Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Upon her return I saw in her face that something had gone wrong. “Burglary,” she said. “The place was ransacked, but thank heavens they didn’t find your Hunnish Tombs.” She pulled my almost finished manuscript from her cenaia . I had put it in a waterproof envelope and sunk it down in a well, thinking that this might save it in case of a house fire. But meanwhile the Nazis had struck! I rode into the city to examine the damage. Our lock had been opened with a crowbar. I bought a new one, this time with the Yale trademark, with bolts to fit, and I filed down the key so it would fit snugly.

Mamú thought that our burglary was “thrilling.” She asked me if I suspected anybody in particular. Well yes: the Nazis, or the heinous pillars of Christian Science, or perhaps both of these in subversive concert. “Then it’s a matter for the police,” said Mamú, and she summoned her chauffeur. Auma’s personal attorney in matters of state and matters of love, the man who sat at her feet, reverted for a brief moment to his professional world of jurisprudence and warned us not to inform the local authorities. He was sure that I already knew that the island police who monitored foreigners were especially suspicious of outlanders who made trouble of any kind. Therefore, he said, I should take matters into my own hands.

“But how?”

“I thought you were an inventor.”

I asked Mamú’s chauffeur to take me in her car to Bonanova for a visit with Count Kessler. I possessed manuscripts of his as well as letters and other documents, and thus he was also involved in the burglary case. When I entered his house he was seated at his desk, a piece of furniture obviously designed by anybody else in this world but his private interior architect Henry van de Velde. This desk was a semi-circular affair, a work space for a housemaid, covered with a simple cotton fabric with printed pattern and fringe. That is where I encountered the Count, at the time the most famous man on the island, committing his thoughts and memories to paper for posterity.

“A burglary, you say? And they didn’t touch my manuscripts? Well, that’s understandable, considering that everything is slated to be published by S. Fischer, back in the Reich . The spies knew all about this, and they had their specific orders.” But they didn’t know the whole story, the Count continued. That miserable Consul wasn’t even aware that he, Kessler, despite being exiled from Germany, had the status of an “exterritorial.” The local police authorities, too, were oblivious — but their ignorance could be called charming in comparison. But no matter. Although the thugs seemed to be aiming at me, Thälmann, Enemy Number One, at the moment the Count was most interested in obtaining a dog. He had the address of some German living somewhere in a hidden corner of the island, a man with a litter to select from.

A few weeks later Kessler arrived at our door in a state of excitement. Something awful had happened to him. Had he been personally burglarized? Had his new dog, the pup from the secret German litter, raised its right paw to the Nazis and licked clean all the fingerprints from all his doorknobs and file cabinets?

Count Kessler had paid a visit to the clandestine dog breeder and told him who he was and what he was looking for. He needed a watchdog, trained to spot his true enemy, Hitler. “Hitler? Who’s that?” the man asked.

“Just imagine. Here’s a man who has lived on this island for decades, breeding dogs. He hasn’t the faintest idea of what’s going on in the world outside. He’s hearing the name ‘Hitler’ for the first time from my lips. And now I have disturbed his domestic comfort in an effort to secure my own domestic security. Now I think I have made a big mistake. I should have bought some local breed.”

I consoled the Count by pointing out the well-known cowardice of the Balearic species, insisting that there wasn’t much to gain with such a purchase. I was aware, I told him, of how profoundly disturbed he must have been, as former President of the German Society for Peace, and as a diplomat familiar with the wish-dreams of all humanity, during his visit to the Mallorcan dog pound. But it was no different with the natives in the African jungle, I went on. They know nothing at all about Jesus Christ, and they eat each other up if that suits their appetite. Then along comes a troop of missionaries who capsize their domestic harmony, leaving them to do the best they can with a switch to vegetarianism.

What was it that Doña Soledad predicted for us? I was destined to have difficulties with the police — but that would depend on my own behavior. I avoided contact with the authorities, steered clear of difficulties, and thereby fulfilled the gitana’s prophecy. Her reputation grew. But then she gazed at the moist hands of an elderly gentleman from Palma and foresaw a true bloodbath on our island. With that her clairvoyance became all too prophetic. Henceforth she was shunned.

A few weeks later I received a telegram informing me that my father had died. My first thought was: the Nazis! I didn’t dare go back home for the funeral. One grave was enough, I figured. Surely one should love one’s enemies, but the Bible says nothing about helping one’s enemies to love one back. Our gypsy had once again prophesied correctly.

Some years later we sat on coils of rope on board a British destroyer. All around us we had refugees, cannons, misery, and whining. Behind us was our island, sinking in the flames of civil war in night and fog — just as the gypsy had foretold. This was our voyage across the waters.

Her predictions for Bobby likewise came true. Taken all together, it was what Henri Bergson called the phenomenon of déjà vu .

Count Harry Kessler dug deeper and deeper into his glorious past. He was up to his ears in his notes, diaries, letters by the thousands, memoranda, finished manuscripts, and other documents in a perpetual state of Wustmannian half-completion. There was hardly a single current event that could ferret him out of his burrow. He claimed that since he was in the process of retrieving the past, he surely ought to know whether he went to school with Hermann Keyserling — although he realized that Hermann wasn’t talking about his school in Darmstadt. He simply couldn’t recall the two of them having school years in common, although Keyserling insisted that they had. This must imply, he said, that he was writing his memoirs without being able to remember his own self. I begged leave to point out that similar cases occur in world literature: Don Quixote , for example. He replied that rather than making fun of him I should just tell him how he could steer clear of that obnoxious fellow. Why, Keyserling was probably going to follow his steps to General Barceló Street! And what was that man after? He needed accomplices for his private harlequinade. For weeks there had been announcements of a session of Count Hermann Keyserling’s School of Wisdom to be held at the Hotel Príncipe Alfonso. And since they went to school together, Keyserling was thinking that he, Kessler, was bound by conscience to assist him at this overseas outpost of German philosophy. But Kessler could remember nothing about schooldays in common…

There are lots of things I can’t remember, but schooldays are not among them; they are forever hammered into my memory. In this respect I differ from Kessler, who from the day he was born was destined for a career at the end of which he would put down his recollections on paper. I was destined for a career at the end of which only I myself would get put down. And that’s why I have never made notes, never kept a diary, never scribbled things on slips of paper and placed them, like Don Juan Sureda, in boxes and suitcases — building-blocks for my applied recollections. If I ever had, then no sooner would neatnik Beatrice have wiped up Kessler’s boot marks from our floor than I would have committed my “Conversations with Kessler” to paper with the verbatim quality of fresh memory, which permits only subtle differentiations such as that between “crook” and “blackguard.”