by Jacob Wren
6. The Frightening Thing Is Everyone Has Their Reasons
There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.
—Fernando Pessoa
I went to get my hair cut in Berlin. The moment I sat down in the chair I could already sense that the hairdresser didn’t much like me. “Fucking American tourists,” I could almost hear him thinking to himself as he brought the scissors closer to my head. “Trendy capitalist shit pigs.”
And he had barely begun to cut my hair but already I could feel it was going to be one of the worst haircuts I’d had in a long time. And I wondered if he was doing it on purpose while at the same time imagining someone else: another German hairdresser, vaguely aware of the Dadaists and having experienced expressionism and the neo-pathetic cabaret just before he left for New York in the forties or fifties, who more than anything hated the fucking stupid Americans that came to get their hair cut from him day in and day out.
And since he was convinced the Americans were completely stupid, he began to experiment, see what he could get away with, cutting away big clumpy bald patches into the sides of people’s heads and, when they complained, telling them that it was the new style back in Germany. Most never came back and yet he started getting a new kind of client: young artists and bohemians in search of styles that ran contrary to the conservative, bourgeois values of the previous generation.
The title of this chapter is stolen from a line of dialogue – or more precisely from a subtitle (since I do not speak or understand French) – that is to be found in the classic Renoir film La Règle du jeu. The film, which I’ve seen only once (something like twenty years ago) made barely the slightest of impressions upon me (even at the time) and yet this single line of dialogue nonetheless continues to strike me anew, incessantly and in the most singularly piercing fashion. Somehow it summarizes everything. The frightening thing is that everyone has their reasons, and somehow whatever anyone does, whatever anyone does to you or for you, they are more often than not able to justify it to themselves in a rather precise and frequently exemplary fashion.
I thought of this sentence many times as I was getting my hair cut in Berlin. And as I continued to distract myself from my ever worsening visage in the mirror in front of me with stories of that other German hairdresser, his business now modestly flourishing within the vibrant subcultures of forties or fifties New York, cutting polka dots into women’s heads and shaving off only half of men’s beards, I thought that perhaps all of my stories, my writings, my so-called works of literature, were exactly like this one: little tales to distract myself from something I actually didn’t want to look at too closely within the strictures of the present moment. Often through conjuring up something far more confusing or worse.
Such as our sepia-toned German hairdresser arriving at his small shop on 31st Street early one morning to find a note taped to his front door. The note said:
There is no trick to it. Nonetheless we have become aware of your activities. Perhaps you might wish to become acquainted with ours.
That was all. No names, no other information whatsoever. He tore the note from the door and stuffed it into his pocket, not giving it any real attention, though later he could not understand how he had managed to put the matter out of his mind so easily.
That morning was free of appointments, since his particular clientele were certainly not early risers, and as he sat alone in the empty shop, cleaning the scissors and mirrors he had neglected to clean the night before, gradually he did in fact find himself pondering the note, especially that first line: There was no trick to what? It meant nothing to him and yet, searching back through his memory he couldn’t feel completely sure it didn’t remind him of something. His thoughts rolled back to Germany, his formative years, when war was looming and his only option was to get out of the country as quickly as possible.
There were a few friends around at that time, certainly not close friends, who were rumoured to have gone underground. And perhaps he now remembered something, a vague recollection of sitting in some Berlin café and asking one of them what exactly it meant to ‘go underground,’ and then a more concrete recollection of being startled by the reply: “There’s no trick to it,” the words filtered back through his memory. “You simply disappear.”
Then he too had disappeared, found himself here, running this strange little shop, his still thick accent a mark of authenticity among his customers who would have been just as convinced if his accent had been fake. He had survived while many others had not, though often his survival seemed to him little more than a joke. Was he anything more than a clown to these people: the mysterious, eccentric foreigner doling out stupid haircuts with a grave composure and solemn expression?
Soon the afternoon appointments would begin. At 1 p.m. he would cut the hair of a young painter from the Netherlands, in residence in New York for the last three years and probably still living off parental dosh. The rich, and what’s worse the pseudo-bohemian offspring of the rich, disgusted him completely and on occasion he felt frustrated that he was in no position to turn down their money. Working for a living – he thought to himself as he began to sharpen his scissors – in fact work itself, was like a biblical plague.
The door opened behind him, the bell that hung off the doorframe tinkling as it was supposed to (he was a traditionalist in such matters) and as he turned, for a brief moment he expected to see not the young pretentious Dutch painter, who was in fact standing there with a big stupid grin on his big stupid face, but instead someone else, someone from his past he at this moment could not quite recall. The young painter, wearing the horrible purple blazer he always had on (to seem more artistic, I suppose, our German hairdresser scowled silently to himself) confidently walked over to the chair and sat down.
