The Play of the Eyes, page 30
Next day I met him at a café. He was with the philosopher Oskar Kraus, who was a faithful disciple of Franz Brentano. This Kraus, a professor of philosophy and a well-known figure in Prague, had been infected with his mentor’s addiction to riddles. He was doing most of the talking. He managed to captivate Kokoschka with a variety of riddles and with talk relating exclusively to riddles; once again I had an impression of modesty, simplicity. In reality, as I realized only later, he was anything but simple, his mind often went devious ways. Nor was he modest; the truth of the matter was that in certain surroundings it pleased him to disappear, as though adapting to the ambient coloration. This opalescent quality was his special gift; here again, in his easy, natural way of changing color, he resembled an octopus, while his large eye, which I always thought of in the singular, scrutinized its prey without indulgence.
But in that café there was little for him to scrutinize. He knew old Professor Kraus well and could hardly have found the smugly garrulous philosopher very exciting. There was something servile about the way in which a man of his age kept referring to his master Franz Brentano, or so it seemed to me at the time, for I had hardly read Brentano and was not yet aware of how richly inspiring a thinker he was. I felt that Kraus with his perpetual chatter was being rude to Kokoschka, but Kokoschka seemed to enjoy it, he had no desire to say anything himself and persisted in his opalescent watchfulness.
All this time I was burning to hear him say something about Georg Trakl. I knew he had known Trakl and had taken the wonderful title of his picture The Bride of the Wind from Trakl. I was convinced that without the title the picture would not exist, that no one would have paid any attention to it if it had not been so titled. It was about that time that I fell under Trakl’s spell; no other modern poet has meant so much to me. His tragic fate still moves me as deeply as when I first learned of it. Obviously there was no point in turning the conversation to Trakl in the presence of this unfeeling riddler. But that is just what I did. I quietly asked Kokoschka if he had known him. “I knew him well,” he replied. He said no more; even if he had wanted to, he couldn’t have said anything, for the professor was already bleating away at another riddle.
I had the impression that Vienna no longer counted for Kokoschka. In his early days, when he would suddenly turn up just about anywhere with Adolf Loos, Vienna had been something. But he had cast Vienna out rather than the other way around, and good old Moll, who had been running himself ragged for him for years, wasn’t the man to revive his interest in Vienna. Gifted as he was at disappearing, I suspected that at present he was disappearing only because he wanted to be left in peace.
I had almost given up hope of having a real conversation with him when he suddenly warmed up and began talking about his mother and his brother Bohi. The house in Liebhartstal, where his brother was still living since his mother’s death, was the only thing that still interested him in Vienna. He regarded his brother as a writer. Did I know him? He had written a great novel in four volumes. He had been a sailor and seen a good deal of the world. No one wanted to publish the book. Did I know of a publisher who might be interested? His brother had no luck in such matters. He was lacking, not in self-confidence, but in calculation. Kokoschka saw nothing shameful in Bohi’s acceptance of his help. He was glad to support his brother and never uttered a word of complaint. He spoke of him with affection and respect. I was moved by this love for his brother, who had always believed in him but also in himself, and it struck me as an endearing trait in Kokoschka that he insisted on offering the world a picture of two equal brothers.
Among my friends in Vienna there had often been talk of this brother. Kokoschka’s reputation was so great that any connection with him conferred a certain prestige. Walter Loos was a young architect; despite his name he was no relation of the great Adolf Loos, but perhaps because of the homonymy, he felt it was his duty to become acquainted with Kokoschka’s brother. When sitting at a Heurigen with Wotruba and me, he gave an enthusiastic account of the exuberantly beautiful chimney sweep’s daughter who was just the right companion for the corpulent Bohi. He told us about the ups and downs of this relationship, about Bohi’s jealousy, about wild scenes and stormy reconciliations. And yet, though pursued by every man in town, the chimney sweep’s daughter was strictly faithful to her Bohi, she just couldn’t be seduced. As Bohi was known to be Oskar’s brother, all talk about him was really about Oskar, and that is why jealousy was required of Bohi. Wotruba listened almost devoutly to all the stories about Kokoschka’s brother. Young Loos, as we called him, kept provoking Wotruba with Oskar’s fame. By holding Kokoschka aloft like a flag, he had gained a certain standing in our group; what he had to say apart from that didn’t amount to much.
