He dreamed that the visitors were laughing, all except one of the general staff officers, who wept and searched for a place to hide. He dreamed that Hoensch recited a poem by Wolfram von Eschenbach and then spat blood. He dreamed that among them they had agreed to eat the Baroness Von Zumpe.
He woke with a start and almost bolted down the stairs to confirm with his own eyes that nothing he had dreamed was real.
When the visitors returned to the surface, anyone, even the least astute observer, could have seen that they were divided into two groups, those who were pale when they emerged, as if they had glimpsed something momentous down below, and those who appeared with a half smile sketched on their faces, as if they had just been reapprised of the naïveté of the human race.
That night, during dinner, they talked about the crypt, but they also talked about other things. They talked about death. Hoensch said that death itself was only an illusion under permanent construction, that in reality it didn’t exist. The SS officer said death was a necessity: no one in his right mind, he said, would stand for a world full of turtles or giraffes. Death, he concluded, served a regulatory function. The young scholar Popescu said that death, in the Eastern tradition, was only a passage. What wasn’t clear, he said, or at least not to him, was toward what place, what reality, that passage led.
“The question,” he said, “is where. The answer,” he answered himself, “is wherever my merits take me.”
General Entrescu was of the opinion that this hardly mattered, the important thing was to keep moving, the dynamic of motion, which made men and all living beings, including cockroaches, equal to the great stars. Baroness Von Zumpe said, and perhaps she was the only one to speak frankly, that death was a bore. General Von Berenberg declined to offer an opinion, as did the two general staff officers.
Then they talked about murder. The SS officer said that murder was an ambiguous, confusing, imprecise, vague, ill-defined word, easily misused. Hoensch agreed. General Von Berenberg said that he would rather leave the laws to the judges and the criminal courts and if a judge said a certain act was murder, then it was murder, and if the judge and the court ruled it wasn’t, then it wasn’t, and that was the end of the matter. The two general staff officers agreed.
General Entrescu confessed that his childhood heroes were always murderers and criminals, for whom, he said, he felt a great respect. The young scholar Popescu reminded the guests that murderers and heroes resembled each other in their solitariness, and, at least initially, in the public’s lack of understanding of their actions.
Baroness Von Zumpe, meanwhile, said she had never in her life met a murderer, as was only natural, but she had met a criminal, if he could be called that, a despicable being imbued with a mysterious aura that made him attractive to women, in fact, she said, an aunt of hers, her father’s only sister, fell in love with him, which almost drove her father mad and led him to challenge the man who had conquered his sister’s heart to a duel, and to the surprise of everyone, the challenge was accepted, and the duel took place in the Heart of Autumn forest, outside Potsdam, a place that she, the Baroness Von Zumpe, had visited many years later in order to see with her own eyes the towering gray trees and the clearing, a sloping piece of ground some fifty yards across, where her father had done battle with that unpredictable man, who arrived at seven in the morning with two tramps instead of seconds, two beggars falling down drunk, of course, whereas her father’s seconds were the Baron of X and the Count of Y, anyway, such a disgrace that the Baron of X himself, red with fury, was about to raise his own gun and kill the seconds who had come with Conrad Halder, that was the name of my aunt’s beloved, as doubtless General Von Berenberg will recall (the general nodded though he had no idea what the Baroness Von Zumpe was talking about), the case was much discussed back then, before I was born, of course, in fact my father, the Baron Von Zumpe, was still a bachelor at the time, anyway, in that little forest with the romantic name the duel was fought, with pistols, of course, and although I don’t know what rules were followed I suppose both men aimed and fired at once: my father’s bullet passed a fraction of an inch from Halder’s left shoulder, and no one heard Halder’s shot, though everyone was convinced it hadn’t hit its target either, since my father was a much better marksman and if anyone fell it would be Halder, not my father, but then, oh surprise, everyone, including my father, saw that Halder, far from lowering his arm, was still aiming, and then they understood that he hadn’t fired yet and the duel, therefore, wasn’t over, and then came the most surprising thing of all, especially if we take into account the reputation of the man, the pretender to the hand of my father’s sister, who, far from shooting at my father, chose a part of his own anatomy, I think it was his left arm, and shot himself point-blank.
