The Hothouse (22 page)

Frau Pierhelm mounted the rostrum: security, security, security. Sedesaum hopped up to the stand, he could hardly be seen: God and Fatherland, God and Fatherland, God and Fatherland. God and world? Dörflich took possession of the parliament and the microphone: Fundamental opposition, loyalty to German principles, the enemy remains the enemy, honor remains honor, war crimes committed only by the enemy, declaration of honor urgently required. Was Dörflich really called Dörflich? One might have thought his name was Bormann; no wonder his milk soured on him. For a time Keetenheuve even felt sorry for the Chancellor. He was still sitting in the same attitude, with his head propped on his hands. Maurice stepped forward with doubts founded on international law. Korodin was still due to speak. He would lead Christianity and Western civilization into battle, stand by long-established cultural values, and rave about Europe. And Knurrewahn would speak shortly before the vote. Keetenheuve went out into the restaurant. The chamber must have emptied a lot. There were many more deputies in the restaurant than in the chamber. Keetenheuve spotted Frost-Forestier, but he avoided him. He avoided Guatemala. He didn't want a bone. Keetenheuve saw Mergentheim. Mergentheim was drinking a coffee, recovering from a radio appearance. He was holding court. People congratulated him for having attracted the notice of the Chancellor. Keetenheuve avoided him. He didn't want any memories. He desired no explanations. He went out onto the terrace. He sat down under one of the colorful parasols. He sat as though under a mushroom.
Ein Männlein steht im Walde ganz still und stumm.
He ordered a glass of wine. The wine was thin and sugary. Keetenheuve ordered a bottle instead. He ordered it on ice. People would notice. People would say: The big cheese is drinking wine. Okay, he was drinking openly. He didn't care. Heineweg and Bierbohm would be horrified by the sight. Keetenheuve didn't care. The ice bucket would offend Knurrewahn. That Keetenheuve did care about, but he poured himself a glass anyway. He drank the cold dry wine in greedy gulps. In front of him there were flower beds. In front of him there were gravel paths. In front of him was a fire hose attached to a hydrant. On the corner were policemen with dogs. The dogs looked like nervous policemen. A police van was parked in the stench next to the cesspit. Keetenheuve drank. He thought: I'm well guarded. He thought: I've come a long way.

He thought about Musaeus. Musaeus, the butler of the President, who thought he was the President, stood on the rose-grown terrace of the presidential palace, and he too saw the policemen, who had thrown their barriers around him too, he saw the police cars driving, he saw the dog handlers walking about under his nose, and he saw police boats fizzing across the river. Then Musaeus thought that he, the President, had been captured, and that the police were planting impenetrably thick rose hedges around the palace, to grow up around the palace, spiked with thorns, with suicide machines, trip wires and police dogs, the President couldn't get away, he couldn't take refuge with the people, and the people couldn't come to the President. The people asked themselves, What is our President doing? The people inquired, What is the President saying? And they informed the people: The President is old, the President is asleep, the President is signing the treaties that the Chancellor has put before him. And they told the people that the President was very pleased, and they showed the people pictures of the President, in which a pleased-looking President sat in a presidential chair, with a thick black cigar turning luxuriously to ash between his fingers. But Musaeus knew that he, the President, was uneasy, that his heart beat uneasily, that he was sad, that something was wrong, maybe the treaties were wrong, or maybe the rose hedges, or the police with their cars and their dogs, and then Musaeus, the President, became ill-humored, all at once he took against the landscape, which lay in front of him like a beautiful old painting, no, Musaeus, the good President, he was too sad to enjoy the scenery any more, he went down to the kitchen, he ate a little chop, he drank a little claret, he had to do it—out of melancholy, out of gloom, out of sadness and heaviness of heart.

Keetenheuve went back into the plenary session. The chamber was filling up again. They were about to do again what they had come here to do, to give their votes and earn their democratic corn. Knurrewahn was speaking. He was speaking out of genuine concern, a patriot, someone whom Dörflich would string up if he could. But Knurrewahn wanted his army too, and he too wanted to join alliances, only not yet. Knurrewahn was a man from the East, and it was dear to his heart to have East and West joined together again, in his dreams he was the great Unifier, he hoped to achieve a majority at the next election, to enter government, and then he wanted to do the work of Unification, and after that he aspired to an army and membership of the alliances. It was striking how ready the old were at all times of history to sacrifice the young to Moloch. Parliament hadn't come up with anything new. They were voting by roll call. The votes were collected in. Keetenheuve voted against the government, and he wondered if that had been right, and if it had been politic of him. But he didn't want to be politic any more. Who would succeed the present government? A better government? Knurrewahn? Keetenheuve didn't believe

