A Greater Music (6 page)

“You read Gunter Grass's
The Tin Drum
? You?”

“That's right. Can't you understand my German? I explained it as well as I could.”

“I just wasn't expecting it, that's all. What do you remember from it?”

“I already told you! Not a single thing. I saw the film too; it was the worst damn film I ever saw. But weirdly enough, it's popular—really popular. That guy must be absolutely rolling in it. And that means he must have plenty of women hanging off him, too.”

“Stop talking like an idiot, Joachim.”

“What's idiotic about it? You and M like each other because you're both rich, no? Do you suppose there's some other reason?”

During the time he spent in civilian service, which he did instead of military service, Joachim had been assigned to a geriatric hospital attached to an old people's home. Naturally this wasn't a position he'd
applied for, but once he'd been assigned the post there was no getting out of it. Ideally, the job required someone with a certain amount of tact and empathy, and Joachim by his own admission was far from sensitive. Neither did he hold all that much respect for those who were. All the same, he'd barely ever spoken about his experiences working there. For a young man just past twenty, the memories of that time were not especially pleasant.

“It was where the hospital sent all the serious cases—well, no, not serious cases, I mean, it wasn't like they were critically ill or anything, just that the doctors had decided it was no use treating them any more. They were just too old, so whatever illness they had, or else the treatment they'd had for it, had left them so weak and feeble they were incapacitated. Or, you know, there were the ones who didn't particularly need to be in a hospital. Anyway, once they came to this place, that was it for them. They would just lie in their beds, waiting to die. Not that anyone thought this was some kind of tragedy, I mean, they were old, it was natural. Every night the old women would crap themselves and in the mornings I had to wash all their underwear. Can you imagine what that was like? Not just what it felt like to have to do it, but what it actually looked like, and the smell. We had to wash them by hand, not just give them a once-over with the showerhead; they insisted that was the only way to get them properly clean. I never understood why we couldn't just use the toilet brushes. And how those old women came to have such enormous genitals, that's something else I never got my head around. These huge things, all wrinkled and withered; dry as a bone no matter how often you washed them. I'm not lying, their underwear was like a giant's black galoshes. And they were almost all women, you know. Maybe because women tend to live longer. Can you imagine how agonizing it was for them, the ones who weren't lucky enough to have a quick end? It was more
than just physical pain. I mean, who wouldn't be in agony, having to live like that? But it wasn't just that they were so immobile they were more like just bodies than actual people, it was that there was nothing they could do themselves; they had no opportunity to make their own decisions. They couldn't even choose to die on their own, someone would have to help them. But it doesn't have to be like that—all it takes is a quick
kkik
at the decisive moment, and it's all over. Simple as that. Meanwhile we civvies joke about how we can't wait to get out of there, but as long as those disgusting places keep being built they'll keep on sending new invalids there to die. Of course, there's plenty of kids in this country that have to do that kind of work, but when you're young—ugh, it's enough to make you sick.”

Gulping down a mouthful of coffee and flicking through yesterday's
Tagesspiegel
, he added: “You're going to die like that too, you know. It's just a matter of time.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because there isn't any other option. Don't you think?”

“Well, what's your secret, then?”

“I'm not going to end up like that. Men don't, generally speaking. And I'm not going to live that long anyway. Seriously, if someone promised me a really long life, I'd tell them thanks, but no thanks. No clinging on to life for me, I'm going to go quickly. And I'm not scared of dying, not in the least—I know it's strange, but it's the truth.”

Mental shallowness, poverty of thought, is no different from death. That was M's belief. That a mind deficient in serious thought is no better than a lump of rotting meat. Even though we consider death to be a concrete, physical, temporally bounded phenomenon, the compass of our lives can be comprehended in the abstract concept of death ahead of this end point. In other words,
there are those of us who are already dying from the moment they are born. In M's opinion, Joachim was one such individual. And so when he boasts about how he's not afraid of dying, trotting it out like a stock phrase, when he claims that the prospect of death—in other words, the prospect of his mind no longer being conscious—holds absolutely no dread or anxiety for him, this is no lie. At first, when I didn't know M very well, I naturally found this judgment extremely harsh. But after I came to know her better, I realized that M's idea of humanity transcends any sense of personal intimacy or human affection, that for M it is a concept that exists outside of the human race. M was coldly, sometimes cruelly precise when it came to assessing Joachim, but this was never a personal attack. Rather than simply being critical of Joachim as an individual, her appraisal was in fact based upon a pessimistic indictment of humanity as a whole. Joachim was perfectly aware of all this, but it didn't bother him. On the contrary, he would confront M with the opposite argument. He would ask, grandly and loudly, since it was clear that not everybody shared M's artistic inclinations, for what reason, then, did everyone have to be absorbed in an abstract world, and think that nothing outside that world could be beautiful, and look down their noses at television, which provided an inexpensive source of relaxation? M had always been contemptuous of Joachim's limited analytical capabilities and narrow-minded opinions, and he would always turn this around and accuse her criticisms of being derivative. And so, listening to their debate, if such a thing could be called a debate, Joachim couldn't help but appear more and more idiotic and obstinate. He was hardly au fait with intellectual discussions, and certainly found no enjoyment in them. But, thinking about it now with the benefit of hindsight, I would hazard that rather than being genuinely unable to follow M's train of thought, it was simply that he couldn't agree with her
reasoning. Plus, his ability to logically argue for a point that he himself did not agree with was sorely limited. He didn't know how to talk in terms of abstract concepts or general postulates. And so the only option left open to him was to continuously deny the validity of the other person's point.

