Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

But then one Easter Sunday — the Risen Lord was making the rounds of the houses with a blessing for each and every one — we both realized how ridiculous this situation was. There were but seventy hearths in the village. Everybody knew everybody else, and everybody knew whether anybody else had ever murdered someone (in the Onsernone Valley the traditional vendetta was still a local custom). Each evening Schulenburg and I stood together down at the roadway waiting for Mella, the postman, sexton, gravedigger, miner, and discreet purveyor of gossip in one and the same well-groomed person, to distribute the mail. Then, keeping a mistrustful distance, we would climb the stone steps that were carved out of the ledge and kept slippery by the local cattle, up to the village.

Things just can’t go on like this, I thought to myself. I sent the Squire of La Monda my just-published German translation of Pascoaes’ St. Paul. The delivery was put in the hands of Emma, the aristocratic couple’s maid, a calm and reliable child with the blank gaze of a grazing cow and a heart of gold that belied the character of her father, the most feared tyrant in the valley. An hour later His Royal-Imperial Excellency appeared in his heavy loden cape and hunting cap, every inch of him an indication that my T’uang theory was dubious, and that the Almanach de Gotha does contain a few pearls after all. To put it briefly, not even Martersteig’s snippety old maids, who grumbled so fiercely against the Tscharners, would have anything to criticize about our visitor, except perhaps his sparse growth of hair and his wife Marianne.

Marianne was an actress, and she was Catholic. She embodied the proverbial radiant glow in the lowly cottage. But how had she entered Count von der Schulenburg’s life? Quite simply: this Count, flexible as he was in all situations, had lowered himself to let her in. He now introduced himself with all his titles — academic, heraldic, genealogical, and literary: Schiller Prize, Goethe Medal, most frequently produced playwright, Senator of the Halcyon Academy. The best I could do to match these honorifics was to present myself just simply as Vigoleis with a V as in Vespucci but lacking the renown of that city, a name that Beatrice’s ck-dt relatives in Basel were reluctant to accept since it intruded on their prerogatives. In any case, Count von der Schulenburg instantly ignored me and turned his attention to Beatrice. He insisted on having met her before — but where? Two such well-traveled individuals might have crossed paths in many places in the world. “In South America, by any chance?” our blue-blood guest suggested. Yes, said Beatrice, that’s where she spent part of her childhood — but then she retreated into her Inca fortress. The Count went on guessing where the two of them could possibly have met, while I remained for him just so much air. It was established that they actually did know each other, but that the how, the where, and the when would only emerge with time. But wait, I thought: in cases of doubt, let truth be told, and so I had to take action. I went to our bookcase, took out our Jacob Burckhardt, and opened a volume containing a youthful photograph of Basel’s most famous sainted scholar. I showed the picture to His Royal-Imperial Excellency, about whom I knew that he had written a biography of the younger Jacob Burckhardt. “This is where you had your first mysterious encounter with Donna Beatrice from the House of ck-dt!” It is a fact that the young Burckhardt looks just like Beatrice.

A citizen of Basel would have countered my exclamation with “ Däwäg !” Count Werner von der Schulenburg… but to continue would take us too far afield. By the time he left us after three hours, we realized not only that he had drunk the last of our wine, eaten the last of our salami, and destroyed all our hopes for a quick downfall of the Nazis, but also that our list of encounters with remarkable personalities had grown by two. There developed a see-saw traffic between the meager hut of the struggling writer and the lofty residence of the great one. In fact, many things developed. I told the Schulenburgs about my Spanish adventures, I unplugged the Count’s bathtub drain in La Monda, told tales of the priest in the neighboring village — which led me to add some whoremongering stories from Mallorca. “It’s amazing how you do that!” said the Count — and for displaying my talents I was rewarded with Valpolicella and roast goat or, most delectable of all, Onsernone fox. Since one cannot go on forever about porra s and putas even when the subject is Spain, I told him that I had been Harry Kessler’s scribe and what one might call his last secretary, adding some highlights from Kessler’s workshop of world history. In the process I also regaled Schulenburg with the story of my third visage, the one that I had worn on the island, albeit only briefly: Thälmann.

Count von der Schulenburg’s gaze darkened, while retaining its aspect of firmness; it was a convincing and almost fear-inspiring glance of the kind that only an ages-old aristocratic family could bring forth. “What?!” he cried. “Do you mean to say that you did all of these things, and yet now that you’re almost starving you’ve never put them to your advantage, you’ve never written a book or even a brochure about the final years of the self-styled Count Harry Kessler from the house of…? You fool, you dimwit, you dunderhead, you!”

“Er — how’s that again? Did you say self-styled? And from the house of…?”

“From the Principality of Reuss! It’s an old story: illegitimate son. Not very complicated, either. Other people have had a harder time getting their noble titles.” I’m quoting exactly what Schulenburg told me, only he presented the story in wittier fashion and with greater precision, without mixing up the Reuss dynasty’s elder and cadet branches. I recalled having heard similar gossip on Mallorca concerning my employer’s sinister bastard blood, rumors that were outdone only by others having to do with his beloved sister, who was said to be the natural daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm I. Kessler would never have written such a grass-roots correction of Gotha into his memoirs. But permit me to ask my curious reader: doesn’t a nightingale have the right to sing a song that the sparrows are already chirping from all the rooftops? Captain von Martersteig, for example, was just such a blatherskite. I believed his very word, all the more willingly, considering that I was myself switched as a baby and then taken for someone I wasn’t at all. Confusions of this kind can happen even in the loftiest regions of society, starting with the Imperial pilarière and extending to princely and ducal bedrooms or the estate stables. I myself, a person possessing no family tree but only a horoscope whose aberrations apply equally to someone else, have never taken such matters very seriously. Cadet Branch or Elder Branch — parthenogenesis happens with crabs and little worms, as well as in stories told by wet nurses.

But what Count von der Schulenburg, a man who sat firmly in the saddle of any and all genealogical discussions, went on to say about that other mystification, my friend Count Kessler’s fixation on Thälmann, knocked me for a loop, for his explanation entered the realm of psychoanalysis. Harry Graf Kessler, he said, had once stood on the barricades in Weimar in 1919, wearing a red shirt. And Schulenburg asked me to guess who had stood next to him defending the fatherland. I thought for a while; I was always lousy in history, and so I wasn’t able to get beyond Rosa Luxemburg. But Beatrice chimed in right away: “Thälmann!” It was him. The rest of the story played itself out according to the laws of subconscious repression. On Mallorca, the phonic similarity of the names Thälmann and Thelen had caused the red-shirted agitator to resurface — surely I understood, said Schulenburg. Hadn’t I studied psychology?