33

It is midnight. The witching hour, Mr. Brodny. Back in Vienna, at twelve midnight, Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha would exchange intimate glances at every creaking of an ancient and decrepit piece of furniture (almost pure Biedermeier, a von Jaentsch heirloom). They knew what was happening: visitors from the beyond. The departed were going about. Uncle Helmuth even knew them by name. During the séances of his spiritist circle, they would materialize in the temporarily emptied physical shells of the mediums, identifying themselves and revealing from which sofa nook or dresser corner they were creaking. You should not be surprised, sir, that I, familiar at an early age with such occult phenomena, have gotten into the habit of summoning ghosts. We live in the era of historicism, obsessed with the notion of rationally comprehensible causal connections; they alone guarantee our reality. I, for my part, am haunted by the loss of a full half of my life. I would like to conjure up the vanished reality of that half. I have to do so. I ask for your sympathy: it’s not pleasant living amid the realities in the no-man’s-land of time. To feel comfortable here, one must be dead, like Uncle Ferdinand, like Cousin Wolfgang, like Schwab and all my other loves. They still exist marvelously as heroes of their myths. Which, of course, also means that they have to put up with being summoned forth by shamans like me. People like us have the power to call them from their shadowy existence into time’s no-man’s-land and to materialize them in the magical element of writing. Just look: all I have to do is use my quill, my ballpoint pen, the keys of my typewriter, to place a few hundred letters on this sheet of paper, and Uncle Ferdinand—the Uncle Ferdinand of winter 1940—will live before our eyes. His yellowish-white spider-head is wedged deep between his high-thrust shoulders. The straw whisk of his mustache bristles out horizontally on either side under the parrot’s beak of his nose. The skin on his forehead is so smooth that it rosily mirrors the glow from the fireplace. I sit opposite him, listening attentively. The reflection of the fire’s glow is fitful in my boot shafts; the boot tips are in a pool of red light. Uncle Ferdinand is also staring at this. Though physically still very much alive in that winter of 1940, he is no longer of this world. He already belongs to another dimension. He now belongs to the marvelous no-man’s-land of space and time in which history and stories exist.

He is already with his ancestors, whose pictures gaze down at him from the high walls of the dining room. His faith in immortality has placed him among them. Perhaps Uncle Ferdinand does not really believe in the immortality of the soul in God, even though he has been brought up in this faith and would regard it as poor taste to doubt it. But he does believe in the immortality of fame. His ancestors did not die because they entered history. He too will not die, for he will become history. Stella says that he is one of the modern princes who do not determine the fate of the nations with an open vizor but manipulate it surreptitiously, rather in the way a man rummages under a girl’s skirt. Hence, says Stella, his proper place is not in the history of the world but in the history of manners. Nevertheless, when you consider the people in the highway rest stop, this is still the history of the manners of gods: mythology. Meanwhile, he thus placed himself in my shaman power. I need only a few dozen letters again, and he scurries over the glossy curvature of the samovar, withdraws into the constriction under his belly, telescopes into his spindly legs, is caught by the ring over the samovar foot and is dreadfully flattened out; then, extended into a serpent, he slithers around the base of the cone over the heater flame and, as though liquefied, pours into it—