What happened next I don’t know. I suppose they took Halder to a doctor. Or perhaps Halder went himself, with his beggar-seconds, to find a doctor to see to the wound, while my father stood motionless in the Heart of Autumn forest, seething with rage or livid at what he had just witnessed, while his seconds gathered around to console him and urge him not to concern himself, one could expect all sorts of buffoonery from these people.
Shortly afterward Halder ran away with my father’s sister. For a while they lived in Paris and then in the south of France, where Halder, who was a painter, though I never saw any of his paintings, spent long stretches. Then they got married and settled in Berlin, or so I heard. Life was hard and my father’s sister fell gravely ill. The day of her death my father received a telegram and that night he saw Halder for the second time. He found him drunk and half naked, while Halder’s son, my cousin, who was three at the time, roamed the house, which was also Halder’s studio, completely naked and daubed with paint.
That night they talked for the first time and possibly came to an agreement. My father took charge of his nephew and Conrad Halder left Berlin forever. Occasionally news came of him, always preceded by some small scandal. His Berlin paintings were left in the care of my father, who didn’t have the heart to burn them. Once I asked where he kept them. He wouldn’t tell me. I asked him what they were like. My father looked at me and said they were just dead women. Portraits of my aunt? No, said my father, other women, all dead.
•
No one at that dinner, of course, had ever seen a painting by Conrad Halder, except for the SS officer, who said the painter was a degenerate artist, clearly a disgrace to the Von Zumpe family. Then they talked about art, about the heroic in art, about still lifes, superstitions, and symbols.
Hoensch said that culture was a chain of links composed of heroic art and superstitious interpretations. The young scholar Popescu said culture was a symbol in the shape of a life buoy. The Baroness Von Zumpe said culture was essentially pleasure, anything that provided or bestowed pleasure, and the rest was just charlatanry. The SS officer said culture was the call of the blood, a call better heard by night than by day, and also, he said, a decoder of fate. General Von Berenberg said culture was Bach and that was enough for him. One of his general staff officers said culture was Wagner and that was enough for him too. The other general staff officer said culture was Goethe, and as the general had said, that was enough for him, sometimes more than enough. The life of a man is comparable only to the life of another man. The life of a man, he said, is only long enough to fully enjoy the works of another man.
General Entrescu, who was highly amused by the general staff officer’s claim, said that for him, on the contrary, culture was life, not the life of a single man or the work of a single man, but life in general, any manifestation of it, even the most vulgar, and then he talked about the backdrops of some Renaissance paintings and he said those landscapes could be seen anywhere in Romania, and he talked about Madonnas and said that at that precise instant he was gazing on the face of a Madonna more beautiful than any Italian Renaissance painter’s Madonna (Baroness Von Zumpe flushed), and finally he talked about cubism and modern painting and said that any abandoned wall or bombed-out wall was more interesting than the most famous cubist painting, never mind surrealism, he said, which couldn’t hold a candle to the dream of a single illiterate Romanian peasant. After which there was a brief silence, brief but expectant, as if General Entrescu had said a bad word or a rude word or a word in poor taste or had insulted his German guests, since it had been his idea (his and Popescu’s) to visit that gloomy castle. A silence that was nevertheless broken by the Baroness Von Zumpe when she asked, her tone ranging from innocent to worldly, what it was that the peasants of Romania dreamed and how he knew what those most peculiar peasants dreamed. To which General Entrescu responded with a frank laugh, an open and crystalline laugh, a laugh that in Bucharest’s most fashionable circles was described, not without a hint of ambiguity, as the unmistakable laugh of a superman, and then, looking the Baroness Von Zumpe in the eye, he said that nothing about his men (he meant his soldiers, most of whom were peasants) was foreign to him.
