The Ludwig Conspiracy(78)
“You’re incorrigibly nostalgic,” Sara said with a sigh. “But guess what? I like that. You’re someone a person could hold on to when time goes racing by too fast.” She spat out a couple of beechnut kernels. “Besides, it’s not what you think. I did read a lot as a child. I often went to the municipal library in Wedding instead of going to school; I told them I had to study there for my homework.” Lost in thought, she cracked another of the dry nuts. “I immersed myself in adventure stories to forget the world outside. Later, my father brought home illustrated books on painting. If you have graffiti and dog turds on your doorstep, a painting by Caravaggio is like a warm, refreshing shower.”
“Is your father a painter, then?” Steven asked.
This time Sara’s laughter was a touch too shrill. “A painter? I think he’d have liked to be an artist. To this day he’s addicted to art. My mother is addicted to alcohol and my father to art, and it hasn’t necessarily made either of them happy.” She abruptly got to her feet and picked up a heap of colorful leaves, dropping them again to rain down on Steven.
“If you were marooned on the proverbial desert island,” she asked him, “which three books would you take with you?”
Steven swept the leaves off his forehead. “Only three? That’s a difficult question. Let me think.” He paused, and then finally went on. “Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, even though I’ve read it three times already. Robert Musil’s thousand-page epic The Man Without Qualities, at least that would last a long time, and then . . .” He stopped, his expression suddenly darkening.
“You’d take Marot’s diary, wouldn’t you?” Sara whispered. “The book’s gotten under your skin.”
Steven did not reply for a long time, and then he hesitantly nodded. “There’s something about it. It’s like black magic, a kind of curse, and I’m afraid I won’t be able to shake it off until I’ve come to the end of the diary. Sometimes I think . . .”
The long drawn-out sound of a ferry’s siren brought them back to reality. Startled, Sara looked at the time.
“Hell, four in the afternoon already,” she said, brushing the leaves off her dress. “I suggest you get back to that curse of yours. You’re supposed to have the bit about Herrenchiemsee decoded by this evening. Meanwhile Uncle Lu is arranging for us to have a private guided tour.”
“How about you?” asked Steven, who was obviously finding it hard to leave their enchanted world in the beech wood. “What will you do?”
“Look around the island for a while.” She kissed him gently on the mouth one last time and then turned to leave. “You don’t want me holding your hand while you work on it, do you? See you at the castle at six. Look after yourself.”
With a final wave, she disappeared among the trees, and Steven was left alone. He ran his hands through his hair, his mind in a whirl. He was clearly in love, a tingling spreading through him right down to his toes. But he had no idea whether Sara felt the same. Steven was reminded of Maria and Theodor. Marot couldn’t be sure either whether the young maidservant felt anything more than friendship for him. Why were women always so complicated?
The thought of the assistant physician reminded Steven of the diary that had cast its spell on him. Still in bewilderment, and with a sense that he was floating on clouds, he sat down on the bench under the beech tree and returned to reading the memoir of a man long dead, a man who was turning more and more into a distant ally of his, a companion linked to him over the years by this book. By now he had stopped transferring the transliteration of the shorthand to his notebook. The entries held him spellbound, too much so for him to have time to make a transcript.
Steven could almost believe he heard Theodor Marot speaking to him between the pages, the whisper as he turned them like the whispering of the conspirators, and he felt as if the king himself might step out of the volume and give him a friendly wave.
After only a few lines, the bookseller was back in the nineteenth century.
20
NFTQM, WQI, GQT
We traveled to the Chiemsee on the railroad, going by way of Starnberg and Munich. Ludwig and I sat at the very front, in a royal car with furnishings in no way inferior to those of the king’s castles. It was as if we were coasting through Bavaria in a golden salon. Snorting like a dragon from the world of the sagas, the locomotive made its way past meadows and fields where a few peasants stood around here and there, waving their hats to us.
Nostalgically, I remembered the brief time before the two great wars, first against Prussia, then against France. At that time, Ludwig still appeared in public, and the people cheered for the tall, good-looking young man who was their king. But in the last few years, Ludwig had turned away from his people. With a curiously storklike gait, which he obviously considered majestic, he occasionally stalked down the lines of elderly dignitaries and young officers, but otherwise he remained alone, surrounded only by his closest companions. It was a self-chosen internal exile that he had left, at the most, only for his friend Richard Wagner, whom he revered and who had died two years earlier.