Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

As for the blackout: at that time the village Deyá had a small unit for producing electrical current, a primitive affair that was in private hands. There was a little generator in a little shed, attached to a tiny two-stroke motor. Day and night it rattled away, and day and night there were breakdowns. But since the current was stored in batteries, there was no interruption of service. I can’t recall whether Graves had a financial interest in the power company, or whether he was just friends with the guy in charge. In any case, whenever Graves got angry at Martersteig, then out of sympathy with the Englishman the Spaniard cut off the German’s electric lights. And the darker things got in the Captain’s house, the angrier he became. It was the same technique as in the bull ring: before the fight the bull is harassed in the darkened toril . And it was like old family feuds, in which no one remembers who started it all and what the original reason for the dispute was; everybody just spits at everybody else. Martersteig was in command of whole regiments of gossiping monkeys, and they impugned the honor of Mr. Graves as often as they could — stories about women, mostly. And Graves countered by cutting off the electricity. But the Germans are not only the inventors of gunpowder and the printing press, but also of a light source made of wax. Martersteig had candles.

That evening, in the light of just one of these German inventions, we sat in the hexagonal study of the creator of the new German army. This room deserves a careful description. The walls of this turret-like space were whitewashed; the beamed ceiling was low, the stone floor covered with the customary palm-leaf mat. In the middle stood a large round table made of darkly stained wood, split on the diagonal. Into the split the owner had stuffed some envelopes and a wire fly swatter. Three high-backed chairs were placed around the table, and on the table’s surface there was a metal holder containing the single wax candle. In one of the walls there was a small hole, and the plaster was peeling around it. Somebody, the Captain explained, as if making an excuse, had tried to drive a nail into the wall, but without success. The walls themselves showed neither bloodstains nor squashed mosquitoes. How did he do it? He killed the mosquitoes on the fly. But of course, the Richthofen Squadron! The Vigoleis Squadron kills mosquitoes using a soft clothes brush instead of his slipper, and that, too, leaves no traces of murder. A naked light bulb hung from the ceiling on an electric wire.

This spartan cell is where the general of the monkeys developed his strategy. This is where the Macaque Army was engendered, where Clausewitz hatched out his plans for cutting and slashing and emasculating the enemy. And this is where we now sat stiffly on chairs after a second starvation ration, listening to a man’s life story that bordered on the uncanny. It was enough to give us the shivers. The Captain drummed on for hour after hour, sitting somewhat bent forward to alleviate the pain. He stood up just once, to take a new candle from a drawer; he lit it and set it on top of the still burning stump. My legs had long since gone to sleep, and I was unable to move. But I wouldn’t have dared to in any case.

Martersteig’s father was a tyrant, an iron Prussian pedagogue who would have admired a teacher at my own imperial educational barracks, who, to teach us a lesson in endurance, marched us into a growth of nettles and commanded us, “Up! Down! Up! Down!” And woe to whoever started whining and pulling his sleeves over his hands like mittens. That kid was given some whacks and ordered to stay after school — down among the nettles. In the Martersteig family, too, there could be no thought of complaining. Germany needed heroes, and heroes grew up only under the parental rod. Daddy had many titles and many obligations. He was a Privy Councillor, possessed a high rank in the military, and wore a slew of decorations that jingled tunes about service to the People and the Fatherland; he may have even been a general. His civilian profession was the law. He held two doctorates and was a State’s Attorney, Superior State’s Attorney, perhaps a District Commmissioner? This, too, I have forgotten. Let us just assume that this father was something very big, very imposing, very fear-inspiring, for his business concerned nothing less than so-called Final Authority. Whoever didn’t pass muster with Old Man Martersteig could just string himself up on the doorpost, or somebody else could string him up. In either case his life was over. Everyone in his house knew that the decisions he made were of the life-or-death variety.

A late marriage to a Swiss woman beneath his social rank gave rise to tensions in the family tree and in the family’s fortune, but happily for the future, the marriage seemed to remain childless. Scandal causes deafness. Or perhaps the Privy Attorney was so busy with his court cases that he forgot to sleep with his bride from the Alpine meadows. The latter is my own theory, but the son of this father expressed it differently: his progenitor didn’t know the word “love”; such a thing didn’t exist for him, neither in spirit nor in the flesh. Nevertheless, late in the marriage, and in a moment of weakness, this stern husband spilled the seed that became Joachim.

Joachim attended a humanistic high school and had what the Dutch call a studiekop , that is, a head for book learning. Translated into the ridiculous, it means that he was purely and simply a brain.

When his father ended 25 years of service to the Empire, he was showered with honors, new decorations, an ornate chair in his office and banquet in the Martersteig villa with servants and printed menu, with braided uniforms, cutaways, naked shoulders, Martersteig diamonds, a Swiss Alpine necklace, a Hungarian fiddler, some dull-witted convent canonesses, and monocles. Someone taps on a glass; all rise and gaze into the silvery eyes of the celebratee. “A toast to many more years!” The band plays a fanfare, outside the rockets soar into the sky, 25 of them, and then the worthy judge raises his glass to his lips and expresses his thanks to one and all. He takes one sip. He staggers. A servant catches him up. There is a hubbub in the room, someone shouts, the ladies grasp at their diamonds. But no assassin or thief has entered the premises. The celebratee had only taken poison, and the curtain came down.

His posthumous papers contained a few words to his family: after twenty-five years, a German judge who has done his duty before God and the Fatherland has but two options: either resign from office or take poison. He preferred the latter choice as the more decent, courageous, Prussian solution, so help him God.

God helped him very effectively. The dosage was exactly proper for the Judge’s constitution, and so he immediately collapsed as if struck by a bolt of lightning. The proper Prussian military method would have been to use a bullet, but the old gentleman was also an aesthete; he didn’t like the idea of blood on his white vest, and perhaps he thought that the explosion of a pistol would be drawing too much attention to himself. I don’t know whether at that time suicide was regarded as a crime in Germany; in any case a civil servant was constrained to follow definite regulations concerning the cause of death: he had to kill himself in keeping with his status in society, for otherwise his widow would forfeit his pension. At the very moment when his father toppled over and there was panic in the hall, a deaf-and-blind Countess von Martersteig and the goldfish in the festively illuminated aquarium were the only ones to maintain their composure. Someone cried out, “Poor Joachim! Now he can’t go to the university!” In fact, Joachim’s mother received no pension at all.