The Hothouse (13 page)

He ordered a salmon, a salmon from the Rhine, and straightaway he regretted it, he imagined the waiters a-leaping, the formally tail-coated welcoming committee of death, overly excited like silly children, overly grave like silly old men, they staggered down to the riverbank, stumbled over sticks and stones, dangled nets in the water, pointed up at Keetenheuve on the terrace, nodded at him, were assured of his agreement, caught the fish, pulled him up, the beautiful, the golden-scaled salmon in shining armor, like a haul of gold and silver he bellied the net, torn from his powerful element by ghosts, from his kindly world of storied, babbling water— oh, to drown in light and air, and the diamond flash of the knife blade in the sun! The salmon was sacrificed to Keetenheuve.
Keetenheuve the god to whom innocent fishes were sacrificed.
Once again, he hadn't wanted it. Temptation! Temptation! What did the anchorite do? He slew grasshoppers. The fish was dead. The wine was moderate. Excellency Keetenheuve ate his diplomat's lunch with moderate appetite.

He conducted diplomatic talks. Who were his guests? Herr Hitler, Führer, Monsieur Stendhal, Consul. Who officiated? Mine host, Mr. Chamberlain.

Hitler: Soft air; historic Rhine scenery; a stimulating terrace. Only nineteen years ago—

Stendhal: My respect and my admiration! Oh, to be young, when you set off from this very terrace for Wiessee to murder your friends! How the fates of youths do commove me! How the novels written under your aegis arouse me! I would have followed your army's progress, as I did Napoleon's. I would have seen Milan again, and Warsaw and the Beresina. With man and horse and chariot, the Lord has you in his lariat. You quoted the poem following your victory over Poland. You spoke in the Reichstag. You rewarded your generals with marshal's staffs and estates in West Prussia. You had a couple of them hanged. Others helpfully shot themselves. To one of them you sent poison. And all your shining youths, your heroes of the air, your heroes of the sea, your heroes in tanks, and your boys in Berlin, Monsieur Hitler! What are your men of literature doing, Monsieur Keetenheuve? You are translating Baudelaire? How fine, how brave! But what of Narvik, Cyrenaica, the Atlantic, the Volga, the places of execution, the prisoner-of-war camps in the Caucasus and the prisoner-of-war camps in Iowa. Who writes of them? What is interesting is truth, nothing but truth—

Keetenheuve: There is no such thing as truth here. Just tangles of lies.

Stendhal: You are an impotent gnostic, Monsieur Keetenheuve.

The tangles of lies form themselves into a chorus line in the air over the Rhine, and flash their dirty undies.

Hitler: In my table talks for the Germanic Historic Institute of United Illustrated Magazines, I've been fighting for years to get German culture cleansed firstly from Jewish, secondly from Christian, thirdly from moralistic sentimental, and fourthly from international cosmopolitan bloodthirsty pacifist influences, and I'm happy to be able to tell you today that I've won all down the line.

Six globes come rolling down the Rhine. They bear flags and weapons. Loudspeakers shrill: Raise high the flags! Chamberlain's hands tremble. He tips melted butter onto the tablecloth, and says: Peace in our time.

The corpse of Czechoslovakia rises out of the water, stinking. Destiny is trapped in the belly of the corpse and wanders witlessly back and forth. Three loudspeakers fight it out. One of them yells: According to plan! The second roars: Plan deficit! The third sings the chorus from the
Threepenny Opera
: Yeah, make a plan. Loudspeakers one and two furiously attack loudspeaker three and beat it to a pulp.

Senator McCarthy sends a couple of lie detectors over to investigate.

The first lie detector turns to Hitler: Mr. Hitler, are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

Hitler: As an obscure lieutenant, I decided to go into politics so that the beast of Bolshevism will never, believe me, rear its ugly head again . . .

The indicator on the lie detector wags enthusiastically.

Hitler glares at it, breaks off his reply, and screams: Show me your Aryan passport!

The first lie detector is utterly bewildered. It blows a fuse and withdraws in confusion. The second lie detector turns to Keetenheuve: And did you at any stage belong to the Communist Party?

Keetenheuve: No. Never.

