Count Luna Read online

  Finally he decided to call upon the relatives with whom Luna had formerly lived, with the intention of assuring them that he, Jessiersky, was not to blame for Luna’s imprisonment. But he did not get very far. These persons, although related only to Luna’s dead mother, were afraid their reputedly well-connected visitor might get them into trouble; relatives of a concentration camp inmate were frequently persecuted simply because they were related to him. The Millemoths, then — this was the name of the elderly couple — barely listened to Jessiersky’s protestations that he could not be blamed for what had happened to Luna and cut short his derogatory remarks about the present regime and its cruelties. Supposing these remarks to have been made for the purpose of tricking them into betraying themselves, they hastened to assure him that Luna’s reactionary tendencies had been well known, and they themselves disapproved of them highly. Far from being surprised at his arrest, they had considered it entirely justified. Surely a nation that had set out to conquer the world could not be expected to let a person who was blind to its greatness attack it from the rear. While they were not exactly happy that Luna had gone, for, after all, he was their relative, they had understood very well why he had been taken. In fact, they had been surprised that it had not happened long before. And so they went on, vying with each other in the anxious repetition of memorized phrases.

  Jessiersky stared at them dumbfounded. At this moment, perhaps for the first time, there dawned upon this wealthy dreamer from the Strattmann Palace, who had had so little experience of hardship, some realization of the ugliness of life. He looked about the room and found it far more poorly furnished than he had expected. The Millemoths were by no means as well off as they had once been. They seemed, in fact, to have become quite impoverished; and while poverty in itself may not be degrading, it undoubtedly is when it follows immediately upon wealth. Luna himself, an unmarried man, appeared to have been by no means as well-to-do as might have been concluded from his former status as a real-estate owner. This made it all the more strange that he had been so unwilling to sell the property.

  Luna was the son of a civil servant and had studied sociology; in fact, he had been on the point of applying for a lecturer’s position at the university. But nothing explained why he had clung so obstinately to that property. Under normal conditions his refusal to sell would have made sense: rather than accept unreliable money for his last assets, he had preferred to live in reduced circumstances. But of what use had the lands been to him when he had practically starved because of them, and what use were they to him now in that camp where, again because of them, he was perhaps being beaten to death?

  On a desk in the room stood a framed photograph; beside it, in a glass, a bunch of wild flowers.

  “Is that he?” asked Jessiersky.

  It was, in fact, his desk and his picture, and that the Millemoths had placed flowers beside it did not quite fit in with their professed satisfaction at his arrest. They became extremely embarrassed and reached for the picture to take it away.

  “Never mind!” said Jessiersky and bent over to look at the picture.

  It showed a slender, rather frail man in the garb of a Maltese Knight. The head seemed a little too large in proportion to the frail body. The face was long and narrow, the forehead high, the chin also long and somewhat protruding. It rested on the collar as though for support, or as though it were bound up in a cloth sling to keep the mouth from falling open like the chin of someone who has just died. The prominent forehead and chin made the middle part of the face look as if it had been pushed in. The man had the air of an elderly aristocrat, which formed a curious contrast with his obvious youthfulness. To heighten this contrast still further, there were two curved lines running from the nostrils to the corners of the mouth. When Jessiersky bent over to examine the picture more closely, he discovered that they were not single, but double lines, each with a ridge, forming a roll of skin between them. The hair was probably dark, the skin white, almost yellowish, and although the portrait had been retouched, the complexion looked as if it were pockmarked. About the eyes, however, there was a serene, almost sleepy, but nonetheless charming smile.

  A silence had come over the room, and Jessiersky, who had the impression that the Millemoths might think that he was gloating over his victim, quickly straightened.

  “Is the name Luna Italian?” he asked.

  “No, Spanish,” was the reply.

  “He looks it,” said Jessiersky. “And was he also a Chevalier de la Lune?”

  The Millemoths did not understand this allusion.

  “I mean was he — I should say, is he a Knight of Malta?”

