Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Count Kessler looked over to our corner of the hall. We waved to him. He gestured his thanks. Afterwards he told us that he felt so ashamed on our account that he was worrying how he could possibly set things aright. He succeeded admirably.

Hermann retreated to his hotel suite and, all alone, drank up the chilled bottles, all six of them. Then he summoned Don Helvecio to his room and discussed with him his departure. He wasn’t interested in a return engagement at Formentor. He had urgent commitments in Barcelona, Madrid, Salamanca…

The local newspapers took notice of the Príncipe event. Who was this Count Kessler, the man whose age, compendious knowledge, and cleverness had so astonishingly outpointed the famous, popular, hispanophile Count Keyserling? He was reported to be a foreign guest on the island, and a renowned personage on all the continents. But why had Mallorca not heard of him before? It was said that he was composing his memoirs, and the hope was that they would be published in Spanish, too.

During the following days Count Kessler was inundated with letters of invitation: conferencias here, conferencias there, requests for pre-publication copies of his memoirs and for copies of his Notes on Mexico . Kessler rejected all of them. It was not his intention, he said, to claim the spotlight. He had simply wished to give the insistent Hermann a lesson. Hermann, for his part, cursed the day when he shared his platonic schooldays with Harry.

Harry once again submerged into his days of imperial glory. Hermann, after a return to the Spanish mainland, enjoyed continued acrobatic success as the prophet of an Iberian Hellas.

I was not aware that the German publisher Samuel Fischer was known to his friends as “Sami.” And thus at first I couldn’t understand why Count Kessler was so upset at reading this man’s obituary, or that he, who even in exile observed all the forms of etiquette, came knocking at our door late in the evening — a type of behavior that we could have expected only from Herr Silberstern.

“Sami is dead. May I come in?” To judge by the newspapers that we found in our corridor, it must have been a night between Saturday and Sunday. Kessler made no attempt to take his shoes off. He was in distress, and kept saying how horrible it was that Sami was dead. Not until he added, leaning against the bookcase in our bible-paper room, that Sami’s successor would no doubt turn out to be his coffin nail, did I realize that the person he was mourning was none other than the famous S. Fischer. There would be trouble, he told us. All their wonderful collaboration on the literary journal Pan was now over with, all the leisure he, Kessler, needed for the later volumes of his memoirs. Then he wandered off in recollections of the post-Bismarck years: the heyday of Naturalist drama: Gerhart Hauptmann, Hofmannsthal, Eberhard von Bodenhausen, all the great European writers that Sami had assembled from near and far: Ibsen, Dostoevsky, Georg Brandes.

Conversing further on, he eventually focused on an episode to be recounted in the final volume of his memoirs, which he intended to finish with his flight from Germany. It was a scene that took place in the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. He was involved in negotiations in a private room with personages whose names I have of course forgotten. A waiter arrives and says, “Gentlemen, the Reichstag is on fire!” Someone grabs Kessler’s arm and whispers to him that it is high time that he pack his bags and escape to England or France. Kessler doesn’t even take the time to return to his apartment on Köthener Strasse, the rooms designed and decorated by Henry van de Velde. Instead, he takes the very next train to Paris. His head was on the list of those to be liquidated when the Nazis faked a Communist assassination attempt against the Führer . Kessler had a copy of that list, given to him by friends of his at the German embassy in London.

That business about Sami Fischer’s successor as Harry’s “coffin nail” made a big impression on me, since I was thinking that a writer of such universal renown as Count Kessler must be immune to the vagaries and chicaneries of any publisher, especially his own publisher. Today I know that an author must consider himself fortunate if his publisher doesn’t send him, along with a publishing contract, a finished coffin — one that would probably be a few sizes too small. It’s a lucky thing for the future of literature that most writers feel so sheltered from death that even in sight of the proverbial four boards, they continue to compose their own epitaphs.

Count Kessler left the island in the spring of 1936. His health was ruined; he was spitting blood, and he looked terrible. Before he departed, in Barcelona and in the Galerías Costa in Palma he arranged exhibitions of highly acclaimed works from his Cranach Press.

We agreed that I should continue par distance as his scribe. He would send me his manuscripts, and I would edit them with my Wustmannian marginal notes. A few letters and manuscript packages went between General Barceló Street and his new refuge, the Hostellerie des Compagnons de Jéhu in Pontanevaux. The outbreak of the Civil War brought all this to an end.

Count Kessler was lucky to have reached French soil when the disaster started. He would not have survived the Franco night of July 18th-19th, 1936. The gun-toting Nazi from Königsberg, the one who took upon himself the purging of the German colony, would have made short work of him. For quite a while a rumor spread that Kessler had been shot on Mallorca. Under normal circumstances the Nazis could have left him alone for a few more years, since he was relatively harmless. He never gave reckless speeches against the Third Reich , and was not involved in any conspiracies. It is only because the collaboration between him and his Wustmannian, Thälmannian, Thelemannian amanuensis worked so well that he hadn’t sought out some politically innocuous secretary. There were times when he was anxious about my unpredictability. Only the completion of his fourth and final volume of memoirs could have given Hitler reason to eliminate him. “That must never be written,” I was told later, by a man sitting next to me on a coil of rope on a British destroyer, a man who had reason to fear the same fate. It was the writer Franz Blei, Kessler’s friend from the time of their collaboration on the literary journal Pan .

It’s always the same when a person is going down the drain: those nearest to him never notice the problem until it is too late. That’s how it was with Zwingli. One day we observed that he had stopped taking baths, that he no longer did us his customary little favors, that again and again we had to tell his limping business partner that Don Helvecio hadn’t come back to us, and that his clothes got dirtier and shabbier. In short, a woman!

She was a dancer of the unclothed variety, her name was Konákis, which suggested Greek origins — or rather the Greek origins of her art. For although she pretended to be a child of Hellas, she was Italian, came from Chicago, and had Irish blood. She could be sporadically observed in the altogether at the dingiest of nightclubs, where she was lauded and serenaded for her beauty.

Like many high-bred women, Konákis preferred men who exuded the aroma of the cave. She, too, yearned to be abducted and thrown into the bushes by hairy chimpanzee fists, and to view above her a powerful male chest with hair containing clumps of earth that she could pluck out one by one, chanting “He loves me, he loves me not,” only to have the depilated savage take out his bloody lust on her. Zwingli had fished up Konákis at the Torre del Reloj. Now he was in her thrall, and quickly went primitive in order to grab hold of her all the more securely. Without such a mutation he wouldn’t have been nearly earthy enough for her. What the two of us were mourning as yet another form of deterioration was for Zwingli, on the contrary, a new awakening. The horn on his pinky once again showed the old signs of accumulated grime. His brain was hatching audacious plans, and producing so much dandruff that a light snowfall occurred whenever he shook his head, which he now often did.