2666

by Roberto Bolaño

Halder, too, was the first to get Hans to read something other than Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. It wasn’t easy. First he asked whether he knew how to read. Hans Reiter said yes. Then he asked whether he’d ever read a good book. He stressed the word good. Hans Reiter said yes. He had a good book, he said. Halder asked what the book was. Hans Reiter told him it was Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. Halder said that must be a reference book and he meant a good literary book. Hans Reiter said he didn’t know the difference between a good refints (reference) book and a good litchy (literary) book. Halder said the difference lay in beauty, in the beauty of the story and the beauty of the language in which the story was told. Immediately he began to cite examples. He talked about Goethe and Schiller, he talked about Hölderlin and Kleist, he raved about Novalis. He said he had read all these authors and each time he reread them he wept.

Hans Reiter replied that the only books he had seen Halder with were history books. Halder’s answer took him by surprise. Halder said: “It’s because I don’t have a proper grasp of history and I need to brush up.” “What for?” asked Hans Reiter. “To fill a void.” “Voids can’t be filled,” said Hans Reiter. “Yes, they can,” said Halder, “with a little effort everything in this world can be filled.

When I was your age,” said Halder, clearly exaggerating, “I read Goethe until I couldn’t read anymore (although Goethe, of course, is infinite), but anyway, I read Goethe, Eichendorff, Hoffman, and I neglected my studies of history, which are also needed in order to hone both edges of the blade, so to speak.”

Halder was always generous. Upon each new visit he gave Hans what he called his share of the booty, which was really no more than a rather large tip, but which for Hans Reiter constituted a fortune. He didn’t show his parents this fortune, of course, because they would have been quick to accuse him of stealing. Nor did he buy anything for himself. He found a biscuit tin, into which he put the few bills and many coins, wrote on a paper “this money belongs to Lotte Reiter,” and buried it in the forest.

Chance or the devil had it that the book Hans Reiter chose to read was Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. When Halder saw him with it he smiled and told him he wouldn’t understand it, but he also said he wasn’t surprised he had chosen that book and none other, because in fact, he said, though he might never understand it, it was the perfect book for him, just as Wolfram von Eschenbach was the author in whom he would find the clearest resemblance to himself or his inner being or what he aspired to be, and, regrettably, never would become, though he might come this close, said Halder, holding his thumb and index finger a fraction of an inch apart.

Wolfram, Hans discovered, said of himself: I fled the pursuit of letters. Wolfram, Hans discovered, broke with the archetype of the courtly knight and was denied (or denied himself) all training, all clerical schooling. Wolfram, Hans discovered, unlike the troubadours and the minnesingers, declined to serve a lady. Wolfram, Hans discovered, declared that he was untutored in the arts, not to boast of a lack of education, but as a way of saying he was free from the burden of Latin learning and that he was a lay and independent knight. Lay and independent.

Of course, there were German medieval poets more important than Wolfram von Eschenbach. Like Friedrich von Hausen or Walther von der Vogelweide. But Wolfram’s pride (I fled the pursuit of letters, I was untutored in the arts), a pride that stands aloof, a pride that says die, all of you, but I’ll live, confers on him a halo of dizzying mystery, of terribl...

Wolfram had no lands. Wolfram therefore lived in a state of vassalage. Wolfram had some protectors, counts who allowed their vassals—or at least some of them—to be visible. Wolfram said: my hereditary office is the shield. And as Halder told Hans all these things about Wolfram, as if to place him at the scene of the crime, Hans read Parzival from beginning to end, sometimes aloud, out in the fields or on his way along the path home from work, and not only did he understand it, he liked it. And what he liked most, what made him cry and roll laughing in the grass, was that Parzival sometimes rode (my hereditary office is the shield) wearing his madman’s garb under his suit of armor.

Archimboldi's own shield

when his team was stationed near Berlin he gave his notice and headed off. It didn’t take him long to find Halder in the big city, and he turned up at his door in search of assistance. Halder got him a job as a clerk in a stationery shop. Hans lived in a room in a house of workmen, where he was let a bed. He shared the room with a man of about forty who worked as a night watchman at a factory. The man’s name was Füchler and he suffered from an affliction, possibly of nervous origin, as he admitted, that some nights manifested itself in the form of rheumatism and other nights as heart trouble or sudden attacks of asthma.

