The Hothouse (16 page)

He passed construction sites. They were working overtime. The government was building, the ministries were building, the building inspection authorities were building, the federation and the various
Länder
were erecting centers, foreign embassies were immuring themselves here, cartels, industrial conglomerates, banking groups, oil companies, steel plants, coal mining associations, electricity producers sited their administrative centers here, as though they mightn't be required to pay taxes in the shadow of the central government, insurance companies put by and built up, and reinsurance companies where insurers insured themselves against insurance losses couldn't even find enough space to store their policies, to house their lawyers, to put up their actuaries, invest their profits, flaunt their wealth. They wanted, all of them, to find a roof as near the heart of government as possible; it was as though they were afraid the government might leave without them, as though one day it would no longer be there, and their new headquarters would have become dread-quarters. Was Keetenheuve living through a new age of Founding Fathers? It was an unfounded, unbounded, well-groundedly groundless age
you have built on shifting sand. Keetenheuve Verdi singer in Bonn
,
on the front of the stage he mastered bel canto on fleeting sand oh how treacherously ye have built. Poor little member of parliament between security bunkers. The worm in the wood. Nail to their coffin. Sick worm. Twisted. Rusty nail. Just as well the insurers will outlast him. He was not insured. Would die like that. A burdensome corpse. No memorial to Keetenheuve. Freed humankind from nothing. Felt his way through earthworks. Traps. Blind. A mole.
—He reached the playground, and, just like this morning, there were two girls sitting on the seesaw. Two thirteen-year-olds. As Keetenheuve looked at them, they stopped bouncing up and down, one of them squatted down on the ground, the other hung suspended in midair. They giggled. They whispered something to each other. One of them gave a tug to her little skirt, pulled the material down over her thigh. Corrupt. Corrupt. What about you? Weren't you tempted by youth, by smooth cool skin? Hair that didn't yet smell of death? A mouth that didn't breathe out putrefaction? It smelled of vanilla. In the ruins there was someone roasting almonds and sugar in a copper pan.
Try my burnt giant almonds
called a rain-soaked sheet. Keetenheuve bought fifty pfennigs' worth of the giant almonds and tried them. They tasted bitter. The sugary coat cracked between his teeth. A brittle and sticky mass lay on his tongue. The burnt almonds tasted of puberty of boyish lusts in dark matinee cinemas: on the screen swelled the dirty freckled white breasts of Lya de Mara, you had a mouthful of sweets, and a new ache stirred in your blood. Keetenheuve stood chewing in front of a shop window full of fraternity accoutrements. The owner of the shop windows was living off the same pubescent feelings. Everything was there again, time ran backwards, there hadn't been any wars. Keetenheuve saw white and colored fraternity caps, dueling-society ribbons, drinking jackets, he surveyed fencing gear, sabers, tankards with the fraternity symbol on the lids, ceremonial books with golden nails in the binding, and metal clasps. Those things were being manufactured and sold, they paid the lease for the window and the shop, and provided the owner of the business with a living. The founding years were really back, the same taste, the same complexes, the same taboos. The sons of the master builders drove to university in their own runabouts, but in the evening they put on their silly hats, they aped their grandfathers, and they did something very strange, they rubbed a salamander; Keetenheuve had an unattractive vision of young men full of beer, stupidity, and ill-defined, sometimes nationalistic feeling, bawling songs, and grinding up some kind of lizards between their beer steins and the table. Keetenheuve chucked the rest of the almonds in the gutter. The paper bag burst and the sugar almonds bounced across the paving stones like marbles.

The infant Keetenheuve plays with agate stones on the pavement
.
Bonn insurance company director runs up to Keetenheuve with white cap
,
fraternity ribbon and saber. Director runs Keetenheuve through. Keetenheuve takes a burnt almond and pops it in the director's mouth. He tugs at the director's jacket
,
and little ten-pfennig pieces come tumbling out of his sleeve onto the pavement. Little girls come by
;
and start collecting the ten-pfennig pieces: they cry out
:
more and more and more coins come tumbling
,
skipping
,
and rolling onto the pavement. Keetenheuve laughs. The director is cross and says: Seriousness of the situation
—

Keetenheuve crossed the market square. The market women were cleaning their stalls.
Joke for Mergentheim: A blind man crosses the fish market
,
sniffs
,
says: "Ah, girls." Bedroom at the Mergentheims
.
