Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Disgusted, I turned and walked away. She caught up with me and took my arm. “Come. Let’s visit the palace.” The gravel crunching under our steps, we went round the building and under the rotunda. Inside, I looked vaguely at the gilt finish, the small, precious furniture, the voluptuous eighteenth-century paintings; I was moved only in the music room, when I saw the fortepiano and wondered if it was the same one on which old Bach had improvised for the king what would become the Musical Offering, the day he had come there: if it weren’t for the guard, I would have stretched out my hand and struck the keys that might have felt Bach’s fingers. The famous painting by von Menzel that shows Frederick II, illumined by cathedrals of candles, playing his flute just as on the day he received Bach, had been taken down, likely from fear of bombs. A little farther on, the tour went through the guest room known as Voltaire’s Room, with a tiny bed where the great man supposedly had slept during the years he taught Frederick the Enlightenment and hatred of the Jews; actually he stayed at the Potsdam town castle. Una studied the frivolous decorations with amusement: “For a king who couldn’t even take off his own boots, let alone his pants, he certainly appreciated naked women. The whole palace seems eroticized.”—“That’s to remind himself of what he had forgotten.” At the exit, she pointed to the hill where some artificial ruins stood out, products of this rather capricious prince’s whim: “Would you like to climb up there?”—“No. Let’s go toward the orangery.” We strolled lazily along, without looking much at the things around us. We sat down for a bit on the terrace of the orangery, then went down the steps framing the large ponds and flowerbeds in a regular, classical, perfectly symmetrical order. Afterward the park began again and we walked on at random, down one of the long footpaths. “Are you happy?” she asked me.—“Happy? Me? No. But I’ve known happiness. Now I’m content with what there is, I can’t complain. Why do you ask me that?”—“Just like that. No reason.” A little farther, she went on: “Can you tell me why we haven’t spoken in more than eight years?”—“You got married,” I answered, holding back a burst of rage.—“Yes, but that was later. And also, that’s not a reason.”—“For me it is. Why did you get married?” She stopped and looked at me closely: “I don’t owe you any explanations. But if you want to know, I love him.” I looked at her now: “You have changed.”—“Everyone changes. You’ve changed too.” We continued walking. “And you, you’ve never loved anyone?” she asked.—“No. I keep my promises.”—“I never made you any.”—“That’s true,” I acknowledged.—“Anyway,” she went on, “obstinate attachment to old promises is no virtue. The world changes, you have to be able to change with it. You’re still a prisoner of the past.”—“I’d rather call it loyalty, fidelity.”—“The past is over, Max.”—“The past is never over.”
