[Chapter 2 of Quasikristalle (Quasicrystals), by Eva Menasse]

[Chapter 2 of Quasikristalle (Quasicrystals), by Eva Menasse]

Sample translation (Translated by Anthea Bell)
Eva Menasse: Quasikristalle
(“Quasicrystals”)
Novel
Publication: February 2012
432 pages
Foreign rights with Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG
Contact:
Iris Brandt/ Rights & Contracts Director: [email protected]
Aleksandra Erakovic/ Foreign Rights Manager: [email protected]
2
[Chapter 2 of Quasikristalle (Quasicrystals), by Eva Menasse]
The evening before, Bernays had still been with Pauline – Paula, Pavla, Pola, Poletta,
Polina. And now he was sitting in the aircraft, his whole head making a statement: he
never wanted to grow up, here he was in his mid-forties, experimenting with henna. He
had already confessed to her from the airport. She had chuckled, sounding slightly bored,
and expressed her hope that he would have washed it out by the time they next saw each
other. That hurt his feelings, because it sounded as if she didn’t like him to be
adventurous and ready for change. He had laughed all the louder, feeling like a fool, a
clumsy and at present red-headed fool. But now he was taking off, going on his travels,
from Pola to Poland. A bad joke. Furthermore, it wasn’t true. He was flying to Vienna to
collect his group for the study trip. There among the Nazis old and new, he would
assemble his own little steadfast crowd and set out for Auschwitz, of all places, with his
Bernays Austrians, as opposed to the Schindler Jews. He ran his fingers through his hair,
pretending to be massaging his scalp, although no one was watching him. One of those
typically human fantasies of omnipotence. Always confusing your own view of
something with another person’s. Just because your reflection is a more startling sight
than usual – the tired-looking blonde had cut off far too much – it doesn’t make you more
conspicuous. He himself, in his never-ending search for innocence and truth, particularly
liked observing those who seemed unaware of themselves, girls whose necklines were
always slipping off the same shoulder and who chewed their left thumbs while they were
doing exams, Yannick pulling his prick out to its full length in the sauna, as if he
instinctively felt it was too short. He never noticed what he was doing, for while he
tugged and tugged at it, getting it to point up to his navel or lie along his thigh in the
direction of his knee, so that merely watching him hurt other people, he would be
discussing acts of aryanization at the highest level. Or Pauline, whose right eyelid
twitched as she explained to Bernays yet again the difference between him and Andrei,
one of them not a father, the other not a lover. But she needed both, didn’t she? And to
emphasize how seriously she meant it, and how entirely legitimate that was, she had
folded her hands on the table and looked straight into his eyes, a picture of calm and
overwhelmingly womanly wisdom. If only that right eyelid hadn’t been twitching.
3
Surreptitiously, Bernays rubbed himself behind the ears. Mustn’t scratch,
scratching your head is disgusting. Rub, massage, act as if you knew where the right
pressure points were. Then he quickly placed his hands on his thighs where he could
examine them unobtrusively. No hair dye on them. Some time he ought to go into the
question of when people first started colouring their hair and what with; in principle, a
good subject for a dissertation. The social implications of hair dye from the Stone Age to
modern times. He had drunk too much the evening before on arriving home. Instead of
packing, he had sat by the window vacuously drinking.
He had been sleeping with Pauline for fifteen years; in the first years he had
thought her the love of his life. When she married Andrei he had to admit that she had
obviously not seen it the same way. However, not much changed at first; they went on
travelling together, they explored the world, and wherever they went, to Rome and
Lisbon, to Jerusalem and Cape Town, he imagined strangers furtively scrutinizing him, as
if they couldn’t make out what that fragile beauty saw in him.
Then there was a terrible break in the relationship that she couldn’t really explain
to him, she kept her distance, she was rearranging her thoughts and feelings. He had
thought it was the end; that was the worst time in his life. He had even contemplated
suicide, not seriously, but he had contemplated it. She, on the other hand, just wanted to
make sure that Andrei really was the father of her child, which seemed to her morally
imperative. Bernays was richly compensated, for as soon as she was pregnant she needed
more sex than ever before. Which probably meant that even Andrei reaped the benefit
more often, as Bernays sometimes bitterly thought at the time. He had got over such
things long ago.