  “Yes.”

  Jessiersky had never met Luna, and as far as he could recall, he had never heard him mentioned by any of his acquaintances. Probably Luna’s means did not permit him to go out very much. He had undoubtedly moved only in circles which, particularly now, for a variety of reasons, including financial, were closed to other people. He seemed, in any event, to belong to one of those foreign aristocratic families who appear in a country and remain for only a few decades. They attract little notice, neither have money nor know how to make it, and soon vanish from sight again. A sad existence, thought Jessiersky who, like all idle people, was fairly sociable.

  “Is his father still living?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “What was he?”

  “Who?”

  “The father.”

  “An official in the Ministry of Education.”

  “And has he any brothers and sisters?”

  “The father?”

  “The son.”

  “No — that is to say, yes. He had a brother who died before he himself came into the world.”

  Jessiersky again stooped down to examine the smile about Luna’s eyes. When this was taken, he thought, the man probably did not even know why he was in such a good humor.

  “And he is a sociologist, then?” he asked. “I mean . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “What is a sociologist actually? I have a vague idea, but . . .”

  “A sociologist,” said Herr Millemoth, “is a kind of economist.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Jessiersky. “By the way, do you believe it possible to restore order in the present chaos?”

  He received no reply.

  “From what I have heard,” he said, “he was even planning to give lectures at the university.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he run into any difficulties when he tried?”

  “Oh, yes. He had a pronounced Catholic, that is to say, clerical bias . . . which, combined with his other views, resulted in . . .”

  Jessiersky, feeling once again that the Millemoths thought they were being cross-examined, cut short this speech which would only have led to further groveling.

  “Would to God,” he exclaimed, “that the economy were still as he imagined it, for then neither the purchase nor the sale of his wretched piece of land would ever have been contemplated. But what really surprises me is that he seems to have had so little interest in putting his theories into practice.” Here he looked about the room. “Could I perhaps do something to relieve his present situation? I mean, couldn’t I place a certain sum at your disposal which would make it possible for you to send him food and clothing? I hear, to my horror, that the state seized not only the proceeds from the sale, but all the rest of his money as well, and perhaps you yourselves are not in a position to make any very great expenditure on his behalf. . . .”

  But he was hastily assured that in Mauthausen, Luna, like all the rest of the prisoners, wore a convict suit, that it was permitted to send him food only rarely, and that their means were sufficient for this. Jessiersky again received the impression that they thought he was trying to get them into trouble, that he might be drawing them out in order to discover whether they were sending illicit parc
els to the prisoner. There was apparently nothing to be done with these people who were so terrified that they had become inordinately distrustful. So he shrugged his shoulders, took a last look at the photograph of the smiling Luna who had now even less to laugh about than before, and took leave of them. He found it particularly distressing when they put their farewell in the form of an awkward “Heil Hitler.”

  He left on foot, not having come by car because he did not want his chauffeur to know where he had been. The dome of pale blue sky above the city reminded him for some reason of the sky over a steppe. The people in the street looked provincial, even shabby; fragments of conversation in a sloppy dialect reached his ears. He met no one he knew. He had time, therefore, both on his way back and after he reached the Strattmann Palace, amid its paintings, chandeliers, and tapestries, to think over this visit, Luna’s ill-furnished apartment, and his plight in general. A great anger welled up in him against the wretched cautiousness and apprehensiveness of the Millemoths which had made it impossible for him to explain himself to them. These were no longer human beings, so he concluded, and it made no difference whether they were no longer so through their own fault or as a result of circumstances. Probably even Luna himself, in Mauthausen, was now no longer a human being! And it seemed to Jessiersky that he had brought misfortune not upon a human creature but upon an animal that had been full of trust in human beings: by a sudden movement, he, Jessiersky, had wounded it mortally — a dumb, unsuspecting animal.

