Shyness And Dignity (13 page)

beard
was a disturbing element in TV’s Foreign Magazine or not, or whether Dan Børge Akerø’s style as a presenter was his own or had resulted from painstaking study of foreign models, especially from the USA, or England maybe. But the remark by the mathematics teacher, I’m somewhat of a Hans Castorp today, was a different matter. It was a naive and natural remark which had simply escaped his colleague’s lips without his giving it much thought. No profundity, just a mathematics teacher who felt a touch of fever and had therefore wondered whether he should stay at home today, under his eiderdown, or whether to forget about it and go to school anyway, because after all he only felt a bit limp and not really sick, and so he wanted his colleagues to know about it, that he didn’t feel quite alright, and the moment he was going to do just that, it occurred to him that his condition was, after all, a bit like the one that Hans Castorp experienced in
The Magic Mountain
, throughout its eight to nine hundred pages, and so he said it, as an allusion which would explain his condition, not to evoke sympathy, but to define his condition with a common reference that simply occurred to him – I’m somewhat of a Hans Castorp today, I should probably have stayed under the eiderdown – and perhaps he was reading
The Magic Mountain
just then and had thought, when he awoke with a bit of fever, that today I’ll stay home and lie under the eiderdown so I can continue to read
The Magic Mountain
, but then he had changed his mind, and to explain that he had said, I’m somewhat of a Hans Castorp today, I should have stayed under the eiderdown, and the
moment
he said it, one of his colleagues, the fifty-odd-years-old Norwegian and history teacher Elias Rukla, began to tremble, for joy. Yes, a thrill of joy shot through him. Another human being, a colleague at that, had mentioned the fictional character Hans Castorp by name, as a natural reference to his own general condition! It was a strange schoolday for Elias Rukla. His joy remained with him all day, when he stood at his desk teaching and, afterwards, when he dropped into the staff room and sat there with his colleagues, glancing discreetly over at the colleague who had said this. He sat behind his desk and conducted his class in his somnolent way, an average grey class that failed to rise above the merely routine in the way he presented the literature of his mother tongue, but his heart was singing all the while: I’m somewhat of a Hans Castorp today, I’m somewhat of a Hans Castorp today, and this joy was so intense that he passed his hand over his forehead to find out whether he, too, wasn’t a little sweaty, a little damp, with an ever-so-little trace of fever today. For a long time afterwards Elias Rukla’s attention was directed at this colleague. He would very much like to become better acquainted with him. Well, actually he forced himself on him, but without his colleague noticing. Sat down beside him in the brief breaks (in the noon break, at the lunch hour, they had more or less permanent seats, and Elias Rukla sat at a different table from this maths teacher) and waited for him to say something. Something like what he had said, something that could give him that same remarkable uplift. Met him constantly in the narrow
corridor
where the teachers had their private cabinets, standing beside him there. Tried to say something himself. But what should he say? What he wished to say he could not bring himself to say, and what he actually said did not lead to their becoming better acquainted, just a few simple, casual words uttered to avoid a complete silence as they stood like this beside each other in the narrow passage, or sat at the same table in one of the brief breaks. He thought he might invite him for dinner! Featuring Eva’s lamb roast, with garlic and rosemary. No, not garlic, it wouldn’t do to invite strangers and serve them food that contained garlic; there were always some people who did not appreciate that, because of their breath afterwards. No, lamb roast with parsley, lots of parsley. He would invite the colleague and his wife for dinner, at home with Eva and himself. He stood in the narrow passage in front of their book cabinets, trying to pluck up his courage and invite him for dinner. But wouldn’t it sound rather odd? After all, they did not know one another, being simply colleagues with a passing acquaintance who had now begun to exchange a few brief words about nothing in particular. So would it not look a bit peculiar to invite him for dinner, together with his wife at that? But how about without his wife? Worse still – Eva and Elias Rukla and the maths teacher, why in the world? No, he had to invite him with his wife. But to do so struck him as being so out of place; after all, he did not know his colleague really well, and as for his wife, he did not even know who she was, and Eva of course knew nothing about either of them. Maybe he should invite