When the right time for a second child came, she suggested he take a semester’s
sabbatical. He said she was right, that was a very fertile notion, although she failed to
notice the irony. He managed to get a research grant of considerable size to work in
Washington for a year, and was determined to marry the first trusting American woman
who came his way. He met several who were pretty and looked up to him, but he didn’t
want to destroy his life for a moment of defiance. He didn’t feel with any of them as he
did with Pauline, so worthless, so inadequate, and yet loved all the same, in a way that
usually happens only to children. The riddle of love that makes you addicted to it. By this
time she had three children, my little bigamist, as he sometimes called her with his fingers
between her legs.
4
Andrei and he were the best of friends. Whether that slim, friendly intellectual
was the dimmest or, on the contrary, the wisest and most generous husband in the world
was something that Bernays had still not decided. He was careful not to ask Polina. If
anything happened to him, Andrei, then Bernays would have to look after the children,
and it would be best for him to marry Pauline at once. Andrei had extracted that promise
from him years ago, almost making him shed tears.
Bernays loved Pauline’s children in a helpless, clumsy kind of way; he felt he
wasn’t equal to dealing with them and his love for them. He was useless as an authority,
as Pauline put it, but thank God there were plenty of figures of authority around.
Sometimes he really did take them for his own children, the amusing little people that
Pauline had withheld from him or spared him, depending on how you looked at it. What
made her so sure that he couldn’t be a father? The majority of mankind, he had once
shouted in a Venetian hotel room where he was naked apart from a pair of baggy silk
shorts, habitually complained of their own fathers. Which said nothing whatsoever about
the factual veracity of those complaints! It was snowing outside, there was mist over the
canals, and an almost indecently fluffy rug was tickling him between his toes. Oh darling,
sighed Pauline from the bed, just look at yourself.
Once there in Vienna he thought that everything, apart from the weather, was appalling.
The annoyingly young and good-looking assistant, Mario by name, who had met him at
the airport, and who made no secret of his obsequious veneration of Rozmburk, even in
the car. The hotel room looking like any other sterile hotel room the world over – the
Austrians proved to be ready and able to learn, especially in superficial matters,
sacrificing what little other people might appreciate in them: their stylishness and
sumptuous excess. The acme of negativity, however, was the university: cold,
ramshackle, and with its interior dilapidated to an extent that couldn’t have been worse in
Bucharest or Kiev. Bernays smiled, as he always did when he would rather have
screamed, and showed reserve. At such moments he was physically aware that
civilization was a shackle, an armament running counter to human nature.
He and Mario stood outside the door of a rather sparsely occupied seminar room,
for the umpteenth time exchanging their concerns for the state of Rozmburk’s health; the
one thing they had to say to each other had already become a linguistic ritual. How much
longer would things go well? Some time or other they would inevitably get round to
5
Rozmburk’s scholarly achievements, and then at the latest Bernays would fall out of step
with this ballet of the civilities. Mario was just expressing a mendacious commonplace to
the effect that Rozmburk had never really recovered from the death of Gisèle, and
Bernays was taking a deep breath so as not to sound impolite when he contradicted him.
But he never got around to it, because suddenly they were surrounded by the delegation.
There was no other way of describing it, as he later told Xane, who laughed at this story
so much that she bowed her head and let her hair fall over her face.
At least, it had been meant to seem like a delegation, overpowering by virtue of its
sheer mass, for to the best of his recollection, clouded by anger as that had been, only one
person had spoken, Kabasta, deputy director of the Institute, who held forth in nasal tones
like those of the unfortunate Viennese emigrants who played the parts of psychoanalysts
in Hollywood movies of the forties and fifties. The others had just nodded, and sighed in
the right places, a humming chorus of regret. The professorial Mafia had brought along a
victim to be pilloried, a scapegoat in the form of a terrified secretary. Later, it was some
time before Bernays could forgive himself for not at least reassuring the secretary,
although the best thing would have been to play Superman and put his arms round her.
For it was absurd to hold this plump girl solely to blame, in the midst of all these
whispering intriguers who nodded in friendly fashion, disconsolately shaking their heads.
