Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Certain aunts of his pooled their resources, and he was sent to a Royal-Imperial military academy — a “brain crusher,” as the Captain described it, using a term that was flattering for such an institution since it assumed that there was such a thing as a brain. What he probably meant, was that when the cadets were grown up and entered “real life,” they had no brain left in them. I can no longer recall whether it was the academy in Berlin-Lichterfelde. While describing life at this place, Herr von Martersteig started shivering, insofar as his bones permitted such motion. If anyone wishes further detail concerning such educational penitentiaries, he should consult Count Dr. Dr. Werner von der Schulenburg, who likewise spent several years in one without getting squeezed flat by the brutal guards. But these are amazing exceptions. Christianity, which developed so gloriously and so naturally out of the starvation edema of humankind, has degenerated at the hands of its own unnatural, self-satisfied, conceited scholarly theology. In similar fashion, Germany has gone to the dogs as the result, speaking with Nietzsche, of its unnatural methods of education. Instead of learning the Greek and Latin classics, philosophy, and psychology, which his talents directed him to do, Martersteig studied generalship.

Then came a war, and the young cadet rose in the ranks — never becoming a true officer, for he made it only to a captaincy, whereas in a war everybody else is named at least a sub-general. No, Herr von Martersteig was attached to the fighter squadron of his colleague Manfred von Richthofen. As an observer he got to see a lot — enemy territory mostly, a bird’s eye view of hell. Not many people had such a chance. That is why, afterwards, he was able to peer into Josefa the cook’s bosom and identify her little asbestos bag as a fireproof receptacle for pipe ashes — without, incidentally, being in any way aroused by what he was looking at; he loved only boys. Then he was brought down out of the skies. One shot sufficed to verify his status as a hero — it is like the shooting gallery at the county fair, where for a dime you can aim at a clay pipe and, bang! the whole array of stuff starts dancing and prancing, things start leaping and twisting and doing somersaults, it’s a high time all over, your audience is amazed. You leave the scene feeling like a hero with your head held high, and you enter a booth and treat yourself to a pickled herring and a mug of beer. It would be a macabre joke of history if the Tommy Robert Graves (minus the “von Ranke”; à bas les boches was still the byword) was the one who shot down this particular enemy, for Martersteig crash-landed behind enemy lines near a unit of French forces where Graves was posted at the time. And he actually landed, that is, he didn’t penetrate the French soil like an artillery shell. He had this lark-like hovering descent to thank for coming out of it with his life, his dislocated spine, his fantasies, his Hindenburg pension, his love-hate of his homeland, his “Farewell my dear homeland,” and the inspiration for his army of monkeys.

The full moon had risen. It was long past midnight, and the stump of the last candle had long since died out in a pool of wax. Our story-teller rose achingly to his feet and paced back and forth noiselessly in his slippers, talking all the time. He did this for a while, then took his seat again. His story was apparently at an end; there seemed nothing more to tell. His pause for thought was, so we thought, the end of his song.

Before we went to bed, Joachim, overcome by his own personal account, one that he often recited silently in his mind but seldom with audible voice — Joachim told us, begging our pardon, that he had decided not to leave the island after all. He would stay in his atalaya in spite of his arch-enemy, the humidity in the valley, the spiders and scorpions, and — he now felt that he could not part with the piece of family furniture; someone had found his father’s final poison inside it. Would we be angry at him? Now that we had seen the commode for ourselves, surely we could understand his misgivings about letting go of it.

“Seen for ourselves?” asked Beatrice. “But we haven’t seen your chest yet, Herr von Martersteig. We haven’t been in all your rooms.” It certainly wasn’t in our bedroom.

“Oh Madame, you are too kind. ‘How nice’—isn’t that what you said when you saw the niche in the entryway, just as we came in? The secret compartment is where my father kept my destiny, the powder he used to bring his brilliant career to an end and to force me into mine. No, I cannot part with that piece as long as my work remains unfinished.”

We left the house early the next morning. A few meters above Martersteig’s little castle, the road made a dangerous curve where drivers sometimes lost control and ended up in the Captain’s front yard. This, too, he seemed prepared to live with for the foreseeable future. Our host stood at the top of the curve like a traffic cop and waved down a truck that was on its way to Palma via Valldemosa.

Our leave-taking was polite. In a single night we had come so close that each party now felt the need to say goodbye as quickly as possible. As we entered the dangerous curve in the road, we saw the castellan’s monocle drop to his anemic hand, and then we could see only dust, chickens, jars of oil. We closed our eyes.

The Captain stayed behind. Now he was 1000 meters back, 1001, 1002, it went quickly. The distance grew between us and the chest with its secret drawer that was to contain my meditative poems. The commode had such small dimensions that not even the art of perspective could make it appear any smaller. As far as my own valuables were concerned, a single poem, folded like the little packet containing a dose of poison, might fit inside the secret cubbyhole. Beatrice might have found room in it for a silk kerchief, a single gossamer item of underwear, her good-luck sturgeon scales, a few trinkets. One of the Captain’s polar-bear slippers was larger than the inlaid drawer with the lock forged by the Nürnberg master Hans Ehemann.

The day before, during our walk through the town of Deyá, we paid a visit to the Japanese painter Three Little Clouds. I chatted with him about the qualities of light on the island (not those in Deyá), admired his delicate, elfin French girlfriend as much as his diaphanous drawings, and poked around a bit in his studio, very much under the impression of his and his artist companion’s similar coiffure: they both wore their hair in bangs, as if they were made for each other. Three Clouds wanted to sketch Beatrice’s portrait, and Aimée asked if she could paint my likeness on ivory on the following day. But then came the night with its cup of poison, and so we departed in an ancient Ford, bouncing and shaking amid poultry, rabbits, black piglets and tomatoes. The only work of art we took with us was our lilliput dream commode, en pensée.

We didn’t see the Captain for years afterward. That is to say, if we met on the street or at the anarchist’s rooming house, we looked right through each other. When the wound caused by the monkey business with the armoire finally healed, and we could have made friends again — although we never really became enemies, our neo-Clausewitz experienced a new shock. Robert Graves had learned of our visit for chest inspection, and thus he found out something that was not to be found in Baedeker: that a man named Vigoleis did typing work for pay. So instead of The Monkey Army by Joachim von Martersteig, I made a clear typescript, from squiggly handwriting, of I, Claudius —a work of the enemy.

Thus we gradually lost sight of our crash-landed friend. But as soon as Germany awoke to the first state-sponsored scansion of the refrain “Germany awake, Judah perish!” and things became very serious for Judah, our Joachim reappeared, and we shook hands in the face of a more powerful enemy, one that was flexing its sinews to leap at us here in our island redoubt. All three of us now castigated the Reich, lamenting how this frightful disgrace was sweeping over everything we held dear — for otherwise, why didn’t the spectacle just leave us cold like some massacre among the Botokudes? We felt we must completely swear off this dishonored fatherland, not only with our hearts, but in our deeds. Beatrice and I kept to this oath, right down to the last Brown Shirt menace. After just a few weeks the Captain was tripped up by a mug of German beer and two German sausages. But the details of this baronial Martersteigian monkey-business will have to wait for a later chapter. Let us close the current one with Vigoleis and Beatrice, who are now lying next to each other on their mattress at the Clock Tower. Their eyes are directed upward to the webbing containing their bodily and spiritual bric-a-brac. But their minds are still mired at rock-bottom, near the keel of their ship of life, where the bilgewater collects. Only rats can live there; never, or almost never, a human being.