“I steal into their dreams,” he said. “I steal into their most shameful thoughts, I’m in every shiver, every spasm of their souls, I steal into their hearts, I scrutinize their most fundamental beliefs, I scan their irrational impulses, their unspeakable emotions, I sleep in their lungs during the summer and their muscles during the winter, and all of this I do without the least effort, without intending to, without asking or seeking it out, without constraints, driven only by love and devotion.”
•
When it came time to go to sleep or move into another room adorned with suits of armor and swords and hunting trophies, where liquors and little cakes and Turkish cigarettes awaited them, General Von Berenberg excused himself and shortly afterward retired to his chambers. One of his officers, the Wagner enthusiast, followed his lead, whereas the other, the Goethe enthusiast, chose to prolong the evening. The Baroness Von Zumpe said she wasn’t tired. Hoensch and the SS officer led the march to the next room. General Entrescu sat beside the baroness. The intellectual Popescu remained standing, next to the fireplace, observing the SS officer with curiosity.
Two soldiers, one of them Reiter, served as footmen. The other was a fat man with red hair, his name Kruse, who seemed on the verge of sleep.
First they praised the assortment of little cakes and then, without pause, they began to talk about Count Dracula, as if they had been waiting all night for this moment. It wasn’t long before they broke into two factions, those who believed in the count and those who didn’t. Among the latter were the general staff officer, General Entrescu, and the Baroness Von Zumpe. Among the former were Popescu, Hoensch, and the SS officer, though Popescu claimed that Dracula, whose real name was Vlad Tepes, aka Vlad the Impaler, was Romanian, and Hoensch and the SS officer claimed that Dracula was a noble Teuton, who had left Germany accused of an imaginary act of treason or disloyalty and had come to live with some of his loyal retainers in Transylvania a long time before Vlad Tepes was born, and while they didn’t deny Tepes a real historical or Transylvanian existence, they believed that his methods, as revealed by his alias or nickname, had little or nothing to do with the methods of Dracula, who was more of a strangler than an impaler, and sometimes a throat slitter, and whose life abroad, so to speak, had been a constant dizzying spin, a constant abysmal penitence.
As far as Popescu was concerned, meanwhile, Dracula was simply a Romanian patriot who had resisted the Turks, a deed for which every European nation should to some degree be grateful. History is cruel, said Popescu, cruel and paradoxical: the man who halts the conquering onslaught of the Turks is transformed, thanks to a second-rate English writer, into a monster, a libertine whose sole interest is human blood, when the truth is that the only blood Tepes cared to spill was Turkish.
At this point, Entrescu, who despite the copious quantities of drink he had downed at dinner and continued to down during the postprandial hour, didn’t seem drunk—in fact he gave the impression of being the most sober of the group, along with the fastidious SS officer, who scarcely wet his lips with alcohol—said it wasn’t strange, if one cast a dispassionate glance over the great deeds of history (even the blank deeds of history, although this, of course, no one understood), that a hero should be transformed into a monster or the worst sort of villain or that he should unintentionally succumb to invisibility, in the same way that a villain or an ordinary person or a good-hearted mediocrity should become, with the passage of the centuries, a beacon of wisdom, a magnetic beacon capable of casting a spell over millions of human beings, without having done anything to justify such adoration, in fact without even having aspired to it or desired it (although all men, including the worst kind of ruffians, at some moment in their lives dream of reigning over man and time). Did Jesus Christ, he asked, suspect that someday his church would spread to the farthest corners of Earth? Did Jesus Christ, he asked, ever have what we, today, call an idea of the world? Did Jesus Christ, who apparently knew everything, know that the world was round and to the east lived the Chinese (this sentence he spat out, as if it cost him great effort to utter it) and to the west the primitive peoples of America? And he answered himself, no, although of course in a way having an idea of the world is easy, everybody has one, generally an idea restricted to one’s village, bound to the land, to the tangible and mediocre things before one’s eyes, and this idea of the world, petty, limited, crusted with the grime of the familiar, tends to persist and acquire authority and eloquence with the passage of time.