When the secretary heard of Rozmburk’s illness, Kabasta explained, wringing his
hands, she had told all callers that the seminar was cancelled, she had thought herself
especially clever, inexperienced girl that she was, when everyone knew that an event
planned so long in advance is never simply cancelled, but goes ahead with the best
possible substitute, what was he saying, substitute, the professor must forgive him,
entirely the wrong word, events might almost be said to have taken a very happy turn,
were unexpectedly enhanced if that were possible, after all, Rozmburk himself always
said ah well, young people, and described the esteemed Professor Bernays, and only
Bernays, as his one true follower, although unfortunately, as we hear, he is firmly settled
there in France, of course applications for the post will be invited in two years’ time, but
more about that later, at the moment we have other worries, do we not, thanks to the
precipitate actions of this young lady.
For this – and he pointed accusingly through the open doorway at the seminar
room, where the few persons present curiously craned their necks – this was the outcome
of that inexcusable and unauthorized action on the secretary’s part: seven participants out
6
of what had once been thirty. Bernays immediately realized that the seven were not
sitting there because they were a particularly bright bunch. On the contrary: those seven
did not read the newspapers, did not follow the news, and were therefore waiting,
undaunted, for Rozmburk to turn up. Rozmburk could be dead, the papers full of
obituaries covering many pages with atmospheric portraits in black and white, men could
be at work at this moment digging his grave for its honoured occupant, but the seven
would still be sitting there, waiting humbly and congratulating themselves on having
gained their much sought-after places on this seminar.
No, Bernays had not asked, in a quiet but sharp voice, whether the young
secretary was solely responsible for running the Institute, he had not commented,
although the words were on the tip of his tongue, that everywhere, always, and not just
after 1945, the lower ranks were punished while the big shots got away scot free. It was
true that afterwards he had wished it had gone like that, but there had been no opportunity
for him to speak his mind, because Professor Kabasta had already gone a shocking step
further. He had reached the subject of his own creative efforts to avert disaster, indeed
perhaps turn it to their advantage. That’s what I always say, you know, he said, bringing
off the trick of smiling ingratiatingly at Bernays from below, although they were the same
height: we don’t admit to problems, we only see the challenges.
And so they had opened up the study trip to just about anyone. They had recruited
active participants, interested people, colleagues, even a writer! For this attempt at, well,
making reparations they had brought together the forces of the Institute, used the
infrastructure of the Institute, and drawn on the funds of the Institute, it would be
contributing anyway later, the accounts committee would see to it, but let me worry about
that.
I will, murmured Bernays. Luckily time was short, and he would not have to set
out with a bus full of Austrian senior citizens who wanted, at long last, to see the place
for which their fathers and grandfathers had needed to be denazified back in the past,
although they really hadn’t known a thing about what was going on!
No, Kabasta and Co. had, as he said, found special, interesting participants, the
aforementioned writer (a British citizen!), in addition two German university colleagues
below professorial rank, who happened to be spending a research semester in Vienna, and
a postgraduate student from the Technical University, writing a dissertation on
architecture that concentrated on the history of building. Also a former journalist coming
7
for reasons of his own, who had promised not to write anything about it. And finally
Rozmburk’s niece. Rozmburk has no niece, thought Bernays, but he said only,
disapprovingly: Not a very homogeneous group.
No, indeed, agreed Kabasta in a friendly tone, for he could fall back on the
centuries-old ability of his fellow countrymen to let aggression and complaint pass them
by with a polite little tinkling sound, as if made by passing through a bead curtain. Not
homogeneous, but exciting. I’d go so far as to call this a real challenge.
Not a problem, then, said Bernays, but Kabasta didn’t understand the joke, or
maybe, who knew, he didn’t want to understand it.
I was sure you’d see it like that, said Kabasta, and his subordinates nodded and
made mewing sounds and expressed their relief in an elaborately speechless way. And
then they asked him please, oh dear, please forgive them, they had kept him from his
seminar far too long already. So they went away, and when Bernays told Xane about it
later he claimed that they did it walking backwards.
The alleged writer was a monosyllabic man in his mid-fifties, a pipe smoker, and
Bernays, who approached writers with a slightly awe-stricken readiness to admire them
that instantly turned to polite disinterest if his expectations were not met (not famous, not
crazy, not brilliant enough), soon decided that he was boring. His name was Richard
Rogers, and he had written two historical novels that Bernays had never heard of. He
wanted to go on the trip to Auschwitz because he was on the trail of a story about four
Jewish women who had worked in the armaments factory there.