At that time, M was living near the Winter Park. On days when we didn't have a class with her, Joachim and I would visit her on our way home from the library. I don't know how that park came to be called the Winter Park. After all, it existed in other seasons too, not just winter. But the green iron signboard at its entrance declared it to be “Winter Park, Hohenschönhausen.” After a heavy snowfall, children flocked there with their sleds, which they would haul up to the park's hilly areas. The biggest thrill was to be had in riding them down the frozen, sloping footpaths. In winter, stark, bare deciduous trees and small green firs were mantled in snow, frozen hard like biscuits left in the refrigerator. M's house was on the edge of a thickly wooded street at the rear of the park. Because of the shade from the trees, the houses there got very little light and so it always felt colder there than elsewhere. Instead of catching a bus from the nearby tram stop where we got off, it was much quicker for Joachim and I to walk to M's through the woods. The snow lying unmelted on the trails had been there for some time. In fact, several weeks had passed since it fell, but even though it had long since vanished from the roads and the rooftops, in the constant shade of the trees it lay glittering cold and magnificent, as if it had fallen only the night before. Entering into the very heart of the woods, where even the rattle of the tram was no longer audible, we would find ourselves in an ice-bound kingdom of wintry silence. The woods seemed as though they'd been locked in eternal winter by some enchantment, until the housing complexes at the rear of the park came into view around a corner. I once saw a
huge snowman standing there. At least a week had passed since the snow had fallen, but the snowman was still almost completely intact, an open black umbrella stuck upright into the crown of its head, a crumpled page from a film program lying at its feet. Visible through the trees, the sky was overcast as though with the smoke from something burning. But as the sun sank below the horizon, a faint, honeyed light briefly draped the western sky. The world of the woods was washed with the colors of winter and evening and the setting sun. Then the snow began to fall, wet and cold on cheeks, lips, and hair. All of a sudden we found we had left the heart of the woods, which had seemed like another world, behind. The entrance to the housing complex at the rear of the park came back into view. M's apartment was on the very edge of the complex. We rang the bell at the front entrance, hurried inside when the door was buzzed open, and went up to M's apartment on the fourth floor. Inside the centrally heated building, sensation rapidly returned to our numbed extremities. Our cheeks flushed red and our heads thrummed gently, as if we'd each inhaled a lungful of cigarette smoke. Joachim always ran up the stairs three or four paces ahead of me, impatient to get inside the warm room as soon as possible and thaw his body with a cup of coffee. He greeted M noncommittally on entering and, without removing his shoes, went to nose around the kitchen, even examining the contents of the fridge. After running his fingers over her computer, opening the lid of the piano and tinkling the keys, changing the television channel, eating some of the cookies and chocolate that were laid out on the coffee table, and pouring himself a cup of coffee from the thermos, he eventually stretched out on the sofa to flick through a magazine. Once, he managed to complete this sequence while I was still laboring up the stairs, and I found him already
lying on the sofa chewing the last of the cookies when I walked in. M held the door open for me after Joachim came in. Her apartment generally tended to be darker than his. Or rather, this darkness was unalleviated by any electric lighting. And so, panting my way up the stairs and entering the old apartment through the half-open door, I would come face to face with that darkness, which always gave off a peculiar smell, light and sweet, like a dried orange just beginning to rot. It was of the same intensity as the shadows that envelop a place from which the sun has withdrawn completely, akin to that realm encountered in dreams, the utter black directly before surfacing from sleep. Even when I didn't know M all that well, that darkness made a very great impression on me. Once I'd stood in front of the door for a short while, objects slowly began to take on solid forms. The faintest of lights seeped into the apartment from who knew where, kindling the silent, solitary existence of inanimate objects, gifting them with the palest hues, whispered words, the barest outlines of physical form. Bare green walls; a narrow corridor covered with a small, worn rug; the door of a wall cupboard where umbrellas and shoes were stored; the faint scent of furniture polish; two rooms with bare wooden floors, their doors lying half-open; a low voice coming from behind that door; the sound of someone leafing through a book. And I enter the apartment and close the door.

After some time had passed, I discovered the following passage in a book I was reading:

           
Early one evening, we arrived at a village of mud huts. The huts were an unsightly pale brown, and stood in stark relief against the vast and otherwise empty plain. A railroad cut across the plains from the west. We came out from there and had to stand in two lines along the rail tracks.

                
I never saw such a desolate place. There was simply nothing, in all directions, as far as the eye could see. The only thing to attract the eye was the far horizon disappearing in a faint light. There was nothing but dust, dust everywhere. It was dreary beyond belief.

                
A Chinese prisoner whispered to me that this area was the start of a place known as “Shinjang”; some truly dire things were rumored about it. He said that we would now be hauled through the Lop Nur desert, where the Chinese government had apparently tested nuclear weapons; up until the Turpan reservoir it was nothing but a city of convicts. In other words, thousands of people incarcerated in hundreds of POW camps.

I had no idea why that passage made me think of M and the period at the beginning of our acquaintance when I'd been a regular visitor at her apartment. M wasn't Chinese, after all, and as far as I could recall we'd never discussed either China or prisons. There's absolutely nothing to attract the eye in this place, it's the kind of place where the only view is of the desolate desert and the far horizon clustered with dust clouds, and all that is now left for me is to pass the remainder of my days as one among thousands of nameless prisoners, in the filthy, wretched POW camp. I couldn't grasp why such a terrible plight would make me think of M and those visits. But as I read the passage I was transported, finding myself directly in front of the door to M's apartment, at the rear of the Winter Park, staring at the darkness inside. When you encounter a
situation in which there is absolutely no opportunity for making any decision; when your immediate environment is unremittingly desolate, lacking even the means for you to distinguish directions; when you're imprisoned as a nameless number, when your individuality is nullified and you become merely one among many—even if you call it by a very different name, even if they aren't quite identical, such an experience is, at the very least, closely akin to death.