The Hothouse (11 page)

They lived symbiotically, in the way that different creatures lived together for mutual advantage; but they weren't sure they weren't damaging themselves as well. Knurrewahn might have contended that Keetenheuve was bad for his soul. Only, Knurrewahn, an autodidact from the period before the First World War, when he had stuffed himself with a progressive-minded and optimistic literature that even then was no longer new (the riddles of the world had all been solved, and once he'd got rid of his ill-advised god, man needed only to put his house in order), denied the existence of the soul. And so the discomfort he experienced through Keetenheuve was comparable to the irritation that a conscientious noncommissioned officer might feel with a one-year volunteer who doesn't understand the point of training and, worse, can't make himself take it seriously. Unfortunately, though, the army needed its one-year volunteers, and the party needed Keetenheuve, who (Knurrewahn guessed) wasn't an officer at all, wasn't even officer material, but was a straightforward confidence trickster, a vagabond, who for some reason, perhaps bound up with his arrogant manner, was taken for an officer. On this last point, Knurrewahn erred; Keetenheuve was not arrogant, he was merely unconventional, and that struck Knurrewahn as the height of arrogance, and so in the end it was he who took Keetenheuve for an officer, whereas Keetenheuve himself would have been quite happy to admit he was something else, a drifter, for example. He respected Knurrewahn, whom he called a boss from the old school, which was said slightly mockingly, but not unpleasantly, whereas when it was reported back to Knurrewahn's ears, it sounded irritating and conceited. He truly was a man from the old school, though, a craftsman from a family of craftsmen, who had aspired first to knowledge, and then to justice, and once knowledge and justice had turned out to be uncertain of definition and always on a sliding scale, to power and control. Knurrewahn didn't want to make the world do his bidding either, but he did think he could be a force for good in it. And as such, he needed companions and helpers, and he had come across Keetenheuve, who didn't strengthen him, but only confused him. Keetenheuve wasn't the type to make a fourth at cards, and he wasn't a beer drinker, and that excluded him from the circle of fellows that gathered around Knurrewahn of an evening, raising their tankards and slapping down their cards, fellows who decided the fate of the party, but who didn't make up a government in waiting and who couldn't even organize the proverbial piss-up in a brewery.

Knurrewahn had been through a lot; but it hadn't made him wise. He had had a kind heart; now it had steeled itself. He had come home from the First World War with a bullet lodged in him, and to the surprise of the doctors he had survived; it was at a time that the medical profession still hadn't known that a man could live with a bullet in his heart, and Knurrewahn had gone from one hospital to the next as a living corpse, until he became cleverer than his doctors, accepted a job in the party, and by diligence and occasionally with the help of his remarkable wound, which made its appearance on election posters, was promoted to member of the Reichstag. In 1933, some veterans appealing to veteran values threw the veteran Knurrewahn, who carried the veteran experience around with him in the form of a piece of lead in his heart, into a camp. His son, who, it had been hoped, would continue the academic ascent of the family, was instead, following an older family tradition, apprenticed to a carpenter, and, embittered about the loss of status, and angry with his father's political misjudgments, and in the deluded belief that he had to prove himself (all over the country there were appalling examples of people proving themselves), he volunteered for the Condor Legion in Spain, where he met his death as a
monteur.
Keetenheuve too had entertained the idea of Spain, and he too, to prove himself, only on the other side (he hadn't done it, and he sometimes reproached himself for having failed here as well), and it wouldn't have taken much for Keetenheuve in an ack-ack emplacement outside Madrid to bring down Knurrewahns son out of the southern sky. The lines of battle snaked right through the middle of countries, and most of those who were flying or shooting no longer remembered what had caused them to fetch up on one side of the front or the other. Knurrewahn never got it. He was a patriot, and his opposition to the government's nationalist politics was, so to speak, a patriotic opposition. Knurrewahn wanted to be the liberator and the unifier of the divided Fatherland, he could already see himself as the Bismarck statue in Knurrewahn Park, and he forgot all about his old dream of the International. In his youth, this International with its red flags had stood for human rights. In 1914, it had died. The new era marched behind different flags, and whatever was still around and called itself International now were little groupings with numbers after their proud names, factions and sects, which didn't exemplify peace at all, but all too evidently discord, from the way they were forever at one another's throats. Maybe Knurrewahn was right to fear an old mistake. In his opinion, the party's position had been insufficiently patriotic in the first German Republic; it hadn't found any support from the already splintered International, and within the nation it had lost the masses, who had been drawn away from it by the siren words of primitive nationalistic egoism. This time, Knurrewahn meant to make sure the patriotic wind would not be taken from his sails. He was in favor of having an army, the burnt child doesn't always fear the flame, but he was in favor of a troop of patriots (the French Revolution blinded him with folly, and perhaps Napoleon was
redivivus
), he was in favor of generals, so long as they were socialist and democratic generals. Fool, thought Keetenheuve, the generals weren't as stupid as they looked, they would lead Knurrewahn up the garden path, they would promise him the earth, they would lay down and open their legs for him, they wanted to bulk up their staffs, they kept half an eye on their shopping lists, they wanted their toys and their sandboxes to play with. What happened now, nobody knew. Tailors like to sew. National regeneration was one of those dicey things. Maybe that wind had lost some of its puff. A patriotic government, cleverer and wilier now, might sail under an international breeze, and a nationalist Knurrewahn might find himself becalmed, instead of making the running as an internationalist, a race with new ideals for sails, making for new shores. Unfortunately, he couldn't see them. He could see neither the new ideals nor the new shores. He failed to enthuse, because he lacked enthusiasm himself. He was like the populist figures out of cheap nationalist and socialist pamphlets, he wanted to be a Bismarck cleansed of hysteria and unscrupulousness, an Arndt, a Stein, a Hardenberg, and a bit of a Bebel, all rolled into one. Lassalle
{10}
was a portrait of the MP as a young man. That young man hadn't made it; the doctors had been right after all, and he hadn't managed to survive the bullet in his heart. The Knurrewahn of today looked good in the homburg he didn't wear. He was a stubborn, ornery so-and-so, not just at cards, he was as stubborn and ornery in his way as Prussia's old soldier king, or as Hindenburg, and so in politics everything had its wires crossed, the winds paid no attention to the courses the parties were trying to keep, and only weather charts, which no one understood, perplexing lines traced between points that had the same temperature (though they might be far apart in other ways) showed the fronts and warned of the impending storm. In a situation like that, Knurrewahn could no longer orient himself, and he clung to Keetenheuve (his well-intentioned Mephistopheles) that he might take the helm and, in the dark and starless sky, steer the little ship by the seat of his pants.