Rolfsen
too, Rolfsen and his wife, Rolfsen who sat at the same table as the maths teacher in the noon break, directly across from him – he had seen them often talk together, and Rolfsen and his wife knew both Eva and him well; yes, that must be it. But he did not do that either, for when all was said and done he did not think he knew him well enough to invite him and his wife together with Rolfsen and Rolfsen’s wife, although they both knew Rolfsen well. He must get to know him better first. But he didn’t, being unable to bring himself to say something that could have made them better acquainted, nor was there anything in the behaviour of the maths teacher which could be interpreted to mean that he wished to become better acquainted with Elias Rukla, and besides, as time went on, he found it improper to force himself upon him in that way, without his colleague noticing anything, to be sure, that he was convinced of anyway, and so after a while Elias Rukla stopped both being on the lookout for him in the narrow passage in front of the book cabinets and sitting down at his table in the brief breaks, doing it only now and then when it seemed quite natural and otherwise never again. But he was constantly waiting. For his colleague to say something that would make Elias Rukla tremble for joy and go into a sweat, as in a mild fever; he was listening with half an ear sitting there, but, of course, there is so much noise in the staff room, especially during the noon break, that as a rule it is impossible to hear what people at other tables are saying, especially when you do not make an effort to listen but only sit there, inadvertently
prepared
in case something should happen, which was not very likely. Oh, how he pined for someone to talk to. Also in the evening when he sat at home in the living room in Jacob Aalls gate, with his beer and his shots of aquavit, occupied with his own thoughts after Eva had gone to bed. He had his own ideas and read a lot. History and novels. He mostly read novels of the 1920s, which were a concept to him: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, Thomas Mann, and Musil were the authors he liked to read, and they were all authors of the 1920s to him. Also James Joyce, though he did not like him, but all the same he considered him a 1920s author, because that way you could perceive the broad outlines of the twentieth-century European novel. Strictly speaking, few of his 1920s authors were actually authors of the 1920s, in any case not without considerable reservations. Like Kafka. Kafka did not write a single book in the 1920s, most of what he wrote appeared even before 1914, but who is more of a 1920s author than Kafka? And Thomas Mann was originally a nineteenth-century author, but his great books,
The Magic Mountain
and
Doctor Faustus
, were novels of the 1920s, despite the fact that
Doctor Faustus
was actually published after World War Two. And Marcel Proust’s
In Search of Lost Time
– most of that work was written before 1914 and very little in the 1920s. But it is the 1920s that have given them their
character
, not only because most of the works of these writers were published then, and attracted attention then, but because it was felt so right that they are placed in the 1920s, when one considers that, for five
whole
years, the old Europe was going under in a futile, purposeless, and utterly ruthless bloodbath in the muddy trenches of Flanders. That Europe survived that war is the truly historical riddle of our century, which must be understood at one time or another, in any case by me, Elias Rukla thought. And these novels of the 1920s, as Elias Rukla’s conceived of them, are stimulating also because they do not differ from one another according to whether they were actually written before 1914, during the Great War of 1914–18, or after it, in the actual 1920s, like
The Magic Mountain
, or for that matter later, in the 1930s or 1940s – indeed, Elias Rukla could point to novels written up to our own time that he would not hesitate to call novels of the 1920s.
