ALWAYS BEGIN WITH THE FACTS
The little man was riding a beautiful white horse, they say, the day he marched into Berlin. Of course he was. Who’d sit Napoleon on a mule?
But, really, it doesn’t matter. Time sullies every truth. History can’t tell you a thing for sure. Well, maybe the date.
It was 27 October 1806.
L’ENTRÉE DE NAPOLÉON À BERLIN
Johannes Meyer was there, in the crowd gathered along Unter den Linden, as cool late-afternoon shadows fell from the buildings and the victorious Grande Armée followed their emperor through the Brandenburg Gate. He was a young man of eighteen years and no particular talent, was like other young men of his generation, those who tended towards romantic poetry, aimless walks in the woods, passionate ideals debated until dawn in the smoky din of coffee houses. Their heroes were Goethe and Schiller and Humboldt, and they could recite passages by heart. They had no money and the future was a bright dream of unbounded freedom and promise. Their mothers worried and their fathers thought them useless.
Johannes Meyer had no parents to contend with, but no matter how hard he pushed, he simply couldn’t get through the crowd to catch even a glimpse of Napoleon Bonaparte.
‘Hey, leave off!’ the man in front of him said and thrust back with his elbow, catching the boy in the ribs. ‘Want me to knuckle you, son?’
His friends were all gone, they’d managed to slip through, but Johannes remained caught at the rear, a lonely leaf in the swirling current.
EVERYTHING HAPPENS, ALL THE TIME
The crowd was vast. They’d come to see the most famous man on earth, the most feared, the most powerful, the man who’d just crushed mighty Prussia at the battles of Jena and Auerstedt, each a mere afternoon’s work. The man who’d sacked the kings and bishops, the man who’d made the Creole an empress. Often, people were disappointed seeing him up close (Bonaparte could always tell and it made him cranky and cruel) but on a white horse at the head of his men, triumphant, surrounded by his preening maréchals and générals, all jostling their mounts to be nearer, eager for reflected glory, the Emperor was all that could be imagined, and more.
The Prussian crowd was silent, the men awed, the women in turmoil. The women endured the grip of an unpatriotic lust. Many succumbed, the energy around them was too intense, impossible to resist. All those lonely soldiers’ wives, the widows, the daughters. And from the most wretched, toothless canonniers, to the eau de cologne colonels, the French reaped desire that day and for a score of days to come, thanks to their short, magnificent leader.
‘Vive l’Empereur!’
Johannes Meyer, too.
Her name was Beatrice Reiss and she’d recognised him instantly; he was tall and looked lost as always, that face, a blush of boyish softness on the cusp of rugged manhood. Dark curly hair, and the dimple in his cheek when he smiled. He often came to the coffee house where she served, arriving with his handsome young friends, laughing and embracing one another, drinking and arguing into the early morning. She’d seen him in the crowd just now and squeezed through the endless shoulders, forced her way over, and then she was standing right beside him, their arms touching, pressed full length. Without a word, without even thinking to do it, she took Johannes Meyer by the hand.
He felt the grip, the moist heat of her palm, and turned to look, his face a question.
Beatrice smiled. The girl from the coffee house.
Her hair was red and plaited down the back, with curling wisps escaping over small ears that stuck out from her head. Pale and freckled, pink-lipped and wide-mouthed, Beatrice wasn’t much older than Johannes but knew far more. This deeper mystery was there in her hazel eyes; the boy saw it and was unable to resist. He’d thought of her often enough, back in his cold attic room, and now here she was.
Beatrice pulled him down towards her, said into his ear, ‘Come with me.’
Johannes followed as she led him out from the crowd. They held hands and turned left and right and then left again, at first against the endless stream of people, soon into less
congested streets. Further on, in a clean, wide cobbled lane, Beatrice found a door and opened it with a key, rushed them both in. She called out once and confirmed nobody was there, then fell upon a couch and pulled up her skirts. She motioned to the boy, his face still asking something of her, and embarrassed now, too.
‘Johannes,’ she said.
He hesitated: a childish fear.
She repeated his name, but softer, breathless. She held out her arms.
He went to her on the couch.
Everything happens, all the time. It had just never happened to Johannes Meyer before.
PISTOLS
Nothing much had ever happened to Stendhal either, apart from syphilis.
