Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“My child, do not be angry if I get so emotional. But you are the only person in this anti-artistic country who has recognized me, who remembers me. Oh Golden Vienna, where I was carried aloft! Friedrich, my son, if you don’t know it already, here is someone who can tell you who your mother truly was! I was once ‘La Gerstenberg,’ and so I could not remain Frau Ginsterberg. And is this your dear husband? Let me welcome you, too!”

I kissed the great actress’s hand and led her back to her chair.

“Oh, I am touched by so many thoughts, so much emotion! Herr von Martersteig already told us that you are a writer. That means we make up a little world of our own here together.”

“But Mama, Martersteig was exaggerating. You know that the information he gets from Anton Emmerich isn’t very reliable.”

Aha, I thought. Our chronique scandaleuse has penetrated to the rocking chairs of the Count’s Hostel! But I took solace in the thought that for Friedrich, it seemed a greater scandal to be a writer than to have been chased out of house and home by a hooker.

“Now son, there you go again. You haven’t expressed yourself very well at all. It’s not an exaggeration to say that a certain person is a writer. The important thing is what that person writes. And with the best will in the world, I can’t say that the Captain knows his limits as a writer. You’re acting just like your father, always leaving yourself open to criticism. That worries me. Excuse us, my friends. Here we are once again with our family topic number one. It must seem quite abstruse when we get to arguing about it in front of strangers in a boarding house. Come on, Friedel, let’s get hold of ourselves, shouldn’t we?”

Mother’s and son’s chairs cannot have swung back and forth more than a hundred times before we learned in general outline the sorrowful story of these two expatriates. Friedrich’s father was a renowned Tübingen cardiac anatomist, who once every month sent them 400 marks, a sum that should easily have kept them going. Yet like the aforementioned Captain, but in a different sphere of activity, this son didn’t know his limits. He was consumptive, and had been forced to break off his medical studies before his doctoral exams. They had lived for a year in the dusty Spanish desert of Alicante, where a woman lived from whom young Friedrich simply could not part. Then, for different reasons, they had come to Mallorca, a place that didn’t seem to me to be ideal for a TB case either. Swiss sanatoriums, they explained, were too expensive, and “La Gerstenberg” had no desire to remain in Germany. Staying there would surely take a bad turn; they were Jewish. Hindenburg was a military giant with softening of the brain. The insurgent National Socialists, in league with Hindenburg’s conservative cohorts, would soon stab the old general in the back, and then all non-Aryans would be slaughtered. Considering that these political speculations were expressed in the summer of 1931, it is amazing how prescient this famous actress was in a field outside of her professional expertise. She had keen insights, and it wasn’t for nothing that she kept up with the best of the world’s news media. Friedrich was a faithful customer of Anton Emmerich’s.

That noontime we didn’t meet any other boarding-house guests. Like Beppo, the cockatoo Lorico had introduced himself, and having just arrived from Pilar’s lodgings, we heard the sounds of home emerging from his obscene beak. Unfortunately, we had no time to indulge in nostalgia of this kind. With Pepe’s help we lugged our belongings from the bookstore and carefully set up everything in our room. Beatrice is a genius at the spontaneous management of space; she knows how to improvise and juggle things around like no other intellectual woman. She places boxes and suitcases on top of each other according to a precise plan, in such a way that it is always the bottom-most box that contains what we need most urgently. Before entering the comedor for supper we had made a home for ourselves from which no one would very easily evict us.

“Captain von Martersteig, if you will permit me, sir. From Magdeburg. Joachim by Christian name — that’s why these odd people here call me Don Joaquín.”

“Vigoleis, with a V, as in Victoria . But I’m from Süchteln on the Lower Rhine, if you will permit me in return.”

We made reciprocal bows, very stiff ones — the Captain for reasons that will soon become clear; I myself in a symptomatic regression to childish German manners.

“Vigoleis? And with a V as in Victoria ? What does that mean? If I have heard you correctly, you have quite a romantic name. Are you related to that knight of Arthur’s Round Table, the one with the wheel on his helmet, le chevalier à la roue, Wigalois ? Medieval Courtly Poetry, 13th century — I own the Benecke edition. Peculiar. Quite remarkable, my good man with your V as in Victoria. ”

Smart fellow, I thought, this captain with a literary education. I’ll have to be on my guard. Give a military man some schooling, and he’ll be doubly dangerous. And a Prussian to boot, whereas I am a Prussian only by coercion. Fortunately, the captain was standing before me in civvies, which dampened his pride of caste. Minor nobility, insignificant.

“Related?” I replied to his literary inquiry into my pedigree. “Well, you might say that I am related in spirit to that character in Gravenberg.” But I refrained from adding that the wheel borne by my medieval namesake as an ornament on his headgear was something I carried around inside my head, where it sometimes spins so rapidly that I get dizzy. The captain would notice this soon enough if we were to share the anarchistic Count’s Round Table for any length of time. “As for the V as in Victoria , I’ll explain that some other time, Captain. It’s a purely Swiss affair. My wife, I should explain, is half Swiss.”

“Great Scott!” the Captain burst out. “Then the other half must be a tinge of Indian. When I first saw you, Madame, I immediately thought of the Aztecs — my respects, Madame. Has Madame recovered from the shock of witnessing the greeting her spouse received yesterday from up in the palm tree?”

“Yesterday,” I replied in Beatrice’s stead, who was reacting to the captain with polite hostility. “Yesterday we got our shocks from some artificial palm trees, and today from a real one. Surely Mr. Emmerich has informed you?”

“Beppo is unpredictable, Madame,” the Captain said over my reply. “And he has every right to be. That is his summum jus . It’s his inalienable right by reason of his belonging to monkeydom, something not even an anarchistic Count can deprive him of. By the way, if that scene yesterday had taken place in a French hotel, I wouldn’t hesitate to call it a perfidious manifestation of germanophobia. I do not love my fellow countrymen unconditionally, and at the moment I am in open conflict with the fatherland. But any time at all I’ll risk my war-battered spine against the French, the whole crew of them. Not even the gratings of a green cheese…”

His remarks ended with this mysterious allusion, for the dinner gong now invited us to table. The Captain took Beatrice’s arm: a handsome couple, two people feuding against their own homelands. It was enough to make Lorico wax indecent again. I followed at a respectful distance — I who, while not yet totally at odds with my fatherland, was in a constant fiery spat with my own personality. Martersteig obediently requested permission to report, à la prussienne , that he had taken the liberty of arranging the table seating in such a way that we could form a little group of our own, together with La Gerstenberg and her pampered son, and not excluding Fräulein Höchst from Dresden, who at this time was still doing healthful Mensendieck calisthenics up in her room.