Blue Self-Portrait

an old friend which I’m not, like an old girlfriend which I wasn’t at the time when he said no, not at all, it’s quite all right in his German-American accent—I must have said my bit in German and he replied in French. Ich habe zu viel gesprochen and I clap him on the back, no, not at all, it’s quite all right, and he touches my arm in the German or American way to communicate friendly affection, I went on, in French now, that it was he who had taught me so, so many things, and I who it seemed was now teaching him something. I had less than nothing to teach him but it was too late, I had talked so much in my passionate, learned and over-expansive way that he must have given up somewhere along the line, actually when I began, from the first word I spoke, from the first parting of my lips and as if to compensate for my missing tooth I had already talked too much, in that passionate, learned and oh so shameless way, you cut modesty class the pianist might have said, so your mother didn’t teach you much about modesty but he didn’t say it, would have had he been me but the pianist and I are two separate people, he modest and I immodest, it was all coming back to me now in the plane between one cloud and the next, between nought and nought, difference condensed, the shamelessness came back to me all of a sudden, I saw myself as I am, so immodest, a fact screaming out to be recognized though it wasn’t, nevertheless, doing that much screaming, neither that fact nor anything else. The passengers were reading and drinking coffees, a plane is no place for screaming, cars yes but not a plane, cars are perfect for your ordinary, personal scream, a scream of truth without obvious motive but the plane solely for unpremeditated and collective screaming with clear and present motive. Why, I wondered belatedly, couldn’t I simply have sat and read my book at the Kaiser Café? and why couldn’t I have had that coffee at Café Einstein two days earlier, drunk a nice coffee while leafing through the newspaper as has been done at the Einstein for centuries in the same relaxed and cultured manner, with the peaceful murmur of a little Mozart piano concerto that never did anyone a bad turn, why couldn’t I have done that, been sitting on that chair in the Einstein without knotting up my legs as if they were venomous snakes and hunching my shoulders as if the weight of the world were upon them when here, at the Einstein, no one ever feels the world’s weight on any part of them, even at the worst point in world history, unswervingly dedicated to its café reputation, and I knew it as soon as I walked in, fifteen years since I’d last been here but everything was the same so I knew it, you can’t put that down to ignorance. This is the place where the whole world is reading the papers, I had told my sister you’ll see, and I said it again because I found it witty, Café Einstein is a refuge from the world which contains the whole world in its newspapers. It’s true that it’s relaxing, a retirement home for those of fragile constitution such as girls like me; it’s arresting here and arrest is a break from the world, I was explaining to my sister, my best audience, security is relaxing when you’re cultured as the people in here are. Nuclear war could break out but it wouldn’t make a difference to the mood in Café Einstein, I thought then as I’d already thought before, but I don’t know if it was with relief or irony or indifference this time or before, we would read in the papers about the catastrophic effects of a nuclear war on the people of Berlin, completely wiped out, every single neighborhood annihilated, the utter destruction of Charlottenburg, the total elimination of the Europa Center and the demolishment into terminal smithereens of the Gedächtniskirche, the memorial church, I translated to myself, memorial of what, memorial not of rout but of nought, the obliteration of all the beautiful grand houses on Kurfürstenstrasse and of all its residents in a great sweep of destruction would make front page news right up to the Einstein’s front door—and all this listening peacefully to that sweet little Mozart piano concerto. Some guy could perfectly well walk in wearing a suicide belt and blow the buffet to kingdom come right there in the main salon shouting Allahu Akhbar and we’d be reading about it in the papers while smoking the odd cigarette and listening with half an ear to the light, inoffensive concerto as Mozart in the background always has been, for as long as background music has been around. Why couldn’t I content myself with flicking through die Welt, a man of culture as all the men here are, a discreet and peace-loving man of culture who twiddles the silver spoon in his coffee without knotting up his limbs like snakes and smokes moderately, in no way like a trooper; why did I have to terrorize the pianist from the word go with my ideas about everything? You have ideas about everything, the pianist could have said but he didn’t say it; sometimes it’s good to keep schtum, he could have said, so interrupting, with this common-sense remark, the unquenchable stream of observations and ingenious associations that flowed from me, each new idea more striking, subtle, singular and wondrous than the last, the pianist thus arresting this verbal invasion, as voluminous as it was shapeless, barbarity versus culture at the Café Einstein, where ideas flow noiselessly and only achieve their impact in the silence of the written and their profundity in the meditation of print. I’d have done better to read die Welt