Second Lie Detector: Did you or did you not on 9 August 1928 take out
Das Kapital
by Karl Marx from the National Library in Berlin, and did you or did you not tell your then girlfriend Sonia Busen not to remove her shirt, since it was more important to study
Das Kapital?

Keetenheuve is frightened and embarrassed. The pointer on the lie detector swings hard left. Rhine maidens rise up out of the Rhine. They wear sexy, sky-blue air hostesses' uniforms, and sing: Wagalaweia, you won't get to America, Wagalaweia, you stay where you are.

Keetenheuve is distraught.

Stendhal attempts to comfort Keetenheuve: Guatemala is no more boring than Civitavecchia, where I was consul. Don't go on vacation, you'll only have a stroke.

Keetenheuve looks reproachfully at Chamberlain and says: But Beck and Haider wanted a coup! Please remember, Beck and Haider wanted to get him!

Hitler smacks his thigh with amusement, and laughs with somnambulistic confidence.

Chamberlain looks heartbrokenly at the remains of the fish as he takes it away. He whispers: A general who is planning a coup may not be a suitable partner for the United Kingdom; the general with a successful coup behind him is a welcome guest at the Court of St. James.

He had better go. It was time. The four waiters were standing around him. Before long they would be serving generals again. It was probably inevitable. The villages on the opposite bank were waking from their siestas. Coffee tables were being prepared. There too, the generals would have a place. The villages wanted their generals back. They felt like rose petals on a black mere. What might not climb up out of the depths? Toads, algae, embryos. Maybe a toad would leap onto a rose petal, hop up to the table, and say: "I'm in charge here." Then it was a good thing to have generals with sabers around. The waiters bowed. He always tipped too much, and it was a good thing that he tipped too much, because Death's welcoming committee let him go this once.

Frost-Forestier's black official car had been waiting for Keetenheuve. Frost-Forestier had wanted Keetenheuve to get used to the amenities that life and the Federal Republic reserved for high officials and government representatives. When he climbed into the car, Keetenheuve saw the French High Commission building, and the tricolor waving on its roof.
"Le jour de gloire
est
arrivé!"
Well, was it at hand, the day of glory? Or was it always at hand? Every day for a hundred and fifty years, one day of glory after another? It wasn't even all that long ago, but it seemed such a long time. It wasn't that long ago that the tricolor was waving in America, they put up a statue to liberty, "
qu'un
sang
impur abreuve nos sillons."
For a century and a half, the nations had been screaming for impure blood and irrigating their furrows with it. They couldn't get enough of that impure blood to cover all the demand for it: German blood, Russian blood, English blood, French, Italian, Spanish, and American blood, blood from the Balkans and blood from Asia, Negro blood, Jew blood, Fascist blood, Communist blood, a horrific lake of blood, the flow kept coming, so many philanthropists had helped dig channels for the blood, so many well-intentioned people, the Encyclopedists, the Romantics, the Hegelians, the Marxists, and the Nationalists of various stripe. Keetenheuve saw red trees with red leaves, he saw red heavens and red earth, and the philosophers' god saw, and he saw that it was not good. Then he whistled up his physicists, who thought in waves and quarks, and they managed to split the atom, and they murdered in Hiroshima.

He passed children in his car. French children, German children, American children. The children went around or played by nationality. The different groups did not speak to each other. Keetenheuve drove through the American village. There was an American village on the Rhine. A little American church had been built in the style of those the American settlers of the pioneer era had built on the edge of the prairie, once they had killed or driven away the Indians. In the church they prayed to a god who loved successful people. The American God would not have loved Keetenheuve. Keetenheuve was not successful, he had never conquered a prairie.