One night, when he got back from work, Hans Reiter found the watchman in bed. The landlady had brought up a plate of soup. The stationer’s apprentice knew at once that his roommate was going to die.

He feared neither the healthy nor the diseased. He never got bored. He was always eager to help and he greatly valued the notion—so vague, so malleable, so warped—of friendship. The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man’s sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too, the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.

Since there was no one to give his belongings to, Hans kept them. A coat, two pairs of shoes, a wool scarf, four shirts, various undershirts, seven pairs of socks. Füchler’s razor he presented to the landlord. Under the bed, in a cardboard box, he found several cowboy novels. He kept those for himself.

Sometimes, however, as they sat on a café terrace or around a dark cabaret table, an obstinate silence descended inexplicably over the trio. They seemed suddenly to freeze, lose all sense of time, and turn completely inward, as if they were bypassing the abyss of daily life, the abyss of people, the abyss of conversation, and had decided to approach a kind of lakeside region, a late-romantic region, where the borders were clocked from dusk to dusk, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, an eternity, like the minutes of those condemned to die, like the minutes of women who’ve just given birth and are condemned to die, who understand that more time isn’t more eternity and nevertheless wish with all their souls for more time, and their wails are birds that come flying every so often across the double lakeside landscape, so calmly, like luxurious excrescences or heartbeats. Then, naturally, the three men would emerge stiff from the silence and go back to talking about inventions, women, Finnish philology, the building of highways across the Reich.

The fourth dimension, he liked to say, encompasses the three dimensions and consequently puts them in their place, that is, it obliterates the dictatorship of the three dimensions and thereby obliterates the three-dimensional world we know and live in. The fourth dimension, he said, is the full richness of the senses and the (capital S) Spirit, it’s the (capital E) Eye, in other words the open Eye that obliterates the eyes, which compared to the Eye are just poor orifices of mud, absorbed in contemplation or the equation birth-training-work-death, whereas the Eye sails up the river of philosophy, the river of existence, the (fastflowing) river of fate. The fourth dimension, he said, was expressible only through music. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven.

According to the director, life qua life in the fourth dimension was of an unimaginable richness, etc., etc., but the truly important thing was the distance from which one, immersed in this harmony, could contemplate human affairs, with equanimity, in a word, and free of the artificial travails that oppress the spirit devoted to work and creation, to life’s only transcendent truth, the truth that creates more and more life, an inexhaustible torrent of life and happiness and brightness.

His eyes were like the eyes of a hawk that flies and delights in its flight, but that also maintains a watchful gaze, capable of discerning even the slightest movement down below, on the scrambled pattern of earth.

Then he got the idea and turned from Halder and Nisa to focus his hawk’s or eagle’s or carrion bird’s gaze on the calm blue eyes of the young Prussian, who was already formulating another question: what would those who had ready access to the sixth dimension think of those who were settled in the fifth or fourth dimension? What would those who lived in the tenth dimension, that is, those who perceived ten dimensions, think of music, for example? What would Beethoven mean to them? What would Mozart mean to them? What would Bach mean to them? Probably, the young Reiter answered himself, music would just be noise, noise like crumpled pages, noise like burned books.

“Don’t speak of burned books, my dear young man.” To which Hans responded: “Everything is a burned book, my dear maestro. Music, the tenth dimension, the fourth dimension, cradles, the production of bullets and rifles, Westerns: all burned books.”

Later, he would tell their hostess that Halder and the Japanese man seemed like decent people, but Halder’s young friend was a time bomb, no question about it: an untrained, powerful mind, irrational, illogical, capable of exploding at the moment least expected. Which was untrue.

After the musicians had gone home, nights at Grete von Joachimsthaler’s flat usually ended in bed or the bathtub, a bathtub like few in Berlin, eight feet long and five feet wide, black enamel with claw feet, where Halder and then Nisa endlessly massaged Grete, from temples to toes, the two of them fully dressed, even sometimes with their coats on (at Grete’s express request), while Grete cavorted like a mermaid, sometimes on her back, sometimes on her belly, other times underwater! her nakedness covered only by foam.

