We made polite small talk for a few minutes, then Reichmann paused and gazed thoughtfully into a distant corner of the room. “I can put you in the way of someone far more significant than this Atterley,” he said. “And possibly a member of his circle will be able to advise you.”
“I’d be most grateful for that,” I told him earnestly.
He wrote down a name on a beer coaster and handed it to me, saying, “Der Bau, nine this evening. The concierge will be able to give you directions.”
He stood up and began to walk away, then suddenly turned about-face and bowed.
“Make him give you a map,” he said.
A few minutes later I obediently carried the coaster to the concierge and demanded directions and a map. He thought the map unnecessary but grudgingly produced one when I insisted. I asked him what a Bau is.
“A Bau is a tunnel,” he said, then, after a moment’s thought: “No, I am mistaken. A Bau is like … is like an underground hiding place.”
“A catacomb?”
“No, an animal’s hiding place.”
“A burrow?”
“That’s it. A burrow.”
In the burrow
I can’t imagine that such a place as Der Bau exists anywhere in the New World, though there might be places created to look like it. When it was built, not far from the Karlstor, c. 1330, it was the cellar of a noble’s palace. The level of the streets around the palace rose with the accretions of centuries, gradually turning the ground floor into a cellar and the original cellar into a subcellar. During World War II the subcellar housed treasures from nearby churches and museums. Afterward the palace stood in ruins until 1958, when it was razed and replaced by a commercial structure. The subcellar was preserved as Der Bau, a cabaret along classic lines, a boozy laboratory of artistic and intellectual experiment rather than a venue for popular entertainment. It was accessible from the lobby of the new building by means of a winding staircase that seemed to descend into the bowels of the earth.
At the entrance, a pleasant young woman tried to persuade me I’d come to the wrong place and would have a much better time anywhere else in Munich. I insisted I knew where I was and had been specifically invited to the evening’s presentation. The name Reichmann bounced off her without effect, but she cheerfully passed me through when she saw I wasn’t going to be deterred.
The room itself was of course abysmally dark but, thankfully, without the usual bohemian touch of candlelit tables. The ceiling, a surprising five or six meters high, teemed with tiny track lights, at the moment dimmed to near extinction but capable of producing the blaze of noon. The room was difficult to size, since its boundaries disappeared in the gloom, but was probably not more than thirty meters square.
A low, circular stage revolved slowly in the center of the room under a stationary, four-sided marquee of video screens. In the center of the stage stood a sort of combined lectern and computer keyboard. I groped my way forward till I found a seat at a table not much bigger than my notebook. One of my keys to early success as a scholar was the ability to listen to a lecture while taking it down verbatim in shorthand. I perfected this trick to such an extent that I could perform it in the dark (as I’d have to tonight) and without even thinking about it. Having made my preparations, however, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder if I wasn’t wasting my time. Herr Reichmann hadn’t given any indication that tonight’s lecture would be in English. Indeed, why would it be? I looked around for someone to ask but quickly found I didn’t care to reveal the fact that I was such a fool as to attend a lecture in an unknown language. I didn’t even know the speaker’s name, for God’s sake.
These fretful thoughts were cut short when the lights under the marquee brightened, marking the arrival of the man himself—the arrival of a man and a woman, as it turned out. They stepped onto the stage, and the man took his place at the lectern and turned on the keyboard. As he worked at the board with silent concentration, oblivious of the audience, he reminded me of a large bird of prey, with his black suit, piercing eyes, and beaky nose. He also reminded me of a gargoyle, with his broad cheekbones and wide mouth, and of a lanky Parisian gangster I’d once met at a cocktail party who quoted Augustine and Schopenhauer and bore in his face the shadows of a terrible past. I thought he looked to be in his early or middle forties.
The woman—tall, athletically built, in her early thirties—took a position at the opposite side of the stage, facing the audience. Wearing jeans tucked into boots, a black silk shirt, and a tawny rawhide jacket that matched the color of her hair, pulled back into a ponytail, she looked out solemnly over the crowd. As the revolving stage slowly brought her round to my side of the room, I saw she had an extraordinary tattoo across her face—a red butterfly. From her rich complexion and exotic features, I felt sure some parent or grandparent had given her an infusion of Africa, Asia, or pre-Columbian America.
Suddenly the video screens popped into life bearing a title:
THE GREAT FORGETTING
The man gave the audience a moment to look at it, then began to speak.* I felt the woman’s eyes on mine as she, too, began to speak … in sign.
Almost from the first words out of his mouth, I knew I’d been deceived—mysteriously and gratuitously. This could be no one but Charles Atterley. I knew this not by any strictly logical process, though logic certainly played its part. That he was an American was beyond doubt. That was enough. It wasn’t possible that two different speakers from America could be spreading inflammatory ideas around Central Europe at the same time.
It seems strange to me now, after the event, that this revelation should have upset me so. I simply couldn’t fathom why Herr Reichmann had taken the trouble to mislead me. It seemed completely pointless, and it was this pointlessness that stunned me. Luckily, my training didn’t fail me. Even if my brain was stalled, my hand continued to work. Atterley’s words marched across the page as if awakened by magic, as if they’d been written in invisible ink and were being drawn up out of the paper by the action of my pen. I realized I was watching my hand when it suddenly stopped—because Atterley had stopped. I looked up to see a new set of words forming on the screen:
VERILY I SAY UNTO YOU …
AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN
For some reason, this succeeded in jolting me out of my trance. I’d missed the first four or five minutes of Atterley’s talk, but of course I hadn’t missed them entirely. The minutes were there as a sort of echo that I was able to play back for the gist of his message.
Atterley was talking about matters close to my life and e
ven closer to my work—and I didn’t like what I heard. This wasn’t because it wasn’t true but for exactly the opposite reason: because it was true and I’d missed it. He was making acute observations about phenomena I’d witnessed a thousand times and never thought to notice. I’d been living like a horse in the winner’s circle at Ascot; the horse isn’t at all impressed if he receives a royal visit, but this isn’t because he’s a republican, it’s because he’s a dimwit.
Everything Atterley was saying was obvious, and all of it was new. This made it maddening, because what is obvious should be old—and therefore well known, boring, and unnecessary to say. I glanced at the listeners around me, and seeing them riveted by Atterley’s words, I wanted to kick them in the shins, grab them by the hair, and shake them, screaming, “Why are you paying attention to this? You know this! You could have worked it out yourself!”
But they hadn’t worked it out—and I hadn’t worked it out either.