He was sideways to the audience, slouching against the podium and leaning forward to bring his lips to within a millimeter of the microphone. I bother with these details in an effort to recreate the impression he gave of being entirely indifferent to conditions that might have silenced or intimidated other speakers, for while the hecklers were not very noisy, their hostility was palpable. His hands were still and relaxed, and he seemed wholly focused on his thoughts, which he was sharing with the audience as intimately and spontaneously as if in private conversation.
I had no idea how long he’d been talking, but as I listened I began to recognize familiar ground within “The Great Forgetting.” But though the ground was familiar, it was less extensive. In other words, this was just a review. Eventually he paused and sent his eyes deliberately around the auditorium.
“Tonight,” he said, “I’d like to talk to you about the boiling of a frog.”
I uncapped my pen and started taking it down.*
An invitation is issued
Till now I’ve never had reason to examine it (or even to notice it), but I go into a sort of trancelike state when I start transcribing a lecture. There is a very pleasant sensation (now that I look at it) that the words co
ming off the end of the pen are my own. I have the illusion that my hand is anticipating what my ears hear—that I know the words before they’re spoken and could transcribe the lecture even if the lecturer stopped speaking. I experience a strange sense of intimacy with the speaker. I may have no very exact understanding of what he’s saying, but I imagine I have a profound perception of his meaning. When he stops speaking, I may be unable to answer the simplest question about his topic, but this doesn’t worry me, because I know it’s all securely locked away in my transcription.
Since on this occasion B was using no visual aids, I closed my eyes, which usually helps concentration. About half an hour later, however, they popped open quite involuntarily. I looked up at B, he looked down at me, and our eyes met briefly, without special acknowledgment or recognition. Without a pause between words, he swept his eyes over the crowd, registering no difference, as far as I could see, between friends and foes. Then, in a gesture that had no evident correlation to anything he was saying, he lifted the index finger of his left hand straight into the air, held it there for a moment, then decisively angled it to his right. It was unmistakably a signal of some kind, but I couldn’t spot anyone who had caught it or seemed be reacting to it in any way. I considered the idea that the signal had been picked up only by me because it was meant only for me.
He went on speaking. I closed my eyes to shut out the relentless noise of the crowd and went on transcribing. Minutes passed. Suddenly I noticed that my hand had stopped moving, and I actually wondered why. Opening my eyes, I saw that B was finished. Even so, it wasn’t till he’d gathered up his papers and stepped away from the podium that the audience seemed to waken to the fact that B’s talk was over. His hecklers sent up a cheer of self-congratulation for a job well done, while his supporters hurried to organize some applause. Already moving, B gave them an indifferent nod and disappeared into the wings.
Pilgrimage
By the time I got outside, the protest had turned into a party, with hugs and kisses and wine-filled paper cups for everyone who had taken part in the mighty deed. B’s supporters straggled into the night unmolested except for teasing catcalls and jeers. As I watched from across the street, I soon realized that the protesters were doing the same thing I was: keeping an eye on the stage-door alley beside the theater, waiting for B to emerge. After a few minutes a car pulled up—not a limo by any means, just a middle-aged Mercedes sedan. A second later a flying wedge cut through the crowd, muscled its passenger into the backseat, and stood guard as the sedan sped off to the right.
Having missed its chance for a last little coup d’éclat, the crowd quickly lost its buoyant mood and began to break up. Bottles were corked, cups were collected, and naturally everyone had to shake hands with everyone else before departing. While this was going on, the uniformed guard reappeared at the theater entrance to usher out one last patron and lock up behind him. The patron thanked the guard with a nod, flipped up the collar of his topcoat against the night air, then turned to his left and made his way through the crowd into the darkness beyond. He would have been easily recognized had anyone bothered to look. I waited until he had a head start of fifty meters or so, then followed.