The former journalist was a retired sports reporter, and had been a communist
from his youth. His name was Georg Slezak, but when his mother called to him she made
his first name into Schurl, and it was for her sake that he wanted to go there. He
confessed that with tears in his eyes. Here it was already, the first problem case. Bernays
groaned inwardly. The tourism of dismay, they’d have to keep an eye on Schurl.
The postgraduate student looked just as ordinary as Richie Rogers, but he had the
energy of a jack-in-the-box. His bright face kept popping up somewhere; he was one of
those people who, the moment they wake in the morning, are spreading productive
uneasiness. He asked respectful questions intended to show that he had read Bernays’s
books, footnotes and all, and would undoubtedly offer Bernays plenty of opportunities to
show off. Bernays did sense that this was a pushy character muscling in on him, but all
8
the same, considering the many hours they were going to spend together, someone to give
the cues would be no bad thing, or so Bernays persuaded himself. And he let the pushy
character enter into vigorous competition with Mario. A dispute between his would-be
lieutenants. Prostituting themselves to please him. As a poor attempt at distancing
himself, Bernays avoided remembering the man’s name and just addressed him,
vacuously, as Mr Architect, although he was not yet qualified.
So that was the depressing situation: Bernays had two young scholars, both of
them men, jealously vying for his favours, and there wasn’t a single interesting woman in
sight, not so much as the trace of a theoretical surrogate for flirtation. There were two
mousy little girls among the students, pale and bespectacled, probably from the Austrian
provinces, who were certainly aiming to be schoolteachers at a high school in Steyr or
Amstetten or Wels. To himself, Bernays christened them Minx and Jinx, and hoped he
wouldn’t really address them thus.
Optically, the third woman student fell into the militant lesbian category: martial
shoes, drooping breasts inadequately supported, short hair. Pauline always said that
women with big breasts ought to correct the imbalance with their hairstyles. The larger
your God-given endowments, the more important it was to have big hair. Bernays, who
was often amazed by the esoteric fields in which Pauline could hold principles, had to
admit that she was right there. At the first session of the seminar, after the shock
delivered by Kabasta, Bernays had called this girl forward. He asked her to put her foot
up on a chair, and praised her shoes as the only kind to wear if it happened to be raining
in Birkenau. The other students giggled uneasily. Bernays persisted. Her shoes – what’s
your name? – Moni, thanks, well then, Moni’s shoes are just right for the excursion, even
if they do look a little reminiscent of the SS. But that’s not to the point in this case. I do
assure you, you want to pack stout shoes for this trip. Otherwise it could be
uncomfortable for us all. After this session maybe Moni will tell you where you can get
them.
The name of the German lecturer was Frauke, and she was the kind of horsy
academic German blonde from the Ruhr that he might have expected: good temper,
strong bones, rather too much in the way of gums on display when she laughed, which
was often and shrilly. Unfortunately. Her colleague Jürgen was colourless, what you
might call wash-and-wear, and was probably her boyfriend. Or wanted to be. He’d have
9
to find out, but cautiously, in case Frauke felt encouraged to throw herself at him,
Bernays.
The missing participant, of course, was Rozmburk’s niece. Bernays, in whose
mind this phrase had rooted itself like a promise, thought by now that she was some ultrasubtle piece of mischief dreamed up by Kabasta. Rozmburk’s niece: it sounded as grand
as the Order of Maria Theresia, evoking the maximum of honour and respect that those
on the course would have liked to feel for Bernays, the substitute bravely stepping into
the breach, but unfortunately it was not available to them. Kabasta must know that
Rozmburk had no siblings, that none of his siblings had survived, and it was just the same
with Gisèle. But what did Kabasta know about anything?
On the last evening before they set out, in the back room of a typical Viennese
inn, Bernays assumed the role of main speaker with ease. As he spoke, he basked in
Mario’s sickly admiration, maliciously parried Mr Architect’s questions, and let Frauke’s
laughter wash over him. Jürgen’s reserve as a colleague no longer bothered him, while
the English writer seemed to have thawed out slightly under the influence of alcohol. The
old journalist sat at the other end of the long table keeping a fatherly eye on Minx and
Jinx, the other students were quietly drinking beer somewhere in the room.
