Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

I couldn’t budge the spring. “Beatrice, be patient for just a minute, and it will work like a top hat — assuming that I owned one… And now…”

I pulled up the curtain from below. “Beatrice, uh…” And I was thunderstruck. Next to Beatrice stood a gentleman — tall, slim, somewhat bent over, with blond hair mixed with grey, faint blue veins in his sagging cheeks, and holding a cardboard folder and a panama hat— but wait, what I’ve just written is pure fiction. All I could see was the outlines of a human figure, one that was standing petrified and staring at the naked white deity who suddenly appeared below the curtain, and who just as suddenly went back out of sight behind the rapidly descending cloth. I wrapped the stupid Unkulunkulu around me like a toga and staggered away, like some rainmaker taken unawares by a cloudburst. Was that laughter that I heard behind me? I threw Unkulunkulu on our bed, and there he lay, one piece of junk on top of another, an object now denuded of its grandeur and practicality, having once again become a god of the jungle whose worship nobody can witness. As for myself, the blaspheming skeptic, I quickly got dressed. My skull was about to burst. Kessler? This can’t be Nietzsche’s friend from Weimar! That’s ridiculous! The founder of the distinguished Cranach Press in Weimar? Nonsense! Germany’s last patron of the arts? And wasn’t there a book by him on Walther Rathenau? Concealing the naked savage beneath my Mallorquin denim suit, I emerged into our bible-paper room and stood across from a fellow in — a simple middle-class Mallorquin denim suit. Was this the democratic camouflage of a man who was once close to the powers-that-be in the German Reich?

“This is Count Kessler from Weimar,” said Beatrice. “He would like to have something translated into Spanish.”

“I beg a thousand pardons,” our visitor said, “for bursting in on you like this, Herr Thälmann! Your wife has explained everything. Do you think it might be possible? I’m rather in a hurry.”

Thälmann? What’s this all about? Just who am I, anyway? For years I’ve been Vigoleis, Don Vigo. As “Thelen” I appear only in the thermal bath of my dreams, and just a minute ago I was some degenerate oaf with the pale skin of occidental technology, metamorphosed beneath our Unkulunku into the supreme divinity of the Kaffirs. And now I’ve been transmogrified or bewitched into Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the German Communist Party, Hitler’s number-one enemy? I bowed, and gave the gentleman my real name. But of course, he said, that was of course my name, a thousand pardons, that’s the name here on this piece of paper, how embarrassing.

Beatrice, misinterpreting my own embarrassment, went on by way of explanation: “You know, the Josephslegende ballet with Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss, and…”

“Oh, yes,” I interrupted her bibliographical prompting. “And the Notes on Mexico that you’ve had for years on your list of books to buy.” Turning to Kessler, I said, “Second edition sold out, right? You see, your reputation has preceded you into this scrubbiest of domiciles. But at the moment all we’re reading is Iberian mystics and detective novels.”

“This tells me that you have a remarkable gift for adaptation, and I’m envious. Especially in this day and age, when all of us are being forced to adapt.”

Not one word about Unkulunkulu, the kettle-maker’s profession, the gangster/ church reformer, or nudism! The person standing here in our presence wearing cheap homespun represented the grand monde ; he was a grandseigneur who harbored within his person the cultures of three fatherlands, nurturing them to sophisticated perfection in a manner that is rare in German climes. His garb was, to be sure, somewhat soiled and worn — it was obvious that he had been unable to bring his valet along with him into exile — but it was distinctive nonetheless. True Mallorquins used their picturesque sashes as trouser belts. But like a bullfighter, Count Kessler had pulled up a pair of cotton underpants that reached above his belly button, and folded them into a roll. At first I thought this might be a nautical life preserver — not a bad invention for a diplomat fleeing his country. The Count’s hands were particularly attractive, the kind of hands that even good writers often refer to as “spiritual.” It was inevitable that they should look this way, for who if not the fastidious intellectual Count Kessler could ever have such beautiful hands? At any rate, Count Hermann Keyserling’s hands were very different, which is why Goebbels had such huge respect for them.

This first encounter with Count Harry Kessler was so bizarre that while committing my Vigoleisian jottings to paper, more than once I’ve asked Beatrice whether my dream life hasn’t been playing odd tricks with reality, causing me to produce here what sensitive readers would call “sheer fiction.” Not a bit of it. She’s sorry, but when she introduced me to Kessler I was actually standing under Unkulunkulu. But she then adds that the contents of the amber handle was a common, ordinary insect. My “millipede” was make-believe.

“Maybe so, but it’s one I don’t want to give up. I need it for that Child of the Eocene, and I need the child in order to prove that prehistoric man was governed by bestial instincts, and that therefore the ovens of Auschwitz, concentration camps, and atom bombs aren’t to be understood, as they sometimes are, as monstrous products of our Christian civilization.”

Count Kessler presented his request. As we were perhaps aware, he had fled from Germany, going first to his sister in Paris, a place where he had been a regular visitor, working in well-known circles as an advocate for international understanding. Then he decided on Mallorca as the place to settle in exile; Catalan friends, or perhaps it was Keyserling, had made this recommendation. Later we made the acquaintance of Kessler’s sister, a plain woman whom I at first took for the Count’s messenger or domestic help. My intercourse with Spaniards, and in particular my friendship with the noble Sureda family, had once and for all made me ignore any and all barriers between classes of people. I regarded any shoe-shine boy as a king, and any king as a beggar. In school I had never grasped the simple rule whereby two quantities can equal a third quantity, even when equal to themselves. This I didn’t begin to understand until I was confronted by Spanish quantities. All beings born upon this earth, I thought, are situated on the same level of humanity, a level that, as I learned in the meantime, is not so very lofty after all. That is how I avoided committing a faux pas with Kessler’s sister, the Marquise de Brion, who idolized her brother and who, with all the sacrifices that she made for him, cannot be ignored in any consideration of Kessler’s life’s work. Now he was a guest on this island, one emigré among so many. He explained that he was living in a house in Bonanova, just outside Palma on the road leading to Génova.

I told the Count that I was not an emigré in the strictly political sense of the word, since I had left the fatherland well before the official de-braining of the country. But I explained further that you would never find me inside the Führer’s deep-sea diving bell. Kessler looked over at Beatrice and murmured something like “ naturellement .” I said to myself, hmm… This experienced diplomat may be thinking that Beatrice is Jewish, and that this might be the reason why we didn’t want the rest of the Jews to perish. So we had to clarify matters, which we quickly did by citing a few facts concerning Beatrice’s Swiss ‘ck-ck-dt’ family history, as well as the fossil Inca prince who played Indian tricks with Beatrice’s bloodline. Whereupon we learned to our surprise that Kessler considered it possible that back in Berlin he had once met Beatrice’s father, the patristic scholar who, to the consternation of the Basel ck-dt’s, had been a pupil of Professor Harnack. “Adolf von Harnack and Kaiser Wilhelm— naturellement ,” said Count Kessler. I remained silent because I wasn’t sure what was so “natural” about this pairing of names. Later, Beatrice cleared things up for me: “ Gott mit uns !”