Obviously I had no idea where he was leading—if he was leading at all. Less obviously I had no idea why I was following, except that I imagined I’d been invited. At first I thought it likely that the Mercedes would circle the block to pick him up, but I was mistaken. Then I thought it likely that he was headed for some nearby tavern or coffeehouse, but again I was mistaken. He walked on—and on and on—gradually leaving the downtown area of the city behind.
I began to have second and third thoughts about this adventure. If suddenly abandoned, I wouldn’t have an easy time finding my way back to the hotel. The buses were no longer running—or at least not here—and I hadn’t seen a cruising taxicab in half an hour. Even worse, from my point of view, we’d entered an area of the city that I supposed would be called light industrial. There were no apartment buildings, no shops, no cafes, no all-night drugstores with convenient telephones and possibly helpful clerks. This was the home of factories, machine shops, brickyards, and warehouses, inhabited at this hour only by night watchmen and guard dogs.
A reasonable question would be, Why didn’t I catch him up and ask where he was going? I wondered about that. Would that be the ordinary thing to do—or the extraordinary thing? The normal thing or the odd thing?
Thinking about it didn’t help, of course. The natural thing is always the unstudied thing, the unselfconscious thing. This particular thing was something that, if done at all, should have been done right away. What sense would it make to follow blindly for an hour, then rush up and demand to know where he was leading me? It was an absurd situation, which I—being grown-up, male, competent, etc., etc.—should somehow have handled in a different and better way (though even now I can’t say what way that might have been).
Looking up from my gloomy thoughts, I saw that B was entering a small, nondescript building just ahead. It looked like a leftover shed of some kind, sandwiched between a warehouse and a railroad yard. I hurried on, hoping this was B’s destination. I was startled and amused when I reached the door and found an artfully rough sign next to it reading LITTLE BOHEMIA.
* The text of this speech will be found in Chapter 26–The Boiling Frog.
Saturday, May 18 (cont.)
Little Bohemia!
When I opened the door and stepped inside, a laugh burst out of me like a bird startled from a tree. Little Bohemia was a tavern, but a tavern unlike any I’d ever seen, except perhaps in dreams or imagination. It might have been a set designer’s creation for a film biography of Amedeo Modigliani. It was low-ceilinged, full of cobwebs and smoke, and would have been pitch-dark except for a few candles stuck in the necks of wine bottles. The walls were thick with sketches, caricatures, and paintings, most so blackened by smoke that they were little more than post-impressionist smudges. Incongruously—yet somehow perfectly—a rainbow-lit jukebox near the door was hissing its way through an ancient, scratchy Piaf record, which had to be, could only be, and indeed was … “La Vie en Rose.” Spending a million, Disney couldn’t have made it better or more archetypal, though the dust and cobwebs would have been created from antiseptic plastic and the song would have been sung by a clone of Piaf herself, wearing a perfect reproduction of the Sparrow’s famous old sweater.
The clientele, however, weren’t en role, or at least not selfconsciously so. There were no berets, no Basque fisherman’s jerseys, no artistic goatees. These folks, murmuring at their tables or hunched over their chessboards, might have been anything—poets, novelists, playwrights, actors, artists, models—but who knows? Nowadays, public-relations flacks look like artists, artists look like truckers, and truckers look like off-duty soccer champions.
B was seated at a table at the back, and I gathered that he must be an old customer and one of settled habits, for a waitress was already in the act of serving him, not sixty seconds after his arrival. Catching sight of me, he summoned me with a nod to the chair at his right. As I approached, I heard him say to the waitress, “Theda, bring my friend one of these as well, won’t you? He’s had a long walk.” And then to me: “It’s a single-malt Scotch, Lagavulin sixteen-year-old, and will restore the dead to life, if administered within a reasonable amount of time.”
I sat down and looked, probably rather blankly, into his strange, gargoylelike face.
“Well, what did you think of my lecture?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, then added: “I’m not being coy. I’m still working on it.”
“You were at Der Bau.”
“That’s right.”
“But not at Stuttgart or before?”
“No.”