Matthias Politycki - Next World Novella

When Schepp crossed the corridor in silence to place the pot of tea beside her on the desk, she was usually hunched over the commentaries of the emperors and philosophers of ancient China, surrounded by the sixty-four signs of the old oracular book. She had hung them on the walls of her room in an order that placed the water signs at the centre — yes, even a scholar strictly interested in philology, like Schepp, knew his way around the I Ching, not so much because it was regarded as sacred by soothsayers, and probably by Countess von Hagelstein too, as because the entire intellectual life of ancient China had been concerned with its interpretation. It was a subject to which grave and serious statesmen and scholars had turned their minds, even Confucius — Kung Tze — whom Schepp venerated. He suspected that the little countess, who in spite of her youth seemed entirely absorbed in research and scholarship, interpreted it in mystical terms. Sometimes she emerged briefly from her reveries with a start when he came in. But usually she didn’t even notice when he stood beside her for a few too many seconds, gazing at her wide-eyed. What could she have seen behind the thick lenses of his glasses anyway, except his pupils, a couple of sparkling pinheads? With his extremely poor eyesight, Schepp was lucky to get out of the room again without bumping into everything. No, he was certain that nothing could bind this perfect young woman to a man like him. Even his school-leaving exams had been a test that he had passed successfully only because his teachers recognized his talent, and his studies had been financed by a foundation for gifted students. It was his place to be grateful and not ask for more than his due.

But one day in the late autumn of 1979, when he was still addressing Doro as Fräulein Dorothee although she had specially asked him to drop the ‘Fräulein’, she had looked up as soon as he had placed the teapot on to her desk, and, even more surprisingly, had asked if he had any idea what the next world would be like. After all, in the Faculty he was considered a specialist on Kung Tze; she, on the other hand, felt a greater sympathy with Taoism. So … In fact here Schepp agreed with Confucius, who held that it was not worthwhile dwelling on what we could not know. But of course, he said as forcefully he could, he had an idea about the next world, in fact an extremely precise idea. There wasn’t one. He didn’t want to live for ever in any case, he added defiantly; there was an end to everything, even a sausage had two ends. The next moment, he would have been prepared to convert to Tibetan Red Hat Buddhism, but Fräulein Dorothee merely regarded him with her dark eyes, and the conversation was over.

Curiously enough, however, she picked up on it the next day exactly where she had broken it off. As soon as Schepp appeared in her doorway she asked him, sounding quite anxious, almost imploring, how, as a thinking human, he could say such a thing. All the cool, objective distance that constituted not a little of her magic was gone; she pleaded with him as if he were a friend who must be saved from some terrible error. There had to be something after death, she said; surely life with all its beauty couldn’t end just like that? There were tears in her eyes. Then, as soon as Schepp had agreed with her, nodding vigorously, they grew even darker, and she said softly, as if he wasn’t there, as if she was completely alone, that of course it wouldn’t go on in as beautiful a way as before, far from it. In the Southern Commentaries on the I Ching, she came across passages in which the sign for ‘lake’ was curiously ambivalent, as if — unlike, for instance, the signs for ‘wind’, ‘mountain’ or ‘sky’ — it wasn’t just referring to something joyful, which was what the Commentaries usually stressed, but also to its opposite, something dark that had to be overcome. However, none of the commentaries told you how to do that, as if the lake — ah, well, she didn’t suppose the mystical side of it would interest a linguist.

Far from it. Schepp dispelled that illusion immediately. And so it was that while for two years he had known nothing about his new colleague in the Faculty apart from the rumours circulating about her, he now discovered her most secret fears in the course of a single afternoon.

After death, she said, if she understood the Southern Commentaries correctly, the process of dying only really begins when the soul is judged and purified. Sooner or later you come to a lake, its waters motionless, in the midst of a bleak landscape. From a distance it may seem like a mountain lake, only larger, much larger, and the far shore can only be vaguely discerned in the diffuse light. Indeed, all the light in that place is muted, she said; there are no colours, no smells, not a breath of wind, not a sound, and that is sufficiently terrible, but worst of all you are entirely alone, yet you must enter the cold water and swim across. Swim to the far shore where perhaps life goes on somehow or other, but that makes no real difference, for you have no chance at all of reaching the shore; your powers are bound to fail by the time you get to the middle of the lake at the latest, everyone’s powers fail. Then you let yourself drift for a while, becoming colder and colder, and at last you are drawn down into the depths as if by a giant hand, and …

And?

No ‘and’. Then you are really dead, and it’s all over.

For ever?

For ever. And the lake, she said, was so dark and cold, and it frightened her.

But who says, asked Schepp, that you have to go into the water? You could just stay on the shore. Or walk around the lake if you really wanted to reach the other side.

Oh, said Fräulein Dorothee, and there were tears in her eyes again, the lake exerts a magical attraction, and although you know you’re sure to meet your end in it, it shimmers promisingly like a new beginning, and you can’t escape it.

Schepp briefly thought of responding with a knowing grin in anticipation of a smile in return — for there was no way she could mean all this seriously — but instead ironic objections spilled out of him. Surely, he said, the lake must be full by now, full to the brim, and in fact if all the people who had died over thousands and millions of years had drowned in it, Doro probably wouldn’t have to swim when her turn came, she could walk across the water dry-shod. The next moment he could have bitten his tongue off, but Fräulein Dorothee just regarded him briefly, and once again the conversation was over.

After that not a day went by when Schepp didn’t think of the lake and its inhospitable shores, and the way Dorothee Wilhelmine Renate, Countess von Hagelstein shuddered at the thought of having to undress there. Sometimes he pondered whether she might enter the water fully dressed, or whether he might swim from the far side of the lake to meet her. He didn’t make much progress with her that way at all. But he made headway with the cold, dark lake. By winter’s end he had a very clear picture of it, could even imagine the surrounding landscape, the vague shape of a mountain pine, a wan sky flashing with distant lightning. So he was greatly surprised when Fräulein Dorothee, still in her coat, came into his room. Since that last conversation she hadn’t deigned to glance at him when he had brought her pots of tea in silent plea for forgiveness. Her hair was a bit tousled; a film of perspiration gleamed on her forehead and upper lip.

Could she show him something, she asked. She knew he didn’t believe in it, but now, now she could prove it. Prove that it existed. The lake. Scarcely an hour later they entered the great glass cube of Berlin’s New National Gallery, which was flooded with light. The little that Schepp had found out from Fräulein Dorothee on the way amounted to the fact that on a recent visit she had discovered a picture that, she could have sworn, hadn’t been hanging there before, a picture that, as far as she knew, had been missing since the war. It had suddenly turned up again without any fanfare although its reappearance should have caused a sensation. She had been deeply moved when she had suddenly been confronted with it; the original had a power at which copies merely hinted, a shattering finality in fact. It was proof.