Sophie getting dressed for the party
,
Corps Diplomatique in
Godesberg,
she pulls a diaphanous corset over her sagging body. Mergentheim is unexcited. He is tired. He says:
"
Keetenheuve came to see me.
"
The corset pinches Sophie. She'd like to slit the seam. She's hot. Mergentheim says: "I don't think I should be on first-name terms with him any more." Sophie thinks
:
What's he babbling on about now
;
this corset is killing me
,
nylon silk, taut and diaphanous
,
I could rip open the seam, I'm not getting changed again. Mergentheim says:
"
I'm his enemy. I ought to tell him. I ought to tell him:
'Herr
Keetenheuve, I am your enemy.'" Sophie thinks
:
What am I putting on this diaphanous corset for
?
If
François-Poncet
saw me like this, you can see everything anyway, all the folds, the rolls of fat. Mergentheim says:
"I
feel mean like this
."
Keetenheuve walked through the market rubbish, rotten, stinking, decomposing, rancid, and spoilt things lay at his feet, he slipped on something,
an orange, a banana
,
a good fruit ripened to no purpose
,
picked to be wasted, born in Africa
,
perished in the market in Bonn, not even consumed, not even metabolized on the journey through the greedy human. Sausage, meat, cheese, fish, and everywhere flies. Heavy bluebottles. Maggots in their bellies. Their weapon. Sliced sausage destroyed on the plate. That's what we eat. That's what they'll tuck into in the Hotel Stern. I could go along there. Middlemen in the lobby
;
field shovels for the border patrols, patent water cannon, artificial diamonds, waiting for a call from the minister. He'll send a car over. Let's have the diamonds, let's have the patent for the water cannon, the shovel, pretty collapsible shovel you can tuck in your waistcoat pocket, wear it under your suit, no one will notice
,
goes down well everywhere, spectacular efficiency, six hundred cubic meters of German soil in an hour, comrade burying comrade. This is England. This is England. You are tuned to the Voice of America.
This time Keetenheuve wouldn't speak. He wouldn't fight them on the airwaves.
Keetenheuve unknown soldier on an unknown front. Pointing forward? Pointing back? Anyone with nerves will fire in the air. Attention! We're not fighting birds here! Keetenheuve a good man, no hunter. White hands. Writer man.
On the balcony of the Stern Hotel stood a delegate from the Bavarian sister party. He was looking down the Mangfall valley. Cows coming in off the pastures. Jingle of cowbells. The year was advancing. The pensions were all full of Prussians: Ave Maria. The Bavarian party, like any of the other little parties, might be the one to tip the scales one way or the other. Much courted. When push came to shove, it voted with the government, in spite of its reservations about the Federal Republic.

There were people lining up in front of a cinema box office. What were they hoping to see? The great German comedy Keetenheuve joined the line. Ariadne guided him, Theseus, who was willing to risk the dark, Ariadne said: "Please move into the middle!" She had a snotty squeaky voice. As an usherette, she had been put in charge of a naughty humanity that didn't move into the middle in time. Keetenheuve sat, and he sat in the appropriate attitude for his time, he was part of a passive audience. Just now he was a passive audience for advertising. On the screen, razors, driving licenses, neckties, fabrics, lipstick, hair dye, and a trip to Athens were offered to him.
Keetenheuve market potential
,
Keetenheuve consumer. Useful.
Keetenheuve bought six shirts a year. Fifty million West Germans bought three hundred million shirts. From one vast bale, the material was fed into the sewing machines. Coils of material snaked around the citizen.
Captive market.
Maths lesson: If a man smokes ten cigarettes per day, how many will he smoke in a year, therefore fifty million smokers will get through a volume of tobacco six times the size of Cologne Cathedral. Only, Keetenheuve didn't smoke.
Darn it!
He was pleased. Here was the newsreel. A minister was opening a bridge. He cut a ribbon. He swaggered over the bridge. Swaggered after him other swaggerers. The President visited the exhibition. A child welcomed him.
Our
Führer
loves children.
A minister was departing. He was taken to the railway station. A minister was arriving. He was picked up. The Miss Loisach contest. Bikinis on the Alps. Nice ass. Big atomic mushroom over the Nevada desert. Skiing on artificial snow on the beaches of Florida. More bikinis. Big crowds. Even nicer asses. Cut to Korea: Meeting of two grim-faced enemies; they go into a tent; they come out again; one of them climbs grimly onto a helicopter; the other, still more grimly into his limousine. Gunfire. Bombs falling on some city. Gunfire. Bombs falling on some jungle. Miss Macao contest. Bikini. Stunning Sino-Portuguese ass. Sport brings people together. Crowd of twenty thousand watching a ball. So boring. But then the cameras tele-lens pulls out a few individual faces from the crowd: terrifying faces, chins thrust out, mouths twisted with hatred, murderous eyes.
