The Torch in my Ear, page 36
But when I said anything about crowds to Thomas, I sensed an altogether different sort of reaction, which initially surprised me. The dissolution of the individual in a crowd was the enigma of enigmas to me, and Thomas saw it in terms of himself, doubting whether he could ever become a crowd. He said he had once asked his mother to take him along to a May Day demonstration. She agreed (reluctantly—he wouldn’t give in) and pushed him in his wagon all the long way to the city. But when they tried to join the parade, they were thrust into a group of invalids, who had come rolling up in their wagons. He protested. He shouted as loud as he could that he wanted to march with the others, but they ignored him. They said it wouldn’t work; he couldn’t even march; he would hold up the procession. No, the invalids would all come together; they would thus have a common tempo. It would look better, too. He wasn’t the only one after all: there were many others; all the war invalids were here.
But he wasn’t a war invalid, he shouted angrily. He was a student; he was studying philosophy; his place was behind the Academic Legion, which was made of militant socialist students. All the like-minded students were marching behind them. He wanted to be with his fellow students, otherwise the whole thing had no interest for him. However, the demonstration organizers wouldn’t yield. They said they had to make sure that everything was orderly, and so they mercilessly placed him among the war invalids in their little wagons. Some of them could move along on their own, others had to be pushed like him.
Throughout the demonstration, he felt raped. He was at the edge, the spectators in their rows had a good view of him; luckily, they didn’t understand what he was trying to say in his breathy voice: “I don’t belong here! I’m not a war cripple!” That was the last thing he cared to be. He had not been in the war. He had not killed anyone. He was serious when he said he wouldn’t have gone to war. The others had all gone, out of cowardice, and had been punished with their serious wounds. Many had even gone out of enthusiasm. But their enthusiasm had soon waned. Now, they were all pulling along, behind the giant signs that said “Never Again War!” Of course not. They would never go to war again; they couldn’t. They weren’t lying at least, but all the others walking on their legs, they would dash to war again like sheep and forget all the fine May Day slogans. He spoke with deep hatred about this demonstration. It was just like the army. All the cripples together, a special company. He believed that everyone should march wherever he felt like. He had nothing against dividing the parade according to districts, or according to factories; but division according to cripples was a scandal, and he never went again.
I asked him whether he couldn’t imagine some other situation in which he would willingly dissolve into a crowd. After all, he had been drawn to the May Day demonstration; otherwise he wouldn’t have nagged his mother to take him. She had given in very reluctantly; she may have realized what the upshot would be. However, there were other occasions which might not require locomotion—meetings in a hall, for instance. Didn’t he enjoy them? He must have had such experiences. The very way he spoke about war was proof for me that he had heard antiwar speeches, indeed, in the excited state of mind that one has when one is together with many other people.
Thomas made a skeptical face. If he had understood me correctly, he said, such an experience requires a feeling of equality, and this was one feeling he didn’t have. Did I know the cripple newspaper, he asked, put out by the Association of Cripples? No? He would ask his mother to put aside a copy of this cripple newspaper for the next time I came. These cripples (he used the word so often in order to make clear how utterly he excluded himself from this category), these cripples had their meetings, too. They were announced in the newspaper. He had once had himself taken to such a meeting to see what they were all about. But none of them were in wagons. They sat in their chairs in rows, while some one-armed man sat on the podium in front, trying to keep order. His mother had placed his wagon on the side, toward the front, so that his heckling could be heard, for he was firmly resolved not to spare them anything.
He told me that I just couldn’t imagine the level of such a meeting. These people regarded themselves as a sort of union and behaved accordingly. They were always carrying on about some rights or other that had to be fought for—he just couldn’t stand the way they wailed on and on about how badly off they were. Yet all they lacked was an arm or an eye. Some had a wooden leg, some had waggling heads, all of them were ugly. He combed the rows of people, looking for an intellectual face. There was none with whom one would have cared to start a philosophical conversation. He would have bet that not a single one of these four or five hundred people in the auditorium had ever heard the name Leibniz. All you heard was demands for higher pensions. A pensioners’ meeting, yes, that’s what it was. Every time such a demand was brought up, he heckled, shouting they had enough as it was. They were much too well off. Just what did they want anyway? The insolence of these people, who had all come to the meeting on their own legs and actually had the gall to complain! He, in any event, disrupted the meeting as much as he could. He heckled much louder than I realized. He didn’t know whether his comments had been understood, but some of them must have been, for the people were annoyed and ultimately they became furious. This was freedom of speech, which people made such a to-do about! The one-armed chairman asked him not to disrupt, others wanted to have the floor, too. But Thomas just couldn’t stand hearing the nonsense, and he kept heckling, until the one-armed chairman asked him to leave the auditorium!
“How am I supposed to leave?” he had retorted. “Could you tell me how I’m supposed to leave?” The one-armed man had had the gall to tell him: “You found your way into the auditorium. You will find your way out again!” The chairman meant that his mother should push him out, and unfortunately she did so, because she got scared. He wanted to remain in order to see what they would do. Perhaps these people, who could walk, would not have been ashamed to pounce on him and beat him, the defenseless man. What did I think? Would they have beaten him? It would have been worth the trouble to wait and see. He wasn’t scared. He would have spat in their faces and yelled “Riffraff!” But his mother wouldn’t go along with such things. She was always trembling for him, her precious child. Actually, she treated him like a babe-in-arms, and he was dependent on her and couldn’t do anything about it. By and large, she did what he wanted her to do, after all.