He was also in Berlin that day, in the crowd at the Brandenburg Gate, though his name was still Marie-Henri Beyle and nobody had ever heard of him. Twenty-three and plump, with a wispy jawline beard and fancy hair, fired by grand artistic ambitions all currently on hold as he endured the duties of an adjutant military commissary (family connections). Under his coat were two loaded pistols. Wary of the crush of people, he’d held his elbows pressed in, hands up at his chest, and walked in a strange, stiff manner all day. He mentioned the pistols when he wrote his sister later that night, but of course said nothing about posing in front of the mirror in his room, arm extended and taking aim side-on, head high and saying to his reflection, ‘Sir, you have injured my good name. Prepare thyself . . .’
and other versions of the same, though he was unable, in the end, to settle upon a final wording.
In the same letter to his sister, Henri Beyle wrote of the Emperor: For the entrance, Napoleon wore the dress uniform of a général de division. It is perhaps the only time I ever saw him. He was riding about twenty paces in front of the soldiers; the silent crowd stood only about two paces from his horse. Anybody could have fired a gun at him, from any one of the windows.
Further on, he added: I don’t know what gave them the idea to put a city in the middle of all this sand.
Like the posing with the pistols in his room, young Henri didn’t mention seeing Johannes and Beatrice through the window either.
After leaving the crowd on Unter den Linden and heading back to his billet, he’d heard the unmistakable sounds of human passion. The future Stendhal stopped before the window, shocked, and listened intently to the soft, rhythmic groans of pleasure. He checked the street, up and down, then pressed his face to the window glass and cupped his hands around his eyes.
He watched and watched, until he heard footsteps at the corner. He continued watching even as they approached and grew louder, holding his breath, unwilling to relinquish the sight. Finally, at the last moment, he swore and dashed away, delighted and thrilled, a memory of Berlin he’d never forget.
More of him later.
FIRST SIGHT
Elisabeth von Hoffmann came around the corner and noticed a man running away down the lane. He looked funny, unnatural, elbows clamped tight at his sides, like little wings pinned to his coat.
She was with her aunt’s secretary, Günther Jagelman, who was old and deaf and so didn’t hear the breathless sounds of lovemaking through the window as they passed. But Elisabeth von Hoffmann heard, and she turned in her stride and saw, disbelieving, the couple on the couch. She forgot about the running man and his chicken wings. All the downy blonde hairs on her arms and scalp lifted, and she felt something like a surge of cold well-water from her head to her toes.
Elisabeth was seventeen years old and locked inside the heated tumult of a young body. Her skin was sensitive to even the thought of a touch; her nights were long and sleepless in her transforming. She was overwhelmed by love and longing, could hardly wait to enter the world and be found by this love, a dream of such exquisite possibility that it seemed inevitable. Instead, she found herself in a constant state of anticipation, disappointment and, ultimately, boredom.
It was torture. It was all she could do to endure another day at her aunt’s home, endure another day in Berlin, caught inside her life like a bird in a cage. With the news of Bonaparte’s victories and impending arrival in the city, she’d felt neither fear nor loss but, rather, hope; this was the glorious upheaval she’d been praying for. There is no greater
reedom than things being taken out of our hands.
The messengers had come and gone all morning with news of Bonaparte’s progress towards the capital until at last, unbelievably, he was there. Aunt Margaretha had forbidden it at first, but Elisabeth had convinced Günther to take her, and so they’d gone together to see the Corsican ogre. The crowd, unfortunately, was enormous and impossible to penetrate; they’d arrived too late. Like Johannes Meyer, they left without even a glimpse.
Behind them now, Elisabeth felt the silence and the hush that pressed down on the crowd when Napoleon appeared in their midst. And it was just then that she heard the strains of passion, too, and looked over her shoulder through the window and saw the couple on the couch. The moment came to bear upon her exactly like that, with that great hush, with a surprising, silent force.
In that same instant, Johannes Meyer looked up from the couch and their eyes met, and it was as though she could see everything that was inside the boy. And he saw her too (she knew it!) and together they confirmed something they’d always known but only now remembered.
AT OTTO KESSLER’S COFFEE HOUSE IN TAUBENSTRAßE
A portly young man came one evening and proposed that each one of us was a living premonition and proof (in the ever-present) of the past and the future fused together.
‘We are a weld,’ this man named Krüger said, ‘of every event and eventuality.’