After a while the name of Kabasta was mentioned, and since he thought his own
resentment was a generally known and justified fact, it infuriated Bernays not to have a
torrent of discreditable rumours about the man served up to him at once. The students
were reserved; Kabasta’s predecessor, Bernays was told, had been much worse. Bernays
was annoyed, but tried to hide it. The Viennese white wine, that peppery, slightly tart
beverage, stimulated him. Now he set himself up to feature, verbally at least, as defender
of the honour of the secretary whom Kabasta had blamed, presenting her as smaller,
sillier and more innocent that she herself would have liked.
The students did not say anything, Mario did not say anything, Mr Architect had
ordered a late plate of goulash and did not say anything because his mouth was full.
Bernays went on criticizing Kabasta in an unreceptive silence, hearing himself as if he
were on tape. When he took a sip of wine in mid-sentence, Frauke giggled: Oh, but he
kissed my hand so nicely. She looked heated. When lipstick runs on a mouth as big as
hers it does her no favours, thought Bernays. Tomato-red lipstick. A clown. The kind of
woman who is born a clown. A good sort, but a chatterer. Later such women marry silent
husbands who wear windcheaters and have crew-cuts and who, along with their clownish
10
of wives, good sorts as they are, never in their lives find out what love really is, how
hysterical, horrible, cruel, divine and devastating it can be.
Kissed her hand. Here an opportunity opened up that Bernays hadn’t considered
for some time. An ability that had to do with his Austrian mother, whom he didn’t like to
remember. Could he still do it? Imitate the typical accent of Vienna with all its sing-song
rising and falling, with the way some syllables stick together and others are deliberately
swallowed? And with a subtle sprinkling of a few but difficult dialect words over what
people thought was educated High German but was really just better-articulated Austrian.
The kind of thing that, particularly in Kabasta’s mouth, seemed to him like perfumed
whimpering, and that in the past could sometimes make his mother laugh so much?
Never mind. He had nothing to lose here. They didn’t like his criticism of
Kabasta, or so he imagined. He wanted to win them back. He transformed his
pusillanimous complaints of Kabasta into an ironic presentation that offered more scope
for sympathy. He played the part of Kabasta, the whole monologue and much more, he
adopted Kabasta’s nasal tones, hummed and sighed, inexcusable unauthorized actions on
the part of the secretary, this young lady, and this – jumping up, forefinger outstretched,
trembling with indignation – this is the result: seven participants out of thirty, but we
don’t admit to problems, we only see the challenges. He was overdoing it, and stopped.
Once again he was the child who played obedient servant, in the Austrian phrase, to his
mother when she was suddenly so sad, the child whose reward was the prospect in the
near future of a visit to Vienna, where he could order as many cakes and tarts in the
coffee-house as he liked, yes, I promise you, as far as I’m concerned you can have all you
like until they make you sick, never mind, we’ll puke on the floor there and leave, this
time they can mop it up themselves. But it never came to that.
He had them in the hollow of his hand now, they chuckled, they were amused.
But only when distinct sounds of laughter were heard, in turn, from the boring writer at
one end of the table and the usually downcast Schurl Slezak at the other – one of them
roaring like a stag caught in a ravine, the other squealing like a rubber-soled shoe on wet
ground – only then did the atmosphere really change to exuberance.
At the end of his act Bernays stood up, bowed, fetched another chair from a
corner, held it unsteadily in the air above his head by two of its legs, and cried: And here
is our unknown star guest – Rozmburk’s niece! He lowered the chair, pointed to it as if
setting the throne straight for a princess, sat down and enjoyed the applause forthcoming
11
for his performance as a whole, not just this final punch line, which no one but Mario
understood.
Then, however, there really was someone else standing there, a young woman in
jeans and a dark red shirt that fitted closely and yet fell so easily over her hips that it
emphasized rather than concealed her slender figure. She stood in the dim light and
narrowed her eyes. She could have been a guest from the main café, lost looking for the
Ladies, or an auxiliary waitress, except that the red shirt didn’t seem right for that. She
came over to Bernays, who was still receiving congratulations, and who was just being
asked to tell them how he had learnt the Austrian accent into which he had slipped as if
into a tailor-made suit, when the strange girl stepped into the circle and asked: Excuse
me, please, are you Professor Bernays?
As he had yet to turn his eyes away from Frauke’s lips, there was a sharp and
tipsy note in his voice as he retorted: If you’re not Rozmburk’s niece?
A rather too long and thoughtful gaze told him, to his astonishment, that she was
exactly that, however she might have come by that description of herself. That the joke he
had intended to crack at the expense of an unsuspecting girl was embarrassing to this one,
who knew what was going on.