And then, taking an unexpected detour, General Entrescu began to talk about Flavius Josephus, that intelligent, cowardly, cautious man, a flatterer and odds-on gambler, whose idea of the world was much more complex and subtle than Christ’s, if one paid it careful attention, but much less subtle than that of those who, it’s said, helped to translate his History into Greek, in other words the lesser Greek philosophers, men for hire of the great man for hire, who gave shape to his shapeless writings, elegance to what was vulgar, who converted Flavius Josephus’s splutterings of panic and death into something distinguished, gracious, and fine.
And then Entrescu began to envision those philosophers for hire, he saw them wandering the streets of Rome and the roads that lead to the sea, he saw them sitting by the side of those roads, bundled in their cloaks, mentally constructing an idea of the world, he saw them eating in portside taverns, dark places that smelled of seafood and spices, wine and fried food, until at last they faded away, just as Dracula faded away, with his blood-tinted armor and blood-tinted clothing, a stoic Dracula, a Dracula who read Seneca or took pleasure in hearing the German minnesingers and whose feats in Eastern Europe found their match only in the deeds described in the Chanson de Roland. Historically, that is, or politically, sighed Entrescu, as well as symbolically or poetically.
And at this point Entrescu apologized for letting himself be carried away by enthusiasm and was silent, and the lull was seized upon by Popescu, who began to talk about a Romanian mathematician who lived from 1865 to 1936, a man who spent the last twenty years of his life devoted to the search for some “mysterious numbers” hidden in a part of the vast landscape visible to man, though the numbers themselves were invisible and could live between rocks or between one room and another or even between one number and another, call it a kind of alternative mathematics camouflaged between seven and eight, just waiting for the man capable of seeing it and deciphering it. The only problem was that to decipher it one had to see it and to see it one had to decipher it.
When the mathematician talked about deciphering, explained Popescu, he really meant understanding, and when he talked about seeing, explained Popescu, he really meant applying, or so Popescu believed. Though perhaps not, he said, hesitating. Perhaps his disciples, among whom I count myself, misinterpreted his words. In any case, as was inevitable, the mathematician went out of his head one night and had to be sent to an asylum. Popescu and two other young men from Bucharest went to visit him. At first he didn’t recognize them, but as the days went by and he no longer resembled a raging lunatic but simply a defeated old man, he remembered them or pretended to remember them and smiled. Nevertheless, at his family’s request, he remained at the asylum. And anyway, because of his regular relapses, his doctors counseled an indefinite stay. One day Popescu went to see him. The doctors had given the mathematician a little notebook in which he drew the trees that surrounded the hospital, portraits of other patients, and architectural sketches of the houses visible from the grounds. For a long time they were silent, until Popescu decided to speak frankly. With the typical heedlessness of youth, he broached the subject of his teacher’s madness or presumed madness. The mathematician laughed. There is no such thing as madness, he said. But you’re here, said Popescu, and this is a madhouse. The mathematician didn’t seem to be listening: the only real madness, if we can call it that, he said, is a chemical imbalance, which is easily cured by treatment with chemical products.
“But you’re here, dear professor, you’re here, you’re here,” shouted Popescu.
“For my own protection,” said the mathematician.
Popescu didn’t understand him. It occurred to him that he was talking to an utter lunatic, a hopeless lunatic. He covered his face with his hands and didn’t move for some time. For a moment he thought he would fall asleep. Then he opened his eyes, rubbed them, and saw the mathematician sitting before him, watching him, his back straight, his legs crossed. Popescu asked whether something had happened. I saw something I shouldn’t, said the mathematician. Popescu asked him to explain what he meant. If I explained, answered the mathematician, I would go mad again and possibly die. But for a man of your genius, said Popescu, being here is like being buried alive. The mathematician smiled kindly. You’re wrong, he said, in fact I have everything here I need to stave off death: medicine, time, nurses and doctors, a notebook to draw in, a park.
Shortly afterward, however, the mathematician died. Popescu attended the burial. When it was over, he and some other disciples of the dead man went to a restaurant, where they ate and lingered until dusk. They told stories about the mathematician, they talked about posterity, someone compared man’s fate to the fate of an old whore, and one boy, scarcely eighteen, who had just returned from a trip to India with his parents, recited a poem.