Now it was Kokoschka who spoke of his brother Bohi as matter-of-factly as if his name and circumstances were well known to all Vienna. When I went on to talk about young Loos, he seemed rather annoyed.
“An architect by that name shouldn’t even exist. There can only be one Loos.”
Nor did it appeal to him when I defended my friend by saying that, after all, he had been the friend of Kokoschka’s brother and not, like old Loos, the friend of the real Kokoschka. This, he felt, called for a speech in praise of his brother, in the course of which I learned more about the four-volume work that no publisher would touch. Hadn’t this so-called young Loos said anything about it?
No, he had only spoken of Bohi’s love for the chimney sweep’s daughter and described their scenes. Kokoschka, who was incredibly quick, sniffed out a connection with the famous scenes between himself and Alma Mahler and made a dismissive gesture, though I had not been so tactless as to suggest anything of the sort.
“That’s pure Nestroy,” he said. “It has nothing to do with Bohi’s writing. Their scenes attract attention because they’re both so fat. Bohi is pure. He doesn’t make scenes in order to attract attention.”
That sounded as if he were trying to justify his own early scenes. When he was teaching in Dresden, he had lived with a life-sized doll, made according to his specifications to look like Alma Mahler, so perpetuating the talk about the two of them. The story was known even to people who had no use for his painting. The doll was the element of the old scenes that he still carried around with him. It sat beside him at cafés, coffee was served it, and supposedly it was put to bed with him at night. Bohi, on the other hand, quite unlike his brother, did nothing for his reputation. That is why Oskar called him “pure”; that’s why he liked to talk about him; to him Bohi was his own innocence.
* * *
On one of the following days a large number of peasants paraded on Wenceslas Square. One had a good view of them from the terrace of my room at the Hotel Juliš. I invited Ludwig Hardt and a few other people to come and watch the parade. Hardt came with his wife, whom I hadn’t met before. She was short like him, pretty and self-assured. When you saw the two together, you couldn’t help thinking of a circus act. You expected horses to be brought in at any moment, and to see the shapely little woman leap from one to another, while he would perform no less hazardous feats at her side.
But now they were standing beside me on the terrace high over the square, where peasants from all over the country were marching past in their native costumes, some on horseback, amid music and cheers. One was reminded of a peasant wedding. A peasant stepped forward and began to dance, then others here and there in the crowd, each by himself. There was something so exhilarating about the way they burst out of the crowd and, bulky as they were, made room for themselves that tears came to my eyes. I turned away to hide them and my eyes met those of Kokoschka, who had just come out on his terrace. He too was looking down at the peasants, and our eyes met. He saw my agitation and signaled to me with as much warmth as if he had been speaking of his brother Bohi.
I could not have said at the time what moved me so in the solo dances of peasants bursting out of their groups. Their exuberance, their strength, their color left no room for sadness. This was a moment free from all dark forebodings, a moment of heartfelt happiness, though I was not included in their parade—a peasant I certainly was not. And at the same time I was moved by a recognition, a recognition of the dancing peasants in Brueghel. Paintings mold our experience. They become an essential part of us, a kind of native soil. According to the pictures we consist of, we embark on different kinds of life. My excitement over the peasants on Wenceslas Square was colorful and liberating. Two years later Prague had ceased to be Prague. But I had been allowed to experience these people’s strength and heavy charm.
