Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

There was no applause as the tragedian’s head sank to the tabletop. Friedel remained seated, and so we assumed that her gesture was part of the mise en scène. But this wasn’t playacting at all. I was deeply moved by this display of emotion. Why had this artist taken leave of her stage career? When Adele finally lifted her head with a smile, wiped her brow, and with another gesture swept away everything in the room that seemed alien to her feelings, her appearance was once again almost true to reality: grey, wasted, old. The first to speak up was Friedrich. He asked us to leave his mother by herself. We crept away on tiptoe. Downstairs in the hallway we sat together for a while until Spanish guests arrived. We then decided it was time to go. But before we left for home at the “Torre,” we heard the actress’s cane tap-tapping on the floor tiles above. She called me. I followed her into her room.

“Please don’t leave without saying something about my play! Was it so bad, Vigoleis?”

I cannot recall verbatim what I replied to her, but in a general sense this is what I said: she, Adele Gerstenberg, had also departed without a word after witnessing our misery in the Clock Tower. Tower or stage drama — it was all the same tragedy…

I kissed her brow and left.

A week later it was my turn to read from the original works of Vigoleis. But what was I to read? In front of such a privileged audience it could only be unpublished material, and since my oeuvre contained an abundance of this sort of writing, my selection ought not to have been difficult. Poems? All I had to do was reach up to our clothesline. But poems are a tricky matter. When reciting them, I feel as if I’m wearing long pantaloons for crawling into a hole in the ground, while the ground refuses to reveal even the tiniest fissure for me to sink into. Prose? That’s innocuous enough — perhaps a chapter from The Cadaver Murders , or—“Beatrice, do you think that it’s proper to appear before La Gerstenberg with corpses? Ones that don’t have any historical patina to make them seem housebroken?” At the time, I was very hard at work on the manuscript for this tome. The crimes were already multiple; “Vigotrice” comprised an inseparable pair of detectives; and the super-whore, the doxy of doxies, had the name María del Pilar. But was this appropriate for the Count’s pensión ? I decided to write something custom-made for this event. I wrote the history of my and my brother Jupp’s murder at the hands of a priest. Here’s how the saga goes:

The “respectable” elementary school in my home town, the scene of my first elemental failure in education, existed under the aegis of Kaiser Wilhelm II — not in itself a fact of earth-shaking proportions, since he lent his august name to some much shoddier enterprises. For the ceremonies for the opening of the school, when I had to recite a patriotic poem, he sent his regrets, preferring to be represented by an oak tree ( Quercus pedunculata ) that was planted in front of the entrance, in the presence of the highest local authorities. The tree didn’t take well to the soil and perished a few years later during the Wilhelminian War, a time when perishing was the order of the day. Since a dead Wilhelminian oak is not an adornment for a Wilhelminian school, and since it might have been taken as an evil omen, the tree was secretly replaced by a hardier local species. This was of course a superfluous act, for soon afterward, the entire Hohenzollern family tree was chopped down for good.

None of the above was in the story I read; it is only now that I’m bringing it back to mind. The story itself concerns the principal of the educational institution in question, the Reverend Dr. Kremers, who caused much trouble for the Holy Father in Rome and for my episcopal uncle in Münster. A notorious man, one who had to submit to ecclesiastical disciplining, he entered history as a behind-the-scenes accomplice and string-puller of the Rhenish Separatist movement, which collapsed in 1923 after proclaiming an independent Rhenish Republic in Aachen. I loved and respected this teacher of mine. He was an excellent pedagogue, not a brute like the other elementary drill sergeants on a staff that consisted wholly of scholarly failures. It was he who opened my eyes to philosophical questioning, to literature (insofar as this didn’t come to me through the Rhenish songwriter Hanns Willy Mertens, who was also a member of the Wilhelminian faculty), and to a cosmopolitan attitude that to this day I call my own. He had become a priest against his will, had a less than exalted opinion of his profession, and made no secret of this. For this reason, and on the basis of his increasingly audacious political activism, he was the best hated man in a town that prided itself as a citadel of Catholicism, but which at bottom was just as worm-eaten as the Arctic Imperial Oak. As soon as the first shouts of “ Heil Hitler ” resounded, the town capitulated, and the spurious edifice of faith collapsed soundlessly in a heap of ruins. A Catholic town expects a priest to become a hypocrite. If he is sleeping with his housekeeper, he should at least do the citizenry the favor of calling her his sister or his niece. My beloved teacher was not of this ilk; he put his trust in the Pope, who was arrogant enough to prefer scandal to lying.

My parental home was one of the few in town that remained open to the school principal. He took frequent advantage of our hospitality, and we welcomed him warmly each time. He also appreciated our wine cellar and the box of 500 cigars into which any male guest was free to grab. I have the fondest recollections of these evenings with Father Kremers.

My brothers and I liked to go out collecting plants and flowers with our principal. We took bicycle trips to nearby Holland, paid visits to the Missionary Headquarters in Steyl (Father Kremers was a member of the Society of the Divine Word), and explored the borderland area between Venlo and Roermond. Once in the month of May — I had already left the school — Father Kremers suggested a bike tour to Roermond, saying that he wanted to show us something very nice there. The group was to include my brother Jupp and a classmate of his named Erich. Departure time: 3:00 am. We arrived at the principal’s door right on time, but Erich was nowhere in sight. I was sent off to yank this lazybones out of bed. I swiftly pedaled to the outskirts of town where he lived and gave a whistle under his bedroom window. Erich’s father, a short, know-it-all factory manager, stuck his head out the window and cursed me and the clergyman; his son wasn’t coming. That school principal wasn’t proper company for a decent student, and I should go to the devil. Erich was what you might call a sissy, but his father, who was a tyrant, wasn’t aware of this.

So we were a threesome for the bike trip, with Father Kremers dressed in civilian clothes. Born in the neighboring town of Dülken, home of Goethe’s Academy of Fools, he had scouted every last corner of the Schwalm valley. He knew by heart all the flora and fauna of the region including, to my particular amazement, plants and animals that were not listed in Brehm’s Guides to Nature . During this day’s exploration we agreed on a plan to write a cyclist’s handbook of local zoology, with the title “What’s Missing in Brehm.” By dusk we were near home, our baskets full of specimens. On a wooded hillside just outside of our “Town Amid the Forest,” we were met by the principal of the Protestant school, a friend of our own Catholic principal. This man handed his fellow clergyman a black biretta and a black loden coat, explaining that it would be best not to appear in town in mufti. Then he gave him the news that his father, old Severin Kremers, had been discovered dead in his bed. He advised him to change clothes in his school, which was located just outside the town limits. Rumors were going around. We boys were asked to stand aside, but we overheard enough to give us the feeling that we were becoming protagonists in a cops-and-robbers story — that Reverend Kremers, who didn’t get along very well with his father, had killed the old man and tried to escape at an early hour in civilian garb. He had, the rumor said, abducted two of his favorite students, and the group had been sighted leaving town. A third student named Erich was forbidden by his father to take part in the suspicious bicycle tour, and thus escaped certain death. The two other boys — the rumor continued — were already dead. The loathsome priest had strangled them and buried them in the forest near a large anthill.