Read Online The Hothouse by Wolfgang Koeppen - Free Book Online

with the faces of civil servants, smoking furtively, they too were industrious, like the Chancellor, had open books spread out in front of them, were studying, striving (like the Chancellor?), grim-faced young people, because that was supposed to be sensible and help them to get ahead, they steeled their hearts, they were mindful of the timetable and not of the stars. The waitress gave it as her opinion that she should have been born with wings, Keetenheuve could see her float off, a halibut with pinions, the establishment wasn't large enough to accommodate all the custom issuing from the big trains, the lobbyists were cross, they wanted their eggs, Keetenheuve ordered a lager. He loathed beer, but on this occasion the bitter fizz seemed to calm his heart. Keetenheuve opened the newspaper at the local page. What was happening in Bonn? He was like the spa guest, who, having been banished to a bleak watering hole for too long, ends up listening to all the village scuttlebutt. Sophie Mergentheim had agreed to a soaking for the benefit of the refugees. There, she never failed. At a reception for God knows whom, she had charitably knelt under a watering can. Sophie, Sophie, the ambitious goose, didn't save the Capitol. You paid your money and you got to give her a drenching. Pretty tulip. The newspaper carried the photograph of a wet Sophie Mergentheim in a wet evening gown, wet to her panties, wet to her powdered scented skin. Colleague Mergentheim was positioned by the microphone, gazing pluckily into the flashlight through his thick black horn rims. Let's see your owl! All quiet in Insterburg. Dog barks. Mergentheim specialized in Jewish jokes; on the old Volksblatt , he had been in charge of the funnies. What , who barked in Insterburg? Yesterday? Today? Who barked? Jews? Silence. Dog joke. In the cinema—Willy Birgel riding for Germany. The loathsome beer foam on his lips. Elke, a name from Nordic mythology. The norns Urd , Werdandi , and Skuld under the tree Yggdrasil. Polished boots. Death in capsule form. Beer over a grave.

2
    K ORODIN GOT OFF THE TRAM AT THE MAIN STATION . A traffic policeman was playacting at being a traffic policeman in the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. He waved the traffic on down the Bonner Strasse. It swarmed and buzzed and squeaked and honked. Cars, bicycles, pedestrians, and wheezy asthmatic trams squeezed out of narrow side streets onto the main station square. This was where coaches had once trundled, drawn by four horses, steered by royal coachmen, Prince Wilhelm had been a student at the university—and was thereby a few meters closer to his ultimate exile in Holland— he wore a tailcoat, the order of the Saxo-Borussian fraternity and their white cap. The traffic got snarled up, impeded and constricted by construction sites, cable laying, canalization pipes, concrete mixers, asphalt boilers. The snarl-up, the labyrinth, the knotty tangle, emblematic of losing ones way, of wandering and erring, the insoluble, inextricable knot, the ancients already had known the curse, had experienced the deception, found themselves ensnared, had lived it and thought about it and described it. Always the next generation would be wiser, would arrange things better for itself. (And this for five thousand years now.) Not everyone had a sword. Anyway, what was a sword good for? You could wave it around, kill people with it, die by it. And the point? None. You needed to show up in Gordium at the right moment. Opportunity makes the hero. By the time Alexander breezed in from Macedonia, the knot was tired of resisting. Besides, the event was without consequence. India did not fall; at the most, some fringe territories were occupied for a few years, and between the locals and the occupying forces there was barter.
    What was the scene at the real Potsdamer Platz? A wire enclosure, a new international frontier, the end of the world, the Iron Curtain that God had caused to fall, God alone knew why. Korodin hastened to the