Rozmburk has no niece, she said coolly, but she sat down on the vacant chair. I’m
a kind of godchild.
Well, here we go, thought Bernays, and his sense of elation returned, with a
warmer and less venomous note to it this time. Rozmburk’s niece not only existed, she
was also the woman who had been so sadly lacking from this company. A gift in a red
shirt. For he had grasped all that was necessary. She was pretty, in a way of which she
herself was probably hardly aware. Bernays liked slender, bright-eyed women who gave,
on the whole, a kind of brownish impression, women who reminded him of the twentyyear-old Pauline, long since submerged in flesh and make-up. This girl was young, but
her manner told him that she was past student age. She was someone in her own right,
and he would find out just who.
He moved back from the table and turned his chair in her direction. He was
making a fuss about her to distract attention from himself. Suddenly the thought of his
performance was uncomfortable. Well, let the others think he had been expecting her.
What would you like to drink? he asked, stood up when she had expressed a wish,
strolled out and fetched her a drink from the bar. He was rewarded on his return by a long
12
look from her. He hoped he wasn’t drunk, and that if he was she didn’t notice. But of
course Viennese women had experience of that, which could be either an advantage or a
drawback. She would probably notice, and equally probably she was unlikely to mind.
They were all under the influence the whole time here, but unless someone mentioned it,
it didn’t count as being drunk.
She herself drank two glasses of wine quickly. At first she was reserved, but with
the first answer of any length that she gave she became lively. When she almost knocked
his glass over, she sat on her hands like a shy little girl. She seemed to be at odds with her
own temperament, engaged in a silent struggle with an uncontrollable force. She struck
him as a little prickly now and then, or perhaps just rough at the edges. The opposite of
the melodiously laughing American girls he had known, or of Frauke. She was called
Roxane.
The name of a Persian queen, he said.
And she replied: I’m glad you don’t quote The Police at me.
He had scored a point. Later she picked at cold pommes frites from a plate without
an owner and waved the menu away, blushing, when he handed it to her. Rozmburk’s
godchild, then. Not in any religious sense, she explained, more of a spontaneously
invented irregular ceremonial, they probably decided to wet my head with beer when I
was a baby. She had never wanted to come on this expedition with him and his group,
and she had certainly not asked for a guided tour on her own. But now that Rozmburk
was ill, who knew how seriously, it suddenly struck her that she really ought to go.
Perhaps, she said, as magic to ward off misfortune. And probably she wouldn’t know
until the last minute, she added, if she really had the courage.
Oh, that would be a great pity, said the words coming out of him.
She looked at him and twisted her mouth. He could see what she was thinking.
A pity for whom, you are asking yourself, he said, forging on and struggling to
find a surprising turn of phrase, well, for you and your uncle, for what you don’t have to
discuss, but it’s there all the same.
Uncle. Using a word like uncle to this young woman. He realized that he must
resort to flight. Her face hovered enticingly in front of him in the smoky air, but he could
no longer decipher the meaning of her glances. At any rate he confessed as much to
himself. He felt as if a false tooth had come loose when he talked. Slowly, as if he had to
yawn, but he only wanted to avoid babbling, he suggested breakfasting together. She
13
nodded quickly, so he wasn’t entirely repulsive. Ten o’clock in the Zögernitz café. As he
stood up he patted her forearm, the weary, protective gesture of an adult. He gave the rest
of the table a quick wave, hurried out, settled his bill at the bar, added the girl’s two
glasses of wine to it in a moment of renewed exuberance, flung himself into a taxi outside
the café, and did not begin making shamefaced grimaces until the car had gone round two
corners.
He woke with a headache when the telephone rang. He wasn’t yet used to its special
structure, the receiver was firmly hooked in place somehow, so that being drowsy in
addition he almost tore it from its moorings to get it into bed with him. Pauline was
calling him, the children had been at school for ages, Andrei was at the Institute, and her
mouth would certainly be immaculately painted. Her lobbyist work didn’t begin until
later. Bernays reached for his prick out of habit, but the memory of a red shirt surfaced,
and he withdrew his hand. He gave her an account of his travel group, leaving out Xane
and making it as malicious as he could.
No interesting women? Pauline asked. You’re keeping something from me.
