Chapter 53The Tempio RobberyTEMPIO-RAUB
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
“My fears have been confirmed. After Jentsch and companion1 moved bag and baggage into the upper rooms on the very evening of your departure, they have now — evaporated. Johanna is in hospital.
“In the hall some 60—80 pictures are missing2.
“In the house it looks frightful. All the linen has vanished, down to two kitchen cloths. The antiquities and the silver too seem to me much thinned out. The gold-embroidered kimonos from your last Asian journey are almost all missing. In the old porcelain there are great gaps as well, especially among the Empire cups. What is missing in underlinen and gowns I cannot judge. In the rubbish I found silver spoons, burnt towels, scraps of fur and other things.
“But all that is nothing against the inner destruction of the house. The criminals departed without turning off the water. Although I had always impressed on them that this must be done even for an absence of a single day. When the great cold came in January, all the pipes burst. I happened to be passing, without the least notion that the precious pair had taken to their heels, and hear from inside a strong, sea-like roaring. I had the door broken open, and floods of water rolled out towards me, with everything swimming about in them in a wild swirl. For how long already, who can say? The boiler of the heating had burst as well.
“Upstairs on the first floor it looked, if possible, still more frightful. Everything in wild disorder. Greasy sausage-skins and hair on the light-yellow brocade armchairs. An unmade bed in the middle of the great room. In short, everywhere dirt and disorder, destruction and devastation!
“I notified the police at once and put the damage to the house provisionally at ten thousand marks; that will certainly not be enough.
“And the restoration of it all will cost about as much again. I pity you from my heart, but — I did warn you! And besides, I should be surprised if with all this the dry rot3 has not come into the house!”
There I sat now in far Asia, and over there at home criminals to whom I had done nothing but good had destroyed my Tempio, perhaps annihilated my existence! I was as though shattered!
I wrote to Zappe at once — for hours I wrote to him in my despair. Above all I begged him to set in train the work of restoring the bathroom and the central heating. Cost what it might — but I could not leave the heap of rubble lying uncleared.
He saw to it too — but the cost of restoring house, park and hall almost ruined me. At the time, however, I still knew nothing of the details, and stayed for long months in tormenting uncertainty. For my round-the-world ticket was taken, my path marked out. And what would it have availed me to hurry home at once? The misfortune had happened; I should see it soon enough. On the contrary, it was even better that I came only later, when the worst of the damage to the heating had been repaired and the wreckage of all the burst radiators and bath-pipes had been cleared aside.
So I talked myself laboriously into calm and travelled on, along the way marked out for me by my ticket. To be sure, it was only on my return in the summer that I recognized fully how cunningly the criminal had contrived it all — trusting to my eleven-month absence4.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑Jentsch and companion — Zappe will not give her the word wife — and the German word he uses instead has a second edge that English cannot carry. Genossin is the feminine of Genosse: companion, comrade, associate — and, in the language of the courts and the newspapers, an accomplice. Zappe has written the charge into the salutation. The memoir has been careful up to now to call her Jentsch's Frau, his wife: chapter 43 records the touching love story the pair told about how they had found each other, that she had been a student of medicine, that his mother was supposedly an Italian countess. Zappe drops all of it in one word, and does not trouble to name her at all.
- ↑some 60—80 pictures are missing — The single most costly line in the letter, and the one Zappe puts in a paragraph by itself. The hall is the Gemäldehalle of chapter 41, which he and she had designed together: twenty metres long, clerestory-lit down both sides, a gable front with two seated figures, casts of the dancing maenads running round as a frieze. She had hesitated a long while over building it, because with the ground it would come to fifteen thousand marks, and had talked herself into it as the best investment for her son's inheritance. What hung in it was her own work. Sixty to eighty canvases out of a living painter's own gallery is not pilfering; it is the removal of a body of work, and it goes some way to explaining why a painter who exhibited on this scale is so thinly represented today. Note also what the number is not: Zappe cannot say, within twenty pictures, how many are gone, because there is nobody left in Berlin who knows the hang.
- ↑the dry rot — Der Schwamm — the parting shot, and the worst thing an architect can say to the owner of a soaked house. Hausschwamm, the true dry rot Serpula lacrymans, is the German builder's nightmare: it follows standing water into timber, spreads behind sound-looking surfaces, and is cured only by cutting out everything it has touched. To say the Schwamm has come into a house is to say the house may not be saveable, and Zappe knows it. There is a second thing in the word that English cannot keep. Schwamm is also the ordinary word for a sponge, and the memoir has already used it at the blackest moment of her first widowhood: my heart was like a sponge soaked full of grief, it could take up no new sorrow. The house is now in the same condition as the heart was, in the same word.
- ↑my eleven-month absence — The last three words of the chapter double as the last piece of its calendar, and they confirm the dating of the whole African journey from the far end. Set the fixed points side by side. She sailed from Hamburg in the middle of September 1911, days after the Moon Festival farewell at the Tempio. The pair moved upstairs that evening. She kept Christmas 1911 on a hotel roof at Mombasa. The pipes burst in the great cold of January; the letter was written after that, and mail from Berlin took the better part of a month to reach Ceylon, which puts this chapter in early February 1912 and leaves the memoir's brisk two days at Colombo where they belong. Eleven months from mid-September 1911 ends in August 1912 — the return in the summer, exactly as she says. Every date closes, and it closes on 1911, which is why the notes to chapters 49 to 51 were corrected. Jentsch, who had made himself the household's secretary and knew the itinerary because he had helped organize the departure, had eleven months of an empty house, and used four of them.