Konrad and Alexandra (pdf) - Rolf Gross

"I rented the large dining hall and two rooms in the house of an absent member of the
Bavarian Royal Family. It is very close."
Alexandra laughed. "I did not realize, but Berg has a certain notoriety among us. Here I
nearly killed a chicken the first time I drove Friedrich’s car. The view across the lake was so
beautiful that I did not watch the road. Was this the place where King Ludwig drowned?"
They walked along the lake shore. The slightly neglected, two-story house, right by the
water, was shaded by old beech and chestnut trees. A small park separated it from the village.
Tsinandali came to Alexandra’s mind and her
beloved Zaguramo.
Rilke, Ruth, and Clara Westberg 1906
"Here we are." Clara opened a French door
from the terrace and let them in. In the center of
the room stood two large blocks of marble,
unfinished sculptures, an arm, a head, the
muscular body of a bearded man, still half-buried
in the block. The floor was covered with a thick
layer of white marble dust.
The spacious room took up the entire lake front
of the house. Four French double doors created a
soft and even light. The view through the trees
onto the water, the houses of the town and the
low, undulating hills on the opposite shore, quiet
and lovely, a refuge for a distressed soul.
Alexandra ran her slender fingers over the
rough, snow-white, crystalline surface of the
freshly broken stone.
"Have you seen Michelangelo’s unfinished
Slaves in the Accademia in Florence?" asked
Clara.
"No, sculpture is unexplored territory to me.
The Michelangelos I saw, his David and Night
and Day in San Lorenzo, left me cold. I don’t know, is it the smooth perfection of their
surfaces? But these are fabulous. The broken stone," she touched the marble again, "is almost
transparent. What are they?"
"They are a commission, a man and a woman, for a new building in Munich. I have
Michelangelo’s Slaves in my mind all the time, they are just like these, intentionally left
unfinished, imprisoned in their blocks forever. I understand your difficulties with the Italian
marbles, they are a challenge to the sculptor, but hard to appreciate by the untrained eye."
Clara went upstairs to get Ruth. "The children can play on the terrace outside."
Left to herself, Alexandra, awed, walked around the two giants. Along the wall stood
three smaller pieces, a bronze bust of a young man with a bushy mustache and a funnyshaped
nose, and two clay models of a very young woman with unusual large eyes in a round
face. It said Paula on the plinth. Everything was thickly covered with marble dust.
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