Laszlo Krasznahorkai - War & War

Kasser and his companions were perfectly aware, Korin explained to the woman, that the landlord of the inn was talking all kinds of nonsense but since they observed that the result of the landlord’s fabrications was that the locals by and large left them in peace, they only occasionally tried to broach the subject with Hirschhardt to ask him why he went about saying they were heroes of Königgrätz when they had never in their lives visited Königgrätz nor had ever claimed to have been there, adding that taking flight before the battle of Königgrätz was not the same as fleeing from Königgrätz itself and so forth, that they were not members of Moltke’s entourage, not even soldiers, and had only tried to escape an impending battle, not emerged from the heat of one, though, truth to tell, they only occasionally pointed this out because there was no point telling Hirschhardt anything for Hirschhardt was incapable of comprehending and simply nodded, his broad, completely bald skull covered in perspiration, his face set in a false smile as if he knew what the truth really was, so that eventually they gave up trying altogether and Kasser picked up a train of thought he had long been following, the original thread , the thing they had been talking about since they first arrived, that is the notion of preparing themselves for utter failure, for that was a genuine, unarguable possibility, since history was undoubtedly tending toward the ever more extensive force, violence , although no proper survey of affairs should omit the fact that a marvelous work was under construction here, a brilliant product of human endeavor, the chief element of which was the discovery of sanctity, holiness , the holiness of unknown space and time, of God and the divine, for there is no finer sight, Kasser declared, than a man who realizes that there is a God, and who recognizes in this God the spellbinding reality of holiness while knowing that reality to be the product of his own awakening and consciousness, for these were moments of enormous significance, he said, resulting in momentous works, for at the center of it all, at the very apex of each and every achievement stood the radiant single figure of God, the one God , and that it was always the man with the vision, the one who beheld him, that was capable of constructing an entire universe in his own soul, a universe like a cathedral aspiring to heaven, and the remarkable thing, the thing in Cologne, was that mortal creatures felt the need for a sacred domain, and this was the thing that completely overwhelmed him, said Kasser, that this desire persisted in the midst of an undeniable failure, a precipitous collapse into ultimate defeat, and yes, Falke took over, that was indeed extraordinary, but what was still more extraordinary was the personal quality of this God, since man, in discovering that there might be a God in heaven, that there might indeed be a heaven beyond this earth, had found not only a kind of lord, someone who sat in a throne and ruled over the world, but a personal God to whom he could speak, and what was the result of that? what happened? asked Falke rhetorically— what happened , Korin echoed him — what happened, Falke answered his own question, was that it extended man’s sense of being at home in the world, and this was the truly startling, truly extraordinary thing, they said, this all-consuming idea that weak and feeble man was capable of creating a universe that far exceeded himself, since ultimately it was this that was great and entrancing here, this tower man raised to soar way beyond himself, and that man was capable of raising something so much greater than his own petty being, said Falke, the way he grasped the vastness he himself created, the way he defended himself by producing this brilliant, beautiful and unforgettable, yet moving, poignant , thing, because of course he was not capable of governing such grandeur, unable to handle something so enormous, and it would collapse and the edifice he had created would tumble about his ears so the whole thing would have to start all over again, and so it would go on ad infìnitum , said Falke, the systematic preparation for failure changing nothing in the desire to create ever greater and greater monuments that collapsed, it being a natural product of an eternal desire to resolve an all-consuming, overwhelming tension between the creator of vast and tiny things.

The conversation continued into the late evening and ended with praise of the discovery of love and goodness, which, as Toót put it, may be regarded as the two most significant European inventions, and this, said Korin, was roughly when Hirschhardt did his round of the tables and totaled up the bills of the various drinkers so that he might send them home, and, while he was at it, to say goodnight to Kasser and his companions too; and so it went night after night, like clockwork, and no one imagined that it would all change soon or that the accustomed order of things would be overturned, not even Kasser’s friends on their way back along the Rhine who felt a little heavy on account of the beer and spent their time discussing whether the peculiarly frightening figure who had recently appeared in the vicinity of the cathedral and whom they had spotted through the window, a gangling, exceedingly thin man with pale blue eyes wearing a black silk cloak, had anything to do with the building, for all they knew about him was what the ever informative Hirschhardt told them when they enquired, which was that he was named Herr von Mastemann, and while that was all he or anyone else knew, there was no lack of gossip on the subject, a gossip that varied from day to day so that now he was supposed to represent the State, and now the Church; now he was said to be from a country on the far side of the Alps, now from some northeastern principality; and while one couldn’t exclude the possibility that one or other of these rumors was true it was impossible to be certain, for there was nothing but rumor, hearsay , said Korin, to go on, rumors such as that he had been seen with the master of the works, or with the foreman of the carpenters and eventually with Master Voigtel too, or that he had a servant, a very young man with curly hair whose only task seemed to be to carry a portable folding chair, to appear with it each morning in front of the cathedral, and to put it down dead in the center facing the west front so that his master might sit in it when he arrived and remain there for hours, immobile, in silence; rumors that women, the women , Korin explained in English, particularly the servant girls at the inn were head over heels in love with him, that he had made them wild; that here in the celebrated city of St. Ursula, the city of beer, he did not drink beer at all but — scandalously — confined himself to wine; in other words, said Korin, there were endless petty rumors but nothing firm, no convincing overall picture, nothing of the essence, as a result of which of course the evil reputation of this von Mastemann increased hour by hour while the whole of Cologne looked on and feared; so that in the end there was no chance at all of discovering the facts, the truth , said Korin, rumor having grown ever wilder and spread ever more quickly, people saying that the air grew significantly cooler as you drew closer to him and that those pale blue eyes were not in fact blue at all, nor were they real, but were actually made of a peculiarly sparkling steel, which must mean that this von Mastemann character was quite blind, and taking all rumors into account the truth itself would have seemed pretty dull so that no one actually sought it any longer and even Toót, who was the least likely to pay attention to idle chatter, remarked that cold shivers ran down his spine as he watched von Mastemann sitting immobile for hours, his two metal eyes sparkling and staring at the cathedral.