It was around this time, as they walked under the sun or the gray clouds, enormous, endless gray clouds that brought tidings of a fall to remember, and his battalion left behind village after village, that Hans imagined that under his Wehrmacht uniform he was wearing the suit or garb of a madman.

another officer, seemingly lost in thought, watched as an orderly carefully laid out refreshments on a folding table, refreshments that he unpacked from a large black box, like a special box from some pharmaceutical company, the kind of box that holds dangerous medicines or medicines that haven’t been thoroughly tested, or even worse, like a box from some scientific research center where glove-wearing German scientists pack away something with the power to destroy the world and Germany too.

another officer, this one in a Luftwaffe uniform, his back to everyone, bored with watching the planes fly overhead, who held a long cigarette in one hand and a book in the other, a simple operation but one that seemed to demand untold efforts, because the breeze on the hill where everyone stood was constantly fluttering the pages of the book so that the officer was unable to read and had to use the hand that held the long cigarette to keep the pages from fluttering (or ruffling or flipping), which only managed to make the situation worse, because the cigarette or the cigarette’s ash unfailingly scorched the pages or the breeze scattered ash across them, which bothered the officer no end, causing him to bend his head and blow, very carefully, because he was facing into the wind and when he blew there was a risk the ashes would fly into his eyes.

Reiter, he said, was different, but actually he was the same person as always, the person everyone knew, what happened was that he had gone into combat as if he wasn’t going into combat, as if he wasn’t there or the quarrel wasn’t with him, which didn’t mean he failed to follow orders or disobeyed orders, it wasn’t that at all, nor was he in a trance, some soldiers, paralyzed by fear, go into a trance, but it isn’t a trance, it’s just fear, anyway, he, the sergeant, wasn’t sure what it was, but Reiter had something evident even to the enemy, who shot at him several times and never hit him, to their increasing dismay.

Once he saw a pair of gobies, Gobius paganellus, lost in a jungle of seaweed, and he followed them for a while (the seaweed jungle was like the locks of a dead giant),

As the doctor left he mused that the lanky boy was probably a drug addict, and he wrote in his diary: how is it that in the ranks of our army we find young men addicted to morphine, heroin, perhaps all sorts of drugs? What do they represent? Are they a symptom or a new social illness? Are they the mirror of our fate or the hammer that will shatter mirror and fate together?

Hans’s battalion was stationed in the Carpathians. The headquarters of the division, which was no longer part of the 10th Corps, but of a new corps, the 49th, which had just been formed and for the moment consisted of a single division, was located in Bucharest,

When the sun rose he realized it was just a forest. He saw hills or rocky outcroppings that looked like ships about to sink, prows lifted, like enraged horses, nearly vertical. He saw dark mountain paths that led nowhere, but above which, at a great height, soared blackbirds that must be carrion fowl.

Reiter’s surprise when he saw the Baroness Von Zumpe step out of the car couldn’t have been greater. But the strangest thing of all was that this time the young baroness stopped in front of him and asked, with real interest, whether he knew her, because his face, she said, looked familiar. Reiter (still standing at attention, staring impassively off at the horizon in martial fashion, or perhaps gazing into nothing) answered that of course he knew her because he had served in the house of her father, the baron, from an early age, as had his mother, Frau Reiter, whom perhaps the baroness might recall.

A few steps from them, waiting, was General Entrescu, who couldn’t stop smiling, and the young scholar Popescu, who more than once exclaimed: wonderful, wonderful, yet again the sword of fate severs the head from the hydra of chance.

When the visitors returned to the surface, anyone, even the least astute observer, could have seen that they were divided into two groups, those who were pale when they emerged, as if they had glimpsed something momentous down below, and those who appeared with a half smile sketched on their faces, as if they had just been reapprised of the naïveté of the human race.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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).

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.

Entrescu began to envision those philosophers for hire, he saw them wandering the streets of Rome and the roads that lead to the sea, he saw them sitting by the side of those roads, bundled in their cloaks, mentally constructing an idea of the world, he saw them eating in portside taverns, dark places that smelled of seafood and spices, wine and fried food, until at last they faded away, just as Dracula faded away, with his blood-tinted armor and blood-tinted clothing, a stoic Dracula, a Dracula who read Seneca or took pleasure in hearing the German minnesingers and whose feats in Eastern Europe found their match only in the deeds described in the Chanson de Roland. Historically, that is, or politically, sighed Entrescu, as well as symbolically or poetically.