Do you want total war? Yeah yeah yeah
From his seat in the dark cinema, Keetenheuve watched the faces that the treacherous tele-lens had violently pulled out of the shelter and anonymity of the crowd, completely beside themselves, cast up on the screen as on a dissecting table by the power of light (which according to Newton was an uncertain substance, floating chilly and aloof over earthbound matter), and he was afraid. Were these human faces? What had happened, and to what chance did he owe it
Keetenheuve pharisee
, that he too wasn't scrambled in this twenty-thousand-strong mass (there were ministers seated on the benches too, and they were caught by the camera's eye, ministers had the common touch, either they really had it, or else they pretended to: gifted mimics) following the ball with outthrust chin? His heart didn't race here, his blood didn't throb, he felt no rage: get the ref by the throat, lynch the bastard, he's bent, penalty ref, never a penalty, whistles! Keetenheuve was offside. He was outside the force field of this assembly of twenty thousand. They were united, they were an accumulation, a dangerous aggregation of zeros, an explosive mixture, twenty thousand excited hearts and twenty thousand empty heads. Of course they were waiting for their Führer, their number One, who would face them down, and turn them into a colossal number, a people, the new bastardized golem that was called a people, one Reich, one Führer, total hate, total explosion, total destruction. He was all alone. He was in the same position as the Führer.
Keetenheuve
Führer.
But Keetenheuve couldn't charm the multitude. He couldn't animate the people. He couldn't fire them. He couldn't even cheat the people. As a politician, he was like a bigamist, who couldn't get it up when it was time to bed Frau Germania. But in his imagination and often enough in fact, and always in his strivings, he was on the side of the people's rights! On the screen, the cinema was now selling itself; short clips from forthcoming dreams were being shown. Two old men were playing tennis together. But these old lads were the romantic leads in the next film, pertly clad in little shorts, and they could easily be Keetenheuve's older brothers, because when Keetenheuve had been a stripling, he could remember seeing these gents in films. But they weren't just tennis players, they were also property owners, because it was a historical film that was being trailed here
moving and dramatic
, and the property owners had lost everything, all their worldly goods had been lost, all that was left to them were their respective properties, the big house, the fields and woods and tennis courts and their natty shorts and of course a couple of thoroughbred horses, which they would one day again ride for Germany. A voice-over declared: "A ravishing woman comes between two lifelong friends. Which of them will win her?" A chunky matron hurtled up to the net in a girly dress, and it was all taking place in the very best society, in a world that no longer existed in that form. And Keetenheuve wondered whether such a world ever had existed. What was this? What were they trying to pretend? A popular German writer called one of her many books
Highlife;
she or her publishers had given the German book the English title, and millions who were unfamiliar with the word "highlife" gobbled up the book. Highlife—tiptop society, magic talisman, what was it, who belonged to it? Korodin? No. Korodin wasn't highlife. The Chancellor? Nor him. The Chancellor's banker? He wouldn't have had people like that in his house. So who was highlife? Ghosts, shadows. The actors on the screen, the ones who were playing at highlife, they were the only ones who were it, they and a few celebrities from the world of magazines and advertisements, the man with the spruce mustache who pours champagne with such inimitable style, the man who smokes everyone's tram cigarette in his polo kit, and the blue smoke twines around the beautiful horse's neck. No one on earth would ever pour champagne or sit on horseback like that, and why should they—but these types were the real shadow kings for the people. A second trailer gave notice of a color film. This time the voice-over cried: "America in the Civil War! The Deep South, land of burning passions! A ravishing woman comes between two lifelong friends!" Two lifelong friends and a ravishing woman—on both sides of the water that seemed to be the only concept the screenwriters knew. On this occasion, the ravishing woman sat on a bareback mustang, and rode in three colors, till it hurt Keetenheuve's eyes to watch. Her two friends—also in three colors—snuck through shrubbery and shot at each other. The voice-over commented: "Such derring-do!" Keetenheuve didn't have a friend he could shoot at. Was he supposed to fire at Mergentheim, and have Mergentheim fire at him? Not such a bad idea really. Sophie could play the ravishing woman.