2666 (111 page)

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 sisters 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.