One day Popescu went to see him. The doctors had given the mathematician a little notebook in which he drew the trees that surrounded the hospital, portraits of other patients, and architectural sketches of the houses visible from the grounds.

Mirror of Edwin Johns

But you’re here, said Popescu, and this is a madhouse. The mathematician didn’t seem to be listening: the only real madness, if we can call it that, he said, is a chemical imbalance, which is easily cured by treatment with chemical products. “But you’re here, dear professor, you’re here, you’re here,” shouted Popescu. “For my own protection,” said the mathematician.

“What is a look of absolute fear?” Popescu asked. The doctor belched a few times, shifted in his chair, and answered that it was a kind of look of mercy, but empty, as if all that were left of mercy, after a mysterious voyage, was the skin, as if mercy were a skin of water, say, in the hands of a Tatar horseman who gallops away over the steppe and dwindles until he vanishes, and then the horseman returns, or the ghost of the horseman returns, or his shadow, or the idea of him, and he has the skin, empty of water now, because he drank it all during his trip, or he and his horse drank it, and the skin is empty now, it’s a normal skin, an empty skin, because after all the abnormal thing is a skin swollen with water, but this skin swollen with water, this hideous skin swollen with water doesn’t arouse fear, doesn’t awaken it, much less isolate it, but the empty skin does, and that was what he saw in the mathematician’s face, absolute fear.

they glimpsed the Baroness Von Zumpe, her golden curls and part of her lily-white forehead occasionally emerging from behind the left shoulder of the person thrusting on top of her. The cries of the baroness alarmed Reiter at first, who was slow to understand that they were cries of pleasure, not pain. When the coupling ended, General Entrescu got up from the bed and they watched him walk to a table where a bottle of vodka stood. His penis, from which hung a not negligible quantity of seminal fluid, was still erect or half erect and must have measured nearly a foot long, Wilke reflected afterward, his calculations on the mark.

He looked more like a horse than a man, Wilke told his comrades. And he had the stamina of a horse too, because after swallowing some vodka he returned to the bed where the Baroness Von Zumpe was drowsing and after he had rearranged her he began to fuck her again, at first scarcely moving, but then with such violence that the baroness, on her belly, bit the palm of her hand until she drew blood, so as not to scream.

By now Wilke had unbuttoned his fly and was masturbating, leaning against the wall. Reiter heard him moan beside him. First he thought it was a rat that just happened to be breathing its last somewhere nearby. A baby rat. But when he saw Wilke’s penis and Wilke’s han...

Wilke ignored him and continued to masturbate. Reiter glanced at his face: Wilke’s profile struck him as very odd. It looked like an engraving of a worker or artisan, an innocent passerby suddenly blinded by a ray of moonlight. He seemed to be dreaming, or, more accurately, momentarily breaking through the massive black walls that separate waking from sleep. So he left him alone and after a while he began to touch himself too, at first discreetly, through his trousers, and then openly, pulling out his penis and adjusting to the rhythm of General Entrescu and the Baroness Von Zumpe, who wasn’t biting her hand anymore (a bloodstain had spread on the sheet next to her sweaty cheeks) but crying and speaking words that neither the general nor the two soldiers understood, words that went beyond Ro...

and as the baroness sank down onto Entrescu’s cock or Entrescu’s cock rose up into the Baroness Von Zumpe, the Romanian general recited a new poem, a poem that he accompanied by waving both arms (the baroness clinging to his neck), a poem that again neither of them understood, except for the word Dracula, which was repeated every four lines, a poem that might have been martial or satirical or metaphysical or marmoreal or even anti-German, but whose rhythm seemed made to order for the occasion, a poem that the young baroness, sitting astride Entrescu’s thighs, celebrated by swaying back and forth, like a little shepherdess gone wild in the vastness of Asia, digging her nails into her lover’s neck, scrubbing the blood that still flowed from her right hand on her lover’s face, smearing the corners of his lips with blood, while Entrescu, undeterred, continued to recite his poem in which the word Dracula sounded every four lines, a poem that was surely satirical, decided Reiter (with infinite joy) as Wilke jerked off again.