Knurrewahn's party would achieve an overall majority. Maybe one day there would be a great coalition of malcontents, with Dörflich at the head of it, and then the devil would be let loose. There they all were, at their wits' ends, the apologists of universal suffrage, the disciples of Montesquieu, and they didn't even realize they were arranging games for simpletons, that the separation of powers that Montesquieu had prescribed did not apply any more. The majority ruled. The majority ruled absolutely What they had was a dictatorship of the majority. All the citizens had to do was choose under whose dictatorship they preferred to live. The politics of the lesser evil, that was the be-all and end-all of politics, the alpha and the omega of all voting and decision making.
The dangers of politics, the dangers of love,
you bought leaflets and you bought prophylactics, and suddenly you were saddled with children and responsibilities, or with syphilis. Keetenheuve looked about him. They all looked stunned.
No
one congratulated the Chancellor. The Chancellor stood there all alone. The Greeks deported their great men. Crosses marked on potsherds condemned Themistocles and Thucydides. Thucydides became a great man only in exile. Knurrewahn stood there all alone as well. He was folding up pieces of paper. His hands were shaking. Heineweg and Bierbohm looked reproachfully at Keetenheuve. They looked reproachfully, as if it were his fault that Knurrewahn's hands were shaking. Keetenheuve stood there in utter isolation. Everyone avoided him, and he kept out of their way. He thought: If we have a sprinkler system in the chamber, someone should switch it on, we need a downpour, we need a storm of gray rain to come and drench us all.
Keetenheuve the great parliamentary downpour

It was all over. That was it. It had just been a bit of theater; now they could all go and take off their makeup. Keetenheuve left the chamber. He didn't flee. He walked slowly. No Furies were chasing him. Step by step, he detached himself from a bewitched existence. Once more he wandered along the corridors of the Bundeshaus, up the steps of the Pedagogic Academy, back through the labyrinth,
Theseus having failed to kill the Minotaur
, he encountered apathetic guards, apathetic cleaning ladies with buckets and mops set about the dirt, apathetic officials set off for home, their greaseproof sandwich paper carefully folded up in their briefcases, to be used again on the morrow, they had a tomorrow, they were durable characters, and Keetenheuve was not one of their ilk. He seemed to himself like a ghost. He got to his office. He switched the neon light on again. Twilit, two-faced, and pallid the delegate stood in the disorder of his life as a representative of the people. He knew it was all over. He had lost the battle. It was circumstances that had got the better of him, not the other side. The other side had barely listened to him. It was the circumstances that were unchanging. They were the trend. They were doom. What was left for Keetenheuve? He could knuckle under, go back to his party, run with the pack. Everyone ran with some kind of pack, bowed to necessity, conceded that it was necessary, perhaps even accepted it as the ananke of the Greeks, but it was nothing more than the daily trot of the herd, the push of fear, and a dusty way to the grave. Take up your cross, called the Christians. Serve the state, shouted the Prussians.
Divide
et
impera,
taught the poorly paid schoolmasters at boys' schools. A new batch of correspondence lay on Keetenheuve's desk. He swept it away. It had become completely pointless to write to him. He didn't want to play any more. He couldn't play any more. He was spent. He swatted his political life aside along with his letters. The letters fell to the floor, and Keetenheuve thought he could hear them groaning and wailing there, they cursed and abused him, there were petitions, there was bitterness, threats of suicide and threats of assassination, there was friction, bruising, and inflammation, a desire to live, a desire for pensions, for support, a roof, claims for jobs, exemptions, benefices, assistance, remission of penalties, a different age and a different spouse, the urge to work off their rage, to confess their disappointment, admit to being at a loss, or press their advice. Finished. Keetenheuve had no advice. He needed no advice. He picked up Elke's picture and the beginning of his translation of
"Le beau navire
." The folder with files, with new poetry, with the works of E. E. Cummings he left behind in his office
(kiss me) you will go.

The neon light in Keetenheuve's office shone all night. It gleamed eerily out across the Rhine. It was the eye of the dragon of legend.

But the legend was old. The dragon was old. It wasn't watching over any princess. It wasn't guarding any treasure. There was no treasure, there were no princesses. There were depressing files, uncovered bills of promise, uncovered beauty queens, and sordid affairs. Who was going to watch over all that? The dragon was a customer of the regional electricity board. Its eye gleamed at two hundred and twenty volts, and it used five hundred watts per hour. Its magic resided in the eye of the beholder. The world was a soulless place. Even the peaceful Rhine was a figment of the onlooker's imagination.