“Do your thing,” the painter said, smiling, with a little manufactured wave of his hands. “Whatever you like. I hope you’re feeling inspired today.”
He was feeling inspired. Inspired to stab this moron in the neck with his newly sharpened scissors. And to keep stabbing and twisting, and whatever other gestures might be necessary, until the moron was dead and they were both completely covered in blood. He glanced over at the window. It was a bright, sunny day. There was much street traffic. He was not a murderer and what’s more he was definitely not stupid enough to commit a murder in front of a street full of happy witnesses. He was a foreigner, a German, in the eyes of everyone here probably little more than a Nazi. It must feel good to have a talented, eccentric Nazi cut your hair, a mark of artistic openness, bravery and authenticity. He hated these tepid assholes, complete wastes of flesh one and all, he thought to himself as he reached for his clippers and began to shave a bald stripe vertically across the head of the little Dutch twit.
He held the mirror vertical to the back of the twit’s head, which his scissors had in fact not touched, and then angled it to each side. The bald stripe was clean and precise, very German he thought to himself, as he detached the plastic cover, shaking it out with a slight flourish.
“Are you done?” the twit seemed pleased but confused, if there was more to come he definitely wanted everything he could get.
“Of course.”
“Fantastic,” the twit smiled that smug smile his parents had instilled in him, stood up and casually brushed himself off. “You’ve once again outdone yourself.” He was examining himself in the mirror, turning to one side then the other.
“Thank you,” our protagonist said, trying not to let his distain feel too obvious, taking the money and folding it neatly into his modest billfold.
Later that night, as he was closing up, he once again glanced at the note (which he had now taped to the top corner of the large mirror):
There is no trick to it. Nonetheless we have become aware of your activities. Perhaps you might wish to become acquainted with ours.
He knew these people. He remembered them vaguely but with all of t
he detail washed away, like a barely remembered dream. Did he in fact wish to become acquainted with their activities? He felt as if he could guess what such activities were but, upon closer inspection of his own thoughts, realized he could not. He had rushed through the last few clients on autopilot, making the usual awkward interventions in their appearance, and felt relieved when it was finally time to close shop.
And as he was leaving I was also leaving, paying the real Berlin hairdresser and feeling him scowl at me as he took my money and folded it into his pocket. “Are you from America?” he asked. “No, Canada,” I replied, and in his polite nod of recognition I could hear him thinking that there was basically no difference (a sentiment I of course, at times, shared).
I left the shop and made my way down Torstr. I had no plans for the rest of the day. The haircut was it, and had been a relative disaster. As I walked I could catch an occasional glimpse of myself in the shop windows. My hair looked terrible but when did I start worrying about such things. No, I didn’t give a shit about the haircut, it was only a stand-in for the fact that I was here wandering aimlessly through the streets of Berlin along with thousands of other Canadians, Danes, Swedes, Americans, Mexicans, Norwegians, artists from every country you could possibly name, and we all wanted something from this place. Berlin was a kind of signifier, evidence we were searching for the next (or more accurately last) exciting moment, some sort of zeitgeist or locus, in our otherwise grievously dull and tepid times. Somehow, in that moment, my haircut seemed like the deflating, other-side-of-the-coin hangover to this earlier, first adventurous impulse to search.
And as I walked, perhaps a bit too aimlessly, or only too obvious in my gentle aimlessness, I continued to wonder about our future-forward German haircutter in New York. How he went home that night, fixed himself his usual simple meal, sat in his kitchen wondering about the note. It would have been immediately obvious to someone more self-aware, but it took him a while to realize that he wouldn’t be thinking about it quite so much if he didn’t want to know more. Would there be another note tomorrow, featuring a more elaborate hint? Or would he have to figure out the next step himself? All the things from that time in his life were completely gone. He had left with nothing but the clothes on his back in order to smoothly cross the unmanned stretch of border to Switzerland. If he had to do it all over again he wondered if he would still have the nerve.
Slowly, as he prepared for sleep, he wondered if these haircuts he was giving were enough. When he was young he had been nothing if not precocious, bursting with potential, the one everyone thought would go furthest, burn brightest. He was of course gaining a sliver of notoriety within certain New York circles, but it barely seemed like the tasks he routinely accomplished each day – yes, with a certain degree of flair and creativity, but with no great thought or effort on his part – were worthy of his younger self. What might he have done if he had remained in Germany? Would he have written philosophy? Painted? Thrown firebombs at the parliament? He could barely recall his former aspirations. The struggle to get here in one piece, set up shop starting from practically nothing, keep the work alive until eventually it became solvent, had sapped away all such dreams. Perhaps he had never exactly known what he would do, had only felt the world was his oyster and someday he would do something truly great.
