"He took me, protecting me, to the Kit Kat Club. Happy, we listened to Sally Bowles and later she came to our table. Let us return briefly to Hegel. Sally was Hegelian truth: she was Bacchic desire, she lived to turn all of herself over to drunkenness. She didn't stop talking for nearly an hour. She had thousands of plans. Most of all she wanted to be a great movie actress. She spoke of her diplomat father, and of her loves with the other cabaret girls and her profitable romances with the more affluent clients. She spoke of Berlin: she loved the chaos of the city. She loved the uproar. So much so that she would stand under the train bridges and would wait breathless with palpitations. She took us on that adventure. If we followed her, it would have been improbable otherwise, it was because Maximilien and I had also made ourselves quite Bacchic. The three, like children, like innocent intoxicated children and somewhat crazy, stood under a bridge, we leaned on the red bricks and waited the arrival of the train. Sally conducted the adventure. We screamed when she screamed. We screamed when the world exploded over us, when the train crossed that bridge like shrapnel carrying within it the thunder of an entire war. We screamed like madmen. We screamed like Sally. Later, Miss Bowles was unpredictable like that, everything ended for her. She had done what she'd wanted to do, she said. Now, she said, I only want to sleep. She made a dancer's gesture with one of her hands with green or violet nails, and she vanished into the night, into a very white and thick cloud the train had left behind. Maximilien and I were left alone and, somewhat astonished, we looked at each other. I had a great desire, still, to do things. Everything had been so quick and the night seemed so long to me, that I said something unthought, as surprising as true: 'What a pity you are homosexual'. Maximilien looked at me, smiled and said something very brief, something that was, for me, immeasurable flattery, the exquisite moment from the night of inebriation. 'Not all the time', he said."


Hannah asked me not to worry about her, that I forget Rainer. He wouldn't do anything to her. My history with Heidegger is about to end; my love, not. She told me she felt condemned, destined to love that man all her life. I told her that, one way or another, that happened to many of us. She laughed loudly and I discovered that her teeth were big and shiny. "Dear Dieter, she said, what's happening to me happens with the Master; it doesn't happen 'one way or another'. It happens to me 'one way and another'. It happens to me every way it could happen. That's what I mean when I say I love him. I don't think that happens to you". I felt rather silly. It was a feeling that Hannah, consciously or not, tended to lead me to. I never used her condition of being a woman to undervalue or negate (protecting myself) her intelligence. She was brilliant and I, and many others, amongst them Rainer, looked the worse by her side. Perhaps for that reason (or surely because of it) we knew better to admire her from afar of the dazzle and grudges of really loving her. "I don't think I'll see Martin again", she said. "There only remains a goodbye, no more than that." I asked her if, hoping to bring him to his senses, she could tell Rainer of her decision. She forbids me completely. "Rainer", she whispered, "doesn't deserve to be part of this story, he'd only dirty it."

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 8:24 AM