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Darling Grete,

The death of Leo Ornstein this week, aged 109, severs the last link with that extraordinary closeknit Futurist coterie with which Fa was so intimately connected in the interwar years... Father, Ornstein, Seligman and, of course, L v. K.

     Ma doesn’t mention Fa much these days so I thought you should have a copy of this as it explains quite a lot. I’ve reconstructed L v. K’s catalogue from Fa’s private papers which, a fortnight after his death, as I wrote you, Ma tore into quarters and scattered for disposal in his war chest, that padlocked packing case (you’d be too young to remember) whose mysterious recesses held the booty he had looted in France, and which - since all demobbed soldiers were ordered, he once told me, to ‘disembark with only those articles they were able to carry’, and he (typically pigheaded) chose to burden himself with a deadweight of 100lbs - stood in the cellar as a mute reminder of the root cause of his persistent back pain and short temper for the remainder of his life.

     Fa’s war chest in the event contained much more besides the documents I have edited in the enclosures: a parachute harness, a Luftwaffe aerial map of the Dover Straits coastline, and a complete black museum of the most monstrous anti-Semitic propaganda imaginable - a brightly coloured kindergarten picturebook, for example, with Reynard the Fox snarling on its cover, entitled, ‘Never Trust a Fox in a Green Meadow and Never Trust the Word of a Jew,’ overstamped Volksschule Neider-Ramstadt - quite evidently exhibits assembled when Fa was a translator with S.H.A.E.F. at the Nurnberg Trials.

     It must have been shortly after Ma came here to stay at the Lodge - and was oversleeping a good deal because of those new pacifiers she would persist in taking against my better judgement - that I repaid a visit in the small hours to her cellar and retrieved in a plastic bin liner the whole sorry mess of torn and mangled leaves which for so long now I have wearied to piece together. The bundle’s hidden even now on top of my wardrobe and the reason (no one needs to seek far to explain) for a hideous recurring dream, the details of which - even though it’s a heavenly Monday morning and the sun is shining on the lawn and Ma’s happily pegging out the chemise she insists on washing herself - I cannot bring myself to describe, even to you.

     As it is, Ma believes I followed her instructions and burnt the entire kit and caboodle in the incinerator at the end of her kitchen garden. Now I’m wishing I had.

Your Loving Sis
Catherine

Encl : ‘The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K’

     Read this first

     From sifting through all Fa’s other occasional commentaries on his friends it would seem L v. K travelled widely in his schooldays, studying at Herder Realgymnasium, Berlin; Escuela Alemana, Barcelona; Institut Minerva, Zurich; Handelsscule Weiss, Vienna; and the Institute of Musical Art, New York. A polyglot, like Fa, he was a gifted pianist (see Study IV, ‘Padereweski’s Dogs’, New York, 1924) and collaborated with Ornstein on many impromptu works. Ten years younger than Ornstein, L v. K was no more than a twelve-year-old when he first heard ‘Suicide in an Airplane’ and, as events proved, the recital made a profound impression on him. (See L v. K’s nihilistic schoolboy essay, Study I, of the same year, ‘A Short History of Alsace’, a territory held in contention with France by L. v. K’s forebears since 1871. L v. K was born in Mulhouse-Riedesheim, Elsass/Alsace.)

     L v. K was, we learn, also an accomplished watchmaker (see Study VI) to whom his small circle of friends (including Ornstein) brought timepieces and metronomes for repair.

     Each momento mori that composed these eleven works was exhibited, so Fa tells us, in the reception room of L v. K’s apartment in Avenue d’Iéna, Paris, at the time of his death, following the signing of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty (see Study XI).

     According to Fa’s notes, L v. K took his own life on August 24th 1939. Fa’s solitary allusion to the identity of L v. K hints that his friend’s ‘ambivalent religiosity and congenital stammer owed much to his illustrious forebear whose twin strains of patriotism and rebellion found release in bringing to frenzied life the most tormented egregious hero to be found anywhere in our literature’, referring, seemingly, to a descendant of H. von Kleist (author of the incendiary novella, ‘Michael Kohlhaas’).

     Dearest, I’ve sent you one or two of the smaller items related in Fa’s journal; the little enamelled canister that Fa pocketed in Paris you’re to retain as a keepsake. Likewise keep the child’s-eye-view (‘Kinderblick’) picture postcard of Hitler garlanding the infants, postmarked 7-8-1937 Berlin NW7 (the message on the reverse, by the way, appears to be from L v. K himself - and gives us more than an inkling that he foresaw, even then, that ‘another show’ was about to begin, i.e. his last remark, ‘Das Theatre fängt an!’)

     Yes, L v K’s caustic postcard is as characteristic of the man as these antemortalo exhibits, a product of a fixated numerologist whose mordant slant on the world is unmistakable.