But now could I tell him whether this was a “crowd experience”? He hadn’t felt at all equal. They all thought he was a lot worse off than they, yet these were people who read their cripple newspaper and nothing else. So they were a lot worse off than he; that was why they had very nearly pounced on him. When he thought about it now, in retrospect, he was forced to conclude that they were all envious of him. Perhaps they could tell just by looking at him that he was preparing for his doctorate in philosophy.
This was all that Thomas could say about crowds. I began to realize how tactless I had been with my talk about crowds. How could I speak in his presence about the density and equality inside a crowd? What equality would this have been for him? And how densely could others squeeze against Thomas, who always lay in his wagon? It was a matter of life and death for him to change, being so different—an inalterably painful difference—into something proud. After all, he had learned how to read with his tongue, he stuck to difficult books, which only a few chosen people could know of; and if he so greatly emphasized that he was studying, then it was only something temporary; in reality, he wanted to be known as a philosopher and write works so powerful and unique that, someday, thick tomes would be written about him, too—as about Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant. This was the only rank he recognized; this was where he belonged, even though he hadn’t reached that point yet, doubting only in moments of extreme shame and humiliation by others that he would someday really be accepted into this rank.
I had never seen such burning ambition, and I liked his ambition, even though I didn’t know what it was based on. For the things that Thomas had already dictated to his mother—scattered thoughts and also sketches for an autobiography—would by no means have struck me had I been unacquainted with the author’s life. He had no style of his own as yet, the language of these dictated pieces was colorless and wooden; the things he told me during the long hours of our conversations were a lot more interesting. The most striking thing of all was that in the course of such a conversation he intensified and became interesting. He soon noticed that I didn’t think much of his pieces, and he said all these things didn’t count: first of all, he had dictated them years ago, before he had even learned how to think, and then—referring to his autobiography—it was all whining and sentimental. After all, he couldn’t tell his mother his true, hard thoughts. They would make her sick. For such dictation, he needed a friend who was his peer, someone like me, and anyway, it was too early for such things. I liked his notion of fame and immortality so much that I believed him. I resolved to believe him, I lulled my doubts, which, however, didn’t fully die.
He talked to me about everything. He was more open than any person I had ever known. Many things that were a matter of course for me, things I never gave a second thought, were first brought to my awareness by him. I had paid little heed to physical things: my body meant nothing to me; it existed, it served me, I took it for granted. At school, I had been unspeakably bored by subjects in which the body was on its own, as it were—athletics, for example. Why run when you’re in no hurry, why jump into the air when it’s not a matter of life and death, why compete against others if you don’t all have the same prerequisites—no matter whether you’re all equally strong or equally weak. You never learned anything new in gym: you kept on repeating the same thing; you were always in the same area, which smelled of sawdust and sweat. Hiking was different. You got to know new places, new landscapes; nothing was repeated.
Yet now it turned out that the things I found most boring were things that Thomas was most interested in. He always kept asking what a person felt like during a high jump; nor was broad jumping to be scorned, or vaulting, or the hundred-meter race. I tried to describe these actions in such a way as to satisfy his curiosity without making him feel too regretful that he couldn’t do them himself. But he was never satisfied with my descriptions. He always lapsed into silence, said nothing for a long while, and then next time he usually came out with questions that made it obvious he wanted far more accurate descriptions. Sometimes, he criticized me for the rather summary fashion in which I reported on these things. Such arrogance didn’t suit me, he said. I was like a man who has overeaten and is talking to a hungry man about food and trying to prove to the hungry man that eating is not what it’s cracked up to be. He thus forced me to pay more attention to physical things. I caught myself suddenly thinking about walking while I was walking, and especially about falling while I was falling. I never lost the feeling that it was important and useful to tell him about failure. And even though he never admitted it, I did sense how happy he was when I again spoke shamefacedly about how ridiculous I had once again been.
In high school, I had really been poor in athletics, and I didn’t have to invent anything against myself in the past: all I had to do was recall situations that I didn’t normally like to remember. As for the present, however, I got used to stumbling more often during walks, falling, and bruising my knees and hands, which I could then show during my visits. I didn’t talk about these things right away, but I kept the bruised hand concealed as if I were ashamed of it. He enjoyed this game, observed me closely, and eventually said: “What’s wrong with your hand?”
“Nothing. Nothing.”
“Show me!”
I held back a bit, but then pulled out my hand, and watched him delight in my clumsiness.
“You’ve fallen again! You’ve fallen again!” He remembered the Ionian philosopher Thales, who looked at the stars instead of at the ground and tumbled into a well. “Starting today, I’m going to call you Thales! Why don’t you go inside and wash off the blood! Mother’s in the house!” The blood wasn’t so bad, but it did him good to have his mother find out about my clumsiness. So I went in, and she insisted on washing off the blood.