I had a similar feeling about the language. It was totally unknown to me. There was a large Czech population in Vienna. But no one else knew their language. Innumerable Viennese had Czech names, few knew what they meant. One of the loveliest of these was Wotruba, the name of my “twin brother,” who didn’t know a word of his father’s language. Now I was in Prague and I went everywhere; I especially liked to stroll about in the courtyards of big apartment houses and listen to the people talking. Czech struck me as a combative language, because all the words were strongly accented on the first syllable. When you listened to people talking, you received a series of quick thrusts, which continued as long as the conversation lasted.
I had studied the history of the Hussite wars. The fifteenth century had always attracted me, and anyone trying to understand the behavior of crowds was bound to take an interest in the Hussites. I respected the history of the Czechs, and it seems likely that as an outsider trying to hear their language in all its modulations I found things in it which had no source other than my ignorance. But there could be no doubt of its vitality and some words struck me as wonderfully original. I was delighted when I heard the word for music: hudba.
All the other European languages I knew of had the same word for it: “music,” a beautiful, resonant word—when you pronounced it in German, you felt you were leaping into the air. When you accented it more on the first syllable, it didn’t seem quite so active, it hovered awhile in midair before taking off. I was almost as attached to this word as to a tangible object, but as time went on, I began to feel uneasy about its being used for every kind of music, especially as I became better acquainted with modern music. One day I plucked up the courage to speak of this to Alban Berg. Shouldn’t there be other words for music? I asked him. Wasn’t the Viennese public’s obstinate rejection of new music somehow related to their identification with the idea evoked by the word “music,” an identification so complete that they could tolerate nothing that might change the content of this word? Perhaps if modern music had a different name, they would try to get used to it. But Alban Berg wanted no truck with this idea. Like all composers before him, he said, he was interested solely in music; what he was doing derived from his forerunners, what his pupils learned from him was music, any other word would be a fraud, and hadn’t I noticed that the same word had spread all over the earth? He reacted violently, almost angrily to my “suggestion,” and so firmly that I never mentioned it again to anyone.
But though awareness of my musical ignorance kept me from talking about it, the idea stayed with me. And now I was fascinated in Prague when I learned by chance that the Czech word for music was hudba. That was the word for Stravinsky’s Les Noces, for Bartók, Janáček and a lot more.
As though enchanted, I went from courtyard to courtyard. What sounded to me like defiance was perhaps mere communication, but if so, it was more highly charged and contained more of the speaker than we tend to reveal in our communications. Possibly the force with which Czech words hit me might be traced back to my childhood memories of Bulgarian. But those memories had vanished, I had completely forgotten Bulgarian, and how much of a forgotten language stays with us I have no way of knowing. It was certain that in those Prague days various impressions made on me by widely separate periods of my life converged. I absorbed Slavic sounds as parts of a language which touched me in some inexplicable way.
But I spoke German with many people, I spoke nothing else, and these were people with a conscious, sophisticated attitude toward that language. For the most part they were writers who wrote in German, and it was always evident that this language, to which they clung against the powerful ground swell of Czech, meant something different to them from what it meant to those who operated with it in Vienna.
Auto-da-Fé had been translated into Czech and recently published. That is why I had come to Prague. A young writer, now known under the name H. G. Adler, who then held a position in some public institution, had invited me to give a reading. Some five years younger than I, he belonged to a German-speaking literary group in which Auto-da-Fé was going the rounds. Adler, the most active of them all, did everything he could to arouse interest in my reading. He also guided me around town, making sure that none of its beauties should escape me.
He was intensely idealistic and seemed out of place in the damnable times to which he was soon to fall victim. Even in Germany it would have been hard to find a man more dominated by German literary tradition. But he was here in Prague, he spoke and read Czech with ease, respected Czech literature and music, and explained everything I did not understand in a way that made it attractive to me.
I’m not going to list the glories of Prague, which are known to all. It would strike me as almost indecent to speak of squares, churches, palaces, streets, bridges and the river, with which others have spent their whole lives and which permeate their work. I discovered none of that by myself, it was all shown to me. If anyone had a right to speak of these confrontations, it was the man who thought of them and brought them about. But he was not content with the surprises he arranged for me; he himself was full of curiosity and throughout our expeditions never tired of asking me questions. I was glad to answer him; I spoke to him of many people, many opinions, judgments and prejudices that had had a place in my life.