Nobody listening responded, or seemed to understand (Krüger could tell by their eyes; he’d had this before and in other places). Disappointed, he cleared his throat and again willed brightness into his voice. It was particularly noisy at Otto’s on Taubenstraße that Wednesday night.
‘Déjà vu,’ Krüger said. ‘Déjà, it means already: the sense that something has already happened before, though it’s also happening now. Who hasn’t felt it?’
Again, nothing.
His brightness dimmed. Krüger preferred to bounce off people when he spoke, draw up quickly against their arguments, derive an intuitive direction and logic from the to-and-fro. Otherwise, in the lagging silence, he had a tendency to grow flustered and confuse himself, lose confidence, his arguments then clattering around in his mind like a shod horse spooked on cobblestones. Which was exactly what had happened to him the previous year, during his disastrous oral presentation at the University of Jena, when he’d been denied a degree.
He took a deep breath, composed himself.
‘Time isn’t a straight line and it doesn’t travel a distance,’ Krüger said. ‘Our lives are merely remaindered embodiments of this false notion, anxious and afflicted because time is imposed. For truly, and we all know it, there is no timeline. Our lives don’t actually goanywhere. We are always here, wherever we are.’ He held out his arms. ‘Where is there to go?’
Somebody called out, ‘Home!’
Laughter.
Another voice: ‘But haven’t I been there before?’
They were gathered around a couple of tables in a corner of the coffee house. Otto’s on Taubenstraße was full of students, young men, older men, lonely men, wounded soldiers, philosophers without formal qualification, cold street dwellers clutching a few begged pfennigs, poets. They smiled. They were enjoying this fellow.
‘The truth is that we churn in a state of circular intertwining,’ Krüger said, persisting, nothing to lose now, ‘caught in a ceaseless and immutable folding, like . . . like cards shuffled by the gods. There are only so many combinations.’
Johannes Meyer leaned forward on his elbows, tried to listen, but the man’s arguments were difficult to follow with the growing chatter. Still, something had caught like a hook into his feelings. This man called Krüger was awkward and Johannes could sense how he’d alienated himself from the crowd there at Otto’s, and maybe that was all it was, the hook: that Johannes knew how the man felt and could hear the truth in his voice. He believed him.
‘The rigid retrospectives of age,’ Krüger said, ‘the prison of numbered years, those most tenacious and insinuating agents of measurement, are an illusion. They draw a single straight line through life, but cannot by nature contain the whole of the movement encompassed. Life is not unfurling in a line,
but rather being spun, constantly, around and around our voluptuous Mother Earth, who is herself simultaneously turning, turning!’
Krüger was twenty-four, pear-shaped like his mother, with narrow sloping shoulders adding emphasis to the thighs and buttocks. His blue eyes had often earned him a second look, but so far he’d been in love only once. He claimed to be from a small town in Westphalia, but nobody had ever heard of it, and later, when he left, the regulars at Otto Kessler’s on Taubenstraße agreed that his accent wasn’t even close to Westphalian.
‘And so,’ Krüger said, ‘thereby, our conclusion: the inevitability of passing through where all and one have already been before and, in fact, must and will be, forever.’
LOVE IS RECOGNITION
Johannes Meyer couldn’t recall everything Krüger said that night, nor did he understand much of what he remembered; but now, as he looked up from the couch and saw Elisabeth von Hoffmann’s face in the window, framed in warm light, pale gold, beautiful, eternal, some impression of the man’s words made him suddenly think: Yes!
Their youthful eyes met and exchanged the moment, unrestrained, fluid, full. Their youthful eyes held and locked together. Johannes Meyer had been here before, that was the feeling, and he knew the girl, or must have known her once, or would do so, or . . . or, otherwise, why this overwhelming sense of her?
‘Listen,’ Krüger had said finally at Otto’s that night, though by now only Johannes and
two or three others were listening to him. ‘The heart, not the mind, sets all criteria for truth, and love is its ingenium. And love is recognition: recognoscere, cognoscere, to know. Yes? All that is behind us, and all that is before us, is here, always, already, to know. You know it. You already know what’s true. You already know.’
Johannes Meyer looked up and he knew. And the girl in the window, she knew it too. And though they neither had any idea what it was that should be known, the revelation that something was known and could be known seemed more than enough.
LOVE IS LOSS
Beatrice pulled the boy down and held him tightly in her arms. She closed her eyes, so the world was as small as it could be.
She’d noticed, seen it straight off, Johannes looking away from her then; ...
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