The Hothouse by Wolfgang Koeppen

Author:Wolfgang Koeppen [Koeppen, Wolfgang]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Published: 2011-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

4

THE DIPLOMAT HAD LUNCHED, THE DREAMER HAD GONE awol, with the result that now Keetenheuve was late, and the members of the committee shot reproachful glances at him. His party colleagues Heineweg and Bierbohm looked at the late arrival with a mien of stern disapproval. With their expressions, they seemed to be accusing Keetenheuve, who had yet to miss an hour of these sessions, and who had been industrious and productive in the committees, of having done irreparable damage to the party and its standing.

Korodin also looked at Keetenheuve, but in his expression there was less blame than expectancy. Once more Korodin wondered whether Keetenheuve might have undergone a transformation, whether he was perhaps delayed because he had been to a church, praying to God for enlightenment, and had now come to them to say: I have found God, I am reborn. Korodin would have accepted a conversation with the Lord as a reason for being delayed, and he would have forgiven Keetenheuve. But Keetenheuve didn't mention anything about having found enlightenment, he muttered a casual and inaudible apology and sat down. He sat down (only they didn't notice) feeling ashamed of himself, ashamed like a bad pupil, unable to think of any defense for his laziness. He had let himself drift today. Like an old boat that had broken away from its mooring, he had slipped away on the variable current of the day. He thought. He had better look after himself. What was the mooring that he had lost? He had lost Elke, the Gauleiter's daughter, the war orphan, and he didn't think of her now as a woman, he saw her as a child that had been entrusted to him, and that he had failed to protect. The child or the duty of care he felt for her, they had been his mooring, a fixed point in the flowing stream, the anchor to his vessel in the, it now appeared, sterile lake of his life, and the anchor had sunk down, the chain had snapped, the anchor would remain for ever in the scary, unknown, dismal depths. Poor little anchor! He hadn't kept it clean. He had allowed it to rust. What had become of Elke at his side? An alcoholic. Where had she fallen in her drunken stupor? Into the arms of lesbians, the arms of those thoroughly damned by love.{14} He had failed to look after Elke. He couldn't understand it. He had attended committee meetings, he had written hundreds of thousands of letters, he had spoken in parliament, he had revised legislation, he didn't understand it, he could have stayed at Elke's side, stayed on the side of youth, and perhaps, if he hadn't done everything wrong, it might have been on the side of life as well. One human being was enough to give meaning to life. Work wasn't enough. Politics weren't enough. Those things didn't protect him from the colossal futility of existence. It was a mild futility. It didn't hurt. It didn't stretch out long ghost arms to catch at the MP.

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