Two years later, purely by chance, Popescu was at a party with one of the doctors who had treated the mathematician during his stay at the asylum. The doctor was a sincere young man with a Romanian heart, which is to say a heart not deceitful in the slightest. Also, he was a bit drunk, which made confidences easier.
According to this doctor, the mathematician, upon being admitted, showed severe symptoms of schizophrenia, though he made favorable progress after a few days of treatment. One night when the doctor was on duty he went to the mathematician’s room to talk a little, because, even with sleeping pills, the mathematician hardly slept and the hospital management allowed him to keep his light on as long as he wanted. The first surprise came when he opened the door. The mathematician wasn’t in bed. For an instant the doctor thought he might have escaped but then he discovered him huddled in a dark corner. He crouched down beside him and after verifying that he was in fine physical shape he asked what was wrong. Then the mathematician said: nothing, and met his eyes, and in them the doctor saw a look of absolute fear of a sort he had never seen before, even in his daily dealings with so many madmen of the most varied types.
“What is a look of absolute fear?” Popescu asked.
The doctor belched a few times, shifted in his chair, and answered that it was a kind of look of mercy, but empty, as if all that were left of mercy, after a mysterious voyage, was the skin, as if mercy were a skin of water, say, in the hands of a Tatar horseman who gallops away over the steppe and dwindles until he vanishes, and then the horseman returns, or the ghost of the horseman returns, or his shadow, or the idea of him, and he has the skin, empty of water now, because he drank it all during his trip, or he and his horse drank it, and the skin is empty now, it’s a normal skin, an empty skin, because after all the abnormal thing is a skin swollen with water, but this skin swollen with water, this hideous skin swollen with water doesn’t arouse fear, doesn’t awaken it, much less isolate it, but the empty skin does, and that was what he saw in the mathematician’s face, absolute fear.
But the most interesting thing, the doctor said to Popescu, was that after a while the mathematician recovered and his look of alienation vanished without a trace, and as far as he knew, it never came back. That was the story Popescu had to tell, and like Entrescu before him, he expressed regret for going on too long and probably boring them, which the others hastened to deny, although their voices lacked conviction. From that moment on, conversation began to flag and soon afterward they all retired to their rooms.
•
But there were more surprises still in store for Reiter. [...] When they were just about to despair, they found what they were looking for: a side passage, very narrow, that ran through the stone walls, walls that looked thick but were apparently hollow, and in which there were peepholes or tiny slits that provided a nearly perfect view of the rooms behind.
And so they were able to look into the room of the SS officer, lit by three candles, and they saw the SS officer up, wrapped in a robe, writing something at a table near the fireplace. The expression on his face was forlorn. And although that was all there was to see, Wilke and Reiter patted each other on the back, because only then were they sure they were on the right path. They moved on.
By touch they discovered other peepholes. Rooms lit by the light of the moon or in shadows, where, if they pressed an ear to the hole bored in the stone, they could hear the snores or sighs of a sleeper. The next lit room belonged to General Von Berenberg. There was a single candle, set in a candlestick on the night table, and its flame wavered as if someone had left the huge window open, making shadows and ghostly shapes that at first disguised the spot where the general knelt at the foot of the big canopied bed, praying. Von Berenberg’s face was contorted, Reiter noted, as if he bore a huge weight on his shoulders, not the life of his soldiers, certainly, or his family, or even his own life, but the weight of his conscience, which was something that grew clear to Reiter and Wilke before they moved away from that peephole, struck with astonishment or horror.
Finally, after passing other watch points plunged in darkness and sleep, they arrived at their true destination, the room of the Baroness Von Zumpe, a room lit by nine candles and presided over by the portrait of a soldier or warrior monk with the intent and tortured air of a hermit, in whose face, which hung three feet from the bed, one could observe all the bitterness of abstinence and penitence and self-abnegation.
