The Two Lolitas by Michael Maar

Author:Michael Maar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

APPENDIX I

TWO STORIES BY HEINZ VON LICHBERG

LOLITA

Someone threw the name of E.T.A. Hoffmann into the conversation. Musical Tales.

The young hostess Beate put the orange that she was about to peel back on her plate and said to the young poet: ‘Do you think it possible that these stories, which I really read very seldom, keep me awake for nights on end? Common sense tells me that it is all fantasy, and yet …’.

‘Precisely because it is no fantasy, my dear lady.’

The legation councillor smiled good-humouredly. ‘But you don’t mean to say that Hoffmann experienced those fearful things?’

‘That is exactly what I mean,’ rejoined the poet. ‘He experienced them! Naturally not with his hands and eyes, but because he was a poet, he experienced what he wrote – or rather, he wrote only of what he experienced in his mind. In fact one could distinguish poets and writers by this criterion. In a poet’s mind, this is where fantasy transposes thought into reality!’

It had grown quite silent in the beautiful Countess Beate’s little Empire dining-room.

‘You are absolutely right,’ said the boyish, sensitive-looking professor. ‘I would like to tell you about something I have carried around with me for many years now, and I still don’t know whether it is experience or fantasy. But it will take a moment or two.’

‘Please go ahead,’ said his hostess.

And so the scholar began his story:

‘Towards the end of the last century I was a student in a very old, fairly large town in South Germany. This must have been some twenty years ago. I lived, since it appealed to me, in a narrow street lined with very old houses. Near my lodgings there was a small tavern that must be one of the strangest I have ever seen. I often went there in the late autumn afternoons, when I would take a break from my work before the last of the daylight had gone.

‘It consisted of just a single dilapidated room with a low ceiling gathering shadows. By the windows on to the street stood two immaculately scrubbed tables with hard wooden chairs. At the back, in a dark corner by the tiled stove, stood a third little table flanked by two strange armchairs covered in brightly coloured chintz. A black silk headscarf of the sort Spanish girls wear on days of celebration was draped over the armchair next to the stove. I never saw another patron in there besides myself, and even today I cannot rid myself of the idea that it wasn’t a public tavern at all. The front door, in any event, was locked, and the shutters on the windows closed every evening on the stroke of seven. I never asked about this, as I soon began to take an unaccountably keen interest in the owners of this curious establishment.

They were called Aloys and Anton Walzer, and appeared very old. Both were incredibly tall and thin, without a hair on their heads but with long, tousled, full grey beards that were streaked with red.

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