  He got up from the armchair in which he had been sitting and walked through the two big parlors and the dining room into the library, whose windows faced the courtyard. Out there it was as still as in the country. The light of the midday sun on the opposite wall was reflected into the two narrow rooms that made up the library. The gilt of the shelves on which the books were standing and the gold of the bindings gleamed as the light fell upon them. A clock was ticking.

  Whenever Alexander Jessiersky entered this library, he was reminded of old Fries. He had to laugh when he thought of how utterly baffled his grandfather must have been by all these books. But in order to own such books and such a palace, it was no longer sufficient — as it had been in the case of the long extinct Strattmann family — to possess a large number of estates and to hold several well-paid court and army positions. Today it was necessary to be the owner of a transport business, of hideous warehouses, countless trucks and furniture vans, which were constantly moving back and forth between Brussels and Bucharest, between Copenhagen and Rome. The laborers and packers slaved away and shouted at one another; the trains roared and the locomotives whistled; even at night there was no quiet in the freight stations. But here in the library it was as still as in a cloister, and the ticking of the clock divided up eternity.

  Alexander Jessiersky reached for the Almanach de Gotha. But he did not find the Lunas. He had almost begun to think that they were not real counts, but merely conti, and was just about to leave the library when, to make quite sure, he took out a Court Almanac and glanced through the table of contents. There, at last, he read: “. . . Löwenstein-Wertheim-Rochefort or Rosenberg, Lübeck, Lubomirski-Przevorsk, Lubomirski-Rzezov, Luchesi-Palli: see Campofranco, Lucedio, Lucinge; Luna see Villahermosa.”

  Under the heading “Villahermosa,” however, he read: “Belonging to the house of Azlor de Aragon. — Catholic. — Ancient Spanish nobility which appears as early as 1136 and whose line goes back to Blasco Perez de Azlor, born 1271, died 1286. — Noblemen (ricos hombres) of the old kingdom of Aragon; Baron Panzano 1293, Conde de Guara 1678.” So they are merely condes, after all, thought Alexander Jessiersky. But it was to prove otherwise. “Inheritance of the dukedom of Villahermosa (Alfonso, a natural son of Juan 11, King of Aragon, Navarre, and Sicily, was named Duque de Villahermosa in 1476) and the earldom and dukedom of Luna (Juan de Aragon had been named Duque de Luna by his uncle, Ferdinand the Catholic, in 1512, and Conde de Luna by Philip III in 1604) following the marriage, in 1701, of Juan-Artel de Azlor, 2nd Conde de Guara, with Josefa de Gurrea de Aragon, Condesa de Luna. . . .”

  Who, among all these people, belonged to whom, and who was really descended from whom? Of one thing he was sure, however: the name of the prisoner in Mauthausen was not both Villahermosa and Luna, but simply Luna. The holders of these titles of count and duke had continually changed. It might very well be, therefore, that the forebears of this unfortunate man had possessed the title of count only temporarily, but had continued to use it anyway. Occasionally, however, the earldom had even become a dukedom. In wartime, for instance, the Count of Luna had also had command of the contingents from the neighboring counties. But it seemed most unlikely that the man in Mauthausen was a Spanish duke and, to top that, related to the Kings of Aragon.

  Further down in the section on the Villahermosas, the reader was referred to Bethencourt, Historia genealogica y heraldica de la monarquia española. So without losing himself further in the maze of titles of the still living Villahermosas, Duques de Granada de Ega, Condes de Guara, Vizcondes de Muruzabal de Andion y de Zolina, etc., Alexander Jessiersky went in search of the Bethencourt. But he could not find the book. Where it was, Heaven only knew. It had been there, it was listed in the catalogue, but it had been taken out. Even the Strattmann library, despite the shipping business by which it was maintained, was crumbling away. Probably in the end it, like so many other things, would also completely disintegrate. Such establishments really lived only on borrowed time, for all that the library clock pretended that the time there was eternal. It was not. It was time exactly like any other. For when the clock, by its ticking, sliced off single segments of it, what was left was no longer as large as true eternity. By reason of this very ticking, slicing off, hacking off, “eternity” became smaller, gradually shrank, and would ultimately come to an end. This was the proof that there was no real eternity, no really enduring time in the library.