They came to Mehlem, they reached the American High Commission, and Keetenheuve got out of the car. The American High Commission was a pile construction in the forest, a modern design with concrete, steel, and glass, but it was as exotic here as a Romantic castle from a German fairy tale, a skyscraper brought over from Broadway and set on concrete stilts, as though it was afraid the Rhine would rise up out of its banks to swallow it up, and the herds of automobiles that were parked underneath the building, in between the concrete stilts, were like little lifeboats that were kept ready for an emergency. Even though it was daytime, thousands of neon tubes were lit throughout the large building, and they heightened the magical, the unreal aspect of the pile structure standing in the middle of the forest. The High Commission was like a mighty magician's palace, and it was also like a huge beehive, where the neon-dripping windows were like honeycombs. Keetenheuve could hear it buzzing. The bees were busy. Keetenheuve walked boldly into the magic kingdom, plunged into the conjurer's domain. He showed his papers to a guard, and the guard let him in. Elevators rose and fell like the circulation of a living creature. Bustling men and women with little files had themselves pumped up and down, they were the bacteria specific to this body, they kept it alive, they strengthened or weakened it. (It would take a microscope to tell whether they were constructive or destructive particles.) Keetenheuve boarded one of the elevators and went up. He got out halfway, and walked down a long, neon-lit corridor. The corridor was ghostly, unreal and pleasant, cool air from an air-conditioner flowed over him in a friendly stream. He knocked on a door and entered a double-lit neon chamber. It was like an artificially lit aquarium in sunshine, and Keetenheuve recalled that he too liked to work in a similarly double-lit aquarium. What specialized breeds they were, in their aquariums and hothouses! He encountered two German secretaries. He asked about an American, and one of the secretaries replied that the American was somewhere in the building, but she didn't know where. Nor was there any point in looking for the American, chipped in the other secretary; they would never find him, and anyway the matter that Keetenheuve had come about hadn't been decided yet, it was currently being considered by other Americans, higher up than the boss of this little aquarium. Keetenheuve thanked them for the information. He stepped out into the singular illumination, the pure neon, of the corridor again, and the futility of what he was doing was revealed to him. The only dark stain on all this meaningless and beautiful clarity was the people somewhere, who were waiting for their case to be decided. Keetenheuve reached the elevator. He rode on up. He reached a rooftop canteen that afforded wide views of the Rhine, and at the same time he set foot in a basement dive in the lower depths of Paris. The ladies and gentlemen who had bustled in the corridors and elevators liked to linger here over coffee, cigarettes, and problems— they scratched at the surface of existence. Did they exist? They seemed to think they did, because they drank coffee, they smoked, and hypothetically or factually they rubbed against one another. They thought about their existence, and about their existence relative to all the other existences, they contemplated the existence of the building, the existence of the High Commission, the existence of the Rhine, the existence of this Germany, the existence of the other states bordering on the Rhine, and the existence of Europe, and in all these existences there was the worm of doubt and unreality and disgust.
And
Thor
threatened them with his giant hammer!
"America is perhaps the last experiment and the last great hope of mankind to achieve its purpose," Keetenheuve had heard a speaker say in the Keyserling Society, and he thought about that now. He would have liked to visit America. He would have liked to see the new Rome for himself. What was it like, America? Big? Free? Not the way one imagined it to be from the banks of the Rhine, for certain. This building wasn't America. It was an extraterritorial office, an outpost, perhaps a certain kind of experiment in a certain kind of vacuum. "America is not about being, but all about becoming," the speaker had said. Keetenheuve was all in favor of becoming; up until now, he had seen only destruction. The girls in the rooftop café wore sheer nylons that held their thighs in a warm, slippery embrace, a second skin of pure sex, that disappeared alluringly under their skirts. The men wore ankle socks, and when they crossed their legs, you could see the hairy calf. They worked together, the bustling ladies and gentlemen, did they sleep together as well? While Thor thundered up above, Keetenheuve envisioned grimly promiscuous bacchanals in the room, all of them busy as they had been before with their files in the elevators and corridors, now given over to a pansexual orgy, from which Keetenheuve was excluded, as he had been excluded by their busyness previously, and for a moment he envied them, but he knew it wasn't love and passion that actuated them, but the hopeless scratching of an ever-recurrent itch. He drank his coffee standing up, and he watched the pretty stockinged girls, and the young men in their little ankle socks, standing around like dissatisfied angels, and then he saw that their attractive faces were marked, marked by emptiness, marked by mere being.
It wasn't enough

4

T
HE
DIPLOMAT
HAD
LUNCHED
,
THE
DREAMER
HAD
GONE
awol, with the result that now Keetenheuve was late, and the members of the committee shot reproachful glances at him. His party colleagues Heineweg and Bierbohm looked at the late arrival with a mien of stern disapproval. With their expressions, they seemed to be accusing Keetenheuve, who had yet to miss an hour of these sessions, and who had been industrious and productive in the committees, of having done irreparable damage to the party and its standing.