Keetenheuve followed the riverbank into town. He encountered the stenographers from the Bundestag. They carried their raincoats draped over their arms. They strolled home. They dawdled by the river. They were in no particular hurry. They looked for their reflections in its murky water. Their forms wavered on the sluggish wash. They drifted on a tired warm wind. It was the tired warm wind of their existence. Joyless bedrooms awaited them. Perhaps one or other of them was expected by an unarousing partner. A few looked at Keetenheuve. They looked without interest. They had bored empty faces. Their hands had recorded Keetenheuve's words. Their memories had not stored his speech.

A pleasure steamer was nearing the shore. Little lanterns were burning on deck. A tour company was sitting over their wine. The men had colored party hats on their bald heads. They had long noses fixed on their own lumpy noses. The men with the colored hats and the long noses were manufacturers. They had their arms around their wives, who wore sweet scents, ugly clothes, and ugly hairstyles. They sang. The manufacturers and the manufacturers' wives sang "The North Sea beach where the seagull flies." In front of the paddle, almost under its dirty froth, stood an exhausted cook on a little platform. He looked across to the shore, with a dull and drained expression. There was blood on his bare arms. He had killed fish—sad mute carp. Keetenheuve thought: Would that be a life for me, with the North Sea beach and the Lorelei every day?
Keetenheuve sad cook on a Rhine pleasure steamer
,
kills no carp

The lights were on in the presidential palace. All the windows were open. The tired warm wind, the wind of the stenographers, flowed through the rooms. Musaeus, the butler of the President, who thought he was the President, walked from room to room, while the actual President was committing one of his cultured addresses to memory. Musaeus went to see if the beds had been properly made. Who would sleep in them tonight? The federal ship with the President on board drifted along on the sluggish wash, in the tired warm wind, but there were dangerous rocks under the gentle current, and then the river would suddenly become a raging torrent, they would be threatened with shipwreck, with smashing apart in the thunderous roar of a waterfall. The beds were made. Who would sleep? The President?

A poster gleamed, lit up by spotlights, an illuminated tent had been set up on the banks of the Rhine, it stank of silt and rot and the artificial preservation of a corpse.
Don't miss Jonah the whale!
Children laid siege to the tent. They waved paper banners, and on the banners it was written:
Eat Busses whale oil margarine with plenty of natural vitamins.
Keetenheuve paid sixty pfennigs and saw himself facing the great marine mammal, the biblical Leviathan, a mammoth of the Polar Sea, a kingly beast, primordial, contemptuous of man and yet a prey to his harpoon, a miserably abused and exhibited titan, a corpse pickled in formaldehyde. The prophet Jonah was thrown into the sea, the whale consumed him (the kindly whale, Jonah's savior, Jonah's destiny), for three days and three nights Jonah sat in the belly of the enormous fish, the sea calmed itself, the companions who had thrown him in the water rowed on into emptiness, they rowed calmly toward the empty, shoreless horizon, and Jonah prayed to God from the belly of hell, from the darkness that was the salvation of him, and God made his intention clear to the whale, and he ordered the good, the maltreated, the monkish animal used to fasting, to spit the prophet out again. Or perhaps, in view of the prophet's subsequent conduct, the beast merely had an acid stomach. And Jonah went to the great city of Nineveh, and he preached
Nineveh will fall in forty days
, and word got to the King of Nineveh, who dismounted from his throne, took off his royal purple, pulled on a sack, and rolled himself in the ashes. Nineveh did penance before the Lord, but Jonah was annoyed with the Lord for taking pity on Nineveh and saving it. Jonah was great and gifted, but he was also a small and peevish prophet. He was right: Nineveh was to have been destroyed in forty days. God, however, thought in leaps and bounds, he didn't follow the official guidelines for thinking that Jonah, Heineweg, and Bierbohm followed, and God was pleased with the King of Nineveh for discarding his purple robes, and he was pleased with the rueful people of Nineveh, and God let his bomb perish in the Nevada desert because they danced nice little boogies in His honor in Nineveh. Keetenheuve felt he'd been swallowed up by the whale. He too was sitting in hell, he too was far below the sea, he too was in the belly of the great fish.
Keetenheuve wrathful Old Testament prophet.
But if it had been he who was saved by God, and spat out of the belly of the fish, Keetenheuve similarly would have announced the destruction of Nineveh, but he would have felt great joy if the King had discarded his purple, discarded his royal robes borrowed from some theatrical costumers, and Nineveh had been saved. The children stood outside the tent. They waved their banners
Eat Busses whale oil margarine with plenty of natural vitamins.
The children had pale, pinched faces, and they waved their paper banners terribly seriously, just as the advertising people expected them to.