Read Online Death in Rome by Wolfgang Koeppen - Free Book Online

disgraceful collaboration with the arch-enemy in the West, who needed German blood and German troops to ward off its former Eastern allies and sharers in the stolen victory. What to do? Already the lights were going on in the hotel. One window after another was lit up, and behind one of them Eva would be sitting and waiting. Her letters, with their obscure turns of phrase that spoke of the disappointment that awaited him, the degeneracy and the shame, allowed him no hope of finding Adolf his son here. Was it worth going home? The desert was still open to him. The net of the German bourgeoisie had not yet been thrown over the old warrior. Hesitant, uncertain, he strode in through the door, came into the wood-panelled lobby, and there he saw German men, his brother-in-law, Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, was among them, he had hardly changed at all, and the German men stood facing one another in the German fashion; they were holding glasses in their hands, not mugs of German barley brew, but glasses of Italian swill, but then he Judejahn drank swill like that himself and God knows what else besides, no blame attached to that away from home. And these men, they were strong and stout, he could hear that, they were singing 'A Fortress Sure', and then he felt himself being observed, not by the singers, he felt himself being observed from the doorway, it was a serious, a seeking, an imploring, a desperate look that was levelled at him.
    It didn't shock him, but it did abash Siegfried to see the broad unmade bed, which drew his eye though he tried in vain to avert it, the broad bed, the marriage bed standing four-square in the spacious room, it was shameless and undeniable, without sensuality and without shame, cold, clean linen laid bare, and it bore witness coldly and cleanly to functions that no one wanted to disavow, to embraces of which no one was ashamed, to deep and healthy sleep
    and all at once I realized that the Kürenbergs were ahead of me, they were the people I wanted to be, they were without sin, they were at once old-fashioned and new, they were antique and avant-garde, pre-Christian and post-Christian, Graeco-Roman citizens and airline passengers crossing the oceans, they were locked up in bodies, but in bodies that were well-explored and -maintained: they were excursionists who had made themselves at home in a possibly inhospitable planet, and who took pleasure in the world as they found it.
    Kürenberg was attuned to nomadism. In shirt sleeves and white linen trousers with a rubber apron tied over them, he was bustling about at a pair of extra tables the hotel had put at his disposal, and I was made to ask myself what special arrangements he had come to with the management, because they must have had new wiring put in for him, he had adaptors with three and four plugs in the sockets, and electric leads ran like intertwining snakes to gleaming electrical gear, grills, ovens, infra-red cookers, steamers, pressure-cookers; it was the most comprehensive of mobile kitchens, which delighted him and went everywhere with him, and he was preparing the dinner to which he had invited me, he was mixing, tasting, beating and spicing, his face was firm and manly, it had a massive calm that did me good to look at, while Frau Kürenberg, having given me her hand and spoken a few welcoming words, 'How do you like Rome? Is this the first time you've been here?', twittering swallows of small talk, low swooping flights, was laying the table, bustled about, went to the bathroom, leaving the door ajar behind her, rinsed glasses, put flowers in a vase, and left the wine to chill under running water.
    I didn't want to stand around idly. I asked Kürenberg what I could do to help, and he gave me a bowl, a cheese-grater and a piece of Parmesan, and told me to grate it. At first the cheese merely crumbled away into the bowl in hard lumps, and Kürenberg showed me how it should be done, and then he asked me whether I hadn't ever helped my mother