The next morning, as he approached the shop at his usual careful pace, already he could see the note, placed in exactly the same spot as the day before. Just to show off, but in fact showing off to no one since there was no one in sight, he pulled the note off the door and crumpled it down into his pocket without even so much as glancing at it. His curiosity could wait for later. What was important now was discipline, that whatever else might happen he would be in charge, he would not allow the notes to exert any excess influence over his carefully balanced daily thoughts and actions.
The notes continued for many weeks and, in order to gain some perspective, and also to regain a certain degree of control, he bought a red scrapbook, pasting the notes within it, one per page, in chronological order. Flipping through this scrapbook each night before he went to bed, he searched for patterns or insights, as certain speculations became clear. These notes were being sent to him by people from his past, people he couldn’t quite remember but who clearly remembered him. What’s more, these people wanted something, required his assistance, and were biding their time until the right moment. He started again at the beginning of the scrapbook:
There is no trick to it. Nonetheless we have become aware of your activities. Perhaps you might wish to become acquainted with ours.
Turning the page:
It is unfashionable to speak of revolution. Much like yourself, we care little for passing fashions. The point is to make a decision and then to act.
And the next note:
What is a decision? How does it differ from flipping a coin? There is no trick to it. The difference is simply commitment.
And the next note always startled him, gave him pause, as he rushed through his memory to think who these note-senders might be:
You have cut our hair and it has grown back. Are these haircuts you give your final decision? We remember you. You had much greater promise.
But he couldn’t identify them. He rolled through all the faces that had sat in his chair and none of them felt right. Of course, it occurred to him that they might be lying, since the notes were nothing if not a form of psychological warfare:
When one is young, one sees the world with a certain perspective. As one gets older, it is only natural for one’s perspective to shift. However, we are sending these notes in order to question whether the changes you have made are precisely the ones you still require.
He tried to think back. Had he really been that much more radical or political when he was young? What he remembered most was a feeling of not being sure. Not being sure which way to turn or which road was right for his life. Yet married to this feeling of uncertainty was an urgency of pure fire – that above all he must do something, do it fiercely and do it soon. For days he would sit in the café and speak about what he should do, how and why, perhaps masking his overwhelming feelings of uncertainty with a ferocious monologue of feigned overconfidence. He would make his name and would do so soon and with flair. And all of this seemed so long ago as he turned the page:
In your haircuts there is always a certain degree of invention. We are also inventors. We are wondering if you can guess or imagine just what it is we invent.
He could not. But then he did remember something, vaguely, loosely, a conversation about science, about the connections between science and revolution, and how visions of revolution without a strong foundation in science were the emptiest utopias of all.
A virus. He remembered it now. All those years ago there was ongoing talk of a virus. A virus that would attack only the Brownshirts and leave his leftist friends unscathed. The realization that the road to revolution lay not in the streets but in the science labs. And yes, how could he have forgotten, but then again he barely knew them. There were a few men and women who decided, all together, to study science, to apply themselves with the utmost seriousness: biology, pathogens.
He put aside the red scrapbook. It was time to sleep now; his memory-jogging experiment had worked, he now had a viable theory as to who was behind the notes. But had their experiment, their brave but insane notion, worked just as well?
The next day, as he arrived at the door of his small shop, he was surprised to find no note. There had been a note every day for the past three weeks and now suddenly there was none. It was as if by cracking the code, by recalling the possible identity of his note-writing tormentors, he had somehow brought the game to a close. There were no notes any day that week and no notes the week after. He was equally surprised to discover how much he missed them.
But then, near the end of the second noteless week, something happened. It was his third appointment of the afternoon, shaving one
half of the head and leaving the other untouched, staring at the client’s face in the mirror so intently he barely noticed the motion of his own scissors. The client was about his own age, with sharp eyes and features, and the more intently he fixated on the mirror the more he wondered if this was some face from his past.
He rarely made small talk with clients, found himself searching for precisely the right leading question, the answer to which would let him know whether he was on the right track (without giving too much away.) He’d never liked playing games, preferred the freedom of a direct approach, still wondering, as the haircut neared completion, how direct should he be? What did he actually want to know?
The man with sharp features stood up, brushed himself off, paid in cash, added a healthy tip and left. Our German hairdresser began to sweep up, but quickly changed his mind, closed shop, headed down the street in the direction he thought he’d seen his last client turn. (Later, when the rest of the day’s clients complained they had come for their regular appointments but found the door locked, he would try to convince them that their understanding of a ‘haircut’ was too narrow, that they should open their minds, that the fact they had shown up to a locked shop, the frustration and confusion they had for a split second felt, was itself a kind of ‘haircut,’ an experience on the very cutting edge of the international conception of the profession.)