But he realized what it meant to me to hear all sorts of people speaking a language I did not understand, to hear them for myself, without anyone translating what they said. My interest in the effect of words I did not understand must have been something new to him. It was a very special sort of effect, not at all comparable to that of music, for one feels threatened by words one does not understand, one turns them over in one’s mind in an attempt to blunt them, but they are repeated and in repetition become more menacing than ever. He was tactful enough to leave me alone for hours, though he worried about my getting lost and, I’m sure, regretted these interruptions to our talks. When we met again he would ask me about my impressions and it was a sign of my great sympathy for him that I found it hard not to tell him everything.
My Mother’s Death
I found her asleep, her eyes closed. She lay there, emaciated, reduced to pale skin, with deep black holes instead of eyes, and lifeless black caverns where her magnificent wide nostrils had been. Her forehead seemed narrower, shrunken on both sides. I had expected the look of her eyes, and I had the impression that she had barred them against me. When her eyes failed me, I searched for what was most characteristic of her, her large nostrils and her vast forehead, but her forehead had lost its spaciousness, it no longer embraced anything, and the anger of her nostrils had been engulfed by their blackness.
I was startled, but still full of her old power; I suspected that she was hiding from me. She doesn’t want to see me, she wasn’t expecting me. She senses my presence and is pretending to be asleep. I asked myself what she would have thought if she had been in my shoes, because I was she, we knew each other’s thoughts, hers were mine and mine were hers.
I had brought roses, she could never resist the scent of roses. She had breathed it in the garden of her childhood in Ruschuk, and when in our happy years we joked about her nostrils—no one else’s were so big—she said they were so big because as a child she had dilated them smelling roses. Her earliest memory was of lying under a rosebush, and then she was crying because she had been carried into the house and the fragrance was gone. Later on, when she left her father’s house and garden, she had tested the scent everywhere in search of the right one; this again had expanded her nostrils and they had stayed large.
When she opened her eyes, I said: “I’ve brought you these from Ruschuk.” She looked at me incredulously, it wasn’t my presence that she doubted but the source of the roses. “From the garden,” I said; there was only one garden. She had taken me there and breathed deeply and consoled me with fruit for my grandfather’s harsh treatment. Now I held out the roses to her, she breathed fragrance, the room filled with it. She said: “That’s the scent. They are from the garden.” She accepted my story, she accepted me too—I was included in the fragrant cloud. She didn’t ask what had brought me to Paris. That was her face again with the insatiable nostrils. Her enlarged eyes rested on me. She didn’t say: “I don’t want to see you. What are you doing here? I didn’t send for you.” She recognized the scent, and I had crept into it. She asked no questions, she surrendered wholly to the smell. Her forehead seemed to widen, I fully expected her unmistakable words, hard words that I dreaded. I heard her words of bitter reproach, as though she had repeated them: You’ve married. You didn’t tell me. You deceived me.
She hadn’t wanted to see me. And when Georg, alarmed at her decline, wired and wrote, telling me to come at once, when I broke off my stay in Prague after a week, hurried back to Vienna and on to Paris, his main concern was how we could make her consent to see me. He wanted above all to disperse the obsession that tormented her and had recently become more intense, and so to avoid an outburst of rage, which was possible, he thought, even in her weakened condition.
When soon after my arrival I told him of my plan to bring her “roses from Ruschuk” and assured him that she would believe me, he said dubiously: “Would you dare? It will be your last lie.” But he couldn’t think of anything better, and when he realized that I not only was concerned with overcoming her resistance to my visit but really wanted to bring her the fragrance she had been longing for, he rather shamefacedly gave in. But he did not wish to be present, for fear of losing her confidence in case my plan should fail and arouse her to new anger.
