Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Kessler was a regular guest of ours for over a year, but he never once referred, not even obliquely, to the circumstances surrounding our first encounter. I once asked him if he thought I was completely batty when he saw me standing there under a bedsheet, naked, cursing all the tinkers of this world and singing the praises of Unkulunkulu, a god that only Kaffirs could believe in.

Well then, he said, if I wished to bring that matter up again, he would have to admit that he couldn’t believe his eyes, and that he would prefer to have taken his leave immediately. But that would have been impolite toward Beatrice, and besides, he couldn’t make any sense out of my rhyming harangue about the church reformer Kessler. Not one in a thousand persons was aware that the religious purifier from St. Gall was an ancestor of his. As I might well understand, this coincidence had given him pause.

“So I can thank Unkulunkulu for the fact that I am playing a peripheral role in the creation of your memoirs?”

Count Kessler, too intensely concentrated on his own world, a world that was causing him more and more anguish as he surveyed his past, simply pointed to Beatrice and began talking French with her — thus avoiding a reply to my mystical gibberish.

Yes, I said, Beatrice was a wonderful woman. She may not appreciate my enlightened Unkulunkulism, lacking as she did any sense of technocratic mysticism. But she tolerated it, and that was saying a great deal. Whereupon I enlightened the Count by explaining that just a few days before his arrival, in pursuit of even battier historical documentation, I had chanced upon the old reformer Johann Kessler in Freytag’s Scenes .

Sometimes if certain pages had many corrections on them, Kessler wanted them retyped right away. On such occasions I retreated to our kitchen with my typewriter, letting him continue his writing at Doña Carmen’s clunky table. I informed him, of course, that the drawer had formerly done service as a tabernacle for our “God’s Eye” grail. This bit of news amused him greatly; his eyes squinted with mirth. He liked to get cheered up every so often by a picaresque story — if it wasn’t too long, because he was always in a hurry. He was now living solely for his work on the memoirs, and he was huddling in for this task as if for an endless winter. He was scarcely alert to current political happenings, especially those in the Nazi Reich. Which is to say, he deliberately kept out of touch as best he could. But sometimes his best was not good enough, and this caused him a considerable amount of trouble. We owned only one table, which we placed in our bible-paper room when he came, leaving me to work in the kitchen on a board that the little Swabian had given me for a completely different purpose. When Kessler became aware of this state of affairs, he preferred to go to the Café Alhambra or one of the clubs on the Borne, where he joined the other elderly gentlemen. But instead of just lounging in an easy chair, playing dominoes while half asleep, or having his shoes shined ten times in succession, he continued working on his memoirs. He would suddenly notice that on page 206, nine lines from the bottom, the word should be “hurried” instead of “ran.” And then a botones from one of the recently organized squads of messengers would run — or was it “scamper”?—to the General’s Street, where his scribe dutifully entered the emendation in the proper manuscript variant, while forcing his memory to keep silent.

In those days Ernst Thälmann was already in a concentration camp under a death sentence, but strangely enough still among the living. The left-wing Spanish newspapers discussed his case extensively, and the anarcho-syndicalists printed broadsheets and staged parades with flags and banners saying, DOWN WITH HITLER! IN THE NAME OF HUMAN RIGHTS WE DEMAND THE RELEASE OF THÄLMANN! This also took place on a particular Saturday. Kessler had been at our apartment. Beatrice was barely able to persuade him not to take his shoes off for fear of soiling our floor, which was carpeted with old sheets of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung . He was worried about spoiling things for us little people, who no doubt wanted to keep things clean for Sunday. After dictating a few letters and finishing a portion of his manuscript, he left for the Alhambra. Half an hour later a botones appeared at our door in great haste, presenting a letter in a bluish, lightly perfumed envelope — but I may be mistaken about the perfume — that began, “My dear Thälmann…” It went on to say that he hoped that the boy would arrive before I started typing, “because on page… it should read…” There was no rush with typing his letters. He wrote further that he would not be returning to Barceló Street as agreed upon, but was going back home to Bonanova.

Thälmann hadn’t been around our house for quite a while. My first visage had completely repressed him, and Kessler had no idea at all about my second visage, or rather, he had only got a glimpse of it when it was overshadowed by Unkulunkulu. But now, all of a sudden, the notorious “red sub-human” Thälmann reappeared, and I was frightened. For as comfortably as I was wont to play my role as Vigoleis, what was I to do with the “arch-egalitarian” inside me? I would try my best to limit the spread of this Kesslerian rash to the less sensitive parts of my body.

Kessler’s Spanish housemaid came by at an unusually late hour, bearing a second letter. It was urgent, she said; the Señor Conde had returned home in great excitement, and she would wait for our reply. I broke open the envelope and, now addressed as “Dear friend,” I learned that the undersigned knew very well that I was not named “Thälmann” and that I wasn’t Thälmann himself, but that the undersigned could not remember my true name. All this, he went on, was extraordinarily embarrassing for him — begging a thousand pardons — and one day he would explain everything. His servante would wait to receive my kind reply.

By this time of day I knew that a protest demonstration had taken place in Palma. There had been some violence, and the rally had ended in the usual fashion with arrests. A handful of gunpowder-filled bones, Don Pablo Enorme told us, prepared for the occasion by Ulua, failed to go off because the bone-tossers were too involved in political discussions at some café or other.

I own, or I should say I once owned, several letters from Kessler in which I am called Thälmann, as well as several others in which he retracts my anarchistic anabaptism, substituting my true name, the one from which I had long since de-baptized myself, for the crossword puzzle that my person often presented to him. He never did offer the explanation promised in his night-time express letter. It wasn’t until many years later that I learned the truth, this time from another Count whose acquaintance we made during our Swiss exile, in the town of Auressio that I have already mentioned in these jottings. It was Count Werner von der Schulenburg, who lived a few hundred meters above us and the rest of the world in his wonderful writer’s domicile named La Monda (later the hermitage of the Dutch poet Marsman). He was reduced to a refugee’s diet, sans German shepherd and sans direct outside contacts, but in the company of his wife Marianne from Düsseldorf who, while she was much too classy to do the proverbial city-street cartwheels, was likewise the object of my admiration. During the Röhm Purge of 1933 the Count was scheduled to be made a head shorter. But, old conspirator and condottiere that he was, a type that not even crafty Nazi huntsmen could drive out of the thicket of his political intrigues, he now sat up there on the hill in his overalls and was writing comedies for the stage. As good Germans we at first avoided each other, each suspecting the other as a spy carrying a concealed dagger and in league with the dreaded Consul in Lugano, Captain Rausch.