freighted with electricity, charged with the emissions from the chimneys of the Ruhr, steaming broody mists, gassy, toxic, and sulfurous, eerie untamed nature moved stormily past the roof and walls of the hothouse, whistling its contempt and its scorn for the sensitive plant within, the grieving man, the Baudelaire translator and MP in his neon cell the other side of the window. And so the time passed until Knurrewahn sent for him.