  Jessiersky finally abandoned his search for the Bethencourt. In various other works, however, he found that there had originally been a Don Alvaro de Luna, whose ancestry could not be readily traced, but who seemed to have been of very high birth. He may even, like the rest of the Spanish high nobility, have traced his ancestry to the Visigoth kings; just as the most noble houses of Europe, the Hapsburgs, for example, the Lorraine dynasty, or the Guelfs, claimed descent from a legendary Frankish King Faramund who, in turn, so the story ran, was descended from the Queen of Troy. No one, of course, could follow them as far back as all that. But although Don Alvaro’s ancestors were shrouded in misty twilight, his descendants, or one of them at least, stood out in bold relief. His natural son, Alvaro, later raised to the rank of Count Gormas, had been Constable of Castile. In 1453 he was executed because, having married the Infanta Maria of Portugal, he had presumed to put himself forward as the brother-in-law of the King. It seemed quite likely that the unfortunate Luna might have been a descendant of this Bastard. Later on, neither the Villahermosas nor the Lunas themselves, but quite another family, the Moncadas, had possessed Luna.

  Jessiersky discovered also that in the city of Leon there was still a Luna Palace. Luna itself, an old capital city of the Lusitanians (which also suggested some connection with nearby Luesia), was situated south of the Pyrenees between the two arms of the river Arva, not far from Exea de los Caballeros and Saragossa. Long ago the city must have been important, for the country below Luna was still called Cataluna, the “Land below Luna,” Catalonia. But now the city had most probably become a dreadful hole.

  There was also a French family, de Viel de Lunas d’Espeuilles. But these Lunas lived in southern France. In eastern France there was Lunéville, in Brussels a rue de la Lune, in Italy a Portus Lunae, so named by the Romans because of its half-moon shape, and the village of Lunigiana in the former duchy of Massa-Carrara. In the northern part of Lower Austria, there was the so-called Moon Forest, in Upper Austria the Moon Lake, and in Africa there were the Mountains of the Moon from which the Nile rises. And
finally there was Monday and the moon itself. But that Luna had originally come from the moon was improbable, although his face was shaped like a half moon and had a moonlike smile.

  Alexander Jessiersky spent many hours in the library, and when he left it, it was far into the evening. On the table in the middle of the front room lay a pile of books, and the ticking of the clock went on and on dividing up eternity, which was not eternity, and converting it into time.

  Jessiersky’s visit to the Millemoths had taken place in September, 1940. During the years that followed, he inquired repeatedly after Luna by roundabout ways. He also gave him assistance whenever possible by sending him food parcels and such like.

  Whether or not Luna knew that all or most of the food parcels which he received came from Jessiersky, it is impossible to say. Perhaps he knew and simply pretended that he did not know, or perhaps he merely accepted them. A concentration camp was not the place to make a show of manly pride when it came to food parcels. In any case, with the aid of the parcels, he bore up under the hardships of his place of detention and the rigors of forced labor, in spite of, or perhaps because of, his frailty and flexibility, far better than more robust people, many of whom did not survive them at all. These hardships and rigors, as everyone knows (although the entire nation later disclaimed all knowledge of them), were appalling. It was understandable, of course, that the Third Reich, like so many other empires before it, should keep slaves. What was not understandable was that, unlike other slaveholding regimes, it treated its slaves so miserably that it destroyed their capacity for work and, along with it, their usefulness, or potential usefulness. What is more, in so doing, it merely damaged still further its already bad reputation and made more and more enemies. Both government and people succeeded only in injuring themselves when they allowed the jailers to give full rein to their cruelty. The jailers alone derived a dubious pleasure from this license. And it is more than strange that the Third Reich, which permitted no one any pleasure, should have allowed them this satisfaction.