grenade blowing him to pieces back then. Then he goes and scrapes himself back together again like a good little boy. This is done very gracefully. And the audience sings along with the chorus:
“Limbs get tossed,
But the war’s not lost!”
CHAPTER 16
IT WAS AROUND NOON WHEN THE TWO GENTLEMEN awoke. They had slept through Genoa entirely and were now approaching San Remo.
Outside was the sea, our primordial mother. That is, the sea is supposed to have been the place where life originated hundreds and hundreds of millions of years ago, only later to crawl forth onto land where, being forced to either adapt or perish, it continued to evolve in that marvelously complicated way.
Schmitz realized that Kobler was looking at the sea for the first time. “So what do you think of the sea?” he asked him.
“I didn’t think it would be any different,” Kobler answered apathetically. He was still lying down, looking very haggard.
“Calm down, my dear sir!” Schmitz consoled him. “Myskull is hurting me just as much as yours, but I’m restraining myself. We shouldn’t have gotten so drunk in Milano.”
“We should’ve restrained ourselves in Milano,” lamented Kobler.
“Vintage 1902,” muttered Schmitz.
They were now riding alongside the sea but they did not actually see anything of it, even though they passed first the Italian Riviera di Ponente and then the French Côte d’Azur, no less. They had to submit themselves to another official customs control and passport inspection in Ventimiglia, a border town between these two coasts. It was here that Kobler felt the most nauseous. Even Schmitz was mucking around on the toilet for nearly an hour. They had to pay a bitter price for their Milanese Chianti. And the bitterness of this price was, as is so often the case in life, vastly out of proportion with the sweetness of the pleasure enjoyed. Kobler in particular could not enjoy this world-famous landscape. He also could not eat anything, vomited at every sharp turn, and looked into the future with gloomy eyes. “I haven’t even achieved the goal of my trip yet and I’m already dead,” he thought dejectedly. “Why am I even going?”
Schmitz kept trying to get him to think about something else. “Look,” he said in Monte Carlo, “here the palm trees grow on the very platforms! I can’t shake the feeling that Western Europe is significantly more bourgeois for having won the World War. I don’t want to know what’ll happen when the Western Europeans finally figure out that, ultimately, they lost the World War! Know what’ll happen then? Then Social Democrats will become ministers here too.”
“Here in Nice,” Schmitz stated, all the while smiling sarcastically, “the clocks ought to be turned back not just by an hour, but by a whole forty years.” When he was alone,however, he did sometimes feel right as rain in the atmosphere of 1890, even though this meant he was contradicting himself.
Antibes made Schmitz think, among other things, of Bernhard Shaw. He thought: that was one witty Irishman. Or he thought of old Nobel, who made the very noble gesture of founding the Nobel Prize after watching people blow each other up with his dynamite.
Now the train was leaving the sea and would return to it again in Toulon. “We’re almost in Marseille now,” said Schmitz. It was already late in the afternoon; the sky was dark blue.
Outside was Toulon, the naval base of the French Republic. The sight of the gray torpedo boats and armored cruisers roused all sorts of childhood memories in Schmitz. And so he remembered how, back when he was a child, he had been allowed to look around one of the armored cruisers of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian fleet in Pola with his posh aunt Natalia. But his aunt soon went down below with a deck officer, leaving him alone up above. He had to wait for her for nearly half an hour. And he was terribly afraid because the gun barrels started moving all by
“Limbs get tossed,
But the war’s not lost!”
CHAPTER 16
IT WAS AROUND NOON WHEN THE TWO GENTLEMEN awoke. They had slept through Genoa entirely and were now approaching San Remo.
Outside was the sea, our primordial mother. That is, the sea is supposed to have been the place where life originated hundreds and hundreds of millions of years ago, only later to crawl forth onto land where, being forced to either adapt or perish, it continued to evolve in that marvelously complicated way.
Schmitz realized that Kobler was looking at the sea for the first time. “So what do you think of the sea?” he asked him.
“I didn’t think it would be any different,” Kobler answered apathetically. He was still lying down, looking very haggard.
“Calm down, my dear sir!” Schmitz consoled him. “Myskull is hurting me just as much as yours, but I’m restraining myself. We shouldn’t have gotten so drunk in Milano.”
“We should’ve restrained ourselves in Milano,” lamented Kobler.
“Vintage 1902,” muttered Schmitz.
They were now riding alongside the sea but they did not actually see anything of it, even though they passed first the Italian Riviera di Ponente and then the French Côte d’Azur, no less. They had to submit themselves to another official customs control and passport inspection in Ventimiglia, a border town between these two coasts. It was here that Kobler felt the most nauseous. Even Schmitz was mucking around on the toilet for nearly an hour. They had to pay a bitter price for their Milanese Chianti. And the bitterness of this price was, as is so often the case in life, vastly out of proportion with the sweetness of the pleasure enjoyed. Kobler in particular could not enjoy this world-famous landscape. He also could not eat anything, vomited at every sharp turn, and looked into the future with gloomy eyes. “I haven’t even achieved the goal of my trip yet and I’m already dead,” he thought dejectedly. “Why am I even going?”
Schmitz kept trying to get him to think about something else. “Look,” he said in Monte Carlo, “here the palm trees grow on the very platforms! I can’t shake the feeling that Western Europe is significantly more bourgeois for having won the World War. I don’t want to know what’ll happen when the Western Europeans finally figure out that, ultimately, they lost the World War! Know what’ll happen then? Then Social Democrats will become ministers here too.”
“Here in Nice,” Schmitz stated, all the while smiling sarcastically, “the clocks ought to be turned back not just by an hour, but by a whole forty years.” When he was alone,however, he did sometimes feel right as rain in the atmosphere of 1890, even though this meant he was contradicting himself.
Antibes made Schmitz think, among other things, of Bernhard Shaw. He thought: that was one witty Irishman. Or he thought of old Nobel, who made the very noble gesture of founding the Nobel Prize after watching people blow each other up with his dynamite.
Now the train was leaving the sea and would return to it again in Toulon. “We’re almost in Marseille now,” said Schmitz. It was already late in the afternoon; the sky was dark blue.
Outside was Toulon, the naval base of the French Republic. The sight of the gray torpedo boats and armored cruisers roused all sorts of childhood memories in Schmitz. And so he remembered how, back when he was a child, he had been allowed to look around one of the armored cruisers of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian fleet in Pola with his posh aunt Natalia. But his aunt soon went down below with a deck officer, leaving him alone up above. He had to wait for her for nearly half an hour. And he was terribly afraid because the gun barrels started moving all by
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