The Trial, The Guermantes Way, The Sleepwalkers, The Man Without Qualities, The Magic Mountain
(and also
Ulysses
, if you will, though it is a dead end, Elias Rukla insisted stubbornly to himself), they are all hypnotic, soberly descriptive novels of the same historical domain, our century at the point in time where truth has become clear and painful. Why Elias Rukla was so taken with the novels of the 1920s, he did not know; he could not recognise himself in them, if that is what one would suppose, but he liked their style and temperature, however much the individual 1920s authors differed among themselves, both in style and temperature. What he found again were the mental jolts caused by the great European war, found again in his own mind eighty years later. His own country had been a neutral outskirt during that war, in any case as far as the Flanders trenches were
concerned
, and yet his innermost being belonged to the regions where these jolts were still reverberating, and this is something that more people than I ought to have reflected upon, Elias Rukla thought, both the fact that the 1920s can be found before the
cause
of the 1920s, the 1914–18 war, and that the jolts from it can be found in my mind, despite the absence of historical documentation, Elias Rukla thought, slightly puzzled. Perhaps I ought to include Kundera, too, as a 1920s author, though I’ve previously refused to do so, because his work is so marked by another postwar era, Eastern Europe after 1945, and not by the 1914–18 war, but judging by what I am saying now, that should not be a hindrance, if I am to use myself as reader as an example, and that, of course, I must be allowed to do, and then, figuratively speaking, Kundera will fit in perfectly as a 1920s author, and since I value him so highly and all – yes, I do, thought Elias Rukla – Kundera is also an author of the 1920s. But of the old 1920s authors he gradually came to like Mann the best. At first it had been Kafka, then Marcel Proust, but lately he had begun to like Thomas Mann more and more. And that was because he had a curious idea that Thomas Mann was the only author who could have written a novel about him, Elias Rukla, and that he could have written down his entire narrative without self-pity, without whining, and with a rare irony, completely different from the kind of irony which is fashionable in our time, the Mannian irony, which is not used as a defence against reality but is a discreet hint that, when all is said and done, as eventually
happens
, this fate too (in this imagined instance, that of Elias Rukla) is rather unimportant, though it certainly is a fate and as such must be studied, as it certainly can be. To qualify oneself for being the central character in a novel is, of course, an achievement in itself, and with what right do I imagine I can be seen as such a character, and in a novel by Thomas Mann at that? Elias Rukla thought, on the verge of shaking his head at himself. Thomas Mann would not have been interested in my soul, or in my soul’s darkness, by itself, and why in the world should he take any interest in it? But I imagine that he might have derived a certain pleasure from describing my wanderings across the floor tonight, in my apartment in Jacob Aalls gate, where I’m walking back and forth, plagued by the fact that I am a socially aware individual who no longer has anything to say, Elias Rukla thought. Actually, Thomas Mann was the only writer of the 1920s who would at all have considered an offer from Elias Rukla to turn him into a character in a novel. He could vividly imagine turning up for an audition to be selected as a fictional character and being scrutinised by the novelists of the 1920s. He could see how they declined with thanks, one after another, he saw Marcel Proust barely raise an eyelid before casting a brief, meaningful, ironic glance at his colleagues, before Céline’s coarse laughter (yes, Céline is also an author of the 1920s, a typical one, though
Journey to the End of the Night
was written in the thirties) resounded in Elias Rukla’s ears. Only Thomas Mann would take the poor candidate aspiring to be a fictional character seriously.
He
would have looked at Elias Rukla and asked if he could, in a few words, say why he was of the opinion that precisely his fate was suitable as fictional material, either in the capacity of a central character or a minor figure, for, after all, if one has the ambition to be a central character, one must have a clear understanding that one can also be suitable as a minor character – that is a condition which must be agreed to before any author will take the slightest interest in one’s fate, he thought Thomas Mann would have said to him. And after Elias Rukla had given an account of his life – and that would, whether I stammered or not, be a model of brevity, he thought – Thomas Mann would give him a reserved but friendly look, he thought, and say, Well, I can’t promise anything, as there is no way I can fit you and your life into my present plans, as far as I can see, but there will be other times after this, and then we can possibly come back to the matter. I don’t promise anything, quite the contrary, yet it should be sufficient to keep you from being discouraged and make you continue your life as before, even if you should not be granted the privilege of entering one of my novels, as a character. Well, this is how Elias Rukla had spent evening after evening, staying up late fantasising, a bit shyly, about his own life and its possibility of at least making contact with the literature he valued most of all, well, perhaps also a bit shamefacedly, because he was afraid he was putting too big words into the mouth of Thomas Mann in the matter of judging whether he was suitable as a character in one of his novels, or that it would not do for him, even if only in