Caught out, Bernays shook his head, but his voice gave no grounds for suspicion,
it sounded freshly oiled. Yes, he said, you’re right, the militant lesbian would be worth
sinning for, of course. Do you think she keeps her shoes on in bed?
Later, in the bathroom, he tried to find out how long he could keep his face in icecold water in the wash-basin, adopting an absurdly distorted, almost cowering attitude.
He had found swellings and red patches on the face of the ageing idiot that he was, an
idiot to whom a strange girl in a red shirt who was much too young for him seemed the
last hope of salvation. I was drunk, he tried to reassure himself, I’m having a mid-life
crisis – and she’s Rozmburk’s niece! Then he laughed out loud all by himself in his hotel
room. The water running down the plughole was tinged with red, a faint echo of her shirt
and the colour of his hair, so presumably it was just the henna washing out after only a
week. Bernays examined his face, the first little broken veins, it wasn’t as bad as all that.
Maybe someone could love me, he thought, maybe my ridiculous appearance would be
endearing to other eyes. And then it struck him that it was a long time since he had
thought so kindly of himself, a very long time, probably not since he met Pauline.
He lost his way twice going to the Zögernitz, and the second passer by that he
accosted paid him an unintentional compliment, asking with disparagingly pursed lips:
14
Where are you from, then? Graz? It was an early spring day, and everything felt like that,
still cool but coming to life underneath it.
Xane was standing in the middle of the café in her coat. She smiled at him,
flapped her arms because there was no table vacant, rolled her eyes when a waiter almost
ran her down, and offered her cheeks to Bernays as a matter of course, first one and then
the other. In France it’s three, he insisted, and she raised her chin, offered him her right
cheek again and said, as if retaliating: But I can pay my own bill.
She ordered two coddled eggs in a glass, and praised the trouble the coffee-houses
of Vienna took with that dish: You just try shelling a soft-boiled egg without breaking it.
Bernays could hardly look at those smooth, white balls in a little glass goblet, sprinkled
with chopped chives. Was it the human size of the items they reminded him of, or was he
hoping for too much again? She stuck a fork pitilessly in the eggs, and the yolks flowed.
She spoke to him, he thought, slightly ironically, addressing him as Professor and asking
whether he was Belgian, French or Israeli. Meanwhile Bernays consumed a headache
tablet. He wondered whether his scrambled egg with bacon would be good for a stomach
acidified by white wine or instead particularly bad for it, and murmured: Born in Poland,
British passport. And my name is Hugo.
I know, Professor, she said, laughing, and put her hand over her mouth in the
same way as she had done yesterday evening. She’s flirting with me, thought Bernays,
and he felt suspicious. He wouldn’t have expected such luck. Why was she doing it?
Because he was leader of this excursion? There were some women who made a beeline
for the alpha male in every situation in life.
Why do you put your hand over your mouth when you laugh, he asked. She
slowly lowered her hand; she wasn’t laughing any more. Instead, she raised one
forefinger and lifted her lip.
Crooked incisor, she said, and he leaned back, imitated her movement with his
own mouth, only further to the side, murmured, crooked canine tooth, lowered his finger
again, looked at her, still leaning back in a macho manner, and said: I think we could use
first names.
The arrival at three in the morning had its usual effect. Although Bernays had hardly slept
at all on the hard bunk, he preferred Polish night trains to any chartered, air-conditioned
coach, complete with background music, that arrived at a normal time of day. There was
15
no need for him to do or refrain from doing anything; in their weariness his charges
immediately got the right impression. The poor street lighting, the dilapidated buildings,
the silence, the lack of people, and in addition the sign saying Oświęcim were enough for
most of them. It looked like night and fog. No chatter, no laughing, you could rely on
that. A brisk walk to the assembly points for young people, and then they could go to bed,
because next morning, when their work began, that first nocturnal image would still be
exerting its subtle influence.