If, en route to his home, I actually stumbled and fell just a few paces from his wagon, then his jubilation knew no end. This didn’t happen frequently; he might have become suspicious. Nevertheless, I learned how to fall credibly, and Thomas made fun of me, even advising me to write an essay on “The Art of Falling”—there was no such essay, he said. He didn’t realize how close he had come to the truth; in order to feed his ego, I had become a true artist in falling. Luckily, I had been working toward this turn of events before we ever met. We had observed one another for three years before speaking. I had been so fascinated by him that I really hadn’t paid attention to where I was walking, and once, very close to him, I had tripped and fallen. This had made a deep impact on him. He had noticed my fall, and now, when I deliberately resumed and continued this tradition of falling, he could remind me of that previous fall in all its details.
I believe that he got to like me because of these stumbles, which I staged for his sake. Certainly, our conversations were important to him too, for here too I made sure I “stumbled.” This wasn’t at all easy; I wouldn’t have cared to miss our conversations for anything in the world, and in order to win the right to these conversations and his trust, I had to let on that I had read a bit and knew a few things. Yet now and then, not too often, I pretended not to know a major scholarly book or even a great philosopher with which he was thoroughly acquainted. This game was not free of risk: I would act as if I knew only from summaries things he was thoroughly familiar with from the texts themselves. I had to suppress arguments that readily sprang to my tongue during a discussion. Once I could manage to avoid certain quotations during a conversation, I would become bold and commit some gross blunder with true insolence: I would credit Spinoza with a line from Descartes, insisting that I was right and leaving Thomas enough time to roll out his heaviest artillery. I gazed at him with bogus fear while he visibly bristled more and more. And finally, when my cause seemed definitively lost, I pretended to be so miserable and ashamed that Thomas found his magnanimity again and had to comfort me. By then, I knew that my trick had worked; he had achieved and was enjoying a sense of superiority without overly disdaining me, for I hadn’t managed so badly in the preceding discussion. I was absolutely delighted when I found the strength to leave him right after such a triumph of his knowledge; and today, it makes me feel no less happy to go back to those moments.
However, Thomas didn’t beat me only in the history of philosophy, which was his real object of study, after all. He gave me the feeling that he didn’t lack experience in a different and very important area. At first, he spoke about it with some restraint, perhaps to keep from frightening me. Or perhaps he first wanted to find out how far he could go, for he regarded me as prudish. I always thought of him as helpless. When he was given food or drink, which sometimes happened in my presence, I witnessed his inability to bring anything to his body on his own. He made sure I wasn’t around when he had to obey a call of nature. If it came upon him suddenly, he would send me away without further ado, calling his mother only after I had gone a few steps away. He would not allow me to return, and I wouldn’t see him until the next day. He was prudish about such things, and I liked the fact that he was prudish. Yet how astonished I was when he once told me point-blank that “the girl” had been there yesterday. He said she was pretty and stupid and was good for only one thing; he usually sent her away after an hour. He had been deceived by the way she walked. He felt like exchanging her for another. He sounded as if he owned an entire pondful of girls, from which he only had to help himself. I was speechless. He sensed my embarrassment and told me all about it.
Earlier, he said, he hadn’t had any girls; this achievement was something that he likewise owed Professor Gomperz. He had deeply wished to be with a woman. He had often been so unhappy about it that he didn’t feel like studying anymore. He then hadn’t touched a book for days on end, his tongue had shrunk because it had nothing to do, and he had scorned his sister so cuttingly because of her suitors that she ran out of the house in tears. Professor Gomperz, who could get nowhere with him during his lessons, had asked him what was wrong, and Thomas had confessed that he needed a woman. He had to have a woman, otherwise he couldn’t continue his studies. Professor Gomperz, as was his wont in difficult situations, stuck his little finger into his ear and promised to take care of the matter.
Gomperz went into a café on a side street of Kärtnerstrasse, a place where prostitutes hung out, and he sat down alone at a round table. Gomperz had never been to such a place before. He had put on dark glasses to remain incognito; after all, he was a professor at the university and an elderly gentleman. There he sat, in his loden cape, which he never took off, and certainly not in this sort of place; he sat huge and bolt upright. He wasn’t alone for long. Three girls sat down at his table. They hadn’t pinned great hopes on him; he looked as if he had wandered in by chance. He wasn’t proud, however; he spoke to them right away in his slow, emphatic drawl, explaining what he was after: He had a young friend who was paralyzed, and he was looking for a girl for him. He wasn’t sickly or repulsive; he didn’t have an unsavory illness—on the contrary, he had extremely rich hair and the most beautiful eyes. He was very sensitive and couldn’t do anything by himself; he couldn’t even reach for food. He had a fine mind and was highly gifted, but everything had to be done for him. He was looking for a young, fresh, healthy girl who could come to his home in Hacking every week, for one afternoon. He (the professor) would take care of the fee. When they had agreed on the price, the money would always be lying on the dresser in the bedroom. Before the girl left, she could simply take the money on the dresser, but only if everything had gone well—that was the only condition.