It was progressive chez Knurrewahn, in a style that he held to be radical and that corresponded roughly to the aesthetic of a bourgeois art monthly. The furniture was practical, the chairs comfortable; furniture, chairs, lamps, and curtains were all the sort of thing that might have appeared in the window display of an interior designer of moderately progressive outlook, labeled 'The Modern Chief Executive's Office," and the bunch of red flowers bought and tended by his secretary stood in exactly the right place, under the watery Weser landscape on the wall. It tickled Keetenheuve to imagine Knurrewahn reading cowboy stories in his chair, but the head of the party had no time for private reading. He listened to Keetenheuve's report, and at the mention of the generals of the Conseil Supérieur des Forces Armées, glamour and treachery entered the room, the perfidy and arrogance of the wicked world, he could see the foreign military men striding across the German weft of his carpets in their riding boots and silver spurs, the French like odalisques in their baggy red pants, and the Brits ready to beat a tattoo on his desk with their little sticks. Knurrewahn was dismayed. He waxed indignant, whereas Keetenheuve could understand the generals talking about the perpetuation of the division of Germany as a scant gain from the last war from the point of view of their specialization. An expert opinion was always going to be narrow, and in this case it was the opinion of generals, so it was bound to be of limited intelligence as well. Knurrewahn didn't share this view; generals impressed him, whereas Keetenheuve tended to bracket them with firemen. The bullet burned in Knurrewahn's heart, the lead that was flesh of his flesh burned, and it was the pain of youth that animated and rejuvenated him. He felt hatred. It was a hatred, furthermore, that the leader of the socialist peace party could afford to feel, a double hatred, doubly legitimated and doubly founded, it was a hatred of the class enemy and the nation's enemy, which presented itself to him and his rage in the same group of persons. Fundamentally, it was the name of their confraternity that sounded arrogant to his ears, it was the expression Conseil Supérieur des Forces Armées that riled Knurrewahn, and that Keetenheuve had held out to him in elegant and calculated provocation, like the torero his cape.