Beneath a naked man with an abundance of hair on his upper back and legs, they glimpsed the Baroness Von Zumpe, her golden curls and part of her lily-white forehead occasionally emerging from behind the left shoulder of the person thrusting on top of her. The cries of the baroness alarmed Reiter at first, who was slow to understand that they were cries of pleasure, not pain. When the coupling ended, General Entrescu got up from the bed and they watched him walk to a table where a bottle of vodka stood. His penis, from which hung a not negligible quantity of seminal fluid, was still erect or half erect and must have measured nearly a foot long, Wilke reflected afterward, his calculations on the mark.
He looked more like a horse than a man, Wilke told his comrades. And he had the stamina of a horse too, because after swallowing some vodka he returned to the bed where the Baroness Von Zumpe was drowsing and after he had rearranged her he began to fuck her again, at first scarcely moving, but then with such violence that the baroness, on her belly, bit the palm of her hand until she drew blood, so as not to scream. By now Wilke had unbuttoned his fly and was masturbating, leaning against the wall. Reiter heard him moan beside him. First he thought it was a rat that just happened to be breathing its last somewhere nearby. A baby rat. But when he saw Wilke’s penis and Wilke’s hand moving back and forth, he was disgusted and elbowed him in the chest. Wilke ignored him and continued to masturbate. Reiter glanced at his face: Wilke’s profile struck him as very odd. It looked like an engraving of a worker or artisan, an innocent passerby suddenly blinded by a ray of moonlight. He seemed to be dreaming, or, more accurately, momentarily breaking through the massive black walls that separate waking from sleep. So he left him alone and after a while he began to touch himself too, at first discreetly, through his trousers, and then openly, pulling out his penis and adjusting to the rhythm of General Entrescu and the Baroness Von Zumpe, who wasn’t biting her hand anymore (a bloodstain had spread on the sheet next to her sweaty cheeks) but crying and speaking words that neither the general nor the two soldiers understood, words that went beyond Romania, beyond even Germany and Europe, beyond a country estate, beyond some hazy friendships, beyond what they, Wilke and Reiter, though perhaps not General Entrescu, understood by love, desire, sexuality.
Then Wilke came on the wall and mumbled something too, a soldier’s prayer, and soon afterward Reiter came on the wall and bit his lips without saying a word. And then Entrescu got up and they saw, or thought they saw, drops of blood on his penis shiny with semen and vaginal fluid, and then Baroness Von Zumpe asked for a glass of vodka, and then they watched as Entrescu and the baroness stood entwined, each with a glass in hand and an air of distraction, and then Entrescu recited a poem in his tongue, which the baroness didn’t understand but whose musicality she lauded, and then Entrescu closed his eyes and cocked his head as if to listen to something, the music of the spheres, and then he opened his eyes and sat at the table and set the baroness on his cock, erect again (the famous foot-long cock, pride of the Romanian army), and the cries and moans and tears resumed, and as the baroness sank down onto Entrescu’s cock or Entrescu’s cock rose up into the Baroness Von Zumpe, the Romanian general recited a new poem, a poem that he accompanied by waving both arms (the baroness clinging to his neck), a poem that again neither of them understood, except for the word Dracula, which was repeated every four lines, a poem that might have been martial or satirical or metaphysical or marmoreal or even anti-German, but whose rhythm seemed made to order for the occasion, a poem that the young baroness, sitting astride Entrescu’s thighs, celebrated by swaying back and forth, like a little shepherdess gone wild in the vastness of Asia, digging her nails into her lover’s neck, scrubbing the blood that still flowed from her right hand on her lover’s face, smearing the corners of his lips with blood, while Entrescu, undeterred, continued to recite his poem in which the word Dracula sounded every four lines, a poem that was surely satirical, decided Reiter (with infinite joy) as Wilke jerked off again.
When it was all over, though for the unflagging Entrescu and the unflagging baroness it was far from over, they filed silently back down the secret passageways, silently replaced the mirror, crept silently down to the improvised underground barracks, and slipped silently into bed next to their respective guns and kits. (2666)