From breakfast on, Bernays barricaded himself behind his new role. He could
imagine that he was alienating Xane for one, and probably most of the others, with his
orange, green and grey outfit. Ever since he had bought it in a Frankfurt shop specializing
in outdoor wear, Pauline and he had called it his Auschwitz uniform, but that was a
private joke that could be shared otherwise only with people like Rozmburk. Over the ten
rainy months when he was doing research for his dissertation, Bernays had worn out so
many shoes and pairs of trousers that there was no avoiding an emergency purchase from
a gentleman’s outfitter in Krakow. In expensive long-distance phone calls he had
complained to Pauline, who was extraordinarily tactful with him at this time: I’m a
historian, not a boy scout. It had been her idea to ask the archaeologists for advice. But
practicality was not the only aspect; with so many visits you needed a kind of work-wear,
something you put on to make it clear to yourself that you were back again. And in
addition, with its bright colours the outfit that he had assembled from the mountaineering
and trekking departments of the Frankfurt shop was also far removed from any of the
fabrics that had ever been used in Auschwitz.
The crazy thing was that here, of all places, people needed a Führer, a leader, not
just a guide, as the members of staff whose services could be booked at the museum were
called. Of course they could hardly offer a leader, with all the associations of that word in
German. Using the term guide, a word that sounded so helpful, gentle and international,
made no difference to the demands on the person doing the job, as he had learnt years ago
from Rozmburk. Never mind whether the guide was one of the angular Polish women
historians who remembered those days, or a pimply Austrian civil servant: guides were
universally expected to tell people what it was all about in every respect, including the
most personal. Bernays was convinced that the stricter the guide, the less the visitors to
the site would fall out of line later, emotionally or alcoholically. The rules, he sometimes
thought, were laid down as clearly as in S and M; you put authoritarian collars on your
16
charges so that they wouldn’t hurt themselves. It was a strain all over again every time.
But his jacket helped him, with all its inside pockets, reflector strips, Velcro fastenings
and the hood that could disappear into his collar in good weather.
As usual, he began with the marketplace of the town, because this was also a
perfectly normal little town, not somewhere dark at the back of beyond. It was not a black
hole. It was not a place of total negation, that was the first thing they had to understand.
Children were born here too, flowers were sold. He stood there, legs apart, thumbs in the
loops of his belt, unwinding his narrative, which like everything he was going to say in
the coming days aimed to undermine preconceived feelings. The flourishing German
community of the nineteenth century, a spiritual centre making its mark far afield in
Europe, the Jerusalem of Oświęcim, as it was known. At this point the faces of all in his
group were the same, they looked as if they had bitten into something rotten and would
like to hold those who had served them up these details responsible, although they felt
that that was too simple.
He went on: figures, dates, historical turns of phrase that sounded ridiculous only
in retrospect, like the fact that the first who had to make way for the planned Nazi camp
and its need for living quarters had been the local Jews of Auschwitz, who were first
deported to the ghettos of Bendsburg and Sosnowitz, then brought back when the place
was finished and, so to speak, murdered at home.
Following a second train of thought of his own, he mused at length on Xane. How
and where he could cut a little hole in his survival costume just for her. Yesterday in the
train, when the others were smoking in the corridor, she had briefly rested her head on his
shoulder after he had shared his apple with her.
Successful Jewish distilleries, like the best known one founded by Jakob
Haberfeld, he was saying just as he noticed that their attention to him had waned.
Something behind them was distracting them. He tried to force the group to make eye
contact with him. Mario looked straight back, but the corners of his mouth were
twitching. Mr Architect had pink blotches on his cheeks. Xane was standing to one side,
scarf up to her chin, staring at her toes and rocking back and forth. The writer gave him a
friendly nod, as if of one father figure to another. Schurl Slezak looked anxious. Several
of the students, including the three girls, were looking at him without really seeing him,
as if they were forcibly keeping their eyes off something else. The others had lost the
thread of his remarks so entirely that they didn’t even appear to be listening. Then Xane
17
raised the old Nikon that she wore round her neck to her face and pointed the camera at
him. She spent a couple of seconds adjusting the focus, pressed the shutter once, twice,
three times. Laughter broke out, suppressed and hysterical. He was familiar with that. But
already, and here?
Bernays broke off in mid-sentence and turned round. Behind him two stray
mongrel dogs were copulating, six legs in the shallow basin of the fountain, taking no
notice of their surroundings and doing it with as much animal enthusiasm as they would
eat and defecate, never mind where they were.
Bernays closed his eyes for a moment. The group behind him was quiet, its
attention entirely concentrated on him again. He turned to them and said: Seeing that sort
of thing might put you off it. As he spoke, he looked only at Xane, and was inwardly
delighted to see how embarrassed she seemed. The he simply walked away as fast as he
could in the direction of the main camp, and his group, abashed, hurried after him.
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