Keetenheuve loved it when Knurrewahn lost his rag. What a magnificent man he still was, with his massive skull, and his Iron Cross shyly in its little box in his desk drawer, and the medal for his wound, both of them wrapped, as it might be, in the release form from the concentration camp and the farewell note from his son before he went off to find his death, fighting for the Condor Legion. But now Keetenheuve had to concentrate, lest Knurrewahn slip away. The party leader wanted to advertise the generals' interview, and let people know what the heads of the European army thought of Germany. He wanted the words
Permanent division
posted on the walls, and then to turn to the people: "See, we are betrayed and sold down the river, this is where the governments policy has landed us!" But such an action would be to defuse the bomb for parliament; the Chancellor would organize the denials and the statements of support from the European powers before the matter was even discussed in the plenary, and in the end only the fly-poster would be called mean and treacherous. There might be public agitation, but that would have little effect; the government wouldn't be put off by public opinion. Knurrewahn believed that the generals, who had expressed themselves so satisfied about the partition of Germany, couldn't simply be denied, but Keetenheuve knew that the politicians in England and France would call their generals to order. They would give them a rebuke because (and on this point it was Keetenheuve who was biased) foreign generals accepted rebukes from their political masters, whereas German generals automatically represented actual power in the state, and they would restore what seemed to them the natural order of things, namely the primacy of the military over the political. The German general was to Keetenheuve a malignancy on the German people, and even his respect for the generals who were murdered by Hitler wasn't enough to affect his judgment on this point. He detested the old barracks types, who, with expressions of fatherly decency, addressed adult citizens as "my lads" or "my boys," and promptly packed his boys off to their deaths. Keetenheuve had seen the people sickening and dying from this outbreak of generals; and who, if not the generals, was responsible for growing the Braunau bacillus! Force had always led only to misery and defeat, and Keetenheuve wanted to give nonviolence a chance of procuring moral victory, if not happiness. Was that the much touted Final Victory? It meant that Keetenheuve could be only a temporary ally for Knurrewahn, who dreamed sincerely of a German national army, and a German people's general, a fit and unpretentious man in gray mountaineer's garb, who shared meals with his troops, and, a good and solicitous father, would share them just as readily with his prisoners. Keetenheuve wanted an end to prisoners, and for that he needed Knurrewahn to oppose the Chancellor's plans for rearmament, but the day would certainly come when he would have to turn his opposition to his friend's much more dangerous idea of a people's army. Keetenheuve espoused a pure pacifism, a putting down of weapons, once and for all! He knew what responsibility he was taking upon himself, it was oppressive and it gave him sleepless nights, but even though there was no one of like mind in the Republic, and he was friendless and misunderstood in West and East alike, the lesson he persisted in drawing from history was that the abjuring of force and self-defense had never brought such evil in its train as their use. And when there were no more armies, then the frontiers would fall; the idea of sovereign nation states that was such an anachronism in the age of jet travel (you broke the sound barrier, but stuck to air corridors that had been dug by maniacs) would be renounced, and man would be free and free to move, and free, in fact, as a bird. Knurrewahn gave in. He thought he probably gave in too much and too often, but he gave in again, throttled back his fury, and they agreed that Keetenheuve would use the generals' little moment of crowing as a surprise weapon during the debate on the security contracts.

He went back to his room. He sat down in the neon again. He left the tubes on, even though the sky was now clear and bright, and the sun, momentarily, bathed everything in a brilliant light. The Rhine sparkled. An excursion steamer plowed past in the white spray of its wheels, and the passengers could be seen pointing at the Bundeshaus. Keeteneuve was dazzled. The translation of the
"beau navire"
had been left unfinished among unopened correspondence, and more had arrived now, more cries for help, more screeds, more complaints, more castigations of the Honorable Member, they came flowing in like the water of the river outside, faithfully scooped up onto the table by postmen and clerical staff, without abatement. Keetenheuve was the addressee of a nation of letter writers; it drained him, and only the intuition of the moment saved him from the flood that otherwise would have broken over his head. He devised a speech to hold in front of the assembly. He would shine! A dilettante in matters of love, a dilettante in poetry, and a dilettante in politics—and he would shine. Who else could save them, if not a dilettante? The experts, sexperts, texperts, were still following their old paths into old deserts. They had never led anywhere else, and it took a dilettante to stumble upon the Promised Land, the kingdom flowing with milk and honey. Keetenheuve poured himself a brandy. The thought of honey flowing somewhere was disagreeable to him. And the description of the Promised Land should not be taken literally either, that was why children didn't find it, why they grew tired, grew up, and set up as tax lawyers, which says everything that needs to be known about the condition of the world. Our forefathers had been expelled from Paradise. That was a fact. Now, was there a way back? There wasn't even the most tenuous path to be seen, but then again the path might be invisible, or maybe there were millions upon millions of invisible steps that lay in front of everyone, just waiting to be trodden. Keetenheuve had to follow his conscience; but a conscience was no more visible and palpable than the right way, and you only heard it bleating very occasionally, and that was something you might equally attribute to circulation disorders. His heart was irregular, and his writing slithered on the smooth official notepaper. Frost-Forestier rang to ask if Keetenheuve would like to have lunch with him. He would send his car around to pick him up. Was that the declaration of war? Keetenheuve thought it was. He accepted the invitation. It was time. They wanted to get rid of him. They wanted to set the pistol to his chest and blackmail him. Mergentheim had known it already. Very well, he would fight. He left the correspondence, he left the files, he left the Baudelaire translation, he left his notes for the debate, and the page from the news agency that Dana had given him, he left everything lying in the neon, which he forgot to switch off, because the sun was still shining, and its light broke in thousand prisms in the mirror of the river and in the droplets on the green leaves on the tops of the trees. It shone, dazzled, glittered, sparkled, flashed.